Three Hundred Million: A Novel (2 page)

FLOOD
:
Like any of those mentioned by name in this proceeding, including the amorphously rendered “Darrel,” no Josh has been identified or come forward. Though we have apprehended numerous suspects believed to be involved with the occurrences at
during the period of
,
the actual number of those involved, like the number of victims, remains in question. It is also as yet unclear to what extent, if at all, any parties who have claimed to live in the house with Gravey were active in his crimes; though some claim compliance and even pleasure, there has been no evidence implicating anyone but Gravey in the physical activity of murder. Many of the stories do not line up. Most of the boys do not acknowledge each other. Some seem to have suffered extreme emotional damage, not to mention what was done to their flesh
.

The space I lay in when I stayed at Gravey’s had real mirrors on the walls and ceiling. There were so many of me in there underneath that and beside that I could not see me in the middle of us where I was: a throne of self made of my bone and flesh repeated. Asleep I’d hold so still and never move a second. I thought about asking Gravey some nights if I could come and live there when my father locked me out of the house as he often would for wearing black and speaking in voices that weren’t mine, but the question hung inside me plane-sized. I felt devout to nowhere. I slept in the tall grass beside the shed full of old tools when I could not find a way to force my way in through Dad’s locks. My father loved being alive: he was a photographer; he understood the human body, and machines; he had all these ways he meant to work inside the math of human ash to build from the deforming light of our great cities an empire of celebrated image memorized forever; models and actors; the living and the dead. He did not care how many other kinds of media there were inside this life already competing for the cash sold on corners and packed onto plastic. Soon anyway he fell too into wreck of air of America like anybody would; I could not spare him; I didn’t want to. He was not really my father any more than where your eyes hit this silent sentence, the same way my mother mattered only long enough to push me out, then there was always this hidden air between us. From outside Gravey’s house at night alone through the beams of the house freckled with ancient aging I could still hear what went on inside: walls not walls but idols. Could hear Josh and some of the other kids we went to school with who had come too to be around Him laughing or saying something in pig latin or whatever or eating angel dust up through their eyes and sometimes there’d be louder noises from the machines that made the house live so much you couldn’t hear anybody else above the churning of the cooling of our bodies off and modems barfing back and forth at one another. Once inside the house again I remembered to try not to listen to the sound of the machines so long as all those others so I would be smarter when I got older and less hurt inside for certain whiles about the way things went on without me in the daily organism, though as that went on too I began to feel too I wasn’t changing and anyway the effect of our inbred-from-Adam-and-Eve origins were beginning more and more to make effect in all of us. Some days inside the house the days inside the house went on so long and still the digits on the machines’ clocks would not blink; I could feel inside me, as the time stayed like that sometimes for some great lengths, the old National Anthem squirting through my organs into the surrounding furniture and glass, sucked out of my teeth and face in all its daily iterations of ads and silent thinking and holy money, into the house where then the house would chew it up; soon each time the house would kill the Anthem into a silence longer than all my cells lined up one after another in a queue inside my wanting and that silence was the new Anthem and that was warm. As long as day went on in this way I could sleep there right inside my posture without feeling any older, weaker, guilty. Eventually I would always wake up back inside the mirror room; there I could see myself standing beside me and this was very beautiful, and I remembered my body, what it wanted me to bring it. Being with my me’s long teeth made me less timid around the larger, higher boys and among the general community of people. One night I remember now I said some dark words to my father through a ham radio I found underneath my bed, its countless knobs marked with foreign symbols: this speaking through the wire would be the last tongues the we of me and Dad did to one another in America. I knew my dad’s destruction need not be by my own hand, as had my mother’s giving birth; there were so many other people past the mirrors; there was He in each of them, and so in his spirit each as much the father and mother of any other person ever as mine, and I too was their parent and always had been. In further time the room alone became my room; I did not have to ask, though often I might share the space with one or several others of us, which in the dark all looked like more of me. Some nights like these I would wake up and could not force my arms to move at all again for all the others we’d packed in. I’d find there hung above me so many of me I could no longer see the mirrors at all, and therefore the walls beneath them. Sometimes all I saw were all my eyes, through which I often found I felt if I could bring myself to press my own eye against my eye again, I could see far beyond this space, down a long glass into somewhere very gone and going further under each time my own sight inside me buckled into black, because it is not time to speak of that yet.

ADAM A.
, age 17: “I uh didn’t know about Gravey’s parents. Or like I didn’t meet them. Sometimes he said he kept his mother in a glass cage in his brain and fed her money. He would have me pet him on the skull. He was exceptionally affectionate. He was nice to be with, even if he was always really fucked up it seemed like though I never saw him eat pills or snort or smoke or whatever. I don’t know why he’s talking like he’s not him, though he was always going on about how we were all made of the same person, or soon we would be, which is why we had to kill them, all of them. I do know there was no one else that was allowed to sleep in the mirror room with him, before the other rooms got mirrors anyway, because that was Gravey’s room, though sometimes he’d let you go in there with him and whatever, though like of course when he was done you had to get out. I don’t remember ever seeing anybody staying the whole night in there but maybe I just didn’t ever see it. Sometimes he like would go in the room and lock it and not come out for a long time and that was fine because we knew where he kept some of his shit and there was always more there even though I don’t think I saw him leave the house. Like any family, I only know as much as anyone would show me.”

