by Ben Marcus
Remarking on conditions and situations already observed by others (the Fact Checker).
Speaking in an accent, to deflect attention from his real voice (the Traveler).
Remarking on his own feelings, presuming outside interest in the statistics of his inner life (the Teacher).
Using words of encouragement and approval when others make observations, because he chooses to be viewed as an enabler and an approver (the Mother).
Asking questions of others merely to hint at the questions he wishes were asked of him (the Poet).
Describing activities he plans one day to undertake in order to suggest an attractive version of himself that has yet to occur (the Scheduler).
Mentioning information he has read about (the Stringer).
Commenting with value phrases on the various things that can be seen or heard or felt, positing himself as a prioritizer or cataloger of whatever can be perceived (the Goalie).
Or finally a young man who only uses language to condemn his parents for launching him in the first place, accessing the blame region of language and utilizing it fully to discredit us (the Person).
It should not matter to us what strategies Ben concocts as a young language user in America, nor should his father and mother compete to apprentice him to their own separate approaches, weak and useless as they are: using words to articulate accomplishments or reasons to be loved (father), using words to describe one’s own shortcomings so fluently that pity is invoked (mother, long ago), using words to lull employees into slavish compliance (father), or no longer using words at all, unless quietly typed to her former husband in a final missive (mother).
Regardless of how we each have failed to traffic in language with any newness at all, a failure we can mourn at some other time (though I would suspect even our mourning style to be derivative, repetitive, selfish), let us for now please agree not to launch an undernourished boy who will be broken open one day and left to fail this world forever on one of our doorsteps (not that your quarters feature a doorstep, though your current home is certainly nicer than where you’re going). For my part, I should not like to feel responsible for a dead boy, particularly as I near completion of my Responsibility Fasting Procedure, my Obligation Shedding Schedule. A decease at this time, particularly of my own child, would be a clear setback, would implicate me in feelings I am no longer interested, or lazy enough, to have.
Because of this speech allergy, Jane Dark is no longer able to read to him from The Unwritten Books of Susan without Ben turning rigid and blank. Can language of this sort act directly on his spine? I know that you advocate a children’s rash, or at least that you have seen rashes as a sign of change, the body fighting the world, for if it is not in collision, then it must be in retreat, and thus weak and afraid, doomed. “What is a rash?” you asked me once while we huddled in the back of a Dating Shelter in Akron, seeking our own private water fountain. Before I could shed my assumptions, as I had learned to do, and formulate some new and impressively lateral idea about skin inflammation as it relates to anxiety, ambition, and behavior concealment—because back then I suffered from a panic to produce for you ideas that were just beyond comprehension, odd and inscrutable enough to baffle or intimidate my audience—you spoke rapidly about armor and inner wind, the body’s topography, how people map one another and produce personality landscapes on their skin, so that the flesh is a mirror, and the rash only reflects the disease of the person nearby, a theory positing the skin as a truth serum, what you called “the divining layer,” “more revealing than a fossil” (your words), which, even if true, does not justify a collection of pelts in the home, or the encouragement of intact skin shedding in a certain man’s daughter.
Let’s say, for the sake of being extremely bored of this argument of yours, and to demonstrate my indifference to it, my “supremacy” (your words), my ability to concede to ideas I privately know to be romantic and flawed, that Ben’s rash is a sign that I am ill, or that we women here are wrong in the body and soon to decline, and Ben is reflecting our decay by adopting raised red bumps all over his chest. My son is a flag for my disorder. We have children so they might advertise our inadequacies. Giving birth is akin to producing proof. The very existence of Ben proves something; his body is litmus, an Empathy Skin. Let’s say it. Consider it said. It has been said.
Now, here on the women’s side of the house we are left with a boy who would scratch his chest until it bled if we didn’t glove his hands, and I must fall back on what I’m sure you’ll determine a conservative notion: that Ben should not gouge at his chest so ruthlessly. If he is to dig, he should dig away from his body. That is what backyards are for: to dig holes, to maybe dig holes big enough for people, to then put people in the holes, and cover them back up again with dirt. To then recite statements atop these holes pertaining to the people within them, to describe atop these holes those people in the holes. To praise them, salute them, send them faithfully away. No hole in Ben’s chest will be big enough to hold another person. There are no graves located on people’s bodies. We do not exhume our own chests for other people’s bones. Digs do not occur at these sites. We do not plant stones there to mark the fallen. We do not place flowers. The body is not a hole, not a grave. Ben should not dig there. My justification? His chest covers his heart. Or perhaps you’d like to downplay the importance of the heart, as well.
Now, final topic. You and I. What is left for us? We will not fuck again. We will not meet. We will not touch each other, or converse. You will not see me again. I will see images of you: photographs, drawings, acetate motion charts. Possibly some EKG readings. A short film will be made of your departure.
Which leaves, finally, Ben’s future.
