Blake Butler: There Is No Year

O of go and how and nowhere .

O of house and son and door .

O of O .

From outside looking in, the father beeped and banged against the glass. No one would look toward him. They all were asking. Inside the house the boxes rang, and heads made laugh and bees barfed buzz and long dogs barked and babies babbled, while inside his bulb the father began to shout a semi-prayer and the bulb zapped his skin and skull in hot correction and across it all there was a wind and no one would.

In the backyard, high as ever, like long blank curtains to the sky, the father swung and bit and bashed his head cutting a pathway in the green. His tongue had begun to gather in his helmet, dislodged somewhere way back down his throat, the weird mashed meat surround-compiling in the space around his cheeks. Likewise, his breath had begun building layers on the bulb’s condensation-proof glass. The father tried to wink his cheek to rub the glass clean, but that was hard.

Somewhere in the yard among the fallen clothesline and loops of dead brown meat once trees, the father came to a gazebo nestled in the growing. A tall thin black corrupted structure, thick and pointed though dented in along the top as if something large had had nabs at it. The father did not like its sweeter smell, etched with the sickness, the surrounding air suffused with more mosquitoes, wasps— had you seen this air here, you could not see —the father tripped his way up beneath the errored awning and into the dark shell, buzzing, smoke.

The father knew that though he’d never seen it, the gazebo had always been in the yard, and always would be, in any yard. The father had had long dreams of coiling in a hammock, eating. Here. There were many things the father had planned to do — in or around the house or other — lists of lists of lists of lists — this gazebo, too, was those. The father walked into its mouth.

From up inside the structure’s bleach-burnt stomach, the father could hear the mother somewhere shout. He could not make out what she said — her voice compiled of several others — a thousand tonalities at once — heads surrounding the gazebo, skin on skin, and air on air. The gazebo walls were screened completely and hung with new-car-scent plumes and bags of rice. A sheet of pupae blocked the holy wire scrim. They were crusted on so thick— such dedication —the gazebo’s size quadrupled, like a crown.

The father could not stop with turning, turning, seeing the same few feet of textured surface, until he fell dizzy on the wood.

When he could think again, the father saw a long black bag hanging from the gazebo ceiling. Hung above by strands of hair, it had a name tag and numbers that the father could not read. The father sat up and reached to touch the bag. He felt it warming under his rub. He felt the wets and bumps and whorls. Kick. Kick kick. Kick . Somewhere the mother went on shouting. On certain words, the father’s language tally meter would mistake her words for his. Zap .

The father unzipped the bag. The metal teeth moaned. Inside the bag the father saw the son curled and snoozing, his hands folded at his face. The father felt a wash of whipping through his back, throat, and aorta. Hey, the father said. He could not recall the son’s name. He tried a few. The current scourged him. The hair grew on his face.

The father shook the son unknowing until he opened up his eyes. From in the bag, the son glared. The father could hardly see the son through the glass inside the helmet, for all his sound and all the hair, the rip. What, the son kept repeating, eyes closed, screaming. What. What. What. What. What. What. Each what flew upward from him toward some nothing that on other days he’d called a sky. The son’s sound against the helmet made the father’s language tallies reset to zero, zero, zero. The father, fried.

Through a window in the house that looked out onto the backyard the son watched the buzzing father rouse himself (the son). The son felt amused. He fixed his hair in the reflection. He tried to speak but made a mess.

And then the son was outside the house there with the father and the father’s arms were wet and kind of mushy and the son tried to sit up and felt something hold him and felt something moving through his lungs, new words wanting out and worming, clustered in his bulb. The father could not see the bulb was see-through, made of days.

And then the son was in the house again looking out and the air was fully solid and the son stood encased inside the air and through the window there was light.

LIGHT OF YEARS LIGHT OF WINDOWS LIGHT OF GROWING LIGHT OF NEED

And then the son stood at the kitchen table eating waffles watching TV laughing, sneezing, and all the pressure in his knees, and there were all these people all around him and they were pushing up against his back, they cawed, and they knocked the table to the left and right and they lifted the table off the ground, and the light inside the drink inside the son’s stomach from the girl’s house began to chew into his chest, and he laughed harder, and everyone was laughing too, all around him bodies laughing, and his teeth began to turn inside his head and he could not see and he could not remember and he was so hungry the ceiling wobbled up and down.

And then the son was being carried through the massive lawn with all the mud splashing up around them, and the sky or ceiling stretching overhead and coming closer down and closer down, and the son could feel his cheeks all puffy and the son could feel his and his father’s heartbeats both together through his own chest, the visor of the father’s helmet banging back and forth against the son’s skull’s hardened soft spot in the rhythm of their fumbling run.

And then the son was in the son’s room looking at all the clear gel spilling from the closet, the closet where the son had spent so many hours typing still unknown, and the son saw what he made, he saw the texture of the ejection, of the words burped from several selves he’d held in hives, layers wished and crushed and in him, and he felt the words spread through the room expanding, felt the words burst back into him and through and through and of the room, words worn on paper, wet and endless, a flooding ocean at his knees, at his chest, his neck, his head, gel gumming up his nostrils and in the air vents, in the air itself — and then the son again could not breathe — and the words slushed and slammed around the son as massive slivers, blubbing up, and the son rose off the floor inside the rising, and the son tried to swim and kick as best he could, the language welling in his head and stomach, stretching his legs and muscles, and therein the son gushed on, and the son slid down through the hallway, wide as ever, and the son warbled down the stairs, down through the house where all was runny and one color, and the son gushed on through the front door—

and then the son opened his mouth and shut his eyes and then the son slid backward through where he’d been and the son saw seas and rooms and constellations and the son grew very large and he grew small—

and then the son was in the father’s arms gel-covered, and the son was the father’s arms themselves and they were standing there beside the mother at a hole large as the house, a hole with many holes inside it, concentric rings of endless holes inside the hole , and the mother’s head was wound with bees and birds and gel and she had a shovel and she was digging in the rip, and she was digging and she was digging, begging in the holes — she was saying something about the father or the son or both together, and the mother ripped and bent her long nails on the hard dirt — the dirt that had built up around the house high as the house and ever higher at the hole’s edge and yet had not yet found a way to touch the sky — and the father tried to make the mother put the shovel down and come away from the half-assed hole she’d hardly dug inside the hole, among all the other holes there all around her, and she there screaming on and on into the grass about insects and sand and windows and the houses and the light—