Alice Knott

by Blake Butler

  Like how it felt once being underwater as a child, trying to hold her breath so long she had no breath left, and so had to breathe off something deeper, something else; where if she could only break her will and stay under just a bit longer, the realms of life and death would touch, she knew, move through her brain; and yet each time, as she had tried to drown herself so often, something in her anatomy had forced her up and out against her will. How the air would flood into her lungs again like fire, filling her body whether she wanted it or not. And still the world would feel no different having kept her among the living; she would no less know how to go on, to shape a hope. She had never found a way to discern between reality and desire, or even to remember which was which.

  The mob of doubles appears to actually fear her, lurking and gawking like captured animals, waiting for her to disappear so that they might take her place—as they had with her true father, so she understands then, in a blink. Each face was activated only as a stand-in, desperate for connection back into the battery of its assigned role, more like a cursor than a person.

  They regard her blankly, unable to act without command.

  Alice finds she can no longer feel her flesh either; or rather at last she can’t see what any inch of her is for, how she could go on being anything her own under such pressure, in the long, blown glow of the telescoping room, wherein still further bodies continue their ongoing onslaught of arrival, loud as an airport or a mall, through more doors than seem possible, swarming in around her and her nearest counterpart, still known in her ongoing register as Smith. When she turns to him for a reaction, some explanation, she finds he has begun to come apart: clusters of pigment foaming over where his outer façade won’t hold together, with no real flesh or blood beneath the buzzing edges of his meat; all made only even hazier with her acknowledgment, as if where he is he really isn’t.

  Alice feels her own experience as if it’s being collected and assessed. Her skin and sense all rubbery and buzzing, as every passing stab at making new memory becomes zapped upon contact, shattered to fragments no sooner than it appends its presence to the record of all time; and so again like that, every instant, so fast it’s like it only really happens once, undoing any perceived familiarity on sight. The other bodies no longer seem to comprise what at first they appeared to embody in correlation to her person; the air itself between them takes on the texture of another mirror, encrypting bit by bit, until it has transformed the shape of where they are into a surface wider and deeper than the cumulative reflective light of all other mirrors, their surfaces melted down to form a single plane beyond the shape of this or any room; higher even than the sky, as we knew it ever, against a form of ground no longer ground, a form of flesh no longer aware.

  How nothing ever felt the way she remembered until after she stopped being able to remember it at all, and then could never find a way to see it as it had been, amid the continuous threat of any second not actually continuing on into the next; how time might somehow not line up right in some small, unarticulated way and then veer off and not return, leaving her standing in a single, repeating day forever, someone else’s, like one of countless colors of wire that fed back to the TV. How her father would close whatever book each time either one of them stepped into the room, foreclosing access to his marks in the margins, leaving her to access them through only her own imagination, none of it in any language she could identify, composed as if in commentary to itself, as if he had been the only author and only reader in the same flesh.

  Amid such fractured recollections, Alice can sense that the prior persons living in her are hanging on only by coincidence, shadows of performances once new, now left adrift, searching through her for something undeniably true: not for an exit but for even deeper hold on what she needs, mashed together like vomit under mud, transforming their own meaning even as they shudder briefly once more into the spotlight of her imagination, felt still in the unseen wake of the massive image of the twin women before her. The surface of that image seems to glow, now, with an ineluctable incandescence, like miles of open sunlight filling in over the mass transmission of all else the world might want, seeming to grow only stronger, brighter, the more the remaining world spread out before them comes apart. She can hear their vibrant silence in her still, where her pulse had once been, her only voice, above the fray; no longer needing language or intention to apply their power to any fate, no threat or commandment to alter any divide between reality and will. They seem able to take hold in each partition of her as it loosens, slips apart, ripping up the archived climes inside her as their own, revealing underneath the surface of her person not flesh or bone, but something like a band of singing voices louder than all other input, embodying the idea of seeing, thinking, wanting, each as an extension of their eternal domain. For all this, the painting is but another mirror, a flimsy mask designed to draw her closer to what remained inhuman about the human: no longer God but God’s marked absence, the wreck of logic and desire, the muddled fray of all we’d sworn over our faith in sight unseen, thereafter no longer granted harbor in our own mind’s life but rather in shame. It’s like the sound of everything she’d ever wished to say all at once; every word she’d wanted more than anything to command into meaning, bound up again in something never intended to be her own.

  The sound—that is, their sound—will not stop rolling on, then, amid the mangling banging of her body crowded in so tight with all the others she can’t feel; with all their output she takes in all words she had been hoarding in her mind in an attempt to maintain sanity, to carry on. The parts of her present conception that she’d tried to hide for her and her alone now pushed into public access, no space for understanding in between. Suddenly she’s shrieking, then, so hard it hurts; the sound is so prolonged in its effect that it takes a lifetime to push a breath out, every inch, and in such a way that once she’s started letting it all out she can’t stop, her malformed expression blasting out in lathering rapids across whatever else there might be to see, wiping out the world like an eraser in deluge, such that what remains thereafter in the wake of anywhere she looks or wants to is nothing more than bloated light, a bright and empty endless smoke spanning all sense of structure, order, information.

