There Is No Year

by Blake Butler

  LIGHT OF YEARS LIGHT OF WINDOWS LIGHT OF GROWING LIGHT OF NEED

  And then the son stood at the kitchen table eating waffles watching TV laughing, sneezing, and all the pressure in his knees, and there were all these people all around him and they were pushing up against his back, they cawed, and they knocked the table to the left and right and they lifted the table off the ground, and the light inside the drink inside the son’s stomach from the girl’s house began to chew into his chest, and he laughed harder, and everyone was laughing too, all around him bodies laughing, and his teeth began to turn inside his head and he could not see and he could not remember and he was so hungry the ceiling wobbled up and down.

  And then the son was being carried through the massive lawn with all the mud splashing up around them, and the sky or ceiling stretching overhead and coming closer down and closer down, and the son could feel his cheeks all puffy and the son could feel his and his father’s heartbeats both together through his own chest, the visor of the father’s helmet banging back and forth against the son’s skull’s hardened soft spot in the rhythm of their fumbling run.

  And then the son was in the son’s room looking at all the clear gel spilling from the closet, the closet where the son had spent so many hours typing still unknown, and the son saw what he made, he saw the texture of the ejection, of the words burped from several selves he’d held in hives, layers wished and crushed and in him, and he felt the words spread through the room expanding, felt the words burst back into him and through and through and of the room, words worn on paper, wet and endless, a flooding ocean at his knees, at his chest, his neck, his head, gel gumming up his nostrils and in the air vents, in the air itself—and then the son again could not breathe—and the words slushed and slammed around the son as massive slivers, blubbing up, and the son rose off the floor inside the rising, and the son tried to swim and kick as best he could, the language welling in his head and stomach, stretching his legs and muscles, and therein the son gushed on, and the son slid down through the hallway, wide as ever, and the son warbled down the stairs, down through the house where all was runny and one color, and the son gushed on through the front door—

  and then the son opened his mouth and shut his eyes and then the son slid backward through where he’d been and the son saw seas and rooms and constellations and the son grew very large and he grew small—

  and then the son was in the father’s arms gel-covered, and the son was the father’s arms themselves and they were standing there beside the mother at a hole large as the house, a hole with many holes inside it, concentric rings of endless holes inside the hole, and the mother’s head was wound with bees and birds and gel and she had a shovel and she was digging in the rip, and she was digging and she was digging, begging in the holes—she was saying something about the father or the son or both together, and the mother ripped and bent her long nails on the hard dirt—the dirt that had built up around the house high as the house and ever higher at the hole’s edge and yet had not yet found a way to touch the sky—and the father tried to make the mother put the shovel down and come away from the half-assed hole she’d hardly dug inside the hole, among all the other holes there all around her, and she there screaming on and on into the grass about insects and sand and windows and the houses and the light—

  and her warm body—

  and her rubbed insides—

  and all her wanting, measured in flume—

  and all the rooms she’d never seen, and the rooms those other rooms contained—

  and her need for forgiveness—

  and her life—

  and then the mother turned and turned, around in nothing, swinging the shovel at the father—

  and the yard was smushed around them burned and buzzing—and the sky was smacked and stretched with mold and slip—and the trees were splotched with sores and raining color— and the son could not see the father could not see the mother could not see—

