I woke in smoke. This time the smoke was the beginning, no longer unwinding into nothing as its layers grew apart. The light surrounded my body on the inside, contained in space that seemed hidden from all the rest of time that I remembered. I knew my name was or had been Flood but could not say it and it no longer felt like language. Instead I could hear several hundred interruptions anytime I tried to think.
The smoke was pouring from my face. From my eyes and from my earholes, growing even thicker when I would try to speak or breathe. The smoke made windows on the air. Eras opened. From the windows there stretched long columns that seemed to form the world, though every column extended only into further reaching. All directions led exactly the same way, like no matter where I went the smoke poured from me and obscured the rest of what could be into more of what it was already: inside and outside me, all of everything.
FLOOD: I don’t know where I am. I’m trapped inside here. I’m not sure where here is, what it connects to, but I am beginning to believe I’ve been caught. Recorded. Or, not recorded—rather, I am rendered as if on a film, an unscrolling repetition owned by the smoke’s repeating gesture, though at the same time, I am alive. My mind is my mind and I believe it but beyond me is something else, not the world as it always had been, but the shell of it. Something is altered. The air is flat and has no taste. It feels like there is something else surrounding the space here, and the something else is where I used to be.
I crawled and crawled along the floor of the ground of the extending darkness. The grain beneath me felt synthetic and did not stick to my body. Just beneath the layer of the ground the grit the surface stood on churned and buzzed, as if being processed and so created only as I touched it, as if underneath the floor of all creation the only thing keeping the floor from sucking in around me into some screaming hole was that I needed somewhere else to go.
And as if only because it was truly what I needed, out of the smoke the world resolved. There were mounds, then there were horizons. I began to recognize out of the stretching amassments local zones of scenery: fields and skylines, holes and corners, foliage like icing, invisible stars. One stroke of familiarity procured the next, aligning the space into further aggregates of definition.
Out of the color of the night, there appeared buildings in the distance, houses, homes. There were networks of understanding and direction. Wires draped the air like no one’s trees. The unfamiliar felt familiar. I began to recognize coordinates of locations I had been through sometime before, though I could not remember when or why. None of the homes seemed like mine. And yet I could read from a long way off how it looked inside architecturally. As if the maps were in my brain. Or as if even where the walls were they were just like more of the smoke I’d spit up; all lines made totally of me. I could not feel any people.
The world was silent. There was no one. All air was nothing but itself, every inch captured into the residue of what it’d always seemed to be to anybody altogether. The only place that wasn’t all the rest was where I felt me in the color of my mind. My thoughts burned on through where my skull was, slowly. They wrapped around me and repeated no matter how much I wished they wouldn’t, or wished they would so hard at least I couldn’t control it. Often the words would take over my brain so much I could not see anything when they were being spoken.
FLOOD: Mostly I can’t alter how I move. It’s like there is this dictation of my presence that tells me what to do, or what I am already doing, or what I have done. And within that, there will be these moments where I am unable to stop myself speaking aloud in a very specific way. The language rips out of my mouth, though it is not actually me speaking. It’s like subtitles in a film. I’m made to say it shaped exactly where I am, as if the continuity of the air were dependent on it, defined by it, could not go on without. It is only in here, far inside me, that I can speak freely, and can understand the terror of believing I was wholly me when I was not. Anytime could be the last time I can speak to you as I am now, though I would likely never know. The tape flutters back and forth between these modes without my knowing. I could go on being beyond myself maybe forever, repeating the same things all seeming each time to me new, forced to continue in a loop, while through all the land, a shapeless language scrolled in silent history, rising against me. To be honest, it doesn’t feel that different from always, only now I know I used to not be the only one.
Years had come, the years were coming, the years had went again, the years were years.
The days inside the years were ours to live in and we had lived in them and now did not.
Or did we live in them again, in repetition. I can’t remember. There was the heaving sky.
There was tonight: the excess weight of missing color in the silent locks of empty homes.
The days of us destroyed. Days beaten as with hammers by the hands we do not have.
Homes so thick there was no longer air between them, as hours passed and disappeared.
The spectators and the actors. I can feel you in here even still. Feel you watching, taking.
Even with your body, you have a body. You can be harmed still. Erased from forever.
Yes, yes, in death, any of us is every inch as open as any had been ever, and even softer.
I encourage you not to breathe at all without the mask on. Also do not: open your eyes.
The kind of light remaining, which you will never touch, destroys all living memory.
Anywhere I look in here I can’t see anywhere inside here, wracked with its starvation.
The void of our history has been colonized, conditioned. It is desperate. It wants to fuck.
I hear machines. I see the sea replicating in its nothing, pushing sand against the sand.
I cannot be the machines. I cannot reach the sea. I can’t find where what was waiting.
The sand doesn’t miss anything about what bodies did upon it, nor does all nature.
I am alive inside this tape. Everything I was is still outside the tape. The tape repeats.
I saw two bears beat the shit out of each other and they were still there the next day.
I don’t want this and it doesn’t want me. My video-body resists supplying what I need.
Teeth fall out of my head sometimes from all the shaking but then I get new teeth.
My hands are larger than my hands were ever. My aorta snorts my blood like drugs.
Some days in here I get up and it’s the day I got up into the day before again.
I do the same things I did the day before because I have to to get to where I am today.
Where’s that.
Where’s what. Who are you. What.
Where are you today I mean. Are you happy.
Does it matter.
It probably matters. Yes.
I’ll have you know I killed myself.
How did you kill yourself.
By getting older. By letting me get older. By going on. And I still am.
Do you regret it.
I can’t remember.
FLOOD: See how that happened? The interruption? I can remember it right now, the words that had just been spoken through me, in the film. That the tape can be switched out of makes me think there’s not wholly nothing left to live with. Though usually within minutes of my being able again to talk freely inside my mind I will forget exactly what has gone on in the tape here in between. I believe this is a feature of self-preservation of the nature of my present brain state, beyond the dead. The other thing about that time is, as you might have noticed, there is something other on the tape in there with me too. Someone speaking back toward me in bold font from inside me, inside the version of my brain the tape controls. I can hear it in my chest and in the air I’m breathing. It is as if this person can hear the scripted thinking in the contained space of the tape and answer back, can hear me when I respond, though my responses are also scripted. I don’t think this other person can still hear me when I am talking as I am now. I don’t know who this person is. I think it only familiar because I have heard it already several thousand times repeated. And yet already now I realize I can’t remember what inside the tape I’m doing or what the words were beyond the fact that they were said. I do remember having tried to kill myself, by the way, or at least trying to kill the me in this recording. I’ve thrown myself off a bridge. I have thrown myself off a roof and from a building. I have taken thousands of many different kinds of pills. I’ve used knives and ropes and guns and other manners of destruction. If you were in here alone I think you might have tried at least once too. Though each time when I die I just end up where I began, rolled in the smoke, and again the smoke resolves into the world alone. I admit I do like hearing the woman. It makes me feel clearer, as if sometimes inside the tape there is somewhere to want to be, unless being dead feels just the same as living, or if every minute in the tape is the beginning of another life. Only in these glitches I can remember the world before now, the world we shared, even if I don’t know how I got from there to here, or what could be coming for me now, forever.
The land of America was catacombs, but without bodies. Even better in our absence I could see upon the land again the shape of where we had lived off the dirt. The sloping earth cupped runoff from the hills of houses held above it, the walls of these here tilted toward where in years before the children would eat and play on in the image of their begetters; eggs had been hidden several Easters running for the chocolate and the coins, some still hidden; later in the nights the older children might have come to lie upon the nook of something simple with their hands up one another’s skirts, or simply spread out on a blanket to see a disc move black across the moon.
The absence of the people on the land here was written over by what grew in behind it. Nowhere the cords of backbones and pillared skull shifts missing refracted on the dry air overrun with centuries of cigarettes and cash and floppy hate sex and grieving terror. Where the bodies did not have to persist now, days smelled better and doors did not open and plants began to grow over the mucus of the interminable graves, erupting in white opera a leak of the song of thriving air all hot with something unlike people. Mites that once would have eaten out our eyes instead went into their own ways to purr in the white sun choked against a thicker plank of netting, our continuity disregarded. The grass unburied rose, licked and whispered at the homes’ faces like pubic hair around a hundred million dicks.
No one needs you, the dream was saying. There is always something.
The homes alone hid everything we believed we could be completely carried on by. The gorgeous clothes clapped in the closets, replicated for endless forms of bodies, went on in the dark and wore their own lives. No object itself actually believed in what it had been envisioned to embody. Death already understood and so did not require the cooperation of gloves and quilts and books and urns and knives and wire, or even trees or nests or glass or lengths of cold air left hanging in a pasture without marking. You didn’t have to see or name the essence of anything to feel it trying to continue without us. The walls of every inch seemed thicker even just knowing what they were forced to contain, a future without new blood: phantoms not of us but ideas of time still caught counting among the homes and days we’d been in where there was nothing left to be now. Both as if we still were there and had never been, leaving the air unconsumed to clap around itself and squirt from centers a waking layer in which something else would be spread onward and licked upon the landscape.
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.
Many of the houses had been destroyed. I don’t know what the people who had lived in the houses had done to one another before there was no one left. There seemed to have been fires, weapons, combat. I could smell the stretch of fists over bones and blood within them laced into the curtain of nothing that enveloped my head. It was a sense so general it was like religion.
From out of the rubble between homes I sometimes took things I thought might make me feel more alive again, or at least more like something like myself. So much junk had been drug out into the light, lying in packs or droves along the circuits of the world of man. There was nothing or no one now to stop me from claiming as my own whatever had provided that security to endless others in the years their bodies still had color, warmth. Money meant nothing now but it still felt ingratiating in some way to heave hundreds of hundreds out of an unlocked bank and rub them on my body, covering my face. Cash actually seemed to mean more now that there was no way left to spend it, like countless little copied quilts, full of the stink of men and boys electric with the intention of what this image could be traded in for, anything. Each bill was its own minor work of shitty art. It felt even better still to burn the bills and watch them turn to ash on the air and breathe it. I could see inside the incinerating flames long years of barfing colors just as quickly again gone.
I could feel the houses watching me. I did not want to go inside them. I was afraid of the color of the beds, of the glass in the frames over the pictures of the people who had lived inside them. No essence to the maps. I knew what they could be hiding, and wanted to keep the possibility of that existence in existence as long as possible without actually having to verify or deny it.
There were many other sorts of cover, niches to impose myself through. Sometimes in stores or buildings built for storage, I found gowns and suit coats, pajamas, bras, piled in pyres as if someone had meant to erase them from the world. In the fibers of the most worn-out garments I could almost hear the breathing skin of who had worn them, wishing for the cells again to fill the fabric out, but the light of the unending tape was brighter, louder. I could hear nothing in them but what they were, the fabric and the clasps, all as if always only ever never worn.
