The Flame Alphabet - Ben Marcus [61]
“I’m proud of that. You don’t often find someone so ripe for turning. She’s a wonderful lady. I enjoyed her company tremendously. Reverse conversion, talking people down from their beliefs. Pretty standard. Anyone can feed a doubt. I gave her hope, which is more than you were doing for her. You treated her like a lab rat and now if you even speak to her she’s going to die.”
“She’s not going to die.”
LeBov laughed.
“At least your denial is consistent.”
Then LeBov dropped down into the hole and disappeared.
I crept over, ducked down to see, but there was nothing, just the smell that seemed to follow me around, the sour fume of sleeplessness and decay.
From the depths of the hole I heard LeBov’s voice.
“Listen,” he called up. “I’d invite you to Forsythe, but there’s that wife of yours. You realize that you’re hurting her, right? Every time you talk to her? You probably think you have her best interests in mind, but believe me you don’t know what they are. Her best interests don’t involve you. Her best interests require your absence. Until death do us part, though? I hope that works out. But if you change your mind, we could use your help.”
It turns out that I did have a last question for him, one that I was still trying to form. I whispered it down the hole, afraid, for some reason, to raise my voice too loudly.
I asked—certain that LeBov was still down there, plotting his course beneath us—about the Jewish children. Early in the epidemic, those reports that the Jewish children were the only toxic ones? I needed to know if that was true, if the epidemic really emerged that way. Was Esther among the first? Or had he, had LeBov, influenced that information? I whispered this down the hole.
“Did you make that up, too? Did you spread misinformation?”
I waited for his response, jets of cold air from the Jewish hole rushing over my face. But LeBov didn’t answer.
He was already gone.
20
At home that night Claire fell asleep in Esther’s bed. Not the sleep that people can easily be roused from, but the leaden hibernation that resists all signaling, raising a carapace on the shell of the sleeper that cannot be pierced by mere shouting. The heart rate slows, the hands grow cold, and life inside the body begins to spoil. Once the vigilant waking person has succumbed, the body consumes itself. A fume rises from the torso as it molders.
It happened sometimes, the little death when Claire slept. Perhaps it happened more now that Esther was spending most nights out of the home. Her bed became one more resting ground for Claire, who toured our rooms in the night looking for the bed that would be the best staging ground for her nightly disappearance.
Her daughter’s bed, one must allow, had become her favorite site for this project.
But tonight Esther came home to be alone, missing her pretty little room, and there was trouble. I’m pretending to know what drove her. I do not know. The exercise of guessing at Esther’s actions, her thoughts, is an advanced one, requiring skills I do not have. But wherever she was and whatever she was thinking or feeling tonight, she came home, and when she did, she encountered something that caused her to give liberal voice to her feelings, to use a voice that for many weeks had been bottled up in our home.
Maybe when Esther came home she crawled into bed, only to find her mother’s dry body under the sheets. The rank-smelling hair, the bruised neck. Perhaps the mouth guard that her mother used to keep her from gnashing into the exposed nerve pulp of her teeth, perhaps this mouth guard had come unseated and was hanging from her mother’s lips like a piece of meat.
It caused her to climb up on her mother and assume a feral crouch, opening her throat for the pure injury to pour out.
By the time I arrived Claire was facedown, holding the pillow over her head. She had woken up only to swoon again. It looked at first like a posture of defense she had struck, but when I checked her she was far from seeing or knowing me.
Claire’s blackout was stubborn. I felt as if I were hacking away at the sleep