Blake Butler - There Is No Year

The man touched the mother on the arm. Certain of the man’s fingers were very cold — as if they’d been in an ice chest somewhere, years — while others in the same grip were crispy, warm. The mother did not recoil from the strange touch. He looked into the mother’s eyes. His pupils resembled little stickers, the kind placed on placards when art is sold.

The man spoke toward the mother’s skull. He said his wife needed, now, please, to use the bathroom. The woman, behind her veil, looked straight ahead.

The mother tried to say something and then could not and felt embarrassed again, rushed, and so nodded and followed the man out of the smallest room inside her home into a slightly larger room inside her home. The mother and the man together turned around and saw the woman still there in the son’s bathroom, standing staring at them, arms tight at her side.

Outside the room the man stepped up and pushed the door closed. He turned back to the mother, smiled.

The mother heard the woman turn the lock.

Outside the bathroom, partitioned cleanly, the man and the mother stood spaced feet apart. The mother thought to say something but could not think of what or how. The man stood with his hands clasped in front of him and turned to look at the wallpaper. He leaned his head near to the wall. The mother watched him watch. His gaze was rigid and unblinking, staring straight on into surface. He seemed to be reading something. The mother moved to look as well. The wallpaper was a deep purple with deep purple ridges and tiny buttons in relief. The ridges’ texture was rather soothing. The mother felt her body limp a little. The skin around her eyes grew moist.

She was not crying, not exactly.

The man was radiating heat. He had the smell of grass about his breadth, strong arms like the man who’d fixed the mower— and like that man, this man, too, was gorgeous, if with a rash upon his cheek . A sudden stink of slit grass and motor rubbings made the mother’s body lump. She started to ask something, blushing, but her mouth was closed and time had passed.

Behind them, in the bathroom, the other woman made a sound. A shrill, quick beep, a mouth noise, as if emulating some alarm, or some detector. There was a kind of pitter-patter. Then breaking glass, and wood against wood. A light showed underneath the door’s lip. The woman’s ever-moaning, saying words. The beep continued, high and awful, rerepeated, each iteration slightly shifting, until, in the mother’s ears, the noise became to have a frame — began to take a shape of language there around it. The beeping, at her head, became a name. The son’s name. Son’s name. Beeping. The woman making, again and again there, the title of her child. The word she’d placed on him from nowhere, that had occurred as lesion in her sleep. The woman screamed the name into the walls among the houselight, in the smallest of all rooms, curdling the air. Beeping. Beeping. Name. Name. Name. Name. The mother felt the blood inside her turning hard. And just as quick, the name becoming something other: becoming ways she could not recognize — the utter shifting off from where it’d held him and slipping therein off into a struggling string. Not a name but something troubled. Reaching. Burble. The scream so loud by now it shook the house.

The hair along the mother’s arms was singing. She closed her eyes and swallowed in the sound. Then, just as quick again, there was no sounding. Silence — or something so loud or strung out there was nothing to be heard. The house as still as any.

The mother turned around. She moved toward the door where in the smallest room the woman was not moving— so still it could not be . She knocked politely on the door’s face, then immediately again.

The woman did not answer. A bigger silence. Some nothing larger than the house. The mother opened up her mouth — and again there came the beeping, this time louder, jostling the door, her hair, the ground. The shaking made the mother dizzy, and yet she could not stop — she could not close her mouth.

The mother turned toward the man — the man right there behind her, breathing.

She’s sick, the man said again. His voice was clear among the noise. Sick, he said, distinctly. He did not seem concerned.

He splayed his hand on the wallpaper, singling fingers.

This is words, he said.

The beeping felt, under the man’s voice, somehow very far away.

The man ran his thumb along some lines. He read aloud in a strange language, what the bumps said. His skin glistened on his head.

Under the speaking, by the beeping, the mother heard the broken glass inside the locked bathroom getting crunched, as if under some other bigger object, like the woman, another wanting mother, one day to be . More jostling around, cabinets slamming, spraying water. There was the sound of sawing or other friction on the wall between the tiny bathroom and the son’s. The mother spoke into the door’s face. She tried the handle with her hand. The door, for sure, would not open. A door in her own home.

The man behind her, rubbing the household, its wallpaper, read aloud another line. These words came through him as more beeping, forming chorus, though now the mother, inside her, could understand. She could hear the voice as if it were her speaking. She fought within her to form breath. Doors inside the house. Doors in other buildings. Windows, vents.

The mother turned inside the sound to shake the bathroom door’s knob with all her fingers. She tried to think of the woman’s name so she could call it out, then realized she did not know the name at all. This woman could have any name.

She could be Janice or Doris or Euphrasie or Kathleen. The mother had this list of names inside her again, female: other mothers . She could be Mary Anne, Sally, Barbara, Arlyn, Mary, Jan; she could be Grace, M., Linda, Regina, Anna, Annie Ruth, Phyllis, Polly, Addie, Afeni, Cherry, Salomea, Joan, Komalatammal, Doreen. . the names came on and on, in spinning, as for combinations on a lock. The mother tried to say the same name as her name, or her mother’s, or the father’s or the son’s, but she found she could not recall any of those names. Her breath sizzled inside her. She leaned into the door. She squeezed.

These walls aren’t even here, the man said behind her.

The man took her by her hand.

The mother started to rip herself away but the man’s hands’ grip was strong and now the fingers were all warm — blistering, even. She felt wet all up in her buttocks and her navel.

The man stretched the mother’s arm and placed her hand against the wallpaper. The ridges slightly writhed. The man’s gone eyes.

Feel, he said.

She felt.

the house there all around her, laughing

all through the roof and walls, the sound

in light, the child’s name rerepeating

names in names in names on names

The mother loved the couple. She wanted them to have the house.

She wanted them to move in and live there right now. There was room. They could share the space together while she and the father looked and found another house. Or, perhaps, the mother mentioned, with her eyes closed tight inside her head, all of them could live together in this air together. They could be two mothers and two fathers, or whatever. All of them in one.

That is ridiculous, to think that, the mother said aloud just after, and yet knew some small to large part of her meant what she had said, and did not wish she didn’t. She could not remember the names of even just the people in her family, much less anybody else. All of these words together in the mother’s head, and still the beeping. A furry evening, all this light.