Sky Saw

by Butler, Blake

  Some levels up, in ripping heat, the dark stitched so thick that it was liquid. The child crept along the frame contorting. The texture of the walls along the stairs felt like a person but it had no color and no sound. He continued on until he felt one of the steps go flat beneath him and the floor spread out into a panel on which he could move further in one direction. The meat of his feet screeched underneath his other layers. A certain length into the space he felt his leg muscles going weak, bowing his stride out in long elastic loops. His bones inside him held the tone. Slow fur grew and subsided on the son’s dry inches, making rasp sounds at his teeth, alive.

  Further out the floor’s face seemed to soften—his feet sunk in as if at flesh. He could no longer locate where the stairs had been behind him. He continued into the brim-mouth gaping, sinking further and further in—something stuck sucking at his eyeholes—corrosive pressure bloomed in bolts, stretching and aching at the flesh around his nostrils, between his teeth. There was a slur then—it welled around him—he could not stop going and he could turn away—he could not blink or cry out in help or warning as there was no word in his blood. Vast stinking suction pulled in against him, stretching his face into a mask that had no edge and gave off smoke. He felt the ball-bulb’s pupils pop one after another, screeching holes that warm nails fit in. Micelight spread into his skull with pissy gold. The gouge sunk nausea through him like a yo-yo—it recoiled into his throat—made his tongue harder—bowing his stomach and the small black sacs surrounding.

  He fought to stand. His back cracked in cartoon screwing. He began to cough a white wide light, a light that cut the son inside him as it sparkled through his gut to course the room where as the tingling settled in his shoulders, he saw among the heavy glow how all the space was stuffed with sleeping people, their mottled bodies packed in naked, flesh to flesh conformed and still conforming. Many of them had no faces. Many others had no heads. Even those that did seemed to blur where they were built, their features changing in floods of color and old mud. The room around them also glistened. There were no girders, no corral bins of the walls—only the mass of bodies comprising distance and nearness. The proximity of their tight-knit skins held each other upright and unconscious, writhing in REM. Their eyeseams stung crusted with yellow sleep shit and their veins twitching in their lids and arms and necks. Some of the heads spoke aloud into the air above them, a language shattered, throttling the room. Some of the bodies tried to walk or hide in fear of the child’s entrance, pushing themselves against their neighbor, so crammed their skin owned bright red lines of indentation where they bent. Most seemed not to sense the son at all. They were old or not, and strong or not, and rich or not, and they had every color eye and face and blood. They wore the faces they only wore when they felt that no one could see them. The son could not tell at either end where the splay of bodies ended and the house again began. Their fleshy ocean stretched far back to no edge, except up to the border where he stood, his own unopened blood still gushing from his sockets to his hands. He felt the air inside him growing fatter, sticking to where he was there, his body brimming out around his eyes. He could not see clearly, then less clearly. He could not stop it. He felt him open up his mouth and he conformed.

  The child spent the next 37 years again stunned in an oblivion while around him in the house the house stayed still.

  When he could see again the room was bound, stuffed full of tape. Black film had wrapped around the contents of whatever had filled the air before it, glistening cocoons of several sizes. All terror buildings and bridges and the forests in the same folds. There were several kinds of silent light. All of the light was dark too at the same time. You could see the shape of day as if engraved. The light gyrated from the center of the room, light made of liquid, light made of skin, light made of light that could not hold itself together, and all around the land laid long in all directions flat and scrawled against itself, black but visible to beyond perimeter by the failing of the eye. The child could hear the sound of huge projectors. He began to move and could not move. He was standing hard against a warm thing, a thickened surface, some kind of screen. The pixels of the screen bent where he touched them, harboring the land. He went in the dark to turn around. The walls were nearer now than ever. The room the child was in was the same size as the child was. The land went on and on. He beat and banged against the glass and called her number. He called his number and nothing changed.

  He held his breath and closed his eyes. He found that not breathing felt the same as breathing. He found that through his lids he could still see the same walls in the same room, though in the room now, held inside him, the screen no longer showed all endless lands, but instead now was reflective. The child could see only himself, though it was not like looking on into reflection. When the child moved his arm the other of him did not move. The other of him was much older and was naked and had no head. The man’s arms were swollen where his were childish, the skin all covered in tattoos, each glyph distorted into shapes indistinguishable for what they’d been sometime or ever, the shapes of continents submerged. The child could see straight through the thin pale skin stretched on the man’s chest. All through his organs small things had nested, thousands of them, innumerable white birds. The child could the muscled veinwork crinkling in the birds’ sternums, their tiny marbled spinning eyes. The child began to raise his arms toward the surface and instead the man was moving his older arms, and then the arms were all around him, forming an oval, or a hole. The room’s film wrapped around the child’s face and the man’s face and their fingers and their chests, around their torso and their middles and their leg meat and down their mouths all through their bifurcating encased holes. The edge of the film slit the child’s and the man’s esophagus and trachea, wrapped over organs. Their blood was pouring back and forth all between blood. The child could feel a voice performing through him, moving his tongue too so that he too said the words, not numbers or names now but other symbols, the language written in the book he’d always thought had been only a mirror.

