by Blake Butler
Throughout it all I felt that hovered presence in my head, beyond even just my thinking; it was more a kind of perverted area wanting something to attach to, a remainder of what life had been once, if only to provide context for its wired content, my memory; otherwise all that I had been just seemed a sprawl of ongoing minor wrecks, a mass of blackness like the dreamworlds where there wasn’t even the idea of something like our land.
And yet nothing new about the hours came forth on their own besides where sometimes the tape would hiss suddenly with static, interrupting the true lines of the supposed real. Glitches would appear or buzz out of the pixels. Whole big lightning-like strikes of wavering would lurch out through the horizontal beams of day. During these times I’d get down on both my knees and beg the buzzing not to stop but to move into me, too, to wrap me over, and it never would. Always the buzzing and razing only hit the land and fuzzed it out into a world less like myself. Sometimes it would obscure my skin a bit or pull my face apart but I could still feel me going on exactly the same, just in different temporary costume.
Anyway, there was no one to tell me what seemed new from the outside, how they couldn’t discern me now from what I’d been just before, or even where the land was and I wasn’t. And yet thereafter when I could see again and could stand again and began to walk among more space, I knew there was something lost about me I might remember sometime that there had been something there before at least, something rolled and wet about the homes and people missing from them and my body and my arms and mouth and face and hair, and even if I never remembered what it was, even in feeling nothing knowing nothing seeming nothing, there was still this little glimmer about the possibility of any instant coming apart from what it was. Where the replicating light inside the tape struck and stuck itself against me over and over I could feel inside the warming flesh there an alternating wish for light, a thing pulling or being pulled or wanting for wanting or knowing the want for want had once been there within the idea of me. Whether this made the hours that much harder or warmer going forward in the hours on hours I have no idea and do not wish to, so if you know please do not say. I wouldn’t hear you anyway, regardless, could I, but there is the shaking of the knowledge of the never-sent response, from which some nights there falls the language of the whole, to which every instant in every body has been appended, regardless of what luck.
* * *
FLOOD: Already more time has passed here between my ability to comment on myself than I remember having passed in prior iterations. My voice itself was bleeding. The whole thing was a trick. I was not really aware that I could count time in this manner but I could feel it. It reminds me more than any of this how it felt outside the tape to live inside the day: time leaping or erasing when I most wished it wouldn’t, and going by the longest when I wished it wouldn’t. It feels like how I’ve always imagined it would feel to die, though slowed down so slow it seems like living.
Another problem is is that there’s like seven hundred ways to talk here, to the no one.
Some of these ways of talking become deleted. Some things you say don’t get uttered.
Like one night I woke up remembering everything I’d ever done in life. Its transcription.
I tried to say everything about me at the same time aloud to anyone so I’d remember.
But when I tried to say it like that or say it at all inside that or speak at all I blacked out.
As if the tape got paused and rewound, or stopped and edited, by someone else. Not god.
Someone outside the machine fucking with the machine because I was learning about me.
I blacked out in the black and saw the black inside me and it was black inside and out.
In the second blackness there were people all around me, beating at me, laughing, knives.
I closed my eyes to hide from being beaten and behind my eyes I saw the world.
The world exactly as I wanted. Without death and beyond number. Held against another.
When I woke again it was like any other time. I remembered remembering but not what.
The years of anyone subtracted, hid forever. The contracting skin and lesions of the dead.
Here all surrounded by the absence of anyone I did not know, which is everyone but me.
I see their belongings and touch the surfaces and can imagine them being killed.
Can smell their blood without the smell there, in a necklace or a doorknob, a bit of land.
I can tell the dying had to hurt. That it must have, though who would really know.
I imagine I’m the one who killed them. I’m who was right there, laughing too.
In every instant every death revises itself to the instant dragging on without the rest.
I ate the skin off of your face. I remembered that just right now. I’m about to forget.
But when your skin came off there was this color like I’ve never seen in any body ever.
It was nothing different than the rest. It felt the same as every other. It wasn’t mine.
I saw the same color emit again when I killed someone else again the next day.
And the next day. The tape wound on. I wound the tape. I was the tape and I was you.
My flesh feels like it’s made of all the other flesh I can’t remember. It must be everybody.
You mean me too. You mean I am in you.
You are in me. It hurts.
