by Blake Butler
In the exact center of the carpet he held the box between his knees.
The box’s outer lining was a silky, stretchy putty that would not quite come off with his nails. The son stretched the stuff in strands of sheeting, slurring his cuticles, stuck deep. It burned.
The son went to the closet, hearing nothing. The son got out exactly the right knife.
There were no markings on the outside of the package except for two small watermarks the son could not see.
Under the black lining was another lining.
Under that lining was a box.
The box was a cloth-wrapped package, blackened, and kind of smashed along the sides. The addressee’s name had been removed. The son split the seam edge on this new box with another certain kind of knife. He opened this new box as well and found inside it yet another. This next box was bubble-wrapped and wound around with tape. This box had a new address that had also been marked out.
When the son shook the package he could hear something in it move.
In the third package was another package.
In the fourth package was another package.
And the fifth, the sixth, the seventh.
What came out of the seventh package seemed too large to have fit inside the others. It was nearly four times the size of even the original black package. It was writ with words, which ants were still swarmed over, crawling up the son’s arms and in his armpits and his teeth.
Across the street, the enormous box upon the neighbor’s yard—a mirror image of this seventh box, here—was changing shape.
The son had a tattoo now on his back. The tattoo was of a tree. It discolored the son’s already discolored skin. The tree’s branches spread up his shoulders, up his neck toward his eyes.
As the son unwrapped the center of the seventh box the tattoo sunk into another layer.
The son was made of layers, too.
In the seventh box’s single center—fat and bloodred—there was a nodule.
The nodule had a lever.
The son pulled the lever and the center bloomed—bloomed out into a light—a light as large as many rooms—
—& the son could not stop shaking.
He could not stop.
???EGAKCAP EHT EDISNI SAW TAHW
Something wrapped in matte white paper.
Paper had no seam or sealant. Paper tasted clean.
The son scratched the paper with another knife till there was room to use his fingers.
Inside the paper there was another box—
the son was getting tired
—a black box just like the first of all—
exactly the same box.
Inside the box, inside more paper, the son found a photo of himself.
In the photo, the son was older than he was now, but the son could still see that it was he. The son had his mother’s eyes.
The photo was an 8" × 10" headshot printed on photographic paper. The son’s autograph appeared at a slight angle across the gloss. The son’s autograph touched the divot in his image’s Adam’s apple. The son could not tell if his autograph was actual or stamped on. The son traced his autograph with his ring finger. Then he could no longer feel his arm.
The son’s photo was the first of many photos stacked together in a pile.
The son shuffled through the pictures in the pile one after another, placing each thereafter on the bottom of the stack.
In the pile there were photos of
Antonin Artaud,1
Sharon Tate,2
Andy Kaufman3
&
Heather O’Rourke.4
The son recognized these first four from a film he’d seen somewhere, though he could not remember where or when.
In the pile there were photos of
Chris Farley,5
Heath Ledger,6
Krissy Taylor,7
River Phoenix,8
Bill Hicks,9
Cliff Burton,10
Christa McAuliffe,11
DJ Screw,12
Timmy Taylor,13
Flannery O’Connor,14
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart,15
Wesley Willis,16
Marc Bolan,17
Bobby Darin,18
Charlie Parker,19
Tupac Shakur,20
Ol’ Dirty Bastard,21
Simone Weil,22
William Burroughs Jr.,23
Srinivasa Ramanujan,24
Ian Curtis,25
Aubrey Beardsley,26
Bas Jan Ader,27
Joan of Arc,28
Kaspar Hauser,29
Egon Schiele,30
Bruce Lee,31
Brandon Lee,32
Tim Buckley,33
Jeff Buckley,34
Malcolm X,35
Pier Paolo Pasolini,36
Ann Quin,37
John Belushi,38
Jean-Michel Basquiat,39
Jonathan Brandis,40
Keith Moon,41
Rainer Werner Fassbinder42
&
David Foster Wallace.43
Photos near the bottom of the pile contained people the son had never heard of. Some were named with names that didn’t even sound like normal human names. Some were dressed in obscure clothing and yet still wore tasteful makeup and a photogenic expression. Some of the photographs appeared to have been ripped or shredded and then taped back together or laminated. The son’s fingers did not leave prints along the gloss.
The son held the pictures looking at them. The son felt his arms make paste.
The son felt nauseated trying to move past certain pictures. Some pictures caused sores to open on the son’s head.
The son could not stop looking yet.
The people in the pictures did not blink.
The son felt a tone sound through his sternum.
The son’s belly button sealed over.
The son shifted the pile again so that his photo sat on top.
The son looked at the son again.
The son put the photos down.
The son was buzzing in his knees a little.
The son’s top and bottom teeth had singed together.
The son was mostly on the ground.
