Blake Butler - Nothing - A Portrait of Insomnia

When there were rooms in this room, they were often small ones, with other rooms inside them — here open to me, among day — unique spaces awakened in my assimilated nod-off. Some of the rooms might have small sleds of food inside them — fist-sized cream puffs, bags of fluid, apples made of obtuse color, sandwiches with meat for bread and bread for meat. I would not eat here, as to eat could nail you to the location eternally and without exit — had I the choice now again to choose to eat I might. Other doors would open into locations in my fleshlife, such as doors into apartments where I had not yet but would soon live. In one building I found a sofa and a turned-off TV and lay down beside it. This would be the house in which I later lived during the years I began repeating a certain recurring gibberish word, a practice I still haven’t forced out of my body. In the room that day I could hear music that filled the house completely, like a water. It was the most perfect music I’d ever heard, or would hear — it was like eight records I had loved or would love one day played at the same time in perfect cohesion, as if they’d meant to be this. I went to the door and knocked with both my hands. A person answered the door there, someone I did not know at the time but would in later years. He was sweating and his whole of skin was flushed a bright red. He’d shaved his head — shaved it of hair I did not know then he had. “What is this music you are listening to?” I asked him. My voice was my voice. He looked me in the head with gleaming eyes. “ Goulange & Godfather ,” he said, and closed the door between us for those years.

In another room inside this region I followed a door that opened into the living room of an old friend. In the floor in this room I heard another music, a record I loved at the time. I could hear the music the same way it sounded in my body, though as I listened somewhere in the middle of the record the album hit a frame of air it had never hit, and entered a composition that had always been hidden on the album, always right there, though no one had ever heard it. The sound of the song lifted my body off the floor and hung me floating while its presence filtered through my blood. All these years comprised and compiling in those sleeping hours during which I could eat my way around completely and explore. The fat cells of my body bringing full mass through me to keep me pinned and spinning down. In other rooms there were people I had known forever and yet would leave there when I left the space and began to forget how to find my way back to there again. Rooms containing objects and potential time therein buried. The dream journals I would write then in my memory, later to switch over to the computer, though in placing those words there I could not find the way to speak them — they instead became bruised replicas of nowhere, keys to nothing, phantoms of emotion enclosed behind nets and fences and locked with locks of all the time I have been gone, hereby dragged into the waking days as totems — relics of the other space threading all space.

The period of time I was able to access these regions of me in retrospect in human time was very small. I was a lazy lucid dreamer and did not string well. I mostly accidented my ways into seeing and still knowing. As in my fat body I began to hunger for some way out — to strip the cells off — I began to find the leaving closed many of those strumming doors. The motion to leave my fat flesh was in the idea of another person — an obsession rendered in and around a human air, which I believed I could open in the image of my dream people. A dream person, here in hand. I began to want to shift the fat bulb of my body into something someone could sometime want — an unhealthy impetus, to be sure, but also one that made me move. Or not move — as it was not in exercising that I peeled off the bulk of pounds. Instead I forced my diet down to almost nothing — two hundred calories a day, which I held myself to above all things, no excuses, no parole. I ate salad and rice cakes, fake eggs, drank mostly water. My insides grinded through the night. Whereas most evenings before I could drift off in an overdose of carbohydrates, I now made my body eat itself. The sounds of the destruction would turn on and then turn off. It would come back often doubled, redoubled, exiting silence. The broil so hard all through my rungs I could hear it as if someone were speaking there inside me — the extra self I had encased. Seeing myself from there inside me, I could know it better. I worked to work it into forms. I worked to shift the cells I had in small ways — veins, shapes, muscles. A me inside me in slow emerge. This is my body. This is my body now. This is my body now now. In my flatting flesh I stuttered on. Days went on in this way. Weeks went. Weeks made of months. Months made of hours. Hours where the bugs were. Where my arms stretched longer than me. More of me disappeared, as did my control of the rooms that sleep hid.

In the three months between my tenth and eleventh grade years, I lost eighty-seven pounds. Down from flat 260 to 173, in slightly more than one full summer. My parents’ friends began to ask my mother if I was anorexic — which, despite the lack of eating, I do not believe I was — as, in some way, I was still eating, though through the cells of me I’d kept around. Carving the body from my body. The other, in there. When I returned to school, the kids I’d spent ten years with so far mostly did not recognize my frame. There was something different about certain people’s eyes. At the center of the oval of my school pictures, tuxedoed for my final year, my face is thinnest, glossy, forced grinned, a thin gloss of makeup covering over where the sleep ruin has reentered, or at least, in my less-padded body, been allowed to surface, show its hold. At gas stations or theaters I would be ID’d and have my picture handed back toward me, fat inside the frame. “That’s not you,” they’d say. Their bodies seemed so far away.

Other times, inside the night in my new flesh, again not sleeping, I would find myself compelled to walk out from my house without my clothes. It began as a challenge to myself in the lowest throes of finding no exit outlet, sitting naked hours in the blue monitor glow. That first night I began by moving to open the front door fully naked, the night air moving in and around to encase my indoor skin. Onto the concrete with my bare feet on cold core into the light that permeated between my own door and the fenced-off yards on our far side, rows of windows each dark-clustered, sometimes opening into darkened rooms. That other air held an electric tension, so set off from the rooms and walls where I’d become encased. Stepping further out, onto the squared-off lawn, and then down into the street that shaped our lawn, the cold ground beneath my feet held some soft wriggle. The ground would even crunch. Each step further from my front door brought a second drum inside me. My naked body in the thrown glow for every inch would seem to reanimate alive — etched through with where I was not supposed to be in such condition — filling through me as if finally actually all awake, no longer bogged inside that halfway place of nothing where words would not come out except compressed. I began to find the further I could make it from my front door undressed the more my body hummed — as if entering some secret hallway, a machine the day disguised and opened unto me here and now only alone. I don’t remember ever seeing any cars. No other people. Nothing but false light, the far-off growl of passing cars, my churning blood. Each foot seemed so far, each instant different. And yet each way always ended just the same — with me back in my house, door locked behind me, my shape returned again in front of the machine full with the remainder of what I’d done — my sets of selves still there again spreading inside me through the small new space the night had made.