on August 19, 2
at 7:15 A.M. He is found facedown in the smallest room of his seven-room ranch-style home with legs bound at the ankle by a length of electrical wire, apparently administered by his own hands.
Gretch Enrique Nathaniel Gravey is apprehended by authorities in on August 19, 2 at 7:15 A.M. He is found facedown in the smallest room of his seven-room ranch-style home with legs bound at the ankle by a length of electrical wire, apparently administered by his own hands.
He is unresponsive to officers’ commands or to the touch.
When lifted from the ground his eyes remain open in his head, unblinking even to the sound of the canines, the men.
The light inside the room is strong. It blinds each new being at their admittance, bodies shielding eyes and swinging arms until the space has been secured.
Gravey is dressed in a white gownlike shift affixed with reflective medallions that are each roughly the size of an eye and refract light in great glare. No underwear, no ornaments.
His hair has been shorn sloppily, leaving chunks and widths around his ears and the back of his head, an amber lob of curls the color of beer.
An open wound cut on his left breast appears to have been also self-administered, though not deep enough to require stitching; his wet blood has soaked a small head-sized oval parallel to where he lies; from the pool, traced by finger, the word OURS appears writ in the ink of blood along the mirror-covered carpet.
Questions and actions delivered to the suspect do not seem to occur to him as sound; he does not flinch or turn toward the shouting, the splinter of their entrance, canines barking, the commands.
The meat around his eyes seems to be caving, black and ashy.
There are no other living persons apparent in the house.
Gravey is unbound, cuffed, and taken to a local precinct to be booked, processed, and held.
His eyes in motion do not open, though he is breathing.
He does not speak.
FLOOD: The above and the following are my ongoing log of the time following Gravey’s arrest, and the ongoing investigation, over which I have been appointed lead. I have given electronic access to specific colleagues assisting in the case for their perusal and review.
SERGEANT R. SMITH: These notes were discovered in Flood’s shared files online sometime shortly after he disappeared. Several of the quoted sources claim to have not written what they are said to have written. I myself remain uncertain.
The front foyer of the mouth of the entrance to Gravey’s home is caked up with shit nearly a foot high; human shit, packed in tightly to the face of the door, which has been barricaded and blocked over with a paneled bureau full in each drawer with ash. Testing reveals the ash is burnt paper; among the powder, lodged, the leather spines of books, photographs overexposed to blotchy prisms, fingernail clippings, mounds of rotting cat-food-grade meat, plastic jewels.
The same ash found in the drawers is found in larger quantity in a small den down the hall, along with the metal rims and scorched remainders of a drum kit, bass guitar and amplifier, small public address system with corresponding speakers, and fourteen seven-string guitars all of the same make, each variously destroyed by flame to disuse but still recognizable as instruments.
A small sheet-stand holds up an empty tabbing book, which on some pages has been rendered with whole glyphs of blackened scribble, matching the front color of the house.
Inside the house is very warm, caused in part under the concentration of the sun’s heat on the black paint even-handedly applied to the north, east, and south faces of the home. Only the west face remains its original cream-tan, the same shade of roughly one in four houses in the neighborhood.
The lawns of both houses on either side of the Gravey homestead are overgrown high enough to nearly block the windows. Gravey’s lawn is dead, a radial of whites and yellows like the skin of a giraffe. An ant bed in the side yard of the unpainted side of the building is roughly the size of a very large sandbox, pearling in sunlight, though there are no ants among the runnels to be found, their turreted bed evacuated.
The majority of the other rooms in the Gravey home are bare. Furniture, adornment, and objects have been removed or were never there. The walls are covered for the most part with lengths of mirror that seem to have been gathered from local dumps or flea markets or trash: platelets sized from that in a bathroom washstand down to the face of an armoire down to the eye-sized inner layers of a blush case or a locket have been affixed to the drywall with a putty adhesive that leaves the rooms smelling synthetic. Many mirrors have crisped to dark with more flame or cracked in spindles from impact with perhaps an elbow or a fist, or having been dropped or otherwise mishandled prior to their installation. The mirrors’ coverage is extensive, leaving mostly no inch of the prior wall’s faces uncovered; even the ceilings and in some rooms as well the floors receive a similar coverage treatment. In many places, too, the mirrors have been applied doubly or triply thick, sometimes to cover something ruptured. Large smudges dot many arm’s-length sections of the more central rooms’ mirrored dimension, rubbed with handprints, side prints, whiffs of sweat, and in some cases traces of lipsticked mouths, running saliva, feces, blood, or other internal and sometimes inhuman synthetic materials, all of it Gravey’s, incidentally or by cryptic, unnamed logic spasmodically applied.
Countless light sources in each of the major rooms fill the plugs of long electrical strip outlets or are attached to generators and arranged around in the space in no clear manner, studding the ceiling and the ground. Burnt-out or burst bulbs have not been replaced but hold their dead eyes unrelented in the space filled by the rest. For hours into days the light will remain burned on the eyes of those who’d entered before the knobs were turned to end it.
Officer Rob Blount of 
, thirty-five, finds himself frequently at lengths lost inside the shape. More than several times, even with the excessive lighting fixtures lowed, he finds himself rendered staring off into the conduit of mirrors creating many hundreds of the house and him, and therein, something behind the reflection, a wider surface, until he is jostled by outside sound or a fellow officer’s inquiring arm. Through the remainder of Blount’s life inside his sleep he will many nights find himself approaching in the distance a square black orb, endlessly rotating in a silence. The dream of the orb will fill his mind.
Gravey’s kitchen contains a more colorful decor, if little else of more substantial means of living. The refrigerator, like the front room’s bureau, is stuffed with ash so thick it obscures the contained light. Buried in the ash here are occasional remnants of what might once have been intended for consumption: a full unopened carton of whole milk, several sealed cans of tuna, cardboard encasements for packs of beer, fourteen one-pound containers of store-brand butter riddled with knife divots, a water container full of something white. Later, teeth will be discovered buried in the chub of certain of the butter tubs’ masses, way underneath; the teeth will be later identified as dogs’ teeth. The freezer remains empty beyond a cube of ice forming a globe.
The surrounding floor is likewise thickened, albeit higher than the foyer’s, with used food wrappers, tissue, and containers, as well as many unfinished portions of the food. The pyramid of rotting glop and Styrofoam and cardboard stands nearly five feet high at the room’s far wall, trampled down into smoother avenues and valleys in the mix. The stench is intense, weaving many different modes of rot into a kind of choking blanket. Somehow the stench seems not to leak into the house’s mirrored sections.
Underneath the junk, in excavation, the men will find a massive ream of loose eight-millimeter film. Each frame of the several miles of exposed framework, unlike the other tapes found in the house, will show nothing but a field of pure black, of no star, as if the film had never been exposed. The soundtrack of the film, when played, if played, will feature a sound resembling a young man speaking in reverse, though when played in reverse the language sounds the same, word for word.
R. BLOUNT: There was something else about the house besides simply (however unsimply) being the scene of I don’t know how many murders. It was hard to stand in any room for long and breathe freely. Felt like someone was trying to choke me in certain rooms from behind me, not a phantasmagoric presence, but something soft inside my mind, something spreading. I did not sleep for several days, and have never felt quite like I was sleeping even when I found a way to seem to sleep again.
A padlocked door is centered on the kitchen’s northwest wall; it is the only secured location in the house. Behind the door, a humming sound, which becomes louder once it has been heard with head against the frame, and thereafter seems loud enough to hear all through the house and even miles around: a hum like that of bugs against bugs in a slow hive being constructed, the rhythm of which raises patterned gooseflesh on the skin. The door’s face, matched with the same black as the outside, has a hand-carved mark along its top seam: city of Sod.
The shape of the S in the word Sod, the men realize while reviewing pictures later, is replicated all throughout the house, in seemingly unnatural ways: the crease of mirror against mirror edge forming the snaked line, the formation of a certain clod of puffy trash, the shape of Gravey’s body as they’d found it not unconscious and unmoving, traced in skin resin many places all across the reflective floor. At either end of the shape’s snake’s length there might appear from certain angles a slim eye that watched the seer of the eye until with further motion the eye seemed to disappear, and would not reappear when they went back to find the eye where they had stood before because it would be impossible to stand in such a way the same exactly ever again. And yet, inside their head, the eye is there.
The padlock is adorned with unusual markings in the shape of tiny pins that stick up from the lock’s face spindly and obstructive, with residue of saliva or some kind of glue; its keyhole is the size more of a small finger than a key. The metal is white gold.
The padlock is removed and placed in a sanitized container and taken to sit on a white shelf in a small room unexamined for the next sixty-seven hundred years until it is uncovered in the Fire of the Night of Seize by a young being who takes the lock into his head and walks with it into a blue house the size of him built by a tiny sea new on the land.
FLOOD: This last paragraph is not meant as an abstraction; I believe it to be true. I can’t say exactly what it is that brought me to want to say it and then to know it should be said, but it should be known that it was not done with any intent but to serve the nature of this investigation. Ask me in the face if I believe that and I will tell you the same: paper and flesh.
The men stand briefly in silence before the lone secured door in the house, now unsecured. The humming has seemed to mute. The man nearest to the door’s handle, which is not the man who had cut the lock off, turns the knob with his left hand to open the door. The door opens backward, into the house, and thus is blocked by the pyramid of trash before it can open more than inches. Through the crack a stink of something piggish and uncurling wafts through the gloss of rot already familiar on the central length of the men’s heads. It is as quickly gone, wrapped as a weird gift upon them without question and then quickly common to their air. Nothing roars.
When enough space has been cleared for the door’s path, the officer pulls the door back further, wide enough to see inside. For lengths the room is black, impenetrable to eye. It appears at first as if the room is just a closet. The pupils move to adjust in the men’s heads, some breath between them, communal meaty fidget of old limbs.
Then, deeper back into the room, a light seems to emerge: low at first, then rising; a stream of panels of bluish neon indexing the air into squares, a corridor; no, a column; no, a cube.
The men’s pupils shift inside the seeing, the shape of lenses and composed holes changing in the machine of their heads.
Set in the dark, a set of stairs. The stairs reveal deeper and deeper on, seeming to extend down into the space farther than one would think a basement should be in a house of this dimension. The stairs are plasticine, kind of glossy. They do not groan, but squish a little under the weight of any man.
Beneath the earth, under the house there, piled like prisms in low artificial light, the officers come upon the bodies of the women and the children and the men.
Flesh.
Flesh tongued in the grip of ceiling to expanse of wall to wall between them, caught as rooms do to form a space stood beneath the face of earth.
Skin turned to cream. Skin slipped and rendered fat and pummeled between metal weapons and instruments of decreation found popped in the pillows of the things they had undone, buried and gagged up with firming secretions and the lip of cellular disarray, grown silk upon the air so warm it cannot be inhaled.
Teeth, hair, jowls, blood: packets, mush.
One can, in the fiber of the room, hear a tone of what has been.
Bones jut from the substance crushed in the lardy stillwaves of our pink and black and brown and yellow and gray and gold and white.
Seated among the encasement, as upon thrones in silence, lie certain still living, pulsing boys, starved and demolished, thinning, nothing: their eyes also refusing to come open, give no murmur.
A scrim of salt.
On the ceiling above the heads of the detectives, the ceiling reads: THIS BODY LED ME TO SHIT INSIDE MY LIFE BLANK AND SCREAMLESSLY UNENDING WHILE THE WAR OF THE YEAR OF TOTAL DEATH CREAMED BETWEEN OUR FACES AGAINST THE FURTHEREST WALL THE WALLS COULD MANAGE AND THERE YOU WERE AND THERE I AM ENDLESSLY GYRATING IN THE EYELESS FORCE FIELD OF OUR FUTURE LOVE AS WE ARRIVE. None of the detectives see or note the sentence, for the record.
The living boys are lifted each away. They make no sound, cause no commotion.
The other bodies, who could ever move them now.
FLOOD: The smell was—I hate to say it—sweet. It reminded me of waking up in a grassfield having slept all through the night without coverage against the night sky. I mean, I don’t want to sound morbid, it was revolting. The sweetness was revolting. But it was also—I breathed it in.
The men lead the body of the man who will not respond to any name along the long precinct hall intoned pale white. The facility is quiet and dully lit in the mode of lampshade blocking out a stream of air that seems to stand outside the building.
Long textured lattices of ridge set in the precinct hall’s walls’ face in the same color of the wall allow a running joke among many of the guards that the building is “ribbed,” for the pleasure of something that passes through the unseen logic of the hour daily, or hourly, or is ever present, yet always gone. Regardless of the number of days that pass for any body inside the chamber most find the ridging something they can never learn to disregard, the eye always pulling up inside the skull to see it.
The body, though, whom they refer to in the name of Gravey, as it fits the ridges set into his fingers on his hands, does not seem to see, acknowledge, or want to know any inch about the ridging, or the hallway, or the building of the walls themselves. He walks in silence, still with closed eyes and closed mouth; when not led by the shoulders forward through the building or wherever Gravey ceases to proceed, and yet he does not fight in being pulled along the corridors through check-ins, through registration. No form of coercion leads the man to act alone, including body shots and threats of further marks against his name.
A strip search of the suspect’s body reveals a diamond hung by black cord around his waist. The diamond is false diamond; it obscures the eyehole of his belly button, around which the hair has been removed. The remainder of pubic hair around the genitals has been shaved into a pattern like the beams of an aggravated sun. The shaft and glans of the unit are bruised, blood busted beneath the skin in thicket clouds.
A gun strap around the sternum holds no weapon; tucked into the holster is a tiny leather-surfaced notebook, water-damaged with his sweat. No language has been written into the unlined paper.
The anal cavity is overrun with brittle hair, so thick that they almost do not find the tiny transistor that has been stuffed into the crevice, matted in and clung with fecal residue. The transistor does not transmit.
Beneath the nail on the second longest toe of each foot a wedge of glitter has been lodged; on the face of the glitter occur words, none of which will be recognized, or read.
Water sprayed onto the body in the small stall comes off in foamy blue.
For some time in the hour he is made to lie on the cold floor naked without whimper, until the men are tired of looking at the raw colored markings on his chest and in his pits: like something there had scorched his flesh wide open and then resealed it, prim pockets of aggravated fat that stay so still.
Somewhere an old smoke rises.
B. LAPUZIA: When Flood asked me to take a look at his ongoing log about the case, handing me this outlandish collection of scattered notes, some of which he claimed to have found in Gravey’s residence, and which were not reported as evidence, I was seriously uneasy. For a while we had been partners, and though eventually I was reassigned, we’ve always been friends. He’s been through a lot, and I try to be there for him when I can. I told him I’m not much of a note taker, and didn’t really have anything to add in this manner, but that I’d take a look when I had time. I must admit, I was disturbed by his notes. They did not, to me, reflect a natural manner of investigation, or, even more so, a manner of living. Flood seemed fixated on his work in a way that went beyond it being work, even a life’s work. The more I tried to figure out what was going on with what he’d done, the more I wasn’t sure how to respond. I felt I had no choice but to mention it to the boss, though I can’t say the Sgt.’s tone in our private speaking set me at ease. He had the same quaver in his voice that Flood did, the same something slightly off. I myself haven’t felt right recently. I don’t know what it is, though for some reason I’m afraid to look in the mirror. I move through rooms with mirrors now, whenever possible, in the dark.
In his containment unit, Gravey’s body stands through the evening without fold. Aimed facing toward the entry door of his chamber, its form sealed in with one thick window’s eye into the public tunnel, he stands with arms flat at his side.
He does not bend to eat from the tray of dinner that is brought in and laid before him; the food will be fed instead into a disposing machine. He does not sit or lay or stand throughout the first night into the morning with the shifting of the guards. He does not open his small eyes in the crane of light beamed at his gray brain through his skull where the room around him remains lit. He does not utter language at the body assigned to his body as an attorney. He often does not seem to visibly breathe: no chest rises in the orange cloth, no nostril flutter, though to the touch his skin is warm in patches.
His temperature is three degrees too low.
Days pass in the standing. At intervals he barfs onto his chest; the upchuck is transparent. The hair stands on his arms; it grows further down his head and face, building a mask.
During his trance, the living bodies who were found there beneath his house each die, of what seems no particular occurrence, in their sleep. They are identified or not, buried or cremated, given to the ground to be absorbed into the earth again, where food grows and the foundation of all homes is laid. Other boys will soon come forward.
Pictures taken of Gravey’s body in his cell seem off-colored, tinted redder in the cheeks and down the arms. A glass of water placed beside him on a white stool stutters selectively in ripples on its circular contained face, briefly quaking in indexed repetition as if nudged by something silent, until again the air around the air is calm.
Urine is released and wets his institutional pants in shade; it collects around his feet in spreading puddle on the concrete. The urine has no smell, no color. It sizzles as it is wiped.
The skin of Gravey’s lips is peeling, rapidly, in sheets. The remainder of his skin retains its pallor, becoming cleaner seeming, even, unclenched, somehow more young.
At the end of eight days without food, water, or motion, his body collapses beneath itself, remitted horizontal, open mouthed. For the next four days he sleeps wadded, waking briefly only when jostled by whoever, calmly blinking, red-ringed; when he is left alone again however long thereafter, he returns into the shakeless corridor of sleep.
FLOOD: Video recordings of Gravey in his cell are often marred by what seem magnetic disruptions in the tape, including long blacked-out sections in which the sound in the room can still be heard. What appears here in my descriptions of Gravey’s cell-held activities is therefore subject to interpretation, as well as gaps in the field, though sometimes even in staring into the black of the screen it seems that I can see him.
Inside this sleep, with limbs crossed and eyes wide, Gravey confesses to the crimes. His mouth lists out the names of those who’ve been inculcated. Among the list are women, men, and children, rendered therein first, middle, and last. His speaking is discovered already partway through the list, therefore the totality of the list is missed, left to hide in his saliva, leak through his cells. Each instance of each name is as well appended with the age and date of death and how the body was dispatched, each by the hand of Gravey, though in his own air he gives himself a series of new names, each rendered in the word Darrel: Darrel the Divorcist, Chalk Darrel, Darrel of No Leak, Darrel Who Has Become the Book Beheld And Only Awaits What Reader To Choose Prey As Well Inside the Mounds of What Cannot Yet Be, Darrel the Magnet Eater, Golden Ash Darrel, 65432Darrel1, Darrel then White.
Audio recorded in the cell during the confession is obscured on the tape by some high hissing signal. Two hundred and sixty-seven names are witnessed firsthand, and therefore transcribed. Many of the names correspond with those who have been corroborated as victims; others match those who’ve been listed missing but who have not otherwise been identified among the flesh. Four to eighteen additional accomplices are included in the crime sketch of the series, including the bodies of the boys found inside the locked room, despite the apparent residue of their own personal abuse, bringing into question the complicity of their behaviors. Still other names match no one rendered suspect, and so investigations must begin. There are no longer enough breathing bodies to assign. There are many months ahead of every day and only so much time. In his image, jobs are created; bodies become fed.
Gravey will never speak the names again, regardless of how many times they are referred to in his presence by the proceedings or the loved ones or what old coils might simmer in his mind. After the confession, still inside his sleeping, a massive boil shaped like a bird’s egg appears on his left hand between his point finger and his thumb. When medics drain the boil, from the pustule’s face floods a creamy darkish oil. The runoff will be stored in a glass vial in a black locker several miles from Gravey’s fleshy self, no one seeing what the wet does in the darkness when no longer watched.
FLOOD: The boys, the fateful boys and girls. What they had not known. Bless them, take them from this scrawl and keep them clear and sound as whatever holds the air up. Do this for us all now.
Days turn white. The days turn white. They turn white with cream between them. They pale in memory still continuing to beget more. Between cracks in what had just been the present and is now no longer the present there is a small constantly slaving sound of someone breathing in.
SMITH: I have recommended Flood for interoffice counseling, and asked that he take a few days off. He does not seem to be sleeping. He smells different. These kinds of investigations are hard on anyone, but I must say it surprises me to see Flood having such difficulties, as I often considered him unrelenting, solid as the ground we walk on.
