Authors: Blake Butler
There Is No Year (9 page)
In the street the father spun around all of a sudden, to recall how the air felt.
The father noticed then how coming up from the box the caterpillars had stretched their cocooning across the yard, a thousand tiny tightroped strings extended off the enmeshed mailbox to the dying tree that masked the front yard—which the father had asked be removed before the house was bought but then forgot—the whole gnarled trunk mostly exposed except for a couple bigger branches near the middle where the father had planned to hang a tire swing or something like it for his wife and child to enjoy, though he’d still not had time for that thing either,
his days stuffed thick with walking, needing, heat
. From the tree the caterpillars had begun to shoot across and comb over the house, their whorls of creamy thread just barely glinting in the waning slivered curtain of old light, as if covert, the thorax drizzle sloshed in long thin strands down through the branches across the long field of air onto the roof, encombing, jeweled with larvae—
further fathers
—spooling out around the house, reflecting light at certain angles hidden, a warbling quilt, a den.
The father stood on the front lawn. Above the sun burped up and down. The father did not know he was not moving. Beneath the father there was grass. Beneath the grass there was root and rock and mud. In the mud were several sorts of other minor organisms, convened and still convening. In the mud there was cells from skin that’d been on humans and there was water that had come down through the air. There were things that’d died and fallen off of trees and floated down and decomposed and sunk into the soil to become part of the soil or to become the soil itself—
a single curving surface on which any flesh must walk or lay
. Further layers under, the dirt turned into rock, slathered in being, crushed with pressure, juiced in spots with gush or tunnel. Certain tunnels went very deep. Certain tunnels ended in doors that led to rooms.
That night the father slept through thirteen dreams. In the first dream he was a priest. In a second dream he was in Judas Priest. In a third dream he betrayed himself. In a fourth dream he ate so much spaghetti he exploded. In a fifth dream he was a beach towel in an unlit closet. In a sixth dream he was a woman who came to the closet and threw up all the spaghetti into the beach towel. In a seventh dream he was all the beaches and all the sand. In an eighth dream he had a cubicle beneath a certain beach where gorgeous women came and forced him to have sex. In a ninth dream he got folded in a remaindered library book and sold on eBay to a woman who binge-ate twice a week. In a tenth dream the father became a series of explosions in a video game his son was playing. In an eleventh dream the father felt very tired, though in this world
tired
meant
obese
, though
obese
meant
made of light
. In a twelfth dream the father was asleep and could not be woken no matter how long they screamed or what weapons were used. In a thirteenth dream the father woke and found himself above himself and inside his mouth he saw himself and inside that self’s mouth he saw himself and inside that self’s mouth he saw a window, and through the window the father saw another window, and through the window the father saw mountains, fountains, fortunes, beaches, gazebos, grease, disease, and the father found that he was laughing and the father crawled inside himself and turned around.
The son burned through the channels. The son saw ads for ground beef and cow milk and respirators. He saw men throw balls at one another. He could not find the woman in the hall. He’d forgotten even what she looked like—her shape—though she was always in his mind. In his bedroom in the mirror or in the air above his bed sometimes he felt he could feel her just beside him. He would move around his bedroom with his eyes closed, feeling for her with hands. She was there.
In absence of the hall film, the son became distracted with another. A movie made many years before the son was born. The son had seen this one before—when he was sick a certain channel had played it back-to-back for near a week—every time it seemed most new. The son couldn’t tell what the film was about. There was a family living in a house. There was a father, a mother, and a son. The family all looked tired. Nothing ever really happened. The father drove places and got lost and walked around the house. The mother mostly cleaned and worried. The son would stand and sit and stand. Other scenes showed the family together, going places, though these were rendered in black-and-white, and seemed of a different grade of film from all the others. Yes, this film was different than the other times the son had seen it.
This time there was something wrong inside the picture. The heads of the main actors and actresses were blurred, though they had not been so the other times the son watched the film, he thought. Also, in this version, the family all kept falling down. In scenes where they’d be walking, doing things the son remembered having seen them do in scenes before, suddenly their legs would fail and they would go down, or otherwise the house around them lurched. The characters did not make reference to this happening—they went on with the scene around the blips. Sometimes the camera fell as well. Sometimes there’d be whole rooms of people falling—all of their heads blurred—
actors
. A scene would take place in a mall, then suddenly all the people walking and shopping and eating fast food would just hit the ground, and then they’d get right back up and keep doing what they were doing. Sometimes the people could briefly be heard talking loud, but in a language that didn’t make sense. The sky over the people would turn purple or turn reflective or begin raining ants or caterpillars out of large holes. No matter what happened no one in the movie acted any different. The son knew the film had not gone this way before. It had not lasted so many hours. The film went on and on.
The son had almost fallen asleep watching the movie before he recognized himself—saw himself right there in the movie, in a window in the background of the screen. His face, unlike the others, was not blurred. In the window the son looked frightened. The son’s hair was flattened, of a bright white. The son could not tell what the window was a part of—the shot was too close up. Several other characters with the blurred faces blocked long sections of the shot. The son felt he recognized certain bodies, the black holes of blurred mouths moving on pale heads.
