Notable American Women (3 page)

And this is where you must ultimately prefer me to any so-called father you may have known before.

Your local father is afraid of everything, is only a baby, a whimpering infant who wants his parents, too, needs to be comforted, soothed, supported, and stroked until he sleeps. His secret is that he wishes it would all go away. You in particular; you are only a horrible responsibility made of flesh. Be gone, too, the world and everything big or little inside it, be forever gone, because it is terribly hard to be him, and no one has any idea how hard it is just to stay alive, to breathe freely, to walk along the road without collapsing in fear and fatigue. To just hide and sleep under a blanket where no one can find him, particularly not you, the creature he created, who now expects his holy everlasting love and will not be gone or ever, ever leave him the hell alone.

I vouchsafe that you will not encounter these problems with me.

You'll note that when a man is rendered to an underground compartment, such as the case with myself, he becomes, among other things, immune to category, beyond a single family, a supervisor of the world he left behind. Such a one is the ideal father. He is a man without weather, upon whom weather cannot act. Do not underestimate this. Not rained upon. Not gusted over, or snowed on, or blown over, or burned by the sun, hidden in fog, lost at sea, killed at work, crushed in a crowd, broken in a fall off a bridge, wounded by the words of his wife, smashed with a hammer, washed away in a flood, or ever struck by sticks flying loose in a storm. Everything that has ever happened above ground has been hellaciously awful. There has been no event under the sun that has not killed people. And none of it can touch him. He is outside of circumstance. He wears a shell of earth on him. He is pure mind. Father mind.

Throughout history, all important Command Centers— where key strategies have been decided and the Lost People of this world have been instructed through the haze—all of these Command Centers have existed underground, below the flow of the projectiles that reduce every other creature under the light into such shivering wrecks in need of protection. If your local father is not at the Command Center,
for I do not see anyone else here with me
—if he is sleeping, or tending the yard, or laughing and splashing in a pool—then I ask you how he can be an effective ruler. Is it not true that he has vacated his throne, and is now simply a boy who would cry like a child as soon as he saw me walking toward him? The minute I approached to take charge of the situation, your so-called father would collapse and fold into my arms with tears of relief and become simply one more of my children—
There there—
making him only a brother to you, an older brother who briefly thought he knew something and could lead the way.

But Father is home now and your older brother can stop pretending.

You must trust me and love me and let me lead you free of sorrow and small thoughts, little ones, because God of God Almighty I'm the father of fathers, who knows and thinks and feels so that you don't have to. And you—if you are listening and at all alive and in need, if it hurts and you are scared, and every day is increasingly an impossible prospect—you are my son, my daughter, my little one, all grown-up, so sweet, so tall, a little bitty thing, aren't you, throbbing and new to the hot sun that spotlights your approach over this earth, a joy to behold, my darling creatures crawling so intently over the soil, homing in on the voice flowing out of the hole and through the sticks and shrubs of Ohio and America into your hearts. A river of sound from the mouth of your father. Swim into me and all will be well.

You have always known that I am him, the one to father you home.

Let it happen. Say good-bye to the old. Forget Ben Marcus and his world of lies. I am not the father of such a one, but I am yours, and yours, and yours. Come to me. We're family.
There
there.
All will forever be all right.

Your father,
Michael Marcus

2

The Ohio Heartless

Shushing the Father
Blueprint
Better Reading Through Food
Dates
The Name Machine

Shushing the Father

I DO NOT RECALL THAT Pal ever resorted to words. Mostly, he just ran and jumped and ate the brown behavior cakes, much like I did, but better and harder. When Pal swam in the learning pond, he dog-paddled with his head up and his tongue hanging from his mouth, as though he had shouted up a thick, dark syrup that froze between his lips.

Pal was a black friend and he growled deeper than an animal. When I growled like him, we made a booming forest sound, enough to bother the women into throwing their listening cloth at us. His hair was one length all over his body, clusters of fine needles on my skin that set me shivering and needing to pee. I had to run to the shrubs and squeeze at myself in private until the terrible itchiness was gone. I wanted to tear him apart to see what exactly he made me feel—to put pieces of him on a table and understand his insides. His hard black head was mostly all I ever saw, a spot of nothing that I wanted to follow. Whatever I couldn't grab and hold and keep was Pal. He was the only thing that wasn't mine, which made me as angry at him as if he were my brother.

I first met him in the arms of the great Jane Dark, who appeared at our house, to a black-carpet reception, along with her army of listening assistants: full-sized girls with stethoscopes and notebooks, wearing streamlined beige hearing suits. The girls stood outside our house that day and looked at our street in grim fascination, as though they had read somewhere it would soon be destroyed. From my window, I watched them, and they never flinched. Our big fake white house could hardly withstand so much staring; it did nothing but die in place as they stood there. Each girl looked almost the same. Sharp hair in a chunk of bang just over her eyes, a body buried under cloth, white shoes shining against the soil like spilled paint. An embarrassing amount of sunlight glowed on the cups the girls all held in their white-gloved hands. It was enough to blind someone who might be trying to figure out who they were.

