Ben Marcus - Notable American Women

Mother did not try to search for me, though I knew she would require an encounter. She might attempt to administer decoy praise, to confuse me, or present affection mimes to ironize my behavior. A silent party might be thrown in my honor, with clear cake and children’s coffee. Women hissing at me, swatting the air, charading their pleasure. Possibly a deep behavior massage was forthcoming, strong hands kneading my body with a lesson. There would be a return to some primary learning water in my daily dosing. I might receive a wind-box application, or she might require me to sit in front of the behavior television. Unless, that is, consequences themselves had been phased out of the wide-scale behavior reduction at work on the compound, in which case my trespass in the stillness shed would go unremarked, even on the bulletin board. The event would be silenced. No reports would be issued, my schedule would not change, and the behavior that met me would be as steady as ever. I would be left to devise my own reaction from the encounter, a private analysis to sort out a moral from my breach of the stillness shed, my disregard for trespassing rules I knew well. Or I could choose to disregard it myself, to store the event nowhere, to mime my indifference until my indifference toward the event became real.

I was hidden deep in the yellow field when I saw my mother’s dim form in front of the house. She swayed slightly on her feet and waited for me. I saw no sled, no assistants, no fainting equipment. My mother was operating solo. A person appeared to have collapsed near her feet. I felt so little already that I was too tired to feel less.

I waited until a bluish darkness filtered over the field. It seemed possible that my mother might exhaust herself out there and lose her purpose, forget why she was standing outside, or, at the least, suffer enough fatigue to diminish the strength of her treatment. We could wait each other out, compete toward apathy. See who cared more. Or less.

I killed the afternoon by moving my limbs, massaging the blood back, though even my fingers were stiff. All motion seemed wrong and foreign. My body refused it. The hard air that had settled over me in the shed had left me capable of only the smallest gestures, useless movements that could not gain me food or make me understood to others. If I tried to speak, I could not move. If I moved, I could not speak or breathe. If I stopped thinking, my limbs twitched and the stiffness would subside, with patches of warmth spreading in my thighs. A certain coordination had been compromised. I tried not to think. If an enterprising animal had found me, it could have had its way with me and encountered very little defense at all.

My mother was stationed on the walkway when I finally pulled myself home. I needed water. The evening was too dark for eye contact between us, and she had spent her quota on me days ago. She stood stiffly as I advanced, tilting her head toward me as if she were blind, as if she might hear everything about my approach that she needed to know. I circled her and tried to keep walking toward the house, quiet in my step, but she raised her hand, jerked it up, and held it aloft. A gesture to stop. Her back was to me, but her head was cocked expectantly. There was no use in me going anywhere.

The behavior flash cards were revealed as I sat in the gravel of the walkway, the evening air thin and sharp around us. Mother’s headlamp provided the light. She mounted the cards on the frame and then retreated slightly to assist her presentation with a languorous wind-box application, shifts of the air that deepened my concentration and made my head feel clear and open. I was not concerned about striking anyone. My body still felt too heavy to use.

These cards were new; I had not seen them before. Each one showed a family scene. The characters were rendered in our own likeness: my mother, my father, and me. A fourth character had been blotted out: possibly a dog, possibly a girl. The cards were drawn as precisely as photographs, suggesting the pictures had been copied from life, but the settings behind the characters had not been filled in. Their actions were suspended in gray space.

The first card showed Mother and Father swinging their boy between them, none of them smiling. In the second card, the boy was afloat and alone, possibly assisted aloft. The third card showed a close-up of the boy’s mouth, void of teeth, a red gummy mess. The fourth card was blank, or speckled with dust, or depicting an empty sky. The father’s back was turned in the fifth card. He was alone and walking away. The boy was sprawled against his legs in the sixth; flung toward the legs, probably, or kicked away. Then the father appeared in a series of cards that showed his shadow to be more ample than he was, a shadow that began to consume him, oversized, a swollen cloud. The boy and his mother were drawing the shadow around the father in the set of cards after that, even while the father seemed to protest, his arms raised, his hands curled into fists. The mother and boy were using brushes or pouring cans of dark liquid around him as the father’s body grew smaller and his shadow blackened over him. In one card, the shadow was pouring directly from the boy’s mouth.

We were up to card twenty. My mother used flat hands to stroke the air as she continued her wind-box application. In the next card, the boy received a shock if he tried to enter the father’s shadow. Cards showed him being flung back as if from a force field, sparks roving over his body. He could not pierce it, though he made several running starts, even as he was held on a leash by his mother, who was leaning away with the strain. A blotted figure was already resident inside the shadow, in a wagon pulled by the father. The figure seemed immune to the father’s shadow, the wagon slightly aglow. In the next few cards, the shadow and the father became one blobby item, and the blob began to recede, until the father was a small black point, no wagon in sight, and the boy and his mother were left alone. The boy’s leash formed a tightrope between him and his mother, and small girls walked the length of it, an empty speech bubble hovering over them. The cards closed in on the girls, who were walking along with big smiles. The boy and his mother were too big to be seen clearly in these cards; they were mostly vague shapes in the background. In the next set of cards, the boy searched through a patch of grass for something, poking his fingers into soil, and finally came up with a small wagon, too small to contain anybody, though he tried fitting himself into it. He then tried to pull the wagon, but there were no wheels on it. He showed it to his mother, but she had her head turned.

In the last set of cards, the mother was building what appeared at first to be a house. Her son stood near her but couldn’t help because his hands had been erased. He tried to nudge supplies toward his mother with his head, but she didn’t seem to want his help. He became smaller as the cards progressed, losing length in his arms, and the mother’s construction project grew larger, surrounding her, until it extended naturally from her massive body and began to feature an engine. The boy rested on his back near the exhaust of the engine. He had no arms. The mother was hardly recognizable for the structure that surrounded her: a large, motor-powered house. The last card showed a thin line of colorless fire. No characters were drawn on the card.

My mother dismantled the rack, tucked away the cards, and then stooped to her feet to gather something from the crumple of cloth. The body on the ground was lifeless and too heavy-looking for her to lift as easily as she did, and when I saw its face to be my own, I recognized it as the mannequin that she had built some time ago — a hollowed-out version of me she could demonstrate behavior on. A procedure had been ordered, and she was following Dark’s suggestion. Build a dummy of your boy. Use his own hair for the head. I had hardly seen this mannequin. For some reason, it was mostly kept from me. It was a fair likeness, and it showed me to be in good health. It was interesting to see a copy of myself so slack in the body, so pliant, as if I were watching myself sleep.