Notable American Women

5. The Launch

AT THE TIME OF THIS WRITING, I am going to be Ben’s mother my whole life, no matter how extreme, inspired, or innovative my behavior. It is not a role I requested. My projects with emotion removal and silence would have thrived similarly without him. I do not seek your agreement on this topic. There was no invitation or application to this motherhood, only your oily body seeking to seal our obligations to each other. You inter-coursed all over me in order to finally obligate me to you. I can’t forget you with your back arched like a swan’s, your teeth bared, clutching the sheets on each side of me as you funneled noiselessly between my legs, forgetting to breathe, until I felt you slowly wilting inside me, then a pool of dampness leaking down my bottom, which you asked me to stanch with your handkerchiefs. Your apologies afterward hardly made a difference. As soon as Ben was conceived, he was apologized for. A detail conveniently omitted from the prelaunch forecast we made when we cataloged our vision for the person he might become.

As much as I had hoped to court ambiguity, complication, and mystery regarding my basic relationship to Ben, to somehow annex my motherhood to my other projects, so that I was not merely shepherding another average person into the midwestern atmosphere, there is a fate that I am not imaginative enough to outdistance, a biology I have yet to surpass. I would like to alter it with chemicals. I would like to zero my heart, enter a silent house, and perform the gestures that will deliver me from all of the sameness. To be new in this awful, old job. I would like to outsmart the role that is destined for me. But I can’t. I have failed to destroy my category.

Did I ask to be Ben’s mother? I did not. Did I know that you were having sex with me? I did. Did I enjoy it? I did not. Encourage it? No. Did I realize that your rampant thrusting over my deliberately inert body would lead to a child such as Ben? I don’t think so. Whose fault is it? Mine, of course. Is anyone else to blame? You are. Do I want something from you now? You’d better fucking believe it.

First, listen to what is happening to him; attend to my decay narrative. Next, note my requests of you. Note them. Note them. Note them. Last, learn what has been decided for you. One, two, three. Is there a punishment in store for you? Possibly, probably, awfully certainly. Yes. Better to think of it as a fate, a result, a consequence to what you did and didn’t do. I mean to extract some final favors from you. You will soon see why you will be compelled to grant them. Pay attention.

Note: All quotes of you are taken from real things you said. I will quote you liberally. I will paraphrase you. I will channel your voice, imitate you. Since you apparently believe first and foremost in yourself, since you only subscribe to ideas of your own issue, I will allow your own words a front-and-center role. By pretending to be you, I will finally have you believe me. In case you get bored. In case you fool yourself into thinking another person’s words, even your former wife’s, are beyond, beneath, or beside your notice. Just in case. Put this aside at your peril. Read this at your peril. Do nothing at your peril. Breathe at your peril. No matter what, your peril will be the featured attraction of that portion of time we have been conservatively, cautiously, fearfully referring to as the future. If it is bad, and it hasn’t happened yet, rest assured it will. You can look forward to it. At your absolute, total peril.

Now. Because we have withdrawn to opposite wings of the house this season, where we cannot audit the growth of our “son,” or even gather at the behavior farm to chalk-talk an emotion-concealment style for his upcoming Akron debut, I am submitting a memorandum to you that demands your immediate attention. My concern is manifold and complicated and probably beyond your narrow comprehension. You need only know that my worry is for the boy we made together, who roves the Marcus property so cautiously, so breakably, that even our domestic animals could probably molest him for their own amusement.

Yes, you have visitation of Ben as part of the Allotment for Father. You ostensibly observe him at work and at play, alone, with others, asleep, at table, weeping, laughing, bleeding: the basic behaviors. But can I rely on you to be appropriately alarmed when Ben is less than average, inferior, loathsome, predictable? I cannot.

My aim is to forestall the demise of this new person we once shared ambition for. Although our launch objectives may have forked (yours into God knows where), we are each, I imagine, still vested in Ben’s success enough to revise our separate child-rearing styles, which might ensure his feeble life at least through this season’s behavior trials.

It is not appropriate — indeed, it is alarming — for a boy of Ben’s age to be developing the hairline of a much older gentleman, and the apologetic body style of a low-riding dog. He appears to be someone who might more appropriately carry a cane, or use a walker to get himself comfortably from the couch to the toilet, if he even moves at all.

When Ben broods over his blocks or puzzle pieces, when he manipulates the domestic action figures you carved of him and his sister, or when he rotates the birds in his model aviary to reflect a religious system where birds act as transport vehicles for wind and prayer, I cannot help feeling I am watching a man who has, for some reason, based himself on a dead person. (Is it childish to believe that the more easily killable things of this world, most notably the birds, as delicate as lightbulbs, and seemingly randomly tossed aloft, have any agency? Is it childish to attach power to supposed objects of beauty? I only mean to establish whether Ben’s nostalgia for birds might be useful in our ultimate plan for him.)

The goal, lest your exile has promoted yet further dementia in your defeated person, is still for him to launch into the greater Ohio — and whatever failing world lies beyond — with an unprecedented persona. I am not ashamed to want to make a boy who will one day set the mold for what might be called — if we gain any say over the conduct styles of our time — the New Behavior. If your goal is otherwise, or if, upon scrutiny of your strategies as an apparent man of Akron, you find that your fatherhood impulses have gone girlish along with your body — your trembling hands, your failing back, your dizziness and frequent wobbling, your sulking response when a conversation veers from your topic, exceeding your imagination or intelligence, your whimpering in your sleep, a list that barely touches on your array of feeble traits, which tempts me to create an entire other document cataloging your failures, a critical edition of my husband, an anthology of disappointments, a kind of best of the worst of the man I used to walk with, back when affection toward another person seemed like an answer to my own mediocrity, when a husband was just another blame hole — Ben will soon be removed from your part-time care and you might stop your reading here, pack your smart little bag, as if being ready for your journey will matter, and sit still until the quiet sisters knock on your door to remove you for all time from the visible world.

Knock, knock.

To the point: Things are getting worse with Ben, and I will soon overwhelm you with examples of his steady slide from excellence, his conspiracy against originality. Aside from a small, vanishing father, a difficult nutrition system meant to suppress or surface specific emotions, and an arsenal of equipment even two grown men would have trouble hauling around (helmets, packs, sleds, mouth-guards, grief biscuits, etc.), there are behavioral errors registering from our boy that were not in our forecast, wildly unchecked emotional displays that embarrass our household (though I would suggest that there can be no other kind of emotional display, and even the word “display,” which in one of the major foreign languages means to spread one’s ass cheeks as wide as possible without tearing the skin, should suggest the value of having emotions at all). These are detours of his person that we failed to map in advance. What is unknown about Plan Ben, or previously unpredicted, is unacceptable. It bespeaks an imprecise launch, and, as such, invites our quickest mastery. “To parent,” in Greek, means “to know.” I think. In German, it means “to cut trees, clear a path, and invite people into the space you have made.” The French use the word “father” for “failure.” “Dad” means “an underwater passage to the afterlife, a constricted tube, a drowning pipe.” Access is difficult. There will be water everywhere. You could drown midway. “Ben” means “never; not on your life; you’re out of your mind.” “Ben” means “the best I could do.” In some cultures, the word serves as an apology.

Let’s examine how well we’ve lived up to these terms.

On those difficult evenings when the parenting schedule requires me to touch our young man’s head in a Mothering Action before putting him to sleep, under the labored shushing sounds of the Ideal Breathing tape broadcast into his bedroom, hissing, hissing, hissing, rendering his room like a wind tunnel, I sense his skull to be smaller than that of other boys, softer and shapeless and altogether too fragile for my liking.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but his head should not conform to his mother’s hand, even a hand that could once repel an advancing, trouserless husband, a man who deployed actual military circlings on his approach to our shared bed, techniques from an actual book, requiring me to be similarly strategic in resisting his attempts at the aggression he called intimacy, the chafing lurches into my body that caused his face to collapse with relief. Yet to battle this man (you) was also to accidentally touch his bare legs and bottom and crotch as he conducted his wagon circle of my overtired person, leaving me to effectively only fight the top half of him, the clothed half, or else possibly incite his arousal even further, a handicap that resulted in a woman (myself) who learned how to beat a man’s trunk, his arms, his face, while avoiding all that lay below.

