The father came into another clearing around the house’s right side. The paint on the house here peeled in scores. The curled paint resembled larvae, and so that’s what they were. There was a window looking in. The father moved to touch the window with cramping fingers. He clanged his metal forehead on the glass but it would not break. He clawed the glass and got some wedged under his nails.
Through the eyeslits the father could see somewhat—into the TV room, though there was no TV now, no other stuff. The TV room had not had a window on the inside, but from outside he could see in. The room contained ten to twenty people—on second thought, more like fifty or a hundred—on third, more like five hundred or ten thousand—teeming like ants, colliding, impossible to count. The father saw himself, the mother, and the son therein among the mingling, chewing cheese and crackers off tiny plates. Others also looked familiar. With each new head the father felt his recall swim for some connection. The whole room overflowed. Keys and eggs and blood and money. Thinning wives and headless men. Young boys with rings and electronic money. The father saw the man and woman who’d appeared to buy the house and recognized them, though he had not been home when they’d come to see the house before, and he could not see how both of them resembled younger versions of himself and her, whomever, and here their heads were tied together by the hair—they had one set of hair between them. The whole house did. They were all speaking into cubes. Everyone with his or her head against a black box, skin growing fatter on their heads. A mush. You could see transmissions on the air—could read the baggage hanging on the slow slopes where all together we were breathing in and out. The rooms not rooms but years. Along the walls the new wallpapered shapes repeating: O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O.
O of go and how and nowhere.
O of house and son and door.
O of O.
From outside looking in, the father beeped and banged against the glass. No one would look toward him. They all were asking. Inside the house the boxes rang, and heads made laugh and bees barfed buzz and long dogs barked and babies babbled, while inside his bulb the father began to shout a semi-prayer and the bulb zapped his skin and skull in hot correction and across it all there was a wind and no one would.