  OR

  —from above the house—and around the house—despite these things—the house could not be seen—the house was hidden, sat in dry air cold and throat-choked with vast collision, all minor manner of humming creature swarmed in spirals through the sound—a sound of something soaked and squashed stung forever in the house’s lining—beneath the roof all bulged and scumming over through the thicket of new trees—bees and bats and ants and crows and cranes and gulls and geese and ducks and dogs and helicopters and doves and pigeons, dragonflies, gnats hung on waves from towers gashed in the weird glow of the sky’s head with translucent stepladders which in the warble now descended, folding and unfolding, cradled around the house, surrounded—this house with no good door—this house in which the son sat—the house in which other families had also sat and still were sitting, through which bodies had moved and opened doors and breathed the air and fucked and gone to sleep—the son with his head a box of years he’d had and years still yet impending—the son’s vibrating mucous membranes—the son’s serrated eyes—the son with his head rubbed quite wide open in the house slicked cream-thick from eave to eave—the rats and ruts and burns corroded—the sky above it wet with need, the sky colliding, the sky unfolded, the sky reflecting back itself—the son above the bed now levitating or coiled to nothing or not quite there—the windows of the swarmed house bending over curling in, falling out a final time to allow the entrance of things banging, begging—their heads a hammer—the house’s floors and carpets slathered, layer after layer, sight unseen—the house’s windows glossing over, revealing things that had been there and yet were not, not even now, yet, things etched on the breath hung as remainder—some reminder, who and who and who, what beds these rooms had nuzzled, what walls the brighter air had seemed—the son unraveled—the son’s cracked back—the globes of light creased and compiling—slurring junk sloughed off, ejected—the light wires crimped and full of glisten and new need—the house’s spreading open—the rooms revealing all in one moment what they’d been and seen and shown—what they wanted—who else they were once, what other inches, who they could be anew again—and the son’s lips and lids and other eyes and pores and holes and follicles sang fat with foam—the son congealing—the son in every window of the house—the son the size of the house, inside—the house walls swelling, the weird unbuckle, the teeming crust riddled with creak, the living layer they’d created warping—gel—the buzz of black transmission—the other houses—the tattoo ratted over the father’s eyes, the son’s, though the mother could almost peek, the mother who’d slipped this riddle, hole of holes there, the mother half inside the son—he in her and she in he and they in ever—the mother could feel the other weight, she could feel him lifted upward—the house now big as some balloon, the old walls warped and cragged with yawn or screeching—the house deforming—all other houses—homes—the sky a soft black zero as the son b u l g e d o u t t h r o u g h t h e s o u n d—

  SOUND OF TRUMPETS SOUND OF SIGHING SOUND OF SHOTGUNS SOUND OF GEESE SOUND OF GLIMMER SOUND OF NOWHERE SOUND OF SON

  —and in the midst of all of this, from the outside, from neighbor’s doors or windows and in the street—from all but a certain very minor other angle there was no way for most to see what had gone on—you could not see that this wasn’t one of many houses—from the street the house was fine—A-OK—today, tomorrow—on the walk the neighbors passed in silent indecision—what for dinner? glass or chicken?—though in the minute on the hour their skin went prickled near their teeth, they looked a second time in one direction, pulled their pets along to shit on somewhere else—that night they didn’t kiss their sons or wives—they grew one more new long hair or felt a ticker in their thigh—only in their sleep then could they see what they had seen.

  HALLWAY

  The son was in the bedroom.

  The son was standing on the bed. He’d brought the mirror back out from the closet and unsheathed it. The son felt very tired. The son shrunk and expanded both at once—so that from the outside the son seemed to
stay the same size.

  The mirror had fingerprints and footprints and breath steamed on the glass from, it seemed, several sides.

  The son stood above the mirror. The son saw the mirror from above. With the masked light flooding through the room’s enormous window—a light that flickered, flexed and charred—the light of so many different days—the mirror seemed to bend. With his head like this and arms like this and humming, the son could see a hallway in the glass. And then depending on what the son wished or how he wanted or remembered or forgot—the son could make the hallway open up. The son could make the hallway fold around him.

  The son could slip into the hall.

  The son walked down the hall with both eyes blinking in and out and in and out.

  The son walked and walked and walked. The son felt lighter. The son’s arms began to shake.

  The son came to a door.

  The light continued. Light ate light up, and shat light out, and light remained. Days rolled in the long blows of the hours hidden in spinning years and months and days.

  In the houses men were laughing. Mothers made other mothers, fathers, too. Sick continued. Night continued. In the night, small pockets fried in endless sing.

  The night gathered up in pockets, grew holes. The holes hummed around a rasping center, rolled. Centered in all air and in all bodies. The center’s center had no name.

  The bodies aged. The bodies ate lunch, their old limbs shifting, breathing up in celebration, years of air. Resting. Nesting. Needing. Sleeping. Going. Sewing. Teeth on teeth.

  Other things would happen. More words would pass from mouth to mouth. The weight of nameless light would overflow the houses, days unblinking, above ground.

  The ground was light. The lunch was light, too. And the days, the beds, more holes. The light would fill the halls for hours. The skin would come and come and come.

  Acknowledgments

  Thank you, Calvert Morgan, magicmachine. Thank you, Carrie Kania, Dennis Cooper, Bill Clegg. Thank you, mother, father, sister, brother-in-law. Thank you, Heather. Thank you, Gene & HTMLGiant crew. Thank you, Featherproof crew. Thank you, Ken, Shane, Gian, Michael, David, Sean, Derek. Thank you, Atlanta friends. Thank you, Internet. Thank you.

