The Flame Alphabet - Ben Marcus [86]
The subjects, reclining in their wheeled hospital beds on the dark, oak stage of the theater, generally endured this work, but only at first. And when they did not endure it, when they made profound protests to the material that was clearly undoing them in every significant way, we were marched from our seats, led from the hall, and corralled as usual back to our offices.
Everything I’d seen so far had prepared me to pay as little notice as I might during these mandatory sessions. And this is right about when a new paradigm was presented to us at assembly, and everything changed.
It was late in my stay in the research wing, when I had already ruled out the efficacy of ancient scripts, had sent reams of alphabets downstairs for toxicity testing, only to have them return in the sleeves reserved for failed research, and I had moved on to the equally unpromising grotesqueries of modern script.
It was a morning around that time when the long bell sounded and we took our seats in the surgery. The lights dimmed. Onto the stage came an old man, his head draped in testicle skin. When he rubbed it and blinked into the lights I saw it was merely his face, beset with a terrible, taffy-like droop. I did not want to reflect what sort of experiments, or what sort of life, had led to possessing a face like that. Behind him wheeled a creaky IV cart.
It was pushed by a child, who was tethered to the thing itself.
I would say that a hush fell at the sight of this man, or more correctly at the uncommon sight of a child, especially one who did not seem to be under guard, but a hush had already fallen. We were steeped in hush, drowning in it. The room was sickeningly quiet. I knew nothing of my colleagues, saw almost nothing of their robed and lab-coated bodies, and could detect little from their impassive, gestureless faces. The lack of speech, the absence of language to build us into full people, had turned us into a kind of emotive cattle. Perhaps a raucous inner life produced shattering notes inside us, but with no extraction tool, no language to pry it free and publicize it, even if it was moronic, one sensed that the whole enterprise of consciousness had suddenly lost its way. Without a way to say it, there was no reason to even think it.
Our faces, without the exercise of speech, had atrophied into slack, piggish masks.
Some of us, I would guess, had not spoken in months, more.
That morning a sheet of glass descended from ropes over the stage, walling off the man and the child.
Once they were enclosed, the man looked up, having apparently heard sounds. He studied the ceiling and then, to what seemed like his own astonishment, he began to speak.
There was nothing to hear. All sounds were sealed from us. On the whole it was an unremarkable spectacle, except for when it came to how this feat of nontoxic language exchange was being achieved.
Our jaws were supposed to drop in amazement that an old man could speak. A year ago none of us would have cared. We would have run screaming from what this man had to say. No doubt he’d have trafficked in platitudes, the most killing forms of banality. He’d use speech to tyrannically reaffirm what we all already knew and we’d only be tortured when he spoke. At the very least we’d have been deaf to his message, and even if he lay bleeding at our feet we’d have stepped over him on the way to our group picnic, where we’d feed each other sweaty cubes of honey rolled in salt. Now we sat in our important seats and were meant to marvel over this reinvention of the wheel. Not even the whole wheel, but only a lug nut of it.
And I’ll admit that it was impressive. He spoke with no apparent agony, without the clenched pain and contortions every single one of us expected to see. Put him in a tuxedo, I thought, and he’s almost a gentleman.
On a side-mounted video monitor, the spectacle unfolded in close-up, but what the camera seemed most