Notable American Women

Shushing the Father

I DO NOT RECALL THAT Pal ever resorted to words. Mostly, he just ran and jumped and ate the brown behavior cakes, much like I did, but better and harder. When Pal swam in the learning pond, he dog-paddled with his head up and his tongue hanging from his mouth, as though he had shouted up a thick, dark syrup that froze between his lips.

Pal was a black friend and he growled deeper than an animal. When I growled like him, we made a booming forest sound, enough to bother the women into throwing their listening cloth at us. His hair was one length all over his body, clusters of fine needles on my skin that set me shivering and needing to pee. I had to run to the shrubs and squeeze at myself in private until the terrible itchiness was gone. I wanted to tear him apart to see what exactly he made me feel — to put pieces of him on a table and understand his insides. His hard black head was mostly all I ever saw, a spot of nothing that I wanted to follow. Whatever I couldn’t grab and hold and keep was Pal. He was the only thing that wasn’t mine, which made me as angry at him as if he were my brother.

I first met him in the arms of the great Jane Dark, who appeared at our house, to a black-carpet reception, along with her army of listening assistants: full-sized girls with stethoscopes and notebooks, wearing streamlined beige hearing suits. The girls stood outside our house that day and looked at our street in grim fascination, as though they had read somewhere it would soon be destroyed. From my window, I watched them, and they never flinched. Our big fake white house could hardly withstand so much staring; it did nothing but die in place as they stood there. Each girl looked almost the same. Sharp hair in a chunk of bang just over her eyes, a body buried under cloth, white shoes shining against the soil like spilled paint. An embarrassing amount of sunlight glowed on the cups the girls all held in their white-gloved hands. It was enough to blind someone who might be trying to figure out who they were.

Later into Dark’s residency, the girls performed fine outdoor spectacles that reminded us how little we had done in our yard. You see someone using your own house better than you’ve ever used it, and you go to your room and close the door. Sometimes the girls linked their arms in a human chain on the lawn while Dark worked her behavior removals inside, rendering my mother a perfectly quiet American citizen, teaching her the new silence. The girls would form a line and slice through the air like the arm of a carnival ride. A heavyset young lady anchored the unit, while an eggy little handful of a girl flew in the windy end position. If she lifted high enough on the swinging limb of bodies, she twirled her rope and created vocalizations up there in the air, grabbing leaves and singing, often catching scratches about her face from tree branches that didn’t much abide her kind of flight. Sometimes she zoomed by my window and I would reach out and try to touch her, like sticking my fingers into a fan. At night, I could hear the hum of bodies whipping through the air as the girls waited outside for instructions from Dark.

Except Dark did not speak at night because the darkness lowered her voice so much, it frightened her women. She slept in a sentry harness outside my mother’s bedroom door, her hands dangling like roots, wrapped in the translucent linen that was starting to fill our house, baffling every sound-making thing until nothing more than the smallest whimpers could escape from it. She rested and kept watch. Even sleeping, she muted our house with her long, soft body, a silence that lasted well into the morning.

Ms. Dark came into our house like an animal who owned something. She walked upright and carried a scary cloth. When she approached some of our furniture or pottery— including old bowls my sister had made, which held her private smelling salts — Dark held the cloth to her mouth, swallowing and coughing at once in a gesture of inventory. For each piece of our property, she raised the cloth to her lips and worked her mouth into it, as though it were a radio she could talk to. I tried to hide from her, but her girls set up so many picks and body barriers that she found me at once and the cloth rose again to her mouth — a dirty white linen, like a rag from my father’s shed. All I could see of her face were her flat eyes, puddles of oily color in her head. My mother accompanied her, held the hem of her shirt, and whispered a mouth-straining message into Dark’s hood that sounded like the end of a sick animal’s breath. I felt sorry for my mother, whose neck wrinkled up in back like an old man’s face. From behind, she looked like someone else’s father. I had not heard her whisper before, and it sounded as though she might be in trouble, wheezing at the high, desperate end of her breath, where words sound like a failing engine. Dark stuffed the cloth between her lips as she listened, and for a moment it sounded as though she were sobbing, because a heaving arose from within the hood, a stuttering intake of breath seizing her shoulders as if she were feeding from her hands. But when the cloth finally revealed her face and she moved once again among our furnishings, Dark’s mouth was dry and bloodless, rimmed with a powdery saliva, and she herself seemed as much without feeling as anyone ever had been in our house.

I stood still as the retinue continued to survey the objects of our home. Two girls slid toward me and pinned a small tag to my pajama top. Their fingers were buttery on my neck and their hair scratched at me like wire. The tag was fastened just under my chin, and I had to scrunch up to see the long code embedded on it, a set of numbers and letters spelling nothing I had read before. I touched the symbols, and they made more sense under my fingers, but before I could figure out a message, my hand was slapped away. Dark lowered her arms as she passed me, and for a second I could smell the cloth go by my face.

The reception carried on in this manner for far too long. When Dark arrived at a window, she took slow postures there in the light — reducing herself so much in space that another woman could have been tarped around her — and we were all supposed to wait there as though we were looking at a painting that might suddenly prove interesting. My mother crouched nearby and squinted at Dark. She tried the postures that Dark had struck, but my mother was too tall and she kept losing her balance, giggling loudly as she toppled, exaggerating her embarrassment, upon which Dark was polite enough not to remark. Some of the assistants stood by my mother and braced her from falling over. I had not seen her allow herself to be handled so freely before. People were actually touching my mother. Other girls made writing gestures in their notebooks, their hands dipping and looping into the paper as if they were sewing up someone’s body. I did not need to stand like a fragile old lady while people massaged my arms and held me upright, but standing upright at all seemed difficult in that company, as the women around me did everything but that: crouching, lunging, going airless in their bodies as they draped themselves like pelts over our furniture. Standing made me feel too tall, in charge of something. I thought I should issue a command or make a ruling, but I could only look at one thing, at the man they had brought with them, who hadn’t hit the floor yet, who was too perfect for me to see, who would not look at me at all.

Pal was carried from room to room that day because Ms. Dark would not let him walk the floors on his own. “A bomb with a heart,” she called him. When his heart stopped, he would go off and there would be a sad time of thunder, with thunder so slow that people would collapse and houses would take great fractures in their sides, with people pouring from the seams, running for their lives. Every time she said “thunder,” she squinted at me, filtering the word toward me with her eyes until I forgot what it meant. She said “thunder” as if it were my name. She said it so much in the way I would imagine my mother saying it, if my mother talked and this were the only word she was allowed to say, a word that would have to stand for everything she felt, that I wanted to run out of the house and dive deep into the learning pond, until I had reached the cold, dark bottom. The girls around her nodded in agreement. I didn’t like how words sounded on her face: frozen bits of her body she was retching up. We had to be very careful, Dark said; we had to keep Pal alive no matter what. His dying would pull the plug on something terrible. She held Pal in front of her, her white shirt blocked by a great spot of black water in the shape of something living. He had legs that were hard and long and made me hungry. I wanted to be held against somebody so that I looked like that: like nothing, like a hole into nowhere, like a piece of sleep. Jane Dark was someone to disappear against. The whole time she carried him, Pal kept his eyes closed, as though a switch had to be flipped for him to wake up and look around. I moved to the stairs and watched, concentrating my whole head at him to see if he would open his eyes, but Pal slept hard against Jane Dark, with a wet mouth. Nothing I could do in that house full of quiet people would wake him up.

I wandered upstairs. All of these old people in my house made it hard for me to breathe. They were too soft. Somebody might break. No one was singing and there were no sandwiches.

In my room, I looked out the window to see where my father might be hiding. A visit from so many people was bound to frighten him off. He would have run to the shed. He would be peeking from behind a tree. Soon we would hear his scared little song.

