The Flame Alphabet - Ben Marcus [5]
The reasoning, when reasoning seemed possible, was simple. Better to stand up to those happy moments, if that’s what they were, and give Esther a father who wasn’t such a spoiler, who didn’t turn pale on the occasion of even the most basic speech. But my face leaked force each time. A daughter was someone to pretend to be healthy for. A daughter shouldn’t see such sickness. Your child will be the end of you, Rabbi Burke had not yet said. I could speak back to her, and I could hear, technically I could. I could ask about school, or the feuds that consumed her, the massive injustices, often by omission, perpetrated by her friends, but the words felt foreign, like they were built of wood. A punishment to my mouth just to extract them, like pulling bones from my head.
That this poison flowed from Jewish children alone, at least at first, we had no reason to think. That suffering would find us in ever more novel ways, we had probably always suspected.
4
At first we thought we were bitten. Something had landed on our backs and sucked on us. Now we would perish. It was September, and the air was still soaked in heat, a nasty fried smell in the yard. Claire and I traced our lethargy, the buzzing limbs and bodies that we dragged around like sacks, to a trip to the ocean, where we succumbed to ill-considered napping atop a crispy lattice of seaweed and sand gnats that left us helplessly scratching ourselves for days.
If we looked closely, a spatter of red marks spread across our backs. Map fragments, like an unfinished tattoo. Not freckles or moles. Possibly the welters from a bite, some rodent eating us while we slept.
Claire spread out on her belly and I straddled her for the examination, but this was the wrong, sad view of her. Her bottom flattened beneath me, as if relieved of its bones, and the generous skin of her back pooled onto the bed.
Esther walked in, looked at us with disappointment. I waved her away, mouthing some scold, hoping Claire wouldn’t notice that she’d been exposed in this position.
“Really?” Esther said, louder than necessary. “I mean you couldn’t even close the door?”
One should not look too closely at a spouse’s back, should not pin her this way to a bed. This was ill-advised scrutiny. I didn’t know what I was looking for anyway. Claire squirmed under me, tried to hide from Esther’s sight.
“Mom’s not feeling well,” I said, climbing down.
“Then maybe you should leave her alone, Dad.”
“I’m trying to help.”
“Hm,” said Esther, using her face to freely show what she thought of that.
Hadn’t Esther, her skin unspoiled, still tauntingly clear, napped on the same tangled nest? We’d set up camp on burnt sand, waiting our turn in line to splash in the fenced-in patch of ocean. The three of us ripped through a bag of salted candies, then fell into one of those blissful afternoon beach comas, sleeping in the sun, our limbs fat with heat.
Claire had an explanation. The old, the tired, the ruined, got done in by bites. Turned into leaking sacks of mush. Whereas the young, they swigged venom to the lees and it supercharged their bodies. They could not be stopped.
Conversations from the museum of the uninformed. It troubled us that our common sense had so little medical traction. There were doctors, and there were armchair doctors, and then there were people like us, crawling in the mud, deploying childish diagnostics, hoping that through sheer tone of voice, through the posturing of authority, we would exact some definitive change of reality. Perhaps we thought the world we lived in could be hacked into pleasing shapes simply by what we said. Maybe we still believed that.
The medical tests, when we sought