Notable American Women (9 page)

The Name Machine

I'LL NOT BE ABLE TO LIST each name we called my sister. The process would be exhausting, requiring me to relive my sister's pitiful life. There are additionally copyright issues connected with persons that are officially the holdings of the government, which is still the case with my sister, despite her demise. To reproduce the precise arc of names that she traversed during her life in our house would be to infringe on a life narrative owned by the American Naming Authority. It will suffice to select those names sufficiently resonant of her, ones that will seem to speak of the girl she was rather than of some general American female figure, although it could be argued that we can no longer speak with any accuracy of a specific person, that the specific person has evolved and given way to the general woman, distinguished primarily by her name.

The names defined here derive from a bank of easily pronounceable and typical slogans used to single out various female persons of America and beyond. A natural bias will be evident toward names that can be sounded with the mouth. The snap, clap, and wave, while useful and namelike in their effect (the woman or girl is alerted, warned, reminded, soothed), are generally of equal use against men, and therefore of little use here. Gestures of language that require no accompanying vocal pitch, such as gendered semaphore, used in the Salt Flats during the advent of women's silent television, or Women's Sign Language (WSL), developed in the '70s as a highly stylized but difficult offshoot of American Sign Language, now nearly obsolete because of the strenuous demands it placed upon the hips and hands, were never successful enough with my sister to warrant inclusion in the study. She plainly didn't respond to the various postures and physical attitudes we presented to her—our contortions and pantomime proved not theatrical enough to distract her into action. No shapes we made with our hands could convince her that there was important language to be had in our activity, and she often sat at the window, waiting for a spoken name, without which she could not begin the task of becoming herself.

This is certainly not to imply that communication between persons and living things requires tone or sound, or that deaf figures of the female communities can have no names. There is always written text, to be apprehended through visual or tactile means, as well as the German-American technique of “handling” the name of a woman onto her thigh. My sister, as it happens, did not respond in any useful way to our repeated and varied handling of her body. As rough as we were, it made no apparent impression on her.

Here the American female name is regarded as a short, often brilliant word. Rarely should it inaccurately capture the person it targets, and its resistance to alternate uses, modifications, translations, and disruptions is an affirmation that individuals can and should be
entirely defined
by a sharp sound out of the mouth—these definitions have simply yet to be developed and written. Once they are, we will know what there is to know about all future persons who take on one of the appellations listed in the American Bank of Names, striving in their own particular way to become women of distinction.

Nicknames, admittedly, allow for a broader range of fetching, commanding, and calling, but the nickname only indicates an attribute or device of a person, such as the length of her legs, the way she sleeps, how she bounces a ball (in this case: “Sticks,” “Taffy,” “Horse”). A name, as the government instructs, can no longer be an accessory of a person, but must be her key component, without which the person would fold, crumble. She would cease, in fact, to be a person. The nickname, and more particularly the endearment (“Honey,” “Doddy,” “Love,” “Lady”), speaks to a deeper mistrust of the original name, a fear of acknowledging the person at hand. If it is possible to change a person by changing her name, why not employ a name of diminished potential and thus diminish or destroy the person? It's a valid concern. When a man modifies or adorns a woman's name, or dispatches an endearment into her vicinity, he is attempting at once to alter and deny her, to dilute the privacy of the category she has inherited and to require that she respond as someone quite less than herself. (Conversely, women who are scared of their own names are also typically afraid of mirrors.) The movement toward a single name for the entire female community (“Jill,” “James,” “Jackie”)—as aggressively espoused by Sernier and practiced by his younger employees—would disastrously limit the emotional possibilities for women and, rather than unify them as the Bible claims, probably force a so-called girls' war in their ranks.

The task of my family in this regard was to process and unravel the names that arrived in the mail, then dispatch them onto my sister, generally with the naming bullhorn, a small seashell my mother carved for the purpose. We were enlisted by the government to participate in what was being called the most comprehensive book ever attempted, a study meant to catalog the names of American women. In the book, each name is followed by a set of tendencies that are certain to arise if the user employs the name as the full-time slogan for herself. The book is meant to serve as a catalog of likely actions, not only to predict various future American behaviors but to control them. If the government regulates the demographics of name distributions, using a careful system of quotas, it can generate desired behaviors in a territory, as well as prevent behavior that does not seem promising. It's not exactly a style of warfare as much as it is deep dramatic control over the country. The book remains unpublished, but its authors are reported to be numerous, somewhere in the thousands, each working blind to the efforts of the others. In my possession are only the notes taken during the naming experiments on my sister—an intuitive set of definitions of the names she inhabited. We were not instructed how to define the names we were given, only to use them, study them, employ whatever research we could devise. I therefore have no notion if our material was ever incorporated into the text. We submitted it promptly but never received word on the matter.