The day was pale enough to reveal a finality of mountains in the distance, and everything looked as it ever did: shrubs buried softly in a soil as loose as black rice, the learning pond set too low to the ground, birds flying poorly and without purpose, the sun blocked by a cloud the shape of our house. Above the furnace, a sharp string of behavior smoke was breaking up as it floated over the learning pond. A convoy of small blue trucks glowed on our street as if they were see-through— Dark’s vehicles parked in neat formation. A flock of birds must have pierced through a small opening in one of them, because a storm of sharp black bits whirled within, the birds as fast and small as bees in a jar.

Below me on the grass in front of the house, a small man was pinned on his back by a circle of girls. My father did not look as disheveled as he should have, considering what it must have taken for the girls to wrestle him down. It would have been just like him to surrender to their grasp too easily, to play along until he was their prisoner, happy to have so many young women minding after him. All he ever wanted was to be an accomplice in his own capture. He must have sat down with pleasure when they set upon him. He must have exaggerated his alarm when they finally pinned him down.

If I held my breath, I could zoom my sight in right up close to his simple face, to a proximity no son should be allowed, and I quickly saw much too much of my father, an amount of his person I didn’t think possible, which made me scared and disappointed by him at the same time. He should not be viewable so close-up, I thought. He should not be that dismissible. The more I held my breath, the more I felt I could leave my room through the window and swoop down through the circle of girls right up against my father’s red, struggling face, not stopping there, but entering my father at his hard red mouth and plunging directly to the underside of his face, where I could look back out from his head at a ring of girls’ faces encircling a cakelike round of sky, and, far beyond that, see the tiny face of a boy framed in glass, watching me as if it were my turn to be alive. I did not much want to be inside my father’s face this way, restrained by children, while my son watched me from his window. No matter how hard I tried, I only noticed what was wrong: the clear flag we had raised alongside the spire on the roof, the unfinished shed where my learning was supposed to happen when Mother wasn’t home, and then the learning pond itself, which from my father’s point of view looked like an unpromising little puddle and nothing more. The water was muddy and slow and dead. A person might float on that water and never change. He might drink it and still remain himself for the rest of his life.

I breathed. I blinked. I turned my head and exhaled in hard, short bursts until I had shaken my father’s perspective. My sight was thin and clean and my own again. When I returned to the window, the picture was foggy and my father was just another man brought to ground by an efficient team of girls, so many of them that he didn’t have a chance. He wrestled vaguely against them on the grass, but they kept their feet on him and made clapping gestures in front of their chests. Something about the way the girls clapped seemed to gather too many birds into their midst, a cluster of black objects that fell heavily to the grass. The claps were short and hard, not at all like music; more like a code of command. The birds gathered nearby, and some of them fell to their backs and seemed to rest there, their brittle legs twitching each time the girls changed the cadence of their clapping. None of it seemed to have anything to do with my father.

I cranked the window closed and took off my clothes. It was time to hold my breath and practice fainting. There were too many wrong, new things in the day, and I had to drop away into the sweet brown light of a good four-minute faint, enough to make the day’s events seem like someone else’s life, happening in a smaller and softer house a good distance down the road from here.

Before I could clear a blackout area for myself — roll out the emotion rug, remove all sharp objects within the safety diameter — I heard footsteps coming slow and heavy down the hallway, someone’s body drumming at me. I was not used to visitors. This was the sound of someone making an exciting mistake. The steps were exaggerated, heavy and sarcastic, by someone who must have thought that walking itself was a joke, to be parodied if done at all. Thundering toward me now, the little man. I knew that I would not be fainting for some time. This would be a good deal better than that. My door trembled with his approach. I turned and waited, trying my best to relax my face.

There’s probably no other way to describe what Pal did than to say that he found me out with his mouth, that he needed to know something, and the answer was somewhere on my person.

He ran upstairs that first day, free of Dark’s arms, and he was yelling in some other language as he jumped up on my bed, a planet of fur and squished eyes, speaking his funny one-syllables, barking the names of people I didn’t know, as if he were only a dog.

I couldn’t understand what he was saying, but I wanted to do something just as impossible, to show him I wasn’t content with anything I could actually be capable of doing — walk the ceiling and speak a new language to my friend, or set fire to my own hands and run circles in the room, but my mouth was built only to apologize and complain. I swayed on my feet as he darted around me. I was afraid I would fall over and go to sleep and then wake up to find him gone, which would mean I’d have to run hard into a wall until I forgot about him. My head would need considerable battering to leak out the sense of this new, amazing man. The helmet would be required, and great gulps of the forgetting water, and a mouth packed with seeds while I slept. His energy was big and I had no part of it. I felt threatened by his happiness. I was too tired, and he was too fast to look at. Being with him was like being alone underwater — everything was slow; nothing counted; I could not be harmed; I would feel dry and cold when I resurfaced. No matter what was happening as his body blurred around me, I worried I might forget it all and have to be myself again, without ever having seen him. There was nothing for me to do but notice him as hard as I could, to notice him, to notice him, to notice him until I did not know what it was to even try to look at somebody without collapsing with exhaustion.

My pajamas were on the hook because I had the window closed and the wind was turned on high out in the world, making my room feel under attack, a bunker keeping the hard sound out. I kept twisting and the wind only got louder, until it was like getting breathed on so hard, it would make me older, with fast air that would turn me into my father. When Pal climbed on and found me with his mouth, I just couldn’t stop laughing, but it was a laugh like an allergy, coming out too hard and strong and choking me, until I lost my breath and went down into the twisted sheets. Pal was part of my body now, but I felt even lighter. I had taken on a passenger, or he had taken on me. Together we were something less, which felt like such a relief, to not be ourselves for a while. I did not know where the rest of me had gone. We could creep from the room without sound. We could casually go to our graves. He would be my camouflage. I rolled over and silently laughed into the pillow, and Pal just sat on my bed on his hands and knees and he drove his mouth into me all day, telling a joke without words, one that tickled and hurt and never quite finished. He kept finding me out until he had solved me, and I was no more than a spill of water on my bed, a leak, soaking the sheets. I was only a bit of math for him to do, and then he had done me, and I was over, solved, finished. I had been answered.

I didn’t start mouthing back until I was older. Jane Dark had moved in and set up her program — a great gymnasium of ladies laboring to be silent — so Pal came to live with us full-time. Father turned scarce, restricted to a shouting position some distance into the field. He raised a fist and yelled, and sometimes he threw a small wooden lance at the house, to little effect. I could imagine small birds breaking against the shutters. Pal and I spent our days in great schemes and chases. Pal would sit back with his legs up and yell at me, but I never knew what he meant. We wrote no notes. To make him stop yelling, I’d put my head down and charge like a bull into the wall. Sometimes I charged so hard, I couldn’t stand back up. Pal yelled louder. We yelled at each other and I tried to learn his language. I would take off my pajamas and play bomber with him, and Pal would calm down for a while, his face bristled and distant, breathing hard, as if it were a language of its own that I should study. I listened to his breath and heard foreign words an old man might say. Then I could approach him and he would pretend not to notice. I could make his breath go steady and slow, until there were no words in it, as if I were washing the air that came out of his mouth, polishing it into my own private wind, until it was a word so pure, it sounded like nothing at all. We would run down near the fainting tanks and sometimes we would play dead for whole afternoons, sprawled next to each other in the grass as if we had been killed far above and had just landed dead like that. When Pal played dead, he invited blackflies around his person, and they would commence to circle and dive-bomb at him. I could hear the whining pitch of their flight. Then he was all of a sudden up fast and running, the flies disturbed from their meal, Pal perfectly happy to have fooled them. I did not much care to stand up after playing dead. My body refused to work. The grass down there was so clean and cold and sharp — I felt plugged in to all those thin green wires. It was the best way to die. When I finally pulled myself up to walk home, all those wires were severed and I operated without power, trying to smile at Pal with my broken, run-down face, which kept slipping down my chest, begging me lower. Trying not to sink back down into the soft shore of the pond, where my face could stay buried.

