by Blake Butler
The son stuttered upstairs toward the hall. The son crushed thousands at his feet. With each ant he crushed another thousand, each of them with eyes. All the eyes he crushed stuck to him, staying.
Certain of the stairs had been eaten through so completely the son felt his foot go through, sucked into the house.
The son felt sick. His eyes were spinning. The son bumped and fell against the wall, raining a sheath of loose ant matter off the drywall, off the layered phrase of paint, each layer making the house that much smaller, along the stretch of dry partitions, creating space, the ants made veins toward the ceiling—webwork. The veins throbbed and fed the bodies into the overhead. The ants had ruined the hallway carpet, slurred in the fibers, drumming, gushed. They’d dug a rut around the bottom of the son’s doorway, a series of smooth flat ridges gnawed—over which if breath were blown the right way, the fluted holes would give a sound. They’d moved the son’s bed slightly to one side and seemed to be trying to flip it over. They crawled into drawers and across the mirrors and up more walls and across the ceiling, patterns. They’d congregated at a small hole that had been cut into the wall, thrumming from the crack into the bathroom. Their tiny backs were mirrored bubbles, glistening, bejeweled. The ants, in silence, programmed, at last there sharing the son’s air.
ENTER
The son stood above the ants. The son stood watching. The son could not feel his fingers or his arms. The small reflective surface of each ant’s head showed his head back into him, a chorus of him, gifted through the house. The son squeezed his phone so tight the skin in his arms and knuckles lost their blood. He could feel ants inside his organs, digging rings and ruts and lines. He could feel them eating in his lids, licking the color from his cornea and replacing it with something other, drummed, undone—something from inside the ants—something digested. The son could taste them in his mouth. He could feel them swimming in his bloodstreams, bathing. Through his colon. Threading his back. He could feel them in the center of his each tooth and hair stem. A black box building in his belly. The phone vibrating in his hands.
WHAT THE SON LEARNED THE ANTS HAD DONE
Downstairs the ants were in the TV—in the wires—in the nodes—as they had always been, in all homes. The ants were in the son. They’d etched their way into certain cushions, chewing room in for their den—they’d already formed a throne room—they’d made lengthy galleries and tombs—a nursery for the many coming newborn—the next time someone sat down on the sofa they would crush an empire and never know. The ants were in the son. The ants had crowned the son’s image in the house in several portraits by eating holes into the paint around his head—they’d made rubbish of the inner workings of the simple lock in the son’s doorknob—they’d covered every square inch of the son’s bicycle—they’d nested slightly in his mattress—they’d kissed each other on the heads—they’d formed a necklace for several moments around the son’s neck as he slept, which thereafter remained as rash—they’d gnawed a tunnel through the meat of certain books, the text around them chawed to mush. The ants were in the son. Other insects also had come in, though unlike the ants they hid in layers. They spun in futures. They knew the mindset of a mold. Small white spiders small as pinheads hung jeweled along the ceiling of one room. The quilt the mother had been making for her one-day grandchildren—the dream of other children always in her head—had been ribboned through and through with mites. A flood of fluttered butterflies had collected on the velvet slide hung over the mantle, a wide piece of woolen fabric that had been in the house when the family moved in, and the family before them, and before them and on and on. The ants were in the son. From certain angles if you held your breath and asked a question, in the velvet you might see the profile of a man—though now the man’s head was encrusted with chrysalis and soft wing gyration. Some certain kind of insect had laid its waste all through the foyer, the stink raising the temperature in the room by several degrees. Grasshoppers in the rice cooker. Roach babies in the sink. Wormy blankets burped by spiders—enough to wrap your head. Termites bundled in a jacket. Chiggers in the coffee grinds. Beetles in the grease and vents and elsewhere, waiting to awake. Insects so loud they could not be heard, obliterating words.
X
The father sat still in his small stall. The building’s lights had been flickering for hours, a flat night club. Each direction seemed to go several directions. The more he worked the more there was.
I AM GOING TO LEAVE THIS ROOM NOW, the father typed into the machine.
THERE ARE OTHER THINGS I HAVE TO DO BESIDES TYPE INTO THE LIGHT.
I DON’T FEEL WELL AND THERE’S TROUBLE AND THESE DAYS AREN’T REALLY DAYS.
PLEASE LET ME BE MORE OFTEN.
The cursor went on, silent beeping.
The father stood up, turned off the computer screen. He hesitated, glued. The way he was standing, the blank box looked straight on at his belly, an enormous glassy eye. It had such good warmth coming off it. The father rubbed his typing hands. At home, he knew, his wife and son were waiting, stuffed full of days that had just passed—days that as they accrued with those incoming would form wrinkles, pustules, new hair on their skin. These imperfections did not yet appear there in the older image of their faces hung on the wall above the father’s desk—mother and son side by side there, smiling, in a room the father did not recognize. The father had not taken the picture, nor had he hung it there.
