NY Tyrant: Blake Butler

You’ve either heard about this guy and already love him, or you’ll hear about him soon enough. Sometime within the past year or two, a hot green blip surfaced on the indie lit radar, a blister on the literary dermis called Blake Butler. Some name, huh? Christened for greatness. Blake broke the rules. You got all these aspiring writers coming to New York. They had no idea it would cost this much. They wind up in horrible jobs. They start blogs at night, they write at night, they do the networking and go to readings. They’re always sticking their hands out to shake your hand. They pull stunts. You know their name, know them as a “writer,” but have never read their stuff. Or you did and you hated it. Shouldn’t they be home writing? You wonder about that. It’s enough to make you think that if you shove your face in anywhere long enough, you’ll become a part of it. That couldn’t be true, could it? No. Yes. No. Blake stayed home. Blake stayed in Georgia and he stayed home and he wrote. He published two fantastic books last year (Scorch Atlas and Ever from Featherproof and Calamari Press), both well received, and has many more coming down the pipeline. All of the bullshit aside, nothing else mattering anyway, this kid can write. And he does it a lot. So try Blake on. Lace him up. Wear him around your neck in wreaths. PS: This piece was published in Tyrant 7. Sourcebook When it came time to destroy the child, the skin around my nipples blackened. My lungs defected in their swelling patterns, my sternum hardened, groin in crumbs. I could not not hiccup in the hour. I wore the light around my neck in wreaths. The second house was now translucent. I would not be deceived. My upper lip stung raw where I’d shaved it seven times rehearsing. I counted layers with my hips, denting the wall. Seven days in seven minutes. I heard the front door down the hall, its latch still stuck still with my best blood cells, but giving inches—the time had come indeed. Through the window sealed with my saliva, I could see where the father and his doppelganger had hulked the monolith already to the yard, its worn white sides prismatic, erupting in the rhythm of my name, the name I heard the soft mouths together saying softly into the stunned crack of the door, also sealed. I had given all I could. I would not be divided. In the house alone the child was mine. The child came out with thistle in him where he should have had the son. In his first hours he’d spit up on my inches a corded crust I’d never shake. In the rooms he’d grind when I came near him: teeth to teeth and bone to bone. He had ripped scripture in his eye. I had plans. I had made them, over years and years and years. I’d prayed and prayed with the machete, soaking. I dreamt an outline on the house. There was a glass case in my mattress, the one I’d carried here through seven states, and in which in the night I could lay down in and feel the air leaving my lungs. There was a gong, which made me dizzy and would initiate the sing. There was a loom I am not sure what for. In the room my gashing gums ripped through the tee-shirt on the child, so wide so I could see where there brightened on his white sternum the digits he’d welled up refused to flicker: the unlock cipher for the lawn hood, which kept the ground against the ground. In the light the lawn showed wormholes and spat blood in the outline of the father. In the ground the father’s bone had turned to flesh and his flesh had turned to bone. Making wishes on a human body is the way that bread is made, I told the child with my tongue against his eardrum. Locked in false grip, behind the child’s back my hands transformed the flow of pus erupting through his hanghole, which had not kept him on the wall. Against my breasts the child harrumphed one final time—a repercussion of his layers lurching, not of any man the child might someday have been. The door behind us leapt in quaver. I heard the silver smash itself inside the high drawer in wanting out. Do not interrupt when I am crying, I continued, having rashed the wet upon my cysted palms into Morse code. With the long nail of my middle finger I ripped a purple fold over the biggest bulb of the child’s spine. Inside him I could hear the incubation. I flicked his thumb into my numb. I ripped the rip across his saddles and lovehandles to his bellybutton, within which the child’s fat was fucked with bleating from all those nights hid in his room—back to wall against the wall we shared with the sourcebook he’d written in his sleep. Often his arrangements would render my cerebrum back to years of my teenaged state detention: eating black beans off wax paper wearing blood helmets while the overseer auctioned us off. Faggot, I said into the child’s kneecap, hoping something there would hold. For a second we shook hands, and in the swim I felt my baby rattle in my own rip, swallowed at seventeen