Notable American Women

by Ben Marcus

  We were all shushing, until it was a slow, steady hiss as plain as traffic. There had never been so much wind in that room, but no one was dying. My mother’s smile almost seemed real. She looked like me, and I wanted to remember her. I tried to move toward her, but Dark held me close on her lap, digging her fingers into my hip creases so that I could only reach with my arms, and as I did so, my mother tilted away just slightly, as if a bug were too near her face.

  Everyone laughed when my father came into the kitchen, a synchronized laughter that seemed planned, breaking up the steady hissing with hiccups of silence, so that laughing seemed like a fast argument between silence and hissing. My father’s body looked small in the room. He was one of those fathers who died in a crowd. He tried to laugh and return the smile of these women he had never seen, but his face wasn’t in it; it could not follow the command. I saw it slide down into a plain, father’s face, a father who has a question or who is just resting his face in between times that mean something. The laughing smothered him, until he cast his head down at his feet to hide it, but his eyes stayed looking up at us, right under his eyebrows.

  He was all messed about and dirty, rolled in soil. His shirt was torn and he had gotten too much sun on the sillier part of his face, as if he had fallen asleep curled up. What little hair he had was flattened and side-mounted up his face.

  The women kept laughing, and Dark held me tighter. I pushed down into her lap and felt something poking at me. I looked at my mother. Her pencil was poised, but she was not writing. She was an accurate statue of a mother: so much detail, as if someone had made her. Her face was set in its control position.

  My father tried my name out in the air, but the women would not stop laughing at him.

  “Let’s go now, Ben,” he said. “Come on out here with me for a minute.”

  He shifted in the doorway, cheating his body out of the room, hinting how I should follow him. I could barely hear him over the laughter, but I saw him fading from the room, and it pulled on me.

  Someone pushed my own hand toward my mouth. My father did not look at the women, only at me, and I saw his little mouth practicing my name so he wouldn’t forget it, his eyes making no argument at all for anything. I wished my name were bigger and longer and louder in the room, so that my father would have something more important to say. Anyone could say a name like mine and nothing would change. As I tried to scoot off Dark’s lap and go to him, she squeezed me harder, until it came from somewhere deep in my legs, a dry engine sound like rushing water. The laughing stopped, and it was only me in the room, the women squeezing my belly, one of my own fingers held up over my lips in the gesture of silence. The shushing posture. A universal signal for quiet. Directed at him in the doorway.

  I looked right at my father and they squeezed me hard, triggering my hiss from deep inside me.

  Nothing sounded. I bloated harder in my face, resisting their squeezing. The room was failing from sight.

  “Ben?” my father asked again, and the word sounded like an apology a man might make before he died.

  And that’s when I could no longer hold the sound in. It poured out of my body hard and solid as water, a shushing that washed over my father and sank him.

  There was no longer room for my father in that company— the room was allergic to his body and he would not be lasting long there. The women looked pleased by the suspense. My mother was suppressing a smile, her hand on her mouth, teeth shining through her fingers. Everyone regarded my father’s little body faltering at the doorway as he took it in, until he backed out of there with small, chipped steps, looking down as he went.

  Several of the smallest girls raced one another, giggling, to be the first to shut the door after him.

  It was to be my father’s last appearance in the house.

  There was no thunder when Pal finally died. I had already forgotten about him. The sky did not look capable: too quiet, too weak, too far away to make any kind of sound we could hear. I found Pal in my room, crumpled in the corner like laundry. The toppled water jar against his mouth did not reflect any breath. Nor did my quick, hard kicks yield any flinches from his form. I touched his lips with some early sweet water he and I had made together, but his mouth was dry and finished. I poured a trickle of the forgetting water on his dry little head. Maybe he had died of memory. Maybe his feelings had caused an inner bursting. Maybe he had died of our house.

  He was easy to pack in a bag. Just a bony container of hair. I stuffed him in and hauled him out of there, clomping down the stairs and limping into the field, glad to have so much to carry and somewhere to go, an errand elsewhere.

  I exaggerated Pal’s weight by plunging deep in my steps and miming gestures of great strain. I did the hernia walk. I panted, stopped, scanned the horizon, rubbed my muscles as if they ached. Several women were about their tasks, applying stethoscopes to the soil, but it was only Jane Dark who saw me lugging my product, Pal’s bones jabbing through the bag at my back. I had not seen her with Pal for some time. Much was different from the words she had used. If Pal was a bomb, he was now defused. You killed my man, I thought. He died alone. You should die by thunder. You should be killed in a loud sky. Let your house break in half and the people inside it be pulled into the sky. Let you faint at night. Let your feelings drown you. Let my father return from the earth to hurt you with sound. She flipped down the goggles from her helmet and crouched in my direction, but if she guessed what I had in my bag, she showed no interest at all. Let you drive off in your truck. Let you never have come.

