Blake Butler: There Is No Year

The next day it took the father six hours to get home from work. He took the same way he took home every day but each day it seemed to take a little longer. The streets went on a little further each time he drove them. There were new things on old streets. There were new streets with no signs for street names. There were traffic lights spaced barely yards apart. Certain lights would sit for many minutes red with the father edging the car further and further into the empty intersection. There never seemed to be any other cars. Ahead, the horizon of no dimension — limbless and suspended, several states away.

For a while the father could not hear anything around him — not even breathing, not even wind — except the sound of something dragging under the car, but each time he pulled over there was nothing. The car stereo would not make sound.

At one point on one of the streets the opposite lane filled with running dogs. The dogs were black and had shining eyes and they were drooling from the mouths. The drool splattered on the windshield and made the street slick and the father skidded a little in his own lane. The windshield wipers made an awful screeching, as if soon the glass would break.

The drive home took so long the father got hungry two different times and at each he stopped at the same fast food restaurant and ordered the same thing, though the two items tasted very different. An attendant in one of the two fast food drive-thru windows had her eyes shut the entire time she took his order. There was a picture of the drive-thru window on her shirt and the father swore he could see himself sitting in the car outside that cotton window though the woman never turned toward him well enough that he could see for sure.

Finally in his driveway the father stopped and parked the car. He took the key out and he touched the key. The father saw the house. The father paused again and put the key in and turned the car back on and edged it closer to the garage. He moved as close to the house as he could manage without touching. The closer he got the car to the house, the more it seemed to shake. The father put the car in neutral and got out and put his head against the hood.

Q: DID THE CAR SOUND FUNNY?

A: The father could not tell. He was not good with his hands or with machines. To some this made the father not a man.

Q: WAS THERE SOMEONE IN THE CAR STILL?

A: The father didn’t think to look.

Q: WHO WAS WATCHING?

A: The house had several windows.

Q: WHAT SHOULD THE FATHER HAVE KEPT IN THE GLOVE BOX THAT HE DID NOT?

A: A gun, a length of wire, a set of rubber gloves, emergency money and some form of rations, Fear of Music by Talking Heads, fake flowers ( the kind that never die ), permanent marker ( the kind that never can be erased ), a photo of his wife from a time he’d like to remember ( uh-huh ), a photo of his mother.

Q: WHAT WAS IT ABOUT THE NEIGHBOR’S HOUSE ACROSS THE STREET THAT THE FATHER DID NOT SEE, DISTRACTED AS HE WAS BY HIS OWN CONDITION?

A: The father did not see the enormous object wrapped in black plastic that took up the majority of the yard.

Q: WITH THE GAS REMAINING IN THE CAR, AND ALL OTHER GAS PERHAPS FOR SALE OR UNDERGROUND ELSEWHERE NOTWITHSTANDING, HOW FAR AWAY COULD THE FATHER GET FROM THE HOUSE IF HE DROVE THE CAR AT EXACTLY THE SPEED LIMIT IN ONE DIRECTION AND DID NOT PAUSE?

A: The father could not get far away at all.

With the car still on the driveway burning fumes, the father came into the house. He’d thought of something he needed to tell the mother. He’d thought of this thing earlier while staring into the work computer and had meant to write it down but didn’t and now he was thankful it had reappeared, veined in his mind. It was an important thing. It was about the house.

The father could not quite say the thing aloud. The father slunk, eyeing for the mother.

The mother was not in the entry foyer, where in the early years she’d always met him coming in, her face engraved with home expression. As well, there, the father was used to seeing the family’s shoes all taken off and stacked in order, as the mother was always a stickler for unsmushed carpet, but in recent weeks she’d stopped bothering to take hers off and so the son had too. The mother and the son both owned several pairs. The carpet was minced and feathered, brained already here and there with darker clot — some slush, some blood, some body oils, a few bits meant to have been eaten. There were so many kinds of stains it looked like more than just the four of them in there, living. Three. Three of them, not four, the father corrected in his head.

The mother was not in the kitchen raising dinner. The lights were on and the fridge was open, full of light and frigid breathing. The oven had been preheated, though there was nothing in it and nothing sitting wanting to get in. A set of knives was spread out on the table. One of the four long bulbs in the overhead fluorescent lamp was dead.

The mother was not in the hallway that connected the kitchen to the garage, though from the garage the father could see his car up near the glass, its headlamps stunted by the near door and treating the tiny windows with more light. The father moved into the garage cracking his fingers and opened the freezer door and shut it. No mother, but the father found a hammer on the ice. The hammer’s head was cold and solid, a thing that would always be. He touched the hammer to his face.

The father carried the hammer with him back into the family hallway with a set of school-made photos of the son ordered in ascending age on either side, a progression that ended with the most recent photos, which somehow still did not look the same as the son did now.

At a certain spot in the hallway on the carpet the father set the hammer down.

The mother was not in the laundry room where the floor had babbled sick with suds. Underneath the suds, the machine shook. The bubbles blew larger than most soap bubbles. The father stamped the sudding with his boot and heard it crackle like glass pellets.

The mother was not in the TV room, as far as the father could rightly see. There was a smell that curled the air. Some color not a color. The TV lay turned over on its face. The father called the mother’s name several times into several cracks the room had and left his voice wedged there behind him.

The door to the son’s room was closed and locked and inside he could not hear the son up or moving. Asleep, the father assumed, as the son would not answer, not for anything. He tried the knob again, again.

The mother was not in their bedroom. The bed was made and covered all with crumbling crap that’d come down off the ceiling, plaster popcorn. Something had been making the ceiling shudder in the evenings. The father’s feet felt triple-sized. The father sat down to take his shoes off, glowing. The father said the mother’s name some more. He was so tired. He knew that he should find her. He knew he couldn’t just go to sleep, though he felt the feeling flooding through him, weighing his limbs down, thickening his blood.

The father leaned back on his elbows on the mattress, nodding. His head felt wide as nowhere. His head had so much in it.

The father heard someone rummage in the bathroom.

Ah, there she is, the father said, relaxing.

Outside the house inside the night beyond the father, the mother stood in porch light, in a gown. The mother knocked and rang the neighbors’ bells. She banged and clapped and tried the windows. People , she thought. People who can sleep . The mother moved from one house to another. None of the houses looked like hers, nor the house she had grown up in, nor the house grown up in by the son. From house to house to house to house to house the mother knocked and crossed off numbers on her arm. She’d woken up and found the numbers there delivered, formed in the patterns of the clogged pores where her hair would no longer grow.