Notable American Women (14 page)

These cards were new; I had not seen them before. Each one showed a family scene. The characters were rendered in our own likeness: my mother, my father, and me. A fourth character had been blotted out: possibly a dog, possibly a girl. The cards were drawn as precisely as photographs, suggesting the pictures had been copied from life, but the settings behind the characters had not been filled in. Their actions were suspended in gray space.

The first card showed Mother and Father swinging their boy between them, none of them smiling. In the second card, the boy was afloat and alone, possibly assisted aloft. The third card showed a close-up of the boy's mouth, void of teeth, a red gummy mess. The fourth card was blank, or speckled with dust, or depicting an empty sky. The father's back was turned in the fifth card. He was alone and walking away. The boy was sprawled against his legs in the sixth; flung toward the legs, probably, or kicked away. Then the father appeared in a series of cards that showed his shadow to be more ample than he was, a shadow that began to consume him, oversized, a swollen cloud. The boy and his mother were drawing the shadow around the father in the set of cards after that, even while the father seemed to protest, his arms raised, his hands curled into fists. The mother and boy were using brushes or pouring cans of dark liquid around him as the father's body grew smaller and his shadow blackened over him. In one card, the shadow was pouring directly from the boy's mouth.

We were up to card twenty. My mother used flat hands to stroke the air as she continued her wind-box application. In the next card, the boy received a shock if he tried to enter the father's shadow. Cards showed him being flung back as if from a force field, sparks roving over his body. He could not pierce it, though he made several running starts, even as he was held on a leash by his mother, who was leaning away with the strain. A blotted figure was already resident inside the shadow, in a wagon pulled by the father. The figure seemed immune to the father's shadow, the wagon slightly aglow. In the next few cards, the shadow and the father became one blobby item, and the blob began to recede, until the father was a small black point, no wagon in sight, and the boy and his mother were left alone. The boy's leash formed a tightrope between him and his mother, and small girls walked the length of it, an empty speech bubble hovering over them. The cards closed in on the girls, who were walking along with big smiles. The boy and his mother were too big to be seen clearly in these cards; they were mostly vague shapes in the background. In the next set of cards, the boy searched through a patch of grass for something, poking his fingers into soil, and finally came up with a small wagon, too small to contain anybody, though he tried fitting himself into it. He then tried to pull the wagon, but there were no wheels on it. He showed it to his mother, but she had her head turned.

In the last set of cards, the mother was building what appeared at first to be a house. Her son stood near her but couldn't help because his hands had been erased. He tried to nudge supplies toward his mother with his head, but she didn't seem to want his help. He became smaller as the cards progressed, losing length in his arms, and the mother's construction project grew larger, surrounding her, until it extended naturally from her massive body and began to feature an engine. The boy rested on his back near the exhaust of the engine. He had no arms. The mother was hardly recognizable for the structure that surrounded her: a large, motor-powered house. The last card showed a thin line of colorless fire. No characters were drawn on the card.

My mother dismantled the rack, tucked away the cards, and then stooped to her feet to gather something from the crumple of cloth. The body on the ground was lifeless and too heavy-looking for her to lift as easily as she did, and when I saw its face to be my own, I recognized it as the mannequin that she had built some time ago—a hollowed-out version of me she could demonstrate behavior on. A procedure had been ordered, and she was following Dark's suggestion. Build a dummy of your boy. Use his own hair for the head. I had hardly seen this mannequin. For some reason, it was mostly kept from me. It was a fair likeness, and it showed me to be in good health. It was interesting to see a copy of myself so slack in the body, so pliant, as if I were watching myself sleep.

She dragged the mannequin up on her lap and began a series of hugging gestures against it. She cradled the head in her arms. She kissed its cheeks. The doll was limp as she held it, but she smothered it all over with nuzzlings. She tried to tickle it. She pressed its head into her bosom. Her face was plastered in a smile, stretched so wide it could have been a grimace of pain. She gazed up at the stars, posing her face in various masks of contentment. My mother could certainly look pleasant. She wanted me to see this. There was a lesson here somewhere. The two of them cuddled there in a picture of affection as her lamp burned on and the night grew later.

