Notable American Women (15 page)

I understand that by choosing a personal paralysis zone, or Shush House, I thus designate the spot from which I may not thereafter retire. This spot must therefore be designated with care, and is hereby referred to as the Final Place, though it can also be known as the Den when I am employing covert messages in the presence of motion addicts. Under no circumstances may I infer that there is an ideal Final Place, or any such thing as a recommended area, from which it is thought best to execute the promise of stillness. Such an understanding on my part, as all understandings ultimately are, would be entirely in error and my sole responsibility and surely a potential occasion for future regret, not to mention punishment and breach of contract. Thus I concede that to draw conclusions would be illegally to engage in deduction, which is a process I choose to take on, and fail at, myself, admitting ahead of time that it is my own folly. So-called good-luck nooks and lobbies are only superstitiously termed (as all terming and naming and definining operate superstitiously to outwit silence) and cannot officially be said to impart greater likelihood of success to the woman bearing down upon herself to end all viewable actions. If I choose a Final Place that has already been chosen, or been designated the Den of another woman, be it an igloo or debris hut or woolen tent, I may either seize that place through forcing motion onto the present occupant, tempting her with motion-inducing gestures such as “the crab,” “the dash,” or “the trot,” as well as other taunting semaphores used to regulate the flight of birds, or I may vacate such an arena in favor of an unoccupied zone, though I hereby admit that there is no such thing as an unoccupied zone, that wherever I go, I do damage to what was there, by either killing or displacing it, that my presence encourages something else's absence, that the term “my body” implies no one else's body, that by moving through air and time, I kill what was attempting to rest or habitate or hold steady. I remove that thing from its chosen space and effectively deny its reentry. I act as a warden of a prison in reverse, since wherever I am, no one else can be, so that to execute this agreement is to do a violence, for which I hereby admit my guilt. I admit that even by speaking or shouting or murmuring or babbling or humming, I crowd my personal airspace, and thus someone's potential personal airspace, with code and thus limit the insertion of codes by others, deny their entry, hoard the airways, create a blockade. For this and other crimes of motion, I hereby admit my guilt.

The Fainting Project

FAINTING IS A FORM OF aggressive sleep and Null Heart attainment that has wrongly been seen as a weakness in women. Historical images of the fainting figure in the American landscape, the cinema, and literature seem to imply that the world is too strong to be tolerated, thus the woman swoons to the floor in escape, requiring a comforting rescue and sharp salts to return her to her senses.

On the contrary, fainting will be considered here as a strategic exit from consciousness, a willful blackout approach to the removal or prevention of the major emotions. In the Marcus Family Enterprise, fainting is a heroic pastime toward self-control. By fainting, we insert a curtain against the onslaught of life, and thus structure and silence the awful drama that would otherwise never cease. Fainting, for us, is a way to author our own lives and insert intermissions, the most underrated portion of any entertainment. By not fainting, we surrender our identities to the mundane chaos of time, the relentless needs of so-called people, and the assault of an American wind that possibly only gusts on people who are awake to receive it (sleeping is the only real way to avoid the wind).

Although I am obviously not a member of the 5,000 Falls Club, the elite corps of female behavior changers who have intentionally fainted or blacked out more than five thousand times, I have followed a rigid swoon program since my youth, and still rely on rapid fainting exits from life when I am otherwise too sad to eat my silencing grain, scared of my father's wood shop, or unreasonably pleased when a person touches my head. Fainting, for me, is particularly effective as a killer of guilt and a dread suppressant, though it has unfortunately proved ineffective with shame, a rather more stubborn condition.

The strategic, short blackouts achieved through willful fainting usually offer an easy antidote to the problem of recently acquired feelings. Fainting closes off the offending world; upon resuscitation with salts or girls' water or women's-frequency injections, including radio-wave body baths, most emotions have been reduced appreciably, or at least temporarily forgotten. What this suggests to the Marcus Women's Team and to the Jane Marcus Emotion Prevention Society is that the entire accessible level of feelings—what we think we feel throughout the day, our supposed personalities—is gratuitous and fleeting, given its lack of reoccurrence after fainting and revival. If these were true feelings—indeed, if there were such a thing as true feelings—they would not be so easily removed.

