Ben Marcus: Notable American Women

Pal was carried from room to room that day because Ms. Dark would not let him walk the floors on his own. “A bomb with a heart,” she called him. When his heart stopped, he would go off and there would be a sad time of thunder, with thunder so slow that people would collapse and houses would take great fractures in their sides, with people pouring from the seams, running for their lives. Every time she said “thunder,” she squinted at me, filtering the word toward me with her eyes until I forgot what it meant. She said “thunder” as if it were my name. She said it so much in the way I would imagine my mother saying it, if my mother talked and this were the only word she was allowed to say, a word that would have to stand for everything she felt, that I wanted to run out of the house and dive deep into the learning pond, until I had reached the cold, dark bottom. The girls around her nodded in agreement. I didn’t like how words sounded on her face: frozen bits of her body she was retching up. We had to be very careful, Dark said; we had to keep Pal alive no matter what. His dying would pull the plug on something terrible. She held Pal in front of her, her white shirt blocked by a great spot of black water in the shape of something living. He had legs that were hard and long and made me hungry. I wanted to be held against somebody so that I looked like that: like nothing, like a hole into nowhere, like a piece of sleep. Jane Dark was someone to disappear against. The whole time she carried him, Pal kept his eyes closed, as though a switch had to be flipped for him to wake up and look around. I moved to the stairs and watched, concentrating my whole head at him to see if he would open his eyes, but Pal slept hard against Jane Dark, with a wet mouth. Nothing I could do in that house full of quiet people would wake him up.

I wandered upstairs. All of these old people in my house made it hard for me to breathe. They were too soft. Somebody might break. No one was singing and there were no sandwiches.

In my room, I looked out the window to see where my father might be hiding. A visit from so many people was bound to frighten him off. He would have run to the shed. He would be peeking from behind a tree. Soon we would hear his scared little song.

The day was pale enough to reveal a finality of mountains in the distance, and everything looked as it ever did: shrubs buried softly in a soil as loose as black rice, the learning pond set too low to the ground, birds flying poorly and without purpose, the sun blocked by a cloud the shape of our house. Above the furnace, a sharp string of behavior smoke was breaking up as it floated over the learning pond. A convoy of small blue trucks glowed on our street as if they were see-through— Dark’s vehicles parked in neat formation. A flock of birds must have pierced through a small opening in one of them, because a storm of sharp black bits whirled within, the birds as fast and small as bees in a jar.

Below me on the grass in front of the house, a small man was pinned on his back by a circle of girls. My father did not look as disheveled as he should have, considering what it must have taken for the girls to wrestle him down. It would have been just like him to surrender to their grasp too easily, to play along until he was their prisoner, happy to have so many young women minding after him. All he ever wanted was to be an accomplice in his own capture. He must have sat down with pleasure when they set upon him. He must have exaggerated his alarm when they finally pinned him down.

If I held my breath, I could zoom my sight in right up close to his simple face, to a proximity no son should be allowed, and I quickly saw much too much of my father, an amount of his person I didn’t think possible, which made me scared and disappointed by him at the same time. He should not be viewable so close-up, I thought. He should not be that dismissible. The more I held my breath, the more I felt I could leave my room through the window and swoop down through the circle of girls right up against my father’s red, struggling face, not stopping there, but entering my father at his hard red mouth and plunging directly to the underside of his face, where I could look back out from his head at a ring of girls’ faces encircling a cakelike round of sky, and, far beyond that, see the tiny face of a boy framed in glass, watching me as if it were my turn to be alive. I did not much want to be inside my father’s face this way, restrained by children, while my son watched me from his window. No matter how hard I tried, I only noticed what was wrong: the clear flag we had raised alongside the spire on the roof, the unfinished shed where my learning was supposed to happen when Mother wasn’t home, and then the learning pond itself, which from my father’s point of view looked like an unpromising little puddle and nothing more. The water was muddy and slow and dead. A person might float on that water and never change. He might drink it and still remain himself for the rest of his life.

I breathed. I blinked. I turned my head and exhaled in hard, short bursts until I had shaken my father’s perspective. My sight was thin and clean and my own again. When I returned to the window, the picture was foggy and my father was just another man brought to ground by an efficient team of girls, so many of them that he didn’t have a chance. He wrestled vaguely against them on the grass, but they kept their feet on him and made clapping gestures in front of their chests. Something about the way the girls clapped seemed to gather too many birds into their midst, a cluster of black objects that fell heavily to the grass. The claps were short and hard, not at all like music; more like a code of command. The birds gathered nearby, and some of them fell to their backs and seemed to rest there, their brittle legs twitching each time the girls changed the cadence of their clapping. None of it seemed to have anything to do with my father.

I cranked the window closed and took off my clothes. It was time to hold my breath and practice fainting. There were too many wrong, new things in the day, and I had to drop away into the sweet brown light of a good four-minute faint, enough to make the day’s events seem like someone else’s life, happening in a smaller and softer house a good distance down the road from here.

Before I could clear a blackout area for myself — roll out the emotion rug, remove all sharp objects within the safety diameter — I heard footsteps coming slow and heavy down the hallway, someone’s body drumming at me. I was not used to visitors. This was the sound of someone making an exciting mistake. The steps were exaggerated, heavy and sarcastic, by someone who must have thought that walking itself was a joke, to be parodied if done at all. Thundering toward me now, the little man. I knew that I would not be fainting for some time. This would be a good deal better than that. My door trembled with his approach. I turned and waited, trying my best to relax my face.

There’s probably no other way to describe what Pal did than to say that he found me out with his mouth, that he needed to know something, and the answer was somewhere on my person.

He ran upstairs that first day, free of Dark’s arms, and he was yelling in some other language as he jumped up on my bed, a planet of fur and squished eyes, speaking his funny one-syllables, barking the names of people I didn’t know, as if he were only a dog.

I couldn’t understand what he was saying, but I wanted to do something just as impossible, to show him I wasn’t content with anything I could actually be capable of doing — walk the ceiling and speak a new language to my friend, or set fire to my own hands and run circles in the room, but my mouth was built only to apologize and complain. I swayed on my feet as he darted around me. I was afraid I would fall over and go to sleep and then wake up to find him gone, which would mean I’d have to run hard into a wall until I forgot about him. My head would need considerable battering to leak out the sense of this new, amazing man. The helmet would be required, and great gulps of the forgetting water, and a mouth packed with seeds while I slept. His energy was big and I had no part of it. I felt threatened by his happiness. I was too tired, and he was too fast to look at. Being with him was like being alone underwater — everything was slow; nothing counted; I could not be harmed; I would feel dry and cold when I resurfaced. No matter what was happening as his body blurred around me, I worried I might forget it all and have to be myself again, without ever having seen him. There was nothing for me to do but notice him as hard as I could, to notice him, to notice him, to notice him until I did not know what it was to even try to look at somebody without collapsing with exhaustion.