Blake Butler - Sky Saw

The 22nd child was made of paper, on which Person 1180 wrote.

The 23rd child, this latest stammer swollen up inside her soon-to-come, flooded the folds inside her with its pre-forming — it felt larger than the others — it already had so many eyes, had already filled in though the sound of everything inside her where among awaiting blood the mother felt the thing she’d meant to be herself learning her veins.

Person 811, somewhere elsewhere, found himself inside a box. The box held a long low light like the kind of light birthed by machines. He could see his short arms crimped with busy muscle. He could see his gushing veins and the scratch marks where he or something else had scratched them. There were scratch marks in the box above his face, bright splinters wedged under his nails.

811 had no idea how long he’d been inside the box. The last thing he could remember was some leaning purple room. From the room he’d moved into an elevator and the elevator sealed. The elevator had descended for several hours and held no music. At times the elevator seemed to be moving to the right or left, or at an angle, or through color. The elevator’s buttons were unmarked. He’d kept on trying buttons with one sore finger till one of the buttons knocked him out.

Before the elevator, he remembered standing in a dark froth up to his neck. It’d been too dark inside the air, too, to know where exactly what made what. He’d gone for miles and not found land — though he had found, by feel, among a patch of lubricant, a tiny plastic ring that fit his finger just exactly, though it kept slipping off, a little burning, and soon he lost it back into the depth.

811 felt something else there with him in the box. Something small and fat and grousing near his feet. He could not budge. He could not think of whom to call for. His mind blanked over so many things he’d one time known — his phone number, how long or fat his dick was and how it had fit into other people, the names of any presidents of Where, or of what his insides looked like on the inside — he’d seen his insides, some technician had showed him in a picture once, gushed and brown and wound, he remembered that — he could not think which way was up.

He knew there was someone somewhere wanting, and he wanted to remember. He tried to think of things he’d thought he’d thought before in other days of other years in the idea that thinking them again would make him click back on where he’d been or what he’d done after. He felt his thoughts flop off from him like live fish:

AM I A FIRE?

HAVE I BEEN MURDERED?

WHAT WAS THAT ONE KIND OF BEER I BELIEVED I LIKED MOST?

WHICH ONE OF ME IS THIS THINKING?

HOW MANY FINGERS WOULD I HOLD UP IF I COULD MOVE MY ARM?

The box was getting smaller, longer. The heat grew with his sigh. His face itched. His veins itched. He counted backwards. The other air the box held itself around his head.

Person 811 felt his name nudge somewhere in him, thrumming upward through his lungs: a name. A name. He’d had one. He spoke his name aloud, again, again. He’d known other people had had his name before him but they were not inside him now — not that he knew. He found that in saying his name aloud in certain phrasings he could remember other people who had also said it — his father, his boss, the bank, the heads in nightmares, his wife — yes, he’d had a wife — a what? — a woman. He could almost smell her. He could not remember much else. He also found that if he said his name enough the same way it began to become another name — something much longer and more difficult to pronounce — something deformed from how his tongue went, very old.

Person 811 knew he was not immortal. He had only been left alone by chance — something shitty in his pheromones, a certain chemical in bad cologne, an incantation he’d not meant to let slip the day before by pressing a certain code into his home phone unaware — there was nothing else about him — when he thought about his hand it hurt. In the nights since then, whenever that was, the man had continued turning aged. He had seen the sheen slip out from behind the skin around his face. He had watched his skin and fingers newly droop. Though days were so short by the hour, when strung together, one after another for weeks or years or which however, in those unglassed contraptions, they seemed even fewer. Soon, he was only thinking of long windows on beach vacation homes. He imagined himself standing neck deep in the warm surf, treading sunned.

811 could have spent the remainder of his life inside this box, he imagined. He would not have felt cheated or ill-framed. He felt flashes in his stomach sometimes, squirts of long silent clods of film of time he’d logged and disregarded. Once — he remembered quickly, his body caught taut trying to sit up — along a stretch of blue sod just south of his prior house he’d seen a mile-long pile-up gushed with blood; neck-deep in the blood, the women crying and mosquitoes swarming for the fresh dead and the not dead yet and the mostly healthy — he’d seen the boils on bodies boiling up with blister in the ransacked sun, their voices peeling at the nothing just above them, inscribing light with all their fear, bursting chocolate lather through their eyelids in the pressure and their reams of fast-ejecting babies floating womby on the curdlip; that day after all that he’d gone home and ate cold tacos and fucked his wife and slept all night.

Yes yes, his wife, she was a woman. She had eyes with color and once she’d touched a prism and for years and years she’d been all that he could know.

Suddenly, beyond his thinking, the lid on the air inside the box came off above him. At first there was so much light he could not see beyond the crag of swarming color platelets. He thought he’d gone so deep into nowhere he’d come out the other side.

Soon then room formed in the flush. In the room there was no wind, no other flesh caught by the walls. The room held just the box that held him, as far as he could see. The space lay long and without texture. 811 found that he could move. He felt the blood rush through his sternum. It filled his arms and made them seem as if erasing from the inside.

The father stood up from the box.

Beyond the box he saw then that he’d not been inside a box at all but just there lying on some surface. The floor was wet and somewhat flooded from a liquid dripping from above, through a dark spot puckered on the ceiling, though which he could hear a some kind of semi-human moan — an orgasm or a singing or confusion among sleep, or all of these at once tangled together — and yet the sound seemed to him second nature to the air here, another part of all our manner.

Hung on the wall from end to end and all he saw so many massive pictures, frames of him caught from all those unremembered years, yet in each one doing nothing — just there standing at the lens — nowhere ungone. In each image he looked older — his face looked burned — his cheeks half see-though and covered with tattoos he could not remember getting and which were no longer there still on his face. Up close he even looked worse than ever — the cells destroyed there, filled with jacked up crap like tiny cities. The closer he looked, the deeper periled — populations being ripped apart, maggots screwing on wide white altars, money smothering the trees.

Person 811 felt someone behind him. Someone unnumbered. Someone behind him — behind him — diamond air.

He continued turning but could not make the airspace frame his eyes.

On the flipside of the mirrors in the room that held Person 811, the surface held another room — a long thin room encircling the walls. Inside this room a phalanx of cameras had been arranged to records the innards of the air. The cameras’ lenses were wide and curved each as skull-sized globes — they had been used in prior years to record some of the highest grossing cinematic bodies in creation, thereafter replicated on the earth uncounted times.