The Flame Alphabet

1

We left on a school day, so Esther wouldn’t see us. In my personal bag, packed when my wife, Claire, had finally collapsed in sleep against the double-bolted bedroom door as it was getting light out, I stashed field glasses, sound abatement fabrics, and enough rolled foam to conceal two adults. On top of these I crammed a raw stash of anti-comprehension pills, a child’s radio retrofitted as a toxicity screen, an unopened bit of gear called a Dräger Aerotest breathing kit, and my symptom charts.

This was the obvious equipment, medical gear I could use on the fly, from the car, at night. That is, if I even got the chance.

I did not bring LeBov’s needle. I had tried the needle and the needle did not work.

My secondary supplies consisted of medical salts and a portable burner, a copper powder for phonic salting, plus some rubber bulbs and a bootful of felt. Eye masks and earplugs and the throat box that was functioning as the white noisery, to spew a barrier of hissing sound over me.

Tucked into the outside pouch, for quick access, I placed a personal noise dosimeter, hacked to measure children’s speech. I wanted to be able to hear them coming.

In my pocket I carried the facial calipers, even if by now finer measurements weren’t required. You could perform the diagnostic just by looking.

Murphy scoffed at this gear, called it salt on the wound. He called it things worse than that, said I was fooling with toys. Medicine, said Murphy, was a vain decoration inside of your body. Invisible war paint, ritual and superstition, typical Jewish smallwork.

Murphy had other plans. Murphy was arming from LeBov’s list and LeBov’s orders came straight from Rochester, where reports on the speech fever had first collected and the cautions were so total now, it was a wonder people weren’t burying themselves alive.

Of course I have no evidence that they were not.

Finally in foil shielding I packed the volatile artifacts themselves: some samples of our daughter Esther’s speech, recorded and written. A language archive of the girl. Paper and tapes, a broad syllabus of topics, a spectrum of moods. Our viral girl, fourteen years old, singing, laughing, yelling, whispering, arguing, speaking sotto voce, making up words. Reciting letters, numbers, crying out in pain. Even some foreign language statements, which I had instructed Esther to recite phonetically.

These I sealed in the woolen dossier because I could not look at the writing anymore without feeling what I could only call the crushing.

Pain is too soft a word for the reaction. Crushing was more accurate, an intolerable squeezing in the chest and the hips, though I didn’t have measurements to support the claim. The Marshall Symptom appliance, bolted to the sidewalk outside the medical center on Fifth Street and visited by a procession of gray-faced neighbors, was meant to detect just how slushed our insides were from too much speech, how blighted we’d become from the language toxin. But the needle was pegging on every sniffle and pain, the appliance red-lighting nearly everyone it tested as overdosed, scorched, past the point of help.

So far the crushing was a personal observation, as with most of the symptoms we’d heard about, and as such it might as well be dismissed.

This bag of gear, as heavy as a small child, would go into the car last.

Claire and I weren’t the only parents to ditch our houses and, in some cases, other items of value. The command went out in early December, issued in a final radio report before the stations went mute, and everyone was leaving. But there was altogether no eye contact from the other men and women likewise packing their cars. The conferring, the hand-wringing, the coolly delivered expertise some of us had to endure from the defensive, uninformed types—that had come and gone, leaving only stupefaction in its place. A disbelief walled off by illness. The know-it-alls are always the last to know. Everyone’s a diagnostician, and everyone’s wrong.

In cities, in towns, in the rural deposits, along the ledge that dropped off into outer Rochester, and in the middle field beyond the swale that some still called the Monastery, quarantines of children clustered up, overtaking neighborhoods, fields, forests, any venue that could be roughly bound by fencing. Loudspeakers lashed to trees, broadcasting the vocal repellent. Fairy tales blasting into the woods, convulsing any adult who came near. Loved ones telephoned each other to exchange dead air, a language of sighs, because to do any more, to build any speech into that heavy breathing, would bring them to their knees.

Which is where some of us belonged.

Today our leaving was blessed by a sheer wall of privacy. The body language on our street could have been studied for its gesture-perfect evasions. Just weeks before, Rabbi Burke, speaking by cable to our Jewish hut, called it defended semaphore, the gestures of a body craving disappearance. How many ways can you say Stay the fuck away from me without speaking? It was a well-crafted public solitude. We were all artfully alone out there, a condition we had better get used to.

After we were sure Esther was gone, I helped Claire downstairs and tried to get her to eat. I pushed some eggs at her, even though I knew that soon I’d be scraping those eggs into the trash. I gave her the sippy cup of juice and forced her hand around a piece of bread. She did not fight my attentions. I pulled her over to the sink and cleaned off what I could. A yolk stain at the corner of her mouth resisted my rough scrubbing, until I realized it was no stain, but jaundice blooming under her skin. Later I could examine her with the lamp, but now it was time to get her out to the car.

Claire’s sole task, given her condition, was to sit in the passenger seat and keep watch. Any sign of Esther walking up the street, a girl with an overstuffed book bag, or so it would seem, and we’d be gone.

It’s not that Esther would be allowed near us. The foam-clad officials, barricaded from what the children sprayed, had taken care of that. It was that we chose not to see our daughter captured as we drove away. We wished to avoid such a sight becoming our last image of Esther. Trapped in a net, twitching from a jolt they fired at her. If I policed Claire on this task, holding her to my small request, I would be viewed as endorsing and even relishing what we were doing. I’d like to call that a small price to pay, but it wasn’t. It was a steep, nasty price. Blame no longer hovered over this whole enterprise. It had landed badly, breaking into pieces inside me, and I was making it welcome.

Even before the quarantine was announced, we knew we had to leave. We talked it through as much as Claire could endure, and she had agreed, or, at least, she had assented silently, before wandering back to her soundproofed room, that our exit would be undertaken without the complication of Esther’s presence. We would not so much as let ourselves see her.

She hated how I verbally rehearsed everything.

I hated it, too.

Once just days before we left, when she was eating candy with a corpse-like lethargy, her hand a cold, blue paw tucking sweets beneath her hospital mask, I showed Claire the timeline I thought we should follow and she held the paper away as if it were an old diaper, heaving an ugly laugh.

Claire had just accommodated a long needle in her hip and she remained perfectly quiet, the stoic patient submitting to her treatment. Now she was rewarding herself with a bowl of candy. My timing was not fine.

“You actually wrote this down,” she finally said, her voice hollowed out through the mask.

A statement and not a question. Some essential marital weaponry from the arsenal of not giving an inch. Verbalize someone’s actions back to them. Menace them with language, the language mirror. Death by feedback.

“It’s a suggestion,” I said, in the bedside voice I’d adopted as her caretaker.

Of course it wasn’t a suggestion. It was the plan and it was what we had to do. Otherwise there’d be chalk marks around us in days. We had tripped our Esther threshold weeks ago, and our medicine—the comprehension blockers, the agents of estrangement, the treated smoke that left a sick chill to our faces—was only making us worse. There was nowhere safe to send Esther, so it was we who had to depart. The children would remain.

How the children would conduct themselves now that they were the only ones not sickened by speech, that was their business.

If you were smart, if you wanted to buy yourself a few more days, you wouldn’t speak at all. Perhaps you already couldn’t. The symptoms swallowed some people faster, circled others more slowly, allowing false strength to set in. But for most of us the face was hardening. The lips were pulling back. Inside the mouth was turning tough, numb, and the tongue was docking. Denial had lost its blissful appeal as Claire turned into a paper-skinned creature, sloughing each time she disrobed, too tired to cough. I could live without all the pretense we poured into discussions where the issue had already been decided, where the issue left us no choice. So much ceremony around caring what the other person thought. We’d rub our faces in etiquette, obsess over manners, and fail to notice that we were on the floor and the light was gone and it was no longer possible to breathe.

Claire gave the timeline back to me and turned away.

“Unbelievable,” she whispered. “I hope you’re enjoying yourself.”

“Oh, I am, Claire,” I said. “The time of my life.”

2

The day my wife and I drove away, the electric should have failed. The phone should have died. The water should have thickened in our pipes.

When the Esther toxicity was in high flower, when it was no longer viable to endure proximity to our daughter, given the retching, the speech fever, the yellow tide beneath my wife’s skin, to say nothing of the bruising around my mouth, that day should have been darker, altogether blackened by fire.

That day should have been visibly stained at the deepest levels of air, broken open, sucking people into oblivion. The neighborhood should have been vacuum-sealed, with people reduced to crawling figures, wheezing on their hands and knees, expiring in heaps.

A seizure of cold brown smoke should have spilled over the house.

What are the operative motifs from mythology when parents take leave of a child? Is there not some standard departure imagery offered by the fables?

The day we finally left, birds should have frozen midflight in the winter air as they cruised the neighborhood. Birds locked up with ice, their wings too heavy to hold them aloft. Birds fallen to the ground and piled at our feet, eyes staring up at the sky.

In the street, cars should have quit and rolled to a stop and the road should have buckled, with gases leaking forth, with water foaming out, with perhaps an unclothed man clawing his way from under the asphalt to stalk the neighborhood.

The yard where we played and sometimes picnicked, where Esther and I once staged father-daughter pretend fights, with fake angry faces, to confuse the passing motorists—Is that a man fistfighting his young daughter?—or where we argued in earnest, with calm faces that belied our true feelings, Esther asserting, no doubt correctly, that there was something I didn’t understand—this yard might have functioned as a massive sinkhole. The yard, a throbbing pit in its center, should have exerted a steady pull on anyone in range.

From above, through the brown smoke, you should have seen people and dogs and the smaller trees getting dragged into the collapsing grass.

The day we left there should have been mourners in the street, a parade of weeping parents walking from their homes. Or not weeping. Past that. Devoid of all signs of feeling in the face. Just walking with calm expressions because their faces had finally failed to signal what they felt.

There should have been music pouring from a loudspeaker on the roof of an emergency vehicle. Or perhaps no music, no sound whatsoever. Instead, an emergency vehicle broadcasting a heavy coating of white noise so that even the leaves rustled silently. A plague of deafness, as if an unseen bunting smothered everything, drinking noise, so we could hear nothing.

Making mimes out of all of us. So that we couldn’t hear ourselves breathe. So that our shared language would have been suddenly snuffed out.

What a fine bit of foreshadowing that all would have been.

But our neighborhood was failing to foreshadow.

What is it called when features of the landscape mirror the condition of the poor fucks who live in it?

Whatever it is, it was not in effect.

This was, instead, a plain day in the neighborhood, save for the shielded officials of the quarantine, lurking under trees until an enforcement was needed.

If you took the Sedgling exit off 38 and hugged the access road until the Beth Elohim Synagogue reared up, and from there you veered right, keeping the highway at your back, you would pass the ring of bread and coffee shops, and the town square with its deafening fountain, before entering our not-so-gated community of houses just new enough to be nothing special at all.

Perhaps the first thing you’d see that was curious as you circled up Montrier Hill, in the shadow of the electrical tower, which on a clear day dropped a net of darkness over the houses, yards, and roads, was a clottage of ungaraged cars, skewered hastily against curbs, up and down the street with their trunks and doors open, bags spilling out, and men and women who, if you examined them closely, looked more medically defeated than frantic.

And you would have seen, no matter how hard you looked, even if you checked the houses from closet to attic to cellar, precisely no children, least of all those blasting language from their not-so-innocent faces.

Adults only. Cars, suitcases, tears.

A masking silence probably would have been noticed. The neighborhood language-free.

There’d be coatracks flashing across lawns, strung up with intravenous pouches fashioned from sandwich baggies, toppling over into the grass, with people scrambling to leave.

Everyone ill from something no one could explain. What the news first had called hysteria, which everyone wished was true. If only it were that.

And finally, at the dark, water-soaked end of Wilderleigh Street, an area of limited sun penetration, there’d be the anemic figures of my wife, Claire, and me, shuffling from the house to the car, carrying one item at a time, loading up for a getaway, with Esther, our only child, thank you God, nowhere in sight.

Do the math on that.

3

In the months before our departure, most of what sickened us came from our sweet daughter’s mouth. Some of it she said, and some of it she whispered, and some of it she shouted. She scribbled and wrote it and then read it aloud. She found it in books and in the mail and she made it up in her head. It was soaked into the cursive script she perfected at school, letters ballooning with heart-dotted i’s. Vowels defaced into animal drawings. Each piece of the alphabet that she wrote looked like a fat molecule engorged on air, ready to burst. How so very dear.

The sickness washed over us when we saw it, when we heard it, when we thought of it later. We feasted on the putrid material because our daughter made it. We gorged on it and inside us it steamed, rotted, turned rank.

Esther sang as she walked through the house. Her voice was toneless, from the throat, in a frequency high in warding power. A voice with a significant half-life, a noxious mineral content, that is, if it could be frozen and crystallized, something then beyond our means or imagination. If her voice could have been made into a smoke, we would have known. If you heard it you were thoroughly repelled. She muttered in her sleep and awake. She spoke to us and to others, into the phone, out the window, into a bag. It didn’t matter. Nice things, mean things, dumb things, just a teenager’s chatter, like a tour guide to nothing, stalking us from room to room. Blame and self-congratulation and a constant narration of this, that, and the other thing, in low-functioning if common rhetorical modes, in occasions of speech designed not particularly to communicate but to alter the domestic acoustics, because she seemed to go dull if she wasn’t speaking or reading or serving somehow as a great filter of words.

She did it without thinking, and she did it to herself, and it was we alone who were sickened.

But of course we’d find out it was others, too. Others and others and others.

What she said was bitter, and we sipped at it and sipped at it, her mother and I, just ever so politely sipped at it until we were sick, because this was the going air inside our house, our daughter talking and singing and shouting and writing.

Whatever we thought we wanted, to hug or kiss our daughter, to sit near her, it was our bodies that recoiled first. We cowered and leaned away from her words, we kept our distance, but Esther was a gap closer, bringing it all right up to our faces. Some sort of magnet was in effect. A father magnet. A mother magnet. As we fled, Esther gave chase. We covered our ears and she talked louder. Our daughter seemed not to care who was listening, and we were ready at hand, ready to service her needs. We stood up to it and took it like parents, because doesn’t the famous phrase say: shit on me, oh my children, and I will never fail to love you?

We’d heard this at the forest synagogue from Thompson during an intermission, when Rabbi Burke allowed his staff access to the radio transmission, and we’d sat in the hut nodding our abstract consent to such a promise. Yes, of course we would love our daughter no matter what. How ridiculous to think otherwise. Ridiculous. It was so easy to agree to what did not test us.

The sickness rode in on my name. Loaded and weaponized. Samuel, which Esther was old enough, her mother and I thought, to call me. A little grace note of parenting, which seemed to work for other people, and which we proudly took up as though we had invented it. But Esther wasn’t impressed by this privilege. She barked my name until it became an insult, said it louder, softer, coughed it up and spat it at me.

We had missed the warnings on this one, phrases transmitted to our synagogue, the rabbi’s droning cautions. And they were killed with their own names. From the Psalms. Beware your name, for it is the first venom. Revelations. These warnings had always seemed like metaphors, the wishful equations of some ancient person’s mind. Little comfort, in the end, and it wasn’t my name alone that was toxic, but all of them.

It came in hello and good-bye and any little thing she said. Except Esther didn’t much say hello. When she didn’t use my name she said Hey and Daddy. She said Ciao and Okeydokey on her way out, language she shared with some of the gender-neutral underlings, incapable of eye contact, she prowled around with, and with fingers I dragged my mouth to smile, even though it fell slack again when I dropped my hand.

The reasoning, when reasoning seemed possible, was simple. Better to stand up to those happy moments, if that’s what they were, and give Esther a father who wasn’t such a spoiler, who didn’t turn pale on the occasion of even the most basic speech. But my face leaked force each time. A daughter was someone to pretend to be healthy for. A daughter shouldn’t see such sickness. Your child will be the end of you, Rabbi Burke had not yet said. I could speak back to her, and I could hear, technically I could. I could ask about school, or the feuds that consumed her, the massive injustices, often by omission, perpetrated by her friends, but the words felt foreign, like they were built of wood. A punishment to my mouth just to extract them, like pulling bones from my head.

That this poison flowed from Jewish children alone, at least at first, we had no reason to think. That suffering would find us in ever more novel ways, we had probably always suspected.

4

At first we thought we were bitten. Something had landed on our backs and sucked on us. Now we would perish. It was September, and the air was still soaked in heat, a nasty fried smell in the yard. Claire and I traced our lethargy, the buzzing limbs and bodies that we dragged around like sacks, to a trip to the ocean, where we succumbed to ill-considered napping atop a crispy lattice of seaweed and sand gnats that left us helplessly scratching ourselves for days.

If we looked closely, a spatter of red marks spread across our backs. Map fragments, like an unfinished tattoo. Not freckles or moles. Possibly the welters from a bite, some rodent eating us while we slept.

Claire spread out on her belly and I straddled her for the examination, but this was the wrong, sad view of her. Her bottom flattened beneath me, as if relieved of its bones, and the generous skin of her back pooled onto the bed.

Esther walked in, looked at us with disappointment. I waved her away, mouthing some scold, hoping Claire wouldn’t notice that she’d been exposed in this position.

“Really?” Esther said, louder than necessary. “I mean you couldn’t even close the door?”

One should not look too closely at a spouse’s back, should not pin her this way to a bed. This was ill-advised scrutiny. I didn’t know what I was looking for anyway. Claire squirmed under me, tried to hide from Esther’s sight.

“Mom’s not feeling well,” I said, climbing down.

“Then maybe you should leave her alone, Dad.”

“I’m trying to help.”

“Hm,” said Esther, using her face to freely show what she thought of that.

Hadn’t Esther, her skin unspoiled, still tauntingly clear, napped on the same tangled nest? We’d set up camp on burnt sand, waiting our turn in line to splash in the fenced-in patch of ocean. The three of us ripped through a bag of salted candies, then fell into one of those blissful afternoon beach comas, sleeping in the sun, our limbs fat with heat.

Claire had an explanation. The old, the tired, the ruined, got done in by bites. Turned into leaking sacks of mush. Whereas the young, they swigged venom to the lees and it supercharged their bodies. They could not be stopped.

Conversations from the museum of the uninformed. It troubled us that our common sense had so little medical traction. There were doctors, and there were armchair doctors, and then there were people like us, crawling in the mud, deploying childish diagnostics, hoping that through sheer tone of voice, through the posturing of authority, we would exact some definitive change of reality. Perhaps we thought the world we lived in could be hacked into pleasing shapes simply by what we said. Maybe we still believed that.

The medical tests, when we sought counsel, came back clear, the numbers low and dull. The doctors shooed us out. We had not been bitten. We would shake it off when the weather broke and the cold air came in. When the understaffed apparatus of our immune systems decided to take notice and erect a defense.

Who even said anymore that fresh air was supposed to help anything?

Drs. Meriwit and Borger did. Dr. Levinson did. Dr. Harris did. Nurses did, and interns at the clinic did, and the evening advisories did, as long as your doctor did.

This was hobby diagnostics. This was troubleshooting by the blind. The hindsight on this isn’t just twenty-twenty. It sees straight through walls.

As Murphy would later say: We are in a high season of error.

The early diagnostics were sad and random, experts holding forth confidently on the unknown, using their final months as language users to be spectacularly wrong. We have unverified complaints, moaned the news.

In Wisconsin the trouble was pinned to dogs. Animals took the blame up and down the coast. From Banff, from almost everywhere, came the question of pollutants, which wasn’t so wrong. Something in the air, something in the ground, a menacing particulate in the water. Something from the child’s mouth, it took them too long to realize. Drink less water, drink more. Use this filter. Put this filter in your fucking throat. Stop breathing and cease listening for a little while. Victims were dried out and saltless. Salt played a role. Of course it did. Streaking dunes of salt collecting first in the Midwest, sweeping to the south. Drifts and ridges and swells. Attractive in the landscape, if you didn’t know what it meant. Children themselves, their noxious oral product, were not yet being blamed, unless you counted the outskirt finger-wagging of LeBov, which too few of us did. But people were noticing that among the ill numbered no children. No one cared to connect the line from Lamentations that declares, And not one child fell to the plague. A university silo in Arizona published the theory that the impact of speech can be measured, with high dosages producing symptoms of the little death, the evening coma, a rictus in the legs. That would have been someone from LeBov’s staff, operating under a fake name, floating the notion.

Before all names were fake. Before all notions had floated so far off, you could no longer see them.

No one important was really looking into history yet, uncovering precedent, so much of it that the foreshadowing was embarrassing. It was not yet discussed that from Pliny comes the idea of the child who speaks the poisonous word, who uses certain mouth shapes to spread pestilence. In our reading of Galen we had not yet connected several mentions of disease originating in the child’s mouth. Herschel’s cone, termed by Vesalius, describes the spray radius of speech, a contact perimeter for exposure, and this we did not know. Nor did we know that an acoustical rupture is observed in Herschel’s cone by Paracelsus. Or that 1854 sees a medical exhibit in Philadelphia featuring the child-free detoxification hut, a prototype only, never adopted. Or that in the end Pliny had shielding nailed to his walls and sought immortality by banning children from his presence, dying only days later.

Our symptoms at first were too vague to name, too easily linked to how we always felt: a bit of sludge in our systems so that we dragged around the house and slept long and looked away from our food. Pushed our plates to the side. Caught ourselves staring into space, drool flooding from our mouths. Friends smirked. The childless ones, underexposed so far. The old loners. The selfish mates who perfected hobbies and tended their own interests instead of turning over their lives to what Claire called a stewardship of the small and crazy. For a while they were fine. Just for a while.

In retaliation we limited our evening drinking, took aggressive walks, performed the recommended stretches and bodywork. But our joints were hardening and our muscles were tight, and when I bent over I could no longer easily breathe. At night we filled ourselves with water and slept more deliberately, with silencing and darkening gear, when we weren’t waking up to dry heave. But we were every day stiffening, growing sicker, paler, more exhausted with what Esther could not stop doing.

A decline in our appearance came next. Claire’s own hair had come to look like a wig, as if her body might reject it all at once. Her hands had the dimpled plastic cast of a mannequin, a body painted with something fake, then cooked. She had never worn much makeup before, but now she was pasting her face with it and she shuffled through the house with the clownish features an undertaker smears on his bodies.

I smiled her way, a little too wide, because the display concerned me. I produced superlatives and praise, in chivalrous phrases that sounded like a foreign language, but I couldn’t get the tone right. I couldn’t scrub my voice of worry. If she returned my look she did so defiantly, daring me to say what I was really thinking. But I had already stopped doing that.

A death mask aesthetics arose, and it occurred to me that Claire was making herself look worse on purpose. Which the sick will do. One can never be sick enough. Even the stricken can milk it.

Some nights Claire and I pushed through the air as if it were solid, our bodies cleaving into fuzz, and then we came to a halt in it, locked up as if in a thick paste.

“What’s wrong with you guys?” Esther snapped one night, looking up from the book she was reading as we drifted through dinner. Those words alone tightened my face and I tried to cloud what I heard so I could breathe again.

Clouding. A good word for the strategic inattention one needed to practice around children.

This was October, before my medical smallwork began, the interventions I conducted to protect myself and Claire. Smallwork, the techniques to keep you alive, at large, prompted from instructions received at our synagogue hut, when it was time to take matters into our own hands.

On our bookshelves we had yet to install the speakers that would pump fine washes of hiss into the room, an acoustical barrier that would mostly fail to cloak Esther’s language.

In our town, in the sweet spot of our county, we were like dark lumps of flesh moving through plasma. In a thousand years, perhaps, our descendants might evolve into creatures with a morsel of understanding at their core, some insight to untangle their gnarled dilemma, but for now, at this moment in our unevolved history, we were blessed with no skill for diagnosing our withered, exhausted state.

We groped about, and if there was a harm’s way, we plunged into it so deeply that we were smeared up to the neck with the very stuff, the greasy paste, that was slowly killing us.

We were tired, is what we said, which was like saying we were alive. Of course we were tired, who wasn’t? Asleep is the new awake, Claire conceded, tossing her hair back to reveal the muddled watercolor lady she’d made of herself. We weren’t worried yet. Don’t let your children see you worry: a rule we pursued, because in our hands a public show of feelings was not sporting. Claire and I had a way of smiling gamely at each other, which meant an admission of illness would be seized upon and punished. We would summon great blame. Our marriage, among its other features, had blacklisted claims of weakness.

“I’m sorry, Sweetie,” I said to Esther. “We’re fine. We should go to bed early tonight, that’s all.”

Issued as a gentle command from one ashen father to his family.

Esther had turned back to her book by then, reading with the glaring superiority that suggested that this adventure story, or whatever she happened to be reading, was so far beneath her, she could hardly see it, idiot language engraved into paper by morons. And then when our food was already wilted and cold, after the conversation had expired, we heard the barest muttering from her. “If we go to bed any earlier, we might as well not get up.”

The symptoms worsened. Someone from Forsythe, one of the medical research labs, called it a virus, menacing to the old, the weak. Menacing to the living, he might as well have said. Claire and I looked dipped in ash. Claire smelled sour, and given the distance she kept from me, I must not have smelled so fine myself.

Something streamed down my legs when I coughed, when I breathed too hard. Something as warm and slow as blood.

Soon we had to work at the basic behavior. It was work to walk. It was work to get dressed. To get undressed was work. To pee, to drink, to groom, forget it.

With no official diagnosis forthcoming, we troubleshot at home, white-boarding the safer explanations first. Maybe this wasn’t a sickness so much as us getting older. Who knew what we were supposed to be feeling, anyway? We assessed our self-care and charted our intake. On principle we ate the better foods. Was one meant to be perfect at nutrition, otherwise be sickened? At first for dinners we had nuts and greens and the healthy oils. Plates of firm white fish crusted up in a glowing pan, shards of salt littered on top. A handful of salad on the side. For dessert a flavored ice or some crisp, cool fruit.

