by Blake Butler
Against the glass I banged my fists and hit my head and spoke to it louder, screamed into it, laughed into it. I pulled the mirror off the wall. It was lighter than I imagined. On the back side of the mirror was a dark synthetic surface, cool and soft against my fingers. I traced its edges for the key or how to make it open from the inside. I pushed at where on the wall the mirror had hung, a faint impression there marked down against the paint around it slightly darker, hidden from general light. Nothing I said or did would make the mirror open into the passage. My blood was opening into passages itself inside my fury, none I could enter.
I tried laying the mirror on other surfaces. I laid it on the bed where whoever had slept for years and I could not sleep. I laid it on the kitchen table, where the prior family had made more of their bodies out of food. I took it outside onto the dirt of the land and laid it on the ground faceup toward where the recording of the sun was and waited for it to burn me, but it did not burn, and the ground held me out as long as any architecture made by man. I laid it on every wall in every room and pressed and held and touched and promised. It still would not let me enter. The level of the glass would only bend so much. Oil from my face was smudging up the surface, obscuring where I could even see me, or could see the room around me, or the world.
I laid the mirror on the ground. I tried to stamp or jump up and land and come down through the surface again, a way repeated from some time I could no longer feel. I saw me from underneath me. I could have been anyone. I cracked the glass under my weight. In the mess of shards I could see several hundred instances of everything. Behind the glass, there was just a flat white surface, reflecting nothing.
I tried again with many mirrors. Each mirror contained the same buzzing and the same promise of somewhere else behind it. In home after home I went from room to room searching out what reflections I could find already awaiting me there in the image. There were mirrors on the walls and in old drawers and suspended in places where they touched nothing behind them. Each time I saw my face approach my face I looked older and older, though I did not feel older. In each mirror I could feel the residue of who had looked into it for years before me, the curve and buzzing of them. I could not feel their memories or anything about how they had felt to be alive, how they had died, or whom they had wished they could live on with forever. I could feel nothing but my own ongoing face. No matter which mirror I took or where I placed it on the house, there was nothing there but me and the edges of the room reflecting shifting angles, showing nothing but the same. I left each mirror broken, finished, empty, and yet each time I returned after the tape began again I would find the mirror melded back in full, and me there young again and aging in the same procession, though I could feel the same air behind each place, the same passage snug and lurking behind any surface waiting for whoever knew exactly how to come. I could not go back, no matter how many times I tried to, in every iteration and repetition of the recording of the present made continually mine alone. And yet in each new mirror that I found, each time again I found it, I felt the same erupting music in my teeth, the knitting possibility that this particular mirror in this particular room at this angle at this time code in this condition would be the one way back to everything. And with each failure, the same reversal of electricity came sucking through me, evacuating, leaving marked back in my blood another hope I’d given away in the name of nothing.
And the year begins again. The year begins again and is the year now. Same as any.
Endless ways. I can’t tell each time if the time before I found the thing I’d meant to find.
Buttons screaming in this life. The pillows the beds full of no smell and I inhale it.
Dynasties of trash. Windows with the prints of any person. Books no longer read.
Every surface a possible eye into the grain of the place I can’t remember feeling.
My eyes won’t stay clean enough to get one thought out of me without starting to cave.
I don’t know why I’m talking in this manner. This orchestration is not me. This sphere.
I’m not looking for anyone any longer because I already feel them in my ass.
What if I laid the mirror on my body. What if the mirror was my body. Eras of worm.
What is it that happens between the blips between the tape ending and rebeginning.
All mirrors are just glass. All glass is just sand. All sand is just dust of the dead.
It has never rained here. It will never rain here. What could I ever think to want dry.
No art. No paint. I do actually laugh a lot, if only at nothing. At knowing I want nothing.
What happens when I am paused. If I am ever ejected from the machine I don’t feel it.
Language written on the black face of the tape, or the label of the tape, or the time stamp.
The distortions piling up in me. The zit of static raising warble on me. Lacerations.
So many unique lengths blip in and on and knock my head off again and again alone.
The range of the flickering frames will send me through centuries of any copied instant.
There is a chamber beyond death. There is a passage wider than the passages in dying.
I want out. I want back into the world, even if it is all dead people, and smells like shit.
I want out of what was in me that let me out of dying. I want to die inside myself.
Whoever you are holding me. Whoever you are, please be kind. For you are in me also.
As I go on, so you go, too. I don’t need to have known you. It is the history of no history.
The hole made punched by all of us in time. The mass of long white memory in any white.
