Authors: Blake Butler
There Is No Year (5 page)
That night on their mattress, lying spines entwined and sleeping, the dusty father and itching mother agreed by grunt how it was time to sell the house.
The son received a package in the mail. The son had not ordered anything or been expecting gifts, nor could he think of anyone remaining who would give him gifts or want to. The son had not given his new address to anyone he could remember, or spoken it aloud into the air, though he may have written it on a free contest entry at a local food chain, which made him eligible to win a free week of gym training:
Shape the Self Inside Your Self
. He planned to exercise unbounded if he won. He would one day ripple in bright light.
When the son was younger, the mother’s mother had often sent the son things for no good reason. At Christmas, the mother’s mother sent the son special food that arrived already rotting—she did it every year. Once the mother’s mother had sent a shrunken gown and a locket with a name inscribed—the mother’s mother’s name, not the son’s. Folded between the locket’s metal halves there was a picture of a man. The man had black hair grown down over most of his face. He always seemed to be looking directly at the son. The son tried to wear the necklace despite the father’s protest but he felt it choked him anyway. The son threw the necklace out a window. He’d found it several times sindce then: around the neck of his favorite doll; looped over the brass knob to the closet. Once he’d coughed it up. The son could no longer see or feel the necklace around his neck if he put it on.
This package was not likely from the mother’s mother, as this year she was underground.
This package fit the exact shape of the mailbox. It was black and weighed more than it looked like it should, and yet the son could lift.
The son didn’t think too much about it. He had his mind cluttered with other things, like how at school no one would come near him and how when he went into certain rooms he gave off smoke and how ceilings always seemed just above his head. Even the teachers went on calling him the wrong name—sometimes the mother’s name, sometimes the mother’s mother’s. Sometimes the son’s name came out as silence, just these moving lips. Other names they used could be found inscribed on plaques and trophies in the glass box at the front of the school, with photos of students left from long ago. They were mostly ugly. It was a very, very old school.
The son took the package out of the mailbox and carried it into the house under his arm. He went up to his room without speaking to anyone—to tell his mother how the new shoes they’d bought over the weekend were now melting in the soles. Even if the son had gone searching, even if he’d felt ecstatic with new bright news, the son would have found no one in the house. They’d all gone off somewhere, maybe. Or they were hiding. Or something else.
Had someone been around to see the son come in, perhaps, they might have stopped him, touched his hand. What’s in that package, they might have said. Let’s make it open. You are so young to receive mail. Instead the son went into her room and closed the door and locked it and turned around and set down the package and took off his clothes and faced the wall.
The son was writing a book. The son did not realize he was writing the book because most of the time while he was writing he was asleep or not paying attention or in the mindset of doing other things. Some nights the son would believe he was playing putt-putt in the backyard with the plastic golf set his father had bought to try to get him interested in sports, but the son was actually writing the book. The son would think he was languid in front of the television watching some kind of program about trucks or swords, designed to ensnare young boys’ attention, but the son was actually writing the book. The son had also mistaken himself for eating dinner, painting pasta, laughing, and brushing his teeth while he was actually sitting in his closet with the door shut and his fingers typing into a very small computer he didn’t know he had.
The computer’s keyboard did not have markings. The light gushed from its screen so bright it would for hours make the son not see. He could not see the words he’d already written as he wrote them, not even inside him. Nothing. His eyes spun in his head.
The words he typed weren’t words. Or, more so, the words had more words in them, collapsing, like flame laid into flame. The words inside the words kept the son from sleeping, even while sleeping.
While all awake, when the son tried to write, any pen refused to release ink. Any pencils he found inside the house would be unsharpened or would break their tips or bend. By the time the son had found something else to write with—rock on concrete, chocolate syrup, mud or blood—he could no longer hear the words inside him, and out came small other words instead: HELLO. HELLO. HELLO. HELLO. Sometimes he could not move his hands or arms or teeth or eyes at all.
The son’s book contained all things.
The son’s book enmeshed the threads of all events or lights or hours that had ever happened or would happen, or were happening right now.
The son’s book contained the sound of wing meat contained in birds once thought extinct, and that meat’s aging, worn to none—
it contained a diagram of long forgotten burned or buried cities and how to enter through their last remaining eyes, how to stay there in that belowground and, of new duration, live—
it contained sonogram photography of the man who in coming years would invent the thing that ruined us all—
it contained every word deleted from all other extant books, everything that every author had said aloud in rooms with no one while writing what words did end up appearing in those books, as well as all other possible combinations of words and new words those same characters could have made—
it contained instructions on how to stand on the surface of a camel’s eye—
it contained an interminable glisten—an unbreakable lock—
it contained the missing seventh and eighth sides of the Clash’s
Sandinista!
