The Flame Alphabet - Ben Marcus [98]
She was really quite lovely, my wife.
LeBov seemed transfixed by the shower spectacle. His mouth had gone slack on the window, mist flaring over his face.
So he’d indicated to Claire that they had Esther in here, and now Claire thought she might just come in and get her? It was hard to think that Claire’s stubbornness had persisted over these last few months, had not yielded even slightly to the crush of reality. Esther would be too old for their purposes by now. At Forsythe teenagers were on the brink of illness themselves, but there was no way Claire could know that.
Or there was every way Claire could have known that, and more. I should have reminded myself not to think I had some advantage of perspective here. What you are most certain of is what will undo you, had said Rabbi Burke, once long ago. I had scoffed. It sounded like the mantra of a high school teacher who trafficked in homilies that no one believed.
The naked Claire stepped behind a curtain.
“And your plans for her now?”
“She’ll serve as an associate tester for us,” said LeBov, bored. He motioned his technicians over and they helped him up.
I pretended to know what that meant, and LeBov caught me trying to decipher what he’d said.
“You think we don’t rank them?”
“Does it matter what I think?”
“Good point,” he admitted.
He went on to explain that her class of test subjects would not die immediately. Claire would be exposed to materials that had not formally been ruled out, scripts, historical speeches delivered in a spectrum of accents, languages laced into ambient room sounds at subvocal thresholds, even though prospects were …
LeBov did not finish saying what Claire’s prospects were.
“It’s possible she’ll even get to read one of your funny little alphabets. What a nice reunion that will be. Maybe you should encode a message to her? ‘Dear Claire, how are you today? I am fine. This script, by the way, I made it myself! And … it will kill you. Love, Sam.’
“Turns out it’s not too late to apologize after all. What’s the hieroglyph for ‘I’m sorry’? In fact, let’s arrange that,” LeBov said.
He laughed. “Don’t you love closure?”
LeBov enjoyed the rhetorical vague. He relished not naming something, in not even talking about something. I felt his pleasure as he refused to say whatever he was obviously thinking. He didn’t even really say what he was saying. Instead he found some way to make it seem that someone else was saying it, someone he looked down on. He was only the vessel, raped in the mouth and made to channel the words of an invader. This kind of concealment was supposed to create tension, build mystery. We spoke in code, but no one was listening in, and we no longer knew the original language to which our niceties would be translated back. We were trapped in the code now for good. A language twice removed, stepped on, boiled into a paste, and rubbed into an animal’s corpse.
We returned to the door outside the Forsythe Jew hole.
I thought of Claire covering herself with the robe they dispense to the subjects, moving into the final processing line, waiting with the others. I thought of her standing there missing her daughter, looking strong and indifferent on the outside, but missing her daughter so hugely that she worried it would show, it would show and then she’d do something wrong, something that would only hurt her chances of seeing Esther again, so she braced herself further, hardened her look, erasing all signs of desire, of interest, of anything. Such erasure of one’s appearances, how can it not seep into the interior, even a little bit? What treaty is it that finally separates those two territories, the hard resolve of our exteriors and the terrible disaster on our insides?
I pictured Claire going to bed tonight. I didn’t even know where the subjects slept, and under what conditions, but that just made it worse. It could not be good, they were not providing comfortable hotel rooms for these people. She’d go to