  * * *

  —

  With her hands fumbling before her, then, feeling for surface within the living scene as it had last been, Alice turns. She faces Smith—his disrupted form hardly now more than crud and digits—and feels the fissure in her rushing up redoubled to override him, an overwhelming feeling of authority as simulated among the living even more complete in her control; as if at last there had been no other way that she could be, filled from end to end with centuries of shapeless screaming. It felt more now like majesty than pain, like a new purpose; or, rather, a purpose finally divulged after suffering so long in her own body, even if she finds no word within her quite to claim it, name its value. The flood of her vision shatters into his impression, his person at once rendered to bumps; all the lifelong fissures in his identity, his ideas, unbound upon direct contact with the power flowing through her, overriding; his flesh come apart as easily as any canvas, any page, the fluttering particles at once swallowed up and incorporated into the surrounding silver shine. Where any spirit might have once hidden somewhere inside him, she sees, the man is all but rub and bubble, nothing there to cling to in remand; and so too then, as Alice reads it, the loosened verve of the divulged man floods through her, its last impression dissolving everything about their location held between the pixels: everywhere there had ever been another person in any scene; any sense of definition without deception; any life and its desires-made-demands. The room at once around her runs together like putty, some kind of fledgling clay that won’t meld or move no matter how she shudders, slips, finding no sure traction in the muddle, so far and wide apart it has nothing left to give, no architecture, as all the rest comes caving in around and throughout her. She feels a fire throttling through her fiber, dragging at her cor
e, her intuition—all of it, at last—splitting open within her, until suddenly it’s not only the sound and light of centuries of pain that’s pouring through and through her, but all that she is: her blood, her love; the possibility of her presence interwoven with the marrow of words ever enlisted to describe to no one who she was, why she is here. Her body feels tugged taut to split, her sternum overwhelmed, not like a wound but like a sea, because she wants this, now more than anything: to see the world turned inside out, the air made smaller and thinner than all the walls in this space folding over and over on themselves, inverting their values. An older, sicker silence rushes through her—not only her, but every possibility of ever being; the mud of everything she ever was or dreamed of yet becoming gush from the imprint of her fate, gaining in nature, unto erasure, shaking her whole life loose to let it all through, all right now, until she needs more and more bandwidth to keep running. And so from her nostrils then and from her eardrums; from the tips of her fingers, busted of nailbeds, and the outline of her prints; from the lines along her palms and every pore, from her nipples and hair’s ends and her navel, her vagina and her asshole; her beliefs; anywhere there’s a hole or not a hole, all of it wanting at once in and out so badly, as if the very act of its excision creates only more yet in its wake. The stinging, clinging crud is all there is, all over the ground and unfurling fast and hot across the floor, gushing down the walls over the endless doors onto the absences of anybody else claimed to have existed, of past and future, none distinguishable from one another any longer but as more of the same grist, the grinding walls and long-clogged outlets of anywhere she can remember ever having been—or understood even only as a figment of her imagination—now opened and worn away. The wet, wide drive of every impossible world pours out from who she was, but also from the descending sky above, all of space, until it is dissolved in the elapsing contour of all proffered identity, until there’s nowhere left for anything but the idea that at last here is an act that might last forever. As she tries to turn to see across the everlasting, crashing absence where all she’d once conceived had been her own, she finds the grade of space itself turns with her too, locked to her contour; she can discern at once the hidden line between what had once been and what remains, its cold equator showing exactly how and why the space had held together long as it already had. She’d needed to arrive here, she senses, not only to recognize it, but to see on through, beyond any idea of how it is now, unwinding and dissolving back into itself like ambient magma, split apart and redoubled so often that her participation in her own experience is no longer required; no frame for any sight and nowhere else left to be mapped; wherein so long as any light might wish to kindle, there’s not a body or a structure or even land yet left to absorb it, only latent lobes that rise and then recede without demand; all space, all hours, rounded out in the same signal, no claim beyond the missing lay of open space under the only looming logo where a sun might once have reigned above us, simple and radiant:

  Between the blinding bars within her mind, Alice can almost quite see out, homing in on the negation like a viewfinder at a glass eye. She can distinguish what appears to be her body, as it remains now, spread out beneath her, on her back, aged and naked, bearing scars; as if every bruise and wound she’d ever suffered, in all her prior hours, has been returned unhealed, set into place, the skin between each so thin and faded she can nearly see through her own self, then her reflection.

  Her face is interlaced with wires, she understands then, tracing the air beneath her back to where her sight begins. Metallic tubing laces her perimeter at access points installed into her person, leading off into the walls and what behind. A bit has been fit in her jaw; she can taste its tangy metal between her teeth and in her brain too; can feel sharp flat heads scanning just beneath the inseam of her cerebrum, scraping, inserting. It doesn’t hurt—or rather, she knows it does hurt, but not in a way that she can feel; nor can she remember how it ever felt to feel regardless; the light had always been like this, each room just like this, embedded floor to ceiling with a shining, depthless glow, like needing a mirror to see sunlight.

