Ben Marcus - Notable American Women

The Secondary Equipment

The Salt Necklace, padded clothing, a Sleep Leash, a hood, and a helmet are all important accessories to the American Female Fainting Enterprise. A helmet should be worn in general when reading, writing, thinking, or sleeping.

The Salt Necklace enables default self-revival if a Blackout Manager becomes injured or defects to another emotion-removal group during a fainting session. Similar to a string of pearls, the necklace threads together calcified balls of salt, which ride the neck like a choker and sting a woman awake if she passes out too soon.

A Sleep Leash tethers the body to prevent long-distance ejections from the Fainting Chair (home runs). The body is kited to an anchor and snaps back to earth if the launch velocity exceeds the crash recovery quotient, a distance beyond which the body will not survive when it lands.

The padded clothing and helmet allow for hard landings without disrupting the depth of the blackout. Although broken bones can be useful in an emotion-removal program, as demonstrated in the discussion on boneless pantomime, the pain event here is too likely to cause feelings such as grief, fright, and alarm, rather than placate or remove them, which is the goal. The head, in turn, is simply too important at this time to be smashed open.

A hood is merely decorative in the fainting program, although it nicely conceals the facial contortions of a fainted woman who is struggling against revival. A woman in a hood can make startling gains in this world and elsewhere.

Underwater Fainting

This last-ditch method of fainting is dangerous to attempt alone. At the Marcus Behavior Suppression and Elimination Site, the Fainting Chair was positioned to eject my oxygen-deprived body into the learning-water tank, so my faint occurred in midair and I splashed down in full blackout. The divers on hand fished me out only when my lungs had filled with water, then resuscitated me with a basic bellows maneuver, followed by a salted sock stretched over my head. This is a method requiring teamwork and devotion, yet it adequately flushed the more stubborn strains of envy that often visited my person during childhood, including the envy I felt for myself at happier times. Submerged fainting (wet sleep) should also be undertaken if a so-called loved one dies or leaves without notice, yet women should be alerted that the recovery from this sort of grief is so quick and efficient that the deceased or departed person is sometimes entirely forgotten, leaving merely an empty feeling of contentment where a person once stood. A woman might choose to keep a Person Log in this case, to objectively remind her of the persons who supposedly once mattered to her life.

1895

CHEMIST EMILY SESSLER, forty-six, heads the first Science Week drive to aid the Vertical Horizon Project, an attempt to extend the typical citizen’s field of vision. Sessler’s scheme, initially opposed only by preservationists, is to craft a fire that will link the American coasts, the largest fire ever conceived, to burn in a pattern precisely designed to create tunnels of brightness deep into the sky. Sessler maintains that brightening the sky with a systematically designed fire will produce a “Horizon Crane” to yank back the barrier of the horizon, altering religious and scientific notions of the role of the Person in the atmosphere. State governments oppose the science fire, partly because Sessler insists on providing her own technicians to manage the blaze. Her technicians radically lobby for the approval of the fire, and ultimately foil their chances, by setting test flames in the perimeter surrounding Atlanta, creating a vortex of heat-generated darkness in the city itself, causing not only a blackout but a “sound-out.” Neighborhoods of Atlanta will be resistant to sound for years afterward, and a localized heat deafness emerges in the South, apparently caused by unnatural exposure to fire.

1935

Burke is born at Akron. Within months, he will use an invented language based on radio static and stuffed-mouth lamentations to control his father and mother like puppets, forcing them to copulate in public and weep openly. The parents will request of the Children’s Police that the young Burke’s gifts be carefully controlled, but it is suspected that even this utterance of theirs is generated by Burke himself, who sees his parents’ bodies as “weapons to be used against the town, satellite forms acting on behalf of my body.” Burke’s youthful demonstrations will be the first American indication that language, dispensed precisely, can regulate the behavior in a territory. It is eventually suspected that a portion of the town of Akron has been “hushed” by the careful recitation of sentences at the perimeter between Ohio and the world. Although the boy is eventually fitted by authorities in a tight, clear sock, even his restricted pantomimes create a disturbing loss of control in the animals and children in his vicinity.

1954

The American Television Industry attempts to market a Women’s Television Set. The unit resembles their standard device, but is designed to receive a special-frequency broadcast from the Women’s Storm Needle at Atlanta, where experiments are being conducted in images and sound that only women can perceive (also known as the Female Jesus Frequency). The set receives little attention and will fall into immediate disuse by the few customers it gains, but the Storm Needle continues to transmit an all-vowel female music for five years. This period will prove to be the most crucial in the Silentist movement, allowing Jane Dark and her followers to travel the countryside undetected, camouflaged by the women’s tones masking the Midwestern landscape, curling over the territory as, arguably, the lowest and thickest wind ever felt in America.

1955

James Water is cultivated and distributed by the Women’s Medical Group. Designed by physician Valerie James, the tonic, comprised of exact water, ostensibly cancels unwanted emotions, as James surmises (prophetically) that feelings merely express an absence or surplus of water in the body, correctable through water fasts or strategies of soaking the body or hands in prepared water. A key premise of her theory is that water is the fundamental, and only reliable, recording agent of behavior. Water is thought to “see” and memorize the actions of persons. By filtering water through patients undergoing fits of various emotions, James creates supposed behavior water of these feelings that can be administered as medicine or antidote; a catalog of fluids that comprises a person’s entire repertoire of behavior. James goes on to write about the centrality of water in considering the possibilities of the person in America (see The New Water ), but warns of its danger, arguing that the next major war will be fought with water alone and that women should carry personalized water for protection, and consider water the only reliable diary, speaking their secrets privately into rivers, lakes, ponds.

1958

The Susan House, an experimental school for girls, has its beginnings in an all-girls’ retreat conducted simultaneously one August evening in seven American towns. The focus of the retreats, initially, is to bury a clay head of Jesus, then meditate over the grave about the true requirements of the name of Susan, a technique of divination dating back to the Perkins Noise, when Perkins killed himself by vigorously repeating his own name, but not before achieving “immense information on the human enterprise.” The Susan House school, initially conceived as a training ground for girls named Susan and no one else, gives rise to several specialty name-centered educational institutions and drives a new and terribly divisive political wedge into the population. Although many parents change the names of their children to Susan, only persons born into the name will be considered for enrollment (see The Unwritten Books of Susan ).