In piles and under dirt I found candles burnt and unburnt; in kennels I found ID tags for pets long buried or otherwise now disappeared; in office buildings I found dead phones that gave no dial tone and held no voice beyond the one I could hear wanting its way there refracted back throughout me; in restaurants I found whole drawers of polished silver, used in their private ways to feed the bodies more mass to build themselves out of. How many mouths had been on any fork or knife forever. I couldn’t taste them in the curves, though I could hear them chewing, digesting, barfing. It sounded like falling asleep in sunlight. It didn’t burn. I could forget how anything had felt now beyond what it was actually doing. In libraries, every book I touched seemed to just be saying nothing in a language no one had ever actually spoken. In rooms no one had ever slept in I read aloud until I couldn’t feel my face, always waiting again for the range of the tape to come to its current end and begin again in a state wherein upon finding anything it seemed all new. No matter how many times the tape of me began again, I still came each time to the same lack in every object, the same lingering presence of anyone but me removed from anything I could ever understand now.
FLOOD: Worse than the sense of following or being followed was the sense that the presence I was after or that was after me was something held beyond the possibility of the world. Always where there was smoke or totem on the tape there was a greater sense of what it had been created by, curated by, who had loved it and in what order, what began and ended in its presence, what it carried and enabled by simply being. The past was always not enough to not stop the present from still being exactly as it was, even if what that was now was an impossibly repeating recording of a world where no one remained alive as far as I could see but me. But there was something to it also more than time. Something outside the potential aspect of god or what had been or could be. Something a language didn’t own. Even as I’d always felt I could not have a relationship with this sort of surface of experience in the human world, and so too in this version copied from the reality of itself, having been relegated in this way to such an atmosphere devoid of all active presences outside my own mind, I felt a pressing at the edges of all things inside here even more than ever. It was as if at every rounding aspect of the world there was just at the cusp of the face it demonstrated itself to me through, something like a reflection buried in its own idea of being. As if each point of the world existed only bearing completely on the idea that it could at any instant be completely ripped apart, and then inhabited by its destruction, the resulting nothing. Every object or field or sense of air was as much exactly everything it wasn’t, and depended on that constantly, in such a feverish state of ongoing death and bliss it couldn’t do anything but be exactly what it was. And so the same was true of me and always had been. And even more so now that I could feel it in all else, even if the way I understood it was only in this buried way of speaking, this private communication I couldn’t even feel me having. This meant there was something of me wholly in you; you being whoever has heard a word that I am saying; and of course that could be no one; and maybe even better being no one; but regardless, it was in this sense of a constant ongoing impossible-to-quantify-or-even-acknowledge-fully network of senses of relation with everything beyond myself that I was allowed to go on being whatever I was. It was in the aggregate of all those negations, and the worlds buried in the access points our bodies had used for centuries to understand them—such as the money and the clothes, and even other people—that I had any chance to live at all. My life, then, and yours, all of whoever, was simply the beginning of the outline of a pixel in an eye inside a face connected to a form that fed off everything we could never develop into while alive. Though that thing had a life, too, and had a death, too, and an understanding of something like god. And that was also our life and our death and god. It was the sum totality of all these fields on fields and lives of lives forever in the tape that I could feel suddenly depending on me every instant to do whatever I would always, and what was always just beyond that waiting to become. Each second that I went on in this understanding was the skin of the beginning. In the light of that beginning, I also knew I would forget all of this the second I stopped thinking it, like right now.
The days went on and on inside me. During the days I lived repeated days as days do.
Even as I continued in repetition of the days repeated, age gathered in me under lard.
And of course still I wanted out. Even having felt a possibility of totality presented in me.
I wanted out. I wanted out. I needed out, more so. And the tape depended on this.
The tape could only be the tape inasmuch as I wanted there to be something more to it.
My face refused to change. I was already wrinkled beyond recognition to me and all else.
Blood curls rose up in my hair like lanyards, though only in the hair inside of my skull.
I went on being exactly me, no matter how much I fought against it by trying to be more.
From outside me I look nice. I feel I am nice: a nice person. I feel no beast, though I am.
In every hour that I lived I could feel your death, see your death in everything you did.
When I watched you die just like anybody I was using both my hands to help you die.
You were any person, ever. You would not survive me. Your relics and icons would burn.
I watched without having to see or take part or understand it. I did not hold your hand.
I stood beside you in the light and watched you die and then I watched you die again.
The manner of your death may have pretended it was something. Cancer, or pneumonia.
But it was me. Your death was me. It was your mom and dad. It was you, too. It was us.
Your death lives on in every element of the face of the real. As does every other death.
All one mind sunning and stuffed full with all the other memories of all the others held.
Your body changed colors once you had left it. It was burned or buried full of its ideas.
I walked around inside your home. Your rooms without you seem much larger.
I have touched your photo on the face. Any and all of our faces. The long white hours.
Soon any grace will be destroyed. Was there something you wanted to save from there.
Was there a thing you meant to keep. A word a mode a box a day a wish a mesh of arms.
The singing all throughout your sternum as your body turned to sod inside the ground.
What does it smell like. My dead body.
It smells like molding trees. Or like some apples in a big sun. It smells bad.
Do you wish there weren’t any smell at all to smell of me forever.
I don’t know what I wish.
Try and think of it.
I can’t. It splits open. It comes apart.
Try harder, fuckface. And keep trying. There is definitely a try. There is definitely a window.
B.: My name is B. Or at least that’s the name Flood has given you to know me by, though it’s not really my name. I have had a lot of names, it feels like. I don’t remember any of them. The name is not important. Flood’s name’s not Flood. Your name’s not really your name either, and so on. There are people, and there are minds, and in the minds there are corridors and glue and other people. There are unique locations on the earth, accessible only through certain openings available only for short periods of time while the locations are available and can be opened into the other locations. This is the system of the world. The temporary doors to the unique locations are carried in our bodies, in thoughts. They are carried in moments and forms and quickly disappearing spaces. I am speaking to you from one of those locations. Please don’t tell him that I have. He thinks he is the only one who can speak outside the speaking in the space beyond the tape, though he is not. He thinks the thoughts he has inside these boxes are not recorded and repeated though they are recorded and repeated, too. There are many tapes, each one believing that the matter they contain is theirs, and that the space beyond them has been disrupted in their absence, or otherwise compromised or damaged or even totally destroyed. Where you were is where you are. But none of this is what I meant to come to tell you. I wanted you to know that everything that has been said up to this point is real. The murders, the boys and bodies, the investigation, the moving from one shape to the next, the other detectives’ thinking: all of this is what was done. And is still being done. Any distortions in the story are the story. It is around you, in the hour of your day. It may seem this is a book that you are reading, and when you close it what it contains is put away. It is not like that. There is a force who moves among our bodies, coming through your holes into the world and slowly knitting. It will be the ending of us all, in a form beyond simply a body. This is not necessarily a bad thing. You are surrounded by mirrors. You make the world out of your mind. The same is true of those you love. You are not dead and you will never be and you are dead and you are not alive and you’re alive and you will never be.
So, like, into the light. The endless daylight. There was a beginning and end, but each day again the beginning began again and the end ended again and nothing changed and nothing grew into anything beyond the tape, which was what I’d always been. The captured colors of the people clasped around me without scent or warmth, nothing to hold still against and listen, no music beyond the other tapes that all seemed blank. I could not think of the name for anything even as I remembered how to use it. There seemed no reason, or concept of reason. When I slept, hoping to wake up anywhere beyond here, I did not dream, or the dreams were just of wide black walls dividing me from everything else ever. After lying down it would be so hard to get back up, my joints and blood so stiff it was as if I’d become part of the surface I’d lain down on. But soon always each stretch of film proved it did not need me and let me always continue going. Each thing that felt new was something I’d already touched and tried to remember that I had and had failed to remember.
The buildings sprawled and held and continued being exactly what they were. Even as far as the world went there seemed spaces I was not meant to be undertaken by. Mostly these were always all the homes. At the mouth of any house where someone had lived a life, I would begin shaking. I’d shake so hard I couldn’t feel my blood, like it was falling out from inside me into deeper crevices divorced from eternity. The vibration in me building false heat would coil so hot and thick I would fall down on the earth sometimes and not be able to get up then for even longer than I knew. All throughout the shaking the video did anything it wanted. It seemed like when I was no longer able to take part in it, the world around me was full of everything I’d always wished. I mean that when I couldn’t look or do anything else about it, I could hear people laughing and being alive then. I could feel them at the edges of me asking if I was okay or needed help. I couldn’t see their forms but I could feel it all, all over.
Each time I rose again there was no one there. This of course again redoubled in me the feeling of wanting to find someone inside the tape, even knowing I’d suffered some latent mirage of purpose. The longer I looked for others and could not find them, or was at least not allowed to feel I had really, the smaller the air seemed somehow, which worked backwards from how I would have expected. There was only me among them breathing, being precisely the thing they weren’t.
Throughout it all I felt that hovered presence in my head, beyond even just my thinking; it was more a kind of perverted area wanting something to attach to, a remainder of what life had been once, if only to provide context for its wired content, my memory; otherwise all that I had been just seemed a sprawl of ongoing minor wrecks, a mass of blackness like the dreamworlds where there wasn’t even the idea of something like our land.
And yet nothing new about the hours came forth on their own besides where sometimes the tape would hiss suddenly with static, interrupting the true lines of the supposed real. Glitches would appear or buzz out of the pixels. Whole big lightning-like strikes of wavering would lurch out through the horizontal beams of day. During these times I’d get down on both my knees and beg the buzzing not to stop but to move into me, too, to wrap me over, and it never would. Always the buzzing and razing only hit the land and fuzzed it out into a world less like myself. Sometimes it would obscure my skin a bit or pull my face apart but I could still feel me going on exactly the same, just in different temporary costume.
Anyway, there was no one to tell me what seemed new from the outside, how they couldn’t discern me now from what I’d been just before, or even where the land was and I wasn’t. And yet thereafter when I could see again and could stand again and began to walk among more space, I knew there was something lost about me I might remember sometime that there had been something there before at least, something rolled and wet about the homes and people missing from them and my body and my arms and mouth and face and hair, and even if I never remembered what it was, even in feeling nothing knowing nothing seeming nothing, there was still this little glimmer about the possibility of any instant coming apart from what it was. Where the replicating light inside the tape struck and stuck itself against me over and over I could feel inside the warming flesh there an alternating wish for light, a thing pulling or being pulled or wanting for wanting or knowing the want for want had once been there within the idea of me. Whether this made the hours that much harder or warmer going forward in the hours on hours I have no idea and do not wish to, so if you know please do not say. I wouldn’t hear you anyway, regardless, could I, but there is the shaking of the knowledge of the never-sent response, from which some nights there falls the language of the whole, to which every instant in every body has been appended, regardless of what luck.
FLOOD: Already more time has passed here between my ability to comment on myself than I remember having passed in prior iterations. My voice itself was bleeding. The whole thing was a trick. I was not really aware that I could count time in this manner but I could feel it. It reminds me more than any of this how it felt outside the tape to live inside the day: time leaping or erasing when I most wished it wouldn’t, and going by the longest when I wished it wouldn’t. It feels like how I’ve always imagined it would feel to die, though slowed down so slow it seems like living.