Ways to Faint

The Fainting Chair employs an ejection seat that launches the woman into flight, but not before depriving her of oxygen (snarfing) until dizziness sets in. Usually the Fainting Chair is of a burled walnut design, outfitted with a Lucite head-gag harness to assist with snarfing before the spring-loaded jettison is triggered. Once the woman's body is fired into the air, the sudden elevation causes a predictable blood shift from her head (diaspora), creating a dry-brain faint that can last until her heart is quiet. The dangers of the Fainting Chair involve unpredictable flight paths, bodies lost in orbit, snuffed ignitions. Nets and crash pads must be judiciously placed throughout the fainting site, and the Smelling Salts Team should be ready to dispense hardened Ohio Salt to the woman's upper lip (winterizing) in the event of a misfire. The fainting site should be high-ceilinged, with unadorned white walls, in order to track the woman's flight into her blackout. To avoid permanent loss of the woman, she should be tethered with a Sleep Leash.

Many women will not have access to professional equipment, but they can easily produce a faint through means other than a special chair. Easiest among these is the spinning, whirling action known as the Candy Cane, or the Barber's Pole. The woman raises her arms to a T shape, then spins in place until the full 360-degree horizon wobbles, tilts, and flattens onto a single plane and a faint ensues. If she is wearing the requisite red ribbon, a lovely spiral is created as she twirls into dizziness, an effect much appreciated by any Blackout Witnesses that may have gathered. A resuscitation team here is not required.

Holding the breath and rising quickly from a regular chair is a cheap, homemade simulation of the ejection seat, and nearly as effective, though flight cannot be achieved. It can be supplemented with a straining action in the face, or a full-body expulsion mime, also known as “bearing down” or “shortstopping,” though this straining can burst vessels of blood in the head, which will certainly bring on one or more resistant emotions, usually a pernicious dose of ambivalence.

The False Promise of Animal Fear

A chief use of the wild animal in emotion removal is to create a sense of vulnerability in the woman or girl, to literally spook the liquid from her until she blacks out. An extreme surge of fear can swiftly produce a faint in such persons—the body anticipates the death event and swoons away from the conflict, voiding its consciousness, rather than keeping alert to the last moments of life. Yet the temptation to hire an animal assistant to regularly threaten the woman or girl, often by startling her in her bedroom or bathroom, is misguided and must here be cautioned against, not least because it exploits the animal as a fear chemical. When an emotion-cleansing faint is produced through a surge of fright—that is, the wolf leaps through an open window and corners its prey, baring its bloody teeth and hissing—the fear response is sealed into the fainting state, and thus preserved in the woman or girl beyond any useful duration. Animal fear and other forms of predator anxiety, including the fear of fathers, are the only causes of fainting that could feasibly do more harm than good.

Blanketing the Fainter

Throwing a blanket over a fainted person (Morris) can enhance the emotion flush, or trap the feeling and keep it from escaping. Often an oil-soaked blanket, whose blaze can be easily contained by a Blackout Manager, is best suited for a quick heat extraction of panic and regret, although blanketing a Morris tends to be ineffective against happiness.

What About Dehydration?

A carefully pursued water minus will increase the occurrence of fainting throughout the regular events of a day; it does so by withering the muscle of wakefulness in the head. But dehydration can easily lead to unexpected fainting (visiting the hole), which may be dangerous. A woman or girl should stay close to the emotion-removal site during a water fast, and she should alert her Blackout Manager if she is abstaining from fluids entirely (Moses). The Manager in these cases will most likely affix the woman with a fainting pager or brown beacon, which detects a blackout, or sudden alteration of body position, and emits a shrill siren into the vicinity, bringing on the resuscitation team, who can home in on the noise until they find their downed woman.

The Primary Equipment of Fainting

I am most inclined to wear a stiff, unwashed flesh-colored turtleneck when I practice a fainting style of the antisadness or passion-dampening variety. The turtleneck limits blood flow just enough to deepen the faint, creating feelings of “dry head,” or “birch body.” While a beige neck corset can also be worn to tourniquet the head—it blends in like a scarf—the danger is that too much blood will be restricted and the faint will deepen and mature into coma. Although coma is interesting, with real potential in future behavior-changing styles, given that it dilutes emotional life in a woman, coma-resuscitation strategies like the Burp and the Bear Hug are still too jarring, tending to result in emotion surges, which lead to dizzying back drafts of envy and regret that create nearly untreatable emotional surpluses, a kind of hysteria of gratitude, elation, and fear.

The Secondary Equipment

The Salt Necklace, padded clothing, a Sleep Leash, a hood, and a helmet are all important accessories to the American Female Fainting Enterprise. A helmet should be worn in general when reading, writing, thinking, or sleeping.

