Читать книгу Sky Saw - Blake Butler - Страница 18

Person 811, somewhere elsewhere, found himself inside a box. The box held a long low light like the kind of light birthed by machines. He could see his short arms crimped with busy muscle. He could see his gushing veins and the scratch marks where he or something else had scratched them. There were scratch marks in the box above his face, bright splinters wedged under his nails.

811 had no idea how long he’d been inside the box. The last thing he could remember was some leaning purple room. From the room he’d moved into an elevator and the elevator sealed. The elevator had descended for several hours and held no music. At times the elevator seemed to be moving to the right or left, or at an angle, or through color. The elevator’s buttons were unmarked. He’d kept on trying buttons with one sore finger till one of the buttons knocked him out.

Before the elevator, he remembered standing in a dark froth up to his neck. It’d been too dark inside the air, too, to know where exactly what made what. He’d gone for miles and not found land—though he had found, by feel, among a patch of lubricant, a tiny plastic ring that fit his finger just exactly, though it kept slipping off, a little burning, and soon he lost it back into the depth.

811 felt something else there with him in the box. Something small and fat and grousing near his feet. He could not budge. He could not think of whom to call for. His mind blanked over so many things he’d one time known—his phone number, how long or fat his dick was and how it had fit into other people, the names of any presidents of Where, or of what his insides looked like on the inside—he’d seen his insides, some technician had showed him in a picture once, gushed and brown and wound, he remembered that—he could not think which way was up.

He knew there was someone somewhere wanting, and he wanted to remember. He tried to think of things he’d thought he’d thought before in other days of other years in the idea that thinking them again would make him click back on where he’d been or what he’d done after. He felt his thoughts flop off from him like live fish:

AM I A FIRE?

HAVE I BEEN MURDERED?

WHAT WAS THAT ONE KIND OF BEER I BELIEVED I LIKED MOST?

WHICH ONE OF ME IS THIS THINKING?

HOW MANY FINGERS WOULD I HOLD UP IF I COULD MOVE MY ARM?

The box was getting smaller, longer. The heat grew with his sigh. His face itched. His veins itched. He counted backwards. The other air the box held itself around his head.