We served up the names to my sister one by one and watched her change beneath them. Researchers here might say that she became “herself” or that it was her body expressing its name, as if something does not know what it is until the proper sound is launched at it. Each new morning that she appeared before us and we announced the name for the day through the bullhorn, we saw her become the new girl and release the old one, drop the gestures and habits and faces that the last name had demanded of her and start to search for the necessities of the new name.

I presume that other men launch their childhoods with sticks and mitts and balls, skinned knees, a sockful of crickets, and other accessories. They are shoved onto a lawn, where they know the routine, can find the snake or book of matches, sniff out water, or sit in a children's ditch and watch the sky with their light and delicate heads. But I was the designated writer among us, unable to walk across grass or throw or catch or hide, equipped only with the stylus and pad, made to create our life in the form of notes on a page. This was unfortunate, because I don't like to write, I don't like to read, and I like language itself even less. My father read to me as a boy and I was mannered enough not to stop him. It was unbearable—book after book that failed to make or change me, my father's lips twisting and stretching during a supposed story hour, massaging a stream of nonsense inside his mouth. I have always tried to be polite about words—good manners are imperative in the face of a father wrestling with a system that has so clearly failed—yet I find language plainly embarrassing. It is poor form, bad manners, that so much hope is pinned to such wrong sounds out of the mouth, to what is really only a sophisticated form of shouting and pain. It is not pleasant for me to hear “foreign” languages, either. All languages are clearly alien and untrue, and, absent of so-called meaning, it is repeatedly clear that language is a social form of barely controlled weeping, a more sophisticated way to cry. To speak is to grieve, and I would prefer not to listen to a weeping animal all day and every day, sobbing and desperate and lost. Particularly when that animal calls itself my father.

Each time we changed my sister's name, she shed a brittle layer of skin. The skins accrued at first in the firewood bin and were meant to indicate something final of the name that had been shed—a print, an echo, a husk, although we knew not what. They were soft in my hands, devoid of information, and quite like what I always thought was meant by a “blanket,” a boy's little towel, something to shield me from the daily wind that got into my room. It is not that the skins resembled a person anymore, or stood for one, or acted as a map of the past. They were, rather, a part of my sister I could have to myself—soft, foldable, smelling of bitter soap, perhaps like a toy she might have used. I kept them for hand warmers, penciled my pictures into their flaky surfaces, draped them over my bedroom lamp for spidery lighting effects and the whiff of a slightly burnt wind. Maybe I smelled something deeper as the skins burned away on the bulb, floating in and out of the cone of light that enabled my infrequent passage from bed to door, at such times when my bedpan was full. There was nothing of food to the smell, only houses, hands, glass, and hair. And her. They smelled of her.

Oddly, these skins my sister shed seemed to serve as a repellent to my sister herself, as if smelling her own body were uncomfortable for her. She would not come near my room when I was using them. Nor would she approach me, particularly if I wrapped myself in parts of her old body and walked through the halls, or bathed in a caul of her husks, which would cling to my skin in a gluey callus when they were wet. No one, I would venture, likes to be understood as deeply as I was understanding my sister at that time, shrouding myself in the flakes of her body that she had lost, wearing her. She preferred, I assume, not to know me.

When the names ran dry, my sister pulled up short somewhere in the heart of the Learning Room. The mail had ceased, and no one was sure what to call her. She slept on the rug and scratched at herself, looking desperately to all of us for some sign of a new name, of which we had none. No one, as I mentioned, was sure what to call her, a problem that proved to be the chief void in her identity, which slowly eroded. There were no more skins, and one morning my sister lost her motion and folded into a quiet pose. Out of sympathy, we reverted back to her original name, or one of the early ones. I have to admit that I'm not sure what name she began with. Nor were any of us too sure, to be frank, whom, exactly, she had become.

