Many other things, like all things, the father could not remember.
He could not remember losing skin.
He could not remember the skull-sized beams of other light they’d shined into his forehead and in the ruts behind his knees, resetting the deletion, blank of blank on blank. All the foot-long pins they’d used, and the sledgehammer, and the prism and the dice. Days extracted in blood pictures. Doorbells. Birthdays. His new name(s). He could not remember anything about the other house, the box.
The father could not remember, in any form, the son — the grain of skin or glint of eye the child had in those first hours, as if having been rubbed with steel wool in the womb; the thin months thereafter in which he could still hold the child in a warm silence against his father chest, pleasant, grinning, before the son had learned to scream; the smell ejected from the holes that kicked out his baby teeth, like wire and old cheese—this smell had soon become so general it disappeared. He could not remember the way for months at first, as the child had begun speaking, he’d called the father by his full name, first, middle, and last; how some days, all days, the son walked backward, even his first steps, before the steps the father and the mother would witness as his “first,” the father had not known this ever anyway, at all; or the letter the child had written to the father their fifth Christmas to say how much he loved the father, the letters out of order and poorly drawn, and the picture of the family there without faces, except the blackened O hole of the son’s mouth at the exact center of his head, scribbled to rip. He did not remember the son’s want and wishing, his decorations, their hours before the house while suns would rise, buses arriving to take the son off to some far location, the father on the lawn then waiting for his return in a light; evenings, hours, suppers, cushions, floors; invented games, the blanket mazes, puzzles. How the son could hide for hours in the house and not be found. The father no longer, in his body, held to an inch of this. He could not, in any alley of his remaining mind there, of what the men had left, recall a single thing about the child that stuck inside him but as bumping, but as tremor, itch, or slur. The exit colors beating underneath his forehead, the window of his lungs.
THE REPEATING NIGHT
The father moved to stand in what remained of his only home’s cracked driveway, holding his head up with his hands. The bulb was very heavy. Inside the bulb it smelled like meat. Outside the bulb it smelled like meat. All air was meat now, as was water. The meat was see-through, at least, thank god. All on the air the bugs were crawling — the caterpillars, the ants, the geese. Most geese aren’t bugs but these were. The paint on this side of the house had now shifted in its tone. It’d grown to match the grass that’d grown almost above the father’s head. On the roof there was an enormous blanket half-tied down. It looked like the baby blanket the son had slept with for years and years until they’d had to take it away for quarantine. Massive cameras hung in the ozone, aimed directly at the house, spooling film down on the planet, long black translucent ticker tape splayed like raining.
In the sky above the house it looked like any other day.
Outside the house the grass was growing. The sun was smuggy. The street was gone. The neighbors did not mend their houses from recent damage. There was too much on the news. Several shopping malls went bust. An ocean liner ate its own weight. The library of the son’s school filled up with dust, though only in the evenings, so no one could know. A theme park became a peach and had a bite eaten in it where kids fell in and drowned. In the sky above the house there was a smoking but it was also clear, and it also smelled like endless beef and yet dogs stayed hidden, cowered. A moving van grew fat with girls. There were other people in their own windows, though they did not know what they were looking for. Gun shops did their business and did it well. Several popular websites were replaced with blocks of color. The grocery stores did not have eggs though they paid their men to stock them. The druggists were on drugs. Something had chewed on the largest building in the downtown district. Populations sweltered. The text in all the books in all bookstores increased in size by millimeters. You could not take a bath. The magicians were disappearing and not coming back to smile and swing their arms to end the show. Stores opened in every strip mall selling only handsaws. Babies came out with pubic hair and tried to crawl back inside their mothers. Women were older much more often. Email servers learned to laugh. You could not press Save on your MS Word files, only Save As. . — unto all things a new name. The ocean grew a tumor. The moon grew a tumor. The president grew a tumor and ate it on TV into a large microphone, making the sound of years to come. You couldn’t sing or cry or chew or want or listen or know or sneeze. This all happened in one wrecked second. Where were we then?
The house remained the same.
The father trampled through the tall grass looking for a way to the front door. He could not quite aim himself toward the destination. The grass flapped at his hair. He could see the part of the house above the doorway where the night lamps glowed now a little bright. The father hacked and hacked the grass down with his sore limbs and walked and thought and looked and moved and walked and thought and thought and walked and looked and moved.
DOPPELGÄNGER MANTRA
Inside the bulb the father spoke.
He was repeating everything he’d ever said throughout his life now once again.
On a tiny panel in the bulb’s interior, LCD nodules tallied each word, how many times.
The top ten words:
WHAT
NO
NOT
HELLO or HI
(HIS NAME)
PLEASE
SON
OUCH
OH
GOODBYE
The father’s voice splashed off the metal, right back into his face.
HIVE
By the time the father found the front door it was locked. The naked father did not have his key. The men had kept it. The welcome mat was gone. Ants swarmed the stain on the concrete where it had been fed the residue. The naked father touched his flesh as if it might have hidden pockets—and though it did he could not find them. The father beat the door and rang the bell. The father browned his fists. Sometimes the buzzer shocked him. Sometimes the buzzer played Brahms, sometimes black metal, sometimes the soothing sound of rain-forest water or a shriek of someone being burned. These windows had been painted over or blocked off. The father put his eye up to the spy hole. Peering backward through it he felt a squirt. Inside the father’s chest was also squirting. He pulled the knob until it came off. The knob cauterized his hand. There’d also been a key under the plant box, though its base had been cracked through. The soil spilled out and ants had ravaged that, eating innards out of the leaves and leaving strange veined wire. The plant’s roots grew into the concrete so deep the father could not lift the box up. Some of the roots had little pods like eyes. So much movement — little sound.