Another problem is is that there’s like seven hundred ways to talk here, to the no one.
Some of these ways of talking become deleted. Some things you say don’t get uttered.
Like one night I woke up remembering everything I’d ever done in life. Its transcription.
I tried to say everything about me at the same time aloud to anyone so I’d remember.
But when I tried to say it like that or say it at all inside that or speak at all I blacked out.
As if the tape got paused and rewound, or stopped and edited, by someone else. Not god.
Someone outside the machine fucking with the machine because I was learning about me.
I blacked out in the black and saw the black inside me and it was black inside and out.
In the second blackness there were people all around me, beating at me, laughing, knives.
I closed my eyes to hide from being beaten and behind my eyes I saw the world.
The world exactly as I wanted. Without death and beyond number. Held against another.
When I woke again it was like any other time. I remembered remembering but not what.
The years of anyone subtracted, hid forever. The contracting skin and lesions of the dead.
Here all surrounded by the absence of anyone I did not know, which is everyone but me.
I see their belongings and touch the surfaces and can imagine them being killed.
Can smell their blood without the smell there, in a necklace or a doorknob, a bit of land.
I can tell the dying had to hurt. That it must have, though who would really know.
I imagine I’m the one who killed them. I’m who was right there, laughing too.
In every instant every death revises itself to the instant dragging on without the rest.
I ate the skin off of your face. I remembered that just right now. I’m about to forget.
But when your skin came off there was this color like I’ve never seen in any body ever.
It was nothing different than the rest. It felt the same as every other. It wasn’t mine.
I saw the same color emit again when I killed someone else again the next day.
And the next day. The tape wound on. I wound the tape. I was the tape and I was you.
My flesh feels like it’s made of all the other flesh I can’t remember. It must be everybody.
You mean me too. You mean I am in you.
You are in me. It hurts.
But if everybody is also in you, then so what. That’s nothing special about me. All those bodies, all of them in death shaped just the same.
I don’t even remember who you are.
I can’t help it.
And that is worse than having died.
No it isn’t.
How would you know, you didn’t die.
How do you know I didn’t? I can’t feel me breathing. I can’t seem to do anything I want. I can’t seem to get where I am going, no matter where that is. How is that any different any day from dying?
You are alive.
Prove it.
There’s only one way to prove it, and then it would no longer then be true.
Go ahead.
You know I won’t. I mean, I can’t. Not to say I wouldn’t. God knows there have been times I wanted to. What person ever didn’t want to kill every person ever, in the history of the world.
You can’t because you’re dead, right? So you are not real.
Yes, I’m dead. And so? So what. I’m as real as any pixel in your face. What’s any different about me now than I was ever, to you or anybody, including me.
Not dying when everybody else did die is like dying harder than everybody else.
You’re dumb.
I am dumb. So what if I am dumb. So what if I’m alive. So what if what. So. So. So.
Stop it. That’s not what life is. To say it like that. That’s not being alive. I would know.
Did I tell you I tried to kill myself too. I tried to come along. To be a person with the rest.
Did I already tell you. It didn’t work. Me killing myself, I couldn’t do it. I tried hard.
In my life before people started killing each other more than usual I tried so many times.
I tried by not trying. I said words like, Fuck god, and Fuck America, and Fuck fuck.
Every day I would say something like, I am going to fucking kill myself motherfucker.
But I never even really tried. To be honest, I couldn’t imagine the world without me.
I continued living. I lived in America. I tried in America. A lot of other people did die.
Then all of you died. Every single one of you. Except me. I went on on this tape alone.
Pretty much if you are reading this or seeing this, however, you are dead and I’m alive.
Though in another way it could be like I am dead and you are living in the flood function.
Because where you are, beyond human existence, it will probably seem like life to you.
Whatever you are experiencing there will feel like your life going on forever and yes.
Even if everyone in America is dead as fuck if you are hearing this you will think: Life.
Even if you are in there wanting to kill yourself you’ll still be thinking something yours.
That is so yours. Please take it. Please let it be you. Forget your arms. There is the word.
I wonder if you’re having a great day in your world there, either way. I hope you are.
I hope you are. I need a message of hope here so I will make one, even if it is nothing.
FLOOD: I didn’t believe anything I said even as I said it. It kept on coming out no matter what I did behind my face in the language. It would not stop. I could already see what was coming for me in every element and yet when it hit it felt like nothing I could have expected. Like histories erased. Like light that didn’t want me in it but was the only fiber of the world.
How many years could I have gone on in here in repetition. How long could the tape continue to repeat me without becoming thin in places, blacking out. It was like the tape went on because I knew it shouldn’t. It was like the tape was my whole mind. Where was my mind in anyone now not appearing. Would I be able to tell the difference between when my body began to be eaten apart by the wear of the reading eye over the band of color language that made me what I was. Already my hands and body seemed so old, so pulled apart from how they seemed to want to remember having felt all they ever had, though I could not remember any actual time and setting attached to that. Only the gaps. The tape was the gaps in us. Every sense of myself was only a residue floating on the cusp of a world long disappeared from underneath itself.
I kept expecting the ground to fall out beneath my feet, to light me down into a space beneath the image, even less than nothing. The blight of my mind inside the tape hid in a secret mind like what we’d always thought of as heaven, or a black hole carried in the grain of the make of everything unseen until you were encompassed by it. Suddenly anything the tape could not contain made more sense to me than any of the ruins and wrecks of landscapes, or the terrifying forms of empty homes, however inconceivable, no less real, whereas here I was only pressed forever in no understanding, no longer even sure how much of me remained in me and less so every second.
And yet the ground did not open up. The sky remained in place and kept its color to itself. No wear would change the world around me any less than how time in my human body had eaten into me without me knowing. When sometime likely soon the tape no longer was able to turn its gears over and again repeating, it would feel exactly like going forward did. What I carried in my blood would always remain forever only mine, all connection to any possible space beyond the daily reality of being as black and inaccessible as an eye seeing itself. Every iteration of the repetition would begin to seem more and more the way it had always been forever until I couldn’t tell the difference between one day and the rest. Knowing I wouldn’t know already hurt more than never having had. Death here would feel just the same as living.
Can I tell you about our life together.
Please don’t.
It will feel good for you to hear it.
I won’t remember.
It will feel good for you to hear, even if you don’t remember. You can remember it while I’m saying it. You can believe me.
I can’t. It won’t.
You were my husband.
No.
You loved me and I loved you.
I was never married. I lived alone.
We lived inside a house together and we tried. We both had lives of long hours apart. We did anyway everything we could. You went and wore a uniform and carried a weapon and talked to people in the streets and did as you were told and hoped if you worked hard enough as a person you could move beyond that point to something that made you feel less fucked each day a little less and were happy in between. I tried hard too and had different jobs I hated even more than you hated yours and at night when I came home you were often still working and I would try to stay up so I could see you when you came in but usually by the time you did come you were so tired you just lay down and passed or I was already asleep. We both ate out of boxes. I remember when we shared meals. That was great. That was enough.
You’re not a person. I’m not a person. Not anymore. Look at this place.
Why does it matter what a place is.
Because I can’t see anything else.
People died because they did. Because they had to. You’re only alive as anybody else. You are only on the far side of any mirror.
You are not there.
You hear me.
No I don’t. I can’t. The tape’s about to end. Then I’ll just have to start over.
How can you know the tape’s about to end if you can’t remember anything.
I feel it melting in my center, its ending and beginning.
That is me. You were my husband and I loved you. This is only one part of me among the many ways that I have been and am and will be, but it is still true. It is true and has been always.
Goodbye.
The face of the sky refused to change. Even in the lash of the breadth of the dead in my memory, the colors of the world wouldn’t let me be released. In every layer of the faces of the rooms, the smoke waited to encamp my mind and repeat its time over and again even in the absence of any decay. The ground made not of bones and flesh turned back to loam but forever video.
I could already feel me not remembering to remember the next self-interrupting thing I thought and wanted to know I knew. I could already not quite be anything I was already.
FLOOD: I don’t know what else to do. Inside the tape I hear me saying these things out loud to the voice and I can’t stop it, though I know it isn’t real. Or, I know I feel inside me that it isn’t, and I can believe it, can feel it coursing through the image of me, but I can’t stop the slow estrangement of what I know and what I want. There are things a person turns to, to believe in, so that he can find a way even to stand up. In this way I could almost not fault anyone for anything they’ve ever done or wished upon a person, though I don’t think I believe that. I think the voice is many people, shifting and aping. All the people I had known. All the people I had not known and never would know but still lived side by side with. All of us who had tried inside the world to live. All after something there among us, beyond cognition. Sometimes it seems as if we’re all together sleeping in a single long white room, all breathing in the same air back and forth into each other and thereby seeding what goes on inside the brain with threads and bits of nowhere squeezed from feeling and the strains of repetition on the body of those feelings being moved through over and over, mushing the colors we have harbored among one another into new colors shifting like cities underneath the blanket of the night. Sometimes I try inside my body to force me awake from that state, there beside you, and rise and walk among us, waking no one up, until I find the body of my wife among the many and lie down again beside her, wrap my torso in her arms, moving in the way only I know how to fit within her, and in this position, inside the white room, speaking no word at all, go back to sleep. I am not sure what the machine is that runs this tape or what the tape is or who puts the words into my other mouth, but I think it’s something shapeless like that, some kind of feeling, something in me, in us all. It seems like if I could name it now or ever it would change. Maybe that is all that we have left.
What do you think I’m saying to you this whole time. I am here. I can’t see you but I believe it and I am waiting for you to come.
How did you hear me? I was thinking.
I can always hear you.
This is insane.
Anybody. Every hour.
I said that I am trying.
I don’t know.
Yes, you do. You do and have and will have. You are here held inside what you are and were and see. You are in the skin around me, all around me. This is not me speaking. This is not a tape any more than any other day was always.
If it’s not a tape why does it all just keep repeating.
What didn’t always ever? In everything is every thing. Whether you are alive or not, or want to be or not, there you are. The world can be founded in the mind of any person, and it is the world, over and over, and it is real. The end of America is not the end of America.
God would you please shut the fuck up about America.
Yes I will.
Every time it begins there is the smoke and zero sound. I go into it because I have to.
The smoke comes out of me until there is no smoke left and then I am shining insanely.
It is the same light every time, or if it changes I can’t tell the difference, or is it both.
The light is not reflective. And yet the first thing I always want to do is see myself.
To verify how I am the same, but older. I am me in here. There is no surface that reflects.
I mean no matter what I look into inside the light or beyond it, no confirming image.
All the houses here are painted black. Their walls contain no windows. The grass is high.
The sky is black also for the most part, though on seeming days it might turn gold.
Between the lobes of black on black the colors have no place between to live but ripped.
The color of my hair and skin: I can no longer tell. I am just in it. I walk and wait to die.
