Three Hundred Million: A Novel (41 page)

FLOOD
:
The colors filled all through my head. They wrote over what I was trying to think with exactly what I’m saying. I no longer could control the way I was able to communicate inside myself with other layers. Or it had always been like that and I was just now allowed to know it, feel it. The smoke curled down into my pores; it pressed back at where the smoke of the repetition again was trying to push new smoke to cover up the old. Between the two of them the world was fuzzing into several of itself at the same time, one of each of me inside them
.
The light was growing wider than the tape was. I could feel the world beyond the tape again caving in, pressing at the presence of me in it, our final eye. Just as I could not escape death as an idea by hoping only to live on in my private memory alone, what slaved beyond death remained constant in us all, and could not be granted without the false originalities of massacre and aspiration having been at last truly compressed beyond the idea of any person: image or language
, never
or
now.

All at once then there just above me I felt something pressing dry against my mind
.

Where on the air the houses ended and still between the sky there was a surface
.

Concealed in along the air. It was like smoke but without smoking. Heavy and rising
.

It was held between the perimeters of the video where the frames of repetition gathered
.

It was as if the tape itself were burning from outside it. Its continuity creamed to glue
.

I could feel the burning also in me spreading. Our pixels curling. All air devoured
.

My life divided every thought. Each thought broke open as it uttered, into nothing
.

Light was upon me. It wound around me. It was settled on the air. It had been wanting
.

It had always been this way. Crushed between the homes. Our air all latticed, closed
.

I could not understand how I’d never seen this. All the fields speaking and reflective
.

It was something wider than a house. It had rooms but did not have walls or windows
.

It was just before me there and far ahead. I knew the tape did not mean for me to see it
.

The tape had built the days to hold me out. It knew I counted time, so it could hold me
.

I had always been in here, I remembered. What I remembered of before was just the tape
.

The world and the wife and the dead and all else were not mine. The tape was not mine
.

The light refracted in my mind. It beat the shit out of my seeing, thinking, needing. Who
.

All around me. All of ever. I’d had to come through everything I knew to just now see
.

I knew the air there of what the shape was held the thing I’d always been and wanted
.

Never found. Something written underneath all faces. All my faces, shook beyond sleep
.

The shape knew me better than I knew me. And couldn’t feel that. Burning and eating
.

It wasn’t even there. It was a silence. When I tried to speak its name, I just blew breath
.

Our lives had always been just out of frame. Just far enough removed to never notice
.

Like crystal pushed against an eye. Needing it even more knowing you could never
.

Tape in my teeth, tape in my lungs. Obliterating by simply being. And I grew wicked
.

And you grew old. Between the walls the world had birthed to separate us. Slaving
.

The shape hilarious and silent. Where when I thought my way toward it, it disappeared
.

Where the longer I looked upon the shape and felt it, the more it was only everywhere
.

The click of the eye of the snap of the trick of the wet dream beneath the skin of god
.

FLOOD
:
I could no longer think or move. The tape kept interrupting. Or I was interrupting. Or where I was thinking and moving now was different than it had been the way I understood it before. Like how soil is always soil, but never the same elements ruined into it. The film was pressing down. It knew I knew. Our silent gap no longer fit the frame of only now. It wanted all the rest of every era
.

The translucent space before me gleamed. I don’t know how I hadn’t seen it like this before now. Always now, always. The more I saw the shape, the more the shape seemed like just another house. Fucking houses. Illicit nowhere. It looked like the black house stuffed up with the smoke where I’d begun but wider than that, and older than that. When I looked at it directly, the shade would change, as if it could feel me wanting it, and knowing in my wanting that to be entered would cause its end. Every angle was another face to feel, both within my skin and pressed against it.

The space held seated somehow propped between the whole space of earth and sun. It came with windows made of people’s sleeping, every person. It had reinforced itself in the absence of all vision. There was no door at all, no locks, not even walls or surfaces. The main face of the structure, once you could see it for a second before it shifted, was embedded on the rip of the air of the tape itself: the blank that held the tape together by showing nothing in recording where there’d been nothing ever to show. It wore the index of space forever invaded by the eras of people simply acting out their lives: asking, laughing, saying, eating, living, being, working, sleeping, knowing, kissing, thinking, rushing, pissing, singing, making, having, going.

Gone. The house was not ours. It had been always. I could tell it had been waiting for someone to touch it once when it was young, and had grown lazy in its waiting. It had so many names: the House of God, the House of Demeaned Cities, the House of No Art We Could Remember, the House of America Without America, the House of Rape Fantasy and Weddings, of the Being of the Been, the House of Sod. If there was anywhere inside the tape where anyone like me might hide in fear, it was here. If nothing else it was the end of anything, the actual end of what the tape could be, the tape beyond my time and here containing everything I wanted, totally held inside which I might be able to stop the repetition and hold longer to the shape of belief I felt some days floating just underneath my face. It wanted me to have it and to know it and to never leave it there again, while also not having to feel me or become me. A shapelessness screwed beyond the idea of even shape.

