There Is No Year - Blake Butler [9]
They’d be watching reruns of The $100,000 Pyramid and the set would make a different kind of sound and the screen would blip to 99, an adult pay-per-view-style station which for some reason came in clear. The family could see the rhythm and the thumping. They could hear the lady squeal. The son sat with his head three feet from the screen. The mother did not turn away. She heard her eyes move in her head, like mice, the pupils widening and resizing under the insistencies and contortions of the replicating light.
The father turned the set off and sent them both to bed at 4:35 p.m.
AN INVESTIGATION
The father started in the corner behind the front door. From hands and knees to tiptoes he combed the walls’ perimeter inch by inch. He took down the still-framed photos, dragged the TV stand, the bench. At the windows he felt for errors in the glass, anyplace where fingers or wire or some other form or fiber could slip in. He dumped the cushions off the sofa and pet the frame seams, looking for bumps or tears or places sewn up, anyplace something could have been hidden.
Every few minutes the father went to throw up again in the kitchen into a yellow trash bag over the sink. Each time he tied the sack and sat it nestled in another, building a tidy, plastic nest. His arms seemed muddy. Seeing made him weak. The father had been feeling sick for several days now—it got worse the more he moved inside the rooms. Most nights since moving in the father dreamt of his skin peeled off in leagues—a surface pale enough to write on, wide enough to wrap the house.
In the kitchen, bedrooms, and bathrooms, he followed a similar procedure, removing the linens from the closets and the foodstuffs from the cabinets, running his hands inside each blank space over the flat surfaces of its innards. He petted the carpet for slits or patches, the way he’d hid certain photos from his mother as a kid, self-created creases in the house. He squeezed seat cushions, upended desk drawers, took the sheets off of the guest bed. He dumped a whole box of cereal out into the trash can and sniffed the crumbs. There was a ring inside the Corn Flakes, the inserted surprise: a black ring, gleaming, his size. He put it on, with all the others—his huge hands. He poured a carton of orange juice into the sink and watched it drain slow. He tapped the mirrors in the bathroom for hollow sounds behind the reflection.
Each thing the father touched became new things.
The father had all night.
LATE LIST
In the silence left over after, the father went around the house and made a list:
—Unknown long scratch mark under recliner
—New bubbles in glass of guest room bedside lamp
—Did fan always spin counterclockwise?
—Son’s dolls in storage: more than a few are missing both eyes
—Garage bees
—Marks of insertion near top of wall in hallway. Larger than a pushpin? Who hangs things up that high?
—Handprints in the dust on top of the bookshelf by the mirror
—Initials and phone # in address book: RPT 515-3033. Who is this?
—Burn or other smudge marks on hallway baseboard, some kind of chewing
—Living room ceiling dripping what?
When not writing, the father clenched the list inside his mouth to keep his hands free so he could rummage. He bit down so hard, not realizing, his teeth went through the paper, through his lip. The blood fed him gulping, warm as from a mother’s nipple, brown.
PASSAGE
On his knees down at the air vent in the guest bedroom, the father clasped his hands. He pressed his flesh against the grate’s face’s metal tines—a mazemap pressed around his eyes. Through the gaps a lukewarm air blew, moist like raindamp, stunk like rice. The screws that held the grate in had no divots in their heads. The father could not pry them up using his fingers. A screwdriver chipped the