Three Hundred Million: A Novel (27 page)

The bodies of the people in the rooms go on inside the day. The clocks change colors, pocked meat and shining rings. There is singing, under every voice’s misuse. The eye of Darrel without name.

Gravey’s body folds to lie down on the floor, his mouth hole touching the endpoint of the high end of the
S
. From the low end of the same symbol, another pearl of smoke emits and rolls along the floor in a white wire, intersecting with the other wall. His nostrils flare, bringing the smoke inside his skull. He exhales again black with it, the color of the smoke having been changed. Out from his face the smoke rises toward the wall behind him, spreading up in packets; the smoke forms a face upon the wall, of a woman with no eyes no ears no brow no cheeks no nostrils. She has a mouth. The room around the smoke face shudders.

The smoke of the smoke lips begins to writhe, pulling open, inside which: teeth, a tongue, a humming. Smoke of a disintegrated sweat.

The head begins to lean out of the wall; its smoke flesh grows. The flesh of the grown face is reflective. A tumor on the head’s cheek glimmers. Somewhere money burns. Somewhere someone else is frying.

Gravey’s sleeping body rises from the ground. He floats above the
S
or
8
now having become many symbols in one face at once, stopping hung there on the paused air of the building, through which, for this instant, all other bodies in the precinct have been removed, evacuated into their memories beyond the present. The bodies will return again as they had been without remembering their disappearance.

Gravey rotates above the symbol in his glitchmoan, head rotating to the smoke-made Head. His hair, hung dry beneath him, sucks up backward, splaying out and turning white down to the scalp. The shifting symbol is written in the scalp meat. A matching tumor grows on Gravey’s cheek, pig-colored, every icon. His eyes fill up with blood. His eyes open. His body opens, the smokehead just behind his head, pressed glyph to glyph.

The smokehead speaks.

How many years have passed here, Flood asks the darkness. The wet by now is higher than him, filling the passage so completely he can no longer feel the bottom. He can find no edges where the walls were under the surface, no soft panels with which to find another passage through the black. The ceiling and the walls above the water seem to have spread wider, into something like an ocean under evening, no edges to the open air where he can find them beyond where in the rising darkness there seems a heaving solid surface in what could be the heavens. He can’t remember which way he came in from, where underneath him or behind him the descending passage went. It is as if the passage itself has wrapped back on itself, holding the time beyond it out. Even the idea of time before
right now
seems conceptual at best, an orblike surface drowned inside the water of his blood.

And yet inside the passage the rising liquid is still rising, a reminder of dimension. The higher the wet rises, the less air around him there must be. Less and less space remaining inside the passage every instant, no matter how hard he tries to think of anywhere else, ever.
How many hours until I am too tired to keep moving
, he hears a voice inside him asking,
how many more until there is no air
.

Flood himself is full; his chestmeat aches around his bone framing his center. He is not hungry or thirsty but not sated. Inside him, his blood presses back against the wet slaving his skin in silent war. His arms buzz hot like thousands of arms pressed into only two.

The wet goes down and down forever underneath him, it seems. However deep Flood forces his body, there is more depth opening into greater pressure and potential dimension. At the length of half his breath, the point where Flood knows inside him sure for certain were he to swim deeper there’d be not enough breathing stored inside him to get back, he feels another presence come lighted, way beneath him; a string of buried glow like some white city far below, swallowed over on some level ground surrounded in the cavity, he believes; long drowned along the nadir of the growing wet wanting to drown him in it.

Sometimes, in the windows of the buildings, somehow becoming clear across great leagues of distance, he feels certain he can see behind the panes inside the small light. And within that light pockets of remote people moving inside rooms; living bodies warbling in muffled silence without even pulse, the word there also buried in the liquid formed around him, rising at his head, today.

With his chest tight, wanting new breath, knowing he should turn away and swim to surface, Flood feels his eye pass through one specific window across the stretch of cheek of a lone woman in a gray dress; a woman alone, standing at the window staring back up at him; a woman who looks in some way like his mother, then like his wife. Her face changes with each expression as Flood swims up and back to look longer, each time more winded than the last, the woman at the glass there standing stolid and looking up into him from so far in and down they shouldn’t be able to see anything of one another. Behind her in the room the light continues changing, fleshing out the endless wet between them with ambient clouds of mottled color.

There is a terror in her eyes, some kind of churning screen of remove in her complexion, but also a desperation for the ability to grant respite, a want to forgive, to cave in to the worst part of anything he has been, could be; some soft understanding coming open in her with his returning presence, as if, in her tiny world, through all the darkened liquid, she could feel him, need him.

Unlike the bodies in the past houses, Flood knows he knows her name; knows who she was and would have always been beside him if he could have let her. But then just as quickly he must rise; kick in frenzy back up through the water to fill his lungs enough to swim back down, each time returning to a smaller and deeper expression of the image of the woman, of the window, of the city, among which he knows for sure now she is held forever there and he is not, his body screaming against the pressure to stay under longer, lower, until on some future iteration, there is nothing.

Among the long blank hours of the tapes of Gravey, an image emerges.

