There Is No Year (26 page)

O of
go
and
how
and
nowhere
.

O of
house
and
son
and
door
.

O of
O
.

From outside looking in, the father beeped and banged against the glass. No one would look toward him. They all were asking. Inside the house the boxes rang, and heads made laugh and bees barfed buzz and long dogs barked and babies babbled, while inside his bulb the father began to shout a semi-prayer and the bulb zapped his skin and skull in hot correction and across it all there was a wind and no one would.

COCOON GAZEBO

In the backyard, high as ever, like long blank curtains to the sky, the father swung and bit and bashed his head cutting a pathway in the green. His tongue had begun to gather in his helmet, dislodged somewhere way back down his throat, the weird mashed meat surround-compiling in the space around his cheeks. Likewise, his breath had begun building layers on the bulb’s condensation-proof glass. The father tried to wink his cheek to rub the glass clean, but that was hard.

Somewhere in the yard among the fallen clothesline and loops of dead brown meat once trees, the father came to a gazebo nestled in the growing. A tall thin black corrupted structure, thick and pointed though dented in along the top as if something large had had nabs at it. The father did not like its sweeter smell, etched with the sickness, the surrounding air suffused with more mosquitoes, wasps—
had you seen this air here, you could not see
—the father tripped his way up beneath the errored awning and into the dark shell, buzzing, smoke.

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, and his teeth began to turn inside his head and he could not see and he could not remember and he was so hungry the ceiling wobbled up and down.

And then the son was being carried through the massive lawn with all the mud splashing up around them, and the sky or ceiling stretching overhead and coming closer down and closer down, and the son could feel his cheeks all puffy and the son could feel his and his father’s heartbeats both together through his own chest, the visor of the father’s helmet banging back and forth against the son’s skull’s hardened soft spot in the rhythm of their fumbling run.

And then the son was in the son’s room looking at all the clear gel spilling from the closet, the closet where the son had spent so many hours typing still unknown, and the son saw what he made, he saw the texture of the ejection, of the words burped from several selves he’d held in hives, layers wished and crushed and in him, and he felt the words spread through the room expanding, felt the words burst back into him and through and through and of the room, words worn on paper, wet and endless, a flooding ocean at his knees, at his chest, his neck, his head, gel gumming up his nostrils and in the air vents, in the air itself—and then the son again could not breathe—and the words slushed and slammed around the son as massive slivers, blubbing up, and the son rose off the floor inside the rising, and the son tried to swim and kick as best he could, the language welling in his head and stomach, stretching his legs and muscles, and therein the son gushed on, and the son slid down through the hallway, wide as ever, and the son warbled down the stairs, down through the house where all was runny and one color, and the son gushed on through the front door—

    and then the son opened his mouth and shut his eyes and then the son slid backward through where he’d been and the son saw seas and rooms and constellations and the son grew very large and he grew small—

    and then the son was in the father’s arms gel-covered, and the son was the father’s arms themselves and they were standing there beside the mother at a hole large as the house, a hole with many holes inside it,
concentric rings of endless holes inside the hole
, and the mother’s head was wound with bees and birds and gel and she had a shovel and she was digging in the rip, and she was digging and she was digging, begging in the holes—she was saying something about the father or the son or both together, and the mother ripped and bent her long nails on the hard dirt—the dirt that had built up around the house high as the house and ever higher at the hole’s edge and yet had not yet found a way to touch the sky—and the father tried to make the mother put the shovel down and come away from the half-assed hole she’d hardly dug inside the hole, among all the other holes there all around her, and she there screaming on and on into the grass about insects and sand and windows and the houses and the light—

and her warm body—

and her rubbed insides—

and all her wanting, measured in flume—

and all the rooms she’d never seen, and the rooms those other rooms contained—

and her need for forgiveness—

and her life—

and then the mother turned and turned, around in nothing, swinging the shovel at the father—

and the yard was smushed around them burned and buzzing—and the sky was smacked and stretched with mold and slip—and the trees were splotched with sores and raining color— and the son could not see the father could not see the mother could not see—

