by Blake Butler
The muck is easy to dislodge. Its quality feels ashen as she digs at it with her fingers, its packed-in surface coming up in clots and plumes, sticking to the wetness of her skin. It’s in her mouth, then, the more she digs, and in her throat and eyes, making her choke; so too her mind, as if there’s nowhere left for it to go but on into her, worming deeper. She had lived for this so long, she understands; had been waiting through it all for now, to feel it come upon her. But no, she hadn’t, she responds; she hadn’t wished for any of this, not a second; instead she’d been dying her whole life, wanting nothing of whatever else came, no matter how clear, or how destroyed.
Several inches down, Alice feels her fingers click on something cold and hard; some kind of hidden surface beneath the softer cover that glints wherever she scrapes the dust away, its exposed edges somehow faintly gleaming in the dim maw of what the world is. Finally, she peers and sees her own self’s shape reflected there, in the flat, through its vast muddle: her own apparent double staring up from what remains below, held on in the lining of what seems another mirror, its surface damaged, wet with mildew, buried so long in its place.
And yet this mirror is unlike others she’s seen before, Alice observes, spreading the acrid wet away as best she can to clear its face. She is surprised by its shape: how it has edges, its own body, against the larger darkness. In this reflection, she sees, her flesh is marred and naked, its fiber an aggravated patchy red in parts and charred to pus or scab in others, like skin once burned and now deep into firming over, becoming healed. As well, the hair has been melted off her head, leaving gross patches, her finer facial features bruised and ruined; only her eyes are recognizable among the mess of her complexion, and even these are ruptured, uniformly blackened throughout, as if each pupil has occluded the entire organ; her lipless mouth still beaming through its damage, as if inexplicably elated in looking back up at her other through their boundary between, now interlocked.
The room this other now appears in, Alice discerns amid its mass disfigured lines, is the same shape and configuration of the vault beneath her house, as she remembers, the missing artworks now still there hanging in the doubled image, if each also damaged by what must be the same fire that hurt her, each painting indistinguishable from any other plate of ugly char.
In the mirror she is kneeling, same as she is above the object; she can even sense the other’s heartbeat in the flat plane of the mirror’s silver, their rhythm only slightly out of sync, enough to suggest each has her own life, independent from the other.
We had passed through this same day as so many different versions, Alice imagines, relieved at least to hear her own voice still there inside her, if still not quite fully her own. I had stood in this very instant and observed myself from years apart, without clear recognition on either side; had wanted into somewhere I distinctly could not go, somewhere sacred, indestructible; less inherent to my flesh and more to the curvature of a state of living beyond life, within which everything about the world as I’d believed I’d known and depended on it would fall away, making room at last for only one source code containing all my possible futures, a fate to define myself against as in relief; so at last to become anyone other than I had ever meant to.
The mirror’s face, in the meantime, has grown inflamed against her skin, warmer in a different way than sunlight, cutting through her, beyond pain, and upon extended contact releasing from her a thousand further questions she might ask of any of her prior versions, or those who saw her in the midst of those lost lives: people she had passed over in potential, avoiding any points of recognition with the many other ways she could have intersected with them, found common ground, or what she could have found a longer hope in or felt any truth through, all against the wide wake of her many other open wounds, carried in behest against the deeper aspirations she’d not allowed herself to see, covered up in rash expressions of bitter blame and shapeless longing, so well concealed from even herself it gave no pause. She can’t begin to think of what her age is, then, nor her name, how she had begun this day or any other. There’s so much space here that isn’t hers; so much she could feel and never see but held so close; as if the mirror is a conduit of sorts, connecting phases without regard for time or light, any instant in all existence laced together in the same shot. If only she could find the language in her brain beyond the throbbing of its cells, or could locate some clear connection within all her past and future impressions of her pain, flowing over and within her not as a strobe or pulse but one long mute, without horizon, beyond the blank between herself and any other unremembered, unto now.