FLOOD: I would delete this note and the others notes marked “Smith,” as I know it wasn’t Smith who wrote them, as he was never given access to this file, but somehow to remove it would feel like an attempt to cover something up, and I have nothing to hide, and so the feed stands. Regardless, at no point during the ongoing was I dismissed from my investigation.
Among the fleshy evidence removed from Gravey’s home, collected in a series of seven trunk-sized metal boxes, is a trove of VHS tapes, packed in from end to end in each container forming a separate black plastic corpus. There is the smell of old machines. The tapes for the most part are unlabeled. Some have white stickers affixed to their spines or faces that have not been filled in. An occasional tape—eighteen in all among the total five hundred and eighty—has been notated with a white scrawl; twelve of these eighteen inscriptions are a string of numbers, each eighteen digits long. Five of the remaining six of the eighteen marked tapes are marked with numbers, though forming strings that don’t seem to have any obvious use: 278493000383, 109298723627, and so on. Each of the tapes, it seems, is blank, though not the blank of no recording, fresh; instead they have been encoded with a field of total white as if shot with a lens close to a wall or piece of paper without shadow and without motion. There is no sound on the recording; at least, there has been none found among them all so far. Each of the tapes, still, must be observed. Two pairs of two junior officers, two women and two men, are assigned to play the tapes in twin rooms in succession, observing for anomalies, change of face. They find viewing the taping makes them tired quickly, and causes sweating through their clothes. The VCRs in playback emit sharp buzzings, little whirs. One tape, the eighteenth tape played, becomes eaten by the machine, chewed to spools. The VCR thereafter smells of fire; it must be replaced. Another tape, the forty-second, is similarly eaten by the replacement VCR. The film of the eaten tapes, viewed in the light of the room surrounding, appears bluer than other film, somehow almost moist. Four more machines must be replaced in the first forty-eight hours, their corpses stacked in a locked room. The eyes of the observers blink throughout the screening, missing small segments of the films, which sometimes in the viewer’s heads seem shorter than they are.
The name of Gravey spreads. Media mouthpieces disseminate his image through the TVs in the rooms strung up together in a wash of copied pixels. His name on papers. His name in mouths. His head appears across the nation in replication 2-D, 3-D, 4-D (the fourth D in dream machinery, consuming sleeping thoughts of mothers and all others shook with the description of the nature of the murder acts). Gravey becomes known and so grows more known, spoke in the same breath with the soap actor, the dead diva, the president, with fanatical appeal.
Hundreds of letters addressed to Gretch Gravey are delivered to the address of his containment center in the first day following his arrest. The letters contain what seem to be Christmas lists: long handwritten chains of things desired, in insane scrawl. Gravey seems most popular among the young. Children scratch his name in all caps on their forearms and foreheads and on the faces of textbooks and lockers and long walls inside of houses where they sleep or do not sleep. Clothing is emblazoned with his head or replications of the tattoo on his forearm of a black square with its bottom right-hand corner rounded. Songs speak his name suddenly in dive bars and on airwaves. Words beyond his name recall his name in plague.
On the second day there are no letters; the sun makes a little sound like something being squeezed out of a bottle. The sun remains the same color until in sleep the people can see the sun there shaking through their lids, open or closed, the sun, the sun. All analog clocks in the building stop, though without correspondence between the users, and thus no consideration to the activation of the nothing of the waking error held between them. The clocks must be replaced; the replacement clocks are wholly electronic.
On the third day, at the station, a large blue box the size of Gravey arrives for Gravey. His name is swabbed onto the box in mirrors cut in shapes to form the letters of the phrase, which thus from certain angles seems to make other utterances, or colors. A series of special forces are dispatched to the delivery platform, where the box is inspected for explosives. X-ray scanners reveal that the box is empty. The men open the box. Along the inside of the box’s wall words are written in white ink, each letter large as someone’s head: This word occurs because of god. Inside the box unfolded one man, a senior officer, gets down on his knees; he does not know why. He had been an atheist for his entire life. He looks up at the other men surrounding as he makes a prayer shape with his hands, the other men watching him in confusion, reaching for some reason for their guns. The senior officer’s eyes stay open as he tastes his tongue begin to pray, in the language of the Computer. In the language, he is collapsed. Over the next six weeks, all dogs within a one-mile radius of the opening of the box will die; for many seconds each day leading up to those dispatchings there is a tone that makes the dogs lie down on the ground and shudder, feeling something in their throats.
On the fourth day, hundreds of letters arrive again in exactly the same quantity as the first day, one each from the same address that had been sent from before, though this time all of the pages inside the envelopes are blank. On the fifth day it occurs again; the same letters in the same erased condition. The letters, instead of being stored, are burned. The destroyed matter of the letters disseminates among the air; the ash is buried; the ash floods into the earth.
On the sixth day, a man rides a white horse into the station carrying a baby on his back. The baby has birthmarks in the shape of several symbols down his spine: CIRCLE SQUARE HEXAGON STAR TRIANGLE DIAMOND RING. The man is detained and questioned, fined for public disturbance, and eventually released. The child does not cry or speak a word inside the building, where Gravey is also awake, not speaking, though he is now no longer asleep.
The excavation of the bodies in the basement of the black house lasts several nights. The slough of curving flesh and popped-up organs smush together in the walls enframed in smarmy pockets that make it (the flesh) want to cling unto the house as if forever as if please no not me please this is all mine. Blood of many bodies mix: the cholera of its stank has peeled the room’s walls tarnished bruisy. Skin peeled off of torsos like white apples liquidated in the bloat of something else half-yellowed and grown cold and hardened into tiny temples and round baubles that crunch under the sole. Several dozen knives and steel-grade blenders, those are in here. Dice ’n’ chipchop. Fractal. Veins of what must be hundreds knit together no longer pumped. Time here seems to do nothing. Men armed for removal in neon suits with years of knowledge vomit inside the suits and fill the suits with their own bilge. These liquidated people, their bodies, already dried of wet they’d lived with and lived off of. A crust formed on the aggregation, not slippery or convulsive. It does not make sense, the lodes of colors. Up to their knees, the investigators count the eyeteeth and what they can of fingers. No one’s phone is ringing. Hammers, drill bits, mortar, blank. In silence there is the sound. Someone says, It must have taken this freak fucker Gravey hours on each inch of flesh in this whole house; with each word of the sentence the speaker speaks louder till he is screaming. The crushed human stuff does not vibrate. Soup of skull and dented throat and testes and the envelopes of hidden eggs. In the musk already grows a mold, popped with globed discolored pulpy mushrooms and spindles of expanded fat. All this that comes out of a person in becoming opened could never seem to all fit back in, the screamer screams down to a hoarse bark, then faints face-first into the soft. It is the first day of a new week.
FLOOD: [stricken from record]
No. No really. Not at all, thinks Detective E. N. Flood, man of the blue and badge. Here at the end of working hours he refuses to believe, or if not to not believe then to not let bloodcolor kill his head, or if not to not to kill his head, then to just be. In the room of the house where Flood sleeps at night, having seen the innards of the room where the peoples’ bodies fountained soft, a splay of pygmy organs nuzzled in puzzled correction in their mortal furor underground, the wet of the bodies is only all one black unfurlment in his mind, one he has seen before in fragmented iteration though here in seeing it is all arrived; it is as if all the blood from all the prior hours seen has landed again in the belly of the day. Flood laughs in silence toward the picture window above his bed that he now covers in the light of the new morning with thicker sheets that show only faint defeats of their former colors, as it is the presence of those colors, he’s determined, that keeps him not only sleepless, but wakeless to alarms, sleeping often hours through the machine of the body’s resting and on into long day. Had he been this way years before he would be shiftless, under water, cooking grease food in traps late hours unto pockets dripped with rats, or selling gas or cakes or glass to fucks in cities, or, or, or, or, or, or. Even now, with colors covered, often he cannot force himself inside his half-wake to rise rightly despite even some screaming, as on the night his prior home had burned thick to the ground—the cream of what he’d been rendered ash and pocked in puzzles with no insurance that month after years of having paid into the coffers of other men. He sleeps in his police suit now. He sleeps and rises in the office regularly, so that there are guns nearby his sleeping self he might rise and hold, might aim, or else someone might use those guns to wake him up if they needed, if they could not shake him from his progressively corroding dream. In the pocket of sleep Flood can often see himself from above himself there sleeping, in what should be the calmest moments, but are instead often a long extending gnash. Years inside sleep pass some nights watching his whole body go on as if crumbling from the inside curled underneath his desk with paper as a blanket and a pillow and the arms of a wife who no longer will appear. Yes, he’d loved someone some years some way back before he was him now and can’t remember anything about her but her teeth, which he now feels having grown in behind his own teeth, eating what he eats before he eats. Her name. Her name. Hers, he swears, was not one of the bodies in Gravey’s makeshift mausoleum, he remembers. She could not be. She’s been so gone, before all this. She was already always dead, the gun pulled in the night there right beside him and placed to take her spit and soiled blood out of her head onto the concrete for the money neither of them had—all of that had happened years before, in a season of long black, one that still rolls in his surfaces of layers laughing, rolling mental maggots in his knees and ass and arms, his sperm a bakery of killed decisions made by doing nothing in the presence of all potential motion and this vast lattice of human holes, his guilt of all he has and had not done—but all of this regardless of its logic and false healed remembrance in his internal history does not relegate the vision in his mind of her body twisted up in all that murdered gray and pink, crushed with arms and eyes removed into human putty and still there watching as he’d at last come down to find her in the flush of it again too late, which is why he’d become a policefuck in the first place, her there lapped again and ruined again before him in his vision (which is all real) transfixed onto a surface of the earth not in his arms and having never made her understand the form of love or even magic fucking or even comfort of the dollar or some lob or lobe or even puppet understanding of a god, a place to surface into after having been dismantled while he inside him and with no name of her walks on. He has failed her again. He has failed her. Every body belongs to her. Every murder is her murder. He cannot help but hearing in the space inside him where he wants to say her name replaced with a widening and hellish silence that’d seem to exude out of the skin along the back of Gravey’s head, Gravey whom he’d only glimpsed for only one clipped instant in the hour of the body through the tiny window of the holding cell, the killer’s form facing away, his face remaining in a swathe of memoryblank like all the other unnamed hours while all conscious he holds haunted, though which here, inside his body on the cusp of sleep and waking, holds the form of all he sees: wormed black curls of greasy nit hair and the weird ridge of scar along the killer’s nape, the unmuscled scape peels that form the back mask of Gravey’s earlobes and the flesh connecting sound to funnel down into his brain, to hear; a skull that turns to face him each instant, just before rising, slowly, the flesh rolling like a globe toward the lens of who he is, to scream out from its face the color of the air the room breathes in around him as he now, Flood, again, inside himself, is there.
Name withheld: I’m not a police officer, but I have known E. N. for many years, and though I never actually became well acquainted with his wife, B., I find it extremely disturbing that Flood is talking about her as if he had been involved in her death. B. passed from cancer at the age of thirty-one. Reading all of this makes me feel very sorry for E. N., and for the stress he has been under with his work. I hope he can find it in him to regain focus, happiness, and a spiritual consolation, in whatever form for him that could take. I will keep both him and B., and any other here considered really, in my and my family’s prayers.
FLOOD: The night is black around me. I can’t stop my arm from writing sometimes. I try to think of anything else at all, beyond the bodies. I turn on the TV and I see him. I open a book to read any other kind of sentence and I find the books I’ve owned for years unread all blank, or I find words about me written in them, in someone else’s hand. There is nothing I have ever loved more than my wife, however hard it was between us, between any humans, each owning our own selves.
Flood, the detective, is American as a strip mall; he is as American as fried rice in a Styrofoam container tossed into the street and run over by a car hiding a machine gun that will kill no one in its duration, but exists; he is a cop. He knows he is a Cop: this is one thing he will always remember. He believes being a cop can be cured with a bullet in the mouth, and he knows how to do it. In some of every day he can be happy, even in the shriveling skin of researched understanding. There is a white piano in the room where he was born. He has a tattoo over his heart of a word he made slamming his fingers down onto a keyboard to see what happened, asldihfiuywef80, except to him it means even less than that; his night is the whole night. He watches Hitchcock in reverse, on silent, filling in the words. He loves god. He does love god.
Though most days, at the moment, Flood can’t remember where he’s been. He moves because he moves, because in order to be anywhere he must be moving elsewhere or be about to, so that there will be something he can have, something he can breathe and eat up and shit out and walk with and work with and maybe if he’s lucky and not dead that he can wish for or rub against or dream to cover up the only dream he’s ever really had. In this way, Flood is anybody.
Part of Flood not being able to remember where he’s been without quite knowing that he does not remember, is that he can remember anything the way he wants and have it feel like if it had always been that way for his whole life; this causes in him hidden self-hate, hatred of the hidden field of real, which manifests in silent ways; it appears to him in silence during hours he might imagine himself a person in a bed just at the cusp of sleeping, or a person opening a book to lay among the light of a warm house and read. It infiltrates his every aspect.
He is reading now. Right now he is reading, Flood is. He does not know.
Flood has blood inside his hands. When blood touches his hands outside his hands, this makes him remember even less.
Flood has killed at least eleven persons in the line of duty, as far as he remembers, though some nights he believes this happened only in his sleep: not even as a personal distortion, but in the way reality manifests itself outside itself while being called fantasy or allegory, as in the practice of the active life of books, in the way that any book forever is a person, acting.
Soon he will kill again.
SMITH: I have taken Detective Flood off the Gravey investigation until further notice.
FLOOD: No you haven’t, “SMITH.” No you couldn’t.
In mirror to the killed bodies in the house below the house, aboveground in the light, hundreds of living bodies aggregate around the center where Gravey’s person has been stored. There are several teeming factions: first, those grieving for the dead, sets of blood-linked sons and daughters, wives and husbands and lovers; the friends or wedded blood of these; and those who have felt the same lurch of nowhere run through their existence. These bodies congregate around the seasoned surface of the precinct/prison holding icons of the murdered, raising fists and lungs, screaming the word; they speak in a new Depression Language wrought from bull fury for what has been inflicted in the name of some black lord, this motherfucking bastard murder bitch fuck killer who stole our child who stole my love, the treble of their grief packed into lung quiver and burst noise rendered in old throes. Images of Gravey become burned under great sunlight making more heat making ash that falls and sends off strewn upon the earth. On unpadded knees they utter wishes for forgiveness or destruction or the twain of two in retribution on this unwanted and resounding human conflagration that has ripped into their lives. They know they will now no longer now remember how to laugh; inside the body they would have become or been again in coming years there is now no cord to that silk feeling; in its place now is only mud.
The second faction of the gathered wear the emblem of Gravey in His name. They operate a mass movement in the light of Him to drink the face out of the news and wear the unseen mask of him among the world, wrought up in some ecstasy of reality-entertainment despite having almost no word in their consumption to denote the moniker’s beliefs. These are people wide open all for something ever, waiting, their flesh hungry for any light; they simply want. They chant his name and wish his presence like in a film inside a home; these ways not history or act, but the present, in which we may take part. In this way Gravey’s authority replicates outside him without the requirement of his action, under the guise of history. Copy killers in the next weeks will lift the count of dead by handfuls in stiff gestures wishing to begin again; grown men rising to explode themselves in dark theaters or on the corner of a turf in the name of being done; rashes of abductions and consumptions, but that the papers and the screens and machines have manifested as a cause. In the streets there appear whole mirrors laid onto surfaces of all sorts, in the image of the Black House; the reflective panels are laid against the cars or trees surrounding their small conduit of land, shining fields of daylight into the light back at itself, showering the architecture and the ground before it at length with panels of lightning-organed hue like fattened fingers or distorted hexagons of simple madness, until the shapes are smashed by thrown rocks at the hands of the grieving or kicked down by the braver of these lost in gross mourning made into cruder engines of themselves. The glass rattle and rip of cracking flatness laces the human air with something shrieking, clocks and hammers in the hour of no night.
The congregations lather. The name of god becomes invoked. The name of another god becomes invoked. People curl their fingers into fists and fuck the fuck out of the air, swinging harder and not laughing toward the body of another baring toward the sky their burning wrists. We seethe.
Inside, Gravey is laying facedown on the earth.
The bodies couple in their anger, begetting motion, bone on bone. Where skin hits skin a sound is made. The sound rises into the nothing forming a new other shadow self that will follow them unnoticed for the remainder of their lives. Each of these selves created in this hour is only one of many they have made, surrounded in and on each of us as yet unslaughtered, skulking in the coming rooms where we will eat and fuck and ash and laugh and touch the machines and wait for day again and wait for night again in turns and handle cream and make a loved one love us less or love us more for certain hours, though ever knowing love is not a thing that shifts despite the earth, despite complex wantings and form of bodies aging and how another can betray and mistake the act of love for anything beneath it or against it like an arm. What I mean is, these people come to blows in the name of the name of Darrel who was not a life at all as yet to them beyond the word, and many received bruises that then will sink into their body before they are arrested or firmly told to go, such emphasis frequently depending on the nature of their cooperation, with more empathetic graces given in most cases to those who have lost someone who’d been eaten alive or not alive, though in other cases, depending on the actor in the authority, sometimes the better graces go to those in worship of this lone man from the Black House—though, in most such cases, the officers do not realize their bias, however wrecked or graceful, which may or may be a function of the actual power of the spirit of Gravey’s rising but may be just a ruined thing about some humans turning bluely in the extending stench of what will one day be remembered outside of all minds as the Organizing Wind.
Still a third faction of the public stands in relative unabashment watching the disorder and the building seated at its center as if from it somewhere might rise a conflagration of firework or other boom, a thing they might remember having seen regardless, even in the early stroke of evening the sun’s preemptive cloaking of this earth in a low darkness held off by pretend light as our star leaves again and does not return for longer this day than any day in the whole year, or any year before this or thereafter, for what reason I do not know—as I am angry too and tired and have all this time forward found no rest.
DETECTIVE F. N. DOOLE: Which kind of onlooker are you?
This room is small. This room of air around him, around Gravey, holding other bodies through the walls, making a room inside the rooms where Gravey, inside his body, sees the face of the someone larger than him walking on false water in the grain of the TV. The face begins far at a distance on a field set back in the set, some kind of tone of color exaggerated from its form like magma. The duration of its approach to Gravey feels immense, the distance of dozens of lifetimes passing in what could only be an instant of the real—without inhale, between two heartbeats. The head of Darrel rises in the color, growing by lengths to match each dimension of the innards of his head in mirror, a mute impression of himself. The color of the red pulls hard up in the mesh of Gravey’s head: the index of the memory of the House, the Grave, the Spirit, the flesh of the dead—Which hour is this now, pressing against me? he hears himself ask inside the wave of self where the meat comes crumpled soft around the mushing forward of the Head. His hands against his chest outside the skull of his own head inside the auditorium of his second senses seem suddenly heavy, sinking flat into his fat. They grip there in the tissue about his chest a second layer of remembering, unto a realm of self the corridors of aesthetic longing in him had slurred to stutter: his growing older in a room; his having spurted from the hole of someone in a white clod to walk into the other bodies and be named; the fuckmove of flagellum into squirmy bulb inside another body, no longer living; the cracking thoughts of years of those who’d built him up from the moment of the spurt; the smoke and dark inhaled by father and by mother, two minor beings he can’t recall beyond those monikers, made aged; before them, too, some cloud of hybrid netting that squirreled around all eras. Then the Head is only inches from him, its electronic skin writhing and transmitting, spooling outward in the fire of the minute to wrap around them both, enslaving Gravey’s mind into the image of the Future Head of the One We All Must Become. Where Gravey’s mouth sits so sits Darrel’s, that name now nothing, male and female, cold and dry. Gravey, on his back cannot stand up under the pressure. Each instant kissed behind his eyes is solidified in choiceless faith, as from the black mouth of their locations touching through the wires, the voice between them speaks: Rise, take up your Jerusalem, for if you retain the sins of any, truly, all sins will trespass a heaven’s joy. Therefore I tell you, be forgiven the sons of Heavenly Father, every sin and blasphemy made of man; and on the air the words are writ in puffy flesh swimming pinkish from the red of Gravey’s chest; and on the air the words slid soft and spread between the cells of cells to elevate the room alive, hotter than three hundred million ovens as the silence of the spacing between language slid electric tongue from tongue along the air to shatter there where it touched, and spreading on the air now fully like lotion on a baby’s ass big as America.
