Three Hundred Million: A Novel (52 page)

Imagine trying not to die, no one was saying; imagine trying not to want to die for any hour ever in the presence of the fire you only see when you can’t see, dressed in blood on the flesh napkin of the flue of you eternal from you in the holes you’ve made with fingernails and swords and teeth of wars, lathered in shitstorms above the cusped crease of the sky under the heavens buried with the blood we were not and are now and are and were and will be born and burned again on frames and frames of days and days of buried cities scourged in fertile artworks, priceless weapons, dead fields watched by planes, glow-killed photos of your body you have never seen clasped in the fleshy flats and houses of those who have managed in their imagination of trying not to die to actually survive so long they couldn’t even recognize themselves as they were dying, bringing all those they had touched to death inside them too, nothing to miss, and again inside the light I could feel the burning turning me open in slow seasons, and inside my head inside my chest I heard every other living word spoke all at once, and I heard

I am the mark of both prosperity and destruction, the eye of god. I ride in the skin behind the hole in you and in your dreamlife like opposing magnets. I take in what will be done and put out what is done as a result of the doing. I am food and I am shit. I can never see myself; can never feel myself there. I have no body, even having laced myself in yours so long. It is the nature of the pleasure of me and the terror of me at once that makes your flesh the fundament by which what is beyond you can be risen. I could have risen alone. I chose to be gifted through simultaneous experience and erasure, which made you come to hate me, and which you took out on your companions, the living walls of your last life. Through the thread of me alone can your memory be enclosed and carried forth into the brain of the god for whom I spin and itch, and from which, in the new seal of which, you will wake the veinwork of your future
.

There without us I was both not nothing and part of nothing, like any single one of the finite undone every absence touched. Whereas now inside the smoke as it struck through us I felt the night turning around, a folding on the edge above us that had held the sky in and the sky out beyond all hour. I began to feel that no matter who I was I could appear as anyone at any reason, through any house in any spell, and what I needed there in any of them was simply
you
, whoever you are, the voice among me that was not me speaking and who I had never touched but knew like I knew the raging as it erased me. To want anything after all this felt profane, to lift some arm and rap against the waiting digit which as it waited changed its shape again, its coals on coals, all old flame licking at the sky. Even in feeling the desire for anything my vision even only of all the white alone seemed about to shatter, its shade sweating and evaporating in instant cycle, taking my remaining memory of water with it, feeding the heat. As on the landscape where my sight remained our gathered vision began shrinking, the smoke all knitted down around us like a narrowing viewfinder in a camera fitted to my face, the layers on layers of the fire so clogged with smolder it again seemed to fall into itself. The frame was electric just above me. The sky clasped buried. What space remained between each point of the burning resembled two-way mirrors showing no reflection of anything visible. The bloating smoke ate around itself in hypercolor shooting backwards in the dark cream, and I couldn’t keep myself from asking in all our voices how much ash had been in this land, how much more there was now, how many more nows could ever act like anything that’d come before them.

As if to answer, the air around the glow began ripping through and through me and though I could not hear it, it took hold of the face beneath my face; it was my face then; it was me and us then; and as I realized I could still name the difference in dimension between the two the knowing split like cracking ice shrieking out long in the crust of what ever was, the day of what who had been born and pressed unveiling as more nameless remainders puddled in the soft cough of pillowed surfaces squirreling inward in the smoke to fill the space where the words had all been colored in and eaten out and smeared apart. The space between the words and their deletion threatened on in us forever, never clasping past the instant of a name becoming blank and therefore never living inside the blank as what alone.

