There Is No Year - Blake Butler [63]
One of the room’s white walls began to shake.
So what do you want to do now? the girl said, bubbling above the sound.
PORTAL
The father opened up his eyes. What he’d made in the wall where he’d located the unwanted indentation was like a puckering, a way out or way in. The father punched the center of the shape with his fist and listened as it fell into the hole. Then the wall was open. The father put his head inside and peered around.
Inside, the space was roughly large enough for an average-sized adult. There wasn’t enough light to see much else. The father pulled his head back out and took the hammer and began to jack at the opening with the butt-end, ripping away chunks of sheetrock in showers. The head of the hammer, cold. The hole began to widen, its pucker yawned. The father dropped the hammer and pulled at the flaky edges instead with his whole hands, dust falling on the carpet, on his shoes and in his hair. He flung the pieces behind him, yanking and sweating, ticked up in some kind of bizarre joy. He could feel the particles in his nostrils, down his throat—bits of the house.
On the stubborn pieces, hung with nails, he pulled harder, at one point ripping a long cut down his forearm. His bright blood dripped in neon light. The color wept into the fiber, and the wood beneath, another layer. The father didn’t stop. His heart throbbed now more than he could last remember. He felt good. His head was light.
He picked the hammer up again and set it down again. The room spun around the father as if on an axis, some translucent wheel. And the music. He heard music somewhere—inside him—a song he knew he knew he knew. So much music, the father thought. He touched the wall.
The father laughed.
QUEEN
On the floor above the father, the mother had risen up. The mother knew she needed something but could not think of what or how to name it, how to put her hands in a way that would bring that something closer or quell the ache. The mother did not realize she was naked. The parents’ bed had moved. The parents’ bed sat against the wall opposite from where it’d been last. Their sheets were wet and upside-down. The designs on the sheets—same as those in the son’s room, and the guest room, and elsewhere in the house—showed backward through the fabric, becoming something.
The mother moved beyond the bed. She went into the bathroom where the sink and bathtub overflowed. The floor was slick with wet from both. The water had not touched the bedroom carpet. The mother stepped into the water. She did not see anyone in the room. She did not see the father or the son or the other father. The mother walked back out into the hall.
The mother went down the hall to the door to the son’s bedroom and put her hand against the door. She beat the shape and knocked and called his name out. Name! Name! she said, croaking. Son! Son! She shook. The door would not come open. Her wet feet had not left a trail behind her on the carpet.
The mother put the lock against her eye. Through the lock she could see nothing. She took her eye away. She replaced the place where her eye had been with her mouth and blew through the keyhole into the door. The mother had learned this trick. Her breath was made of air and water, laced with house dust. The mother touched the knob again. The door came open. Inside the son’s room as well the bed had moved from one wall to another—through the wall the parents’ and the son’s beds had come to kiss. The wall seemed to bow slightly between them. There was a sound but not a sound.
On the floor, bunched on the carpet, the mother saw a box. The box was neat and had black coating. The box did not have seams. The mother moved. The windows rattled. Her cell phone