by Blake Butler
0
The figure hung right there above the son. The figure had the longest hair. The figure’s hair was lashed into the son’s hair. They had the same hair. The hair grew shorter, pulling taut. The son looked into the figure. The figure was long in moments and scratched in others. The figure has someone else inside it also. Populations. Masses. Burning. The figure wore the son’s original shade of pupils, refracted now with shards of foreign color—red—red like the son’s bruises, like bricks for houses or wall paint, red the color the son had shat the week he ate all the mother’s lipstick, the mother’s lipstick in him, red like certain birds not yet exploded for the air, red like the son inside the son and the son the son could have had himself.
The son and the figure were mouth to mouth. Their lips were cracked and puffy. They breathed back and forth to one another. Their breath was made of the same cells. They breathed. They breathed. In each breath there was another word, and in each word there was another, and the son began to see the things the son would never see. They breathed.
DAYS
The massive vehicle slid along the street until it stopped in the new rut around the house. Something had sawed into the yard’s perimeter, made a little ditch that ran with sludge and seemed to sink into itself. The vehicle’s soundless transmission warped several birds out of the sky, raining the birds onto the windshield, their carcasses then sucked into a suction and used to fuel the vehicle. The back window of the vehicle folded down and out of it pushed the father.
The father rolled down along the back hood and off the bumper into the street. He bruised his elbows on the pavement, bleeding clear. He stood up shaking and watched the long white vehicle drive off. The vehicle bruised the ground.
The father was naked except for a metal bulb around his head. Two tiny slits allowed him to see out. There were not slits for ears or nose or mouth. The father had gained weight. The men had fed the father through long weird tubes and turkey basters. He did not know how long he’d been gone. There were no official charges. He’d been fully reprimanded. He’d been made to solve crossword puzzles in a small translucent box at the bottom of a public swimming pool, through which in his mind he could see the chubby men and women in their slick suits holding their children while they peed. He could see all the stuff the people’s bodies flushed into the water, which came and stuck to the perimeter of the father’s box. The crossword puzzles were designed to trigger complicated extrasensory properties. The father filled in 49 ACROSS with the word LASAGNA and could taste it in his mouth. That was the good part. The father had had to fill in many other less delightful words—such as LESION, such as NEED, such as—such as—such as . . .
Many other things, like all things, the father could not remember.
He could not remember losing skin.
He could not remember the skull-sized beams of other light they’d shined into his forehead and in the ruts behind his knees, resetting the deletion, blank of blank on blank. All the foot-long pins they’d used, and the sledgehammer, and the prism and the dice. Days extracted in blood pictures. Doorbells. Birthdays. His new name(s). He could not remember anything about the other house, the box.
The father could not remember, in any form, the son—the grain of skin or glint of eye the child had in those first hours, as if having been rubbed with steel wool in the womb; the thin months thereafter in which he could still hold the child in a warm silence against his father chest, pleasant, grinning, before the son had learned to scream; the smell ejected from the holes that kicked out his baby teeth, like wire and old cheese—this smell had soon become so general it disappeared. He could not remember the way for months at first, as the child had begun speaking, he’d called the father by his full name, first, middle, and last; how some days, all days, the son walked backward, even his first steps, before the steps the father and the mother would witness as his “first,” the father had not known this ever anyway, at all; or the letter the child had written to the father their fifth Christmas to say how much he loved the father, the letters out of order and poorly drawn, and the picture of the family there without faces, except the blackened O hole of the son’s mouth at the exact center of his head, scribbled to rip. He did not remember the son’s want and wishing, his decorations, their hours before the house while suns would rise, buses arriving to take the son off to some far location, the father on the lawn then waiting for his return in a light; evenings, hours, suppers, cushions, floors; invented games, the blanket mazes, puzzles. How the son could hide for hours in the house and not be found. The father no longer, in his body, held to an inch of this. He could not, in any alley of his remaining mind there, of what the men had left, recall a single thing about the child that stuck inside him but as bumping, but as tremor, itch, or slur. The exit colors beating underneath his forehead, the window of his lungs.
THE REPEATING NIGHT
The father moved to stand in what remained of his only home’s cracked driveway, holding his head up with his hands. The bulb was very heavy. Inside the bulb it smelled like meat. Outside the bulb it smelled like meat. All air was meat now, as was water. The meat was see-through, at least, thank god. All on the air the bugs were crawling—the caterpillars, the ants, the geese. Most geese aren’t bugs but these were. The paint on this side of the house had now shifted in its tone. It’d grown to match the grass that’d grown almost above the father’s head. On the roof there was an enormous blanket half-tied down. It looked like the baby blanket the son had slept with for years and years until they’d had to take it away for quarantine. Massive cameras hung in the ozone, aimed directly at the house, spooling film down on the planet, long black translucent ticker tape splayed like raining.
