Notable American Women (10 page)

Jane Dark and Bob worked together, providing spots and corrections, performing stand-in maneuvers, shadow demonstrations, silently critiquing their sluggish young Silentists, who often failed to stand freely and had to be propped in place or strung up in harnesses. The stillness rehearsals of the girls had made them unfit for simple movement. They were too good at doing nothing, and now their bodies were soft and puddly, with skin spilled slowly over the air, a bright red mouth bubbling somewhere in it, some dull hair dashed over the top. Often I was summoned to work through cloth, at night, without the girls' entire knowledge, a spotter providing bump assistance behind me at my hips in case I tired and experienced a send delay.

Sometimes I was permitted to play a tape of favorite conversations to help myself achieve sends. The
Lectures of the Presidents,
with its hiss and static, its Old English mannerisms and extended weeping, its fitful animal cries in the distance, was soothing enough to deliver me through such moments, allowing me to ignore the oceanic, unbodylike forms of the girls I was paired with, and proceed as usual until I had sent through. With the tape on, and the old clay head in my arms, I could close my eyes and enter that special time when those historic leaders shouted their hearts out to the world, lecturing feverishly until their bodies collapsed and they died. I could imagine myself near the burnished podium while the greatness of their words crackled in the air above me. My picture of that time was so vivid that if I held my breath and strained, I could even see all of the helmeted children standing obediently in the audience, holding their slender candles that drooped under their hot breath, their faces awestruck with the words of their leaders. Such moments beckoned even the most elusive of sends from my person, and I could host several visitors in a single afternoon. But the tapes grew warped with use, and since Bob required a vowel enhancer and a consonant muffler on the tape player to keep our atmosphere silent, soon it was merely a slow, droning hum I heard from the speakers, no different than someone's father might make if he was bound and gagged beneath the bed, crying for help in his breathy, underwater way.

By this time, Mother was fully quiet and roved mainly at night on a motion sled pulled along by a team of girls. She required the convenience of various locations to accomplish the last of her silencing, but she could not spare physical movement from her ever-diminishing motion quota to get anywhere, thus her need for the girls and the sled, which took a great deal of engineering work on the part of Bob Riddle to operate quietly. He fitted the joineries of the sled with a soft and durable Hushing Bread that muffled the squeaks of the gears, moistening the shrill squeal of the runners on our cement floor. The sled disgorged a share of fine crumbs in its wake that were swept by a Silentist in my mother's retinue. She wore the crumbs in short sacks around her hips and they were later recycled with a new batch of bread, a secondary set of loaves that had yet greater silencing powers. If Mother lumbered at all in the mornings, she was crackery in appearance and fully breakable. She seemed to be stalking an animal in slow, instructional frames of action, and could not help but mock the simplest of motion technologies, like walking, which she performed more sarcastically than anyone I've ever seen.

Straitjackets lined the halls. Many of the girls, deemed barren or sufficiently advanced in their practice, had entered the final stages of their promise of stillness. They would no longer be submitted to intercourse. Their days obtaining sends had ended. They were ready to take a paralysis on our property and sign their promises against motion. Stillness rehearsals took place in the sheds along the water by the fainting tank. A bright red bolt shot across the door indicated a stillness procedure in session. Girls applied the straitjackets: full-bodied canvas buntings equipped with a rip cord leading up to their mouths. When they approached a self-induced full stillness, usually after three days, they yanked the cords with their teeth, and their bodies were released in a heap on the dirt floor. It took them a week to move fluidly again, even with the assistance of a masseuse, and their faces were long and dry with pale brown welts, as if their elective paralysis had set off a decay in their skin. After a stillness rehearsal, the girls cautiously rehydrated with quiet water and examined the film footage of their mistakes, how they flinched and fidgeted, what broke them back into motion.

By late March I lost the potent fire that caused my error to wooden. A small, strong girl came to my room, eyed me fiercely, then sat over my legs, but I had nothing but smush for her. I had given them all so many sends, but it didn't seem to matter in my current condition. After waiting for me to finish fumbling with it, she laughed silently in my face, pulled up her pants, and strode from the room. My error rested cold and wet on my belly.

Dark peered in afterward and queried me. She wore a burlap glove and ran some tests, her body stiff and formal as she busied about the copulation room. “Cough,” she said. “Hold your breath.” She meant for me to do both at once, and I tried, despite the pain it caused my back, the sense that my bowels might release. With my breath held, I managed only the driest rasp in my chest, made even harder with the grip Dark held on my exposed bottom. “You're not trying,” she said, tightening her hand, pressing her other palm over my mouth. I summoned a cough again, higher-pitched, my face sealed up from air, and something gave way in my back, a scurrying that was sweet for just a moment before darkening under my skin, stiffness creeping over my torso as if it had been injected there.

