by Ben Marcus
I cannot recall the precise words for the phrase: “I’m sorry.”
When I learn these words again, I will never stop saying them.
Fear the Morning
His name had been scratched off his documents years ago. There had been little reason since then to refer to himself, and his rigorous daily schedule kept him from thinking what he might be called if someone addressed him.
In the morning he would make a plate of eggs and dot it with hard cheese. He ate until he was tired, then put his plate in the sink, combed his dry, curly hair until his scalp hurt, then put on his long coat and went out for his tour. Every day the tour followed a different track away from his house, sometimes climbing a hill, other times descending one. He did not wish to see the same people. Their faces troubled him. Any one of them might be the very person waiting to replace him. If he could not avoid a greeting, he said “Hello,” and breathed down at his feet while he walked, listening for their departing steps behind him.
Under the coat was a naked body that he fussed at with a special lotion. He thought of it as his own body. A pocket of the coat was torn through at the bottom, allowing his hand to spread lotion while he walked. If he saw a person, his feeling faded, no matter how fast his hands moved. People were no good for his feeling, but he could not have the feeling alone at home, either, so he risked sighting them at large in the world around his home. He preferred to see trees, but forests were no good. Too many trees suggested too much possibility, and his feeling faded. He had to be moving along at a swift pace, with trees looming in his periphery but not surrounding him, clusters of green growth like clouds of algae bursting in the air. Then he could massage his area until his stomach steamed with friction and he became hungry for lunch.
He took his meals in the center of town. Ham was his preferred dish, especially in the winter, when it was shaved transparently thin and rolled inside flavored paper straws. Usually he washed it down with a steeped citrus drink, depending on the season. He liked berry drinks, but his town rarely produced berries, and if a berry-flavored water was ever made, it was bitter and gritty in his mouth. Mostly his town sold long hollows of bread lathered in fruit. The meat was flown in from the north. He ate a meat that had traveled high in the air.
After lunch, he walked home for his appointment in front of the television, where he watched a daily show that concerned people who fought to board a very small boat. Once aboard, they had to row themselves to a pre-agreed target, often an island, but sometimes a town that fronted a river. He had his favorite characters, usually the redheads, because they were seaworthy and never backed down from a fight. But he was more interested in the water and how the water made everybody on the show look sleepy. He liked to see people bursting out of it, scrambling onto the lip of the boat, having their hands beaten by the passengers who had already secured a berth, then slipping back into the water. Sometimes the people said things just as their heads entered the water, so the words were partially muffled, and he tried to give his words that same kind of sound. When he filled his mouth with bread, he could sound like one of the strong redheads slipping underwater after a struggle.
In the unspoken-for hours in his afternoons, he delivered phone calls from a hard, gray phone that had been carved into his wall. There was a code he could press into his phone that changed his behavior when he talked. If he prefaced the person’s number with this code, he could speak smoothly and at length from a set of feelings that were not his own. He never wanted to forget these three numbers, so he wrote them on a little white sticker and stuck it to his phone. The numbers he dialed were from a special phone book purchased at a store outside of town. He believed it gave him access to more extraordinary people than the ones he had to see on his morning tours. When someone answered on the other line, he opened the conversation by apologizing to them, using their name and a special, sorrowful voice, which often led them to believe he was someone else. His phone book seemed to have many numbers of people who were waiting by their phones for a man to call and apologize to them. In the afternoons, before his special dinners, he was often this man. Minutes would go by before the people discovered he was someone else, and even if this made the people angry, he often learned about who he had been, and he felt like someone else for a little while, which was so hard to feel for very long, and always made him a little bit hungry.
He had to signal for his dinner with a special light he pointed from his window. Then there might be a crackling knock at the door, as if someone had stepped on a small bird. Sometimes the knock on the door came before he signaled with the light, but he knew at least not to eat his dinner until he flashed his signal.
Dinner was never much other than a plate of potatoes run under a broiler until it blistered with heat. The woman who brought his food stood near him and touched his cheek, and he would endure this gesture until she had left the plate on the table and closed his door behind her.
Once he ate his potatoes, he knew that very little could happen, and that, with some special effort, and much thought, he could arrange things so that even less might happen, until possibly nothing would, a circumstance he might very well be rewarded for. It was a matter of skill. He would perfect this skill until he had arranged for a situation that would go on for as long as he wanted it to, in which absolutely nothing occurred. Even if people defied his wish, and walked the streets and roads in greatcoats spreading lotions over the territory, he knew that no one would see them, or, if they did, they would never remember it. The disruption would seem dreamlike, with artificial colors. The people would be made of bark.
His bedtime came when the potatoes still sat high in his stomach but he could not keep his eyes open. He unrolled a flannel sleep shirt. He ran a toothbrush through his mouth. He coughed his special words into the speech hole in his bedroom.
