Notable American Women

Failure to Mate

WHEN I WAS FIRST PUT TO SIRE for the Silentists, my father, the senior male, had just been rendered into the hole, and no other youth were sufficiently available to dispense completions into the selected women. Maybe there were boys from middle Denver who coupled with some silent girls brought in by Jane Dark and Quiet Boy Bob Riddle, but I am to understand that I was the chief agent of physical contact among the various women’s militia that came through town, even the Listening Group, who were loud and often took me with force.

The siring period lasted a full winter. My location was frequently the upper floors of the house. Toward the end of the copulative term, I waited naked on my father’s surrendered bed, a denim ringlet assisting my erratically operative genital arm, an appendage referred to in my mother’s notes as my “error.” The chosen girl at her most fertile moment would make a slippered approach down the long hallway, often goaded along by Dark right up to the doorway, where she might balk until pushed into the room and onto the bed. She’d find me disrobed there, positioned on my back in the snow-angel posture, as instructed. She might gather up her dress and sit across my hips for the transaction. Sometimes she struck a sidesaddle position for efficiency, or T-crossed me, with her bottom smiling toward my face, always averting her eyes from myself or my body or my props. She may have worn a hood or blinders, a mouth-guard, a helmet. A linen jumper possibly covered her body. She was gentle and tall, or small-bodied, with clumsy hands that smeared my chest with some sort of listening grease if she lost her balance and fell onto me. She was shy or loud, mocking or rude. She had learned to move so silently that she seemed delicately afloat, using a cautious, china-shop choreography, as though she might break herself through gesture alone. She never spoke to me. If I closed my eyes, I was alone.

Afterward, she was inverted and slung from the doorway in the conception harness, her face plump and flushed as she dangled there, waiting to seed. I was shuttled from the house and fed a hot plate of brown cakes: pounded, sizzled, and salted. Vials of water were stashed in my behavior kit, and I drank them without reading their labels, gargling first, swallowing short and hard, spitting just a trace of water back into the grass around me, as instructed.

As I waited on the lawn to be let back into the house — a clear flag hoisted over the fainting ledge was the signal, indicating the young Silentist’s removal from the harness — I could not help looking past the learning pond and across the field at the solitary figure of Larry the Punisher, holding the glinting speech tube over my father’s receptacle. Larry never seemed to tire out there. Even from a distance, his figure proposed direct menace toward my father, his head enveloped in the vacuum speech hoof, his arms keeled back as though he were readying himself to dive headlong into the earth. There was no clear route to where Larry stood — no road or path that I knew of— and I wondered how Mother and Dark had placed him there, whether through an airdrop, digging, or catapult, or if Larry was an overland expert in the style of an early Thompson, who could assert his own person into those distant areas that harbored prisoners such as one’s father.

On those afternoons when a seizure of darkness blotted my presence in the field and rendered our Ohio locale dim and prematurely brown in the air, birds sliding fatly overhead on solid slicks of wind, I whispered from my grassy hideout in Larry’s direction, hoping that some of my sound might gain the speech tube and make its way down to the man-sized room that held my father, though I knew that to add more words into his sealed container would only hasten the bursting that awaited him, dosing him ever faster with a language weapon that promised a slow, sure rupture of his body. I whispered hard until my face hurt, risking even the all-vowel words that had the longest-range acoustics and the most father-specific messages I knew of, but Larry never flinched. If he heard me, his body did not show it. My message went softly soundless in the space between us, drowned out in the field beyond, and I lay breathless and spent in the grass.

Mother and Jane Dark did not instruct me or much explain my role as sire, other than to direct that I hold the bottom pose with my young visitors and strike an arch during my release, a gesture Dark referred to as “the send.” I was always to send high, releasing on an upstroke. If I sent low on a downstroke, leaking would occur and the send might fail to gift. I was to breathe throughout the duration of my send. Failure to aspirate created a weak send. Too much aspiration, as with Rapid Family Breathing, created a send deemed too watery by Dark, who had tested my send water, produced under differing controls, including sends coaxed from me while my mouth was stuffed with cloth, sends I gave off while wearing the life helmet, or sends I made under the special wind of a foreign language whispered at me by Bob Riddle. I was not to send without a Silentist present, or a Listening Group citizen, or a motion-reduction committee, who would receive and bottle my sends for dispensation throughout the Ohio or Little England districts, where Silentists were seeking to breed. If I ignored this rule and sent alone, that was called a “blown send,” but I counted many of them regardless, because I had found a soft old suede glove of my father’s, which gentled my stiffly burdensome nighttime error into easy, sweet sends often just before I fell asleep, sometimes in less than twenty hand-shakes. Mother found me once in the morning with the glove still wrinkled over my hand, as though I had the big loose skin of an animal hanging from me. She sat down and wrote a note of warning against the solo send, her brightly scratching pencil the only sound in my room. “We depend on you. If you require to send again before sleep, please raise your readiness flag and a visitor will make a withdrawal. I’ll trust you to discard the prisoner’s glove on your own.” After handing me the note, she administered eye contact, squaring herself off and sitting erect, staring at me hard until I looked away. Her stare had a kind of wind in it that pushed my face around; I could never eye it directly. This was her typical preface to a dose of wind-box emotion removal she had scheduled, and I braced myself by twining tightly in the sheets, to keep from accidentally striking her if I thrashed too hard. She positioned her hands in front of my face and commenced a knot-tying gesture just inches from my mouth, scratching at the air as if it were a hard surface, a kind of semaphore she performed from memory, and soon whatever I had been feeling or thinking was just quietly scraped away: a gray vacuumed container ballooning inside me as my heart started to zero down and forget its special complaint. I felt scrubbed clean and plain, siphoned off, leaked. Not content. Not angry. Not happy. Not tired. A minus condition. There would be no thrashing this time.

As she stood up to leave, my face twitched with the slightest traces of wind, aftergusts her fingers left lasting only as long as her body did in my room. I tried to breathe, and I managed to get some air into my chest, but the air felt thin and watery and false sloshing around inside me, and I preferred to keep as much of it as I could on the outside of my person.

Every time I was summoned to sire, I wanted to handle the heads of the girls, to grip their faces, clutch their brittle tied-back hair, clasp their necks. If the girls rocked over me too fast, or swooned away from my grasp, or otherwise struck damsel postures that rendered their heads slippery or elusive while we coupled, my send became equally elusive, I grew distracted, and my error might wilt, or, worse, wooden too much to ever yield a send. My hands sought to press on the girls’ faces as they rose and fell over me, my fingers pushing their mouths into the shapes of speech, which the girls sometimes vigorously resisted, as their muscles had settled so long against the strain of spoken language that their faces would pull or seize if summoned for talk.

Because this obstructed our transaction, and often dislodged a chew ball a girl might be harboring in her stubbornly shut mouth, Jane Dark issued a directive that a clay head be fabricated to incite my arousal, to ensure I might nurse a prop regardless of the damsel style my Silentist partner had adopted.

Before long, a large and heavy head was brought to me, forged of the kind of clay that is dense and skinlike, the way a real head should be, and I never worked without it. It was kept in a mesh pouch on my father’s door. During my spare hours at night, I etched a shallow beard onto the long face of the bust, and I fancied it to resemble a great man whose name escaped me, too unpronounceable and beautiful, a name burning hot in my mouth the more I forgot it, someone who had led his people to a promising hill in a country very much like our own, though lower to the sea, with smaller and softer shelters, with food that hovered at eye level, where the water was the same temperature as people’s faces and the wind was thick and pale like glue, slow enough to climb onto and ride over the low grasses. He was my comfort, this man who did not require a body to be important to someone. I held him to my chest or just above my face, so that I could look into the flat mud of his eyes while my body below me went to work for other purposes.