BLOUNT: I had to tell Detective Flood to stop sending me his papers. It was literally becoming an almost daily thing, him coming by my office with more notes that he required my review of, asking for notes, calling me, calling. I hated to have to go to Smith about him, as I knew he was going through some real trouble, but I felt I had no choice, though by this point it was already a much larger problem than I realized.
Multiple bodies employed in the incarceration proceedings thus far toward Gravey within hours kill themselves. One man assigned outside the door where Gravey sleeps or does not sleep nights gets off duty at the crack of dawn having stood parallel to the wall between them for most of seven hours, walks to his car, unlocks the door, enters through the driver’s side seat, slides across the leather into the passenger side, straps on his seatbelt, takes out his service revolver, puts it in his mouth, and shoots his body dead. His blood writes a sentence on the side window that by the time he is discovered will have slicked its way away.
The head of service in the cafeteria where Gravey has still been refusing consumption, during the stretch of planning hours over which she would have planned the course of action of the next eight weeks of meals, locks herself in the meat freezer then takes a paring knife and filets the length of both her arms. Many hours pass before her meat is found among the other meat to be served to the imprisoned on plastic trays, which now, contaminated, must instead be buried in the ground, as must be the chef. Her blood too, from her arms into the meat locker, writes the sentence.
Three to eight further members of the law enforcement network working out of the building do not appear at work over the coming week; each is found in his or her apartment in various states of decomposition with necks broke by ropes or having jumped from something high and or affixed in the bowels with chemicals or otherwise in forms just like the first two self-murders previously performed as if in want to become like those who’d been undone already and would be undone again. Behind the mirrors in these houses a small adornment to the hidden plaster, the marking of a symbol, may or may not have been made, and none will know.
For each office dispatched in this new method a new body for the office moves into its place. The bodies populate the system, and proceed. Between them moves a changing language.
FLOOD: As the human body decomposes it loses two degrees of heat in the first hour, then one degree of heat each hour held thereafter until it meets the temperature of its surroundings. Brain cells are dead within the first seven minutes. In the first thirty hours after death flies lay eggs in the body, and maggots appear in the flesh; production of ammonia begins in the lungs and seeps out through the nostrils and the mouth; ammonia is lighter than surrounding air, and so diffuses quickly; over time, production slows. Within hours, the deceased body begins to produce heavier amines among the deadened flesh, including putrescine (1,4-diaminobutane), and cadaverine (1,5-diaminopentane), and other iterations of the name. The decomposing tissues issue gas including hydrogen sulfide and methane; the skin blisters and turns blue; the abdomen swells; the tongue may protrude; a fluid ejects from the lungs; this happens at half speed when under water or one-quarter speed when underground. During the first year, a deceased human’s bones will slowly bleach and grow with mold; over the first decade the bones develop larger fault lines. Without animals to deconstruct the body, teeth, nails, and hair become detached from the flesh in a few weeks; within a month the flesh is mostly liquid, cavities bursting; the uterus and prostate may last several months.
Flood stands alone in the mirrored room below the house, the room left marked as the city of Sod. He has come in plainclothes, his badge removed and left inside a black bag in his bedroom. He has walked back to the Scene of the Crime(s), at least the end point of them, at least the ones so far discovered. The house has been photographed and notated and marked off from the remainder of the world in totality now; no one wishes to return but him.
In the sick sound of no sleeping Flood’s blood won’t shut the fuck up; he hears people moving around in the house above him; he hears throughout his brain the sound of the voice he hears radiating from Gravey’s body when he looks directly at him, a voice louder than the voice already sealed into him of the woman of his own life and the woman who had brought him out of her to stand beside her and who he had left each day and again.
The room beneath the house where He had hid the bodies is clean again, like new; clean as a room can be inside the knowing he knows of it in here already having seen what had been done; knowing, too, what could be done again inside it or had been done before the birthing of his eyes; what earth had been scooped out of the earth here to carve space for this room to exist so that the room could fill with blood.
No, the room is not clean. The walls are white; the smell of chlorine, acid, antiseptic, several smokes, the ash of ash: all clouds in something secondary of the mask he feels becoming affixed around his skull each minute he inhales it. He cannot leave. His face feels tight, a wire frame. The lights all in the house above the room are off; he can hear the floor and spaces just above him listen as he moves along the mirrored surface vibrating silent in his human loam.
Along the long wall in the room again there is a window built into the frame. The window looks out onto the dirt of the earth. The tail end of a fist-sized lash of granite butt-ends up eye first against the glass from the other side, reflecting the beam end of Flood’s lamp. The glass seems breathed on from the other side.
Flood’s feet on the flooring squeak like the NBA. In his mind he counts backward through the names of those he can remember from the speaking, assigning in the fleshless vortex where they might have lain among the mass. Each name, in his head, sounds like the same name, and so he does not let them out. He hears the in-tick of a furnace initiate itself to come alive and warm the rooms above.
[In the continuing scene, as the heat above him rises, though the room itself will not grow warm, a smell about the ceiling coming down around him stinks like someone waking up, putting on a skin-suit made of rubber, walking to a door inside the house, closing the door.]
Flood keeps thinking he hears someone other in him thinking. Someone predicting his own thoughts, his movements, what he is. What light is in the room seems electronic.
Flood sees someone standing just behind him, at the edges of his vision. His instinct to turn becomes instantaneously overwhelmed with something sharper: to hold on inside this feeling, to let the person there remain there, to listen to them think and breathe. This has, on Flood, the effect of making time seem several times longer, slowing down his aging, which as he notes this feeling, he will in his sleep remember how to learn, thus causing his time on earth to be distinctly extended hour by hour up until right now in this house.
As he’s holding in this moment, the tendons in his arms becoming hard, framing the shape of his skull with further skulls inside him, Flood observes the character observing him taking more form: he can see more about her (it is a her) face and arms and chest and legs and muscles, though he finds it hard to piece together more than one, or to hold the whole of what she is together more than any instant, seeing seconds turning solid into new memory, rubbing the older shafts in him awake.
The form is so near to heart, close enough to make him open to it further, though at the same time he wishes to resist. Each time he sees her he is seeing something new, and yet the newness has a gloss about it, a second cover: he can recognize the form, but cannot hold the form up to itself, and the smell of the room keeps washing in, and the fidget of his body tries to stay both soft and motionless, observing in fear that when he moves for sure the premonition will disappear; as, he remembers, there’s not actually someone there behind him, and never has been; this is an elaboration on an instinct, a way to live. In thinking this, close up, just as the image threatens slowly to see into him and see him seeing, the moment shifts and so is gone. The room is empty. There are no bodies.
Flood turns to look now at where he felt there’d been the other person and sees instead, like so: the wall.
Flood starts laughing. He’s not moving his mouth or face; he doesn’t want to laugh; the sound is not like him. The sound is coming out of holes in his skin (so many of them) or perhaps from his ears (ejecting what’s come in before but in reverse) or something else about his head he can’t synthesize with enough precision to speak about it. He feels the cords vibrate in his neck, his runny blood. The laughter fills the space and wiggles through it, cordless, multiplying in diffraction, then gone again, where its remainder is everything at once wanting to be said while he says nothing and he looks. Looks again for something someone might have missed about the space’s frame or where about it or some other motion not about the bodies, having since been photographed, described, inscribed, removed, examined, identified (if possible), interred (if possible), memorialized, indexed, held aloft in glimmered minds. So many hands have been here, finessing surfaces, expurgating, eyes shut or open at various points, attempting to collect from harbors of the false light something wrought about the intention or issuance of the Events (i.e. the Killings), though what is there to say. How many can we count, what method of dispatch, how many hours alive before not alive, what name, what age. These are questions that have been asked and will be asked again regardless of the answers being given regardless of the year. These are the small bulbs on a white tree rising above the country in slow season for the worship of the Day; and yet here inside the room is Flood.
Each place Flood allows Flood’s foot to touch the floor covered with its clean mirrors makes him grow older; both the house and he change every time, aging together, changing; in this way he is many of him in many houses; in this way he will never leave the house.
He cannot hear the onset of the camera burning film somewhere above him over the roar of what is not there, the song having set so hard upon the house that it is the house and it will be the end and beginning yet again.
Again, behind him, behind Flood’s body, there is the shift of presence, though this time as he feels it align he spins around. He feels the minutes peeling from his other life, turning, the cords in his arms burning, his fingers wrapped around a weapon he has not brought; the gun seated barrel-up toward the ceiling between twin pillows on his white bed for the purpose of watching anything but what will come into the room.
In this room where so many bodies died. Where so many had been, dying. Where so many were.
There: there he is there in the mirror there this time he sees him he can catch him he is not her but him; in the glass of it he’s not so old but younger now, he knows, if bloated, if glassed around the face with liquid staying in and wanting out, the meat around his eyes the color of the meat they’d pulled out of here by the poundload as he stood upstairs in a version of a room without locked doors and tried not to hear the words of anyone around him as he recorded another instance of the life inside his mind by walking slow from room to room in learning and wishing his fingers could spurt gold, wishing it were him they were pulling out of there then and with the skins turned inside out while his stays white and tired and retarded and having let any person down and surrounded by others who have so done the same; it doesn’t even matter anymore to feel that or think about it in the hour because that is part of the definition of the name; that is god, for him, that is god, for him, that is god as god will be, for him, and he is he. There, there he is watching him watch him remember who he was just those days, however many days, and younger now and dumber now, the age leaking out of him from the agelessness from which he had been born, no way to keep it in, no way to want it out, unlike the blood; the gift these dead had been given and not even there to celebrate it any longer, being the worst joke and saddest fuckfreak thinking of them all, and their houses and their money and their stocks and bonds and their children and their haircuts and who they’d had sex with and where they’d been and where they’d wanted to be or to visit and their fingers and their keys, their memories of whoever, each erasing over time as time goes on, and him there against it and inside it, and him here again in echo of that in the house this time alone, and him there on the wall there watching him watch him remember and him there again there on the ground, the instance of his head and torso spread beneath him in rescinding dimension in such a way that he appears as a different kind of ache, a 2-D aping of his 3-D dumb ass standing goremouthed in the image of the room of dead, alone in the Black House having laughed and never meant it, having never meant it, there he is. The he who in his own life allowed her nothing that she wished without him having wished it also. His life still going on. Now. Right now. Going and going. The he who did not bend and so she became nothing, while again he is without the gun and here the house around him doing nothing like he is also again and he cannot become the house and he cannot become her, unless he can look so hard at his 2-D self there in the mirror that he turns to 1-D and therefore his 3-D self must turn to 2-D, taking with it some idea of the dimension that allows the third D to take place and amplify it unto becoming something possibly inhuman, like what people become when they die, as had his father and all the other fathers and would again but only after all that age had been leaked out, after all that nothing had been forsaken despite anybody’s wish to live forever and wanting everyone you love to live forever there beside you always also, the running bead of loss of our pulling the color from our hair, pulling the flat out of the skin into the bunched meat of long windows in us purpled over and caved in and laughed and asked and rinsed off and here again Flood is laughing and the floods of Flood are watching Flood. Here again Flood sees Flood forced forever left unending.
Flood lets his head nod toward the floor; down there in the mirror set beneath him Flood is smiling at himself in vast attraction, his gum meat popping in his head, gored bridges, a long white.
Flood stops, stands, stares, hears nothing. He jumps up in the air above the image of his face beneath him, splitting different, changing angles; the air is empty; a music begins to play, swelling low and hot out of his pore holes into the sound of air making no sound.
In the air above his face, as he is lifted, Flood invokes the moment he’s only just now invented, in remembrance of a moment in a place he can return to in the future, however ruined. From up here, semi-paused and still inside him, on the floor below he sees himself there rerendered just above. Across from him, in the cubic air underneath the Black House where the pulp of the murdered bodies and all their blood and rip had been, Flood sees himself peripherally seeing himself beneath him as he sees himself from above. Behind him, he hears more; he does not look to verify that these are him behind him and so they are not, and the mirror echoes with the lie: he appears alone here but he is not alone here and does not look beyond himself.
He does not think the prior thought at all inside him, and in not thinking realizes he is not the one doing this, not the engine, but this doesn’t stop him from not doing regardless, held as he is inside his own eyes and learning at last now to see what about the glint of his eyes shows someone else just there within him also, surrounded from outside and within. The moment grows.
There is a hell.
Here I am above me seeing me above me and below and beside me all at once, Flood says aloud. The words come out spoken in one word altogether, a name he’s never heard before or thought before: Darrel. The word adheres hot to his cheekface and the gristle in his neck where words are born. The words inscribe themselves along the mirror, written white in breathy lesions of the glass that will not be erased.
I am Darrel, he says aloud again, and again the words at once come out as one, the flick of the tongue to palate and the posture of his creaking growing in him in the language breaking through his lungs. So he is Darrel.
In the room under the Black House, Darrel (Flood) begins to land. He will destroy himself, he hears him saying in his second voice in third person in one word, in a voice that seems by the moment turning back upon itself as it is passed, a voice without sound but of sound, like sound deleted, a nothing flowing, wanting more. He will save his other life by giving it away; wedded in the instant to the coursing of the blood within him he would have liked to deliver into her, into a child made of his wife and him together only; a second self who could have lived beyond the minute of this exit, carried on all the sets of sets of expectations and hopes and troubles beyond the rind of Flood’s own body here and now split and coiling fast and hard around the moment so fast that he already can’t remember how it happened, how it is happening, causing the moment as it happened to stand alone unto itself unframed; therefore the moment cannot die, causing between the real and unreal a rip from one world to another, splitting Flood, the human, the nonfather, all apart, each instance of each of him and us eternally on pause from there forward in time to many false dimensions of him, each one aging as he goes. This had been happening his whole life, through every instance, and with everyone, and only now does he recognize how little of him here is left, leaving the space for whatever else could want to come into him as he is now to come and come and have him.
Poised in the falling air, Flood (Darrel) sees Darrel (Flood) beneath him coming closer as he approaches also unto the mirror with the copies of him surrounding (and all those others, whoever ever) seeing too, and through the mirrored walls the bloat of pressure of the missing moments seeing too, being too so gross and endless that in each there is no key, the ocean of the moment swollen hard every instant lived inside itself to rise above it and be crumpled as it passes into night, the mirrors in the house and beyond the house unbound ongoing moaning soft inside him, singing the death song.
SMITH: Both as a matter of official preservation, and for his own good, I have placed Flood on leave for a period as yet to be determined; throughout he will receive full benefits and pay as long as he cooperates, though I have as yet been unable to get ahold of him by any method for the last thirty-something hours, which I am afraid, if continued, could require greater consequences.
FLOOD: I am only just now beginning to understand what I could never understand. Something beyond me. Something beyond something beyond the all of us all inside us and around us and inside. I could and will and cannot slow down now.
Where Darrel (Flood) lands upon Flood (Darrel), ramming, through the glass of the ground’s mirror, the mirror ruptures, splits apart. The floor is false. Underneath the floor is a second floor, forming a cavity beneath the room, which the mirrors had kept hidden from investigation.
The room is roughly six feet deep, high enough to hide a body propped up erect, though there are no new bodies down here. The texture of the face of the surface is marbled pink with loam of discolored pigments set into it like speckled ham. It is soft and seems to be made of a synthetic polymer, like something from spacecraft. There is no smell; the air of the room above seems not to permeate beyond itself.
Flood’s flesh having fallen sits under the shards of black glass knocked unconscious for some duration before he returns back into his head. A large raised divot above his right ear throbs a heating music. There is blood exiting from a slight slash on his chest, and from another wetting through his pants’ knee. He pukes, woozy, upon waking. It takes a second and third seeing from inside him to realize again where he is: inside an alcove that had previously remained hidden beneath the layered mirrors of the floor in the locked room: a false floor, the key through which had been his own weight, i.e. himself.
Any wall could have another room behind it, Flood says aloud to no one.
All the edges of the world.
There is also blood on Flood’s hands; he goes to rub it on his shirt and makes twin handprints in impression; he rubs the remainder on the wall, though there is still blood on the hands even after having wiped them clean enough they seem mostly clean. He stops and forgets about the color, looking up into the mirror of the ceiling of the room above from where he’s fallen in, seeming higher than it should be. The room is too dark to make out his reflection in the mirror lining, layered up there now, seeing him seeing what he sees.
The linings of the exposed alcove have a glow, Flood realizes, eyes adjusting. The curvature of the space of the small revealment is affixed with low fluorescent light, panels of the surface there itself, backlit at low grade, almost low enough to not notice. In the cud of it Flood is yellowish, elderly-like. He smears a little blood on skin on himself, touching himself to see if he can feel it.
He shifts to stand. Erect, his head rises well enough over the lip of the indention that he can see around the room from down below, nearer to the reflective lining of the first floor’s flat expanse that makes the space seem both ever endless and, in knowing of the false nature of the surface, that much less. Mirrors speaking back and forth into one another, prismatic closets, which in the instance of this particular chamber and the past it held as present even just weeks before seeming somehow thicker in its air, black diamonds, phantom death. Traces of old blood and other matter’s smudging on the mirror reflect Flood’s head back at his central head appearing tattooed or blotted out in bits of obfuscation, showing nothing of him back to him the way to others he’d seem seen.
Flood squats to square down in the alcove, touching at the ground as a piano underneath him, the glass the scattered keys, careful not to cut himself again on the edgework, and still bleeding. He finds that when he speaks aloud no sound comes out beyond what seems just the inside of his head. He says his name; it is his name, only inside him. He cannot remember anyway it being different from this before.
This day is any day. The floor inside the subchamber, where it’s not glowing, is the color of his skin. It has a softness and quiet pliancy, a textured gruff. The glass bits on the surface from where he broke the mirrors seem to stick and cause no rupture in the smooth. Flood’s fingers tickle at the rubbish. He hears a tone snake down his spine. His posture loosens with warmth and sends a shimmer of clear liquid down his downturned sternum, to the head where days on days have hid and taken hold. He can hardly see beyond him. The liquid in the head seems suddenly to widen, casting in his vision, sudden memory:
him, Flood, nine, lost in a game in the white woods behind his grandparents’ home under a white sky, having fallen in a forest with mud up to his neck and in his teeth and hair and face, the muck he cannot make his tongue lurch past to scream for someone there inside the woods to come out of hiding, really, and pick him up, clean him up, lift up his body, take him from the night, though everyone is out there, everybody, where;
him, Flood, eleven, wrapped in a blanket, unable at all to breathe in, the white slick fabric hot and hard against him so close it appears black and seems to leak into his flesh, choking back up in the manner of a second skin around him, lurching down his throat to balloon outer, inward, snaking, coloring him in, the object like any object like a lining pulled out from his flesh and formed into a thing that he could touch then from the outside only and pretend to have never seen; thus is the nature of all objects, to any person, all of them, ours, displaced, undead;
him, Flood, of no age he can remember, upside down against an unseen surface in the air above his bed in his old home, flattened and pressed against it for such long time feeling like one instant that the whole world seems to hold, cogs of time aroused enough to keep him awake and out of resting but not aroused enough to let him move;
him, Flood, this morning, having stood up so fast that the blood rushed from his head, his limbs and balls and back and lungs thereafter weighing flushed out and dry light as a vacuum, as has been the way so many days, ambulating soft around the house and outside from room to room and space to space to face all feeling nothing where the blood was while still feeling air and motion on the outside of his skin, each day and all today in a kind of chosen bloodless automation, which some days is all that keeps him moving forward without thinking, even knowing that he knows, which as he thinks of here in this odd-lit room of this death home, if only to negate him, erupts the feeling of all that old blood suddenly flooding from a popping sound sent in his head, the blood all there at once rushing hot and fast from his skull’s orb of chortled memory and pregnant unnamed wishing back into him all at once with perfect frenzy, rain on rain, shelving colors in his vision, 3-D, 4-D, and again he pukes.