When I went downstairs the day of Pal’s first visit, my mother said I should wash my face, but she didn’t wait for me to do it. She was quickly on me with a sponge, roughhousing my cheeks, using the sandy side all over my head, until it chafed and strawberried. She showed me notes she must have scribbled while I was upstairs with Pal, admonishments of one kind or another. I was in for corrections. There would be new learning water to drink, new behavior flash cards, and gymnastics against emotion. An itinerary was written out for me with early rising times, and cleaning duty at the fainting tank. The ladies in the room applauded my mother, quietly patting their knees as they crouched like skiers, and my mother just scrubbed me harder, as if she were acting in a play that required her to do this. I thought we were all watching ourselves being serious. I made a serious face and tried to look tired. I held my breath until my vision clouded and I felt older. She showed special vigor on that part of my head that would have had hair on it had I been more like other boys, buffing the very top of me. Some of the girls in the kitchen laughed, imitating me getting scrubbed up. They squinched their faces and dodged about the room, pretending to fend off the sponge. To everything I did, they invented a dance, so that even when I tried not to move, they exaggerated my stillness and strutted like stifflimbed robots. The smallest girls in the background simply hissed through tiny perforations they made between their fingers, filling the kitchen with a young, female wind that was sharp on my skin. I thought my bones might slowly break. It was like being held by a large hand, choked by air that had formed a corset around me.

By the end of this public washing, I no longer had any of Pal on me, but I didn’t need to; my heart was flushed and fast and I could still feel him in the fat wall of my chest, where I had decided to save my day with him, where he pulsed in me. My mother released her sponge to a group of girls, who quickly bagged it and marked the bag with code. The sponge was brought over to Jane Dark, who slipped it into her cloak and coughed.

They led me to the table. Dark wore a burlap hood and was muttering something. I felt happy; my face was clean; my vision had doubled, tripled, so I could see deep inside everyone, even all of the emotion removers, who were stone-faced and dead-looking, who had wept into cloth and laughed or raged into their hard swatches of linen that they wore in bracelets over their wrists. I could see inside Ms. Dark’s hood and through her face and I could watch the tiny women struggling to operate this great lady’s head, even though it was only blood and flesh like the rest of us, even though I only wished her design were something anyone could determine.

Dark took me on her lap, which was the first lap that I had been on. It felt designed for my own body, a seat only I could fit in. I rocked in it and it held me in a perfect mold, like a great warm palm. Mother looked on and turned her hand to some notes. She mimed a smile at me, but her face collapsed too quickly and I wasn’t fooled. I still could not keep myself from smiling back at her, even though I had been told not to, covering my teeth with my hands. She would not hold my stare.

To everything I tried to say, Dark shushed me. I wanted to ask her about Pal, but she put a finger to her lips. When I mentioned that Father was outside, the whole room shushed me at once, the sound of a faucet turned on full. Dark held me closer and squeezed my torso, kneading my ribs and belly as if it were a dough, until I started to huff, just because it felt new so deep in my belly, especially when she held me like that. She placed her hand on me and I shushed the room in a loud expulsion. Little girls gathered near me and helped squeeze at my midsection until the shushing came from way down in my stomach, a silencing hiss I had not heard myself make before, loud enough to fill the room. The women all smiled and seemed shy. I shushed hard and long, with my eyes squinched tight, until my face felt swollen, as though a tourniquet were constricting my neck, and then the shushing seemed to release from my mouth and act on its own, and I could breathe quite separate from it and just listen to the hiss. It was so soothing that I was afraid for the kitchen to be quiet again. The quiet might hurt, without the shush filling the air like a great pillow. The quiet might tear something open.

We were all shushing, until it was a slow, steady hiss as plain as traffic. There had never been so much wind in that room, but no one was dying. My mother’s smile almost seemed real. She looked like me, and I wanted to remember her. I tried to move toward her, but Dark held me close on her lap, digging her fingers into my hip creases so that I could only reach with my arms, and as I did so, my mother tilted away just slightly, as if a bug were too near her face.

Everyone laughed when my father came into the kitchen, a synchronized laughter that seemed planned, breaking up the steady hissing with hiccups of silence, so that laughing seemed like a fast argument between silence and hissing. My father’s body looked small in the room. He was one of those fathers who died in a crowd. He tried to laugh and return the smile of these women he had never seen, but his face wasn’t in it; it could not follow the command. I saw it slide down into a plain, father’s face, a father who has a question or who is just resting his face in between times that mean something. The laughing smothered him, until he cast his head down at his feet to hide it, but his eyes stayed looking up at us, right under his eyebrows.

He was all messed about and dirty, rolled in soil. His shirt was torn and he had gotten too much sun on the sillier part of his face, as if he had fallen asleep curled up. What little hair he had was flattened and side-mounted up his face.

The women kept laughing, and Dark held me tighter. I pushed down into her lap and felt something poking at me. I looked at my mother. Her pencil was poised, but she was not writing. She was an accurate statue of a mother: so much detail, as if someone had made her. Her face was set in its control position.

My father tried my name out in the air, but the women would not stop laughing at him.

“Let’s go now, Ben,” he said. “Come on out here with me for a minute.”

He shifted in the doorway, cheating his body out of the room, hinting how I should follow him. I could barely hear him over the laughter, but I saw him fading from the room, and it pulled on me.

Someone pushed my own hand toward my mouth. My father did not look at the women, only at me, and I saw his little mouth practicing my name so he wouldn’t forget it, his eyes making no argument at all for anything. I wished my name were bigger and longer and louder in the room, so that my father would have something more important to say. Anyone could say a name like mine and nothing would change. As I tried to scoot off Dark’s lap and go to him, she squeezed me harder, until it came from somewhere deep in my legs, a dry engine sound like rushing water. The laughing stopped, and it was only me in the room, the women squeezing my belly, one of my own fingers held up over my lips in the gesture of silence. The shushing posture. A universal signal for quiet. Directed at him in the doorway.

I looked right at my father and they squeezed me hard, triggering my hiss from deep inside me.

Nothing sounded. I bloated harder in my face, resisting their squeezing. The room was failing from sight.

“Ben?” my father asked again, and the word sounded like an apology a man might make before he died.

And that’s when I could no longer hold the sound in. It poured out of my body hard and solid as water, a shushing that washed over my father and sank him.

There was no longer room for my father in that company— the room was allergic to his body and he would not be lasting long there. The women looked pleased by the suspense. My mother was suppressing a smile, her hand on her mouth, teeth shining through her fingers. Everyone regarded my father’s little body faltering at the doorway as he took it in, until he backed out of there with small, chipped steps, looking down as he went.

Several of the smallest girls raced one another, giggling, to be the first to shut the door after him.

It was to be my father’s last appearance in the house.

There was no thunder when Pal finally died. I had already forgotten about him. The sky did not look capable: too quiet, too weak, too far away to make any kind of sound we could hear. I found Pal in my room, crumpled in the corner like laundry. The toppled water jar against his mouth did not reflect any breath. Nor did my quick, hard kicks yield any flinches from his form. I touched his lips with some early sweet water he and I had made together, but his mouth was dry and finished. I poured a trickle of the forgetting water on his dry little head. Maybe he had died of memory. Maybe his feelings had caused an inner bursting. Maybe he had died of our house.

He was easy to pack in a bag. Just a bony container of hair. I stuffed him in and hauled him out of there, clomping down the stairs and limping into the field, glad to have so much to carry and somewhere to go, an errand elsewhere.