  The child found himself again inside the house. He was standing in a small room without windows or decorations or furniture or paint. The room was hardly larger there than he was. A sound all knotted in his face. He felt his face and it felt older. There was nothing to look into. The room around him was all language: where there meant to be a chair he just saw chair. When he looked down at where he felt his arms were, he saw nothing.

  The child moved back out of the room. He saw it was the door to where before he’d found the stairwell. There were no stairs there. The air felt calm. The child looked at his arms and felt they seemed the same as any hour. He closed the door to the room and locked the door with his long nail.

  The milk of air was winding through the house. It knew the house and wanted through it. It wanted to fill the air of the house and filled the space of the house’s shape itself. Milk all through the years in lather leather held out only by an idea.

  The child came into Person 1180’s bedroom. He moved to stand above her bed. The mother’s face and hair were crusted white. Her cheeks had marks of small incision. The child cracked his knuckles with no sound and watched his mother’s body shake. He could not remember her in younger form, the air among them then, the light of the rooms contained, the many buried spheres of dark all gathered in his linings.

  Through the sheets and through the mother’s gown and through her stomach flesh he could see the flesh all building in her, spreading the space of where it was into the room around them filled with her or someone else. The liquids in her knitting where she wanted and was wanted. The fields inside her silent. He leaned against her. He pressed against her. The sound he’d carried in him from the room of the younger mother changed—turned on its side inside him, pinking the edges of a color captured in the sound hid in the flesh, the ancient color between colors slaved and waving.

  In the room around the child, the walls began to pour, a liquid leaking from the holes the house had
all throughout it onto the air the house contained away from other light. Some of the gush turned into eggs or maggots, sometimes to birds, which flew up and at or into the son’s head, squawking, clawing at his eyes. He tried to shout the mother’s name but instead everything else kept coming out—a shattering sound the son had only ever heard inside him in there eating at the inside of his face.

  Soon it was impossible to tell where the walls ended and floor began, or where the inside met the daylight, where any of these surfaces ended or began, or where the sky above it all claiming the buildings separated them from that, and whatever lay beyond it. Outside the house the ground was skin and ash. All of the surfaces were slurring. The substance pooled around his flesh, its color coming from his holes and joining with it. His new skin stuck to the air. The color covered up his face and arms, the light surrounding. It was above him, and beside him, folding over where he was, though from outside himself he just seemed standing, staring, in a room. It seemed any day becoming. He thought to raise his arms and watched them raise. With the cells grown out each suddenly long as both his arms on every finger he clawed and clawed at the wet but found it felt just like any air and nothing changed.

  Outside the house inside the sound again there coming off it the remaining men mashed sky to skin. It had been ages as the day broke. The space of each body near and nearer at each other in the revolving stroboscopic sudden air all wet with an interlocking hum of digits gripping fast at what they passed, each instant ripped from that one prior, an old dry fire buried in the air. The men could not quite find their way to fit into the house now—the cells kept mixing. The night was crushing. They seemed already in the house. The length of rooms wobbled around them. From all the windows there was mass.

  Around the house for miles the bodies swarmed stuck against it—men conglomerating men, men but not men but bodies full all of men and women only ever, eggs and knotting throttling their flesh. One by one the mass grew larger, hoarding skin sacs pillowed whole. The bodies were strung with muscle, crick and crap redoubled, packed in damaged intestines and flat minds. A massive bulge somewhere goaded on the distance small and sweltered, a gift sent in the guise of sickly rain, beating the house’s seams in waves as had the waters. All gave knocking. There came all knocking in and on around the house and pounding rounder, toward zero. The knocking flickered the lights in every room—it caused all adornment from the walls where walls were never wanted—the paint in sheaths rotting through hues, the pictures crumpled beyond image, the curtains scorched to gowns of ash, bright fibers wriggling where nothing held—it spread all through the soil and pilled it under, inward, crumpling the land and calling out.

  The bodies swam and spread in and over one another, pushed inside their common flesh. They were nearly all one body throbbing, a cortex spread and slurred upon the day in heat. The body had so many mouths and eyes and ear holes—there was so much they could take in—their nostrils sniffing up what they could force, their fingers wriggling for some hole. Their pressure piled up around the house and rutted at their skin strips coming open. A hulking heat pooled up on certain scalps, scorching the hair off of their arms. All of their voices stuttered out at once, counting aloud, each human want they chewed through, One one-thousand, two.

  For years the father walked in darkness. There was nothing about the way. The field was low and flat and he could not see it. No matter how far or fast or which way in the dark he moved it was the dark.

  The father ate the sweat off of his hands. In his mind he imaged catalogs of food he’d eaten all the years in all the other rooms and he ate them all again. Once he had eaten the food out of his mind it was no longer there and could not be eaten any further, though it was stored in rungs hid in his fat. The father felt the fattest he had ever. The fat was all around him.

