BLAKE BUTLER / MY LAST DOSE OF MOURNING POWDER
At last my mother is no longer where she’d been. Instead, upon our family’s passed down sick-person platform, has appeared the pile of pale gold mourning powder, defined inside the windshield of my visor as holy gift. When I click against it with my eyes {expand} it says: the final living sacrament offered for proper usage in rightful recognition of her faith.
I am well familiar with the intention of the substance. It had been granted likewise upon my father’s death, delivered without fanfare within minutes of his concession, whenever that was, his eyes turned fully silver a final time. And I know in truth, despite its definition’s intentional omissions, this is only the exact same stuff that filled our beds when we still owned those; and still today yet lines our land; the same state-powder used in recognizing every living being’s passing away, including pets and home computers, thereafter retiring their memory in full.
Use of the powder, then, comes with the condition of a promise, a legal rite implied for those aggrieved. And I have no problem signing off, playing my part; there is little left regardless to give up. The hours have been long, sicker than I even can remember, by the end none of which my mother could tell a lick between in light of what had eaten through her cells, undoing to mulch every idea of both her person and my person, or as the visor says {expand} awakening to the disease {expand} so that at last she might find faith. The powder, then, for me, is meant to help me find a meaning, reason to continue.
I smear the powder on my face, according to protocol. Everything seems more simple then, at once, as has been promised by the Code’s effect, before there even was a Code to follow; before they’d just forcefed us what we needed in our sleep. Such tactics are certainly no longer required under the current format, and thank goodness; now again we may enjoy active leisure with a full range of affect. I feel lighter, looser, like half my body’s missing, though I cannot be sure which half. I can’t remember all the years of feces on my fingers and the choking of the milk; the erased creation behind my mother’s ongoing apparition running its program in her husk. If we could only live this way unending. If there were only already enough hell.
And yet even the powder is not enough. As when I turn to face the window, under the influence, I can now see where the ground is covered in miles of gushing layers of strange bumps, same as the bumps that line my back and in my mouth hole; above that, like a funny mirror, the sky is colored like all the blood the bumps have oozed out, soaking the soil brown, caulking it out. Among the bumps, too, sparse garlands of gray flowers spurt up where they can muster through crack marks in the ooze, despite how many times they’ve been pressed flat and flat again by the Compressing Ceiling that comes on to tamp the bumps down when no one’s looking. The flowers have a will to survive that surpasses anything, it seems; and still they are not beautiful, serve no good purpose but to refuse to relinquish their position in the map; and this despite how, flowers or no flowers, classifying one’s location is not only forbidden, but impossible. I am not supposed to even want something as such, something still beautiful, much less locatable, including myself, blessed here in passing witness to the remaining ground outside our house as it once was and always had been, for as long as we had lived, as long as there’d been people.
What’s more I know I will not remember what I’ve seen when it is no longer allowed; that when the powder wears off I will only recognize the world beyond the glass as florid, full of open fields of glittering pixels programmed to encroach and mesmerize. And even if the access to Actual Information remains lurking in my corpus strong enough that I can feel it fumbling within me, like a promise, it is only to keep me fearful from stepping foot beyond the confines of our household, fused in my meat’s rules, a gift granted only for how it haunts me. These, after all, had been the true terms of the allowance of our prayers, the conditions we’d signed to by being allowed to be let back out of the bubble cages, to return to the image of the once-deleted archive of nostalgia only each unto their own could understand. Any further coming out and the Numbing Nails will rise to order, end my congress with the transitory autonomy I’ve been blanched in.
It still feels good. I still want more. Yet I am careful snurfing the powder for a second and third dose, one in each eye, so as not to overdo it, to buy in too much, as had my cousin Sharon when his child died from exposure, resulting in the total demolition of his estate. My see-cells still hold scenes, too, from when I’d overdone it with my father’s dying powder in the first hour; how for some weeks I believed half our locality had been washed away, in simulated memory of what had flooded his birthplace as an infant, long before there were such machines as we have now controlling weather and our remembrance of it; before I was fixed upon him in intervention as an anchor, something to keep him from exploding on the job. My father had been instrumental in the incorporation of the mourning rites in our locality, as it happens, though he had not meant to be at all; he thought he’d been acting in the favor of his people, to bring them better food and greener cash; and thus was somewhat of an unwilling icon in how it actually turned out; how here we were again enclosed in our ambition under the waste of a millennium, like all the rest of us allowed alive; another would-be martyr like my father for every place where there remained those who for some reason had not yet given up.
