Sky Saw (13 page)

He wanted to walk some way into the room where the living room had been—where he’d sat nights beside the mother with TV light around them—where he’d eaten so many meals when there were meals to eat, microwaved or mashed and slathered—where there’d been pictures hung of him with others, laughing, touching, held in time—if he could just feel that again, a little—though no matter where he went inside the house and all the rooms about it and around it or what the rooms resembled, he could not find that room. He kept feeling the room he needed would be the next room in the sequence, but each time the next room was a room he’d already been in remade, a room he did not recognize in this condition, or there would just be wall and then more wall. The man felt something was pulling him away from the place he knew he needed to be going and back toward another room inside the house.

He tried several times to go back to where the door he’d come into the house through had been—the stairwell unto floors unending—though where it had been before it now seemed not—only the continuing flat surface of where the house was, holding what beyond him there all out. It was as if the door had never actually been there—as if it were a door existing only ever somewhere in his mind meat, burbling with knots.

Holy fuck someone is attacking my goddamned mind, he tried to say, but the words were fat and clung inside him. The words were bigger than his heart, his head, the house, and all of it was creaking.

The man was growing old already in this new place. He felt the rinds rolling
through his leg joints, his muscle eaten up with acid called ideas. He looked already older than he’d even imagined he could ever, older even than his own father if his father were still alive now and if he remembered that man at all, though inside him he seemed growing younger, scrunching in his skin’s cold shell. No time seemed to pass from one room to the next room or however long he waited for the words.

Let me live forever there inside you please god,
the space inside him seemed to be saying, though he himself could not make the voice come out.

Let me eat.

Inside the house alone regardless the man moved what furniture was here now back to how it seemed that he remembered it had been, or would have been had it been in the house before. He wasn’t sure why he felt he knew that but it was in him. He tried to make himself at home. He used his spit to wax the wooden seats and sofa arms more to his color—the house had lost his smell. He spread his sneeze and urine around the room in handfuls, along long blank walls he could not find his way behind. The walls would shake and break before him but still be walls there. No room could keep him long enough to be. The air made lesions on his teeth and traced the spaces in him where he wanted silence. He drew a small round square in the center of the room with more of his blackened, leaking blood where he remembered once there’d been a rug, where on other older nights the father would have liked now to take a coffee and watch men on TV throw themselves at one another for the bliss of many thousands screaming, shaking air.

Another TV in his skull turned on and off, each screen when lighted showing scenes here previously described, though with the father holding all the roles of all the people there combined, each way when dark again he could not feel the air at all around him.

The dicing day began to lean. Through sudden holes there in the walls around him, the man heard what somewhere sounded like the sound inside him recorded as the mother’s moan, so many voices baked in one sound, but he could not really recognize the sound or what it was and when he moved through rooms to where he felt sure he’d heard it come from, it was not there. Windows would look out onto the house held there again, another house with people in it too blurred to turn toward him. Colors of a shaft or panel would split when he stare. The grade would spit up in his face and make his face spin, though once it calmed he felt thereafter also calmer, thicker, nice. He rubbed his glands and braced his eyes,
time catching time there where time had meant to never be.

The space in this house where there should have been the mother’s room had no door here on the hall, and yet the man stood in the space where it would have been not even knowing and touched the wall and looked at it and touched his face again and thought about the wall and what behind it and touched the wall again and waited and could sense something but did not know what or why or why this wall or why the other doors were disappeared and what he would have wished that he would find there waiting for him behind a door here if there were one and he could have it. He punched his muscles with his fists until both were bleeding and with his
blood on one of the small walls he traced another door. The door did not have any number, no crease around it, but still it was a door.

And he kissed the door and kissed the door and kissed the door there—felt it move around his face like milk.

The man came into the room and stood above the woman in the image of his wife. He did not recognize her—her skin had shifted texture, kind, and size. There were no walls there where there’d always been walls there around the bed where they had slept and breathed and spoken in the night unknowing. There was no time inside the way. The father watched the woman sleep and breathe without clear rhythm. There was something thrilling in her pose—the way her hair encaged around her head stung on the static of the small room’s excess electric charge—how even from here, through lengths of air and glass, he could smell the smell of him about her, the smell of her on him. She was shaking.

In something about the air between him and the body of the woman, the man could taste the grain each time he breathed, the rush of which itched all through his lungs and pelvis as if accelerating his body’s aging even in
spite of the slender or uncertain and translucent screens that in his memory the state said to have erected around each and every neat locale, and were claimed to have caught the brunt of the crap and cancers and what all else some god had dreamed to wear their lives—the state’s voice the only clear one through and through him, ordering his veins, though at the same time scored on all sides by the tone beyond it, shaking in his sight.

The man tried to move toward the woman and found that he could not—he banged his face hard on the instant. There was a field there struck between them, not all unlike the mirror glass or any window framing day, though at once thicker and thinner, wider and nearer, there all at once and not at all there,
black beyond black.
Behind the cell the colors of the woman in her layers layered through him and sunned into him and struck the sound out of his eyes. He could remember things they’d done and said together, where they’d been together, what they’d been together, though he could still not remember who she was. He had no phrase for it and did not want to.

The man kicked and licked the surface there between him and the woman. Why could he not just touch her. He wanted to touch her, not just in the way he’d always known, but in something else about him. The glass persisted. The room’s walls were even less there in the bedroom. He watched the liquid from her purr. The sound all in his ears from her and all surrounding shook colors from him too, turning his skin a glassy color to match where he could not move him holding hard. He knew the surface knew what it had to hide. He knew it knew he knew there was something there between them, something the man had had once, a view.

