Three Hundred Million: A Novel (39 page)

I want out of what was in me that let me out of dying. I want to die inside myself
.

Whoever you are holding me. Whoever you are, please be kind. For you are in me also
.

As I go on, so you go, too. I don’t need to have known you. It is the history of no history
.

The hole made punched by all of us in time. The mass of long white memory in any white
.

The smoke rising from your blood in the gray evening. Breathed in by anyone erased
.

This time I am going to remember what I remembered and remember to forget it
.

In our small home together, when we were the two of us. We had our bodies. We had a gun. You named it. You slept so hard. Some nights you would shake so hard inside the sleeping and so much screaming I would shake you in the shaking and you would still not wake up. You would say the gun’s name over and over in your sleep and you would not know mine, like now. I just wanted us to live like people, to be people, when so many people were something else. I wanted the skin over our faces to match some hours just by thinking that it did. That was then. Here we are again.

No.

When you woke up I would hold you and try to tell you where you were and what you’d said inside your sleep. You usually would not believe me. You would believe you’d slept as still as dead. Or you would not want me to tell you what you looked like in the grip of it. You would get up and go and lock yourself inside the bathroom where we showered and took baths together some nights and where we had to flush our waste out of us. Do you remember that at least? Do you remember shit? Do you remember breaking the mirror with your head? You had your own blood then. Just yours. You thought. Though it was always ours. And mine. And the visions in it. And the coming storm of money and the death of the Person and the death of skin and breath and flash photography and the death of death.

No.

What do you want me to tell you? I will tell you, and you won’t listen, and I will tell you, and you won’t. You’ve heard it all before. It is all in here. Can’t you remember writing all these words down? Do you remember where they came from? From your silence? From having heard inside you no clear word? Who had said that silence? Was that you or was that someone else? Was that him there or was that you here or was it something well beyond yourself. Do you believe now? Are you capable of belief in something other than yourself?

For some reason anytime I find myself not thinking I find me thinking thoughts I know aren’t mine. For instance, you.

I am the false beginning of the end. Or is it the end of the beginning.

Where am I.

Inside things fulfilled because prophesized.

Prophesized by who? Are you

Prophesisized-ed-ed-ized-id-id-ized-id.

What. Please help me. I am an American. I’m human.

Morskishbombumbleebithellzmitziturdammundendititititititititititititititititizeedsed.

O

No you are doing it all wrong. Please think a minute. Make your hand like mine is. Do like we did. Do this. Try more trying.

You are not alive.

You are not alive. I killed you. Whoever you are.

Yes of course I am. I told you I am everybody. Including you, including the thing you call Darrel, who is patiently waiting to begin. Including anyone who looks upon these words to give you life through having touched them. Including anyone you’d like to name, though that is not their name now. They are inside me. They always were and always will be.

Okay, I still don’t understand. I am trying. Please help me. I am a person. I am here.

It never ends.

What never ends.

The way I am. The way you are within me. The way the days are all a sphere, held in the eye inside a head inside a soap dish inside a battery inside a lamp inside a house inside a window inside a bug inside an eye.

I don’t believe you. You are evil.

Or whatever other word you want.

I am just talking to myself.

You and all the rest of us forever.

FLOOD
:
I felt the voice awake then in my head, in a different way than it had been in all the language. It happened suddenly, and without warning, the way that love does, then once it had begun it would not stop. It stayed on in my head and wrapped around me. I could smell the tape there burning in my chest. The wear of repetition on its fibers took hold in what has been before and would again, but this time only as a motion, small outlying folds of understanding, beyond water. The smoke traced past my face and filled my ideas with waking blue, then green, then gray, each color writing in over the other toward what in the world could be would have no form, and therefore needed no body
.

Before me then I saw the house where I had lived. Where we had lived our life together. The walls were the walls we’d used against the night. They were colored like all the other walls of all the houses, but through these I could feel breathing what had been of us and always been of us. It opened out around my mind like old ice melting. The home vibrated against me, against the ground. The rest of the world around it seemed to darken, blur, disfigure. My arms were my arms.

The door had not been locked. I, like anyone, could move into the house behind it, place myself inside the surface. Nor did I lock the door behind me as I entered. I had always made sure throughout my life to secure any space I claimed against every other person as soon as possible—I could never find a way to sleep with open doors, could never even drive without my windows up and locks locked against the shifting air of anywhere. Now I hardly even closed the door. My skin was cooler than the room’s skin, turning harder all around me, as if it didn’t wish me in it.

And yet I recognized each room. I had lived here. We had lived here. I already knew which way the floor spread out underneath my walk. I knew which ways I had to move among the furniture to connect my path into the next space, littered with the ornaments of our inhabitance. I could have walked it in the dark. It was not dark now in the house, though through any window I could see nothing beyond a shaking, abstruse light.

