Over time the figure proceeded and the son began to learn the figure’s face. He could see the face and sensed a squirm a scrunch a need for recognition. Someone certain. Someone nearby. Someone the son had learned to love, though in a distant, ingrained method. The son had seen this person every day. He knew the smell. He knew the inches of the fabric of the thing the figure carried forward and wore all draped around it. The fabric was made of meat and blood and things undone and hair and years and wanting and a special blend of polyester. The son knew the figure’s name inside him. The son felt something welling through his skin.
The cell phone was ringing so hard through the son now that he could feel the impending conversation. He could hear what the person on the other end would be saying and he could hear his voice reply. He’d heard those words a billion times too. He heard them every time he slept. He said them in dreams of people he did not know yet. He said them in very tiny rooms. He spoke them out into the bedroom also. The bedroom’s walls had absorbed so much. The son wanted to touch the bedroom walls again. The son wanted to stand up. The son’s skin was getting ugly. A bubble flooded on his neck. He popped the bubble with his finger. Another rose. He popped and popped. He could feel the hemming of his lines, becoming sizes. He could feel his last haircut aching in the tendrils of the hair he sometimes—like the father—devoured in his sleep. In his sleep the son had eaten more than anyone could ever. There was so much in the son. The son could kill a forest if he shaved. The son could cripple nations. The son could sew designer jeans out of his runoff.
Everything.
The son could hear the prior homeowners’s pets, which were endlessly buried in the backyard and underneath the house and sometimes even under the gravel of the driveway or in the carpet underneath the son’s bed.
The son’s skin was coming off.
The figure stood closer. The fabric the figure had unfolded stunk and filled the room. More beef. A little cream. Graham crackers. The son loved graham crackers—he liked the crack between teeth—he’d eaten enough to build a mall—the figure knew this. The figure had a mouth, the son could see that, he could see inside the mouth. The son could see the room flooding with liquid. The son could see the apartment the figure rented in the figure’s chest.
The son could not laugh either, but he did too.
The room was getting warmer—sweating. The son’s posters slipped off the walls. The ink slid from off the posters and the paint from off the place where they had hung. The paint coagulated into pigments. The son felt a blister open on his top lip. He had a suntan. He had a sunburn. Months of sunburns. Years in years. Sun damage. Damage. He grew thicker.
The figure was off the width of a fist now, give or take a hair. The son had made many fists but wanted to make more. Once the son had seen an ocean slip out of the crack slit in the windshield of a car, a car cracked as the son watched and made the car skid with his eyes. The son’s hair contained the cells of everyone he’d ever been.
Actually, the son could laugh a little, though it came out through his back and sunk into the bed. The son was sneezing colors. The son had lanterns in his eyes—lanterns once used to light other houses. The son felt someone sewing his perimeter into the clothgrain of the bed. He blinked and found himself inside a mattress on top of which someone was sitting—someone asleep or still or reading or too tired to stand up—someone maybe thinking of the son—maybe the son himself. The son saw days he’d spent already layered across the room in film. The son watched his head in photo portraits his mother had made him hang up on his room’s walls wilt in time-lapse backward, his skin becoming puckered, regressing into cells. The son was inside the mother then and could see the mother’s moving arms. The mother digging, bug-swarmed. The son could read the things the mother had not meant to think about the son—the thoughts pummeled through and through her—her imagination’s doubt. The son saw the mother through the mother. Saw the mother lying on a bed. Saw the mother coursed with wrinkles, her coarse white hair. The mother in a very tiny room.
The son could not fully sit up. He felt his blood gush inside a spiral. He fell straight down through long darkness. His neck was getting tired.
The son.
The son felt older. He grew a mustache, faint at first and then a handlebar, one that, if he could move his hands, he would have twisted at the ends into a creation that would have made him memorable in pictures. The son’s voice inside him changed—though he could not use it, he could hear several other sounds projected—other people.
Other people in the son.
The son grew capable of babies—capable of son. A billion sperm.
The son shed skin at a rate that made his body lift off the mattress inch by inch. The room was filling up. His fingernails were curling. His eyes changed color twice—once to gold like change he’d hidden—once to the shade of blue the summer sky had been the day the father and the mother had made the son on the very bed the son sprawled on now.
The son’s back began to crimp. The son felt his hands go loose a little.
Above the bed the ceiling was bowing down. It bowed to touch the center of the moment where the son and the figure would collide. The walls as well had swum with hump, puckered funny, pulling out. Hair, skin, liquid, money. The carpet sat slathered in frustration, stapled to the ground.