Three Hundred Million: A Novel (49 page)

I could hear several hundred hands surrounding in each instant and more so then with every knowing. Sand rolled limbs around my face’s blank—sand in no color I’d imagined, like the veils of smoke I slowly remembered from before, from worlds of tape not like this present moment, but no less false. The sand was inside me. The smoke was inside us mirrored. The air thugged thick, ticking no dream’s remainder away. There was nothing burning down. No matter where I went in any blackness I could not find the hallway to the integral rooms of what had felt like my own life in this world. The pillows of the darkness made each room each time I saw them seem to stretch more and more toward forever. Each time I thought or said a word aloud or tried to inhale, the caving in me emerged more. It was grinding in me. It was always.

I crawled along the floor, whatever a floor was. Inside the rising volume of my mind I slapped on hands and knees among the slick of surfaces between the earth and every body the air had made to keep us framed in; the sand beneath it swishing, as if being sucked into a hole, as if underneath the floor the only thing keeping the rest of the world from sucking in around me and you and everybody with it into some screaming hole focused from all the endless in what had been. My clothes seemed searing, knitting tighter, like every surface of my home, which in its latest alterations had become so close against me there was nearly nowhere left to move. I felt the walls where everything was not, no matter what I wanted. It was easier then to move without thinking where to go, though still the choking and croaking of my body, the unbelievable breadth of everything else. The shapeless sound coming from my mouth was feeding right back up into my nostrils, feeding my face full, covering over every memory again with the new deformation of what hours did, overwriting every idea of itself, every inch of anyone but me in me.

In me, then, the house could grow no smaller. I found it fit exactly with my mind. I’d become surrounded wholly by the same shade, the color of no color, all directions.

The color opened.

It was an eye.

Any eye.

The white of the light of the eye inside it was brighter than the house had ever been, wider than sky was, than my memory. Even thin as the film over the eye’s white seemed to be from far away, it held more edges than I could count; it held a past that hadn’t happened yet; it had always been in the house before there was a house; it gave the room around me its dimension; it had appeared in every age; it had observed every action; the eye of anything but now, of anyone but no one.

Against the color of the eye I could not see the walls or what beside them; I could not remember how I’d made way here through any other sort of being, outside the way I’d always come before to every present instant always again; though on the air there was the itch of something older bloating; colors like ions; sound like glass filling the air. There was no reason this hour should have been any different than all the other years of any life, and yet here the eye was, all surrounding.

Up close the eye no longer seemed to have a shape; it held together like a corpse, organs made of letters made of blank space of dots and lines feeding a warping shape like ours, which the longer I looked into blurred inside the light unto a gray mass like a wall. I stared into the eye and felt it humming without language; all words now no longer language. I closed my own eyes and saw the wall there too and looked again, a mirror image in my body made of bodies; then I was there inside the eye’s own head; I was seeing at the wall inside me as if everything I wasn’t was at the far side of the wall inside the light again made clear.

There was no shift; I found inside my seeing how I could scroll along the light’s face with the motion of my hand; the eye inside me held there against itself slithering downward to reveal itself again inside the extant eye made hidden on space forced in the space as in the oceans of our blood consumed, evaporated, nowhere; the light of all our faces.

I let the light come on in ruptured flues; it swam sick past my face like meat to meat, light pouring through where words were not, straining in the light to scan the flattened fiber of the vein of mottled language engorged and disappearing. Time passed and passed and nothing had happened; nothing had not happened; I could no longer remember how I was different than anything else, how anything else could not become me; the space around us held on, our blubber wooing like an ocean in a shell; my body not my body sticking at the frame of the page of the light folding our absent organism to its skin in rising heat and burning not of fire but of where the flesh of all of us each instant shrunk and expanded both at once, under equal age and iteration, all ongoing, and the syntax burst between; each thought risen as a prison in our teeth and lungs and slapped ass screeching; eyes spinning locked in all our lids; speech mixing itself against itself to change itself and call itself the word inside the word against the word while outside itself the sand went on regardless, and each word as it came through us fell back out the other side, clung at old holes in landscapes, hopes unwinding.

I could no longer not quite think, or remember; the shapes of what was once clawed where my sound had never made a sound; feeding faster full of past thoughts, where every word a thought was made of wore a murder of its own; each death a death of all things and so nothing; there in the light the bread of time; the speech of all speech whaling in us where far along the shafts of script in my own self I reached a drop, something sticking in the wash of blood between living and not living, looking there into the white along the current seeing faster until the sound inside the eye were these words, the run of light forming this sentence becoming typed across the screen of the eye of all our eyes no longer seeing, appearing newly every moment like something carried in my skin, each inch another name for silence.

