by Blake Butler
No, the mother could not bring herself again to do the thing she’d done twice just now already.
No.
NO
The mother peeped through the window from the outside to make sure her husband was still sleeping. Under the blanket, she watched him wriggle. The father had always been a rowdy sleeper. Most nights he kept the mother up straight through till morning. The mother slept most during the day, if ever. The sleeping father spoke in languages the mother had not heard—if she’d heard them she could not remember. The sleeping father chewed the skin inside his mouth to bits.
In a hurry, slunk and brooding, knowing what the father, waking, might have to say, the mother fire-lifted her son’s copy body on her shoulder and carried him silent through the night. She moved into the thick lip of trees grown up and out around the house, into which no fake light showed. She carried the body through the thick murk, keeping careful not to fall. The earth around was eaten up with tunnel. There was wobble. There was grease. There were creatures out here somewhere. She could hear their tiny teeth. There were holes in the soil that led to somewhere. The mother moved by feel. The mother carried her son’s copy body through the forest through a tunnel lined with crud. Through the tunnel came a clearing. Set in the clearing there was wire. The wire scorched the mother’s hand. Still she knew what she was seeking. She knew that she would know.
When she arrived in or at some small exact place, the mother set the copy son’s soft copy body down. In the mud, the light around his copy body began bending—the mother basking briefly in that fold—the son set underneath her old and getting older, his copy skin turned mirrored, bright. The son’s holes among the bending gave off a thick dark smoke—smoke rose in burst toward the sky—it rushed in rising as if to bend that surface also, wanting, only soon to disappear there somewhere high above, the tendrils birthed and blown away to unseen, sunken—diffused though holes in holes in holes—rips the sky had hidden in its years on years and days on days. The copy child and mother went on still there beneath it, frying, one breath fed back and forth between. They purred secret sentences in silent rising spiral until the sky at last had drunk so much it sunk to night—the night not out of cycle but in insistence, demanded in the skin, the unseen smoke of body after body sewn surrounding until the mother, at least, could not see—could not feel the air even around her, or her other—could not feel anything at all—and in the dark the mother stuttered—and in the dark again the mother walked.
A GOOD DAY
The next day there was nothing wrong. No one was coughing. There were no bills. The sun rose in the morning and felt warm and not oppressive. The yard looked bright and clean. The mother made the son breakfast and drove him to where he was supposed to be and she came home alone and felt okay. The father called her twice to ask how she was without any preamble of suspicion.
The mother made herself an egg sandwich and found just enough hot sauce in the bottle to make it tasty, eliminating the chance that she might overdo it and make the eggs too saucy and thus inedible, as she had a tendency to do. She solved the newspaper’s word puzzle in record time without even really understanding how she knew the answers.
The father’s stocks went up enough to alleviate a recent downswing since they’d moved into the house. The father sat in his office with his stock tracker open, watching the numbers replace one another on the screen. He masturbated in the handicapped stall without any other person coming in. His size felt fine.
At school the son made a friend. A new girl in town from out of town. The girl resembled the son in many features—skin, lips, cheeks, hair, teeth, build, height, sound—but because she was female he did not notice. The girl was very rude to teachers, but in a way the son found wise. The girl wore long black gloves. The girl had two different colored eyes, one of which would be looking at the son and the other eye of which seemed to toggle. She would not tell the son her proper name. She had a lot of nicknames she liked for him to say aloud. The girl ate with her mouth open and the food all falling out.
The son enjoyed the girl. He felt happy to have a friend.
When the family got home, all at the same time, they gathered around the kitchen table and played Monopoly. They all landed on FREE PARKING every other time around. Everyone was able to buy the properties that they needed, and the bank ran out of money, and the game ended in a tie. Afterward the son did a stand-up routine he’d written at school from a deep sleep. The parents were impressed by the breadth and maturity of his jokes. They couldn’t stop laughing—it made their heads ache, it was all so funny. Even when the son cursed the parents didn’t mind because it added. Our child is . . . child is . . . entertaining! one parent told the other, fighting for breathing, though later they could not remember which had said and which had heard.
For dinner they ordered pizza and it arrived a little late and the pizza guy refused to take their money though he did accept a small tip and the pizza was still warm and even more delicious since they’d had that extra time to let their stomachs think. Instead of TV or closing themselves in their individual rooms the way most nights went, they sat around the table long after dinner and talked about things that made them glad or things they wanted to become in the future or things about themselves and one another that they liked. They found themselves saying things that they wanted, things they did not know they wanted—the mother candles, the son a black pen, the father a new pair of working gloves—and therefore felt the bloom of some new direction.
They went to bed together, all at once, without discussing, and they didn’t feel the need to lock their doors. They fell asleep quickly without thinking and their dreams were full of bliss or magic, some kind of wondrous unfamiliar which in the coming days of daylight would itch and itch against their lives.