The Salt Necklace enables default self-revival if a Blackout Manager becomes injured or defects to another emotion-removal group during a fainting session. Similar to a string of pearls, the necklace threads together calcified balls of salt, which ride the neck like a choker and sting a woman awake if she passes out too soon.

A Sleep Leash tethers the body to prevent long-distance ejections from the Fainting Chair (home runs). The body is kited to an anchor and snaps back to earth if the launch velocity exceeds the crash recovery quotient, a distance beyond which the body will not survive when it lands.

The padded clothing and helmet allow for hard landings without disrupting the depth of the blackout. Although broken bones can be useful in an emotion-removal program, as demonstrated in the discussion on boneless pantomime, the pain event here is too likely to cause feelings such as grief, fright, and alarm, rather than placate or remove them, which is the goal. The head, in turn, is simply too important at this time to be smashed open.

A hood is merely decorative in the fainting program, although it nicely conceals the facial contortions of a fainted woman who is struggling against revival. A woman in a hood can make startling gains in this world and elsewhere.

Underwater Fainting

This last-ditch method of fainting is dangerous to attempt alone. At the Marcus Behavior Suppression and Elimination Site, the Fainting Chair was positioned to eject my oxygen-deprived body into the learning-water tank, so my faint occurred in midair and I splashed down in full blackout. The divers on hand fished me out only when my lungs had filled with water, then resuscitated me with a basic bellows maneuver, followed by a salted sock stretched over my head. This is a method requiring teamwork and devotion, yet it adequately flushed the more stubborn strains of envy that often visited my person during childhood, including the envy I felt for myself at happier times. Submerged fainting (wet sleep) should also be undertaken if a so-called loved one dies or leaves without notice, yet women should be alerted that the recovery from this sort of grief is so quick and efficient that the deceased or departed person is sometimes entirely forgotten, leaving merely an empty feeling of contentment where a person once stood. A woman might choose to keep a Person Log in this case, to objectively remind her of the persons who supposedly once mattered to her life.

Dates

1895

CHEMIST EMILY SESSLER, forty-six, heads the first Science Week drive to aid the Vertical Horizon Project, an attempt to extend the typical citizen's field of vision. Sessler's scheme, initially opposed only by preservationists, is to craft a fire that will link the American coasts, the largest fire ever conceived, to burn in a pattern precisely designed to create tunnels of brightness deep into the sky. Sessler maintains that brightening the sky with a systematically designed fire will produce a “Horizon Crane” to yank back the barrier of the horizon, altering religious and scientific notions of the role of the Person in the atmosphere. State governments oppose the science fire, partly because Sessler insists on providing her own technicians to manage the blaze. Her technicians radically lobby for the approval of the fire, and ultimately foil their chances, by setting test flames in the perimeter surrounding Atlanta, creating a vortex of heat-generated darkness in the city itself, causing not only a blackout but a “sound-out.” Neighborhoods of Atlanta will be resistant to sound for years afterward, and a localized heat deafness emerges in the South, apparently caused by unnatural exposure to fire.

1935

Burke is born at Akron. Within months, he will use an invented language based on radio static and stuffed-mouth lamentations to control his father and mother like puppets, forcing them to copulate in public and weep openly. The parents will request of the Children's Police that the young Burke's gifts be carefully controlled, but it is suspected that even this utterance of theirs is generated by Burke himself, who sees his parents' bodies as “weapons to be used against the town, satellite forms acting on behalf of my body.” Burke's youthful demonstrations will be the first American indication that language, dispensed precisely, can regulate the behavior in a territory. It is eventually suspected that a portion of the town of Akron has been “hushed” by the careful recitation of sentences at the perimeter between Ohio and the world. Although the boy is eventually fitted by authorities in a tight, clear sock, even his restricted pantomimes create a disturbing loss of control in the animals and children in his vicinity.

1954

The American Television Industry attempts to market a Women's Television Set. The unit resembles their standard device, but is designed to receive a special-frequency broadcast from the Women's Storm Needle at Atlanta, where experiments are being conducted in images and sound that only women can perceive (also known as the Female Jesus Frequency) . The set receives little attention and will fall into immediate disuse by the few customers it gains, but the Storm Needle continues to transmit an all-vowel female music for five years. This period will prove to be the most crucial in the Silentist movement, allowing Jane Dark and her followers to travel the countryside undetected, camouflaged by the women's tones masking the Midwestern landscape, curling over the territory as, arguably, the lowest and thickest wind ever felt in America.

