Three Hundred Million: A Novel (9 page)

FLOOD
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Indeed, no evidence in the homes of Gravey’s victims demonstrated their penetration. No apparent damage to the sealing or the locks, as if the rooms did not separate their interiors from their exteriors. In cases where the homeowners had alarm systems or watch dogs, etc., the alarms were not reported tripped, nor were unusual activities reported by surviving neighbors, suggesting that Gravey’s methods for entry were unusual, perhaps verbally or otherwise coerced
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We did not need the breath of keys or codes to slit the windows or the doors to allow our entrance. They already believed in us as much as anything could ever, without the necessity of will. All walls are permeable by simply wishing back against them hard enough to stir inside it the wish to be parted. Like this me and the boys came through the brick of any home, and found there the same objects of belonging, like a library full of shit. Once in, the boys at once dispersed into the house in shafts of their own need, bleating their organs on the peace. The gristle of their mind clung to keep their innards from wanting so hard they burst out through their holes as they overturned the furniture and air, sniffing for the remainders of historical calamity we could fuse to right now. Our shapeless song began to splay and flub out of the holes the ceiling owned, turning sudden sense of present tense of coming killing into the night of what had always been the past. The fourth mother had yet to emerge. She had not completed her unknowable, unmanageable mother preparation in skin and nails and hair in the bedroom of her last night with her children in their rooms asleep. The phantom presence of the father in her mind provided us a breathtaking Trojan horse; she lived as if he’d never died, as if he’d been there in the house like any other husband every day since and past, part of Our Country, which is our world. We felt nothing beyond whatever natural border in our minds existed. This was painless to abuse; in passage it became true of every house surrounding: a nation of no father while the mother waits to die: the true nature of adultery. In the house becoming ours the mother wore her whitest gown. She appeared before we even found her. Her name was all over everything, in the sound of her sexlife and want for future, food in the fridge waiting to become more of her. The house clearly wanted her dead, too; it wanted to eat the food itself, to live for itself alone, to be itself and no one’s box; its cells were taking shape in full cooperation for the translation we would provide for what desperately everyday hope she’d tried to smush into the home’s walls to refortify what was not there. Everything had already happened and yet I had to play the part as had been promised. I walked along the long hall lined with pictures of the mother in different bodies than she had now and could never have again, alongside what other bodies the mother had met in nearby rooms and made time with, alongside the kids she’d pushed out of her hole, each of them as well in bodies that no longer fit them. I could hear the mother quiver through the house’s circuits, burning like star meat. She had a few more thoughts to think through unto the becoming zero. Her god was off duty tonight, somewhere like Disney. My teeth were greasy with intent to do exactly what I was doing. I had a boner and a cough. I heard Darrel in me getting stoned on our blood bowling open like locked darkrooms, black cabinets full of speaker coils. I was so ready to be. The smoke raised through my shoulder blades and made me scream in places where my own cells were turning square-shaped like STOP symbols on VCRs. I stopped along the wall and groaned our song some out of my mouth, holding my breath. I could hear this mother on the far side of the drywall. She was reading romance. I pressed my palm flat on the paint and said each word aloud as it crossed across her eye. She looked up at where I wasn’t yet. This turned me imminently blacker with the fury. The grain of the glass made reflective over the pictures shifting past from each new angle showed secret films of every hour in the house as this family had lived it, filled with great pus and totally false senses of inhibition. It was in me too, so it was in her. It was in the babies we had not had yet and for whom the future had to end. The house’s present children were asleep, dreaming of tunnels. Along the hall as if to match this vision in reverse my boys come coasting forward with the mother borne between them in another Christ pose. They’d given her a pretend choice between sex and death and she’d said nothing. They covered her mouth so the song would come out of her nostrils. I raised my arms and said Hello, pointing in every direction I could think of. Her head shook swoopy with her looking as she followed me with her face trying to understand anything. The book she’d read tonight had made her dreamlike. I had a new book. I bent down and said Hello again. She had another belly on her, someone else’s trimester. Her curvature was silly and elaborate. It kept begging me to kiss it. As I did, I heard her other children in the bedroom getting snuffed inside their dreams as one word from my lips sent through the wires in their new brother sent wide black swords into their sleep, and then their sleep went on forever. Each of their last cries was better entertainment than anything I’d ever rented. I moved to press my own belly against the mother’s so we’d match, my own gut full of the rite of fast food, hers the pustule of the future baby and diet shakes. My laughing gave her a massage until she was warm enough to pry apart in all the places her creator had designed for me to do so. I used my fists first, then my forehead, then my teeth, and then my eyes. I used the edge of her own camera to slice the best bits. I used the glass that housed the photographs and then the photographs themselves. I used the edges of the money she’d been saving to give to cancer research, I used her own nails, I used her own teeth, I used her. Every color that came out of what she had to be turned into was exactly like mine. They laid the mother on the floor. With my chest against the ground I drank the blood out of her womb with my whole mouth. I drank the blood from her vagina until she didn’t have a vagina really anymore, as far as god could tell. I drank and ate of her forever. The boys were clawing at my hands. I fed the boys in turns with each of my ring fingers as they sucked the way I told them. I made them wash their faces in it, their arms and hands. They took the blood and heard me speaking, clearing each word of the mother’s from the remainder of her mind. With these words as I translated, the boys began to scribe this book along the wall, rubbing their ring fingers and their dicks in a dot matrix aimed at covering the house, filling in the walls with our scripture around the mother until her bleeding was depleted and then the real writing began.

