Three Hundred Million: A Novel (3 page)

FLOOD
:
I’m not surprised to find Gravey claiming here to have been, in so many words, psychically taken over by a child, who, again, I’m not sure if I believe is the same person. He very often acts like a hybrid of a thirteen- and sixty-year-old, spastic then tired, immature then graven. He will often revert to baby talk, even in midsentence, and often he switches between voices as if he’s playing ventriloquist dummy on himself. It is clear now at least that the child at least some part of Gravey remembered being at some point and the burnout he is presently are at this point in the narrative becoming mixed, at least as far as Gravey’s highly damaged point of view. As far as the identity of “Darrel,” I don’t know. Though Gravey will often respond to almost any name you call him, as if it is his name, anytime I mention Darrel, Gravey will gnash his teeth and squeal, in such a way that I can’t tell if he enjoys it or despises it or both
.

I waited in the red. My cheeks wore weirder. I didn’t believe the words I’d heard me say into me in the name of Darrel, corkscrewed with flat beer the ringing woke in me and which I drank. The house seemed rather tilted. I laughed too, though I could not feel a center from which the color of my sound came. I kept looking up toward the ceiling to see where Darrel might be through the floor as he had mentioned, but the house was ranch-style. The roof was diamond-eyed. The only stairwell in the whole space went to a stormroom someone had filled up with a bunch of wire and a white chunk of marble big as two of me. Someone said Gravey had been planning to carve a replica of someone famous out of the substance, though who they said the person was was someone I’d never heard of, which seemed not famous, and made in my mind the substance anyone at all. Anyone forever and unending. All over all earth. In the red I held my head inside me and the phone in me was silent. I was spinning. The bumps along my arm began to rise, form clusters. Some came where a watch would be if I would wear a watch but I do not believe in time; one large cushy pustule opened near the center of my skull meat, hidden underneath my hair; also a bulge on the foreskin of my penis, on the bottom side, so that while peeing it could not be seen; one last trio of ridges on the inside of my upper lip like a keyboard. These all rose out of me within eight hours of the first phone call; some became foamy and met my hunger. I tried to corner Josh and give unto him some witness, though he was already so gooey and socially negligible by this point in our lives he just smiled and smiled, taking no part. I nudged him with my boot and said goodbye, for while I knew I’d see him later, I no longer felt him in me anywhere I’d felt anyone I’d known before this hour right now. He was the last one. It was arbitrary. The red was all mine now.

FLOOD
:
Gravey’s Escherian perception of the architecture of his home and space surrounding is apparent by now: his house does not indeed have a stairwell (as far as we have uncovered), nor do many of the other physical elements or objects mentioned later actually appear. Perhaps some have been removed or destroyed. Perhaps there are multiple locations he is confabulating into one, much like the contours of his mind. At the same time, having spent dozens of hours in the house by now looking for answers as to the nature of this whole machine of events, certain of Gravey’s enunciations have in some subtle way in me seemed to ring true: as if there is something more about the spatial dimension of the building and what would come to wake inside it than one might gather simply looking. I can’t fully explain it as yet
.

I did not kill Gravey with my hands. That is, my hands did not touch Gravey in the making of the leaving of the body of his blood, nor did I aim a knife or pistol or other tool in his direction, nor did I say a word into his head that caused an orchestral damning damage. How Gravey died was something came into his life. I mean the next time I saw him after my instructions he was wearing black earrings and a blue shirt with a circle in the center of his chest. I think it was supposed to be a tour tee of a band he’d loved or wished he had. He was stooping. His hair was shorter on his head and longer on his face. Whereas before he’d never really talked except in wrinkles now he would not stop it with his mouth. He’d make a little barking sound. He’d sniff the wallpaper and pull it off in the kitchen to reveal the white behind it. He brought down a whole strip and wrapped a mask around his head. You could hear him talking inside the paper but the paper caught the language. He, as a conduit, was already being diminished. I needed nothing but to believe. I watched him from inside me as he banged his skull on the stove and turned the stove on and was laughing in the seven voices, the sound inside which I could not then remember the name of the neighborhood of where my father had had his house. I couldn’t remember my father’s name or the dog he’d bought me when I was four and it had bit me on the cheek some but we’d still kept him and I still slept with him in my room. All the photographs of things I’d done before now were somewhere outside Gravey’s house. Anything could go in just a single stroke of the eye against a portion of a building or a person in the long night around us. In knowing that, the house became not Gravey’s house but so much my body’s, I could smell it in my blood. This house needs to be painted, I heard Darrel say and now I was communicating with him not by the phone but in between my teeth and where my gloves would have been had I been wearing gloves. I understood. I went outside. Outside, in the mash surrounding the house with cash and unending television, by breathing in I gathered up the night. I felt it rummage in me, having traveled long for miles around the air of us in circuits everlasting. My skin around me did a slither; then I was sweat-logged, emptied of me. I used my arms to spread upon the eaves and locks and windows a shade more sky than nothing and less sky than what I already struggled to remember about the way the overhead had always seemed before: so dark despite the pins and orbs pretending to lend dimension to what otherwise went on no deeper than any body full of blood. Under the new moon my pores were so smooth. They gave the light back to the evening where the moon refused to take its turn as I spread upon the house our mortal color. I got less tired the more I worked. When I was the most not tired I could be, beyond my body, that was what I came to know as love.

JOHN R.
, age 18: “I don’t know what the fuck he was thinking painting the house like that with all what was happening and going to happen. It was like he wanted to be stopped before he started, or like he had to have it so raw in the face of everybody if he was going to do it. He really wanted to die. I knew right then I should have left them. I couldn’t leave.”

