The Flame Alphabet - Ben Marcus [9]
Nothing to worry about here, reported the doctor.
Nothing your tiny mind can conceive of, I thought.
I sucked on a swab, spat in a jar, peed in a cup. My bottom was probed and, like a little boy, I giggled. Nothing conclusive came back, just the mortal data, the numbers within range, the levels of little concern.
In the waiting room neighbors stared at their pee-soaked laps, hacked into fistfuls of cloth. Some went shirtless from the pain. Out in the parking lot people shivered in their cars, sometimes didn’t get out. The occasional ambulance stopped on our block, stayed too long, drove away finally, too quiet, its lights revolving in funereal silence.
Later Dr. Moriphe was sick herself, but doctors and their entourage employ a different vocabulary for their own physical failings. Each appointment I made was canceled by her office at the last minute. She, too, was not feeling so well. She was never really feeling up to coming to work, they said. Would you like to see someone else? they wanted to know.
I’d seen someone else. Someone else was a moron.
“Does she have children at home?” I asked.
What a gorgeously long pause came back.
They couldn’t give out that information. We can pass on a message to her if you like, they offered, in their best professional voice. And I said sure, sure, please do that. Pass on a message.
5
Then came November’s stay, a sweetly deluded phase of recovery that we fed with great doses of denial.
But in Wisconsin there were early adopters. A fiendish strain of childless adults who consumed the toxic language on purpose, as a drug, destroying themselves under the flood of child speech. They stormed areas high in children, falling drunk inside cones of sound. They gorged themselves on the fence line of playgrounds where voice clouds blew hard enough to trigger a reaction, sharing exposure sites with each other by code. Later these people were found dried out in parks, on the road, collapsed and hardening in their homes. They were found with the slightly smaller faces we would routinely see on victims in only a few weeks.
Drifts of salt blew in from the west, blew out to sea, leaving bleached streets, trees abraded to pulp. Perhaps just a coincidence. Sometimes the driving was blind, and on the highways blowers mounted to poles kept the roads clear.
But at home Claire woke up one morning and declared us cured.
Esther was away at horse camp, her school’s fall trip. They’d gone to Level Falls Farm, a four-figure getaway that promised intimate occasions with horses and the experts who baby them. Blood money paid out to stop the flow of Esther’s demands for a few seconds. Money paid to her school, who we already paid, so they could take her away for a while and we could fucking breathe.
Esther was probably riding a horse right now, wearing the black Mary Janes she refused to shed for anyone, even if it was a shit-clotted field she needed to cross. Or she was lugging a saddle to the stable, or standing not-so-patiently as someone overexplained something Esther already knew. At home she fumed when you doled out information she took to be a given. Anything factual went without saying. Esther opposed repetition, opposed the obvious, showed resistance to anything that resembled an instructional phrase, a word of advice, a sentence that carried, however politely, a new piece of information. These were off-limits, or else we would be scorched by her temper. Out in the world I wonder how she concealed it. With strangers a level of control must have been available to Esther that we never got to see. One hoped.
Perhaps while her mother and I were at home believing we might be getting better, Esther sat quietly in her farmhouse room at a mirror adjusting her collar so her head did not look, in her words, “like a tube,” which was a great concern of hers that she angrily shared with us and that would never, ever be solved, because it was our fault. We’d made that body of hers, shaped it. We’d done it on purpose, out of spite, to keep her