Alice Knott

by Blake Butler

  Such as how, one day, just like that, her father had disappeared; or, rather, the man who had so far been her father ceased to exist as she had known him, even in light of the shallow remains of the past Alice retained and called her own, in that following the dark transition she was the only one who seemed to recognize a change. He hadn’t died, her father, at least not officially—there was no mourning and no funeral, nor had he officially announced himself out of the household going forward. Instead, the shift came without any form of friction at all, any blight beyond where Alice herself felt it—not her mother, no one else. The man had simply completely ceased appearing anywhere, as far as Alice knew, including in others’ memory but hers, or any trace of evidence he’d ever been.

  From room to room, on the first day after, Alice came into each space finding not only nothing left of him where it had always been before, but even amendments applied in the shaping of the places once all his. Such as: no set of hammers in the closet where he had kept his hammers, but instead board games she could never remember how to play; no freezer full of private beef, which he had hunted down himself and brought home and wrapped in plastic for some future meal that never seemed to come, but now branded frozen foodstuffs, from corporations. Their house itself appeared, as well, to Alice, to have been remodeled within the space of one night’s sleep: the ceilings higher, the hallways longer; closets full of clothes she’d never seen (ones that would not have ever fit him or even close, from outdated eras, full of ruffles, awful colors). Even the ground around the yard beyond the windows where she had grown up playing by herself was nothing like it had been, if in only subtle ways: the private treasures she had buried for safekeeping no longer in the dirt where she had placed them, favorite paths in the forest leading not to secret hideouts or favorite landmarks but on to further paths to nowhere.

  No matter how long it went on like this, that day and after, Alice remained the only one who bore the difference (except perhaps her father, though he was no longer there to say). Her mother, for instance, when asked where Dad was, refused to respond with anything pertinent: she would proceed instead as if she couldn’t even hear her daughter’s spoken words—not ignoring, or choosing to withhold reaction, but wholly unconscious of any reception of the man’s name or any other acknowledgment of his residual presence in their timeline, as if some embedded editor were muting out all reference, leaving only enough overlapping continuity that she, as the now single head of household, could go on without having even sensed disruption, any ill tone. Her mother seemed concerned only with Alice’s perception of concern itself, her sudden alarm, her manic anxiety, over not only the unnoted absence of her father, but also how nothing she could say to work it out; nothing too her mother could or would do to allay her child’s fears but reiterate that everything was and always would be fine; but insist that Alice would calm down soon and see again what had once been and still was, what was actually actual, all okay. For many of those hours, during the rare early days when they were both home and awake at the same time, they would lie in bed together, mother petting her daughter’s head and letting Alice wallow and sob until she exhausted herself so completely that she fell full bore into dreams, back then full of nothing else but gore and mirrors, no respite; and each day again awaking into a world that felt more and more as if it must hold someone else’s life in her own stead, someone she couldn’t peel away from or convince to calm down even from a remove, somewhere within. The same felt true each time she closed her eyes, the emotional coordinates of any moment scrambling and reconfiguring at any given opportunity, if only just enough that she could feel it and not name why.

  The same perturbation of continuity was also true, if in a slightly less crucial way, of all other persons coming and going from their home during that period of transition, which for at least a summer was a lot: strange men and women in the late evenings, right at Alice’s bedtime, often indecorously dressed, and most of whom acted as if it were not only Alice’s father, but also Alice, who did not exist. Nearly every night for a while there: long parties that took their course for the most part throughout the hours Alice was supposed to have been asleep, and which her mother would often lock her door through, over into mornings and late into the next day, as Alice waited without food and drink. Often through long shafts of night she could hear nothing but screaming through the walls, afraid even to move or close her eyes, and in the mornings masses of bodies all passed out around various rooms of the house like corpses that eventually came alive and crawled out across the ground and left the house, only to return again the following evening, and repeat.

  Of the men who sometimes stopped to speak to her, for once admitting she was there, many of them holding themselves close against her and grinning as if flooded with electricity, none seemed ever to have heard of her father either; they looked at her in pity when she explained with growing resignation what had happened, how everything was different now, wondering aloud when would it go back to how it was, until her mother came and hurried her away. Only Alice seemed to remember how much better off the house had felt during their prior lives; how much she missed the way they were then, and most of all just missed her father, the one person who loved her more than anyone, she knew and felt, even if she could remember nothing else about him even days after her awareness of his disappearance beyond a smell of moss or wink of eye; not even any face there in her remembrance, just the outline of a person.

  In the end, what little she had held as real about her life before the shift could withstand only enough oncoming friction for her to grasp the difference for a short while after the fact, until it began to feel no longer really true but under review, confined in facts revised out of how the world had once been to any mind beyond her own.

