Sky Saw

by Butler, Blake

  Person 2030 had been 811’s, who like the mother had descended from two bodies rendered during DELETED ERA. This child—the only one of hers that had thus far survived behind its eyes, held in its cruddy back and black saliva—had been the reason the father left, she knew. Though he’d not expressed this so directly—he’d said nothing really, just been gone—she could tell he’d despised the baby for shucking off his image, for already beginning to grow old. The air had seemed to buzz between them.

  The other births after 2030’s were a different matter, following a similar structure to the system of her aging, if reversed—one for each year, young and coming, if all crammed into such a short amount of time—the same spiral cut procession seen in all things, of all things one after another—new infants bloating in her as if in instants, spooling ropes on ropes of breathing cells. She tried to hold them in but they came out.

  The 2nd child had burst unfurling as a smudge of scum on the black summer pavement tile while the first child crawled through the whole house calling the father’s forgotten name, already gone. The stench had been horrendous, like endless fire. 1180 had washed with bleach and light for days and still could not forget. The curd left rashes on her face.

  The 3rd child had been a trembling wash of chunks that would not stop running, squashed and ransacked in the eyes. It did have eyes, at least that. 1180 took to wearing diapers or standing over buckets until she stopped caring about the carpet.

  The 4th child sluiced out while 1180 stood ironing a work shirt she knew 811 would never need to wear. Even if he returned there’d be no reason. Person 811’s place of employment had been converted into pyres. The church was eaten up with acid dust and some white substance. There were no words to call the evenings. And though the counted dead would never end, the state had claimed use of the bodies to build a wall—a wall that would keep them, finally, protected. 1180 ironed anyway. She pressed her knuckles to the iron’s steaming eyes to make a memory.

  The 5th child came out of the wrong hole during a shit.

  The smell of the 6th child—the mother despised herself for this—reminded her of biscuit gravy, and that was all she’d eaten then for weeks.

  The 7th child grew its voice first and still spoke inside her when she was most alone. The 7th child knew things about her and rose them on her skin in detailed dioramas. The 7th child was not a woman or a man.

  The 8th child seemed to want to make it. This child had kept in place for two whole days. By the time it came out as stippled magma, one solid body seared to the lining from where it’d come. 1180 had swelled large as a window. It pulled and pulled at her until after some time in the sun room it did not.

  The 9th through 19th child came one after another like rollercoaster cars deformed and farting, hardly gas but so much blood—and then the 20th child emerged immediately thereafter, as a glassy substance the mother could manipulate between her hands—enough to make so many bulbs to light the outside bright forever—enough to build a boat had there been anywhere to row.

  The 21st child swam around 1180 and caressed her head and told her future and said that soon 1180 would feel safe and she would have what she’d always wanted, but there was still more things she had to do yet and could she hold on please, could she hold, and 1180 shook her head and tried to turn to see this child, this sweet one, this living sheet, and yet no matter how quick she turned her head or in which direction the child could not be seen.

  The 22nd child was made of paper, on which Person 1180 wrote.

  The 23rd child, this latest stammer swollen up inside her soon-to-come, flooded the folds inside her with its pre-forming—it felt larger than the others—it already had so many eyes, had already filled in though the sound of everything inside her where among awaiting blood the mother felt the thing she’d meant to be herself learning her veins.

  Person 811, somewhere elsewhere, found himself inside a box. The box held a long low light like the kind of light birthed by machines. He could see his short arms crimped with busy muscle. He could see his gushing veins and the scratch marks where he or something else had scratched them. There were scratch marks in the box above his face, bright splinters wedged under his nails.

  811 had no idea how long he’d been inside the box. The last thing he could remember was some leaning purple room. From the room he’d moved into an elevator and the elevator sealed. The elevator had descended for several hours and held no music. At times the elevator seemed to be moving to the right or left, or at an angle, or through color. The elevator’s buttons were unmarked. He’d kept on trying buttons with one sore finger till one of the buttons knocked him out.

  Before the elevator, he remembered standing in a dark froth up to his neck. It’d been too dark inside the air, too, to know where exactly what made what. He’d gone for miles and not found land—though he had found, by feel, among a patch of lubricant, a tiny plastic ring that fit his finger just exactly, though it kept slipping off, a little burning, and soon he lost it back into the depth.

  811 felt something else there with him in the box. Something small and fat and grousing near his feet. He could not budge. He could not think of whom to call for. His mind blanked over so many things he’d one time known—his phone number, how long or fat his dick was and how it had fit into other people, the names of any presidents of Where, or of what his insides looked like on the inside—he’d seen his insides, some technician had showed him in a picture once, gushed and brown and wound, he remembered that—he could not think which way was up.

  He knew there was someone somewhere wanting, and he wanted to remember. He tried to think of things he’d thought he’d thought before in other days of other years in the idea that thinking them again would make him click back on where he’d been or what he’d done after. He felt his thoughts flop off from him like live fish:

  AM I A FIRE?