Last came the only ritual that might help him disappear. If he pressed the three-digit code into the phone again, he could, with any luck, become someone else before he went to sleep, which meant he could give the gift of rest to his other person, the one that he secretly oiled with his hands while out touring, the one he was seducing into taking his place in the great world. He could give his other person a chance to dream and sleep and wake up and toss and turn in the sheets. Then maybe there was a better likelihood that, instead of himself, it would be the other person who would wake up, and something different might happen, something that had not happened yet. He would know what to call himself then. His name would sound very much like an engine does. The other person would be in charge now, and he’d have a very different idea of how things should be done. In this way, he, the first person, the one who had started this, and kept it going day after day with almost no help from anyone else in the world, with the small exception of the woman who brought his dinner, could take a break himself, and hide out close to the new man’s skin, right there on his body, under the long coat that moved near the world’s trees, where the lotion was smooth and soft, and no light could get in. This was where he wanted to be. This was why he entered a code into the phone and slid deep into his soft, clean bed, waiting for morning.
Origins of the Family
A man and woman sometimes gather in the evening to discuss their future projects together, a conversation that takes place in a hushed, bone-free room. They tap the walls and call out some of the more popular names for people, to make sure they are alone. The names they recite are shaped inside a bone hollow called a mouth. Their conversation most often freely circles the shame zone that hovers over the table. They take turns arranging the net of bones their skin is concealing so their bodies appear to move. She lifts a small bone resembling a finger, he slides a long, heavy one into place over a chair and expels hot temperature called breath. When they discuss children, they are trying to discover if they can create a new set of bones together. Their difficulties are architectural: can the house support the bones, or will structural changes be required? They submit sketches across the table, editing each other�
��s ideas about the new person. When they rehearse the names they might call it, and illustrate their visions of its ultimate shape and color, each of them listens privately for a vibration in their bones, pressing their fingers into their flesh to determine what they might feel.
Bones prevent the heart from beating so loudly it would deafen the person. They were first called listening sticks, because they absorbed the body’s sounds and allowed men and women to hear their own voices during intricate skirmishes in the home. This is why settlers erected mothers-of-bone in loud rooms such as the kitchen. Only later did people bag and animate the mothers so that they might move from room to room, accomplishing broader functions within the family. Boneless people did and said little. They were not capable of fighting. They could hide inside each other’s bodies. Without bones, a person, upon entering a room, would deafen the people stationed there. He would have to throw blankets in advance of his body, to baffle the sound he was bringing, an application of fabric that amounted to laying a heavy rug in a room, but sharp-bodied girls could be smothered in this way. Sometimes instead of blankets he would throw another person into the room ahead of him, which was referred to as “turning on the light.” These people were said to have a blinding effect, particularly if they arrived unannounced and appeared to be strangers. Loud people have thin, hollow bones. They can be broken in half and discarded into a pit. They snap as easily as children do, but they will not burn as long in a fire. If a loud person tries to store his voice in a jar, he will not be able to, unless the jar is a mouth worn on the face of someone in his family, which he must prize open with his fingers while shouting deep into the hole there.
One year, people stacked bones outside their houses to absorb the sound of the police, who were talking loudly and pounding on the door. If no bones were available, an entire person was used, who would be escorted away and locked in a room. Every family kept a young person for this purpose. Often they sent him out on thieving missions smeared with a special scent, to attract the police’s attention. Now the police are required to carry a small bone in a polished black toy bucket called a holster. If they wish to be heard, they must hurl the bone away from themselves into a field, creating a current of deafness in the air that passes for weather so mild, even birds can fly in it. When birds actually manage to lift off without instantly listing into the colder turbulence that circles a house, where they might crack open over a roof, it indicates the looming presence of the law, and many family conversations grow nervous at the first sign of birds, with fathers sticking their hands out into the air, to test it for sound. When men cough or talk into their hands, they are praying to their own bones, hoping to change their minds about something. The police ride velvet-covered bone cages called horses. Horses are sad because they hear their own bodies sloshing and cracking. They produce an aggressive, highly pitched physical weeping known as galloping, and in this way spread their feeling across large fields of grass.
People have bones so insects won’t flood their limbs and inflate their bodies to normal size. A person who is insect-controlled often sits and drinks tea, though an insect fluid called blood flows quickly beneath her skin. She has an accurate walking style and can converse in one or more languages. She sleeps lying down, and uses a filter called hair to attract her mates. The small people in her house call her “Mom,” and she answers them by collapsing the tension in her face, a surrendering of control that passes for listening. When she pursues an upper-level-difficulty slalom run of housekeeping throughout her house, she has most likely failed to seal her bones from escape with fixatives called clothing. Her actions become commanded for the good of something larger, such as a naked man who resembles her father, although he might be younger and smaller and weaker, as if playing the part of her husband, though not convincingly. Her motion is voice-activated. When he addresses her, she stands on her toes and lets her arms raise up at her sides. She does a forward bend in the morning to be sure her blood pools at the top of her head. If you sliced her arm open, you would hear a faint buzzing. She has one pair of eyes, and they are often tired and red. When she uses her arms to prop up a document of regret known as a book, her bones form an ancient shape, and a brief, flashing signal is sent out through the window into the fields beyond her house, where the hive is.
