Three Hundred Million: A Novel (23 page)

FLOOD
:
All the colors in my eyes. All the machines inside the machines in my body, the other bodies
. I swear this is not me speaking. I cannot control my mouth or hands.
The nightwave knitting though the fields, coloring
[his name]
in the space between me and where I am, which is becoming several more places every minute. It is splitting. We are splitting in it
. No.
Each of the strings of images begets the next
. No.
Try not to think of me as disappearing, but simply always being. Where I am, there you are
. This is not me. I did not want this. I will not believe this.
It has gone on this way for all of time
. Stop it.
It will go on this way for more than time is, every instant, so loud I cannot hear
. Stop.

Inside his sleep Gravey turns over to face up along the ground rather than face down.

He hears the word inside the curd inside the blood inside his skull.

He lifts his head with both hands to see the ground beneath him.

He barfs a liquid colored like the inside of a sun.

He eats the liquid back into him.

The hair grows on his head.

He grows.

The incline of the opened passage, unlike its central mainspring, slowly ascends. The wet under Flood’s feet recedes and follows him as footprints only briefly. What air there is is thick. The walls remain in darkness for some time, through which he wanders hands out before him, until there becomes a kind of light natural to the ongoing. Colorless, controlling. Beneath his feet Flood sees the white of the emerging surface turn to wood grain, then to carpet. The carpet is deep red, soft enough that it seems almost as if he isn’t walking on it. The passage continues.

Flood realizes he feels calm. Blissful, even. Easy. The higher he ascends into the branch, the less he aches from where he fell, the less he can remember the blood pouring inside him. Soon he can feel no pain in his body, and almost nothing there inside the work of moving, being.

The passage resolves into a wall. The wall is flat and mirrored, reflecting the orifice of the passage back into itself as if to make it appear forever going on. Flood does not appear reflected in the surface somehow. No matter where he moves, there’s only more of the passage headed back on where he came. He touches the mirror, feels its silence. There is a small latch attached to the edge of the mirror marked with a small burn mark, round like the world is, and hollow centered. When undone, the latch causes the mirror to open outward into what behind it.

What’s behind it is a home. On the far side of his mirror, Flood finds a room there opened up, having become accessible on its own side through a point where on the wall another mirror had been hung—a mirror to cover over the mirror through which Flood’s entered, or perhaps the back side of the same, either way a seeming point of unknown entry, linking his passage free into the house.

The room is decorated for a family. There is a sofa and a TV. There is a window covered with white curtains, bleeding light through. Bookshelves line the back wall filled with volumes whose titles Flood realizes he can’t read no matter how carefully he focuses. It is as if the room is slightly endowed with a blur, as if the lenses in his head have been set just out of focus.

He realizes, also, that here he can’t bring himself to touch anything the house holds. As he reaches for a light switch along the wall to fill the room up, he finds the blood inside his limb becoming heavy very fast, tingling in such a way that the closer he comes to touching anything the room holds, the more difficult it is to move. At the edge of where his hand stops, even just there fractions of an inch off the wall, it is as if he is being pressed back at by a great force. Once he stops trying to touch, his arms go easy again, and he can continue freely into the space. It is like this with all items there collected in the house, the decorations and the weapons and the food and tools and furniture and junk. His flesh feels cold. It’s as if he’s there but not.

It does not feel strange to walk naked among the home of strangers. This way his skin can breathe, and he is more open to understanding. He can’t remember anytime he hasn’t ever been just skin like this, breath like this.

There are other rooms off the first room. There is a kitchen and dining room and a half bathroom. Off a slightly longer hall there are two doors to separate bedrooms. In the first room a child is sleeping, the air around him illuminated by a single pink-swathed bulb low to the ground. Images cover the child’s walls every inch, as if trying to cover the flat white space out with shiny famous faces and cartoon bodies. The child looks like any child, the way all children do to Flood, never having been a parent. The child sleeps clutching a toy camera to his chest; a camera instead of a bear or blanket, as if at any moment he will be called on to document the world.

In the second bedroom there are two adults side by side, facing opposite directions. Across from their bed, a mirror, doubling their image, and the image of the open door. Again Flood does not see himself reflected in the mirror.

Flood comes into the room. He comes to stand over the bodies. Their breath is low and steady, and does not react to his presence.

There is another window here, over the bed, and here the curtains have been pulled back. Though beyond the window, Flood sees nothing but more darkness. No streetlamps and no moon. No strange edge to the way the absence of light lies over objects underneath it. Just flat unending black, profuse as hell. It is a different sort of darkness than that from which he’d come out of in the tunnel. He can feel no language in it. No sound.

Flood finds that, unlike all the objects, he is not prevented from touching the people. In fact, almost the opposite is true. He doesn’t know why, but he can’t seem to control his left limb from rising up to pet the long arms of the sleeping woman. Her skin is soft and covered in light hair. She is very warm. The man is warm, too. Flood lingers over both, caressing their scalps and tracing the veins along their limbs. They don’t seem to feel anything, or don’t respond with more than slight alterations in their sleeping posture. Their eyes are rolled back under their lids, jerking hastily under the flesh there as if in desperation for some icon lodged into the skull.

