There Is No Year

by Blake Butler

  They ate. They were so hungry. There were all these hours. They chewed and chewed and then they swallowed. The food moved into the family through the flesh made from older food.

  Some dishes were so hot no one could stand them. The son used his ring finger as a ladle and got scalded. The mark resembled the impression of a missing, inch-thick wedding band. The son sucked the finger with one side of his mouth and stuffed cooler food in on the other. He did not want to slow down in fear he might not get enough of something.

  ANOTHER ROOM ON THE SAME EVENING

  In another room, a room without the family, an indentation grew into one wall—a new pucker wide enough to fit a wire hanger, a pinky finger, something lean—a rip someone could breathe through—a hole for seeing out or seeing in. The home went on in this condition.

  THE SKIN OF GOD

  Outside, around the house, birds were landing on the roof. The birds could not stop shitting. The sun grew upon the white waste’s sheen, showing the shrieking sky back at itself.

  AFTER DINNER

  The family all felt so stuffed they could not move. Though in their minds they were not full yet—had there been more food they would have ate and ate.

  They had to crawl to the TV.

  Usually the cable’s crap connection delivered all the channels with a rind of fuzz. The screen would sometimes spurt and bubble with long rips of swish, often in the most important moments of a program, or at least the moments the person watching would most like to see. The cable company had sent several repairmen with no success. Several of the men had fallen off the roof, cracked bones or bruises. One of the men had lost his thumb.

  That night the set kept changing channels.

  They’d be watching Trading Spaces and the set would make a sound and the screen would blip to channel 48, a station that ran live feeds supplying info on local traffic and weather. Each time the blipping happened, the cameras seemed stuck above their very neighborhood, their street. There in the center of the screen they could see their little house with the blood red roof with the strange pattern and the mold.

  They’d be watching reruns of The $100,000 Pyramid and the set would make a different kind of sound and the screen would blip to 99, an adult pay-per-view-style station which for some reason came in clear. The family could see the rhythm and the thumping. They could hear the lady squeal. The son sat with his head three feet from the screen. The mother did not turn away. She heard her eyes move in her head, like mice, the pupils widening and resizing under the insistencies and contortions of the replicating light.

  The father turned the set off and sent them both to bed at 4:35 p.m.

  AN INVESTIGATION

  The father started in the corner behind the front door. From hands and knees to tiptoes he combed the walls’ perimeter inch by inch. He took down the still-framed photos, dragged the TV stand, the bench. At the windows he felt for errors in the glass, anyplace where fingers or wire or some other form or fiber could slip in. He dumped the cushions off the sofa and pet the frame seams, looking for bumps or tears or places sewn up, anyplace something could have been hidden.

  Every few minutes the father went to throw up again in the kitchen into a yellow trash bag over the sink. Each time he tied the sack and sat it nestled in another, building a tidy, plastic nest. His arms seemed muddy. Seeing made him weak. The father had been feeling sick for several days now—it got worse the more he moved inside the rooms. Most nights since moving in the father dreamt of his skin peeled off in leagues—a surface pale enough to write on, wide enough to wrap the house.

  In the kitchen, bedrooms, and bathrooms, he followed a similar procedure, removing the linens from the closets and the foodstuffs from the cabinets, running his hands inside each blank space over the flat surfaces of its innards. He petted the carpet for slits or patches, the way he’d hid certain photos from his mother as a kid, self-created creases in the house. He squeezed seat cushions, upended desk drawers, took the sheets off of the guest bed. He dumped a whole box of cereal out into the trash can and sniffed the crumbs. There was a ring inside the Corn Flakes, the inserted surprise: a black ring, gleaming, his size. He put it on, with all the others—his huge hands. He poured a carton of orange juice into the sink and watched it drain slow. He tapped the mirrors in the bathroom for hollow sounds behind the reflection.

  Each thing the father touched became new things.

  The father had all night.

  LATE LIST

  In the silence left over after, the father went around the house and made a list:

  —Unknown long scratch mark under recliner

  —New bubbles in glass of guest room bedside lamp

  —Did fan always spin counterclockwise?

  —Son’s dolls in storage: more than a few are missing both eyes

  —Garage bees

  —Marks of insertion near top of wall in hallway. Larger than a pushpin? Who hangs things up that high?

  —Handprints in the dust on top of the bookshelf by the mirror

  —Initials and phone # in address book: RPT 515-3033. Who is this?

  —Burn or other smudge marks on hallway baseboard, some kind of chewing

  —Living room ceiling dripping what?

  When not writing, the father clenched the list inside his mouth to keep his hands free so he could rummage. He bit down so hard, not realizing, his teeth went through the paper, through his lip. The blood fed him gulping, warm as from a mother’s nipple, brown.

