Three Hundred Million: A Novel (6 page)

Name withheld
: “I was confused about it and I didn’t know about it and I didn’t want to and I knew that I should leave and I knew that it was wrong and I wanted to stop them and I thought I could try to stop them and I wanted to and I was going to and then I didn’t and then I didn’t and was going to leave and tell someone and didn’t and and and and. It could go on like that forever. Then one night Gravey saw me standing in the hall. He saw the weird light in my face and how I was frightened and the color in me and he took me by the hands and squeezed until I thought my skin was going to pop and he said,
A human’s screaming is eternal music
, and he punched me in the face so hard I didn’t fall but always from that point forward felt like I was falling and my body was the hole and Gravey was the space the hole was wrapped around forever and I would never land and never stop. All else after that was so easy, and totally awesome.”

The first mother the boys brought to me wore blue slacks and a neck brace. They’d found her in the same school area I had come from though I could not remember then; even just the name of the school crusted a white foam against the inner tube of my spirit, then disappeared. Her head’s lips were painted purple. She had white shoes turned darker by the mud. I asked her her name. She said a word of breathing. She did not appear upset. No, I said, your name is Darrel. She looked at me not with her eyes. A small ridge of fatter flesh pounded electric above her eyebrow, pulsing out a beat I would use to write the bass line to a song that did not exist. I told the boys to take the mother in the bathroom and clean the disease from her hands to prepare the entrance. I had them fill her mouth with pills and gave her water. I blessed the water in her mouth and watched some of it work down the chamber laid in her neck on through her chest. Some spat back up on her yellow shirt and formed a pattern. I locked her in the smallest mirrored room and told the Darrels to take turns waking her organs. Through the walls for hours after you could hear her squealing at the roof, the rafters of the house rising from what the boys or her together made unmade. I waited in great patience raw with itching. Then when Darrel said we’d broke the lip of her private ocean inside her, I pulled the boys away and let her lie. An unnamed range of time required passage. At night, locked in alone, she lip-synched words to a song again I would not write, but would hear forever in my head rendered in bumps naming the word all there among her while in my own body I made paste till I was ready and I could feel in me the blooming moons. In the false silence of the house encasing darkness alone I entered the locked room after all the others had gone down where I could no longer feel them. I found the girl’s body on the bed with mouth wide open in a neon light from a glowing Timex. The watch’s face said the time in zeroes: never set, or reset since entering the house, or struck by current, or any of the hidden ways time is deformed. Her head faced away from where I stood, its reflection corroborated in the mirror parallel, and again at oblong angle from above and below on either end. The folds of her in such light formed a town: a mass of others smoothed into her in snowbanks of pale skin. I moved to flatten myself beside her. I flanked her central image with the mirror to cause twins. Up close I could see me better in the mirror. I seemed ugly. The hair curled from my lengths of extra face. Black rouge where I had applied none. Cysts surrounded both my eyes in tiny white pills, all of them cursing. My age today contained the number nine. The boys were watching through the walls. I don’t know who all inside the house was asleep, or where they slept when they were sleeping. I brought myself to tower above the female figure. I felt her skeleton under my erection. I made her trace a square across her forehead. I called her Darrel. She didn’t answer. I called her Joyce. I called her Margaret and Dallas. I called her any name of any woman I could remember. With each name I felt new cysts rise in my brain, working hard to tunnel fast to join my appearance. I brought my meat into her vision. She was already pretty messy. Her hip bone cut into my own with every thrust. Darrel, I said. Say it, Darrel. All of us Darrel, all in all. I let the light back in the room. The way the light fell this time showed me the girl’s face from a different space in my own head. Her head had my old head about it. It had the lips and chin I’d worn into the house. From there, the cheeks and lashes matched my mother’s, same as mine. Along her back the girl was smooth like paper ready for writing. I came up to see into her eyes. Her eyes were open in the room seeing beneath me up into my seeing. I saw me seeing me trying to see something else. I tried to hide the light inside my hand again but it found ways out between my fingers and glowed bright warm through my palm, despite the absence of stigmata. Yet. The shape of where the girl had been began to try to rise up from her. I was smiling in her. My own head began to overflow with pixels. I had always wanted to kill me. The closer her face came, the more of me there was. Our mouths gave laughter to the darkness. I think we kissed, my first taste that I’d remember of someone else’s open mouth. It tasted like my sleep had always tasted when I woke up in my skin again. If there was anything about the old me I must remember it was that. I let the form with my face put its tongue inside my head. I used my hands graced with the light to bring the other skull as near to mine as it could manage, tongue to teeth, and ate. From there forward I could not stop shitting.