Beside the picture, sized just like it, a small square window in the building looked onto the outside. The window looked upon no other shore or building, but more light—the same color, grain, and sound of light as the machine’s. Above the window, a small placard: There is no year.
The father grunted, made his hands fists. He swallowed on his spit, frothing suds between his cheeks in makeshift milkshake. He drank.
The father, feeling fatter, fuller, sat back down on his cube chair.
Into the black machine, with the screen off, the father typed as if he were at an organ, performing some small song.
INVERSE SOUND
And now the son had squeezed out all the toothpaste screaming.
And now a blurt had opened in the floor.
And now the room contained one billion windows.
And now the son felt sore.
And now the son felt his backbone shift slightly, pinching taut the skin around his cheeks and lids.
And now the son moved to turn around inside the room and found he was too large to turn around inside the walls.
And now the son felt his flesh compressed on all sides by something growing in and off the house.
And now the son could not stop coughing, and the tremor, and the ants.
And now the son was off the floor by inches and now the son’s head compacted with his neck and his neck compacted with his ribcage and his ribcage puttered cream and the son felt his voice inside him slushed to zero and he felt his teeth grinding in his eyes and the son felt his bones becoming blubber and he felt the liquid in him brim.
And now the son spun around in one continuous direction, though from outside him he looked still.
And now the son’s flesh could not contain his girth.
And now the son was more than tired and the son coughed up an enormous log of chalk and the son coughed up a pane of glass, a set of keys, and a door without a knob, and now the son’s mouth sprayed out graffiti, the son gushed gold and gray and green, the son gushed glue and blue, and now the son coughed up a TV and now the TV screen was glowing and in the glow there someone stood and the house was shaking and made of money, and now the son coughed up a massive book, and the book began to read itself aloud into him, full of his words, and now the son would sing, and now the son coughed up a vein of hair he’d worn in styles of other years and the hair was drenched with grease he’d eaten and sugar he’d drunk and the hair wrapped around his head in coils, and now the son coughed up the sand of all the beaches and the heat of the son warped the sand down into glass, and through the glass th
e son saw other houses, and now the son coughed up wet and wax and coffee, and now the son coughed up more money by the sheet, and now the son coughed a length of pipe, a bulb of moss, a flock of birds, a box inside a box, a travel guide with all blank pages, and now the son coughed up his sleep and now the son coughed up reams of endless skin still growing older and the son coughed up the son.
SKINNING
When the mother woke the following morning her body was as sore as it had ever been. In her sleep she’d drooled and sweated like the son and there the fluids had formed a kind of crust across her body and the bedsheets and the air. The mother’s hair stuck to her cheek skin. The crust had spread across her eyelids and down her nostrils and in the grooving of her ears so that it took almost an hour with her nails digging as at blackboards before she could see well enough to cross the room.
In the bathroom the mother washed her face and body in the shower with the coldest water the house could make, holding her head against the pressure close with her mouth open, sucking spray. She could not seem to bring her mind and body out of sleeping. She could not quite bring her mind to think. The coldest water rinsed the mother and slicked bits off her body into the drain. The shower water exited the shower and the bathroom and the upstairs and the house. In its exit the shower water traveled deep into and through the ground, met with other water that women and men within the neighborhood and others had used to clean or clear their bodies, water which would later be filtered and fertilized and redistributed on the earth—it would be mixed with bourbon in a dark room to help take the shaking out of a certain kind of man—it would be mixed with sugar and Kool-Aid powder at a young lady’s seventh birthday party for the pleasure of the young lady and her seven guests, each of whom would bring a gift—it would be given to the sick to help with sickness. The water, via the mother and her others, would taste delicious. One day the water would return to rain.
While the mother dressed and did her hair and makeup—even in sweat she kept a way—she imagined a set of unseen hands lifting objects from rooms in the house. The mother had already begun packing the house up for moving in her mind. It hadn’t been that long since they packed the last time. A certain percentage of the family’s belongings were still boxed in the garage and attic—things the family did not need really except to help them remember who they’d been at other times—things that could have been removed and burned or melted down and the family would not have known the difference. Material of this nature comprised 62 percent of their belongings’ mass. She imagined massive hands wrapping the beds and chairs and sofas in brown paper and sealing them with tape. She imagined the house lifted off the ground—brought to hover above the next house. She imagined the house turned on its side—the house turned fully over—its contents raining into place—the contents in the new house and the house made of years as yet to come, congealing and all else et cetera gone away. The family would be happy. They would be happy. They would be happy. They would be happy. They would be happy. They would be happy. They would be happy. They would be happy. They would be happy. They would be happy. They would be happy. They would be happy. They would be happy. They would be happy. They would be happy. They would be happy. They would be happy. They would be happy. They would be happy. They would be happy. They would be happy. They would be happy. They would be happy. They would be happy. They would be happy. They would be happy. They would be happy. They would be happy.
