by Blake Butler
The air was flaxen then—was rubber, then was wetted, then was cream. The air was nothing. There was all—some thick black crap crammed in around his head. The son began negotiation. He found that with his sharpest teeth—more knives—he could bite in and to and through the nothing air. The son bit & chewed & swallowed. He saw a crack of light. In the light there was some of somewhere. The son chewed & chewed & chewed & chewed & chewed & by each inch through which the son chewed he found no matter how much he could swallow,
his
mouth
was
al-
ways
full.
NOTHING YOU EVER, NOTHING NOTHING
The black creation that’d been seated on the neighbor’s house’s front lawn all this time had by now spread around the structure, further on. It had covered over the old doors and windows with new doors and windows, such as the one the son had come to stand in front of, sopping wet. The son did not see the swelling structure. The son did not see the street, nor his own house there beyond the pavement—the same house they’d lived in all these years, they did not know they’d never moved. The son couldn’t see much for all the glaring—even if he had seen, even if he wanted, his house would not be there. The son felt sure that he’d arrived.
Yes.
Yes, in one of the windows in the house’s face he saw the girl there smiling. The girl’s soft head, shaped like his. He waved. He waited. He knocked and knocked and rang the bell. The girl was no longer in the window. The house was all around.
The son thought maybe there was something he had not done. Some invocation for invitation. He took out again the girl’s directions. In fear unknowing, he’d stuffed them down his pants. He found now in his running, all his nowhere, the heave and screaming, drenched, the paper had adhered to the son’s skin. Stuck to him, hugging, tingle. As the son pulled the paper off his body the paper ripped and became paste. It left small tattered patches near the son’s navel. On the son’s stomach the ink had transferred backward. The son could read the symbol words. The son spoke aloud each line, tasting language. In the list now the son found an instruction he hadn’t read before, writ in new blue markings on his belly—a new tattoo.
The son did exactly as his skin said.
ANOTHER FUCKING BOX
Out in the street there, hours over, among the mist of night the father came upon a box. He could not remember the box he’d seen out on the neighbor’s lawn all those days or weeks before. This box here was much like that box, of the same texture and shade, except bigger and giving off a stream of steam, sent out to mesh and branch upon the night.
The box here, in the middle of the highway—how had he hit, at last, a highway? where were all the other cars?—took up so much of the six lanes heading south—six other lanes blockaded off beside them heading the opposite direction—there remained no room on the blacktop for the father’s car to fit around it. The box seemed to give away its own light, in flux of concert with the row of streetbulbs and skyspots overhead.
Under the loom of lamp the father slowed the car approaching, stopped before the box, got out. He left the engine on behind him, burning power.
Up close the box smelled like the son. The father had never had a particular stench he associated with the child’s air, but here it was the first thing that he thought—like charcoal and like money, cake batter or a freshly painted wall. The father put his head against the surface, listened. Inside, he heard a motor, churned—the same sound as his own motor, there behind him, clearly repeated in the box. As well, the sense of something softer hovered, inches from his head there, ear to ear.
Hello, he said aloud and heard the words come out all from him, and heard it also in the box repeated back. Hello.
Oh, he said, realizing. Oh.
He peered up toward his car. The windshield had fogged over so thick he could see no longer in. Something hulked behind the shading. Heads. He felt his eyes move in his head to see the sky above him, flat clean black.
This box was warm. The father knocked. He heard the knock as well repeated, two sounds from one move.
My name is . . . the father said, then waited, to hear the voice inside the box fill the sentence in, but it did not. Instead, an itch dragging up along his inseam, a spark of choir. My name is . . .
The father threw up on the ground. In the vomit, there were errors—strings not vomit, but language, light. The bunched up bits were writing something, words at once sunk into the ground.
The father’s hair was longer now. He could not feel it.
The father walked around the box. He brushed his hands along the surface, after something—ridges, locks, or doors. At the corner, between where the highway’s edges held the box in at its side, there was a little aisle of space where he could sidle down along the box’s left flank, pressed in. He could not see from here how long the box went on. It seemed to stretch forever down the way, as if the whole highway from this point and thereafter were seated with it, hosting. A light far beyond it gave it size.
The father hesitated at the box corner, not quite blinking, then he began along the box. His belly rubbed. His backbone. Inseams. Friction. The grain of the box, unlike the concrete median, was soft but firm—both wanting and somehow giving.
On the north side of the highway, there behind him, the father felt an audience, all watched. The median between them dragged against his back’s tagged body fat. What if the box grew larger, all of a sudden? He would be crushed.
Inside his chest, he heard applause.
Inside the box, as he squeezed sideways, onward, inside the box, too, he heard the brush of flesh on box.
Father? the father asked it.
This time from inside the box came no reply.
SOFT!
Somewhere sometime along the box shape, the father found a divot in its face—a small nudged spot where the flat black surface interrupted and gave the father’s body space to stand. Looking from the divot back along from where he’d come, the father could no longer see the box’s end, where he’d left the car alive and running—and still there, the other way, the box continued on—the same dimension stretching both ways out there from this divot, shaped distinctly in his size.