1955

James Water is cultivated and distributed by the Women's Medical Group. Designed by physician Valerie James, the tonic, comprised of exact water, ostensibly cancels unwanted emotions, as James surmises (prophetically) that feelings merely express an absence or surplus of water in the body, correctable through water fasts or strategies of soaking the body or hands in prepared water. A key premise of her theory is that water is the fundamental, and only reliable, recording agent of behavior. Water is thought to “see” and memorize the actions of persons. By filtering water through patients undergoing fits of various emotions, James creates supposed behavior water of these feelings that can be administered as medicine or antidote; a catalog of fluids that comprises a person's entire repertoire of behavior. James goes on to write about the centrality of water in considering the possibilities of the person in America (see
The New Water
), but warns of its danger, arguing that the next major war will be fought with water alone and that women should carry personalized water for protection, and consider water the only reliable diary, speaking their secrets privately into rivers, lakes, ponds.

1958

The Susan House, an experimental school for girls, has its beginnings in an all-girls' retreat conducted simultaneously one August evening in seven American towns. The focus of the retreats, initially, is to bury a clay head of Jesus, then meditate over the grave about the true requirements of the name of Susan, a technique of divination dating back to the Perkins Noise, when Perkins killed himself by vigorously repeating his own name, but not before achieving “immense information on the human enterprise.” The Susan House school, initially conceived as a training ground for girls named Susan and no one else, gives rise to several specialty name-centered educational institutions and drives a new and terribly divisive political wedge into the population. Although many parents change the names of their children to Susan, only persons born into the name will be considered for enrollment (see
The Unwritten
Books of Susan
).

1959

Animal artist George Rafkill, twenty-nine, is arrested when it is discovered that his popular portraits of horses and dogs,
The
Animals of America,
which sell to hotels and restaurants, and can also be embroidered on flags, bear undeniable facial resemblances to thirteen women who have been missing from his Akron neighborhood for the past year. While Rafkill claims that he can “paint the dead,” authorities point out that he only paints those dead that are also missing and believed murdered.

1963

Athlete Emily Anderson, forty-five, who has been imprisoned for interfering with runners at a men's track meet in Chicago just as they neared the finish line, is fatally injured when she is shot from a cannon into a brick wall during her “Hard to Die” show in July. An unknown Silentist, in a show of grief over the death of the quiet athlete, catapults herself from an English cliff into the sea, and an
Anderson
comes to be known as an act of mourning in which women launch themselves into the air for extended distances, often landing in the sea, but not necessarily.

1974

Men from Akron stack bones outside their houses to absorb the sound of women. When no bones are available, an entire person is used. Every family keeps a “Ben Marcus” for this purpose. Often he is sent out on thieving missions, smeared with a special scent, in order to attract the women's attention. Now the women are required by the Silence Commission to carry a small bone in a holster. If they wish to be heard, they must hurl the bone into a field, creating a current of deafness in the air. When men cough or talk into their hands, they are praying to their own bones. The women ride velvet-covered bone cages, called “horses.” They produce an aggressive, highly pitched physical weeping, known as “galloping,” and in this way spread their feelings across large fields of grass.

1978

The first plaster casting is taken of the inside of Bob Riddle's mouth, including the cavity that extends down his windpipe, ending at his lungs. When the casting is removed and hardens, it resembles a roughly shaped sphere (the inside of the mouth) with a ridged handle attached, and is considered a primary shape around which his body has grown, a hardened form of the white space at Riddle's center, a sculpture of his nothingness. Riddle calls it, incorrectly and rather pretentiously, his “soul,” given that it represents his “language cave,” and he argues that this shape is the primary object by which a person can be understood, and possibly controlled. The object will later be known as a Thompson Stick, as important a shape as the sphere or triangle. Silentists will quietly beat the earth with it, releasing pockets of sound that have been stored in the soil.

1979

Jane Marcus occurs in Deep Ohio. She has an accurate walking style and can converse in one language. She sleeps lying down, and uses a filter called “hair” to attract her mates. The small people in her house call her “Mother,” and she answers them by collapsing the tension in her face, a release that passes for listening. Her motion is voice-activated. She has one pair of eyes, and they are often tired and red. When she uses her arms to prop up a document of regret, known as a “book,” her bones form an ancient shape, and a brief flashing signal is sent out through the window and into the fields beyond her house, where the hive is.