Notable American Women (13 page)

4

Planet Jane Dark

Teachings of the Female Jesus
Promise of Stillness
The Fainting Project
Dates
Names

Teachings of the Female Jesus

ONE NIGHT WHEN THE AIR was torn up by papery clouds, and the calendar showed no siring appointments for me to meet, I skipped my evening water dosing and slid back the red bolt on the door of the stillness shed.

I did not often skip my water intake. It was not thirst that set in without it, but wrong thoughts in my head that could not be mastered, and a pulse in my chest that fired too fast and stalled my breathing. It was a disruption that could lead to mistakes: memories, for instance, which could lead to other mistakes, like feelings. This was water that put me to sleep: a long, calm stretch of time to keep me blank until morning. The world speeded up without it. The people in it became blurry. The water was like a blanket inside me that I could crash against.

There were no guards outside the shed to monitor access. It was a night of pure Ohio silence. In daylight I could not go near it without encountering an escort. That night I walked upright and crunched through the grass and no one came near me. It was easy to be anywhere. The women were all sleeping.

A dark brown light stained the inside of the shed. A dirty fog. It smelled like something. The structure was once a barn, a simple wooden box, with wide boards smeared in a honey varnish. Every day I watched the women file in, carrying their stillness equipment. Heads down, serious, hushed. Sometimes a thin coil of smoke arose from a perforation in the roof. Otherwise there was nothing to see or hear from the shed. It was muffled in some deep bunting, as quiet a house as there was on the whole compound. If the women exited, they did so discreetly, at odd hours, without sound.

The air inside felt rumpled, as thick as cloth on my face. I moved into it slowly, squinting into the deep brownness. On the floor, sitting in neat rows like students, were more stillness practitioners than I could count, many rows deep, their bodies receding into the darkness at the back of the room. They were flush to the walls, with hardly a lane left for walking. Several bodies lined the near walls, fastened upright with harnesses, as if they were participating in a carnival ride. There was equipment everywhere: rigging, piles of cloth, chalkboards. Many of the women wore straitjackets, though some were covered in makeshift corsets and capes, draped so deeply in cloth that their bodies were not visible at all. It was difficult to see much. I tried to look at their faces, but they were downturned and some were covered in what seemed like gauze. I waited in the doorway, adjusting my eyes, trying to breathe quietly, shallowly, to keep the odd scent out of my mouth. My entrance did not seem to have disturbed them. It was as if I had walked into a room of the dead.

Out of the silence came short blasts of high-pitched breathing, a synchronized hissing that suggested their bodies were connected to some vast engine beneath the floor, firing air through these women as if they were just pipes. Possibly this was a form of unison breathing. Crowds of women breathing in sequence, a political breathing, precisely timed, producing their audible wind, then entering a hard inhale all together, clearing the room of oxygen, stifling anyone not following their calibration. The room felt like a large dry lung.

I stepped in and tried to navigate toward the back. There was hardly room to walk. With my dangling hand, I accidentally touched against some of them. Their bodies were cold and rigid. Their skin had the same clammy density as my old clay head. None of them flinched at the contact. No coughs or groans or shuffled positions. I was possibly one of the temptations they had trained for, a man in their midst, an opposer to challenge their stillness and tempt them back into motion. They were good. I felt thoroughly ignored. The room refused to come alive.

I had read the report on the atmospheres in the shed. As women motioned down, their exhalations thinned out and they needed less oxygen. The air in the shed would go unused, thickening around their bodies. It would be a paralysis air. A straitjacketing air. It could be a bottled stillness. Injected into canisters to quickly rid a room of its motion.

The more of it I breathed, the slower I moved. If it had a taste, I could never describe it, but it made all other air I had ever breathed seem weak, an air that did nothing for a person but dry out his insides, make his whole head brittle and cold, lather him with age. I felt myself filling with a kind of sweet sand that would fill my gaps, coating the hollows inside me until I was solid and heavy and entirely finished as a person.

