Three Hundred Million: A Novel (36 page)

I am still in here.

Millions and millions of white halls. Three hundred million is just a number, each death a color, each house a hole into the eye, each body a condition cracked in the edges of a longer length of organ on a gold field undulating in no sound.

I believe when I am dead it will be black.

Close your eyes and look at what that black does. It wraps around you.

It needs no skin.

All I want now is silence.

Then I’ll be silent.

Thank you.

I began to force myself to enter every house as I came to it. I could no longer stand the lurking presence of all possible space I felt waiting in every window. The shaking still came on after me, but I moved on through the shaking and each time came out the other side still full myself. All I had to do was not stop and let the shaking overcome me, just keep going, and not consider what or who might appear. I simply walked into wherever, regardless of what seemed open to my presence or not. The doors would do their job without a key or any sound, and behind them the tape continued, now revealing new kinds of space I hadn’t felt.

The walls inside the homes felt different from the walls of the world outside. It wasn’t necessarily a smell or sound or texture, but the feeling of what had transpired over time in the presence behind closed doors, worked in the weave of the video. It was like another film beneath the film’s face, something the world I knew had been copied over onto. I hadn’t escaped the tape as I understood it, but I had found within it at least something unlike the shape of its unwinding, something previously undefined from my perspective.

In each house I made sure to enter every room. Every possible next place resolved itself as I touched through it. I moved behind the drapes and through the closets. Stairs couldn’t stop me, aiming up or down. I heard the hum of the machines the house had lived with, though if they weren’t already on they wouldn’t turn on. Anything could do only what its extant reality allowed it. Many rooms were still lighted by something I could not tell what.

Anyone had lived once in these homes. In rooms alone I lay in beds where other people presumably had slept and fucked for years, unless all of this was just a set decorated to divide me. This hidden air surely wasn’t mine. The house would get really cold for certain minutes when I went into a particular area with my hands out in the dark looking for something firmer than air to hold onto. I was looking for something else, not even really people. I could not tell what I was looking for beyond the shape of myself, in the same way I could not remember what I did not remember though simply by knowing I was looking meant there was something to be found, and this provided me the silence of ongoing responsibility in the face of what could have otherwise been an overwhelming hell.

FLOOD
:
I could not remember that I’d already done this. Over and over. Every possible action I could make here had already been performed long before me just by the fact of being. The strings of me vibrated like an instrument on fire coming through any door where anyone I hadn’t been had lived their life in rooms alone. When I closed my eyes I saw everything the same, there playing also on the inside of my head, beyond all vision
.

Into the night of homes I walked in waver. The shape of the homes forced me to feel my shape within them while I shook them down for what they pretended not to be. Along long panels in the house I would rub my face or hands or chest to feel what sound the house hid when I could not find what I felt I’d been meant to. Like people shuddering in the eaves in fear of what had passed and what was passing. Or like a passage that would walk me back into my life. In the walls I found the eggs of rats and spiders; I found the color of night packed in long strands of oozing black slick that had aggregated where we’d breathed together while we could. The unseen held the world together. In some homes I’d find jewelry that I’d wear and make believe had always been mine. I could feel where the wedding rings were missing their intended fingers, necklaces missing necks. I wore them anyway. I sucked the taste out of them. I’d put on so much gold I seemed to burn the air around me. The clothes here also itched, alive enough outside the ongoing light of outside that when I rubbed my face into their fiber or in desperation put them on I could hear them speaking in my body as if my body were their body. They would beg me to lie down and never move now. They would ask me to put my arms around them where they weren’t. In all the voices were the same voice, the same long warmth of nothing stretching where it wished to believe itself again as something compatible with what I might be, heavier than any sunlight or understanding.

The weight still wasn’t enough to push me underneath the ground. It would not bring me royalty from nowhere, and yet all I had to do was say it had. I was the ruler of this era and it felt ageless. Everything remained for me to make of it what I could. Overhead coming back outside between the houses again into light, unlike what crept away, the sun bit at my ass through all its black with laughing. It screeched like children being smothered and tried to kick the color from my eyes, into the flat of lesser black the houses harbored. The sky wanted everything we’d been keeping from it always in what seemed the safest places and yet were always just rooms. I waited, laughed back, told it to take me over. I shouted words of the new language I was making in the space between the tapes at no one there and felt them shatter. I believed in nothing. Didn’t I? Wasn’t everything I did exactly as I said? The houses bulged with nothing. No matter what I believed each time I found my thoughts still there inside me when the tape began again, it felt hard to recall how I’d come to that, as any prior logic in my head from prior iterations seemed like mazes I’d took the name of and called mine, having again found my way to nowhere, every minute the most now. Anything that held up was just more of the nature of how I was meant to understand it.

FLOOD
:
Among the tape all things feel the same, one thread and then another, each as it begins just full of hope, though when I am here again only in my mind with sound and can think again I realize it’s because the shrieking sound inside my recorded body is so high and shrill there that it’s beyond my human register. It just feels like being ripped apart at a high speed, over and over, and then resealing, inside the baking furor of the light, then ripped again, each time so quickly I can’t tell that anything has happened besides the fact that inside the silence here I am
.

