Blake Butler - There Is No Year

Among the black space of the box, now turning softer, now gone cushy, streaming, the father, aging, wormed. He could not tell at all where he was going. Every inch matched every inch.

Into the shape of box surrounding, the father walked into the box.

Every so often he would open up his eyes again slowly, unreleasing, buttons pressing in reverse. Walls around him. Stalls around him. Houses. All mass. Massed. Opening each instant. On in. On.

If there is one hole in any home there must be many, he heard himself shout somewhere inside him.

Outside his skin he heard the night.

Inside the girl’s house, the house seemed endless. The ceiling went too high. The walls were made of stone and cracked in patterns that pleased the eye. There were large pictures of women and of men — some the son could recognize. Or had seen once. Or he might have. Just now. The son felt a bubble in his foot birth. He felt the bubble bobble up along his belly and past his lungs before it burst. He called these thoughts .

The house had not seemed so large from the outside, or so gorgeous. The girl’s parents must be rich, the son thought. Which was weird because at school the girl always wore such ratty clothes — weird humpy bags of browbeaten cotton from long-dead decades’ smothered styles.

The girl’s house was made of wire, wicker, marble, slick, and sand. It had no smell. The girl’s house’s walls were often mirrors. There was everywhere to walk.

The son spent several hours staring into the portrait over one mantel, a gleaming field of white on white.

The son turned around then. He turned and turned. Tied to the wall where he’d come in, the son realized a piece of string he hadn’t seen there prior. The string looped around his middle like a belt. The son grasped the string and felt it simmer, half-electric. He slid his fingers, making static, zinging. Cold. .

The son followed the

long string down a

hallway without a

ceiling and without

doors.

The walls along the hall were wet and mirrored and left grease on the son’s hands, slipped in slats of gold goo underneath him, trying to stick him in one place. There was a music playing somewhere, by a band that did not actually exist.

blank music washed on and on and all through the house like blood bombs dropping, like skin peeling off of trees in sheets, women becoming horses becoming dogs becoming light — a whole slew of awful sounds that were not really sound exactly, but sound as an idea

The son could feel the sound against his chest and where his bones joined, meeting, vibrating his canine teeth.

The son could sort of see.

The son

went up

a

stairwell

and

down a

stairwell,

the string

now

burning

in his

hand—

the string

singing

along

and on

and on

into the

house.

For long stretches rooms would repeat — the walls and width identical from end to end. White light in wash, from overhead: projectors. Locks without true doors. Doors without true locks or knobs or seams.

A small eye in some pink wood watched him from underneath the floor .

Hairy curtains. Gold glass in windows, looking out onto long unblinking fields.

Black chandeliers with yard-long candles. Coffee tables made of water.

Bees.

The son in one room sat down for some time in a recliner, hearing his cells spin or moisten, softly jostled, coming open or awake.

The son walked.

The son found a charcoal-colored elevator that would not go up or down, but had one button for each year.

He found a room filled almost full with one white cube, around which he could wriggle, pressed at both sides, breathing in.

He found a voice behind a wall — the voice of his voice, older, slowing — some time gone.

And another stairwell, and another, each one wet and rattled in its own way. Some of the conjunctions between stairwells would have huge holes in their floors — wide-open mouths down into further house or houses. Some landings would have four or fifteen stairwells leading from them, lending the son a choice of which to take, but for each the string would keep him clinging, rawing at his palm.

The rooms went on each way around him there forever, not a music.

The son walked and walked and walked and walked and walked and walked and walked and walked and walked and walked and walked and walked and walked and walked and walked and walked.

Inside the house the father crawled on. His eyes were pouring liquid. Laughing. The hot air ached his eyes. He’d moved into the box until he recognized it, found sections of its breadth where he had been — where he had called home — when he had slept and ate and lived. He found himself again inside the house’s vents, the streetlights and homelights there somehow connected, and the airspace, and the drift.

The father loved the smell baking the house now, like money being burned, like melting Christmas trees and wire, like. . like. .

Like days.

At the vent’s first bend, the tunnel opened into a small pocket ridged with bubbles. There was a language in the metal, the pocket’s domed walls cut with tiny engraved pictures of a house. The father could not keep his eyes held clean enough to see into the windows. Behind him he could no longer see the bedroom’s light. There was another kind of light inside the vent now, writhing. The light in liquid at his face. He felt hair growing out around him, from each one of his finite, numbered pores.

I am the oldest man who’s ever lived, the father heard himself say, blank of thinking. I will still be here in this air here when everybody else is burned and gunked and gone.

The words became a new long vein inside his nose.

Along the vent again the tunnel opened further ahead into two. Soon the two made four, and four made eight, and so on. Each tunnel looked the same. At each the father chose by which one seemed to need him. Laughing harder. Gasping. Blue balloons . His scalp skin crisping hard around his head.

At sudden nodules in the network, the father found holes where he could see back into the house — the living room, the upstairs hallway — the walls there had been painted over black — in some rooms orange or yellow — screaming neon — though here the vents went so thin he could not fit through them, not even partly, just his arms. Some rooms had been filled with dirt or smoke or foaming. Some rooms were full of skin — other families, people, bodies — smushed. One hole into one very far room was the exact same size as his eye — through the hole he could see another small eye seeing. His eye . Light.

The tunnels unfurled on. The ceilings raised or floors grew lower. He could hunch, then he could stand. Soon the walls were so high and far apart he could not feel them at all. The floor beneath him made of sand. In his testicles a transient tingling, like someone crawling through an opening in him, through his guts and up his body, spreading out and up and on among his blood. There was more of him than ever.

At another upstairs pucker the father looked out and saw the mother walking up and down the street. She had her head down looking for something. When she got to one end of the street she turned around. She walked back and forth and back and forth in slow procession, holding her left arm straight up over her head. In her hand, a wide gray steel umbrella. She was talking to herself. She had her hair done up expensive. She’d done her face. The father banged his fist against the window to try to tell her she looked the best she’d ever looked but the mother could not hear him or would not turn.