Also from the box there with the photos the son pulled out a small black coil.
The coil had an outer layer, with a thread clasp.
The coil unfurled to become a long black bag—a black bag made of leather and about the size of an XXXL nightgown, or a balloon.
The bag held its mouth closed with a metal zipper.
The son unzipped the zip.
He held his face up to the bag and looked in.
There was nothing in the bag.
No smell, no light, no hour.
The son emphatically inhaled.
The son touched the bag against his forehead.
The son kissed the bag.
PART THREE
I never told a joke in my life.
ANDY KAUFMAN
RENEGE
Within the duration of one hour on the nose in the long corralled light of afternoon, the mother received a phone call from every agent and buyer who’d submitted offers on the house. Each retracted in soft formal English as if their words had been lifted from a manual. Each hung up the phone before the mother spoke. One man said, I am exhausted and can no longer feel my hands, though he sounded rather chipper. At the end of that one hour, the couple’s agent also called—a man who sounded most exactly like the man himself, except for the manner by which he chewed. The couple weren’t retracting their offer, the agent assured the mother, as she began to weep into the phone. There was the sound of something plastic closing or coming open. The agent stated their new claim: the couple was now offering a sum of $19,000 for the real estate—almost a 90 percent drop from the original offer—which was to be paid directly from buyer to seller in a series of biannual installments equaling a certain modest percentage of the remainder outstanding on the house. The agent acknowledged—at the mother’s prod
ding—how such a payment plan would never actually get the house paid off. Instead, an endless minor diminishing toward zero, a payment scheduled to be terminated after both the father and the mother’s passing. The couple was not willing to involve third parties such as a moneylender or the like, the agent explained, as they were private with their ways of living and to get a loan you had to tell a lot of people a lot of shit. The agent actually said the word shit into the phone hotly, using a tone laden with some strange amount of venom and, no doubt, spittle, at which point the mother terminated the call. When the phone began to ring again immediately, she took the phone off the hook and left it that way for the remainder of the day, so that whatever sounds the house or family made were broadcast to an open line.
REDRESS
The mother spent the next several hours with her head against a wall. She tried to push with sufficient force to make her face join with the house. Instead she learned to smile a little wider. In the backyard she could hear what seemed a hundred screeching, squealing dogs and car alarms. Some people singing, maybe. An implosion. The mother went to the window and saw nothing but bright light. The mother stared into the light until her pupils zeroed, until even when she turned her head the room was washed. Washed. Worked white, dewormed.
Seeing white, the mother put herself to work. She began first mopping the kitchen, sloshing soap across the blinded tile. In other rooms she grunted on her knees with brush and carpet soap, stench expanding in her head. She washed the floors in every room the house had. In certain rooms the mother found infestation. Not leagues of ants, the way the son had said, but little trickles invading through small cracks, creating grainy graded torrents and tiny turrets. The ants crumpled on contact, tidal, their tiny bodies sloshed in venom. Closer up, the mother found, pinching one’s thorax between her two longest fingers, these were not ants but something else. They had a different shape of head and tiny patterns on their bellies, which almost looked like words. The mother swept the tiny carcasses into a dustbin with one gloved hand. She cured the sodden carpet on her hands and knees with the hairdryer and combed away the smell. She did not want the son to know.
In the son’s bathroom, where she’d not been since the sales show, the mother came to stand before the hole in the wall between the bathroom and the son’s room where the veiled woman had cut through. In the gap between two walls, she discovered, a thick clear gel had been stuffed into the air—had been stuffed, or always been there—always in the house. An odd shade for insulation, she imagined. Plus it was cold and had a throaty smell, like chowder.
Through the hole the mother could see into the son’s room from a new angle, to the bed. The room looked differently from this perspective: smaller, taller. She could not see the other door, though it should have been right there on the wall cattycorner. On the bed, a mirror facing face-up, toward the ceiling, its surface bending slightly in.
The mother walked from the hole back through the bathroom to the son’s door set on the hall. The door had been left wide open. The son was not there in the bed. There was no hole there where the hole was, from the bathroom—there instead, the mirror hung. She closed the door behind her, nodded. There were two rooms.
The mother closed her eyes. She walked back into the bathroom feeling her way. Back at the rip there, the hole, the pucker, the mother worked with eyes still closed. The mother spread the wall with putty over the new hole, sealing it full whole. The first few blobs went hot and runny and sank into the surface. It burned her on the hands. She had to reapply the substance several times before it stuck and even then it slid and bubbled. She sang inside her, making silence, rehearsing lines from a play she’d been in the year just before the child was born—lines sealed inside herself. When the new wall was halfway dry the mother pressed her thumb into its softish face. The mother felt something transfer through her.
