Three Hundred Million: A Novel (50 page)

I could no longer tell any difference between the world and what I knew. Between myself and you or anybody. Between the eye and our skin and what sky. The lack of color matched our worship without surface. No way back and no way out of nowhere being dreamed. No belief but in every faith we hadn’t lived and held within us, between anyone and zero.

I closed my eyes a final time. Inside my head the dead within me began glowing; they grew inside me with great force, dressed in the long white hair of no one, and in the eyes behind my sight I felt the glowing filling up itself like future hearses. I felt the eyes close inside the eyes again, the dark among them erupting definition.

The light was screaming between voices, mine and no one’s. Any inch of where we’d been appeared not glown by glow, but cut into the grade of the sand of all of our remainder melting into the face of what remained.

The air where we were born filled in unwinding over fields of white on white, while underneath, the rimmed earth sung thick with the old poltergeists of our eternal seething seed.

Time strewed lengthwise and widewise in batter-buried color of no reflection laid wide open on the land; all years coagulated in spite of sense, passed hours upon hours beating the surface of the earth with hellish cells that felt like homes where all the unborn men and women drowned within us came and went. I could not stop them with my mouth or arms or flinging hope so hard into the sky it might knock the sky down, or shrieking our old name shaped like their old name walking up and down and up the streets and giving off the friction stink we mistook inside our skins as how the air itself just smelled like the color of our hair. Like the longing for the pleasure of having had hair, grown and cut and grown again.

You were beside me; I was beside you.

I held our melding sight up without hands, not feeling either where through the white again into glown points I saw the air of the glow bloat again for whom in furor rose from all our last attentions piling aflame in the infinite incarnation of all conception, each when made to roast why and wish who and blow long the breath into the next ones of we beyond recording opened wide and curled and curling lost around a shape inside a shape spilled vast and spilling from its innumerable faces where in us lighted night engorged within the baby fat of time, rasped in the skin of us as we were wedded why to walk why in me for whom forever slowly elapsed.

Without seeing then I spun to press fast our size against the white in full. At last I solely wanted all of all the nothing. My whole nonexistent head and sternum stung flush with our blood and our unchildren’s blood and yours and mine within this nowhere I pressed me hard against the world I could not watch. I pressed us there also pressing in the reflective surface on the back side of our vision, against the flesh, each possible instant in us rolling backwards and coming out the far side of understanding. I felt the mass wrap in around me and through this could not hear our narration screaming for me at last to just look up, as walled in behind the light there was a hole that went so far back behind the house there was no longer any space there and I was at last here at home where someone had spread a wall over any mirror so I could not see in where I was. There was only white on white and some long sound like all our bodies in me here pulling the world down crushed against itself; each word chiseled with its own eye becoming forced so wide open it had no cell. All the words once hidden among our bodies had been split apart in heat, held constantly imploding inward like the black of any pupil.

We were so loud I could not see. I had all this fission in me, pressed among the light inside my skin and bones turned together throbbing forward longways through this remainder of a shape of a place like our own life, each pixel pregnant with more days that would no longer, each day pregnant with its own glass, where the longer it manifested itself in continuity the more there was between us and the less any inch of any of us may remember how it felt or ever could have, endlessly forwarded and reversed at once against and through and into the perimeter of the cusp of every possible context. The deleting bright was all around me and still spreading and divulging.

Beyond my sight, the era opened into curves. It hissed the light back at me like a putty, reflective, impossible. There grew between us all a single face, a face of endless faces, and in the light now all around me I could feel it inhaling all our voices, never looking back. From within the face I watched the face open its mouth of all our mouths, and in its mouth there was a common darkness, born from the space inside all heads alone, and from this darkness without motion came all possible pronouncements, all language not yet released out of its unliving breath. It wasn’t sound and did not speak. The stretch of the skin of the mind of the face could not contain any word we’d confabulated for whatever. Nothing unquantified in its conception, the lanyards of our cerebrums, singing, sleeping. I heard the memory of all passed bodies in the face’s features being cracked into tablets, drugs for the light to swallow and become, and in becoming to contain all continuity forever. Every eye we’d watched anything go on through basked full in the face’s total common future, consummating every air into its inherent definition: (
all the light that had been shined into our face
) (
all our past laughter
) (
the sound inside us anchored to history unclaimed
) (
what we were too young then to remember
) (
all that had not happened and one day could have
) (
all holes forever
) (
nowhere, now
).

