The Flame Alphabet - Ben Marcus [4]
3
In the months before our departure, most of what sickened us came from our sweet daughter’s mouth. Some of it she said, and some of it she whispered, and some of it she shouted. She scribbled and wrote it and then read it aloud. She found it in books and in the mail and she made it up in her head. It was soaked into the cursive script she perfected at school, letters ballooning with heart-dotted i’s. Vowels defaced into animal drawings. Each piece of the alphabet that she wrote looked like a fat molecule engorged on air, ready to burst. How so very dear.
The sickness washed over us when we saw it, when we heard it, when we thought of it later. We feasted on the putrid material because our daughter made it. We gorged on it and inside us it steamed, rotted, turned rank.
Esther sang as she walked through the house. Her voice was toneless, from the throat, in a frequency high in warding power. A voice with a significant half-life, a noxious mineral content, that is, if it could be frozen and crystallized, something then beyond our means or imagination. If her voice could have been made into a smoke, we would have known. If you heard it you were thoroughly repelled. She muttered in her sleep and awake. She spoke to us and to others, into the phone, out the window, into a bag. It didn’t matter. Nice things, mean things, dumb things, just a teenager’s chatter, like a tour guide to nothing, stalking us from room to room. Blame and self-congratulation and a constant narration of this, that, and the other thing, in low-functioning if common rhetorical modes, in occasions of speech designed not particularly to communicate but to alter the domestic acoustics, because she seemed to go dull if she wasn’t speaking or reading or serving somehow as a great filter of words.
She did it without thinking, and she did it to herself, and it was we alone who were sickened.
But of course we’d find out it was others, too. Others and others and others.
What she said was bitter, and we sipped at it and sipped at it, her mother and I, just ever so politely sipped at it until we were sick, because this was the going air inside our house, our daughter talking and singing and shouting and writing.
Whatever we thought we wanted, to hug or kiss our daughter, to sit near her, it was our bodies that recoiled first. We cowered and leaned away from her words, we kept our distance, but Esther was a gap closer, bringing it all right up to our faces. Some sort of magnet was in effect. A father magnet. A mother magnet. As we fled, Esther gave chase. We covered our ears and she talked louder. Our daughter seemed not to care who was listening, and we were ready at hand, ready to service her needs. We stood up to it and took it like parents, because doesn’t the famous phrase say: shit on me, oh my children, and I will never fail to love you?
We’d heard this at the forest synagogue from Thompson during an intermission, when Rabbi Burke allowed his staff access to the radio transmission, and we’d sat in the hut nodding our abstract consent to such a promise. Yes, of course we would love our daughter no matter what. How ridiculous to think otherwise. Ridiculous. It was so easy to agree to what did not test us.
The sickness rode in on my name. Loaded and weaponized. Samuel, which Esther was old enough, her mother and I thought, to call me. A little grace note of parenting, which seemed to work for other people, and which we proudly took up as though we had invented it. But Esther wasn’t impressed by this privilege. She barked my name until it became an insult, said it louder, softer, coughed it up and spat it at me.
We had missed the warnings on this one, phrases transmitted to our synagogue, the rabbi’s droning cautions. And they were killed with their own names. From the Psalms. Beware your name, for it is the first venom. Revelations. These warnings had always seemed like metaphors, the wishful equations of some ancient person’s mind. Little comfort, in the end, and it wasn’t my name alone that was toxic, but all of them.
It came in