I had pressed myself into so many lives, realities, she hears herself thinking, through the mirror, that to know that none of them was as much mine as I had once believed was to accept my own annihilation, within which what I was when I was where I was when I was who to whoever else I wasn’t was as much me as the rest of the shape of everywhere I’d never seen; so much the same as any in their own life—including you, whoever you are, the same you who in no time yourself will no longer be: not even zilch, a void, but what exists only once it’s all at once been made undone.
* * *
—
The ground seems not only just beneath her, then, but the same on all sides, as if there are not many directions filling out the darkness, but only one spread encrypted all throughout. She can’t remember then quite which way to reach to brace her shape and maintain hold on where she is. The space within the dark falls in around her, its runny silt up to her ankles, then her knees, forcing her back down each time as she tries again to rise, and more so in every motion as she struggles to pry and hold the object of her reflection up above the muck, the shit, the wailing, to go on seeing who she was, what she could want, at once already unable to tell herself apart from her reflection, even in flashes, going under. Soon she can hear nothing but the sound inside her mind, awash in the black churning gush of every possible erasure of our world, the friction between land and object, flesh and spirit, all hours fused together as one long take, never to be split again or carried over, unto at last the only way it ever could have really been.
All time thereafter is a gnarl; no phase left to shape a recognition of itself outside its own best understanding, within which she can see and feel the present instant only spread apart and held in thrall, at once overridden with a further sprawl of possible oncoming coordinates and timelines so prodigious it blinds all further direct vision but in bolts. And now Alice can see as if around each passing second, not the present but the fragmented gaps between: spirals of smashed-in wishing brought on slow as windows never opened; everything not quite done and never since; all buildings ever, burning; the books all burning; the smoke together coiling all throughout it all: the breath of God. All passing seconds felt thereafter only as copies, wherein all copies aren’t a copy but our only true and living fate; what we had once called our ideas, now only made more ours in their discharge, filling the air up without a signal.
0003
“The Persistence of Memory” disappears. “The Last Supper” disappears. “The Tower of Babel” disappears. “Self-Portrait with Two Pupils” disappears. “Self-Portrait as the Allegory of Painting” disappears. “Painting” disappears. “Apollo the Lute Player” disappears. “Bridgewater Madonna” disappears. “Mask” disappears. “The Autobiography of an Embryo” disappears. “The Son of Man” disappears. “Massacre of the Innocents” disappears. “Good News, Bad News” disappears. “Bare Willows and Distant Mountains” disappears. “Master of the Symbolic Execution” disappears. “The Broken Column” disappears. “The Ninth Wave” disappears. “Friendship” disappears. “Portia Wounding Her Thigh” disappears. “Self-Portrait with Bandaged Ear” disappears. “Composition V” disappears. “The Black Painting” disappears. “Black Heart” disappears. “Las Meninas” disappears. “Dance at Le Moulin de la Gallette” disappears. “Along the River During the Qingming Festival” disappears. “Femme Assise dans un Jardin” disap
pears. “A Mother I Remember” disappears. “Saturn Devouring One of His Children” disappears. “Dustheads” disappears. “The Dream” disappears. “Flag” disappears. “Masterpiece” disappears. “Pictorial Quilt 1898” disappears. “Silver Car Crash (Double Disaster)” disappears. “Triptych, 1976” disappears. “Infinity (Infinity Seascape)” disappears. “Bull” disappears. “Bird in Space” disappears. “White Cockatoo: Number 24A” disappears. “Target with Plaster Casts” disappears. “The Liver Is the Cock’s Comb” disappears. “Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I” disappears. “Woman with Crossed Arms” disappears. “Young Lady on a Red Sofa” disappears. “Diana and Actaeon” disappears. “Mahishasura” disappears. “Liberty Leading the People” disappears. “Oedipus and the