Nothing (25 page)

I walk along the wall and skin my skin becoming bunched until, on the newer one, appears: another door—a hole into the house again I’d never seen there. This door is smaller than me, chest-sized, with a peephole that sees inside. The rim around the door is sealed, healing as with bruised flesh to cake the door into the body of the house. Through the hole I see the light arranged kaleidoscopic, in neon rainbow, camouflage, snowing in slow screech—the hours of the house wrapped up in hours turned to mush and wearing time upon its time at last no longer there translucent but neon, gummy—then, with my eye’s ridge screwed harder down against the metal eyelet, the colors become a wall—become a hall, a subtle tunnel, raining length from where I am into some center of the home—become a stairwell headed up inside the house unto a layer set above it, though the house always had been a ranch. On the stairs, packed in chorus, a stream of people, naked, shaved-headed, waiting in a line, their spines and flesh packets so crammed together in the low light it is hard to see where one begins and another stops. They look like me, my dad, my mother, all at once—faces buried in faces, as would earth. They look like anybody. If I let my eyes go goggled enough, it is all one flesh—it is all air, all the house just this one room.

In the room, for one blinked instant, the man is standing—the same man from the car, the same him with the voice I feel that came into me through the phone, same who wrote the words inside the balloon, him having hid same most years somewhere in the middle of my books—here he is there, arms loose, posture lilted slightly backward, as being pulled to stand erect. His body changes as I see it—there’s my body at age nine, there is me at eighteen, me at fifty—there is not me there, but anyone, the skin of his face cold with a glow. In the instant that our eyes meet he is unblinking. There is a sound. I cannot see—not into the house, my lashes itching. My eyes roll in my head. I step back in the outer, darkened light—
ouch!
—step away—bang my head and back against the house still there behind me, crushing pressure down in spiral through my cerebrum. My own house, this version, wound in the wire, shows no matching hole—its flat expanse continues on warm to the touch—deformed.

I try to look again at where the hole had been to see again into the house into the man again though the hole no longer appears there: against the wall instead my face is itching, sticky. Through the wall I can hear my parents shouting something at me, or each other, or at anyone at all. Something in me nudging where the hole was, a bubble traveling along my bloodlines down through my organs and my spray; the hole eating holes into me, popping pockets, eating up what had been there. The wire pulls, as would guitar cords and piano wires—as would lengths making a fence—as would a pumpkin’s innards, growing riper unto mush. It pulls at me to go on against the house in the contained air, of a no light. Beneath me caves eating miles beneath the earth. Shafts no bigger than an eyehole on a pyramid that open into chambers, rooms designed in profile of where they’ve not been filled, in the past appearance of a succumbing to the death. The hole an elevator up my spine cord, for one second, shivering as would a length of skin too closely shaved. I can hear my father’s brain—hear it shrieking where inside itself it feels itself parting from itself in cellfields and lurched in want for where the other parts of him outside of him exist, held in me in what I’ve seen of him that he now no longer will remember—where the hole inside me eats in me the same—days unfurling out of days there fed from his slow death, like anybody’s, massing at my lids, flushing my weight with all my hidden orbs of absorbed pounds—the fat around me always in me and around me despite where I had tried to burn it off.

In where overhead by now the sky is going lighter, light as paper, bumped with garble barf-out from old machines, I continue on around the house in round. The houses need against me. They squirm. The brick brushes out by length in turning wooden, turning metal, then to mesh. The mesh remains opaque—though in the web of slits each inch makes, something yawns—the hours of the house the night devours. The hours of the night against the house, inside it, wanting out where I’d lain open and become it and not remembered—will not even now in having seen or read or written—the residue of captured speech and thinking absorbed into the ground under the house with sour loam—infiltrating the foundation, boring more holes where the soil would beg to be filled in—with more bodies full of bodies in the brains degrading and the images caught burned.

Upon the slanting soil the house begins to shift. From the flat smushed face of the new widths of the old house my father’s outline becomes pressed through. His shoulders, chin, and sternum. The lips beneath the surface moving, saying words I cannot hear. The bulge grows hair out from it, hair that whitens, curls to mold like what had grown up inside our home’s beds’ sacs. In my head, the text my father speaks becomes new veins, abrasions, tracing bridges between skin that will also make me old. That time will ask for. That he will ask for. That will eat years. That are already in me buried.