[Lisa]

Because the word “Lisa” most closely resembles the cry heard within the recorded storms at the American Weather Museum, a crisply distorted utterance claimed to be at the core of this country's primary air storms, the girl or woman to carry the burden of the Lisa name carries also perhaps the most common sound the world can make, a sound that is literally in the air, everywhere and all the time. (Most wind, when slowed down, produces the sound “Lisa” with various intonations.) The danger is one of redundancy, and furthermore that a woman or girl cruelly named Lisa will hear her name so often that she will go mad or no longer come when called. Children learn that repeating a word makes it meaningless, but they don't know why. Briefly: Weather in America occurs through an accumulation and disturbance of language, the mildest form of wind. To speak is to create weather, to supply wind from a human source, and therefore to become the enemy. The female Silentists are silent primarily to heal the weather, or to prevent weather, since they believe that speech is the direct cause of storms and should forever be stifled. A Silentist regards the name Lisa as the purest threat, given that, when heard, it commonly indicates an excess of wind, an approaching storm, possibly the world storm. The name Lisa, to some Americans, is more dangerous than the words “fuck” or “fag” or “dilch.” It should probably be discontinued. It can crush someone.

Statistics for Lisa:
An early name of my sister. She rarely acknowledged it. It caused her anger. We could pin her to the floor with it. She drank girls' water and would peaceably wear a Brown Hat. Her Jesus Wind resistance was nearly zero. Rashes and facial weakness were frequent. A distressed tone to her skin. Her language comprehension was low, or else she showed selective deafness. A growling sound was heard when she wrote. She seemed blind to my father.

3

The Technology of Silence

Failure to Mate
The New Female Head
Women's Pantomine
Dates
Names

Failure to Mate

WHEN I WAS FIRST PUT TO SIRE for the Silentists, my father, the senior male, had just been rendered into the hole, and no other youth were sufficiently available to dispense completions into the selected women. Maybe there were boys from middle Denver who coupled with some silent girls brought in by Jane Dark and Quiet Boy Bob Riddle, but I am to understand that I was the chief agent of physical contact among the various women's militia that came through town, even the Listening Group, who were loud and often took me with force.

The siring period lasted a full winter. My location was frequently the upper floors of the house. Toward the end of the copulative term, I waited naked on my father's surrendered bed, a denim ringlet assisting my erratically operative genital arm, an appendage referred to in my mother's notes as my “error.” The chosen girl at her most fertile moment would make a slippered approach down the long hallway, often goaded along by Dark right up to the doorway, where she might balk until pushed into the room and onto the bed. She'd find me disrobed there, positioned on my back in the snow-angel posture, as instructed. She might gather up her dress and sit across my hips for the transaction. Sometimes she struck a sidesaddle position for efficiency, or T-crossed me, with her bottom smiling toward my face, always averting her eyes from myself or my body or my props. She may have worn a hood or blinders, a mouth-guard, a helmet. A linen jumper possibly covered her body. She was gentle and tall, or small-bodied, with clumsy hands that smeared my chest with some sort of listening grease if she lost her balance and fell onto me. She was shy or loud, mocking or rude. She had learned to move so silently that she seemed delicately afloat, using a cautious, china-shop choreography, as though she might break herself through gesture alone. She never spoke to me. If I closed my eyes, I was alone.

Afterward, she was inverted and slung from the doorway in the conception harness, her face plump and flushed as she dangled there, waiting to seed. I was shuttled from the house and fed a hot plate of brown cakes: pounded, sizzled, and salted. Vials of water were stashed in my behavior kit, and I drank them without reading their labels, gargling first, swallowing short and hard, spitting just a trace of water back into the grass around me, as instructed.

As I waited on the lawn to be let back into the house—a clear flag hoisted over the fainting ledge was the signal, indicating the young Silentist's removal from the harness—I could not help looking past the learning pond and across the field at the solitary figure of Larry the Punisher, holding the glinting speech tube over my father's receptacle. Larry never seemed to tire out there. Even from a distance, his figure proposed direct menace toward my father, his head enveloped in the vacuum speech hoof, his arms keeled back as though he were readying himself to dive headlong into the earth. There was no clear route to where Larry stood—no road or path that I knew of— and I wondered how Mother and Dark had placed him there, whether through an airdrop, digging, or catapult, or if Larry was an overland expert in the style of an early Thompson, who could assert his own person into those distant areas that harbored prisoners such as one's father.

On those afternoons when a seizure of darkness blotted my presence in the field and rendered our Ohio locale dim and prematurely brown in the air, birds sliding fatly overhead on solid slicks of wind, I whispered from my grassy hideout in Larry's direction, hoping that some of my sound might gain the speech tube and make its way down to the man-sized room that held my father, though I knew that to add more words into his sealed container would only hasten the bursting that awaited him, dosing him ever faster with a language weapon that promised a slow, sure rupture of his body. I whispered hard until my face hurt, risking even the all-vowel words that had the longest-range acoustics and the most father-specific messages I knew of, but Larry never flinched. If he heard me, his body did not show it. My message went softly soundless in the space between us, drowned out in the field beyond, and I lay breathless and spent in the grass.

