The Flame Alphabet - Ben Marcus [38]
The text was pale blue, like a writing erupted under skin. The illustrations—illness maps, perimeter lines for the epidemic, and module schematics—were drawn by a palsied hand. In these drawings germs were people or beasts, and viruses looked like the world seen from miles away. Speech from the faces of children was rendered in ugly rushes of color, with each color coded on a wheel to some kind of distress.
On the back page Murphy had written: I’ve entrusted you with something, now it’s your turn.
He’d found my house, then. Which meant he had followed me. I pictured him striding in the shadows down Wilderleigh on a cold wellness walk, his children barking at home while his wife moaned in the corner. If there was a wife. He was waiting for his moment, watching my house from down the street.
I concealed The Proofs and looked at the issues alone in bed. But with each delivery I put everything back in my mailbox as I’d found it, creeping out in the dark of morning so Murphy could not know for certain I had received what he sent.
Inside The Proofs I found historical precedent for the language toxicity. A kind of medical foreshadowing from earliest history. Signs from the past that this would happen, or that it had happened before and been snuffed out, forgotten. Hippocrates, Avicenna, a long list of experts who knew without really knowing that our strongest pollution was verbal.
The master dissector Gabriele Falloppio, forerunner of the modern autopsy, found what he termed curious erosions in the brain from multilingual patients. Or more notably Boerhaave, who registered speech aversions in the infirm and began to use small doses of speech as homeopathic treatments. Boerhaave saw only one way this could go, hoped to trigger immunity through controlled exposure. Hoped to, but didn’t.
Throughout The Proofs were phrases lifted from as far back as the medical spookeries of Laennec and Auenbrugger, sometimes misattributed, sometimes attributed to medical scientists I’d never heard of, because, I suspected, they had not actually lived.
Theories of exposure, but more than that. A grammar detected in breath, in wheezing. A new rationale for listlessness. Epidemics like cholera reimagined as speech-driven, miasmatic cyclones, an airborne disturbance, to be sure, but one that fed on the denser pockets of speech, grew stronger in such places, dying out in regions of controlled silence.
The finer print offered no attribution. No masthead, no bylines. Just the name LeBov raised in a sickly script. You almost needed night vision to see his name. With a computer one might have mocked this up alone and run off copies at the supermarket.
A list of speech rules filled the inside cover. A caution to ration one’s I statements, suppress reference to oneself, closing off a small arsenal of the language. The various speech quotas scientists were proposing now, even if they didn’t believe it would matter. Grammatical amputations. A list of rules so knotted that to follow them would be to say nearly nothing, to never render one’s interior life, to eschew abstraction and discharge a grammar that merely positioned nouns in descending orders of desire.
Presumably if you wanted nothing, you’d have no occasion to speak.
In a section of historical anecdotes I read that in 1825, Jacob Gallerus, a chemist, was sickened by his family. A letter to the medical dean of some Dublin college, written by him, asking for outside verification, which was not granted. He recorded symptoms of nausea and dizziness while in their company, determined the sickness occurred only when they spoke to him. Troubleshooting not listed, diagnostics similarly absent. A form of inbreeding, he called it, to listen to his family. There is congress in speech, he wrote. It is illicit from them.