Our delusions do have costs, so it would seem, as do our attempts to eliminate or cope with those delusions, such as using the powder in any manner but for self-cleansing during the death-rite, or attempting to acknowledge that partaking of the powder at all is only designed to turn the deeper partitioned segments of our personas more relentlessly, in midst of trauma; to expose the full make of what we fear and what we still believe we could ever want to their scanners, revealing the softest points for future influence and conditioning of sickness. And still everyone partakes. Everyone is more afraid not to than to be subjected to what eventually will come. Not partaking, we understand, is the surest means to ending up on a target list short of speaking in the Forbidden Language or taking off one’s visor when not in the presence of a cop. No one who has ever been on a target list has not ended up shredded to grist, their remainders shaken to the skies left beyond all mourning and salvation, regardless of whether either would actually carry permanent effect or not, any true meaning.
And I am not ready to die. I have so much shitting and standing and ambling around to do between now and when an actual fate arrives by fact of nature {expand} the fists of the dream of god they’d enabled me to feel inside my life outside their frame {expand} the heat that lurks over our head always and regardless, burning out the eyes of any who might wish to look upon it unpermitted {expand} anyone but those already called to die and become powder too in the confirmation of a love one’s lost life. I only want to take part in what I am meant to take a part in by now, to see what has been made for me to see. I am no longer interested in harboring any weight that might evict me from my own place in the halls of their concept of our eternal being {expand} there is no further available information, whatever the cost.
It is with the reconfirmation of this wish, I know, already feeling out along the dying half-life of my dosage, that I am allowed to see before me upon the fields, the only officially permitted image of my mother and my own self left on record, as we had once kneeled, learning our trade, the grain of our encoding already sore in the grout of rubbing feedback of the ruined land; I see our flat palms placed softly, firmly, upon the other’s temples, cold as true earth, pressing down on either side at the other’s brain in performance of the Wish for Necessary Understanding, one of the no longer practiced rituals of our nation’s history, but still permissible in record, as actual fact, as the rite is no longer seen as having ever been actually potent, and so therfore safe to ruminate on, in the name of striving for best practice; proving that we as a people we have grown; that we can understand now more completely our commitment to the laws.
Yet in the grid around the memory, as I can see, our flesh is shining. Our mouths are open, our tongues black with ritual milk, of blood that’d rained; I know we believe we are awaiting what would fill us from above there by the holy manual’s pronouncement, were we strong enough to let it, were we the right kind of citizen to be given witness to Beyond. I know that we were in fact definitively not such a citizen, nor could have been any in the era before the installation of our visors; such citizens did not exist. And I remember too how completely I believed in what I felt that afternoon regardless, how strongly I had understood that even if such revelation from our mandated holy practice did not come today, it would come tomorrow; and that it was the potential of any day being the day of its commencement that I had found something upon which yet to thrive, a flowing feeling that pushed me forward through the hours, helped me have conviction enough to do my work, to go on eating, to tend to my mother as she became unable to still worship with me, to even place a name to any desire that she felt, much less my own name, or the name of him to whom we’d believed then we were praying all those hours padding up.
Our old beliefs, from such a distance in reflection, seem only catastrophic to me then, a far cry from the fundament of grace witnessed into us as thankfully the proper authorities had intervened, to set us straight, helps us find traction; to indeed at last be allowed to recognize my prior mode of hope as folly, despite the necessary friction and destruction taken up along the way; to be thankful for all I am, at last, deep down where only the powder could truly find me, for all that has been taken from me and my family, for all the blood and brain-erasure that’d occurred; for it is that very loss alone that must have saved me, brought me to stand here still on my flat feet. Without having suffered, I understand, for all of us, without having been abused, taken advantage of, used for fodder, pressed in our sleep, we would not have been able to survive, to feel a person in my person, much less any person.
I am thankful, I think aloud, using the visor’s language, to be allowed. To be revealed unto myself. I know this is what I was chosen from the piles of bodies to be given life for. Though I know there is nothing different about this powder than any other powder my life is made from, I remain thankful for its allowance, however brief and under what trauma, herein the only pleasure I can feel, thus making all relative pleasure pale and wrong, its essence brighter, slicker in transmission, an experience to live for regardless of how little I will soon recall its false effect; to have seen as through the eyes of someone wiser than I ever could be, someone who has designed this experience by fate; to allow me to remember, with permission and proper guidance, what had been once more, whether it actually had been as it was, which I already know it wasn’t, and already do not care.