Case in point: The neighboring Smith children, when they pile over the south fence, and commence to lower their heads and charge the wall that encircles the listening hole, seem only temporarily stunned by the collision. Apart from questioning their aim in such a pursuit (namely, why would a young Smith risk what is arguably its best asset — its head — in order to knock down a wall that it could easily surmount with a ladder; what could be the launch objective of the Smith parents in allowing such a battery to occur, particularly on someone else’s property?), one must observe that there are no blackouts among that bunch of youngsters, no fainting, no discernible concussions, contusions, or spells. Just a white cloud stunned from the wall by the ramming of their heads, rendering the Smiths as dark shapes inside a haze, blaring like foghorns as they wait for clear air (a bluster that must challenge the decoding tactics of our young listeners laboring in the hole). The Smiths roughhouse as though they were smash puppets, and one observes no resulting decay in their persons, whereas our Ben, let us confess, flinches if his own hand comes too near his face, as with eating, for example (he is too facially cautious to feed himself soup; we have lately resorted to a blindfold), or grooming (I observed him fastening his hairbrush to the wall, his arms keeled back while he burrowed his head against it, as though truffling for some message in the bristles that might rub off on his face). He is so shy of himself that he often ducks his own motions while leaving the house or carrying seeds to the Storm Needle, as if a bee were dive-bombing his face and his hands had produced a sign language to ward it off. If he continues to smother his own actions, he will simply be a boy who spins in place, erasing every gesture he makes until he is busily still, a kind of hummingbird person at best, fascinating to watch, but in the end just another curiosity, merely pitiable. While such a repertoire might suffice if he were a dancer, parodying the way people sabotage their own progress, a palsy meant to ridicule the very idea of motion, as a person it is not acceptable for his actions to symbolize, even satirically, the failures of others. The parallels are too chancy, and our Akron neighbors should not be expected to supply all of their own irony, to comprehend that Ben represents something other than himself, which was never our intention for him. We seek to put people in mind of absolutely nothing when they observe him. We desire primary behavior from our boy. Let him be new, or let us remove him from the yard, the house, the world.

Okay, problem articulated. Now, Ben’s mania toward his own head is evidence of something, but what? He is either afraid of himself (not exactly irrational, and in some sense impressively shrewd of the boy to identify his own self as a threat, a discovery that takes other people years, if they make it at all), or he’s instinctually protecting his head from harm, which is one more boring way he is just like All Other People to This Date, not just weak and death-prone but glaringly, theatrically weak, almost asking to be killed. My feeling? Do not, do not, do not fuck around and ask for something like that. It is too damn tempting. At least pretend to want to live.

It is not that I presumed the girls’ water we used as his infant formula would counteract these predictable, unsatisfactory instincts (protect the head, breathe, eat, grab warm bodies, and nuzzle their flesh). For all of its power, girls’ water cannot prevent basic animal responses to threats or hunger, however boring these predicaments have proved to be. As you may have noted from your observation tower, I have stood outside under the flood of evening birds, who circle the emotion furnace and feed on the behavior smoke, and I have consumed great amounts of water, with the hope of generating an ideal learning fluid for the boy, which would save him from the terrible guesswork of life among people. He drinks it and he smiles, but nothing is learned; he swallows no instructions. Ben still sits at the window and sings his warble, runs after the birds with his little arms waving as though he controls them with string. I am trying to discourage his sense that he can influence the life around him, that he is responsible for something that is already occurring. Part of my approach here is the institution of a Powerlessness Emphasis Program. For about an hour each day that Ben is charged to me, I take him around the house and point out things he was not responsible for, mostly tables, chairs, beds, walls, other people. I have lately also been scheduling a stop at the mirror by the bathroom, allowing Ben to discover how unremarkable his features are, to educate him on the basic disappointments of the face. When the light is right, I drop his pants and we consider how crushed and matted his hips appear, how his penis looks like an entire person smushed into a wrinkle, his buttocks like the flattened head of a seal.

My problem: Parenthood should not feel like charity. Ben is proving special in the wrong way. My soft spot for cretins is bone-hard.

I am nevertheless disappointed to see Ben’s contract with poor performance so quickly fulfilled, his apparently easy assimilation to other people and their average theater of disappointments, despite our best efforts to originalize him.

My concern: by publicizing his “insecurity” (your words), Ben boasts of a future failure and creates a zone of foreshadowing around his head, indicating his Kill Spot, akin to wearing a bull’s-eye. I read the papers enough to know that failure is the trend for young people today, but it does not compel me, and I’ll be curious to watch its enticements fade as success and survival regain prominence as the coveted actions for persons, and others, of our time. A sort of glory is lately attached to coming up short, then articulating the inadequacy, soliciting blame with the same fervor our generation sought to deny it, as though verbal eloquence can overwhelm incompetence. But I say let the other American children fail and brag of failure, whether through song or verse, even exaggerating the various ways they have become terribly weak people of the Current Moment, a regime where the word “person” now equals “loss,” where to breathe is to inhale remorse. Error is a dead end. Modesty is the most arrogant stance of all. Our boy will continue to operate in secret, beyond the behavior fads, and his debut will revise what has heretofore been thought possible in the scope of actions that a person can produce. I believe this.

Do I care how arrogant this sounds? I do not. Am I worried that my ambitions for him are not his ambitions for himself? I am not. Left to his own devices, Ben would have no devices. Left alone, he would be alone. The history of behavior has borne this out. No more equivocating. My role is to optimize him, to medicate his trajectory, to fuel the launch. “To mother:” a verb suggesting special, strategic assistance, a tactic of person making. Mothering is the science of waking up. Bestowing behaviors on others. Mothering.

So how will he do it? At the least, Ben should be outfitted with a decoy weakness, an area some distance from his head, that he nurses with care. This is an old-fashioned idea, but one that we have apparently overlooked in all of our quests for newness. I am not suggesting a garden — civilization should quit its relentless tilling of the earth before it digs its way to hell; it is presumptuous the way people attempt to enhance or alter vegetal life, while in the end they only interfere with something they don’t understand (fatherhood, according to my father, is to modulate interference, to ration intervention, like management with a whip). Instead, why not a living creature who can die before Ben does, to give Ben a sample of recoverable loss, just to widen his arc of grief before his emotions are finally cleansed? But who or what should this living creature be? Who or what? Who or what? Do any candidates come to mind that we can sacrifice to Ben’s advancement? A loved one? A formerly loved one? A despised one who thinks he’s a loved one? Think! Presuming your own selfishness still obtains (which isn’t even a presumption, but a rational prediction based on all of your past behavior), and you refuse to completely and finally donate your own person for this project, we might consider accessorizing Ben with a dog or a child, a side-car diversion to give his potential attackers real blood to shed and to let Ben fail at something grave — the upkeep of another life — without dying himself, though we should be careful not to fetishize his survival above more spectacular behavioral gains. Let’s not presume that he needs to live to be considered a successful young man. Survival for its own sake can tend to feel so obvious, so plainly desperate.

