Three Hundred Million: A Novel (7 page)

From outside the house the house was changing color in correlation to the earth. What it reflected in the grade of black paint became inverted. The roof had freckles that seemed mile-deep. Through the rasp of cavity the house hid from the backyard I could hear the boys inside us again at my order making my music again ring out between the rings of skyward foam and long along between the houses shaking glass. At certain windows even so far off along the stretch of city I felt families gathered pressed to bedroom walls inside their sleep wishing to walk into the next day’s sunlight and be burned. America, I felt, was changing under Darrel. Many times inside that first night there would be a city of gold when I closed my eyes, but there would not be any life inside it. There would be a tree that bore the fruit we would need to eat to be there. Each instant it changed kind. There would be places where water came up to the lip of the ground when I wasn’t looking and then it would go down again and we could not reach the water. It would come up again and come down again. There was a series of seven eternal shapes, burned in my vision on the face of all things: CIRCLE SQUARE HEXAGON STAR TRIANGLE DIAMOND RING. Each of these had appeared to me throughout my life emblazoned onto objects. They had formed the contours of the maps we used to find our way between the seas of people believing we were ending up somewhere we had not been. They defied all history. They rang and burned inside my brain, inert weapons allowing no ability beyond the fact of their creation. They had no eyes and no dimension. All else around them must be burnt, reduced to sand and dust, no water. Inside the house I knew a desert must begin. There must be a focus around which all the land could sink and pull the air down, and so after it, all other houses, cities, space. But to begin a desert you must have silence. You must remove the water from the mud. This means light. In each room of the house there must be so much light that there is no house at all. So much light that from the air outside the house surrounding the presence of America would be gored, stripped, and reversed of all its wet. With my mind inside my mind I sent all the boys not in the band to buy our new skin of electronic lamps and television. We began to fill the house with falsely burning objects. Light between mirrors. Light inside me. I felt the Wrath of Darrel strengthen with each added filament: his godmilk spurting through my vessels swimming and piling weight on and glorifying. His voice refracted in the pillow of the summoned light and held me hard. I looked down at my arms: the short arms I had seen once when I looked down trying to see me and seeing only part, the arms I’d come into the house with. I could not remember ever after going out, or how it might have smelled there, without the boys to need me, without the coming bodies of the mothers. My old arms on me again were black as charcoal, burnt and buried underground. In fear I touched me and I watched my old me chafe off on my hands.

FLOOD
:
At the time of his arrest, there were some 240+ working light fixtures on the property, lamps and fixtures of all size and kind, many of them plugged into the walls as well as several extra generators. How the house didn’t burn up like a wig I have no idea. Absolutely blinding
.

Under the same hour as we’d done apart the first flesh I sent the boys back out into the air to bring more mothers to the house. Some others of the boys were sent instead or as well to bring more bulbs for those that had blown out where everybody at the same time was trying to see. In the mirror in the rooms of light the air was making movies inside itself like Magic Eye. Bulbs would shatter in the lamps and the TVs. The faces of the people exploded from out of nowhere covered in glistening gunk and begging me to have sex with them; I was not attracted to them because they weren’t aging. I was aging for them instead of the sex. I would reach biblical age in my dreamlife before there was no longer anyone remaining. With my black camera I caught as much shit as I could of every errant waking fantasy the boys enacted onto anything that made a sound, and burned it into pixels to be learned, onto tapes spanning the history of the nation’s audiovisual entertainment. Each film drowned the next one out; I erased each entertainment one by one. With each deletion, time and space grew closer. In the mirror, while I waited for whatever else, I watched me watch me watch. I wanted to make love to me but I couldn’t find the hole, so instead I pressed my head so hard against the glass I could not see me but the black inside me in which were written all these sentences, congregating in black battalions to replace my thinking with static blocks. I tried to write the words down on my hands with pencil or with reeds inside my mind to get them out but my arms would not stay still enough to get unshaken signal and my meat kept growing back over. Inside the house hungry for more mothers I found it hard to walk or think or want or know or ask or see beyond whatever walked just right there inches at my vision. Outside, the sun outside the house scraped against the house all hours for what it knew we grew and incubated. This was wearisome, like aging twice. It made the scraping appear again also mirrored in me welling over with such blood the films blurred. I did not want to masturbate again and yet my balls screamed between my legs and my shaft stood up doing stand up, the oldest jokes I’d ever heard. The mouth of the head would sometimes speak in Darrel’s voice and beg and beg me. The corridors of Darrel were turning and unfurling. On every finger, Darrel’s rings, ripped from planets falling into orbit of our bone.

Name withheld
: “We made films of everyone we killed. We copied over the movies in every home’s collection with the evidence of their ending. Their VHS death providing the death of cinema itself. As soon as you copied over, like,
Gone with the Wind
, it was also copied over in all the copies of it ever sold. It was fucking awesome. The cameras clung to our hands and tried to love us as creators. The majority of the films did not need to be filmed by us directly, as they had already always existed in the brains and layers of the mnemonic American mush. The tapes would fill the bloodstream of our future, and in it we would bathe and wake and so dissolve.”

FLOOD
:
The films, like the audiotapes, taken from the house of Gravey have as yet all appeared all blank, though the number of these films is significant, and the tapes appear to have been regularly played (the media inside them slightly battered, sometimes broken). Investigations into what content might be hidden among the archive is in process
.

