Everything I produced and sent down to the yard for testing suggested that it was comprehension itself that we could no longer bear.
The days of understanding were over. The question I could not even formulate was this: What was it we were now supposed to do if it was medically impossible to even understand each other without a rapid, ugly sickness taking hold? This was not a disease of language anymore, it was a disease of insight, understanding, knowing.
I thought about all of this as I sat in a Forsythe room with a blanket over my head.
My captors pursued a soundless agenda. The room was chilly and smelled of nothing, and I had a sickening fear that whatever aggression they might have planned against me would be nothing compared to simply being abandoned there to expire under a blanket in a side room no one ever visited.
I resolved to make myself as quiet as possible, to silence my movements and breath in order to determine what was going on. I would listen my way out of this dilemma.
Then someone cleared his throat, unwrapped my hood.
Standing over me, holding the dark blanket, was the redhead LeBov. It looked like someone had vacuumed the extra flesh from his head and body. He didn’t seem older so much as deflated. He smiled, as if our wonderful meeting had been scheduled long ago and now it had finally arrived.
LeBov helped me to a chair, slid me in, then took himself to the other side.
“You’re looking… not so well,” he said.
He was not supposed to be able to speak, and I was not supposed to be able to hear it. We were long past that. My face wasn’t hardened so much as lifeless now, a phantom face where my real face once was.
I cringed as a reflex, at the sight of LeBov’s mouth moving, waiting to feel the hot speech pour over me, tighten me into crippling spasms. I gripped my chair, braced as if a car was about to hit me.
But something else happened instead. Nothing. Like the night in the bushes when Esther marauded through, and LeBov filled my mouth with grease. I still felt the muscled roughness of speech, almost like a smoke too thick to inhale. But instead of a toxicity, it was cold and oily in the air.
I coughed, tried to swallow.
“You’ll get used to it,” LeBov said, bored. “Just keep listening. Let it take hold. It’s fucking weird at first.”
LeBov was right. As he spoke, his speech felt solid in the air. It seemed like I was trying to breathe underwater, and with concentration I could barely do it. I could allow his speech in and it would pose no danger.
I looked at my naked arm, which felt heavy and weak. They must have injected me after all. I wanted to say: But I never felt a needle go in.
“It’s impressive, right?” said LeBov, noticing my amazement. “Those guys are good.”
On my arm a cold bead of blood crawled out of the puncture. I stared at it as if it were a jewel. They’d shot me with something, and now I could speak, could listen again.
My first spoken words in months came out in a cracked whisper.
I said, “Can I ask to what do we owe this conversation?”
LeBov sat back in his chair, looked at me without disguising his excitement.
I found I knew the answer without his help.
“It’s that stuff, right? The stuff you gave the old man up onstage?”
LeBov chuckled. “Yeah. We call it ‘that stuff.’ How do you like it?”
My voice came out weak. It did not sound like me. “So children are fueling this conversation?”
“This very one. Better make it count.”
On the table LeBov had gathered some of my work, a stack of scripts, some of the 3-D models, slabs of stone. He made a show of looking through it, scowling at the sheaths of letters, squinting to communicate his displeasure. He passed through it so rapidly, and with such disdain, he could not possibly have given it the attention it deserved.
“What are you doing with this stuff?” he said. “It’s ridiculous.”
I’d never seen my work exposed like that, cut free of the self-disguising paper. It stunned me that we could spread it out on the table and not retch with illness. My technique was messier than I expected, incoherent in places, letters dropping off pages, failing to come together, breaking into pieces. Imperfections everywhere. I felt ashamed to see it unclothed like that. And yet I wanted to grab the materials from LeBov and rush back to my office. If I could take it all in, if I could actually fucking look at my own work, I might be able to really do something effective.
LeBov flipped through more of it and then pushed it all aside. “Are you serious? Do you honestly believe we haven’t thought of this already? You’re sitting here creating fucking alphabets? How small exactly is your mind?”
I tried not to look at him too closely. His teeth had the quality of fossils.
When I spoke my voice was quieter than his, less convincing.
“It’s the work you seemed to want,” I offered. “There’s no equipment here, nothing. So I’m creating scripts, alphabets. You said yourself that the solution was in scripts, visual codes. You said that.”
“Correction. Murphy said that. Slightly different person. Dead to me now, in any case. Along with his so-called ideas, thank god.”
“Well, how would I know?” I said. “There’s not exactly an open channel of communication. If I could get my gear, I think I could get back to some of the medical stuff.”
“We have real doctors for that. We have people who actually know what they’re doing. Your little purses of smoke, I popped them over my children’s heads to make them laugh. Kids love their own little mushroom cloud. They’re tchotchkes, and they stink. Seriously. They smell awful. That’s probably why your house is still abandoned.”
He checked his watch.
I wasn’t sure how much more I wanted to say. This was the first conversation I’d had in months, and the muscles of my face had gone soft.
“Maybe I should give you a tour of the real research wing,” said LeBov. “We should have ‘Bring a Naïve Pretender to Work Day,’ and then I’ll let you check out the pros.”
I did not respond. The antagonistic foreplay had lost its appeal. In my limbs, in my head, I felt the heaviness of what they’d shot me with. It was rough, unrefined, but I wished I could get my hands on it.
I had questions, too. How long did a dosage last? What were the side effects? What exactly was the fucking stuff, and… I didn’t even want to think through this last question, but at what cost comes this serum? What does the extraction do to its… host?
LeBov held up one of my finer pages of cuneiform, some Presargonic panels I’d written about a poisoned body of water in the netherworld. Experimenting with one of my Aesop’s templates.
“Has it occurred to you that these things are useless if people can’t decipher them? You’ve given cuneiform to people who barely read English?”
“Yeah, that did occur to me. Right around the time that you were drawing fluid out of children’s bodies.”
“But you did it anyway? See it through to the end even if it’s obvious?”
“Well, have you stopped to wonder why that very script, which you say they can’t understand, is still making them sick? Isn’t that a little bit curious to you?”
LeBov checked his watch again. He closed his eyes in some exaggerated show of irritation.
“Do you have any confirmation that we’re even showing them your stupid alphabets? Have you verified that?”
I thought of my time on the observation deck, watching the subjects spoil in the heat, get carted off. Wagons of paper were brought to them, unloaded, shoved in front of their eyes, and they pored over it like dutiful patients, scrutinizing it until their vitals flared and someone called a code. This was my work that sickened them, even if I could not see it precisely. It must have been my work they saw. But I knew that I was never on-site confirming that, never actually down there to be sure. Such vigilance hadn’t occurred to me.