Notable American Women (2 page)

Nor do I mean to suggest that a retarded or simple man such as Ben can have no use in a society. I am in favor of a caste system in which the dull, the boring, the slow and sugar-minded American animals—often mistaken for “people” and likewise privileged—are given challenging tasks and rewarded with carefully controlled sexual intercourse, excellent bread and butter, and weekend meat. Ben is a strong lad and can reliably carry sacks of soil, sing a convincing love song, and show unmatched devotion to his “mother.” These tasks certainly can find their expression in the world at large without offending or hindering the more necessary living persons. Indeed, the front-runners of civilization
need
helpers such as Ben, and not just for sexual release, but also to fix roads, level trees, and dig position trenches for women's-frequency hijacking.

But if you are in a position to look at this Ben Marcus, who I'm sure will do his best to get in your face at every opportunity and show himself to you (such is his ignorance of his own hellishly depressing appearance), then I invite you to do so, and not uncritically, being honest with yourselves about what you see, and what you don't, allowing your deepest judgments to emerge. It will help to scan smartly away from his form on occasion to the more realistic objects in the landscape—the trees and houses and people that happen to fill your view, or the bookcases, lamps, and flowers—in order to appreciate just how wrongly Ben's body juts out of nothingness into a space worthy of a more substantial creature or household object; considering all the while, if you are able, what a miracle it is that even routine self-examination on his part—while brushing his teeth or soaping his face before a mirror—has not yet led him to quietly end his own life down at the river, with a rope or gun or razor, and give everyone concerned a needed breather from the exhausting obligation of his existence.

Certainly you would, at the least (if you do not agree that he makes a good candidate for a respectably necessary suicide), have to then agree that he cuts a poor form—he is stooped and bald and sad, his gait is a slouching apology against motion, his pockets are empty, the poor fellow has lost his mother, and I would guess that no pretty creature has handled his penis in months. His body is not exactly the makings of a hero, and I warrant it emits much disagreeable waste.

Naturally, a son who is crippled or ill, weak and sad, or palsied with fear at the thought of life without his father— who may or may not have been
brought to ground
by a group that calls itself the Silentists—incites a degree of sympathy in the father. The father remembers those early moments of the Marcus life project, when Benjamin was just a small measure of flesh called a child—the size of his father's hand, but in no way as interesting to look at—when he labored on palms and knees to ascend the ever-dashing body of his father, who moved through the fields with supremacy. At the time, Benjamin enjoyed seeking information within the father's imposing beard, or his soundproof wig, which certainly must have appeared as a nest of treasures, within which something knowable might be discovered. He sought carriage now and again in a swing set built and anchored to the turf by the father, who stood behind the swing to ensure that it traversed an agreeable arc, containing the disastrous body of the son. Often the father strapped Ben into his seat and sent him “Around the World,” over the top bar of the swing, and over again, until Ben was panting fast and crazy in the eyes, a bit wobbly on his feet after he climbed back down to earth, but always sweetly smiling, trusting the man who ruled him even when the sensations of that rulership were not entirely agreeable or were beyond the boy's comprehension.

The young Ben was a collector: flowers, buttons, stones, and any scrap of equipment that littered the compound. Everything small that he could remove from the world and bring to his parents' attention. He carried his stuff in wagons and could thrill himself with the littlest achievements, often fancying himself a key figure in the important job of shuttling junk from here to there. It was a sobering but necessary task each time to remind the little fellow that he had not invented these special things—the buttons and stones and sticks, the disposable hearing cups and seared swatches of cotton—that all the world's beauty existed before him, and did not require him for survival. He was just a person, and everything he thought and did had already been thought and done. Perhaps he should seek to discover something that wasn't so obvious and abundant in nature, it was suggested. To say something new, to do something startling. That he has not proved himself capable of even a single original act, discovery, or statement is nearly as damning as his frequent weeping and his neurotically induced deafness.

And while my son's illness, if such it is—the apparent onset of “motion fear” and his supposed deafness to certain words, as spoken by certain people—provides a partial excuse for his failure to come forth as a creature of distinction, a man who might soldier over every difficulty to slaughter his life opponents with great ferocity, either with weapons or through the sheer verbal power that runs deeply in his family (on his father's side), he is, in fact, short of any kind of battle plan, lacks the coordination to even flee from a predator, and is weakly stocked with reproductive fire, given his inability to father very many effective persons during his enforced copulations with the Silent Mothers.

Let it not be said that this father is without an animal response to the son, in which warmth of the old-fashioned kind flows in the chest and a certain pity is forthcoming no matter what feeble
gestures of life
the Ben Marcus system manages to perform, even if the boy were to attempt to physically beat the father, a type of aggression the father is completely prepared for, by the way, no matter how dark it is in here, or how much advantage a creature has who can see his own goddamned hands. The father would beat down the son's attack, naturally, wound him just enough to reaffirm the boy's all-encompassing weakness and widespread failure, and then hold his injured body and attempt a soothing litany of comfort words. I am sure it is what he wants, and it is not beyond me to talk soft. I can make a creature weep and will do it if I see the need, if it leads to a situation I might require within my larger strategy. I have said things to this boy that, if heard by an outsider, would fairly indicate a degree of affection being transmitted. It could easily be understood as love: “There there, little Ben.” “Egghead.” “Bald Beauty.” “Sugar Cheeks.” “It's okay, Sweetbread.” “Just breathe.” “Tiny Shark.” “Little Tiny Shark.” “Skin Fish.” All little nicknames that produce an unreasonable amount of pleasure in his person, cause him to curl up and grin and gaze at the sky.