and never shat. In my skin my also-swallowed beeper, at thirty-seven, went bumping with it, the tiny lights and spines of wires bearing for the seventh time in seven minutes the number for the father’s extension underground—another sad crack at diversion—the father, in his dual mind, would never learn. In the door the double father beat the metal with his form. In fact he had factioned half a hand through, one engloved pinky struggling up to switch the heat panel set in glisten there beside the door to ON. The first degrees slurped into the home at once, sledding the paint off the base where I’d sent the wall’s eye under. A new rind curled on the floor beams in wet fingers. On the wall laid in the past-paint, the false photos we’d ordered taken in the neon booth the night before the beach exploded had shifted in their hue, revealing the handmade diagrams of the father’s lung sacs where I’d installed the pneumonia beads. More effective than the beads, though, were my twin blackmilk injectors, which had made my admonition final, though it took several days thereafter to accept how now there’d be no one left to bind my hands—the self-same hands I’d used in fuck-inducing in those glad days in our mad effort to recreate—to piece the child from what we were once into the thing we’d never been. There were several methods I’d projected in my study of the destruction of the child. In the warm rooms he seemed one way while in others I had doubt. In my first machinations in the clear house—its entrance wedged in the light between my bed and where there was no wall—I’d clung quickest to the method of brute force—for instance, shouldering the child inside his sleeping and spurting him headfirst against the wall, or setting the air around him into fire—though such direction in certain mothered layers caused an itch I could not even in my folding smother out. For a while I’d thought immersion: a plastic pool around the head, some contraption that could keep space sealed and leaking. I considered inhalation, grazing, freeze. A tarp. A trim. A rammer. I bought and axe and brought it back—though not before the fence around our neon lake had suffered. I tried to write a riddle that could lurch deep into his head, unlock the lapse that’d been there hunting, broached in minor corridors, but each time I came in semblance I could not hold my pen. A sponge. A plunger. Some fine resin. A pin in the right place. None of these convinced the window in me shut enough that in my eruption I could sleep. The child wore my maiden name, despite whatever else he or they or it or I had done. The child had wormed its way from out of in me even if what the father’d brought for his part had been fermented years in residues—bent with the endless batting of so many other skins, so many other cells inhaled, the rooms and rooms and arms and lips and teeth of each and every face he’d considered in the street: the way they find their way in through your eyes. Regarding all things, hung in the second house, the manner of the child’s and my progression came and sung and sank its way into me. With those hands again there in the melt room I reached deeper on into the child. I reached past the gilded pincushion he’d invented, clogging the stoma to his grief. I reached past the wallpaper we’d bargained for to keep the sleep out during the years he’d tried to eat, past the rack of sneezing salts the father’d shoved into him when he would lie, explanations guarding my (his lidless mother’s) actions and reactions (that dear dear thing, such halls of cells, none that I’d wanted, here or there). With my arm up through the child as a sock-puppet from behind, my mouth fit concretely to his inlaid crown, the whorl of which went counter-clockwise, as if against the gun of time. In the scalp close up I could see the sand yards and the beggars on their knees. I could count the lumps of crust from malnutrition, the whine sewn in as stones. I chipped my left incisor on one flat stalactite rendered in the image of the second father, who in his first weeks, by my creation, wiped the child’s ass with his bare hands; who though for several days had helped me hold out hope in silence in the light, had begun to come to wake me speaking already in that same voice, touched in the same thrusts; who as I’d realized could not be recreated by my wanting, no matter what spells, had also gone to waffle the lawn from underneath. In the night I could erode the child the most, make him dream me, make him need, though even then there were not such windows—it was the father who had had the child the most—the father with his anvil earrings and his devising and his many, many tongues. In the last weeks’ crushlight the lawn had grown an essay of the father’s doubled diastolic form, the sperm of his sagged testicles squiggled in red leaves, the root of his milelong vas deferens ejecting blue tubers from the soil. The