Ben Marcus - Notable American Women

Jane Dark and Bob worked together, providing spots and corrections, performing stand-in maneuvers, shadow demonstrations, silently critiquing their sluggish young Silentists, who often failed to stand freely and had to be propped in place or strung up in harnesses. The stillness rehearsals of the girls had made them unfit for simple movement. They were too good at doing nothing, and now their bodies were soft and puddly, with skin spilled slowly over the air, a bright red mouth bubbling somewhere in it, some dull hair dashed over the top. Often I was summoned to work through cloth, at night, without the girls’ entire knowledge, a spotter providing bump assistance behind me at my hips in case I tired and experienced a send delay.

Sometimes I was permitted to play a tape of favorite conversations to help myself achieve sends. The Lectures of the Presidents, with its hiss and static, its Old English mannerisms and extended weeping, its fitful animal cries in the distance, was soothing enough to deliver me through such moments, allowing me to ignore the oceanic, unbodylike forms of the girls I was paired with, and proceed as usual until I had sent through. With the tape on, and the old clay head in my arms, I could close my eyes and enter that special time when those historic leaders shouted their hearts out to the world, lecturing feverishly until their bodies collapsed and they died. I could imagine myself near the burnished podium while the greatness of their words crackled in the air above me. My picture of that time was so vivid that if I held my breath and strained, I could even see all of the helmeted children standing obediently in the audience, holding their slender candles that drooped under their hot breath, their faces awestruck with the words of their leaders. Such moments beckoned even the most elusive of sends from my person, and I could host several visitors in a single afternoon. But the tapes grew warped with use, and since Bob required a vowel enhancer and a consonant muffler on the tape player to keep our atmosphere silent, soon it was merely a slow, droning hum I heard from the speakers, no different than someone’s father might make if he was bound and gagged beneath the bed, crying for help in his breathy, underwater way.

By this time, Mother was fully quiet and roved mainly at night on a motion sled pulled along by a team of girls. She required the convenience of various locations to accomplish the last of her silencing, but she could not spare physical movement from her ever-diminishing motion quota to get anywhere, thus her need for the girls and the sled, which took a great deal of engineering work on the part of Bob Riddle to operate quietly. He fitted the joineries of the sled with a soft and durable Hushing Bread that muffled the squeaks of the gears, moistening the shrill squeal of the runners on our cement floor. The sled disgorged a share of fine crumbs in its wake that were swept by a Silentist in my mother’s retinue. She wore the crumbs in short sacks around her hips and they were later recycled with a new batch of bread, a secondary set of loaves that had yet greater silencing powers. If Mother lumbered at all in the mornings, she was crackery in appearance and fully breakable. She seemed to be stalking an animal in slow, instructional frames of action, and could not help but mock the simplest of motion technologies, like walking, which she performed more sarcastically than anyone I’ve ever seen.

Straitjackets lined the halls. Many of the girls, deemed barren or sufficiently advanced in their practice, had entered the final stages of their promise of stillness. They would no longer be submitted to intercourse. Their days obtaining sends had ended. They were ready to take a paralysis on our property and sign their promises against motion. Stillness rehearsals took place in the sheds along the water by the fainting tank. A bright red bolt shot across the door indicated a stillness procedure in session. Girls applied the straitjackets: full-bodied canvas buntings equipped with a rip cord leading up to their mouths. When they approached a self-induced full stillness, usually after three days, they yanked the cords with their teeth, and their bodies were released in a heap on the dirt floor. It took them a week to move fluidly again, even with the assistance of a masseuse, and their faces were long and dry with pale brown welts, as if their elective paralysis had set off a decay in their skin. After a stillness rehearsal, the girls cautiously rehydrated with quiet water and examined the film footage of their mistakes, how they flinched and fidgeted, what broke them back into motion.

By late March I lost the potent fire that caused my error to wooden. A small, strong girl came to my room, eyed me fiercely, then sat over my legs, but I had nothing but smush for her. I had given them all so many sends, but it didn’t seem to matter in my current condition. After waiting for me to finish fumbling with it, she laughed silently in my face, pulled up her pants, and strode from the room. My error rested cold and wet on my belly.

Dark peered in afterward and queried me. She wore a burlap glove and ran some tests, her body stiff and formal as she busied about the copulation room. “Cough,” she said. “Hold your breath.” She meant for me to do both at once, and I tried, despite the pain it caused my back, the sense that my bowels might release. With my breath held, I managed only the driest rasp in my chest, made even harder with the grip Dark held on my exposed bottom. “You’re not trying,” she said, tightening her hand, pressing her other palm over my mouth. I summoned a cough again, higher-pitched, my face sealed up from air, and something gave way in my back, a scurrying that was sweet for just a moment before darkening under my skin, stiffness creeping over my torso as if it had been injected there.

Dark’s hand gave up my bottom and she stood, ignoring my grimace. My error was cold as a worm. She moved to the window and bent into a deep maneuver that involved a pretense of a search for something on her own person. Her arms were hard to follow. She patted at herself while lunging, creating a complication of limbs I could not decode or even watch without feeling nauseous. The shadow she made on the wall looked like a house, slowly dismantling. It seemed to have very little to do with her body — the lines were too delicate and numerous, the shadow too intricate, but it moved exactly as her limbs did, swelling and shrinking as she changed her position in front of the window. With so many sacks of water in the room, I guessed she was creating some special sauce for me, gesturing intricately in front of it, seeking a witness water of an entirely different design. But I was not thirsty. I had drunk enough water. There had to be a period when people could ignore water for a time and let themselves run dry. I shrank further and rolled off the bed to get dressed.

At first I wanted to think that the cold weather had put my blood on slow, since I was shriveled and blue in my skin, too tired even to monitor what kinds of water they gave me at night. But later that day Dark returned with a heater that she placed beneath my father’s bed until I was inflamed and sweaty, engorged with blood everywhere but at my cold hips. It did not help. I wrestled with an error that felt like nothing more than a finger without its bone.

Mother sprayed a fine mist of behavior water at me that night. She sat listlessly in her sled and seemed barely capable of squeezing the bulb of the atomizer. Much of the water blew back over her shrunken, unmuscled body, and she shivered as it settled on her. She fumbled with the bulb, her mouth wet and slack and colorless. The water was an extraction of pure copulation-witnessing liquid, and it had a fine, clear glimmer, like very thin honey. I soaked in it, as instructed, and sipped down several jars more, but my error simply retreated further and failed to respond. With a clipped series of gasping breaths, my mother signaled to the girls, who quietly pulled her from the room in her sled. She left no notes for me.