Three Hundred Million: A Novel (45 page)

Alone with each face along the flesh mosaic in all directions I spent an eternity called a life. Each life in this manner passed in the duration it would have liked to, which ranged from no seconds to the end of the end, and beyond the end of the end for some. I aged accordingly for each person by gaining one darker dot along my outline’s lip or chin or arm, a flux of pigment I could not feel the ages aggregating in me, even with thousands gathered, as with the passing complexion of my skin so passed the remembrance of the condition it had held just prior to the current state, therefore maintaining my fragile balance in the harbor of being forever at the present stitch in skin oncoming in the skin. A version of who I’d been the year before this condition had approached perhaps had felt or could feel the brush of what would come to pass soon in the world against his nape and called it wind or premonition. And so.

The world around me writhed beyond its posture. Even clear as I felt now, I’d yet to realize where the mask of who we were once grew thinner with every passing stroke, shedding every wish into the mud into the dirt sinking beneath me all around while through my sight I tried to carry on my way.

The memory of our blood rained through and through upon the light beyond all seeing. And the blood lapped at the faces turning to sand again beneath my feet. And the day was silent without solitude. I was no longer anyone, like you. I had nowhere to be and nothing to speak for. I stood among the dead and was surrounded and I could not breathe, and I was breathing and my eyes stung and the wind was hot and still and the my mind was cold, and I wanted only to feel nearer to the ground, nearer to anybody I’d not known among the nothing covered over, and into the soft sod of mush selves I knelt and spread out and lay down, and as I closed my eyes my eyes stayed open.

Tonight or now was any destination. All points within me touched all points. The map of day was gnawing in my chest, the book of every person.

My skin was three hundred million measures long. I was so obese, wrapped into a small torso and series of appendages humming with eternity, while overhead the pumping conglomerates of black fission squirted in silence through discolor. This same sky had been above us every hour, absorbing our image into pigment, into our only voice.

I was breathing, yes, but it was not air, and hair was growing and I was hungry, but for nothing. My ears were stuffed full with old sound I always remembered and now could not count, its absence overlaid into the system of the image over which I had no control. Or it was like I had a choice but had no choice.

Behind the flattened light, the curve of all our space looked on. I could feel the compression of the dead in every beam no matter how blank. Their dreams in absence of individual mobility rasped whiter than white was when I understood what white was. Every idea of god in them cloaked as pale-eyed as the heavens.

My heart was full of every history anyone had believed we’d all be carried on in.

FLOOD
:
The breadth beyond death opened inside me. I was walking on the face of the narration of the light. I could see the shape of the earth beneath my vision spinning the land to show its several faces caved in one place, though each face looked the same. There was a light rind of skin growing over all things, over any recognition, every thought. I heard my own idea of
right now
explode out through the back hatch of my head. The sound came in all down around me. I felt someone take me by the hand
.

Through the dark of the breath of dead in me, our exhausted phantom history rose. It already knew it would not survive itself and did not wish to. It had nothing else to speak, no grace beyond a final iteration flashed into the gap between what had been and what would become. Against my mind it beat the blue of purple from the black of gold and laughed and lay down through and through me as layers on the layers being granulated for a lens with which to let the light queue into and derivate its shafts consumed in shafts reconsecrated upon the corridor of possible lives. This book of all our lives had already been written in our death upon the page of landscapes where the organisms burned and woke in whorls laid on the fingers where the book had been before and would be again: in resin sunned the fingers in our fingers fucked the fingers we had thought most ours and spread them white upon the beaches in the blood among us and let them bake regurgitated in low coils to call the fish and phantom schools up from the wet of which we’d been robbed and relocated in the curd mold of the waves steered by the moon to know what anyone would look at anytime thus leaving the star as plain as any day among the days where water rose and fell and rose again and fell again and was the water in our bodies and our mouths and lubes and liquors’ lubes and baby fodder and so on unseen before the beaches’ sand the bodies walked on upon the bodies right before the eyes as eyes would turn in swarm of looking fast into the shadow laid upon us ever shifting as if meaning to reanimate the leather from the bead but only ever making glass, only ever thickening the soles with which the bodies meandered and curved and saw what they had done in the images of what they could not see that they had done swelling and negating as the moon pulled back and forth upon the skin of it and lap of it where even animals could swim and sink and live and shit and eat their shit again and go on in silent provocation as in the image of a bed on which we lay and waited to be entered or forgiven or at least allowed to close the eyes and walk again into the image the machines kept stealing as we tried again to burn it through the folding layers as we tried to get the word as only it could be forever on inside itself the word falsed into shapes of other words wrapped and beating each other’s asses in commiseration that really did on occasion make us weep on knees or asses or backs beneath the ceiling beneath the sky silently branded with the wished images in any mind blown raining each in collaboration like symbols in the sky as lost as night and forced in our tongues to go on these undone years in other guise as we had as had our children as we would inside those books in myths called characters in films in machines again called actors in songs called sound. As the myths and sounds became our history, a white dust upward through which the emissions could emit and names could go on bouncing in trauma paths around the mansion of the ideas set on the air and moaned again drawing us in them as our blood begat our blood, even having crashed the dream of murder hard against a stupid tree grown out of food the blood poured strong and silent like a pirate through the cities without our bodies even there and as the silence laughed it knew our murder would be as paltry as another disc, as any verb, as any casual human opening a paper in no sunlight while the machines glowed and wives or husbands crawled along the floor praying in the temple of memory to be jacked off forever in the name of marriage and wishing hard to be a pustule on the dark part of totality, the blue of bedrooms crusting over with the sons and daughters also praying in the same words and the papers glowing with the promise and the making and in the cell the singers ever ringing all their teeth out through their eyes.

