later years I would spend whole days of whole long summers underwater trying to hold my breath so hard I could turn hard myself inside and be thereafter able to walk beneath the nothing, breathing, in my flesh, though I clearly never did; and (b) through the small slit of window just above my bathroom’s toilet, with one small latch clasp holding it closed, a view that mostly for most years would be obscured by brush growth from the plants that grew beside the house, obstructing the backyard. Only from certain angles and by leaning could you get any bit of sky inside that frame, and, when the bushes had been trimmed back, the right side of our next-door neighbor’s house, where a very large man lived with his old mother—the two of them together inside that small, encrushed house for years with a lawn that grew up and over and would die. In that grass once I found a skateboard I rode until it made me fall and drew my blood out. I also found a black softball bat I would in some evenings hold against me when sounds inside the house and through the walls would stir, waiting for something to come out so I could crush it—something nameless—it never came.
For all those years and since then I’ve never seen an inch of the inside of the house of those nearest neighbors. I’ve seen only the mother and the man inside there come and go, mostly just the man, coming out to climb to stand inside the backyard and look at nothing, or once to get on the roof and fix the antenna to the TV. How in that time he’s shirked the cells off of his body from at least 350 pounds down to near now around 220—a shrinking of self much the way I had, years before him, just next door—as if, in the years between, we’d shared a cyst, a giving-of into a void. How now, seeing him wobble from the garage door down the drive, I cannot help but imagine his home lined with that old meat, hung on the walls, a padding against light and outside sound there, he and his mother. Some days in his thin afternoons he comes out and stares through the fence at my sister’s barking dog, staring hard and wordless into the dog as if to burst it from its center, to desist its barking sound.
Between these three exits from this bedroom there would be enough conduit-space therein that at any given hour in my night there could be something coming in or peering in into me without me knowing, and this does not include the vents, the phone lines, the eventual internet connection, the holes too small for me to see at all. These openings inside my room, without sleep defense image, seemed to stretch over all the air. By the third day of staying awake panels of color began to appear over my bed and beyond my doorway, floating scrims of ghosting color that would dissipate as I moved toward them in my flesh. Other times the color would form dots or ovals on my vision which then would bloom to globes or sink away. Space became not a system of dimensions but a kind of substance one could mold, if in the whole exhaustion feeling too far sunk in to manipulate even my eyes—thus, a twofold kind of shifting: seeing more and knowing less.
Around the house inside these changing I trudged from room to room through disparate hours of the night, crying through the hallways asking anybody, god or whoever, just to shut me down, undo my time. Standing in the kitchen on the far side of the counter from my mother in a late light and her looking at me, speaking, as if from several hundred years away. Less than the words she spoke then, I remember the sound that surrounded all the air around me and between us, the slight shake of my frame inside my frame, and of the frame of house around me, and the air around that, layers quaking, full of night. Sometimes back inside my bedroom again hours later, as if time had not passed, I’d get the feeling that all the doors inside the house, all houses, had come open, and anything then was able to go out or come in. There comes, in the carving out, a
For all those years and since then I’ve never seen an inch of the inside of the house of those nearest neighbors. I’ve seen only the mother and the man inside there come and go, mostly just the man, coming out to climb to stand inside the backyard and look at nothing, or once to get on the roof and fix the antenna to the TV. How in that time he’s shirked the cells off of his body from at least 350 pounds down to near now around 220—a shrinking of self much the way I had, years before him, just next door—as if, in the years between, we’d shared a cyst, a giving-of into a void. How now, seeing him wobble from the garage door down the drive, I cannot help but imagine his home lined with that old meat, hung on the walls, a padding against light and outside sound there, he and his mother. Some days in his thin afternoons he comes out and stares through the fence at my sister’s barking dog, staring hard and wordless into the dog as if to burst it from its center, to desist its barking sound.
Between these three exits from this bedroom there would be enough conduit-space therein that at any given hour in my night there could be something coming in or peering in into me without me knowing, and this does not include the vents, the phone lines, the eventual internet connection, the holes too small for me to see at all. These openings inside my room, without sleep defense image, seemed to stretch over all the air. By the third day of staying awake panels of color began to appear over my bed and beyond my doorway, floating scrims of ghosting color that would dissipate as I moved toward them in my flesh. Other times the color would form dots or ovals on my vision which then would bloom to globes or sink away. Space became not a system of dimensions but a kind of substance one could mold, if in the whole exhaustion feeling too far sunk in to manipulate even my eyes—thus, a twofold kind of shifting: seeing more and knowing less.
Around the house inside these changing I trudged from room to room through disparate hours of the night, crying through the hallways asking anybody, god or whoever, just to shut me down, undo my time. Standing in the kitchen on the far side of the counter from my mother in a late light and her looking at me, speaking, as if from several hundred years away. Less than the words she spoke then, I remember the sound that surrounded all the air around me and between us, the slight shake of my frame inside my frame, and of the frame of house around me, and the air around that, layers quaking, full of night. Sometimes back inside my bedroom again hours later, as if time had not passed, I’d get the feeling that all the doors inside the house, all houses, had come open, and anything then was able to go out or come in. There comes, in the carving out, a
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