by Blake Butler
10. The year I died each day one after the other by saying the words I’d learned aloud; each time I died, I began again at the point at which I’d heard the word said; in this way life was like a recording of my life; in this way I went on
11. The year at once all before me in the midst of all the years beforehand the year seemed just fine; as if the years before this in my body had been not what happened but were ideas I wrote out for me alone, and really my eyes and skin and dad and neighbors and homes and hours could have been anybody else’s, and instead of what I was now it was a clear day in a nice mall walking with my mother to buy the suit I’d wear to church eleven times inside it before she died
12. I did not kill my mother; I did not kill your father or you; I did not kill anyone; I am not alive; I am not a person; I am not dead
13. The year my legs were replaced with someone else’s legs; I could tell this just by waking up; the surgery had been seamless, there were no scars, no weird tissue fissions, no stitches, but the legs were not my legs; I could tell from how I walked different, sometimes backward, sometimes side to side inside the house to find a door; I do not know who the legs belonged to before me but whoever it was they were much, much older and had smoked their whole life and smelled of terror; they would make me walk some days for hours into places I did not want to go, though these by now I don’t remember; I simply remember walking through the fields and the reams of birds and the house on the horizon and the word
14. I am you; I really am you; you wrote this
15. The year after becoming someone else like you I could not stop the wish inside me to move on to the next instance of a body in the mess of bodies on the earth surrounded by no walls and more walls and doors; how each time I saw another person through your eyes I moved into him and was then them from then on until I saw another person and moved into him again; each person I moved into was you and me and he or she again thereafter, and each of us as well would be then in the next and who before; in this way, god stopped growing, slowed the orbits; in this way there was no center to the earth, and no center to the space around us, cities, planets, ever
16. The year the face of god appeared inside our music; the song we were not singing, and within then stopped aging, and had never aged and never would again, and our translucent flesh would rain inside the endless night resizing where around us we were going to be not there anymore so soon that we could smell the burning of the shrinking in our lungs, in fear of which we ate or drank or heard jokes or wrote jokes or wrote or lied or lived
17. The endlessly repeating night that would not end and so kept gazing and in gazing learned the hole, each body up against the best mirror of their remaining house, ejaculating into the image of themselves
18. Through the hole the tunnel through the center of this dimension, to the mirror, where the machine will not desist, seeing it again begin again without ever actually beginning
19. The year we forgot about the sun; where what had been a sun up till then became replaced with what the sun is now and this would become how to us it had always been; the prior instance of the sun then disappeared, leaving where it had been all these words in all this white forever, a bank of prisms in the sky replacing sky where sky was to reflect the thing back at itself so the thing could see itself and so go on in going on
20. The year the words learned to move into one another as had we before them, unresolving; one word without an eye or face or feeling shitting up against the word against it pressed against it welling down; we would move into this too, the space between where the word had been before and where the word was now inside the word beside it; god would move into this, and the houses, and the prisons, and the bodies, and the blood; the word remained inside the word only forever, returning to the beginning, in my life, which was our lives, which was dry as light inside of light
21. 00:00:00:00
I close my eyes and try to open my eyes again and in the dark I can’t get out. The skin won’t come back open. I can’t move. When I am not moving it is as if I am free and could do anything, though when I try to actually do anything, nothing happens. The air holds in down around me. It shapes the air and light I breathe.
I do not remember where my face is, what my vision feeds through to. I know it is older than me and wider than me and had always been waiting in me to be lifted.
I don’t know why I can know what I do not know or how I could ever name what is not mine.
I remember I’d been younger. I’d bitten into apples and felt the flesh become a part of what I was. How strange to hold something in your hand then and know that it would knit into you or otherwise come out as shit, that you could select the elements that built your body and with that body make your way. My parents were beautiful people. They were kind people. In the backyard we had a building where I was allowed to play with animals and machines, and though I certainly enjoyed those also I had real other human friends, and I smiled more than the average and went to places where the music wrote along the inside of my face. All the days stretching my brain in ways I wanted whether I wanted it or not. Each day a series of infinite selections gathered in the only way it would ever be, no matter how many times the same space was writ and wrinkled, corkscrewed in its avenues unto the dust, beyond which what translucent shape my space had incubated would beyond its image now become so open there was no word I could not burn. How anything at any instant could always happen.
