The Flame Alphabet - Ben Marcus [72]
But I had found it, and now I wanted to listen in. If LeBov could intercept the feed without a listener, then so could I. I’d worked my own orange cable for years, learned a thing or two about the secret Jewish radio.
The wire magazine rack was easy to dismantle. I straightened the curved frame, rotating a small length of wire like the hand of a clock until it snapped off. With this short wire I climbed back on the chair, grabbed the warm meat of the cable, and pierced the shielding until the wire penetrated the cable’s core. A sudden antenna.
On the chair I braced myself, thinking I was bringing together two powerful forces that might knock me to the ground.
But nothing happened. No transmission, no sound.
I’m not sure why I thought there would be. I’d bridged no signal, simply pierced the cable and possibly deferred one channel of the transmission into the air of my room, where it died out inaudibly.
It’s true that the medical smoke briefly faltered in my room when I pierced the orange cable, sputtering from the nozzle, but that might have been a coincidence.
What I needed to do was extend the wire from the orange cable to a grounded point of metal conduction, then parlay the transmission into something that could pass for an audio speaker. Then I’d be able to hear the feed. If there was a feed. If this was a Jewish transmission at all.
From the straightened coils of the magazine rack I snapped off a clutch of longer wires, crimping them onto the short piece that pierced the cable, and in this way I wove a necklace of wire from the ceiling cable to the electrical outlet in the baseboard.
From here I used the final length of wire to bridge the signal into the best point of conductivity I could think of, the most natural audio speaker there is, at least when you have no other radio equipment on hand: the flesh inside of one’s own mouth.
I coiled a tight nest of wire using the last scraps of the magazine rack and stashed it under my tongue. This was elementary antenna work. When I was ready I would feed the wire from the electrical outlet to the nest in my mouth, consummating the transmission. Perhaps then Burke would speak. Burke would make himself known through my mouth. My rabbi could be heard again.
My face was cold, as rough as an animal’s back. LeBov’s ointment last week had bought me some time, softened my palate enough for me to speak in ways I didn’t understand. But that had worn off by now and my face had the buzzing, numb feeling of a sleeping limb. It therefore did not concern me that I was delivering the Jewish voltage to my mouth. My mouth was probably the safest place to test this bit of smallwork.
I sat down on the floor with the conducting wire, gripping the chair leg for support. At this point I should have taken stock, given some last thought to my Esther in the quarantine, Claire barely alive. I should have paid my respects to what little was left of the world I knew. But instead I touched the wire to the metal nest inside my mouth and fell at once into a tremble.
My vision blistered, blackened, and a seizure surged through my body. A darkness came over me, and in a great rush of sound, the Jewish transmission gushing from my face at a shattering volume, I blacked out.
27
Blessed are they who keep his testimonies quiet, who share them not even with themselves.
They make no crime in the air; they walk in the ways.
How does a person cleanse his way?
By saying nothing of your word.
Let me never announce the thought. Let me not corrupt it with sound.
Your word I have buried in my heart.
My heart I have buried in the woods.
These woods you have hidden from me in darkness.
You have commanded us not to know you and we have obeyed. When we have known you we have looked away, put blacklings