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.
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.