There Is No Year - Blake Butler [78]
The father knew that though he’d never seen it, the gazebo had always been in the yard, and always would be, in any yard. The father had had long dreams of coiling in a hammock, eating. Here. There were many things the father had planned to do—in or around the house or other—lists of lists of lists of lists—this gazebo, too, was those. The father walked into its mouth.
From up inside the structure’s bleach-burnt stomach, the father could hear the mother somewhere shout. He could not make out what she said—her voice compiled of several others—a thousand tonalities at once—heads surrounding the gazebo, skin on skin, and air on air. The gazebo walls were screened completely and hung with new-car-scent plumes and bags of rice. A sheet of pupae blocked the holy wire scrim. They were crusted on so thick—such dedication—the gazebo’s size quadrupled, like a crown.
The father could not stop with turning, turning, seeing the same few feet of textured surface, until he fell dizzy on the wood.
BAG
When he could think again, the father saw a long black bag hanging from the gazebo ceiling. Hung above by strands of hair, it had a name tag and numbers that the father could not read. The father sat up and reached to touch the bag. He felt it warming under his rub. He felt the wets and bumps and whorls. Kick. Kick kick. Kick. Somewhere the mother went on shouting. On certain words, the father’s language tally meter would mistake her words for his. Zap.
BLANK
The father unzipped the bag. The metal teeth moaned. Inside the bag the father saw the son curled and snoozing, his hands folded at his face. The father felt a wash of whipping through his back, throat, and aorta. Hey, the father said. He could not recall the son’s name. He tried a few. The current scourged him. The hair grew on his face.
EITHER
The father shook the son unknowing until he opened up his eyes. From in the bag, the son glared. The father could hardly see the son through the glass inside the helmet, for all his sound and all the hair, the rip. What, the son kept repeating, eyes closed, screaming. What. What. What. What. What. What. Each what flew upward from him toward some nothing that on other days he’d called a sky. The son’s sound against the helmet made the father’s language tallies reset to zero, zero, zero. The father, fried.
COPY OF A COPY OF A COPY
Through a window in the house that looked out onto the backyard the son watched the buzzing father rouse himself (the son). The son felt amused. He fixed his hair in the reflection. He tried to speak but made a mess.
And then the son was outside the house there with the father and the father’s arms were wet and kind of mushy and the son tried to sit up and felt something hold him and felt something moving through his lungs, new words wanting out and worming, clustered in his bulb. The father could not see the bulb was see-through, made of days.
And then the son was in the house again looking out and the air was fully solid and the son stood encased inside the air and through the window there was light.
LIGHT OF YEARS LIGHT OF WINDOWS LIGHT OF GROWING LIGHT OF NEED
And then the son stood at the kitchen table eating waffles watching TV laughing, sneezing, and all the pressure in his knees, and there were all these people all around him and they were pushing up against his back, they cawed, and they knocked the table to the left and right and they lifted the table off the ground, and the light inside the drink inside the son’s stomach from the girl’s house began to chew into his chest, and he laughed harder, and everyone was laughing too, all around him bodies laughing,