Not anymore. The food burst into rotten morsels in my mouth when I ate. I thought I was chewing on skin, maybe my own. Frequently I spat sad things back onto my plate, and if I ate at all, I waited until Claire and Esther were asleep, snuck into the kitchen, and sucked on a rag soaked in apple juice, which offered cold relief.

Our weekly trips to synagogue, trekking to the woods each Thursday, were robotic, if we even went. Until October we heard only the usual services, Rabbi Burke’s sermons lightened by occasional broadcasts of Aesop’s tales. At synagogue we sat in stunned exhaustion, taking in nothing, and we barely got ourselves through the woods back home again before collapsing.

Claire and I started making way for each other, the small courtesies one shows a sick person. Wide berths in the hallway and boundaries observed in bed. We slept in lanes, did not visit each other in the night, even for the sexless embrace, to extinguish each other’s insecurities, to see what comfort there wasn’t in someone else’s cold frame. Skills arise to suit this sort of work. I could turn over without breaching Claire’s side of the bed. A person wants his space when he feels like that. Even our functional kisses—good night and, less happily, good morning—were drily offered at a distance, faces braving the infected space, bodies angled away as if leaning into a terrible wind. Separately we showered and bathed and soaked in salts, we rinsed with astringents, dutifully pursuing what hygiene we could manage, but something wasn’t washing out, and I was versed enough in rotting, spoiling, putrefaction—we all have our specialties—to know that these odors of ours were not the oils of the skin or the tolerable foulness of sweat.

If Esther banged on the bathroom door and so much as shouted “Hurry!” that word alone tightened my throat. I’d go to my knees, the wind knocked out of me.

The evidence was mounting, but I seemed to have a pact against insight, a refusal to name my poison. Esther had no such inhibition. Esther knew, in the precocious way of nearly everyone but us. She might have thought it was what she said that hurt us: the actual words in their scathing specifics, as if meaning itself ever had that kind of power. But she could have been singing us love songs, cooing little melodies of affection, and the effect would have been the same. By now, or maybe always, the meaning failed to matter.

I required Esther’s total silence. When I looked at her—a young girl dipped in a shell of unkillable health—it was with pure, scientific ambition. I had a technical, professional need, and it wasn’t personal, or of course it fucking was. I needed my daughter to disappear from my sight. If I could have had a wish, I would have wished her away.

Dr. Moriphe, when we returned to her, did the blood work, metabolic panels, thyroid function tests, an ESR and a CRP. Claire got spun through a cylinder that whirred and clicked, a picture of deep blue space flickering on the screen, her body rasterized into a galaxy of points and dusky blotches.

Nothing to worry about here, reported the doctor.

Nothing your tiny mind can conceive of, I thought.

I sucked on a swab, spat in a jar, peed in a cup. My bottom was probed and, like a little boy, I giggled. Nothing conclusive came back, just the mortal data, the numbers within range, the levels of little concern.

In the waiting room neighbors stared at their pee-soaked laps, hacked into fistfuls of cloth. Some went shirtless from the pain. Out in the parking lot people shivered in their cars, sometimes didn’t get out. The occasional ambulance stopped on our block, stayed too long, drove away finally, too quiet, its lights revolving in funereal silence.

Later Dr. Moriphe was sick herself, but doctors and their entourage employ a different vocabulary for their own physical failings. Each appointment I made was canceled by her office at the last minute. She, too, was not feeling so well. She was never really feeling up to coming to work, they said. Would you like to see someone else? they wanted to know.

I’d seen someone else. Someone else was a moron.

“Does she have children at home?” I asked.

What a gorgeously long pause came back.

They couldn’t give out that information. We can pass on a message to her if you like, they offered, in their best professional voice. And I said sure, sure, please do that. Pass on a message.

5

Then came November’s stay, a sweetly deluded phase of recovery that we fed with great doses of denial.

But in Wisconsin there were early adopters. A fiendish strain of childless adults who consumed the toxic language on purpose, as a drug, destroying themselves under the flood of child speech. They stormed areas high in children, falling drunk inside cones of sound. They gorged themselves on the fence line of playgrounds where voice clouds blew hard enough to trigger a reaction, sharing exposure sites with each other by code. Later these people were found dried out in parks, on the road, collapsed and hardening in their homes. They were found with the slightly smaller faces we would routinely see on victims in only a few weeks.

Drifts of salt blew in from the west, blew out to sea, leaving bleached streets, trees abraded to pulp. Perhaps just a coincidence. Sometimes the driving was blind, and on the highways blowers mounted to poles kept the roads clear.

But at home Claire woke up one morning and declared us cured.

Esther was away at horse camp, her school’s fall trip. They’d gone to Level Falls Farm, a four-figure getaway that promised intimate occasions with horses and the experts who baby them. Blood money paid out to stop the flow of Esther’s demands for a few seconds. Money paid to her school, who we already paid, so they could take her away for a while and we could fucking breathe.

Esther was probably riding a horse right now, wearing the black Mary Janes she refused to shed for anyone, even if it was a shit-clotted field she needed to cross. Or she was lugging a saddle to the stable, or standing not-so-patiently as someone overexplained something Esther already knew. At home she fumed when you doled out information she took to be a given. Anything factual went without saying. Esther opposed repetition, opposed the obvious, showed resistance to anything that resembled an instructional phrase, a word of advice, a sentence that carried, however politely, a new piece of information. These were off-limits, or else we would be scorched by her temper. Out in the world I wonder how she concealed it. With strangers a level of control must have been available to Esther that we never got to see. One hoped.

Perhaps while her mother and I were at home believing we might be getting better, Esther sat quietly in her farmhouse room at a mirror adjusting her collar so her head did not look, in her words, “like a tube,” which was a great concern of hers that she angrily shared with us and that would never, ever be solved, because it was our fault. We’d made that body of hers, shaped it. We’d done it on purpose, out of spite, to keep her freakish, ensure her difference. Hadn’t we? We were, she said, probably glad she came out that way. Oh, probably. At home we defeated this tube of Esther’s head, daily, with high collars, scarves, turtlenecks. Endless strategies of cloth, sculpted around her neck. Even though we failed to detect the disorder ourselves, we made Esther’s head seem rounder by fitting her with wide glasses, prescription-free. This would fool the eye, make her look like something that she was almost certainly not. And sometimes it even calmed her down, allowed her to move on to other troubles, our little girl’s great project of faultfinding—with us, with others, with the world—that would never be complete.

With Esther upstate, our days without exposure numbered four by now.

Our health seemed to be flowing back, but there were hidden factors in play. We were ignorant of the illness plateau, the comprehension ratio we’d soon surpass. There were only so many words you could stand before you were done. About the child radius we were naïve. Naïve is too mild a word for what we were. With this illness, signs of recovery were the trickiest symptoms of all. Feeling better was perhaps just a form of stunned disbelief, a shutting down. Maybe this was the quiet before the really fucking quiet.

“I think I feel better,” Claire announced, sounding blurry. “I’m definitely kicking this thing.”

Said the half-dead person, I thought.

It was remotely possible she was right, which isn’t to say Claire wasn’t capable of objective diagnostics, but that sometimes she suffered from spells of positive thinking.

To prove her vigor, Claire cornered me, sexually, made a physical trespass. Seeking, it would seem, someone to leak on. But my body, pajama-clad and sweated out, with enough blood to power only part of me, failed to cooperate. Her lips dragged across my back like a rough little claw.

“What do you think?” she said. There was something forced to the way she kept rubbing, as if she wanted to get down to the bone.

Claire’s breath soaked into me and she pitched her voice against my neck, speaking so closely to my body that only gibberish came out. This should have felt nice, but something sour hovered.

“Want to?”

“You mean now?” I stalled.

“We could,” she said, and her hand dropped, found my coldness, squished it inside her fist.

There was no response. I rolled out of range.

Claire never propositioned me, which on its own would be understandable. Language shouldn’t be required for a married couple to toil for their grain of pleasure. But she never actually took off pants, mine or hers, or got the enabling oils or the towel. I guess that was supposed to be a man’s work, or maybe only mine. She sent out clues and then waited for me to follow through, but often I did the reverse. Some days I was blind to the clues a little bit on purpose.

In this case I was hoping to wait for Thursday, when we were at synagogue, the two of us in the woods after the broadcast had ended. In the hut, with the cold air pouring in, and the radio crackling in the background, it was easier to surrender to what sometimes, if we were exceptionally lucky, felt unterrible.

Claire furrowed back into me, tugged too hard, and I swallowed some bile. Part of her on the wrong part of me was gritty and rough. There was a terrible smell in the air, most likely my own, and my groin was cold. It seemed as if what she gripped so fiercely might come loose in her hand.

I tried to look at Claire, but her face was too close. “Should we later?” I said, hiding the apology in my voice.

I sold the gambit with the most unbothered look I could manage. It was important that she not feel rejected. I noted, too, that sudden atypical sexual desire, with predatory indicators, was a clear symptom. But of what I still wasn’t sure.

“I’m just so happy,” Claire said, and her hug turned cozy, safe.

Wasn’t I happy, too? she wanted to know. Wasn’t I?

We hadn’t been outside in days. We hadn’t gotten dressed or done more than swish some cold water in our mouths, inhale a little bit of soup, maybe submit to the coarse body brush we treated each other to at bedtime. But bedtime seemed to be all day lately, and since today, with the contagion absent, we found ourselves moving faster and suddenly dressed for an outing, we got in the car and took off for a black-blanket picnic in our usual spot, up on Tower Ledge.

The field was quiet when we arrived, thoroughly childless. Some older couples, wrapped in parkas and camp blankets, huddled around their bread and jam. They suffered from the facial smallness; I tried not to stare. But people with shrunken features seemed short on time. It was like they were on their deathbeds. A ventilator chugged along on a carpet, churning liquid in its tank. Beneath a shawl two women shared the mask, passing it back and forth without bothering to wipe it out between turns.

As usual, some families had run extension cords up from their cars to power portable heaters, casting shimmering air over the field. You could walk through pockets of heat, as if they had burst through a hole in the earth.

In the field no one sang, and if there was speech, it was whispered at levels too low to decode. People hummed in secretive tones, giving in to fits of coughing when their breath failed. When Claire and I walked through the grass looking for a dry patch where we might settle, picking our way through collapsed piles of people, we triggered ripples of silence in everyone we passed. No one wished to be overheard.

But I didn’t want the secrets of these strangers. I did not think I could bear them.

The picnic tables, usually loaded with serving boats of communal food, were empty except for traces of gauze rolls, some shredded medical supplies. Wrist straps and crumbled yellow tubing sat in the dirt. A fluid had dried and gone dark in streaks over the grass. It looked like the aftermath of an outdoor surgery.

At the shaded end of the field, where the sand run was installed, no little dogs tore back and forth, kicking up blizzards of sand. No dogs to be seen in the whole field. No dogs and no children.

Over on the scorched cement pads no one was shooting off rockets into the woods below. The public fire pit hadn’t been cleaned from last time, and last time seemed like long ago. A mound of coals spilled over the rim of the hole, and the spit rod was still filthy with skin, from what might have been the final cookout.

The field was usually so crowded that family blankets met at their edges until the grass was covered in a great rug of black tufted wool. But today our rugs were scattered far apart, too few to ever connect, and we sat in distant rafts from each other, mostly out of earshot.

“I guess it’s sort of cold,” I offered, by way of a theory.

Claire didn’t second me. She must have also known that couldn’t be it. We’d come here in weather far worse and the field was packed with families. In the snow last year we rolled our blanket over frozen grass. Someone built a fire inside an old iron lung, which got so hot it glowed. When the sun set in late afternoon some elders launched from a slingshot hardened balls of birdseed, which ripped through the sky and occasionally got intercepted, in dusty explosions, by the bald sparrows that kept watch in the trees and shot out when they saw food.

It was not such a nice day and there was illness in the field, but we decided to stay. We’d come all the way out here and both of us dreaded being home again, where the house smelled of our own spoiled traces. Esther was coming back tonight, so at least today, for a little while in the field, we could spend our recovery out of doors with some people who were almost our own.

The picnics were not strictly for the Jews of our neighborhood and maybe Bayside or Fort Wine, but they’d winnowed down that way. We were a community bound by an agreement to graze in the same field and enjoy the sight of each other, but beyond that it needn’t escalate.

We used to bring our kids to these picnics as surrogate social agents and the kids seemed to coagulate in some violent, anonymous way, even if the adults cuddled inside their own force fields and only said hello to one another.

Hello was the perfect word. It began and ended all contact, delivering us into private chambers from which we could enjoy other people in textbook abstraction, without the burden of intimacy.

The kids would devour their food, then run off down the foot trail that dead-ended in a wall of trees. Well, other people’s kids. We used to bring Esther to the picnics, but she clung to us and sulked, building out a gloom that she somehow bloodied our own hands with, as if we created her moods in a lab and force-fed them to her every day, giving her no choice but to display feelings of our own authorship. The other kids formed a roving pack, moving like one of those clusters of birds that seem to share a single, frantic brain.

Claire and I would scout the kids for Esther, identifying girls her age, potential targets for friendship.

“I like that girl’s shoes,” I’d say, and Esther wouldn’t even look, just tell me that I should go talk to her if I liked her shoes so much.

“Is that how you captured Mom? Complimenting her footwear?”

“I didn’t capture your mother,” I said.

“Not yet,” smirked Claire.

Kids approached Esther and asked her to play, but she politely declined, citing fatigue. Or she’d say, “No thank you, I never really get to spend time with my parents,” putting her head in her mother’s lap. Claire accepted the affection, ulterior or not, and petted Esther’s hair, careful not to push things too far.

Last year a gaunt, tall girl trespassed our blanket and asked, in the workshopped tones of a second language, if Esther wanted to come see something. The girl smiled conspiratorially, as if to suggest that Esther’s idiotic parents could have no idea how brilliant this thing was that she was inviting Esther to see. Parents were creatures with ruined, insensate heads, and how could they ever be expected to appreciate the marvels of the Monastery valley woods? What was it they’d found, a bucket of fresh, oiled genitals? When Esther declined, failing even to look intrigued, the girl ran off and was soon sucked into a cloud of children who plunged down the hill, shrieking.

“Sweetie, I thought she seemed nice,” Claire said.

“Because she asked a question? That makes her nice? That’s a fairly low standard, Mom.”

“Well, because she was inviting you to join in, and that’s a nice thing to do. She made an effort to include you.”

“So if I try to coerce someone into doing something they don’t want to do, then I’ll be considered nice also?”

This was Esther logic. It was formidable.

“You guys wouldn’t go running off with a pack of strangers,” Esther said, “so why should I?”

“It’s fun,” I ventured, bracing myself for her response.

“Dad, can you name one time in your life when you suddenly ran off with a group of people you didn’t know, screaming and laughing, simply because they were your age?”

I looked down, hoping Esther would lower her voice. But it was true, I could not think of a single time.

“I guess it’s something you sort of stop doing when you get older,” I admitted.

Esther looked at me so hard I couldn’t bear it.

“So why can’t I follow your example and never get involved in such practices in the first place? I’m not an animal. I don’t follow people around simply because their asses smell good to me.”

I probably sighed. Certainly I expressed disappointment without speaking. It always surprised me when I didn’t just stoop to Esther’s level but dug down below it, responding to her killing logic with sublingual ordnance. She watched my little performance, the facial codes I sent out to no avail. I saw her straining not to feel sorry for me.

“This picnic would be more successful,” said Esther, as if she were honestly trying to troubleshoot what had gone wrong, “if you guys gave up your urge to control me.”

“But where’s the fun in that?” I said under my breath.

Sometimes Esther appreciated these retorts. Not today.

We were surrounded by other parents on the black rug, some of whom were overdoing their attempts to show they were not listening. Mostly they’d stopped talking, staring into space as if some wind-borne peril had paralyzed them.

“I think it’s a perfectly successful picnic,” Claire announced. “I’m having a terrific time. I really am.”

The word really showed up now and then in family conversations like these. We all clung to it. A desperate little adjective.

Claire struggled to trust what she’d said. Perhaps she thought a voice-over would convince our audience. She had the amazing ability to conceal all evidence that she detected our prevailing moods, and if she ignored them maybe those moods would vanish. It is true that Claire’s indifference to our despondency sometimes had a medical effect.

Esther looked as if she had been studying our discussion for a class. Her face was blank. She’d fended off another friend and perhaps in her world—with its new-generation accounting—this was a point scored, another success.

Down the ledge an awful blast of laughter rose up from the children, but on our carpet we were quiet.

Without Esther today we tried not to trouble our few neighbors in the field by staring. No one wants to be seen asleep with a blood-cracked mouth. The ventilator chugged and the wind swept waves of dry warmth at us from the heaters. A hairless couple slept loudly on the carpet nearby, the wife’s face erased beneath a white hospital mask.

We ate and rested and we talked a little. Claire insisted that she felt fine. I wanted to believe her, but I felt scared deep in my body. This might have meant nothing. I could feel that way at the wrong times, when things were fine, when I slept or even laughed. Surges of fear that I’d learned to ignore. Eventually you stop paying attention to your own feelings when there’s nothing to be done about them. I wanted to tell Claire I was frightened, but it seemed like one of those remarks that would lead to trouble.

Claire tucked some cookies in her mouth, moving them around with her tongue as if they had bones.

I would have liked to believe in her recovery, but the evidence was impossible to ignore. On our carpet Claire looked like one of those terminal patients let out of the hospital for a final field trip to her favorite restaurant, a ball game. A pity outing. She was thin and pale and when she smiled something dark shone from her mouth.

I would not oppose what Claire claimed about herself or argue her from her position, so I said nothing of the bruising on her hands, the dried blood crisped over one of her ears. Instead I scooted next to her and felt how little she was, how even through her coat I could feel the long cage of my wife’s bones. When I hugged Claire, with sick people strewn in the field, I felt the shallow swell of her breath and she seemed to me like a bellows that I could control, opening and closing her to the air of the world. I thought if I held her I could always be sure she could breathe. I could just squeeze her a little bit, and when I released her the sweet air would rush in to revive her.

From our portable radio came word that studies had returned, pinpointing children as the culprit. The word carrier was used. The word Jew was not. The discussion was wrapped in the vocabulary of viral infection. There was no reason for alarm because this crisis appeared to be genetic in nature, a problem only for certain people, whoever they were.

It was probably only contagious within a certain circumference.

Allergy is such a broad word, claimed one of the experts on the news. Of course, to some degree, we are allergic to everything. But we react at different rates, sometimes so slowly that we never show symptoms.

I imagined myself tearing up this man’s credentials, burying him in a hole.

As our tools of detection improve, we see more symptoms.

At this point it was not a terrible idea, if you felt you fit the category, to bring your child in for testing.

When they started listing counties, I turned off the radio.

The day defaulted with small eruptions of chatter until the air fell cold at the appointed hour. The sun looked ready to falter. Our neighbors drifted off, helping each other from the field in a long, slow shuffle until Claire and I were alone.

This was what we wanted. We usually waited late into the afternoon for everyone to leave so we could have the last bright minutes of the day to ourselves.

At a high southern swell in the field, past the fire pit, a sight line down the ledge into the tangle of evergreens allowed us to see the rough location of our forest synagogue, a little two-person hut hidden in the woods.

If our hut had an antenna, perhaps it would surface through the trees and serve as a landmark. Maybe on a day like this we could look down from the field and see it. But our hut used no antenna, so from the field you could never see the structure itself or even the little trail we took each Thursday up from the creek bed to get there. From above you couldn’t see anything but woods. From above you couldn’t be sure that our synagogue existed. Sometimes even inside it, while Rabbi Burke’s sermon pumped from the strange radio, I felt the same way.

Claire and I held hands as the field darkened and we said nothing. Our silence was a rule of the synagogue, something we swore to when we were first entrusted with membership. We did not discuss what we heard there, nor did we discuss the hut itself. Even just looking at it from this elevation in the field we remained, by mandate, quiet.

But I wouldn’t have had it any other way. The enforced silence was a relief. Because all talk was banished we could not disagree, we could not mutually distort what we heard during services. There was nothing to debate, nothing to say, and the experience remained something we could share that would never be spoiled with speech.

On the footpath back to the car, we passed people huddled in the woods, voices warped in dispute. A man wept and a woman seemed to berate him in whispers. Normally when couples fought, Claire and I put our heads down and charged past them, congratulating ourselves later for getting along so well. We’d never fight like that! Out in public! We were better than that!

But this didn’t seem like a domestic argument.

Through the trees, in the grass, sat a man and woman I recognized from the picnics. They had two kids I didn’t much enjoy, boys who belted each other and fell down so often, they seemed immune to pain and probably the higher feelings as well. But I didn’t see the boys now, only the parents.

Standing over them was a large man with red hair, wearing an athletic suit. He was not one of the regulars from the field. I didn’t know him.

“Everything okay?” I called into the trees.

The couple didn’t respond, just whispered harder.

“We’re good,” the tall redhead finally answered, and when the man groaned, the redhead seemed to shush him.

Are you speaking for everyone? I didn’t ask.

The redhead looked back through the trees, weaving to get an angle on us, but I’m not sure what he could see.

Claire pulled on my arm. “C’mon,” she said, “let’s go.”

It was getting darker and colder and Claire and I were too tired to have been out this long. She tugged on me and leaned downhill, pleading.

“Maybe I should call someone,” I whispered to Claire, pulling against her.

But the redhead must have heard me.

“We’ve already called someone, they’re coming. Everything’s taken care of.”

He didn’t look our way. He seemed to be trying to block my view of the other two. If I could have examined them, would I have seen the facial smallness, felt a hardened callus forming under their tongues? Would there have been a yellow stain in their eyes?

Claire started off downhill without me, said she’d meet me at the car.

The redhead went to his knees, folding his huge body over both of them as if he might protect them from a blast. Then a distant, small sound, a kind of high-pitched whine, pierced the air. But it could have been anything, really. It probably was.

I waited and heard nothing, then struck off down the path back to the car.

When I looked back one last time, the redhead had emerged from the woods and stood by himself on the path. He didn’t see me, just started heading uphill, back to the field, which was empty by now, and certainly growing dark.

I couldn’t think what a man like that would want up at a Jewish picnic field at night.

This was Murphy, walking away from me. I would formally meet him in a week, and not by accident. He was already canvassing Jewish families, probably had been for months, or even longer. Canvassing might not be the word for what he was doing. Cornering, manipulating, extracting. There is no precise word for this work. There can’t be. In the end our language is no match for what this man did.

6

That evening we got to work on Esther’s welcome-home dinner. We cooked in silence. This was us at our best, stew building, salad making, sweating, and braising. We cleaned as we went and we bussed each other’s dishes. Maneuvering around each other with polite touches on the arm. Claire and I were suited for joint tasks, parallel play. We were proud of how well we got along in the kitchen, when married couples were supposed to drive each other to violence while assembling a sandwich. Harmony came easily for us, and it was perhaps our most salient statistic, the least problematic of our virtues.

When Esther returned, we didn’t know it at first. She slipped quietly into the house and went to her room. The bus must have dropped her off, but we heard no greeting when she came in and our little welcome home ceremony never happened. Claire was putting some laundry away as I was setting the table when I heard her yell, “Oh my god, you’re back!”

A blast of one-sided chatter filled the air. Countered by the return fire of Esther’s silence. I saw no reason to intrude on their reunion. I waited at the table as Claire’s voice muddied into nothing against some part of Esther. This would have indicated the hugging and nuzzling, the probably exaggerated joy. I could picture Esther half squirming away, too embarrassed to openly enjoy the affection of her mother, but not cold enough to flee it entirely. I was bracing for her ambivalence to mature into a more liberal hostility.

“Esther’s home!” Claire shouted.

I held my ground.

Esther’s allergy to ceremony was predicted by all the guides we’d half read about teenagers. We saw it coming, then put our heads in our own asses. We were warned, but still we insisted on basic politeness as part of some dim instinct we had to remain in control. Esther abhorred all the functional vocal prompts one bleated in order to stabilize the basic encounters, to keep them from capsizing into awkward fits of milling and hovering. Hello and good-bye and thank you to strangers; good morning and how are you. These phrases were insane to her. She would pick the simplest rituals, the most basic behavior that people keep in their back pockets and whip out without a fuss, and wage dark war against them, scorning us mightily for caring about the exchange of niceties.

“What have you learned, Samuel, when you’ve asked me how I am?” she sniped once.

“Maybe I’ve learned… how you are?”

“Right,” she nodded. “And you can’t tell that by looking at me? Is that really your best way to find out what you need to know?”

“Sweetie, talking to you isn’t just about gathering information.”

“Apparently not, because you don’t remember a single thing I say. Your gathering mechanism is fucked.”

Had Esther just said mechanism?

She seemed in her element during these conversations, glowing with the power she had over me, as if I should enjoy it, too.

I’d parry with oily fathery lameries. “Doesn’t it feel better to say things to people?”

“Feel better? It feels like shit. It feels entirely like the worst kind of shit.”

Little did she goddamn know.

“Okay, darling, I’m sorry.”

And thus a rhetorical marvel was engineered: I apologized to Esther, regularly, for her refusal to be queried on her well-being. I regularly failed to mount cogent justifications for any of the human practices. They turned out to be indefensible to her. In the end I was a poor spokesman for life among people. Such were the victories of language in the home.

After they’d snuggled and debriefed, Esther trailed Claire out of her room. Esther looked heavily guarded, as if to say, I have been at horse camp and I have changed considerably, in ways you could never understand, so let’s not waste each other’s time, you old asshole. Stay away from me, you tiny, silly creatures, for you have not been to horse camp.

Out of consideration for her privacy, I did not strive for eye contact.

Leave the little gal alone, I reminded myself, give her space, even though I wanted to hug the crap out of her and maybe get a smell of those horses I had paid for her to play with.

