Blake Butler - Nothing - A Portrait of Insomnia

Most days, my father, recognizing mostly nothing, walks around the house for hours without pause. I have seen him walk in dark along the hall to the room where he has slept for years and years here, stand inside it staring, come back out. I have tried to ask him to come into a room where I am in here typing and stop and speak to me. When I ask, he asks me to take him back home. He says this is not his home, here — the house he’s lived in forty years. He says, “I’ve been around here all day and I’m ready to go now.” He does not recognize the backyard or the bedroom. The lights in the hall are often off. In his sleep in the chair before the TV he talks to no one, often laughing, speaking a language of somewhere far off and rolled. Shut in a dark of heavy nothing, a film made of no light.

Tonight inside the house I’m in nothing will stop. The air seems not air at all, made for our breathing, but empty space; the telephones inside the rooms and all the rooms of houses here surrounding about to ring; the bodies through the window sometimes passing and when not passing always about to be again, any of them someone who might turn and walk toward the window, press their face against the glass, see me seeing them, and say a word.

My father as a younger man. My father in the hours of the day he and my mother made me — what he ate, heard, what he said, what doors opened or songs sung. As in how after a first private showing to a small group of people, Kubrick cut thirty minutes out of the film. As in the people, minutes, in any body’s mind there buried, fit into a gray made flesh. As in along the hall the hand-sewn quilts hang parallel on the wall’s far side to, in many rooms, books in bookcases full of words, words rendered and waiting, never to be opened into light again, unless.

Tonight the night is still the night. The crush of no noise at all for right now that seems to permeate the air. The latch on the thin window. Bodies passing on the other side.

The skin that freed itself in friction from the arm of Borges as he walked from room to room on the day he first bumped upon the thought of a space containing all possible books.

Last night, abutting this one, predating whatever else, maybe, perhaps I grab a random book by its spine among the many lining my loft with its high ceilings, out of some drift where any book is any book. Perhaps I read from the page to where it opened up: “There are things you can think about,” the book says, or said, is saying, “where if you follow your thoughts in, no one will ever be able to get you out.”165

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Suddenly, inside my typing, my father is standing right behind me at the door — as if he could hear inside the pattern of the keys his name, his shape, symbols marking down what he is doing in this house that he has cut out of his work, his mind.

“What you doin’, mister?” he says to me in a pinched, strange voice, his imitation of an older man than even him. He hasn’t lost his sense of humor. He’s wearing his windbreaker, Easter yellow. One of several hats he rotates in and out over the bald part of his head I can’t ever remember seeing not rubbed bare.

“Just typing,” I say, turning from the words. “What’s up?”

Without answer he moves from the door on down the hall, into the bedroom where my mom is probably just now lying down in the same spot she has most every night since I was seven. A few minutes later, he walks back past. He turns the light on at the far end of the hallway, the longest room in our whole house. I hear him walk into the far end again and then it’s silent. The light is on.

I save this file.

I stand up again inside the house. I walk along the hall where the light goes on along the long room and stops and ends at the next room, the kitchen, sandwiched between the primary front and back entry and exit doors. In the room beyond the kitchen I can see the muted glue of textures of the next space thrown out from the TV, and beyond that, another door into a space filled up with darkness, the last room on this end of the house, its mouth.

I don’t see my father in this makeshift tunnel, and there still isn’t any sound.

Coming on into the kitchen the large panes of glass that comprise the door and windows reflect the room I’m in back at itself, the light inside not also outside, flattened. I see me stand there in the shift of glass, making two people. I can see through me, again. Certain low-lit shapes sit in the yard under another, softer, further off illumination, blockaded at certain angles. I cannot see the sky for all the night. The front door is locked or it is unlocked. I don’t know, from here, who’s touched what, what could come in through the night in search toward this glow.

I stand inside the doubled room — inside and outside the house both — my father in neither — his body where. His mind as all those doors sleep has held hidden, some sealing off under their cells or as the years curl further in, the spool of sleep.

In the kitchen I move toward my reflection facing me, spreading my arms out flat, four of them, on the air. I move closer to the glass. I become larger, shifting the texture of the light.

From closer up I can see forming, among the concrete and the yard, different shades of dark and tunnel where the air is. I move to press my flesh against the pane. It is a cold surface, soft but ungiving, demanding exit only under being broken. At the median of the two rooms in one image, I press my head against the plane and close my eyes. My teeth inside my head form a ream of girders. My cheeks in knots of round. This silent house. This night around the evening, not electronic. This pressing presses back at me with questioned pressure, some soft unbending, a translucent sense-thin skull. As if at any moment it might open, fold me through it. And I want it to.

I do.

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Outside the night is warmer than it had seemed felt through the glass. Over the pool’s water, a thin skin, caused in the stillness of the pool’s disuse, the sky doubled from overhead in reflection on the scrim. Another mirror. From outside, looking back, the inside of the house seems so clear — bright as if with no air, in a vacuum, sealed — a place I’ve never been — as if I’m only in here in this instant. Through the house’s eyes back in I still can’t find my father moving. Nothing but the light and my split body, still pressed against the glass from the inside. These rooms humped up to one another. These rooms where — where what — here tonight confabulated in crystalline arrangement, hidden — no air shaking — all evenings in this evening placed on pause.

I walk along the yard between the fence into the next yard, also confined by the street where in other years I fell and left behind bits of my skin, paving its paved face with other layers of my body, for its surface, and spilling onto it in blood, a consecration of that hour and the beginning of new heal; the wires hanging from the house’s roof’s lip and strung along to poles stabbed in the ground, feeding off into the other neighboring houses and on down the streets among their artificial light; the yard of grass I’ve cut pushing machines upon it in rhythmic patterns over and over again, year in and out, and yet the mud beneath it never failing to keep sending new cells to be cut and cut again, slowing only for the freezing air of seasonal night; the music I pumped into my body over and over in that circling, loud enough to mask the noise of the machine, not loud enough to mask my own thoughts underneath it hovered, in the input, in sight; the years my younger father set part of the yard on fire piling leaves and branches into a mounded divot, burning those excess folds off into nowhere, into the air, for which we breathed — all that sound I can’t remember, all those words he spoke into my head; the trees that used to fill the yard all mostly cut down, so that in the light and night there is much more space to see of other homes, the open windows in the night air blank of the bodies surely somewhere there inside them, asleep or awake; the year the bird fell out of the sky in some negation of its sense of self and landed stomach-up upon the yard, the light of sky that afternoon as Dad and I squatted together there above it, the sky behind us, the blank behind that, no oxygen, no sound.