He wanted to walk some way into the room where the living room had been — where he’d sat nights beside the mother with TV light around them — where he’d eaten so many meals when there were meals to eat, microwaved or mashed and slathered — where there’d been pictures hung of him with others, laughing, touching, held in time — if he could just feel that again, a little — though no matter where he went inside the house and all the rooms about it and around it or what the rooms resembled, he could not find that room. He kept feeling the room he needed would be the next room in the sequence, but each time the next room was a room he’d already been in remade, a room he did not recognize in this condition, or there would just be wall and then more wall. The man felt something was pulling him away from the place he knew he needed to be going and back toward another room inside the house.
He tried several times to go back to where the door he’d come into the house through had been — the stairwell unto floors unending — though where it had been before it now seemed not — only the continuing flat surface of where the house was, holding what beyond him there all out. It was as if the door had never actually been there — as if it were a door existing only ever somewhere in his mind meat, burbling with knots.
Holy fuck someone is attacking my goddamned mind, he tried to say, but the words were fat and clung inside him. The words were bigger than his heart, his head, the house, and all of it was creaking.
The man was growing old already in this new place. He felt the rinds rolling through his leg joints, his muscle eaten up with acid called ideas. He looked already older than he’d even imagined he could ever, older even than his own father if his father were still alive now and if he remembered that man at all, though inside him he seemed growing younger, scrunching in his skin’s cold shell. No time seemed to pass from one room to the next room or however long he waited for the words.
Let me live forever there inside you please god, the space inside him seemed to be saying, though he himself could not make the voice come out.
Let me eat.
Inside the house alone regardless the man moved what furniture was here now back to how it seemed that he remembered it had been, or would have been had it been in the house before. He wasn’t sure why he felt he knew that but it was in him. He tried to make himself at home. He used his spit to wax the wooden seats and sofa arms more to his color — the house had lost his smell. He spread his sneeze and urine around the room in handfuls, along long blank walls he could not find his way behind. The walls would shake and break before him but still be walls there. No room could keep him long enough to be. The air made lesions on his teeth and traced the spaces in him where he wanted silence. He drew a small round square in the center of the room with more of his blackened, leaking blood where he remembered once there’d been a rug, where on other older nights the father would have liked now to take a coffee and watch men on TV throw themselves at one another for the bliss of many thousands screaming, shaking air.
Another TV in his skull turned on and off, each screen when lighted showing scenes here previously described, though with the father holding all the roles of all the people there combined, each way when dark again he could not feel the air at all around him.
The dicing day began to lean. Through sudden holes there in the walls around him, the man heard what somewhere sounded like the sound inside him recorded as the mother’s moan, so many voices baked in one sound, but he could not really recognize the sound or what it was and when he moved through rooms to where he felt sure he’d heard it come from, it was not there. Windows would look out onto the house held there again, another house with people in it too blurred to turn toward him. Colors of a shaft or panel would split when he stare. The grade would spit up in his face and make his face spin, though once it calmed he felt thereafter also calmer, thicker, nice. He rubbed his glands and braced his eyes, time catching time there where time had meant to never be.
The space in this house where there should have been the mother’s room had no door here on the hall, and yet the man stood in the space where it would have been not even knowing and touched the wall and looked at it and touched his face again and thought about the wall and what behind it and touched the wall again and waited and could sense something but did not know what or why or why this wall or why the other doors were disappeared and what he would have wished that he would find there waiting for him behind a door here if there were one and he could have it. He punched his muscles with his fists until both were bleeding and with his blood on one of the small walls he traced another door. The door did not have any number, no crease around it, but still it was a door.
And he kissed the door and kissed the door and kissed the door there — felt it move around his face like milk.
The man came into the room and stood above the woman in the image of his wife. He did not recognize her — her skin had shifted texture, kind, and size. There were no walls there where there’d always been walls there around the bed where they had slept and breathed and spoken in the night unknowing. There was no time inside the way. The father watched the woman sleep and breathe without clear rhythm. There was something thrilling in her pose — the way her hair encaged around her head stung on the static of the small room’s excess electric charge — how even from here, through lengths of air and glass, he could smell the smell of him about her, the smell of her on him. She was shaking.
In something about the air between him and the body of the woman, the man could taste the grain each time he breathed, the rush of which itched all through his lungs and pelvis as if accelerating his body’s aging even in spite of the slender or uncertain and translucent screens that in his memory the state said to have erected around each and every neat locale, and were claimed to have caught the brunt of the crap and cancers and what all else some god had dreamed to wear their lives — the state’s voice the only clear one through and through him, ordering his veins, though at the same time scored on all sides by the tone beyond it, shaking in his sight.
The man tried to move toward the woman and found that he could not — he banged his face hard on the instant. There was a field there struck between them, not all unlike the mirror glass or any window framing day, though at once thicker and thinner, wider and nearer, there all at once and not at all there, black beyond black. Behind the cell the colors of the woman in her layers layered through him and sunned into him and struck the sound out of his eyes. He could remember things they’d done and said together, where they’d been together, what they’d been together, though he could still not remember who she was. He had no phrase for it and did not want to.
The man kicked and licked the surface there between him and the woman. Why could he not just touch her. He wanted to touch her, not just in the way he’d always known, but in something else about him. The glass persisted. The room’s walls were even less there in the bedroom. He watched the liquid from her purr. The sound all in his ears from her and all surrounding shook colors from him too, turning his skin a glassy color to match where he could not move him holding hard. He knew the surface knew what it had to hide. He knew it knew he knew there was something there between them, something the man had had once, a view.
The man barked. He peeled a pretend sun down. He comprised his hand into a fist fumbling to keep the fingers flexed — there was something about them they did not want to bargain on — no curling center — he beat himself against the seed. He beat until something in him made the silence other, began to turn it. Beneath the flesh he could see where his cragging purple fodder pooled — purple not purple but sixty kind of color, and from each another wash of each—god, the last time he’d cut himself it stunk so much— his mouth came open all around him — his legs around him — his body made among itself and among her, grasping his breath in reins and clawing for cover — small as all the rings on all the fingers. His head against the silent space felt cooler, flatter, like a surface formed to fit into crevice bent to hold his shape—yes—he felt her body press against him — he felt the breathing — he felt a murmur in the earth — there was no tone then—I could not count it—fire barking through the fits of going on — with each day so short and nothing in it, it would not matter how quick the cooling came.