Yeah.

Yeah what.

I don’t know. I don’t know what I’m saying. Sometimes I am only ever talking to myself, which feels better than talking to someone who isn’t really there.

Sometimes it’s nice to make the talking to myself seem like someone else, even when they don’t answer, or when they use the voice of someone I do not remember to try to make me feel some pain or edge of itch inside me.

I don’t need to have someone speaking to me to know that I am somewhere else and looking for any evidence of exactly what doesn’t exist.

I don’t need it.

Please.

I don’t, really. I don’t miss anyone.

I must maintain rigor in the nothing.

I found nobody in the name. I called the words of those I felt written in my insides, the residues, though I did not remember them beyond the clasp of something dry around my lungs or jutting in my abdomen. The names fell out between my teeth onto the floors. They rasped and clung against the dry grind of the shitty carpets or the wood grain. They fizzled, issued smoke. The smoke would hang around my head for minutes after, sometimes longer, reminding me the end was coming soon, and through the end so the beginning. I could inhale it and feel fucked. Some awful squealing in my sacs permeated every instant I found nothing, no reflection, no one to put my word in, no eyes or hands.

Even my flesh would not work with me. I’d masturbate and issue a gallon of black stones. Each stone leaving made me want it back inside me: what could I build with this, what walls to keep every other idea out. Instead, the stones sunk into the earth and hissed and burned there without purpose. And that was fine, too. The skitter of the cells about me burst upon the air and made me shortly warmer and less destructive while also contributing to the curvature of the landscape, even if, having absorbed my children, its surface appeared the same. Coming back, too, some time later, in some future iteration of the tape, I would find the house grown over with a moss or fine-hued silt of aggravated sand where I had touched it, changed its future,
which meant then that the tape was not my god
, I thought, which meant then that
if this is a tape I am awake in, there must be somewhere else a full machine that plays the tape; if there is a machine that plays the tape, there should be a hand that puts the tape in and presses play; there must be a room around this room the image enters, there must be eyes
. Even if from here I could never move between the tape inside the machine to the world around it, even if the hidden spaces here were just as open to all else as anyplace beyond, there must still be a way to speak into the head attached to the eyes, to the brain.
Communication with the presence beyond my reality could then affect the shape of the reality itself, which then might change the nature of the relation of the presence to the tape, and what between them; might even make the space between them disappear
.

I hated each of these thoughts as I had it, a blue foam burning in my eyelids, though once they’d begun they would not stop shaking in my brain until they broke. For long periods then thereafter in meat of wandering and peeping my vision would vibrate just slightly for what seemed days. Clusters of color where before there’d been the clear-glass plate of space at which point my eyes ended and the world began, each shift of hue causing the earth itself to seem that much nearer to my head, and coming closer each time the vibration made me close my eyes and touch the ground to keep from barfing and rub my face in dirt and wish for the beginning to begin again already, to end the colors from my head and make them black again like all the houses and the sky behind the helmet of the world. Every instant like this was pure panic, glossed in the solitude of absolute misunderstanding, the foundation of the world.

In some modes the earth between blinks would get so close up to my face that I would move forward even by standing still; my flesh would flood beyond my head; even sometimes also I would end up going backwards, my eyes behind me, and find, no matter how hard I pressed to stay exactly where I was, I’d feel the rest of my body briefly leaking back into who I’d always been before now: back to stand in the first room of the first black house’s whitest center, standing, with someone’s blood all on my hands: the blood of everyone at once, one final body, who in the world outside the frame of tape I knew I’d killed, because we all had, as a fact of being, breathing; the me there in the body of the man I knew I’d been when I put my hands around the skin of the murdered people, regardless of whose hands they really were; the me of me in anyone, all history.

Sometimes, in those clearest moments splitting, by no longer blinking I could see my head leave my head; I could find me seated in a building on a cot with my hair full of the black again and my arms measured with tattoos and the sound of other people talking and making on the far side of the walls, despite how from where I sat I could find no door or exit, no return even in remembrance to the people in their temporary hour all alive; faces alive again beside me, and me part of it, fabric or fantasy regardless, no longer dead, or if dead, all of us and not just not me; I heard the flashbulbs; heard a woman; liquid squirting from my pores; I would feel on my skin the light of the white inside the tape through which I had inhabited my body, the room filled up with wet in which I’d killed the image of the mother, father, and the child; then just as quickly again the smoke would rise up all around, engorged and pressed against me, shifting the memory of how or when, and still inside me still no matter how, my skull would make me blink again and the smoke would part and I would be inside the tape again and I could no longer feel any part about me beyond this land, the blood upon my hands again having turned translucent or sunk into my veins to join the rest; and then again the tape would end; the tape would stop and rewind and I’d be right there beginning in the same place where it’d ended, with nothing left but me there in my head. Then I would begin again at the beginning, if with another hole inside me, if with the pressure of the presence of the same day ready now to take me in its code.

FLOOD
:
Over anything I felt I understood, the speech I could not stop laced through me over and rewound, beating my brain apart and into blackness, flatness. Any revelation was just wallpaper, behind which, no wall, behind which
.