by Blake Butler
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Name withheld: “Sometimes he would just lie down on the ground and fold into a ball so tight we couldn’t pull him back apart. He seemed in those moments to be trying to be compressing himself all back into a dot somewhere inside him, like disappearing. He could get so small. He would seize and seem to be weeping but nothing came out. He would speak in the language of a child, like one who’d never learned a word. These spells might last three minutes or an evening, which took the same shape. These ways were when we feared him most.”
BILL L.: “No new word shall form. No shapes. No abyss of sky. No now.”
By now the boys were bringing mothers home in set of sevens. I wasn’t even asking but they had their own integrations going, fired in their bellies, doing my work for me while I grew larger. Sometimes their genitals pushed so far out through their pants the dickheads had fists that punched holes in the house and let the outside in, or their ovaries would distend against the innards of their belly and make it impossible to go around. Whole sections of the house might be partitioned off for hours with flesh, stranding boys or sound behind a length of thickening wall so full of the media we were expunging it was like the house had disappeared. And this I realized was a fantastic predicament and must be continued as our day grew larger among the unknowing fields of neighbors waiting to become us. Their private screams in the American aloneness trembled and made my lardy body tremble too, a necessity for learning how to feel them. People. I had so much of them inside and around me I caved a new eternity every time I stroked. Our victims were coming so easily now it was like a video game sewn in my vision with the controller embedded in my breath. Some days multiple mothers would have to be discarded in order to keep within the house some space to exhale and I was too full to eat much of them so I let the boys and local pets have more than their fair share. I hardly even believed in killing anymore and so it was like I was always the president on vacation. I’d already lost count of our accumulating libidos and anyway I couldn’t reach my dick. Words filled me in the second of every deathblow as the bodies became part of the enunciation with the last note of the band of Darrel purring silent noise through and through and through the glass of time. All I ever did now was lie around and grow and watch my growing in the mirrors fund the growing further dadlike. Some of the mirrors had gone so black inside the ejection of the spirit into the house that they were halls as well, connecting us with passageways to other homes and corporate offices full of more victims. In reverse we populated backgrounds of universal art with our machetes and laughed from where inside the cabinets and collard greens the audiences would retroactively disregard how anything had changed in the painting or program or outlet mall they’d been born to admire, allowing sharper gnawing and longer sleep, allowing my prowess to fill the house all by myself alone and leach out into one life then another, loved from foot to face by anyone I entered, because I was as much them as they were and by god were they ready to worship that. Both the mother and the child myself between us. The seas of we united and extended in the rapidly approaching wrath of heatless energy awakened only in death.
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KALEB, age 17: “Black gouge meat poured from them. I saw Darrel lift them up. They were inculcated sweetly with the blue drum throbbing in me and we were the sound. I had waited all my life to be the centerpiece of someone’s dreamland, as when I closed my eyes inside my head I could hear nothing but the nothing moving through the cities whistling against the fumes. The mirror of the reflection of the mirror of the sky made flesh stand out on the heads between the curvatures of buildings where when I went and sat inside a room I could feel holy by lying on the floor and looking down. The meat of the women was the most beautiful year of my life every minute of it even as I knew I did not want to see them suffer as I wear my mother’s heart. There is only one motion to becoming and that is to no longer press the button and yet the hand of the globule in the arm of the American raises up and raises up never pausing.”
We ate the mothers’ neckflesh and their lockets, we ate their wedding rings or where those rings were not, we burned the hair and drank the smoke in, felt in filling where in we we wished we weren’t, we peeled the linings off the organs and wrapped their softing casings on our faces and stood in the overwhelming late and saw each other as another rising, we ate the smile meat off the cheeks and around the lips in lining, we ate the glimmer of the eyelids empurpled where each had rolled up on itself so many times against the sun for sleep or in the blink of meat encased among the soft night of the self; we shucked the bones clean while I gave speeches that contained no words, the screaming so loud in our tendons that it climaxed through the milk of air and was not there above our breath. Our new god’s body rang the telephones inside the houses as I ripped again and again from the many minor mothers’ chests the layers of the flesh where they had held the feelings of the mother for the child, and this was eaten again under a load of rain by fourteen Darrels who would mold the meat inside them into a horn that grew out on a lesion on my large intestine as more and more the song grew strong. The stench of blood would etch itself under our own nails and in the slits between the mirrors and the grade of air where we believed in what we were becoming, in the flood of human silt and milk and pilling on the veins of space our being here must enter and awake. We ate the curling food of her brain tunnels unearthed from where the skulls split and juiced their columns clean between our teeth, sulking the amalgamation memory of our uncoming to the future diamond skull our last god longed for. The pretending light erupted gleamshapes on reality that mimicked our cold motion well beyond our homes as all minds remained united in the dead mouth of anywhere surrounded all the countless versions of the hours ticking upward to bare upon the sky a wish for all else appearing where it wasn’t. We