There Is No Year (27 page)
Authors: Blake Butler
In the houses men were laughing. Mothers made other mothers, fathers, too. Sick continued. Night continued. In the night, small pockets fried in endless sing.
The night gathered up in pockets, grew holes. The holes hummed around a rasping center, rolled. Centered in all air and in all bodies. The center’s center had no name.
The bodies aged. The bodies ate lunch, their old limbs shifting, breathing up in celebration, years of air. Resting. Nesting. Needing. Sleeping. Going. Sewing. Teeth on teeth.
Other things would happen. More words would pass from mouth to mouth. The weight of nameless light would overflow the houses, days unblinking, above ground.
The ground was light. The lunch was light, too. And the days, the beds, more holes. The light would fill the halls for hours. The skin would come and come and come.
Thank you, Calvert Morgan, magicmachine. Thank you, Carrie Kania, Dennis Cooper, Bill Clegg. Thank you, mother, father, sister, brother-in-law. Thank you, Heather. Thank you, Gene &
HTMLGiant
crew. Thank you,
Featherproof
crew. Thank you, Ken, Shane, Gian, Michael, David, Sean, Derek. Thank you, Atlanta friends. Thank you, Internet. Thank you.
B
LAKE
B
UTLER
is the author of the novella
Ever
and the novel-in-stories
Scorch Atlas
, named Novel of the Year by
3:AM Magazine
. He edits
HTMLGiant
, “the internet literature magazine blog of the future,” as well as two journals of innovative text,
Lamination Colony
and
No Colony
. His writing has appeared widely online and in print, including in
The Believer
,
Unsaid
,
Fence
, and
Vice
, and short-listed in
The Best American Nonrequired Reading
. Butler lives in Atlanta and blogs at gillesdeleuzecommittedsuicideandsowilldrphil.com.
Visit www.AuthorTracker.com for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins authors.
Scorch Atlas
Ever
Cover design and photograph by Milan Bozic
Author photograph by Morgan Kendall
All other photographs by Justin Dodd
THERE IS NO YEAR.
Copyright © 2011 by Blake Butler. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
FIRST EDITION
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.
ISBN 978-0-06-199742-6
EPub Edition © 2011 ISBN: 9780062087324
11 12 13 14 15
OV/RRD
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
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1
Antonin Artaud died alone, seated at the foot of his bed, holding his shoe.
2
Sharon Tate died tied neck to neck with another person while thirty-four weeks pregnant.
3
Andy Kaufman died leaving the premonition in several others that he hadn’t.
4
Heather O’Rourke died soon after completing a trilogy of films about a cursed family, after which several other members of the cast are said to have also died prematurely.
5
Chris Farley died wearing sweatpants and an open button-down shirt.
6
Heath Ledger died lying facedown on a bed.
7
Krissy Taylor died despite more than an hour of attempted resuscitation.
8
River Phoenix died after falling on the ground and convulsing for eight minutes.
9
Bill Hicks died twelve days after ceasing speaking in his parents’ home in Little Rock, Arkansas.
10
Cliff Burton died after winning the right to the bed he died in by pulling the ace of spades from a deck of cards.
11
Christa McAuliffe died attempting to enter outer space.
12
Robert Earl Davis Jr. died on the floor of the bathroom of his recording studio after his fifth heart attack, chemically induced.
13
Timmy Taylor died in a one-car accident on the way home from a recording session during the production of his band’s major-label debut.
14
Flannery O’Connor died thirty-three years before her mother.
15
Johannes Chrysostomus Wolfgangus Theophilus Mozart died and was buried in a common grave with no mourners in attendance.
16
Wesley Willis died having recorded more than a thousand songs.
17
Marc Bolan died leaving a supposed curse on those he’d known, which thereafter has been associated with more than a dozen incidents of premature death.
18
Bobby Darin died of blood poisoning from dental medication despite eight hours on the operating table.
19
Charlie Parker died inside a body mistaken by his coroner to be twenty years older than it actually was.
20
Tupac Shakur died as a result of gunshot complications after spending six days in a medically induced coma, and posthumously continued to release albums.
21
Russell Jones died with a doubled plastic bag of narcotics hidden in his stomach.
22
Simone Weil died refusing to eat more than small amounts of food, opening her body to her disease.
23
William Burroughs Jr. died having returned to the state where he was raised in search of help.
24
Srinivasa Ramanujan died after being incorrectly diagnosed and thus not receiving treatment for his infection, which could have easily been cured.
25
Ian Curtis died after watching Werner Herzog’s
Stroszek
and listening to Iggy Pop’s
The Idiot
.
26
Aubrey Beardsley died very early in the morning on a hotel bed sometime after having begged his publisher to destroy his obscene work.
27
Bas Jan Ader died lost at sea while attempting to cross the Atlantic alone in performance of a piece he titled
In Search of the Miraculous
.
28
Joan of Arc died by fire and then was burned twice again, to ashes, to prevent the preservation of relics of her flesh.
29
Kaspar Hauser died of a stab wound inflicted on him by a stranger who also handed him a small bag containing a message written backward.
30
Egon Schiele died three days after his wife and spent the time between their deaths drawing sketches of her.
31
Bruce Lee died with his brain having swollen by 13 percent.
32
Brandon Lee died on a film set almost exactly twenty years after his father.
33
Tim Buckley died as a result of his response to the direct challenge “Go ahead, take it all.”
34
Jeff Buckley died in a river almost exactly twenty-two years after his father.
35
El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz died in sunlight standing before a crowd of more than four hundred.
36
Pier Paolo Pasolini died on a beach that often appeared in his novels, after being run over several times by his own car.
37
Ann Quin died while swimming out to sea.
38
John Belushi died having recently filmed a cameo in which he was portrayed facedown in a swimming pool, dead.
39
Jean-Michel Basquiat died having hid many of his best works to keep them from being sold.
40
Jonathan Brandis died after his performance in one of his last roles was cut from the film.
41
Keith Moon died a few weeks after the release of the album
Who Are You
, on the cover of which he appears seated backward on a chair to hide his weight gain.
42
Rainer Werner Fassbinder died with a cigarette in his mouth and blood pouring from one nostril.
43
David Foster Wallace died with a massive and uncompleted manuscript found bathed under light in his garage.
44
[
All the phones inside the house were ringing, and in the next hour, and the next
—