There Is No Year (22 page)

The son shook his head, looked up by looking down.

His mouth filled up again with nothing—he swallowed hard.

I like to remember things my own way, like anybody, he said, in a second voice, with words that were not words.

DRINK

The girl laughed louder than the son had. She laughed so hard her eyes shook and she spanked the back of the son’s head and tugged his hair harder than hard and laughed again so loud the air was older and made the son slap her hand with his. She fell back against the wall of bags, disturbing several,
the sound of cymbals and of paste
. She writhed across the floor. Her body seemed to dance, contorted. Her eyes rolled back in her head. Her neck was bending. Her neck seemed putty. The walls went wrinkled. The son started to stand up. Instead the girl stood up and caught her breath and waved for him to stay. She crossed the room and opened a panel in the ceiling with her long arms—
the son had not noticed how long her arms were
—and came back out with a can—a fist-sized chrome can with no label but engraved shit the son could not read. She set the can down on a tray. She brought the tray over to the son and stuck a long curled straw through the can top and helped the straw into the son’s mouth. The straw was made of something neither plastic, metal, wood, nor bone. It seemed to fit his teeth.

Drink, the girl said. It is delicious.

The son could not disagree—though the substance was not liquid—nothing there but air at all.

He drank.

the house there all around him, ashing

all through the roof and walls, unwound

in light, his name shaking out its color

shaking out its hours, numbers, nouns

THAT IS SOME THICK STUFF

The girl watched the son drink, then took the tray away and went back in place again to comb. She yanked the son’s hair back so hard on his head his scalp strained red, exposed. The son’s scalp had tattoos all through it. The tattoos were of text fine-printed, writ by hand. The hair was held back by a series of small pins that pulled the hair’s roots so tightly they seemed ready to rip out any minute. In the mirror across the room the son could see himself aligned. He could see his room a little, his other room, in that old house. He felt the house inside him, in the mirror, its glass now leaning right against his face. This particular mirror, the son noticed, close up—
among the many rooms refracted
—this mirror was the same mirror as the one he’d slept with every night. This particular mirror was caving inward there against him, curving, becoming jelly, burble, white. In the mirror now, the son gleamed, of no expression.

RORRIM

The girl saw the son was looking. She let the son’s hair fall free and took the son’s chin. She seemed to be saying something. The heat was foaming. The son could not shake it off. He could not not. The house’s color bloomed. He felt something move inside him, metastasizing, filling his form with its form:
smoke through smoke, room through room
. The son reached back and touched the girl’s arm. Her skin was smiling.

So what do you want to do
now
? the girl said.

NOT A WORD OR SHAPE OR NAME

The other floor’s long hall of bedroom doors all stood open, stunk and stung the father’s eyes. The wet revolved inside his head and made him hungry, stuck with an itching, in the light. He held his hands upon the air there, flush with hot flashes—a drum kit in his lungs—his feet swollen beneath him, doorbells. The other house alive.

The floors down here were mirrors. The father watched himself walking from below. Each step made him thicker, narrowing the walls.

In spasmed gulps, the way his childhood cat had—
the cross-eyed, many-named creature who one night had crawled into a mudhole in the woods behind his parents’ house and not come out
—
its name still somewhere in him, its absent sound
—the father coughed something up into his hands: an origami box folded out of wet, smeary flash paper—with it at last out of his chest he could see head-on again—he could think of things he’d seen once: ash rising from fires, balls thrown, nipples tugged, bundles of cash. The father unfolded the origami, hearing it crinkle, as did each day the fat filling his head. WHO IS IN THERE, someone had written. The father ripped the note into many tiny pieces and swallowed it again.

In the house the hall held still. Somewhere above him a pucker shrunk a little, released a smudge of air. Black and magnets. Runny.

The father walked along the hall. He stopped outside the copy master bedroom. He turned to face the light. In the room he saw his body sleeping, several of him. The furniture had been removed. The bodies of him piled into the small space stacking, puddled up with limbs. Some were missing hair or digits. They were cuddling, chewing, talking in their sleep. Laughing, scratching, humping, what have you. The more he looked the more there were, though sometimes, between blinking, there was just him,
well, he and the him inside him
, and the meat around his seeing, and his arms. The father closed his eyes and heard them breathing, heard his many hungry stomachs snarl.

With his hands within the forced dark, the father closed the door.

The father felt his way along the hallway further, palms along the walls. In the grain, the house had written out a list of names, a man’s phone number, a tablature, a hymn’s words, a prayer, a map, a day—none of which the father understood as language,
and yet it settled in him still.

The father felt along the hall with all his fingers till he felt another door. This door would be the son’s door, the father said, and heard his body say. The door into she and I and his and hers and ours and ours and our son’s room. This door as well was open,
another mouth inside the copy house
—or was he back inside his own house now? The father could not tell. His chest was throbbing.

The father moved into the room. He moved onto the air with skin around him, feeling forward, unwilling yet to open back his eyes.

INTERVIEW

The girl moved in a little closer. She had her hands behind her back.

The girl turned into the mirror—turned to look at someone else.

