There Is No Year - Blake Butler [73]
The cell phone was ringing so hard through the son now that he could feel the impending conversation. He could hear what the person on the other end would be saying and he could hear his voice reply. He’d heard those words a billion times too. He heard them every time he slept. He said them in dreams of people he did not know yet. He said them in very tiny rooms. He spoke them out into the bedroom also. The bedroom’s walls had absorbed so much. The son wanted to touch the bedroom walls again. The son wanted to stand up. The son’s skin was getting ugly. A bubble flooded on his neck. He popped the bubble with his finger. Another rose. He popped and popped. He could feel the hemming of his lines, becoming sizes. He could feel his last haircut aching in the tendrils of the hair he sometimes—like the father—devoured in his sleep. In his sleep the son had eaten more than anyone could ever. There was so much in the son. The son could kill a forest if he shaved. The son could cripple nations. The son could sew designer jeans out of his runoff.
Everything.
The son could hear the prior homeowners’s pets, which were endlessly buried in the backyard and underneath the house and sometimes even under the gravel of the driveway or in the carpet underneath the son’s bed.
The son’s skin was coming off.
The figure stood closer. The fabric the figure had unfolded stunk and filled the room. More beef. A little cream. Graham crackers. The son loved graham crackers—he liked the crack between teeth—he’d eaten enough to build a mall—the figure knew this. The figure had a mouth, the son could see that, he could see inside the mouth. The son could see the room flooding with liquid. The son could see the apartment the figure rented in the figure’s chest.
The son could not laugh either, but he did too.
The room was getting warmer—sweating. The son’s posters slipped off the walls. The ink slid from off the posters and the paint from off the place where they had hung. The paint coagulated into pigments. The son felt a blister open on his top lip. He had a suntan. He had a sunburn. Months of sunburns. Years in years. Sun damage. Damage. He grew thicker.
The figure was off the width of a fist now, give or take a hair. The son had made many fists but wanted to make more. Once the son had seen an ocean slip out of the crack slit in the windshield of a car, a car cracked as the son watched and made the car skid with his eyes. The son’s hair contained the cells of everyone he’d ever been.
Actually, the son could laugh a little, though it came out through his back and sunk into the bed. The son was sneezing colors. The son had lanterns in his eyes—lanterns once used to light other houses. The son felt someone sewing his perimeter into the clothgrain of the bed. He blinked and found himself inside a mattress on top of which someone was sitting—someone asleep or still or reading or too tired to stand up—someone maybe thinking of the son—maybe the son himself. The son saw days he’d spent already layered across the room in film. The son watched his head in photo portraits his mother had made him hang up on his room’s walls wilt in time-lapse backward, his skin becoming puckered, regressing into cells. The son was inside the mother then and could see the mother’s moving arms. The mother digging, bug-swarmed. The son could read the things the mother had not meant to think about the son—the thoughts pummeled through and through her—her imagination’s doubt. The son saw the mother through