Notable American Women (5 page)

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 as 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 current 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.

I Would Like to Help You

If you wish to fondle the author, I should take off my clothes for you and sit on a bed to the tune of a funeral march, or a sound track of your own choice, or no music at all, though I will warn you that my mother spoiled me for silence and my body sometimes fails to appear in a hushed room; I do not show up so well without sound. There should be mournful music and the smell of warm food, an unimpeachable day of fair weather, and you should be allowed your way with me, until whatever terrible insufficiency you're nursing has been soothed. At the time of this writing, I am nowhere near my ideal level of compliance. I should be so submissive that something will finally come true for you. You should take out your worst, your most secret fantasy on me. You should use me as a surrogate for whatever never happened to you, or whatever happened too much, or didn't happen correctly.

When you have exhausted your capacity for love or hatred or ambivalence, if there is any difference in these three daytime strategies, you may close the book. Only first tell me something special, a sweet thing only you can say, because as shallow or wooden or headless as I might seem, I still require a word of devotion, a cooing noise to comfort me, just anything soft and from your mouth alone. If possible, please also scratch or hold my head, because my head feels far too little held in this life. If I had to take my thousands of desires and their millions of horribly unquenchable offshoots and digressions and contradictions, most of which quickly leave the realm of law and sense and logic, and enter a place of pain and shame and impossibility (PSI), and from these innumerable desires choose only one that I would forever have addressed whenever and wherever I liked, in the cities and at the behavior farm or down in my father's cell, an instant satisfaction I could summon with a button, or the clap of my hands, that desire would be to have my head handled, to have it scratched and rubbed and cradled, washed with a soft rag, wiped dry if wet, moistened if dry, kissed, kissed, kissed forever, scratched, covered with fine stuff, the most expensive velvet, rich creams, discussed in discussion groups, analyzed by long-bodied men in coats, whispered about by girls from another country, never forgotten. I would simply and finally be happy to be able to snap my fingers or press the Give Me What I Want button, located ideally on my own body so that I could ask for love more discreetly simply by seeming to scratch my belly, and instantly have my head serviced whenever I desired, have girls and boys and their chaperones come running from their apology centers or fainting tanks to deal with it, a ritual as regular as prayer, where every member of a large city was constantly on call to deal with my head, full-timers, part-timers, temps, and scabs. If only my head could no longer suffer a boundary with other people's hands. If only there were no boundaries. If only my head and body didn't differ so from everything else. It is where my body begins to differ from what surrounds it that everything first seems to go wrong. If only my head were finally not my responsibility, could be put into someone else's care, could be made to merge with other persons and the world so that it would no longer suffer such distance and touchlessness, would no longer even be a head, because even when touched, there are parts of my head not being touched. Even underwater parts of my head feel dry.

If Things Had Gone My Way

I should still be alive in this book. I should not have died so young, or died at all, or ever been alive. I should have fought off my last failure of breath, been brave, said better things. There should not be a smooth wooden tombstone engraved with my name and planted in the field behind my Ohio home. The tombstone should not say RIP, or Here Lies, or Quiet Goes a Man, or Survived by No One.

I should be able to say hello to my mother, to wash my father's hands, to hear my mother sing a song, rather than imply it with her fingers. I should be able to breathe without the sky suffering from lack of birds. The air I make should no longer hurt the men and women. There would not be an empty room without windows in a perfect world. In a perfect world, nothing would have happened yet. Everything would go without saying. All of the sayings would be a given.

What's Inside

This book fails the Wixx/Byner comprehension test. This book eludes the Ludlow Plot Distribution Requirement Phase detection, which sleuths linear progression and character continuity in texts purporting to be fiction, of which only a small number actually are. By a wide margin, this book fails to meet the Coherency Requirement for Machinery Manuals as determined by the Ohio Clarity Foundation. The Reader Memory and Nostalgia Club, from Ohio, scores this book a six out of a possible twenty-five points, yet this book induced 415 false memories or recollections from the members of this club, who were prone to insert events from their own childhood into the plot of this book. This book required seven Simplification Batch Processes on the Language Cleaner Machine in order to render a legally binding one-hundred-word summary of its contents for the
Annual Brochure of All Texts.
The resulting one-hundred-word summary of this book proved too legally similar to the Declaration of Independence to be included here. The Reading Wizard, a machine that scans and summarizes books to determine their themes and content, determined that this book was “a documentary account of the role of the mouth in the art of deception and failure, with a specific focus on children who have been buried alive.”