Name withheld
: “The black house was always black. It has always been black like any house and the painting placed upon it was only in the dimension meant to bring it right like any house should be. We would have painted every house on the street if we could have had that much to make for. Would have painted the houses on other streets and the streets and fucking Arnold Schwarzenegger and your fucking face you pig bitch ass fuck American fuck.”

The longer Gravey walked inside the house shaped in the black mass pigment the older he got faster. The skin around his ankles sagged in ways as if made melting. His arms could not reach to touch even the persons of our congregation who had allowed him to do the touching without the help of chemicals or need. He took to standing in the kitchen by the knife rack and leaning forward, eliciting shadows. He saw himself in windows and feared his disappearance. The less of him in him there was allowed me further open. Any minute I began to feel empty or dismissive of our fate, the phone rang in my blood again and rang until I pressed my palms flat against my lap or face and swore to my prior self that there was nothing undesigned about us coming, nothing I had power to remold. Other times the ringing would not happen and I’d just be blown up with such high shriek in all the air it was like every phone in America invoked at once, though no one else inside the house there seemed to hear. Somehow that pulling off of power made me horny and I would forget to rest. The night was lifting from the night. I needed not to not think. I used another phone outside the phone inside me to call my dad now still at the birth location to speak his death wish but it was already underway and always had been, disguised in stomach cancer and insomnia. His answering machine was still me age six saying hello hello hello hello hello hello hello hello. My present mouth moved to match the words, slowly unlatching itself from repetition into unforeseen syllables. I heard the future me in me explain some things about the old me to the old me on the tape directly, for someone else to bury, my blue-brained memory meat so divorced from anything that mattered: days not even days as I’d lived them but mnemonic home video of someone else’s shit-parade. Each word I said came out of me and left me without that word forever so that I could have new space to fill with how the future sounded. When I’d finished what I meant to say, I stayed on the phone until the machine ran out of tape, miming our silence, and my old house hung up on me and there I was now.

The next day Gravey was not there, or at least not Gravey as I had understood him. There was a slim window of excess time I spent between our transference. Our bodies now were both the same, like a shitting doll with several accessory skins you could force onto it. The quickening difference left in my memory a gap opened between who I’d been in my false youth and the present sack of meat I called my ongoing complexion. I’d spent my last night in the child awake inside the mirror chamber, pressed against it flat and laughing, waiting for Darrel to turn my hand into a saw or give me hope. The must of the room’s lining and my dreams of human leather and fire cities in the closet fill the skin around my eyes with birthing pimples. I had to pick me clean for hours. I came out of the dark covered in fuzz and walked into the kitchen with the itch risen and resounding, ready to take him alive by my own hands as had been commanded by Darrel in my blood for him and us brightly colliding and in the kitchen where he was most days most often he was not. I didn’t know that, no sooner had I made the decision to really kill him, he was me. He had always been me and always would be, just like for each new victim that I took I was always them also. The skin of every slipping minute passing as my human brain rattled to catch up to my condition sealed me deeper in our flesh, a vessel desperate for itself. In the needle den, no Gravey. No Gravey in the yard or in the drum rooms or rolled inside the closet where when I slept I dreamed of horses’ blood, though here were seven boys there passed out in no shirts and white jeans with the word FLAGELLUM stitched along the seam of their bellies and their hair done up like people meant to be wished upon, another band. I hated when fucking shitty bands slept in the fucking shitty house because I could hear the fucking shitty music coming out of their fucking shitty face holes and their fingers, though I could not remember in the night before there having heard them making any fucking shitty noise. I closed them in the room and locked the door. Today was Saturday or Wednesday in October or July. It was 1981 like it was 1440 like it was last month when you were born. Like it was 2667. My arms inside me kept on reaching after my own life. Gravey wasn’t in the yards. He wasn’t in the bunker where the shit went or any of the bifurcated rooms the house had made where it had learned to pull apart. I called his name saying just nothing. It was way way back behind my brain. I was way way back behind my eyes’ eyes in there with it wrapping gifts of undying adulation and absolute mirage.

FLOOD
:
Time also seems to be a problem for Gravey’s sense of person, which is not surprising considering he dresses like a mixture of the ’80s and the ’60s and the ’40s and the dead. His bouquet could as well be considered a mash of many generations. Either way, we’ve apparently reached the point in the concurrent story where Gravey can attempt a plea, though there hasn’t been a single detective or attorney who’s spoken to him and not come out saying the whole thing is an act, that he is aware of every inch of him, and not only is he aware of where he is, he’s just ahead
.

In the hallway bathroom I ran into another body, someone I knew I’d seen before, though now he looked like he’d aged a hundred months. He was busy flossing blood out of his teeth and chewing. Where is Gravey? I said, saying it seven times before it came out of my mouth. The other body looked at the me inside the mirror with his red gums gushing. His pupils looked like some pixels. Nice, he said. I feel you. He had a circle tattooed on his nose. I looked at him looking at me in the mirror and then I looked at me and back at him. Some of his mouthblood had flecked out on the flat reflections of us like confetti, a little party. Shut up with shit, I said. I’m after Gravey, I have a word to give him, have you seen him. The mirror bending. We watching we watching we watch we. Yeah, I see you, dude, the guy said, doubled. His many eyes drew slightly lighter. I felt much more tired now than before I’d ever gone to sleep at all.

CHARLES
, age 15: “I remember coming in one night and seeing Gravey standing with his back against the wall of the room and looking with his eyes so big at everyone like he’d never seen not only any of us but any person ever. He wouldn’t let anybody come within a few feet without swinging with his nails. He took some of my skin off, I remember, and then he started like licking at it, chewing it really hard and shit. It freaked me out then but later I would realize what gratitude was required of such honor. Whoever in him died to bring the making was the first of many necessary deaths, for which I am still praying to be given mine.”