Notable American Women

by Ben Marcus

  As to the doubts the author experienced while writing this book, they were characterized variously as suspicions, regrets, and certainties. The phrase “known failure” was used most often in the early evening, generally muttered “under his breath,” a technical impossibility, since at the time of this writing spoken language has yet to occur without breath, or under it or on top of it, despite the efforts of the female Silentists to deploy “words without wind.” (The author concluded that for breath to occur without a word attached was a violation of what breath was for—namely and exclusively as a transportation vehicle for language, a small car meant to compete in the space normally reserved for birds and wind; thus breathing itself was considered the first language, and if the author breathed at all, he should always, at the least, be sure to layer a word into the breath, so as not to be wasteful with the vehicles he dispatched into the air, often choosing the word “help,” for its simplicity and accuracy and full-time relevance.) He was openly admired for admitting his doubts, when confessions of weakness briefly passed for bravery, when certain persons in his life responded favorably to what the Ohio Pillow Talk Council calls “Fallibility Narratives”: pre- or postcoital speeches that prove the superiority of someone other than the speaker and instill respect and empathy in the listener, thus possibly creating the desire for sex, when humility and self-deprecation are seen as a covert kind of strength, best responded to by a submissive presentation of an orifice (SPO).

  Last Wishes

  When the time comes, and the day has failed, and this book is finished or tossed away in disgust or quietly put aside after being just casually scanned and dismissed; when this moment arrives, if I should exit this place heading north, please let no one care to follow me or even watch my last body as it falls from sight over the hill. I prefer not to be seen or known or discussed. I should be given a head start of a ten-count. My enemies should be blindfolded and spun in place. There should be no wolves. When my execution is planned by the people assigned to kill me, wolves should be left out of it. Let no grief circles form related to my demise.

  At the end of this book, the characters should stand in a line and bow. All the places and names should fade to powder. My father should walk across the stage and make a short ceremony of blowing the powder out into the faces of the audience, raising a chalky dust that clouds the air and settles like flour onto the audience. There should be no applause. People should go home wearing the decay that the book enabled.

  The book should be closed so hard that a wind blows from it, gusting however feebly into whatever little world there is left. The day will be late, the sun a small accident in the sky, quickly apologizing from sight. This book wind will blow on whatever people happen to get in front of it, whoever’s not too terribly tired to walk a short routine in the park and show off their body to the Bird. A shy breeze will rub their faces, twisting their hair into punctuation above their heads, the way wind from another town feels different and wrong and reminds you how far from home you are; some touch or gust or small warning of themselves, all from the wind released by this book, and briefly something will matter, though it will never be articulated or shared, but the wind will continue to digress, deflecting from bodies and objects, losing itself in the things of this world that pass for bodies and people, and the last little breeze from this book will finally fade out somewhere near the coast, where the land is dying every day into the water, just shy of the ocean, ending in a brief ripple in the sand.

  If this wind were colored red, by a process that probably will get invented sometime soon, a cartoon weather to further exaggerate what goes on around us, lest we missed the point, in case some tiny fraction of life had miraculously gone unexplained, then the wind from this book would look like blood introduced into water, curdled and red and slow, a thick and terribly detourable fluid that can easily be diluted and absorbed invisibly into the larger world, and dissipatingly killed, by a simple wave of the hand.

  There would be no funeral, unless a funeral can be characterized as a period of mass, united indifference; only a moment when everyone everywhere is all at once awake, in cities and in the country and even our enemies at sea, coincidentally thinking simultaneously of nothing at all in common, standing or sitting or reclining or diving, in an apparent world that is suddenly, and only for a moment, and for the very first time, completely free of air.

  The tombstone for this book will read THE END.

  Better Reading Through Food

  MY LIFE HAS BEEN LIVED under the strategic nourishment of the Thompson Food Scheme, a female eating system (FEAST) devised by an early Jane Dark deity construct named Thompson, who later became an actual person, though not a good one. The food regimen I have followed was further modified by my “parents” to suit their early experiments with silence and voluntary paralysis, not to mention the person-shaping projects they conducted on myself and my sister, who died for other reasons.

  The diet Thompson and his food team developed was meant at first to favor a woman’s mind and blood, to dispose her to the vowel world hidden within American dialects and weather, and lastly to enable strains of behavior considered to be distinctly female—actions, thoughts, and standing poses only girls and women can produce. It is also a diet meant to feed and promote silence, limit motion, and restrict hearing and speech to an all-vowel repertoire. In my own case, a symptom of selective deafness (to my father’s voice, then later deafness to my own voice) emerged in my youth that I cannot help but relate to the food I eat.

  Indeed, the word “eat” does not adequately cover what can be done with foodstuffs. For instance, I consume nuts in great quantities, as well as every kind of nut butter and the water extracted from pressed vegetable seeds, though the seeds themselves would poison me. I drink milk and sometimes take a syringe of pure, animal milk into a delicate vein in my ankle. In the morning, I chew the skins of fruit; the pulp is stored under my tongue throughout the day, then discarded into my chewed-food wallet, and later archived. I apply a fiber poultice against my legs, using a roughage sponge, and likewise use the meal of oats as a crushed paste under my arms or at the nape of my neck when I am fasting. In the evening, I spray my eyes with plant milk before retiring; this lubricates my blinking apparatus during sleep, throwing more light into my dreams, though I’m not much of a believer in the imagination. Every Sunday, I chew heated strips of linen, then stuff a handful of bleached soundproof linen in my mouth to prepare the area for food or speech purges.

