Alice Knott

by Blake Butler

  “For years it went on like this,” the man continues, seeming calm and only calmer the longer she allows him to carry on, “all as if the same day forced repeated, just slightly off enough to be ignored. My mom was gone around the clock each day, earning a living while my father stayed in with his own work; that is, the reading; until he eventually took ill. I never felt certain what sort of sickness he had, or where it came from, how it took hold of his whole life, though it was said to be rooted in our family’s bloodlines, an inevitability in time. And still his fading and our lack of traction didn’t stop him from going on and on about the books, if almost never about their actual substance, only the surrounding mythology of it, the lore. There were supposed to be twenty-six of them in all, each bearing the same title, no variation, though he’d managed to collect only the final twenty-five, missing only the first volume, of which, so he claimed, there was only ever one: a single copy somewhere no one knew, which could be accessed only by a true believer, in his words. It became my father’s total life obsession, to get his hands on that edition, so he said, though he never actually did anything to find it; he just kept reading the other volumes, trying to decipher from them a kind of context by which he could infer its origin; to intuit what kind of information the missing book might need to contain, as if it could only be written by omission, in his infested imagination, never needing to actually exist in human hands. Therein lay its ultimate power, so he claimed, even as what that power meant or might be used for remained impossible to parse. And no matter what ongoing inconsistencies appeared in his own logic, no matter how much sicker he grew by giving himself over to it, even certain death wouldn’t dissuade him. By the end, he’d even begun to believe he’d already read the missing volume without having had to; he decided that the origin must be hidden throughout all its subsequent components, the answer right beneath his eyes all this time, revealing itself to him more clearly as he grew ever weaker in its transference, eradicating all other aspects of his life. Eventually he even tried to give it our own lives also—his quote unquote family, he called us—though he became only more terrifyingly unwavering the longer we refused to participate. So many nights I’d hear him wandering the house from room to room, often carrying a weapon, going on and on to no one about how close he was to discovering his fate, what everlasting glory awaited him on the far side of himself, within which all prior questions about life and death and what came after would be given answers; and even more so: given flesh.”

  Alice’s whole body is trembling, she can see then; for how much about her he seems to know, things she hadn’t even thought of in forever, so much so she can’t be sure they’re really hers, or otherwise some coincidental simulacrum, unintended in how exactly they overlap, about which the man doesn’t seem to realize, given his placid, piecemeal gait. She finds she doesn’t want his speech to stop now, as if by allowing it to play out long enough she might understand what really happened to her; and in the same breath, finally so might someone else; that is, for once she might no longer have to solely be herself, stranded alone in her own life, but to share time with someone else, as after years of marriage, or as in the way she’d always thought of death: not as an end but a beginning.

  Still, already, she feels the idea collapsing, losing its conditioning; she knows that, as far as her strong sense of recognition had felt true, it was only in a plagued way: uninvited, involuntary, strained. The walls of the room have grown so hazy that it’s unclear where the vault ends and the house begins, much less the larger, looming world beyond. Somewhere above, in the house outside the vault, Alice can hear the sound of banging, dragging; distant voices, as if people had come in behind them and started moving things around: other employees of the company, perhaps, or burglars returned to claim what they’d left behind. Yet she does not try to move, to crack the present and call attention to their presence; instead she stares at the man before her, as if he might explain it all away, or otherwise amend the situation.

  By now, though, the adjuster’s grin has grown so wide it bends his face. Each time he blinks the room is flatter, and at the same time, she imagines, somehow more real; or, rather, more like it had always been, just out of range. She can no longer hear the sounds from upstairs over their shared silence. In the mirror, their bodies appear to have rapidly aged, stretched so thin and feeble that Alice thinks they might collapse on contact, even as the world around them continues on its fat blank, scaling toward nothing, flatness in all directions, for forever, only waiting some day to be filled in; or, rather, to continue expanding until there’s nothing else left.

  “Somewhere within the years there, as life continued, my mother got sick and died,” the man is saying, “from complications of the birthing of my sister, which took place behind locked doors, while I slept, and who still looked exactly like me, even all those years apart; I would despise her for that forever, both our mother’s passing and the shared likeness, until almost exactly eighteen years later, when my sister also died, in the same way, birthing her own daughter, though that child by all accounts had come out as hardly human, just a blob, whose parts became recycled, donated to science, for who knows what. Her name would have been Alice, just like you,” he says, now suddenly looking up, if not directly at her, but so as to appear to, just slightly off, “though in the end she never had a name. They were too embarrassed, too desperate to move forward, to erase the most painful subset of their whole short lives.” He watches her, then, waiting that she might interrupt or add something, ask a question; and still all Alice can manage is not to blink. “Regardless, no matter what waking hell our life became, my father refused to shift his course. He hardly even seemed to notice that my mother was no longer there, allowing me to run the house and raise his newborn daughter by myself. At some point he stopped leaving his den at all, and began speaking only by quoting directly from the books, in an unrecognizable language.”

