It was just as it was when no one was wanting to be found. The nails in the floor were all that held the world down, you understood, same as the magnets in your brain were all you had any allowable idea of how to align by post-intervention. For this practice you remained thankful, much as you had been when we'd sewed your holes shut, cut your tubes; you had no choice and no petition. It all appealed to our public's writhing necessity of innovation—no, perseverance; that is, belief. It was required. It shaped your daily habits, seen as ways you'd always been and could not change. Such as how you poured the auto-acrid breastmilk you'd meant to feed your offspring with all down your arms, how it came out horrid colors, and how you believed its coating kept you young, kept you invisible, as by now what else could you believe? You could no longer tell a difference between the permitted and the arcane in living texture, every act of faith designed in the ongoing determination you would would outlive your every neighbor, despite how you could not name a single one, had no reason left to want to live. If you could hear anything beyond your own thoughts, it was the echoed retching of other warm lard blobs, pumped in through the 2-way speakers in any wall; how from just the labored breathing of the recorded breath of even those so much younger yet than you seemed to bear so much agony, learned as much from actual virtual damage as from the rolling reels of reenacted human data-film we held as knowledge soft-uploaded onto our sick cells, copies of deletions, as had yours, when you still could, though you cannot remember the last time you could remember anything but barfing, waiting for a birth that could not come now that our wombs and balls had been removed, replaced with recycled plastic through every corpse, the final landfill. Your phantom milk was their milk, too, of course, forced from the same brine vats that culled our frothing lunches we pressed through cloth to split the blood out from the pap, for which you had to crawl out from the Melancholy Incubator to receive when at last the window opened, take your place lunged in the lines of mirage bodies that spanned so far across the burnt black transom there was no end in sight, nor could you tell which was feeding toward what source point either way, nor did you need to to be fed; you only had to show your ongoing ability to take part, that you still held the will and muscle tone to want to still squeeze your way between the craning nearness of the installed sky and the scrim of the firmament of hardened blood, not that you could actually go anywhere in any one sustained direction if you even wished to, or so everyone but you yet seemed to inherently comprehend—as no sooner was your most recent mutation rendered as active in the understanding of Our Only Eye That No One Held, you would be filled up by the injectors, packed full of stringy protein semen and tangy dew, sewn up with dread-light in the newer films they would allow you to feel a buzz from, like fornication, then blinded back to a better dream bent between the possible shift in coming frames. And though already when by simple shape of impulse and condition you tried to return to hunch away again in the same small gnaw-hole in the mar yards you'd come to think of as a home, the only place you'd ever lived, you returned each time to find the cleft filled up by someone sicker than even you, forcing their stunned plotline into the only hidey hole that you felt knew you even better than you knew yourself, kept your last mind alive with its strange stank; and yet you found the other body there could lay prone and suck its own tits just as well as you could; the hole needed nothing like your mind or what you were; and just as easily, hardly a stone's throw forward, there was another nodule there awaiting among billions where someone like you had left it absent just for now; and so in turn you worn your way into their old life in your own right, making of theirs what now must yet be yours, and found at once you could believe in it with just the same amount of vigor, with so little required, hardly a difference between the shape of any sac, the whining of any dying wonder; and again you laid like that long as you could, until again the phase of testing forced you to hunger, or until we had some further spoilage to disperse, to stuff your only little square of servitude three-quarters full of what remained of all our shitting, our pretend science, the games we played with your entrails, whatever else might be leftover from enacting what seemed to us our responsibility to govern this whole long wad-work, in such a way we pretended even to each other might have been the lead design of our creator, much less a basilica beyond the living altar we have formed out of your still cadavers, your ideas, a living rhizome as much hallowed as overflowed with viral ricochet and gore. Because of course there isn't even any room here either, among our archives, the bugged up throne rooms we have installed behind your simulated sky, shining as blood would bile, such silk. There is no room remaining yet in anything we've ever dreamed, despite how sheer our god's gold plan was, once in our hands, however now written over by epidemiological marketing, ravaged by feelings; as if in no time there were not one god yet but one for each of every us who we still allow to speak, so many shingles in the bright magma crammed with blank verse to be begotten, rendered edict in your hard drive's dying spunk, with so few cleft decades left to watch the only all-live reels of only the most tender of our people still remaining desperate to pass their name unto a clod, to receive absolution or even rest, the ongoing withholding of resolution of which by now remains the only pleasure left to those of us to whom you pray.
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Blake Butler's fourth novel, ALICE KNOTT, is forthcoming from Riverhead.

Read Lauren Pike's 2½ Questions interview with Blake.

Detail of art on main page courtesy of Godino.

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