The smoke rising from your blood in the gray evening. Breathed in by anyone erased.
This time I am going to remember what I remembered and remember to forget it.
In our small home together, when we were the two of us. We had our bodies. We had a gun. You named it. You slept so hard. Some nights you would shake so hard inside the sleeping and so much screaming I would shake you in the shaking and you would still not wake up. You would say the gun’s name over and over in your sleep and you would not know mine, like now. I just wanted us to live like people, to be people, when so many people were something else. I wanted the skin over our faces to match some hours just by thinking that it did. That was then. Here we are again.
No.
When you woke up I would hold you and try to tell you where you were and what you’d said inside your sleep. You usually would not believe me. You would believe you’d slept as still as dead. Or you would not want me to tell you what you looked like in the grip of it. You would get up and go and lock yourself inside the bathroom where we showered and took baths together some nights and where we had to flush our waste out of us. Do you remember that at least? Do you remember shit? Do you remember breaking the mirror with your head? You had your own blood then. Just yours. You thought. Though it was always ours. And mine. And the visions in it. And the coming storm of money and the death of the Person and the death of skin and breath and flash photography and the death of death.
No.
What do you want me to tell you? I will tell you, and you won’t listen, and I will tell you, and you won’t. You’ve heard it all before. It is all in here. Can’t you remember writing all these words down? Do you remember where they came from? From your silence? From having heard inside you no clear word? Who had said that silence? Was that you or was that someone else? Was that him there or was that you here or was it something well beyond yourself. Do you believe now? Are you capable of belief in something other than yourself?
For some reason anytime I find myself not thinking I find me thinking thoughts I know aren’t mine. For instance, you.
I am the false beginning of the end. Or is it the end of the beginning.
Where am I.
Inside things fulfilled because prophesized.
Prophesized by who? Are you
Prophesisized-ed-ed-ized-id-id-
ized-id.
What. Please help me. I am an American. I’m human.
Morskishbombumbleebithellzmitziturdammundendititititititititititititititititizeedsed.
O
No you are doing it all wrong. Please think a minute. Make your hand like mine is. Do like we did. Do this. Try more trying.
You are not alive.
You are not alive. I killed you. Whoever you are.
Yes of course I am. I told you I am everybody. Including you, including the thing you call Darrel, who is patiently waiting to begin. Including anyone who looks upon these words to give you life through having touched them. Including anyone you’d like to name, though that is not their name now. They are inside me. They always were and always will be.
Okay, I still don’t understand. I am trying. Please help me. I am a person. I am here.
It never ends.
What never ends.
The way I am. The way you are within me. The way the days are all a sphere, held in the eye inside a head inside a soap dish inside a battery inside a lamp inside a house inside a window inside a bug inside an eye.
I don’t believe you. You are evil.
Or whatever other word you want.
I am just talking to myself.
You and all the rest of us forever.
* * *
FLOOD: I felt the voice awake then in my head, in a different way than it had been in all the language. It happened suddenly, and without warning, the way that love does, then once it had begun it would not stop. It stayed on in my head and wrapped around me. I could smell the tape there burning in my chest. The wear of repetition on its fibers took hold in what has been before and would again, but this time only as a motion, small outlying folds of understanding, beyond water. The smoke traced past my face and filled my ideas with waking blue, then green, then gray, each color writing in over the other toward what in the world could be would have no form, and therefore needed no body.
Before me then I saw the house where I had lived. Where we had lived our life together. The walls were the walls we’d used against the night. They were colored like all the other walls of all the houses, but through these I could feel breathing what had been of us and always been of us. It opened out around my mind like old ice melting. The home vibrated against me, against the ground. The rest of the world around it seemed to darken, blur, disfigure. My arms were my arms.
The door had not been locked. I, like anyone, could move into the house behind it, place myself inside the surface. Nor did I lock the door behind me as I entered. I had always made sure throughout my life to secure any space I claimed against every other person as soon as possible—I could never find a way to sleep with open doors, could never even drive without my windows up and locks locked against the shifting air of anywhere. Now I hardly even closed the door. My skin was cooler than the room’s skin, turning harder all around me, as if it didn’t wish me in it.
And yet I recognized each room. I had lived here. We had lived here. I already knew which way the floor spread out underneath my walk. I knew which ways I had to move among the furniture to connect my path into the next space, littered with the ornaments of our inhabitance. I could have walked it in the dark. It was not dark now in the house, though through any window I could see nothing beyond a shaking, abstruse light.
