The Flame Alphabet - Ben Marcus [89]
I resolved to make myself as quiet as possible, to silence my movements and breath in order to determine what was going on. I would listen my way out of this dilemma.
Then someone cleared his throat, unwrapped my hood.
Standing over me, holding the dark blanket, was the redhead LeBov. It looked like someone had vacuumed the extra flesh from his head and body. He didn’t seem older so much as deflated. He smiled, as if our wonderful meeting had been scheduled long ago and now it had finally arrived.
LeBov helped me to a chair, slid me in, then took himself to the other side.
“You’re looking … not so well,” he said.
He was not supposed to be able to speak, and I was not supposed to be able to hear it. We were long past that. My face wasn’t hardened so much as lifeless now, a phantom face where my real face once was.
I cringed as a reflex, at the sight of LeBov’s mouth moving, waiting to feel the hot speech pour over me, tighten me into crippling spasms. I gripped my chair, braced as if a car was about to hit me.
But something else happened instead. Nothing. Like the night in the bushes when Esther marauded through, and LeBov filled my mouth with grease. I still felt the muscled roughness of speech, almost like a smoke too thick to inhale. But instead of a toxicity, it was cold and oily in the air.
I coughed, tried to swallow.
“You’ll get used to it,” LeBov said, bored. “Just keep listening. Let it take hold. It’s fucking weird at first.”
LeBov was right. As he spoke, his speech felt solid in the air. It seemed like I was trying to breathe underwater, and with concentration I could barely do it. I could allow his speech in and it would pose no danger.
I looked at my naked arm, which felt heavy and weak. They must have injected me after all. I wanted to say: But I never felt a needle go in.
“It’s impressive, right?” said LeBov, noticing my amazement. “Those guys are good.”
On my arm a cold bead of blood crawled out of the puncture. I stared at it as if it were a jewel. They’d shot me with something, and now I could speak, could listen again.
My first spoken words in months came out in a cracked whisper.
I said, “Can I ask to what do we owe this conversation?”
LeBov sat back in his chair, looked at me without disguising his excitement.
I found I knew the answer without his help.
“It’s that stuff, right? The stuff you gave the old man up onstage?”
LeBov chuckled. “Yeah. We call it ‘that stuff.’ How do you like it?”
My voice came out weak. It did not sound like me. “So children are fueling this conversation?”
“This very one. Better make it count.”
On the table LeBov had gathered some of my work, a stack of scripts, some of the 3-D models, slabs of stone. He made a show of looking through it, scowling at the sheaths of letters, squinting to communicate his displeasure. He passed through it so rapidly, and with such disdain, he could not possibly have given it the attention it deserved.
“What are you doing with this stuff?” he said. “It’s ridiculous.”
I’d never seen my work exposed like that, cut free of the self-disguising paper. It stunned me that we could spread it out on the table and not retch with illness. My technique was messier than I expected, incoherent in places, letters dropping off pages, failing to come together, breaking into pieces. Imperfections everywhere. I felt ashamed to see it unclothed like that. And yet I wanted to grab the materials from LeBov and rush back to my office. If I could take it all in, if I could actually fucking look at my own work, I might be able to really do something effective.
LeBov flipped through more of it and then pushed it all aside. “Are you serious? Do you honestly believe we haven’t thought of this already? You’re sitting here creating fucking alphabets? How small exactly is your mind?”
I tried not to look at him too