Blake Butler - There Is No Year

The son’s flesh rolled between his small hands, doughy. He felt something spark between his teeth and there inside them. A little liquid dripped down from his ears. He heard a whirring in his stomach like garage doors. The whole room seemed to squeeze. The son was tired. He was talking to himself. The room seemed to flutter in his eyelids, eyes behind them. The walls would lean or move. The carpet grew long. There was a boulder rolling above the bed. There were eyes on every surface. There was someone in the mattress.

The son saw the bedroom door come open. The door moved forward on its hinges just a crack. The son closed his eyes, pretending. He heard someone move into the room. He did not want to look. He did not look.

The son received directions to the girl’s house in a black envelope delivered in the night. There’d been no one in the hallway. The son had not slept. He hadn’t seen the girl at school since the invitation. None of the teachers knew a thing. The other students still would not acknowledge him. The girl’s locker seemed to be filled with some kind of buzz. The girl’s directions were several pages long and writ in ink that changed colors in the light. The son read them again and again, over and over until he could hear them in his head:

FIND AN EGG — ANY EGG! — BREAK THE EGG OPEN — IN THE EGG THERE IS A KEY — WRAP THE KEY INSIDE A TUFT OF HAIR THEN PLACE IT ON YOUR TONGUE — NOW SUCK! — GO THROUGH THE INSIDE TO THE OUTSIDE — TAKE A RIGHT — A RIGHT — A LEFT — A SLIGHT RIGHT — A RIGHT — YOUR OTHER RIGHT — A RIGHT AGAIN — GOOD JOB — IF AT ANY POINT YOU PASS A LIBRARY, TAKE A KNEE & BURN YOUR FINGER WITH A MATCH — NOW OUTSIDE A PICTURE WINDOW WITH NO PICTURE CURL ON THE GROUND INTO A BALL — ROLL FORWARD ONCE FOR EACH TIME YOU’VE KISSED YOUR MOTHER — FOR EACH TIME YOU’VE GIGGLED, MARK YOUR ARM — RECITE THE WITNESS — CALL THE NUMBER — SPIT THE KEY INTO THE SAND — THE KEY WILL SINK — DIG AFTER THE KEY WITH YOUR LONGER FINGER — WHEN YOU FIND THE KEY AGAIN YOU WILL HAVE FOUND A WALL — THE WALL WILL OPEN — LET THE SAND FILL IN BEHIND YOU — COME IN ALONE — I WILL BE THERE SHORTLY — NO ONE MUST KNOW — NO ONE MUST KNOW — GO.

The directions continued on for pages, including footnotes. There was a map so splotched with lines and symbols you could not see through it even when you held it up to the light.

The son sent the girl an email— LOL, say wha? The girl did not respond. The son did not know the girl’s last name to look it up. The son felt much too warm.

And yet when it came time to go, he went. He didn’t tell the father or the mother where he was going, as he knew the mother would not let him — not alone.

That night the son shaved his face for the first time with a knife he found inside his hand when he woke up. He did not notice all the blood, or the strange smell, or the nodule in his hair.

The son was an expert at forgetting.