If the session was at the noon hour, Dark often rehearsed her emotion-removal behavior stances near the window while the girl pursued her draw. I cried out loud on those days, without emotion, weeping after my send, shouting throughout the engagement, barking as many consonant sounds as I could until the room filled with a chunky vocal percussion.

As she rehearsed, Dark’s shadow blotted the wall in pristine geometries, smooth globs of shade too perfect-looking to fall from a real person. Her movements seemed designed precisely to give off unexampled shadows, as if her goal were to be an originator of a new kind of shade. If ever she was practicing at the window while I was enjoined with a girl Silentist bobbing steadily above me, I could look only at Dark’s shadow as she threaded air with her fingers, kneeling or crouching, balancing on a knee and a wrist, a cheek and a heel, images that nearly told whole stories to me, but not quite, leaving me feeling itchy and short of breath. Bolts of cloth were fed through the rafters to absorb the excess consonant sounds I let into the room, and some girls quietly hyperventilated while we coupled, inhaling the extra noise I spilled over our bodies. The cloth work must have been that of Bob Riddle, a man whose every move seemed to silence the world around him, because the more I thundered out plosives and hard sounds of the throat, the less I could even hear myself, so strategic was his laying of the listening fabric, which soon formed a clear lattice over the bed and began to quiver just slightly as it absorbed my commotion, rendering a finely deaf room. And if there was something to our practice that Dark found correctable, she would stand in the muted air at the bed and guide the two of us, her hands as rough as oven mitts. Sometimes I deliberately flurried my stroke or counterthrusted and withheld my send by dislodging my error from my mate, just to draw Dark away from the window and over to the bed, where her hands would soon apply an adjustment and I could feel her labored breath against my face, hotly spiced with the scent of a special water she brewed for herself alone.

My diet at the time was mostly a witness water brewed from persons watching me copulate. At night, I was administered a sleeping water that went down thickly and made me dizzy under my blankets. It dried on my chin and I felt bearded as I slept, my face tight and bristly, but I did manage to sleep anyway, in hard gray stretches of time. On days off, I drank children’s coffee and ate a great share of potatoes in the darkened meal room. I drank copiously and peed often, with the sense that I surrendered far more fluid than I took in. Brown cakes were only available after a send, which meant that on some days I fed on water, seeds, and nuts alone. There was beef on rainy days, but it hardly rained, and the beef, when it came, was solid and dry as a button.

The witness water was simple to make. An observation deck installed onto the northern wall of my father’s room allowed girls in line for the service to see what was in store for them, to study the copulative transaction and jot down any questions they might have, to mime their fucking on a small hobbyhorse that had been stationed there. I heard nothing from the spectators as I labored at my sends, but I knew that the bit of mottled wall that separated us was thin and clear enough to let them see me. As they watched and waited, small vials of water lining the shelf of the booth stored the girls’ impressions and became resonant with the spectacle of intercourse. This was witness water: water stationed in the vicinity of persons witnessing something grand, a lucky water, a learning water, a real behavior liquid. I was to drink the liquid that had been near my own copulation. It would keep me primed to continue; it would make me fertile. My sends would be teeming and lumpen, rich with children. Sacks of new water filled the room by my father’s bed, awaiting injection into the small cartridges that were portable for Silentist outings and stillness retreats. The water tasted like nothing at all, and I was not allowed to salt it or dip my leftover cakes. After a dosing, I would think I had swallowed my share, when more would dribble from my mouth and down my shirt, warm and sweet as perspiration. If Mother was present, she would rub the spill into my chest and fix me another glass, hovering her hands over my face in a potentially soothing gesture, bowing her head toward mine as if she might embrace me, then miming a series of quick dry kisses in the windless vicinity of my cheeks, chewing at the air, her mouth pinched into a pale wrinkle, no color to her face at all. If I moved to meet her, to feel solid contact with her kiss, she shied just away from my gesture, always keeping a smooth column of air between us, a no man’s land that neither of us could enter.

By the new year, none of the girls were speaking and nearly all of them were listless as pillows out in the yard. It was difficult to deliver the send when the girls were in such a way. They would gradually cease bobbing and seem near to a kind of disturbed sleep above me, drowsily teetering in place, heavily slack in their faces. It was a time of much policing in the copulation room, for no one was participating with vigor, and there had so far been zero conceptions from all of our labor. No pregnant Silentists. No gifts to the Silentist lineage. No new quiet girls with pure blood and a head start toward stillness. I was so far not a father. The bulletin board in the mudroom featured a small neat zero if I ever checked it.

Jane Dark and Bob worked together, providing spots and corrections, performing stand-in maneuvers, shadow demonstrations, silently critiquing their sluggish young Silentists, who often failed to stand freely and had to be propped in place or strung up in harnesses. The stillness rehearsals of the girls had made them unfit for simple movement. They were too good at doing nothing, and now their bodies were soft and puddly, with skin spilled slowly over the air, a bright red mouth bubbling somewhere in it, some dull hair dashed over the top. Often I was summoned to work through cloth, at night, without the girls’ entire knowledge, a spotter providing bump assistance behind me at my hips in case I tired and experienced a send delay.

Sometimes I was permitted to play a tape of favorite conversations to help myself achieve sends. The Lectures of the Presidents, with its hiss and static, its Old English mannerisms and extended weeping, its fitful animal cries in the distance, was soothing enough to deliver me through such moments, allowing me to ignore the oceanic, unbodylike forms of the girls I was paired with, and proceed as usual until I had sent through. With the tape on, and the old clay head in my arms, I could close my eyes and enter that special time when those historic leaders shouted their hearts out to the world, lecturing feverishly until their bodies collapsed and they died. I could imagine myself near the burnished podium while the greatness of their words crackled in the air above me. My picture of that time was so vivid that if I held my breath and strained, I could even see all of the helmeted children standing obediently in the audience, holding their slender candles that drooped under their hot breath, their faces awestruck with the words of their leaders. Such moments beckoned even the most elusive of sends from my person, and I could host several visitors in a single afternoon. But the tapes grew warped with use, and since Bob required a vowel enhancer and a consonant muffler on the tape player to keep our atmosphere silent, soon it was merely a slow, droning hum I heard from the speakers, no different than someone’s father might make if he was bound and gagged beneath the bed, crying for help in his breathy, underwater way.

By this time, Mother was fully quiet and roved mainly at night on a motion sled pulled along by a team of girls. She required the convenience of various locations to accomplish the last of her silencing, but she could not spare physical movement from her ever-diminishing motion quota to get anywhere, thus her need for the girls and the sled, which took a great deal of engineering work on the part of Bob Riddle to operate quietly. He fitted the joineries of the sled with a soft and durable Hushing Bread that muffled the squeaks of the gears, moistening the shrill squeal of the runners on our cement floor. The sled disgorged a share of fine crumbs in its wake that were swept by a Silentist in my mother’s retinue. She wore the crumbs in short sacks around her hips and they were later recycled with a new batch of bread, a secondary set of loaves that had yet greater silencing powers. If Mother lumbered at all in the mornings, she was crackery in appearance and fully breakable. She seemed to be stalking an animal in slow, instructional frames of action, and could not help but mock the simplest of motion technologies, like walking, which she performed more sarcastically than anyone I’ve ever seen.

