by Blake Butler
Where she can feel her flesh, then, thereafter, she feels the pending world beyond it at her edges, pressing, as if to break her bones next, make a wish.
* * *
—
The next several hundred pages of the book are blank. Nothing fills the remaining space of the document, as if abandoned or left open for appending; nor then are the words still on the pages she’s just read when she flips back through to find her place. The text is missing, absorbed into itself or never there.
* * *
—
“What’s all this supposed to be?” Alice shouts, aiming her attention toward the partition between her and where the driver should be. She wants to continue the conversation, to deny participation in what the document contends, but instead she inhales and tastes no air, feels nothing flooding in to fill the space where her instinct might have been. Only the silence of the car in motion then remains, a high-end monotonic hum risen over all else, from the core of the machine.
She bangs her fists against the glass for the driver’s attention, then her forearms, her whole chest; she buckles back against the seat, kicking with both feet at the same time, gassed with adrenaline and rage. No matter how or where she bashes at it, though, the partition hardly shudders, wholly stronger than it looks, made of more than sight can see.
Alice begins anew, frantic, determined. She pats her hands along the silver surface for a latch, any handle or button to a door or to a window she might access as an exit, and yet she finds only further featureless smoothness to the expanse: nothing clicking or upending, no way out. What is there actually outside where they are, she wonders, if she even could locate a way? Where are they headed, and how long has it already been? She can’t remember any idea about where her family’s house had been, her bed, her bleating screen; even the high walls of the prison seem better to have been held in than in here, where nothing seems to cohere but in terror.
She finds her phone stuffed in her pocket still, wiped of its memory as it remains, and tries to dial a number, any number, but can’t remember who there had ever been to call, each entry ending only in malfunction or yet another open line, as if someone is there listening but not responding. No matter how she bangs around or what she shouts, the space won’t change, nowhere else accessible beyond the mirrors’ shaping at all sides, which she can see now has begun to go cloudy in her frenzy, her rising captive heat, as if to match the smoke-laced texture of the world beyond, the further queries rushing upward from her slowly drowning sense of any recognition, definition of the day. Where are there even air holes in the car, she wonders, her damp hands shaking as she tries to regain center, catch her breath. How much longer might she survive off of the air trapped in here with her? What else might be done thereafter with what remains?
Her life does not so much flash before her eyes then as thrash around inside her like a caught bird, her concentration all a sprawl and blood thinning out beneath her flesh, flushed up with rising fever in the space behind her face, dragging her down. She wants to scream but cannot, wants to explode but cannot; there is nothing left that she can dream, every inch of her is saying, all at the same time, so firmly and completely she can’t remember then thereafter what else there had ever been to do but fester, flounder, writhe with fury so overwhelming she can’t see straight.
“I can understand why you’re disturbed,” the man’s voice throughout the car at last responds, calmer than ever. “It’s hard to remember anything at all, isn’t it? Much less everything completely and in the proper context, day in, day out. If I may quote you here directly, from perhaps my favorite of all your writings, at least among the ones I’ve been opened yet to have read: ‘Our only human history is a sieve made of innumerable eyes, in innumerable lifetimes, through which the face of hell floods forever.’”
The silence in the car thereafter spans unmeasured time, underscored by the clicking-dragging of the road beneath them, abrading any urge in her response with second thoughts. The face of hell? All her writings? Human history? She’s no longer sure what she can parse apart from any grasp, nor which of her present feelings or sensations is actually hers, what logic might be connected to the driver’s expectations in collaboration with her own; just as there were many rooms in every room all through her life, there were so many expressions in each expression, identities in every mind.
Somewhere there within that sprawl, she thinks, her present person lurks, waiting to discover what it might recover and carry on, bound up in error as it might be, growing only stronger in replication over time, until at long last there is no recognizable host left, only her mutation. And so the same must be true too with every other person, in the same breath—such that when someone begins to feel they recognize wherever she or any other felt they must be, they will at once be no longer in that place, nor had they ever been; the time had already long run past, covered over in its own wake by the pending signals of every other hour, every body; such that even now, when she tries to think of how this day, year, life began, she feels only the turning reels there, the shorting signals; it all just runs back over into itself, feeding data into data, over and over, until there was never any fact; nothing there even in flashes, fragments of visions, against which even this cognition framing awareness in her present thinking holds no authority outside its own realm, as the only source of open information.
“Or perhaps you know more than you let on,” the voice suggests, in direct countermand, within. “Perhaps your first reaction is a false front, one your blood requires to keep pumping, and behind your face is someone else’s, one pre-equipped with all the information of what’s meant to happen, its application arriving not by fate, but by the fact of its true self: what it commands. As you yourself said, if you might remember, at our inauguration: ‘As within every still image stands the place in time that its form had meant to embody, represent, therefore it also holds the forthcoming action it will harbor, what can be revealed only in our most haunted of all nightmares, through which we must learn to confront an otherwise impossible form of every future.’ Is that not exactly what you wanted? The very reason that we are here? ‘How every you in you is as much you as you are, so every past and every future, for every cell, until we discover how we might obliterate the barrier between emotions, between our very lives and minds and times; to force the signified back up against its signifier; every current second against all others already past and yet to come, forming a continuity at last no longer representable by plot.’”
