There Is No Year (20 page)
Authors: Blake Butler
This house was excellent, the son decided, spoke in a voice inside his eyelid. Whenever the girl showed up the son was going to ask if he could move in, or at least if his dad could get a job with the girl’s dad.
Completing this thought, the son tried to go on and think the next thing and felt the same words thereon repeat: This house is excellent—
his screaming eyelid!
—Whenever the girl showed up he was going to ask if he could move in—
yes, please, now
—or at least if his dad could get a job with the girl’s dad—
he needed
.
And the thought again. The thought again, rolled in warming foam inside his head. A tone. He could not shush it. It numbed his gums—the food gluing all inside him, singing, a blank recurring unto exhausted, fat-full sleep.
In the other house—the empty house—
where was the father?
—the mother went to Google search.
The mother had on a translucent negligee. The mother’s face was wet.
The mother typed in:
man who fixed the mower
.
She saw a bunch of lawnmowers and some fires and a knife.
The mother typed in:
man in the house with so much sand
.
The search results contained texts about a man who’d built his house on sand, a man who made sand music, a movie based upon a book, thoughts on how to enjoy beaches, a man who’d built his house on rock.
None of this was what the mother wanted, clearly.
The mother’s elbows creased with chafe, indention. Her forearms were so thick.
The mother typed in:
he with such long fingers
.
The mother typed in:
he with teeth & gloves
.
The mother typed in:
him
.
The screen went white. She felt her belly bubble, throb. It made a beeping.
The mother looked at what she’d done.
The father came out of the bedroom into the hallway and started down the stairs and then the stairs beneath him seemed to crimp in some way they had never before right there. The stairs seemed to cling against the father’s feet and also were crumbling in. Even as he stepped down onto the surface of the landing in the foyer where the stairs had always ended—there facing the door into the outside—the father could not help but feel that the room he was in now at the bottom of the stairs was not the room that had always been at the bottom of the stairs, but another room of the same shape and make and color—slightly off. Something about the texture of the wall or the way the window glinted or the way the light came in from outside and graced the ground. Something about the words that had been said in that room before then not quite sitting.
The father put his foot in certain places the way he had so many other days and felt a different feeling than he’d felt then. His right eyelid again twitching—
inner houses
. The father pinched and prodded at his skin. He punched himself hard in his chest, his gut, the sides. The vibration flexed through his body in other places: between his toes, against his scrotum (vessels), in his knees. His other eye sat waiting, clean.
The father moved from the landing to the next room, which on most days was the room where the family ate. They had just eaten there today, had they not? Were they not eating there right now? The dining table still sat smattered under the bright red tablecloth curtain, stained in all those places that would not wash out. It seemed slightly larger than it had once been, or the father smaller. The chandelier the father had hung himself there to replace the prior lamp—a lamp that refused to quit cutting in and out, the sockets zapping when he touched them—the chandelier was still intact—though this chandelier’s crimped metal arms hung so much lower—the father could step right up and take a bite. He could fit the tiny frosted bulb glass into his mouth and huff it. With the glow washed up inside his cheeks the father looked upon the room.
The father could have done anything he wanted. He could have walked right out of the house. He could have gone to the airport and bought a ticket to Lithuania. He could have walked to the grocery store and climbed inside the freezer bin and pulled the bags of broccoli over his face. He could have become a male prostitute and fucked for cash in bathrooms with his head beating in rhythm on the toilet tank. He could use the cash to buy stocks that would skyrocket and make him very rich, rich enough to live somewhere alone for the rest of his life and not stare at boxes in an office and not speak to anyone again. Not ever. At any moment, any of these things, the father could have done them. The father did not do any of these things.
ANTECHAMBER, SECOND ANTECHAMBER, SHAFTS
The father left the room with the table and entered another room that the family did not have a name for. The father did not like the way he felt while standing in this room but he also felt that he did not want to ever leave it.
The father craned his head into the next room, which was a hallway, and the father looked and looked. The father closed his eyes. He thought he heard someone else enter the room he’d just come from. He felt light bending around his back.
The father looked again and closed again. He had to leave this room, he knew, but he did not want to touch the hallway carpet and he could not go back the way he came. The hallway carpet had a peculiar pattern.
The father held his breath and jumped across the air.
The father landed in another room.
There were tiny holes in this room that looked out onto exact geographic coordinates of space.
The father opened up his eyes.
The father had aged by eighteen months.
The father was at an age when eighteen months would not vastly change his outward physical appearance greatly, though some more of his hair had fallen out or molted white. His joints creaked in their gristle. His skin continued to sag. The father’s teeth bent slightly inward and were corroded slightly in color and dimension. His vision degraded enough to make him ineligible to pilot a motor vehicle. His other insurance premiums increased by 18 percent. His intestines loosened and the tapeworms inside them multiplied and slithered in their widths. The father’s brain blew fat with wrinkle.
Around the father in the house the rooms were there. Through the years these rooms would fill with things and some of those things would stay and remain the same unless moved or acted on by outside forces and other things in the rooms would come and go—this is what science had let him know. For the majority of their existence the rooms would contain nothing, and the nothing would not change.
In the room the father could not see one end of the room or the other. He could not see his fingers or his hands.
