Three Hundred Million: A Novel (38 page)

Which is

Which is

Please fill in the gaps. My mind won’t do it. I feel a pressure in my knees like I am kneeling though I believe I’m standing. Help me.

Help me.

I am sorry I told you to be silent. I don’t want that. Please come back.

I can’t find an exit. I give up.

Please.

Please rewind the tape. Record it over. Make it all white.

I couldn’t help it, please, I’m sorry, I am.

I am here. I never left. I couldn’t even if I meant to. No one could ever. Your arms are both my arms. You are my eyes.

Thank you. Oh, thank you. For that. For speaking.

What do you need.

I can’t stop the unending iteration.

You will never.

So what am I supposed to do.

Who am I.

I can’t remember.

Who am I.

What do you want.

I don’t know. To be happy. To not understand what it’s like to want to kill people, or know they can be killed. To surpass death. To be calm and quiet. To lie down. To be full of something warm when I am waking up alone or beside someone. To walk across a bridge and find the water at both ends. To know the someone that I loved again. To have silence. To have all of that and none of that.

So just do those things then.

How.

How do I do that.

I don’t know what to do.

You are doing it already.

I don’t know what I’m doing.

You are.

Just tell me who this is.

You know who this is. And you know I can’t tell you.

Why.

Because I don’t have a name.

How can I find you if I don’t know what your name is.

It is the same name as your name. I’m in all names now. I’m any of them. So are you. Hi, I’m your wife. I’m your neighbor, your child, your brother. I killed all those people and gave them life. I’m not anybody. You’re the one pretending you don’t remember what all these words mean, though I know really that you do.

I am waiting for you. There’s no answer. There is an answer.

I am the color of the house. I am your bedroom. I have waited here for so long I can’t even remember.

I need to see you now to know that you are there.

Here I am.

I can’t see anything. I don’t know where to go now.

I am right behind your face.

I can’t stop me from the talking. I want to stop now.

Stop me.

Stop.

B.
:
There was the wind around the sand beneath us. Even I don’t know who I am often, either, though I do, too. The color in the smoke. The sound of every one of us forever, before and after the possibility of birth. Still I still can’t crush the one of me in me who knows what I had always as a person felt most: to hear my loved one say my name. A name that is not my name at all to me and yet inside which I can sleep, and feel no time, though I know all the rest goes on unending, and what is left now is more than ever was. Death is not a question of becoming nothing, it’s a question of everything at once, ending where the edge between the two of us was always rubbing in us, craving no break between
.

The mirrors in the homes were flat and long. I went to press myself against one. I did remember. I remembered how the rooms could be opened into from the outside, from someone beyond the cut of the way the home supposed itself. I remembered how behind the flat copied image of myself there in endless rooms the world had offered I’d found in each a way into a common space. The long, buried backbone of the black house just underneath the feet of any homemaker, provider. Any child. Somewhere in the welding of the dark network behind the rooms here there must still be a way back into the world from where I’d come, if anything remained of that by now. Somehow out from this recording I’d caught myself inside I could feed myself back through the lens and out into the eye, and if it was only death there waiting for me on the far side, into the brain of the body of the present, in this way at least I would have lived and died. I would have been a person in the system of faces and beliefs, another square inch in the last era of our death.

The face of the mirror in the bathroom of the house as it was in the present surrounding version was about as wide as my own chest. It was as tall as me there, affixed against a blue wall in a bedroom where whoever last had lived inside the room had left their bed unmade, though there remained no smell of them left in the fiber.

I had tried. I had lain down in the bed first, hoping somehow it would fall out underneath me, or at least that I would sleep. Here when sleep came it felt the same as waking, and when you dreamed you saw what you would see awake again. The sleeping hurt worse than the being, an inverse of how I remembered our prior understanding. My skin seemed colder against the glass of the mirror. Where my image touched my image it felt electric, like cells knitting where we touched without quite touching, only wanting to be closer, through the glass.

I kept waiting for the surface to adhere to me and take me into it, but it wouldn’t. Each time I pulled back to look at what I was again I saw only myself: my eye right there at my eye, moving as my eye moved to see it seeing. The color in my pupils seemed to want to take my reflection into me as much as I wanted to go into my reflection. Touching the glass, I couldn’t see anything but the dark I carried, somehow closer than ever now.

