Three Hundred Million: A Novel (55 page)

It doesn’t have to say a word.

I watch my hand put the hole in my mouth.

I feel the hole there.

I see the color.

I hear the sound.

 
  1.
The year my eyes turned grew fat around them without clear provocation to become impossible to see through for several weeks, days between which whole years seemed passing, and I grew older, and no one would look me in the face; the rings around my eyes soon grew so thick and wide that it was my whole head and my whole body and then I looked like anyone again; even my parents could not remember who I’d been before; they could not see the rings, but I could see the rings; I slept and slept; I felt my disease spread

 
  2.
The year the food placed on my plate at dinner seemed to pour smoke from where it’d been burned, as my mother was a lousy cook; slab of turkey spitting fire fission from its erupted cell holes; columns of diffuse tar rising from my grits; most nights I could not eat at all; some nights I closed my eyes and thought of cream; the food would burn in me forever, being burned, becoming my skin

 
  3.
The year my father lost his brain; his recognition of me and my mother and his brothers and whoever turning in his field of cells to mush; how he could walk around the year forever seeing other people, calling after, rendering their names onto the air; I would hold the names inside me; I would wrap my fists with wire; my father never tried to open any doors; his body shrinking

 
  4.
The year the house beside our house began to sink into the ground; only I could see this; when I pointed to my mother or went to the door and knocked and pointed the people looked upon me with arcane names; I tried to stop the house from going with my fingers and then with branches and then with prayer or spells and then with ideas but the house kept going; there were other houses in this way too

 
  5.
The year my house was the only house left on the block or down the street or as far as I could walk forever and yet there would be people in the streets; they would go around for hours as if nothing happened; where they went at night I do not know

 
  6.
The year I almost died from laughing in my sleep; that year I did not dream

 
  7.
0

 
  8.
All this had happened at once to anybody

 
  9.
The year then where on the ground the houses had sunken fully down into the earth, and there were no houses; the houses made of other colors and with floors and walls and people in them all reversed; this was any year at all, forever, at last removed; inside here our house still seemed the same; and inside of each house to the people in the house their house still seemed the same too; the houses rose toward the darkness all above us

 
10.
The year I died each day one after the other by saying the words I’d learned aloud; each time I died, I began again at the point at which I’d heard the word said; in this way life was like a recording of my life; in this way I went on

 
11.
The year at once all before me in the midst of all the years beforehand the year seemed just fine; as if the years before this in my body had been not what happened but were ideas I wrote out for me alone, and really my eyes and skin and dad and neighbors and homes and hours could have been anybody else’s, and instead of what I was now it was a clear day in a nice mall walking with my mother to buy the suit I’d wear to church eleven times inside it before she died

 
12.
I did not kill my mother; I did not kill your father or you; I did not kill anyone; I am not alive; I am not a person; I am not dead

 
13.
The year my legs were replaced with someone else’s legs; I could tell this just by waking up; the surgery had been seamless, there were no scars, no weird tissue fissions, no stitches, but the legs were not my legs; I could tell from how I walked different, sometimes backward, sometimes side to side inside the house to find a door; I do not know who the legs belonged to before me but whoever it was they were much, much older and had smoked their whole life and smelled of terror; they would make me walk some days for hours into places I did not want to go, though these by now I don’t remember; I simply remember walking through the fields and the reams of birds and the house on the horizon and the word

 
14.
I am you; I really am you; you wrote this

 
15.
The year after becoming someone else like you I could not stop the wish inside me to move on to the next instance of a body in the mess of bodies on the earth surrounded by no walls and more walls and doors; how each time I saw another person through your eyes I moved into him and was then them from then on until I saw another person and moved into him again; each person I moved into was you and me and he or she again thereafter, and each of us as well would be then in the next and who before; in this way, god stopped growing, slowed the orbits; in this way there was no center to the earth, and no center to the space around us, cities, planets, ever

 
16.
The year the face of god appeared inside our music; the song we were not singing, and within then stopped aging, and had never aged and never would again, and our translucent flesh would rain inside the endless night resizing where around us we were going to be not there anymore so soon that we could smell the burning of the shrinking in our lungs, in fear of which we ate or drank or heard jokes or wrote jokes or wrote or lied or lived

 
17.
The endlessly repeating night that would not end and so kept gazing and in gazing learned the hole, each body up against the best mirror of their remaining house, ejaculating into the image of themselves

 
18.
Through the hole the tunnel through the center of this dimension, to the mirror, where the machine will not desist, seeing it again begin again without ever actually beginning

 
19.
The year we forgot about the sun; where what had been a sun up till then became replaced with what the sun is now and this would become how to us it had always been; the prior instance of the sun then disappeared, leaving where it had been all these words in all this white forever, a bank of prisms in the sky replacing sky where sky was to reflect the thing back at itself so the thing could see itself and so go on in going on

 
20.
The year the words learned to move into one another as had we before them, unresolving; one word without an eye or face or feeling shitting up against the word against it pressed against it welling down; we would move into this too, the space between where the word had been before and where the word was now inside the word beside it; god would move into this, and the houses, and the prisons, and the bodies, and the blood; the word remained inside the word only forever, returning to the beginning, in my life, which was our lives, which was dry as light inside of light

 
21. 00:00:00:00

I close my eyes and try to open my eyes again and in the dark I can’t get out. The skin won’t come back open. I can’t move. When I am not moving it is as if I am free and could do anything, though when I try to actually do anything, nothing happens. The air holds in down around me. It shapes the air and light I breathe.

