Blake Butler - Nothing - A Portrait of Insomnia

At some point, in my waiting, I again nodded off. Like any other way I can’t remember the transition — I was there at the window, then I was there again, time having passed again around me, though the boulder dream had not occurred — the first blank night in what seemed even longer than simple years. My mouth was dry. I could tell I’d slept only when I could see again the light outside the house had returned — one instant dark, the next in rising gloaming. The man no longer appeared there along the lawn, the street returned to same as always, giving confine to our yard’s grass and the trees and wires overhead. The man was gone, and so, I realized over time, so was the boulder.

So many things inside that night that man could have done. Keys he could have used to come inside the house, or touch the windows, whisper into me. I would not have to know — my hours sleeping open, unto any kind of light — the patient, waiting error in communication between the self there and the brain. It seems odd that years of the same dream would end with something nameless like this, something whose presence even in memory I can’t put a hand to, but in my head the two events remain burned into one together, somehow crystalline, rendered in my head in perfect film — unlike most every other image in the long crud, yesterday gone underneath today’s want for more passage, more called on. Whether or not this is at all how it happened, this is the way by which in memory a life is formed; one room butts against another, one branch of nothing splintered soft into the next, creating rungs, which then must be shuffled from one to the next like bloodflow inside each moment, both incidental and by form, something crept under the surface there meant to knit and wait and be, visible only when it’s gone.

For many nights after I saw the man outside our house unmoving I waited up for him to reappear. He did not that night, nor the next night. Nor the next, then. Or again. And yet, upon the air there, where he’d been then, on the street there, there was instilled a silent charge — a layer to the air around the house and my own seeing that I could not explicate, or size — a layer that when passed through in my body in the light outside the house I rarely thought to think of, but only at the window, framed, felt distilled. Sometimes in late evenings or at the house alone I still look out that window to see if that man is still there — still right there outside the window right now, with this sentence still in my fingers, between my teeth… as just now I part this bedroom’s bloodred curtains and, underneath, the translucent veil — a double layer against the seeing out or seeing in. Since then, the yard has grown in thicker, a bush with pink buds so high the stretch of street is hardly seen, beyond the fat tree now red with fall wet, its leaves molting red. The yard shifting around the house, changing the house, masking the air. Today, for instance, I see no one, no man awaiting, no white car, no person I have never met or ever murmuring into me through the phone. Why not. Why am I sitting. What other hours.

Today inside the house I collect my legs and I stand up. I move here from the typing desk toward the doorway to other rooms — rooms I’ve lived in or around by now for years. I pass along the hallway hung with pictures of my sister and me varying in age — pictures of us, drawings we made (lines and words ejected from the flesh). The pictures of us watch me walk along the hallway with the carpet full of our dead hair. The carpet soft and without heat beneath my feet. I pass through another door into the kitchen, the room in which of all rooms I have put the most food inside my skin. I move toward the glass door I once ran head-on into as a child, running from nothing, the shape of impact shaking sound into my head — sound I feel still here in me, nowhere. Through the glass today, the light — the light of day in all directions, silent. Today is today again and I am here — I am in me, wherever I am.

Inside the light, I go ahead.

In the backyard, on the concrete, I find my father standing with the pool net looking up into the leafless tree in other years I liked to climb. Its limbs are splayed and skinny. Beneath it is the ground where the remainder of my first dog sits beneath mud buried in the clearing among some bush. The grass is not at all discolored where we chunked the mud out to make room for what remained of her body after being cremated, to dust. My father does not turn to look at me as I pass him. There seems a globe or glove around his head, a veil ejected from the form inside his mind that has eaten up his modes of recognition — the bodies in this house here all around him often not his family he has known, but people passing by inside a strange hold in the hours; no longer sure of where the bed is, or the bathroom; his brain consumed with something ejecting spreading black over the interior terrain of his recognition, transforming the holds of the home around him in ways that no longer fit the keys — or is it the reverse — the keys malforming, fattening against the turngrain of the tumblers where for years he’d been and been — or both, or neither. He is here among us, in his body, though who he is in there has turned deformed, slim glimmerings of recognition or want or who he’d ever been coming on only briefly, in small passings, and even these diminishing among the night.

Today our yard contains no sound — the wind and light and animals as if on pause for some soft hour. No rising balloons. No other dogs. I hesitate for half a second, thinking to go back and verify my mother’s presence inside the house there in whichever room she might be in — often staring into a machine working puzzles inside a box — to clear her mind and think of nothing beyond the click. Other hours she will sew, the thread and fabric forced together with her hands attached to her whole body, which created me as well.

I do not go back inside. I do not touch my father, ask him how his day has been, his brain inside him aging, losing cell meat of who and where his arms were in other days, hours he could transfer into me for safekeeping, so I’ll remember for him. Most of these days I do not ask. For all the ways I feel failing as a person, this is the most palpable of all, and yet, nothing. My father’s arms. The hair on his arms, and the hair not on his arms. The patches of the way his skin has changed over all this time. Time we spent in different rooms, or in the same room. Hotels where both of us have slept. Hours we both have not slept. My mother. My sister somewhere else with her husband and her dogs, maybe sleeping or not sleeping. Every minute of every day is this. Surrounded by the yard where years I grew. The vortex of the body and the hours ill spent and the things said or never said. The ruin accumulating in soft pockets on the body and the mind, replacing fat with ways we went wrong — or worse, not even that — the fucked folds of every minute, like several thousand stairwells made of meat, all rising off from one point, crystallizing, lost — the inaction of action — the blank of acting, so as to be not blank — the blank even then, and even then. And yet. And yet. Even in this sentence, in this room of different light, I cannot stop myself from stopping myself. The man inside the white car, I know, today, is waiting, being for me, in the road. Outside my house — our house. Appearing.

Today I am awake.

I leave my father at the pool there, his arms inside his clothes, connected to those arms, his paling body, which seems to be expanding and imploding both at once. I walk across the concrete where I would lie for hours watching for something coming for me, from the center of this sky. Certain hours of certain days even having convinced myself I could see the balloon again floating in from somewhere, so far off, a dot set in the sky so deep yet I still could see it, another message-filled balloon. Sometimes the balloon would seem so near inside its small size it was a planet. Sometimes it would be the sky.