by Blake Butler
Then, again, my mother covered up my eyes.
For eons I could not think. Nor could I describe or feel my perception. Even where before I’d felt numbness, now there was not even that; no sensation, even including the absence of the feeling of absence; no past inferred but in the echo of carnage, made in our image, in reinvention of all the mush that rose and fell. My senses were all silver, fuzzed out from focus where I’d tried to learn again to see the coming day as it remained. In whatever way I’d felt before that I could contain any remembrance, there was only every prior hour crushed so completely into the present that it had no remainder, no skin left to be felt; and so once again it was as it was and always had been forever; sheer hemispheres of landscape ground down into nowhere, same as what would come out of burning up a picture or a table, indistinguishable now from flesh or floors, each tick of time so conflicted it’s already over as soon as it begins, beyond even the shape of information, story. And so no story left to say; nowhere but what exists outside itself forever, now coming open; integrating.
Inside this expanse, I closed my eyes and clasped my hands. I heard the pages of my past life turning in my person, no longer flesh but only flow, made of expired language claimed out of all the open time we’d never witnessed pressed together, then welling out from its compression, so that whenever I tried to look or be front and center, I could feel many potential forms of future, each written over by another as they struggled to remain a dream: miles of vibrant fire populated by massive machines, gunmetal black; flame unfurling like dumb lava through some deformed architecture without map, churning putty and smoke in clouds that weep; hordes of masses packed together around a high, wide, silver wall, waiting to be let in, perhaps, or for something to emerge; the only open sound the sound of their whining, gnawing, starving; dirt becoming overturned; masses of birds with deformed wings flooding out in fever at the light; children bawling in open fields; windows smashed out of buildings as looters take whatever they can find, not to have but to destroy; globs of gold dust sticking to all the glass there, among roving clouds of open blood; the tide of the sea no longer moving, still as the land is; piles of money in the street not even good enough to burn; reams of celluloid and tapes weird with emulsion, dumped into bodies of stagnant water overflowing, filling gorges where plots had been; books and canvases and audio tapes being ripped to bits by machines with human faces as packs of cops stand calm and smoking in the sun, no features to their faces, no fingers to their fists, smoke all over everything in layers; each person not completely crippled carrying a copy of the same book, like an appendage; shots of countless planets, ours and others alike, seen from roving monitors above each square mile; construction crews set up in action in wide deserts, erecting a translucent screen installed as a ceiling just beneath the sky above; silent troops in white gear moving across locations as barren as lost film sets; piles of blood, slathered across landscapes, floors, unknown locations; each, even in repeating, bearing down upon the grain behind it, wearing through it, thin. And where the image occurs, the blight behind grows stronger, burning through the very shape of its idea; no repetition and no subject; the miles of fire spreading over all below, ash raining down as from some high eye; people shrieking in the streets with arms raised and mouths forced open, inhaling the cinder written all among them and above them and beyond.
Within all this, when I could feel myself again, the world was not the world as it had been, nor was it any of the days I’d ever passed through in my life; it was not a world at all, really, but an apparition, more real than all the rest, full of air from fields of buried dead, their flesh disintegrated into soil and heat, even their brains and names only a loam. I couldn’t tell the difference between one inch and another, nor could I remember how to want to care; every hour had fallen into the same hour, each passing pixel contained in each new frame; I kept finding my eyes were closed when I had believed them open, and as I opened my eyes again the eyes would burn, as looking on through countless frames of light and sound all at the same time, like every film I’d ever seen or book I’d ever read or paintings I’d passed by in rooms at once all laid on top of one another into a field of conflicting signals so loud they defied certain shape or hue; so where in every inch lived every life, splitting out through what must once have been my point of view, one of many billions of our skins draped all throughout eternal night, each corresponding lifetime in its own mind larger than all else as yet combined, its gravity so dense it could not stop spreading through itself, eating itself, and at once echoed so intensely by every other it split each color from its name, until soon, so on thereafter, there would be nothing left between us, no edge to anything.
By now, Alice finds, the dusk is coming down; the night all leaky, having slicked her clothes and skin with dew. She’s wandered far out among the plots, she realizes, without direction, no longer able to see any definitive landmark or location like her home or the idea of one no matter how she turns, no other living shape under the sky. She might imagine she is lost, too far to find a way back, were she not standing front and center in the pathway of a car; a white stretch limo, rather, its engine running and high beams left on, cutting toward her on the air.
She recognizes the car at once, despite having never been allowed to ride inside it either with her father or unfather—she can’t remember which—who’d purchased the machine, or so he’d claimed, to be used for free delivery to their own funerals, each of the family, a morbid punchline that always made her mother cackle with crazed glee. And yet, even if it were indeed a punchline, he hadn’t strayed from its sole law: to keep it clean and shining for when the day came, never driving it otherwise, or letting anybody else. She can’t remember the last time she’d seen it, after it was stored so long in a sealed air bubble in some garage Alice always avoided for its stench of mildew; nor has she driven herself anywhere in so long she’s not sure she still remembers how.
