Blake Butler: Sky Saw

Upon the father’s rising from the box into the twin space — his body already spinning and spinning after something — the lenses’ glass began to fog. The glass dripped sweat like human skin and rumpled with the smell of metal burning. The cameras had been designed for this condition. The cameras’ makers understood certain things about Person 811—what that number itself meant — who he had thought he’d been, and who he was now, who he had once wanted to be, what he would actually become.

Across the bubble of the lens eyes, a flush of bacteria, made for cleansing, became released. Their tiny translucent tongues absorbed the liquid, became drunk, allowed the screening to stay captured clear. The image of Person 811 continued to hit tape, replicated into planes. The icons wrapped around against each other, stored in spools that rolled in gyration in rooms behind the room where the cameras watched this body move.

Behind the room that held the cameras, wedged between the camera room and the room that held the film, a man stood standing upright in the light there in his flesh without a head. The man did not move or think or want or breathe but the man knew all about the father and the cameras and what had come before them.

In other years, before he lost his head, the man had, at some time or another, been on the inside of every human home. The homes’ owners did not know the man, or that the man had been there. From each home the man took just one thing he knew would soon be missed. I cannot think of what things like those could be now. He’d swallowed each thing after thorough sucking, to change the taste. The man’s intestines were a mess. In certain homes the man would stand over the sleeping people. He’d run his fingers in the drapes. He’d lick the skin off a husband’s face, or cry the room full, or kiss the children and braid their hair. Sometimes he’d just stand there inches over, still as glass. Often he’d still be there when the folks woke and yet they went on just the same.

Those years were over now. The man weighed less now. He had a new employment, and so inside that, a new life.

The man could not remember where once he’d had a head that looked exactly like Person 811, who in turn looked exactly like someone else. He, exactly like Person 811, could not remember beyond the placeholder of his knowing how in the time he’d already lived he’d lived through the top times of his life already, and how these other moments, these were after.

They were men made of the same skin, like all men, again.

The man watched Person 811 spin around around around. He watched 811 spread his hands across the blank walls, searching for a seam or knob or some way in.

In his hands the headless man felt the things Person 811 felt.

You would call the feeling aging.

He called it Cone.

Person 1180 found the way the men had ripped the stuffing out of 811’s office walls. They’d shit in the Victrola and smeared the whole of the air with something. They’d overturned 811’s black plastic desk. Taped to the underbelly of the desktop were several glossy photos of some woman nude but for a hood. There were markings on her body. 1180 could not tell if they were in the picture or drawn on. For sure someone had traced the woman’s nipples so many times with the tips of his fat fingers that the flesh had been rubbed through. The stink of the father’s scentless discarded excess semen clung around the woman’s image slick like night.

1180’s newest wounds had been addressed. She’d absorbed the stinging of the entries of the men into the dark inside her. The scabs were patchy. The men were done and gone and elsewhere for awhile. She’d kept her eyes closed and her mouth wide the whole time. She’d thought so hard into the silent space she carried she could not remember what they’d done — no inch of new wreck stored in her synapses among all the other hell she’d held — though she could hear the newer infant all inside her come alive, thrumming brighter now than any other she remembered, knitting hyper in her skin.

What she did not see did not have to happen, she’d been taught.

Outside tonight the air was liquid. Children and blood and mud or shit clods floated past the window in oblong droves of packets. Occasional tremors like someone choking shook the texture off the home’s foundation and its eaves. The tone, for now, was silent, or just perhaps too loud or high-pitched for her to attend.

On TV, 1180 watched the men roll a huge translucent ball along the expressway. Men and goats stationed on both sides watched the procession from behind a velvet cable. At the center of the ball there was a nude woman, strapped with her arms above her head. The women’s breasts had been augmented so that they obscured the majority of her torso. Her nipples were so brown they appeared black. The woman’s pure white hair had been combed with glitter and bits of foil that made her seem expensive. A large brass band mostly of tubas followed the ball in its procession, squalling basslines uncoordinated from one performer to the next. The men who pulled the ropes that dragged the ball were made up bronze and coiled all in the face like royal bulls.

1180 recognized certain of the men’s gashed or pimpled foreheads. They seemed everywhere at once. This had all already happened.

The men grunted though their holes in deformed rhythm as they brought the ball toward the wide bright eye hung on the city. 1180 swam the channels through several hundred angles aimed at different close-ups on the woman’s flesh, her eyes blank and elaborate.

1180 could hear the woman’s thoughts — the addled feed spoke into her head in a voice like her voice if shifted older and still aging — wholly ruined — the men around her barking and barfing, throwing their fists into the light, around which the whole sky seemed to pucker, and the woman’s voice groaned on and on and older still.

1180 could not stand to hear the woman speaking any longer. She felt a button on her tongue, but she’d already pressed it so many times and still felt nothing. The men inside the TV shitting mnemonic cash back and forth between their being. 1180 turned the TV off but it stayed on.

In the kitchen 1180 stood among the way the man had ransacked the storage fridge. The men had eaten all the bee meat and drank the runoff water and the pine bread. All they’d left behind was condiments — countless plastic packets salvaged from fast food, distributed in past weeks by kids in massive trucks with countless turrets and steaming screens. Despite the trucks’ clear impenetrability men for miles would crowd around them gnawing and knocking one another’s eyes out.

1180 felt mostly calmer after suckling just one packet of the chemic mayonnaise. She experienced feelings of vast euphoria, self worth and creativity, as well as a warm flush feeling through her linings. It tasted like sucking on a baby doll but it was easy. Several hours without imbibing caused withdrawal, the inverse symptoms of which included ranting, loss of wisdom, megalomania, frothy discharge from the ears.

1180 tried to keep herself in hunger as long as possible but most days she gave in quick — she could feel the hole growing inside her, a round hole lined with even wider teeth.

1180 saw by the large panel LCD clock that had been installed in her forearm that it was time to go downstairs. Everyday from 1 to 4 was MANDATORY SPONSORED INTERMISSION, a practice the state had instituted in the house for several weekends in the months before the presence of the present child. Each home or house in the local area had been installed with safety stairwell bunkers for a cost absorbed in the aggregate war effort — the war against the long black dogs — the war against the books that had not yet been read — the war against the war against the prisms installed in our ribcages — the war against Kentucky’s buried growling — the war against anyone named John. Each war went on regardless of when it ended or began, and should be feared beyond the fear of fearing any other dead idea.