Three Hundred Million: A Novel

I’m saying this so it can be erased.

I remember corridors and chambers, buried in my finger.

I remember every ever eaten bite of food, how it spanned the cells between the cells, the space of light slowly made gathered, the eyes of the man or woman who placed the food before me on the table. I remember the voracity with which I took it all down against my teeth and holes to make more of me as if in the world forever I had been the only one.

I can’t remember how I would wake up with so much in my mouth I was no longer breathing and there was no longer any way to speak or write, though I still am, and how is that. I can’t remember to take what I just said seriously and erase everything, burn the buttons, accept fate.

I remember wallowing in bodies, sucking their fingers, humping their knees, starved as hell for death and never dying, even in dying. And then, now.

I remember the way a hand might come against me and I’d shudder and then feel happy to have been touched and feel myself more in being touched and turn around to try to face the touching person and find nothing there but night.

I remember you there, then I don’t.

I can’t remember sound.

I can’t remember where on the silent light we floated, language leaking back and forth between the countless holes where we had leaked out our innards. The meat of the earth stuck to my lids and to yours and wished me open and you open and soon we were wide as we had ever been.

I remember the remaining span of days on earth of those beyond the length of fabric where the reverberation of the holes sung forth, passed for those who wished to see it as a lifetime as all of time forever, while in us it passed as now, all instants and instances passing through a single focus, spreading out in each span with their own whorl.

I remember you as pixels in the mask I wear to stand before the mirror and see beyond the shape of us.

I do not remember what a face is or a hand is or how to not believe in anything.

I remember a box inside a room. Both the room and the box could have held anything, before or after. It was a black box with a black lid. There were no tapes. I stood there above the box and thought about the shape of the box and the frame of the box and its space inside it held. I thought about the cells of the box and the cells inside the box and the burning in my hands. I thought about the walls around the box and the walls around me. The box just sat there. I watched the box sit. I watched the box until there was nothing left that I had not imagined had been inside the box forever, every inch and every hour, and then I went on watching. I watched the box until the night arrived and the box was still there and nothing about the box had changed and then I left the room and locked the door behind. The box did nothing to stop me. I walked along the hall and went downstairs and the house was just the same. I found my mother at the kitchen table writing a letter she would never mail. Her hair was white and she was thin. She had lived a whole life since I saw her last. I sat down at the table with my mother and we spoke. Whatever the words were that went between us made the air there in the house feel clean and calm, and ours. I can’t remember what else then happened. I never thought about the box again.

I remember each room is the room where you are born, the room where you are killed, the room where you make skin and speak in someone else’s code. As no one knows when they are dead, it doesn’t matter. They are carried and carried on in vast precision in the image of what had been, each world both old and made eternal, under a sky that needed nothing beyond itself.

I can’t remember how no book was a book. How no one had lived and none had passed. No flesh was a body. Whatever was said was said by all people or was not said and the word was just the word and I had needed you so long.

I remember how I tried to copy my own wish inside your head and then could hear it continually thereafter shaking where it didn’t fit, no matter how I turned your head and pushed you oblong through a place like home or under sleep into grand halls and fields of light. How in my own body still I can feel you also in my image always and forever.

I can’t remember how you are the only person who can read this.

I come into the house draped in all gowns.

I come into the house and find no house here.

I come into the house and it’s a sea. The level of the water rises with my presence in the volume, spreading quick to lap along the drywall, and behind each wall another wall in its same image.

I remember how we’d drowned. What had come from water must return to water. The house from inside larger than the earth itself, the water sagging up and overrunning, up to my chest already, creamed with pearling cream and pattered ash. It slaps against me in even repetition, one long fat strobe that hits me squarely in the breasts, though I can’t remember I have breasts. The water wants my milk. It sucks my glands, though I am sand there, the nipples sore from being had by someone I can’t remember in the silent purr of ageless language up my arms and down my back, curtains spurting layered in all air I can’t remember.

I remember the water did not exist.

I remember how I grew; how I had been the child and then grown through my own life into the man who finally killed every other living person and consumed them; how then that person disappeared; though as I try to tell you now again I can’t remember which or how I knew to tell you.

I am in the home and in the home. I turn inside the mass of heavy nothing to look and wade back into the stretch I’d just come through, though as I turn I see the house is not the house there but every human liquid: blood, eggs, semen, saliva, sweat. The wet goes on in every way, white and shining, depth erupting warm and clean and fast into wherever I cannot, depths deeper than there need to be as I will never know them.

I remember my mother wiping my face with a cold washcloth on the morning I learned I would not remember dying.

I remember waking up three hundred million times. How I had been some mornings as a blind woman, as an actor, as a masseuse, though even in the knowing of this knowing I can’t return to any of them, as if my idea of even this is another old disease where I must come to and rub and mutter, be again speaking words that mean nothing to anyone, an image waiting to live the remainder of his or my life out tick by tick unfunny, recorded over.

I remember what it felt like to feel my body fill with fire. Or with nostalgia.

I can’t remember why I’m soft.

I remember the strange feeling of wandering through the dark with arms extended, looking for a wall, or someone’s arm, another me there anywhere.

I come into the house and everyone is still alive. They are all there, all our people. They wear the frame of face and dress they’d felt the most themselves as, at whatever age. They have children and are children. It is a celebration. There are candles and white balloons. There is a cake white as my mind, shaped like a cone. The eyes all watch me enter without recognition. They blink and smile all gapless and no words, while beneath the skins awaits an expectation of coming song, though there is no breath left to lift.

I can’t remember how in every instant I was the lips of any person; I was the color of all birth, the canals the bodies had been sent through from blood into a common light; I was the hair that had not grown; I was the hair that had been shorn from the heads of the living and the dead and laid upon the ground to hide it through crucial minutes in which the eye inside that ground must rise for air; no one else was coming; this was our iteration; a wider milk rose in the seas; from even feet away no one could see this; the tables carved initials in themselves; I was the shoulder blades and the manes of ice over the homes’ roofs and the ring fingers; I was the ring around each hope; each body I became I had been always and inside it there it felt the same, a mutual darkness lay awaiting when the skin rolled down over our eyes, the days beginning as they ended, waking mirrors all around the beds; the mirrors then must be walked into; I was the organ of the totality of glass; every inch of what we’d eaten; ornaments held on the shelves in rooms where no one moved; bulbs left on to burn out, dreaming wire; I was the words following our last words on the lungs; I was the trachea and pelvis; I was the grinding of the teeth.