Ben Marcus - Notable American Women

Request: Can your team, or what’s left of it (these are such quiet days in Men Town), not devise a limbering station for Ben to visit each day before breakfast, on such days when you are his Learning Host? For my part, I would be willing to surrender my commitment to Dark’s Ninety Motions™ as the ideal actions for a body. I realize that Ben is a boy, though I take issue with your definition of this word, and I defer now to any movement at all you might choose for your last sessions with him, so long as that movement does not confiscate him in a Final Exit.

You’re wondering now whether this note to you is itself only an articulate set of complaints, a description of a crisis, lacking in target behaviors, solutions, or rectification approaches. You’re also wondering — let me keep guessing — why I would write to you at all, given my “complete control of Ben” (your words), my “mastery over the launch” (your words), my profound disregard for your strategies and designs for the person-building program initiated with respect to Ben, though the phrase “strategies and designs” rather overstates the coherency of your thinking on this project. Why include you or ask for your help, and in the same breath ridicule you and threaten your life? One answer: Such a contradiction is mysterious. I don’t seem like I should need your help, yet I am asking for it. Possibly I mean to put you off guard, or to give you hope. Or I am just as selfish as you’d like to believe, and I need your exclusive wisdom regarding Ben, no matter how much I might publicly disavow your role with him. I seek your counsel in private, then ridicule you in public. This interpretation flatters your pride, and I certainly don’t mind if you entertain it, however deeply wrong it actually is. (It is in my interest for you to be wrong about me. The less you understand, the more attention you will pay.)

One theory:

Mastering a launch, as every parent tries to do, also requires ceding control, hard as this is, portioning tasks to deputy figures, however weak these assistants might be, designating partial or temporary authority to Field Decoys (you) who might influence the trajectory of the subject (Ben) in small but significant ways, who are poised in small but significant ways to supplement the far more complicated work of the launch master herself, a person, in this case, who must cover such a wide range of problems and challenges that her actual hands-on work with the subject must often be farmed out to helpers with a smaller horizon of concerns, who can then report back to her and describe the tactile sensations of handling her child, interacting with him, witnessing the behavior he produces throughout the day, which is information she still requires to perfect her work, though, because she has already touched her child, and has no time or patience for repetition, she only requires reminders and updates that can easily be delivered by her staff. Much of her contact with her actual boy can be verbal, secondary. A launch master is concerned to be not just a mother but also a behavior creator, a consultant, and ultimately a specialist in the horizon, an expert in the distance, which is the final problem of the young person in America. She sculpts his ending while he has barely begun. She scouts so far ahead that sometimes her child cannot even see her. Forget about tethers and leashes and kiddy cords; a launch master takes full advantage of the so-called generation gap. She swings wide. The furthest distance between two points is a mother. Although she may appear as a speck in the distance, she is in reality huge and looming. She is the expanse, not the point. This distinction will be meaningless to you, which only illustrates how out of your league you are.

We have carpentry uses for you. We have construction uses for you. There are projects in the physical plant that could use your help. Read on if you are concerned to participate in the world we are building for Ben.

What I suggest first is the introduction of windows into Ben’s room in Man House, a ventilation system that will not leave him so flushed and lightheaded; and possibly, at least for one learning season, a modest tank-and-mask affair that he might harness over his helmet just to get him back on his feet without choking and fainting as often.

If you agree to aid us, you have my permission to travel to the women’s side of the compound for a parts consultation at the shed, though I don’t mean to imply that you lack the facilities to produce a streamlined child’s mask yourself. Only know that I think our staff, if you have any people left who still answer to you, can collaborate on this dilemma without too much rupture, particularly if the treaty is observed.

If you do make your way over here, I ask that you observe the motion laws, travel during daylight, and resist carrying weapons or bringing your so-called assistants. If Larry emerges, you can trust that he will be fired upon until he ceases his advance. Then his body will be seized. All captures will be filmed, and the films will be projected on the barn as a caution. Let’s not have any more trouble. I’m sure you’ve seen the trucks behind the house, gouging into North Yard, and the Quiet Sisters at work digging the hole, and I’m further sure I don’t need to tell you that this hole, like certain holes, called “graves,” built to house the dead, can and will serve many interesting purposes, including the possible containment of figures failing to yield to former agreements.

That was certainly a mouthful of a sentence. You might favor yourself by reading it again for clues.

Or in plain speech: Watch yourself.

Let me now describe a change in my beliefs, not interesting in its own right, but certainly bound to affect the so-called future moments of Ben, the only real topic to bind us at this late moment in your conscious life.

While I once agreed that limiting Ben’s use of natural elements — rationing his light, air, and water, concealing his food, ironizing or curtailing the affection we dispensed (employing such techniques as the hug that just misses, the air kiss, the parent mannequins, the empty house in the morning, the growling sound track piped into his room at night, the wolf experience, the cruel girl in the field) — would theoretically create a hungrier, sharper, strong lad — better suited to become the kind of person we once agreed we would like to launch, a boy who only relied on natural resources as a last resort, in case a sound-out or blackout or food minus really did seize the current moment, or in case the current moment itself contracted and went airless and commenced to suffocate those persons living in it (as you predicted every day over breakfast, when words of doom were apparently once thought to render a young family dependent on the man who spoke them) — my team and I are discovering that the once-intriguing deprivations might now be too severe for Plan Ben, tiring the actual Ben’s little body beyond use, caving in his chest, withering his legs. In short, we are actually only teaching him exhaustion, fatigue, despair, and he is a very quick study, for he is becoming almost like some figure from literature: short of breath, despondent, frail, contrived.

A “body bellows,” as you call it, is undoubtedly an important way to teach a man to earn his own life, something I still favor, theoretically. But I have a question: When do these devices exceed Ben’s Opponent Quota, and how many enemies to his natural sustenance can he rightfully engage before he loses the battle to become an upright man during the daytime? Are parents not enemies enough? In other words: Is our family project still interesting if Ben dies beneath a burden of homemade equipment? Does a child-rearing strategy effectively terminate when the child does? Is it possible that you are scheming to induce an exit in your child because you sense one impending for yourself, thus you have straitjacketed him with a bellows set on “high” and he is gently commencing to expire? And, if so, would that not be a somewhat derivative approach to the art of the launch? Is it not ultimately dull to abort your own launch? Are you so boring that you would try to kill Ben? Have you eschewed excellence simply because your own project as a man has failed?