Blake Butler - Nothing - A Portrait of Insomnia

The man inside the car, I know, is out there.

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I walk across this grass I cut for years wearing the same clothes, playing tapes of the same music repeating several hundred times, until I can hear them now inside me without hearing. The grass this year in such a dry heat becoming overrun with ants. How the last time I mowed the lawn, this past cold summer, I sucked up the antbeds directly with the mower and the blade. The beds becoming quick washes of brown powder. Spreading out in dry cloud on the light. How any second any section of any hour or block of air could become split to ribbons. Could become full of what you have or have not done again in vast recurrence, as in my father’s dementia-eaten head. The hours malforming from his recognition. Every hour cut from hours never lived.

In the yard I go to the gate and push up the latch that divides the backyard from the front, moving my body through the gap inside the fence that divides our yard from several others, and from the rest of our near world. I pass through the gate, my dad not moving, air not moving. From the gate’s mouth I can still not see the corner where I already know the man inside the car has parked. I move forward several feet up along the driveway past the cars we use to move through further air. My father having recently been resigned of his own car unto driving how for his brain has changed with loss of recognition, his failing eyesight and his memory and dementia, his unshaping motor skills. How now, in recent periods of new unleaving, I can see him sinking in to somewhere else, a field of fragments of what had been once somewhere — scrambled frames. My father, into the smushed light of hours I have most felt being ejected from all dreams. The far-off glowlight of his nowhere becoming a true and seizing aspect of the house. His blood bottled in him, waiting. These days he sleeps more now than ever, as if drinking in the hours of that space becomes an exit — the only exit he has left.

From here I still cannot at all see the man, or his white car’s shape, though I can hear him in my head. This man a minute from one evening of several hours of one day, and yet still so locked inside the face behind my face. This man, who has never slept, no hour, and will never — this man throughout all hours in my mind, alive.

Across from the corner where I expect any second to see the man’s car, there is the patch of grass where one night I saw another man eject his blood — once waiting there to cross the street with my father and my sister in coming home from a football game at the high school we watched a man drive his car straight out into another car — as if he’d been pulled or insisted upon. The glass sprayed at our flesh. My father reaching back to shield my sister and me not only from the crush, but from the sound. The man coming some time later in that night, with us again inside, to knock on our front door and ask to use the phone. The blood he left on the receiver. The bloom of that glass still mostly all there on the air, any hour that I ask it, of light haunted not due to the dead, but our remainders. This corner, any hour, the scene of countless wrecks in endless heads, its plot of air alive with light and nothing, in plain daylight, night light, where. Speech, exercising, houses built and rebuilt, roads, destruction, shitting birds, inhale/exhale, laughter, asking, what might be buried in the leak, what was rained down and rained up from and for us, what has come and comes again. This replication in a silence, lawns and lawns of homes and homes. How could I ever sleep here. How have we ever. Each inch’s rooms on rooms on rooms.

Something flashes in my head here. An instant’s closed eyes. A kind of gone. I think I hear my father saying something, then it slows down, then it’s nothing. Not a voice.

When I look again inside my thinking to the corner nearer to me, slightly blinking, I see the man’s white car parked again right there. Waiting idle, as it has been, all those nights and nights and nights. The hieroglyphic license numbers and chrome bumper gleaming in our afternoon. An engine purred under such silence.

Seeing, I stop, my blood going hardened in my hands. I had not really expected, even in projection. The windows of the car reflecting light in such dimension I can hardly see the hood — and yet I know the doors are not locked. I know when I walk up to the car and touch its metal, I know the doors will be unlocked. Even if not, I have a key still, somewhere. I know this man will let me in. In the light around the car my skin seems see-through. A glass bowl over my head and my home, over my father and my mother. I am standing on the drive. I am standing and am speaking, my mouth moving in my head’s meat, in the light, though nothing comes out on the silence. No other cars or worms or birds. In some way I have been standing in this moment so long. This moment does not exist.

I see the white car’s brake lights grow a glow — two blown red eyes on the ass-end. Out from the front, the high beams showing thickly on the already teeming day of light.

Briefly, in my pause, mouth still gaping, through the house’s outer walls I hear my mother singing, the same songs she repeats in chain most every day — her voice just off from what the note is, vibrating in near-key. The note, as quickly, is diminished. The color of the house itself remains the same. The air around my head a helmet.

I approach the car.

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The man inside the car is not my father but still the car smells like my father’s truck: crushed cigars and wet and dirt and cracking foam.

The man inside the car is facing forward, at the windshield, with both hands gripping the wheel, and still I feel his burned eyes on me as I slide across the skin-toned seat in silence and I close and lock the door. Though from up close outside, the windows appeared opaque with clay mold, from inside out, the front façade of my parents’ house is still apparent, holding still. The car’s glass seems even larger from behind it, whole flat planes that show not an inch of the reflection of my head or chest and eyes.

The man inside the car appears obese in sudden places, oblong globes of flesh bulge off along his spine, at his right knee, near his kidneys. His clothes are white. His hair is gone. A small tattoo along the vein bulge in his left neck is the tattoo I meant to get last year— I think this thought and feel it exiting my mind .

We go. By going I mean the terrain outside the car begins to scroll around us, leaving, though this is the only signal that the car itself can move. It seems to sit silent with us in it — no control panel, no LCD — the man does not move his arms to steer.

All the ashtrays in the car are overflowing though now the car does not smell at all like smoke — liquid Downy, wet dog, bending metal — the smells shift immensely when I blink. The ash is also at my ankles, in my pockets, on my lap. The man’s not smoking, but the air is, gentle fissures pouring through cracks in the upholstery from outside — as if the whole outside is burning underneath us, though through the glass the sky seems fine.

The seat feels deep and open all around me, yawning to fit my body in the dry cavern of its cloth. I relax, sit back. There is the man there beside me in the car. Though he is not my father, he has certain of my father’s features: gone eyes, stern lips, white beard, the cheeks and forehead he gave me in our blood. He still has not at all moved his head — though he is breathing. There are pustules on his arms.

I open up my mouth to speak and instead hear a moist note — something toned from deep down in my lungs. It burns. My cheeks go saggy. I become wet around my crotch. The harder I make strain to eject words out, the more colored the air gets, shifting shitty. Stinking: piss, then weapons, lice, then a low light. Rubber libraries. Eons. Dice.