Sky Saw

by Butler, Blake

  The father opened his mouth again to try to say something to the woman, but she was older now; instead his mouth ejected reams of infant birds. The birds were slow and small and not like birds then, covered in a gel. They shat long white strings of old light as they flew up; they flew straight into the wall at once; they died. Their feathers fell upon his body, stuck against him, glued down with his ejaculate, still kind of strumming with future flew. They stuck too to the woman until he and she were under so much writhing neither could see where he or she began. Their muscles throttled in the mask. They shat so fast. The room began filling up with wet between the fiber, more gush and slick pushed from all their holes. All ages fried.

  The woman’s mouth said another question but Person 811 could not hear it through the gunk, the tone inside it making shriek. The beef inside him beating.

  One massive hauling on the woman’s chain inside the downy lather ripped the woman all of a sudden through the wall. Then it was dark. No matter how he struggled to flap and rise like what he’d seen come from her thereafter, he could not inside himself find hold.

  The new men had to swim from several miles up, bleeding, to drag Person 811 out of where he lay, his body pussed and pulled apart and overflowing. The men had been employed. The men were not alive in certain senses. Where they’d lost their heads they’d been affixed with false heads made of leather, skin, and plastic, to give the appearance of having heads. The false heads bore great resemblance to Person 811.

  Several sections of the father had become dislodged from the father in the toning, the elongation of his cells. The fleshy segments floated off among the liquid held to his body only now by bits of stringy flesh, vibrating with a language. The men collected these eruptions into a film sac—a bit of ear, a lash, a prism, something wet the father had swallowed years before—though some of the bit had washed out so far that they would not be found in time. The reconstruction of the father would therefore have to go on as best it could.

  Underwater, the men lashed the father to a table and spun him upwards through the clear. They fit the father in a van. They drove the van into another van. This second van knew where to go. The van’s driver had touched the father on the eye once, years before, in a gold room. The van’s second-in-command had hid inside a blanket in the father’s father’s trunk for many months, breathing the same air as the father when the father’s father drove him to and from the school. The father’s father had never driven him anywhere but the school, and, well, once, to the ocean once to see where everyone they ever knew had drowned, to see the long intestines washing on the shoreline, and the massive birds growing more massive in their feeding.

  The van’s fuel had once been inside the father also, but not via the manner you might assume.

  The van itself had once been used for rape, and would again, and would again.

  Inside the van, Person 811 lay with his head down against the floorboards with the human moaning of the road.

  In another kind of dark the men massaged the father’s face. They stretched certain parts of him to yawning. They filled in the holes in with several kinds of putty and perfume orbs. The insides of Person 811 were now pastel. There men inserted devices in the father, items—none of which by sight or function they could name—inscribed text and digits on the father’s cells and sperm and organs, grafted buttons—then the father was sewn up.

  Person 811 was made to stand and laugh and say nice things, though his new tongue kept getting in the way.

  When he could shake hands with satisfaction, the men took him to visit the naked woman’s grave. She had perished in his pleasure, they explained. Pleasure had been administered, please recall. For your enjoyment. The enjoyment of the pleasure of it. The greatest light. Now if you don’t mind: sign this form. And this form. And spit up here. And as well here now make the creaming. Stamp, initial, spit up, making creaming, sign. Checks must made out to the Absorber. Keep your eyes open.

  The men watched Person 811 kiss the ground. They watched him lick the woman’s headstone and thank and thank it. Under the headstone was just putty. The woman had been absorbed or reassigned. Everything, they said, would be okay.

  Okay? the father said. He could not taste it. Okay? Okay?

  They pointed up.

  They handed him a special pair of high-grade zoom bifocals that fit intensely to his whole face.

  The word was written on the sky.

  There in the weeks I came to know my wife again, the air was made of liquid ash

  You could walk for weeks and step through windows and still just everything was old

  Spumes of shit or wingbeat would come floating on some shudder

  But for the most part, the house, the yard, in everybody—we knew black

  We lanced around in squirmy currents cutting transitions for our hands

  It wasn’t funny, nor would it stop

  In the ash you let your eyes and arms go and you would end up somewhere or another

  You could just roll around and release shit

  No one would know

  Some nights I’d turn the a/c down or leave the fridge wide open and the black rooms would then turn harder, into ice

  Then there’d be rungs that formed up in the transom

  Then you could climb

  I’d slunk through all of this alone

  By the time I’d learned the manner of the ladder there was lather in the den

  There were shapes among us and we could feel them

  We could have them, or be had

  I was raped in so many positions I can’t remember by things I also can’t remember