Above, the sky was shuddering with light. Day soon again already, the father thought, and felt the box sway, the ground beneath him skinny, pale.
The father turned to face toward the box. Black and flat, twice as high as he was, hard to tell when there was no light where box ended and sky began. There in the grain of it, some language. The father leaned his head close up to read. Instead the words were little pictures—the father standing in the house, the father coughing, the father holding a hammer toward a door. In each picture, the father appeared so much clearer, tighter. The father tried to turn away. As he did, inside each image, the other fathers turned first, and then he himself could not. He closed his eyes.
Overhead the light was gone again, hid behind lids. A flesh or floor or wall behind the father moved around him, sealed him in—the box around him eating the air up—the same blank sort of air that filled his house’s vents—washing in around his knees.
AIR
Among the black space of the box, now turning softer, now gone cushy, streaming, the father, aging, wormed. He could not tell at all where he was going. Every inch matched every inch.
Into the shape of box surrounding, the father walked into the box.
Every so often he would open up his eyes again slowly, unreleasing, buttons pressing in reverse. Walls around him. Stalls around him. Houses. All mass. Massed. Opening each instant. On in. On.
If there is one hole in any home there must be many, he heard himself shout somewhere inside him.
Outside his skin he heard the night.
SLEEPOVER
Inside the girl’s house, the house seemed endless. The ceiling went too high. The walls were made of stone and cracked in patterns that pleased the eye. There were large pictures of women and of men—some the
son could recognize. Or had seen once. Or he might have. Just now. The son felt a bubble in his foot birth. He felt the bubble bobble up along his belly and past his lungs before it burst. He called these thoughts.
The house had not seemed so large from the outside, or so gorgeous. The girl’s parents must be rich, the son thought. Which was weird because at school the girl always wore such ratty clothes—weird humpy bags of browbeaten cotton from long-dead decades’ smothered styles.
The girl’s house was made of wire, wicker, marble, slick, and sand. It had no smell. The girl’s house’s walls were often mirrors. There was everywhere to walk.
The son spent several hours staring into the portrait over one mantel, a gleaming field of white on white.
The son turned around then. He turned and turned. Tied to the wall where he’d come in, the son realized a piece of string he hadn’t seen there prior. The string looped around his middle like a belt. The son grasped the string and felt it simmer, half-electric. He slid his fingers, making static, zinging. Cold . . .
PATH
The son followed the
long string down a
hallway without a
ceiling and without
doors.
The walls along the hall were wet and mirrored and left grease on the son’s hands, slipped in slats of gold goo underneath him, trying to stick him in one place. There was a music playing somewhere, by a band that did not actually exist.
blank music washed on and on and all through the house like blood bombs dropping, like skin peeling off of trees in sheets, women becoming horses becoming dogs becoming light—a whole slew of awful sounds that were not really sound exactly, but sound as an idea
The son could feel the sound against his chest and where his bones joined, meeting, vibrating his canine teeth.
The son could sort of see.
The son
went up
a
stairwell
and
down a
stairwell,
the string
now
burning
in his
hand—
the string
singing
along
and on
and on
into the
house.
For long stretches rooms would repeat—the walls and width identical from end to end. White light in wash, from overhead: projectors. Locks without true doors. Doors without true locks or knobs or seams.
A small eye in some pink wood watched him from underneath the floor.
Hairy curtains. Gold glass in windows, looking out onto long unblinking fields.
Black chandeliers with yard-long candles. Coffee tables made of water.
Bees.
The son in one room sat down for some time in a recliner, hearing his cells spin or moisten, softly jostled, coming open or awake.
The son walked.
The son found a charcoal-colored elevator that would not go up or down, but had one button for each year.
He found a room filled almost full with one white cube, around which he could wriggle, pressed at both sides, breathing in.
He found a voice behind a wall—the voice of his voice, older, slowing—some time gone.
And another stairwell, and another, each one wet and rattled in its own way. Some of the conjunctions between stairwells would have huge holes in their floors—wide-open mouths down into further house or houses. Some landings would have four or fifteen stairwells leading from them, lending the son a choice of which to take, but for each the string would keep him clinging, rawing at his palm.
The rooms went on each way around him there forever, not a music.
The son walked and walked and walked and walked and walked and walked and walked and walked and walked and walked and walked and walked and walked and walked and walked and walked.
HOME
Inside the house the father crawled on. His eyes were pouring liquid. Laughing. The hot air ached his eyes. He’d moved into the box until he recognized it, found sections of its breadth where he had been—where he had called home—when he had slept and ate and lived. He found himself again inside the house’s vents, the streetlights and homelights there somehow connected, and the airspace, and the drift.
The father loved the smell baking the house now, like money being burned, like melting Christmas trees and wire, like . . . like . . .
Like days.
