Three Hundred Million: A Novel (37 page)

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