Now I could not remember what I’d done. I could not remember that I did not remember where I’d been forever or what the bodies had become among the night where knives were every understanding. I was all hours at the same time in every current instant of our lives arrived. I was in the homes beyond the idea of having lived. I was eating dinner or touching paper or swimming under sun or taking a child toward a machine to learn to read again a new way or was teaching myself another language to say what to someone else or I was at a desk staring where light was or I had hid again my eyes. It was all of any of us at once that made any of us nowhere else, held in the motion of any aspiration.

I thought to touch my face then but I did not. I felt something in me at last growing eons older in one instant, like any instant, and from the light I looked away. I stood there for some time then feeling nothing; I stood there waiting in the white unfurling hot and hard around all shape without intention or utterance demarcating. Some other of me in me tried to turn around and go back the way I’d come inside the world to now but when it turned around there were again the walls; where the world as I’d never understood it had moved again to fill the space behind me, so that where I tried to move on from what I was or felt again there was nothing but more of me, the erased eras in me going slump in spindles and pressing at where my nape and back and skull were just more flesh waiting to be smothered.

The world was what had lived. Within each inch there were colors; the colors each pixel held a sea; buried in the sea another kind of time under old blue lard of reckless dreaming; in each world, people wide awake, spreading flesh as they went aging around the holes of them that did not age or bloat. Overhead in every instance of right now the sky was caving; a second sky beneath that was more the way I’d once remembered the one we watched as ours, its dimensions bulging in soft places, puckered, growing in against itself, all the icons of every era swelling in against me with the world at once compressing into the sound of every recorded life. It was all of us and always had been, just like this. The eye saw.

Held in the eye, I felt us speak.

It was the same voice I’d heard traced through my whole life up to this point, though where before that voice had always been only me, now it was unending and breathless.

I couldn’t hear what the voice was saying through its layers, though I could feel it in my fiber.

The words weren’t words, but landscapes, mounds. I was looking up and I was up there and I was looking far down into our mud, and I was in the mud and all directions, and when I looked again above us I saw

countless suns

And beneath the suns I saw

the soft ground rising

I saw it piling all around, the house and the voice and my mind becoming comprised in the husks of anyone’s mortal remains, the memory of the person once carried in those husks, the mottled mass of presences inert and passed on pressed together full, waiting impossibly for every hour ever to return into the flesh of all the rest of us at once wherever with our common images split down the center writhing.

And I saw the sand again around the old world becoming buried in the sand of what my world had become

the sand of all without horizon

And as we spoke I saw the sand again falling away

And I saw

all negations

And I saw

agelessnesses

I saw

no walls forever in our love

And I did not need to understand.

In us, the shape of any sky was rubbing upward, sucking in nothing. The ground erupting antigravity and light. The light louder than it was actually. Planets were everywhere: dissolving, without surface.

Nothing had ever happened.

And from the sprawl I saw

the light blown open

I saw

no color rising underneath us

in time dividing

tunnels to nothing

Way out along the long horizon from where any form had been, the face of day split wide.

Our eyes were changing.

The eyes in mounds of eyes without pupil, lens, or image.

And I saw

no beginning & no end

And I saw

nowhere

I could not see more than in long fits and whorls, because of what had happened to the light.

I did not want to see, but what I didn’t want was as much me as what I had been.

I had no skin. I had no organs.

Each instant wore through all our lives.

The walls around the words we could not remember rose beyond us.

Light fell into time fell into flesh fell into speech; word fell into syllable fell into letter;
z
fell into
y
fell into
b
fell into
a
; shape fell into line fell into dot fell into gram; kilometer fell into meter fell into millimeter fell into volume; home fell into house fell into den fell into bed fell into frame; film fell into picture fell into pixel fell into color; body fell into sternum fell into ribcage full into bone; skull fell into brain fell into memory fell into where; 1 fell into 0; you fell into me fell into us fell into we fell into I; now fell into now.

Now was the color of all our skin and sins and fingers. Of water and oxygen elapsed. Every film at last erased, all books cured of their language, all ideas of their ego.

There was no longer any other voice. They were all my voices. Sound and light unfolding in the skin of nothing. Not a present moment as much as a pyre on which the world turned, all the sand not sand but breadth combining in reverse, where from out of the land the smoke of the dead of the land each node of creation ate back onto every inch it’d never been and always could have.

And in the thrall of all, I closed my eyes again where I no longer could see.

And I saw

Against the flood of where the eye was, I turned to face in total silence what the world had left behind a final time. Through white so bright it crushed itself by simply being, I saw where every inch of now touched every color grinding in the ground broken and blown apart. Where as I turned the air around me smiled and nodded and said the words I’d said already back into me again in a language without nature, and as I turned back, nothing held. No kind of sight but what the light was.