Alice Knott

by Blake Butler

  Sometimes, in the flat of night there, running open, Alice can even hear the texture of her father’s voice—not her unfather, for once, but the one who had been lost—reading to her aloud among the black space crammed into the air behind her eyes. And though she can’t really seem to make out any of the single words themselves, their clusters, or what they mean, she can sense where the sounds of the spoken sentences pushed up against her flesh, the blood beneath. If she can fix herself just so, on the edge of hours passing half asleep inside her cell as the world without her carries on, it might begin to seem almost as if she is still in her old room in her family’s house instead of here; the mouth of his voice might still appear there reading the words out of the book between her and him, some kind of passage through which she cannot wriggle but can breathe; his whiskers brushing at her ear, his thick tongue clucking, the sound of the language stronger the longer she can go without asking where it came from or what it means. It is the clearest feeling she can count not still today, held so tightly down against her she might soon not remember having ever moved an inch or felt a way.

  * * *

  —

  Whenever Alice opens her eyes again, coming to into the feeling of being watched from the outside, it’s just the cell there, same as last time; her old body back in place within the waiting world and what it wants, which is nearly nothing now, second to second, in her confinement, as somewhere beyond the walls the rest goes on. She watches what she can of what appears broadcast behind the glass of the screen inside her cell, its trim eye coming on and glowing through a channel as if at irregularly programmed quadrants from out of nowhere, if always armed with information.

  Her name, in the mouths of the pundits, does not sound to her like her own name; nor does it fit the facts of who she’d been throughout the hours leading up to now. So many seem to think they know more about who she is and what she’s done, crimes alone notwithstanding, than Alice herself: as every other mention of her in the media in their continuing coverage of her case and its implication—always still the topic of the hour for some reason, at least as shown to her—provides further detail of the apparent facts that bind her life, all of it made new to her, live and then again in syndication: stills of her, several years younger, smiling wild-eyed, from her only previous arrest, a DUI; of her even younger, in high school, dressed in all black, baring her teeth (a photo she herself had never seen, though she could nearly remember its having been taken: a flash of light erupting in the hands of some human person she’d once felt raw for, full of love); and alongside that, most recently, the footage of the aftermath of her arrest, herself being led out of the museum by a small band of men, bolstered with reports provided by the courts and now made public, detailing how in addition to her extremely high blood alcohol content at the time of arrest (.402)—a shock considered she hasn’t had a drink in seven years and seven months—she’d had significant amounts of various foreign substances in her system, including a nearly lethal level of crack cocaine, as well as smaller but not diminutive amounts of psilocybin, methamphetamine, and LSD, none of which, beyond the booze, Alice had knowingly ingested in her life.

  Nor does she remember having agreed to allow blood testing, despite her clear initials scribbled into the margins of the paperwork as supplied on demand by the guards who come to maintain her upkeep—not that she’d ever developed any definitive process for that scrawl, even when sober, always simply putting pen down to paper and letting it rip. It could have been anyone who had signed for any of her, as such; any of millions, taking over in the guise of her own person, hacking her history with the simplest of commands. Now the whole world knew who she was, what she had done, perhaps more concretely than even she did, processed through facts she wasn’t sure whether to dispute or to try to understand.

  Could she actually have done what they were saying, she can’t help but start to wonder, given the gaps in what she felt about who she was? Didn’t they have anything better to report on, given the innumerable order of other worldwide horrors going on inflicted by the hour? Even the future, as it happens, feels more like a revision of what was meant to be than original events, pasted in and crossed out over and over so many times beforehand that when it actually arrives, it bears the same wear as all the rest, long rolled over and disremembered, left to suffer—the same way that the longer she remains locked in the long shape of such present, the less she finds she can remember of all else. Increasingly it’s as if, in the same way her father had disappeared, whole parts of the world and the life she’d lived inside it are disappearing, are only there enough within her that she might recognize them missing, being thought of as for the last time: The flower she had picked and pressed into the book her mother had read to her every night before the transition, whose petals had bled their color onto the paper, ruining the words. The blanket she had slept with through those same years, nuzzled through so many hours of sleep that by the end it was only threads and dust, indistinguishable from any rag to anyone but her. The soft spot in the forest where she had buried a box of undeveloped film, full of images of all those days then, whose location she could no longer remember but could still sense the color of the film’s flat blackness stretching soft and far inside her face. The field of white dirt where she had always imagined she’d be buried, if there was anybody left by then to carry out her will, and that in the meantime she dreamed of not as a place of death, but worship, a small eye in the world where it had actually seemed there portended the aspect of the presence of a god.

