Blake Butler - Nothing - A Portrait of Insomnia

These images, one after another, each I can still see inside my head. I can hear the sound of the women’s grunting and the scripted sex speech spooling same as any birthday or Christmas— more . These pages the new spool from some strange, sex-rendered printer, one I could not fully gather in my mind. Poring over their glinting inches as if looking for a way to move into them, make them real. The code word. The key. The tunnel. Take that for what you will. These items in my room alone I would spread out before me on the carpet, in the light, in the same way I had before with my carefully kept comic books and ball cards — my indexed, unorganed, neurotic shrine, which in the night would be there, never-ending, a door of its own door. Some nights I would simply sit before the slick, deconstructed mural and look upon it, feel the gush move through my walls. Something about the blood inside me stirring — perhaps the true desired product of any obsessive act — could keep me up for hours into the night alive and blinking. A light left in the light left in the window in the night. As more years passed, and my partitioned understanding grew inside me, spreading out to overflow the walls of where I’d hid it (both intuitively, and in size), I began to allow small bits of paper radiation to spread into my bedroom walls, shifting the room’s condition. I began by displaying, around the space where I would sleep each night, a small glossed magazine page of a bikinied woman with large breasts. The image was not visible from most angles, blocked by a dresser in which my mother placed my folded clothes — unless you knew what you were looking for you wouldn’t see it, 2" × 3". But the mere fact of the fleshy picture’s presence into the open air without the hiding felt like bleeding into bright light. Even when I would leave the room I could hear the object of my hidden lust radiating in the walls left separate from my head, waiting for me, a declaration.

In the place of my previous decorations — album covers by Weird Al and Guns N’ Roses and full-sized posters of Bo Jackson and Barry Bonds, Uncanny X-Men #265 and Spawn #1 tacked up carefully by their whiteboards — my aging idols — I made small replacements one by one, among the color, dotting bodies in corridors among the muddle. The flesh of my bedroom began to spread around me, leaking on my air like mold. Still a furtive, silent process, one into which at night I would enfold. The images I gathered came from grocery stores and bookshops, among what time of them I could squeeze out as my own. I was too young at twelve and thirteen to project myself in these locations without my mother, and so extricating from her for the collection was integral. I would hover near the “sports” section of the magazine aisle, after swimsuit issues and bodybuilding mags. Incidentally, my first glimpse of nude tits had been in a convenience store with my father, where a tattoo issue had women with bright nipples holding guns. I would move back and forth before the long racks, peering, seeing which magazines I could snatch when it seemed safe, and making sure no one could see me seeing; as for what they would then think of me, I feared. Sometimes I would pace and plot and gauge for half an hour, leading up to nothing as there never came the proper time. It was all about timing, about the small grooves of the public spheres around my bulb. The fear inside me of both my hidden ideas, born in skin, and how they would be rendered in the event of meshing with other eyes inside the light — it was enough to make my blood ache. I imagined cameras at my head. Massive unseen bodies standing at my sides there, smelling the machinery of my head. At the proper times, though, when the urge overtook me, and through quick rummages of peeping, I’d find the proper page holding the best image of a skin woman I could find, and then, with my breath all solid in me, rip it from the book there on the stand. Quickly I would fold the women, being careful not to crease them across the breasts or thighs or face, put them deep into my pockets, and move from the racks with my head down, the silence of a hot furor settling all throughout and against me where the false skin touched my skin.

A few times I managed to convince myself to go further, buy whole magazines in small commitments, pacing near the register for up to an hour before approaching and involving myself in a transaction with whatever middle-aged attendant was on the job. During these modes I could hardly speak or blink or move my arms right. The unblank of such an ultimately benign — but so taboo to me, for its softly bruised air, the only — a draft unfolding in my barely teenaged flesh. Sometimes the shakes would get into me so deeply that even coming up to the moment of entering these stores with these intentions would make it hard to breathe. Certainly it was just as much the thrill and vice-light of the moments all preceding the moment of acquisition that got me going, the amalgam of furtive gestures and weird sweat. In any way, via obsession, these public fields could become warm, could close in and crush around me with their hum so loud it became more and more difficult to shut off.

As I gathered more fake flesh enmassed around me, my mind began to hollow to it, sink it. From tiny scraps no one would notice in the corner I moved to whole pages high or low centered on the wall, still the sprawl but much more out there. The room’s air shuffled, balled. At the mall I would go to Spencer’s and buy full-sized posters of Pamela Anderson (yes, again) in her panties, Playboy models cupping their chests. I would hang these behind the door at first, then in more places. The replications overtook the room. One Thanksgiving my aunt and uncle slept in my two bunk beds underneath my full-bloomed canopy of tits. All along there was no mention. My expulsed inner-light grew stronger. I turned the energy of the indirect exposure inside myself inversed, doubled it with further-packed air, remained silent through the day. The blue space above my pillow pockmarked with countless images, each with its own eyes, watching me through sleep, images that could be induced by focusing my mind and body into brainworlds where they were there upon me and I was given room into them to there release — inside a constantly ecstatic coma, at all hours alive, blurring beyond light the taste of night and day.

I began to find, too, in my attentions, that I could control the fabric of my sleep. By tuning my attentions in on the context of how and when I went to bed, the differences between the sleeping and waking states, as well as thinking hard about what I wanted to find when I’d be there, and holding it distinctly in my brain before and after, I could not only manipulate when and where and who and what I would see inside my sleeping, but also my own careering there among it. I knew nothing at all about the concept of lucid dreaming at the time, the various methods for turning these things on, but in the devices of my own controlling, my obsession, the dream realm allowed me an increasing reign over its glut, strung along as if within Borges’s hidden city Tlön, where one of many schools of thought “believes that while we are asleep here, we are awake somewhere else, so that everyone is two.” My body’s private body, rendered from its other light.

By manipulating sleep while waking, I could find myself involved in certain sleep-unique locales I found it difficult to extricate myself from as more time passed, as if by further practice I could fully eliminate the need for return to my body. I mean I did not often want to wake up: the rooms inside my sleep connected of a logic that when waking disappeared among the light. There were people and areas within the dreams that could be glimpsed at times outside the fold of sleeping, but not in such a way as what was in there, rammed with network. This was a world where trees did not age so much as glisten harder, and each room connected to all rooms, and the dead spoke with the living and the uncreated, though in communicating with one another we did not mention those old yards or our other bodies outside the fold. Mostly language was shared by eyes, not winking or complex gestures but a kind of texture in the light the way they worked here, of no ground, and the way the brain behind the lenses could speak without speaking. In this space there was a quite a bit of water — an ocean that from certain angles seemed to stretch on and on forever and had a depth into which a ball of light could descend until it was no longer clear or even there. Mostly we did not interact with these wet bodies as they seemed to suggest a whole other subregion to this region, and one that did not seem inviting. There was not time — as though time did not seem to count here in the normative way; the way it accrued was even faster than in the flesh. Weeks might go by in the duration required to lift an arm. I cannot account for the periods elapsed in this manner, as they did not appear in wrinkles on my body, at least on its outside.