, written by a presence never mentioned in the band, which when played at a specific volume at a certain vector would invoke an unremembered form of light—and a song deleted from that missing album—lyrics deleted from that song—code words deleted from that language—time—
it contained a sister for the son to speak to in the evenings when the whole house was not awake, whom he would let his darkest language into, black pictures writ on black—
it contained a killer recipe for Apple Brown Betty, enabling mesmerism, enabling sight of new rooms set upon rooms—
it contained electronic conversations between Richard Nixon and Aleister Crowley, convening under new moonlight to discuss the initiation of the construction of a translucent ceiling over the United States, a silent, hieroglyph-inscribed dome, to watch the waking and the sleeping, to see and see—
it contained air that the reader, underwater, could truly breathe—
it contained how to erupt a mansion from a dot; and from a mansion, sores—from sores, pistons—from pistons, night—from night, a thing without a name—so on—
it contained combinations to every locker in a high school buried underground in the mud around the house where the son had been born, the lockers’ insides padded with a gummy, tasteless residue, no stink,
and underneath that gunk, another combination knob
—
it contained a verbal adaptation of the film that would be considered the sequel to every film existing and film thereafter and film not found,
the paper white
—
it contained various ingestible flavors, scents, and textures, imaginary numbers, sentences that destroyed themselves in their own utterance—
a mirror
—
a wet
—
a gun
—
a time spit
—
lumps
—
computers
—
life
—
it contained full texts of endless novels trapped inside the perished brains of certain women and certain men, and in presences neither man nor woman but spread among the several, silent scourging brains—
it contained the last words of every major-league baseball player ever and the lengths of their longest hairs—
it contained directions on how to find your way into a room held offscreen in
The Wizard of Oz
,
The Wizard
, and
The Wiz
, and the films contained in those films, in no punch line, the frames therein unshot, unscened, unframed—
it contained containment—
it contained.
The son’s book was all one sentence.
The son’s book did not glow.
The son’s book would one day be line-edited by a hair-covered man in a small office with no windows and no doors.
The son’s book is forthcoming from Modbellor & Watt in 2118, when there is no one remaining who can see.
The man stood up above her. From in the sun he looked down. The mother could not make out the man’s face, or what about it. As she stood up to look closer she felt her body brim with empty blood. Her head went swelling, dizzy. She put her hands into the blur for balance. She saw the man move as if to want to help her, but before they touched he stopped himself. The man’s hands were very large, rings on each finger. Friction. The mother felt a minor wish that he’d come on—that he could want that—that he would ever. The mother crouched back near the ground.
The mother had become covered, somehow, in motor grease. She had it on her hands and neck and face and blouse and pant legs and on her shoes. She felt embarrassed. She’d filled the mower with gasoline and checked the oil and kissed the engine and still it wouldn’t run. She’d ripped the cord until her arm hurt. She’d kicked and squawked and invoked god. The yard needed to look clean.
The man was saying something. He made motions with his hands. The mother had yet to meet the other people living on their street—to even see their faces—though in the mornings she noticed cars leaving and in the evening they came back. The mother didn’t know why she couldn’t make out what the man was saying. She saw his mouth, the hair around it—so much hair. She watched his lips move in small directions. The man’s hands were colored darker than the whole rest of his skin.
The man knelt down beside her. The man had on a yellow dress shirt buttoned all the way up and no tie, the shirt’s neck loose around his throat as if it’d been tugged at, itching. Long black gloves hid his forearms with silky sheen. His pants were deeply pleated, like theater curtains. The pants comprised a pattern, wavering in the repeat as would a wall of heat. The mother caught herself staring into the pants transfixed, as in the toning. The mother’s head filled up again with liquid. The man grinned. He stood back up. He came back down. He licked his thumb and touched the mower. He was very near the mother.
With long, thick fingers, the man lifted the mower and peered into its mottled belly. He blew a silent breath into the engine,
a simple trick
. He stood up again and the mother stood up with him, in cohesion. The man was saying something. He had long hair like a woman, the mother noticed now, as had the father once.
How had she not noticed this at first?
When the man pulled the cord the mower roared. He pointed at it, two long nails.
The mower’s clamor seemed to nudge the sun. The air around them rippled.
The man began to mow the lawn.
The son had the TV up as loud as it would go. He’d hoisted the glowbox off the stand into his lap. He’d wedged himself between the wall and sofa. From most major angles a person passing would not see him in the room. When the screen went black between certain scenes or before commercials, the son could see his head reflected with a warp.
The son had spent all morning brushing his teeth and gums and tongue and still couldn’t get this certain taste out of his mouth. There were matted knots in the son’s hair the size of horse apples, though usually the son’s hair was beautiful and straight.
The TV had a name but no one ever called it by it.
The son kept pressing the volume up button though he already knew it was as loud as it could be. He’d tuned into a certain movie on a certain channel that for some reason came in clear. On the screen, there was a woman, pictured only from the back. She wore a dress, tight and red like the fabric on the sofa. The dress was slightly translucent in a way that caused the son to feel aroused. The son did not understand arousal. The woman was walking down a hall. Her strange shoes clacked on the tile so loud around the woman and the son that he could feel it in his chest. The hall’s walls were long and dark and smooth. The woman did not pass any windows, any people, hangings, doors. The skin of the woman’s legs was bruised.
The son stayed in the TV room for three days, days counted unnamed. He felt air or fabric move around him, but he did not get up to see who or what was there. The son could not get up. All that happened was he watched the woman walk down halls. The TV movie did not break for commercials. The son had to think to even breathe. The son knew he wanted a roast beef sandwich but could not bring himself to get up and go make it—his stomach speaking words—writing words along his flesh inside him—ageless, lightless. The son could feel the TV’s weight and heat burning deep and deeper through, warping layers, peeling skin. No one came looking for the son.
