Notable American Women

1. Bury Your Head

I OFFER THIS MESSAGE UNDER DURESS, hungry, winded, and dizzy, braving a sound storm of words meant to prevent me, I’m sure, from being a Father of Distinction. For the sake of those persons in the world who expect leadership, clarity, and a levelheaded account of the matterful times that my “family”— to hell with all of them — has witnessed, I will not succumb to the easy distractions of language poison, even if it kills the body that I’m wearing, even if I become just another dead man who once felt things keenly and wished only for the world to see inside his heart and mind. There is light enough for one hour of transcription each day, and it is within this time that I have assembled these remarks, having carefully considered the true nature of what I think and feel during my other twenty-three daily hours, allotted to me as darkness by my captors, a group also known as Everyone I Used to Love, Who Would Never Have Survived Without Me.

I am aware that Ben Marcus, the improbable author of this book, but better known as my former son, can pass off or structure my introduction in any way that he chooses: annotate, abridge, or excise my every comment. He will have the final cut of this so-called introduction to his family history, and I’ll not know the outcome unless he decides to share with me how he has savaged and defathered me for his own glory. He can obviously revise my identity to his own designs, change my words altogether, or simply discard them in place of statements he wishes I would make. I would put none of these distortions past him and will only caution the careful and fair-minded reader to be ever vigilant against his manipulations, to remember that he is a creature, if that, of inordinate bias and resentment, for reasons soon to be disclosed, undoubtedly intimidated by the truth only a father can offer. Considering that I fathered him with the utmost precision, I am sorry that it should be this way. I fully expect even this statement to be omitted, given how it might contradict the heroic role he will no doubt claim for himself, in which case it is only you, Ben, my jailer, who will read this. Please let a father say his part. You have done enough harm already.

A father naturally has much to say on the topic of his son. If he chooses not to meddle it is out of respect, or at least politeness toward this young “man” and his grievous errors. To show too much knowledge of my son’s undertaking is to crowd the space the boy must fill in his own time, however slow or errant he might be, however much he lurches into travesty or crushes the father’s own deeds with his actions. In such cases, the father, by intruding, obstructs the opportunity for discoveries that mark the basic stages of the boyhood trajectory, in which the son mimes a personhood worthy of the father’s own example. Because the son must learn to behave in a manner in keeping with the father, the father must be a shadow figure at best, a kind of detached bird who can circle and observe without interference, reserving assistance and withholding navigational strategy in order for the son to make a true gain toward the identity of his father, and not cheat into a role that is nearly impossible to attain, that took the father himself many decades to hone and perfect.

Indeed, a father is in no small way the first author of anything the son endeavors to write — is he not? — given the father’s cultivation of the little boy, his careful employment of language coaching during that time of youth when the so-called mind of his son was aching to be fed its daily words, and his generous delegation of major family writing tasks — when this country’s government hired the Marcus family to study the names of women — assigning the daily written labors to the son instead of hoarding them (as the father might or should have done) to himself. Not to mention an innovative father who allowed an all-vowel language nutrition to be used on his son in order to groom a new and beautiful brain in the boy, a so-called women’s brain.

When so viewed, a father can rightly see his own name, Michael Marcus, just above his son’s writing, instead of the name of his son. For if his son gathered food and carried it home, that food would become the property of the residing father, to dispense or destroy as he decided, to boil, bake, or bury. So it is with writing that the son might have undertaken and brought to the father for purposes of examination, correction, or criticism. The son is in all effects an agent of gain for the father, an employee who happens to share a genetic strategy, a facial style, and posture, though little else, apparently. What the son produces through his labor as a man in this world becomes the property of the father, to consume or discard as he likes, and even the son’s name — Benjamin, in this case (or Ben, as it has been diminished in the world at large, a baby sound more fitting to an animal, if that, a word indicating vast and irrevocable disappointments) — can be seen as one of the many stage names adopted by the father, to be borrowed by a person he has set into motion on his own behalf.