I rubbed my palms along the glass. I waited, pressed, anticipating buttons, some kind of trigger or lever, a panel that would open back into itself. I licked the surface with my tongue and said words that came out without me thinking. Any combination of language could be another language. There could be a way to speak the name of the mirror into itself and force it to let me become what I wanted. I tried anything my blood came up with. My old imagination. I waited and listened to what the reflection was most desperate to hear. When I spoke, I heard only our language. It sounded like me here. It was only me again.

Against the glass I banged my fists and hit my head and spoke to it louder, screamed into it, laughed into it. I pulled the mirror off the wall. It was lighter than I imagined. On the back side of the mirror was a dark synthetic surface, cool and soft against my fingers. I traced its edges for the key or how to make it open from the inside. I pushed at where on the wall the mirror had hung, a faint impression there marked down against the paint around it slightly darker, hidden from general light. Nothing I said or did would make the mirror open into the passage. My blood was opening into passages itself inside my fury, none I could enter.

I tried laying the mirror on other surfaces. I laid it on the bed where whoever had slept for years and I could not sleep. I laid it on the kitchen table, where the prior family had made more of their bodies out of food. I took it outside onto the dirt of the land and laid it on the ground faceup toward where the recording of the sun was and waited for it to burn me, but it did not burn, and the ground held me out as long as any architecture made by man. I laid it on every wall in every room and pressed and held and touched and promised. It still would not let me enter. The level of the glass would only bend so much. Oil from my face was smudging up the surface, obscuring where I could even see me, or could see the room around me, or the world.

I laid the mirror on the ground. I tried to stamp or jump up and land and come down through the surface again, a way repeated from some time I could no longer feel. I saw me from underneath me. I could have been anyone. I cracked the glass under my weight. In the mess of shards I could see several hundred instances of everything. Behind the glass, there was just a flat white surface, reflecting nothing.

I tried again with many mirrors. Each mirror contained the same buzzing and the same promise of somewhere else behind it. In home after home I went from room to room searching out what reflections I could find already awaiting me there in the image. There were mirrors on the walls and in old drawers and suspended in places where they touched nothing behind them. Each time I saw my face approach my face I looked older and older, though I did not feel older. In each mirror I could feel the residue of who had looked into it for years before me, the curve and buzzing of them. I could not feel their memories or anything about how they had felt to be alive, how they had died, or whom they had wished they could live on with forever. I could feel nothing but my own ongoing face. No matter which mirror I took or where I placed it on the house, there was nothing there but me and the edges of the room reflecting shifting angles, showing nothing but the same. I left each mirror broken, finished, empty, and yet each time I returned after the tape began again I would find the mirror melded back in full, and me there young again and aging in the same procession, though I could feel the same air behind each place, the same passage snug and lurking behind any surface waiting for whoever knew exactly how to come. I could not go back, no matter how many times I tried to, in every iteration and repetition of the recording of the present made continually mine alone. And yet in each new mirror that I found, each time again I found it, I felt the same erupting music in my teeth, the knitting possibility that this particular mirror in this particular room at this angle at this time code in this condition would be the one way back to everything. And with each failure, the same reversal of electricity came sucking through me, evacuating, leaving marked back in my blood another hope I’d given away in the name of nothing.

And the year begins again. The year begins again and is the year now. Same as any
.

Endless ways. I can’t tell each time if the time before I found the thing I’d meant to find
.

Buttons screaming in this life. The pillows the beds full of no smell and I inhale it
.

Dynasties of trash. Windows with the prints of any person. Books no longer read
.

Every surface a possible eye into the grain of the place I can’t remember feeling
.

My eyes won’t stay clean enough to get one thought out of me without starting to cave
.

I don’t know why I’m talking in this manner. This orchestration is not me. This sphere
.

I’m not looking for anyone any longer because I already feel them in my ass
.

What if I laid the mirror on my body. What if the mirror was my body. Eras of worm
.

What is it that happens between the blips between the tape ending and rebeginning
.

All mirrors are just glass. All glass is just sand. All sand is just dust of the dead
.

It has never rained here. It will never rain here. What could I ever think to want dry
.

No art. No paint. I do actually laugh a lot, if only at nothing. At knowing I want nothing
.

What happens when I am paused. If I am ever ejected from the machine I don’t feel it
.

Language written on the black face of the tape, or the label of the tape, or the time stamp
.

The distortions piling up in me. The zit of static raising warble on me. Lacerations
.

So many unique lengths blip in and on and knock my head off again and again alone
.

The range of the flickering frames will send me through centuries of any copied instant
.

There is a chamber beyond death. There is a passage wider than the passages in dying
.

I want out. I want back into the world, even if it is all dead people, and smells like shit
.