I found I could not speak surrounded in us. I could not think or feel or hear anything among the unending shrieking veils of sand. But I was in here, pressed against anything we’d witnessed. So many days had passed this way, where what had happened to me had happened to you too and seemed to happen regardless of whether we did the things we believed we did or not. And yet still as I felt each perspective passing through me, I knew it was the last, as where it touched me every cell burst into nameless burning.

God began again inside the burning as I watched. For each of the unbelieving bodies splayed up rotting in persistence, he made a mark upon his flesh. The first mark bore the shape of a circle, an unbreaking pact made with itself; the band of the clasp of the circle walked forever in the furrows of sand that would become the bodies of our bodies in the years before the years; from the sand the sound would form dimensionless, to be demented in man’s image, and so from the symbol of the circle every other symbol fell. There were the urges and the bees who stung the urges in us. There were the numbers and acolytes of hope and certain gestures grafted into the limbs of us by fright. There was nothing to fear so we feared the nothing. The heat of the breath of god formed the spaces among the fibers for the sicknesses to dwell in. Each time the day began again, a new great sickness. The dreams placed in our teeth supplied a yearning for communication and definition crowded in among what must have been our eyes. Around the eyes arose the lungs, nose, nostrils, cheeks, aorta, gonads, urethral lips, large intestines, small intestines, thumbs, as well as the anatomies forever cursed by lightning where black refracted in the corridors of the house of god’s black mind, begetting spleen, gallbladder, ureter, lung, pancreas, rectum, each of which would teach itself to swim wide in the chosen moments while the body lay upon its back. Having been given flesh, then, the urges returned and overtook us and filled us with their speech; inside our shapes was placed a strobing that bore the mark of the endless death soon to be made witness unto us as soon as we realized we’d appeared here in the world at once always both alone and not alone, so that we’d never shake the wish both to be and kill our own creator.

Out of the burning, land is born. The land is vivisected, given new names, which all are the same name again, with many different ways to say it. Weather stirs the dirt and water into lather that dictates certain corridors the way that air alone once had been meant to. Between the corridors we make our homes, confining light in ways among which we can sleep. Each motion takes us further on toward its own ending.

There is that which cannot be seen. Houses in the name of god are built with colored glass and high ceilings and the long pews and the cash plates and the casks of water and the blood and the body and the pipe organ and the restrooms and the books. Here a language will be spoken, the word after the word. With one’s head against the wood in the right condition with the head aimed and open to the sun and charcoal underneath the building and the correct cluster of buttons pressed hard inside the head and a draft of cold air for several sleepings and hours under water, one might hear the words as they all are: the name repeated, the name repeated.

Every name is given a new name. It does not matter what the name is. In the reiteration of each whichever, we hear the damage rendered as new words. We hear the echo of the bodies of the prior iteration of the hour in the rising acts of evisceration, iteration. We hear us lying on our backs in the cornfields under a white sky being cannibalized outside the black house of the scene of the crime inside this book which must only go on forever in its own presence in its instance of the past and yet also so again and so must become silence must become and through which we go on. We wear the void plain on our face all waking hours already knowing, and so clothing, makeup, colors, mirrors, walls.

Death feeds itself already with our phantoms, the daily killings we have yet to take form to commit. Early infanticides and hyperventilating sermon are pummeled out with stone on stone between the making where in the last hours the dying president had stood and sworn in tongues in the thronelight already burning mirrored above and below our chorus and what else. And where god stood strobing before a marked door in a machine and farted through the word of words snatched from the mass of confetti blood pouring eternally in the pilgrimages where our death Worship made and sold our organs into slavery for the
N
th time and gnashed us bit from bit along the ridged backbone neoning beneath the trammeled cistern pouring blood back into the blood all black inside every father of the child aping cold prayer service behind the steering wheels of cars and in the hair of horses and in the teeth of pets and in the eye of the coin stamped with the false image of our eye.

The cities box themselves in wallwise, already folded with the magma still in swill beneath where here we were again with he among us and he within us. Each new ending wrote itself over the last, always beginning already again before it could, the copies clogging up like water gnashing around a hole in the floor of the ocean beneath the putty mirror marker disrupting boats and knocking white planes out of blue skies downward to crest into the mapmash of this blood foam lubing up the face of the ocean to mirror the mirror again back at itself squealing the death jokes on a gray stage underneath yellow headlamps in green boxes in the pink belly of the worship we wrapped around each old gold city shit upon from birds white as the eye purple as the eye brown as the eye clear as the eye inside the eye, and where in vast collaboration more cogs catch and flip and shiver bronzed between each other turning milk out of the retch, caught in flesh flasks unto the body of god already whored into a dome, god on god now rising fast and fresh around America in snaking portraits called museums called beautiful evenings called new food, its whipping weight peeling high along the unseen ceiling so bunched double that the future too is pulled, drafted like icons obscuring even the wish of television in our heart, gnarling the dream seed even as it rises and shapes in pleasure caked in objects like a rash, whirring hot to open sores so tiny they could not be sniffed by the promise of our children having children. And so the coming comes again bearing the deadliest birthmark underneath prismatic post-god scrim, while yes, thank god we scream saying the name again the wrong way, thank god, there is a new day, here I am.