It is with sorrow, then, that this father should find such serious fault to Benjamin’s “work,” if such a generous word might be applied to his writing. I refer, of course, to the book you are holding or that (if you happen to have on hand an orator or nanny who reads you the day’s literature) is being recited to you. A father is here inclined to speak critically, and will do so, because of the countless errors and lapses of vision committed by his son, because of the quite un-Marcus-like writing and thinking the son has conducted. How a father wishes that such an intrusion were not necessary and only a quiet celebration were called for instead, an occasion for the Marcus family, such as it feebly remains, to believe once again in its power to exhibit frank statements about the world and its secret histories, a day for such remaining Marcus persons to gather in crew and sip good water together, to breathe in unison and perhaps sing the family ballad, a song I have not heard in some years, as pretty as Family Motivation Music ever was.

Yet such pleasure is not possible, given the travesty of fieldwork on the projects of women submitted here by my son, who is by no means a historian or even a reliable memoirist, entirely lacking in loyalty to the actual world. The very notion at this time of a family reunion is not only suspect but repulsive, and it will not be entertained by any sufficient father, let alone one such as myself, detained in a chamber by his supposed loved ones, surviving despite piped-in language and the occasional presentation of black bread, with strips of “fish” as thin as paper, and vials of highly suspicious behavior water, which I refuse to consume.

Not only are there inexactitudes of an appalling scale in this book, but events, comparisons, and analyses that threaten to fracture a reality that must in every way be preserved, or else forgotten with dignity. Let our lives at least disappear into nowhere, along with everything else that matters. Had my former son undertaken instead a book more in keeping with his abilities — about boats or cars or other craft that boys might need to care about during their period of fascination with motion — a father could be amused by the lovely diversion his son had produced (the world needs more books about the enjoyable objects of our time) and feel no need to offer full-scale rectifications, even if they were required, even had the son scored error after error on the subject, which would have certainly been possible, given his consistent capacity to take what is true and bury it deeper even than his own once-loved father — for his love for me did run at full steam — is buried alive and imprisoned in the field behind his house.

Yet, when the son’s topic has so trespassed on the deeds and designs of his former father and the corps of persons once commanded beneath him — to treat, for example, the moments of his demised sister, the implementation of a women’s television device to produce new strains of behavior in his person, a secret history of women in the American townships, a supplementary women’s chronology of lost events, the vital teachings of the figure known as the Female Jesus, the advent of a women’s currency devised by my “wife” to allow an exclusive economy to occur between women, and the ultimate so-called capture of the father by the person Jane Dark, together with her listeners and Silentists (I can still hear them shushing me) — the father feels deliberately antagonized and forced into a category of fatherhood heretofore vastly underutilized, that of the Refuser (a word which also means to process and eliminate garbage), who is meant at all costs first to enact a deep and lasting condemnation of the offender, in this case the figure posing as my ostensible son, and next to retract the manuscript, and all copies, to its likely destination, the incinerator, where the language upon it might be burned from the page and forever prevented from such a heinous arrangement again. Indeed, I herewith ask all readers, once they have absorbed and studied my remarks, and then transcribed them as an exemplary caution against the treason of children, to forgo whatever follows in this book, all of it certainly folly, I assure you, and burn the thing to cinders with the greatest haste. Bring a hard fire upon it, please, and see it all as an aberration prosecuted by a disease called “Ben Marcus.”

Any other father would agree that corrections in this life must always be sought. A son’s goal, if the son is operating at capacity, must be to extend the bodily range and mental power of his father, particularly, especially, if that father is interred in an underground compartment where language — I should not need to repeat it — is funneling down in an ever-menacing stream by a man hired to burst the father’s body with words. When that task is compromised, the father is expected to speak loudly and with force to ensure that a correction is registered. The task of being right is a task the father perfects over time. He rehearses various forms of error and attempts at every turn to incorporate them into his arsenal of actions, using the Behavior Bible if he must, seeking always to dilate the range of conduct available to a father and the persons he commands, remembering that morality (that is, what to do when another animal gets too close) is often regulated by figures unwilling to commit the necessary harms, the incidental bloodshed and trespasses that a mastery of daily life requires, never feeling sure that an act is wrong until it feels life-threatening to the father, which can only be signaled by the appearance of the father’s blood, or by levels of pain in the father that are unbearable, at which point a powerful verbal gesture — written, spoken, carved into the wall — is required to bring the matter to its correction. Even a muffled voice of a father, as if uttered from underground, for fuck’s sake, has more force than a clear and booming voice of the boy who is his son. The boy’s voice is anyway sheer ventriloquism on the part of the father, is it not, since I cocreated the awful lad? Yet sometimes that ventriloquism, if too accurate, must be adjusted in pitch and brought to a falser modulation, lest an audience mistake the dummy for an actual person with its own heart and head and hands, a boy rather like the father in matters of hair and skin, certainly, but deeply different at the level of mind, only an apprentice — and here a poor one, a stick figure, convincing only if viewed at a distance — to the range of thought the father himself has cultivated.

