Alice Knott

by Blake Butler

  “Or ‘unbrother,’ as you always liked to call me,” the child says, interrupting her apparent recognition, back to now. “Which would hurt my heart, I must admit, to the point of nearly dying, or wanting to die; until years later, when eventually I understood; when I could grasp what our blood was turning into, I mean; what all of any human blood was even for; how sometimes, in the ongoing mass of what you felt, I might be someone else; your brother, yes, but then your father, your unfather, your mother and unmother, your daughter, son; each all the same.”

  Alice’s teeth sting; her eyes burn; her lips ache; her hips rip; her tender fire slowly dying out, sirens in her scraping; the sour muddle, full of friction, fiction; all of it wailing, waiting to be given pasture, any end, even as the present bending phrase only continues; awl to leather; heat to nowhere.

  “Soon I could not keep control of what I was to you, latch onto it; which for years and hours scared me beyond death, how well you shook us off, myself as well as any other, the whole world handled each the same; how quickly anyone could be forgotten, blown into fragments, fault lines. For so long, all I wanted was to be understood, by you or any other, to become inculcated into satisfaction whether I had earned it yet or not; and still anything that happened, no matter what efforts I applied or what I gave up, only turned out the opposite of what I’d wished. In the end, it was your refusal, the depth of loss in that reality, that gave me something to push back on, to want to grow from, a living seed.”

  As in every memory, ever after, there he was, where for so long he had not been; no way back; he who had threaded his way into any mind where it took damage, in so many kinds of forms it populated its own world, something once flesh and phantom, found and lost. All the gaps in what you could remember, filled as if with plaster, comprising decades, years you had mostly already blacked out for yourself. And even where he wasn’t, he still was, taking over anywhere left unattended, growing stronger. Years and years of correspondence from abroad; phones ringing in the evening without answer, while the rest of the world slept; his voice as close to your brain as it is now, even when silent; all laced together in a network that even as it whorls and clings under his gaze, you can’t remember how so many years had passed already, or how many remained as yet to come; each day bleeding together so completely they might as well all be the same.

  * * *

  —

  “I thought you died,” Alice stutters, the words more slurred, forced out into the story between what might be actually allowed, pushed free from a warmth within her not quite felt. Nor is there any emotional force behind the words as she hears them, only an unsteady echo as at the tail end of long years spent in fade, clamoring to regain control over how even our language could fall out from underneath itself in becoming uttered. “Or I didn’t know what to think,” she goes on, feeling the cords inside her tighten, “in having lost you by losing control of my thinking, as if someone else was also in me; in every one of me . . . like right now.”

  Alice can see then how the face before her is still changing, from the prior incarnation she had recognized as Richard to something molten, somewhere else, each part of her overflowing as much with the flesh of those she’d shattered or run over as with any essence of herself. Nothing doesn’t hurt that still feels familiar; she can feel nothing else but in its light, passed through every shade of future hour, days becoming decades. She can see among the unfurling lapses of impressions in his image taking familiar forms, just out of step—her family members, local leaders, pundits, spokespeople, anyone who might have passed before her eyes—each not quite who they were but still present in her software same as ever, turning over.

  “I did die,” the face says calmly. “And so did you. So did every person, every life, as we went on waiting for something that could never actually appear. The absence of any key to our creation made a coma of our dream lives, such that only within them might we live on, as in a state of total and ongoing subjugation to ourselves. The undeath of what remained possible in dreaming scalped our memory, caused our surest intentions to come caving in on all the rest. And throughout it all we each believed ourselves the center of not only ourselves but the whole world, through which someone else was always seeing and misconstruing, smearing its presence, unto end.”

  How some nights you would wake up so many times it was like the night could never happen, growing older the longer you lay awake and even longer until morning. Sometimes you would wake up so far from anywhere you knew, on piles of dirt along some shoreline, after Armageddon; or in a bed stuck inside someone else’s life, alone. The only way you could find your way home was to lie down and go asleep again, praying that when you awakened it’d be fixed, and you’d forget it even happened, believing only that everybody else knew what was wrong, carrying on in spite of all you ever were, in the same way transferring their future absence into everything you touched or saw or even just imagined; any all.

  * * *

  —

  And yet none of this is true, Alice insists, her own voice still there alive, somewhere inside her. None of these memories is mine.

  The words come in just beneath the others in her hearing, like subtitles on a film too near to see, a straining feeling welling over where any times touch. Nothing rings as quite actually there—little had, ever, but in perceived simulation—this time felt along the skin of the mirage not as her own error, some incalculable disease, but innate in all of us, the passed along as well as the future pending in the same stretch as her own.

