1180 recognized certain of the men’s gashed or pimpled foreheads. They seemed everywhere at once. This had all already happened.
The men grunted though their holes in deformed rhythm as they brought the ball toward the wide bright eye hung on the city. 1180 swam the channels through several hundred angles aimed at different close-ups on the woman’s flesh, her eyes blank and elaborate.
1180 could hear the woman’s thoughts — the addled feed spoke into her head in a voice like her voice if shifted older and still aging — wholly ruined — the men around her barking and barfing, throwing their fists into the light, around which the whole sky seemed to pucker, and the woman’s voice groaned on and on and older still.
1180 could not stand to hear the woman speaking any longer. She felt a button on her tongue, but she’d already pressed it so many times and still felt nothing. The men inside the TV shitting mnemonic cash back and forth between their being. 1180 turned the TV off but it stayed on.
In the kitchen 1180 stood among the way the man had ransacked the storage fridge. The men had eaten all the bee meat and drank the runoff water and the pine bread. All they’d left behind was condiments — countless plastic packets salvaged from fast food, distributed in past weeks by kids in massive trucks with countless turrets and steaming screens. Despite the trucks’ clear impenetrability men for miles would crowd around them gnawing and knocking one another’s eyes out.
1180 felt mostly calmer after suckling just one packet of the chemic mayonnaise. She experienced feelings of vast euphoria, self worth and creativity, as well as a warm flush feeling through her linings. It tasted like sucking on a baby doll but it was easy. Several hours without imbibing caused withdrawal, the inverse symptoms of which included ranting, loss of wisdom, megalomania, frothy discharge from the ears.
1180 tried to keep herself in hunger as long as possible but most days she gave in quick — she could feel the hole growing inside her, a round hole lined with even wider teeth.
1180 saw by the large panel LCD clock that had been installed in her forearm that it was time to go downstairs. Everyday from 1 to 4 was MANDATORY SPONSORED INTERMISSION, a practice the state had instituted in the house for several weekends in the months before the presence of the present child. Each home or house in the local area had been installed with safety stairwell bunkers for a cost absorbed in the aggregate war effort — the war against the long black dogs — the war against the books that had not yet been read — the war against the war against the prisms installed in our ribcages — the war against Kentucky’s buried growling — the war against anyone named John. Each war went on regardless of when it ended or began, and should be feared beyond the fear of fearing any other dead idea.
The INTERMISSION method was intended to increase tranquility, introspection and to avoid the most common hours of disease — the air panes ripping, helicopters dropping from the sky, spokes of bugs forced through the air vents, paper growing legs and standing up, none of which she’d felt the sound or tremor of an inch of, though this was entirely the point — and but mostly during that time, when they had shared it, 1180 and 811 cowered in the practice position invented and taught wide by the state. 811 would cover his head and babble in a pretend female voice. 1180 kept asking that he repeat what he said louder so she could understand, but 811 would only close his eyes and bleat.
1180 could not remember anything at all or else about 811 ever near her in his life beyond the rich reeking of shit thickening in his pants in various terror, goosey spillage writhing down in long lines for the stairwell where 811 hid and begged against the nothing that had come. And 1180 loved this man regardless. In the night asleep she said his other name.
The safety stairwell, as far as they’d found, led to nowhere. It went on and on into the plastic of the earth. The air seemed sticky and filled with mirrors. Just before he disappeared, 811 had claimed to have continued down and down until he’d found a little coffee shop that sold cold crumpets, but 1180 knew this was a sham — he’d only meant to set her mind at ease. In his time, at times, for some lengths, he had been so thoughtful of her, such a man.
In her own time with the stairwell alone, for all her walking, the mother had developed muscles all throughout her — tremendous calves in which she could see her sheen of beef having seemed to develop the same contoured expressions as a face. Even now, in the mandate’s remission, she still practiced the practice each afternoon at the learned time, though mostly she waited until the child fell sleeping, as the intermission stairwell’s deformed and deforming air did not seem something he or she should breathe.
During the year of nonstop rains, before the burning, the stairs had flooded up a pool inside it some flights down, which in the night—the mother did not know this—the father once had tried to swim down into it. He’d seen a glowing in the depths there, some kind of light sometimes as if from reflective metal money, sometimes as if from one large blinking pupil. He had not been able to swim down far enough — his small lungs red as if to ripping — the pressure in his head like large hands — he’d given up.
1180 had not told 811 she’d used the water in the stairwell to wash their laundry, and her body — she’d had no choice — nothing was coming through the home’s pipes to their rooms, none to wipe the baby clean or mix with liquor. The stairwell water seemed like any other water for the most part, though it was so cold and somehow slick, and sometimes she felt sure she could feel it staying specific through her holes, not mixing with the other liquids of her body, private rivers. So many things they kept from one another without a reason.
Some days 1180 would come to sit by the water’s lip and read. She read mostly instruction manuals for dead appliances and convoluted diagrams of local zoning, as there were no other words these days created — too many were too defeated, and all remaining paper had all been reserved by assholes for phonebooks, receipts and bills. The moan of the minor ocean contained inside their building made her calm, gave her somewhere to escape the flux of massive sunlight that 811 had to walk into every morning to get paid — employed, as were most men before it’d been abandoned, to build the Universal Roof. It was hard work. He came home each day covered in blood, little smear marks around his eyes where he’d kept crying to keep his cheeks clean so he could see. It made the father weary and irritable, hard to love.
In her small evenings by the strange water there, the mother had seen people held under the surface — flattened faces with no eyes, or with more eyes than one should want to have, or in the place of eyes, advertisements — they were in there, underwater but alive. She saw men with tongues so long that they could lick themselves in several pleasure places — she saw lardy machines of vast dimension like no object of this air — she saw whole hotels or office buildings of other bodies coming rising from the bottom, men in every window making gestures, women writhing on the beds behind them, surrounded by machines. They could see her through the surface, clawing at it. She could hear their bloating in the night.
The mother breathed. Something on the stairwell now seemed to row the air around her, as if shifting. The walls seemed closer than she last remembered, the faces of the steps much thinner.
Behind her eyes were also stairwells, which also led to something gone.