Three Hundred Million: A Novel (22 page)

In the minute of the taking of the color under the color hid inside the screen, one might no longer recall how to get back to where the self was there beforehand, prior to this, in the body, nor might one want to or even remember what it would feel like to want to, to feel anything beyond here, absent from the names of names of days. One might not remember one had been ever anywhere but where one is now, flooding, flooded, for forever, wrapped and lifted in the white that bloats still deeper dry inside itself. Perhaps there never even was any other moment, or ever will be, outside of this one, out of this long and lengthless void of breadth, even as outside the color, the body watching or not watching, the body goes on in its war. There might never have been or will be any instance of the self or selves beyond the color, the end of color, white. One might live on only ever now inside the idea of itself. One might become nothing but the absence of the presence it had never fully even been before then. In the fact of disappearance, one might now actually exist.

MARY RUTHERFORD, MD
:
Pardon my late entry into this notation, as I have just been given access to these files as a result of my psychiatric examination of Detective Flood, but what I am most concerned by is the complete lack of comment regarding Flood’s investigation of the “Gretch Gravey” character? I know that not all police operations are made public, and even medical doctors involved with officials under duress in the line of duty are often kept out of the more gory or legal details of a case, but considering the apparent attention surrounding this particular case as described by Flood, and in my understanding of his current involvements, I wonder why no one has mentioned that this case does not seem to exist. I can find no evidence in reports personal or private at my level of access to the investigation or holding of a suspect by the name Gravey or the acts attributed to him above. Flood’s growing mania for what seems to me a potentially fabricated line of investigation wherein
several dozen women have been brutally murdered and had their flesh eaten,
and the subsequent lack of attending to said fabrication’s presence in the mind of an officer of the law, is baffling, sad, disturbing, and problematic in ways we have as yet not begun to scrape the face of. I would like to request counsel not only with Flood directly, but with Sgt. Smith in regards to the nature of Flood’s recent work, as if I am being withheld of this information, I don’t know how I could ever begin to do my job with a clear mind. I’m not sure what else there is to say, besides that I honestly don’t know how I will find a way to bed tonight, as there now seems about my air too something leaking
.

SMITH
:
???

On this fourth day of the viewing, the fourth officer of the video review squad of the white films of Gretch Gravey ends the lives of the three other officers in the same employment using her service pistol placed against their skulls: not by shooting any of them with a bullet, but by blows, an estimated more than several hundred per cadaver, deployed between the eyes. The officer, a mother of three, is able to complete this triple murder despite walking covered in blood out of the station after having performed the first kill in the adjoining viewing office. Somehow knowing the locations of the two remaining male viewing members’ homes she performs the same gun-butt beatings on both their bodies among descending dusk: the first alone in his apartment eating microwaved spaghetti, the second in the presence of his wife and child near the TV. Having finished off the other viewers, the murdering officer returns to her own home, to dispatch herself before her own spouse and her two oldest children, calmly, neatly placing the gun at last against her own white head and pulling the trigger with open eyes.

Into fifty microphones gathered in bouquet and a feed of cameras sucking his image hard across our electronic fields, Gravey presents an oral statement into America: “Not guilty,” he says. His voice is ashy. He chokes on something else. The air is still beyond all birds. The images burned of him in the instant will show how, during the duration his mouth comes open, Gravey’s head seems to slightly blur around the nostrils and the eyelids, rapidly blinking. Mouth closed again, he raises his locked arms toward the sky; appears to pull something down into him; inhales with his nostrils; shudders; closes back his eyes. Flashbulbs again and the sky unflinching, soon again to grow opaque like chocolate wrappers from the inside, sealed against the flesh of the dark bar. Gravey remains still and hard-shaped, saying nothing for the duration of the melee of questions without answer and the still surrounding public screaming ricocheting off of all the seeing teeth, until by other hands he’s led inside, led down a corridor unto a corridor unto a corridor unto a floor, where on the zigzagged tile in silence is placed a single hard-boiled egg on a black platter, which Gravey eats still in the shell and stands to sleep.

BLOUNT
:
No one has seen Flood in several days, or is it hours—what is the word for the period in which daylight ends and then again begins? The detective assigned in Flood’s place as lead investigator has also gone missing. I can’t remember quite his name. Now they are asking me to take the helm. Or rather, it doesn’t seem like they are asking. I go to Gravey’s cell sometimes and just stand there near the wall there, and I listen. I hear me talking
.

Flood finds his eyes.

Where he is now standing in a passage. He is naked. He doesn’t remember how he became naked. There is a wall behind him, against his back, on which he finds that he’s been leaning. New dark continues going forward toward an unreadable distance. Graded panels light the hole, the same glow as what had laced the space beneath the mirrored floor in Gravey’s basement, though here only occasionally deployed, so that the illumination comes with great gaps, smaller and smaller in the distance. The light seems natural, as if brought in by shafts from actual daylight.

The walls are white.

Flood is somewhere underneath Gravey’s home, he realizes. The second floor had been also false. He must have fallen through it like the first one, and landed down here, whatever here is. His entire body hurts; it feels like he’s bleeding from every inch of him, a kind of constant sensation of sweating and absorbing at the same time, but there is no blood, or if there is, he hasn’t seen where. Above him, the ceiling is high up and nestled in a dark, somewhere among which must be the surface he remembers rubbing through, or into. He can’t see anywhere to have fallen in from, or any way back out. If anyone can hear him shouting, they don’t answer.