Dark's hand gave up my bottom and she stood, ignoring my grimace. My error was cold as a worm. She moved to the window and bent into a deep maneuver that involved a pretense of a search for something on her own person. Her arms were hard to follow. She patted at herself while lunging, creating a complication of limbs I could not decode or even watch without feeling nauseous. The shadow she made on the wall looked like a house, slowly dismantling. It seemed to have very little to do with her body—the lines were too delicate and numerous, the shadow too intricate, but it moved exactly as her limbs did, swelling and shrinking as she changed her position in front of the window. With so many sacks of water in the room, I guessed she was creating some special sauce for me, gesturing intricately in front of it, seeking a witness water of an entirely different design. But I was not thirsty. I had drunk enough water. There had to be a period when people could ignore water for a time and let themselves run dry. I shrank further and rolled off the bed to get dressed.

At first I wanted to think that the cold weather had put my blood on slow, since I was shriveled and blue in my skin, too tired even to monitor what kinds of water they gave me at night. But later that day Dark returned with a heater that she placed beneath my father's bed until I was inflamed and sweaty, engorged with blood everywhere but at my cold hips. It did not help. I wrestled with an error that felt like nothing more than a finger without its bone.

Mother sprayed a fine mist of behavior water at me that night. She sat listlessly in her sled and seemed barely capable of squeezing the bulb of the atomizer. Much of the water blew back over her shrunken, unmuscled body, and she shivered as it settled on her. She fumbled with the bulb, her mouth wet and slack and colorless. The water was an extraction of pure copulation-witnessing liquid, and it had a fine, clear glimmer, like very thin honey. I soaked in it, as instructed, and sipped down several jars more, but my error simply retreated further and failed to respond. With a clipped series of gasping breaths, my mother signaled to the girls, who quietly pulled her from the room in her sled. She left no notes for me.

Alone, I paced the room for some time, slapping lightly at my unresponsive error, before I finally took the clay head from the door and lay on my back in the darkness, holding it to my chest, stroking the stiff beard, my hips exposed and cooling yet more in the sexless room. I was not sure what was happening inside my person, but something thick held me high in my chest, surging surely and slowly in my blood. I did not know it as a certainty, but it corresponded to what I had read of the sensation referred to in the
Behavior Bible
as “relief.” An actual feeling, one of the restricted ones, one my body had been sutured against forever ago. An immunization I had taken under the great helmet when I was a child. I could not remember its use, its purpose, the particular demographic of those persons who practiced it. There was a special history of relief, I was sure; a pattern one could study, a population of relieved people who had much to say about it, techniques to describe, precautions to issue. There were tall-standing adults in northern towns who fiended for relief, scheming through sleepless nights to get it from one another, letting their own blood out into small jars until the feeling washed over them. If it was true, it would be happening to me despite my diet, despite the fainting course I had undergone that fall, despite the high, scribbling wind-box treatments my mother had filtered over my face almost weekly to cure me of emotions, cleanse me of the feeling virus, shed me of every loudness in my heart. But despite the precautions of my mother and her team and their highly complex safeguarding work against sensations relating to the world of emotions, I may very well have slipped past their doctoring, their shields. There was a flaw to the wall they had built, and it seemed connected to my wilted error. Quite possibly I felt something that night, even if I did not know its real name and did not know how to feel it, what to do once the feeling started, where to put it, or what exactly it wanted from me. Something was happening that I knew should be kept secret.

I closed the door of my father's room and did my best to breathe.

On those increasingly frequent mornings when I could not send, Dark and Mother retreated to the stillness shed, where they took fainting spells for each other and labored their mouths over the chew stand, which left me free to walk the field and get a closer look at Larry the Punisher. His presence never wavered, but during some sundowns Larry took a seat on what must have been a stool or stone placed above my father's container. He removed the speech hoof from his face, placed his head in his hands, and heaved. I could not ascribe an action such as weeping to him. Possibly he was taking the deep and complicated breaths required of a full-time language punisher, a weapon-breathing technique he administered to restore his full word power to himself. Darkness fell too soon for me to tell how long these rests of his took, whether he was down for the night, or only an hour, but I observed many of them, and at such times could picture my small father pacing the length of his cell, peering up at the ceiling at the sudden silence, wondering what had happened to the stream of hard language funneling down at him. I was curious if his body was yet buckling under the words being fed into his room, and if these reprieves allowed him to breathe easier for a time, or took some strain off of his bones and head. Possibly his body had failed already, brought to a final pressure by the Attack Sentences that Larry was orally injecting into the room through the speech hoof. In that case, Larry was shouting out there at a dead man, who could be killed no more. His work was finished and he could drop the hoof and throw down a tombstone already, mark the site, sing a quiet all-vowel song for the life my father had lost. Even a prisoner deserves a funeral. All that language was being wasted. Larry was shooting bullets into a corpse. He might as well have come back to the house, or gone wherever a person like Larry went, and left my father's body alone.

