Ben Marcus: Notable American Women

Certainly you would, at the least (if you do not agree that he makes a good candidate for a respectably necessary suicide), have to then agree that he cuts a poor form — he is stooped and bald and sad, his gait is a slouching apology against motion, his pockets are empty, the poor fellow has lost his mother, and I would guess that no pretty creature has handled his penis in months. His body is not exactly the makings of a hero, and I warrant it emits much disagreeable waste.

Naturally, a son who is crippled or ill, weak and sad, or palsied with fear at the thought of life without his father— who may or may not have been brought to ground by a group that calls itself the Silentists — incites a degree of sympathy in the father. The father remembers those early moments of the Marcus life project, when Benjamin was just a small measure of flesh called a child — the size of his father’s hand, but in no way as interesting to look at — when he labored on palms and knees to ascend the ever-dashing body of his father, who moved through the fields with supremacy. At the time, Benjamin enjoyed seeking information within the father’s imposing beard, or his soundproof wig, which certainly must have appeared as a nest of treasures, within which something knowable might be discovered. He sought carriage now and again in a swing set built and anchored to the turf by the father, who stood behind the swing to ensure that it traversed an agreeable arc, containing the disastrous body of the son. Often the father strapped Ben into his seat and sent him “Around the World,” over the top bar of the swing, and over again, until Ben was panting fast and crazy in the eyes, a bit wobbly on his feet after he climbed back down to earth, but always sweetly smiling, trusting the man who ruled him even when the sensations of that rulership were not entirely agreeable or were beyond the boy’s comprehension.

The young Ben was a collector: flowers, buttons, stones, and any scrap of equipment that littered the compound. Everything small that he could remove from the world and bring to his parents’ attention. He carried his stuff in wagons and could thrill himself with the littlest achievements, often fancying himself a key figure in the important job of shuttling junk from here to there. It was a sobering but necessary task each time to remind the little fellow that he had not invented these special things — the buttons and stones and sticks, the disposable hearing cups and seared swatches of cotton — that all the world’s beauty existed before him, and did not require him for survival. He was just a person, and everything he thought and did had already been thought and done. Perhaps he should seek to discover something that wasn’t so obvious and abundant in nature, it was suggested. To say something new, to do something startling. That he has not proved himself capable of even a single original act, discovery, or statement is nearly as damning as his frequent weeping and his neurotically induced deafness.

And while my son’s illness, if such it is — the apparent onset of “motion fear” and his supposed deafness to certain words, as spoken by certain people — provides a partial excuse for his failure to come forth as a creature of distinction, a man who might soldier over every difficulty to slaughter his life opponents with great ferocity, either with weapons or through the sheer verbal power that runs deeply in his family (on his father’s side), he is, in fact, short of any kind of battle plan, lacks the coordination to even flee from a predator, and is weakly stocked with reproductive fire, given his inability to father very many effective persons during his enforced copulations with the Silent Mothers.

Let it not be said that this father is without an animal response to the son, in which warmth of the old-fashioned kind flows in the chest and a certain pity is forthcoming no matter what feeble gestures of life the Ben Marcus system manages to perform, even if the boy were to attempt to physically beat the father, a type of aggression the father is completely prepared for, by the way, no matter how dark it is in here, or how much advantage a creature has who can see his own goddamned hands. The father would beat down the son’s attack, naturally, wound him just enough to reaffirm the boy’s all-encompassing weakness and widespread failure, and then hold his injured body and attempt a soothing litany of comfort words. I am sure it is what he wants, and it is not beyond me to talk soft. I can make a creature weep and will do it if I see the need, if it leads to a situation I might require within my larger strategy. I have said things to this boy that, if heard by an outsider, would fairly indicate a degree of affection being transmitted. It could easily be understood as love: “There there, little Ben.” “Egghead.” “Bald Beauty.” “Sugar Cheeks.” “It’s okay, Sweetbread.” “Just breathe.” “Tiny Shark.” “Little Tiny Shark.” “Skin Fish.” All little nicknames that produce an unreasonable amount of pleasure in his person, cause him to curl up and grin and gaze at the sky.

Oh no, I admit it, the father is truly sympathetic to weakness, frailty, and lost hope in a son, should it be exhibited, particularly when the son has been regularly tormented in the worst way by an animal, indeed brought to submission by a dog, and used for unbearable purposes by a group proposing an end to all motion. Allowances are made for every kind of error. Nor is it that a father wishes to make a case, either legal or emotional, against his son (which is not to say that a good case could not be made, because it certainly could), or wishes that his son would stay his hand at attempting to narrate events he cannot possibly grasp, whether or not they happened to him, or concepts that, when presented without the appropriate theory and context, such as the Weather Museum, for Christ’s sake, the Clay Head of Jesus, and the Women’s Frequency of Sound, appear ridiculous and untrue, and will be believed by no one, dumb ass. A father is pleased anytime a son can regulate his busily superficial mind for the time required to command a book’s worth of language to the page. Such a feat is particularly notable, given the aforementioned mental challenges of the son, when it can barely be expected that the son remember to bring potatoes to the underground area where his father waits to be fed. When his only task is to bring a potato to his goddamned father, or to let new air into his father’s area, where the old air has already been used, because there is a living man down here! or to walk his father up above when his father has gone months, motherfucker, without seeing a house, a stick, a bird, a window, a road, the key objects of our time, when his father has no new air to clean his eyes and rid his skin of the language fluid poured in by the man with the tube, who speaks his Sentences of Menace, trying to burst the father’s body with words. Let a man wash himself, and stride in the open air, for fuck’s sake! Given his systematic incompetence and neglect of the one person he was born to love, how can a single word from Ben Marcus’s rotten, filthy heart be trusted?

Granted, I love my son dearly. He has been a sweet boy at times (I can picture his long head sailing through the air like a ball), and rather touching to observe, despite his failures. He is cute, with his wet red mouth, and it would no doubt be interesting to dress him in a costume to entertain the members of a picnic, to inflate balloons and dazzle the children, perhaps, or to pretend he was a horse or some other simpler creature of this world.

I love what keeps me alive, and my son is an extension of my body, a prosthesis, you understand, that I can dispatch on my behalf to prowl my former house, to collect objects, or witness conditions that might prove to be a revelation upon examination. A father must continually be in a state of study, should he not? I care for this fellow because he is an apparatus that can investigate areas my own local body can no longer achieve. In that sense, my son is the part of myself that still operates at large. And although physical harm to his body does not technically hurt me, if his body were prevented from its task in the greater world, if he were finally captured by the authorities (that is, if personal failure and disappointment were policed and punished by law), my own body would eventually suffer because its special flesh satellite had been severed. There is also a small chance that I might starve without him.