  About The Author

  BLAKE BUTLER is the author of the novella Ever and the novel-in-stories Scorch Atlas, named Novel of the Year by 3:AM Magazine. He edits HTMLGiant, “the internet literature magazine blog of the future,” as well as two journals of innovative text, Lamination Colony and No Colony. His writing has appeared widely online and in print, including in The Believer, Unsaid, Fence, and Vice, and short-listed in The Best American Nonrequired Reading. Butler lives in Atlanta and blogs at gillesdeleuzecommittedsuicideandsowilldrphil.com.

  Visit www.AuthorTracker.com for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins authors.

  Also by Blake Butler

  Scorch Atlas

  Ever

  CREDITS

  Cover design and photograph by Milan Bozic

  Author photograph by Morgan Kendall

  All other photographs by Justin Dodd

  Copyright

  THERE IS NO YEAR. Copyright © 2011 by Blake Butler. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

  FIRST EDITION

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.

  ISBN 978-0-06-199742-6

  EPub Edition © 2011 ISBN: 9780062087324

  11 12 13 14 15 OV/RRD 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  About the Publisher

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  1 Antonin Artaud died alone, seated at the foot of his bed, holding his shoe.

  2 Sharon Tate died tied neck to neck with another person while thirty-four weeks pregnant.

  3 Andy Kaufman died leaving the premonition in several others that he hadn’t.

  4 Heather O’Rourke died soon after completing a trilogy of films about a cursed family, after which several other members of the cast are said to have also died prematurely.

  5 Chris Farley died wearing sweatpants and an open button-down shirt.

  6 Heath Ledger died lying facedown on a bed.

  7 Krissy Taylor died despite more than an hour of attempted resuscitation.

  8 River Phoenix died after falling on the ground and convulsing for eight minutes.

  9 Bill Hicks died twelve days after ceasing speaking in his parents’ home in Little Rock, Arkansas.

  10 Cliff Burton died after winning the right to the bed he died in by pulling the ace of spades from a deck of cards.

  11 Christa McAuliffe died attempting to enter outer space.

  12 Robert Earl Davis Jr. died on the floor of the bathroom of his recording studio after his fifth heart attack, chemically induced.

  13 Timmy Taylor died in a one-car accident on the way home from a recording session during the production of his band’s major-label debut.

  14 Flannery O’Connor died thirty-three years before her mother.

  15 Johannes Chrysostomus Wolfgangus Theophilus Mozart died and was buried in a common grave with no mourners in attendance.

  16 Wesley Willis died having recorded more than a thousand songs.

  17 Marc Bolan died leaving a supposed curse on those he’d known, which thereafter has been associated with more than a dozen incidents of premature death.

  18 Bobby Darin died of blood poisoning from dental medication despite eight hours on the operating table.

  19 Charlie Parker died inside a body mistaken by his coroner to be twenty years older than it actually was.

  20 Tupac Shakur died as a result of gunshot complications after spending six days in a medically induced coma, and posthumously continued to release albums.

  21 Russell Jones died with a doubled plastic bag of narcotics hidden in his stomach.

  22 Simone Weil died refusing to eat more than small amounts of food, opening her body to her disease.

  23 William Burroughs Jr. died having returned to the state where he was raised in search of help.

  24 Srinivasa Ramanujan died after being incorrectly diagnosed and thus not receiving treatment for his infection, which could have easily been cured.

  25 Ian Curtis died after watching Werner Herzog’s Stroszek and listening to Iggy Pop’s The Idiot.

  26 Aubrey Beardsley died very early in the morning on a hotel bed sometime after having begged his publisher to destroy his obscene work.

  27 Bas Jan Ader died lost at sea while attempting to cross the Atlantic alone in performance of a piece he titled In Search of the Miraculous.

  28 Joan of Arc died
by fire and then was burned twice again, to ashes, to prevent the preservation of relics of her flesh.

  29 Kaspar Hauser died of a stab wound inflicted on him by a stranger who also handed him a small bag containing a message written backward.

  30 Egon Schiele died three days after his wife and spent the time between their deaths drawing sketches of her.

  31 Bruce Lee died with his brain having swollen by 13 percent.

  32 Brandon Lee died on a film set almost exactly twenty years after his father.

  33 Tim Buckley died as a result of his response to the direct challenge “Go ahead, take it all.”