Straitjackets lined the halls. Many of the girls, deemed barren or sufficiently advanced in their practice, had entered the final stages of their promise of stillness. They would no longer be submitted to intercourse. Their days obtaining sends had ended. They were ready to take a paralysis on our property and sign their promises against motion. Stillness rehearsals took place in the sheds along the water by the fainting tank. A bright red bolt shot across the door indicated a stillness procedure in session. Girls applied the straitjackets: full-bodied canvas buntings equipped with a rip cord leading up to their mouths. When they approached a self-induced full stillness, usually after three days, they yanked the cords with their teeth, and their bodies were released in a heap on the dirt floor. It took them a week to move fluidly again, even with the assistance of a masseuse, and their faces were long and dry with pale brown welts, as if their elective paralysis had set off a decay in their skin. After a stillness rehearsal, the girls cautiously rehydrated with quiet water and examined the film footage of their mistakes, how they flinched and fidgeted, what broke them back into motion.

By late March I lost the potent fire that caused my error to wooden. A small, strong girl came to my room, eyed me fiercely, then sat over my legs, but I had nothing but smush for her. I had given them all so many sends, but it didn’t seem to matter in my current condition. After waiting for me to finish fumbling with it, she laughed silently in my face, pulled up her pants, and strode from the room. My error rested cold and wet on my belly.

Dark peered in afterward and queried me. She wore a burlap glove and ran some tests, her body stiff and formal as she busied about the copulation room. “Cough,” she said. “Hold your breath.” She meant for me to do both at once, and I tried, despite the pain it caused my back, the sense that my bowels might release. With my breath held, I managed only the driest rasp in my chest, made even harder with the grip Dark held on my exposed bottom. “You’re not trying,” she said, tightening her hand, pressing her other palm over my mouth. I summoned a cough again, higher-pitched, my face sealed up from air, and something gave way in my back, a scurrying that was sweet for just a moment before darkening under my skin, stiffness creeping over my torso as if it had been injected there.

Dark’s hand gave up my bottom and she stood, ignoring my grimace. My error was cold as a worm. She moved to the window and bent into a deep maneuver that involved a pretense of a search for something on her own person. Her arms were hard to follow. She patted at herself while lunging, creating a complication of limbs I could not decode or even watch without feeling nauseous. The shadow she made on the wall looked like a house, slowly dismantling. It seemed to have very little to do with her body — the lines were too delicate and numerous, the shadow too intricate, but it moved exactly as her limbs did, swelling and shrinking as she changed her position in front of the window. With so many sacks of water in the room, I guessed she was creating some special sauce for me, gesturing intricately in front of it, seeking a witness water of an entirely different design. But I was not thirsty. I had drunk enough water. There had to be a period when people could ignore water for a time and let themselves run dry. I shrank further and rolled off the bed to get dressed.

At first I wanted to think that the cold weather had put my blood on slow, since I was shriveled and blue in my skin, too tired even to monitor what kinds of water they gave me at night. But later that day Dark returned with a heater that she placed beneath my father’s bed until I was inflamed and sweaty, engorged with blood everywhere but at my cold hips. It did not help. I wrestled with an error that felt like nothing more than a finger without its bone.

Mother sprayed a fine mist of behavior water at me that night. She sat listlessly in her sled and seemed barely capable of squeezing the bulb of the atomizer. Much of the water blew back over her shrunken, unmuscled body, and she shivered as it settled on her. She fumbled with the bulb, her mouth wet and slack and colorless. The water was an extraction of pure copulation-witnessing liquid, and it had a fine, clear glimmer, like very thin honey. I soaked in it, as instructed, and sipped down several jars more, but my error simply retreated further and failed to respond. With a clipped series of gasping breaths, my mother signaled to the girls, who quietly pulled her from the room in her sled. She left no notes for me.

Alone, I paced the room for some time, slapping lightly at my unresponsive error, before I finally took the clay head from the door and lay on my back in the darkness, holding it to my chest, stroking the stiff beard, my hips exposed and cooling yet more in the sexless room. I was not sure what was happening inside my person, but something thick held me high in my chest, surging surely and slowly in my blood. I did not know it as a certainty, but it corresponded to what I had read of the sensation referred to in the Behavior Bible as “relief.” An actual feeling, one of the restricted ones, one my body had been sutured against forever ago. An immunization I had taken under the great helmet when I was a child. I could not remember its use, its purpose, the particular demographic of those persons who practiced it. There was a special history of relief, I was sure; a pattern one could study, a population of relieved people who had much to say about it, techniques to describe, precautions to issue. There were tall-standing adults in northern towns who fiended for relief, scheming through sleepless nights to get it from one another, letting their own blood out into small jars until the feeling washed over them. If it was true, it would be happening to me despite my diet, despite the fainting course I had undergone that fall, despite the high, scribbling wind-box treatments my mother had filtered over my face almost weekly to cure me of emotions, cleanse me of the feeling virus, shed me of every loudness in my heart. But despite the precautions of my mother and her team and their highly complex safeguarding work against sensations relating to the world of emotions, I may very well have slipped past their doctoring, their shields. There was a flaw to the wall they had built, and it seemed connected to my wilted error. Quite possibly I felt something that night, even if I did not know its real name and did not know how to feel it, what to do once the feeling started, where to put it, or what exactly it wanted from me. Something was happening that I knew should be kept secret.

I closed the door of my father’s room and did my best to breathe.

On those increasingly frequent mornings when I could not send, Dark and Mother retreated to the stillness shed, where they took fainting spells for each other and labored their mouths over the chew stand, which left me free to walk the field and get a closer look at Larry the Punisher. His presence never wavered, but during some sundowns Larry took a seat on what must have been a stool or stone placed above my father’s container. He removed the speech hoof from his face, placed his head in his hands, and heaved. I could not ascribe an action such as weeping to him. Possibly he was taking the deep and complicated breaths required of a full-time language punisher, a weapon-breathing technique he administered to restore his full word power to himself. Darkness fell too soon for me to tell how long these rests of his took, whether he was down for the night, or only an hour, but I observed many of them, and at such times could picture my small father pacing the length of his cell, peering up at the ceiling at the sudden silence, wondering what had happened to the stream of hard language funneling down at him. I was curious if his body was yet buckling under the words being fed into his room, and if these reprieves allowed him to breathe easier for a time, or took some strain off of his bones and head. Possibly his body had failed already, brought to a final pressure by the Attack Sentences that Larry was orally injecting into the room through the speech hoof. In that case, Larry was shouting out there at a dead man, who could be killed no more. His work was finished and he could drop the hoof and throw down a tombstone already, mark the site, sing a quiet all-vowel song for the life my father had lost. Even a prisoner deserves a funeral. All that language was being wasted. Larry was shooting bullets into a corpse. He might as well have come back to the house, or gone wherever a person like Larry went, and left my father’s body alone.

I did not send up a flare. I did not speak. I did not approach Larry’s position far out in the field and wrestle the Punisher down, steal his key, and rescue my father.

Instead, I rolled onto my stomach from my distant zone and thought that if I was entrenched in the grass directly above my father’s receptacle, I could burrow my arm into the soil and grab his scraggly head with my hand as he stalked around, pull my father by his hair up against the roof of his cell, even if he kicked and writhed against my grasp like a man being hanged, wriggle him through the hole my arm had made, and release him back above ground, even if the constriction of the narrow hole killed him on the way out, even if he was already dead by the time I had rescued him, even if his body had been fully and terminally language-shot, so that it was bones and skin and hair only, a torso rent by words, mutilated in its pressure box by the choicest and hardest and cruelest sentences, which had been composed precisely to dismantle a father’s body, to leave just a face and teeth as soft as bread. Even if all of these things were true, I could burrow him out of there and lie in the grass with whatever was left of my father’s body. The scraps, the bits, the broken head, a shoe. Have a companion night out under the flat black sky, beneath the radar of winds and birds, just out of range of the girls in the listening hole, too low for Dark and her shadow-location technique, too quiet even for Riddle to hear us. In a region my mother’s new sled could not obtain. Me and my father out in the field.