I exaggerated Pal’s weight by plunging deep in my steps and miming gestures of great strain. I did the hernia walk. I panted, stopped, scanned the horizon, rubbed my muscles as if they ached. Several women were about their tasks, applying stethoscopes to the soil, but it was only Jane Dark who saw me lugging my product, Pal’s bones jabbing through the bag at my back. I had not seen her with Pal for some time. Much was different from the words she had used. If Pal was a bomb, he was now defused. You killed my man, I thought. He died alone. You should die by thunder. You should be killed in a loud sky. Let your house break in half and the people inside it be pulled into the sky. Let you faint at night. Let your feelings drown you. Let my father return from the earth to hurt you with sound. She flipped down the goggles from her helmet and crouched in my direction, but if she guessed what I had in my bag, she showed no interest at all. Let you drive off in your truck. Let you never have come.

I left the compound, tracking through dried grass until there was no more growth on the earth at all, just water, me, and Pal.

The pond was long and clean that day. Water ran in patchy sheets occasionally scored by wind. I could see just enough of my house in the distance, a shelter looking more like a sharp hole someone had torn in the horizon, pulsing with light, as if it might break open. For a moment, I forgot what was in the bag. It could have been anything, and I could simply have been a man that day visiting a thin stretch of water visible from his house. I had come a distance to do a job. That almost seemed to be enough. I had a bag of something, and would be returning home without it. But when I touched the hard bones, and felt the flat, plain face that once fit perfectly against the curve in my back, I knew whom I carried and what I had come to do.

No ceremony was necessary, no small words. I stepped up to the waterline and set the bag twirling over my head until its speed was sufficient to launch it well away from me over the pond. But I did not release it. The bag hummed in my hands until my arms were pulled taut, and I clutched it harder as the speed increased, feeling it drag my weight off the ground. I was not ready to let it go. I wanted true flight for this bag, not just an adequate throw, enough to send Pal deep into the water, plunging past the easy top layers into the true deepness, where a bolt of cold ocean water feeds the pond from below, where even a dead person might have his bones sucked through the backwash and out into the great wide ocean beyond, little bullets sent to sea. Pal deserved something more, even if I wasn’t the person to give it to him. But I would try for him as if it were me in the bag, looking out through the mesh holes at the spinning world, cycling through trees and sand and water and sky as I flew, until the water hit me like a wall and I could take a final break from the labor of breathing.

I twirled yet harder, until my arms ached, and then finally let my hands go, listening to the wind rip against the bag as it flew over the learning pond, where I had never buried anyone before. Pal could have been anybody up in the air, launched over the pond. My first body. My first throwing of a dead friend. I wished I were at my own window watching it all so I could remember it better, so that I could instantly faint it deep into my body. I would try to breathe less on my return home. I would try to swallow the feeling in my chest until it glowed in my bones.

The bag did not fly for long, considering what some birds do. But by the time the short, harsh splash had sounded, as plain as an old man coughing, I had turned my back on the pond and was already setting out for home.

My father would not be there. No one resembling a mother would be there. And now Pal would not be there. There would be people answering to names they did not deserve. It would hurt to say their names. I would head upstairs and crack the seal on a jar of tomorrow’s water, next week’s water, next year’s thin, sweet water — going as far ahead into the future as I could, until the water was barely there, clear and weak and airy — and I would commence a fine, hard drinking spell, until this whole day, and the days before it, and then the people in those days and myself entirely, and my hard, dead name turned into a slick wire that pulled farther and farther away from me, slipping finally from view as I filled myself, as I took in enough water to make myself forever new to the small world that held me.

Blueprint

I AM PROBABLY BEN MARCUS. I might be a person. There’s a chance I lived on a farm meant to muffle the loud bodies of this world, a sweet Ohio locale called Home, where our nation’s women angled toward a new behavior, a so-called Final Jane. We could have had special water there, a behavior television, a third frequency, after AM and FM, for women’s messaging, for women to steal the air and stuff it with their own private code.

Most likely I am still alive, suffering from a heart, unsatisfiable hands, legs that walk away. I may be the son of a woman who chooses not to move, refuses to speak. My father could be interred in a hole — the American word for his condition would be “buried”—punished for interfering with the women who called an end to motion and noise. My father may have stood up to himself and lost.

If I had really lived, I would have been the subject of emotion-removal experiments, person-blocking strategies (PBS), attempts to zero out my heart. It may have worked. Yet somewhere in the past, a period of time also called the mistake zone, it’s possible a hardened creature with black hair, wrongly taken for a dog, took a leading role with my heart, walked me through a series of steps that ended up counting as my life, then left me in some after-house called Ohio, where I have nothing to do but issue reports.

It’s possible that I cannot hear, that my head will not admit sound. There is very little chance that I survived.

System Requirements

This book is unfortunately designed for people. People are considered as areas that resist light, mistakes in the air, collision sweet spots. At the time of this writing, the whole world is a crime scene: People eat space with their bodies; they are rain decayers; the wind is slaughtered when they move. A retaliation is probably coming. Should a person cease to move, she would cease to kill the sky, and the world might begin to recover. Women seeking to increase their Mercy Quotient should follow the example of my mother and her cohorts by bringing a New Stillness upon their persons. They should read no further, for even reading is an embarrassing spasm of the body.

Although this book is for people in general, it is more specifically designed for people who have fallen over, who can’t get up, whose hands hurt and eyes smart, whose limbs are tired on the inside, though doctors might find nothing wrong with them.

Healthy, sturdy, “strong people” (an oxymoron) are welcome to do their best to fetch this book into their persons through whatever word-eating technology they favor: reading, scanning, the poultice, a Brown Hat. But healthy, sturdy, and strong people probably don’t need to be reading a book, do not miss anything in their lives that would make them want to waste time sitting down with a book that, admittedly, won’t do much to add to their strength or confidence or well-being, properties that are probably cresting at an all-time high for them right now anyway. Such persons might find their assets diminished with this book, which in turn might lead this book to be seen as a challenge for those who are enlivened by threats of failure, people who have only ever thrived after being criticized, demeaned, misunderstood. In which case, this book can accommodate the healthy, sturdy, and strong people, but it may be an occasion of loneliness and confusion for them, though the whole notion of an “occasion” fairly thoroughly guarantees loneliness and confusion, and such emotions are not technically supported. Nor are any other emotions technically supported here. Readers looking to indulge in the having of emotions (HOE) should do so on their own time, in small bursts, preferably in a closed room, coughing often into an absorbent rag and wringing the rag down a drain.

But for the Limitations of Space

There should be pages of this book devoted only to women’s weather, to Atlanta wind, to the women’s radio frequency, to the mouth storm. A one-hundred-page section, with German references, should provide a final history of the American mouth. The American mouth would never need to be discussed again.

But for the limitations of space, more man-on-the-street interviews would have been conducted; a new technology for weeping would have been produced; a character named Steve would have died repeatedly at the start of each chapter. But for the limitations of space, this entire book would go without saying.

There should be a list of all the people who have walked the earth, or been seen breathing above it, their names and habits, the failures and successes of their hands. The list would be a pull-out parchment affair, embossed with small type. It would finally be a book that excluded no one. And then when all the world’s people had been singled out and praised for their good works, forgiven their failures and near misses and broken promises, both to themselves and others, excused every digression of their hearts, when their names had finally been inscribed by wire onto a piece of wood that bands the earth like a belt holding the whole place together, these people would once and for all be killed, so that they won’t return and won’t be remembered, a complete killing in the old-fashioned style of the Ohio Exits, where not only the person is killed but the things around him and any referencing devices indexing, in any way, the person: killed. In a perfect world, these people would continue being killed until a zero population had been reached, until the cities and towns and other life-viable areas and elsewhere were just empty boxes free of people, and the phrase “free of people” could actually be uttered safely in every area and finally be considered true.