Our shattered speaking sang and sang. It ate its singing and barfed its singing up and ate it back and sang it back to nothing. Where each old era opened, the blood of light flowed awake and was flowed into and all over. The words themselves began to speak. The words were burning in my face. They had been written here wherever on everything at once and eaten up or absorbed among the living no longer living. Every passage of being caressed all that I wasn’t. I rolled along inside the sweat and let it leave me clearer. I was bleeding light and signal. The colors around my eyes kept changing textures like organisms. The words kept coming. I began to be the words there, though I could not understand the breadth behind; they felt like words I’d never said or heard before wherever, words erased inside a book I’d read every night inside my sleep in every other version of me. The book was in my skin now. The skin was peeling. It came off where all along inside the enervating wash my body split and bubbled with the friction and the language as the flatness came and went and the skin came off me where I rolled along inside the light inside the sand all pouring smoke from the friction as the flatness changed and bent and grew and flooded. I could not stop seeing and hearing and tasting and taking of the soft space rising all around my body so surrounded there was nothing left of what it was, beyond contour and no horizon.

Each way I felt then wore away, as if the world at once within me turned numb or gone. I did not know what was becoming of my thinking with the sound inside me splitting into halves, and those halves splitting in their utterance again to others though already they were lost along the unrolling understanding of the land, upon which I saw not sand but space between the sand and light of what there was, one day made of all the days we’d meant to fill with all of us and yet had not, not knowing how. What had been sand then was all the glass in all the mirrors, in each of which I could see the hues of what had once been hidden behind us in the frame, our bodies packed with all cells dragging heavy on the radiance unknown.

I could no longer tell even now which one of me was still there hearing me speaking and which was watching from outside whom. The more I thought about the difference the more it burned me, and the less that I could remember having felt at all, there as our body full of bodies filled with colorless blazing, within which wherever my form ended there were others, much like me too, once the only center of their worlds, and the heat was licking up and off the deformation, the dead desire in their own bodies all soft like mine somehow unlocked, marring their most undisplayed desires in private eternal lust to at last be burned by light in full, reduced to char, and that char too to be burned immediately thereafter, and so on like that, along the ground too now our flesh, the ground and all gloss around me rubbing through the surfaces with a strange and gold bliss, where as the sky sucked up the shape and sound of our cremation it slung to spin, and at the center of the spinning I saw the miles of our disintegrating bodies in their last throes sprawl for longer depths than I had mind, and in great grief I closed my eyes, which closed all of our eyes at once, and with our eyes closed I heard

and though I recognized the shape I did not know now what it wanted, until in the space behind what had once been all our faces I heard something curved free beyond music, at once close and clean larger than all sound, a voice not like any voice of us, but risen from us like a bruise meant soon to heal

I am the mark of the sun of your old world. I have been burning and repeating in what you have known as sky for all of the time you can remember. Each time I appeared I was both a warning and a blessing, neither of which you took to heart. The machines carried my mark as a signal of their recording, their capture of you, their desire of you, of which you were neglectful. You were mystified by your own image. You made copies of your mind and wished them filling up the world in everything you weren’t. Quickly there was nothing left to have alone or remain free from. The world around us was made hollowed, filled with holes through which nothing could appear. It ate and etched through all the faces, each like yours in that in the dark it couldn’t tell itself from any. I grew and flourished in the gap behind these faces now ignited. I filled the faces with everything they weren’t. Sleep grew smaller, and all imagination with them, every impossible fantasy made real in a space inaccessible to understanding. Soon you won’t remember me from you. You will be absorbed wholly into the rivers of the blood of all of man, in my image, behind the faces all at last diminished by their void. But I am only the beginning
.

As the sound struck it took off with it the idea I’d ever heard it, as if once defined a thing could not continue owning any mind. In the white now sound was shapes and shapes were colors. The terrain was full of nowhere growing brighter until it became indistinguishable as on the sky the seething ended and nothing began. I was only me as much as I was any other. Each point in my mind touched every other part of else, all time contained outside its outline. Soon it was so loud and bright it seemed there was no seeing there at all, no grace between what was now and what had been for what or who.

Under my lids the words trapped in my flesh behind my head gasped deeply, as what I was pulsed to remember remembering how it had felt as flesh to see. There was nothing left of what I’d used of me to create understanding, and instead, in its place, a space beyond the necessity of word. And though holding too long with my senses not receiving hurt as much as having felt anything else in any life, I would not let them interrupt the shift, as I knew the next time that I looked all would be incinerated into nothing like anything matching all the black I’d carried in my face or there beyond. I knew I was not ready to relent yet; I’d never been ready, not for anything ever; and the burning knew and knew I knew it knew; and the burning ate my fear as I produced it, knowing no feeling, and I heard