Blake Butler - Nothing - A Portrait of Insomnia

When I can see me clear again from there inside me I am sitting in the chair, the same I sit in almost every day, here with the machine. The room has shrunk against me. My shirt has been removed. All down my chest the drool erupts in runnels from my mouth. Where the wet is, my chest appears burned. Welts, like little windows, for how my flesh within them swims see-through. The machine’s face stunned in all white, blowing. My arms against me cling. I cannot stand up inside this room again. I rub along the lash of it, the inseam, looking for where upon the air the boards will bend, or a keyhole or some fissure. I sense my mother just behind me — hear her breathing, her certain tone — but in the reflection off the screen I see no one standing. This room again. The friction my fingers on the box’s want makes sound — cues in a music in me booming, a subwoofer underneath my fat, tweeters in my testes — doorbells, ringing, stones — all in singing, come combined — songs spent threaded through my years, the days arranged in their unwinding, though herein replayed into me at once, all at the same time, blistering my blood — a song’s song.

Something is writing words down on my back. I can feel the ink gun on my inches. Silent laughter. I try to turn around. My arms grind where my arms are. My spine itching in time to the song in shaking versions, instruments of air. In the box a slow heat rising. My hair clings to my hair, a kind of helmet. Where I turn the room makes sticky. Batches. More spit. I flub. A stink of warm all through my stuff. I settle down. I face the front, with eyes wide. I try to focus again on the reflection in the white. The screen is too wide. My eyes, too, stinging to get stood. My arm muscles clinging to my ribs.

In my lap, I see now, seeing, a book has been spread across my lap — a white book with a white spine and no title, in the shape of the white screen, as if it had been pushed out in a silence to sit upon me. I find around it I can move my fingers, held magnetic. My neck cocks my skull to face straight down. The book is humming, warm. Inside the front cover I find my name written in childish letters, inscribed. This book belongs to _____ . Black crayon. No numbers.

The book’s pages are all blank. I thumb through them finding no word. The paper bright against my eyes.

I turn back to the front. Where the crayon inscription of my young me before had been, there is now only a cursor at the margin, blinking, waiting:

]

I can hear the cursor think — can hear it waiting for me, making, in its image rerepeated, along the book’s far edge, again, again.

]

]

]

The stutter of its light. Magnetic fire.

I go to put my fingers at the paper but my arms again are not allowed to move. The cursor. Inside my brain I hear it hear me think. It wants.

My words inside my head in shaping scrolling appear again inside the book, framed a command:

] WHAT IS GOING ON

I hear a sound — a click — within the nothing.

Below my line, another appears, scrolling across the book’s page in quick marquee, words appear there in the book in set response:

You are in a room. This is where you have always been.

The words disappear each one as I read them — my input phrase as well sunk gone — and then there again the cursor, waiting, blinking in the none:

]

]

]

My hands do not look like my hands. My tongue flips in my head a little. I am sitting.

] WHAT AM I SUPPOSED TO DO NOW

You tell me.

I look around. The walls where there had been a room before have moved against me mostly, shaped to fit me in the air. There is a smoke pulsing behind the surface.

] I WANT TO LEAVE THIS BOX

You cannot. Not by saying. The air is hard.

The air is getting harder.

I still cannot move my arms. My brain inside me gaining heat to match the book’s growing gloam of burn against my thighs.

] IS THERE A KEYHOLE HERE

You cannot see any keyhole.

] A KNOB

No.

] PASSWORD

You have to try.

Some coming word. What is the word . I ape to speak and nothing comes out. My mouthroof sticks to something welled up around my tongue. Through my eyes, I see nothing beyond the book’s blown color. I feel my body spreading out around me, getting fat again with all the warm.

] SAY MY NAME

Your voice enters a hole.

] SAY MY MOTHER’S NAME, MY FATHER’S

There is nothing.

A puddle in me runs — organ to organ, a shake like laughter.

