Alice Knott

by Blake Butler

  And yet there’s still one location he needs to see, Alice realizes, a location known in her mind as the scene of the crime. Most of the rest of the house bears nothing in her already any longer, not really, even in doting, each memory only more fodder for a hollow sort of heart, around which the true nature of the house had learned length by length to hide its face, somehow leaving only the occasion of intrusion and invasion as patent, real, amid the lacking texture of all else. Indeed, she finds the door down to the vault still right there as it had once been installed, the structure’s metal rigging affixed into the surrounding brittle drywall of the remaining subject like a suture, out of place, and yet providing a sense of comfort to Alice in its definitive location, its persistence against all else.

  Behind the door, as there had last been, are the stairs, fashioned of the same material as the door’s smooth, silver metal, providing continuity to its frame; though now the steps seem shallower than before, Alice thinks, with barely enough room to put her foot down and not feel like falling. Nor are there handrails on either side, whereas before some days the rails were the only way she’d gotten down the stairs in the first place, inebriated beyond invention. Once they’ve started down, though, the descent begins to feel more usual, despite how the ongoing distance appears to span much longer than she remembers, begetting further lengths and lengths of such precarious balance, their manufacture now set in a spiral so as to shield the way forward and back both, eventually continuing so far that Alice imagines there might never be another checkpoint; as if either course might only go on and on forever in their way, beyond the necessary makeup of the physical landscape, where it ends and somewhere else entirely takes hold.

  But then, like that, they’re at the bottom, where again all looks the same as it once had been: the small metallic alcove, slick and featureless but for the flat vault’s door and the panel requiring her passcode to proceed. As for the code, she’d typed it in so many times it had become a second nature, and yet for some reason Alice finds now, in midst of approach, that the muscle memory does not deliver; in the digits’ place in her head, instead, she finds only other spooling strings of unrelated numbers bound together: her age, for instance, its ever-changing value, the days and dates all stuck together in her mind, each wanting its own significance in the fray where dates, phone numbers, page numbers bang around, mobbed beyond application. Suddenly there seem infinite possible combinations she might once have known. Any string might be the one solution, she realizes, all possible monikers ready for meaning in your context, claiming their own weight.

  Amid her hesitation, Alice sees Smith move past her, his demeanor suddenly stirred to active, if still without expression, bearing no word. With all the fingers on both hands, then, as Alice watches, he starts to type at length into the pad, inputting hundreds of sequential characters as if typing out a sentence, a paragraph, a page. It might go on like this for the rest of their lives; perhaps they could remain here on the far side of the vault door forever, stalled in the process of approach, remaining only ever in transition, not quite knowing what’s to come; which is how it had always felt, as Alice lived it, never knowing at which stroke the falsely endless feed might at last be called complete, until it is, and they are in.

  Beyond the door, the world around them opens up. They are in a lobby, or something like one, like the processing chamber from the prison but even larger, the walls farther apart and half translucent, rising high up to a glass ceiling that fills the room with artificial light. It’s no longer certain which door in the wall behind them is the same they’d just come in through, already sealed shut and indistinguishable from the countless other doors on either side, lined up to fill the wall in both directions as far as the room goes.

  Nor is it clear, yet, where they should stand. All directions seem the same direction, Alice senses, her eyes unfocused as the space around her seems to bloat, in search of traction, any firm feature. Not until she looks high above them, at the massive wall spanning the space’s farther perimeter, do her eyes light on an image, so wide it’s almost impossible to even really see. She strains to fix a context amid its overwhelming breadth, its hues glistening and shifting on reception, like gasoline. She finds the prospect can only be realized sector by sector, making the rest of the room there seem to disappear into it, hidden in plain sight.

  The image is a portrait of a woman, Alice recognizes then, leering hard against the wide room’s open glow. No, not only one woman, she resolves, but two, so much alike: twins, it seems, each young enough yet to grow up into something so much different; their faces thin, forbidding, at once ubiquitous and anonymous, open to drift. Their white bodysuits resemble matching horsehides, the flesh of either indistinguishable from the other in the frame, their limbs commingled as through one torso, sharing a blood. Each wears a metal band on her right hand, much like the one on Alice’s own finger, she remembers, finding it suddenly tightening and burning in recognition against her flesh, though theirs are each mounted with a setting: the left figure’s a garnet, the right’s an aquamarine, the precious texture of each somehow an eyeful in its own right, overpowered only by the women’s doubled, mesmerizing gaze. They appear to look right back at everything that might regard them, including Alice and her companion, as one and the same—a boundless, edgeless gaze, stern but without judgment—while also assuming some sort of reflection of any viewer’s face, Alice’s and Smith’s alike, just exactly as they would appear to one another in the moment, in a way that any others also looking on must see their own faces rendered live, sculpted to appear to have existed forever on the massive canvas—so as to each viewer, their own hope. Behind them, in the portrait’s background, a flood of cinder lines the world for miles, its boundless blackened landscape leading flat off into a silver sky that seems to extend into the very structure of the building, the very ground on which Alice herself stands.