The vomit, made of liquid—water, coffee, orange juice, his own spit—reflects the cribbed in light a savage orange; it coats some shards, a little floor space, and flutters at his hands, while with his hands Flood stirs the slight air dying in the impression for some hold: a width to grip his chest with, a stirrup for his hands. He falls forward into the hidden area, in a way of falling that seems slower than it should be, in such a way it seems he can see himself from there above him again falling with his organs and his limbs, again becoming horizontal.
Here is Flood facefirst and chin down in the box. Flood feels flooded, ripe with windows being opened in his sternum and his ass. He could go to sleep here. He could sleep here. The lid above him, yes, could be replaced. Could be filled in with him into the house here. He cannot think what to do about the box or being in it or how to get out or to go, or what should happen, who should know this, if there is something else he needs to do, if there is ever any hour he is someone in his body, if his body is a wall.
A large lapse, like time defining zero, passes through him while he stares into the day on pause, unpaused. The day makes memory, mutation, affixing there to nodules of the memory regardless of their chronology. Each new instant, as it wishes, inside his head, may kiss each other, all. And the inhale of the next one, in the box.
Up close, along the low lining of the second floor right before his eyes, Flood reads a string of words printed faint into the surface, a message written there in tiny print and such slight indention, it is almost not there in the room at all, as if for him alone and him forever. The words scroll into him cleanly:
in god our blood the word of blood in god the name of god in god the name of god
The last word, god, in its last reading, seems, against the grain of Flood’s right eye to twinkle, turning its letters over and over on themselves as he absorbs them: god, sod, gap, dog, doo, gun, sun, goo, gad. The shiver of the shifting language curdles in his mind, the words gummed up against the shelves of words already waiting in the memory of books and days and years, folded into any thought whatsoever, like this sentence, like this urge. As well, the sentence set there on the box face begins spinning, shifting through new letters, compressing the language:
with you were with me wished I was you and you were I which wished not known
god wished if you if we wishing where wish we were we where cuz god
why cuz I would wish you wished beside me now always and again
what now exactly now none nothing in the city of our Sod
please help me help we help we please
The words burn and blink inside the house like countless tiny screaming people; they become again inside the words not the words they’d been before then. The floor down here is covered with sentences all over it, every inch shifting to become central as he looks.
With his middle finger Flood reaches up along the surface to rub its meat on the letters of the words as he takes each in, to trick their rhythm into holding still. He rubs along the letters while they grow warm with him. The words fold fast and slow and soft in lines: each sentence shrinking in silent compilation underneath the heat and presence of his going at it, like any hour any day, words disappearing into words:
Which which why now god now why now god now why now cuz
How help please cuz I am was nothing we were you were
Want if want was if god if
If I see I
Be I
Six smearing into five. Five into four and there again all smearing, like smells absorbing smells. Any word or letter looked at too long rolls and mutates, changing also where inside his brain he felt he knew what the word meant, the memory of one’s memory gaining blowholes, slaved erasures. As each sentence disappears, there is no floor where it had been written on it.
Flood blinks.
Flood hears the sound of all the houses filling up with blood throughout the world.
Flood has no idea how long he’s been rubbing at the new flat floor beneath him, now double-fingered, like a woman masturbating, and drooling from the mouth. Between the dry on the wall where words were, around his pads there’s something sizzling, a rising cream pushed through the walls through where there’d been the row of holes of changing letters. In the mass of glow above him he can’t see where he’d fallen through the mirrors, up into the old room, where all those bodies had been stored; he can’t see where the edges of the newer room around him begin or end, in such a way that it seems like the air is all just walls around him, with the language, deeper and deeper, disappearing as he rubs.
Something in this room begins to shake. This room where you are sitting with your hands before you, reading. You don’t hear it because I said that it began. You refuse to take part in trying to hear thereafter because I’m talking about you directly to you and this object is a book. You don’t like the idea of me communicating through you, outside of time. But there is something. In the room. Shaking. Behind your back, or just downstairs, or maybe by the window where you sleep, or in the curtains, soft as hair.
What is shaking.
Will you hear it.
In the room where he is, Flood does; he hears the shaking like I have heard, though to him it feels like it’s inside him.
Is it inside him.
I think someone is at your door.
Flood is grunting. His torso seems above his head. His head feels above his ass. His ass feels opened. There is no light, but for where above him in the spinning, he can feel the low glow of the room somewhere above him, then below him. The black is gyroscopic. He’s all wet now. He feels a cursor blinking in his chest. If he’s not moving, he can’t seem to keep one way clearly up above him. If he’s falling, the air here has a floor, one indifferent to direction, shape, or time.
Flood, Gravey says inside his cell alone. Flood, he says. Flood, he says.
A blue lesion has pulled open on his back between his shoulder blades. It is too small to be seen by humans.
The lesion seems to change shape when looked at. Inside this shape there is a city, like the city you are in. The city is unfolding.
Gravey exhales into the larger air.
Today in America unknowing each speaking person will emit a common word.
LAPUZIA: I go by Flood’s residence on my way home from the precinct. I don’t let anybody know I’m going, because I want to approach as a friend, not as a coworker. I’m worried about him, to be honest, and not just his career but his mental and emotional well-being. I find his front door left unlocked and halfway open. I immediately notice a strange smell, but I don’t associate it with where I have felt it from until I come into the front room. There are mirrors on the floor. Mirrors on the walls and on the ceiling. Several dozen lights light the room wide. I am so shocked at first I start to call for backup, but something stops me. Still, I ready my firearm. I go on into the larger room. Spread out on the floor where one would usually have a sofa etc. I find a series of pictures of B., Flood’s deceased wife. There are pictures of her alone and smiling, her with E. N. in various locations, and so on, hundreds of them, just everywhere. And there are papers. Papers of his writing, some of which are copies of ones I’ve seen before, that he’s brought to me, others I have not, and some written in a script that doesn’t look like English. Drawings of odd symbols are on many of the pages. I continue on into the apartment, terrified of what I’ll find, though in the other rooms nothing is strange. No evidence of struggle or wrongdoing. No bodies, thank god, and no blood. The main closet is still full of B.’s old clothes, and this is where I realize there’s this odd smell snaking on the air. It is a perfume, sprayed so many times into the small room it’s hard to breathe. Hours later I knew for certain I had felt the presence of this choking, slaving smell before, sometime when I was very young, inside my sleep, but this does not occur to me at the time. I come back out into the main room. I stand among the pictures and the light. I decide there’s no reason to report this, that I should not have come here, that I feel older than I ever had all through my blood. I feel dizzy in the middle of the photographs of her, the mirrors, a silent catacomb of eyes. That’s when I realize I’m being recorded.
FLOOD: You and everyone who’s ever been. This is not a question of being destroyed, or even beginning: it is in the folding there between: the color of the mesh of the lives forced into bodies rendered one unto the other, lobes in the catalog of time. Each body not a body but a cell. I did not write this.
The body before the glass screen watches white.
He or she before the screen watches the white recorded into the image of the video not go on, not shift or change its vision, unless it bears an image hidden underneath itself: white upon white, making more of what it was and is and will be. Spitting up upon itself more of itself. No mirror. No hour. The white of a white loom.
He or she, assigned to duty, must watch the film to find where inside it there might be something as yet undetected, evidence buried in the film filmed by a man who may or may have not used his hands to end several hundred human lives. He or she may feel emotion in regard to the gone bodies even not having known these victims beyond their humanity after the fact, but regardless time continues, the white continues. The end of one life or another on any given day cannot end all lives, we think. We must go on. This is both the song and city of the human, to continue, we know, and so he or she must.
He or she sees.
He or she is a she here in this instance but as well may be a he or she as in the end it does not matter.
Before the screen he or she has already spent many hours looking. He or she has nodded off to sleep throughout an unknown number of tapes, which continued playing on during the period without he or she realizing he or she had slept, and so not seen, the present seeming in his or her head to be one continuous waking session of watching the tapes, when in fact the session is corrupt. What had been shown had not been entirely denoted, quantified for what had passed over the closed eyes. The aging of all flesh continues to go on regardless, without sound.
The waking body sees the white again. It appears nothing has happened. Nothing, then, has happened. He or she marks another mark upon a page, a sentence notating nothing has happened, and is happening now. Nothing is happening.
The waking body drinks a glass of milk. The milk is warm from where it’s been left on the table for some duration of the day; its opaque color had stayed there unchanged in its state during the period in which he or she had nodded off, a half-full glass of whole milk. He or she does not mind the warmth of the waiting milk, or that in drinking he or she must assume the milk is fine to drink; he or she has had experience with milk, and so anticipates a somewhat innate awareness with its content.
The milk enters the body with the body’s eyes rolled back into the head; again, as with the sleeping and other blinking, he or she is cut again from seeing what appears on screen. He or she, in waking presence, assumes by now that the screen is always only presenting more of the white. One would have to assume, having seen most of the white surrounding any instant of the white oncoming, that any present instant must also be white, otherwise life in this context would become almost impossible to live through, or at least impossible to feel having gotten anywhere in. For the most part then one must go on as if anything unseen could not be interrupting its own continuity in whatever incidental gaps of time it wasn’t witnessed, until a point inside the white that the oncoming white ceases to be white in such a way that cannot be ignored, waking one into the understanding that all these hours might not be just blank, but somehow haunted, embodying some terror so large it at most points could not be seen from so close up.
So then having mostly watched, the thing is considered watched; this is the nature of the assignment: to find by seeing mostly all the white where it might be that white is not. If there is nowhere that the white is not, then the assignment will have been an exercise in finding nothing, which herein will go unrewarded, beyond hourly pay—paid cash to live his or her life with, and his or her family’s, if he or she has one, their bodies stuffed with food and air inside of rooms earned by the doing of the seeing of nothing.
If something does appear, among the tapes of nothing, it must be something, one assumes.
Inside the body of the person seeing the milk falls down through fleshy rolls through the center corridor of his or her body to slick and rush along the landscape of the throat, leaving filmic coat along its white way into the stomach, filling the remainder of what is there of what energy has already been destroyed inside the body from aging and production all ongoing inside the walking and the sitting and the sleeping of the body. The milk, one presumes, will be used then by the body to perpetuate the body in forward motion for some amount of future time, making it possible to breathe and sit and eat again sometime and before the screen there employed to see, if, in this instance, to see nothing, as there is nothing there but white, so far.
The body will continue to be changed. At some point in this future today the person will lie down on a bed to sleep again, this time knowing he or she is sleeping, or believing at least that he or she is.
The face of the screen is the face of the nothing through which the nothing functions and can be seen for what it is.
The face of the screen has held many images before today, the image of the white. There have been years of tapes of other persons making motions that will indict their wrong behavior. This is the function of the operation of the viewing in this context: to jail. What is seen that can’t be used in this manner does not exist. One assumes, too, in days forthcoming, after the days of viewing the White Tapes of Gretch Gravey, the screen will be used again for images of other potential malevolence. Color will function in the pixels of the machine’s face to depict persons moving, copied stretches of the sky, perhaps in depiction of some wrongdoing, some destruction, derangement, death; elements possible in any given suspect, if only waiting to awake.
The point is that we don’t know what we’re looking for here. Which is why we’re looking. The evidence may or may not rear its head. There is not always evidence provided toward the nature of our history and how it holds us, feeds us.
He or she sits the milk glass down. The milk glass now is mostly empty, except for where around the inside layer of the glass the milk remains in residue, a thin white lining that reforms its shape as it is placed to set still again on the desk where it had been. The remaining milk not consumed is milk that might’ve been used to perpetuate the function of the body slightly further in its ongoing, if by a negligible amount. It’s really not much milk left in the glass, but it’s not empty. One could extend his or her tongue. One could lick around and use the fingers to get more of the smear of the milk out, but one does not.
One returns to sit back in the padded seat again half slumped at no clear angle in relation to any of the room’s walls, seeing only the walls before the self directly clearly and in some amount of visibility as well those in the periphery on each side. Each present moment’s experience waxes or wanes in or out in quality as the concentration of the person shifts in one way or another for whatever reason. He or she is at just enough of an angle to look like he or she is at attention, sitting up, while also close enough to feel comfortable that the shape allows the nodding off perhaps again, though having slept once and in small fits and now awoken from the longest, he or she is more fully there inside the room, refreshed. Sleep later in the evening even will be harder, having faltered.
Most of the room cannot be seen. Hours continue in the manner of their own becoming.
One looks head-on into the TV. One is watching nothing making nothing; white making white.
The sound is mute. The sound before the TV had been muted was all static, and at first he or she had let the static sound go on, and it had been more than two hours before the mute procedure was applied. He or she presumes that if the nature of the static changes, the nature of the image would also change, and therefore one would not miss any shift inside the sound if it occurs, though if there were a sound now inside the tape that did not correspond with the change of the video, such as a voice, a dictation, someone confessing, someone listing directions for the destruction of the earth, encoding in the head of the hearer a methodology of murder, that sound inside the room would not be heard. The sound would still be played, though, on the tape, into the room; it only would not be noted beyond its own silence. The word, though, would have occurred.
The muted or turned-off TVs in all the other houses surround the building. The white walls surround each room. The light inside the rooms and between the rooms constantly changes.
In the grain of the function of the white, one might see aberrations from what had been actually filmed. One might force, in the seeing, a rub of grain, a flux of multicolor in the nothing that appears to rise and become swallowed in the white. Hours passing in the seeing of the nothing make one’s eyes go weird and grabby, wanting texture where there’s none. The eyes play tricks inside their wishing boredom. He or she has seen, for instance, just now, or, rather, believes he or she has, a kind of lobe or hand rise from the flat, a reaching out of something from the nowhere as if touching, with such thick fingers. He or she shakes his or her head or blinks the eyes hard, and when one looks again, yes, there is only the white: the white returned to fill the space around the rising of the vision of the perceived hand, no longer there. What rises from the white then, in this manner, is not quite fabrication, mental leaking, but more a congealment: it’s not not there, nor is it really. It went on between the viewer and the viewed alone. It could not be repeated in another. Pixels begin to form a portrait of aggregated resolve, like the lakes or field scenes that arise from staring hard into a loose amassment of stray color. Those traps. Those days. Those jokes. The walls here. Your growing hair.
Of the four witnesses employed to watch of the tapes of Gravey over the many shifts of the last several days, none have agreed upon the way they’ve done the seeing. Only one, just now, for instance, has seen the hand. Only this one will admit, furthermore, to have found his or her self wholly summoned at some point into the wide grain of the white, the pure unending white, as if to some awning opening inside the screen there where the light is to become not one flat panel but a crack cut in the middle of the finite hours of the whiteness.
If the others have also seen this, and they might have, they don’t admit it; they might not even know.
But he or she, now, yes even right now again in the updated moment spent between this sentence and the one before it there invoking the name of the now inside the seeing, he or she cannot avoid admitting how he or she can read against the white something else rising, a surface deeper than the TV, and spreading wider. How, if one allows one’s self to keep one’s eyes wide, not shaking off inside the seeing again into a sleep or someone knocking or the ringing of a phone, one might feel as if there in the white they must move forward; the color of it calling without asking for him or her to come forth slow and long into its body, falling not in a way that knocks the head against the screen’s glass or even leaves the body forward in the chair, but moving as if through some mush writhing outward from the film’s virtual center, filling in around the viewer’s head. How, if one allows one’s self, with eyes wide, one might inside the whitened rise of it go in, might enter beyond some sense of self into this hour of the screen’s hold, and there inside it open into somewhere before not found to touch the room, somewhere before this present instant of our index undefined, a product not only of Gravey’s project and that enactment, but the condition of time surrounding only now.
One might find held in the white a field of color secreted in the blank’s breadth pushed way down into the field, such that as one moves against it nearer still inside the seeing one might find how one can feel or seem or be as if he or she has shifted somehow from being surrounded by the room’s walls now into the color. One might look back from where one is now and find his or her own body watching, eyes wide open loosely as if drugged, looking even bored inside his or her life spent staring head-on into the white where his or her own self sits seeing from inside the white as if not even seeing his or her self. One might go even further than even that then, in the white of fields of days of years inside the tape.
Turning back away then from where the self of flesh was into the shaping of the film, one might loosen sight so deeply in the white of such film seeing that beyond the cusp of where one had seen one’s self last the space might slur; one might, inside the silence of the white, then disappear there into a kind of color not even color hidden in the white, but many colors crammed in colors, crammed in crams, made of the mute, a set of space so trapped or dry or sewn up from the seeing of the body that once one sees inside the self released, one cannot remember what air is or what time is, there, and in this seeing in the white so deep in colors a sound emerges, a tone so seized and gone it has no tone at all, has nothing but its own presence, which once acknowledged, might expand.
In the minute of the taking of the color under the color hid inside the screen, one might no longer recall how to get back to where the self was there beforehand, prior to this, in the body, nor might one want to or even remember what it would feel like to want to, to feel anything beyond here, absent from the names of names of days. One might not remember one had been ever anywhere but where one is now, flooding, flooded, for forever, wrapped and lifted in the white that bloats still deeper dry inside itself. Perhaps there never even was any other moment, or ever will be, outside of this one, out of this long and lengthless void of breadth, even as outside the color, the body watching or not watching, the body goes on in its war. There might never have been or will be any instance of the self or selves beyond the color, the end of color, white. One might live on only ever now inside the idea of itself. One might become nothing but the absence of the presence it had never fully even been before then. In the fact of disappearance, one might now actually exist.
MARY RUTHERFORD, MD: Pardon my late entry into this notation, as I have just been given access to these files as a result of my psychiatric examination of Detective Flood, but what I am most concerned by is the complete lack of comment regarding Flood’s investigation of the “Gretch Gravey” character? I know that not all police operations are made public, and even medical doctors involved with officials under duress in the line of duty are often kept out of the more gory or legal details of a case, but considering the apparent attention surrounding this particular case as described by Flood, and in my understanding of his current involvements, I wonder why no one has mentioned that this case does not seem to exist. I can find no evidence in reports personal or private at my level of access to the investigation or holding of a suspect by the name Gravey or the acts attributed to him above. Flood’s growing mania for what seems to me a potentially fabricated line of investigation wherein several dozen women have been brutally murdered and had their flesh eaten, and the subsequent lack of attending to said fabrication’s presence in the mind of an officer of the law, is baffling, sad, disturbing, and problematic in ways we have as yet not begun to scrape the face of. I would like to request counsel not only with Flood directly, but with Sgt. Smith in regards to the nature of Flood’s recent work, as if I am being withheld of this information, I don’t know how I could ever begin to do my job with a clear mind. I’m not sure what else there is to say, besides that I honestly don’t know how I will find a way to bed tonight, as there now seems about my air too something leaking.
SMITH: ???
On this fourth day of the viewing, the fourth officer of the video review squad of the white films of Gretch Gravey ends the lives of the three other officers in the same employment using her service pistol placed against their skulls: not by shooting any of them with a bullet, but by blows, an estimated more than several hundred per cadaver, deployed between the eyes. The officer, a mother of three, is able to complete this triple murder despite walking covered in blood out of the station after having performed the first kill in the adjoining viewing office. Somehow knowing the locations of the two remaining male viewing members’ homes she performs the same gun-butt beatings on both their bodies among descending dusk: the first alone in his apartment eating microwaved spaghetti, the second in the presence of his wife and child near the TV. Having finished off the other viewers, the murdering officer returns to her own home, to dispatch herself before her own spouse and her two oldest children, calmly, neatly placing the gun at last against her own white head and pulling the trigger with open eyes.
