Blake Butler: Sky Saw

The INTERMISSION method was intended to increase tranquility, introspection and to avoid the most common hours of disease — the air panes ripping, helicopters dropping from the sky, spokes of bugs forced through the air vents, paper growing legs and standing up, none of which she’d felt the sound or tremor of an inch of, though this was entirely the point — and but mostly during that time, when they had shared it, 1180 and 811 cowered in the practice position invented and taught wide by the state. 811 would cover his head and babble in a pretend female voice. 1180 kept asking that he repeat what he said louder so she could understand, but 811 would only close his eyes and bleat.

1180 could not remember anything at all or else about 811 ever near her in his life beyond the rich reeking of shit thickening in his pants in various terror, goosey spillage writhing down in long lines for the stairwell where 811 hid and begged against the nothing that had come. And 1180 loved this man regardless. In the night asleep she said his other name.

The safety stairwell, as far as they’d found, led to nowhere. It went on and on into the plastic of the earth. The air seemed sticky and filled with mirrors. Just before he disappeared, 811 had claimed to have continued down and down until he’d found a little coffee shop that sold cold crumpets, but 1180 knew this was a sham — he’d only meant to set her mind at ease. In his time, at times, for some lengths, he had been so thoughtful of her, such a man.

In her own time with the stairwell alone, for all her walking, the mother had developed muscles all throughout her — tremendous calves in which she could see her sheen of beef having seemed to develop the same contoured expressions as a face. Even now, in the mandate’s remission, she still practiced the practice each afternoon at the learned time, though mostly she waited until the child fell sleeping, as the intermission stairwell’s deformed and deforming air did not seem something he or she should breathe.

During the year of nonstop rains, before the burning, the stairs had flooded up a pool inside it some flights down, which in the night— the mother did not know this —the father once had tried to swim down into it. He’d seen a glowing in the depths there, some kind of light sometimes as if from reflective metal money, sometimes as if from one large blinking pupil. He had not been able to swim down far enough — his small lungs red as if to ripping — the pressure in his head like large hands — he’d given up.

1180 had not told 811 she’d used the water in the stairwell to wash their laundry, and her body — she’d had no choice — nothing was coming through the home’s pipes to their rooms, none to wipe the baby clean or mix with liquor. The stairwell water seemed like any other water for the most part, though it was so cold and somehow slick, and sometimes she felt sure she could feel it staying specific through her holes, not mixing with the other liquids of her body, private rivers. So many things they kept from one another without a reason.

Some days 1180 would come to sit by the water’s lip and read. She read mostly instruction manuals for dead appliances and convoluted diagrams of local zoning, as there were no other words these days created — too many were too defeated, and all remaining paper had all been reserved by assholes for phonebooks, receipts and bills. The moan of the minor ocean contained inside their building made her calm, gave her somewhere to escape the flux of massive sunlight that 811 had to walk into every morning to get paid — employed, as were most men before it’d been abandoned, to build the Universal Roof. It was hard work. He came home each day covered in blood, little smear marks around his eyes where he’d kept crying to keep his cheeks clean so he could see. It made the father weary and irritable, hard to love.

In her small evenings by the strange water there, the mother had seen people held under the surface — flattened faces with no eyes, or with more eyes than one should want to have, or in the place of eyes, advertisements — they were in there, underwater but alive. She saw men with tongues so long that they could lick themselves in several pleasure places — she saw lardy machines of vast dimension like no object of this air — she saw whole hotels or office buildings of other bodies coming rising from the bottom, men in every window making gestures, women writhing on the beds behind them, surrounded by machines. They could see her through the surface, clawing at it. She could hear their bloating in the night.

The mother breathed. Something on the stairwell now seemed to row the air around her, as if shifting. The walls seemed closer than she last remembered, the faces of the steps much thinner.

Behind her eyes were also stairwells, which also led to something gone.

The mother fumbled down along the stairwell reeling, feeling at any moment ready to go toppling headfirst, though somehow keeping her posture aimed in weird momentum by dragging her arms out beside her in a thin X on the air.

At some point the walls became so close together there was no space at all between them, and yet she walked.

The mother went down and down. The surface of the air seemed to suck around her. She found herself head-on, faster and farther. She could not stop her body coming with it. She opened and her eyes and closed her eyes and opened them and watch the pattern of the texture change: like the language in the book she read the child would, the same symbols in her lids. Without seeing, she went farther down along the stairwell than she’d ever before been — past the bit of wall on which she had meant to mark her future child’s arriving height — past the bit of wall that’d crumbled open and through which she could not see, but could reach her arm up to the elbow — past the low water mark even, where the water had once sat still and teeming, waiting for its next fit of rising — she felt nothing. She went so deep beyond the house there was no air — the dark around her held together chalky, ashen. She could no longer measure her impression of her descending of the stairs. She slipped and twisted in the darkness but there seemed no context to it, no dimension — as if she’d woken up inside a pillow full of dust, the grain clung in her throat and whites of eyes. She fought to find a ledge or other landing to the space there while in the dark she sunk straight down — not quite free falling, but growing lower, ground in amongst sand. She felt it chewing at her knees and cheeks together. She opened her mouth to call out for someone— who? — and in the dry dump her cheeks bloomed empty with fat pits. The gums inside her ate the language. She could feel her shoulders ripping up. Her fingernails seemed to pull out from their sleeves. It pulled all through her.

The mother vomited a bird. First there was one bird, then there were many, their tremble rummaged up her middle, from her throat. They scratched her cheeks and pore meat with their clawing, her O-hole stretched wide as it could go. Enormous birds, she saw, as white as nowhere, thrushed with feathers matted in a gel. They kept coming up out of her in a chain, all gushing and aflutter— silent —each one imprinted all through and through their gristle with a word, one word for each all written in their linings and down the contours of their suits, the word and word again all densely textured, though the mother could not read the words as they emerged — she could not make out the letters or what about them, or their presence there at all. Each bird’s word was its own word for it alone, though all their screeching came out of them the same, brief and lame and hellish.

Once emerged, the birds stayed thick around her rushing, flapping fat, their gross warped wings beating at her body, pulling her back up out from the fold. She felt their enmassed cluck-caw on her eardrums and their blown motion somehow muffled into one continuous barrage, their note-stung tendons pulsing at her hot as if after some way through her body there back in, finding none — altogether in their presence wanting someone other than she was.