  The child’s eyes are even wrong, she sees, looking not directly at her but just beyond, at anything that might be there beyond the living frame, more like a recording of someone wanting to appear alive, to really know you—the same sort of inherent interruption that had followed Alice her whole life, willing her to destroy the possibility of even existing in order to finally see something actual, the very sort of unresolved anticipation that gave each day its shape; though despite all else she had held on, depleted and scattered, yet still wanting to press past the active fault, the same way she had strained her way through every moment, looking forward while still wired to the past.

  The child’s face feels so close now, so integral to how she is, despite the vastness of their gap; as if without it, nothing of the world could ever be, an inherited feeling she feels enforced upon her even as its claim to any intimate proximity betrays its core. She sees faults now, in his complexion, breaks in the continuity of even a blur of possible familiarities, hints of another face behind the façade; not only the lasting impressions of the acne they had shared, but deeper damage—finer defects amid the rendering, derived not out of actual suffering, or even the evocation of it, but of a loss of resolution, lack of depth; inconsistencies created by the image’s apparent failure to align with what it desires to portend.

  The mutating face is more a mask than a memory, she understands then. The person the face represents is not even actually in there, Alice realizes, only what she might imagine it could be, modeled by Alice’s own mind, through its confusion, using her own worst feelings against her as a mechanism of belief.

  Still, the device cannot resist feeding off its own denial; the face’s eyes continue changing even as her perception of him does, trying to shape its total image back toward a form that maintains an emotional effect. It seems that whatever the face of the child represents can sense what its audience is thinking, even beneath its disarray, suggesting there must still be limits to what it can access. Its reach can really extend only so far, then, Alice imagines, its presence determined as much by others’ collaboration as by an infernal drive to overcome, control. How much cleaner to let the child’s design fit as it wishes, she thinks, to let her mind slip and accept exactly what it projects itself to be, though the urge is undercut by the possibility that, upon concession, its desire might drive even deeper, more completely.

  We had been constraining ourselves for so long without even meaning to, Alice feels the face behind
the face reconfirming, as if in solidarity to her awareness, a new false flag, that we’ve forgotten how to stop, nor do most of us have any kind of real desire to, much less a motive. It’s no longer quite a question asked only of Alice, then, but of anyone with whom she’d ever been brought into contact: those who’d seen her, felt her, in any form of broadcast, however far from truth its received impression might have been, however far out on the long lineage of adaptation she’d had to bend to make it fit into the timeline of her life.

  All our days had always been aligned by someone else’s want for setting, structure, she hears herself think, unsure by now which voice is thinking through her after all, a mechanism by which some such overseer might transgress beyond human understanding, and perhaps soon beyond a living face or need for voice at all, beyond flesh.

  * * *

  —

  The mutating head is sweating, Alice notices, or leaking, the fluid different in how it glistens and distorts, freeing loose odd lodes of color inside each cell behind it. The image has begun consuming its own surface, it appears, distorting both the face and its speech: when the voice attempts to continue any narration, to direct her thought, its sound clips in and out around the edges, gumming up in passing places, full of lurch. It’s as if the words no longer wish to stick together, clinging together where one’s influence infects the other, becoming stung.

  “And still you despised me for what I wasn’t,” the voice insists, taking on a plaintive tone amid its glitch, scrabbling to maintain its own integrity by blasting past it, “for where your own sense of reality diverged from what actually would happen, resulting in the ongoing enactment of a trauma by which our larger devastation might begin, wherein some would say such obfuscation would soon become our greatest gift, the very means by which we might transcend the necessity of human pain forever, once and for all.”

  Despite such consolation, slurring long and low into what might once have been soft, the guidance of the head is already turning stricter, more impenetrable, such that each word as it is considered by her system undoes itself at once, or at least rendered in some lost partition of herself still locked and combing for a key for any set of stimuluses to come together, make the day click over into what it had always seemed it might best hold, toward the kind of life we might actually wish to live; in joy, in love, in aspiration. Despite it all, charged with such anguish, she would find a way to want to still believe in what could be, an urge made only more intense each time it splinters, over and over and again.

  The face is glowing now, backlit with crumble like coals in fire. “Nowhere more could such a wound be carried on,” it manages to mutter, the gears in the voice slowing and tangling, “but in every potential human action never permitted to eventually occur, in coexistence with our mythology’s constantly remodeling emotional architecture, diverged in spirit from what we wanted to become given the opportunity to no longer have to want to strive—and so each act made equally redundant, thereby begetting actual liberty, for all.”

  For a moment, as the face falls deeper into its encoded manner of digression and justification, Alice watches as it transforms into the woman she had known as Alice Novak; then Smith, the president, her mother and her father and unfather; then Richard, through all his ages left unseen; and finally, behind that, the coagulating face of her own face replacing the previous completely, burned into fiber. Behind that, behind her, what outlasts isn’t a face at all, has no complexion—more like a landmass, lost in time. The distinction between remaining flesh and what’s behind it then collapses, leaving only lines of code, then smolder, then rubble.