  * * *

  —

  Where has she seen this scene before? Alice thinks, for some reason now in third person. Why does it seem like something’s about to rip straight through its shell? She feels detained somehow in the image’s presence, full of such overwhelming stillness that she can hear the liquid running through her veins, its emphasis so large and loose around her that it seems to run beneath her, through the floor, on and on somewhere far below the earth’s curved surface. She might go on standing forever just like this, she then imagines, under the women’s inert gaze, waiting to be granted an understanding previously impossible but through them and them alone. And so you shall, she hears them seethe, suddenly communicable beyond a need of tongue. We had been alive there in every book you’d ever read, in every film and program you’d nodded off during, just out of frame until unseen; there in your sleep, too, tracing the locations between nightmares, which looking back from here spans your whole lifetime; until, at last now, at the center of only our attention, here you are.

  All motion, all other interaction, before this present second had been for Alice out of focus, or rather, out of frame; any questions she might have had, now or ever, about her life or how it went are done away with under their gaze, gripped of an unscriptable logic, so they are saying, one made accessible only in having been at last relieved of the apparition of ourselves. Such rationale, burst free from her prior forms of thinking, thereafter obscures all other fleeting sensory effect, shaping a feeling that thereafter retrofits itself through how it is, all the rest bound up in false nostalgia, bought and sold to each as their own brand. Which, at last, is not a pleasure, Alice understands, but endless pain; to know once and for all that, within what had once seemed one’s own existence, they had only ever been playing along, not even for any present audience, but for themselves, in living misery at the ragged end of an era in which humans had imagined fertile purpose, exposed emotion, even pride, each even less their own than she’d imagined; that any person’s life, in its ongoing manufacture, had been both the means by which they’d been tricked into signing off the
ir only rights, in hopes of being retained in future seasons of a show that never aired, and also the precedent thereafter, preventing any further claim on what else they might have otherwise committed to, become.

  The subsequent corresponding fissure—between Alice and herself, in collaboration with the women’s faces overhead, the lengthless size behind their eyes—echoes in Alice’s ears and all throughout her person, then and now, an instantaneous and overriding revision of the vocabulary of the present, such that suddenly to not remember is to see, and to want to act is to feel time lurch out from underneath us, negating the very space where it had been; and so too, at last, can she see each other self as she remembers it alike within the prior landscape of her life, each presence designed inside its own mind as the center of all experience, so desperate for traction that it would seize the world unto its end; each never dying in its own mind’s understanding as it was never actually alive.

  Above the image hangs a massive, shining title card, floating in its message made of curling neon, crimson and silver edged with every color underneath, welcoming the viewer to the room at last: VOID.

  Something like centuries must pass then, so it feels; each hour in them absent of view, where the only measure of the time passed is time itself, not unlike how it might have felt to have her life remembered for her by someone else.

  It is only Smith’s voice, there just behind her, that breaks her thrall. His tone is lower, older than she remembers, nor is the effect quite even speech, suffused instead with clicks of tongue and heavy breathing. Smith himself, however, appears to understand exactly what he’s saying, forcing the ongoing articulation despite how he can’t seem to stop blinking his eyes, his skin so oily now it’s like he’s leaking, turning to mush. He looks even more memorable in such condition, Alice finds, like some actor in his most celebrated role, having wound his way into her life after decades of recurring appearance in the costume, if still always inherently himself just underneath, though no longer quite so free.

  He raises his arm then, pointing above them at the looming image of the women. This would be the last work of any living artist, Alice can hear him impressing upon her then, a fact not carried through him as spoken, but by measuring his impression against the developing direction of her mind, within the nature of their scene’s ongoing production. It has been made for only you, the script seems to hold, both in your image and to end it, at last no longer needing to survive, such that when you turn away, it will be for the last time, and after which we cannot speak.

  Alice finds her head around her mind’s eye already nodding, incorporating—yes—while beneath the lining of her flesh she feels the logic disseminating, binding her blood flow, her aging organs, all that she is with some necessary glue, ambient music loosening within her where any prior understanding might have fried and come apart; it feels as if her very ability to feel is reformatting, given the new evidence now writhing in her linings like poison gas into a cave, taking with it too any sense of balance, any intention. Thereafter her vision feels divided into two: into who she had to have been to do what she’d done to get here, and who she is now as a result, even as each alike still goes on changing even thereafter, no longer bound in their resolve. She can only go on seeing double, then, in trails of rubbled color, her arms suddenly so heavy that their connective tissues might soon rip, the glands along her neck bulging, full of cold, dark liquid, itching down the veins inside her hands, her buzzy knees. The room spins, somehow both around her and within her, as time itself elongates, becoming dragged.