The New Female Head

A FEMALE HEAD LIBERATION SYSTEM (FLUSH) follows the theory that experiences, which may or may not cause an emotional response in a woman (we may never know), filter first through her head.

If the head’s hollow space (chub) is filled with materials like cloth, an ice Thompson, wood, or behavior putty (also known as action butter), then less life can enter and, perhaps, fewer emotions will result.

This approach works best with cultures that believe the “person” operates from somewhere inside the head, that the head is the command center of the body, driving it in and out of the home, forward and away from various “people,” and toward attractive bodies of water where the woman might replenish herself for later conflicts. In a survey of the female population of the Ohio countryside, a three-quarter majority of women touched their faces and eyes when asked which part of their body contained their “self.” The remainder touched their hands, hips, bellies, or bottoms, while a small percentage of women touched other people or animals or simply grabbed the air. For better or worse, the head, for most women, is still an obvious indicator that a person is in the room.

The emotion-removal strategy, then, is to cut off stubborn feelings before they start, by walling up the head’s unused space with various fillers and props and glues, to catch, block, or deflect the incoming behavior stuffs onto another person or animal. A careful woman can then use her head as a ricochet ball or “grief mirror” and bounce her feelings onto her family, to slow their progress or surge them with a debilitating emotion.

If a woman can reduce her chub to 1 percent of total head volume, chances are that very little of what happens to her— including the death of a child, the loss of a friend, or gaining an important promotion at work, just to cite a few contemporary examples — will have any effect on how she feels. She will be immune to emotion-causing events, better prepared to launch into a new and distinctly female space. She may later choose to empty or even increase her chub area, but only after she has zeroed her heart.

A Caution When Using Props in the Chub

When filled with fabric, wood, or an ice Thompson, a woman’s chub danger is deactivated, but the resulting fabric waste, spoiled wood, or mouth water, all known as “heart chaff”—marinated in the overflow of feelings, and bearing the impress of a woman’s mouth and every consonant-bearing word (crack) she has ever uttered — becomes hazardous and should be disposed of properly.

What Do I Do with Heart Cha f When I Am Done with It?

Landfills for heart chaff have turned into a kind of American behavior graveyard. Female looters, scavengers, and behavior instructors have stormed these chaff sites and walked off with barrels of used fabric and chewed wood, still soaked with the behavior juices of the former owners, a dumping site of Identity Medicine that is far too dangerous to inexperienced women. This kind of American behavior transfer — chaotic and outside the eye of the government — will most certainly lead to diluted strains of female identities and an absolute detour from name-based behavior ventures and Null Heart attainment strategies. To prevent collective behavior sharing, several safer methods are available for the disposal of chaff, or any cloth that has been deeply chewed by a woman. These methods include:

Weaving children’s clothing from heart chaff and donating it to the misbehaved young people of this country, who might wear the new suits of clothing — often brown and roughly textured, like a woven graham cracker— and thus relearn some of the basic life actions.

Creating flags and flying them outside of women’s houses to advertise the favored behaviors and feelings of the family within.

Building elaborate behavior-free shade zones in open fields by creating tents from the chaff that will shelter those women who no longer know what behavior they would like to exhibit. Resting in the shade of a behavior tent allows women to comfortably plan their next move without the embarrassing pressure of sunlight, widely thought to exacerbate behavior on the surface of the world. Important behavior tends to occur in darkness, or not at all.

What If It’s Too Late?

Let’s say a woman’s chub is not properly stuffed, a worst-case scenario, where her head has defaulted to its status as a prop-free object in the American landscape. Then key life events invade her head and riot into important feelings, a mess of attachments, hopes, and regrets. Is there a way to manipulate the female head after these emotions have begun, a sort of morning-after treatment when the woman is on the verge of feeling something?

Absolutely.

Because residue of an emotion apparently does remain in the mouth (except in deaf individuals of America, whose emotional activity is stored on their skin, in the form of behavior oil), coats the tongue, and probably does something quite unbecoming to the teeth and lips and gums, it can still be absorbed by the appropriate rag — that is, cloth that has “heard” the secret speech of the woman in question.

The Thought Rag

When women in the American territory speak careful sentences into a handkerchief, they are creating, whether they know so or not, an important item called “a thought rag.” Once confided to, the cloth becomes a listening towel, or “priest,” regularly privileged to whatever a woman chooses to say. The cloth may be tied smartly to a skirt or blouse, or used as a scarf or bandit rag; sometimes an adventurous woman employs it as a wind sock (if she needs to handicap her actions, lest her skills intimidate her acquaintances). Regardless of how it is worn, it stores a tonal material in its surface and can begin to contain what is crucial of the women who use it — a record of those female citizens who feel comfortable storing their basic life messages (I’m sorry, Go away, It hurts, I’ll take it) in a portable medium such as a swatch of stylish fabric. Even a carpet sample can be used, although rough cloth can chafe the face and mouth of the woman, leading to facial weaknesses, like weeping.

Everything a woman feels or suspects is to be confided to the thought rag, as with a diary. This takes all the noise of the “inner life,” the so-called dialogue with oneself formerly thought to be so crucial to sophisticated living (though primarily a device of “men” to justify and complicate long periods of inarticulate confusion), and exports it to an object that can fit smartly into a woman’s handbag. It is a far safer way to store the fundamentals of a female identity, and the head becomes devalued since it no longer stores a woman’s mystery.

These swatches of cloth can be exchanged between people when a shortcut to intimacy is desired. Indeed cloth-swapping salons and thought-rag sharing allow a woman to keep abreast of the personalities of her friends and acquaintances without the troubling ambiguity of speech and imprecise self-representation. A thought rag cannot lie; it won’t fail to impart the key data of the person who has used it. If I were to meet you, I would rather spend several hours sniffing and mouthing your thought rag than with you personally. You would no doubt try to impress me or somehow manipulate my experience of your person, concealing your fears and doubts, foregrounding some unbearable fiction of what a person should be. Your thought rag would give me the whole story in an hour or so and I could then decide if a meeting between us would be worthwhile.

Yet swap meets of this kind are also how a thought rag can become lost or stolen, and a woman’s identity can be “chewed” by another woman. In such cases, a thought rag can be assigned a password, generally keyed in with a gnashing sequence of the teeth.

Is the Head Itself Still Essential?

At the time of this writing, the head probably cannot be omitted from the person pursuing the female life project. Radical antiemotionalists have attempted a head-free trajectory in the world, yet these pioneers, while laudably testing the limits of the female life project, have unfortunately defaulted their ability to report on the effects of their experiment. They have gone too far from our world for us to understand them. Perhaps one day this approach will seem heroic, yet a woman without an operative head is still unable to signal her former world; to observers, she is nearly similar to a deceased person — her skin is cold, and she does not respond when prodded or splashed with water.

But a compromise is available for those women looking to limit the role of their heads in their behavioral and identity-development enterprises. This compromise involves cold-treating the female head with an item known as the Zero Hood, or facial cloak, form-fitted to a woman like a ski mask and meant to flash-freeze her face and skull. The head can withstand short periods of deep freezing several times per day, as long as the Thawing Sock is applied directly to the woman in time to prevent memory loss. Husbands and brothers are the best assistants for this sort of technique. Machinery should not be operated by a woman using the Zero Hood, nor should she go near children or animals.

