Blake Butler - There Is No Year

Through the window you could see into the backyard, where the light was gushed and bronzing. The yard had grown. The light was null. The swimming pool had overflowed. Black algae water sloshed the grass and tore the sod up. The yard could moan a little.

The copy father and the copy mother, in the deep parts, floated up and down and up.

Men came for the father in the morning. They arrived in inky shockgear — stained black jumpsuits with enormous kneepads for kneeling and fattened multicolor frays around their shoulders to make aiming at their heads much more confusing and long bright orange gloves that hid their skin while domed metal visors hid their eyes. There were seven men, but just one language. They also moved as one and ate one meal a day and slept in the same bed and knew the same woman with whom they’d made the same child. They worked for the same firm as the father. They were the future.

The father stood there in the kitchen. The father would not blink. He watched the walls that brought the room together, tracing the outlines with his eyes. He was waiting to see something. He was waiting for something to see. He’d wedged himself into a portion of the room where he felt he could see and monitor every inch. Still, when the father turned his head just slightly one way or another, he felt something loom on the perimeter. He could not keep a straight face. Either he was laughing or he had his mouth scrunched to try to keep the laughter in. His stomach muscles burned. He hadn’t eaten. Someone was knocking on the door.

The father continued to watch the room. The father did not want to leave the room and break his concentration. He knew things about the house. He had long words written on his arms in marker, maybe. His lips and neck were wet with running ink. In the photographs it would appear the father had just written his name over and over and then begun to sweat them off, but actually he’d been licking. He did not know about the licking. His tongue was filthy. His blood was unwell.

The father did not flinch as the door became kicked open. He did not struggle as the men swarmed in around. They restrained his legs and arms in plastic ticker. They striped tape around his ears and lips and mouth and hair. He was allowed to continue seeing. The father’s eyes stayed focused on the room from every angle as they logrolled him out the door. Through the vehicle’s back window, the father saw something draped across the house.

Upstairs the mother stood in the shower with her clothes on. Wet had collected in the room up to her knees and she was singing. Through the bathroom window, on her tiptoes, the mother saw the men corral the father into the car. The mother sang louder, closed her eyes. With soap the mother lathered a bearded mask around her head. In the sheen of many bubbles there were ballrooms, there were halls.

The mother came into the son’s room with her hair up in a towel. The towel was made of other hair. The mother did not know where the hair had come from. She’d found many other things made of hair: afghans, hats, rugs, carpet, confetti, wigs, transistors — homes for bugs. The towel was soft and warming and seemed to suck the mother’s skull.

The son was in the bed asleep, several blankets piled on top. So many blankets. The mother wondered how he could breathe through all that cotton — or all that silk or polyester or maybe hair, whatever. In the middle of the son’s floor the carpet was all stained and rusty, gunked and bright with oxidation. The mother walked across the stain and felt her brain take light in photocopied. She stopped.

She moved toward the bed. The mother stopped and moved toward the bed again. The mother stopped and moved toward the bed. She looked and found she was further from the bed than when she’d started. She could see how far the bed was and reached to touch it. The bed was right in front of her. She kneeled into the bed and felt her back bend. She had on so much blush and rouge and lipstick the son might not recognize her if he could see. She wanted him to see a little. She pulled the covers back off of the son’s head. The son’s eyes were open, glassed. He did not answer the mother’s question but he was breathing fine, okay. Deep sleep. Deep sun. The son’s breath smelled of old flowers. The mother covered up the son.

In her own room again the mother touched herself with her best fingers, rubbing skin to skin against her gut, the house inside her egg-shaped belly — night above her — a silence made of towns. Each time she came she blacked out and when she came back she began again in mimicked moan.

1. The son was in the house.

Q: HOW MANY CURTAINS DID THE HOUSE HAVE?

A:

Q: DID THE HOUSE WANT THE SON IN IT?

A:

Q: WAS THE SON IN THE HOUSE?

A:

2. The son slept for several months — though in this state, via several internal forces i.e. wanting i.e. loss — time refracted through the son’s body and therefore within the house it passed as only seven hours.

Q: IF SOMEONE WERE STANDING NEAR OR AT OR IN THE SON’S BODY, OTHER OUTSIDE FORCES NOTWITHSTANDING, HOW MANY TOTAL MONTHS OR HOURS WOULD THAT PERSON AGE?

A:

Q: HOW LONG DOES IT TAKE NEW FLESH TO WRINKLE?

A:

Q: I FEEL VERY OLD AND TIRED.

A:

3. One year earlier the son had discovered a small panel in the floor under his bed — a panel that, when opened, revealed a narrow passage down which the son could reach his hand. The son reached and reached and felt something down there nudge his knuckles. When the son removed his hand he found a short brass penny nail had been stuck into the loose skin between his thumb and pointer finger. The son took the nail out and looked at it and touched it to his tongue. The son swallowed the penny nail.

Q: IS THE SON STUPID?

A:

Q: HOW ELSE COULD THE NAIL HAVE BEEN USED?

A:

Q: HOW MUCH DID THE SON BLEED?

A:

4. In the son’s sleep, the son was sleeping. In the sleeping sleep, the son had a dream. In the dream the son knew as given that the son would never die.

Q: HOW MANY OTHER SONS WERE IN THIS DREAM? SONS THE SON COULD NOT SEE. SONS HIDING IN THE SLEEP WALLS. WHO ELSE’S SONS?

A:

Q: IS THAT TRUE? WOULD HE NOT EVER DIE?

A:

Q: WHY COULD NOT THE SON JUST SLEEP AND SLEEP?

A:

The son’s cell phone rang nonstop blitzed no pausing. On vibrate, the phone would shake so hard it shook the bed, the air. The vibration continued even when the son turned the phone off.

The son did not want to look at the phone’s face to see who was calling in this way.

The son did not want to look. His eyes above, below, and beside him.

The son took the phone into the bathroom and hid the phone inside the drawer.

From the bedroom he could hear the porcelain of the sink above the drawer cracking under strain. He could hear the mirror patter. He could hear the soap dish dance. Something warped the bevel of the walls.

The son sat as long as he could manage on the corner of his bed, trying not to think. The bed was pushing up beneath him.