Blake Butler - Sky Saw

One then another

My wife tried to hug me to her chest

I said Ouch a little, and she echoed it back at me

There were new lines in her eyelids and what beneath them

She was already unfolding

I felt my ribcage folding inward as the form inside her stomach kicked me in my own

She lashed and gnashed and shrieked up steam shaped like my face

I kept the door between us mostly always after

I slept with knives and mirrors and a bell

I heard her in the old rooms brimming over

I heard the child inside her coming out

There was a smell and some kind of gonging

I couldn’t see, I closed my eyes

My body moved me through the house

I felt my each inch spreading out

There was more of me than I could need in any instant

There were more years then

There was the new edge of the night

Inside the house Person 2030 sat silent with his eyes closed scrawling drawings of himself. In each picture he’d made his gut appear enormous, like his mother’s, filling up most any page — another person lodged inside him, like his mother. In some pictures the person was hair-covered, while in others it had no openings.

The child had made hundreds of copies of himself. Each one he named with longer numbers that weren’t numbers. The paper filled the room. It caked around his face and made it hard to breathe. There was so much paper. The pages that appeared blank were fat with certain words where the child’s sweat had kissed against it. His arms were throbbing. He could not stop drawing. His stomach in the pictures kept on growing and in his real stomach something moved — an odd shape shaking through his inseams, against his blood — he felt it stretch up along his body to his finger.

He bit his finger, sucked the foam. Among the mottled knots of flesh and tissue, there were a set of keys, a keyboard organ made of organ. The keys each had a different word imprinted on them. Each of the keys, when played, made the same sound. The child touched notes and felt his fingers burning. He felt the notes inside his head. For each note there were endless others at the same time in it bending what the note had meant to mean, and yet once played there was no way to unplay it.

Outside his shape, he heard the other sound, the shrieking of the tone, again beginning— a tone, he realized, made of every sound he’d heard or uttered here so far and so too would utter then in years to come; these words that made him, in the book, and all the books read or dreamt of as they passed the words into the book of him in its creation. He’d heard the tone many times before but never in a room here by himself. It struck the air so loud it shook his body to its strands — he could see straight through his skin — his skin now newly rashed in bumps that matched the pattern found on each of the bodies of him that he’d drawn, and too the bodies in the bodies growing, written in their 2D lard. He moved through the room’s light toward the sound. At first it seemed to come from one direction then it spread out into spirals. In the spirals the child moved. He wobbled through the kitchen to the hallway where down the hall he saw the door.

He had been told not to touch this door. The door would burn him, the mother warned in her sleeping. The door would eat your mind. It is terrified of everything. Along the hall the child bonged back and forth between parallel walls. He shook inside himself where the blood inside him bonged along also. There were pictures on the walls of earth from far away and overhead but he elected not to see.

The door had not a knob now but this did not stop him from making it come open.

Behind the door he saw the private stairwell where his mother once with another man had hid, though now instead of down the stairs went up.

Each stair had a unique symbol traced in dark epoxy.

The child could not quite see as he ascended. He could not see the frame of the house or its condition or the way the space around him stayed one size as he moved forward on its air. The stairwell seemed much thinner than it should be in some places, so thin that the son had to turn profile and scrunch against his side, dragging himself upward using his convulsive muscles to draw himself along the banister in shifts. Sometimes the stairs became automatic and the son could hold on and ride clean.

At various points along the incline the stairwell opened into rooms. The child came upon a room swarmed with tiny flies. They were coursing over objects, like a long land. He moved into them full, regardless, as if he knew why they were there. He recognized the patterns in the layers of them. He listened to them breathe. They caked around the son’s face until there was no face left, sucking, until the insides of the son flowed dry. Then all again he was ascending, stairs beneath him. His ass and legs already burned.

The markings of each stair’s face burned low with an old glow, each feeding some form of murmuration through his legs. The son had no reason to go on upward but he knew he could not go down — there was no remainder of the stairs that had brought him to this level — and with each step the well behind him disappeared.

Further on the stairwell opened onto a large and long white building, higher than he could crane his head to see to look. The building had thick curtains closed and glowing in each window, silhouettes. He could not find an entrance into the building. He pressed against it. He moved his hands all through it as through milk. Someone was reaching on the far side for him, then he was falling. Then he was ascending again on the stairs, and soon another landing opened down into a house, into a room like the child’s mother’s bedroom had been as a child herself.

She was there sleeping. She seemed the same age as the son now. Her hair was long and clean and blonde. Her eyes were open as she slept. She watched the son move there above her. He tried to speak and he could not. Through the walls a screeching filled the old air, like the prior tone but backwards, as if captured in his blood. The girl smiled. Above the bed he touched his mother’s face with his face and together they drew air and then again the son was no longer in the room there but still ascending and wished he wasn’t but he was. There were so rooms many the son could not remember each, one after the other. On each the son could not remember how he kept finding his way back to the stairs. There was always more blank space and further eras.

Some levels up, in ripping heat, the dark stitched so thick that it was liquid. The child crept along the frame contorting. The texture of the walls along the stairs felt like a person but it had no color and no sound. He continued on until he felt one of the steps go flat beneath him and the floor spread out into a panel on which he could move further in one direction. The meat of his feet screeched underneath his other layers. A certain length into the space he felt his leg muscles going weak, bowing his stride out in long elastic loops. His bones inside him held the tone. Slow fur grew and subsided on the son’s dry inches, making rasp sounds at his teeth, alive.

Further out the floor’s face seemed to soften — his feet sunk in as if at flesh. He could no longer locate where the stairs had been behind him. He continued into the brim-mouth gaping, sinking further and further in — something stuck sucking at his eyeholes — corrosive pressure bloomed in bolts, stretching and aching at the flesh around his nostrils, between his teeth. There was a slur then — it welled around him — he could not stop going and he could turn away — he could not blink or cry out in help or warning as there was no word in his blood. Vast stinking suction pulled in against him, stretching his face into a mask that had no edge and gave off smoke. He felt the ball-bulb’s pupils pop one after another, screeching holes that warm nails fit in. Micelight spread into his skull with pissy gold. The gouge sunk nausea through him like a yo-yo — it recoiled into his throat — made his tongue harder — bowing his stomach and the small black sacs surrounding.