Such admonitions against trespass kept me afloat with Esther. But she was adorable-looking, which I wasn’t allowed to mention, and the one thing I most wanted to do, to hold her and tickle her and just be next to her, was the one thing that was definitively not on the table. Not even near it.

Esther’s usual poker face couldn’t really hide her suspicion. She had deep energy reserves for uncovering contradiction and hypocrisy. When she smelled it she jumped into action. This new bit of news—Mom and Dad are feeling better—was vulnerable to attack, obviously. Clearly she’d been clued in to our ostensible recovery.

I saw her mind working away at the weakness of everything she’d heard from her mother, the great dismantling project going on not so secretly in the twitches of her face.

“You’re better,” she announced, unimpressed, as she flipped through the week’s worth of catalogs that had come.

This bedside manner would help her one day, no doubt. Rhetorical mode number forty-fucking-five. Death through obviousness, insistence on the literal. I will show you that your basic claims about yourself are insane, simply by repeating them back to you.

Then it graciously changed into a question. “You’re feeling better?”

I breathed hard from my nose, as if to say: “According to some,” but what came out was a scoff. Sometimes if I took the same sarcastic tone as Esther we’d remain allies for a bit longer, but I always failed when it came to the music of the sarcasm, and even that phrase, “music of the sarcasm,” should be a giveaway that I was out of my league. The acoustics changed every year, or more often than that. Usually I produced the sort of tonal errors of speech that made her seem to hate me even more. I was one of those dads who gladly gave up his own identity in order to act like someone Esther might hang out with at school—as if a wet-faced, overweight, middle-aged man with adolescent speech habits that were slightly out of date did not trip any number of warning signs and send up alarms all over the neighborhood. Sometimes my desire to please meant that Esther still ignored me, but without hostility, and these were the spoils I greedily enjoyed in my role as her father.

“Dinner’s soon,” I said. “If you want to get cleaned up and… you know.”

Esther looked at me with what seemed like pity.

“Oh, I do know,” she said. “You don’t even know how much I know.”

“Okay,” I laughed, even though I had no idea what the hell she was talking about.

7

At dinner we tried to extract the details about Esther’s trip, but all she did was eat and mumble. The trick was to make this conversation unlike an interrogation, to conceal our basic curiosity, which is what Esther found to be our most appalling trait. How dare you care about something? Don’t you know what a breach it is? When we let down our 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 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 soil rests under a rank film of water. If we took a direct path from home we could be listening to Rabbi Burke in under an hour. But monthly we had to change our route to the hut, switch approaches, delay arrival. Sometimes we spent half a day on detours so elaborate that even we became lost on our way to the woods.

Such huts were the common Reconstructionist camouflage of the time, erected over the gash in the ground, huts with gouged-out floors and a fixture called a listener to welcome the transmission cables and convert the signal sent from Buffalo, Chicago, Albany into decipherable speech.

Huts could be anywhere, disguised in the woods, hidden in plain sight. Yards would host these huts. Sometimes a field. Huts were marked with a star that only glowed with soil rubbed on it, affixed with a surveillance camera. To repel the curious, its walls might be armored in dung.

Generations ago, on Long Island and elsewhere, holes like ours were lined with stone, made to pass for wells. Mock pulleys and bucket systems were propped over them, every manner of concealment employed. The holes were guarded by boys, protected by a wolf, filled in with sand, prettied up with gravestones. Tradition tells different stories about how our predecessors channeled the rabbi’s word and none of them much matter. In any case, I don’t care so much for stories.

Our hut was assigned to us early in our marriage by Rabbi Bauman, and it was ours alone. If other Jews gathered there to worship, then we never saw them in that sector of woods. The rules of the hut were few but they were final. Claire and I were only to go together. We could neither of us attend this synagogue alone. The experience would not be rendered in speech, you could not repeat what you heard, or even that you heard anything. Bauman was firm on this, said our access would be revoked if we breached. You would not know who else received worship in this manner, neighbors or otherwise. Children were not allowed access to the hut. Their relation to you alone did not automatically qualify them. They must be approached separately, assigned their own coordinates. Curiosity about how others worshipped, even others in your family, even Esther, was not genuine curiosity; it was jealousy, weakness. Burke called it a ploy against our own relationship to uncertainty. You can know nothing of another’s worship, even when they try to tell you. To desire that information is to fear a limitation to your own devotion.

There were rules of appearance as well. A hut could not look maintained. We tended the grounds, kept the landscape looking unvisited. In the fall I cleansed the surveillance camera, its lens gummed up by summer, by steaming heat and the moths that melted into slurry against the glass.

Build nothing of splendor over the hole, was the rule. If it were not for hostile visits, a naked hole would be ideal, a hole not hidden by any hut.

Rabbi Ira no doubt envisioned a hut-free world, where anyone could stop at a hole, crouch down, and avail himself of a sermon flowing up from the earth. The religion would be on all the time, would pour from the earth. But the world didn’t accommodate this ideal. Disguises were required.

The technology of the hut was a glowbug setup. The hut covered a hole and the hole was stuffed with wire. From our own hole came bright orange ropes of cabling, the whole mess of it reeking of sewage, of something dead beneath the earth. This wiring was grappled to the listener, and the listener, called a Moses Mouth by Bauman, even while we were instructed to never refer to it, was draped over the radio module. I’m understating the complexity of this. But on a good day, it just worked.

Transmissions flowed into the hut on Thursdays, usually at noon. Sometimes no messages came, or they arrived in broken notes from the radio and we suffered through services in languages too foreign to know. Our gear was faulty and old. The glowbug had one dry little input that always needed grease. In the winter it cinched shut and I’d have to stretch it back open with my finger.

Sometimes it was not word that we received at the hut, but a hissing silence, months of it, even as we waited for guidance, freezing in the hut under a pile of rotted blankets, groping beneath each other’s clothing to dispatch little moments of pleasure.

We did what we could, within the bounds of the rules, to make the hut cozy. We filled a wooden crate with extra hats, sweaters, mittens, then painted on it, instead of our names, the word Us.

Each time we visited the hut we brought a pink rubber ball to feed into the hole. We took turns dropping it in, listening for the distant, wet bounce. We wondered how many balls it would take, how old we’d be, when the balls piled up so high in the hole that they overflowed into the hut.

If we missed a visit sometimes we could coax a summary from the archive, my private term for the expired messages festering in the wire. But the summaries, if I released them, were skeletal, in bones of language that often could not be joined for sense. Such messages were often hammered flat, their meaning ripped out, as if the rabbi’s mouth when he spoke had been filled with glue. Transmissions expired into garbled tones if we did not enter the hut in time. But if we squatted in the hut and waited, if we slept there or overstayed, the transmissions receded, failed to issue in language we could understand.

From Buffalo the connection could be severed at any time, when tampering or illegitimate listening was attempted, and of course it was attempted all the time. Which meant that if the line was dead for too long, someone was out there trying to hack into Rabbi Burke’s broadcast.

The secrecy surrounding the huts was justified. The true Jewish teaching is not for wide consumption, is not for groups, is not to be polluted by even a single gesture of communication. Spreading messages dilutes them. Even understanding them is a compromise. The language kills itself, expires inside its host. Language acts as an acid over its message. If you no longer care about an idea or feeling, then put it into language. That will certainly be the last of it, a fitting end. Language is another name for coffin. Bauman told us the only thing we should worry about regarding the sermons was if we understood them too well. When such a day came, then something was surely wrong.

At the hut a few days after Esther’s return from camp, when there could no longer be any doubt about what was sickening us, Claire scooped grease from the tub in the bin, then lubed the orifice in the floor by plunging her entire hand inside. I crouched behind her and when her hand popped out, I draped the listener over the fixture.

The listener, a warm bag filled with conductive gel, stripped away the hiss to reveal the underlying speech. Ours was scissored for us by Bauman from a larger bolt, and he gave us a quick course in its care. A small box of maintenance tools was entrusted to us, but I’d never needed it. I’d stashed it in my bedroom dresser, a box with a chisel, a thimble, some rubber clips, and clear sheets of what looked like gelatin.

The listener could not endure sunlight, nor could we risk hiding it in the hut, so we kept it buried in an unmarked grave that rotated according to season, and we retrieved and cleaned it for each visit.

Today the listener gripped the fixture as it siphoned out a broadcast, sputtering sound into the hut. On the steps we waited as the system hissed to life. Claire huddled inside her parka, stiffening when I touched her.

Burke’s service, when finally it crackled on, centered on blame and how we might distinguish ourselves through its broader adoption. But first we had to listen to songs, Burke’s melodies distorted through copper wire. From the radio came warbled noisings filtered through miles of earth. It is possible that in person Burke possessed a beautiful singing voice that transformed the dull language of song lyrics into transcendent moans. Transmitted all the way to our hut, Burke’s incantations only made us feel that we were listening to the death throes of an old man in bed, someone uttering his last.

When the service began, Burke held forth on the opportunity called blame. In blame is a chance to step into responsibility, to make of our bodies absorbent parcels for the accusations of others. Burke discussed how we might extinguish doubt in our neighbors, make their fears small. He insisted that blame can have no literal meaning; there really is no such thing when you love the Name, our term for Hashem. Blame exists only in our desire to bestow cause locally, and there is no such thing. No such thing. When people seek to place blame, it means they have nothing left to give. It reflects their inability to appreciate the inscrutability, the all-knowingness of the Name. Taking blame is then a service, and now we are called upon to offer this service again.

“A tremendous opportunity has arisen,” Burke said. “We have the chance to take the blame for something extraordinary, an incomprehensible affliction.”

Claire and I sat together on the cold floor of the hut. I could feel her listening next to me. She had tightened with attention.

Burke started shouting, the higher registers of his voice distorting the speaker.

“We can take this blame as a curse, and rage against it, crying out about unfairness. How can my child be blamed for anyone’s sorrow? My child is innocent! Innocent! Or we can receive this blame as a gift to us, which is what it is. So much of what we must do today is sculpt our understanding to accommodate what we cannot bear. Now we must help people who do not understand, even if we are lost ourselves. This is our role. And we do this by stepping forward, saying, I, it was I who did this. I did this to you. Not my child. I did it.”

Claire sounded like she’d been struck in the chest.

“Understanding itself is beside the point,” Burke said, more calmly. “Do not make of it a fetish, for it pays back nothing. That habit must be broken. Understanding puts us to sleep. The dark and undesired sleep. Questions like these are not meant to be resolved. We must never believe we know our roles. We must always wonder what the moment calls for.”

Rabbi Burke did not officially exist in public. There was no such person. Our system of worship was likewise kept secret, which means that our practice at the hut suffered its share of misinformation and rumor. The more we concealed it, the more it troubled people, so they invented actions for us, ascribed false powers to the radio. It was guessed to be a hole in some secret location that speaks only to Jews. From the hole came bits of data: sound, word, and pulse, that Jews alone could decode, using their oily gear, their hacked electronics.

We endured lurid speculation on what we might be doing in the woods. We were called forest Jews and in newspapers cartoons depicted what awful work we’d undertaken. The Jew, in these images, sits on a jet of steam that charges him with special knowledge. God’s air, heated to a vapor, is blown over the mystic. The Jew fits his sticky red mouth over the nozzle and sucks. Into a vein in the Jew’s leg comes the cold, clear liquid.

And then the speculation on the dark electronics of such messaging, how a system like this could even work. A radio console with a flesh underside is postulated. Modules sheathed in gauze, lubricants siphoned from children, injected to flow through custom gears.

In our defense spoke only those who said we did not exist. We’d been invented by our enemies to give them something to tear apart with their teeth. How convenient, a Jew with important secrets. How self-serving to you, they said. These were our defenders, but to them we were a fiction. It was not clear that we owed them gratitude.

The Jewish person who has not received an assignment at a hole, and the Gentile who has only heard rumors about the gear that governs the hole’s ritual, have missed the elemental purpose of these transmission sites: the Jewish transaction is a necessarily private one. I am thinking of people like Murphy who would plunge his fists into it, believing he could extract some perfect remedy for the speech fever.

The topic was a common one in the broadcasts. Burke returned to it often. What others, with no information, might make of us.

Let such errors stand, he always said. Their mistakes put good miles between us. There is no better blessing for us than to be unknown.

If a knowledge is to be made public, went the saying, it should erect a shell around our secret. Such is true of the Torah, the Talmud, the Halakha we appear to follow. When we communicate, we do so to throw them off our scent.

Claire and I had done our part. Said nothing. Never indicated for a moment that we were members of this faith.

“To be a Jew is to let them be wrong about you,” said Burke today. “If we cannot allow this, then nothing is possible.”

He always lowered his voice when he was nearly finished, an emphatic whisper he used to hammer home his final point.

“There is nothing like being profoundly misunderstood. Let others expose their secrets, advertise their identities, neutralize their mysteries with imprecise language. A Jew must project behavior distant from his aim, must cast up a puppet world for those who are watching. Puppets made of real flesh. Puppets who weep, bleed, die.”

We had, it seemed to me, succeeded perfectly at being misunderstood. Again and again our huts were surveilled, seized, burned, for fear that the Jew was drinking something too important out of these holes, drinking directly from God’s mind, eating a pure alphabet that he alone could stomach. These were the fearful rumors. Such an apparatus, if true, was too good for Jews alone. It must be breached, overturned, made to work for the others. The holes must be explored, chased to their source, fucked dry for their secrets.

And they were.

When a hut above a loaded hole is found, a hole that is hot with language, the hut is overturned. If the listener is buried elsewhere, as it must be, then no reception is possible. Even when the exposed cables are jammed into every kind of translating console by engineers, without a listener nothing but burnt tones are ever heard, and even these are confused for last year’s wind, swept underground now and dying.

Without the listener draped over the radio module hugging that fucker until it releases its broadcast, these are the spoils the intruder will hear, these at most, and he will soon cease to care. Not least because such washes of sound render the inexperienced vandal docile, listless, apathetic.

After all their violating labors, what is extracted from these holes by intruders is never anything coherent enough to be called a language, and the public curiosity whispers down into nothing again.

Foolish Jews worshipping in the mud, goes the claim. Let them have their holes, their ancient language of clicks and whistles and yells.

And have them we damn well do.

The radio fell silent when Burke finished. Before he signed off he promised that a brief message from Rabbi Thompson would follow. Until then there’d be a low rumble from the module, remote voices chopped into pieces too small to understand.

Claire curled up on the hut floor and I pulled a blanket from the bin.

“If you get up I can put this under us,” I said.

With a show of labor, her body in pain, Claire pulled herself up and stepped from the hut. I rolled out the blanket and brought Claire back in, lowering her down again. Without removing her shoes she shucked her leggings to her knees, then turned on her stomach.

“Okay” was all she said, not even looking up at me. She was ready.

I did not yet know if I was aroused.

Claire was quiet today, but sometimes our best intimacy occurred after the most difficult sermons. We could not speak of them and I don’t think either of us was even tempted. Our minds worked away in private at what we heard, but our bodies sometimes wanted the busywork of a cold joining of parts.

Burke’s sermons reminded me of what I did not know, could hardly ever honestly feel. “You come here because of what is missing,” he always said. To listen to Burke was to believe I could be curious about something. In theory I felt a great awe for what could not be explained, but in practice I felt too alone. Always I worried that I lacked the great appetite for uncertainty that Burke demanded. What if uncertainty held no appeal for me?

A distant hissing reported from the radio, the searching work of the listener, divining the wire for a signal. Before I dropped down over Claire for our intimacy, I put my coat over the radio. Sometimes vestigial sound poured out, accidents in the broadcast, and we preferred these stifled so we could concentrate.

Claire stretched long and I covered her. Beneath me, even clothed, she felt bony. I worried my weight was too much for her, so I held myself up with my arms, letting my face settle in her hair.

We worked the messy connection by shifting clothing, Claire’s leggings in a ruffle around her knees. The moment of insertion was abrasive, but soon a moist warmth engulfed us, and we settled into a dutiful pursuit of pleasure, sharing the labor as equally as we could. Fairness always, even in these grisly animal matters. When Claire took the lead from underneath, I held my breath so I could feel her against me. When it was my turn to provide the motion, I shut my eyes and put all my weight, it would seem, on my face, which pressed into the filth of the blanket.

It was here, one guesses, that our toxic Esther was conceived. Certainly it was here.

We coupled under the hiss of the module until Thompson’s broadcast kicked on, and we missed the first part of it, heard only the coat-muffled drone of Burke’s second rabbi, a rabbi with more technical, practical concerns.

My completion, when it came, did so without my full knowledge. I noticed it drooling across my leg when I looked down, felt myself shrink and go cold.

“I’ll be outside,” Claire said, before I’d even gotten off her.

We kissed and I helped her up. She never seemed interested in Thompson’s information, so she’d wait in the yard, stretch her legs, get some sun, if she could find a spot not too shielded by trees. I don’t really know what she did out there while I stayed inside and cleaned up. But Thompson often provided more concrete information and I always wanted to hear him out.

Thompson spoke in warnings today. Warnings and guidance. Usually he followed Burke and simply reaffirmed the need for secrecy, urging us to a deeper privacy, reminding us of the levels of disclosure we succumb to every day without even knowing. Disclosures in the face and eyes. Disclosures in our bearing, our dress. Disclosures through omission, everything we fail to say and do. The Name is the only one who does not disclose. When we find no evidence of the Name, that is when we can be most sure of him. But we, we wake up and reveal ourselves until everything special vanishes. Our privacy drains from us no matter what, said Thompson.

And now that weakness merited ever more vigilance. We would be queried on our affiliation, he said. That is not new. We might be followed. A threat I never took seriously. It seemed so grandiose to believe anyone cared how Claire and I spent our Thursday lunch hour. But Thompson said our hut visits should only be conducted with special watchfulness.

Then it was doctors who received his scorn, doctors and experts of any kind. We were to take matters into our own hands. The doctors are scared. Of course they are. From doctors we would receive no insight. If we could gather our own statistics, we would be better prepared. Thompson fell into a list of technical details and materials, read quickly in a desperate voice, the transmission flickering in and out.

There was, it seemed, smallwork to be done now, and this was how to do it.

Sometimes when Thompson spoke I had to touch the wet belly of the listener to ground the signal. Otherwise it shorted, fell mute. This rarely happened with Burke’s sermons. I used the back of my hand against the listener’s cool, slick exterior, pushed up into the softness until I felt resistance, as if deep inside the listener, if you gouged enough jelly from it, was a long, flat bone.

Thompson provided the details that would inform my first round of smallwork, the tests and procedures I might perform, taking matters into my own hands, to keep Esther close to us.

When the service finished I unseated the listener and wrapped it in plastic before burying it behind the hut. Back inside I stuffed the cables into the hole and covered up the hole with a floorboard.

Claire and I made no sign to each other outside, only stared at the yardless plot of dirt that circled our hut. It was our right to ignore what we heard. Burke always said there was no true reaction to the service, no single response. “Bafflement is the most productive reaction,” he said. “This is when the mind is at its best. This is all we are in the face of the Name’s mystery.”

We walked the perimeter of the hut and finally groped our way into a conversation about the brush, beating it back, knowing that we’d never do it so long as the rules were in place. But we indulged these conversations about gardening anyway, let them fill the air so we could use our voices again, which always sounded so loud and wrong in the air outside the hut, after so much of our own silence. We thought it’d be nice to plant some grass here one day, and we’d better do it soon, hadn’t we, before the grotesque wall of trees crowded in too close. Before the trees grew into the hut itself.

This would almost make a kind of home for us, wouldn’t it? Just in case? We could do some work on the land, build an addition onto the hut. It would not be terrible. Couldn’t we live here someday if we needed to, if it came to that?

You weren’t supposed to, but who would know? How could that be bad, to make this place prettier and livable? There is no possible way that could be bad. Making a place nicer was a good thing to do. No one could argue with that. No one would have to know.

9

LeBov, by radio—broadcasting from a secluded location for his own protection—brought his diagnosis public, called out the toxic Jewish child. A disease seeping beyond its circumference, radiating from the head, the face, the mind.

There are particulars I do not wish to share, said LeBov. A secrecy that made his claim seem more true.

It was hard to disagree, but everyone did. They protested out of conviction or denial or fear or real scientific understanding. The diagnostic debate played out with proponents and detractors firing evidence back and forth across the massive pit of confusion we all swam in.

The culprits, the carriers, the agents of infection, were Jewish children, all children, not just children, some adults, all of us.

The culprits were infirm only, or maybe just the healthy, or maybe only those who’d eaten dirt, or not eaten enough of it. An autopsy was called on the whole living planet. The expertise in each case was minor and romantic and you could hitch your fate to any of it, so long as you didn’t mind being wrong.

To challenge matters, a child-free settlement in Arizona produced victims with identical symptoms: facial smallness, lethargy, a hardening under the tongue that defeated attempts at speech. No exposure to a child, let alone a Jewish one.

LeBov wasn’t bothered. “I’m speaking of the cause,” he said, “and this cause spread fast a long time ago. Our forest Jews know what I mean. Just ask them.”

When the affliction crystallized on a map, colors coding the victim radius, the image was pretty, a golden yellow core radiating out of inner Wisconsin. Whatever was happening seemed to happen there first. But there were flares of activity everywhere, and every day they changed, the whole map strobing over time into one blinding sphere.

Activity was the word for people finally hardening in their beds for good, sewn up in frozen limbs from speech and its offshoots. Activity was the diplomatic word for its reverse.

Whatever anyone knew, they knew it with desperate force and you were crazy not to believe them. But when you melded the various insights to forge a collective wisdom, you had total venom pouring from every speaking creature. The common thread among the theories was that whoever was to blame, children alone were resistant.

It was a piece of evidence not lost on the children.

At home, in the weeks after Esther’s return from camp, I traversed the dirty five-mile wedge of boulevard that insulated our house from the woods, chasing the question of the Esther perimeter. Basic smallwork prompted by Thompson’s sermon. How far away from our daughter did we need to remove ourselves to experience an abatement of symptoms or even, one hoped, the ability to breathe enough air to stay functional and conscious?

On my evening walks, initially to Culpin Boulevard on the north end, or to Blister Field and its adjacent parks just south of the synagogue prison, where the narrow, tree-clotted streets give way to plantless swaths of gravel, I tracked the distance that would be required from Esther for the sickness to retreat.

Men my own age wandered by, smothered in winter wear, their eyes locked to the footpath. From their mouths curled thin ribbons of steam. Women with the same gray face as Claire’s wheezed under the cover of trees. One of them offered a shy wave I chose not to return. Or perhaps her raised arm was meant to ward me off.

Nothing much lived in the air. The occasional sickly bird chugged past overhead, its body translucent. These birds were so undefended, so slow and stupid at flight, I felt I could grab them from the air.

When it was children I saw, particularly the older ones who roved together and glowed with obscene health, I changed my direction. Slowly, though. Careful to disguise my caution.

In our neighborhood, anyway, these children were not just Jewish. This was a mixed, feral pack, drawing from vast bloodlines. And together, when they spoke in unison on their nighttime tours, their weapon was worse.

Sometimes it was hard work, the air too rough with sleet, my body unfit for hiking so far afield. My equipment was awkward and heavy, like carrying a squirming person against my chest, and I would forget to turn it on. Or the battery pack overheated, burned through the shielding, raising welts on my skin beneath the warm metal plate.

I stopped to rest on benches, in the grass, against the knee wall at Boltwood Park, and then hours later I struggled to my feet and hoped I recognized my surroundings well enough to return home. Not that home was where I wanted to be. Sometimes I suffered shallow sleep on a bench until it was dark and then woke to wet, frozen pants at my crotch and a shard of drool solidifying into ice at the corner of my mouth.

On such nights I was critically chilled and scraped absolutely raw from such contorted sleep, but I walked home under streetlights and felt so lucid, so glaringly vital, that it scared me to open the door to my house again and fight back through the awful air to my room, where I would fail to sleep in noxious proximity to something my body could no longer endure.

On days of minimal exposure to Esther, I conducted perimeter and fence line ambient air quality tests and sent in the results for analysis. Sediments of speech, airborne now, might indicate different toxicity thresholds throughout the area.

The numbers that returned offered no insight I could use.

I utilized a real-time aerosol monitor with data logging, purchased secondhand from Science Exchange. Collecting air samples was straightforward, and I looked like any citizen out for a night of hobby work, gathering bugs in a jar, not that anyone ever stopped to question me.

This after administering a full broad-spectrum heavy-metals panel, inconclusive on us both.

This after following the standard collection protocol for poisoning, testing our blood, hair, saliva, and nails.

Such samples I scraped from Claire when she slept. Humors for a futile investigation.

You’ll gain no satisfaction through tests of the air or water, was a sentence making the rounds.

Point the testing wand into the child’s mouth, was another favorite.

Or, fill the child’s mouth with sand.

The walks each evening were my prescribed escapes from the home, and they became a necessary after-dinner regimen. I performed smallwork with salts, knowing little of how to modify my tonic, knowing nothing of a delivery system through poultice applications on the sweeter nerves inside of my arms, the so-called Worthen site, proceeding only with some unmodified antiseizure agents as a foundational syrup.

Laughably amateur modifications, yet ones I hardly understood. I needed to believe Thompson that my own understanding played no role. I could execute a procedure without knowing why. I had to believe, per Burke, that my own insights, if I even had them, were an impediment to survival.

At our home, since Esther’s return from camp, little household habits emerged that soon were absorbed into our schedule. A scattering after dinner, improvised medicine injected into the fatty softness of the leg from a Windsor needle, then flight outdoors. We practiced, with full complicity, an avoidance altogether of family time.

For once, Esther’s disgust for us was mutually convenient. An altogether necessary disgust. We exploited it, allowed her to think we were keeping our distance at her request. But we saw her sometimes looking in at us from doorways, without her scowl, her body free of its habitual disdain. She stood in her pajamas and watched us, radiating something very close to concern.