I did not send up a flare. I did not speak. I did not approach Larry's position far out in the field and wrestle the Punisher down, steal his key, and rescue my father.

Instead, I rolled onto my stomach from my distant zone and thought that if I was entrenched in the grass directly above my father's receptacle, I could burrow my arm into the soil and grab his scraggly head with my hand as he stalked around, pull my father by his hair up against the roof of his cell, even if he kicked and writhed against my grasp like a man being hanged, wriggle him through the hole my arm had made, and release him back above ground, even if the constriction of the narrow hole killed him on the way out, even if he was already dead by the time I had rescued him, even if his body had been fully and terminally language-shot, so that it was bones and skin and hair only, a torso rent by words, mutilated in its pressure box by the choicest and hardest and cruelest sentences, which had been composed precisely to dismantle a father's body, to leave just a face and teeth as soft as bread. Even if all of these things were true, I could burrow him out of there and lie in the grass with whatever was left of my father's body. The scraps, the bits, the broken head, a shoe. Have a companion night out under the flat black sky, beneath the radar of winds and birds, just out of range of the girls in the listening hole, too low for Dark and her shadow-location technique, too quiet even for Riddle to hear us. In a region my mother's new sled could not obtain. Me and my father out in the field.

The New Female Head

A FEMALE HEAD LIBERATION SYSTEM (FLUSH) follows the theory that experiences, which may or may not cause an emotional response in a woman (we may never know), filter first through her head.

If the head's hollow space (chub) is filled with materials like cloth, an ice Thompson, wood, or behavior putty (also known as action butter), then less life can enter and, perhaps, fewer emotions will result.

This approach works best with cultures that believe the “person” operates from somewhere inside the head, that the head is the command center of the body, driving it in and out of the home, forward and away from various “people,” and toward attractive bodies of water where the woman might replenish herself for later conflicts. In a survey of the female population of the Ohio countryside, a three-quarter majority of women touched their faces and eyes when asked which part of their body contained their “self.” The remainder touched their hands, hips, bellies, or bottoms, while a small percentage of women touched other people or animals or simply grabbed the air. For better or worse, the head, for most women, is still an obvious indicator that a person is in the room.

The emotion-removal strategy, then, is to cut off stubborn feelings before they start, by walling up the head's unused space with various fillers and props and glues, to catch, block, or deflect the incoming behavior stuffs onto another person or animal. A careful woman can then use her head as a ricochet ball or “grief mirror” and bounce her feelings onto her family, to slow their progress or surge them with a debilitating emotion.

If a woman can reduce her chub to 1 percent of total head volume, chances are that very little of what happens to her— including the death of a child, the loss of a friend, or gaining an important promotion at work, just to cite a few contemporary examples—will have any effect on how she feels. She will be immune to emotion-causing events, better prepared to launch into a new and distinctly female space. She may later choose to empty or even increase her chub area, but only after she has zeroed her heart.

A Caution When Using Props in the Chub

When filled with fabric, wood, or an ice Thompson, a woman's chub danger is deactivated, but the resulting fabric waste, spoiled wood, or mouth water, all known as “heart chaff”—marinated in the overflow of feelings, and bearing the impress of a woman's mouth and every consonant-bearing word (crack) she has ever uttered—becomes hazardous and should be disposed of properly.

What Do I Do with Heart Cha f When I Am Done with It?

Landfills for heart chaff have turned into a kind of American behavior graveyard. Female looters, scavengers, and behavior instructors have stormed these chaff sites and walked off with barrels of used fabric and chewed wood, still soaked with the behavior juices of the former owners, a dumping site of Identity Medicine that is far too dangerous to inexperienced women. This kind of American behavior transfer—chaotic and outside the eye of the government—will most certainly lead to diluted strains of female identities and an absolute detour from name-based behavior ventures and Null Heart attainment strategies. To prevent collective behavior sharing, several safer methods are available for the disposal of chaff, or any cloth that has been deeply chewed by a woman. These methods include:

Weaving children's clothing from heart chaff and donating it to the misbehaved young people of this country, who might wear the new suits of clothing—often brown and roughly textured, like a woven graham cracker— and thus relearn some of the basic life actions.

