Authors: Blake Butler
BLINK
There was a woman on the bed—the same woman he had seen before, from somewhere, though he could not decipher this, as her body had changed too:
her body less wrinkled in his presence than under any light.
By her reflection in the mirror over his shaving shoulder, the father could see the woman mostly did not have a face. That is, she had a head and hair around it. The snow stuck in her hair. It did not melt into the hair, just clung there glinting.
The woman had a mouth of huge white teeth—this he could see. She had spent years caring for them, each, in full. But where the woman should
have eyes and cheeks and nostrils, instead the father saw something else. Staggered beads of wretched colors, rolling in and on around against their texture like pixels flailing. Bits and pieces of other parts of other bodies, collaged. Bodies he had known or not known and did it matter. No, it did not matter.
The woman’s face remained refracted as she lay there naked on the bed. She had a huge round ream of black film she used to wrap around her neck. She worked the film around her in a circle, passing hand to hand, the scream of adhesive whirring on over each inch of her body covering it gone. She’d already done her lower portions, her waist and arms and legs and tits and more—the woman’s nipples were massive, 811 noticed, covering her whole tit mostly, black as a long and unlit hallway, slick. He still wanted to touch the tits, kiss around them, suckle—though by the time he felt that wanting in him all the nipple skin had been enmeshed. All she had left now not yet film-covered was her screwed head—the pulsing head of TV color—the slick blonde hair pulled to a comb—the father recognized this hair—he could smell it.
The woman’s mouth was spewing coins—they gored in fountain down onto the mattress—all the metal money Person 811 had spent in years on other women, on his body, building size. The woman’s cocooned body writhed among it, sucking the stink in. She, he recognized then, had been inside his home.
His home?
The phrase contorted in his flat mouth as he tried to speak it, spit it aloud. It wouldn’t come out how he meant. He could not make the word alight upon the air around him. He felt the fat vein in his
forehead squirt a little harder each time he tried—his larynx clucking with old smoke and dandruff
—the snow was dandruff
—the ceiling like some dead skin cracking in its still—the walls some celled portion of a larger thing—a thing that moved.
I still do not know… Person 811 said in someone else’s voice. Still do not know… Still do not…
What the hell am I saying,
he tried to say, and in trying could hear nothing but the tone.
The father found that he was not shaving now so much as laughing, rubbing an apple on his face. A chubby wretched apple, stuck with aphids. Its crumpled skin clung to his skin. He stopped and gnashed into the apple. He chewed the loamy gut, tasted hot hair oil and bleach. Inside his stomach he felt the pieces of the apple reconvening. He felt it stick in his throat width, holding certain words there. He had the razor in his hand again.
He began to shave his tongue—the tongue he’d used so many ways—the tongue that still would not form the words he wished. He tried to turn around and look upon the woman,
his young wife,
to bring some morning to this color, ask her to help him say the words right, ask her to tell him where and when and who he was, but still he could not make his body work. Instead he shaved—right to left and left to right, up and down and back against the grain, the bitter foaming cold cream itching where it clung and took the cells up, the hair and skin beneath him piling up in cold report.
The next time 811 felt himself allowed to look again the woman was not there. The room was not there. The space was gushing light. The light blicked in and out and off and on around him, against his chest and face. The walls inside him roared beyond.
He found that when the light was off he could move by his own will—his hands were freed, he discontinued shaving, he touched sorely smoothing sections on his chin—but in the light he could do nothing except see himself there with himself—another version of him across the room where the faceless woman on the bed had been. This double of the father was rather massive, more than in numbers. Its other body contained all of the room’s space. It had eyes. In his own eyes enlarged before him he could see several people waiting. They spread their fingers on the flipside of the glass bulb of his eyes’ lenses. Their fingers squeaked the eye with resin.
The other father did not blink. His enormous mouth opened and began spraying spittle and some stench—a crystalline wind that flapped 811’s hair on his own smaller head and tucked his skin back. The skin was runny. The massive mouth was open—hot, a window, some new door—811 inhaled the exhale and felt it harden in his intestines. The lights kept blinking. The walls were neon-gravy colored. In the dark the father moved toward himself.
Back where the house had been the mother began to rebuild the house with what things she could find or make. There was not much there of the remaining materials around the home’s indention that did not have the error of the tone all shattered in it, nor was the land right, and so she resorted to herself—to build the house out of the cells she’d carried in her blood and organs for this silent purpose through all those other years and other books. In the light around the gob of shit the house had stood upon and must stand upon again the ground groaned with a long low seam of all prior bodies’ groans condensed.
The mother used a slab of rock to shear some of her skin off and this became the house’s frame. The walls were thin and marbled and they wobbled on no breeze. The pockmarks or other frayed places on her size moaned wide and of a texture stung endlessly by wasps and poked by men and lathered
over with chemicals aimed to keep her clean and calm her down inside the sighing night, becoming rooms and hallways on the air there. The mother spit into her hand and rubbed it hot and stroked it across clips of nothing to make windows, through which one could see out but not see in. She pressed them warm into the walls. She stood for sometime there outside in the reflection looking through it, believing each thing that might be needed into place.