  HAVE I BEEN MURDERED?

  WHAT WAS THAT ONE KIND OF BEER I BELIEVED I LIKED MOST?

  WHICH ONE OF ME IS THIS THINKING?

  HOW MANY FINGERS WOULD I HOLD UP IF I COULD MOVE MY ARM?

  The box was getting smaller, longer. The heat grew with his sigh. His face itched. His veins itched. He counted backwards. The other air the box held itself around his head.

  Person 811 felt his name nudge somewhere in him, thrumming upward through his lungs: a name. A name. He’d had one. He spoke his name aloud, again, again. He’d known other people had had his name before him but they were not inside him now—not that he knew. He found that in saying his name aloud in certain phrasings he could remember other people who had also said it—his father, his boss, the bank, the heads in nightmares, his wife—yes, he’d had a wife—a what?—a woman. He could almost smell her. He could not remember much else. He also found that if he said his name enough the same way it began to become another name—something much longer and more difficult to pronounce—something deformed from how his tongue went, very old.

  Person 811 knew he was not immortal. He had only been left alone by chance—something shitty in his pheromones, a certain chemical in bad cologne, an incantation he’d not meant to let slip the day before by pressing a certain code into his home phone unaware—there was nothing else about him—when he thought about his hand it hurt. In the nights since then, whenever that was, the man had continued turning aged. He had seen the sheen slip out from behind the skin around his face. He had watched his skin and fingers newly droop. Though days were so short by the hour, when strung together, one after another for weeks or years or which however, in those unglassed contraptions, they seemed even fewer. Soon, he was only thinking of long windows on beach vacation homes. He imagined himself standing neck deep in the warm surf, treading sunned.

  811 could have spent the remainder of his life inside this box, he imagined. He would not have felt cheated or ill-framed. He felt flashes in his stomach sometimes, squirts of long silent clods of film of time he’d logged and disregarded. Once—he remembered quickly, his body caught taut trying
to sit up—along a stretch of blue sod just south of his prior house he’d seen a mile-long pile-up gushed with blood; neck-deep in the blood, the women crying and mosquitoes swarming for the fresh dead and the not dead yet and the mostly healthy—he’d seen the boils on bodies boiling up with blister in the ransacked sun, their voices peeling at the nothing just above them, inscribing light with all their fear, bursting chocolate lather through their eyelids in the pressure and their reams of fast-ejecting babies floating womby on the curdlip; that day after all that he’d gone home and ate cold tacos and fucked his wife and slept all night.

  Yes yes, his wife, she was a woman. She had eyes with color and once she’d touched a prism and for years and years she’d been all that he could know.

  Suddenly, beyond his thinking, the lid on the air inside the box came off above him. At first there was so much light he could not see beyond the crag of swarming color platelets. He thought he’d gone so deep into nowhere he’d come out the other side.

  Soon then room formed in the flush. In the room there was no wind, no other flesh caught by the walls. The room held just the box that held him, as far as he could see. The space lay long and without texture. 811 found that he could move. He felt the blood rush through his sternum. It filled his arms and made them seem as if erasing from the inside.

  The father stood up from the box.

  Beyond the box he saw then that he’d not been inside a box at all but just there lying on some surface. The floor was wet and somewhat flooded from a liquid dripping from above, through a dark spot puckered on the ceiling, though which he could hear a some kind of semi-human moan—an orgasm or a singing or confusion among sleep, or all of these at once tangled together—and yet the sound seemed to him second nature to the air here, another part of all our manner.

  Hung on the wall from end to end and all he saw so many massive pictures, frames of him caught from all those unremembered years, yet in each one doing nothing—just there standing at the lens—nowhere ungone. In each image he looked older—his face looked burned—his cheeks half see-though and covered with tattoos he could not remember getting and which were no longer there still on his face. Up close he even looked worse than ever—the cells destroyed there, filled with jacked up crap like tiny cities. The closer he looked, the deeper periled—populations being ripped apart, maggots screwing on wide white altars, money smothering the trees.

  Person 811 felt someone behind him. Someone unnumbered. Someone behind him—behind him—diamond air.

  He continued turning but could not make the airspace frame his eyes.

  On the flipside of the mirrors in the room that held Person 811, the surface held another room—a long thin room encircling the walls. Inside this room a phalanx of cameras had been arranged to records the innards of the air. The cameras’ lenses were wide and curved each as skull-sized globes—they had been used in prior years to record some of the highest grossing cinematic bodies in creation, thereafter replicated on the earth uncounted times.

  Upon the father’s rising from the box into the twin space—his body already spinning and spinning after something—the lenses’ glass began to fog. The glass dripped sweat like human skin and rumpled with the smell of metal burning. The cameras had been designed for this condition. The cameras’ makers understood certain things about Person 811—what that number itself meant—who he had thought he’d been, and who he was now, who he had once wanted to be, what he would actually become.

