There Is No Year - Blake Butler [47]
The mother went back into the house and washed the floors again. She washed the floors again. She washed the floors until she could crawl upon them. Until she could lick and kiss and laugh and feel fine in this house clean of all others. She could somehow hear the mirror, upstairs, shaking.
Yes yes yes, the mother said, rolling. Yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes.
Now with the momentum really in her, gassed and ticking, the mother drove to the grocery down the street and bought as much cleaning product as she could carry. All the prices seemed very high. She watched the items scan across an electronic neon zapper by a young man who would not open his mouth or blink his eyes. The young man had a photograph in his pocket, folded halfway fourteen times, a picture of himself contorted in a position that made his body seem to not be there. The mother handed this young man her cash. He looked, too, like the young father, though the mother could not remember who that was.
Back at home the mother took the son out on the battered lawn to sit and gather sun. She’d called again to keep the child home, nearer to her, needing. The mother felt determined. Her insides goggled, warm with war. There was nothing about the house she’d leave to fester any longer. The mother wrapped a clean dry cloth around her face and forehead, leaving room only for her eyes. She patrolled the house wielding one can after another, spraying every surface, every inch. She wiped and foamed and sprayed and swished and swum and wiped. She cleaned the walls, the floors (again), the blades of fans, the blades of knives and other utensils, the countertops, air vents, knobs and handles, baseboards, corners, nooks, books (she thumbed through pages), closets, clasps, curtains, windows, boxes, things inside boxes, crumbs in cracks. She stood on stools on chairs on tiptoes and splashed the ceiling down. Her body sizzled lightly. Her fingers tingled from how they weren’t getting enough blood.
Outside the house took on an aura. The chemic stink pillowed out for blocks. The mother went out and strapped the son’s face with its own mask. She still felt she had not done enough. She felt impulsive. She went back through the house, now walking backward. She began to take certain things against her chest. She smashed ceramic heirloom plates. She took the street numbers off the house. She called the phone company and had their number changed. She took the bed linens and pillows into the backyard and burned them. She burned the picture of the man and of the father at the party. She burned some clothing. She burned a sofa. She burned the relics of the son’s condition. It was time. The past. The after. The mother felt she had been foolish. Caught up. She burned the plaster cast of the son’s chest and his sick drawings and his thermometers, his night-light. She burned any inch that had held ill.
The mother thought of other things to do. In the half-light of the bugged sun, the mother went through the woods wielding a steak knife, in search of the place she’d hid the copy son but she could not find him among all else. She dragged the winter lid onto the pool.
The mother’s mind designed itself.
By the end of early evening, the house felt mostly new. If not new, clean. If not clean, better. If not better, something. The mother snuck one of the father’s cigarettes from underneath his pillow. She went behind the house to smoke it, watching the son from around the corner of the house. The light over the house seemed like something funneled through a tarp. The air was thick and rather fat. The son was smiling. He had strange teeth—chalked and spattered with flecks of diseased color. The son might never kiss a woman. The son did not like to kiss regardless. The mother stroked her arm a little. The mother dragged the last ash from the cig and tabbed