People from films began to appear inside the house beyond their replications. Their images were struggling to preserve the tradition of entertainment against my anti-comedy. From films I could remember and not remember I saw bodies I had seen on cartridges and in small apartments or rented warehouses and false velvet-lined screening booths at length materialize in piggish light and go on walking around the house in suits or without clothing. Their tattoos would reflect in the mirrors and try to remind my skeleton how I had lived among them as a witness, fondled their blowholes in my dreams. Men with necklaces made of a gold so false it made another light inside the light bend over. Men with no testicles and huge breasts. These were images my human mind had been trying to hide from my own spirit. I had to learn to shake them out, to kill the image of them as carried in me the same I would kill everybody else. One night I saw a man I’d seen at least in seven strong productions sit down behind my drum set and try to play with perfect limb independence. I punched him in the throat. He fell on the floor and coughed up language. He threatened me by god. He was worth billions and still as easily a phantom I could transmute through. I laughed at the word of his god splayed against me in my house of mirrors. I licked my thumb and pressed him dead in the fontanel. Though he continued to walk thereafter he was no one there again. His career went to commercials, then to appearing in newspapers catching men’s room promises and ruin. In each new image he now looked exactly like me, as he had always, though only in his mental death did I see how. I couldn’t even remember who he was in any other name from that point forward. It was so simple then to repeat this process against every other media, and with each my size grew more. Time grew shorter in between all of my people. It had been two days inside my mind since I was me last, though now I was more me than I was then. In the human air that moved in dog years we were older now already and so many of us had planned to grow fat only in the face. The boys in the house that I called boys had never been boys at all inside their lives, and were now even less boys and more just mobile walls around us bloating inward at the same rate, making the nearby houses horny with their friction. America had needs they did not know they had and we would show them how to know. We stacked more mirrors on top of the mirrors. The rooms got smaller. Something in me bent and I fell sick. We took the mirrors down but I still could then hear Darrel only under a trough of greater trembling that grew thicker the more I wished it out. I felt the curling in me trying to uncurl more where I uncurled it. I heard the dogs where their eggs had lain and my blood crushed them but this took power. We needed to begin to begin before this sickness thickened. There were so many possible mistakes. I asked Darrel what to do and in the throbvoice, in time in silence with the band, he told me that to begin I’d need to tell the boys to bring to us inside the mirror house a newer mother, made in my mother’s name to be renamed as Him, amen.
A. F. F., age 18: “He said it didn’t matter what she looked like as long as she was American and everyday. He said all of them were mothers and all of them were His. He said we’d know, or if we didn’t know we would be led to her by just doing whatever. I didn’t want to do it but several of the others were so incensed and ready by now to do almost anything Darrel asked that he didn’t have to ask more than once. Mostly it was the new ones. I was recognizing less and less the faces of the people around me each day when I woke up. Yeah, some might have been famous before but no one gave a shit about legends. It was all changing way too fast. I tried to leave that night after he started talking about the woman. I went right out the front door. No one tried to stop me. I walked and walked and the further I walked from the house the harder it was to breathe. I mean about like halfway down the block I was gasping and turning blue in the face, like I was in outer space. I went back and felt fine. The next day when a small group of us got ready to go and find the woman to take off the street I put my clothes on the same way and I got up and went without saying anything. I had no trouble breathing at all. In fact I couldn’t stop laughing.”
No. Not amen yet. I didn’t want to. Behind my lids inside the mirrored room my mother’s head wore the bruises of where I’d lived. The blood poured from her eyes through slim cylinders in curlicue over the back side of her skull and out around her ears forming a helmet. Her breath condensed on no clear surface. She wanted to keep me. The face she was had become deformed from the gears and brakes and where she’d screamed into them trying to stop the cells coming apart, where she’d sang the song she’d sang at me in smallest hours trying to reverse in me the urge the blood of me had made. Though she was all these other mothers also. Where had I been, she asked; when would I come home; why was I fraught in this wishless virus while in all the other houses the babies grew into their own versions of the women and the men, deserving life. I knew her image was not memory, not even desire, but my own native resistance to simple faith. That I cared so much for anyone ever invigorated my ability to want more for everything surrounding all. Through the floor I felt the many floors: other layers to the house where other rooms were with others stacked in deep refraction, none of which I could reach. There would need to be another way to descend into the inevitability. These rooms, too, would lead beneath America into the other houses in the night. If I could find my way into the center of the mirrored house of our human network I could access any home for all it was, then we could replicate our kill. The bodies of the boys were the beginning. I could smell the teeth inside their balls having sex lessons with themselves. More would soon commence to fill His motion’s promise. Through the walls I heard the band not playing and it was louder still than all. My mother’s head spun around above me and showed me the face she’d always hid behind her head throughout my years beside her, one shaped like mine exactly. And yet my face was only one of several thousand faces that she’d carried in the corridors of eggs and sperm she lived with, from which I had been selected like an emotion on the way out. These were my people; cells in my best image; my negation and deletion. In seeing them, I named them, and they began to spurt. She leaned with her whole life to kiss me. I was awake again and so was Darrel, the most awake we’d ever been. I walked through the kitchen over the piles of sleeping or prone pleased bodies to pretend I could see out through the mirror over the window to the flat backyard. In the yard the flies had not arrived, but they were coming. I could not hear them because I wanted their cock so bad that I became them.
Name withheld: “I was confused about it and I didn’t know about it and I didn’t want to and I knew that I should leave and I knew that it was wrong and I wanted to stop them and I thought I could try to stop them and I wanted to and I was going to and then I didn’t and then I didn’t and was going to leave and tell someone and didn’t and and and and. It could go on like that forever. Then one night Gravey saw me standing in the hall. He saw the weird light in my face and how I was frightened and the color in me and he took me by the hands and squeezed until I thought my skin was going to pop and he said, A human’s screaming is eternal music, and he punched me in the face so hard I didn’t fall but always from that point forward felt like I was falling and my body was the hole and Gravey was the space the hole was wrapped around forever and I would never land and never stop. All else after that was so easy, and totally awesome.”