If Ben elects voluntary paralysis when he turns eighteen, and inhabits a silent suit down at the Akron Stillness Center, I would at least like him to have experienced, for the purposes of later dismissal, the dubious pleasures and vague disappointments of running, jumping, sliding, and walking, the dullness and fascination of being able to lead his own body off road into the woods, up ladders, onto roofs, or down the emotion-reduction luge chute, not least because these technologies of personal transport might deliver him beyond the compound of the house and its satellite buildings—its barns and silos and fainting tanks—into the city, and to the natural preserves he has probably noticed pulsing somewhat dimly on the horizon.
He spends enough time on the roof for me to guess that he is one of those young people interested in the distance, in objects that he can see but cannot touch. Since you and I discovered in our time together that touching something, such as a boy, or each other, infected it with ourselves and thus spoiled our curiosity for it, because our attractions for others were based on our repulsion for ourselves, it will probably be useful to allow Ben access to those regions we most wish him to dismiss (other people, other places), to let him realize on his own how dull the world can be. Let us not imprison him before giving him a chance to imprison himself.
I do not share Ben’s interest in the distance, and I do not want to presume to know the boy (I am not interested in the trap of empathy or the false comfort [any other kind?] of understanding), but he must be looking at something.
Thinking back on my own life, which technically does not interest me, there was a time when I felt a distracting curiosity about mountains, as much as I tried to discipline myself against it. Something felt unfinished in me when I regarded the hills and swells around my childhood home, areas my father referred to as “mistakes in the terrain.” I thought, Even though the world spins so fast, how come it hasn’t smoothed down these so-called mountains? Why are they still so lumpy when the wind has leveled everything else? Are mountains just a failure of wind? Shouldn’t the earth be less interesting? Otherwise what does one do with something that is merely pretty? And ultimately: Why am I being tested this way? I felt as though I had eaten someone else’s emotions and they were swimming in my body, that I had strong feelings that weren’t my ow
n. I was hosting another person inside myself, like that man in the famous book who eats his family to protect them from the sun. My choice: either digest the person or perform it out of myself, invert myself and cleanse my feelings. (This is what it is to feel things: to feel like someone else.) It wasn’t the loss of control that made me sick, but my utter unfamiliarity with myself, the disappointment of discovering reactions and attitudes to the world that seemed so highly predictable. Here I was, just another girl responding to beauty, and the inevitability of this disposition to the world seemed like a terrible loss of control, a vastly disappointing conformity I had hoped to be exempt from.
What did I do? I took my father’s advice: “Go away.” I overcame the problem by wearing a modified falcon’s hood, what my mother called my “visor,” which defeated my attempts to discern the horizon and reminded me that if an object was out of my reach, it most likely belonged to someone else, and of course, as I believe, affection should not occur without possession.
A phrase worth repeating.
Certainly we can agree that the boy should see more and that he should gain these visions by his own power, by zooming in on objects through his own effort, running toward trees, other people, and so forth. Yet you’ll understand that no one on the women’s side of the house is inclined to drive Ben to these scenes, even if the lake and the so-called trees are supposedly “wonderful,” as you repeatedly used to tell me during that time when you believed that sharing your opinion with me would make me care for you more, or implicate me permanently in your ideas and life, as though learning something of your bias was actually going to prove useful to either of us. By sharing interpretations of a world that refused to accommodate our ideas, we only embarrassed each other and dramatized our own ignorance. An injunction of silence in our relationship would have quite possibly forestalled our disappointing discoveries about each other. Your words: “To know someone is to know why you should leave them.”
The women’s use of cars, as I’m sure you know, has been attended by collision, ambush, and pistol fire, and we are not prepared to lose any more women or equipment to those excursions when we have everything we need right here, including enemies we can at least see. Please note that this is not an accusation of you or your staff. An accusation would sound more like this:
I’m sure it’s a coincidence that every time a female staffer leaves the compound she dies before nightfall, at which point the men’s camp lights a celebration fire and sings until dawn.
But even that sounds mild, more like sarcastic innuendo. How about:
Because you had decreasing access to the physical territory we will refer to as “me” (though the naming of my person is a complicated and highly contested endeavor, and I imagine your exhaustion would exempt you from such a difficult task), a place you felt you formerly visited regularly and with my permission, though indeed I only ever allowed passive access, and you then received notice, in the form of silence, that this trespass of yours would never occur again, you took the liberty of canceling what women of mine entered your purview, a cancellation you accomplished with weaponry and subterfuge, with traps you dug in the soil or laced into trees.
But I harp on. The point of all this: Why not take Ben on an outing? Father and son go to the hills. Michael and Ben take a trip in a car. Boy and man eat sandwiches in a box. Colorful napkins. Bring a ball and a bat, your mitts. Take hats, jackets, Ben’s sweater. Drive along the road. Enjoy yourselves. Let him see what he sees (extremely important parenthetical remark: you will be watched, you will be watched, you will be watched). And you, by all means, take a good look around while out in the open air with your own little Ben. Take note of the world and its things. Practice remembering the lake and the field and the hills bubbled up in the distance, trees leaning like broken cages over you, the so-called birds asserting their airborne geometry. Take very special note of these sites.