I never die, I just start over. And every time, even the same, it feels much worse.
Like I wouldn’t even know if I exploded or if I had no eyes. Or if there were someone.
Some hours, diamonds light the way. They appear in the darkness overhead and bake.
If they aren’t diamonds, I don’t know what they are. They refuse to take my language.
Between the houses sometimes briefly steaming cakes of wet surface appear and hiss.
The substance aches when stepped on. It has blood. It is blood. It is still bleeding.
I want to give it mine. When I cut my hand the blood comes but then the tape starts over.
Fuck. And so I want to go further, right. I have to. I have to go further. There is more.
Even if there is not a reason to live inside a film one must imagine there must be, living.
If not I must pretend. If I can’t pretend I have to anyway, as this dying is not death.
I have to go on in hope, like life was, searching for answers I know will never come.
And so on between the houses to the next house which for the most part is the same.
But in the house there will be different relics of the people who had been there wanting.
I have to assume they died. But what I’m looking for is someone not dead or like me.
What am I. What I find instead is more of bedrooms and rooms and places and food.
I find sometimes lengths of long hair left curled on the rug or on the objects like a brush.
Or like the air. There is a breeze and a kind of heaving, which means it needs me.
So, see then, yes, you are needed. See that. What you said.
I didn’t mean it. This isn’t even me speaking.
Who then.
I don’t know. I cannot stop it. I try not to talk and I still talk.
What if I told you that everything that you’ve seen happen has not happened? That you are spinning. The world all waiting in the day. What if I told you that you have been staring into the same mirror in a small room in the house that you grew up in for so long now you can no longer see your face?
I’ve never seen my face anyway. It’s always just beyond me. Reflections and photographs are masks.
What if I told you I was Gretch Gravey? That I was you and you were me. That everyone I killed was by your hands as I had moved inside you, or just the opposite: you through me. That Gretch Gravey was not a person but a feeling. What if I told you that through all the days of your life, no matter what you felt that you were doing in them then, you were only standing in the dark before a mirror? What if I told you you’re an idea, and what all you’ve felt or said has happened was my mind, that all the heads and all the bodies of all the people ever sleep inside you, feed around you, color the light behind your eyes? What if I told you this too was a recording: what I’m saying, all the colors, all the sound, all your memories and histories and mine and all of everybody’s ever, every inch of where even held beyond the tape you slave on, tapes in tapes in tapes, with no perimeter, no dimension, no rest coming for all era? What would you do then? Who would we be then?
If you told me that I would not believe you. I have lived this. What is said is what was done.
What if I told you you are dead then? That what you feel right now is what it feels like to be dead, and that all this waiting for the coming death that ends the body you believe in will begin another life again? That no matter how many times you reach the ending the space goes on? Not an afterlife or many lives appending, but one long and white unending thrall, against which when you pause inside the going you pick up somewhere else. That eventually you will see through all the eyes there have ever been. A mass of eyes around a silent center.
Why can’t the end just be the end.
A center another cell in another form of world.
I am still in here.
Millions and millions of white halls. Three hundred million is just a number, each death a color, each house a hole into the eye, each body a condition cracked in the edges of a longer length of organ on a gold field undulating in no sound.
I believe when I am dead it will be black.
Close your eyes and look at what that black does. It wraps around you.
It needs no skin.
All I want now is silence.
Then I’ll be silent.
Thank you.
I began to force myself to enter every house as I came to it. I could no longer stand the lurking presence of all possible space I felt waiting in every window. The shaking still came on after me, but I moved on through the shaking and each time came out the other side still full myself. All I had to do was not stop and let the shaking overcome me, just keep going, and not consider what or who might appear. I simply walked into wherever, regardless of what seemed open to my presence or not. The doors would do their job without a key or any sound, and behind them the tape continued, now revealing new kinds of space I hadn’t felt.
The walls inside the homes felt different from the walls of the world outside. It wasn’t necessarily a smell or sound or texture, but the feeling of what had transpired over time in the presence behind closed doors, worked in the weave of the video. It was like another film beneath the film’s face, something the world I knew had been copied over onto. I hadn’t escaped the tape as I understood it, but I had found within it at least something unlike the shape of its unwinding, something previously undefined from my perspective.
In each house I made sure to enter every room. Every possible next place resolved itself as I touched through it. I moved behind the drapes and through the closets. Stairs couldn’t stop me, aiming up or down. I heard the hum of the machines the house had lived with, though if they weren’t already on they wouldn’t turn on. Anything could do only what its extant reality allowed it. Many rooms were still lighted by something I could not tell what.
Anyone had lived once in these homes. In rooms alone I lay in beds where other people presumably had slept and fucked for years, unless all of this was just a set decorated to divide me. This hidden air surely wasn’t mine. The house would get really cold for certain minutes when I went into a particular area with my hands out in the dark looking for something firmer than air to hold onto. I was looking for something else, not even really people. I could not tell what I was looking for beyond the shape of myself, in the same way I could not remember what I did not remember though simply by knowing I was looking meant there was something to be found, and this provided me the silence of ongoing responsibility in the face of what could have otherwise been an overwhelming hell.
FLOOD: I could not remember that I’d already done this. Over and over. Every possible action I could make here had already been performed long before me just by the fact of being. The strings of me vibrated like an instrument on fire coming through any door where anyone I hadn’t been had lived their life in rooms alone. When I closed my eyes I saw everything the same, there playing also on the inside of my head, beyond all vision.
Into the night of homes I walked in waver. The shape of the homes forced me to feel my shape within them while I shook them down for what they pretended not to be. Along long panels in the house I would rub my face or hands or chest to feel what sound the house hid when I could not find what I felt I’d been meant to. Like people shuddering in the eaves in fear of what had passed and what was passing. Or like a passage that would walk me back into my life. In the walls I found the eggs of rats and spiders; I found the color of night packed in long strands of oozing black slick that had aggregated where we’d breathed together while we could. The unseen held the world together. In some homes I’d find jewelry that I’d wear and make believe had always been mine. I could feel where the wedding rings were missing their intended fingers, necklaces missing necks. I wore them anyway. I sucked the taste out of them. I’d put on so much gold I seemed to burn the air around me. The clothes here also itched, alive enough outside the ongoing light of outside that when I rubbed my face into their fiber or in desperation put them on I could hear them speaking in my body as if my body were their body. They would beg me to lie down and never move now. They would ask me to put my arms around them where they weren’t. In all the voices were the same voice, the same long warmth of nothing stretching where it wished to believe itself again as something compatible with what I might be, heavier than any sunlight or understanding.
The weight still wasn’t enough to push me underneath the ground. It would not bring me royalty from nowhere, and yet all I had to do was say it had. I was the ruler of this era and it felt ageless. Everything remained for me to make of it what I could. Overhead coming back outside between the houses again into light, unlike what crept away, the sun bit at my ass through all its black with laughing. It screeched like children being smothered and tried to kick the color from my eyes, into the flat of lesser black the houses harbored. The sky wanted everything we’d been keeping from it always in what seemed the safest places and yet were always just rooms. I waited, laughed back, told it to take me over. I shouted words of the new language I was making in the space between the tapes at no one there and felt them shatter. I believed in nothing. Didn’t I? Wasn’t everything I did exactly as I said? The houses bulged with nothing. No matter what I believed each time I found my thoughts still there inside me when the tape began again, it felt hard to recall how I’d come to that, as any prior logic in my head from prior iterations seemed like mazes I’d took the name of and called mine, having again found my way to nowhere, every minute the most now. Anything that held up was just more of the nature of how I was meant to understand it.
FLOOD: Among the tape all things feel the same, one thread and then another, each as it begins just full of hope, though when I am here again only in my mind with sound and can think again I realize it’s because the shrieking sound inside my recorded body is so high and shrill there that it’s beyond my human register. It just feels like being ripped apart at a high speed, over and over, and then resealing, inside the baking furor of the light, then ripped again, each time so quickly I can’t tell that anything has happened besides the fact that inside the silence here I am.
Yeah.
Yeah what.
I don’t know. I don’t know what I’m saying. Sometimes I am only ever talking to myself, which feels better than talking to someone who isn’t really there.
Sometimes it’s nice to make the talking to myself seem like someone else, even when they don’t answer, or when they use the voice of someone I do not remember to try to make me feel some pain or edge of itch inside me.
I don’t need to have someone speaking to me to know that I am somewhere else and looking for any evidence of exactly what doesn’t exist.
I don’t need it.
Please.
I don’t, really. I don’t miss anyone.
I must maintain rigor in the nothing.
I found nobody in the name. I called the words of those I felt written in my insides, the residues, though I did not remember them beyond the clasp of something dry around my lungs or jutting in my abdomen. The names fell out between my teeth onto the floors. They rasped and clung against the dry grind of the shitty carpets or the wood grain. They fizzled, issued smoke. The smoke would hang around my head for minutes after, sometimes longer, reminding me the end was coming soon, and through the end so the beginning. I could inhale it and feel fucked. Some awful squealing in my sacs permeated every instant I found nothing, no reflection, no one to put my word in, no eyes or hands.
Even my flesh would not work with me. I’d masturbate and issue a gallon of black stones. Each stone leaving made me want it back inside me: what could I build with this, what walls to keep every other idea out. Instead, the stones sunk into the earth and hissed and burned there without purpose. And that was fine, too. The skitter of the cells about me burst upon the air and made me shortly warmer and less destructive while also contributing to the curvature of the landscape, even if, having absorbed my children, its surface appeared the same. Coming back, too, some time later, in some future iteration of the tape, I would find the house grown over with a moss or fine-hued silt of aggravated sand where I had touched it, changed its future, which meant then that the tape was not my god, I thought, which meant then that if this is a tape I am awake in, there must be somewhere else a full machine that plays the tape; if there is a machine that plays the tape, there should be a hand that puts the tape in and presses play; there must be a room around this room the image enters, there must be eyes. Even if from here I could never move between the tape inside the machine to the world around it, even if the hidden spaces here were just as open to all else as anyplace beyond, there must still be a way to speak into the head attached to the eyes, to the brain. Communication with the presence beyond my reality could then affect the shape of the reality itself, which then might change the nature of the relation of the presence to the tape, and what between them; might even make the space between them disappear.
I hated each of these thoughts as I had it, a blue foam burning in my eyelids, though once they’d begun they would not stop shaking in my brain until they broke. For long periods then thereafter in meat of wandering and peeping my vision would vibrate just slightly for what seemed days. Clusters of color where before there’d been the clear-glass plate of space at which point my eyes ended and the world began, each shift of hue causing the earth itself to seem that much nearer to my head, and coming closer each time the vibration made me close my eyes and touch the ground to keep from barfing and rub my face in dirt and wish for the beginning to begin again already, to end the colors from my head and make them black again like all the houses and the sky behind the helmet of the world. Every instant like this was pure panic, glossed in the solitude of absolute misunderstanding, the foundation of the world.
