LeBov wouldn’t say.
Because maybe LeBov didn’t fucking know? Because maybe there was nothing to know. There was no one else out there? No unspeakably wise rabbi, Rabbi Zero, issuing guidance beyond the toxicity, advising survivors on some life we are meant to lead after language, since the human sound on our lives had been turned off, and our mouths had been seized, and even our minds, little and dim as they were—I make no argument here—could no longer bear to understand the smallest things?
And if this all worked, it wasn’t just the tapes of my daughter I’d get to enjoy under the spell of the child serum. Claire and I would be allowed to leave Forsythe. The only solution I saw. The only one. I wanted nothing of the feeds or some phantom rabbi, because there was nothing to know. What a fucking joke. Knowing of this kind was only a harm. I would have killed to know less than I did. I wanted to finally be gone from here. Claire and I would be safely escorted somewhere downstate. Maybe they’d put us in one of the red busses, drive us out to the countryside.
Give me four walls of soil and a breathing tube. And a knife. Give me a supply of water. And give me my wife back, you goddamn monsters. Even silent. Return her to me. Then promise you’ll leave us alone.
Unless LeBov was deeply full of shit again, sticking his hand into my whole life and squeezing the pieces until they broke. Because that’s what people named LeBov do. Because restoring the language to a people was only one small piece of his work. Child’s play, I bet. Smallwork is right. In the end it’s too small, isn’t it? Easy enough to shoot everyone with a fluid so they could shout insults at each other again, launch their campaigns of vocal blame. Easy. He would do more than that. LeBov would also erase a belief system, remove love from the air as if it were only an atmospheric contaminant. Love was just a pollutant you could blow clear of a person, right, LeBov? If only you had the proper tools.
I had to believe that LeBov’s ambition extended beyond my imagination, into territories yet more awful. I had to believe this, because it kept coming true. I had to start working harder to imagine the worst.
42
When Claire finished her listening session with Esther’s voice, the technicians monitored her by console until her language immunity expired. The injection worked for an hour at most. I did not get to see her during this withdrawal, but from the hectic procedures outside my room, I could guess they were deflating their equipment, ensuring that their patient could no longer hold a word.
How they test that I don’t know, but I hoped they did it without hurting her.
Claire was in my bed when I was permitted back into my room. The technicians would give us a little time to ourselves now.
I would say that Claire looked like she’d been crying, but everyone looks that way. Faces wrecked and wet, eyes red. Everyone always seems to have just wept their hearts out before rounding a corner and forcing out a fake smile for whomever they saw.
I locked my door and went to her. Under my sheets she was cold, still clothed, stiff in my arms.
She looked at me only briefly, then looked away. Claire seemed stunned, tired.
Perhaps it was too much to let her listen to Esther like that. Perhaps she had heard something—our daughter reaching into the future to disturb us—that made her want to be alone now.
What was it Esther even said in those recordings? Numbers and names, I thought, vocal specimens to flesh out the medical picture. A story or two. Could such a listening regimen be so disturbing? I’d never listened to the tapes myself. By that point it was getting to be too late.
When the child serum wears off the face settles back into lockdown and it doesn’t feel good. Claire’s little face was hard and she looked at me as if I were not her living husband but a frozen exhibit of him that she could study while entertaining an old memory.
It might be easy to presume that, had Claire and I really wanted to that night in my room at Forsythe, we could have spoken. We could have, had we really wanted to, weathered the convulsive speech, the air-shredding toxicity that brought us to our knees.
None of that, it could be argued, should have stopped us. Hardened faces, docked tongues, throats stuffed with bloody wood. We had not seen each other in months. Intimacy overpowers such literal impediments, does it not? Haven’t the great loves conquered far more than this, surpassed difficulties that made a literal language barrier, such as what we suffered, seem trifling?
Yes, I suppose the great loves have done this.
And ours, that night, did not. Our love that night was minor and it was hard to find. Our love could not overcome the medical dilemma. As the night wore on I became more afraid of what Claire would say to me if she could say anything. The barrier tonight was only a relief. Thank god the language had died between us. Some things should go without saying forever.
In bed we groomed and stroked each other, we rubbed each other’s necks. I freed Claire of her clothes and she made of her body a cooperative object.
She was too thin, with a low, sweet bulge in her tummy, the last little part of her to shed fat. Her legs were chalky, dry, as if she’d walked through salt to get here. Should there not have been more evidence of her days and nights, her feelings, the things Claire kept herself from feeling? What was her body for if not to record something so simple as that?
I peeled down my jumpsuit and returned to bed, but Claire took no special notice.
Claire and I had been naked together as a matter of contract for so many years at bedtime that an animal indifference had developed. Perhaps that’s a working definition of love. We were fellow creatures who grazed and fed nearby, who tended the same difficult offspring. We opened our faces in complaint to each other when some injustice showered down, frequently by our own hand, and together we linked arms to squeeze out vocal notes of disapproval whenever something struck us as wrong, which only meant we had not thought of it ourselves.
Such a shared habitat allowed ritual nudity to occur at home, a nudity that often heralded nothing but private fits of sleep on top of the same, vast bed.
When Esther switched from needing us to hating us—perhaps the two are not so different—Claire and I stopped being naked together. This is one of the thousands of coincidences that combine to assemble the skeleton of a marriage. After Esther switched off her feelings—after she instituted delay strategies when it came to demonstrations of love—Claire and I undressed and suited up in private instead, removing our nightwear, if the occasion called for it, only after we’d crawled under the blankets and turned out the light.
Just when there was no reason for it, when our history and intimacy made such shyness preposterous, we’d each discovered shreds of modesty with which to build out our evening endgame.
It had thus been longer than usual since we had been under the light and fully nude together. And as lovely as Claire looked, I felt sorry for her tonight, sorry for her and somewhat ashamed of myself for getting us undressed so quickly.
I took Claire’s hand and rolled over her. Beneath me her body felt cold and long. I tried to fit myself over her in a way that would trigger something. It would seem that, through touch, through kissing, we might have gouged a worm-size channel through which crucial information could pass, sublingual messages, the kind of pre-verbal intimacy that should flow with thunderous force between the bodies of people so bonded. We should have been able to bypass a mere inability to exchange language.