I watched her loving the doll. She did it well. She had an accurate and complex style of affection. I could easily believe she was feeling love for it. I sat perfectly still in the warmth from the two of them. A photograph of this scene would have convinced anyone. It would have been proof that I had been held, doted on, cuddled, nuzzled, kept warm, and kissed and kissed and kissed. I would like to have copies of such photographs. They would prove interesting and useful for later study. For later regard. It would be good to have evidence of the endearments my mother and I have exchanged.

A month later my sends had yielded zero gifts, an entire winter of wasted mating. My sends were no more than vapor, leaks down other people's legs. In the end, I had sent nowhere. There would be no purebred Silentists, no girls of the new water, no prodigies of stillness born without a bias toward motion, an allergy to sound. No children at the compound at all.

I walked down on the lawn and saw those remaining Silentists, who had yet to undertake their promise of stillness, standing in a circle around the burning conception harness.

Their communication was reduced to a rough hand grammar that looked like a stylized midwestern fighting style. It was performed without flinching, yet consisted of considerable gestures of rearing back, hands ferreted up, retracted punches, ducking and weaving heads. These were pre-stillness women, purging their last spastic actions.

Here they all were, facing one another, showing much gesture of warfare as the harness burned. Some made as if they were squeezing a small animal in their fingers, tearing it apart. Their heads were placid while their hands contorted, their faces erased of expression. At certain intervals in the gesturing, their mouths pitched down jets of wind into their hands and they appeared to be warming themselves like travelers around a fire. All the staff was on hand, though I did not see Mr. Riddle, the silencing man. A quick check behind me revealed Larry's dim form at work in the field as always, barking hard at the hole that held my father.

Mother and Jane Dark took turns kneeling behind the girls to spot their gestures: guide their hands and correct their motion, apply paddles to their limbs, a short stick to the small of the back, fine jets of water onto the face.

The door to the stillness shed was open and a great noise of hosing could be heard within, the sound of fast water striking something soft and loose, like skin. Many of the women carried packs.

I had not known them to gather at once in this way, to put their bodies in view, to be such plain targets in the daytime. Something busy was afoot, but as I stepped among them their gestures quickly subsided, my motion poisoning the air and killing their own. The women powered down as if my presence had tripped a plug on their bodies, and soon no one was moving but me. It was a field of statues, though their hair still frittered in the low morning wind, and a new scent swirled about the area, the smell of paralysis.

One of the frozen women was my mother. Her body, such as it barely was, had curled around a small cardboard box. She was just another Silentist now, who could not abide being seen, who would not move if a man was watching. Her face relaxed as I approached her. It was spongy and showed no recognition. She was styling herself for me to see her. It seemed to take great effort, but her mouth moved in purses and puckers, a face not practiced at speech seizing now under its strains. She was making the musclings of language, but there was no sound. It looked as though she would eat the space between us. If this was what it took for my mother to talk, to make a piece of loud wind that I might use—in order to know her, or myself, or my purpose—I did not care to see it. I sat with her there until her face fell calm and she was no more than a mannequin of my mother. True to life, perhaps, and accurately rendered, yet wooden to the core. The work of a carpenter, at the most. The work of a person-builder. A very certain kind of no one. A body you could sit next to all afternoon and, with the right kind of concentration, start to forget.

Inside the box, which slipped easily from my mother's hands, sat a helmet as soft and colorless as a man's deflated face. Its perfect oval shape was what I had always hoped my head might look like. I had not realized a helmet could be as clear as water, could make my face feel so small and safe—a tiny, plain face that would seem far away to anyone who looked at it. A helmet to frame me into the distance, so I might look as though I had yet to arrive.

A note in my mother's hand was taped to its slightly hairy top, where the skin was pink and sticky. “Put this on,” the note said. “You're going to need it. We will not see you again.” I could not look at any of the Silentists. I knew it would shame them to be seen. I did not want to damage anyone's chances, to cause more feelings than I needed to. With a lowered gaze, I picked up the helmet, which proved heavy and sourly scented of meat, strapped it on, and rose slowly to my feet. My head felt older and more familiar, as if something had been missing from it before.

I had vials of water in my bag and many small sacks of seeds, and I began slowly to make a distance from the house, walking delicately under my own head, listening for my thoughts, waiting for the sound of them to blast back on.

