Blake Butler - Nothing - A Portrait of Insomnia

So what goes on then — what turns in turning, going on alone again surrounded. What is there inside the turning off and turning on among no center in no spin and the noise and the night and the hours going, all after something that by definition, in its want, cannot be had, where the question asks itself the same question as it asked. You go on because you do. You do because in doing nothing is the going — at death, the going — in every inch toward the end — where between each lobe of time there are the days, the shapeless language. The people in you are.

]

]

]

I go to get a glass of water. I’m watching my dad again today so Mom can go to quilt guild and get out of the house. Dad in time has gotten stranger, more far gone from knowing who or when or where he is or was. Around the house he walks and knocks on glass and punches his own hand, in endless iteration. He seems continually waiting for something to happen, though when things do happen, it’s not the thing. In the late years of his life, he seems newborn in certain ways, definitionless, no longer knowing where to aim, though in his eyes and in the knocking and the skin around him, you can see that he has lived. None of this is his fault, or anyone’s. It is days.

When I come into the kitchen, Dad is leaning on the kitchen counter. There are no lights on in the room, which in this day of muted sun seems dark even at noon.

“What’s up?” I say. “What are you doing?”

“Lost,” he says. He looks not directly at me, but off to something just beside. Like I’m standing next to myself.

“I’m the only one here,” he says.

“Do you want something to eat?” I say.

“Nah, we don’t need that,” he says.

On the counter there’s a bunch of loose-leaf paper. On the paper he’s written numbers, his name, illegible words. I pick one up and he says it is his ticket.

“Ticket to where?” I say.

He says, “Right.”

He walks across the room toward the door. The door is glass. The light comes through it. He knocks his fists against the glass and knocks and knocks. He hasn’t held a key to a door in this house for a year now.

I touch his shoulder. He doesn’t look. He rubs his hands together in strong fury. He punches one hand with the other. There is something there behind his face; something awake in his aging and erasing. He hits and hits and hits his hand against his hand.

I’ve said most everything I can ever think of to him in these moments. The house around us.

All words seem the same words.

I leave my father and the glass door and go and walk back down the hall. I come back into the room here where the desk is and I sit down at the machine. The house is quiet when he’s not banging, beyond the low whir of the hard drive and the phones. I leave the door open so I can hear him. I look and look into the white space of this file. There are all these words here.

There is the blinking cursor, its forced command prompt, waiting.

I minimize the file and cross the room and close the door.

Back at the desk, in the web browser, I look at the sites I’ve already likely refreshed several dozen times. I follow a link from one of the social networking websites to a video chat website.

I click a button to begin.

In the frame I am connected to the image of a gush of yellow glow inside some dark.

> Connected, feel free to talk now

Stranger: hi

[me]: u r a light?

Stranger: yea

Stranger: i m god

[me]: what should i do

> Your partner disconnected.

> Reconnecting…

I close the site and lie down on the floor.

Nowhere

In my head the light goes white. I’m lying face-up on a surface, the space above me full of flattened color. There seems no sound here. Another day here. The light continues. It is a gone light, feeding off of where it is. Through my whole fat head, a warming; blood moves; I think about my knees and feel my knees. A burr wakes in my brain inside the thinking and seems to move through my cerebrum down my neck, filling my chest up, threading in the chub around my ribs. Cold fireworks squirt along my lungs where I am again aware of breathing, around the shapes that make my sternum and the cellular walls vibrate all through my guts, my organs in transmission flipping, sizzled, then again in furied silence, as if erasing in their places, into pins along my stomach. I am awake again, and I am naked. I am in here again. Here is where.

Fed with the light the stretch marks on me where I was fat once begin to glow: tiny webs of slightly lighter skin trails like water systems in a leaf packed in where I forced my flesh to spread beyond itself — my want for anything around me to live inside of solid again burnt off, leaving the kiss of where it’d been — a pack of fat of air always around me in my mind, holding the slur. I feel glow move to curl through my intestines, colon, kidneys, to my sacs, the harbored swill of multimillions that could each become another man, become a son or daughter, though I cannot imagine — there compacted, there to be burst into the light, gobs of me abandoned in small rooms somewhere like all those years here I’ve made my motions, though now again awake in here again, I never want to move. If seen from elsewhere than my body, I imagine, the pattern of my spreading cells would reveal their endless errors, their rashness of wish and malnutrition and nights alone, and any billion other catalogued evidence of how I’ve gone wrong or stupid, the true conduit of sleepless nights, the true milk of what could never feed me in how I’ve steered this body backward and in horror and ill fit for any air, in the remembrance of nothing, in small pleasings. Here again in here again in here.

Along my legs, the hairs are standing up, strobing the order of my veins. A color I cannot smell or feel or see quite circles my kneecaps in numbing silence, washing as with cloths along the inside of great glass domes. I am thinking of saying something but I don’t — I can’t think of what to say — no good words to fill the space of this continuing instant I am aging in with — this awareness does not stop the want. I breathe air in spreading see-through through me, circling downward somehow to my heels and toes and soles, and held in long breaths through my body, blood networking, lit and lit with all this time burnt up in rooms and thoughts and want for feed and time and typing. I’m supposed to sit up. The day is daying. I am right here. I am me.

In a pinch between two blinkings I see my body from overhead — the way my mother says she saw the room the day when I was born, C-sectioned. I see my body bent and leaning, whole hosed and half-lit live into a flat white shape just at my head — like the sky sunk down to sit above me — endless ceiling. It’s dry and wide. Me craning fully forward wet into it, up to my waist by neck and chest, my whole half of me there given unto the white, gone sealing, my body drank as would one into a vat of milk … and at the windows, a great seizure, a scattering of cells, which with their color, through the window, form fine pictures splashed against my brain: flesh of piglets, humans, goats, and geese; parades of bodies aiming through a blender, giving their limbs unto the night; a child large as the sky is; liquid money; where does this come from; why these letters; you are all right. Against the shape of sky, body coursing, getting juiced of what I’m worth, giving unto the screen my private thinking, taking from it, and this is okay, the volume of the room in here filled with small prayer; in each inch another of me, asking, asking; want large as I am, large as ways; I open eyes inside the seeing and see again and open eyes again inside that seeing and can see again here nearer still, and open eyes again inside that, and inside that, the sky there disappearing in my skin …