The father went back to the mailbox and filled the bucket up again. He hadn’t thought there’d be enough caterpillars to fill the bucket twice. But the caterpillars filled the second bucket and a third and fourth and once again. He carried each load to the same place, the ground there darkening with every dump, rising up, a structure. By the time the father had carried twelve loads he was very tired and soaked with wetting and not so much interested in preserving the caterpillars anymore. He could hardly blink or breathe. He stopped and stood for some long second staring straight up into the long column of air carried above him, into the barely yellow sky, on pause — his spine inside him, hiding — his head’s blood inside out and upside down.
If the father ever played a Hammond organ, he would find he was naturally a master. Elevator music. Careful evenings. Tone wheels in his heart and in his hands.
Moving again from the mailbox, the father went and uncoiled the garden hose from its spindle set upon the house, its source mouth fed by pipes buried underneath the dirt. The father dragged the hose around the house. With the far end of the tangle he sprayed out the inside of the mailbox, flooding pressure, until it was clean and clear enough to kiss. On the ground below the mailbox the crap from all the gashing caterpillars pillowed and piled over. Their minor bodies gave off what looked like human blood, a little lake and many rivers. The warm ground seemed to sauté the runoff.
Several thousand gallons later—in which a whole day passed, bringing the father full-scale back to the exact second of the day as the second in the day before when he’d stopped realizing where he was—the father stood there for some time in waning sunlight and admired what he’d done. His hands had a slow itch. He craved chili. He scratched his hands together, knuckles in friction, and then he went inside and got online. On a credit card he’d never used before, christening, he ordered ten new magazines that would be delivered to his gorgeous, sparkling, brilliant, bending mailbox once a month.
The magazines were:
1. Penthouse
2. Enormous Women
3. Better Homes & Gardens
4. The Father Life: The Men’s Magazine for Dads
5. [THIS MAGAZINE DOES NOT HAVE A NAME]
6. 2600: The Hacker Quarterly
7. Animal Husbandry Enthusiast
8. Teen People
9. TV Guide
10. Guide to TV Guide
ENCOMBING
And yet the next morning, when the father came to the mailbox, he found it once again unclean. A new crop of caterpillars had convened around the post and swathed the unit with a fine tent of thready sheeting. The material was half-translucent so that through and around it the father could see the mass of caterpillars moving in arteries, some still gushing out the thread. The stunted light from overhead caused the bulb to sort of glow around the edges, melting the nest in places, dripping to the ground.
Near the center of the mass the texture became so thick that the father could no longer see the mailbox, nor could he really see the wooden stand that’d held its husk up, though he knew it had to still be in there, didn’t it now, did it not? In this massive clot condition the mailman would not have anywhere to stick the mail, the father knew, not unless it could be wedged up in the larval sheeting, which made even the father’s stomach lurch. The father would not receive any of his new magazines, he realized — he’d not be spending any of the several coming evenings locked in one of the house’s several bathrooms or large closets, studying the glossy pages of young famous men and women and whatever other things the magazines tried to sell — he would not receive that pleasure. He would get older every day.
In the street the father spun around all of a sudden, to recall how the air felt.
The father noticed then how coming up from the box the caterpillars had stretched their cocooning across the yard, a thousand tiny tightroped strings extended off the enmeshed mailbox to the dying tree that masked the front yard — which the father had asked be removed before the house was bought but then forgot — the whole gnarled trunk mostly exposed except for a couple bigger branches near the middle where the father had planned to hang a tire swing or something like it for his wife and child to enjoy, though he’d still not had time for that thing either, his days stuffed thick with walking, needing, heat. From the tree the caterpillars had begun to shoot across and comb over the house, their whorls of creamy thread just barely glinting in the waning slivered curtain of old light, as if covert, the thorax drizzle sloshed in long thin strands down through the branches across the long field of air onto the roof, encombing, jeweled with larvae—further fathers—spooling out around the house, reflecting light at certain angles hidden, a warbling quilt, a den.
WHAT WAS BENEATH THE FATHER
The father stood on the front lawn. Above the sun burped up and down. The father did not know he was not moving. Beneath the father there was grass. Beneath the grass there was root and rock and mud. In the mud were several sorts of other minor organisms, convened and still convening. In the mud there was cells from skin that’d been on humans and there was water that had come down through the air. There were things that’d died and fallen off of trees and floated down and decomposed and sunk into the soil to become part of the soil or to become the soil itself—a single curving surface on which any flesh must walk or lay. Further layers under, the dirt turned into rock, slathered in being, crushed with pressure, juiced in spots with gush or tunnel. Certain tunnels went very deep. Certain tunnels ended in doors that led to rooms.
13-DREAM DREAM SEQUENCE
That night the father slept through thirteen dreams. In the first dream he was a priest. In a second dream he was in Judas Priest. In a third dream he betrayed himself. In a fourth dream he ate so much spaghetti he exploded. In a fifth dream he was a beach towel in an unlit closet. In a sixth dream he was a woman who came to the closet and threw up all the spaghetti into the beach towel. In a seventh dream he was all the beaches and all the sand. In an eighth dream he had a cubicle beneath a certain beach where gorgeous women came and forced him to have sex. In a ninth dream he got folded in a remaindered library book and sold on eBay to a woman who binge-ate twice a week. In a tenth dream the father became a series of explosions in a video game his son was playing. In an eleventh dream the father felt very tired, though in this world tired meant obese, though obese meant made of light. In a twelfth dream the father was asleep and could not be woken no matter how long they screamed or what weapons were used. In a thirteenth dream the father woke and found himself above himself and inside his mouth he saw himself and inside that self’s mouth he saw himself and inside that self’s mouth he saw a window, and through the window the father saw another window, and through the window the father saw mountains, fountains, fortunes, beaches, gazebos, grease, disease, and the father found that he was laughing and the father crawled inside himself and turned around.