Three Hundred Million: A Novel (13 page)

ASHLEY F.
, age 24: “It was growing large enough to hold us all. It was not an ark finally.”

FLOOD
:
Today I asked one of the boys if Gravey finds Darrel not only in himself, but in all people. The child began to laugh until he threw up blood, and did not stop throwing up until the nurse, a woman, touched him, at which point his eyes grew wider than I have ever seen. Later, when I came back, he had drawn a picture of a dog with countless heads on his stomach upside down. He was still adding more heads
.

The bodies of the mothers began appearing all across the country. I could no longer control the scroll of our own blood, which meant that this was working. The bodies appeared as misplaced objects in the landscape. Young ones could no longer find their keys, or the shirt with their name across the chest from their encampment, or the name of who they’d meant to learn someday to meet in love or sex. These mothers were the killers. We were in their bodies too, while in the same dimension the bodies congregated as we destroyed them and took their pieces in our chest and air. This was no sort of new beginning. This was every country all at once, each in her own mind of America undone and disappearing, seeming the center of themselves. The bead of earth here where we had writ the Becoming rose in slow dimension to the sky; it mirrored the inward sloping of the house toward the night air, allowing the house again to sit reflected at itself beside itself and above it and beneath it. The horizon’s curve no longer fit. The dysfunction between what was and what would soon be mayonnaised a medium between the features of the present moment. It rattled the paper in the libraries. At the center of the books that would never be again opened, blood began to fill. Our presence spread mnemonically as a blank virus upon the land. Holy men and churches began combusting into fire, spreading. The fire walked into some of the houses and made copies of itself onto old things. It spread its ideas into surfaces and filled them up with nothing and made them appear not ever there, though there they were. Even fire is full of holes; its air is wholly holes itself. The resulting ash became the liver of the new god overall; so named Darrel; so in silence; for which the corresponding mothers of the United States had been divulged of their lives by the hand of Him. Where the fire fell it left its resin until that too became dispersed. This all happened among our No Sound, finally perfected in the bed of den of flesh we’d cleaned. Where the fire had no children there was a cold air that walked upon the soil; it touched the doors of certain houses and invented in inhabitants there inside their sleep a walking roar that ate the pleasure out of their vessels. When they fucked, they felt the same as any day; the sensation still was recognized inside them as codified and vital, a rarefied form of being mostly only ever conceivable in the space where meat meets meet; they felt, then, they had to work harder to feel the nothing harder where the nothing went. I could literally enter absolutely anybody at this point. On the air of America around the Black House the tissue of these organs grew one by one, reflected from the central mirror of the new god, making provided tissue and glands and veins and cells by which to clasp around themselves together. And where Darrel threw up, this would be the skin. And where the water of the earth burned against the skin in unseen soft formation so came the threads of hair that grew out on our godhead, along her arms and down her body, amassing in flowerbeds around her birthing surface and her Invention Putty held there within holding the names so hard against itself it bruised her and from the bruises woke the flesh, which woke the other organs soon to come, in me, and there above the earth the revolutionizing body overall above us trembled in new terror ripped among our words we couldn’t hear it, and more were made and she grew larger and she grew larger, sick with heat. The bedsore cornbread flowed for days; out of the mouths of where the mothers appeared it gunked into the homes again forgotten. We were just sitting in the house now, being people; the work performed itself. Rot cycled in ecstatic function quicker, feeding off everything. The chords of death aggregated in the Black House’s spinal column between its many versions, stuttered forth to connect the dots. The infestation took place in hours during birthday parties and celebrations of the Rising Hour or when the women of the surrounding houses had gone to sleep or were reading in the bathtub or making dinner out of whatever could be found inside the confines of the walls. The men of the houses were always under water with their own fantasy against the color and so heard nothing but the speaking voices they had meant to use and would not now and yet could remember in a certain vector of the brain between the lid of sleep and nowhere and therefore hold within them consciously but in the act of drowning and so bathed in and found the whole of and spent the night inside of cracking and yet when woke rose having not known or learned the resin of it but for a certain kind of crick about the teeth. Spigots of another silent substance rose inside of boxes of the houses unexamined: in the sealed furniture and hollow avenues behind the walls uncurtained and the lumps of space between dresser drawers and surrounding vents unto the reaches of the flesh. Dogs walked on. Walks dogged on. Days on calendars filled in with instances of their images of self as catalogs of old decisions, vacations, appointments, seasons, ideas, forgotten proclivities compiled. Time ate itself and ate what came out of it as itself digested and ate what came out again. From the corresponding puzzle-ash our dimension’s feverish imagination emerged alive drunken on the very air. Everything we’d meant to ram with or ram up in us for the next several hundred thousand lengths of time gaped in white cures in this version of Today sopping glossy and in sticky floods of screaming egg and semen indexed along the banisters and mirrors and fine carpet beneath us waiting for the current instant to turn. Our sermon was the history of human sickness, for which the babies even still resolved no medication: blueblack pillars of slick