Blake Butler: There Is No Year

The son could not laugh either, but he did too.

The room was getting warmer — sweating. The son’s posters slipped off the walls. The ink slid from off the posters and the paint from off the place where they had hung. The paint coagulated into pigments. The son felt a blister open on his top lip. He had a suntan. He had a sunburn. Months of sunburns. Years in years. Sun damage. Damage. He grew thicker.

The figure was off the width of a fist now, give or take a hair. The son had made many fists but wanted to make more. Once the son had seen an ocean slip out of the crack slit in the windshield of a car, a car cracked as the son watched and made the car skid with his eyes. The son’s hair contained the cells of everyone he’d ever been.

Actually, the son could laugh a little, though it came out through his back and sunk into the bed. The son was sneezing colors. The son had lanterns in his eyes — lanterns once used to light other houses. The son felt someone sewing his perimeter into the clothgrain of the bed. He blinked and found himself inside a mattress on top of which someone was sitting — someone asleep or still or reading or too tired to stand up — someone maybe thinking of the son — maybe the son himself. The son saw days he’d spent already layered across the room in film. The son watched his head in photo portraits his mother had made him hang up on his room’s walls wilt in time-lapse backward, his skin becoming puckered, regressing into cells. The son was inside the mother then and could see the mother’s moving arms. The mother digging, bug-swarmed. The son could read the things the mother had not meant to think about the son — the thoughts pummeled through and through her — her imagination’s doubt. The son saw the mother through the mother. Saw the mother lying on a bed. Saw the mother coursed with wrinkles, her coarse white hair. The mother in a very tiny room.

The son could not fully sit up. He felt his blood gush inside a spiral. He fell straight down through long darkness. His neck was getting tired.

The son.

The son felt older. He grew a mustache, faint at first and then a handlebar, one that, if he could move his hands, he would have twisted at the ends into a creation that would have made him memorable in pictures. The son’s voice inside him changed — though he could not use it, he could hear several other sounds projected — other people.

Other people in the son.

The son grew capable of babies — capable of son. A billion sperm.

The son shed skin at a rate that made his body lift off the mattress inch by inch. The room was filling up. His fingernails were curling. His eyes changed color twice — once to gold like change he’d hidden — once to the shade of blue the summer sky had been the day the father and the mother had made the son on the very bed the son sprawled on now.

The son’s back began to crimp. The son felt his hands go loose a little.

Above the bed the ceiling was bowing down. It bowed to touch the center of the moment where the son and the figure would collide. The walls as well had swum with hump, puckered funny, pulling out. Hair, skin, liquid, money. The carpet sat slathered in frustration, stapled to the ground.

The figure hung right there above the son. The figure had the longest hair. The figure’s hair was lashed into the son’s hair. They had the same hair. The hair grew shorter, pulling taut. The son looked into the figure. The figure was long in moments and scratched in others. The figure has someone else inside it also. Populations. Masses. Burning. The figure wore the son’s original shade of pupils, refracted now with shards of foreign color — red — red like the son’s bruises, like bricks for houses or wall paint, red the color the son had shat the week he ate all the mother’s lipstick, the mother’s lipstick in him, red like certain birds not yet exploded for the air, red like the son inside the son and the son the son could have had himself.

The son and the figure were mouth to mouth. Their lips were cracked and puffy. They breathed back and forth to one another. Their breath was made of the same cells. They breathed. They breathed. In each breath there was another word, and in each word there was another, and the son began to see the things the son would never see. They breathed.

The massive vehicle slid along the street until it stopped in the new rut around the house. Something had sawed into the yard’s perimeter, made a little ditch that ran with sludge and seemed to sink into itself. The vehicle’s soundless transmission warped several birds out of the sky, raining the birds onto the windshield, their carcasses then sucked into a suction and used to fuel the vehicle. The back window of the vehicle folded down and out of it pushed the father.

The father rolled down along the back hood and off the bumper into the street. He bruised his elbows on the pavement, bleeding clear. He stood up shaking and watched the long white vehicle drive off. The vehicle bruised the ground.

The father was naked except for a metal bulb around his head. Two tiny slits allowed him to see out. There were not slits for ears or nose or mouth. The father had gained weight. The men had fed the father through long weird tubes and turkey basters. He did not know how long he’d been gone. There were no official charges. He’d been fully reprimanded. He’d been made to solve crossword puzzles in a small translucent box at the bottom of a public swimming pool, through which in his mind he could see the chubby men and women in their slick suits holding their children while they peed. He could see all the stuff the people’s bodies flushed into the water, which came and stuck to the perimeter of the father’s box. The crossword puzzles were designed to trigger complicated extrasensory properties. The father filled in 49 ACROSS with the word LASAGNA and could taste it in his mouth. That was the good part. The father had had to fill in many other less delightful words — such as LESION , such as NEED , such as — such as — such as. .

Many other things, like all things, the father could not remember.

He could not remember losing skin.

He could not remember the skull-sized beams of other light they’d shined into his forehead and in the ruts behind his knees, resetting the deletion, blank of blank on blank . All the foot-long pins they’d used, and the sledgehammer, and the prism and the dice. Days extracted in blood pictures. Doorbells. Birthdays. His new name(s). He could not remember anything about the other house, the box.

The father could not remember, in any form, the son — the grain of skin or glint of eye the child had in those first hours, as if having been rubbed with steel wool in the womb; the thin months thereafter in which he could still hold the child in a warm silence against his father chest, pleasant, grinning, before the son had learned to scream; the smell ejected from the holes that kicked out his baby teeth, like wire and old cheese— this smell had soon become so general it disappeared . He could not remember the way for months at first, as the child had begun speaking, he’d called the father by his full name, first, middle, and last; how some days, all days, the son walked backward, even his first steps, before the steps the father and the mother would witness as his “first,” the father had not known this ever anyway, at all ; or the letter the child had written to the father their fifth Christmas to say how much he loved the father, the letters out of order and poorly drawn, and the picture of the family there without faces, except the blackened O hole of the son’s mouth at the exact center of his head, scribbled to rip. He did not remember the son’s want and wishing, his decorations, their hours before the house while suns would rise, buses arriving to take the son off to some far location, the father on the lawn then waiting for his return in a light; evenings, hours, suppers, cushions, floors; invented games, the blanket mazes, puzzles. How the son could hide for hours in the house and not be found. The father no longer, in his body, held to an inch of this. He could not, in any alley of his remaining mind there, of what the men had left, recall a single thing about the child that stuck inside him but as bumping, but as tremor, itch, or slur. The exit colors beating underneath his forehead, the window of his lungs.