Blake Butler - Nothing - A Portrait of Insomnia

The yard tonight, white, dying, brittle — my father no longer able to spend long afternoons with seed and blade, pruning the yard up to be a thing he took a pride in, an outfit for the house. The sky tonight, there is no moon — no definition in the low code of its abstruse, slate gray ceiling, flat and unending until the point along its stretch it disappears behind the lip of my perspective — clipped under by the curving of the earth unto the forms of buildings and the trees.

Underneath this what, just like my father, the nameless man’s car tonight does not appear — he where here inside my life I’ve sensed always approaching — no face, no frame — and always just ahead, unshaping time. In the car’s place, tied to a massive bolt, clung with protrusions, nodules, gold, as if torn from the center of a lock or from the engine of a car, there is strung another wire — this one thinner, blacker , than those strung between the houses, chewed up and kinked like pubic hair. The wire follows up from its endpoint where the ground is, leading off into atmosphere, into the nowhere of the night. Between my two longest fingers’ pads the wire remains silent — its shape off, minute in one dimension, endless in the other, as far as I can tell, lurching upward, outward on. I feel a slowing urge to yank the wire down and hard from where it runs off, suspended above the street as far as I can see, and yet I do not. I hold it firmly.

I walk forward with the wire in my hand. I lead my way along the wire in low light. It doesn’t matter what the wire is. Along the lip of street heading due south, among new grass the state has recently installed, to cover over pipe and mud, through which the rainwater will go gushing nights that something overhead throws it down, some eternal wet in slow recycle, cells once inside of others, where and when. Over the sidewalk where I have run so many nights to burn my cells off, feeding my own sweat back into the unending mouth of what is breathed. The wire leads me on between the flat faces of the two long neighboring buildings where for seven years I went to school — the one building on the left, behind which I once watched a kid get clocked along the jaw with brass knuckles while a horde of us all watched, the grass field where I was so fat I could not finish the mile for all that hulking and the terror of my veins, those rooms gummed each new year with new bodies, unreflective in the night; and the one building on the right where I grew thinner, the trophy cases full of photos with trapped versions of people, many of whom likely still live within a nearby range. The glass of neither building winks. The parking lot of the grid on my left is full of at least a dozen empty buses, parked at parallels, where from the distance I see oblong shades of bodies, held still in the aisles, no eyes.

I follow the wire between the schools on both sides. I can see the wire’s glint extending further on ahead, down the slow grade to the creek bed which certain nights would swell so high it covered up the bridge. That night, in the downpour, we came to stand there at the lap and watch the cars scream through at different speeds, until the small dark red one flipped, gunning its wheels. Metal on metal in that evening, glass popping out half under water, blood mixing with the mud rain, silent now, again — all this air in endless charging, eaten up with what had been seen, while tonight — no one.

I hear my me inside me think — shitting out each word of this in its iteration, scrolling on a wire from my cerebrum through my sternum and meat of heart, to catch tangled in the thin rungs of my fingers and wrapped around my testes, filling space with tumor-noise. Behind my head the moon grows glowing so hot and fast I have to close my lids to keep from burning, and then and there under my lids I hear the moon blink with me— burning out —so that there at once in my unseeing the air around the earth also cannot see — the fields and houses and the hours cloaked with nothing around my nothing, a darkness deeper than no mind in mirror cloak — a darkness time could not erase in new directions — ageless black unleaving. I swallow and hear shapes. I rub my finger and my thumb together and feel the words between them screech, wanting out into the dark where they could hide from paper and from thinking — to slip into no light and never be remade — all my words ever only wanting in this in me — to go nowhere.

When I look again, the night is fine. It is as any night — the time between when I had looked and not looked, in the dark, threaded with the street bulbs and our glow, the moon returned to screw above anybody, all reflection — an eye without a lens or head.

Beyond the creek, and past a further field and hill paved of its grass, along a long rip of mud where once a manmade lake had lain, its liquid so dark in the passing there is even no reflection of what stands above it, overhead, among a neighborhood I’ve watched rot and repair through my thirty years, the wire leads up to a house — a house, as white as typing paper, lit just with two bulbs on either side of its one door, the curtains in the window of a color dark enough to appear beyond opaque. A house, I realize in standing three feet from it, the wire wet from sweat inside my hand, that has stood across the street from where I grew up all those hours, all that time — though I do not now know how, in all my walking, I have returned here to stand before it, and there beside it, before mine, where here the light is different, and the yard is knee-high, and the brick is colored like the scratch mark in my knee, but it is still the house I have spent the most of all my hours there inside of, come full circle, lost in accidental circuits of the feed, in the folding of the map. Through their bedroom window, I see my mother and my father standing shoulder to shoulder with their eyes closed in their heads. There he is.

This other house’s door is locked. The bolt makes a clicking sound inside itself when I flub at it. The wire strung into the night. My own old home is closed off also — the knob spins in my hand.

I turn around. These two houses stand facing one another by a margin wide enough for me to move between, pushed together in my presence to obliterate the yards — covering up the space of years where I had moved and stood and swam and read and talked and looked at sky. The brick of both just at my front and back, breathing my breathing, dragging at the hairs pinned in my pores pinned in my skin pinned on my flesh. The walls seem from here to go on so far — I cannot see any end. Along the length I waddle on between the houses dragging, the night above me doing slur; lines pulled out of lines where the sheath of dark screams friction between perspectives, like sliding off of something just behind it, tipping lids. The farther I can fall along the way between the houses without blinking the gap gets bigger, though there seems nothing there behind the fold — the sky behind the sky the same color as the sky in its same hour, as if any hour splayed, the night peeling in constant burn of layer all through the days in mirrored time like skin goes purred. Nights barfing nights and into day again to barf the day again to night in cycles thinning out the space between us and whatever way on out there, the air rained with that matter, thickening the earth in matching rhythm of the rising of the dead.

I walk along the wall and skin my skin becoming bunched until, on the newer one, appears: another door — a hole into the house again I’d never seen there. This door is smaller than me, chest-sized, with a peephole that sees inside. The rim around the door is sealed, healing as with bruised flesh to cake the door into the body of the house. Through the hole I see the light arranged kaleidoscopic, in neon rainbow, camouflage, snowing in slow screech — the hours of the house wrapped up in hours turned to mush and wearing time upon its time at last no longer there translucent but neon, gummy — then, with my eye’s ridge screwed harder down against the metal eyelet, the colors become a wall — become a hall, a subtle tunnel, raining length from where I am into some center of the home — become a stairwell headed up inside the house unto a layer set above it, though the house always had been a ranch. On the stairs, packed in chorus, a stream of people, naked, shaved-headed, waiting in a line, their spines and flesh packets so crammed together in the low light it is hard to see where one begins and another stops. They look like me, my dad, my mother, all at once — faces buried in faces, as would earth. They look like anybody. If I let my eyes go goggled enough, it is all one flesh — it is all air, all the house just this one room.