It should never be forgotten that Benjamin Marcus is being commanded at this and all moments by the person whose words you are reading.

The corrections I mention are not only required to assert dominion of the father, which here hardly needs doing — since even in prison I can choreograph realistic situations in the living world — but to protect my former son from the wake of disaster inevitably impending when such a degree of falsity and incompetence has been registered, as with the book at hand. He will not be forgiven his mistakes.

Given Ben’s statement, however, that the father only possesses a reproduction of what the son has written, indicating the presence of other copies out of the father’s range, in areas the father’s body is restricted from, the father must here be content with producing a disclaimer that will sufficiently mute all that follows of the son’s labor, a short introduction to the man acting as my son that might warn a careful reader— because you had better be careful — sufficiently clear of his despicable person.

While Benjamin is not entirely retarded in the conventional sense, a slowness and singularity to his behavior have been unfortunately observed, and other fathers and mothers might grimly relate to the lowering of standards that becomes necessary during such situations when the boy in an American family proves to be just slightly craftier than an imbecile. Yes, he can eat and laugh, play simple outdoor games, dress himself in the appropriate gear, and carry on a sensible conversation. Yet one is so eager to witness a son whose mind can operate at the highest levels, who can synthesize the confusion of a world clogged indiscriminately with trees, persons, and repetitive shelters into a regulated drama with causation, revelation, and redemption; a boy who can cut through the mystery of daily life with confidence and thus come to control the people in his range of sight and beyond, simply by outsmarting and outfighting the motherfuckers; yet in the case with the Benjamin figure, the apparition so similar to my son, no such control has in any way been evident. His complicity with mediocrity has been impressively well realized.

Nor do I mean to suggest that a retarded or simple man such as Ben can have no use in a society. I am in favor of a caste system in which the dull, the boring, the slow and sugar-minded American animals — often mistaken for “people” and likewise privileged — are given challenging tasks and rewarded with carefully controlled sexual intercourse, excellent bread and butter, and weekend meat. Ben is a strong lad and can reliably carry sacks of soil, sing a convincing love song, and show unmatched devotion to his “mother.” These tasks certainly can find their expression in the world at large without offending or hindering the more necessary living persons. Indeed, the front-runners of civilization need helpers such as Ben, and not just for sexual release, but also to fix roads, level trees, and dig position trenches for women’s-frequency hijacking.

But if you are in a position to look at this Ben Marcus, who I’m sure will do his best to get in your face at every opportunity and show himself to you (such is his ignorance of his own hellishly depressing appearance), then I invite you to do so, and not uncritically, being honest with yourselves about what you see, and what you don’t, allowing your deepest judgments to emerge. It will help to scan smartly away from his form on occasion to the more realistic objects in the landscape — the trees and houses and people that happen to fill your view, or the bookcases, lamps, and flowers — in order to appreciate just how wrongly Ben’s body juts out of nothingness into a space worthy of a more substantial creature or household object; considering all the while, if you are able, what a miracle it is that even routine self-examination on his part — while brushing his teeth or soaping his face before a mirror — has not yet led him to quietly end his own life down at the river, with a rope or gun or razor, and give everyone concerned a needed breather from the exhausting obligation of his existence.

Certainly you would, at the least (if you do not agree that he makes a good candidate for a respectably necessary suicide), have to then agree that he cuts a poor form — he is stooped and bald and sad, his gait is a slouching apology against motion, his pockets are empty, the poor fellow has lost his mother, and I would guess that no pretty creature has handled his penis in months. His body is not exactly the makings of a hero, and I warrant it emits much disagreeable waste.