Mother and Jane Dark did not instruct me or much explain my role as sire, other than to direct that I hold the bottom pose with my young visitors and strike an arch during my release, a gesture Dark referred to as “the send.” I was always to send high, releasing on an upstroke. If I sent low on a downstroke, leaking would occur and the send might fail to gift. I was to breathe throughout the duration of my send. Failure to aspirate created a weak send. Too much aspiration, as with Rapid Family Breathing, created a send deemed too watery by Dark, who had tested my send water, produced under differing controls, including sends coaxed from me while my mouth was stuffed with cloth, sends I gave off while wearing the life helmet, or sends I made under the special wind of a foreign language whispered at me by Bob Riddle. I was not to send without a Silentist present, or a Listening Group citizen, or a motion-reduction committee, who would receive and bottle my sends for dispensation throughout the Ohio or Little England districts, where Silentists were seeking to breed. If I ignored this rule and sent alone, that was called a “blown send,” but I counted many of them regardless, because I had found a soft old suede glove of my father's, which gentled my stiffly burdensome nighttime error into easy, sweet sends often just before I fell asleep, sometimes in less than twenty hand-shakes. Mother found me once in the morning with the glove still wrinkled over my hand, as though I had the big loose skin of an animal hanging from me. She sat down and wrote a note of warning against the solo send, her brightly scratching pencil the only sound in my room. “We depend on you. If you require to send again before sleep, please raise your readiness flag and a visitor will make a withdrawal. I'll trust you to discard the prisoner's glove on your own.” After handing me the note, she administered eye contact, squaring herself off and sitting erect, staring at me hard until I looked away. Her stare had a kind of wind in it that pushed my face around; I could never eye it directly. This was her typical preface to a dose of wind-box emotion removal she had scheduled, and I braced myself by twining tightly in the sheets, to keep from accidentally striking her if I thrashed too hard. She positioned her hands in front of my face and commenced a knot-tying gesture just inches from my mouth, scratching at the air as if it were a hard surface, a kind of semaphore she performed from memory, and soon whatever I had been feeling or thinking was just quietly scraped away: a gray vacuumed container ballooning inside me as my heart started to zero down and forget its special complaint. I felt scrubbed clean and plain, siphoned off, leaked. Not content. Not angry. Not happy. Not tired. A minus condition. There would be no thrashing this time.

As she stood up to leave, my face twitched with the slightest traces of wind, aftergusts her fingers left lasting only as long as her body did in my room. I tried to breathe, and I managed to get some air into my chest, but the air felt thin and watery and false sloshing around inside me, and I preferred to keep as much of it as I could on the outside of my person.

Every time I was summoned to sire, I wanted to handle the heads of the girls, to grip their faces, clutch their brittle tied-back hair, clasp their necks. If the girls rocked over me too fast, or swooned away from my grasp, or otherwise struck damsel postures that rendered their heads slippery or elusive while we coupled, my send became equally elusive, I grew distracted, and my error might wilt, or, worse, wooden too much to ever yield a send. My hands sought to press on the girls' faces as they rose and fell over me, my fingers pushing their mouths into the shapes of speech, which the girls sometimes vigorously resisted, as their muscles had settled so long against the strain of spoken language that their faces would pull or seize if summoned for talk.

Because this obstructed our transaction, and often dislodged a chew ball a girl might be harboring in her stubbornly shut mouth, Jane Dark issued a directive that a clay head be fabricated to incite my arousal, to ensure I might nurse a prop regardless of the damsel style my Silentist partner had adopted.

Before long, a large and heavy head was brought to me, forged of the kind of clay that is dense and skinlike, the way a real head should be, and I never worked without it. It was kept in a mesh pouch on my father's door. During my spare hours at night, I etched a shallow beard onto the long face of the bust, and I fancied it to resemble a great man whose name escaped me, too unpronounceable and beautiful, a name burning hot in my mouth the more I forgot it, someone who had led his people to a promising hill in a country very much like our own, though lower to the sea, with smaller and softer shelters, with food that hovered at eye level, where the water was the same temperature as people's faces and the wind was thick and pale like glue, slow enough to climb onto and ride over the low grasses. He was my comfort, this man who did not require a body to be important to someone. I held him to my chest or just above my face, so that I could look into the flat mud of his eyes while my body below me went to work for other purposes.

