Notable American Women

Teachings of the Female Jesus

ONE NIGHT WHEN THE AIR was torn up by papery clouds, and the calendar showed no siring appointments for me to meet, I skipped my evening water dosing and slid back the red bolt on the door of the stillness shed.

I did not often skip my water intake. It was not thirst that set in without it, but wrong thoughts in my head that could not be mastered, and a pulse in my chest that fired too fast and stalled my breathing. It was a disruption that could lead to mistakes: memories, for instance, which could lead to other mistakes, like feelings. This was water that put me to sleep: a long, calm stretch of time to keep me blank until morning. The world speeded up without it. The people in it became blurry. The water was like a blanket inside me that I could crash against.

There were no guards outside the shed to monitor access. It was a night of pure Ohio silence. In daylight I could not go near it without encountering an escort. That night I walked upright and crunched through the grass and no one came near me. It was easy to be anywhere. The women were all sleeping.

A dark brown light stained the inside of the shed. A dirty fog. It smelled like something. The structure was once a barn, a simple wooden box, with wide boards smeared in a honey varnish. Every day I watched the women file in, carrying their stillness equipment. Heads down, serious, hushed. Sometimes a thin coil of smoke arose from a perforation in the roof. Otherwise there was nothing to see or hear from the shed. It was muffled in some deep bunting, as quiet a house as there was on the whole compound. If the women exited, they did so discreetly, at odd hours, without sound.

The air inside felt rumpled, as thick as cloth on my face. I moved into it slowly, squinting into the deep brownness. On the floor, sitting in neat rows like students, were more stillness practitioners than I could count, many rows deep, their bodies receding into the darkness at the back of the room. They were flush to the walls, with hardly a lane left for walking. Several bodies lined the near walls, fastened upright with harnesses, as if they were participating in a carnival ride. There was equipment everywhere: rigging, piles of cloth, chalkboards. Many of the women wore straitjackets, though some were covered in makeshift corsets and capes, draped so deeply in cloth that their bodies were not visible at all. It was difficult to see much. I tried to look at their faces, but they were downturned and some were covered in what seemed like gauze. I waited in the doorway, adjusting my eyes, trying to breathe quietly, shallowly, to keep the odd scent out of my mouth. My entrance did not seem to have disturbed them. It was as if I had walked into a room of the dead.

Out of the silence came short blasts of high-pitched breathing, a synchronized hissing that suggested their bodies were connected to some vast engine beneath the floor, firing air through these women as if they were just pipes. Possibly this was a form of unison breathing. Crowds of women breathing in sequence, a political breathing, precisely timed, producing their audible wind, then entering a hard inhale all together, clearing the room of oxygen, stifling anyone not following their calibration. The room felt like a large dry lung.

I stepped in and tried to navigate toward the back. There was hardly room to walk. With my dangling hand, I accidentally touched against some of them. Their bodies were cold and rigid. Their skin had the same clammy density as my old clay head. None of them flinched at the contact. No coughs or groans or shuffled positions. I was possibly one of the temptations they had trained for, a man in their midst, an opposer to challenge their stillness and tempt them back into motion. They were good. I felt thoroughly ignored. The room refused to come alive.

I had read the report on the atmospheres in the shed. As women motioned down, their exhalations thinned out and they needed less oxygen. The air in the shed would go unused, thickening around their bodies. It would be a paralysis air. A straitjacketing air. It could be a bottled stillness. Injected into canisters to quickly rid a room of its motion.

The more of it I breathed, the slower I moved. If it had a taste, I could never describe it, but it made all other air I had ever breathed seem weak, an air that did nothing for a person but dry out his insides, make his whole head brittle and cold, lather him with age. I felt myself filling with a kind of sweet sand that would fill my gaps, coating the hollows inside me until I was solid and heavy and entirely finished as a person.

I am generally no strong advocate of breathing. I do not appreciate the labor behind it, the gruesome inflation of the chest, how it fattens a man’s face and advertises his hunger. Something as necessary and regular as breathing should not require such shameful heaving, such greedy shapes of the mouth. There is no civil, polite way to do it without embarrassing oneself. I prefer to hold my breath when I can, to feel warmth spread through my face as my emotional fire stifles inside me without any air to feed it. As much as one inhales even the best of mountain air, the supposedly healthy, rich oxygen of the countryside, every breath produces a small disappointment, fails to soothe one’s inner body.

I pushed deeper into the room. It was so quiet I could not hear myself move. In the far corner was a small area free of women, equipped with a blanket and a low ledge of water vials, a case that looked like a behavior kit, and several swatches of rough-textured fabric. A small framed photo of Jane Dark as a teenager was nailed to the wall — a little girl in braids performing a dance for the camera — positioned for a devotee to gaze at as she sought her private paralysis. There was a technology to the area, a sense of expert outfitting, suggesting that if anyone would ever succeed at stillness — even a man who had been told that the project was off-limits to him — he might do it here, in this advanced setting, with perfect conditions.

I took my position on the carpet, lowering down among the women. I wrapped the blanket over my shoulders and braced myself with wedges of carpet. My legs felt wrong beneath me, stiff and aching. I tried to sit upright, but the muscles high in my back burned in such a posture. I scooted into the corner, which held me better, and pulled the blanket over my face, until the wool heated against my mouth and I was breathing into its scratchy surface, fully covered, hidden in the back of the shed.

I waited for the great merit of stillness to hit me, the benefit of my motion camouflage. Much of the literature of stillness posted on the bulletin board was coded just out of my range, either vowelized or rendered in a foreign tongue, too difficult to decipher. To look at it always left me disoriented and tired, knowing less than when I started. I wasn’t sure if stillness should make me feel more or less. Huge feelings that racked the body and could never be reported to the outside world other than by a seizure of weeping and wailing; or a clean, quiet heart that shot jets of forgetfulness through the blood, antidotes to complaints, leaving a calm minus in its place.

I waited there under the shroud of blanket, breathing all over myself.

That is all I remember.

I was discovered the next morning by the motion warden. I presume that’s who she was. She sprayed men with a terrible device. It lured them into motion, dosed their bodies with frenzy. She kept the shed free of false students, policing the women for weakness in their practices. I do not know how she found me, unless my smell was a trigger, unless they knew I had escaped the house, unless she had seen me enter the shed and was waiting for the precise moment to spray such crazy motion onto me.

I had seen this warden before, training on the compound, but she had never come for a send. We had not coupled. Probably she had failed at silence and was not selected for mating. Too noisy in the mouth. Banging around through her life. She took her afternoons in the exercise yard, doing face work mostly. Usually she stayed low to the ground, showing a great strength when operating from a crouch. A body not suited to silence. Too powerful to stay quiet. Sometimes she took part in evening helmet burnings, when an edition of silence helmets had expired.

The warden crouched and applied her prod to my legs, a charge so hot and deep that I thought I had wet myself. Her dog hissed at me like a cat, a raggy thing with terrible breath, jumping around me and blasting its awful air into my face.