In the sky above the house it looked like any other day.
Outside the house the grass was growing. The sun was smuggy. The street was gone. The neighbors did not mend their houses from recent damage. There was too much on the news. Several shopping malls went bust. An ocean liner ate its own weight. The library of the son’s school filled up with dust, though only in the evenings, so no one could know. A theme park became a peach and had a bite eaten in it where kids fell in and drowned. In the sky above the house there was a smoking but it was also clear, and it also smelled like endless beef and yet dogs stayed hidden, cowered. A moving van grew fat with girls. There were other people in their own windows, though they did not know what they were looking for. Gun shops did their business and did it well. Several popular websites were replaced with blocks of color. The grocery stores did not have eggs though they paid their men to stock them. The druggists were on drugs. Something had chewed on the largest building in the downtown district. Populations sweltered. The text in all the books in all bookstores increased in size by millimeters. You could not take a bath. The magicians were disappearing and not coming back to smile and swing their arms to end the show. Stores opened in every strip mall selling only handsaws. Babies came out with pubic hair and tried to crawl back inside their mothers. Women were older much more often. Email servers learned to laugh. You could not press Save on your MS Word files, only Save As . . .—unto all things a new name. The ocean grew a tumor. The moon grew a tumor. The president grew a tumor and ate it on TV into a large microphone, making the sound of years to come. You couldn’t sing or cry or chew or want or listen or know or sneeze. This all happened in one wrecked second. Where were we then?
The house remained the same.
The father trampled through the tall grass looking for a way to the front door. He could not quite aim himself toward the destination. The grass flapped at his hair. He could see the part of the house above the doorway where the night lamps glowed now a little bright. The father hacked and hacked the grass down with his sore limbs and walked and thought and looked and moved and walked and thought and thought and walked and looked and moved.
DOPPELGÄNGER MANTRA
Inside the bulb the father spoke.
He was repeating everything he’d ever said throughout h
is life now once again.
On a tiny panel in the bulb’s interior, LCD nodules tallied each word, how many times.
The top ten words:
WHAT
NO
NOT
HELLO or HI
(HIS NAME)
PLEASE
SON
OUCH
OH
GOODBYE
The father’s voice splashed off the metal, right back into his face.
HIVE
By the time the father found the front door it was locked. The naked father did not have his key. The men had kept it. The welcome mat was gone. Ants swarmed the stain on the concrete where it had been fed the residue. The naked father touched his flesh as if it might have hidden pockets—and though it did he could not find them. The father beat the door and rang the bell. The father browned his fists. Sometimes the buzzer shocked him. Sometimes the buzzer played Brahms, sometimes black metal, sometimes the soothing sound of rain-forest water or a shriek of someone being burned. These windows had been painted over or blocked off. The father put his eye up to the spy hole. Peering backward through it he felt a squirt. Inside the father’s chest was also squirting. He pulled the knob until it came off. The knob cauterized his hand. There’d also been a key under the plant box, though its base had been cracked through. The soil spilled out and ants had ravaged that, eating innards out of the leaves and leaving strange veined wire. The plant’s roots grew into the concrete so deep the father could not lift the box up. Some of the roots had little pods like eyes. So much movement—little sound.
As the father turned from the house, someone behind the door watched through the window.
The father loped back into the high grass, grown even higher since his arrival. The father fought to forge a path. He toppled forward with the bulb off-balance. The grass cut tons of tiny marks across his naked arms and legs and belly. The father’s testicles were swollen. He had a limp in both his legs. The father’s legs were now prosthetic, as were his chest and lungs and muscle—as was the vast majority of the father—though the father felt the same.
The father tottered through the growth with his head half at his knees. The bulb kept sweating. He could hear dogs around him packed in masses. He could hear a billion humming bees. All through the grass, hung on the blades around and on the house, the bugs were scumming up a hive. Countless interlocking pockets wet with bee grease, clasped in combs—each hole an eye—each eye a yawning. One long buzz. As well, in the soil below the swim of hive stuff, the ants were laying bed foundation—dirt clipped in piles and stacked as turrets, torrents, entry gaps large enough to suck around the father’s foot. The father danced and leapt and rolled along and through the yard with welts already forming on his knees—pocks on his sternum—chiggers kissed inside his ankles. He felt dizzy with new data. His mouth began to foam. In the foam his words popped as bubbles. The LCD clicker ran up and up. With each curse word, use of god’s name, or fault of grammar, the father received a cram of shock.
POPULATION
The father came into another clearing around the house’s right side. The paint on the house here peeled in scores. The curled paint resembled larvae, and so that’s what they were. There was a window looking in. The father moved to touch the window with cramping fingers. He clanged his metal forehead on the glass but it would not break. He clawed the glass and got some wedged under his nails.
