Blake Butler: There Is No Year

Help! His crotch was sopping. The air was thick, and more so the further in. He knew he should not be crawling any further— what if someone came along and screwed the vent’s grate face back on behind him, moved a dresser to block its eye? And yet, ahead, where the vent curved in an L out of his vision, the waiting metal shined. The seizing of his cells inside the terror made the father’s teeth taste sharp — made his heartbeat lurch inside him, metabolizing. The air grew warmer, quicker, tighter, the deeper still into the house the father crawled, still with his mind inside him thinking, Help

Help

Help

Help

Help

Help

Help

That night on their mattress, lying spines entwined and sleeping, the dusty father and itching mother agreed by grunt how it was time to sell the house.

The son received a package in the mail. The son had not ordered anything or been expecting gifts, nor could he think of anyone remaining who would give him gifts or want to. The son had not given his new address to anyone he could remember, or spoken it aloud into the air, though he may have written it on a free contest entry at a local food chain, which made him eligible to win a free week of gym training: Shape the Self Inside Your Self . He planned to exercise unbounded if he won. He would one day ripple in bright light.

When the son was younger, the mother’s mother had often sent the son things for no good reason. At Christmas, the mother’s mother sent the son special food that arrived already rotting — she did it every year. Once the mother’s mother had sent a shrunken gown and a locket with a name inscribed — the mother’s mother’s name, not the son’s. Folded between the locket’s metal halves there was a picture of a man. The man had black hair grown down over most of his face. He always seemed to be looking directly at the son. The son tried to wear the necklace despite the father’s protest but he felt it choked him anyway. The son threw the necklace out a window. He’d found it several times sindce then: around the neck of his favorite doll; looped over the brass knob to the closet. Once he’d coughed it up. The son could no longer see or feel the necklace around his neck if he put it on.

This package was not likely from the mother’s mother, as this year she was underground.

This package fit the exact shape of the mailbox. It was black and weighed more than it looked like it should, and yet the son could lift.

The son didn’t think too much about it. He had his mind cluttered with other things, like how at school no one would come near him and how when he went into certain rooms he gave off smoke and how ceilings always seemed just above his head. Even the teachers went on calling him the wrong name — sometimes the mother’s name, sometimes the mother’s mother’s. Sometimes the son’s name came out as silence, just these moving lips. Other names they used could be found inscribed on plaques and trophies in the glass box at the front of the school, with photos of students left from long ago. They were mostly ugly. It was a very, very old school.

The son took the package out of the mailbox and carried it into the house under his arm. He went up to his room without speaking to anyone — to tell his mother how the new shoes they’d bought over the weekend were now melting in the soles. Even if the son had gone searching, even if he’d felt ecstatic with new bright news, the son would have found no one in the house. They’d all gone off somewhere, maybe. Or they were hiding. Or something else.

Had someone been around to see the son come in, perhaps, they might have stopped him, touched his hand. What’s in that package, they might have said. Let’s make it open. You are so young to receive mail. Instead the son went into her room and closed the door and locked it and turned around and set down the package and took off his clothes and faced the wall.

The son was writing a book. The son did not realize he was writing the book because most of the time while he was writing he was asleep or not paying attention or in the mindset of doing other things. Some nights the son would believe he was playing putt-putt in the backyard with the plastic golf set his father had bought to try to get him interested in sports, but the son was actually writing the book. The son would think he was languid in front of the television watching some kind of program about trucks or swords, designed to ensnare young boys’ attention, but the son was actually writing the book. The son had also mistaken himself for eating dinner, painting pasta, laughing, and brushing his teeth while he was actually sitting in his closet with the door shut and his fingers typing into a very small computer he didn’t know he had.

The computer’s keyboard did not have markings. The light gushed from its screen so bright it would for hours make the son not see. He could not see the words he’d already written as he wrote them, not even inside him. Nothing. His eyes spun in his head.

The words he typed weren’t words. Or, more so, the words had more words in them, collapsing, like flame laid into flame. The words inside the words kept the son from sleeping, even while sleeping.

While all awake, when the son tried to write, any pen refused to release ink. Any pencils he found inside the house would be unsharpened or would break their tips or bend. By the time the son had found something else to write with — rock on concrete, chocolate syrup, mud or blood — he could no longer hear the words inside him, and out came small other words instead: HELLO. HELLO. HELLO. HELLO. Sometimes he could not move his hands or arms or teeth or eyes at all.

The son’s book contained all things.

The son’s book enmeshed the threads of all events or lights or hours that had ever happened or would happen, or were happening right now.

The son’s book contained the sound of wing meat contained in birds once thought extinct, and that meat’s aging, worn to none—

it contained a diagram of long forgotten burned or buried cities and how to enter through their last remaining eyes, how to stay there in that belowground and, of new duration, live—

it contained sonogram photography of the man who in coming years would invent the thing that ruined us all—

it contained every word deleted from all other extant books, everything that every author had said aloud in rooms with no one while writing what words did end up appearing in those books, as well as all other possible combinations of words and new words those same characters could have made—

it contained instructions on how to stand on the surface of a camel’s eye—

it contained an interminable glisten — an unbreakable lock—

it contained the missing seventh and eighth sides of the Clash’s Sandinista! , written by a presence never mentioned in the band, which when played at a specific volume at a certain vector would invoke an unremembered form of light — and a song deleted from that missing album — lyrics deleted from that song — code words deleted from that language — time—

it contained a sister for the son to speak to in the evenings when the whole house was not awake, whom he would let his darkest language into, black pictures writ on black—

it contained a killer recipe for Apple Brown Betty, enabling mesmerism, enabling sight of new rooms set upon rooms—

it contained electronic conversations between Richard Nixon and Aleister Crowley, convening under new moonlight to discuss the initiation of the construction of a translucent ceiling over the United States, a silent, hieroglyph-inscribed dome, to watch the waking and the sleeping, to see and see—