Blake Butler - Nothing - A Portrait of Insomnia

] THE MIRROR JUST BEHIND THE MIRROR

] WANT OF

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The home is bubbling. It gives a smoke.

] PRESS UPON THE HOME NOW WITH MY BODY

Where you press, the surface mumbles up a slip: a small divot in the flat’s face, bending inward. You press your arms harder, teeming in — the house above you, rolling forward on its gait. Your form appears in the wall’s far side, an indention. The roof becoming your roof. The sun of light becoming gone. You press and press until you find yourself slipped in the middle of the walls’ meat, a space surrounding years where you have been. In the slip of the house the sweat and song and eggs of roaches and the aggregate of breathed-out air has formed a mass — a crystalline and glowing substance which in the space, into your head, glows a sound. The sound rubs the memory of where you’re from even further into your blubber. You turn around.

You turn around again.

The room appears: a small room absent of all light.

As you look again, having remembered, the room becomes the den inside the house where you grew up: it holds the smell now of all the foods inside it eaten, all the bathwater, all the gush. There seems to be no air, though you can breathe.

You are in the room where several years you built another house inside it, out of bedsheets, out of books; the room where your father gave you a speech on reproduction; the room where a dot matrix printer has returned now, ejecting pages.

] READ THE PRINTING

You pick a sheet out of the spool. The sheet is covered up with nothing. No words, though the printer makes a screaming sound as if beating each page full of ink.

The white seems to be shifting.

In the room behind you, someone moves.

] HELLO

There is no one in the room.

There is a window, through which you see rain fall hard upon a yard, dotting the pool you almost drowned in, becoming drunk into the ground. It is briefly mesmerizing: you feel a pang for drinking meat. You chew your knuckle. The curtains rumple.

Further murmur from the far end of the house.

] FOLLOW THE SOUND

From the den you move into the living room where nights your mother and father watch TV. The chair leg where in running from you your sister fell and burst her head open, gushed into the light. If there is one room around which your life could be said centered, this is likely it. None of these people you remember are in this room now.

The furniture in this version of the room has been removed. A tiny house sits where the TV used to, another light inside it.

As soon as you see the house, breathe its screaming, you forget that it is there.

You will remain here for your entire life, no matter where else you think you go.

] FOLLOW THE SOUND

From the living room into the kitchen, recreated of its food — all the food you’ve ever eaten there inside it, pressed in, ejecting through the roof. The cereal and turkey dogs and diet soda and peanut butter rise into some small point far above, a cylinder unto the black point hanging over all things in the sky. You breathe the air and taste it, your body blubbing quickly with new fat, the calories herein recycled gaining mushmeat on your cheeks and arms and ass. The more you inhale here — in this room where days in the sink your mother washed your hair, where you would come and go into the night surrounding — the harder it is to push on.

The only thing not gathering dimension in the eating is your head.

Inside your head, the chain of commands aching, blinking, typing into or therefore out from some other, smaller machine:

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And therein, underneath each:

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Inside the sound your body goes on growing — and in the skin more made.

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And under each again again beginning…

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And therein, and so on…

Soon you cannot see the room around you.

Soon the room is any room.

] FOLLOW THE SOUND

From the kitchen [fat] into the hallway, down the center of this book. Down the center of the books this book wants inside it, wants as second flesh. [the endless flesh] The walls here, felt up close against your fattened body, are made aggregate ends of each book’s paper, spine to spine. The friction makes little rips along your cushion, leaving wet upon the walls: wet of sweat and blood and self-gunk, lathering the seam. Leaking back out of your new shape-size. Mushing up the books. Between the web of walls where you are come from, your sopping leaves a film behind you on the frame, a bubble mirror glowing at the light behind your body, sealing off the way — though you can still see there, in refraction, all the bodies, all the space — your mother, father, sister, unborn brothers, all those loved in bodies on the air there, clustered in the quickly splitting lenses, their eyes broke up in spit-spins, and behind them too, a further on — each context of body there behind them, watching, their own mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers born and those unborn, and theirs loved also, and the others in them, kaleidoscopic, countless eyes. The prism of them splintered through you, held in the past sections of the house, that where you can no longer throttle, even in shrinking, for what is gushing in the way, and thereby breaking in the hour where you try to think or nudge or say, popping open into magnets where the space was, wolfing air. It’s such a song, that false silence — at once dissolving in its way — at once becoming again, another room, an instant eaten, into the next instant eaten, so on unto the hole.

And still, the sound around you, louder here now in the center of the house, where in mirror to the globe of wet behind you, blurring, further doors open a way.

The pictures of you on the wall, hung on the book’s ends, show you again getting older, though not as old as in this way. The shape of any face of any picture not the one that you are wearing as you see them in black poses, recostumed constantly with age. Even in the way the glass over each picture shows you you inside there, looking, the time between the seeing and the see.