by Blake Butler
Do you want to start over. Do you hear the coming number. Are you still dead. Are you the sound. Do you want to live forever instead. Do you love me. Can you prove it. Prove it. Prove it. Name one of the seven hundred ways to speak. I will be listening. I am listening.
Today is your birthday.
Today is today.
The light of all the nights we’d killed and fucked crashed through my mind. It pulled thick light down around the body of the idea of creation. The repeating sound of all our days was the color of all reflected flesh at once negated. There was never any actual beginning we saw by our hands as they grew even paler than our minds were. Milk was snowing from between the burning legs spread on the ocean purring blue comedy in invitation for the god to kiss the god and enter the god and wash the god off from the inside and live him. And the skin of everyone around me scrolled away from the night’s color into something more like the daylight we’d learn to like to feel alive in. Every word was any word, cursed into the Pledge and the National Anthem and the Constitution and the Declaration and the Vows and the Holy Book and the Enactment spoke at once inside the rubbing of our bodies turned to candles around the bed of a great furnace lurking underneath the sash of dads queued up each gut waiting for the right to scratch against its own destruction. Soon the sky had learned as well to speak our myths, which made it all the colors there at once seeming opaque enough to huddle beneath and deep enough to shriek at with machines and devices in the image again where the child would learn to walk under. Where in every understanding’s brutal echo our shared forefathers stomped around in mortal retardation like a dream, claiming each inch of everything as only his forever despite what death, every oven and cloth and pill and mate and wish and day and age and sound not ours and taking shits inside the food and defending the food only ever with his fists while above me stars made marks along the land. Where every word we’d ever said instead of being any ever to me now sounded all like the same word at once: no. No no no no no no no our forefather screamed inside my heart, at every pixel beyond his, each having intended to fit fine inside the heads of us oncoming but held in like a blaspheme in the presence of god arrived at last. With each enunciation of the same cell, the cell grew slower, smaller, less like anything once ours. We all demented in his image. We at last before the screen, showing no light, seeing the light instead of seeing the thing not there as well. The glue rattled in our teeth and prayed no syllable and lashed against the mantle falling through white on the idea of white lurking its way all over everything and someone coming to the door pressed facewide to every door, the living rooms and bedrooms and guest rooms and kitchens softened from their black glow into the colors the night our very presence had demented around the house like patterns that gave us glow inside our sleeves enough some days to stand enough some days to walk from room to room even wishing for no image even hopeful, while all across the air the cells of our friends and family pulled apart to make as strangers and were laughing through the night where in absence of the father we forgot to close the homes and lock the doors against whoever even knowing who had been or what had been or what was wondered, what we of we would need to grow among us into the space between the space made for us to live and need forever in against the vast fabric of one long wherever full of all things named and cataloged under the pustule called a moon and the cancer called a quasar and so on and so on with the machine light burning our eyes, with the telephones ringing through the never-ending putty wishing words into the fabric of us blurring the fabric where they could not fully enter our bodies and become us, while No no no no no no no our father screamed in his own absence, barely noise at all now. No no no no no no no, with his last undead breath. No no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no.
Even you were not free of this infestation, however kind you felt you’d been. You might have imagined yourself spared, but you were not spared. You who had moved from room to room held in the houses among the bodies in the light, who had slept through hours gone unknowing of who would come in above you in the great year of the universe becoming one eternal sore upon undone forever lathered forever loved.
Inside this book, you’d come into a room. It was the bedroom where you’d slept nightly. The color of the walls here will appear in preservation always all white, though truly the colors were always changing, and with their changing so changes your idea of what white was, preserving in the folded home the idea of the whiteness, so that days in their way might go on.
From your head you saw your arms. They may have had tattoos or cuts or hair grown on them; these are the arms you’ve always had. Your identity is yours in you to you unveiled unveiling in the moment of its making.