would never need to kill again once there was no one left to kill. The world all ours, all bodies and all customs in whatever name refracted through the color soon we would become. There must be only one body remaining. This is why we eat: so that each I take in will be in me like the others he had eaten were inside him. All bodies pressed into the flesh of god. The color of the curd of the rainbow coming out of any inch of the killed held in perpetuity together in one final surface all regardless of how they were cut or who they’d been made by, in what citizenship or temporary color they’d believed, which mouth of time of us they entered to become an entry in index of the ultimate data, full defeat, unto an eternal life where life is not alive or dead but the deformity of the plane of space shaping the age of the dying god’s last novelty. And this still was not enough. No hour was sufficiently ours to be the way an hour had been in the hour of the making of earth according to man’s imagination. Where the mothers’ colors met through me they became fused, and I could have them and everything they remembered was open to everything. Everything not flesh or bone we did away with. We burned the bras we burned the hair we burned the credit cards and cash we burned the rings around the fingers we broke the fingers and the nails we burned the burning in their loins we burned them and we burned them. The lessons pilled up on the floor like the dream of a wall around our people that could not be felt. The colors of their lipsticks and foldings and our dry hump was overwriting the previous year’s best clothing designers’ dreamlives, thereby overriding yours. So that when we did find you in the killing fields, and we would, you would look more fuckable than you had ever on your own. Any inch of what was mine once became yours by my not knowing how to have it, in that wherever I was not looking was always the only place to be remembered. Bit by bit the nation ate itself alive by we the teeth. No matter what I gave or killed or wished or centered or reconceived by my own hands in the greatest struggle of passion I was nothing more than the end of the beginning. This had become our country all along. This had been the instant of the waking ending as it instanced open, and still waited for another end to bless our hearts. Another end was not coming. That would have been a gift to give your lover for every commercial holiday combined, thou
gh now all lovers were equal. Whenever anything ends before you, you may know now it is a false thing, and so call it, and so know the want of more, and more want of want of more of all what fills each prior sentiment as experienced in humans funding the understanding of true beauty. There was so much need now in the house where the mothers’ remembrance-complexes and remainders collided in psionic beehive, the wideload of pleading and bloodshed and their thereafter replicating so many haunted lives pressed in on the same air in the same era, the light of the TVs and the bulbs brighter than any sunrise or corona, that you could hardly think about your thinking. I was sleeping so well every night, nothing machining in the blue space where I had before me and before my present body always stung so hard the night would scream in the coming image of our god at last leavened in my breast as he always had and always would now. This act of our word written out by hand on this white paper was all we’d all been doing as a human people even closest in the moments we believed to be building our new homes. To stroke the hair of the loved ones, to fold grain into loaves that would be broken before audiences as entertainment. At last here I was, served in a service with no residual continuum beyond fiber, though there must so soon distinctly be a certain end for the flesh of those we wished into us as we laid the foundation upon turning every person back to zero. One nowhere for us all at once again, in which we could return the favor we’d been granted to appear ever out here side by side, though it would be not you or I who brought fruition, but simply the birthplace of an actually everlasting form of spirit beyond the grave. Refracted in the last black house of our black city once lined with mirrors now lined again with something spinal on the night.
* * *
FLOOD: Photographs of the remains found in the room beneath the house are almost impossible to look at, in that they more resemble abstract art than corpses. The level of dismantling and removal is almost machinic. I can’t help thinking of grapefruit. A fellow officer made a joke how one shot resembled the walls in his grandparents’ living room when he was little. I found myself laughing. I couldn’t stop laughing.
The dying god releases a map of the world. It looks like a map of the world.
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FLOOD: I submit another request for the paperwork explaining the details of the manner of detection leading up to Gravey’s arrest, being as I had not been involved with this case throughout that time, having moved over to this precinct just before his arrest. The previous lead detective had transferred or gone on extended leave just immediately before the date of apprehension, or this is what I’m told. I don’t know why I haven’t gotten this information passed to me already. I have to submit three more requests before the work finally shows up: a file only eleven pages long, with information pertaining only to Gravey’s prior record (clean), a note regarding the difficulty of finding almost any public record or testimonial about Gravey’s position in the community or details of his past, and the contents of his home at the time of booking (of which I was already aware). Upon request for the rest of the files, how we found out about Gravey’s existence in the first place, etc., I am told this information “does not exist,” meaning that whatever other files there were, beyond essentially what I’ve put together on my own, went with the prior detective, , who I never actually met directly, and is “no longer accessible,” according to our would-be mutual superior. Any further attempts I’ve made at unraveling the story end with the forwarded phone calls, questions answered with questions, and blank stares that come with the territory of my work, which of course is frankly part of what I love about it: the infernal collaboration of creativity and fate.
