Blake Butler - Nothing - A Portrait of Insomnia

The smell I leave inside the car behind me is lavender and candy, crumpled paper, guns.

In the light outside my body stings. My flesh continues spreading out in each direction, blowing bubbles, wet or air inside of me creating room. The car idles beside me silent, waiting, while in the open light my skin makes more.

Fear of Body

On the earliest video images captured of me, via Betamax one Christmas, my body appears translucent. Where I am standing in the image you can still see the room behind me, as if I’m not at all really there, or am a temporary gloam over the more permanent structure that the house is. That house, by now, to me as a concrete place is gone, having been sold after my grandparents’ passing, turned over to others to reoutfit with the hours of their lives. I will never go inside that house again — here it is upon the tape, in a day I do not remember but by seeing myself moving in the replicated room there. There too, the cells of my body, at age two or three, form a version of my body I could never find my way into again, and could not even as that image was burned into its pixels, even as I moved in the instant. And yet I am still in this same body, if grown larger, older, here today — I watch myself in the old space unaware of being watched. Therein, in the containment, I seem to contain a kind of false eternal life, a compilation of temporary minutes constricted into data that inside the tape play on — me there, speaking, gleeful, shaking objects out of boxes, aging with age I have had now inside me for so long. The tape seems almost to mock the absence of my own version of the memory — what about my life the machine remembers that I do not. These kinds of videos and images exist now for most everybody in certain hours, spools of versions, days gone past.

In my own skull’s box, too, beyond the camera’s reach, there are films coiled, ones seen once and not again, some seeming not like days I’ve lived but like exposures burned in from a different kind of light. As thick and suddenly eruptive as recall can be — some moments so burned into the blood and definitive of self they seem always playing in there in learned silence, on and on — for each of any of these clearest hot spots, there must be hundreds of thousands of other instants crushed underneath — either because they seemed less remarkable than another upon occurrence, or simply because it is our nature, inundated, to let the mass of what has come and gone become dissolved into some kind of bulkhead over the hour, there but not there, accessed by accident and sometimes force of will — though so many of the instants that do roll up inside me even now seem somehow qualitatively, at the time of entry, unpronounced. More clearly than the specifics of most any of my birthdays, or the deaths of my relatives or my skinned knees, I remember things that should seem, in comparison, a sidebar, common. Better than being baptized or going to prom or my first ball games, I remember with some great degree of spatial semblance the year I saw a certain movie on TV — one I’ve never found again since whatever year — a film wherein a child sized like me then appeared asleep in front of another screen — until in the dark room through the glass, as he remains still, a horde of countless bulbous insects rush to fill the floor, come to surge and writhe around his sleeping body in a clustered mass encountered unaware — the insects then carry the child’s body off into the dark of the house surrounding, offscreen — gone from me in vision except for where the sight is burned still in my mind.

Another year, when I was three— though this, unlike the movie, I would not remember without having been told —my mother found me talking on the phone — connected through a wire to a stranger speaking words into my head. Mom thought at first that I was playing on in self-conversation until the nature of my speaking began to shift, and it became clear someone was there. She took the phone out of my hand and asked, “Who is this?” The person on the other end hung up without further word. Our bill that month would reveal I’d been on the line with whomever almost half an hour, sharing wire, a digit string I’d dialed by fluke punching the keys. Unlike the unread note inside the balloon caught in a tree years later, I’d received a message, though one all buried, lurking here inside me now.

What sounds that man laid into me, what language. His breathing or commands; perhaps some code repeated over and over, prophetic dictum. I have no memory of it at all. I know it occurred at all because my mom remembers, and yet that residue still lingers, or something like it — I feel I can’t get the idea of the voice out of my head. It feels as close inside me as any minute, in my body — not a voice inside me, but its specter, by definition shapeless, and so in concept capable of any shape.

This seeing, hearing, being, contained inside the self — boxes, film, speech, image, air — must in gathering within me, even silent, contain a voidspace — a terrain inaccessible but through an inversion or elaboration of a certain sketch of time held in chemical loops caked in my mind, their silent wheels working in orchestration with any other range of moment, forgotten and not forgotten, amassed dimensionless, a hidden blood. When I die, those spaces die within me, while the tapes outside me continue on, there with all the other relics of the things I’ve taken into me in translation via seeing, reading, thinking, wishing, what — each also to one day be discarded, sold or buried, burned, donated, inherited, thrown away, passed on to other bodies, for whatever, until those bodies too are gone.

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To keep me calm or to recalm my internalizing terror in the fake light the house held to keep the night out, my mother read to me aloud. She read me books beside my bed about boys or men who, waking, moved — through forests to find fathers or ride on rivers; men who went because they could. Her voice gave a calm and even glove of warming, one like an endlessly played album I can in my head alone invoke: a soft pocket right there all through the veils of junk recorded on my brain’s ends. With her there nearby, projecting softly aloud, the larger world felt far away — the crushing veils of silence in which the evil things could hide and approach suddenly filled with protection, an eye. She would stay there, predicting end points for our evening when she would need to leave me and always staying when I asked for further, more.

Despite her sound, the reading never made me go to sleep. Our time would end when she herself, among the reading, had grown tired in her own body, her voice perhaps having even changed in tenor, turning sore. Inside the silence after, my mom would leave me with the light on, my smaller self in fear needing the reading lamp to keep the room close, quiet. A light like fire that would invoke fear in those beginning their wanting in — it was not until later, maybe, that I realized the light is what would draw them, bring them wanting. So many years I camped inside the house among that glowing, exposed as new rock, my dumb awake glow spreading out around the house all hours in small unwinking, not even miles.

In later years, both my mother and I aging, changing bodies, I would record my own voice reading on cassettes that then could be replayed night by night in loops, the cogs inside the machine fitting into the two eyeholes in the tape’s face, keys turning locks. Each night I would play the tape again, hearing my own voice in her image repeat those words pulled from some page, until over time, I learned the story from the inside, the phrases incanting from twin speakers unto late hours of no sleep, so that I could hear the words without them being said — cooked in my flesh. Those words in some way the seed of words sent out through my hands each day now, waking, repeating on and on beyond the shell, wormed in unzapped fat, too deep, and reinforced in fresh reservoirs since then somewhere fed and fed hard in the days spent inert absorbing more.