These were highly guarded lists. A small group of people would be entrusted with them, hone them in Rochester, test for toxicity only on themselves.
“Words you’d recite for medicinal purposes? Some kind of healing acoustics?” I asked.
Murphy tilted his head, grimaced, suggesting maybe, maybe not. Suggesting an idiocy he couldn’t meet halfway.
I said something about Babel. It was the easiest myth to invoke, queued up for renewed scrutiny, and it was getting batted around by anyone who believed our oldest stories still mattered. What I said was probably nothing. Maybe I only said the word Babel, let it hang out there as if that’s all that was required.
Murphy wasn’t impressed. “That topic is exhausted. Mythology is the lowest temptation. You want to talk about first causes, I’d go back before the Jewish child and cite mythology, the most sickening specimens of speech. We subscribe to these supposedly important stories, religious stories, and we ignore their inanity, how moronic and impractical they are. Can we prove the stories don’t make us sick? Because they happened long before we were born, we somehow decide they are extraordinarily important and we shut our brains down, we turn into imbeciles, we let the past start thinking for us. That’s sickness. Talk about a fucking precursor.”
“I don’t think those things actually happened,” I said. “As in really happened. If we’re still talking about Babel.”
He’d gotten himself pretty worked up. A halo of spit ringed his mouth, his eyes flaring.
“And you’re an authority on what has and hasn’t happened? Where’d you do your training?”
“It’s a parable,” I said. “You believe that, right? You don’t think it’s a true story?”
“Forget it,” he said.
I had no interest in speaking about Babel, a heavy-handed narrative from a world that wasn’t mine. Those obvious myths from the Old Testament—decoy, decoy—bored me anyway. I’d brought it up because of how harmless it seemed, drowning in easy connotations. But part of me couldn’t resist the topic.
“So you’re saying,” I began, as if I didn’t really understand what he was saying, “you’re saying that a biblical story in which God strikes down his people with aphasia is not relevant? A story about losing our power of speech?”
“That’s exactly what I’m saying,” said Murphy, quietly. “Sometimes it serves a larger interest to keep people from communicating. The sharing of information hasn’t always been a good thing. Sometimes it is a very terrible thing. Perhaps always. God behaved appropriately in that situation.”
“You don’t think people will write books about this very topic, linking this speech poison, or whatever it is, to something biblical?”
“On the contrary,” said Murphy, “that’s exactly what I think. As always, people will court the gravest misunderstandings. People are driven to be wrong in the most spectacular ways. There’s fame in it. We are in a high season of error. But don’t fool yourself. There aren’t going to be too many more books. We’re not going to see a lot of documented analysis or any kind of analysis. This crisis is different. It will be met with muteness. There’s no time for a last word. The last word’s already been had, and it wasn’t by us. Civilization’s first epidemic to defy a public exchange of language. This is a plague among cavemen, and soon we’ll only be grunting to each other about it. You can’t exactly describe a poison with more of itself, write about how poisonous writing is. And pretty soon the causes won’t really seem to matter. The whole fucking idea of cause.”
Murphy fell silent and we walked through the cold streets back into my neighborhood. It would be morning soon and I wanted to get to sleep before Esther woke up. My gear was heavy and hot on my body and I was tired.
“I guess this is me,” I said, stopping short at a buckled brick path.
It wasn’t my house we stood in front of, but I didn’t want Murphy to know where I lived. I pictured him the other day in the woods, harassing the Jewish couple, and I hadn’t seen them or their violent boys again. I figured I could say good night, walk around and hit the alley, then cut back over to my house.
“Here we are, huh?” Murphy looked at the house and then back at me with a grin.
I had picked a difficult house to lie about. There was a windowless store with a side entrance dormered onto the residence. The sign said it sold ribbons, cartridges, adhesives. A portion of the roof was exposed, with blue Tyvek badly nailed over a hole. It would be too cold to live there. Whatever construction that was under way must have been abandoned for the winter.
“All right, uh, Bill, or whoever you are,” said Murphy.
The name I’d given him was Steven. He was testing me. I let it go.
Manage your disclosures. The problem was that, by lying, I’d made him more curious. I needed him to feel he had picked me clean.
“You should come to the Oliver’s. That’s where we’ve been meeting. But you’d better get right with meds, and soon, no matter what you believe. You need to start dosing. Have you been to the Oliver’s?”
I stalled. “Sure.” I pictured myself in a long, beige room trying to climb over a wall.
“Obviously you haven’t, but that’s all right.”
Murphy seemed less amused, rubbed his face so hard it hurt to watch. From his pocket he took out the grease again, pushed a tuft of it into the roof of his mouth, smacked his lips.
“Bill, I’m not the devil. I’m not evil,” he said. “You’re not alone is all. It’s perfectly all right to work together on this thing. But I think I understand. Privacy and all that. You have your little hut, I presume? Your forest worship? Maybe you’re one of those? People are wondering if there’s some, you know, in those locations.”
Some, you know, what?
Murphy paused, waited for me to roll over on my back with my legs in the air, begging him to take me.
“It would seem that secret channels of insight are obliged right now to open up, reveal their wares. This is definitely not the time for secrecy.”
Oh, but yes it is, I thought. I gave him nothing.
“I hope it works out for you,” he added.
This was bait I would not take. I smiled, lacking all the required skills for this conversation. My lies were glaring, but Murphy remained polite.
“Here,” said Murphy. “Here’s the address, and my number.”
I looked at the script on the card and my eyes watered, lost focus.
Murphy nodded up at the house that wasn’t mine.
“You’d be lucky if you really lived here,” he said.
I stared at the house without really seeing it.
“Check your vitals,” said Murphy. “No children in there that I can tell. I bet your heart is thriving right now. I wish to fuck that I lived here.”
He was wrong. My heart wasn’t thriving. It felt tight and cold, strangling inside my rib cage. I needed to get out of there.
We stared at this house as if we were tourists looking up at a great cathedral.
“Anyway,” Murphy finally said, “don’t court too much blame out there. You know, blame is interesting, but be careful. It’s a dangerous strategy.”
Blame. I’d said nothing to him about it.