The father opened his mouth again to try to say something to the woman, but she was older now; instead his mouth ejected reams of infant birds. The birds were slow and small and not like birds then, covered in a gel. They shat long white strings of old light as they flew up; they flew straight into the wall at once; they died. Their feathers fell upon his body, stuck against him, glued down with his ejaculate, still kind of strumming with future flew. They stuck too to the woman until he and she were under so much writhing neither could see where he or she began. Their muscles throttled in the mask. They shat so fast. The room began filling up with wet between the fiber, more gush and slick pushed from all their holes. All ages fried.
The woman’s mouth said another question but Person 811 could not hear it through the gunk, the tone inside it making shriek. The beef inside him beating.
One massive hauling on the woman’s chain inside the downy lather ripped the woman all of a sudden through the wall. Then it was dark. No matter how he struggled to flap and rise like what he’d seen come from her thereafter, he could not inside himself find hold.
The new men had to swim from several miles up, bleeding, to drag Person 811 out of where he lay, his body pussed and pulled apart and overflowing. The men had been employed. The men were not alive in certain senses. Where they’d lost their heads they’d been affixed with false heads made of leather, skin, and plastic, to give the appearance of having heads. The false heads bore great resemblance to Person 811.
Several sections of the father had become dislodged from the father in the toning, the elongation of his cells. The fleshy segments floated off among the liquid held to his body only now by bits of stringy flesh, vibrating with a language. The men collected these eruptions into a film sac — a bit of ear, a lash, a prism, something wet the father had swallowed years before — though some of the bit had washed out so far that they would not be found in time. The reconstruction of the father would therefore have to go on as best it could.
Underwater, the men lashed the father to a table and spun him upwards through the clear. They fit the father in a van. They drove the van into another van. This second van knew where to go. The van’s driver had touched the father on the eye once, years before, in a gold room. The van’s second-in-command had hid inside a blanket in the father’s father’s trunk for many months, breathing the same air as the father when the father’s father drove him to and from the school. The father’s father had never driven him anywhere but the school, and, well, once, to the ocean once to see where everyone they ever knew had drowned, to see the long intestines washing on the shoreline, and the massive birds growing more massive in their feeding.
The van’s fuel had once been inside the father also, but not via the manner you might assume.
The van itself had once been used for rape, and would again, and would again.
Inside the van, Person 811 lay with his head down against the floorboards with the human moaning of the road.
In another kind of dark the men massaged the father’s face. They stretched certain parts of him to yawning. They filled in the holes in with several kinds of putty and perfume orbs. The insides of Person 811 were now pastel. There men inserted devices in the father, items—none of which by sight or function they could name—inscribed text and digits on the father’s cells and sperm and organs, grafted buttons — then the father was sewn up.
Person 811 was made to stand and laugh and say nice things, though his new tongue kept getting in the way.
When he could shake hands with satisfaction, the men took him to visit the naked woman’s grave. She had perished in his pleasure, they explained. Pleasure had been administered, please recall. For your enjoyment. The enjoyment of the pleasure of it. The greatest light. Now if you don’t mind: sign this form. And this form. And spit up here. And as well here now make the creaming. Stamp, initial, spit up, making creaming, sign. Checks must made out to the Absorber. Keep your eyes open.
The men watched Person 811 kiss the ground. They watched him lick the woman’s headstone and thank and thank it. Under the headstone was just putty. The woman had been absorbed or reassigned. Everything, they said, would be okay.
Okay? the father said. He could not taste it. Okay? Okay?
They pointed up.
They handed him a special pair of high-grade zoom bifocals that fit intensely to his whole face.
The word was written on the sky.
There in the weeks I came to know my wife again, the air was made of liquid ash
You could walk for weeks and step through windows and still just everything was old
Spumes of shit or wingbeat would come floating on some shudder
But for the most part, the house, the yard, in everybody — we knew black
We lanced around in squirmy currents cutting transitions for our hands
It wasn’t funny, nor would it stop
In the ash you let your eyes and arms go and you would end up somewhere or another
You could just roll around and release shit
No one would know
Some nights I’d turn the a/c down or leave the fridge wide open and the black rooms would then turn harder, into ice
Then there’d be rungs that formed up in the transom
Then you could climb
I’d slunk through all of this alone
By the time I’d learned the manner of the ladder there was lather in the den
There were shapes among us and we could feel them
We could have them, or be had
I was raped in so many positions I can’t remember by things I also can’t remember
It felt like walking
Soon the long waves sunk off from the houses and on the air was left no light
From the dark rhythm I cut a woman’s body
My wife of me was made of night at first, whereas I have only ever been all cold
Her voice would pour out of my skin asleep for hours
She had such undoing ideas
She had a talisman that gave off weather
There was so much between us we could touch and so much milk
Right now I can remember I am the father in this book
Right now, regardless, I remember, though soon again soon I will not
In this scum I’d built the house that would be ours
I built it just by blinking
It was right there
Just years and years and fucking years inside this house there counting
Moving in from room to room in no clean light
Often my wife was not around at all, or she was watching from somewhere I could not feel her
I could not feel anything
My skin would stick to certain surfaces for days and I would wait