  I left the compound, tracking through dried grass until there was no more growth on the earth at all, just water, me, and Pal.

  The pond was long and clean that day. Water ran in patchy sheets occasionally scored by wind. I could see just enough of my house in the distance, a shelter looking more like a sharp hole someone had torn in the horizon, pulsing with light, as if it might break open. For a moment, I forgot what was in the bag. It could have been anything, and I could simply have been a man that day visiting a thin stretch of water visible from his house. I had come a distance to do a job. That almost seemed to be enough. I had a bag of something, and would be returning home without it. But when I touched the hard bones, and felt the flat, plain face that once fit perfectly against the curve in my back, I knew whom I carried and what I had come to do.

  No ceremony was necessary, no small words. I stepped up to the waterline and set the bag twirling over my head until its speed was sufficient to launch it well away from me over the pond. But I did not release it. The bag hummed in my hands until my arms were pulled taut, and I clutched it harder as the speed increased, feeling it drag my weight off the ground. I was not ready to let it go. I wanted true flight for this bag, not just an adequate throw, enough to send Pal deep into the water, plunging past the easy top layers into the true deepness, where a bolt of cold ocean water feeds the pond from below, where even a dead person might have his bones sucked through the backwash and out into the great wide ocean beyond, little bullets sent to sea. Pal deserved something more, even if I wasn’t the person to give it to him. But I would try for him as if it were me in the bag, looking out through the mesh holes at the spinning world, cycling through trees and sand and water and sky as I flew, until the water hit me like a wall and I could take a final break from the labor of breathing.

  I twirled yet harder, until my arms ached, and then finally let my hands go, listening to the wind rip against the bag as it flew over the learning pond, where I had never buried anyone before. Pal could have been anybody up in the air, launched over the pond. My first body. My first throwing of a dead friend. I wished I were at my own window watching it all so I could remember it better, so that I could instantly faint it deep into my body. I would try to breathe less on my return home. I would try to swallow the feeling in my chest until it glowed in my bones.

  The bag did not fly for long, considering what some birds do. But by the time the short, harsh splash had sounded, as plain a
s an old man coughing, I had turned my back on the pond and was already setting out for home.

  My father would not be there. No one resembling a mother would be there. And now Pal would not be there. There would be people answering to names they did not deserve. It would hurt to say their names. I would head upstairs and crack the seal on a jar of tomorrow’s water, next week’s water, next year’s thin, sweet water—going as far ahead into the future as I could, until the water was barely there, clear and weak and airy—and I would commence a fine, hard drinking spell, until this whole day, and the days before it, and then the people in those days and myself entirely, and my hard, dead name turned into a slick wire that pulled farther and farther away from me, slipping finally from view as I filled myself, as I took in enough water to make myself forever new to the small world that held me.

  Blueprint

  I AM PROBABLY BEN MARCUS. I might be a person. There’s a chance I lived on a farm meant to muffle the loud bodies of this world, a sweet Ohio locale called Home, where our nation’s women angled toward a new behavior, a so-called Final Jane. We could have had special water there, a behavior television, a third frequency, after AM and FM, for women’s messaging, for women to steal the air and stuff it with their own private code.

  Most likely I am still alive, suffering from a heart, unsatisfiable hands, legs that walk away. I may be the son of a woman who chooses not to move, refuses to speak. My father could be interred in a hole—the American word for his condition would be “buried”—punished for interfering with the women who called an end to motion and noise. My father may have stood up to himself and lost.

  If I had really lived, I would have been the subject of emotion-removal experiments, person-blocking strategies (PBS), attempts to zero out my heart. It may have worked. Yet somewhere in the past, a period of time also called the mistake zone, it’s possible a hardened creature with black hair, wrongly taken for a dog, took a leading role with my heart, walked me through a series of steps that ended up counting as my life, then left me in some after-house called Ohio, where I have nothing to do but issue reports.

  It’s possible that I cannot hear, that my head will not admit sound. There is very little chance that I survived.

  System Requirements

  This book is unfortunately designed for people. People are considered as areas that resist light, mistakes in the air, collision sweet spots. At the time of this writing, the whole world is a crime scene: People eat space with their bodies; they are rain decayers; the wind is slaughtered when they move. A retaliation is probably coming. Should a person cease to move, she would cease to kill the sky, and the world might begin to recover. Women seeking to increase their Mercy Quotient should follow the example of my mother and her cohorts by bringing a New Stillness upon their persons. They should read no further, for even reading is an embarrassing spasm of the body.

  Although this book is for people in general, it is more specifically designed for people who have fallen over, who can’t get up, whose hands hurt and eyes smart, whose limbs are tired on the inside, though doctors might find nothing wrong with them.

