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

would say, are the most powerful impediment to any true understanding of this crisis. As soon as we litter our insights with pronouns, they spoil. Ideas and people do not mix.
    I would agree with everything Sernier says. But I’ll point out that bugs crawl from his mouth now, and there’s no one left to read what he wrote.
    I looked over at Claire, who had been awfully quiet. Usually she stayed quiet on purpose, in retaliation, to allow Esther, as she put it, to discover herself out loud. To Claire, I was the obstacle as we battled for a foothold as parents. She would say that I offered so many listening prompts to Esther, such eager receptivity and sentence finishing, that I obliterated our daughter’s conversational flow and actually caused her reticence. One can be adversarial, apparently, through aggressive attention. My signs of interest, and their vocal accompaniment, claimed Claire, were the problem.
    I looked over at Claire after Esther’s monologue, and she had vanished into herself, ghosted out with her long stare. Her hand covered her mouth, seemed to want to disappear inside it. In her eyes I saw nothing. They had gone to glaze.
    There’s our answer, I thought.
    Welcome to the relapse, I wanted to say, but Claire lurched from her chair, mumbling, “Excuse me,” and Esther and I looked away from each other as we heard confirmation from the bathroom, the sound of someone we loved trying mightily to breathe.
    I produced some elementary noise interference with my utensils on the plate, but my food, some kind of porridgy loaf that was supposed to be a risotto, oozing over my plate like the inner mush of an animal, was bringing up my own small swell of nausea.
    I cleaved into it, breaking its gluey shell, and a thread of steam released over my face.
    Esther broke the silence first, her mother heaving in the background. “Wow,” she said. “Glad to hear you guys are on the mend. I was beginning to worry.”
    “Well, we wouldn’t want that,” I said, and I pushed back from the table.
    In the closet I grabbed a towel and went in to help Claire. I dampened the towel in the sink, knelt behind her at the toilet, held back her hair, which felt dry and breakable in my hands, and I brought my body down softly against her, feeling each of her shaking spasms deep inside me.
    When Esther approached the bathroom I pushed the door closed, and Claire and I stayed in there until her footsteps retreated.
    Even then we waited, catching our breath, which didn’t come back so well. For what felt like hours we sat together on the bathroom floor with the faucet in full thunder, until outside the streetlights sizzled out and we could be sure that Esther had finally gone to her room for the night and closed the door. Only then was it safe to come out.

8
    At noon each Thursday, before the illness began to deter our worship, Claire and I collected religious transmissions from the utility hut on the county’s northern back acre.
    As Reconstructionist Jews following a program modified by Mordecai Kaplan, indebted to Ira Eisenstein’s idea of private religious observation,
an entirely covert method of devotion
, Claire and I held synagogue inside a small hut in the woods that received radio transmissions through underground cabling.
    The practice derived from Schachter-Shalomi’s notion of basements linked between homes, passageways connecting entire neighborhoods. But our sunken network existed solely as a radio system, feeding Rabbi Burke’s services to his dispersed, silent community. Tunnels throughout the Northeast, stretching as far as Denver, surfacing in hundreds of discrete sites. Mostly holes covered by huts like ours, where two members of the faith—the smallest possible
chavurah
, highly motivated to worship without the
pollutions of comprehension
of a community—could privately gather to receive a broadcast.
    Our hut stands where Montrier Valley dips below sea level into a bleached, bird-littered marshland, and the