  As she exhumes each above the piles of other psychic refuse, held between white walls, Alice feels their past locations folding over like a map, each fact of her existence lost within the contours of the day, in and over on themselves, erasing without even the echo of a report. If she herself could not remember them forever, who would? Who else could sense the dissolution of the very ground she had walked on anywhere, its surface turning over a new face that matched the old, despite how she had fallen on it, ripped her skin there? There was no such awareness of its significance in her own life beyond her mental borders, no tag with any hint of how these moments made her who she was now even still—and how, without them, what remained? What held firm about the future as it became the present and then the past, over and over, never dissipating, turned to mush? Any expectation could just as easily become the absence to which one’s persona forfeited its identity, unto fate worse than mere death, and therefore any past fact might just as quickly have no floor. The world might open underneath her, yes, or worse, it might stop holding traction, its fiber no longer connecting to the space on either side. Like a person captured in a painting, or a model; or in their own life, placed here side by side with every other in every moment, every hour, and no one counting.

  * * *

  —

  That evening, after supper in the form of another serving of the gray liquid, Alice is escorted from her cell, along a long thin hall of the same color, only to end up in another cell shaped just the same but bare of bed or toilet, and in the place of the display screen a huge bay window, wide as seven of her standing side by side. The whole breadth of the view is encased in hefty plastic, into which gouges like claw marks appear to have been rendered, perhaps by animal or by machine, though whether from the inside or the outside is not clear.

  The world outside the window is difficult to parse. Far out as she can look, the ground goes on flat and slight, paved over, or made of dirt so cleanly blasted by the sun it no longer bears a color. Only in the very far reaches of her vision can she make out a mass of smoke on the horizon, somehow insanely far away—a rising host of ongoing conflagration; or is it rainfall? She can hardly see, the thick glass in the face of the window for some reason easily clouding over from her breathing and her heat, against where on the far side, she can clearly feel, the air is freezing; so much so it hurts to touch. And yet she puts her head against the pane again, trying to see, better, anywhere she’s ever been; though the scene now
resembles nothing of the world in which she’d tried to learn to live, all possible paths she can imagine ending up only in the same place: where she is now, nowhere else.

  At last, for once, though, at this wider window, which she still is not quite sure why they have brought her out to see—a reward for good behavior, allowing her a peek behind the scenes?—she finds she no longer feels it necessary to believe anything enough to not expect to one day ask again and receive a different answer. When she is most honest with herself, she knows that what has been abandoned would likely have been no better; that all she recalls as prior life was nothing more than further smoke; that the holes and interruptions that plagued her now would still have wound their way in, wrought their damage. She is only exactly who she is. Wherever any expectation might appear to differentiate from her past timeline meant nothing more than any other form of interruption, some commercial crammed into the narrative fiber of a lifetime, wrought by the same dark nail through every fate, if always obscured behind the veils of expectation and intention, all the flashbulbs and the gore.

  As Alice looks across in the longer reaches of the distance across the flatness, beyond the edges of the farthest scope of light, she can make out other soft features encrypted even further in its immense landscape, just there enough to be mistaken, overlooked: white sets of scaffolding fit with wired lighting fixtures, like half-finished film sets, abandoned or in disuse; and then, beyond them, hanging cranes and stadium seating where countless cameras dot the necks of apparatuses installed along the sky, no audience where bleachers for millions stand as if free-floating on all sides, all of it lost among other patterns and minutiae just as quickly as she can parse it, sensed thereafter only as a refraction of cracks in perception in the horizon, small fits of sickly weather, the land rebuffing where it touched parts of the world too far gone to read from here.

  Alice’s bail is set at $17 million.

  It doesn’t feel like a real number—at least no more than the prices set and paid for the works she had allegedly destroyed, each more than most people make through their whole life. It’s what some might call an obscene sum of money, though to Alice, in certain shock now, it only feels like another punchline to the joke.

  Though there had been a time when such an obviously intentionally excessive penalty would not have been outside Alice’s command—the impending sprawl of mismanagement of which had played no small role in precisely how she ended up here, so it seems—it has been some time since even that abstract financial reality could be confirmed as actual liquidity; all squandered away or blown through on purpose, or otherwise relinquished by her in her detesting of the obligation, whence it came, by now seemed as virtual as the manner by which such funds might have accrued, somewhere so buried in her bloodline now she can’t remember having benefited from a stitch of it, despite the ledgers and receipts that must still exist, demonstrating her participation in said transactions despite whatever else about it she’d like to feel.

  Alice no longer has the money, is the conclusion, and nowhere near it, if she ever even really did; whoever that had been seems like someone else, a story she had read somewhere, so long ago its source had long divorced its particulars, misappropriated its intent into her way, including the apparent demolition of the very assets she might have cashed in now to buy her freedom—though by now she can’t recall the feeling of ever having owned those paintings, even been near them, nor can she remember ever having lived as if she had; no phase at all where her kin were allowed to live in any way but by the skin of someone’s teeth, stretching to make ends meet, to make dinner. All she knows for certain now is that each time she wakes she is more tired than she had been and always has been, and nothing others claim as true really does seem true.