  Healthy, sturdy, “strong people” (an oxymoron) are welcome to do their best to fetch this book into their persons through whatever word-eating technology they favor: reading, scanning, the poultice, a Brown Hat. But healthy, sturdy, and strong people probably don’t need to be reading a book, do not miss anything in their lives that would make them want to waste time sitting down with a book that, admittedly, won’t do much to add to their strength or confidence or well-being, properties that are probably cresting at an all-time high for them right now anyway. Such persons might find their assets diminished with this book, which in turn might lead this book to be seen as a challenge for those who are enlivened by threats of failure, people who have only ever thrived after being criticized, demeaned, misunderstood. In which case, this book can accommodate the healthy, sturdy, and strong people, but it may be an occasion of loneliness and confusion for them, though the whole notion of an “occasion” fairly thoroughly guarantees loneliness and confusion, and such emotions are not technically supported. Nor are any other emotions technically supported here. Readers looking to indulge in the having of emotions (HOE) should do so on their own time, in small bursts, preferably in a closed room, coughing often into an absorbent rag and wringing the rag down a drain.

  But for the Limitations of Space

  There should be pages of this book devoted only to women’s weather, to Atlanta wind, to the women’s radio frequency, to the mouth storm. A one-hundred-page section, with German references, should provide a final history of the American mouth. The American mouth would never need to be discussed again.

  But for the limitations of space, more man-on-the-street interviews would have been conducted; a new technology for weeping would have been produced; a character named Steve would have died repeatedly at the start of each chapter. But for the limitations of space, this entire book would go without saying.

  There should be a list of all the people who have walked the earth, or been seen breathing above it, their names and habits, the failures and successes of their hands. The list would be a pull-out parchment affair, embossed with small type. It would finally be a book that excluded no one. And then when all the world’s people had been singled out and praised for their good works, forgiven their failures and near misses and broken promises, both to themselves and others, excused every digression of their hearts, when their names had finally been inscribed by wire onto a piece of wood that bands the earth like a belt holding the whole place together, these people would once and for all be killed, so that they won’t return and won’t be remembered, a complete killing in the old-fashioned style of the Ohio Exits, where not only the person is killed but the things around him and any referencing devices indexing, in any way, the person: killed. In a perfect world, these people would continue being killed until a zero population had been reached, until the cities and towns and other life-viable areas and elsewhere were just empty boxes free of people, and the phrase “free of people” could actually be uttered safely in every area and finally be considered true.

  In a Perfect World

  All the characters in this book should line up one by one and walk through a low-lit wood-paneled room, where you should be able to inspect their bodies, their hair, look into their mouths. You should be able to undress and handle them as though they belonged to you, pursue a casually confident intercourse against their flesh without recrimination—unless you desire it; without consequence—unless it is part of your arousal apparatus to be blamed, held accountable, reproached.

  Good books should offer characters for fondling, more characters for private and group fondling, in lakes and onshore, whatever sweet locale the customer chooses. In a perfect world, good books would offer characters with sparse, tear-away clothing and touchable bodies, sweet faces, skin that smells the way milk would smell if it were really the tears of God, just the most perfect kinds of people, provided by the very best books, so that we could finally stop the world of the book and fish the attractive people from it for our own private inspection, which even the best books have already denied us, though we are taunted with the most believable, palpable, and beautiful characters, who, no matter how real they seem to us, ultimately fail us miserably because we can never touch or fondle them, cannot fish them from fakery and thrust away all our frustration on them.

  We should be able to grab whoever entices us and really get down to business on their bodies, doctor them, treat them, submit to them, play horse to exhaustion, dress them up or down, pose them, give them words to say that we have been waiting all of our lives to hear. People should be able to conduct their own private inspection of anyone they wish, to finally satisfy their curiosity with everybody out there that they could never hope to touch in the governable world, even if they don’t know what they want and have never known. As long as the current laws apply, it would not be possible. In a perfect world, the cur
rent laws would not apply.

  If I had my way, I would supply people for everyone to have intercourse with, people that other people could tie or dress up, chase, undress, kiss, touch, squeeze, maneuver into position, throw off a horse and tackle and rough up, pamper, drape in cotton, in linen, in gauze, in cashmere, in fleece, rub with butter, cover in oil. I would have these people delivered every morning in a van or dropped off by trucks, sold on the street, displayed in windows, used as props in the park like public sculpture, except malleable, the way the very best bodies of this world are so malleable that we can actually break them for good, which is always what makes other bodies so treacherously joyful to handle, the fact that the people in this world are just so unbelievably and easily killable. If I had my way, I would be a purveyor, a sergeant of pleasure. In a perfect world, books would give more sexual pleasure. People would give more sexual pleasure. Sex would give more sexual pleasure. A storm would come and we could drop our trousers and finally really fuck the wind. We could leave our seizures everywhere; the world would be steeped in seizures, a cartoon world of spasming citizens. We could power the whole world by thrusting our hips into the weather. If we stopped thrusting, the world would slow to a crawl.