Most nights Claire disappeared into the crafts room, or had never come out of it in the morning. Technically no crafts emerged from this part of the house. We named it once with the hope that someone, sometime—a future child of ours, perhaps—would go in there and be productive, make something pretty or useful or interesting. Such were our speculations for the children we might have. They would fashion objects that glowed or spoke, and we would sit in wonder as we held their tremendous work in our hands. This was, apparently, one reason to bear children. It would guarantee some future astonishment, restore to us our sense of surprise. Our children would solve some fundamental boredom we could not escape, and it would happen here. We could not wait to feel proud of something like that.

Now the room contained a guest cot and an unplumbed sink, with one window painted shut. Some tub buckets and a little footlocker and a fridge lined the floor. The linoleum was buckled in the corner, beneath a baseboard that had grown so sodden and soft that I finally pushed a night table against it to block it from my sight.

The occasional brownish rag came out of Claire’s room and a stack of clean rags went in.

10

On the night I met Murphy, dinner was abandoned. Perhaps it had never been attempted. Esther slipped into her room, where gelatinous bird sounds flowed out, half-words and astringent syllables that produced a low-grade menace.

I’d braved a conversation with her, counting on her angry silence, which she delivered with force. I asked her, nervously, to limit her speech, with every expectation of getting shouted down, of getting mocked by our skilled and vicious little mistress. She smirked off, sparing me any response, and in the following days she launched a campaign of sonorous gibberish whenever she thought we were in earshot, and that earshot was something harder and harder to escape.

Earshot. Such a very true word.

My plan was to track my symptoms without appearing too conspicuous. Beneath my coat I buckled my DRE Axis 4 portable vital signs monitor. The tubing had gone yellow, and cabling was exposed through the insulation, but the device held a steady charge for my outings and collected reliable data.

At the corner of Hospring and Woods, where the evergreens hung skeletal and brown, with sick branches that looked burnt by wind, I stopped for a one-mile readout.

A row of privets concealed the single-level houses that ran south along Hospring, and there in the unweeded mulch bed at the roots I saw, for the second time, the strange man from the picnic trail, the redhead who’d threatened the Jews. He was retching into the weeds, giving it his all.

He had seemed daunting when I first saw him off the trail, hulking over the Jewish couple as if he might carve into their backs and eat them. Now he was ill, on his knees.

I recalled a sermon Burke had delivered months ago, when everything from the Jew hole was still safely abstract, wisdom I could enjoy in the unactionable pit of my mind. They will sniff at your legs, went Burke’s sermon. They will wish they were you. Beware the man on his knees, the display of weakness. But the sermon had not passed through the radio coherently that day; static cloaked the transmission. Every other word was weakness, as if the broadcast were looping by mistake. We were to fear weakness not in oneself, where it should be cherished, but in others. Or not fear it, but mistrust it. We too easily believe in the trouble of others, erect a machinery of caring. Look through the story at the teller’s need, was the caution. Share not your full story, went the warning.

I stood closer to the hedge, tried to see the redhead’s face, thinking that at least he’d hear scuffling and turn to acknowledge me.

When I approached him, a pale cylinder of liquid birthed from his mouth, his lips stretched to allow its passage. A faint hiss followed, almost pretty, like crickets in the trees at night, but then a sour smell filled the air.

He was decorous in his expulsion and it appeared to come at no visible cost to his body. I reasoned that he must vomit with some regularity. He made it look natural, as if his face occasionally needed to void itself.

I turned away as he finished and asked if he needed any help.

The retching stopped.

“Oh, goodness,” he said. “I didn’t see you there.” He coughed, swallowed, arranged his appearance.

This was Murphy’s first lie.

I frisked myself for a tissue I didn’t have.

He brought out a handkerchief, touched it to his mouth, as if he were dabbing a drop of soup from his lips.

“Sorry about that. I thought I was alone. Give me a second.”

He opened a tiny bottle, swished a mouthful, then spit a black mess into the bushes. From a small tin he scooped a grease with his finger, then smeared it inside his mouth, running it around with his tongue. Some flavoring to mask the bile, maybe. I wasn’t sure.

With a spoon he scraped some dirt over his pool of sickness and then stood to kick more mulch over the area.

“It’s actually good for the plants,” he said, and he stuck out his hand.

I managed a laugh.

“Murphy,” he said, and we shook hands.

He didn’t seem to recognize me from the hiking trail.

I gave him a name for myself—share not your full story—and we stood there in the cold, looking everywhere but at each other. I needed to get at my gear for a measurement, or else this whole cycle was blown, but I couldn’t perform a half-mile reading in front of him and he failed to produce the body language that would allow us to go our separate ways.

“You’re sure you’re all right?” I finally asked.

He laughed. “Not even close. But at least I’m out of the house.”

He seemed pleased with this answer, but then he noticed the bulge under my coat.

“You’re not all right, are you?”

Murphy smiled at me with believable concern.

“I’m fine.”

“Uh-huh. Well, how many miles out are you?” he asked.

He tapped the machine beneath my coat, which he could not have known was there.

“From what?”

“Your kids.”

“I have just one.” As I said that I pictured an oversize Esther, towering above Claire and me, bending down to crush us.

“One will do it,” he said.

I’d not discussed the toxicity with a stranger, but the information was too rampant now to pretend I didn’t know what he meant. Everything is a disclosure.

Murphy did nothing to disguise his curiosity at my silence. Curiosity might be too kind a word.

“Okay, how about this?” he asked.

Murphy opened his coat and flashed some corroded metal, a vital signs kit not unlike my own, strapped to his chest like a bomb. There was something brown and wet on his, though, glistening as if smeared in paste, but I didn’t get a careful look at it before he closed up his coat.

In return I did not similarly open my own coat. I hugged it closer instead.

“I’ll do us a favor then and go first,” he said. “I have four kids. Try to multiply your bullshit into that. I am two miles out. That’s my minimum. Less than that and I’m sure we could bond over some symptoms. Want to?”

I didn’t answer, but I gave him to understand, through a controlled smile, that he was not wrong to confide in me. Perhaps there was something to be learned here.

Listen for a change, Claire’s old admonition, suddenly seemed useful. She would say it as a joke, mocking the folk wisdom, emphasizing the phrase’s secondary meaning—if you desire change then first you must listen—but I think Claire actually believed it. Wisdom would come from outside ourselves. We must keep an ear to the ground.

If that was true, then it was the deep listeners among us, consuming so much more of the venom, who would die first. My indifference to others might end up buying me a little more time.

Murphy and I walked together and I lost track of our direction. He boasted of the insulation he’d installed in his home. The soundproof barriers with R-values above twenty, the speech-blocking baffles, some sediment collectors that were yielding a not uninteresting powder, even if the use of this powder was still beyond him.

For some reason it kept falsely testing as salt.

His kids were younger than Esther, and, to hear him tell it, they were compliant to his wishes. Little eager subjects who sat for every experiment he could devise. This whole thing excited them, he said, even though it’s hell on us, and I didn’t ask who the rest of the us was.

“If you think about it,” said Murphy, “our kids are the first generation. They are the first with this power. We’re seeing an incredible transition.”

Transition to what, I didn’t ask.

In his house quiet time was nearly all the time, but Murphy said it had stopped mattering and they were worried. He and—I forget his wife’s name, if there really ever was a wife—were beginning to question if there wasn’t something else going on, an undetermined allergy radiating from persons beyond his children, as if the toxin were replicating, and his testing had gone in what he called a very different direction.

Why, for instance, would the sickness endure even if the children were silent?

“Have you given any thought to that, that it isn’t just them?” he wanted to know.

I had given thought to that, so much that I’d exhausted myself. To Murphy, in response, I offered the obvious idea that there was no way to reconcile why children’s language should be toxic while the language of adults was not. The acoustics were the same, child, adult, machine. If you taught a chimp to speak, that speech should sicken you, too. How could the source matter? It doesn’t make sense. None of it makes any sense.

Murphy scoffed.

“I’m fascinated by people who pout when they can’t find sense and logic, as if it’s not fair when something in nature doesn’t reveal an obvious pattern. It’s a fucking epidemic, and the logic is impenetrable. That’s how it succeeds, by being inconsistent and unknowable. Fairness is for toddlers in a goddamn sandbox. No one wants to admit that our machine of understanding is inferior.”

“I’ll admit that, but it’s not malicious to try to understand what’s happening,” I said.

“No, maybe not. But understanding takes its toll. It’s a fucking disease in its own right.”

Murphy brought out the tin of grease, coating the inside of his mouth with another shining scoop of it. It smelled like jam.

He held it out for me to try.

“If we’re going to keep talking, you’re going to want some of this. For protection.”

“What is it?”

“This? It’s child’s play. Some basic shielding. It’s been around for a while. It’s pretty much lost its effectiveness for me, but I don’t want to take any chances. You could rub some on your throat first.”

I thanked him but declined.

“Still waiting for an official solution? Don’t you think it’s time we took matters into our own hands? The doctors are scared, right? Aren’t the doctors scared? That’s what I’m hearing.”

I looked at him, determined to show no sign I’d heard those words before, not so long ago, from Thompson.

“I don’t think we’ll get any insights from them, that’s all,” Murphy said.

More of Thompson’s exact language.

He smiled at me, waited. It was like he was watching me open a present, excited to see my reaction.

Murphy wasn’t Jewish. There was no way he’d have access to a feed from a hole. Except this was certainty based on nothing I could name, a certainty I found I had come to specialize in. I caught myself feeling curiosity about another person’s faith and tried to shut it down. Whatever Murphy believed should not concern me. It would dilute my own ideas, even if presently I had none. I was not supposed to care. I knew that. I knew it.

I just wish that I could have felt it, too.

At the intersection where Nearing dead-ends into the synagogue prison wall, Murphy directed me out of the streetlight and we walked down the unlit causeway toward Blister Field and the electrical tower.

“Are you reading LeBov?” Murphy asked.

“Not so much,” I said. “Which books would be good?”

Murphy looked confused. “LeBov doesn’t write books. Books expire. Books get hacked. No one wants to leave that kind of evidence.”

It seemed important to reveal a kernel of the dilemma, in good faith, to discover Murphy’s strategy. I took my time and tried to fill him in on my fledgling perimeter work, the respite during Esther’s trip to camp. I drew a distinction between the genders, because it seemed obvious to worry about how resistance differed. Claire was always sicker than I was, always. And I floated the Jewish question, since the news had already spit out this idea of a chosen affliction, something related to genetics and faith and whether or not your distant relatives thousands of years ago were covered in shit-clotted fur and prone to kill everything in sight.

I suggested, in counterargument to LeBov, that Murphy’s children were not Jewish, were they, and yet apparently they carried the toxic language as well.

Murphy nodded, perhaps too slowly.

“LeBov isn’t blaming Jewish children,” he said, carefully. “This isn’t about blame. He has profound respect for them. How can you not appreciate that kind of power? His diagnosis is medical, not political. How can we not be curious about where this thing started?”

“I thought you were suggesting that curiosity was pointless.”

“Well, maybe LeBov has a reason. Sometimes you say something unbelievable in order to promote a new idea. You build authority that way, and possibly it’s better to be doubted than believed. It is more productive to be doubted. What good is it when people believe you?”

Reading LeBov would catch me up on things, explained Murphy, but I had to be careful not to be misled. There was too much conflicting information, too many doctored broadsides attributed to him, loaded with unverified ideas. The speech cautions making the rounds, for instance, against I statements, against certain rhetoric deemed to be more toxic, attack sentences, that sort of thing, were probably not LeBov’s cautions. Even if it was possible, said Murphy, that an ultra-restricted language, operating according to a new grammar, might finally be our way out of this.

Which meant, what, that the vague worries and rules of someone who might not exist were now being called further into question?

It didn’t help that no one knew much about who LeBov really was.

Or maybe, Murphy speculated, it did help, and that was precisely the point. Maybe the best leaders are the ones we cannot really know. The misinformation coming out of Rochester wasn’t exactly an accident, he felt, but a fairly advanced strategy. They knew exactly what they were doing up there at Forsythe.

“In some ways, misinformation can be more useful at a time like this.”

I could not follow this reasoning.

Word on LeBov, said Murphy, as a for instance, was that he was childless. He was a woman. He was a teenager. Anthony LeBov was two people, a father and son. LeBov had made himself forget the English language, he self-induced aphasia through high dosages of Semantiril, or he took scheduled breaks from listening, reading, all comprehension.

Nothing was verified, but Rochester was certain, if you wanted to know where the good thinking was getting done. This was news coming out of Rochester. Forget Rochester. Rochester didn’t mean what you thought it did, said Murphy. It was said that LeBov participated in the Minnesota trials, the lab work in Denver, some study in Dunkirk of which he alone survived.

LeBov, went the story, had a chamber upstate. LeBov did cryptography. Most of the work now was in the wilted alphabet, which wasn’t even its real name. I was sure I had misheard this, but I didn’t want to interrupt. Until the world’s vocabulary got pumped through a kit, and no one could even agree on which kit to use, we wouldn’t know anything.

“The solution is in scripts, don’t you think?” he asked. It wasn’t a question for me. “Visual codes. Except not the ones we know. The ones we know are already causing problems. Reading is next. It’s not even next. It’s now.”

We had to prepare for a time, said Murphy, when communication was impossible. This thing started with children, but you were a fool to think it would stop there. Some of us were fools anyway.

“You’ve heard of the flame alphabet, of course,” said Murphy. “I’m sure I don’t need to tell you.”

Again this look of his, as if he’d reached into my head with a dowser, monitoring my reaction to see if he’d struck water.

I nodded.

I wouldn’t show him. Perhaps he was kidding, or, worse, testing me. But this was something straight from the hut, a seasonal topic of Burke’s, when he adopted tones of high caution, warnings so spectacular you could not entertain them as remotely true. If you expected to go on living, that is.

Murphy held forth on the flame alphabet as though he’d been in the hut with us. The name as deceiving shade. Nothing called by its accurate title. We’ve trafficked in an inexact language that must be translated anew. Not even translated. Destroyed. Rebuilt. The call for a new code, new lettering, a way to pass on messages that would bypass the toxic alphabet, the chemically foul speech we now used.

Some of Murphy’s rant was unfamiliar, strayed into craziness. Nothing from the hut. But other phrases seemed lifted exactly from Burke, as if he’d recorded and memorized the sermons.

The problem was that I had disregarded a lot of these sermons because—I should be honest here, and there is no one left whom I wish to deceive—these ideas bored me. Maybe I failed to understand them. Burke agonized over speechblood, an engine ripped from the language so the language would fail, and I took it for granted as the higher registers of a religion that did not always move me. The flame alphabet was the word of God, written in fire, obliterating to behold. The so-called Torah. This was public domain Jewish information, easy for Murphy to obtain. We could not say God’s true name, nor could we, if we were devoted, speak of God at all. This was basic stuff. But it was the midrashic spin on the flame alphabet that was more exclusive, spoken of only, as far as I knew, by Rabbi Burke in our hut. Since the entire alphabet comprises God’s name, Burke asserted, since it is written in every arrangement of letters, then all words reference God, do they not? That’s what words are. They are variations on his name. No matter the language. Whatever we say, we say God. This excited Burke to shouting. Therefore the language itself was, by definition, off-limits. Every single word of it. We were best to be done with it. Our time with it is nearly through. The logic was hard to deny. You could not do it.

Of course somehow I had found a way. And Rabbi Burke must have found a way, too, because he went on using language and in the end seemed stronger for it. What was Burke but disembodied speech? He showed no signs of walling himself up in silence any time soon.

If Murphy did have his own hut, it didn’t seem possible he was breaking protocol in the worst way. Speaking freely of the secrets, sharing them at length with a stranger. And if he had no hut of his own, then somehow he’d gained access to the transmissions, to our transmissions, and this he wanted me to know.

Murphy said that someone under LeBov was a troubleshooter, apparently, did speech tests, was favorable to lists. Lists were all the talk at Forsythe. Blacklists, safe lists, green lists, healing lists. There were words to fill all of them. But the healing lists, these were short, and no one was saying for sure what words were on them, not until they were tested, tested very thoroughly.

These were highly guarded lists. A small group of people would be entrusted with them, hone them in Rochester, test for toxicity only on themselves.

“Words you’d recite for medicinal purposes? Some kind of healing acoustics?” I asked.

Murphy tilted his head, grimaced, suggesting maybe, maybe not. Suggesting an idiocy he couldn’t meet halfway.

I said something about Babel. It was the easiest myth to invoke, queued up for renewed scrutiny, and it was getting batted around by anyone who believed our oldest stories still mattered. What I said was probably nothing. Maybe I only said the word Babel, let it hang out there as if that’s all that was required.

Murphy wasn’t impressed. “That topic is exhausted. Mythology is the lowest temptation. You want to talk about first causes, I’d go back before the Jewish child and cite mythology, the most sickening specimens of speech. We subscribe to these supposedly important stories, religious stories, and we ignore their inanity, how moronic and impractical they are. Can we prove the stories don’t make us sick? Because they happened long before we were born, we somehow decide they are extraordinarily important and we shut our brains down, we turn into imbeciles, we let the past start thinking for us. That’s sickness. Talk about a fucking precursor.”

“I don’t think those things actually happened,” I said. “As in really happened. If we’re still talking about Babel.”

He’d gotten himself pretty worked up. A halo of spit ringed his mouth, his eyes flaring.

“And you’re an authority on what has and hasn’t happened? Where’d you do your training?”

“It’s a parable,” I said. “You believe that, right? You don’t think it’s a true story?”

“Forget it,” he said.

I had no interest in speaking about Babel, a heavy-handed narrative from a world that wasn’t mine. Those obvious myths from the Old Testament—decoy, decoy—bored me anyway. I’d brought it up because of how harmless it seemed, drowning in easy connotations. But part of me couldn’t resist the topic.

“So you’re saying,” I began, as if I didn’t really understand what he was saying, “you’re saying that a biblical story in which God strikes down his people with aphasia is not relevant? A story about losing our power of speech?”

“That’s exactly what I’m saying,” said Murphy, quietly. “Sometimes it serves a larger interest to keep people from communicating. The sharing of information hasn’t always been a good thing. Sometimes it is a very terrible thing. Perhaps always. God behaved appropriately in that situation.”

“You don’t think people will write books about this very topic, linking this speech poison, or whatever it is, to something biblical?”

“On the contrary,” said Murphy, “that’s exactly what I think. As always, people will court the gravest misunderstandings. People are driven to be wrong in the most spectacular ways. There’s fame in it. We are in a high season of error. But don’t fool yourself. There aren’t going to be too many more books. We’re not going to see a lot of documented analysis or any kind of analysis. This crisis is different. It will be met with muteness. There’s no time for a last word. The last word’s already been had, and it wasn’t by us. Civilization’s first epidemic to defy a public exchange of language. This is a plague among cavemen, and soon we’ll only be grunting to each other about it. You can’t exactly describe a poison with more of itself, write about how poisonous writing is. And pretty soon the causes won’t really seem to matter. The whole fucking idea of cause.”

Murphy fell silent and we walked through the cold streets back into my neighborhood. It would be morning soon and I wanted to get to sleep before Esther woke up. My gear was heavy and hot on my body and I was tired.

“I guess this is me,” I said, stopping short at a buckled brick path.

It wasn’t my house we stood in front of, but I didn’t want Murphy to know where I lived. I pictured him the other day in the woods, harassing the Jewish couple, and I hadn’t seen them or their violent boys again. I figured I could say good night, walk around and hit the alley, then cut back over to my house.

“Here we are, huh?” Murphy looked at the house and then back at me with a grin.

I had picked a difficult house to lie about. There was a windowless store with a side entrance dormered onto the residence. The sign said it sold ribbons, cartridges, adhesives. A portion of the roof was exposed, with blue Tyvek badly nailed over a hole. It would be too cold to live there. Whatever construction that was under way must have been abandoned for the winter.

“All right, uh, Bill, or whoever you are,” said Murphy.

The name I’d given him was Steven. He was testing me. I let it go.

Manage your disclosures. The problem was that, by lying, I’d made him more curious. I needed him to feel he had picked me clean.

“You should come to the Oliver’s. That’s where we’ve been meeting. But you’d better get right with meds, and soon, no matter what you believe. You need to start dosing. Have you been to the Oliver’s?”

I stalled. “Sure.” I pictured myself in a long, beige room trying to climb over a wall.

“Obviously you haven’t, but that’s all right.”

Murphy seemed less amused, rubbed his face so hard it hurt to watch. From his pocket he took out the grease again, pushed a tuft of it into the roof of his mouth, smacked his lips.

“Bill, I’m not the devil. I’m not evil,” he said. “You’re not alone is all. It’s perfectly all right to work together on this thing. But I think I understand. Privacy and all that. You have your little hut, I presume? Your forest worship? Maybe you’re one of those? People are wondering if there’s some, you know, in those locations.”

Some, you know, what?

Murphy paused, waited for me to roll over on my back with my legs in the air, begging him to take me.

“It would seem that secret channels of insight are obliged right now to open up, reveal their wares. This is definitely not the time for secrecy.”

Oh, but yes it is, I thought. I gave him nothing.

“I hope it works out for you,” he added.

This was bait I would not take. I smiled, lacking all the required skills for this conversation. My lies were glaring, but Murphy remained polite.

“Here,” said Murphy. “Here’s the address, and my number.”

I looked at the script on the card and my eyes watered, lost focus.

Murphy nodded up at the house that wasn’t mine.

“You’d be lucky if you really lived here,” he said.

I stared at the house without really seeing it.

“Check your vitals,” said Murphy. “No children in there that I can tell. I bet your heart is thriving right now. I wish to fuck that I lived here.”

He was wrong. My heart wasn’t thriving. It felt tight and cold, strangling inside my rib cage. I needed to get out of there.

We stared at this house as if we were tourists looking up at a great cathedral.

“Anyway,” Murphy finally said, “don’t court too much blame out there. You know, blame is interesting, but be careful. It’s a dangerous strategy.”

Blame. I’d said nothing to him about it.

“I’m sure we’ll see each other again.”

Not if I can help it, I didn’t say, whoever you fucking are.

11

It was early November. The Forsythe drug trials sped through testing, and the basic anti-speech agents were released for free to the public, dumped into empty newspaper bins on corners.

The drugs were a medical slush short on real medicine, soggy little tonics desperate for vast strengthening. It was the wrong time for placebos, for liquid vials of nothing. When we injected them, they only stupefied us until we sputtered awake in a different room. Instead of healing us, this medicine seemed only to bring on spells of afternoon death. A rehearsal, maybe. A warm-up.

In the days after my run-in with Murphy I rigged a lab in the kitchen, following Thompson’s orders. On my conscious nights I milled speculative medicines designed to keep us healthy enough to hold our ground at home. Such nights were coming less often, but when I was able to crawl from the rug in my home office, where I had erected a person-size humidor in which to test the inhalers, and when the evening was cleansed of potential encounters with Esther, I started boiling down drugs.

From the kitchen’s single crusted naval port window, as I waited for my solutions to cool, I watched the emergency vans cruise down Wilderleigh at night, sampling the air with roof-mounted saucers and testing wands that spoiled from their bumpers like fins.

No such vans roamed the streets in daylight. A medical truck might have parked on the corner, but I suspect this was for the personal use of a neighbor, the private removal of a loved one who’d just fallen to the toll. A yellow hearse roamed the neighborhood, opening its doors to sheet-covered gurneys. And the occasional diesel helicopter pitched north of us through the upper Montrier Valley, taking aerial surveys, but it was a skeletal effort that could not have yielded much useful information. If officials wanted data on the predicament, they gathered it at night from the vans, and this I knew because nighttime was best for lab work. If there was medical forensics being practiced in our neighborhood, I’d see it through the window.

Esther was no threat at night. At night she slept, or she left the house, teaming up with the other underage weapons in the neighborhood.

The lab was piecemeal, outfitted with equipment I swapped for at the Science Exchange. On the kitchen counter I looped tubes between a trio of beakers, and I flipped the circuit to the furnace so I could plug in the micro finer, which pulverized whatever organic matter I required as ballast, without causing a brownout. Working with no furnace made for cold nights so I repurposed our silverware drawer to hold a stash of sweaters and socks. Hats and whatever else I kept in a wire basket in the pantry. I had a separate handmade Valona machine for fats.

With an induction burner I reduced solutions of saline, blended anti-inflammatory tablets, atomized powder from non-drowsy time-release allergy vials, and milled an arsenal of water-charged vitamins, particularly from the B group, along with binding agents and hardened shavings of an herb dust I’d crushed in the mortar. The salted protein sheets, rolled out from bulk supplies of medical gelatin, I stretched on the dish rack until they resolved as clear as glass, and once they’d hardened I cut them into batons and hollowed out their middles so they could be injected with medicine.

With a cold-reduction process I isolated lead—quivering, gangly worms of it—which served as a jacket around the pills I fed poor Claire. These weren’t time release so much as time capsule. Health bombs to go off only when the exposure was intense. Or so they were designed. I planted secret weapons in my wife and she swallowed them down without a fuss. My logging was steady now. All these trials and procedures are documented.

We told ourselves, when we spoke at all, that it was helping.

I mentioned this work to Murphy the next time I saw him. I didn’t want there to be a next time, I never did, but there always was. He admitted there was a small chance, statistically insignificant, that it could help. Medical shielding, a chemical serum. It wasn’t technically impossible.

We’d run into each other by accident a few nights after our first meeting—I had little reason to think otherwise—in the bitter early morning hours down near Esther’s school. I wasn’t even checking my vitals. There really was no need anymore.

He found me resting on a bench, as if he happened to be walking by, and I filled him in on my kitchen lab work. He seemed sympathetic at first. Sat down with me and really listened.

