The Flame Alphabet - Ben Marcus [30]
Again this look of his, as if he’d reached into my head with a dowser, monitoring my reaction to see if he’d struck water.
I nodded.
I wouldn’t show him. Perhaps he was kidding, or, worse, testing me. But this was something straight from the hut, a seasonal topic of Burke’s, when he adopted tones of high caution, warnings so spectacular you could not entertain them as remotely true. If you expected to go on living, that is.
Murphy held forth on the flame alphabet as though he’d been in the hut with us. The name as deceiving shade. Nothing called by its accurate title. We’ve trafficked in an inexact language that must be translated anew. Not even translated. Destroyed. Rebuilt. The call for a new code, new lettering, a way to pass on messages that would bypass the toxic alphabet, the chemically foul speech we now used.
Some of Murphy’s rant was unfamiliar, strayed into craziness. Nothing from the hut. But other phrases seemed lifted exactly from Burke, as if he’d recorded and memorized the sermons.
The problem was that I had disregarded a lot of these sermons because—I should be honest here, and there is no one left whom I wish to deceive—these ideas bored me. Maybe I failed to understand them. Burke agonized over speechblood, an engine ripped from the language so the language would fail, and I took it for granted as the higher registers of a religion that did not always move me. The flame alphabet was the word of God, written in fire, obliterating to behold. The so-called Torah. This was public domain Jewish information, easy for Murphy to obtain. We could not say God’s true name, nor could we, if we were devoted, speak of God at all. This was basic stuff. But it was the midrashic spin on the flame alphabet that was more exclusive, spoken of only, as far as I knew, by Rabbi Burke in our hut. Since the entire alphabet comprises God’s name, Burke asserted, since it is written in every arrangement of letters, then all words reference God, do they not? That’s what words are. They are variations on his name. No matter the language. Whatever we say, we say God. This excited Burke to shouting. Therefore the language itself was, by definition, off-limits. Every single word of it. We were best to be done with it. Our time with it is nearly through. The logic was hard to deny. You could not do it.
Of course somehow I had found a way. And Rabbi Burke must have found a way, too, because he went on using language and in the end seemed stronger for it. What was Burke but disembodied speech? He showed no signs of walling himself up in silence any time soon.
If Murphy did have his own hut, it didn’t seem possible he was breaking protocol in the worst way. Speaking freely of the secrets, sharing them at length with a stranger. And if he had no hut of his own, then somehow he’d gained access to the transmissions, to our transmissions, and this he wanted me to know.
Murphy said that someone under LeBov was a troubleshooter, apparently, did speech tests, was favorable to lists. Lists were all the talk at Forsythe. Blacklists, safe lists, green lists, healing lists. There were words to fill all of them. But the healing lists, these were short, and no one was saying for sure what words were on them, not until they were tested, tested very thoroughly.
These were highly guarded lists. A small group of people would be entrusted with them, hone them in Rochester, test for toxicity only on themselves.
“Words you’d recite for medicinal purposes? Some kind of healing acoustics?” I asked.
Murphy tilted his head, grimaced, suggesting maybe, maybe not. Suggesting an idiocy he couldn’t meet halfway.
I said something about Babel. It was the easiest myth to invoke, queued up for renewed scrutiny, and it was getting batted around by anyone who believed our oldest stories still mattered. What I said was probably nothing. Maybe I only said the word Babel, let it hang out there as if that’s all that was required.
Murphy wasn’t impressed. “That topic is exhausted. Mythology is