Looking back, I saw the closed door of the stillness shed, the red bolt blazing firmly in place. The women were gone. A motion-free area had been achieved. It took me turning my back, and then they were gone. The shed was full. My own head was finally a finished part of my body. I would not need to worry about it again. The moment called for a dash of new water to be donated, and I spilled it out on the dirt at my feet, where it did not seep in, where it merely puddled on the soil, shimmering a bit in the late-afternoon sun until I stepped on it firmly, squarely, pushing it as deeply as I could into the earth.

I noted the Punisher's position on the horizon. He could have been a fake man, a statue, a mannequin. Too far away for me to tell. Men that far away are as good as dead. It was best that the punishment was happening behind me. Fathers are always punished in the distance. He did not move and nothing near him did either, suggesting his entire location was constructed of color and light alone, with not one single beating heart in it, no real skin, nothing that could actually die. It would not be a place for someone such as myself.

I turned my back on him and walked hard and straight toward the deepest Ohio. My house gained size behind me as I retreated, staining the ground in a clear, thick shadow at my feet, the distant horizon ahead of me breaking into smaller and softer pieces as I approached it. There was nothing to do with my hands then but hold them up and feel around on my face— touch my mouth, my cheeks, my eyes—and maybe discover what, if anything, on that last day at home, I might actually have been conspiring to feel.

Promise of Stillness

LET IT BE RECOGNIZED, under the witness of the all-prevailing female Thompson, that this legal creed against motion bears the authority of a Female Jesus edict, a life law designated by our Lady Freeze, through which a woman of America might prosecute her stoppage of viewable actions, thus joining forces against all that moves, waging war in the name of stillness and silence, creating of her body a fixed landmark, an example of tranquillity, a frozen zone.

By signing this document, I enter into this agreement solely through my own choice, which I assert is mine to dispense. I have not been paid or persuaded to halt the viewable gestures of my body. If I profit from my ensuing stillness, it is from an arrangement of my own, though money I earn while physically still is fully taxable and subject to paralysis funds or other dowries initiated to support motion-free localities and persons residing there or en route to them. I hereby assert that I have not notified any member of the Silentist organization of a financial motive for stillness, a manner that stillness might be construed as employment, labor, or creative endeavor, subject to compensation, or gambled upon by persons betting on the outcome of the promise of stillness.

I agree that none of my garments, while I bear down into stillness, should advertise the interests of a foundation or individual other than myself, and in no way may I be marked, whether through tattoos or scars or text slogans burned into my skin, with symbols that can be construed as citation for anything outside of my own physical interests. Nor may I license my name or likeness for the mercenary aims of those not affiliated with the Silentist organization and its satellite groups. I remain fully accountable for the way my name is used, written, uttered, or in any way referenced by these outsiders.

Should my stillness result in personal debt or bankruptcy, I cannot assign that failure to any motion-prevention society existing now or in the future, and I forfeit any right to seek damages for any change in my wealth status or physical health or emotional condition that results.

Nor will I hold accountable any other woman, or person or animal masquerading as such, for the task which I hereafter set about to accomplish, regardless of the outcome, including the possibility of my disappearance or forceful demise or drowning down a well into the hell pool. That task can be described as the ultimate full stop of every action viewable at a distance of one arm's length or greater, with the exception of fidgets and grimaces, magnified semaphore or rescue gestures, a stoppage also known as the promise of stillness, the life pause, the freeze, the Jane Dark.

The distance of viewable motion detection, if my stillness is ever tested, may not be assisted with motion-detection glasses, gesture goggles, body microscopes, viewfinders, binoculars, a pencil, action-detection wands, stilts, or eyesight-enhancement devices of any sort existing now or yet to be developed, including smart skin, dead face styles, or hand-to-the-earth tremor-sensing techniques of the Indian people and others trained by them. Nor should organic vision in excess of twenty-twenty be the standard eye strength by which the distance is determined, even if the twenty-twenty standard becomes, at some future or other time, an easily surpassed milestone of eyesight, whether through medical or vitamin enhancement, an exercise regimen, nutritional assistance to the head through such devices as the strength sponge, or self-surgery interventions designed to render the seeable far more vivid, applying a close-up filter to that which was technically once far away, a come-hither ointment rubbed on what was once distant, a coil device affixed to objects, pulling them into sight as they are approached or summoned. My body may not be treated with motion-detection jellies, circled by twitch-inducing dogs, smeared with bait to lure me into action, or prodded with an electrical rod.