As Alice hears the words uttered, she finds she can indeed begin to remember having said them; if not in this life, then in one of any of the many she could no longer use to correspond; a dream of monologue not even hers in having performed it countless times, having felt this very moment coming for her in the fit of all the other moments she’d felt she’d chosen her own way, but part of an inevitable conclusion she would have come to no matter how many different ways she tried to make the record skip, to turn away from what awaited and go elsewhere; not like a predetermined position, not quite, but one she accessed most directly in fear; the rub of all she really wanted welling up within the darkness of having had to go through it alone, to know the dire consequences of even living, as a performance, and still commit to going on, to rising and revising, in the name of doing what she must; which, already, in the wide tow of it, feels not at all like what she meant; the darker urges of collaboration with unwanted forces having infected her intentions with all their years of clawing, gnawing, bearing down, to the point that no matter what she might have ever wished would appear at last in her own life, she no longer wants anything to do with it at all; not here, not anywhere; not now, not ever. Each word she tries to stutter seems to mean something different from what it should; the gleam in the glass of the windows buzzing as if to shock her, slit her to ribbons; no beyond; the blood within her rolling over, coming up in nausea, filling her mouth, her lungs, her guts; no clear condition or idea to anything about her.
/> Alice holds her breath and closes her eyes. She tries to bear inside her mind the current second, then rewind it, to remember how she’d ever come into this day; how any string of passed hours could have ended as they have and placed her here, inside this car, this body. She can feel no entry point into her person, no particular dimension from which the person she’d turned into took its form. So much time had been spent exactly like this, forward and back; no path ahead from any point she could recall that might have led here, now, wherever that was, much less to find herself within an aspect shared in name by so many other lives desiring the same answers, in the same time. How could any second ever actually pass, then, and unto whose future?
She sees herself as from a remove then, as through her own face onto another face beyond, finding herself seated then not in a moving vehicle but in the padded chair inside her father’s den, where he’d spent the last years of his life locked away, reading in silence, just like her now; a room familiar to her now in its dimensions and yet still disconnected given how she’d never been allowed inside it long enough to gain its trust. Still spread open in her lap is the black book, the same one he’d been reading on the night he died, she realizes, all those years, its binding loose and water-damaged, worn apart, in his edition, while in her own version the pages remain so sharp and unblemished, somehow brand new. She has been reading for some time like this, she knows, though she can’t remember how long or what was said; she feels younger than she’s ever been, unable to compare the present with the past; and yet she can still feel where the book’s borrowed language assumes traction in her memory, every line briefly banging around inside her head until it is turned loose on by the next; the same way the days seem to have been full of glass; how there always seemed something hidden here that should not be hidden, something pressed beneath the letters in each line; and so something too beneath where they appear and scrawl inside her, taking hold.
The more she reads, too, the harder it is to remember she is reading, the networked pressure now surrounding her attention only compounding as she seeks to shake free of her impression of the present, a sudden, blank wall rising up inside her mind between her and any further information. Against her lap, the book feels so heavy, warm, as if it needs her, can imagine no other reader, no other way. She runs her fingertips along its spine and up around the unmarked cover, down the deckled edge, along the flaps, allows the slickened surface to slice into her fingerpads, slitting open tender flaps that then spew oily resin from their hollow, long tiny draughts of yellow smoke that dissipate at once across her face, making it almost impossible to breathe, much less go on reading.
* * *
—
When Alice looks again, it’s like rewinding. The world is overridden, mum, just out of reach. The condensation on the windows, as she can make them out from in the patchy blind, has turned to full wet, as has her hair and clothing, dark with sopping. She sees herself again in every pane, each of her younger than she still feels now, having seen nothing of their own she hasn’t seen; on each of their fingers, one of the same rings she is wearing, no matter how she tries to pull them off, first tugging at her own fingers, then in her mind, through all the glass’s fast impressions, the dark loops’ tension growing only tighter on her hand, swelling as if to cut right down through to the bone. As she tries to push herself up out of herself, to force the grade of space another way, she sees that none of her innumerable reflections correspond, their bodies remaining motionless, all looking at her, held in place, each holding their own version of the leather-bound text spread open on their laps. And the same in her own lap, she finds; her eyes swim across the empty page, across which a scrolling line of live teleprompted language begins appearing, passing just slow enough for her to skim before again it disappears.
