by Blake Butler
“I do remember you,” Alice says, her tone convincing enough in its projection that it for once seems like her own voice—she seems to actually care about this person, she imagines, an impression perhaps spurred by his apparent familiarity with her life. She finds it feels good regardless to let the words out as confirmation, like scratching a rash knowing that when the scratching stops the itch will come back even worse. And so she repeats the phrase, covering their first urge over, and then again, and yet again—I do remember, yes; I really do, even if I can’t completely fathom why, or how it matters—therein finding the cooling, coursing feeling of compliance redoubled with each repetition, as if she is not only saying it but really wants to.
If the man is pleased about her urge, though, he doesn’t let on. If anything, his demeanor becomes at once again more guarded, polished with practice; he seems unwilling or unable to go any deeper into their relation, satisfied to have won her over to his side. Their interface from that point forward feels so certainly decided, as if now all other bets are off.
“It’s getting late out here so quickly these days, wouldn’t you say, dear?” she hears the man purr, while hooking his arm gently but firmly into hers. His body’s oddly warm contour cleaves onto her completely, in such a way she can’t remember how to lurch away, finding herself instead then leaning into him with all her weight. He leads her forward then, as tightly tucked, toward where the limo waits against the wider brightness, his remaining language filling in over all other signals in her head as might the refrain of an ad: “So little time left of all our time, yes, and still so much impending yet to parse.”
Inside the vehicle, Alice finds herself surrounded by a disorienting sheen similar to the outside, the many wide interior windows only reflecting rather than allowing seeing out. Dozens of replications of her appear at once, captured at endless angles in the glass. Already she can’t tell which of them is the most her, she thinks, which at the center, the self she might understand beyond all else.
The car’s interior is so cold it seems angular, inflexible, bracing her on edge against the impending silhouette of her exhaustion, even clearer now that she is seated. It feels novel, in a way, to be alone in what resembles a state of luxury, if still in a way she doesn’t quite feel fully adjusted to enjoy. The car’s interior isn’t the same one she’d arrived in before, she realizes, despite how alike it’d seemed as she was getting in; she already can’t even detect where in the mirroring effect here there might still be a hatch to get back out. Nor does she hear an engine start, no sound of idling, though soon she feels the roll of motion underneath her lurching forward, without known destination; no concrete claim between her present state yet and what fate’s future.
Suddenly, though, she’s woozy then, as with motion sickness, generated in the shift between her expectation’s states. She moves to press her forehead against the nearest window’s mirror, into her own face, watching her eyes approach her eyes and disappear; then, through the edge of the reflection, held in its darkness, she finds that she can see the wider land beyond: a long, flattened contention scrolling out beyond beneath them, blank as blanched gravel, feeding on and on into itself, a mirror’s match for all the still muted sky there just above, revealing nothing.
* * *
—
When the man’s voice returns, it comes from somewhere through the air held underneath her, as if the shell of the car itself has learned to speak.
“It will be about a fifteen-hour drive,” he says, his cadence clearly the same as of the man she’d met outside, though now removed of its familiarity by his face. The volume on the transmitting system is louder than need be; the syllables vibrate through her legs. “We would have flown you, but the board felt in this case, with so many elements yet unclear, it would be best to stay close to the center. Really we were fortunate you could still be accessed at all at this point, given the exposure.”
“Exposure,” Alice repeats. The word on her tongue feels fat in her mouth, too soft, something to swallow, projecting nothing else thereafter left to say.
As if to fill in the silence for her, a compartment in the back of the front seat slides open then at once, toward her face; through it a thick, black, leather-bound folio is passed, falling onto the seat before her as the compartment is again closed.
“You must be sure to correspond with Human Relations before any further media relations,” the voice continues. “At this point, non-vital visibility is all but locked down, at least until the system has regained stability. Sadly, it’s no longer clear how much of any source can be believed, what is known and not known, and under whose authority beyond our own.”
The folio’s front and back covers are unmarked, flat in a style Alice finds immediately repellent, though she can’t say why. The volume feels heavier than it should for its size and smells like rotten soil when drawn open wide across her lap. The first page is blank, a glossy flyleaf, its sheen invasive, too much shine, and sticky where she touches. Its sheen is clammy, too, even warmer than the cover, an acidic quality to its enamel that itches at her skin in some dissolving way she can’t quite feel. She can faintly make out the haze of her form’s outline in its finish, there and not there.
