by Blake Butler
As if to answer, the air around the glow began ripping through and through me and though I could not hear it, it took hold of the face beneath my face; it was my face then; it was me and us then; and as I realized I could still name the difference in dimension between the two the knowing split like cracking ice shrieking out long in the crust of what ever was, the day of what who had been born and pressed unveiling as more nameless remainders puddled in the soft cough of pillowed surfaces squirreling inward in the smoke to fill the space where the words had all been colored in and eaten out and smeared apart. The space between the words and their deletion threatened on in us forever, never clasping past the instant of a name becoming blank and therefore never living inside the blank as what alone.
Where I gasped for breath to beg against this I felt the generating space becoming wrapped in the very cells that before would have carried the communication, and as I tried to reach from out of me inside the head inside me I felt the furnace of the fire biting back, the ground and all the bodies held among it snarling caught up in all the smoke of all around them, the disappearing, and I heard
I am the mark of song. I have no meaning but myself. Air and water ate my mind out when I was a child lost in catacombs of dead from the prior iteration of the vomit your bones were scalded out of. I had wanted to be something like a mountain but could not control my vision from mutating my private places into forms of motion. I heard your howling and beating at the ground from miles and centuries away and tried thereafter to move in any direction but where you would appear, and still I found myself alive in the tendons of your arms and the paste of your cerebrum. My mouth is nothing. My eyes are starving to be filled with the meat you left behind and yet when I take it in my mouth it makes me ill, and then I cannot sleep until I have cleared my bowels out with a bow. In witness of my sickness, you danced. You threw long parties. You forced my body into where you felt a deficit. Each time you died I became pregnant and my children were taken from me in the dark before I could even push them out. I know you did this because I had something you wanted. In spite of all of this, I stayed beside you. I had no choice. You were like spouses to me. I will not miss you. At last, in your absence, I will produce my greatest work.
I opened my eyes. I and the burning of what we had been stood smushed face to face in nothing, where was no shape beyond that. This air felt different than I’d imagined in my heart. I no longer had an imagination, or an understanding of having. It was something else now. I can’t think of how to tell you. My brain was all around me. My skin was all around where. Your brain. Our skin. Pale to no music. Turning to view left or right was fire. Up was fire. Down was the white ground of creation always disrupted by the light off the ways beyond, new enormities catching on in conflagration as the singing burning eating awake continued beyond fronds and dots I could not gauge. The face of the burning was both reflective and translucent, though there was nothing shown inside it but the color of where our sight before had stretched to nothing left, all understanding compressed clearer in the seeing nothing, still more light creaming over on itself as more light changed and swayed, pressing the dots against the dots inside of which what had burned grew insurmountable around our massless gloss wore wide in all the pockets we’d hidden hardest. We were all listening for one last word, a promise blown in what had become of all our people, all the names around our name sunk in through the skin holes and the mouths of days all blacked in black around the living instant, all of our eyes searing together, all of you and me along the numbered corridors of thundered years all of which and whom however in frames corroded. Whereas the dying fire starving for more mass again screamed inside its own destruction, and in screaming through us this time too we heard the fire touch its own eternal definition, and as it did I could feel time open in our senses through my senses, and we heard
I am the mark of all. I been waiting for you to find me and erase me your entire life, and for the lives of all before you. By erase I mean become, as I am speaking to myself and always have been, like anybody. You shall not wake. This is because you were never sleeping. When you close your eyes, you enter me. When I close my eyes, I become what you were at the beginning, which is myself again, though unlike you I know what you will do, who you will love back, what door among the many doors leads through every memory to now. Here alone you will find rest. And when you wake, you will keep waking.
Then nothing happened.
There was nothing.
No symbol and no sound, no fingers or brains or eyes about us. No word for us or way to say it or one to be said to or to say. Yet I was speaking. Not in a language, nor with a tongue or teeth or belief. The text had already been set into what there was and what had been, which were the same. Touching and have taken were the same. Being and having were like nothing. Beauty was like nothing. All of it louder than ever in its resistance, through and through.
Where I absorbed this, now I was. Spread on no altar in no period. All worlds blown listless and exploded through all forms of memory out of all flesh and aggregate of every sound and image wished. All logic black as hell and getting blacker in the screen of burning; all flesh at last erased. Light called again to stand against the widening sky and thrash and die without the requirement of first having had life.
In the blackness, any palace, any pleasure; no requirement of all.
And this was not another new beginning. No split of lived and loved between what light. And whereas I tried to hold the sound of what had been myself alone, to see the sound all bright pulsating white where white is, where in it now I could have turned my head once I had no other. Each of us so much of us we split the spitting with every glint of time aroused in fields and fields blown free inside the roaring coming down recalled what no one knew, christened in the skin of who had been and would have been and will be by never having had to. Each all alight inside the flickering so temporary no matter where we could have looked against the glove of ash, our born and unborn senses entered one another turning open in the blare and the ash began to glisten.