Sphinx” disappears. “The Raft of the Medusa” disappears. “Krishna and Radha” disappears. “Death of the Virgin” disappears. “The Third of May 1808” disappears. “Louis XVI” disappears. “Girl at a Window” disappears. “The Snail” disappears. “The Fighting Temeraire” disappears. “Adam and Eve” disappears. “The Ambassadors” disappears. “The Lady of Shalott” disappears. “Veil” disappears. “Slicer” disappears. “Electric Prisms” disappears. “Bird Cloud” disappears. “The Encounter” disappears. “The Great Wave off Kanagawa” disappears. “The Migration Series” disappears. “Metamorphosis of Narcissus” disappears. “Crucifixion” disappears. “The First Part of the Return from Parnassus” disappears. “Still Life with Checked Tablecloth” disappears. “The Teacher” disappears. “Untitled” disappears. “Untitled [No. 25]” disappears. “The Dinner Party” disappears. “Stretch” disappears. “The Reader” disappears. “Cindy” disappears. “Aberration #8” disappears. “Sappho” disappears. “Buddha Footprint” disappears. “The Flower Carrier” disappears. “Pine Forest” disappears. “Ashes to Ashes” disappears. “Cultural Gothic” disappears. “Pink Panther” disappears. “Purple Octagonal” disappears. “Sweetie” disappears. “The Small Morning” disappears. “Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963–1995” disappears. “Nature Unveiling Herself to Science” disappears. “Tête” disappears. “Head of Apollo” disappears. “Head” disappears. “The Sower” disappears. “Sorrow” disappears. “Future” disappears. “Crowd” disappears. “Entrada” disappears. “Christ” disappears. “Human Machine” disappears. “Prop” disappears. “For the Love of God” disappears. “Spirit of the Night” disappears. “Sunflowers” disappears.
And so on and on like that then.
* * *
—
The world is calm. Its light is see-through.
Alice feels her body rushing up then from out of where she had last been and into now, full of something like panic on the cusp of blacking out, wanting no part of what could have ever come before.
She finds she is sitting in a very small white room; the dimensions are the same as the last space, with the mirror, which she does not actively remember beyond an impression, displaced in time; nor can she recognize where she is or where she’s been. And yet she feels no panic in not knowing, as on the edges of waking: to imagine the past seems the same as imagining the future, or the present, any difference all a whorl; as if the edges of the room are also the edges of her experience; as if the world has just begun with her beginning.
There is a bed, a sink, a toilet, a door. A TV stands installed into the wall across from the bed, turned to no channel; only a white glow, matching the walls. Her hair is long, unwashed, mangy with age. She is wearing a white jumpsuit, marked with a number: 98,100,001,844. And, on her right wrist, a tattoo:
She doesn’t feel surprised to see the marks, though she can’t remember when or how she had received them. Nothing feels so different from how it always had, an aggregate of alike days repeating in the absence of so much of her memory beyond certain hot spots, flashes of an existence so far away it seems like someone else’s. No way to know how long has passed in this condition except by the nauseous soreness in her gut, her heavy limbs unsure of what to do in any second; no other day forever but through this one.
* * *
—
Alice stands. Her legs feel strange beneath her; not weak, but slightly off, a moment’s delay between her impulse and its corresponding motion; the joints run stiff, not quite all there. She half expects to collapse, and to see herself in freefall before it happens, her vision somehow several seconds just ahead inside her head, comprised in thoughts that do not completely feel like hers, words that come on like lines of script more than live action.
She experiences her body calmly moving across the room to touch the door. Its frame is as wide as her shoulders’ span and high as her head, as if custom-made for her to fit. The door, of course, she already knows, is locked; has been for some time, maybe forever. Through a small panel she can see out into the hall beyond. There’s nothing there from her perspective but another wall, of the same white as those on her side, seeming almost near enough to touch if she could only reach out through the partition, break the plane.