night would often be disrupted by the shift of the first father with his double even still, though I’d placed them neatly and without marking at far ends of the burn farm. I could not, despite best efforts, regulate the way the soil changed in rain to slurping tunnels, to holes through which the light and creak might slither, and thus the wet dream, amalgamation. At the door the two as one together through the glue had learned to bargain, the nape of their enfolded tonsils caressing through already, the scummy quaver of their fused cords and larynx amalgamated trying to make sound. Despite the silence, I felt the father’s speech saliva gather in the same old run-spots where for years he’d slathered his insistence without rhyme: this inch, that hole, we would, I think, I am, hey, what is this, how could you, mine, as well, the second father’s reiteration of the one thing he’d had time to learn in English in his false sleeping—endless: we are running out of time. In my mind of minds I designed grace. Around my fist the child had lathered. I could smell fine china, or a lock. The child’s scent had always owned a sort of pummel, perhaps the thing he had learned from me the least. In the zapped air of the backyard the child would turn iridescent at his edges, forthcoming wrinkles drunk with the sun sent flattened into him over even the short years of his becoming, the new incubation on his blood—this had been foremost among the list of raptured reasons I had carved out a separate closet without the father’s knowledge, using the crimped end of my coat hanger, where in my solitary hours I would practice, I would dig further for the other hallway, the other den. I would kiss my holes and chew them deeper and scrape a new gown from my tongue. In this way I would make a house for us forever, for us forever, in the most incensed sweet cream of me. In other lights, as our cold house corroded, I tried to teach myself to understand, but in the end there always was the error. I knew and knew I knew. Inside the room inside the stench there was an undercurrent, a lidless box of undone air, rummaged from the tumor mailed by mailmen to me inside my stretching second house, which by the seventh instance had eleven rooms. I had meant to live defensive, to deconstruct my life in metered groan: to obliterate each element in the order it had insisted or had had itself insisted thereupon me. I ate the pistons out of the Honda with month-old mayo. I devoured our antique blankets at the stitch. So far the dog had been the hardest, of yet the most unrelenting grip in grin, though there also was the socks I’d planned to one day die in, my glass calculator, the showerhead. The father was like cakewalk, a long longed-for satisfaction after which I’d coaxed myself out to the mall, to the find the sweater of our years together, there in the value bin of the first store I came up to, its price tag covered in white lice. The cashier’s eyes would not come open. The receipt did not have words. Still I had not yet been able to find the cut door. I had not found the center of the mind. In the room around me and me around him, the walls at once in sound gave back our sweat, a cull inflicted by the child’s writhe, the coalescing condensation of what until had been held. Through his mouth and ears and eyes and ass and other holes and pores the together at once child ejected the embedded sets of sounds he’d learned: the cues and cuts and aural infestations sucked out of mouth of daily air: transmissions known and not known, the air made rotten, the house hung with hidden vibe. In the resounding of the sound mash I could taste the order they had made, culled up in order of the last long years of frequency of repetition, corresponding with which most had made me, weak me, weep or otherwise unravel: — AWOOWGEGEGG: Through his front teeth during eating, I think, or after laughing, as if in the manner of inhale, as if it hurt him to fit the air back in to fill what he had ushered out. From him as an infant I would moan for hours having heard such interruption—what error had made mine?—and yet as the years came and went and went and went again it was more a thing I learned to close the eyes to, as in the way a house in silence is not silent, or when in want of sleep, the pillow holds a thrum. UHNEHHHHHE: This in the sunroom mostly only and with his pants around his knees, sometimes shortly but often for hours, when he would think I’d gone to sleep. The child in his minutes, here, in this sound, had no other thing about him. As well within it: the sound of his arching back, the struggle of smaller veins. WUMUMMMUM: Rendered only ever in a chant, in mesmerisis, with his head underwater or pressed against the glass corner of our foyer’s extra floor. In times the sound would lock and he could not dismiss it without shaking. He could not be called away. PSSHHSPSPPSS: This one seemed to come