There Is No Year - Blake Butler [54]
Hello, he said aloud and heard the words come out all from him, and heard it also in the box repeated back. Hello.
Oh, he said, realizing. Oh.
He peered up toward his car. The windshield had fogged over so thick he could see no longer in. Something hulked behind the shading. Heads. He felt his eyes move in his head to see the sky above him, flat clean black.
This box was warm. The father knocked. He heard the knock as well repeated, two sounds from one move.
My name is . . . the father said, then waited, to hear the voice inside the box fill the sentence in, but it did not. Instead, an itch dragging up along his inseam, a spark of choir. My name is . . .
The father threw up on the ground. In the vomit, there were errors—strings not vomit, but language, light. The bunched up bits were writing something, words at once sunk into the ground.
The father’s hair was longer now. He could not feel it.
The father walked around the box. He brushed his hands along the surface, after something—ridges, locks, or doors. At the corner, between where the highway’s edges held the box in at its side, there was a little aisle of space where he could sidle down along the box’s left flank, pressed in. He could not see from here how long the box went on. It seemed to stretch forever down the way, as if the whole highway from this point and thereafter were seated with it, hosting. A light far beyond it gave it size.
The father hesitated at the box corner, not quite blinking, then he began along the box. His belly rubbed. His backbone. Inseams. Friction. The grain of the box, unlike the concrete median, was soft but firm—both wanting and somehow giving.
On the north side of the highway, there behind him, the father felt an audience, all watched. The median between them dragged against his back’s tagged body fat. What if the box grew larger, all of a sudden? He would be crushed.
Inside his chest, he heard applause.
Inside the box, as he squeezed sideways, onward, inside the box, too, he heard the brush of flesh on box.
Father? the father asked it.
This time from inside the box came no reply.
SOFT!
Somewhere sometime along the box shape, the father found a divot in its face—a small nudged spot where the flat black surface interrupted and gave the father’s body space to stand. Looking from the divot back along from where he’d come, the father could no longer see the box’s end, where he’d left the car alive and running—and still there, the other way, the box continued on—the same dimension stretching both ways out there from this divot, shaped distinctly in his size.
Above, the sky was shuddering with light. Day soon again already, the father thought, and felt the box sway, the ground beneath him skinny, pale.
The father turned to face toward the box. Black and flat, twice as high as he was, hard to tell when there was no light where box ended and sky began. There in the grain of it, some language. The father leaned his head close up to read. Instead the words were little pictures—the father standing in the house, the father coughing, the father holding a hammer toward a door. In each picture, the father appeared so much clearer, tighter. The father tried to turn away. As he did, inside each image, the other fathers turned first, and then he himself could not. He closed his eyes.
Overhead the light was gone again, hid behind lids. A flesh or floor or wall behind the father moved around him, sealed him in—the box around him eating the air up—the same blank sort of air that filled his house’s vents—washing in around his knees.
AIR
Among the black space of the box, now turning softer, now gone cushy, streaming, the father, aging, wormed. He could not tell at all where he was going. Every inch matched every inch.