In the window the son was saying something. The son couldn’t hear him through the glass and other conversation, though he could tell by the son’s lips that the son was repeating the same thing over and over. The son’s lips were cracked and kind of swollen, the same lips the son used each day to eat and drink and speak and sometimes kiss another’s skin. Then the camera moved and the son was no longer in the picture and the blurry heads inside the film went on—scenes and scenes there never-ending, and in some scenes other scenes there played in the background on little screens—and in the background of those scenes, screens too—and in those and those and those, so on.
Upstairs in the son’s closet, the sealed black package rolled over on its side.
The son and the new girl quickly became special friends. They sat together in the lunchroom—no one else came near. That week the school stayed filled with screeching as the school tested the fire systems and the lights. The son could see other people talking but heard all siren. He could somewhat still hear the girl. The blinking shook his eyes. The girl paid for both their lunches. She carried both trays with one hand. The son was so hungry lately. After meals he chewed his fingernails and hair. The girl and the son had a lot in common. They both liked sleeping. They both liked knives. Some days in class the girl would stand up and put her gloved arms out and make a hum and spin around and the teachers never stopped her. Nobody ever said a word. The girl told the son there was something she had to tell him later. Sometimes the girl bought the son gifts. She gave the son a heavy book with empty pages. She gave the son a glass bead to sleep with. She gave the son lots of lengthy, pressured hugs. She said she didn’t want the son to give her anything because she liked giving so much more.
Sometimes at school the son would come into a classroom and find himself already seated in his assigned chair, his hair combed clean and neatly parted, a blue word sometimes plainly scrawled or stamped across his creaseless, spit-shined head.
Sitting upstairs in the closet,
where she’d hidden
, the mother heard a knocking through the floor—sound that seemed at first to come from on the wood there in the closet, just behind her head.
She could not move. She was so thick.
The mother, sitting wobbling, felt the knocking shift along the inseam of the house, all down around its back and belly to the downstairs, to the front door. There the knocking became pounding, became shouting, became bells—a chime the house had held inside it, somehow, since it had been built, a human sound. The low tone of the doorbell made the mother’s body moisten, the stink of grass around her head—the knocking pounding all throughout her, at her heartbeat, twinned together, double time—then, inside the rhythm, she could see again, and she could stand.
At the door, through the thick peephole, the sweating mother saw a man. Not the man she’d hoped to see there,
he with such hands
, but her husband, balding. Here, the father, at his own door: a lock to which he had the key. The mother breathed to see the father upright, glistening in outdoor light—she could not remember the last time she’d witnessed him outside the house since they moved in.
And yet this father was not the father, the mother saw then, looking longer, her brim shifting—no, not quite. This man clearly had aged less than the current father. His cheeks were tight and eyes were clean. He had another way about him. Kempt clothes, casual. A fine set of clean black driving gloves. The mother saw some kind of promise in his posture, days yet coming, the expectation of a life. For years all the males the mother looked at looked like the father—every single one—though that was in the years when he was thinner and she quicker and them strong.
The mother looked and looked and looked again, her eyelids flitting. This man was beautiful, she knew. Like her husband except newer, neater, which could have made him anybody.
The mother unlocked, unlatched, and opened up the door.
Beside the man, the mother saw, as the strong door revealed another hole, there stood a woman, too. A woman about as tall as the mother, a small taut belly protruding from her skeleton, petite. This woman wore a veil—a white bride’s veil, the mother noticed— certainly a bride’s, it had to be,
the color shifting, pale
, with long dark driving gloves, like those the man beside her wore, covering her skin’s arms. Through the veil the mother could see the semi-outline of the other impending mother’s face, the features meshed in, fluttered. She had a mouth and, somewhere, eyes.
The mother smiled. A new young starting, she thought. One for another. She felt her skin inside her, warm.
The mother watched the other woman reach slowly on into her pocket, as for a gun. Together they inhaled, then.
The mother closed her eyes. She felt the warm air blowing somewhere high above her, though down here the air was still. She swallowed and she swallowed.
When she looked again, the other woman had a piece of paper in her hands. At first glance, it seemed blank, then it seemed to show the mother her own head back. The mother’s dry eyes swam. She craned her neck in, stumbled closer, looking for her age. Up close, she could read there, a description of her house—the ad she’d placed just that same morning, black-and-white. How many bedrooms, their dimensions. How many fireplaces, baths. Kind of siding, year built (
left blank
), a/c presence, names of nearby schools and roads. The mother wasn’t sure how the ad had already made print. The paper people had said it would take at least three days—days the mother had planned to use to clean the house, to mow and mow the grass. Most days the day was always over before the day began.
And yet here was this young couple,
local people
, at the front door, for a view. They looked clean and kind, dressed and possessed of a certain manner that to the mother suggested money, which suggested therefore that if they approved they might buy quickly, and then the family could move even sooner to a new house, which was beginning to seem more and more exactly what they needed. The mother did not feel at home. At night in their bedroom she had dreams of such condition she could hardly bring herself to go to sleep. Dreams of fissure, squashing, oily sneeze. Dreams of the son screaming and on fire. Of the sky above them melting like a raw egg and dripping down to crush the house with them inside it. During the dreaming the dreams seemed very real, not like a film at all, the way some dreams often would.
