The Flame Alphabet - Ben Marcus [78]
A paper of silver was produced for me, upon which letters were raised only through application of a light wand. A birch paper dipped in copper appeared in my materials box. Across its face I rubbed some salt. I scripted with salt on black felt, sprinkled salt over a twisting wooden model of block text, mounted on a wire like a nursery mobile, upon which the salt pooled in hills, creating the ephemeral shape of letters.
With stones I rubbed text away from paper, with sticks and clay bark and pastel markers I tested how much I could cover text without fully hiding it, and whether the covering mattered, being sure our test subjects would be shown plain blocks of color alongside shades that hid writing beneath.
I shaped letters with yarn, hieroglyphs with yarn, arranged yarn in the minimal spatter of contemporary shorthand. With a tweezers I laid down a vertical script of yarn, hung yarn from wire so it draped just so, and with jets of air blew the yarn into letter shapes as it swayed. Or so I surmised, for I did not look at the device myself. With yarn I wrote full sentences in the Coptic alphabet, the Indus script, Linear A and B, all proven toxic already, all capable, in blocks and paragraphs, to generate sickness—micro coma, paralysis—in the reader, but then I tugged each end of the yarn on these sentences until the words pulled long. I tugged on the yarn and documented each stage until the yarn was pulled so taut, it stood out in a straight line and could never be mistaken for language.
The results you already know. We took this work to our subjects, then stood to watch from the observation deck. If it was indoor work, the work of reading, we assembled the material in sealed-off rooms, into which a subject was brought, shown a chair, left alone.
The materials were bound, sealed in foil.
To be thorough, we tested on men and women alike, young and old, sick and well. There was a healthy supply of subjects on hand. People lined up for this work. They volunteered, fought to be first, scratched at each other without mercy, as if they’d been profoundly misled about what waited for them inside Forsythe.
Which of course, well, they had.
From my window I saw them, and from the observation booth I saw them, and sometimes I didn’t need to see them at all. I could stay at my desk and picture the sad readers being led into the testing area, strapped to the medical monitors. I could picture exactly how they would react. The work was foregone. To see it, to confirm it, was only a waste of time. I would know if something actually worked. The news would come fast. Or perhaps, if I ever did develop a script that could be read without sickness, restoring language to our fine species, I wouldn’t be so quick to share it with the good people of Forsythe.
Perhaps such an invention, kept private, was just what I needed to find my leverage.
31
At Forsythe one worked, one ate, one rested, and on occasion one consensually fucked a stranger, an arrangement that produced merely a pinhole of joy. Beyond that entertainment was limited, at least for my class of researchers, since our appetites were highly regulated. We were under shield. Our health was a priority.
Health. Perhaps that wasn’t what people with stiff, shadowed faces really had, whose tongues had atrophied. People unable to look at each other. Out of shame or fear or maybe finally a true loss of interest. If we looked away from each other in the halls, it was mostly because we’d seen enough. Other faces were just uglier parts of the landscape inside of Forsythe. And people might have hurried past you, but soon they seemed transparent.
When I wanted to see children I watched old television shows, the comedies.
A