protozoa puffed up and gathered like the lining of a coat; spores that softed through the house in calm arena microscopically amassed in snotty marble of our already rampant skin disease; cancer lampshades; diabetic doorknobs; sickly blood lining the halls of us begetting one another; one long AIDS hall, clustered wallpaper sputum guardrails and lesion buttons to doors that would not peel. Our housing was all ovens baking lymph wall-to-wall shrunk with tattoos we could not see, the piled-up ribcages and neck strengths and lodes of sore collapsing in the high multitudes of compiling pressure of the flame of want that made the days seem a size both countable and variable, depending on how hellishly we wished them done; creamy sternums knitting into sternums, child and parent, cells spreading open puddled in white languor for the house to shudder deeper, fill up more air with more of us in the idea that therein we could be comforted; rest; such flesh compressed into any instant of the house it was all of them together in each cell, where each cell held the pudding of knowing what we could have been with all ourselves and in ourselves a mass of autistic hope scratched on a log of bacon in great unburning flare; the lash of being nothing unto nothing with the cracking of the backbone lying onto beds to open wide regardless of what children or fear or wanting might erect a shield inside in practiced desperation, weapons of mesmerism, ass. Our years of murder were no calamity but the calm of sitting in the white of rooms of our own making while in all the other houses the daylight gored the hour to no nub but what we photographed or scribbled into symbols and the gas leaking beneath the houses to drink into the mudbath spirit-money stuffed behind the walls of human skin peeled and left for absent lining the corridors of other homes and heads and every inch of rooms of worlds; our vast destructing unresolving carpet under all flat shaving human feet and rising high into a yogurt curl of stuttered universes rubbing where we will not look as turning as we turn to see what we can see. I’d already lost count in here in what I’d done, even seeing the making of the music, the dreamlife numbers I rolled in nightly and stored in my memory as gold grills I’d wear to be mistaken in our music videos for someone someone thought they felt a love in. This was an aesthetic moment, blinking instantly from one to next inside no passage as the passive orbs of sun and moon tricked us enslaved. Even I would not remember I had experienced this a single evening in His presence, as in the next instant again lurched the bloodfields and machine guns and trenches fit with catalogs of years which by totally dying we avoid; frozen film of teeth being removed from the heads and worn on jewelry for the impregnation rite under Presidents installed in order off of lists printed on human grief; years of islands under water and bones crushed under tank tread and the billow of the flesh out of a pinhole on sunk fields uphill toward no sign where children hid shitting in the woods waiting no death under our orgasm for a final eternal war; the other countries in their barracks cut and pasted onto the same square in machete liquid and long bombglow burnt into the light we called a nice day and the summer of white convulsive heat glowing in no shadow as we forgot again that we’d forgot; weapons of the nose and palate splitting flesh for years through fields of marbled horseshit spit of mouths of soldiers at our griefcenters each instant in the drapes and up our stairs unto no door becoming store floors and LCD screens and gleaming polish. This was both our history and our future melded together so it could be consumed, a gown I sweated through so well it was transparent. This state of ours again already smelled like bliss, like pineapples falling open in a low sun heated with the skin of everyone inside the skin becoming bluer than the realm of god and pouring blood from each into a clear cup rising through the universe at elemental speed for no reason but to move and move again, forced fucked between the hours, inside the scroll of time we worshipped Holy Rest; brains packed with dresses the mothers we’d collected in the house below the homes so far would wear to stand before the pyre of no Sun to be knighted into name of one name reigning as only it could ever; the coronation in black linen lined with neon purple ribbing around the nipples and collarneck and sleeves and bone-colored buttons rubbing skin off where pressed with the wrong finger, which was any finger not absolutely mine; the dresses we would wear in idea of afterlife all were smoke and did not miss our prior bodies; I listened as the fabrics they’d be stitched from poured out through the grinding of the house into the coming evening while all the other houses let their trash be used as toys or eaten and delivered into flesh again to be part of us again, to love us again, to hold a thought together, though we would not because we could not pay attention half that time, our corpses were so inebriated. The body of god’s body was by now just above my body, positively stunning draped in the worms the fat with the ranks of flesh now disappeared or otherwise wholly avoided, less worm-looking than a worm is and more prismatic, colors filtered through the glueglass of ornaments we’d hung in houses for celebration in old light shat out by machines and called our birthright, while tonight the going bright white behind the moon plumed down from its orbit with its necessary illusion as the sky sobbed and wrapped en masse around our sweating forehead ever-growing, going tripled between instants, each shaking more and more of its new self from its decided center as I speak, establishing even more mechanical desire in those remaining, the bodies only soon as yet to be made full in mine; each of these grossed up with pink bubbles changing color as they went on in their learned versions of the frames of daily walking around and eating and taking mail and pills and cough syrup and making anything they could, drumming on along a sweet curve in vast magnetic mass held unrecorded as this house held its up and splintered south and north and west and east into new floors, all the bodies they were cut from only desperate to make more babies where they did not mean to and would never.

