Ben Marcus: Notable American Women

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

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

I Would Like to Help You

If you wish to fondle the author, I should take off my clothes for you and sit on a bed to the tune of a funeral march, or a sound track of your own choice, or no music at all, though I will warn you that my mother spoiled me for silence and my body sometimes fails to appear in a hushed room; I do not show up so well without sound. There should be mournful music and the smell of warm food, an unimpeachable day of fair weather, and you should be allowed your way with me, until whatever terrible insufficiency you’re nursing has been soothed. At the time of this writing, I am nowhere near my ideal level of compliance. I should be so submissive that something will finally come true for you. You should take out your worst, your most secret fantasy on me. You should use me as a surrogate for whatever never happened to you, or whatever happened too much, or didn’t happen correctly.

When you have exhausted your capacity for love or hatred or ambivalence, if there is any difference in these three daytime strategies, you may close the book. Only first tell me something special, a sweet thing only you can say, because as shallow or wooden or headless as I might seem, I still require a word of devotion, a cooing noise to comfort me, just anything soft and from your mouth alone. If possible, please also scratch or hold my head, because my head feels far too little held in this life. If I had to take my thousands of desires and their millions of horribly unquenchable offshoots and digressions and contradictions, most of which quickly leave the realm of law and sense and logic, and enter a place of pain and shame and impossibility (PSI), and from these innumerable desires choose only one that I would forever have addressed whenever and wherever I liked, in the cities and at the behavior farm or down in my father’s cell, an instant satisfaction I could summon with a button, or the clap of my hands, that desire would be to have my head handled, to have it scratched and rubbed and cradled, washed with a soft rag, wiped dry if wet, moistened if dry, kissed, kissed, kissed forever, scratched, covered with fine stuff, the most expensive velvet, rich creams, discussed in discussion groups, analyzed by long-bodied men in coats, whispered about by girls from another country, never forgotten. I would simply and finally be happy to be able to snap my fingers or press the Give Me What I Want button, located ideally on my own body so that I could ask for love more discreetly simply by seeming to scratch my belly, and instantly have my head serviced whenever I desired, have girls and boys and their chaperones come running from their apology centers or fainting tanks to deal with it, a ritual as regular as prayer, where every member of a large city was constantly on call to deal with my head, full-timers, part-timers, temps, and scabs. If only my head could no longer suffer a boundary with other people’s hands. If only there were no boundaries. If only my head and body didn’t differ so from everything else. It is where my body begins to differ from what surrounds it that everything first seems to go wrong. If only my head were finally not my responsibility, could be put into someone else’s care, could be made to merge with other persons and the world so that it would no longer suffer such distance and touchlessness, would no longer even be a head, because even when touched, there are parts of my head not being touched. Even underwater parts of my head feel dry.

If Things Had Gone My Way

I should still be alive in this book. I should not have died so young, or died at all, or ever been alive. I should have fought off my last failure of breath, been brave, said better things. There should not be a smooth wooden tombstone engraved with my name and planted in the field behind my Ohio home. The tombstone should not say RIP, or Here Lies, or Quiet Goes a Man, or Survived by No One.

I should be able to say hello to my mother, to wash my father’s hands, to hear my mother sing a song, rather than imply it with her fingers. I should be able to breathe without the sky suffering from lack of birds. The air I make should no longer hurt the men and women. There would not be an empty room without windows in a perfect world. In a perfect world, nothing would have happened yet. Everything would go without saying. All of the sayings would be a given.

What’s Inside

This book fails the Wixx/Byner comprehension test. This book eludes the Ludlow Plot Distribution Requirement Phase detection, which sleuths linear progression and character continuity in texts purporting to be fiction, of which only a small number actually are. By a wide margin, this book fails to meet the Coherency Requirement for Machinery Manuals as determined by the Ohio Clarity Foundation. The Reader Memory and Nostalgia Club, from Ohio, scores this book a six out of a possible twenty-five points, yet this book induced 415 false memories or recollections from the members of this club, who were prone to insert events from their own childhood into the plot of this book. This book required seven Simplification Batch Processes on the Language Cleaner Machine in order to render a legally binding one-hundred-word summary of its contents for the Annual Brochure of All Texts. The resulting one-hundred-word summary of this book proved too legally similar to the Declaration of Independence to be included here. The Reading Wizard, a machine that scans and summarizes books to determine their themes and content, determined that this book was “a documentary account of the role of the mouth in the art of deception and failure, with a specific focus on children who have been buried alive.”

Statistical Data and Codes

The word “and” is often used as a secret code. It can be rubbed with the finger. Sometimes the word “and” serves as a distress call between two words or objects, which can often have no relationship without it. The word “heart” means “wind,” unless it follows the word “my,” in which case it can mean “mistake,” in a world where weather functions as the combustible error produced by people, although sometimes the word “heart” indicates the social intermission people use to feel sorry for themselves, when self-pity is medically treated by vocal noises of certain volume (a type of song some bodies produce, called “sympathy”).