Alice Knott

by Blake Butler

  And yet the very sense of wonder in seeing herself anew makes Alice want to understand what could come next: how she might look pushed to her limit, beyond change. Within a few paces the skin around her eyes tightens demonstrably, her chin becoming rounded, her knitting brow. Nearer still, the pixels of her face begin to bluster and coalesce, new ridges forcing their way out of the sharper features and obscuring each prior layer, filling in with grayer, rougher tones, taking on age. The feeling isn’t so defeating as it might feel in other context, peeling years of looks off of her life; instead she is attracted to the mirror, feels its craving fill her flesh, scrawling through it without focus, as in a heat wave, manipulating its own perceived design in kind by how it’s read. It’s almost as if there’s a whole other person enabled in her image, Alice imagines, coming free only in accrued observation, decades of rot. She finds she wants to touch the surface of the mirror as it shifts against her image, to hold it steady; to be near the other of her so she can understand her better, learn what it wants; to know her body from the outside as well as all those who’ve ever looked upon her without permission.

  By the time she is halfway across the space, Alice finds, her reflection has taken on the image of someone well into late middle age. There’s no music to the moment, no nothing beyond the time lapse as it gathers from her aggregating form, her hair extending down around her eyes, along her back, thinner and flatter, all color eradicating itself as if being vacuumed up from within her, slipping out. Though all of this is only true in the reflection, Alice thinks; and indeed she can see and feel along her present flesh that nothing actually is changing but in the glass; she feels no different at all except for where a rising heat behind her face fumbles with empathy, not for her own reflected image but for what has been obscured between them, throughout time: moments already lost as soon as she could ever want to try to understand them; each captured instant of her as if she were a different woman through every hour of her life; and each then overwritten in transition, made merely another forced iteration, the newest outer layer of her persona, subject and object, in control for just an instant then just as quickly smothered out, never to be recovered. She can already feel the skin hid in her mind, as she’d last been, just now, becoming replaced by another layer, and the next layer then at once again the same, over and over; quicker and closer. The only thing that had held all these lives together before now, she understands, was delusion, some false premonition as transmutable as any painting touched by flame or any elapsed memory made bereft, and nothing in her carried over louder than the questions she could only hope to never know an answer for, so that she might spend the whole rest of life in wonder, the only thing that, despite its pain, kept her living through the rubble.

  Though when she feels her actual body try to speak—to slow itself in its transition in the mirror by objection, the sound exuding not through her mouth or even pores but through the gap between her living body and the other of her in the glass—it comes out so loud it hurts her hearing; as if there’s something even louder locked within it, rounding out the corresponding feeling of having had something to say once covered over with mass dark. Then at once there’s nothing left she can remember but years and years of heavy volume, inner-screaming; the countless versions of her fraught in anguish across their catalog of silent lives, amplified together within her to drown out her present understanding; thereafter splitting open, unscrolling innumerable other tormented voices carried on in every offshoot of her past persona, where at the center underneath it there’s no true sound there, but endless blank, its flimsy, shrieking flesh becoming thin against her, stretching up through her brain and over her eyes. Then, on the far side of it, suspended, she can perceive a simple, terrifying calm: such blistered mass packed fat and crammed so full and filling that there’s nowhere left to fit, nothing alive within this feeling but the sense of no longer being capable of feeling anything at all, no longing or outline or intent to fill her future life; only the feeling of the bending inward of her logic turned against her, pressed to burst. And then, briefly, as the rift glides: flashbulbs crashing in the overwhelming brightness; a sea of hands, as molding clay; a rush of wind so wide and far apart it rolls like water; silence.

  She cannot remember how to live. All sense of what had always been required of a body to keep being suddenly seems warped, capped full of continuously elapsing turns at each of which one might become fixed forever to its intention, washed away. Time is not a shapeless thing, she hears her voice say, but sets of cells on cells one could become sewn into, immobilized unending; a heat not fused from heat but glazed with film, edge-hard, undying; the words each coming undone as they are uttered, so that even trying to think anything else burst worlds apart, all potential edges of desire beyond the present’s nowhere pressing mud in her blood, each passing intention sprawled through her heart and born again into a lower, indescribable form of sense, beyond any emotion or expectation.

  Her reflection’s flesh is soft as anything, she finds, now that she is finally able to reach out and touch it, beyond its image, in the ensuing blind; so permeable it might as well be putty, and yet drawn up against some harder structure clasped within, against which she finds there is a force that wishes her to continue, to press her whole sense of central self into the fold, leave no space between the known and unknown therein remaining. Even as she tries alike to so comply she feels it lurch, and beneath that something grinding, metal on metal, each presence at once worn away on either side, like lines in a book that disappear as they are read.

  The room was blue. Then it was a low white, as with day passing, and back to a blue of dimmer shade, whereby in being seen once and parsed it could no longer continue being what it had always been.

  Alice is there. She can hear her thoughts as in dictation, somewhere above her. Between the thoughts, nothing exists.