  The last remaining light between them is filing in, becoming covered over; and yet Alice can still see him speaking, the rest of the remaining world no longer required. The story is no longer even hers at all, as she would tell it, its course now clearly veering from her own; as if the programming might now be altered, rearranged; what might have once been her own speech editing itself, becoming something else entirely; and yet, to her, it feels no less familiar than the rest, maybe even more familiar as there’s even less left to rely on; as if, even in her own mind, acknowledging the revision of her own story out from underneath her, it must continue shifting further still—but for whose purpose? Hers? Her brother’s? Someone else’s?

  “Finally, one night I decided I was going to burn the books,” the man continues, suddenly leering, “to end their existence once and for all. It seemed the only way to undo what was becoming of our family, much less the whole world.”

  Alice feels the breath inside her bristle, lock—for, though she hadn’t lived this version of the account, she already knows what’s coming, and now can’t make it stop.

  “I told my father there was another kid I knew at school whose father read the same books as him, and who supposedly had a hard copy of the missing first volume. I had seen it with my own eyes, I swore, and a book so large it could not be held with human hands. My father’s reaction was not at all what I expected, at least at first; he became overcome with rage, started screaming at me, demanding to know where my friend lived, what the other father looked like, how old he was and how many kids.”

  Was this how it actually happened? Alice wonders. More true than how she otherwise might have remembered? Suddenly she can’t seem to tell the difference either way, as if no matter how the story’s told, it leads to now.

  “I provided him with a false address, even directions, at which point he gathered some things into a bag—including a knife, I noticed, and a large bundle of cash, with which we could have been eating all this time. I was afraid he would take the rest of the books with him as well, but suddenly he seemed to have forgotten them complet
ely, as if the rest were no longer necessary in the light of the missing version.”

  Had there even really been more than one book? Could it have really been the key to all those other volumes, their whole world?

  “He left the house at once, then, locking me in it, telling me not to answer the phone or even raise my head or think until he got back, which should be soon, he said, if not tomorrow, or by next week at the latest.”

  Every day thereafter, every hour, under the expectation of some arrival, if not of her father, then of someone, or something; all these years.

  “My father never returned. I would never see him again in this world, waking or dreaming, except for when I closed my eyes and said his name; then I would see only my own face there reflected, right inside me, so old I don’t know how I could still be left alive.”

  The story seems to take further and further liberty in the absence of any friction, Alice imagines, absconding with the events as they must have been. She finds she can already place the next word the man will say before he says it, right alongside him, as if in the end she is the only one who can cut the thread.

  “As soon as he was gone, I gathered all the volumes of the series into a pile in the floor right there in his den,” they say together now, aloud in tandem, suddenly the only way to speak. “It almost didn’t even occur to me to look inside, to read; I didn’t want to know what the books were about; I just wanted them gone from us, forever.”

  Yes, Alice can feel her body thinking. Yes; though in her mind: miles of black smoke; the inseam of her own face hot and melting in long rivulets that puddle in her stomach; endless loops.

  “But the spines were such thick leather that they refused to catch from any spark, so finally I opened a random volume to light it by its pages. There was nothing printed on the paper, at least far as I could tell. I remember flipping through one volume, then another, feeling this strange elastic feeling moving through me that deepened further the more there was nothing there to read. Though it was not a simple blankness, as on new paper; instead, it felt like being drawn down into the page, the trace of the lines accessing their way inward, all around me, as I moved my eyes across the absent lines, the world left undescribed there in its languagelessness more like the world I knew than any prior recitation; a feeling both electric and made of drowning; starved for attention, out of reach.”

  His and her voice by now are bound together in her brain, indistinguishable from any other she recalls; so slick and black it’s more like silence.

  “Immediately I closed my eyes and struck the match and lit the book there in my hands. This time, because I could not see, I could feel its flame catch on the paper with ease, begin to spread; the same true, too, when I laid the burning object on the ground there with the others and opened my eyes to see the fire open up between. Within minutes they were ash; the smoke amassing in upon itself and dissipating smoothly, as if devoured by the hole made in the books as they consumed themselves.”

  Smith turns toward her then, at once and fully for the first time since he appeared, his attention at last breaking from where his eyes had held transfixed; the whites all bloodshot at the edges as if having been awake for far too long, pupils large and starving, the only fixed points left in his blurred face.

