Three Hundred Million: A Novel (14 page)

I rose. I was the mothers fully, their organs, their eras, spaces, eggs. In the many houses all the hours were my eyes. Killing the fathers and the mothers and the children with my hands of other men made my void voracious and I needed to be fed. I looked like any other person. I worked at Subway and split meat. I rubbed the bread with colored substances and chortled near the glass. I said I rose. I am the god too. I told this to anyone who would come near. No one came near. No one had fingers. I walked among the light. The Black House spread to color many other houses. This was seen by most as night protection, as defense of weather, but the surfaces and symbols and keyholes made the houses sicker, made them absorb my laughter. Any house wants only at last a life too and would take the worst in your not letting it at all move. It ate the leeches and the termites from the floor of the earth on which I walked and drank them hard into the walls so soft you could not feel it breathe. When the rasp of rats or something shaking brought the house out to flood or when someone knocked at windows with a gun or came in and killed your family or you or took your money or your clothes this was the safest you could ask. Every other minute I was rising. I work in shifts. I take no knee for you. My robe is folded on the coming pyre made for all of us to begin again in. I need you to write me back, and yes you will.

I rose again. Inside, the night was puffy. The mirrors turned red, then blue. The white lights did not affect this despite being hyper-crowded. I said the name of Darrel to have the boys lie down before me and make a bed for who I was turning into. They did not move. There were men who were not the men I was at the windows and in the vents speaking the outdated language. I could see the eye sockets of them dripping with a kind of language. I’d thought I’d had those removed from their spirits, that they would not even be able to see me. Their radios were heaving bullshit. I told the boys to bend over and defend me. To lean down and listen hard to what the people in the submerged room were doing. I felt something in me coming from an opposite direction. The red lights turned to diamondcolor. The boys refused to blink. The beams of lights between their eyes were weaving into layers upon layers in the reflection through the glass made to see itself again. Together all at once they raised both hands hard in tragic gesture toward the false hole in the ceiling that had opened unto the hyperventilating night. The night looked less false than I remember. It had a sternum etched upon it, bruised into hiding with the blue. All across it were these eyes, like thousands of them, all seeing down on us, all never blinking. The boys’ arms began to quiver. Light emerged somewhere between each of their sockets and aimed directly at my skull. The boys did not lie down. Between the dots of each there slimmed a pleasure scripture caricatured by where I’d had them build their skin thicker to defeat against the melting temperatures of invocation. The boys did not lie down. I tried to go on as if nothing I didn’t want was ever happening. I asked how many of us were still at work out there in the houses preparing the extension of our nest into the farther space of being. My voice spilled on my shirt and changed its color to match my flesh. My flesh was older than I remembered. In each of the mirrors I saw only one of me, covered in old ink. A tattoo on my breastbone revealed a combination to a lock. I said the numbers aloud and nothing happened. My flesh was older. The boys did not perform as we’d rehearsed. I went to stand up from my throne and felt three hundred feet where both my feet were. The whole air of the world around me squiggled in evacuation, replacing silence with psychic acne lathering against everything I felt. Each pustule held another camera filming where between the light of the boys were disappearing. The best of the boys’ arms were growing longer, taking pain. The skin around their fists poured batter over any free space. All the neighbors’ houses were farther apart than ever, through the world, suddenly, like being cut out of a womb. I smelled wigs and iron. I went to say the name of Darrel and instead said Gravey. My lap was full of beans I was already eating and shitting out. As I looked back up to see again if the boys had done as I had asked them yet finally I saw the lid of night turning itself on. It was a hissing panel. It had a center. It lit my body through and through. There was nowhere left to move between the wall of us and outside except for where I didn’t want to.

SAL
: “The day they came in through the doors wearing the blue suits Gravey didn’t even flinch. He went on as if these people coming through the doors were in his convocation, as if he’d ordered them to come. He greeted the officers speaking back into the glare as if they were any one of us. The blood was on his face and hands from his last supper in the house still and in his eyes I could see from down there on the floor standing behind him I could see he was no longer in the Gravey body anymore. His skin was so dry it kind of flaked off on the other men’s arms when they touched him.”

FLOOD
:
It was actually raining the day our squad went in for him, into the Black House. Raining so hard it seemed like the sky had been ripped off and behind it all that blue up there had always been a liquid. It rained like it didn’t want for you to walk. And warm. So warm. The warmest rain I can remember. I recall the sun was out under the storming, a summer color. It seemed like it would go on like that forever until it didn’t
.

