Scorch Atlas
Page 11
LIGHT
What where would function in such luster? I’d nearly given up. There were voices in the muck somewhere, but none that I could need. Our roof laid miles beneath now, no doubt, you couldn’t see up or on or out beyond the window. You couldn’t hear a shudder in the grease shifts, in the unlidded clap of utter. It came at once, not some intrusion, but a bouquet opened over all. The light spread through the layers laid already. It drank the water; lit the dust; it curled ants and aphids up to nothing; it refracted through the glass of our gone rooms; split a billion ways reflected off the sheen of teeth; ripped through the glitter and the clots of blood and meat and shit in streams of staticked color—colors in eons, color gloaming, one hue for every inch we’d leaked. It burst at the center of somewhere I had not been forever—spread without motion, spread and spreading. Its skin so bright you couldn’t see it. Its knees so sharp you couldn’t walk. The house came open. The yard was not there. The street was not there. There was light. The light rained down. It came down on us. It came in all through and through.
BLOOM ATLAS
SURFACE(S)
—Would the slick sock of the ocean please consume me and not remember? Up here the sog goes on forever. Shopping malls and shooting ranges and apartment buildings deep beneath. A wronged froth foaming over our years together, awaiting evaporation under human sky. Now ripped to ribbons. Backyards buried. Our mottled sun. The crumbs we called plantations. Cemeteries weathered to no headstone. All my brothers and their women and their children’s children unmarked and eye to eye. The ocean’s face: a thick lick of grime and white rice and spit and petrol and old blood. Somehow I am up here. Somehow I am unsplit. Throat ripped in undone cattle. Skin tanned so thick I’ll never feel.
DIVE
—I crack the crust open with my forehead. The water slaps my chest, succumbs me under. Sludge slick through my hair. Grit gummed up in my nostrils. Cold metal in my brain. With the slow sling of my blubbered arms I stroke along the lip. The wet so warm it’s close to breathing as on long August Georgia nights. Scum of green and lipids brimming, algae afghans worn on dead waves. I swear some of this pulp has vision, heartbeat, teeth. Open my own eyes underwater and blink into the depths with bubbling cheeks. Beneath there lies the city, chewed in chocolate eruption, crystallized beneath a billion gallons. Perhaps in god’s saliva, having drooled down in endless strings. Or perhaps his boohoo, stung, his translucent elbows and his knees, scabbed and wretched for our error, our soft days gobbling, furrowed, squeamed. Held breath burns. I am something. Way down, the billboards peel in blistered strips, shedding their color to the seahead. Face of a gone woman floating toward me, eyes as big as minivans. COCA COLA. ELECT FOR GOVERNOR. 1-800. WE BUY HOMES. Through the buildings’ windows there are rooms. Within each room, filled up airtight—dust, carpet, lost hair, water cups, unopened mail, microscopics—the space in which small bodies negotiated, paddled, swore.
ON SWIMMING PAST OUR HOUSE
—Where Dad and I would wrestle. Where each night for a week before the raining my mom removed her brand new inset teeth, after a bird had smashed her first ones trying to fly straight down through her throat. Where in those last days I woke up choking on grasshoppers, the ceiling cracking. Water gushing from my ears. Snails in my breakfast. Sores in between my toes. I watched my father’s face lose its pixels by the hour. My mother sweating blood and leaving spots on sofa pillows, the fridge, new patterns for our wallpaper. The cat having learned an awful language. Unlike others, I chose sleep. Passing now, I kick to swoop down deep enough to touch our roof, but each time I dive I make it only so far, an arm’s length away before my lungs bunch and I must kick back numb and bubbling overhead.
RESURFACE
—Coming up I find again the water’s face a rind. I bump and fumble with my back. The water wants me nearer, sucked into its gut. The mustache hairs on my top lip tremble. My brain goes Jell-o hot. I press and push, my blood babooning, until I birth a tunnel through the mud. My screaming lungs: a tulip blooming in fast-forward in reverse. Overhead the sky seems another surface, all reflection—as in, in the sky, I see the water. And there within it, me, muck-covered, huffing. I see myself seeing myself and we blink together, open-mouthed. I am older than I remember. I shaved my head once. I also had a child. We microwaved store milk in the bottle to make it warm. He’d coo and suck and sputter. I can feel him stretch inside me sometimes, reappeared back in there, unborn. Sometimes there is only color. I try to focus on my stroke: skull—slump—scissor—doggy paddle. My muscles ache in fever, sneezing. In want of something summered somewhere. I will go on until whenever.
BLOOM
—I will go on until the ocean spins and shoots its water in a funnel up to god. We here climb it—we now? yes, we—fast and fisting, scenting something overhead—scorch of several summers? Wilting forests? Surely bleach. When our tongues hang out they sizzle. A buzzing scums our eyes—we who? who, we? my brothers, my baby, my, my, my sunning hum.
