Blake Butler: There Is No Year

They were supposed to change his name. They were supposed to forget everything the son had said aloud up to that point. The father, at least, had done the last of these. Over afternoons he had collected and removed what he could find of the son’s scribbling on reams of paper, the paragraphs in illegible legends, letters smaller than the eye hole of a pin, drawings of mazes, maps, and bodies, cribbed in among the glyphs of language, enough to fill a book. The father had as well thrown out any books he’d seen the son touch or look at or had heard read aloud by the mother’s mouth. Any music. Any gist.

This son , the father sometimes heard himself say inside him, in someone else’s voice, should no longer be alive .

In the room the mother stood wearing the white mask, holding the precautionary plaster cast she’d made of the son’s chest — already crumbling — against her own chest, humming one long sound.

The father had tried to convince the mother that it was best to get rid of these things as they could hold the sickness in their fibers, but whenever he brought it up like that the mother would get down on her knees and scream and scream until he said okay.

Eventually the father had even begun to want them for himself. He did not tell the mother how for weeks he’d slept with a long lock of the child’s hair until he’d woke and found he’d eaten it.

The father took the plaster molding from the mother and sat it on the carpet and unplugged the mother’s ears and clasped her hands and squeezed. He put his mouth against her head.

Do you want to go to McDonald’s? he said. Do you want to go to Chili’s? Do you want to go to Outback? Do you want to go to Miami Subs Grill? Do you want to go to the Container Store? Do you want to go to Sharper Image? Do you want to go to Hooters? Do you want to go to Chi-chi’s? Wait, Chi-chi’s is out of business. Do you want to go to Kenny Rogers Roasters? Do you want to go to Denny’s? Do you want to go to Great Clips? Do you want to go to Taco Bell?

The father did not know what had made him talk like that.

The father could not laugh.

For years the son believed the father when the father said he owned a live man’s head — though years later, in the telling, the father swore he’d said nothing of the kind . The father told the son he kept the head locked in the attic in a safe in their old house. He said he’d bought the head from a woman on the street — a woman with wrinkled, thumbless hands and a mustache. The father claimed the head particular in its eating. The head liked ranch dressing on fruit salad. The head liked mayo by itself. The father told the son not to try to see the head because the head would bite the son. The father said the head had mentioned the son in particular as a thing he meant to eat.

The son went on for years and years with the head inside his head. He began to learn other things about it. He and the head had long talks and walked in sunsets. The head told him things about money and pornography and chess and investing and wilderness survival. The son was three years old at the beginning, and the head was there still when he was nine. All through those years the son tried to guess the safe’s combination with no luck, though his dry mouth spoke the numbers in the night.

The son’s tenth birthday morning bore one condition: go. And so he’d gone. The son had gotten out of bed, sweated sopping wet with eyes not open, and walked downstairs and left the house. He walked straight on into the forest. He was thinking anything at all. He came to a small, hardwood gazebo. The gazebo was black and had words emblazoned, long words, names on names . A beehive hung from a cord in the gazebo’s ceiling’s center. In the son’s hands he found a stick. With the stick he beat the hive down with wide swinging, expecting to be stung — stung and stung and swollen up all over, growing several times himself— the son had thoughts inside his head . Instead, the hive hit the ground in silence, the bees all stunned in seasoned sleep — a queen among them, held a god.

The son felt cheated. The son winged rocks. He shouted sick words into the hive’s holes. He heaved the hive into the air over and over and watched it hit the ground. No matter what it was the son did the son could not get the bees to buzz up, to surround him, though on his tenth toss, the hive fell open. Inside the hive was chock with mazy tunnel. Something oozing, some white brine, a sound.

Cut in the wax there, runned with honey, the son saw the combination.

In the morning, crushed with a warm air, the mother could not think of where to hide. She’d been left alone in the house again, like every other day — the father working, son at school. Usually the mother liked to be alone, swum in the peace. Sometimes she took her clothes off and went out into the backyard and stood and sang and walked around, performing common household habits like any other except with her boobs and ass hung in the sun, as she had when she was teenaged on strange beaches on vacation from her childhood house. The mother felt young out in the wrecked light naked. The mother could spend years inside those days.

Today the mother’s spit was brown like coffee. She ground her teeth, felt them diminish. She could not shake the sense of someone there behind her. She kept feeling something brush against her back. In all the rooms the curtains seemed to rustle even when the a/c had been turned off. She’d been finding keys all around the house. She’d found a key in the baking powder. She’d found a key taped to the window. A key inside a certain book on a certain shelf. A key tied into her hair. All the keys unlocked the house, though some had no teeth. The mother hid the keys in certain places. Still she kept hearing the front door open. She heard something moving on the roof.

She tried to hide in the hallway closet but something kept rustling in the towels. She tried to hide in the washing machine but it kept turning itself on. Even when she stood and watched the room in a long mirror she knew things happened every time she blinked her eyes.

Cramped up under the son’s small bed, the mother found a purple folder full of photos of women ripped from magazines. Naked women — glossed and healthy — each much older than the son — their bodies seemed so clean. The son had adorned the women’s heads with extra eyes and horns and speech bubbles saying awful things — text that went on and on for pages, cramped tight to dark black— text that should have been destroyed . In many of the drawings, a smaller version of the son crawled on or in the women. The mother replaced the photos as if she had not seen them. The mother went into her room and drew a cold bath, watched it wait.

The family sat around a table. The father sat at the table’s head looking straight ahead at no one. Behind the father’s head there was a photograph of another man’s head, hairy. The man seemed to stare into the father. The father had not noticed this picture. The mother had taken the picture without asking, and hung it without asking, and if asked she would not be able to say when or where it was shot or whom it pictured. The only person at the table who knew whom the picture pictured was the son, though he would never look at the picture long enough to see.

The table was filled end to end with food. There was so much food on the table that there wasn’t any room for plates. The family picked the things they wanted out of the serving dishes, some of which were larger than their chests: pink meats and bruised fruit, slaws and sauces, all soft enough to eat without the teeth, pervaded by a common smell. No one knew who cooked the food. The father assumed it was the mother. The mother assumed it was someone else. The son didn’t think about it — he was already saying his own prayer in his head. The mother and the father waited for someone to say grace. They’d been saying grace for years together though they could not remember who mostly said it for them. They each kept waiting for one another to begin. Each time the father thought to speak up he’d feel like the mother was about to speak herself and so he’d stop and wait and then she wouldn’t. Under the table, the father rubbed his crotch seam with his thumb. He ate.