Authors: Blake Butler
For once I found the way to sleep by simply sleeping
I hid inside me in the world
I’d half cracked a dream of false condition—free fast food, water parks and mega-money—when I felt my wife’s tongue in my cheek
It moved around inside me as if searching, as if after some compartment I had not found, the most mashed part of me stored white inside it, some lick I’d managed to keep mine
Her tongue touched my own tongue and made me speak a language I’d never heard
Those old tongues in me all full of other people
My wife there all above me in no light
We had been together for exactly fourteen days through all the banging
She ate my breath and held my hands
She let her tongue continue slit so far down deep into my throat I could feel it coming out the far end
I could feel it squeegee through my balls, the halls of ugly others of me all inside them, also speaking
Knowing all of our old names
It folded through me like a waking
Where I would go to be alone
Very soon our skins had changed
I heard the sound of metal drumming
The walls inside my sleep were slurred and pocked with goiters
There was a swan, a goose, a chicken—all of them pecking at my head from the inside—while on the out my wife would shriek and she was in me and I was in her—so
Then was someone other also too
My wife swelled up only from one point, her private center, while the rest of her curled dry
This was all within a matter of an hour
Her front became a thing against which I could lean
Then it became more than that
I could forget that I was there, though when I did this my wife would try to drink my body
My blood and such shit
The other of us wanted mass
Each inch had its own inches to derive and to comply to
My wife gave it all the rest that we had saved
She ate the ash that shook off from the ceiling
She made me go out into the yard and dig up a certain kind of nit—a thin translucent nit no bigger than an idea
The nit had a massive nest of eggs just like it, in its image, as were we now
My wife gave each one a little pet name before she slurped them through her sternum to the child
The nits replicated and came back out of her through where her holes were
As had I once been created, as had you
There were webs or nests all through the bedroom and beyond
This was all within a matter of an hour
One then another
My wife tried to hug me to her chest
I said Ouch a little, and she echoed it back at me
There were new lines in her eyelids and what beneath them
She was already unfolding
I felt my ribcage folding inward as the form inside her stomach kicked me in my own
She lashed and gnashed and shrieked up steam shaped like my face
I kept the door between us mostly always after
I slept with knives and mirrors and a bell
I heard her in the old rooms brimming over
I heard the child inside her coming out
There was a smell and some kind of gonging
I couldn’t see, I closed my eyes
My body moved me through the house
I felt my each inch spreading out
There was more of me than I could need in any instant
There were more years then
There was the new edge of the night
Inside the house Person 2030 sat silent with his eyes closed scrawling drawings of himself. In each picture he’d made his gut appear enormous, like his mother’s, filling up most any page—another person lodged inside him, like his mother. In some pictures the person was hair-covered, while in others it had no openings.
The child had made hundreds of copies of himself. Each one he named with longer numbers that weren’t numbers. The paper filled the room. It caked around his face and made it hard to breathe. There was so much paper. The pages that appeared blank were fat with certain words where the child’s sweat had kissed against it. His arms were throbbing. He could not stop drawing. His stomach in the pictures kept on growing and in his real stomach something moved—an odd shape shaking through his inseams, against his blood—he felt it stretch up along his body to his finger.
He bit his finger, sucked the foam. Among the mottled knots of flesh and tissue, there were a set of keys, a keyboard organ made of organ. The keys each had a different word imprinted on them. Each of the keys, when played, made the same sound. The child touched notes and felt his fingers burning. He felt the notes inside his head. For each note there were endless others at the same time in it bending what the note had meant to mean, and yet once played there was no way to unplay it.
Outside his shape, he heard the other sound, the shrieking of the tone, again beginning—
a tone,
he realized,
made of every sound he’d heard or uttered here so far and so too would utter then in years to come; these words that made him, in the book, and all the books read or dreamt of as they passed the words into the book of him in its creation.
He’d heard the tone many times before but never in a room here by himself. It struck the air so loud it shook his body to its strands—he could see straight through his skin—his skin now newly rashed in bumps that matched the pattern found on each of the bodies of him that he’d drawn, and too the bodies in the bodies growing, written in their 2D lard. He moved through the room’s light toward the sound. At first it seemed to come from one direction then it spread out into spirals. In the spirals the child moved. He wobbled through the kitchen to the hallway where down the hall he saw the door.
He had been told not to touch this door.
The door would burn him,
the mother warned in her sleeping.
The door would eat your mind. It is terrified of everything.
Along the hall the child bonged back and forth between parallel
walls. He shook inside himself where the blood inside him bonged along also. There were pictures on the walls of earth from far away and overhead but he elected not to see.
The door had not a knob now but this did not stop him from making it come open.
Behind the door he saw the private stairwell where his mother once with another man had hid, though now instead of down the stairs went up.
Each stair had a unique symbol traced in dark epoxy.
The child could not quite see as he ascended. He could not see the frame of the house or its condition or the way the space around him stayed one size as he moved forward on its air. The stairwell seemed much thinner than it should be in some places, so thin that the son had to turn profile and scrunch against his side, dragging himself upward using his convulsive muscles to draw himself along the banister in shifts. Sometimes the stairs became automatic and the son could hold on and ride clean.