Gaining pace now in burning sunlight, the mother forced herself to laugh. The sound became a bedroom, with air inside it she could breathe, and space to negotiate the catalogs of prior nights arranged in catalogs of deformed color representing…what? She could not remember. The forms were firm, though, and held mass. They buzzed around her body, waking sleep. The refracting air around the passing laughter became food, cells they would suck into their body in the mind of feeling pleasured, drawn with light. She plucked her wisdom teeth and fashioned clocks, each bent on counting every second gone here in the building held together, another she would never have again. She yanked her remaining hair out by the shallow roots and from these she made wires for the light, so that in the house she and the child could see each other coming, going. There would be places left to hide, places the light would not reach no matter how many devices the mother fashioned, any hour. From her eye she pulled a door, the front door that led into the house where here in coming days she would grow old with what was left of her by now. From gaps in her memory she made knobs with gears inside them that could turn to lock or to unlock. For keys to the keyholes she broke her index nails off, one for the child and one for
her—she knew already if turned too hard they would break and there’d be no keys. The mother spoke into her hand and had each thing she needed. It was all right there, she found, if pulled in dark meat of her most tired parts.
The son paid no attention. His hair had grown out even more, enough to mask him from sun damage and from the buzzing remainder of the tone. He could not feel the button underneath his tongue—a button which, had it been pressed in at any minute, would have made the old house reappear in full, and they could have gone into the house in there and lived without a mind. All other days instead in simple presence of the unpressed button, consumed with all the other kinds of shit. He invoked himself in conversation, chucking long rocks at the unfinished Universal Roof, shouting for someone to come and touch his body, though at the mother’s touch he balked. The worms were writhing in him also and in his hair he wore the dust of the collapsed house and the ground did not like him alive. He breathed and breathed it. He watched his mother work stuffing dirt and moss between the new home’s walls of skin for insulation that would keep them warm or keep them cool, and would help to keep the sound there in or out around them, would pack them in and hold them nearer to each other.
When she was finished, cold and glowing, in the front door the mother carved their prior names, watched them sway away into the grain.
Inside the house it seemed the same house as the first one, the one the father had lived in alongside them there before, except for small facets such as the placement of light switches, hanging pictures. Some of the rooms had changed their shape from what a room is or seemed slightly off-sized in the day: a room shaped like a locket or a toothache or the waning of the moon.
As well, the air here was much colder—the mother’s mouth made plumes that hung and stuck around her face, firm bots of breath she could reach up and grab hold of. Her exhaust formed shapes like little crystalline rooms again inside them, smaller copies of the shapes that held the other air inside the house around them. She put each shape to her ear and listened. Inside she heard someone speaking and another person speaking back. She tried to believe the things she understood them saying. She tried to want it too,
and tried to tell it. She watched each shape one after another dissolve all dry and frying in her palms.
With each breath the mother took what she had made and set it on the ground, while the son, coming behind her, crushed the mother’s breathing underneath his feet.
In the hall the mother found a calendar in which all the dates said the same day. On certain instances of that day someone had written things to do in what looked like her own hand:
JANUARY 1—CACKLE LESSONS
JANUARY 1—DON’T FORGET TO TURN THE CLOCK
JANUARY 1—HOLE DOCTOR APT., BRING KKKASSH!
JANUARY 1—WHO WAS AT THE WINDOW LAST NIGHT
JANUARY 1—WILL YOU QUIT EATING ALL THE CHALK
JANUARY 1—GOD THE WATER IS TOO HOT HERE
JANUARY 1—GROPE MOVIE
JANUARY 1—FILM YOURSELF STANDING ON A LADDER
JANUARY 1—CLIT PIERCING PROMISE
JANUARY 1—BRUNCH WITH GOD
JANUARY 1—LOOK BEHIND YOU
She ripped each page off as she read and ate it. She did not chew with teeth, but let her stomach have each unto itself, to swallow whole. A sheath of white bird feathers bloomed on her forearm and she brushed them loose with her thick nails. Her skin was watching.
I am getting tired of myself, the mother thought.
I am tired also, the son replied from a far room.
I am also very tired.
I would feel okay if you did not turn the page.
Why did you do that?
I told you I was tired.
You know how you and I are getting sicker.
I mean, it’s hilarious.
We won’t speak of this again.
In the new house the mother still found the door that held the stairwell, lodged like a razor in an apple. She had not built a stairwell for this new house, expressly. Someone was knocking on the door. The knocking made the whole house quiver like a fire. She touched the crack around the door. She traced its long shape with her knuckles. She felt a warmish crumbling kind of air there coming through. She felt the thing inside her eating. She felt her ribcage being toned on, nestled near to, giving birth to more of where she was again, every inch of her another child. She sneezed up a sofa and moved it over the door’s face. She went to bed, though inside her sleep she saw the door again, and behind the door again another door and it was snowing something.
The father wriggled in the father. In the light he moved through corridors of chub, black spasmed pockets of hid body caught and aging. He did not know what about his moving was what moved him, only that when he nudged his head another way he would shudder from one crux to another, the air slurring into squirmy clouds of pinkish liquid, scent of want. He often thought he heard someone other coming toward him from the other way in the larger body, down the long blond hall inside him where he’d wormed. A strumming presence, something heavy like the name of cream and crushing putty on the air. He tried to hurry forward through him in the slather, kicking, barking, forming new minutes in his flesh. He found he could not at all remember which way he should be headed, which way already he had been or if he’d ever moved at all. Each inch had new tunnels, some so immensely black there was no way.
For each inch of the father there were many fathers. For each father in the father there was sound from which the body had been composed. The sound cased in around him making flesh. He couldn’t see what his hands were doing. He couldn’t see what his face was doing. Little worms caked in the walls around him were passing also through his skin and unto somewhere else. For years he’d swallowed pills to try to clear his system of its parasites and its ailment and none of it had worked, none of it had done anything except turn his shit a different color, which matched the walls of many houses and sometimes the color of his mind. The years still shaking in the father like the silence: