Ben Marcus - Notable American Women

I stepped in and tried to navigate toward the back. There was hardly room to walk. With my dangling hand, I accidentally touched against some of them. Their bodies were cold and rigid. Their skin had the same clammy density as my old clay head. None of them flinched at the contact. No coughs or groans or shuffled positions. I was possibly one of the temptations they had trained for, a man in their midst, an opposer to challenge their stillness and tempt them back into motion. They were good. I felt thoroughly ignored. The room refused to come alive.

I had read the report on the atmospheres in the shed. As women motioned down, their exhalations thinned out and they needed less oxygen. The air in the shed would go unused, thickening around their bodies. It would be a paralysis air. A straitjacketing air. It could be a bottled stillness. Injected into canisters to quickly rid a room of its motion.

The more of it I breathed, the slower I moved. If it had a taste, I could never describe it, but it made all other air I had ever breathed seem weak, an air that did nothing for a person but dry out his insides, make his whole head brittle and cold, lather him with age. I felt myself filling with a kind of sweet sand that would fill my gaps, coating the hollows inside me until I was solid and heavy and entirely finished as a person.

I am generally no strong advocate of breathing. I do not appreciate the labor behind it, the gruesome inflation of the chest, how it fattens a man’s face and advertises his hunger. Something as necessary and regular as breathing should not require such shameful heaving, such greedy shapes of the mouth. There is no civil, polite way to do it without embarrassing oneself. I prefer to hold my breath when I can, to feel warmth spread through my face as my emotional fire stifles inside me without any air to feed it. As much as one inhales even the best of mountain air, the supposedly healthy, rich oxygen of the countryside, every breath produces a small disappointment, fails to soothe one’s inner body.

I pushed deeper into the room. It was so quiet I could not hear myself move. In the far corner was a small area free of women, equipped with a blanket and a low ledge of water vials, a case that looked like a behavior kit, and several swatches of rough-textured fabric. A small framed photo of Jane Dark as a teenager was nailed to the wall — a little girl in braids performing a dance for the camera — positioned for a devotee to gaze at as she sought her private paralysis. There was a technology to the area, a sense of expert outfitting, suggesting that if anyone would ever succeed at stillness — even a man who had been told that the project was off-limits to him — he might do it here, in this advanced setting, with perfect conditions.

I took my position on the carpet, lowering down among the women. I wrapped the blanket over my shoulders and braced myself with wedges of carpet. My legs felt wrong beneath me, stiff and aching. I tried to sit upright, but the muscles high in my back burned in such a posture. I scooted into the corner, which held me better, and pulled the blanket over my face, until the wool heated against my mouth and I was breathing into its scratchy surface, fully covered, hidden in the back of the shed.

I waited for the great merit of stillness to hit me, the benefit of my motion camouflage. Much of the literature of stillness posted on the bulletin board was coded just out of my range, either vowelized or rendered in a foreign tongue, too difficult to decipher. To look at it always left me disoriented and tired, knowing less than when I started. I wasn’t sure if stillness should make me feel more or less. Huge feelings that racked the body and could never be reported to the outside world other than by a seizure of weeping and wailing; or a clean, quiet heart that shot jets of forgetfulness through the blood, antidotes to complaints, leaving a calm minus in its place.

I waited there under the shroud of blanket, breathing all over myself.

That is all I remember.

I was discovered the next morning by the motion warden. I presume that’s who she was. She sprayed men with a terrible device. It lured them into motion, dosed their bodies with frenzy. She kept the shed free of false students, policing the women for weakness in their practices. I do not know how she found me, unless my smell was a trigger, unless they knew I had escaped the house, unless she had seen me enter the shed and was waiting for the precise moment to spray such crazy motion onto me.

I had seen this warden before, training on the compound, but she had never come for a send. We had not coupled. Probably she had failed at silence and was not selected for mating. Too noisy in the mouth. Banging around through her life. She took her afternoons in the exercise yard, doing face work mostly. Usually she stayed low to the ground, showing a great strength when operating from a crouch. A body not suited to silence. Too powerful to stay quiet. Sometimes she took part in evening helmet burnings, when an edition of silence helmets had expired.

The warden crouched and applied her prod to my legs, a charge so hot and deep that I thought I had wet myself. Her dog hissed at me like a cat, a raggy thing with terrible breath, jumping around me and blasting its awful air into my face.

The sudden daylight in the shed burned my skin. I could not detect that any time at all had passed since I had sat down to try my stillness. It seemed to have been a single moment, but when I attempted to fend off the dog, and could not move, I guessed that the night must have passed, and possibly more time than that, because my limbs felt cemented onto me, my skin a quicksand that could drown me. The stillness I had gained did not want to surrender me, even as the warden’s ministrations increased, pumping a heat into me that left me twitching around on the floor, fat and warm in the hands.

Much disturbance commenced at that time in the shed. Once the women abandoned their poses, a full vigilante system was launched, and I came under their methodical, slow siege, more threatening because of how leisurely they approached me. They fell and writhed in the dust as they shouted their all-vowel invective, chanting high-pitched songs full of scolding, angry intonations. The women looked very much at sea, reaching up to me as if I might save them from drowning. The volume in the room had been raised, possibly with the opening of the door or the sudden movement of so many Silentists. My eyes and ears smarted with the brittle sounds, even those my body made as it rubbed against itself, and I felt for the first time the allergic reaction sound could produce after so much silence. It was a sound I could not digest, and my body convulsed to reject it, but it smothered over me in too great a wash. I felt a rash coming up under my skin like a suit of sand.

An alarm rang somewhere. I found a lane free of bodies and took it, forearming past the warden and into the women who had sprung from their straitjackets to grab at me. I was on my feet and powerful and not long for that shed. I muscled myself roughly through the crowd. They were easy to disperse, their bodies hollow and dry. It was like pushing through stalks of wheat. I was afraid they would break when I touched them. They cried out sharp, high notes as they toppled, quivering quickly on the ground, their hands grazing at my legs with no force at all.

Soon I had cleared the last of the women and found the door. Only the sky was above me, the shed a wooden mistake to my rear, a shrill vowel invective still pulsing in the air like the sound of a distant celebration. I ran brokenly, wrongly, until I only heard a faint hissing behind me, as delicate as water, a hissing sound that in the end was just my own legs, pumping hard and fast through the grass, taking me away from there.