The Flame Alphabet - Ben Marcus [71]
The bathroom was dank and its lone faucet, protruding from the wall, blew debris-laden air from its nozzle. If liquid rode in this stream, it clung to the sand that blasted out. I held my hands under the nozzle, beneath a wind that scarcely moistened my fingers. I bent to it and swallowed jets of wind so fierce, they knocked me against the back wall of the bathroom.
The air sped through me with such turbine force, I sensed a bird’s violation when its beak opens, wind penetrating every last space inside its body.
When I pictured Claire, she crouched in the woods, caked in mud so the dogs couldn’t smell her. In my wishful thinking, which amounted to all my thinking, Claire had fled the truck, scattered to the tree line, then vanished into the woods. From there she watched our house. In her gown she strained to get a safe look at Esther. She strained and failed. When I pictured this, Esther remained hidden from Claire, would not show herself, and her mother did not relent, crawling through the woods for every advantage of perspective.
No matter how much I wanted to, I could not get Claire to see Esther, even though I should have been in charge of my own imagination. It should have been child’s play to picture these events, but somehow this imagery was blacked out in me. When I moved Esther and Claire together in my mind, a darkness fell and they turned into distant, weak shapes. Even if I could collide these shapes, at that point they were not even people, just blocks of cold darkness that looked nothing like my wife and daughter.
Early in my stay, I discovered a way to access Rabbi Burke, but the method had difficulties.
At some point I woke up to an engine shrieking overhead. It was day, it was night, it was early, it was late. The time was best judged, if it needed to be judged, by how thirsty I was, and now my tongue was as dry as a sock in my mouth.
Above me, jets of smoke poured from a ceiling fixture. I reasoned it to be intentional smoke, a smoke meant for me, the patient, as opposed to exhaust fumes from an accident elsewhere at Forsythe.
Finally they were medicating me so I could get out of there. A nozzle in the ceiling pumping vapors into the recovery wing.
The flow was loud and cold. No matter where I huddled in my room it reached me, pouring cloudy fumes over my face. In the hallway it pumped. In the other rooms, even Room 4, covering in fog the man on the floor.
Sometimes the machinery behind the spout whined and the smoke spewed faster from its hole. When I tried to stop it, thinking perhaps the spigot could be dialed down, I discovered that the cork ceiling panel it protruded from was unusually soft. Soft and easy to remove.
I stood on my chair, ducking the putrid smoke, rotten and icy at its source, and pushed aside the panel. The drop ceiling disguised a tangle of plumbing ducts and power lines, but something else snaked through that space as well: a bright orange cable such as the one that pulsed up from our Jew hole. A shining orange piece of conduit. I’d recognize it anywhere.
I wanted to think that this cable could have been anything. It probably was a coincidence. Plastic orange insulation could not be exclusive to the forest Jews who deployed a Jewish radio. But when I gripped the cable it warmed in my hands, pulsing as if fated with a heartbeat. It gave off the same heat, the same nauseating smell, as the cable of our hut.
To be sure, I checked the other rooms, the hallway. I dragged my chair throughout the recovery wing, pushed aside ceiling panels, and found the orange cable wherever I looked. In Room 4 I stood over the fallen man and found the orange cable buried in his ceiling as well.
When I traced the cable out of the recovery wing, I struck a concrete wall and could follow it no farther. The cable flowed up from somewhere and retreated,