Sky Saw

by Butler, Blake

  The mother wrapped herself in blankets. She felt afraid somehow of growing young, having to see all of this repeated—as if the age the child had gathered in so quickly had been supplanted out from her—she was much closer to the end than him, her meat insisted. She rolled in the sheets and comforters and pillowcases and old afghans someone old had knitted, pounds and pounds of threaded fiber, sunk with sweating among slept years—under their weight she felt she lost her body into mushing, yet she could always feel her head, and she could not quite make her eyes close.

  Behind the wall the room that held the film that held the father began to grow so great in mass it warped with heat. It made the walls expand and stick to nothing. The floor squealed in juicing ridges full of pulp. The film had grown so thick among its spools that it began to form in knots and spots of blue emulsion. 811 felt himself become melted with it as it grew gathered.

  The machines began to smoke. It stunk of burning sweat. The air itself began to grow.

  The man without his head and yet still somehow eyes saw the machines steaming from through the wall. He crossed the room toward another wall parallel to the one through which the film room held the father. On this wall he spoke into a set of holes shaped like a star. Someone spoke back to him, in wrecked language. The symbol of the star slightly changed shape. The man without a head might have wished to nod. Instead he crossed the room again halfway toward a third wall against the outdoors, the sun and fields there. In the center of the wall he felt along the surface for a panel till it clicked. He opened the panel and pressed a button. A small hole in the film room with the father opened. The slurring film there began to thread out through the crease—through the crease into the air outside and into the air of all other things—there was a sound of skin or skins becoming slid from—cells barfing wide into the light.

  The film spooled out around the building that held the room that held the father. It crept in wadding tides along the flat walls and out into the larger air, fluttered in thin ropes of darkened frame-hid color both all through the make of space and to the ground. It masked the windows of the building where heads had looked in or out on where they stood behind the pane divided. It knocked large birds out of the sky, dark bodies that as they fell dropped many eggs in clots of bombing, their half-bred babies also gone. The film gave sound in popping bubbles, scratching the surface of the concrete miles around the center of its eye. The concrete had been poured by state-named men to cover the earth over and keep all the crap and bugs and bodies or their sound from coming up—the concrete had been poured over rivers, statues, flowerbeds, and homes where homes had been before our homes now, ages interred—encasing the encased. The film slit slots in the fresh ground and went into it, spreading roots. Somewhere deep inside there it found itself again and reconnected in new frame, the father’s images rubbing in incidental friction. Through the film could squirt no light.

  The film amassed around the building and mussed up quickly, building the building into some sort of slick and massive hive. From a distance the sheen of the film would reflect so much sun though you could not see—it would burn your eyes out—it would want to.

  The film grew even as it burst. It grew as babble lathered in computers and as confluence under hair and tideless ocean. The film lashed across continents unseen, gushed in making new memory of its own presence, bowled over forests, wrapped through windows, undid locks. It mummy-wrapped the dead, engorged the subway system stalled and fat with bodies swollen from waves of heat, flossed the teeth of several living. As excrement it wormed into cows and birthed their young, came through TV screens and PC monitors and out through books, splashed up from coffee and other burning liquids, became tongues, became the language the tongues vibrated—it filled every inch of air of certain rooms, of certain weeks already passed and weeks uncoming. In many of the rooms the film came into there was no one left but this did not stop the film’s advance.

  The film defeated sleep. It wedged as a disease into the ears of the half-conscious, wiped the goggled colors all to white, the motion there embedded back to nothing.

  The bodies all woke up. The bodies moved from their beds and touched the window, looked for who had been there and who was coming. The bodies could not see beyond several feet, as if they’d remained stuck their in their own heads, their vision squashed and remaindered in the brain.

  The film slid down the mouths of crying babies in their beds or in their cages, left alone in houses squashed by mice deformed and starving. The tape made loops inside their gut. The tape masked their eyeballs, made bandannas, curled into a new shining second skin. Became the child. The tape choked the elderly, slapped the deaf. Became the child. It washed through sound not known, layered in years of melted vinyl, it stroked the ceiling of soundstages, it skewered the holes in certain kind of breakfast cereal and then ate the breakfast cereal and then repackaged the breakfast cereal in better boxes, boxes more apt to get someone to touch it—had there been people shopping in these aisles. It replaced the definitions of certain words in dictionaries no one would ever open. It congealed in the next thing we would bite. It squished in trash compactors, snapped their gears and turned them pudding. I don’t know where we are. It became the stuff of pancake syrup. It meshed in the insulation of old houses, through the wires, it wore a buzzing, it caused long rips in old maps for new roads new zones new plate tectonics that would burp and screech, that would slide to one side or the other and let some new stretch burble up—on these flat pieces of new land were other buildings with no windows and no door, inside which there were men or women with no faces, features, no names, no nothing but keyholes in their eyes.

