There Is No Year

by Blake Butler

  He drank.

  the house there all around him, ashing

  all through the roof and walls, unwound

  in light, his name shaking out its color

  shaking out its hours, numbers, nouns

  THAT IS SOME THICK STUFF

  The girl watched the son drink, then took the tray away and went back in place again to comb. She yanked the son’s hair back so hard on his head his scalp strained red, exposed. The son’s scalp had tattoos all through it. The tattoos were of text fine-printed, writ by hand. The hair was held back by a series of small pins that pulled the hair’s roots so tightly they seemed ready to rip out any minute. In the mirror across the room the son could see himself aligned. He could see his room a little, his other room, in that old house. He felt the house inside him, in the mirror, its glass now leaning right against his face. This particular mirror, the son noticed, close up—among the many rooms refracted—this mirror was the same mirror as the one he’d slept with every night. This particular mirror was caving inward there against him, curving, becoming jelly, burble, white. In the mirror now, the son gleamed, of no expression.

  RORRIM

  The girl saw the son was looking. She let the son’s hair fall free and took the son’s chin. She seemed to be saying something. The heat was foaming. The son could not shake it off. He could not not. The house’s color bloomed. He felt something move inside him, metastasizing, filling his form with its form: smoke through smoke, room through room. The son reached back and touched the girl’s arm. Her skin was smiling.

  So what do you want to do now? the girl said.

  NOT A WORD OR SHAPE OR NAME

  The other floor’s long hall of bedroom doors all stood open, stunk and stung the father’s eyes. The wet revolved inside his head and made him hungry, stuck with an itching, in the light. He held his hands upon the air there, flush with hot flashes—a drum kit in his lungs—his feet swollen beneath him, doorbells. The other house alive.

  The floors down here were mirrors. The father watched himself walking from below. Each step made him thicker, narrowing the walls.

  In spasmed gulps, the way his childhood cat had—the cross-eyed, many-named creature who one night had crawled into a mudhole in the woods behind his parents’ house and not come out—its name still somewhere in him, its absent sound—the father coughed something up into his hands: an origami box folded out of wet, smeary flash paper—with it at last out of his chest he could see head-on again—he could think of things he’d seen once: ash rising from fires, balls thrown, nipples tugged, bundles of cash. The father unfolded the origami, hearing it crinkle, as did each day the fat filling his head. WHO IS IN THERE, someone had written. The father ripped the note into many tiny pieces and swallowed it again.

  In the house the hall held still. Somewhere above him a pucker shrunk a little, released a smudge of air. Black and magnets. Runny.

  The father walked along the hall. He stopped outside the copy master bedroom. He turned to face the light. In the room he saw his body sleeping, several of him. The furniture had been removed. The bodies of him piled into the small space stacking, puddled up with limbs. Some were missing hair or digits. They were cuddling, chewing, talking in their sleep. Laughing, scratching, humping, what have you. The more he looked the more there were, though sometimes, between blinking, there was just him, well, he and the him inside him, and the meat around his seeing, and his arms. The father closed his eyes and heard them breathing, heard his many hungry stomachs snarl.

  With his hands within the forced dark, the father closed the door.

  The father felt his way along the hallway further, palms along the walls. In the grain, the house had written out a list of names, a man’s phone number, a tablature, a hymn’s words, a prayer, a map, a day—none of which the father understood as language, and yet it settled in him still.

  The father felt along the hall with all his fingers till he felt another door. This door would be the son’s door, the father said, and heard his body say. The door into she and I and his and hers and ours and ours and our son’s room. This door as well was open, another mouth inside the copy house—or was he back inside his own house now? The father could not tell. His chest was throbbing.

  The father moved into the room. He moved onto the air with skin around him, feeling forward, unwilling yet to open back his eyes.

  INTERVIEW

  The girl moved in a little closer. She had her hands behind her back.

  The girl turned into the mirror—turned to look at someone else.

  The girl began to speak, in several voices, asking someone:

  Q: WHAT DID THE SON WANT TO DO?

  Q: WHAT DID THE SON WANT TO WANT TO DO?

  Q: WHAT DID THE GIRL WANT FOR THE SON?

  Q: WHAT COULD THE GIRL HAVE DONE TO MAKE THE SON WANT SOMETHING ELSE?

  Q: HOW MUCH HAD THE SON EATEN? HOW MUCH HAIR COULD FIT INSIDE HIS CHEST?

  Q: HOW MUCH COULD FIT INSIDE THE GIRL’S HOUSE? THE SON’S HOUSE? THE COPY VERSION(S)? WHY?