The sudden daylight in the shed burned my skin. I could not detect that any time at all had passed since I had sat down to try my stillness. It seemed to have been a single moment, but when I attempted to fend off the dog, and could not move, I guessed that the night must have passed, and possibly more time than that, because my limbs felt cemented onto me, my skin a quicksand that could drown me. The stillness I had gained did not want to surrender me, even as the warden’s ministrations increased, pumping a heat into me that left me twitching around on the floor, fat and warm in the hands.

Much disturbance commenced at that time in the shed. Once the women abandoned their poses, a full vigilante system was launched, and I came under their methodical, slow siege, more threatening because of how leisurely they approached me. They fell and writhed in the dust as they shouted their all-vowel invective, chanting high-pitched songs full of scolding, angry intonations. The women looked very much at sea, reaching up to me as if I might save them from drowning. The volume in the room had been raised, possibly with the opening of the door or the sudden movement of so many Silentists. My eyes and ears smarted with the brittle sounds, even those my body made as it rubbed against itself, and I felt for the first time the allergic reaction sound could produce after so much silence. It was a sound I could not digest, and my body convulsed to reject it, but it smothered over me in too great a wash. I felt a rash coming up under my skin like a suit of sand.

An alarm rang somewhere. I found a lane free of bodies and took it, forearming past the warden and into the women who had sprung from their straitjackets to grab at me. I was on my feet and powerful and not long for that shed. I muscled myself roughly through the crowd. They were easy to disperse, their bodies hollow and dry. It was like pushing through stalks of wheat. I was afraid they would break when I touched them. They cried out sharp, high notes as they toppled, quivering quickly on the ground, their hands grazing at my legs with no force at all.

Soon I had cleared the last of the women and found the door. Only the sky was above me, the shed a wooden mistake to my rear, a shrill vowel invective still pulsing in the air like the sound of a distant celebration. I ran brokenly, wrongly, until I only heard a faint hissing behind me, as delicate as water, a hissing sound that in the end was just my own legs, pumping hard and fast through the grass, taking me away from there.

Mother did not try to search for me, though I knew she would require an encounter. She might attempt to administer decoy praise, to confuse me, or present affection mimes to ironize my behavior. A silent party might be thrown in my honor, with clear cake and children’s coffee. Women hissing at me, swatting the air, charading their pleasure. Possibly a deep behavior massage was forthcoming, strong hands kneading my body with a lesson. There would be a return to some primary learning water in my daily dosing. I might receive a wind-box application, or she might require me to sit in front of the behavior television. Unless, that is, consequences themselves had been phased out of the wide-scale behavior reduction at work on the compound, in which case my trespass in the stillness shed would go unremarked, even on the bulletin board. The event would be silenced. No reports would be issued, my schedule would not change, and the behavior that met me would be as steady as ever. I would be left to devise my own reaction from the encounter, a private analysis to sort out a moral from my breach of the stillness shed, my disregard for trespassing rules I knew well. Or I could choose to disregard it myself, to store the event nowhere, to mime my indifference until my indifference toward the event became real.

I was hidden deep in the yellow field when I saw my mother’s dim form in front of the house. She swayed slightly on her feet and waited for me. I saw no sled, no assistants, no fainting equipment. My mother was operating solo. A person appeared to have collapsed near her feet. I felt so little already that I was too tired to feel less.

I waited until a bluish darkness filtered over the field. It seemed possible that my mother might exhaust herself out there and lose her purpose, forget why she was standing outside, or, at the least, suffer enough fatigue to diminish the strength of her treatment. We could wait each other out, compete toward apathy. See who cared more. Or less.

I killed the afternoon by moving my limbs, massaging the blood back, though even my fingers were stiff. All motion seemed wrong and foreign. My body refused it. The hard air that had settled over me in the shed had left me capable of only the smallest gestures, useless movements that could not gain me food or make me understood to others. If I tried to speak, I could not move. If I moved, I could not speak or breathe. If I stopped thinking, my limbs twitched and the stiffness would subside, with patches of warmth spreading in my thighs. A certain coordination had been compromised. I tried not to think. If an enterprising animal had found me, it could have had its way with me and encountered very little defense at all.

My mother was stationed on the walkway when I finally pulled myself home. I needed water. The evening was too dark for eye contact between us, and she had spent her quota on me days ago. She stood stiffly as I advanced, tilting her head toward me as if she were blind, as if she might hear everything about my approach that she needed to know. I circled her and tried to keep walking toward the house, quiet in my step, but she raised her hand, jerked it up, and held it aloft. A gesture to stop. Her back was to me, but her head was cocked expectantly. There was no use in me going anywhere.

The behavior flash cards were revealed as I sat in the gravel of the walkway, the evening air thin and sharp around us. Mother’s headlamp provided the light. She mounted the cards on the frame and then retreated slightly to assist her presentation with a languorous wind-box application, shifts of the air that deepened my concentration and made my head feel clear and open. I was not concerned about striking anyone. My body still felt too heavy to use.

These cards were new; I had not seen them before. Each one showed a family scene. The characters were rendered in our own likeness: my mother, my father, and me. A fourth character had been blotted out: possibly a dog, possibly a girl. The cards were drawn as precisely as photographs, suggesting the pictures had been copied from life, but the settings behind the characters had not been filled in. Their actions were suspended in gray space.

The first card showed Mother and Father swinging their boy between them, none of them smiling. In the second card, the boy was afloat and alone, possibly assisted aloft. The third card showed a close-up of the boy’s mouth, void of teeth, a red gummy mess. The fourth card was blank, or speckled with dust, or depicting an empty sky. The father’s back was turned in the fifth card. He was alone and walking away. The boy was sprawled against his legs in the sixth; flung toward the legs, probably, or kicked away. Then the father appeared in a series of cards that showed his shadow to be more ample than he was, a shadow that began to consume him, oversized, a swollen cloud. The boy and his mother were drawing the shadow around the father in the set of cards after that, even while the father seemed to protest, his arms raised, his hands curled into fists. The mother and boy were using brushes or pouring cans of dark liquid around him as the father’s body grew smaller and his shadow blackened over him. In one card, the shadow was pouring directly from the boy’s mouth.

We were up to card twenty. My mother used flat hands to stroke the air as she continued her wind-box application. In the next card, the boy received a shock if he tried to enter the father’s shadow. Cards showed him being flung back as if from a force field, sparks roving over his body. He could not pierce it, though he made several running starts, even as he was held on a leash by his mother, who was leaning away with the strain. A blotted figure was already resident inside the shadow, in a wagon pulled by the father. The figure seemed immune to the father’s shadow, the wagon slightly aglow. In the next few cards, the shadow and the father became one blobby item, and the blob began to recede, until the father was a small black point, no wagon in sight, and the boy and his mother were left alone. The boy’s leash formed a tightrope between him and his mother, and small girls walked the length of it, an empty speech bubble hovering over them. The cards closed in on the girls, who were walking along with big smiles. The boy and his mother were too big to be seen clearly in these cards; they were mostly vague shapes in the background. In the next set of cards, the boy searched through a patch of grass for something, poking his fingers into soil, and finally came up with a small wagon, too small to contain anybody, though he tried fitting himself into it. He then tried to pull the wagon, but there were no wheels on it. He showed it to his mother, but she had her head turned.