Flood feels a great desire to lie down. More so, he wants to pull the man out of the bed and stuff his body in the closet, and take his place in the bed beside the woman. Just to sleep some. He is so tired. It has been long years coming up to now. But the man’s body is too heavy to move, even an arm alone. Flood can do nothing to change the way they are; he can only brush and breathe against them, feel them, try to try. The woman’s face seems so familiar; the lips around the mouth, the groove of the neckline, the shoulders. He wants to hold her, to lie against her. Instead, he tries to wake her, shaking gently at her shoulders. He says a name he believes could be hers, could be anybody’s. She goes on sleeping, always sleeping, no matter what now.

Under their skin, the eyes looking out seem to see nothing.

Flood leaves the room. Coming back along the wall, he finds the child’s door has been closed and locked from the inside. Flood pulls at the knob and whispers into the gap under the door and no one answers.

Other windows in the house reflect the same black matter as the first. Flood can’t force his arms up to try to turn the latch or bang the glass out, the blood inside his arm turning to stone. The same is true of the three doors he finds leading into the space from outside; he can’t reach them, even the one he finds ready to be unlocked, the key left turned in the deadbolt for anyone to use.

He could stay in here forever, Flood feels. He could move from room to room and continue his life like that. He would feel fine here. Nothing would have to happen. The people could sleep and sleep and say nothing to him. He feels no hunger, no fear, no boredom, and can’t imagine having to feel these ways again. And yet he knows, inevitably, these feelings will find him, grow into him, change him. He knows he has to leave the house before anything can take his heart; to keep the feeling he feels now inside him, held inside him, untouchable.

Flood returns to try to wake the woman twice again without result before he leaves the house the way he came. His body passes though the mirror, and then, once clicked locked behind him, he continues back down the passage into different darkness.

FLOOD
:
Whatever else I can’t remember I remember was my eye forever
.

They realize Gravey must be moved. In the streets and cities there’s demand, creamed in the people. The smell of the blood of the city says his name inside them. The people wish. The warden’s worried all the people begging banging shrieking fucking licking at the doors around the center will find some way to beat their whole way in, and worse than free the killer, kill him. Gravey must suffer for his crimes. All must suffer, all days, in the name they’ve built to walk and live among. The warden wants to get him somewhere undetected, with thicker walls and wiser locks. Four men in black suits come in and hold him down and stick his forearm with three different kinds of needle, leaking juice. Thereafter there’s a large amount of light.

Gravey grins. He blinks his eyes hard, feeling giddy. He looks into the men.

“My friends,” he says. “My me again.”

His forehead shudders, quaking in moonlike ridges.

The men stop. The men stand around Gravey in a circle. They watch him lie. There is a kind of smell about the session, skin in glisten. The dark clothes of the men begin to darken more. They do not look up at one another. The drugs in Gravey’s arm trace through his veins. His eyes remain open. He does not look at the men. The men adjust their positions in the circle without speaking to form another kind of shape. Gravey seems to puff up some. A smoke somewhere rising. Gravey gives the men new names. The names appear inside their head. The shape of them shifts again, again. The walls are wet.

The men leave the room. They leave Gravey on the floor there with the door open.

The largest of the four men walks along the long hall to the exit corridor. He comes into a series of other rooms and goes into the first room not already occupied with warming bodies and takes a service revolver off the wall. He shoots himself in the shoulder, that with which he’d given Gravey the injection, then shoots between the eyes. His blood runs from his body in a star.

The second largest of the four men walks along the long hall to the exit corridor into the door to the outside. He walks straight ahead from the building bypassing his vehicle and the gates, walks without looking in either direction into traffic across the main thoroughfare abutting the complex, causing two family-sized vehicles to swerve to avoid him and crash into several vehicles, which crash into several more. He walks four point four further miles causing similar dysfunction resulting in an uncounted number of accidents or deaths until he arrives at his home, where his wife and three-year-old daughter are napping in the smallest room of the house. He locks them into the house. He sets fire to the house using propane from the grill and gasoline siphoned from his car. He goes back into the house. He locks the front door, tapes his knees and wrists together, lies down on the floor there below the bed beside his child and wife.

The second smallest of the four men goes about his day; he feels tired but rather happy somehow, giddy even; in the morning he will make a routine visit to his physician, who will find a small blue growth in the flesh around his kidneys, and in the flesh behind his eyes.

The smallest of the four men goes into a break room with a telephone. He begins calling numbers from memory of the people and businesses he has known inside his life, dialing rapidly each one in an order subscribed to his emotion. He will speak to bodies, to machines. He will speak to the presences at the end of the line and give into them not a word but the Name of God coursed through him without sound. Each of the called will act on their own calls burned in their own brains until they have sent as well the waking message to hundreds of others, who do the same. Each person, having completed some precise number of calls already written, kills themselves with knives or ropes or pills or whatever way it is they always privately fantasized on at their grossest or most bored.

Gravey closes the cell with him inside it.

RUTHERFORD
: [
stricken from record
]