At the vent’s first bend, the tunnel opened into a small pocket ridged with bubbles. There was a language in the metal, the pocket’s domed walls cut with tiny engraved pictures of a house. The father could not keep his eyes held clean enough to see into the windows. Behind him he could no longer see the bedroom’s light. There was another kind of light inside the vent now, writhing. The light in liquid at his face. He felt hair growing out around him, from each one of his finite, numbered pores.
I am the oldest man who’s ever lived, the father heard himself say, blank of thinking. I will still be here in this air here when everybody else is burned and gunked and gone.
The words became a new long vein inside his nose.
TUNNEL IN A TUNNEL IN A TUNNEL (IN AN EYE)
Along the vent again the tunnel opened further ahead into two. Soon the two made four, and four made eight, and so on. Each tunnel looked the same. At each the father chose by which one seemed to need him. Laughing harder. Gasping. Blue balloons. His scalp skin crisping hard around his head.
At sudden nodules in the network, the father found holes where he could see back into the house—the living room, the upstairs hallway—the walls there had been painted over black—in some rooms orange or yellow—screaming neon—though here the vents went so thin he could not fit through them, not even partly, just his arms. Some rooms had been filled with dirt or smoke or foaming. Some rooms were full of skin—other families, people, bodies—smushed. One hole into one very far room was the exact same size as his eye—through the hole he could see another small eye seeing. His eye. Light.
The tunnels unfurled on. The ceilings raised or floors grew lower. He could hunch, then he could stand. Soon the walls were so high and far apart he could not feel them at all. The floor beneath him made of sand. In his testicles a transient tingling, like someone crawling through an opening in him, through his guts and up his body, spreading out and up and on among his blood. There was more of him than ever.
WHAT
At another upstairs pucker the father looked out and saw the mother walking up and down the street. She had her head down looking for something. When she got to one end of the street she turned around. She walked back and forth and back and forth in slow procession, holding her left arm straight up over her head. In her hand, a wide gray steel umbrella. She was talking to herself. She had her hair done up expensive. She’d done her face. The father banged his fist against the window to try to tell her she looked the best she’d ever looked but the mother could not hear him or would not turn.
HELP YOURSELF
The girl’s house’s kitchen was enormous. There were cabinets lined from end to end. Many of the cabinets had been padlocked. From inside some there came a scraping. Pictures of the girl were hung all over—tacked up in tiny frames all up and down the walls and the ceiling and the floor. In some the girl looked very old—much older than the son remembered. In some the girl was an old woman, or a man? In some the girl had so much hair you could not see her in the picture.
The son’s arms were rubbed with rugburn though he did not remember any rug. He couldn’t remember ever leaving off the hallway. He couldn’t think of when he’d closed his eyes.
The house contained no clocks.
On a massive gleaming stove there were several pots and pans and spoons and basins of shifting size. The things smelled awful or they smelled good. Many pots had lids puffed up with overflowing. The kitchen counter was long and marble and very cold. The son touched it with his face.
On the tile
over the stove in black marker or grease there was a note: I AM WASHING. I AM TIRED. I WILL FIND YOU WHEN I CAN. LOOK DOWN.
The son looked down. The son could not see anything about the floor. His legs were wobbling a little. He couldn’t think of when he’d last eaten. Maybe several days. His stomach felt lined with ugly light. He turned to look at all the cabinets. He had no idea which one he should open.
In the first cabinet, the son found a long rack of enormous knives—beautiful, sharply made blades that showed his face back to his face. The knives were so huge—as tall as he was, with a book’s width to the blade—he knew he couldn’t take one, though he tried. The metal slithered hot against his body as he stuffed it down his shirt. It burned and fizzled at his chest flesh, becoming soldered. It hurt to rip it free. The aching son replaced the knife inside its holder and watched it look back at him and gleam.
Another cabinet was the size of a warehouse and was stocked with books from end to end. All the books were copies of the same book, rotting, stuffed so full there wasn’t room to move.
In another cabinet there was a replica of the son’s neighborhood complete with every window, every door. Unlike the others, the son could not pry the doors or windows on his own house open, nor could he see in through the glass. A tiny black gazebo sat in their house’s backyard beside the pool. A gazebo? Even smaller bugs were clustered to it, working at the roof. Some smoke rose from its gaps. The son touched the gazebo’s tip, felt an incision. He sucked his thumb and closed his eyes. When he looked again, there were people, many of them, small and teeming, crowded in like ants. They moved on small magnetic tracks set in the ground around his house and the gazebo, wanting in. They had eyes that opened and real hair. Some were shouting, so soft, a shiver purr. They would not see the son above. In other houses the people moved from room to room, at their own mirrors, eating air. From certain windows came a song. The son felt dizzy, dangled upside down. He chose one of the many people and broke the bind off and brought its body closer to his face. The little head was staring, saying something. The son squeezed the tiny body tight inside his palm. Tighter. Tighter. A little bubble. Rumbling. Pop.
