Friday Fiction Fix: "Blueprint"

As I prepared to put together today's fiction fix, it occurred to me that we've only featured white male authors thus far. Naturally, a small sense of panic in the form of a question knocked on the door of my House: Do I go with a minority figure or a woman? I thought long and hard over this predicament, and came to quite the trying conclusion. But it wasn't easy.

Yeah. I pretty much said fuck it. But hold it. It's not because I don't appreciate and respect authors of other demographics. We'll get to them sooner rather than later. It's more about selecting a good piece that, in some twisted fashion, I can relate to the rough focus of this blog, which happens to be the rivalry between the Kansas City Chiefs and the Denver Broncos if you're just tuning in. And frankly, there are other figures that we've ignored for far too long. Today, with the help of Ben Marcus, we'll have a look at a credit-owed figure not named Brandon Marshall.

Ben Marcus is from Chicago. He matriculated at both New York and Brown University. He is now the head of the MFA writing program at Columbia University in the city of New York, so he's got that goin' for him, which is nice. His works include The Age of Wire and String, The Father Costume, and Notable American Women, and today we will look at a story from the latter. His writing has been called surreal fiction. It has been called post-modern, and those that choose to be annoying call it post-post-modern. I like to call it good.

"I am probably Ben Marcus.



I might be a person. There's a chance I lived on a farm meant to muffle the loud bodies of this world...



...Most likely I am still alive, suffering from a heart, unsatisfiable hands, legs that walk away.



If I had really lived, I would have been the subject of emotion-removal experiments, person-blocking strategies (PBS), attempts to zero out my heart. It may have worked. Yet somewhere in the past, a period of time called the mistake zone,



it's possible a hardened creature with black hair, wrongly taken for a dog, took a leading role with my heart, walked me through a series of steps that ended up counting as my life, then left me in some after-house...



...where I have nothing to do but issue reports."

Later on in the story...

"There should be a list of all the people who have walked the earth, or been seen breathing above it, their names and habits, the failures and successes of their hands...



...these people would once and for all be killed, so that they won't return and won't be rememberd, a complete killing in the old-fashioned style...where not only the person is killed but the things around him and any referencing devices indexing, in any way, the person: killed. In a perfect world, these people would continue being killed until a zero population had been reached, until the cities and towns and other life-viable areas and elsewhere were just empty boxes free of people...



...though we are taunted with the most believable, palpable, and beautiful characters, who, no matter how real they seem to us, ultimately fail us miserably because we...cannot fish them from fakery and thrust away all our frustration on them.





We should be able to grab whoever entices us...doctor them...dress them up or down, pose them, give them words to say that we have been waiting all of our lives to hear...



...even if they don't know what they want and have never known."



Later...

"...I still require a word of devotion, a cooing noise to comfort me...I would simply and finally be happy to be able to snap my fingers or press the Give Me What I Want button, located ideally on my own body...



...If only my head were finally not my responsibility, could be put into someone else's care, could be made to merge with other persons and the world so that it would no longer suffer such distance and touchlessness...though it would be impossible to detect whether this were ever the case...

...A person is always camoflauge for something small and soft and possibly buriable. Often he should be killed to discover what he has been aliasing,



even if it is just the most perfect thing: a person-sized piece of empty space."

It is plausible that "deciding that his own person was akin to a correctional facility for feelings, which had been placed in his body under house arrest, his body a manner of tomb, and that he was the warden of all the various ways to feel, though it should be remarked that these captured feelings were in no way rehabilitated for later release while serving time in his body. They were put away for good."

In the bitter end, "if I should exit this place heading north, please let no one care to follow me or even watch my last body as it falls from sight over the hill. I prefer not to be seen or known or discussed. I should be given a head start of a ten-count. My enemies should be blindfolded and spun in place. There should be no wolves. When my execution is planned by the people assigned to kill me, wolves should be left out of it. Let no grief circles form related to my demise."

Ben Marcus' Web site can be viewed here. Notable American Women can be purchased here.