Three Hundred Million: A Novel (25 page)

[
His sweat is almost like a well. It fills his mouth. I taste the salt and cannot chew. I’m sweating also, more now than I ever
.]

[
Each time I inhale, he exhales
.]

[
There is so much liquid on the floor, I can feel it
.
I can’t look down
.]

[
Gravey’s face begins to emit sounds of biting, from inside his throat, like something in there tearing. His eyes are wet, and making gleam. He refuses to make words, despite the nearly constant ream of guttural and convulsive sound seeming to come from all over his body. I watch. I hold my hands close. I feel hungry: I wish I didn’t have to say I did
.]

[
I cannot speak
.]

[
I cannot speak and do not wish to
.]

[
More time goes on. I am seeing colors. I close my eyes and can’t make them open up. I keep waiting for the guards to come and get me. I feel nothing. Later, standing up from where I’d been seated, I would imagine it had been at least weeks since I had left the room, as I would find my legs so stiff and weird beneath me it was as if they were not mine. I find myself again compelled against speaking
.]

[
Gravey’s sternum is shaking. It stinks
.]

[
The whites of Gravey’s eyes have become grayer, packed with bluish spindles. The pupils rolled down to look toward me, not at or into me, but straight through, as if focused hard on something on the far side of my head. I could feel a little burn like boiling wine where my memory packets swirled around a cold spot in my cerebrum. I turned around to look where he was looking on the wall. There on the wall, a black square printed at eye level into the white surface, hazy, floating on my vision, and just thereafter, sunk away into the cream
.]

[
I got up and walked out of the room
.]

[
I mean
I get up.
This is happening in present tense
.]

[
I walk along the long hall through the building seeing nobody else. I have to piss. I’m freezing cold. None of the doors in here will open. Nothing would open. The door to the outside is no longer where I remember it was. I don’t know where anybody is. Through the window into another holding chamber holding a shitload of dogs inside it. The dogs are gnawing at each other
.]

[
None of the other rooms is really a room. There are beds. There are thimbles and money stacked in piles like pyramids and globes
.]

[
I have to piss. There is all this liquid in me. My arms are heavy
.]

[
I find a water fountain and try to take my dick out to piss into the hole of the fountain because whatever, but I can’t get the opening open on my pants
.]

[
I piss my pants. My piss is white as paper and has writing all the fuck over it, every word I’d ever said. It has your name on it. It has the date, and all the dates before today’s date. It does not have any dates after today
.]

[
I walk back to the room where I’d left Gravey. I feel I need to see him. I have to hurry. There is this want. It is the greatest want I’ve ever felt, all of a sudden. I hurry for the room. The room where He had been before me. Along the walls now, though, the hall keeps going on. Where the door was supposed to be, the door to He, each time I think I’m there along the long wall, I find a little piece of paper in my hand. The paper is always blank
.]

[
The paper is blank until it wasn’t. Until when I opened the paper, there I was. Then there were no doors. There was no city
.]

[
I put my head against the floor. I heard Him again right there in me, answering me again, in my own voice, with the questions I had asked, and the answers I had answered
.]

[
There are all these motherfucking words. They were shaking in me. They knew who you were
.]

[
Inside His voice aloud I hear me also speak. I hear me speak and speak and speak in all these other rooms around us
.]

[
I’m bleeding
.]

[
holy fuck I’m bleeding
]

SMITH
:
J. Burns was a member of our police force from 1961 to 1967. He was killed in service during a routine investigation of a property at
, suspected to be harboring a multiple felon wanted on evidence of additional homicide, pedophilia, and distribution of narcotics. Said suspect fled the scene and successfully escaped through an unlit wood behind the house. Burns was an extremely dedicated cop, and more so a good man. I have no idea why his name appears here, though I do recognize a few of the exchanges presented above from segments of a videotaped deposition of Gravey on the morning following his arrest
.

Four more mothers kill more friends. Four friends of each of the killed persons kill another four persons, and from there, each four more. Four of the relations of each of the victims of Gretch Gravey kill four more people, and four of each of those killed by the mother kill four more people. Each, having killed four, kill themselves. Other bodies choose to replicate the Gravey method, killing many in a silence without public detonation or self-snuffing, requiring capture by police, and forthcoming investigation, and prosecution, which, for each, takes more time, a form of worship.

In waves of four new sets of four more kill further bodies immediately again. The work occurs in dark or light: women and men are stabbed inside their cars or closets or beds or bathrooms or at work or on the bus; children and babies are smothered in their cribs or inside day care or before their parents at their park; guns are placed in mouths and eyes and earholes, knives inserted into slits of flesh the flesh had held for life, waiting for the injection of the knife to be the key turned in the lock the flesh makes at last forever once and only ever by his hand. Homes are intruded upon by those taken up in spirits or stone sober or somnambulating or quite calm; wives, judges, bag boys, busboys, window shoppers, roofers, tourists, police officers, designers, homemakers, the poor, the elderly, the lame turn fists and fingers and teeth and trowels and machetes and steel bats on the homeless, the work-from-home, stockbrokers, students, demolition experts, body doubles, waitresses, the faithful, the faithless, chefs, producers, writers, actors, window washers, architects, the terminally ill. The function of the action spreads in doily-motion, turnpiking out from each to each, so that by lengths the victims activate the guilty and the guilty in turn beget more of both.