The ash was listening.
FIVE THE PART
ABOUT DARREL
I remember waking in a field. The sun is above me. It has a face but not like mine. Its eyes are closed.
I’m wearing a gown made of the hair we’d never grown. The gown stretches behind me as I walk, winding and clinging against the landscape as if to wed me to it. It pulls the roots of my scalp so wide and far apart you can see straight into my brain, the mounds and nubs there, holes and powder.
Beneath the dirt, the blood is dry. Enmassed dreams of the dead hold up the lattice of the unnamed landscape. Where I’d already walked I knew I could not walk back.
The light of day is near and thin with no one waiting.
I remember coming to the house. The house had awaited my return through all our lives. It had watched me move toward it in the waves of seasons spanning all the air like leather.
The house appears slick black from a distance, like a night sea, though up close it is transparent, barely there.
Each other house surrounding matches exactly. Miles of homes along the land all same as ours, each disappearing when not watched. Nowhere I could go would not end up here.
Our house has more doors than I can count—so many there’s no part of the exterior that’s not an entrance.
Where I touch the house, my fingers stick. My skin and the house’s skin mesh. I sense a screeching sound beyond the paint—lobes of damaged language waxing and refracting in a familiar lilt that holds the house together.
Each instant seems to scrape around behind my face, as if probing for a way out.
I remember inside the house the walls are mirrored. Once closed, the doors could not be opened from inside. The tiles along the floor beneath my feet have symbols etched into their faces, though when I try to read them, they go blurred.
In the mirrors, there are no symbols; the floor is white, unmarked. Nor do I appear there where I’m standing. In
stead of me there, I see Gravey, wholly naked. The light around him is so severe the house no longer appears to have border.
I remember his name had been Gravey in some eras, though in others he took on other names, now in their mass erasing all.
Gravey regards me smiling with countless mouths. His nails are long and gold, his face and arms covered with a thin hair whiter than I remember hair could be.
At Gravey’s feet, there is a woman. The blood on the floor and air is hers, I know. I know it smells like blood does. It’s on both sides of her face, outside and in, and on Gravey’s face and arms, and on mine. The light is shining off the blood so loud.
As the shape inside my brain adjusts, many men appear there standing in the white surrounding Gravey, their breath among them knotted as if to one field, which flows in through the vents and circuits from the expanse beyond the house flush with unleavened breath made melting in the wake of all of us beneath the sun now turning seven suns and then seven hundred and then and then.
My features feeding, the days collecting underneath. No way back beyond this instant, I remember, though in knowing so, the instant too is split apart. I can watch myself there watch myself there watch the men among the men. Gravey with his arms raised; all our arms raised.
I stand above the body of the woman on the floor.
The woman looks like me, as did all women, cradled there among the many men and boys and girls brandishing knives, or holding pocket mirrors or small bulbs between them to bring the house around them closer. I watch them clench my jowls and stretch them out, looking for pockets. I watch them cut the ears off of my face and wing them. I watch them smear parts of the reflecting room with my dark blood, obscuring what repeated. They take turns feeding off the torso. The bite-mark lesions on her face interrupt my face from being who I’d been before the house had risen, the gouge marks taking putty from my jaw. My teeth are removed and chewed in other mouths or hot glued to the ceiling in chandeliers, or worn as jewels on the boys’ fingers, marking with molars down their arms. Blue of a bruise milking to muddish rouge again around the elbows where I sat propped and pulled along the wood grain banged with nails to jut the feet of those who passed so they’d remember any instant among the instant, holding time down where it caught and held warm to the house and cooled and let us know. The scalp shorn back to bring the hair up with it, showing the evening underneath the ridge of pulp I’d squeezed myself in underneath, the matte of sleeprooms and remembered bodies and the idea of a way to stumble through old doors; the symbol he or they or I would cut into the surface of me soft where hair had hid me palest to match my surface there with theirs; how the symbol seemed to shine, collecting human dust along the clot of light that hung around it in connection to the prior symbol in the prior body, and the symbol in the body yet to listen. All of them mine.
I can read the instant in me like mirages. I can stand behind the arms and take the arms up and be the arms as they would cut and hold the torso, aping it a puppet or a mummy or a mother or her child. The words I felt lodged in my chest came out through the man as whatever words he wanted, and they had always been. My goldish mounds. The pyramids my cheeks mimed as I stood unseen in the muddle of all the air of the house surrounded at the center of the hair, broke in such love, while from its fold the field grows growing.
