Blake Butler - Sky Saw

For each inch of the father there were many fathers. For each father in the father there was sound from which the body had been composed. The sound cased in around him making flesh. He couldn’t see what his hands were doing. He couldn’t see what his face was doing. Little worms caked in the walls around him were passing also through his skin and unto somewhere else. For years he’d swallowed pills to try to clear his system of its parasites and its ailment and none of it had worked, none of it had done anything except turn his shit a different color, which matched the walls of many houses and sometimes the color of his mind. The years still shaking in the father like the silence:

The year my final dentist fit his whole arm down inside me, hungry for a portal, high on light.

The year I would have been a husband to anyone here with my same eyes.

The year I said I thought I wanted more — and really did.

The year my fat shook itself free, became another body, on its own — one who would stand above me in the evenings, never touching.

These are not my years, the father tried to tell the years themselves inside his thinking, though the words his body thought were:

What else could I have loved.

Move! Person 811 heard himself outside himself repeating, this voice as big as he’d imagined something in the mind of some gone god’s. Move, you massive dickless fucker!

He was already going fast as he could — the muscles in him stretched raw with windows in their gristle. He could no longer sense the other man following behind him, nor the man behind that man, so on.

All these fat, prismatic people.

The father breathed his blood.

Inside himself he felt the flesh walls to turn to water where he touched them— because he was them —a tasteless, scentless, flushing liquid that stung his lids and shrank his bowels. The other body all around him also seemed shrieking. In the color of it was the tone.

The father rolled along among the water folded and unfolding — grasping for the door — what door — some, any vision — a window — waking locations. He kept rolling. He felt several sections of himself go other ways, swimming in opposite directions at the same time, a separation in his skin. He could not think of which part of what to try to hold onto.

Above the water a black orb-camera kept panning back and back and back, capturing each blinking of the father in tunnel method of the smear. The face of the water was all placid seen from above it, despite the movement underneath. The camera ascended, its organs burning, until it hit some kind of perimeter or ceiling and was stopped.

The camera kept bashing at the surface, at the surface. It could not cause a crack in what held it there from moving further out. Something very warm beyond it seemed to murmur. The camera beat itself to bits, sending small fragments flying until it hit the vital cord and fell into the thing it meant to film.

The surface did not blink.

The father’s body washed up in a bathtub. A nude woman stood beside it in the mirror working curls into her hair, long gray locks that ate the light up. She heard the father sputter, sneezing sea up, weed and scales screwed through his own hair. The woman had a long black metal chain that ran out from her vulva. The chain led somewhere beyond the bathroom door, its presence vibrating with a low tone. The woman continued with her fingers curling till her whole head was encased — her cheek skin slumped and slathered with bright white oil that clung to light underneath. Her tits, he saw, had been removed. In the tub, Person 811 burped and stammered, trying to stand up. The nude woman’s neck was stacked with hickeys, kind of glowing. Her spinal column seemed disrupted. Her ass, though — her ass had spent endless time on glossy paper, replicated through the years. The father nodded. He felt his back arch, his fat toes cracking as they cricked.

The woman finished with her make-up and came to stand above him. The chain anchored inside her tremored taut — as if the chain itself or something huddled at the far end could sense her moving and did not want it — and yet the woman did not flinch — no emotion as the chain tugged up from her, peeling her skin in flaps up off the limb. Her eyes were hard and had no color. In the tub the woman knelt down on the father, pressing some fleshy wet spot on his gut. Somewhere downstairs animals were screaming, chipping at the walls.

The woman took the father by the dark balls and opened up her mouth.

WHAT’S THE MOST BEST THING YOU’VE EVER SEEN, she said loudly without speaking, her mouth full of his dick. WHAT’S THE ONE NAME YOU COULD KNOW WITHOUT KNOWING YOU KNEW IF YOU HAD TO WHO IS THE WAY YOU WERE THEN THERE WHEN YOU WERE THE WAY YOU WERE THEN THERE OR NOW HOW MUCH DO YOU LOVE YOUR HOME WHERE ARE YOU IN YOU

The woman’s pores and eyes were gushing flour, some of which filled the father’s nostrils and other holes, clogging his body to stay closed in. Cold spirals waddled up him.

When he did not reply, the woman shook her head and let the father’s dick flop out soft against itself. Coming in contact with his other flesh now, the dick sort of sizzled and leaked liquid. 811 felt exquisite pain lurch up his sternum, ejaculating in the bath. Afterwards he still felt ugly. He watched the sperm worked through the water at his skin, searching through the mud there for some hold. He felt a billion others growing larger in his self-sacs, one for every sperm he’d not released. All of it squalling all inside him and around him bloating. And it burned.

The father opened his mouth again to try to say something to the woman, but she was older now; instead his mouth ejected reams of infant birds. The birds were slow and small and not like birds then, covered in a gel. They shat long white strings of old light as they flew up; they flew straight into the wall at once; they died. Their feathers fell upon his body, stuck against him, glued down with his ejaculate, still kind of strumming with future flew. They stuck too to the woman until he and she were under so much writhing neither could see where he or she began. Their muscles throttled in the mask. They shat so fast. The room began filling up with wet between the fiber, more gush and slick pushed from all their holes. All ages fried.

The woman’s mouth said another question but Person 811 could not hear it through the gunk, the tone inside it making shriek. The beef inside him beating.

One massive hauling on the woman’s chain inside the downy lather ripped the woman all of a sudden through the wall. Then it was dark. No matter how he struggled to flap and rise like what he’d seen come from her thereafter, he could not inside himself find hold.

The new men had to swim from several miles up, bleeding, to drag Person 811 out of where he lay, his body pussed and pulled apart and overflowing. The men had been employed. The men were not alive in certain senses. Where they’d lost their heads they’d been affixed with false heads made of leather, skin, and plastic, to give the appearance of having heads. The false heads bore great resemblance to Person 811.

Several sections of the father had become dislodged from the father in the toning, the elongation of his cells. The fleshy segments floated off among the liquid held to his body only now by bits of stringy flesh, vibrating with a language. The men collected these eruptions into a film sac — a bit of ear, a lash, a prism, something wet the father had swallowed years before — though some of the bit had washed out so far that they would not be found in time. The reconstruction of the father would therefore have to go on as best it could.

Underwater, the men lashed the father to a table and spun him upwards through the clear. They fit the father in a van. They drove the van into another van. This second van knew where to go. The van’s driver had touched the father on the eye once, years before, in a gold room. The van’s second-in-command had hid inside a blanket in the father’s father’s trunk for many months, breathing the same air as the father when the father’s father drove him to and from the school. The father’s father had never driven him anywhere but the school, and, well, once, to the ocean once to see where everyone they ever knew had drowned, to see the long intestines washing on the shoreline, and the massive birds growing more massive in their feeding.