There Is No Year

by Blake Butler

  That small sound echoed in the son’s ears: pop

  pop

  pop

  pop

  pop

  POP!

  The son looked up. Standing beside him there was a little man—scaly, pale, flat features—the man seemed very pleased. He had long arms and a longer mustache and he was dressed in a deep gray bellhop jumper with high-heeled boots, a black neck scarf, and, draped over his shoulders, a snakeskin jacket. He had the biggest teeth the son had ever seen. The teeth all looked like keys. The son was afraid at first that the man would bite. Instead the man got out a little chalkboard.

  He wrote, traced in the old dust using his thumb: I HAVE NEVER BEEN OUT OF THE HOUSE.

  He set the chalkboard down on the floor where, resting, the text changed: THIS HOUSE IS OUR HOUSE, YOURS AND MINE. The son did not see these newer words. He did not see the text change again.

  The man laughed and clapped and splayed his hands—a blackjack dealer’s flourish, followed by sneezing. He went over to another cabinet and reached inside and got a tray. He went to the stove and opened pots and spooned things out onto many little plates, still sneezing, not covering his holes. The man didn’t say anything. He breathed hard. His spine looked ruined or crooked. When the tray was full—so much food, enough for several people—the man hoisted the tray onto his shoulders and pointed with his nose toward another cabinet door—a door shaped just like the son was—son-sized.

  So, son? the small man intoned, key-teeth splaying, speaking with no tongue. He sneezed and winked. Shall we? Surely. Oh, by all means, apres vous, allons-y, , proceed?

  FILM

  The son followed the

  man into the cabinet,

  down another

  hallway, also shaped

  like him—though this

  one was much shorter

  than the others and

  there were little

  nodules with TV

  screens on them

  playing films.

  Some of the films the

  son had seen, though

  others were unlike

  anything. Some of the

  films looked like real

  people doing real

  things, walking,

  eating, taking a

  shower, laughing,

  playing video games,

  brushing teeth.

  Some of the films

  were quite obscene.

  There were films of pigs and dogs being exploded—films of women giving birth, and films of men with women in the stage of birthing preparation (one of the couples in the films looked most exactly like the father and the mother but much younger, the son thought), and there were films of milk pouring from another familiar house’s windows and its girders and its seams (what house? the son could not remember any house but this one he walked and walked and walked in now) milk that on contact with the air and sky around it turned to mildew and to cheese—cheese that would be someday soon sold and then eaten, sent back into other bodies, carried on. There were films of the son watching a film inside a film inside a house (that same house again, what was this? what was the son inside there doing with his eyes?), there were films of the son falling through a great and endless air, the rip of wind and endless light greasing his body, pulling the flesh back in his face, making him look older than he’d ever looked, even in the deepest hours of the night.

  Each film looped forever unrepeating, roaring on and on inside its frame, watching the son pass with its blank eyes, negotiating light.

  The son saw and did not see.

  The son’s eyes were changing colors.

  The son turned his head to concentrate on following the back of the bobbing head of the little man with all the food. The man had a tic in his neck that made him spasm so hard the son thought the man was going to drop everything he carried, but just as the tics began to get most convulsive, knobby knots, skin-held explosions, the man’s neck and back and spine at once shaking so hard he hardly seemed to touch the ground, his skin as heavy as the sky—inside the room then the films went off and there they both were, standing face-to-face inside a cube.

  ROOM

  This room—made from calming—was

  stuffed full of flowers large as the son.

  Some of the flowers formed a chair.

  There was a gentle music

  playing—tones that raised tiny bumps

  under the son’s hair.

  The man motioned for the son to sit down on the flower and when he did the man sat the tray down on the son’s lap. The tray was hot and heavy. The son could hardly move. He looked up to the man and as their eyes met the man bowed low down to the floor and as the man’s head touched the floor the flowers rumpled and the room went superdark.

  PHOTOPERIOD

  Inside the father’s eyes, white. A gold of many glows.

  xxx xxx

  Around his head, a second head. White-on-white-on-white.

  xxx xxx

  a hunk of blank space, meat or ceiling, a white of darkness inside the son,

  mask or fervor, him or he, or she: they scourged and beeping, gone, going

  xxx xxx

  A gold of man glows, unfolding. In stereo of stereos, so wide.

  xxx xxx

  [Inside the second head, the father [Inside the second head and house, a

  watched the space around his body city spinning soft. A sea which in the

  shuffle, open, like a deck of open caused a closing, a collapse of all

  decks of cards, into a house.] that ageless air same as it came.]

