The Flame Alphabet - Ben Marcus [74]
A clump of black fur was pressed to my neck with a forceps, and when I buckled with dizziness I seemed to have passed the test.
A man used a tweezers to extract a piece of paper from a medical waste bag. I squirmed away from it, some deep instinct repelling me from reading. From behind me someone gripped my face and again the paper was dangled, twisting in the breeze.
My handlers averted their eyes.
The paper tilted, caught the perfect plane, and for a moment I saw it clearly. It had words on it, the sort I knew and would never forget, and I was forced to look at them. Yet more papers were tweezed from the bag and held before me, one after another. I was out of practice, but I knew I could estrange myself from language, should I encounter it. I could squint away the particulars, fuzz them into nothing.
But part of me was curious. Perhaps this was their only way of telling me something. Perhaps these notes held a message for me.
My interest appeared too late. The last page was retracted, the bag sealed, and then a handler stepped forward, gripping a short needle in his work glove, and jabbed me with it. I looked away as he drew from my thigh the blood they apparently required.
The other tests were routine and I submitted to them patiently. The goggles worn by my handlers were curious: the light was not bright enough to call for them. I realized then that they did not wear goggles to shield their eyes from the sun, but rather to keep themselves from being seen, to hide their eyes. I had seen no other unadorned faces, made no eye contact, heard no speech. The silence of everyone and everything felt pressurized, achieved at some cost I couldn’t calculate.
When my examination was done, someone nudged me from the filthy yurt into a clearing, the Forsythe courtyard.
On top of a perfect circle of grass, a table stood loaded with bread, toasted seeds, a bowl of jam. The rolls were still warm. When I tore one open the steam bathed my face, and in my mouth it was soft and salty, so lovely to taste I nearly wept. On my second roll I spread some of the pale yellow jam and scattered the blackened seeds over it, stuffed the hot mass into my mouth, then looked for something to drink.
Nothing else had been laid out. When a handler passed me I grabbed his arm and made a drinking gesture, but he ducked away. The nimble way he evaded me, not hostile, just effortless and fast, as if he were executing a precisely timed dance move, suggested he had practiced this kind of avoidance before.
I waited while my work order was finalized, shifting along the courtyard every so often to keep the shade, which was terribly cold, from overcoming me. There were others, apparently dragged from a recovery tank somewhere also, likewise encased in oversize pajamas, huddled against themselves inside the great open courtyard. We looked like prisoners staggered in precise intervals so someone, stationed in a high tower, could practice his rifle skills.
In buildings as formidable and cold as this, one expects to look up from a courtyard at cruelly small windows, and see desperate faces pressed to the glass, the urgent signals of people held against their will. Instead the facility wall that gave onto the courtyard below featured broad sheets of transom glass, allowing more sunshine than a building as featureless and leaden as Forsythe would seem to be able to tolerate.
No ashen prisoners crowded behind the glass, only lab-coated observers, standing in full view. The glass shielded an indoor deck of some kind, allowing people to stand and study the doings below.
Before I was taken to my new room, I glimpsed what must have been capturing the interest of those people up in the observation booth: a man under a clear dome in the courtyard, his head encased by bright yellow earphones. A crowd of lab-coated observers stood outside the dome with clipboards, while above them their supervisors surveyed the spectacle.
The man tugged at the earphones,