There Is No Year - Blake Butler [11]
This package was not likely from the mother’s mother, as this year she was underground.
This package fit the exact shape of the mailbox. It was black and weighed more than it looked like it should, and yet the son could lift.
The son didn’t think too much about it. He had his mind cluttered with other things, like how at school no one would come near him and how when he went into certain rooms he gave off smoke and how ceilings always seemed just above his head. Even the teachers went on calling him the wrong name—sometimes the mother’s name, sometimes the mother’s mother’s. Sometimes the son’s name came out as silence, just these moving lips. Other names they used could be found inscribed on plaques and trophies in the glass box at the front of the school, with photos of students left from long ago. They were mostly ugly. It was a very, very old school.
The son took the package out of the mailbox and carried it into the house under his arm. He went up to his room without speaking to anyone—to tell his mother how the new shoes they’d bought over the weekend were now melting in the soles. Even if the son had gone searching, even if he’d felt ecstatic with new bright news, the son would have found no one in the house. They’d all gone off somewhere, maybe. Or they were hiding. Or something else.
Had someone been around to see the son come in, perhaps, they might have stopped him, touched his hand. What’s in that package, they might have said. Let’s make it open. You are so young to receive mail. Instead the son went into her room and closed the door and locked it and turned around and set down the package and took off his clothes and faced the wall.
THE SON’S BOOK
The son was writing a book. The son did not realize he was writing the book because most of the time while he was writing he was asleep or not paying attention or in the mindset of doing other things. Some nights the son would believe he was playing putt-putt in the backyard with the plastic golf set his father had bought to try to get him interested in sports, but the son was actually writing the book. The son would think he was languid in front of the television watching some kind of program about trucks or swords, designed to ensnare young boys’ attention, but the son was actually writing the book. The son had also mistaken himself for eating dinner, painting pasta, laughing, and brushing his teeth while he was actually sitting in his closet with the door shut and his fingers typing into a very small computer he didn’t know he had.
The computer’s keyboard did not have markings. The light gushed from its screen so bright it would for hours make the son not see. He could not see the words he’d already written as he wrote them, not even inside him. Nothing. His eyes spun in his head.
The words he typed weren’t words. Or, more so, the words had more words in them, collapsing, like flame laid into flame. The words inside the words kept the son from sleeping, even while sleeping.
While all awake, when the son tried to write, any pen refused to release ink. Any pencils he found inside the house would be unsharpened or would break their tips or bend. By the time the son had found something else to write with—rock on concrete, chocolate syrup, mud or blood—he could no longer hear the words inside him, and out came small other words instead: HELLO. HELLO. HELLO. HELLO. Sometimes he could not move his hands or arms or teeth or eyes at all.
BOOK
The son’s book contained all things.
The son’s book enmeshed the threads of all events or lights or hours that had ever happened or would happen, or were happening right now.
The son’s book contained the sound of wing meat contained in birds once thought extinct, and that meat’s aging, worn to none—
it contained a diagram of long forgotten burned or buried cities and how to enter through their last remaining eyes, how to stay there in that belowground and, of new duration, live—
it contained sonogram photography of the man who in coming years would invent the thing that ruined