by Blake Butler
Up close the eye no longer seemed to have a shape; it held together like a corpse, organs made of letters made of blank space of dots and lines feeding a warping shape like ours, which the longer I looked into blurred inside the light unto a gray mass like a wall. I stared into the eye and felt it humming without language; all words now no longer language. I closed my own eyes and saw the wall there too and looked again, a mirror image in my body made of bodies; then I was there inside the eye’s own head; I was seeing at the wall inside me as if everything I wasn’t was at the far side of the wall inside the light again made clear.
There was no shift; I found inside my seeing how I could scroll along the light’s face with the motion of my hand; the eye inside me held there against itself slithering downward to reveal itself again inside the extant eye made hidden on space forced in the space as in the oceans of our blood consumed, evaporated, nowhere; the light of all our faces.
I let the light come on in ruptured flues; it swam sick past my face like meat to meat, light pouring through where words were not, straining in the light to scan the flattened fiber of the vein of mottled language engorged and disappearing. Time passed and passed and nothing had happened; nothing had not happened; I could no longer remember how I was different than anything else, how anything else could not become me; the space around us held on, our blubber wooing like an ocean in a shell; my body not my body sticking at the frame of the page of the light folding our absent organism to its skin in rising heat and burning not of fire but of where the flesh of all of us each instant shrunk and expanded both at once, under equal age and iteration, all ongoing, and the syntax burst between; each thought risen as a prison in our teeth and lungs and slapped ass screeching; eyes spinning locked in all our lids; speech mixing itself against itself to change itself and call itself the word inside the word against the word while outside itself the sand went on regardless, and each word as it came through us fell back out the other side, clung at old holes in landscapes, hopes unwinding.
I could no longer not quite think, or remember; the shapes of what was once clawed where my sound had never made a sound; feeding faster full of past thoughts, where every word a thought was made of wore a murder of its own; each death a death of all things and so nothing; there in the light the bread of time; the speech of all speech whaling in us where far along the shafts of script in my own self I reached a drop, something sticking in the wash of blood between living and not living, looking there into the white along the current seeing faster until the sound inside the eye were these words, the run of light forming this sentence becoming typed across the screen of the eye of all our eyes no longer seeing, appearing newly every moment like something carried in my skin, each inch another name for silence.
Now I could not remember what I’d done. I could not remember that I did not remember where I’d been forever or what the bodies had become among the night where knives were every understanding. I was all hours at the same time in every current instant of our lives arrived. I was in the homes beyond the idea of having lived. I was eating dinner or touching paper or swimming under sun or taking a child toward a machine to learn to read again a new way or was teaching myself another language to say what to someone else or I was at a desk staring where light was or I had hid again my eyes. It was all of any of us at once that made any of us nowhere else, held in the motion of any aspiration.
I thought to touch my face then but I did not. I felt something in me at last growing eons older in one instant, like any instant, and from the light I looked away. I stood there for some time then feeling nothing; I stood there waiting in the white unfurling hot and hard around all shape without intention or utterance demarcating. Some other of me in me tried to turn around and go back the way I’d come inside the world to now but when it turned around there were again the walls; where the world as I’d never understood it had moved again to fill the space behind me, so that where I tried to move on from what I was or felt again there was nothing but more of me, the erased eras in me going slump in spindles and pressing at where my nape and back and skull were just more flesh waiting to be smothered.
The world was what had lived. Within each inch there were colors; the colors each pixel held a sea; buried in the sea another kind of time under old blue lard of reckless dreaming; in each world, people wide awake, spreading flesh as they went aging around the holes of them that did not age or bloat. Overhead in every instance of right now the sky was caving; a second sky beneath that was more the way I’d once remembered the one we watched as ours, its dimensions bulging in soft places, puckered, growing in against itself, all the icons of every era swelling in against me with the world at once compressing into the sound of every recorded life. It was all of us and always had been, just like this. The eye saw.
Held in the eye, I felt us speak.
It was the same voice I’d heard traced through my whole life up to this point, though where before that voice had always been only me, now it was unending and breathless.
I couldn’t hear what the voice was saying through its layers, though I could feel it in my fiber.
The words weren’t words, but landscapes, mounds. I was looking up and I was up there and I was looking far down into our mud, and I was in the mud and all directions, and when I looked again above us I saw
countless suns
And beneath the suns I saw
the soft ground rising
I saw it piling all around, the house and the voice and my mind becoming comprised in the husks of anyone’s mortal remains, the memory of the person once carried in those husks, the mottled mass of presences inert and passed on pressed together full, waiting impossibly for every hour ever to return into the flesh of all the rest of us at once wherever with our common images split down the center writhing.
