Nothing (33 page)

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CLIMB THE LADDER

The ladder’s end starts somewhere else.

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ENTER HOME

There is no entrance to that from here either, not that you can see.

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YOU ARE PISSING ME OFF

The home continues in this condition.

Blood is running from your name. All the bruises you have incurred have returned here, on your new skin. They compile the inches into old form. You ooze. Where you can see you from inside your skull, you appear the same as you do to you now any day.

In the mirror surfaces, you see now how the house continues replicated in each direction, end to end, and on and on. Countless houses. Countless you. And all that glass . . .

Inside the house, something is trembling.

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DOES ANYTHING JUST HAVE DOORS HERE

Every inch.

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OPEN ANY OF THE DOORS

The trembling inside makes the walls wet. They stick to where your bruises sting, pocking the fresh parts with dust and fiberglass and crummy bits.

The pictures on the walls inside the house’s front room have curled. The quilts hung along the long, dark hallway sunken back into the walls. The walls, like your heart, are purple, though they are turning. The wires frying in the frame. Every sound inside the house that’s ever happened is happening again in the surround, all at once so loud it feels like nothing.

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LOOK AT THE PICTURES

They are all mottled. There are bits of eyes and bits of lips or buttons, walls, but mostly the splotch is impossible to gather.

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GO DOWN THE HALL

Your body, near the pictures, refuses to move. It wants you there, to stay and wait beside the pictures for them to reconfigure, to adhere from the slur into a sense. The days. The color surface. Your blood is runny. You’re losing balance.

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STARE INTO THE PICTURES HARDER

Burble.

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EAT THE PICTURES, STICK THEM TO MY SKIN

The pictures won’t come off the walls. They’re affixed with something deeper than metal.

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BREAK THE SEALANT

No.

You can’t.

Do something else.

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FUCK, I CAN’T THINK, THERE’S TOO MUCH NOISE HERE

. . .

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THIS JUST FEELS LIKE ANY OTHER DAY. FEELS LIKE A WEBSITE, IN A BOOK HERE. HOURS.

. . .

The cursor goes on winking in my skull.

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In my lap the shape is burning, it is so warm.

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Against the blank my head floods with an itching.

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THE COLOR OF MY MOTHER’S HAIR WHEN SHE WAS MY AGE; WHEN SHE GAVE ME BIRTH; WHEN SHE WAS BORN.

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THE SOUNDS OUR DOGS UNDERSTOOD ABOUT US, SEEING. SLEEPING IN THOSE ROOMS; THE WORDS WRITTEN ON THEIR RIBS.

The home begins to lean.

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THE KEYS I DID NOT LOSE, BUT DRANK INTO ME IN FEAR OF NEVER FINDING THE RIGHT DOOR. MY FATHER’S WANT FOR KEYS NOW TO A CAR HE CAN’T DRIVE, TO A HOUSE HE CANNOT LEAVE.

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THE GROUND THIS HOUSE WAS BUILT ON, WHO HAD WALKED UPON IT, WHO PRAYED, WHERE THEY HAVE GONE; THE GROUND OF THE HOUSE BESIDE THIS HOUSE, AND THE HOUSE BESIDE IT. THE GROUND.

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HALLWAYS PARALLEL TO THESE SAME HALLWAYS IN THE HOUSE WITH THE PICTURES FACING PICTURES, MAKING SIGHTLINES IN GRIDS ACROSS THE AIR ABOVE THE GROUND, VIVISECTING ALL THE WANT INTO UNIQUE LOCATIONS, ASSIGNED.

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THE AIR WHERE ANYONE WAS BORN: BASEBALL, KISSING, CANDLES, CRANES, ALL THAT AGELESS SHIT LIKE PYRAMIDS INSIDE OF BUILDINGS, INSIDE OF LIGHT.

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TWO PHOTOGRAPHS OF WHITE ON WHITE IN EVERY HOME, TWO NAMELESS CITIES STRETCHED INSIDE THEM, WAITING.

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THE LENGTH OF MY HAIR NOW, AND MINUTES LATER, DECADES LATER. MONTHS AS DAYS, DAYS AS YEARS REWINDING AND REBEGINNING

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TODAY’S DATE TODAY

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THE MIRROR JUST BEHIND THE MIRROR

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WANT OF

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The home is bubbling. It gives a smoke.

