by Blake Butler
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PETER S., age 15: “The most people I ever saw come over at once was like five. Mostly Gravey didn’t like a lot of people in the house until he started whatever. Everybody around school was talking about wanting to go to Gravey’s since they could get fucked up there, to the point that I think he started being scared that someone was going to find out he was hanging out with all those kids and like what so he told us to shut the fuck up. All the music he ever played us that he had made when he was our age or whatever really sucked.”
Then oh hey yeah one night at Gravey’s we, I mean us people, guys or whoever, we were floating inside the house again like ever and the bubbles in my brain became a phone. I picked up the phone inside my skull and heard someone at the far end screaming in a slow striation, syllables splashing at my face. As I learned to listen harder I could make out little bits of what it was, and though the language wasn’t mine quite, I learned to separate the sound that up till then had been my name inside me. The name no longer sounded like my name. Other guys inside the house around me not inside the phone were also screaming around the sound of the screaming coming through me in the phone, though these bodies were screaming at each other, swimming limbs and prodding sockets. The walls rammed in around me seemed higher than they had been before right now. The phone cord curled in my head meat made dizzy music with my blood in fury. I couldn’t hear the voice. I couldn’t hear Him; I heard me capitalize that pronoun in my aorta. I went in the mirror closet and closed the door with me there swimming in black fabric with the lights off. It smelled like going to the dentist. My hands were nothing. Inside it I could hear. This was the first time I heard Darrel. I heard Darrel tell me his name was Darrel. The mirror room closed around me closer even then. I knew right away he did not need me but I needed him. I could no longer find the door. Why Darrel, I said, what is a Darrel, why not another name, and I felt the receiver holes press through the back side of my skull, making little stirrups for the Listening. The syllables were curls, clenching licelike in my shape. Darrel said some of the things he had already said again. He gave his location in the house in a part of the house I had never been in and did not believe was in the house at all. Darrel told me he had lived inside the house as long as houses had been around and even longer than that. Then Darrel told me to kill Gravey. Darrel said I would understand why later maybe I had to do this and it didn’t matter if I did or didn’t, because by the time anybody else who could do anything to stop me knew about it it would be over and done with most exactly unremembered and this was the nature of the disembodiment of passion. Darrel’s forehead was so large, and the tongue inside it whorled; I could hear him right beside me in seven voices all the same voice everlasting. Through the script I heard the wail of home trying also to come into the room and stop the word and be between us, slurring my sternum: I heard Josh laughing, Gravey laughing, someone someone someone someone else. How will I kill Gravey, I asked Darrel, in my inside-voice, and now inside the phone inside me Darrel too began to laugh throughout the house’s hidden laughter saved like the maker’s breath inside a stick of butter. Darrel’s brand of laughing made me go goo-juiced and feel weirdo; it combed my hair and I was clean. Darrel said then that I would kill Gravey over time. He said that he would help me with this part, because we were married. He said I was married unto him; in the black book of years and sermons we had been written. He said once Gravey was dead we would begin. He said I was to enter Gravey once I had killed him and wear the body like our body and then the next phase could occur. He said we had time because time was coming and uncoming, because all of this had already happened and was happening right now, and would happen again in the near future. He said don’t you remember. He slammed the phone down in my head; it shattered hard straight through my neck into my lungs into my belly, making red sleeves on my reams of vision, which when I shook my head still stayed. There with the voice still there inside me after, my teeth felt colder than my jaw and I was laughing in the sound of Darrel’s laughing like I had always been and always would again all through my chest filled with the slowlight and I knew what I would be and then I instantly forgot. I felt along the closet for the knob and felt a wet thing surrounded by dark hair. In the dark I could not see my arms or anyone. This was our new daylight.
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FLOOD: I’m not surprised to find Gravey claiming here to have been, in so many words, psychically taken over by a child, who, again, I’m not sure if I believe is the same person. He very often acts like a hybrid of a thirteen- and sixty-year-old, spastic then tired, immature then graven. He will often revert to baby talk, even in midsentence, and often he switches between voices as if he’s playing ventriloquist dummy on himself. It is clear now at least that the child at least some part of Gravey remembered being at some point and the burnout he is presently are at this point in the narrative becoming mixed, at least as far as Gravey’s highly damaged point of view. As far as the identity of “Darrel,” I don’t know. Though Gravey will often respond to almost any name you call him, as if it is his name, anytime I mention Darrel, Gravey will gnash his teeth and squeal, in such a way that I can’t tell if he enjoys it or despises it or both.