  Q: WHAT WAS THE GIRL’S HOME MADE OF? AND THE SON’S SKIN? AND THE GIRL?

  Q: WHAT FIT IN THE SPACE BETWEEN THE HOUSES?

  Q: WHO ELSE WAS COMING BY?

  The girl was turning. The girl glowed. The son glowed.

  Q: DO YOU KNOW NOW?

  Q: DO YOU?

  Do you?

  THE WANTING BOX

  In the image of the room where nights the son would be, the father felt his body press against another hold. He opened his eyes, saw nothing but it—a black box large as the whole room. It gave off a silent steam or smoke, as had the last box he remembered, which upon remembering in that instant he ceased to remember furthermore.

  The door the father had come into the room through was no longer there behind him, nor was there much of any space left for him to stand between the box and wall. He had to suck his gut in, skin into skin there, held not breathing, and still there was hardly room for him to move—as if he were underneath the box at the same time as above it, and beside it—nothing but the box—no room at all.

  Inside the box, a bumping. Something smothered. Rub of skin of fists. The father pressed his head against the surface, wanting. He listened harder, leaning in. The more he leaned, the more he had to—his spine took kindly to the curve—then, there he was leaning with all of him against the image, its surface adhered to his shoulder and his cheek.

  The round meat of the father’s left ring finger puffed up. More rings.

  Father, the father tried to say back, and out came all the other names.

  He tried to speak again and still could not, the words instead reflected in his head, spurting as would a heavy wet through his cerebrum and down into his chest and ass and legs, and no repeat.

  The father’s face against the box, both of them aging, one changing shape inside, one not—his body flush against the box’s, gripped.

  The no light coming through no windows to the no room to the need.

  In all his want, and all the surface, the father’s head became pressed upon so hard against the box he could not see—or could not tell what he was seeing, in such color—the bend of wall on wall, the blank—gone windows lit with light of leaving, sucked from the house into the sky. The box pulled on his backbone, barfing through his body in reverse—warm milk, spit, rainwater, stomach acid, fresh blood—his body sticking to the seam, wherever. In his head he heard a hundred guns—a fall, a swallow, sinking—black cells—then, there he was above him, and beside—then, there he was below him, and between him, and overhead, within—he could see himself from every angle—he could see himself inside the box.

  INSIDE

  The box

  inside was

  small at

  every

  angle—so

  small the

  father had

  no room to

  move his

  arms or

  legs or

  head.

  The inner

&n
bsp; surface of

  the box,

  unlike its

  outside,

  held a ripe

  transparent

  pale—so

  pale there

  appeared

  not to be a

  surface

  there at all,

  unwinding

  —and yet

  against the

  father’s

  flesh it

  made a

  pressure

  and

  against the

  father’s

  flesh it

  burned.

  To the left

  and just

  above the

  father’s

  vision in

  the box

  there was a

  hole—a

  single tiny

  source of

  seeing

  allowing

  light onto

  the pupil

  of his right

  eye.

  Through the

  hole, the

  father saw a

  grayish

  chamber.

  Inside the

  chamber hung

  another eye,

  like the

  father’s eye

  but larger,

  with lid and

  vein and

  cornea

  removed.

  In the light inside the eye the father saw another light—it had a name—a name he could not hear or say or see inside him, though it was watching—seeing—seen. The father could not think beyond the what.

  The eye had many sides. Each time the father blinked inside his own sight within the other’s—quick black—when he looked again the eye would seize. The eye would spin among its sides and scrunch like aged skin, then come to settle centered on another side. Each new side held a new pupil to look into, and it looking back as well, again.

  Through each pupil, paused before him, the father felt a force of light thread through his head—

  light of photographs without color—

  light of music without sound—

  light of books without pages—

  light of paintings without paint—

  light of dance without limb—

  light of speech without lung—

  light of buildings without walls—

  In deleted air the father saw the ageless light of those the light itself had made destroyed—one for each side of the eye here in the box here in the copy house around the father, stunned with the light of skin in skin deleted young—like those in the pictures the father’s son had been sent, the son among them—bodies organed with creation of an hour never named—deleted light held inside daughters, inside sons.

  The light came in all through the father, frying.

  In the light the father saw:

  ,44

  ,45

  &

  .47

  The father saw:

  ,48

  ,49

  ,50

  ,51

  ,52

  ,53

  ,54

  ,55

  ,56

  ,57

  ,58

  ,59

  ,60

  ,61

  ,62

  ,63

  ,64

  ,65

  ,66

  ,67

  ,68

  ,69

  ,70

  ,71

  ,72

  ,73

  ,74

  75

  &

  .76

  There were many other sides upon and in between each side that the father could not sense seeing, even deleted, but which came into him still.