I recognized the color of the table from which we’d eaten. I knew the books that lined the cases, which words from them I’d copied into my mind, and which I’d left to sit stuffed with themselves separate forever. I knew what had been poured into the pipes, what sweat of mine and hers, or bile or blood we’d given up to nowhere. The pipes connected rooms to rooms. I knew the clothes in the closets and what I’d worn to where in total. The edges of her nightgown. The rough frill of a dress she’d never worn. I knew the texture of bed against my back, the edges of her flesh I’d felt pressed against me in it.

I knew what the mirrors all had seen. I did not want to look in the mirrors, and instead felt my reflection held against me, watching regardless of how I would not turn. It didn’t feel like me there.

On this tape I’d finally found our home but it did not feel like our home. Even understanding every inch already for what it’d always been in my mind, preserved now in this manner it only filled the air because it had to, I couldn’t shake it. Because there was no way for it to not. Every inch I touched or looked on seemed to want to turn away toward a part of the house I’d never touched and hide its face from me. I didn’t blame it.

I couldn’t leave. As off as my home felt captured in this manner, against its will and my whole mind, it was my home. It was the one shaft of now held beyond all. It buzzed and rolled disruption in my reason, like panes of glass pushed on at one another with all the weight of the separate worlds they’d ever looked out onto, never the same. Every eye in every eye of every inch of now forever watching while I moved from room to room, touching anything, remaining.

It is unclear how long this went on. Inside the house the tape seemed not to hit its end so fast as when I didn’t know what way to move; it just kept going. I felt no smoke here. I could have lived a million lives in every second carried in these walls and only ever felt the one awaiting. For as much time and mind as I knew held close in every object of ours we’d spent a life interloping among, nothing of it reappearing brought me nearer to myself, what I now wasn’t.

Each time I entered every room it was with the sense that in the next I’d find it wholly reupholstered, brought to life around me. Or I’d find a silver tunnel burrowed wide into the earth, through which then I could throw myself and become whatever, anything, nothing. Though even when I closed my eyes the air was there.

In the darkness, what I touched was all its own.

I kept waiting for the tape to begin again and take me back to its beginning. Every second it did not felt like it could be the last, and when it was not the last it was just another like all the others.

Eras passed. I waited. I lay and couldn’t sleep. I ate food and could not taste it. I put my head against the ground. Every time I killed myself I reappeared. I woke up in the same rooms beside the same rooms. My face covered in its same hair. My eyes flummoxed with edges I could not force to turn against themselves, see nothing else.

I could not bear to open the door to the rest of the world again.

FLOOD
:
Every instant in the house I lived the voice grew louder in my flesh. It was all throughout my back, strung in my muscles, shaking my hair so hard I couldn’t have seen me in the mirrors if I did grow heart to look there. The voice felt clearer now inside these rooms, and only more so as each fiber of syllable it contained disappeared inside the total volume, becoming singular, monotone. The more I heard the voice the more I felt it was my wife’s voice, as any idea, though she did not sound like my wife. The edges of resin in her resonances pulsed just slightly off from what seemed all of her I felt about her. A charcoal layer. Like a mask made out of sound. And yet, even feeling where in the voice the voice was not her voice, I could not stop believing it. The voice said she was right there. It said she was in the house with me there and how had I not found her. The voice flexed static. How could I not see her in every field. I could already tell that my own thoughts, as I’d partitioned them apart from the limited understanding the tape allowed me, were bleeding together with the dead. Even as I thought this thought now, speaking to you, I could hardly tell how it was any different from what I felt was what I felt throughout the tape as I had always. Any minute soon now I might not be able to remember there was ever any other way
. And that’s exactly what you’ve always wanted
, the voice consoled me
. To feel no split in your senses, no other layer to the world. It is enough to go on believing, right, yes, regardless of the gap in the nature between belief and the believed.
I could not argue. Even as I tried, my mouth stayed shut. My thoughts pulsed and strobed hard in their contours where I could make them anything, and then did nothing. The voice grew on. It rose in volume
. Believe me. Believe in me. Belove me. Love me. Live in me. Have me. Remain. Be.
With every word the voice took more and more of the shape and tone of what I’d used or loved into it. Even as with each shift in its contour from something I believed that I could understand as real into something I knew as a stand-in for that thing, Still I could not stop myself from responding, even knowing each note was made to mock those I’d treasured in my heart as long as I had had an I to be. Soon it would be so loud, I knew, I wouldn’t be able to tell the voice from any other echo. I wouldn’t remember to know I’d known that, or that there’d ever been another way
.

I came into a room and found my wife. There was nothing to differentiate the moment from any other, besides now that in a world where for as long as I could remember I’d been the only one alive, here she was standing, in our bedroom, at the window, beyond our bed. She had her back turned to me. Her hair was long.

She did not stutter as I entered, as if my presence to her was as steadfast and uncommon as the coming and going of a moon. I immediately could not remember what the house had felt like so long without her, though I also didn’t rush to take her in my arms. The room felt wider than it had been all the other times I’d come into it, endlessly repeating, on the tape, flush to my mind. I felt myself speak aloud to say her name but nothing came out, or I couldn’t hear me.