Name withheld
: “We were all pregnant, and all beyond turned on, and it was growing. You were in there. The walls were white. The flood of the birthwater would soon run down the legs of the earth and flood the prism of the eye of the earth, all in Her name, born, and here again. By now there was no turning back regardless of what you believed about the way the words curled on your eyes, or how fast you turned off from them, hid them away. It was no longer about light.”

L. S.
, age 19: “Just try to breathe. You can’t, can you?”

It was Becoming. Through the phones in all of us god spoke a language that could not be transcribed while night inside itself continued its devolvement. The last body of god rose through a white hazing oil that loved anybody who would exist before it while the morning tore itself apart; it lathered down in clear down blankets wrapped around us. Each vitamin begat an exorcism of the safe word between two doors along the birth hall of our rapidly increasing mass, which by now had bulldozed every inch of breathing air within me. Where the verbs fell from their protection grew a new road to walk along unto some sea. The sea would appear to not be boiling. Inside our future minds the language babies writhed and pupated with babble cockles, deriving the next language to be spoken in the swoon of nothing. Our black house smelled like a bowling alley full of pig heads. The mother bodies were snuffed in dozens and leaked their juice so loud sometimes I could see it coursing down the empty streets where no one soon would be walking and up white mountains to be burned off into the sun, while underneath us the blood grew bluer and then blacker, leaping maggots from where the flesh collected. Often I couldn’t tell the difference now between a new mother and a pickaxe; they mostly passed as water, air, and sleep. And yet the sixty-seventh invocation of the mother looked just like me again. I still didn’t remember any hour there before or after, though, but here where this one had my skull and sacs and all my dismantled grievances recombined. This one wanted all the same things I’d ever wanted, if I remembered rightly, which I didn’t, as held in scar flesh on his love handles and in the hair around his anus hiding what he was. I put a mirror to him and he looked like a simple yellow dot. From the dot there rose a little cake. I ate it with my ear, and then could hear his contribution to god’s most recent face: his own phantom mother, delivering the replication hurt, the want for being somewhere further soon and so then trying and gaining more flesh by rubbing that want out. Our god filled the other organs in with colored pencil. Our god rubbed a grease eraser over folds and made them colonize. The bodies seared, gave smoke, and disappeared; it made us starving. Every lick of nothing was a gift we didn’t need and so consumed that much more quickly and bulged the wordless seam within. I broke the mirror. I ate the mirror. I ate me. I ate the home, and went back out, and came back in.