ROOM OF HAIR
The father spent coming weekends painting over the walls of several rooms. At move-in the house’s walls had been all a shade of blue so blue it appeared black. In certain rooms the walls had been augmented with intricate designs and tiny lines of texts, though these as well were rendered in the same blue and thus could not be seen. The paint the father swathed over the old paint hid the old paint from the eye. The father’s body groaned with all his reaching. The wall’s length often seemed to grow. The father would paint and paint and paint and still have hardly painted anything at all.
In the evenings now before his sleeping the father walked for hours through the house—room to room to room there, seeing. The house seemed larger than it was. Many rooms were long and had no windows. Firetraps, they might be called. Other rooms had shelves or holes or seating built right into the body of the house. Doors with odd knobs. Patterned carpet. Bulbs in certain lamps he’d need would burst. Sometimes the father liked to leave the lights off from one room to another, fumbling for something, bumping his shoulder or kneecap on something hidden, hard. At doorways he would flick the light on half a second, burst the room bright, then in the returning dark try to negotiate the space by mirror in his mind. In certain rooms the father found it hard at all to breathe.
One room on the second floor had a dumbwaiter which would whine along its string, and when pulled rose to somewhere overhead, straight up. There was nothing above the second floor as far as the father knew, except the roof, the sky, the light. One night the father placed an empty water glass into the dumbwaiter. He closed the small door and pulled the pulley. He waited long enough to smoke a cigarette then he brought the box back down. The glass had been turned on its side. The rim felt wet. The father put an orange inside and brought it up and brought it down and found the orange had lost its color. The father wrote a note on a piece of paper—WHO IS IN THERE—and brought it up and brought it down and found the paper rendered blank. The father was too large to fit into the dumbwaiter himself. The father bought a padlock.
Off the house’s longest hallway, the father found a room the realtor had not shown the father—a room also not on the father’s copy of the blueprints, a room so s
mall the father could hardly fit inside—this room was stuffed with hair. Wispy black hair, the kind a cat sheds, though it didn’t smell like cat. The father found himself pressing his head into the hair, breathing, breathing. The father had been balding steadily for at least the past two years. All the other men in the father’s family kept their hair. In fact, the father’s father had grown his hair beyond his ass—enough hair to wrap the father’s father’s body before they’d buried him at sea.
Nestled in the hair against the seamless wooden floorboards, the father found a key. The key seemed wider than most locks. The father clenched the key inside his fat fist. The father swallowed something in him. The father closed the tiny room. The father walked the key into the kitchen and placed it in a drawer with all the steak knives. The father stood in the kitchen for an hour. The father went back to the tiny room. The father gathered all the black hair into a black trash bag and walked it outside to the street. The father went inside watched it through the window.
The father drank a beer. The father drank a beer.
DISEASE RELICS
The father came into a room and saw the mother standing silent with her fingers in her ears. The mother’s long fake neon nails made the plugging mostly ineffective, but still the mother would not answer. The mother’s eyes were open but she would not look directly at the father. She kept turning more and more away.
The room was full of stuff they’d had to stop using as a precaution of the son’s disease. They were supposed to have thrown it out. Burned it. Burned the ashes. Buried the ashes’ ashes in a sealed jar. Razed the land the jar was put in. Razed their minds of if and else. No one had come to make sure that these things happened, and so they had not happened. Instead the mother hid these things away. They were supposed to have gotten rid of his newly huge pajamas, his crusty sheets, his loose hair and teeth—the teeth he would have lost eventually anyway and the teeth he should have worn forever—his unopened Study Bible and his toothbrush and his lost teeth, the baby book the mother had used to transcribe the details of his birth and youth, as well as any photographs taken of him during the period and any cards or other mail that bore his name.
They were supposed to change his name. They were supposed to forget everything the son had said aloud up to that point. The father, at least, had done the last of these. Over afternoons he had collected and removed what he could find of the son’s scribbling on reams of paper, the paragraphs in illegible legends, letters smaller than the eye hole of a pin, drawings of mazes, maps, and bodies, cribbed in among the glyphs of language, enough to fill a book. The father had as well thrown out any books he’d seen the son touch or look at or had heard read aloud by the mother’s mouth. Any music. Any gist.
This son, the father sometimes heard himself say inside him, in someone else’s voice, should no longer be alive.
In the room the mother stood wearing the white mask, holding the precautionary plaster cast she’d made of the son’s chest—already crumbling—against her own chest, humming one long sound.
The father had tried to convince the mother that it was best to get rid of these things as they could hold the sickness in their fibers, but whenever he brought it up like that the mother would get down on her knees and scream and scream until he said okay.
Eventually the father had even begun to want them for himself. He did not tell the mother how for weeks he’d slept with a long lock of the child’s hair until he’d woke and found he’d eaten it.
The father took the plaster molding from the mother and sat it on the carpet and unplugged the mother’s ears and clasped her hands and squeezed. He put his mouth against her head.
Do you want to go to McDonald’s? he said. Do you want to go to Chili’s? Do you want to go to Outback? Do you want to go to Miami Subs Grill? Do you want to go to the Container Store? Do you want to go to Sharper Image? Do you want to go to Hooters? Do you want to go to Chi-chi’s? Wait, Chi-chi’s is out of business. Do you want to go to Kenny Rogers Roasters? Do you want to go to Denny’s? Do you want to go to Great Clips? Do you want to go to Taco Bell?
