The Flame Alphabet - Ben Marcus [32]
“You should come to the Oliver’s. That’s where we’ve been meeting. But you’d better get right with meds, and soon, no matter what you believe. You need to start dosing. Have you been to the Oliver’s?”
I stalled. “Sure.” I pictured myself in a long, beige room trying to climb over a wall.
“Obviously you haven’t, but that’s all right.”
Murphy seemed less amused, rubbed his face so hard it hurt to watch. From his pocket he took out the grease again, pushed a tuft of it into the roof of his mouth, smacked his lips.
“Bill, I’m not the devil. I’m not evil,” he said. “You’re not alone is all. It’s perfectly all right to work together on this thing. But I think I understand. Privacy and all that. You have your little hut, I presume? Your forest worship? Maybe you’re one of those? People are wondering if there’s some, you know, in those locations.”
Some, you know, what?
Murphy paused, waited for me to roll over on my back with my legs in the air, begging him to take me.
“It would seem that secret channels of insight are obliged right now to open up, reveal their wares. This is definitely not the time for secrecy.”
Oh, but yes it is, I thought. I gave him nothing.
“I hope it works out for you,” he added.
This was bait I would not take. I smiled, lacking all the required skills for this conversation. My lies were glaring, but Murphy remained polite.
“Here,” said Murphy. “Here’s the address, and my number.”
I looked at the script on the card and my eyes watered, lost focus.
Murphy nodded up at the house that wasn’t mine.
“You’d be lucky if you really lived here,” he said.
I stared at the house without really seeing it.
“Check your vitals,” said Murphy. “No children in there that I can tell. I bet your heart is thriving right now. I wish to fuck that I lived here.”
He was wrong. My heart wasn’t thriving. It felt tight and cold, strangling inside my rib cage. I needed to get out of there.
We stared at this house as if we were tourists looking up at a great cathedral.
“Anyway,” Murphy finally said, “don’t court too much blame out there. You know, blame is interesting, but be careful. It’s a dangerous strategy.”
Blame. I’d said nothing to him about it.
“I’m sure we’ll see each other again.”
Not if I can help it, I didn’t say, whoever you fucking are.
11
It was early November. The Forsythe drug trials sped through testing, and the basic anti-speech agents were released for free to the public, dumped into empty newspaper bins on corners.
The drugs were a medical slush short on real medicine, soggy little tonics desperate for vast strengthening. It was the wrong time for placebos, for liquid vials of nothing. When we injected them, they only stupefied us until we sputtered awake in a different room. Instead of healing us, this medicine seemed only to bring on spells of afternoon death. A rehearsal, maybe. A warm-up.
In the days after my run-in with Murphy I rigged a lab in the kitchen, following Thompson’s orders. On my conscious nights I milled speculative medicines designed to keep us healthy enough to hold our ground at home. Such nights were coming less often, but when I was able to crawl from the rug in my home office, where I had erected a person-size humidor in which to test the inhalers, and when the evening was cleansed of potential encounters with Esther, I started boiling down drugs.
From the kitchen’s single crusted naval port window, as I waited for my solutions to cool, I watched the emergency vans cruise down Wilderleigh at night, sampling the air with roof-mounted saucers and testing wands that spoiled from their bumpers like fins.
No such vans roamed the streets in daylight. A medical truck might have parked on the corner, but I suspect this was for the personal use of a neighbor, the private removal of a loved one who’d just fallen to the toll. A yellow hearse roamed the neighborhood, opening its doors to sheet-covered gurneys. And the occasional diesel helicopter pitched north of us through the upper Montrier Valley, taking aerial surveys, but it was a skeletal