But if everybody is also in you, then so what. That’s nothing special about me. All those bodies, all of them in death shaped just the same.
I don’t even remember who you are.
I can’t help it.
And that is worse than having died.
No it isn’t.
How would you know, you didn’t die.
How do you know I didn’t? I can’t feel me breathing. I can’t seem to do anything I want. I can’t seem to get where I am going, no matter where that is. How is that any different any day from dying?
You are alive.
Prove it.
There’s only one way to prove it, and then it would no longer then be true.
Go ahead.
You know I won’t. I mean, I can’t. Not to say I wouldn’t. God knows there have been times I wanted to. What person ever didn’t want to kill every person ever, in the history of the world.
You can’t because you’re dead, right? So you are not real.
Yes, I’m dead. And so? So what. I’m as real as any pixel in your face. What’s any different about me now than I was ever, to you or anybody, including me.
Not dying when everybody else did die is like dying harder than everybody else.
You’re dumb.
I am dumb. So what if I am dumb. So what if I’m alive. So what if what. So. So. So.
Stop it. That’s not what life is. To say it like that. That’s not being alive. I would know.
Did I tell you I tried to kill myself too. I tried to come along. To be a person with the rest.
Did I already tell you. It didn’t work. Me killing myself, I couldn’t do it. I tried hard.
In my life before people started killing each other more than usual I tried so many times.
I tried by not trying. I said words like, Fuck god, and Fuck America, and Fuck fuck.
Every day I would say something like, I am going to fucking kill myself motherfucker.
But I never even really tried. To be honest, I couldn’t imagine the world without me.
I continued living. I lived in America. I tried in America. A lot of other people did die.
Then all of you died. Every single one of you. Except me. I went on on this tape alone.
Pretty much if you are reading this or seeing this, however, you are dead and I’m alive.
Though in another way it could be like I am dead and you are living in the flood function.
Because where you are, beyond human existence, it will probably seem like life to you.
Whatever you are experiencing there will feel like your life going on fo
rever and yes.
Even if everyone in America is dead as fuck if you are hearing this you will think: Life.
Even if you are in there wanting to kill yourself you’ll still be thinking something yours.
That is so yours. Please take it. Please let it be you. Forget your arms. There is the word.
I wonder if you’re having a great day in your world there, either way. I hope you are.
I hope you are. I need a message of hope here so I will make one, even if it is nothing.
* * *
FLOOD: I didn’t believe anything I said even as I said it. It kept on coming out no matter what I did behind my face in the language. It would not stop. I could already see what was coming for me in every element and yet when it hit it felt like nothing I could have expected. Like histories erased. Like light that didn’t want me in it but was the only fiber of the world.
How many years could I have gone on in here in repetition. How long could the tape continue to repeat me without becoming thin in places, blacking out. It was like the tape went on because I knew it shouldn’t. It was like the tape was my whole mind. Where was my mind in anyone now not appearing. Would I be able to tell the difference between when my body began to be eaten apart by the wear of the reading eye over the band of color language that made me what I was. Already my hands and body seemed so old, so pulled apart from how they seemed to want to remember having felt all they ever had, though I could not remember any actual time and setting attached to that. Only the gaps. The tape was the gaps in us. Every sense of myself was only a residue floating on the cusp of a world long disappeared from underneath itself.
I kept expecting the ground to fall out beneath my feet, to light me down into a space beneath the image, even less than nothing. The blight of my mind inside the tape hid in a secret mind like what we’d always thought of as heaven, or a black hole carried in the grain of the make of everything unseen until you were encompassed by it. Suddenly anything the tape could not contain made more sense to me than any of the ruins and wrecks of landscapes, or the terrifying forms of empty homes, however inconceivable, no less real, whereas here I was only pressed forever in no understanding, no longer even sure how much of me remained in me and less so every second.
And yet the ground did not open up. The sky remained in place and kept its color to itself. No wear would change the world around me any less than how time in my human body had eaten into me without me knowing. When sometime likely soon the tape no longer was able to turn its gears over and again repeating, it would feel exactly like going forward did. What I carried in my blood would always remain forever only mine, all connection to any possible space beyond the daily reality of being as black and inaccessible as an eye seeing itself. Every iteration of the repetition would begin to seem more and more the way it had always been forever until I couldn’t tell the difference between one day and the rest. Knowing I wouldn’t know already hurt more than never having had. Death here would feel just the same as living.