I am generally no strong advocate of breathing. I do not appreciate the labor behind it, the gruesome inflation of the chest, how it fattens a man's face and advertises his hunger. Something as necessary and regular as breathing should not require such shameful heaving, such greedy shapes of the mouth. There is no civil, polite way to do it without embarrassing oneself. I prefer to hold my breath when I can, to feel warmth spread through my face as my emotional fire stifles inside me without any air to feed it. As much as one inhales even the best of mountain air, the supposedly healthy, rich oxygen of the countryside, every breath produces a small disappointment, fails to soothe one's inner body.

I pushed deeper into the room. It was so quiet I could not hear myself move. In the far corner was a small area free of women, equipped with a blanket and a low ledge of water vials, a case that looked like a behavior kit, and several swatches of rough-textured fabric. A small framed photo of Jane Dark as a teenager was nailed to the wall—a little girl in braids performing a dance for the camera—positioned for a devotee to gaze at as she sought her private paralysis. There was a technology to the area, a sense of expert outfitting, suggesting that if anyone would ever succeed at stillness—even a man who had been told that the project was off-limits to him—he might do it here, in this advanced setting, with perfect conditions.

I took my position on the carpet, lowering down among the women. I wrapped the blanket over my shoulders and braced myself with wedges of carpet. My legs felt wrong beneath me, stiff and aching. I tried to sit upright, but the muscles high in my back burned in such a posture. I scooted into the corner, which held me better, and pulled the blanket over my face, until the wool heated against my mouth and I was breathing into its scratchy surface, fully covered, hidden in the back of the shed.

I waited for the great merit of stillness to hit me, the benefit of my motion camouflage. Much of the literature of stillness posted on the bulletin board was coded just out of my range, either vowelized or rendered in a foreign tongue, too difficult to decipher. To look at it always left me disoriented and tired, knowing less than when I started. I wasn't sure if stillness should make me feel more or less. Huge feelings that racked the body and could never be reported to the outside world other than by a seizure of weeping and wailing; or a clean, quiet heart that shot jets of forgetfulness through the blood, antidotes to complaints, leaving a calm minus in its place.

I waited there under the shroud of blanket, breathing all over myself.

That is all I remember.

I was discovered the next morning by the motion warden. I presume that's who she was. She sprayed men with a terrible device. It lured them into motion, dosed their bodies with frenzy. She kept the shed free of false students, policing the women for weakness in their practices. I do not know how she found me, unless my smell was a trigger, unless they knew I had escaped the house, unless she had seen me enter the shed and was waiting for the precise moment to spray such crazy motion onto me.

I had seen this warden before, training on the compound, but she had never come for a send. We had not coupled. Probably she had failed at silence and was not selected for mating. Too noisy in the mouth. Banging around through her life. She took her afternoons in the exercise yard, doing face work mostly. Usually she stayed low to the ground, showing a great strength when operating from a crouch. A body not suited to silence. Too powerful to stay quiet. Sometimes she took part in evening helmet burnings, when an edition of silence helmets had expired.

The warden crouched and applied her prod to my legs, a charge so hot and deep that I thought I had wet myself. Her dog hissed at me like a cat, a raggy thing with terrible breath, jumping around me and blasting its awful air into my face.

The sudden daylight in the shed burned my skin. I could not detect that any time at all had passed since I had sat down to try my stillness. It seemed to have been a single moment, but when I attempted to fend off the dog, and could not move, I guessed that the night must have passed, and possibly more time than that, because my limbs felt cemented onto me, my skin a quicksand that could drown me. The stillness I had gained did not want to surrender me, even as the warden's ministrations increased, pumping a heat into me that left me twitching around on the floor, fat and warm in the hands.

Much disturbance commenced at that time in the shed. Once the women abandoned their poses, a full vigilante system was launched, and I came under their methodical, slow siege, more threatening because of how leisurely they approached me. They fell and writhed in the dust as they shouted their all-vowel invective, chanting high-pitched songs full of scolding, angry intonations. The women looked very much at sea, reaching up to me as if I might save them from drowning. The volume in the room had been raised, possibly with the opening of the door or the sudden movement of so many Silentists. My eyes and ears smarted with the brittle sounds, even those my body made as it rubbed against itself, and I felt for the first time the allergic reaction sound could produce after so much silence. It was a sound I could not digest, and my body convulsed to reject it, but it smothered over me in too great a wash. I felt a rash coming up under my skin like a suit of sand.