The father did not know what had made him talk like that.
The father could not laugh.
HOW THE SON GOT SICK
For years the son believed the father when the father said he owned a live man’s head—though years later, in the telling, the father swore he’d said nothing of the kind. The father told the son he kept the head locked in the attic in a safe in their old house. He said he’d bought the head from a woman on the street—a woman with wrinkled, thumbless hands and a mustache. The father claimed the head particular in its eating. The head liked ranch dressing on fruit salad. The head liked mayo by itself. The father told the son not to try to see the head because the head would bite the son. The father said the head had mentioned the son in particular as a thing he meant to eat.
The son went on for years and years with the head inside his head. He began to learn other things about it. He and the head had long talks and walked in sunsets. The head told him things about money and pornography and chess and investing and wilderness survival. The son was three years old at the beginning, and the head was there still when he was nine. All through those years the son tried to guess the safe’s combination with no luck, though his dry mouth spoke the numbers in the night.
The son’s tenth birthday morning bore one condition: go. And so he’d gone. The son had gotten out of bed, sweated sopping wet with eyes not open, and walked downstairs and left the house. He walked straight on into the forest. He was thinking anything at all. He came to a small, hardwood gazebo. The gazebo was black and had words emblazoned, long words, names on names. A beehive hung from a cord in the gazebo’s ceiling’s center. In the son’s hands he found a stick. With the stick he beat the hive down with wide swinging, expecting to be stung—stung and stung and swollen up all over, growing several times himself—the son had thoughts inside his head. Instead, the hive hit the ground in silence, the bees all stunned in seasoned sleep—a queen among them, held a god.
The son felt cheated. The son winged rocks. He shouted sick words into the hive’s holes. He heaved the hive into the air over and over and watched it hit the ground. No matter what it was the son did the son could not get the bees to buzz up, to surround him, though on his tenth toss, the hive fell open. Inside the hive was chock with mazy tunnel. Something oozing, some white brine, a sound.
Cut in the wax there, runned with honey, the son saw the combination.
KEYS
In the morning, crushed with a warm air, the mother could not think of where to hide. She’d been left alone in the house again, like every other day—the father working, son at school. Usually the mother liked to be alone, swum in the peace. Sometimes she took her clothes off and went out into the backyard and stood and sang and walked around, performing common household habits like any other except with her boobs and ass hung in the sun, as she had when she was teenaged on strange beaches on vacation from her childhood house. The mother felt young out in the wrecked light naked. The mother could spend years inside those days.
Today the mother’s spit was brown like coffee. She ground her teeth, felt them diminish. She could not shake the sense of someone there behind her. She kept feeling something brush against her back. In all the rooms the curtains seemed to rustle even when the a/c had been turned off. She’d been finding keys all around the house. She’d found a key in the baking powder. She’d found a key taped to the window. A key inside a certain book on a certain shelf. A key tied into her hair. All the keys unlocked the house, though some had no teeth. The mother hid the keys in certain places. Still she kept hearing the front door open. She heard something moving on the roof.
She tried to hide in the hallway closet but something kept rustling in the towels. She tried to hide in the washing machine but it kept turning itself on. Even when she stood and watched the room in a long mirror she knew things happened every time she blinked her eyes.
Cramped up under
the son’s small bed, the mother found a purple folder full of photos of women ripped from magazines. Naked women—glossed and healthy—each much older than the son—their bodies seemed so clean. The son had adorned the women’s heads with extra eyes and horns and speech bubbles saying awful things—text that went on and on for pages, cramped tight to dark black—text that should have been destroyed. In many of the drawings, a smaller version of the son crawled on or in the women. The mother replaced the photos as if she had not seen them. The mother went into her room and drew a cold bath, watched it wait.
HEADS
The family sat around a table. The father sat at the table’s head looking straight ahead at no one. Behind the father’s head there was a photograph of another man’s head, hairy. The man seemed to stare into the father. The father had not noticed this picture. The mother had taken the picture without asking, and hung it without asking, and if asked she would not be able to say when or where it was shot or whom it pictured. The only person at the table who knew whom the picture pictured was the son, though he would never look at the picture long enough to see.
The table was filled end to end with food. There was so much food on the table that there wasn’t any room for plates. The family picked the things they wanted out of the serving dishes, some of which were larger than their chests: pink meats and bruised fruit, slaws and sauces, all soft enough to eat without the teeth, pervaded by a common smell. No one knew who cooked the food. The father assumed it was the mother. The mother assumed it was someone else. The son didn’t think about it—he was already saying his own prayer in his head. The mother and the father waited for someone to say grace. They’d been saying grace for years together though they could not remember who mostly said it for them. They each kept waiting for one another to begin. Each time the father thought to speak up he’d feel like the mother was about to speak herself and so he’d stop and wait and then she wouldn’t. Under the table, the father rubbed his crotch seam with his thumb. He ate.