  PASSAGE

  On his knees down at the air vent in the guest bedroom, the father clasped his hands. He pressed his flesh against the grate’s face’s metal tines—a mazemap pressed around his eyes. Through the gaps a lukewarm air blew, moist like raindamp, stunk like rice. The screws that held the grate in had no divots in their heads. The father could not pry them up using his fingers. A screwdriver chipped the paint, caused him to cut his right hand open with its end—more blood, from a new hole, though this blood smelled not the same—not like blood at all, but charcoal. The father sucked the squirt. He pushed and battered at the grating, bumping his fists, saying god’s name, until after some unapparent pattern, the vent’s face fell off in his hands. Another pucker. The drywall shedded ash. Somewhere upstairs he heard a brief instance of strange brass.

  The father had never seen such a large hole. The vent’s revealed mouth matched exactly with his shoulders’ width. He stuck his head in, already sweating, his teeth tight in his gums. The passage went along a long way straight before him before it turned quick at a right angle, toward the TV room and to the kitchen, thereafter blooming out to other rooms. The father felt a sudden want to sing into the warm hole, to fill the house with sound. He could not think of any songs.

  With his shirt between him and the metal, the father forced himself in along the hole. He felt he’d gotten fatter. His flesh-bulged form fit to the rectangle. His feet and shoes dangled in the air in the guest bedroom and then, following his ass, became drawn in.

  Where in the vent the roof had ridges, he felt his back’s long black hairs becoming ripped out of their pores. It kind of hurt more than it should have. The passage seemed too small. Some goop of residue caked on the pipe’s sides was rubbing off all on his pants and hands, his hair. He tried to stop and back out from already several feet deep. The air was blowing hotter, harder, at his body. Like someone breathing. Somewhere: babies. Mothers. Money. His hips seemed swelling. His thighs were meat. The vent’s skin sucked in all around him. Nearer. Leaning. The father cursed and breathed the ripping air. He half-called for someone to come and help him. Half-called less loud. Whispered, Help.

  Help! His crotch was sopping. The air was thick, and more so the further in. He knew he should not be crawling any further—what if someone came along and screwed the vent’s grate face back on behind him, moved a dresser to block its eye? And yet, ahead, where the vent curved in an L out of his vision, the waiting metal shined. The seizing of his cells inside the terror made the father’s teeth
taste sharp—made his heartbeat lurch inside him, metabolizing. The air grew warmer, quicker, tighter, the deeper still into the house the father crawled, still with his mind inside him thinking, Help

  Help

  Help

  Help

  Help

  Help

  Help

  DECISION

  That night on their mattress, lying spines entwined and sleeping, the dusty father and itching mother agreed by grunt how it was time to sell the house.

  HIS

  The son received a package in the mail. The son had not ordered anything or been expecting gifts, nor could he think of anyone remaining who would give him gifts or want to. The son had not given his new address to anyone he could remember, or spoken it aloud into the air, though he may have written it on a free contest entry at a local food chain, which made him eligible to win a free week of gym training: Shape the Self Inside Your Self. He planned to exercise unbounded if he won. He would one day ripple in bright light.

  When the son was younger, the mother’s mother had often sent the son things for no good reason. At Christmas, the mother’s mother sent the son special food that arrived already rotting—she did it every year. Once the mother’s mother had sent a shrunken gown and a locket with a name inscribed—the mother’s mother’s name, not the son’s. Folded between the locket’s metal halves there was a picture of a man. The man had black hair grown down over most of his face. He always seemed to be looking directly at the son. The son tried to wear the necklace despite the father’s protest but he felt it choked him anyway. The son threw the necklace out a window. He’d found it several times sindce then: around the neck of his favorite doll; looped over the brass knob to the closet. Once he’d coughed it up. The son could no longer see or feel the necklace around his neck if he put it on.

  This package was not likely from the mother’s mother, as this year she was underground.

  This package fit the exact shape of the mailbox. It was black and weighed more than it looked like it should, and yet the son could lift.

  The son didn’t think too much about it. He had his mind cluttered with other things, like how at school no one would come near him and how when he went into certain rooms he gave off smoke and how ceilings always seemed just above his head. Even the teachers went on calling him the wrong name—sometimes the mother’s name, sometimes the mother’s mother’s. Sometimes the son’s name came out as silence, just these moving lips. Other names they used could be found inscribed on plaques and trophies in the glass box at the front of the school, with photos of students left from long ago. They were mostly ugly. It was a very, very old school.

  The son took the package out of the mailbox and carried it into the house under his arm. He went up to his room without speaking to anyone—to tell his mother how the new shoes they’d bought over the weekend were now melting in the soles. Even if the son had gone searching, even if he’d felt ecstatic with new bright news, the son would have found no one in the house. They’d all gone off somewhere, maybe. Or they were hiding. Or something else.