A short diagnosis of Ben’s condition: Afraid of One’s Own Motion, Afraid of Hands, Scared to Breathe, Walking Fear, Repulsion Toward Food, Fear of Clouds, Water Phobia, Nauseated by Sound, Allergic to Objects, Allergic to People, Allergic to Oneself. I presume parents, if anyone, should cure these fears and aversions. Parents should intervene at a stage such as this one and impart a survival tactic, a motion reduction, an anxiety channel to siphon off the distracting behavior. Certain specific parents, in fact, should consider the ultimate sacrifice to their son, a boy who might finally require the loss of a parent in order to be healed (I’ll spell it out: Ben requires a disappeared father, a dead father, a father harmed and brought to his knees, an embarrassed or humiliated father, a father attacked, a father lost at sea, a father with no money, a depraved father, a shot-in-the-head father, a gut-shot father at night, a father fallen from a tree, winded, a confused and possibly blind father, groping down the hallway in his nightshirt, entering the wrong room, weeping, a father who must be fed, a deaf father, whose lips curve around other people’s words but never discern them, a father who one day doesn’t wake up, who stiffens there in bed, finished). A successful young boy might require one of these events to mark him as a more authentic young man, a man with experience, a man with knowledge, a man who has suffered. If you cared at all for his progress in the world, you would help Ben with this deficiency; you would not even blink before volunteering. You would be loading your gun at this very moment. You would be swallowing all of the wrong pills and dragging your fatally poisoned body out into the field, where Ben could watch you fail this world forever, and never forget your death. A father having a seizure. A father expiring in the grasses outside his own home. How proud we would all be if you could do this for him! What an amazing gift! How noble, to exit your hard life and infuse our young man with such an important, defining loss! How many young men actually get to watch their fathers die? An intelligent man would overcome his self-serving blind spot on this topic. What exactly are you “living” for if not to accelerate your son’s stalled launch, to jettison your sorry boy back onto the frontier of the all-new behavior? Let him live through grief! An intelligent man would do this.

For my part, no matter how often I provoke the boy to a fainting spell by launching his body in the chair — his limbs wheeling in the air above the fainting tank, my own son aloft and unconscious, confusing the bird life in the vicinity — upon landing, his fear of himself is not cleansed. During the resuscitation procedure, after I salt his upper lip, he comes to alertness and seems “glad” to be alive, for I observe his face to gain the rictus of a smile and I watch his arms breach the space toward my person as he nuzzles into my heat, his mouth transmitting coos and baby sounds. But after I right his body, and distance myself two arm’s lengths from him to better observe the effects of the faint, and then note his symptoms in the ledger, he is soon again fending some invisible attack near his eyes, swatting the air, sometimes appearing to hug himself lightly on the shoulders in a solo embrace, as though his arms were being operated from afar and he were administering to himself some early, unchecked version of affection. I am repulsed when comfort becomes the chosen performance of the day, when people decide to soothe one another or themselves. It is so disappointing to ratify our panic. And to try to comfort oneself, a sort of asexual masturbation, like administering a massage to your own body, simply communicates to others what they should never do for you. It advertises your basest need. If Ben desires to be touched by me, he certainly won’t get his wish by touching himself in my presence. That is simply patronizing and far too obvious.

As you know, I prefer objects that do not give when you push or poke or prod them: a wall, a rock, a tower. I prefer men who don’t fall down and weep, who absorb a blow, who do not scamper and yell when chased, but stand firm, crouch, square off, meet an attack with something like resistance, even if it kills them. The four-point stance is my favorite posture for men. It indicates readiness, disguises fear, and raises their bottoms above their heads, which more authentically prioritizes a man’s body. Men should not gust so heavily from the mouth when they are being tended to; their noises should occur as language, or not at all. I do not like their sounds of relief. They sigh too easily, overusing the facial strategy of “smiling,” as though communicating their mood will deliver wanted news from their persons. As though, as though. They expect a far more ample interest in their needs than is ever warranted. The biggest tactical error of our time: using the face to communicate a mood. It amounts to spying on oneself. As for men, it is their completely wrong view of themselves I cannot stand. We could use a little more self-loathing from them, to give the rest of us a break. There is so little accuracy in their faces.

So when I can preside over the alteration of an object, or when that object sympathizes with my touch so much as to yield to it (Ben’s personality, so-called, not to mention his body, such as it is, and his head, his overall yieldingness and susceptibility and failed resistance to everything suggested for him), I am inclined, since I pursue my desires with “intense behavior” (your words), to continue shaping that object until it is small enough for me to stash in my pocket or bury or fling into the sea, all actions that would bring a final harm to Ben and our plan.

Although I am eager to resist the stereotypes of motherhood that would have me coddling the boy, swathing him in blankets, soothing his rages with my special, medical voice, and confirming or accommodating every fear and worry he attempts to indulge, I am not convinced that the opposite Approach of Indifference is any more original a parenting stance, and I’d like to resist ignoring the young man just because it’s a less charted region of behavior, however personally fascinating I might find it, however endlessly rich the results it might yield for me. Detachment is an indulgence of mine, I’ll admit, particularly when Ben speaks to me — announcing his feelings, querying mine, reporting what he has observed in the field, strategies that all cause me to stiffen — and I must moderate the display of my aloof postures with vigilance, lest it seem to him that I am simply powered down, or drunk. As useful as it is to position myself as a remote, masterful mother who employs hidden, satellite controls while refusing her son such techniques as physical proximity, or basic verbal or physical acknowledgments of his messages or gestures, such as eye contact (an overrated method), the danger is that, however advanced his mind might become as a result, Ben’s body will cool considerably, he will grow inert, his muscles will atrophy, and he will become too listless even for the most basic self-care. A dead son is not immediately in our interest at this time.

The question now is, So What? Here is just another crisis of parents with an average kid who will not produce the behaviors they dream about. Welcome to the club. What is so different about our struggle? Why should we complain when our boy fails to pioneer? Should we not be pleased by his divergence, even a divergence into likelihood, sameness, average output? Is it not necessary for him to be precisely other than we thought he would, exactly outside of our imagination for what people can do, a schism that defines the tension produced between generations? Well, yes. In theory, I agree. Let Ben be a Dutch princess. How utterly startling. My problem, which I hope is yours as well, is that Ben’s failure has not proved challenging, surprising, mysterious, complicated, difficult, alarming, or exciting. He is small and colorless and his voice cannot compete with a hushed room. His words, when he uses them, are nervous. He is bald and his head is overlarge. His lips are fat and wet.

Which is where you come in.

I am not sure if, in your ministrations to him, when you cleanse him or coach his life maneuvers on the Person Course behind the shed, you have had cause to handle his face, or to read his gestures with your mitten to discover what our young man might be feeling (not that such a subject concerns you, or should). But I ask that you look to him at once during his next behavior bath, being careful, please, not to alarm him, if indeed he is not accustomed to hosting your hand on that part of his body (reminder: Ben has Afraid of Hands).

Here are some remedy queries you might consider during your examination:

Should a boy’s face be that soft?

Does overnight burial harden a boy’s head?

Will an Outdoor Endurance Occasion create a facial callus sufficient to conceal him into adulthood?

Does such a callus permanently guarantee an emotionless citizen?

Can a controlled flame be used to toughen his face and generate a gesture-free armor for him?

Next, where exactly is that “music” coming from, if not his mouth? I’m sure you’ve heard it, unless you are as deaf to relevant sounds (your wife’s voice, your son’s voice, your own ludicrous voice) as you sometimes seem, a low keening pitch off his body that attends his person in the daytime, like a morose sound track? (“Morose” is probably not the right word. Just to say that a boy’s body is projecting its own sound track should be enough of a description, and types of music are reportedly subjective [a topic outside my expertise], so when I say it’s morose, I’m only revealing the ways in which I allow myself to be sad; it becomes a tool for others to overthrow me. Meaning: Enemies of mine [fill in the goddamned blank] could use Ben to make me sad, when even his rough breathing sounds like an old German dirge. They could station him near my bed while I sleep, and dose me with a hard sadness. They could position pictures of him on my shelves and within my personal effects, leading me to pause throughout my day and spiral into nonuseful contemplation of his face, which still invites interpretation, no matter how finally I have learned to ignore the gestures living there, to never look at Ben’s face, for fear of the trap there. Let me say more specifically that properties of this music arising off our son’s body are able to surmount my current Grief Defense Strategy, which I admittedly developed far too late in life to be effective around the clock. My shield is down sometimes just before a meal. Moments of hunger seem somehow tied to moments of feeling. The precise relationship between the two eludes me.)

Nevertheless, nevertheless, nevertheless. Some questions for you: Should Ben’s tones be transcribed by our listener (using twelve-tone behavioral notation) and then sent to a musicologist for interpretation?