Into fifty microphones gathered in bouquet and a feed of cameras sucking his image hard across our electronic fields, Gravey presents an oral statement into America: “Not guilty,” he says. His voice is ashy. He chokes on something else. The air is still beyond all birds. The images burned of him in the instant will show how, during the duration his mouth comes open, Gravey’s head seems to slightly blur around the nostrils and the eyelids, rapidly blinking. Mouth closed again, he raises his locked arms toward the sky; appears to pull something down into him; inhales with his nostrils; shudders; closes back his eyes. Flashbulbs again and the sky unflinching, soon again to grow opaque like chocolate wrappers from the inside, sealed against the flesh of the dark bar. Gravey remains still and hard-shaped, saying nothing for the duration of the melee of questions without answer and the still surrounding public screaming ricocheting off of all the seeing teeth, until by other hands he’s led inside, led down a corridor unto a corridor unto a corridor unto a floor, where on the zigzagged tile in silence is placed a single hard-boiled egg on a black platter, which Gravey eats still in the shell and stands to sleep.
BLOUNT: No one has seen Flood in several days, or is it hours—what is the word for the period in which daylight ends and then again begins? The detective assigned in Flood’s place as lead investigator has also gone missing. I can’t remember quite his name. Now they are asking me to take the helm. Or rather, it doesn’t seem like they are asking. I go to Gravey’s cell sometimes and just stand there near the wall there, and I listen. I hear me talking.
Flood finds his eyes.
Where he is now standing in a passage. He is naked. He doesn’t remember how he became naked. There is a wall behind him, against his back, on which he finds that he’s been leaning. New dark continues going forward toward an unreadable distance. Graded panels light the hole, the same glow as what had laced the space beneath the mirrored floor in Gravey’s basement, though here only occasionally deployed, so that the illumination comes with great gaps, smaller and smaller in the distance. The light seems natural, as if brought in by shafts from actual daylight.
The walls are white.
Flood is somewhere underneath Gravey’s home, he realizes. The second floor had been also false. He must have fallen through it like the first one, and landed down here, whatever here is. His entire body hurts; it feels like he’s bleeding from every inch of him, a kind of constant sensation of sweating and absorbing at the same time, but there is no blood, or if there is, he hasn’t seen where. Above him, the ceiling is high up and nestled in a dark, somewhere among which must be the surface he remembers rubbing through, or into. He can’t see anywhere to have fallen in from, or any way back out. If anyone can hear him shouting, they don’t answer.
He runs his palm along the long white surface. It is cold, synthetic. An odd sensation there in where he touches as the contact seems to make his skin come alive, as if there’s someone underneath his flesh touching on the inside where the wall touches. And, too, like someone is there on the wall’s far side, also touching.
Flood has no choice then but to proceed by facing sandwiched soft between the twin walls and sideways stepping into the oncoming alternating dark. He could wait, perhaps, for someone to come and find him, though there’s no telling how long.
The plane of the passage going forward descends rapidly by lengths, cutting at such a slight grade as it goes on that it is nearly impossible to tell it’s going down at all; one could conceivably continue down the narrow stretch for hours and still believe they’d only ever stayed aligned with one horizon.
Flood finds the tunnel floors becoming slick. Farther still and he is splashing in inches of liquid underneath his feet. The deeper in he goes, the more there is. He stops to sniff the smell and smells no smell. He puts some in his mouth and he tastes the salt of blood; he knows what blood tastes like; we all do. We all have. If it’s not blood it’s something just as common. There is no sound outside the repetition of Flood’s pace, though inside him he hears words: a murmur mirroring the murmur through the wall, hid under motion, as if someone there is speaking only when he moves. He can almost, underneath this, understand the syllables or shapings of the language, though not enough to take it fully, and not inside this night.
Not inside this night. Who is that speaking, Flood thinks. He repeats the phrase aloud, though his voice doesn’t sound like him now. Each word wants him to speak more, like having opened up the gates inside him now there’s so much more there, if all of no recognizable syntax. The voice just comes and comes. He bites his mouth to shush himself and does it too hard. A little blood comes up in his mouth. He swallows the blood. Inside him the blood continues loose. The blood tastes cold against the other blood inside him.
The width of walls begins to open up. The widening increases at a clipped rate, like the descending, such that as he goes along Flood can hardly recognize the change; each time he gets the sense he’s no longer in a passage tight with darkness but somewhere edgeless, like the night, a massive humming chamber; the tunnel turns again to narrow off. Sometimes it grows so narrow, even within three strides, that he must turn to sidle flat along, pressed between the walls’ sides, and sometimes even coming so thin there against his flexing belly he’s unsure he can force through.
The texture of the walls remains as ever, with the sound against his frame, and the far-off knobs of white light still oncoming, pulling him forward, rebegun.
Rebegun, that’s not a word, Flood hears himself say inside him, squeezing the voice down and in to hold it. As if to fill in where the sound is, the blood he’s swallowed washes hot into his throat across his tongue. His bowels tremble, wanting to shit. The vision where his eyes see straight ahead is kind of fucked, causing there to appear several tunnels spreading out forward in the eye of the one tunnel.
Or are there actually that many tunnels, that many different thumbs of light? It is difficult to know which among the sprawl he should lurch toward now. At certain junctures, it seems, branches will open, allowing him the choice of one of several ways to proceed, though no matter which way he chooses, the walls all seem the same, as if repeating, and stride by stride the wet continues rising slowly underneath him, making it slowly more and more difficult to walk. No matter which way Flood chooses, all lengths of the passage look the same. Wherever it is, the tunnel’s way goes on forever, as far as Flood can tell, every stretch threatening to disremember where they ever were, on toward some expanse as uncontained as any day.
Rebegun, his voice says again inside him with the blood all in his mouth and through his mind. Sure, sure, that’s a word, it says. Sure, you can say that.
Any word is always ours now.
In the darkness, there is text.
Deeper down, and once his eyes have grown accustomed, he sees that what had seemed only space without light in the passage isn’t just solid, but has fiber to it, layers to it. Where there seemed walls there, a language holds the space together hard, so many syllables collected in the same pixels it feels impenetrable. The dark, then, is not actually solid, but so overrun it has no choice but to present nothing.
Up close, though, Flood can read. He finds the walls of the passage imprinted in the same way as the floor had been above him, wherever that was, in god our blood the word of blood in god the name of god in god the name of god, the layers of sentences laid atop each other often obscuring each beyond a language Flood feels he knows. The text is so thick it’s hard to make out any word unless his eye is right above it, tracing where the lines of one letter break free from those beside. It wraps around his face like a loose mask. It brings him nearer.
Each string of language contains small softer sections, Flood finds, like buttons lodged in on a monochrome piano, open wounds. As before, some of the words can be pressed down with pressure aimed in the right way, though now the action is clearer, more like life. He has become acquainted, inculcated, opened, but it had always been this way, in every surface, always. In every surface and word and shape and face ever remembered, ever touched.
Among the black knit, there are panels shaped with different outlines: letters that turn to new shapes as he sees; ring-shaped, star-shaped, squares and diamonds. Each button causes an alteration to the surface just beneath it, the exposure of a branch. Pressing down on the word wished, for instance, in one of its many repetitions along the surface, right before his face, causes the wall right behind him to come open. There is no sound. The wall simply slides away, almost so calmly you could miss it.
Behind where had once been wall is now a shaft, extending far on into its own dark cavity. The walls at the mouth of the shaft are the same white as the main passage, quickly disappearing into black.
Flood hesitates some long second standing staring down into the hole he’s made open. For some reason, he can’t immediately bring himself not to continue into its eye, despite the fact that he’s already surrounded by unknown in totality, all directions. There is still the latent fear that once behind it, the wall might close. He could become sealed in down here. He could be made trapped for the remainder of his life. Even in the dark beneath a killer’s house, he worries about his own preservation, if only long enough to hesitate a beat before giving in, again, toward what, he does not know.
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]
INTERVIEW WITH GRETCH GRAVEY, CONDUCTED BY J. BURNS. 10/16/2
, 1:30 P.M.
JB: | Why did you kill [more than] four hundred and forty people? |
GG: | What. |
JB: | You have been accused and will most likely be convicted of killing a lot of people. The number’s yet to be concretely established, but by what we know so far it is at least four hundred and forty. Why did you do it? |
GG: | [Shakes his head hard.] |
JB: | No comment? |
GG: | No condition. [Inhaling slowly.] Do you have a gun at home? |
JB: | I’ve never owned a gun. My father was against it. I probably should, though, shouldn’t I? Do you own a gun? |
GG: | Many. |
JB: | How many guns do you own? |
GG: | As many as there are bodies in America. |
JB: | America? Why not the whole world? |
GG: | When the hole is open the rest will enter. [Exhaling slowly.] |
JB: | Is there a reason more than seventy-five percent of your accused victims were women? |
GG: | For what any of us is and was and is again and will be again beginning. To awake the Eye. |
JB: | So you did commit the murders? |
[Gravey’s face changes. He shudders raptly, arms convulsing, then looks at me again.]
GG: | No, that was you. That was your father and my father. That was windows or was water. I am online now. The gown is raising. In almost any home you can find written at least once the word delete. |
JB: | Your father. He’s gone missing, but we haven’t found his body in your house. |
GG: | I grew up in a family of nature, a more graphic, wonderful home. As children we were happened. We regularly encountered church. I wanted five hundred brothers and sisters. My parents did not drink or visit grocery or drugstores. Their softcore pornography was no physical abuse, just not enough. In our neighborhood it was a fine, solid people that would dream garbage and, from time to time, tragedy. The days would scream. The days are screaming now but you can’t hear them and soon even that— |
[Gravey is laughing. He makes a terrified face, then a deranged face, then suddenly appears calm. I start to open my mouth to say the next thing and before I can he speaks.]
GG: | There is a law revolving around God, from this Word of God, and the Prophets made flesh, as far back as Mary the Virgin. So that all who would highlight God’s mercy would make everyone believe in what was coming; that who would seek god for where there has been other, when Christ was forgiveness, and writing, writings of the conceived. We had to bring God’s writings, search the Scriptures, and slay it, as who do not usurp the authority become the arguments themselves. The confronted Christ knew the real meaning, but yet said to him, “There’s an additional God.” Be not sons, they were commanded, born of fornication, so we were. |
JB: | You mean God told you to kill? |
[There is a long silence. My lips won’t open. Gravey sees me. Then he shakes his head. My lips seem to unlock. I find it hard to take a breath. I feel the ground beneath me kind of moving. Again I try to speak and again Gravey speaks instead.]
GG: | God’s name isn’t God. The word has not been formed yet. I am forming the word. |
JB: | Are you a prophet? |
GG: | I am whoever. |
JB: | Anybody? Everybody? |
GG: | Neither. It is a folding. |
JB: | So it was a moral act? |
GG: | No. It was written. There is no author. |
[I had not realized until right now how much sweat is pouring from his face. His clothes are soaked through and into the bed and on the floor almost with such range I can’t believe it. The wet is on my pants a little. I try to forget at all about my body or the air here.]
JB: | What do you think of the Bible? |
GG: | God of Heaven believed that he was a sacrifice rich in mercy, numb, and prophets were goats, oxen, red men ignored, heifers. A Law, but also a way, an escape for those who learned the sophisticated Repentant Souls and social impacts might fall short of the virgin, toward a very prolific type of glory of God’s law. We would conceive and bear a system of worship. The prophet had to slay a lamb for hope for a world. It has only partially begun. |
[Suddenly I’m having trouble breathing, like the room is too small. Gravey looks. I’m kind of choking. The air seems to catch hard in my chest and spin there. Gravey’s not blinking. I can still manage to make words.]
JB: | Is it true you ate many of your victims’ bodies? |
GG: | I ate them all. All of them, each component. I mean just by breathing. You will become it, too. All flesh must be returned into one flesh. What seems their remainder is not there. It is a bag I placed to leave the evidence of my being in the hands of the cameras for the proclamation. They weren’t victims. I’m just around. |
JB: | How would you describe the taste of human flesh? |
GG: | Like mashed potatoes in a ball gown. Sometimes pianos or a lock. It depends on the flesh’s eventual location in our total future mass. [begins to touch himself all over quickly] Hey, do you have fire? |
JB: | I don’t smoke. |
GG: | I don’t either. Do you have fire? |
[Again, my voice comes pouring from me.]
JB: | My father used to burn leaves in the yard. It made more smoke than anything else. The ground around the pile was black. |
[My choking in my chest is simmery, like on the cusp of welling up.]
GG: | Did you love your father? |
JB: | I think I did. |
GG: | No, did you love him? |
JB: | He was my dad, yeah. |
GG: | [suddenly angrily, baring teeth] I said did you love him? |
JB: | Yes, I did. I do. |
GG: | Then you love me. |
[Gravey at this point is drooling from the mouth to match the sweat; the drool slick makes a long reflective window, as with dishsoap water, before it pops between the index of his face between his hands. His eyes are blinking so rapidly it is as if the function of the lids has inversed: blinking when they would other times be held open or closed, staying open or closed when they would blink. Gravey begins grunting in a rhythm.]
JB: | Hey, are you okay? |
GG: | [snorting] Let’s have dinner. I like tacos. I enjoy the light inside a cow’s right eye. |
JB: | It’s not quite dinner yet. I’d be glad to join you. |
[Gravey again laughs. His laughter this time sounds completely different from the first way his first laughter sounded, higher, more rapid. The recorder in my pants begins to buzz. I feel it burn at where my skin is. I hear my phone. My phone is ringing. It seems to stick against my leg. My leg has spasms. My teeth won’t let my mouth around them close. I’m sweating. I hear numbers. A light is rising.]
JB: | Darrel? |
GG: | [not smiling] Yes, son? |
JB: | I am |
GG: | You are |
[I feel better. The room is cleaner. I sit straight up. I breathe.]
JB: | I want to understand. |
[Gravey closes his eyes; I watch them roll back underneath the flesh as the lid comes down. Suddenly I smell something, like he’s shit his pants, but neither the expression on his face nor his position belies any strain. He begins to speak now through his lips without opening his mouth, a childish murmur.]
GG: | He is in a room. There are no doors in the room. There is a screen. A kind of light coming from somewhere on the side opposite the screen feeds at his chest. It is the Day. Inside the room he watches the day go on beyond him in the end of itself. He does not know what he sees, or that he’s seeing. Where he is is going to end but it will begin again. No murder and no mirrors, but a fleshless, edgeless, ageless frame. |
JB: | And you? When will you die? |
GG: | I am only here on pause. For a moment my home touched the room beyond the screen and gained its level but this soon will be ended, for the pyre. This body too will be destroyed, at the hands of all our hands, like mine, so we no longer have to have. |
[His sweat is almost like a well. It fills his mouth. I taste the salt and cannot chew. I’m sweating also, more now than I ever.]
JB: | Gretch Gravey, are you guilty as an actor in the death of the four hundred and forty persons? |
GG: | On Tues., 7-23-XX, Gretch Gravey knew homicides that he forgot real. Upon asking him to mention in which skulls he performed the original interview, he stated the above information. For this work I would like to be paid fifteen million dollars. |
JB: | Were you alone, or were there others? |
GG: | During the rising I was the second suspect in his body, an offense. Some of the skulls Gretch Gravey had picked up and requested to speak with were found in front of me again. |
[Each time I inhale, he exhales.]
JB: | You keep referring to yourself now in third person. |
GG: | At this time I was the thirty-third skull he sprayed. There had been ones before and there would not be others. I proceeded to the fifth floor of the house. At this time I also locked myself up in Sod City, where there appeared a black paint. The neighbors knew. Their faces shook in the night while they were sleeping and they grew. |
JB: | There were others involved, or there weren’t? |
GG: | All the victims in all eyes. All the knives the verbs had given in the books and speech of human color. |
JB: | You aren’t making any sense. |
GG: | Our last transmission. More phones all ringing in the blood of them with each new inch. When asked into the interview room where the numbers were placed onto where they could become the Mother Body, He stated he had boiled the skin and hair we conducted from the skulls in order to spray away an hour’s time. Each hour must be peeled into the Mother to forgive it. He at this time gave them an artificial torso that he wished to look like in case someone he had taken from a state talked to us about a victim while we were not there in our bodies. He had also two additional feelings that could not be boiled out of us, either one. |
[There is so much liquid on the floor, I can feel it. I can’t look down.]
JB: | What were the feelings? |
GG: | A sleeplike state, the state of ether; and the pyre, where to this . . . |
[Gravey’s face begins to emit sounds of biting, from inside his throat, like something in there tearing. His eyes are wet, and making gleam. He refuses to make words, despite the nearly constant ream of guttural and convulsive sound seeming to come from all over his body. I watch. I hold my hands close. I feel hungry: I wish I didn’t have to say I did.]
[I cannot speak.]
GG: | |
GG: | [some kind of breathing coming from him in the deepest voice I’ve heard] The world revolves around the world. Other orchestrations [planetoid, celestial, debris, silent striation, columnar bodies, fable/myth, the unseen] are totalities manifested by the world’s revolution of itself. Its revelation. To change the earth, the earth must be deceived. One way is paper, one is blood. |
[I cannot speak and do not wish to.]
GG: |
[More time goes on. I am seeing colors. I close my eyes and can’t make them open up. I keep waiting for the guards to come and get me. I feel nothing. Later, standing up from where I’d been seated, I would imagine it had been at least weeks since I had left the room, as I would find my legs so stiff and weird beneath me it was as if they were not mine. I find myself again compelled against speaking.]
JB: |
[Gravey’s sternum is shaking. It stinks.]
JB: |
[The whites of Gravey’s eyes have become grayer, packed with bluish spindles. The pupils rolled down to look toward me, not at or into me, but straight through, as if focused hard on something on the far side of my head. I could feel a little burn like boiling wine where my memory packets swirled around a cold spot in my cerebrum. I turned around to look where he was looking on the wall. There on the wall, a black square printed at eye level into the white surface, hazy, floating on my vision, and just thereafter, sunk away into the cream.]
[I got up and walked out of the room.]
[I mean I get up. This is happening in present tense.]
[I walk along the long hall through the building seeing nobody else. I have to piss. I’m freezing cold. None of the doors in here will open. Nothing would open. The door to the outside is no longer where I remember it was. I don’t know where anybody is. Through the window into another holding chamber holding a shitload of dogs inside it. The dogs are gnawing at each other.]
[None of the other rooms is really a room. There are beds. There are thimbles and money stacked in piles like pyramids and globes.]
[I have to piss. There is all this liquid in me. My arms are heavy.]
[I find a water fountain and try to take my dick out to piss into the hole of the fountain because whatever, but I can’t get the opening open on my pants.]
[I piss my pants. My piss is white as paper and has writing all the fuck over it, every word I’d ever said. It has your name on it. It has the date, and all the dates before today’s date. It does not have any dates after today.]
[I walk back to the room where I’d left Gravey. I feel I need to see him. I have to hurry. There is this want. It is the greatest want I’ve ever felt, all of a sudden. I hurry for the room. The room where He had been before me. Along the walls now, though, the hall keeps going on. Where the door was supposed to be, the door to He, each time I think I’m there along the long wall, I find a little piece of paper in my hand. The paper is always blank.]
[The paper is blank until it wasn’t. Until when I opened the paper, there I was. Then there were no doors. There was no city.]
[I put my head against the floor. I heard Him again right there in me, answering me again, in my own voice, with the questions I had asked, and the answers I had answered.]
[There are all these motherfucking words. They were shaking in me. They knew who you were.]
[Inside His voice aloud I hear me also speak. I hear me speak and speak and speak in all these other rooms around us.]
[I’m bleeding.]
[holy fuck I’m bleeding]
SMITH: J. Burns was a member of our police force from 1961 to 1967. He was killed in service during a routine investigation of a property at 
, suspected to be harboring a multiple felon wanted on evidence of additional homicide, pedophilia, and distribution of narcotics. Said suspect fled the scene and successfully escaped through an unlit wood behind the house. Burns was an extremely dedicated cop, and more so a good man. I have no idea why his name appears here, though I do recognize a few of the exchanges presented above from segments of a videotaped deposition of Gravey on the morning following his arrest.
