Blake Butler - There Is No Year

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Heather O’Rourke. 4

The son recognized these first four from a film he’d seen somewhere, though he could not remember where or when.

In the pile there were photos of

Chris Farley, 5

Heath Ledger, 6

Krissy Taylor, 7

River Phoenix, 8

Bill Hicks, 9

Cliff Burton, 10

Christa McAuliffe, 11

DJ Screw, 12

Timmy Taylor, 13

Flannery O’Connor, 14

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, 15

Wesley Willis, 16

Marc Bolan, 17

Bobby Darin, 18

Charlie Parker, 19

Tupac Shakur, 20

Ol’ Dirty Bastard, 21

Simone Weil, 22

William Burroughs Jr., 23

Srinivasa Ramanujan, 24

Ian Curtis, 25

Aubrey Beardsley, 26

Bas Jan Ader, 27

Joan of Arc, 28

Kaspar Hauser, 29

Egon Schiele, 30

Bruce Lee, 31

Brandon Lee, 32

Tim Buckley, 33

Jeff Buckley, 34

Malcolm X, 35

Pier Paolo Pasolini, 36

Ann Quin, 37

John Belushi, 38

Jean-Michel Basquiat, 39

Jonathan Brandis, 40

Keith Moon, 41

Rainer Werner Fassbinder 42

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David Foster Wallace. 43

Photos near the bottom of the pile contained people the son had never heard of. Some were named with names that didn’t even sound like normal human names. Some were dressed in obscure clothing and yet still wore tasteful makeup and a photogenic expression. Some of the photographs appeared to have been ripped or shredded and then taped back together or laminated. The son’s fingers did not leave prints along the gloss.

The son held the pictures looking at them. The son felt his arms make paste.

The son felt nauseated trying to move past certain pictures. Some pictures caused sores to open on the son’s head.

The son could not stop looking yet.

The people in the pictures did not blink.

The son felt a tone sound through his sternum.

The son’s belly button sealed over.

The son shifted the pile again so that his photo sat on top.

The son looked at the son again.

The son put the photos down.

The son was buzzing in his knees a little.

The son’s top and bottom teeth had singed together.

The son was mostly on the ground.

Also from the box there with the photos the son pulled out a small black coil.

The coil had an outer layer, with a thread clasp.

The coil unfurled to become a long black bag — a black bag made of leather and about the size of an XXXL nightgown, or a balloon.

The bag held its mouth closed with a metal zipper.

The son unzipped the zip.

He held his face up to the bag and looked in.

There was nothing in the bag.

No smell, no light, no hour.

The son emphatically inhaled.

The son touched the bag against his forehead.

The son kissed the bag.

Within the duration of one hour on the nose in the long corralled light of afternoon, the mother received a phone call from every agent and buyer who’d submitted offers on the house. Each retracted in soft formal English as if their words had been lifted from a manual. Each hung up the phone before the mother spoke. One man said, I am exhausted and can no longer feel my hands, though he sounded rather chipper. At the end of that one hour, the couple’s agent also called — a man who sounded most exactly like the man himself, except for the manner by which he chewed. The couple weren’t retracting their offer, the agent assured the mother, as she began to weep into the phone. There was the sound of something plastic closing or coming open. The agent stated their new claim: the couple was now offering a sum of $19,000 for the real estate — almost a 90 percent drop from the original offer — which was to be paid directly from buyer to seller in a series of biannual installments equaling a certain modest percentage of the remainder outstanding on the house. The agent acknowledged — at the mother’s prodding — how such a payment plan would never actually get the house paid off. Instead, an endless minor diminishing toward zero, a payment scheduled to be terminated after both the father and the mother’s passing. The couple was not willing to involve third parties such as a moneylender or the like, the agent explained, as they were private with their ways of living and to get a loan you had to tell a lot of people a lot of shit. The agent actually said the word shit into the phone hotly, using a tone laden with some strange amount of venom and, no doubt, spittle, at which point the mother terminated the call. When the phone began to ring again immediately, she took the phone off the hook and left it that way for the remainder of the day, so that whatever sounds the house or family made were broadcast to an open line.

The mother spent the next several hours with her head against a wall. She tried to push with sufficient force to make her face join with the house. Instead she learned to smile a little wider. In the backyard she could hear what seemed a hundred screeching, squealing dogs and car alarms. Some people singing, maybe. An implosion. The mother went to the window and saw nothing but bright light. The mother stared into the light until her pupils zeroed, until even when she turned her head the room was washed. Washed. Worked white, dewormed.

Seeing white, the mother put herself to work. She began first mopping the kitchen, sloshing soap across the blinded tile. In other rooms she grunted on her knees with brush and carpet soap, stench expanding in her head. She washed the floors in every room the house had. In certain rooms the mother found infestation. Not leagues of ants, the way the son had said, but little trickles invading through small cracks, creating grainy graded torrents and tiny turrets. The ants crumpled on contact, tidal, their tiny bodies sloshed in venom. Closer up, the mother found, pinching one’s thorax between her two longest fingers, these were not ants but something else. They had a different shape of head and tiny patterns on their bellies, which almost looked like words. The mother swept the tiny carcasses into a dustbin with one gloved hand. She cured the sodden carpet on her hands and knees with the hairdryer and combed away the smell. She did not want the son to know.

In the son’s bathroom, where she’d not been since the sales show, the mother came to stand before the hole in the wall between the bathroom and the son’s room where the veiled woman had cut through. In the gap between two walls, she discovered, a thick clear gel had been stuffed into the air — had been stuffed, or always been there — always in the house. An odd shade for insulation, she imagined. Plus it was cold and had a throaty smell, like chowder.

Through the hole the mother could see into the son’s room from a new angle, to the bed. The room looked differently from this perspective: smaller, taller. She could not see the other door, though it should have been right there on the wall cattycorner. On the bed, a mirror facing face-up, toward the ceiling, its surface bending slightly in.

The mother walked from the hole back through the bathroom to the son’s door set on the hall. The door had been left wide open. The son was not there in the bed. There was no hole there where the hole was, from the bathroom — there instead, the mirror hung. She closed the door behind her, nodded. There were two rooms.