There on the wall of the house across from my father’s bulged impression—
I can hear it, I do not look
—there is the body of the other man. Two holes, where eyes are, go down deeply into a kind of light I cannot see. From the holes, a gentle smoking. Choirs. The houses leaning, trying to fold their frames back into one. Into one house, like all houses. The houses around the houses leaning too, smushing in around the aisles and wires to meld to nothing. To be nothing, cream the space to zero. Years of bathing.
I must leave here.
My arms around my arms make knots—clogging up with motion I have not made.
I must leave here, now, now.
In my body I go on. I go on in snaking along between the houses, in their slow purring where the folding has already made a mess out of the air, blurring the sky above the house into a circuit board, a prism—how in the blank between the houses it is no music, but lack of motion, some stillness so still that it seems between the edges of my skin to strobe. A still so still it is the absence of all action, a space in which there’s never been a thought—no flood of snow or sickness, no need.

The gap and faces of the facing walls go on as long as I go on—making me that much more wanting of the end oncoming, though by now I can’t even see where back the way I came—the whir from where all this walking started—no beginning. Walls in both directions, on both sides, a paralleling sound. I hear me ask outside me where I’m going, what to want for, aimed at no one, and yet I get an answer—the blistering of my soft eye—patches of colors squirming in the shape of what had been seen—cloud bumps—screaming grog. A fluid rushes backward from where the lids are, blinking, back in warm gunk up my sinuses into my skull. I slosh around in that some minutes, bumping back and fro between the two surfaces, hearing guns. It feels familiar:
this has happened to me in a book
. My hands somewhere beside me. My chest. In spotty blinking, I catch glimpses of the stretch. The sky above it giving colors, sort of learning how to laugh. A word is written up there somewhere—many words, disfigured, in a language canopy—I cannot find my name. I strum still forward, seeing backward and before me both at once, as if walking through a loosely wired house of mirrors—the lights tipping in and out—more laughing—or in the ways at night I’d walk from room to room, flicking the switches, not wanting to fill my head with too much light, but not also wanting to run into the shapes the darkened rooms make. The persons in the thrall. You somewhere on this graft’s edge, colored of the eyes. This sentence to be closed between these pages and let to hide forever in a dark inside your room, perhaps. Or to be transported, closed in no light, to another. To be burned, made into a still more temporary light.

I cannot hear you breathe. I am talking all the way out loud, my mouth’s meat fixing syllables with words my body wants to say, in the history of how I’ve learned, and yet the sound is undynamic. I hear it instead in my blood. Corkscrewing sound erupting glitchmarks in the organs I have been told that I need. The organs, some or one and then all of which, will one day fail. Or have failed, in their failing, passed down and down. The wall of the house I grew up inside of by now is so far from where we started I can’t remember where we’ve been, but in the diminution of my vision I can hear better, through the brick. I hear the voice I’ve learned I used to have by watching versions of me caught on tape, talking out loud, in the way I’ve been out here trying, saying words I said once then back then. Words which in their exit of my head have left somewhere behind them. Through the house’s hulk the words seem pleading, rendering the flattened face with little veins, mazes in tiny tunnels on the outdoors, a massive human skin, where facing this the wall of the new house combined the house is made of glass now, an opaque glass that clears in splotches where I breathe, my blinking becoming calm, slowing off until my lids seem to no longer want to lift at all without a burning. Through the lids I can see into this house now whole—see the whole house in one prism, sound packed into sound, packed into light and aging, crystallized. Through a hole the house did not know it had in it forever—I can smell the hole extending back through all its time—through the hole into the second house there I can see into all the houses where the house has always been. I can see, though it does burn me, though it hits upon my eye, hits me blankly, each inch at once, each inch asking me rubbed out, rubbed into the mush of coming color that the night makes replacing the prior pixels, a flood around my eyes.

Inside the house there all around me here at all angles growing I see:

A WOMAN STANDING AT AN OVEN, PUTTING GREASE ONTO HER HANDS, HER BELLY HUGE

SEVEN DOGS CROWDED AROUND AN OBSCURE POINT ON A LAWN MADE OF ALL LAWNS

WATER FALLING IN REVERSE, DESTROYING COLOR

A CLOUD OF BLACK SMOKE CURLING THROUGH A FLOWER GARDEN

SEVEN GUNS, AIMED AT A HEAD WITH ITS FACE MISSING

BABIES, RASPING

THE LARGEST BIRTHDAY CAKE ANYONE HAS EVER MADE, BUT ALL TRANSLUCENT

Someone now is tapping on my shoulder, but I’m stuck there, the wet inside me turning around.

I see . . .

