Ben Marcus - The Flame Alphabet

We left on a school day, so Esther wouldnt 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 childs radio retrofitted as a toxicity screen, an unopened bit of gear called a Drger 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 LeBovs 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 childrens speech. I wanted to be able to hear them coming.

In my pocket I carried the facial calipers, even if by now finer measurements werent 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 LeBovs list and LeBovs 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 werent 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 Esthers 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 didnt 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 wed 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 wed 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 werent 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 typesthat 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. Everyones a diagnostician, and everyones 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 Id 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.

Claires 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 wed be gone.

Its 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. Id like to call that a small price to pay, but it wasnt. 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