Nothing (24 page)

Tonight inside the house I’m in nothing will stop. The air seems not air at all, made for our breathing, but empty space; the telephones inside the rooms and all the rooms of houses here surrounding about to ring; the bodies through the window sometimes passing and when not passing always about to be again, any of them someone who might turn and walk toward the window, press their face against the glass, see me seeing them, and say a word.

My father as a younger man. My father in the hours of the day he and my mother made me—what he ate, heard, what he said, what doors opened or songs sung. As in how after a first private showing to a small group of people, Kubrick cut thirty minutes out of the film. As in the people, minutes, in any body’s mind there buried, fit into a gray made flesh. As in along the hall the hand-sewn quilts hang parallel on the wall’s far side to, in many rooms, books in bookcases full of words, words rendered and waiting, never to be opened into light again, unless.

Tonight the night is still the night. The crush of no noise at all for right now that seems to permeate the air. The latch on the thin window. Bodies passing on the other side.

The skin that freed itself in friction from the arm of Borges as he walked from room to room on the day he first bumped upon the thought of a space containing all possible books.

Last night, abutting this one, predating whatever else, maybe, perhaps I grab a random book by its spine among the many lining my loft with its high ceilings, out of some drift where any book is any book. Perhaps I read from the page to where it opened up: “There are things you can think about,” the book says, or said, is saying, “where if you follow your thoughts in, no one will ever be able to get you out.”
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Suddenly, inside my typing, my father is standing right behind me at the door—as if he could hear inside the pattern of the keys his name, his shape, symbols marking down what he is doing in this house that he has cut out of his work, his mind.

“What you doin’, mister?” he says to me in a pinched, strange voice, his imitation of an older man than even him. He hasn’t lost his sense of humor. He’s wearing his windbreaker, Easter yellow. One of several hats he rotates in and out over the bald part of his head I can’t ever remember seeing not rubbed bare.

“Just typing,” I say, turning from the words. “What’s up?”

Without answer he moves from the door on down the hall, into the bedroom where my mom is probably just now lying down in the same spot she has most every night since I was seven. A few minutes later, he walks back past. He turns the light on at the far end of the hallway, the longest room in our whole house. I hear him walk into the far end again and then it’s silent. The light is on.

I save this file.

I stand up again inside the house. I walk along the hall where the light goes on along the long room and stops and ends at the next room, the kitchen, sandwiched between the primary front and back entry and exit doors. In the room beyond the kitchen I can see the muted glue of textures of the next space thrown out from the TV, and beyond that, another door into a space filled up with darkness, the last room on this end of the house, its mouth.

I don’t see my father in this makeshift tunnel, and there still isn’t any sound.

Coming on into the kitchen the large panes of glass that comprise the door and windows reflect the room I’m in back at itself, the light inside not also outside, flattened. I see me stand there in the shift of glass, making two people. I can see through me, again. Certain low-lit shapes sit in the yard under another, softer, further off illumination, blockaded at certain angles. I cannot see the sky for all the night. The front door is locked or it is unlocked. I don’t know, from here, who’s touched what, what could come in through the night in search toward this glow.

I stand inside the doubled room—inside and outside the house both—my father in neither—his body where. His mind as all those doors sleep has held hidden, some sealing off under their cells or as the years curl further in, the spool of sleep.

In the kitchen I move toward my reflection facing me, spreading my arms out flat, four of them, on the air. I move closer to the glass. I become larger, shifting the texture of the light.

From closer up I can see forming, among the concrete and the yard, different shades of dark and tunnel where the air is. I move to press my flesh against the pane. It is a cold surface, soft but ungiving, demanding exit only under being broken. At the median of the two rooms in one image, I press my head against the plane and close my eyes. My teeth inside my head form a ream of girders. My cheeks in knots of round. This silent house. This night around the evening, not electronic. This pressing presses back at me with questioned pressure, some soft unbending, a translucent sense-thin skull. As if at any moment it might open, fold me through it. And I want it to.

