There Is No Year - Blake Butler [59]
This house was excellent, the son decided, spoke in a voice inside his eyelid. Whenever the girl showed up the son was going to ask if he could move in, or at least if his dad could get a job with the girl’s dad.
Completing this thought, the son tried to go on and think the next thing and felt the same words thereon repeat: This house is excellent—his screaming eyelid!—Whenever the girl showed up he was going to ask if he could move in—yes, please, now—or at least if his dad could get a job with the girl’s dad—he needed.
And the thought again. The thought again, rolled in warming foam inside his head. A tone. He could not shush it. It numbed his gums—the food gluing all inside him, singing, a blank recurring unto exhausted, fat-full sleep.
DATABASE
In the other house—the empty house—where was the father?—the mother went to Google search.
The mother had on a translucent negligee. The mother’s face was wet.
The mother typed in: man who fixed the mower.
She saw a bunch of lawnmowers and some fires and a knife.
The mother typed in: man in the house with so much sand.
The search results contained texts about a man who’d built his house on sand, a man who made sand music, a movie based upon a book, thoughts on how to enjoy beaches, a man who’d built his house on rock.
None of this was what the mother wanted, clearly.
The mother’s elbows creased with chafe, indention. Her forearms were so thick.
The mother typed in: he with such long fingers.
The mother typed in: he with teeth & gloves.
The mother typed in: him.
The screen went white. She felt her belly bubble, throb. It made a beeping.
The mother looked at what she’d done.
ENTRANCE, PASSAGE, GALLERY
The father came out of the bedroom into the hallway and started down the stairs and then the stairs beneath him seemed to crimp in some way they had never before right there. The stairs seemed to cling against the father’s feet and also were crumbling in. Even as he stepped down onto the surface of the landing in the foyer where the stairs had always ended—there facing the door into the outside—the father could not help but feel that the room he was in now at the bottom of the stairs was not the room that had always been at the bottom of the stairs, but another room of the same shape and make and color—slightly off. Something about the texture of the wall or the way the window glinted or the way the light came in from outside and graced the ground. Something about the words that had been said in that room before then not quite sitting.
The father put his foot in certain places the way he had so many other days and felt a different feeling than he’d felt then. His right eyelid again twitching—inner houses. The father pinched and prodded at his skin. He punched himself hard in his chest, his gut, the sides. The vibration flexed through his body in other places: between his toes, against his scrotum (vessels), in his knees. His other eye sat waiting, clean.
The father moved from the landing to the next room, which on most days was the room where the family ate. They had just eaten there today, had they not? Were they not eating there right now? The dining table still sat smattered under the bright red tablecloth curtain, stained in all those places that would not wash out. It seemed slightly larger than it had once been, or the father smaller. The chandelier the father had hung himself there to replace the prior lamp—a lamp that refused to quit cutting in and out, the sockets zapping when he touched them—the chandelier was still intact—though this chandelier’s crimped metal arms hung so much lower—the father could