  NIGHT

  The mother grew, filled up with nothing—cells in cells on cells, a house.

  CONSUME

  In the light from off his forehead, the son still could see his hands. The dinner plate was larger than he’d imagined. Some of the dishes were labeled with square brass placards, many of which, by handwriting or in translation, the son could not at all read: pink meats and bruised fruit, slaws and sauces, all soft enough to eat without the teeth, and such reek.

  Several other unlabeled items were the ones that tasted best. The son stuffed his cheeks to bursting. The son ate so much it seemed his teeth themselves were also chewing with other tiny sets of teeth—as if eighteen people lived there inside him—people in people—on and on. There was a drink that tasted like one thing until he wished it tasted like something else and then it did. The son ate everything on every plate. The more he ate the more he wanted.

  This house was excellent, the son decided, spoke in a voice inside his eyelid. Whenever the girl showed up the son was going to ask if he could move in, or at least if his dad could get a job with the girl’s dad.

  Completing this thought, the son tried to go on and think the next thing and felt the same words thereon repeat: This house is excellent—his screaming eyelid!—Whenever the girl showed up he was going to ask if he could move in—yes, please, now—or at least if his dad could get a job with the girl’s dad—he needed.

  And the thought again. The thought again, rolled in warming foam inside his head. A tone. He could not shush it. It numbed his gums—the food gluing all inside him, singing, a blank recurring unto exhausted, fat-full sleep.

  DATABASE

  In the other house—the empty house—where was the father?—the mother went to Google search.

  The mother had on a translucent negligee. The mother’s face was wet.

  The mother typed in: man who fixed the mower.

  She saw a bunch of lawnmowers and some fires and a knife.

  The mother typed in: man in the house with so much sand.

  The search results contained texts about a man who’d built his house on sand, a man who made sand music, a movie based upon a book, thoughts on how to enjoy beaches, a man who’d built his house on rock.

  None of this was what the mother wanted, clearly.

  The mother’s elbows creased with chafe, indention. Her forearms were so thick.

 
The mother typed in: he with such long fingers.

  The mother typed in: he with teeth & gloves.

  The mother typed in: him.

  The screen went white. She felt her belly bubble, throb. It made a beeping.

  The mother looked at what she’d done.

  ENTRANCE, PASSAGE, GALLERY

  The father came out of the bedroom into the hallway and started down the stairs and then the stairs beneath him seemed to crimp in some way they had never before right there. The stairs seemed to cling against the father’s feet and also were crumbling in. Even as he stepped down onto the surface of the landing in the foyer where the stairs had always ended—there facing the door into the outside—the father could not help but feel that the room he was in now at the bottom of the stairs was not the room that had always been at the bottom of the stairs, but another room of the same shape and make and color—slightly off. Something about the texture of the wall or the way the window glinted or the way the light came in from outside and graced the ground. Something about the words that had been said in that room before then not quite sitting.

  The father put his foot in certain places the way he had so many other days and felt a different feeling than he’d felt then. His right eyelid again twitching—inner houses. The father pinched and prodded at his skin. He punched himself hard in his chest, his gut, the sides. The vibration flexed through his body in other places: between his toes, against his scrotum (vessels), in his knees. His other eye sat waiting, clean.

  The father moved from the landing to the next room, which on most days was the room where the family ate. They had just eaten there today, had they not? Were they not eating there right now? The dining table still sat smattered under the bright red tablecloth curtain, stained in all those places that would not wash out. It seemed slightly larger than it had once been, or the father smaller. The chandelier the father had hung himself there to replace the prior lamp—a lamp that refused to quit cutting in and out, the sockets zapping when he touched them—the chandelier was still intact—though this chandelier’s crimped metal arms hung so much lower—the father could step right up and take a bite. He could fit the tiny frosted bulb glass into his mouth and huff it. With the glow washed up inside his cheeks the father looked upon the room.

  THE FATHER, RECONSIDERED

  The father could have done anything he wanted. He could have walked right out of the house. He could have gone to the airport and bought a ticket to Lithuania. He could have walked to the grocery store and climbed inside the freezer bin and pulled the bags of broccoli over his face. He could have become a male prostitute and fucked for cash in bathrooms with his head beating in rhythm on the toilet tank. He could use the cash to buy stocks that would skyrocket and make him very rich, rich enough to live somewhere alone for the rest of his life and not stare at boxes in an office and not speak to anyone again. Not ever. At any moment, any of these things, the father could have done them. The father did not do any of these things.

