I guess what happened then is the mother and the son, they walked, though there was nowhere for them to go. The grass where the neighborhood had once hosted a garden later used for ritual burial had grown so high it seemed a sea, and, surely, inside it, there were a billion bodies lost and rotting, as the stench that rose made wavy lines like heat grade on the hemisphere of breath. I guess the road that had always led out of the front gates to a street that led to shopping centers was now so cracked in so many places that the asphalt resembled undentisted teeth, the gaping mouth of all worn around them which would suck you in alive in stench.
The mother tried to lead her son into the manhole that hid the gutter from daily vision, down into the branching bastard yearlong labyrinth of pipe connecting all things elsewhere, though here the muck had washed up so thick it made a cake on top that you could stand on, through which in so many places on the surface you could see the reams of those who’d gotten stuck, their half-plunged bodies draped as if relaxing, sponged and nowhere, covered in machine grease and fleas.
Right.
So, the mother started one direction then another, turning, turning, aware of leaking gas behind her eyes — gas of nauseas, fear, contusion, gorgons, aping hate leashed in her teeth. She felt mammalian—was she not? — semi-destructive and in sudden want of death haunted by half-hung memories of glee — old warmth hidden in some kind of no longer present feeling. Don’t you feel ashamed? something long beyond her kept repeating, and though she did not yet, she felt she did. Each hill surrounding seemed just to get steeper, each inhale came through a little less. In each place they went she called out for the father in the other name she could remember, no longer concerned by the Terms. She remembered the father’s prior name and could feel it coming out of her pores and through her aspiration. She screamed the name without opening her mouth and in each place they went the father’s name echoed and the walls or air of the places trembled by the gait of what had come out of her in light, and sometimes solid things were turned to liquid by her just by her being and liquid things were dried to sand, and the mother spun her head in circles looking through something wedged between her and her mind, the portholes lodged in the background of the flush of her skin, all inches of her begging in one long sound, like the toning, but inverted, and still the father did not appear.
In the light Person 811 found himself standing at the mirror shaving his face. He’d been there working the razor for several hours, he knew that. He carried the razor in his skin, where it had been gifted to him by his father, one of no number, who had pulled the blade out of the ground beneath them where they stood. For years the blade had sung for hours each night vibrating. 811 often felt it in his tongue or through his sternum. He’d run over the coarse skin so many times now there were mowed red indentations in his cheeks, strapped strips of almost bleeding where the flesh still sort of hung together. There was no more hair, and yet he shaved as if his arm did not belong to him.
811 had burst a woman once, by staring — the blood had spouted through her face — the curd had looped down from her nape and chest like gowns. Her body continued on inside the air that day and never came back. That night the father stayed out in the backyard practicing hypnosis.
The father had his own ideas regarding god.
The mirror, likewise, did not seem to hold him. In the cusp around his oddly glowing body there was a room he’d known before. He knew he knew the room but he could not say exactly why or what about it or who had been there once and when.
The room was blowing snow, or something else. A screen of light white powdered petals poured from the long flat ceiling onto the bed — matter that in other years had fallen on the father in other temperatures and locations and forms. 811 felt his body changing.
BLINK
There was a woman on the bed — the same woman he had seen before, from somewhere, though he could not decipher this, as her body had changed too: her body less wrinkled in his presence than under any light.
By her reflection in the mirror over his shaving shoulder, the father could see the woman mostly did not have a face. That is, she had a head and hair around it. The snow stuck in her hair. It did not melt into the hair, just clung there glinting.
The woman had a mouth of huge white teeth — this he could see. She had spent years caring for them, each, in full. But where the woman should have eyes and cheeks and nostrils, instead the father saw something else. Staggered beads of wretched colors, rolling in and on around against their texture like pixels flailing. Bits and pieces of other parts of other bodies, collaged. Bodies he had known or not known and did it matter. No, it did not matter.
The woman’s face remained refracted as she lay there naked on the bed. She had a huge round ream of black film she used to wrap around her neck. She worked the film around her in a circle, passing hand to hand, the scream of adhesive whirring on over each inch of her body covering it gone. She’d already done her lower portions, her waist and arms and legs and tits and more — the woman’s nipples were massive, 811 noticed, covering her whole tit mostly, black as a long and unlit hallway, slick. He still wanted to touch the tits, kiss around them, suckle — though by the time he felt that wanting in him all the nipple skin had been enmeshed. All she had left now not yet film-covered was her screwed head — the pulsing head of TV color — the slick blonde hair pulled to a comb — the father recognized this hair — he could smell it.
The woman’s mouth was spewing coins — they gored in fountain down onto the mattress — all the metal money Person 811 had spent in years on other women, on his body, building size. The woman’s cocooned body writhed among it, sucking the stink in. She, he recognized then, had been inside his home. His home? The phrase contorted in his flat mouth as he tried to speak it, spit it aloud. It wouldn’t come out how he meant. He could not make the word alight upon the air around him. He felt the fat vein in his forehead squirt a little harder each time he tried — his larynx clucking with old smoke and dandruff—the snow was dandruff—the ceiling like some dead skin cracking in its still — the walls some celled portion of a larger thing — a thing that moved.
I still do not know… Person 811 said in someone else’s voice. Still do not know… Still do not…
What the hell am I saying, he tried to say, and in trying could hear nothing but the tone.
The father found that he was not shaving now so much as laughing, rubbing an apple on his face. A chubby wretched apple, stuck with aphids. Its crumpled skin clung to his skin. He stopped and gnashed into the apple. He chewed the loamy gut, tasted hot hair oil and bleach. Inside his stomach he felt the pieces of the apple reconvening. He felt it stick in his throat width, holding certain words there. He had the razor in his hand again.
He began to shave his tongue — the tongue he’d used so many ways — the tongue that still would not form the words he wished. He tried to turn around and look upon the woman, his young wife, to bring some morning to this color, ask her to help him say the words right, ask her to tell him where and when and who he was, but still he could not make his body work. Instead he shaved — right to left and left to right, up and down and back against the grain, the bitter foaming cold cream itching where it clung and took the cells up, the hair and skin beneath him piling up in cold report.