Nothing by Blake Butler Read Free Book Online Page B

relaying sentences such as “I went to sleep, woke up, and there was more money in my account.” We get breath strips and Bluetooth, satellite radio, the artificial liver. People are diagnosed as having sleep sex and sleep e-mailing in the manner of somnambulism. We get human-approved Botox, which 150 years prior had been known as sausage poison. The largest shopping mall ever on the earth opens in China and remains perpetually 99 percent unfilled. Fewer people need to walk or speak more often because there are machines that do it for them. People laugh, still. There are parties. Certain men announce themselves as god returned in human form and they are killed or kill themselves. Kids are also killing other kids in schools more often, and eating pills more often. We get the birth control patch, the Date Rape Drug Spotter, GPS. We get the iPod and its competing replicants, each version smaller than the one before. Bodies make more bodies and those bodies make more too—the method of the making, at least, doesn’t change in how it works upon the body, though the body is no longer officially required. People continue to write their own sentences and record music and say words and take more photographs and they consume and they emit. Artificial flesh is developed to replace destroyed limbs or regulate the systems in specific hearts or heads. Electronic pets popularize among the young, though the electronic pets can still die. Tanning beds are deemed “as deadly as arsenic and mustard gas” and still are popular as ever. 129 There is such sound, so much that when it’s silent some feel the most fear. There are more books than ever, more albums, movies, more ideas, coming from more bodies and machines within further and further subdivided air. All of this information, every hour, goes on in light or no light, while in automated buildings we sleep the same way when we can, eyes alive inside the head and body held still, if interrupted or on pills, waking mornings with the taste of nowhere in our mouths and crust around our eyes. We rise and find our shapes imprinted on the bed’s make and the mattresses conforming over years, filling with living cells of those in feed, and the surrounding walls made slightly thicker with cosmetic paint and a kind of psychic crowd—each room a room where someone else might once have lived once or inside the night come in, packed with an air that goes on before and after anybody, at any instant with and without where, unto whatever.
    What Not Sleeping Starts To Make
And I also have no name, and that is my name. And because I depersonalize to the point of not having a name, I shall answer every time someone says: me.
    Clarice Lispector
    For several years between the ages of eight and twelve, I saw the same dream every night. The trick about the dream is that I was not dreaming, or asleep. The vision was of my room. In the vision I lay in my bed the way I did when waking, in my blue bedroom in the half bunk bed with the head end against the wall. From in the bed I could see above me a large stone boulder hung in the ceiling, through our home’s roof, lying lodged. The boulder was large as half of my whole room was, and seemed to negate any air. I mean in the room I was not breathing, and did not need to. I could not close these second eyes behind my eyes.
    Each night, the boulder rolled. I could feel it edging forward slightly in its dark mass, so slow that it almost seemed not to move at all. There was a low sound to the grinding, its frame against the house’s frame. Over hours, the boulder would roll toward me looming, approaching closer and closer to my head. During this whole time I could not move my arms or legs or blink my eyes at all. I could not force myself to come back fully into wake, nor could I lapse deep enough into the nothing that there was nothing I could see. I could not unlock myself from watching, through the whole night, as it came forward, end over end, the space between