Three Hundred Million: A Novel (43 page)

FLOOD
:
Through the woman’s eyes, I could hear Gravey. His voice buzzing with every human voice combined in every syllable, writing over any thought of my own I could have had then:
You could find an ending in any eye. I had learned this as a child when staring hard into the sunlight even so briefly and still it cut the meat out of my eyes, and wrapped around in my surroundings with its blackness, handcuffing my imagination. In the blindness there and then only had I learned to see the ways between the houses, between minds. Death at last was no longer an inevitability; it was the mass of the ground that we grew out of.

The body of the carpenter was found dismembered into five equal parts, divided in halves along the center of the sternum and halved again across the middle, and lopped off at the head. The head was gorged of its softer parts, the eyes, the lobes, the cheeks, the lips, the gathering beneath the chin. The face would be recognizable to the wife were she not also pulled apart. The mother’s head was all intact except the hair, which had been shaved to match the balding father, with a ring of pubelike stragglers crowning the elongated cranial peak. An orange plastic stitching, rendered from cloth of stretchy sack designed for carrying potatoes, was used between the eight bodily sections of the two parents, lashing chest to chest and chest to chest and waist to waist and waist to waist, creating from the two previously independent parties a pair of hybrid halves. The genitals of the mother had been sewn shut on the side of the lower body that remains bearing the bits (her left); the genitals of the father had been removed, and buried with his left index finger beneath the land the home of the family lived inside, and grew together through years of light and pigment and dinners and language unto the day when the five children would take the parents clean apart. The coupled neutered bodies meshed lay head to head forming a flatline at the concrete mouth cupping the local street unto the home’s stoop; the left and right arms of each of the prior bodies reach to cup the hand of the other arm on the other body to which they previously by flesh had been attached; the palms were cut open and sewn together, forming a circuit. The wedding rings had been switched. The mouth of the mother splayed open toward the sky as if in waiting for something to rain into them and be fed. In the concrete were scratched the initials of each of their children, along with a large blockade of tracing that to the parents had always looked like a picture of a sun rising over a large square pond. The concrete ended at the mouth of the house where the home had been burned to char against the ground. Cremains of the five children could be found strewn among the rubble, each demolished in kind one by one by age from oldest to youngest, knives, ropes, fists, vices, confounded in the remains of incineration of the pillows, place mats, clothing, photography, trash, uneaten food, books, dolls, board games, toothbrushes, chairs, mattresses, sofas, calendars, crib notes, new envelopes, desks, carpet, hair, in all a thick gray field visible from several hundred yards overhead. A corresponding oval of shared blood between the two parental torsos at the mouth of the ash field glistened even in the dark.

FLOOD
:
The voice continued even when it wasn’t speaking, I could not stop it. It was becoming hard to hear my own, or to feel where in his body I was at all besides as interruption:
This whole world of the living was so shrill. How could you be sure any moment you’d believed you’d been alive and living you weren’t looking head-on into a mirror? How do you know you weren’t being recorded, or that you yourself weren’t a recording? There’s no one left but me to let you know. I who had been always by your side, always just beneath you and behind you and within you.

The body of the homemaker was blue, beaten to mush. In each room of the house she had a body she hoped would continue growing even during days where she was concerned with her image and so out loud wished to lose the weight. Each day depended on their staying alive. The son who would go through the day inside a vehicle among other vehicles piloted on whim and gasoline. The daughter who would walk among men and women who all had eyes and access to knives and a will to act in any minute. The father had a brain with thoughts that flashed like little cities winking on and off in darkness, perhaps the idea of stroking something or eating something or beating something; the world depended in some way on every ion of him not going haywire any day, even in the smallest acts, i.e. gently stroking his left or right hand just so much in one direction either way while driving on a highway by or not by direct intention, the resulting clash of machines taking someone we knew and loved and changing our lives like bread into an oven to be eaten by someone we knew nothing of or maybe thought we did. The color of the homemaker’s hair could change at will by her hand or on its own in time because god is all things, she believed. God’s power has no bounds, she’d say inside herself and at certain times aloud, though perhaps not in the presence of the bodies that had bred in her the love that made her want. If god wants to kill me today there is a reason, she would go on. If god wants to have someone write a book in which I am being inadequately described as a fraction of a person existing perhaps in countless bodies, who has already been killed by someone else, if for no other reason than boredom, or his own fury or sadness, so be it; this is god’s will also. What if I don’t believe in god, she’d ask herself some nights under quilts and covers wrapped in the white wire blankets in the room of the house surrounded by the world lit only by sight and sound and touch, the senses, which could be so easily removed. What if I think I believe in him but I don’t believe in him really and he knows I don’t and can smell it even though I can’t because he is a greater force and can smell the real thing, why am I thinking this even, I wish I did not have to think, thinking kills the light out of me, it kills my light out, and any thought will only be profane, and profane isn’t even a word or concept that I value but I still believe that we as humans are in trouble and yet I go on and I believe and I act and I make and I cook and I wash and I want and I learn and I make and I continue forth in the effervescent mash of the human spirit surrounding any intention even the blackest even the illest even those who would say the darkness is all around because really in darkness the greatest gift might be born and in embracing the blackest of our sides we are alive even in death we would be alive, I think, and regardless or not if I believe and regardless or not if my belief is being considered or judged or reflected or compressed in the moment of some something above the minute I will imagine right now that time goes on forever and in going on forever does not exist and so to embrace nothing is a kiss of god and to die is a kiss of god and to not die yet is a kiss of god and to not realize I have died is a kiss of god and to be even silent underground or bloody open underneath the veil of sky is the kiss of god, even those who do not believe in god will be kissed by him the way they walk through air and go to dinner and hear songs and take on vision even blind or deaf even in America even today with the knife so at our throats as it has always been by our hands, the hand of god in any body, the hand of god again, the sight.