I do.

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Outside the night is warmer than it had seemed felt through the glass. Over the pool’s water, a thin skin, caused in the stillness of the pool’s disuse, the sky doubled from overhead in reflection on the scrim. Another mirror. From outside, looking back, the inside of the house seems so clear—bright as if with no air, in a vacuum, sealed—a place I’ve never been—as if I’m only in here in this instant. Through the house’s eyes back in I still can’t find my father moving. Nothing but the light and my split body, still pressed against the glass from the inside. These rooms humped up to one another. These rooms where—where what—here tonight confabulated in crystalline arrangement, hidden—no air shaking—all evenings in this evening placed on pause.

I walk along the yard between the fence into the next yard, also confined by the street where in other years I fell and left behind bits of my skin, paving its paved face with other layers of my body, for its surface, and spilling onto it in blood, a consecration of that hour and the beginning of new heal; the wires hanging from the house’s roof’s lip and strung along to poles stabbed in the ground, feeding off into the other neighboring houses and on down the streets among their artificial light; the yard of grass I’ve cut pushing machines upon it in rhythmic patterns over and over again, year in and out, and yet the mud beneath it never failing to keep sending new cells to be cut and cut again, slowing only for the freezing air of seasonal night; the music I pumped into my body over and over in that circling, loud enough to mask the noise of the machine, not loud enough to mask my own thoughts underneath it hovered, in the input, in sight; the years my younger father set part of the yard on fire piling leaves and branches into a mounded divot, burning those excess folds off into nowhere, into the air, for which we breathed—all that sound I can’t remember, all those words he spoke into my head; the trees that used to fill the yard all mostly cut down, so that in the light and night there is much more space to see of other homes, the open windows in the night air blank of the bodies surely somewhere there inside them, asleep or awake; the year the bird fell out of the sky in some negation of its sense of self and landed stomach-up upon the yard, the light of sky that afternoon as Dad and I squatted together there above it, the sky behind us, the blank behind that, no oxygen, no sound.

The yard tonight, white, dying, brittle—my father no longer able to spend long afternoons with seed and blade, pruning the yard up to be a thing he took a pride in, an outfit for the house. The sky tonight, there is no moon—no definition in the low code of its abstruse, slate gray ceiling, flat and unending until the point along its stretch it disappears behind the lip of my perspective—clipped under by the curving of the earth unto the forms of buildings and the trees.

Underneath this what, just like my father, the nameless man’s car tonight does not appear—he where here inside my life I’ve sensed always approaching—no face, no frame—and always just ahead, unshaping time. In the car’s place, tied to a massive bolt, clung with protrusions, nodules, gold, as if torn from the center of a lock or from the engine of a car, there is strung another wire—this one thinner,
blacker
, than those strung between the houses, chewed up and kinked like pubic hair. The wire follows up from its endpoint where the ground is, leading off into atmosphere, into the nowhere of the night. Between my two longest fingers’ pads the wire remains silent—its shape off, minute in one dimension, endless in the other, as far as I can tell, lurching upward, outward on. I feel a slowing urge to yank the wire down and hard from where it runs off, suspended above the street as far as I can see, and yet I do not. I hold it firmly.

I walk forward with the wire in my hand. I lead my way along the wire in low light. It doesn’t matter what the wire is. Along the lip of street heading due south, among new grass the state has recently installed, to cover over pipe and mud, through which the rainwater will go gushing nights that something overhead throws it down, some eternal wet in slow recycle, cells once inside of others, where and when. Over the sidewalk where I have run so many nights to burn my cells off, feeding my own sweat back into the unending mouth of what is breathed. The wire leads me on between the flat faces of the two long neighboring buildings where for seven years I went to school—the one building on the left, behind which I once watched a kid get clocked along the jaw with brass knuckles while a horde of us all watched, the grass field where I was so fat I could not finish the mile for all that hulking and the terror of my veins, those rooms gummed each new year with new bodies, unreflective in the night; and the one building on the right where I grew thinner, the trophy cases full of photos with trapped versions of people, many of whom likely still live within a nearby range. The glass of neither building winks. The parking lot of the grid on my left is full of at least a dozen empty buses, parked at parallels, where from the distance I see oblong shades of bodies, held still in the aisles, no eyes.