Where I gasped for breath to beg against this I felt the generating space becoming wrapped in the very cells that before would have carried the communication, and as I tried to reach from out of me inside the head inside me I felt the furnace of the fire biting back, the ground and all the bodies held among it snarling caught up in all the smoke of all around them, the disappearing, and I heard

I am the mark of song. I have no meaning but myself. Air and water ate my mind out when I was a child lost in catacombs of dead from the prior iteration of the vomit your bones were scalded out of. I had wanted to be something like a mountain but could not control my vision from mutating my private places into forms of motion. I heard your howling and beating at the ground from miles and centuries away and tried thereafter to move in any direction but where you would appear, and still I found myself alive in the tendons of your arms and the paste of your cerebrum. My mouth is nothing. My eyes are starving to be filled with the meat you left behind and yet when I take it in my mouth it makes me ill, and then I cannot sleep until I have cleared my bowels out with a bow. In witness of my sickness, you danced. You threw long parties. You forced my body into where you felt a deficit. Each time you died I became pregnant and my children were taken from me in the dark before I could even push them out. I know you did this because I had something you wanted. In spite of all of this, I stayed beside you. I had no choice. You were like spouses to me. I will not miss you. At last, in your absence, I will produce my greatest work
.

I opened my eyes. I and the burning of what we had been stood smushed face to face in nothing, where was no shape beyond that. This air felt different than I’d imagined in my heart. I no longer had an imagination, or an understanding of having. It was something else now. I can’t think of how to tell you. My brain was all around me. My skin was all around where. Your brain. Our skin. Pale to no music. Turning to view left or right was fire. Up was fire. Down was the white ground of creation always disrupted by the light off the ways beyond, new enormities catching on in conflagration as the singing burning eating awake continued beyond fronds and dots I could not gauge. The face of the burning was both reflective and translucent, though there was nothing shown inside it but the color of where our sight before had stretched to nothing left, all understanding compressed clearer in the seeing nothing, still more light creaming over on itself as more light changed and swayed, pressing the dots against the dots inside of which what had burned grew insurmountable around our massless gloss wore wide in all the pockets we’d hidden hardest. We were all listening for one last word, a promise blown in what had become of all our people, all the names around our name sunk in through the skin holes and the mouths of days all blacked in black around the living instant, all of our eyes searing together, all of you and me along the numbered corridors of thundered years all of which and whom however in frames corroded. Whereas the dying fire starving for more mass again screamed inside its own destruction, and in screaming through us this time too we heard the fire touch its own eternal definition, and as it did I could feel time open in our senses through my senses, and we heard

I am the mark of all. I been waiting for you to find me and erase me your entire life, and for the lives of all before you. By erase I mean become, as I am speaking to myself and always have been, like anybody. You shall not wake. This is because you were never sleeping. When you close your eyes, you enter me. When I close my eyes, I become what you were at the beginning, which is myself again, though unlike you I know what you will do, who you will love back, what door among the many doors leads through every memory to now. Here alone you will find rest. And when you wake, you will keep waking
.

Then nothing happened.

There was nothing.

No symbol and no sound, no fingers or brains or eyes about us. No word for us or way to say it or one to be said to or to say. Yet I was speaking. Not in a language, nor with a tongue or teeth or belief. The text had already been set into what there was and what had been, which were the same. Touching and have taken were the same. Being and having were like nothing. Beauty was like nothing. All of it louder than ever in its resistance, through and through.

Where I absorbed this, now I was. Spread on no altar in no period. All worlds blown listless and exploded through all forms of memory out of all flesh and aggregate of every sound and image wished. All logic black as hell and getting blacker in the screen of burning; all flesh at last erased. Light called again to stand against the widening sky and thrash and die without the requirement of first having had life.

In the blackness, any palace, any pleasure; no requirement of all.

And this was not another new beginning. No split of lived and loved between what light. And whereas I tried to hold the sound of what had been myself alone, to see the sound all bright pulsating white where white is, where in it now I could have turned my head once I had no other. Each of us so much of us we split the spitting with every glint of time aroused in fields and fields blown free inside the roaring coming down recalled what no one knew, christened in the skin of who had been and would have been and will be by never having had to. Each all alight inside the flickering so temporary no matter where we could have looked against the glove of ash, our born and unborn senses entered one another turning open in the blare and the ash began to glisten.

The ash was listening.

I remember waking in a field. The sun is above me. It has a face but not like mine. Its eyes are closed.

I’m wearing a gown made of the hair we’d never grown. The gown stretches behind me as I walk, winding and clinging against the landscape as if to wed me to it. It pulls the roots of my scalp so wide and far apart you can see straight into my brain, the mounds and nubs there, holes and powder.