And though the counted dead would never end, the state had claimed use of the bodies to build a wall—a wall that would keep them, finally, protected. 1180 ironed anyway. She pressed her knuckles to the iron’s steaming eyes to make a memory.
The 5th child came out of the wrong hole during a shit.
The smell of the 6th child—the mother despised herself for this—reminded her of biscuit gravy, and that was all she’d eaten then for weeks.
The 7th child grew its voice first and still spoke inside her when she was most alone. The 7th child knew things about her and rose them on her skin in detailed dioramas. The 7th child was not a woman or a man.
The 8th child seemed to want to make it. This child had kept in place for two whole days. By the time it came out as stippled magma, one solid body seared to the lining from where it’d come. 1180 had swelled large as a window. It pulled and pulled at her until after some time in the sun room it did not.
The 9th through 19th child came one after another like rollercoaster cars deformed and farting, hardly gas but so much blood—and then the 20th child emerged immediately thereafter, as a glassy substance the mother could manipulate between her hands—enough to make so many bulbs to light the outside bright forever—enough to build a boat had there been anywhere to row.
The 21st child swam around 1180 and caressed her head and told her future and said that soon 1180 would feel safe and she would have what she’d always wanted, but there was still more things she had to do yet and could she hold on please, could she hold, and 1180 shook her head and tried to turn to see this child, this sweet one, this living sheet, and yet no matter how quick she turned her head or in which direction the child could not be seen.
The 22nd child was made of paper, on which Person 1180 wrote.
The 23rd child, this latest stammer swollen up inside her soon-to-come, flooded the folds inside her with its pre-forming—it felt larger than the others—it already had so many eyes, had already filled in though the sound of everything inside her where among awaiting blood the mother felt the thing she’d meant to be herself learning her veins.
Person 811, somewhere elsewhere, found himself inside a box. The box held a long low light like the kind of light birthed by machines. He could see his short arms crimped with busy muscle. He could see his gushing veins and the scratch marks where he or something else had scratched them. There were scratch marks in the box above his face, bright splinters wedged under his nails.
811 had no idea how long he’d been inside the box. The last thing he could remember was some leaning purple room. From the room he’d moved into an elevator and the elevator sealed. The elevator had descended for several hours and held no music. At times the elevator seemed to be moving to the right or left, or at an angle, or through color. The elevator’s buttons were unmarked. He’d kept on trying buttons with one sore finger till one of the buttons knocked him out.
Before the elevator, he remembered standing in a dark froth up to his neck. It’d been too dark inside the air, too, to know where exactly what made what. He’d gone for miles and not found land—though he had found, by feel, among a patch of lubricant, a tiny plastic ring that fit his finger just exactly, though it kept slipping off, a little burning, and soon he lost it back into the depth.
811 felt something else there with him in the box. Something small and fat and grousing near his feet. He could not budge. He could not think of whom to call for. His mind blanked over so many things he’d one time known—his phone number, how long or fat his dick was and how it had fit into other people, the names of any presidents of Where, or of what his insides looked like on the inside—he’d seen his insides, some technician had showed him in a picture once, gushed and brown and wound, he remembered that—he could not think which way was up.
He knew there was someone somewhere wanting, and he wanted to remember. He tried to think of things he’d thought he’d thought before in other days of other years in the idea that thinking them again would make him click back on where he’d been or what he’d done after. He felt his thoughts flop off from him like live fish:
AM I A FIRE?
HAVE I BEEN MURDERED?
WHAT WAS THAT ONE KIND OF BEER I BELIEVED I LIKED MOST?
WHICH ONE OF ME IS THIS THINKING?
HOW MANY FINGERS WOULD I HOLD UP IF I COULD MOVE MY ARM?
The box was getting smaller, longer. The heat grew with his sigh. His face itched. His veins itched. He counted backwards. The other air the box held itself around his head.
Person 811 felt his name nudge somewhere in him, thrumming upward through his lungs: a name. A name. He’d had one. He spoke his name aloud, again, again. He’d known other people had had his name before him but they were not inside him now—not that he knew. He found that in saying his name aloud in certain phrasings he could remember other people who had also said it—his father, his boss, the bank, the heads in nightmares, his wife—yes, he’d had a wife—a what?—a woman. He could almost smell her. He could not remember much else. He also found that if he said his name enough the same way it began to become another name—something much longer and more difficult to pronounce—something deformed from how his tongue went, very old.
Person 811 knew he was not immortal. He had only been left alone by chance—something shitty in his pheromones, a certain chemical in bad cologne, an incantation he’d not meant to let slip the day before by pressing a certain code into his home phone unaware—there was nothing else about him—when he thought about his hand it hurt. In the nights since then, whenever that was, the man had continued turning aged. He had seen the sheen slip out from behind the skin around his face. He had watched his skin and fingers newly droop. Though days were so short by the hour, when strung together, one after another for weeks or years or which however, in those unglassed contraptions, they seemed even fewer. Soon, he was only thinking of long windows on beach vacation homes. He imagined himself standing neck deep in the warm surf, treading sunned.
811 could have spent the remainder of his life inside this box, he imagined. He would not have felt cheated or ill-framed. He felt flashes in his stomach sometimes, squirts of long silent clods of film of time he’d logged and disregarded. Once—he remembered quickly, his body caught taut trying to sit up—along a stretch of blue sod just south of his prior house he’d seen a mile-long pile-up gushed with blood; neck-deep in the blood, the women crying and mosquitoes swarming for the fresh dead and the not dead yet and the mostly healthy—he’d seen the boils on bodies boiling up with blister in the ransacked sun, their voices peeling at the nothing just above them, inscribing light with all their fear, bursting chocolate lather through their eyelids in the pressure and their reams of fast-ejecting babies floating womby on the curdlip; that day after all that he’d gone home and ate cold tacos and fucked his wife and slept all night.
Yes yes, his wife, she was a woman. She had eyes with color and once she’d touched a prism and for years and years she’d been all that he could know.
Suddenly, beyond his thinking, the lid on the air inside the box came off above him. At first there was so much light he could not see beyond the crag of swarming color platelets. He thought he’d gone so deep into nowhere he’d come out the other side.
Soon then room formed in the flush. In the room there was no wind, no other flesh caught by the walls. The room held just the box that held him, as far as he could see. The space lay long and without texture. 811 found that he could move. He felt the blood rush through his sternum. It filled his arms and made them seem as if erasing from the inside.
The