At various points along the incline the stairwell opened into rooms. The child came upon a room swarmed with tiny flies. They were coursing over objects, like a long land. He moved into them full, regardless, as if he knew why they were there. He recognized the patterns in the layers of them. He listened to them breathe. They caked around the son’s face until there was no face left, sucking, until the insides of the son flowed
dry. Then all again he was ascending, stairs beneath him. His ass and legs already burned.
The markings of each stair’s face burned low with an old glow, each feeding some form of murmuration through his legs. The son had no reason to go on upward but he knew he could not go down—there was no remainder of the stairs that had brought him to this level—and with each step the well behind him disappeared.
Further on the stairwell opened onto a large and long white building, higher than he could crane his head to see to look. The building had thick curtains closed and glowing in each window, silhouettes. He could not find an entrance into the building. He pressed against it. He moved his hands all through it as through milk. Someone was reaching on the far side for him, then he was falling. Then he was ascending again on the stairs, and soon another landing opened down into a house, into a room like the child’s mother’s bedroom had been as a child herself.
She was there sleeping. She seemed the same age as the son now. Her hair was long and clean and blonde. Her eyes were open as she slept. She watched the son move there above her. He tried to speak and he could not. Through the walls a screeching filled the old air, like the prior tone but backwards, as if captured in his blood. The girl smiled. Above the bed he touched his mother’s face with his face and together they drew air and then again the son was no longer in the room there but still ascending and wished he wasn’t but he was. There were so rooms many the son could not
remember each, one after the other. On each the son could not remember how he kept finding his way back to the stairs. There was always more blank space and further eras.
Some levels up, in ripping heat, the dark stitched so thick that it was liquid. The child crept along the frame contorting. The texture of the walls along the stairs felt like a person but it had no color and no sound. He continued on until he felt one of the steps go flat beneath him and the floor spread out into a panel on which he could move further in one direction. The meat of his feet screeched underneath his other layers. A certain length into the space he felt his leg muscles going weak, bowing his stride out in long elastic loops. His bones inside him held the tone. Slow fur grew and subsided on the son’s dry inches, making rasp sounds at his teeth, alive.
Further out the floor’s face seemed to soften—his feet sunk in as if at flesh. He could no longer locate where the stairs had been behind him. He continued into the brim-mouth gaping, sinking further and further in—something stuck sucking at his eyeholes—corrosive pressure bloomed in
bolts, stretching and aching at the flesh around his nostrils, between his teeth. There was a slur then—it welled around him—he could not stop going and he could turn away—he could not blink or cry out in help or warning as there was no word in his blood. Vast stinking suction pulled in against him, stretching his face into a mask that had no edge and gave off smoke. He felt the ball-bulb’s pupils pop one after another, screeching holes that warm nails fit in. Micelight spread into his skull with pissy gold. The gouge sunk nausea through him like a yo-yo—it recoiled into his throat—made his tongue harder—bowing his stomach and the small black sacs surrounding.
He fought to stand. His back cracked in cartoon screwing. He began to cough a white wide light, a light that cut the son inside him as it sparkled through his gut to course the room where as the tingling settled in his shoulders, he saw among the heavy glow how all the space was stuffed with sleeping people, their mottled bodies packed in naked, flesh to flesh conformed and still conforming. Many of them had no faces. Many others had no heads. Even those that did seemed to blur where they were built, their features changing in floods of color and old mud. The room around them also glistened. There were no girders, no corral bins of the walls—only the mass of bodies comprising distance and nearness. The proximity of their tight-knit skins held each other upright and unconscious, writhing in REM. Their eyeseams stung crusted with yellow sleep shit and their veins twitching in their lids and arms and necks. Some of the heads spoke aloud into the air above them, a language shattered, throttling the room. Some of the bodies tried to walk or hide in fear of the child’s entrance, pushing
themselves against their neighbor, so crammed their skin owned bright red lines of indentation where they bent. Most seemed not to sense the son at all. They were old or not, and strong or not, and rich or not, and they had every color eye and face and blood. They wore the faces they only wore when they felt that no one could see them. The son could not tell at either end where the splay of bodies ended and the house again began. Their fleshy ocean stretched far back to no edge, except up to the border where he stood, his own unopened blood still gushing from his sockets to his hands. He felt the air inside him growing fatter, sticking to where he was there, his body brimming out around his eyes. He could not see clearly, then less clearly. He could not stop it. He felt him open up his mouth and he conformed.
The child spent the next 37 years again stunned in an oblivion while around him in the house the house stayed still.
When he could see again the room was bound, stuffed full of tape. Black film had wrapped around the contents of whatever had filled the air before it, glistening cocoons of several sizes. All terror buildings and bridges and the forests in the same folds. There were several kinds of silent light. All of the light was dark too at the same time. You could see the shape of day as if engraved. The light gyrated from the center of the room, light made of liquid, light made of skin, light made of light that could not hold itself together, and all around the land laid long in all directions flat and scrawled against itself, black but visible to beyond perimeter by the failing of the eye. The child could hear the sound of huge projectors. He began to move and could not move. He was standing hard against a warm thing, a thickened
surface, some kind of screen. The pixels of the screen bent where he touched them, harboring the land. He went in the dark to turn around. The walls were nearer now than ever. The room the child was in was the same size as the child was. The land went on and on. He beat and banged against the glass and called her number. He called his number and nothing changed.