The body of the machine is hot to the touch, she finds, sticky with sundrench. She puts her head to the glass, expecting to see a driver there inside, perhaps even someone she should know, or who has more information for her, though there does not appear to be anyone in the front seat, nor any passenger in the long, slick back space, large enough for a dozen or more.
The limo’s doors aren’t locked. The keys are still in the ignition, too, attached to a keychain bearing the initials a.b.k., same as she’d shared with both her parents, as she remembers, though in the moment she finds she can’t recall their full names, each possible moniker sounding wrong, not a real person.
Still, it feels good to sit in the driver’s seat, she finds, pulling the driver’s-side door closed against herself in the freezing rush of hard A/C; to feel her hands around the wheel, peering out through where to see anything beyond the glass she has to wipe an eyehole, the cool air inside causing thick white condensation on the glass, same as the mirror had, covering the world up and over again each time as it fills back in. The seat leather sticks to her skin, its deep cupped bucket wanting to surround her, draw her down, until she’s soon hardly high enough to see out or over into anywhere.
* * *
—
Alice puts the car in drive and hears it speak. The machine’s voice is like a woman’s, mottled with digitization that betrays it as unnatural, though this does not dissuade it from commanding her to proceed to the route, its program already somewhere well into a set of ongoing directions once abandoned, now revived. At least for once there is an unquestioned destination, Alice imagines, an authority to point the way, and though she has never used a GPS before—never trusted it, never wished to—somehow now it seems exactly what she needs, hardly a choice.
Driving seems easier than she remembers, a motion still harbored somewhere in her habit’s memory, awkward mostly in how the world beyond still defies her direct recognition, even miles out: no familiar landmarks or significant visual stretches looming up from the landscape in her mind. Spaces move past her, continuous p
atches of blurred terrain, never standing out long enough to inform her present position, her blinking cursor in the open document of space and time. There’s so much world out here, she finds, and so much empty, so much alike and just the same, not even any other passing cars. The night is wholly silent besides the rushing wind and the ongoing, canny voice of GPS, which she relies on blindly, finding pleasure in following its instructions toward a future destination apparently already entered, bearing out the continuing surprise of each new turn; each step in the dictated directions arriving just as quickly as they feed into the last, only to disappear again as somewhere she’d once been. She’s hardly even really driving, she realizes, as each time she notices where she is, she can’t remember having acted, for which she feels thankful, already unsure which lever to turn or nub to press to make the car do anything.
Then, like that, just as she’s enjoying the procession, she’s arrived; or so the device announces, ceasing its dictation, returning to its default state to await the next command. Through the windshield, the façade of the site where she’s arrived is lit so sharply it’s hard to see in full expanse, the high lines of the massive structure rising up as if in direct competition with the half-moon, all polished metal and massive, opaque plate glass panes that do little more than deflect the eye, giving the whole grounds a floating feeling, open wide. There’s no indication that the place is even actually in business, or ever has been, far as Alice can tell: construction all so new, no defining signage, no cars at all beyond her own in the massive lot flanking the wide grounds, each space numbered with absurdly long strings of ID digits. She hears nothing but the hollow fall of her own feet on the fresh pavement, breath and heartbeat loud in her head, all other senses suddenly stuffed.
The structure’s exterior appears to have no entrance, in fact, she finds, no matter how far around it she continues: all only further matching walls and glass. She passes benches for sitting without clear reason; a fountain of a pyramid spurting white-glowing water, full of coins to make a wish; the whole back half of the property blocked off with a seamless forest overrun with stunted trees, their lower limbs all cut off within reach. Why isn’t there anyone else out here, Alice wonders? Though perhaps the better question remains: Why is she? She can’t remember what urge had brought her to leave her house at any point, ever; much less her bed itself, the heavy fiber of her ongoing exhaustion already filling out her moving muscles, full of gunk. It would be so nice to lie down, she can’t stop thinking, now and forever; if only I could remember where was home.
She’s already begun tracing her way back to the limo, uncertain which outbound direction leads to where, until around another hard curve in the narrow structure’s surface she runs head on into a face: a flat, massive woman’s head, floating before her, part of the building, overridden upon with rising daze, from out of which she sees cheeks and teeth, first, then a set of nostrils, each as big as her own skull, like open portals punctuating the flesh between the face’s pursed lips and the lids of its closed eyes. Only as she steps back to take it in can Alice gather context: the same face of the same deceased artist from earlier that same day on the TV, here captured in the midst of speaking or breathing out, or so it seems; the same static ocean still spanning the background, without waves; the same wide silver sky looming above it parallel and overseeing all.
Alice is terrified, seeing the woman again now, larger than life. The face seems able to see her even through her eyelids’ skin, leering and alien, likely at any second to open her mouth and start to speak; or perhaps to swallow her whole there, into her body, and the bowels of the world beneath. Alice herself can’t quite seem to clear the image from her mind then, or catch her breath; she starts backing away on tiptoe from the intolerable image, its impression seeming to follow as she moves, looming out around her in vibrant animation the more she tries to resist or turn away, to undo herself from its influence, its expression.