CHARLES
: “The ssssssssssscreaming that night lasted forty-seven billion yearssssss. It came out of every inch of every perssssssson in the housssssssssse but the housssssssssssssssssse itself was still. Even right now it is in the wallsssssssssssssssss and all over your face.”

FLOOD
:
Attempts to discern which among the many bodies believed undone by Gravey was the first have been pretty much absolutely impossible, given the nature of their undoing. Regardless, his intimation here of the practice of consuming flesh of the victim immediately after their undoing is indicative of his procedure across the board. In these early acts, his tendency would be toward consuming sections of the face of the victim (cheeks, jowls, cartilage, tongue), as if to place his mark on them in the most visible and personally associative sense; later, this habit will increase, and eventually disregard any seeming order to what is consumed, as his desire to “absorb the person wholly, all persons wholly, unto one body” becomes more central
.

I stood up from the mirror bed and flexed my mind inside the musics. Blood helicopters chopped across my slim cerebrum like fresh diamonds, rings in screaming on small hands coming awake inside my linings, each after its own way to reach beyond me. New light like ham bumped from my ducts and spilled against the floor gross for the worlds of corpses that purred in orbs beneath the floor. They’d wolfed up years of fake food in one hour in my gray space. Worms covered the house’s slim north wall to defend again against whatever light infected from a false national conscience. Birds had laid ancestors in our pipes. I smoked some of the girl’s hair out of a paper bong and ate the ashes. I loved the way she tasted like a soon-to-be-famous set of stab wounds: two to the head, five to the neck, and sixteen to the back. My bedroom’s hall was painted gold. There had not been a hall there that I remembered any day before the day before. Gold was how I would forget anything about this set of hours; tomorrow I would need another. Through the hall I found my way back into the house another way entirely and so the house began again. The boys were there and they were still boys and they were growing. Some had acquired such enormous stomachs. In their lard something was promised. I sent three of the biggest to go blow kisses in the attic to consecrate some space where we could keep the coming breed of mothers. Having had one I needed every, and even more than that.

