“Right. And you’d know that how?”
“Uh, because I’ve memorized them? Because they repeat? Burke’s sermons are decoys for people like me who hack into the transmission, to appease us, to make us stop looking. They’re not real. They’re bait, you fucking kike. You’re supposed to activate your listener to pick up the real transmissions. Even the morons down in Fort Wine figured that out. What do you think that box is for that I got from your house? You didn’t even slide in the glass. Those tools were untouched.”
“It was never broken,” I whispered.
“But it fucking hell was! It was dead. How could you not have noticed?”
LeBov was ready to go, his tools packed, his bag strapped to his chest.
“You still have time on the clock,” he said. “Any more questions?”
I stared at this man filling the hole in my hut.
“No?” he said. “I have a question, then. I’ll use your remaining seconds. We’ll say that I owe you. My question is, for whose benefit is it?”
“Is what?”
“Your complete inability to understand what’s going on.”
“I don’t see that it benefits anyone,” I admitted.
“Oh. I was just curious. That strategy is really unfamiliar to me. It kept me fairly interested in you. I figured you had a deeper play. I thought that perhaps I was missing out on the angle and I wanted to see what you’d do, but then you didn’t do anything. I guess that’s your play?”
LeBov gave some genuine reflection to this idea.
“You have a novel way with confusion. In another world inertia might have helped you, might have seemed genius. But even this thing with Thompson. I mean, you really believed that, that he was a rabbi? You didn’t recognize my voice?”
“You want me to believe that you were Thompson, too?”
“No, not particularly. It’s more interesting when you don’t believe deeply obvious facts. That’s far more fascinating to me. I like to surround myself with mistaken people. I draw strength from it. It increases my own chances for success.”
“Agreement is a poison, right?”
“That’s part of it.”
“So the medical approach Thompson prescribed,” I started.
“I needed it done and there you were, needing to do it. It occupied you, didn’t it? It took your eye off the ball. I didn’t think you’d take it all so seriously, but thank you for obliging.”
“And your promise to my wife?”
“I’m proud of that. You don’t often find someone so ripe for turning. She’s a wonderful lady. I enjoyed her company tremendously. Reverse conversion, talking people down from their beliefs. Pretty standard. Anyone can feed a doubt. I gave her hope, which is more than you were doing for her. You treated her like a lab rat and now if you even speak to her she’s going to die.”
“She’s not going to die.”
LeBov laughed.
“At least your denial is consistent.”
Then LeBov dropped down into the hole and disappeared.
I crept over, ducked down to see, but there was nothing, just the smell that seemed to follow me around, the sour fume of sleeplessness and decay.
From the depths of the hole I heard LeBov’s voice.
“Listen,” he called up. “I’d invite you to Forsythe, but there’s that wife of yours. You realize that you’re hurting her, right? Every time you talk to her? You probably think you have her best interests in mind, but believe me you don’t know what they are. Her best interests don’t involve you. Her best interests require your absence. Until death do us part, though? I hope that works out. But if you change your mind, we could use your help.”
It turns out that I did have a last question for him, one that I was still trying to form. I whispered it down the hole, afraid, for some reason, to raise my voice too loudly.
I asked—certain that LeBov was still down there, plotting his course beneath us—about the Jewish children. Early in the epidemic, those reports that the Jewish children were the only toxic ones? I needed to know if that was true, if the epidemic really emerged that way. Was Esther among the first? Or had he, had LeBov, influenced that information? I whispered this down the hole.
“Did you make that up, too? Did you spread misinformation?”
I waited for his response, jets of cold air from the Jewish hole rushing over my face. But LeBov didn’t answer.
He was already gone.
20
At home that night Claire fell asleep in Esther’s bed. Not the sleep that people can easily be roused from, but the leaden hibernation that resists all signaling, raising a carapace on the shell of the sleeper that cannot be pierced by mere shouting. The heart rate slows, the hands grow cold, and life inside the body begins to spoil. Once the vigilant waking person has succumbed, the body consumes itself. A fume rises from the torso as it molders.
It happened sometimes, the little death when Claire slept. Perhaps it happened more now that Esther was spending most nights out of the home. Her bed became one more resting ground for Claire, who toured our rooms in the night looking for the bed that would be the best staging ground for her nightly disappearance.
Her daughter’s bed, one must allow, had become her favorite site for this project.
But tonight Esther came home to be alone, missing her pretty little room, and there was trouble. I’m pretending to know what drove her. I do not know. The exercise of guessing at Esther’s actions, her thoughts, is an advanced one, requiring skills I do not have. But wherever she was and whatever she was thinking or feeling tonight, she came home, and when she did, she encountered something that caused her to give liberal voice to her feelings, to use a voice that for many weeks had been bottled up in our home.
Maybe when Esther came home she crawled into bed, only to find her mother’s dry body under the sheets. The rank-smelling hair, the bruised neck. Perhaps the mouth guard that her mother used to keep her from gnashing into the exposed nerve pulp of her teeth, perhaps this mouth guard had come unseated and was hanging from her mother’s lips like a piece of meat.
It caused her to climb up on her mother and assume a feral crouch, opening her throat for the pure injury to pour out.
By the time I arrived Claire was facedown, holding the pillow over her head. She had woken up only to swoon again. It looked at first like a posture of defense she had struck, but when I checked her she was far from seeing or knowing me.
Claire’s blackout was stubborn. I felt as if I were hacking away at the sleep that covered her. It did not help that Esther was in full tirade, producing a language so rank that I failed to breathe, lost control of my hands.
The air was clogged with speech and I fell from the bed. It was coming from everywhere, a wall of sound bearing down on my hips—the pressure seemed to be coming from inside me, something trying to force itself out—and I crumpled, started to retch.
I couldn’t block the sound with my hands, and I felt myself blacking out.
I remembered LeBov’s needle and grabbed it from my pocket. I jammed it into an ear, but missed the hole, piercing the cartilage on the outer ear. I tried again, slower, letting the tip of the needle fill the ear hole, then, when I was sure of my aim, jamming in the needle until it passed through the thinnest part of the inner ear, which presented no more resistance than a tissue.