Three Hundred Million: A Novel (8 page)

FLOOD
:
The morning after I read this section, I woke up with the book against my chest. I found I’d copied all the words above exactly onto the cover of my Bible, which I’ve begun keeping near me when working with Gravey’s pages. The handwriting looked like mine when I was a child more than it does now. The ink was all over my hands and face. I was clenching the pen so tightly even in my sleep that my nails had cut into the palm of my left hand, freeing the blood
.

The house began to fill. While the boys made boys between them, even more were mooring in. You could not throb a foot forward in the mess without connecting to another shoulder or coupling session. The house moaned for more house to move the house through, and the moaning moaned more for more mothers to make the house stay warmer than our machines, and the blood roared to match the need the incubating house had kept hidden long enough to turn invisible to the bored. The rising stink of all us becoming combined was never enough and made the boys even more horny to expand. The sea of heads the horizon promised yet to come were crispy, reproducing in my mind as we made mush from every love our house collected. I caught a little pinch of each boy’s private pleasure expressions and witched the air around their butts so that without me they could not fantasize on their own time and they would never jerk off right again. Their come should only wake them up for fire, so that they might appear inside themselves at last. Some boys I sent to carry knives and fires into small businesses and get the cash and bring it back to us and to bring meat back to us. That money I spent on mold, crushed into the form of blue pills I had more of the boys sell in the streets or feed into me and them from them to me by lips. Light, more light. We were training in the system. We swallowed glass or lengths of rope and wore them. My slow bone boys. I watched from inside me and overhead while work among us warm was done. I told the sadder ones to take themselves into museums and put their limbs through masterworks. I told them scrape a Kandinsky with their teeth. Lay some semen on a Johns. I felt the claw marks on my insides where Richter and Ruscha and Twombly and Warhol and whoever forever had been burned and buried in no future for their crimes. Fuck art. A fist could take the face out of the pigment, a newer, longer, death. These boys had sickles in their eyes already. They had lived long enough under developmental law. They would not come back but they would not need to. Their minds began with where the gash woke and hallelujah and amen with strokes larger than an eternity of media.

BILL L.
, age 14: “There are no museums in this city.”

I watched from inside me and overhead while work among us warm was done. Our heat protected us. There was a ring around our house that made it look like anybody’s. Detectives with silver badges would see no air and turn away. Their bones would melt inside their hands if they came nearer. No matter how many of the boys slipped away or did themselves in, in fear of really knowing, the house held more still. Every eye led back to ours. All of the rooms were one connected, though the boys slept in the belief that they were not aging, gifted with the basked blood and the elegance into which I had enslaved them. We were growing our own film inside the house now, from the cells shucked off of foreheads or from the backs of knees. Each scene provided its own nourishment to make the next one. I did not consume water or eat beyond the victims’ bodies or the sprouts that grew up from their remainders in the locked room under the house. Sometimes I wore a headdress of their skin and sometimes gowns like a desperate princess. The smell of human leather made me erect, and I’d pinch the meatus till it disappeared into the future, for anyone to ride then. I needed every hour of me now for every mother. The boys shot my semen for me in the meantime, from our shared veins. They’d fuck anything that slept. Any flat surface. The house was coming open.

A. F. F.
: “Yeah, a couple cops came sometime soon after the second set of girls. I don’t think the officers knew necessarily about what was going on but there’d been complaints about the black paint and the noise that would go on and on around the house, and the rising grasses, and man, just looking at the house, you knew. I went in the hall closet and hid and listened. I heard no talking. About an hour passed and nothing happened. I came back out slow and saw Gravey lying on the floor faceup with his mouth open. I thought he was dead but then I could see that he was laughing though no sound was coming out.”

