There Is No Year - Blake Butler [43]
The mother walked through the bedroom past the bed into the hallway and stopped. From the doorway in the hall there the mother could see into the son’s room.
The son spread-eagled on the mattress, his hands clasped against his mouth—his thin arms stretched all taut through his pajamas emblazoned with shapes the mother had thought were Mickey Mouse heads when she bought them, though on closer examination she saw the ways the shape wavered from the popular icon into a thing she could not name—and yet she let the son use them for sleep. The son’s torso seemed to have expanded—swollen perhaps, the mother thought first, reeling, with relapse, with new disease—though as she crossed the room she saw how the son had pulled on several layers for protection, as had she that other evening, every sweater that he owned, all ringed and hot and worn and chubby, the outermost sweater showing the son’s name in neon puff-paint like the one the mother often wore, a pair of garments bearing their names, each, which had been given to them both at the same time, some occasion, though the mother could not think of who or what or when.
Around his neck the son had wrapped a scarf. Over his head he had a ski mask. Around his feet he’d wrapped old T-shirts and on his hands he had baseball gloves, one turned the wrong way to fit the thumb. The fabric on the son’s hands and legs was smeared with something runny. The son’s hands clutched a shovel. The son didn’t answer when she shook him. She found dirt nuzzled in his clothes. She stripped him clean layer by layer, like peeling some huge orange. The son was not opening his eyes. The mother said the son’s name—again, again—her voice all flat. The son’s skin was stretched and splotched in spots as it had been most of his sick year—a year now carried in the mother’s flesh memory as a tiny colored lesion, one polka dot.
This child. This child. This child here. The mother inhaled and touched the son. She touched the son again a different way and said the son’s name and touched her forehead. She spread her arms and said the name and held the son and kissed his fingers and tried to sing the song she’d always sung—a song she’d dreamt up when the son was still inside her, a song she used to calm their blood—though now she could not quite hear it—she could not think of all the words.
IN A DAZE THE SON REMEMBERS THE BLACK PACKAGE HE’D UP TILL NOW IGNORED OR FORGOTTEN OR SOMEHOW JUST NOT SEEN
The son lay in his bed. The mother downstairs, the mother having coaxed the son to waking, having held and wished and prayed above him until the son opened up his eyes.
The son had told the mother about the ants. He said it over and again until finally she’d lifted him up and led him through the house to see how all was well, nothing was there, not a thing, no ants. Not even one. Nor inside him, she said. Never.
Again alone, around the son the air was clear.
Alone the son lay cocked still and looking up, transfixed with something there above him, in his thoughts—breath burnt like scratched black barns in yards of long grass smudged and smoldered—the son crimped and creaming—the son as a thing not in the room but of it—the son as a field of cells—the son—the son’s backbone—the son’s miles of intestine, fat with grease and shit and knitting—
The son stopped thinking for a second and when the breath inside him broke he swung, sat up.
The son heard something near him moving. The lights inside the room were on.
The son moved and put his feet down. He turned around and saw behind him where ants were still there coming right in through the wall—through cracks, in hordes of slow procession from the bathroom to the closet where they’d gather in a mass. The son sneezed. He smiled. The ants. He’d said it. His mother did not know.
The son rose up from his chair and crossed the room.
The son moved into the closet with the ants beneath him and stood and looked among his stuff—the leagues