Ben Marcus - Notable American Women

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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