The beginning had begun and it was going and it was going fast and wanted more than what it had and more than what it wanted to want. I felt a continuous strumming connected in the fiber of my men. Our need made need need need. I shaved the hair off of my body so I could glide and do my best. I felt the rising hammer in my pudge where what I’d eaten all those years there sat upon me waiting to be fed what it had asked for every inch and hour in the theaters and the poll booths and the gas stations and the groceries and the houses of the other people who had let me down and those who had not meant to let us down, the same. It all welled up so fast between my heart and hands, in Darrel, in me, I could not hold it, so it flowed into the boys, and even then I had to teach myself to masturbate again by imagining the high mounds of our cities and the founts or mountains being lifted up and let to fall in fissure and land smashed into the earth. Through the window as far along the land I looked I saw more and more dirt, the bead of all the days surrounding going on in all ways and yet at the same time so hopelessly foreshortened and unexpanding it seemed to end right down the street. The dimensions had no dimensions and no dreamlife. The house was getting fuller faster yet, filling up with all our holes. Each hole could be the only one that led to what it led to. As they burst open, the earth spun. The distance between our house and the homes beside us seemed continuously to grow. I could see the lesions of the huddle of our neighbors spread like Pangaea in reverse to a new perimeter thereon, the bitchbrick of their sad fortresses unspasmatic as if right beside me. I could not keep still my aching meat teeth wanting more, a sweltering writhing so centered around nothing real despite the wars and wishing and the money and the motherfuckers and the cancer and what had I done all these hours until just right this second. Everything at once seemed so tired I could hardly hold my hands inside my hands, still colored in the blood of our first mother. I was grinding with impossible fury. The house asked questions. I went and set my drums on fire. I heard me call the boys in to surround me in the room to watch work burn and learn its tenor. It licked the walls and drums and left only the metal rims. The plastic stunk and got them high as fuck and then they like me were warm. We stomped the carpet clean. I gathered the ashes with a shovel and a blade. So all this black now. So our womb. I yelled over my yelling for the boys to go into the mirror room and bring the mother to me. Her body drug along the grooves between one mirror and another. I spread the ashes on the remainder of where I’d loved her, her posture firm, already of no smell. I tapped two boys to wrap her in a U.S.A. flag. The blue part went around her head so she could see the stars. Someone made a joke about a burrito and I punched him in the heart until he was no longer asthmatic. These were the stars we’d lived under as long as we’d been allowed to, wet with performance. The stars were screaming. The blue could no longer exist. I told the boys to lay with me now to listen near against the girl and learn the prattle of her linings through the American colors. I told them this would be the song they had to play to make the skyhole inside us all together want to be fucked and in reverse unleash upon our earth our worship, the heart of whom is not a kind of music at all but an itch that swallows one’s whole shape. Now I was the one screaming, with all the stars live in my shafts. I reached into my pockets and pulled out the teeth I’d removed from the girl’s head shaped like my mother’s and showed them to everybody. These are Darrel’s teeth, I said. Darrel no longer requires food to make his flesh. We are his mouths; he is our house. I put the girl’s teeth shaped like my mother’s teeth into my own mouth and on her teeth I chewed until I heard my own teeth in my head breaking and I swallowed and I smiled. My blood ran down my chin, my own blood, Darrel’s. I heard the floors beneath us multiply, and underneath them old doors open. All of us were watched, I heard me shrieking, by each of us again, and so inside us. I leaned to let my streaming blood pour onto the flag around the girl. Some time went on in this time. I squeezed blood from me. I was pouring black of night from every inch of me that’d ever healed. I felt one of the other Darrels touch my elbow. Where I looked to see him he had split his body sevenfold, alike in each way. He said my old name in a slow voice. I threw his hand off my arm. I reached up with my own arm there between us and wiped my blood (our blood) flat on his flesh. There before the many other boys I made him touch his face and taste the silk of how we’d lived. The boy was crying, so we were crying. Others stood silent, so we were that. Do you love me, I asked anybody. They didn’t have to answer. I knew they did. The house did. And the shells. The light today inside us loved me. The me inside the flag did. Inside the flag I heard the sperm of anybody sent inside our new god swimming for some flesh to set up shape in and teach its frame to truly eat.

A. F. F.
: “Even when he was talking about it and we brought the girl back and all that I don’t think many of us really believed he was going to do anything really serious like that. I mean yeah I know kidnapping is fucked up and I knew he’d been doing things to her, but like killing someone is really beyond what I thought. Which sounds stupid because he’d been talking about it all this time and I’d already been involved with the clearly messed up shit going on but man there was something about the way he’d tell it that made it seem okay, or at least important, or even not real or something. But seeing what he’d done to that girl’s body and the way about his face when he showed us and how he just seemed to not even care that he himself was bleeding or what he’d done and how some of the other guys in the house were all about it and like fiendish for the ideas he was spouting out in all these other languages and shit, I don’t know. It was becoming hard to tell who was who in there anymore, but from this point forward shit really started changing, and the people around the house were different. And yeah, I didn’t leave. I let me do whatever also and went along and I listened until sometimes I couldn’t even tell where I was anymore and sometimes it was just the brightest bright.”