  I was watching myself as if from above, and at the same time as from inside me. I had to close my eyes and focus on the texture of my body to begin to see again out of the face I knew as mine, to go on managing my life, though when I saw out of my face, there was nothing but this sick, mislaid expanse of sun and dust, a deranging phase forced through the hue of blanking out, which then became the brightest, widest blank, in all directions, wrapped around me. I still felt everything I had to feel—the recognition of myself in the reflection, the understanding that I was already not who I’d just been, each second leaving my prior self behind me as an image, ever-off—though in a way more like having it described to me than actual experience.

  Alice is not sure where the house is, beyond the mirror’s edges. She knows that she has felt this way before, infinite times: such as the morning of the appearance of the unfather; such as this morning too, the day the cameras claimed her, unable for hours after waking to move or open up her eyes.

  Wherein, behind my eyes, I saw bright snow, the kind from old-time rupture in our signal, when we still believed in local weather. How often something so much like hope would fill me up from the inside despite how I could not remember anything else about where I’d been, what I’d been doing; as if regardless of all that, when at last I came around and found myself again, somewhere within me, it would be the same as it had been, in days when I felt love, when I knew who was waiting for me where and why, when I could remember my own name without trying.

  Each time, though, when the snow touched to my flesh it immediately melted, as I was burning, full of bloat, and as the colors again widened, in between them I saw other people on their knees; saw them in the worst ways, fumbling, broken, each at once so much like me, grasping for faith; each only ever granted relief in at last turning over, giving in; at which point I realized I was no different from any of them; I was here trapped in me for a reason, beyond life; beyond anything even something like God could comprehend.

  Every word dissolves into the ones subsequent, becoming absorbed in the running language of her thought’s sentence as it sticks. She keeps waiting for the state to
end, the way a dream would, returning the structure of the space to how it had last been, though the longer she waits the more it’s like there could never be an out, that her life has ended not in fracture or in tragedy, but in simply coming to a wall.

  * * *

  —

  The scene cuts out. The air around where the screen had been begins to shudder, a simulation of physical motion that doesn’t seem to correspond to what she is. It’s as if she’s being turned over on her side, but for both sides at the same time, a mass of force without effect, framed by their speech.

  I’d already lived through this before, her voice is praying. I’d traced this faulty plot already, its living layer lying hidden and waiting to conform me to it like a flesh. Each instant that I lived now was only the conflation of all prior points of culmination competing in me to retake the helm, seize the controls, and all the pending world awaiting a lost relation to the present person I must be still standing strong enough to hold the claim.

  And when I looked in search of any world that might remain, I saw the sound of all time becoming broken open everywhere around, the glass of endless windows, mirrors, sight on sight, where through its rupture of my perspective I could then begin to hear another kind of speaking, the loudest, thickest voice I’d ever felt, compromised from all the people I’d ever known, each of them speaking at the same time, their choir brutal and unrehearsed, spreading through me with its sick yearning. It wasn’t even sound as much as motion, spurred by an intent my own actual fiber could not trace. It numbed my arms and legs and face, then up and in through my intestines, working quick and hard around my heart, spreading out an instant, insistent warmth that made me want it never to stop coming, surging, living in me, like a passion; an act of understanding.

  I had never felt so small, and at the same time so full and flooded with the sense that there was nothing left about me that was mine. I mean, I could not breathe. I could not see anything. I was sucking on the air no longer there, clutching at my body for ways to slip out, the words of urges flooding from my face. Everything I touched thereafter became a part of everything else I’d touched already, including light and air, including me, as did every other lifetime having touched the same space before or after, all the lengths and breadths of every face; and though I did not feel any pain in such erasure, neither mine nor someone else’s carried on, when I closed my eyes next they would not open, nor would they want to ever.

  * * *

  —

  Alice is holding the mirror in her arms. She has removed it from the wall, she finds, hefting it up against her chest, bracing it tight against her face. The mirror’s flesh is overwarm now, as if from sunlight, its surface sticking to her skin where pulled away. She is surprised to find, too, how little it weighs, only hollow between sides.

  The mirror’s gleaming hurts her eyes, somehow shining in the room’s absence of any fertile hue—like the meat of the sclera, the margins of the pages of a book. She feels an urge to look anywhere else but directly at it, searching for traction some long, lost time before she finds the will to look away, to lay the mirror facedown on the floor where she’d been standing, the ground beneath it left to reflect the dark back at itself in hidden space.

  The silence seems different then somehow, an active mute made negative, capped off. The backside of the mirror bears the same hue as the walls, unadorned but for the glinting outline of a small metallic placard installed into the upper right-hand corner of the otherwise bare field, engraved with a clear pattern cut into its substance, in relief. The edges of the etching glisten where the light behind her head still hits from certain angles, allowing its latent logo to resolve:

  The pattern’s shining weaves and stings, hard to look at quite directly. Alice rubs her thumb over the cut edges of the lines, feeling her flesh press into their divots, as if imprinting. The tines between the cuts are warm, like liquid; its gather clings against the pads of her prints, making the skin stick briefly before lifting away. In looking up again she sees the remaining expanse of what could only be her vault, standing long and flat at her periphery, recohering, coming down, the firming ground beneath her all that she can ascertain therein so clearly, left again with no way in and no way out.