The many eyes became one eye, an eye set in a head, set in the horizon of the house. The eye was looking down into me. It had a pupil in the color of our floor, which was as well my color, which meant the eye had always been. It was just above me: a whole other sort of surface pressed against the public. It had no lid and didn’t stutter. Behind the eye the boys were growing. Their sex organs plugged into the eye on its far side and lit it alive with a growing light that filtered with their eggs and sperms. The eye began to spurt. It gushed out from it a string of drumheads and guitar strings and stripping throats and thumbskin. The mash fell down upon me and rolled me in a coat of newer silence. Where I could see now too around the house the outside was so near there was none of it left. The walls between the outside began peeling with all bloomed layers bent toward me. The house around the eye pulled inward and coated the walls with black again and again over anything to make it small while expressly, from the inverse, my skin continued to turn hard and fat. Wrinkle mass and all my anger trembled in me as I grew and rushed to meet the house as it came nearer, surrounding what of me remained. With this wish, the song knew nothing. It was nothing: it held no sound. It sung nothing. It had, at last, begun to have been always. In my skin my skin was singing nothing with it, not nothing, no new thought. This was the absolute silence of us. The lost words finally matching each in full the only one I’d ever really imagined. No longer only any brain lined by itself. No longer me again alone in me. All puzzles laughing in their fixtures. The blacking house unwound, a mouth for the breadth of us, alive. The eye was just against me. I was around the eye.

Name withheld
: “Oh, I was waking. You were waking. Even as it seemed the end of the beginning, the moon was wrapped in all her skins when she combined inside the mind of all the air ever around us, sounded around us, wound around us.”

FLOOD
: [
stricken from record
]

I’m wearing white. I’m wearing clean beekeeper veils. I’m sewn in the color of me sunburned aged seven scared of holes slit in the sand with my head under my mother’s shirt to keep the flies off of my head. I’m wearing neon yellow. I’m wearing someone. I’m walking through a prism gorge, cut so deep along the bottom of the skull I one year found underneath a rosebush outside the food court at the mall. I’m wearing wish robes. I’m walking with the trowel. I’m looking for a spot left loose enough in a pasture to dig myself an imprint wide as me but all the ground is foil. When I listen I hear men dividing into futures, into sternums, into more of now than I can stand to force to rest, so I do not listen until there’s nothing else about me, which is always, which is how I learned to write.

Gretch Enrique Nathaniel Gravey is apprehended by authorities in
on August 19, 2
at 7:15
A.M.
He is found facedown in the smallest room of his seven-room ranch-style home with legs bound at the ankle by a length of electrical wire, apparently administered by his own hands.

He is unresponsive to officers’ commands or to the touch.

When lifted from the ground his eyes remain open in his head, unblinking even to the sound of the canines, the men.

The light inside the room is strong. It blinds each new being at their admittance, bodies shielding eyes and swinging arms until the space has been secured.

Gravey is dressed in a white gownlike shift affixed with reflective medallions that are each roughly the size of an eye and refract light in great glare. No underwear, no ornaments.

His hair has been shorn sloppily, leaving chunks and widths around his ears and the back of his head, an amber lob of curls the color of beer.

An open wound cut on his left breast appears to have been also self-administered, though not deep enough to require stitching; his wet blood has soaked a small head-sized oval parallel to where he lies; from the pool, traced by finger, the word
OURS
appears writ in the ink of blood along the mirror-covered carpet.

Questions and actions delivered to the suspect do not seem to occur to him as sound; he does not flinch or turn toward the shouting, the splinter of their entrance, canines barking, the commands.

The meat around his eyes seems to be caving, black and ashy.

There are no other living persons apparent in the house.

Gravey is unbound, cuffed, and taken to a local precinct to be booked, processed, and held.

His eyes in motion do not open, though he is breathing.

He does not speak.

FLOOD
:
The above and the following are my ongoing log of the time following Gravey’s arrest, and the ongoing investigation, over which I have been appointed lead. I have given electronic access to specific colleagues assisting in the case for their perusal and review
.

SERGEANT R. SMITH
:
These notes were discovered in Flood’s shared files online sometime shortly after he disappeared. Several of the quoted sources claim to have not written what they are said to have written. I myself remain uncertain
.

The front foyer of the mouth of the entrance to Gravey’s home is caked up with shit nearly a foot high; human shit, packed in tightly to the face of the door, which has been barricaded and blocked over with a paneled bureau full in each drawer with ash. Testing reveals the ash is burnt paper; among the powder, lodged, the leather spines of books, photographs overexposed to blotchy prisms, fingernail clippings, mounds of rotting cat-food-grade meat, plastic jewels.