Blake Butler - There Is No Year

The girl saw the son was looking. She let the son’s hair fall free and took the son’s chin. She seemed to be saying something. The heat was foaming. The son could not shake it off. He could not not. The house’s color bloomed. He felt something move inside him, metastasizing, filling his form with its form: smoke through smoke, room through room . The son reached back and touched the girl’s arm. Her skin was smiling.

So what do you want to do now ? the girl said.

The other floor’s long hall of bedroom doors all stood open, stunk and stung the father’s eyes. The wet revolved inside his head and made him hungry, stuck with an itching, in the light. He held his hands upon the air there, flush with hot flashes — a drum kit in his lungs — his feet swollen beneath him, doorbells. The other house alive.

The floors down here were mirrors. The father watched himself walking from below. Each step made him thicker, narrowing the walls.

In spasmed gulps, the way his childhood cat had— the cross-eyed, many-named creature who one night had crawled into a mudhole in the woods behind his parents’ house and not come out — its name still somewhere in him, its absent sound —the father coughed something up into his hands: an origami box folded out of wet, smeary flash paper — with it at last out of his chest he could see head-on again — he could think of things he’d seen once: ash rising from fires, balls thrown, nipples tugged, bundles of cash. The father unfolded the origami, hearing it crinkle, as did each day the fat filling his head. WHO IS IN THERE, someone had written. The father ripped the note into many tiny pieces and swallowed it again.

In the house the hall held still. Somewhere above him a pucker shrunk a little, released a smudge of air. Black and magnets. Runny.

The father walked along the hall. He stopped outside the copy master bedroom. He turned to face the light. In the room he saw his body sleeping, several of him. The furniture had been removed. The bodies of him piled into the small space stacking, puddled up with limbs. Some were missing hair or digits. They were cuddling, chewing, talking in their sleep. Laughing, scratching, humping, what have you. The more he looked the more there were, though sometimes, between blinking, there was just him, well, he and the him inside him , and the meat around his seeing, and his arms. The father closed his eyes and heard them breathing, heard his many hungry stomachs snarl.

With his hands within the forced dark, the father closed the door.

The father felt his way along the hallway further, palms along the walls. In the grain, the house had written out a list of names, a man’s phone number, a tablature, a hymn’s words, a prayer, a map, a day — none of which the father understood as language, and yet it settled in him still.

The father felt along the hall with all his fingers till he felt another door. This door would be the son’s door, the father said, and heard his body say. The door into she and I and his and hers and ours and ours and our son’s room. This door as well was open, another mouth inside the copy house —or was he back inside his own house now? The father could not tell. His chest was throbbing.

The father moved into the room. He moved onto the air with skin around him, feeling forward, unwilling yet to open back his eyes.

The girl moved in a little closer. She had her hands behind her back.

The girl turned into the mirror — turned to look at someone else.

The girl began to speak, in several voices, asking someone:

Q: WHAT DID THE SON WANT TO DO?

Q: WHAT DID THE SON WANT TO WANT TO DO?

Q: WHAT DID THE GIRL WANT FOR THE SON?

Q: WHAT COULD THE GIRL HAVE DONE TO MAKE THE SON WANT SOMETHING ELSE?

Q: HOW MUCH HAD THE SON EATEN? HOW MUCH HAIR COULD FIT INSIDE HIS CHEST?

Q: HOW MUCH COULD FIT INSIDE THE GIRL’S HOUSE? THE SON’S HOUSE? THE COPY VERSION(S)? WHY?

Q: WHAT WAS THE GIRL’S HOME MADE OF? AND THE SON’S SKIN? AND THE GIRL?

Q: WHAT FIT IN THE SPACE BETWEEN THE HOUSES?

Q: WHO ELSE WAS COMING BY?

The girl was turning. The girl glowed. The son glowed.

Q: DO YOU KNOW NOW?

Q: DO YOU?

Do you?

In the image of the room where nights the son would be, the father felt his body press against another hold. He opened his eyes, saw nothing but it — a black box large as the whole room. It gave off a silent steam or smoke, as had the last box he remembered, which upon remembering in that instant he ceased to remember furthermore.

The door the father had come into the room through was no longer there behind him, nor was there much of any space left for him to stand between the box and wall. He had to suck his gut in, skin into skin there, held not breathing, and still there was hardly room for him to move — as if he were underneath the box at the same time as above it, and beside it — nothing but the box — no room at all.

Inside the box, a bumping. Something smothered. Rub of skin of fists. The father pressed his head against the surface, wanting. He listened harder, leaning in. The more he leaned, the more he had to — his spine took kindly to the curve — then, there he was leaning with all of him against the image, its surface adhered to his shoulder and his cheek.

The round meat of the father’s left ring finger puffed up. More rings.

Father, the father tried to say back, and out came all the other names.

He tried to speak again and still could not, the words instead reflected in his head, spurting as would a heavy wet through his cerebrum and down into his chest and ass and legs, and no repeat.

The father’s face against the box, both of them aging, one changing shape inside, one not — his body flush against the box’s, gripped.

The no light coming through no windows to the no room to the need.

In all his want, and all the surface, the father’s head became pressed upon so hard against the box he could not see — or could not tell what he was seeing, in such color — the bend of wall on wall, the blank — gone windows lit with light of leaving, sucked from the house into the sky. The box pulled on his backbone, barfing through his body in reverse — warm milk, spit, rainwater, stomach acid, fresh blood — his body sticking to the seam, wherever. In his head he heard a hundred guns — a fall, a swallow, sinking— black cells —then, there he was above him, and beside — then, there he was below him, and between him, and overhead, within — he could see himself from every angle — he could see himself inside the box.

The box

inside was

small at

every

angle — so

small the

father had

no room to

move his

arms or

legs or

head.

The inner

surface of

the box,

unlike its

outside,

held a ripe

transparent

pale — so

pale there

appeared

not to be a

surface

there at all,

unwinding

— and yet

against the

father’s

flesh it

made a

pressure

and

against the

father’s

flesh it

burned.

To the left

and just

above the

father’s

vision in

the box

there was a

hole — a

single tiny

source of

seeing

allowing

light onto

the pupil

of his right

eye.

Through the

hole, the

father saw a

grayish

chamber.

Inside the