Blake Butler - Nothing - A Portrait of Insomnia

I can only sit still by not trying.

The man who is not my father speaks.

— Do you remember

He stops. His voice is small and sandy, like something rubbed out from between two long human hairs. The main vein running at the globe-edge of his skull’s frame stands out winking. His concentration comes from none. I open up my mouth again and he is speaking.

— when you and Jason R. and Bradley R. and Samad A. made Darrell C. stand underneath the monkey bars in the mudfield behind East Valley Elementary and then took turns swinging down from both sides to kick his chest and stomach one after another until he turned bright white and could not breathe. You all talked him out of going to get help from the teacher by patting the cough out of his back and saying he was cool.

I see my pants are ripped a little. In the side mirror I can no longer see our house, inside of which the computer where I’d been typing is still typing. My mother in the next room asleep in her bed upside down.

That I could never get over coming back to that house, and likely never will.

By now we’ve passed the church on our same street I once believed was literally the house of god — god being my friend Adam’s father, the minister who stood before us and spoke out or sung from books in words I did not understand. How I would not come when he appeared at our front doorstep to pick me up and take me home to play with his son, in their backyard with that magnolia tree that seemed to touch the sky. How I hid inside a closet in no light and waited till he was gone. Then my mother took me over and that afternoon Adam and I discovered an elevator in his basement that went to nowhere, on and on.

Since then that church has doubled in its size.

The smell inside the car now is the same as the blood that was pouring out of Marcus S.’s nostrils without clear reason in the grass inside the night, during another Boy Scout meeting where everybody carried handkerchiefs and knives. The blood’s glisten, his eye wet’s glisten. I find it hard to breathe — and yet the creaming taste opens a door. The car starts moving faster.

— Hey,

I hear myself say. It’s the only word I am allowed.

The word inside my mouth makes glow-oil. I am working on a new balloon.

— You are working on a new balloon,

the man continues, his hands so tight-gripped to the wheel his fingers seem about to break. I realize he is wearing thin gloves, revealed by how their skin color frays around his wrists. The gloves’ color match the car’s interior’s color match the man’s other skin, and mine. My skin is sticking to the all of it.

— but the problem is, you’ve already turned so old. Every day is faster than the last and you’re still all pen to paper and all in small rooms hiding from the light. What do you think sleep is? One third of any life. And still the bodies who talk about books don’t want to hear what happened to you in there, call it ugly. Like every word you’ve ever said. Like every inch you’ve ever houred. This is the smallest car I’ve ever drove.

Driven, I start to say to him, correction — and my mouth is so full of my spit, I can’t even snort or say no, pull over, who are you, there’s no seat belts, where are we going, why does the radio not have dials, why does the seat belt feel like burning, what is that banging in the trunk. Suddenly I have all these questions, and from each of those three more, and from each of those a paragraph of wanting I’ve never written down and will die in me, I know, contained — even when the skin splits and my blood runs to leave the meat, these wrinkles will remain — these wrinkles will decay to sit upon the air the way all light does, a hard drive on the night, and yet still every day my first concern is all this typing — not any woman, not any walking in a pasture or a light. Every minute with anywhere and escalators and moss and doors ever, all directions all at once in every era, and yet the same room with the same splits in the same walls, healing and unhealing, asking…

I look down, see there is a button sticking up out of my shirt — from the center of my chest; it’s always been there. Its head is gold and cannot see. I cannot move my arms to move my hands upon them to touch the button, to press the button in my chest, and I know that when I look away I will not see the button there again, ever or ever, or feel the wanting of it, the gold thrum, and it will be right there in my chest still all those hours, waiting all the same.

The man who is not my father lifts a hand off the steering wheel and moves to hold my face, to cup it like a massive taco and fix it forward, looking straight on, as he is, to what’s ahead.

— That’s not a button, it’s a tumor. You are growing. Doesn’t matter. You are growing inside too. The length of the human intestines are ten times longer than the length of the body. Each year 275,000 Britons disappear. In 30,000 years, Saturn’s rings will have disseminated into blank. So what. So who. Listen, the reason you don’t sleep is because you’ve never really been tired. Because there’s nothing to name the thing you want. Well isn’t that just so sad.

Through the front window of the car the yards of the houses in surrounding come on calm. This is a neighborhood and its outlying I’ve lived in or been around for thirty years now. Thirty years in counting down. There is the by-now half-overgrown driveway where the car full of screaming kids pulled over behind my friend Chu L. and I walking home from the comic-book store both with paper bags and the kid got out and ran and punched me walking in the face; how I walked stiff-armed straight forward not at all blinking, the warmth all spreading through my jaw.

There is the stretch of hill in the emptying where in the light off the tall lamp a van had parked and as we crossed some grass these two men came walking as if to cut us off, no one else anywhere around, the spot on the grass where I stopped and said we’d missed a house behind us and my friend said no we hadn’t and I said yes we did I’m going back and the men were getting closer and my friend didn’t get it and I grabbed his arm and we started up the hill again and the men walked faster and we ran, then later that night on television we saw how a few other kids had been abducted in our area by men inside a van.

Every stretch of these roads the organs for the map of every person passing in their way — the sleeping and unsleeping. A common night. Night in which you cannot see the sky inside its shifting, or hear the resin of it blanking in both ears like a kind of helmet that melts into what it wears (and it is the one that wears).

The smell in the car now is of new horse, a horse or horses being born — or both things at the same time, in every city, in every room in every city, in every cell of every room of every city…

— The only horse you ever rode on wouldn’t even move. She just stopped and stood there in the mud. I should kick your ass out of this car. Stop talking. This is not a book about insomnia, because there is no such thing as insomnia. That’s an idea they sold you, like new music and birthday money. Do you need to get out of the car?

My chest has swollen with liquid. It shows blue through my chest. The wet is warm. The seat rubs with me. I smell the burn behind my eyes.

The car, in moving, slows down to standstill outside a long field where massive towers carry telephone and power wires both ways for miles. The grass is high as a man’s chest in places, of a crisp white, corn silk or a doll’s hair.

The man reaches past me to open the car door, his flesh in my flesh, his head still headed straight and on. The door pops and I flood for it, my body growing out into the added air.

Far in the distance, the red roof of my parents’ house billows brown clouds — but I cannot see that from here. I cannot see them for the lip of sky hung hanging from the sky itself, where something on the light has opened up. A crust of birds or kites or helicopters moving in both the left and right peripheries, beyond the edges of my lids.