Three Hundred Million: A Novel (46 page)

The years go on in sevens. Each of the years is its own veil, surrounded by each person’s private birthplace in all minds. The names of the colonies and states seem imbued with past days each in their own way, fat full of exit language that on our lips all make the same shape. We worship light in Smexas, New Xork, Cruxisim. We worship in harbors, getting haircuts, growing fat. These are the names of god not god. Our history is overrun already with commercial demand, and demand for demand, which means we put the butter in the freezer and the ice cream in the cupboard, believing this is correct, and never knowing any different. We turn on the water in the sink at the faucet to watch it run and are surprised when it is cold and we try to answer the phone but it keeps ringing though we are speaking into the mouthpiece saying hello hello hello hello hello and the words do not exist and then we shit our pants again and cannot feel it and the history goes on.

You already know about the wars. You know about the lengths of leg and laughter that rolls from the holes we had been given and woke again in new shapes each day to wrap around the air between the pillars of the house that squeezes itself in pockets of our fat. Each house is the same house and knows all colors secreted together into mirrors. The singing is not songs, but a certain form of itching that crawls along our spines and jellies and makes along the sky appear the moons, the eyes of long dead light arriving. Each instant holds more work than any one cell could hold through any other instant. In this way we repeat even our present moments. We build the boxes and the homes again and again as has been told, while waiting through any instant for any ending. No one word or face or image can hold the center, and so without center, we reflect. This happens every instant every hour. Where we walk is where our killer awaits us. It feels good to be wanted. We watch the killer writhe inside his wishing to kill and kill and kill again, the singing taking shape inside the killer’s body as thunder, sunshine, writing, by which we learn to plan our days. This is our history, we imagine, language buried in a song no one is hearing. Each sentence thought or spoken indicates the coming birth and death of thousands.

We count upon our hands the gold. We elect bodies to edict above our bodies. Numbers become counted, tallied, praised. Days each day feel the same with slightly different skin. We remember the story of the birth of Christ, of erosion, of the barbarism of the land, relayed by people repeating words inside words; the words change shape each year. It’s impossible at all to remember any of it more than in short life shifts, as we’ve been slaughtered, sautéed, saladed again, so continuously it feels like progress.

There is a catalog of vast delight. We’ve been murdered, but we’re inventing! We make more locks to fit with keys, taking photographs to deform the light with what we might remind ourselves we know, and what we looked like then, and who stood by us, and anything at all. It’s not a dream we’re dreaming; it is us.

