Blake Butler - There Is No Year

The son played the level for several hours, still not getting any further. The game’s music kept on with one corrupted tone that seemed to pan back and forth inside the son’s head. Sometimes there were little torches or bitmapped symbols that showed the figure was moving forward. The son had not eaten food and swallowed water at any point throughout the day— this was in the game’s design . The son made the figure do things to try to find a glitch inside the level. The son made the figure throw himself into the ceiling. The son made the figure duck down and up and down and up in patterns. He made the figure stand and squat and stand and squat and walk endlessly forward into a wall into which no matter how hard the son pressed the buttons he could not force the figure through.

The son stopped pressing buttons for a minute and looked at the screen. The son felt frustrated. He felt something click inside his boredom. The son pressed a series of many buttons into the control pad with his thumbs. He pressed the buttons in an order that was not intentional but still came out of him himself.

The sequence formed by the son’s button pressing caused a small black square across the screen. The black square covered over a certain section of the long room’s pixelated ceiling, around which the other pixels went slurred and glitchy. The son’s current score appeared deformed, though he could still read the last six digits, all still zeroes.

Something in the room around the son released an air. The figure representing the son inside the game went locked. No matter what buttons the son would press now the figure would not respond. The son pressed more buttons, feeling angry. He rapped his knuckles on the screen. Inside, briefly, he heard something knocking back. The TV began to hum. The screen felt warm — too warm. The son was looking at the figure. Above, the square spread rapidly across the screen, aiming to cover over all. The son saw the figure begin to wriggle. The figure turned his head toward the son. The figure was looking at the son now most directly and there was something written in his eyes — something carried in the figure all those hours — carried over in every replicated instance of his entire life

Inside the game the music paused out, nowhere. The figure’s mouth fell open, in an O.

Along the bottom of the screen, a scrolling text, each instance beeping:

Help

Help

Help

Help

Help

Help

Help

In his car along the street among the houses in the light — something shaking where the sun was— some complex hole —the father could not remember how to get to home. He was supposed to be already back at his desk now for the next day, for more staring. He could not even feel the wheel.

He sent an email from his cell phone to his superior, a man he’d never seen or heard or known by name:

To Whom It May Concern:

Sick. Sorry. Soon.

Yours,

A reply came back in several seconds.

To Whom It Does Concern:

You snide shit. I’m getting groggy. I am becoming an exploder and you are nearby. I have sleds in my sheep barn — barn, barn, house, your house. Got it? Suck one. Suck good. And bring an extra arm.

Best,

Somewhere now out lost in loops around the building— where was the building? — the father could not at all recall even the direction he’d made the car aim in the name of home all those evenings, and those mornings, in reverse — which way to go now in the nowhere that had settled on the air. Today the day was bruisy like a dropped baby and half of the sky seemed stood before, as if by god, or a cardboard cutout of god in god’s absence, wherever he or she or it had gone. The father refused to capitalize the word god even inside his mind, despite how in the night inside his mind when he could not sleep, he prayed. Prayed so loud inside his mind it hurt, it made the house stink, which his wife assumed was indigestion.

Inside the car the father rolled long along the street among the buildings in the light — something shaking where the sun was— he’d already thought all this before . His balding head was pounding. The streets and trees had blanched a white. Where there’d been strip malls somewhere before, billboards, the wet and wire were all covered in a gloss, webbed fat with chrysalis or kite-string — an ever-present mayonnaise. By miles the roads would loop back to where they started, farting the father back out nowhere clear. The nearest roads’ names had changed to SLORISISIIISSISS, VORDBEND, MONNNNNNEY. There was nowhere clear to get a beer.

Along the streets in all directions a slow, thick rain raining in rising from the earth into the sky.

Inside his car the father felt an awful feeling there was something breathing besides him. Something right there on the backseat, strapped in, needing, shaped like him. He could not bring himself to peek. Through the windshield in his car out in the street among the houses in the light the father watched the car continue forward, scrolling, returning where he’d been again already — no sound — the years inside him itching, eating, and, outside, the years upon him soon to come.

In the night the son stood in the bedroom as the sun outside was coming down. Its orb slid from the sky in staggered increments, leaving a slight residue behind in slur, and where it began. The face of the sun itself was ragged and discolored, swimming — a humming hole impenetrable to eye. The way the light came through the window made the bedroom slow, the glass reflective, holding night out and inside in.

Parallel to there, just at his second side, the son had set the mirror on the air. He posed his body at an angle catching himself there in the two quick flattened planes reflected back and forth between the glass and glass a billion times, his body, each with mouth and skin and headholes replicated till there were more of him than he could stand. All of him crowded in and shouting: a maze of sons under no sun. Bruised skin in a relief map. Buttons.

There was someone other also in there, the son saw — slipped in the instance, between versions of he and he. Someone waiting, of a nothing. It had a black tongue. It had so much hair. It held a bell.

The son stuck his fingers in his eyes, color exploding. He could not see, though he could hear — the rummage in the glass, a muffled speech, his billioned skins peeling. The bending bow of glass sent out to kiss his head on both sides, in the pull. A sudden warm air hit the room — a pocket — squashing where his chest was, up his lungs. New words. Pistons. Popping. The son burst out and made no sound. He felt the many move into him.

The son, between the mirrors, fell.

When he could stand again, in the bedroom, the son closed the blind inside the room and took the mirror and wrapped it several times inside a sheet. He set the shrouded mirror in his closet with the reflective face turned toward the wall.

In the room below the son’s room the windows had gone tinted. The son had taken the video game console and put it in the trash compactor but it would not break. He’d put the mirror in the compactor and it had shattered, but when he went back upstairs there it was again.

The son stripped nude and got in bed, the wood frame groaning. He ran his fingers along his bruises. The skin there rumpled, rain-run, discolored, something beneath. The son chewed on the divots in his forearm: piano noise. He could taste it coming off in sheeting. His legs would not stay still. His brain would not go quiet. What if he’d been born several seconds later? What if he’d been born under another name? What if on the thirty-fifth day the mother was pregnant the mother had shone a flashlight down her throat; or read the Bible backward; or heard some certain song; or pressed her cheek against a saw?