Creating flags and flying them outside of women's houses to advertise the favored behaviors and feelings of the family within.

Building elaborate behavior-free shade zones in open fields by creating tents from the chaff that will shelter those women who no longer know what behavior they would like to exhibit. Resting in the shade of a behavior tent allows women to comfortably plan their next move without the embarrassing pressure of sunlight, widely thought to exacerbate behavior on the surface of the world. Important behavior tends to occur in darkness, or not at all.

What If It's Too Late?

Let's say a woman's chub is not properly stuffed, a worst-case scenario, where her head has defaulted to its status as a prop-free object in the American landscape. Then key life events invade her head and riot into important feelings, a mess of attachments, hopes, and regrets. Is there a way to manipulate the female head after these emotions have begun, a sort of morning-after treatment when the woman is on the verge of feeling something?

Absolutely.

Because residue of an emotion apparently does remain in the mouth (except in deaf individuals of America, whose emotional activity is stored on their skin, in the form of behavior oil), coats the tongue, and probably does something quite unbecoming to the teeth and lips and gums, it can still be absorbed by the appropriate rag—that is, cloth that has “heard” the secret speech of the woman in question.

The Thought Rag

When women in the American territory speak careful sentences into a handkerchief, they are creating, whether they know so or not, an important item called “a thought rag.” Once confided to, the cloth becomes a listening towel, or “priest,” regularly privileged to whatever a woman chooses to say. The cloth may be tied smartly to a skirt or blouse, or used as a scarf or bandit rag; sometimes an adventurous woman employs it as a wind sock (if she needs to handicap her actions, lest her skills intimidate her acquaintances). Regardless of how it is worn, it stores a tonal material in its surface and can begin to contain what is crucial of the women who use it—a record of those female citizens who feel comfortable storing their basic life messages (I'm sorry, Go away, It hurts, I'll take it) in a portable medium such as a swatch of stylish fabric. Even a carpet sample can be used, although rough cloth can chafe the face and mouth of the woman, leading to facial weaknesses, like weeping.

Everything a woman feels or suspects is to be confided to the thought rag, as with a diary. This takes all the noise of the “inner life,” the so-called dialogue with oneself formerly thought to be so crucial to sophisticated living (though primarily a device of “men” to justify and complicate long periods of inarticulate confusion), and exports it to an object that can fit smartly into a woman's handbag. It is a far safer way to store the fundamentals of a female identity, and the head becomes devalued since it no longer stores a woman's mystery.

These swatches of cloth can be exchanged between people when a shortcut to intimacy is desired. Indeed cloth-swapping salons and thought-rag sharing allow a woman to keep abreast of the personalities of her friends and acquaintances without the troubling ambiguity of speech and imprecise self-representation. A thought rag cannot lie; it won't fail to impart the key data of the person who has used it. If I were to meet you, I would rather spend several hours sniffing and mouthing your thought rag than with you personally. You would no doubt try to impress me or somehow manipulate my experience of your person, concealing your fears and doubts, foregrounding some unbearable fiction of what a person should be. Your thought rag would give me the whole story in an hour or so and I could then decide if a meeting between us would be worthwhile.

Yet swap meets of this kind are also how a thought rag can become lost or stolen, and a woman's identity can be “chewed” by another woman. In such cases, a thought rag can be assigned a password, generally keyed in with a gnashing sequence of the teeth.

Is the Head Itself Still Essential?

At the time of this writing, the head probably cannot be omitted from the person pursuing the female life project. Radical antiemotionalists have attempted a head-free trajectory in the world, yet these pioneers, while laudably testing the limits of the female life project, have unfortunately defaulted their ability to report on the effects of their experiment. They have gone too far from our world for us to understand them. Perhaps one day this approach will seem heroic, yet a woman without an operative head is still unable to signal her former world; to observers, she is nearly similar to a deceased person—her skin is cold, and she does not respond when prodded or splashed with water.

