The Flame Alphabet by Ben Marcus Read Free Book Online Page A

guard and showed interest, Esther’s anger flared up.
    My tricks of reversal were never any match for her, either. I could say, “It sucked there, I heard,” and she would grunt. I could say, “Your mother made love to a horse once,” and she would scoff. I could say, “Eloise (the nickname we’d privately given her grandfather) will be surprised to hear how well you’ve learned to fire a pistol.” Nothing, no response, ever.
    So we fell into the old cajole. We prodded, she resisted, we sulked and put our own irrelevant feelings in the air, and Esther suddenly, after we had cursed the whole transaction and felt disgusted by the topic, got talkative, after which we tuned out and quietly longed for her to shut up.
    The medically definitive moment came with the story of the horse.
    Esther had much to say about a horse there named Genghis, a great old roan, a sergeant of the New York grass. This horse, apparently, had shown Esther some exclusive, rare affection. Or so claimed the instructor, who was evidently impressed that Genghis, who did not care for people, had made an exception for Esther. But people are always telling kids that a particular animal likes them. Kids are told that every person likes them, too, when in fact most people do not, or could not be bothered. And yet this horse really, really did like Esther, in some kind of different way, which in the end couldn’t but impress Esther, who in her diligent way made a singular effort to distinctly
not
be liked, which made this horse in my view an idiot, and could she maybe get a horse, you know, for real, if she saved her allowance and did what we asked of her and promised not to want anything ever again?
    I did not appreciate how easily Esther had been fooled by this sort of thing. Where was the old suspicion, the doubt, the more or less unchecked hatred? Why didn’t she mistrust this horse the way she mistrusted, for instance, us?
    I said, “Whatever happened to: any horse that likes me isn’t worth a damn?”
    Claire shot me a look. Slow it down, she didn’t need to say. Don’t spoil her enthusiasm.
    “And who names a horse Genghis?” I continued.
    Esther stabbed at her food.
    The best part of the trip, she told us, was the last day, because they were allowed to take the horses on some back trails. The kids went off alone, she said. The kids rode unsupervised all day and even got to put the horses away and do stuff the counselors usually did. And then they got to eat whatever they wanted that night because the counselors didn’t feel like cooking, supposedly.
    Didn’t feel like it.
    I had to ask, and the counselors, well, they’d come down with something, hadn’t they, some really nasty, uh, flu?, and the timing wasn’t so good but they’d all gotten pretty sick, so they sort of rested while the kids stayed up late and talked and it was the best night ever.
    Dinner provided the first localized site of language exposure since Esther had returned from her trip, and what happened to our bodies would prove to be textbook.
    We did not know it yet, but LeBov had already issued guidance that the toxicity was perceptibly worse after you’ve broken exposure from it, the reaction far more visceral. From Esther’s mouth came something that was causing a chemical disruption, like a mist borne on the climate. That’s the only way to explain it, and this was when any notion of a toxicity not connected to Esther’s language seemed instantly absurd. This wasn’t her hair or clothing or rural dander. This was nothing that could be washed off. The evidence was pouring right out of her face and we were bathing in it. There was a soiled quality to her words, something oily that made them, literally, hard to hear.
    Later philosophers of the crisis, like Sernier, would mock the poetics of all this. He’d decry the absence of facts, the vague and personalized anecdotes that inevitably pollute the possibility for real understanding. Personal stories, Sernier