by Blake Butler
I loved the composition of the silence. I had gone nowhere. I closed my eyes. It was so black in there, it wasn’t even black. It was like a room with countless mirrors and all the lights turned on and aimed into them now so bright the colors come alive and eat into your face into your brain into a black so black it begins to seem that you are actually alive and that each instant you have lived has not only brought you to where you are now but has in bringing brought us all.
The body of the masseuse believed she lived unending, struck in the temple with the blow of the fist at the moment incanting in her head the wish for replication of self beyond the moment of making, pushing through herself the idea she could in god’s name go on forever if the wish grew strong enough and in her in the biblical sense of aging to ages in the high hundreds for centuries of waiting speaking being closer still to god. The function of bone through flesh through flesh on bone again knocked the color of the thought into her whole hard whitely, masking up in blood as salad dressing barfs its way through sinky murk. Curls of the thought lashed upon corridors of cells the brain wished to carry on inside of and struck there paused as by machine she could live inside her and go on and live inside her and go on with the teeth of the child she would never bear masked in the fat around her gut unmoving in the want of search of semen to impregnate the cycle of the moon’s egg she’d been desisting upon with pills in cycled practice since the blood first poured from the white cup in her heart undying and sometimes out in such force upon the padding in the seat cushions of the sofas she would fall asleep on before the TV with the blue glow of no screened communication between other machines glowing the room into a womb for her to wait in god’s name to wait for god to become god’s last and needing bride she believed to bring the son again to earth to lash the son here to the earth as had the book said but in the magic of distinctive pronouncement through her body rather than fluttering from sky; she would be the Mother of the gift of revelation to the choirs and vans and towering buildings of the city in her century she swore while the pill kept out the wet of the other father sacrificing as well something in his whole life to become closer to her in the spirit of the animalian wish for god he swore off screaming over the mashed potatoes and frozen pizza at the dinner table each night that god had forgotten and would not come again and not into this house and not for any and the sky would burn in fire for the moon before a jesus of the nature scrolled upon in ancient books would be again given to us as a people for we were people crushed into infinite recursion on a model of shitstorm centuries and rapefuck, he screamed, he screamed blue in the face, he screamed with both fists raised above the dinner table, though she knew, the masseuse, her hands worked in the fields of flesh that came unto her in the glove of night to be worked of stress of daily nattering and basking and drinking and heaving and working, as she hamslammed out the passion of her waiting for the Father above the father to come into her and come all through her and fill her with the sand of the child of the centuries who would take her human father and gnash him teeth by teeth before the animals in an example of the screech of fornication without promise without gift in the stroke of ego of making as he had, a child, and as he had, words outside the word of god, and the song of god would pour out from her in the birthing as the night strobed against her with its silence and unknowing, a human song so innate it could be heard in any singing they had given all these years, all these recordings, all the chewing of the food, it could be heard in every body and only by every body all at once for it was in the people that the song flew and only the song of god compared and she knew this had to come only by their killing, their bodies struck wide open in the daylight at their own hands knowing what was wider than the sky already in the back of their heads as they could not sleep or thought they could in the beds where ticks and sweat eons curdled in the coils of springs and rubber they forked down money for so as to not sleep close to the earth, as inside there too the sound, and the sound forever in the dead years everlasting until it did not at all and could not go on in the face of the fists of children beating teeth from their parents in the name of a word that seemed like someone else but yes was god and god was the sound and the song and the flesh and the killing and the name and the word and the buildings and skin of us and the life of us and the speech and the typing and the fingers up the holes and the holes itself and the nothing itself and the waiting and the want and the rapefuck yes too that was god too how could it not be she would squeal with the wet still pouring out of her inside the hour waiting and the wet then pouring out of her inside a light as the men yes came in his image yes to denude her before the horses they had ridden up on in the image of the ancient book to scream her name in the name of all their names at once together laughing and she would not look away she could see even in the human fecal fuckforce of the big blue cock of the incubating aimless fury stretching the murderers’ faces as they peeled her open ripped her wider did her in, rubbing hot froth and endless gnashing in the hole where the god would come into her and make the seedling this was god now yes this was god he was going to burst, and the men did too, and they took turns, and the come was washing out, and it was god’s come, it had to be god’s come, and so inside her the child, and so she would die, and so she would live forever on in the making of the child frozen in the bloodstream passion altar and you could see it in her eyes and you could see it in the archmeat where after having raped and burst her womb and scratched her lenses the men had dug into the flesh with their white swords and in the flesh they’d found her backbone curved from stooping in the house of man these years in waiting and they had pulled the backbone out and looked upon it in the bloodbath and the wishing under the color of the sunning eye.