Can I tell you about our life together.
Please don’t.
It will feel good for you to hear it.
I won’t remember.
It will feel good for you to hear, even if you don’t remember. You can remember it while I’m saying it. You can believe me.
I can’t. It won’t.
You were my husband.
No.
You loved me and I loved you.
I was never married. I lived alone.
We lived inside a house together and we tried. We both had lives of long hours apart. We did anyway everything we could. You went and wore a uniform and carried a weapon and talked to people in the streets and did as you were told and hoped if you worked hard enough as a person you could move beyond that point to something that made you feel less fucked each day a little less and were happy in between. I tried hard too and had different jobs I hated even more than you hated yours and at night when I came home you were often still working and I would try to stay up so I could see you when you came in but usually by the time you did come you were so tired you just lay down and passed or I was already asleep. We both ate out of boxes. I remember when we shared meals. That was great. That was enough.
You’re not a person. I’m not a person. Not anymore. Look at this place.
Why does it matter what a place is.
Because I can’t see anything else.
People died because they did. Because they had to. You’re only alive as anybody else. You are only on the far side of any mirror.
You are not there.
You hear me.
No I don’t. I can’t. The tape’s about to end. Then I’ll just have to start over.
How can you know the tape’s about to end if you can’t remember anything.
I feel it melting in my center, its ending and beginning.
That is me. You were my husband and I loved you. This is only one part of me among the many ways that I have been and am and will be, but it is still true. It is true and has been always.
Goodbye.
The face of the sky refused to change. Even in the lash of the breadth of the dead in my memory, the colors of the world wouldn’t let me be released. In every layer of the faces of the rooms, the smoke waited to encamp my mind and repeat its time over and again even in the absence of any decay. The ground made not of bones and flesh turned back to loam but forever video.
I could already feel me not remembering to remember the next self-interrupting thing I thought and wanted to know I knew. I could already not quite be anything I was already.
* * *
FLOOD: I don’t know what else to do. Inside the tape I hear me saying these things out loud to the voice and I can’t stop it, though I know it isn’t real. Or, I know I feel inside me that it isn’t, and I can believe it, can feel it coursing through the image of me, but I can’t stop the slow estrangement of what I know and what I want. There are things a person turns to, to believe in, so that he can find a way even to stand up. In this way I could almost not fault anyone for anything they’ve ever done or wished upon a person, though I don’t think I believe that. I think the voice is many people, shifting and aping. All the people I had known. All the people I had not known and never would know but still lived side by side with. All of us who had tried inside the world to live. All after something there among us, beyond cognition. Sometimes it seems as if we’re all together sleeping in a single long white room, all breathing in the same air back and forth into each other and thereby seeding what goes on inside the brain with threads and bits of nowhere squeezed from feeling and the strains of repetition on the body of those feelings being moved through over and over, mushing the colors we have harbored among one another into new colors shifting like cities underneath the blanket of the night. Sometimes I try inside my body to force me awake from that state, there beside you, and rise and walk among us, waking no one up, until I find the body of my wife among the many and lie down again beside her, wrap my torso in her arms, moving in the way only I know how to fit within her, and in this position, inside the white room, speaking no word at all, go back to sleep. I am not sure what the machine is that runs this tape or what the tape is or who puts the words into my other mouth, but I think it’s something shapeless like that, some kind of feeling, something in me, in us all. It seems like if I could name it now or ever it would change. Maybe that is all that we have left.
What do you think I’m saying to you this whole time. I am here. I can’t see you but I believe it and I am waiting for you to come.
How did you hear me? I was thinking.
I can always hear you.
This is insane.
Anybody. Every hour.
I said that I am trying.
I don’t know.
Yes, you do. You do and have and will have. You are here held inside what you are and were and see. You are in the skin around me, all around me. This is not me speaking. This is not a tape any more than any other day was always.
If it’s not a tape why does it all just keep repeating.
What didn’t always ever? In everything is every thing. Whether you are alive or not, or want to be or not, there you are. The world can be founded in the mind of any person, and it is the world, over and over, and it is real. The end of America is not the end of America.
God would you please shut the fuck up about America.
Yes I will.
Every time it begins there is the smoke and zero sound. I go into it because I have to.