Should the standard Ohio Motion Detection Device™, as worn by a Jane Dark representative, register natural movement of any sort on my person, or a wobbling palsy arising from my body, as with nervous hands, whether through tethers, leashes, or strings that snap taut if I so much as move, or a sonar device that alerts a Jane Dark representative, who might occupy an observation booth, of motion occurring from my person, this contract shall become void and may not again be undertaken. Nor might any future accidental paralysis of mine, or frozen body condition that I may adopt, whether through enforced stillness, straightjacketing, coffin incarceration, or any other unnamed method of stillness, including my apparent demise, even if it proves a real demise, complete with eulogy, burial, and headstone, or a real demise that lacks these rituals, but still occurs, such as my body flung from a vehicle and come to rest in a ditch, where it is never discovered, but is still technically in a state of demise, be indicative of a successful promise of stillness, but instead shall signify an aberrant or natural pause in my motion akin to a stop-time event in a bird migration, such as birds pausing midair to perform a shadow function on the land below—which in some cases is a system of messaging for those women equipped to read it—or some other unsanctioned event resulting in stillness, such as a personal gridlock, a crisis of motion, or a Syrup Action.

I recognize that stillness occurs by accident all the time, and agree not to confuse these forms of stillness with the stillness I herewith set about to adopt. If I do not know this, I admit that others sufficiently know it, and I grant these others the power of mind over me to know the things that I am not capable of knowing, to adopt the ideas I recognize to be in my best interest, however incapable I might be of holding those ideas on my own, even if I do not consciously agree that the ideas are in my best interest, and even if I actively declare these ideas to be harmful and alarming, or cry out in pain, or beg for help, or disavow the very words of this agreement, or deny signing this agreement, or claim no knowledge of the terms of this agreement.

I further disavow that which randomly or intentionally puts a halt to my body. I disavow bodies that stop through inertia, fatigue, car crashes, and other collisions or unions that bodies make when they persist toward solid objects and become stunned into torpor. I disavow the nonstillness achieved when bodies are acted upon, lunged, hurtled, or thrown into the landmarks of the countryside, including the insertion of bodies into slings attached to the long wooden arms of the great structures known as catapults, which, when activated, hurl forth the contained body into modes of extreme nonstillness, which can apparently result in conditions known as orbit, though often don't, particularly when walls intervene, when trees intervene, or when the body itself windmills and rudders and otherwise drags on the air so much as to render its flight finite, and it crashes down to earth.

I disavow bodies that stop to pleasure sexually against other bodies, even if malicious in intent, even if incapable of pleasure, even if both or all of those bodies fail to gain actual, measurable pleasure from their attempts and instead only become injured, whether they break or bleed or carry the wound within, whether the pleasure attempt results only in sadness, shame and disgrace, irritation, detachment, or nostalgia, whether their bodies fail them or surpass them, whether they merely perform such techniques as cuddling, nuzzling, or cooing. The result of self-styled bodies seeking pleasure against one another is irrelevant to my purposes and I cannot confuse these results with my own goals. Seizures of pleasure that result in spells of rigidity or surges of paralysis, as with orgasm functions that produce even permanent collapse or demise, which I recognize to mainly occur in horses, or suspended postures of sexual rictus of the body that in every viewable way seem to duplicate stillness, are not applicable to elective stillness and cannot be counted among their legal modes.

I disavow bodies that use themselves as restraining devices against other bodies or animals, applying smothering or straitjacketing effects, employing techniques such as the dog pile, the clothesline, the roadblock, all in order to channel a paralysis style, to induce a person or animal, through force, to collaborate on a project of stillness. My stillness, should I achieve it, may not be contingent upon another person or thing. It must be summoned of my own power.

I further understand that this contract against motion does not imply a legal agreement against nutrient input or other body-sustenance strategies, activities falling under the categories of eating or feeding, but not limited to them. Gesture-free nutrition intake is permissible and advisable, whether through intravenous methods or a food-entry system that can be accomplished without the technique of chewing, handling, or in any way moving in relation to the nutrient stuffs. If I hire a male feeder or biscuit person, I acknowledge that I am responsible for any accidental motion that might occur as he moves around my body, deploying the food into my person, inputting it, injecting it, catapulting or throwing or rubbing it in with the poultice, the dinner brush, or the swab. He is permitted to move me while mediating the food into my system, but if I am seen to move toward food or him or anything or anywhere, including but not exclusive to Objects of the Night that roam outside my periphery, this contract is terminated and I might legally be killed by Susan, whom I hereby designate as my executioner should I fail the terms of this agreement. I invite Susan to come and get me. I ask Susan to end my days.