out of every inch of him and would always burn my eyes, in a technique as if the child were sorting through his layers, after the cord to pull the crease and wake the light. Each week after, sometimes longer, the child would come down with fever, lice, and mold. BLIZZZZZZZZISI: This one I only heard this one time and could not verify for certain it came up of the child himself, but more likely something in him he’d implanted or held otherwise conjoined, or found forced into some crevice where someone like the father left it, as the father was the only other one I’d ever heard replicate this sound, though in the house the doors would quake. — Inside the child here with my lips now graveled there was something soft about my reek, another color coming from the cord rammed in my colon the week I’d tried to learn the size of night. The smoke slits around my bellybutton from my full height resembled slogans and worm leak, though up close I could see more clearly where the blood had clustered underneath the skin to form a numeral. Each time I licked the child’s nape the numeral ascended by nines. In this manner I kept tally as through the child’s scalp I made my way, such saliva with his cold blush color making small swamp glow in the small room’s neon light. My fist inside the child had hardened. My fingernails grew in encased, the protein from the child’s blonde locks and slow want making a thin gristle that kept me caught so I could hardly turn my head. By now the doorframe had distended into such a whiplash that within the dual father could negotiate with quite some give, its swollen forehead’s false veins scrunching a series of thin knots in the surface—another forbearance to be listed in longhand writ with child’s blood on the new second house’s walls—walls I planned to paste together with what in this other house would not quite be ingested and what came out the other end—the mashed slather of my spit spackled in the new seams. I had lists and lists of things I’d need: lectures, weapons, breakfast, wives, enticement, candles, weekends, need. For the new light system I could not be more excited, as even in its eruption, there was none. I would never see my hands again, their dumb knuckles scored with fleas; nor my rinding belly, flubbed and patchy, the coarse context of which the hymn would hum just at my elbows, another hymn written out of context in the new pages of my skin. Shit, hey, hi, the child was saying, high against my thinking, as if trying to wake up. The blood throes made his lower body loosen, letting shit white on the floor, his leg muscles cramming in friction sung to one another, as if trying to expurgate the notes my body had begun to come to want to learn to know, though my mouth was so around the child I could not make my tongue wriggle up or fold into the proper curve of grooves. The waves of panic in the door jamb coursed against me, lapping my back folds into froth, the tile beneath us warping to low bows, each so clean under new inches of the dual father’s impinging elbow grease that at my angle, in our reflection, the child and I among our intermingle formed a fold of selves ourselves, if not quite raptured in the flesh of no breath as these two others, shit, still some something: my head crunching his, together, bone to bone and gland to gland. Skin to skin, as how he’d come up from me but now in the reverse method and in my size. My teeth in the child’s temples kissed the crimp of it open into tunnels, and yet from the tunnels came no blood. Instead the platelets surged against my tongue—my spittle and his vein gunk, curdled together in the new heat of the house, the meter having ruptured its own plastic, the air cooked to racks of sudded steam. In the reflection too, slung up above our head(s) sizzling in inches, the old house liquefying in its accidental peace, the years of years it had kissed upon our bodies and forgiven nothing, remembered nothing, made no heed. It had thought it could outlive our human inches but I had awoken in its know, I had pissed, in love, for every inch. I would not swim to my undoing. I had had my mouth around the blackest song. I would not let the being in my bloodstream, no matter which word they chose, no matter whatever dead they had appended or incurred: I could not be erased. I knew, for instance, the mailman had had tabs on me for eons, what with his fingerprints in all my mail; the overseer had been camping in our camper, thinking I would not recognize the missing beer; even the ex-reverend I’d fed on god from in the combed church with his white robes an exact match for his white hair, I would not let the invocation overcome me. I would disrupt the composition by my air. In my chest I had the ribs to use for pews. I had the penance of my lung walls, thrushed in the intonation of deliberate smoke and nictotine. I could grow my hair out verse for verse, my eyelids goblets, my