  The film fed into projection booths of theaters no longer attended but still running, their smashed gray light gushed wrong and endless against the biggest walls of smallish rooms, the rows and rows of empty chairs all aimed as if to have even the air itself pay heed—to see. The film rolled in and made replacement of all the film on all the shelves in all the shops, all the men and all the women in and on and around the silent houses around any house, all the same house, the air of years and years of shapes embedded, forms recreated in grainy grain again, stored in a billion minds a billion times, or something, each sentence spoke a certain way, the way the eyes of certain actors would linger on the camera, the folds of days and age and light composed in each scene—never again—the reels and reels of names caught white on black or vice versa—all of this erased—all of this made of the father now—all as the tape spurted off and slithered, as the tape, unknown to the father, squirmed its grabbing girth around what had been and was the world.

  That night the shrieking tone really erupted. The house stood on its side. The fibers in the house’s rooms erected from their expanses, spindling the hallways with weird fur. The tone went so large it bashed past hearing and into nowhere, colorlessness, then back to loud—so strong it popped blood vessels in the child’s eyes while he was sleeping—all he saw when he woke again was masked in pillowed red. He didn’t mind.

  The tone ripped the mother’s clothing against her body through the seams, her skin smashed patchy with the resounding tenor, thin bloodshot lines creased through her flesh—spraying the lining of her innards with the spittle of cracking meat, stirring the remainders of what had gathered in her womb there into pigments, changing its face—a living mush of no known name. It brought the house’s eaves down, cracked the mantle, splashed the windows back to sand, braided the long hairs on the carpet, from the bodies. It peeled the wire out of the hallways, blanched the shutters. It slid its incision in most all things until air itself was hardly there, the night corralled to skeins of dust.

  Inside the house, the rooms went warbly and became several rooms at once—where in them people laid on long beds laughing, the light of no moon strumming their nude and something flexed where nothing was. On the air you could see pilling, tiny spindled segments of the seconds split into hyphae, kaleidoscopic cells. The rooms reconvened then, and seemed to lift a lit
tle, becoming slurred in as the tone rummaged through the windows of each blink—the reconditioned post-stink stirring of each of these rooms and what they’d held, what they were holding, what they would hold now in the way of some new condition—all there scrambled or erased.

  There was a shaking then. There was a long rip, coming from one direction then another. There were a million little tones. You couldn’t even hear it—as it began it had always been—the sound of something larger than the whole earth. The tone burped through light and carved it well into a strobe that in repetition appeared to slow down to gone again, while the day shook in the pummel of one thousand drums, the light around it breaking at the knit, pulling anything that had lived longer than it all apart.

  When the air again was silent, the mother and the son found themselves outside the house. Where the house had been was mostly nil. Some of the wires that had once held the house down, connected—power, TV, sound, heat, air, telephonic, light, breeze, monitor, alarm—spread sprayed in worming threads up toward the skylight dome nodule that had been installed above the house for weather interpretation. Their fibrous fraying zapped electrons and gave off heat, making cursive on the air. There were rutted suggestions of where the house’s rooms had been—weight, impression, space, regard—but the rooms themselves were no longer there.

  The mother watched the newly grown child—bigger than her now, a thing she could not carry, ever again—he stood in the air where the den had been, wielding a remote. Though the TV—or whatever else the remote had controlled—was no longer there he stood there staring like it was, stroking buttons to err the channel, raise the volume, on or off. She felt some kind of recognition in this action. She shook her head until it fell away. She went and took Person 2030 by his cold forearm—so thick she could not make her fingers go around— she felt him rip away. She watched him hulk his hands and stamp the ground with clumsy footfalls, cutting holes into the home’s foundation, from which long thin animals reeked and surged, spouting up from where they’d hidden there inside the earth the very instant 2030’s presence popped an exit. She could not believe what all had been underneath them all those hours, what other space inside the musk of earth there was, and now above them where the air above the house had come apart. Long claps of gross wind hung combed over through long stunted portholes chafing sections of other air entirely mostly discolored or strapped with lines. The state had ordered an apparatus around the larger sections, a scaffolding made of semi-transparent polymer—so as to preserve the vast billboard horizon, they said, no eyesores—though you could still see the outlined shape of what was made. A maze, a bent-up aero-ghetto, half-abandoned in its make, the long braches of corridors meant to place order on the shifting shit sky left undone by the mass death of city workers, men like her disappearing mate—they’d begun falling from their ladders, out of skyscraper windows, thrown from trucks, choked by their ties or other costumes, the interstate spun to knots—whole long strips of street once connecting cities now rewired into loops, crammed with battalions marooned cars, sweltered with the bloated bodies of those who could not find a way to climb down, who spent their last days licking the crumbs up from the dash of where the light hid among the sky.

  In some places now, hung on the half-assed aerial architecture, men huddled hidden, using their pants for roofs or flags, the mother saw. Whole colonies had jimmied nooks into the new air, thought most of them, by now, were dead. Others just hung on awnings, apses, little outhung nodules to which they’d tied their necks and jumped. Grappled and grappling. Fat with mucus. Getting groaned. Even without the want, the news would tell you, one could wither through exposure in almost no time, now, with the way the sun could just come on. Count your minutes. Stay inside.