NUMBERS BARKING AT ONE ANOTHER ON FIELDS OF PAPER

TWO PHOTOGRAPHS OF WHITE ON WHITE

AN EXTREMELY FAMOUS OLDER PERSON WITH FACIAL FEATURES POURING PUTTY IN ALL DIRECTIONS IN THE COLOR OF THE SKY

BLUE MILK IN A WHITE URN ON A SOUNDSTAGE SUSURRATING

A POCKETWATCH MADE OF ASH

TIME IN SPINDLES OF GRAY SUNSHINE SHITTING FROM THE FACE OF THE POCKETWATCH GROWN LARGE AS A WHOLE MALL AND WRAPPED IN LEAGUES AROUND MY BODY AND ALL BODIES

A GUMMY HALLWAY AND THE MAN STANDING INSIDE IT WITH HIS EYES CLOSED AND MOUTH SO WIDE, NO TEETH

OVAL PRISMS IN A BEDROOM GLEAMING LIKE A MOON DOES

YOUR FACE

Under each image I cannot stand up. I feel my legs farting underneath me, sinking into soil—into where the ground beneath us has bent gone, cut open with the holes eaten up all through it, yawning today for all the meat the ground could ever want—the bodies filling in around us, houses around us, fuzzy.

I see . . .

ME, WITH MY SKIN BACKWARD

ME, WITHOUT MY SKIN, THE SPAN REPLACED WITH BEES

YOU INSIDE A WARDROBE, TURNED TO CLOTHING TO BE WORN BY SOMEONE YOUNG IN YEARS UNWRITTEN

MIRRORS SHATTERING IN EVERY HOUSE

A SNARE DRUM MADE OF SAND

A MUSIC FROM SAME SNARE DRUM, CLAWING AT THE SKY, MAKING HOLES WHERE LIGHT COMES RAINING, WHERE SOMEONE SAYS . . .

NO LIGHT

MOUNTAINS WHERE THE SOUND IS, RUMMAGING INTO A HOLE, A HOLE AROUND WHICH THE NO LIGHT IS ORGANIZING, SUCKING SMOKE OUT OF THE LAND, SUCKING THE CELLS INSIDE MY HEAD BACK TO A SMALL POINT THROUGH WHICH, WITHIN THE HOUSE, I FEEL A GREAT RELEASE, A LITTLE POCKET OF EXPLOSION, A RISING NIGHTTIME UNDER THE LAND, INTO . . .

A CHILD

A CHILD FOLDING INTO ITSELF INTO A CHILD AGAIN, INSIDE A CHILD AGAIN

A CHILD INSIDE A CHILD, INTO A CHILD INSIDE A CHILD AGAIN INSIDE A CHILD AGAIN, REPEATING

INTO NOTHING

There I am looking all at none. The skin of the image in an instant gathered into one syllable, one frame, containing all prior images and what to come—a frame unglitched in its focus, put on pause—every instant all at once. I hear no bells—there is no sound or surface there beyond me, the me of no house or hole beyond my rind in itching freeze, a copied conduit of rooms in rooms and no one standing there inside them but spreading out from one point into a map of homes where homes had been before the homes here, a crushed museum: space removed of what it had contained—the living room where I would roll, perched on the carpet with the TV, repeating its speech—
I can no longer remember what came in or out
; the kitchen where, the blood dripped the day my sister bumped open her head, spilling soft onto the tiles and years later I’d be paid in cents to scrape an error waxy lining off each square—
but what beyond that, any hours that had surrounded these two small things clogged in years around an instant’s spine
; the hallway, longest of all rooms, and with the most bright light in the whole house—
nothing seems to have ever gone on here beyond the walking back and forth, the passage from space to space for something always elsewhere
; the bedroom where the bed is, where from the ceiling the boulder rolled, and where I notice now there for the first time, mirrors of both sides—one making the long face of the closet, one, wider, in the bathroom, just across—a wide conduit between them over where, in those nights, I would be—
no memory beyond the memory of doing nothing to preserve the instant in its passing, the passing acting as the instant in itself
.

Where in the house here, here I am in here—here in here standing right beside me in the glow, the room around the room around the room so washed in silence I can’t bring myself to look beyond where each of these words go on ticking along inside the white—the white of white—another body—some skin shape seated in the light—a body like my body had been when it was in here—still here—made of me. I am parallel to my own body, fleshy mirror. I raise my arm to touch my arm—all of me there just before me, spread like paper—when I touch me, the room collapses in the light—the light collapses inside the room inside the light there underneath us into soil—the soil beneath us filling in around us in the house again beneath the house, packing in the holes with all our murmur.