thumbnails wide and endless in their toning of the light. I had stood for hours in one position, knowing all of every lobe of every hall. In my arms the child made mushing. The doors to rooms and other rooms inside the house were pushing weight, under their locks and locks and layers even still kissing at our air. The seal of the windows snapped with racket, their rash of paint flakes slashing every inhale with their gather. At the child’s heart my fist had rooted, the grooves in my skin of palms a perfect fit—just as I’d made it, just ever as we’d always known. The child was tired. The child gushed out of my ears and nostrils, from the pores of our pores through the thing translucent gate I’d worn on all these years. The tally on my arm now read a number with no name. On the child’s heart I had the buttons locked correctly into place, the same code for the lawn here also working, as any code would, any code. In the skin of where my front meat met his back a spool of name-brand slither crumpled up, the flash of something megaphoned and endless ringing in the rinds of our rings slung to stick. My clitoral hood made an umbrella. The paper rasp. The glitch. The pissing: as on the floor below us, the child had ruined his dinner, pushing out of him in urine any inch I could not parse: the nights of rooms of no room, the nights of leaning over in blind light, of his hands over his mouth to hold my name in, our passing in the blood hall without recognition, and therefore without error, without fright. Into this wet, as well, much other: the films and scores and text he’d ingested, wrong. The gold air of jewelry I’d not wanted. The lift, the unfurl. All unseized. Against my back I felt the dual father through the door almost completely, our air already so tight against my backbone in distraction that I no longer could quite sit up off the child there, not that I would have, or even ever: the absence spilling absent in my moan holes, leaking into what I’d be. The house among its wish-distressed directions also had invited itself in. From overhead the other halves had smashed the attic down straight through the ceiling. And the other rooms from their own angles, aiming: the smudge den; the empty foyer; our crushed kitchen still containing its ex-cradle corner, where in the nights the child would learn to feed itself simply by thinking; the mesh container of the bright light adjoining the sunroom in a unit; the pound (the dog inside it also swollen, and the dog before it, and before it: one to one to one); the conservatory where I’d not set foot once, the instruments inside hung on their apparati and unnamable for so much dust; etc. etc. etc.; and the halls connecting these and other rooms together—pleating. In my head I could not stop drawing numbers, recoiled beneath the label-freight of ways already been. Despite my seven years of cold exaction, the sleep rehearsal, the naming of new names, inside the presence I found myself curled so wet I could not stop curling when I’d meant. Nor really even did I want to. I hadn’t laughed yet. Nor was there sun. With my fists inside him and my mouth collapsed and squeaming, the brittle cottage of our teeth, I found myself speaking high into the foldhead the nature of new promises we’d make, conditions we could all agree to, declarations of the ways and frames in which each of us could remain free. I found my tongue spun in old clothing, a suit the child in new years soon could wear, designed, by the lack of my designing, to grow to fit him better with each bulge—and how those bulges would keep bulging, bulging their own bulges, and those too—so groaned—lifting in their indication, off the floor wear, further in and up and off of me. In the curd around my neck skin then and there I felt the necklace, strung with the strings of every hair and harpstring, every wire in the field. I felt hands clench around me: hands of hands of older heads, each and other also wearing the necklace, wearing the come-open of our air. With my hands I reached to reach the hands and help them hum me—hum who—where then—to undo up into the second song—but on the air the song was ajar and the wet was warmer and in the gum the gong was gone. In its eruption the room made new notes, culled up one after another, though this time counting down, bound to the slung draft of this and this and me and me, I could quite divide each in their unsaddle, and yet, and yet, and yet—their names: — GORREOROERRRDD: This one lifted up the windows. This one had it hands deep in gasoline, the unborn fortune clasped upon the layers of the land under our houses. Under our organs the air was wearing. 100 eyelids hid their size. 1,000 fountains hoping through the framework. 10,000 pushing up under the tile, into the cabinets and closets where each we’d hid shit, where each of us was us. 100,000 ways to listen. 