Lastly, if each woman of America carved a wooden version of her own head (rook) and polished it with a personalized cloth, speaking kind words to the head (as one would talk to a plant), whispering in its ears, kissing the mouth, and grooming and oiling its surface, a woman might discover a person-shifting relationship with herself in which her own head becomes less important to her life, a prop to decorate, certainly, but not to be deployed much beyond that. This wooden head could be placed in rooms where a woman’s presence was desired, a kind of surrogate ambassador for her life, during those many moments that would otherwise exhaust or disgust her real head, the one that still suffers from responses and upsetting reactions to the world at large. I am not embarrassed to admit that I see a world one day where many beautiful wooden heads fill a room, while the people these heads represent are able to rest alone in their cabins and still accrue important experiences with other people.

What About the Nostrils and the Ears?

These important orifices are still a mystery; nearly nothing certain is known about the nostrils or the ears. The more we speak about these enigmatic absences, the further away we seem from any real understanding. It is an unusual bafflement to the American science of the head, and I have always been encouraged by my teachers and surrogate mothers to simply pause in silence if ever questioned about the true nature of these elusive areas. I stand with my head bowed and allow full reverence to accrue until my questioner understands how sacred is the lack of information about these parts of the head.

The Myth of Suffocation

A mouth filled with a bolus of wood or a full pound of linen does not necessarily mean the woman will not be able to breathe, only that her body, once blocked at the mouth and nose (and thus enabled elsewhere), will revert to its internal oxygen stores and alternative “breathing” methods, such as the “emotion furnace,” in which the body essentially burns its own anxiety for fuel when the mouth is clogged, rendering an emotion-free American citizen. After the initial panic of suffocation is surpassed, a feeling of relaxation and ease sets in, and a woman will notice her feelings rapidly quitting her body, bringing much-deserved silence into her heart.

Furniture for the Head

A chew stand should be established in the home. In time, it will become the essential emotion-quieting furniture for women. It can be a coat rack with a wooden ball at the level of a woman’s mouth, for her to approach and chew, several times a day, to leech herself of grief and rage. This cools the murdering impulse that sometimes occurs in a well-populated American shelter.

Alternatively from the chew stand, a wooden chew ball can be affixed to a doorway or window frame, so long as a woman can approach and fit her mouth over it without cutting or cracking her lips; it must not be too big or too small, nor should it be pliable enough for her teeth to diminish its size. If the height of the chew ball is incorrect, a woman will cramp at the neck or calves.

The chew stand creates an elegant opportunity for American women to pause in their daily lives within their homes and fill the largest chub of their heads with a finely polished wooden sphere. In this instance, wood is considered to be a meat, yet a durably inedible meat, a kind of pure protein that renews itself. A chew session can last for half an hour. If the sphere is cleaned between uses, many women can enjoy the chew stand, although identity compromises (relationships) may result, since wood can only leech so much heart static from the emotion banks of a female citizen and will start to “feed back,” flooding a woman’s mouth with the identity water of the last woman to chew on the ball.

Women of financial means, who are prepared to spend more money on their own behavior alterations, might consider posting an armed guard at the chew stand to prevent men and other fetishists from chewing and sniffing their wooden ball. A well-used wooden ball begins to smell sweet. Sometimes men will lie in wait, or they will carve tiny versions of their own heads and replace the balls with these. Many women will chew up a man’s head this way.

What Is Behavior Putty?

The residue a person leaves behind after performing certain tasks, like chopping wood, speaking to a crowd, buying a sack of nuts, or lunging through a Silence Hoop in an Ohio wheat field, can be collected in a jar, labeled according to the action that produced it, and then used as a topical ointment to prevent that action in others. It might technically be considered as a jelly history of life.

I am not sure why it is sometimes called “action butter,” but the term offends me and I would like to see its use forbidden. Butter is one of the most important items the world has seen, and to equate it with behavior is to deny its potency not only as a key form of animal water but as probably the most reliable soundproofing rub the American body can withstand without seriously harming the skin. Butter also lubricates a woman’s body to maneuver through American weather with a minimum of friction. She becomes a secret person within the wind. Without butter, a woman might be seen everywhere, pushed and pulled every which way. She would too easily be a target, plainly revealed and vulnerable to every kind of sighting.

Women’s Pantomime

THE FIRST OBSTACLE TO EXCELLENCE in women’s pantomime is the surplus of small bones in the face, feet, hands, and body. True mime is best done from a near-boneless approach, when the flesh can “rubber-dog” various facial and postural styles. The kind of mime most often produced by men with a full set of bones (a stack) is stiff and lumbering, hardly believable as an imitation of real behavior. There are simply too many nonpliable bones in the body to allow for the covert shapes and postures that lead to useful emotion purges. A woman who tries to mime away her excess emotions while operating with a full stack of bones will find little success. Only a “short stack” mime style can effectively contribute to the quiet heart.

The chief way to determine the gratuitous bone content in the female head (shabble) is to tap its surface with a facial mallet over an extended period of a month or more, using a mallet style more like worrying than actual smashing. Worrying the same area of the head with the mallet will eventually break down the excess bone matter, much of which is at the back or crown of the head, and it will pass naturally from the body, through the tears or saliva or sweat. Any bones that can be shed this way are not important to the life of the body, but are a disposable shell that simply needs to be cracked free and passed.

A small-boned woman who can add at least seven pounds of pure facial weight, without increasing mass to the rest of her body, would not need to remove any bones from her head. The added flesh would be sufficient for even the most elastic of mimes, including the pancake and the puddle styles. The best way to fatten the face through spot gaining is probably to drink cream at the rate of a gallon a day. Another option is a fat transfer from a richer area of the body, like the thighs or hips. With the fat transfer, the fat is brusquely massaged up the torso, into the head, then tied off with a tourniquet about the neck until the fat catches and takes root in the cheeks and around the eyes.

Barring these difficult methods, which only work with the small women, every woman can safely achieve a short stack of bone content by sacrificing several pounds of thin bones in the hands and feet, two rib bones, some gratuitous material on and near the spine (flak), the kneecaps, and parts of both shoulder blades. The bones, once broken, dislodged, and pulverized, can most safely leave the body from a bone exit zone introduced near the sternum.

Other bone removals are riskier, but the rewards of mime adaptability are all the greater. Removing a portion of the jaw-bone allows a woman to perform the hammerhead mime, good for quieting nearly all of the emotions, but envy in particular. Boneless hands can be pulled into excellent shadow shapes and silhouettes, enabling the chicken and the waterfall. The armless mimes of Geraldine include the weather vane and the elephant, not to mention the sleeveless John Henry. Since all teeth but the front two are disposable, their removal allows for inner-mouth and foreign-language mimes, which are widely effective with conditions of empathy and awe.

Given this rather dire recommendation for such an excess of self-surgery, it should be cheering to hear that the disposable bones, once broken and dislodged, don’t always have to be removed from the body; they can be migrated under the skin to the belly area, or pushed around into the excess flesh of the buttocks, where they will keep for months, provided the buttocks are regularly massaged and soaked in water. Restoring the bones to their original locations is easy; they can be shuttled through the skin until they arrive at the home area, then a body vise, a so-called Restorer, might be layered underneath a denim bodysuit for a week or so, until the bones have rooted again and returned to their former function.

What Do I Do with the Bones After I Remove Them?