More than a mile above, the earth is made of milk and foam. I see my mother in an outline made of pummel on the sea. Her rotten hair spindling up into me. Her goddamn hair. I can not breathe. I can not mumble. I climb higher into the thinning and turn around to look again. Her body shrunk into a compass, each node stirring soft spots in my mind—
N (at her temple)—the rose thatch where, once young, I’d etched my chest, the marks still clear even now when observed in certain light;
E (her tired left arm)—that cross from church just downwind which they’d lifted off and painted black just before the sky invoked;
S (around her bloated toes)—Dad, his skin blood now, his blood skin, buried somewhere in the tide;
W (her right hand’s chubby fingers)—I could see nothing in this direction.
Somewhere below I hear the moan of those left over, rendered in tongues already half-forgotten or undone. I can recall the taste of years of toothpaste, our frozen dinners, the running rain, only when our sky height makes me vomit. Come back down, the them below us say. We’ll have you this time. We will breed. I shake the echo off and look ahead, focused on the rhythm of my sizzling sweat to kill all and any other sound.
HOW THE BIRDS FLEW
—these newer birds, each made of metal, thorn and neon. They buzz around us by the hundred, snagging our skin in magnet. I can feel their nuzzle deep inside me, their squawk becoming logic, ways I know. Their shit drips down my white thighs with such weight I can barely further climb. I go dizzy. I see colors, hues no crayons had ever been. The others lost above me screaming. I swing my fists. I pop birds out of the air in rattle, their carcasses hailing into nowhere.
When I can breathe again, I climb on, my lungs humming with human dust. I hear the others, yes, the others, ahead of me up there, already grand. As I get higher it’s cold enough to numb my head. Here the clouds hang thick in filament. The sun a gummy gunk and running. My sore skin peels. Under my skin, another something. With the voices gone and no others, I only briefly feel afraid.
OPERATIVE
—UP is on no compass. DOWN I’d have to learn to disregard.
FURTHER
—I slip a sheet of self under my tongue and taste tar. I can no longer see my mother. I climb to a clearing. She’s still right there, her bloated body continental—eyes a hundred evenings wide—her voice—Remember the sky that morning? The way it cracked up as an egg? The foam gushing out of everywhere: the gutters, the children’s eye holes, the broken backbone of the sea? Her rhythm pummels through me, moistening my brain with ugly dew. Yes, come back down, she snores into my stomach. The blood piddles and divides. Come back and all will be well. We will learn. Behind those oceanic eyes, though, such burn. Such unclear terror, laced with sting. I feel her weather. Fan her faint. I feel her finger in my knee. My one, I swear, I promise, please… I turn and continue higher. I climb until the land is covered under curdle. Until I can’t hear her singing and my head is full of pop. The air around me in a bonnet. The strum inside me stru
ng with color. No nothing but a gleam. I could wrap my arms around it—I could breathe it in—I did.
COMA OCEAN
—Some morning I will wake up. Come morning I’ll wake up and. And the summer in my elbows. Sun at my elbows, stuttered open. Some morning I will stand up and the floor will swish beneath my feet. My new feet, bruised and washed white. White I wouldn’t recognize, imagine. Imagine home. Some homecoming. I will move into those lost rooms, wet and depthless, and I will sit against the wall. I’ll sit with the wall and watch the years unwrap a second span. My head. My lips unwrapped and chapped wide open. My colors spilling lather in the reek. Somewhere sandwiched solid something. Zeroes. Greased. Goodnight. Hello.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Thank you more than thanking to my parents, L.D. and Barbara, two unmatchables, without whom…
Thank you to my sister, Morgan, who knows, and to Justin.
Thank you to Heather for the time, and for our air.
Thank you to Zach and Jonathan for being, and believing.
Thank you to Michael Kimball, Keith Montesano, Ryan Call, for the wise eyes.
Thank you to Derek White, Robert Lopez, and Peter Markus, each a brother.
Thank you to Jesse Ball and Ken Sparling.
Thank you to Ken Baumann, Sean Kilpatrick, Mike Young, Sam Pink, Gene Morgan, Shane Jones, Jamie Iredell, Matthew Simmons, Lily Hoang, Chris Higgs, Justin Taylor, and Adam Robinson.
Thank you to a lot of other people also, whose names could fill another book.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Blake Butler is the author of the novella EVER (Calamari Press). He edits ‘the internet literature magazine blog of the future’ HTML Giant, as well as two journals of innovative text: Lamination Colony, and concurrently with co-editor Ken Baumann, No Colony. His other writing has appeared in The Believer, Unsaid, Fence, Dzanc’s Best of the Web 2009, as well as shortlisted in Best American Nonrequired Reading and widely online and in print. He lives in Atlanta, and blogs at gillesdeleuzecommittedsuicideandsowilldrphil.com.
EVER
A NOVELLA BY BLAKE BUTLER
CALAMARIPRESS.COM
Copyright © 2009 by Blake Butler
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except in the case of short passages quoted in reviews.
This is a work of fiction. All names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination. Where the names of actual celebrities or corporate entities appear, they are used for fictional purposes and do not constitute assertions of fact. Any resemblance to real events or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.
Design: bleachedwhale.com
Published by
featherproof books
Chicago, Illinois
www.featherproof.com
Library of Congress Control Number: 2008940499
eISBN : 978-0-982-58086-8
Set in Quadraat