Notable American Women

by Ben Marcus

  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.”

  Statistical Data and Codes

  The word “and” is often used as a secret code. It can be rubbed with the finger. Sometimes the word “and” serves as a distress call between two words or objects, which can often have no relationship without it. The word “heart” means “wind,” unless it follows the word “my,” in which case it can mean “mistake,” in a world where weather functions as the combustible error produced by people, although sometimes the word “heart” indicates the social intermission people use to feel sorry for themselves, when self-pity is medically treated by vocal noises of certain volume (a type of song some bodies produce, called “sympathy”).

  Possibly the best kind of regret occurs between sentences, which may be why the word “shyness” is frequently mispronounced as “crevasse.” “Wind,” when used in a sentence, means danger. When used alone on a page, no interpretation of “wind” will be required, but the page should not be allowed to remain open in an unattended room. An unattended room is an empty room, or a room with someone’s sleeping father in it. Sleep, when practiced by someone’s father, is also known as The Penalty Box. A father, in this book, no longer affects the population of a town or peopled area. The population of a town is computed as the number of people minus the fathers. No other interpretation is any longer required of fathers. Slamming the book shut produces wind on the face, a weather that is copyrighted by the author, and this wind may not be deployed without permission, nor may the pages be turned without express written permission.

  A misspelled word is probably an alias for some desperate call for aid, which is bound to fail. If “wind” is misspelled, for instance, as h-e-l-p, or i-t-h-u-r-t-s, then a storm can be expected, a hard sky, a short paralysis of rain. Rain is used as white noise when God is disgusted by too much prayer, when the sky is stuffed to bursting with the noise of what people need. If all the words of this book are misspelled, but accidentally spell other words correctly, and also accidentally fall into a grammatically coherent arrangement, where coherency is defined as whatever doesn’t upset people, it means this book is legally another book. Likewise, if another book is comprised entirely of misspelled words that, through accident or design, happen to spell correctly and in the proper order the so-called words of this book, which in fact will be proven not to be words at all, but birdcalls, then that book might be regarded as a camouflage enterprise or double for this book, though it would be impossible to detect whether this were ever the case, in which case something is always a decoy for something else, and the word “camouflage” simply means “to have a family.” In this book, the word “decoy” means “person.” A person is always camouflage for something small and soft and possibly buriable. Often he should be killed to discover what he has been aliasin
g, even if it is just the most perfect thing: a person-sized piece of empty space.

  Throughout the book, the names of children, people, heroes, gods, and things are generally given without accents, which are too personal to most readers (though other personal devices, such as women’s names, have been retained), and the spelling of such names is mainly that which accords most nearly with Old American pronunciation as specified by the Ohio Diction Team, who are considered to have the ideal mouth shape. Spelling is a way to make words safe, at least for now, until another technology appears to soften attacks launched from the mouth. If we didn’t spell them, they would hurt us more directly. The appearance of blood would indicate success. Spelling puts a corset on words, takes the knives out of them. Spelling a person’s name is the first step toward killing him. It takes him apart and empties him of meaning. This is why God is afraid to have his name spelled.

  Performance Notes

  This book is meant to be recited at libraries with a pound of linen ballasting the inside of the mouth of the orator or nanny; no one else may legally recite it. Rest rooms should be stationed near any reading of this book, as should fatigue houses and guilt huts. Women’s rest rooms should be guarded by a policeman wearing a gender helmet, even if such a helmet passes as a hairstyle. The doctor-to-audience ratio of a crowd listening to this book, by choice or by accident—since it is designed for recitation in public parks and heart-solving squares where unwitting customers of this book might be resting on blankets, waiting for their chance to feel nothing—should be 1:15 or better. This book sounds more clear, makes more sense, when recited through a megaphone, at night, under clear skies, in an area free of birds. When recited with a German accent, this book might induce crouching. A helicopter should be standing by at all times, unless the recitation occurs in an urban stadium within one mile of a hospital, in which case ambulances should be ready to cart the wounded to whatever local healing site obtains. A religious figure should be stationed near the site but not inside. Chances are that a religious figure will already be stationed there. If resources permit, for every hundred persons in the crowd, there should be at least one masseuse to rub and caress the listeners, using “literary hands,” which assist a person who can’t comprehend language. Public money should be used to deploy roving masseurs to caress citizens of our public areas so their bodies might better yield to the speech and weather broadcasts streaming from this book.

  Behind the Scenes: An Inventory of Accidents

  The author lost the use of his hands for three weeks while writing this book. During the period this book was written, he wept six times, one of which was used to secure sex as a sympathetic response to perceived sadness, a sex that produced in the author a diamond-cutter tumescence to his erection, leading him to conclude that weeping and arousal were intimately related, so that he often tried to weep before initiating intercourse, as foreplay; weeping became his most reliable seductive tool, at least for his own desire (because during sex he had first to seduce himself, an elusive and often unseduceable figure), though he was frequently merely alone to deploy his diamond-cutter, with two-person intercourse itself an imagined option at best, which he then concluded to be the actual best option, with real intercourse coming to seem contrived and imagined, ornate and implausible, too theatrical and overproduced, less vivid than the kind he conjured for himself in his mind, thus less realistic.

