Alice Knott

by Blake Butler

  Such as: How long had she been out that night? Alice couldn’t remember lying down or getting up, as the dark between held on all blotchy, endless, comprised in chunks cross-stitched together with the sour drag of a hangover in their wake. She couldn’t piece together anything about the night in question, really, in her own mind, until later, when she read back the statements she’d apparently offered that same blurred morning they’d brought her in and shook her down, all of it transcribed and signed in her own name; describing a night that could have been any other she recalled: staring at the depth of night for hours, face at a window, reading the moon, before turning in just as the sun began to cut across the land. Which in the end had apparently been enough, as they found no evidence that anything about such claims was untrue; and in the end the case of the death of her parents, as they were, had been closed as quickly as it transpired, despite what seemed to Alice some great wrong, a sense of cleaving she might have welcomed were it not so ugly, out of whack. All the evidence was beyond her, supplanted by facts counted more real than anything she could offer, somehow adding up to what the law deemed a full picture, apparently; and so too, soon, it was easier to let it fade away than try to fight, her waking daily plague of familial terror at last finding a point from which it might recede, even as she was haunted newly not by what she’d done but what she hadn’t, still unsure of how or why she could have changed their dismal course.

  * * *

  —

  Most confounding of all, though, if in a completely different measure, was her inheritance—their inheritance, she should say, hers and Richard’s—which included not only the house and all its present contents, but a sum of money so large it didn’t seem correct, or at least not an amount their family had ever demonstrated access to. Alice had known they were well enough off, according to figures, though her parents hardly acted as if that were true, and certainly not to the extent the local coverage said they had been, detailing their fortune in abstract digits as enough to live out a thousand other lives, all of which was to be split down the middle with her unbrother—made legally now her actual brother by definition, his name right there on paper alongside hers. It was so much money, really, that what it came to mean to Alice eventually, more than all else, was that she might never fully rid herself of an association with her unwanted lineage; it would haunt her in its essence forever after, like a virus, despite how over time she’d try to spend it all or give it away, eventually going all in on the purportedly priceless works of strangers, each with a different life all their own, and unaffected as the world continued changing, until now, in their destruction.

  Likewise, the ongoing state of sickness Richard had been said to live under, locked in his room through all Alice knew of his whole life, upon their parents’ death itself had shifted gears. It was not days after their cremation—and the eventual scattering to local waters that Alice arranged to have performed by caretakers in her stead—that any remaining suggestion of Richard’s presence inside the house was packed up and shipped out, as overnight. Though half the physical body of the house had been named his now, he’d left her to it, even taking his name off the deed, as if in trade for his unauthorized absconding with most all of what had outfitted their house’s innards all that time—from the strange lace curtains in her mother’s bedroom to the unfather’s peculiar miniatures collection, a sticky group of countless tiny dolls strewn throughout the house; the candles and the maze games and the folded maps of foreign locations and the steak knives; even the carpet they’d installed just months before, a deep green color that blurred the eye, its removal leaving bare strange black paneled floors of interlacing diamond tile, which Alice could not remember being under there before—anything not bolted down, as the saying went, that had been a feature of their family; including every picture of them, from all their eras, leaving behind no photographic document of any of their lives—including shots held over from her mother’s childhood, or those of Alice by herself, without which, Alice found, she found it increasingly difficult to remember how any of them had looked, including her, her memory mutating instead to whatever phantom relics she’d recorded in her mind. Sometimes she found it impossible to remember ever having any other face than the one she currently wore, as if she’d had the same features in every incarnation, no matter what age; sometimes she couldn’t even imagine that present face without staring back at it directly, and even then it didn’t match. And so, with her mother, passed any concrete semblance of attachment to all they’d shared, however wrong, the scaffolding around those years thereafter eroding, coming open.

  Alice found, too, that she felt no real sense of mourning in the dissolution, as much as she might once have suspected she would miss even such ongoing pain when it was gone. She had been mourning the absence of a home, a love, a self for so long it felt her whole life, partitioning every prior feeling she and her mother had once shared, before the becoming of the unfamily, into its own state of disregard; as if any living bond between her and her mother as she’d once felt it had been itself the true mirage. If anything, it must be pure relief in the release, Alice encouraged herself to imagine, no longer forced to live on pressed between the possibilities of anything returning to how it had once been, that soft and false nostalgia battered so far down that all it had do was crumple up and crawl away. It would not be long, she felt sure, before she would be unable to remember her mother’s voice at all, nor any moment shared between them, beyond sudden desperate flashes felt through night. Soon the very idea of ever having had a family or unfamily at all began to integrate itself into something long begotten and undone, a rotten joke no part at all of her real life, such that more and more throughout each waking hour her way of being became the only way it could be or ever had, held in the here and now, all her own, with any other sense of budding explanation only fodder for some fire in her heart, burning up along the very wire of today.

