Notable American Women (18 page)

Does such a callus permanently guarantee an emotionless citizen?

Can a controlled flame be used to toughen his face and generate a gesture-free armor for him?

Next, where exactly is that “music” coming from, if not his mouth? I'm sure you've heard it, unless you are as deaf to relevant sounds (your wife's voice, your son's voice, your own ludicrous voice) as you sometimes seem, a low keening pitch off his body that attends his person in the daytime, like a morose sound track? (“Morose” is probably not the right word. Just to say that a boy's body is projecting its own sound track should be enough of a description, and types of music are reportedly subjective [a topic outside my expertise], so when I say it's morose, I'm only revealing the ways in which I allow myself to be sad; it becomes a tool for others to overthrow me. Meaning: Enemies of mine [fill in the goddamned blank] could use Ben to make me sad, when even his rough breathing sounds like an old German dirge. They could station him near my bed while I sleep, and dose me with a hard sadness. They could position pictures of him on my shelves and within my personal effects, leading me to pause throughout my day and spiral into nonuseful contemplation of his face, which still invites interpretation, no matter how finally I have learned to ignore the gestures living there, to never look at Ben's face, for fear of the trap there. Let me say more specifically that properties of this music arising off our son's body are able to surmount my current Grief Defense Strategy, which I admittedly developed far too late in life to be effective around the clock. My shield is down sometimes just before a meal. Moments of hunger seem somehow tied to moments of feeling. The precise relationship between the two eludes me.)

Nevertheless, nevertheless, nevertheless. Some questions for you: Should Ben's tones be transcribed by our listener (using twelve-tone behavioral notation) and then sent to a musicologist for interpretation?

Is it safe to make an audiotape of the young man, and if so, where against Ben's body, or elsewhere, should the microphone be placed?

What are the bootleg risks for such an endeavor?

Could a clever parent or person-producing company (don't fucking get me started) divine information about a person like Ben based on the sound of his body, and do we then run the risk of a person-dilution duplication, a behavior theft, in case his person is sampled and stored and broadcast for the benefit of other families, who were too lazy to raise a boy of their own, who were too stupid, who couldn't be bothered to think for even one second about what it was they were doing in creating a brand-new person, that no one in the world had ever laid eyes on, so why not steal the very details and parameters and attributes of the person they're calling Ben Marcus?

Do we leak details about our boy by allowing others to hear the sound of his body before we officially release him to view?

By publishing such sounds from our Storm Needle on a clear day, when person sounds will travel unobstructed as far as the state border, as clear as birdcalls, do we compromise our Newness Incentive and contribute to the derivative child-rearing styles of America?

And, ultimately, will learning something new about Ben end up mattering? Is it healthier to maintain, even to cultivate, a degree of mystery about the boy, so that we ourselves will not lose interest in him? Can we find out too much? Or should we strive to lose interest, in the economic sense, so as to zero our own panic in case he does emerge as a bold and altogether hardcore person with an approach to the world that might ultimately harm our own physical selves?

I have stopped short of fully disrobing the boy to finally trace the source of the sound, and the Quiet Sisters seem shy of him when his person is so loud (producing person evasions, fainting onto body rugs when he passes, hiding under cloth when he speaks, weeping if he eats grain). A young girl here, operating covertly under the name Julie, performed an Anderson out of the widow when Ben's volume grew too unbearable.