In a Perfect World

All the characters in this book should line up one by one and walk through a low-lit wood-paneled room, where you should be able to inspect their bodies, their hair, look into their mouths. You should be able to undress and handle them as though they belonged to you, pursue a casually confident intercourse against their flesh without recrimination — unless you desire it; without consequence — unless it is part of your arousal apparatus to be blamed, held accountable, reproached.

Good books should offer characters for fondling, more characters for private and group fondling, in lakes and onshore, whatever sweet locale the customer chooses. In a perfect world, good books would offer characters with sparse, tear-away clothing and touchable bodies, sweet faces, skin that smells the way milk would smell if it were really the tears of God, just the most perfect kinds of people, provided by the very best books, so that we could finally stop the world of the book and fish the attractive people from it for our own private inspection, which even the best books have already denied us, though we are taunted with the most believable, palpable, and beautiful characters, who, no matter how real they seem to us, ultimately fail us miserably because we can never touch or fondle them, cannot fish them from fakery and thrust away all our frustration on them.

We should be able to grab whoever entices us and really get down to business on their bodies, doctor them, treat them, submit to them, play horse to exhaustion, dress them up or down, pose them, give them words to say that we have been waiting all of our lives to hear. People should be able to conduct their own private inspection of anyone they wish, to finally satisfy their curiosity with everybody out there that they could never hope to touch in the governable world, even if they don’t know what they want and have never known. As long as the current laws apply, it would not be possible. In a perfect world, the current laws would not apply.

If I had my way, I would supply people for everyone to have intercourse with, people that other people could tie or dress up, chase, undress, kiss, touch, squeeze, maneuver into position, throw off a horse and tackle and rough up, pamper, drape in cotton, in linen, in gauze, in cashmere, in fleece, rub with butter, cover in oil. I would have these people delivered every morning in a van or dropped off by trucks, sold on the street, displayed in windows, used as props in the park like public sculpture, except malleable, the way the very best bodies of this world are so malleable that we can actually break them for good, which is always what makes other bodies so treacherously joyful to handle, the fact that the people in this world are just so unbelievably and easily killable. If I had my way, I would be a purveyor, a sergeant of pleasure. In a perfect world, books would give more sexual pleasure. People would give more sexual pleasure. Sex would give more sexual pleasure. A storm would come and we could drop our trousers and finally really fuck the wind. We could leave our seizures everywhere; the world would be steeped in seizures, a cartoon world of spasming citizens. We could power the whole world by thrusting our hips into the weather. If we stopped thrusting, the world would slow to a crawl.

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 aliasing, 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 cavern 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.

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 for 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.

Phase two of the diet begins when the tongue is hard enough to produce a clear knocking tone when addressed with a small mallet. This indicates that the mouth is ready to be filled with linen. The cloth recommendation here is not strict, but the dieter would do well to avoid wool and wool substitutes. The psychological setback would be too great, and I would no longer be of help through the many discomforts that wool-assisted reading might elicit. In addition, a dieter would sacrifice the claim to free technical support while reading this book if wool is used to stuff the mouth at this stage. Cotton may be used, but cotton does not wick away moisture, and it can thus prevent the full storage of the body’s base language (which is nearly 95 percent water), in which case the language detox process would not be complete before reading, so there would still be sentence pollutants awaiting excretion. Cotton additionally begins to rot and expand if used as a language towel, whereas linen simply erodes into the earth. At any rate, enough cloth should be stuffed into the mouth so that the jaw extends to its full hinge and the cheeks appear ballooned. A neck brace at this time might also assist the dieter. The head, generally, cannot be supported enough, and shoulder splints may profitably be fastened up the ears to the level of the crown.

During phase two, it is difficult to take a full breath or to exhale around the obstacle of cloth in the mouth. Oxygen restriction while fasting (ORF) forces the body to derive oxygen from within itself, particularly from memories and extraneous behavior (which are highly combustible); unnecessary emotions are cleansed from the system through its natural furnace, and the body learns inner breathing. The primary use of feelings, in this book, will be as energy seeds for the body to burn, although the body, when gagged, needs to be trained to view these conditions as flammable. Fainting again becomes a danger here, so netting and helmets should be used to prevent injury. Indeed, a helmet should be worn the entire time this book is being read, and during any foray you might make into the world at large. A helmet will be one more barrier that could possibly save your life.

Food-Intake Strategies

Almonds are language-neutral. They will not affect the perception of sentences by the human head. Eating almonds additionally provides almost certain protection from fainting, which is a very real danger when reading this book. And although it will be demonstrated that repeated fainting is probably the purest way to permanently eliminate behavior, and thus rid the body of unnecessary emotions, it is not a career to enter recklessly. Strategic fainting requires equipment, preparation, and commitment, as well as a supportive family or diet team who are trained to catch and revive you when you collapse. Before I was ejected from Team Quiet, I was able to faint with regularity several hundred times a week, and stayed relatively free of injury (although my father would certainly disagree with this claim).

The Food

Directly before reading each morning, the reader should undergo a full-body flush, drinking at least one gallon of reader’s water. Warm-up exercises should be light: basic limbering stretches, but nothing to increase the heart rate. If desired, a language enema might be taken (speak spontaneously until exhaustion, and your body will purge all of its unspoken messages and sentiments. It might prove useful to record this ceremony, as details about yourself can be discovered). Throughout the day, feeding can occur on fibrous vegetables and fruit, with occasional yogurt gargles and snacks of hard bread and butter. Since it is not recommended that this book be read in the evening, neither should any food be consumed during that time. Total rest is suggested and motion of any kind is discouraged.

For Advanced Readers Only

For those readers looking to optimize their time with this book (or people reading the book for a second or third time), the eyes should be masked in black cotton during the daytime hours of the fasting procedure and no other written language should be regarded. Thoughts, if necessary, should be conducted in shorthand or steno, and if communication is required, though I cannot authorize it (and in theory oppose it), a set of flash cards should be used, with easy-to-understand pictograms that will satisfy the demands of the basic interactions: commerce, expressions of love, hunger signals, and warnings of impending disaster. At the time of this writing, images are far less taxing than words and should be deployed anytime the head needs relief. If another book or pamphlet is placed before you and you are required to read it, which I cannot recommend, or if navigational messages are presented to your person during a period of travel (also to be avoided), a simple technique of nodding, squinting, and ducking should be used to quickly scan the message, which you would then do well to vowelize before it can take hold of your thinking in any substantial way.

Who Were the Jane Dark Gods and What Did They Want?

The first Jane Dark gods were invoked by members of Team Quiet in Ohio to solidify Dark’s authority as a silence expert. Most organizations require a deity scaffold to boost their veracity with recruits. The deity referred to as Thompson has been used in fiction and nonfiction alike, and is not scheduled to die, or to suffer myth remission, until certain concepts have fully integrated the culture. The Jane Dark gods were never described physically, and they had no special powers.

Why Cloth?

My family believes that the inside of the mouth is equivalent to a cave. Words accrue and marinate as pockets of vibrational sound, changing the delicate structure of the palate, which influences the acoustics of spoken language, inevitably launching speech wind — an early form of menacing weather — into the atmosphere or deep into someone’s body. Cloth is used not only to pad the surface of this cave but to absorb speech residue, to store the elemental messages of a person and delimit personal wind output (the Barking Quota). If every person carried a language towel such as this, much preliminary misunderstanding between people could be avoided. People could simply exchange language towels and chew them for instant, intimate knowledge of one another, rather like a peace pipe was once used, no doubt.

Does the Skin Eat?