I recognized the color of the table from which we’d eaten. I knew the books that lined the cases, which words from them I’d copied into my mind, and which I’d left to sit stuffed with themselves separate forever. I knew what had been poured into the pipes, what sweat of mine and hers, or bile or blood we’d given up to nowhere. The pipes connected rooms to rooms. I knew the clothes in the closets and what I’d worn to where in total. The edges of her nightgown. The rough frill of a dress she’d never worn. I knew the texture of bed against my back, the edges of her flesh I’d felt pressed against me in it.
I knew what the mirrors all had seen. I did not want to look in the mirrors, and instead felt my reflection held against me, watching regardless of how I would not turn. It didn’t feel like me there.
On this tape I’d finally found our home but it did not feel like our home. Even understanding every inch already for what it’d always been in my mind, preserved now in this manner it only filled the air because it had to, I couldn’t shake it. Because there was no way for it to not. Every inch I touched or looked on seemed to want to turn away toward a part of the house I’d never touched and hide its face from me. I didn’t blame it.
I couldn’t leave. As off as my home felt captured in this manner, against its will and my whole mind, it was my home. It was the one shaft of now held beyond all. It buzzed and rolled disruption in my reason, like panes of glass pushed on at one another with all the weight of the separate worlds they’d ever looked out onto, never the same. Every eye in every eye of every inch of now forever watching while I moved from room to room, touching anything, remaining.
It is unclear how long this went on. Inside the house the tape seemed not to hit its end so fast as when I didn’t know what way to move; it just kept going. I felt no smoke here. I could have lived a million lives in every second carried in these walls and only ever felt the one awaiting. For as much time and mind as I knew held close in every object of ours we’d spent a life interloping among, nothing of it reappearing brought me nearer to myself, what I now wasn’t.
Each time I entered every room it was with the sense that in the next I’d find it wholly reupholstered, brought to life around me. Or I’d find a silver tunnel burrowed wide into the earth, through which then I could throw myself and become whatever, anything, nothing. Though even when I closed my eyes the air was there.
In the darkness, what I touched was all its own.
I kept waiting for the tape to begin again and take me back to its beginning. Every second it did not felt like it could be the last, and when it was not the last it was just another like all the others.
Eras passed. I waited. I lay and couldn’t sleep. I ate food and could not taste it. I put my head against the ground. Every time I killed myself I reappeared. I woke up in the same rooms beside the same rooms. My face covered in its same hair. My eyes flummoxed with edges I could not force to turn against themselves, see nothing else.
I could not bear to open the door to the rest of the world again.
* * *
FLOOD: Every instant in the house I lived the voice grew louder in my flesh. It was all throughout my back, strung in my muscles, shaking my hair so hard I couldn’t have seen me in the mirrors if I did grow heart to look there. The voice felt clearer now inside these rooms, and only more so as each fiber of syllable it contained disappeared inside the total volume, becoming singular, monotone. The more I heard the voice the more I felt it was my wife’s voice, as any idea, though she did not sound like my wife. The edges of resin in her resonances pulsed just slightly off from what seemed all of her I felt about her. A charcoal layer. Like a mask made out of sound. And yet, even feeling where in the voice the voice was not her voice, I could not stop believing it. The voice said she was right there. It said she was in the house with me there and how had I not found her. The voice flexed static. How could I not see her in every field. I could already tell that my own thoughts, as I’d partitioned them apart from the limited understanding the tape allowed me, were bleeding together with the dead. Even as I thought this thought now, speaking to you, I could hardly tell how it was any different from what I felt was what I felt throughout the tape as I had always. Any minute soon now I might not be able to remember there was ever any other way. And that’s exactly what you’ve always wanted, the voice consoled me. To feel no split in your senses, no other layer to the world. It is enough to go on believing, right, yes, regardless of the gap in the nature between belief and the believed. I could not argue. Even as I tried, my mouth stayed shut. My thoughts pulsed and strobed hard in their contours where I could make them anything, and then did nothing. The voice grew on. It rose in volume. Believe
me. Believe in me. Belove me. Love me. Live in me. Have me. Remain. Be. With every word the voice took more and more of the shape and tone of what I’d used or loved into it. Even as with each shift in its contour from something I believed that I could understand as real into something I knew as a stand-in for that thing, Still I could not stop myself from responding, even knowing each note was made to mock those I’d treasured in my heart as long as I had had an I to be. Soon it would be so loud, I knew, I wouldn’t be able to tell the voice from any other echo. I wouldn’t remember to know I’d known that, or that there’d ever been another way.