Three Hundred Million: A Novel (31 page)

There is a knock at the lone window. Old bells ring upon the air. The death machine is shaking.

Over the frying, our applause.

Over the applause, the husking flake of our surrounded flesh all turning dry.

The dryness of light no one remembers.

The day of the dryness of light.

Today in America, 208,135,180 people become killed, each and all killed and killed again forever amen until everybody in America is dead.

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.