  Amid the glut, as Alice sifts, appears the semblance of a face; an anonymous composite of impressions sourced from all the other faces she’s ever seen, pressed together beyond any central semblance: a slur of pupils, nostrils, cheeks, hair; then, from those, lips around a mouth, teeth, a tongue, all of it at once so far away and still so near it’s hard to know exactly how or where to aim the eyes.

  The child looked so much like myself, Alice thinks, as if reading from plates carried lifelong somewhere inside her, to be accessed only now. Or so much like someone I remembered and could not identify, myself a stranger, as if even I had forgotten how I was.

  And yet for all the ways she feels the face resembles hers, she also knows it could not be: the eras of their flesh are different, their formal definitions, what either wanted, what they are. These other eyes, so much like hers, held gore and order together, each definition epochs older than the rest of all there is, older than any other person who’d ever lived, and here before her filled up with incarnate texture much like gray, but graver, deeper, radiating.

  The child forces a familiar smile, as if he can hear Alice thinking or already knows the story. The metal braces on his teeth are glinting silver, their metal chrome same as the tubing lacing Alice’s flesh. Any other light inside the space cuts back whatever else might wish to look too long into it, and only more so as it might try to turn away.

  The child’s gaze spread out among my thoughts, my life, my fire, wedging into any open weakness in how I was. It crowded in around my mind, surrounding any dream or idea I’d hidden and did not even know, what I thought or felt or any else I’d ever been; all the hell and hope that I’d absorbed in prior time and could no longer distinguish from any else. Soon then I could recognize myself forgetting there could have ever been a place for who I was, that I might have ever thought back on some passed day and found myself there, still elapsing.

  * * *

  —

  “You don’t remember,” the child states, its voice cutting at once through all other impression. The face’s lips don’t seem to need to move to make the question, nor does its expression ripple, yet Alice can hear the message just as clear; it feels like screws intruding in her linings, searching out her weakest points. The very presence of the speaking nudges open innumerable old sores, faintly detectable against the larger gnawing of her nature, held within her all entwined and interlocked. Alice feels as if there is nothing left within her that isn’t the child’s too, a common logic hanging over their shattered landscape of mutual memory.

  Rooms where we’d stood together in no daylight, waiting for any other person to appear; how we always felt we were alone even in company; how nothing stuck but all the games we invented to pass time, like the one where the ground was lava and if you touched it you would disintegrate to nothing. Sometimes whole weeks would go by before the world revealed itself again as interactive, anywhere that we could touch. How we would take turns staying up late to watch the moon glow against darkness, in fear that if it went on too long unprotected it would fall out of the sky, which always ended in us each hard and fast asleep by morning, neither knowing what had happened in between, a state that soon became the only way we ever walked.

  Each prompted memory unclasps another, like layers peeling off inside their common mind, none of which Alice really feels she recognizes upon contact and just as quickly can’t deny. They seem all that remains to her, despite the sinking feeling of something slipping, simulated: parts of her perception rendered missing, left unlabeled; every hour in just some small way incomplete, regardless of how discreetly any user might wish to feed it faith.

  “Of course I remember, Richard,” Alice answers finally, her voice calm and clear, filling in over all else she might remember. “You are my blood. My brother. How could I not?” Where she’d felt the urge then to let the text out, she finds nothing
underneath to follow; its meaning seems to peel off, feeding back into the face’s expectant fiber, making it clearer with every dislocated surge. Soon the face is beaming brightly, fleshing its form out, showing its mouthful of vile teeth, hundreds of them, lining his throat and windpipe, each reflecting a nearly once-familiar world.

  The stairwell in the house you’d found that led down to a checkered floor, which seemed to extend so far in all directions it had to be so much larger than the house; how you would get lost on it, you and he together, in the dim musk of all lost time, holding hands until you found your way back to somewhere real, thereafter traced for months, for years, under the sneaking suspicion that the world that you’d returned to wasn’t ours, but had replaced one nearly like it, a fear that could be allayed only by your brother’s ongoing persistence, his infectious calm. How the hands of your father, when you found him, in whatever version of your house this world contained, always seemed so large, so numb, fumbling to hold anything; how loud any signal had to be to make it through; thus the shaking, screaming din of the shows he would watch with you and Richard both so young there in the room, wrought with nauseating light, the volume up so loud you couldn’t hear your own mind, allowing no thoughts of your own outside those provided by the screen; and somewhere, within that, held even nearer, the unremitting texture of your brother’s voice, louder and clearer than all the rest, even your own feeling, right underneath you. How he had begun to seem to be able to read your thought, to know what you most wanted, how you were, what you feared and how it grew, no matter how completely you tried to hide inside it, like right now.