Sky Saw

by Butler, Blake

  1180 felt mostly calmer after suckling just one packet of the chemic mayonnaise. She experienced feelings of vast euphoria, self worth and creativity, as well as a warm flush feeling through her linings. It tasted like sucking on a baby doll but it was easy. Several hours without imbibing caused withdrawal, the inverse symptoms of which included ranting, loss of wisdom, megalomania, frothy discharge from the ears.

  1180 tried to keep herself in hunger as long as possible but most days she gave in quick—she could feel the hole growing inside her, a round hole lined with even wider teeth.

  1180 saw by the large panel LCD clock that had been installed in her forearm that it was time to go downstairs. Everyday from 1 to 4 was MANDATORY SPONSORED INTERMISSION, a practice the state had instituted in the house for several weekends in the months before the presence of the present child. Each home or house in the local area had been installed with safety stairwell bunkers for a cost absorbed in the aggregate war effort—the war against the long black dogs—the war against the books that had not yet been read—the war against the war against the prisms installed in our ribcages—the war against Kentucky’s buried growling—the war against anyone named John. Each war went on regardless of when it ended or began, and should be feared beyond the fear of fearing any other dead idea.

  The INTERMISSION method was intended to increase tranquility, introspection and to avoid the most common hours of disease—the air panes ripping, helicopters dropping from the sky, spokes of bugs forced through the air vents, paper growing legs and standing up, none of which she’d felt the sound or tremor of an inch of, though this was entirely the point—and but mostly during that time, when they had shared it, 1180 and 811 cowered in the practice position invented and taught wide by the state. 811 would cover his head and babble in a pretend female voice. 1180 kept asking that he repeat what he said louder so she could understand, but 811 would only close his eyes and bleat.

  1180 could not remember anything at all or else about 811 ever near her in his life beyond the rich reeking of shit thickening in his pants in various terror, goosey spillage writhing down in long lines for the stairwell where 811 hid and begged against the nothing that had come. And 1180 loved this man regardless. In the night asleep she said his other name.

  The safety stairwell, as far as they’d found, led to nowhere. It went on and on into the plastic of the earth. The air seemed sticky and filled with mirrors. Just before he disappeared, 811 had claimed to have continued down and down until he’d found a little coffee shop that sold cold crumpets, but 1180 knew this was a sham—he’d only meant to set her mind at ease. In his time, at times, for some lengths, he had been so thoughtful of her, such a man.

  In her own time with the stairwell alone, for all her walking, the mother had developed muscles all throughout her—tremendous calves in which she could see her sheen of beef having seemed to develop the same contoured expressions as a face. Even now, in the mandate’s remission, she still practiced the practice each afternoon at the learned time, though mostly she waited until the child fell sleeping, as the intermission stairwell’s deformed and deforming air did not seem something he or she should breathe.

  During the year of nonstop rains, before the burning, the stairs had flooded up a pool inside it some flights down, which in the night—the mother did not know this—the father once had tried to swim down into it. He’d seen a glowing in the depths there, some kind of light sometimes as if from reflective metal money, sometimes as if from one large blinking pupil. He had not been able to swim down far enough—his small lungs red as if to ripping—the pressure in his head like large hands—he’d given up.

  1180 had not told 811 she’d used the water in the stairwell to wash their laundry, and her body—she’d had no choice—nothing was coming through the home’s pipes to their rooms, none to wipe the baby clean or mix with liquor. The stairwell water seemed like any other water for the most part, though it was so cold and somehow slick, and sometimes she felt sure she could feel it staying specific through her holes, not mixing with the other liquids of her body, private rivers. So many things they kept from one another without a reason.

  Some days 1180 would come to sit by the water’s lip and read. She read mostly instruction manuals for dead appliances and convoluted diagrams of local zoning, as there were no other words these days created—too many were too defeated, and all remaining paper had all been reserved by assholes for phonebooks, receipts and bills. The moan of the minor ocean contained inside their building made her calm, gave her somewhere to escape the flux of massive sunlight that 811 had to walk into every morning to get paid—employed, as were most men before it’d been abandoned, to build the Universal Roof. It was hard work. He came home each day covered in blood, little smear marks around his eyes where he’d kept crying to keep his cheeks clean so he could see. It made the father weary and irritable, hard to love.

  In her small evenings by the strange water there, the mother had seen people held under the surface—flattened faces with no eyes, or with more eyes than one should want to have, or in the place of eyes, advertisements—they were in there, underwater but alive. She saw men with tongues so long that they could lick themselves in several pleasure places—she saw lardy machines of vast dimension like no object of this air—she saw whole hotels or office buildings of other bodies coming rising from the bottom, men in every window making gestures, women writhing on the beds behind them, surrounded by machines. They could see her through the surface, clawing at it. She could hear their bloating in the night.