The man barked. He peeled a pretend sun down. He comprised his hand into a fist fumbling to keep the fingers flexed—there was something about them they did not want to bargain on—no curling center—he beat himself against the seed. He beat until something in him made the silence other, began to turn it. Beneath the flesh he could see where his cragging purple fodder pooled—purple not purple but sixty kind of color, and from each another wash of each—
god, the last time he’d cut himself it stunk so much—
his mouth came open all around him—his legs around him—his body made among itself and among her, grasping his breath in reins and clawing for cover—small as all the rings on all the fingers. His head against the silent space felt cooler, flatter, like a surface formed to fit into crevice bent to hold his shape
—yes
—he felt her body press against him—he felt the breathing—he felt a murmur in the earth—there was no tone then—
I could not count it
—fire barking through the fits of going on—with each day so short and nothing in it, it would not matter how quick the cooling came.

In a den of water well beneath them, an oil-thick sea far underground, the amalgamated film spools of the father began ejecting from a small hole in the sand. The film spooled out into the waters, amassing around the spigot in a cloud. The images in replicate kissed in wetness, melding—frames banging into frames—lacing through other older frames of other men and women already held there—
any person
—black hours slithered through a common liquid, finite years. Fish and bacteria nipped at the celluloid and chewed some of it out, relaying bits of frame into the waters, thrumming with them into foam and lather, subdividing the wet night. In this way the endless film spread along the long floor of ocean, rising up and out and on, while far above, there on the surface, the other men were growing mold, light in their eyes, moving in the same motion the mouth set in the man’s own head vibrating and peeling at the edges of the transparent.

The mother found that she was walking. What was all else had disappeared. She could not remember how long she’d been asleep or ever sleeping. She was not in the house as she remembered making, but a long wide surface like the outside, countless edgeless corridors and pockets white as paper, yet contained. The room’s comb wore a crusting curtain through which another nothing glowed. Her blood slushed on the air around her, built a lather on the floor. The mother could no longer think of what number had been her name for so long, or that she’d had one even then. Each time she tried to think at all she was just walking.

At the end of the hall the mother found the hall opened up into a room shaped like an orb. The room loomed huge and was not like any room come into before in any home. She could see a long way over, on the other side, a door that led into the room that had once been the room the hall led
into. She could see a lot of something shining, so much it turned her eyes another shade.

The blank before her held an old sound—the room so wide and pink, squirming with metal. There were little nodules on the ground, emitting more. The nodules tripped her, in slow motion. When she fell, their vibrations caught and kissed her face. Through the nodules she could see into the house as from above. Smoke wrote itself in code over the mud surrounding. Old windows purpled cogging in the light. Inside, she and the child and the father there inside one room, making their day there, all days engorged into one scrunch, so thickly built in gathered action they were not moving. There forms each sat together, holding still, frozen through all the motions there enacted, the air around their faces all a blur. She could not tell what they were doing and did not need to.

She stood again and again and walked and felt the room expand. With each step her organs juggled just a little, ridged and glowing, making room for something else. The tone vibrated through her body. The more she moved the louder that it grew. She kept her eyes ahead. She did not flinch among the weird spray as her blood wrote itself across the air.

BLINK

The mother’s blood formed endless stairs.

The stairs aimed downward, though this kind of downward at the same time was also up, and also was straight forward or backward on any given air, and also never moved at all.

The stairs seemed to never have an end.

The mother found that walking on the stairs felt no different than just breathing, doing nothing. She kept walking, falling forward, taking each stair among the sudden claps of massive light.

The mother felt certain, any stair now, she’d recognize a place she’d been—a room where she had lived once, somewhere to sit.

The knives and blades of every instant unremembered gleaming all around her cut her body, burned her eyes.

The cities waiting to be given.

BLINK

In the sheen of blood there somewhere far down, somewhere way below the house, below the ocean under these houses no one in this book had ever found—a black wet large as silent ideas, piled together in tiny other orbs lathered in bruising juice—the mother touched the first end of the film of all their years in all their minds—hers and the father’s and the child’s—each
of the many men—each of the inches of the house. She looked into the frames and saw her many versions, the fray of the earth set in the warped celluloid—she saw the slush of those gone bodies, their screech and stutter, speaking all through her with one word, a sound like the tone through all the days there at once, all the words inside them, vibrating her lips. She inhaled the word where she’d just thought it and felt it spin in her again and come back out, its digits blurring in her colors.

She fed the flat end of the film into her mouth. She could taste the emulsion and the shade of each frame going through her. She ate each frame slick and small, the film there threading in her blood and organs. She chewed until her jaw hurt, then she sucked. Then she was only ever drinking, then only breathing, being, then just nothing. The film showed through her skin. The space around began to lean and change its color. Her form stroked phrases on the air. It spoke in code and complex whining that made the skin along her forehead eject jewels she’d swallowed in the night—jewels from necklaces and rings she’d worn in other rooms for occasions and ceremonies, the endless people,
some of which she could recall.
The numbers all bled together. 1, 6, 15, 28, 45, 66, 91, 120, 153…
No.
The presence made the ceiling above her shape turn translucent, but with such strained eyes even inside her she could not see. She was getting stronger through and through in old milk, though not enough yet to crush the crystal screeching in her gums.