She can’t remember exactly how to move then, each gesture somehow resulting in something more like falling backward in slow-motion, the space behind her rushing out around her to fill in where she is not. No matter how she contorts or blinks, the face’s gape continues in and down upon her, leaving no outlet but to go on edging further and further back as best she can, soon finding herself pressed back against another surface behind her in relief, its wide white premise even more formidable from so close up. As she tracks her eyes across the divide searching for sky, the flat beneath her splits in half, yawning apart wide unto a sudden silent gasp of too-warm air, flooding out around her like a hard wind at all sides, a rift rendered as in inhaling, luring her along into its gait with both her arms out, spinning for bearing, before the would-be automatic doors slide back into place just past her eyes, their wide white backside sealing her within it, part of the building.
* * *
—
The lobby of the gallery, as it resolves like déjà vu, is brightly lit and claustrophobic; white as the walls in her home’s vault. All further sound is absorbed by the wide tiles beneath her feet, which form a strangely interlocking pattern that for no clear reason brings her instant calm, an infectious flattening projected by the space’s tempered, steady light. Otherwise the entry space is empty—no one on duty behind what appears to be a welcome kiosk spanning the far side of the space in her approach, its countertop bare besides a leather-bound guest book left propped open, full of names, into which Alice adds her own mark without hesitation: just her initials, the thin black pen buzzing at her fingers as she writes, leaking its sharp blue ink over everything it touches, leaving nothing legible among the blob.
There’s only one way forward then, from there, besides just leaving, about which Alice senses an inclination to do just that, yet instead finds herself following the pattern of the floor into the adjacent space, its corresponding layout much like the first but longer, thinner, as if a copy of the lobby had been clicked and dragged to open up.
Printed onto a wide part of the wall, visible only as she draws near, in shimmering texture changing color with the angle, she reads:
ALICE NOVAK: A Memorial Exhibition
And beneath that, in smaller, darker font:
I Retrospective
II Devoid
The wall beyond the marking for some distance remains bare. Alice has to proceed for longer than it should take to span the room before she finds some form of exhibit, installed onto the wall aligned in matching silver frames: a series of photographs, each unlabeled and identical in size.
The first photo shows the same woman from the display outside—Alice Novak, context predicts—but as a young girl, perhaps age six. She appears wearing a gray smock, standing on black sand far as the eye can see—the same beach as in the prior image, Alice imagines, judging by its consistency, but decades earlier—which in this depiction looks so much like the land surrounding the manmade lake behind her mother’s parents’ house; the place where they’d both died when it burned down, long before Alice was even born; the lake itself had been eventually filled in, according to local ordinance—something about a contagion in its waters, one that could not be diluted or broken down, which had then spread, as Alice recalls, across innumerable locations, far and wide.
The next few photos show the same girl amid the sprawl of growing up. The child looks more and more familiar to Alice as her face refines with age. She is always depicted, for some reason, amid nature: on dirt or near water, surrounded by trees or grass, not at all the kind of youth Alice herself had experienced, behind closed doors. And yet, as each image moves the child nearer and nearer to adulthood, Alice can’t help but see the rising lines inside the captured face conforming, making sense, not quite a match for who she is now, but for who she’d once been, as if wearing younger Alice’s own features, down to tics of facial behavior and innate expression so much her own. But why then do the places, the situations, seem so outdated, someone else’s? Something in the timeline isn’t adding up, despite the low-pitched gr
inding Alice feels already gathering, in gut reaction; something remains off between what possible actuality the images insist on and what remains in her own mind. She feels a shaking, then, just slightly, down her arms and through her hands, spreading upward and inward, made only worse as she tries to suppress it.
In the next framed image, she sees the other woman there again, now in what must be her early thirties, shown in joyful embrace with a familiar man: Alice’s father, as she remembers—her actual father, without a doubt—alongside whom the woman seems aglow, a joy between them that was absent from the prior pictures. Together they are standing at the front stoop of a house, exactly like the version she remembers of their home before so much remodeling or mutating, as it were, and smaller from the outside than it had ever really felt, suggesting a much more modest air to the estate, a fact also reflected in their shabby, outdated clothing. There is no question, though, that this version of the woman looks exactly how Alice herself had at that age, however long ago it is now; it could be almost no one else but her—Alice Knott, not Novak—here depicted in what must have been her own mother’s timeline’s life, somehow the same age as her father during an era when Alice as she is now could not have yet been born.
Had her mother really resembled her so clearly back then? Alice can’t remember ever being told that or seeing pictures that suggested such, much less ever recognizing such similarities herself in her mother’s later, living face; although it had been so long since she’d seen even any memorabilia from those times, all of it swept away with Richard’s supposed parting from the house. What was all this meant to be, then? Where did this Novak person get these pictures, and what could she think gave her the right? Or was there something else about all this: some kind of hoax photography, a trace of green screen, causing any passing viewer to format their own lives between the lines, their most precious memories revised and mangled into a display designed to simulate disorder, to confound one’s own past and person right before their eyes?