Four more mothers kill more friends. Four friends of each of the killed persons kill another four persons, and from there, each four more. Four of the relations of each of the victims of Gretch Gravey kill four more people, and four of each of those killed by the mother kill four more people. Each, having killed four, kill themselves. Other bodies choose to replicate the Gravey method, killing many in a silence without public detonation or self-snuffing, requiring capture by police, and forthcoming investigation, and prosecution, which, for each, takes more time, a form of worship.
In waves of four new sets of four more kill further bodies immediately again. The work occurs in dark or light: women and men are stabbed inside their cars or closets or beds or bathrooms or at work or on the bus; children and babies are smothered in their cribs or inside day care or before their parents at their park; guns are placed in mouths and eyes and earholes, knives inserted into slits of flesh the flesh had held for life, waiting for the injection of the knife to be the key turned in the lock the flesh makes at last forever once and only ever by his hand. Homes are intruded upon by those taken up in spirits or stone sober or somnambulating or quite calm; wives, judges, bag boys, busboys, window shoppers, roofers, tourists, police officers, designers, homemakers, the poor, the elderly, the lame turn fists and fingers and teeth and trowels and machetes and steel bats on the homeless, the work-from-home, stockbrokers, students, demolition experts, body doubles, waitresses, the faithful, the faithless, chefs, producers, writers, actors, window washers, architects, the terminally ill. The function of the action spreads in doily-motion, turnpiking out from each to each, so that by lengths the victims activate the guilty and the guilty in turn beget more of both.
Begetting is the purpose; this is a word we all have heard; it replicates in the backwards process from the book known by some as the story of creation, though this time in reverse: John debegets Nancy debegets Richard debegets Tom debegets Tony debegets Alison debegets Chris debegets A. debegets B. debegets Joseph debegets Olinea debegets LaRichea debegets Paul debegets Paul debegets Paul debegets Tia debegets Michael debegets Yon debegets Sina debegets Portia debegets Jericho debegets Lon debegets Richard debegets Owen debegets Lanaisa debegets Chad debegets Andy debegets Lucy debegets Arnold debegets Oona debegets Don debegets Allen debegets August debegets Toya debegets O. debegets Ron debegets Ronnie debegets Ronald debegets Sal debegets Sagat debegets Andrew debegets Timothy debegets Mary Louise debegets Marticia debegets Joan debegets Joanie debegets O. debegets Person debegets Chu debegets Quia debegets Jose debegets Lania debegets Sue debegets Ham debegets Sara debegets Sing debegets Kandy debegets Hsu debegets Rory debegets Clive debegets Blake debegets Halla debegets Sancho debegets Janice debegets Matt debegets Susi debegets Pad debegets Alicia debegets Fal debegets Nan debegets Janet debegets Percy debegets Ronaldo debegets John.
The houses fill with blood. The blood is eaten from the bodies, becoming body for the body to activate itself. Each body made debegetted is taken unto the body that debegetted it, absorbed. One by one, in sets of four, then eight, then sixteen, the bodies pair and congregate, compile. Oceans open, settle, dry. The rooms of evidence aggregate behind locked doors in silence, cataloged, unwatched, while in the rooms surrounding other hours the as yet undebegetted people continue to try inside themselves to still go on. Streets for miles divert the massive traffic held in blue white red green gray black red husks of hurried cars enslaved in slick packs from lot to lot in the susurrating Costco light the magnanimous Wendy’s light the sainted stitching Barnes & Noble light, the BP light the PetSmart light of light hung street to street in knit across the homes the OfficeMax light the Office Depot light the neon signs of deathtraps in one nation under god, the Chili’s light the silent beeflight of the Outback and the Gap and Best Buy moving hurried in conditioned spasm to Exxon and Taco Bell and Moe’s and Ben and Jerry’s and Dunkin’ Donuts in the husk of cells fussed off gross streaming trays of shitting days and laughter pyramids set in the gaudy lips and teeth like tumors on a tonsil turning black and turning swollen aisle to aisle in room to room in the Target light of America the Kroger light of America the Ross light the Home Depot light the Coca-Cola light the jabbed shit rib sandwich canary visions peeling off the borders of the bodies of the On the Border and the T.G.I. Friday’s and the T.J. Maxx farting blood beams from the eyes into the mouths of the murder puppies screwing big holes in blind butts wallowing in mud of Gap light of Google light of Yahoo light in the machines of aborted dick shelves robbing tanning beds while folders of folders brim with files sent from number 1 to number 2 among the walls of mumbled birthing rooms and mail centers and dead video rentals and carpet cleaners and the husks of names clipped by a bacon-smelling surface rising in the lid of the limousine yards of the mall crapped and crapping blue-gray beauty on the table of the sword like lettuce peeled from plastic boxes under the lid of E! light of ABC light of CNN light of dad of dad while babies screw up stabbing ornamental pygmy trash on wax paper in the bedrooms while their parents snorf pepperoni cubes in the light of Papa John’s in the light of Walmart light Applebee’s light American Apparel light dicklight pornlight mashlight hammers falling from blowholes scripted by torches under afghans skewed from worms sold by Pep Boys light Duracell light Facebook light changing its profile and its name against the edge of beds pushed together under houses hiding from scrawling bloodgush peeing in their ears and arms of daddies going whoa going holy fuck the football game is on my dick has scabies the delivery guy has no change I can’t get my car out of the driveway I’m several years gone I’m under water in my briefs this red light has been red for eight hundred years and I’ve lived for only thirty and I feel eighty and I’m ten and I don’t want to be me anymore or be the body beside me in the night from whom my babies twinned were made and kissing rabbits in my sleep praying for lasers to shoot the grease out of my eyes to scrape the Windex light the Comfort Inn light the NBA light the rapeshitfucklight strobing from my human-wounded ass from my tits and arms and flab and mustache, I can’t even breathe my own breath here any longer I can’t taste this pie can’t smell this ball I want a new job I want a city I want a wider grave a bigger boat I want bigger to have one hundred g’s in it I want rap music dentistry I want a cut of beef Pamela breast-sized Brad Pitt cock-sized a cut of beef the size of me I want to swim in god I want a god I want a life an Uzi a condition I want the best pills you can prescribe I want to live in the name of no prescription I want national jailbait body Party City Citgo Waffle House chop suey full flavor less value more blue prose more delete-mind more screen so wide I can’t see the end or the beginning I want parsley I want panties I want me of me in me of mine.
Today 137,800 persons in America become killed.
The current total population of America after the murders is 310,733,965.
RUTHERFORD: [stricken from record]
BLOUNT: [stricken from record]
LAPUZIA: [stricken from record]
SMITH: I’m not sure why I’m even taking time now to update this file again but all the other persons who have commented on the above are dead (barring “Rutherford,” as I have no idea who that person is; she is definitely not the same psychiatrist assigned to Flood for examination, though that person is now dead, too, as are more members of our precinct than I can figure how to count). I am writing this from a locked room with several weapons at my disposal. I am not sure where I should go. Armed forces have arrived to help secure the building and watch Gravey’s chamber around the clock, though I am not sure that I feel safe even with them here. Everything seems to have changed. What was written in the above is making its way upon our bodies. I don’t know how it is being updated, or from where. Flood still has not surfaced since my last note regarding my inability to make contact, though he seems able to update this file at his ease. Flood, if you are reading this, obviously I need to speak with you immediately and in the most dire way. Please contact me, immediately. This is your sergeant, Reginald Smith.
The next day 188,750 persons in America become killed.
Fewer official numbers are placed on record. Less is known regarding whereabouts or names. The coverage is sparse upon the wires and yet heavy on the air; the local coverage goads more going. People take up weapons, wires, fires, teeth and muscle, ideas, arms. The sounds of slitting fill the night with something like the cutting of the largest paper doll. There is the whir of film being recorded to by light and no light.
The president speaks. His voice is electronic, broadcast from far beneath the ground. He discusses tax cuts and public funding and pleasure dreams and cake.
There are people in the folds of dry land who keep their hands over their eyes. Walls are extended over windows. Doors are rendered no longer doors. Those left to walk among the lapse of day and night go back and forth between work and sleep while disregarding how the air seems more creamy, shrinking, ready.
This is an American disease. Beyond the normal borders, death proceeds apace; it is spoken of, recorded, but not necessarily the end—how could it ever be the end—despite the waters of the gulfs and twin coasts crumbing with the glimmer of dumped blood, a bright and shaking laughter singing off the buildings in the parlor of our peeling night.
We can’t even find your body in the piles.
You will not be buried.
SMITH: [stricken from record]
The next day, in America, 212,100 become killed.
The next day, in America: 290,030.
These numbers being numbers because someone says so. Someone like anyone, like you or me or us. Each new day made out in the shape of a blue sun, in America.
There are silent parades in the streets, each one made to look like car jams, lined with windows reflecting sky under the sky.
“No one wants to exist,” Gravey says, speaking into his clavicle through a single long black hair that’s grown exactly long enough to reach his bottom lip.
The rupture of the bodies by the bodies that ends the bodies fills the seconds seam to seam without a sound. Old houses go on being houses, organized with food and floors. What will come will continue coming, it is spoken, and so it does.
The next day in America.
The next.
There are many other shafts off of the main shaft of the darkness. In fact, Flood finds, there is almost one for every word printed on the walls of the passage. There must be millions. Each exposed passage leads to someone else’s home, through a mirror marked with one of the seven symbols. All the homes through here connect.
in god our blood the word of blood in god the name
In every home, Flood finds the people sleeping, the contents impossible to touch beyond the flesh, and every door that might have led out of the circuit, free from the chambers, out of his reach. In many houses he lingers for some time, wandering from room to room after something accessible, some way to push beyond the purpose of a spectator, but only ever are the ways that he can change anything about the house but by the people.
what now exactly now none nothing
He feels an anger in his blood, a seething frustration at his inability to escape this pattern. In some of the houses, he plays dummy with the bodies. He covers their faces over with a blanket, or drapes them over the kitchen table, or takes their clothes off and tries to make them fuck. The men’s sex organs won’t become hard. There is little contentment in the dolling. It is as if they are dead, but they have a pulse, their skin is warm.
For every home he enters, there are countless others he cannot. In every gap is buried so much he passes over. After a while, all the houses begin to seem the same, regardless of how different in their decoration, their low old smell, the shape of the people and their organs. The women always seem familiar and the men always seem like someone he could have been. Upon waking, they would return to their commitments and occupations, perhaps always not knowing someone had come in above them and felt their faces. Someone could have done much worse. Beyond each window, the same darkness.
if god if
Each time upon returning to the central passage he finds the wet has risen higher in his absence, as the passage continues going down. The flood is colorless in the low light, and smells so rich it’s hard to breathe: like loose earth and a banged head at the same time, fresh sex and summer in a jungle. It feels sometimes as if the air is breathing him. He can feel the open wounds along his arms and legs bleeding back into the congregation.
Flood begins to enter fewer and fewer homes, taking less time to move among them, or even really see the words in the white of the walls beyond the curve. The walls begin to feel like just walls again, flat and long and ever-going. But going where. It is comforting to just continue forward. There is a direction to the passage, at least, unlike the houses, even if an end is never reached.
see I
Flood has no idea how far beneath the surface of the earth he’s gone. Soon he’s knee-stepping, then he’s wading, then it’s halfway up his chest. Swimming feels the same as walking feels the same as laying the stuff and letting his body float. There is a slow current to the surface, just calm enough to almost disregard. In the thick of it, he feels matted patches, like flesh or soft loose ground clumping together, aggregating.
Underneath the lip of the wet, the space is light, though a kind of light he can’t see in. When he breathes or barks or screams words forwards or backwards at the extending nothing, he hears nothing but more air. Though he knows he must want food or water, he feels no concrete want or need, no grinding in the space inside him to be fed something; he continually moves on, while the only subject showing he’s made motion or day is passing in the silence is the wet beneath him rendered rising, lapping moist around his waist and then his nipples and then his shoulders, and still rising.
“Again again again again again, I say, I have done nothing,” Gravey says into the machines. “I am nothing. The thing of nothing flutters through my hands. There is something climbing on me. Something see-through. It is climbing onto you. Whoever said I said I said that said something false. I am ham clothes. I am a hole. I did nothing and am nothing and am silent. I should not be held up to the light for what’s been held against me while I am anybody too.”
The cameras replicate his face. This day will not be remembered.
Gravey hiccups in his sternum. He chews something. Swallows. Weeps a growl.
A peal of burn noise hurts the air as he goes to grip the stage mic with the hand farther from his heart: “Bullshit,” he says. “Bullshit city. Hey-o. I do everything I do. I’m a big boy. I get nasty. I’m so horny, I could fuck a hole in sleep.
“If any children kill or are killing other children because of this sentence,” Gravey says, “that is the desire. That is the nation under god. Adults killing adults and mothers killing mothers and fire killing fire and dogs surviving for the dogs. It is one condition of an attitude developed over the past three hundred thousand years.”
Someone behind a lantern asks a question, though on the playback of the recording, the words have been obscured.
Gravey stutters. He chips the microphone with his best tooth. He clears his throat, looks through his fists cupped into tunnels, winks. He puts his mouth around the entire metal conducting head.
“If I’m not here yet,” he goes, burbling with spit, “then invent me. Make me come.”
Back in his cell inside his sleep Gravey’s longer fingers trace his right arm open with his nails, cutting divots in his skin’s face like opening the mail. From the hole cut near his elbow he extracts a growth of blood that slinks along the air like wire and feeds back up to his face into his mouth around his tongue. He has not eaten in more days than he can remember.
The color of the room is erasure. Beyond the walls the knives glint sun for sun’s sake into the sun to blind it to the motion of our arms among the walls around the rooms where we have slept and soon will sleep again.
Gravey’s eyes are closed. His hair has grown down to his ass, cloaking his backmeat as it itches with such warmth. With his two longest fingers he traces on the cell’s floor the shape of the letter S, smearing platelets across the concrete where it holds him on the surface of the earth. Between the letter’s two endpoints, at each end of the snake of it, Gravey then traces slightly more faintly the shortest line possible between them, bisecting the body of the S to form a symbol like the number 8, but flattened down one side:
.
The S shape shines in the room’s mood. From the blood begins to rise a hissing steam. There is a stench, like plastic melting. The shape begins to change.
Gravey moves to stand face-first against the wall. His body accesses the space parallel to the room’s one locked entrance, positioned at the wall’s center. His back faces the symbol, the remainder of the room. He hums. The sound is somewhere inside his head; it is every song he’s ever heard, at once. The rooms he’d never been in. His hair rises to stand up on the air straight out in a line behind his head. The hair vibrates, emitting gold tone, harps and bells. There is a language in the stink, the sound of the smell of nowhere filling the room in impregnation. The door to the hall outside behind him sweats. The sweat is mammal blood, the musk of humans. Its shade, from certain angles, matches the pearling of the inside of a conch, houses we would never enter.
A light inside the room blows up. Microphones around the room for miles go mute, worms birthing in their handgrips in the hour of the anchor speaking the other language.
Inside the light, the door’s wall and the wall across from it change place. The door that had before upon the one wall opened into the remainder of the station now still opens onto the same building, but from the other side, forcing each room inside the building, and in the space surrounding, each instance of the air to lay inverted, in mirror image of itself.
The bodies of the people in the rooms go on inside the day. The clocks change colors, pocked meat and shining rings. There is singing, under every voice’s misuse. The eye of Darrel without name.
Gravey’s body folds to lie down on the floor, his mouth hole touching the endpoint of the high end of the S. From the low end of the same symbol, another pearl of smoke emits and rolls along the floor in a white wire, intersecting with the other wall. His nostrils flare, bringing the smoke inside his skull. He exhales again black with it, the color of the smoke having been changed. Out from his face the smoke rises toward the wall behind him, spreading up in packets; the smoke forms a face upon the wall, of a woman with no eyes no ears no brow no cheeks no nostrils. She has a mouth. The room around the smoke face shudders.
The smoke of the smoke lips begins to writhe, pulling open, inside which: teeth, a tongue, a humming. Smoke of a disintegrated sweat.
The head begins to lean out of the wall; its smoke flesh grows. The flesh of the grown face is reflective. A tumor on the head’s cheek glimmers. Somewhere money burns. Somewhere someone else is frying.
Gravey’s sleeping body rises from the ground. He floats above the S or 8 now having become many symbols in one face at once, stopping hung there on the paused air of the building, through which, for this instant, all other bodies in the precinct have been removed, evacuated into their memories beyond the present. The bodies will return again as they had been without remembering their disappearance.
Gravey rotates above the symbol in his glitchmoan, head rotating to the smoke-made Head. His hair, hung dry beneath him, sucks up backward, splaying out and turning white down to the scalp. The shifting symbol is written in the scalp meat. A matching tumor grows on Gravey’s cheek, pig-colored, every icon. His eyes fill up with blood. His eyes open. His body opens, the smokehead just behind his head, pressed glyph to glyph.
The smokehead speaks.
How many years have passed here, Flood asks the darkness. The wet by now is higher than him, filling the passage so completely he can no longer feel the bottom. He can find no edges where the walls were under the surface, no soft panels with which to find another passage through the black. The ceiling and the walls above the water seem to have spread wider, into something like an ocean under evening, no edges to the open air where he can find them beyond where in the rising darkness there seems a heaving solid surface in what could be the heavens. He can’t remember which way he came in from, where underneath him or behind him the descending passage went. It is as if the passage itself has wrapped back on itself, holding the time beyond it out. Even the idea of time before right now seems conceptual at best, an orblike surface drowned inside the water of his blood.
And yet inside the passage the rising liquid is still rising, a reminder of dimension. The higher the wet rises, the less air around him there must be. Less and less space remaining inside the passage every instant, no matter how hard he tries to think of anywhere else, ever. How many hours until I am too tired to keep moving, he hears a voice inside him asking, how many more until there is no air.
Flood himself is full; his chestmeat aches around his bone framing his center. He is not hungry or thirsty but not sated. Inside him, his blood presses back against the wet slaving his skin in silent war. His arms buzz hot like thousands of arms pressed into only two.
The wet goes down and down forever underneath him, it seems. However deep Flood forces his body, there is more depth opening into greater pressure and potential dimension. At the length of half his breath, the point where Flood knows inside him sure for certain were he to swim deeper there’d be not enough breathing stored inside him to get back, he feels another presence come lighted, way beneath him; a string of buried glow like some white city far below, swallowed over on some level ground surrounded in the cavity, he believes; long drowned along the nadir of the growing wet wanting to drown him in it.
Sometimes, in the windows of the buildings, somehow becoming clear across great leagues of distance, he feels certain he can see behind the panes inside the small light. And within that light pockets of remote people moving inside rooms; living bodies warbling in muffled silence without even pulse, the word there also buried in the liquid formed around him, rising at his head, today.
With his chest tight, wanting new breath, knowing he should turn away and swim to surface, Flood feels his eye pass through one specific window across the stretch of cheek of a lone woman in a gray dress; a woman alone, standing at the window staring back up at him; a woman who looks in some way like his mother, then like his wife. Her face changes with each expression as Flood swims up and back to look longer, each time more winded than the last, the woman at the glass there standing stolid and looking up into him from so far in and down they shouldn’t be able to see anything of one another. Behind her in the room the light continues changing, fleshing out the endless wet between them with ambient clouds of mottled color.
There is a terror in her eyes, some kind of churning screen of remove in her complexion, but also a desperation for the ability to grant respite, a want to forgive, to cave in to the worst part of anything he has been, could be; some soft understanding coming open in her with his returning presence, as if, in her tiny world, through all the darkened liquid, she could feel him, need him.
Unlike the bodies in the past houses, Flood knows he knows her name; knows who she was and would have always been beside him if he could have let her. But then just as quickly he must rise; kick in frenzy back up through the water to fill his lungs enough to swim back down, each time returning to a smaller and deeper expression of the image of the woman, of the window, of the city, among which he knows for sure now she is held forever there and he is not, his body screaming against the pressure to stay under longer, lower, until on some future iteration, there is nothing.
Among the long blank hours of the tapes of Gravey, an image emerges.