I follow the wire between the schools on both sides. I can see the wire’s glint extending further on ahead, down the slow grade to the creek bed which certain nights would swell so high it covered up the bridge. That night, in the downpour, we came to stand there at the lap and watch the cars scream through at different speeds, until the small dark red one flipped, gunning its wheels. Metal on metal in that evening, glass popping out half under water, blood mixing with the mud rain, silent now, again—all this air in endless charging, eaten up with what had been seen, while tonight—no one.

I hear my me inside me think—shitting out each word of this in its iteration, scrolling on a wire from my cerebrum through my sternum and meat of heart, to catch tangled in the thin rungs of my fingers and wrapped around my testes, filling space with tumor-noise. Behind my head the moon grows glowing so hot and fast I have to close my lids to keep from burning, and then and there under my lids I hear the moon blink with me—
burning out
—so that there at once in my unseeing the air around the earth also cannot see—the fields and houses and the hours cloaked with nothing around my nothing, a darkness deeper than no mind in mirror cloak—a darkness time could not erase in new directions—ageless black unleaving. I swallow and hear shapes. I rub my finger and my thumb together and feel the words between them screech, wanting out into the dark where they could hide from paper and from thinking—to slip into no light and never be remade—all my words ever only wanting in this in me—to go nowhere.

When I look again, the night is fine. It is as any night—the time between when I had looked and not looked, in the dark, threaded with the street bulbs and our glow, the moon returned to screw above anybody, all reflection—an eye without a lens or head.

Beyond the creek, and past a further field and hill paved of its grass, along a long rip of mud where once a manmade lake had lain, its liquid so dark in the passing there is even no reflection of what stands above it, overhead, among a neighborhood I’ve watched rot and repair through my thirty years, the wire leads up to a house—a house, as white as typing paper, lit just with two bulbs on either side of its one door, the curtains in the window of a color dark enough to appear beyond opaque. A house, I realize in standing three feet from it, the wire wet from sweat inside my hand, that has stood across the street from where I grew up all those hours, all that time—though I do not now know how, in all my walking, I have returned here to stand before it, and there beside it, before mine, where here the light is different, and the yard is knee-high, and the brick is colored like the scratch mark in my knee, but it is still the house I have spent the most of all my hours there inside of, come full circle, lost in accidental circuits of the feed, in the folding of the map. Through their bedroom window, I see my mother and my father standing shoulder to shoulder with their eyes closed in their heads.
There he is.

This other house’s door is locked. The bolt makes a clicking sound inside itself when I flub at it. The wire strung into the night. My own old home is closed off also—the knob spins in my hand.

I turn around. These two houses stand facing one another by a margin wide enough for me to move between, pushed together in my presence to obliterate the yards—covering up the space of years where I had moved and stood and swam and read and talked and looked at sky. The brick of both just at my front and back, breathing my breathing, dragging at the hairs pinned in my pores pinned in my skin pinned on my flesh. The walls seem from here to go on so far—I cannot see any end. Along the length I waddle on between the houses dragging, the night above me doing slur; lines pulled out of lines where the sheath of dark screams friction between perspectives, like sliding off of something just behind it, tipping lids. The farther I can fall along the way between the houses without blinking the gap gets bigger, though there seems nothing there behind the fold—the sky behind the sky the same color as the sky in its same hour, as if any hour splayed, the night peeling in constant burn of layer all through the days in mirrored time like skin goes purred. Nights barfing nights and into day again to barf the day again to night in cycles thinning out the space between us and whatever way on out there, the air rained with that matter, thickening the earth in matching rhythm of the rising of the dead.