Three Hundred Million: A Novel (11 page)

FLOOD
:
The night I first read to this point in the manuscript I paused here because there was something knocking at a window in the far end of my hotel room, which I’d rented to read inside a different space from where I sleep. I’d not told anyone where I was staying; there was no one to tell. I went to the window and looked out. It looked like any kind of time. No one was out there. I looked at long angles with my head against the glass to try to see what had done the knocking. I got my gun and opened the door. On the ground there was a picture of me sitting on the bed in my hotel room, reading the book. You were in the picture, too. I don’t know who you are or what you look like, but it was you. You were on the bed asleep. The photo was taken from the perspective of the bathroom mirror. The next morning the picture had gone pale
.

FLOOD
:
This page at first glance appears blank. Up close, though, in proper light, there is a kind of indecipherable font, or more like little pictograms that don’t seem to form any image. I find myself staring into the page here for too long at times, waiting for the build of it to compile correctly, but instead I end up feeling sick or falling asleep. Then I look up and see it’s as light or dark outside as ever, like no time passing. After more time spent studying the pictograms I feel certain I have seen them elsewhere in the world, like signs of corporate logos or textures on the sides of buildings seared somehow into my unconscious, but of course this is me searching for meaning. Likely there is no meaning but it is my job to persist in the identification of tragedy nailed to nothing, and so I will. Honestly at this point I want to burn the book. I also find myself thinking I want to eat it, that I want to get the sentences tattooed on my body. The thought snakes through me in my voice. I have been sleeping with the book at night whether I do or not, like suddenly it’s in my arms, or it feels like it is. It is a pressure. A dress. It kind of itches. As an afterthought, I have covered up the mirrors in my home, though not those in my car. Suddenly I feel over-aware of the number of mirrors I come into contact with daily, often without having even noticed their presence in the room. The book continues
.

“Do you know about the city of Sod,” I heard me saying. “Do you know about the city of the children of Sod. Do you know about the silence of the locks in the city of the children of Sod, who have been waiting to be cut free from bereavement. One method for arriving at the white gate is chloroform and candles. This should be applied to you by a licensed client of the word, who will appear above your bed in a down flak jacket. I am the jacket. The erotics of names is not a joke. Every night’s name is every night’s name and the room’s too. I will arrive inside you also and you will allow me. Every griever is my fiancé. Our jagged tips reach up into the Sod. The transfigured night is why you age. The cloaking me will kill the remainder so we can have an unoblivious serenity. I am online. The me I am not me inside the mirror walks toward me as the mirror grows closer with me in it, approaching me approaching. The glass dome on this home shatters every time another person has a birthday. The homes beside this home call the shards in mnemonic purring to come into the home and cut them into worship. The entrance to the cloaking city must be cloaked on the face of the blood of all. Eternally, the lamps inside our house so familiar they are not there. Where I am so warm in me I can’t sleep until the work is written and erased. Where I can sleep outside me against the neighbor house with my head against the siding, listening for my name without realizing I am listening for my name or realizing I am listening or realizing I am not against the house or I am not outside my house but your house. My words eat the tone out of their fantasy until they look like something you have done or will do or would want to and will or would want to and cannot or will again. When I say I love you I mean I am you in the color of your blood. Welcome our house of endless milk. The mist of our fourteenth moon rising in the cake batter of the mattress where you will make the final child of your whole life each night and transfer into us. Not yours but yours and mine. Not ours.”

Name withheld
: “Sometimes he would just lie down on the ground and fold into a ball so tight we couldn’t pull him back apart. He seemed in those moments to be trying to be compressing himself all back into a dot somewhere inside him, like disappearing. He could get so small. He would seize and seem to be weeping but nothing came out. He would speak in the language of a child, like one who’d never learned a word. These spells might last three minutes or an evening, which took the same shape. These ways were when we feared him most.”

BILL L.
: “No new word shall form. No shapes. No abyss of sky. No now.”

By now the boys were bringing mothers home in set of sevens. I wasn’t even asking but they had their own integrations going, fired in their bellies, doing my work for me while I grew larger. Sometimes their genitals pushed so far out through their pants the dickheads had fists that punched holes in the house and let the outside in, or their ovaries would distend against the innards of their belly and make it impossible to go around. Whole sections of the house might be partitioned off for hours with flesh, stranding boys or sound behind a length of thickening wall so full of the media we were expunging it was like the house had disappeared. And this I realized was a fantastic predicament and must be continued as our day grew larger among the unknowing fields of neighbors waiting to become us. Their private screams in the American aloneness trembled and made my lardy body tremble too, a necessity for learning how to feel them. People. I had so much of them inside and around me I caved a new eternity every time I stroked. Our victims were coming so easily now it was like a video game sewn in my vision with the controller embedded in my breath. Some days multiple mothers would have to be discarded in order to keep within the house some space to exhale and I was too full to eat much of them so I let the boys and local pets have more than their fair share. I hardly even believed in killing anymore and so it was like I was always the president on vacation. I’d already lost count of our accumulating libidos and anyway I couldn’t reach my dick. Words filled me in the second of every deathblow as the bodies became part of the enunciation with the last note of the band of Darrel purring silent noise through and through and through the glass of time. All I ever did now was lie around and grow and watch my growing in the mirrors fund the growing further dadlike. Some of the mirrors had gone so black inside the ejection of the spirit into the house that they were halls as well, connecting us with passageways to other homes and corporate offices full of more victims. In reverse we populated backgrounds of universal art with our machetes and laughed from where inside the cabinets and collard greens the audiences would retroactively disregard how anything had changed in the painting or program or outlet mall they’d been born to admire, allowing sharper gnawing and longer sleep, allowing my prowess to fill the house all by myself alone and leach out into one life then another, loved from foot to face by anyone I entered, because I was as much them as they were and by god were they ready to worship that. Both the mother and the child myself between us. The seas of we united and extended in the rapidly approaching wrath of heatless energy awakened only in death.

