The Flame Alphabet - Ben Marcus [88]
But none of that was to be tonight.
I took my usual route from the office to the mezzanine, following the brown hallways that had been scrubbed of every directional marker and now featured only windowless, oval doors every so often, behind which I never heard anything.
I must have been rounding a corner when a team of technicians walked out of one such room, quietly fell on me, covered my head with something hot, which was tied tightly at my neck, and dragged me into a room.
I was thrust into a darkness made swamp-like by my own breath, which steamed up over my face inside of what seemed like a woolen blanket.
Something heavy was dragged across the room, scraped the floor so violently it shrieked, and then I heard the clicks and manipulations of a machine. A fan switched on and a chill settled through the room.
Inside my hood I pitched my breath down over my chin to keep it from reeking up my space. Whoever the technicians were, they were breathing hard, and I registered a worrisome silence until one of them pressed his weight against me, removed some piece of my clothing, and brought a cool solution that felt like alcohol over my skin.
A sleeve was cut free of my shirt and I felt the tickle of a razor shaving the hairs of my forearm.
They were prepping me to receive an injection, and I waited for the sharp insult of a needle, but it never came.
Throughout my captivity I did not struggle. I went limp, tried to comply. But it was hard to comply when I didn’t know what they wanted me to do.
And so I settled into the dark, felted cocoon they’d made for me, wondering why I’d been singled out for this molestation, and what kind of procedure was in store.
Nothing I’d done seemed to warrant the attention of anyone powerful. Most of my morning had been spent in futile paroxysms of invention, itself too strong a word. The work was a chore, but I forced myself to do it. After a quick breakfast of peaches at my desk, I’d looked into yet more defunct writing, undeciphered and disappeared scripts, scripts that had failed or been abused or misused or just gravely misunderstood.
I moved from Olmec to Meroitic. In Rongorongo I burned letters onto wood. Always throughout the testing of defunct scripts, I paired Roman samples as a control.
Then I stepped away from the visual side of scripting and began to wonder how content figured into the revulsion. Was our aversion to language based on what we said to each other: the cryptic things, the direct things, the disappointing things, the neutral ones? Was it because of what we didn’t say? Had we failed to say or write something that would ensure our survival, and now this failure had grown too massive, become irreversible?
These questions I dodged. They were too big, too hard.
But more came. Was language rich in information, filled with verifiable detail and data, worse than language that lied? Which diction made us sicker? Could abstract language, the kind that skirted anything visual and posited ideas and qualifications over the concrete, be less harmful? Were expressions of love safer than threats?
Everything I produced and sent down to the yard for testing suggested that it was comprehension itself that we could no longer bear.
The days of understanding were over. The question I could not even formulate was this: What was it we were now supposed to do if it was medically impossible to even understand each other without a rapid, ugly sickness taking hold? This was not a disease of language anymore, it was a disease of insight, understanding, knowing.
I thought about all of this as I sat in a Forsythe room with a blanket over my head.
My captors pursued a soundless agenda. The room was