Instead, she touches her own face. The flesh feels fake, frigid beneath its semi-malleable outer lining, numbed to the impression of her own contact on the outside. Where she should see her own reflection in the glass of the door’s viewing panel she does not appear there; the grain’s all glare, obscuring any central aspect.
She can still understand how it had felt before to feel—though something’s missing between her understanding of what she’d been and what she’d come from, who and how she still must be, despite the lack of active definition; the only difference this time being how she doesn’t miss at all what she has lost. Instead its absence provides strange relief, a covering over of a covering over, as if there had never really been another place to be.
* * *
—
The cell door opens from the outside. Once it does, all prior supposition of what might be or had been in her dissolves, becomes another dislocated feeling.
Alice is sitting on her mattress. She can’t remember having returned to the position. Nor can she remember having ever stood. The kind of air that seems to curl in through the open door is the only mind the room has.
A man in a pressed blue uniform appears. He ducks his skull beneath the transom so as not to bump it, though he has already been injured, apparently, as he’s moving with a limp, his poor posture making him seem shorter, smaller than he actually must be. He’s carrying a tray that bears a glass of thick gray liquid, which he comes to place at Alice’s feet, keeping his eyes down from her, not a word.
The man waits while she studies the glass’s contents, poking at its surface, sniffing its edge to find no smell. She is unsure at first what she is meant to do with it: Eat it? Clean her body? Rinse her eyes? Queries seethe against the lining of her skull like wire mesh, pulsing through the flesh around her eyes, but no words emerge to break her silence, more so the longer that she can’t. Where to begin even? she wonders, not for the first time. What does it even matter when and where am I, or why and who? Everywhere within her where she might once have felt the urge to resist her bonds, her captivity, she feels instead a lurching feeling, like hunger laced with nausea, in the same stew. Already her body seems to know what it wants from her: She takes down the whole glass of gray liquid in one go. The stuff has no taste at all, she finds, despite its oily texture; it seems to spread out inside her like wallpaper melting, coating her linings with warm slur.
When she is finished, the man takes the empty glass and tray again and gives her a cloth to wipe her face. He then turns back, eyes still averted, and approaches the screen set in the wall, upon which he summons a command screen and enters a passcode, bringing the interface alive. Alice can’t stay with him long enough to read his maneuvers in the software, selecting options from stacked menus scrolling open into more, until eventually the blank screen shifts into a peal of calibrating static, then a printed title card on a white screen: ALICE KNOTT, Exhibit A.
The man turns to leave then, saying nothin
g. As the cell door closes again between them, Alice hears the tumblers scraping in the locks, like lobes of gravel ground together.
The recording, following its title, shows Alice seen from above and behind, standing in a room with bright blank walls, much like her cell but wider, full of daylight. It is clearly her, she sees; she recognizes the clothes she’s wearing as the same she’d worn so many days, like a personal uniform, the arch of her own posture distinct to her from out of hundreds despite having seen herself outside herself only on film. Those are the shapes of the veins that run along her arms, she sees; there is the mole on her neck that sometimes grew so sore she couldn’t sleep; those are the earrings she took off her mother just days before her death, to wear herself thereafter. The only difference she can tell between herself and her depiction is her age, equally indeterminate on both ends, as if her life had spanned so long a time it no longer sticks in any given state.
It takes another moment, though, before she identifies the space on the screen as that of the memorial exhibition for the dead artist, whose name she can no longer recall—however long ago it had been—except for how in the film here, unlike the empty breadth of her remembrance, there are many other people packed in, both in the current chamber and in those beyond, on either side. As she recalls there had been nothing hanging there but on the one wall of framed pictures of her family, but here there are works of varying size and disposition all throughout, many bearing images of wholly different persons and locations, abstract smears, none of whom seem familiar to Alice now at all. Many of the exhibits in the very next room even appear to be A/V presentations, like this one Alice is watching, shown through large screens that fill each spectator’s face with diffuse glow.