He runs his palm along the long white surface. It is cold, synthetic. An odd sensation there in where he touches as the contact seems to make his skin come alive, as if there’s someone underneath his flesh touching on the inside where the wall touches. And, too, like someone is there on the wall’s far side, also touching.

Flood has no choice then but to proceed by facing sandwiched soft between the twin walls and sideways stepping into the oncoming alternating dark. He could wait, perhaps, for someone to come and find him, though there’s no telling how long.

The plane of the passage going forward descends rapidly by lengths, cutting at such a slight grade as it goes on that it is nearly impossible to tell it’s going down at all; one could conceivably continue down the narrow stretch for hours and still believe they’d only ever stayed aligned with one horizon.

Flood finds the tunnel floors becoming slick. Farther still and he is splashing in inches of liquid underneath his feet. The deeper in he goes, the more there is. He stops to sniff the smell and smells no smell. He puts some in his mouth and he tastes the salt of blood; he knows what blood tastes like; we all do. We all have. If it’s not blood it’s something just as common. There is no sound outside the repetition of Flood’s pace, though inside him he hears words: a murmur mirroring the murmur through the wall, hid under motion, as if someone there is speaking only when he moves. He can almost, underneath this, understand the syllables or shapings of the language, though not enough to take it fully, and not inside this night.

Not inside this night
. Who is that speaking, Flood thinks. He repeats the phrase aloud, though his voice doesn’t sound like him now. Each word wants him to speak more, like having opened up the gates inside him now there’s so much more there, if all of no recognizable syntax. The voice just comes and comes. He bites his mouth to shush himself and does it too hard. A little blood comes up in his mouth. He swallows the blood. Inside him the blood continues loose. The blood tastes cold against the other blood inside him.

The width of walls begins to open up. The widening increases at a clipped rate, like the descending, such that as he goes along Flood can hardly recognize the change; each time he gets the sense he’s no longer in a passage tight with darkness but somewhere edgeless, like the night, a massive humming chamber; the tunnel turns again to narrow off. Sometimes it grows so narrow, even within three strides, that he must turn to sidle flat along, pressed between the walls’ sides, and sometimes even coming so thin there against his flexing belly he’s unsure he can force through.

The texture of the walls remains as ever, with the sound against his frame, and the far-off knobs of white light still oncoming, pulling him forward, rebegun.

Rebegun, that’s not a word, Flood hears himself say inside him, squeezing the voice down and in to hold it. As if to fill in where the sound is, the blood he’s swallowed washes hot into his throat across his tongue. His bowels tremble, wanting to shit. The vision where his eyes see straight ahead is kind of fucked, causing there to appear several tunnels spreading out forward in the eye of the one tunnel.

Or are there actually that many tunnels, that many different thumbs of light? It is difficult to know which among the sprawl he should lurch toward now. At certain junctures, it seems, branches will open, allowing him the choice of one of several ways to proceed, though no matter which way he chooses, the walls all seem the same, as if repeating, and stride by stride the wet continues rising slowly underneath him, making it slowly more and more difficult to walk. No matter which way Flood chooses, all lengths of the passage look the same. Wherever it is, the tunnel’s way goes on forever, as far as Flood can tell, every stretch threatening to disremember where they ever were, on toward some expanse as uncontained as any day.

Rebegun, his voice says again inside him with the blood all in his mouth and through his mind. Sure, sure, that’s a word, it says. Sure, you can say that.

Any word is always ours now.

In the darkness, there is text.

Deeper down, and once his eyes have grown accustomed, he sees that what had seemed only space without light in the passage isn’t just solid, but has fiber to it, layers to it. Where there seemed walls there, a language holds the space together hard, so many syllables collected in the same pixels it feels impenetrable. The dark, then, is not actually solid, but so overrun it has no choice but to present nothing.

Up close, though, Flood can read. He finds the walls of the passage imprinted in the same way as the floor had been above him, wherever that was,
in god our blood the word of blood in god the name of god in god the name of god
, the layers of sentences laid atop each other often obscuring each beyond a language Flood feels he knows. The text is so thick it’s hard to make out any word unless his eye is right above it, tracing where the lines of one letter break free from those beside. It wraps around his face like a loose mask. It brings him nearer.

Each string of language contains small softer sections, Flood finds, like buttons lodged in on a monochrome piano, open wounds. As before, some of the words can be pressed down with pressure aimed in the right way, though now the action is clearer, more like life. He has become acquainted, inculcated, opened, but it had always been this way, in every surface, always. In every surface and word and shape and face ever remembered, ever touched.

Among the black knit, there are panels shaped with different outlines: letters that turn to new shapes as he sees; ring-shaped, star-shaped, squares and diamonds. Each button causes an alteration to the surface just beneath it, the exposure of a branch. Pressing down on the word
wished
, for instance, in one of its many repetitions along the surface, right before his face, causes the wall right behind him to come open. There is no sound. The wall simply slides away, almost so calmly you could miss it.

Behind where had once been wall is now a shaft, extending far on into its own dark cavity. The walls at the mouth of the shaft are the same white as the main passage, quickly disappearing into black.

Flood hesitates some long second standing staring down into the hole he’s made open. For some reason, he can’t immediately bring himself not to continue into its eye, despite the fact that he’s already surrounded by unknown in totality, all directions. There is still the latent fear that once behind it, the wall might close. He could become sealed in down here. He could be made trapped for the remainder of his life. Even in the dark beneath a killer’s house, he worries about his own preservation, if only long enough to hesitate a beat before giving in, again, toward what, he does not know.