Each time I try to speak I hear my body grinding, stone on stone. Where once I had a head it seems my whole head is imploding. I can’t remember what it is in me that lets me seem like I exist, what binds me and deforms me every instant, why it goes on.
I can’t remember why I can feel or think at all or why I’d want to. Time continues, though no one’s counting.
I remember there had been so many hours spent in wait. Other people went on in their homes through night on night never knowing most of what any others wanted or could be. Yet even in the dark so far apart we’d believed in living, I remember. The wish to want to touch and to be touched in some way formed the body, framed by the world. Even just the light of a bathroom in the far room as someone we’d loved prepared to sleep beside us and be there when we woke could be enough to feel actually alive. The soft brush of air from a door opened toward one’s own chest to open space before it could be wider than the room.
It seems impossible for anything I remember to have ever happened, just as it seems impossible now that I can’t seem to do anything but be. To go on in any instant as I was now was to walk through every gesture, dream, and vision, every curl of grunt for sustenance, for warmth, for life forever, though worn in sleeves and curtains called a day, an atmosphere of calm encased in ageless frenzy, cages made of shapes, shapes saving their blue and red and white and white and black and black and black into a waking like the sun brings burning endlessly on a thing that cannot move.
My tongue of every taste of food we’d ever eaten. My eyes of every sight. My lungs of the air we passed between us endlessly for centuries. My fingers of ash. My skin of everything that never happened, surrounded by the absence of the feeling of having been surrounded all our lives.
I remember how in me anybody could have been you. You could have said anything, been anything, made anything. You could have removed the skin off of my face, and with the same will walked into the ocean, written this sentence.
And so you have. Everything has always been exactly as you wished it would be, only now it has no end. You do not remember the difference between what happened and what did not happen. You do not remember where I became you and was always. Nameless, mapless.
Inside the dark, I turn and wait and press at my eyes and feel inside me the blind in all our minds there held forever as each remembers each, all so smeared into the present what is created could no longer have an end or a beginning.
Let there be light, I say, and nothing changes.
I sat up in another dark again and I was wired. I could
see through this dark as if it were daytime. There were mirrored walls on the horizon reflecting miles of more mirrors on beyond all definition. The mirrors were absorbing all the air around me, taking the air there and pulling it down into their flesh. There were no edges to the world here, though in that freedom it was unnecessary to even think. Every pixel of me was so filled with everything already. It didn’t matter if I felt content or false, dead or alive, loved or alone. Each instant stretched so long it no longer had a surface. It was so loud I couldn’t do anything. It made me calm. I lay back in the light and closed my eyes. Behind my eyes my eyes were open, flooding, throbbing, without face.
I close my eyes and open my eyes and I am Flood. I mean I am me again, as I had been, though my experience of myself occurs now once removed, as if I’m watching me perform me.
I am surprised to not feel any relief in reappearing in the world. Inside what would be my skull the meat of the head’s periphery seems to stretch further back and in the more the eye is crimped to peer against it, looking back into the space the self makes as if there in the wake of it might form some window or apparatus by which the self inside the space may retain form. There are no arms there, no torso beneath the space of head from which where I peer down, though the taste in the mouth of the head is something blown apart and silent.
I don’t think about Flood’s life. I don’t need to. It is mine. Above, the sky has turned entirely opaque, shutting out the ream of color holding beyond us anywhere the night might stretch forever. The sheen of the lip of it remains reflective; each glint shows the earth back at itself. There is no moon or starlight in the dead resonance, but the pulp of day remains visible beneath, the glow of sun sucked into the ground radiating through all coils, the heat hungry for more meat to disintegrate on stage, more skins unpeeled against the faces, torsos, limbs to expose the meat from and let simmer, desist, until underneath that too, the private lattices of bone and thrall, which as well has rubbed and split and uncompressed to ash and silt and blown away, sucked into wherever, sexless, lipless, nowhere.
