by Blake Butler
* * *
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.