  Had someone been around to see the son come in, perhaps, they might have stopped him, touched his hand. What’s in that package, they might have said. Let’s make it open. You are so young to receive mail. Instead the son went into her room and closed the door and locked it and turned around and set down the package and took off his clothes and faced the wall.

  THE SON’S BOOK

  The son was writing a book. The son did not realize he was writing the book because most of the time while he was writing he was asleep or not paying attention or in the mindset of doing other things. Some nights the son would believe he was playing putt-putt in the backyard with the plastic golf set his father had bought to try to get him interested in sports, but the son was actually writing the book. The son would think he was languid in front of the television watching some kind of program about trucks or swords, designed to ensnare young boys’ attention, but the son was actually writing the book. The son had also mistaken himself for eating dinner, painting pasta, laughing, and brushing his teeth while he was actually sitting in his closet with the door shut and his fingers typing into a very small computer he didn’t know he had.

  The computer’s keyboard did not have markings. The light gushed from its screen so bright it would for hours make the son not see. He could not see the words he’d already written as he wrote them, not even inside him. Nothing. His eyes spun in his head.

  The words he typed weren’t words. Or, more so, the words had more words in them, collapsing, like flame laid into flame. The words inside the words kept the son from sleeping, even while sleeping.

  While all awake, when the son tried to write, any pen refused to release ink. Any pencils he found inside the house would be unsharpened or would break their tips or bend. By the time the son had found something else to write with—rock on concrete, chocolate syrup, mud or blood—he could no longer hear the words inside him, and out came small other words instead: HELLO. HELLO. HELLO. HELLO. Sometimes he could not move his hands or arms or teeth or eyes at all.

  BOOK

  The son’s book contained all things.

  The son’s book enmeshed the threads of all events or lights or hours that had ever happened or would happen, or were happening right now.

  The son’s book contained the sound of wing meat contained in birds once thought extinct, and that meat’s aging, worn to none—

  it contained a diagram of long forgotten burned or buried cities and how to enter through their last remaining eyes, how to stay there in that belowground and, of new duration, live—

  it contained sonogram photography of the man who in coming years would invent the thing that ruined us all—

  it contained every word deleted from all other extant books, everything that every author had said aloud in rooms with no one while writing what words did end up appearing in those books, as well as all other possible combinations of words and new words those same characters could have made—

  it contained instructions on how to stand on the surface of a camel’s eye—

  it contained an interminable glisten—an unbreakable lock—

  it contained the missing seventh and eighth sides of the Clash’s Sandinista!, written by a presence never mentioned in the band, which when played at a specific volume at a certain vector would invoke an unremembered form of light—and a song deleted from that missing album—lyrics deleted from that song—code words deleted from that language—time—

  it contained a sister for the son to speak to in the evenings when the whole house was not awake, whom he would let his darkest language into, black pictures writ on black—

  it contained a killer recipe for Apple Brown Betty, enabling mesmerism, enabling sight of new rooms set upon rooms—

  it contained electronic conversations between Richard Nixon and Aleister Crowley, convening under new moonlight to discuss the initiation of the construction of a translucent ceiling over the United States, a silent, hieroglyph-inscribed dome, to watch the waking and the sleeping, to see and see—

  it contained air that the reader, underwater, could truly breathe—

  it contained how to erupt a mansion from a dot; and from a mansion, sores—from sores, pistons—from pistons, night—from night, a thing without a name—so on—

  it contained combinations to every locker in a high school buried underground in the mud around the house where the son had been born, the lockers’ insides padded with a gummy, tasteless residue, no stink, and underneath that gunk, another combination knob—

  it contained a verbal adaptation of the film that would be considered the sequel to every film existing and film thereafter and film not found, the paper white—

  it contained various ingestible flavors, scents, and textures, imaginary numbers, sentences that destroyed themselves in their own utterance—

  a mirror—a wet—a gun—

  a time spit—lumps— computers—

  life�
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  it contained full texts of endless novels trapped inside the perished brains of certain women and certain men, and in presences neither man nor woman but spread among the several, silent scourging brains—

  it contained the last words of every major-league baseball player ever and the lengths of their longest hairs—

  it contained directions on how to find your way into a room held offscreen in The Wizard of Oz, The Wizard, and The Wiz, and the films contained in those films, in no punch line, the frames therein unshot, unscened, unframed—

  it contained containment—

  it contained.

  The son’s book was all one sentence.

  The son’s book did not glow.

  The son’s book would one day be line-edited by a hair-covered man in a small office with no windows and no doors.

  The son’s book is forthcoming from Modbellor & Watt in 2118, when there is no one remaining who can see.