Inside this room of yours there was a bed. Upon the bed someone was sleeping, features turned to face the wall. You saw the one upon the bed there was who you remembered yourself as; who held this book and read it, reading it now; the one having walked around in one’s own house and home and life thinking of food to eat or doors to open or the phone calls or the child; the black flash of one’s own presence in the hour between pages turned, the words upon the pages changing, too, becoming any book forever, blank or all sound, inscribed with any kind of name; each instant in ongoing correspondence with whichever memory of past hours would corroborate the feeling of the day and strength enough at least to carry on, while also always shifting quickly into future versions without disturbance of the portion of whoever clinging but in an overwhelming sense of blank no one could quite describe.
Inside the house you raised your arm inside the room toward the instance of the self you saw as you remembered, upon the bed, and the knife glinted, and you hesitated watching your soft chest rise and fall, breathing slowly in common sleep. You felt yourself seeing yourself inside your sleeping on the bed there, brain full of stairways, long days, weird heads, laughter, the color of all man.
You could hesitate no more; you moved into the frame; moved to stand between the image of the mirror and the image of you in your body on the bed; the book against your chest went on white with its flat pages, while outside the house inside the hour the sky was nowhere.
“This, too, is my body,” you heard you saying. “I was you once.”
And you raised the glinting knife and brought it down. And when this was done, you did the same again. Here in the end of every now.
You and I, beyond time, we felt, without a world.
We stabbed ourselves forty-seven times in the stomach and the chest and abdomen and chest and face until we were sure that we were dead. There was no passion in the stabbing. There was the gesture of the arm—a gesture like that used in religious confirmation, voting, shaping clay. The blood poured from our body, sprayed against our faces, soaked hot and wet into the mattress in a shape refusing form. The luster of the body sat inside the silent room before us splayed in lavendergold curtains of the flesh, now inert.
We took some blood up in our hands. It was our blood. The blood fit in our mouth as if it had always been there, and it had. The blood was thick enough to chew. It tasted like the year we learned to speak the word, and the year we learned to remember what words we were saying; the same taste of the bodies we’d befriended in the hour of the day standing on white grass under a hard sun laughing and the year we learned to wish for someone other than ourselves to lie against us in the small rooms of flat cities under night. Each mouthful repeated the only word inside us as if it has always been and forever will be again.
In pleasure, reign.
Wet on the bed our old body flooded its wet out. Set in the mush of pus our organs it sat and listened. What rubble we had suffered. What day removed.
With hands cold in the mirrors, we took our old skin up. A fingernail slitted along the cream edge of the stabbing allowed the hand to feel down deep between our flesh, freeing with one clean fist the left lung of us from the hot index of cells. Clutched between fingers our bored hand tickled the organ, a spackled hamhock warbling in veiny tendrils.
&nbs
p; With its bread, we filled our mouth. We tongued the surface, tasting hair there, the leathered slopes where air for years has entered, fixed and functioned through the body. Our top and bottom teeth met inside the meat. We felt the mirror there behind us watching in silence as we ate the left half of the organ whole; the substance made loose popping noises against the gums and palate, our pressed dynasties singing hard against the slip of the enamel, taking the taste of where you’d sat inside the living room those nights alone, remembering whatever you wish you would remember.
We devoured what within the head remains. We licked and sucked the groove-holes of the skull’s lip where the blade had chipped against its shape, elongating the fissure where before there fit the organ of the eye. We ate the mush remaining of the stabbed eyes, the destroyed lenses, mushy cake. The vision left no resin, going down clean, hearing in the cells of us the shaking of the colors of the encased decades of sight becoming flesh, returning to the form it had been whipped from, anywhere but now.
There were, as well, the other organs: the stringy legs, the darker sections of the kidneys clobbered with impurity, the gift boxes of the sternum’s circus, the cake party of the intestines, the thighs, the toes, the knees. We ripped and chawed what we could pry loose from the internal structure, which was a lot. Our jaws worked no music as we felt our stomachs filling. The meat of us inside us disappeared, bulging water-shaped in globe of pregnancy repeated. Our blood was bright and shining in the room. The walls were watching.