Why? Here is your future in writing: You and I are operating within an inevitability that I have designed. I am proud to announce authorship of the next things that will happen to you. It is best that you learn about them now. A container is being prepared for you: It will contain your body and be possessed of enough dimension for you to spin in place or lie prone, twist on the floor, or crawl several strokes, a repertoire of actions I predict you will soon abandon, though they are among your favorite things to do. One: No one will watch you. Two: These actions will prove distinctly uncomfortable. Three: It will be impossible for you to cultivate a sense of accomplishment. This is a fancy way to say we are interring you in an underground cell, sending you under, putting you away. Your potential physical velocity will be modest at best, since walls will prevent your acceleration, and collisions lack the complexity of sensation I know that you favor in your experiences. I cannot imagine you throwing yourself against a wall for very long without becoming bored or hurt beyond repair. The container’s location is irrelevant, at least to you, since you will be inside of it and lose sense of all other places. But you can be assured that it will be in no such place for persons out walking, or some such other incorrect form of “engaging the day or night” (your words), to come upon you by chance, to hear your shouts, to dig you out and save you and end your terrible ordeal (any other kind?).
Sentences of words are being composed at this very moment that will disturb you to hear. They will comprise the entire media of your days and nights in the container, unless darkness counts as a medium, or your own breath counts as a medium, or your own shouts of greeting or strife to persons who are not present or do not actually exist can come to count as a medium, as any distortion of silence is ultimately the attempt of a creature to gain attention, although silence itself is God’s medium, as you pointed out, in which case you will enjoy his solo performance of silence for a long, long time. You will be in audience to his expertly crafted silence, his “original nothingness of sound” (your words). His silence will be made and experienced and enjoyed by you alone. Alone, alone, alone.
Is that it? That is not it. Should you care to know, an aperture will be in place in the area commonly known as the ceiling. We will call this the “aperture of contact,” and it will be through here that you will be given access to the language we have designed. It will not admit light, this aperture. It will not admit people. It will admit words, but it will not receive them. Think of it as a mouth, though the metaphor ends there. Its larger purpose is for you to guess at, which should give your so-called imagination a small degree of labor, a task that will have to count as your main recreation, since you may require something to do after all, other than to listen to the sentences coming in, so why not be alone there to puzzle with yourself over what exactly is going on?
As such, then, the only choices for you now involve your conduct within the inevitable. Isn’t that, after all, where all conduct occurs? And as a former expert of conduct, which you purported to be, and occasionally were, I hope that you will give the matter the very best thoughts you have, and concoct a behavioral endgame that will, at the least, engage those persons required to witness your last moments as a living man. Please be mindful of those of us who must watch you. Give us something to pay attention to.
Will I be there when they lower you into the hole? I will not. Will I toss dirt over the entrance? No. Will I ever visit the hole to speak words there? I cannot answer that; it simplifies my plans. Will I sometimes, at night, go out to the hole and stand there quietly weeping, watching the sun break down over the horizon? No, no, no. I will have no such moments. In fact, I would argue that those are not moments at all. Moments actually occur, while these things are crafted with such panic and falsity that they freeze up and in reality do not happen at all—woman weeping over incarcerated man—though they are remembered as if they did. Let’s say my body might grace your grave site. I may roll in the soil there. Do I believe in saturating my skin in the soil that covers the man in the chamber? I might. Do I subscribe to blanketing myself in sediment, performing the postures of sile
nce while caked in dirt, exploiting my body as a full-scale listening device modified by the earth that covers a husband? A resonant earth? Do I plan to cultivate and disperse this soil, to distribute it in this and other areas as a muffling tarp, hush crumbs, a layer of silence to finally quiet down the world. Do I?
Knock, knock.
Good-bye,
Jane Marcus
ALSO BY BEN MARCUS
The Age of Wire and String
FIRST VINTAGE CONTEMPORARIES EDITION, MARCH 2002
Copyright © 2002 by Ben Marcus
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
Parts of this book first appeared in Bomb, Conjunctions, Fence, Harper’s, McSweeney’s, Pushcart Prize volume XXV, and Tin House.
The following organizations supported the writing of this book, and the author is grateful for their assistance: The Mrs. Giles Whiting Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Fund for Poetry, the Art Development Committee, and the Corporation of Yaddo.
Vintage is a registered trademark and Vintage Contemporaries and colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Marcus, Ben, 1967–
Notable American women / Ben Marcus.
p. cm.
1. Young men—Fiction. 2. Emotions—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3563.A6375 N68 2002
813’.54—dc21 2001045517
www.vintagebooks.com
www.randomhouse.com
eISBN: 978-0-307-42705-2
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