Naturally, a son who is crippled or ill, weak and sad, or palsied with fear at the thought of life without his father— who may or may not have been brought to ground by a group that calls itself the Silentists — incites a degree of sympathy in the father. The father remembers those early moments of the Marcus life project, when Benjamin was just a small measure of flesh called a child — the size of his father’s hand, but in no way as interesting to look at — when he labored on palms and knees to ascend the ever-dashing body of his father, who moved through the fields with supremacy. At the time, Benjamin enjoyed seeking information within the father’s imposing beard, or his soundproof wig, which certainly must have appeared as a nest of treasures, within which something knowable might be discovered. He sought carriage now and again in a swing set built and anchored to the turf by the father, who stood behind the swing to ensure that it traversed an agreeable arc, containing the disastrous body of the son. Often the father strapped Ben into his seat and sent him “Around the World,” over the top bar of the swing, and over again, until Ben was panting fast and crazy in the eyes, a bit wobbly on his feet after he climbed back down to earth, but always sweetly smiling, trusting the man who ruled him even when the sensations of that rulership were not entirely agreeable or were beyond the boy’s comprehension.

The young Ben was a collector: flowers, buttons, stones, and any scrap of equipment that littered the compound. Everything small that he could remove from the world and bring to his parents’ attention. He carried his stuff in wagons and could thrill himself with the littlest achievements, often fancying himself a key figure in the important job of shuttling junk from here to there. It was a sobering but necessary task each time to remind the little fellow that he had not invented these special things — the buttons and stones and sticks, the disposable hearing cups and seared swatches of cotton — that all the world’s beauty existed before him, and did not require him for survival. He was just a person, and everything he thought and did had already been thought and done. Perhaps he should seek to discover something that wasn’t so obvious and abundant in nature, it was suggested. To say something new, to do something startling. That he has not proved himself capable of even a single original act, discovery, or statement is nearly as damning as his frequent weeping and his neurotically induced deafness.

And while my son’s illness, if such it is — the apparent onset of “motion fear” and his supposed deafness to certain words, as spoken by certain people — provides a partial excuse for his failure to come forth as a creature of distinction, a man who might soldier over every difficulty to slaughter his life opponents with great ferocity, either with weapons or through the sheer verbal power that runs deeply in his family (on his father’s side), he is, in fact, short of any kind of battle plan, lacks the coordination to even flee from a predator, and is weakly stocked with reproductive fire, given his inability to father very many effective persons during his enforced copulations with the Silent Mothers.

Let it not be said that this father is without an animal response to the son, in which warmth of the old-fashioned kind flows in the chest and a certain pity is forthcoming no matter what feeble gestures of life the Ben Marcus system manages to perform, even if the boy were to attempt to physically beat the father, a type of aggression the father is completely prepared for, by the way, no matter how dark it is in here, or how much advantage a creature has who can see his own goddamned hands. The father would beat down the son’s attack, naturally, wound him just enough to reaffirm the boy’s all-encompassing weakness and widespread failure, and then hold his injured body and attempt a soothing litany of comfort words. I am sure it is what he wants, and it is not beyond me to talk soft. I can make a creature weep and will do it if I see the need, if it leads to a situation I might require within my larger strategy. I have said things to this boy that, if heard by an outsider, would fairly indicate a degree of affection being transmitted. It could easily be understood as love: “There there, little Ben.” “Egghead.” “Bald Beauty.” “Sugar Cheeks.” “It’s okay, Sweetbread.” “Just breathe.” “Tiny Shark.” “Little Tiny Shark.” “Skin Fish.” All little nicknames that produce an unreasonable amount of pleasure in his person, cause him to curl up and grin and gaze at the sky.

