Blake Butler - Sky Saw

He fought to stand. His back cracked in cartoon screwing. He began to cough a white wide light, a light that cut the son inside him as it sparkled through his gut to course the room where as the tingling settled in his shoulders, he saw among the heavy glow how all the space was stuffed with sleeping people, their mottled bodies packed in naked, flesh to flesh conformed and still conforming. Many of them had no faces. Many others had no heads. Even those that did seemed to blur where they were built, their features changing in floods of color and old mud. The room around them also glistened. There were no girders, no corral bins of the walls — only the mass of bodies comprising distance and nearness. The proximity of their tight-knit skins held each other upright and unconscious, writhing in REM. Their eyeseams stung crusted with yellow sleep shit and their veins twitching in their lids and arms and necks. Some of the heads spoke aloud into the air above them, a language shattered, throttling the room. Some of the bodies tried to walk or hide in fear of the child’s entrance, pushing themselves against their neighbor, so crammed their skin owned bright red lines of indentation where they bent. Most seemed not to sense the son at all. They were old or not, and strong or not, and rich or not, and they had every color eye and face and blood. They wore the faces they only wore when they felt that no one could see them. The son could not tell at either end where the splay of bodies ended and the house again began. Their fleshy ocean stretched far back to no edge, except up to the border where he stood, his own unopened blood still gushing from his sockets to his hands. He felt the air inside him growing fatter, sticking to where he was there, his body brimming out around his eyes. He could not see clearly, then less clearly. He could not stop it. He felt him open up his mouth and he conformed.

The child spent the next 37 years again stunned in an oblivion while around him in the house the house stayed still.

When he could see again the room was bound, stuffed full of tape. Black film had wrapped around the contents of whatever had filled the air before it, glistening cocoons of several sizes. All terror buildings and bridges and the forests in the same folds. There were several kinds of silent light. All of the light was dark too at the same time. You could see the shape of day as if engraved. The light gyrated from the center of the room, light made of liquid, light made of skin, light made of light that could not hold itself together, and all around the land laid long in all directions flat and scrawled against itself, black but visible to beyond perimeter by the failing of the eye. The child could hear the sound of huge projectors. He began to move and could not move. He was standing hard against a warm thing, a thickened surface, some kind of screen. The pixels of the screen bent where he touched them, harboring the land. He went in the dark to turn around. The walls were nearer now than ever. The room the child was in was the same size as the child was. The land went on and on. He beat and banged against the glass and called her number. He called his number and nothing changed.

He held his breath and closed his eyes. He found that not breathing felt the same as breathing. He found that through his lids he could still see the same walls in the same room, though in the room now, held inside him, the screen no longer showed all endless lands, but instead now was reflective. The child could see only himself, though it was not like looking on into reflection. When the child moved his arm the other of him did not move. The other of him was much older and was naked and had no head. The man’s arms were swollen where his were childish, the skin all covered in tattoos, each glyph distorted into shapes indistinguishable for what they’d been sometime or ever, the shapes of continents submerged. The child could see straight through the thin pale skin stretched on the man’s chest. All through his organs small things had nested, thousands of them, innumerable white birds. The child could the muscled veinwork crinkling in the birds’ sternums, their tiny marbled spinning eyes. The child began to raise his arms toward the surface and instead the man was moving his older arms, and then the arms were all around him, forming an oval, or a hole. The room’s film wrapped around the child’s face and the man’s face and their fingers and their chests, around their torso and their middles and their leg meat and down their mouths all through their bifurcating encased holes. The edge of the film slit the child’s and the man’s esophagus and trachea, wrapped over organs. Their blood was pouring back and forth all between blood. The child could feel a voice performing through him, moving his tongue too so that he too said the words, not numbers or names now but other symbols, the language written in the book he’d always thought had been only a mirror.

The child found himself again inside the house. He was standing in a small room without windows or decorations or furniture or paint. The room was hardly larger there than he was. A sound all knotted in his face. He felt his face and it felt older. There was nothing to look into. The room around him was all language: where there meant to be a chair he just saw chair. When he looked down at where he felt his arms were, he saw nothing.

The child moved back out of the room. He saw it was the door to where before he’d found the stairwell. There were no stairs there. The air felt calm. The child looked at his arms and felt they seemed the same as any hour. He closed the door to the room and locked the door with his long nail.

The milk of air was winding through the house. It knew the house and wanted through it. It wanted to fill the air of the house and filled the space of the house’s shape itself. Milk all through the years in lather leather held out only by an idea.

The child came into Person 1180’s bedroom. He moved to stand above her bed. The mother’s face and hair were crusted white. Her cheeks had marks of small incision. The child cracked his knuckles with no sound and watched his mother’s body shake. He could not remember her in younger form, the air among them then, the light of the rooms contained, the many buried spheres of dark all gathered in his linings.

Through the sheets and through the mother’s gown and through her stomach flesh he could see the flesh all building in her, spreading the space of where it was into the room around them filled with her or someone else. The liquids in her knitting where she wanted and was wanted. The fields inside her silent. He leaned against her. He pressed against her. The sound he’d carried in him from the room of the younger mother changed — turned on its side inside him, pinking the edges of a color captured in the sound hid in the flesh, the ancient color between colors slaved and waving.

In the room around the child, the walls began to pour, a liquid leaking from the holes the house had all throughout it onto the air the house contained away from other light. Some of the gush turned into eggs or maggots, sometimes to birds, which flew up and at or into the son’s head, squawking, clawing at his eyes. He tried to shout the mother’s name but instead everything else kept coming out — a shattering sound the son had only ever heard inside him in there eating at the inside of his face.

Soon it was impossible to tell where the walls ended and floor began, or where the inside met the daylight, where any of these surfaces ended or began, or where the sky above it all claiming the buildings separated them from that, and whatever lay beyond it. Outside the house the ground was skin and ash. All of the surfaces were slurring. The substance pooled around his flesh, its color coming from his holes and joining with it. His new skin stuck to the air. The color covered up his face and arms, the light surrounding. It was above him, and beside him, folding over where he was, though from outside himself he just seemed standing, staring, in a room. It seemed any day becoming. He thought to raise his arms and watched them raise. With the cells grown out each suddenly long as both his arms on every finger he clawed and clawed at the wet but found it felt just like any air and nothing changed.