Notable American Women

by Ben Marcus

  Dark’s hand gave up my bottom and she stood, ignoring my grimace. My error was cold as a worm. She moved to the window and bent into a deep maneuver that involved a pretense of a search for something on her own person. Her arms were hard to follow. She patted at herself while lunging, creating a complication of limbs I could not decode or even watch without feeling nauseous. The shadow she made on the wall looked like a house, slowly dismantling. It seemed to have very little to do with her body—the lines were too delicate and numerous, the shadow too intricate, but it moved exactly as her limbs did, swelling and shrinking as she changed her position in front of the window. With so many sacks of water in the room, I guessed she was creating some special sauce for me, gesturing intricately in front of it, seeking a witness water of an entirely different design. But I was not thirsty. I had drunk enough water. There had to be a period when people could ignore water for a time and let themselves run dry. I shrank further and rolled off the bed to get dressed.

  At first I wanted to think that the cold weather had put my blood on slow, since I was shriveled and blue in my skin, too tired even to monitor what kinds of water they gave me at night. But later that day Dark returned with a heater that she placed beneath my father’s bed until I was inflamed and sweaty, engorged with blood everywhere but at my cold hips. It did not help. I wrestled with an error that felt like nothing more than a finger without its bone.

  Mother sprayed a fine mist of behavior water at me that night. She sat listlessly in her sled and seemed barely capable of squeezing the bulb of the atomizer. Much of the water blew back over her shrunken, unmuscled body, and she shivered as it settled on her. She fumbled with the bulb, her mouth wet and slack and colorless. The water was an extraction of pure copulation-witnessing liquid, and it had a fine, clear glimmer, like very thin honey. I soaked in it, as instructed, and sipped down several jars more, but my error simply retreated further and failed to respond. With a clipped series of gasping breaths, my mother signaled to the girls, who quietly pulled her from the room in her sled. She left no notes for me.

  Alone, I paced the room for some time, slapping lightly at my unresponsive error, before I finally took the clay head from the door and lay on my back in the darkness, holding it to my chest, stroking the stiff beard, my hips exposed and cooling yet more in the sexless room. I was not sure what was happening inside my person, but something thick held me high in my chest, surging surely and slowly in my blood. I did not know it as a certainty, but it corresponded to what I had read of the sensation referred to in the Behavior Bible as “relief.” An actual feeling, one of the restricted ones, one my body had been sutured against forever ago. An immunization I had taken under the great helmet when I was a child. I could not remember its use, its purpose, the particular demographic of those persons who practiced it. There was a special history of relief, I was sure; a pattern one could study, a population of relieved people who had much to say about it, techniques to describe, precautions to issue. There were tall-standing adults in northern towns who fiended for relief, scheming through sleepless nights to get it from one another, letting their own blood out into small jars until the feeling washed over them. If it was true, it would be happening to me despite my diet, despite the fainting course I had undergone that fall, despite the high, scribbling wind-box treatments my mother had filtered over my face almost weekly to cure me of emotions, cleanse me of the feeling virus, shed me of every loudness in my heart. But despite the precautions of my mother and her team and their highly complex safeguarding work against sensations relating to the world of emotions, I may very well have slipped past their doctoring, their shields. There was a flaw to the wall they had built, and it seemed connected to my wilted error. Quite possibly I felt something that night, even if I did not know its real name and did not know how to feel it, what to do once the feeling started, where to put it, or what exactly it wanted from me. Something was happening that I knew should be kept secret.

  I closed the door of my father’s room and did my best to breathe.

  On those increasingly frequent mornings when I could not send, Dark and Mother retreated to the stillness shed, where they took fainting spells for each other and labored their mouths over the chew stand, which left me free to walk the field and get a closer look at Larry the Punisher. His presence never wavered, but during some sundowns Larry took a seat on what must have been a stool or stone placed above my father’s container. He removed the speech hoof from his face, placed his head in his hands, and heaved. I could not ascribe an action such as weeping to him. Possibly he was taking the deep and complicated breaths required of a full-time language punisher, a weapon-breathing technique he administered to restore his full word power to himself. Darkness fell too soon for me to tell how long these rests of his took, whether he was down for the night, or only an hour, but I observed many of them, and at such times could picture my small father pacing the length of his cell, peering up at the ceiling at the sudden silence, wondering what had happened to the stream of hard language funneling down at him. I was curious if his body was yet buckling under the words being fed into his room, and if these reprieves allowed him to breathe easier for a time, or took some strain off of his bones and head. Possibly his body had failed already, brought to a final pressure by the Attack Sentences that Larry was orally injecting into the room through the speech hoof. In that case, Larry was shouting out there at a dead man, who could be killed no more. His work was finished and he could drop the hoof and throw down a tombstone already, mark the site, sing a quiet all-vowel song for the life my father had lost. Even a prisoner deserves a funeral. All that language was being wasted. Larry was shooting bullets into a corpse. He might as well have come back to the house, or gone wherever a person like Larry went, and left my father’s body alone.