If I could reach the end-space of the tape’s helm, I felt, seeing the nothing where the edges of the space of tape itself began, I could maybe slither out; I could rise beyond my age into the rip of what was never promised but always had held me up.

And yet the shape would not stay still. The very nature of it crested between levels of its own image. Like insects printed in the pixels of the landscape. As I moved, it moved among me. It was inside me and had been and knew what I would do before I did it. Some seconds it would just be instances of sky, or would be a fuzz of grain around some nodule too far off inside the recording to decipher. Regardless, I could hear it humming, in the absence. It was giving heat off. The only heat remaining.

I wanted the space the most when I couldn’t see it. I went even when I wasn’t going, and couldn’t stop. For miles along the recording of the earth my body bled. The blood was lines I had no choice but to be. I took the lines and walked as quickly as I could manage with my icon forced through the repeating surface. Static was caking at my chest. Friction in variation on the norm of what the body mostly did upon the tape would be punished in the tape’s spool, flaking cells between us off from skin and celluloid alike, as if both accelerating rapidly in age. Any furor from the friction with the time code made me nauseated, my remembered flesh wanting out onto the recorded flesh even more the more the tape wanted me to slow.

I would not slow. I had this itch in my threads. The taped air of the homes fumbled against me, forming white walls in my vision where the houses believed they ended and another house was, turning instead in rows to rows of houses with fences higher than many of me stacked up foot to head. I crawled down shafts through air vents in the places and laughing at the color of the grain of the metal trying to mirror-trick me back to some beginning, and I laughed at me trying to trick me, trying to be me backwards, trying to force me back into the smoke that soon would pour out of my mouth. I went on forever haunted in the furor of the trembling of the houses here in error every second I wasn’t totally erased, foregone forever from this endless land of murder fainting claustrophobia fevers death-faced shitty-feelings distemper sweat-pits vertigo, and far beyond, altogether acted out in all the wrong poses of the era and pauses in the absence of the presence of whatever held us in the world as it had been and was no longer.

And so something in me continued going, something not even me but what I felt. Where my cords would bundle and build heavy unto sleep to disrupt the ease of anything just pleasant, I would rise and I would rise and not even wishing to rise I would do it and I would be popping and so here I was again curled in these unending fields. Here I am in fission in the tape wanting its ejection, sweating seasons long beyond the end of weather, as if somewhere there is a section of a tape hid in the tape awaiting my witness, wanting to be returned to where it belongs along the cord of my own eye, or whatever could be in there, underneath that, whatever could be.

I began again again. The houses where I had been had learned by light to remove their markings and so were older but I still could not tell them from the rest and still knew I had to get on with it regardless because there are only so many sentences one might read in any life. The sun was ratcheting my back in a loop again like a mirror to the hallway underneath the ground where through the earth of film earth the bells began to ring. They were coming from the mush between the houses, which with the sound coagulated. It strung around the holes between them and made the air weird so I could not see where to go, could no longer make out any angle of the edge beyond, though with my hands vibrating before me I could still sense what was up and what was down, and behind me I could hear the smoke of where I’d been before waiting to take me, to become me, drown me out.

Inside the font of movement still regardless, patches then began to gather on the system of the air before me where I waddled, hands out, collecting between my fingers and in my curvature of tape. If I was to be free again, the tape wanted all the others I’d buried in me to keep forever, to feed and feed on, even if there was no one left to watch. Who had been before and what before those and where before I’d come the tape would crush out from my blood and use to tint itself with inimitable color, eyes and lips and mouths and cheeks made into more and more land; and from those carried in me, the tape could take part in what they’d wished to do thereafter, when and how, what inches I had pulled out of them to live on. We had all already lived our lights out; every word was already never ours.

This time as the tape clicked back to start again I felt it grinding at its code. Inside the video I was thrown forward; I could not hear me, no matter in what way you called. I kept waiting for the voice I’d heard beyond me to return, to give me guidance, or at least to grind me deeper in against it so far I could feel or want to feel the tape against me any longer, but I could no longer hear it. Rather, I couldn’t hear anything but it. It was in the fiber of the grain that made the ground go on beneath me, crushing to me, becoming impossible to distinguish from any pixel or glitch. It was in the soundtrack of the wind and sun and my own motion. It ran all through every gap and was the gaps. It spread the light around my mind. It carried everything about me regardless of whether I wanted to believe it could or couldn’t.

Where the glitches on the air around me hung and buzzed, I felt holes open in me too
.

Holes behind my face, between my teeth and in my tongue and backbone. Zero planets
.

In me, I found me waking. How old I had been. How old was I becoming in the becoming
.

Scars all over my flesh. I wore every camera in my stomach. I had the skin of a woman
.