It is difficult at first to decipher the dimensions of the contour from the flat white after all these hours burned upon the viewer’s face. There are floors, then there are walls. The outline of a room there, then a room there. The room itself is mostly white as well, though by method of slow accumulation an underlying texture in the surface rises. One sees rise among the air the form of furniture, and hair; hair, yes, attached to limbs of bodies attached to people in a space, the aging heads of humans, their vertices of assembled flesh emerged in neon connection from the first suggestion of their presence, then as well: persons, objects, a window, light.
As quickly then as anyone could remember, the image continues on as if it had always been a film of just this room, as if all the hours of the white had never been.
The time code on the tape’s playtime, at the instance of the image, resets on the machine to 00:00:00.
In the film, the people sit in silence holding postures that only slowly and occasionally adjust: one man holding a book with no word written on its spine or face sits on a sofa, beside which a woman stands at a window with her back turned to the viewer. On the floor, before a TV, a small child grips a toy camera, the rim around its lens gnawed up. From this angle we cannot see the content of what is being watched by the family this evening, though its color fills the room.
Each body is mostly still. Small adjustments occasionally occur, like inhalation, the book’s page turn, the movement of a limb, as if to remind us the shot’s not static. The space inside the room is calm. Any noise is subtle and mostly covered over by the larger sound of nothing, like the feeling one gets when passed by something larger than one would wish to be near.
A floor-length mirror stands along the far wall, copying the room. The reflection shows no filming camera in the frame, despite the fact that at this angle, the camera should, by proximity, appear. This glitch in continuity suggests some alteration of the record, an outside guidance.
On further inspection it becomes apparent there is something off or wrong or different about the child’s reflection. Such as, in the skin of the face of the skin of him there in the mirror appear patches of discolor like the scape of glimmer in gasoline splayed under sun, while his unreflected skin is creamy. The hair around the lips and ears of the child in certain reflected angles appears to be thicker than what actually appears on the child’s head. He looks older than he should.
What is wrong with the reflection of the child?
What about he here must be different from he there?
No one seems to notice, or else they have accepted his condition as a fact of life.
All is calm.
The woman at the window stands seeing out with her face near the glass, breathing against it. The changing light of the TV in the room makes it impossible for us to see what she is looking out at; only the room again appears reflected, doubled, extending the room out into the night. We cannot see from here where the reflection in the window meets the reflection in the mirror. The woman’s hands are clasped before her, her hair pulled back tightly around her skull.
The man turns a page again. The page’s turning makes no sound, though on this page, open before him, still unseen by the camera eye, the man seems to see something unexpected; his face changes, clenching; he brings his head down toward the page; he seems to be reading or looking in whatever way at whatever is there more carefully now, taking the words slow, as if to parse it clearer. The color of his face changes. He looks up suddenly toward the viewer, out of the film, though it is unclear what he sees there. Suddenly he is pouring sweat, visibly spewing and misting in the TV light. He stares as if transfixed in horror with the viewer, while beside him the woman and child go on exactly as they have been.
The toy camera in the child’s hands is blue. The camera is leaking something. There is a wet mess on the floor and on his clothes and in his hair a little. The way the child cajoles the machine, bats and shakes it, hugs it hard with the lens aimed into his chest, causes the machine to take pictures of the world without the guidance of a human eye, filling up its electronic memory.
The viewer can’t stop looking at the child. The child looks so much like how the viewer remembers looking as a child, however long ago that was. The hour seems familiar. The color of the hour.
With this realization, another man steps into the screen. He seems to move in from somewhere just behind the lens, where a camera would be. The viewer views at first only his shoulders, then his whole back, his arms and waistline. He is naked. His hair is grown down to his ass. His skin is wrinkled, leathery, sopping wet. His body pours water from his fingers, from his hair slick, from his arms; it seems to gather on the floor inside the image, pooling up in the room over the carpet rising.
The man has no reflection.
The man moves forward in the image until he is standing at the center of the room. The array of light around him has come bright white, from the TV or the window or both or neither. The man with the book is shaking now, as are the edges of the house, only slight enough to make the walls seem blurry, ruining the mirror. The shaking causes the wet to come out of him faster; he is crying, sweating, then begins bleeding from the eyes. His crotch is wet as are his pores. He can’t seem to do anything but sit as he had been before, holding the book, frozen wide-eyed. The child and the woman are also sweating, though they don’t seem to notice; they do not react at all to the man.
The viewer realizes he or she is also filled with liquid.
This white around the language on the page before you is a mirror.
The figure raises up his arms. As he does, the woman at the window raises her arms, too, then the seated man, and last the child. The light beyond the window is strobing slowly with the TV in time as the wet pours from them each at once together rising in the room, quickly enough already to have covered up the carpet and the feet of the furniture. Or time is faster now. Life is faster.
The child now sees the wet but does not stand up or attempt to move away onto the furniture or into the man or woman’s arms, only holding more tightly to the camera, its flashwork going off at adverse time in relation to the TV and the sky beyond. The child clings to the object so hard its white hands turn even whiter. He tries to make a word but it is covered over by whatever sound of nothing inhabits the film’s soundtrack. It is a calm and simple silence.
Soon the liquid rises over the child’s head. Underneath the other accumulating liquids of the people, there is brief cloud of his blood, which rapidly bands together with the rest of it. In his hands, the camera too has been sealed under, its electronic memory licked clean and thereby absorbed into the wet held now visionless forever.
In the image, to the viewer, the screen inside itself is filling up, the liquid pouring off the bodies. As with the child, it gathers quickly above the seated man’s knees and waist and chest and neck as he sits still, beyond response. His mouth is open.
The viewer’s arms go numb, but seem not numb, to him or her.
Somewhere a fire is being ignited; somewhere stairs lead down and down.
The man goes under the water, seated, holding his book. There is another burst of blood. The gift of his blood to the rising aggregation shudders, lapping at the flat of glass and at the thick shape of the figure, still at center, motionless.
The screen is almost two-thirds covered over. Underneath the layers of the liquid too the light is still somehow coming off the TV in matching color beam bent into malfunctioning bright blips each hardly colors, squirming pale under the wet surface, growing paler as the liquid rises, thickens. The room is filling faster. The less room is left the faster still it fills. We can already seem to not remember the child and the father having gone beneath the surface, buried, turned to liquid. We can hardly tell how this began; it seems now to have always been happening.
Beyond the window, the waiting night.
In silence then, and without fanfare, the woman at the window mesmerized goes slump. Her knees weaken beneath her. She slides without sound or gesture down under the surface of the liquid. The wet is too dark now to show the cloud of blood she leaves briefly behind as it joins the rising mass.
The back of the head of the man before the camera, inside the gathering liquid, is all that now remains. In the window, now no longer blocked mostly by the body of the woman, we can see his front side reflected in the glass, though the image is too blurred somehow to make him out. Beyond the glass the black holds up the night unending.
All is calm, yes.
Yes, only as the last laps of the liquid squirm to reach above the frame of the viewer’s perspective, the remaining man at the center of the room turns to face us.
FLOOD: What voice asks the questions, and what answers. Help me. What questions do the answers ask. What has been said in my name was not me. What sound has been constricted in the liquids the body finds a way a while to contain and yet can’t force itself to contain itself unending in the name of to which the liquid must return. I did not mean to be this. What hour is the hour described in this passage. What are you going to do about it. My memory dividing. My mind dividing.
Blood violence. Scrying violence. Schools’ doors locked door to door. Homes surrounded with a netting. Pastries rolled up with the asp. Tomahawks in hands of children come down on dolls and friends, come down on ants, come down on me. Fathers kill their fathers and their sons. Sons kill their friends. Wives kill their husbands and their doctors. They kill the babies in their guts. War violence in the home. Sky violence writing itself white into the cover of the hour with the screens’ electrifying prismlight. What would have been watched in place of doing is become doing. Runes are written on the heads. Lawns are cut in slurs or glyph stakes, calling for the meteor or blank invasion. A burning planted somewhere in every city near the homes. The wash of the bathwater on the drowned self. The pills. The pills to erupt the cells out of the body. The naked turned to breadloaves. The football hero with the Luger to his temple on the fifty-yard line. The banker handing back a withdrawal in the form of a sheet of his own skin. Gas station attendants robbing the customers of their consciousness. Of blood. The dogs walking the dogs. “What is happening in America? The homeland commissioner is up in arms. We must act now. This is our home.” The black rabbit in the east sky rises and vomits a column of dust onto the air. Troops deployed for the protection of the people stab each other in the chests. Intestine dinners. Ageless, graceless. The face of god: torn in strips off a billboard and used to wrap the dead. This is an art project, someone stutters, and the teeth fall out of their mouth onto the ground and are eaten by the starving some days layer. Enamel over all. Video game machines going blank. Wires doing blank. Email reading these same words in every head. A package is delivered to the homeland commissioner and it is opened by him on live TV, though we know it will explode. The pets’ names are changed to Darrel. The children’s names are changed to Darrel. The nation’s name is changed to Darrel. Michael Jackson’s name is changed to Darrel. Human instances of Darrel are caught in mobs and crucified inside the streets as nonbelievers. The name of Darrel in the mass of names is silence. The days. The occasionally clean are surrounded by their own flesh and bone. No metaphor left behind. No building not written whitely with the curse word over the crush of any city now called Darrel. Order again is demanded. Vegetable delivery is mandated by the state to arrive each evening in a long white limousine. This we believe in, which makes us calmer. It does not happen. Another 340,000 die. Another 417,550. Another 589,000. The rising numbers count themselves in the blue of pigs’ blood in cursive on the sky below the blank where there might have been a moon once, and still might be, though we can’t remember where to look. The instance of the number is attacked by air force bombers to obliterate as smoke. The smoke maintains the will of concrete underneath the cluster bomb. The fallout rains us birds. We eat them. The flesh of the bird delivers awful vision inspiring awful art. A mechanic kills a man who’s come to have his wheel replaced; he kills using the machine of his daily labor; another day he might have simply changed the wheel. Someone is counting down the hours on the fingers of those who pass him in the street. Rotting frottage underneath the street puts a disorienting sound in cats’ mouths and the houses rub where none of them touch and so it spreads and fills and holds. Someone with a hammer appears in one in 144 houses in one evening, mimicking at once a series of different people in one body, tolling the present number of the murdered bodies higher. There is no going backward. The faster we die we all will die. Sickness is not a shaking but a way of looking across a breakfast table or giving thanks. Anywhere this does not happen yet, the air remains. Turnips in fields turn up with dried blood centers. The trees bow down to kiss the ground. 700,010 dead. 880,789 dead. Telephones. Locks sold from the hardware station come without a key. Each four killed make eight kill eight more and then kill themselves or kill another set of eight, bodies branching off of each eight killed kill at least sixteen or toward twenty-four, each body desisted initiates replication in the spool of those surrounding; not by plague or viral idea or passion or brutal ministry or campaign, but by something they’ve not named and yet knows each better than any could, and in the unnaming of the so-occurring the day goes on and renders shorter while the skin flies at the light above in reams of hiss and collects in lathered wreaths around the public breath. The remaining bodies of their living go on tasting each other body in their mouths because they must. The colors of us giving up only one color, of little sex. The cars turning themselves on. A day at last to come of our vast creation returning to its fury. Crystal visions. Winking paper. So ends the beginning of our summation of the dead.
Gravey stands before the courtroom, no attorney (having refused), his head aglow in flat light from the neon panels in the ceiling holding the natural light out. Seven of the twelve jurors seated in the box are wearing all black; three are wearing white; they look exhausted, taut of skin; the remaining two jurors are dressed in clothes they might have another morning worn to church. For each member of the jury an armed bailiff is located somewhere in the room, in addition to the extra battery of officers at each door and window, and surrounding the buildings. Through the walls it is so silent between speaking it is as if one can hear the sun. The local premises are being patrolled round the clock by helicopters, federal troopers, private hires, and overhead, remaining unseen. This trial will have no real beginning and no end. This is formality. The jurors speak in tongues. The judge speaks in tongues. The judge’s dying mother on the phone with the judge during lunch recess speaks in tongues. The D.A. speaks in tongues. The assistant to the D.A. speaks in tongues. The witnesses speak in tongues. The loud interlocutor whose daughter had been killed by Gravey and who has come to the courtroom wearing a mask over her face screaming suddenly amidst the silence for Gravey’s blood speaks in tongues. The other grieving speak in tongues. The press pundits speak in tongues. The windows do not speak. Gravey does not speak. It has not rained in thirty-seven days.
When not waiting in silence in the courtroom, Gravey stands all hours at the center of his cell. He will not sit or sleep or eat or speak or close his eyes. He finds his chest so thin it is translucent. His organs and orifices in the cold clear gel have neon colors, their edges bloating and retracting into plastic puzzle shapes: his spleen a circle; his gallbladder a square; his ureter hole a hexagon; his lungs a star; his pancreas a triangle; his rectum a diamond; his brain a ring. His blood is thin and turning clear. Among his flesh, he’s disappearing: his chest, his arms, his neck. He tries to summon from his memory a mirror, but there is nothing there like that at all, nothing beyond the ringing in his sternum, pages turning. Each time he thinks another sentence, the earth begins again around it.
FLOOD: Each time I try to call a name out, I can’t make my mouth open. Trying to remain silent, I hear the wind run through me where I am not. Everything I look at shows my reflection. And behind me: nothing.
There is very little room now left to breathe.
Each time he pushes up out of the dark liquid, Flood finds the walls of the chamber nearer, slicker. The surface tension of the wet is turning hard. The blood inside him also is stiffening, becoming heavy from his fingers to his head; he finds it hard to move his joints, or harder to want to. Behind his eyes is all the black.
He goes under into the wet again, again, spreading his arms out, looking, looking, that something from the darkness might emerge; another kind of light inside it, or a person, though he cannot remember who now, or perhaps a second darkness darker than the first, something he can move inside of, become filled by.
Marking each inhale reemerging, somewhere in the larger world far outside the chamber another several thousand people die, and therefore many several thousand other future people who would have come from them are now never born.
FLOOD: My body full of spit and blood. My mind full of holes leading to rooms full of the dead. Through the surfaces conferred their final concentration in the film containing all other film, upon which there is no rewind, no eject. A world awaiting.
Other tapes among the tapes of Gravey begin to reveal themselves as holding shapes. Hid in the white the act of the destruction of the family occurs again, again. Each tape begins in a new but similar location, with different sets of families, though it is difficult to remember one apart from any other by the end. There is the liquid. There is the child’s camera. In the rising wet, the people become drowned upon the presence of the man arriving at the center of the room, whose face is never shown. The blood will wash out of the bodies, raising it higher. The scene will end then, cutting out.
The tape could be rewound. The tapes could be played again, over and over, as long as there is someone there to operate their mechanism, to have the wish to.
The video is not proper evidence of Gravey as a killer, despite the resemblance of him from behind. Each time the camera faces the face, the film there ends, just at the instant one would see him seeing. The shape of the figure could be anybody, legally, from this angle, and so is anybody.
Anybody.
All who see the tape there for all days coming can recall only the white.
Today in America, 2,441,560 people become killed.
Moms and dads die, kids die, friends die, lifeguards die, road workers die, PhDs die, lieutenants die, the incarcerated die, all at the hands of those they know or have come near; they are ripped open and their innards are eaten from the hull of their unmaking; ushers die, singers die, strippers die, organ donors die; their organs are not used to fill other bodies with a new life; Golden State Warriors die, gypsies die, hitchhikers die, dentists die, dental assistants die at the hands of the dentists or the patients, the weight of the buildings rises during the night; screenprinters die, brothers die, creators die, the dying die, the wishmakers die, the wanting die, the laughter coming from their heads; the coffee erupting on the counters as the timers go off as planned, burning the surfaces with black liquid overflowing, never again; pet owners die, the pets will fend for themselves; bartenders die, alcoholics die, their bodies are not preserved; artisans die, matchmakers die, janitors die, game show employees die, the worshipped die, the worshipping die; the color of all sound; editors die, the planets spinning; the reader of the book; lamps die, Boy Scouts die, Girl Scout leaders die; the train arriving at the station comes in late; hearse drivers die, neuroscientists die, chemists die, programmers die, some of the people you went to high school with die, some of the people you saw years back at the mall, the people you bought gas from, the organ grinder, the descendents of him who delivered from her mother’s flesh your mom; the sentence makers die, the law writers die, the magicians die, the poets die, the blog commentators die, the violinists die; the fish sing in your ears; the blue of a wheelbarrow reflecting anything it comes near back toward itself; the first baseman dies, the pitcher dies, the catcher waits crouched at his knees, the balls over America at any hours descending in their numbers, the blacktop and the feed; camels die, bathroom attendants die, stockbrokers die, those who have no central occupation of creation or focus or hobby or forward motion in the name die; the shirts come off the bodies; the bodies are eaten into other bodies and become less bodies, all in one, each fed into the other in a becoming-final string of flesh entering flesh, while the newborn numbers descend further and the cells are counted as cells we have and may not ever have again, unless; the strongmen die, the bearded lady dies, the stuffers of the pillows and the folders of the cloth; the surgeons die, the plumbers die; the grass rising up around the homes; the angered die, screenwriters die, those who operate the phones, those who tear the tickets at the mouth of buildings, those who power walk; salesmen of vitamins and fine clothes and batteries and cars and furnaces and loft apartments and MacBook Pros and Fritos and divine ideas and pleasure purpose and sexual dementia and pressure washers and word processing software and eggs and cheese and tee shirts and cleaner cities and designers of the fur and wanters of the honey and those with gardens and those with eyeglasses and those against milk, those with rings around their fingers, those in horror, those who write infernal books, those who are infernal books themselves by merely walking with eyes open in the light, they die. Some of them kill themselves to miss the rest of this. Some go on. Machines go on and something else does, while in the hour of the Thrust, in singing minutes, hundreds of thousands hand to hand and face to face, they die. Justices die by swords in the hands of sculptors, Christians die by the hands of parking lot attendants under mist, whites die by the hands of priests and waitresses and students and the homeless and the living and the pearled with fists and jackhammers and darts and overdoses delivered by the tongue; the foreheads are bitten from the faces, swallowed; the fingernails are chipped off from the fingers, gnawed; the chest flesh is rendered from the sternum with an apparatus and taken into the self in part of self becoming and then taken off of those with scalpels or teeth themselves; witnesses are hung from rafters in a backyard of old Kentucky; cleaners are beaten in the face upon the face of I-295, the concrete alive with the putty of the blood congealing in the seemingly redoubled sun; cops are killed by fingertricks and sternum throttles and long blue swords and pikes and black magick by tricks and jerks and friends and royalty and cherry pickers and the rich; cops are made to choke on their own flesh and spit by the hands of the virgins and the lifeguards and the valorous and the unholy and the timid and the cancered and those who solicit money outside the mall; cops are chewed to bits by cats trained by warm-weather lovers in the streets outside the houses where the cops lived one year when they were young; cops are killed by cops; for thirty seconds over California the image of an aleph forms from clouds of discolored smoke, then blows away; all the stations in the world play the same commercial in the same instant without prior planning; goose eggs fall out of a tree; dog groomers are licked of skin by Holocaust survivors; godmothers are driven by the skull into a yellow wall in Minnesota; a pastry truck is overturned, found filled with lice; the oldest person in the country kills one hundred and forty-seven with a machine gun in Kansas City before she falls flat on the last face she’ll remember and is mauled to pieces by one librarian in the name of names, raising the name into the light, the name I can’t remember even in my own breath here to tell you because the name resounds no longer in a language and has passed into the soil, has felt to burrow in the money of the pit of the eye of eternal wishing and the parrot of the Sod, though we still do not know what the Sod is and will not know and will need to know or know. Those who remain in certain hours still find laughter about something and try to share it. There are tongues passed between friends’ lips. The cock might grow hard. The finger in the belly. Jewelry is sold. Machines turn off and on among the flowing platelets. “I will wear you unto my king.” “I will be the ground that you have walked on.” “Love me. Love me.” The pavement feels deranged. Butchers die, longshoremen die, blackjack dealers die, sidewalk salesman are ripped limb from limb by those who ten minutes prior had felt inside them a clean wish to buy a gift; gifts hidden in boxes in coming houses become forever hidden before the burning; those with the unbroken hymen die, those with the shirts with their own names printed or embroidered die, the same ten numbers repeat in shaking rosters again, again, the numbers eating through the paper in a room of no one watching, the palm trees growing ever nearer to the curb. The binders die, the mugged. Night comes again. Smoke rises in a harbor where ships stand for hours counting the surrounding mountains pouring wet like melting cones, and blue cones rise in the sinking fields of commerce from the lessening of trample on their face. Smoke rises from the gums of women. Smoke on the shorelines. Everybody knows a joke. The bodies smell like gravel, then like pig meat, then like glass. The sea thickening, where reflected, holding out beyond our minds, our Sod City we do not know in all cities, Our City of the Chewing of the Rolling Light of Gloss of Sod.