I waited in the red. My cheeks wore weirder. I didn’t believe the words I’d heard me say into me in the name of Darrel, corkscrewed with flat beer the ringing woke in me and which I drank. The house seemed rather tilted. I laughed too, though I could not feel a center from which the color of my sound came. I kept looking up toward the ceiling to see where Darrel might be through the floor as he had mentioned, but the house was ranch-style. The roof was diamond-eyed. The only stairwell in the whole space went to a stormroom someone had filled up with a bunch of wire and a white chunk of marble big as two of me. Someone said Gravey had been planning to carve a replica of someone famous out of the substance, though who they said the person was was someone I’d never heard of, which seemed not famous, and made in my mind the substance anyone at all. Anyone forever and unending. All over all earth. In the red I held my head inside me and the phone in me was silent. I was spinning. The bumps along my arm began to rise, form clusters. Some came where a watch would be if I would wear a watch but I do not believe in time; one large cushy pustule opened near the center of my skull meat, hidden underneath my hair; also a bulge on the foreskin of my penis, on the bottom side, so that while peeing it could not be seen; one last trio of ridges on the inside of my upper lip like a keyboard. These all rose out of me within eight hours of the first phone call; some became foamy and met my hunger. I tried to corner Josh and give unto him some witness, though he was already so gooey and socially negligible by this point in our lives he just smiled and smiled, taking no part. I nudged him with my boot and said goodbye, for while I knew I’d see him later, I no longer felt him in me anywhere I’d felt anyone I’d known before this hour right now. He was the last one. It was arbitrary. The red was all mine now.
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FLOOD: Gravey’s Escherian perception of the architecture of his home and space surrounding is apparent by now: his house does not indeed have a stairwell (as far as we have uncovered), nor do many of the other physical elements or objects mentioned later actually appear. Perhaps some have been removed or destroyed. Perhaps there are multiple locations he is confabulating into one, much like the contours of his mind. At the same time, having spent dozens of hours in the house by now looking for answers as to the nature of this whole machine of events, certain of Gravey’s enunciations have in some subtle way in me seemed to ring true: as if there is something more about the spatial dimension of the building and what would come to wake inside it than one might gather simply looking. I can’t fully explain it as yet.
I did not kill Gravey with my hands. That is, my hands did not touch Gravey in the making of the leaving of the body of his blood, nor did I aim a knife or pistol or other tool in his direction, nor did I say a word into his head that caused an orchestral damning damage. How Gravey died was something came into his life.
I mean the next time I saw him after my instructions he was wearing black earrings and a blue shirt with a circle in the center of his chest. I think it was supposed to be a tour tee of a band he’d loved or wished he had. He was stooping. His hair was shorter on his head and longer on his face. Whereas before he’d never really talked except in wrinkles now he would not stop it with his mouth. He’d make a little barking sound. He’d sniff the wallpaper and pull it off in the kitchen to reveal the white behind it. He brought down a whole strip and wrapped a mask around his head. You could hear him talking inside the paper but the paper caught the language. He, as a conduit, was already being diminished. I needed nothing but to believe. I watched him from inside me as he banged his skull on the stove and turned the stove on and was laughing in the seven voices, the sound inside which I could not then remember the name of the neighborhood of where my father had had his house. I couldn’t remember my father’s name or the dog he’d bought me when I was four and it had bit me on the cheek some but we’d still kept him and I still slept with him in my room. All the photographs of things I’d done before now were somewhere outside Gravey’s house. Anything could go in just a single stroke of the eye against a portion of a building or a person in the long night around us. In knowing that, the house became not Gravey’s house but so much my body’s, I could smell it in my blood. This house needs to be painted, I heard Darrel say and now I was communicating with him not by the phone but in between my teeth and where my gloves would have been had I been wearing gloves. I understood. I went outside. Outside, in the mash surrounding the house with cash and unending television, by breathing in I gathered up the night. I felt it rummage in me, having traveled long for miles around the air of us in circuits everlasting. My skin around me did a slither; then I was sweat-logged, emptied of me. I used my arms to spread upon the eaves and locks and windows a shade more sky than nothing and less sky than what I already struggled to remember about the way the overhead had always seemed before: so dark despite the pins and orbs pretending to lend dimension to what otherwise went on no deeper than any body full of blood. Under the new moon my pores were so smooth. They gave the light back to the evening where the moon refused to take its turn as I spread upon the house our mortal color. I got less tired the more I worked. When I was the most not tired I could be, beyond my body, that was what I came to know as love.