Oh no, I admit it, the father is truly sympathetic to weakness, frailty, and lost hope in a son, should it be exhibited, particularly when the son has been regularly tormented in the worst way by an animal, indeed brought to submission by a dog, and used for unbearable purposes by a group proposing an end to all motion. Allowances are made for every kind of error. Nor is it that a father wishes to make a case, either legal or emotional, against his son (which is not to say that a good case could not be made, because it certainly could), or wishes that his son would stay his hand at attempting to narrate events he cannot possibly grasp, whether or not they happened to him, or concepts that, when presented without the appropriate theory and context, such as the Weather Museum, for Christ’s sake, the Clay Head of Jesus, and the Women’s Frequency of Sound, appear ridiculous and untrue, and will be believed by no one, dumb ass. A father is pleased anytime a son can regulate his busily superficial mind for the time required to command a book’s worth of language to the page. Such a feat is particularly notable, given the aforementioned mental challenges of the son, when it can barely be expected that the son remember to bring potatoes to the underground area where his father waits to be fed. When his only task is to bring a potato to his goddamned father, or to let new air into his father’s area, where the old air has already been used, because there is a living man down here! or to walk his father up above when his father has gone months, motherfucker, without seeing a house, a stick, a bird, a window, a road, the key objects of our time, when his father has no new air to clean his eyes and rid his skin of the language fluid poured in by the man with the tube, who speaks his Sentences of Menace, trying to burst the father’s body with words. Let a man wash himself, and stride in the open air, for fuck’s sake! Given his systematic incompetence and neglect of the one person he was born to love, how can a single word from Ben Marcus’s rotten, filthy heart be trusted?

Granted, I love my son dearly. He has been a sweet boy at times (I can picture his long head sailing through the air like a ball), and rather touching to observe, despite his failures. He is cute, with his wet red mouth, and it would no doubt be interesting to dress him in a costume to entertain the members of a picnic, to inflate balloons and dazzle the children, perhaps, or to pretend he was a horse or some other simpler creature of this world.

I love what keeps me alive, and my son is an extension of my body, a prosthesis, you understand, that I can dispatch on my behalf to prowl my former house, to collect objects, or witness conditions that might prove to be a revelation upon examination. A father must continually be in a state of study, should he not? I care for this fellow because he is an apparatus that can investigate areas my own local body can no longer achieve. In that sense, my son is the part of myself that still operates at large. And although physical harm to his body does not technically hurt me, if his body were prevented from its task in the greater world, if he were finally captured by the authorities (that is, if personal failure and disappointment were policed and punished by law), my own body would eventually suffer because its special flesh satellite had been severed. There is also a small chance that I might starve without him.

You might think that ditto is true for your son, that all of the above applies in spades to whatever awful creature you fucked for and birthed into the Ohio pasture to grow into some kind of person who would only live to fail repeatedly before your eyes, to wither, no matter how you watered him. Nothing could be worse than to watch one’s own bodily product fail to learn to swim, I’m sure, or smash his teeth on the rung of a ladder and be forever a kind but ugly man.

But you cannot share my grief unless your son is also a shandy, but not the kind of shandy who crouches over men’s hips to host the probing of their genitals, but rather one who is supplicated to the dog of the house — you heard me — the quietly elegant creature on all fours who seeks and finds dominion over your son with hygienic regularity, who tracks him down outside in the yard or inside in the den to play horsey, a dog and a man playing horse, giddyap and let’s go at it, this creature all over your son, who is too scared, or too secretly pleased, to assert his evolutionary supremacy and beat back the amorous advance, until his shoulders are calloused from the paws of a dog and he practically wears an apron for the animal, so total is his submission.

There is then a point when a father says so long, farewell, good-bye to a boy who has traversed so far from actions that might be considered human that he is only the bitch of a beast who eats out of a bowl, a kind of whore to a four-legged “man” that has him in every room of the house and in the field or at the pond and even on the flannel pillow in the kennel. The father becomes deprived of the child; he enters a state of child minus and is in need of a new brood.