I remember how the light inside me fried. I remember the texture of my shape inside the body of the woman as they undid her, clammed surrounding my own mind, framed in such bright motion-tinsel there is no home. Each cut into her flesh creates a sentence of the widest kind. Books of the trees. The windows slide one by one out of me firm. The tapes spool and lather around my aggregating outline. I do not need to think at all to see the years the woman had held there at my center full of the belief that we had been and always would, that no time could erase the white walls out of the sense of being born. The long shade of the woman’s mother in her like a mother. Stairwells that bend into an ocean all pink and gray, wrapped in the softest mouths and brightest holidays, the kneecaps cracked on gravel and father-kissed and mended, flesh again.
I remember the one dry body of the chorus of the boys. I remember threading through the boys at once, all of the body of me, and they are muscle and they are bone, they have tongues gouged from the parents in them who I had already been before pilled to speak the scripture of their lives, the laughter they threw out to pull to the moon, the tattoos their skin rejects and wears in squirming radiation. Their ring fingers burning where barns had been before them full of pigs and calling rakes to change the nature of the lawns where they would stand among a coming storm on clearest days and throw a ball so hard and high into the sky they might knock out the sheath of glass we’d named our heavens. All the boys with all the mouths. All the ash flexed in the testicles and ovum caked up like televisions blinking back and forth between the edited breasts and the call for ground beef pillows every dream, wept from pubic carpets unto wanting more and asking more inside the mirror of my blood where the day turns into day again to day again to day again today.
I close my eyes and open my eyes and I am in another woman’s body, any of them. I remember the brush of blades along my cheek, the inner friction matched with something pearled along the chaw outside my head. Someone was speaking, yes, in through a wedge of soft between my bone, yes, my only bone, knitted from silt. I’d heard the words before: each night of my life carried in secret in the black above my bed, crammed in between the rafters and insulation holding out the mask of their ideas; how in that space sealed under sleep and all wide open I had eaten of the black, had spoken in tongues to no one there, confessing every crime committed in the history of my home and country as all mine. Then, like any child, I’d woke, drunk on saliva and that false language through the whole span of waking day. This was worn along the lids, carried in acid I would use to break down what came inside me. In each word I could read the hours as they were. And with the words, a breath of clenching winds or someone’s fingers, a narrowing enormous hall rendered in time, from where along the distance there was a singing not like the voices of the surrounding men, no chords or hymnals or holy organs, but sound like a negated human mass. Music, yes, once, that woke me up and held me hard against myself inside a pocket of another person, a woman, too; there the blood that rushed beyond my skin had been contained, enmassed in slim packets vast enough to curl me from them, crushed enough that they must break. Within the cram of night the skull contains, in any hour. This is the space for which I’d tried to live, licking back the blacker centimeters of my memory to wake the mirror, slip myself again into the game of self where before me I had been. As in the sealed space surrounding every life the black of the unseen flips up in spasm, and splays on the walls a negative light made of my division, where above me there the boys again are slaving, staring through me, as if my skin is not a surface but a tear. The house around them glows with something not like fire, a digital convulsion split between a universe of glassless screens. The whole length of the split of the way I’d meant to walk along the circumference of my head here clasping and collapsing beyond the instant to keep the instant where it waits to split unsealed.
Here in the room the boys are chanting. The words make gaseous glint around the skulls they were. The speech is all the same. It pills and pills the weight around me, holds me up. I can sense beneath me where I should be able to feel them lifting my thighs wide on the carpet, spreading tendons tight along the legs I know were mine: mine and mine again where old milk reaches. My clitoris is hard and slunk back up in my cavity of man, throbbing through the flesh walls with its sightless tip alive and never dying. The space beneath me where the babies would be birthed from squirms and spreads, lapping wet warmth something from my center like a zapped lamp. The faces of the boys are enormous. They grow small pustules that against the cream of the air of me burst into a color once that had been called silver, then had been gray, then is no different than any.
I feel something in me becoming unreme
mbered, moving from the flesh framed in the face along the center of this current body full of currents in reverse. It appears then in my bank of mind rawing, deformed in sticky sacs unframed, one to another, the gash behind the gashing coming open, catching in cluster where I’m not. The transfer burns; I cannot read it; it is in me like the space I’d go along in through all our lives; I feel the whole rest of me around me want to pull into the instant, to become gored into the forgotten nodule of any woman’s brain, to suck the whole rest of all the lives of our lives in the eyes of what a life was into one cell; then just as quickly, it is nothing; flat black matter, each small destruction eaten into its own center as if to seal off from all else ever awake. It wipes me out. It loves and loves me until I can’t believe I am no void, and all I want hard is to stay inside this body in this instant all forever and I know I cannot hold this and I’m only anywhere.