Authors: Blake Butler
There Is No Year (11 page)
The man was radiating heat. He had the smell of grass about his breadth, strong arms like the man who’d fixed the mower—
and like that man, this man, too, was gorgeous, if with a rash upon his cheek
. A sudden stink of slit grass and motor rubbings made the mother’s body lump. She started to ask something, blushing, but her mouth was closed and time had passed.
Behind them, in the bathroom, the other woman made a sound. A shrill, quick beep, a mouth noise, as if emulating some alarm, or some detector. There was a kind of pitter-patter. Then breaking glass, and wood against wood. A light showed underneath the door’s lip. The woman’s ever-moaning, saying words. The beep continued, high and awful, rerepeated, each iteration slightly shifting, until, in the mother’s ears, the noise became to have a frame—began to take a shape of language there around it. The beeping, at her head, became a name. The son’s name. Son’s name. Beeping. The woman making, again and again there, the title of her child. The word she’d placed on him from nowhere, that had occurred as lesion in her sleep. The woman screamed the name into the walls among the houselight, in the smallest of all rooms, curdling the air. Beeping. Beeping. Name. Name. Name. Name. The mother felt the blood inside her turning hard. And just as quick, the name becoming something other: becoming ways she could not recognize—the utter shifting off from where it’d held him and slipping therein off into a struggling string. Not a name but something troubled. Reaching. Burble. The scream so loud by now it shook the house.
The hair along the mother’s arms was singing. She closed her eyes and swallowed in the sound. Then, just as quick again, there was no sounding. Silence—or something so loud or strung out there was nothing to be heard. The house as still as any.
The mother turned around. She moved toward the door where in the smallest room the woman was not moving—
so still it could not be
. She knocked politely on the door’s face, then immediately again.
The woman did not answer. A bigger silence. Some nothing larger than the house. The mother opened up her mouth—and again there came the beeping, this time louder, jostling the door, her hair, the ground. The shaking made the mother dizzy, and yet she could not stop—she could not close her mouth.
The mother turned toward the man—the man right there behind her, breathing.
She’s sick, the man said again. His voice was clear among the noise. Sick, he said, distinctly. He did not seem concerned.
He splayed his hand on the wallpaper, singling fingers.
This is words, he said.
The beeping felt, under the man’s voice, somehow very far away.
The man ran his thumb along some lines. He read aloud in a strange language, what the bumps said. His skin glistened on his head.
Under the speaking, by the beeping, the mother heard the broken glass inside the locked bathroom getting crunched, as if under some other bigger object, like the woman,
another wanting mother, one day to be
. More jostling around, cabinets slamming, spraying water. There was the sound of sawing or other friction on the wall between the tiny bathroom and the son’s. The mother spoke into the door’s face. She tried the handle with her hand. The door, for sure, would not open. A door in her own home.
The man behind her, rubbing the household, its wallpaper, read aloud another line
.
These words came through him as more beeping, forming chorus, though now the mother, inside her, could understand. She could hear the voice as if it were her speaking. She fought within her to form breath. Doors inside the house. Doors in other buildings. Windows, vents.
The mother turned inside the sound to shake the bathroom door’s knob with all her fingers. She tried to think of the woman’s name so she could call it out, then realized she did not know the name at all. This woman could have any name.
She could be Janice or Doris or Euphrasie or Kathleen.
The mother had this list of names inside her again, female: other mothers
. She could be Mary Anne, Sally, Barbara, Arlyn, Mary, Jan; she could be Grace, M., Linda, Regina, Anna, Annie Ruth, Phyllis, Polly, Addie, Afeni, Cherry, Salomea, Joan, Komalatammal, Doreen . . . the names came on and on, in spinning, as for combinations on a lock. The mother tried to say the same name as her name, or her mother’s, or the father’s or the son’s, but she found she could not recall any of those names. Her breath sizzled inside her. She leaned into the door. She squeezed.
These walls aren’t even here, the man said behind her.
The man took her by her hand.
The mother started to rip herself away but the man’s hands’ grip was strong and now the fingers were all warm—blistering, even. She felt wet all up in her buttocks and her navel.
The man stretched the mother’s arm and placed her hand against the wallpaper. The ridges slightly writhed. The man’s gone eyes.
Feel, he said.
She felt.
the house there all around her, laughing
all through the roof and walls, the sound
in light, the child’s name rerepeating
names in names in names on names
The mother loved the couple. She wanted them to have the house.
She wanted them to move in and live there right now. There was room. They could share the space together while she and the father looked and found another house. Or, perhaps, the mother mentioned, with her eyes closed tight inside her head, all of them could live together in this air together. They could be two mothers and two fathers, or whatever. All of them in one.
That is ridiculous, to think that, the mother said aloud just after, and yet knew some small to large part of her meant what she had said, and did not wish she didn’t. She could not remember the names of even just the people in her family, much less anybody else. All of these words together in the mother’s head, and still the beeping. A furry evening, all this light.
The mother lay face down on the floor.
She lay face down with arms splayed out beside her and listened to the air inside the home’s vents gushing, coming out to feed her, warm.