In some modes the earth between blinks would get so close up to my face that I would move forward even by standing still; my flesh would flood beyond my head; even sometimes also I would end up going backwards, my eyes behind me, and find, no matter how hard I pressed to stay exactly where I was, I’d feel the rest of my body briefly leaking back into who I’d always been before now: back to stand in the first room of the first black house’s whitest center, standing, with someone’s blood all on my hands: the blood of everyone at once, one final body, who in the world outside the frame of tape I knew I’d killed, because we all had, as a fact of being, breathing; the me there in the body of the man I knew I’d been when I put my hands around the skin of the murdered people, regardless of whose hands they really were; the me of me in anyone, all history.
Sometimes, in those clearest moments splitting, by no longer blinking I could see my head leave my head; I could find me seated in a building on a cot with my hair full of the black again and my arms measured with tattoos and the sound of other people talking and making on the far side of the walls, despite how from where I sat I could find no door or exit, no return even in remembrance to the people in their temporary hour all alive; faces alive again beside me, and me part of it, fabric or fantasy regardless, no longer dead, or if dead, all of us and not just not me; I heard the flashbulbs; heard a woman; liquid squirting from my pores; I would feel on my skin the light of the white inside the tape through which I had inhabited my body, the room filled up with wet in which I’d killed the image of the mother, father, and the child; then just as quickly again the smoke would rise up all around, engorged and pressed against me, shifting the memory of how or when, and still inside me still no matter how, my skull would make me blink again and the smoke would part and I would be inside the tape again and I could no longer feel any part about me beyond this land, the blood upon my hands again having turned translucent or sunk into my veins to join the rest; and then again the tape would end; the tape would stop and rewind and I’d be right there beginning in the same place where it’d ended, with nothing left but me there in my head. Then I would begin again at the beginning, if with another hole inside me, if with the pressure of the presence of the same day ready now to take me in its code.
FLOOD: Over anything I felt I understood, the speech I could not stop laced through me over and rewound, beating my brain apart and into blackness, flatness. Any revelation was just wallpaper, behind which, no wall, behind which.
There is no one here There is no one here now, I knew you would stop trying, I knew, I
Knew you would stop speaking There is no one here even faking The earth is in my nails
Do you hear me, do you, love, me, am I, am I what, is bone, what is the fire in my fingers
okay you can stop now you can say something again I believe you okay you can okay
I don’t want to go to into any more air that isn’t air I know, I don’t, want, I, I, I, do you
Okay, please now I remember Please I do Remember I swear I do Remember Please
I remember being killed I remember killing I remember not remembering. What else.
All of that was not done in the name of you, I remember that. All that was done in any
Of us, done in the name of us. in god our blood the word of blood in god the name
And so that was you then, too, then, wasn’t it? Your language all over the walls
My hands, the house, the same year, the same body pulling itself apart with every word
I was a child, we all were. The air crushed hours. We got older, We hid our faces.
The world was nothing that we said it was, please, I wasn’t, trying, to do anything
I took part in everything, I did not mean to, simply by being a person on the earth.
The white inside the black behind my eyes would not stop and I was calm and I went on
I I I I went on I I I I kept hearing everything I I didn’t hear it I I heard it I couldn’t
I could not stop It, and did not want to, even when I, I convinced myself I did. Our time,
The hours, wore us down, though we allowed the hours, I allowed the hours, I was tired
Forgive me for having done what to all of us and who inside you and thru and thru you
Help me stop, none of this speaking is my speaking, none of it is saying it is you, are you
Are you still there?
I changed my mind. Please answer.
No?
I understand.
Okay, I don’t understand. But I am trying.
I am still trying.
You will do whatever you will. You always were.
I am going to
I am
There were always other homes. The house of man would perpetuate its memory as long as there was any lens to have it. In every home there were doors that led to rooms that led to doors and on like that until I was back outside in the dust of the earth of the world again waiting to find somewhere else the same.
Many of the homes had a computer somewhere inside them. Our machines had certainly survived us. They held on among metal, wire, and plastic, doing nothing and loving it. Their lives were only theirs. Even in homes that looked recovered from years well before the time I remembered living in, there were devices well beyond their time lodged in hidden crevices. The dead monitors reflected my face back at me in the weird lamp of no light. I pressed the buttons regardless, hoping for some brief jot at the window of the world where there’d been people recreating their faces into electronic sites and talking in abbreviation, for the archives. That seemed like a world there, more than this one here with no one with a tongue who would appear. The glow of my skin inside the LCD light seemed like a place to walk around forever in grain against the way inside the film I appeared flat.
Most of the machines would not turn on. They would not turn on no matter how I begged or used my hands. They held no fear in their cables. They did not want me. In some of the homes in anger I would then kill the machines in the way the others had been killed, such as by throwing the body of the machine against the house itself. This could go only so far as to deconstruct its image, as the computer did not bleed. Even when I ate the black wheel of the disc of the device’s memory it did not bleed or cry or speak against me and show me or curse my body and I did not think of anything any differently from how I had before nor could I think of what then. What they held, they’d hold forever. The outlets and the plugs inside the house gave cold against my tongue, the windows diffuse with worthless clout.
Other machines did have their own power, however brief. I could turn a laptop on and see the minutes of its life writ in a corner. There was no lie about their lifespans, like the humans, though sometimes the seconds listed would count down by threes or fives, and even more so when I used them. Their screens’ faces each would go deep blue. Then gone again unto eternal pause, frozen in midst of their own purpose. Or paused for me and taken up in presence somewhere else, an icon opening in the fold of buried life. In the span before the machine would die I’d click and click with my best hand the buttons leading my cursor through the folders.
In the folders, I found maps, caught in the form of images of loved ones, wives and daughters, fathers, sons, though not in the way that I remembered photography always working. Glitches in the pixels changed what had been there into raw mass, char of color and weird buzzing where faces should be; even the machine’s memories were stilted, though you could still read in the light around them the rooms or spaces beyond the doors where we had lived and congregated, each of them in some way changed by light that let the day knit over night and give us ways to look upon each other and move toward each other and perhaps inside then say a word, though you could no longer hear the words here in the pictures, nor could you tell what went on beneath the casing. Even in the video recordings on the drives there was such rumble caught above the audio of something like a shaking behind the contained horizon that it was impossible to decipher what was being said, which opened the possibility of the saying to contain all possible phrases.
In other folders in other directories or subdirectories ordered then, inside the innards of the machine, there were files of the sounds of people making instruments intone, albums of notes and voices arranged in small rooms recorded to be played over and over, beyond time, though not in the way that I remember: the files of songs were deformed, backwards, fucked up, mute. Under the noise you could hear the skronk of human voices, though the words they made inside the sound were not like I remembered singing once to be, nor even screaming. The voices shook inside the speakers as if to bust through the machine. I felt scared to play any song for too long, and often even before I pressed the stop button myself the program that played the songs would crash.
Most strange to me were the files full of typing. What words had been there were also scrambled over, turned to symbols, or had they always been this way, always unreadable to anyone but who had typed them. After some time it began to seem that each file in each house, as I compared them in my staring and my want for sense there, contained exactly the same syllables in each:
though as I looked longer into the file, eventually I would realize this was not the case, that the words were always different and it was only just my brain making me believe the other way.
FLOOD: I was right, then, when I saw the repetition in the language, but that’s not what the text on the file actually says. It says: “This word occurs because of god. In our year here god is not a being but a system, composed in dehydrated fugue,” and on from there, pages and pages. These were the notes here I had taken, about the murders, and what had happened to me then. In every house I found I found it again, copied onto the drives of all computers and machines, anything that could be encoded, any memory, any white, though in the film I could not read the words. Even as I watched me stare into the file just right there at them. Even while typing the next lines. Often I wasn’t really even typing or looking at the words themselves where they appeared, but instead at what I wanted them to say. I could see anything I wanted: I could see a picture of a person, one for each symbol in the lines. By staring even harder and more generally into the flood of it I could make the image come alive, like some strange filmstrip inside this filmstrip, which as I did that now with this block above this I heard another voice inside me come along and press against the first, a voice similar in tone to mine here but just in some small way removed, as if my blood were speaking from parts in me I thought forgotten, or had left unrecorded, or were now invented by the light by which I’d somehow become surrounded. Either way, once it turned on in me, I could remember it like any day. The voice was there inside my voice and always had been. Once there was that one, then would come others, whether I acknowledged them or not, whether I let them be written into the white here, whether I remembered them as mine or someone else’s, as by now I could no longer tell.
Each time while using the computer, or any of the machines, in any of the houses, the machine died, right in the midst of its own time; there was no power in the outlets, no way to make my access to their memories extend. I could feel the shutdown in the machine stutter upward also through my fingers in a frenzy, clicking and pressing buttons, trying to find something else to have, desperate for familiarity, for a window, the sound of all of my wanting running wildly up my arms into my flesh. My body wanted something I could remember of me in these images, these gone people, something I had lived for in them or them in me. Their eyes just watched me flat undying as the black of the unpowered electronics came on and ended just like that. Then it was me again, the world again. Each machine that lived and died inside those hours made me older, though I did not age. I was not aging on this tape, no matter how hard I wished to wrinkle, for the dark to fill me.
There were always other houses. When I came back again inside another instance, the machines would die again the same. They would die and die again, no matter how many times or ways I shuffled to do something right for us for once here. I carried on as I’d been taught to, taught by myself in the form of someone long forgotten: the parent I’d been before I’d made me. I kept looking. I went and wanted more to go, even already suspecting what the latent nature of the world was, and how much ground I could cover before I was forced to start again.
As I began to learn the motion and approximate duration of the tape’s face, I tried to get as far as I could, unveiling new space despite still knowing it was all in the same image. The more houses I came to, the harder it was to remember any of them from the rest, which I’d already been through and found no one nothing not a person nobody at all no one I could hold or eat or be, all of this only refortifying how I knew there must be something or someone I wanted, and wanted even more in knowing less of anything about it, for which all things in me went on relentlessly regardless of whether I could find the name or definition of what or who there—what had once been that lit me up, what had moved me before it ended in me, somewhere crushed in memory, where despite the fact that all I touched here and went here among the recurring video was always continuously ending. There was something lurking underneath its current surface, something there beyond even the memory of the idea of it, the name of it, which I could not remember, a space beyond the space of itself
Which is
Which is
Please fill in the gaps. My mind won’t do it. I feel a pressure in my knees like I am kneeling though I believe I’m standing. Help me.
Help me.
I am sorry I told you to be silent. I don’t want that. Please come back.
I can’t find an exit. I give up.
Please.
Please rewind the tape. Record it over. Make it all white.
I couldn’t help it, please, I’m sorry, I am.
I am here. I never left. I couldn’t even if I meant to. No one could ever. Your arms are both my arms. You are my eyes.
Thank you. Oh, thank you. For that. For speaking.
What do you need.
I can’t stop the unending iteration.
You will never.
So what am I supposed to do.
Who am I.
I can’t remember.
Who am I.
What do you want.
