by Blake Butler
Upon the night hiding the bloodbath there haloed seven moons. Each of the moons had seven moons about it. Each of the moons’ moons was engraved with one of seven symbols, huffing smoke out from the edges where the night’s anger surged against its own surface, wanting to destroy the speech from all horizons. Where before the sun had been, there hung an orb the same color and dimension of the prior bulb that watched us among along with one vast unending pupil. Even my boys did not imagine such eternal confirmation. They were all so engorged with how we’d fed, they had to drag their ass across the earth. Their skin cells left no trail behind us, indistinguishable in this era’s light from soil. Each house howled as we passed it; each house wanted us to revise its content also, include them in the narrative. And in the morning, when we all woke again together invalid as ever, there was no mail, and the malls stayed closed an extra half an hour, during which, for once, I wept, which felt like rape, and after which I washed my hands and aimed at the old idea of god and waved.
We put new mirrors up over the mirrors in the black house. We harvested the chuff of our deadening emotions for the glue. Mushed them. Wished them whiter. Soon there was no inch we couldn’t see ourselves in. My bloodstreams were going bonkers from the new meat and blood all rolling through them, already starving. I needed to calm down inside my pleasure, so said Darrel, which would cause accidental detonation music. Over the mirrors we laid another mirror layer, then a layer of magnifying film. Each boy was then commanded to cleave the skin off his forehead with the sharp end of a magnet. We rubbed the oily side of the skin on the wall for lubrication, then fed the rest into the kitchen sink, forcing raspy floods of us into the pipes that carried air in knots of to and from in network under universal homes. What opened over our eyes was not a wound, but many eyes. When we were healed it would be the first day of our Sod, a day designed for destroying any gifts we’d ever been given by any human. The stink that rose out of our common facial bleeding amplified the innards of the house, over which we laid a final layer made of newer mirrors snatched from newer nearby houses we had sacrificed to flames, and over this at last we painted over the mirrors in our minds to match the black like our house’s outside. Consecrated altogether with our spittle, the new wall’s rapt heavy face remained reflective just the same, a total window to the holes of holy era already coming. And now the flies between the walls and wounds began to laugh and lay eggs and eat them. Everything from here on would go much quicker, each instant of it that much easier to lie down inside of, like a prison.
* * *
FLOOD: Each of the boys we’ve brought in thus far does indeed have a marking on his face, some of which they claim were self-inflicted, while others, they insist, were branded in a medicinally induced unconsciousness. The marks are specific for each person, one of a series of seven total designs (as far as I have counted). The symbols are: CIRCLE, SQUARE, HEXAGON, STAR, TRIANGLE, DIAMOND, RING, the same ones previously noted. I’ve had no success in gathering further information from those bearing the symbols on their bodies, as they seem to have no idea themselves, though some, when prodded, will open their mouths and strain their throats and face skin as if they are being throttled from the inside. Otherwise, they often act as if they don’t realize the marks are there, or feel pain. A surprising number of the wounds caused by the markings have yet to fully heal, and they emit a yellow pus. There are no visible marks on Gravey’s own head or body other than distinct markings from childhood acne and a tattoo in his right armpit of the numbers one through twenty-one.
