Nothing by Blake Butler

My father having recently been resigned of his own car unto driving how for his brain has changed with loss of recognition, his failing eyesight and his memory and dementia, his unshaping motor skills. How now, in recent periods of new unleaving, I can see him sinking in to somewhere else, a field of fragments of what had been once somewhere—scrambled frames. My father, into the smushed light of hours I have most felt being ejected from all dreams. The far-off glowlight of his nowhere becoming a true and seizing aspect of the house. His blood bottled in him, waiting. These days he sleeps more now than ever, as if drinking in the hours of that space becomes an exit—the only exit he has left.
    From here I still cannot at all see the man, or his white car’s shape, though I can hear him in my head. This man a minute from one evening of several hours of one day, and yet still so locked inside the face behind my face. This man, who has never slept, no hour, and will never—this man throughout all hours in my mind, alive.
    Across from the corner where I expect any second to see the man’s car, there is the patch of grass where one night I saw another man eject his blood—once waiting there to cross the street with my father and my sister in coming home from a football game at the high school we watched a man drive his car straight out into another car—as if he’d been pulled or insisted upon. The glass sprayed at our flesh. My father reaching back to shield my sister and me not only from the crush, but from the sound. The man coming some time later in that night, with us again inside, to knock on our front door and ask to use the phone. The blood he left on the receiver. The bloom of that glass still mostly all there on the air, any hour that I ask it, of light haunted not due to the dead, but our remainders. This corner, any hour, the scene of countless wrecks in endless heads, its plot of air alive with light and nothing, in plain daylight, night light, where. Speech, exercising, houses built and rebuilt, roads, destruction, shitting birds, inhale/exhale, laughter, asking, what might be buried in the leak, what was rained down and rained up from and for us, what has come and comes again. This replication in a silence, lawns and lawns of homes and homes. How could I ever sleep here. How have we ever. Each inch’s rooms on rooms on rooms.
    Something flashes in my head here. An instant’s closed eyes. A kind of gone. I think I hear my father saying something, then it slows down, then it’s nothing. Not a voice.
    When I look again inside my thinking to the corner nearer to me, slightly blinking, I see the man’s white car parked again right there. Waiting idle, as it has been, all those nights and nights and nights. The hieroglyphic license numbers and chrome bumper gleaming in our afternoon. An engine purred under such silence.
    Seeing, I stop, my blood going hardened in my hands. I had not really expected, even in projection. The windows of the car reflecting light in such dimension I can hardly see the hood—and yet I know the doors are not locked. I know when I walk up to the car and touch its metal, I know the doors will be unlocked. Even if not, I have a key still, somewhere. I know this man will let me in. In the light around the car my skin seems see-through. A glass bowl over my head and my home, over my father and my mother. I am standing on the drive. I am standing and am speaking, my mouth moving in my head’s meat, in the light, though nothing comes out on the silence. No other cars or worms or birds. In some way I have been standing in this moment so long. This moment does not exist.
    I see the white car’s brake lights grow a glow—two blown red eyes on the ass-end. Out from the front, the high beams showing thickly on the already teeming day of light.
    Briefly, in my pause, mouth still gaping, through the house’s outer walls I hear my mother singing, the same songs she repeats in chain most every