* * *
FLOOD: In these elapsed eyes now I could hear nothing, grinding on nothing, louder than life.
The body of the actor had been strewn across the land. His organs were removed one by one from his body and not tasted for fear of what has gathered through years of being shot by cameras and then through the cities on the air, the replications of his image sent through homes and wires and on discs and drives and printed onto paper and surfaces and dimensions and printed onto cells in such syndicated aggregation there is no center and no star. The actor’s spleen has been placed into a small glass cage and displayed under synthetic yellow light, prodded at by mushy fingers in the waiting space of a long hall now destroyed. The actor’s gallbladder has been spread thin and refashioned into a garment draped around the surrounding landscape of his birthplace as far as it could cover, which is not far. The actor’s ureters and the fleshy sacs attached thereto have been placed into the sockets of the eyes of another well-known actor with exciting teeth and medium-sized cock; the configuration is shot on digital video and edited with seven tracks of varying cartoon music, symphony, black metal, banjo, then uploaded to a file-sharing server under the name of a once-popular teen heartthrob mp3 anthem machine, spreading in the final hours of the American breathing conglomerate a facefucking of the beloved by the beloved. The actor’s lungs have been rendered into cream and smeared across the long bow of one of several dozen high white crosses done up in the center of a field, where many several other hundred had been done in matching fashion in the name of pleasure. The actor’s pancreas was placed plainly on a white breakfast table with blue flowers and a blank ream of white paper. The actor’s rectum ejects prayer. The actor’s eye turned inward in the skull socket to face what for years had clawed behind it dying.
The body of the artist lay half buried with her face and right fist under moss. The skin along her back has been removed, replacing the stretch between her shoulder blades where before there’d been a tattoo of a blue tree. The mother’s fingernails are pink, done fresh for her attendance of the wedding of her sister to a man she’d never met. She believed in the love of the two people despite knowing nothing of them, even her sister; so many years had passed between their taking turns combing each other’s hair under the white blanket in the field pr
etending to be nowhere near their home. She’d not been able to go sleep out there in the field that night, hearing the moving tubers in the ground, the oncoming piddled rush of liquid between dirt somewhere beneath them. She watched her sister’s face croon in its sleep. Of all the days, that would be the one she most remembered, despite whatever else of her own life: the coming of the child; the spheres of sky forever counted in endless days unrepeating for form and color despite the constancy of their return; the fission of any word. Her child, before he had been ended in his own rite, had murdered forty-seven bodies, in the service, with a baton. Her face pressed in the soil left fully naked to the white sun overhead sees nothing beyond the mush upon the stone.
The body of the surgeon has sewn her whole self shut. With a thread colored in the same hue as her hair she rendered seamless her eyeholes, nostrils, mouth. Her ears have been tucked over and sewn to crude pods that seem to want to bloom. Her asshole and vagina have been sealed. Here, in distension, a kind of gathering of released fluids has swollen her abdomen and belly bubbly with something opened up inside of her. The crude gash strikes of the stitching have in some places caused in operation further gash holes that then she therefore had to seal again, working fevered, seeing several of herself. She would not be entered. She would not exit. She would exist without form, she wished. With the same hands prior, she’d sewn shut both her daughter and her son, whose heights against the back door of the bedroom where she’d locked them in to hide them from the world show they had both grown several inches in the past year, shooting up toward some wished distance only remaining between their temples and the sky.
The bodies of the seventeen young pregnant mothers were all hung in a birch tree by their hair. Their clothes have been removed to show the rounding of their bellies, arranged in order from the flattest to the most ready to burst. The mothers’ eyelids have been removed to match the clothes. Around their foreheads, crowns of wire pulled from machines in neon colors pink yellow blue gray maroon gold. The mothers’ gristle groaning ham stench. The names of each child are stitched inside the bellies, all the same name, with red thread above their navels, the end and beginning of the thread continuing from where it ends emerging from each mother’s skin unto the body before and after in the round, forming a circuit without power.