The mother went back into the house and washed the floors again. She washed the floors again. She washed the floors until she could crawl upon them. Until she could lick and kiss and laugh and feel fine in this house clean of all others. She could somehow hear the mirror, upstairs, shaking.
Yes yes yes, the mother said, rolling. Yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes.
Now with the momentum really in her, gassed and ticking, the mother drove to the grocery down the street and bought as much cleaning product as she could carry. All the prices seemed very high. She watched the items scan across an electronic neon zapper by a young man who would not open his mouth or blink his eyes. The young man had a photograph in his pocket, folded halfway fourteen times, a picture of himself contorted in a position that made his body seem to not be there. The mother handed this young man her cash. He looked, too, like the young father, though the mother could not remember who that was.
Back at home the mother took the son out on the battered lawn to sit and gather sun. She’d called again to keep the child home, nearer to her, needing. The mother felt determined. Her insides goggled, warm with war. There was nothing about the house she’d leave to fester any longer. The mother wrapped a clean dry cloth around her face and forehead, leaving room only for her eyes. She patrolled the house wielding one can after another, spraying every surface, every inch. She wiped and foamed and sprayed and swished and swum and wiped. She cleaned the walls, the floors (again), the blades of fans, the blades of knives and other utensils, the countertops, air vents, knobs and handles, baseboards, corners, nooks, books (she thumbed through pages), closets, clasps, curtains, windows, boxes, things inside boxes, crumbs in cracks. She stood on stools on chairs on tiptoes and splashed the ceiling down. Her body sizzled lightly. Her fingers tingled from how they weren’t getting enough blood.
Outside the house took on an aura. The chemic stink pillowed out for blocks. The mother went out and strapped the son’s face with its own mask. She still felt she had not done enough. She felt impulsive. She went back through the house, now walking backward. She began to take certain things against her chest. She smashed ceramic heirloom plates. She took the street numbers off the house. She called the phone company and had their number changed. She took the bed linens and pillows into the backyard and burned them. She burned the picture of the man and of the father at the party. She burned some clothing. She burned a sofa. She burned the relics of the son’s condition. It was time. The past. The after. The mother felt she had been foolish. Caught up. She burned the plaster cast of the son’s chest and his sick drawings and his thermometers, his night-light. She burned any inch that had held ill.
The mother thought of other things to do. In the half-light of the bugged sun, the mother went through the woods wielding a steak knife, in search of the place she’d hid the copy son but she could not find him among all else. She dragged the winter lid onto the pool.
The mother’s mind designed itself.
By the end of early evening, the house felt mostly new. If not new, clean. If not clean, better. If not better, something. The mother snuck one of the father’s cigarettes from underneath his pillow. She went behind the house to smoke it, watching the son from around the corner of the house. The light over the house seemed like something funneled through a tarp. The air was thick and rather fat. The son was smiling. He had strange teeth—chalked and spattered with flecks of diseased color. The son might never kiss a woman. The son did not like to kiss regardless. The mother stroked her arm a little. The mother dragged the last ash from the cig and tabbed the butt against her whitish tongue and pressed her tongue against the mouth roof and sucked a little with saliva and chewed and choked it down. She felt it nuzzle in her stomach. She watched the son and smoked again.
GAME
The son.
The son was in the TV room. The room was there still, in the house, its carpet’s color matching the chafe marks on his knees. The father and the mother were upstairs talking in voices the son could hear bleed through vents, ballooning. The son was sitting on the sofa in the center of a stain. A stain that had not been there w
hen he sat down. A stain that matched another stain made somewhere else.
That morning the son had found his old video game system in the box beneath his bed—a thing he hadn’t used in years, a portal to old worlds defined by pixel, light, and color. For certain months of a certain year certain men had sat in certain rooms and typed on keyboards creating language that would then be stored and replicated on the plastic cartridges such as the one the son now had employed. This language fed into the son via his open undone eyes.
The son was pressing buttons.
In the game the son was represented by a figure. The son could cause the figure to move in one direction or another. The son could lead the figure to die. The son’s small fingers were fat with callus from where he’d spent countless hours in this system. The son could burn the pad of his left index finger with a lighter for several minutes and still not feel a thing. Certain sections of the game the son knew so well he could close his eyes and still complete them.
The son.
The son had groove marks in his armpits and around his shoulders and in his hair from where the ants had dug into him, where they’d searched for a way in, where they’d bit. The son would never know how much he’d bled. The son could have filled a shopping mall with platelets.
The son pressed the button that made the figure jump across the chasm. The son watched the sky above the figure become riddled with explosion, swathed with gray and green and yellow bits and blocks.
In the front face of the plastic game console there were three other outlets where three other players could plug in and control their own figure, but those three other outlets remained unfilled: three more eyes. The son watched the time allotted to complete some current objective ticking in increments toward zero. There was so much going on.
