There Is No Year - Blake Butler [55]
Into the shape of box surrounding, the father walked into the box.
Every so often he would open up his eyes again slowly, unreleasing, buttons pressing in reverse. Walls around him. Stalls around him. Houses. All mass. Massed. Opening each instant. On in. On.
If there is one hole in any home there must be many, he heard himself shout somewhere inside him.
Outside his skin he heard the night.
SLEEPOVER
Inside the girl’s house, the house seemed endless. The ceiling went too high. The walls were made of stone and cracked in patterns that pleased the eye. There were large pictures of women and of men—some the son could recognize. Or had seen once. Or he might have. Just now. The son felt a bubble in his foot birth. He felt the bubble bobble up along his belly and past his lungs before it burst. He called these thoughts.
The house had not seemed so large from the outside, or so gorgeous. The girl’s parents must be rich, the son thought. Which was weird because at school the girl always wore such ratty clothes—weird humpy bags of browbeaten cotton from long-dead decades’ smothered styles.
The girl’s house was made of wire, wicker, marble, slick, and sand. It had no smell. The girl’s house’s walls were often mirrors. There was everywhere to walk.
The son spent several hours staring into the portrait over one mantel, a gleaming field of white on white.
The son turned around then. He turned and turned. Tied to the wall where he’d come in, the son realized a piece of string he hadn’t seen there prior. The string looped around his middle like a belt. The son grasped the string and felt it simmer, half-electric. He slid his fingers, making static, zinging. Cold . . .
PATH
The son followed the
long string down a
hallway without a
ceiling and without
doors.
The walls along the hall were wet and mirrored and left grease on the son’s hands, slipped in slats of gold goo underneath him, trying to stick him in one place. There was a music playing somewhere, by a band that did not actually exist.
blank music washed on and on and all through the house like blood bombs dropping, like skin peeling off of trees in sheets, women becoming horses becoming dogs becoming light—a whole slew of awful sounds that were not really sound exactly, but sound as an idea
The son could feel the sound against his chest and where his bones joined, meeting, vibrating his canine teeth.
The son could sort of see.
The son
went up
a
stairwell
and
down a
stairwell,
the string
now
burning
in his
hand—
the string
singing
along
and on
and on
into the
house.
For long stretches rooms would repeat—the walls and width identical from end to end. White light in wash, from overhead: projectors. Locks without true doors. Doors without true locks or knobs or seams.
A small eye in some pink wood watched him from underneath the floor.
Hairy curtains. Gold glass in windows, looking out onto long unblinking fields.
Black chandeliers with yard-long candles. Coffee tables made of water.
Bees.
The son in one room sat down for some time in a recliner, hearing his cells spin or moisten, softly jostled, coming open or awake.
The son walked.
The son found a charcoal-colored elevator that would not go up or down, but had one button for each year.
He found a room filled almost full with one white cube, around which he could wriggle, pressed at both sides, breathing in.
He found a voice behind a wall—the voice of his voice, older, slowing—some time gone.
And another stairwell, and another, each one wet and rattled in its own way. Some of the conjunctions between stairwells would have huge holes in their floors—wide-open mouths down into further house or houses. Some landings would have four or fifteen stairwells leading from them, lending the son a choice of which to take, but for each the string would keep him clinging, rawing at his palm.
The rooms went on each way around him there forever, not a music.
The son walked and walked and walked and walked and walked and walked and walked and walked and walked and