The body of the child is glimmer white. He was not old enough yet to have seen a horse or held an egg. Along the inside of the flap of meat where the chest has been slid open, a series of impressions in the folding appear to mimic a crude language scribbled with a heated iron bit. Had he grown to age thirty-seven the child would have cured the common cold. He would have lived without a wife or child and learned to cook from a machine. He would have loved his life. In the wormhole of the air not gone forward through by his flesh in propagation there is a ridge formed to the light, into which a ream of seeing might sink and become butter and make the grease from which would rise another hour vibrating hard and fast against where right now, seated in your room reading, your body waits, in seeing. This could be said of any day.
The body of this member of the congregation was clawed apart like trash.
The body of this Boy Scout was peeled neatly and hung as shades for windows in a house.
The body of this daughter was struck from a large distance apart by something unseen.
The body of this beggar held up longer than most would under the knives.
The body of this butcher began to masturbate just before it could expire, desperate to feel anything again before it couldn’t.
The body of this body had already been reduced in life to an immobile thing, unconscious, shitting itself alone in rooms it could not tell from food or laundry.
The body of this author was brought to an end in exactly the manner he’d described after completing writing a fictional description of his own death.
The body of the reader felt itself still reading. Miles and miles of lines like this in no imagination or remorse.
The bodies free of their bliss and wind and wonder.
Bodies piling up or disappearing into weather or digestion or being compacted by machines brought online to do the work of humans or ripped apart by birds caught in the bloodlust of the human spirit replicating to reenact its own demise in repetition.
Bodies called to give their color to the night, in soil ecstatic with our blood without us, human mud becoming sucked into the fundament.
Here is the body of the long old spirit beaten holey by heads of hammers in the hands of children thrown to dust and screeching in their bloodstreams and wanting nothing more than the end of the sun brought on forever blanketing the ground in nowhere.
Here is a skull against which light would purr and stroke its sound out in echo of the banging bone on bone filling the hour slick enough to not remember.
Here is the body of whoever.
* * *
FLOOD: The light was bending back against itself, accelerating. It kept opening before me, like a tunnel inside-out, leaving less of me to see there with each impression. Or this was happening again and had never happened. Or the brain would shrivel inside the endless air of all our time blown wide. Or I am a map of all the days we have not spent and never will be spent. Or I am right here in a way I can’t even operate, some kind of god inside a god. What would be the difference in any of these definitions. How could it not be always all of them at once.
Alone with each face along the flesh mosaic in all directions I spent an eternity called a life. Each life in this manner passed in the duration it would have liked to, which ranged from no seconds to the end of the end, and beyond the end of the end for some. I aged accordingly for each person by gaining one darker dot along my outline’s lip or chin or arm, a flux of pigment I could not feel the ages aggregating in me, even with thousands gathered, as with the passing complexion of my skin so passed the remembrance of the condition it had held just prior to the current state, therefore maintaining my fragile balance in the harbor of being forever at the present stitch in skin oncoming in the skin. A version of who I’d been the year before this condition had approached perhaps had felt or could feel the brush of what would come to pass soon in the world against his nape and called it wind or premonition. And so.
The world around me writhed beyond its posture. Even clear as I felt now, I’d yet to realize where the mask of who we were once grew thinner with every passing stroke, shedding every wish into the mud into the dirt sinking beneath me all around while through my sight I tried to carry on my way.
The memory of our blood rained through and through upon the light beyond all seeing. And the blood lapped at the faces turning to sand again beneath my feet. And the day was silent without solitude. I was no longer anyone, like you. I had nowhere to be and nothing to speak for. I stood among the dead and was surrounded and I could not breathe, and I was breathing and my eyes stung and the wind was hot and still and the my mind was cold, and I wanted only to feel nearer to the ground, nearer to anybody I’d not known among the nothing covered over, and into the soft sod of mush selves I knelt and spread out and lay down, and as I closed my eyes my eyes stayed open.
