Authors: Blake Butler
The year my final dentist fit his whole arm down inside me, hungry for a portal, high on light.
The year I would have been a husband to anyone here with my same eyes.
The year I said I thought I wanted more—and really did.
The year my fat shook itself free, became another body, on its own—one who would stand above me in the evenings, never touching.
These are not my years, the father tried to tell the years themselves inside his thinking, though the words his body thought were:
What else could I have loved.
Move! Person 811 heard himself outside himself repeating, this voice as big as he’d imagined something in the mind of some gone god’s. Move, you massive dickless fucker!
He was already going fast as he could—the muscles in him stretched raw with windows in their gristle. He could no longer sense the other man following behind him, nor the man behind that man, so on.
All these fat, prismatic people.
The father breathed his blood.
Inside himself he felt the flesh walls to turn to water where he touched them—
because he was them
—a tasteless, scentless, flushing liquid that stung
his lids and shrank his bowels. The other body all around him also seemed shrieking. In the color of it was the tone.
The father rolled along among the water folded and unfolding—grasping for the door—what door—some, any vision—a window—waking locations. He kept rolling. He felt several sections of himself go other ways, swimming in opposite directions at the same time, a separation in his skin. He could not think of which part of what to try to hold onto.
Above the water a black orb-camera kept panning back and back and back, capturing each blinking of the father in tunnel method of the smear. The face of the water was all placid seen from above it, despite the movement underneath. The camera ascended, its organs burning, until it hit some kind of perimeter or ceiling and was stopped.
The camera kept bashing at the surface, at the surface. It could not cause a crack in what held it there from moving further out. Something very warm beyond it seemed to murmur. The camera beat itself to bits, sending small fragments flying until it hit the vital cord and fell into the thing it meant to film.
The surface did not blink.
The father’s body washed up in a bathtub. A nude woman stood beside it in the mirror working curls into her hair, long gray locks that ate the light up. She heard the father sputter, sneezing sea up, weed and scales screwed through his own hair. The woman had a long black metal chain that ran out from her vulva. The chain led somewhere beyond the bathroom door, its presence vibrating with a low tone. The woman continued with her fingers curling till her whole head was encased—her cheek skin slumped and slathered with bright white oil that clung to light underneath. Her tits, he saw, had been removed. In the tub, Person 811 burped and stammered, trying to stand up. The nude woman’s neck was stacked with hickeys, kind of glowing. Her spinal column seemed disrupted. Her ass, though—her ass had spent endless time on glossy paper, replicated through the years. The father nodded. He felt his back arch, his fat toes cracking as they cricked.
The woman finished with her make-up and came to stand above him. The chain anchored inside her tremored taut—as if the chain itself or something huddled at the far end could sense her moving and did not want it—and yet the woman did not flinch—no emotion as the chain tugged up from her, peeling her skin in flaps up off the limb. Her eyes were hard and had no color. In the tub the woman knelt down on the father, pressing some fleshy wet spot on his gut. Somewhere downstairs animals were screaming, chipping at the walls.
The woman took the father by the dark balls and opened up her mouth.
WHAT’S THE MOST BEST THING YOU’VE EVER SEEN, she said loudly without speaking, her mouth full of his dick. WHAT’S THE ONE NAME YOU COULD KNOW WITHOUT KNOWING YOU KNEW IF YOU HAD TO WHO IS THE WAY YOU WERE THEN THERE WHEN YOU WERE THE WAY YOU WERE THEN THERE OR NOW HOW MUCH DO YOU LOVE YOUR HOME WHERE ARE YOU IN YOU
The woman’s pores and eyes were gushing flour, some of which filled the father’s nostrils and other holes, clogging his body to stay closed in. Cold spirals waddled up him.
When he did not reply, the woman shook her head and let the father’s dick flop out soft against itself. Coming in contact with his other flesh now, the dick sort of sizzled and leaked liquid. 811 felt exquisite pain lurch up his
sternum, ejaculating in the bath. Afterwards he still felt ugly. He watched the sperm worked through the water at his skin, searching through the mud there for some hold. He felt a billion others growing larger in his self-sacs, one for every sperm he’d not released. All of it squalling all inside him and around him bloating. And it burned.
The father opened his mouth again to try to say something to the woman, but she was older now; instead his mouth ejected reams of infant birds. The birds were slow and small and not like birds then, covered in a gel. They shat long white strings of old light as they flew up; they flew straight into the wall at once; they died. Their feathers fell upon his body, stuck against him, glued down with his ejaculate, still kind of strumming with future flew. They stuck too to the woman until he and she were under so much writhing neither could see where he or she began. Their muscles throttled in the mask. They shat so fast. The room began filling up with wet between the fiber, more gush and slick pushed from all their holes.
All ages fried.
The woman’s mouth said another question but Person 811 could not hear it through the gunk, the tone inside it making shriek. The beef inside him beating.
One massive hauling on the woman’s chain inside the downy lather ripped the woman all of a sudden through the wall. Then it was dark. No matter how he struggled to flap and rise like what he’d seen come from her thereafter, he could not inside himself find hold.