  * * *

  —

  As for where Richard went or what became of him thereafter, that would remain a mystery to her for more than two decades, if one she found bizarrely easy to forgo. It all seemed so much more flimsy after the fact—his needs, his phantom motion, all the rest—much as each coming day did, all the time, the present point of focus slipping only further and further from its own foundation in retro-context, however marred as it remained. The whole disarming fact of having lived among the family had come and gone in what seemed months, leaving no trace beyond the chains of empty rooms she could not count, the insufferable moods that came over her as from out of nowhere amid the new shape of going on.

  Even Richard’s room itself, which had come to signify some sort of central emotional coordinate of that prior era—its door remained locked, without key that Alice could locate, the space itself remaining as inaccessible as it had always been, after the fact, though at the least she’d long since stopped hearing his mumbling echo in the nights; his phantomic lingering in her periphery waned away. She might have kicked the door down or removed its hinges, gone in and seen at last what else was there once and for all, but she couldn’t summon the will; and soon she no longer wished to know. She would rather go on as if none of all that stretch of time, however long it had actually been, had ever happened; his prior space surrendered unto nothing. Alice could start to live now, as she saw it, with her and herself alone, somehow a pair, as if it had never been another way, keeping on only a last name that already felt like someone else’s.

  Alice’s newfound isolation, however, did not mean that no trace of her old life would yet be left behind. Despite the summarily executed evacuation, the damage of what had gone on in or through the house continued to hold haunt, no matter how efficiently Alice designed her life to move along.

  It showed itself in early days as only a distant sense about the air held over in such a trauma’s wake: some sinking, overwritten feeling carried in the wood grain and the drywall; half adrenaline, half dread, intermixed with a continuous anxiety, amo
ng which the sleep that had always been hard enough grew harder as she aged. Alice found her nights extending one atop another like rungless ladders, allowing no firm place for resting as she climbed, no better with her eyes closed than eyes open. Occasionally, too, she’d come across some trinket passed over from before, a remnant of the way it’d so long been, appearing as if from out of nowhere to remind her who she was: a hairpin on the floor, caught with a single follicle of what could only be her sibling’s slick, dark hair, as seen in pictures; a loose pill, brightly colored, possibly any other of her family members’ regular dose, marked with cryptic engravings by some corporation; unnervingly often, crumpled notes in cramped, childish handwriting she could only imagine must be Richard’s, so barely legible it hurt her head to read; and yet she couldn’t overlook how each fragment seemed to correspond to her own life, as might an omniscient narrator describe it, in the third person. Alice is walking down a long white hall, one such note read, the ink all smearing where she touched, in her old house, as it had been once; but is it even her? She hadn’t looked so young in so long, though the girl clearly is wearing her same face, her deep-set eyes ringed with acne, deeper bruises all down her arms—sourced presumably, as she imagines, from how often she had fainted as a child. But where is she going now? What does she live for? It gave her gooseflesh every time, reading and rereading someone writing of her like that, as if she were some chess piece to be paraded around, made a game of; as if the author could directly mold her past, her coming fate.

  Alice is looking for her brother, another note read; today is his birthday, which also happens to be hers. This year she has a gift to give him, one she’d found buried in the yard beneath the tree they sometimes joked about hanging themselves from together: a small black book. She had not opened the book without him, saving it hidden beneath her pillow for just the right time to give her gift; she wanted him to be the one to read it aloud, unto the both of them, in his small strange voice, so much her own, adding his own parts in as he went, between the lines.

  It really had been her birthday when she’d found the scrap, a fact she might have wholly passed over in her mind without reminder; and though he’d clearly made up the thing about them discovering the buried book—had he not?—she did at least know what he meant, referring to the series of novels the unfather had spent much of his last days with, so caught up in its entangled, epic plot that he couldn’t bring himself to turn away. And though Alice had always wondered what the books said, wishing she could steal one for herself and read it locked in her own room, far from all eyes, she would never have wished to share it with Richard, much less to have him read it to her; and either way, she’d never found the courage to set foot in the unfather’s study; instead she could only pretend to read them with her mind, envisioning the contents typed out against the darkness as she lay awake all night, beyond sleep. And so these fragments, Alice realized, must be their author’s own attempt to do the same—to make something out of nothing; another world—although, unlike in her own imagination, this conception referred not to ecstatic fiction, but to their own actual lives, generating variations on the present hour as it passed, which in tone seemed to her something like incantations, like hexes that could change the way she saw herself, the world.

  Alice would get the sense at times that these fragments were being left behind with intent, specifically for her to find, even if she could not begin to sketch a reason why. If not Richard, then who was it? And so she’d started burning each further scrap as soon as she’d found it, dozens of them, hundreds, stuffed in the kitchen sink, along a fan’s blade, between slices of bread right out of the bag—sometimes several copies of the same phrase, only a word or two varying between them, sometimes whole sets of other words erased. So much smoke rose out of such a small amount of paper, she discovered, as if its fibers were thicker than they appeared, causing a stink she couldn’t get out of her hair or clothing no matter how many times she washed.