Tonight or now was any destination. All points within me touched all points. The map of day was gnawing in my chest, the book of every person.
My skin was three hundred million measures long. I was so obese, wrapped into a small torso and series of appendages humming with eternity, while overhead the pumping conglomerates of black fission squirted in silence through discolor. This same sky had been above us every hour, absorbing our image into pigment, into our only voice.
I was breathing, yes, but it was not air, and hair was growing and I was hungry, but for nothing. My ears were stuffed full with old sound I always remembered and now could not count, its absence overlaid into the system of the image over which I had no control. Or it was like I had a choice but had no choice.
Behind the flattened light, the curve of all our space looked on. I could feel the compression of the dead in
every beam no matter how blank. Their dreams in absence of individual mobility rasped whiter than white was when I understood what white was. Every idea of god in them cloaked as pale-eyed as the heavens.
My heart was full of every history anyone had believed we’d all be carried on in.
* * *
FLOOD: The breadth beyond death opened inside me. I was walking on the face of the narration of the light. I could see the shape of the earth beneath my vision spinning the land to show its several faces caved in one place, though each face looked the same. There was a light rind of skin growing over all things, over any recognition, every thought. I heard my own idea of right now explode out through the back hatch of my head. The sound came in all down around me. I felt someone take me by the hand.
Through the dark of the breath of dead in me, our exhausted phantom history rose. It already knew it would not survive itself and did not wish to. It had nothing else to speak, no grace beyond a final iteration flashed into the gap between what had been and what would become. Against my mind it beat the blue of purple from the black of gold and laughed and lay down through and through me as layers on the layers being granulated for a lens with which to let the light queue into and derivate its shafts consumed in shafts reconsecrated upon the corridor of possible lives. This book of all our lives had already been written in our death upon the page of landscapes where the organisms burned and woke in whorls laid on the fingers where the book had been before and would be again: in resin sunned the fingers in our fingers fucked the fingers we had thought most ours and spread them white upon the beaches in the blood among us and let them bake regurgitated in low coils to call the fish and phantom schools up from the wet of which we’d been robbed and relocated in the curd mold of the waves steered by the moon to know what anyone would look at anytime thus leaving the star as plain as any day among the days where water rose and fell and rose again and fell again and was the water in our bodies and our mouths and lubes and liquors’ lubes and baby fodder and so on unseen before the beaches’ sand the bodies walked on upon the bodies right before the eyes as eyes would turn in swarm of looking fast into the shadow laid upon us ever shifting as if meaning to reanimate the leather from the bead but only ever making glass, only ever thickening the soles with which the bodies meandered and curved and saw what they had done in the images of what they could not see that they had done swelling and negating as the moon pulled back and forth upon the skin of it and lap of it where even animals could swim and sink and live and shit and eat their shit again and go on in silent provocation as in the image of a bed on which we lay and waited to be entered or forgiven or at least allowed to close the eyes and walk again into the image the machines kept stealing as we tried again to burn it through the folding layers as we tried to get the word as only it could be forever on inside itself the word falsed into shapes of other words wrapped and beating each other’s asses in commiseration that really did on occasion make us weep on knees or asses or backs beneath the ceiling beneath the sky silently branded with the wished images in any mind blown raining each in collaboration like symbols in the sky as lost as night and forced in our tongues to go on these undone years in other guise as we had as had our children as we would inside those books in myths called characters in films in machines again called actors in songs called sound. As the myths and sounds became our history, a white dust upward through which the emissions could emit and names could go on bouncing in trauma paths around the mansion of the ideas set on the air and moaned again drawing us in them as our blood begat our blood, even having crashed the dream of murder hard against a stupid tree grown out of food the blood poured strong and silent like a pirate through the cities without our bodies even there and as the silence laughed it knew our murder would be as paltry as another disc, as any verb, as any casual human opening a paper in no sunlight while the machines glowed and wives or husbands crawled along the floor praying in the temple of memory to be jacked off forever in the name of marriage and wishing hard to be a pustule on the dark part of totality, the blue of bedrooms crusting over with the sons and daughters also praying in the same words and the papers glowing with the promise and the making and in the cell the singers ever ringing all their teeth out through their eyes.