  He became choked up 412 times while reading books, watching films or television, talking to friends or acquaintances or strangers or children or himself, or sitting alone in a house or park or person booth or public-transport vehicle, such as a police cruiser, unable to talk to himself or think or speak aloud. Indeed, becoming choked up became such a constant experience, as familiar as breathing, though no less unbearable or inaccurate a method to keep time with the world, that he no longer noticed it and came to regard it as his stable mood, one that held weeping at bay only tenuously and foreshadowed an emotional release just moments away, all the time, yet never actually delivered this emotional release, thus foreshadowed it falsely, or did so truly only six times, as mentioned, but the other 406 times failed to deliver any emotional release whatsoever, only threatened to produce weeping, but in the end managed actually to produce the reverse of weeping—a series of emotional captures—deciding that his own person was akin to a correctional facility for feelings, which had been placed in his body under house arrest, his body a manner of tomb, and that he was the warden of all the various ways to feel, though it should be remarked that these captured feelings were in no way rehabilitated for later release while serving time in his body. They were put away for good.

  This man had a failure in his neck five times, which resulted in immobility of the torso and head and led to the use of an old foul-smelling neck brace once prescribed for him when these body failures were more frequent, then later used as a language diaper when uncontrollable speech was a symptom, a pillowy brace, shaped like a snake, that was saturated in all of his unwanted words, stinking of a version of himself he wasn’t able to share with the world, wrapped around his neck, a towel for his secrets.

  During the period this book was written, he tripped up a flight of stairs three different times, incorporating three different flights of stairs, striking his chin on a step a total of one time, scuffing either his right or left wrist a total of one time, but feigning injury all three times, behaving as though the stumble were intentional and part of his natural boundless energy, to bounce off stairs and even slap his face against one of them and find it all part of the bustly navigation everybody signs up for when leaving the house for the adventure, the disaster, of the daytime trajectory. All three times, this man looked back after stumbling, to see who might have seen him slip, noting their faces and names, if available to his sight, promising himself to hate them as fully as he could at the soonest possible occasion (an occasion he tried to design by aiming his body in their direction), through either indifference or direct aggression, or some yet-to-be-devised strategy, which he was eager to invent and deploy at these witnesses for having seen him in pain, seen him stumble, watched him fail at being himself, as though it were even possible that anything involving motion could ever be said to succeed, or that a person, especially a man, could actually ever be anything, not to mention something so directly impossible as being himself.

  He fell, sometimes on purpose, a total of nineteen times during the period this book was written, and he told a story once after intercourse, to the person who had just politely and patiently hosted him while he hyperventilated in their shared space until his error had been registered as a small dollop of fluid he extruded from his mistake zone, of falling as a child and suffering a terrible blow to his leg, a story he then later came to associate with having intercourse itself. Any kind of leg pain thereafter made him desire sex, though the fall and injury depicted by the story occurred more than ten years before he had ever had intercourse; he was only a child when he fell, but the story became a dirty story, an erotic one full of promise, and it came to depict what he called his first sexual encounter, a run-in with the hard earth that damaged his leg, a story with secret pornographic implications that he often imagined represented in a full-color pictorial with children and a cool, suburban palette. He also told a story, just before intercourse, of falling from his motorcycle, and thus a motorcycle crash was for him the ideal depiction of intercourse, which was one of his first justifications for introducing a helmet into the bedroom.

  Most of his experiences of intercourse were free of speech, or, more specifically, free of consonants, since vowels indicate pleasure and consonants indicate pain and confusion, and he pursued an Ohio Lovemaking Stratagem that focused mainly on his own pleasure, a sensation that was found to dilate if certain all-vowel exclamations were launched; his lovemaking was once endorsed by a mayor, which was also once his sexual nickname, “the Mayor,” though it was admittedly a name he bestowed upon himself and never actually uttered aloud, except within the cave
rn of his terrible head. Yet because the people orbiting his mostly failed person proved entirely reticent to assign him nicknames or pet names or any kind of slogans or monikers or handles or endearments that veered even one letter from his actual name—even though in one sense all he ever wanted was to be someone with many nicknames; it seemed so exciting to be known variously, cutely, wrongly—he was obliged to take up the task alone and refer to himself quietly as “Champ,” “Rip,” “Daddy,” and “the Mayor.”

  This author was called to perform bodily attention on six different women during the period this book was written. Of those six women, four of them unknowingly used a nearly similar vocabulary to describe the defects of the author, cited as: impatient, distracted, selfish, self-centered, dull. The other two women were similar in using nearly no vocabulary at all in describing the author, refraining almost entirely from the rhetoric of description or from any language that might have indicated any insight or interest in things involving either the author or otherwise, if indeed those are the only two choices of speech topics—the author or otherwise—since dichotomies such as that one still tend to present too complete a picture, and thus invite the worst kind of disappointment, that of knowing all of one’s options. In short, the other two women refrained from language or excessive gesture or anything thought to pass for communication before, during, or after intercourse (the only three possible descriptions of time), though it is admitted that the absence of all communicative actions becomes, in itself, a rather forceful and unambiguous communication itself, interpreted by the author as: Get off of me, Get away, Don’t touch me, Leave me alone, Stop, you’re hurting me. The author has thus come to interpret silence, even his own, as a directive to cease and desist, to apologize, to enter the opening moments of behavior known as regret and shame. The author concluded that silence was a green light for shame.