The Flame Alphabet - Ben Marcus [63]
People swarmed the street. I could not see their faces. Our evacuation was orderly and our denial so final, we were spared overt displays of grief. The day was hot, there was weeping down the hill, some other person’s weeping, and in our own yard, under the fractured shade of the oldest tree on our block, such a clutter of moths bothered the air. These were the slow, bird-size moths, so awkward they may as well have been tagged and numbered.
My face felt so heavy, I thought I could remove it, step on it until it composted. I coupled my hip bag of adrenaline with boiled-down Semantiril to queer any speech sounds I might hear. I needed speech estranged into grunts and huffs. Even these could command people into action. I required speech submerged in fluid, warbled, buried in the ground. The Semantiril got me close. It brought foam into the holes, filling in whatever silence was left inside a word. What I heard were solid blocks of tone, like the test sounds from an emergency broadcast.
Throughout the day I paused while loading the car to huff these vapors from an oily lunch bag.
The last signs of life flickered inside Claire. That much and no more. When she looked at me I felt the high disgrace of being known for what I am.
Outside the house was a whiteout of silence, the sound of a whole neighborhood holding its breath. I kept my head down, vowed not to see. If I did not regard others in their shame, their haste, perhaps they would spare me from seeing mine.
Once I had Claire in the car, I noticed she was clutching the letter she’d written to Esther. Somehow she’d found the strength to sit down and write a final message. It was sealed and I was not to read it or ask about it. Fairly simple parameters to follow. The envelope was wrinkled with sweat, with whatever leaked freely from Claire.
I wrote no such letter myself. There was something blackening to the act of writing words, like carving into flesh. My hand felt foreign. It would not cooperate. And if I did write anything, it looked like a drawing dismantled into too many pieces. I could make the parts but I could not put the parts together.
Decipherment of words on a page was too difficult. When I managed it, I was never sure what had happened, who’d been killed by whom. It was becoming clear to me that reading would be something I would avoid. The very thought of it sent a wave of fear through my chest.
When I finally sat down with a voice recorder the night before, I produced only excuses. The rhetoric of a whitewasher. Nothing passed for tender in what I said, which meant that I had already communicated all I could on the topic. Everything else, like most of my parenting to Esther, would have to go without saying, without doing. But when I listened back to the recording, to check the quality of the sound, I heard the sounds of a man with cloth stuffed in his mouth. In the end this was what I left for Esther. There was no larger wisdom I could impart.
Here, my final words to you, just nothing. It is all that I know.
In the car I pulled Claire’s nightgown from where it was bunched under her legs. I straightened her coat. Beneath the seat I clicked the lever and shifted her back. Her legs released into the freed-up space and she relaxed.
I did not want to hurt her so I did not speak. I held her face and mouthed, “How’s that?”
She stared straight through me.
I looked at this stoic, long-suffering woman, who really should have died weeks ago. What an insult this all was to her. She did not want me breathing in her space, leaning my weight against her. She did not want me getting close. In Shippington, in Lobe Arbor, in one of the fields that ran flush to West Hollows, Claire could be alone all she liked.
If there was a plan, it was that we’d head down Route 4, but take the splinter trail that cuts beneath the Monastery, following the tracks until the trail dovetails with 41. In Shippington or Lobe Arbor we’d book a motel, monitor the situation from there.
I’d called ahead this