And I saw the sand again around the old world becoming buried in the sand of what my world had become
the sand of all without horizon
And as we spoke I saw the sand again falling away
And I saw
all negations
And I saw
agelessnesses
I saw
no walls forever in our love
And I did not need to understand.
In us, the shape of any sky was rubbing upward, sucking in nothing. The ground erupting antigravity and light. The light louder than it was actually. Planets were everywhere: dissolving, without surface.
Nothing had ever happened.
And from the sprawl I saw
the light blown open
I saw
no color rising underneath us
in time dividing
tunnels to nothing
Way out along the long horizon from where any form had been, the face of day split wide.
Our eyes were changing.
The eyes in mounds of eyes without pupil, lens, or image.
And I saw
no beginning & no end
And I saw
nowhere
I could not see more than in long fits and whorls, because of what had happened to the light.
I did not want to see, but what I didn’t want was as much me as what I had been.
I had no skin. I had no organs.
Each instant wore through all our lives.
The walls around the words we could not remember rose beyond us.
Light fell into time fell into flesh fell into speech; word fell into syllable fell into letter; z fell into y fell into b fell into a; shape fell into line fell into dot fell into gram; kilometer fell into meter fell into millimeter fell into volume; home fell into house fell into den fell into bed fell into frame; film fell into picture fell into pixel fell into color; body fell into sternum fell into ribcage full into bone; skull fell into brain fell into memory fell into where; 1 fell into 0; you fell into me fell into us fell into we fell into I; now fell into now.
Now was the color of all our skin and sins and fingers. Of water and oxygen elapsed. Every film at
last erased, all books cured of their language, all ideas of their ego.
There was no longer any other voice. They were all my voices. Sound and light unfolding in the skin of nothing. Not a present moment as much as a pyre on which the world turned, all the sand not sand but breadth combining in reverse, where from out of the land the smoke of the dead of the land each node of creation ate back onto every inch it’d never been and always could have.
And in the thrall of all, I closed my eyes again where I no longer could see.
And I saw
Against the flood of where the eye was, I turned to face in total silence what the world had left behind a final time. Through white so bright it crushed itself by simply being, I saw where every inch of now touched every color grinding in the ground broken and blown apart. Where as I turned the air around me smiled and nodded and said the words I’d said already back into me again in a language without nature, and as I turned back, nothing held. No kind of sight but what the light was.
I could no longer tell any difference between the world and what I knew. Between myself and you or anybody. Between the eye and our skin and what sky. The lack of color matched our worship without surface. No way back and no way out of nowhere being dreamed. No belief but in every faith we hadn’t lived and held within us, between anyone and zero.
I closed my eyes a final time. Inside my head the dead within me began glowing; they grew inside me with great force, dressed in the long white hair of no one, and in the eyes behind my sight I felt the glowing filling up itself like future hearses. I felt the eyes close inside the eyes again, the dark among them erupting definition.
The light was screaming between voices, mine and no one’s. Any inch of where we’d been appeared not glown by glow, but cut into the grade of the sand of all of our remainder melting into the face of what remained.
The air where we were born filled in unwinding over fields of white on white, while underneath, the rimmed earth sung thick with the old poltergeists of our eternal seething seed.
Time strewed lengthwise and widewise in batter-buried color of no reflection laid wide open on the land; all years coagulated in spite of sense, passed hours upon hours beating the surface of the earth with hellish cells that felt like homes where all the unborn men and women drowned within us came and went. I could not stop them with my mouth or arms or flinging hope so hard into the sky it might knock the sky down, or shrieking our old name shaped like their old name walking up and down and up the streets and giving off the friction stink we mistook inside our skins as how the air itself just smelled like the color of our hair. Like the longing for the pleasure of having had hair, grown and cut and grown again.
You were beside me; I was beside you.
I held our melding sight up without hands, not feeling either where through the white again into glown points I saw the air of the glow bloat again for whom in furor rose from all our last attentions piling aflame in the infinite incarnation of all conception, each when made to roast why and wish who and blow long the breath into the next ones of we beyond recording opened wide and curled and curling lost around a shape inside a shape spilled vast and spilling from its innumerable faces where in us lighted night engorged within the baby fat of time, rasped in the skin of us as we were wedded why to walk why in me for whom forever slowly elapsed.