Inside sleep I placed my own head on the machine of movies we had made or we had wished for in time recorded. As they played, they lost their color, turned monochrome and shaking without horizontal hold. From the inside looking out the days of us were in perpetual fast forward. Our song was on so many stations on the earth already and always had been, slid between the shit. Inside the muffled light of the house when I awoke again I’d have the boys come gather at a speaker each and pray in the leopard language of distortion and human vocals as gasping passage, to destroy this music, these head colds passed as hope. The paper cones vibrated with the nothing so hard, in certain frames it split my teeth; inside each tooth another field unfolding into seven where light I’d need when sundials had no one left to speak to could wait hidden. Where on the transmit span our song had not appeared yet, the other songs that came through hissed head colds into everyone we weren’t. You could hear the bodies with their wires and beef chortle feeding each other right in plainclothes and getting paid to do it. The dance palaces of black luck collapsing in no rhythm as boys and ladies rubbed themselves ready for us to want them even childless. By now none of the boys had pistons left inside them to even laugh at what so much marketable prophecy had done to all their friends, the people they had been once. I listened to them fry against the light. I loved to hear them splitting down the middle, becoming many different people, more of us. The way a body loses the self it is in the instant of the self recognizing the leaving of the self had never been more clear as in the hour of us doing absolutely nothing in between doing the worst things we could think of in America, where more air begat more air. Meanwhile, I let these boys have love. I let them taste upon me the prior mothers by the cells their bodies passed not making children yet this month, and then the cells that held within them as the making of me hard and wide inside them tried to take hold, which did not matter, as the cage was closing even still. Even in these grips of our deleted songwork, and the cower and the pinch, my boys could not itch the trigger in their blood against me and my desire to make them walk upon the earth and raise the dead. I could feel the living thoughts of every person ever vibrating in my boner, and only worse the longer they were allowed to carry on being entirely themselves. There was, for one, the house beside our house, right next door, which could be any house in America for all you know. This house, the first of many, of all of them, wore the color of the days I had not lived, days I could have lived if I were anybody else. I watched these neighbors with my mind. I could catch them in my mirrors. I stayed in one position with my fingers at my throat over a significant stretch of evenings, aiming eyes into the eye of me and memorizing where they had been already so I would know what I was going to do. I was doing all these other things at the same time too like drawing maps and baking cakes and buying stock and thinking of the day.

The best thing about planning to kill everybody in America is you can begin with anybody in America. We’d been becoming all our lives. Always our fathers had dementia whose fathers had had dementia and made our fathers with our fathers’ mothers loved our fathers and saw our fathers meet our mothers in transitory ecstasy and our mothers loved our fathers and made us in their image so that we too would do fuck and make more also. To have a mind now requires one to forget so hard even inside the perpetual familial forgetting that it now took so little crime for no crime to be distinct from all the rest, even a crime as fine as everybody in America at last at once dying, which is why it had to happen and is why I felt I had been given hands. Each object created in our image prior was a gun aimed at our forehead. Each word a hair on the finger that pulled the trigger. Each song baked into our heads so small to make room for the bigger song the band beat the shit out of with the instruments in the rooms around me, as I hawked up the liquid in which our arms and legs would be coated so that we could begin to leak the killing procedure into the cities in infestation, using every person’s arms instead of just the boys’ and mine. It would not take long to wake in where it already had been implanted. The faith that people have in people would be the very skin of the bag in which we buried our husks inside the bags of flesh we walk around in before the sun and wind and residue of all that speaking at last found us all in our eternal lack of motion there together, giving firm horizon to all this memory language and videotape, from off which we refract back into the refraction from which we’d come, beyond the edge of all possible communication, beyond reproduction.

R. A.
, age 22: “Something about the cream of the breath when words came out of Gravey made you want to make them happen, made you believe that what he said was really god. I never really believed in god before but if there was a god I thought it should feel like what I felt seeing the life come out of people. It was a power. We were making something of the earth’s presence. All everybody seems to want is to feel consumed with something and surrounded by something and this did that to me more than any else I’d had before. So yeah, I did whatever Darrel said but it was what I wanted too.”

