by Blake Butler
Alice turns to see herself again reflected and can make out only where there isn’t what there was before she looked. The air is ripping. The day is ripping. The world all overwritten. Nothing there. Her neck is leaking fluid, a bright black oil slicking her shirt. Her arms aren’t helping. She can’t see anything; then she can see too much. Infinite colors. Her unfather’s voice. He’s reading to her as he would sometimes while her mother drove, the only time any of them were allowed to hear his stories. No one would tell her where they were going. They put a mask over her eyes. So many voices there alongside, then, multiplying, till it was like some infernal party she was not allowed to bear, one to which by the time they arrived she’d already fallen asleep, every time, the taste of metal in her mouth, unable to stand.
Notorious public figure Alice Knott, age fifty-nine, was executed today by lethal injection at federal facilities in A., less than eight days after being found guilty on all counts by a local jury of her peers.
The unfather’s breath against her neck, slurring his words again, this time in an infernal, cartoonish tone, like the occasional narrator of their favorite program, who through the screen would sell them dream vacations that never came; vitamins that claimed to cure all sickness and yet only made you tired, inconsolable; survival packs in case of plague, full of enough nonperishables to last a lifetime without leaving the house. Her mother cackling from the front seat, smoking out the window, strange rotten smoke; and her brother or unbrother there beside her, laughing right along, while at the same time squeezing her hand so hard she thought he’d pop it.
In a final statement, delivered flat on her back with eyes unblinking, Knott accepted blame for everything she’d done, as well as everything she’d failed to. She expressed regret and a sincere wish for peace in the lives of all those her actions had affected, both those living and those no longer alive. Witnesses report that she refused to close her eyes, staring straight on into the two-way mirror behind which hundreds sat, come to bear witness.
Somewhere the wind beyond the car. The glass against her fists, thin as a hiss, yet no less firm a place to bash her head in. Screaming for a doorway, keys to the locks. Begging for someone at last to explain to her the reasons, how to be. Feeling her brother’s fingers then constricting around her own, so tight she can no longer move; his pulse so near to her own as he inhales in awe, sliding the metal band off of her left hand and then at once onto his own; a matching ring for each of them, just like their parents, as it had long been meant to be, through all their lives. Then she can no longer feel the child there, nor the seat’s lines, the car’s interior, any partition.
Alice Knott is survived by no known kin. Memorial services will be held in her hometown of X. tonight at six o’clock and are open to the public.
She finds that she can control her face again, at least a little. Her arms are heavy and hard, like miles away, nearly impossible to hold up long enough to claw at the hot cloth across her eyes until she’s bleeding; through veils of winding color. She is able, then, to see beyond the light. Just above her, a breach has opened in the chrome, some kind of sun roof. Somehow she can see it beyond all else; the sky above them all a gore, full with a ripping wind beyond any further possible narration.
It takes all she can muster, gums clenched and breathing, seething through the woozy pain that blurs her legs, for her to rise to press against the long warm surface of the vehicle, pushing blind out on through its vibrant opening, head, shoulders, hands, into the rush at once so overwhelming it conforms around her body.
In lieu of flowers, interested parties are encouraged to send donations to the New International Preservation Effect, a mutual outreach initiative by ExxonMobil, Facebook, Void Corporation, and the Marines, fostering cross-cultural intersections in creative expression and innovation.
The land sprawls out beneath her far and wide. She can no longer see the roof of the car so close against it, the muggy white metal becoming seamless with her skin, her arms somehow so long now she can almost reach beyond its breadth, feeling the cream-like whipping of the blur of land beyond as it blasts past—into more and more of the same remaining blank of solace; carried forward on against her will, toward anywhere she can’t remember, her only mind remaining all full of platelets, a humming mold allowed at last to come awake.
There’s nothing to see, finally, even with eyes open, no form of act or wish so clear as what is not—a thriving, waking cleft of broken, numbing air, so much like all that she remembers having swept across her life, binding all their hours held on in hope through entertainment, the unending anticipation of which had for so long been the only reason she survived, perpetually awaiting what could at last no longer be extended, day by day, pulled at last beyond the reach of any eye, all possible communication thereafter held indecipherable, impossible, part of a script without an actor, any lines.
Alice can’t imagine what else there is to do then but to pull the rest of herself up through the opening. Her remaining flesh weighs nothing underneath, easy as feeding to hoist her lower half up through the hole behind the rest, the ongoing lines of lurch that form the world sculpting her engagement in it like a hand on arid clay. No sooner than she’s through, she feels the space beneath her become closed up, at once again made seamless with the rest of all as it remains, the ground and sky beyond her overridden, splitting and smoothing itself over and over so fast it all seems at last to disappear: all her hours, all the language, the further silence flooding up and filling her there from within, absorbed into the very possibility of her own life. There isn’t a story left to tell, then; nor any sensation or response; not a thought but to be carried forward, through the nothing.
