Notable American Women (19 page)

We have carpentry uses for you. We have construction uses for you. There are projects in the physical plant that could use your help. Read on if you are concerned to participate in the world we are building for Ben.

What I suggest first is the introduction of windows into Ben's room in Man House, a ventilation system that will not leave him so flushed and lightheaded; and possibly, at least for one learning season, a modest tank-and-mask affair that he might harness over his helmet just to get him back on his feet without choking and fainting as often.

If you agree to aid us, you have my permission to travel to the women's side of the compound for a parts consultation at the shed, though I don't mean to imply that you lack the facilities to produce a streamlined child's mask yourself. Only know that I think our staff, if you have any people left who still answer to you, can collaborate on this dilemma without too much rupture, particularly if the treaty is observed.

If you do make your way over here, I ask that you observe the motion laws, travel during daylight, and resist carrying weapons or bringing your so-called assistants. If Larry emerges, you can trust that he will be fired upon until he ceases his advance. Then his body will be seized. All captures will be filmed, and the films will be projected on the barn as a caution. Let's not have any more trouble. I'm sure you've seen the trucks behind the house, gouging into North Yard, and the Quiet Sisters at work digging the hole, and I'm further sure I don't need to tell you that this hole,
like certain holes, called
“graves,” built to house the dead,
can and will serve many interesting purposes, including the possible containment of figures failing to yield to former agreements.

That was certainly a mouthful of a sentence. You might favor yourself by reading it again for clues.

Or in plain speech: Watch yourself.

Let me now describe a change in my beliefs, not interesting in its own right, but certainly bound to affect the so-called future moments of Ben, the only real topic to bind us at this late moment in your conscious life.

While I once agreed that limiting Ben's use of natural elements—rationing his light, air, and water, concealing his food, ironizing or curtailing the affection we dispensed (employing such techniques as the hug that just misses, the air kiss, the parent mannequins, the empty house in the morning, the growling sound track piped into his room at night, the wolf experience, the cruel girl in the field)—would theoretically create a hungrier, sharper, strong lad—better suited to become the kind of person we once agreed we would like to launch, a boy who only relied on natural resources as a last resort, in case a sound-out or blackout or food minus really did seize the current moment, or in case the current moment itself contracted and went airless and commenced to suffocate those persons living in it (as you predicted every day over breakfast, when words of doom were apparently once thought to render a young family dependent on the man who spoke them)—my team and I are discovering that the once-intriguing deprivations might now be too severe for Plan Ben, tiring the actual Ben's little body beyond use, caving in his chest, withering his legs. In short, we are actually only teaching him exhaustion, fatigue, despair, and he is a very quick study, for he is becoming almost like some figure from literature: short of breath, despondent, frail, contrived.

A “body bellows,” as you call it, is undoubtedly an important way to teach a man to earn his own life, something I still favor, theoretically. But I have a question: When do these devices exceed Ben's Opponent Quota, and how many enemies to his natural sustenance can he rightfully engage before he loses the battle to become an upright man during the daytime? Are parents not enemies enough? In other words: Is our family project still interesting if Ben dies beneath a burden of homemade equipment? Does a child-rearing strategy effectively terminate when the child does? Is it possible that you are scheming to induce an exit in your child because you sense one impending for yourself, thus you have straitjacketed him with a bellows set on “high” and he is gently commencing to expire? And, if so, would that not be a somewhat derivative approach to the art of the launch? Is it not ultimately dull to abort your own launch? Are you so boring that you would try to kill Ben? Have you eschewed excellence simply because your own project as a man has failed?

Make no mistake; I do remember your early work, if this consoles you at all, though my intention is to be correct, rather than to comfort you. It was fatherly of you to suit up in the body bellows yourself before apprenticing Ben to the project, though, if you'll recall, young Ben steered himself well clear of his thus-attired father, and even I suffered more than my typical indifference touching you that month (yet the bellows did provide a difficulty that I had previously found your body to lack: Navigating the apparatus made me impatient enough to almost desire you, when your body was rendered inaccessible due to the wires that bound it). In those days, you could barely breathe, and often lay gasping on the floor, your eyes tearing, your skin a flat and terrible shade of blue. That was when our eroticism followed a medical model, me nursing you as though you were a huge and faulty mechanical bird, come crashed near my home, brave and stupid and near death, allowing the hardest kind of love, which would not have to be backed up in the morning. I could mythologize you beyond a walking mediocrity, a flesh-made disappointment. You were my broken machine, a cage with blood flowing through it.

It is true that when you finally shed the bellows that early spring day down at the learning pond, there was something buoyant, if spastic, to your step, an odd and mismanaged freedom your body struck with the air, as though you would be more at home ballooning over Ohio alongside the clouds, a man to lead the weather out of our lives for good, some sort of pied piper pulling wind behind him. You had clearly become stronger, but it was not clear to what end, and this sums you up entirely: intriguing and original upon first glance, yet useless and vain in the end, a reminder of another pointless way life could have gone, and actually did go, but not before, thankfully, thankfully, I altered my own course wide, wide, wide from you, and got myself the hell out of your wrongful way.

It puts me in mind of an instructive moment when I was a girl. There was a boy who was a runner, whose mother wanted terribly for him to win the races. Every morning we saw him jogging in his medical shorts through our neighborhood, a tall boy with a father's portion of hair on his arms. While we girls were hidden in greatcoats, our scarves wired around us and hats stoppered on our heads, foolish lunches handed over that we would later trade for candy, this boy was steaming with fog as he ran down our streets, just about on pace with the cautious little cars that boxed us up to school. But all of the boy's training didn't put him ahead, because there was inevitably some other boy in another town who could run faster, and did, repeatedly, in race after race. Our boy was not a winner, and his huge desire to win only seemed to embarrass everybody, because his confidence in himself was so inaccurate.