“Failures have their place in our work,” he admitted, after hearing me out. “I’ve had my flirtations with failure. There is a small allure there. I commend you for seeking out failure so aggressively. But this idea people have of failing on purpose, failing better? Look at who says that. Just look at them. Look at them very carefully.”

I tried to picture the people who said that, but saw only my own head, mounted on a stick.

“They talk about failure all the time,” said Murphy. “They’re obsessed with it. Really what they’re doing is consoling themselves for being ordinary, boasting about it, even. They’ve turned their incompetence into a strange kind of glory. They have entered the business of consoling themselves.”

And you think that’s what I’m doing? I didn’t ask.

It was a cold, awful night, and my only consolation, solitude, was gone for the moment.

“You’re testing on two people, and you’ll probably be dead before your work will help anyone. You need a much, much broader test population for your studies to lead anywhere. You know that, right? It’s not as if you want only you and your wife to survive, right? You’re doing this work because you want to stop the epidemic, right?”

Right, I thought. Right. I think.

Murphy repeated his invitation to the Oliver’s. Or Forsythe. I wasn’t really clear about the naming. I didn’t care.

What wasn’t failure? I wanted to know. Was there something that was working?

Murphy spoke of a vaccine derived from children. When he said that word he grew quiet, looked around as if we were being observed. He didn’t like to believe this, he didn’t want to believe this, but if the children harbored the poison, then they no doubt contained the antidote to it as well. No doubt. It stood to reason. He mumbled on about blood, marrow, building tolerance, immunity, controlling the circumstances. This was a favorite word of his. Circumstances. It sounded so odd when he said it, one of those words designed to make me forget other words, the whole language.

Murphy felt that we should be drawing blood from our own kids, informally, gently, of course. Everyone will soon come over to this approach. It needn’t cause any trouble. In the spirit of science.

“Don’t tell me you haven’t thought about drawing some of, what’s your daughter’s name again? Her blood?”

I had not told him Esther’s name, had not even told him I had a daughter. Just called her my kid. If I had thought of drawing her blood, a nighttime withdrawal while the girl slept, I would not reveal that to Murphy.

“You have the source of the disease living in your house and you’re not even curious what her blood might reveal under a microscope?”

Profoundly incurious, I thought. Deeply, hugely indifferent. I looked down and smiled as if he were being hypothetical.

Murphy waved the question away, letting me off the hook, repeating that if I’d only come down to the Oliver’s, I could see what was being done.

I pictured children linked by medical tubing to one of those vast, overhead syringes. I pictured a wolf climbing a slippery wall, on top of which sat some glistening piece of meat.

I thanked him and said good night. Had to be getting back. Work to do. Pretty tired now. But Murphy didn’t respond, didn’t move.

Among other things, Murphy excelled at a refusal to release me from our encounters. It was a strange power of his, to pretend a conversation had not ended.

“Wait,” he said, his head cocked, listening.

I wanted to go home, get away from him, but I stopped, quieting my breath. You could hear the engines running the neighborhood homes. Furnaces and water heaters droning on. Above us came a hum from the telephone lines.

Murphy gripped my shoulder, raised his other hand in concentration, his eyes closed. And then I heard it, too.

A din rose out of the north field beyond the school, and as the sound bloomed it grew piercing, wretchedly clear, borne so quickly on the wind, we shuddered when it hit. Voice-like, childlike, a cluster of speech blaring out of the field. The sound crushed out my air. Behind the noise ran a pack of kids, so shadowed and small at that distance, they looked like animals sprinting across the field. Coming right toward us.

In front of them came a wall of speech so foul I felt myself burning.

Murphy scrambled, grabbed me, and we ran for cover. In the bushes I felt his cold hand in my mouth, a greasy paste spreading against my gums, his fingers reaching so far into me, they touched the back of my throat.

I gagged over his hand, fought to breathe. Murphy wanted to reach all the way into my lungs. I tried to relax my mouth, my throat, but I could feel my lips stretching, starting to tear. Murphy’s weight was on me, his own scared breath against my neck.

I gave in, exhaled, letting the man cover me, spread his medicine deep in my mouth. Then finally Murphy pulled out his hand, wiped it on the grass next to my face. The release from this agony felt sweet, and I could breathe again.

The kids cleared the field, ran past us, their voices sounding—I wasn’t sure how—harmless to me now, as if I’d only imagined the effect before. The awful wave had passed through and now I felt no acid in their speech. Just kids’ voices squeezed against the higher registers. Sharp and annoying, maybe, but safe. I had a fruity taste in my mouth and I had to keep swallowing. The paste triggered a gush of saliva that I did not want to give up. I drank what released in my mouth and watched. Everything out on the street under the lamp seemed gorgeous and clear.

One of the kids stopped on the sidewalk across the street from us. He’d caught someone and now he was going to attack. He crouched, his hands cupped over his mouth, and he started shouting. A series of single word cries, projected through his hands, as if he were launching ammunition from his face.

But this was no abstract show of force, this was an attack on someone who hadn’t found cover in time.

Sprawled on the street beneath the boy was someone who wasn’t moving, and the boy made sure of that with repeated volleys launched right over the body, a relentless flow as the body twitched on the asphalt each time the kid spoke, as if a cattle prod shot electricity from his mouth.

Then the body stopped twitching and the boy relented.

When the boy stood up we saw his face in the streetlight, so long and solemn and awful to behold.

Except the kid wasn’t a boy. It was my Esther. Her hair was wild and she wore an outfit I didn’t recognize, some long coat that was too big on her.

From our hiding place in the grass we watched her.

“Be careful of that one,” whispered Murphy into my neck.

I tightened at the warning. That one. That one was my one and only.

Esther looked down at the person at her feet, seemed to whisper something. Then she ran to catch up with her friends, dwarfed by her coat. On the street that body still didn’t move.

Murphy climbed off me, sat back in the grass.

“That one is trouble,” Murphy said. “I’d like to see a sample of her blood, wouldn’t you?”

In my mouth I felt that I had eaten a piece of terrible meat.

“What did you give me?” I asked.

“A gift.” Murphy handed me a tissue.

I didn’t thank him. I wanted to be sick.

Murphy crawled up to me, held my face tight.

I felt that I should go after Esther, if slowly, carefully, but I was afraid to move.

“Now say thank you,” Murphy said. “Or have you forgotten your manners?”

His hand gripped my face so hard, I could barely form the words, but I did it, I thanked him, and he released me.

Murphy relaxed, sat back.

“Well, you’re welcome,” he said. “It was really my pleasure. But now I’m curious about something.”

The man on the street groaned, rolled over. I couldn’t be sure, but it seemed to disappoint Murphy that the man was not dead.

“I’m curious,” he said. “I’ve done something for you. Now how do you propose paying me back?”

12

The next day I struck out for the hut alone, Claire too ill to join me. I offered to drive right up to the trailhead for her, perhaps all the way down past Boltwood, if we could get the gate open and sneak our car through. For Claire I would even drive down to the northern foot of the stream where it ponds and there’s a small turnout. From there I could strap her to a sled and drag her up the embankment. It’d be bumpy but we could line the sled with pillows. She would hardly have to walk. I’d carry her that last leg, if she wanted. We could bring extra blankets, a thermos of soup. It would be good to go to the hut today. Good for us. It might help.

I wasn’t sure I believed this, but I needed to sound hopeful for Claire.

It didn’t matter, because she declined the invitation. She didn’t even decline, just failed to answer, staring with dread focus at her own little finger, as if she could will me from the room by exercising that top knuckle back and forth, back and forth.

Without Claire I took the cautious route, down Sedgling to 38 for one exit’s worth of highway, only to return to town from the north, dropping into the valley from the old Balden Road, which is so steep that no matter how slow you take it, riding your brake the whole way, you fairly skid along the sand to the bottom, where the Montrier electrical tower sits planted inside a guarded park.

Even here I doubled back along the dark wall of the Monastery, in case I was being followed, because Murphy seemed too easily to find me. Even though I’d driven this time, driven not just the long way but the entirely incorrect way, a route that made no navigational sense, I could not risk running into him today. I would follow Thompson’s rules to the letter.

Behind the hut I extracted the listener from its shit-caked bag. At the rusted orifice in the hut floor I squeezed the hole until I could pull on the fitting, but the hole was stiff. Today I could hardly force it open. After a finger-mincing effort, it ripped wider with what sounded like an animal cry and heat spread into the hut as the listener shriveled in my hands. Soon the bag stoppering the hole swelled with air, inflating gently as if a sick person lay beneath it, breathing his last. Now, at least, a transmission might be possible.

I found the labor dispiriting. It was too much effort to get to Rabbi Burke. You should have been able to plug in our radio and turn it on. But Burke had indicated once, while praising us for our adherence to protocol, that sentences pertaining to the Jewish project must come in certain lengths, precise strings of language, stripped of acoustical excess. Otherwise they were invalid, not technically a part of the authentic language, which required endless honing, pruning. The listener enabled this, in ways I would never understand. The requirements we upheld at our hut would fill a whole other report until it burst into rags. As with any religion, one supposes.

Perhaps other options might present themselves here, I hoped. Burke, or even Thompson, would have to consider more concrete guidance now, particularly since LeBov was saying we knew something. Everything had changed. One’s faith was meant to yield actionable material at times like this, I always thought, when one’s own imagination had failed, when nothing seemed possible. Wasn’t this why we accommodated an otherwise highly irrational set of beliefs?

I had not done this hut work alone before. Solitude was not authorized. And this was no Thursday, which doubled my violation. I half thought I’d see some other Jew in the woods toting his own blood-slick listener.

Tuesdays are mine, he’d snarl, heaving his hot listener over the console.

I would guess that my visit took place on a Tuesday, but days were not easy to track. It was hard to believe that it should matter, that access to our faith would be blocked on some days, regulated according to some inscrutable limitation in, of all things, forest electronics, radio science.

Lately there were days I wished I could walk into a real synagogue, a real one, sit down, and listen to a live person, a person I could then follow home with questions.

When the listener was sealed to the bag and my tests for leaks yielded only a mild stream of wind from the hole, I ran the orange cable into the console and sat down to listen. I waited there in the cold hut and I squeezed out all other noise, freezing on the wood floor.

Nothing happened. Hours later I’d only gathered hisses and blips, a language ripped apart, turned into flesh and then shredded. At one point I discovered that with my face pressed against the listener, more voices flowed through the radio, a tumble of speech from a man whose voice was far lower than Rabbi Burke’s. A different man entirely, speaking in what sounded like Old English. The harder I pressed my face against the listener, smashing it into the wet flesh, the clearer this man’s voice became, but it seemed I’d have to hurt myself to make his words audible. I’d need to break my skin, fracture my jaw, taking the listener inside my own face, and I could not bring myself to do it.

Instead I retreated, went back to the standard procedures. But the module could build nothing else from whatever weak signal trickled through. Yesterday’s signal, the vestiges of a message that might have once mattered, but by now had been hacked into nonsense by exposure in the hole. A sermon built only from wind, a wind that had been buried for years, only to spill from the earth now with no force or meaning.

The listener could not even pull a fairy tale from the cable for me, which it sometimes did, after Burke’s sermon had been discharged, sometimes instead of Burke’s sermon, instead of Thompson’s typical aftermath.

Claire and I always got excited that we might hear a story instead of a sermon. The line would crackle, seem to die, and then, with no preamble, a broadcast surged on that played the old stories, one after another. Scratchy-voiced recitations of Aesop’s, or the story of the dry well, which we very much loved, no matter how many times it played. Even “Rothschild’s Shoes” was not terrible. We did not find it a terrible story at all. We never complained if we got to hear it from the radio in our hut.

And these stories, unaffiliated as we guessed they were, unrelated to our religious practice, these we could talk about together. These we could share out loud, which made us like them even more.

Our favorite line was, Then what does he do when it rains?, asked about Rothschild of the golden shoes. We used to ask this of each other on the way home from the hut, and we asked it solemnly, sometimes holding each other’s faces, trying not to laugh. We came to say it of nearly anyone we saw who seemed too good to be true, happy and attractive and successful. Yes, Claire would say later, when we were home in bed and debriefing on this person, trying not to show how threatened we were, But what does he do when it rains?

Now in the hut when I looked at this sad apparatus, the crumbled rubber, the flannel insulation from some other time, the felted “skin” lining the orange cable that I could not touch without gagging, I felt queasy about how it all worked, how these parts, useless and absurd on their own, were meant to accomplish anything, least of all connect me to rabbinical guidance pumped in from an elsewhere I couldn’t name.

Burke was gone today, Thompson was off. Nothing flowed from the radio. I was alone out there, and any channel of insight would have to be one I manufactured myself. This I did not know how to do.

Cold as it was, I stripped off my clothes, then wrapped my body over the listener, hugging it so tightly that a broadcast finally surged into the hut. If I held still and squeezed the listener for dear life, I could now hear Rabbi Thompson, even though he sounded old and tired, as if he were transmitting from late in his life. In his sermon were medical instructions, more of the technical work we might pursue, and I took in as much as I could before my body failed and I fell from the listener, freezing.

Without Claire the hut felt small and false, the childish architecture of some hack inventor, someone who didn’t believe enough that this location would actually be inhabited by real people one day.

Claire and I were proud—I’m speaking for her because she couldn’t hide how she felt—that we had something private like this that was our own, and that it gave us something to listen to, to think about, to rail against, to love. But there were times when I wondered why it had to be so difficult, so dependent on questionable equipment.

Sitting there as the day grew dark, the listener perspired on me, and one part of it, a fin canting from its rear that seemed encased by a soft wood, was so hot that I felt sick when I touched it.

It was time to go. Given the extra distance I had to travel to get home, I was in a hurry. I rushed to the woods and took the northern trail down into the valley again and up the other side to where the car was, jogging the whole way so I would not have to walk those woods in the dark.

In my haste I believe I left the listener there on the floor of the hut, or perhaps I dropped it on the porch, the shining limb.

I cannot understate the error of such an action.

I failed to bury the listener when I was done.

With Claire this never would have happened. She was fastidious, held us to protocol each time, and together we checked and balanced our tasks, dispersing whatever ritual worry we might have until the worry turned small.

No, I left the listener there, exposed for anyone to find, to try to use, because I’d broken code and gone alone to the hut. Because I thought I could do something like this by myself.

13

In late November documents crowded my mailbox. Printouts sealed in manila lacking address or postage. This was my first view of The Proofs, a medical broadside of LeBov’s that Murphy called required reading. It resembled a university newspaper, except blown strange, its histories slurred, its facts effaced.

The text was pale blue, like a writing erupted under skin. The illustrations—illness maps, perimeter lines for the epidemic, and module schematics—were drawn by a palsied hand. In these drawings germs were people or beasts, and viruses looked like the world seen from miles away. Speech from the faces of children was rendered in ugly rushes of color, with each color coded on a wheel to some kind of distress.

On the back page Murphy had written: I’ve entrusted you with something, now it’s your turn.

He’d found my house, then. Which meant he had followed me. I pictured him striding in the shadows down Wilderleigh on a cold wellness walk, his children barking at home while his wife moaned in the corner. If there was a wife. He was waiting for his moment, watching my house from down the street.

I concealed The Proofs and looked at the issues alone in bed. But with each delivery I put everything back in my mailbox as I’d found it, creeping out in the dark of morning so Murphy could not know for certain I had received what he sent.

Inside The Proofs I found historical precedent for the language toxicity. A kind of medical foreshadowing from earliest history. Signs from the past that this would happen, or that it had happened before and been snuffed out, forgotten. Hippocrates, Avicenna, a long list of experts who knew without really knowing that our strongest pollution was verbal.

The master dissector Gabriele Falloppio, forerunner of the modern autopsy, found what he termed curious erosions in the brain from multilingual patients. Or more notably Boerhaave, who registered speech aversions in the infirm and began to use small doses of speech as homeopathic treatments. Boerhaave saw only one way this could go, hoped to trigger immunity through controlled exposure. Hoped to, but didn’t.

Throughout The Proofs were phrases lifted from as far back as the medical spookeries of Laennec and Auenbrugger, sometimes misattributed, sometimes attributed to medical scientists I’d never heard of, because, I suspected, they had not actually lived.

Theories of exposure, but more than that. A grammar detected in breath, in wheezing. A new rationale for listlessness. Epidemics like cholera reimagined as speech-driven, miasmatic cyclones, an airborne disturbance, to be sure, but one that fed on the denser pockets of speech, grew stronger in such places, dying out in regions of controlled silence.

The finer print offered no attribution. No masthead, no bylines. Just the name LeBov raised in a sickly script. You almost needed night vision to see his name. With a computer one might have mocked this up alone and run off copies at the supermarket.

A list of speech rules filled the inside cover. A caution to ration one’s I statements, suppress reference to oneself, closing off a small arsenal of the language. The various speech quotas scientists were proposing now, even if they didn’t believe it would matter. Grammatical amputations. A list of rules so knotted that to follow them would be to say nearly nothing, to never render one’s interior life, to eschew abstraction and discharge a grammar that merely positioned nouns in descending orders of desire.

Presumably if you wanted nothing, you’d have no occasion to speak.

In a section of historical anecdotes I read that in 1825, Jacob Gallerus, a chemist, was sickened by his family. A letter to the medical dean of some Dublin college, written by him, asking for outside verification, which was not granted. He recorded symptoms of nausea and dizziness while in their company, determined the sickness occurred only when they spoke to him. Troubleshooting not listed, diagnostics similarly absent. A form of inbreeding, he called it, to listen to his family. There is congress in speech, he wrote. It is illicit from them. It is obscene. A sentence from The Proofs I will always recall: I am not similarly ill with strangers. In his cellar Gallerus built a soundproof room to recuperate and to purge himself—these were his words—from the exposure to his wife and children. To what end it isn’t said. Of what he finally died neither.

Alongside the historical anecdotes were medical recommendations, refutations, preventative treatments.

If a child was deemed viral, he was salted. This by the Jews, I read. What kind of Jews, it was not clear. Circa sometime that was not mentioned. Salted in the deepest sense. A cake of it rubbed over the limbs, salt poured down their mouths, into their cavities.

It is possible, I thought, that these were stories. Fancies. But if so, they were not good ones or even whole ones, but facts made wrong, broken open and remolded into lies. Someone reaching back into history and rearranging the parts, but with a filthy hand. Which would be to what end? The urge to falsify such details was without any purpose I could name. There was too much, additionally, that I knew to be true.

In a section related to materials I read of pariahs and salt, lepers and salt, the use of salt when it comes to lunatics. Salt as a detoxifier. From Jews comes the idea of salt as the residue of an ancient language, which I’d heard at the hut. Such salts were dissolved in water and dispensed to mutes, to the deaf, to infants on the threshold of speech. Acoustical decomposition, the powder left over from sounds. What this proved went unsaid.

In The Proofs a pattern of cryptic evasions became clear, of failing to deduce.

From recorded language, broadcast in a controlled environment and subjected to freezing temperatures, is collected trace amounts of salt. Whorf and Sapir perform this work with some graduate students. A salt deficiency lowers language comprehension in children.

The practice of language smoking originates in Bolivia but quickly travels north. In Mexico City it is perfected. Words and sentences tested by a delegate in a smoke-filled tube, at the end of which is stationed a sacrificial listener called, for unknown reasons, the bell.

The bell’s brain, when he dies, is pulled and separated into loaves. The loaves are tagged and named. Only drawings survive.

More instances of rot in the brain from those who have exceeded the threshold of listening.

In 1834 a family of five in Rotterdam are discovered expired in their home, parents and children blanketed in hives. That same year, farther north, a series of rashes observed in children, rashes with what is inexplicably called “a tonal element.” Rashes, hives, welts: of inordinate concern in The Proofs. And the connection is, I wondered.

In the island of Port Barre the citizens employed expired animals for soundproofing. Walls of pelts on stilts over fault lines. The typical strategy of shielding with organic matter. Usage of animals for such purposes not being the point, apparently, but rather the unanswered question, from what were they soundproofing? What was so loud that needed quieting? Autopsies show a nonmedical diagnosis. Blackened cortex, they call it.

Perkins refers to the “person allergy,” a toxicity to others. Uses the phrase as if it’s an accepted disorder. He fails at developing any effective shielding. Scoffs at the use of animals for such work. Meat is in fact an amplifier, he will say.

The young Albert Kugler has a superstition against the utterance of certain words. Proper names are volatile, likewise imperatives.

A section, mostly inscrutable, written perhaps in code, or in an eroded language, on which words are volatile. A volatility index?

None of them not, the conclusion?

A tribe from Bolivia rations their use of spoken language by appointing a delegate. Again this term, delegate, who uses language so others don’t have to. A language martyr. These tribe members speak and write on behalf of the entire community. They die young, their hands bloated, hearts enlarged, goes the claim. No asterisk, no footnote. How the others die goes unmentioned.

Hiram of Monterby calls language the great curse. Esther of the Fire, in her almanac, decries the pollutions of the mouth. It will burn in your mind, says Pliny, of a speech he hears an unknown traveler deliver at the roadside at Thebes.

If I could only speak such words at my enemy, would say Pliny. What weaponry I would have.

I knew my Pliny pretty well and I was fairly sure this was wrong, hadn’t happened to Pliny. Or anyone. Yet the tone was assured, hardened in the rhetoric of fact.

The brain of Albert Dewonce, whose job it was to listen to troubles. Of whom nothing is given, but one can guess at the kind of job. Heard more words than anyone alive, was the claim, this Dewonce. His brain, they said, when he died, was decayed at the core, a lather of cells that could not possibly have received any information. Says the coroner. The cortex, blackened. Says his wife, he was sick each night from what he heard.

A brain that had been rendered to slush from speech, then.

Stories of this sort all throughout. Did any of it stand to reason? The profound cost on the brain itself. Its limited resilience in the face of, what, language?

A person’s language age can be measured through a test of his Broca’s area, such test to be performed with a tool whose name is defaced, unreadable. Unattributed drawings near the text are perhaps this tool. Language age, a phrase used throughout The Proofs. Language death, when the body is saturated. At the cusp of adulthood. A drowning of cells, is the phrase. The time of quota, when the threshold is tripped, at or near the age of eighteen.

Giving Esther four more years, I noted.

Another section, a test, called How Do You Feel When You Read This? Then some words slung together without logic.

The reading did not harm me. I scanned through what was written but felt nothing. Sometimes numbness took me, working like a vacuum to siphon off what I knew, but it did not feel connected to reading. It felt like a headache that had grown cold, pulled long, a headache on the move through parts of me I never knew felt pain.

In future issues of The Proofs, a final theory of rashes was pledged. We’d see working drawings of the Perkins Mouth Guard. The thirty-word language would be revealed, the least toxic words in our lexicon, but these words would primarily be place-names.

The Proofs was conspicuous for its absence of conclusions. One was not sure it was not simply the stitchery of Murphy, whose motives were somehow other. Deeply other. Unguessable. If The Proofs was advocating something, it did not say. It was not for sale. How many copies there were, I didn’t know.

Before folding up my evening reading and stuffing it back in its envelope, I saw in smaller print, bound by a box, a paragraph of text with the title Take Heart!

What a thing to do, and how very much I wished I could.

14

The red busses of Rochester pulled in that week, parked outside the school to collect their cargo. They came from Forsythe, a universal F scratched into their hoods. These were not busses so much as engorged medical waste canisters, motorized and fitted with tires, dipped in brilliant red paint. The medical waste being our children.

The cockpits of the busses, should passengers become vocal, were wood-boxed, soundproofed, blackened, double-locked.

An optional alleviation, these busses were called. Your children, went the pledge, would not be subjected to medical tests. Nothing invasive. They would be kept safe, held for you, in order for local recoveries to flourish. Medical babysitting.

Segregation was the strategy. Divide and conquer. But this was more like divide and collapse, divide and weep.

Minnesota was a destination, a low-activity coordinate. The toxicity couldn’t linger with those thermals. You wanted to be where the wind was. A certain species of it. Some kind of grassland facility in Pennsylvania was listed as well, where a new form of ventilation was being attempted.

A picture of the destination floated around, an empty field with a horse trotting through. The imaginary landscape of a travel brochure. We were meant to envision a clean, new settlement, a territory free of peril. Your children will be safe. Maps for the evacuation were taped to lampposts, peeling away to litter the street. Track your child. You’d see one of the sad fathers standing alone in the road, examining one of these maps, which depicted a future that did not include him.

The busses filled with children. Some orphans—mothers and dads fled already—mounted the stairs alone, taking a snack from the basket in the aisle. When parents appeared, they held their kids’ hands. Their faces showed something no one could decode, mouths stretched into grins. They delivered their children into the hushed busses, then bent down to the cargo bays to stuff in a suitcase. Children with labels stitched across their coats, their names rendered in scrawls of yarn, as if they weren’t already lost. Walking toxics, before we fully understood the poison of scripts: the slower, awful burn of writing when you saw it. Children should be neither seen nor heard, especially if they carried names on their clothing. Then together or alone the parents returned to their cars and drove home.

And the busses roared from the neighborhood. Headed elsewhere, carrying part of the problem away from us. For now.

Because this exodus was optional, some children still remained. Including Esther and her friends. But was friends really the word for that group, who lorded over the neighborhood in our final days, creating barriers of speech so putrid you could not cross them?

Per Thompson, I escalated my smallwork in the kitchen lab from solid medicines to smoke. Even if this succeeded to numb our faculties and kill off input, it would be the mildest sort of stopgap. At best I was buying us dark minutes, prolonging the stupor. At worst I was rushing us closer toward some highly unspectacular form of demise. If we were dying I wanted us to die differently.

Otherwise we’d be found in sweat-stained pajamas leaning against the toilet. We’d be found on the low bench we’d installed in the closet under the stairs, for hiding, Claire’s face stuck to my hair. We’d be found deep under our blankets in whatever bed we’d made for ourselves that night. Or we’d not be found, because one of us would have wandered into the yard and then the woods, confused, only to collapse in a ravine.

