FLOOD: A theory: Child-Gravey and Adult-Gravey have apparently at this point, as a narrator, become fused, a process tempered by Spirit-Gravey (AKA Darrel) (AKA, I think, perhaps, Gravey’s idea of God? The future of god?) (who I might suggest is only Gravey too, or at least an idea in his mind, though I would not be surprised by the emergence of an actual OTHER Darrel, who for all we know, to Gravey’s way of thinking, could be absolutely anybody ever in history and time). Quite a bit of me believes, too, that the Child-Gravey is actually just Gravey at a much earlier age, a kid who once was normal and natural and grew up into the animal Adult-Gravey, in mediation of which Adult-Gravey bisects and distorts, in an apparently conscious fashion, the time of for his own psychological purposes. Though I am also open to the idea that there was a kid, someone outside Gravey, who came to Gravey’s house, and whom Gravey took to so completely that he truly believes they became one. As for whether this would have been one of the kids who lived in the house with Gravey over the many years he occupied the house, or another kid he killed or did away with on his own, what is real seems almost impossible to decipher by now.
It was hard in the first hours under Darrel to figure out how to make the voice come out of my lungs the way the blood in those lungs meant to barf the syllables rejected from the vocabularies of common man. Gravey had not spoken so well in so long and I newly here inside him burned like burning books searching for the locks to keyless ways. I had to breathe way hard deep inside me like I was to be going under water; then I would close my eyes and listen hard, and through the phone over the rolling of the water I could hear the things we meant to verbalize in bone. What came out of my mouth was different from what the flesh in me was screaming. I could feel the mirrors in me spurting ash all over all my other organs, black on black. I watched me tell the boys to gather around me and put their fingers on my head and let more words come out of me and into them so they could speak when I was not speaking which would be mostly. They listened to what I was saying without me listening to what I was saying. I don’t know why they did that except there was something wrong with all their eyes, screwed up as if with the meat of past lives raining through them continuously. They looked at me as if I too was the mirror, and their mother, and their lover, which I was. I was our fingers and our rings. With my new mouth inside the common shaking I changed all the boys’ names to Darrel. I spoke from all my holes: “There has been a long world in this world before us, a long world in this world the world has hid on the same air where we awake. The problem is is we believe this world cannot be touched. We see each word all as a different word, imagining we’re actually here somewhere inside us in our speaking, faking muscle out of blood. The seed has leaked into our homes and flakes and cables. It has wrapped around our minds, and stirred in the gloss an internal fantasia, inside which we will go on eternally in fear: knitted to the Sod of Nothing. The night collapsing underneath itself. Leaving a hole where we were bigger than our time. What happens between the hour of the light returning to us and the rest of where we are today inside this Eating is every body in America must die, must be killed at once and all together at our own hands. This will be where we begin to become.” My holes closed up then. The house was older. The boys were older. I was fine. The mirrors in the room encased us, held the day out. I threw up water, and we drank.
SAL, age 20: “He was very easy to believe in. Even if you didn’t want to hear it and were coming to get fucked up he would go on and on for so long in all these ways and he would give you shit if you said otherwise and after a while it was like, Yeah that sounds good, and no one else was saying anything else to us except in obviously fucking stupid ways before outside the house so like we just started saying the things too. I was going along at first kind of making fun I think in my vast private retardation seeing how everyone I had known before had failed me like they do and yet as I kept saying and hearing and saying and hearing the words showed up in my sleep and in my lungs and stuff without me even having to do it. It felt really good. Even if you didn’t think about it at all Gravey would do the speaking for you anyway in response. He would like make all these different voices come out of him and he would look at you and he had your voice and he could say things for you, and that was powerful. So you would let him. And then it just became this thing. It’s hard to explain. It doesn’t matter. The faster as well that it happened it happened faster and better and more and more, and just like that it was days passed and we all looked the same. We will forever. Even if he killed my parents and he made me wish I was somewhere else I still believe that.”
FLOOD: This section contains Gravey’s first reference to Sod, which as far as I can make out is what he believed would be created in the wake of his murders, a kind of palace of bodies through which the total spirit and history of his idea of God could be arrived at. When I have asked him directly what the city of Sod is, he just sits and looks straight on at me as if I’m part of the wall.
At night I played my drums. They would make anger. I would tell the boys to go to sleep and they would do that and then I’d go and sit behind the snare and raise the sticks. I might hover a whole hour or seven of them waiting for the scourge to roll up through my gut along my arms and make me shudder with the tremor of the phones and bodies turning yellow and the melting pyramids of every market in the ash of what overturning deathblow awaited all. I beat the shit out of the skins. In the drumming there was further music, which was also Darrel, and was war like all days. I had a job to do. I had this house now, and this body inside the house through which I could force others into service of it in the same way I’d changed me. I could not remember now what my body had looked like before Gravey, but when I looked down I saw nothing anyway. I mean I was not there: no teeth, no chest, no cock. I touched myself for days and never came. I let the drums into me as my purer fornication. I was a flesh virgin when I came into the house and I would be still mentally when eventually again by our negation we all died, and in the meantime, in the smallest room this mirrored black house could bear to bear, I lived inside the language. I was snowing like a crematorium on fire in the stem of August all throughout me. My mouth unlearned to dictate my ideas, which gave them precedence. When I was not playing the drums, the tapes would play what had already been played back louder and different from how I just had. I had an intercom installed, wired speakers in the bed frames and the kitchen and in the inches of the lamps, so that anyone could always hear. The hours lengthened. Each night for food we ordered steaks. There would not be no meat inside the house for any minute and there would not be food not of the flesh. Some of the boys had been confabulated into other ideas, and for this they had to learn. It did not take them long; in starvation, they might even bite into their arm and drink and laugh a little. We learned to see sound. I had FLAGELLUM change their name to Darrel, too; they set their set up in the den, in the room behind the room that held my drum sets, facing away. They believed in me at first as I was Gravey, then they began to believe in something else, the flesh of me in me surrounded in the body of Our Man. The players had to practice very hard to play a single lick about the music of what Darrel wanted from them. The new songs I had written for their music could be performed only in unnatural light. We began with neon panels, then to blacklights, then to candles; then we were there inside the blackness. The words the singer of the band sang were all one word. The word was Darrel. The songs were one note. The note was Darrel. They did not argue even once.