There Is No Year - Blake Butler [5]
For dinner they ordered pizza and it arrived a little late and the pizza guy refused to take their money though he did accept a small tip and the pizza was still warm and even more delicious since they’d had that extra time to let their stomachs think. Instead of TV or closing themselves in their individual rooms the way most nights went, they sat around the table long after dinner and talked about things that made them glad or things they wanted to become in the future or things about themselves and one another that they liked. They found themselves saying things that they wanted, things they did not know they wanted—the mother candles, the son a black pen, the father a new pair of working gloves—and therefore felt the bloom of some new direction.
They went to bed together, all at once, without discussing, and they didn’t feel the need to lock their doors. They fell asleep quickly without thinking and their dreams were full of bliss or magic, some kind of wondrous unfamiliar which in the coming days of daylight would itch and itch against their lives.
ROOM OF HAIR
The father spent coming weekends painting over the walls of several rooms. At move-in the house’s walls had been all a shade of blue so blue it appeared black. In certain rooms the walls had been augmented with intricate designs and tiny lines of texts, though these as well were rendered in the same blue and thus could not be seen. The paint the father swathed over the old paint hid the old paint from the eye. The father’s body groaned with all his reaching. The wall’s length often seemed to grow. The father would paint and paint and paint and still have hardly painted anything at all.
In the evenings now before his sleeping the father walked for hours through the house—room to room to room there, seeing. The house seemed larger than it was. Many rooms were long and had no windows. Firetraps, they might be called. Other rooms had shelves or holes or seating built right into the body of the house. Doors with odd knobs. Patterned carpet. Bulbs in certain lamps he’d need would burst. Sometimes the father liked to leave the lights off from one room to another, fumbling for something, bumping his shoulder or kneecap on something hidden, hard. At doorways he would flick the light on half a second, burst the room bright, then in the returning dark try to negotiate the space by mirror in his mind. In certain rooms the father found it hard at all to breathe.
One room on the second floor had a dumbwaiter which would whine along its string, and when pulled rose to somewhere overhead, straight up. There was nothing above the second floor as far as the father knew, except the roof, the sky, the light. One night the father placed an empty water glass into the dumbwaiter. He closed the small door and pulled the pulley. He waited long enough to smoke a cigarette then he brought the box back down. The glass had been turned on its side. The rim felt wet. The father put an orange inside and brought it up and brought it down and found the orange had lost its color. The father wrote a note on a piece of paper—WHO IS IN THERE—and brought it up and brought it down and found the paper rendered blank. The father was too large to fit into the dumbwaiter himself. The father bought a padlock.
Off the house’s longest hallway, the father found a room the realtor had not shown the father—a room also not on the father’s copy of the blueprints, a room so small the father could hardly fit inside—this room was stuffed with hair. Wispy black hair, the kind a cat sheds, though it didn’t smell like cat. The father found himself pressing his head into the hair, breathing,