Under the wake of all of night we went again. We wedded the public with the private; tunneled through the holes in the houses the darkness graced as welcome mats made of the dirt of the buried, gifting access into each home, and enough desire to slip into each denatured, dragging the future. Into each I went, too, split in my dimension to replicate across the universe of homes. In each we found a version of the mother to behold and hold above us and render into godflesh. Often the mother was a child. When the mother had testicles, we removed them and placed them in one of my boys’ mouths to bring them home. These must be fed into the incubation outlet for the prison system of the next year to feed with, reproteinizing any face. The hair would grow out on us so thick there would be no cavern but for Him who firebreathed no flame in the Name. In each house we bound the husband’s hands with leather thongs we’d rendered from the excess pets we’d bred. Many of the houses had second floors the inhabitants had not realized. These floors were full of beds. The sleeping of the Darrels there in coming years would knit the house into the ground, pushing down as well the submerged layer of the buried persons who were speaking always in our organs. They knew nothing of me, but they slipped into my speeches. They were nothing like lyrics. Each husband would be dispatched with a chrome lever affixed to his throat. The lever lifted brought his voice out like from a spigot and spilled upon his chest and wrote the Word. The Word would in the proper configuration, with the word placed on the next victim, I believed, erase the voices with the downing as they lowered with the sentences of Darrel, and so this was done some nights ten times or fifty in a row. Stabbing with the left hand then the right hand then with the lever wedged in my ribcage. Whatever wet the bodies shot upon me stayed, became my coat worn in a sheath to explicate our absolute and shapeless deathgod’s phantom body. Each house we entered was a new cell to be filled in with the makings of the night. Some stabbing hit upon the buttocks so that they might stand for many years and feel the blood mush in their legs, learning the posture of the Darrel as they held the marks of the language of the new god up upon the temple of their heads. In each house I removed the DELETE key from any computer and ate it into my belly and heard it affix to my tubes. Behind my eyes the typing fired.
* * *
R. A.: “By now he was seeing through the eyes of each of all of us at once, he said, and through the eyes of the building body of the mother made from all of those we’d taken apart, so that upon the rooms he could see the other rooms coming and going and all that had and would be done. One night I watched him lean so hard against a mirror the mirror split around his head. We weren’t even playing music anymore for all the times as at last Gravey said the song was playing itself and so we were playing it as we walked and woke and said nothing, as no speaking in the house was allowed but his and he mostly didn’t ever so we could listen to the becoming of the day despite it looking like it had all the other days surrounding.”
There was nowhere to hide all that we had not begun consuming. We packed the cavity under the house with more bodies and more bodies and soon it would overflow and we’d dig further to make the chamber bigger and the ground below us moaned and caved more space again to fill. We covered each new layer with more mirrors and more light. We made the shapes that Darrel commanded in the walls there with our longest fingers and ejected the seedchild crust; and once the musk of innards had settled in the chamber we went to Petco and bought all the darling parasites they had for sale: hamsters and guinea pigs and white mice and fancy rats captured in cages. These could do some of the eating in our stead, as my teeth were getting sore from all the flavor, and my lips were about to fall out, and the boys seemed old as hell. The U-Haul full of our pets became a superior Rauschenberg of actual excrement and fur immediately. The traffic lights came on red all the way returning. At an Exxon I bought a candy necklace and wore it around my chest and let it do my speaking for me so I could set my brain on pornography of an everlasting nature. Our death would never have to die. At home we put the temporary pets into the incubation chamber and let them go to work among the bread bed of corpses, demolishing the remainders. We watched them pack the mush of every corpse into dens of blue intestine. Into these mounds they laid packs of eggs all colored gold, or squirted repeated pregnancies into the beautiful lard as we’d provided. Each time the animals and we inside ourselves ate enough mother to brine a child ins
ide the shit, the babies immediately would inside the house begin again to make themselves again and lay themselves into the blacking mass. It made a sound of gnat accordions and secondary wishing in the name of Sod. The eggs were spooling harder and where they birthed again into themselves the corridor became packed. Each new birth was a cell in the new god. It would be my rite to raise him on the lawn of the Black House while the cameras rolled and our song sang and shat and sang and kissed every hour underground rolled up above and born again. For each new generation more mothers had to be made witness to him in donation of their American memory of how cells die, which meant there was more work for the boys to do to bring them to me and to help me continue to remember to want to need. Their airs immediately combined, the rising air all together not just of man but of the louse in man most recognizable, beyond the ark of the old god. The stench cells under sky’s devoid rim shaking while we waited more through shorter periods while in the wet of noise the song of hours became stiller still and harder to acknowledge. To pass the time we practiced coronations and mind vibration. Of course we filmed it. The films were in our skin. The soundtracks were the same lack of everything we’d always wanted. Inside the newer no sound our undrummer got entranced; he cut his right arm off to control his fortitude for doing nothing better than ever. Our guitarist tried to unshred with all the notes at once and became actually immaculate enough to throw his mental children to their deaths inside the well of his ability. The toilets all began to overflow inside the zilch and vermin pregnancizing. Our musk flooded fast to fill the blush above the houses, the lawn around us bluer and inculcating burrowing vermin for miles under the earth, each laying their eggs in the grown sod to be nearer to our affection. The piping of my sermon fed them grace through holes I did not want to provide for free but could not contain because I am loud when I am ejaculating which is always which means sometimes I can’t bring myself to clear my throat and when I vomit from the air of this world it clings inside me and becomes more lingo I have to dethrone into silence.