Three Hundred Million: A Novel (35 page)

And yet the ground did not open up. The sky remained in place and kept its color to itself. No wear would change the world around me any less than how time in my human body had eaten into me without me knowing. When sometime likely soon the tape no longer was able to turn its gears over and again repeating, it would feel exactly like going forward did. What I carried in my blood would always remain forever only mine, all connection to any possible space beyond the daily reality of being as black and inaccessible as an eye seeing itself. Every iteration of the repetition would begin to seem more and more the way it had always been forever until I couldn’t tell the difference between one day and the rest. Knowing I wouldn’t know already hurt more than never having had. Death here would feel just the same as living.

Can I tell you about our life together.

Please don’t.

It will feel good for you to hear it.

I won’t remember.

It will feel good for you to hear, even if you don’t remember. You can remember it while I’m saying it. You can believe me.

I can’t. It won’t.

You were my husband.

No.

You loved me and I loved you.

I was never married. I lived alone.

We lived inside a house together and we tried. We both had lives of long hours apart. We did anyway everything we could. You went and wore a uniform and carried a weapon and talked to people in the streets and did as you were told and hoped if you worked hard enough as a person you could move beyond that point to something that made you feel less fucked each day a little less and were happy in between. I tried hard too and had different jobs I hated even more than you hated yours and at night when I came home you were often still working and I would try to stay up so I could see you when you came in but usually by the time you did come you were so tired you just lay down and passed or I was already asleep. We both ate out of boxes. I remember when we shared meals. That was great. That was enough.

You’re not a person. I’m not a person. Not anymore. Look at this place.

Why does it matter what a place is.

Because I can’t see anything else.

People died because they did. Because they had to. You’re only alive as anybody else. You are only on the far side of any mirror.

You are not there.

You hear me.

No I don’t. I can’t. The tape’s about to end. Then I’ll just have to start over.

How can you know the tape’s about to end if you can’t remember anything.

I feel it melting in my center, its ending and beginning.

That is me. You were my husband and I loved you. This is only one part of me among the many ways that I have been and am and will be, but it is still true. It is true and has been always.

Goodbye.

The face of the sky refused to change. Even in the lash of the breadth of the dead in my memory, the colors of the world wouldn’t let me be released. In every layer of the faces of the rooms, the smoke waited to encamp my mind and repeat its time over and again even in the absence of any decay. The ground made not of bones and flesh turned back to loam but forever video.

I could already feel me not remembering to remember the next self-interrupting thing I thought and wanted to know I knew. I could already not quite be anything I was already.

FLOOD
:
I don’t know what else to do. Inside the tape I hear me saying these things out loud to the voice and I can’t stop it, though I know it isn’t real. Or, I know I feel inside me that it isn’t, and I can believe it, can feel it coursing through the image of me, but I can’t stop the slow estrangement of what I know and what I want. There are things a person turns to, to believe in, so that he can find a way even to stand up. In this way I could almost not fault anyone for anything they’ve ever done or wished upon a person, though I don’t think I believe that. I think the voice is many people, shifting and aping. All the people I had known. All the people I had not known and never would know but still lived side by side with. All of us who had tried inside the world to live. All after something there among us, beyond cognition. Sometimes it seems as if we’re all together sleeping in a single long white room, all breathing in the same air back and forth into each other and thereby seeding what goes on inside the brain with threads and bits of nowhere squeezed from feeling and the strains of repetition on the body of those feelings being moved through over and over, mushing the colors we have harbored among one another into new colors shifting like cities underneath the blanket of the night. Sometimes I try inside my body to force me awake from that state, there beside you, and rise and walk among us, waking no one up, until I find the body of my wife among the many and lie down again beside her, wrap my torso in her arms, moving in the way only I know how to fit within her, and in this position, inside the white room, speaking no word at all, go back to sleep. I am not sure what the machine is that runs this tape or what the tape is or who puts the words into my other mouth, but I think it’s something shapeless like that, some kind of feeling, something in me, in us all. It seems like if I could name it now or ever it would change. Maybe that is all that we have left
.

What do you think I’m saying to you this whole time. I am here. I can’t see you but I believe it and I am waiting for you to come.

How did you hear me? I was thinking.

I can always hear you.

This is insane.

Anybody. Every hour.