  It felt like walking

  Soon the long waves sunk off from the houses and on the air was left no light

  From the dark rhythm I cut a woman’s body

  My wife of me was made of night at first, whereas I have only ever been all cold

  Her voice would pour out of my skin asleep for hours

  She had such undoing ideas

  She had a talisman that gave off weather

  There was so much between us we could touch and so much milk

  Right now I can remember I am the father in this book

  Right now, regardless, I remember, though soon again soon I will not

  In this scum I’d built the house that would be ours

  I built it just by blinking

  It was right there

  Just years and years and fucking years inside this house there counting

  Moving in from room to room in no clean light

  Often my wife was not around at all, or she was watching from somewhere I could not feel her

  I could not feel anything

  My skin would stick to certain surfaces for days and I would wait

  Wait and ask and look and listen, peeling slowly, where I could

  Watching the slow slim building of the soft house stacking forward up into the day

  Once the current floor had flown up from me higher, I would not think of it again ever at all

  Inside this house I could sleep as long as all I wanted

  Which was almost always

  My house to me only ever one flat level, as my father’s had been

  Inside the night, the air light compiling, the burst and lift, the sloping ground

  The night we made the child along the air between us I’d been mostly overwhelmed

  The air was crumbed and creamy and I’d been spinning with the scissors

  You had to get at it from an angle to make the rooms things again that would not burst

  I’d slipped up and racked my forehead three times

  My wife was not concerned

  She’d been talking to the rathole, where I swear I saw her forcing the best of all our food—the white pecans and goose hair

  I swear she had it in for both of us

  As I did too

  I would tape her hands together for our sleeping but by midnight she’d chewed through

  She took to knitting a
parachute in case the world slurred sideways or inverted

  There were so many things to come, she swore

  My eyes by now were mostly swollen lids

  I walked in the patterns I most remembered to our bedroom and rolled myself into the moth-made bed

  For once I found the way to sleep by simply sleeping

  I hid inside me in the world

  I’d half cracked a dream of false condition—free fast food, water parks and mega-money—when I felt my wife’s tongue in my cheek

  It moved around inside me as if searching, as if after some compartment I had not found, the most mashed part of me stored white inside it, some lick I’d managed to keep mine

  Her tongue touched my own tongue and made me speak a language I’d never heard

  Those old tongues in me all full of other people

  My wife there all above me in no light

  We had been together for exactly fourteen days through all the banging

  She ate my breath and held my hands

  She let her tongue continue slit so far down deep into my throat I could feel it coming out the far end

  I could feel it squeegee through my balls, the halls of ugly others of me all inside them, also speaking

  Knowing all of our old names

  It folded through me like a waking

  Where I would go to be alone

  Very soon our skins had changed

  I heard the sound of metal drumming

  The walls inside my sleep were slurred and pocked with goiters

  There was a swan, a goose, a chicken—all of them pecking at my head from the inside—while on the out my wife would shriek and she was in me and I was in her—so

  Then was someone other also too

  My wife swelled up only from one point, her private center, while the rest of her curled dry

  This was all within a matter of an hour

  Her front became a thing against which I could lean

  Then it became more than that

  I could forget that I was there, though when I did this my wife would try to drink my body

  My blood and such shit

  The other of us wanted mass

  Each inch had its own inches to derive and to comply to

  My wife gave it all the rest that we had saved

  She ate the ash that shook off from the ceiling

  She made me go out into the yard and dig up a certain kind of nit—a thin translucent nit no bigger than an idea

  The nit had a massive nest of eggs just like it, in its image, as were we now

  My wife gave each one a little pet name before she slurped them through her sternum to the child

  The nits replicated and came back out of her through where her holes were

  As had I once been created, as had you

  There were webs or nests all through the bedroom and beyond

  This was all within a matter of an hour

  One then another

  My wife tried to hug me to her chest

  I said Ouch a little, and she echoed it back at me

  There were new lines in her eyelids and what beneath them

  She was already unfolding

  I felt my ribcage folding inward as the form inside her stomach kicked me in my own

  She lashed and gnashed and shrieked up steam shaped like my face

  I kept the door between us mostly always after

  I slept with knives and mirrors and a bell

  I heard her in the old rooms brimming over

  I heard the child inside her coming out

  There was a smell and some kind of gonging

  I couldn’t see, I closed my eyes

  My body moved me through the house

  I felt my each inch spreading out

  There was more of me than I could need in any instant

  There were more years then

  There was the new edge of the night

  Inside the house Person 2030 sat silent with his eyes closed scrawling drawings of himself. In each picture he’d made his gut appear enormous, like his mother’s, filling up most any page—another person lodged inside him, like his mother. In some pictures the person was hair-covered, while in others it had no openings.