  ANTECHAMBER, SECOND ANTECHAMBER, SHAFTS

  The father left the room with the table and entered another room that the family did not have a name for. The father did not like the way he felt while standing in this room but he also felt that he did not want to ever leave it.

  The father craned his head into the next room, which was a hallway, and the father looked and looked. The father closed his eyes. He thought he heard someone else enter the room he’d just come from. He felt light bending around his back.

  The father looked again and closed again. He had to leave this room, he knew, but he did not want to touch the hallway carpet and he could not go back the way he came. The hallway carpet had a peculiar pattern.

  The father held his breath and jumped across the air.

  The father landed in another room. There were tiny holes in this room that looked out onto exact geographic coordinates of space. The father opened up his eyes.

  The father had aged by eighteen months.

  The father was at an age when eighteen months would not vastly change his outward physical appearance greatly, though some more of his hair had fallen out or molted white. His joints creaked in their gristle. His skin continued to sag. The father’s teeth bent slightly inward and were corroded slightly in color and dimension. His vision degraded enough to make him ineligible to pilot a motor vehicle. His other insurance premiums increased by 18 percent. His intestines loosened and the tapeworms inside them multiplied and slithered in their widths. The father’s brain blew fat with wrinkle.

  Around the father in the house the rooms were there. Through the years these rooms would fill with things and some of those things would stay and remain the same unless moved or acted on by outside forces and other things in the rooms would come and go—this is what science had let him know. For the majority of their existence the rooms would contain nothing, and the nothing would not change.

  FILM OF A FILM

  In the room the father could not see one end of the room or the other. He could not see his fingers or his hands.

  The father’s feet were on the floor, he felt sure. He was breathing through his mouth.

  A camera may have floated through the darkness—dark was all that held the house together.

  The father moved forward through the room in one direction. He could not feel his body go.

  The father tried again.

  Around the father the room went somewhere and in the room the father went into it and the father was there and the father moved.

  He did not realize he was shouting. His voice enclosed around his head. He shook his head to get the sound out, and again began shouting, turning red:

  This is my house.

  This is our house.

  This is where I am.

  MAP OF ASCENT

  The father went

  —through a room he recognized into a room he did not recognize, each in exact image of the room where he’d been born

  —into a room hung with photographs of people the father felt sure he did not know, he could no longer recognize his father, his father’s father, his father’s father’s father, as well as several other men with his blood in them, and so on

  —into the room where the mother had figured she’d someday find time to do her sewing, making bed quilts out of old clothes, instead the room had grown so thick with dust you could no longer see the walls

  —into the room that’d most sold the father on the house for no particular reason he could put a thumb on, six walls slanted inward up to some center overhead, a leaving point, a sight

  —into a room that was all windows, the glass gurbled, spurting, off, through which window the father saw only color that was not like any color unto him before, the compiled color of the lengths of skin he’d bruised upon himself and certain others over the fearful evenings of his life

  —into a room made of liquid in which the father could swim deep into one corner and could touch something there giving off air, a tiny rimless hole, and the father put his mouth against it and he breathed, inhaled the smell of gasoline and cinder and gunpowder and new cars, and there were objects consecrated there around him in the liquid, held within a gel, he could not see

  —into a room of cold wet sand tunneled by worms, worms that once had lived inside the son, and ate of all the food the son ate, making a blank space, and heard of all the sound he heard, and sang in all his singing, and wallowed in his light

  —into a room of babies held in long glass bubbles burping, screeching, needing feeding, waiting for their size, each of which would one day make their own sons and daughters, and those their own sons and daughters, and theirs, and theirs, more and more blood

  —into a room lodged in the bulb glass of some light fixture in a woman’s apartment in some city, where the father watched the woman remove her clothes and masturbate against a mirror and brush her teeth and wrap her head in string, the father wanted this woman more than any one or thing he’d seen in his whole life, and did not realize how she
looked exactly like the mother, named the same

  —into a room the father had already been in before this evening but not in the same light, not like this, to be honest all of these rooms had the same shape and grain and color, each measured 5.24 m × 10.48 m × 5.86 m

  —into a room where the father was hardly dust and the father could not feel his arms, his hair around him in a coarse gown, as one day he would be buried under sand

  —into a curtain of endless blank where there was laughing, every person, all at once, one thick and endless sound so loud it went beyond human hearing and beyond that again, killing all ears, breaking all windows in all buildings, shattering all light, and then replacing all of what it had damaged with new versions of itself, so deftly done we’d never know