10,000,000 buttons in the breathe. MURRRRMLANNAMURRRRRRRRRRMAMAAAA: The sound that had come out of him (and him)(and her)(and me) in all our dark, in the nights one after another when in his head he’d felt turned off, though through his eyes and on his lips there, decentered, the lapse of him drew out. Often I could not stop myself from hulking my drowsed body up over his shoulders to feel the sound slither up and into me, causing another sound there altogether the other sound which sounded not outside of me but in— SSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS: Slit to the room at last, once, threading on it, by which my own shoulders swallowed down, flapping rightly in the slim air, warm as the center layer of any bolt; and following my shoulders went my hips. My lips. My titties, my backbone pockets full of liquid I’d never felt the right to share, my taut, my tendon, my years of cut hair hidden on me ever, my sacks of sacs and cells and skeins: unrolling each in each direction, only, sopping off where each of the others around me did the same, their own stewed sluice among us coiling up and gassing off, already wrapping upward into more air, into ways that someone other-than might breathe. _____________: At length, the note I’d felt in all things: in the upchuck, in the dome, in the back and forth between such stations and in the stations in and of themselves, in the burn of screen cells and of capture, in and of each thing through which I’d ever look, or looked into, or at or over, or those I had not looked upon at all: a single tone at all points in my eardrums, so far so long that inside it I’d gone numb: though even as I’d gone on all this time unhearing, I could feel it right there in my teeth, and in the room as each of the sounds we’d shat among us gathered, we were we. — And yet it was in the enfolding of the enfolding(s) that on the air the index would not wake. The tone bunched at its edges, sucking the outer reams to center. The melodies of each our bodies began at node points and then collapsed, corkscrewing in the mass impending volume to, by several measures, become skew. Though I could feel the bass burn and/or some other in my ass hair, my lung shudder, I could not keep with my teeth: the enamel slick and rising, hard rainshowers, slummed with beat. In the glitch I sensed the son’s color but I could not push my tongue. The knots crammed in the motor. The colander of walls. As each of our layers made the tone come clean between us, gushing up, I knew then that I knew something about the substance that in my meat would not stay sung. Against my mouth the second house lurched, broiling, the halls descending into grease. I could not decompress the meter. There were no dreams then. There was no wash. No sunshower, no repeeling, no slaw glow. There was no glisten of the room, where in other minutes I had pressed the child against me, fevered, where I had brought us and it through ways of walks of rooms made matter. I had already told it so much—things I had not even know I’d ever seen: how when I brushed my hair the hair would come out and in the hair there were the cells and in the cells there were the further rooms of other women brushing hair, and how in those women’s hair, and in those women’s cells, and in me, in me—how in the sleep the mouth would fill with blood and of the blood you then could drink. There was no way to tell the child this here with my back ruptured into color, with my layers hammered open and into layers I had so quickly thought demolished, stunted in the stone lip of the curd of overflowing, of the fuck shards, of the blight. There were no windows here, no cognitions. There was no eye set in the sink, no way to cut the lights off in the forest, no elevator clouded down, no no resounding, no bright wire. In the pillow of my pillow I had my hands both nattered at the blistered fold, and yet I could not stutter up it. I could not uncommand. The second house had come grunted over, with the metal earrings enrapturing the porch, the 100,000,000,000 there among us always standing guard but for one window in which I had not left a latch: a seamless, one pane terror, bought from the night when at my mother’s flesh I could not say my name. I could not record the chord above me. I could not separate the notes. The cadence of the one wall turning over, to show the side we had not used, the sun damage on the wallpaper where, regardless, the house had gone on aging in our lack of memory, the clogs of slits and slats and switches, rooms where we’d choked back and forth on one another, pronged—our bodies in the gash night moving unknown through the dark to beat upon our peace. There was no way to end the ways there was no way to. No burst under the burst. And through and through the house held shudder. And once again the gears drug dry. And in the clap clock of our spooling we sat in layers and let the flashbulbs burn our eyes. ILLUSTRATION BY ATTICUS LISH