The last word, god, in its last reading, seems, against the grain of Flood’s right eye to twinkle, turning its letters over and over on themselves as he absorbs them: god, sod, gap, dog, doo, gun, sun, goo, gad. The shiver of the shifting language curdles in his mind, the words gummed up against the shelves of words already waiting in the memory of books and days and years, folded into any thought whatsoever, like this sentence, like this urge. As well, the sentence set there on the box face begins spinning, shifting through new letters, compressing the language:
with you were with me wished I was you and you were I which wished not known
god wished if you if we wishing where wish we were we where cuz god
why cuz I would wish you wished beside me now always and again
what now exactly now none nothing in the city of our Sod
please help me help we help we please
The words burn and blink inside the house like countless tiny screaming people; they become again inside the words not the words they’d been before then. The floor down here is covered with sentences all over it, every inch shifting to become central as he looks.
With his middle finger Flood reaches up along the surface to rub its meat on the letters of the words as he takes each in, to trick their rhythm into holding still. He rubs along the letters while they grow warm with him. The words fold fast and slow and soft in lines: each sentence shrinking in silent compilation underneath the heat and presence of his going at it, like any hour any day, words disappearing into words:
Which which why now god now why now god now why now cuz
How help please cuz I am was nothing we were you were
Want if want was if god if
If I see I
Be I
Six smearing into five. Five into four and there again all smearing, like smells absorbing smells. Any word or letter looked at too long rolls and mutates, changing also where inside his brain he felt he knew what the word meant, the memory of one’s memory gaining blowholes, slaved erasures. As each sentence disappears, there is no floor where it had been written on it.
Flood blinks.
Flood hears the sound of all the houses filling up with blood throughout the world.
Flood has no idea how long he’s been rubbing at the new flat floor beneath him, now double-fingered, like a woman masturbating, and drooling from the mouth. Between the dry on the wall where words were, around his pads there’s something sizzling, a rising cream pushed through the walls through where there’d been the row of holes of changing letters. In the mass of glow above him he can’t see where he’d fallen through the mirrors, up into the old room, where all those bodies had been stored; he can’t see where the edges of the newer room around him begin or end, in such a way that it seems like the air is all just walls around him, with the language, deeper and deeper, disappearing as he rubs.
Something in this room begins to shake. This room where you are sitting with your hands before you, reading. You don’t hear it because I said that it began. You refuse to take part in trying to hear thereafter because I’m talking about you directly to you and this object is a book. You don’t like the idea of me communicating through you, outside of time. But there is something. In the room. Shaking. Behind your back, or just downstairs, or maybe by the window where you sleep, or in the curtains, soft as hair.
What is shaking.
Will you hear it.
In the room where he is, Flood does; he hears the shaking like I have heard, though to him it feels like it’s inside him.
Is it inside him.
I think someone is at your door.
Flood is grunting. His torso seems above his head. His head feels above his ass. His ass feels opened. There is no light, but for where above him in the spinning, he can feel the low glow of the room somewhere above him, then below him. The black is gyroscopic. He’s all wet now. He feels a cursor blinking in his chest. If he’s not moving, he can’t seem to keep one way clearly up above him. If he’s falling, the air here has a floor, one indifferent to direction, shape, or time.
Flood, Gravey says inside his cell alone. Flood, he says. Flood, he says.
A blue lesion has pulled open on his back between his shoulder blades. It is too small to be seen by humans.
The lesion seems to change shape when looked at. Inside this shape there is a city, like the city you are in. The city is unfolding.
Gravey exhales into the larger air.
Today in America unknowing each speaking person will emit a common word.
LAPUZIA: I go by Flood’s residence on my way home from the precinct. I don’t let anybody know I’m going, because I want to approach as a friend, not as a coworker. I’m worried about him, to be honest, and not just his career but his mental and emotional well-being. I find his front door left unlocked and halfway open. I immediately notice a strange smell, but I don’t associate it with where I have felt it from until I come into the front room. There are mirrors on the floor. Mirrors on the walls and on the ceiling. Several dozen lights light the room wide. I am so shocked at first I start to call for backup, but something stops me. Still, I ready my firearm. I go on into the larger room. Spread out on the floor where one would usually have a sofa etc. I find a series of pictures of B., Flood’s deceased wife. There are pictures of her alone and smiling, her with E. N. in various locations, and so on, hundreds of them, just everywhere. And there are papers. Papers of his writing, some of which are copies of ones I’ve seen before, that he’s brought to me, others I have not, and some written in a script that doesn’t look like English. Drawings of odd symbols are on many of the pages. I continue on into the apartment, terrified of what I’ll find, though in the other rooms nothing is strange. No evidence of struggle or wrongdoing. No bodies, thank god, and no blood. The main closet is still full of B.’s old clothes, and this is where I realize there’s this odd smell snaking on the air. It is a perfume, sprayed so many times into the small room it’s hard to breathe. Hours later I knew for certain I had felt the presence of this choking, slaving smell before, sometime when I was very young, inside my sleep, but this does not occur to me at the time. I come back out into the main room. I stand among the pictures and the light. I decide there’s no reason to report this, that I should not have come here, that I feel older than I ever had all through my blood. I feel dizzy in the middle of the photographs of her, the mirrors, a silent catacomb of eyes. That’s when I realize I’m being recorded.
FLOOD: You and everyone who’s ever been. This is not a question of being destroyed, or even beginning: it is in the folding there between: the color of the mesh of the lives forced into bodies rendered one unto the other, lobes in the catalog of time. Each body not a body but a cell. I did not write this.
The body before the glass screen watches white.
He or she before the screen watches the white recorded into the image of the video not go on, not shift or change its vision, unless it bears an image hidden underneath itself: white upon white, making more of what it was and is and will be. Spitting up upon itself more of itself. No mirror. No hour. The white of a white loom.
He or she, assigned to duty, must watch the film to find where inside it there might be something as yet undetected, evidence buried in the film filmed by a man who may or may have not used his hands to end several hundred human lives. He or she may feel emotion in regard to the gone bodies even not having known these victims beyond their humanity after the fact, but regardless time continues, the white continues. The end of one life or another on any given day cannot end all lives, we think. We must go on. This is both the song and city of the human, to continue, we know, and so he or she must.