There Is No Year by Blake Butler Page B

hallway carpet, slurred in the fibers, drumming, gushed. They’d dug a rut around the bottom of the son’s doorway, a series of smooth flat ridges gnawed—over which if breath were blown the right way, the fluted holes would give a sound. They’d moved the son’s bed slightly to one side and seemed to be trying to flip it over. They crawled into drawers and across the mirrors and up more walls and across the ceiling, patterns. They’d congregated at a small hole that had been cut into the wall, thrumming from the crack into the bathroom. Their tiny backs were mirrored bubbles, glistening, bejeweled. The ants, in silence, programmed, at last there sharing the son’s air.

X
    The father sat still in his small stall. The building’s lights had been flickering for hours, a flat night club. Each direction seemed to go several directions. The more he worked the more there was.
    I AM GOING TO LEAVE THIS ROOM NOW, the father typed into the machine.
    THERE ARE OTHER THINGS I HAVE TO DO BESIDES TYPE INTO THE LIGHT.
    I DON’T FEEL WELL AND THERE’S TROUBLE AND THESE DAYS AREN’T REALLY DAYS.
    PLEASE LET ME BE            MORE OFTEN.
    The cursor went on, silent beeping.
    The father stood up, turned off the computer screen. He hesitated, glued. The way he was standing, the blank box looked straight on at his belly, an enormous glassy eye. It had such good warmth coming off it. The father rubbed his typing hands. At home, he knew, his wife and son were waiting, stuffed full of days that had just passed—days that as they accrued with those incoming would form wrinkles, pustules, new hair on their skin. These imperfections did not yet appear there in the older image of their faces hung on the wall above the father’s desk—mother and son side by side there, smiling, in a room the father did not recognize. The father had not taken the picture, nor had he hung it there.
    Beside the picture, sized just like it, a small square window in the building looked onto the outside. The window looked upon no other shore or building, but more light—the same color, grain, and sound of light as the machine’s. Above the window, a small placard: There is no year.
    The father grunted, made his hands fists. He swallowed on his spit, frothing suds between his cheeks in makeshift milkshake. He drank.
    The father, feeling fatter, fuller, sat back down on his cube chair.
    Into the black machine, with the screen off, the father typed as if he were at an organ, performing some small song.

INVERSE SOUND
    And now the son had squeezed out all the toothpaste screaming.
    And now a blurt had opened in the floor.
    And now the room contained one billion windows.
    And now the son felt sore.
    And now the son felt his backbone shift slightly, pinching taut the skin around his cheeks and lids.
    And now the son moved to turn around inside the room and found he was too large to turn around inside the walls.
    And now the son felt his flesh compressed on all sides by something growing in and off the house.
    And now the son could not stop coughing, and the tremor, and the ants.
    And now the son was off the floor by inches and now the son’s head compacted with his neck and his neck compacted with his ribcage and his ribcage puttered cream and the son felt his voice inside him slushed to zero and he felt his teeth grinding in his eyes and the son felt his bones becoming blubber and he felt the liquid in him brim.
    And now the son spun around in one continuous direction, though from outside him he looked still.
    And now the son’s flesh could not contain his girth.
    And now the son was more than tired and the son coughed up an enormous log of chalk and the son coughed up a pane of glass, a set of keys, and a door without a knob, and now the son’s mouth sprayed out graffiti, the son gushed gold and gray and green, the son gushed glue and blue, and now the son coughed up a TV and now the TV screen was glowing and in the glow there someone stood and the