There Is No Year - Blake Butler [50]
Along the streets in all directions a slow, thick rain raining in rising from the earth into the sky.
Inside his car the father felt an awful feeling there was something breathing besides him. Something right there on the backseat, strapped in, needing, shaped like him. He could not bring himself to peek. Through the windshield in his car out in the street among the houses in the light the father watched the car continue forward, scrolling, returning where he’d been again already—no sound—the years inside him itching, eating, and, outside, the years upon him soon to come.
INFINITE REFLECTION
In the night the son stood in the bedroom as the sun outside was coming down. Its orb slid from the sky in staggered increments, leaving a slight residue behind in slur, and where it began. The face of the sun itself was ragged and discolored, swimming—a humming hole impenetrable to eye. The way the light came through the window made the bedroom slow, the glass reflective, holding night out and inside in.
Parallel to there, just at his second side, the son had set the mirror on the air. He posed his body at an angle catching himself there in the two quick flattened planes reflected back and forth between the glass and glass a billion times, his body, each with mouth and skin and headholes replicated till there were more of him than he could stand. All of him crowded in and shouting: a maze of sons under no sun. Bruised skin in a relief map. Buttons.
There was someone other also in there, the son saw—slipped in the instance, between versions of he and he. Someone waiting, of a nothing. It had a black tongue. It had so much hair. It held a bell.
The son stuck his fingers in his eyes, color exploding. He could not see, though he could hear—the rummage in the glass, a muffled speech, his billioned skins peeling. The bending bow of glass sent out to kiss his head on both sides, in the pull. A sudden warm air hit the room—a pocket—squashing where his chest was, up his lungs. New words. Pistons. Popping. The son burst out and made no sound. He felt the many move into him.
The son, between the mirrors, fell.
When he could stand again, in the bedroom, the son closed the blind inside the room and took the mirror and wrapped it several times inside a sheet. He set the shrouded mirror in his closet with the reflective face turned toward the wall.
LOOK AGAIN
In the room below the son’s room the windows had gone tinted. The son had taken the video game console and put it in the trash compactor but it would not break. He’d put the mirror in the compactor and it had shattered, but when he went back upstairs there it was again.
The son stripped nude and got in bed, the wood frame groaning. He ran his fingers along his bruises. The skin there rumpled, rain-run, discolored, something beneath. The son chewed on the divots in his forearm: piano noise. He could taste it coming off in sheeting. His legs would not stay still. His brain would not go quiet. What if he’d been born several seconds later? What if he’d been born under another name? What if on the thirty-fifth day the mother was pregnant the mother had shone a flashlight down her throat; or read the Bible backward; or heard some certain song; or pressed her cheek against a saw?
The son’s flesh rolled between his small hands, doughy. He felt something spark between his teeth and there inside them. A little liquid dripped down from his ears. He heard a whirring in his stomach like garage doors. The whole room seemed to squeeze. The son was tired. He was talking to himself. The room seemed to flutter in his eyelids, eyes behind them. The walls would lean or move. The carpet grew long. There was a boulder rolling above the bed. There were eyes on every surface. There was someone in the mattress.
The son saw the bedroom door come open. The door moved forward on its hinges just a crack. The son closed his eyes, pretending. He heard someone