Then, revelation, his mother decided to handicap his training so that during races he would have more power. The first handicap was an oxygen tank that limited his breath. Come race time, having shucked his gear, he was not only pounds lighter but it was as if he had a sudden third lung, a power boost akin to cutting gills into his ribs. After that, he ran like an escaped lung patient, the tank on his back bobbing like an oversized coffee thermos.

He was faster, but still not enough.

Next, she hooked a cart to her boy, had him run like a mule carrying fruit to market. Except instead of fruit there was a man in the back of that cart who did things to impede the boy's progress.

Things?

He heckled him. He pulled on his “reins.” Objects were tossed in his path. There was some occasional tackling.

The cart, too, failed to improve his performance, though it certainly complicated it and introduced new ways for him to thrive. Had there been a cart-pulling race, our boy would have taken first place. He could run under duress. If there was ever a war, for instance. Et cetera.

Next, she abandoned constraining her son's body and took him off the roads entirely. She went in for visualization, had him picturing stuff that hadn't happened, to prepare his body for when it would. He was entirely on blocks, stretching out his brain. Our boy stopped running down our streets and we no longer saw him, except when he was a normal citizen in the classroom, plain and powerless. I remember how disappointed I felt watching him do math. I refused to accept him as a citizen, so dull in his school uniform. Someone said that each day before and after school he sat in a “running room” his mother had designed, thinking about running. I pictured his brain fat with thought, his scalp pale, his drumstick calves pulsing with unbidden twitches.

The result at his next race was surprising. He was serene, calm, sort of floating along, driven not by his legs, it seemed, but by some strange current of energy the air had sent into him alone on the racing course. A mind-powered runner. It was beautiful to watch him. If you squinted, you could almost see thin strings of light feeding his muscles as he ran. He had grown slightly thick at the waist, and his legs had lost their veiny, snakelike strength, yet the other runners looked crippled next to him, awkward and near death, as though he were the only man on a gassed battlefield who could breathe. He brought a lyricism to the art of motion that made everyone at the race nervous to even try to walk. I felt stupid and ashamed and my hips ached. It hurt just to stand there. I creaked and cracked on my sockets as though my bones were made of cookie. The result of the race? His original style proved unwinning. He came in third. Speed seemed irrelevant to his gestural fluidity. He was getting worse.

His mother was perplexed. She had fetishized his rehearsal, mistakenly believing that people practice, physically or mentally, for some event in the future. Her solution stunned everyone in the neighborhood, however, and I credit her remedy with solving my own already-erring emotions at the time.

Here's what happened: His mother decided to train for him. She had not been helping him directly enough, had made no sacrifice of her own whatsoever. There had always been the two of them, but only
he
had been training. So this time the boy stayed home and his mother did the running. She was weak and fat and out of shape. She lacked the flashy gear. Mostly, she trained in a long denim baking skirt, her hips jostling like sacks of flour tied around her waist. We could very nearly walk faster than she ran, but we stayed away and watched her circling their block, sometimes all day on weekends, while the boy watched through binoculars from the window, tied down with weights, noting God knows what in a ledger. Sometimes at night, we could still hear her sharp, chipping steps and her breath, as painful and awkward as someone might produce if her head was wrapped in plastic.

Clearly, she wasn't showing her boy how to run. So what was she doing? How could her pained, palsied trotting possibly help him get faster? Her running itself would never help him; it was what her running led to—namely, her death one morning several weeks into her training, right in front of the house, the boy positioned at his perch in the window (some would say he was chained there). Her oily heart went cold and lurched too hard. She faltered, brought her hands into her bosom, looked around the street accusingly, as if such pain must have been wished on her from someone nearby, and, as her eyes settled on her watching son and her body settled on the asphalt in front of him, she died.

I will not patronize you with my interpretation of this little anecdote. We have outsmarted our lives too much as it is. Understanding is overrated. To hell with it. Yet I will again ask you to consider the depth and scope of your fatherly sacrifices with regard to Ben. I will ask you to do some real thinking for a change. I will ask for these things from you, and I will wait by my window, in my room, in the field—all the while conducting my experiments in silence and the final shedding of my feelings—I will wait for some sign from you that you have heard and are ready to comply, to participate, to finally fulfill your real role as a father to Ben, to ascend, however much it will harm your physical self. I will ask you to do these things. Then I will no longer ask you.

We must always be prepared to admit when a theory is merely lyrical, but fucked in practice. Today it is clear to all of us that the Black Room and the Wind Quota were fine ideas when we first blueprinted Ben's development narrative—in those days when having a child was like writing about something that hadn't happened yet—but now we must concede that Ben does not even resist his daily wind-ambush baths down at the learning pond. He simply allows himself to blow wherever the machine fans carry him, and I suspect that any benefits of this disruption—the technical elements of surviving a weather ambush, for instance—are lost on him. He knowingly walks into the collision every day, having learned nothing, apparently, from the successive regulated wind attacks we designed to occur like an invisible sunset, one made of air, which, according to you, took you and knocked you down and reset you for the next day, breathless and hungry for something new to happen.

It's as though he walks into the same dark alley night after night, even though he knows a man with a knife awaits him. Possibly Ben subscribes to a statistic that asserts perfectly awful events cannot recur with such precision day after day. He cannot believe that a calamity can repeat from the same coordinates, as though every house and every yard and every father can only produce one disaster, and the disaster, once discharged, cannot return to where it was stored. He is not learning from his injuries. It's the old French idea that Father never strikes twice. I forget who said it, but it's a pretty notion, if only it were true. It certainly isn't true about his father.