In the last set of cards, the mother was building what appeared at first to be a house. Her son stood near her but couldn’t help because his hands had been erased. He tried to nudge supplies toward his mother with his head, but she didn’t seem to want his help. He became smaller as the cards progressed, losing length in his arms, and the mother’s construction project grew larger, surrounding her, until it extended naturally from her massive body and began to feature an engine. The boy rested on his back near the exhaust of the engine. He had no arms. The mother was hardly recognizable for the structure that surrounded her: a large, motor-powered house. The last card showed a thin line of colorless fire. No characters were drawn on the card.

My mother dismantled the rack, tucked away the cards, and then stooped to her feet to gather something from the crumple of cloth. The body on the ground was lifeless and too heavy-looking for her to lift as easily as she did, and when I saw its face to be my own, I recognized it as the mannequin that she had built some time ago — a hollowed-out version of me she could demonstrate behavior on. A procedure had been ordered, and she was following Dark’s suggestion. Build a dummy of your boy. Use his own hair for the head. I had hardly seen this mannequin. For some reason, it was mostly kept from me. It was a fair likeness, and it showed me to be in good health. It was interesting to see a copy of myself so slack in the body, so pliant, as if I were watching myself sleep.

She dragged the mannequin up on her lap and began a series of hugging gestures against it. She cradled the head in her arms. She kissed its cheeks. The doll was limp as she held it, but she smothered it all over with nuzzlings. She tried to tickle it. She pressed its head into her bosom. Her face was plastered in a smile, stretched so wide it could have been a grimace of pain. She gazed up at the stars, posing her face in various masks of contentment. My mother could certainly look pleasant. She wanted me to see this. There was a lesson here somewhere. The two of them cuddled there in a picture of affection as her lamp burned on and the night grew later.

I watched her loving the doll. She did it well. She had an accurate and complex style of affection. I could easily believe she was feeling love for it. I sat perfectly still in the warmth from the two of them. A photograph of this scene would have convinced anyone. It would have been proof that I had been held, doted on, cuddled, nuzzled, kept warm, and kissed and kissed and kissed. I would like to have copies of such photographs. They would prove interesting and useful for later study. For later regard. It would be good to have evidence of the endearments my mother and I have exchanged.

A month later my sends had yielded zero gifts, an entire winter of wasted mating. My sends were no more than vapor, leaks down other people’s legs. In the end, I had sent nowhere. There would be no purebred Silentists, no girls of the new water, no prodigies of stillness born without a bias toward motion, an allergy to sound. No children at the compound at all.

I walked down on the lawn and saw those remaining Silentists, who had yet to undertake their promise of stillness, standing in a circle around the burning conception harness.

Their communication was reduced to a rough hand grammar that looked like a stylized midwestern fighting style. It was performed without flinching, yet consisted of considerable gestures of rearing back, hands ferreted up, retracted punches, ducking and weaving heads. These were pre-stillness women, purging their last spastic actions.

Here they all were, facing one another, showing much gesture of warfare as the harness burned. Some made as if they were squeezing a small animal in their fingers, tearing it apart. Their heads were placid while their hands contorted, their faces erased of expression. At certain intervals in the gesturing, their mouths pitched down jets of wind into their hands and they appeared to be warming themselves like travelers around a fire. All the staff was on hand, though I did not see Mr. Riddle, the silencing man. A quick check behind me revealed Larry’s dim form at work in the field as always, barking hard at the hole that held my father.

Mother and Jane Dark took turns kneeling behind the girls to spot their gestures: guide their hands and correct their motion, apply paddles to their limbs, a short stick to the small of the back, fine jets of water onto the face.

The door to the stillness shed was open and a great noise of hosing could be heard within, the sound of fast water striking something soft and loose, like skin. Many of the women carried packs.

I had not known them to gather at once in this way, to put their bodies in view, to be such plain targets in the daytime. Something busy was afoot, but as I stepped among them their gestures quickly subsided, my motion poisoning the air and killing their own. The women powered down as if my presence had tripped a plug on their bodies, and soon no one was moving but me. It was a field of statues, though their hair still frittered in the low morning wind, and a new scent swirled about the area, the smell of paralysis.

One of the frozen women was my mother. Her body, such as it barely was, had curled around a small cardboard box. She was just another Silentist now, who could not abide being seen, who would not move if a man was watching. Her face relaxed as I approached her. It was spongy and showed no recognition. She was styling herself for me to see her. It seemed to take great effort, but her mouth moved in purses and puckers, a face not practiced at speech seizing now under its strains. She was making the musclings of language, but there was no sound. It looked as though she would eat the space between us. If this was what it took for my mother to talk, to make a piece of loud wind that I might use — in order to know her, or myself, or my purpose — I did not care to see it. I sat with her there until her face fell calm and she was no more than a mannequin of my mother. True to life, perhaps, and accurately rendered, yet wooden to the core. The work of a carpenter, at the most. The work of a person-builder. A very certain kind of no one. A body you could sit next to all afternoon and, with the right kind of concentration, start to forget.

Inside the box, which slipped easily from my mother’s hands, sat a helmet as soft and colorless as a man’s deflated face. Its perfect oval shape was what I had always hoped my head might look like. I had not realized a helmet could be as clear as water, could make my face feel so small and safe — a tiny, plain face that would seem far away to anyone who looked at it. A helmet to frame me into the distance, so I might look as though I had yet to arrive.

A note in my mother’s hand was taped to its slightly hairy top, where the skin was pink and sticky. “Put this on,” the note said. “You’re going to need it. We will not see you again.” I could not look at any of the Silentists. I knew it would shame them to be seen. I did not want to damage anyone’s chances, to cause more feelings than I needed to. With a lowered gaze, I picked up the helmet, which proved heavy and sourly scented of meat, strapped it on, and rose slowly to my feet. My head felt older and more familiar, as if something had been missing from it before.

I had vials of water in my bag and many small sacks of seeds, and I began slowly to make a distance from the house, walking delicately under my own head, listening for my thoughts, waiting for the sound of them to blast back on.

Looking back, I saw the closed door of the stillness shed, the red bolt blazing firmly in place. The women were gone. A motion-free area had been achieved. It took me turning my back, and then they were gone. The shed was full. My own head was finally a finished part of my body. I would not need to worry about it again. The moment called for a dash of new water to be donated, and I spilled it out on the dirt at my feet, where it did not seep in, where it merely puddled on the soil, shimmering a bit in the late-afternoon sun until I stepped on it firmly, squarely, pushing it as deeply as I could into the earth.

I noted the Punisher’s position on the horizon. He could have been a fake man, a statue, a mannequin. Too far away for me to tell. Men that far away are as good as dead. It was best that the punishment was happening behind me. Fathers are always punished in the distance. He did not move and nothing near him did either, suggesting his entire location was constructed of color and light alone, with not one single beating heart in it, no real skin, nothing that could actually die. It would not be a place for someone such as myself.

