The Flame Alphabet - Ben Marcus [94]
Once I knew my scripts were pre-classified as doomed, never even shared in the courtyard, or, if they were, used on the test subjects merely to confirm a previously held certainty, a certainty that written language, no matter how inventively conceived or destroyed and then remade, could not safely be read again for very long by people over a certain age, I began to keep some experiments to myself, substituting credible symbol systems and scripts for the technicians to take away, while concealing anything promising—the project that might deliver me from this facility—beneath a pile in my desk drawer.
I even sent down alphabets that had already been tested.
For the decoy work I faked my way to bedtime. When I did not use letters soaked with ink I used objects, mostly bones. These were brought to me in a wire basket, with a set of burnishing tools, abrasives for sanding, some picks, little chisels, a mallet.
This decoy work could not be too amateur. I thought I could go down to the courtyard myself, in person, and use a small hooked knife to slice a divot of skin from myself, then flick that skin over a subject, a language of the body, piece by piece, until I expired at the table.
Or we could perform suicide by fairy tale. Issue a classic tale to each test subject, each technician, which would include the motherfucker LeBov. We could give a fairy tale to every unnamed person of Forsythe, and then on cue, we could commence to read our little tales.
I knew the fairy tale that I would select for my last obliterating language. I knew it inside and out.
Then we could finally bring an end to this thing, a lovely end, death by reading. How many sentences in would we get? Could we get to the part where the wolf is waiting in the grandmother’s bed, or would we have collapsed in agony already? Would we miss the best part?
It was a matter of choosing which form of failure to ride out to the spectacular, bloody end.
If I produced the decoy scripts fast enough, and had them available for the technicians when they came, I had enough time to think about my real work, and this, inevitably, had to involve a complete rethinking of the Jewish script.
From my drawer I retrieved the Hebrew balloon shrapnel. The deflated letters had dried and curled over the last few days. Some of them stank of the sea. On a stretching board I revived the pieces, ladled oil into their skin until they were slick, pulled others too long until they tore, and with my molder I formed a new set of dense cubes, like square rubber erasers, with which to build, perhaps, a Hebrew letter heretofore unseen.
With this material I fussed throughout the day, doing mock-ups in ink, laying down string for patterning, making textile samples of this lettering and wrapping the material around different lengths of iron rod.
The script, when I erected it on pins and experimented with small jets of air, looked like the folds of a brain.
I staged it in arrangements that might constitute sensible order, the logic of words, but not the sort of words we’d ever use.
It was foolish, maybe, but I wouldn’t be sharing it with just anyone, and if it wasn’t harmful, then this was the work I wanted to do, these were the letters I preferred to be near. The Hebrew letter is like a form of nature. In it is the blueprint for some flower whose name I forget, and if this flower doesn’t exist yet, it will. It is said that the twenty-two Hebrew letters, if laid flat and joined properly, then submitted to the correct curves on a table stabbed with pins, would describe the cardiovascular plan of the human body. And not only that. That was child’s play.
The absolute key was that this letter would, by necessity, need to be orphaned from the flame alphabet, toxic to it and in no way capable of joining its system. No matter what else you could communicate with it, it was imperative