Three Hundred Million: A Novel (19 page)

[In the continuing scene, as the heat above him rises, though the room itself will not grow warm, a smell about the ceiling coming down around him stinks like someone waking up, putting on a skin-suit made of rubber, walking to a door inside the house, closing the door.]

Flood keeps thinking he hears someone other in him thinking. Someone predicting his own thoughts, his movements, what he is. What light is in the room seems electronic.

Flood sees someone standing just behind him, at the edges of his vision. His instinct to turn becomes instantaneously overwhelmed with something sharper:
to hold on inside this feeling, to let the person there remain there, to listen to them think and breathe
. This has, on Flood, the effect of making time seem several times longer, slowing down his aging, which as he notes this feeling, he will in his sleep remember how to learn, thus causing his time on earth to be distinctly extended hour by hour up until right now in this house.

As he’s holding in this moment, the tendons in his arms becoming hard, framing the shape of his skull with further skulls inside him, Flood observes the character observing him taking more form: he can see more about her (it is a her) face and arms and chest and legs and muscles, though he finds it hard to piece together more than one, or to hold the whole of what she is together more than any instant, seeing seconds turning solid into new memory, rubbing the older shafts in him awake.

The form is so near to heart, close enough to make him open to it further, though at the same time he wishes to resist. Each time he sees her he is seeing something new, and yet the newness has a gloss about it, a second cover: he can recognize the form, but cannot hold the form up to itself, and the smell of the room keeps washing in, and the fidget of his body tries to stay both soft and motionless, observing in fear that when he moves for sure the premonition will disappear; as, he remembers, there’s not actually someone there behind him, and never has been; this is an elaboration on an instinct, a way to live. In thinking this, close up, just as the image threatens slowly to see into him and see him seeing, the moment shifts and so is gone. The room is empty. There are no bodies.

Flood turns to look now at where he felt there’d been the other person and sees instead, like so: the wall.

Flood starts laughing. He’s not moving his mouth or face; he doesn’t want to laugh; the sound is not like him. The sound is coming out of holes in his skin (so many of them) or perhaps from his ears (ejecting what’s come in before but in reverse) or something else about his head he can’t synthesize with enough precision to speak about it. He feels the cords vibrate in his neck, his runny blood. The laughter fills the space and wiggles through it, cordless, multiplying in diffraction, then gone again, where its remainder is everything at once wanting to be said while he says nothing and he looks. Looks again for something someone might have missed about the space’s frame or where about it or some other motion not about the bodies, having since been photographed, described, inscribed, removed, examined, identified (if possible), interred (if possible), memorialized, indexed, held aloft in glimmered minds. So many hands have been here, finessing surfaces, expurgating, eyes shut or open at various points, attempting to collect from harbors of the false light something wrought about the intention or issuance of the Events (i.e. the Killings), though what is there to say. How many can we count, what method of dispatch, how many hours alive before not alive, what name, what age. These are questions that have been asked and will be asked again regardless of the answers being given regardless of the year. These are the small bulbs on a white tree rising above the country in slow season for the worship of the Day; and yet here inside the room is Flood.

Each place Flood allows Flood’s foot to touch the floor covered with its clean mirrors makes him grow older; both the house and he change every time, aging together, changing; in this way he is many of him in many houses; in this way he will never leave the house.

He cannot hear the onset of the camera burning film somewhere above him over the roar of what is not there, the song having set so hard upon the house that it is the house and it will be the end and beginning yet again.

Again, behind him, behind Flood’s body, there is the shift of presence, though this time as he feels it align he spins around. He feels the minutes peeling from his other life, turning, the cords in his arms burning, his fingers wrapped around a weapon he has not brought; the gun seated barrel-up toward the ceiling between twin pillows on his white bed for the purpose of watching anything but what will come into the room.

In this room where so many bodies died. Where so many had been, dying. Where so many were.

There: there he is there in the mirror there this time he sees him he can catch him he is not her but him; in the glass of it he’s not so old but younger now, he knows, if bloated, if glassed around the face with liquid staying in and wanting out, the meat around his eyes the color of the meat they’d pulled out of here by the poundload as he stood upstairs in a version of a room without locked doors and tried not to hear the words of anyone around him as he recorded another instance of the life inside his mind by walking slow from room to room in learning and wishing his fingers could spurt gold, wishing it were him they were pulling out of there then and with the skins turned inside out while his stays white and tired and retarded and having let any person down and surrounded by others who have so done the same; it doesn’t even matter anymore to feel that or think about it in the hour because that is part of the definition of the name; that is god, for him, that is god, for him, that is god as god will be, for him, and he is he. There, there he is watching him watch him remember who he was just those days, however many days, and younger now and dumber now, the age leaking out of him from the agelessness from which he had been born, no way to keep it in, no way to want it out, unlike the blood; the gift these dead had been given and not even there to celebrate it any longer, being the worst joke and saddest fuckfreak thinking of them all, and their houses and their money and their stocks and bonds and their children and their haircuts and who they’d had sex with and where they’d been and where they’d wanted to be or to visit and their fingers and their keys, their memories of whoever, each erasing over time as time goes on, and him there against it and inside it, and him here again in echo of that in the house this time alone, and him there on the wall there watching him watch him remember and him there again there on the ground, the instance of his head and torso spread beneath him in rescinding dimension in such a way that he appears as a different kind of ache, a 2-D aping of his 3-D dumb ass standing goremouthed in the image of the room of dead, alone in the Black House having laughed and never meant it, having never meant it, there he is. The he who in his own life allowed her nothing that she wished without him having wished it also. His life still going on. Now. Right now. Going and going. The he who did not bend and so she became nothing, while again he is without the gun and here the house around him doing nothing like he is also again and he cannot become the house and he cannot become her, unless he can look so hard at his 2-D self there in the mirror that he turns to 1-D and therefore his 3-D self must turn to 2-D, taking with it some idea of the dimension that allows the third D to take place and amplify it unto becoming something possibly inhuman, like what people become when they die, as had his father and all the other fathers and would again but only after all that age had been leaked out, after all that nothing had been forsaken despite anybody’s wish to live forever and wanting everyone you love to live forever there beside you always also, the running bead of loss of our pulling the color from our hair, pulling the flat out of the skin into the bunched meat of long windows in us purpled over and caved in and laughed and asked and rinsed off and here again Flood is laughing and the floods of Flood are watching Flood. Here again Flood sees Flood forced forever left unending.