The girl began to speak, in several voices, asking someone:

Q: WHAT DID THE SON WANT TO DO?

Q: WHAT DID THE SON WANT TO WANT TO DO?

Q: WHAT DID THE GIRL WANT FOR THE SON?

Q: WHAT COULD THE GIRL HAVE DONE TO MAKE THE SON WANT SOMETHING ELSE?

Q: HOW MUCH HAD THE SON EATEN? HOW MUCH HAIR COULD FIT INSIDE HIS CHEST?

Q: HOW MUCH COULD FIT INSIDE THE GIRL’S HOUSE? THE SON’S HOUSE? THE COPY VERSION(S)? WHY?

Q: WHAT WAS THE GIRL’S HOME MADE OF? AND THE SON’S SKIN? AND THE GIRL?

Q: WHAT FIT IN THE SPACE BETWEEN THE HOUSES?

Q: WHO ELSE WAS COMING BY?

The girl was turning. The girl glowed. The son glowed.

Q: DO YOU KNOW NOW?

Q: DO YOU?

Do you?

THE WANTING BOX

In the image of the room where nights the son would be, the father felt his body press against another hold. He opened his eyes, saw nothing but it—a black box large as the whole room. It gave off a silent steam or smoke, as had the last box he remembered, which upon remembering in that instant he ceased to remember furthermore.

The door the father had come into the room through was no longer there behind him, nor was there much of any space left for him to stand between the box and wall. He had to suck his gut in, skin into skin there, held not breathing, and still there was hardly room for him to move—as if he were underneath the box at the same time as above it, and beside it—nothing but the box—no room at all.

Inside the box, a bumping. Something smothered. Rub of skin of fists. The father pressed his head against the surface, wanting. He listened harder, leaning in. The more he leaned, the more he had to—his spine took kindly to the curve—then, there he was leaning with all of him against the image, its surface adhered to his shoulder and his cheek.

The round meat of the father’s left ring finger puffed up.
More rings.

Father, the father tried to say back, and out came all the other names.

He tried to speak again and still could not, the words instead reflected in his head, spurting as would a heavy wet through his cerebrum and down into his chest and ass and legs, and no repeat.

The father’s face against the box, both of them aging, one changing shape inside, one not—his body flush against the box’s, gripped.

The no light coming through no windows to the no room to the need.

In all his want, and all the surface, the father’s head became pressed upon so hard against the box he could not see—or could not tell what he was seeing, in such color—the bend of wall on wall, the blank—gone windows lit with light of leaving, sucked from the house into the sky. The box pulled on his backbone, barfing through his body in reverse—warm milk, spit, rainwater, stomach acid, fresh blood—his body sticking to the seam, wherever. In his head he heard a hundred guns—a fall, a swallow, sinking—
black cells
—then, there he was above him, and beside—then, there he was below him, and between him, and overhead, within—he could see himself from every angle—he could see himself inside the box.

INSIDE

The box
inside was
small at
every
angle—so
small the
father had
no room to
move his
arms or
legs or
head.
The inner
surface of
the box,
unlike its
outside,
held a ripe
transparent
pale—so
pale there
appeared
not to be a
surface
there at all,
unwinding
—and yet
against the
father’s
flesh it
made a
pressure
and
against the
father’s
flesh it
burned.

To the left
and just
above the
father’s
vision in
the box
there was a
hole—a
single tiny
source of
seeing
allowing
light onto
the pupil
of his right
eye.

Through the
hole, the
father saw a
grayish
chamber.
Inside the
chamber hung
another eye,
like the
father’s eye
but larger,
with lid and
vein and
cornea
removed.

In the light inside the eye the father saw another light—
it had a name
—a name he could not hear or say or see inside him, though it was watching—seeing—seen. The father could not think beyond the what.

The eye had many sides. Each time the father blinked inside his own sight within the other’s—
quick black
—when he looked again the eye would seize. The eye would spin among its sides and scrunch like aged skin, then come to settle centered on another side. Each new side held a new pupil to look into, and it looking back as well, again.

Through each pupil, paused before him, the father felt a force of light thread through his head—

light of photographs without color
—

light of music without sound
—

light of books without pages
—

light of paintings without paint
—

light of dance without limb
—

light of speech without lung
—

light of buildings without walls
—

In deleted air the father saw the ageless light of those the light itself had made destroyed—one for each side of the eye here in the box here in the copy house around the father, stunned with the light of skin in skin deleted young—like those in the pictures the father’s son had been sent, the son among them—bodies organed with creation of an hour never named—deleted light held inside daughters, inside sons.

The light came in all through the father, frying.

In the light the father saw:

,
⁴⁴

,
⁴⁵

 
⁴⁶

&

.
⁴⁷

The father saw:

,
⁴⁸

,
⁴⁹

,
⁵⁰

,
⁵¹

,
⁵²

,
⁵³

,
⁵⁴

,
⁵⁵

,
⁵⁶

,
⁵⁷

,
⁵⁸

,
⁵⁹

,
⁶⁰

,
⁶¹

,
⁶²

,
⁶³

,
⁶⁴

,
⁶⁵

,
⁶⁶