All space coursing around her has become scrambled, full of heat. Corrupted flowmarks course the edges where every previous surface had once been. She can hear no sound of any kind, no mutual presence in the present, rewound and pressed forward at the same time. All potential plot points now seem pressed together and held together, all at once, as if they’d never previously existed uncombined, smoke pouring out from the shape of any space drawn out from underneath and above her, from anywhere and anyone she’d ever been.
Alice claps her hands and holds her breath. She listens to the lines there spreading out within her, resolving into numbers without names—some kind of final prayer devised in her adrenaline as someone else’s life flashes through her eyes.
She knows what she is meant to do before she does it, not because it has been written for her, but because it’s all there is, all there ever had been, the only way; where as she throws herself headfirst into the blur of the world as it remains, all motion seizes, splits apart, having at last reached its source; the lost, fat vastness of all that she can remember how to feel now torn apart through its transference into fate.
0004
Alice is standing in the foyer of her home. She doesn’t recognize the space at first, turning from facing the portrait mirror to look out into the front sitting room. She registers not what is there so much as what is off: no decorations on the walls now, no standing rust-colored wardrobe into which she and other guests could place their clothes, for so long full of countless strangers’ forgotten garments, parts of costumes. Also missing is the way the room had always felt, a childish sense of private timelessness she’d been able to maintain most days within the space’s forever-lurking smell of scorched sugar, a too-warm air until the dark came.
And where before there had been an exit from here to outside, now there’s none; instead, only her clear awareness of where it’d been, pinned by the one small diamond-shaped window once installed at the missing door’s center, for looking out, not in, and through which Alice can see—in place of where there’d once been a porch, a path, a stoop, trees, a street leading to more streets, houses, people—now only lawn, stretching out wide and far in all directions; and where in the sky above she sees no sun, no cloud or plane, but endless flatness, so sharp it’s hard to look at.
Behind her,
then, turning around, Alice finds Smith, the driver, who appears to have followed her inside—a spitting image of him, anyway, except for where the scar along his throat seems to have completely healed, the skin all smooth now and unbroken, and instead of a suit he’s wearing white. He studies her wondering as if in awe, parsing his reaction to her reaction, which makes her only that much more aware of what is different in the space; yet her gait remains calm, her face vacant of remorse or consternation, for after all the house had always felt this way, had it not? Even before it hadn’t?
How long have they been standing here, for instance? It seems forever, one of so many iterations of the same duration, identical but in small ways that only she could ever feel. In the next room, Alice finds the furniture gone missing, done away with: sofa and coffee table and rugs and chandeliers and lamps, leaving not even marks of wear from where they’d sat so long. The walls are blank as walls can be, not even bearing any signs of common use, pins or smears, cracks in the settling; nor are there windows, ways to let light in, even lamps, though she can see throughout the house clearly, each space’s illumination somehow innate.
A corresponding absence spans all the house’s other spaces, or so she finds, leading her companion forward through it, from room to room. Food and hardware are gone from the kitchen; beds gone from the guest bedrooms, and from her own, as if the evacuation that took place upon Richard’s leaving has now been ultimately fulfilled, with nothing left. Some places where doors had once been now have none, the wall spread flat over its prior partition, scouring any passage into what had once been just behind.
Even her unbrother’s bedroom, which she can’t remember ever having entered, now stands with door left open for what seems to her the only time ever, its would-have-been contents likewise missing, the scuffed but freshly polished hardwood floors hardly bearing any remnant of how she would have once imagined the sick room’s captured content, though it retains its haunted air. The room’s layout is an exact copy of her own bedroom’s, Alice realizes: the same placement of the closets and sharply sloping ceiling, a lone thin window above where there had always been a bed, too high to try to see out of from the floor; the only window remaining in the house, so it appears. She can sense the same strange lurking quality she felt about the wall between them all those years ago as she brushes her hand along it now, feeling for the first time what it would have been like to stand where he did, her unbrother, at least supposedly, in parallel to her own young self there on the far side, as if the wall were only a soundstage partition. She feels the urge to step up and pull it back, then, to reveal how their two rooms in fact had always been one, divided only for the illusion of privacy; such that all she’d ever had to do to see him there beside her was reach out, offer her hand.