The fourth mother began giving up her birth. The scroll of wet carried from her organs to the air so we could inhale it quicker. I thanked her by putting my arm inside her. I clenched my groin and touched the center of my skull to her tummy nozzle. The child was in there. I named the child every name but Darrel. I gave him a religion and a cause, selected his sexual preference and sense of humor from the vast array of ugly possibilities. Each fiber of his then became mine, ours in the light that we could all smell him more than anything else. He was risen, in the past tense. The mother was shuddering so fast it was like she was rewinding, pulling her idea of the house in down around her, giving her everything over and over. The power sockets in the house around us began staggering with the hell of what they had to offer light to. Above the house I heard the voice of Darrel utter his commandments full of silence. My chest was cymbals. We’d kissed the crest. Above the house I heard the Eye of Darrel blink and brush the crust off some morning soon to come like any father. The baby coming out of her was dressed in gowns of beautiful lather and packets of acne. It looked so old already. There were so many wrinkles I could hardly see which part was its genitals he’d have tried to use to make another and which were the legs he would have spent years training to use to get to the source with which he’d make. He refused to look at me. He refused my forgiveness. This was all part of the act. The boys around me began singing absolutely nothing as I used my wisdom teeth to take the kid apart, to take equal mouthfuls each of him and her together, pausing only every so often to get a rip on the end of the mother’s tit. What dreamy milk. Layer upon layer, I revised them. I tasted spaghetti, apples, chicken in her character. The mother was shrouded in some sort of defensive mist now and eyes rolled in her head ecstatic. Just as I noted this, she closed her eyes so I could not see her come. There was more of the child in her than ever, then, as I removed the rope between her and him in long shanks, hand over hand, and her wet ran down the walls on all sides. The gift the mother gave the evening was my next jacket. Her breast meat would fortify my eyes. She slipped in glitch somehow now repeating her unborn baby’s name into the space where wet met air, and in her thickest mist of all now overflowing the mother bloomed.

Inside the fourth mother’s head there was a cask of chubby meat inside a bone cage. I raised the meat out of her threads. The remainder of her body clung to the removal in thin tendrils over which the breath of shouting in the house around me bowed. It was the worst song I’d ever heard, absolutely perfect. I brought the meat up to my own face and rubbed it to my temples and wore it as a crown I could no longer tell from my hair. I wondered what would happen later that evening and the next night to the stock market. Beneath me on the floor the mother sang along with muscle fission, the skin withdrawing up into itself doing player-piano-style grindsing, saying nothing. Yes. I kissed the mother’s eyes. Inside the remainder of the junk inside her skull I heard the older god lurking, emptying the remainder of the moan she could no longer offer to anyone within earshot. I held her hands and waited with her. I felt the residue of each time she’d been told I love you by someone who meant it as a ring placed on my finger and dissolved into more lard. I rummaged through her memories for the ones most vivid for recording and I smothered them zero. Through her, I placed my hands upon the child. The child was still and dumb as fuck and waiting for me and when I touched his face he smiled and he was done then. His life was my life. I pulled the tiny corpse out in a clap of pig-noise and cold froth. The child emerged the most blessed he had ever been while human, his genitals covered in putridity, his skull a handful. I kissed his eyes. I sucked the eyes into my mouth and sucked their vision, swallowed. Now that was good now. Yes. My wishes passed their own high limits, no longer ours. Sweet reason hulking in my bloodstreams gorgeous, without doors. I placed the baby’s corpse back into the mother and patted the skin around the hole as best it would. The mother’s color was soaking into the carpet. It could not find the earth there. We sat together, she and I, beneath a fine and uneroding skyline in our eternal summer. Every murder always went like this. With every inch I’d ever wished etched in my days I waited with her for her to disappear. I ate some of her sternum, and of her shoulders. Both tasted the same. There was very little left to recognize about her, so I had done my job, though most of me was somewhere else. I heard the bone of me tell me to find the rest of what I meant and I looked up and found that I could see straight through the ceiling, yes, and through the roof, and there I saw the electrifying slush of night becoming stone above us, the language chiseled in its stutter shaking more and more silence out of somewhere harder there above, and thereby raining it back down on other U.S.A. houses as a bright bath anywhere another person could be found, until the pulse inside my skull pulled my seeing back into my face, into my skull, and thereby back into the putty of me and thereby back into my speech and through the remainder of the mother and her child, which there vibrating in me made me hover and crust over in the center of a spine of someone in me I had never quite yet fully been, and so most worshipped. Within this body, in an instant there above the mother boiling, I grew old and ill and died inside me and saw that it was good and gave my word and rose again.

The child inside the fourth mother realized its lungs suddenly. It was screaming ideas of metal. It spoke in personas bled into it by the mother in her sleep, deleted Worship tomes in the Rolodex of names shat out of my mouth between me and the child forming a syllabic bridge of colored mush rising a language wind. The names between us became human names erected in tines of purple cells and hissing insects. Each name as it blew through me knocked the godblood out of my mouth. It splashed to kiss the crease of where the boys asleep now in the kitchen had exposed their holes for Shaking. Each name replaced a wish in Darrel and became Darrel and became. The space bar in my mind grew letters on it. Where each name went in, another name came out and fell upon the house’s carpet made of shining lymph. Soon the house was overflooded with the syntax icons of all Americans. They piled up in pyramidal mink. Each brick locked in with six bricks exactly of mosaic skin, pooing a movie I would star in when I died, screened in the long flat white awaiting. The inverse image of the movie sealed the mother’s false deleted children in their ripped nurseries into cubes of dentures and clean beds, already aged beyond the stage of memory making. The cubes heated with my smiling and turned to ovens where their bodies would be burned. The house’s oven opened wide and said our prayer. The prayers sealed in the bricks around the mother and the child, who as the sounding rose me forward from the house forever wished me luck with all his holes unsizing in all of where he’d never been, while behind me the house looked like any other house just built and sold upon the dead mountains of our country, its front door exit breathing in the word in the world where we all talked at the same time.