There Is No Year - Blake Butler [49]
The son stopped pressing buttons for a minute and looked at the screen. The son felt frustrated. He felt something click inside his boredom. The son pressed a series of many buttons into the control pad with his thumbs. He pressed the buttons in an order that was not intentional but still came out of him himself.
The sequence formed by the son’s button pressing caused a small black square across the screen. The black square covered over a certain section of the long room’s pixelated ceiling, around which the other pixels went slurred and glitchy. The son’s current score appeared deformed, though he could still read the last six digits, all still zeroes.
Something in the room around the son released an air. The figure representing the son inside the game went locked. No matter what buttons the son would press now the figure would not respond. The son pressed more buttons, feeling angry. He rapped his knuckles on the screen. Inside, briefly, he heard something knocking back. The TV began to hum. The screen felt warm—too warm. The son was looking at the figure. Above, the square spread rapidly across the screen, aiming to cover over all. The son saw the figure begin to wriggle. The figure turned his head toward the son. The figure was looking at the son now most directly and there was something written in his eyes—something carried in the figure all those hours—carried over in every replicated instance of his entire life
Inside the game the music paused out, nowhere. The figure’s mouth fell open, in an O.
Along the bottom of the screen, a scrolling text, each instance beeping:
Help
Help
Help
Help
Help
Help
Help
SURROUND
In his car along the street among the houses in the light—something shaking where the sun was—some complex hole—the father could not remember how to get to home. He was supposed to be already back at his desk now for the next day, for more staring. He could not even feel the wheel.
He sent an email from his cell phone to his superior, a man he’d never seen or heard or known by name:
To Whom It May Concern:
Sick. Sorry. Soon.
Yours,
A reply came back in several seconds.
To Whom It Does Concern:
You snide shit. I’m getting groggy. I am becoming an exploder and you are nearby. I have sleds in my sheep barn—barn, barn, house, your house. Got it? Suck one. Suck good. And bring an extra arm.
Best,
Somewhere now out lost in loops around the building—where was the building?—the father could not at all recall even the direction he’d made the car aim in the name of home all those evenings, and those mornings, in reverse—which way to go now in the nowhere that had settled on the air. Today the day was bruisy like a dropped baby and half of the sky seemed stood before, as if by god, or a cardboard cutout of god in god’s absence, wherever he or she or it had gone. The father refused to capitalize the word god even inside his mind, despite how in the night inside his mind when he could not sleep, he prayed. Prayed so loud inside his mind it hurt, it made the house stink, which his wife assumed was indigestion.
Inside the car the father rolled long along the street among the buildings in the light—something shaking where the sun was—he’d already thought all this before. His balding head was pounding. The streets and trees had blanched a white. Where there’d been strip malls somewhere before, billboards, the wet and wire were all covered in a gloss, webbed fat with chrysalis or kite-string—an ever-present mayonnaise. By miles the roads would loop back to where they started, farting the father back