Blake Butler: Nothing: A Portrait of Insomnia

In the room you cannot see. The sound of scratch has filled all sides here. It fits underneath your skin. A small pockmark of light appears inside your vision, jostled as you sneeze — something snaking in you, raking. You sneeze and sneeze again.

As you sneeze the point of light expands to crust the blank air. The scratch so loud you cannot hear it. Holographic.

There is a flat before you now. A floor.

] WALK ALONG THE FLOOR

The floor is built of mirrors. It replicates the sky. As you move you can see yourself stretched underneath you, and so in the sky too. Onto and underneath yourself you walk.

] HOW OLD AM I INSIDE THIS IMAGE

The floor begins to incline. Your leg muscles ache with bulbs. The sky is building light. The light burns in time with the muscles, making putty around your blood. It hurts.

] STOP WALKING FORWARD

Your legs move faster.

] I SAID STOP IT

The itch is underneath your tongue. You still can’t hear it, but the spit flows. Flowers blooming, on the mirror’s edge and in your hand. When you look they will not be there.

In the light ahead, a form.

] EXAMINE FORM

It is long and it is nothing.

]…

You continue toward the form.

] I’D RATHER NOT, PLEASE. I’D LIKE TO STOP NOW

As you go even closer, the form has edges. It has a top and bottom. Has a front, a wall without a door.

The form, you think, is mottled.

You are not wrong.

] THAT IS NOT ME WHO THOUGHT THAT, THAT WAS YOU, I DON’T THINK THE FORM IS MOTTLED, I WOULD NOT SAY THAT. AT LEAST LET ME HAVE MY HEAD. I WANT TO FEEL GOOD. I WANT TO BE KIND.

The form reminds you of somewhere you have been.

There is an awful texture to the air here.

The mirror underneath you does not glow.

] TURN AROUND

…

] I ASKED PLEASE TURN AROUND

You are now standing right beside the form. It is smaller than you imagined, from the distance, and in how you recalled it from before.

The surface of the wall still shows no hole, no stutter. The sky has filled in on you, from behind. There is no inch or leak of where you just walked, or elsewhere forward. Above, below, so too — all mirror, which when touched won’t shudder. Flat. Forever.

There are many houses, all around you, breathed in crushed upon the air.

] TOUCH THE MIRROR HARDER

Gone.

] TOUCH THE FORM

It’s warm. A color appears, a wash around your head. Pops in small collision. Rashy. A fuzz that disappears, unfurls, repeals.

] SPREAD THE COLOR

Under your fingers, breathing, the form becomes a home. It is a long, cream-colored ranch-style dwelling with a lawn that appears dead.

All the bikes you’ve ever ridden are buried underneath the lawn. All the phones you’ve called in from are again calling. There is no sound. There is the hair you’ve grown and cut off of you in the years wove to a necklace that you wear around your neck. If you look down to see the necklace it will disappear. Your fingernails are very long now. Your heart is purple. Someone watches from behind.

There are still no doors or windows in the home’s face, though you can hear a rattling inside. A smoke burst from the upper quadrant’s corner, forming a column to the sky. A little ladder. Soft and risen.

] CLIMB THE LADDER

The ladder’s end starts somewhere else.

] ENTER HOME

There is no entrance to that from here either, not that you can see.

] YOU ARE PISSING ME OFF

The home continues in this condition.

Blood is running from your name. All the bruises you have incurred have returned here, on your new skin. They compile the inches into old form. You ooze. Where you can see you from inside your skull, you appear the same as you do to you now any day.

In the mirror surfaces, you see now how the house continues replicated in each direction, end to end, and on and on. Countless houses. Countless you. And all that glass…

Inside the house, something is trembling.

] DOES ANYTHING JUST HAVE DOORS HERE

Every inch.

] OPEN ANY OF THE DOORS

The trembling inside makes the walls wet. They stick to where your bruises sting, pocking the fresh parts with dust and fiberglass and crummy bits.

The pictures on the walls inside the house’s front room have curled. The quilts hung along the long, dark hallway sunken back into the walls. The walls, like your heart, are purple, though they are turning. The wires frying in the frame. Every sound inside the house that’s ever happened is happening again in the surround, all at once so loud it feels like nothing.

] LOOK AT THE PICTURES

They are all mottled. There are bits of eyes and bits of lips or buttons, walls, but mostly the splotch is impossible to gather.

] GO DOWN THE HALL

Your body, near the pictures, refuses to move. It wants you there, to stay and wait beside the pictures for them to reconfigure, to adhere from the slur into a sense. The days. The color surface. Your blood is runny. You’re losing balance.

] STARE INTO THE PICTURES HARDER

Burble.

] EAT THE PICTURES, STICK THEM TO MY SKIN

The pictures won’t come off the walls. They’re affixed with something deeper than metal.

] BREAK THE SEALANT

No.

You can’t.

Do something else.

] FUCK, I CAN’T THINK, THERE’S TOO MUCH NOISE HERE

…

] THIS JUST FEELS LIKE ANY OTHER DAY. FEELS LIKE A WEBSITE, IN A BOOK HERE. HOURS.

…

The cursor goes on winking in my skull.

]

]

]

In my lap the shape is burning, it is so warm.

]

]

]

Against the blank my head floods with an itching.

] THE COLOR OF MY MOTHER’S HAIR WHEN SHE WAS MY AGE; WHEN SHE GAVE ME BIRTH; WHEN SHE WAS BORN.

] THE SOUNDS OUR DOGS UNDERSTOOD ABOUT US, SEEING. SLEEPING IN THOSE ROOMS; THE WORDS WRITTEN ON THEIR RIBS.

The home begins to lean.

] THE KEYS I DID NOT LOSE, BUT DRANK INTO ME IN FEAR OF NEVER FINDING THE RIGHT DOOR. MY FATHER’S WANT FOR KEYS NOW TO A CAR HE CAN’T DRIVE, TO A HOUSE HE CANNOT LEAVE.

] THE GROUND THIS HOUSE WAS BUILT ON, WHO HAD WALKED UPON IT, WHO PRAYED, WHERE THEY HAVE GONE; THE GROUND OF THE HOUSE BESIDE THIS HOUSE, AND THE HOUSE BESIDE IT. THE GROUND.

] HALLWAYS PARALLEL TO THESE SAME HALLWAYS IN THE HOUSE WITH THE PICTURES FACING PICTURES, MAKING SIGHTLINES IN GRIDS ACROSS THE AIR ABOVE THE GROUND, VIVISECTING ALL THE WANT INTO UNIQUE LOCATIONS, ASSIGNED.

] THE AIR WHERE ANYONE WAS BORN: BASEBALL, KISSING, CANDLES, CRANES, ALL THAT AGELESS SHIT LIKE PYRAMIDS INSIDE OF BUILDINGS, INSIDE OF LIGHT.

] TWO PHOTOGRAPHS OF WHITE ON WHITE IN EVERY HOME, TWO NAMELESS CITIES STRETCHED INSIDE THEM, WAITING.

] THE LENGTH OF MY HAIR NOW, AND MINUTES LATER, DECADES LATER. MONTHS AS DAYS, DAYS AS YEARS REWINDING AND REBEGINNING

] TODAY’S DATE TODAY