  I did not send up a flare. I did not speak. I did not approach Larry’s position far out in the field and wrestle the Punisher down, steal his key, and rescue my father.

  Instead, I rolled onto my stomach from my distant zone and thought that if I was entrenched in the grass directly above my father’s receptacle, I could burrow my arm into the soil and grab his scraggly head with my hand as he stalked around, pull my father by his hair up against the roof of his cell, even if he kicked and writhed against my grasp like a man being hanged, wriggle him through the hole my arm had made, and release him back above ground, even if the constriction of the narrow hole killed him on the way out, even if he was already dead by the time I had rescued him, even if his body had been fully and terminally language-shot, so that it was bones and skin and hair only, a torso rent by words, mutilated in its pressure box by the choicest and hardest and cruelest sentences, which had been composed precisely to dismantle a father’s body, to leave just a face and teeth as soft as bread. Even if all of these things were true, I could burrow him out of there and lie in the grass with whatever was left of my father’s body. The scraps, the bits, the broken head, a shoe. Have a companion night out under the flat black sky, beneath the radar of winds and birds, just out of range of the girls in the listening hole, too low for Dark and her shadow-location technique, too quiet even for Riddle to hear us. In a region my mother’s new sled could not obtain. Me and my father out in the field.

  The New Female Head

  A FEMALE HEAD LIBERATION SYSTEM (FLUSH) follows the theory that experiences, which may or may not cause an emotional response in a woman (we may never know), filter first through her head.

  If the head’s hollow space (chub) is filled with materials like cloth, an ice Thompson, wood, or behavior putty (also known as action butter), then less life can enter and, perhaps, fewer emotions will result.

  This approach works best with cultures that believe the “person” operates from somewhere inside the head, that the head is the command center of the body, driving it in and out of the home, forward and away from various “people,” and toward attractive bodies of water where the woman might replenish herself for later conflicts. In a surve
y of the female population of the Ohio countryside, a three-quarter majority of women touched their faces and eyes when asked which part of their body contained their “self.” The remainder touched their hands, hips, bellies, or bottoms, while a small percentage of women touched other people or animals or simply grabbed the air. For better or worse, the head, for most women, is still an obvious indicator that a person is in the room.

  The emotion-removal strategy, then, is to cut off stubborn feelings before they start, by walling up the head’s unused space with various fillers and props and glues, to catch, block, or deflect the incoming behavior stuffs onto another person or animal. A careful woman can then use her head as a ricochet ball or “grief mirror” and bounce her feelings onto her family, to slow their progress or surge them with a debilitating emotion.

  If a woman can reduce her chub to 1 percent of total head volume, chances are that very little of what happens to her— including the death of a child, the loss of a friend, or gaining an important promotion at work, just to cite a few contemporary examples—will have any effect on how she feels. She will be immune to emotion-causing events, better prepared to launch into a new and distinctly female space. She may later choose to empty or even increase her chub area, but only after she has zeroed her heart.

  A Caution When Using Props in the Chub

  When filled with fabric, wood, or an ice Thompson, a woman’s chub danger is deactivated, but the resulting fabric waste, spoiled wood, or mouth water, all known as “heart chaff”—marinated in the overflow of feelings, and bearing the impress of a woman’s mouth and every consonant-bearing word (crack) she has ever uttered—becomes hazardous and should be disposed of properly.

  What Do I Do with Heart Cha f When I Am Done with It?

  Landfills for heart chaff have turned into a kind of American behavior graveyard. Female looters, scavengers, and behavior instructors have stormed these chaff sites and walked off with barrels of used fabric and chewed wood, still soaked with the behavior juices of the former owners, a dumping site of Identity Medicine that is far too dangerous to inexperienced women. This kind of American behavior transfer—chaotic and outside the eye of the government—will most certainly lead to diluted strains of female identities and an absolute detour from name-based behavior ventures and Null Heart attainment strategies. To prevent collective behavior sharing, several safer methods are available for the disposal of chaff, or any cloth that has been deeply chewed by a woman. These methods include:

  Weaving children’s clothing from heart chaff and donating it to the misbehaved young people of this country, who might wear the new suits of clothing—often brown and roughly textured, like a woven graham cracker— and thus relearn some of the basic life actions.

  Creating flags and flying them outside of women’s houses to advertise the favored behaviors and feelings of the family within.

  Building elaborate behavior-free shade zones in open fields by creating tents from the chaff that will shelter those women who no longer know what behavior they would like to exhibit. Resting in the shade of a behavior tent allows women to comfortably plan their next move without the embarrassing pressure of sunlight, widely thought to exacerbate behavior on the surface of the world. Important behavior tends to occur in darkness, or not at all.

  What If It’s Too Late?

  Let’s say a woman’s chub is not properly stuffed, a worst-case scenario, where her head has defaulted to its status as a prop-free object in the American landscape. Then key life events invade her head and riot into important feelings, a mess of attachments, hopes, and regrets. Is there a way to manipulate the female head after these emotions have begun, a sort of morning-after treatment when the woman is on the verge of feeling something?

