Soon then room formed in the flush. In the room there was no wind, no other flesh caught by the walls. The room held just the box that held him, as far as he could see. The space lay long and without texture. 811 found that he could move. He felt the blood rush through his sternum. It filled his arms and made them seem as if erasing from the inside.
The father stood up from the box.
Beyond the box he saw then that he’d not been inside a box at all but just there lying on some surface. The floor was wet and somewhat flooded from a liquid dripping from above, through a dark spot puckered on the ceiling, though which he could hear a some kind of semi-human moan — an orgasm or a singing or confusion among sleep, or all of these at once tangled together — and yet the sound seemed to him second nature to the air here, another part of all our manner.
Hung on the wall from end to end and all he saw so many massive pictures, frames of him caught from all those unremembered years, yet in each one doing nothing — just there standing at the lens — nowhere ungone. In each image he looked older — his face looked burned — his cheeks half see-though and covered with tattoos he could not remember getting and which were no longer there still on his face. Up close he even looked worse than ever — the cells destroyed there, filled with jacked up crap like tiny cities. The closer he looked, the deeper periled — populations being ripped apart, maggots screwing on wide white altars, money smothering the trees.
Person 811 felt someone behind him. Someone unnumbered. Someone behind him — behind him — diamond air.
He continued turning but could not make the airspace frame his eyes.
On the flipside of the mirrors in the room that held Person 811, the surface held another room — a long thin room encircling the walls. Inside this room a phalanx of cameras had been arranged to records the innards of the air. The cameras’ lenses were wide and curved each as skull-sized globes — they had been used in prior years to record some of the highest grossing cinematic bodies in creation, thereafter replicated on the earth uncounted times.
Upon the father’s rising from the box into the twin space — his body already spinning and spinning after something — the lenses’ glass began to fog. The glass dripped sweat like human skin and rumpled with the smell of metal burning. The cameras had been designed for this condition. The cameras’ makers understood certain things about Person 811—what that number itself meant — who he had thought he’d been, and who he was now, who he had once wanted to be, what he would actually become.
Across the bubble of the lens eyes, a flush of bacteria, made for cleansing, became released. Their tiny translucent tongues absorbed the liquid, became drunk, allowed the screening to stay captured clear. The image of Person 811 continued to hit tape, replicated into planes. The icons wrapped around against each other, stored in spools that rolled in gyration in rooms behind the room where the cameras watched this body move.
Behind the room that held the cameras, wedged between the camera room and the room that held the film, a man stood standing upright in the light there in his flesh without a head. The man did not move or think or want or breathe but the man knew all about the father and the cameras and what had come before them.
In other years, before he lost his head, the man had, at some time or another, been on the inside of every human home. The homes’ owners did not know the man, or that the man had been there. From each home the man took just one thing he knew would soon be missed. I cannot think of what things like those could be now. He’d swallowed each thing after thorough sucking, to change the taste. The man’s intestines were a mess. In certain homes the man would stand over the sleeping people. He’d run his fingers in the drapes. He’d lick the skin off a husband’s face, or cry the room full, or kiss the children and braid their hair. Sometimes he’d just stand there inches over, still as glass. Often he’d still be there when the folks woke and yet they went on just the same.
Those years were over now. The man weighed less now. He had a new employment, and so inside that, a new life.
The man could not remember where once he’d had a head that looked exactly like Person 811, who in turn looked exactly like someone else. He, exactly like Person 811, could not remember beyond the placeholder of his knowing how in the time he’d already lived he’d lived through the top times of his life already, and how these other moments, these were after.
They were men made of the same skin, like all men, again.
The man watched Person 811 spin around around around. He watched 811 spread his hands across the blank walls, searching for a seam or knob or some way in.
In his hands the headless man felt the things Person 811 felt.
You would call the feeling aging.
He called it Cone.
Person 1180 found the way the men had ripped the stuffing out of 811’s office walls. They’d shit in the Victrola and smeared the whole of the air with something. They’d overturned 811’s black plastic desk. Taped to the underbelly of the desktop were several glossy photos of some woman nude but for a hood. There were markings on her body. 1180 could not tell if they were in the picture or drawn on. For sure someone had traced the woman’s nipples so many times with the tips of his fat fingers that the flesh had been rubbed through. The stink of the father’s scentless discarded excess semen clung around the woman’s image slick like night.
1180’s newest wounds had been addressed. She’d absorbed the stinging of the entries of the men into the dark inside her. The scabs were patchy. The men were done and gone and elsewhere for awhile. She’d kept her eyes closed and her mouth wide the whole time. She’d thought so hard into the silent space she carried she could not remember what they’d done — no inch of new wreck stored in her synapses among all the other hell she’d held — though she could hear the newer infant all inside her come alive, thrumming brighter now than any other she remembered, knitting hyper in her skin.
What she did not see did not have to happen, she’d been taught.
Outside tonight the air was liquid. Children and blood and mud or shit clods floated past the window in oblong droves of packets. Occasional tremors like someone choking shook the texture off the home’s foundation and its eaves. The tone, for now, was silent, or just perhaps too loud or high-pitched for her to attend.
On TV, 1180 watched the men roll a huge translucent ball along the expressway. Men and goats stationed on both sides watched the procession from behind a velvet cable. At the center of the ball there was a nude woman, strapped with her arms above her head. The women’s breasts had been augmented so that they obscured the majority of her torso. Her nipples were so brown they appeared black. The woman’s pure white hair had been combed with glitter and bits of foil that made her seem expensive. A large brass band mostly of tubas followed the ball in its procession, squalling basslines uncoordinated from one performer to the next. The men who pulled the ropes that dragged the ball were made up bronze and coiled all in the face like royal bulls.