  “It would not take long before it was as if we never had existed even to the idea of ourselves,” the last voice boils, no longer speech but infestation, a disease that rises up from underneath the crumbling words, “and then thereafter, in our absence, no such idea as fact or fiction—no true future, nor a past—no construct of self beyond where here we are now—not in a term but in a sentence being stuttered through its ending, and the silence after—”

  The head is no longer there on the screen. The space where it had once been snows against its own suggested absence, in resolution, revealing coagulating patterns, forms of shape; each again then at once grown soft with blinding colors, flashing trails no sooner perceived than passed away.

  Where at first there had been one head, now there are countless, their full projection ransacking the light; as many heads as had ever lived; billions upon billions of comprised shells, of past and future lives, each devoid of feature or persona; spanning more space than any sky.

  They are all looking back up to the same point, toward a focus once represented as our Alice, by her own face, on the far side of the room; each spectator stunned by whatever it is they believe they feel they see of her or in her place, each seeming to possess knowledge far beyond the fact of where or who they are.

  Their continuing image, from Alice’s last perspective, extends further and further back across the erased faces, through endless open space the size of any ego; far beyond anything like Alice’s conception, across all anybody might imagine, until we the audience, held just offscreen, no longer bear sufficient bandwidth to absorb the information, and so the system crashes, and the condition disappears.

  And when I woke again the room was not the room as it had been, nor was it any of the rooms I’d ever passed through in my life; not a room really at all but a phantasm, full of air from fields of buried dead, their flesh disintegrated into soil and heat, with my own arms held as well there within it, soft as sound, and my lost skin within me struck with blooming, turning over, caressed wide open by the absence of the light.

  Wherever I could sense myself, then, from in the absence, I knew at once the world was not the world as it had been, but more so a model of its last mirage, designed to fit around my mind, and simply by breathing in I understood how every other person had also had a similar process of understanding put to action at the same time. As well I knew the binding grease within my mind was every memory that hadn’t happened yet, and now would never happen.

  As I acknowledged this, through its intrusion, a larger blankness filled the air where I was not. It filled in fast and hard along the old lines of the prior world already far behind me, sealing me at once into its conception spreading forth, where within every breath I felt the present draft of human history disappearing as it stood, braced within that by the idea of my never having slept or ever awoken, in any life, nor seen or spoken, strung a thread. I kept finding my eyes were closed when I had believed them open, and as I tried to make them open again, the cells within the eyes would burn. The fact of burning firmed them, somehow; its heat enwrapped and wrapping still in fetid heat around my being, wearing it down by slowly poaching my own self-concept up from out of me and replacing it with its own unwritten code, without a key.

  Therein, in the same breadth, I found I felt I knew at once that this condition loved me more than I had nature to believe. Its texture held no sickness, no intention beyond the winding of its whir; no further factor for identity beyond how, with any way I tried to move, I remained the only thing not already moving, spanned through all the different modes of narrative, without return; not a flesh but a sensation. Where had I ever really been? Why had I lived, or at least believed I had? To ask meant nothing, as in expecting any definition or description, my blank provided even less; every erased experience I’d once embodied having been already long turned into cinder, compressed as futures never glimpsed beyond their potential as passed plot.

  What I saw as land then opening before me became like the act of seeing in and of itself; where even seeing as an action became like being pulled apart, revealed as nightmares draped throughout eternal night, each one larger than the universe’s size, filling the indescribable space of our imagination as at last the frame of all creation had come alive, in place of us; a seeing, writhing state of being, from which there would no longer exist any exit, even death; no life to live but
through what had already become accumulated as unnegotiable terrain, a scene shot without a lens into a darkness in which the lack of light itself had learned to think.

  Where we were then was full of shining in the nothing. I saw that I had more eyes now than I could count, disguised inside the shades of flesh I carried in me all dismantled as every human memory, far and wide, only now throughout it, where all the air had once been, there was a hemisphere of blood, and we were all at once as close as skin upon it, each able to feel it changing just the same, a state within which I was not an I, nor any other, and where anywhere I’d ever been was so much smaller than itself; and yet still smaller every stitch, slipping only further still into negation where it could feel me begging for release; until, in no time at all so near, I could not feel anything at all, nor could I hear or taste or listen, pressed flat as I now was against the glass all in my heart, wider than even how dying felt in dreaming of it throughout all my living hours, so far apart within me now there was no longer anything to name.

  0005

  On the final video, in night vision, we see a massive glassy structure in the dark. It has no windows, no clear entrances or exits.

  The complex is enormous; it fills the screen, taking up so much space that nothing else appears along the body of the land even as the camera pulls backward, revealing only more of the same. No sky, no sea, no other eye.