The Flame Alphabet - Ben Marcus [36]
Behind the hut I extracted the listener from its shit-caked bag. At the rusted orifice in the hut floor I squeezed the hole until I could pull on the fitting, but the hole was stiff. Today I could hardly force it open. After a finger-mincing effort, it ripped wider with what sounded like an animal cry and heat spread into the hut as the listener shriveled in my hands. Soon the bag stoppering the hole swelled with air, inflating gently as if a sick person lay beneath it, breathing his last. Now, at least, a transmission might be possible.
I found the labor dispiriting. It was too much effort to get to Rabbi Burke. You should have been able to plug in our radio and turn it on. But Burke had indicated once, while praising us for our adherence to protocol, that sentences pertaining to the Jewish project must come in certain lengths, precise strings of language, stripped of acoustical excess. Otherwise they were invalid, not technically a part of the authentic language, which required endless honing, pruning. The listener enabled this, in ways I would never understand. The requirements we upheld at our hut would fill a whole other report until it burst into rags. As with any religion, one supposes.
Perhaps other options might present themselves here, I hoped. Burke, or even Thompson, would have to consider more concrete guidance now, particularly since LeBov was saying we knew something. Everything had changed. One’s faith was meant to yield actionable material at times like this, I always thought, when one’s own imagination had failed, when nothing seemed possible. Wasn’t this why we accommodated an otherwise highly irrational set of beliefs?
I had not done this hut work alone before. Solitude was not authorized. And this was no Thursday, which doubled my violation. I half thought I’d see some other Jew in the woods toting his own blood-slick listener.
Tuesdays are mine, he’d snarl, heaving his hot listener over the console.
I would guess that my visit took place on a Tuesday, but days were not easy to track. It was hard to believe that it should matter, that access to our faith would be blocked on some days, regulated according to some inscrutable limitation in, of all things, forest electronics, radio science.
Lately there were days I wished I could walk into a real synagogue, a real one, sit down, and listen to a live person, a person I could then follow home with questions.
When the listener was sealed to the bag and my tests for leaks yielded only a mild stream of wind from the hole, I ran the orange cable into the console and sat down to listen. I waited there in the cold hut and I squeezed out all other noise, freezing on the wood floor.
Nothing happened. Hours later I’d only gathered hisses and blips, a language ripped apart, turned into flesh and then shredded. At one point I discovered that with my face pressed against the listener, more voices flowed through the radio, a tumble of speech from a man whose voice was far lower than Rabbi Burke’s. A different man entirely, speaking in what sounded like Old English. The harder I pressed my face against the listener, smashing it into the wet flesh, the clearer this man’s voice became, but it seemed I’d have to hurt myself to make his words audible. I’d need to break my skin, fracture my jaw, taking the listener inside my own face, and I could not bring myself to do it.
Instead I retreated, went back to the standard procedures. But the module could build nothing else from whatever weak signal trickled through. Yesterday’s signal, the vestiges of a message that might have once mattered, but by now had been hacked into nonsense by exposure in the hole. A sermon built only from wind, a wind that had been buried for years, only to spill from the earth now with no force or meaning.
The listener could not even pull a fairy tale from the cable for me, which it sometimes did, after Burke’s sermon had been discharged, sometimes instead of