It is therefore asked that those examining this written artifact, or listening to its delivery, defer to the voice of this father, the overfather, the father of fathers. If confusion results in such a pursuit — if too many fathers present themselves as figures of authority seeking to exercise power upon your person, to caress or handle you, to dictate the dangers of the day, or to weep just when you doubted their humanity — let it be remembered that the father who commands your attention at this very moment should be given dominion over whatever local father happens to obtain in your vicinity, even if that local father appears familiar and kind, the lover of your mother, warm, a dispenser of money, and fatherlike in other comforting ways. Even if he is the man who appears to be posing in those old photographs, holding an early version of you in his arms and possibly kissing your head. If a picture of him now makes your chest come aglow, if speculation or remembrance of his death causes empty black alarm — he is at all costs to be refused, please, dismissed and forgotten. You are to consider him a decoy father sent to test your fealty while your real father waits trapped in a hole, fathering you from afar. This is not solely because I am a superior figure to your local father, or because I could reduce your local father to a mess of apologies and contradictions if I were allowed to occupy the same room as he does, to interrogate or debate him on the complications, the difficulty, the serious flaw to the life project. Nor is it because I am greater in physical prowess than your local father, could throw him in a pit or storm-fist his body to sleep, beat him in a foot-race or humiliate him at chess, outwit him in any conversation about a machine or the building of a house or the theory and use of every tool in his probably inferior tool chest. Nor indeed is it solely because I could twist your local father’s arm up his back, then turn him to face you so you could see his agony as he admits that, no, he doesn’t love you and how, if it came down to it, he would save himself, would sacrifice you to whatever threat came along, a dog, an intruder, a flood — you’re on your own! — because he doesn’t want to die either, this man masquerading as your father, the Halloween version, whom I am more than happy to unmask, the fraud.

And this is where you must ultimately prefer me to any so-called father you may have known before.

Your local father is afraid of everything, is only a baby, a whimpering infant who wants his parents, too, needs to be comforted, soothed, supported, and stroked until he sleeps. His secret is that he wishes it would all go away. You in particular; you are only a horrible responsibility made of flesh. Be gone, too, the world and everything big or little inside it, be forever gone, because it is terribly hard to be him, and no one has any idea how hard it is just to stay alive, to breathe freely, to walk along the road without collapsing in fear and fatigue. To just hide and sleep under a blanket where no one can find him, particularly not you, the creature he created, who now expects his holy everlasting love and will not be gone or ever, ever leave him the hell alone.

I vouchsafe that you will not encounter these problems with me.

You’ll note that when a man is rendered to an underground compartment, such as the case with myself, he becomes, among other things, immune to category, beyond a single family, a supervisor of the world he left behind. Such a one is the ideal father. He is a man without weather, upon whom weather cannot act. Do not underestimate this. Not rained upon. Not gusted over, or snowed on, or blown over, or burned by the sun, hidden in fog, lost at sea, killed at work, crushed in a crowd, broken in a fall off a bridge, wounded by the words of his wife, smashed with a hammer, washed away in a flood, or ever struck by sticks flying loose in a storm. Everything that has ever happened above ground has been hellaciously awful. There has been no event under the sun that has not killed people. And none of it can touch him. He is outside of circumstance. He wears a shell of earth on him. He is pure mind. Father mind.

Throughout history, all important Command Centers— where key strategies have been decided and the Lost People of this world have been instructed through the haze — all of these Command Centers have existed underground, below the flow of the projectiles that reduce every other creature under the light into such shivering wrecks in need of protection. If your local father is not at the Command Center, for I do not see anyone else here with me—if he is sleeping, or tending the yard, or laughing and splashing in a pool — then I ask you how he can be an effective ruler. Is it not true that he has vacated his throne, and is now simply a boy who would cry like a child as soon as he saw me walking toward him? The minute I approached to take charge of the situation, your so-called father would collapse and fold into my arms with tears of relief and become simply one more of my children—There there— making him only a brother to you, an older brother who briefly thought he knew something and could lead the way.

But Father is home now and your older brother can stop pretending.

You must trust me and love me and let me lead you free of sorrow and small thoughts, little ones, because God of God Almighty I’m the father of fathers, who knows and thinks and feels so that you don’t have to. And you — if you are listening and at all alive and in need, if it hurts and you are scared, and every day is increasingly an impossible prospect — you are my son, my daughter, my little one, all grown-up, so sweet, so tall, a little bitty thing, aren’t you, throbbing and new to the hot sun that spotlights your approach over this earth, a joy to behold, my darling creatures crawling so intently over the soil, homing in on the voice flowing out of the hole and through the sticks and shrubs of Ohio and America into your hearts. A river of sound from the mouth of your father. Swim into me and all will be well.

You have always known that I am him, the one to father you home.

Let it happen. Say good-bye to the old. Forget Ben Marcus and his world of lies. I am not the father of such a one, but I am yours, and yours, and yours. Come to me. We’re family. There there. All will forever be all right.

Your father,

Michael Marcus