Blake Butler - Sky Saw

The van’s fuel had once been inside the father also, but not via the manner you might assume.

The van itself had once been used for rape, and would again, and would again.

Inside the van, Person 811 lay with his head down against the floorboards with the human moaning of the road.

In another kind of dark the men massaged the father’s face. They stretched certain parts of him to yawning. They filled in the holes in with several kinds of putty and perfume orbs. The insides of Person 811 were now pastel. There men inserted devices in the father, items— none of which by sight or function they could name —inscribed text and digits on the father’s cells and sperm and organs, grafted buttons — then the father was sewn up.

Person 811 was made to stand and laugh and say nice things, though his new tongue kept getting in the way.

When he could shake hands with satisfaction, the men took him to visit the naked woman’s grave. She had perished in his pleasure, they explained. Pleasure had been administered, please recall. For your enjoyment. The enjoyment of the pleasure of it. The greatest light. Now if you don’t mind: sign this form. And this form. And spit up here. And as well here now make the creaming. Stamp, initial, spit up, making creaming, sign. Checks must made out to the Absorber. Keep your eyes open.

The men watched Person 811 kiss the ground. They watched him lick the woman’s headstone and thank and thank it. Under the headstone was just putty. The woman had been absorbed or reassigned. Everything, they said, would be okay.

Okay? the father said. He could not taste it. Okay? Okay?

They pointed up.

They handed him a special pair of high-grade zoom bifocals that fit intensely to his whole face.

The word was written on the sky.

There in the weeks I came to know my wife again, the air was made of liquid ash

You could walk for weeks and step through windows and still just everything was old

Spumes of shit or wingbeat would come floating on some shudder

But for the most part, the house, the yard, in everybody — we knew black

We lanced around in squirmy currents cutting transitions for our hands

It wasn’t funny, nor would it stop

In the ash you let your eyes and arms go and you would end up somewhere or another

You could just roll around and release shit

No one would know

Some nights I’d turn the a/c down or leave the fridge wide open and the black rooms would then turn harder, into ice

Then there’d be rungs that formed up in the transom

Then you could climb

I’d slunk through all of this alone

By the time I’d learned the manner of the ladder there was lather in the den

There were shapes among us and we could feel them

We could have them, or be had

I was raped in so many positions I can’t remember by things I also can’t remember

It felt like walking

Soon the long waves sunk off from the houses and on the air was left no light

From the dark rhythm I cut a woman’s body

My wife of me was made of night at first, whereas I have only ever been all cold

Her voice would pour out of my skin asleep for hours

She had such undoing ideas

She had a talisman that gave off weather

There was so much between us we could touch and so much milk

Right now I can remember I am the father in this book

Right now, regardless, I remember, though soon again soon I will not

In this scum I’d built the house that would be ours

I built it just by blinking

It was right there

Just years and years and fucking years inside this house there counting

Moving in from room to room in no clean light

Often my wife was not around at all, or she was watching from somewhere I could not feel her

I could not feel anything

My skin would stick to certain surfaces for days and I would wait

Wait and ask and look and listen, peeling slowly, where I could

Watching the slow slim building of the soft house stacking forward up into the day

Once the current floor had flown up from me higher, I would not think of it again ever at all

Inside this house I could sleep as long as all I wanted

Which was almost always

My house to me only ever one flat level, as my father’s had been

Inside the night, the air light compiling, the burst and lift, the sloping ground

The night we made the child along the air between us I’d been mostly overwhelmed

The air was crumbed and creamy and I’d been spinning with the scissors

You had to get at it from an angle to make the rooms things again that would not burst

I’d slipped up and racked my forehead three times

My wife was not concerned

She’d been talking to the rathole, where I swear I saw her forcing the best of all our food — the white pecans and goose hair

I swear she had it in for both of us

As I did too

I would tape her hands together for our sleeping but by midnight she’d chewed through

She took to knitting a parachute in case the world slurred sideways or inverted

There were so many things to come, she swore

My eyes by now were mostly swollen lids

I walked in the patterns I most remembered to our bedroom and rolled myself into the moth-made bed

For once I found the way to sleep by simply sleeping

I hid inside me in the world

I’d half cracked a dream of false condition — free fast food, water parks and mega-money — when I felt my wife’s tongue in my cheek

It moved around inside me as if searching, as if after some compartment I had not found, the most mashed part of me stored white inside it, some lick I’d managed to keep mine

Her tongue touched my own tongue and made me speak a language I’d never heard

Those old tongues in me all full of other people

My wife there all above me in no light

We had been together for exactly fourteen days through all the banging

She ate my breath and held my hands

She let her tongue continue slit so far down deep into my throat I could feel it coming out the far end

I could feel it squeegee through my balls, the halls of ugly others of me all inside them, also speaking

Knowing all of our old names

It folded through me like a waking

Where I would go to be alone

Very soon our skins had changed

I heard the sound of metal drumming

The walls inside my sleep were slurred and pocked with goiters

There was a swan, a goose, a chicken — all of them pecking at my head from the inside — while on the out my wife would shriek and she was in me and I was in her — so

Then was someone other also too

My wife swelled up only from one point, her private center, while the rest of her curled dry

This was all within a matter of an hour

Her front became a thing against which I could lean

Then it became more than that

I could forget that I was there, though when I did this my wife would try to drink my body

My blood and such shit

The other of us wanted mass

Each inch had its own inches to derive and to comply to

My wife gave it all the rest that we had saved

She ate the ash that shook off from the ceiling

She made me go out into the yard and dig up a certain kind of nit — a thin translucent nit no bigger than an idea

The nit had a massive nest of eggs just like it, in its image, as were we now

My wife gave each one a little pet name before she slurped them through her sternum to the child

The nits replicated and came back out of her through where her holes were

As had I once been created, as had you

There were webs or nests all through the bedroom and beyond

This was all within a matter of an hour