There Is No Year - Blake Butler [66]
Drink, the girl said. It is delicious.
The son could not disagree—though the substance was not liquid—nothing there but air at all.
He drank.
the house there all around him, ashing
all through the roof and walls, unwound
in light, his name shaking out its color
shaking out its hours, numbers, nouns
THAT IS SOME THICK STUFF
The girl watched the son drink, then took the tray away and went back in place again to comb. She yanked the son’s hair back so hard on his head his scalp strained red, exposed. The son’s scalp had tattoos all through it. The tattoos were of text fine-printed, writ by hand. The hair was held back by a series of small pins that pulled the hair’s roots so tightly they seemed ready to rip out any minute. In the mirror across the room the son could see himself aligned. He could see his room a little, his other room, in that old house. He felt the house inside him, in the mirror, its glass now leaning right against his face. This particular mirror, the son noticed, close up—among the many rooms refracted—this mirror was the same mirror as the one he’d slept with every night. This particular mirror was caving inward there against him, curving, becoming jelly, burble, white. In the mirror now, the son gleamed, of no expression.
RORRIM
The girl saw the son was looking. She let the son’s hair fall free and took the son’s chin. She seemed to be saying something. The heat was foaming. The son could not shake it off. He could not not. The house’s color bloomed. He felt something move inside him, metastasizing, filling his form with its form: smoke through smoke, room through room. The son reached back and touched the girl’s arm. Her skin was smiling.
So what do you want to do now? the girl said.
NOT A WORD OR SHAPE OR NAME
The other floor’s long hall of bedroom doors all stood open, stunk and stung the father’s eyes. The wet revolved inside his head and made him hungry, stuck with an itching, in the light. He held his hands upon the air there, flush with hot flashes—a drum kit in his lungs—his feet swollen beneath him, doorbells. The other house alive.
The floors down here were mirrors. The father watched himself walking from below. Each step made him thicker, narrowing the walls.
In spasmed gulps, the way his childhood cat had—the cross-eyed, many-named creature who one night had crawled into a mudhole in the woods behind his parents’ house and not come out—its name still somewhere in him, its absent sound—the father coughed something up into his hands: an origami box folded out of wet, smeary flash paper—with it at last out of his chest he could see head-on again—he could think of things he’d seen once: ash rising from fires, balls thrown, nipples tugged, bundles of cash. The father unfolded the origami, hearing it crinkle, as did each day the fat filling his head. WHO IS IN THERE, someone had written. The father ripped the note into many tiny pieces and swallowed it again.
In the house the hall held still. Somewhere above him a pucker shrunk a little, released a smudge of air. Black and magnets. Runny.
The father walked along the hall. He stopped outside the copy master bedroom. He turned to face the light. In the room he saw his body sleeping, several of him. The furniture had been removed. The bodies of him piled into the small space stacking, puddled up with limbs. Some were missing hair or digits. They were cuddling, chewing, talking in their sleep. Laughing, scratching, humping, what have you. The more he looked the more there were, though