  * * *

  —

  It was around this time, age eleven, or was it nine, that Alice had begun to teach herself to drink, initially inspired after a few pulls on the dark bottles the passed-out people left all over their increasingly crowded home. No matter how many days she passed in the new condition, the glaring divergence between prior and present never itched her any less, nor did the fortitude of the alteration feel any less evidently everlasting, though the liquor, at least, made the overlap seem distant, increasingly transparent. Consumption made Alice’s hours seem to blur both going forward and in reverse, giving time a graceless and yet transfixing texture held up against how it had begun to seem, inside of which she learned not only to disregard the trauma of dislocation, but to become it. The longer she spent inside the temporary corridors of medication, the more natural the relief seemed, as if no brain were ever meant to go untampered, in the name of taking reign over the illusion of one’s life.

  Once this door had been pulled open, it remained that way until there were no longer hinges or a jamb, even a wall at all, a prior world; her life even then at six or was it sixteen was soon as awash to her as any hour already past, semantically as much anyone else’s going forward now as hers, or so she felt. Nothing could ever need to be the same. The older she became, the more there no longer seemed a math to how it went—no one true body or name actually embodying an identity belonging to their person, no past or future. Anyone could be only so much of a fraction of who they’d already been at any given time before, and any future balance could be revealed only as you became capable of its arbitrary fabrication, and, therefore, its impression of reality as fixed.

  Not only did her father never appear again amid the strange light, nor eventually could she unremember how it had felt before, but as well there were each day new facts about the contiguous content of her life—presences that emerged out of the early hordes of partygoers and became constant, then the only—and then, one day, as if it’d never been another way; an ongoing reformat featuring, most prominently, another father, from out of nowhere, who at once held himself forth as her father for all time, confirmed as their home’s ongoing and uncontested figurehead according to anyone who came around but Alice, w
ho knew for sure this wasn’t true, and nevertheless was expected then to treat the appearance of the new father in her life as if she felt the same way about him as he supposedly did her: that they were linked, that he had been there before even she had; that he in fact had given her existence, raised her up. There was no question, nor any contesting the conviction left allowed; there was only the way it was, and so now the way it had been, so they insisted.

  And yet, despite whatever ways she tried to teach herself to go along, Alice could find no shred of tolerance for this new father’s insertion over the old one; no matter what this small, bony man did or said or knew or showed her, whatever memories in common he could share, even all the ones predating his appearance in her understanding, predating her ability to remember anything at all, no foundation would be allowed Alice in accepting the man as anything but virtual, a human tick. Nor would even the conception of stepfather ever fit, as that still suggested some acceptance of the relation going forward on her part: that he had authority over her person in command. Unfather had been the only thing she could stand to call him or consider him, though rarely to his face, eventually, to avoid her getting smacked. Amid all of this she’d be continuously reminded, despite her mind’s ulterior evidence, that not only did she wear his same last name, he also shared her image: the same round face, same pinned-back ears, same widow’s peak and crooked teeth, even the same way of moving through a room or standing in one. Both he and her mother could spin a childhood’s lifetime of reminiscence to ground the relation amid significant detail: places they’d all been together, catastrophes they’d weathered, food they’d shared, the long gone nights under one sky they’d all survived, one after another—not to mention the deeper relatives in common, so much kin long passed and buried in the very ground on which they walked, and for whom Alice was said to now carry on the torch, full of their blood.

  As the new way it was took hold by span of accrued time alone, and its concurrent sovereignty extended, refusing to mutate in Alice into new loyalty by simple accrual but instead taking on a sort of sheen through which soon no word or wish felt really hers, gradually her mother’s love and understanding—the only pins between her last life and the present—began to reoutfit themselves as well. The woman’s initial patience with what she perceived in her young Alice as a kind of temporary dementia loosened into her own equivalent anxiety, then to frustration, and from there downhill into unabashed vehemence, almost spite. As weeks passed without the change becoming common to her daughter, even when secretly drunken, Alice’s mother began to demonstrate increasing distaste as to why the child “suddenly refused” to accept her very own flesh, her gracious father who had only ever loved and supported Alice in all she wished for, without bounds.

  If the distinction upset her unfather in the slightest, however, he had a funny way of coping. He would mostly refer to Alice’s behavior as “fake forgetting,” laughing it off; she would grow out of it, he insisted, would soon give up her ruse and settle into line once more mature; she was simply acting out, a reaction to the changes in her body, its desires, as he saw it, the most common form of insurrection in the world. He really even seemed to believe it, this total stranger standing alongside her mom above her during her bedtime as they had tucked her in so tight it was hard to move her arms; this adult man, not her father, full of some wholly other kind of means, looking down into her with an expression of what Alice could sense was his idea of mimicking concern, a performance she could see right through, without a doubt; and so no matter who asserted what or how they pleaded, promised, Alice refused to let him in, to occlude the heart of who she knew she really was, or at least had once been; to concede. If anything, his apparent passion for her just felt creepy, a malevolent trick his simple mind didn’t even realize his spirit had taken up, executing it upon on her, her mother, and himself alike, if not the world.