We invent swim fins. We invent the octant and the stove. We invent mail order, the lightning rod, the catheter; we invent the swivel chair, the flatboat, bifocals, the automatic flour mill. We have held these things before. They take shape around our bodies. We invent the cracker, the cotton gin, the wheel cipher, the fireplace, the suspension bridge, the hydrant, the amphibious vehicle, refrigeration, percolation, the lobster trap, the circular saw. These are American creations. It’s another new beginning. We are Americans again, filling ourselves again into where we were or are again or will be or want to or want to want to or will or were. We invent dental floss, the milling machine, the lathe, the detachable collar, the graham cracker, the platform scale, the electric doorbell, the machine reaper, Morse code, the sewing machine, the threshing machine, the combine harvester, the steam shovel, the wrench, the solar compass, the circuit breaker and the relay there between. Each day is less a day of ours. Each day is a day. We invent the self-polishing steel plow, the corn shelter, the sleeping car, vulcanized rubber, anesthesia, the grain elevator, the ice cream maker, the evaporator, the printing press, the tape primer, the baseball, holding on tight to our eyes; the printing telegraph, the doughnut, the safety pin, the gas mask, the inverted microscope; Herman Melville publishes
Moby-Dick
; the fire alarm, the elevator brake, potato chips, the clothespin, the breast pump, condensed milk, we will relearn to feed our child; toilet paper, pepper shaker, monkey wrench, and mason jar; ironing board, twine knotter, burglar alarm; escalator, vacuum cleaner, repeating rifle, the twist drill; postcard, pin tumbler lock, machine gun, the enclosing surface of the home; Henry Howard Holmes kills at least twenty-seven bodies; breakfast cereal, ratchet wrench, roller skates, spar torpedo, cowboy hat, urinal, chuckwagon, motorcycle, paper clip; barbed wire, ticker tape, water-tube boiler, refrigerator car, paper bag, tape measure, vibrator, American football, the pipe wrench, the clothes hanger, the can opener, sandblasting, the mixer, the diner, the railway air brake, jeans, the knuckle coupler, earmuffs, the fire sprinkler, ice cream soda, the quadruplex telegraph, QWERTY keyboards, the dental drill, the mimeograph, the synthesizer, the airbrush, the tattoo machine, the phonograph, district heating, the carbon microphone, the free jet water turbine, the bolometer, the cash register, the oil burner, candlepin bowling, the electric chair, the electric dead; the metal detector, the electric iron, Christmas lights, the electric fan, the solar cell, the thermostat, the dissolvable pill; do you want me to keep going, do you love me, are you inside me, are you mine; you must keep up; we invent the lap steel guitar, the popcorn machine, photographic film, the skyscraper, fuel dispenser, dishwasher, filing cabinet, telephone directory, slot machine, softball, gramophone, comptometer, AC motor, kinetoscope, trolley pole, drinking straw, stepping switch, revolving door, payphone, the stop sign, the tabulating machine, the smoke detector, the jackhammer, the Ferris wheel, the Tesla coil, the zipper, the bottle cap, the dimmer, the tractor, laxative, radio, mousetrap, volleyball, comic strip, cotton candy, muffler, charcoal briquette, remote control, semiautomatic shotgun, hairbrush, filing cabinet, flashlamp, and the century ends, this ends the century, the next century begins, this begins the century; we invent the thumbtack key punch assembly line Jane Toppan kills at least thirty-one safety razor radio direction finder hearing aid postage meter teddy bear periscope air-conditioning tea bag offset printing press airplane windshield wipers baler automatic transmission AC power plugs batting helmet architectural acoustics fly swatter ice pop paper towel electric washing machine electric mixer Skee-Ball paper shredder suppressor gin rummy headset binder clip automobile self-starter road surface marking autopilot fast food restaurant electric blanket electric traffic light traffic cone fortune cookie skeet shooting supermarket cloverleaf exchange where the fuck are the bodies tow truck condenser microphone the bodies the bodies the toggle light switch the killer’s arm stream cipher superheterodyne receiver hydraulic brake blender pneumoencephalography silica gel pop-up toaster Albert Fish kills at least five and maybe more than one hundred jungle gym garage door flowchart bodies adhesive bandage bodies water skiing radial arm saw bulldozer bodies masking tape Reuben sandwich Gertrude Stein publishes
The Making of Americans
Tilt-A-Whirl killer cotton swab America fucked in America instant camera gas chamber execution Moviola garage door opener power steering drive-thru liquid-fuel rocket bread slicer jukebox garbage disposal where are the bodies negative feedback amplifier recliner ice cube tray this is America bubble gum this is a list of holy wars wars inside the bodies for the bodies in the name of the name of names electric razor iron lung air traffic control Freon tampon applicator flight simulator sunglasses frozen food particle accelerator car audio Carl Panzram kills at least twenty-one and sodomizes at least a thousand runway lighting the bathysphere chocolate chip cookie electric guitar strobe light golf cart we have not yet learned quite how to kill radio telescope tape dispenser drive-in theater impact sprinkler trampoline Richter scale franchising black light parking meter surfboard fin pH EEG topography stock car racing programming language the bodies in the head the chairlift bass guitar photosensitive glass digital computer shopping cart blood bank cyclamate beach ball fiberglass xerography nylon Teflon soft-serve yield sign VU vocoder deodorant acrylic fiber corn dog napalm killkillkill microwave oven cruise control chemotherapy William Heirens kills at least three bodies DEET diaper proton therapy cloud seeding transistor Ed Gein kills at least fifteen women defibrillator acrylic paint supersonic aircraft hair spray windsurfing cat litter video games cable TV flying disk carbon dating airsickness bag atomic clock crash test dummy artificial snow credit cards leaf blower cooler wetsuit correction fluid airbag polio vaccine barcode artificial heart Apgar Wiffle ball TV dinner automatic door synthetic diamond radar gun nuclear submarine William Gaddis publishes
The Recognitions
hard disk OS wireless microphone laser sugar packet bubble packing carbon fiber integrated circuit fusor weather satellite spandex artificial turf magnetic stripe card global navigation the pill spreadsheet wearable computer biofeedback light-emitting diode jet injector glucose meter computer mouse lung transplantation BASIC neutron bomb plasma display Moog eight-track heart transplantation LCD SQUID snowboarding Kevlar hypertext cordless phone Richard Ramirez kills at least fourteen space pen minicomputer CD internal-frame backpack food bank handheld calculator racquetball virtual reality bone marrow transplantation lunar module laser printer Charles Manson kills no one with his own hands inside the family mind of minds Taser mousepad markup language LAN PC microprocessor floppy disk email C video game console John Wayne Gacy kills more than twenty-four bodies and buries them inside his home oh here are the bodies there will be more bodies more bodies ended more bodies made Randy Steven Kraft kills at least sixteen bodies and maybe more than sixty Thomas Pynchon publishes
Gravity’s Rainbow
personal watercraft recombinant DNA catalytic converter mobile phone Ted Bundy kills more than forty bodies voice mail Dean Corll kills more than twenty-seven boys Heimlich maneuver Post-it UPC David Berkowitz kills six bodies wounding seven digital camera Ethernet breakaway rim Hepatitis B vaccine Gore-Tex MRI BBS Carlton Gary kills at least seven women Joseph Paul Franklin kills at least eleven Jim Jones kills nine hundred and seventeen bodies with his mind Coral Eugene Watts kills between eighty and one hundred women winglets polar fleece control-alt-delete fetal surgery space shuttle paintball GUI internet laser blind signature Gary Ridgway kills at least seventy-one women laser turntable Henry Lee Lucas kills at least eleven and as many as six hundred Cormac McCarthy publishes
Blood Meridian
atomic force microscope stereolithography DMD Perl Richard Angelo kills at least twenty-five bodies Eddie Leonski kills at least five nicotine patch firewall ZIP file format magnetic lock sulfur lamp Bret Easton Ellis publishes
American Psycho
Jeffrey Dahmer kills at least fifteen people and consumes their bodies Aileen Wuornos kills at least seven men GPS scroll wheel JavaScript low plasticity burnishing bait car David Foster Wallace publishes
Infinite Jest
Francisco del Junco kills at least four women Ronald Dominique kills at least twenty-three men Mars rover DVR virtual globe phase-change incubator Dr. Harold Shipman kills at least fifteen Segway artificial liver SERF Tommy Lynn Sells kills at least twelve and as many as seventy-one HPV vaccine 3-D model rendering shingles vaccine trongs Dennis Rader kills at least ten women nanowire battery bionic contact lens composite aircraft whoever what Gretch Gravey kills three hundred million all in all.