Later into Dark's residency, the girls performed fine outdoor spectacles that reminded us how little we had done in our yard. You see someone using your own house better than you've ever used it, and you go to your room and close the door. Sometimes the girls linked their arms in a human chain on the lawn while Dark worked her behavior removals inside, rendering my mother a perfectly quiet American citizen, teaching her the new silence. The girls would form a line and slice through the air like the arm of a carnival ride. A heavyset young lady anchored the unit, while an eggy little handful of a girl flew in the windy end position. If she lifted high enough on the swinging limb of bodies, she twirled her rope and created vocalizations up there in the air, grabbing leaves and singing, often catching scratches about her face from tree branches that didn't much abide her kind of flight. Sometimes she zoomed by my window and I would reach out and try to touch her, like sticking my fingers into a fan. At night, I could hear the hum of bodies whipping through the air as the girls waited outside for instructions from Dark.

Except Dark did not speak at night because the darkness lowered her voice so much, it frightened her women. She slept in a sentry harness outside my mother's bedroom door, her hands dangling like roots, wrapped in the translucent linen that was starting to fill our house, baffling every sound-making thing until nothing more than the smallest whimpers could escape from it. She rested and kept watch. Even sleeping, she muted our house with her long, soft body, a silence that lasted well into the morning.

Ms. Dark came into our house like an animal who owned something. She walked upright and carried a scary cloth. When she approached some of our furniture or pottery— including old bowls my sister had made, which held her private smelling salts—Dark held the cloth to her mouth, swallowing and coughing at once in a gesture of inventory. For each piece of our property, she raised the cloth to her lips and worked her mouth into it, as though it were a radio she could talk to. I tried to hide from her, but her girls set up so many picks and body barriers that she found me at once and the cloth rose again to her mouth—a dirty white linen, like a rag from my father's shed. All I could see of her face were her flat eyes, puddles of oily color in her head. My mother accompanied her, held the hem of her shirt, and whispered a mouth-straining message into Dark's hood that sounded like the end of a sick animal's breath. I felt sorry for my mother, whose neck wrinkled up in back like an old man's face. From behind, she looked like someone else's father. I had not heard her whisper before, and it sounded as though she might be in trouble, wheezing at the high, desperate end of her breath, where words sound like a failing engine. Dark stuffed the cloth between her lips as she listened, and for a moment it sounded as though she were sobbing, because a heaving arose from within the hood, a stuttering intake of breath seizing her shoulders as if she were feeding from her hands. But when the cloth finally revealed her face and she moved once again among our furnishings, Dark's mouth was dry and bloodless, rimmed with a powdery saliva, and she herself seemed as much without feeling as anyone ever had been in our house.

I stood still as the retinue continued to survey the objects of our home. Two girls slid toward me and pinned a small tag to my pajama top. Their fingers were buttery on my neck and their hair scratched at me like wire. The tag was fastened just under my chin, and I had to scrunch up to see the long code embedded on it, a set of numbers and letters spelling nothing I had read before. I touched the symbols, and they made more sense under my fingers, but before I could figure out a message, my hand was slapped away. Dark lowered her arms as she passed me, and for a second I could smell the cloth go by my face.

The reception carried on in this manner for far too long. When Dark arrived at a window, she took slow postures there in the light—reducing herself so much in space that another woman could have been tarped around her—and we were all supposed to wait there as though we were looking at a painting that might suddenly prove interesting. My mother crouched nearby and squinted at Dark. She tried the postures that Dark had struck, but my mother was too tall and she kept losing her balance, giggling loudly as she toppled, exaggerating her embarrassment, upon which Dark was polite enough not to remark. Some of the assistants stood by my mother and braced her from falling over. I had not seen her allow herself to be handled so freely before. People were actually touching my mother. Other girls made writing gestures in their notebooks, their hands dipping and looping into the paper as if they were sewing up someone's body. I did not need to stand like a fragile old lady while people massaged my arms and held me upright, but standing upright at all seemed difficult in that company, as the women around me did everything but that: crouching, lunging, going airless in their bodies as they draped themselves like pelts over our furniture. Standing made me feel too tall, in charge of something. I thought I should issue a command or make a ruling, but I could only look at one thing, at the man they had brought with them, who hadn't hit the floor yet, who was too perfect for me to see, who would not look at me at all.