It is difficult at first to decipher the dimensions of the contour from the flat white after all these hours burned upon the viewer’s face. There are floors, then there are walls. The outline of a room there, then a room there. The room itself is mostly white as well, though by method of slow accumulation an underlying texture in the surface rises. One sees rise among the air the form of furniture, and hair; hair, yes, attached to limbs of bodies attached to people in a space, the aging heads of humans, their vertices of assembled flesh emerged in neon connection from the first suggestion of their presence, then as well: persons, objects, a window, light.

As quickly then as anyone could remember, the image continues on as if it had always been a film of just this room, as if all the hours of the white had never been.

The time code on the tape’s playtime, at the instance of the image, resets on the machine to 00:00:00.

In the film, the people sit in silence holding postures that only slowly and occasionally adjust: one man holding a book with no word written on its spine or face sits on a sofa, beside which a woman stands at a window with her back turned to the viewer. On the floor, before a TV, a small child grips a toy camera, the rim around its lens gnawed up. From this angle we cannot see the content of what is being watched by the family this evening, though its color fills the room.

Each body is mostly still. Small adjustments occasionally occur, like inhalation, the book’s page turn, the movement of a limb, as if to remind us the shot’s not static. The space inside the room is calm. Any noise is subtle and mostly covered over by the larger sound of nothing, like the feeling one gets when passed by something larger than one would wish to be near.

A floor-length mirror stands along the far wall, copying the room. The reflection shows no filming camera in the frame, despite the fact that at this angle, the camera should, by proximity, appear. This glitch in continuity suggests some alteration of the record, an outside guidance.

On further inspection it becomes apparent there is something off or wrong or different about the child’s reflection. Such as, in the skin of the face of the skin of him there in the mirror appear patches of discolor like the scape of glimmer in gasoline splayed under sun, while his unreflected skin is creamy. The hair around the lips and ears of the child in certain reflected angles appears to be thicker than what actually appears on the child’s head. He looks older than he should.

What is wrong with the reflection of the child?

What about he here must be different from he there?

No one seems to notice, or else they have accepted his condition as a fact of life.

All is calm.

The woman at the window stands seeing out with her face near the glass, breathing against it. The changing light of the TV in the room makes it impossible for us to see what she is looking out at; only the room again appears reflected, doubled, extending the room out into the night. We cannot see from here where the reflection in the window meets the reflection in the mirror. The woman’s hands are clasped before her, her hair pulled back tightly around her skull.

The man turns a page again. The page’s turning makes no sound, though on this page, open before him, still unseen by the camera eye, the man seems to see something unexpected; his face changes, clenching; he brings his head down toward the page; he seems to be reading or looking in whatever way at whatever is there more carefully now, taking the words slow, as if to parse it clearer. The color of his face changes. He looks up suddenly toward the viewer, out of the film, though it is unclear what he sees there. Suddenly he is pouring sweat, visibly spewing and misting in the TV light. He stares as if transfixed in horror with the viewer, while beside him the woman and child go on exactly as they have been.

The toy camera in the child’s hands is blue. The camera is leaking something. There is a wet mess on the floor and on his clothes and in his hair a little. The way the child cajoles the machine, bats and shakes it, hugs it hard with the lens aimed into his chest, causes the machine to take pictures of the world without the guidance of a human eye, filling up its electronic memory.

The viewer can’t stop looking at the child. The child looks so much like how the viewer remembers looking as a child, however long ago that was. The hour seems familiar. The color of the hour.

With this realization, another man steps into the screen. He seems to move in from somewhere just behind the lens, where a camera would be. The viewer views at first only his shoulders, then his whole back, his arms and waistline. He is naked. His hair is grown down to his ass. His skin is wrinkled, leathery, sopping wet. His body pours water from his fingers, from his hair slick, from his arms; it seems to gather on the floor inside the image, pooling up in the room over the carpet rising.

The man has no reflection.

The man moves forward in the image until he is standing at the center of the room. The array of light around him has come bright white, from the TV or the window or both or neither. The man with the book is shaking now, as are the edges of the house, only slight enough to make the walls seem blurry, ruining the mirror. The shaking causes the wet to come out of him faster; he is crying, sweating, then begins bleeding from the eyes. His crotch is wet as are his pores. He can’t seem to do anything but sit as he had been before, holding the book, frozen wide-eyed. The child and the woman are also sweating, though they don’t seem to notice; they do not react at all to the man.

The viewer realizes he or she is also filled with liquid.

This white around the language on the page before you is a mirror.

The figure raises up his arms. As he does, the woman at the window raises her arms, too, then the seated man, and last the child. The light beyond the window is strobing slowly with the TV in time as the wet pours from them each at once together rising in the room, quickly enough already to have covered up the carpet and the feet of the furniture. Or time is faster now. Life is faster.

The child now sees the wet but does not stand up or attempt to move away onto the furniture or into the man or woman’s arms, only holding more tightly to the camera, its flashwork going off at adverse time in relation to the TV and the sky beyond. The child clings to the object so hard its white hands turn even whiter. He tries to make a word but it is covered over by whatever sound of nothing inhabits the film’s soundtrack. It is a calm and simple silence.

Soon the liquid rises over the child’s head. Underneath the other accumulating liquids of the people, there is brief cloud of his blood, which rapidly bands together with the rest of it. In his hands, the camera too has been sealed under, its electronic memory licked clean and thereby absorbed into the wet held now visionless forever.