  STAY INSIDE, the nation’s mantra.

  Our house, motherfucker, the mother said aloud into the larger light, is gone.

  In her own face reflected in the milky leather of what that destroyed space she saw the lines she’d been made of all these years there worked or wormed, each readjusting in the seared meat. There was the bruise still on her neck’s bulb from where when she was nine she fell into a hive. The bees had stung her all in the same place, one after another, ignoring all her other flesh; she had swollen that day to an enormous size, but no one else had noticed. Here she was again. Here was her neck now slushed to bands of wriggle, strummed in black chords by the hands that had grown up in her gut—her gut as gushed and gobbling as the thing inside her spread into her, was her, wanted more. Here were her arm follicles all groaning, giving off sound that matched the tone—the tone so omnipresent and gashed and slurping now that it had become a number on the air, pressed on all people. Her pores resembled tree bark, cracked and capped off with old lines of other age and rash and ranting, worn inside with where little bugs embarked, making new homes inside her fat, drawing strips along in rip to meld with other stations on the house. Here were the mother’s tiny teeth—each one that much ouched over the other—screwing her gums deeper when they wanted—aching one another out—the nights of screeching—the endless bleeding—how she cared for them in floss—burned from white to orange to yellow, red to brown to black to gone—and yet here again, like doors. Here were the mother’s birthing thighs nicked fat with sore spots grown wide as doorways, wide as suns. With the proper aim and angle and volition, one could lean into them and disappear.

  I guess what happened then is the mother and the son, they walked, though there was nowhere for them to go. The grass where the neighborhood had once hosted a garden later used for ritual burial had grown so high it seemed a sea, and, surely, inside it, there were a billion bodies lost and rotting, as the stench that rose made wavy lines like heat grade on the hemisphere of breath. I guess the road that had always led out of the front gates to a street that led to shopping centers was now so cracked in so many places that the asphalt resembled undentisted teeth, the gaping mouth of all worn around them which would suck you in alive in stench.

  The mother tried to lead her son into the manhole that hid the gutter from daily vision, down into the branching bastard yearlong labyrinth of pipe connecting all things elsewhere, though here the muck had washed up so thick it made a cake on top that you could stand on, through which in so many places on the surface you could see the reams of those who’d gotten stuck, their half-plunged bodies draped as if relaxing, sponged and nowhere, covered in machine grease and fleas.

  Right.

  So, the mother started one direction then another, turning, turning, aware of leaking gas behind her eyes—gas of nauseas, fear, contusion, gorgons, aping hate leashed in her teeth. She felt mammalian—was she not?—semi-destructive and in sudden want of death haunted by half-hung memories of glee—old warmth hidden in some kind of no longer present feeling. Don’t you feel ashamed? something long beyond her kept repeating, and though she did not yet, she felt she did. Each hill surrounding seemed just to get steeper, each inhale came through a little less. In each place they went she called out for the father in the other name she could remember, no longer concerned by the Terms. She remembered the father’s prior name and could feel it coming out of her pores and through her aspiration. She screamed the name without opening her mouth and in each place they went the father’s name echoed and the walls or air of the places trembled by the gait of what had come out of her in light, and sometimes solid things were turned to liquid by her just by her being and liquid things were dried to sand, and the mother spun her head in circles looking through something wedged between her and her mind, the portholes lodged in the background of the flush of her skin, all inches of her begging in one long sound, like the toning, but inverted, and still the father did not appear.

  In the light Person 811 found himself standing at the mirror shaving his face. He’d been there working the razor for several hours, he knew that. He carried the razor in his skin, where it had been gifted to him by his father, one of no number, who had pulled the blade out of the ground beneath them where they stood. For ye
ars the blade had sung for hours each night vibrating. 811 often felt it in his tongue or through his sternum. He’d run over the coarse skin so many times now there were mowed red indentations in his cheeks, strapped strips of almost bleeding where the flesh still sort of hung together. There was no more hair, and yet he shaved as if his arm did not belong to him.

  811 had burst a woman once, by staring—the blood had spouted through her face—the curd had looped down from her nape and chest like gowns. Her body continued on inside the air that day and never came back. That night the father stayed out in the backyard practicing hypnosis.

  The father had his own ideas regarding god.

  The mirror, likewise, did not seem to hold him. In the cusp around his oddly glowing body there was a room he’d known before. He knew he knew the room but he could not say exactly why or what about it or who had been there once and when.

  The room was blowing snow, or something else. A screen of light white powdered petals poured from the long flat ceiling onto the bed—matter that in other years had fallen on the father in other temperatures and locations and forms. 811 felt his body changing.

  BLINK

  There was a woman on the bed—the same woman he had seen before, from somewhere, though he could not decipher this, as her body had changed too: her body less wrinkled in his presence than under any light.

  By her reflection in the mirror over his shaving shoulder, the father could see the woman mostly did not have a face. That is, she had a head and hair around it. The snow stuck in her hair. It did not melt into the hair, just clung there glinting.