Major artworks in more than thirty countries are attacked in the broad daylight, bent up by men and women, young and old. When asked for comment, some refer directly to the name of Alice Knott; others remain purposeful in silence, or in derangement.
She finds, too, within the reading, that what is described no longer pertains to who she is, what she has done, but a resolution culling from it; a kind of future present, perhaps, force-fed through aggregated news, transcribed in font both diminutive and garish, filling the space between them with its command.
The videos proliferate online, a discontinuous stream of shaky documentation of acts of vandalism. Museums both national and local close their doors and lock them, and some who don’t are asked to do so by local police forces, until some more manageable solution can be reached.
Alice can hear the others of her breathing, through the mirrors. They turn their pages as does she, each bringing the book closer and closer to her face as the print seems to grow smaller and smaller as she reads.
The uproar spills over into the outdoors, leaked like an overflow of water onto water, commingling temperatures apart, against the very ground we’d clasped for granted as it continued aging beneath our feet. The world is wide, full of its figments: A woman takes a sledgehammer to the Vietnam Memorial one clear and sunny day in Washington, state the reports. She’s able to disfigure names across nearly two square feet of surface area before restraint, also injuring several officers and hero citizens in the process. A glinting froth pours from her mouth, its bright white color captured on camera as she barks and flails and blinks her eyes, as if broadcasting a pattern. Later this same day, six students throw themselves off the roof of the Whitney Museum in New York, killing none, but causing brain damage in four, paralyzing one from the waist down; the sixth is fine, unscarred as if it had never happened; she is placed under arrest and later successfully kills herself banging her head against a wall.
Alice can no longer see the book there in her hands, so close to her face now is the paper; nor can she see her hands or the arms connected to her flesh, her body, what outside. The words are all there is, then all there ever has been.
Within seventy-two hours, additional assaults have been made inside America on the Lincoln Memorial, the Washington Monument, and the Gateway Arch; and on foreign soil against the Sphinx, the Great Wall, the Eiffel Tower, the Parthenon, Easter Island, as well as structures designed by Le Corbusier, Frank Lloyd Wright, Rem Koolhaas, I. M. Pei. Armed guards are assigned to other major monuments identified as potential targets in continuous shifts, even as new masses stand in lines to see the icons of a past they can’t remember, newly enthralling for their vulnerability, the revived reminder that they one day might no longer appear, regardless of what they might have meant to stand for. By day’s end, sectors of most major modern cities have been regimented into gridlock, designed to prevent unwanted action of any kind. From overhead, the shots of enforced order look almost peaceful, silent from their distance, pocked with unnatural light, as upon the world there hangs a listening vigil. It would seem unreal were it not shown this way, like every unknown wish unfulfilled in transit from the heart of man, pushed in through the holes in all our senses, the fiber in our feelings, coming open.
There’s nowhere else; no way to turn from here but toward what world might wait beyond the windows passing beyond sight. Each sentence seems to last a lifetime in its rendition, its transient texture spreading further wider and thinner against its own known definition until there’s nothing left, including silence, its idea; no frame within which someone she once recognized or even loved could appear anywhere but buried in her, not even a name.
And on and on, the world over, still further works remain left out alone to bear their witness to any person who might come. In the night, unknown further creations are punched and stabbed and shot at and spit on and defaced, using screwdrivers, hammers, nails, scalpels, fingers, fists; sculptures are knocked off of their displays, the signals report, denting or chipping or becoming shattered on the hard floor into innumerable fragments, a finer dust that never could be gathered up and none alike; leaving only the understanding of what has been initiated in their undoing, in acts
ranging from seething violence to an almost hypnotic glee, against works that had survived the multiplying means of nature and the want for preservation, through wars and riots, destitution and loss of mind; having been held captive even longer in private quarters by collectors and historians and restorers and hoarders and the investors and the rich and bored; years of sunlight or electric fading all colors as natural rot and erosion and friction faded the shapes, even when restored time and again by minds armed with science and good intentions, still resulting in collaboration against the object’s will; as whoever touches any creation as well becomes part of it, and who stands before it has existed in its field. In this way, the unreal is made real, and the real is made even more impossible to distinguish or identify, much less to parse, passed as it has been through so many sets of eyes and ragged instants bending its premise beyond the grasp of recognition in our bones, and still allowed somehow to spread its image through space and time, against our will, until at last we’re left with what seems no choice but to lash out; to stake our claim on our own minds through some illusory version of new vengeance, in the name of preservation of our own kind; and therein to imagine we might be able yet to take back at least a portion of the simulation of control, over the very terms on which our spirit had been fomented and transacted after all, against the unyielding panoply of replications and inundations exercising their authority on what still remains our lost faith, by now spread so far and thin across our embodiment’s terrain that it becomes difficult to know if we are or were ever actually alive, much less where and when ever again we might stake a sense of hope or wonder in any claim, left as we have been with so little sense of recognition and even less still left to lose.