Smith, having followed her in here, is staring at her even more intently now, face fixed with a strained grimace, as if he can’t not smile or doesn’t really wish to, its stricture stronger than whatever other urges might want his muscle. He seems to have to tell her something, to clarify why they are here, but as had she so many times prior, he can’t make his body cooperate beyond ulterior designs. He looks so much thinner than when they’d first met, she decides, unsure now when that was, his skin pulled taut around the cheekbones, his hair more sparse and brittle, his pupils shrunk to almost nothing, the surrounding corneas all bloodshot, dry. She tries to find the words to draw him out, to ask him how they’ve ended up here, where her belongings are, what he even wants in following her around, but finds she too still can’t quite remember how to speak or what to say. The air feels tense within her, or folded over, though she is not sure what that means; it’s something her unbrother would have said, she imagines, air folded over, not quite her; the logic of his language now within her somehow, having at last allowed her into his room, a trace of underlying meaning transferred over in the rendition, perhaps, by just breathing his old air. When she tries to scroll her mind back through any prior perspective of who she is or how she’s been, she finds only traces of a much more distant common past, all of it having already been invaded and revised by Richard, through and through her, connecting back to childhood hours spent together before he’d ever occurred to her, in her mind, coming unpressed: him and her, posing together in dress clothes pretending to be robots, without feelings; dreams of other planets they had shared in whispered secrets in their own language, untranslatable to any else; the gifts of glass beads, packs of magic powder, little knives they’d passed back and forth, each promising to keep them safe for when they would be needed; so many secrets laced day in, day out, in all the hours she’d used to cover over their ambitions and ideas; so much they had shared and weathered out together that she’d shuttered off or else erased.
Each of these phantasms, as she regards them, seems still more real to her than all the rest. She feels the pang of an awakening nostalgia resonating in the flattened absence of all else the house had held, despite how still in every of those memories she can still feel the burning, itching underneath, how his face at all points remains blurred, sharing features with so many sorts of nearby passing faces; his person just off camera always, but without question really there, primary director of the production of his own meaning in her life, against her will; at the same time so strong and interlinked with all the rest of all there is—her house, her life, her mind—that she can no longer remember exactly how to explain what might have made her feel this forced distortion in her bloodlines, father or unfather, unbrother and no brother, death and life. That whole idea of something shifted in their balance—was it another of the ideas she and he had made up, collaborated on, she wonders, just then; some kind of system of bizarre games, one within which the longer she embraced it, the more completely any passing hour seemed to slip away, becoming written over, filled with ransom, until soon she could no longer tell the difference between feeling and believing, neither more true than any other, all the rest?
It’s so easy, she thinks, suddenly, to see, to understand: the perception of so much change within her life, the sprawl, the warping, had been functions of life itself, each flaw a fact she must learn to include in her definition of what the world was at any moment. Had she begun to tell herself it was all not hers, but someone else’s, a darker side of the same coin? How much hidden pleasure had she taken in letting her father be erased, while feigning horror, all time in tow thereafter all spent conditioning herself to be anybody but who she was? How much could have been so different for her if she’d only accepted her own life at once and without question, and so how different the world?
Smith, by now, is wholly beaming, his head so flush it seems his skin might come apart. He watches her as if he too can hear the words dictated in her head: how the same effect as she must feel now could be found as true of every other person, in their own distortions of their experience of life, bridging the gap between what they’d always wanted and what was, if only just to stay afloat, to be able to survive at all amid so much shock as must be required to even live. Such ongoing misapprehension formed the foundation of all life, she understands, the crumbling ground on which we wandered, the shifting light that filled the time between our eyes. Every inch of everything was and had been always teeming with what it wasn’t, in congregation, over and over, on and on, such that only by becoming carried up within it, buried by it, would it ever sanctify her, let her be.
This observation is no less untrue than any else, Alice decides; only another part of her corrupted drive learning to re-create itself in its own image, an understanding—as manufactured as any—to illuminate how they’ve wound her down, turned her so hard and fast against her so many times, throughout so many understandings, until she might at last completely acquiesce, on her own terms, which had been the whole point from the beginning, had it not? All her family had ever wanted for her, and all anybody ever, was to have the unnavigable immensity of being at last pulled down so tight around her that there was nothing more for her to do but let the others have their w
ay; to make of her own life what most might suit them in the mirage of yet becoming entirely one’s self, even while knowing that there would always be another lurch yet to come within the full collapse, how each would end up only yet another wrong beginning, and thereby made only stronger, more all-consuming, as we race forward along a fast unfolding present track that might only ever find a destination once in forfeit under one and all, at last, and whereby the living lines of any future could be found encoded only in her flesh, in the wake of which, with no way back and no beginning, we might begin to see what’s yet to come.
They head back through the house the way they came, she and Smith, the only Smith she can remember. She can feel him right there beside her even with their arms linked, moving as she moves, eventually snaking his large, cold palm into her own, as would a child. Triggered by this, she seems to take the lead, dragging them together forward into space; he seems now only able to follow along, waiting for her to make her own conclusions and decisions, which he must then go along with; as if without her nothing else might ever be again, or ever have been at all. She finds she wants him to understand her now, or her intentions: to see the house as she’d once seen it, decorated end to end with such fanciful nostalgia that he might relate to how different it is now, for better or for worse; though already knowing at the same time that nothing she could say might make him feel as she does.