  Maybe she’s even actually guilty, she imagines? Maybe she did do everything they claimed, and thereafter just forgot or revised its memory beyond her, as she feels she had of so much of her life. The longer she allows herself to go on not remembering how she ended up here, what had actually happened, the more it begins to seem as if not only must her reported actions be true, but as if she can actually remember having been where they say she has, done what she’s been accused of. She can even then remember, if she wishes: the nearness of the flame, the white-hot eye wielded in her fists primed for the destruction of the artworks, ready and willing to bring an end to anything that would allow itself to be; the incinerating cluster of the pigmented canvas melting away, turning to smoke and ash, can feel the leather of its absence stretching out along her limbs and through her lungs, her sternum, into her heart, igniting fast across each coming thought as it arose. Likewise, for once more clearly now than ever, she can understand the pleasure of such destructive power, what might bring a person to want to be not one who created, but who destroyed; someone who, for once, at last could be said to have even so briefly taken control of their nature, their direction, and, for better or for worse, altered the world. Who is to say the state might not know her better than she could herself, parsing what’s available on paper into her blackest wishes, what she would not have even known she could be capable of doing? In what ways is it not her?

  Alice begins to hear herself confess into the small cell, then, listing aloud everything she might remember wrong, or might have done different had she known better, or had not done but should have, on and on, welling up from there within her unstoppably once allowed initiation. For once the speaking seems to come out in what is really her own voice, even if she can’t connect all of the utterances to facts, each possible thought sliding out between her lips as if no urge’s requirement remains, and thereafter committed to her living record as soon as it has shape—as if all it takes to have performed an act is to say so, requiring not even one’s own personal belief. And yet throughout it all there’s something different about the language, the grain she feels against it. There is something in the logic of the sound that makes all the old words feel like shelves, places where things had been placed more than things themselves; as if what is on the far side of the wall of her small cell now is not another cell at all, but yet another room appearing in her childhood household, one possessed of endless ways to be.

  When Alice wakes, the room is blurry and half formed. There is a face. The man in blue is there above her, leering with eyes that tremble in their sockets, all other features melding into their surroundings at the edges, half abstracted. He has no mouth at first, no eyelids; then, though, there is a mouth, fitted with gold, no sound about it but of a low hiss, speaking in a language hardly human till it begins to coalesce.

  The mouth has to tell her several times, in several manners, that she must rise; and though she feels lightheaded sitting up and seeing the scape of the bed beneath her, logged with sweat, it doesn’t stop her body from bending upright, lurching forward on the mattress, weak but operable, still there. She can sense at once that she’s lost mass; less of her left there than there should be, it seems, in a bad way, as if the muscle between the meat has been sucked out, replaced with putty or rubber, the skin all raw and far too thick. Her mouth tastes strange, sour and dry around a throat that doesn’t want to swallow without grind; and at her center, the dull roar of open aching, like hunger but wider, more overriding.

  The man is watching her, Alice notices, unlike before, though his eyes seem to have no feeling behind them, dilated down to thin gray rims around their centers’ holes. He moves as if blind, only able to source her presence there by heat and motion, such that if I could stay still forever, Alice imagines, he’d go away and not come back. She feels closer to him then, suddenly, relieved for no clear reason she can separate from other sensations. Congruently, the guard cracks half a smile, his aged face fumbling with wrinkles that emerge only in expression, attached to longer modules beneath his flesh that pump and rotate, searching for ground. He closes his eyes as such, frozen in posture, waiting for some confirmation of intent to which he might react. He clasps his hands together and rubs one in the other with the
milky hiss of skin on skin, an ugly rhythm. Meanwhile, behind him, on the screen, live, the feed shows a shot of the room with them inside it from overhead, offering a view of the back of the man’s body while she stares past him into the camera from the bed. She is so pale, she thinks, studying her own representation, so hardly there. She sits watching the screen then for some time, expecting to see herself take action without the necessity of activation, as if the version of them held onscreen could carry on without correspondence with her person.

  It is on the screen first, then, that Alice sees the guard, still with his eyes closed, turn and trundle stiffly back toward the cell’s lone door; he stops and looks back to face her only briefly—an action matched in real time as she transfers her attention from the screen to where he really stands—before he then continues on out into the hallway linked beyond, this time leaving the door open for her behind him without instruction. She finds that every next motion on her own requires enormous concentration, each joint and bone having come loose now in her muscle memory of even standing, walking, seeing, each somehow disattached from how she is. It remains unclear if she’s supposed to follow the guard or just wait here, much less what consequences await either choice if correct or incorrect; still, she lurches to her feet and forward, and likes the way the sudden motion makes her feel, like being drunk again, sensing doors where there aren’t doors, walls where there aren’t walls, despite how the world always seems to come around.