The Flame Alphabet - Ben Marcus [31]
“I don’t think those things actually happened,” I said. “As in really happened. If we’re still talking about Babel.”
He’d gotten himself pretty worked up. A halo of spit ringed his mouth, his eyes flaring.
“And you’re an authority on what has and hasn’t happened? Where’d you do your training?”
“It’s a parable,” I said. “You believe that, right? You don’t think it’s a true story?”
“Forget it,” he said.
I had no interest in speaking about Babel, a heavy-handed narrative from a world that wasn’t mine. Those obvious myths from the Old Testament—decoy, decoy—bored me anyway. I’d brought it up because of how harmless it seemed, drowning in easy connotations. But part of me couldn’t resist the topic.
“So you’re saying,” I began, as if I didn’t really understand what he was saying, “you’re saying that a biblical story in which God strikes down his people with aphasia is not relevant? A story about losing our power of speech?”
“That’s exactly what I’m saying,” said Murphy, quietly. “Sometimes it serves a larger interest to keep people from communicating. The sharing of information hasn’t always been a good thing. Sometimes it is a very terrible thing. Perhaps always. God behaved appropriately in that situation.”
“You don’t think people will write books about this very topic, linking this speech poison, or whatever it is, to something biblical?”
“On the contrary,” said Murphy, “that’s exactly what I think. As always, people will court the gravest misunderstandings. People are driven to be wrong in the most spectacular ways. There’s fame in it. We are in a high season of error. But don’t fool yourself. There aren’t going to be too many more books. We’re not going to see a lot of documented analysis or any kind of analysis. This crisis is different. It will be met with muteness. There’s no time for a last word. The last word’s already been had, and it wasn’t by us. Civilization’s first epidemic to defy a public exchange of language. This is a plague among cavemen, and soon we’ll only be grunting to each other about it. You can’t exactly describe a poison with more of itself, write about how poisonous writing is. And pretty soon the causes won’t really seem to matter. The whole fucking idea of cause.”
Murphy fell silent and we walked through the cold streets back into my neighborhood. It would be morning soon and I wanted to get to sleep before Esther woke up. My gear was heavy and hot on my body and I was tired.
“I guess this is me,” I said, stopping short at a buckled brick path.
It wasn’t my house we stood in front of, but I didn’t want Murphy to know where I lived. I pictured him the other day in the woods, harassing the Jewish couple, and I hadn’t seen them or their violent boys again. I figured I could say good night, walk around and hit the alley, then cut back over to my house.
“Here we are, huh?” Murphy looked at the house and then back at me with a grin.
I had picked a difficult house to lie about. There was a windowless store with a side entrance dormered onto the residence. The sign said it sold ribbons, cartridges, adhesives. A portion of the roof was exposed, with blue Tyvek badly nailed over a hole. It would be too cold to live there. Whatever construction that was under way must have been abandoned for the winter.
“All right, uh, Bill, or whoever you are,” said Murphy.
The name I’d given him was Steven. He was testing me. I let it go.
Manage your disclosures. The problem was that, by lying, I’d made him more curious. I needed him