by Blake Butler
Which which why now god now why now god now why now cuz
How help please cuz I am was nothing we were you were
Want if want was if god if
If I see I
Be I
Six smearing into five. Five into four and there again all smearing, like smells absorbing smells. Any word or letter looked at too long rolls and mutates, changing also where inside his brain he felt he knew what the word meant, the memory of one’s memory gaining blowholes, slaved erasures. As each sentence disappears, there is no floor where it had been written on it.
Flood blinks.
Flood hears the sound of all the houses filling up with blood throughout the world.
Flood has no idea how long he’s been rubbing at the new flat floor beneath him, now double-fingered, like a woman masturbating, and drooling from the mouth. Between the dry on the wall where words were, around his pads there’s something sizzling, a rising cream pushed through the walls through where there’d been the row of holes of changing letters. In the mass of glow above him he can’t see where he’d fallen through the mirrors, up into the old room, where all those bodies had been stored; he can’t see where the edges of the newer room around him begin or end, in such a way that it seems like the air is all just walls around him, with the language, deeper and deeper, disappearing as he rubs.
Something in this room begins to shake. This room where you are sitting with your hands before you, reading. You don’t hear it because I said that it began. You refuse to take part in trying to hear thereafter because I’m talking about you directly to you and this object is a book. You don’t like the idea of me communicating through you, outside of time. But there is something. In the room. Shaking. Behind your back, or just downstairs, or maybe by the window where you sleep, or in the curtains, soft as hair.
What is shaking.
Will you hear it.
In the room where he is, Flood does; he hears the shaking like I have heard, though to him it feels like it’s inside him.
Is it inside him.
I think someone is at your door.
Flood is grunting. His torso seems above his head. His head feels above his ass. His ass feels opened. There is no light, but for where above him in the spinning, he can feel the low glow of the room somewhere above him, then below him. The black is gyroscopic. He’s all wet now. He feels a cursor blinking in his chest. If he’s not moving, he can’t seem to keep one way clearly up above him. If he’s falling, the air here has a floor, one indifferent to direction, shape, or time.
Flood, Gravey says inside his cell alone. Flood, he says. Flood, he says.
A blue lesion has pulled open on his back between his shoulder blades. It is too small to be seen by humans.
The lesion seems to change shape when looked at. Inside this shape there is a city, like the city you are in. The city is unfolding.
Gravey exhales into the larger air.
Today in America unknowing each speaking person will emit a common word.
* * *
LAPUZIA: I go by Flood’s residence on my way home from the precinct. I don’t let anybody know I’m going, because I want to approach as a friend, not as a coworker. I’m worried about him, to be honest, and not just his career but his mental and emotional well-being. I find his front door left unlocked and halfway open. I immediately notice a strange smell, but I don’t associate it with where I have felt it from until I come into the front room. There are mirrors on the floor. Mirrors on the walls and on the ceiling. Several dozen lights light the room wide. I am so shocked at first I start to call for backup, but something stops me. Still, I ready my firearm. I go on into the larger room. Spread out on the floor where one would usually have a sofa etc. I find a series of pictures of B., Flood’s deceased wife. There are pictures of her alone and smiling, her with E. N. in various locations, and so on, hundreds of them, just everywhere. And there are papers. Papers of his writing, some of which are copies of ones I’ve seen before, that he’s brought to me, others I have not, and some written in a script that doesn’t look like English. Drawings of odd symbols are on many of the pages. I continue on into the apartment, terrified of what I’ll find, though in the other rooms nothing is strange. No evidence of struggle or wrongdoing. No bodies, thank god, and no blood. The main closet is still full of B.’s old clothes, and this is where I realize there’s this odd smell snaking on the air. It is a perfume, sprayed so many times into the small room it’s hard to breathe. Hours later I knew for certain I had felt the presence of this choking, slaving smell before, sometime when I was very young, inside my sleep, but this does not occur to me at the time. I come back out into the main room. I stand among the pictures and the light. I decide there’s no reason to report this, that I should not have come here, that I feel older than I ever had all through my blood. I feel dizzy in the middle of the photographs of her, the mirrors, a silent catacomb of eyes. That’s when I realize I’m being recorded.
FLOOD: You and everyone who’s ever been. This is not a question of being destroyed, or even beginning: it is in the folding there between: the color of the mesh of the lives forced into bodies rendered one unto the other, lobes in the catalog of time. Each body not a body but a cell. I did not write this.
The body before the glass screen watches white.
He or she before the screen watches the white recorded into the image of the video not go on, not shift or change its vision, unless it bears an image hidden underneath itself: white upon white, making more of what it was and is and will be. Spitting up upon itself more of itself. No mirror. No hour. The white of a white loom.
