Blake Butler - Sky Saw

Outside the house inside the sound again there coming off it the remaining men mashed sky to skin. It had been ages as the day broke. The space of each body near and nearer at each other in the revolving stroboscopic sudden air all wet with an interlocking hum of digits gripping fast at what they passed, each instant ripped from that one prior, an old dry fire buried in the air. The men could not quite find their way to fit into the house now — the cells kept mixing. The night was crushing. They seemed already in the house. The length of rooms wobbled around them. From all the windows there was mass.

Around the house for miles the bodies swarmed stuck against it — men conglomerating men, men but not men but bodies full all of men and women only ever, eggs and knotting throttling their flesh. One by one the mass grew larger, hoarding skin sacs pillowed whole. The bodies were strung with muscle, crick and crap redoubled, packed in damaged intestines and flat minds. A massive bulge somewhere goaded on the distance small and sweltered, a gift sent in the guise of sickly rain, beating the house’s seams in waves as had the waters. All gave knocking. There came all knocking in and on around the house and pounding rounder, toward zero. The knocking flickered the lights in every room — it caused all adornment from the walls where walls were never wanted — the paint in sheaths rotting through hues, the pictures crumpled beyond image, the curtains scorched to gowns of ash, bright fibers wriggling where nothing held — it spread all through the soil and pilled it under, inward, crumpling the land and calling out.

The bodies swam and spread in and over one another, pushed inside their common flesh. They were nearly all one body throbbing, a cortex spread and slurred upon the day in heat. The body had so many mouths and eyes and ear holes — there was so much they could take in — their nostrils sniffing up what they could force, their fingers wriggling for some hole. Their pressure piled up around the house and rutted at their skin strips coming open. A hulking heat pooled up on certain scalps, scorching the hair off of their arms. All of their voices stuttered out at once, counting aloud, each human want they chewed through, One one-thousand, two.

For years the father walked in darkness. There was nothing about the way. The field was low and flat and he could not see it. No matter how far or fast or which way in the dark he moved it was the dark.

The father ate the sweat off of his hands. In his mind he imaged catalogs of food he’d eaten all the years in all the other rooms and he ate them all again. Once he had eaten the food out of his mind it was no longer there and could not be eaten any further, though it was stored in rungs hid in his fat. The father felt the fattest he had ever. The fat was all around him.

Through the darkness, fat made sound. At first from far away it sounded like the tone did — pearly and piercing, bone on bone pummeling skull — though as he grew closer in wherever it was familiar music, even if he could remember why or how. It colonized the light it, made it layered, layered the layers, split them wide.

The father followed the sound for further years again inside the same space until he was standing at a screen. The screen was silver, comprised of private light. The light was wider than his arms, wider than the space of wet he’d been contained in, and than the container of that wet, and that beyond. He went to move inside the space to touch the silver and found his arms were stuck hard in his sleeves. He could not move. The room fit down around him, sucking his cells. He closed his eyes and saw the silver shudder. There were ten of him, then even more. There were more of him before him in the silver than he could count, each of them more like him to him than he was himself. They had bodies he remembered being, arms and faces. Even when they did not resemble him exactly he understood. The bodies were all around him touching. They were talking. It was so all at once there was no inch. It felt like sleeping. He went again to open up his eyes.

The room was dark. There were walls there, stairs beneath them lit with ovals. He could move now, but only downward, as where before there’d been the screen there was what seemed by touch to be a ceiling but in fact was just the sky.

The father continued down the stairwell in the dark until he found a door. It was black and locked and had no number. The space behind the door was sort of humming.

He leaned and spoke into the keyhole. He said Hello, I am the father. His voice felt weird, somewhat like him but quite much thicker, cracking at the edges. As he said the words he felt them leave, sucked again into no sound. His head was wet and cheeks and ass were wet and holes were wet and he seemed shrunken. He touched his jaw as if to make it go again. His touching fleshes gave off sparks that gave him words.

The man said I am sorry I could not remember but now I remember many things I think and as time progresses I will continue to remember more things and there will be more things to remember.

I have been only here forever.

I will know what I was meant to be.

The door would not open. He pulled and pulled it. He called and begged and called the names and tried again. He pulled at the door and banged at the door and shook himself against the face of the door unchanging until there was nothing left about his fingers or his hands.

He turned around and found the world.

Inside the house the small door to the stairwell opened and a man came in. He could not remember what had just happened in the body of the father. In the hall the air was wet. There was so much heat there, like a furnace, though there was no one in the room. The walls were running thinly with clear liquid that made it glint wide with the light. There was no mother and no child. There was no noise of people or the men there and through the window the day was calm.

In the light the man seemed clean. He had been upholstered with new skin and hair. He had a smile that stretched the corners of his faces into small abscesses in which mud and rot had took to clinging.

If the version of the house built by the mother from her body had held a picture of the man we know as Person 811 in it somewhere, which it didn’t, this man standing in the front hallway, he would look nothing like that other man. Some would say, then, these two could not be the same person. Some would say this discrepancy inside a story could cause a problem. Like how one would expect two cars driving at one another from in opposing direction on the same straight road to be piloted by different drivers. Another idea to consider is how when a furnace turns itself on in a house, whether there is someone home or not, there is a clicking sound and there’s a glint.

This man who seemed to have to be the father, Person 811, whoever else, despite the problem in his appearance, he couldn’t even spell his current thought, though he had it tattooed on his knuckles, between his teeth. He tried to walk along the hallway. He had his arms steadied out beside him as if learning. He was saying something he couldn’t make come out quite right. The words seemed strung inside his mouth and blinking as if some rheumy cord of Christmas lights, his eyes slightly bulging from his head in bulbs of water. His feet left puddles on the carpet, puddles in which no reflection of the air around him shone. The man waddled past the small door that led into the kitchen and continued onto straight to the wall. He banged his skull and heard no sound.

At the wall — where before there’d been a space to go into the house, for all those years — he went on walking heavy with his forehead pressed flat and firm into the fiber. The new wall was affixed with a mirror, same as the one he remembered from another room aged in his life, though never before here. The man looked head on into his own face, the other of him there embedded. He looked at the symbols of the language burned on his skin and flexed his muscles. He did not remember having ever worn the clothes in the reflection — a black shawl, a wire bib, blood down his arms — or having worn clothes at all ever for that matter. He touched his reflection’s face and then his face. He put his thumb into his mouth to taste the thumbprint and see if it could matched the pattern of his gums. He looked into the man’s eyes and the man looked back.