They would be happy.
The mother could already taste the sweet indulgence of the low-fat imitation butter and sugar-free jam spread on the one-quarter wedge of a low-fat coupon-bought whole-wheat bagel that had been the mother’s breakfast every morning for seven years. The mother worked her hand in circles of contentment across her belly, as she had while pregnant with the son.
The mother walked through the bedroom past the bed into the hallway and stopped. From the doorway in the hall there the mother could see into the son’s room.
The son spread-eagled on the mattress, his hands clasped against his mouth—his thin arms stretched all taut through his pajamas emblazoned with shapes the mother had thought were Mickey Mouse heads when she bought them, though on closer examination she saw the ways the shape wavered from the popular icon into a thing she could not name—and yet she let the son use them for sleep. The son’s torso seemed to have expanded—swollen perhaps, the mother thought first, reeling, with relapse, with new disease—though as she crossed the room she saw how the son had pulled on several layers for protection, as had she that other evening, every sweater that he owned, all ringed and hot and worn and chubby, the outermost sweater showing the son’s name in neon puff-paint like the one the mother often wore, a pair of garments bearing their names, each, which had been given to them both at the same time, some occasion, though the mother could not think of who or what or when.
Around his neck the son had wrapped a scarf. Over his head he had a ski mask. Around his feet he’d wrapped old T-shirts and on his hands he had baseball gloves, one turned the wrong way to fit the thumb. The fabric on the son’s hands and legs was smeared with something runny. The son’s hands clutched a shovel. The son didn’t answer when she shook him. She found dirt nuzzled in his clothes. She stripped him clean layer by layer, like peeling some huge orange. The son was not opening his eyes. The mother said the son’s name—again, again—her voice all flat. The son’s skin was stretched and splotched in spots as it had been most of his sick year—a year now carried in the mother’s flesh memory as a tiny colored lesion, one polka dot.
This child. This child. This child here. The mother inhaled and touched the son. She touched the son again a different way and said the son’s name and touched her forehead. She spread her arms and said the name and held the son and kissed his fingers and tried to sing the song she’d always sung—a song she’d dreamt up when the son was still inside her, a song she used to calm their blood—though now she could not quite hear it—she could not think of all the words.
IN A DAZE THE SON REMEMBERS THE BLACK PACKAGE HE’D UP TILL NOW IGNORED OR FORGOTTEN OR SOMEHOW JUST NOT SEEN
The son lay in his bed. The mother downstairs, the mother having coaxed the son to waking, having held and wished and prayed above him until the son opened up his eyes.
The son had told the mother about the ants. He said it over and again until finally she’d lifted him up and led him through the house to see how all was well, nothing was there, not a thing, no ants. Not even one. Nor inside him, she said. Never.
Again alone, around the son the air was clear.
Alone the son lay cocked still and looking up, transfixed with something there above him, in his thoughts—breath burnt like scratched black barns in yards of long grass smudged and smoldered—the son crimped and creaming—the son as a thing not in the room but of it—the son as a field of cells—the son—the son’s backbone—the son’s miles of intestine, fat with grease and shit and knitting—
The son stopped thinking for a second and when the breath inside him broke he swung, sat up.
The son heard something near him moving. The lights inside the room were on.
The son moved and put his feet down. He turned around and saw behind him where ants were still there coming right in through the wall—through cracks, in hordes of slow procession from the bathroom to the closet where they’d gather in a mass. The son sneezed. He smiled. The ants. He’d said it. His mother did not know.
The son rose up from his chair and crossed the room.
The son moved into the closet with the ants beneath him and stood and looked among his stuff—the leagues of old dolls he’d once collected against his father’s will, with sets of eyes each, the outgrown clothes, the many knives, the clippings of local outbreak he’d collected since his own sick, spread on the air—sick that since had kept a certain air about him, dirt and pickles—as well the snips he’d taken from his hair in private for safekeeping, as had the father, stashed in little baggies marked with dates—so much the so
n had stowed, not knowing.
The ants were not after these things.
The ants were swarming the black package.
They were all around it.
Mashing. Massive.
Clicking eyes.
Click clack.
The son had had the package in the closet all this time.
The son had stepped over it naked, getting dressed.
The box had seen his dick.
He’d walked around it like something that’d been affixed for ages, something built into the house and in the son’s life—common as a keyhole or an eye.
The ants were all around the box. The son could hardly see. He could hardly remember where it’d come from.
He could not remember.
With the flat skin of his small hands, the son brushed ants’ bodies from the box.
At his touch the ants seemed to die or stiffen or go dumb, sloughing off the box in crippled hordes.
The son lifted the box against his body and carried it back into his room.
