In the room, for one blinked instant, the man is standing — the same man from the car, the same him with the voice I feel that came into me through the phone, same who wrote the words inside the balloon, him having hid same most years somewhere in the middle of my books — here he is there, arms loose, posture lilted slightly backward, as being pulled to stand erect. His body changes as I see it — there’s my body at age nine, there is me at eighteen, me at fifty — there is not me there, but anyone, the skin of his face cold with a glow. In the instant that our eyes meet he is unblinking. There is a sound. I cannot see — not into the house, my lashes itching. My eyes roll in my head. I step back in the outer, darkened light—ouch! — step away — bang my head and back against the house still there behind me, crushing pressure down in spiral through my cerebrum. My own house, this version, wound in the wire, shows no matching hole — its flat expanse continues on warm to the touch — deformed.
I try to look again at where the hole had been to see again into the house into the man again though the hole no longer appears there: against the wall instead my face is itching, sticky. Through the wall I can hear my parents shouting something at me, or each other, or at anyone at all. Something in me nudging where the hole was, a bubble traveling along my bloodlines down through my organs and my spray; the hole eating holes into me, popping pockets, eating up what had been there. The wire pulls, as would guitar cords and piano wires — as would lengths making a fence — as would a pumpkin’s innards, growing riper unto mush. It pulls at me to go on against the house in the contained air, of a no light. Beneath me caves eating miles beneath the earth. Shafts no bigger than an eyehole on a pyramid that open into chambers, rooms designed in profile of where they’ve not been filled, in the past appearance of a succumbing to the death. The hole an elevator up my spine cord, for one second, shivering as would a length of skin too closely shaved. I can hear my father’s brain — hear it shrieking where inside itself it feels itself parting from itself in cellfields and lurched in want for where the other parts of him outside of him exist, held in me in what I’ve seen of him that he now no longer will remember — where the hole inside me eats in me the same — days unfurling out of days there fed from his slow death, like anybody’s, massing at my lids, flushing my weight with all my hidden orbs of absorbed pounds — the fat around me always in me and around me despite where I had tried to burn it off.
In where overhead by now the sky is going lighter, light as paper, bumped with garble barf-out from old machines, I continue on around the house in round. The houses need against me. They squirm. The brick brushes out by length in turning wooden, turning metal, then to mesh. The mesh remains opaque — though in the web of slits each inch makes, something yawns — the hours of the house the night devours. The hours of the night against the house, inside it, wanting out where I’d lain open and become it and not remembered — will not even now in having seen or read or written — the residue of captured speech and thinking absorbed into the ground under the house with sour loam — infiltrating the foundation, boring more holes where the soil would beg to be filled in — with more bodies full of bodies in the brains degrading and the images caught burned.
Upon the slanting soil the house begins to shift. From the flat smushed face of the new widths of the old house my father’s outline becomes pressed through. His shoulders, chin, and sternum. The lips beneath the surface moving, saying words I cannot hear. The bulge grows hair out from it, hair that whitens, curls to mold like what had grown up inside our home’s beds’ sacs. In my head, the text my father speaks becomes new veins, abrasions, tracing bridges between skin that will also make me old. That time will ask for. That he will ask for. That will eat years. That are already in me buried.
There on the wall of the house across from my father’s bulged impression—I can hear it, I do not look—there is the body of the other man. Two holes, where eyes are, go down deeply into a kind of light I cannot see. From the holes, a gentle smoking. Choirs. The houses leaning, trying to fold their frames back into one. Into one house, like all houses. The houses around the houses leaning too, smushing in around the aisles and wires to meld to nothing. To be nothing, cream the space to zero. Years of bathing. I must leave here. My arms around my arms make knots — clogging up with motion I have not made. I must leave here, now, now. In my body I go on. I go on in snaking along between the houses, in their slow purring where the folding has already made a mess out of the air, blurring the sky above the house into a circuit board, a prism — how in the blank between the houses it is no music, but lack of motion, some stillness so still that it seems between the edges of my skin to strobe. A still so still it is the absence of all action, a space in which there’s never been a thought — no flood of snow or sickness, no need.
The gap and faces of the facing walls go on as long as I go on — making me that much more wanting of the end oncoming, though by now I can’t even see where back the way I came — the whir from where all this walking started — no beginning. Walls in both directions, on both sides, a paralleling sound. I hear me ask outside me where I’m going, what to want for, aimed at no one, and yet I get an answer — the blistering of my soft eye — patches of colors squirming in the shape of what had been seen — cloud bumps — screaming grog. A fluid rushes backward from where the lids are, blinking, back in warm gunk up my sinuses into my skull. I slosh around in that some minutes, bumping back and fro between the two surfaces, hearing guns. It feels familiar: this has happened to me in a book. My hands somewhere beside me. My chest. In spotty blinking, I catch glimpses of the stretch. The sky above it giving colors, sort of learning how to laugh. A word is written up there somewhere — many words, disfigured, in a language canopy — I cannot find my name. I strum still forward, seeing backward and before me both at once, as if walking through a loosely wired house of mirrors — the lights tipping in and out — more laughing — or in the ways at night I’d walk from room to room, flicking the switches, not wanting to fill my head with too much light, but not also wanting to run into the shapes the darkened rooms make. The persons in the thrall. You somewhere on this graft’s edge, colored of the eyes. This sentence to be closed between these pages and let to hide forever in a dark inside your room, perhaps. Or to be transported, closed in no light, to another. To be burned, made into a still more temporary light.
I cannot hear you breathe. I am talking all the way out loud, my mouth’s meat fixing syllables with words my body wants to say, in the history of how I’ve learned, and yet the sound is undynamic. I hear it instead in my blood. Corkscrewing sound erupting glitchmarks in the organs I have been told that I need. The organs, some or one and then all of which, will one day fail. Or have failed, in their failing, passed down and down. The wall of the house I grew up inside of by now is so far from where we started I can’t remember where we’ve been, but in the diminution of my vision I can hear better, through the brick. I hear the voice I’ve learned I used to have by watching versions of me caught on tape, talking out loud, in the way I’ve been out here trying, saying words I said once then back then. Words which in their exit of my head have left somewhere behind them. Through the house’s hulk the words seem pleading, rendering the flattened face with little veins, mazes in tiny tunnels on the outdoors, a massive human skin, where facing this the wall of the new house combined the house is made of glass now, an opaque glass that clears in splotches where I breathe, my blinking becoming calm, slowing off until my lids seem to no longer want to lift at all without a burning. Through the lids I can see into this house now whole — see the whole house in one prism, sound packed into sound, packed into light and aging, crystallized. Through a hole the house did not know it had in it forever — I can smell the hole extending back through all its time — through the hole into the second house there I can see into all the houses where the house has always been. I can see, though it does burn me, though it hits upon my eye, hits me blankly, each inch at once, each inch asking me rubbed out, rubbed into the mush of coming color that the night makes replacing the prior pixels, a flood around my eyes.