The Flame Alphabet - Ben Marcus [40]
If I could only speak such words at my enemy, would say Pliny. What weaponry I would have.
I knew my Pliny pretty well and I was fairly sure this was wrong, hadn’t happened to Pliny. Or anyone. Yet the tone was assured, hardened in the rhetoric of fact.
The brain of Albert Dewonce, whose job it was to listen to troubles. Of whom nothing is given, but one can guess at the kind of job. Heard more words than anyone alive, was the claim, this Dewonce. His brain, they said, when he died, was decayed at the core, a lather of cells that could not possibly have received any information. Says the coroner. The cortex, blackened. Says his wife, he was sick each night from what he heard.
A brain that had been rendered to slush from speech, then.
Stories of this sort all throughout. Did any of it stand to reason? The profound cost on the brain itself. Its limited resilience in the face of, what, language?
A person’s language age can be measured through a test of his Broca’s area, such test to be performed with a tool whose name is defaced, unreadable. Unattributed drawings near the text are perhaps this tool. Language age, a phrase used throughout The Proofs. Language death, when the body is saturated. At the cusp of adulthood. A drowning of cells, is the phrase. The time of quota, when the threshold is tripped, at or near the age of eighteen.
Giving Esther four more years, I noted.
Another section, a test, called How Do You Feel When You Read This? Then some words slung together without logic.
The reading did not harm me. I scanned through what was written but felt nothing. Sometimes numbness took me, working like a vacuum to siphon off what I knew, but it did not feel connected to reading. It felt like a headache that had grown cold, pulled long, a headache on the move through parts of me I never knew felt pain.
In future issues of The Proofs, a final theory of rashes was pledged. We’d see working drawings of the Perkins Mouth Guard. The thirty-word language would be revealed, the least toxic words in our lexicon, but these words would primarily be place-names.
The Proofs was conspicuous for its absence of conclusions. One was not sure it was not simply the stitchery of Murphy, whose motives were somehow other. Deeply other. Unguessable. If The Proofs was advocating something, it did not say. It was not for sale. How many copies there were, I didn’t know.
Before folding up my evening reading and stuffing it back in its envelope, I saw in smaller print, bound by a box, a paragraph of text with the title Take Heart!
What a thing to do, and how very much I wished I could.
14
The red busses of Rochester pulled in that week, parked outside the school to collect their cargo. They came from Forsythe, a universal F scratched into their hoods. These were not busses so much as engorged medical waste canisters, motorized and fitted with tires, dipped in brilliant red paint. The medical waste being our children.
The cockpits of the busses, should passengers become vocal, were wood-boxed, soundproofed, blackened, double-locked.
An optional alleviation, these busses were called. Your children, went the pledge, would not be subjected to medical tests. Nothing invasive. They would be kept safe, held for you, in order for local recoveries to flourish. Medical babysitting.
Segregation was the strategy. Divide and conquer. But this was more like divide and collapse, divide and weep.
Minnesota was a destination, a low-activity coordinate. The toxicity couldn’t linger with those thermals. You wanted to be where the wind was. A certain species of it. Some kind of grassland facility in Pennsylvania was listed as well, where a new form of ventilation was being attempted.
A picture of the destination floated around, an empty field with a horse trotting through. The imaginary landscape of a travel brochure. We were