Is it safe to make an audiotape of the young man, and if so, where against Ben’s body, or elsewhere, should the microphone be placed?

What are the bootleg risks for such an endeavor?

Could a clever parent or person-producing company (don’t fucking get me started) divine information about a person like Ben based on the sound of his body, and do we then run the risk of a person-dilution duplication, a behavior theft, in case his person is sampled and stored and broadcast for the benefit of other families, who were too lazy to raise a boy of their own, who were too stupid, who couldn’t be bothered to think for even one second about what it was they were doing in creating a brand-new person, that no one in the world had ever laid eyes on, so why not steal the very details and parameters and attributes of the person they’re calling Ben Marcus?

Do we leak details about our boy by allowing others to hear the sound of his body before we officially release him to view?

By publishing such sounds from our Storm Needle on a clear day, when person sounds will travel unobstructed as far as the state border, as clear as birdcalls, do we compromise our Newness Incentive and contribute to the derivative child-rearing styles of America?

And, ultimately, will learning something new about Ben end up mattering? Is it healthier to maintain, even to cultivate, a degree of mystery about the boy, so that we ourselves will not lose interest in him? Can we find out too much? Or should we strive to lose interest, in the economic sense, so as to zero our own panic in case he does emerge as a bold and altogether hardcore person with an approach to the world that might ultimately harm our own physical selves?

I have stopped short of fully disrobing the boy to finally trace the source of the sound, and the Quiet Sisters seem shy of him when his person is so loud (producing person evasions, fainting onto body rugs when he passes, hiding under cloth when he speaks, weeping if he eats grain). A young girl here, operating covertly under the name Julie, performed an Anderson out of the widow when Ben’s volume grew too unbearable.

I assure you that I am not afraid, in the technical sense, of hosting a version of Ben that is naked, particularly if it means discovering tactics that might be crucial to his future. Sometimes, while scrubbing my face before undergoing the Posture Hour with Jane Dark, I might entertain a memory of the very young and undersized Ben, who, as I’m sure you’ll recall, was often unattired in our midst. Dark’s Posture Hour is a strenuous regimen that always seems to disarm my thought stream and render me susceptible to nonuseful recollections, and the mandatory facial scrubbing beforehand only accentuates this vulnerability. (Is the face more important than we had thought? Should it be scrubbed more vigorously, scoured, brushed? By assaulting our own faces, do we possibly somehow access all-new behaviors? Should we tear off our faces? Should we cut them free with a knife? Is there something under there?) But I recall that Ben was a baby nudist, who showed no instinct for clothing and seemed inclined, like a young buccaneer, to stride across the living room in such a manner as to foreground his sharp, angular genitals, his penis slashing here and there, often cutting the fabric barriers we’d slung from the rafters to deter his free passage within a cloth-made world: hips forward, probing the wind, arms folded behind his back, his bottom tucked so far under him that it appeared as a gaping seam up his puckered front side. His behavior was a sort of vaudeville youth pornography that came from nowhere, as though he were puppet master of his own penis, conducting it through flight patterns that seemed nearly impossible. Where did someone so young learn to make such a horror of his own crotch? He had seen no movies and read no books; in fact, he was only recently free of his life-prevention hood, the cotton bunting meant to limit his experience of the world. Was such a display consciously designed to alarm his young mother?

So you’ll understand if I feel that his nudity is too emotionally treacherous for the women here who might encounter it. The nudity of a young man can lead to a wide range of emotions, most notably disappointment. And, however much I subscribe to long seasons of vague disappointment, accompanied by a low-chain starch diet to suppress my desires, disappointment produces a listless clientele, a sluggish workforce. Even as a sire, Ben was not required to fully disrobe (why complicate sexual collaboration with full nudity, introducing curiosity and repulsion all at once, a combination that all but shuts down the reproductive organs?). Not to mention that Ben could only sustain an erection if it poked through the unzipped fly of his denims, a fact I am reminded of every time I encounter a pair of his buttoned, unzipped trousers in the hamper, encrusted about the fly area with excess albumen. Even with his pants at his ankles, his concentration flagged and he lost his temper, and while the denim ringlet you designed acted briefly as a tumescence sustainer, or, in the Spanish parlance, a “cock ring,” it seemed far less cumbersome to let him operate his fornications through his zipper hole, though his blue jeans were chafing to so many of our young women here. Just one more reason there was so little conception in the house that winter.

Being his father, at least for these last days, I hope you might assume the task of disrobing Ben to sleuth a possible torso sound hole, and report to me what you discover. If you anticipate experiencing bouts of sudden loss while encountering a nude young man — your body seized by “plummet mode” though indeed you remain seated, a sure sense of descent gripping your skin, a vertical wind shaving up your legs, you will do best to conceal these sensations from our boy. Attire yourself properly in the sterilized examiner’s equipment, a doctor’s smock, and shoe guards. Visor yourself, or wear your hood. But in the end, it is not for me to tell you what to do with unbidden emotions (is that a redundant phrase?), or outsized reactions to the basic consorting styles between men, as with, in this case, a large man disrobing a small boy to discover the source of a mysterious sound, leading to your loss of breath, your frozen hands, your back seized up, your total body collapse, your Deep Regret, which actually feels like a blood condition and not just an emotion. It is so petty to feel things just because you can, and to indulge in feelings you might like to call “strong,” and to then be proud of what you call your “ability to feel,” as though it were a talent. As though, as though. He is your boy and his body is modeled after yours, apprenticing it while introducing improvements so subtle we could never guess at them, however much we believe ourselves to be raising him. To raise: to flay off skin and insert another body inside the pelt. From the perspective of relevancy, your response to Ben is no longer interesting. You would do well to remember that your reaction to our son is anecdotal at best. You showed long ago that feelings couldn’t be proved. Should you now live by your own lesson? You should. Should you live at all? We’ll see.

The real alarm: Even with the clear helmet you’ve introduced to Ben’s wardrobe (let’s see that more youth pay attention to his equipment, if not his tendency to weep during field events), he seems highly breakable and far too temporary a person, and I should like at once to rectify our home atmosphere so that our young man might at least breathe enough air to promote his little body toward a more common manhood, armored against those small dull birds that clog our Ohio airways and seem a little bit too interested in Ben’s passage, trailing his sloping body like a long black kite whenever he leaves the house to stick his unmistakable and prematurely bald head into public airspace for anyone to see it. (Isn’t there a famous old story about a boy who is followed by birds from city to town to country, until he is running into the woods, the birds not far behind? In the story, doesn’t the boy finally hide underground, where the relentless birds can’t go, though they try anyway by crashing into the earth at the perforation of the boy’s disappearance, leaving an ever-growing smear of beak and feathers in the soil? Does the boy not meet a terrible end underground, a place so dark that his body has been twisted upside down for weeks, before his head, so fruity with blood, grows too enriched, too large? Is the phrase “terrible end” also a redundancy? And if there is such a famous old story, what exactly are we to deduce from Ben’s apparent casting in it? Was the character’s name also Ben? Did he die? Why would our Ben be taking part in a story that was written down long ago? Do the stories repeat themselves, or is Ben being derivative?)

Request: Can your team, or what’s left of it (these are such quiet days in Men Town), not devise a limbering station for Ben to visit each day before breakfast, on such days when you are his Learning Host? For my part, I would be willing to surrender my commitment to Dark’s Ninety Motions™ as the ideal actions for a body. I realize that Ben is a boy, though I take issue with your definition of this word, and I defer now to any movement at all you might choose for your last sessions with him, so long as that movement does not confiscate him in a Final Exit.

