Ben Marcus - Notable American Women

She dragged the mannequin up on her lap and began a series of hugging gestures against it. She cradled the head in her arms. She kissed its cheeks. The doll was limp as she held it, but she smothered it all over with nuzzlings. She tried to tickle it. She pressed its head into her bosom. Her face was plastered in a smile, stretched so wide it could have been a grimace of pain. She gazed up at the stars, posing her face in various masks of contentment. My mother could certainly look pleasant. She wanted me to see this. There was a lesson here somewhere. The two of them cuddled there in a picture of affection as her lamp burned on and the night grew later.

I watched her loving the doll. She did it well. She had an accurate and complex style of affection. I could easily believe she was feeling love for it. I sat perfectly still in the warmth from the two of them. A photograph of this scene would have convinced anyone. It would have been proof that I had been held, doted on, cuddled, nuzzled, kept warm, and kissed and kissed and kissed. I would like to have copies of such photographs. They would prove interesting and useful for later study. For later regard. It would be good to have evidence of the endearments my mother and I have exchanged.

A month later my sends had yielded zero gifts, an entire winter of wasted mating. My sends were no more than vapor, leaks down other people’s legs. In the end, I had sent nowhere. There would be no purebred Silentists, no girls of the new water, no prodigies of stillness born without a bias toward motion, an allergy to sound. No children at the compound at all.

I walked down on the lawn and saw those remaining Silentists, who had yet to undertake their promise of stillness, standing in a circle around the burning conception harness.

Their communication was reduced to a rough hand grammar that looked like a stylized midwestern fighting style. It was performed without flinching, yet consisted of considerable gestures of rearing back, hands ferreted up, retracted punches, ducking and weaving heads. These were pre-stillness women, purging their last spastic actions.

Here they all were, facing one another, showing much gesture of warfare as the harness burned. Some made as if they were squeezing a small animal in their fingers, tearing it apart. Their heads were placid while their hands contorted, their faces erased of expression. At certain intervals in the gesturing, their mouths pitched down jets of wind into their hands and they appeared to be warming themselves like travelers around a fire. All the staff was on hand, though I did not see Mr. Riddle, the silencing man. A quick check behind me revealed Larry’s dim form at work in the field as always, barking hard at the hole that held my father.

Mother and Jane Dark took turns kneeling behind the girls to spot their gestures: guide their hands and correct their motion, apply paddles to their limbs, a short stick to the small of the back, fine jets of water onto the face.

The door to the stillness shed was open and a great noise of hosing could be heard within, the sound of fast water striking something soft and loose, like skin. Many of the women carried packs.

I had not known them to gather at once in this way, to put their bodies in view, to be such plain targets in the daytime. Something busy was afoot, but as I stepped among them their gestures quickly subsided, my motion poisoning the air and killing their own. The women powered down as if my presence had tripped a plug on their bodies, and soon no one was moving but me. It was a field of statues, though their hair still frittered in the low morning wind, and a new scent swirled about the area, the smell of paralysis.

One of the frozen women was my mother. Her body, such as it barely was, had curled around a small cardboard box. She was just another Silentist now, who could not abide being seen, who would not move if a man was watching. Her face relaxed as I approached her. It was spongy and showed no recognition. She was styling herself for me to see her. It seemed to take great effort, but her mouth moved in purses and puckers, a face not practiced at speech seizing now under its strains. She was making the musclings of language, but there was no sound. It looked as though she would eat the space between us. If this was what it took for my mother to talk, to make a piece of loud wind that I might use — in order to know her, or myself, or my purpose — I did not care to see it. I sat with her there until her face fell calm and she was no more than a mannequin of my mother. True to life, perhaps, and accurately rendered, yet wooden to the core. The work of a carpenter, at the most. The work of a person-builder. A very certain kind of no one. A body you could sit next to all afternoon and, with the right kind of concentration, start to forget.

Inside the box, which slipped easily from my mother’s hands, sat a helmet as soft and colorless as a man’s deflated face. Its perfect oval shape was what I had always hoped my head might look like. I had not realized a helmet could be as clear as water, could make my face feel so small and safe — a tiny, plain face that would seem far away to anyone who looked at it. A helmet to frame me into the distance, so I might look as though I had yet to arrive.

A note in my mother’s hand was taped to its slightly hairy top, where the skin was pink and sticky. “Put this on,” the note said. “You’re going to need it. We will not see you again.” I could not look at any of the Silentists. I knew it would shame them to be seen. I did not want to damage anyone’s chances, to cause more feelings than I needed to. With a lowered gaze, I picked up the helmet, which proved heavy and sourly scented of meat, strapped it on, and rose slowly to my feet. My head felt older and more familiar, as if something had been missing from it before.

I had vials of water in my bag and many small sacks of seeds, and I began slowly to make a distance from the house, walking delicately under my own head, listening for my thoughts, waiting for the sound of them to blast back on.

Looking back, I saw the closed door of the stillness shed, the red bolt blazing firmly in place. The women were gone. A motion-free area had been achieved. It took me turning my back, and then they were gone. The shed was full. My own head was finally a finished part of my body. I would not need to worry about it again. The moment called for a dash of new water to be donated, and I spilled it out on the dirt at my feet, where it did not seep in, where it merely puddled on the soil, shimmering a bit in the late-afternoon sun until I stepped on it firmly, squarely, pushing it as deeply as I could into the earth.

I noted the Punisher’s position on the horizon. He could have been a fake man, a statue, a mannequin. Too far away for me to tell. Men that far away are as good as dead. It was best that the punishment was happening behind me. Fathers are always punished in the distance. He did not move and nothing near him did either, suggesting his entire location was constructed of color and light alone, with not one single beating heart in it, no real skin, nothing that could actually die. It would not be a place for someone such as myself.

I turned my back on him and walked hard and straight toward the deepest Ohio. My house gained size behind me as I retreated, staining the ground in a clear, thick shadow at my feet, the distant horizon ahead of me breaking into smaller and softer pieces as I approached it. There was nothing to do with my hands then but hold them up and feel around on my face— touch my mouth, my cheeks, my eyes — and maybe discover what, if anything, on that last day at home, I might actually have been conspiring to feel.

LET IT BE RECOGNIZED, under the witness of the all-prevailing female Thompson, that this legal creed against motion bears the authority of a Female Jesus edict, a life law designated by our Lady Freeze, through which a woman of America might prosecute her stoppage of viewable actions, thus joining forces against all that moves, waging war in the name of stillness and silence, creating of her body a fixed landmark, an example of tranquillity, a frozen zone.