I turned my back on him and walked hard and straight toward the deepest Ohio. My house gained size behind me as I retreated, staining the ground in a clear, thick shadow at my feet, the distant horizon ahead of me breaking into smaller and softer pieces as I approached it. There was nothing to do with my hands then but hold them up and feel around on my face— touch my mouth, my cheeks, my eyes — and maybe discover what, if anything, on that last day at home, I might actually have been conspiring to feel.

Promise of Stillness

LET IT BE RECOGNIZED, under the witness of the all-prevailing female Thompson, that this legal creed against motion bears the authority of a Female Jesus edict, a life law designated by our Lady Freeze, through which a woman of America might prosecute her stoppage of viewable actions, thus joining forces against all that moves, waging war in the name of stillness and silence, creating of her body a fixed landmark, an example of tranquillity, a frozen zone.

By signing this document, I enter into this agreement solely through my own choice, which I assert is mine to dispense. I have not been paid or persuaded to halt the viewable gestures of my body. If I profit from my ensuing stillness, it is from an arrangement of my own, though money I earn while physically still is fully taxable and subject to paralysis funds or other dowries initiated to support motion-free localities and persons residing there or en route to them. I hereby assert that I have not notified any member of the Silentist organization of a financial motive for stillness, a manner that stillness might be construed as employment, labor, or creative endeavor, subject to compensation, or gambled upon by persons betting on the outcome of the promise of stillness.

I agree that none of my garments, while I bear down into stillness, should advertise the interests of a foundation or individual other than myself, and in no way may I be marked, whether through tattoos or scars or text slogans burned into my skin, with symbols that can be construed as citation for anything outside of my own physical interests. Nor may I license my name or likeness for the mercenary aims of those not affiliated with the Silentist organization and its satellite groups. I remain fully accountable for the way my name is used, written, uttered, or in any way referenced by these outsiders.

Should my stillness result in personal debt or bankruptcy, I cannot assign that failure to any motion-prevention society existing now or in the future, and I forfeit any right to seek damages for any change in my wealth status or physical health or emotional condition that results.

Nor will I hold accountable any other woman, or person or animal masquerading as such, for the task which I hereafter set about to accomplish, regardless of the outcome, including the possibility of my disappearance or forceful demise or drowning down a well into the hell pool. That task can be described as the ultimate full stop of every action viewable at a distance of one arm’s length or greater, with the exception of fidgets and grimaces, magnified semaphore or rescue gestures, a stoppage also known as the promise of stillness, the life pause, the freeze, the Jane Dark.

The distance of viewable motion detection, if my stillness is ever tested, may not be assisted with motion-detection glasses, gesture goggles, body microscopes, viewfinders, binoculars, a pencil, action-detection wands, stilts, or eyesight-enhancement devices of any sort existing now or yet to be developed, including smart skin, dead face styles, or hand-to-the-earth tremor-sensing techniques of the Indian people and others trained by them. Nor should organic vision in excess of twenty-twenty be the standard eye strength by which the distance is determined, even if the twenty-twenty standard becomes, at some future or other time, an easily surpassed milestone of eyesight, whether through medical or vitamin enhancement, an exercise regimen, nutritional assistance to the head through such devices as the strength sponge, or self-surgery interventions designed to render the seeable far more vivid, applying a close-up filter to that which was technically once far away, a come-hither ointment rubbed on what was once distant, a coil device affixed to objects, pulling them into sight as they are approached or summoned. My body may not be treated with motion-detection jellies, circled by twitch-inducing dogs, smeared with bait to lure me into action, or prodded with an electrical rod.

Should the standard Ohio Motion Detection Device™, as worn by a Jane Dark representative, register natural movement of any sort on my person, or a wobbling palsy arising from my body, as with nervous hands, whether through tethers, leashes, or strings that snap taut if I so much as move, or a sonar device that alerts a Jane Dark representative, who might occupy an observation booth, of motion occurring from my person, this contract shall become void and may not again be undertaken. Nor might any future accidental paralysis of mine, or frozen body condition that I may adopt, whether through enforced stillness, straightjacketing, coffin incarceration, or any other unnamed method of stillness, including my apparent demise, even if it proves a real demise, complete with eulogy, burial, and headstone, or a real demise that lacks these rituals, but still occurs, such as my body flung from a vehicle and come to rest in a ditch, where it is never discovered, but is still technically in a state of demise, be indicative of a successful promise of stillness, but instead shall signify an aberrant or natural pause in my motion akin to a stop-time event in a bird migration, such as birds pausing midair to perform a shadow function on the land below — which in some cases is a system of messaging for those women equipped to read it — or some other unsanctioned event resulting in stillness, such as a personal gridlock, a crisis of motion, or a Syrup Action.

I recognize that stillness occurs by accident all the time, and agree not to confuse these forms of stillness with the stillness I herewith set about to adopt. If I do not know this, I admit that others sufficiently know it, and I grant these others the power of mind over me to know the things that I am not capable of knowing, to adopt the ideas I recognize to be in my best interest, however incapable I might be of holding those ideas on my own, even if I do not consciously agree that the ideas are in my best interest, and even if I actively declare these ideas to be harmful and alarming, or cry out in pain, or beg for help, or disavow the very words of this agreement, or deny signing this agreement, or claim no knowledge of the terms of this agreement.

I further disavow that which randomly or intentionally puts a halt to my body. I disavow bodies that stop through inertia, fatigue, car crashes, and other collisions or unions that bodies make when they persist toward solid objects and become stunned into torpor. I disavow the nonstillness achieved when bodies are acted upon, lunged, hurtled, or thrown into the landmarks of the countryside, including the insertion of bodies into slings attached to the long wooden arms of the great structures known as catapults, which, when activated, hurl forth the contained body into modes of extreme nonstillness, which can apparently result in conditions known as orbit, though often don’t, particularly when walls intervene, when trees intervene, or when the body itself windmills and rudders and otherwise drags on the air so much as to render its flight finite, and it crashes down to earth.

I disavow bodies that stop to pleasure sexually against other bodies, even if malicious in intent, even if incapable of pleasure, even if both or all of those bodies fail to gain actual, measurable pleasure from their attempts and instead only become injured, whether they break or bleed or carry the wound within, whether the pleasure attempt results only in sadness, shame and disgrace, irritation, detachment, or nostalgia, whether their bodies fail them or surpass them, whether they merely perform such techniques as cuddling, nuzzling, or cooing. The result of self-styled bodies seeking pleasure against one another is irrelevant to my purposes and I cannot confuse these results with my own goals. Seizures of pleasure that result in spells of rigidity or surges of paralysis, as with orgasm functions that produce even permanent collapse or demise, which I recognize to mainly occur in horses, or suspended postures of sexual rictus of the body that in every viewable way seem to duplicate stillness, are not applicable to elective stillness and cannot be counted among their legal modes.

I disavow bodies that use themselves as restraining devices against other bodies or animals, applying smothering or straitjacketing effects, employing techniques such as the dog pile, the clothesline, the roadblock, all in order to channel a paralysis style, to induce a person or animal, through force, to collaborate on a project of stillness. My stillness, should I achieve it, may not be contingent upon another person or thing. It must be summoned of my own power.

