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.
FLOOD: Time also seems to be a problem for Gravey’s sense of person, which is not surprising considering he dresses like a mixture of the ’80s and the ’60s and the ’40s and the dead. His bouquet could as well be considered a mash of many generations. Either way, we’ve apparently reached the point in the concurrent story where Gravey can attempt a plea, though there hasn’t been a single detective or attorney who’s spoken to him and not come out saying the whole thing is an act, that he is aware of every inch of him, and not only is he aware of where he is, he’s just ahead.
In the hallway bathroom I ran into another body, someone I knew I’d seen before, though now he looked like he’d aged a hundred months. He was busy flossing blood out of his teeth and chewing. Where is Gravey? I said, saying it seven times before it came out of my mouth. The other body looked at the me inside the mirror with his red gums gushing. His pupils looked like some pixels. Nice, he said. I feel you. He had a circle tattooed on his nose. I looked at him looking at me in the mirror and then I looked at me and back at him. Some of his mouthblood had flecked out on the flat reflections of us like confetti, a little party. Shut up with shit, I said. I’m after Gravey, I have a word to give him, have you seen him. The mirror bending. We watching we watching we watch we. Yeah, I see you, dude, the guy said, doubled. His many eyes drew slightly lighter. I felt much more tired now than before I’d ever gone to sleep at all.
CHARLES, age 15: “I remember coming in one night and seeing Gravey standing with his back against the wall of the room and looking with his eyes so big at everyone like he’d never seen not only any of us but any person ever. He wouldn’t let anybody come within a few feet without swinging with his nails. He took some of my skin off, I remember, and then he started like licking at it, chewing it really hard and shit. It freaked me out then but later I would realize what gratitude was required of such honor. Whoever in him died to bring the making was the first of many necessary deaths, for which I am still praying to be given mine.”
In the midst of my becoming, the mirrors from my bedroom spread over the floors. They became affixed too to the ceiling and the framework of the walls along the places where we would walk most first and then the lesser places, patch by patch and row on column. Where we got the mirrors from was anybody. The thing about a mirror is they always act the same, no matter how much the price or who had been in them previously or for how long hurting what meat or touching what where with what hand. My own reflection in the mirrors began changing. My hair grew out on my hands. Like Gravey, I began stooping, and I began to answer to his name, slick from the boys’ mouths, toward who I now felt erotically charged. Some of the boys were women, though I felt nothing for those, and so learned to no longer know the difference. I tried to smile a lot and say not much of anything, in Gravey’s manner, and when I said a thing at last it would be immediately done, as long as I had cash or pills to place on open palms, which I always did. The fortune poured out of my pockets or my fingers. It came and came like kin. In time the mirrors appeared procured from any nearby space with doors that opened; from dressing rooms and washrooms and display rooms we took the ones over the beds, long ones set in the backs of doors or thumb-sized ones inside lockets, all of them someone else’s, wholly used. Soon there was no inch about the house that did not hold me seeing, and all the others. When someone walked, you heard it splinter. The blood was gorgeous, a temporary replicating gift. I rose.