There Is No Year

by Blake Butler

  LAWNWORK

  The man stood up above her. From in the sun he looked down. The mother could not make out the man’s face, or what about it. As she stood up to look closer she felt her body brim with empty blood. Her head went swelling, dizzy. She put her hands into the blur for balance. She saw the man move as if to want to help her, but before they touched he stopped himself. The man’s hands were very large, rings on each finger. Friction. The mother felt a minor wish that he’d come on—that he could want that—that he would ever. The mother crouched back near the ground.

  The mother had become covered, somehow, in motor grease. She had it on her hands and neck and face and blouse and pant legs and on her shoes. She felt embarrassed. She’d filled the mower with gasoline and checked the oil and kissed the engine and still it wouldn’t run. She’d ripped the cord until her arm hurt. She’d kicked and squawked and invoked god. The yard needed to look clean.

  The man was saying something. He made motions with his hands. The mother had yet to meet the other people living on their street—to even see their faces—though in the mornings she noticed cars leaving and in the evening they came back. The mother didn’t know why she couldn’t make out what the man was saying. She saw his mouth, the hair around it—so much hair. She watched his lips move in small directions. The man’s hands were colored darker than the whole rest of his skin.

  The man knelt down beside her. The man had on a yellow dress shirt buttoned all the way up and no tie, the shirt’s neck loose around his throat as if it’d been tugged at, itching. Long black gloves hid his forearms with silky sheen. His pants were deeply pleated, like theater curtains. The pants comprised a pattern, wavering in the repeat as would a wall of heat. The mother caught herself staring into the pants transfixed, as in the toning. The mother’s head filled up again with liquid. The man grinned. He stood back up. He came back down. He licked his thumb and touched the mower. He was very near the mother.

  With long, thick fingers, the man lifted the mower and peered into its mottled belly. He blew a silent breath into the engine, a simple trick. He stood up again and the mother stood up with him, in cohesion. The man was saying something. He had long hair like a woman, the mother noticed now, as had the father once. How had she not noticed this at first? When the man pulled the cord the mower roared. He pointed at it, two long nails.

  The mower’s clamor seemed to nudge the sun. The air around them rippled.

  The man began to mow the lawn.

  A VERY LONG HALLWAY

  The son had the TV up as loud as it would go. He’d hoisted the glowbox off the stand into his lap. He’d wedged himself between the wall and sofa. From most major angles a person passing would not see him in the room. When the screen went black between certain scenes or before commercials, the son could see his head reflected with a warp.

  The son had spent all morning brushing his teeth and gums and tongue and still couldn’t get this certain taste out of his mouth. There were matted knots in the son’s hair the size of horse apples, though usually the son’s hair was beautiful and straight.

  The TV had a name but no one ever called it by it.

  The son kept pressing the volume up button though he already knew it was as loud as it could be. He’d tuned into a certain movie on a certain channel that for some reason came in clear. On the screen, there was a woman, pictured only from the back. She wore a dress, tight and red like the fabric on the sofa. The dress was slightly translucent in a way that caused the son to feel aroused. The son did not understand arousal. The woman was walking down a hall. Her strange shoes clacked on the tile so loud around the woman and the son that he could feel it in his chest. The hall’s walls were long and dark and smooth. The woman did not pass any windows, any people, hangings, doors. The skin of the woman’s legs was bruised.

  The son stayed in the TV room for three days, days counted unnamed. He felt air or fabric move around him, but he did not get up to see who or what was there. The son could not get up. All that happened was he watched the woman walk down halls. The TV movie did not break for commercials. The son had to think to even breathe. The son knew he wanted a roast beef sandwich but could not bring himself to get up and go make it—his stomach speaking words—writing words along his flesh inside him—ageless, lightless. The son could feel the TV’s weight and heat burning deep and deeper through, warping layers, peeling skin. No one came looking for the son.

  Over several hours the son managed to slip his fist around the TV’s extension cord. With concerted effort and metronomic breathing over several further hours, he used his will to tug the cord out of the wall, the tendon of his arm meat seething with the heat of the cord curled up around him and the electric flood sent there inside it through miles of wires through the outlet to the screen, which when pulled as prongs out of the two holes made no stutter—the woman went on walking in the long light. In the light along the woman’s dress the son could read small embroidered script of words he’d said or would say later, stitching down her, near her skin. The woman was getting older. Her hair molted from blond to gray to black. It grew in inches parallel to her encased backbone, thousands of elevators, strands in packs. There was a wet spot between her shoulders, leaking.

  At some point, in some hallway, the woman passed a door. She didn’t pause or stutter in her walking. She didn’t stop to try this passage in this unending hall after all these hours. Just as quick, the door was gone. The son had seen the door. The door was white with a white knob and had a number. The son could not think which one, though he could see it. The woman’s new long bone-white hair dragged behind her on the hall tile.

  THE SON’S FINGERNAIL

  Looking closely at the son’s nail—the ring finger on his right hand usually, though sometimes the left, and sometimes on a toe or chewed to slivers in his stomach—one could distinguish a certain shape that in certain kinds of light became another hallway or a wall.

