There Is No Year - Blake Butler [35]
Through the floor the father watched the copy father climb the stairs.
Through the walls the father could hear the copy father breathing in the hall. Heavy, labored breathing. It shook the bed frame and the lamp. It shook the mother in the bed beside him and she was laughing. She sounded high, shook with a shudder in her extra clothing and her fat. The way she breathed in with the copy breathing made him feel hazy, grazing, tired.
The copy father stood outside the master bedroom with his face against the door.
SOMNAMBULIST
In her sleep the mother heard someone at the bedroom door and she stood up out of the bed. The mother walked to the bedroom door and listened. The mother nodded, cracked the door. On the bed behind her the father’s mouth and eyes were open, though he did not blink. The mother saw the father shudder.
The mother left the bedroom and walked down the hall and stairwell and outside. Overhead the night was full. Overhead the night had opened and all throughout it there were words. Words made of skin or spit or coffee. The mother followed one certain sentence through the sky in a straight line. The mother walked on mud and gravel, concrete, glass, and stone. The mother’s feet began to bleed a trail.
The sentence led to the front door of a house. The mother went in through the front door and locked it shut behind her. In the house the lights were off. Black lights, floodlights, stacked in masses. Several billion unburned bulbs. The mother went into another room. She went into another room. In the fifth room there was a glow and someone standing in the corner.
Long white walls.
Sleeping bees.
The mother left the house through a certain window some time later, leaving blood marks on the sill.
The window led into the backyard. The backyard was full of sand. The mother walked into the sand up to her hipbones. The mother folded her flat hands. With the grace of nowhere, the mother tucked her chin against her chest and fell headfirst into the sand.
Inside the sand there was a door. Through the door there was a hallway. There again the mother slept.
INVOCATION—INVITATION
In his room awake now the son sat hunched over her computer typing into a chat box with a 45-year-old man. The 45-year-old man had contacted the son via a social networking website that the son did not know he’d joined. The son and the man had exchanged email addresses and written back and forth for several weeks. The last email from the 45-year-old man in the son’s inbox bore the subject heading RE:RE:RE:RE:RE:RE:RE:RE:RE:RE:RE:RE:RE:RE:RE:RE:RE:RE:hi.
The 45-year-old man said he had a wife and an ex-wife and two kids about the same age as the son. He said he lived nearby.
The son was not aware he was online. The son felt like he was sleeping. He didn’t realize any of the things he’d said to the man in all those emails.
The son had told the 45-year-old man things he’d never thought he’d tell another, things he didn’t even know were true until he typed them, until the words were coming from his hands.
He told the 45-year-old man about the knife he’d stolen from the small store in the mall, and how from there he could not stop himself from stealing knives wherever he went; how he’d taken more than two hundred knives from different places in the past several weeks alone and he had them all there in his closet; knives from restaurants and shops and other homes; straight razors and safety razors and kitchen knives and plastic knives and steak knives and pocketknives and knives emblazoned with special logos and with his own name and Ginsu knives and knives for scraping and knives for fighting and butter knives and butterfly knives and a knife he’d taken out of a blind man’s hand in the street.
The son had told the 45-year-old man about the night he’d taken his father’s car in the sudden idea that he must drive, a sudden image of some warm location appearing at sudden to him with the hottest