  If I’m going to say something important to my father, I’ll fasten a tourniquet around my waist before I eat, to prevent lower-body absorption of the nutrients, which drives all of my bodily resources into my head in one huge rush, ensuring that my Dispute and Conflict Faculties will be fully charged.

  Monthly, I cast a hot mold of my inner mouth, to catalog the changes to my palate, which helps me discern my purpose as a “person” and divine my next move in this world. The goal is to dilate the mouth cavity so that it can store more wind and inhale or alter the excess language in a room—since language is made, changed, and destroyed by air and man-made wind— although I would emphasize that I am not a word-eater. In the great state of Ohio, where I once had a home, there is a collection of Ben Marcus Palate Casts—also called Thompson Sticks, if the molding extends into the windpipe—that chart the structural changes to my inner head as I have trafficked into the present moment (huffed). My palate is shrinking and turning smooth over time, as certainly is my head, my hands, my heart.

  I pursue food with my head and limbs wrapped in various fabrics, usually linen filters extracted from the Great Antenna—which increases the speech vitamins in my food, and primes my body to decipher women’s radio waves, in case a command is given and Mother requires my help—but also cottons, wools, and rayons, burlap, and woven foil. I wear a helmet when I eat meat. If my diet requires bread or bread sticks or soaked dough, which it rarely does, or if bean oil, stew, or cake is indicated as a surface disguise or color filter fo
r the object I’ll be concealing in my body, I must take the nourishment while blindfolded and breathe into a cloth mouth-guard for one hour afterward; otherwise, I’ll die. Cheese is forbidden because it conceals accelerated milk. But I have farmed and eaten a cheese made from antique water samples left to harden and mold in my sister’s wooden jewelry box. It’s a translucent cheese with no nutrients or calories, but it animates the body during sleep and possibly improves deep listening skills. If something is being said, anywhere, I care to hear it. This cheese is also produced naturally in the hair of women who diet on girls’ water and follow a promise of stillness.

  If I wear a food bell, although I haven’t worn one since my father attempted a tonal study of my motion within our home, and the bell rings while I am eating, indicating a spastic posture toward the meal, a fast is required to slow my body’s motion. When I was at my physical best, as a teenager, I could run away from Jane Dark if she or her assistants were chasing me—to enforce my copulative obligation at the Silentist compound—and I was frequently agile enough to keep the Ben Marcus Locator bell from ringing, even if it was fastened to my neck. I could run gracefully enough, though to many observers it appeared that I was hardly moving my limbs at all, arcing over the territory as if someone had thrown me.

  Fasting is a common element in the Thompson Food Scheme, naturally, and it is fasting that will be recommended to the reader before setting forth into this book. The kinds of deep fasts, food-deprivation strategies, and language-cleansing styles certainly vary. Nor do fasts necessarily cause weight loss or decay of bone and muscle, although if I fast while listening to a recitation of all-vowel children’s literature, I am prone to produce a small thread of human milk from my chest, after which I can be weary and given to fainting. Much of this boy’s milk has been archived throughout my life and labeled in vials according to the genre that charmed it out of me. When I drink from the vials now, I can remember fondly those early stories of my youth: the adventures, mysteries, romances, and quest narratives that were converted by the Susan Group into an all-vowel format and hummed at me while I worked on the Great Antenna.

  As a child of nine, I fasted for four months and still gained three pounds, accumulating mass through gestural practice and the hard women’s mime that was popular at the time in my family. If I fast at the wrong time of day and become caught in a rainstorm, I could easily become paralyzed. I will never fast without wearing a heart magnet (also called The Cookie), which acts effectively as a reset button in such situations. In a winter water fast (WWF), the body absorbs water rather than swallows it, to ventilate the throat and mouth, and scour them free of language residue, or Word Sugar. Much water weight can be gained in the process; spot gaining can specifically be used to enlarge the hands (which can never be too big). When a dieter exits this fast, the French language is the only alphabet of sounds that will not wound the mouth, the flesh of which has softened under the absence of words and will be cut to shreds by the recitation of sharper languages such as German or English, at least until a palate callus is again developed so normal speech may resume.

  As with most diets, however complex they are, water is still the crucial element that supports or undermines the actions of the various edibles. Water is clearly the primary instruction set for the person in the world. Yet Thompson Water™ is the only treated, strategic water used to forcibly alter and promote specific behaviors. (It is technically not a soda: When sweetened, it will burn through the belly and pass from the body as a photographic liquid of the person who swallowed it.) If used more widely in America, Thompson Water™ could easily lead to radical new behaviors—performances of the human enterprise never seen before. Such is the hope, anyway, of people like my mother, who distributed water in the most violent way imaginable (and whom I propose to reveal later in so much detail that no one need ever mention his mother again).