  Like the recurring glitch in the screenlight of the computer she’d so often slept with before the fire in their first house—which she could not remember until now—whose flames had taken over so much more than she could remember, in both her perception and her kind. How each day she’d always felt she’d already dreamt what was going to happen the night before, unable to shake the feeling not of simply already knowing what was coming, but of doing it all wrong, as if her performance of it meant more than any action, a feeling broken only upon the impact of her fainting every morning when trying to stand up from the bed, her head heavier than the rest of her, forever.

  Alice can see herself only as from inside herself, she understands, watching as if she’s already watched herself in this exact scene once before, somewhere, on a screen—so many nights, she thinks, not just today; so many lifetimes—though this time she can still feel where she might be alive inside the moment, given the ability, in turning over, to actually perform. She has never had a moment like this before, where she felt so directly linked to her own fate; until now so much of her life has felt like one long do-over, fanned through the wishes of so many others, their own faces forced into remand—for once this now has never had another, and never will, but rather something more like the reverse—as once she had experienced herself as such, she can’t go back, a surface scraped so thin there’s nothing left.

  Around the edges of the room, then, Alice hears the sound of wider grinding against the fade inside her head, followed by an even lower bloat, like putty pressed into her ears from both sides, dropping the pressure. Her scope of vision follows, panning as might a camera toward the rows of stacking doors. Far down along the widened space, she sees, all pale fat bright and bare of detail, a door comes open from the outside. Another woman appears there in the cracked light, then: one dressed the same as Alice finds herself now, in the same white gown she had worn both day and night, her preferred costume throughout the years alone. On the woman’s right hand’s ring finger, a gemless band just like Alice’s. Behind her, too, another man, dressed like Smith but with a slightly different face, familiar but of a different era. They both look back at Alice, seemingly not surprised to find her, but certain, steely, as if they’d known exactly how this would happen, had been waiting their whole lives to step into action, to replace her.

  This man is wearing his own ring too—as is her own Smith, Alice realizes, turning toward him now, his own eyes closed against the appearance of their matching pair. The nearest man now seems unable to be able to stand the others’ sudden presence, for some reason, bending at the knees there in a sudden pain that makes him ill, though Alice herself seems to feel nothing at all in their wake, only conceptually able to understand the way her flesh no longer has the will, or perhaps rather lacks the utility, her body’s linings long since trained to undermine and then absorb any urge once seen as instinct, premonition, before it surfaces. Her body has at last reached its full exhaustion, beyond the point of all return—a fact she does not fear, at last, but fully embraces, leaning in to how the world thereafter seems to drown within itself, the once-surviving lifeforce felt even in strangers, in the inanimate, all run together, so flat as the horizon, all the land she’d never touch.

  Alongside the door just opened, Alice sees then, another door follows likewise, and thereafter quickly yet another farther down; then countless more doors in the same way together, one by one or ten by ten, stacked and clustered, as through each doorway further versions of her enter—all different ages, sizes, brought in pairs, from endless iterations of her life; persons she might have even been once, in her imagination, while they in turn believed it was themselves who held her place; making Alice, then, the true stand-in in her own history, from their perspective, changed in and out so many times. Each is accompanied alike by strange companions, such as Smith: persons she had spent time with or passed by in rooms long elsewhere, through all the old scenes and landscapes she’d lived among and soon let go, here modeled to perform her, in reflection; a swift cast of innumerable selves, pouring forward far as long as she can see in the constrained space, door after door, life after life, dressed in the same clothes, rings on each finger, performing a lost expression in their eyes, and still more coming in through other entrances the room blossoms into, most so far away already she can hardly parse their bearing from the rest, obscured among her more intangible memories as they cohere, a fever screen of all the mislaid reflecti
ons of her persona.

  The tightness of the gauze around her neck and wrists, the cold wet swabs, as the men, the family’s “doctors,” had held her down and fixed her, still so young, certain there must be some way to connect her person to the kind of child that they’d always wanted. Her actual father’s hands holding the book up as they read aloud together every night before they took him, at last having broken through the fine print on the pact that’d held our worlds together all this time. Or the earsplitting sound the moon made when she watched it too long, the summer before the production crews began to block whole plots of land once called public; how much it hurt each time the clapper clicked, no matter how often she heard it or how far she might believe she’d gotten after walking offset. How some nights in the house it had seemed there was no door that didn’t lead back to the room she had just come in through, no way out.

  None of that had really happened, until it had, Alice understands; her every action surrounded by the fact of what was not. Each faded flash of prior timeline slides in upon her as through a spiral, searching for slits in which it might become installed, its software overwriting what had been previously expected; a mind made up of cavities and rifts, all barely held together within her against the future possibility of pushing through, understanding herself as who she was, not who she wanted, much less anybody else. And still they can hear the others of her, in her image, sorting through her thinking, each emerged person’s sense of self and life’s desire pending in upon her from all directions; as to replace her, make her theirs; their own imagination of her overriding all else that she might be or ever wish to; and so too then every other person, dead or living, yet to live, each struck in their own way at a loss, capturing and dividing up inside themselves a workable representation of their nature, as it stands in evidence against each other’s understanding of the facts.