I pierced it with a needle. I pierced it and then squeezed it, examining the hole with a magnifying glass, but no matter how hard I squeezed, no black fluid beaded up. Not even a puff of dark powder.
Several times I gagged on the fumes, which only confirmed to me that it was nearly ready.
The potential was here for a self-disguising object that might be used as languages once were. Even though I could not assess its toxicity today, since I was protected by the serum, I recalled that under no protection, days ago, I had not been durably sickened. Even without the serum this letter had not wounded me. I had to believe the letter would allow for some elementary, nonfatal communication. Serum or not, I had to think this letter would work.
Such was the flawed reasoning I practiced.
As a test I would embed a message Claire would instantly know, something that could only come from me.
What kind of shoes does Rothschild wear?
Probably golden shoes.
Then what does he do when it rains?
My focus felt cold and clear. I did not ask for the serum that made this work possible; I wished it never existed. Yet since it did exist, since someone had discovered that a child might be siphoned in order for our speech to resume, I could not now deny its merits.
I pictured the children surrendering it through tubes in an underground room at Forsythe. Not just Forsythe, but elsewhere, at facilities in Wisconsin, Denver. I’d lost track of where the important work was being done.
I pictured myself in charge of this extraction. I lacked discipline when it came to the imagination, and here I was in my own mind leading a team, holding down children, some of whom grew distressed during the procedure, withdrawing the essence that protected them from the toxic speech. Withdrawing it so people who mattered—who had tangible communicative aims that they would soon enact, for the benefit of every living person—could ingest it and carry on in the world. This was simply about loaning a resource from a surplus site and shuttling it to an area of deficit.
Not everyone needed to speak. We’d have delegates, elected language users. Public servants.
Resource management involved compromise, but the gains could be so glorious.
For reasons totally other than moral, completely outside of the so-called human implication, a child-fueled communication system was problematic.
I knew that. And yet when my first dosage wore off I felt a skin peel away, and a skin, and another skin, and it was a great loss, a technical, objective sadness. Not my own, but a sadness belonging to the situation. Unprotected, the air was suddenly a salt on the body, and the overhead lights were a salt, and when I moved too quickly I felt a blast of granular salt at every turn.
An anecdotal observation, meant to illustrate how much protection this serum offered, regardless of its source. It was an exquisite thing, and without it we would be walled off from one another forever.
If the serum was high and burning in my blood right now, I would use its defenses to finally tackle my work with all of my faculties in play.
The first time they’d shot me with enough fluid to endure the session with LeBov, but this last time the antidote lasted longer, and I forgot myself.
I finished work and left my office, testing my power in personal whispers as I went, talking to myself out loud. Through the corridors and halls and then on the entertainment byway I walked with a weapon, one that could not hurt me, past my fellow scientists and the technicians and the women in white business attire, some of them dragging bright wagons that carried the same kind of old oak box they used on LeBov.
In the television room the facially distorted children ran as a group into the sea and did not come out.
Out in the hallway nothing was happening on the high monitors. The video feeds of the world offered the same dull exteriors. One feed revealed a man on a scooter whisking down the highway. On another feed a meadow spread out into the distance, disrupted by strange swells. These were shelters, but if people came and went, if people even existed, one saw no evidence of it.
At the child quarantine monitor a small clutch of scientists had gathered, studying the screen. They stood there pretending they were not hoping to catch sight of a child of theirs. They studied the screen as if their interest was merely professional, when in reality they were window-shopping against the glass that held the last possible hope that they might see their children.
I went to the coffee cart and found my sexual partner straightaway, and together we moved quietly back to my quarters, our hands lightly touching.
The ordeals of the day had demanded a trip to the coffee cart. Seeing Claire undergo the shower sequence, prepped to serve inside the facility as a test subject, seeing her endure the decontamination proudly, as if she’d been selected for special service based on her unique abilities, and, further, agreeing to change my work assignment in a few days and begin to help decode the transmissions from the old, abandoned Jewish hole hidden beneath the facility, all of these things led me to the coffee cart, where I felt a sexual engagement was now appropriate.
Tonight with a paralyzed face Marta unzipped my jumpsuit, gathered it up, and placed it folded on the dresser. This was kind of her. I dropped to the bed and watched her undress.
It would have been nice to see Marta undergo the horizontal shower spout where they prep the test subjects, if only because she would handle it gracefully. I felt strongly that it was not a harsh treatment to be sprayed that way, just a forceful one with a specific aim, but it allowed a naked body a particular luminous beauty, absorbing propulsive blasts from the water jets. Marta would have sustained such a treatment nobly, and if I could have watched it facedown against the floor looking through that low window—even if LeBov, wheezing through his blackened teeth, had to join me—I would have gladly done so.
During intercourse with Marta, the last traces of the serum still fizzing in me, I tested the air with a word.
In bed, in the early part of our expressionless exchange, when sexual release seemed so distant as to not even be likely tonight, no matter what techniques were deployed, I spoke by mistake or on purpose, or, more likely, I spoke from a mixed motive that had not been properly examined, and Marta tensed in my arms, tensed and grew cold.
I cannot remember the word I spoke, but I do remember what it felt like to have my hands on Marta when I did it, to feel the violent rejection shake through her body at the release of a single word. I was able to hold her body in my hands and speak, and there was no stronger demonstration of how the acoustically delivered word was simply violating. A disease born straight from the mouth. How she reacted as if I’d pushed a knife into her ribs and then kept pushing, when it was no longer funny, leaning on her with all my weight.
Marta shot from the bed, rolled against the wall, and came to rest panting. From the chair she grabbed her things and hurried into them. Only then did I start to see what might technically be considered a feeling from her. I’d unleashed something, and I wondered, hypothetically, what more words might do, a sentence, several sentences, if I managed to lock the door and bar her exit while I held forth on some topic that might have concerned me, or even addressed the growing bond between us, since we had never once spoken about our relationship.