Blake Butler - There Is No Year

Each time the father hit a certain specific combination in cohesion with another input in the buildings’ many cubicles and aisles, inside another room, on floors beneath the ground, a mouth set in a white flat wall spit out another black and gleaming box.

In the front room, through the open door, the son saw how ants were coming in. The son thought he’d shut the door but it was open. The key was no longer in his hand. There were hundreds of ants, thousands of them, clustered in weird lines along the carpet, headed up the stairs — new crudded skeins of running cells — black — like glistened mobs of moving mold. They were everywhere, innumerable. They streaked in long neat lines up the house walls and into cracks riddled with holes. They made a buzzing sound like bees.

The son stood in the flood of influx with them swarmed around his legs. The son could not unfocus his attention. He was staring at his cell phone, which he’d taken from the other son. The handset had shifted color. It was gray now — gray as gross birds, birds which for weeks had flocked at the son’s window, peering, chipping their whittled beaks on the long glass, wanting in, chirrup-chirrup-chirruping.

The son’s phone had made 488 new outgoing calls in the last half hour. One specific number had been dialed 237 times. The son did not recognize the numbers. Some of the numbers did not have enough digits to be completed. Some of the numbers had digits that weren’t digits. The phone had also received a handful of calls incoming but the numbers were in encoded scripts the son could not decipher. All of the numbers that had been stored in the son’s phone — his mother’s cell phone, the house number, his grandmother’s house (the grandmother dead now and her number disconnected), 411 and 911, the number of the people who’d lived next door at the house they’d lived in before — where a little boy that looked a lot like the son had lived and he and the son had played together every day and the son had spoke into that child’s head, giving into him the words he could create outside his body, overflowing from his silent book, until soon thereafter, in the spreading, the son got sick and swollen up and blue, bedridden, and then the neighbor was not allowed to see him and then they moved — all those familiar digits had been replaced with one single listing. It hurt the son’s eyes to try to read the number. The phone’s display was glowing very brightly.

The son stuttered upstairs toward the hall. The son crushed thousands at his feet. With each ant he crushed another thousand, each of them with eyes. All the eyes he crushed stuck to him, staying.

Certain of the stairs had been eaten through so completely the son felt his foot go through, sucked into the house.

The son felt sick. His eyes were spinning. The son bumped and fell against the wall, raining a sheath of loose ant matter off the drywall, off the layered phrase of paint, each layer making the house that much smaller , along the stretch of dry partitions, creating space, the ants made veins toward the ceiling — webwork. The veins throbbed and fed the bodies into the overhead. The ants had ruined the hallway carpet, slurred in the fibers, drumming, gushed. They’d dug a rut around the bottom of the son’s doorway, a series of smooth flat ridges gnawed — over which if breath were blown the right way, the fluted holes would give a sound. They’d moved the son’s bed slightly to one side and seemed to be trying to flip it over. They crawled into drawers and across the mirrors and up more walls and across the ceiling, patterns. They’d congregated at a small hole that had been cut into the wall, thrumming from the crack into the bathroom. Their tiny backs were mirrored bubbles, glistening, bejeweled. The ants, in silence, programmed, at last there sharing the son’s air.

The son stood above the ants. The son stood watching. The son could not feel his fingers or his arms. The small reflective surface of each ant’s head showed his head back into him, a chorus of him, gifted through the house. The son squeezed his phone so tight the skin in his arms and knuckles lost their blood. He could feel ants inside his organs, digging rings and ruts and lines. He could feel them eating in his lids, licking the color from his cornea and replacing it with something other, drummed, undone — something from inside the ants — something digested. The son could taste them in his mouth. He could feel them swimming in his bloodstreams, bathing. Through his colon. Threading his back. He could feel them in the center of his each tooth and hair stem. A black box building in his belly. The phone vibrating in his hands.

Downstairs the ants were in the TV — in the wires — in the nodes — as they had always been, in all homes. The ants were in the son. They’d etched their way into certain cushions, chewing room in for their den — they’d already formed a throne room — they’d made lengthy galleries and tombs — a nursery for the many coming newborn — the next time someone sat down on the sofa they would crush an empire and never know. The ants were in the son. The ants had crowned the son’s image in the house in several portraits by eating holes into the paint around his head — they’d made rubbish of the inner workings of the simple lock in the son’s doorknob — they’d covered every square inch of the son’s bicycle — they’d nested slightly in his mattress — they’d kissed each other on the heads — they’d formed a necklace for several moments around the son’s neck as he slept, which thereafter remained as rash — they’d gnawed a tunnel through the meat of certain books, the text around them chawed to mush. The ants were in the son. Other insects also had come in, though unlike the ants they hid in layers. They spun in futures. They knew the mindset of a mold. Small white spiders small as pinheads hung jeweled along the ceiling of one room. The quilt the mother had been making for her one-day grandchildren— the dream of other children always in her head —had been ribboned through and through with mites. A flood of fluttered butterflies had collected on the velvet slide hung over the mantle, a wide piece of woolen fabric that had been in the house when the family moved in, and the family before them, and before them and on and on. The ants were in the son. From certain angles if you held your breath and asked a question, in the velvet you might see the profile of a man — though now the man’s head was encrusted with chrysalis and soft wing gyration. Some certain kind of insect had laid its waste all through the foyer, the stink raising the temperature in the room by several degrees. Grasshoppers in the rice cooker. Roach babies in the sink. Wormy blankets burped by spiders— enough to wrap your head . Termites bundled in a jacket. Chiggers in the coffee grinds. Beetles in the grease and vents and elsewhere, waiting to awake. Insects so loud they could not be heard, obliterating words.

The father sat still in his small stall. The building’s lights had been flickering for hours, a flat night club. Each direction seemed to go several directions. The more he worked the more there was.

I AM GOING TO LEAVE THIS ROOM NOW, the father typed into the machine.

THERE ARE OTHER THINGS I HAVE TO DO BESIDES TYPE INTO THE LIGHT.

I DON’T FEEL WELL AND THERE’S TROUBLE AND THESE DAYS AREN’T REALLY DAYS.

PLEASE LET ME BE MORE OFTEN.