In those last weeks at home Claire sometimes shuffled into the kitchen and surveyed my lab work. She pulled up a stool and sat at the counter as I fed our medicine through the bottle-size smoker.

Claire watched while I freebased for her one of the mineral trials, using a kitchen apron draped over her head for a vapor hood.

She endured the exposure without coughing and I detected gratitude in her eyes. I could tell even without looking that she was smiling at me while I worked, content to be together in the evening.

The medicinal smoke was bitter and I swept it from her face when she finished a dose. She looked at me so gently, and when I held her for a neck injection her skull felt small and cold in my hands. When I needed Claire’s vitals she accommodated the kit over her ribs, opening her robe for me without complaint. She even did so without my having to ask.

Every few days, it seemed, she graduated to the next belt buckle on the kit, her body losing size, her face retreating on her head, taking on that awful smallness.

I wanted only to provide Claire with some medicine that might help her sit near Esther, to endure her company without symptoms. After precisely timed doses, she dragged herself through the house and tried to visit with her daughter, if by chance her daughter was home. A narrowing of her motives had led to this small desire, but it remained difficult, and Esther had little patience for a chilled and sick mother who only wanted to cuddle.

One night I heard Esther yell, “You’re disgusting,” and walked in to find Claire sprawled on her back, smiling up at me. She’d gotten what she needed. She’d hugged her daughter, and the retaliation had been worth it.

Esther, inside her large coat, headed out the door.

If the smoke from whatever powders I’d scorched was thick enough to hang in place, I captured it in bags, to create smoke purses, little sacklets of fumes that could be punctured by a juice box straw if I required a small dose.

In the spice cabinet I kept wicker baskets filled with these smoke purses, labeled in black marker. If I had data relating to Claire’s response to the inhalation, I noted it on the back of the purses. I wrote things like no change. I wrote muteness. I wrote talkative, erratic, nervous. I wrote giddy. I wrote, and this I wrote most, no data. Or I wrote nothing at all. The writing was strange to my hand. Sometimes before writing on the pillowy bags I had to practice on paper, and I could not always recognize the script.

I suspected that if I wrote the wrong thing, the wrong way, the lettering would harm me. I’d excite some new sensitivity in my perception, and I would collapse.

Those were quiet nights. Claire and I took breaks outside, bathing our faces in the cold November air. Our neighborhood was chilled and flat and all green growth was gone. I loved it so stripped down and frozen. There was something sculpted to the shapes, as though our streets had been carved from ice, colored with pale dyes squirted from a dropper. I loved the frost on the cars at night and the steam that flowered in marble-smooth shapes from the yards, like perfect gray ghosts made of balloon material. To be outside without our coats in such cold raw air was exquisite. Sometimes puffs of breath rose from a porch down the street and we heard the muted voices of our last neighbors. But usually no one was out, and if there were lights it was the blue glow of the streetlamps. These lamps only sharpened the darkness, radiating a pure blue smolder that made the night feel stronger. A final absence of light that would take hours of sunshine to boil off.

When the vans drove through, they did so quickly, with so little noise, their engines seemed swaddled in silencers. Or perhaps they had no engines and glided past our house on a perfect slick of air.

It was Claire one night who offered that perhaps we didn’t need the medicine we’d just finished scalding our lungs with. She seemed to be suggesting a change of strategy.

“It’s so good of you, Darling, the work you’re doing,” she said, staring at the street.

We sat bundled in a shared blanket on the steps. The cold air felt intense in my chest. I knew how wrong it was to feel happy, but I could not help it.

I didn’t look at her. Work was a wishful word for my failures in the lab. Nothing was good of me. Claire’s compliment was only necessary because of how obvious the failure was. Whatever I was brewing and pumping into her was nothing I should be thanked for.

“I know you’ve probably thought of this,” Claire said, her words slurred, “but maybe it’s not the best thing for Essie with us taking all this new medicine, in terms of how it might make her feel.”

“It’s not for her. It’s for us.”

I knew I was missing the point, but I couldn’t tiptoe around the euphemism. Esther’s well-being had become a distant concern, like worrying about the flesh wound of a god.

“Is there something, or are we …” Claire started.

I waited, but the sentence never finished. It dug a little hole in the air between us, and the hole throbbed, until I realized it was there for me to fill.

“The busses,” I said, giving it my worst guess. There was a chance Claire wanted me to finish her sentence this way, didn’t have the heart to do it herself. Maybe I was the one who had to say it out loud.

“We could bring her down there and see,” I continued. “That would remove her from anything unpleasant at home, and then we wouldn’t need to interrupt our work. Best of both worlds, maybe.”

“Best of both worlds?” asked Claire. “Really.”

She shook her head, wouldn’t look at me.

We could, I thought. Esther would not even need to know why we were going. A field trip, a vacation, with horses certainly. I’m sure there will be horses! Just look at this picture. We could pretend Esther didn’t know what these red busses were, and it would join that larger field of perceptions, insights, and facts I also pretended Esther did not possess.

The logistics of getting Esther strapped in a bus seat evaded me, led me into thoughts and plans I did not wish to have.

Was I not meant to think the unthinkable? Hadn’t our hut training led exactly to this, courting unbearable circumstances as a matter of principle?

Claire sighed, but in such a kind, noncombative way that it disarmed me. It made me sad to think that she’d been rehearsing this conversation for days, probably, hoping to sound kind and wise and open-minded. She wanted off the medicine. I think she wanted off more than that.

“Esther’s not going anywhere, Sam. You don’t get to make that decision, and I’ll never agree to it.”

It was always awkward to hear my own name in her voice. We never did that. Never. We openly discussed that we never did that. It was somehow unbearably intimate and deeply hostile at the same time.

I nuzzled up against her. “I know. I’m just saying.”

Which wasn’t true. I wasn’t saying anything. What I particularly wasn’t saying was that I could never send Esther on a bus, either, but by taking that position I could keep Claire sympathetic to the medical trials. She’d see it as an either-or situation. I saw no other way for us to stay at home.

“I don’t think medicine is the answer anymore,” she said. “I think there is no answer. I just want to be with Esther when it happens.”

When it happens? I didn’t want to ask.

“Will you let me?” she said. “Could you arrange it?”

I squeezed her hand and she squeezed back, which once meant that things were fine between us, a language of anxious grips that we exchanged to rescue ourselves from disagreement. Now, it was code for nothing. You translated it and it yielded speech vacuumed of meaning.

“I promise you it’s not going to happen.”

“You can’t, though. You can’t promise me anything.”

Claire’s breathing changed and I felt her sobs in my body before I heard them.

I tried to stop what was coming by saying her name, but this only triggered it harder.

“This is my fault,” said Claire, shaking. She gestured at the street, as if she were taking responsibility for the whole world outside our house: the people, the trees, the weather. She’d done this.

I reached for her but she pulled away, repeated her claim. It was her fault. All of it. The entire thing. It was all her fault.

“Please, Claire.”

“I am to blame.” She raised her voice, shouted into the street. “I did this!”

I ducked, as if I needed to show my embarrassment to any invisible person watching us from the dark exteriors of the neighborhood.

I told her it wasn’t true. I reasoned with her, asked for evidence. There was no evidence.

“Yes, but he told me it was my fault. He told me! What kind of person does that? He must have a reason. If the rabbi is not right, then I will never forgive him.”

I said, “We shouldn’t even be talking about this. We can’t be talking about this. You know that.”

“Why?” she shouted. “Why the fuck not? How can we not talk about it? How do they expect us to do that? It’s impossible.”

“The rules,” I whispered. Instantly I hated how this sounded.

“The rules? From Bauman? How do we even know who that old man was? He was no one. A fucking weirdo. He’s gone. We’ve never seen him again. We haven’t seen anyone! There’s no one to see.”

“But there doesn’t need to be,” I said. “What would that even do? It’s a distraction.”

“Speak for yourself, you bastard.”

Claire cried hard into her hands. Hoarding, monstrously, this unknowable thing all to herself.

I said, “I won’t discuss this with you, Claire. I can’t. This is a conversation you have to have with yourself. We keep our own counsel.”

“Talking to myself is not a conversation! I have no counsel to keep. I’m alone. You are, too. How can you stand it?”

“You’re upset. Let’s get you inside and maybe try a different dose. I think I know what I did wrong.”

“Oh, you have no idea what you’ve done wrong. No idea. You’ve done enough. Just keep that fucking medicine away from me.”

I stood, tried to walk it off, but it didn’t come off. I couldn’t shake it.

“So this is your fault?” I said. “You really believe that?” I asked her. “Fine, let’s fucking talk about it.”

Claire nodded up at me. “It’s the first thing that’s made sense out there for me in years. It’s the first thing I heard that felt true and real.”

The first thing? In years?

“It wasn’t true and real. It was a sermon. You’re not meant to believe it like that.”

“Oh? Then how the fuck am I supposed to believe it? If I don’t believe it, then why are we going out there? Is it a joke?”

I didn’t know what I was saying now, but I kept talking.

“The lessons are abstract, something to think about.”

She scoffed. “Maybe to you they are. If you want to escape all responsibility, that’s your business, Sam. Do that. If that’s what you call keeping your own counsel.”

“Well, if it’s your fault, if you actually believe that, then fix it,” I said.

Claire seemed confused.

“Make it better,” I shouted down at her. “Make this go away, Claire. Undo it. I’m going to fucking wait here until you do.

“You see?” I said. “It’s meaningless. Your claim is fucking meaningless. It’s the most selfish thing of all for you to take the blame, as if you had anything to do with this.”

She looked at me in high disbelief.

“Selfish?” she asked.

“I’m serious,” I yelled, and she flinched.

“If it’s your fault, do something about it, Claire. Otherwise shut up and never say that again. Never open your mouth about this again.”

This stopped the crying. I watched my wife draw in her forces, sealing herself off from not just what I said, but from me as well, from the evening, from the days that had passed. A project of wall building, face hardening, secret fortifying of everything that mattered to her. All done without moving, an inner construction project Claire seemed to command until she was, in all the ways that matter, gone. Sitting on the steps Claire receded, drifting farther and farther away from me until she looked up at me with the stare reserved for a stranger, all intimacy erased.

“It’s not your decision,” I said to her, softer. “You can’t break faith because it also breaks mine. I can’t go out there without you. You know that. It doesn’t work. I already tried it. We have to go together, to believe in it together.”

She laughed. “But we don’t have to, Sam. We actually don’t. Find someone else to believe in nothing with. I’m done.”

“It’s not your choice,” I whispered.

“Oh, I think it is. And, anyway, it’s for the best. I have it on good faith that if I stop going, Esther will be safe. Someone’s made a promise to me, and, unlike you, I think he can keep it.”

“Someone?”

“Yes, Sam. Someone. You don’t know him.”

“Claire, please,” I said. “This person.”

“Forget it.”

“He came to the house?”

“I said forget it.”

“One question.”

“No. No questions. No questions and no answers.”

“Claire. Did this man call himself Murphy? Does he have red hair?”

My wife did not respond, but she gave me such a queer, searching look, and then it was a long time before she looked at me again.

Together we sat staring out at the street, the final exhausts of Claire’s sobs gasping out. She slid to the far end of the steps, kept to herself for the rest of the night. She was perhaps too weak to bring herself inside.

Salt blasts had streaked into the neighborhood. You couldn’t see them at night, or even so well in the day. Mostly it was the pellucid salt already washed clear by the wind. But you felt it crunching under your feet, some living thing recently crushed into grain.

I looked east toward the man-shaped silhouette between two houses where the sun would appear in a few hours, but there was nothing there to suggest a sun could ever heave itself into the sky again. I would never get used to that.

I could not ignore how that space looked forever immune from any illumination. Places give no warning that they might soon be erased by light. There is never a single thing to suggest that some grotesque change is coming that will reveal all, and soon.

A language solely of place-names. What would we possibly say to each other?

Sitting with my wife, whose disgust pulsed over me, I laughed to myself over these assessments, thoughts of a final or irresolvable darkness. There was textbook wisdom surfacing a little too easily. Sentimentality was no doubt a side effect of the speech fever, compounded by the side effects of all our failed medicine. The side effects of fighting, the side effects of knowing nothing, the side effects of being done with it and somehow, for no reason I could detect, still alive. One uses one’s deathbed energy to project meaning where none can be found. How does the species possibly benefit from such an action?

Your feelings will matter to you and to you alone, would say LeBov. You will surge with emotion over situations that have no bearing on the crisis. It’s a tactic. A trick. Believe in it at your peril. Better to bury yourself alive than give these ideas any due.

LeBov’s wisdom, like anyone’s, most fitting for those who wished to live, who had tasks in mind they still hoped to complete. For the others, like us two on the steps that night, wisdom is a high-handed scold, a reminder of what you’re not capable of thinking, some bit of behavior you can’t even reach for. Whether or not LeBov would prove to be right would remain to be seen. That night I wanted to expire on those steps, breathing in the perfect, cold air.

In many ways, that would have been a preferred outcome.

It still seems important, given all that’s happened, to report that across the street from my house, there was a hidden piece of the deadest air. No glow whatsoever, even from the streetlamps. I felt I could shine a lamp into it and the light would be extinguished. Just a swollen patch of darkness that seemed to throb the more I stared.

15

By early December we huddled at home, speechless. If we spoke it was through faces gripped in early rigor mortis. Our neighborhood had gone blank, killed down by winter. It was too cold even for the remaining children to do much hunting.

I don’t know how else to refer to their work, but sometimes they swarmed the block, flooding houses with speech until the adults were repulsed to the woods.

You’d see a neighbor with a rifle and you’d hear that rifle go off.

The trees stood bloodless, barely holding on in the wind. We sat against the window and waited, spying out at the children when they roved through. The children—they should have been called something else—barking toxic vocals through megaphones as they held hands in the street.

I hoped they wouldn’t turn and see us in the window, come to the door. I hoped they wouldn’t walk up the lawn and push their megaphones against the glass. And always I hoped not to see our Esther in these crowds, but too often there she was in the pack, one of the tallest, bouncing in the winter nighttime fog, breathing into her hands to keep warm. She’d finally found a group of kids to run off with.

If there was an escape to engineer we failed to do so, even while some neighbors loaded cars, smuggling from town when they’d had enough. The quarantine hadn’t been declared, but in our area they weren’t letting children through checkpoints, except by bus. Basic containment. If you wanted to leave, you left alone.

Even so, bulky rugs were thrust into trunks. Items that required two people to carry. Usually wrapped in cloth, sometimes squirming of their own accord, a child’s foot poking out. A clumsy game of hide-and-seek, children sprawled out in cargo carriers, children disguised as something else, so parents could spend a few more minutes with what ailed them.

Claire retired as my test subject. She stopped appearing in the kitchen for night treatments, declined the new smoke. When I served infused milk she fastened her mouth shut. If she accepted medicine from me she did so unwittingly, asleep, whimpering when the needle went in.

I couldn’t blame her, falling away like that, embracing the shroud of illness. But I did. I conducted nightly campaigns of blame and accusation, silently, in the monstrous internal speech that is only half sounded out, a kind of cave speech one reserves for private airing. In these broadsides Claire spun on a low podium and absorbed every accusation.

If I prepared a bowl of steamed grain and left it on the table for her, salted as she liked it, pooling in the black syrup, she passed her spoon through it, held up a specimen for study, and could not, just never could, finally slide it in her mouth. For Claire I cut cubes of meat loaf, and at best she tucked one or two in her mouth, where she could suck on them until they shriveled to husks.

Claire no longer slept in her bed and she seemed too listless even to maneuver to the crafts room, to the guest room, to anywhere she might be able to fall unconscious in private.

I was always trying to offer her shield, a modesty curtain, so she could come undone alone and unseen. She shouldn’t have to collapse in hallways. If necessary I helped her along, at least to a corner, where I could erect a temporary blind.

Once I found her asleep in the bathroom, one eye stuck open, leaking a speckled fluid. I crouched down and closed the eye, blotted it with my shirt. It opened again and she whispered at me.

“Hi there.”

I looked down at her and she blinked, perfectly alert.

Claire must have thought she was smiling, but that was so far from a smile. With my fingers I tried to change the feeling, to reshape her mouth. I couldn’t have her looking at me like that.

Her lips were cold and they would not stay where I arranged them. Her face had the weight of clay.

“Go back to sleep” was all I could think to say, and I draped a bath towel over her, leaving her to rest on the cold tiles.

At home I took charge of what remained of our dwindling domestic project, the blending of food into shakes, the cleaning of all our gray traces. I formed a packing plan, a strategy with regard to the luggage, mapped a route to outskirt lodging. Our pajamas, robes, towels, dishrags, these I washed every day, closing myself in the laundry room where the hot engine of the machine drowned out noise and thought. Against the hum of the washer I was, for a little while, nobody much, and this was how I preferred it.

I left Esther’s warm, folded clothes in her bedroom. Often they went untouched. Or later, after Esther had plowed through the house before returning to her gang, I’d find the pile toppled onto the floor, a heap of black crumbs, like someone’s ashes, dumped over it.

Claire’s robe went mostly unwashed, because she didn’t like to take it off, and if I ever found her half asleep and staring into nowhere from her resting place, she wouldn’t respond when I asked if I could do any laundry for her, she’d just smack her lips to indicate thirst.

“It’d be nice to have fresh clothes, right? I could clean these and have them right back to you.”

I tugged at her robe and she pulled away from me, threw an arm over her face.

“Your robe will be nice and warm out of the dryer. We could get you covered in extra blankets in the meantime. It’ll be nice to be clean. You’ll feel better.”

I spoke to Claire as if she understood me, but she only stared. I spoke to her through a stiff, heavy face that seemed fitted on my head solely to block me from speaking. I sounded like a man underwater.

As our tolerance departed for the speech of children, so, too, did our ability to speak. Language in or out, we heard, produced, or received. A problem any which way.

To keep Claire hydrated I’d have to peel back her hospital mask, prop her upright, and press the sippy cup straw through the gluey seal of her lips.

I lowered the mask when she was done and flowery welts of orange juice soaked through the fabric.

When it was time to clean her, I filled a bowl with warm water, settled it over a towel at her bedside. With a washcloth I soaped her neck and face. She lifted her chin, gathered her hair out of the way. I squeezed little pools of water over her throat. I placed another towel under her feet, then lifted and washed each leg, rubbing as softly as I could, watching the little streaks of redness follow my cloth.

Claire’s legs rose too easily in my hands, as though they’d been relieved of their bones.

With the last of the water I reached into Claire’s robe and washed her stomach, the skin that once held her breasts. I peeled her from the bed so I could wash her back, pushing the washcloth under the robe, feeling each hollow between her ribs, a sponginess I did not want to explore. Then I settled her back down again, pulled up her covers, lifted the mask from her mouth so I could replace it with a clean one.

She forced a smile, but a shadow had spread under her gums, a darkness inside her mouth.

When I brought her soup, warmed the long bread she loved, or offered Claire some of the candies that usually she could never refuse—baby amber globes with a cube of salted caramel inside—at most she would roll over, heave, pull the quilt above her head.

It was only when the front door swung open and Esther came in the house sweating, crazed, in clothing I’d never seen, that Claire sat up, drawing on some last reserve of power. She always wanted to catch sight of Esther, to watch her from a doorway, so she followed her from room to room, keeping her distance, and Esther tolerated the stalking. You could see in her whole body the effort she made to endure this attention she loathed.

Esther had changed. Her face was older, harder. Filthy from her outings, but spectacularly beautiful. Of course I must think this, I’m her father. Fathers do not easily succumb to assessments of ugliness where their children are concerned. Esther had never been a cute child, but she’d grown threateningly stunning in the last few months. She let her mother watch from a safe perimeter and she was considerate enough not to turn on her with speech, to stop and speak until Claire fell. Esther saw her mother in doorways, looked away, said nothing. It was her greatest kindness to us, that silence. I will always appreciate the restraint she showed in those last days.

16

Esther’s birthday fell on a Sunday. Claire was oblivious, wheezing beneath the medicated linen I’d dipped for her. I realized what the day was late in the afternoon after crawling on the floor of the shower, the water softening my face.

What was called LeBov’s Mark had grown in fast, a hardened lump under my tongue, anchoring it down. The shower seemed to help. On the tiled floor I could tilt my face into the spray, let the heat loosen my throat. In the bathroom I exercised my voice so that it would not flow from me in shapeless moans.

Last year, when Esther turned fourteen, she’d wanted no party, just money and privacy. She used those words exactly, then said: “Why would you even ask me what I want if you have no intention of delivering on it?”

Delivering on it was her phrase. To which Claire and I could only shrug, agree, say Okay, sure, we can give you that, Honey. And then we wondered, How much? How much money, how much privacy does she want?

Esther wanted us to promise that we’d not talk about the birthday, not mention her age, absolutely not remark on how she’d grown up or changed or stayed the same, not reference what she was supposedly like as a baby, since why would I want to know, she’d asked, what you think you used to think of me? She claimed such a detail was an obscure statistic, a piece of information that future corpses—her phrase—stored in their bodies as a charm.

Esther reasoned that, in any case, we never felt fondly toward her at the time, that we loved her best in hindsight.

It was true. Our family suffered from issues of calibration.

“Even now,” she said. “It’s happening right now. Years from now you will have distorted this moment, which is an awful moment, into something nice, and you’ll badger me with that memory until I agree, which I’ll only do to make you stop talking. You are professional distorters, incapable of simply seeing a situation for what it is.”

Years from now. The things we will do. In the end Esther really did underestimate us.

Memories of any kind, for Esther, were similarly off-limits. Shed the skin and burn it, apparently. Memories that asked Esther to picture herself doing something she no longer recalled, like skating in a rope chain of children, when she was seven, down the traffic lines of an iced-over Wilderleigh Street. This was the week the elm fell to lightning and we built a snow fort circling the trunk. Or climbing a ladder stretched flat on the grass and pretending it was vertical, so that each time she let go of it she fake-tumbled to the bottom.

Such images were an attack. They caused physical pain, and why did we insist on hurting her? Why did it seem that we were instinctually driven to cause her pain? It was not right to hurt her on her birthday. Especially on her birthday. What kinds of parents were we, after all?

We’d grown so accustomed to hiding our feelings around Esther that it seemed easier to just not have those feelings in the first place.

You people and your memories, she’d said through a sneer.

Esther requested that her birthday not serve as an occasion for us to pretend that we were closer than we really were, since why should that random date, a date based on the most flawed and sentimental calendar, make us suddenly tell lies about how we really felt?

“Sweetie,” I countered.

“See, like that,” she said. “There’s a lie right there. You think that a generic endearment will somehow show how you feel toward me, talk me out of how I actually feel. One word is going to do that, a word used for pets? How many people use that exact word to hide what they feel? It’s like you’re throwing up on me, actually. I feel like you just threw up on me.”

But in the years before these revelations and rules, before she was overwhelmed by insights she felt compelled to share with us, we’d had birthday parties. We staved off tantrums and avalanches of greed, accommodated in our home the children who seemed to function—if barely—as Esther’s friends. Along with these preteen colleagues we welcomed skulking parents, who would invariably let one of their babies—babies had not been invited, but there they were, there they always were—go off on a shelf-clearing campaign. Then a parent would quietly retreat, without the baby, to the off-limits master bathroom and take a toilet-wrecking shit that could never be flushed, only to emerge with the blissful look of someone whose own home is not being destroyed at this very moment, stepping half-apologetically, but really with relief, with genuinely visible relief and perhaps even a kind of lurid joy—this party is really fun!—over dumped cupcakes, grinding them further into the rug we should have pulled up before the party, but did not, because in the end we always failed to imagine how savage these people could become.

“There you are,” the parent would scold the baby, as if it was the baby who had disappeared. The baby would crawl over, try to stand, hold up its arms in supplication to be carried, then topple over.

Depending on the baby, it would either sob, laugh, or be gorgeously oblivious to all mortal proceedings. One of those three behavioral paths.

“Come smell the shit I took,” the parents never said.

Instead the one-sided, rhetorical, patronizing dialogue would commence: “What did you do? Huh? What did you do?” the parent would interrogate the baby, picking it up and seeming to study it for evidence.

A theater of mock blame the parent should have been directing to the mirror.

“Why not ask someone who can actually answer you?” I wouldn’t say to them. “I’ll tell you exactly what your baby did. Would you really like to know? Can you handle a conversation with a real, live adult?”

I stood and stared at these people and they serially failed to read my mind.

Instead they would be locked in some kind of airborne mouth-tickling activity with the baby—holding it aloft and, to all appearances, trying to eat it—a baby who by now, so many years later, as a seven- or eight-year-old, I’d guess, was probably shouting that same parent into a corner, turning the parent pale, speaking with so much force that the parent was husking, shelling, dying in a house somewhere probably not so far away.

Had those parents built a locker beneath the stairs, as we did? Cut in a peephole, lined the little room with pillows? Had they shielded themselves from the speech of their offspring, effaced their hearing, or damaged the little ones themselves, stopped the reeking language at its source? Were they pumping white noise from the old slab radio, and did it not fully hide the child’s speech? Or perhaps the parents had already fled upstate. If they were smart. If they knew how to shut down their attachment apparatus and see their children for what they really, most essentially, were. Agents of such terrible mouth sounds that, relation or not, one hoped never to see them again.

On Esther’s final birthday in our house I went to the kitchen to get to work on the cake. There wasn’t much food left in the cupboard, just some pancake mix and a blend of baking powders I’d dumped into a bag. From the meaty, mineral smell I figured this would give a lift to the cake, at least if I got the batter down to room temperature and shocked it into a hot oven so it might have some spring.

For liquids I had an egg and some buttermilk, the custardy sludge from the bottom of the carton.

I could boil the buttermilk to kill off bacteria, then flash freeze it before dumping it into the batter. The egg, too, would need flame, because it was likely spoiled by now.