  The mother breathed. Something on the stairwell now seemed to row the air around her, as if shifting. The walls seemed closer than she last remembered, the faces of the steps much thinner.

  Behind her eyes were also stairwells, which also led to something gone.

  The mother fumbled down along the stairwell reeling, feeling at any moment ready to go toppling headfirst, though somehow keeping her posture aimed in weird momentum by dragging her arms out beside her in a thin X on the air.

  At some point the walls became so close together there was no space at all between them, and yet she walked.

  The mother went down and down. The surface of the air seemed to suck around her. She found herself head-on, faster and farther. She could not stop her body coming with it. She opened and her eyes and closed her eyes and opened them and watch the pattern of the texture change: like the language in the book she read the child would, the same symbols in her lids. Without seeing, she went farther down along the stairwell than she’d ever before been—past the bit of wall on which she had meant to mark her future child’s arriving height—past the bit of wall that’d crumbled open and through which she could not see, but could reach her arm up to the elbow—past the low water mark even, where the water had once sat still and teeming, waiting for its next fit of rising—she felt nothing. She went so deep beyond the house there was no air—the dark around her held together chalky, ashen. She could no longer measure her impression of her descending of the stairs. She slipped and twisted in the darkness but there seemed no context to it, no dimension—as if she’d woken up inside a pillow full of dust, the grain clung in her throat and whites of eyes. She fought to find a ledge or other landing to the space there while in the dark she sunk straight down—not quite free falling, but growing lower, ground in amongst sand. She felt it chewing at her knees and cheeks together. She opened her mouth to call out for someone—who?—and in the dry dump her cheeks bloomed empty with fat pits. The gums inside her ate the language. She could feel her shoulders ripping up. Her fingernails seemed to pull out from their sleeves. It pulled all through her.

  The mother vomited a bird. First there was one bird, then there were many, their tremble rummaged up her middle, from her throat. They scratched her cheeks and pore meat with their clawing, her O-hole stretched wide as it could go. Enormous birds, she saw, as white as nowhere, thrushed with feathers matted in a gel. They kept coming up out of her in a chain, all gushing and
aflutter—silent—each one imprinted all through and through their gristle with a word, one word for each all written in their linings and down the contours of their suits, the word and word again all densely textured, though the mother could not read the words as they emerged—she could not make out the letters or what about them, or their presence there at all. Each bird’s word was its own word for it alone, though all their screeching came out of them the same, brief and lame and hellish.

  Once emerged, the birds stayed thick around her rushing, flapping fat, their gross warped wings beating at her body, pulling her back up out from the fold. She felt their enmassed cluck-caw on her eardrums and their blown motion somehow muffled into one continuous barrage, their note-stung tendons pulsing at her hot as if after some way through her body there back in, finding none—altogether in their presence wanting someone other than she was.

  The sky above the house began to blink—the tone surrounding as it stuttered as something again soft inside it came apart and lathered down on us in waves—old fires burning still in all the houses and phantoms fucking—the air all written full of what any evening left alone must do and always would.

  Somewhere elsewhere hours or days later, she could not tell and did not think to try to, Person 1180 found herself inside a box. There held a long low light like the kind of light along a longer hallway, someone in a far room glowing with TV. Her skin was so thin that she was see-through, held inside her, her organs putty colored and dented in. Her blood curled through the corridors like tangled instruments between. There was language cut into the box above the mother’s face. She could not read. She had no idea how long she’d been inside the box, or how the box was any different from any hour held before or coming after. She could not remember her number or anything about any room. There was a rumble spinning through the flat panes. At some points, through glass, the mother saw some of the men who’d filled her up, or who she had seen inside their eyes how they had meant to. Some of the men were holding infants, and those were eating. What were they eating? Some of the men were exactly her. Each time she closed her eyes the box was still right there, its darkness burning.

  Person 811 moved toward the polished wall. Tucked in the far corner there, under a small sheath of black protective plastic that burned his hand, he found a panel that instead of showing outward, opened in. Through the panel, he could see a bulging naked woman standing in another house. She was pretty, he thought, beyond the lesions. She was …

  Person 811 stood with one hand spread at the glass panel over the woman, stroking with his thumb and his ring finger the raspy spread of where her body breathed. The woman’s eyes were closed and kept on closing—innumerable lids. Her gut was stacking up at each new instant with fat in fat like pyramids. An ageless dark rouged through her shape tracing her veins. His tips ached where he could not remember before that he’d touched her, and not the other way around. Other men before him had left their mark there on the glass from the same rubbing, though the father could not smell them or defer—he could only taste the itch of it.