The fifth through fifteenth mothers were made makeshift from the boys. The shrinking house was packed in angles of mushy arm meat and abdomens in such ways I couldn’t walk to see who was there or what food I would not eat. The sexdrives of the molding prior bodies of the dead refracted through me in the silence of the act of spreading of our silence outside the house. We clearly knew one day we’d have to all kill one another to become All, and why not begin now? Which boys we’d dismantle among our own first would be selected on the basis of those I didn’t most want to beat the shit out of the second I saw them, notarized by Darrel with a shudder of rushing breath through the shafts becoming woken up beneath the house. Because these boys were boys and therefore most of them came equipped with testicles and no wombs, I had to have their junk removed to make them inhabitable. I performed each operation with a butter knife and several lengths of wire from a clock I bought online that was said to once have been kept inside a deaf-mute astronomer’s bedchamber. The boys took turns holding the others down. They sprayed all they had left into the room, their rancid death-urine foaming up among the lashing of their limbs and clouding the house fat enough to believe in friendship. The unspent semen would be harvested and spread over the walls and on the ground around the house to keep the machines out. During these operations the band played their nothing music to steady my nerves, not even holding instruments between their hands now: they’d learned through proper practice and my hissing to speak the music through the skin around their knees. The music turned the house into a spitbath for air, lacing the whole bloat of the discharged-choking space between the walls with numbing aether through which the motion of me rendered slower, and I could see my hands move before me before I went to move my hands as all of we already had in the marbling of history. Each hour, to match the new boys, more mothers were being brought in and processed. They were being broken down into component parts again, in sweatshop. The legskin of the mothers was sliced off in neat precision so as to fashion costumes we would wear out for the final Halloween. The brains were packed together in the smoking closet as an ashtray. The scalps and cheekflesh of the mothers were fed to Darrel through the plumbing. The remainder of their fleshes was turned into a couch. The backbones became fishing poles and back scratchers. The remainder of the bones we simply saved; together, as the dead fell, they would interlock across the continents, forming a freeform pyre spanning all homes in total larger than the homes themselves, an incidental holy location thereafter to be worked down over time, as sun and rain continued in our absence. The blood we always totally ate, or at least all together would lie down in and fake sleep.
* * *
Name withheld: “The boys were killing each other anyway. They wanted to be killed and become part of the body. They did not want to die as dying is, and instead to be incorporated. Really Gravey didn’t touch anyone, they were doing it to themselves, and some were trying to talk the other into doing them up and arguing who should do who and what the flesh was and the smell. It was a disease waiting to be called on. Whoever ended up dead got put in the mirror room for incubation. It seemed like Gravey genuinely couldn’t even tell who was dead or alive, as he talked to them all the same way, as they were all dead already in the name.”
With all the blood and night surrounding, the mirrors slickened and inverted and turned white and collandered the air beneath the curl of sun. It wasn’t sun; it was the first cells of the first series of the bodies of the mothers pearling. It wasn’t like rotting, though it seemed that, orally; it was their unpacked flesh at last crystallizing its first layer where once our mission was complete we would wake dynasties repeating in the hyperventilating light beyond this race. The floor above us in the first level of becoming still would not allow us to step foot or even wink its presence but we were accumulating power quickly. The gifting blood of the women and not-women flooded through the house and juiced the day against itself in fast formation and laughed and laughed and air was hours in an instant like me becoming mine. I felt me get fucked by every cock of life inside the coffins I carried in my brain until they could erupt inside me cold at once and fill me with the unending spirit of our hope, hidden in all of us forever bred. I felt the boys becoming steadfast in their ability to split apart, their cells cartooning instant to instant as they flashed and spread the vision. All the names of the new and certain dead were falling out of the air like little 4-D scabs the TV weathermen mistook as hail. Each house ever had a number
you could use to speak into it, and so often I would use the phone inside my brain to call these people I’d soon visit and just sit there breathing my dinner into their head. The resulting music of these communications gave new inspiration for that band of ours to turn inside out and fill their lungs with reproductions of all the highest-grossing hits, regurgitating would-be future classic albums as absolutely nothing into the lymph of the first ancestors of Darrel, in the dead world. In all our mirrors I could see infinite rooms of the house exaggerating all around us in the insane light, splitting each like me into sevens and sevens of versions we could fill soon. The splitting of the rooms fed my hunger with more hunger. It filled me with the seasons I would eject into the nation, opening every man to my disease, while by my heart the bells of our incoming curd of god blurred overhead, a descending limit on the cities’ ambient ability to withstand anything we uttered.
* * *
A. F. F.: “Leaking out of the house into the other houses was reckless and essential. There were boys who wanted Gravey calmed, and some who said they had a plan to slit his throat soon in the house if he did not slow down. Those boys were killed by other boys. The loyalty to Gravey’s vessel in the mode of Darrel by now was real, and would become only more real the further the curve rose. It is still rising, there is no longer time. It would not be stopped will not be stopped. Kill me or him or anybody on the cross of your machines and I would smile through blood and what has been done has been done. The splitting of the houses will continue even right now where you are standing, underneath you, and how you cannot feel it means it is at work.”