Now we must fuck. In the presence of only ourselves, we would make fuck on the remainder of ourselves. The killing and the eating of the flesh of our old body had made us beyond horny. We were flush with new blood.
Our body shuddered against our skin. We loved us. We wanted to have us and everything we could become wholly forever. We would fuck us everlasting. Our glands were ours. The hole of us that we were fucking was enormous. We couldn’t tell which of us was which. We rode hard and loose upon the gray nub of the cake self split and choking blood around the bed. We heard the peel of the remaining world in our minds forever onward wishing too to get fucked and do fuck with what we were or could have been. Either the self beneath us was screaming or we were screaming for it to scream, in the voice of anybody.
We were fucking us with force. Our cock or hole around our cock or hole purred nasty for more power, the pudding of the blood and massive shaping making any feeling in us blown out and absent of clean color but still causing sparks of friction where it sat and peeled with pressure. It was hard to keep the body there in one piece, for all the stabbing we’d done already, but we held the mass together with our hands as best we could and thrust and rammed and focused our weeping on the gash of how to make ourselves come.
The coming come was a sled-vision, a blurring hexagonal solid. It floated dry in far-off orbit around the house slipping down against the human light of day, as outside the house the air itself was calm.
The fuck was over before it began. Our organs were turning pliable again already, made for elsewhere. It didn’t matter. Here I was always again yours and you were mine. Already filled with all eternal come splayed underneath us, the body of our body was not anywhere where we’d go, every death turning milled in mills beneath each new instant undefined; our future body not without organs but without area; without perimeter or mission, from whose wounds left out to rot in silence alone roared a wordless, faceless way of being.
* * *
[YOUR NAME]: [stricken from record]
Very soon then I could hear no one and nothing else. Where every hour disappeared inside the idea of every life as last I felt it, it held no contour beyond what it had been. The itch it left was nothing more than air alone and unrepeated. I was allowed then in the absence to feel anything I wished, to remember anything I wished, without vocabulary.
And yet I loved the feeling of the disappearing. I wanted it to never cease. The slower I tried to make it go, the less there was left behind thereafter.
My final body rose from what we’d been. I was the last remaining person, alive beyond any memory, or now. I could feel my name inscribed the endless faces on the land of the bodies slain in layers carried in us all echoed as the gristle of today.
My skin was soft. I remembered nothing, which meant I could remember anything in any head, which means I did not have to remember to still feel it knitting in me, turning in against itself, as what I was. My arms resembled every arm, every inch bursting over with tattoos and wounds the flesh had eaten down into me, conformed intact with what I was. I could go on now forever in the instant despite all I’d done and what had been done before me, fearing nothing of the shift of blood and skin that formed the ground, the light shaking in marrow of the nature of my breathing, thinking, wanting, eating, laughing, each now no longer caving me with age.
I did not wear a ring. I could not remember what a ring was.
All remaining land was only sand—white sand forever shaken from the resin of our scalps and fingers, flesh torn apart; our bodies rendered at last no longer, unto powder, shimmered with all prayer, though you can no longer tell one body from another, from the ground itself. No matter which way I went or how far into it, the sand continued, all directions, over oceans, every forest.
I did not know why I walked. The heat of the dry scape burned my feet beneath me. I could feel the spaces in me where I’d had a friend once, a family, somewhere out here, like the light. The sand is what the sand is.
Nowhere else. I would find perhaps here or there among the plane of planning a jawbone or a locket, a strand of hair unmelted several feet deep, or a glove of glass, or some white shell. I pressed the objects to my face, heard nothing, and in placing them again against the ground would soon feel them lost in untraceable whiteness.
I could not remember why I’d ever went.
I knew I had forgotten where I’d been already and was walking the same surface many times repeated, seeing the same things new as nothing new.
I could not remember my name, the word for anything. I did not know how long time had been this way against me. I could tell no difference from any old day and the last. I heard nothing sing within me.