It would be foolish to simplify the role of the skin in reading, thinking, and eating. Nearly everything that can be said about the skin can be disproved or at least convincingly denied. For the purposes of this book, once the fast is completed, the arms should be wrapped in the cloth you had stashed in your mouth. You are training your body to be a full-scale receiver of language, to feed on the noise of words as it does with so-called food. The sooner the head is decentralized in the nutrition-intake process, the more ripe the body will become to decipher nonlanguage communication streams like wind and electronic women’s frequency. The skin should be frequently brushed with a wire scrubber to clear the pores; the skin of the arms might further be primed with a sixty-minute daily bath of high-volume radio static.

Why Nuts and Milk?

When milk is understood as animal water—a nutritive liquid produced by nonlanguage creatures enduring their brief term on earth — it becomes clear that this edible product of creatures allows us access to the bodies of strangers without risk, to steal their life information and expand our own possibilities as people. In this sense, milk is probably the primary learning water, a deep liquid that tells us how to act. It is precisely when I feel estranged from myself that I drink my own milk. Most men won’t have this option. Their first choice should be another man’s milk, or to cultivate milk from one of their male children. Nuts, on the other hand, can be derived artificially by a Voice Blizzard, in which hundreds of people speak rapidly (hark) into the same container until the vocal waves congeal, or “nut.”

What Is the Di ference Between a Vow of Silence and a Language Fast?

In a language fast, cleansing measures and word purging accompany the quietude. A vow of silence is only an early step toward controlling the role of words in the head. Women’s Pantomime, if performed according to Jane Dark’s criteria, can sweat excess language from the body, accelerating the benefits of a vow of silence. A linen mouth guard, or any cloth gag, with the exception of a riding bit, might also allow the muted language to be stored and archived, for the purposes of later listening and self-study.

Should a Helmet Be Worn When I Make Love?

Until the notion of Helmet-Assisted Life catches on with more people, you may be seen as a threat if you wear a helmet during moments of intimacy. Yet it might also be true that relaxed intimacy cannot occur unless the head is fully protected. Desire is difficult to maintain during moments of risk and danger — men regularly attacked or humiliated by animals have frequently proven to be impotent. Perhaps the best solution is to encourage your partner to wear a helmet first, gently implying that it increases your arousal or fulfills a fantasy you’ve always had — that is, to make love to a beautiful person who is wearing protective headgear. Then when you introduce your own helmet into the bedroom, discreetly, of course, through a lights-out equipment-debut strategy, the helmet will seem natural and lovely, like a headdress once may have looked to warriors — honorable and sacred and sexual— and you can make love safely, without unwanted risk to your head. Helmets should slowly become a regular feature of life. Until that time, users should respect those people not yet accustomed to them, who still prefer a naked, vulnerable head.

Caution

The author discourages travel and indeed all extraneous motion during the reading period, both of which will tend to minimize the sympathy/fascination quotient by increasing circulation and allowing outside events to shape the emotional palette. A reader’s sock, to immobilize the body while the book is being read, is the ideal harness. I favor a Smart Noose, which flushes my head to an itchy but excitable degree of swelling, allowing every word I hear or read to tickle me deeply at the back of my head. Other readers have used coffins, straitjackets, or have employed “the pinch,” to temporarily paralyze themselves for the duration of the reading period.

The reading of this entire book should profitably occur over the period of one week, although “Kevin R.” (not his real name), from Denver, took nearly a year to finish the book, and “Deborah,” from the North, read it straight through and finished in nine hours, mostly because she could not endure the stricture of the reader’s diet (due to a vomit response to language). These extremes in the reading duration are not encouraged. Indeed, both of these participants are still suffering from vertigo, rapid weight loss, and a flattening of the vision. I have attempted to correct their diet and offer language antidotes; children’s verse, vowelized, seems to be the most effective, along with dry morsels of shortbread. (The stories of Hans Christian Andersen, recited without consonants, appear to relax and rejuvenate most American people.) Yet I cannot say with certainty that these readers will ever fully recover.

As for the reader participants “William L.,” “Roger K.,” “Sandra S.,” and “Angela B.,” I offer my condolences and apologies to their families. May they rest in peace. They were heroic young people, the bravest of readers, and they will be sorely missed.

Dates

1825

THE FIRST DOCUMENTED INSTANCE of the Female Jesus appears in England in the form of a seven-year-old girl. Using rapid clapping and tongue clicks, the girl lures various species of birds from hundreds of miles away, who assume a circle of protection around her and raise a field of sharp wind in the area. When her father attempts to rescue her, the birds are able to beat out a rudimentary language of ricocheted wind to command his own hand against him, and he dies, a suicide. Several male witnesses also die, and the air that the birds have stirred with their wings remains sharply turbulent at the seaside site for the next five years, repelling any men who try to approach. This form of barrier comes to be known as “Jesus Wind.” It will be used against men, together with a clear sock covering women’s heads, to neutralize their language at the End of Sound protest in 1974.

1922

Finland proposes a separate language for women, becoming the first European nation to do so; all men and women twenty-four years and older not considered suicide risks are fitted with a Brown Hat, to enable or prevent them from performing the new language. The Brown Hat, in women, is fitted into the mouth to allow a broader range of vowel production, which is considered a vastly unfulfilled potential of women (see The Vowelists, 1940). The flesh-colored apparatus is meant to camouflage the head. For a time, it becomes a symbol of status and wealth; streamlined designs create striking new possibilities for the human head, accentuating its animal shape. Women in Finland seen without the facial gear are considered incompletely attired and are refused admission to the black-tie Head Theater conducted in the countryside. Men are to utilize a smaller, darker Brown Hat (the Carl Rogers Cage), resembling a bridle, which will restrict their vowel production and crimp the skin of the upper face to narrow the ear canals, deafening them to the new language. Both men and women will be advised to speak nightly messages of personal import into a cloth screen that will be used to test for a possible chemical element of language (see Language Poultice, Shame Towel, Prayer Rag, 1962). No chemical difference is discovered between the speech of the sexes, only a marked absence of water in each, which will prove to be vital for later projects of the Listening Group, who will add water to its language filters, Brown Hats, or Thompson Masks in order to scramble or falsely translate their speech.

1928

The American Naming Authority, a collective of women studying the effects of names on behavior, decrees that a name should only have one user. The nearly 1 million American users of the name Mary, for example, do not constitute a unified army who might slaughter all users of the name Nancy, as was earlier supposed, but rather a saturation of the Mary Potential Quotient. Simply stated: Too many women with the same name produces widespread mediocrity and fatigue. A competition of field events, centering around deployment of a forty-pound medicine ball into hoops and holes, is proposed to determine which women shall rightly hold the title of their name, with all losers in the same-name category to be designated as helpers — subsets — of the winner, forced to wear wind socks or hip weights to slow down their progress, enslaved to the first Mary, the first Nancy, the first Julia, as the case may be. Parents still able to name their children begin to seek either unique names or names that are considered neutral by the authority, such as Jesus and Smith. Many girls are given the name Jesus Smith, which, when pronounced as an all-vowel slogan, becomes a crucial new word in the Silentist movement, and is also possibly responsible for enabling the new strains of female behaviors seen at this time.

1935

Boston widow Claire Dougherty is arrested on her doorstep October 3 by detective Sherman Greer as she tries to swallow a coded message. In prison, she refuses to speak and appears to suffer at hearing any kind of sound, a condition termed Listener’s Disease, in which even sounds produced by her own body appear to cause her agony. She must wear a soundproof suit and a life helmet. State doctors report that there is nothing unusual in Dougherty’s hearing, but they agree to relieve her with a quiet cell in the prison and a full-body muffle, later termed a Claire Mitten and worn by young girls who are sickened or distraught at the sound of their own voices. Before she dies, in November, she writes in a letter to her daughter that “. . a new sound is upon the world. We have erred greatly and will be killed for it. Look to the soil, for the sound to me was beneath it. Walk slow or do not walk. Hide. Duck. Listen.” Detective Greer, the arresting officer, will die a year later, complaining of a “sharp noise” in the water near his home. His cause of death is listed as exhaustion. The two deaths will launch several studies of diseases caused by sound, and Greer’s wife will later appear in the streets of Boston wearing an executioner’s hood. Her body, upon examination, will reveal heavily damaged ears.