Without seeing then I spun to press fast our size against the white in full. At last I solely wanted all of all the nothing. My whole nonexistent head and sternum stung flush with our blood and our unchildren’s blood and yours and mine within this nowhere I pressed me hard against the world I could not watch. I pressed us there also pressing in the reflective surface on the back side of our vision, against the flesh, each possible instant in us rolling backwards and coming out the far side of understanding. I felt the mass wrap in around me and through this could not hear our narration screaming for me at last to just look up, as walled in behind the light there was a hole that went so far back behind the house there was no longer any space there and I was at last here at home where someone had spread a wall over any mirror so I could not see in where I was. There was only white on white and some long sound like all our bodies in me here pulling the world down crushed against itself; each word chiseled with its own eye becoming forced so wide open it had no cell. All the words once hidden among our bodies had been split apart in heat, held constantly imploding inward like the black of any pupil.
We were so loud I could not see. I had all this fission in me, pressed among the light inside my skin and bones turned together throbbing forward longways through this remainder of a shape of a place like our own life, each pixel pregnant with more days that would no longer, each day pregnant with its own glass, where the longer it manifested itself in continuity the more there was between us and the less any inch of any of us may remember how it felt or ever could have, endlessly forwarded and reversed at once against and through and into the perimeter of the cusp of every possible context. The deleting bright was all around me and still spreading and divulging.
Beyond my sight, the era opened into curves. It hissed the light back at me like a putty, reflective, impossible. There grew between us all a single face, a face of endless faces, and in the light now all around me I could feel it inhaling all our voices, never looking back. From within the face I watched the face open its mouth of all our mouths, and in its mouth there was a common darkness, born from the space inside all heads alone, and from this darkness without motion came all possible pronouncements, all language not yet released out of its unliving breath. It wasn’t sound and did not speak. The stretch of the skin of the mind of the face could not contain any word we’d confabulated for whatever. Nothing unquantified in its conception, the lanyards of our cerebrums, singing, sleeping. I heard the memory of all passed bodies in the face’s features being cracked into tablets, drugs for the light to swallow and become, and in becoming to contain all continuity forever. Every eye we’d watched anything go on through basked full in the face’s total common future, consummating every air into its inherent definition: (all the light that had been shined into our face) (all our past laughter) (the sound inside us anchored to history unclaimed) (what we were too young then to remember) (all that had not happened and one day could have) (all holes forever) (nowhere, now).
Our shattered speaking sang and sang. It ate its singing and barfed its singing up and ate it back and sang it back to nothing. Where each old era opened, the blood of light flowed awake and was flowed into and all over. The words themselves began to speak. The words were burning in my face. They had been written here wherever on everything at once and eaten up or absorbed among the living no longer living. Every passage of being caressed all that I wasn’t. I rolled along inside the sweat and let it leave me clearer. I was bleeding light and signal. The colors around my eyes kept changing textures like organisms. The words kept coming. I began to be the words there, though I could not understand the breadth behind; they felt like words I’d never said or heard before wherever, words erased inside a book I’d read every night inside my sleep in every other version of me. The book was in my skin now. The skin was peeling. It came off where all along inside the enervating wash my body split and bubbled with the friction and the language as the flatness came and went and the skin came off me where I rolled along inside the light inside the sand all pouring smoke from the friction as the flatness changed and bent and grew and flooded. I could not stop seeing and hearing and tasting and taking of the soft space rising all around my body so surrounded there was nothing left of what it was, beyond contour and no horizon.
Each way I felt then wore away, as if the world at once within me turned numb or gone. I did not know what was becoming of my thinking with the sound inside me splitting into halves, and those halves splitting in their utterance again to others though already they were lost along the unrolling understanding of the land, upon which I saw not sand but space between the sand and light of what there was, one day made of all the da
ys we’d meant to fill with all of us and yet had not, not knowing how. What had been sand then was all the glass in all the mirrors, in each of which I could see the hues of what had once been hidden behind us in the frame, our bodies packed with all cells dragging heavy on the radiance unknown.
I could no longer tell even now which one of me was still there hearing me speaking and which was watching from outside whom. The more I thought about the difference the more it burned me, and the less that I could remember having felt at all, there as our body full of bodies filled with colorless blazing, within which wherever my form ended there were others, much like me too, once the only center of their worlds, and the heat was licking up and off the deformation, the dead desire in their own bodies all soft like mine somehow unlocked, marring their most undisplayed desires in private eternal lust to at last be burned by light in full, reduced to char, and that char too to be burned immediately thereafter, and so on like that, along the ground too now our flesh, the ground and all gloss around me rubbing through the surfaces with a strange and gold bliss, where as the sky sucked up the shape and sound of our cremation it slung to spin, and at the center of the spinning I saw the miles of our disintegrating bodies in their last throes sprawl for longer depths than I had mind, and in great grief I closed my eyes, which closed all of our eyes at once, and with our eyes closed I heard