  Against the screen he laid his head and heard the shrieking.

  Before I was born inside the mother I slept inside the wound for 37 years

  There was a spot between the gloss and sill where I would settle in and suck the dust

  My mother’s hull had many doors wedged in her knees and neck, her belly

  You could slit the locks with one wet thought

  I could not count the other women hid among the mother though they filled me turn by turn with sight

  For a while I was the women too: I had husbands, blisters, monthly blood of those I had not nurtured

  I had bumps all across my scalp, one for each of whom I’d wanted or would awake in wanting soon

  I was the child

  I as well often was the mother and the father, though they did not have my hands

  Nor did I want what hands I had been given

  When I slept I dreamt only ever of the Cone

  The years went on like that for years

  Sometimes what a year was would change in midst of counting

  A month would pass and it’d been a week

  An hour did it’s thing and it’d been twenty

  The space of air outside my mother often filled with dogs

  Or it would fill with larvae or with flowers

  Some days other men or sounds of men

  Inch by inch I watched the years that were not years sludge along under motor oil and ash

  What white of wide machines among me scratching rooms and windows into all my eyes

  Our hole of god

  I heard the evenings counting down

  What had been and always be had not yet happened

  Inside the house my mother hung long reams of paper, which rats would rip down to use for dens

  There were the walls we had repainted

  One fresh coat for every layer of our flesh

  For weeks while we were sleeping the skin would become costumes, helmets, rings on fingers, fat sacs, gloves and gowns, by lengths destroyed, unveiled

  In these guises we would walk around and feel the world

  Inside the fold I learned to read by staring at an afghan my mother’s mother hemmed from old clothes in her rivulets of sweat

  The grunt of something peeling

  Dadmeat

  Money

  I was already very old

  I learned to write by pinching gristle in the cortex of my face to kill the instant as it happened

  For each face I held for hours some nights there were several other faces I would feel behind the one I knew is mine

  I did an eating in me

  I shat me out again

  I made out of my shit another chest

  I made my skull inside the mother

  I called it me

  Then I forgot

  I learned to read again the new tongues by counting money where it was placed against our frame

  We were laid upon white tables

  My mom and I and anybody else at all I had not ruined

  I learned to laugh by buying land

  The land outside my forming body was named by hours full of light

  I loved this light’s age, from this distance

  I did not need another way

  I had just only pieced together my cerebrum and the gorehouses of my wanting one night when in the blood someone reached and took me by my arm

  My joint slipped from its socket

  The arm inside my arm went numb

  Among me on the air my mother screamed as if she’d hit her head against some low ceiling

  As if what was coming out was not how she’d expected or intended

  And what was all this white foam

  Why the putty on her nostrils

  In the color of the Cone

  It had always been this way already

  I did not want to come out of her either

  I was miles long and so was she

  I knew all of what had been done in the Cone’s name and in my name by me and all the other men, where a man is also any woman, any summer, any inch

  I did not want to see the me who I’d already been always awaiting

  What one of me I’d let touch and rub my buttons in the middle of my grossness

  I tried to use my nails, full grown already, to claw my way back to where I’d hid

  Her soft tunnels streaked with rip and all those rooms there

  It did not work

  At least at last I left my itch imprinted on her insides, a gluey stamp on our last life

  When I came out fully finally I found my mother held inside an axis above the floor

  Her gut still hung fat once I had emerged as with me in it

  All the bruises on her face

  We did not touch

  There was an air there cogitating

  It is like this even now

  Even now, I mean, there is still something here about the gleam about me I do no
t like

  And still again

  One thing about my birthing fingers is they came equipped with rings

  No gems, just bands of plastic

  When I make them spin they burn

  My veins bulged as if hiding something solid in them

  Look out the window

  Who is there

  Who is it inside me I can’t quite feel

  As when my mother eats a sandwich—no bread no butter—dust

  I can’t keep myself from snatching at it, after more growth

  I can’t restrain the tremor in my life

  My even longer nails now making marks to match the ones set inside her

  Sets in sets of parallels unsized

  My mother in the evenings walks room to room with her eyes closed, a necklace painted on her neck, a blistered dictionary

  This house runs in all directions from itself

  I can feel the walls tug in the kitchen, all air so stung with thinking, neon white

  The night cut brighter now than wherever you are

  And the dawns are even worse

  I do not want to go on making more of me in my own mind