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PRESS UPON THE HOME NOW WITH MY BODY

Where you press, the surface mumbles up a slip: a small divot in the flat’s face, bending inward. You press your arms harder, teeming in—the house above you, rolling forward on its gait. Your form appears in the wall’s far side, an indention. The roof becoming your roof. The sun of light becoming gone. You press and press until you find yourself slipped in the middle of the walls’ meat, a space surrounding years where you have been. In the slip of the house the sweat and song and eggs of roaches and the aggregate of breathed-out air has formed a mass—a crystalline and glowing substance which in the space, into your head, glows a sound. The sound rubs the memory of where you’re from even further into your blubber. You turn around.

You turn around again.

The room appears: a small room absent of all light.

As you look again, having remembered, the room becomes the den inside the house where you grew up: it holds the smell now of all the foods inside it eaten, all the bathwater, all the gush. There seems to be no air, though you can breathe.

You are in the room where several years you built another house inside it, out of bedsheets, out of books; the room where your father gave you a speech on reproduction; the room where a dot matrix printer has returned now, ejecting pages.

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READ THE PRINTING

You pick a sheet out of the spool. The sheet is covered up with nothing. No words, though the printer makes a screaming sound as if beating each page full of ink.

The white seems to be shifting.

In the room behind you, someone moves.

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HELLO

There is no one in the room.

There is a window, through which you see rain fall hard upon a yard, dotting the pool you almost drowned in, becoming drunk into the ground. It is briefly mesmerizing: you feel a pang for drinking meat. You chew your knuckle. The curtains rumple.

Further murmur from the far end of the house.

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FOLLOW THE SOUND

From the den you move into the living room where nights your mother and father watch TV. The chair leg where in running from you your sister fell and burst her head open, gushed into the light. If there is one room around which your life could be said centered, this is likely it. None of these people you remember are in this room now.

The furniture in this version of the room has been removed. A tiny house sits where the TV used to, another light inside it.

As soon as you see the house, breathe its screaming, you forget that it is there.

You will remain here for your entire life, no matter where else you think you go.

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FOLLOW THE SOUND

From the living room into the kitchen, recreated of its food—all the food you’ve ever eaten there inside it, pressed in, ejecting through the roof. The cereal and turkey dogs and diet soda and peanut butter rise into some small point far above, a cylinder unto the black point hanging over all things in the sky. You breathe the air and taste it, your body blubbing quickly with new fat, the calories herein recycled gaining mushmeat on your cheeks and arms and ass. The more you inhale here—in this room where days in the sink your mother washed your hair, where you would come and go into the night surrounding—the harder it is to push on.

The only thing not gathering dimension in the eating is your head.

Inside your head, the chain of commands aching, blinking, typing into or therefore out from some other, smaller machine:

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And therein, underneath each:

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Inside the sound your body goes on growing
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and in the skin more made.

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And under each again again beginning . . .

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And therein, and so on . . .

Soon you cannot see the room around you.

Soon the room is any room.

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FOLLOW THE SOUND

From the kitchen [fat] into the hallway, down the center of this book. Down the center of the books this book wants inside it, wants as second flesh. [the endless flesh] The walls here, felt up close against your fattened body, are made aggregate ends of each book’s paper, spine to spine. The friction makes little rips along your cushion, leaving wet upon the walls: wet of sweat and blood and self-gunk, lathering the seam. Leaking back out of your new shape-size. Mushing up the books. Between the web of walls where you are come from, your sopping leaves a film behind you on the frame, a bubble mirror glowing at the light behind your body, sealing off the way—though you can still see there, in refraction, all the bodies, all the space—your mother, father, sister, unborn brothers, all those loved in bodies on the air there, clustered in the quickly splitting lenses, their eyes broke up in spit-spins, and behind them too, a further on—each context of body there behind them, watching, their own mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers born and those unborn, and theirs loved also, and the others in them, kaleidoscopic, countless eyes. The prism of them splintered through you, held in the past sections of the house, that where you can no longer throttle, even in shrinking, for what is gushing in the way, and thereby breaking in the hour where you try to think or nudge or say, popping open into magnets where the space was, wolfing air. It’s such a song, that false silence—at once dissolving in its way—at once becoming again, another room, an instant eaten, into the next instant eaten, so on unto the hole.

And still, the sound around you, louder here now in the center of the house, where in mirror to the globe of wet behind you, blurring, further doors open a way.