  Across the bubble of the lens eyes, a flush of bacteria, made for cleansing, became released. Their tiny translucent tongues absorbed the liquid, became drunk, allowed the screening to stay captured clear. The image of Person 811 continued to hit tape, replicated into planes. The icons wrapped around against each other, stored in spools that rolled in gyration in rooms behind the room where the cameras watched this body move.

  Behind the room that held the cameras, wedged between the camera room and the room that held the film, a man stood standing upright in the light there in his flesh without a head. The man did not move or think or want or breathe but the man knew all about the father and the cameras and what had come before them.

  In other years, before he lost his head, the man had, at some time or another, been on the inside of every human home. The homes’ owners did not know the man, or that the man had been there. From each home the man took just one thing he knew would soon be missed. I cannot think of what things like those could be now. He’d swallowed each thing after thorough sucking, to change the taste. The man’s intestines were a mess. In certain homes the man would stand over the sleeping people. He’d run his fingers in the drapes. He’d lick the skin off a husband’s face, or cry the room full, or kiss the children and braid their hair. Sometimes he’d just stand there inches over, still as glass. Often he’d still be there when the folks woke and yet they went on just the same.

  Those years were over now. The man weighed less now. He had a new employment, and so inside that, a new life.

  The man could not remember where once he’d had a head that looked exactly like Person 811, who in turn looked exactly like someone else. He, exactly like Person 811, could not remember beyond the placeholder of his knowing how in the time he’d already lived he’d lived through the top times of his life already, and how these other moments, these were after.

  They were men made of the same skin, like all men, again.

  The man watched Person 811 spin around around around. He watched 811 spread his hands across the blank walls, searching for a seam or knob or some way in.

  In his hands the headless man felt the things Person 811 felt.

  You would call the feeling aging.

  He called it Cone.

  Person 1180 found the way the men had ripped the stuffing out of 811’s office walls. They’d shit in the Victrola and smeared the whole of the air with something. They’d overturned 811’s black plastic desk. Taped to the underbelly of the desktop were several glossy photos of some woman nude but for a hood. There were markings on her body. 1180 could not tell if they were in the picture or drawn on. For sure someone had traced the woman’s nipples so many times with the tips of his fat fingers that the flesh had been rubbed through. The stink of the father’s scentless discarded excess semen clung around the woman’s image slick like night.

  1180’s newest wounds had been addressed. She’d absorbed the stinging of the entries of the men into the dark inside her. The scabs were patchy. The men were done and gone and elsewhere for awhile. She’d kept her eyes closed and her mouth wide the whole time. She’d thought so hard into the silent space she carried she could not remember what they’d done—no inch of new wreck stored in her synapses among all the other hell she’d held—though she could hear the newer infant all inside her come alive, thrumming brighter now than any other she remembered, knitting hyper in her skin.

  What she did not see did not have to happen, she’d been taught.

  Outside tonight the air was liquid. Children and blood and mud or shit clods floated past the window in oblong droves of packets. Occasional tremors like someone choking shook the texture off the home’s foundation and its eaves. The tone, for now, was silent, or just perhaps too loud or high-pitched for her to attend.

  On TV, 1180 watched the men roll a huge translucent ball along the expressway. Men and goats stationed on both sides watched the procession from behind a velvet cable. At the center of the ball there was a nude woman, strapped with her arms above her head. The women’s breasts had been augmented so that they obscured the majority of her torso. Her nipples were so brown they appeared black. The woman’s pure white hair had been combed with glitter and bits of foil that made her seem expensive. A large brass band mostly of tubas followed the ball in its procession, squalling basslines uncoordinated from one performer to the next. The men who pulled the ropes that dragged the ball were made up bronze and coiled all in the face like royal bulls.

  1180 recognized certain of the men’s gashed or pimpled forehe
ads. They seemed everywhere at once. This had all already happened.

  The men grunted though their holes in deformed rhythm as they brought the ball toward the wide bright eye hung on the city. 1180 swam the channels through several hundred angles aimed at different close-ups on the woman’s flesh, her eyes blank and elaborate.

  1180 could hear the woman’s thoughts—the addled feed spoke into her head in a voice like her voice if shifted older and still aging—wholly ruined—the men around her barking and barfing, throwing their fists into the light, around which the whole sky seemed to pucker, and the woman’s voice groaned on and on and older still.

  1180 could not stand to hear the woman speaking any longer. She felt a button on her tongue, but she’d already pressed it so many times and still felt nothing. The men inside the TV shitting mnemonic cash back and forth between their being. 1180 turned the TV off but it stayed on.

  In the kitchen 1180 stood among the way the man had ransacked the storage fridge. The men had eaten all the bee meat and drank the runoff water and the pine bread. All they’d left behind was condiments—countless plastic packets salvaged from fast food, distributed in past weeks by kids in massive trucks with countless turrets and steaming screens. Despite the trucks’ clear impenetrability men for miles would crowd around them gnawing and knocking one another’s eyes out.