  * * *

  —

  It was likewise from out of nowhere, after just long enough to begin to seem to have worn away to achy lull, that the standing premise of their family again split, from out of nowhere, and only further in reverse of what Alice knew it once had been—not only was there an unfather, now, but an unbrother, whose appearance in her life felt even more unprecedented than the previous revision, without a base.

  The child began to appear first in only pictures, like the one the news had broadcast, many often with Alice right there alongside; and whereas she and the unfather shared strong resemblance, she and Richard looked identically alike. They were twins, in fact, or so both her unfather and her mother claimed, over and over, rolling their eyes, even jeering at each other in shaming mimicry of her expressions when Alice would ask who that was beside her in the pictures. There was little about Richard that marked him as other from Alice but his supposed gender and his clothes, perhaps the strange look he seemed to always be emitting in the picture, as if he were trying to see through you; otherwise, even to her, it would be nearly impossible to tell them apart, a condition that in addition to Alice’s lack of physical context for her brother in her life throughout those hours she would at various points begin to imagine was some cruel game, a manifestation agreed upon by everyone around her, designed to spin her world even further yet out of its course, even without clear motivation why anyone would wish to, what might be at stake in doing so besides to break her down.

  In kinder moments, more and more rare the longer the condition persisted in her mind, one or both of her parents would sit her down and explain the whole configuration of their family once again as if from scratch, to an amnesiac, filling in the blank spaces in her heart and memory with language that made the bodies carry meaning, context, trajectory. It had always been this way, they’d say. And moreover: It would never not be. When it came to family, you had no choice. And so there could only be, so as they saw it, an eventual acceptance of whatever mental damage had been rendered in her ongoing understanding of supposed lineage, most of the damage in this case solely Alice’s, to be held together by a system of ideas set in place long before her own appearance, full of questions no offered answer might assuage.

  The truth was in her blood. She could not live without her blood, or so they told her.

  * * *

  —

  And still the most confounding thing of all about the addition of the unbrother, which seemed to have happened longer ago each time the thought occurred, was how he never actually physically appeared. As at once within the era of his suggestion in the home among them as ambient presence, he was referred to openly and regularly only as “sick,” and as such spent all hours prone in his bedroom recuperating, beyond all shared air and light of day. At no point in the present, beyond the applied memories she was expected to assume, was her supposed lifelong sibling not considered under quarantine, which meant as well, Alice discovered, that the door to his room, down the hall from hers on the same floor, was always locked; nor would it ever be opened in Alice’s presence under the apparently dire premise that they didn’t want her to be exposed—the comings and goings of their shared parents, supposedly, taking place only in secret, under cover, wearing masks.

  When asked what was wrong about him, no one could say; her mother would only turn her face and burst into weeping, both at the continuously injurious evocation of her child in pain, which at no point lessened in its drama, and at Alice’s apparent willingness to press and pry into the family’s open wounds, a tendency her mother read not as a cry for help but as mere cruelty, abandon. How could Alice refuse to acknowledge all the time she and her brother had spent together, always bent instead on testing and retesting the family bonds that should have grown only more meaningful—and so more powerful—with age? Did Alice feel the same lack of love toward her mother too, the woman demanded, clinging only more and more steadfastly to a brutal willingness to question what everyone else around her experienced as innate? This gap in their connection would be the last snapped straw of once-shared understanding as mother and dau
ghter: as after the appearance of the supposed sibling, her mother regarded her at best then with shameful pity, tending further and further toward disgust, and only further fortified within the ongoing gravity of emotional engagement the male half of their burgeoning unfamily required, day in, day out.

  Richard is in pain, the unfather might mumble from a corner of the room, unseen as Alice arrived again to petition her mother’s prior understanding, fending her off through clenched teeth. Leave our son alone. He needs his rest. Her mother looking on beside her, saying nothing as the man’s voice filled in over her own. You know he’s been through so much already. Why do you have to make it worse?

  Thus, the distressed gap in Alice slowly became a widening expanse, increasingly palpable between her and those with whom she slept in rooms beside, then turning only firmer as a rallying cause between them, at once walling Alice out and further confirming the distortion in who she’d once felt she was and who she seemingly could not discontinue in becoming. How much of life had gone on like this, without her favor, both unconscious and awake, leaving nothing to be desired but that there could ever be an end to the ordeal without having to start over? It seemed like every second, every hour; wherein all the times she’d felt most almost herself were as well the most completely swarming, clogged beyond her own influence, to the point that doing something like reading or writing became all but impossible under the anticipation of a last, unnegotiable deluge. Around every unseen corner, then, she sensed some sort of fall, an expanse so much wider than would ever actually reveal itself, allow conception; every wall only a wish and vice versa.