Among the vast terrain remains what junk. The haunted veins of buildings stand up uneroded, their matched glass eyes seeing the seer where the glint of the contained light does not obstruct the vision head on into the building, through which the hallways cross and come to doors, catacombs of air locked in unto itself beyond all disintegrated organs. There are the statues and the lamps, the birdhouses and gravestones and quilts and gravel stacked as high as what the air was. The lists of what remains remain unmade. Wires hang taut in arteries to where buildings had been indexed on the mud, beaming nothing back and forth between the husks where in the absence of larger motion hive cells have begun to cluster up over long fields absorbing the leavings of our people into its chest, now spun defunct and clogging nothing.
I feel Flood’s body’s organs flay and tangle. Its blood is screaming for itself. I raise Flood’s right arm where it would have been and have him touch his face and where I want to feel the finger between my eyes there nudging at the space where flesh had held him caged, the texture of my vision warps white around the presence, any color turned to gyres. His shape is no longer contained in him alone, but made as if with coordinates that change as the lens shifts to change the framing: every instance of him rendered long and wide and senseless. Wishless, and so full of every wish. Cold folds like little hills of newer land where we could walk and tell our daze and have a fall. On the land is so much room there, space that opens up around us more the harder that I make him press, miles of it contained in him at any instant, requiring only to be forced up into birth by feel. This could be true of any vision, I remember, in any being.
Why was I me. What have I done. What fields of rooms of people have gone on hidden in them, the blipping lights, so many breadths in any inch. There could never be a reason.
Where I have no organs I am eggs. Or I am in awe. Along the perimeters of holes: not the hole itself but not not the hole there either. What am I feeding.
Beyond day. Smoke flows from where the light was, like old locks. An oceanic box of blue more soft than sky and neater, nearer. It could be any blue, I know, set to pupils or dog collars or the whole tone of a life. A fragment of an instance in a version where even I am not a she or he or me but floors, or money, or a thing like color, here kissed from lips to lips like blood that hadn’t pooled, knives of the hours between all desire left unlisted from the trees allowed inside the evening to deform, to crawl over the highways or the plots before the plot of any text turned all yards into the way of graves. All our worlds up before us, mulched and sharper than any tool used to cut the dinner down, the blood in colors like a person aging in an instant from the sperm back to the sac, microphones in any mind catching the sound of all that living in a width quicker than every square of every square dividing.
I close my eyes and see the blood alone. In the blood the rooms are there too, through all the houses held there to connect. I walk into the blood and feel the film of it surround me. I feel the film fold down against the white. Within the white I close my eyes too and find another film held within it, in which again my eyes are open wide, where then again I then close them, and there again there is the white. And now I cannot remember who I’ve been talking to this whole time.
I can no longer remember where I am. Each room around me as I went seemed to hold voices on the far side of the chamber, a human sound of moaning that lighted through with the idea there would be someone left still in this shape, but I could find no end point to the walls. Each new room along the chain of rooms there seeming to partition off another impossible place, a language always on the far side of where I was.
No matter how long it went on, I loved this house. I loved the screaming and the beats between the screaming. I loved the grain of the wood of the floor beneath me like never-ending skin I might have meant to wear myself. At each inch of the wall I touched I felt someone on the far side touching back, and though they would not answer me, I loved their future. As I moved away, they moved away.
Sometimes I would find windows in the walls through which I could see out into the sky. Its face was full with smoke or milk in big blown sac clouds in packets bumping up against each other desperate for rain, and beyond that, a kind of wall there dark as my closed eyes had been when I could close them, only now all above us, waiting to burst.