OR

—from above the house—and around the house—despite these things—the house could not be seen—the house was hidden, sat in dry air cold and throat-choked with vast collision, all minor manner of humming creature swarmed in spirals through the sound—a sound of something soaked and squashed stung forever in the house’s lining—beneath the roof all bulged and scumming over through the thicket of new trees—bees and bats and ants and crows and cranes and gulls and geese and ducks and dogs and helicopters and doves and pigeons, dragonflies, gnats hung on waves from towers gashed in the weird glow of the sky’s head with translucent stepladders which in the warble now descended, folding and unfolding, cradled around the house, surrounded—this house with no good door—this house in which the son sat—the house in which other families had also sat and still were sitting, through which bodies had moved and opened doors and breathed the air and fucked and gone to sleep—the son with his head a box of years he’d had and years still yet impending—the son’s vibrating mucous membranes—the son’s serrated eyes—the son with his head rubbed quite wide open in the house slicked cream-thick from eave to eave—the rats and ruts and burns corroded—the sky above it wet with need, the sky colliding, the sky unfolded, the sky reflecting back itself—the son above the bed now levitating or coiled to nothing or not quite there—the windows of the swarmed house bending over curling in, falling out a final time to allow the entrance of things banging, begging—their heads a hammer—the house’s floors and carpets slathered, layer after layer, sight unseen—the house’s windows glossing over, revealing things that had been there and yet were not, not even now, yet, things etched on the breath hung as remainder—some reminder, who and who and who, what beds these rooms had nuzzled, what walls the brighter air had seemed—the son unraveled—the son’s cracked back—the globes of light creased and compiling—slurring junk sloughed off, ejected—the light wires crimped and full of glisten and new need—the house’s spreading open—the rooms revealing all in one moment what they’d been and seen and shown—what they wanted—who else they were once, what other inches, who they could be anew again—and the son’s lips and lids and other eyes and pores and holes and follicles sang fat with foam—the son congealing—the son in every window of the house—the son the size of the house, inside—the house walls swelling, the weird unbuckle, the teeming crust riddled with creak, the living layer they’d created warping—gel—the buzz of black transmission—the other houses—the tattoo ratted over the father’s eyes, the son’s, though the mother could almost peek, the mother who’d slipped this riddle, hole of holes there, the mother half inside the son—he in her and she in he and they in ever—the mother could feel the other weight, she could feel him lifted upward—the house now big as some balloon, the old walls warped and cragged with yawn or screeching—the house deforming—all other houses—homes—the sky a soft black zero as the son b u l g e d o u t t h r o u g h t h e s o u n d—

SOUND OF TRUMPETS SOUND OF SIGHING SOUND OF SHOTGUNS SOUND OF GEESE SOUND OF GLIMMER SOUND OF NOWHERE SOUND OF SON

—and in the midst of all of this, from the outside, from neighbor’s doors or windows and in the street—from all but a certain very minor other angle there was no way for most to see what had gone on—you could not see that this wasn’t one of many houses—from the street the house was fine—A-OK—today, tomorrow—on the walk the neighbors passed in silent indecision—
what for dinner? glass or chicken?
—though in the minute on the hour their skin went prickled near their teeth, they looked a second time in one direction, pulled their pets along to shit on somewhere else—that night they didn’t kiss their sons or wives—they grew one more new long hair or felt a ticker in their thigh—only in their sleep then could they see what they had seen.

HALLWAY

The son was in the bedroom.

The son was standing on the bed. He’d brought the mirror back out from the closet and unsheathed it. The son felt very tired. The son shrunk and expanded both at once—so that from the outside the son seemed to stay the same size.

The mirror had fingerprints and footprints and breath steamed on the glass from, it seemed, several sides.

The son stood above the mirror. The son saw the mirror from above. With the masked light flooding through the room’s enormous window—a light that flickered, flexed and charred—the light of so many different days—the mirror seemed to bend. With his head like this and arms like this and humming, the son could see a hallway in the glass. And then depending on what the son wished or how he wanted or remembered or forgot—the son could make the hallway open up. The son could make the hallway fold around him.

The son could slip into the hall.

The son walked down the hall with both eyes blinking in and out and in and out.

The son walked and walked and walked. The son felt lighter. The son’s arms began to shake.

The son came to a door.

The light continued. Light ate light up, and shat light out, and light remained. Days rolled in the long blows of the hours hidden in spinning years and months and days.