Three Hundred Million: A Novel (16 page)

Long textured lattices of ridge set in the precinct hall’s walls’ face in the same color of the wall allow a running joke among many of the guards that the building is “ribbed,” for the pleasure of something that passes through the unseen logic of the hour daily, or hourly, or is ever present, yet always gone. Regardless of the number of days that pass for any body inside the chamber most find the ridging something they can never learn to disregard, the eye always pulling up inside the skull to see it.

The body, though, whom they refer to in the name of Gravey, as it fits the ridges set into his fingers on his hands, does not seem to see, acknowledge, or want to know any inch about the ridging, or the hallway, or the building of the walls themselves. He walks in silence, still with closed eyes and closed mouth; when not led by the shoulders forward through the building or wherever Gravey ceases to proceed, and yet he does not fight in being pulled along the corridors through check-ins, through registration. No form of coercion leads the man to act alone, including body shots and threats of further marks against his name.

A strip search of the suspect’s body reveals a diamond hung by black cord around his waist. The diamond is false diamond; it obscures the eyehole of his belly button, around which the hair has been removed. The remainder of pubic hair around the genitals has been shaved into a pattern like the beams of an aggravated sun. The shaft and glans of the unit are bruised, blood busted beneath the skin in thicket clouds.

A gun strap around the sternum holds no weapon; tucked into the holster is a tiny leather-surfaced notebook, water-damaged with his sweat. No language has been written into the unlined paper.

The anal cavity is overrun with brittle hair, so thick that they almost do not find the tiny transistor that has been stuffed into the crevice, matted in and clung with fecal residue. The transistor does not transmit.

Beneath the nail on the second longest toe of each foot a wedge of glitter has been lodged; on the face of the glitter occur words, none of which will be recognized, or read.

Water sprayed onto the body in the small stall comes off in foamy blue.

For some time in the hour he is made to lie on the cold floor naked without whimper, until the men are tired of looking at the raw colored markings on his chest and in his pits: like something there had scorched his flesh wide open and then resealed it, prim pockets of aggravated fat that stay so still.

Somewhere an old smoke rises.

B. LAPUZIA
:
When Flood asked me to take a look at his ongoing log about the case, handing me this outlandish collection of scattered notes, some of which he claimed to have found in Gravey’s residence, and which were not reported as evidence, I was seriously uneasy. For a while we had been partners, and though eventually I was reassigned, we’ve always been friends. He’s been through a lot, and I try to be there for him when I can. I told him I’m not much of a note taker, and didn’t really have anything to add in this manner, but that I’d take a look when I had time. I must admit, I was disturbed by his notes. They did not, to me, reflect a natural manner of investigation, or, even more so, a manner of living. Flood seemed fixated on his work in a way that went beyond it being work, even a life’s work. The more I tried to figure out what was going on with what he’d done, the more I wasn’t sure how to respond. I felt I had no choice but to mention it to the boss, though I can’t say the Sgt.’s tone in our private speaking set me at ease. He had the same quaver in his voice that Flood did, the same something slightly off. I myself haven’t felt right recently. I don’t know what it is, though for some reason I’m afraid to look in the mirror. I move through rooms with mirrors now, whenever possible, in the dark
.

In his containment unit, Gravey’s body stands through the evening without fold. Aimed facing toward the entry door of his chamber, its form sealed in with one thick window’s eye into the public tunnel, he stands with arms flat at his side.

He does not bend to eat from the tray of dinner that is brought in and laid before him; the food will be fed instead into a disposing machine. He does not sit or lay or stand throughout the first night into the morning with the shifting of the guards. He does not open his small eyes in the crane of light beamed at his gray brain through his skull where the room around him remains lit. He does not utter language at the body assigned to his body as an attorney. He often does not seem to visibly breathe: no chest rises in the orange cloth, no nostril flutter, though to the touch his skin is warm in patches.

His temperature is three degrees too low.

Days pass in the standing. At intervals he barfs onto his chest; the upchuck is transparent. The hair stands on his arms; it grows further down his head and face, building a mask.

During his trance, the living bodies who were found there beneath his house each die, of what seems no particular occurrence, in their sleep. They are identified or not, buried or cremated, given to the ground to be absorbed into the earth again, where food grows and the foundation of all homes is laid. Other boys will soon come forward.

Pictures taken of Gravey’s body in his cell seem off-colored, tinted redder in the cheeks and down the arms. A glass of water placed beside him on a white stool stutters selectively in ripples on its circular contained face, briefly quaking in indexed repetition as if nudged by something silent, until again the air around the air is calm.

Urine is released and wets his institutional pants in shade; it collects around his feet in spreading puddle on the concrete. The urine has no smell, no color. It sizzles as it is wiped.

The skin of Gravey’s lips is peeling, rapidly, in sheets. The remainder of his skin retains its pallor, becoming cleaner seeming, even, unclenched, somehow more young.

At the end of eight days without food, water, or motion, his body collapses beneath itself, remitted horizontal, open mouthed. For the next four days he sleeps wadded, waking briefly only when jostled by whoever, calmly blinking, red-ringed; when he is left alone again however long thereafter, he returns into the shakeless corridor of sleep.

FLOOD
:
Video recordings of Gravey in his cell are often marred by what seem magnetic disruptions in the tape, including long blacked-out sections in which the sound in the room can still be heard. What appears here in my descriptions of Gravey’s cell-held activities is therefore subject to interpretation, as well as gaps in the field, though sometimes even in staring into the black of the screen it seems that I can see him
.