  Through the darkness, fat made sound. At first from far away it sounded like the tone did—pearly and piercing, bone on bone pummeling skull—though as he grew closer in wherever it was familiar music, even if he could remember why or how. It colonized the light it, made it layered, layered the layers, split them wide.

  The father followed the sound for further years again inside the same space until he was standing at a screen. The screen was silver, comprised of private light. The light was wider than his arms, wider than the space of wet he’d been contained in, and than the container of that wet, and that beyond. He went to move inside the space to touch the silver and found his arms were stuck hard in his sleeves. He could not move. The room fit down around him, sucking his cells. He closed his eyes and saw the silver shudder. There were ten of him, then even more. There were more of him before him in the silver than he could count, each of them more like him to him than he was himself. They had bodies he remembered being, arms and faces. Even when they did not resemble him exactly he understood. The bodies were all around him touching. They were talking. It was so all at once there was no inch. It felt like sleeping. He went again to open up his eyes.

  The room was dark. There were walls there, stairs beneath them lit with ovals. He could move now, but only downward, as where before there’d been the screen there was what seemed by touch to be a ceiling but in fact was just the sky.

  The father continued down the stairwell in the dark until he found a door. It was black and locked and had no number. The space behind the door was sort of humming.

  He leaned and spoke into the keyhole. He said Hello, I am the father. His voice felt weird, somewhat like him but quite much thicker, cracking at the edges. As he said the words he felt them leave, sucked again into no sound. His head was wet and cheeks and ass were wet and holes were wet and he seemed shrunken. He touched his jaw as if to make it go again. His touching fleshes gave off sparks that gave him words.

  The man said I am sorry I could not remember but now I remember many things I think and as time progresses I will continue to remember more things and there will be more things to remember.

  I have been only here forever.

  I will know what I was meant to be.

  The door would not open. He pulled and pulled it. He called and begged and called the names and tried again. He pulled at the door and banged at the door and shook himself against the face of the door unchanging until there was nothing left about his fingers or his hands.

  He turned around and found the world.

  Inside the house the small door to the stairwell opened and a man came in. He could not remember what had just happened in the body of the father. In the hall the air was wet. There was so much heat there, like a furnace, though there was no one in the room. The walls were running thinly with clear liquid that made it glint wide with the light. There was no mother and no child. There was no noise of people or the men there and through the window the day was calm.

  In the light the man seemed clean. He had been upholstered with new skin and hair. He had a smile that stretched the corners of his faces into small abscesses in which mud and rot had took to clinging.

  If the version of the house built by the mother from her body had held a picture of the man we know as Person 811 in it somewhere, which it didn’t, this man standing in the front hallway, he would look nothing like that other man. Some would say, then, these two could not be the same person. Some would say this discrepancy inside a story could cause a problem. Like how one would expect two cars driving at one another from in opposing direction on the same straight road to be piloted by different drivers. Another idea to consider is how when a furnace turns itself on in a house, whether there is someone home or not, there is a clicking sound and there’s a glint.

  This man who seemed to have to be the father, Person 811, whoever else, despite the problem in his appearance, he couldn’t even spell his current thought, though he had it tattooed on his knuckles, between his teeth. He tried to walk along the hallway. He had his arms steadied out beside him as if learning. He was saying something he couldn’t make come out quite right. The words seemed strung inside his mouth and blinking as if some r
heumy cord of Christmas lights, his eyes slightly bulging from his head in bulbs of water. His feet left puddles on the carpet, puddles in which no reflection of the air around him shone. The man waddled past the small door that led into the kitchen and continued onto straight to the wall. He banged his skull and heard no sound.

  At the wall—where before there’d been a space to go into the house, for all those years—he went on walking heavy with his forehead pressed flat and firm into the fiber. The new wall was affixed with a mirror, same as the one he remembered from another room aged in his life, though never before here. The man looked head on into his own face, the other of him there embedded. He looked at the symbols of the language burned on his skin and flexed his muscles. He did not remember having ever worn the clothes in the reflection—a black shawl, a wire bib, blood down his arms—or having worn clothes at all ever for that matter. He touched his reflection’s face and then his face. He put his thumb into his mouth to taste the thumbprint and see if it could matched the pattern of his gums. He looked into the man’s eyes and the man looked back.

  Their shared expression was one like hope.

  The man spent the evenings with his ear against the house, feeling with fingers in the ridges that there would be something to draw in and hold near. This is not what he’d expected. This was not the color of the carpet. This was not his head growing all this hair. There was so much moving in there among the insulation, and yet he had darker color in his eyes. He the mother’s mistakes and misgivings in their home’s creation down scribed in long illegible music down in his arms. The notes read one way on the paper, and another way when spoke aloud. The reading made his hair grow long. There was so much the man wanted to shout aloud into the house after whoever, but something in him ate the language out of his mouth before he could ever have it go, or other times the words would get caught behind his eyes and shoot off guns there, black cracking igloos of birth pellets. He could feel them in there bugging, lapping the lens curve, gagging up.