The son walked into the long night. He went up one street and down another. He turned and turned at times for turning. The streetlamps were dead or blue or strobed. The trees along the roadside hung down right against the gravel, fat with slug and chrysalis, thick with ash. The son walked. The son crawled a little. The son’s legs began to ache. The son tried to hail a long white taxi that barreled past him but the taxi did not slow or stop. Through the taxi windows the son saw no one. The son felt hungry. His hair was itching. The son licked his wrists. The son looked into the light. The night was scorched and streaked in lines. The son could hardly see. The son’s pants were wet around the edges, though it hadn’t rained in months. The son got a nosebleed. His skin felt heavy. There were wrinkles in his face. The son took a minute to lie down — an exit method he’d grown fond of — and against the earth his body rattled. The dirt was hard and itching, filled with lumps that bulged and warmed and wormed. The son rolled into some grassing. The grass smelled familiar. The son nodded off. The son woke up and walked. He saw the sky above him. The sky was gushing green. The sky was wrapped in mosses attached to trees attached to houses. There was a constellation in the shape of a dead horse. The son walked underneath it. A flood of pigs ran past. One of the pigs was a man on hands and knees. A pack of long dogs with even longer ass hair came after. The son no longer wished to go where he was going. He had never felt so tired. The son turned to head back the way he’d come but everything behind him now looked different. The concrete was bright yellow and glowed inside its cracks. Sometimes the cracks ejected worms. A man came out of the dark and asked the son for a quarter. The son said he didn’t have any money. The man asked again and the man asked. The man tried to touch the son’s face and the son began to shake and the son said I swear I don’t have any money. The son pulled out both pockets to prove it and out of the son’s pockets change came falling. It fell all across the floor — the outside had a floor now, made of vinyl mashed and melted down from all the records ever, reflective, clean — and the man fell down onto the money and hoarded it into his mouth with both hands and with his mouth overflowing the man’s voice came out, and the man said, I knew that you were a liar, you’ve always been a liar, always will be, that’s what you are, and the son could hear the money rubbing on the man’s tongue and his own tongue and he could taste it melting in his cheeks, the metal money filled his mouth so much he could not find a way to speak, and the man was rolling on the ground beside him in the money and the man was coughing out one long endless sound and the man looked exactly like the man the son had seen inside his mother’s mother’s locket and he looked exactly like the man who’d been only a head, the man who’d touched the sickness in him, the man was chewing on the money so hard he was chewing his own face and the man’s face was bleeding and the face unfolded and the man’s eyes split apart, and the man had five eyes, eight, ten, thirty gleaming, thirty thousand, a thousand thousand, and then the man had no eyes at all and the son felt frightened and the son turned to run and as he ran his hair grew out behind him long and rippled, fat with wind, and the son’s hair began to try to tie itself to things such as the man’s hair and the vinyl and the sky now burping overhead and the hair was pulling the son back down in anger and the son felt his cell phone ringing and the son took his phone out and answered and inside the phone someone was screaming and the son hung up the phone and tried to call his mother but the phone would not pick up a signal and the phone kept beeping through its speaker and someone was trying to call him back and the son could not get the phone off of his face again and his skin was sticking to his hair and fingers and the son ran and ran and ran and ran and ran and ran and the street kept getting longer and the street became a studded metal beltline that moved and moved against the way the son was running, and the son ran past a new man in the scrunched light pounding a drum kit and he ran past a man at a table eating a sandwich bigger than the earth and he ran past many other men who tried to ask him questions and all the men resembled the same man and the son felt the drumming banging in his ears and more dogs ran past him from the opposite direction and the dogs were dragging something and he could hear the dogs around in all directions coming and he could hear the sucking of a fan or vacuum from above, and he came to a street sign that looked familiar, but the next sign said the same thing, the streets all said the same thing, no matter how far the son went, and the flat long treadmilled concrete of the ground beneath him began to go soft and turn to mush, and the son was stepping high and hard like a bandleader and the son was trying to say a word and the son could hear the man still drumming and now with the drumming there were guitars, a heaving bass that made the air bend, and the drums were louder, and the word, and the son’s calves were hulking, and the muscles bloomed with tumor, and the dogs were out there somewhere ripping clean and the son cried out and could not hear it and his skin was sledding off him in long coils, and liquid sluiced in rivers from his eyelids and out through metal straws now stitched into his head, kinked in long loops with bulbs and boilers and then back down into his mouth into his throat and the son gulped and drank his gushing wet and he found his tears refreshed him and he found his head sprayed open as a fountain — his head congealing, becoming lighter, blooming upward, bending in, he felt his new head mashed inside itself recoiling and the head began to take on new weight, and soon the head was very heavy and the son could not control the sound, and the son lay down spread out against the vinyl floor — he felt it spread around him, one drawn and endless flat adhering and the son could not quite move and did not want to — and then the sky was bowing — and then the sky was just above.