I am getting tired of myself, the mother thought.
I am tired also, the son replied from a far room.
I am also very tired.
I would feel okay if you did not turn the page.
Why did you do that?
I told you I was tired.
You know how you and I are getting sicker.
I mean, it’s hilarious.
We won’t speak of this again.
In the new house the mother still found the door that held the stairwell, lodged like a razor in an apple. She had not built a stairwell for this new house, expressly. Someone was knocking on the door. The knocking made the whole house quiver like a fire. She touched the crack around the door. She traced its long shape with her knuckles. She felt a warmish crumbling kind of air there coming through. She felt the thing inside her eating. She felt her ribcage being toned on, nestled near to, giving birth to more of where she was again, every inch of her another child. She sneezed up a sofa and moved it over the door’s face. She went to bed, though inside her sleep she saw the door again, and behind the door again another door and it was snowing something.
The father wriggled in the father. In the light he moved through corridors of chub, black spasmed pockets of hid body caught and aging. He did not know what about his moving was what moved him, only that when he nudged his head another way he would shudder from one crux to another, the air slurring into squirmy clouds of pinkish liquid, scent of want. He often thought he heard someone other coming toward him from the other way in the larger body, down the long blond hall inside him where he’d wormed. A strumming presence, something heavy like the name of cream and crushing putty on the air. He tried to hurry forward through him in the slather, kicking, barking, forming new minutes in his flesh. He found he could not at all remember which way he should be headed, which way already he had been or if he’d ever moved at all. Each inch had new tunnels, some so immensely black there was no way.
For each inch of the father there were many fathers. For each father in the father there was sound from which the body had been composed. The sound cased in around him making flesh. He couldn’t see what his hands were doing. He couldn’t see what his face was doing. Little worms caked in the walls around him were passing also through his skin and unto somewhere else. For years he’d swallowed pills to try to clear his system of its parasites and its ailment and none of it had worked, none of it had done anything except turn his shit a different color, which matched the walls of many houses and sometimes the color of his mind. The years still shaking in the father like the silence:
The year my final dentist fit his whole arm down inside me, hungry for a portal, high on light.
The year I would have been a husband to anyone here with my same eyes.
The year I said I thought I wanted more — and really did.
The year my fat shook itself free, became another body, on its own — one who would stand above me in the evenings, never touching.
These are not my years, the father tried to tell the years themselves inside his thinking, though the words his body thought were:
What else could I have loved.
Move! Person 811 heard himself outside himself repeating, this voice as big as he’d imagined something in the mind of some gone god’s. Move, you massive dickless fucker!
He was already going fast as he could — the muscles in him stretched raw with windows in their gristle. He could no longer sense the other man following behind him, nor the man behind that man, so on.
All these fat, prismatic people.
The father breathed his blood.
Inside himself he felt the flesh walls to turn to water where he touched them—because he was them—a tasteless, scentless, flushing liquid that stung his lids and shrank his bowels. The other body all around him also seemed shrieking. In the color of it was the tone.
The father rolled along among the water folded and unfolding — grasping for the door — what door — some, any vision — a window — waking locations. He kept rolling. He felt several sections of himself go other ways, swimming in opposite directions at the same time, a separation in his skin. He could not think of which part of what to try to hold onto.
Above the water a black orb-camera kept panning back and back and back, capturing each blinking of the father in tunnel method of the smear. The face of the water was all placid seen from above it, despite the movement underneath. The camera ascended, its organs burning, until it hit some kind of perimeter or ceiling and was stopped.
The camera kept bashing at the surface, at the surface. It could not cause a crack in what held it there from moving further out. Something very warm beyond it seemed to murmur. The camera beat itself to bits, sending small fragments flying until it hit the vital cord and fell into the thing it meant to film.
The surface did not blink.
The father’s body washed up in a bathtub. A nude woman stood beside it in the mirror working curls into her hair, long gray locks that ate the light up. She heard the father sputter, sneezing sea up, weed and scales screwed through his own hair. The woman had a long black metal chain that ran out from her vulva. The chain led somewhere beyond the bathroom door, its presence vibrating with a low tone. The woman continued with her fingers curling till her whole head was encased — her cheek skin slumped and slathered with bright white oil that clung to light underneath. Her tits, he saw, had been removed. In the tub, Person 811 burped and stammered, trying to stand up. The nude woman’s neck was stacked with hickeys, kind of glowing. Her spinal column seemed disrupted. Her ass, though — her ass had spent endless time on glossy paper, replicated through the years. The father nodded. He felt his back arch, his fat toes cracking as they cricked.
The woman finished with her make-up and came to stand above him. The chain anchored inside her tremored taut — as if the chain itself or something huddled at the far end could sense her moving and did not want it — and yet the woman did not flinch — no emotion as the chain tugged up from her, peeling her skin in flaps up off the limb. Her eyes were hard and had no color. In the tub the woman knelt down on the father, pressing some fleshy wet spot on his gut. Somewhere downstairs animals were screaming, chipping at the walls.
The woman took the father by the dark balls and opened up her mouth.
WHAT’S THE MOST BEST THING YOU’VE EVER SEEN, she said loudly without speaking, her mouth full of his dick. WHAT’S THE ONE NAME YOU COULD KNOW WITHOUT KNOWING YOU KNEW IF YOU HAD TO WHO IS THE WAY YOU WERE THEN THERE WHEN YOU WERE THE WAY YOU WERE THEN THERE OR NOW HOW MUCH DO YOU LOVE YOUR HOME WHERE ARE YOU IN YOU
The woman’s pores and eyes were gushing flour, some of which filled the father’s nostrils and other holes, clogging his body to stay closed in. Cold spirals waddled up him.
When he did not reply, the woman shook her head and let the father’s dick flop out soft against itself. Coming in contact with his other flesh now, the dick sort of sizzled and leaked liquid. 811 felt exquisite pain lurch up his sternum, ejaculating in the bath. Afterwards he still felt ugly. He watched the sperm worked through the water at his skin, searching through the mud there for some hold. He felt a billion others growing larger in his self-sacs, one for every sperm he’d not released. All of it squalling all inside him and around him bloating. And it burned.