But a compromise is available for those women looking to limit the role of their heads in their behavioral and identity-development enterprises. This compromise involves cold-treating the female head with an item known as the Zero Hood, or facial cloak, form-fitted to a woman like a ski mask and meant to flash-freeze her face and skull. The head can withstand short periods of deep freezing several times per day, as long as the Thawing Sock is applied directly to the woman in time to prevent memory loss. Husbands and brothers are the best assistants for this sort of technique. Machinery should not be operated by a woman using the Zero Hood, nor should she go near children or animals.

Lastly, if each woman of America carved a wooden version of her own head (rook) and polished it with a personalized cloth, speaking kind words to the head (as one would talk to a plant), whispering in its ears, kissing the mouth, and grooming and oiling its surface, a woman might discover a person-shifting relationship with herself in which her own head becomes less important to her life, a prop to decorate, certainly, but not to be deployed much beyond that. This wooden head could be placed in rooms where a woman's presence was desired, a kind of surrogate ambassador for her life, during those many moments that would otherwise exhaust or disgust her real head, the one that still suffers from responses and upsetting reactions to the world at large. I am not embarrassed to admit that I see a world one day where many beautiful wooden heads fill a room, while the people these heads represent are able to rest alone in their cabins and still accrue important experiences with other people.

What About the Nostrils and the Ears?

These important orifices are still a mystery; nearly nothing certain is known about the nostrils or the ears. The more we speak about these enigmatic absences, the further away we seem from any real understanding. It is an unusual bafflement to the American science of the head, and I have always been encouraged by my teachers and surrogate mothers to simply pause in silence if ever questioned about the true nature of these elusive areas. I stand with my head bowed and allow full reverence to accrue until my questioner understands how sacred is the lack of information about these parts of the head.

The Myth of Suffocation

A mouth filled with a bolus of wood or a full pound of linen does not necessarily mean the woman will not be able to breathe, only that her body, once blocked at the mouth and nose (and thus enabled elsewhere), will revert to its internal oxygen stores and alternative “breathing” methods, such as the “emotion furnace,” in which the body essentially burns its own anxiety for fuel when the mouth is clogged, rendering an emotion-free American citizen. After the initial panic of suffocation is surpassed, a feeling of relaxation and ease sets in, and a woman will notice her feelings rapidly quitting her body, bringing much-deserved silence into her heart.

Furniture for the Head

A chew stand should be established in the home. In time, it will become the essential emotion-quieting furniture for women. It can be a coat rack with a wooden ball at the level of a woman's mouth, for her to approach and chew, several times a day, to leech herself of grief and rage. This cools the murdering impulse that sometimes occurs in a well-populated American shelter.

Alternatively from the chew stand, a wooden chew ball can be affixed to a doorway or window frame, so long as a woman can approach and fit her mouth over it without cutting or cracking her lips; it must not be too big or too small, nor should it be pliable enough for her teeth to diminish its size. If the height of the chew ball is incorrect, a woman will cramp at the neck or calves.

The chew stand creates an elegant opportunity for American women to pause in their daily lives within their homes and fill the largest chub of their heads with a finely polished wooden sphere. In this instance, wood is considered to be a meat, yet a durably inedible meat, a kind of pure protein that renews itself. A chew session can last for half an hour. If the sphere is cleaned between uses, many women can enjoy the chew stand, although identity compromises (relationships) may result, since wood can only leech so much heart static from the emotion banks of a female citizen and will start to “feed back,” flooding a woman's mouth with the identity water of the last woman to chew on the ball.

Women of financial means, who are prepared to spend more money on their own behavior alterations, might consider posting an armed guard at the chew stand to prevent men and other fetishists from chewing and sniffing their wooden ball. A well-used wooden ball begins to smell sweet. Sometimes men will lie in wait, or they will carve tiny versions of their own heads and replace the balls with these. Many women will chew up a man's head this way.

What Is Behavior Putty?

The residue a person leaves behind after performing certain tasks, like chopping wood, speaking to a crowd, buying a sack of nuts, or lunging through a Silence Hoop in an Ohio wheat field, can be collected in a jar, labeled according to the action that produced it, and then used as a topical ointment to prevent that action in others. It might technically be considered as a jelly history of life.

I am not sure why it is sometimes called “action butter,” but the term offends me and I would like to see its use forbidden. Butter is one of the most important items the world has seen, and to equate it with behavior is to deny its potency not only as a key form of animal water but as probably the most reliable soundproofing rub the American body can withstand without seriously harming the skin. Butter also lubricates a woman's body to maneuver through American weather with a minimum of friction. She becomes a secret person within the wind. Without butter, a woman might be seen everywhere, pushed and pulled every which way. She would too easily be a target, plainly revealed and vulnerable to every kind of sighting.