by Marcus, Ben
I wish I could say it was not a house we lived in, but admitting to the house is crucial. It gives a certain picture that will be required, in the end, when we are dead: my father, brother, and me, ducking under bags of sharp salt suspended from the rafters to keep the indoor birds sufficiently wounded, too tired to fly away. A house where birds performed a required orbit that affected how a man aged. A house where the flight of a bird might keep your costume young. Our windows fashioned of lens material for the sun to photograph us.
It is a necessary picture, the three of us walking in a crouch, our faces sometimes cut. It will be fine to be remembered that way. I prefer a picture to a written report. A written report would be sure to fail my family. If the sun has witnessed our behavior, perhaps one day we will reappear on some horizon, and we will again walk the earth and inhale some of the world’s harder wind, to keep it off the bodies of those people not yet born.
The day in question was not much of a day. The sun paused at the horizon until a cluster of hard, black birds burst from the woods. They tore a path into the sky that the sun could fill, and the sun then commenced to stretch the space around it until something passing for daylight occurred. A smarter family would not have been fooled. A smarter family would have pursued a longer concealment within a cloth camouflage. But it was an accurate enough form of light; it showed the smallest, softest version of my father I had ever seen.
My father woke early and opened four jars in the doorway. He tuned the radio dial to Englishville and we heard a series of recent horizon songs made with a slow, old-fashioned breathing style. In between the music, one of the more famous years was being described by a girl whose voice had to project through a wooden mouth. Her mother apparently had designed the mouth of an old man, so the girl could not be recognized. The antenna of our radio had been soaking in honey overnight. After wiping down the tip, my father pushed it through the ceiling until the music became louder.
The three of us crouched down at the writing hole in the center of the room. It was moist that morning, rimmed with foaming soil, so my father fitted the mouth with scraps of linen and then reached his arm deep into the hole. We each took our turn. Above us the sky sounded like a waterfall. My brother held his breath and smiled when his arm went in the hole, as if he could stay like that forever. The radio would not keep still, buzzing on the countertop as if an animal were trapped inside it. Some other family must have died that day, because our house had too much electricity. If too many people died, there would be lightning in our room. If the men on our road stopped breathing, we would be blinded. We would not be able to honor the kill hole. A fine spray of crumbs blew from the speaker until the air in the room seemed filled with insects.
We packed our things into clear burlap sacks. Father took down the wind sock and inhaled the last remnants of yesterday’s air for strength. He passed the sock to my brother, who lazily wiped his face with it before fitting it onto an unused portion of his costume. He spoke three Forecast sentences into his scarf before kissing it and wrapping it around his neck. The language made me drowsy. The three of us rolled our bodies in the Costume Smoother and checked ourselves for wind drag. Father unplugged the four corners of the house and kicked at the baseboards to set the decay timer. He coordinated his kicks with the Bird Metronome until the room became recalibrated and silent, more hushed than I had ever heard it, which made me want to stay there and hold my breath, to take a silence bath, to rub my sleeves and groom myself clean in that brand-new air.
There was nothing for us to do then but wait. I watched my father greasing our windows with oil, drawing pictures of us against the glass with precise, thin lines. In the picture, from what I could decipher, my father was standing in full costume, tearing a piece of bread in half for my brother and me, who were crouched on our heels with our hands raised. It would be a long time before someone looking into the house with a Cloth Diviner could determine that we had left the premises, that the picture of these three men exchanging bread was merely a decoy, erasable, made of oil. With the right manipulations of the hand, those three men could be made to do anything. By then we would be far off on the water.
I wish I could say my father’s name. I do not know the grammatical tense that could properly remark on my father. There is a portion of time that my own language cannot reach. A limitation, probably, in my mouth. In this portion of time is where my father is hidden. If I learn a new language, my father might come true. If I reach deep into my mouth and scoop out a larger cave. If I make do with less of myself, so that he might be more.
It would be easier to hold a magnifying glass to the scrap of my father’s shirt that still remains. To focus a hot cone of sunlight through the glass onto the fabric that once concealed him. Then the last of him could be burned, and in the sound of the flame a small message might be heard. I wish that his name occurred in nature. I could point to the sky and my gesture would indicate him better than any of my own noises ever could. I wish that there was a new man who looked like my father. I could grab hold of him if he rowed by. I could enter his clothes so that he would never float. Hide in the extra space between his body and the cloth. Drag him down into the water, the two of us sinking double-time, down to where the people are waiting, their reaching hands just beyond my sight now as I stare into the water.
When the boat appeared, my father pulled it in with his rope and loaded our parcels down below. He attached long bronze wires onto the stern that fluttered in our wake, creating the turbulence of a much larger boat, a decoy trail for any Cloth Monitors watching us escape. We would produce a commotion of foam. An attack would be less likely. I was asked to spray the south-facing wall of our house with writing, a script to poison travelers if they ever became stranded at our house, to prevent them from living the way we had, to keep ourselves from becoming repeated. I used one of the safer, mouth-borne languages for the project, restricting myself to words that indicated only those things that could be concealed with burlap. When I was finished, and the wall of our house was like a language trap, I still had some writing left over, which I smeared out carefully over the sides of our boat until it had spread into a translucent glue.