As the light of Darrel slathered up and under all around us in the flesh of mankind, I began to see through other minds. I could shoot from one spine to another, becoming more people the sharper the silence got with death. I mean that when I closed my lids there wasn’t black there or teeth or wolves but simple perspectives. I would close my eyes inside the house a mini-instant in my body and where the skin was I’d have vision through another set of meatholes, they among the houses of the living all surrounding now. I’d see a lawn, a store, some hands slicing a melon, driving a golf cart, washing. I might occur into a small man standing at a register where food was being served, his small tattooed arms and long veinwork in a far light making food and taking cash; within him I could remember all the things I’d touched with those weird hands before, could see how despite my best intentions and whatever faith I’d had there were these darker rings inside my body, which whether or not I felt a part, I was. The set of all present current thought clicked around me in a silence permeated with slow blood, among the hours spent surrounded by others who might be the next one the self inside me would click inside of and see from there, no longer recalling; years lived in each human separately and so, infinitely, if all packed into a space too small to allow even grace. These weren’t memories but more made in the way I’d been inside a schoolboy’s body before and was now a middle-aged user. I didn’t have to move into the body to control it or change the words inside the skull and how they’d come out. I’d simply inhabit the limbs and speech as I could see them there within me and take the workload over. It was only a way of life, the way any day there is the list of commands you must process and exist in, no matter how benign. The length of time I spent inside these would shift; I might go on elsewhere for many years or hours, held uncounted beyond the wall of being them. In each it felt like very little. In each there was a world. My methods were always tending toward rupture of what was given. Inside a housewife I would hold the hairdryer so long against the scalp that the hair burned through and skin came open. Instead of squealing, I would laugh. Inside a man tending his yard I’d ride the lawnmower over concrete scraping sparks and ram a fence or side of neighbor’s house, or mine. Once I had touched myself as me into this human passage through the shift of body, I no longer needed to stay inside the body to continue guiding my vision for the ending of all narration; and though once I left this body it would not remember my having come inside and known and given vision and kissed the cold word of our Sod against the lips, the person would go on in this way; he or she would cohabit the organism of our total future. The longer I did the act and however more often, the greater lengths I could involve myself as they were fully. I had the person all throughout them in me like a geode. And yet when my eyes were open I was inside my own space and felt nothing. Then I could do two of them at once, like screens side-by-side and parallel in time, then seven. Each mother we killed and body I consumed fed me more ability. It was like I had the energy of the dead cruising my brainlocks. Eventually it got so I could operate so many at the same time they moved in flights: I’d have a horde of geriatrics go bananas inside a Walmart, or a gang of seething boys overtake their PE class with biting maneuvers, or a series of fires in a hospital. Brownouts. I turned a prison upside down and no one noticed. In this manner we took form, spreading out into the feeding flesh for what the light of us required. This comes not a proclamation of judgment or of absent faith, but the natural proclivity of the necessary destruction that feeds in the body of the human to make more humans who then must fold; it is not good or evil, light or opaque, gross or gorgeous; it is a paste I ride. In the blinking I went on to more bodies behind their thin doors and started to use their bodies to infect into even more other bodies too. I spread the edges of me into whoever I could imagine. It didn’t matter why. Each time it seemed outside me like only more of what the world had always wanted. The news corporations assisted my integration beautifully. I didn’t even have to have them read the script, nor did I need to keep my mind on anything to have everyone inside me focused, a bank of captured feeds so high and wide it felt like celebrating all our birthdays at the same time always. I moved into the skulls in floods wearing the vision of the seven symbols and there I placed them across the land: inside the bodies of the teacher, the carpenter, the homemaker, the mime, the masseuse, the actor, the artist, the surgeon, the child, the mother, the father, the killer, the reader of this book. My power was conflagrating and masturbating at the same time; I could feel it most focused in my ring finger. I would kiss the knuckle and touch anything and let the buzzing fill all possible other sound inside anyone around me. I mean our senses. The mechanisms of control infected everywhere they fantasized of or saw on the films or through my boys’ extending visions patrolling the streets for who was next. The boys were all my senses, and therefore those of all my brain absorbed, altogether weaving and arranging quietly in private among the congregating holes and fibers of us a rapidly evolving apparatus that soon would be filled with all I had felt inside the name of Darrel consecrated in full across a space as wide as the only continent I’d ever touched, therefore the only land that really exists, which soon would find itself made truly and forever the wanting void it’d always been, our names credits for a commercial our emotions couldn’t begin to witness.