KALEB
, age 17: “Black gouge meat poured from them. I saw Darrel lift them up. They were inculcated sweetly with the blue drum throbbing in me and we were the sound. I had waited all my life to be the centerpiece of someone’s dreamland, as when I closed my eyes inside my head I could hear nothing but the nothing moving through the cities whistling against the fumes. The mirror of the reflection of the mirror of the sky made flesh stand out on the heads between the curvatures of buildings where when I went and sat inside a room I could feel holy by lying on the floor and looking down. The meat of the women was the most beautiful year of my life every minute of it even as I knew I did not want to see them suffer as I wear my mother’s heart. There is only one motion to becoming and that is to no longer press the button and yet the hand of the globule in the arm of the American raises up and raises up never pausing.”

We ate the mothers’ neckflesh and their lockets, we ate their wedding rings or where those rings were not, we burned the hair and drank the smoke in, felt in filling where in we we wished we weren’t, we peeled the linings off the organs and wrapped their softing casings on our faces and stood in the overwhelming late and saw each other as another rising, we ate the smile meat off the cheeks and around the lips in lining, we ate the glimmer of the eyelids empurpled where each had rolled up on itself so many times against the sun for sleep or in the blink of meat encased among the soft night of the self; we shucked the bones clean while I gave speeches that contained no words, the screaming so loud in our tendons that it climaxed through the milk of air and was not there above our breath. Our new god’s body rang the telephones inside the houses as I ripped again and again from the many minor mothers’ chests the layers of the flesh where they had held the feelings of the mother for the child, and this was eaten again under a load of rain by fourteen Darrels who would mold the meat inside them into a horn that grew out on a lesion on my large intestine as more and more the song grew strong. The stench of blood would etch itself under our own nails and in the slits between the mirrors and the grade of air where we believed in what we were becoming, in the flood of human silt and milk and pilling on the veins of space our being here must enter and awake. We ate the curling food of her brain tunnels unearthed from where the skulls split and juiced their columns clean between our teeth, sulking the amalgamation memory of our uncoming to the future diamond skull our last god longed for. The pretending light erupted gleamshapes on reality that mimicked our cold motion well beyond our homes as all minds remained united in the dead mouth of anywhere surrounded all the countless versions of the hours ticking upward to bare upon the sky a wish for all else appearing where it wasn’t. We would never need to kill again once there was no one left to kill. The world all ours, all bodies and all customs in whatever name refracted through the color soon we would become. There must be only one body remaining. This is why we eat: so that each I take in will be in me like the others he had eaten were inside him. All bodies pressed into the flesh of god. The color of the curd of the rainbow coming out of any inch of the killed held in perpetuity together in one final surface all regardless of how they were cut or who they’d been made by, in what citizenship or temporary color they’d believed, which mouth of time of us they entered to become an entry in index of the ultimate data, full defeat, unto an eternal life where life is not alive or dead but the deformity of the plane of space shaping the age of the dying god’s last novelty. And this still was not enough. No hour was sufficiently ours to be the way an hour had been in the hour of the making of earth according to man’s imagination. Where the mothers’ colors met through me they became fused, and I could have them and everything they remembered was open to everything. Everything not flesh or bone we did away with. We burned the bras we burned the hair we burned the credit cards and cash we burned the rings around the fingers we broke the fingers and the nails we burned the burning in their loins we burned them and we burned them. The lessons pilled up on the floor like the dream of a wall around our people that could not be felt. The colors of their lipsticks and foldings and our dry hump was overwriting the previous year’s best clothing designers’ dreamlives, thereby overriding yours. So that when we did find you in the killing fields, and we would, you would look more fuckable than you had ever on your own. Any inch of what was mine once became yours by my not knowing how to have it, in that wherever I was not looking was always the only place to be remembered. Bit by bit the nation ate itself alive by we the teeth. No matter what I gave or killed or wished or centered or reconceived by my own hands in the greatest struggle of passion I was nothing more than the end of the beginning. This had become our country all along. This had been the instant of the waking ending as it instanced open, and still waited for another end to bless our hearts. Another end was not coming. That would have been a gift to give your lover for every commercial holiday combined, though now all lovers were equal. Whenever anything ends before you, you may know now it is a false thing, and so call it, and so know the want of more, and more want of want of more of all what fills each prior sentiment as experienced in humans funding the understanding of true beauty. There was so much need now in the house where the mothers’ remembrance-complexes and remainders collided in psionic beehive, the wideload of pleading and bloodshed and their thereafter replicating so many haunted lives pressed in on the same air in the same era, the light of the TVs and the bulbs brighter than any sunrise or corona, that you could hardly think about your thinking. I was sleeping so well every night, nothing machining in the blue space where I had before me and before my present body always stung so hard the night would scream in the coming image of our god at last leavened in my breast as he always had and always would now. This act of our word written out by hand on this white paper was all we’d all been doing as a human people even closest in the moments we believed to be building our new homes. To stroke the hair of the loved ones, to fold grain into loaves that would be broken before audiences as entertainment. At last here I was, served in a service with no residual continuum beyond fiber, though there must so soon distinctly be a certain end for the flesh of those we wished into us as we laid the foundation upon turning every person back to zero. One nowhere for us all at once again, in which we could return the favor we’d been granted to appear ever out here side by side, though it would be not you or I who brought fruition, but simply the birthplace of an actually everlasting form of spirit beyond the grave. Refracted in the last black house of our black city once lined with mirrors now lined again with something spinal on the night.