FLOOD: The night I first read to this point in the manuscript I paused here because there was something knocking at a window in the far end of my hotel room, which I’d rented to read inside a different space from where I sleep. I’d not told anyone where I was staying; there was no one to tell. I went to the window and looked out. It looked like any kind of time. No one was out there. I looked at long angles with my head against the glass to try to see what had done the knocking. I got my gun and opened the door. On the ground there was a picture of me sitting on the bed in my hotel room, reading the book. You were in the picture, too. I don’t know who you are or what you look like, but it was you. You were on the bed asleep. The photo was taken from the perspective of the bathroom mirror. The next morning the picture had gone pale.
FLOOD: This page at first glance appears blank. Up close, though, in proper light, there is a kind of indecipherable font, or more like little pictograms that don’t seem to form any image. I find myself staring into the page here for too long at times, waiting for the build of it to compile correctly, but instead I end up feeling sick or falling asleep. Then I look up and see it’s as light or dark outside as ever, like no time passing. After more time spent studying the pictograms I feel certain I have seen them elsewhere in the world, like signs of corporate logos or textures on the sides of buildings seared somehow into my unconscious, but of course this is me searching for meaning. Likely there is no meaning but it is my job to persist in the identification of tragedy nailed to nothing, and so I will. Honestly at this point I want to burn the book. I also find myself thinking I want to eat it, that I want to get the sentences tattooed on my body. The thought snakes through me in my voice. I have been sleeping with the book at night whether I do or not, like suddenly it’s in my arms, or it feels like it is. It is a pressure. A dress. It kind of itches. As an afterthought, I have covered up the mirrors in my home, though not those in my car. Suddenly I feel over-aware of the number of mirrors I come into contact with daily, often without having even noticed their presence in the room. The book continues.
“Do you know about the city of Sod,” I heard me saying. “Do you know about the city of the children of Sod. Do you know about the silence of the locks in the city of the children of Sod, who have been waiting to be cut free from bereavement. One method for arriving at the white gate is chloroform and candles. This should be applied to you by a licensed client of the word, who will appear above your bed in a down flak jacket. I am the jacket. The erotics of names is not a joke. Every night’s name is every night’s name and the room’s too. I will arrive inside you also and you will allow me. Every griever is my fiancé. Our jagged tips reach up into the Sod. The transfigured night is why you age. The cloaking me will kill the remainder so we can have an unoblivious serenity. I am online. The me I am not me inside the mirror walks toward me as the mirror grows closer with me in it, approaching me approaching. The glass dome on this home shatters every time another person has a birthday. The homes beside this home call the shards in mnemonic purring to come into the home and cut them into worship. The entrance to the cloaking city must be cloaked on the face of the blood of all. Eternally, the lamps inside our house so familiar they are not there. Where I am so warm in me I can’t sleep until the work is written and erased. Where I can sleep outside me against the neighbor house with my head against the siding, listening for my name without realizing I am listening for my name or realizing I am listening or realizing I am not against the house or I am not outside my house but your house. My words eat the tone out of their fantasy until they look like something you have done or will do or would want to and will or would want to and cannot or will again. When I say I love you I mean I am you in the color of your blood. Welcome our house of endless milk. The mist of our fourteenth moon rising in the cake batter of the mattress where you will make the final child of your whole life each night and transfer into us. Not yours but yours and mine. Not ours.”