The Flame Alphabet - Ben Marcus [77]
These people, whose worlds had been suddenly sealed up by a sickness from language, who had been forced to cease all communication with their loved ones, their friends, strangers, and who now stood patiently outside hoping some answer was being devised in here: What might they say to each other if they were suddenly given a language that worked again?
30
At my desk each day I chased the notion that the alphabet as we knew it was too complex, soaked in meaning, stimulating the brain to produce a chemical that was obviously fatal. In its parts, in combination, our lettering system triggered a nasty reaction. If the alphabet could be thinned out, shaved down, to trick the brain somehow, perhaps we could still deploy this new set of symbols, or even a single symbol, the kind you hold in your hand and reshape for different meanings, for modest, emergency-only communications.
I decided to go all the way back to the first scripts. I had to rule out cuneiform, hieroglyphs, wedge writing. From the Egyptian I had to exclude the hieratic and demotic writings. It was impossible to be thorough, so I took shortcuts. Of the cuneiform I surveyed and dismissed were the Hurrian, Urartian, the Sumerian.
Each of these I re-created with meticulous examples and each of these was retrieved from my office by a technician, who came to my research floor in the afternoons with his medical bag to collect whatever specimens I had, all of which I created under cover from myself, in working conditions I thought of as controlled ignorance.
From my office the specimens were brought downstairs and readied for testing against people, people already shattered and near death, overexposed to the very thing I made more of every day.
And so my work began, ruling out approaches, touring through the history of letters and alphabets, borrowing liberally from incompatible scripts, inventing new ones, correcting mistakes burned into the old ones.
What the Pollard script could not do, neither could the script of Fraser. When I blended them it was worse, and when I crammed in the lettering from elsewhere—as with the Bamum script and the script from Alaska, whose characters I sought to flatten, because a central bone could be amputated from these scripts and they would collapse into rumpled shapes—the mixture was likewise noxious.
Did the language itself matter? Was ours exhausted and did an ancient one need to be revived, or were we bound to invent a new one, avoiding the perils of every language that has heretofore existed, I wondered.
Or was it the way that language was rendered, drawn, projected, seen. Had we tried everything possible in this realm? Was the delivery system the problem?
To test this I created white text on white paper, gray on gray, froze water into text-like shapes and allowed it to melt on select surfaces—slate, wood, felt—which it scarred so gently, you’d need a magnifying glass to spot the writing.
I tried pointillizing type, whitening or darkening it, making a scattered dust of it on the page, then blowing that dust free with a bellows until it could only be read under blue light. I tried copying it on the machine until the duplication rendered it ghosted and pale. The usual distortions, obvious, of course, and all failures.
If we hid the text too much, it could not be seen. If we revealed it so it could be seen, it burned out the mind. No matter what. To see writing was to suffer.
Strictly to rule out surface as a factor, I wrote on clay, I squeezed water onto wood using a dropper. Onto foam I poured channels of fluid, then hardened that foam with hot air. The paper I used was baked, bleached, soaked in lye. I ordered paper made not just from cotton and linen, but wool, the wool shorn from whatever was still out there, the world I was now protected from inside Forsythe.
From my window I saw no animals. I had a pair of binoculars, and when I was tired of the detached work of language creation I zoomed in on the hills of Rochester, hoping to see something.
Oh,