I further understand that this contract against motion does not imply a legal agreement against nutrient input or other body-sustenance strategies, activities falling under the categories of eating or feeding, but not limited to them. Gesture-free nutrition intake is permissible and advisable, whether through intravenous methods or a food-entry system that can be accomplished without the technique of chewing, handling, or in any way moving in relation to the nutrient stuffs. If I hire a male feeder or biscuit person, I acknowledge that I am responsible for any accidental motion that might occur as he moves around my body, deploying the food into my person, inputting it, injecting it, catapulting or throwing or rubbing it in with the poultice, the dinner brush, or the swab. He is permitted to move me while mediating the food into my system, but if I am seen to move toward food or him or anything or anywhere, including but not exclusive to Objects of the Night that roam outside my periphery, this contract is terminated and I might legally be killed by Susan, whom I hereby designate as my executioner should I fail the terms of this agreement. I invite Susan to come and get me. I ask Susan to end my days.

I admit that because all motion can be argued to be a collaboration pursued with another person, object, or wind, there is no time that I am not complicit in my own motion, an accomplice to the crime of nonstillness, and thus already in breach of this contract, producing hard excesses of visible behavior, betraying myself. If convicted, I may be put to sleep with a Thompson Stick and then interred in the Women’s Weather Museum, put on display or exhibited in a show concerned with portraying the various ways women have failed to be still, though I admit that the verb form “to be” cannot precisely be used with regard to the condition of stillness, implying motion as it does, suggesting tremors, frenzy, spasm, activities that are seeable, which by definition are off-limits to me, as all forms of language eventually will be. I authorize in advance the use of my body as a caution against the future errors that girls not even born might be prone to commit, and I hereby license the Silentist organization, and any of its museum affiliates or community centers or shame igloos or apology huts, to apply any curatorial device whatsoever if it is deemed to create an instructional spectacle of my physical error, including, but not limited to, wall mounting, animated installation, taxidermy, hologram, math, flashlight.

Any fasting procedure conducted concurrently with this promise of stillness is an addition I make by my own design. If I fast, I fast under no impression from the Silentist organization, or any similar women’s sound-prevention society or listening club, that the abstention of food intake will assist the activity of stillness here proposed. Starvation, should it occur, cannot be linked to the Silentist organization or its affiliates but is entirely the result of my own actions, which have not been influenced by any extant women’s group. Nor can I at any time claim or imagine such a connection to exist, either through interpretations of their words or direct citation of such, including, but not limited to, quoting, sampling, footnoting, or applying slogans to my garments. If I starve, it is through my own active avoidance of that which would reverse starvation — namely, food, pellets, cloth, and liquids. I further understand that starvation begins the moment nutrient input or foodstuff acquisition ends, the point at which my mouth cavity lacks population and is fully hollow, save for those objects that have organic residence there, including, but not limited to, the teeth and gums and tongue. A person not eating at this very moment is technically beginning to starve and is thus legally starving, in which case I hereby admit that I am starving right now, already, and thus will have been starving before I signed this document, continuing to starve as I read it, and starving at this very moment, a statement that, when uttered, can never be untrue, which indicates that starvation is a pre-existing condition for me and not covered by any grandfather clause endorsed by the Silentist organization. Nor can I assume that to traverse this border of starvation/consumption by sandbagging my head with a lifetime supply of slow-acting food that will drip down my throat for the duration of my alert term as a person is a sanctioned antidote to the problem of terminal hunger, or that there is a sanctioned antidote for the problem of terminal hunger, not to mention a cure. I admit that it is not possible to be in a constant state of eating, or “fugue feeding,” because eating interferes with breath. For the purposes of this agreement, I recognize eating and breathing to be in a primary competition with each other to dominate the mouth.

By executing this promise of stillness, I sever all future rights to discuss the results of my actions, whether through interpretation, reflection, public memory, dispute, debate with persons who move, or otherwise. I may not use words or signs of the hand or conduct my face through a gymnastics of code that might present some person or other appropriate receptacle standing opposite me, or outside of the space where I can be said to be standing, even if I am prone on a rug and blinded by pain with a hot poker pressed against my neck, with a coherent notion of what it is like, and has been like, to be, or have been, me. Or, if this pronoun does little to produce the suggestion of my person to the attention of others, Me, then whatever word, words, or symbols I use to designate the flesh mistake that covers me, stands for me, actually is me, hosts me, collaborates to materialize my spirit, or leads others to believe that I am being referred to, will indicate my special accident. Doing so shall void me from this agreement and subject me to possible living-prison incarceration, hard-motion punishments, or other public demonstrations of discipline to be determined by the Silentist organization or any punishment strategist designated to act on behalf of the Silentist organization, whether publicly or in secret, or otherwise.

I understand that by choosing a personal paralysis zone, or Shush House, I thus designate the spot from which I may not thereafter retire. This spot must therefore be designated with care, and is hereby referred to as the Final Place, though it can also be known as the Den when I am employing covert messages in the presence of motion addicts. Under no circumstances may I infer that there is an ideal Final Place, or any such thing as a recommended area, from which it is thought best to execute the promise of stillness. Such an understanding on my part, as all understandings ultimately are, would be entirely in error and my sole responsibility and surely a potential occasion for future regret, not to mention punishment and breach of contract. Thus I concede that to draw conclusions would be illegally to engage in deduction, which is a process I choose to take on, and fail at, myself, admitting ahead of time that it is my own folly. So-called good-luck nooks and lobbies are only superstitiously termed (as all terming and naming and definining operate superstitiously to outwit silence) and cannot officially be said to impart greater likelihood of success to the woman bearing down upon herself to end all viewable actions. If I choose a Final Place that has already been chosen, or been designated the Den of another woman, be it an igloo or debris hut or woolen tent, I may either seize that place through forcing motion onto the present occupant, tempting her with motion-inducing gestures such as “the crab,” “the dash,” or “the trot,” as well as other taunting semaphores used to regulate the flight of birds, or I may vacate such an arena in favor of an unoccupied zone, though I hereby admit that there is no such thing as an unoccupied zone, that wherever I go, I do damage to what was there, by either killing or displacing it, that my presence encourages something else’s absence, that the term “my body” implies no one else’s body, that by moving through air and time, I kill what was attempting to rest or habitate or hold steady. I remove that thing from its chosen space and effectively deny its reentry. I act as a warden of a prison in reverse, since wherever I am, no one else can be, so that to execute this agreement is to do a violence, for which I hereby admit my guilt. I admit that even by speaking or shouting or murmuring or babbling or humming, I crowd my personal airspace, and thus someone’s potential personal airspace, with code and thus limit the insertion of codes by others, deny their entry, hoard the airways, create a blockade. For this and other crimes of motion, I hereby admit my guilt.

The Fainting Project

FAINTING IS A FORM OF aggressive sleep and Null Heart attainment that has wrongly been seen as a weakness in women. Historical images of the fainting figure in the American landscape, the cinema, and literature seem to imply that the world is too strong to be tolerated, thus the woman swoons to the floor in escape, requiring a comforting rescue and sharp salts to return her to her senses.