You’re wondering now whether this note to you is itself only an articulate set of complaints, a description of a crisis, lacking in target behaviors, solutions, or rectification approaches. You’re also wondering — let me keep guessing — why I would write to you at all, given my “complete control of Ben” (your words), my “mastery over the launch” (your words), my profound disregard for your strategies and designs for the person-building program initiated with respect to Ben, though the phrase “strategies and designs” rather overstates the coherency of your thinking on this project. Why include you or ask for your help, and in the same breath ridicule you and threaten your life? One answer: Such a contradiction is mysterious. I don’t seem like I should need your help, yet I am asking for it. Possibly I mean to put you off guard, or to give you hope. Or I am just as selfish as you’d like to believe, and I need your exclusive wisdom regarding Ben, no matter how much I might publicly disavow your role with him. I seek your counsel in private, then ridicule you in public. This interpretation flatters your pride, and I certainly don’t mind if you entertain it, however deeply wrong it actually is. (It is in my interest for you to be wrong about me. The less you understand, the more attention you will pay.)

One theory:

Mastering a launch, as every parent tries to do, also requires ceding control, hard as this is, portioning tasks to deputy figures, however weak these assistants might be, designating partial or temporary authority to Field Decoys (you) who might influence the trajectory of the subject (Ben) in small but significant ways, who are poised in small but significant ways to supplement the far more complicated work of the launch master herself, a person, in this case, who must cover such a wide range of problems and challenges that her actual hands-on work with the subject must often be farmed out to helpers with a smaller horizon of concerns, who can then report back to her and describe the tactile sensations of handling her child, interacting with him, witnessing the behavior he produces throughout the day, which is information she still requires to perfect her work, though, because she has already touched her child, and has no time or patience for repetition, she only requires reminders and updates that can easily be delivered by her staff. Much of her contact with her actual boy can be verbal, secondary. A launch master is concerned to be not just a mother but also a behavior creator, a consultant, and ultimately a specialist in the horizon, an expert in the distance, which is the final problem of the young person in America. She sculpts his ending while he has barely begun. She scouts so far ahead that sometimes her child cannot even see her. Forget about tethers and leashes and kiddy cords; a launch master takes full advantage of the so-called generation gap. She swings wide. The furthest distance between two points is a mother. Although she may appear as a speck in the distance, she is in reality huge and looming. She is the expanse, not the point. This distinction will be meaningless to you, which only illustrates how out of your league you are.

We have carpentry uses for you. We have construction uses for you. There are projects in the physical plant that could use your help. Read on if you are concerned to participate in the world we are building for Ben.

What I suggest first is the introduction of windows into Ben’s room in Man House, a ventilation system that will not leave him so flushed and lightheaded; and possibly, at least for one learning season, a modest tank-and-mask affair that he might harness over his helmet just to get him back on his feet without choking and fainting as often.

If you agree to aid us, you have my permission to travel to the women’s side of the compound for a parts consultation at the shed, though I don’t mean to imply that you lack the facilities to produce a streamlined child’s mask yourself. Only know that I think our staff, if you have any people left who still answer to you, can collaborate on this dilemma without too much rupture, particularly if the treaty is observed.

If you do make your way over here, I ask that you observe the motion laws, travel during daylight, and resist carrying weapons or bringing your so-called assistants. If Larry emerges, you can trust that he will be fired upon until he ceases his advance. Then his body will be seized. All captures will be filmed, and the films will be projected on the barn as a caution. Let’s not have any more trouble. I’m sure you’ve seen the trucks behind the house, gouging into North Yard, and the Quiet Sisters at work digging the hole, and I’m further sure I don’t need to tell you that this hole, like certain holes, called “graves,” built to house the dead, can and will serve many interesting purposes, including the possible containment of figures failing to yield to former agreements.

That was certainly a mouthful of a sentence. You might favor yourself by reading it again for clues.

Or in plain speech: Watch yourself.

Let me now describe a change in my beliefs, not interesting in its own right, but certainly bound to affect the so-called future moments of Ben, the only real topic to bind us at this late moment in your conscious life.

While I once agreed that limiting Ben’s use of natural elements — rationing his light, air, and water, concealing his food, ironizing or curtailing the affection we dispensed (employing such techniques as the hug that just misses, the air kiss, the parent mannequins, the empty house in the morning, the growling sound track piped into his room at night, the wolf experience, the cruel girl in the field) — would theoretically create a hungrier, sharper, strong lad — better suited to become the kind of person we once agreed we would like to launch, a boy who only relied on natural resources as a last resort, in case a sound-out or blackout or food minus really did seize the current moment, or in case the current moment itself contracted and went airless and commenced to suffocate those persons living in it (as you predicted every day over breakfast, when words of doom were apparently once thought to render a young family dependent on the man who spoke them) — my team and I are discovering that the once-intriguing deprivations might now be too severe for Plan Ben, tiring the actual Ben’s little body beyond use, caving in his chest, withering his legs. In short, we are actually only teaching him exhaustion, fatigue, despair, and he is a very quick study, for he is becoming almost like some figure from literature: short of breath, despondent, frail, contrived.

A “body bellows,” as you call it, is undoubtedly an important way to teach a man to earn his own life, something I still favor, theoretically. But I have a question: When do these devices exceed Ben’s Opponent Quota, and how many enemies to his natural sustenance can he rightfully engage before he loses the battle to become an upright man during the daytime? Are parents not enemies enough? In other words: Is our family project still interesting if Ben dies beneath a burden of homemade equipment? Does a child-rearing strategy effectively terminate when the child does? Is it possible that you are scheming to induce an exit in your child because you sense one impending for yourself, thus you have straitjacketed him with a bellows set on “high” and he is gently commencing to expire? And, if so, would that not be a somewhat derivative approach to the art of the launch? Is it not ultimately dull to abort your own launch? Are you so boring that you would try to kill Ben? Have you eschewed excellence simply because your own project as a man has failed?

Make no mistake; I do remember your early work, if this consoles you at all, though my intention is to be correct, rather than to comfort you. It was fatherly of you to suit up in the body bellows yourself before apprenticing Ben to the project, though, if you’ll recall, young Ben steered himself well clear of his thus-attired father, and even I suffered more than my typical indifference touching you that month (yet the bellows did provide a difficulty that I had previously found your body to lack: Navigating the apparatus made me impatient enough to almost desire you, when your body was rendered inaccessible due to the wires that bound it). In those days, you could barely breathe, and often lay gasping on the floor, your eyes tearing, your skin a flat and terrible shade of blue. That was when our eroticism followed a medical model, me nursing you as though you were a huge and faulty mechanical bird, come crashed near my home, brave and stupid and near death, allowing the hardest kind of love, which would not have to be backed up in the morning. I could mythologize you beyond a walking mediocrity, a flesh-made disappointment. You were my broken machine, a cage with blood flowing through it.

It is true that when you finally shed the bellows that early spring day down at the learning pond, there was something buoyant, if spastic, to your step, an odd and mismanaged freedom your body struck with the air, as though you would be more at home ballooning over Ohio alongside the clouds, a man to lead the weather out of our lives for good, some sort of pied piper pulling wind behind him. You had clearly become stronger, but it was not clear to what end, and this sums you up entirely: intriguing and original upon first glance, yet useless and vain in the end, a reminder of another pointless way life could have gone, and actually did go, but not before, thankfully, thankfully, I altered my own course wide, wide, wide from you, and got myself the hell out of your wrongful way.

It puts me in mind of an instructive moment when I was a girl. There was a boy who was a runner, whose mother wanted terribly for him to win the races. Every morning we saw him jogging in his medical shorts through our neighborhood, a tall boy with a father’s portion of hair on his arms. While we girls were hidden in greatcoats, our scarves wired around us and hats stoppered on our heads, foolish lunches handed over that we would later trade for candy, this boy was steaming with fog as he ran down our streets, just about on pace with the cautious little cars that boxed us up to school. But all of the boy’s training didn’t put him ahead, because there was inevitably some other boy in another town who could run faster, and did, repeatedly, in race after race. Our boy was not a winner, and his huge desire to win only seemed to embarrass everybody, because his confidence in himself was so inaccurate.

Then, revelation, his mother decided to handicap his training so that during races he would have more power. The first handicap was an oxygen tank that limited his breath. Come race time, having shucked his gear, he was not only pounds lighter but it was as if he had a sudden third lung, a power boost akin to cutting gills into his ribs. After that, he ran like an escaped lung patient, the tank on his back bobbing like an oversized coffee thermos.