  * * *

  —

  Other similar manifestations were much less indirect, seeming only to appear during her sleep: a new foyer, for instance, one cold morning, leading from the dining room where no one had ever together dined, into a hall so long she’d thought it never would end, until it did, upon a stage with velvet curtains thick as her chest, beyond which she found only a shallow alcove that bore no lighting and no proper seating for their guests. Or, then, another evening, elsewhere, a window that looked straight out onto another window just the same, each nearly opaque with blue-black glass, visually abutting into a section of the house that, try as Alice might, she could never seem to make connect; and always with the sense that someone else was performing the same on the far side, approaching and inspecting, just out of sight. These shifts felt different compared to how the house had changed when she was younger, now more and more blatantly defiant, no longer even trying to hide what they transformed.

  Even more damaging than these physical alterations were other trace associations, new memories and meanings that cropped up in her experience of what space did seem to hold its shape around her, no matter how much time passed in between; such as what had been done to the living room beneath her bedroom, one of the few areas that had survived emotionally intact through the transition from one father to the other—a small, low-ceilinged space, harbor for their own flat jokes about its cramped dimensions, which never dissuaded either from insisting most every evening after dinner that they retire there all together, as a family, gathering around the glowing screen in total silence, to receive what it presented of the world. It was in this room, Alice remembered in post-transition years, that if she closed her eyes and tried to wish herself away, she could feel as if she were very young again, still there in what she’d come to think of as the prior version of her life, possible for some brief glimpse to carry on in within a familiar form of her existence, happy, safe—a needed gash of hopefulness that for some time kept her going, no matter how quickly with her eyes again reopened the feeling faded, became like all else.

  Even that sensation now, though, with the house in both her and Richard’s name, had not held over. The room felt less itself each time she came around, if still strong enough inside her heart to seem a beacon as she wandered the house searching for places of comfort, common sense. It always managed to retain the same door, at least: dark wood with a polished gemstone doorknob, marred on the inside with claw marks along its bottom edge, from the year they’d tried to keep a feral cat—a memory she did not remember having until she ran her nails along the markings’ deeper grooves and listened in—though the space behind it each time seemed even smaller, soon more like a closet than a room: the walls so near on every side, the ceiling low; the TV itself, one of the few things she understood Richard had intentionally left behind, no longer able to find any channel but marred globs of static, no matter what brand of service she installed, what signal was sent through the wires; as if this room, as it was now, could not be reached.

  It was through this room’s steadfast nostalgia—if nothing else, so long withstanding in her mind—that what would serve as her most vivid memories of Richard began cropping up, bearing timeworn associations he had never previously attained; on both sides of her understanding of their family, pre- and post-shift; as if in each phase he’d always been there, in both versions. Suddenly she could remember no other way it hadn’t always been: the four of them together, crowded in for entertainment all those nights—Alice and her mother, yes, and either the father or unfather, depending on the time; and then, alike in both fraught eras, her living twin, his presence overriding whatever else the revision of her life had once entailed; as if, regardless of who the supposed progenitor was, Richard, the son, fully her brother, had always been there just as she had, one and the same.

  Very quickly, in tracing this feeling in its appearance, Alice found she could no longer track the nature of the difference between the real father and the unfather; not because they looked alike, but beca
use in the now-revised memory of their time alive together in the TV room, the body of the father had no face; instead there hung a smear of pallid outline where there should have been clear features, the skin around it caving in with waver, rods and pills. The same was true then for her mother in such memories too, as if the lack of recognition in the adults had copied itself onto her source of birth, leaving of all her family’s faces only Richard’s fully formed, and so at once her only living link to who she’d been, who she still was. Richard had simply implanted himself there, she felt, worming his way into the last remaining parts of her she could maintain, tearing down the wall between them that had survived their parents, either kind—and therein begetting adherent memories at last no longer part of an erasure, but bound within it, shared between; such that he too had been a victim, of whatever happened, a bond between them that no one else, even their blood, could understand, regardless of what kind of unword she used to differentiate between them. Then, yet further still, it began to seem as if in fact he had been there even before her; such that, from his perspective, Alice had been the one who just appeared from out of nowhere, living sick; she the fulcrum around which their shared world had been forever changed, beyond all compromise or correlation.

  Even then, as she relived those memories newfangled, still nothing of Richard’s actual physical presence would appear. His image in her memory remained merely a suggestion of a person, someone who must have been there but about whom she had already walled off all the facts; whose face and self remained from her perspective out of field, same as she’d sensed through all their hours, but now dipped in living glue, if still never actually on camera in any version, no matter how convincing her burgeoning memories began to seem. Once she had felt such association, even as barely there as ever, she could feel him from that flashpoint leaking further out, pressing at the edges of all the rest that she remembered no matter how much she tried not to, an itch she wouldn’t scratch in fear of it inflaming, taking hold.