If enough hardened bone remains after removal, a behavior whistle, or body flute, should be carved. Music played through an instrument derived from a woman’s own body will tend to calm her feelings, pacify the various rages of the day, and offer a sense of collapsed time, which aids in decreasing attachments for persons or things. The songs from the body flute may also be effective in halting the motion of others, or causing them to sleep or cry or harm themselves, depending on the tune that’s played.

Animal Mimes

It is only natural that miming an animal (slumming) would produce an internal animal state of reduced feelings. Most persons, including women, regularly slum an animal without knowing they are doing so. A basic zoological catalog of actions, such as the Behavior Bible, can be followed by the miming woman (the quiet Gladys) looking to cool down the intensity of her feelings, and these animal actions can more or less be subtly integrated into daily life, appended to the so-called human behavior a woman exhibits, so that basic tasks like walking, swimming, reading, and speaking can be augmented with various animal behaviors: stamping the feet, mewling, scratching, bucking, kicking, lumbering, hissing, skulking in the grass. It will be for the individual woman to determine which animals offer the behavior models she most needs to eliminate or conceal. There are so many animals in the world now, and the history of behavior has become so vast, that a woman should have no trouble finding a creature that corresponds to her emotion surplus (fiend quotient), but the search for an appropriate animal should very likely begin on the American farm. My animal-mime practice, when it was required of me, centered on a creature known as the horse. The horse postures, stances, and attitudes I pursued — the trot, gallop, canter, feeding from a bag, shaking my “mane,” rearing up with my “hooves” when I was introduced to people— including an intricate program of neighing, whinnying, and snorting, which I deployed orally at every opportunity, until I had successfully and legibly integrated bursts of these noises into my everyday speech so that I appeared merely to be loudly clearing my throat — these horse intrusions required so much attention from me that the result, at the end of the day, was inevitably to leech me of every active feeling I was aware of and thus cleanse my rioting heart down to the simplest, pumping thing. Indeed perhaps the chief effect of miming an animal is a kind of deep exhaustion not possible otherwise.

My earliest memories of my father involve his dog mimes, then later a wolf act that became indistinguishable from his real behavior, an addition to his fatherhood that kept him out-of-doors, knocking about in the yard, hard to please. During his dog phase, in the mornings at our Ohio home, he prowled outside my bedroom door and growled and scratched and barked, sending up moans and howls and threatening sounds, sometimes gnashing his teeth as though he were tearing at a piece of meat. He often pretended he was eating me. If I went to the door, still cautious and confused from sleep, to determine what was the ruckus, I’d only hear him scamper away and discover in his place nothing but scratch marks and slobber and a strange odor, along with a hard, dark nugget of waste. Upon my return to bed, he’d be back at it, barking his hard, father’s bark and pawing at my door, throwing himself into it, whining.

My mother’s animal of choice appeared to be a creature I could only fathom to be another woman, very much older, probably her own mother, who was stooped and sad and sometimes aimless. It was a quiet mime, with only the subtlest style, the most refined behavioral imitation I’ve ever observed, entailing long days of stillness by the window, elegant use of her hands to hide her face, and a deep expulsion of sighs that bordered on language but lacked, always, the requisite shape of the mouth to carve the air into words.

Is There Anything I Should Not Pretend to Do?

Miming an emotion is the most dangerous gestural pretense, for obvious reasons. If an emotional condition is unintentionally mimed, such as weeping, laughing, wincing in fright, doubting — even when done as a joke, as though to suggest, Wouldn’t it be funny if I actually felt something? — the only real antidote can be an extended performance of the nothing mime, a stationary pose held outdoors for a full day, which requires a woman to do exactly nothing until the mimed emotions begin to subside. The danger of a mimed emotion is that there is very little difference, if any, between pretending to feel something and actually feeling it; in some cases, the pretense is even stronger, the imitation cuts deeper and lasts longer. Thus the nothing mime, conducted in any weather and deployed with the use of a full-body mood mitten, which registers a woman’s emotional activity on its surface, is prescribed.

The Thrust Mime

The gestures of intercourse (stitching), when undertaken without another body or prop, are useful in purging feelings of confusion and doubt. If I do not believe I can accomplish a task, performing the thrust mime, an extended stitch and volley, tends to erase my doubt and send me back into my life with renewed commitment. My common stitch occurs with a wide stance against a waist-high table, one arm crossed behind my back for balance, the other leaning on the table (military push-up — style). On the count of three, I begin to thrust, a slow pace at first, smooth and solid, with a striding tilt to my hips, as though I were probing a stiff pudding. I drive deep with arched back and clenched buttocks. At the full-thrust position, I “flurry” with short, fast strokes, then pull back and “go long,” slowing the thrust almost to a stop and drawing all the way back (the seesaw); intermittently, I withdraw and hold a long pause, then nozzle at the threshold, which involves rising up and down on my toes (also called Peeking in the Window), before returning to the basic thrust and flurry rhythm, the parry, the dodge, the throw. This style also works over a staircase, though both arms are used for support (the civilian). When practiced against a wall, a shoulder can be relied on for pivoting, with both arms clasped behind the back (the gentleman). People will naturally have to discover an authentic thrust mime for themselves, based upon the primary gesture that brings about release. They may also employ a bump coach, if their budget permits it. If the act of thrusting is not the chief sexual gesture, then the mime should be changed accordingly. Knitting and pecking are other useful intercourse paradigms. I have seen women perform the elegant fade-away jumper mime, the elaborate sauté, the arched mime of hula hoop, and the rise and shine, a somberly grave sexual style that always saddens me, and I suspect these actions were based on sexual experiences, given the gentle facial tremors I observed and the strained gestures of concentration. There are probably thousands of different ways to mime human intercourse — to stitch the air with one’s hips — not to mention the many animal styles that also have their uses, yet a woman should not be discouraged if her intercourse mode is different or unusual to witness, if it requires a complicated and new physical presentation that might frighten other people who could mistake her stitch for a seizure or rough sleeping. A deceitful, conservative stitch is helpful to no one, nor will anyone be fooled. More and more women, during moments of doubt and confusion, will be pausing in their daily affairs to mime briefly a personalized moment of intercourse, however strenuous and interruptive it might first seem, and thus recover their courage to move about in the world.

The Good-bye Mime

The good-bye mime is probably the most therapeutic behavioral imitation available, yet the very notion of therapy involves a promise of relief, which itself is one of the more stubborn American feelings, and not to be succumbed to, so this form of fake behavior should be treated carefully. If too much comfort is derived from performing the good-bye mime, it should be discontinued. In short, the good-bye mime involves constructing nonflesh enemies who can be “killed” through mime weaponry, strangling, drowning, and other means decided by the woman “waving” good-bye. The kill function, as a general behavior in this world, is not available to very many persons without legal consequence, yet a certain love reduction can probably only be accomplished through the mimed slaughter of persons orbiting the woman’s life, especially those doing so to an excessive degree, the fathers, the brothers, the so-called lovers, the strangers. A nonflesh duplicate of these enemies, or mannequin equivalents, can be aggressively mistreated by a woman at will — stabbed, shot, punched, and pummeled — and the result is an outrush of attachment sensations (friendliness), which can be the most resistant to emotion flushing. The good-bye mime should be executed at a private kill site, where vocalizations may be freely released and a wide cache of weaponry is available. A woman should kill her father, brothers, friends, and relevant strangers in this way whenever the trap of devotion begins to feel too real.

In turn, the suicide mime (carpenter), done when a woman’s personal shame volume (PSV) has become overly loud in her body and threatens to produce undesirable acts of contrition and apology, is a useful self-killing mime that, if performed frequently enough, can accelerate the zero heart attempt. In my experience, the suicide mime must be arpeggiated to work well: I must rapidly fake many suicides, through gunshot, hanging, and knife wounds, miming the actual death moment each time. Women might prefer to “Shakespeare” the death moment and draw it out over a full day, while others may find that “cartooning” it is more effective for shame reduction.