Pal was carried from room to room that day because Ms. Dark would not let him walk the floors on his own. “A bomb with a heart,” she called him. When his heart stopped, he would go off and there would be a sad time of thunder, with thunder so slow that people would collapse and houses would take great fractures in their sides, with people pouring from the seams, running for their lives. Every time she said “thunder,” she squinted at me, filtering the word toward me with her eyes until I forgot what it meant. She said “thunder” as if it were my name. She said it so much in the way I would imagine my mother saying it, if my mother talked and this were the only word she was allowed to say, a word that would have to stand for everything she felt, that I wanted to run out of the house and dive deep into the learning pond, until I had reached the cold, dark bottom. The girls around her nodded in agreement. I didn't like how words sounded on her face: frozen bits of her body she was retching up. We had to be very careful, Dark said; we had to keep Pal alive no matter what. His dying would pull the plug on something terrible. She held Pal in front of her, her white shirt blocked by a great spot of black water in the shape of something living. He had legs that were hard and long and made me hungry. I wanted to be held against somebody so that I looked like that: like nothing, like a hole into nowhere, like a piece of sleep. Jane Dark was someone to disappear against. The whole time she carried him, Pal kept his eyes closed, as though a switch had to be flipped for him to wake up and look around. I moved to the stairs and watched, concentrating my whole head at him to see if he would open his eyes, but Pal slept hard against Jane Dark, with a wet mouth. Nothing I could do in that house full of quiet people would wake him up.

I wandered upstairs. All of these old people in my house made it hard for me to breathe. They were too soft. Somebody might break. No one was singing and there were no sandwiches.

In my room, I looked out the window to see where my father might be hiding. A visit from so many people was bound to frighten him off. He would have run to the shed. He would be peeking from behind a tree. Soon we would hear his scared little song.

The day was pale enough to reveal a finality of mountains in the distance, and everything looked as it ever did: shrubs buried softly in a soil as loose as black rice, the learning pond set too low to the ground, birds flying poorly and without purpose, the sun blocked by a cloud the shape of our house. Above the furnace, a sharp string of behavior smoke was breaking up as it floated over the learning pond. A convoy of small blue trucks glowed on our street as if they were see-through— Dark's vehicles parked in neat formation. A flock of birds must have pierced through a small opening in one of them, because a storm of sharp black bits whirled within, the birds as fast and small as bees in a jar.

Below me on the grass in front of the house, a small man was pinned on his back by a circle of girls. My father did not look as disheveled as he should have, considering what it must have taken for the girls to wrestle him down. It would have been just like him to surrender to their grasp too easily, to play along until he was their prisoner, happy to have so many young women minding after him. All he ever wanted was to be an accomplice in his own capture. He must have sat down with pleasure when they set upon him. He must have exaggerated his alarm when they finally pinned him down.

If I held my breath, I could zoom my sight in right up close to his simple face, to a proximity no son should be allowed, and I quickly saw much too much of my father, an amount of his person I didn't think possible, which made me scared and disappointed by him at the same time. He should not be viewable so close-up, I thought. He should not be that dismissible. The more I held my breath, the more I felt I could leave my room through the window and swoop down through the circle of girls right up against my father's red, struggling face, not stopping there, but entering my father at his hard red mouth and plunging directly to the underside of his face, where I could look back out from his head at a ring of girls' faces encircling a cakelike round of sky, and, far beyond that, see the tiny face of a boy framed in glass, watching me as if it were my turn to be alive. I did not much want to be inside my father's face this way, restrained by children, while my son watched me from his window. No matter how hard I tried, I only noticed what was wrong: the clear flag we had raised alongside the spire on the roof, the unfinished shed where my learning was supposed to happen when Mother wasn't home, and then the learning pond itself, which from my father's point of view looked like an unpromising little puddle and nothing more. The water was muddy and slow and dead. A person might float on that water and never change. He might drink it and still remain himself for the rest of his life.

I breathed. I blinked. I turned my head and exhaled in hard, short bursts until I had shaken my father's perspective. My sight was thin and clean and my own again. When I returned to the window, the picture was foggy and my father was just another man brought to ground by an efficient team of girls, so many of them that he didn't have a chance. He wrestled vaguely against them on the grass, but they kept their feet on him and made clapping gestures in front of their chests. Something about the way the girls clapped seemed to gather too many birds into their midst, a cluster of black objects that fell heavily to the grass. The claps were short and hard, not at all like music; more like a code of command. The birds gathered nearby, and some of them fell to their backs and seemed to rest there, their brittle legs twitching each time the girls changed the cadence of their clapping. None of it seemed to have anything to do with my father.

I cranked the window closed and took off my clothes. It was time to hold my breath and practice fainting. There were too many wrong, new things in the day, and I had to drop away into the sweet brown light of a good four-minute faint, enough to make the day's events seem like someone else's life, happening in a smaller and softer house a good distance down the road from here.

Before I could clear a blackout area for myself—roll out the emotion rug, remove all sharp objects within the safety diameter—I heard footsteps coming slow and heavy down the hallway, someone's body drumming at me. I was not used to visitors. This was the sound of someone making an exciting mistake. The steps were exaggerated, heavy and sarcastic, by someone who must have thought that walking itself was a joke, to be parodied if done at all. Thundering toward me now, the little man. I knew that I would not be fainting for some time. This would be a good deal better than that. My door trembled with his approach. I turned and waited, trying my best to relax my face.

There's probably no other way to describe what Pal did than to say that he found me out with his mouth, that he needed to know something, and the answer was somewhere on my person.