by Blake Butler
Moms and dads die, kids die, friends die, lifeguards die, road workers die, PhDs die, lieutenants die, the incarcerated die, all at the hands of those they know or have come near; they are ripped open and their innards are eaten from the hull of their unmaking; ushers die, singers die, strippers die, organ donors die; their organs are not used to fill other bodies with a new life; Golden State Warriors die, gypsies die, hitchhikers die, dentists die, dental assistants die at the hands of the dentists or the patients, the weight of the buildings rises during the night; screenprinters die, brothers die, creators die, the dying die, the wishmakers die, the wanting die, the laughter coming from their heads; the coffee erupting on the counters as the timers go off as planned, burning the surfaces with black liquid overflowing, never again; pet owners die, the pets will fend for themselves; bartenders die, alcoholics die, their bodies are not preserved; artisans die, matchmakers die, janitors die, game show employees die, the worshipped die, the worshipping die; the color of all sound; editors die, the planets spinning; the reader of the book; lamps die, Boy Scouts die, Girl Scout leaders die; the train arriving at the station comes in late; hearse drivers die, neuroscientists die, chemists die, programmers die, some of the people you went to high school with die, some of the people you saw years back at the mall, the people you bought gas from, the organ grinder, the descendents of him who delivered from her mother’s flesh your mom; the sentence makers die, the law writers die, the magicians die, the poets die, the blog commentators die, the violinists die; the fish sing in your ears; the blue of a wheelbarrow reflecting anything it comes near back toward itself; the first baseman dies, the pitcher dies, the catcher waits crouched at his knees, the balls over America at any hours descending in their numbers, the blacktop and the feed; camels die, bathroom attendants die, stockbrokers die, those who have no central occupation of creation or focus or hobby or forward motion in the name die; the shirts come off the bodies; the bodies are eaten into other bodies and become less bodies, all in one, each fed into the other in a becoming-final string of flesh entering flesh, while the newborn numbers descend further and the cells are counted as cells we have and may not ever have again, unless; the strongmen die, the bearded lady dies, the stuffers of the pillows and the folders of the cloth; the surgeons die, the plumbers die; the grass rising up around the homes; the angered die, screenwriters die, those who operate the phones, those who tear the tickets at the mouth of buildings, those who power walk; salesmen of vitamins and fine clothes and batteries and cars and furnaces and loft apartments and MacBook Pros and Fritos and divine ideas and pleasure purpose and sexual dementia and pressure washers and word processing software and eggs and cheese and tee shirts and cleaner cities and designers of the fur and wanters of the honey and those with gardens and those with eyeglasses and those against milk, those with rings around their fingers, those in horror, those who write infernal books, those who are infernal books themselves by merely walking with eyes open in the light, they die. Some of them kill themselves to miss the rest of this. Some go on. Machines go on and something else does, while in the hour of the Thrust, in singing minutes, hundreds of thousands hand to hand and face to face, they die. Justices die by swords in the hands of sculptors, Christians die by the hands of parking lot attendants under mist, whites die by the hands of priests and waitresses and students and the homeless and the living and the pearled with fists and jackhammers and darts and overdoses delivered by the tongue; the foreheads are bitten from the faces, swallowed; the fingernails are chipped off from the fingers, gnawed; the chest flesh is rendered from the sternum with an apparatus and taken into the self in part of self becoming and then taken off of those with scalpels or teeth themselves; witnesses are hung from rafters in a backyard of old Kentucky; cleaners are beaten in the face upon the face of I-295, the concrete alive with the putty of the blood congealing in the seemingly redoubled sun; cops are killed by fingertricks and sternum throttles and long blue swords and pikes and black magick by tricks and jerks and friends and royalty and cherry pickers and the rich; cops are made to choke on their own flesh and spit by the hands of the virgins and the lifeguards and the valorous and the unholy and the timid and the cancered and those who solicit money outside the mall; cops are chewed to bits by cats trained by warm-weather lovers in the streets outside the houses where the cops lived one year when they were young; cops are killed by cops; for thirty seconds over California the image of an aleph forms from clouds of discolored smoke, then blows away; all the stations in the world play the same commercial in the same instant without prior planning; goose eggs fall out of a tree; dog groomers are licked of skin by Holocaust survivors; godmothers are driven by the skull into a yellow wall in Minnesota; a pastry truck is overturned, found filled with lice; the oldest person in the country kills one hundred and forty-seven with a machine gun in Kansas City before she falls flat on the last face she’ll remember and is mauled to pieces by one librarian in the name of names, raising the name into the light, the name I can’t remember even in my own breath here to tell you because the name resounds no longer in a language and has passed into the soil, has felt to burrow in the money of the pit of the eye of eternal wishing and the parrot of the Sod, though we still do not know what the Sod is and will not know and will need to know or know. Those who remain in certain hours still find laughter about something and try to share it. There are tongues passed between friends’ lips. The cock might grow hard. The finger in the belly. Jewelry is sold. Machines turn off and on among the flowing platelets. “I will wear you unto my king.” “I will be the ground that you have walked on.” “Love me. Love me.” The pavement feels deranged. Butchers die, longshoremen die, blackjack dealers die, sidewalk salesman are ripped limb from limb by those who ten minutes prior had felt inside them a clean wish to buy a gift; gifts hidden in boxes in coming houses become forever hidden before the burning; those with the unbroken hymen die, those with the shirts with their own names printed or embroidered die, the same ten numbers repeat in shaking rosters again, again, the numbers eating through the paper in a room of no one watching, the palm trees growing ever nearer to the curb. The binders die, the mugged. Night comes again. Smoke rises in a harbor where ships stand for hours counting the surrounding mountains pouring wet like melting cones, and blue cones rise in the sinking fields of commerce from the lessening of trample on their face. Smoke rises from the gums of women. Smoke on the shorelines. Everybody knows a joke. The bodies smell like gravel, then like pig meat, then like glass. The sea thickening, where reflected, holding out beyond our minds, our Sod City we do not know in all cities, Our City of the Chewing of the Rolling Light of Gloss of Sod.