He or she, assigned to duty, must watch the film to find where inside it there might be something as yet undetected, evidence buried in the film filmed by a man who may or may have not used his hands to end several hundred human lives. He or she may feel emotion in regard to the gone bodies even not having known these victims beyond their humanity after the fact, but regardless time continues, the white continues. The end of one life or another on any given day cannot end all lives, we think. We must go on. This is both the song and city of the human, to continue, we know, and so he or she must.
He or she sees.
He or she is a she here in this instance but as well may be a he or she as in the end it does not matter.
Before the screen he or she has already spent many hours looking. He or she has nodded off to sleep throughout an unknown number of tapes, which continued playing on during the period without he or she realizing he or she had slept, and so not seen, the present seeming in his or her head to be one continuous waking session of watching the tapes, when in fact the session is corrupt. What had been shown had not been entirely denoted, quantified for what had passed over the closed eyes. The aging of all flesh continues to go on regardless, without sound.
The waking body sees the white again. It appears nothing has happened. Nothing, then, has happened. He or she marks another mark upon a page, a sentence notating nothing has happened, and is happening now. Nothing is happening.
The waking body drinks a glass of milk. The milk is warm from where it’s been left on the table for some duration of the day; its opaque color had stayed there unchanged in its state during the period in which he or she had nodded off, a half-full glass of whole milk. He or she does not mind the warmth of the waiting milk, or that in drinking he or she must assume the milk is fine to drink; he or she has had experience with milk, and so anticipates a somewhat innate awareness with its content.
The milk enters the body with the body’s eyes rolled back into the head; again, as with the sleeping and other blinking, he or she is cut again from seeing what appears on screen. He or she, in waking presence, assumes by now that the screen is always only presenting more of the white. One would have to assume, having seen most of the white surrounding any instant of the white oncoming, that any present instant must also be white, otherwise life in this context would become almost impossible to live through, or at least imp
ossible to feel having gotten anywhere in. For the most part then one must go on as if anything unseen could not be interrupting its own continuity in whatever incidental gaps of time it wasn’t witnessed, until a point inside the white that the oncoming white ceases to be white in such a way that cannot be ignored, waking one into the understanding that all these hours might not be just blank, but somehow haunted, embodying some terror so large it at most points could not be seen from so close up.
So then having mostly watched, the thing is considered watched; this is the nature of the assignment: to find by seeing mostly all the white where it might be that white is not. If there is nowhere that the white is not, then the assignment will have been an exercise in finding nothing, which herein will go unrewarded, beyond hourly pay—paid cash to live his or her life with, and his or her family’s, if he or she has one, their bodies stuffed with food and air inside of rooms earned by the doing of the seeing of nothing.
If something does appear, among the tapes of nothing, it must be something, one assumes.
Inside the body of the person seeing the milk falls down through fleshy rolls through the center corridor of his or her body to slick and rush along the landscape of the throat, leaving filmic coat along its white way into the stomach, filling the remainder of what is there of what energy has already been destroyed inside the body from aging and production all ongoing inside the walking and the sitting and the sleeping of the body. The milk, one presumes, will be used then by the body to perpetuate the body in forward motion for some amount of future time, making it possible to breathe and sit and eat again sometime and before the screen there employed to see, if, in this instance, to see nothing, as there is nothing there but white, so far.
The body will continue to be changed. At some point in this future today the person will lie down on a bed to sleep again, this time knowing he or she is sleeping, or believing at least that he or she is.
The face of the screen is the face of the nothing through which the nothing functions and can be seen for what it is.
The face of the screen has held many images before today, the image of the white. There have been years of tapes of other persons making motions that will indict their wrong behavior. This is the function of the operation of the viewing in this context: to jail. What is seen that can’t be used in this manner does not exist. One assumes, too, in days forthcoming, after the days of viewing the White Tapes of Gretch Gravey, the screen will be used again for images of other potential malevolence. Color will function in the pixels of the machine’s face to depict persons moving, copied stretches of the sky, perhaps in depiction of some wrongdoing, some destruction, derangement, death; elements possible in any given suspect, if only waiting to awake.
The point is that we don’t know what we’re looking for here. Which is why we’re looking. The evidence may or may not rear its head. There is not always evidence provided toward the nature of our history and how it holds us, feeds us.
He or she sits the milk glass down. The milk glass now is mostly empty, except for where around the inside layer of the glass the milk remains in residue, a thin white lining that reforms its shape as it is placed to set still again on the desk where it had been. The remaining milk not consumed is milk that might’ve been used to perpetuate the function of the body slightly further in its ongoing, if by a negligible amount. It’s really not much milk left in the glass, but it’s not empty. One could extend his or her tongue. One could lick around and use the fingers to get more of the smear of the milk out, but one does not.