Everyone young that I could remember having been around before in rooms outside the house inside that false year, we hung out where Gravey lived without seeming beginning and without end. It came to be our days and evenings, small countless hours slipped under sweat and what the hell. I was still working up the ways within me I could find a way out of this body and into the next one, and I still had no idea, beyond how when my arms or face would go to sleep before my brain I’d feel this shaking, this speaking in me, like something fumbling through my cells. During this era, Gravey wore his white hair like a robe a lot, wrapped around his fangled body with the weird bruises at his softer points such as his calves and pits and chin, as the networking womb inside him widened. He never said a word. If he had any of what was going on between us, he smeared it in him with more smoke. Around him I felt older faster. I began to come around as who I was more. I put a picture of my dad I’d burnt the paper mouth off of with a blunt butt underneath my special mattress, which, when I was not there, other kids would use to be me too. Sometimes someone might come and stand above or lie beside me in the long haze of anywhere around us. I did not stop them. I did not feel nothing. Some nights the house would shake like a bead inside a baby rattle in another home. Other nights it felt as if there were no floors, and everyone kept just falling at the same rate through the same air with the lights out and the moths collecting on the eaves. We were not aging. In Gravey’s house surrounded we listened to his recording of himself or someone else playing the drums: long looping thud of arrhythmic kick and floor tom stuttered like shitty pasta. Other tapes were only loops of long whats of muffling and chime beat, which reminded me of electronics being pulled apart by time. Gravey in the sound would turn to stone. His face hated itself. In some other era he, I think, Gravey, had been attractive; now he seemed unto himself alone, destroyed, a body walking around in the light of what he’d needed and not gotten like anybody else, waiting for something to blot him out or at least say his name. The growing kids who came around to be around Gravey daily rotated through a central corridor of spines, or I was unlearning how to recognize who. Me and Josh were the smaller of the standards. Some nights I knew no one’s face. In my head I would refer to them by something wrong about them with their bodies, like Eternal Shithead or the Wolf Who Bleats Ash or simply You. Soon even that would fall away inside another kind of speech. Their faces would become mounds of hell and skin all run together in all our memories at once, even just seconds after having seen. No one knew me either. Often we boys each named and nameless all ended up faceup on the floor all bone, as the pills Gravey began to get from someone out there on the earth would make your body feel like it’d turned inside itself to stone too and shit upon you so hard that what our blood really awaited soon awoke.

PETER S.
, age 15: “The most people I ever saw come over at once was like five. Mostly Gravey didn’t like a lot of people in the house until he started whatever. Everybody around school was talking about wanting to go to Gravey’s since they could get fucked up there, to the point that I think he started being scared that someone was going to find out he was hanging out with all those kids and like what so he told us to shut the fuck up. All the music he ever played us that he had made when he was our age or whatever really sucked.”

Then oh hey yeah one night at Gravey’s we, I mean us people, guys or whoever, we were floating inside the house again like ever and the bubbles in my brain became a phone. I picked up the phone inside my skull and heard someone at the far end screaming in a slow striation, syllables splashing at my face. As I learned to listen harder I could make out little bits of what it was, and though the language wasn’t mine quite, I learned to separate the sound that up till then had been my name inside me. The name no longer sounded like my name. Other guys inside the house around me not inside the phone were also screaming around the sound of the screaming coming through me in the phone, though these bodies were screaming at each other, swimming limbs and prodding sockets. The walls rammed in around me seemed higher than they had been before right now. The phone cord curled in my head meat made dizzy music with my blood in fury. I couldn’t hear the voice. I couldn’t hear Him; I heard me capitalize that pronoun in my aorta. I went in the mirror closet and closed the door with me there swimming in black fabric with the lights off. It smelled like going to the dentist. My hands were nothing. Inside it I could hear. This was the first time I heard Darrel. I heard Darrel tell me his name was Darrel. The mirror room closed around me closer even then. I knew right away he did not need me but I needed him. I could no longer find the door. Why Darrel, I said, what is a Darrel, why not another name, and I felt the receiver holes press through the back side of my skull, making little stirrups for the Listening. The syllables were curls, clenching licelike in my shape. Darrel said some of the things he had already said again. He gave his location in the house in a part of the house I had never been in and did not believe was in the house at all. Darrel told me he had lived inside the house as long as houses had been around and even longer than that. Then Darrel told me to kill Gravey. Darrel said I would understand why later maybe I had to do this and it didn’t matter if I did or didn’t, because by the time anybody else who could do anything to stop me knew about it it would be over and done with most exactly unremembered and this was the nature of the disembodiment of passion. Darrel’s forehead was so large, and the tongue inside it whorled; I could hear him right beside me in seven voices all the same voice everlasting. Through the script I heard the wail of home trying also to come into the room and stop the word and be between us, slurring my sternum: I heard Josh laughing, Gravey laughing, someone someone someone someone else. How will I kill Gravey, I asked Darrel, in my inside-voice, and now inside the phone inside me Darrel too began to laugh throughout the house’s hidden laughter saved like the maker’s breath inside a stick of butter. Darrel’s brand of laughing made me go goo-juiced and feel weirdo; it combed my hair and I was clean. Darrel said then that I would kill Gravey over time. He said that he would help me with this part, because we were married. He said I was married unto him; in the black book of years and sermons we had been written. He said once Gravey was dead we would begin. He said I was to enter Gravey once I had killed him and wear the body like our body and then the next phase could occur. He said we had time because time was coming and uncoming, because all of this had already happened and was happening right now, and would happen again in the near future. He said don’t you remember. He slammed the phone down in my head; it shattered hard straight through my neck into my lungs into my belly, making red sleeves on my reams of vision, which when I shook my head still stayed. There with the voice still there inside me after, my teeth felt colder than my jaw and I was laughing in the sound of Darrel’s laughing like I had always been and always would again all through my chest filled with the slowlight and I knew what I would be and then I instantly forgot. I felt along the closet for the knob and felt a wet thing surrounded by dark hair. In the dark I could not see my arms or anyone. This was our new daylight.