“There is a public demand to kill. This was all simple negotiation. Millions of women will take only a few weeks more; the rest must automatically collapse. They will become absorbed. The few remaining bodies should be of use to a consecrating fuckfest for whoever’s got a dong still in this country, male or female. With complete automation of our disease and old age we will mark the beginning of an emotional morality. There will be celebration on the face of every final breath. There will be no wake. We’re not god because what god is does not end. The silence must expand between notes until there is no awareness. I call on you to stop. Death is all over. I’m glad it is. Peace in their lives a million times. If you knew what was ahead of you, you’d rest. Because what are people but the peddlers of we and all we’re doing is I don’t care.”

CHARLES
, age 15: “As his voice started to get raw he began whipping his hands around in front of him like I guess it was supposed to be sign language. After that he traced the words in some dark liquid along his arms and chest and face. I knew I understood, and had been waiting in my life to find these words presented, opened, burned onto my mind.”

The second and third mothers the boys brought to me were much older than the first. They were sisters and had made babies before with other men. I could see where on their arms they had been bruised by the boys in handling from wherever they had come. I did not want to know the origin because here we were now. The smell of meat was flooding from their pores. I could hardly look at them, I was shaking so hard, with all the ascendancy inside me that they triggered. He who gives must give and give. This is the nature of the music. I told the boys to leave me now. I told them to all go in the band room and hold their instruments against their chests and think about what in them should not exist. On the floor inside the mirror room the women wept. Their gift was not at all like silence. For my pleasure I wept too. The wet upon my wide face sizzled and spattered in the mirrors and evaporated into flavor. I matched the women note for note resounding while their brownish nipples shook and shook. There was milk inside them. There were eggs inside them. There was a space inside them. They were mine. Ours. Today. I moved inside the room hearing my mother’s inhale brushed in every inch of how my own meat fit together waiting to be made larger. I reached my arms to touch the twins both on their heads. We made a leaking tripod. Our fluids needed killing too. I took their tears up on my hands and licked them off me and could taste the aspiration of their young years becoming gifted in my blood, endless gifts of hell and semen I’d take for mine in contribution to my work. This had been a long time coming, in all those books and movies, and masturbation fantasy and bloodlust and laughter and church and days unwound in rooms with those we’d loved. Which was now too. I loved these mothers. Where I licked the skin burned and left a bruise in the shape of someone turning off a lamp inside a hive. The light around us mattered. It mattered even more. I touched their heads again. I drew a hexagon in light. Each place I touched turned wet around my flesh unto the air and therefore inside made them drier. Their clothes had been remaindered. They wore stuffing they had pulled out of the bed to hide their naked. Tufts marring their nipples and obscuring the marks the boys had left where they were kissing on their way home to bring the mothers to me or where they had or had not found their way in. I hated to think of the men before me in these women’s lives, and the women in their lives, and the women in my lives, and the men in my lives. I was kind of spinning in the minute. I touched the women harder. I wished my blood into their chests through my celebrity. I could see the way they felt it as their eyes grew open and they stopped sobbing. They were warm against me. I felt they wanted in me too, and so instead I brought them on and in and in into my body, inch by inch, face first. My coming birthday would be bluer. The newest New Year’s would have no color ever again.

FLOOD
:
The bodies of a pair of twins we believe to be those referred to here were located buried among the primary mass grave that would be created in the room beneath the house (frequently referred to as “the mirror room”). The flesh surrounding both victims’ features (cheeks, nose, forehead, eyelids) had been stripped in large part from the bone; as well, various small incisions of flesh from the chests, backs, thighs, and forearms of both females. The cutting is crude, and will remain so as Gravey’s ritual consumption of his victims’ bodies becomes more and more important in his procedure. Many future bodies will be rendered unrecognizable
.

The bodies of the women. They came apart like women. They came apart like men. The bodies of the bodies. They came apart. In the mirrors there we were. We were not there. We were not us. I turned around and closed the room. I heard the house expanding. I was inside it. I was expanding too. I heard the boys. Heard them coming back in from our night in the cloak of the long ongoing vault of ash that rains. Have you seen me in rain. I know you have. I know you. I went out to see the boys with both my hands. My mouth was full and I was talking. I said the words the second and third mother made me say. They said to close the door. The boys were holding new lamps. I took the lamps out of their hands and broke them on the ground. I told them to move against me. I told them there were more wives. Mothers. Wives. There were other men. I told them to bring the bodies to me so we could write the word that closed the window on the house for good and opened new windows in the floor. Their eyes were pyramids. They stretched beside me. I think one said another’s name not in the name. I grabbed him by the throat and made him spit into my hands on my chest. I made him spit till he was ugly. Till he was not a body made of him. I will wear him, and he will be me, I told another, whose eyes were rubbing at my head. I grabbed him by the throat too and bit with teeth that taste of women still and tasted in his self’s skin a new history he would remember when he woke up some day. We. I would wake him up when when made when. The house was gold. I looked and saw where for both our twin mothers too late I’d made twin husbands of my friends of selves, my mashing hours. The other boys before me bowed. Their knees were purple like a machete in the mouth of a horse I’d loved and kissed and cannot remember now but for how one day he’d simply disappeared into my blood.

You. You taking my words from me. I wish that I could find and lie beside you in the room where you have been preparing for this sentence your whole life, so that as you take it in I could press my scourging dick against your forehead, correct a red impression on the center of the skin between your eyes so that those who pass you hereon will know you’ve taken part of something from which now there is no exit. What you’ve seen is rendered in our common leather. I am written in you, and erased. I wish you’d lay this book facedown on your lap now and think about your life while there is light still. I know you won’t.