For all the hours held inside us, and the vertices of potential other ways those hours could have been spent — a splitting unto infinite splitting — there are also all the doors and paths held over us, on our exterior. Watching. Waiting. When. For what. That there could never be an answer becomes as well the innards of the question — the bloodlight of the word itself. Because you wouldn’t want to know. Because you could not. Because, given the answer, the light inverts. Becomes a no light. And then these houses — folding on a fold. “I can’t jack off without history peering in,” writes Johannes Göransson.189 And too, the air and walls and endless doors — and the out-of-doors. The excess breathing, the history of any dot, or any word around where it’s been placed.190 Here where after erasing the word “mother” in the search bar and instead typing the address of the house where this sentence is being written into Google search leads me to hover over the terrained image of the house, inside of which, one might imagine, I could also be sitting, in my underwear, glowed on by this screen. According to the current map, there are three cars parked outside my house. Two of colors I don’t recognize. Another waiting in the street. This moment frozen in representation of the place wherein which my body matured, grew older, large. Who said you could have that? The roof over what is mine. Why doesn’t Google see inside the house, forever? Google Attic. Google Mind. Enmapped: a rash of trees like enormous broccoli grown over a section of our roof. Whole sections where trees cover the screen from end to end entirely — a huge crudded maze of green. Other cars on other streets unmoving as if we all went still at once. What people hidden in this picture, beneath these roofs or blending in. What, unknowing, is contained — like the Magic Eye paintings sold in most every mall, which I’ve never been able to make work. Look again. Out of this chaos might emerge a landscape. Within this skin there is a seam. A watching without a blinking. A kind of map of sleep that does not sleep.
Down the street here in this rendition of the miles around where I grew up there is the church where I was baptized, where later the troop leader of my Boy Scout group showed me his stab wound to prove how I should listen. Staring at the church’s image here again today from this false overhead, I can’t help but want to move further there into — to crease the page of screen and enter. I zoom until its face is wholly splotch: pixels larger than their data. The window tonight is not cold. The light inside the house against the night again makes it difficult to see anything but me. I see my face there, as if through the window looking in, as if waiting for me to open the glass and allow entry. My eyes. The size of the church since then has at least doubled — the way all modern churches seem to, eating $$$$—you can read its new countenance from the street, the pervading hulk of it that much larger, longer, as if it’s adhered to the air it once only inhabited, in surround.
Further down along the browser, dragging, from the church there is the driveway where a nine-year-old girl once threatened me with a hammer. The house where during third-grade afternoons we imagined war with sticks, and concrete in the backyard of a kid I helped learn English from his Portuguese — he who since then, right after high school, drowned in his parents’ bathtub in Brazil with a girl. The cul-de-sac where some kid I’d never seen before and would never see again showed me the origami woman he’d folded into being, complete with vagina lips cut and pasted out of a dirty magazine — such moments somehow rendered in my nowhere, made of other people, less of me. Every hour of this caught inside here unremembered but by my temporary brain — a brain that can’t even catalog all of that it holds or has hid.
It seems I’ve hardly grown since all of when. Perhaps my mind has. Perhaps, in confabulation of the distances the world once held, and the amount it seems to hold now, packed full, the air indeed has been pushed in, the same way time as we get older seems to go faster despite its eternal measure, with each new second held that much slighter in contrast to the bulk of all the years. If time and space are not enough to fit my incidental reconnaissance to the Google Maps image I’ve so recently drawn up to write of herein, this night I will go running off into it in nothing but the rhythm of my breath and the sloppy smacking of my feet upon the pavement, perhaps in some pattern of repetition over where I’ve run before, the misted night above me abstruse with such glow and the hung bulbs here making the sky by now resemble one large silent box, of a silence I can’t help but think of as an image, of dimension, screaming silence, white on white in other air, which from underneath and right there seems as if somewhere above me it must come at any minute to sudden end, a day contained, a thing photographable from some distance, a thing contained. If I am asleep or awake right now, I can’t remember, and it hardly seems to matter.
]
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Today while trolling through various web results for deeper sleep cures, I find a man in a video titled “All Hypnosis Is Self Hypnosis”191 who offers to hypnotize me right now — through the machine, via recording. Underneath his up-close, centered, smiling head is the URL of his hypnosis vendor site, along with a message beneath it telling me to visit the site and relax even more. The Google-supplied ad over the message under his ad under his head says “Learn to Hypnotize Anyone,” and then it changes yet again. The man tells me to close my eyes. “Because there is nothing for you to see,” he says. He’s staring. I press pause and stare back into the pixilated lidded whites of his small head. The ads around him go on blinking. While he’s on pause, I get new e-mail — I see it appear as a number annotated in another open browser tab, and when I click over to read, as I now must, by impulse, I find a new automated message sent from Facebook, letting me know someone has commented on my latest status update: a Ben Marcus quote that appears also earlier in this book. The message says the comment says: I like that sentence, too. I delete the e-mail. I refresh the page and see nothing else. The paused video on the YouTube tab sits behind the fold of this tab waiting. In total I have six tabs on my browser open: Gmail with all the not yet archived but already read mail compiled;192 Facebook home with all the updates of the 894 friends I supposedly have;193 a Wikipedia page on the Ziggurat of Ur, which I can’t remember why I have open;194 a long essay on the rhizomatic riddle of Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut a friend sent out on Twitter,195 for which I’d closed Twitter to have room to fit all the tabs comfortably on one screen and still be able to see when new e-mail arrived; one of countless pages today selling hypnosis CDs;196 and the video of the man — each of them in some way selling something, information however hidden197—and each waiting in their own silence, folded, to be again brought to front or dismissed.
Before going back to the video again, I open a new tab on my browser and load iGoogle, which holds my Google Reader, tracking the hundreds of RSS feeds that get continually updated and tracked and fed into me through the day. I see a friend has shared a link to an article on Gizmodo.com that claims how each year each American consumes 34 gigabytes of data (including internet, TV, radio, and reading), accumulating in a national sum of 3.6 zettabytes per year (a zettabyte is one billion trillion bytes, the article explains).198 Within this, per day, there are slightly more than one hundred thousand processed words, through movies, music, books, and TV, though the internet speech dominates them all.
At the far end of the house I hear, in my gaping, someone opening a door. Seconds later, my cell phone vibrates in my pocket, tickling the thigh flesh, radiating cells. Without taking out the handset, I press the button that makes the vibration stop, sending whoever is in there on the far end to a recording of my voice asking him or her to leave me a recording of his or her voice.