Bodies are being buried in their homes to save the room. The faces of the houses containing those already murdered are painted black to alert the mailmen to mark the mail returned. The wires from the houses are clipped to prevent transmissions in or out. The glass of the windows reflects the light of knives. Houses where a mother or a father or a child alone has become murdered while one or more remains surviving receive not an entire coat of black paint but a square set at the center of the home’s face. In daylight in better neighborhoods the neighbors may bring these homes baskets of soup and bread, bring roses, bring alarms and mace, bring wishful words. There are no maps.
This sentence describes the panic of the American population remaindered in the rising light of rising terror of the murder of ourselves, which I could not begin to bring myself to impart to you directly for the way it might feel too much today like what you’ve done.
Today in America, a wake is waking.
* * *
FLOOD: Think of night arrived during the daytime. It was impossible almost even to see out into the streets in the low light of what the bodies brought to pass between them. The fists and faces and their machines brought the blood and bone and organs through the surfaces that had meant to contain them so much longer. The light could look then in onto the middles of the people, their blood, cavities, and brains. There were no hidden pla
ces left. All manners of forms of homes and businesses collapsed, the organisms filling up the buildings snapping one into ten inside their sternums under the sound and then ransacking the space around them destroyed until they were done in by whomever else. It fed all through and through us. It moved into us wanting to want more until there was nothing left. All our years done in like that in mere instants while beyond our reach the color of the sky and space beyond us did absolutely jack shit.
Today in America we go to war again flat on our backs. We will hear the morning rising in the sound of the screaming mothers becoming dismantled again as the death toll of our people on this one batch become killed at our own hands. As all hands are all of our hands. Today it doesn’t matter how many people in America become killed because today is another day in America, and tomorrow today is dead.
The end of starvation. The end of AIDS. The end of cancer. The end of patience. The end of old age. The end of accidents. The end of smoking. The end of patience. The end of alcoholism, the overdose, the sneeze. The end of retardation. The end of rape. In America. The end of being young. The end of being old. The end of the end of. The end of religion. The beginning of religion. The end of television programming. The end of musical performance. The end of typing. The end of murder. The end of wishing. The end of the end of the film. In America. The end of boxing. The end of photography and speech. The end of being thought upon. The end of bedsores. The end of ulcers. The end of making love. The end of the ringing of the phones. The end of waking up. The end of medication. The end of parenting. The end of sight. The end of laughter. In America. The end of trying to understand horses. The end of astronomy. The end of balding. The end of shopping. The end of motherhood and fatherhood and the end of sharpening the knives. The end of worship. The end of sin. The end of dick pills. The end of animation. The end of publication. In America. The end of standing in line. The end of cooking. The end of jokes. The end of steakhouses. The end of dry cleaning. The end of cleaning. The end of washing. The end of want for silence. The end of mortgages. The end of folding money. The end of email. The end of roadkill. The end of salad. The end of sentences. The end of punctuation. The end of design school. The end of pulses. The end of the ego. The end of the blurt. In America. The end of sandwiches. The end of cycling. The end of tumors. The end of snot. The end of marriage. The end of the gift of flowers. The end of collections. The end of pest control. The end of fear. The end of cold cuts. The end of driving nails. The end of marketing. The end of sequels. The end of invention. The end of endings. In America.
* * *
FLOOD: All that was left then there before me was the word. No matter how I touched the space or spoke into them or threw my body on them the words appeared and would not stop. There was nothing there to use or touch besides the whiteness.
Flood at the mirror, being crushed. His spine and shoulders hulk against the upper mirror, bending to it, accruing pressure. The surface of the liquid around his chest and sternum and below has turned so hard he’s rendered in it like a self around himself; it bloats to fill the measure of the seams, the liquid crystallized and fleshy, made of crushed organs.
Inside the chamber a small gap of air no larger than a bird’s egg. The air fits around Flood’s eyes and nostrils like a visor. He can see out and breathe in. The air recycles through him; he is feeding, and remains fed. The air and liquid have no smell.
Flood face to face with his reflection, in reflection. He is so old his skin’s see-through. Through him he sees himself again reflected, between the mirrors on both sides. His head wholly a hole.