On the contrary, fainting will be considered here as a strategic exit from consciousness, a willful blackout approach to the removal or prevention of the major emotions. In the Marcus Family Enterprise, fainting is a heroic pastime toward self-control. By fainting, we insert a curtain against the onslaught of life, and thus structure and silence the awful drama that would otherwise never cease. Fainting, for us, is a way to author our own lives and insert intermissions, the most underrated portion of any entertainment. By not fainting, we surrender our identities to the mundane chaos of time, the relentless needs of so-called people, and the assault of an American wind that possibly only gusts on people who are awake to receive it (sleeping is the only real way to avoid the wind).

Although I am obviously not a member of the 5,000 Falls Club, the elite corps of female behavior changers who have intentionally fainted or blacked out more than five thousand times, I have followed a rigid swoon program since my youth, and still rely on rapid fainting exits from life when I am otherwise too sad to eat my silencing grain, scared of my father’s wood shop, or unreasonably pleased when a person touches my head. Fainting, for me, is particularly effective as a killer of guilt and a dread suppressant, though it has unfortunately proved ineffective with shame, a rather more stubborn condition.

The strategic, short blackouts achieved through willful fainting usually offer an easy antidote to the problem of recently acquired feelings. Fainting closes off the offending world; upon resuscitation with salts or girls’ water or women’s-frequency injections, including radio-wave body baths, most emotions have been reduced appreciably, or at least temporarily forgotten. What this suggests to the Marcus Women’s Team and to the Jane Marcus Emotion Prevention Society is that the entire accessible level of feelings — what we think we feel throughout the day, our supposed personalities — is gratuitous and fleeting, given its lack of reoccurrence after fainting and revival. If these were true feelings — indeed, if there were such a thing as true feelings — they would not be so easily removed.

Ways to Faint

The Fainting Chair employs an ejection seat that launches the woman into flight, but not before depriving her of oxygen (snarfing) until dizziness sets in. Usually the Fainting Chair is of a burled walnut design, outfitted with a Lucite head-gag harness to assist with snarfing before the spring-loaded jettison is triggered. Once the woman’s body is fired into the air, the sudden elevation causes a predictable blood shift from her head (diaspora), creating a dry-brain faint that can last until her heart is quiet. The dangers of the Fainting Chair involve unpredictable flight paths, bodies lost in orbit, snuffed ignitions. Nets and crash pads must be judiciously placed throughout the fainting site, and the Smelling Salts Team should be ready to dispense hardened Ohio Salt to the woman’s upper lip (winterizing) in the event of a misfire. The fainting site should be high-ceilinged, with unadorned white walls, in order to track the woman’s flight into her blackout. To avoid permanent loss of the woman, she should be tethered with a Sleep Leash.

Many women will not have access to professional equipment, but they can easily produce a faint through means other than a special chair. Easiest among these is the spinning, whirling action known as the Candy Cane, or the Barber’s Pole. The woman raises her arms to a T shape, then spins in place until the full 360-degree horizon wobbles, tilts, and flattens onto a single plane and a faint ensues. If she is wearing the requisite red ribbon, a lovely spiral is created as she twirls into dizziness, an effect much appreciated by any Blackout Witnesses that may have gathered. A resuscitation team here is not required.

Holding the breath and rising quickly from a regular chair is a cheap, homemade simulation of the ejection seat, and nearly as effective, though flight cannot be achieved. It can be supplemented with a straining action in the face, or a full-body expulsion mime, also known as “bearing down” or “shortstopping,” though this straining can burst vessels of blood in the head, which will certainly bring on one or more resistant emotions, usually a pernicious dose of ambivalence.

The False Promise of Animal Fear

A chief use of the wild animal in emotion removal is to create a sense of vulnerability in the woman or girl, to literally spook the liquid from her until she blacks out. An extreme surge of fear can swiftly produce a faint in such persons — the body anticipates the death event and swoons away from the conflict, voiding its consciousness, rather than keeping alert to the last moments of life. Yet the temptation to hire an animal assistant to regularly threaten the woman or girl, often by startling her in her bedroom or bathroom, is misguided and must here be cautioned against, not least because it exploits the animal as a fear chemical. When an emotion-cleansing faint is produced through a surge of fright — that is, the wolf leaps through an open window and corners its prey, baring its bloody teeth and hissing — the fear response is sealed into the fainting state, and thus preserved in the woman or girl beyond any useful duration. Animal fear and other forms of predator anxiety, including the fear of fathers, are the only causes of fainting that could feasibly do more harm than good.

Blanketing the Fainter

Throwing a blanket over a fainted person (Morris) can enhance the emotion flush, or trap the feeling and keep it from escaping. Often an oil-soaked blanket, whose blaze can be easily contained by a Blackout Manager, is best suited for a quick heat extraction of panic and regret, although blanketing a Morris tends to be ineffective against happiness.

What About Dehydration?

A carefully pursued water minus will increase the occurrence of fainting throughout the regular events of a day; it does so by withering the muscle of wakefulness in the head. But dehydration can easily lead to unexpected fainting (visiting the hole), which may be dangerous. A woman or girl should stay close to the emotion-removal site during a water fast, and she should alert her Blackout Manager if she is abstaining from fluids entirely (Moses). The Manager in these cases will most likely affix the woman with a fainting pager or brown beacon, which detects a blackout, or sudden alteration of body position, and emits a shrill siren into the vicinity, bringing on the resuscitation team, who can home in on the noise until they find their downed woman.

The Primary Equipment of Fainting

I am most inclined to wear a stiff, unwashed flesh-colored turtleneck when I practice a fainting style of the antisadness or passion-dampening variety. The turtleneck limits blood flow just enough to deepen the faint, creating feelings of “dry head,” or “birch body.” While a beige neck corset can also be worn to tourniquet the head — it blends in like a scarf — the danger is that too much blood will be restricted and the faint will deepen and mature into coma. Although coma is interesting, with real potential in future behavior-changing styles, given that it dilutes emotional life in a woman, coma-resuscitation strategies like the Burp and the Bear Hug are still too jarring, tending to result in emotion surges, which lead to dizzying back drafts of envy and regret that create nearly untreatable emotional surpluses, a kind of hysteria of gratitude, elation, and fear.

The Secondary Equipment

The Salt Necklace, padded clothing, a Sleep Leash, a hood, and a helmet are all important accessories to the American Female Fainting Enterprise. A helmet should be worn in general when reading, writing, thinking, or sleeping.

The Salt Necklace enables default self-revival if a Blackout Manager becomes injured or defects to another emotion-removal group during a fainting session. Similar to a string of pearls, the necklace threads together calcified balls of salt, which ride the neck like a choker and sting a woman awake if she passes out too soon.

A Sleep Leash tethers the body to prevent long-distance ejections from the Fainting Chair (home runs). The body is kited to an anchor and snaps back to earth if the launch velocity exceeds the crash recovery quotient, a distance beyond which the body will not survive when it lands.