1942

A woman is found collapsed in a field, her arms sheathed in metal sleeves, nearly burned down to the bone. Her mouth is void of teeth and likewise charred. When a microphone is held to her skin during a routine exam by a Listener, muted voices and noise can be heard, suggesting her body has been crushed or otherwise altered with sound. During the same month, a caravan of women is intercepted by the Texas Mounted Police. Among their possessions are found a set of foil-lined sleeves and leather hoods, which the women will only say are used to “fight sound.” When they are addressed during a group interrogation, they use quick actions with their hands to nearly silence the questions coming at them. The turbulence they generate with their limbs is recognized as Jesus Wind. They are apparently able to quiet the local sounds in a room simply by making shapes with their hands. A child Jane Dark is among them, who demonstrates that by standing next to a passing train and engaging in an odd form of gymnastic pantomime that appears part karate, part dance, the girl can mute the forceful racket of the train so that it passes by in virtual silence. Late in her life, it will be this talent that will prevent her from hearing even her own voice, as the orbiting wind of silence she herself has created becomes so potent that it can no longer be penetrated, and she appears to the people around her as a character in a silent movie. She can neither speak nor be spoken to, a deprivation of language that causes her hands to wither.

1952

The Women’s National Pantomime group gathers on an athletic field in Dulls Falls, Wisconsin, for their largest event since their inception in 1946. Fifteen new gestures are introduced by the group leader, a slender teenager named Jane Dark, and so many women suffer seizures and vomiting after performing the difficult new movements that the local hospitals cannot contain them and Ms. Dark is forced into hiding. Four women die, while many others turn in their memberships in protest. The wounded women are so disoriented that they must relearn basic movements such as walking and kneeling, drinking and sleeping. The men’s chapter of the Pantomime Association publicly renounces Dark and her followers, calling her modifications harmful and contrary to the chief purpose of Pantomime, which is to entertain. Dark explains that her fierce group of aggressively silent women will no longer exist to glorify the “false promise” of silent motion, or Pantomime, but will instead attempt a new system of female gestures, to replace sound as the primary means of communication, declaring motion the “first language,” with a grammar that is instinctual and physical, rather than learned. It will be the first instance of a women’s semaphore that will not be an imitation, but, rather, a primary behavior with, according to Dark, “very real uses in this country.” Dark will begin authorship of a series of pamphlets called New Behaviors for Women. The pamphlets argue that gesture and behavior alone can solve what Dark calls “the problem of unwanted feelings.” She also helps market Water for Girls, small vials of “radical emotional possibility,” under the premise that water contains the first and only instructions for how to behave in this world.

1960

The English language is first overheard in a wind that circles an old Ohio radio operated by an early Jane Dark representative. Words from the language are carefully picked out of this clear wind over the next thirty years and inscribed on pieces of linen handed out at farmers’ markets. When the entire vocabulary of words has been recovered from the radio, it is destroyed, and the pieces of linen are sewn together into a flag that is loaned out to various Ohio cities and towns, where it is mounted over houses. Once the fabric is hoisted on a flagpole, the language is easily taught to the people inside of their homes, who have only to tune their radios to the call sign of the flag station, extract and aim their freshly oiled antennas, and position their faces in the air steaming from the grille of their radios. When their faces become flushed and hot, they can retreat to other rooms and say entirely new things to the children who are sleeping there.

1965

A noise filter is created at Dark Farm to muffle radio and television frequency. It will be the first nonsacrificial attempt by Jane Dark and her followers to mute the noises of the air and bring about a “new world silence.” Mounted upon the roof of a hilltop barn, the filter is a dish-shaped sieve filled with altered water that will supposedly attract and cancel electronic transmissions, including television, radio, and women’s wind. The water, which absorbs the intercepted frequency, is considered a master liquid of supernutritive value. It is removed monthly and administered to the women as a medicinal antibody. The drink is called a “charge,” or Silent Water, said to render women immune to sound.

1985

Quiet Boy Bob Riddle constructs his home weather kit, to definitively prove that speech and possibly all mouth sounds disturb the atmosphere by introducing pockets of turbulence, eventually causing storms. By speaking into the tube that feeds the translucent-walled weather simulator, which resembles a human head — in this case, the head of his father — Riddle demonstrates the agitation of a calm air system. The language that Riddle introduces to the test environment — whether English, French, or the all-vowel slang of the Silentists — repeatedly smashes the model house within, proving that sound alone can distress and destroy an object. His essay, “The Last Language,” argues for an experimental national vow of silence, claiming that spoken language is a pollutant that must be arrested, first by stuffing the mouths of unnecessary speakers (“persons whose message has already been heard”) with cloth. Before his death, in 1991, he will build a mouth harness (the Speech Jacket) that limits its wearer to a daily quota of spoken language, beyond which he or she must remain silent until the next day, or else trigger a mild explosive that will destroy the mouth. The Speech Jacket is tested first on children. Although it causes intermittent blackouts and fainting, it serves to restrict their speech to requests for food and short displays of all-vowel singing.

The Name Machine

I’LL NOT BE ABLE TO LIST each name we called my sister. The process would be exhausting, requiring me to relive my sister’s pitiful life. There are additionally copyright issues connected with persons that are officially the holdings of the government, which is still the case with my sister, despite her demise. To reproduce the precise arc of names that she traversed during her life in our house would be to infringe on a life narrative owned by the American Naming Authority. It will suffice to select those names sufficiently resonant of her, ones that will seem to speak of the girl she was rather than of some general American female figure, although it could be argued that we can no longer speak with any accuracy of a specific person, that the specific person has evolved and given way to the general woman, distinguished primarily by her name.

The names defined here derive from a bank of easily pronounceable and typical slogans used to single out various female persons of America and beyond. A natural bias will be evident toward names that can be sounded with the mouth. The snap, clap, and wave, while useful and namelike in their effect (the woman or girl is alerted, warned, reminded, soothed), are generally of equal use against men, and therefore of little use here. Gestures of language that require no accompanying vocal pitch, such as gendered semaphore, used in the Salt Flats during the advent of women’s silent television, or Women’s Sign Language (WSL), developed in the ’70s as a highly stylized but difficult offshoot of American Sign Language, now nearly obsolete because of the strenuous demands it placed upon the hips and hands, were never successful enough with my sister to warrant inclusion in the study. She plainly didn’t respond to the various postures and physical attitudes we presented to her — our contortions and pantomime proved not theatrical enough to distract her into action. No shapes we made with our hands could convince her that there was important language to be had in our activity, and she often sat at the window, waiting for a spoken name, without which she could not begin the task of becoming herself.

This is certainly not to imply that communication between persons and living things requires tone or sound, or that deaf figures of the female communities can have no names. There is always written text, to be apprehended through visual or tactile means, as well as the German-American technique of “handling” the name of a woman onto her thigh. My sister, as it happens, did not respond in any useful way to our repeated and varied handling of her body. As rough as we were, it made no apparent impression on her.

Here the American female name is regarded as a short, often brilliant word. Rarely should it inaccurately capture the person it targets, and its resistance to alternate uses, modifications, translations, and disruptions is an affirmation that individuals can and should be entirely defined by a sharp sound out of the mouth — these definitions have simply yet to be developed and written. Once they are, we will know what there is to know about all future persons who take on one of the appellations listed in the American Bank of Names, striving in their own particular way to become women of distinction.

