Three Hundred Million: A Novel (32 page)

Streets grew longer than the earth beneath. Doors would open from a surface and nothing coming through or going on. Stock rose and fell inside the peace, making warmth in which an aging color grew, sermonizing and baptizing and giving thanks sung in the floors of the homes of the American unveiling of a graveyard in which I alone was left to walk, trapped for no reason other than that I insisted, wanting only anything like what I had once, and felt and held dear, and now can hardly separate inside my mind from feeling ill, despite knowing through and through that I was someone once who in my dreams could never die, and so never was my body, and never aged a day, despite eternity, like how often in the light of certain other eras for hours and hours we would sing all together the same words, celebrating the mark of the word of the end of the door of the day toward our disappearing hope.

FLOOD
:
I knew I wasn’t even me. I knew the land that let me touch it was only an idea. And yet what choice did I have but to go on. To look for anything to hold fast or wait to be absorbed by. If others were alive inside here with me, I could not find them. I had the sense at once of being followed and following someone else who could feel me following but could not find me. Often I would turn around to look back where I had just come and see nothing but the same stretch I saw looking the same way, as if I were standing where a mirror was. As if I myself were the mirror reflecting two halves of a world with no one in it but the shit everyone but me had left behind. Who else could I have ever been
.
Sometimes again the smoke of the beginning of the world as I understood my appearance in it would appear, rolling over the long horizon far off and coming over. I imagine this meant there could be another face like mine somewhere out there ejecting the hell of the black of the smoke that comprised exactly what confined me. But as soon as I saw and understood the smoke this way, it rolled apart. It would spread and flesh out so generally into the distance I couldn’t tell it from the sky or whatever stood behind the sky or any of the houses that from here just looked like nothing but more indeterminate color. Whoever could have been there waiting to find me became again as nowhere as any stretch of air behind a wall. And the same of me to them. To even just the idea of them, anybody
.

The years came and came on me again. They came and came on me. They held me
.

The years did. They loved me. I could see out through the screens. I watched you dying
.

In every inch of the zilch of nowhere I could see out into everything you lived through
.

You looked gorgeous. Don’t fret about it. You did something with your life that hung
.

All eyes did. They wore the same color, in spite of how they seemed to vary or shift
.

The oceans of red money spilled for hours in the furor of the gnaw of dying laughter
.

Blood poured forever in your mind. You were dead before you understood the idea
.

The humans died and didn’t realize any better. They couldn’t feel the difference
.

I wish I’d known you better than I do. The machines took you apart upon the dirt
.

Your organs were ribbed with words. I couldn’t read what all the words said at all
.

Your body became buried under bodies, which were buried under grass that grew
.

That’s what I believe love is: doing something again because it’s still there and is and is
.

I don’t know where all the other bodies went. I used to know a couple people. Persons
.

Friends and family. Salesmen. What. They lit me up. I didn’t know they lit me then
.

I didn’t see the cracks dry in my whole flesh until there was no flesh left to press against
.

I am thirty-one years old. Some day soon I will turn to thirty-two, though I am dead
.

Is that a good thing or a bad thing.

What, the being dead, or my new birthday.

Either.

Yes. Yes it’s a good thing. And I need you.

I need you, too. Hold me.

You know I can’t.

I did not know that. No day goes past without you wholly of my whole mind.

What does it feel like to think you have a mind still?

It’s all right.

Can you show me?

I cannot show you.

Why. Why can’t you.

I can’t do anything but see.

FLOOD
:
I don’t think being inside this tape means I am here forever, or that I have to be. I don’t think I am not in some way living, though I seem now to be the only one. Even the voice is not a person here before me, with legs and arms and eyes and someone’s face. I’ve walked for so long among the buildings and the fields here in search of any shape still taking breath like me. But they all killed each other. They are all ended. They are all stacked up in thick piles. I don’t want to think about it, not when all I have to think about when I can’t actually think is what there isn’t versus what there never was
.

I already knew I needed out. Though I couldn’t feel anything in the grain it was the feeling of no feeling that burned worse, and knowing that underneath that there must be something silent and corroded lacing through what I was meant to use as a human to understand another person. That there was no one here to apply that understanding to made it a weapon against itself, a private bloodbath where whatever what my blood was now should have been pumping, filling my organs with inspiration. Wherever anyone wasn’t now forever was space that pounded at my lack of awareness of the pounding, bruising anything remaining of what I’d been or was beyond the point of any recognition. The houses and the wires and the pixels in the sky didn’t want me to do anything but not take part in my own image.

Worse than knowing I needed out, I didn’t know what I needed back out into. Even when I could feel there was something else beyond the edges of any color in the street or window where no one waited even to just totally ignore me, I couldn’t recognize it enough to know how to want it harder. Along each street it was as if I were waiting for some hole to swallow my face. Each moment it didn’t made the going into the next step that much less worth doing. This is what life had always felt like. In my mind, expecting the absence of something or someone there before me made the presence in its place feel like the punch line to a routine no one was performing. And where I couldn’t find a way to laugh, I became my own stand-in, over and over, like painting white over a window from the inside.