“I am a hole,” he says, though underneath the liquid they become absorbed into the fully hardened league of come and skin and blood. “I am a hole,” he says again. The liquid rises slicker, slurring his nostrils. His breathing in the wet. Underneath, he lets his lips fall open, and some of it fills him there too. He hears a motor coming on. He hears the sound of flashbulbs lurching. When he does not speak, he hears his words.
Flood looks up. Flood feels, between the holes, a pressure build, a gift like massive magnets held apart. He feels a tickle in his head: the last condition of what was in there taking firm hold, seeing itself seen. He feels the videos of the days of all the people going on around him in the air surrounding being filmed into his flesh, filling his flesh with the reiteration of the image of the days he can’t feel under the rest. There is a slow curl of the memory forced into smaller and smaller space.
The holes in Flood’s eyes widen. The walls convening, eating. The skin of Flood’s rolled forehead touches soft against the reflective surface, front and back. The pressure builds between them. The holes enclosing where they match and touch. Flesh on flesh by mirrored mirror. Exit language: no word. Exit music: sound on sound. The holes between the mirrors meeting pressed to Flood where Flood is. His body blanking, under nothing. Glyph of pressure, gas releasing, frames releasing.
The liquid fills the space.
* * *
FLOOD:
In the full darkness, there is a word.
The word encompasses the darkness.
Flood presses the button in the word.
He hears no sound. His eyes are open.
Today in America, 4,241,560 people become killed.
The bodies find the bodies hiding in their houses in the world. They find the bodies wielding weapons of guitars. In black theaters and food distribution centers and the long passages where once the fruitful sewage grew and flowed, they find the mothers and the fathers and the daughters and the sons yet still alive wedged as deep down as they might manage in a crevice between surfaces, in fear. They find them shopping in the long aisles of the supermarket and in the game room and at work, against long panels in museums wishing themselves into the frame. They find them by the godterror rising through their sternums drinking coffee under an awning on a mountain in the rising of the sun under the sun, by the maps imprinted on their sternums, by closing their eyes and fumbling around. They find them, bodies on bodies, bodies in bodies yet unborn licked by no burn. They turn the lights on. They are anyone you’ve ever known. They have wrists and arms and necks and some have hair in many places and they go by names and from their mouths there comes the words and from their fingers there comes the word of Sod. The brandishing of thin knives and fist fury and rope and power; removed, in name of their unnaming, to anywhere but where. Bluebirds fly in all directions. The screaming wracking asking grovel game-speak please-god fills the hour in the millions being murdered with a decibel above the common purr, constant enough now and clear enough now to overcome the concept of a single person’s shrieking exit into an aggregate of prolonged human demolition at such sure and constant volume in the rising that it sounds like nothing, like any day. This is any day, I’m saying. There is no such thing as the unreal; it sits in the palm of the blue beholden and cries out for language; it gives and gives and what is given is given back into it by seven, by seven and seven again inside the reeling while the houses stand and watch. Do not ask about how this could be measured or what else. No more questions as to the future or why it seems today the hour continues on and the cars pass by the house there at the window where you are holding yourself up or down against an earth; do not ask. They find the bodies at the windows in the houses where they are holding themselves up. They find them waiting with their own murder weapons, and so the flipping of a coin. From each sprung head the wet flows and by the hour is dry again. They eat the bodies with their fingers and their teeth and mouths. They bite from the neck and back and face. Their minds are the utensils and the surface and the menu and the course. They eat the flesh of the human the way they eat the flesh of the cow or pig or dog or eel or chicken. They eat the flesh like at family dinner, chewing calmly, speaking words they will not remember in the hour of the rising corridor. Stars make gravy we can’t see. It pours down through veins that seem vacations. There is a wedding. There is sense. The walking goes for hours and seems pleasant again and there are some who never h
ave to hide. They are found in their beds up to their necks in the cloth of paradise enjoying cold dreams of the longest fingers, in the pyramids of Giza transplanted onto Michigan and onto Georgia and onto North and South Dakota and onto Texas and onto Florida and onto Wisconsin. The pyramids are bells. The pyramids are vacation homes along the beaches where the mice wash in with numbers underneath their fur. We build a castle from the sand of the dead-longer-than-we-are. The sun evaporates the land. Today in America 5,700,700 become killed, 8,890,100 become killed tomorrow, 16,650,013 become killed, 25,000,000 become killed. Today in America however many you want to be killed become killed. However many you wish would live forever in your arms or across the continents become killed. The plots become the soil. The soil becomes the ocean. The ocean dries and lives again. It is still only an ocean. An ocean, in some understandings, can be everything. The word of it. The word.
* * *
GRETCH GRAVEY: Blood drying against concrete slathered baking in such daylight as glass shattered in metal crunching bone beneath bright planes banging bullets on the fields of women and men until the pilot too turns on the party of himself. What colors where the air mixed and filled itself in with private liquids, the brains removed of desperation, fire. Stone through cranium. Metal through surface. Why would it ever rain again. Who was counting up the numbers, all mirrors watching unwatched on old walls, while elsewhere, in a large unmarked room, the further image dreamt in the new dead were piling up inside the nothing rising.