Three Hundred Million: A Novel (53 page)

Beneath the dirt, the blood is dry. Enmassed dreams of the dead hold up the lattice of the unnamed landscape. Where I’d already walked I knew I could not walk back.

The light of day is near and thin with no one waiting.

I remember coming to the house. The house had awaited my return through all our lives. It had watched me move toward it in the waves of seasons spanning all the air like leather.

The house appears slick black from a distance, like a night sea, though up close it is transparent, barely there.

Each other house surrounding matches exactly. Miles of homes along the land all same as ours, each disappearing when not watched. Nowhere I could go would not end up here.

Our house has more doors than I can count—so many there’s no part of the exterior that’s not an entrance.

Where I touch the house, my fingers stick. My skin and the house’s skin mesh. I sense a screeching sound beyond the paint—lobes of damaged language waxing and refracting in a familiar lilt that holds the house together.

Each instant seems to scrape around behind my face, as if probing for a way out.

I remember inside the house the walls are mirrored. Once closed, the doors could not be opened from inside. The tiles along the floor beneath my feet have symbols etched into their faces, though when I try to read them, they go blurred.

In the mirrors, there are no symbols; the floor is white, unmarked. Nor do I appear there where I’m standing. Instead of me there, I see Gravey, wholly naked. The light around him is so severe the house no longer appears to have border.

I remember his name had been Gravey in some eras, though in others he took on other names, now in their mass erasing all.

Gravey regards me smiling with countless mouths. His nails are long and gold, his face and arms covered with a thin hair whiter than I remember hair could be.

At Gravey’s feet, there is a woman. The blood on the floor and air is hers, I know. I know it smells like blood does. It’s on both sides of her face, outside and in, and on Gravey’s face and arms, and on mine. The light is shining off the blood so loud.

As the shape inside my brain adjusts, many men appear there standing in the white surrounding Gravey, their breath among them knotted as if to one field, which flows in through the vents and circuits from the expanse beyond the house flush with unleavened breath made melting in the wake of all of us beneath the sun now turning seven suns and then seven hundred and then and then.

My features feeding, the days collecting underneath. No way back beyond this instant, I remember, though in knowing so, the instant too is split apart. I can watch myself there watch myself there watch the men among the men. Gravey with his arms raised; all our arms raised.

I stand above the body of the woman on the floor.

The woman looks like me, as did all women, cradled there among the many men and boys and girls brandishing knives, or holding pocket mirrors or small bulbs between them to bring the house around them closer. I watch them clench my jowls and stretch them out, looking for pockets. I watch them cut the ears off of my face and wing them. I watch them smear parts of the reflecting room with my dark blood, obscuring what repeated. They take turns feeding off the torso. The bite-mark lesions on her face interrupt my face from being who I’d been before the house had risen, the gouge marks taking putty from my jaw. My teeth are removed and chewed in other mouths or hot glued to the ceiling in chandeliers, or worn as jewels on the boys’ fingers, marking with molars down their arms. Blue of a bruise milking to muddish rouge again around the elbows where I sat propped and pulled along the wood grain banged with nails to jut the feet of those who passed so they’d remember any instant among the instant, holding time down where it caught and held warm to the house and cooled and let us know. The scalp shorn back to bring the hair up with it, showing the evening underneath the ridge of pulp I’d squeezed myself in underneath, the matte of sleeprooms and remembered bodies and the idea of a way to stumble through old doors; the symbol he or they or I would cut into the surface of me soft where hair had hid me palest to match my surface there with theirs; how the symbol seemed to shine, collecting human dust along the clot of light that hung around it in connection to the prior symbol in the prior body, and the symbol in the body yet to listen. All of them mine.

I can read the instant in me like mirages. I can stand behind the arms and take the arms up and be the arms as they would cut and hold the torso, aping it a puppet or a mummy or a mother or her child. The words I felt lodged in my chest came out through the man as whatever words he wanted, and they had always been. My goldish mounds. The pyramids my cheeks mimed as I stood unseen in the muddle of all the air of the house surrounded at the center of the hair, broke in such love, while from its fold the field grows growing.

I remember how the light inside me fried. I remember the texture of my shape inside the body of the woman as they undid her, clammed surrounding my own mind, framed in such bright motion-tinsel there is no home. Each cut into her flesh creates a sentence of the widest kind. Books of the trees. The windows slide one by one out of me firm. The tapes spool and lather around my aggregating outline. I do not need to think at all to see the years the woman had held there at my center full of the belief that we had been and always would, that no time could erase the white walls out of the sense of being born. The long shade of the woman’s mother in her like a mother. Stairwells that bend into an ocean all pink and gray, wrapped in the softest mouths and brightest holidays, the kneecaps cracked on gravel and father-kissed and mended, flesh again.

I remember the one dry body of the chorus of the boys. I remember threading through the boys at once, all of the body of me, and they are muscle and they are bone, they have tongues gouged from the parents in them who I had already been before pilled to speak the scripture of their lives, the laughter they threw out to pull to the moon, the tattoos their skin rejects and wears in squirming radiation. Their ring fingers burning where barns had been before them full of pigs and calling rakes to change the nature of the lawns where they would stand among a coming storm on clearest days and throw a ball so hard and high into the sky they might knock out the sheath of glass we’d named our heavens. All the boys with all the mouths. All the ash flexed in the testicles and ovum caked up like televisions blinking back and forth between the edited breasts and the call for ground beef pillows every dream, wept from pubic carpets unto wanting more and asking more inside the mirror of my blood where the day turns into day again to day again to day again today.

