There Is No Year - Blake Butler [22]
The mother did see, though, how the son now had long brown streaks worked under his eyes—so brown they looked like makeup. She rubbed one with her thumb and made a smudge. The son looked like a tiny warrior, or a linebacker. The son’s eyes were whirling, as had the gulls.
Hey, the son said, staring at her. Hey. Hey. Hey. Hey. Hey. Hey. Hey. Hey. Hey.
The mother clasped her grass-green hands.
THE MOST FREQUENTLY PLAYED SONG ON THE SON’S COMPUTER BEFORE THE SON ERASED THE CONTENTS OF THE HARD DRIVE AND BURNED IT AND BURIED THE COMPUTER IN THE WOODS
1. _________ (197136 plays). This song’s title appeared in the son’s iTunes browser as a trail of mangled digits or a blur. The son could not view the details of the track. When the son tried to click the track to play it, iTunes would crash and often so would the computer. He did not know how the song had gotten onto his machine. Sometimes the son was able to mouseover the title when rolling in from certain angles and the album art would appear in the bottom corner of the iTunes browser. The album’s artwork appeared to be the face of a man obscured by several kinds of light, though the son could never see the image long enough to be certain of the features, or the flesh. The song’s play count rose week after week, despite the son never hearing, and continued when the son turned the computer asleep or off. In this way this song covered the son’s whole life, up to a point. Sometimes unplugged, the computer’s encasement would discolor or spin or flake or walk. The son could not bring himself to delete this song.
INCOMING
The next time the father went to get the mail he found the whole box fat with caterpillars. They spilled out as he pulled the lid down. They were curled and brightly hued, some in a webbing. Some had hair as long as half a foot and fat as someone’s finger. Some wore yellow and some wore orange, some wore gold or green and black or silver, messed in spindles, mounds. Some were a color the father could not think of the name of, though somehow it reminded him of a stretch of land for sale somewhere in Nebraska. The father had never been to Nebraska. The critters fell and wiggled on the concrete. There were hundreds of them stuffed inside the mailbox. There was no room for the mail.
The father went to the garage and got a cup and bucket and went back and used the cup to scoop the caterpillars out. He didn’t want to touch them with his fingers—he didn’t like that. Crawling. He didn’t want to kill them either. The father had heard stories of men becoming things in other lives—how when you are reborn you could come as any other. You could come back as a wall. The father imagined his father there in the mailbox now, spackled, wet with wriggling, and his father’s father, and father’s father’s father, on from there. The father imagined all the prior men in his dead family there in the mailbox waiting for him, destined. This was some kind of delivery.
In careful scoops the father took the caterpillars from the mailbox and when he’d filled the bucket up he carried them away. He went off behind the house and through the forest following a wire until he got to some small exact place, in the mud. He dumped the bucket in a pile of colored moss or mold that’d grown up in this location, groggy bloom. The caterpillars (fathers) squirmed and squirted. Many slunk or screamed along the ground. Some submerged headfirst down into the dirt, building tunnels, which the father had never seen a caterpillar do, down and down into the earth. Then silence.
The father went back to the mailbox and filled the bucket up again. He hadn’t thought there’d be enough caterpillars to fill the bucket twice. But the caterpillars filled the second bucket and a third and fourth and once again. He carried each load to the same place, the ground there darkening