Blake Butler: There Is No Year

Looking closely at the son’s nail — the ring finger on his right hand usually, though sometimes the left, and sometimes on a toe or chewed to slivers in his stomach — one could distinguish a certain shape that in certain kinds of light became another hallway or a wall.

Other times one could see the son himself there embedded with his face cracked down the middle on the run of weird cell-matter the son’s disease had cut into the nail— the gloss of certain weeks the son had spent upside-down or in a prism — the rings the son would one day wear — the blip — the years uncoming, the windows sloshed with sun .

Other times there was absolutely nothing and you’d be a fool to think in wonder.

Look again.

The father lay on the bed. He lay beside the sleeping mother. Into his mouth he’d stuffed ten cigarettes. He gripped their gather like a bat. He inhaled through his mouth and out his nostrils. Filled with smoke, he fainted briefly— a second smoke inside him —and woke up. The house’s power had gone out. There was no light from in or outside. The moon had moved behind something or another, or someone had blocked it, or it was no longer even there. The father’s pupils began expanding.

In the bed the wife sat up. She asked what happened to the light. The father asked what did she care, she was sleeping. The mother said the light had gone off inside her sleeping also. She said she’d been talking to someone in there and they were looking at one another and happy and things were good and then the light went off and she could not find this person no matter how loud she called into the dark. The father said, How nice.

Through the air vent to the downstairs they could hear the son’s voice, shouting, though neither said anything about it. The father inhaled his cigarettes and blew more into the cloud over the bed. The father didn’t say anything further about the mother’s sleeping or the light or what else they should do. The mother breathed the smoke without complaining. She didn’t ask when he’d started smoking. She moved to get up out of the bed and the light in the house came on and she was naked.

The father had not seen the mother’s body in a decade. He found her appealing still, despite her marks. The mother had been through long cycles of weight loss and gain. Some months the mother would eat as if there were someone else inside her. Some months she couldn’t hold a glass of water. The mother’s breasts were huge and white. The father felt his body stirring. The father raised his pelvis off the bed.

The son wasn’t yelling anymore. The mother said something about the room seeming much smaller. The mother got back in the bed and covered up. She turned her back toward the father. Her back was ridged and knobby and had pockmarks all around it which when connected made a number. The father did not try to touch — he knew better — but still he kept his body flexed. He kept himself suspended as much as possible off the mattress and soon his muscles stretched with ache. It was a game. The sweat sluiced off his back onto the bed sheets. He was grunting. The smoke encombed his head. He could breathe still without coughing.

The lights went off again. The mother sat up. The lights went on and off and on in quick succession. Outside, they heard the sound of metal against metal. The mother went to the window to look down. She stayed at the window for some time, her breath all foggy. She didn’t say anything about what was there. The father noticed now she had a scratch mark down the center of her chest.

In the hallway, the father heard the son talking in a strong, high voice. Then the son was laughing. He had a very peculiar laugh. The mother turned away from the window and went to stand facing the wall.

On the other side of the wall, though the mother could not see him, the son came into the adjacent room and stood. The mother and the son became parallel to one another, a wall between them. The mother moved her legs a certain way. The son moved his legs in mirror, spreading. There they held an endless posing pause — a wet erupting from the son’s mouth, then the mother’s, twin rivers glinting of a light.

Behind, the father watched the ashes fall off on his tired stretch-marked belly. He lit another pack. The lights went off and on and off and on. Their power bill would be enormous.

Over many weeks, once they had settled, their copies nowhere , the house fell into feeling, often, fine. The house had an oven, stairs, some ceilings. The family began to loosen. They put their things where they belonged in this new system. They unwrapped the crap they used the most first, then on to baubles. They changed the grade of light in certain rooms. They hung up pictures of things they wanted to remember or identified with or just liked to look at while passing in the hall. The family tried to make the house their home.

As weeks gathered, passed in packets — days that often seemed of no uniform length, one unto the other and again — the house took shape around its new contents in nameless ways. Some nights the family would be woken by long bowed tones from all around — their whole house surrounded by an edgeless, shapeless singing ; a sound that had an eye . It never seemed as though the family all heard the sound on the same evenings. Sometimes it would stir only the mother or the son. Sometimes the tone seemed, to the father, just inside his eyelid— therein, he could not stand up from the bed, his flesh repelled upon the air as if by magnets . Some nights, the whole night, the tone would row, the mother and father there frozen side by side in bed together, seeing one another, not a blink. In the mornings, one or the other might mention how they’d heard it — the loudest droning— the father thought it was a D flat, though he could not sing it back in tune —and the one who’d heard it the night before would say, Oh, I slept straight through the hours.

Down the street three feet, or just above it, the sound around the house could not be heard.

Some nights, the son, awake well beyond both parents, would shake inside his skin. The sound would form around him, like cold clothing, threading on the night. The gong and organ in his chest would chime right in — repeating, harmonizing. The son felt words along his tongue. In the mornings, trying to tell the father or the mother of the shape growing inside him, all around the house, the words came out as something else.

Panes kept falling out of all the windows. Sometimes the sand that’d made the glass became apparent, insects sprawling in the grain. The tires on the family car would have flattened many mornings. The welcome mat would melt in too much light. The birdbath teemed and toppled. The dishwasher would seem to speak. Nothing ever seemed to line up with one another. The son could not walk from one room to another without bumping his elbow, nicking his shoulder. He often heard people speaking in the vents, grunting or gunplay on the roof. The house would not stay still.

The father and the mother tried to go on, despite the headaches and morning pus. They fixed the windows and kissed the son. They kept their cool. They did not scream at one another when the garage door came down on the car while they were backing out. They did not panic when the front yard flowerbed spat the bulbs out of the ground. They did their best just not to think. Relax a little. They found themselves repeating it: RELAX. RELAX. They slept with their eyes open, all at once.