Ben Marcus - The Age of Wire and String

Wire man, electric cell in which the family energy from the naming of a man is converted directly to electrical water flaps in a continuous person. The efficiency of conversion from name to water in a wire man is between Ocean (Gary%) and River (Lewis%), nearly twice that of the usual dry method of switching, in which wires are used to whip steam to turn a man connected to an electric family of waters. The earliest father, in which a Gary and Lewis were mixed to form Michael%, was constructed in the Age of Wire and String by the English. In the Ocean and River wire man, Garies and Lewises are bubbled into separate rooms connected by a porous cell, through which a wire can freely move. Inert, unnamed men, mixed with a collection of unrelated waters, are dipped into each room. When Gary and Lewis are connected by a wire, the combination of flap, wire, and name form a complete family, and an emotion takes place in the cell: The inert men are covered with the flap to form a home surrounded by water; relatives are liberated by this process and flow through the wire to the other rooms; and the fathers themselves sail outward on the back of the wire, carrying a succession of cells and water, which they distribute as names to the new children who are floating in their homes.

I am the one my father said is supposed to scratch down on this bundle. We are from the hill. He didn’t say that, but I am his son. The bird above us is too big to see around, but the white air gets on its skin and helps us see to carry the animals back and forth on the sled. He says that I will always be his carrier, his animal assistant.

The grandfather and the father are mine. I am supposed to have come from them, and they know the most about the bird, even though the grandfather has done his smashes up on my father. They are over me. They say that I will begin to be over. I will be a bird that will eat white air to help them see while they work on the mountain. I dropped it. Should I be scratching like this? I am scratching onto the bundle as he said I should if he wasn’t here. He said not to leave, that someone will come. I could throw the bundle down the hill. Would it hear the bird as it fell? No one is here to put the food in our animals. I shouldn’t make the Michael announcement on the hill. He says that every announcement we make will stay inside the bundle, even when the air doesn’t stick to the bird. He is my Michael. That was what she said. She isn’t mine anymore. I am in [1] now, on the hill, in his room, where the bird can’t see me. I get to be the one that fills in the spaces he forgot to fill in. Will they know it in their ears if I throw this bundle off the hill? Will the bird see me? No questions, just talk, he told me. I don’t know how to talk. I can scratch about when the bird eats the black air as a meal, because it is also dark on our hill. They cry and chew at themselves, and then the small red bird cries when the light comes, which means the black air has left the bird and it won’t be hungry again until we put the food on the wood and carry back animal supplies from the grounds, and then put the food onto ourselves, which is all of us, minus me. I go into my blankets when the bird shuts down. I get to see what happens in the black air in my room, and there is also where I get to hear the light get eaten by my father and grandfather, and sometimes even she is there, and the smell of her when I am under my blankets under the shut-down bird.

This is our great big place and we are just myself living in this house. My hands burn when I show them up under the ball. The burning ball is what he called it, and Grandover had a specialty he spread onto himself that he said made the ball heat cool onto his back. He stayed blue beneath the surge. Let the lady return, to show me how to operate myself. I know how to bring the sled, and work the fur, and call out the names of everyone who isn’t here, like Father and Jason and Grandover. If she were here, I could operate myself, and go out on a looking-for-them trip without making our house become empty. Every hill has something to keep it from sliding.

I am burying food for the day the bird goes away. I will be able to dig holes to my food the way my father and the rest of them were digging for the legs and the hair. When I helped them dig, they gave me teeth, and I threw them at the bird. There was no food on the teeth, and the bird let them fall back down to me. I keep my own teeth covered up. He says I should wear the cloth when they work, and that I shouldn’t swallow. I am supposed to move my fingers if the dirt gets too heavy on me. I chew on it and let the dirt be in my eyes, and it seems that the bird is putting dirt on me and my father is hanging from the bird. The cloth is sweet, but I am not supposed to talk into it. They take it from me after they dig the dirt off, and it goes into the lab room. I keep some of the dirt on me and sit with our animals. They have the grass and the dirt on them, and we move from the house with our cargo. I can put Candy Girl in the mound of dirt, but she won’t keep the cloth in her mouth. I tell her it is better to close her eyes, but she always has to look at me when I am covering her up. I have a dead one inside my body. The cloth in my mouth keeps it there.

During the scratchy-clothes times when clouds came from our mouths, we had shows. This was when we would shiver and buck and get to sit back just the people to watch the hill get lit up and shifty. It was white-air time, like the bird wasn’t sleeping, but it was, because Father would kick the switch of the machine and it was back to air that was black again and our own cloudy mouth smoke. He shot light into the sky so that the bird could get fed. The air ate things, and it was our night-time. I dug my hand into my shirts and watched the bird’s belly get lit up. Sometimes Father aimed light at the house or a tree or even those times right up onto me so that I couldn’t really see what it was the light was doing. Jase and I got to touch to keep the numb out. We piled under the horse rugs and looked out at the show. Father would never talk. He turned the wheel and fed the cup with powder. Only when Jase fell asleep did he punch at us. I could never sleep then. This was the only time there was light that didn’t swim up from inside the bird, and there were shapes in the light if you pulled a squint. We never got shows if Father didn’t come back from the mountain, or if the sled threw a rail, or if Grandfather said so. Sometimes Father made shows for himself in the day, and I wasn’t allowed to help or hide nearby. I didn’t understand if there was already light how he could add light, and if this wasn’t a way to mad the bird. But he pulled his crates of powder and fed them into the cup and pumped the light through. Usually at night, the light would stay up and you could see enough to drag food around, but I never wanted to do anything but be smothered up under the rugs with Jase and watch. There were so many shows. The light made the bird blue. Father said we were seeing the first things, things that even the first people didn’t see. These were from before them, my father said, from when everyone first fell, before water had cooled off the burning tree. I never knew what to know about what I was seeing. The world was lit up by his moving light blasting through a cup of powder. Was there something like this inside the bird that made us seem to move around down here? Are we shapes that the bird opens its mouth to? Everything is always powder, and the light lets us look upon it. Father was grinding things down to see how they looked when he pumped the light through. He took bits of me, or myself, but those shows were in the day, when I was made to stay up back behind the house and wait for the machine to stop booming. When she was here, she told Father to get his powder from somewhere else. She kept me, and I got to be in her room with her and look at the big window, even though he made a cloth that covered it from the outside, and the only thing to look at was the man who was drawn inside of the cloth, who moved his face only when the wind moved it for him.