  “And yet by then,” they say together absolutely, without emotion, as if cold reading from a script, each syllable a placeholder for another, sicker syllable behind, “as you must know, it was too late,” her hands in his hands, squeezing and throbbing, impossible at last to pull apart, “as once I’d felt that feeling, of having read the page, seen it come alive before me, move into me, I would not stop feeling it thereafter, from then on; and I had never felt it elsewhere, in no person, place, or object—until now.”

  The man is gone, then: his voice, his presence, even the feeling of where he’d been, all of it now covered with ambient warbling, a wake to fill. All Alice can see is where, in both the reflection and her flesh, nothing exists beyond the empty space enclosed between the house’s walls surrounding, clear as day; nowhere else to be but within what remains visible before her or within her; no other land.

  But the larger world is certainly still out there somewhere, she remembers, feeling the light above from which she’d let the man into her house still brushed upon her skin, how it had burned her even on the inside, all her life; all she has to do is find a place where she can interact with it again, return to its context, and then remember how to move; though even as she tries to make her head turn, in collaboration, to shift her leg to start to walk, she finds her equilibrium thrown sideways, legs rubbering beneath her as she fumbles to her knees in pitching forward, to be embraced by winding colors wide as a horizon, all across her.

  The ground beneath her descent is off, then, she finds, only eventually coming to a full stop after what seems far too long spent as in fall—the floor beneath her now no longer hardwood, as her vault’s had been, but something soft, rough on her flesh. There’s patchy soil there, some brittle grass across it, a suspended feeling. As she stretches forward all lightheaded on her hands, reaching for any sign of home, she finds only earth and dander, no wind, and no construction.

  The longer she lies there, the more the daylight holds together held above her, as in a field, adjusting to the long, stunned open glow. Somewhere amid the white above, firming from nothing, the sky is massive, monochrome, almost large enough to imagine how and why a creator could have placed it there: to distract; or more directly: to pose a mirage through which a larger, strong presence always pended, awaiting just the right time to puncture through. Alice feels her blood churn with viscous pressure, crowding her innards’ edges as if for outlet, to become spilled across the land; at last, to be seen.

  Otherwise, the soil beneath her feet is pale and dead, in some way unnatural in texture, like turf. The open air stinks like expired cream, wafts of meatsmoke. Ahead, in all directions, her view is broken up every few yards with a waist-high white wood cross crammed into the earth; for miles and miles there, hundreds or thousands of them, without clear layout, any center.

  None of the crosses bears any name; when they are marked, she finds it’s only with odd sets of years burned into the wood, no months or days:

  1920–1964

  1922–1975

  1939–1979

  1971–1996

  1957–1998

  1906–2002

  1929–2005

  1945–2006

  And on the cross marking the plot where she’d been lying:

  1944–2019

  Far against the distance just beyond, slipped into the airspace, Alice can see the looming outline of what could only be her home, its position held in place by all the land her family had owned longer than she’s been alive, left unattended following her inheritance, unto rot.

  I spent so much time here as a young one, in this same field, our family graveyard, Alice thinks, rubbing her thumb across the nearest dates, relieved to find her thinking now returned to her alone, if still somehow like being read to. How in the year before my mother died, to give my father some space inside the house alone to write, she brought me out to witness what was said to be the last solar eclipse. This was just before my real father became replaced, as I remember, before I began puberty; he was working at that time almost sixteen hours a day, locked in his study, writing and writing, which at the time I did not understand: that my father made words that other people read, and so allowed into their bodies, like a plague.

  Alice finds her instinct to interrupt her own remembrance locked out now, left over as a spectator unto herself, recalling each line soon as it’s uttered as the way it all had been; and still the thread of it keeps running, slithering through her: Nor could I understand why my mother brought a mirror to watch the sun with, and kept insisting I not look up into the light, but instead at the copy of it on which she’d caught the light and held it between us. Each time I turned my head up to look directly, she would
scream and pull me to her, as if the brightness overhead were a hole into which I might be sucked.

  The present light itself is also strong, she realizes, almost matching her memory in its intensity, if subject to the whim of such wide clouds. Finally she forced her hand over my eyes to hide the damage, releasing only when the sun was completely snuffed, which seemed to last a lifetime, then another. I remember feeling then that we were the only two alive, the only people ever in the world, and, there within that, the understanding that I would never need to move or breathe or eat again, that I could stay like this forever, without a motive, not even fear, though such a flash of full contentment passed so fast I hardly felt it, beyond how thereafter, as the years passed, it only served to hold me down, to make me wonder how long before I could find a way back to that feeling, to live inside it.

  The crosses spread across the land from there: miles and miles of plots for bodies, multiplying as she scans them with her eyes, beyond history.

  Only now do I realize that all the time that’s passed between that instant and the present was not mine, her mind suggests; that the only place I’ve ever been is here, forlorn but not alone, without a grave, waiting for my body to find a way in to what the light had promised.

  The light is wide, all burning at her.