My brother and I held hands in the low morning wind while my father fitted the Travel Costume onto us, adjusting the straps so that my bigger, softer body would not bulge from the fabric. We kissed before saying good-bye to each other, even though our bodies would be staying close. We would share an outfit, which meant that we had to alternate moving about the boat. Only one of us could be in charge of a costume. A bird or man might think my father had only one son on board. I went fully limp first, and issued small motion commands to my brother, who had stronger legs, a stronger back, and better eyes.
The day was mostly a crude alphabet of sounds, like one of the Southern languages recited through a gauze filter. It made my father cross. He rowed crudely, chopping at the water as if it were ice, and we slid away from our home in jerking strides. Animals may have been responsible for the noises we heard, but I saw little that was living, only clean geometries of clouds above a rigid tree line, and a shore that receded the more you stared at it. We sailed the narrow waterway until the houses grew small and pale, whitish blurs on the horizon, and the water thickened beneath us.
For hours we saw only my father’s back, tilting against the long oars. On the shore were long descriptions scrolling in the tree line, sentences indecipherable without the proper cloth filter. We had only so much burlap to spare, and the messages did not seem crucial. We were always choosing what we needed to know, yet I had trouble leaving those sentences unread. I thought they might have been placed there for us. My brother moved our costume to keep me from seeing the shore. I saw only the wake behind us, a trail of foam that produced a language of bubbles so intimate I was ashamed to decipher it.
When the sun was directly above us and our shadows were deep inside our own bodies, my father produced the first parcel. There was a cheese that we had been saving. There was a b
read. The bread was wrapped in a stiff sheet of wool. It was given to me to undress it. First I held my hands in the water. If I closed my eyes, the water felt as loose and grainy as soil, with bits that broke gently against my touch. My hands were smooth and glistening when I removed them, and the bread unraveled easily. We kept the items of the parcel near our persons, in contact always with our costumes, in case witnesses from the far shore had been employed. In case, my father said, someone was given a reason to come out there after us. We used the cheese and bread without much motion. Someone watching could easily have assumed that we were sleeping. After we ate, I shot a thin piece of wool into the water as an offering.
I have a photo of my brother that is simply a picture of an empty field. I am collecting empty spaces for him that he might like, spaces safe enough for entry. There is a scratchy yellow grass growing wild, a dried white mud, nothing much alive in the air. Trees with shriveled limbs corkscrew over the field, providing a cage of wooden protection. No people there, least of all my brother, least of all even an artifact of his several costumes. There is no clothing. I could throw this photo into water, to feed the image enough for my brother to grow in it. It seems a safe enough place for him to enter, a place with none of the warning signs that in the end kept my brother from going anywhere. He could live in this field, if only I could make him grow there.
We rowed on because my father told us to. Words were exchanged that I could not use. My brother had spent his ration of bread to brace his mouth for brand-new utterances that hurt me to listen to. My father had an angry body that he kept turned away from us. I held my head low and watched the water flowing around us. Signs posted in the channel told of families that had come and gone. Cursive script on wooden placards, counterweighted with buoys, like simple billboards on a road. Short, orbular lights mounted on the signs cast oily images of the various fathers on the water, spotlights of men’s faces as if projected from the bellies of birds. The current was troubled enough to dissolve these fathers’ faces as it pulled us along, until we were sailing directly over wavy versions of these men as we tried not to read of what had happened to them, who they were, what they did, why they failed.
The signs, in the end, gave way simply to sticks and platforms as we gained the ocean, weeds coiling up out of the water around them. We saw no more writing for hours. My head became blank and I remembered an old song a woman used to sing. It was a song built of pauses and breath, with notes that were just the words a person might use to procure food, yet once I remembered it, it seemed crucial to my own breathing, and I worried that if I forgot to keep time with the song, to hum it always, I might fail to breathe, I might lose my own time for good.
It was early afternoon by the time my father showed his full face to me. I did not care to see it. It was too big. Anyone could have been inside it. He required me to see him there in our boat on the water, and I obliged as much as I could. My brother, I suspect, did his best to look away. I felt the costume pulling at me, tight as a muscle.
The second parcel in my father’s bag contained a metronome, with a hollow darning needle that served as the wand. He placed it near my brother, adjusted the dial to Suffocate, and caused my brother, after several spasms of resistance, to stop breathing. Our boat felt lighter immediately, and we began to pick up speed, slicing swiftly through a water channel that suddenly seemed as light as air.
