There Is No Year - Blake Butler [67]
With his hands within the forced dark, the father closed the door.
The father felt his way along the hallway further, palms along the walls. In the grain, the house had written out a list of names, a man’s phone number, a tablature, a hymn’s words, a prayer, a map, a day—none of which the father understood as language, and yet it settled in him still.
The father felt along the hall with all his fingers till he felt another door. This door would be the son’s door, the father said, and heard his body say. The door into she and I and his and hers and ours and ours and our son’s room. This door as well was open, another mouth inside the copy house—or was he back inside his own house now? The father could not tell. His chest was throbbing.
The father moved into the room. He moved onto the air with skin around him, feeling forward, unwilling yet to open back his eyes.
INTERVIEW
The girl moved in a little closer. She had her hands behind her back.
The girl turned into the mirror—turned to look at someone else.
The girl began to speak, in several voices, asking someone:
Q: WHAT DID THE SON WANT TO DO?
Q: WHAT DID THE SON WANT TO WANT TO DO?
Q: WHAT DID THE GIRL WANT FOR THE SON?
Q: WHAT COULD THE GIRL HAVE DONE TO MAKE THE SON WANT SOMETHING ELSE?
Q: HOW MUCH HAD THE SON EATEN? HOW MUCH HAIR COULD FIT INSIDE HIS CHEST?
Q: HOW MUCH COULD FIT INSIDE THE GIRL’S HOUSE? THE SON’S HOUSE? THE COPY VERSION(S)? WHY?
Q: WHAT WAS THE GIRL’S HOME MADE OF? AND THE SON’S SKIN? AND THE GIRL?
Q: WHAT FIT IN THE SPACE BETWEEN THE HOUSES?
Q: WHO ELSE WAS COMING BY?
The girl was turning. The girl glowed. The son glowed.
Q: DO YOU KNOW NOW?
Q: DO YOU?
Do you?
THE WANTING BOX
In the image of the room where nights the son would be, the father felt his body press against another hold. He opened his eyes, saw nothing but it—a black box large as the whole room. It gave off a silent steam or smoke, as had the last box he remembered, which upon remembering in that instant he ceased to remember furthermore.
The door the father had come into the room through was no longer there behind him, nor was there much of any space left for him to stand between the box and wall. He had to suck his gut in, skin into skin there, held not breathing, and still there was hardly room for him to move—as if he were underneath the box at the same time as above it, and beside it—nothing but the box—no room at all.
Inside the box, a bumping. Something smothered. Rub of skin of fists. The father pressed his head against the surface, wanting. He listened harder, leaning in. The more he leaned, the more he had to—his spine took kindly to the curve—then, there he was leaning with all of him against the image, its surface adhered to his shoulder and his cheek.
The round meat of the father’s left ring finger puffed up. More rings.
Father, the father tried to say back, and out came all the other names.
He tried to speak again and still could not, the words instead reflected in his head, spurting as would a heavy wet through his cerebrum and down into his chest and ass and legs, and no repeat.
The father’s face against the box, both of them aging, one changing shape inside, one not—his body flush against the box’s, gripped.
The no light coming through no windows to the no room to the need.
In all his want, and all the surface, the father’s head became pressed upon so hard against the box he could not see—or could not tell what he was seeing, in such color—the bend of wall on wall, the blank—gone windows lit with light of leaving, sucked from the house into the sky. The box pulled on his backbone, barfing through his body in reverse—warm milk, spit, rainwater, stomach acid, fresh blood—his body sticking to the seam, wherever. In his head he heard a hundred guns—a fall, a swallow, sinking—black cells—then, there he was above