The father’s feet were on the floor, he felt sure. He was breathing through his mouth.
A camera may have floated through the darkness—
dark was all that held the house together
.
The father moved forward through the room in one direction. He could not feel his body go.
The father tried again.
Around the father the room went somewhere and in the room the father went into it and the father was there and the father moved.
He did not realize he was shouting. His voice enclosed around his head. He shook his head to get the sound out, and again began shouting, turning red:
This is my house.
This is our house.
This is where I am.
The father went
—through a room he recognized into a room he did not recognize,
each in exact image of the room where he’d been born
—into a room hung with photographs of people the father felt sure he did not know,
he could no longer recognize his father, his father’s father, his father’s father’s father, as well as several other men with his blood in them, and so on
—into the room where the mother had figured she’d someday find time to do her sewing, making bed quilts out of old clothes,
instead the room had grown so thick with dust you could no longer see the walls
—into the room that’d most sold the father on the house for no particular reason he could put a thumb on,
six walls slanted inward up to some center overhead, a leaving point, a sight
—into a room that was all windows, the glass gurbled, spurting, off, through which window the father saw only color that was not like any color unto him before,
the compiled color of the lengths of skin he’d bruised upon himself and certain others over the fearful evenings of his life
—into a room made of liquid in which the father could swim deep into one corner and could touch something there giving off air, a tiny rimless hole, and the father put his mouth against it and he breathed,
inhaled the smell of gasoline and cinder and gunpowder and new cars, and there were objects consecrated there around him in the liquid, held within a gel, he could not see
—into a room of cold wet sand tunneled by worms,
worms that once had lived inside the son, and ate of all the food the son ate, making a blank space, and heard of all the sound he heard, and sang in all his singing, and wallowed in his light
—into a room of babies held in long glass bubbles burping, screeching, needing feeding, waiting for their size,
each of which would one day make their own sons and daughters, and those their own sons and daughters, and theirs, and theirs, more and more blood
—into a room lodged in the bulb glass of some light fixture in a woman’s apartment in some city, where the father watched the woman remove her clothes and masturbate against a mirror and brush her teeth and wrap her head in string,
the father wanted this woman more than any one or thing he’d seen in his whole life, and did not realize how she looked exactly like the mother, named the same
—into a room the father had already been in before this evening but not in the same light, not like this,
to be honest all of these rooms had the same shape and grain and color, each measured 5.24 m × 10.48 m × 5.86 m
—into a room where the father was hardly dust and the father could not feel his arms,
his hair around him in a coarse gown, as one day he would be buried under sand
—into a curtain of endless blank where there was laughing,
every person, all at once, one thick and endless sound so loud it went beyond human hearing and beyond that again, killing all ears, breaking all windows in all buildings, shattering all light, and then replacing all of what it had damaged with new versions of itself, so deftly done we’d never know
—into another room made of something other,
the description of this room has been withheld by request
—through a room he recognized into a room he did not recognize,
each in exact image of the room where he would die
In this last room the father touched the wall and slid against it and the father was on the floor there looking up—through the ceiling the father could see some clouds convening, or were they clouds or something else. Something unraveled, something blackened, threaded through and through and through, and in this last room, from another, in a far part of the house, someone was shouting something awful in the soundshape of the father’s other name, and the father turned toward the name, his insides lifting, and the ceiling flexed with all his work and in the center of the ceiling a new hole opened and through the new hole came an eye, which there, then, saw.
Outside the house the grass around the house—the dead and endless grass the mother had mowed and mowed in begging to keep down—the grass with no roots left to mention, their butt ends frayed into a mush—roots that once had spread embedded underneath the other nearby houses in a network, a scumming labyrinth, a kind of whip—by now this dead and pure white groan-grass had grown up a few feet high. It grew to just below the house’s windows and grew up around the doors and at the outsides of the walls. It grew up beneath the house beneath the father and the father could feel it tickle, screaming, other language, through his chest.
The son felt a warmth flood through his skin. Gumming. Groggy. Mental sunshit. Metal wash. He could not get his eyelids open. He felt pressure running in one ear. His corneas felt fat—so big behind his eyelids that they groped and grapped and stuck. The son rolled and moaned for someone. So many colors washed his mind—the color of every room he’d ever been in, one after another, roto-flashed, became white. To match the color,
somewhere counting
, the son heard a snake of language at his ear—every word he’d ever said replayed together, compressed into one brief, marbled gob. The words were coming slightly out of the son’s mouth. He was saying things he’d said before. He could hear himself but nothing else. He didn’t want to say it. The son’s nostrils allowed something in then something broke off and then the son’s head throbbed through sinking and he could see.
The girl was standing above him. Her arms were flexed with muscle through the gloves. Their heads were held together, inches. The girl was breathing in his breathing and he was breathing in the girl’s. Up close, the son could see the girl was wearing the locket he’d tried for years and years to throw out, its clasp unclicked. The son looked to see the tiny picture there inscribed: an image of him looking at him, covered in black hair, a ring of bees surrounding the tight perimeter of his two whiteless, gleaming pupils, in each of the eyes another son reflected, and in those eyes, and in those. As far back into the aisle of eyes as he could see the son saw him there, seeing. Then the eyes blinked,
all at the same time, with the son’s
.