I am long in up to my neck in iniquity against my country, I know, and always have been; likewise I am mired in such iniquity unto myself. I am already lost to what must be, on land and in mind, regardless of what small indulgences they allow us at the most sacred times, and for a distinctly certain purpose actually only benefitting a purpose that seems to not require my long term interaction; this moment is for here, only, and now. It is a moment around which my life, and so any, could be dismissed entirely from record, from all eternity.
As such, I do not allow myself to linger on the fact that as real as the already fading image of memory appears, I can still hear no soundscape to its internal daylight, as the out-of-doors had universally employed then, when they’d still bothered to funnel in an anthem to disguise the distant sound of pounding and seared meat. I cannot begin to remember even how such a music might have gone, as I know my cells for understanding melody and rhythm have been removed; as have, already, the cells that upon seeing my mother, young and healthy, can remember how it had felt to take for granted that such days would not last the feeling of months, neither in physicality or in retrospect, much less forever. I can hardly even see me there inside my younger self, my face devoid of all their scarring, of the work of rephasers, of the enforcement of the branding and the bugs. I am nowhere in me in that child, despite the ID of what my visor suggests had been my most beloved moment {expand} a form into which a weaker person would be trapped; though you are not weak, are you? {expand} We need you to thrive. {expand} We need you for feeling. For the Commencement of greater good of those from whom who take command, split from the very skin that ages on your back, your blood as old as anything even we yet can remember; we who allow you yet to be {expand} we who only want this because we know you also want it, as it was written {expand} Don’t you?
Do you not?
Yes, I think, using the visor’s language in response to itself, regurgitating, I want to thrive. I want to give back to those who have set the table for my daily cooperation. I have no one else for whom I might live now, as you know, as the only person who still loved me no longer breathes. I know no other. Without you now I must be nothing.
With this last prayer, then, I am ready for my mourning phase to end. I have never been so ready, having met my small goals like a good boy. Today is the day for which I’ve been meant to take up our dying name. And yet I must wait another interval before I am allowed again to invoke a transition sequence of my choosing back to now, at last turning back to face the room with my burning eyes closed to find it again as it had been before I found my mother’s bestilled corpse; and now with the powder burning the skin off of my cheeks as it erases what I have seen in its own wake, I feel the final layer of its remainder framed as a penance to what I’ve seen, using up all of what its digital effect had so provided that it might convince me to be assuaged in my relation of release. I feel the spindly fingertips of someone stronger even than a parent or a friend rubbing in for me the last licks of residue of the powder on my eyelids and at my lips, the places I am most soon to be first touched by someone who might mourn me in my own turn; though I cannot think of who this possible mourner yet might be; and still, for the remainder of this small season, I am, I know, as yet alive {expand} yes, in fact, you are alive {expand} yes, we assure you {expand} so stop expanding.
And so I stop. Already then I cannot remember from what event the powder had been granted. At once I can’t remember quite exactly where I am, or rather why I am, here in the home that I grew up in, having never let my mind inside another space inside my life; or why our family’s private sick-person platform had been unpacked and rolled out into the middle of what had been, I recall, only a guest bedroom, my mother’s name already missing in me where I’d acknowledge her hereafter as the final effects of the mourning powder shakes away, converting its primary function then from display thereafter to absorb. I only am thankful now that this {deceased person’s passing apparatus} is still granted as an asset to our household, as the only official enabling device of human rest; I am certainly exhausted from all my work and inner-weather, after all; I only want for less requirement to have to sense, a fact the platform embraces in me with without a hitch, hungry itself for something new to latch its sensors onto, to earn its keep. Its thrumming platelets are still warm where I strap in, too, sticky still from whoever had been installed it before me, though I don’t mind, and in fact I find it pleasant, welcome, as if it had been where I was supposed to have been connected to it all this time, held down and zoned out, like a child, or rather like the only definition of what a child may be as now presented on the pleasurable recordings the apparatus begins to fill my mind with as I turn down, begin awaiting who will soon arrive to take my last place, to begin attending to me in my absence, all of my body’s failing needs.
Blake Butler's fourth novel, Alice Knott, will be published by Riverhead in 2019. He lives in Atlanta.