I don’t know. To be happy. To not understand what it’s like to want to kill people, or know they can be killed. To surpass death. To be calm and quiet. To lie down. To be full of something warm when I am waking up alone or beside someone. To walk across a bridge and find the water at both ends. To know the someone that I loved again. To have silence. To have all of that and none of that.
So just do those things then.
How.
How do I do that.
I don’t know what to do.
You are doing it already.
I don’t know what I’m doing.
You are.
Just tell me who this is.
You know who this is. And you know I can’t tell you.
Why.
Because I don’t have a name.
How can I find you if I don’t know what your name is.
It is the same name as your name. I’m in all names now. I’m any of them. So are you. Hi, I’m your wife. I’m your neighbor, your child, your brother. I killed all those people and gave them life. I’m not anybody. You’re the one pretending you don’t remember what all these words mean, though I know really that you do.
I am waiting for you. There’s no answer. There is an answer.
I am the color of the house. I am your bedroom. I have waited here for so long I can’t even remember.
I need to see you now to know that you are there.
Here I am.
I can’t see anything. I don’t know where to go now.
I am right behind your face.
I can’t stop me from the talking. I want to stop now.
Stop me.
Stop.
B.: There was the wind around the sand beneath us. Even I don’t know who I am often, either, though I do, too. The color in the smoke. The sound of every one of us forever, before and after the possibility of birth. Still I still can’t crush the one of me in me who knows what I had always as a person felt most: to hear my loved one say my name. A name that is not my name at all to me and yet inside which I can sleep, and feel no time, though I know all the rest goes on unending, and what is left now is more than ever was. Death is not a question of becoming nothing, it’s a question of everything at once, ending where the edge between the two of us was always rubbing in us, craving no break between.
The mirrors in the homes were flat and long. I went to press myself against one. I did remember. I remembered how the rooms could be opened into from the outside, from someone beyond the cut of the way the home supposed itself. I remembered how behind the flat copied image of myself there in endless rooms the world had offered I’d found in each a way into a common space. The long, buried backbone of the black house just underneath the feet of any homemaker, provider. Any child. Somewhere in the welding of the dark network behind the rooms here there must still be a way back into the world from where I’d come, if anything remained of that by now. Somehow out from this recording I’d caught myself inside I could feed myself back through the lens and out into the eye, and if it was only death there waiting for me on the far side, into the brain of the body of the present, in this way at least I would have lived and died. I would have been a person in the system of faces and beliefs, another square inch in the last era of our death.
The face of the mirror in the bathroom of the house as it was in the present surrounding version was about as wide as my own chest. It was as tall as me there, affixed against a blue wall in a bedroom where whoever last had lived inside the room had left their bed unmade, though there remained no smell of them left in the fiber.
I had tried. I had lain down in the bed first, hoping somehow it would fall out underneath me, or at least that I would sleep. Here when sleep came it felt the same as waking, and when you dreamed you saw what you would see awake again. The sleeping hurt worse than the being, an inverse of how I remembered our prior understanding. My skin seemed colder against the glass of the mirror. Where my image touched my image it felt electric, like cells knitting where we touched without quite touching, only wanting to be closer, through the glass.
I kept waiting for the surface to adhere to me and take me into it, but it wouldn’t. Each time I pulled back to look at what I was again I saw only myself: my eye right there at my eye, moving as my eye moved to see it seeing. The color in my pupils seemed to want to take my reflection into me as much as I wanted to go into my reflection. Touching the glass, I couldn’t see anything but the dark I carried, somehow closer than ever now.
I rubbed my palms along the glass. I waited, pressed, anticipating buttons, some kind of trigger or lever, a panel that would open back into itself. I licked the surface with my tongue and said words that came out without me thinking. Any combination of language could be another language. There could be a way to speak the name of the mirror into itself and force it to let me become what I wanted. I tried anything my blood came up with. My old imagination. I waited and listened to what the reflection was most desperate to hear. When I spoke, I heard only our language. It sounded like me here. It was only me again.
Against the glass I banged my fists and hit my head and spoke to it louder, screamed into it, laughed into it. I pulled the mirror off the wall. It was lighter than I imagined. On the back side of the mirror was a dark synthetic surface, cool and soft against my fingers. I traced its edges for the key or how to make it open from the inside. I pushed at where on the wall the mirror had hung, a faint impression there marked down against the paint around it slightly darker, hidden from general light. Nothing I said or did would make the mirror open into the passage. My blood was opening into passages itself inside my fury, none I could enter.
I tried laying the mirror on other surfaces. I laid it on the bed where whoever had slept for years and I could not sleep. I laid it on the kitchen table, where the prior family had made more of their bodies out of food. I took it outside onto the dirt of the land and laid it on the ground faceup toward where the recording of the sun was and waited for it to burn me, but it did not burn, and the ground held me out as long as any architecture made by man. I laid it on every wall in every room and pressed and held and touched and promised. It still would not let me enter. The level of the glass would only bend so much. Oil from my face was smudging up the surface, obscuring where I could even see me, or could see the room around me, or the world.
I laid the mirror on the ground. I tried to stamp or jump up and land and come down through the surface again, a way repeated from some time I could no longer feel. I saw me from underneath me. I could have been anyone. I cracked the glass under my weight. In the mess of shards I could see several hundred instances of everything. Behind the glass, there was just a flat white surface, reflecting nothing.
I tried again with many mirrors. Each mirror contained the same buzzing and the same promise of somewhere else behind it. In home after home I went from room to room searching out what reflections I could find already awaiting me there in the image. There were mirrors on the walls and in old drawers and suspended in places where they touched nothing behind them. Each time I saw my face approach my face I looked older and older, though I did not feel older. In each mirror I could feel the residue of who had looked into it for years before me, the curve and buzzing of them. I could not feel their memories or anything about how they had felt to be alive, how they had died, or whom they had wished they could live on with forever. I could feel nothing but my own ongoing face. No matter which mirror I took or where I placed it on the house, there was nothing there but me and the edges of the room reflecting shifting angles, showing nothing but the same. I left each mirror broken, finished, empty, and yet each time I returned after the tape began again I would find the mirror melded back in full, and me there young again and aging in the same procession, though I could feel the same air behind each place, the same passage snug and lurking behind any surface waiting for whoever knew exactly how to come. I could not go back, no matter how many times I tried to, in every iteration and repetition of the recording of the present made continually mine alone. And yet in each new mirror that I found, each time again I found it, I felt the same erupting music in my teeth, the knitting possibility that this particular mirror in this particular room at this angle at this time code in this condition would be the one way back to everything. And with each failure, the same reversal of electricity came sucking through me, evacuating, leaving marked back in my blood another hope I’d given away in the name of nothing.
And the year begins again. The year begins again and is the year now. Same as any.
Endless ways. I can’t tell each time if the time before I found the thing I’d meant to find.
Buttons screaming in this life. The pillows the beds full of no smell and I inhale it.
Dynasties of trash. Windows with the prints of any person. Books no longer read.
Every surface a possible eye into the grain of the place I can’t remember feeling.
My eyes won’t stay clean enough to get one thought out of me without starting to cave.
I don’t know why I’m talking in this manner. This orchestration is not me. This sphere.
I’m not looking for anyone any longer because I already feel them in my ass.
What if I laid the mirror on my body. What if the mirror was my body. Eras of worm.
What is it that happens between the blips between the tape ending and rebeginning.
All mirrors are just glass. All glass is just sand. All sand is just dust of the dead.
It has never rained here. It will never rain here. What could I ever think to want dry.
No art. No paint. I do actually laugh a lot, if only at nothing. At knowing I want nothing.
What happens when I am paused. If I am ever ejected from the machine I don’t feel it.
Language written on the black face of the tape, or the label of the tape, or the time stamp.
The distortions piling up in me. The zit of static raising warble on me. Lacerations.
So many unique lengths blip in and on and knock my head off again and again alone.
The range of the flickering frames will send me through centuries of any copied instant.
There is a chamber beyond death. There is a passage wider than the passages in dying.
I want out. I want back into the world, even if it is all dead people, and smells like shit.
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.
The skin of my wife’s back. The constellation of her moles and blemishes, the knobs of her bone through skin. I couldn’t smell her, but could sense the sense of what I knew of what I’d breathed in about her all our years. Breathing in rooms with faces close and seeing or not seeing, the leather of our time. It was immediately as if she had never not been right here beside me, in one of the many rooms our house forged out against all else, waiting for me to find her, to continue.
I could not remember any blood. No wire in the fiber of the light here. At last the tape had revealed something that buzzed my heart, and with it, my whole expanse, all of all I’d held smeared in me, still smearing. Now, at last, I felt, was really now, and nothing else had ever happened ever.
As I grew closer to my wife, I saw I could see through her. Her skin was not exactly skin, but more of a layer on the air that moved among the idea of what signified where I could read her. The pixels of her were made of something like a gauze. Beyond her face there was the wall there, the window showing nothing just beyond it but the wrecked color of the old world. The color splintered with her, bending, beginning.
I took her body by the arm. It was the same arm I had wrapped around me before, same I’d watched her feed or wash herself with. My ring glinted on her finger. Her flesh was warm, if in a way more like a machine that’s been on for too long running rather than the human heat I felt off my own brain. She turned toward me as I touched her, as if surprised to find me there, touching her now, today of all days. For what reason did I touch her. There were so many rooms in our whole house. I seemed to have knocked her out of somewhere else, like she’d forgotten where she was. Quickly, her expression shifted again to one I could see myself in, a recognition. She didn’t take her arm away. She didn’t pull me to her either. We stood there touching. I said some words. She said some words in response. I could not hear them, though my body understood. I was close enough now that her translucence clung together, again providing the appearance of a flesh. I could not remember how it felt to have seen through her. I did not want to.
And yet I knew something was wrong. I could feel where on the tape this image wasn’t like I remembered her having been once. This image had my wife’s eyes, my wife’s pores, and even though I didn’t need to hear her voice to feel her speaking, there was a gnarled roar underneath the seams. The reels of how our time and limbs connected ground against the face of the breadth of the house, the world surrounding elsewhere. Beneath her flesh was not her bones, her blood, but only spindles, indexed partitions meant to invoke in me the plane of what she was, what had been and was no longer. Through my wife, the voice could speak, and I could feel alive and haunt myself forever in that feeling, but it wasn’t where I was, and it did not hold the colors in it any history portended.
My wife caressed me calmly, expressionlessly. She filled where in me I needed her presence with something like the presence she’d always carried. The further on I let it ride, the wider the gap between what I even remembered having felt before grew between then and the absence of that feeling now. Soon I felt I would not need to remember how that feeling had felt at all, only ongoing in what this recording offered, in its want to fill my want. The replication wormed itself between itself and myself, eating our all, filling it over, becoming the present only held wholly forever.