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JOHN R., age 18: “I don’t know what the fuck he was thinking painting the house like that with all what was happening and going to happen. It was like he wanted to be stopped before he started, or like he had to have it so raw in the face of everybody if he was going to do it. He really wanted to die. I knew right then I should have left them. I couldn’t leave.”
Name withheld: “The black house was always black. It has always been black like any house and the painting placed upon it was only in the dimension meant to bring it right like any house should be. We would have painted every house on the street if we could have had that much to make for. Would have painted the houses on other streets and the streets and fucking Arnold Schwarzenegger and your fucking face you pig bitch ass fuck American fuck.”
The longer Gravey walked inside the house shaped in the black mass pigment the older he got faster. The skin around his ankles sagged in ways as if made melting. His arms could not reach to touch even the persons of our congregation who had allowed him to do the touching without the help of chemicals or need. He took to standing in the kitchen by the knife rack and leaning forward, eliciting shadows. He saw himself in windows and feared his disappearance. The less of him in him there was allowed me further open. Any minute I began to feel empty or dismissive of our fate, the phone rang in my blood again and rang until I pressed my palms flat against my lap or face and swore to my prior self that there was nothing undesigned about us coming, nothing I had power to remold. Other times the ringing would not happen and I’d just be blown up with such high shriek in all the air it was like every phone in America invoked at once, though no one else inside the house there seemed to hear. Somehow that pulling off of power made me horny and I would forget to rest. The night was lifting from the night. I needed not to not think. I used another phone outside the phone inside me to call my dad now still at the birth location to speak his death wish but it was already underway and always had been, disguised in stomach cancer and insomnia. His answering machine was still me age six saying hello hello hello hello hello hello hello hello. My present mouth moved to match the words, slowly unlatching itself from repetition into unforeseen syllables. I heard the future me in me explain some things about the old me to the old me on the tape directly, for someone else to bury, my blue-brained memory meat so divorced from anything that mattered: days not even days as I’d lived them but mnemonic home video of someone else’s shit-parade. Each word I said came out of me and left me without that word forever so that I could have new space to fill with how the future sounded. When I’d finished what I meant to say, I stayed on the phone until the machine ran out of tape, miming our silence, and my old house hung up on me and there I was now.
The next day Gravey was not there, or at least not Gravey as I had understood him. There was a slim window of excess time I spent between our transference. Our bodies now were both the same, like a shitting doll with several accessory skins you could force onto it. The quickening difference left in my memory a gap opened between who I’d been in my false youth and the present sack of meat I called my ongoing complexion. I’d spent my last night in the child awake inside the mirror chamber, pressed against it flat and laughing, waiting for Darrel to turn my hand into a saw or give me hope. The must of the room’s lining and my dreams of human leather and fire cities in the closet fill the skin around my eyes with birthing pimples. I had to pick me clean for hours. I came out of the dark covered in fuzz and walked into the kitchen with the itch risen and resounding, ready to take him alive by my own hands as had been commanded by Darrel in my blood for him and us brightly colliding and in the kitchen where he was most days most often he was not. I didn’t know that, no sooner had I made the decision to really kill him, he was me. He had always been me and always would be, just like for each new victim that I took I was always them also. The skin of every slipping minute passing as my human brain rattled to catch up to my condition sealed me deeper in our flesh, a vessel desperate for itself. In the needle den, no Gravey. No Gravey in the yard or in the drum rooms or rolled inside the closet where when I slept I dreamed of horses’ blood, though here were seven boys there passed out in no shirts and white jeans with the word FLAGELLUM stitched along the seam of their bellies and their hair done up like people meant to be wished upon, another band. I hated when fucking shitty bands slept in the fucking shitty house because I could hear the fucking shitty music coming out of their fucking shitty face holes and their fingers, though I could not remember in the night before there having heard them making any fucking shitty noise. I closed them in the room and locked the door. Today was Saturday or Wednesday in October or July. It was 1981 like it was 1440 like it was last month when you were born. Like it was 2667. My arms inside me kept on reaching after my own life. Gravey wasn’t in the yards. He wasn’t in the bunker where the shit went or any of the bifurcated rooms the house had made where it had learned to pull apart. I called his name saying just nothing. It was way way back behind my brain. I was way way back behind my eyes’ eyes in there with it wrapping gifts of undying adulation and absolute mirage.