When the father got home from work that morning, the mother was in the kitchen. She was sitting at the counter on a tall stool with her legs crossed and her back toward the door. He seemed to not have seen her in months, or years. The father knew the mother would not believe his explanation that the streets were getting longer. He’d been getting up earlier and earlier to make it to his desk on time and his desk kept getting smaller and he kept getting home later and later and his fingernails kept growing. The last several nights the father felt sure that he’d come home, gone upstairs, taken off his clothes, gone to the bathroom, splashed water on his face, gotten into bed on one side—
he had not noticed the presence or absence of his wife
—rolled over on his side, gotten out of the bed on the other side, gone to the bathroom, splashed his face again, put on the same clothes, walked out the door. It took several full tanks of gas to get to work and back. The father had clocked the distance on his odometer and it always stayed the same.
That night on the way home he’d stopped and eaten books at a restaurant he’d never seen. The restaurant was next to another building he felt sure he recognized, as it had an unusual shape. He knew the second he saw the restaurant that he would eat there. He’d given up on trying to make it home in time for family dinner. He was so motherfucking goddamn hungry. The restaurant had no sign. The tacos were delicious, the best he’d ever had. He couldn’t even think of how a person could make a taco that tasted like these—they seemed to contain the pleasure of a whole meal in every bite. In each bite of the taco the father tasted steak and onions, ranch dressing, chocolate cake, bananas, gummy spiders, rum, and Cheetos. Those things all together tasted somehow very good. He’d ordered extra to bring the mother some so she could try them but after a while in the car he’d gotten hungry and he’d eaten them and he felt awful and too full, but would have done it again given the opportunity—given even thirteen hundred complimentary tacos, he would have eaten every one. The father had a new favorite place to eat and he planned to keep it to himself.
The father was walking up behind the mother. He moved slow, trying to be quiet, though he knew she knew that he was there. He found himself walking on his tiptoes, slow and lurching, like a man who’d come to kill. The father put both hands across his mouth to keep from giggling. His teeth bit at his one hand and he was bleeding and the blood was in his mouth.
The mother at the counter hunched and cringed with the father’s every step. She felt afraid—afraid not for the father’s silent acting, though she could sense it, but because the couple had made an offer and she didn’t know what he would think. The phone had begun ringing almost as soon as she’d closed the door behind them. Within the hour a contract had been delivered in a black envelope by a private courier who appeared to have approached the house on foot. They’d offered the full asking price, in paper money. Afterward, the mother felt so cold. She put on as many layers as she could manage, the oldest clothes stuffed in her drawers—dresses, shirts, pants, shoes she hadn’t worn in ages—back before she became pregnant with the child. With so many layers laid around her she could hardly move her arms or legs, her body, heat amassing in her thighs, so large, though inside her, at the center, her stomach roared.
Behind, the father moved closer and still closer. The father’s mouth drooled, overflowing. He had his hands worked into weapons. He closed his eyes.
When the father reached the mother he put his head square in the center of the mother’s back. He pressed with his forehead in a way that made the mother’s muscles stiffen, through the fabrics. They hung there slightly humming, their two bodies perpendicularly aligned.
Without turning to look at him, without surprise, the mother lifted the offer paper off the counter. She read it softly to the husband like a bedtime story, her voice rather raspy and unconcerned, feeling the sulk and burn of coming crying making her whole throat run with slush. The father’s body tensed against her as she spoke the couple’s offer’s words, the formal language. The mother felt the father remove his head and stand straight up. There was a grubby guzzling sound then, as if inside him the father were compacting trash.
The father reached across the mother’s shoulder and took the contract from her hand.
In the smallish light there in the kitchen for a minute the father seemed to stare straight through the paper. If he had seen through the paper, the father might have seen a person at the window. The father’s hands were shaking. He found himself already holding a pen, the logo of the place where he’d eaten dinner kissed upon it. The father moved to press the paper flat against the mother’s back.
Through her flesh the mother felt the father sign a name—not quite his name, she could feel that—the loop of lines and dots and holes went on so long.
The father crossed the other name out and tried again. He signed another, this one in big block letters that more resembled hieroglyphics. The father barked. The father’s hand was cramped and jiggling and he could not hold it still. With his free hand he gripped the wrist of the one he used for writing and in long forced crooked half-strokes he this time finally felt his hand scrawl out his given name, syllables for years he had been stalked by, concentrating, pressing hard, causing small hash marks on the mother’s skin, and underneath, the vessels breaking, giving blood.
When he looked again, it still was not what he’d intended. He’d made a mess of rods and dots, some of it written not upon the paper, but the mother’s clothing, and through the layers, on her skin. He looked and looked at what he’d written.
That really
is
my name, he said aloud. His voice was soapy, like a car wash.
He put the pen down and closed his eyes and moved and heaved the mother from the stool, into his arms.
Clordbedded ahst forb, said the father, alone upstairs. He had his head against the bathroom wall. He could not remember how he’d gotten through the house back to the bathroom. Froth hung in long ropes from his mouth. Blossbit ein vord cloddut, he said, choking. Cheem cheem murd bot. Loif oissis oissis oind.
There was a music in here with him, all of woodwinds and deep bass. He could feel the pen inside him, writing.
Unk barnitt weedumsissis, quoth the father, eicheit undit pordrondoid blerrum misht. Misht eichlitt leichord nord ip beebit. Juinfurr hossis, mekkum dha.
He could not feel his hands.
On the other side of the wall, in the guest bedroom, someone had hung a picture of the father. A pleased pre-father father at a party in nice clothes, surrounded by bodies, openmouthed. They were together singing or saying something.