Begetting is the purpose; this is a word we all have heard; it replicates in the backwards process from the book known by some as the story of creation, though this time in reverse: John debegets Nancy debegets Richard debegets Tom debegets Tony debegets Alison debegets Chris debegets A. debegets B. debegets Joseph debegets Olinea debegets LaRichea debegets Paul debegets Paul debegets Paul debegets Tia debegets Michael debegets Yon debegets Sina debegets Portia debegets Jericho debegets Lon debegets Richard debegets Owen debegets Lanaisa debegets Chad debegets Andy debegets Lucy debegets Arnold debegets Oona debegets Don debegets Allen debegets August debegets Toya debegets O. debegets Ron debegets Ronnie debegets Ronald debegets Sal debegets Sagat debegets Andrew debegets Timothy debegets Mary Louise debegets Marticia debegets Joan debegets Joanie debegets O. debegets Person debegets Chu debegets Quia debegets Jose debegets Lania debegets Sue debegets Ham debegets Sara debegets Sing debegets Kandy debegets Hsu debegets Rory debegets Clive debegets Blake debegets Halla debegets Sancho debegets Janice debegets Matt debegets Susi debegets Pad debegets Alicia debegets Fal debegets Nan debegets Janet debegets Percy debegets Ronaldo debegets John.

The houses fill with blood. The blood is eaten from the bodies, becoming body for the body to activate itself. Each body made debegetted is taken unto the body that debegetted it, absorbed. One by one, in sets of four, then eight, then sixteen, the bodies pair and congregate, compile. Oceans open, settle, dry. The rooms of evidence aggregate behind locked doors in silence, cataloged, unwatched, while in the rooms surrounding other hours the as yet undebegetted people continue to try inside themselves to still go on. Streets for miles divert the massive traffic held in blue white red green gray black red husks of hurried cars enslaved in slick packs from lot to lot in the susurrating Costco light the magnanimous Wendy’s light the sainted stitching Barnes & Noble light, the BP light the PetSmart light of light hung street to street in knit across the homes the OfficeMax light the Office Depot light the neon signs of deathtraps in one nation under god, the Chili’s light the silent beeflight of the Outback and the Gap and Best Buy moving hurried in conditioned spasm to Exxon and Taco Bell and Moe’s and Ben and Jerry’s and Dunkin’ Donuts in the husk of cells fussed off gross streaming trays of shitting days and laughter pyramids set in the gaudy lips and teeth like tumors on a tonsil turning black and turning swollen aisle to aisle in room to room in the Target light of America the Kroger light of America the Ross light the Home Depot light the Coca-Cola light the jabbed shit rib sandwich canary visions peeling off the borders of the bodies of the On the Border and the T.G.I. Friday’s and the T.J. Maxx farting blood beams from the eyes into the mouths of the murder puppies screwing big holes in blind butts wallowing in mud of Gap light of Google light of Yahoo light in the machines of aborted dick shelves robbing tanning beds while folders of folders brim with files sent from number 1 to number 2 among the walls of mumbled birthing rooms and mail centers and dead video rentals and carpet cleaners and the husks of names clipped by a bacon-smelling surface rising in the lid of the limousine yards of the mall crapped and crapping blue-gray beauty on the table of the sword like lettuce peeled from plastic boxes under the lid of E! light of ABC light of CNN light of dad of dad while babies screw up stabbing ornamental pygmy trash on wax paper in the bedrooms while their parents snorf pepperoni cubes in the light of Papa John’s in the light of Walmart light Applebee’s light American Apparel light dicklight pornlight mashlight hammers falling from blowholes scripted by torches under afghans skewed from worms sold by Pep Boys light Duracell light Facebook light changing its profile and its name against the edge of beds pushed together under houses hiding from scrawling bloodgush peeing in their ears and arms of daddies going whoa going holy fuck the football game is on my dick has scabies the delivery guy has no change I can’t get my car out of the driveway I’m several years gone I’m under water in my briefs this red light has been red for eight hundred years and I’ve lived for only thirty and I feel eighty and I’m ten and I don’t want to be me anymore or be the body beside me in the night from whom my babies twinned were made and kissing rabbits in my sleep praying for lasers to shoot the grease out of my eyes to scrape the Windex light the Comfort Inn light the NBA light the rapeshitfucklight strobing from my human-wounded ass from my tits and arms and flab and mustache, I can’t even breathe my own breath here any longer I can’t taste this pie can’t smell this ball I want a new job I want a city I want a wider grave a bigger boat I want bigger to have one hundred g’s in it I want rap music dentistry I want a cut of beef Pamela breast-sized Brad Pitt cock-sized a cut of beef the size of me I want to swim in god I want a god I want a life an Uzi a condition I want the best pills you can prescribe I want to live in the name of no prescription I want national jailbait body Party City Citgo Waffle House chop suey full flavor less value more blue prose more delete-mind more screen so wide I can’t see the end or the beginning I want parsley I want panties I want me of me in me of mine.