The gap spread in my mind. I tried to turn away and found I could not move my body. Or, I could not control the way my body moved. Or, I was moving my body, but not in the ways that I’d expected, or even in the ways I felt I’d choose to move given the choice. But it was me moving. It was my flesh moving. I felt that I could see through my flesh too, or would be able to if I were far enough away from me to see me that way, as I had her. Which immediately gave me the feeling then that someone indeed was watching, far from any mirror, and they could see me as I felt, and perhaps then could see beyond that feeling, and what beyond it, which felt like nothing.
My wife was pawing at my eyes. It was as if she could sense me feeling what I felt and did not want me to. Some amount of time had passed between the thinking and the being. I was much older. Again, I could not respond, nor could I hear what sounds were coming out of me between us. She pawed me harder. Her mouth was open, full of black. In the black I heard every word I’d ever heard again ongoing over every other word. Itching at me. Lathering at me. Not any voice. Not her. Deformed.
I felt my arms rise up to strike the image. To strike the sense of what she wasn’t off of what I knew she was. I was filled with such a violence. It didn’t feel like my arms were where they were. I didn’t want to. I only wanted what was meant in what was always nearly in there, in every inch of every edge, in any person. The voice was changing. The words all clustered and flooded with the ash of the idea of what they’d been called up to represent in us. I was striking with my mind. My hands beat at the air I knew was not the air it claimed it was now. Where I struck the flesh I could not see. It was only black then. Black of millions bruised all in the same place. Creaming eons. Healing into nothing. No longer see-through, but unappearing.
FLOOD: It was not my wife. I did not want to leave her. It was not her. It didn’t have to be for now. There was no speech in the rooms between us or beyond us. The house was many different colors. Where I did not look, the colors did everything they could to be what they meant to be. They were the world the tape believed. What had been recorded could have been anything but what it really was. At the center of me, a long cold wind blew, the last wind I remembered, or would remember.
I appeared inside the smoke again. The smoke felt colder now, and thicker. I wondered if the world as it emerged would appear different from how it always had, but soon out of the smoke again the homes appeared, the endless homes in the same order, empty, endless. And yet, now I knew exactly where I was. My house was any of the houses, and always had been. I had always gone in through the wrong door. The door was in my hands. Each of my fingers. The nails on every finger buzzed. Any of the walls I wished were the same that’d always been my own, and there inside each the apparition of my wife waited for me to return to her as I had always, daily, like a person.
And I did. In the mirage of the repeating tape, even knowing it was nothing, I could not stop myself from going back, the throb of the grease of the voice each time raising louder and louder over all sound as I neared, the colors blending white in my periphery, to zero.
Every time I found my wife inside the house inside the tape of our world, I found a different future mocked up in her translucent flesh. There was a future where together we grew old, had seven children, each who had children, grew old, and time went on. There was a future where cancer ate into her brain, removed the idea of me from her wholly. There was a future where I died long before her, and she went on in my memory alone unto her own death. Both of the deaths only begat the tape again, placing me firmly back in the suspension of the world there, seeking the same solace anywhere, only to begin again with her there, in the image.
No violence in me changed what the tape held. No murder of my own, or of myself, no brain damage caused by throwing my body down a flight of stairs, by eating poison from the bottles in the bathroom, by banging my face against her face, would do anything but cause the tape again to repeat. Our death was always incomplete. It could still taste where I lingered beyond my own being, the false conduit of what had passed.
I knew I could not change now, nor could I ever, in this contortion. The tape was everything I was, or had been. I could no longer differentiate the shift. I could not feel where anyone who’d ever been had been anything different than what they were always through and through the conduits of dirt and dying light that stroked us all into our graves.
And yet, when I closed my eyes inside the replicating leather of instance upon instance, I saw fire. I saw it burning in the flesh behind my face, through the lanyards of my brain vats, my skeletonic weaponry, my avenues of video-laid blood. The fire had no heat and yet burned all throughout me. It turned my organs black, my tongues. It lapped over the edges of my being throbbing as I walked and warred directionlessly against anything I could find to bear difference with.
The fire lived inside its smoke. It curled around me in my sleep and held me down and beat me apart and woke me up and made me walk until I could no longer walk and was wide open and could be had again, forced on. The fire was the light that lit the day here bright enough that I could see anything apart from what I wanted in the spindles of homes of all the others having lived beside me in matching desperation, in death now compressed together, forming the ground of which I walked, the pixels of the tape in which I lived on in me even having nothing, preventing in my absence from the totality of death a shapeless singing no one could hear in any present future.
My hands were overrun with light. Where I had touched my wife so many times, first in hope she’d feel the way I remember her having felt beyond the tape, and then in anger in finding nothing of us carried on, my flesh stung and bubbled inside itself, if on the surface always remaining only the image the tape of all my memory of me allowed me to appear as.
The light was slow. It became slower still as in the tape I moved my hands to raise against all overhead, the endless eye unseeing. I could feel the tape figuring me out; I knew it knew I recognized the way its image of my wife was not the wife that I remembered, that I could not go on in any of its multitude of humming futures without inside me always knowing what was off, where the colors it gave and gave me did not match the ones they really were, or were no longer now but had been, and so could not be shaken from their loom. It was only I, the last living breathing being, even recorded, who held us back from never needing any frame again against no time, no limb, no wish. Beyond the edges of us always something waited to become all of us at once without a face, or any era.
I entered any of the homes. I closed and locked the door behind me.
The tape was clinging at my grain. It knew I knew it knew I did not wish to live it out like this forever, and so against me began trying to split apart my widths. It slid interference in my image, made me slower, made rooms not connect to their right maps. It could do anything it wished and say it always had been like that. It spun its own mind, wore its own air. I wasn’t even breathing.
I was burning. The flames of the friction of my mind against the tape were not even as bright as the light the color of my hissing flesh blew out around me, trying to blind me, to hypnotize me into faith. The more it stung the more I burned. I watched my skin wriggle around me, covered in uncontrollable color.
The fire glowed within my hands. Its discontinuity with now fed into my seeing and made me open even further. I wanted more glow, more light. I wanted to be everywhere at once. Where I touched the room, the room took fire, too. It made no sound outside its body being eaten by the color. I watched it calmly. I was calm. My teeth were eyes. My eyes were laughing.
One by one I touched and lighted off my glowing the things inside the home I’d spent a life beside. I lit the sofa where we’d lain together watching films. I lit the carpet pressed imprinted with every motion. I lit the books I’d read and hadn’t read yet. I lit the edges of the frames of the photos on the walls who watched me moving, any of them believing in their context they were as alive as I was, even now.
For each surface that I touched, no smoke rose and nothing crumpled into cinder. More so, it buzzed against my rind, absorbed the contour of my friction, splitting open against its private definition in my existence. It grew awake inside my glow, and as it grew to glow, too, not quite burning, then I could no longer feel what it had been to me before now, less and less to overcome of what had been and becoming instead more like any edge in any house forever, every and all. Soon in each room there were fewer and fewer things I recognized as ours or mine or someone’s, as anything but icebergs in an archive.
Glowing, I moved from shape to shape. The light of me erased the grade of any private understanding in each surface. The screaming light grew over everything I touched or saw. The weight of light collected everywhere I wasn’t. I was so slow now. I could see me moving before I moved. With every gesture, I could feel my image coming apart from what the tape was and what I’d been that made it. Every definition burying its head in its own face. Soon I could not remember which room my wife had appeared in, in any version. Then I could not recall the texture of her face, the smell of the sound around. Then I could not remember what a wife was. Then I could not remember having ever wanted to remember.
I watched me pass through all the rooms of all our lives, at every inch further and further from that day, slower and slower, disappearing, soon so bright I could not see.
FLOOD: The colors filled all through my head. They wrote over what I was trying to think with exactly what I’m saying. I no longer could control the way I was able to communicate inside myself with other layers. Or it had always been like that and I was just now allowed to know it, feel it. The smoke curled down into my pores; it pressed back at where the smoke of the repetition again was trying to push new smoke to cover up the old. Between the two of them the world was fuzzing into several of itself at the same time, one of each of me inside them. The light was growing wider than the tape was. I could feel the world beyond the tape again caving in, pressing at the presence of me in it, our final eye. Just as I could not escape death as an idea by hoping only to live on in my private memory alone, what slaved beyond death remained constant in us all, and could not be granted without the false originalities of massacre and aspiration having been at last truly compressed beyond the idea of any person: image or language, never or now.
All at once then there just above me I felt something pressing dry against my mind.
Where on the air the houses ended and still between the sky there was a surface.
Concealed in along the air. It was like smoke but without smoking. Heavy and rising.
It was held between the perimeters of the video where the frames of repetition gathered.
It was as if the tape itself were burning from outside it. Its continuity creamed to glue.
I could feel the burning also in me spreading. Our pixels curling. All air devoured.
My life divided every thought. Each thought broke open as it uttered, into nothing.
Light was upon me. It wound around me. It was settled on the air. It had been wanting.
It had always been this way. Crushed between the homes. Our air all latticed, closed.
I could not understand how I’d never seen this. All the fields speaking and reflective.
It was something wider than a house. It had rooms but did not have walls or windows.
It was just before me there and far ahead. I knew the tape did not mean for me to see it.
The tape had built the days to hold me out. It knew I counted time, so it could hold me.
I had always been in here, I remembered. What I remembered of before was just the tape.
The world and the wife and the dead and all else were not mine. The tape was not mine.
The light refracted in my mind. It beat the shit out of my seeing, thinking, needing. Who.
All around me. All of ever. I’d had to come through everything I knew to just now see.
I knew the air there of what the shape was held the thing I’d always been and wanted.
Never found. Something written underneath all faces. All my faces, shook beyond sleep.
The shape knew me better than I knew me. And couldn’t feel that. Burning and eating.
It wasn’t even there. It was a silence. When I tried to speak its name, I just blew breath.
Our lives had always been just out of frame. Just far enough removed to never notice.
Like crystal pushed against an eye. Needing it even more knowing you could never.
Tape in my teeth, tape in my lungs. Obliterating by simply being. And I grew wicked.
And you grew old. Between the walls the world had birthed to separate us. Slaving.
The shape hilarious and silent. Where when I thought my way toward it, it disappeared.
Where the longer I looked upon the shape and felt it, the more it was only everywhere.
The click of the eye of the snap of the trick of the wet dream beneath the skin of god.
FLOOD: I could no longer think or move. The tape kept interrupting. Or I was interrupting. Or where I was thinking and moving now was different than it had been the way I understood it before. Like how soil is always soil, but never the same elements ruined into it. The film was pressing down. It knew I knew. Our silent gap no longer fit the frame of only now. It wanted all the rest of every era.
The translucent space before me gleamed. I don’t know how I hadn’t seen it like this before now. Always now, always. The more I saw the shape, the more the shape seemed like just another house. Fucking houses. Illicit nowhere. It looked like the black house stuffed up with the smoke where I’d begun but wider than that, and older than that. When I looked at it directly, the shade would change, as if it could feel me wanting it, and knowing in my wanting that to be entered would cause its end. Every angle was another face to feel, both within my skin and pressed against it.