  The child had made hundreds of copies of himself. Each one he named with longer numbers that weren’t numbers. The paper filled the room. It caked around his face and made it hard to breathe. There was so much paper. The pages that appeared blank were fat with certain words where the child’s sweat had kissed against it. His arms were throbbing. He could not stop drawing. His stomach in the pictures kept on growing and in his real stomach something moved—an odd shape shaking through his inseams, against his blood—he felt it stretch up along his body to his finger.

  He bit his finger, sucked the foam. Among the mottled knots of flesh and tissue, there were a set of keys, a keyboard organ made of organ. The keys each had a different word imprinted on them. Each of the keys, when played, made the same sound. The child touched notes and felt his fingers burning. He felt the notes inside his head. For each note there were endless others at the same time in it bending what the note had meant to mean, and yet once played there was no way to unplay it.

  Outside his shape, he heard the other sound, the shrieking of the tone, again beginning—a tone, he realized, made of every sound he’d heard or uttered here so far and so too would utter then in years to come; these words that made him, in the book, and all the books read or dreamt of as they passed the words into the book of him in its creation. He’d heard the tone many times before but never in a room here by himself. It struck the air so loud it shook his body to its strands—he could see straight through his skin—his skin now newly rashed in bumps that matched the pattern found on each of the bodies of him that he’d drawn, and too the bodies in the bodies growing, written in their 2D lard. He moved through the room’s light toward the sound. At first it seemed to come from one direction then it spread out into spirals. In the spirals the child moved. He wobbled through the kitchen to the hallway where down the hall he saw the door.

  He had been told not to touch this door. The door would burn him, the mother warned in her sleeping. The door would eat your mind. It is terrified of everything. Along the hall the child bonged back and forth between parallel walls. He shook inside himself where the blood inside him bonged along also. There were pictures on the walls of earth from far away and overhead but he elected not to see.

  The door had not a knob now but this did not stop him from making it come open.

  Behind the door he saw the private stairwell where his mother once with another man had hid, though now instead of down the stairs went up.

  Each stair had a unique symbol traced in dark epoxy.

  The child could not quite see as he ascended. He could not see the frame of the house or its condition or the way the space around him stayed one size as he moved forward on its air. The stairwell seemed much thinner than it should be in some places, so thin that the son had to turn profile and scrunch against his side, dragging himself upward using his convulsive muscles to draw himself along the banister in shifts. Sometimes the stairs became automatic and the son could hold on and ride clean.

  At various points along the incline the stairwell opened into rooms. The child came upon a room swarmed with tiny flies. They were coursing over objects, like a long land. He moved into them full, regardless, as if he knew why they were there. He recognized the patterns in the layers of them. He listened to them breathe. They caked around the son’s face until there was no face left, sucking, until the insides of the son flowed dry. Then all again he was ascending, stairs beneath him. His ass and legs already burned.

  The markings of each stair’s face burned low with an old glow, each feeding some form of murmuration through his legs. The son had no reason to go on upward but he knew he could not go down—there was no remainder of the stairs that had brought him to this level—and with each step the well behind him disappeared.

>   Further on the stairwell opened onto a large and long white building, higher than he could crane his head to see to look. The building had thick curtains closed and glowing in each window, silhouettes. He could not find an entrance into the building. He pressed against it. He moved his hands all through it as through milk. Someone was reaching on the far side for him, then he was falling. Then he was ascending again on the stairs, and soon another landing opened down into a house, into a room like the child’s mother’s bedroom had been as a child herself.

  She was there sleeping. She seemed the same age as the son now. Her hair was long and clean and blonde. Her eyes were open as she slept. She watched the son move there above her. He tried to speak and he could not. Through the walls a screeching filled the old air, like the prior tone but backwards, as if captured in his blood. The girl smiled. Above the bed he touched his mother’s face with his face and together they drew air and then again the son was no longer in the room there but still ascending and wished he wasn’t but he was. There were so rooms many the son could not remember each, one after the other. On each the son could not remember how he kept finding his way back to the stairs. There was always more blank space and further eras.