None of this stopped me from believing every instant that the entire condition of my existence was going to change at any minute. Every edge of door or floor before or beneath me could be the initiation of an entirely different fate. In any foyer beyond any location someone could be standing with their face against the wall waiting to hear me coming. The sky could always split right down the middle.

FLOOD
:
Why were there no bodies. There were only the buildings and the ground. Everything was covered in a dark hue as if held on in night during the day. Many doors and windows had been sealed into the surfaces around them. The world was empty of us, except for me, cleared as to a land inside an amusement park that’d closed its doors. I don’t know what I would have done with the bodies but I wanted to see them, even to be them. I wanted to remember they were there. Through my own vision on the tape, though, often all I could see for miles set in the land were the wrecked remains of what still had the balls to cling to the idea of us returning, the bridges and the doors and hallways built as if from bone and sinew, though in a guise that even I here inside the clearer thinking could no longer recognize the purpose of. Which makes me wonder now what else is less clear to me here than I imagine, what has not transferred between the seeming many ideas of me that I am, all split apart and up under trance. What about you, for instance? Whoever I am speaking this to, if anybody. Why won’t you respond?

Sometimes my skull burns in my head. It hurts to say the words here. Every of them
.

Ouch. Ouch. Ouch. Ouch. This is me talking. Ouch. Ouch. Ouch. Ouch. Ouch
.

I feel confused. I feel as if I’m being followed. I feel as if my time is bleeding from me
.

There is everywhere to go. In the new days I go from room to room in the houses
.

I go into people’s homes. I see what they were there. I lie down in their beds
.

I eat their food. I sometimes am their food entirely, seeing them above me, eating
.

I want to be eaten. I want out. There is a hole here somewhere. There is a way back
.

Into the dead, who have a spirit, whereas I feel like rubber under water, in a vise
.

Death, in preservation, burns worse than being burned to die and enter light
.

I still want everything I ever wanted and maybe even more now that only I exist
.

I want
silence
beyond the word. Whereas here, in memory, stillness is loudest
.

In the houses people haunt the years with ways they used to walk when they had skin
.

Their mind will come up to me here inside their house and open their life against me
.

I can feel their blood pummel. The noise the days suffused inside them is hellish shit
.

No eye has ever died. It goes on seeing. I don’t want to go on seeing. I want nothing
.

Some rooms will feel against me so familiar it’s as if I’ve been there my whole life
.

As if when I go to sleep I’m in the rooms again and all the people are there with me
.

All the people. All their words. Maybe among them someone waiting for my nearness
.

Each day inside this tape I can go as far as I can go inside it before the tape ends
.

When the tape ends that’s when I black out and then sometime the day begins again
.

I need the eye that’s been burnt out. The day in the eye of the seeing beyond sight
.

I’m trying to learn to stay up longer. To go further. There must be someone in the homes
.

There must be someone left besides me beyond this tape of America I can make love with
.

Make love with me.

You know I can’t. I told you that already.

It hurts.

I know. To think about it even is so hellish.

God.

Yes, god.

What about my mind. Can you fuck my mind please. Hard please.

What’s all this with fucking. What about your arms. Your cheeks. Your knees.

When I say fuck or make love, I mean be around me. I mean be here where I am.

I am.

You’re not.

I know. I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know.

You do not. Not yet. You will, though.

You will remember.

I hope I do. I will try to remember to keep hoping.

FLOOD
:
I do remember. I know I do remember. I had in the world before this had a wife. I had known a woman who I had loved and had asked to share her life beside me. We had been together several years. We met in a small room near an ocean. I knew her already before I did. I mean that in the way you could ever know a person because they are a person who is another part of you, and who you also are a part of. It is as if you have been split, and have been walking around in long dementia wide apart, each containing in your own body parts of that person they will never have again, no matter how hard you try to spread it back into them. Through where you try is where the color grows and melds you to something beyond the world, beyond the videos and language, beyond the silence of us. These colors fill the air among us. It wakes among us beyond skin. The changing light in layers laid unto no ending, despite the body’s softing, and the mind’s white. I knew already that my wife was sick when we were married. I knew that a thing unlike the thing we meant had chewed into her frame, and taken place inside her brain, and grew and grew against the growing of the colors we had saved, and though it could not deform the colors, it could deform the shape of her I most knew. It took the skin from her, the blood from her. It worked all through her in the night while all I could do was lie beside her, and in the day I left to go about my work, as to have the time to live beside her I had to go to give parts of me I did not at my center wish to give away so there would be money to give us shelter and give us food. All of us had always done this. My wife had done this, too, while she could still stand. When she could no longer stand, and the chewing took her, the chewing took me, too. The part of me I did not wish to give my time to by now felt like the only thing I had. In that light I went and walked among the other bodies, full of their blood, and the skin around them holding it in, huddling the spaces desired by the coming sick like hers but in so many forms to work into us too. Often I wished it would not hold us in, that we would burst and fill the world with all that darkness, all of us at once
.