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.