  In retrospect, Alice found in her later years that she could recall passed time only as played out under heavy glaze, as if it were all one long day; the withstanding larger world, too, impossibly obscure, bound by an illusion of immensity that connected nowhere else but back again upon itself. No matter how far she’d ever walked in one direction in her childhood home, the only place she’d ever lived, she always found her way arriving back to where she’d already been, despite how no location felt at all like her own, even given the countless points of passing recognition: the texture of the sheets of her own bed, cold no matter how long she lay within them; the closet full of clothes that fit her body as if sewn for her and her alone, no matter how much her body changed; the workbooks she’d been supplied for education full of logic problems none of which had any real answers, complex equations full of symbols and no instructions. Some days she’d grow so tired she could hardly see or think at all, stuffed full as if she’d eaten way too much; an object like a locket or a doll she’d loved would disappear completely, nowhere to be found no matter how many times she retraced her steps, then sometimes later turning up again wrapped in black plastic in the backyard, or for some reason stuffed inside her pillow, or on the roof.

  Still nowhere, throughout all that time, following her unbrother’s introduction in her life, had Alice ever been able to connect her supposed flesh and blood to a full person, no matter how much or little she tried to care. The door to his room remained locked from the inside even after she’d stopped hearing about his sickness and then eventually stopped hearing about him ever, the name made verboten between her and her mother once again, as had her real father been, still for no reason she could state, making Alice wonder if he’d died. Thereafter, the unfather refused to let her near him, as if the mere sight made him ill for dearer child; instead he began spending all his waking time locked in the den he’d converted from a sun room, blacking the windows with layers of fresh paint—so that he could read and think in solitude, her mother stated, caught up with a series of thick jacketless books he’d been subscribed to by a friend, and about which he would not speak, responding when prodded by her mother in a hoarse, high-pitched, clipped voice like some sick toy, in text that didn’t even sound like English, his eyes unfocused, far away.

  For the most part, though, Alice did not go seeking company, her prior efforts to hold a sense of home together quickly dissipating into a more focused isolation, bleeding from her teen years, straight through into early middle age. Her lone tie that kept her tuned in was a rising, constant worry for her mother’s health: how she’d seemed at some point to go off a cliff, from out of nowhere, and thereafter, once acknowledged, to worsen by the day, suddenly gaining weight so fast it was as if it had never been another way. The woman then began spending all her time in bed, hidden away in one of the house’s many guestrooms, which she and her supposed husband never appeared to share, her internal faculties going haywire one by one: first her desire to wash herself, to use the restroom, then to realize she needed to at all; then, not long after, forgoing any sense of when or where she was; then who she was, who Alice might be, why. It was as if whatever shred of personality or passion Alice could remember of the woman became as covered over in her as her bones under her accruing pounds of pasty flesh of no known feeding. Alice began then counting down to the time she’d soon be able to move away, an urge she couldn’t help but hate herself for feeling, no matter how well earned, for how in turn she’d done no better for her mother than she for child, each stranding the other in a corrupt offshoot of their own ailing lifeline, related strangers.

  In the end, the doctors said, it wasn’t weight that killed her mother, or even immobility, not exactly—somehow underneath it all her heart was fine
. Rather, she died of what they insisted be called shock: some sudden battery of hormones and adrenaline so strong it had changed the rhythm of her pulse—not a heart attack, but an immense stress. Something that occurred upon her, or within her, the doctor had written in the reports the police eventually provided, what seemed far too long after the fact, like emotional spontaneous combustion. Alice had never understood how they could decipher such definitions from a blood test or a graft; nor had she been expecting it when she was informed that her unfather had taken his own life, in the same hour as her mother, according to the coroner, via a gunshot to the head; the man had hardly even seemed able to remember her mother’s name in those most recent months, much less to be so devastated by her loss as to kill himself in response, unless the two events were somehow only coincidentally timed, which, improbable as that seemed, who could prove otherwise?

  This had all happened, apparently, as Alice slept, through another night of dreams aping her daily reality, frozen faceup in the bed, waking the next morning to find the house aflood with men with badges, bodies already removed from the scene, the necessary work of investigation under way. Any suspicion she might have harbored about wrongdoing in the matter, whether by her unfather, or by the authorities, or even by Richard, could be confirmed by no actual evidence in hand, nothing certain beyond lifetimes of ongoing psychic malfeasance that when described aloud in the presence of outside authority only ever seemed to raise eyebrows in Alice’s direction—as if she were the one gone off the rails, informed by a worldview that to anyone who hadn’t been there seemed unreliable, full of holes.