Nicknames, admittedly, allow for a broader range of fetching, commanding, and calling, but the nickname only indicates an attribute or device of a person, such as the length of her legs, the way she sleeps, how she bounces a ball (in this case: “Sticks,” “Taffy,” “Horse”). A name, as the government instructs, can no longer be an accessory of a person, but must be her key component, without which the person would fold, crumble. She would cease, in fact, to be a person. The nickname, and more particularly the endearment (“Honey,” “Doddy,” “Love,” “Lady”), speaks to a deeper mistrust of the original name, a fear of acknowledging the person at hand. If it is possible to change a person by changing her name, why not employ a name of diminished potential and thus diminish or destroy the person? It’s a valid concern. When a man modifies or adorns a woman’s name, or dispatches an endearment into her vicinity, he is attempting at once to alter and deny her, to dilute the privacy of the category she has inherited and to require that she respond as someone quite less than herself. (Conversely, women who are scared of their own names are also typically afraid of mirrors.) The movement toward a single name for the entire female community (“Jill,” “James,” “Jackie”) — as aggressively espoused by Sernier and practiced by his younger employees — would disastrously limit the emotional possibilities for women and, rather than unify them as the Bible claims, probably force a so-called girls’ war in their ranks.

The task of my family in this regard was to process and unravel the names that arrived in the mail, then dispatch them onto my sister, generally with the naming bullhorn, a small seashell my mother carved for the purpose. We were enlisted by the government to participate in what was being called the most comprehensive book ever attempted, a study meant to catalog the names of American women. In the book, each name is followed by a set of tendencies that are certain to arise if the user employs the name as the full-time slogan for herself. The book is meant to serve as a catalog of likely actions, not only to predict various future American behaviors but to control them. If the government regulates the demographics of name distributions, using a careful system of quotas, it can generate desired behaviors in a territory, as well as prevent behavior that does not seem promising. It’s not exactly a style of warfare as much as it is deep dramatic control over the country. The book remains unpublished, but its authors are reported to be numerous, somewhere in the thousands, each working blind to the efforts of the others. In my possession are only the notes taken during the naming experiments on my sister — an intuitive set of definitions of the names she inhabited. We were not instructed how to define the names we were given, only to use them, study them, employ whatever research we could devise. I therefore have no notion if our material was ever incorporated into the text. We submitted it promptly but never received word on the matter.

We served up the names to my sister one by one and watched her change beneath them. Researchers here might say that she became “herself” or that it was her body expressing its name, as if something does not know what it is until the proper sound is launched at it. Each new morning that she appeared before us and we announced the name for the day through the bullhorn, we saw her become the new girl and release the old one, drop the gestures and habits and faces that the last name had demanded of her and start to search for the necessities of the new name.

I presume that other men launch their childhoods with sticks and mitts and balls, skinned knees, a sockful of crickets, and other accessories. They are shoved onto a lawn, where they know the routine, can find the snake or book of matches, sniff out water, or sit in a children’s ditch and watch the sky with their light and delicate heads. But I was the designated writer among us, unable to walk across grass or throw or catch or hide, equipped only with the stylus and pad, made to create our life in the form of notes on a page. This was unfortunate, because I don’t like to write, I don’t like to read, and I like language itself even less. My father read to me as a boy and I was mannered enough not to stop him. It was unbearable — book after book that failed to make or change me, my father’s lips twisting and stretching during a supposed story hour, massaging a stream of nonsense inside his mouth. I have always tried to be polite about words — good manners are imperative in the face of a father wrestling with a system that has so clearly failed — yet I find language plainly embarrassing. It is poor form, bad manners, that so much hope is pinned to such wrong sounds out of the mouth, to what is really only a sophisticated form of shouting and pain. It is not pleasant for me to hear “foreign” languages, either. All languages are clearly alien and untrue, and, absent of so-called meaning, it is repeatedly clear that language is a social form of barely controlled weeping, a more sophisticated way to cry. To speak is to grieve, and I would prefer not to listen to a weeping animal all day and every day, sobbing and desperate and lost. Particularly when that animal calls itself my father.

Each time we changed my sister’s name, she shed a brittle layer of skin. The skins accrued at first in the firewood bin and were meant to indicate something final of the name that had been shed — a print, an echo, a husk, although we knew not what. They were soft in my hands, devoid of information, and quite like what I always thought was meant by a “blanket,” a boy’s little towel, something to shield me from the daily wind that got into my room. It is not that the skins resembled a person anymore, or stood for one, or acted as a map of the past. They were, rather, a part of my sister I could have to myself — soft, foldable, smelling of bitter soap, perhaps like a toy she might have used. I kept them for hand warmers, penciled my pictures into their flaky surfaces, draped them over my bedroom lamp for spidery lighting effects and the whiff of a slightly burnt wind. Maybe I smelled something deeper as the skins burned away on the bulb, floating in and out of the cone of light that enabled my infrequent passage from bed to door, at such times when my bedpan was full. There was nothing of food to the smell, only houses, hands, glass, and hair. And her. They smelled of her.

Oddly, these skins my sister shed seemed to serve as a repellent to my sister herself, as if smelling her own body were uncomfortable for her. She would not come near my room when I was using them. Nor would she approach me, particularly if I wrapped myself in parts of her old body and walked through the halls, or bathed in a caul of her husks, which would cling to my skin in a gluey callus when they were wet. No one, I would venture, likes to be understood as deeply as I was understanding my sister at that time, shrouding myself in the flakes of her body that she had lost, wearing her. She preferred, I assume, not to know me.

When the names ran dry, my sister pulled up short somewhere in the heart of the Learning Room. The mail had ceased, and no one was sure what to call her. She slept on the rug and scratched at herself, looking desperately to all of us for some sign of a new name, of which we had none. No one, as I mentioned, was sure what to call her, a problem that proved to be the chief void in her identity, which slowly eroded. There were no more skins, and one morning my sister lost her motion and folded into a quiet pose. Out of sympathy, we reverted back to her original name, or one of the early ones. I have to admit that I’m not sure what name she began with. Nor were any of us too sure, to be frank, whom, exactly, she had become.

[Lisa]

Because the word “Lisa” most closely resembles the cry heard within the recorded storms at the American Weather Museum, a crisply distorted utterance claimed to be at the core of this country’s primary air storms, the girl or woman to carry the burden of the Lisa name carries also perhaps the most common sound the world can make, a sound that is literally in the air, everywhere and all the time. (Most wind, when slowed down, produces the sound “Lisa” with various intonations.) The danger is one of redundancy, and furthermore that a woman or girl cruelly named Lisa will hear her name so often that she will go mad or no longer come when called. Children learn that repeating a word makes it meaningless, but they don’t know why. Briefly: Weather in America occurs through an accumulation and disturbance of language, the mildest form of wind. To speak is to create weather, to supply wind from a human source, and therefore to become the enemy. The female Silentists are silent primarily to heal the weather, or to prevent weather, since they believe that speech is the direct cause of storms and should forever be stifled. A Silentist regards the name Lisa as the purest threat, given that, when heard, it commonly indicates an excess of wind, an approaching storm, possibly the world storm. The name Lisa, to some Americans, is more dangerous than the words “fuck” or “fag” or “dilch.” It should probably be discontinued. It can crush someone.

Statistics for Lisa: An early name of my sister. She rarely acknowledged it. It caused her anger. We could pin her to the floor with it. She drank girls’ water and would peaceably wear a Brown Hat. Her Jesus Wind resistance was nearly zero. Rashes and facial weakness were frequent. A distressed tone to her skin. Her language comprehension was low, or else she showed selective deafness. A growling sound was heard when she wrote. She seemed blind to my father.