The Flame Alphabet - Ben Marcus [44]
“So this is your fault?” I said. “You really believe that?” I asked her. “Fine, let’s fucking talk about it.”
Claire nodded up at me. “It’s the first thing that’s made sense out there for me in years. It’s the first thing I heard that felt true and real.”
The first thing? In years?
“It wasn’t true and real. It was a sermon. You’re not meant to believe it like that.”
“Oh? Then how the fuck am I supposed to believe it? If I don’t believe it, then why are we going out there? Is it a joke?”
I didn’t know what I was saying now, but I kept talking.
“The lessons are abstract, something to think about.”
She scoffed. “Maybe to you they are. If you want to escape all responsibility, that’s your business, Sam. Do that. If that’s what you call keeping your own counsel.”
“Well, if it’s your fault, if you actually believe that, then fix it,” I said.
Claire seemed confused.
“Make it better,” I shouted down at her. “Make this go away, Claire. Undo it. I’m going to fucking wait here until you do.
“You see?” I said. “It’s meaningless. Your claim is fucking meaningless. It’s the most selfish thing of all for you to take the blame, as if you had anything to do with this.”
She looked at me in high disbelief.
“Selfish?” she asked.
“I’m serious,” I yelled, and she flinched.
“If it’s your fault, do something about it, Claire. Otherwise shut up and never say that again. Never open your mouth about this again.”
This stopped the crying. I watched my wife draw in her forces, sealing herself off from not just what I said, but from me as well, from the evening, from the days that had passed. A project of wall building, face hardening, secret fortifying of everything that mattered to her. All done without moving, an inner construction project Claire seemed to command until she was, in all the ways that matter, gone. Sitting on the steps Claire receded, drifting farther and farther away from me until she looked up at me with the stare reserved for a stranger, all intimacy erased.
“It’s not your decision,” I said to her, softer. “You can’t break faith because it also breaks mine. I can’t go out there without you. You know that. It doesn’t work. I already tried it. We have to go together, to believe in it together.”
She laughed. “But we don’t have to, Sam. We actually don’t. Find someone else to believe in nothing with. I’m done.”
“It’s not your choice,” I whispered.
“Oh, I think it is. And, anyway, it’s for the best. I have it on good faith that if I stop going, Esther will be safe. Someone’s made a promise to me, and, unlike you, I think he can keep it.”
“Someone?”
“Yes, Sam. Someone. You don’t know him.”
“Claire, please,” I said. “This person.”
“Forget it.”
“He came to the house?”
“I said forget it.”
“One question.”
“No. No questions. No questions and no answers.”
“Claire. Did this man call himself Murphy? Does he have red hair?”
My wife did not respond, but she gave me such a queer, searching look, and then it was a long time before she looked at me again.
Together we sat staring out at the street, the final exhausts of Claire’s sobs gasping out. She slid to the far end of the steps, kept to herself for the rest of the night. She was perhaps too weak to bring herself inside.
Salt blasts had streaked into the neighborhood. You couldn’t see them at night, or even so well in the day. Mostly it was the pellucid salt already washed clear by the wind. But you felt it crunching under your feet, some living thing recently crushed into grain.
I looked east toward the man-shaped silhouette between two houses where the sun would appear in a few hours, but there was nothing there to suggest a sun could ever heave itself into the sky again. I would never get used to that.
I could not ignore how that space looked forever immune from any illumination. Places give no warning that they might soon be erased by light. There is never a single thing to suggest that some grotesque change is coming that will reveal all, and soon.
A language solely of place-names. What would we possibly say to