He was faster, but still not enough.

Next, she hooked a cart to her boy, had him run like a mule carrying fruit to market. Except instead of fruit there was a man in the back of that cart who did things to impede the boy’s progress.

Things?

He heckled him. He pulled on his “reins.” Objects were tossed in his path. There was some occasional tackling.

The cart, too, failed to improve his performance, though it certainly complicated it and introduced new ways for him to thrive. Had there been a cart-pulling race, our boy would have taken first place. He could run under duress. If there was ever a war, for instance. Et cetera.

Next, she abandoned constraining her son’s body and took him off the roads entirely. She went in for visualization, had him picturing stuff that hadn’t happened, to prepare his body for when it would. He was entirely on blocks, stretching out his brain. Our boy stopped running down our streets and we no longer saw him, except when he was a normal citizen in the classroom, plain and powerless. I remember how disappointed I felt watching him do math. I refused to accept him as a citizen, so dull in his school uniform. Someone said that each day before and after school he sat in a “running room” his mother had designed, thinking about running. I pictured his brain fat with thought, his scalp pale, his drumstick calves pulsing with unbidden twitches.

The result at his next race was surprising. He was serene, calm, sort of floating along, driven not by his legs, it seemed, but by some strange current of energy the air had sent into him alone on the racing course. A mind-powered runner. It was beautiful to watch him. If you squinted, you could almost see thin strings of light feeding his muscles as he ran. He had grown slightly thick at the waist, and his legs had lost their veiny, snakelike strength, yet the other runners looked crippled next to him, awkward and near death, as though he were the only man on a gassed battlefield who could breathe. He brought a lyricism to the art of motion that made everyone at the race nervous to even try to walk. I felt stupid and ashamed and my hips ached. It hurt just to stand there. I creaked and cracked on my sockets as though my bones were made of cookie. The result of the race? His original style proved unwinning. He came in third. Speed seemed irrelevant to his gestural fluidity. He was getting worse.

His mother was perplexed. She had fetishized his rehearsal, mistakenly believing that people practice, physically or mentally, for some event in the future. Her solution stunned everyone in the neighborhood, however, and I credit her remedy with solving my own already-erring emotions at the time.

Here’s what happened: His mother decided to train for him. She had not been helping him directly enough, had made no sacrifice of her own whatsoever. There had always been the two of them, but only he had been training. So this time the boy stayed home and his mother did the running. She was weak and fat and out of shape. She lacked the flashy gear. Mostly, she trained in a long denim baking skirt, her hips jostling like sacks of flour tied around her waist. We could very nearly walk faster than she ran, but we stayed away and watched her circling their block, sometimes all day on weekends, while the boy watched through binoculars from the window, tied down with weights, noting God knows what in a ledger. Sometimes at night, we could still hear her sharp, chipping steps and her breath, as painful and awkward as someone might produce if her head was wrapped in plastic.

Clearly, she wasn’t showing her boy how to run. So what was she doing? How could her pained, palsied trotting possibly help him get faster? Her running itself would never help him; it was what her running led to — namely, her death one morning several weeks into her training, right in front of the house, the boy positioned at his perch in the window (some would say he was chained there). Her oily heart went cold and lurched too hard. She faltered, brought her hands into her bosom, looked around the street accusingly, as if such pain must have been wished on her from someone nearby, and, as her eyes settled on her watching son and her body settled on the asphalt in front of him, she died.

I will not patronize you with my interpretation of this little anecdote. We have outsmarted our lives too much as it is. Understanding is overrated. To hell with it. Yet I will again ask you to consider the depth and scope of your fatherly sacrifices with regard to Ben. I will ask you to do some real thinking for a change. I will ask for these things from you, and I will wait by my window, in my room, in the field — all the while conducting my experiments in silence and the final shedding of my feelings — I will wait for some sign from you that you have heard and are ready to comply, to participate, to finally fulfill your real role as a father to Ben, to ascend, however much it will harm your physical self. I will ask you to do these things. Then I will no longer ask you.

We must always be prepared to admit when a theory is merely lyrical, but fucked in practice. Today it is clear to all of us that the Black Room and the Wind Quota were fine ideas when we first blueprinted Ben’s development narrative — in those days when having a child was like writing about something that hadn’t happened yet — but now we must concede that Ben does not even resist his daily wind-ambush baths down at the learning pond. He simply allows himself to blow wherever the machine fans carry him, and I suspect that any benefits of this disruption — the technical elements of surviving a weather ambush, for instance — are lost on him. He knowingly walks into the collision every day, having learned nothing, apparently, from the successive regulated wind attacks we designed to occur like an invisible sunset, one made of air, which, according to you, took you and knocked you down and reset you for the next day, breathless and hungry for something new to happen.

It’s as though he walks into the same dark alley night after night, even though he knows a man with a knife awaits him. Possibly Ben subscribes to a statistic that asserts perfectly awful events cannot recur with such precision day after day. He cannot believe that a calamity can repeat from the same coordinates, as though every house and every yard and every father can only produce one disaster, and the disaster, once discharged, cannot return to where it was stored. He is not learning from his injuries. It’s the old French idea that Father never strikes twice. I forget who said it, but it’s a pretty notion, if only it were true. It certainly isn’t true about his father.

Let’s have some evidence: If you look at Ben’s films, particularly the behavior footage of the wind ambush, you’ll see that Ben is just a boy who apparently believes that every morning he will be swept from his feet by the wind and slammed into the barn or the silo or the now-crumbling lip of the well, after which he must brush himself off and be on his way, limping and possibly bleeding, but grinning, as if to deny his attackers the pleasure of seeing his pain (although the grin has never been proven to be anything more than acute facial discomfort, a gestural insecurity that the face adopts when other gestures are not forthcoming).

Aside from simply wishing Ben were smarter (which only means I would like to feel more intimidated, surprised, or baffled by him), one must observe that he certainly is no more kite-like or nimble in the wind than he ever was, if such a talent is even possible or useful or interesting, or even a talent at all.

In the end, Ben has fewer maneuvers than a stone. Your idea of a “Kite Boy” was once provocative, in the perfectly harmless way that ideas are: potent and fascinating and useless. To be fair, there was a time when we all wanted to envision Ben somehow immune to what made the rest of us so “miserable,” before we understood how sadness was dosed over our household in a systematic, midwestern, medicinal wind, emotions carried in on the unstoppable weather: a relentless blowing, blowing, blowing, wherever we went, a skin-piercing wind that made the inside of our bodies so distractingly loud and cold and raw, no matter what clothes we wore and what walls we erected in the field to block it, despite the calisthenics we devised to alter how our bodies met or skirted the air. Before we windproofed our lives with special birds and thick trees and houses built just so, when even deep in our beds there was this inevitable final voiding of privacy, from a nature that was so jealous of the objects inside it that it could do nothing but eavesdrop all the time, sending wind on reconnaissance inside every porous body to snoop around, dispatching the air as a final spy to ensure that absolutely nothing, nothing, nothing would occur without its notice.

It was thus easy to dream of fashioning a boy who would evolve beyond this vulnerability to such meddling, hard air. An immunity we longed for, if not for ourselves, then for our little person. He would be shielded. What else was evolution for but to correct the deepest miseries of a person, and shouldn’t Person Rearing in America simply accelerate our mastery over the Sorrows from the Outside, so that people might live in secret, be less noticed, more covert, possibly untraceable? Did God not ask Jesus to be new and unknown, to crawl through water, to move his hands in front of his enemies’ mouths so their language would be rendered babble? Did Jesus not stitch his own mouth after filling it with cloth, rendering his sermon muffled and anguished? Did not this cloth, and others like it, soaked in the oldest language, become holy, so we could swab ourselves with his word, wash our heads in sermon?

Maybe. Maybe. Maybe. But Ben is simply going to be killed, and this is not an interesting-enough way to die.