I assure you that I am not afraid, in the technical sense, of hosting a version of Ben that is naked, particularly if it means discovering tactics that might be crucial to his future. Sometimes, while scrubbing my face before undergoing the Posture Hour with Jane Dark, I might entertain a memory of the very young and undersized Ben, who, as I'm sure you'll recall, was often unattired in our midst. Dark's Posture Hour is a strenuous regimen that always seems to disarm my thought stream and render me susceptible to nonuseful recollections, and the mandatory facial scrubbing beforehand only accentuates this vulnerability. (Is the face more important than we had thought? Should it be scrubbed more vigorously, scoured, brushed? By assaulting our own faces, do we possibly somehow access all-new behaviors? Should we tear off our faces? Should we cut them free with a knife? Is there something under there?) But I recall that Ben was a baby nudist, who showed no instinct for clothing and seemed inclined, like a young buccaneer, to stride across the living room in such a manner as to foreground his sharp, angular genitals, his penis slashing here and there, often cutting the fabric barriers we'd slung from the rafters to deter his free passage within a cloth-made world: hips forward, probing the wind, arms folded behind his back, his bottom tucked so far under him that it appeared as a gaping seam up his puckered front side. His behavior was a sort of vaudeville youth pornography that came from nowhere, as though he were puppet master of his own penis, conducting it through flight patterns that seemed nearly impossible. Where did someone so young learn to make such a horror of his own crotch? He had seen no movies and read no books; in fact, he was only recently free of his life-prevention hood, the cotton bunting meant to limit his experience of the world. Was such a display consciously designed to alarm his young mother?

So you'll understand if I feel that his nudity is too emotionally treacherous for the women here who might encounter it. The nudity of a young man can lead to a wide range of emotions, most notably disappointment. And, however much I subscribe to long seasons of vague disappointment, accompanied by a low-chain starch diet to suppress my desires, disappointment produces a listless clientele, a sluggish workforce. Even as a sire, Ben was not required to fully disrobe (why complicate sexual collaboration with full nudity, introducing curiosity and repulsion all at once, a combination that all but shuts down the reproductive organs?). Not to mention that Ben could only sustain an erection if it poked through the unzipped fly of his denims, a fact I am reminded of every time I encounter a pair of his buttoned, unzipped trousers in the hamper, encrusted about the fly area with excess albumen. Even with his pants at his ankles, his concentration flagged and he lost his temper, and while the denim ringlet you designed acted briefly as a tumescence sustainer, or, in the Spanish parlance, a “cock ring,” it seemed far less cumbersome to let him operate his fornications through his zipper hole, though his blue jeans were chafing to so many of our young women here. Just one more reason there was so little conception in the house that winter.

Being his father, at least for these last days, I hope you might assume the task of disrobing Ben to sleuth a possible torso sound hole, and report to me what you discover. If you anticipate experiencing bouts of sudden loss while encountering a nude young man—your body seized by “plummet mode” though indeed you remain seated, a sure sense of descent gripping your skin, a vertical wind shaving up your legs, you will do best to conceal these sensations from our boy. Attire yourself properly in the sterilized examiner's equipment, a doctor's smock, and shoe guards. Visor yourself, or wear your hood. But in the end, it is not for me to tell you what to do with
unbidden emotions
(is that a redundant phrase?), or outsized reactions to the basic consorting styles between men, as with, in this case, a large man disrobing a small boy to discover the source of a mysterious sound, leading to your loss of breath, your frozen hands, your back seized up, your total body collapse, your Deep Regret, which actually feels like a blood condition and not just an emotion. It is so petty to feel things just because you can, and to indulge in feelings you might like to call “strong,” and to then be proud of what you call your “ability to feel,” as though it were a talent. As though, as though. He is your boy and his body is modeled after yours, apprenticing it while introducing improvements so subtle we could never guess at them, however much we believe ourselves to be
raising
him. To raise: to flay off skin and insert another body inside the pelt. From the perspective of relevancy, your response to Ben is no longer interesting. You would do well to remember that your reaction to our son is anecdotal at best. You showed long ago that feelings couldn't be proved. Should you now live by your own lesson? You should. Should you live at all? We'll see.