I broke it into a pan, stifled a gag, then whisked it over a simmer until it frothed up, sputtered, and grew clear again. Mostly it did not congeal. The hardened parts were easy to flick out. When the pan cooled I slid it into the freezer, went to work on sifting the powders.

For sugar I reduced the last of the orange juice until it thickened into a syrup, then whipped in a thread of honey. This would have to do, because I needed the last of the sugar for frosting. I liked to feather it on lightly, then comb it up while hardening it with the medical cold blower, as if the cake had a fright wig.

The frosting I colored silver with a bead of food-grade aluminum.

When she was younger, Esther preferred black frosting on Fez cakes, and she liked these cakes tethered by rope candy. Or, if not rope candy, then string, dipped in food coloring and pan-seared inside a thin jacket of sugar. When she was ten we’d cooked, cooled, and braided her own rope candy, but left it clear.

“Color is vulgar,” she said, quoting somebody.

Once we’d built trails with jelly beans, linking the baby cakes by candy cobblestone. Esther discovered that the jelly beans could be cut smaller and arranged so densely, it seemed the entire gathering of cakes rested on a pebbled surface.

Instead of a candle Esther would have me soak the perimeter of the cake with a squirt of kerosene, which flamed a perfect halo. When she was nine we strung a wick between two pieces of wire that bordered the cake. The laundry line, we called it. We lit the wick from both ends while singing “Happy Birthday” and watched it fall into the frosting. The two little balls of flame found each other in the center of the cake, burned out, and left a dark, charred circle.

“The burnt part is the best,” declared Esther. “I get the burnt part!”

Today I had no candle, no sweets. I did have a placebo smoke purse, which I’d billowed with safe vapors early in my experiments with Claire. The purse had cured—the plastic must have been tainted—yielding a reddish smoke inside.

I rolled an egg of wax, scooped it hollow, then linked it by drinking straw to the red smoke purse.

The smoke drained from the purse through the straw, filled the ball of wax, clouding the inside of it, turning it dark.

I removed the straw and quickly sealed the ball of wax. With a potato peeler I set about shaving the ball, thinning its surface to transparency. Then Esther could see the red smoke trapped inside. Perhaps she’d pierce the ball with her teeth, let the smoke release into her mouth.

A birthday smoke should be red. It’s the prettiest color for smoke.

When I was done I placed the wax ball on top of the cake. It sank slightly into the silver frosting, and that was that. It didn’t symbolize anything. This was the point. It was interesting to look at and I thought that Esther might have fun holding it up to the light, wondering how the dark red smoke got in there.

I found Claire beneath her linen shield and helped her into the hiding place under the stairs. Her body was light in my hands these days, but if I pulled the comforter she was resting on, I could drag her as on a sled from room to room, interrupted only by the thresholds, which offered a small obstacle Claire didn’t seem to mind.

I did not speak, did not tell her where we were going, but she’d want to see this, her daughter’s birthday. Together we could watch safely through the hole in the door our own little girl. It would be safe. Esther would come home and have some cake and we could watch her together.

I left a trail of Post-its that would lead Esther to the cake, which I’d positioned on a pedestal table within view of the peephole. We’d bored a hole into the crawl space door and now this was our little shelter beneath the staircase.

Next to the table I pulled up the children’s chair she used when she was younger. Surely she could still fit into it. And at this height she’d be right in our line of view, provided she didn’t move the chair and turn her back on us.

Inside our heads Claire and I could sing “Happy Birthday.” No one would have to hear. Esther wouldn’t even know we were there. She could enjoy her cake and it would be nice to be together again.

I pushed Claire into our cave beneath the stairway, tucked her all the way back, then crawled in myself. Claire did not rouse herself or show much interest. When the time came, when Esther returned, walked through the house, and then found the cake, I would wake Claire and help her see.

We settled onto our cushions, pulled shut the door, and waited. Claire leaned against me, seemed to whisper something, but I think she was speaking to herself.

From where I sat I could see perfectly through the peephole. That was a pretty cake on the pedestal, its little wax ball starting to sweat from the smoke. I was just fine to wait here.

It was dark and late when I woke beneath Claire’s damp body. Someone was in the house. I pressed my face to the peephole.

The footsteps shook the floor. Esther must have been wearing boots. She clomped through the house as if she were old and slow. I could hear every move as she walked near to us, then far. All I saw through the hole was the little silver cake on the table.

The steps drew closer, and then a voice called hello. A man’s voice.

Hello and hello and hello. He called out the name Steven? Steven as a question. He asked if Steven was there. Walked through, opened and closed doors. Was Steven home? Anybody?

“Hello?”

It was Murphy.

I held my breath.

He was bundled for the cold. He stood huge in our little house. The room was doll-size with him in it.

He stopped next to the cake, let a finger drag through the frosting. He turned and looked at the door that sheltered Claire and me.

I stared at him through the peephole and did not move.

The wet rattle of Claire’s breath seemed suddenly loud. I could not shush her. Even placing my hand over her mouth would not work. The sound didn’t come from her mouth, but from her chest, her whole body. Our hiding place vibrated with Claire’s gasps.

Murphy walked off, resumed calling out hello, but in a lifeless, obligatory way, as if he couldn’t turn off his voice.

I waited for Murphy to leave, but he took his time. He went upstairs, came down, went back up. At one point it seemed that he pulled up a chair, sat for a while, before scooting out again.

In our bedroom Murphy seemed to move some furniture.

Finally the front door closed and his steps retreated.

I kept on waiting, pictured Murphy walking to his car, opening it, getting in, and driving away. Then I pictured the same routine again, over and over, until I could be sure that he was far away.

Except I could never be sure of that.

Claire’s weight was stifling, a wet pressure. I pushed her off me and climbed out of the crawl space to survey the damage.

All throughout the house everything seemed as it was, except upstairs I discovered that the hut repair box was missing from my drawer. The little tools meant to fix the listener at the Jewish hole, tools I’d never needed to use. This box was all that was missing. For all of Murphy’s raucous rummaging he hadn’t taken much.

But the cake had been disturbed. Not eaten, but violated, the ball of wax collapsed, smokeless. Something had been dropped on the cake, then removed. I made a fist, held it above the ruined cake. This was too large.

The size of the crater was just right for Esther’s hand, I reasoned. Balled up, punching down.

I couldn’t believe she would destroy her own cake. Certainly the cake had collapsed because I had baked it poorly, failed to follow a recipe. It was stupid to think I could go in the kitchen and improvise like that.

Perhaps Esther was not hungry. Perhaps she came in and saw the cake and decided she might have a slice later on. Only not now. After dinner, maybe.

I’d put it in the refrigerator, is what I would do. The cake would be there for her when she was hungry. Perhaps when I was feeling better I would have a piece, too. Maybe Esther and I could sit quietly together over a piece of cake. I’d skin back my frosting for her, because she liked extra. There’d be no reason to speak. We could enjoy each other’s company in silence, in the kitchen, on her birthday. If I could find a candle, an old-fashioned one, we’d light it up. It’d be nice to sit together, listening to our forks click on the plates. We’d be sure to save a piece for her mother.

17

LeBov died that week. A feature ran on the news, a final piece of television. He was sixty-two. Or he was sixty-eight. An assistant found him at home, where he lived alone. Two of his many children apparently lived nearby. I missed the picture they flashed of him, but then a photo of one of LeBov’s sons, cast up on the screen, showed a suntanned, elderly fellow with a white ponytail. LeBov’s son. There was no mention of a wife. LeBov had been taken to a private facility in Denver where he later expired. This was the language used by the newscaster. Expired.

There would be no funeral.

According to the news, LeBov was perhaps the first researcher, certainly the most outspoken, to identify the threat of language.

All the good it’s done, I sat there thinking.

The editorial assessment of the news program was that LeBov’s death was particularly distressing at this time, given our current situation.

A toxicologist by training, they called LeBov. He had lived mostly in Canada, spent the early years of his career developing his theory of a primary allergen, allergy zero.

Later in his career LeBov focused on the toxic properties of language. Most recently, until his passing, he had been the director of a private research lab in Rochester called Forsythe. He was working closely with health officials on the problem of the viral child.

“Claire!” I called out into the cold house.

LeBov was known for disseminating his views in underground publications. Designed, some said, deliberately to mislead. Filled with false information and historical inaccuracies invented to bolster his theories.

A montage spun together clips of other scientists appraising LeBov’s contributions. He merited scorn, derision, from a pedigreed cohort, doctors, scientists, linguists. But these were old clips, exhumed from an archive somewhere, stitched together to form a portrait. All the footage was from well before his death, before his recent lunge into credibility. These men and women, pronouncing on the now dead LeBov, projected a vital cheer quite terrible in hindsight—sitting in offices or newsrooms while off-loading their expensive opinions about someone they could safely dislike in public.

These scientists had yet to live in these times. Today, yesterday, the past few months. Their short-term futures were going to hurt, and they had no idea. Where were these fine people now? I wondered. Were they hiding yet?

Have you found shelter? Is it finally quiet and safe where you are? I wanted to ask them.

Not a person alive could be made to talk like that now, look so healthy, using language as if it did not break something in us.

Even the newscaster, broadcasting live, wore a bloodless mask, staring, one supposed, at the words on the teleprompter. Eating the vile material for his very employment, each word producing the crushing. You could tell. He seemed to weaken by the second. They’d done him up in television paint. One could see that this man did not have long. For some reason I recall his name. Jim Adelle.

Jim Adelle’s News Hour. A Special Report with Jim Adelle.

I wonder how many more days he had to live.

The feature continued. I settled in to listen as LeBov’s colleagues detailed his work, decried his methods, his results, his person.

“Claire!” I called again. She couldn’t still be asleep. I knew she’d be interested in this.

LeBov’s theory of allergy did not assist his career. One of the desert universities finally offered him a silo, but they kept him away from students. Later he distanced himself from the theory, then finally renounced the idea as dangerous.

Not really a rebuttal, I noted, to call your own idea dangerous. More of a sensationalizing gesture to increase attention.

This would turn out to be a signature method throughout LeBov’s career. He advanced an idea, often a problematic one, beat its drum until everyone was revolted, then turned on himself, often through pseudonym, and attacked his own work. He staged battles in the academic journals between two different versions of himself, argument and refutation coming from the same man.

At conferences LeBov sent imposters to the podium in his place. No one knew what he looked like, apparently. Then he sat hectoring his stand-in from the audience, protesting every idea, sometimes storming out in disgust. He accused himself of fraudulence, plagiarism. In at least some cases it would seem that he was correct.

LeBov’s signature work, in the end, addressed the trouble with language, the word trouble being, in his view, an understatement. He argued for most of his professional life that language should be best understood, aside from its marginal utility as a communication technology—can we honestly say it works?—as an impurity.

Language happens to be a toxin we are very good at producing, but not so good at absorbing, LeBov said. We could, per LeBov, in our lifetimes, not expect to process very much of it.

In answer to his detractors, LeBov asked what it was that ever suggested speech would not be toxic.

“Let us reverse the terms and assume that language, like nearly everything else, is poisonous when consumed to excess. Why not assault the folly that led to such widespread use of something so intense, so strong, as language, in the first place?”

Where was the regulatory body? LeBov wanted to know. Where was the marshaling instinct for speech, for language itself?

It causes the most unbearable strain on our systems, LeBov would say. It is not very different from a long, slow venom.

This idea was never granted legitimacy, evidenced by the battalion of naysayers. He simply had no proof. Witness after witness remarked on LeBov’s lack of evidence, and the word evidence came to indicate something significant that LeBov was missing, like an eye, a limb.

They had some audio for this, a response of sorts. More than anyone else in the world, I wish that I was wrong, answered LeBov, in a voice I felt I had heard before. What a relief that would be, to me, and also to my family.

“Claire,” I called out again, softer. I listened into the house to hear some sign of her. “Come sit with me.”

LeBov had written something, a screed, on the Tower of Babel, apparently, but retracted it before it could go to press. The other version of the story is that LeBov wrote in and protested to his own publisher, demanded they pulp the book. The book was a dangerous speculation, an assault on reality.

“Claire, Honey?” I called.

The Babel document came up a few times in the news interviews, though no one, it seemed, had read it. LeBov had an obsession with this myth. More than that, a bone to pick. He felt that it was a misleading, dangerous myth. It had, he supposedly argued, been copied out incorrectly, transmitted from generation to generation with a serious degree of error. Now the myth as we knew it presented a terrible impediment. I saw where Murphy had gotten the idea.

Claire appeared in the doorway, fully dressed, brushing the last of her hair.

“Why do you keep yelling my name?” she asked.

“I wanted you to see something,” I said. “This show I’m watching. On this guy who died.”

“Well, you could have said that. I wish you wouldn’t yell my name. I really can’t stand it.”

I apologized to her.

“It’s fine,” she said, leaving the room. “But I can’t stand it. Please don’t do that anymore.”

“I’m sorry,” I said again, feeling less sorry.

“And I said it’s fine,” she yelled from another room. “Stop apologizing.”

Sorry, I said to myself, wondering how many times in my marriage I’d said that, how many times I’d meant it, how many times Claire had actually believed it, and, most important, how many times the utterance had any impact whatsoever on our dispute. What a lovely chart one could draw of this word Sorry.

A linguist from Banff scorned LeBov’s idea of a toxic language.

“This idea implies a physical component to language. Some material antigen,” she said. “What exactly is the substance, in chemical terms, that is causing this allergy he speaks of?” asked the linguist. “Language is the scapegoat here. If there is a problem—and I highly doubt there is, I cannot imagine such a thing—it is one for the immunologists.”

Was the Banff linguist, I wondered, simply part of LeBov’s long plan, designed to control the flow of the argument?

The linguist held forth, smugly dismissing an idea that had recently come into its own. It interested me that the linguist’s inability to imagine something constituted a sound rejection of its possibility.

I cannot imagine such a thing.

If only that kept it from coming true.

You had simply to look out the window to see the missing evidence she was calling for, watch the neighbors drive off and not return.

Actually you had only to look at Claire, if you could even bear to. I certainly tried to avoid sight of her, even dressed up, even with her hair, falling out as it was, brushed back over her small face. That sort of witness bearing did no one any favors.

LeBov was dead, so enemies could alert the world to how unimportant the old man really was, before irony would come along to smother them alive.

I thought of Murphy and wondered to what authority figure he would answer now. Was he trembling in his room at home now that his master had died?

The final segment of the news focused on LeBov’s Jewish problem. LeBov exhibited, admitted one commenter in rather shy tones, an unreasonable interest in the private activities of members of a certain religious faith.

LeBov often stoked, our expert remarked, the long-standing rumor of a segment of the Jewish population who worship privately, sharing wisdom through an underground signaling mechanism.

Of course we have found no basis for these rumors, the expert assured us.

Of course, I thought.

These rumors show a profound disrespect for people of diverse faiths.

Yes, yes. A profound disrespect.

When a scientist, particularly a scientist, the expert warned, buys into superstition, into lore, and uses them as paradigms of insight, our entire method of knowing is threatened. LeBov shows no respect by fanning the flames of a dangerous rumor, a rumor that only seeks to further isolate those among us who do practice authentic religious observance. To people of genuine faith, LeBov’s antics are a disgrace.

LeBov had apparently called for the forest Jews to come forward, to quit hoarding their fucking treasure.

From what I could tell, LeBov knew little of our practice. He bathed in the standard misinformation, took wild swings, threw out a stinking bait that, I was sure, none of us would take.

Wisdom, he argued, was meant to be shared. Particularly wisdom that offers precise guidance on our crisis. A crisis like this, he said, requires assets. We must develop assets that will assist us in our change, and we can never ignore the source of a poison, the source of it, when we look to soothe its symptoms.

The source of it. He was talking about children.

Which had what to do with our religion? I wondered.

A closing thought on LeBov from our expert. I do not recall the man’s name or title, just that he wore a collar and a dark robe, and that his thoughts seemed to come so slowly that they caused him pain.

“LeBov’s idea that science cannot help us, but faith can—this is an idea that resonates deeply for me. Deeply.”

He attempted an important pause.

“But when the faith to which he is referring does not exist, I can only be profoundly troubled. It desecrates the real, authentic Jew to imagine a false and private one, and to accord that imaginary Jew with secret powers channeled against the interests of the world at large. It’s a desecration.”

The feature on LeBov ended and Jim Adelle seemed caught by surprise, swaying in his chair behind the big news table. He put his finger to his ear, listened to his producer, winced. Perhaps, instead of a verbal message, they’d sent a knifelike frequency into his head. In the end, I bet Jim Adelle would have preferred that to words.

He looked up but his focus couldn’t quite meet the camera. He seemed to be staring at something inside his own eyes. With a mechanical face he repeated the news. LeBov was dead.

I got up to continue my apology to Claire, if I could find her. It was going to take a little bit more work.

Then they showed LeBov’s picture again.

Except on the screen where there should have been a picture of a man I’ve never seen, whose voice I’d hardly heard on the radio, they showed a picture of Murphy. It was unmistakable. The same red hair, the same immortal skin. A recent photo of Murphy.

I crouched into the blue funnel of the television to get a good look.

So. This was LeBov.

Do not let him confuse or mislead you, Murphy had said. Or was it LeBov who said this to me?

Are you reading LeBov? That will catch you up on things.

If he was still alive, and I had a terrible feeling that he was, I was pretty sure I knew where I could find him.

18

News of the quarantine issued through the car radio on my way down to the Oliver’s. It would be temporary. The neighborhood would be restricted to children, protected, necessities provided. Details were given about the gate, the fence line, the use of dogs. It was time for everyone else to go.

A diversion would be created for the children. Something involving the school. Or was it the prison?

They were giving us a day, a day and a half, to pack our things and leave.

Some suggested destinations followed. Shelters, towns, mostly fanning to the south. Wheeling, Marion, Danville, the quad county district, Albert Farm. Towns with undeveloped space, meadowland. Counties with soil still soft enough for digging, where the salt was naturally repelled by the winter air systems. The list was not long.

The way I heard this was: Do not go to Wheeling, Marion, Danville. Avoid the quad counties and Albert Farm.

I pictured Claire under blankets in the backseat of the car as I drove all night, wondering where to stop. She was not ready to travel, especially with no destination, no promise of comfort or safety when we arrived.

Wherever we ended up, we would need to be separated from our volatile fellows. The toxicity had spread beyond children. Not everywhere, not fully, but that was the trend. Everyone would make everyone sick, with children the lone immuners. We should not, according to the report, even be together, unless we could refrain from speech, take a pact of silence.

We urge you to travel alone. Consider this an allergy to people.

I was as bad for Claire as Esther, or would be soon. Earlier today, when I found Claire after the report on LeBov and subjected her to my lengthy, defensive apology and watched her shrink into the bed while I spoke, it wasn’t only because she had grown sick of the sight of me. It was my language as well. It was that I had spoken at all.

If we traveled together we had better hold our goddamn tongues.

The radio report followed in robotic tones, with cautions, locations to avoid, roads that were closed. Rivers and bridges, the Sheldrake, Wickers Creek, the Menands Bridge. Something about the airspace of Elmira and a marine warning near the Mourner’s Sound. A different station was given for the full, updated list of closures, but I did not switch over. I could wait to hear the names of places I should not go.

At a stop sign I heard a sharp noise and something hit my car. A whimper floated up, perhaps from my own mouth. The streets were dark, boiling circles of light spreading from the streetlamps. A pack of children tore across a yard, fled from sight. I locked my doors. Then a soft thing fell into the car and the car lifted, as if someone were out there, trying to push the car over.

I stepped on the gas, revved it hard, but the car was blocked by something. It whinnied forward, the engine straining, and seemed to elevate in the back.

One of them pressed his little face into the driver’s side window, so close. He smiled, his lips moving, as if he were singing. With his finger he tapped on the glass, made a twirling motion for me to roll down the window. His hands formed a posture of prayer under his chin and I believe he mimed the word please.

He wanted to talk.

I hammered down on the gas again and the car whined, lifted, then released with a squeal over whatever had been blocking it and I sped away.

In my rearview mirror a few of them crouched over something, not even looking my way. They formed a circle, went to their knees, and that was all I saw.

It was just kids, out in the street after suppertime. That’s all it was. Kids playing in the road.

In the Oliver’s parking lot I sat in the car to listen to the rest of the broadcast.

The emergency report was delivered in clipped tones, the voice of a woman who seemed unable to hear herself, as if she were reading a foreign language phonetically.

An escalation in the toxicity had been observed in places like Harrisburg, Fremont, with more reports coming in. Something had happened in Wisconsin. Wisconsin had experienced an incident. There was, according to reports, a complete absence of speech originating from Wisconsin. This was no longer a poison from children. In Wisconsin all language, no matter the source, was toxic. The children alone were immune.

The station faded to static. I spun through the pre-sets and found nothing else, just sharper or lower-toned hissing, from one end of the dial to the next.

The parking lot of the Oliver’s was crowded with vans. From one of them came a fat tunnel of hosing. Little wisps of smoke spilled from its papery surface as the hosing curled away from the van, dropping down a fenced-in manhole.

The smoke smelled clean, fruity. Whatever work was going on was soundless.

A man wearing a clear vest stood by the manhole with a clipboard. After vigorously massaging my face to prepare it for speech, I asked him what was going on.

He smiled, shook his head, pointed to his ear.

This meant, what, he was deaf?

I pointed at the manhole, shrugged, and mouthed: “What is it?”

The man shook his head in the negative again.

A worker climbed from the hole as I walked away. He picked clumps of a wet cheese from his face. Tethered to his waist was an orange cable as thick as a man’s leg, and he dragged it from the hole where they pinned it in place on a specimen table. I’d seen that cabling before. The man with the clipboard grabbed his radio and, instead of speaking into it, held it out at the cable, as if whoever was on the other end of the radio needed to hear this.

But then I heard it, too, and it was unmistakable. From that orange cable, with no listener attached, came the voice of Rabbi Burke, singing one of his songs. A song I’d heard before.

In the lobby of the Oliver’s I looked for Murphy.

People hurried around breaking things down, packing boxes. A stack of crates sat at the door, waiting to be loaded into the vans. The crates had breathing holes drilled into them, arrows painted on their sides, pointing up. The sweet, gamey smell of a zoo was in the air.

A young man in coveralls sat at a table up front, seeming official. When I asked him if Murphy was here, he could only repeat the name back to me, as if I’d issued a math problem he was not expected to solve.

I explained that Murphy had invited me down here. Spitting image of LeBov, I didn’t say. Rest his soul.

It was hard to understand him through his respirator, a steamed-over mask covering his mouth.

“Invitations aren’t required,” I think he said, pointing at the open door.

An elderly couple swept into the lobby. They clung to each other, looking at us as if we were wild animals. The woman cried out, fell. From nowhere rushed two guards with blankets. They covered up the couple and dragged them away.

“We’re open to everyone,” said the young man.

He pushed his respirator to the side, wiped his mouth, then carefully fit it back on. With a handheld mirror he checked the straps that cut across his cheeks.

“I know,” I said, even though I didn’t. “But Murphy thought my research might benefit, or that, what I mean is, people here might benefit from the work I’m doing.”

The man returned the sort of smile professionals are trained to give no matter what you’ve said. I could have threatened his life, my own. I could have asked for the bathroom. I’d get the same lunatic smile.

He leaned in close, placed his finger over my mouth.

He wanted me silent. I supposed I understood, so I didn’t reply, only nodded, looked away.

From a box he retrieved a white choke collar, mimed for me to put it on. It was smeared in what smelled like Murphy’s grease, cold on my neck. My face relaxed when I fastened it on.

He said Murphy’s name aloud, as if that might jar his memory. Finally he said, “I’m sorry. I’m not very good with names.”

I wanted to say: Red hair, large face. Excels at ambush. Perhaps immune to the problem we’re all here to solve. Not who he seems to be? That Murphy?

I couldn’t say LeBov. It’s LeBov I’m looking for, because I have reason to believe that he’s still alive, operating under a different name. Murphy. But you probably know all of that, don’t you?

“Is there someone else I could talk to?” I asked.

And say what? And do what?

“I’m afraid the time for that is over.”

Literal language was useless for what I’d come to do. This man was refusing to read between the lines, acknowledge any subtext, and thus we were locked in a prison of exact meaning, impossible to shed.

It would turn out that LeBov’s language protocols, as practiced by his staff, prohibited nuance, inference. They were nearly moot now anyway.

He stood up, gathered some papers, among them what I took to be a copy of The Proofs.

I pointed at it. “Where’d you get that?” I asked.

He pointed at a pile of them sitting on another table.

Right. He would victimize me with facts, fail to elaborate, force me to excavate an ultra-specific set of questions to which he would then show his dumb, blank face. Quiet uncertainty is perhaps the most medicinal mode. I was not going to like this new form of speech.

He pushed a pamphlet at me. “You might want to look at these protocols. Some things to keep in mind when you speak, if you really must speak. You’ve mentioned yourself a few times, and it’s probably worth avoiding. It’s not personal. Or I guess actually that it is. It’s really personal. It’s just that the studies are pretty conclusive about this stuff.”

“The studies?” I asked. “Is that what you’ve been doing here?”

A low growl issued from one of the crates, triggering a chorus of animal cries throughout the lobby.

“Or talk all you want,” he said, bored. “But do it somewhere else.”

His smile had a little bit of clear shit in it. I could smell it.

I took the pamphlet, stared at it without focus. The text was slightly darker than the white paper it was printed on. My hands were unsteady and the text wobbled, as if it hadn’t been fastened to the paper. I felt sick, a tightness in my chest.

“It only seems harder to read,” he smirked. “It’s much, much easier on the… you know,” and he tapped his head. “We’re probably going to see a lot more of that soon.”

I pictured seeing more of something you could hardly see to begin with. That great unused resource, the invisible air. We’d fill it with text, the nearly translucent kind. That would solve everything.