When he emerges each Tuesday from the Black Room, it seems that not only speech but also written language alarm him and cause his chest to become flushed, welts blooming on his body as though he were boiling on the inside, his skin poured over him as if it were glue, to hide the real person inside. You’ll say that it is the women’s speech his body is rejecting, that he has developed a listener’s rash to the mouth allergens spewed out when we open up our heads to speak. Go ahead and say it. I know your argument by heart. I know you by heart. The things you say are just symptoms of your corrupted mouth, your distorted palate. But each Tuesday evening, Ben is submitted to my Motherhood Messages, on cassette tape, at ample volume. And although we can’t judge by his emotions, which I understand to be decoys meant to put me off my guard and compel me to repeat the mistakes of Persons That Have Died™, who once indulged in The Having of Emotions, and thus digressed their entire lives into indulgent and self-congratulatory reflection, pursuing Rewards of Insight and Rewards of the Mouth, I have observed Ben to soften at his own mouth as he curls his pajama-clad body around the tape machine in the Affection Room. His breathing goes slow, and his lips become moist and slack before he falls asleep.

The small wet mouth is an interesting symptom in child rearing. When it is exhibited, it is the only time I am almost tempted to touch him. I avoid the booth at such times. I wring my cloth until the feeling passes. I do my stretches. Possibly a bit of duct tape over the area would discourage my impulse. Yet that would clog his language apparatus, and it is on Ben’s language apparatus that we are pinning most of our hope, looking for unprecedented utterances. New words, old words said newly, nonwords, sounds. Maybe something else. It’s a big hole there. Anything could come out of it.

Hear me out. If we are to have a person between us, we should have a full-sized one with a fully functioning mouth, an enlarged and intricately structured palate, a cavity that will accommodate as well as generate the messages that will command the citizens of the town and elsewhere. We require a boy who will come to use the Ohio language like the other alleged children in the neighborhood (I absolutely refuse to comment, but every word in that entire phrase should be in quotes, italicized, underlined, asterisked, and, if that fails to send up a warning flag, fucking burnt to the ground). Even if the things Ben comes to say do not subscribe to our traditions of sense, even if he turns out to be a shouter and complainer.

Or, or, or. Using words in other popular ways, as we have observed from him all too many times:

Breaking open his own mouth with foreign languages (the Ambassador).

Redescribing basic household events in terms of his own discomfort (the Patient).

Bemoaning his exclusion from events that occurred before he was born or while he was asleep or otherwise incapacitated (the Anachronist).

Remarking on conditions and situations already observed by others (the Fact Checker).

Speaking in an accent, to deflect attention from his real voice (the Traveler).

Remarking on his own feelings, presuming outside interest in the statistics of his inner life (the Teacher).

Using words of encouragement and approval when others make observations, because he chooses to be viewed as an enabler and an approver (the Mother).

Asking questions of others merely to hint at the questions he wishes were asked of him (the Poet).

Describing activities he plans one day to undertake in order to suggest an attractive version of himself that has yet to occur (the Scheduler).

Mentioning information he has read about (the Stringer).

Commenting with value phrases on the various things that can be seen or heard or felt, positing himself as a prioritizer or cataloger of whatever can be perceived (the Goalie).

Or finally a young man who only uses language to condemn his parents for launching him in the first place, accessing the blame region of language and utilizing it fully to discredit us (the Person).

It should not matter to us what strategies Ben concocts as a young language user in America, nor should his father and mother compete to apprentice him to their own separate approaches, weak and useless as they are: using words to articulate accomplishments or reasons to be loved (father), using words to describe one’s own shortcomings so fluently that pity is invoked (mother, long ago), using words to lull employees into slavish compliance (father), or no longer using words at all, unless quietly typed to her former husband in a final missive (mother).

Regardless of how we each have failed to traffic in language with any newness at all, a failure we can mourn at some other time (though I would suspect even our mourning style to be derivative, repetitive, selfish), let us for now please agree not to launch an undernourished boy who will be broken open one day and left to fail this world forever on one of our doorsteps (not that your quarters feature a doorstep, though your current home is certainly nicer than where you’re going). For my part, I should not like to feel responsible for a dead boy, particularly as I near completion of my Responsibility Fasting Procedure, my Obligation Shedding Schedule. A decease at this time, particularly of my own child, would be a clear setback, would implicate me in feelings I am no longer interested, or lazy enough, to have.

Because of this speech allergy, Jane Dark is no longer able to read to him from The Unwritten Books of Susan without Ben turning rigid and blank. Can language of this sort act directly on his spine? I know that you advocate a children’s rash, or at least that you have seen rashes as a sign of change, the body fighting the world, for if it is not in collision, then it must be in retreat, and thus weak and afraid, doomed. “What is a rash?” you asked me once while we huddled in the back of a Dating Shelter in Akron, seeking our own private water fountain. Before I could shed my assumptions, as I had learned to do, and formulate some new and impressively lateral idea about skin inflammation as it relates to anxiety, ambition, and behavior concealment — because back then I suffered from a panic to produce for you ideas that were just beyond comprehension, odd and inscrutable enough to baffle or intimidate my audience — you spoke rapidly about armor and inner wind, the body’s topography, how people map one another and produce personality landscapes on their skin, so that the flesh is a mirror, and the rash only reflects the disease of the person nearby, a theory positing the skin as a truth serum, what you called “the divining layer,” “more revealing than a fossil” (your words), which, even if true, does not justify a collection of pelts in the home, or the encouragement of intact skin shedding in a certain man’s daughter.

Let’s say, for the sake of being extremely bored of this argument of yours, and to demonstrate my indifference to it, my “supremacy” (your words), my ability to concede to ideas I privately know to be romantic and flawed, that Ben’s rash is a sign that I am ill, or that we women here are wrong in the body and soon to decline, and Ben is reflecting our decay by adopting raised red bumps all over his chest. My son is a flag for my disorder. We have children so they might advertise our inadequacies. Giving birth is akin to producing proof. The very existence of Ben proves something; his body is litmus, an Empathy Skin. Let’s say it. Consider it said. It has been said.

Now, here on the women’s side of the house we are left with a boy who would scratch his chest until it bled if we didn’t glove his hands, and I must fall back on what I’m sure you’ll determine a conservative notion: that Ben should not gouge at his chest so ruthlessly. If he is to dig, he should dig away from his body. That is what backyards are for: to dig holes, to maybe dig holes big enough for people, to then put people in the holes, and cover them back up again with dirt. To then recite statements atop these holes pertaining to the people within them, to describe atop these holes those people in the holes. To praise them, salute them, send them faithfully away. No hole in Ben’s chest will be big enough to hold another person. There are no graves located on people’s bodies. We do not exhume our own chests for other people’s bones. Digs do not occur at these sites. We do not plant stones there to mark the fallen. We do not place flowers. The body is not a hole, not a grave. Ben should not dig there. My justification? His chest covers his heart. Or perhaps you’d like to downplay the importance of the heart, as well.

Now, final topic. You and I. What is left for us? We will not fuck again. We will not meet. We will not touch each other, or converse. You will not see me again. I will see images of you: photographs, drawings, acetate motion charts. Possibly some EKG readings. A short film will be made of your departure.

Which leaves, finally, Ben’s future.

If Ben elects voluntary paralysis when he turns eighteen, and inhabits a silent suit down at the Akron Stillness Center, I would at least like him to have experienced, for the purposes of later dismissal, the dubious pleasures and vague disappointments of running, jumping, sliding, and walking, the dullness and fascination of being able to lead his own body off road into the woods, up ladders, onto roofs, or down the emotion-reduction luge chute, not least because these technologies of personal transport might deliver him beyond the compound of the house and its satellite buildings — its barns and silos and fainting tanks — into the city, and to the natural preserves he has probably noticed pulsing somewhat dimly on the horizon.