  Other times one could see the son himself there embedded with his face cracked down the middle on the run of weird cell-matter the son’s disease had cut into the nail—the gloss of certain weeks the son had spent upside-down or in a prism—the rings the son would one day wear—the blip—the years uncoming, the windows sloshed with sun.

  Other times there was absolutely nothing and you’d be a fool to think in wonder.

  Look again.

  POWER EXIT

  The father lay on the bed. He lay beside the sleeping mother. Into his mouth he’d stuffed ten cigarettes. He gripped their gather like a bat. He inhaled through his mouth and out his nostrils. Filled with smoke, he fainted briefly—a second smoke inside him—and woke up. The house’s power had gone out. There was no light from in or outside. The moon had moved behind something or another, or someone had blocked it, or it was no longer even there. The father’s pupils began expanding.

  In the bed the wife sat up. She asked what happened to the light. The father asked what did she care, she was sleeping. The mother said the light had gone off inside her sleeping also. She said she’d been talking to someone in there and they were looking at one another and happy and things were good and then the light went off and she could not find this person no matter how loud she called into the dark. The father said, How nice.

  Through the air vent to the downstairs they could hear the son’s voice, shouting, though neither said anything about it. The father inhaled his cigarettes and blew more into the cloud over the bed. The father didn’t say anything further about the mother’s sleeping or the light or what else they should do. The mother breathed the smoke without complaining. She didn’t ask when he’d started smoking. She moved to get up out of the bed and the light in the house came on and she was naked.

  The father had not seen the mother’s body in a decade. He found her appealing still, despite her marks. The mother had been through long cycles of weight loss and gain. Some months the mother would eat as if there were someone else inside her. Some months she couldn’t hold a glass of water. The m
other’s breasts were huge and white. The father felt his body stirring. The father raised his pelvis off the bed.

  The son wasn’t yelling anymore. The mother said something about the room seeming much smaller. The mother got back in the bed and covered up. She turned her back toward the father. Her back was ridged and knobby and had pockmarks all around it which when connected made a number. The father did not try to touch—he knew better—but still he kept his body flexed. He kept himself suspended as much as possible off the mattress and soon his muscles stretched with ache. It was a game. The sweat sluiced off his back onto the bed sheets. He was grunting. The smoke encombed his head. He could breathe still without coughing.

  The lights went off again. The mother sat up. The lights went on and off and on in quick succession. Outside, they heard the sound of metal against metal. The mother went to the window to look down. She stayed at the window for some time, her breath all foggy. She didn’t say anything about what was there. The father noticed now she had a scratch mark down the center of her chest.

  In the hallway, the father heard the son talking in a strong, high voice. Then the son was laughing. He had a very peculiar laugh. The mother turned away from the window and went to stand facing the wall.

  On the other side of the wall, though the mother could not see him, the son came into the adjacent room and stood. The mother and the son became parallel to one another, a wall between them. The mother moved her legs a certain way. The son moved his legs in mirror, spreading. There they held an endless posing pause—a wet erupting from the son’s mouth, then the mother’s, twin rivers glinting of a light.

  Behind, the father watched the ashes fall off on his tired stretch-marked belly. He lit another pack. The lights went off and on and off and on. Their power bill would be enormous.

  RELAX

  Over many weeks, once they had settled, their copies nowhere, the house fell into feeling, often, fine. The house had an oven, stairs, some ceilings. The family began to loosen. They put their things where they belonged in this new system. They unwrapped the crap they used the most first, then on to baubles. They changed the grade of light in certain rooms. They hung up pictures of things they wanted to remember or identified with or just liked to look at while passing in the hall. The family tried to make the house their home.

  As weeks gathered, passed in packets—days that often seemed of no uniform length, one unto the other and again—the house took shape around its new contents in nameless ways. Some nights the family would be woken by long bowed tones from all around—their whole house surrounded by an edgeless, shapeless singing; a sound that had an eye. It never seemed as though the family all heard the sound on the same evenings. Sometimes it would stir only the mother or the son. Sometimes the tone seemed, to the father, just inside his eyelid—therein, he could not stand up from the bed, his flesh repelled upon the air as if by magnets. Some nights, the whole night, the tone would row, the mother and father there frozen side by side in bed together, seeing one another, not a blink. In the mornings, one or the other might mention how they’d heard it—the loudest droning—the father thought it was a D flat, though he could not sing it back in tune—and the one who’d heard it the night before would say, Oh, I slept straight through the hours.

  Down the street three feet, or just above it, the sound around the house could not be heard.

  Some nights, the son, awake well beyond both parents, would shake inside his skin. The sound would form around him, like cold clothing, threading on the night. The gong and organ in his chest would chime right in—repeating, harmonizing. The son felt words along his tongue. In the mornings, trying to tell the father or the mother of the shape growing inside him, all around the house, the words came out as something else.

  Panes kept falling out of all the windows. Sometimes the sand that’d made the glass became apparent, insects sprawling in the grain. The tires on the family car would have flattened many mornings. The welcome mat would melt in too much light. The birdbath teemed and toppled. The dishwasher would seem to speak. Nothing ever seemed to line up with one another. The son could not walk from one room to another without bumping his elbow, nicking his shoulder. He often heard people speaking in the vents, grunting or gunplay on the roof. The house would not stay still.

