Ben Marcus - Notable American Women

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

[Lisa]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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