I said that I am trying.

I don’t know.

Yes, you do. You do and have and will have. You are here held inside what you are and were and see. You are in the skin around me, all around me. This is not me speaking. This is not a tape any more than any other day was always.

If it’s not a tape why does it all just keep repeating.

What didn’t always ever? In everything is every thing. Whether you are alive or not, or want to be or not, there you are. The world can be founded in the mind of any person, and it is the world, over and over, and it is real. The end of America is not the end of America.

God would you please shut the fuck up about America.

Yes I will.

Every time it begins there is the smoke and zero sound. I go into it because I have to
.

The smoke comes out of me until there is no smoke left and then I am shining insanely
.

It is the same light every time, or if it changes I can’t tell the difference, or is it both
.

The light is not reflective. And yet the first thing I always want to do is see myself
.

To verify how I am the same, but older. I am me in here. There is no surface that reflects
.

I mean no matter what I look into inside the light or beyond it, no confirming image
.

All the houses here are painted black. Their walls contain no windows. The grass is high
.

The sky is black also for the most part, though on seeming days it might turn gold
.

Between the lobes of black on black the colors have no place between to live but ripped
.

The color of my hair and skin: I can no longer tell. I am just in it. I walk and wait to die
.

I never die, I just start over. And every time, even the same, it feels much worse
.

Like I wouldn’t even know if I exploded or if I had no eyes. Or if there were someone
.

Some hours, diamonds light the way. They appear in the darkness overhead and bake
.

If they aren’t diamonds, I don’t know what they are. They refuse to take my language
.

Between the houses sometimes briefly steaming cakes of wet surface appear and hiss
.

The substance aches when stepped on. It has blood. It is blood. It is still bleeding
.

I want to give it mine. When I cut my hand the blood comes but then the tape starts over
.

Fuck. And so I want to go further, right. I have to. I have to go further. There is more
.

Even if there is not a reason to live inside a film one must imagine there must be, living
.

If not I must pretend. If I can’t pretend I have to anyway, as this dying is not death
.

I have to go on in hope, like life was, searching for answers I know will never come
.

And so on between the houses to the next house which for the most part is the same
.

But in the house there will be different relics of the people who had been there wanting
.

I have to assume they died. But what I’m looking for is someone not dead or like me
.

What am I. What I find instead is more of bedrooms and rooms and places and food
.

I find sometimes lengths of long hair left curled on the rug or on the objects like a brush
.

Or like the air. There is a breeze and a kind of heaving, which means it needs me
.

So, see then, yes, you are needed. See that. What you said.

I didn’t mean it. This isn’t even me speaking.

Who then.

I don’t know. I cannot stop it. I try not to talk and I still talk.

What if I told you that everything that you’ve seen happen has not happened? That you are spinning. The world all waiting in the day. What if I told you that you have been staring into the same mirror in a small room in the house that you grew up in for so long now you can no longer see your face?

I’ve never seen my face anyway. It’s always just beyond me. Reflections and photographs are masks.

What if I told you I was Gretch Gravey? That I was you and you were me. That everyone I killed was by your hands as I had moved inside you, or just the opposite: you through me. That Gretch Gravey was not a person but a feeling. What if I told you that through all the days of your life, no matter what you felt that you were doing in them then, you were only standing in the dark before a mirror? What if I told you you’re an idea, and what all you’ve felt or said has happened was my mind, that all the heads and all the bodies of all the people ever sleep inside you, feed around you, color the light behind your eyes? What if I told you this too was a recording: what I’m saying, all the colors, all the sound, all your memories and histories and mine and all of everybody’s ever, every inch of where even held beyond the tape you slave on, tapes in tapes in tapes, with no perimeter, no dimension, no rest coming for all era? What would you do then? Who would we be then?

If you told me that I would not believe you. I have lived this. What is said is what was done.

What if I told you you are dead then? That what you feel right now is what it feels like to be dead, and that all this waiting for the coming death that ends the body you believe in will begin another life again? That no matter how many times you reach the ending the space goes on? Not an afterlife or many lives appending, but one long and white unending thrall, against which when you pause inside the going you pick up somewhere else. That eventually you will see through all the eyes there have ever been. A mass of eyes around a silent center.

Why can’t the end just be the end.

A center another cell in another form of world.