One returns to sit back in the padded seat again half slumped at no clear angle in relation to any of the room’s walls, seeing only the walls before the self directly clearly and in some amount of visibility as well those in the periphery on each side. Each present moment’s experience waxes or wanes in or out in quality as the concentration of the person shifts in one way or another for whatever reason. He or she is at just enough of an angle to look like he or she is at attention, sitting up, while also close enough to feel comfortable that the shape allows the nodding off perhaps again, though having slept once and in small fits and now awoken from the longest, he or she is more fully there inside the room, refreshed. Sleep later in the evening even will be harder, having faltered.
Most of the room cannot be seen. Hours continue in the manner of their own becoming.
One looks head-on into the TV. One is watching nothing making nothing; white making white.
The sound is mute. The sound before the TV had been muted was all static, and at first he or she had let the static sound go on, and it had been more than two hours before the mute procedure was applied. He or she presumes that if the nature of the static changes, the nature of the image would also change, and therefore one would not miss any shift inside the sound if it occurs, though if there were a sound now inside the tape that did not correspond with the change of the video, such as a voice, a dictation, someone confessing, someone listing directions for the destruction of the earth, encoding in the head of the hearer a methodology of murder, that sound inside the room would not be heard. The sound would still be played, though, on the tape, into the room; it only would not be noted beyond its own silence. The word, though, would have occurred.
The muted or turned-off TVs in all the other houses surround the building. The white walls surround each room. The light inside the rooms and between the rooms constantly changes.
In the grain of the function of the white, one might see aberrations from what had been actually filmed. One might force, in the seeing, a rub of grain, a flux of multicolor in the nothing that appears to rise and become swallowed in the white. Hours passing in the seeing of the nothing make one’s eyes go weird and grabby, wanting texture where there’s none. The eyes play tricks inside their wishing boredom. He or she has seen, for instance, just now, or, rather, believes he or she has, a kind of lobe or hand rise from the flat, a reaching out of something from the nowhere as if touching, with such thick fingers. He or she shakes his or her head or blinks the eyes hard, and when one looks again, yes, there is only the white: the white returned to fill the space around the rising of the vision of the perceived hand, no longer there. What rises from the white then, in this manner, is not quite fabrication, mental leaking, but more a congealment: it’s not not there, nor is it really. It went on between the viewer and the viewed alone. It could not be repeated in another. Pixels begin to form a portrait of aggregated resolve, like the lakes or field scenes that arise from staring hard into a loose amassment of stray color. Those traps. Those days. Those jokes. The walls here. Your growing hair.
Of the four witnesses employed to watch of the tapes of Gravey over the many shifts of the last several days, none have agreed upon the way they’ve done the seeing. Only one, just now, for instance, has seen the hand. Only this one will admit, furthermore, to have found his or her self wholly summoned at some point into the wide grain of the white, the pure unending white, as if to some awning opening inside the screen there where the light is to become not one flat panel but a crack cut in the middle of the finite hours of the whiteness.
If the others have also seen this, and they might have, they don’t admit it; they might not even know.
But he or she, now, yes even right now again in the updated moment spent between this sentence and the one before it there invoking the name of the now inside the seeing, he or she cannot avoid admitting how he or she can read against the white something else rising, a surface deeper than the TV, and spreading wider. How, if one allows one’s self to keep one’s eyes wide, not shaking off inside the seeing again into a sleep or someone knocking or the ringing of a phone, one might feel as if there in the white they must move forward; the color of it calling without asking for him or her to come forth slow and long into its body, falling not in a way that knocks the head against the screen’s glass or even leaves the body forward in the chair, but moving as if through some mush writhing outward from the film’s virtual center, filling in aro
und the viewer’s head. How, if one allows one’s self, with eyes wide, one might inside the whitened rise of it go in, might enter beyond some sense of self into this hour of the screen’s hold, and there inside it open into somewhere before not found to touch the room, somewhere before this present instant of our index undefined, a product not only of Gravey’s project and that enactment, but the condition of time surrounding only now.
One might find held in the white a field of color secreted in the blank’s breadth pushed way down into the field, such that as one moves against it nearer still inside the seeing one might find how one can feel or seem or be as if he or she has shifted somehow from being surrounded by the room’s walls now into the color. One might look back from where one is now and find his or her own body watching, eyes wide open loosely as if drugged, looking even bored inside his or her life spent staring head-on into the white where his or her own self sits seeing from inside the white as if not even seeing his or her self. One might go even further than even that then, in the white of fields of days of years inside the tape.