There Is No Year - Blake Butler [30]
The man touched the mother on the arm. Certain of the man’s fingers were very cold—as if they’d been in an ice chest somewhere, years—while others in the same grip were crispy, warm. The mother did not recoil from the strange touch. He looked into the mother’s eyes. His pupils resembled little stickers, the kind placed on placards when art is sold.
The man spoke toward the mother’s skull. He said his wife needed, now, please, to use the bathroom. The woman, behind her veil, looked straight ahead.
The mother tried to say something and then could not and felt embarrassed again, rushed, and so nodded and followed the man out of the smallest room inside her home into a slightly larger room inside her home. The mother and the man together turned around and saw the woman still there in the son’s bathroom, standing staring at them, arms tight at her side.
Outside the room the man stepped up and pushed the door closed. He turned back to the mother, smiled.
The mother heard the woman turn the lock.
BEEP PROBE
Outside the bathroom, partitioned cleanly, the man and the mother stood spaced feet apart. The mother thought to say something but could not think of what or how. The man stood with his hands clasped in front of him and turned to look at the wallpaper. He leaned his head near to the wall. The mother watched him watch. His gaze was rigid and unblinking, staring straight on into surface. He seemed to be reading something. The mother moved to look as well. The wallpaper was a deep purple with deep purple ridges and tiny buttons in relief. The ridges’ texture was rather soothing. The mother felt her body limp a little. The skin around her eyes grew moist.
She was not crying, not exactly.
The man was radiating heat. He had the smell of grass about his breadth, strong arms like the man who’d fixed the mower—and like that man, this man, too, was gorgeous, if with a rash upon his cheek. A sudden stink of slit grass and motor rubbings made the mother’s body lump. She started to ask something, blushing, but her mouth was closed and time had passed.
Behind them, in the bathroom, the other woman made a sound. A shrill, quick beep, a mouth noise, as if emulating some alarm, or some detector. There was a kind of pitter-patter. Then breaking glass, and wood against wood. A light showed underneath the door’s lip. The woman’s ever-moaning, saying words. The beep continued, high and awful, rerepeated, each iteration slightly shifting, until, in the mother’s ears, the noise became to have a frame—began to take a shape of language there around it. The beeping, at her head, became a name. The son’s name. Son’s name. Beeping. The woman making, again and again there, the title of her child. The word she’d placed on him from nowhere, that had occurred as lesion in her sleep. The woman screamed the name into the walls among the houselight, in the smallest of all rooms, curdling the air. Beeping. Beeping. Name. Name. Name. Name. The mother felt the blood inside her turning hard. And just as quick, the name becoming something other: becoming ways she could not recognize—the utter shifting off from where it’d held him and slipping therein off into a struggling string. Not a name but something troubled. Reaching. Burble. The scream so loud by now it shook the house.
The hair along the mother’s arms was singing. She closed her eyes and swallowed in the sound. Then, just as quick again, there was no sounding. Silence—or something so loud or strung out there was nothing to be heard. The house as still