I do not remember where my face is, what my vision feeds through to. I know it is older than me and wider than me and had always been waiting in me to be lifted.

I don’t know why I can know what I do not know or how I could ever name what is not mine.

I remember I’d been younger. I’d bitten into apples and felt the flesh become a part of what I was. How strange to hold something in your hand then and know that it would knit into you or otherwise come out as shit, that you could select the elements that built your body and with that body make your way. My parents were beautiful people. They were kind people. In the backyard we had a building where I was allowed to play with animals and machines, and though I certainly enjoyed those also I had real other human friends, and I smiled more than the average and went to places where the music wrote along the inside of my face. All the days stretching my brain in ways I wanted whether I wanted it or not. Each day a series of infinite selections gathered in the only way it would ever be, no matter how many times the same space was writ and wrinkled, corkscrewed in its avenues unto the dust, beyond which what translucent shape my space had incubated would beyond its image now become so open there was no word I could not burn. How anything at any instant could always happen.

Each time I try to speak I hear my body grinding, stone on stone. Where once I had a head it seems my whole head is imploding. I can’t remember what it is in me that lets me seem like I exist, what binds me and deforms me every instant, why it goes on.

I can’t remember why I can feel or think at all or why I’d want to. Time continues, though no one’s counting.

I remember there had been so many hours spent in wait. Other people went on in their homes through night on night never knowing most of what any others wanted or could be. Yet even in the dark so far apart we’d believed in living, I remember. The wish to want to touch and to be touched in some way formed the body, framed by the world. Even just the light of a bathroom in the far room as someone we’d loved prepared to sleep beside us and be there when we woke could be enough to feel actually alive. The soft brush of air from a door opened toward one’s own chest to open space before it could be wider than the room.

It seems impossible for anything I remember to have ever happened, just as it seems impossible now that I can’t seem to do anything but be. To go on in any instant as I was now was to walk through every gesture, dream, and vision, every curl of grunt for sustenance, for warmth, for life forever, though worn in sleeves and curtains called a day, an atmosphere of calm encased in ageless frenzy, cages made of shapes, shapes saving their blue and red and white and white and black and black and black into a waking like the sun brings burning endlessly on a thing that cannot move.

My tongue of every taste of food we’d ever eaten. My eyes of every sight. My lungs of the air we passed between us endlessly for centuries. My fingers of ash. My skin of everything that never happened, surrounded by the absence of the feeling of having been surrounded all our lives.

I remember how in me anybody could have been you. You could have said anything, been anything, made anything. You could have removed the skin off of my face, and with the same will walked into the ocean, written this sentence.

And so you have. Everything has always been exactly as you wished it would be, only now it has no end. You do not remember the difference between what happened and what did not happen. You do not remember where I became you and was always. Nameless, mapless.

Inside the dark, I turn and wait and press at my eyes and feel inside me the blind in all our minds there held forever as each remembers each, all so smeared into the present what is created could no longer have an end or a beginning.

Let there be light
, I say, and nothing changes.

I sat up in another dark again and I was wired. I could see through this dark as if it were daytime. There were mirrored walls on the horizon reflecting miles of more mirrors on beyond all definition. The mirrors were absorbing all the air around me, taking the air there and pulling it down into their flesh. There were no edges to the world here, though in that freedom it was unnecessary to even think. Every pixel of me was so filled with everything already. It didn’t matter if I felt content or false, dead or alive, loved or alone. Each instant stretched so long it no longer had a surface. It was so loud I couldn’t do anything. It made me calm. I lay back in the light and closed my eyes. Behind my eyes my eyes were open, flooding, throbbing, without face.

I close my eyes and open my eyes and I am Flood. I mean I am me again, as I had been, though my experience of myself occurs now once removed, as if I’m watching me perform me.

I am surprised to not feel any relief in reappearing in the world. Inside what would be my skull the meat of the head’s periphery seems to stretch further back and in the more the eye is crimped to peer against it, looking back into the space the self makes as if there in the wake of it might form some window or apparatus by which the self inside the space may retain form. There are no arms there, no torso beneath the space of head from which where I peer down, though the taste in the mouth of the head is something blown apart and silent.