  When the light of each of all the sides was gone again in spinning, the light remained there still—it hung in gristle, caked in bones and teeth, in the ceiling of the nothing far above—in distance and in hours, doorways—reflecting air back at the earth—in all the dirt, and all the wonder—days in hours—years in days.

  Inside the box inside his seeing, the father aged. Old sores on his body healed shut. New unseen sores began. His blood made bleeding, wanting. The father felt no tone.

  Each time the eye shuddered in rotation a place inside the father’s head would make a click—a long hot drop all through his body—light beyond light—and then, from nowhere, his eyes could see again. He went on in this condition, a finite binary upon his body suffered in repeat:

  (a) The spinning spheroid’s next side.

  (b) The burst of light of light.

  With each instance, the father screamed. He screamed so hard all through him and with every inch he felt his body, in that instant, become zilch. He could feel, in the periods in which he did the watching, such white-hot power-terror funneled through his blood and air and flesh that it was as if he never had existed, underneath such screaming, such massive, hobbling hurting, grief. He knew, upon each instance, that when it had passed it would be gone from him again—and yet would not be gone at all. Among all air. Upon the body. The gift ungiven in no glow.

  As each click came, compiling, the father felt no terror and no rake—not even any itch for where the light came crushed against him—and in the end the father was still there—the father soft and strung inside the box inside the house inside the street inside the light inside the air that held the house among the void. The father’s body eating both himself and nothing, son and father, light and no light, silence, sound.

  And now this moment never happened

  and this went on for quite some time

  ANSWER

  All the son could see, where he was, was milk and mirrors, knives.

  The room was very gone. Beginning. The son turned inside him, on.

  Then the son could see a color, then another color. Then a hole.

  BOX OF BOXES

  In the house again, beside the box, the father felt him, in his body, open up his ageless mouth—a mouth of skin and text and warm rain—and though still now in the room there with the box still words would not come out, and there from his father body came another shape instead, a glowing, flowing fountain through his center—a small ream of creamy water which, against his teeth and tongue, became another box,

  a blackened nodule

  in his mouth hole,

  small as a bird’s

  egg, or a bulb: o

  And in the room there the father could see absolutely nothing but the sides and faces of the ejection, the new shape, each side there in the house there pouring brightly, and there against his skin the box began to spin,

  giving off

  an awfulllllllllllllllllll

  stuttereddddd

  sounddddddd

  With each instance of the sound, the box blew even more light, glowed as if its heat would bend it in

  and from the seam of what the box was it made another, spitting more boxes from its shrieking o o o o o

  another box there: o

  and another: o

  boxes falling out of boxes, boxes of boxes, boxes, glow on glow on glow—the mother somewhere underneath it—as in spiral, as in stun—boxes spitting up more boxes to make more boxes, blackened gifts

  and as each box hit the air inside the house the house would shake and ripple, there and there, and there—

  shook like singing through blown speakers

  rippled like clear light peeled off of some uncertain sky

  as each box fell, sent in its order, to shriek and shake upon the ground, the room quickly became filled in with the boxes—the more there were the quicker made—each box giving its own and from therein more and more, each of a light and sent in writhing, still unopened, mega-rubbed—

  until box by box

  by box by box

  the room was so bright

  and the father, any of him, at the windows

  could not breathe

  or sink or say or

  see

  WHERE AM I WHE
RE HAVE I BEEN WHERE ARE YOU

  & now the house was full of boxes houses

  & now the air around the house was full as well, swarmed & gathered at its walls & ceilings, a silent sound a hall

  & now in the sky above the house of boxes light was rising

  & resizing

  & now the father, son & mother at once in time together breathed—& in the same way they had grew out of some center

  to the center they returned

  THERE THERE

  The son appeared inside the house before the father. The father had begun to rub his forearms soft together, creating further song. The father stood against the wall, the son against him. The son said something to the father and the father did not reply. The father exhaled through his mouth. The father was looking through the room at where the son was but the father could not see the son. The father said something aloud.

  Against the wall inside the next room, the mother cocked her head. She had to cup her lips to keep from laughing.

  Her neck was sore. She had an awful twitch. Above the mother’s head there was a window.

  Through the window you could see into the backyard, where the light was gushed and bronzing. The yard had grown. The light was null. The swimming pool had overflowed. Black algae water sloshed the grass and tore the sod up. The yard could moan a little.