The Flame Alphabet - Ben Marcus [59]
“Yes, actually. I am sad. I’m sad that you’re here where you do not belong. It’s private, and there’s nothing here for you.”
“Nothing,” he said. “I wouldn’t call this nothing.”
He held up my listener. It was ripped down the middle, coated on its underside with something shiny. The bottom pouch was leaking and the gel had spread over LeBov’s hands.
“Okay, good for you. You must be so pleased.”
“I am fairly pleased,” he said. “I thought that I might need your help, but I don’t. Now I need to get myself down this hole.”
He screwed himself farther in, squeezing his hips past the floorboards.
I’d never gotten in that far, but I’d never had to.
“That’s not how it works,” I said. “There’s nothing down there. You’re missing the point.”
LeBov was submerged to the shoulders now, holding his bag above his head as if he were about to wade across a stream. He was trying to vanish down the little hole in the floor that normally housed our transmission cables.
“Believe me,” he said. “I am not missing the point. I think that you’re the one who has missed the point.”
Something was wrong. LeBov was straining, turning red. He couldn’t force himself through, so he squirmed out of the hole and retrieved a saw from his bag. From a position on his stomach he reached into the hole and started sawing, stopping to examine his work with the flashlight. When he finished sawing, he sat up and raised a finger as if we were meant to listen for something.
We heard the clatter of wood falling away from us, but we did not hear it land.
Probably the rubber balls at the bottom of the hole absorbed the impact.
“Maybe now,” he said.
I told LeBov that I felt obliged to ask him some questions.
“That sounds like a burden. Unburden yourself. By all means. You have about forty-five seconds. If that’s how you’d like to use your remaining time, feel free.”
“Okay. Why did you do it?”
LeBov didn’t even take a minute to think. It was as though I’d asked him a question he’d rehearsed all his life. From LeBov I merited the canned response, deflection delivered with a hint of superiority. I hated people who could answer questions like these. Any kind of questions, maybe.
“There are certain boundaries that I’d prefer not to observe when it comes to my own identity,” LeBov said. “There’s a lot of behavior that I want to accomplish, but I don’t need all of it, or really any of it, attributed to me. Attribution is a burden. In that sense I’m less like a person, a person as you might think of one, and more like an organization. There’s also behavior that I need to undo, to take away, and this is often best accomplished by others, people who can erase action, alter ideas. I have a staff who work for me, of course. It’s always startled me that people are so cautious when it comes to who exactly they are. It’s almost the only thing we actually get to control. What a missed opportunity, really. For instance, you don’t even know that I’m the real LeBov. But it’s hard to grieve the choices made, or not made, by uninspired people. The sympathy allotment doesn’t extend that far.”
“So you change your name, fake your death.”
“Look, that’s nothing. That’s cosmetic. Not even cosmetic. I moved around some grains of sand. Or not even that. I can’t invent a small enough metaphor for what I’ve done. It’s that insignificant. It adds some maneuverability, that’s all. Some spaces open up. Everyone’s presumed dead now anyway, as of tonight, after the radio darkness. Today was the last chance to die and have it reported. I hit the last news cycle. My death was the last story before the blackout. The world’s last obituary. You should be congratulating me.”
I looked at this redhead squeezing through the floor of my synagogue.
“Congratulations. And if in the process of this important work you hurt someone?”
“Then, uh, they feel pain? Is that a trick question? Is that really what’s at issue right now, your hurt feelings? Could your perspective be any smaller?”
“You spoke to my wife.”
“Someone had to. At least she actually listened. So much for your