If the session was at the noon hour, Dark often rehearsed her emotion-removal behavior stances near the window while the girl pursued her draw. I cried out loud on those days, without emotion, weeping after my send, shouting throughout the engagement, barking as many consonant sounds as I could until the room filled with a chunky vocal percussion.

As she rehearsed, Dark's shadow blotted the wall in pristine geometries, smooth globs of shade too perfect-looking to fall from a real person. Her movements seemed designed precisely to give off unexampled shadows, as if her goal were to be an originator of a new kind of shade. If ever she was practicing at the window while I was enjoined with a girl Silentist bobbing steadily above me, I could look only at Dark's shadow as she threaded air with her fingers, kneeling or crouching, balancing on a knee and a wrist, a cheek and a heel, images that nearly told whole stories to me, but not quite, leaving me feeling itchy and short of breath. Bolts of cloth were fed through the rafters to absorb the excess consonant sounds I let into the room, and some girls quietly hyperventilated while we coupled, inhaling the extra noise I spilled over our bodies. The cloth work must have been that of Bob Riddle, a man whose every move seemed to silence the world around him, because the more I thundered out plosives and hard sounds of the throat, the less I could even hear myself, so strategic was his laying of the listening fabric, which soon formed a clear lattice over the bed and began to quiver just slightly as it absorbed my commotion, rendering a finely deaf room. And if there was something to our practice that Dark found correctable, she would stand in the muted air at the bed and guide the two of us, her hands as rough as oven mitts. Sometimes I deliberately flurried my stroke or counterthrusted and withheld my send by dislodging my error from my mate, just to draw Dark away from the window and over to the bed, where her hands would soon apply an adjustment and I could feel her labored breath against my face, hotly spiced with the scent of a special water she brewed for herself alone.

My diet at the time was mostly a witness water brewed from persons watching me copulate. At night, I was administered a sleeping water that went down thickly and made me dizzy under my blankets. It dried on my chin and I felt bearded as I slept, my face tight and bristly, but I did manage to sleep anyway, in hard gray stretches of time. On days off, I drank children's coffee and ate a great share of potatoes in the darkened meal room. I drank copiously and peed often, with the sense that I surrendered far more fluid than I took in. Brown cakes were only available after a send, which meant that on some days I fed on water, seeds, and nuts alone. There was beef on rainy days, but it hardly rained, and the beef, when it came, was solid and dry as a button.

The witness water was simple to make. An observation deck installed onto the northern wall of my father's room allowed girls in line for the service to see what was in store for them, to study the copulative transaction and jot down any questions they might have, to mime their fucking on a small hobbyhorse that had been stationed there. I heard nothing from the spectators as I labored at my sends, but I knew that the bit of mottled wall that separated us was thin and clear enough to let them see me. As they watched and waited, small vials of water lining the shelf of the booth stored the girls' impressions and became resonant with the spectacle of intercourse. This was witness water: water stationed in the vicinity of persons witnessing something grand, a lucky water, a learning water, a real behavior liquid. I was to drink the liquid that had been near my own copulation. It would keep me primed to continue; it would make me fertile. My sends would be teeming and lumpen, rich with children. Sacks of new water filled the room by my father's bed, awaiting injection into the small cartridges that were portable for Silentist outings and stillness retreats. The water tasted like nothing at all, and I was not allowed to salt it or dip my leftover cakes. After a dosing, I would think I had swallowed my share, when more would dribble from my mouth and down my shirt, warm and sweet as perspiration. If Mother was present, she would rub the spill into my chest and fix me another glass, hovering her hands over my face in a potentially soothing gesture, bowing her head toward mine as if she might embrace me, then miming a series of quick dry kisses in the windless vicinity of my cheeks, chewing at the air, her mouth pinched into a pale wrinkle, no color to her face at all. If I moved to meet her, to feel solid contact with her kiss, she shied just away from my gesture, always keeping a smooth column of air between us, a no man's land that neither of us could enter.

By the new year, none of the girls were speaking and nearly all of them were listless as pillows out in the yard. It was difficult to deliver the send when the girls were in such a way. They would gradually cease bobbing and seem near to a kind of disturbed sleep above me, drowsily teetering in place, heavily slack in their faces. It was a time of much policing in the copulation room, for no one was participating with vigor, and there had so far been zero conceptions from all of our labor. No pregnant Silentists. No gifts to the Silentist lineage. No new quiet girls with pure blood and a head start toward stillness. I was so far not a father. The bulletin board in the mudroom featured a small neat zero if I ever checked it.