He held his breath and closed his eyes. He found that not breathing felt the same as breathing. He found that through his lids he could still see the same walls in the same room, though in the room now, held inside him, the screen no longer showed all endless lands, but instead now was reflective. The child could see only himself, though it was not like looking on into reflection. When the child moved his arm the other of him did not move. The other of him was much older and was naked and had no head. The man’s arms were swollen where his were childish, the skin all covered in tattoos, each glyph distorted into shapes indistinguishable for what they’d been sometime or ever, the shapes of continents submerged. The child could see straight through the thin pale skin stretched on the man’s chest. All through his organs small things had nested, thousands of them, innumerable white birds. The child could the muscled veinwork crinkling in the birds’ sternums, their tiny marbled spinning eyes. The child began to raise his arms toward the surface and instead the man was moving his older arms, and then the arms were all around him, forming an oval, or a hole. The room’s film wrapped around the child’s face and the man’s face and their fingers and their chests, around their torso and their middles and their leg meat and down their mouths all through their bifurcating encased holes. The edge of the film slit the child’s and the man’s esophagus and trachea, wrapped over organs. Their blood was pouring back and forth all between blood. The child could feel a voice performing through him, moving his tongue too so that he too said the words, not numbers or names now but other symbols, the language written in the book he’d always thought had been only a mirror.
The child found himself again inside the house. He was standing in a small room without windows or decorations or furniture or paint. The room was hardly larger there than he was. A sound all knotted in his face. He felt his face and it felt older. There was nothing to look into. The room around him was all language: where there meant to be a chair he just saw chair. When he looked down at where he felt his arms were, he saw nothing.
The child moved back out of the room. He saw it was the door to where before he’d found the stairwell. There were no stairs there. The air felt calm. The child looked at his arms and felt they seemed the same as any hour. He closed the door to the room and locked the door with his long nail.
The milk of air was winding through the house. It knew the house and wanted through it. It wanted to fill the air of the house and filled the space of the house’s shape itself. Milk all through the years in lather leather held out only by an idea.
The child came into Person 1180’s bedroom. He moved to stand above her bed. The mother’s face and hair were crusted white. Her cheeks had marks of small incision. The child cracked his knuckles with no sound and watched his mother’s body shake. He could not remember her in younger form, the air among them then, the light of the rooms contained, the many buried spheres of dark all gathered in his linings.
Through the sheets and through the mother’s gown and through her stomach flesh he could see the flesh all building in her, spreading the space of where it was into the room around them filled with her or someone else. The liquids in her knitting where she wanted and was wanted. The fields inside her silent. He leaned against her. He pressed against her. The sound he’d carried in him from the room of the younger mother changed — turned on its side inside him, pinking the edges of a color captured in the sound hid in the flesh, the ancient color between colors slaved and waving.
In the room around the child, the walls began to pour, a liquid leaking from the holes the house had all throughout it onto the air the house contained away from other light. Some of the gush turned into eggs or maggots, sometimes to birds, which flew up and at or into the son’s head, squawking, clawing at his eyes. He tried to shout the mother’s name but instead everything else kept coming out — a shattering sound the son had only ever heard inside him in there eating at the inside of his face.
Soon it was impossible to tell where the walls ended and floor began, or where the inside met the daylight, where any of these surfaces ended or began, or where the sky above it all claiming the buildings separated them from that, and whatever lay beyond it. Outside the house the ground was skin and ash. All of the surfaces were slurring. The substance pooled around his flesh, its color coming from his holes and joining with it. His new skin stuck to the air. The color covered up his face and arms, the light surrounding. It was above him, and beside him, folding over where he was, though from outside himself he just seemed standing, staring, in a room. It seemed any day becoming. He thought to raise his arms and watched them raise. With the cells grown out each suddenly long as both his arms on every finger he clawed and clawed at the wet but found it felt just like any air and nothing changed.
Outside the house inside the sound again there coming off it the remaining men mashed sky to skin. It had been ages as the day broke. The space of each body near and nearer at each other in the revolving stroboscopic sudden air all wet with an interlocking hum of digits gripping fast at what they passed, each instant ripped from that one prior, an old dry fire buried in the air. The men could not quite find their way to fit into the house now — the cells kept mixing. The night was crushing. They seemed already in the house. The length of rooms wobbled around them. From all the windows there was mass.
Around the house for miles the bodies swarmed stuck against it — men conglomerating men, men but not men but bodies full all of men and women only ever, eggs and knotting throttling their flesh. One by one the mass grew larger, hoarding skin sacs pillowed whole. The bodies were strung with muscle, crick and crap redoubled, packed in damaged intestines and flat minds. A massive bulge somewhere goaded on the distance small and sweltered, a gift sent in the guise of sickly rain, beating the house’s seams in waves as had the waters. All gave knocking. There came all knocking in and on around the house and pounding rounder, toward zero. The knocking flickered the lights in every room — it caused all adornment from the walls where walls were never wanted — the paint in sheaths rotting through hues, the pictures crumpled beyond image, the curtains scorched to gowns of ash, bright fibers wriggling where nothing held — it spread all through the soil and pilled it under, inward, crumpling the land and calling out.
The bodies swam and spread in and over one another, pushed inside their common flesh. They were nearly all one body throbbing, a cortex spread and slurred upon the day in heat. The body had so many mouths and eyes and ear holes — there was so much they could take in — their nostrils sniffing up what they could force, their fingers wriggling for some hole. Their pressure piled up around the house and rutted at their skin strips coming open. A hulking heat pooled up on certain scalps, scorching the hair off of their arms. All of their voices stuttered out at once, counting aloud, each human want they chewed through, One one-thousand, two.