Notable American Women (21 page)

What did I do? I took my father's advice: “Go away.” I overcame the problem by wearing a modified falcon's hood, what my mother called my “visor,” which defeated my attempts to discern the horizon and reminded me that if an object was out of my reach, it most likely belonged to someone else, and of course, as I believe, affection should not occur without possession.

A phrase worth repeating.

Certainly we can agree that the boy should see more and that he should gain these visions by his own power, by zooming in on objects through his own effort, running toward trees, other people, and so forth. Yet you'll understand that no one on the women's side of the house is inclined to drive Ben to these scenes, even if the lake and the so-called trees are supposedly “wonderful,” as you repeatedly used to tell me during that time when you believed that sharing your opinion with me would make me care for you more, or implicate me permanently in your ideas and life, as though learning something of your bias was actually going to prove useful to either of us. By sharing interpretations of a world that refused to accommodate our ideas, we only embarrassed each other and dramatized our own ignorance. An injunction of silence in our relationship would have quite possibly forestalled our disappointing discoveries about each other. Your words: “To know someone is to know why you should leave them.”

The women's use of cars,
as I'm sure you know,
has been attended by collision, ambush, and pistol fire, and we are not prepared to lose any more women or equipment to those excursions when we have everything we need right here, including enemies we can at least see. Please note that this is not an accusation of you or your staff. An accusation would sound more like this:

I'm sure it's a coincidence that every time a female staffer leaves the compound she dies before nightfall, at which point the men's camp lights a celebration fire and sings until dawn.

But even that sounds mild, more like sarcastic innuendo. How about:

Because you had decreasing access to the physical territory we will refer to as “me” (though the naming of my person is a complicated and highly contested endeavor, and I imagine your exhaustion would exempt you from such a difficult task), a place you felt you formerly visited regularly and with my permission, though indeed I only ever allowed passive access, and you then received notice, in the form of silence, that this trespass of yours would never occur again, you took the liberty of canceling what women of mine entered your purview, a cancellation you accomplished with weaponry and subterfuge, with traps you dug in the soil or laced into trees.

But I harp on. The point of all this: Why not take Ben on an outing? Father and son go to the hills. Michael and Ben take a trip in a car. Boy and man eat sandwiches in a box. Colorful napkins. Bring a ball and a bat, your mitts. Take hats, jackets, Ben's sweater. Drive along the road. Enjoy yourselves. Let him see what he sees (extremely important parenthetical remark: you will be watched, you will be watched, you will be watched). And you, by all means, take a good look around while out in the open air with your own little Ben. Take note of the world and its things. Practice remembering the lake and the field and the hills bubbled up in the distance, trees leaning like broken cages over you, the so-called birds asserting their airborne geometry. Take very special note of these sites.

Why? Here is your future in writing: You and I are operating within an inevitability that I have designed. I am proud to announce authorship of the next things that will happen to you. It is best that you learn about them now. A container is being prepared for you: It will contain your body and be possessed of enough dimension for you to spin in place or lie prone, twist on the floor, or crawl several strokes, a repertoire of actions I predict you will soon abandon, though they are among your favorite things to do. One: No one will watch you. Two: These actions will prove distinctly uncomfortable. Three: It will be impossible for you to cultivate a sense of accomplishment. This is a fancy way to say we are interring you in an underground cell, sending you under, putting you away. Your potential physical velocity will be modest at best, since walls will prevent your acceleration, and collisions lack the complexity of sensation I know that you favor in your experiences. I cannot imagine you throwing yourself against a wall for very long without becoming bored or hurt beyond repair. The container's location is irrelevant, at least to you, since you will be inside of it and lose sense of all other places. But you can be assured that it will be in no such place for persons out walking, or some such other incorrect form of “engaging the day or night” (your words), to come upon you by chance, to hear your shouts, to dig you out and save you and end your
terrible ordeal
(any other kind?).

Sentences of words are being composed at this very moment that will disturb you to hear. They will comprise the entire media of your days and nights in the container, unless darkness counts as a medium, or your own breath counts as a medium, or your own shouts of greeting or strife to persons who are not present or do not actually exist can come to count as a medium, as any distortion of silence is ultimately the attempt of a creature to gain attention, although silence itself is God's medium, as you pointed out, in which case you will enjoy his solo performance of silence for a long, long time. You will be in audience to his expertly crafted silence, his “original nothingness of sound” (your words). His silence will be made and experienced and enjoyed by you alone. Alone, alone, alone.

Is that it? That is not it. Should you care to know, an aperture will be in place in the area commonly known as the ceiling. We will call this the “aperture of contact,” and it will be through here that you will be given access to the language we have designed. It will not admit light, this aperture. It will not admit people. It will admit words, but it will not receive them. Think of it as a mouth, though the metaphor ends there. Its larger purpose is for you to guess at, which should give your so-called imagination a small degree of labor, a task that will have to count as your main recreation, since you may require something to do after all, other than to listen to the sentences coming in, so why not be alone there to puzzle with yourself over what exactly is going on?

As such, then, the only choices for you now involve your conduct within the inevitable. Isn't that, after all, where all conduct occurs? And as a former expert of conduct, which you purported to be, and occasionally were, I hope that you will give the matter the very best thoughts you have, and concoct a behavioral endgame that will, at the least, engage those persons required to witness your last moments as a living man. Please be mindful of those of us who must watch you. Give us something to pay attention to.

Will I be there when they lower you into the hole? I will not. Will I toss dirt over the entrance? No. Will I ever visit the hole to speak words there? I cannot answer that; it simplifies my plans. Will I sometimes, at night, go out to the hole and stand there quietly weeping, watching the sun break down over the horizon? No, no, no. I will have no such moments. In fact, I would argue that those are not moments at all. Moments actually
occur,
while these things are crafted with such panic and falsity that they freeze up and in reality do not happen at all—woman weeping over incarcerated man—though they are remembered as if they did. Let's say my body might grace your grave site. I may roll in the soil there. Do I believe in saturating my skin in the soil that covers the man in the chamber? I might. Do I subscribe to blanketing myself in sediment, performing the postures of silence while caked in dirt, exploiting my body as a full-scale listening device modified by the earth that covers a husband? A resonant earth? Do I plan to cultivate and disperse this soil, to distribute it in this and other areas as a muffling tarp, hush crumbs, a layer of silence to finally quiet down the world. Do I?

Knock, knock.

Good-bye,
Jane Marcus

ALSO BY BEN MARCUS

The Age of Wire and String

FIRST VINTAGE CONTEMPORARIES EDITION, MARCH 2002

Copyright © 2002 by Ben Marcus

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

 

Parts of this book first appeared in
Bomb, Conjunctions, Fence, Harper's, McSweeney's, Pushcart Prize
volume XXV, and
Tin House
.

 

The following organizations supported the writing of this book, and the author is grateful for their assistance: The Mrs. Giles Whiting Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Fund for Poetry, the Art Development Committee, and the Corporation of Yaddo.

 

Vintage is a registered trademark and Vintage Contemporaries and colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.

 

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Marcus, Ben, 1967–
Notable American women / Ben Marcus.
p. cm.
1. Young men—Fiction. 2. Emotions—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3563.A6375 N68 2002
813'.54—dc21 2001045517

 

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eISBN: 978-0-307-42705-2

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