If you possess the long, white tubing implements meant to prevent people from squeezing through small holes and disappearing, you have boning material, and you can begin to secure people to your team, insuring them against sudden departure. Bones of this sort were devised by Father so his children could not hide from him. They would no longer be able to collapse their dimensions and defy the restrictions he had built into his house. He had grown tired of a pocket-sized person devoid of shape who could not be broken. He wanted a guarantee, a chance to break something he could not fix. “Having a talk” with Father meant submitting oneself to the insertion of these bones, no matter how much it tingled.
When children fall into a well after being yelled at, it is not the power of their father’s voice that has sent them there, but their desire to enter a long, hollow bone in the earth and become cleansed of sound. They would prefer to hide within their own bodies. When children are yelled at by Father, their skin tightens into a grimace over their faces because their bones have grown swollen with his voice. Most facial expressions result when the bones of the head respond to the difficult sounds produced in the outside world. Churches were originally built of bone as an answer to hard noises that troubled people, but the small fathers and mothers who were envious of the unused space around their own bodies entered the churches with hammers and cups. They positioned themselves near the walls and took stones from them, attempting to grow taller, wider, bigger. When you pray with your hands against your face, you are trying to add bone mass to your head, which has most likely become weak and crackable, thinning out over time. When a priest lays his hands over his congregation, he presses his thumb into the soft part of a person’s pudding until the person weeps his full share.
Bodies are hidden in the earth after they have finished breathing so that our towns will appear more peopled to the birds that fly over them, scanning for a weakness in our communities. Their vision does not tell them who is living or dead. They only see the depth of our ranks, namely, how many persons deep we are, what type of hard, white scaffold supports the town, whether our underground people have an organized or chaotic shape. The more buried bodies, the better. The dead, if buried together, create the illusion of an army. A latticework structure is offered for those who still stand aboveground, who must walk over the bones of former people with no guarantee that the earth will not collapse beneath them.
At certain moments, men, women, and children fall to the ground, breathing weakly, clutching their throats. Sometimes these moments are predicted and planned for, which means a hole is prepared in advance and a report is written. After a person dies, his bones still function. Although bones become dry, and the marrow can be scooped from them, and they can be broken in half even by children, a person who was once built of them, however tired and still he might seem, can at least drape a skin over himself and block the important doorways of the major houses in the town from the approaches of nearly anyone, including the people who live there.
Against Attachment
I was fortunate to find a person who would solve my solitude. She would use her hands on my person until it was soothed. She would chop at my husk, then spoon out my sorrow and be its keeper. I located her at a castle. My intention had not been to find her, for I had been busy being lonely with someone else. It was a tangled area of preening people, mostly diaper free, with real feet and hands, and each was traveling alone. You could ask about the weather there, and people would answer you in English.
The great Horace, childhood lover to Homer the Blind, when asked of love and its effects by the town council, who were conducting their Survey of the Mysteries, gathered his robes, stood up, left the auditorium, and never spoke again.
The time was technical summer, a season that had been achieved by nature so many times that a clotted arrangement of birds created splotches of ink called shadows, and whole days passed without gunfire. Shadows were blind spots that everyone shared. Graves were called homes, and apologies known as writing were carved in their surface. Rotten bags were called people. Milk was never sprayed from a fire hose at children until they skittered over the pavement like weevils, but the children wore shields of clothing regardless, and the people who guarded them were often trembling.
There was a chance, however remote, that we—among all the others who also famously walked the earth—would not breathe again, however much our mouths looked wet and ready for action. If we pictured ourselves in the future, we were forced to imagine our coffins shifting on a loosely soiled terrain, slipping into holes.
In short, it was necessary to establish a romantic alliance and to publish the results inside each other’s bodies. When we referred to our fear as “tomorrow,” our only solution was to seek aerial sensations with each other. Although we pretended to choose whom we would destroy in the name of a relationship, we were instead forced at each other, feigning admiration for the way our bodies lacked fat, hair, and color.
Together we conceived of solitude as a math problem, such like the ancients must have encountered when they saw two different suns in the sky: a daytime sun that was hot and burned out the eyes, and an evening sun that was cool, pale, and white. Each would soon have its own name, but for the time being the suns were anonymous, and they careened to a complex logic, and they were frequently misunderstood. People often died of heartbreak because of them. Maps of the dead called snowdrifts gathered in the mountains. An obituary water called rain fell everywhere, and the ancients—desperate, scared, vain—turned the hammered surface of their faces into it, so that none of it could reach the ground.