  The father and the mother tried to go on, despite the headaches and morning pus. They fixed the windows and kissed the son. They kept their cool. They did not scream at one another when the garage door came down on the car while they were backing out. They did not panic when the front yard flowerbed spat the bulbs out of the ground. They did their best just not to think. Relax a little. They found themselves repeating it: RELAX. RELAX. They slept with their eyes open, all at once.

  PART TWO

  Live audiences frighten me to death.

  Sharon Tate

  WHAT TOOK THE FATHER SO LONG AT WORK

  The next day it took the father six hours to get home from work. He took the same way he took home every day but each day it seemed to take a little longer. The streets went on a little further each time he drove them. There were new things on old streets. There were new streets with no signs for street names. There were traffic lights spaced barely yards apart. Certain lights would sit for many minutes red with the father edging the car further and further into the empty intersection. There never seemed to be any other cars. Ahead, the horizon of no dimension—limbless and suspended, several states away.

  For a while the father could not hear anything around him—not even breathing, not even wind—except the sound of something dragging under the car, but each time he pulled over there was nothing. The car stereo would not make sound.

  At one point on one of the streets the opposite lane filled with running dogs. The dogs were black and had shining eyes and they were drooling from the mouths. The drool splattered on the windshield and made the street slick and the father skidded a little in his own lane. The windshield wipers made an awful screeching, as if soon the glass would break.

  The drive home took so long the father got hungry two different times and at each he stopped at the same fast food restaurant and ordered the same thing, though the two items tasted very different. An attendant in one of the two fast food drive-thru windows had her eyes shut the entire time she took his order. There was a picture of the drive-thru window on her shirt and the father swore he could see himself sitting in the car outside that cotton window though the woman never turned toward him well enough that he could see for sure.

  Q&A RE: THE FATHER’S CAR & HOUSE, ETC.

  Finally in his driveway the father stopped and parked the car. He took the key out and he touched the key. The father saw the house. The father paused again and put the key in and turned the car back on and edged it closer to the garage. He moved as close to the house as he could manage without touching. The closer he got the car to the house, the more it seemed to shake. The father put the car in neutral and got out and put his head against the hood.

  Q: DID THE CAR SOUND FUNNY?

  A: The father could not tell. He was not good with his hands or with machines. To some this made the father not a man.

  Q: WAS THERE SOMEONE IN THE CAR STILL?

  A: The father didn’t think to look.

  Q: WHO WAS WATCHING?

  A: The house had several windows.

  Q: WHAT SHOULD THE FATHER HAVE KEPT IN THE GLOVE BOX THAT HE DID NOT?

  A: A gun, a length of wire, a set of rubber gloves, emergency money and some form of rations, Fear of Music by Talking Heads, fake flowers (the kind that never die), permanent marker (the kind that never can be erased), a photo of his wife from a time he’d like to remember (uh-huh), a photo of his mother.

  Q: WHAT WAS IT ABOUT THE NEIGHBOR’S HOUSE ACROSS THE STREET THAT THE FATHER DID NOT SEE, DISTRACTED AS HE WAS BY HIS OWN CONDITION?

  A: The father did not see the enormous object wrapped in black plastic that took up the majority of the yard.

  Q: WITH THE GAS REMAINING IN THE CAR, AN
D ALL OTHER GAS PERHAPS FOR SALE OR UNDERGROUND ELSEWHERE NOTWITHSTANDING, HOW FAR AWAY COULD THE FATHER GET FROM THE HOUSE IF HE DROVE THE CAR AT EXACTLY THE SPEED LIMIT IN ONE DIRECTION AND DID NOT PAUSE?

  A: The father could not get far away at all.

  WHAT THE FATHER DID THEN

  With the car still on the driveway burning fumes, the father came into the house. He’d thought of something he needed to tell the mother. He’d thought of this thing earlier while staring into the work computer and had meant to write it down but didn’t and now he was thankful it had reappeared, veined in his mind. It was an important thing. It was about the house.

  The father could not quite say the thing aloud. The father slunk, eyeing for the mother.

  The mother was not in the entry foyer, where in the early years she’d always met him coming in, her face engraved with home expression. As well, there, the father was used to seeing the family’s shoes all taken off and stacked in order, as the mother was always a stickler for unsmushed carpet, but in recent weeks she’d stopped bothering to take hers off and so the son had too. The mother and the son both owned several pairs. The carpet was minced and feathered, brained already here and there with darker clot—some slush, some blood, some body oils, a few bits meant to have been eaten. There were so many kinds of stains it looked like more than just the four of them in there, living. Three. Three of them, not four, the father corrected in his head.

  The mother was not in the kitchen raising dinner. The lights were on and the fridge was open, full of light and frigid breathing. The oven had been preheated, though there was nothing in it and nothing sitting wanting to get in. A set of knives was spread out on the table. One of the four long bulbs in the overhead fluorescent lamp was dead.