This box was warm. The father knocked. He heard the knock as well repeated, two sounds from one move.
My name is. . the father said, then waited, to hear the voice inside the box fill the sentence in, but it did not. Instead, an itch dragging up along his inseam, a spark of choir. My name is. .
The father threw up on the ground. In the vomit, there were errors — strings not vomit, but language, light. The bunched up bits were writing something, words at once sunk into the ground.
The father’s hair was longer now. He could not feel it.
The father walked around the box. He brushed his hands along the surface, after something — ridges, locks, or doors. At the corner, between where the highway’s edges held the box in at its side, there was a little aisle of space where he could sidle down along the box’s left flank, pressed in. He could not see from here how long the box went on. It seemed to stretch forever down the way, as if the whole highway from this point and thereafter were seated with it, hosting. A light far beyond it gave it size.
The father hesitated at the box corner, not quite blinking, then he began along the box. His belly rubbed. His backbone. Inseams. Friction. The grain of the box, unlike the concrete median, was soft but firm — both wanting and somehow giving.
On the north side of the highway, there behind him, the father felt an audience, all watched. The median between them dragged against his back’s tagged body fat. What if the box grew larger, all of a sudden? He would be crushed.
Inside his chest, he heard applause.
Inside the box, as he squeezed sideways, onward, inside the box, too, he heard the brush of flesh on box.
Father? the father asked it.
This time from inside the box came no reply.
SOFT!
Somewhere sometime along the box shape, the father found a divot in its face — a small nudged spot where the flat black surface interrupted and gave the father’s body space to stand. Looking from the divot back along from where he’d come, the father could no longer see the box’s end, where he’d left the car alive and running — and still there, the other way, the box continued on — the same dimension stretching both ways out there from this divot, shaped distinctly in his size.
Above, the sky was shuddering with light. Day soon again already, the father thought, and felt the box sway, the ground beneath him skinny, pale.
The father turned to face toward the box. Black and flat, twice as high as he was, hard to tell when there was no light where box ended and sky began. There in the grain of it, some language. The father leaned his head close up to read. Instead the words were little pictures—the father standing in the house, the father coughing, the father holding a hammer toward a door. In each picture, the father appeared so much clearer, tighter. The father tried to turn away. As he did, inside each image, the other fathers turned first, and then he himself could not. He closed his eyes.
Overhead the light was gone again, hid behind lids. A flesh or floor or wall behind the father moved around him, sealed him in — the box around him eating the air up — the same blank sort of air that filled his house’s vents — washing in around his knees.
AIR
Among the black space of the box, now turning softer, now gone cushy, streaming, the father, aging, wormed. He could not tell at all where he was going. Every inch matched every inch.
Into the shape of box surrounding, the father walked into the box.
Every so often he would open up his eyes again slowly, unreleasing, buttons pressing in reverse. Walls around him. Stalls around him. Houses. All mass. Massed. Opening each instant. On in. On.
If there is one hole in any home there must be many, he heard himself shout somewhere inside him.
Outside his skin he heard the night.
SLEEPOVER
Inside the girl’s house, the house seemed endless. The ceiling went too high. The walls were made of stone and cracked in patterns that pleased the eye. There were large pictures of women and of men — some the son could recognize. Or had seen once. Or he might have. Just now. The son felt a bubble in his foot birth. He felt the bubble bobble up along his belly and past his lungs before it burst. He called these thoughts.
The house had not seemed so large from the outside, or so gorgeous. The girl’s parents must be rich, the son thought. Which was weird because at school the girl always wore such ratty clothes — weird humpy bags of browbeaten cotton from long-dead decades’ smothered styles.
The girl’s house was made of wire, wicker, marble, slick, and sand. It had no smell. The girl’s house’s walls were often mirrors. There was everywhere to walk.
The son spent several hours staring into the portrait over one mantel, a gleaming field of white on white.
The son turned around then. He turned and turned. Tied to the wall where he’d come in, the son realized a piece of string he hadn’t seen there prior. The string looped around his middle like a belt. The son grasped the string and felt it simmer, half-electric. He slid his fingers, making static, zinging. Cold. .
PATH
The son followed the
long string down a
hallway without a
ceiling and without
doors.
The walls along the hall were wet and mirrored and left grease on the son’s hands, slipped in slats of gold goo underneath him, trying to stick him in one place. There was a music playing somewhere, by a band that did not actually exist.
blank music washed on and on and all through the house like blood bombs dropping, like skin peeling off of trees in sheets, women becoming horses becoming dogs becoming light — a whole slew of awful sounds that were not really sound exactly, but sound as an idea
The son could feel the sound against his chest and where his bones joined, meeting, vibrating his canine teeth.
The son could sort of see.
The son
went up
a
stairwell
and
down a
stairwell,
the string
now
burning
in his
hand—
the string
singing
along
and on
and on
into the
house.
For long stretches rooms would repeat — the walls and width identical from end to end. White light in wash, from overhead: projectors. Locks without true doors. Doors without true locks or knobs or seams.
A small eye in some pink wood watched him from underneath the floor.
Hairy curtains. Gold glass in windows, looking out onto long unblinking fields.
Black chandeliers with yard-long candles. Coffee tables made of water.
Bees.
The son in one room sat down for some time in a recliner, hearing his cells spin or moisten, softly jostled, coming open or awake.
The son walked.
The son found a charcoal-colored elevator that would not go up or down, but had one button for each year.