  Absolutely.

  Because residue of an emotion apparently does remain in the mouth (except in deaf individuals of America, whose emotional activity is stored on their skin, in the form of behavior oil), coats the tongue, and probably does something quite unbecoming to the teeth and lips and gums, it can still be absorbed by the appropriate rag—that is, cloth that has “heard” the secret speech of the woman in question.

  The Thought Rag

  When women in the American territory speak careful sentences into a handkerchief, they are creating, whether they know so or not, an important item called “a thought rag.” Once confided to, the cloth becomes a listening towel, or “priest,” regularly privileged to whatever a woman chooses to say. The cloth may be tied smartly to a skirt or blouse, or used as a scarf or bandit rag; sometimes an adventurous woman employs it as a wind sock (if she needs to handicap her actions, lest her skills intimidate her acquaintances). Regardless of how it is worn, it stores a tonal material in its surface and can begin to contain what is crucial of the women who use it—a record of those female citizens who feel comfortable storing their basic life messages (I’m sorry, Go away, It hurts, I’ll take it) in a portable medium such as a swatch of stylish fabric. Even a carpet sample can be used, although rough cloth can chafe the face and mouth of the woman, leading to facial weaknesses, like weeping.

  Everything a woman feels or suspects is to be confided to the thought rag, as with a diary. This takes all the noise of the “inner life,” the so-called dialogue with oneself formerly thought to be so crucial to sophisticated living (though primarily a device of “men” to justify and complicate long periods of inarticulate confusion), and exports it to an object that can fit smartly into a woman’s handbag. It is a far safer way to store the fundamentals of a female identity, and the head becomes devalued since it no longer stores a woman’s mystery.

  These swatches of cloth can be exchanged between people when a shortcut to intimacy is desired. Indeed cloth-swapping salons and thought-rag sharing allow a woman to keep abreast of the personalities of her friends and acquaintances without the troubling ambiguity of speech and imprecise self-representation. A thought rag cannot lie; it won’t fail to impart the key data of the person who has used it. If I were to meet you, I would rather spend several hours sniffing and mouthing your thought rag than with you personally. You would no doubt try to impress me or somehow manipulate my experience of your person, concealing your fears and doubts, foregrounding some unbearable fiction of what a person should be. Your thought rag would give me the whole story in an hour or so and I could then decide if a meeting between us would be worthwhile.

  Yet swap meets of this kind are also how a thought rag can become lost or stolen, and a woman’s identity can be “chewed” by another woman. In such cases, a thought rag can be assigned a password, generally keyed in with a gnashing sequence of the teeth.

  Is the Head Itself Still Essential?

  At the time of this writing, the head probably cannot be omitted from the person pursuing the female life project. Radical antiemotionalists have attempted a head-free trajectory in the world, yet these pioneers, while laudably testing the limits of the female life project, have unfortunately defaulted their ability to report on the effects of their experiment. They have gone too far from our world for us to understand them. Perhaps one day this approach will seem heroic, yet a woman without an operative head is still unable to signal her former world; to observers, she is nearly similar to a deceased person—her skin is cold, and she does not respond when prodded or splashed with water.

  But a compromise is available for those women looking to limit the role of their heads in their behavioral and identity-development enterprises. This compromise involves cold-treating the female head with an item known as the Zero Hood, or facial cloak, form-fitted to a woman like a ski mask and meant to flash-freeze her face and skull. The head can withstand short periods of deep freezing several times per day, as long as the Thawing Sock is applied directly to the woman in time to prevent memory loss. Husbands and brothers are the best assistants for this sort of technique. Machinery should not be operated by a woman using the Zero Hood, nor should she go near children or animals.

  Lastly, if each woman of Americ
a carved a wooden version of her own head (rook) and polished it with a personalized cloth, speaking kind words to the head (as one would talk to a plant), whispering in its ears, kissing the mouth, and grooming and oiling its surface, a woman might discover a person-shifting relationship with herself in which her own head becomes less important to her life, a prop to decorate, certainly, but not to be deployed much beyond that. This wooden head could be placed in rooms where a woman’s presence was desired, a kind of surrogate ambassador for her life, during those many moments that would otherwise exhaust or disgust her real head, the one that still suffers from responses and upsetting reactions to the world at large. I am not embarrassed to admit that I see a world one day where many beautiful wooden heads fill a room, while the people these heads represent are able to rest alone in their cabins and still accrue important experiences with other people.

  What About the Nostrils and the Ears?

  These important orifices are still a mystery; nearly nothing certain is known about the nostrils or the ears. The more we speak about these enigmatic absences, the further away we seem from any real understanding. It is an unusual bafflement to the American science of the head, and I have always been encouraged by my teachers and surrogate mothers to simply pause in silence if ever questioned about the true nature of these elusive areas. I stand with my head bowed and allow full reverence to accrue until my questioner understands how sacred is the lack of information about these parts of the head.