Do you want to start over. Do you hear the coming number. Are you still dead. Are you the sound. Do you want to live forever instead. Do you love me. Can you prove it. Prove it. Prove it. Name one of the seven hundred ways to speak. I will be listening. I am listening.

Today is your birthday.

Today is today.

The light of all the nights we’d killed and fucked crashed through my mind. It pulled thick light down around the body of the idea of creation. The repeating sound of all our days was the color of all reflected flesh at once negated. There was never any actual beginning we saw by our hands as they grew even paler than our minds were. Milk was snowing from between the burning legs spread on the ocean purring blue comedy in invitation for the god to kiss the god and enter the god and wash the god off from the inside and live him. And the skin of everyone around me scrolled away from the night’s color into something more like the daylight we’d learn to like to feel alive in. Every word was any word, cursed into the Pledge and the National Anthem and the Constitution and the Declaration and the Vows and the Holy Book and the Enactment spoke at once inside the rubbing of our bodies turned to candles around the bed of a great furnace lurking underneath the sash of dads queued up each gut waiting for the right to scratch against its own destruction. Soon the sky had learned as well to speak our myths, which made it all the colors there at once seeming opaque enough to huddle beneath and deep enough to shriek at with machines and devices in the image again where the child would learn to walk under. Where in every understanding’s brutal echo our shared forefathers stomped around in mortal retardation like a dream, claiming each inch of everything as only his forever despite what death, every oven and cloth and pill and mate and wish and day and age and sound not ours and taking shits inside the food and defending the food only ever with his fists while above me stars made marks along the land. Where every word we’d ever said instead of being any ever to me now sounded all like the same word at once:
no
. No no no no no no no our forefather screamed inside my heart, at every pixel beyond his, each having intended to fit fine inside the heads of us oncoming but held in like a blaspheme in the presence of god arrived at last. With each enunciation of the same cell, the cell grew slower, smaller, less like anything once ours. We all demented in his image. We at last before the screen, showing no light, seeing the light instead of seeing the thing not there as well. The glue rattled in our teeth and prayed no syllable and lashed against the mantle falling through white on the idea of white lurking its way all over everything and someone coming to the door pressed facewide to every door, the living rooms and bedrooms and guest rooms and kitchens softened from their black glow into the colors the night our very presence had demented around the house like patterns that gave us glow inside our sleeves enough some days to stand enough some days to walk from room to room even wishing for no image even hopeful, while all across the air the cells of our friends and family pulled apart to make as strangers and were laughing through the night where in absence of the father we forgot to close the homes and lock the doors against whoever even knowing who had been or what had been or what was wondered, what we of we would need to grow among us into the space between the space made for us to live and need forever in against the vast fabric of one long wherever full of all things named and cataloged under the pustule called a moon and the cancer called a quasar and so on and so on with the machine light burning our eyes, with the telephones ringing through the never-ending putty wishing words into the fabric of us blurring the fabric where they could not fully enter our bodies and become us, while No no no no no no no our father screamed in his own absence, barely noise at all now. No no no no no no no, with his last undead breath. No no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no.