There Is No Year - Blake Butler [68]
INSIDE
The box
inside was
small at
every
angle—so
small the
father had
no room to
move his
arms or
legs or
head.
The inner
surface of
the box,
unlike its
outside,
held a ripe
transparent
pale—so
pale there
appeared
not to be a
surface
there at all,
unwinding
—and yet
against the
father’s
flesh it
made a
pressure
and
against the
father’s
flesh it
burned.
To the left
and just
above the
father’s
vision in
the box
there was a
hole—a
single tiny
source of
seeing
allowing
light onto
the pupil
of his right
eye.
Through the
hole, the
father saw a
grayish
chamber.
Inside the
chamber hung
another eye,
like the
father’s eye
but larger,
with lid and
vein and
cornea
removed.
In the light inside the eye the father saw another light—it had a name—a name he could not hear or say or see inside him, though it was watching—seeing—seen. The father could not think beyond the what.
The eye had many sides. Each time the father blinked inside his own sight within the other’s—quick black—when he looked again the eye would seize. The eye would spin among its sides and scrunch like aged skin, then come to settle centered on another side. Each new side held a new pupil to look into, and it looking back as well, again.
Through each pupil, paused before him, the father felt a force of light thread through his head—
light of photographs without color—
light of music without sound—
light of books without pages—
light of paintings without paint—
light of dance without limb—
light of speech without lung—
light of buildings without walls—
In deleted air the father saw the ageless light of those the light itself had made destroyed—one for each side of the eye here in the box here in the copy house around the father, stunned with the light of skin in skin deleted young—like those in the pictures the father’s son had been sent, the son among them—bodies organed with creation of an hour never named—deleted light held inside daughters, inside sons.
The light came in all through the father, frying.
In the light the father saw:
,44
,45
&
.47
The father saw:
,48
,49
,50
,51
,52
,53
,54
,55
,56
,57
,58
,59
,60
,61
,62
,63
,64
,65
,66
,67
,68
,69
,70
,71
,72
,73
,74
75
&
.76
There were many other sides upon and in between each side that the father could not sense seeing, even deleted, but which came into him still.
When the light of each of all the sides was gone again in spinning, the light remained there still—it hung in gristle, caked in bones and teeth, in the ceiling of the nothing far above—in distance and in hours, doorways—reflecting air back at the earth—in all the dirt, and all the wonder—days in hours—years in days.
Inside the box inside his seeing, the father aged. Old sores on his body healed shut. New unseen sores began. His blood made bleeding, wanting. The father felt no tone.
Each time the eye shuddered in rotation a place inside the father’s head would make a click—a long hot drop all through his body—light beyond light—and then, from nowhere, his eyes could see again. He went on in this condition, a finite binary upon his body suffered in repeat:
(a) The spinning spheroid’s next side.
(b) The burst of light of light.
With each instance, the father screamed. He screamed so hard all through him and with every inch he felt his body, in that instant, become zilch. He could feel, in the periods in which he did the watching, such white-hot power-terror funneled through his blood and air and flesh that it was as if he never had existed, underneath such screaming, such massive, hobbling hurting, grief. He knew, upon each instance, that when it had passed it would be gone from him again—and yet would not be gone at all. Among all air. Upon the body. The gift ungiven in no glow.
As each click came, compiling, the father felt