Equipment

The very notion of women’s pantomime is to conduct a life without things, so equipment itself becomes a paradox, and, with one or two exceptions, should be refused in favor of a pure mime life that could occur anywhere in the world without alteration. Although some women prefer to wear the full-body mood mitten and the empathic storm sock throughout their daily activities, I view this choice of attire as an arrogant display of reduced emotions, somewhat too preening and boastful, insulting to those persons who still are addicted to expression and emoting.

Yet one important device is indispensable to the frontier of women’s mime, and that is the body-correction full-length glass, the Translator, which serves as a window in front of the miming woman and distorts her actions in various ways: It makes her seem more friendly, it “males” her or “ages” her, it delays her gestures and plays them back later, for behavior festivals, and it creates a mirror template of refined women’s actions, for her to model her body after when she is practicing her behaviors.

Would It Hurt If You Mimed Your Father?

Miming a member of one’s own family (ambush) can create an interesting behavior minus that can nearly last forever, particularly if the family can work as a team to mime one another’s behavior (a figure eight), doing so in real time throughout their daily lives, swapping roles during those hard hours between sleep sessions. A camouflage mime occurs when several family members suddenly mime a single person (bull’s-eye), as when parents mime their son, for instance, and do not relent or admit that they are doing so; this is also called “overmiming,” or “love,” and can cause a very durable behavior minus in the boy whose behavior is being imitated, particularly if he goes by the name Ben Marcus. The overmime absolves the boy from being himself, given that his behavior is so well covered in the actions of others. He can watch his parents acting as he would, imitating him, until his head and heart become so quiet and small that quite possibly no one in the world can see him, and he can make his exit from all visible life without report.

Dates

1852

WOMEN IN MIDDLE DENVER seize celebration rights to the annual Festival of Stillness, previously observed and dominated by men. They travel in groups to mountainsides and forests outside of town, drink girls’ water, attire themselves in stiff sheets of weighted cotton, and seek a final, frozen posture, hoping apparently that the mountain weather will fossilize their bodies into a “one true pose,” to represent them for all time. Their bodies are displayed in a traveling exhibit called “Women’s Behavior Statues,” and teenage girls are asked to study and rehearse the more basic positions. The slogan “Action is harm” is coined that year and the Festival of Stillness becomes a dominant women’s holiday.

1934

Early Ohio weather is first captured and preserved, then played back later through a simple AM radio. These radios can be taken on picnics to the lake, for customized weather and simple wind performances, benefiting the other families parked there to eat sandwiches and cast pebbles into the water. If several families stationed on blankets along the shore play their radios in a simulcast, calibrating the tilt of their antennas to focus their broadcast just over the water, the sky appears stronger, the children’s words are clearly enunciated, and the currents in the water ripple more realistically. Every family has a favorite weather style, and a radio that will play it back for them. Sometimes it sounds like the shortest words of the American language, in particular the first names that are used to summon people up from sleep, to groom their heads with a softly blowing oil, preparing them to be addressed by the largest person in the house, often the mother or father.

1939

Long Island physician Valerie James, thirty-six, and a sister begin a practice devoted to what they call “Women’s Fuel.” She has studied anatomy with a local medical group for three years but is otherwise untrained. Before she develops her notorious line of medical drinks for women, the James Liquids, or Water for Girls (1955), she and her sister will attempt several techniques of altering the disposition of women: the water chair, bolted to the floor of a medicinal pool, which holds a woman underwater until her lungs give out and “expel from the body all toxicity”; a sleep sock slung over the doorway, that women might sleep “in the fashion that they stand”; high volumes of wind shot at a woman’s body to “massage the senses”; and endurance speaking (or language fasting), in which the woman speaks rapidly until collapse, to “deeply fatigue the head and free it of language pollutants.” Only the sleep sock, which enforces a female sleeping posture, will prove to have lasting credibility, although the language fast is adopted and modified by Sernier, who requires his students to undergo it before attending his lectures.

1966

A clear sock is devised by the body-sleeve specialist Ryman that will protect a woman’s head from men’s language, the so-called weapon of the mouth. The sock also works to block the entrance of television and radio transmissions, certain man-made aromas, and men’s wind. Because breathing is difficult when wearing the Ryman sock, fainting often results, and it is through this accident that the Listening Group discovers what it will term the “revelatory power of willful fainting,” and adopts the belief that regular drops in consciousness allow women to hear something deeply secret in the air. The Ryman sock will be fitted posthumously to the heads of dead Silentists, to aid their attainment of a possible women’s afterlife.

1968

The first official version of the “Promise of Stillness,” a vow against motion, appears in January in Albany. The document argues that motion and speech disturb the atmosphere and must cease before a “world storm” is generated that could destroy America. The Women’s Congress, which fled to Albany from Boston in December, has commissioned local radio announcer Katherine Livingston, twenty-six, to risk her job by reading the document on the airwaves while, throughout the country, the signatories take their final positions, mostly in their homes, before ceasing all motion and speech. Emily Walker, the most vocal of those women to take the promise of stillness, issues a statement, declaring, “If I die, it will not be of hunger. I am not hungry or thirsty. I refuse the false promise of motion. I stop.” She dies in six days after shedding a brittle layer of skin, the Walker Pelt, which hangs still in a New Jersey home. Her cause of death is listed as starvation. In the years to follow, Walker Pelts will be marketed to families as small body rugs to be thrown over children, either to immobilize them or to reduce the falsity of their motion.

1971

Silentists attack Fort Blessing, Texas, July 19 and kill five members of the Listening Group before kidnapping seventeen-year-old Caroline Ann Parker. She will live peacefully with the Silentists for four years (until “rescued” against her will by the Texas Mounted Police), marry Quiet Boy Bob Riddle, and stage spectacular, noiseless demonstrations in the Texas desert. As a professional Listener, Parker will be employed by the Silentists to discover an American territory with broad parameters of silence, a region where silence will not only be possible but required. They will settle in Ohio.

1972

Martha Ferris develops Women’s Sign Language and tours the country, demonstrating the technique at schools and churches, proposing a women’s bilinguality that will not only allow for private utterances but possibly enable new forms of thought not available under current systems of grammar and syntax. Her younger sister, Katherine Ferris-Watley, has pierced her own eardrums during a local show of silence and refuses to learn American Sign Language, keeping her hands swaddled in cloth, and often “signing in tongues,” a form of gibberish sign language thought to have religious significance. It is from Katherine’s blunt and frustrated semaphore that Sign Language for Large Hands emerges, a system of forceful prop-aided sign language meant to be read from a great distance, utilized by Silentists who have injured or burned their own hands in protest but who still must enact a basic language. Women’s Sign Language will be rejected by the deaf communities, since much of it requires that the hands of a woman be pinned against her hips while she jumps and spins in the air, actions that deaf women, with their compromised sense of balance, are unable to perform safely. The Listening Group, seeking further difference from the Silentists, will establish a new but troubled relationship with the deaf communities, believing that their skin is receiving the sound that their heads cannot, leading to the Deaf Pelt Thefts of 1974, an action of massive scalping and skin theft against deaf persons.