Flood lets his head nod toward the floor; down there in the mirror set beneath him Flood is smiling at himself in vast attraction, his gum meat popping in his head, gored bridges, a long white.

Flood stops, stands, stares, hears nothing. He jumps up in the air above the image of his face beneath him, splitting different, changing angles; the air is empty; a music begins to play, swelling low and hot out of his pore holes into the sound of air making no sound.

In the air above his face, as he is lifted, Flood invokes the moment he’s only just now invented, in remembrance of a moment in a place he can return to in the future, however ruined. From up here, semi-paused and still inside him, on the floor below he sees himself there rerendered just above. Across from him, in the cubic air underneath the Black House where the pulp of the murdered bodies and all their blood and rip had been, Flood sees himself peripherally seeing himself beneath him as he sees himself from above. Behind him, he hears more; he does not look to verify that these are him behind him and so they are not, and the mirror echoes with the lie: he appears alone here but he is not alone here and does not look beyond himself.

He does not think the prior thought at all inside him, and in not thinking realizes he is not the one doing this, not the engine, but this doesn’t stop him from not doing regardless, held as he is inside his own eyes and learning at last now to see what about the glint of his eyes shows someone else just there within him also, surrounded from outside and within. The moment grows.

There is a hell.

Here I am above me seeing me above me and below and beside me all at once, Flood says aloud. The words come out spoken in one word altogether, a name he’s never heard before or thought before: Darrel. The word adheres hot to his cheekface and the gristle in his neck where words are born. The words inscribe themselves along the mirror, written white in breathy lesions of the glass that will not be erased.

I am Darrel, he says aloud again, and again the words at once come out as one, the flick of the tongue to palate and the posture of his creaking growing in him in the language breaking through his lungs. So he is Darrel.

In the room under the Black House, Darrel (Flood) begins to land. He will destroy himself, he hears him saying in his second voice in third person in one word, in a voice that seems by the moment turning back upon itself as it is passed, a voice without sound but of sound, like sound deleted, a nothing flowing, wanting more. He will save his other life by giving it away; wedded in the instant to the coursing of the blood within him he would have liked to deliver into her, into a child made of his wife and him together only; a second self who could have lived beyond the minute of this exit, carried on all the sets of sets of expectations and hopes and troubles beyond the rind of Flood’s own body here and now split and coiling fast and hard around the moment so fast that he already can’t remember how it happened, how it is happening, causing the moment as it happened to stand alone unto itself unframed; therefore the moment cannot die, causing between the real and unreal a rip from one world to another, splitting Flood, the human, the nonfather, all apart, each instance of each of him and us eternally on pause from there forward in time to many false dimensions of him, each one aging as he goes. This had been happening his whole life, through every instance, and with everyone, and only now does he recognize how little of him here is left, leaving the space for whatever else could want to come into him as he is now to come and come and have him.

Poised in the falling air, Flood (Darrel) sees Darrel (Flood) beneath him coming closer as he approaches also unto the mirror with the copies of him surrounding (and all those others, whoever ever) seeing too, and through the mirrored walls the bloat of pressure of the missing moments seeing too, being too so gross and endless that in each there is no key, the ocean of the moment swollen hard every instant lived inside itself to rise above it and be crumpled as it passes into night, the mirrors in the house and beyond the house unbound ongoing moaning soft inside him, singing the death song.

SMITH
:
Both as a matter of official preservation, and for his own good, I have placed Flood on leave for a period as yet to be determined; throughout he will receive full benefits and pay as long as he cooperates, though I have as yet been unable to get ahold of him by any method for the last thirty-something hours, which I am afraid, if continued, could require greater consequences
.

FLOOD
:
I am only just now beginning to understand what I could never understand. Something beyond me. Something beyond something beyond the all of us all inside us and around us and inside. I could and will and cannot slow down now
.

Where Darrel (Flood) lands upon Flood (Darrel), ramming, through the glass of the ground’s mirror, the mirror ruptures, splits apart. The floor is false. Underneath the floor is a second floor, forming a cavity beneath the room, which the mirrors had kept hidden from investigation.

The room is roughly six feet deep, high enough to hide a body propped up erect, though there are no new bodies down here. The texture of the face of the surface is marbled pink with loam of discolored pigments set into it like speckled ham. It is soft and seems to be made of a synthetic polymer, like something from spacecraft. There is no smell; the air of the room above seems not to permeate beyond itself.