“Sorry to run but you’ll have to excuse me,” he said. “We’re closing up. This Forsythe is probably not going to meet again. Maybe that guy you’re looking for, Murray? Maybe he’s in Rochester?”

Murray of Rochester. In my mind I hacked at him with a long knife.

It was dark outside and the Oliver’s staff had finished loading their vans. They drifted out of the lobby into the parking lot. I guess they would go home and pack now, maybe get an early start and hit the road later tonight, before the sun came up. Beat the traffic.

It’s hard to describe people who are silent as a matter of life and death, who move through the world in fear of speech. You can hear the swishing of their limbs, the music of their breath. None of them spoke. They left the building with small waves of the hand to each other, faces down, and walked out into the night.

As the man in coveralls walked off I asked him if he’d had any news, if he knew anything. I tried to raise my voice but the white collar on my neck seemed to limit my volume.

“Go home, stay inside,” he said, over his shoulder. “Do not talk to anyone.”

“Right,” I said. “But do you know what’s actually happening?”

“We’re telling people, just to be safe, to say their good-byes.”

I watched him leave. He embraced an older, well-dressed woman on the way out. She was crying. He kissed her cheek, then disappeared into the throng of vans.

19

There was one place left to try. It would involve parking the car at Blister Field, ducking under the fence, and trekking through the woods until I reached the stream. The stream would be dry now, maybe iced over, and I’d have to traverse the bank in darkness, groping on hands and knees until I found the half-rotted footbridge that would bring me across.

Then the far bank would need to be climbed and tonight it would certainly be slippery. Slippery and sharp, with stones pushed up from the frost heaves, the bitter ends of tree roots bulging out to collect heat from the air.

I never went to the hut at night. But tonight would seem to be an exception to the rule. These last months were an exception, if one wanted to be strict about it. It was hard not to feel that the codes of access at our hut were written for unexceptional times. All the guidance I knew was written for unexceptional times.

I climbed the last of the riverbank and bushwhacked through low, dry branches until finally I reached the little footpath that would lead me along the southern approach to the hut.

Before I even arrived I saw the wild glare of a flashlight. An oily glow zoomed through the woods and I ducked down to watch. The hut had no window, just a framed hole long relieved of its glass.

On warm days Claire sometimes sat in the empty window frame while I readied the transmission.

Now inside our hut a man crouched and shook, peered out at the forest. Parts of him were all I could see. I stayed hidden in the trees, watching that smooth, preserved face, the orange hair boiling on the head.

LeBov was alive and he was Murphy.

He looked from the window hole with the light under his face, showing himself to the dark woods.

I circled quietly, keeping my distance. From behind a tree I watched as he went in and out of the hut, sweeping his flashlight in small arcs of discovery.

Occasionally the flashlight settled on something and he dilated the lens. He’d stoop over, pick something up, examine it in the light, then, invariably, he’d toss it to the ground and resume his search.

LeBov circled behind the hut, dragged over a crate, and climbed up on the roof. From there he crouched, seemed to pick at the shingles, and then slid down and disappeared, the glare from his flashlight strobing in the high branches.

I dug in against the embankment. LeBov’s flashlight retreated into the far woods behind the hut, and then I heard nothing, saw no more light.

I sat back to rest. I’d give it a little bit more time.

I should have gone home. At home there was still so much to do. We had to pack, ready the house. Claire would need help. Perhaps I could lift her into the bath, let her soak. More than that, she might need persuading. I had to think about how I would explain our next move, how to remove all choice from my presentation.

She’d want to stay. Beg to stay. But I couldn’t let her.

Staying wasn’t staying. They’d find you and wouldn’t have stayed at all.

Beyond that were my medical supplies, just a bare minimum, and where to put them. The key gear, and then at least a suitcase’s worth of medicine. I’d want to resume my work as soon as we relocated. To lose momentum now would be a mistake.

But I didn’t go home. The woods were fully quiet now, the light was gone. LeBov had no doubt finished with his defilement and moved on to other fine projects. I’d missed my chance to confront him and I will admit that I was relieved.

I groped into the darkness toward the hut. In front of me I could not even see my hand. With each step I braced myself for a collision, something sharp to strike my face.

I’d spent so many days here, thoroughly explored the grounds, dug shallow holes each time I buried the listener. Claire and I had walked home thoughtlessly, paying no attention to our surroundings, and we’d never been lost, never felt scared by unexplained sounds in the woods.

Now in the darkness, hours before we would leave town for good, I was completely helpless just steps from the hut. I wish to remark on the darkness of this place without resorting to hyperbole, but I do not think that is possible.

I reached out my arms, leaned, then fell into the dirt.

It was easier from there to move on hands and knees, but I needed to keep one arm up to guard my head. I crawled through frozen mud, butted into a tree stump, then corrected my attack and crept forward. Finally I struck the wall of the hut, and from there I guided myself until I collided with the staircase.

When I opened the door, a flashlight switched on. LeBov had wedged himself into the floor, his legs dangling down the hole.

“There you are,” he said.

Across the hut floor he slid the grease tin, and I scooped some of it into my mouth.

He gestured to his neck, so I spread some there as well, pasting the white collar tighter on my skin.

It took hold in my face, softening my mouth, and my vision sharpened. When the tightness in my throat released, I found I could speak more easily, even if the ability brought nausea along with it.

“This is private property,” I said quietly.

“Oh? I’d love to see your deed.”

I stepped inside, leaned against the doorway.

“Maybe first you could let me know to whom I am speaking,” I said.

“You’re not the only one who can use a fake name.”

“Apparently not.”

His legs seemed trapped in the hole.

“Can I help you?” I asked.

I wanted him to be aware that I could take two steps up to him and deliver a sweet kick to his face. He would not be able to get away from me in time.

“No, thanks,” he said, oblivious that I was sparing him. “I have everything I need.”

He reached across the floor and grabbed a duffel bag, which clanged as he dragged it.

“I was saddened to hear of your death,” I said. “It’s a great loss. For all of us.”

“Thank you. You sound sad.”

“Yes, actually. I am sad. I’m sad that you’re here where you do not belong. It’s private, and there’s nothing here for you.”

“Nothing,” he said. “I wouldn’t call this nothing.”

He held up my listener. It was ripped down the middle, coated on its underside with something shiny. The bottom pouch was leaking and the gel had spread over LeBov’s hands.

“Okay, good for you. You must be so pleased.”

“I am fairly pleased,” he said. “I thought that I might need your help, but I don’t. Now I need to get myself down this hole.”

He screwed himself farther in, squeezing his hips past the floorboards.

I’d never gotten in that far, but I’d never had to.

“That’s not how it works,” I said. “There’s nothing down there. You’re missing the point.”

LeBov was submerged to the shoulders now, holding his bag above his head as if he were about to wade across a stream. He was trying to vanish down the little hole in the floor that normally housed our transmission cables.

“Believe me,” he said. “I am not missing the point. I think that you’re the one who has missed the point.”

Something was wrong. LeBov was straining, turning red. He couldn’t force himself through, so he squirmed out of the hole and retrieved a saw from his bag. From a position on his stomach he reached into the hole and started sawing, stopping to examine his work with the flashlight. When he finished sawing, he sat up and raised a finger as if we were meant to listen for something.

We heard the clatter of wood falling away from us, but we did not hear it land.

Probably the rubber balls at the bottom of the hole absorbed the impact.

“Maybe now,” he said.

I told LeBov that I felt obliged to ask him some questions.

“That sounds like a burden. Unburden yourself. By all means. You have about forty-five seconds. If that’s how you’d like to use your remaining time, feel free.”

“Okay. Why did you do it?”

LeBov didn’t even take a minute to think. It was as though I’d asked him a question he’d rehearsed all his life. From LeBov I merited the canned response, deflection delivered with a hint of superiority. I hated people who could answer questions like these. Any kind of questions, maybe.

“There are certain boundaries that I’d prefer not to observe when it comes to my own identity,” LeBov said. “There’s a lot of behavior that I want to accomplish, but I don’t need all of it, or really any of it, attributed to me. Attribution is a burden. In that sense I’m less like a person, a person as you might think of one, and more like an organization. There’s also behavior that I need to undo, to take away, and this is often best accomplished by others, people who can erase action, alter ideas. I have a staff who work for me, of course. It’s always startled me that people are so cautious when it comes to who exactly they are. It’s almost the only thing we actually get to control. What a missed opportunity, really. For instance, you don’t even know that I’m the real LeBov. But it’s hard to grieve the choices made, or not made, by uninspired people. The sympathy allotment doesn’t extend that far.”

“So you change your name, fake your death.”

“Look, that’s nothing. That’s cosmetic. Not even cosmetic. I moved around some grains of sand. Or not even that. I can’t invent a small enough metaphor for what I’ve done. It’s that insignificant. It adds some maneuverability, that’s all. Some spaces open up. Everyone’s presumed dead now anyway, as of tonight, after the radio darkness. Today was the last chance to die and have it reported. I hit the last news cycle. My death was the last story before the blackout. The world’s last obituary. You should be congratulating me.”

I looked at this redhead squeezing through the floor of my synagogue.

“Congratulations. And if in the process of this important work you hurt someone?”

“Then, uh, they feel pain? Is that a trick question? Is that really what’s at issue right now, your hurt feelings? Could your perspective be any smaller?”

“You spoke to my wife.”

“Someone had to. At least she actually listened. So much for your unified front.”

LeBov reached into his coat and removed a long darning needle.

“Here,” he said, rolling it over. “If you don’t jam it in too hard, you won’t do any permanent damage.”

“To myself?”

“To anyone. Jesus, you are so self-centered. Thousands of years of Judaism, topped off by exclusive, secret access at your hole, for ultra-rare religious guidance, and this is all your people have come to?”

He gestured at our surroundings as if I, too, was meant to examine them.

“I’m sorry,” he said, “but this place is sad. I examined your, what do you call it, your Moses Mouth? Your enabler? You all have different silly words for it.”

He was referring to the slashed-up listener in his bag.

“Listener,” I whispered to him. I don’t think I’d ever said it out loud.

“You examined it?” I asked.

“And you didn’t even bleed the withers, or whatever that fucking extra skin is called. It’s completely engorged. You only used it to tap into Burke. That’s insane. I’ve never seen such a rudimentary listener, and I have a good collection of them now. Anyone can listen to Burke, because there is no Burke. You don’t even need a fucking listener. I can drop a copper wire into any conductive soil and pick up that signal. Probably with my landline telephone I could dial it up. It’s completely unsecured. Public domain. Probably ham radio. I bet people get it in their houses. I bet you could pick it up off a filling in your molar. You spent all this time out here with this amazing device and you never wondered if you were hearing the right broadcast? The deepest feed? Instead you fucked on the floor like animals. Honestly, sometimes I had to look away. You didn’t care and you fucked in a pile of musty sweaters. I’m kind of astounded. The Burke sermons were recorded years ago and play on a loop.”

“Right. And you’d know that how?”

“Uh, because I’ve memorized them? Because they repeat? Burke’s sermons are decoys for people like me who hack into the transmission, to appease us, to make us stop looking. They’re not real. They’re bait, you fucking kike. You’re supposed to activate your listener to pick up the real transmissions. Even the morons down in Fort Wine figured that out. What do you think that box is for that I got from your house? You didn’t even slide in the glass. Those tools were untouched.”

“It was never broken,” I whispered.

“But it fucking hell was! It was dead. How could you not have noticed?”

LeBov was ready to go, his tools packed, his bag strapped to his chest.

“You still have time on the clock,” he said. “Any more questions?”

I stared at this man filling the hole in my hut.

“No?” he said. “I have a question, then. I’ll use your remaining seconds. We’ll say that I owe you. My question is, for whose benefit is it?”

“Is what?”

“Your complete inability to understand what’s going on.”

“I don’t see that it benefits anyone,” I admitted.

“Oh. I was just curious. That strategy is really unfamiliar to me. It kept me fairly interested in you. I figured you had a deeper play. I thought that perhaps I was missing out on the angle and I wanted to see what you’d do, but then you didn’t do anything. I guess that’s your play?”

LeBov gave some genuine reflection to this idea.

“You have a novel way with confusion. In another world inertia might have helped you, might have seemed genius. But even this thing with Thompson. I mean, you really believed that, that he was a rabbi? You didn’t recognize my voice?”

“You want me to believe that you were Thompson, too?”

“No, not particularly. It’s more interesting when you don’t believe deeply obvious facts. That’s far more fascinating to me. I like to surround myself with mistaken people. I draw strength from it. It increases my own chances for success.”

“Agreement is a poison, right?”

“That’s part of it.”

“So the medical approach Thompson prescribed,” I started.

“I needed it done and there you were, needing to do it. It occupied you, didn’t it? It took your eye off the ball. I didn’t think you’d take it all so seriously, but thank you for obliging.”

“And your promise to my wife?”

“I’m proud of that. You don’t often find someone so ripe for turning. She’s a wonderful lady. I enjoyed her company tremendously. Reverse conversion, talking people down from their beliefs. Pretty standard. Anyone can feed a doubt. I gave her hope, which is more than you were doing for her. You treated her like a lab rat and now if you even speak to her she’s going to die.”

“She’s not going to die.”

LeBov laughed.

“At least your denial is consistent.”

Then LeBov dropped down into the hole and disappeared.

I crept over, ducked down to see, but there was nothing, just the smell that seemed to follow me around, the sour fume of sleeplessness and decay.

From the depths of the hole I heard LeBov’s voice.

“Listen,” he called up. “I’d invite you to Forsythe, but there’s that wife of yours. You realize that you’re hurting her, right? Every time you talk to her? You probably think you have her best interests in mind, but believe me you don’t know what they are. Her best interests don’t involve you. Her best interests require your absence. Until death do us part, though? I hope that works out. But if you change your mind, we could use your help.”

It turns out that I did have a last question for him, one that I was still trying to form. I whispered it down the hole, afraid, for some reason, to raise my voice too loudly.

I asked—certain that LeBov was still down there, plotting his course beneath us—about the Jewish children. Early in the epidemic, those reports that the Jewish children were the only toxic ones? I needed to know if that was true, if the epidemic really emerged that way. Was Esther among the first? Or had he, had LeBov, influenced that information? I whispered this down the hole.

“Did you make that up, too? Did you spread misinformation?”

I waited for his response, jets of cold air from the Jewish hole rushing over my face. But LeBov didn’t answer.

He was already gone.

20

At home that night Claire fell asleep in Esther’s bed. Not the sleep that people can easily be roused from, but the leaden hibernation that resists all signaling, raising a carapace on the shell of the sleeper that cannot be pierced by mere shouting. The heart rate slows, the hands grow cold, and life inside the body begins to spoil. Once the vigilant waking person has succumbed, the body consumes itself. A fume rises from the torso as it molders.

It happened sometimes, the little death when Claire slept. Perhaps it happened more now that Esther was spending most nights out of the home. Her bed became one more resting ground for Claire, who toured our rooms in the night looking for the bed that would be the best staging ground for her nightly disappearance.

Her daughter’s bed, one must allow, had become her favorite site for this project.

But tonight Esther came home to be alone, missing her pretty little room, and there was trouble. I’m pretending to know what drove her. I do not know. The exercise of guessing at Esther’s actions, her thoughts, is an advanced one, requiring skills I do not have. But wherever she was and whatever she was thinking or feeling tonight, she came home, and when she did, she encountered something that caused her to give liberal voice to her feelings, to use a voice that for many weeks had been bottled up in our home.

Maybe when Esther came home she crawled into bed, only to find her mother’s dry body under the sheets. The rank-smelling hair, the bruised neck. Perhaps the mouth guard that her mother used to keep her from gnashing into the exposed nerve pulp of her teeth, perhaps this mouth guard had come unseated and was hanging from her mother’s lips like a piece of meat.

It caused her to climb up on her mother and assume a feral crouch, opening her throat for the pure injury to pour out.

By the time I arrived Claire was facedown, holding the pillow over her head. She had woken up only to swoon again. It looked at first like a posture of defense she had struck, but when I checked her she was far from seeing or knowing me.

Claire’s blackout was stubborn. I felt as if I were hacking away at the sleep that covered her. It did not help that Esther was in full tirade, producing a language so rank that I failed to breathe, lost control of my hands.

The air was clogged with speech and I fell from the bed. It was coming from everywhere, a wall of sound bearing down on my hips—the pressure seemed to be coming from inside me, something trying to force itself out—and I crumpled, started to retch.

I couldn’t block the sound with my hands, and I felt myself blacking out.

I remembered LeBov’s needle and grabbed it from my pocket. I jammed it into an ear, but missed the hole, piercing the cartilage on the outer ear. I tried again, slower, letting the tip of the needle fill the ear hole, then, when I was sure of my aim, jamming in the needle until it passed through the thinnest part of the inner ear, which presented no more resistance than a tissue.

I did this without thinking, with no sense of how much pressure was required.

If you do it right, you’ll cloud your hearing for about an hour, maybe longer, LeBov had said.

He didn’t elaborate. I didn’t ask. An hour earlier, sitting with LeBov in the hut, I didn’t think I’d drive a needle into my head so that I could deafly handle the vocal cloud of a child.

The pain was deep. For a moment I heard distant crying. A person, a bird, a siren. Warm liquid filled my ear, poured down my face.

I touched it, expecting to draw back bloody fingers, but the liquid was clear. Clear and warm.

LeBov’s needle didn’t work. I could hear perfectly from the punctured ear. I only hollowly contemplated approaching the other ear with the needle, ramming it in to balance the pain.

Esther had stopped speaking by then anyway. My activities with the needle had rendered her mute. She stood watching me, a mostly convincing look of fear on her face. An effective display of crying, soft crying that she seemed to want to suppress, came next. She performed her grief for my benefit, but I had other things to do. The house was calm now. The only sounds were from our Claire, who mumbled something from the bed, rolled deeper into her covers.

These were such reassuring sounds to me, the sounds of Claire not yet gone.

Esther crouched next to me, her finger crossing her lips to show she would not speak. A sign I once might have trusted. She brought her shirttail up to dab at my ear, to wipe free some of the discharge, and it seemed for a moment that she was intent on hugging me, but I pulled her hand away. I pulled it away, stood up myself, and walked strongly with my daughter out of her room, dragging her with me, through our house and out the front door, where I left her alone in the yard.

I would like to say that love shows itself in strange ways, but that would not be true in this case. Sometimes love refuses to show itself at all. It remains perfectly hidden. One spends a lifetime concealing it. There is an art to this. To conceal love is, in its way, the most sophisticated kind of smallwork there is.

Esther stood outside our house with her head down, shoulders small.

I rushed her again, moved my daughter yet farther into the yard, and she slumped over me, let herself be carried. At the sidewalk I dropped her and with my hands I made the most terrible gesture I could.

It was the most fluent I’d ever been without speech.

Stay, stay there. Do not come in this house again. You are forbidden from here. We do not know you.

Esther looked up at me and nodded. With her little finger she crossed her heart.

I would not be fooled by her ministrations, such conspicuous acts of tenderness designed to fool us into letting down our guard. She should have known better. Maybe now she would.

Tonight I needed to protect my home and that meant keeping people like her—blood relation or not—well clear of it. If Esther tried to return I would be ready for her. I would meet her with everything I had.

21

We drove out the next morning. Our breath was scarce and we were bruising in dark pools beneath the skin. A small wound on my leg failed to bleed. It opened like the mouth of a baby. From the gash came the faintest wheeze of sound. I flinched when I heard it, braced for it to sicken me, too.

People swarmed the street. I could not see their faces. Our evacuation was orderly and our denial so final, we were spared overt displays of grief. The day was hot, there was weeping down the hill, some other person’s weeping, and in our own yard, under the fractured shade of the oldest tree on our block, such a clutter of moths bothered the air. These were the slow, bird-size moths, so awkward they may as well have been tagged and numbered.

My face felt so heavy, I thought I could remove it, step on it until it composted. I coupled my hip bag of adrenaline with boiled-down Semantiril to queer any speech sounds I might hear. I needed speech estranged into grunts and huffs. Even these could command people into action. I required speech submerged in fluid, warbled, buried in the ground. The Semantiril got me close. It brought foam into the holes, filling in whatever silence was left inside a word. What I heard were solid blocks of tone, like the test sounds from an emergency broadcast.

Throughout the day I paused while loading the car to huff these vapors from an oily lunch bag.

The last signs of life flickered inside Claire. That much and no more. When she looked at me I felt the high disgrace of being known for what I am.

Outside the house was a whiteout of silence, the sound of a whole neighborhood holding its breath. I kept my head down, vowed not to see. If I did not regard others in their shame, their haste, perhaps they would spare me from seeing mine.

Once I had Claire in the car, I noticed she was clutching the letter she’d written to Esther. Somehow she’d found the strength to sit down and write a final message. It was sealed and I was not to read it or ask about it. Fairly simple parameters to follow. The envelope was wrinkled with sweat, with whatever leaked freely from Claire.

I wrote no such letter myself. There was something blackening to the act of writing words, like carving into flesh. My hand felt foreign. It would not cooperate. And if I did write anything, it looked like a drawing dismantled into too many pieces. I could make the parts but I could not put the parts together.

Decipherment of words on a page was too difficult. When I managed it, I was never sure what had happened, who’d been killed by whom. It was becoming clear to me that reading would be something I would avoid. The very thought of it sent a wave of fear through my chest.

When I finally sat down with a voice recorder the night before, I produced only excuses. The rhetoric of a whitewasher. Nothing passed for tender in what I said, which meant that I had already communicated all I could on the topic. Everything else, like most of my parenting to Esther, would have to go without saying, without doing. But when I listened back to the recording, to check the quality of the sound, I heard the sounds of a man with cloth stuffed in his mouth. In the end this was what I left for Esther. There was no larger wisdom I could impart.

Here, my final words to you, just nothing. It is all that I know.

In the car I pulled Claire’s nightgown from where it was bunched under her legs. I straightened her coat. Beneath the seat I clicked the lever and shifted her back. Her legs released into the freed-up space and she relaxed.

I did not want to hurt her so I did not speak. I held her face and mouthed, “How’s that?”

She stared straight through me.

I looked at this stoic, long-suffering woman, who really should have died weeks ago. What an insult this all was to her. She did not want me breathing in her space, leaning my weight against her. She did not want me getting close. In Shippington, in Lobe Arbor, in one of the fields that ran flush to West Hollows, Claire could be alone all she liked.

If there was a plan, it was that we’d head down Route 4, but take the splinter trail that cuts beneath the Monastery, following the tracks until the trail dovetails with 41. In Shippington or Lobe Arbor we’d book a motel, monitor the situation from there.

I’d called ahead this morning, gotten nothing, not even an unanswered ring.

When I thought of Esther alone in the house, without us, I pictured her being waited on by… us. Facsimiles of us. Robot usses. Father and mother us, hovering over Esther with bowls of berries, with the special dinner of steamed greens, the de-meated slab of protein and sautéed bread she liked. Her own baby bowl of salt, hooked onto her dinner plate like a sidecar. I couldn’t see her, Esther didn’t exist, without a satellite of us orbiting by, although I’m sure Esther had no problem imagining her solitude. We’d always cooked and cleaned for her, served her food, done her laundry, put away her things. Standard-issue caretaking. There was no way to distill these tasks into words and leave her with any clear sense of how to take care of things herself. But I flattered myself when I thought that what Esther needed was instructions regarding the house, a set of operational strategies to keep her afloat inside the family home. That is not what Esther needed.

When Esther was finally old enough to walk to school by herself, she still wanted approval for things that were too basic to be considered talents. Eating an apple. Standing on one leg. Soon she’d want to be congratulated for waking up, leaving a room. Once she sat on our windowsill—she must have been eight or nine already. She was very pleased with herself, swinging her legs back and forth.

I should have congratulated her. Who was I to say this wasn’t extraordinary? What did I really know about extraordinary things?

At the car I crouched down next to Claire to administer her travel dose. When we got to the motel I would bathe her, let her sleep, and go out and get us some food, if I could find any. Perhaps she would sleep for days. I would let no children into the room. Would I hurt the children if they approached? I had not decided. I would refrain from speaking. The television and radio and phone would be unplugged. Claire would enjoy total silence. She could rest and eat and rest and bathe and eat and sleep until this was over and she recovered.

I had recuperative medicines in mind for this next phase. Claire needed a few weeks of quiet.

Perhaps we’d find the moans that were safe to exchange, and into them we’d spread enough meaning to get by.

I pushed Claire’s gown up her legs and grabbed a handful of skin.

She didn’t flinch when I jammed in the needle.

A clear bead of serum gathered on her thigh, clung to a fine hair.

Despite the precaution against speech, I spoke to Claire, and I wish I could remember what I said, if only to seal off this memory and never consider it again. I have not found my doubt to be useful. It is a distraction to live so long with uncertainty.

What I said to Claire may have been an estimate of our departure. Probably that sort of chatter, whatever was coming next. We were minutes away—Let me check the trunk. Are you thirsty?—or it may have been an endearment I offered. Did I say that I loved her? Nothing but wishful thinking would suggest that I did. Such a phrase would have sounded awful on that day. Certainly ill-timed, certainly self-serving. A phrase designed purely to trigger an equivalent response. But wishful thinking has had its way with me. It has hounded me. In all of this silence it is my primary voice.

Did I say that I loved her?

The question is immaterial. It’s the last piece of speech I gave my wife, and it matters to no one but me.

The car was packed, but before we could leave I had my own injection to administer. I’d doctored my blend with a trace of Aphaseril, which curled into the serum in a dark ribbon that settled at the bottom of the vial. For privacy I crouched down against the rear wheel of the car.

“Here’s how,” I said to no one, and fed the needle into my loneliest vein. A coldness overtook me as the needle found purchase, chilling my groin, rising up my stomach. I clung to the car as my heart surged. Such a sweet ache rushed in to cover the nausea. It was what I needed to make the final push out of here.