The new men had to swim from several miles up, bleeding, to drag Person 811 out of where he lay, his body pussed and pulled apart and overflowing. The men had been employed. The men were not alive in certain senses. Where they’d lost their heads they’d been affixed with false heads made of leather, skin, and plastic, to give the appearance of having heads. The false heads bore great resemblance to Person 811.
Several sections of the father had become dislodged from the father in the toning, the elongation of his cells. The fleshy segments floated off among the liquid held to his body only now by bits of stringy flesh, vibrating with a language. The men collected these eruptions into a film sac—a bit of ear, a lash, a prism, something wet the father had swallowed years before—though some of the bit had washed out so far that they would not be found in time. The reconstruction of the father would therefore have to go on as best it could.
Underwater, the men lashed the father to a table and spun him upwards through the clear. They fit the father in a van. They drove the van into another van. This second van knew where to go. The van’s driver had touched the father on the eye once, years before, in a gold room. The van’s second-in-command had hid inside a blanket in the father’s father’s trunk for many months, breathing the same air as the father when the father’s father drove him to and from the school. The father’s father had never driven him anywhere but the school, and, well, once, to the ocean once to see where everyone they ever knew had drowned, to see the long intestines washing on the shoreline, and the massive birds growing more massive in their feeding.
The van’s fuel had once been inside the father also, but not via the manner you might assume.
The van itself had once been used for rape, and would again, and would again.
Inside the van, Person 811 lay with his head down against the floorboards with the human moaning of the road.
In another kind of dark the men massaged the father’s face. They stretched certain parts of him to yawning. They filled in the holes in with several kinds of putty and perfume orbs. The insides of Person 811 were now pastel. There men inserted devices in the father, items—
none of which by sight or function they could name
—inscribed text and digits on the father’s cells and sperm and organs, grafted buttons—then the father was sewn up.
Person 811 was made to stand and laugh and say nice things, though his new tongue kept getting in the way.
When he could shake hands with satisfaction, the men took him to visit the naked woman’s grave. She had perished in his pleasure, they explained. Pleasure had been administered, please recall. For your enjoyment. The enjoyment of the pleasure of it. The greatest light. Now if you don’t mind:
sign this form. And this form. And spit up here. And as well here now make the creaming. Stamp, initial, spit up, making creaming, sign. Checks must made out to the Absorber. Keep your eyes open.
The men watched Person 811 kiss the ground. They watched him lick the woman’s headstone and thank and thank it. Under the headstone was just putty. The woman had been absorbed or reassigned. Everything, they said, would be okay.
Okay? the father said. He could not taste it. Okay? Okay?
They pointed up.
They handed him a special pair of high-grade zoom bifocals that fit intensely to his whole face.
The word was written on the sky.
There in the weeks I came to know my wife again, the air was made of liquid ash
You could walk for weeks and step through windows and still just everything was old
Spumes of shit or wingbeat would come floating on some shudder
But for the most part, the house, the yard, in everybody—we knew black
We lanced around in squirmy currents cutting transitions for our hands
It wasn’t funny, nor would it stop
In the ash you let your eyes and arms go and you would end up somewhere or another
You could just roll around and release shit
No one would know
Some nights I’d turn the a/c down or leave the fridge wide open and the black rooms would then turn harder, into ice
Then there’d be rungs that formed up in the transom
Then you could climb
I’d slunk through all of this alone
By the time I’d learned the manner of the ladder there was lather in the den
There were shapes among us and we could feel them
We could have them, or be had
I was raped in so many positions I can’t remember by things I also can’t remember
It felt like walking
Soon the long waves sunk off from the houses and on the air was left no light
From the dark rhythm I cut a woman’s body
My wife of me was made of night at first, whereas I have only ever been all cold
Her voice would pour out of my skin asleep for hours
She had such undoing ideas
She had a talisman that gave off weather
There was so much between us we could touch and so much milk
Right now I can remember I am the father in this book
Right now, regardless, I remember, though soon again soon I will not
In this scum I’d built the house that would be ours
I built it just by blinking
It was right there
Just years and years and fucking years inside this house there counting
Moving in from room to room in no clean light
Often my wife was not around at all, or she was watching from somewhere I could not feel her
I could not feel anything
My skin would stick to certain surfaces for days and I would wait
Wait and ask and look and listen, peeling slowly, where I could
Watching the slow slim building of the soft house stacking forward up into the day
Once the current floor had flown up from me higher, I would not think of it again ever at all
Inside this house I could sleep as long as all I wanted
Which was almost always
My house to me only ever one flat level, as my father’s had been
Inside the night, the air light compiling, the burst and lift, the sloping ground
The night we made the child along the air between us I’d been mostly overwhelmed
The air was crumbed and creamy and I’d been spinning with the scissors
You had to get at it from an angle to make the rooms things again that would not burst
I’d slipped up and racked my forehead three times
My wife was not concerned
She’d been talking to the rathole, where I swear I saw her forcing the best of all our food—the white pecans and goose hair
I swear she had it in for both of us
As I did too
I would tape her hands together for our sleeping but by midnight she’d chewed through
She took to knitting a parachute in case the world slurred sideways or inverted
There were so many things to come, she swore
My eyes by now were mostly swollen lids
I walked in the patterns I most remembered to our bedroom and rolled myself into the moth-made bed