  The notion of Thompson Water™ probably derives from the early American Pantomime Water (Shush), a liquid used to teach children how to behave in the home, marketed in a beverage series called Simple Skills for Children, at sixty cents a bottle. The inner Ohio Pantomime Water of the ’60s, devised by Burke, was administered to me like baby formula and subsequently taught me how to stand and walk, to run, to read, to call my mother’s name, and to sing using only mouth-carved breath, a storm music developed in Little England and used here to duplicate the sounds of trains, automobiles, and crashing waves. Despite everything that has happened, and everything I desired to happen that never did, I can still soothe myself with this kind of music. Pantomime Water operates under the principle that water is the purest medium to store the details of behavior. When my mother placed a jar of water in the Learning Room and then walked circles around it, the water recorded the principles of walking—it witnessed and reflected her motion—so if I drank from the jar, I absorbed the instructions and could then walk myself. The implications of this type of water-based instruction—to drink the source code of any task—are quite broad, and should soon lead to a widespread behavior-sharing system that will eliminate most notions of expertise and special skills. Basic tasks like mowing, painting, fishing, and hunting will be made available as affordable soft drinks. There will be men’s water and women’s water, water for sleeping, running, and hiding.

  Because I am a man, the effects of the diet have not been optimal, to say the least. My beard has been slow to grow, I suffer a hollow feeling in my bones, and mostly I prefer to rest in my chair and watch the clouds bleed in and out of the sky. My parents probably understood this going into their project with me. Yet my career as a person has been aimed in part to shatter my accidental manhood and create, in its place, something else. I cannot resent being a subject for the food work and motion studies of men and women who are less than scientists, who are at the forefront of a field that hardly exists; while some of their errors and blind experiments have caused me direct pain and confusion, elsewhere their brilliant and pioneering work has ensured that my life has been filled with astonishing surprises.

  While I do not presume to possess the food knowledge of a Thompson or a Burke or a Dark, or even someone as deeply wrong-minded about food and other mouth-destined objects as my imprisoned father, I have field-tested this book with control groups under the influence of varying food-combination/ absorption strategies, with and without water, in varying climates and stress conditions, and I believe there is a clear-cut way to optimize the reading experience, an eating program to best dispose the reader’s body toward a story. Because my results are not statistically valid or verified by any literary council, I cannot say definitively that readers will necessarily survive the project I propose for them, nor am I interested in such a guarantee. Every eating style courts its own danger, and reading without protective equipment is risky for other reasons. Thus all food-intake recommendations, nonfood-nourishment strategies, special language fasts, and reading-equipment suggestions that I will offer are only meant as general guidelines and should not be undertaken without consultation with a doctor. Most American and English-speaking doctors will be familiar with the risks of food-assisted reading, and they will be able to offer advice tailored to the frailties of each patient.

  The Fast

  Because the Marcus family, through elaborate trial and error, bloodshed, and heartbreak, believes that food plays an important role in how words enter the body, and what these words come to mean, it is first recommended that a cleansing fast of nuts and milk be undertaken. For one week, nothing but these foods should be consumed; each day no more than a pint of milk and a pound of nuts. While an ideal reading experience cannot be guaranteed, the nutritive ballast of nuts and animal water can ensure that the reader’s body will be sensitized to the women’s histories offered in this book.

  Nuts, when consumed in bulk, create a grammar sympathy quotient that is nearly off the map; almost any idiom can be understood through the regulated intake of these items. Although I have not been trained in the language of other people—the so
-called French, Spanish, or Italian tongues, among others—I discovered early in life that alterations to my diet could help me understand the strangled noises of these people, should they ever decide to speak to someone like me, or should I ever be required to decipher their weird marks on paper. These alterations often involved a nut called the almond.

  Milk, on the other hand, if properly prepared and consumed, increases sensitivity to unusual locution, dialects, and accents, while flat bread baked in hot salt for a day can aid with problems of believability, when the statements being made are incredible or impossible-seeming. Increased gullibility, on the other hand, is a problem with this type of bread. Liars will have a free run of a crowd that feeds in such a way.

  Once the fast is undertaken, a healing crisis should come on the third or fourth day. For some readers, the crisis will be revelatory, with great understandings washing through the body like a wind made of warm water. Others may find the physical changes too abrupt and uncomfortable, and they would do well to stay near a private soundproof bathroom, or wear limb mittens to prevent excess spasm, seizure, and Infant Language Recall. (My first experience with this type of fasting proved to be too much for my small intestine, which ended up a casualty to the project—a language diaper is now required.)

  Once this fast is completed, the tongue should be dry and hard, allowing spoken vowels a dynamic range and crispness that will compensate for a decreasing ability to produce hard sounds. It will be possible, in effect, to speak intelligibly with an all-vowel repertoire, rather like holding the tongue while talking. This new, women’s language (since women’s mouths are far better suited to it) has probably five times the sophistication of the crude, hard men’s language known as English, filled with its rough consonants and abrupt acoustical stops, which inevitably result in the choppy air so prevalent whenever a man is speaking, the men’s weather that, quite frankly, can start to stink, halting the flow of sweet air around a person’s head.