If it were up to me, I would dress my father in a long, clear sleep costume. I would knit linens from my mother’s abandoned luggage and spray them from the Costume Gun onto my father. I would weight my hands with heavy blocks of wool, which I would toss in the water to create a retention current, to keep my father from rowing away. A set of spirals in the water that would prove inescapable to him. If it were up to me, I would soak my father’s hands in milk, then fit them with gloves of hemp. I would use the leftover milk to make a writing. My father I would fix to a platform on the water until the animals came for him. If I ever saw my father again, I would let the animals come for him, even if I had to costume the animals myself with special attack clothing—father-hunting shirts, father-killing hats, father-chasing corsets—even if I had to teach them how to swim after someone as fast, as expertly clothed, as my father. I would teach them. If my father would not be disrobed, I would wait on my platform until animals came to help. It would be simply a matter of time.
The metronome produced an English sound. My father had stopped rowing. He was collecting small writing samples from the water. I was sharing a costume with a boy who could not breathe. It was like having a body that was partly cold and numb, a part of my person being now just furniture I carried with me. My brother’s head was dry. I could hear it scratching against the facial cloak on his side of the costume, the sound a dog might make if it was buried alive. I tried to adjust some zippers and buttons, but the change only hastened my own breathing, until I worried I might hyperventilate and be thrown from the costume, which could only tolerate a certain number of breaths per minute. During each expression of the metronome, I beckoned to my brother using special, waterproof sounds, which I was careful to conceal from my father. He was busy fitting vials of a possible fluid into the compartments on his vest. A fluid filled with writing. I had seen him wear glass only once before. During one of the famous years, when children operated the electricity console in our town, he had lined his chest with glass and set about to alter the kill hole. We watched him from the window, his body stretched thin and long behind his special outfit. This time, his glass costume consisted of short, stubby bullets filled with fluid. As much as I squinted at him, I could see nothing behind it.
The two of us would never be more at sea. I was my father’s only son. Some town registry should acknowledge the change. Looking around me, I thought I could produce a drowning, with a little effort. We exchanged one sector of nowhere for another. Travel seemed exclusively contrived to make houses disappear. There was nothing out there but water. At the most, I saw the empty platforms, like lily pads, scattered throughout the waves. But no land anywhere.
We were going to row until evening. I was wearing clothing enough for two, but there was just one of us now. In tribute, my father broadcast audiotapes of my brother for us to listen to, mostly weeping sounds from when he was younger. He hooked the small speakers of the machine to the outside of the boat and aimed the sound of my brother directly into the water, using a volume mechanism derived from my mother’s old sewing kit. A loose, circular current reflected the sound, leaving frothing pools in the water as we sailed through. Other boats might later trigger these sorrow vectors of my brother’s, sailing through his weeping pools. He would cry for them, if they could find the right patch of water. If they could sail into it.
Sadness could be stored in an area, sealed in a small spot of water. Water could be the costume for what my brother felt.
I spoke to my father’s back with my hands, shielding my speech with a canvas visor. My hands cast the wrong sorts of shadows on the bottom of the boat, a set of lines so precise that they could have been simple English sentences asking for help. It worried me to think my father might misunderstand me. I stroked the empty part of my clothing and scanned the vast, blank water for land. There was nothing anywhere, just the water rippling beneath our boat, which made a low, smooth Spanish sound.
If he heard or saw my speech he did not acknowledge it. He had opened the third parcel, a collection of lenses, which he braced below our sails with a system of rigging I could not comprehend. As I looked up, I saw through the distortion of the lenses a sky and sun that were grotesquely oversized, magnified beyond repair, swollen and bloated and not possible to regard for long. My only thought then was that if the above and beyond were rendered so large, if he had dilated those items of our world that were already massive, and his lenses worked their exaggerations in reverse, how small indeed would the two of us look sailing below in our boat? Had we become tiny enough to no longer be seen? Was my father, with his third parcel, creating a disappe
arance? Was it a new costume of nothing?
If it were up to me, I would not come from a place where fathers leave their houses by boat. Where fathers kill a costume and leave heaps of cloth like grave sites in their wake. I would choose a world of straight grass roads, with only famous years, with only days of actual light, where a metronome might be silenced by the right kind of sunlight. I would choose a house free of kill holes where a mother still stood upright and walked the rooms, using a soothing medical voice entirely free of cloth. There would be pieces of time produced through the furnace of the house, and the word memory would have an angry meaning. People would have memories to turn red, to fume, to produce a special smoke. If it were up to me, a father’s costume could be filled with special English air and set afloat outside a house. This air-filled costume could be fed with chunks of hardened time so that the family inside would not die. The costume would be called a Day Eater. Growing old would be its sacrifice. The Bird Metronome would keep the costume clean. If the chunks became depleted, the costume could feed on the father himself, who would still be located somewhere deep inside the costume, far from sight, in the recesses of a sleeve, for instance, where a specialized darkness might cover the father’s body in a thick, gray film.
By sunset, my brother was cast into the water. A hole blown in our costume, his body dragging behind us like a raft. My father would only hand me the needle and thread. I did not know where to start stitching. I could not perform a mending on my own back, on parts I could hardly see or touch. Nearly everything on that boat could have been sewn up. Cold air was striking the new vacancy in my costume. My father adjusted the metronome to Sleep, a rhythmic shushing, but I sat in the back and watched my brother bob in the waves as we lurched away from him.