Three Hundred Million: A Novel (24 page)

  JB:

Why did you kill [more than] four hundred and forty people?

GG:

What.

  JB:

You have been accused and will most likely be convicted of killing a lot of people. The number’s yet to be concretely established, but by what we know so far it is at least four hundred and forty. Why did you do it?

GG:

[
Shakes his head hard
.]

  JB:

No comment?

GG:

No condition. [
Inhaling slowly
.] Do you have a gun at home?

  JB:

I’ve never owned a gun. My father was against it. I probably should, though, shouldn’t I? Do you own a gun?

GG:

Many.

  JB:

How many guns do you own?

GG:

As many as there are bodies in America.

  JB:

America? Why not the whole world?

GG:

When the hole is open the rest will enter. [
Exhaling slowly
.]

  JB:

Is there a reason more than seventy-five percent of your accused victims were women?

GG:

For what any of us is and was and is again and will be again beginning. To awake the Eye.

  JB:

So you did commit the murders?

GG:

No, that was you. That was your father and my father. That was windows or was water. I am online now. The gown is raising. In almost any home you can find written at least once the word
delete
.

  JB:

Your father. He’s gone missing, but we haven’t found his body in your house.

GG:

I grew up in a family of nature, a more graphic, wonderful home. As children we were happened. We regularly encountered church. I wanted five hundred brothers and sisters. My parents did not drink or visit grocery or drugstores. Their softcore pornography was no physical abuse, just not enough. In our neighborhood it was a fine, solid people that would dream garbage and, from time to time, tragedy. The days would scream. The days are screaming now but you can’t hear them and soon even that—

GG:

There is a law revolving around God, from this Word of God, and the Prophets made flesh, as far back as Mary the Virgin. So that all who would highlight God’s mercy would make everyone believe in what was coming; that who would seek god for where there has been other, when Christ was forgiveness, and writing, writings of the conceived. We had to bring God’s writings, search the Scriptures, and slay it, as who do not usurp the authority become the arguments themselves. The confronted Christ knew the real meaning, but yet said to him, “There’s an additional God.”
Be not sons
, they were commanded,
born of fornication
, so we were.

  JB:

You mean God told you to kill?

GG:

God’s name isn’t God. The word has not been formed yet. I am forming the word.

  JB:

Are you a prophet?

GG:

I am whoever.

  JB:

Anybody? Everybody?

GG:

Neither. It is a folding.

  JB:

So it was a moral act?

GG:

No. It was written. There is no author.

  JB:

What do you think of the Bible?

GG:

God of Heaven believed that he was a sacrifice rich in mercy, numb, and prophets were goats, oxen, red men ignored, heifers. A Law, but also a way, an escape for those who learned the sophisticated Repentant Souls and social impacts might fall short of the virgin, toward a very prolific type of glory of God’s law. We would conceive and bear a system of worship. The prophet had to slay a lamb for hope for a world. It has only partially begun.

  JB:

Is it true you ate many of your victims’ bodies?

GG:

I ate them all. All of them, each component. I mean just by breathing. You will become it, too. All flesh must be returned into one flesh. What seems their remainder is not there. It is a bag I placed to leave the evidence of my being in the hands of the cameras for the proclamation. They weren’t victims. I’m just around.

  JB:

How would you describe the taste of human flesh?

GG:

Like mashed potatoes in a ball gown. Sometimes pianos or a lock. It depends on the flesh’s eventual location in our total future mass. [
begins to touch himself all over quickly
] Hey, do you have fire?

  JB:

I don’t smoke.

GG:

I don’t either. Do you have fire?

  JB:

My father used to burn leaves in the yard. It made more smoke than anything else. The ground around the pile was black.

GG:

Did you love your father?

  JB:

I think I did.

GG:

No, did you love him?

  JB:

He was my dad, yeah.

GG:

[
suddenly angrily, baring teeth
] I said did you love him?

  JB:

Yes, I did. I do.

GG:

Then you love me.

  JB:

Hey, are you okay?

GG:

[
snorting
] Let’s have dinner. I like tacos. I enjoy the light inside a cow’s right eye.

  JB:

It’s not quite dinner yet. I’d be glad to join you.

  JB:

Darrel?

GG:

[
not smiling
] Yes, son?

  JB:

I am

GG:

You are

  JB:

I want to understand.

GG:

He is in a room. There are no doors in the room. There is a screen. A kind of light coming from somewhere on the side opposite the screen feeds at his chest. It is the Day. Inside the room he watches the day go on beyond him in the end of itself. He does not know what he sees, or that he’s seeing. Where he is is going to end but it will begin again. No murder and no mirrors, but a fleshless, edgeless, ageless frame.

  JB:

And you? When will you die?

GG:

I am only here on pause. For a moment my home touched the room beyond the screen and gained its level but this soon will be ended, for the pyre. This body too will be destroyed, at the hands of all our hands, like mine, so we no longer have to have.