Then, from overhead, inside myself, I feel something lurch: nails just as the white flat fold that forms the sky here, inches from my skull. In pads the scratching piles in packs as dogs do after something buried. I try to shout, again: the taste of leather. Money. Ashes and clean knives. I go again to try to say my mother’s name and feel it hum hard in my neck.

Overhead the light is piling. Windows in the light.

Inside the scratch, the cursor replicating.

]

]

]

]

]

] MAKE IT STOP

]

]

]

]

] PLEASE STOP

]

]

]

] OK HOLD ON

] LISTEN

I close then open up my eyes. I squeeze my self inside me. No think.

The words come spooling out.

] THE DAY YOU FELL WHILE PLAYING BASKETBALL IN THE BACKYARD WITH YOUR FATHER AND BLAMED THE ACCIDENT ON HIM, SAID HE’D PUSHED YOU, SO YOU’D LOOK LESS DUMB IN FRONT OF YOUR FRIENDS, SO YOU DID NOT HAVE TO BE THE ONE WHO FELL: INVENTING BLAME. HIM WET-EYED IN THE DARK LIGHT THAT THEREAFTER, THE ONE TIME YOU CAN REMEMBER WITNESSING HIM IN TEARS, OVER HOW HE DID NOT UNDERSTAND QUITE HOW TO REACH YOU.

The scratching above and below me becomes doubled. Close then open up my eyes.

] THE DAY YOU AND THOSE FIVE OTHER KIDS SURROUNDED DARRELL ON THE PLAYGROUND IN THE MUDYARD AND KICKED HIM BY TURNS IN THE CHEST. YOU WENT ALONG AND LAUGHED AND DID NOT THINK. HIM CENTERED IN THE BRIGHT WHITE SHAKING. THE AIR LOST IN HIS BODY. HIS COVERED EYES.

] THE DAY YOU SHOOK YOUR SISTER BY HER WHOLE FRAME ON THE SOFA, UNDERNEATH THE PICTURES OF YOU SOMEONE ELSE HAD DRAWN, FOR HOW SHE’D GONE INTO YOUR ROOM AND COPIED MUSIC, THE SONGS FED INTO HER HEAD, YOUR SHUTTING DOORS, YOUR GREED, AND WHY NOW WHEN IT COMES UP NOW SOMETIMES YOU PRETEND IT NEVER HAPPENED.

] THE NEON BLUE KEY YOU STOLE FROM A HARDWARE STORE IN FLORIDA AND WERE QUICKLY CAUGHT, THAT YOUNG AND ALREADY SO UNGRACEFUL, THE KEY BURNING IN YOUR HAND SOMEHOW FOREVER AFTER.

] THOSE HOURS FED INTO MACHINES, TYPING BULLSHIT FOR THE NOTHING, NO GIFT, TURNING OFF IN WAYS FROM THOSE MADE NEAR AS IF IN SPITE, KNOWING IN THE KNOWING OF THE SILENCE YOU WERE HIDING. FROM WHAT. FROM WHAT. FROM WHAT.

] THE WAY EVEN TODAY MOST DAYS YOU SPEAK TO THOSE YOU LOVE: FLAT, IMPATIENT, STUBBORN IN SILENCE: AND GOING ON WITH SUCH A WAY EVEN IN RECOGNIZING, FEELING TIME END, ALLOWING DAYS TO PASS INSIDE OF DAYS, COUNTING OFF THE HOURS THEY WILL BE BESIDE YOU, DOWN TO NONE.

] EVERY THING YOU DID AND DID NOT DO, AND HOW YOU NEED IT, CLUNG TO GUILT WITHOUT A NAME.

] EVERY BOOK YOU’VE READ AND CAN’T REMEMBER, LIKE A PRISON, HIDDEN WALLS AROUND YOUR HEAD. ALL THOSE INSTANTS BURNING OFF ALREADY UNREMEMBERED. FOR WHO.

] EVERY HOUR IN SUCH WANT OF NO DIRECTION.

The book in my lap has grown large. It is larger now than my whole lap. Its face is kind of milky. Around my head, wrapped. Around my backmeat. The still blank book feeds its response: