Three Hundred Million: A Novel (28 page)

In the image, to the viewer, the screen inside itself is filling up, the liquid pouring off the bodies. As with the child, it gathers quickly above the seated man’s knees and waist and chest and neck as he sits still, beyond response. His mouth is open.

The viewer’s arms go numb, but seem not numb, to him or her.

Somewhere a fire is being ignited; somewhere stairs lead down and down.

The man goes under the water, seated, holding his book. There is another burst of blood. The gift of his blood to the rising aggregation shudders, lapping at the flat of glass and at the thick shape of the figure, still at center, motionless.

The screen is almost two-thirds covered over. Underneath the layers of the liquid too the light is still somehow coming off the TV in matching color beam bent into malfunctioning bright blips each hardly colors, squirming pale under the wet surface, growing paler as the liquid rises, thickens. The room is filling faster. The less room is left the faster still it fills. We can already seem to not remember the child and the father having gone beneath the surface, buried, turned to liquid. We can hardly tell how this began; it seems now to have always been happening.

Beyond the window, the waiting night.

In silence then, and without fanfare, the woman at the window mesmerized goes slump. Her knees weaken beneath her. She slides without sound or gesture down under the surface of the liquid. The wet is too dark now to show the cloud of blood she leaves briefly behind as it joins the rising mass.

The back of the head of the man before the camera, inside the gathering liquid, is all that now remains. In the window, now no longer blocked mostly by the body of the woman, we can see his front side reflected in the glass, though the image is too blurred somehow to make him out. Beyond the glass the black holds up the night unending.

All is calm, yes.

Yes, only as the last laps of the liquid squirm to reach above the frame of the viewer’s perspective, the remaining man at the center of the room turns to face us.

FLOOD
:
What voice asks the questions, and what answers
. Help me.
What questions do the answers ask
. What has been said in my name was not me.
What sound has been constricted in the liquids the body finds a way a while to contain and yet can’t force itself to contain itself unending in the name of to which the liquid must return
. I did not mean to be this.
What hour is the hour described in this passage. What are you going to do about it
. My memory dividing. My mind dividing.

Blood violence. Scrying violence. Schools’ doors locked door to door. Homes surrounded with a netting. Pastries rolled up with the asp. Tomahawks in hands of children come down on dolls and friends, come down on ants, come down on me. Fathers kill their fathers and their sons. Sons kill their friends. Wives kill their husbands and their doctors. They kill the babies in their guts. War violence in the home. Sky violence writing itself white into the cover of the hour with the screens’ electrifying prismlight. What would have been watched in place of doing is become doing. Runes are written on the heads. Lawns are cut in slurs or glyph stakes, calling for the meteor or blank invasion. A burning planted somewhere in every city near the homes. The wash of the bathwater on the drowned self. The pills. The pills to erupt the cells out of the body. The naked turned to breadloaves. The football hero with the Luger to his temple on the fifty-yard line. The banker handing back a withdrawal in the form of a sheet of his own skin. Gas station attendants robbing the customers of their consciousness. Of blood. The dogs walking the dogs. “What is happening in America? The homeland commissioner is up in arms. We must act now. This is our home.” The black rabbit in the east sky rises and vomits a column of dust onto the air. Troops deployed for the protection of the people stab each other in the chests. Intestine dinners. Ageless, graceless. The face of god: torn in strips off a billboard and used to wrap the dead. This is an art project, someone stutters, and the teeth fall out of their mouth onto the ground and are eaten by the starving some days layer. Enamel over all. Video game machines going blank. Wires doing blank. Email reading these same words in every head. A package is delivered to the homeland commissioner and it is opened by him on live TV, though we know it will explode. The pets’ names are changed to Darrel. The children’s names are changed to Darrel. The nation’s name is changed to Darrel. Michael Jackson’s name is changed to Darrel. Human instances of Darrel are caught in mobs and crucified inside the streets as nonbelievers. The name of Darrel in the mass of names is silence. The days. The occasionally clean are surrounded by their own flesh and bone. No metaphor left behind. No building not written whitely with the curse word over the crush of any city now called Darrel. Order again is demanded. Vegetable delivery is mandated by the state to arrive each evening in a long white limousine. This we believe in, which makes us calmer. It does not happen. Another 340,000 die. Another 417,550. Another 589,000. The rising numbers count themselves in the blue of pigs’ blood in cursive on the sky below the blank where there might have been a moon once, and still might be, though we can’t remember where to look. The instance of the number is attacked by air force bombers to obliterate as smoke. The smoke maintains the will of concrete underneath the cluster bomb. The fallout rains us birds. We eat them. The flesh of the bird delivers awful vision inspiring awful art. A mechanic kills a man who’s come to have his wheel replaced; he kills using the machine of his daily labor; another day he might have simply changed the wheel. Someone is counting down the hours on the fingers of those who pass him in the street. Rotting frottage underneath the street puts a disorienting sound in cats’ mouths and the houses rub where none of them touch and so it spreads and fills and holds. Someone with a hammer appears in one in 144 houses in one evening, mimicking at once a series of different people in one body, tolling the present number of the murdered bodies higher. There is no going backward. The faster we die we all will die. Sickness is not a shaking but a way of looking across a breakfast table or giving thanks. Anywhere this does not happen yet, the air remains. Turnips in fields turn up with dried blood centers. The trees bow down to kiss the ground. 700,010 dead. 880,789 dead. Telephones. Locks sold from the hardware station come without a key. Each four killed make eight kill eight more and then kill themselves or kill another set of eight, bodies branching off of each eight killed kill at least sixteen or toward twenty-four, each body desisted initiates replication in the spool of those surrounding; not by plague or viral idea or passion or brutal ministry or campaign, but by something they’ve not named and yet knows each better than any could, and in the unnaming of the so-occurring the day goes on and renders shorter while the skin flies at the light above in reams of hiss and collects in lathered wreaths around the public breath. The remaining bodies of their living go on tasting each other body in their mouths because they must. The colors of us giving up only one color, of little sex. The cars turning themselves on. A day at last to come of our vast creation returning to its fury. Crystal visions. Winking paper. So ends the beginning of our summation of the dead.

Gravey stands before the courtroom, no attorney (having refused), his head aglow in flat light from the neon panels in the ceiling holding the natural light out. Seven of the twelve jurors seated in the box are wearing all black; three are wearing white; they look exhausted, taut of skin; the remaining two jurors are dressed in clothes they might have another morning worn to church. For each member of the jury an armed bailiff is located somewhere in the room, in addition to the extra battery of officers at each door and window, and surrounding the buildings. Through the walls it is so silent between speaking it is as if one can hear the sun. The local premises are being patrolled round the clock by helicopters, federal troopers, private hires, and overhead, remaining unseen. This trial will have no real beginning and no end. This is formality. The jurors speak in tongues. The judge speaks in tongues. The judge’s dying mother on the phone with the judge during lunch recess speaks in tongues. The D.A. speaks in tongues. The assistant to the D.A. speaks in tongues. The witnesses speak in tongues. The loud interlocutor whose daughter had been killed by Gravey and who has come to the courtroom wearing a mask over her face screaming suddenly amidst the silence for Gravey’s blood speaks in tongues. The other grieving speak in tongues. The press pundits speak in tongues. The windows do not speak. Gravey does not speak. It has not rained in thirty-seven days.

When not waiting in silence in the courtroom, Gravey stands all hours at the center of his cell. He will not sit or sleep or eat or speak or close his eyes. He finds his chest so thin it is translucent. His organs and orifices in the cold clear gel have neon colors, their edges bloating and retracting into plastic puzzle shapes: his spleen a circle; his gallbladder a square; his ureter hole a hexagon; his lungs a star; his pancreas a triangle; his rectum a diamond; his brain a ring. His blood is thin and turning clear. Among his flesh, he’s disappearing: his chest, his arms, his neck. He tries to summon from his memory a mirror, but there is nothing there like that at all, nothing beyond the ringing in his sternum, pages turning. Each time he thinks another sentence, the earth begins again around it.

FLOOD
:
Each time I try to call a name out, I can’t make my mouth open. Trying to remain silent, I hear the wind run through me where I am not. Everything I look at shows my reflection. And behind me: nothing
.

There is very little room now left to breathe.

Each time he pushes up out of the dark liquid, Flood finds the walls of the chamber nearer, slicker. The surface tension of the wet is turning hard. The blood inside him also is stiffening, becoming heavy from his fingers to his head; he finds it hard to move his joints, or harder to want to. Behind his eyes is all the black.

He goes under into the wet again, again, spreading his arms out, looking, looking, that something from the darkness might emerge; another kind of light inside it, or a person, though he cannot remember who now, or perhaps a second darkness darker than the first, something he can move inside of, become filled by.

Marking each inhale reemerging, somewhere in the larger world far outside the chamber another several thousand people die, and therefore many several thousand other future people who would have come from them are now never born.

FLOOD
:
My body full of spit and blood. My mind full of holes leading to rooms full of the dead. Through the surfaces conferred their final concentration in the film containing all other film, upon which there is no rewind, no eject. A world awaiting
.

Other tapes among the tapes of Gravey begin to reveal themselves as holding shapes. Hid in the white the act of the destruction of the family occurs again, again. Each tape begins in a new but similar location, with different sets of families, though it is difficult to remember one apart from any other by the end. There is the liquid. There is the child’s camera. In the rising wet, the people become drowned upon the presence of the man arriving at the center of the room, whose face is never shown. The blood will wash out of the bodies, raising it higher. The scene will end then, cutting out.

The tape could be rewound. The tapes could be played again, over and over, as long as there is someone there to operate their mechanism, to have the wish to.

The video is not proper evidence of Gravey as a killer, despite the resemblance of him from behind. Each time the camera faces the face, the film there ends, just at the instant one would see him seeing. The shape of the figure could be anybody, legally, from this angle, and so is anybody.

Anybody.

All who see the tape there for all days coming can recall only the white.

Today in America, 2,441,560 people become killed.

