There Is No Year - Blake Butler [56]
HOME
Inside the house the father crawled on. His eyes were pouring liquid. Laughing. The hot air ached his eyes. He’d moved into the box until he recognized it, found sections of its breadth where he had been—where he had called home—when he had slept and ate and lived. He found himself again inside the house’s vents, the streetlights and homelights there somehow connected, and the airspace, and the drift.
The father loved the smell baking the house now, like money being burned, like melting Christmas trees and wire, like . . . like . . .
Like days.
At the vent’s first bend, the tunnel opened into a small pocket ridged with bubbles. There was a language in the metal, the pocket’s domed walls cut with tiny engraved pictures of a house. The father could not keep his eyes held clean enough to see into the windows. Behind him he could no longer see the bedroom’s light. There was another kind of light inside the vent now, writhing. The light in liquid at his face. He felt hair growing out around him, from each one of his finite, numbered pores.
I am the oldest man who’s ever lived, the father heard himself say, blank of thinking. I will still be here in this air here when everybody else is burned and gunked and gone.
The words became a new long vein inside his nose.
TUNNEL IN A TUNNEL IN A TUNNEL (IN AN EYE)
Along the vent again the tunnel opened further ahead into two. Soon the two made four, and four made eight, and so on. Each tunnel looked the same. At each the father chose by which one seemed to need him. Laughing harder. Gasping. Blue balloons. His scalp skin crisping hard around his head.
At sudden nodules in the network, the father found holes where he could see back into the house—the living room, the upstairs hallway—the walls there had been painted over black—in some rooms orange or yellow—screaming neon—though here the vents went so thin he could not fit through them, not even partly, just his arms. Some rooms had been filled with dirt or smoke or foaming. Some rooms were full of skin—other families, people, bodies—smushed. One hole into one very far room was the exact same size as his eye—through the hole he could see another small eye seeing. His eye. Light.
The tunnels unfurled on. The ceilings raised or floors grew lower. He could hunch, then he could stand. Soon the walls were so high and far apart he could not feel them at all. The floor beneath him made of sand. In his testicles a transient tingling, like someone crawling through an opening in him, through his guts and up his body, spreading out and up and on among his blood. There was more of him than ever.
WHAT
At another upstairs pucker the father looked out and saw the mother walking up and down the street. She had her head down looking for something. When she got to one end of the street she turned around. She walked back and forth and back and forth in slow procession, holding her left arm straight up over her head. In her hand, a wide gray steel umbrella. She was talking to herself. She had her hair done up expensive. She’d done her face. The father banged his fist against the window to try to tell her she looked the best she’d ever looked but the mother could not hear him or would not turn.
HELP YOURSELF
The girl’s house’s kitchen was enormous. There were cabinets lined from end to end. Many of the cabinets had been padlocked. From inside some there came a scraping. Pictures of the girl were hung all over—tacked up in tiny frames all up and down the walls and the ceiling and the floor. In some the girl looked very old—much older than the son remembered. In some the girl was an old woman, or a man? In some the girl had so much hair you could not see her in the picture.
The son’s arms were rubbed with rugburn though he did not remember any rug. He couldn’t remember ever leaving off the hallway. He couldn’t think of when he’d closed his eyes.
The house contained no clocks.
On a massive gleaming stove there were several pots and pans and