He spends enough time on the roof for me to guess that he is one of those young people interested in the distance, in objects that he can see but cannot touch. Since you and I discovered in our time together that touching something, such as a boy, or each other, infected it with ourselves and thus spoiled our curiosity for it, because our attractions for others were based on our repulsion for ourselves, it will probably be useful to allow Ben access to those regions we most wish him to dismiss (other people, other places), to let him realize on his own how dull the world can be. Let us not imprison him before giving him a chance to imprison himself.

I do not share Ben’s interest in the distance, and I do not want to presume to know the boy (I am not interested in the trap of empathy or the false comfort [any other kind?] of understanding), but he must be looking at something.

Thinking back on my own life, which technically does not interest me, there was a time when I felt a distracting curiosity about mountains, as much as I tried to discipline myself against it. Something felt unfinished in me when I regarded the hills and swells around my childhood home, areas my father referred to as “mistakes in the terrain.” I thought, Even though the world spins so fast, how come it hasn’t smoothed down these so-called mountains? Why are they still so lumpy when the wind has leveled everything else? Are mountains just a failure of wind? Shouldn’t the earth be less interesting? Otherwise what does one do with something that is merely pretty? And ultimately: Why am I being tested this way? I felt as though I had eaten someone else’s emotions and they were swimming in my body, that I had strong feelings that weren’t my own. I was hosting another person inside myself, like that man in the famous book who eats his family to protect them from the sun. My choice: either digest the person or perform it out of myself, invert myself and cleanse my feelings. (This is what it is to feel things: to feel like someone else.) It wasn’t the loss of control that made me sick, but my utter unfamiliarity with myself, the disappointment of discovering reactions and attitudes to the world that seemed so highly predictable. Here I was, just another girl responding to beauty, and the inevitability of this disposition to the world seemed like a terrible loss of control, a vastly disappointing conformity I had hoped to be exempt from.

What did I do? I took my father’s advice: “Go away.” I overcame the problem by wearing a modified falcon’s hood, what my mother called my “visor,” which defeated my attempts to discern the horizon and reminded me that if an object was out of my reach, it most likely belonged to someone else, and of course, as I believe, affection should not occur without possession.

A phrase worth repeating.

Certainly we can agree that the boy should see more and that he should gain these visions by his own power, by zooming in on objects through his own effort, running toward trees, other people, and so forth. Yet you’ll understand that no one on the women’s side of the house is inclined to drive Ben to these scenes, even if the lake and the so-called trees are supposedly “wonderful,” as you repeatedly used to tell me during that time when you believed that sharing your opinion with me would make me care for you more, or implicate me permanently in your ideas and life, as though learning something of your bias was actually going to prove useful to either of us. By sharing interpretations of a world that refused to accommodate our ideas, we only embarrassed each other and dramatized our own ignorance. An injunction of silence in our relationship would have quite possibly forestalled our disappointing discoveries about each other. Your words: “To know someone is to know why you should leave them.”

The women’s use of cars, as I’m sure you know, has been attended by collision, ambush, and pistol fire, and we are not prepared to lose any more women or equipment to those excursions when we have everything we need right here, including enemies we can at least see. Please note that this is not an accusation of you or your staff. An accusation would sound more like this:

I’m sure it’s a coincidence that every time a female staffer leaves the compound she dies before nightfall, at which point the men’s camp lights a celebration fire and sings until dawn.

But even that sounds mild, more like sarcastic innuendo. How about:

Because you had decreasing access to the physical territory we will refer to as “me” (though the naming of my person is a complicated and highly contested endeavor, and I imagine your exhaustion would exempt you from such a difficult task), a place you felt you formerly visited regularly and with my permission, though indeed I only ever allowed passive access, and you then received notice, in the form of silence, that this trespass of yours would never occur again, you took the liberty of canceling what women of mine entered your purview, a cancellation you accomplished with weaponry and subterfuge, with traps you dug in the soil or laced into trees.

But I harp on. The point of all this: Why not take Ben on an outing? Father and son go to the hills. Michael and Ben take a trip in a car. Boy and man eat sandwiches in a box. Colorful napkins. Bring a ball and a bat, your mitts. Take hats, jackets, Ben’s sweater. Drive along the road. Enjoy yourselves. Let him see what he sees (extremely important parenthetical remark: you will be watched, you will be watched, you will be watched). And you, by all means, take a good look around while out in the open air with your own little Ben. Take note of the world and its things. Practice remembering the lake and the field and the hills bubbled up in the distance, trees leaning like broken cages over you, the so-called birds asserting their airborne geometry. Take very special note of these sites.

Why? Here is your future in writing: You and I are operating within an inevitability that I have designed. I am proud to announce authorship of the next things that will happen to you. It is best that you learn about them now. A container is being prepared for you: It will contain your body and be possessed of enough dimension for you to spin in place or lie prone, twist on the floor, or crawl several strokes, a repertoire of actions I predict you will soon abandon, though they are among your favorite things to do. One: No one will watch you. Two: These actions will prove distinctly uncomfortable. Three: It will be impossible for you to cultivate a sense of accomplishment. This is a fancy way to say we are interring you in an underground cell, sending you under, putting you away. Your potential physical velocity will be modest at best, since walls will prevent your acceleration, and collisions lack the complexity of sensation I know that you favor in your experiences. I cannot imagine you throwing yourself against a wall for very long without becoming bored or hurt beyond repair. The container’s location is irrelevant, at least to you, since you will be inside of it and lose sense of all other places. But you can be assured that it will be in no such place for persons out walking, or some such other incorrect form of “engaging the day or night” (your words), to come upon you by chance, to hear your shouts, to dig you out and save you and end your terrible ordeal (any other kind?).

Sentences of words are being composed at this very moment that will disturb you to hear. They will comprise the entire media of your days and nights in the container, unless darkness counts as a medium, or your own breath counts as a medium, or your own shouts of greeting or strife to persons who are not present or do not actually exist can come to count as a medium, as any distortion of silence is ultimately the attempt of a creature to gain attention, although silence itself is God’s medium, as you pointed out, in which case you will enjoy his solo performance of silence for a long, long time. You will be in audience to his expertly crafted silence, his “original nothingness of sound” (your words). His silence will be made and experienced and enjoyed by you alone. Alone, alone, alone.

Is that it? That is not it. Should you care to know, an aperture will be in place in the area commonly known as the ceiling. We will call this the “aperture of contact,” and it will be through here that you will be given access to the language we have designed. It will not admit light, this aperture. It will not admit people. It will admit words, but it will not receive them. Think of it as a mouth, though the metaphor ends there. Its larger purpose is for you to guess at, which should give your so-called imagination a small degree of labor, a task that will have to count as your main recreation, since you may require something to do after all, other than to listen to the sentences coming in, so why not be alone there to puzzle with yourself over what exactly is going on?

As such, then, the only choices for you now involve your conduct within the inevitable. Isn’t that, after all, where all conduct occurs? And as a former expert of conduct, which you purported to be, and occasionally were, I hope that you will give the matter the very best thoughts you have, and concoct a behavioral endgame that will, at the least, engage those persons required to witness your last moments as a living man. Please be mindful of those of us who must watch you. Give us something to pay attention to.

Will I be there when they lower you into the hole? I will not. Will I toss dirt over the entrance? No. Will I ever visit the hole to speak words there? I cannot answer that; it simplifies my plans. Will I sometimes, at night, go out to the hole and stand there quietly weeping, watching the sun break down over the horizon? No, no, no. I will have no such moments. In fact, I would argue that those are not moments at all. Moments actually occur, while these things are crafted with such panic and falsity that they freeze up and in reality do not happen at all — woman weeping over incarcerated man — though they are remembered as if they did. Let’s say my body might grace your grave site. I may roll in the soil there. Do I believe in saturating my skin in the soil that covers the man in the chamber? I might. Do I subscribe to blanketing myself in sediment, performing the postures of silence while caked in dirt, exploiting my body as a full-scale listening device modified by the earth that covers a husband? A resonant earth? Do I plan to cultivate and disperse this soil, to distribute it in this and other areas as a muffling tarp, hush crumbs, a layer of silence to finally quiet down the world. Do I?

Knock, knock.

Good-bye,

Jane Marcus