Through the eyeslits the father could see somewhat—into the TV room, though there was no TV now, no other stuff. The TV room had not had a window on the inside, but from outside he could see in. The room contained ten to twenty people—on second thought, more like fifty or a hundred—on third, more like five hundred or ten thousand—teeming like ants, colliding, impossible to count. The father saw himself, the mother, and the son therein among the mingling, chewing cheese and crackers off tiny plates. Others also looked familiar. With each new head the father felt his recall swim for some connection. The whole room overflowed. Keys and eggs and blood and money. Thinning wives and headless men. Young boys with rings and electronic money. The father saw the man and woman who’d appeared to buy the house and recognized them, though he had not been home when they’d come to see the house before, and he could not see how both of them resembled younger versions of himself and her, whomever, and here their heads were tied together by the hair—they had one set of hair between them. The whole house did. They were all speaking into cubes. Everyone with his or her head against a black box, skin growing fatter on their heads. A mush. You could see transmissions on the air—could read the baggage hanging on the slow slopes where all together we were breathing in and out. The rooms not rooms but years. Along the walls the new wallpapered shapes repeating: O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O.
O of go and how and nowhere.
O of house and son and door.
O of O.
From outside looking in, the father beeped and banged against the glass. No one would look toward him. They all were asking. Inside the house the boxes rang, and heads made laugh and bees barfed buzz and long dogs barked and babies babbled, while inside his bulb the father began to shout a semi-prayer and the bulb zapped his skin and skull in hot correction and across it all there was a wind and no one would.
COCOON GAZEBO
In the backyard, high as ever, like long blank curtains to the sky, the father swung and bit and bashed his head cutting a pathway in the green. His tongue had begun to gather in his helmet, dislodged somewhere way back down his throat, the weird mashed meat surround-compiling in the space around his cheeks. Likewise, his breath had begun building layers on the bulb’s condensation-proof glass. The father tried to wink his cheek to rub the glass clean, but that was hard.
Somewhere in the yard among the fallen clothesline and loops of dead brown meat once trees, the father came to a gazebo nestled in the growing. A tall thin black corrupted structure, thick and pointed though dented in along the top as if something large had had nabs at it. The father did not like its sweeter smell, etched with the sickness, the surrounding air suffused with more mosquitoes, wasps—had you seen this air here, you could not see—the father tripped his way up beneath the errored awning and into the dark shell, buzzing, smoke.
The father knew that though he’d never seen it, the gazebo had always been in the yard, and always would be, in any yard. The father had had long dreams of coiling in a hammock, eating. Here. There were many things the father had planned to do—in or around the house or other—lists of lists of lists of lists—this gazebo, too, was those. The father walked into its mouth.
From up inside the structure’s bleach-burnt stomach, the father could hear the mother somewhere shout. He could not make out what she said—her voice compiled of several others—a thousand tonalities at once—heads surrounding the gazebo, skin on skin, and air on air. The gazebo walls were screened completely and hung with new-car-scent plumes and bags of rice. A sheet of pupae blocked the holy wire scrim. They were crusted on so thick—such dedication—the gazebo’s size quadrupled, like a crown.
The father could not stop with turning, turning, seeing the same few feet of textured surface, until he fell dizzy on the wood.
BAG
When he could think again, the father saw a long black bag hanging from the gazebo ceiling. Hung above by strands of hair, it had a name tag and numbers that the father could not read. The father sat up and reached to touch the bag. He felt it warming under his rub. He felt the wets and bumps and whorls. Kick. Kick kick. Kick. Somewhere the mother went on shouting. On certain words, the father’s language tally meter would mistake her words for his. Zap.
BLANK
The father unzipped the bag. The metal
teeth moaned. Inside the bag the father saw the son curled and snoozing, his hands folded at his face. The father felt a wash of whipping through his back, throat, and aorta. Hey, the father said. He could not recall the son’s name. He tried a few. The current scourged him. The hair grew on his face.
EITHER
The father shook the son unknowing until he opened up his eyes. From in the bag, the son glared. The father could hardly see the son through the glass inside the helmet, for all his sound and all the hair, the rip. What, the son kept repeating, eyes closed, screaming. What. What. What. What. What. What. Each what flew upward from him toward some nothing that on other days he’d called a sky. The son’s sound against the helmet made the father’s language tallies reset to zero, zero, zero. The father, fried.
COPY OF A COPY OF A COPY
Through a window in the house that looked out onto the backyard the son watched the buzzing father rouse himself (the son). The son felt amused. He fixed his hair in the reflection. He tried to speak but made a mess.
And then the son was outside the house there with the father and the father’s arms were wet and kind of mushy and the son tried to sit up and felt something hold him and felt something moving through his lungs, new words wanting out and worming, clustered in his bulb. The father could not see the bulb was see-through, made of days.
And then the son was in the house again looking out and the air was fully solid and the son stood encased inside the air and through the window there was light.