Oh no, I admit it, the father is truly sympathetic to weakness, frailty, and lost hope in a son, should it be exhibited, particularly when the son has been
regularly tormented in the worst
way by an animal,
indeed brought to submission by a dog, and used for unbearable purposes by a group proposing an end to all motion. Allowances are made for every kind of error. Nor is it that a father wishes to make a case, either legal or emotional, against his son (which is not to say that a good case could not be made, because it certainly could), or wishes that his son would stay his hand at attempting to narrate
events he cannot possibly
grasp,
whether or not they happened to him, or concepts that, when presented without the appropriate theory and context, such as the Weather Museum, for Christ's sake, the Clay Head of Jesus, and the Women's Frequency of Sound,
appear ridiculous and untrue,
and will be believed by no one, dumb ass. A father is pleased anytime a son can regulate his busily superficial mind for the time required to command a book's worth of language to the page. Such a feat is particularly notable, given the aforementioned mental challenges of the son, when it can barely be expected that the son remember to bring potatoes to the underground area where his father waits to be fed. When his only task is to
bring a potato to his goddamned father,
or to let new air into his father's area, where the old air has already been used, because there is a living man down here!, or to walk his father up above when his father has gone months, motherfucker, without seeing a house, a stick, a bird, a window, a road,
the key objects of our time,
when his father has no new air to clean his eyes and rid his skin of the language fluid poured in by the man with the tube, who speaks his Sentences of Menace, trying to burst the father's body with words. Let a man wash himself, and stride in the open air, for fuck's sake! Given his systematic incompetence and neglect of the one person he was born to love, how can a single word from Ben Marcus's rotten, filthy heart be trusted?

Granted, I love my son dearly. He has been a sweet boy at times (I can picture his long head sailing through the air like a ball), and rather touching to observe, despite his failures. He is cute, with his wet red mouth, and it would no doubt be interesting to dress him in a costume to entertain the members of a picnic, to inflate balloons and dazzle the children, perhaps, or to pretend he was a horse or some other simpler creature of this world.

I love what keeps me alive, and my son is an extension of my body, a prosthesis, you understand, that I can dispatch on my behalf to prowl my former house, to collect objects, or witness conditions that might prove to be a revelation upon examination. A father must continually be in a state of study, should he not? I care for this fellow because he is an apparatus that can investigate areas my own local body can no longer achieve. In that sense, my son is the part of myself that still operates
at
large.
And although physical harm to his body does not technically hurt me, if his body were prevented from its task in the greater world, if he were finally captured by the authorities (that is, if personal failure and disappointment were policed and punished by law), my own body would eventually suffer because its special flesh satellite had been severed. There is also a small chance that I might starve without him.

You might think that ditto is true for your son, that all of the above applies in spades to whatever awful creature you fucked for and birthed into the Ohio pasture to grow into some kind of person who would only live to fail repeatedly before your eyes, to wither, no matter how you watered him. Nothing could be worse than to watch one's own bodily product fail to learn to swim, I'm sure, or smash his teeth on the rung of a ladder and be forever a kind but ugly man.

But you cannot share my grief unless your son is also a shandy, but not the kind of shandy who crouches over men's hips to host the probing of their genitals, but rather one who is supplicated to the dog of the house—you heard me—the quietly elegant creature on all fours who seeks and finds dominion over your son with hygienic regularity, who tracks him down outside in the yard or inside in the den to play horsey, a dog and a man playing horse, giddyap and let's go at it, this creature all over your son, who is too scared, or too secretly pleased, to assert his evolutionary supremacy and beat back the amorous advance, until his shoulders are calloused from the paws of a dog and he practically wears an apron for the animal, so total is his submission.

There is then a point when a father says so long, farewell, good-bye to a boy who has traversed so far from actions that might be considered human that he is only the bitch of a beast who eats out of a bowl, a kind of whore to a four-legged “man” that has him in every room of the house and in the field or at the pond and even on the flannel pillow in the kennel. The father becomes deprived of the child; he enters a state of child minus and is in need of a new brood.

It is therefore asked that those examining this written artifact, or listening to its delivery, defer to the voice of
this
father, the overfather, the father of fathers. If confusion results in such a pursuit—if too many fathers present themselves as figures of authority seeking to exercise power upon your person, to caress or handle you, to dictate the dangers of the day, or to weep just when you doubted their humanity—let it be remembered that the father who commands your attention
at this very
moment
should be given dominion over whatever local father happens to obtain in your vicinity, even if that local father appears familiar and kind, the lover of your mother, warm, a dispenser of money, and fatherlike in other comforting ways. Even if he is the man who appears to be posing in those old photographs, holding an early version of you in his arms and possibly kissing your head. If a picture of him now makes your chest come aglow, if speculation or remembrance of his death causes empty black alarm—he is at all costs to be refused, please, dismissed and forgotten. You are to consider him a decoy father sent to test your fealty while your real father waits trapped in a hole, fathering you from afar. This is not solely because I am a superior figure to your local father, or because I could reduce your local father to a mess of apologies and contradictions if I were allowed to occupy the same room as he does, to interrogate or debate him on
the complications, the difficulty, the serious flaw to the life project.
Nor is it because I am greater in physical prowess than your local father, could throw him in a pit or storm-fist his body to sleep, beat him in a foot-race or humiliate him at chess, outwit him in any conversation about a machine or the building of a house or the theory and use of every tool in his probably inferior tool chest. Nor indeed is it solely because I could twist your local father's arm up his back, then turn him to face you so you could see his agony as he admits that, no, he doesn't love you and how, if it came down to it, he would save himself, would sacrifice you to whatever threat came along, a dog, an intruder, a flood—you're on your own!—because he doesn't want to die either, this man masquerading as your father, the Halloween version, whom I am more than happy to unmask, the fraud.