The real alarm: Even with the clear helmet you've introduced to Ben's wardrobe (let's see that more youth pay attention to his equipment, if not his tendency to weep during field events), he seems highly breakable and far too temporary a person, and I should like at once to rectify our home atmosphere so that our young man might at least breathe enough air to promote his little body toward a more common manhood, armored against those small dull birds that clog our Ohio airways and seem a little bit too interested in Ben's passage, trailing his sloping body like a long black kite whenever he leaves the house to stick his unmistakable and prematurely bald head into public airspace for anyone to see it. (Isn't there a famous old story about a boy who is followed by birds from city to town to country, until he is running into the woods, the birds not far behind? In the story, doesn't the boy finally hide underground, where the relentless birds can't go, though they try anyway by crashing into the earth at the perforation of the boy's disappearance, leaving an ever-growing smear of beak and feathers in the soil? Does the boy not meet a terrible end underground, a place so dark that his body has been twisted upside down for weeks, before his head, so fruity with blood, grows too enriched, too large? Is the phrase “terrible end” also a redundancy? And if there is such a famous old story, what exactly are we to deduce from Ben's apparent casting in it? Was the character's name also Ben? Did he die? Why would our Ben be taking part in a story that was written down long ago? Do the stories repeat themselves, or is Ben being derivative?)

Request: Can your team, or what's left of it (these are such quiet days in Men Town), not devise a limbering station for Ben to visit each day before breakfast, on such days when you are his Learning Host? For my part, I would be willing to surrender my commitment to Dark's Ninety Motions™ as the ideal actions for a body. I realize that Ben is a boy, though I take issue with your definition of this word, and I defer now to any movement at all you might choose for your last sessions with him, so long as that movement does not confiscate him in a Final Exit.

You're wondering now whether this note to you is itself only an articulate set of complaints, a description of a crisis, lacking in target behaviors, solutions, or rectification approaches. You're also wondering—let me keep guessing—why I would write to you at all, given my “complete control of Ben” (your words), my “mastery over the launch” (your words), my profound disregard for your strategies and designs for the person-building program initiated with respect to Ben, though the phrase “strategies and designs” rather overstates the coherency of your thinking on this project. Why include you or ask for your help, and in the same breath ridicule you and threaten your life? One answer: Such a contradiction is mysterious. I don't seem like I should need your help, yet I am asking for it. Possibly I mean to put you off guard, or to give you hope. Or I am just as selfish as you'd like to believe, and I need your exclusive wisdom regarding Ben, no matter how much I might publicly disavow your role with him. I seek your counsel in private, then ridicule you in public. This interpretation flatters your pride, and I certainly don't mind if you entertain it, however deeply wrong it actually is. (It is in my interest for you to be wrong about me. The less you understand, the more attention you will pay.)

One theory:

Mastering a launch, as every parent tries to do, also requires ceding control, hard as this is, portioning tasks to deputy figures, however weak these assistants might be, designating partial or temporary authority to Field Decoys (you) who might influence the trajectory of the subject (Ben) in small but significant ways, who are poised in small but significant ways to supplement the far more complicated work of the launch master herself, a person, in this case, who must cover such a wide range of problems and challenges that her actual hands-on work with the subject must often be farmed out to helpers with a smaller horizon of concerns, who can then report back to her and describe the tactile sensations of handling her child, interacting with him, witnessing the behavior he produces throughout the day, which is information she still requires to perfect her work, though, because she has already touched her child, and has no time or patience for repetition, she only requires reminders and updates that can easily be delivered by her staff. Much of her contact with her actual boy can be verbal, secondary. A launch master is concerned to be not just a mother but also a behavior creator, a consultant, and ultimately a specialist in the horizon, an expert in the distance, which is the final problem of the young person in America. She sculpts his ending while he has barely begun. She scouts so far ahead that sometimes her child cannot even see her. Forget about tethers and leashes and kiddy cords; a launch master takes full advantage of the so-called generation gap. She swings wide. The furthest distance between two points is a mother. Although she may appear as a speck in the distance, she is in reality huge and looming. She is the expanse, not the point. This distinction will be meaningless to you, which only illustrates how out of your league you are.