* * *
FLOOD: The night I first read to this point in the manuscript I paused here because there was something knocking at a window in the far end of my hotel room, which I’d rented to read inside a different space from where I sleep. I’d not told anyone where I was staying; there was no one to tell. I went to the window and looked out. It looked like any kind of time. No one was out there. I looked at long angles with my head against the glass to try to see what had done the knocking. I got my gun and opened the door. On the ground there was a picture of me sitting on the bed in my hotel room, reading the book. You were in the picture, too. I don’t know who you are or what you look like, but it was you. You were on the bed asleep. The photo was taken from the perspective of the bathroom mirror. The next morning the picture had gone pale.
* * *
FLOOD: This page at first glance appears blank. Up close, though, in proper light, there is a kind of indecipherable font, or more like little pictograms that don’t seem to form any image. I find myself staring into the page here for too long at times, waiting for the build of it to compile correctly, but in
stead I end up feeling sick or falling asleep. Then I look up and see it’s as light or dark outside as ever, like no time passing. After more time spent studying the pictograms I feel certain I have seen them elsewhere in the world, like signs of corporate logos or textures on the sides of buildings seared somehow into my unconscious, but of course this is me searching for meaning. Likely there is no meaning but it is my job to persist in the identification of tragedy nailed to nothing, and so I will. Honestly at this point I want to burn the book. I also find myself thinking I want to eat it, that I want to get the sentences tattooed on my body. The thought snakes through me in my voice. I have been sleeping with the book at night whether I do or not, like suddenly it’s in my arms, or it feels like it is. It is a pressure. A dress. It kind of itches. As an afterthought, I have covered up the mirrors in my home, though not those in my car. Suddenly I feel over-aware of the number of mirrors I come into contact with daily, often without having even noticed their presence in the room. The book continues.
“Do you know about the city of Sod,” I heard me saying. “Do you know about the city of the children of Sod. Do you know about the silence of the locks in the city of the children of Sod, who have been waiting to be cut free from bereavement. One method for arriving at the white gate is chloroform and candles. This should be applied to you by a licensed client of the word, who will appear above your bed in a down flak jacket. I am the jacket. The erotics of names is not a joke. Every night’s name is every night’s name and the room’s too. I will arrive inside you also and you will allow me. Every griever is my fiancé. Our jagged tips reach up into the Sod. The transfigured night is why you age. The cloaking me will kill the remainder so we can have an unoblivious serenity. I am online. The me I am not me inside the mirror walks toward me as the mirror grows closer with me in it, approaching me approaching. The glass dome on this home shatters every time another person has a birthday. The homes beside this home call the shards in mnemonic purring to come into the home and cut them into worship. The entrance to the cloaking city must be cloaked on the face of the blood of all. Eternally, the lamps inside our house so familiar they are not there. Where I am so warm in me I can’t sleep until the work is written and erased. Where I can sleep outside me against the neighbor house with my head against the siding, listening for my name without realizing I am listening for my name or realizing I am listening or realizing I am not against the house or I am not outside my house but your house. My words eat the tone out of their fantasy until they look like something you have done or will do or would want to and will or would want to and cannot or will again. When I say I love you I mean I am you in the color of your blood. Welcome our house of endless milk. The mist of our fourteenth moon rising in the cake batter of the mattress where you will make the final child of your whole life each night and transfer into us. Not yours but yours and mine. Not ours.”