I close my eyes and open my eyes and I am in another woman’s body, any of them. I remember the brush of blades along my cheek, the inner friction matched with something pearled along the chaw outside my head. Someone was speaking, yes, in through a wedge of soft between my bone, yes, my only bone, knitted from silt. I’d heard the words before: each night of my life carried in secret in the black above my bed, crammed in between the rafters and insulation holding out the mask of their ideas; how in that space sealed under sleep and all wide open I had eaten of the black, had spoken in tongues to no one there, confessing every crime committed in the history of my home and country as all mine. Then, like any child, I’d woke, drunk on saliva and that false language through the whole span of waking day. This was worn along the lids, carried in acid I would use to break down what came inside me. In each word I could read the hours as they were. And with the words, a breath of clenching winds or someone’s fingers, a narrowing enormous hall rendered in time, from where along the distance there was a singing not like the voices of the surrounding men, no chords or hymnals or holy organs, but sound like a negated human mass. Music, yes, once, that woke me up and held me hard against myself inside a pocket of another person, a woman, too; there the blood that rushed beyond my skin had been contained, enmassed in slim packets vast enough to curl me from them, crushed enough that they must break. Within the cram of night the skull contains, in any hour. This is the space for which I’d tried to live, licking back the blacker centimeters of my memory to wake the mirror, slip myself again into the game of self where before me I had been. As in the sealed space surrounding every life the black of the unseen flips up in spasm, and splays on the walls a negative light made of my division, where above me there the boys again are slaving, staring through me, as if my skin is not a surface but a tear. The house around them glows with something not like fire, a digital convulsion split between a universe of glassless screens. The whole length of the split of the way I’d meant to walk along the circumference of my head here clasping and collapsing beyond the instant to keep the instant where it waits to split unsealed.

Here in the room the boys are chanting. The words make gaseous glint around the skulls they were. The speech is all the same. It pills and pills the weight around me, holds me up. I can sense beneath me where I should be able to feel them lifting my thighs wide on the carpet, spreading tendons tight along the legs I know were mine: mine and mine again where old milk reaches. My clitoris is hard and slunk back up in my cavity of man, throbbing through the flesh walls with its sightless tip alive and never dying. The space beneath me where the babies would be birthed from squirms and spreads, lapping wet warmth something from my center like a zapped lamp. The faces of the boys are enormous. They grow small pustules that against the cream of the air of me burst into a color once that had been called silver, then had been gray, then is no different than any.

I feel something in me becoming unremembered, moving from the flesh framed in the face along the center of this current body full of currents in reverse. It appears then in my bank of mind rawing, deformed in sticky sacs unframed, one to another, the gash behind the gashing coming open, catching in cluster where I’m not. The transfer burns; I cannot read it; it is in me like the space I’d go along in through all our lives; I feel the whole rest of me around me want to pull into the instant, to become gored into the forgotten nodule of any woman’s brain, to suck the whole rest of all the lives of our lives in the eyes of what a life was into one cell; then just as quickly, it is nothing; flat black matter, each small destruction eaten into its own center as if to seal off from all else ever awake. It wipes me out. It loves and loves me until I can’t believe I am no void, and all I want hard is to stay inside this body in this instant all forever and I know I cannot hold this and I’m only anywhere.

I watch though cannot feel as the boys slip the slimy lanyard of my intestines from my bellows, the meat-lengths I’d used inside this version of who I was to push the feces from me, to pillow the child I never bore, the soft mass of it unwound and unraveled, ticker-taping anywhere, wholly emblazoned. It has a pinky stench, the coils on coils do, a little knotted meal, what sound. The pump of where the stuff of me had gone along my organs to fill the bulk of the meat vein seems to go on pumping crud off into the arena. The glimpse of the gap between where I’d been before I was there and the shape of the space that knitted me from ash has come apart and cannot breathe. The gunk is up between my teeth and I am growing. I can count along the room where each of me already has split again into another, the mink of the air arranging itself around my vision to fill up with what I couldn’t, there in the faces of the men and women, there in the reflections of the faces of the men and women, in the revision of no day becoming all. I go to close my eyes again but they are already closed. The black-space where I had enmasked my mind before inside no hour stirs on the air like any vow. All our men have peeled it from me with my veinwork, my silent putty, their hopes not buried in what I am not now, but between.

They take my ribs and lids. They take the foam around my spirit. I am wider than the room. The house is rising.

They take my hands.

I sat up from the dark into more dark. I felt my wife beside me. I knew her body like my own. She was very slim. We were in a room I did not recognize, though I could see only outlines.

I touched my wife’s face. Where I touched her face her face touched my fingers and remained. I didn’t need to say anything. There wasn’t anything to say. The world held on around us. No sound.

I wanted to go on like this the rest of my life. Now that I had found it I could not remember any other feeling.

As if to mark this thought, the dark around us began to move. It peeled the room back, covered my recognition over, filled the space. And just as quickly she was disappeared again into anything. And the dark was not a room again but just the endless shapelessness. I could not stop it.