I admit that because all motion can be argued to be a collaboration pursued with another person, object, or wind, there is no time that I am not complicit in my own motion, an accomplice to the crime of nonstillness, and thus already in breach of this contract, producing hard excesses of visible behavior, betraying myself. If convicted, I may be put to sleep with a Thompson Stick and then interred in the Women's Weather Museum, put on display or exhibited in a show concerned with portraying the various ways women have failed to be still, though I admit that the verb form “to be” cannot precisely be used with regard to the condition of stillness, implying motion as it does, suggesting tremors, frenzy, spasm, activities that are seeable, which by definition are off-limits to me, as all forms of language eventually will be. I authorize in advance the use of my body as a caution against the future errors that girls not even born might be prone to commit, and I hereby license the Silentist organization, and any of its museum affiliates or community centers or shame igloos or apology huts, to apply any curatorial device whatsoever if it is deemed to create an instructional spectacle of my physical error, including, but not limited to, wall mounting, animated installation, taxidermy, hologram, math, flashlight.

Any fasting procedure conducted concurrently with this promise of stillness is an addition I make by my own design. If I fast, I fast under no impression from the Silentist organization, or any similar women's sound-prevention society or listening club, that the abstention of food intake will assist the activity of stillness here proposed. Starvation, should it occur, cannot be linked to the Silentist organization or its affiliates but is entirely the result of my own actions, which have not been influenced by any extant women's group. Nor can I at any time claim or imagine such a connection to exist, either through interpretations of their words or direct citation of such, including, but not limited to, quoting, sampling, footnoting, or applying slogans to my garments. If I starve, it is through my own active avoidance of that which would reverse starvation—namely, food, pellets, cloth, and liquids. I further understand that starvation begins the moment nutrient input or foodstuff acquisition ends, the point at which my mouth cavity lacks population and is fully hollow, save for those objects that have organic residence there, including, but not limited to, the teeth and gums and tongue. A person not eating at this very moment is technically beginning to starve and is thus legally starving, in which case I hereby admit that I am starving right now, already, and thus will have been starving before I signed this document, continuing to starve as I read it, and starving at this very moment, a statement that, when uttered, can never be untrue, which indicates that starvation is a pre-existing condition for me and not covered by any grandfather clause endorsed by the Silentist organization. Nor can I assume that to traverse this border of starvation/consumption by sandbagging my head with a lifetime supply of slow-acting food that will drip down my throat for the duration of my alert term as a person is a sanctioned antidote to the problem of terminal hunger, or that there is a sanctioned antidote for the problem of terminal hunger, not to mention a cure. I admit that it is not possible to be in a constant state of eating, or “fugue feeding,” because eating interferes with breath. For the purposes of this agreement, I recognize eating and breathing to be in a primary competition with each other to dominate the mouth.

By executing this promise of stillness, I sever all future rights to discuss the results of my actions, whether through interpretation, reflection, public memory, dispute, debate with persons who move, or otherwise. I may not use words or signs of the hand or conduct my face through a gymnastics of code that might present some person or other appropriate receptacle standing opposite me, or outside of the space where I can be said to be standing, even if I am prone on a rug and blinded by pain with a hot poker pressed against my neck, with a coherent notion of what it is like, and has been like, to be, or have been, me. Or, if this pronoun does little to produce the suggestion of my person to the attention of others,
Me,
then whatever word, words, or symbols I use to designate the flesh mistake that covers me, stands for me, actually is me, hosts me, collaborates to materialize my spirit, or leads others to believe that I am being referred to, will indicate my special accident. Doing so shall void me from this agreement and subject me to possible living-prison incarceration, hard-motion punishments, or other public demonstrations of discipline to be determined by the Silentist organization or any punishment strategist designated to act on behalf of the Silentist organization, whether publicly or in secret, or otherwise.