There Is No Year - Blake Butler [74]
The son could not fully sit up. He felt his blood gush inside a spiral. He fell straight down through long darkness. His neck was getting tired.
The son.
The son felt older. He grew a mustache, faint at first and then a handlebar, one that, if he could move his hands, he would have twisted at the ends into a creation that would have made him memorable in pictures. The son’s voice inside him changed—though he could not use it, he could hear several other sounds projected—other people.
Other people in the son.
The son grew capable of babies—capable of son. A billion sperm.
The son shed skin at a rate that made his body lift off the mattress inch by inch. The room was filling up. His fingernails were curling. His eyes changed color twice—once to gold like change he’d hidden—once to the shade of blue the summer sky had been the day the father and the mother had made the son on the very bed the son sprawled on now.
The son’s back began to crimp. The son felt his hands go loose a little.
Above the bed the ceiling was bowing down. It bowed to touch the center of the moment where the son and the figure would collide. The walls as well had swum with hump, puckered funny, pulling out. Hair, skin, liquid, money. The carpet sat slathered in frustration, stapled to the ground.
0
The figure hung right there above the son. The figure had the longest hair. The figure’s hair was lashed into the son’s hair. They had the same hair. The hair grew shorter, pulling taut. The son looked into the figure. The figure was long in moments and scratched in others. The figure has someone else inside it also. Populations. Masses. Burning. The figure wore the son’s original shade of pupils, refracted now with shards of foreign color—red—red like the son’s bruises, like bricks for houses or wall paint, red the color the son had shat the week he ate all the mother’s lipstick, the mother’s lipstick in him, red like certain birds not yet exploded for the air, red like the son inside the son and the son the son could have had himself.
The son and the figure were mouth to mouth. Their lips were cracked and puffy. They breathed back and forth to one another. Their breath was made of the same cells. They breathed. They breathed. In each breath there was another word, and in each word there was another, and the son began to see the things the son would never see. They breathed.
DAYS
The massive vehicle slid along the street until it stopped in the new rut around the house. Something had sawed into the yard’s perimeter, made a little ditch that ran with sludge and seemed to sink into itself. The vehicle’s soundless transmission warped several birds out of the sky, raining the birds onto the windshield, their carcasses then sucked into a suction and used to fuel the vehicle. The back window of the vehicle folded down and out of it pushed the father.
The father rolled down along the back hood and off the bumper into the street. He bruised his elbows on the pavement, bleeding clear. He stood up shaking and watched the long white vehicle drive off. The vehicle bruised the ground.
The father was naked except for a metal bulb around his head. Two tiny slits allowed him to see out. There were not slits for ears or nose or mouth. The father had gained weight. The men had fed the father through long weird tubes and turkey basters. He did not know how long he’d been gone. There were no official charges. He’d been fully reprimanded. He’d been made to solve crossword puzzles in a small translucent box at the bottom of a public swimming pool, through which in his mind he could see the chubby men and women in their slick suits holding their children while they peed. He could see all the stuff the people’s bodies flushed into the water, which came and stuck to the perimeter of the father’s box. The crossword puzzles were designed to trigger complicated extrasensory properties. The father filled in 49 ACROSS with the