The space held seated somehow propped between the whole space of earth and sun. It came with windows made of people’s sleeping, every person. It had reinforced itself in the absence of all vision. There was no door at all, no locks, not even walls or surfaces. The main face of the structure, once you could see it for a second before it shifted, was embedded on the rip of the air of the tape itself: the blank that held the tape together by showing nothing in recording where there’d been nothing ever to show. It wore the index of space forever invaded by the eras of people simply acting out their lives: asking, laughing, saying, eating, living, being, working, sleeping, knowing, kissing, thinking, rushing, pissing, singing, making, having, going.
Gone. The house was not ours. It had been always. I could tell it had been waiting for someone to touch it once when it was young, and had grown lazy in its waiting. It had so many names: the House of God, the House of Demeaned Cities, the House of No Art We Could Remember, the House of America Without America, the House of Rape Fantasy and Weddings, of the Being of the Been, the House of Sod. If there was anywhere inside the tape where anyone like me might hide in fear, it was here. If nothing else it was the end of anything, the actual end of what the tape could be, the tape beyond my time and here containing everything I wanted, totally held inside which I might be able to stop the repetition and hold longer to the shape of belief I felt some days floating just underneath my face. It wanted me to have it and to know it and to never leave it there again, while also not having to feel me or become me. A shapelessness screwed beyond the idea of even shape.
If I could reach the end-space of the tape’s helm, I felt, seeing the nothing where the edges of the space of tape itself began, I could maybe slither out; I could rise beyond my age into the rip of what was never promised but always had held me up.
And yet the shape would not stay still. The very nature of it crested between levels of its own image. Like insects printed in the pixels of the landscape. As I moved, it moved among me. It was inside me and had been and knew what I would do before I did it. Some seconds it would just be instances of sky, or would be a fuzz of grain around some nodule too far off inside the recording to decipher. Regardless, I could hear it humming, in the absence. It was giving heat off. The only heat remaining.
I wanted the space the most when I couldn’t see it. I went even when I wasn’t going, and couldn’t stop. For miles along the recording of the earth my body bled. The blood was lines I had no choice but to be. I took the lines and walked as quickly as I could manage with my icon forced through the repeating surface. Static was caking at my chest. Friction in variation on the norm of what the body mostly did upon the tape would be punished in the tape’s spool, flaking cells between us off from skin and celluloid alike, as if both accelerating rapidly in age. Any furor from the friction with the time code made me nauseated, my remembered flesh wanting out onto the recorded flesh even more the more the tape wanted me to slow.
I would not slow. I had this itch in my threads. The taped air of the homes fumbled against me, forming white walls in my vision where the houses believed they ended and another house was, turning instead in rows to rows of houses with fences higher than many of me stacked up foot to head. I crawled down shafts through air vents in the places and laughing at the color of the grain of the metal trying to mirror-trick me back to some beginning, and I laughed at me trying to trick me, trying to be me backwards, trying to force me back into the smoke that soon would pour out of my mouth. I went on forever haunted in the furor of the trembling of the houses here in error every second I wasn’t totally erased, foregone forever from this endless land of murder fainting claustrophobia fevers death-faced shitty-feelings distemper sweat-pits vertigo, and far beyond, altogether acted out in all the wrong poses of the era and pauses in the absence of the presence of whatever held us in the world as it had been and was no longer.
And so something in me continued going, something not even me but what I felt. Where my cords would bundle and build heavy unto sleep to disrupt the ease of anything just pleasant, I would rise and I would rise and not even wishing to rise I would do it and I would be popping and so here I was again curled in these unending fields. Here I am in fission in the tape wanting its ejection, sweating seasons long beyond the end of weather, as if somewhere there is a section of a tape hid in the tape awaiting my witness, wanting to be returned to where it belongs along the cord of my own eye, or whatever could be in there, underneath that, whatever could be.
I began again again. The houses where I had been had learned by light to remove their markings and so were older but I still could not tell them from the rest and still knew I had to get on with it regardless because there are only so many sentences one might read in any life. The sun was ratcheting my back in a loop again like a mirror to the hallway underneath the ground where through the earth of film earth the bells began to ring. They were coming from the mush between the houses, which with the sound coagulated. It strung around the holes between them and made the air weird so I could not see where to go, could no longer make out any angle of the edge beyond, though with my hands vibrating before me I could still sense what was up and what was down, and behind me I could hear the smoke of where I’d been before waiting to take me, to become me, drown me out.
Inside the font of movement still regardless, patches then began to gather on the system of the air before me where I waddled, hands out, collecting between my fingers and in my curvature of tape. If I was to be free again, the tape wanted all the others I’d buried in me to keep forever, to feed and feed on, even if there was no one left to watch. Who had been before and what before those and where before I’d come the tape would crush out from my blood and use to tint itself with inimitable color, eyes and lips and mouths and cheeks made into more and more land; and from those carried in me, the tape could take part in what they’d wished to do thereafter, when and how, what inches I had pulled out of them to live on. We had all already lived our lights out; every word was already never ours.
This time as the tape clicked back to start again I felt it grinding at its code. Inside the video I was thrown forward; I could not hear me, no matter in what way you called. I kept waiting for the voice I’d heard beyond me to return, to give me guidance, or at least to grind me deeper in against it so far I could feel or want to feel the tape against me any longer, but I could no longer hear it. Rather, I couldn’t hear anything but it. It was in the fiber of the grain that made the ground go on beneath me, crushing to me, becoming impossible to distinguish from any pixel or glitch. It was in the soundtrack of the wind and sun and my own motion. It ran all through every gap and was the gaps. It spread the light around my mind. It carried everything about me regardless of whether I wanted to believe it could or couldn’t.
Where the glitches on the air around me hung and buzzed, I felt holes open in me too.
Holes behind my face, between my teeth and in my tongue and backbone. Zero planets.
In me, I found me waking. How old I had been. How old was I becoming in the becoming.
Scars all over my flesh. I wore every camera in my stomach. I had the skin of a woman.
It burned, the shifting of my recorded flesh, pulled out like drawers inside a flesh on fire.
The boning of me croaked. My teeth unlaced from gums where language wanted out.
I found, in the slick white mass of fat around my marbled tonsils, a period inflating.
The mirror of myself inside myself all encoded wrapped with electronic understanding.
Whereas for any inch I had forgotten, this has made me wholly who I was without image.
In the fieldwork of the earth too, I was in there. I could see my hours in the absent faces.
Smoke fed itself smoke and begat smoke and became smoke and died and rose again.
The tape adhering to itself, forgetting how to repeat now that I wouldn’t just go blank.
The white was in my brain and bones and eyes. I was way in there, packed with all death.
The dead who wanted nothing more than what they’d been before already but now new.
Not any one but all wide open. Black forests. Anti-electronic bloodstreams. Silver milk.
In each the hues screwed wide and carried over, splintered into every possible emotion.
FLOOD: No word we made was ever ours; none of what we’d said were the words we’d meant at all inside you or me and instead a word in our blood turned and turned, the same word over and over, all the hours, against the measure of the sand, until even you could not recognize you recognizing you inside you and instead inside the house we fell into something soft inside the silence between twin iterations of the word and there you were, and the years continue again and spin rewinding and inside the light inside the seeing.
The light moved through all mirrors. Our color cored inside the sound was only reflecting against itself. Inside the smoke I saw the skin of the sound around me come apart into a whorl, one of three hundred million films, each with innumerable films carried inside it, and in those too. All the longing. The whorl solidified around me until I was anywhere there could have been ever. I was in the room beneath the house. I was in the dry inside the fire baked with resin. I was walking along a hall. I was facedown in the living room awaiting bodies. I was falling through this.
I closed my eyes.
Inside the black I could still see the land of the world surrounding empty, though here behind the land I saw the long veil of human history knitting in the light we’d left behind, a scrolling ream of memory-dimension beyond both time and space where all our lives fed through the same lens, the sunning voice burning even the glass out into air, and from the air then the burning image beyond all color, code, or era.
It was my own voice then I heard beyond me, saying nothing.
Inside no sound, each present edge still disappeared into the next. The white of the light inside the silence between language made my own skin seem miles denser in comparison, and the idea of all previous occurrences even thicker, to the point of impossibility. Along the air there was the void of something exploding continuously and unendingly, light pouring through where words weren’t.
I thought to touch my face then but I couldn’t. I could not remember anything except thinking this sentence. I could not remember what the sentence meant, that I did not remember where I’d been forever or what I wanted. I tried to turn around and go back the way I’d come, inside the air, but when I turned I found the world had changed to fit my shape, filled through and through me without color.
This was what had always been. Nothing had happened; nothing had not happened; and yet everything was ours. Our bodies stuck at the frame of the page of the light where the flesh of all of us each instant shrunk and expanded overwritten overrun false with all absent language lorded between any way ever. Each word held a murder of its own; each death a death of all things and so now nothing. There was so much light coming from all the holes now I could hardly tell what parts of me were me and what was time, all stretching out forever over what had been once.
All I wanted was to love and to be loved. I wanted to feel us loved and go on in love again and have a spouse and child again in love in endless light in endless repetition beyond the shape of any home you made beyond our image, though here the light kept frying out and walls kept turning into mirrors and the floors harbored under floors, cold colors longer than the house is, any instant stretched to oldest tone. Here I wanted to exist in the rhythm of a stunning surface grown from no sleep in all our excess all beside you beyond blood. I wanted to be free and laugh like fire, to watch the edge of the earth expand so wide it killed the color of the void, carved a peace for us to spread our lives out warm in ancient fat and growing ages. I would have given anything to stand beside you. I would give you anything.
I raised my arms into the light. I did not have arms but I could feel them rubbing against everything they weren’t. I heard me shouting long before the sound came. Each syllable stretched for longer than I could imagine ever existing. I opened my eyes over and again and each time saw the same long corridors of white against the white repeating nil.
Between each nil I lived forever. A century of centuries of summers in the bodies murmuring my head my head wide open with the faces, speech undone. Walls around us, light around us, above, below. Not in any place that had a name still, but simply here. In the end of asking, and of needing to be asked. The end of whatever you’d been waiting for forever in the long stand of electricity and putty. Wherever you could find a way.
Wherever we have been. In the end of commentary. The end of the end of anything we’d wished to conceive and not conclude. All those instants collected on the body of all of us and placed beneath us so that we could still walk and not need to remember we’d been deformed. With our tongues against the emblem, pupils swelled to fill out not only our whole eye, but the space beyond the eye. In the end of the out-of-frame, the end of seeing. The end of the pigment of our dreaming existing only forced encased.
Where all we wanted was to hold. In the end of shapes and endless endlessnesses. The end of something like falling through no hour. Here in the shower of all sound, wearing a skin made of the moment of eruption as our bodies finally gasped the dust out of the streets and stood up and bowed without an encore.
The end of will. In the end of needing form and fingers to exist beside the space you’d been forever and had suffered for to control, where when the lights come on in the house again we must swear we won’t remember how anything at all between us has been amended before appearing. Blown out and blotted in the loveless marrow of the present.