The Flame Alphabet - Ben Marcus [69]
The message traveled so fast into me that I felt torn open. The phrase, whatever it meant, was like an act of sudden surgery, the kind that cuts the rotted thing from your body, leaving you empty, healed, exquisitely released from pain. That’s all I remember.
I woke inside a light-scorched hallway. A salted object filled my mouth. Someone shoved it deeper, his fist jammed into my face, as if he was trying to hide his whole arm in my body. I breathed through my nose and tried to keep up, but my mouth was too full with the gag of salt.
My escorts held me close and I let their bodies guide me. We moved from hallways to small rooms, waited at doors, then passed through tight corridors until we mounted a steep, narrow staircase and came up on the floor where I would be staying.
I tried to keep my sense of direction throughout this interior maneuvering, but the compass I conjured in my mind had only a single direction, the needle in a palsy over a symbol I didn’t recognize.
A man in a lab coat removed the salt object from my mouth and something tore as he pulled it out.
I felt hands on me, sharp pieces of bodies that stank. Someone with a practiced touch lifted my arms, removed my shirt. He’d done this to many people, I could tell. Disrobed them while they slumped over in a stupor, readied them for some miracle.
I was held in place while something pinched under my arm, deep against the bone. It is hard to know if I made any show of my feelings. I looked down as a syringe pulled from a perforation under my arm, the skin hugging the needle as it retreated.
This was no medicine I had tried before. It brought my eyes halfway shut and I could do nothing to open them again.
The man spoke in that foreign, airless language, his breath oily in my mouth, and this time his phrasings made me cry. I cried in the most childish, open-faced way.
I let myself fall into his arms.
With a thumb jammed between my shoulder blades, he worked a finger from his other hand deep under the bone of my sternum. He had a hand on each side of me and he crouched, readied himself in preparation.
I draped over him, unable to stand.
When my lungs were empty, he squeezed, as if his thumb and finger might meet inside my body. I believe he succeeded.
The sensation came too quickly for me to cry out. My face tightened, a blast of pressure leaking from my eye. He slipped out from under me and I fell.
He left me in a heap on the floor.
The medical procedures at Forsythe, at least those I received in the parking lot and outer hallways of the recovery wing, belonged to no speech fever treatment I knew. Hebraic phrases delivered through a prosthetic mouth, triggering ecstasy, promoting unconsciousness. Perhaps these were the healing phrases Murphy—LeBov, I should say—had mentioned. Then there was the profoundly painful bodywork, the deep-tissue manipulation and extreme compression. Crushing. These practices had not been discussed publicly.
Against the cold wall of my room, in clothes that reeked of my travels, I spoke for a time with Claire. I spoke to her in private tones, words dismantled into grunts, because Claire did not need anything spelled or even sounded out for her, she never did.
Sometimes I could summon my wife’s voice, no matter where she was. Sometimes she would talk back, even if it was only me willing it so.
I found myself arguing for the family, trying to make a case that we needed to stick together, and as I did that, I could see Claire’s face, a stricken look of disbelief on it, a really appalled look that I would even begin to suggest she did not also want that, which of course I agreed to as fully as I could, but I could tell from her face that it was too late, I had cast myself as the one who wanted unity, I had excluded her from this desire, and how dare I do such a thing?
Stick together? She didn’t need to ask. This from the man who drove off without us?
What’s important now, I started to say to her. What’s important now … What’s important is that we …
I pictured Claire waiting for me to say, waiting for me to actually