Alice Knott

by Blake Butler

  If there is sound in the video, it is the sound of nothing.

  * * *

  —

  Inside the complex, framing our perspective, another camera moves along a long white hall. Oblong mirrors installed at regular intervals along the passage disjointedly reflect the camera’s path, showing it moving independent of any visible operator across a course of points at which some sense of recognition might occur, as one might have felt once in a museum. The camera appears to have no wires, to bear no logo, same as the soundtrack shares no sound.

  * * *

  —

  Eventually, somewhere along the hallway—we can no longer really tell how long—the camera comes to a stop. It turns to face the nearest mirror, identical to the others we have passed, then rolls forward to press against it, to see into it.

  The mirror is transparent. Behind it appears a cubic chamber, four white walls, the same hue and texture as the others. At the center of the area, a body appears strapped down to a chrome table, its head laced with receptors, gauges, body braced with locks on the limbs and around the waist and neck and ankles. The body breathes, or so it seems from the gentle rising and falling of its frail chest. Otherwise, it is completely still, as if unconscious.

  It takes a while to recognize the body’s face: it is Alice Knott, a bygone name appearing in our mind as some echo of an icon of our memory, almost like a friend, or someone we’d wished to know in such a way, though really by now we are not sure who Alice Knott might be. She is so old it seems impossible; her skin a surgery of putty, puffy leather, lacing, colored veins. She has no hair, no teeth, no nails.

  Why do we feel we understand? And why this strange impression of warmth in the recognition, despite its coarseness? It’s not quite a wholehearted feeling, more a stinging in the places that love might have activated some years before. We find we wish that she could wake and look at us, or even rise, approach the window, a feeling complicated by our understanding that she does not know we are there.

  * * *

  —

  The video is interrupted by an ad for a memory medication, made by a brand that has no name. The ad depicts a single massive sky blue pill, large as an airfield, glistening in hard light against an incandescent background, absent of clear relation to any kind of environment in which we might have spent our life.

  An insect flutters down from overhead; it is a grotesque thing, with many heads and wings, but also exaggeratedly juvenile, an unlikable cartoon. The bug lands on the pill and begins to gnaw at its linings with all its mouths at once, sprawls of tendrils quivering in audible ecstasy.

  Its pleasure attracts several other insects to the scene, all lighting down on the same pill, also taking up part in the feast; soon hundreds are gathered there, so thick you can no longer see the medication’s pastel flesh beneath its living, buzzing coat. The POV pans back then to reveal a field of insects far as the eye can see, all fumbling and mangling at one another to reach the center.

  Within the texture of the image, a tiny, sprawling text weaves its way, listing the product’s side effects so fast no one could read them: nausea, vomiting, malaise, loss of appetite, weight loss, weakness, diarrhea, constipation, painful urination, bruising, tremors, increased blood pressure, chest pain, muscle cramps, headaches, fatigue, insomnia, drowsiness, dizziness, confusion, amnesia, hallucination, fainting, seizures, itching, swelling, difficulty breathing, blood clot, paralysis, sudden death.

  After the ad, a flash of barcode, the same one we would remember seeing every time we blink, if only seeing the barcode didn’t make you forget you’ve seen anything but what you’re seeing next.

  * * *

  —

  The video returns to Alice, on the bed. Our attention is tuned now to a small live monitor installed into the wall above her body, displaying its subject’s current thoughts, fed from wires in her face into the network, for both maintenance and internal security. We know this because we already knew this. The feed is also being supplied into another form of serial entertainment, of which without realizing we have now become a part.

  The screen reveals what Alice herself believes in the present moment: that she is lying in her childhood bed, looking up at the ceiling where she once designed a solar system on the plaster with glowing stickers, forming a mass of stars so crowded in and close that no inhabitable terrain among them could sustain human life. Staring into the constellation seems to make her happy, even now, content to be exactly where she is, though we, the viewer, do not feel the same; there is something missing from the moment, something inherent to it that might have made it feel true; as if we know something Alice does not, but we can’t name it.