An alarm rang somewhere. I found a lane free of bodies and took it, forearming past the warden and into the women who had sprung from their straitjackets to grab at me. I was on my feet and powerful and not long for that shed. I muscled myself roughly through the crowd. They were easy to disperse, their bodies hollow and dry. It was like pushing through stalks of wheat. I was afraid they would break when I touched them. They cried out sharp, high notes as they toppled, quivering quickly on the ground, their hands grazing at my legs with no force at all.

Soon I had cleared the last of the women and found the door. Only the sky was above me, the shed a wooden mistake to my rear, a shrill vowel invective still pulsing in the air like the sound of a distant celebration. I ran brokenly, wrongly, until I only heard a faint hissing behind me, as delicate as water, a hissing sound that in the end was just my own legs, pumping hard and fast through the grass, taking me away from there.

Mother did not try to search for me, though I knew she would require an encounter. She might attempt to administer decoy praise, to confuse me, or present affection mimes to ironize my behavior. A silent party might be thrown in my honor, with clear cake and children's coffee. Women hissing at me, swatting the air, charading their pleasure. Possibly a deep behavior massage was forthcoming, strong hands kneading my body with a lesson. There would be a return to some primary learning water in my daily dosing. I might receive a wind-box application, or she might require me to sit in front of the behavior television. Unless, that is, consequences themselves had been phased out of the wide-scale behavior reduction at work on the compound, in which case my trespass in the stillness shed would go unremarked, even on the bulletin board. The event would be silenced. No reports would be issued, my schedule would not change, and the behavior that met me would be as steady as ever. I would be left to devise my own reaction from the encounter, a private analysis to sort out a moral from my breach of the stillness shed, my disregard for trespassing rules I knew well. Or I could choose to disregard it myself, to store the event nowhere, to mime my indifference until my indifference toward the event became real.

I was hidden deep in the yellow field when I saw my mother's dim form in front of the house. She swayed slightly on her feet and waited for me. I saw no sled, no assistants, no fainting equipment. My mother was operating solo. A person appeared to have collapsed near her feet. I felt so little already that I was too tired to feel less.

I waited until a bluish darkness filtered over the field. It seemed possible that my mother might exhaust herself out there and lose her purpose, forget why she was standing outside, or, at the least, suffer enough fatigue to diminish the strength of her treatment. We could wait each other out, compete toward apathy. See who cared more. Or less.

I killed the afternoon by moving my limbs, massaging the blood back, though even my fingers were stiff. All motion seemed wrong and foreign. My body refused it. The hard air that had settled over me in the shed had left me capable of only the smallest gestures, useless movements that could not gain me food or make me understood to others. If I tried to speak, I could not move. If I moved, I could not speak or breathe. If I stopped thinking, my limbs twitched and the stiffness would subside, with patches of warmth spreading in my thighs. A certain coordination had been compromised. I tried not to think. If an enterprising animal had found me, it could have had its way with me and encountered very little defense at all.

My mother was stationed on the walkway when I finally pulled myself home. I needed water. The evening was too dark for eye contact between us, and she had spent her quota on me days ago. She stood stiffly as I advanced, tilting her head toward me as if she were blind, as if she might hear everything about my approach that she needed to know. I circled her and tried to keep walking toward the house, quiet in my step, but she raised her hand, jerked it up, and held it aloft. A gesture to stop. Her back was to me, but her head was cocked expectantly. There was no use in me going anywhere.

The behavior flash cards were revealed as I sat in the gravel of the walkway, the evening air thin and sharp around us. Mother's headlamp provided the light. She mounted the cards on the frame and then retreated slightly to assist her presentation with a languorous wind-box application, shifts of the air that deepened my concentration and made my head feel clear and open. I was not concerned about striking anyone. My body still felt too heavy to use.