The Flame Alphabet - Ben Marcus [92]
One wall, however, was devoted to something I was careful not to look at too closely. It was a collection of listeners, perhaps forty of them, nailed to plywood. They differed in size and shape. Some glistened, others were shrunken and dry. They were lobes, or orbs, or limb-like. Most were deep brown in color. A rail at the top of the wall misted some fluid in a cloud that rained down over them, keeping them moist. Beneath each listener trailed a piece of thin, white cabling that joined in a fixture at the bottom of the wall and traveled over to a table covered in a black blanket.
The listeners pulsed generating a low, dark hum. On the top row, in the middle, was my very own listener, shriveled and pale, like an oversize raisin cast in cement.
I turned my back to it.
“Nice hole,” I said.
“Right,” agreed LeBov. “We think so, too.”
I walked back to the door. “Can I return to work now?”
“Well, that’s why I brought you here. What would you think about working here instead?”
“No thanks,” I said. “I enjoy the view from my office. It’s kind of dark in here.”
I imagined this massive space filled with listener’s gel, LeBov and me swimming around in it, trying to strangle each other before we suffocated and sank. It was like a vast, desiccated aquarium, the sort of space whose bottom surface should not be traversable on foot. And then there were the throbbing, brown listeners, like a collection of human livers. I wanted to get out.
I tried the door, expecting it to be locked, but it opened and we stepped back into the hallway.
LeBov was casual, as if he was asking me to join his softball team. “So will you help us?” he asked. “It could be an interesting project.”
“I thought you had what you needed. You said that yourself. What you took from me when you left.”
I remembered the punctured listener leaking down his wrists as he tried to wriggle through the hole. Along with his burns, it could have been a cause of the nosebleeds.
“Well, I thought so, too. But I didn’t. Your listener has proven stubborn to us. That’s why we need your help. The original owner of the thing, certain administrative rights, the ability to modify the property in ways we require. Something about you people is a catalyst.”
“Us people. How frustrating for you to have something you don’t control. But I’m not sure I understand. Why don’t you force me?”
LeBov broke into a fit of coughing.
“That’s a really good question,” he said, when he’d recovered. “It’s a pet topic of mine. Our studies show that coercion has a fairly poor track record. Otherwise, of course, we would.”
“Then no, thank you. I do appreciate the offer, though.”
“That’s not the whole story,” said LeBov, and I thought, Too bad. It never is.
“We saw what you did with that wire when you first got here, that little act of ventriloquism. That was of enormous interest to us and that’s why we pulled you out of isolation. You channeled a prayer none of us had heard before.”
“You were watching me?”
“Unfortunately, yes. And we’ve tried to duplicate your work, connecting wires to the mouths of Jews, to mannequins, to anyone, but no one else is conductive like you appear to be. Something about your mouth we’d like to study. And that prayer you were transmitting, that prayer doesn’t even … exist. We can find no record of it. It’s not a real prayer, which confirms to us that there’s something out there that we need to hear more of. There’s a territory of wisdom we don’t own, and that’s troubling. We need to get you connected in here.”
“You want to nail me to your wall and use me as a listener?”
“Well, not if you don’t want to.”
“Good, because I don’t want to.”
LeBov checked his watch.
“Whoops. We’d better get you back.”
This wasn’t the last word on the hole, obviously. LeBov’s mildness on the subject was unnerving. But he didn’t bring it up again and he seemed in a hurry to get rid of me.
On our way back to the spiral staircase, LeBov stopped at a door and looked in the high window.
“What’s in there?” I asked.
“Take a look,