The Flame Alphabet - Ben Marcus [84]
I tried everything but the Hebrew alphabet. I knew it was poison, too, but I didn’t want this script to cause pain. Lift not the language into the service of bloodshed, Burke had said. Or, these words will open up holes in men. I would not be the person to pass scripts of these symbols into the courtyard, where seizures would occur. But though I never sent down work that explored the Hebrew possibility, I did make latex letters in the Hebrew script that inflated, once I’d sewn up the sutures, into fat, black clouds. Little floating tumors that were language-free, hovering over my desk until I pierced them. And when I did that, they fell into shredded piles and I swept them into a drawer.
Of course I tried codes. In modern Roman letters I encrypted a suicide note, some gentleman’s last words, with the Caesar cipher. From there I re-created what I could remember from historical texts—the Gettysburg Address was one—and fed them into simple substitution ciphers, homophonic coding, and a modified Vigenère cipher. If this worked, it would mean that our own scripts were too obvious and needed to be concealed, encrypted. But it didn’t work.
To readers not versed in the code, this presented like pulp. No sense could be had unless the subjects sat down with a Caesar wheel to decipher what I’d done, and we allowed our martyrs no equipment, let alone enough time to drag meaning out of the ultra-cloaked messages before them.
But it didn’t matter. Sense wasn’t what was getting them, the immediate impact of comprehension in the brain. It may have been meaningless, but they were sick regardless, even sicker than before.
The progression of our shared disability defied the going modes of understanding.
So I tried different colored papers, clear papers, walls, cloth, skin. I ran troubleshooting on backgrounds, which interested me, the visual phenomena that stood behind the text in question, to determine how the backgrounds to our written language either support or defeat the toxicity. What kind of air masks a language, and does that air matter?
We lacked the equipment for a smoke machine that might be fitted with a text filter, through which legible typefaces could float out and dissipate in time. A self-eroding writing, a writing that dissolved when it was seen. But I didn’t need to make skywriting to know how we would react to it. With cotton balls I tufted up letters, glued them to cork. I acquired an LED board, rigged it to scroll words, to blink the scripts that I commanded.
These light boards not only failed, they brought on new symptoms, triggering a palsy in our subjects, sometimes rendering them moribund, twitching on the testing-room floor until we unplugged the board.
A writing might be made of air alone, I reasoned, colored air, the brittle air in zero-humidity climates, fur or animal hair that’s been pulverized by mortar or woven into strands, any kind of cloth, any kind of object, or ink alone, ink on paper, ink delivered by means of stylus. It was worrisome how bottomless my project was. For a stylus I defaulted to reed. But I also used pens, pencils, knives, my own finger dipped in pigment, and a lead nail for scratching over glass. The ancient tools were there for me, dragged from some useless museum, no doubt—everything at your disposal, sir, the technicians never said—and I used them, but to use them convinced me further that this direction was doomed.
After every failure I returned to my desk more certain that scripts were finished. No matter how I ornamented them, in the courtyard the result was the same. Months of this confirmation took place, played out against a range of test subjects. The work that I produced, the letters and codes and then the aggregates and compilations of these, sometimes brought to further order and logic by the Forsythe technicians, was nothing but a weapon.
When I looked from the window at the crowd outside Forsythe, clamoring without a sound to be let in, I felt wildly blank, unresponsive. They were desperate for admission but too cautious to riot, too scared, because