FLOOD
:
With each word I could less and less tell my body from any other cadaver; in each, the voice again there melded to my blood:
Each time a room is photographed, it doubles. The same with people, and their mortality. In our total human death, all hours compile unframed with every possibility of what we felt we knew or wanted. As soon as this could have been true, it always was.

The body of the mime cannot be found. It had been consumed all parts and portions from the brush of flesh over his face to the thin rinds between his smallest two toes and his gonads. His flesh was found to taste like grapefruit peeled and doused with lighter fluid and rolled into a market aisle gathering dirt and silence as shoppers might have passed placing canned peas and syrup in their carts with their eyes anywhere but down. The rough lining around the muscle was melted under flamethrower and used to tease the dogs who would run from the stench of it into a deep woods; then the men, who’d never meant to feed the dogs with this gray meat regardless, could chew and choke themselves and taste the silence where words pocked into the mashy pockets of the brain and down the fingers of a man suffused with light from machine screen and buzzing bells reminding human contact and the words that time had altered in their unpresuming meaning beforehand as he placed his fingers on the buttons to again be misread by whomever beyond his own misreading as should all things be until they no longer are. The blood would be drunk by mouths put to the pumping spigot of the flesh or it would be washed into the earth. The bones from there fashioned into weapons that could then be used to strike further bodies of their blood and cells, begetting more meat, begetting weapons in the act of debegetting else; what vocabulary swatted cold inside his skull of teeth and gums, among blood bubble and scraping brain putty; what has never been a word, and would never be a word again; what ash. The skull was ground to powder and snorted in pursuit of some fried high, which truly would find its function in the disassemblers’ bloodstreams centered at the moon’s spin like chambers in a gun around the bullet of America giving itself again unto itself again with gifts for our last birthday one last time while the hour struck the name of the year inside us unrepeating and the arms were fine and glasses raised and promises repeated and mouth to mouth and singing zero.

FLOOD
:
My sight was voice and voice was sight; my mind was nothing beyond what came across it:
These corpses are the filaments of our cells. Their destroyed memories are our blood. They speak forever now in colored shafts inside the head wound of the ground where grass must grow. For each body, think of all that had touched them, come forth from them, depended on them. Think of all that had been rendered in their meat. Now think of a stairwell with each step flattened out so wide it covers everything and all directions. Now climb in silence.

Moving among the bodies, holding their era, made me come awake inside my own shape over and over, full of pleasure to find them waiting. Each inch filled me that much brighter than the last. I was not embarrassed about what any of us had done, nor ashamed, nor sad, nor hopeless. It felt like waking up in different worlds second to second.

In the eyes of each of the gone people I could read their days—who they were and what they had been and done and did and would have had they not been killed and ended. Their faces showed exactly who they were, plain on the skin they wore as it degraded. In single fingernails I saw the color I needed to believe that anyone was somewhere and so could continue walking, as otherwise their beauty in death would lay me down. I wanted to lie down in every instant. I wanted to sink into the earth, the skin and meat of it. My clothes had become so see-through from my trembling and the false sweat that I was naked. The breeze of life blew through my hair. The light was taking pictures. It ate the pictures. It shat the pictures out and glowed. From the glowing new houses rose up behind me; I could hear them, but I was not allowed to look. My head would not turn, nor my torso.

My erection led me on. My spindly labia led me on. My undeveloped pubis led me on. My lifetime led forever forward. The ash left trails that blew away.

Our architectures had already forgotten us. The curve of concrete into metal plane against red brick wired together through and through the airspace lapped with glass and wood and bone sung no album against the unbreathed air squelching vast gap where speech had beaten at it daily; no thumb or nail to scratch its shape again but the wind and drip of its own cover over all. The earth was hollow with all our corridors through dark dirt of transit at last unburdened of the endless ramming and given time alone. Grass and foliage wrote itself over the surfaces we’d conditioned in our image without our image in them. All the eyes who could not see at last made open.

Always the silence moved beside me. It fell between the people, conducted among friction with the contours of their torsos and their necks and thighs. They would not look me in the eye; their gaze always aimed as if in taking but just slightly off, feathered instead wholly, stilly toward the flatness above. These people had had many names, some hundreds of them, names for nowhere, though none of these words would appear inside my vocabulary. They were anybody. Their arms were burned and scored with patchy lacerations, as if by years of being copied on the air, whirring with the dream of dynasty and orgasm.

I did not look back. The silence pulled me like a rope wrapped warm to tie around my neck. Where I tried to think or speak, the stars winked out in ricochet, falling from heaven’s meat clinging to no bones wrapped around this hemisphere. The stars had names, too, but we’d gotten every one of them wrong; in falling they screamed the name inside the silence wrapped around us and streaked the black with black again from tar and burned to ash before they hit the ground. The ash rained and rained in warbled strobe to stick against my cheeks and hair. It gave me new skin.

I loved the composition of the silence. I had gone nowhere. I closed my eyes. It was so black in there, it wasn’t even black. It was like a room with countless mirrors and all the lights turned on and aimed into them now so bright the colors come alive and eat into your face into your brain into a black so black it begins to seem that you are actually alive and that each instant you have lived has not only brought you to where you are now but has in bringing brought us all.