The next page, as if to reinforce the front’s reflective quality, reflects her visage also, though this time in the form of an actual photograph, taken some years younger, so it seems—a mug shot, by its context, staring head-on into the camera with her back against a wall, a sign bearing digits held up to her chest. Alice can barely recognize herself, despite her name there: so many dark platelets underlining her sickly skin—so much like the driver’s, she imagines, if who she’s been with then is really driving—and pores large enough to read like Braille; hair cut crudely, as if with safety scissors, by herself; her bloodshot eyes absent of light. I look undead, Alice thinks, or outdated, though it appears she’s wearing the same clothes in the image still today, despite how her shape has changed so much beneath them from year to year, the skin regenerating, recompiling itself against her will. She wishes at once never to have to see herself that way again, and never to have to see any other one who she must be now, such that when she turns the page she knows it’s for the last time.
* * *
—
The printed language on the following pages is brittle, pressed deep into the paper, as if stamped by a machine made long ago.
Deposition of Alice Knott
Below the title, blank lines for Date, Place, Time have been left incomplete.
The remaining text provides no context outside the transcribed statements.
—You understand why you are here?
Because there could never be a format for our identities beyond everywhere we never were.
Alice reads with her finger tracing along beneath each word, hearing the language of the response in her own voice, as if she were also saying it aloud.
—We’re not talking about a “we,” we’re here because . . .
. . . because the door has already been forced open, and now you’re feeling extra fucked, yeah? You’d not felt fear like this before, had you, in all your lives, despite all you’ve seen of others’ suffering, frequently even at your own hand—their ongoing trauma, their dementia, the all-consuming darkness. And yet you’ve already had so many extra chances to survive, so many warnings left unheeded. There’s no answer I can give that satisfies the question we’ve all been asked unending times, through as many mouths as there are planets.
The dictation sounds familiar, Alice finds; not as if she’d spoken such before, but that she’d read it, long ago, so far back it predates any other memory in combination. She finds, then, as she continues, that she can hear the words already in her head before they appear, to the extent she can’t tell if she is predicating their arrival, or vice versa.
—Please state your name.
My name is yes. My mask, like yours, was skin and organs, the hair and lips that made me desirable, capable of be
ing used. I knew that every word I uttered wasn’t mine, but more a code I used to fuse my spirit to the world, a collaboration with our eternal fate but ever-changing, impossible to apprehend. Of course this had been going on as long as there’d been bodies, a looming part of every person who believed they’d ever lived; and where the presence of our predecessors itched in us, it burned, and where it burned it begged for something else: to be let go—to be relieved of the very vocabulary we tried to use to identify ourselves with to one another, to understand, which in truth only made the faith of being so much worse, such that soon only by the destruction of what we thought defined our lives might we be actually allowed to live without a boundary, beyond fate.
In her reflections there surrounding, Alice sees herself seeing herself holding the pages up so she can read, alongside countless others of her in the same phase, on the same line, looking back up at her until again she looks away.
—When did you decide to start burning works of art?
Burned, sure. Or sometimes pummeled, shot to pieces. Sometimes I used sand or water to rip the lines away. In the end, all that mattered was that the transference had occurred; the object had been removed from existence, and so, in no time, from every history, any mind.
—Why?
All decisions were made inside my sleep. When I had a choice to make, I simply lay down and turned my mind off, and when I woke I found each time the damage had already been done. It was the world that did it for me; I was just a fulcrum, if one upon which all prior mechanisms of identity and control depended, unto, in its transition, a different form of bearing truth, one wherein the story we’d been telling ourselves all of this time could be supplanted, given soil in which it might one day actually thrive. But this is just the first step, out of billions, long past the point of turning back; my sole desire for what remains of here and now was simply to cut to the essence of our own image while we still can, to take control of what yet might come after, by any clock: that is, to merge the afterlife with the still living, the future dead; so that we might one day find something to believe in and understand without the heed of our creator, a reason to live long after we’re no longer able.
Alice doesn’t want to read what she is reading any longer; she wants to close her eyes and seal them shut, to not see the language on this or any page, forever; to instead, for once, find herself anywhere but exactly where she is, each impression interrupted only ever by the future, nothing past; wherein, between the pending words, as she moves through them, less and less space remains than just before, as if they’re burning. The sentences, as such, no longer seem composed of only language, but lost mirages, tablature without a song.
—I’m going to need you to be more specific.
Of course you are; you who have been left without your own imagination, who have been split apart to hardly fragments despite all your preening. So how’s this: My eye was your eye, and what we took on as vision became our bodies. The cells of all of us were whole as a world each, and just as void in hypothetical dimension as our false cosmos. In each direction, the walls of what we would become seized our world over and bound it up, to make it seem like it would disappear as soon as we did, no longer able to go on, which in our hearts we did not want to believe was true no matter how much we wanted to believe it; we could feel it pulsing in our cognition every second as our loved ones grew older, passed away, as the cells in our bodies grew harder and filled with tumors, each trauma slowly gnawing all ambition down to dust as we woke and carried on, trying to find anyone we recognized along the vast debris, desperate to feel belief; and still the longer we existed, the less about us we could still parse apart from any other, so loud did all the wailing come to rise, so numb at every urge were all our nightmares.
