Ben Marcus - Notable American Women

Statistics for Patricia: My sister was mostly pliant as Patricia. She willingly posed in several behavior statues for my mother. No resistance to the Brown Hat, which allowed her to converse fluently with several of my mother’s assistants. They spoke a language that sounded like slow laughter.

[Carla]

There are fabrications that go forth under the Carla tag. They are smallish and brown-hued. There is an actual Carla at a school, and it will learn to beat away the fake occasions of its own number. It will see one coming up the road, one little brown Carla, with fingers like American bread and a hairdo cut right out of the afternoon. The real Carla circles the false object and places fire on its living parts. Many times, an American fire contains glittered fragments of a combusted Carla. There are fires in Ohio and girls are leading their dead parts into them. Every morning in every city young women are seen chancing a look back down the road. Sometimes a sluggish fat-skinned fake is sulking back there, waiting to take over and fail in Carla’s place. When the Carla makes comfort with boys under trees and farther out on the landscape, there is an apology to the movement of its hands. It touches a boldly upright kid’s penis and then palms the dust, the soot, the soil, feeling for the tremor of legs approaching.

Statistics for Carla: A name regularly used on my sister. She showed frequent bloating and could not fit into the sleep sock. A Ryman sock was used with much discomfort. Her evening mimes were striking as Carla. Often she could calm the entire household.

[Nancy]

I saw one at a bed. It kneeled; it leaned. There was hair and a body and no such thing as weather, no window broken onto a wall, nor water rushing behind us, or a road to remind me I could leave. Something like this is waiting to happen for everyone. A room somewhere sweetened with a Nancy system. You can approach it and examine its teeth. They are the color of an old house and have chewed their way through something — a trap, a net, a man’s hand. I let my arms operate like they did when I was a little boy. I “held” it. It did not bite; it did not speak. I stumbled. It gestured for me to rest. The Nancy shape cannot be detached from the woman it stands for. It can be released, to drag a bed — from a rope looped over its hips— into the city, putting to sleep the visitors that approach it and speaking to them certain facts, certain secrets as they dream, until they can rise from the sheets and move away from it into the distance, toward an area lacking all Nancy, dull and shoe-colored and simple, an American city with other kinds of “people,” and life beyond restriction.

Statistics for Nancy: No skin was shed after my sister used this name. My father repeatedly scoured her body with the pelt brush, to no avail. The only language she exhibited was to say “Nancy” until she collapsed with fatigue. A highly harmful name. Possibly a harmful word. None of us enjoyed calling her this.

[Julie]

There is probably no real Julie.

[Linda]

From 1984 until the winter of 1987, an absence of significant registered Lindas spurred a glut of naming activity in that category by parents eager to generate unique-seeming figures into the American landscape and thus receive credit for an original product, the Linda. The resulting children are emerging mostly out of Virginia, with a possible leader, or group of leaders, working through Richmond. Examples have been seen in the West — small and shockingly white, with delicate eyes— but they have been in poor health and have not lasted. Weather cuts them down and hides their lives until it is too late, and they die. Sometimes rain is blamed. Sometimes nothing but wind. The adult community — too old to register their names and therefore unable to receive the benefits of official status— has nevertheless been supportive of the surge. The tall and stately Lindas, with plenty of money and a husband, have politely vacated their homes, allowing the new Linda children in for full access to their men, their things, their lives. The older ones enter a sack and wait.

Statistics for Linda: High-level exhaustion during the Linda phase. My sister showed bewilderment and frequently made evasive maneuvers. Quick on her feet and difficult to catch. Often we could not find her. She seemed inclined to play dead. A nonuseful name for her. Highly inaccurate. May have caused permanent damage.

ONE NIGHT WHEN THE AIR was torn up by papery clouds, and the calendar showed no siring appointments for me to meet, I skipped my evening water dosing and slid back the red bolt on the door of the stillness shed.

I did not often skip my water intake. It was not thirst that set in without it, but wrong thoughts in my head that could not be mastered, and a pulse in my chest that fired too fast and stalled my breathing. It was a disruption that could lead to mistakes: memories, for instance, which could lead to other mistakes, like feelings. This was water that put me to sleep: a long, calm stretch of time to keep me blank until morning. The world speeded up without it. The people in it became blurry. The water was like a blanket inside me that I could crash against.

There were no guards outside the shed to monitor access. It was a night of pure Ohio silence. In daylight I could not go near it without encountering an escort. That night I walked upright and crunched through the grass and no one came near me. It was easy to be anywhere. The women were all sleeping.

A dark brown light stained the inside of the shed. A dirty fog. It smelled like something. The structure was once a barn, a simple wooden box, with wide boards smeared in a honey varnish. Every day I watched the women file in, carrying their stillness equipment. Heads down, serious, hushed. Sometimes a thin coil of smoke arose from a perforation in the roof. Otherwise there was nothing to see or hear from the shed. It was muffled in some deep bunting, as quiet a house as there was on the whole compound. If the women exited, they did so discreetly, at odd hours, without sound.

The air inside felt rumpled, as thick as cloth on my face. I moved into it slowly, squinting into the deep brownness. On the floor, sitting in neat rows like students, were more stillness practitioners than I could count, many rows deep, their bodies receding into the darkness at the back of the room. They were flush to the walls, with hardly a lane left for walking. Several bodies lined the near walls, fastened upright with harnesses, as if they were participating in a carnival ride. There was equipment everywhere: rigging, piles of cloth, chalkboards. Many of the women wore straitjackets, though some were covered in makeshift corsets and capes, draped so deeply in cloth that their bodies were not visible at all. It was difficult to see much. I tried to look at their faces, but they were downturned and some were covered in what seemed like gauze. I waited in the doorway, adjusting my eyes, trying to breathe quietly, shallowly, to keep the odd scent out of my mouth. My entrance did not seem to have disturbed them. It was as if I had walked into a room of the dead.

Out of the silence came short blasts of high-pitched breathing, a synchronized hissing that suggested their bodies were connected to some vast engine beneath the floor, firing air through these women as if they were just pipes. Possibly this was a form of unison breathing. Crowds of women breathing in sequence, a political breathing, precisely timed, producing their audible wind, then entering a hard inhale all together, clearing the room of oxygen, stifling anyone not following their calibration. The room felt like a large dry lung.