The padded clothing and helmet allow for hard landings without disrupting the depth of the blackout. Although broken bones can be useful in an emotion-removal program, as demonstrated in the discussion on boneless pantomime, the pain event here is too likely to cause feelings such as grief, fright, and alarm, rather than placate or remove them, which is the goal. The head, in turn, is simply too important at this time to be smashed open.

A hood is merely decorative in the fainting program, although it nicely conceals the facial contortions of a fainted woman who is struggling against revival. A woman in a hood can make startling gains in this world and elsewhere.

Underwater Fainting

This last-ditch method of fainting is dangerous to attempt alone. At the Marcus Behavior Suppression and Elimination Site, the Fainting Chair was positioned to eject my oxygen-deprived body into the learning-water tank, so my faint occurred in midair and I splashed down in full blackout. The divers on hand fished me out only when my lungs had filled with water, then resuscitated me with a basic bellows maneuver, followed by a salted sock stretched over my head. This is a method requiring teamwork and devotion, yet it adequately flushed the more stubborn strains of envy that often visited my person during childhood, including the envy I felt for myself at happier times. Submerged fainting (wet sleep) should also be undertaken if a so-called loved one dies or leaves without notice, yet women should be alerted that the recovery from this sort of grief is so quick and efficient that the deceased or departed person is sometimes entirely forgotten, leaving merely an empty feeling of contentment where a person once stood. A woman might choose to keep a Person Log in this case, to objectively remind her of the persons who supposedly once mattered to her life.

Dates

1895

CHEMIST EMILY SESSLER, forty-six, heads the first Science Week drive to aid the Vertical Horizon Project, an attempt to extend the typical citizen’s field of vision. Sessler’s scheme, initially opposed only by preservationists, is to craft a fire that will link the American coasts, the largest fire ever conceived, to burn in a pattern precisely designed to create tunnels of brightness deep into the sky. Sessler maintains that brightening the sky with a systematically designed fire will produce a “Horizon Crane” to yank back the barrier of the horizon, altering religious and scientific notions of the role of the Person in the atmosphere. State governments oppose the science fire, partly because Sessler insists on providing her own technicians to manage the blaze. Her technicians radically lobby for the approval of the fire, and ultimately foil their chances, by setting test flames in the perimeter surrounding Atlanta, creating a vortex of heat-generated darkness in the city itself, causing not only a blackout but a “sound-out.” Neighborhoods of Atlanta will be resistant to sound for years afterward, and a localized heat deafness emerges in the South, apparently caused by unnatural exposure to fire.

1935

Burke is born at Akron. Within months, he will use an invented language based on radio static and stuffed-mouth lamentations to control his father and mother like puppets, forcing them to copulate in public and weep openly. The parents will request of the Children’s Police that the young Burke’s gifts be carefully controlled, but it is suspected that even this utterance of theirs is generated by Burke himself, who sees his parents’ bodies as “weapons to be used against the town, satellite forms acting on behalf of my body.” Burke’s youthful demonstrations will be the first American indication that language, dispensed precisely, can regulate the behavior in a territory. It is eventually suspected that a portion of the town of Akron has been “hushed” by the careful recitation of sentences at the perimeter between Ohio and the world. Although the boy is eventually fitted by authorities in a tight, clear sock, even his restricted pantomimes create a disturbing loss of control in the animals and children in his vicinity.

1954

The American Television Industry attempts to market a Women’s Television Set. The unit resembles their standard device, but is designed to receive a special-frequency broadcast from the Women’s Storm Needle at Atlanta, where experiments are being conducted in images and sound that only women can perceive (also known as the Female Jesus Frequency). The set receives little attention and will fall into immediate disuse by the few customers it gains, but the Storm Needle continues to transmit an all-vowel female music for five years. This period will prove to be the most crucial in the Silentist movement, allowing Jane Dark and her followers to travel the countryside undetected, camouflaged by the women’s tones masking the Midwestern landscape, curling over the territory as, arguably, the lowest and thickest wind ever felt in America.

1955

James Water is cultivated and distributed by the Women’s Medical Group. Designed by physician Valerie James, the tonic, comprised of exact water, ostensibly cancels unwanted emotions, as James surmises (prophetically) that feelings merely express an absence or surplus of water in the body, correctable through water fasts or strategies of soaking the body or hands in prepared water. A key premise of her theory is that water is the fundamental, and only reliable, recording agent of behavior. Water is thought to “see” and memorize the actions of persons. By filtering water through patients undergoing fits of various emotions, James creates supposed behavior water of these feelings that can be administered as medicine or antidote; a catalog of fluids that comprises a person’s entire repertoire of behavior. James goes on to write about the centrality of water in considering the possibilities of the person in America (see The New Water), but warns of its danger, arguing that the next major war will be fought with water alone and that women should carry personalized water for protection, and consider water the only reliable diary, speaking their secrets privately into rivers, lakes, ponds.

1958

The Susan House, an experimental school for girls, has its beginnings in an all-girls’ retreat conducted simultaneously one August evening in seven American towns. The focus of the retreats, initially, is to bury a clay head of Jesus, then meditate over the grave about the true requirements of the name of Susan, a technique of divination dating back to the Perkins Noise, when Perkins killed himself by vigorously repeating his own name, but not before achieving “immense information on the human enterprise.” The Susan House school, initially conceived as a training ground for girls named Susan and no one else, gives rise to several specialty name-centered educational institutions and drives a new and terribly divisive political wedge into the population. Although many parents change the names of their children to Susan, only persons born into the name will be considered for enrollment (see The Unwritten Books of Susan).

1959

Animal artist George Rafkill, twenty-nine, is arrested when it is discovered that his popular portraits of horses and dogs, The Animals of America, which sell to hotels and restaurants, and can also be embroidered on flags, bear undeniable facial resemblances to thirteen women who have been missing from his Akron neighborhood for the past year. While Rafkill claims that he can “paint the dead,” authorities point out that he only paints those dead that are also missing and believed murdered.

1963

Athlete Emily Anderson, forty-five, who has been imprisoned for interfering with runners at a men’s track meet in Chicago just as they neared the finish line, is fatally injured when she is shot from a cannon into a brick wall during her “Hard to Die” show in July. An unknown Silentist, in a show of grief over the death of the quiet athlete, catapults herself from an English cliff into the sea, and an Anderson comes to be known as an act of mourning in which women launch themselves into the air for extended distances, often landing in the sea, but not necessarily.

1974

Men from Akron stack bones outside their houses to absorb the sound of women. When no bones are available, an entire person is used. Every family keeps a “Ben Marcus” for this purpose. Often he is sent out on thieving missions, smeared with a special scent, in order to attract the women’s attention. Now the women are required by the Silence Commission to carry a small bone in a holster. If they wish to be heard, they must hurl the bone into a field, creating a current of deafness in the air. When men cough or talk into their hands, they are praying to their own bones. The women ride velvet-covered bone cages, called “horses.” They produce an aggressive, highly pitched physical weeping, known as “galloping,” and in this way spread their feelings across large fields of grass.