Something begins to scrape along the undercarriage of the car, then, Alice feels, metal on metal, only worse the more she attempts to read on through; then the sound is scraping the roof, too, and on either side, as if their passage through the world is turning narrow. The screeching spreads along the linings of her teeth and through her hair down to her skull, chafing her brain beneath the bone at points of spasm, at once then either ending or becoming so immense she can no longer register the sense, a deafness forced into her diction made only worse by the fact that, still within her, the narration carries on.
—
Imagine there were only eight remaining artworks in the world, for instance. It doesn’t matter who made them, though let’s assume that whoever did by now had become dead. Let’s also assume, which is no long shot, that no one living could remember how to make art, and all we had left were these eight creations built by the hands of people we had never heard speak or could even really imagine walking around on the same land. What would the work mean to us then? Would it seem impossible to understand how it could ever have been conceived? Would we want to make more in its image, or would we despise it?
Recall how when you are born, your mother is a stranger, and you a stranger just the same to her. You sleep at first in nearby rooms; then the rooms grow farther and farther apart; and between them there are other persons, rooms, languages, eyes. Because as our capabilities accrue, so does the need to establish further network: further bodies, memories, to feed the new space over into, and blank to fill it to keep it from its inevitable impossible conclusion. And so you learn to carry the blood you stole and copied from a body most like yours across locations it would have never, could not have ever. And in the make of every instant you become changed, a wholly different person with every second passing, and so each other life too in your wake, every instant of every hour, aggregating for every one of us alone until there is nowhere that is itself and never had been. The result is a greater dementia than already written in the blood of man; a more pure evil; as what is fearsome isn’t actually the hole itself, but what lies at the bottom of that which has no actual bottom.
By now, the car is shaking so hard, Alice can’t imagine how it could still be moving forward. Outside the glass, too, Alice discovers, pressing her head again against it, looking out, the world has shifted tense: there’s nothing left there, not even sunlight, smudge, or concrete, only endless miles of thick white smoke, impenetrable to deeper vision, what could ever lie beyond; then nothing but smoke too where the car should be, or her body, the present page.
—
In the end, all our beauty has taken its toll. Every word we’d ever said had been the inverse of how we meant it, even when it sounded like words we felt we knew and carried on as true tradition, all the vows and prayers and wishes, every I love you, I will always love you, I am here. And yet we believed each as our own, of course, as we knew no other way to know a reason for anything. From all our failures, the mud of being filled itself in through any space we could not hold, allowing the illusion of more freedom with each indication of our false prowess, so that everywhere we went the world seemed seamless, each instant touching each on either side. Every map we made in our own image was only as incorrect as our perception of the heavens, likewise the distance of dead stars, the depth of dreams. And though the function of our art, our reason for being, or so we thought, had been to try to nail down locations in this blather, provide points of significant recognition, lines of sight, this in turn served only to scourge the scene with more mirages, erroneous conclusions. In such fashion we lined our homes with errors, shit; and still we believed we recognized ourselves there in the onslaught. We slept with such creations hung above our bed, filling our houses, breeding only more amnesia, loss of faith; meanwhile, awestruck within the pretty colors, loops and lines, we were being trampled, filled with sickness, suffocated, killed in our sleep, over and over, high on the conglomerate of fiction, our skin soon nothing more than the grist the whorl of every era used to grease its viral contract: that once we’d lived, so must we pay the everlasting price.
The longer Alice tries to see, the more it hurts her eyes to try to hold them open, till eventually she can’t help but not; she finds the
smoke is there behind her face too, inside her skull and through her body, and in all the feel of space around her anywhere she tries to move to pull apart; as if there’s nothing different there to pull away to; the same absence alive at every side, each inch crammed in so close there’s nowhere other.
—
In the end, the only way you will ever understand anything is to have never seen it; for there to no longer be this sentence or this book, if only in the context that the text of the book allows itself, by having said as much directly, to again become forgotten, or better yet never read and unremembered but by you and you alone; for there must be some difference between a mask and what it masks; all you couldn’t even see or hear or feel held up against what remains at any point before your eyes.
What must be shaken loose in our remaining moment is the very mechanism of understanding, the site of the receptors, something more than God at last, the word of God, its whole conception; more than blood or hope or spirit after all; beyond retention, definition, for which we might not even need to live or die, but simply become.
Close your eyes, is what I’m saying. Close your eyes and turn the page.
But Alice’s eyes are already closed, she finds; have been for some time. Instead, upon command, she makes them open, and as she does she hears a flash like fire bending through her living mind: a long, hot, rushing hissing, as if the cells and vessels in where her sight works are turning over, rising up.