Inside this sleep, with limbs crossed and eyes wide, Gravey confesses to the crimes. His mouth lists out the names of those who’ve been inculcated. Among the list are women, men, and children, rendered therein first, middle, and last. His speaking is discovered already partway through the list, therefore the totality of the list is missed, left to hide in his saliva, leak through his cells. Each instance of each name is as well appended with the age and date of death and how the body was dispatched, each by the hand of Gravey, though in his own air he gives himself a series of new names, each rendered in the word Darrel: Darrel the Divorcist, Chalk Darrel, Darrel of No Leak, Darrel Who Has Become the Book Beheld And Only Awaits What Reader To Choose Prey As Well Inside the Mounds of What Cannot Yet Be, Darrel the Magnet Eater, Golden Ash Darrel, 65432Darrel1, Darrel then White.

Audio recorded in the cell during the confession is obscured on the tape by some high hissing signal. Two hundred and sixty-seven names are witnessed firsthand, and therefore transcribed. Many of the names correspond with those who have been corroborated as victims; others match those who’ve been listed missing but who have not otherwise been identified among the flesh. Four to eighteen additional accomplices are included in the crime sketch of the series, including the bodies of the boys found inside the locked room, despite the apparent residue of their own personal abuse, bringing into question the complicity of their behaviors. Still other names match no one rendered suspect, and so investigations must begin. There are no longer enough breathing bodies to assign. There are many months ahead of every day and only so much time. In his image, jobs are created; bodies become fed.

Gravey will never speak the names again, regardless of how many times they are referred to in his presence by the proceedings or the loved ones or what old coils might simmer in his mind. After the confession, still inside his sleeping, a massive boil shaped like a bird’s egg appears on his left hand between his point finger and his thumb. When medics drain the boil, from the pustule’s face floods a creamy darkish oil. The runoff will be stored in a glass vial in a black locker several miles from Gravey’s fleshy self, no one seeing what the wet does in the darkness when no longer watched.

FLOOD
:
The boys, the fateful boys and girls. What they had not known. Bless them, take them from this scrawl and keep them clear and sound as whatever holds the air up. Do this for us all now
.

Days turn white. The days turn white. They turn white with cream between them. They pale in memory still continuing to beget more. Between cracks in what had just been the present and is now no longer the present there is a small constantly slaving sound of someone breathing in.

SMITH
:
I have recommended Flood for interoffice counseling, and asked that he take a few days off. He does not seem to be sleeping. He smells different. These kinds of investigations are hard on anyone, but I must say it surprises me to see Flood having such difficulties, as I often considered him unrelenting, solid as the ground we walk on
.

FLOOD
:
I would delete this note and the others notes marked “Smith,” as I know it wasn’t Smith who wrote them, as he was never given access to this file, but somehow to remove it would feel like an attempt to cover something up, and I have nothing to hide, and so the feed stands. Regardless, at no point during the ongoing was I dismissed from my investigation
.

Among the fleshy evidence removed from Gravey’s home, collected in a series of seven trunk-sized metal boxes, is a trove of VHS tapes, packed in from end to end in each container forming a separate black plastic corpus. There is the smell of old machines. The tapes for the most part are unlabeled. Some have white stickers affixed to their spines or faces that have not been filled in. An occasional tape—eighteen in all among the total five hundred and eighty—has been notated with a white scrawl; twelve of these eighteen inscriptions are a string of numbers, each eighteen digits long. Five of the remaining six of the eighteen marked tapes are marked with numbers, though forming strings that don’t seem to have any obvious use: 278493000383, 109298723627, and so on. Each of the tapes, it seems, is blank, though not the blank of no recording, fresh; instead they have been encoded with a field of total white as if shot with a lens close to a wall or piece of paper without shadow and without motion. There is no sound on the recording; at least, there has been none found among them all so far. Each of the tapes, still, must be observed. Two pairs of two junior officers, two women and two men, are assigned to play the tapes in twin rooms in succession, observing for anomalies, change of face. They find viewing the taping makes them tired quickly, and causes sweating through their clothes. The VCRs in playback emit sharp buzzings, little whirs. One tape, the eighteenth tape played, becomes eaten by the machine, chewed to spools. The VCR thereafter smells of fire; it must be replaced. Another tape, the forty-second, is similarly eaten by the replacement VCR. The film of the eaten tapes, viewed in the light of the room surrounding, appears bluer than other film, somehow almost moist. Four more machines must be replaced in the first forty-eight hours, their corpses stacked in a locked room. The eyes of the observers blink throughout the screening, missing small segments of the films, which sometimes in the viewer’s heads seem shorter than they are.

The name of Gravey spreads. Media mouthpieces disseminate his image through the TVs in the rooms strung up together in a wash of copied pixels. His name on papers. His name in mouths. His head appears across the nation in replication 2-D, 3-D, 4-D (the fourth D in dream machinery, consuming sleeping thoughts of mothers and all others shook with the description of the nature of the murder acts). Gravey becomes known and so grows more known, spoke in the same breath with the soap actor, the dead diva, the president, with fanatical appeal.

Hundreds of letters addressed to Gretch Gravey are delivered to the address of his containment center in the first day following his arrest. The letters contain what seem to be Christmas lists: long handwritten chains of things desired, in insane scrawl. Gravey seems most popular among the young. Children scratch his name in all caps on their forearms and foreheads and on the faces of textbooks and lockers and long walls inside of houses where they sleep or do not sleep. Clothing is emblazoned with his head or replications of the tattoo on his forearm of a black square with its bottom right-hand corner rounded. Songs speak his name suddenly in dive bars and on airwaves. Words beyond his name recall his name in plague.