And so we went unto the neighbors. The crash of night again rose shielding light against the sky for us to walk beneath unseen into the community with arms raised and faces washed. There were more of us than I could count between the mirrors, though as we surged out from the windows I realized there were less. It didn’t matter. From the light our cords contained returning to the evening made my eyes hulk in every head. Around the house a whitewash gored over the yard in the husk of moths that came to feather at the warmth our home birthed by all the flesh and homebirth. No one could see shit besides what hadn’t happened yet. Each of the boys carried long knives, which I had them select from the set of flatware in my heart according to their height: the shortest self carried the longest blade and so on unto there, where at the middle there had been the most medium of people, and the steak knife. I’d slit this middle child’s throat for being average, which seemed too real. His common blood spread on the tile and would be repackaged into little vials I would have the boys take and release into random containers of organic juice in aisles across our minor cities. For my own part I carried the weapon of my silence where the wet inside me would not end. The animals and instruments we’d lived in and believed in by memory alone and worn as skin outside our skin unfurled a silent canopy above our heads as we paraded quiet into all that old United air. I walked hid at the center of our swarm toward the neighbors singing nothing, keeping Darrel’s common brain poised in the Eye of our parade as words furled between us each to etch our presence totally common, beyond what the flanks of any municipal alarm might feel. The air I’d supplied in the boys’ minds could blow straight a dead bolt on our imaginary war. This was not hyperbole. We were the neighbors, however many miles away. The street we held our heads to was everyone’s. Their wish lived in my fingers as I pointed our way toward where was love. The current now-becoming-now was finally actually at last the instant it had always been meaning to act like.

SAL
: “We didn’t even have to kill the family next door to kill them. They would be dead the next morning regardless, only now they’d not be having breakfast. The radios played Gravey dictating the moves we made on the FM band so everyone could follow on at home, though to them it sounded like Madonna.”

Name withheld
: “I was involved. I was not involved. Both are the same. That’s no more of a confession than pulling your car up in the drive-thru at Arby’s and ordering just enough to fill you up in your imagination. There’s no need for threatening me about getting to go home for saying any different than I have already, a thousand times over, since I was born. I’m a fire. My body is my helmet. Bleat.”

We used our knives to cut the wires down around the neighbor’s house. I ate some of the wire into my mind and felt it bake there, unto dissolution. It had a taste of smolder, its knotted innards fused and twined. The image of the hours burst into the house, laughing at us all forever at the seam of Exit Sky. What words those inches had accrued in shitting information back and forth between the people. I could taste where in the wire the neighbor mother’s speech and seeing, all her wishes her best guesses, had already been rummaged through her coilings hot and hard so many times she hardly had an imagination left. I could taste the remainder of the days of pregnancy about her where the babies had come out. Each of the babies had their own films in them like mine and yours, some of which the father in transcription of flash and mangy memory had tried to store as homemade media on versions of hard drives of the house’s machines before he was removed; the wire had eaten most of that too, by my order, encrypting its data into mental zits. It made the house’s body glow under no moon, feeding a beacon for us to flood forth toward as a beginning with which we could begin to make this home into more of ours. I heard the paint murmuring inside me, baking organs I could spoot into the gaps for insulation, the singing crease. The lawn beneath my body as I walked with arms down turned to velvet Astroturf. The dirt beneath the lawn turned to a putty you could use to seal a tunnel cut through brick. The night sealed us inside it. Insects in its shitstorm murmured words the mother would have one day said had we not come, while in my blood the words she’d say instead became my torso. I had been carrying this moment’s creation in the curls of my black sacs for thirty-four years and a tight collection of horrifying months. Each hour I could not be here in the moment of the passing moment was a death I lived through and would never have again. The boys did not understand this, I knew, and did not need to. They had their own words and hours to carry thick, to lie down inside of without crying on the softest nights knowing what would come for them among some end. They were only partially eternal. They were not yet their own death, so could go on now into any other. As we crossed the lawn of our new victim toward the coming house I made our gang sign with my shoulder at the moon, the throat of Darrel, which could never be destroyed, no matter how much blood was hurtled through it, or what food the raining meat would ruin. The windows of the house our house descending in our vision above the neighbor house reflected nothing back at nothing. We did not appear in the smear, as we had had our own masks made of our faces and wore them now no longer left as masks but accusations of our heads. I could smell America warm for mating, like what else is new. Somewhere nearby men were carving ice into beautiful ideas. The glint of our knives against the window gleam made steam rise, become the planets. We encircled the house kissing the tips of blades. It made a hole around where we would enter. Through the rim of the house I could hear the fourth mother in preparation, rubbing her fingers, breathing the last gas her cells required to make her body’s shape and smell into how it would be when it became. There had to be the exact amount of her left in her and the exact amount left out. The minute had been decided. I led the song in singing as the throat of the moon disappeared behind itself and gave us grace, opened up our pure eternal vision, and in we come.