I remember the red curtains in our bedroom. I remember the bookshelf set into the wall. I remember how hard it was to button the neck on my work shirt. I remember waking up before the alarm. I remember the cursor blinking. I remember sensing I was being watched. I remember the blue key that started my first car and where I wrecked the car and how my posture never seemed the same again. I remember trying to teach myself to paint landscapes. I remember swallowing the first tooth I lost. I remember making eye contact with passing people and knowing I’d never be this near to them again. I remember the frozen food aisle at night alone. I remember never being able to remember certain names no matter how many times they were repeated. I remember a recurring dream of a large white church without doors. I remember wanting to remember things I’d dreamt and repeating them in my mind until I forgot. I remember lighting candles just to have them blown out. I remember cold glass on warm days. I remember the brightness of a bulb turned on near the bed in darkness. I remember believing I’d die drowning. I remember feeling guilty having never donated blood. I remember the click of the handle when the gas completed pumping. I remember changing my opinion of a color. I remember waiting to be told I was free to go. I remember biting into fruit that’d turned brown on the inside. I remember the color of the grass of our front lawn weeks after it caught fire. I remember looking into my eyes shaving my face. I remember checking to see if my wife had returned home. I remember the long dark hair on my forearm that grew back no matter how many times I plucked it. I remember the way snow looked landing on a sweater. I remember wishing I could remove one of my arms to sleep better on my side. I remember feeling d
iscomfort and trying to remember to feel gratitude for the absence of that discomfort after it subsided. I remember imagining there was a secret room inside my grandparents’ basement. I remember laughing at the unfunny jokes of strangers. I remember waking myself up laughing. I remember wiping the dust off the screen of the TV with my palm. I remember lying in rented beds and imagining who had been in them before me. I remember the stretch of the skin around my smile. I remember knowing what I should say to someone and never saying it. I remember playing the same song over and over until I no longer needed to play the song to hear it. I remember watching my father talk to men of business. I remember wondering what lava felt like. I remember saying goodbye several times before I left. I remember being asked for directions and not knowing and still giving the directions. I remember taking the strings off a guitar and saving them. I remember writing down what I hoped would happen one day. I remember believing I already knew what would happen. I remember checking to see the door was locked. I remember trying to understand what it would be like to hear other people’s prayers. I remember keys I couldn’t remember what they went to. I remember not being able to remember the password. I remember trying on new clothes that didn’t fit. I remember not wanting to close my eyes yet. I remember waiting for the rain to pass. I remember a voice I recognized muffled through walls late and in darkness. I remember the water at my knees then at my waist then at my neck. I remember knots in the hair that held the comb from combing. I remember a light shined down my throat. I remember selecting one ring from many rings available for purchase. I remember peeling. I remember the different kinds of blue a bruise could be. I remember searching for the sentence I loved in the book I loved. I remember breathing into my hands to make them warm. I remember being unable to lift myself and finding another person there to lift me. I remember feeling like the day would never come. I remember knowing I wouldn’t know when I no longer remember what I remembered. I remember not liking how I looked for years. I remember metal in my mouth. I remember the wind against my face. I remember empty cages and colored wires. I remember diving. I remember opening the blinds at night. I remember believing I’d been going where I meant to go. I remember saying my name until it no longer felt like anything. I remember fearing what I’d said aloud would become true. I remember the scabs on my fingers. I remember gold robes. I remember holding someone’s hands in mine. I remember being scanned for parasites. I remember panes of glass. I remember cutting the words out of the paper without purpose. I remember standing in line for something I didn’t want. I remember the fear of my teeth being removed. I remember my tongue against my teeth. I remember pressing pause and it not pausing. I remember how the surface would get so hot. I remember the room we weren’t supposed to go in and therefore wished to more than ever. I remember spreading out in green. I remember the eclipse and what it meant to me. I remember the bathwater. I remember no moon. I remember believing bodies were hollow on the inside. I remember counting days down to one day. I remember chords I had not played. I remember seeing myself in a crowd across a large room. I remember stairwells that never seemed to end. I remember the skin of horses. I remember patterns. I remember whole rooms full of flowers. I remember games we played pretending we were wolves. I remember where the mountain disappeared. I remember trying not to wake the baby. I remember sand in the bed we never planned to leave. I remember drawing a picture of my face that resembled no one I knew. I remember the dials on our oven. I remember my mother’s pins. I remember asking someone else to choose. I remember leaving the lens cap on the camera. I remember chisels. I remember rooms that seemed a different size each time. I remember the darkness in the container. I remember wiping the grease off the meat. I remember the blood on my shirt in the sunlight. I remember spinning and stopping. I remember endless alternate endings. I remember inhaling between lines sung in the song. I remember asking someone to come nearer.