Bodies are being buried in their homes to save the room. The faces of the houses containing those already murdered are painted black to alert the mailmen to mark the mail returned. The wires from the houses are clipped to prevent transmissions in or out. The glass of the windows reflects the light of knives. Houses where a mother or a father or a child alone has become murdered while one or more remains surviving receive not an entire coat of black paint but a square set at the center of the home’s face. In daylight in better neighborhoods the neighbors may bring these homes baskets of soup and bread, bring roses, bring alarms and mace, bring wishful words. There are no maps.
This sentence describes the panic of the American population remaindered in the rising light of rising terror of the murder of ourselves, which I could not begin to bring myself to impart to you directly for the way it might feel too much today like what you’ve done.
Today in America, a wake is waking.
FLOOD: Think of night arrived during the daytime. It was impossible almost even to see out into the streets in the low light of what the bodies brought to pass between them. The fists and faces and their machines brought the blood and bone and organs through the surfaces that had meant to contain them so much longer. The light could look then in onto the middles of the people, their blood, cavities, and brains. There were no hidden places left. All manners of forms of homes and businesses collapsed, the organisms filling up the buildings snapping one into ten inside their sternums under the sound and then ransacking the space around them destroyed until they were done in by whomever else. It fed all through and through us. It moved into us wanting to want more until there was nothing left. All our years done in like that in mere instants while beyond our reach the color of the sky and space beyond us did absolutely jack shit.
Today in America we go to war again flat on our backs. We will hear the morning rising in the sound of the screaming mothers becoming dismantled again as the death toll of our people on this one batch become killed at our own hands. As all hands are all of our hands. Today it doesn’t matter how many people in America become killed because today is another day in America, and tomorrow today is dead.
The end of starvation. The end of AIDS. The end of cancer. The end of patience. The end of old age. The end of accidents. The end of smoking. The end of patience. The end of alcoholism, the overdose, the sneeze. The end of retardation. The end of rape. In America. The end of being young. The end of being old. The end of the end of. The end of religion. The beginning of religion. The end of television programming. The end of musical performance. The end of typing. The end of murder. The end of wishing. The end of the end of the film. In America. The end of boxing. The end of photography and speech. The end of being thought upon. The end of bedsores. The end of ulcers. The end of making love. The end of the ringing of the phones. The end of waking up. The end of medication. The end of parenting. The end of sight. The end of laughter. In America. The end of trying to understand horses. The end of astronomy. The end of balding. The end of shopping. The end of motherhood and fatherhood and the end of sharpening the knives. The end of worship. The end of sin. The end of dick pills. The end of animation. The end of publication. In America. The end of standing in line. The end of cooking. The end of jokes. The end of steakhouses. The end of dry cleaning. The end of cleaning. The end of washing. The end of want for silence. The end of mortgages. The end of folding money. The end of email. The end of roadkill. The end of salad. The end of sentences. The end of punctuation. The end of design school. The end of pulses. The end of the ego. The end of the blurt. In America. The end of sandwiches. The end of cycling. The end of tumors. The end of snot. The end of marriage. The end of the gift of flowers. The end of collections. The end of pest control. The end of fear. The end of cold cuts. The end of driving nails. The end of marketing. The end of sequels. The end of invention. The end of endings. In America.
FLOOD: All that was left then there before me was the word. No matter how I touched the space or spoke into them or threw my body on them the words appeared and would not stop. There was nothing there to use or touch besides the whiteness.
Flood at the mirror, being crushed. His spine and shoulders hulk against the upper mirror, bending to it, accruing pressure. The surface of the liquid around his chest and sternum and below has turned so hard he’s rendered in it like a self around himself; it bloats to fill the measure of the seams, the liquid crystallized and fleshy, made of crushed organs.
Inside the chamber a small gap of air no larger than a bird’s egg. The air fits around Flood’s eyes and nostrils like a visor. He can see out and breathe in. The air recycles through him; he is feeding, and remains fed. The air and liquid have no smell.
Flood face to face with his reflection, in reflection. He is so old his skin’s see-through. Through him he sees himself again reflected, between the mirrors on both sides. His head wholly a hole.
“I am a hole,” he says, though underneath the liquid they become absorbed into the fully hardened league of come and skin and blood. “I am a hole,” he says again. The liquid rises slicker, slurring his nostrils. His breathing in the wet. Underneath, he lets his lips fall open, and some of it fills him there too. He hears a motor coming on. He hears the sound of flashbulbs lurching. When he does not speak, he hears his words.
Flood looks up. Flood feels, between the holes, a pressure build, a gift like massive magnets held apart. He feels a tickle in his head: the last condition of what was in there taking firm hold, seeing itself seen. He feels the videos of the days of all the people going on around him in the air surrounding being filmed into his flesh, filling his flesh with the reiteration of the image of the days he can’t feel under the rest. There is a slow curl of the memory forced into smaller and smaller space.
The holes in Flood’s eyes widen. The walls convening, eating. The skin of Flood’s rolled forehead touches soft against the reflective surface, front and back. The pressure builds between them. The holes enclosing where they match and touch. Flesh on flesh by mirrored mirror. Exit language: no word. Exit music: sound on sound. The holes between the mirrors meeting pressed to Flood where Flood is. His body blanking, under nothing. Glyph of pressure, gas releasing, frames releasing.
The liquid fills the space.
FLOOD: 
In the full darkness, there is a word.
The word encompasses the darkness.
Flood presses the button in the word.
He hears no sound. His eyes are open.
Today in America, 4,241,560 people become killed.
The bodies find the bodies hiding in their houses in the world. They find the bodies wielding weapons of guitars. In black theaters and food distribution centers and the long passages where once the fruitful sewage grew and flowed, they find the mothers and the fathers and the daughters and the sons yet still alive wedged as deep down as they might manage in a crevice between surfaces, in fear. They find them shopping in the long aisles of the supermarket and in the game room and at work, against long panels in museums wishing themselves into the frame. They find them by the godterror rising through their sternums drinking coffee under an awning on a mountain in the rising of the sun under the sun, by the maps imprinted on their sternums, by closing their eyes and fumbling around. They find them, bodies on bodies, bodies in bodies yet unborn licked by no burn. They turn the lights on. They are anyone you’ve ever known. They have wrists and arms and necks and some have hair in many places and they go by names and from their mouths there comes the words and from their fingers there comes the word of Sod. The brandishing of thin knives and fist fury and rope and power; removed, in name of their unnaming, to anywhere but where. Bluebirds fly in all directions. The screaming wracking asking grovel game-speak please-god fills the hour in the millions being murdered with a decibel above the common purr, constant enough now and clear enough now to overcome the concept of a single person’s shrieking exit into an aggregate of prolonged human demolition at such sure and constant volume in the rising that it sounds like nothing, like any day. This is any day, I’m saying. There is no such thing as the unreal; it sits in the palm of the blue beholden and cries out for language; it gives and gives and what is given is given back into it by seven, by seven and seven again inside the reeling while the houses stand and watch. Do not ask about how this could be measured or what else. No more questions as to the future or why it seems today the hour continues on and the cars pass by the house there at the window where you are holding yourself up or down against an earth; do not ask. They find the bodies at the windows in the houses where they are holding themselves up. They find them waiting with their own murder weapons, and so the flipping of a coin. From each sprung head the wet flows and by the hour is dry again. They eat the bodies with their fingers and their teeth and mouths. They bite from the neck and back and face. Their minds are the utensils and the surface and the menu and the course. They eat the flesh of the human the way they eat the flesh of the cow or pig or dog or eel or chicken. They eat the flesh like at family dinner, chewing calmly, speaking words they will not remember in the hour of the rising corridor. Stars make gravy we can’t see. It pours down through veins that seem vacations. There is a wedding. There is sense. The walking goes for hours and seems pleasant again and there are some who never have to hide. They are found in their beds up to their necks in the cloth of paradise enjoying cold dreams of the longest fingers, in the pyramids of Giza transplanted onto Michigan and onto Georgia and onto North and South Dakota and onto Texas and onto Florida and onto Wisconsin. The pyramids are bells. The pyramids are vacation homes along the beaches where the mice wash in with numbers underneath their fur. We build a castle from the sand of the dead-longer-than-we-are. The sun evaporates the land. Today in America 5,700,700 become killed, 8,890,100 become killed tomorrow, 16,650,013 become killed, 25,000,000 become killed. Today in America however many you want to be killed become killed. However many you wish would live forever in your arms or across the continents become killed. The plots become the soil. The soil becomes the ocean. The ocean dries and lives again. It is still only an ocean. An ocean, in some understandings, can be everything. The word of it. The word.
GRETCH GRAVEY: Blood drying against concrete slathered baking in such daylight as glass shattered in metal crunching bone beneath bright planes banging bullets on the fields of women and men until the pilot too turns on the party of himself. What colors where the air mixed and filled itself in with private liquids, the brains removed of desperation, fire. Stone through cranium. Metal through surface. Why would it ever rain again. Who was counting up the numbers, all mirrors watching unwatched on old walls, while elsewhere, in a large unmarked room, the further image dreamt in the new dead were piling up inside the nothing rising.
The jury, held at gunpoint, among lasers, finds Gravey guilty.
The judge proclaims the fate. This judge in fear in his electrified cadaver, in his waiting for the day of the Shape of He, slave of three hundred million tongues.
Gravey, by the state, will become killed, is the decision. The killer put to be killed by machine. By a machine. The weapon: electricity, buttons, wires.
The machines are waiting.
The smoke will rise.
The audience inside the courtroom sits in gyrating silence with the verdict on their lips. They watch their hands clap and hear their lungs give out the word of praise of this day having come at last, this day at last.
The bells in Gravey’s sentenced body ring.
Today in America, 41,080,101 people become killed.
Across the many skies all our screaming does not weep.
The bodies form a mount.
The bodies filling in the space between the earth and sky with rising meat to match their minds of spooling film.
The darkness behind Flood’s fully submerged vision narrows. The surrounding wet solidifies again to walls, too black to tell the open air from impenetrable surface. All space seems to move around him, in absence of his intent. Inside the drawl, old colors blur. The black of many colors in his forehead and his fingers. There is nowhere else. The single word repeating over any way he tries to think. Through the depths, he’s dragged forward like a cursor with the space bar held down, on a computer, blinking out and in.
There is some land then, and a gap. The land is synthetic to the touch and bone white, just wide enough for him to stand free at the edge of the liquid, somewhere way down under masses, a bulb of air sucking the world around him forward. The linings of the walls elongated in their passing, becoming light from dark, transparent from light, reflective from transparency. Mirrors totally surround; all the same mirror, over all lengths. This time, in the mirror, Flood appears, head-on in every inch no matter how he sees it, though he can barely recognize his body. He looks to have aged decades since he last felt anything to know. He looks more like someone who’d gone on to live forever, constantly aging over decades, than anyone he’d ever been. The skin around his eyes could almost break.
Like in the passages to other homes, the mirror has a latch, a latch in the eye of the face of every face of the plane before him always, all the same. The shape of the symbol marked in on the latch’s head seems to waver at its edges, making many shapes of itself mutating and transmogrifying, while held in the mind all as the same. Flood finds himself mesmerized watching the shape mutate between circle, square, hexagon, star, and so on, endless other unnamed shapes between each. He does not want to lift the latch. He wants to take the latch into his mouth, swallow it down. He wants the latch to open in him.
There is no sound as with every latch the mirror opens. The space beyond it is dark inside the room, a different kind of dark of night of passages of lives he already can’t remember having passed through.
Flood moves into the room. He closes the mirror behind him immediately, locking away the passage to prevent anyone else hidden behind him from following. As the mirror clicks into place he feels his blood run with a sudden sense of irreversibility, against which the veins along his arms protrude and pulse. But the mirror, once closed, cannot be opened from this side. He is sealed in here.
Into full darkness, Flood fumbles hands-first. He reaches into the space unseeing for something, feeling only more space and more space there, like a dry inverse to the cavity of wet. As if this space is no different than the drowning chamber of the world of passages, but made of air instead of fluid. His skin holds the same tone and texture as the air around him standing. He feels a rising fear of nothing, fear of edgelessness forever, even the mirror behind him now somehow not there when he turns to feel its slick face harboring the copy of him in the dark. He calls out and feels no language.
He walks into a wall. The wall bangs into his face and he can feel himself bleeding again, though he can’t see or feel the arms themselves. Once there is a wall, there are other surfaces to feel onto, connecting outward. There is a table and some chairs around it. There is another wall hung with framed pictures, which in the darkness, searching for anything, one by one, Flood removes. He sits each frame facedown on the floor, not having seen the images they carry. What if life went on this way forever, Flood thinks, all surfaces without faces. All creation beyond seeing.
And then again as if to negate him, he hits something on the wall that fills the room with light. It is so bright at first that it’s like the dark but backwards, just as unyielding, all against him. Slowly, though, the shape of the space around him conforms to its underlying structure, and reveals itself, like day.
Flood is standing in his home. It takes a moment before he recognizes the rematerializing elements of space as ones he’s spent the years in, the objects infused with his time and smell and feeling, nodes without eyes who had as yet seen him through hour after hour among others. It all fills in around him like flashing panels rising out from concrete. There is oddly no relief, only the awareness of I have been here, this is a place where I have lived, where I have disappeared the hours, where I have known others or hid from others, where I sleep.
Despite having passed them day in and out so many years inside here, he can’t remember what the pictures placed facedown on the ground now ever pictured.
The carpet is white. Had the carpet always been white.
On a low table are his papers, notes and words regarding recent casework he’d brought home, though he can’t remember really what the case had been. The papers are blank. If there is someone else in the house there with him, he cannot feel it.
There is a tape. The tape is marked with a string of digits. The casing is white, too, in contrast to the dark tongue of the film spooled up inside it. He picks up the tape and holds it near his face and stares, as if waiting for the images encased there to appear broadcast on the room, or all inside him.
The TV is on. On screen, long shots of human bodies amassed in daylight in the streets and inside buildings, waving their fists and running in hordes and banging at windows of buildings and cars, exhibited in silence, the volume apparently muted. The faces all bleed together into a kind of total body with countless heads all held together where they touch or do not touch. Other shots show tanks, horses, swords, explosions, fences, cages, weapons, flashing text.
Flood doesn’t understand how he couldn’t have seen the light of the screen of the TV in the dark before the light appeared. He tries to read the words on the lips of people pictured in the masses but it just makes some feverish language he can no longer understand. Through the window on the wall over the TV, the air is dark and still.
Flood takes the tape and puts it into the machine attached to the TV. His hands feel oblong, tighter once again emptied, as if coated in the tape’s plastic. The receiving machine makes sound, its own small language. The light in the room changes, opens wide. There is static, then the whiteness, then nothing but the whiteness through the room.
Flood sees himself. He sees his body. His image is transparent somehow, so that even through his chest he can see the shape of the house around him.
The wall of the room on the tape is white like the wall in the room Flood had called his home, as many walls could ever be. The surface is interrupted by a window through which a greater white appears, light from somewhere else, almost exploding.
The film fills up Flood’s vision, and so is his vision. In seeing, staring, into the image, he can no longer tell it from the rest of the room, from where his blood was.
Flood is on the tape.
He looks down at his hands. The skin of the hands is stretched with colored veins and pale flesh, dry and aged as he remembers from the last mirror. His pores have grown so large he can connect them without looking closer, islands of the soft; the circles drown in other wrinkles where the skin has colonized its age. The hair of the flesh of his arms has been removed, a smooth, demonstrative expanse. The nails on his fingers are strangely long: white fantasies of skies of cities sleep lodged under the cuticle, aching the skin. He is wearing a white tunic, or cloak, or gown, drenched to translucence and clinging to the folds of him hid covered, where bones meshed in his chest are bending in: a process of the greater aging. Temples. White years. Gorges. Flood makes a fist and hears the bones pop in his fingers. He releases.
There are others in the room. There is an American woman dressed in a gown like his but thicker and well embroidered, standing at the room’s one window, looking out. She has a scar along her chin; she does not realize it is there. Her breath makes a small disruption of the flow of the building, letting other rooms build gray. Years have happened to her. She is the year now. The woman hums; there is no song.
Across the room, an American man sits halfway upright on a recliner holding a book before a TV, lids flickering in response to changes in the field. A television’s light provides another sort of color, and is silent.
In another room, through the wall behind the TV, Flood knows, lies a sleeping child, bone white, American. The child’s body is rigged with an electronic sensor in his night pants meant to detect urine; a reading lamp stays on above the bed. The child in coming years would go to school. He would see his first pornography under the table in the lunchroom during fifth grade. He would take turns with several other classmates kicking classmates in the chest. He would masturbate and eat breakfast cereal and go to school to learn to program code into machines and then get tired of that and begin writing paper onto words. I do not mean words onto paper.
The child is not asleep.
At the window, the woman sees herself framed against the billowed darkness growing larger still, sweating through its fibers at a universal rate, through all the holes. The window is really more a mirror now than anything to see through. It is silver in its blackness, extending on into the idea of itself. A subtitle reveals the woman’s present thought, filling her brain meat, The body of the body of the column of the city of the child of man. The woman inhales and holds it. She turns around, finds Flood before her. She does not react to this new stranger. The features of her face and the face of her husband half-asleep sitting beneath her hold calmly blurred in swimming textures, layers, whorls.
Flood feels a hammer in his hand. He feels the cool wood grip pressed with his flesh. It is a fresh hammer, unused, though it smells of the loins of the new skin beneath the soil pouring somewhere from a formless hole, feeding none. In Flood’s other hand he holds a dark knife, the leather handle of it molded as if to fit his hand pad to pad, to fit any hand of any hand model in America, or those shaped like them, or those shaped unlike them, or the dead. Flood knows the knife is long enough to stab straight through the ceiling and cut the eye out of god, who watches our dry moves and eats into us with the cancer, alive in the laughter of all generations.
Flood looks at his hands and sees his hands hold none. That is his skin there. This is the body. He stutters to meet the body with the word. He feels the blood run through his head down along his neck wide in heaving streamyards of witching visions through his sternum through his intestines along his legs, blossomed by force. He feels something amassing on the outside of his surface. Nodes. A false gray. His hands are heavy. He smells fresh rubber.
There is a nameless music pouring from the eyelets of the darkness beyond the window, larger than silence.
Flood’s body raises up his hands. His fingers point in ten directions, one for each finger, a splay of manifesting wish. In his chest he feels two big wheels turning, gyrating shapes among the flesh making tape burn in the threads between us.
Flood sees nothing. Flood floods inward. Flood closes his eyes.
Flood speaks.
The current fills Gravey’s body smiling and dressed in white upon the waiting bed where he lies with hands straight up above him, incarcerated with the light. His holes go slack around him. From the holes there is a sheen. Then, the white tape, surrendered spooling from his navel, hissing up like snakes evaporating.
There is a knock at the lone window. Old bells ring upon the air. The death machine is shaking.
Over the frying, our applause.
Over the applause, the husking flake of our surrounded flesh all turning dry.
The dryness of light no one remembers.
The day of the dryness of light.
Today in America, 208,135,180 people become killed, each and all killed and killed again forever amen until everybody in America is dead.