  Through the cubicle’s interior speakers, we hear the child Alice singing to herself, a made-up song with no clear melody or refrain, unknown lyrics displayed onscreen in an unrecognizable language. The song is the theme to the most popular TV program of all time, which we are not aware we’ve even heard.

  * * *

  —

  The camera moves back from the mirror and continues along the hall. Other mirrors blur on either side as it continues passing, an open color. It remains unclear if the camera is being operated by a remote presence, or if it is self-propelled.

  Every so often, the camera stops again and approaches a different mirror, peers into a different room. Some of the bodies seem familiar, as had Alice, if still in a way we can’t discern: persons we once knew who had since disappeared, leaving only fragments of impression, arcane sense. Others bear no connection at all, are only other bodies, people someone other than us must have once cared for; some seem sick, barely held together in their repose by artificial means.

  The thoughts of many of these subjects are all but illegible: abstract wind-lanes of muddy color; wheels of fuzz. Others show pistons ramming into pistons on a wide field, or snow falling onto water and not melting but hissing and ejecting reams of colored smoke. None of the bodies ever moves more than in brief spasm, no correlation to anything onscreen, or to the camera, to us.

  In many of the chambers, no one is there. The empty apparatuses remain unmanned, perhaps soon to be filled with someone or something else. The thought-screens above the empty beds exude an open glow, eclipsed of image, filling the chamber with a calm almost like daylight.

  * * *

  —

  The video is interrupted now by an ad for drinking water, represented by a massive pool, wide as the sky, no land or other surface visible beyond. There’s a soundtrack that sounds like way too many people have guitars. Somewhere far in the background, people are howling, as in great pain, pleading in the same wrecked language as from the song we already can’t remember Alice singing, in her chamber, here heard as sickening, cringeworthy; a disease.

  Suddenly the voices are cut off, choked into a matching silence, before a cloud rises through the waters; the blood; its muddy color fills in across the waters’ shining surface, darkening the screen out, echo black.

  In handwritten cursive font, then, the tagline: Water Is a Privilege, followed again by barcode.

  * * *

  —

  Every so often, the camera passes a section on the wall that is not mirror but external window, allowing the viewer to see beyond the walls. None of the visible locations seems to match what we remember from the video’s beginning: instead, the land is a flat, blotched gray. Fleeting stabs of electricity skirt across its stomach, spreading far out toward a sky absent of stars or planets, only matching panes of flatness, altogether more like a ceiling than a sky. Along the landscape, at various distances, we see the outline of other structures just like this one, with no wires strung between, no signage or definition to identify their nature. Corralling waves of light extend their command between more definitive patrols, a long, wide world of unseen lines of sight and sound spanning the complex’s perimeter, designed to hold together no matter how far along them someone might wander if let loose, eventually
circling any body straying across the continent back toward the center of the set, its outline pumped full of heavy air so hard and sharp it stings to breathe once activated by live commotion, any noise. So much better to remain within the parameters as defined, within which one’s unique personal settings can be adjusted to fit one’s preferences at any time, in collaboration, so long as those preferences are provided in writing three to six weeks in advance, so that we may be made aware you still have preferences.

  Further off, too, beyond the ostensible horizon, at such a distance it blends in beneath the glut, a massive sprawl of metal bleachers lines the grounds, buried so brightly no one might ever make out a single face among the wall of watching bodies filling the tiers but left to stand, all their heads shaved and obscured in ways that make them impossible to tell apart; each struck open-mouthed in silence, silver-teethed, feeding, if still unclear at whose behest, or where else there might yet be that they might one day gather up and leave for, to return home.

  The camera doesn’t linger on the view; instead, it passes fast enough for one to imagine there was never any view at all.

  * * *

  —

  This video will have no outside narration, we realize, hearing our own passing thoughts fill in whatever else does not; there is no sound to direct or manipulate our perspective, and no way to change the channel, though we remember how we used to sit before screens for hours upon hours imbibing custom content, every day.

  Instead, there seems to be no space outside this one recording in our experience—only the video, nothing else—and though we have questions about context, infrastructure, how we’re here, they must pass without real contemplation, for we can’t seem to make the logic last. At times we become aware of what seems like someone breathing in the soundtrack, but this is only us, whoever we are.