1978

The first plaster casting is taken of the inside of Bob Riddle’s mouth, including the cavity that extends down his windpipe, ending at his lungs. When the casting is removed and hardens, it resembles a roughly shaped sphere (the inside of the mouth) with a ridged handle attached, and is considered a primary shape around which his body has grown, a hardened form of the white space at Riddle’s center, a sculpture of his nothingness. Riddle calls it, incorrectly and rather pretentiously, his “soul,” given that it represents his “language cave,” and he argues that this shape is the primary object by which a person can be understood, and possibly controlled. The object will later be known as a Thompson Stick, as important a shape as the sphere or triangle. Silentists will quietly beat the earth with it, releasing pockets of sound that have been stored in the soil.

1979

Jane Marcus occurs in Deep Ohio. She has an accurate walking style and can converse in one language. She sleeps lying down, and uses a filter called “hair” to attract her mates. The small people in her house call her “Mother,” and she answers them by collapsing the tension in her face, a release that passes for listening. Her motion is voice-activated. She has one pair of eyes, and they are often tired and red. When she uses her arms to prop up a document of regret, known as a “book,” her bones form an ancient shape, and a brief flashing signal is sent out through the window and into the fields beyond her house, where the hive is.

Names

[Deborah]

THERE ARE ABOUT FIFTY known examples of it in the Rocky Mountain area, some dating as far back as 1931. They are thought to improve the people they encounter. The usual number of finished girls in a territory as common as “Deborah” is twenty-eight, with a quota of twenty and a maximum limit of thirty-two. Any more than this should suggest a dilution of the original Deborah, which produces strains of Amy or Ellen. Although the midcentury Rocky Mountain persons had utilized a Deborah to comfort the saddest local families, reserving the medical Deborah for only the most pressing cases of grief, the need for a cheer-spreading personage began to be felt at a national level, and abductions and faking occurred. There is consequently an extreme Deborah in the East, possibly of Colorado origin but bred through men of the Midwest (and therefore tall and reddish and chalky), dispensing a form of nearly unbearable, radical happiness into cities and homes. It is often housed in a little body, but its range is wide and its effect is lasting. To say “Deborah” is to admit to sadness and ask for help.

Statistics for Deborah: She preferred modifications to her head when we called her this. No matter how far we launched her in the chair, my sister did not faint. Small emotional showings were on view: contentment and pleasure, occasional cheer. She attempted to embrace my mother, usually before bedtime, and my mother only barely escaped these approaches. Sometimes she endured long hugs from this Deborah.

[Susan]

From afar, the Susan appears to be buckling, shivering, seizing, its body exhibiting properties of a mirage. Up close, there is mass to Susan and it is real to the touch. There will be food for you if you are Susan, although possibly a pile of food for Susan is a trap, to be regarded with suspicion. It is an elegant and refined system that established a school for itself, The Susan House. Its doctrine, The Word of Susan, is useful also to versions of Julia and Joyce but can be harmful to Judith. All of its books have gone unwritten.

Statistics for Susan: Quite poor weather during this phase. My sister aged considerably and showed signs of acute attention and superiority. Insisted on privacy. Dressed formally. Seemed not of our family. Our presence confused her. She once asked my father how he knew her name. It was a question my father could not answer.

[Jesus]

Women achieve their Jesus by speaking and studying their own name. The original Jesus figure examined his name, then derived actions and strategies from his analysis. This is the primary purpose of the Jesus noise — self-knowledge, instruction, advice. Women betray their Jesus when they forget that there is an answer at the heart of their name, to be divined by loud, forceful recitations of it in the streets, for as long as it takes. Simply saying “Jesus,” however, is ineffective. (Breathing is the most common strategy for remembering our names.)

Statistics for Jesus: It was decided not to call my sister this. Mother felt we might lose her. But I tried it anyway one night when my parents were asleep. I had to use a low-volume setting on the naming bullhorn and I whispered it at her while she slept. It was during an early Tina phase. She never woke. I sat at her bed all night and used this name against her until my mouth was exhausted. Nothing happened.

[Father]

To refer to a woman as “Father” is to engage her inner name and fill her hands with power. It is a code that many American women respond to with energy and hope. It is therefore used as a healing noise, particularly at hospitals, where nurses utter the word “Father” to women who are ill or tired. When men make love to Father, they use hearty motion and often call out words of labor and ecstasy; they thank Father, and they ask Father for more. Men in Utah, where this sort of naming is most frequent, take Father to the baths and hold her while rinsing her hair, until she feels soothed and calm, until she is manageable and not crazy with power, or too big for her body, or at least not dirty and alone, which makes Father dangerous. In wealthy households, Father enters a boy’s room and blackens it with a gesture of her hand, then starts in on the boy with warm oil on his thighs, squeezing the oil into his legs until he weeps or breathes easy. Father pulls back the sheets and she climbs in to treat the boy and teach him to live. A boy often first makes love to Father because she is gentle and confident, someone the boy can trust. He holds on to Father’s hands when she straddles the bed and affects her graceful motion. A boy says “Father” as she leans over him to help, dipping and rising, although sometimes the boy is quiet, preferring to feel her deepening attentions and not destroy the moment with speech.

Statistics for Father: Chaos at the house. My real father was banished during this phase. He slept in the shed. I wanted to call him a girl’s name, but I was not allowed to see him. My sister clearly thrived as Father: she boomed; she boasted; she tore through the house. She smashed the behavior television; she burned her old sleep sock. Mother was scared. A soothing litany of vowel songs was used on my sister to calm her down, without which she might have escaped. By the time the name would have worn off, she would have reached Akron. We restricted the study to two days. When we stopped calling her Father, she shed the hardest skin of all the names. My mother removed it from the house with a shovel before inviting my father back inside.

[Mary]

Every five minutes, a woman named Mary will stop breathing. It is a favorite of children, and every five minutes there are children standing in witness to the ending of Mary. Children clap at it when they see it. They are thrilled and they weep. Sometimes they become excited by a Mary that comes to die before them and they chase it and hit it. The Mary takes a wound. It holds up an arm and shields what is coming. It holds a wound in its hand, and the children are delighted.

Statistics for Mary: She was mostly slumped over. This was near the end. We tried to groom her, but her body was cold. Her hair broke when you touched it. She weakened visibly every time we said “Mary.” She refused all food. In the mornings, she wrung her hands and wept quietly. Mother collected something from her face. Possibly some scrapings, possibly the smallest bit of fluid. Mary was the last thing we called her. It was possibly the name that killed her.

Certain factions of women go by a nonname and therefore participate in a larger person that is little seen or heard or known. It cannot be summoned or commanded. Generally, it walks stiffly, owing to its numerous inhabitants. A body such as one not named can be toppled, no doubt — felled and pinned to the turf, brought under control with water and a knife, some rope, and hard words. It is the primary woman, from which many women have emerged, to which many will return. It is believed to reside in Cleveland. Probably it is bleeding and tired. By now, it might be nearly finished.

Statistics: We treated my sister with silence at the end. We used an openmouthed name that failed to break the air, no different from a deaf wind. A great deal of hissing was heard in the house, though we could not find the source of this sound. My sister’s skin was clear. It would not peel. It would not shed. We waited near her slumped body. She stayed nameless. She retained her skin.