Moms and dads die, kids die, friends die, lifeguards die, road workers die, PhDs die, lieutenants die, the incarcerated die, all at the hands of those they know or have come near; they are ripped open and their innards are eaten from the hull of their unmaking; ushers die, singers die, strippers die, organ donors die; their organs are not used to fill other bodies with a new life; Golden State Warriors die, gypsies die, hitchhikers die, dentists die, dental assistants die at the hands of the dentists or the patients, the weight of the buildings rises during the night; screenprinters die, brothers die, creators die, the dying die, the wishmakers die, the wanting die, the laughter coming from their heads; the coffee erupting on the counters as the timers go off as planned, burning the surfaces with black liquid overflowing, never again; pet owners die, the pets will fend for themselves; bartenders die, alcoholics die, their bodies are not preserved; artisans die, matchmakers die, janitors die, game show employees die, the worshipped die, the worshipping die; the color of all sound; editors die, the planets spinning; the reader of the book; lamps die, Boy Scouts die, Girl Scout leaders die; the train arriving at the station comes in late; hearse drivers die, neuroscientists die, chemists die, programmers die, some of the people you went to high school with die, some of the people you saw years back at the mall, the people you bought gas from, the organ grinder, the descendents of him who delivered from her mother’s flesh your mom; the sentence makers die, the law writers die, the magicians die, the poets die, the blog commentators die, the violinists die; the fish sing in your ears; the blue of a wheelbarrow reflecting anything it comes near back toward itself; the first baseman dies, the pitcher dies, the catcher waits crouched at his knees, the balls over America at any hours descending in their numbers, the blacktop and the feed; camels die, bathroom attendants die, stockbrokers die, those who have no central occupation of creation or focus or hobby or forward motion in the name die; the shirts come off the bodies; the bodies are eaten into other bodies and become less bodies, all in one, each fed into the other in a becoming-final string of flesh entering flesh, while the newborn numbers descend further and the cells are counted as cells we have and may not ever have again, unless; the strongmen die, the bearded lady dies, the stuffers of the pillows and the folders of the cloth; the surgeons die, the plumbers die; the grass rising up around the homes; the angered die, screenwriters die, those who operate the phones, those who tear the tickets at the mouth of buildings, those who power walk; salesmen of vitamins and fine clothes and batteries and cars and furnaces and loft apartments and MacBook Pros and Fritos and divine ideas and pleasure purpose and sexual dementia and pressure washers and word processing software and eggs and cheese and tee shirts and cleaner cities and designers of the fur and wanters of the honey and those with gardens and those with eyeglasses and those against milk, those with rings around their fingers, those in horror, those who write infernal books, those who are infernal books themselves by merely walking with eyes open in the light, they die. Some of them kill themselves to miss the rest of this. Some go on. Machines go on and something else does, while in the hour of the Thrust, in singing minutes, hundreds of thousands hand to hand and face to face, they die. Justices die by swords in the hands of sculptors, Christians die by the hands of parking lot attendants under mist, whites die by the hands of priests and waitresses and students and the homeless and the living and the pearled with fists and jackhammers and darts and overdoses delivered by the tongue; the foreheads are bitten from the faces, swallowed; the fingernails are chipped off from the fingers, gnawed; the chest flesh is rendered from the sternum with an apparatus and taken into the self in part of self becoming and then taken off of those with scalpels or teeth themselves; witnesses are hung from rafters in a backyard of old Kentucky; cleaners are beaten in the face upon the face of I-295, the concrete alive with the putty of the blood congealing in the seemingly redoubled sun; cops are killed by fingertricks and sternum throttles and long blue swords and pikes and black magick by tricks and jerks and friends and royalty and cherry pickers and the rich; cops are made to choke on their own flesh and spit by the hands of the virgins and the lifeguards and the valorous and the unholy and the timid and the cancered and those who solicit money outside the mall; cops are chewed to bits by cats trained by warm-weather lovers in the streets outside the houses where the cops lived one year when they were young; cops are killed by cops; for thirty seconds over California the image of an aleph forms from clouds of discolored smoke, then blows away; all the stations in the world play the same commercial in the same instant without prior planning; goose eggs fall out of a tree; dog groomers are licked of skin by Holocaust survivors; godmothers are driven by the skull into a yellow wall in Minnesota; a pastry truck is overturned, found filled with lice; the oldest person in the country kills one hundred and forty-seven with a machine gun in Kansas City before she falls flat on the last face she’ll remember and is mauled to pieces by one librarian in the name of names, raising the name into the light, the name I can’t remember even in my own breath here to tell you because the name resounds no longer in a language and has passed into the soil, has felt to burrow in the money of the pit of the eye of eternal wishing and the parrot of the Sod, though we still do not know what the Sod is and will not know and will need to know or know. Those who remain in certain hours still find laughter about something and try to share it. There are tongues passed between friends’ lips. The cock might grow hard. The finger in the belly. Jewelry is sold. Machines turn off and on among the flowing platelets. “I will wear you unto my king.” “I will be the ground that you have walked on.” “Love me. Love me.” The pavement feels deranged. Butchers die, longshoremen die, blackjack dealers die, sidewalk salesman are ripped limb from limb by those who ten minutes prior had felt inside them a clean wish to buy a gift; gifts hidden in boxes in coming houses become forever hidden before the burning; those with the unbroken hymen die, those with the shirts with their own names printed or embroidered die, the same ten numbers repeat in shaking rosters again, again, the numbers eating through the paper in a room of no one watching, the palm trees growing ever nearer to the curb. The binders die, the mugged. Night comes again. Smoke rises in a harbor where ships stand for hours counting the surrounding mountains pouring wet like melting cones, and blue cones rise in the sinking fields of commerce from the lessening of trample on their face. Smoke rises from the gums of women. Smoke on the shorelines. Everybody knows a joke. The bodies smell like gravel, then like pig meat, then like glass. The sea thickening, where reflected, holding out beyond our minds, our Sod City we do not know in all cities, Our City of the Chewing of the Rolling Light of Gloss of Sod.