  * * *

  —

  And still we can’t shake Alice from our mind. At each next mirror, we hope to see her again behind the glass, but it’s always only someone else, a stranger or someone whose face we can’t remember, one of an endless queue of bodies, none of whom appear to understand they’re there. We recognize only the blank behind their look, the paling weight of endless pending in their unknown cooperation.

  * * *

  —

  The last ad we remember is an ad for lard. It depicts the same model seen in other ads we can’t remember seeing all our lives. In flashback we see her rubbing lard into her cheeks and lips and beaming, eating the lard alone off a chrome table, sleeping in a pile of the lard, cradling the lard in her arms and humming to it like a child. The house in the ad looks so much like the house you remember living in, though you can’t remember anything about that life.

  And yet, you know you want the lard. You want the lard so much you would pay any price they ask, but the ad gives no info on how to purchase. You can only wait.

  Or perhaps you have the lard already. We know the ads we’ve seen must still repeat; that, or they are new ads that seem just like the old ones, presenting different things or the same things: an ad for holograms that fuck; an ad for fresh human hair, for feeding, and for caressing; an ad for a set of black leather-bound books, in a new edition of a once-popular series now reprinted in condensed form, all one volume, nearly the width of your own head.

  Each time we see an ad we can’t remember having seen it before, which seems true of the rest of the video as well, though we can’t remember how or why.

  * * *

  —

  Mirror after mirror, hall after hall; hour upon hour; all without timecode, any cut that’s not an ad. What appears is what there is—and it is all there is. Chamber after chamber, body after body, screen after screen—no next direction to the world but what the world itself decides to see depicted on demand, dismissing all prior record wherein it might have never been the case without fanfare or relent, until at last, in the next chamber, strapped to a chrome table like all the others: There you are.

  * * *

  —

  You don’t recognize yourself at first, what with the wires and tubing obfuscating your features, the lines of age accrued in the shadow of your face amid the bone protruding through the flesh there worn away.

  And yet, unlike the other bodies you have seen here, your eyes are open; you’re staring out right back at where you are, through the mirror into the camera, though it’s unclear if you are actually seeing, as any life behind your face there never flinches; nor does your expression change at all in being seen.

  Still, yes, you feel, this must be you; how could you mistake your own two eyes, the same ones you’ve spent a life looking back into already, in mirrors, in pictures, the evidence of your surveillance? And so that must be the rest of your body there attached, you figure: the flesh and bones you’d lived inside for so long, the you you’d carried through sickness, pleasure, boredom, so many nights you can’t recall beyond their dark. This face is your face, for certain; those arms are your arms; this condition all you know.

  * * *

  —

  On the screen installed above your inert body, there you are too: an image of who you feel you must be in your present version, as you understand you, outside any other eye’s description. You’re sitting in a familiar room, wherever you happen to be now: perhaps your home, just barely breathing in the open, muted glow that fills our face.

  In your hands is a book, held open near its ending, though you can’t see any words marked on the page. You’re grinning at yourself, showing your chrome teeth; your unblinking eyes like shining, so alive.

  You see yourself seeing yourself, if only for a second, before the camera moves away.

  Acknowledgments

  My endless gratitude belongs to: Cal Morgan, Bill Clegg, Riverhead Books—and for their solidarity: Casey McKinney, Sarah Rose Etter, Kristen Iskandrian, Wyatt Williams, Gian DiTrapano—and for their specific inspirations: Thomas Pynchon, Harry Mathews, Brian Evenson; Jane Unrue’s Love Hotel, J. G. Ballard’s High-Rise; Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish and History of Madness; Tim Hecker; Isabelle Huppert—and, for their spirit, beyond dementia: Mom, Dad, Memaw—and, to Molly Brodak: all my love forever.

  About the Author

  Blake Butler is the author of acclaimed novels including 300,000,000, There Is No Year, and Scorch Atlas, as well as the nonfiction Nothing: A Portrait of Insomnia. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Believer, Bookforum, BOMB, and elsewhere. He lives in Atlanta, Georgia.

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