1980

Sernier kills Burke and is acquitted. He says that if he had it to do over again, he would have killed Burke more slowly. He wishes he could “continue killing Burke.” Burke’s family silently walks through their Akron neighborhood while people jeer at them with the chant “Burke is dead.” Burke’s scholarly works are no longer widely stocked in bookstores. The grammatical tense that Burke has proposed — Burke — is rejected by the Omaha Language Council on the grounds that it renders improbable things too plausible, because it “makes no linguistic distinction between what can and cannot happen. ” In August, Sernier’s students attack seven men and women who were said to have been students of Burke, forcing them into a Thompson Box, a clear cell with a speech tube attached, where the input of language disrupts the rhythm of their bodies, leading to seizures and ultimate physical arrest. Sernier applauds his students in an editorial, asking readers not to forget that he killed Burke. He promises that the word “Burke” will hereafter create a “lasting wound to the skin.” Jane Dark promptly adopts the word as her first language weapon. She demonstrates that by shouting “Burke!” at a small dog, it will not be able to walk and will soon collapse with fatigue.

Names

[Erin]

THE ERIN IS A KEY GIRL in many American houses. It is often misnamed Julie, Joanne, or Samantha, and sometimes it is clothed as a man. As a man, it is still beautiful, although less visible, and prone to lose color during sleep. It makes love and has slender legs, while persons that see it are eager to palm the spot where the woman parts would be, to sweep and pan their hands over the heat of the man that is hiding her. Persons pry a finger into its mouth and feel weak and sweet in the legs, deriving pleasure through this gateway into Erin, breaking through the husk of a man’s body into an inner body named Erin, sometimes breaking past that also to touch at the smooth core and stain their hands on it. There are text versions of Erin, as well. Reading them is similar to seeing Erin. It takes a day to read the full version of Erin, and the process is exhausting. The text cannot be memorized and sometimes the ending comes abruptly and frightens the reader. The first lusciously bright pile of Erin that the others feed from is located in Denver and kept warm by a man named Largeant. It must be swallowed quickly or it will cut and wound the mouth.

Statistics for Erin: My sister refused all clothing but an old beige throw rug. She crawled around under the rug, mostly at night. No real language was exhibited, though she made rudimentary attempts at Burke. She seemed concerned to exhibit clean geometries with her body beneath the rug: circles, triangles, squares. We could not get her to wear a sleep sock. If she fainted, she did so without our knowledge.

[Tina]

The Tina will die. It will emerge in Chicago and reside in chipped white houses of wood and warped glass. It will die quietly. When it does not emerge in Chicago, there will be something uncertain and weak to its shape, a rough tongue, and hair that a father has unjustly handled. It will die on a Tuesday and the hands will go blue. There is promise to the newer Tina shape. It is blackened through ancestral practice, but it can be watery in color. There is a milky storm nearby this Tina figure, and girl versions often dive into the heart of the wind for cleansings. Nothing by way of an answer is ever found in it. On its back is a mark, a freckle, a blister, a scar.

Statistics for Tina: My sister walked upright and spoke basic English. Her face approximated gestures of “happiness.” Her nocturnal actions were mostly low-level postures of sleep. Excellent wind resistance. She showed confusion when we stopped calling her Tina. She had already decorated some of her belongings with this name.

[Patricia]

It isn’t the most willing shape to swim or lunge or use force to motion over the road. The body prefers the easiness of a chair and a stick to point at what it likes. It is most fully in the Patricia style in the evenings, with brittle hairings and admirable mouth power. They have a Patricia everywhere now, sometimes many. There is no conflict in an abundance of it, which can be considered the chief difficulty. There are many and yet it seems as though there are none. It will be born in America and will exist most successfully as a child. Often the Patricia system lives well into the last posture before demise, beyond the view of childhood. Age falls all over it and makes it walk down into the ground and sleep as though it lived in a grave. It calls out from its grave phone, but the ringing sounds only like a sleeping dog and is ignored. It is then allowed to witness itself as an earlier thing, a thing best seen young. The older Patricia fights off the young girl Patricia. It will kill it down again and again, achieving nothing, but killing it nevertheless, creating space for something else that is new and wildly bodied. The young Patricia eats a large bowl of corn for pleasure. It weeps at the sight of water.

Statistics for Patricia: My sister was mostly pliant as Patricia. She willingly posed in several behavior statues for my mother. No resistance to the Brown Hat, which allowed her to converse fluently with several of my mother’s assistants. They spoke a language that sounded like slow laughter.

[Carla]

There are fabrications that go forth under the Carla tag. They are smallish and brown-hued. There is an actual Carla at a school, and it will learn to beat away the fake occasions of its own number. It will see one coming up the road, one little brown Carla, with fingers like American bread and a hairdo cut right out of the afternoon. The real Carla circles the false object and places fire on its living parts. Many times, an American fire contains glittered fragments of a combusted Carla. There are fires in Ohio and girls are leading their dead parts into them. Every morning in every city young women are seen chancing a look back down the road. Sometimes a sluggish fat-skinned fake is sulking back there, waiting to take over and fail in Carla’s place. When the Carla makes comfort with boys under trees and farther out on the landscape, there is an apology to the movement of its hands. It touches a boldly upright kid’s penis and then palms the dust, the soot, the soil, feeling for the tremor of legs approaching.

Statistics for Carla: A name regularly used on my sister. She showed frequent bloating and could not fit into the sleep sock. A Ryman sock was used with much discomfort. Her evening mimes were striking as Carla. Often she could calm the entire household.

[Nancy]

I saw one at a bed. It kneeled; it leaned. There was hair and a body and no such thing as weather, no window broken onto a wall, nor water rushing behind us, or a road to remind me I could leave. Something like this is waiting to happen for everyone. A room somewhere sweetened with a Nancy system. You can approach it and examine its teeth. They are the color of an old house and have chewed their way through something — a trap, a net, a man’s hand. I let my arms operate like they did when I was a little boy. I “held” it. It did not bite; it did not speak. I stumbled. It gestured for me to rest. The Nancy shape cannot be detached from the woman it stands for. It can be released, to drag a bed — from a rope looped over its hips— into the city, putting to sleep the visitors that approach it and speaking to them certain facts, certain secrets as they dream, until they can rise from the sheets and move away from it into the distance, toward an area lacking all Nancy, dull and shoe-colored and simple, an American city with other kinds of “people,” and life beyond restriction.

Statistics for Nancy: No skin was shed after my sister used this name. My father repeatedly scoured her body with the pelt brush, to no avail. The only language she exhibited was to say “Nancy” until she collapsed with fatigue. A highly harmful name. Possibly a harmful word. None of us enjoyed calling her this.

[Julie]

There is probably no real Julie.

[Linda]

From 1984 until the winter of 1987, an absence of significant registered Lindas spurred a glut of naming activity in that category by parents eager to generate unique-seeming figures into the American landscape and thus receive credit for an original product, the Linda. The resulting children are emerging mostly out of Virginia, with a possible leader, or group of leaders, working through Richmond. Examples have been seen in the West — small and shockingly white, with delicate eyes— but they have been in poor health and have not lasted. Weather cuts them down and hides their lives until it is too late, and they die. Sometimes rain is blamed. Sometimes nothing but wind. The adult community — too old to register their names and therefore unable to receive the benefits of official status— has nevertheless been supportive of the surge. The tall and stately Lindas, with plenty of money and a husband, have politely vacated their homes, allowing the new Linda children in for full access to their men, their things, their lives. The older ones enter a sack and wait.

Statistics for Linda: High-level exhaustion during the Linda phase. My sister showed bewilderment and frequently made evasive maneuvers. Quick on her feet and difficult to catch. Often we could not find her. She seemed inclined to play dead. A nonuseful name for her. Highly inaccurate. May have caused permanent damage.