JOSEPH A., age 21: “I played bass in Flagellum before he made us change it. I was pissed at first because that was my name that I’d made up and I thought it sounded cool and weird, like sperm and like getting beat up and shit. Then this old hippie who likes just awful hippie shit comes in and starts telling us what to do, that the only way we’ll get famous is if he helps us, if we do exactly as he says. We were all like uhhh what could you possibly do about anything besides being a burnout but we didn’t have any other place to practice and it was mostly his gear anyway so we just played along to make him happy. At least that’s how it started. We never planned to actually do the change, or do any of his songs. But then something in them started making sense. We started playing his shit more and more not just to please him but because it just kept going. Our hands were playing. Our mouths were open. Pretty soon we forgot all those other songs we’d worked so hard on.”
FLOOD: Tapes marked with the name “Darrel” found in the house contain no sound.
At times there were bits of me before me-as-me that still occurred. While the boys ate or played or slept or burned a fire I might go into the first, locked mirrored room and lie down and hold still in the shape of nowhere. My prior self, the child in me, occurred again at slow moments: the grind of our shared cells against the house began to learn how there were layers to the world, layers to those layers. All of us were in all of these walls the present day touched, I knew; in every mother. Any way you drove or flew or typed a word or made a claim, our history was in all of those. Don’t think you weren’t there with me in the small locked room while noise through walls jostled my false flesh and made me warm and I ejaculated virgin semen into the mattress and made it swim alive. Each time I came I felt the future of the world becoming changed around me. The children I would never have of them, my creamy daughters, sons, spilled dead for the passing of the day tricked in the friction of my palms. Through this, too, Darrel entered. Darrel fluttered in my cavities. Soon I did not even have to hear the phone inside me ringing to feel him right there in my wires, on my buttons, calling home. Then just as quickly as I entered inside the house I began seeing on the mirrors all these movies I had not seen played on the flesh inside my head. What the movies were were operations. They had only partially survived themselves. Some I could still remember from before in darkened rooms bent by a slow strobe, but here in remembrance slightly off. Like in that one I’d watched once with my mother on the floor of our first apartment, where the machine kills men in outer space by turning against them; instead of that world ending with a tunnel of long color and a white room and a baby large as many earths, in this version it just drove itself straight into the sun and filled the night with so much screaming that the sky around the sun filled with milk. Another movie I remembered, where all these frogs rained out of the sky and brought the characters together, ended instead with the frogs continuing to rain and piling up and up on all the buildings and the people until there was nothing left to film or breathe except the frogs. Instead of in my mind me remembering how once I had remembered my mother making me a grilled cheese and some ham squares and putting me to bed, now here I was in this man’s body and I could not even think of anything before the day I’d heard Darrel murmuring my heart. I knew the alterations in the movies meant that I would die before I became the age that people die at in this era, that I was an altar, not a person, but that was also soon to change, and also did not really matter, because when I died there would be finally a novel night, as in this nothing we are nothing, and in the nothing in the nothing we have all the days to come. I knew I must obliterate the films, record over them in every memory, to make space for the virtual flesh, to dream the blood of our god in total being. Every image must be fused, each death brought open wide into the same sod of His body, all private histories carried into language outside continuum. This was beyond any future, every future. Before Darrel had appeared in me I was no one and it does not matter and all is coming and you already know my mom is dead or will be and you know my father is nobody either and is dead or will be. Darrel at least through me is capable of showing love to the boys inside the house where light is made the widest. Darrel shows me how to stroke their heads though they are taller and older than me and can do more drugs and love me more than I love them since Darrel was so smart as to put me in the body of a person who gave everybody drugs. Everybody loves drugs even if they do not love drugs like my mother claimed to never, instead they love the lord because the lord is drugs really, and even if when I die I see the lord and he is a man standing above me in a white shroud pouring blood from palm to palm, and if I say to him before Him that I believe he is a man who came to walk among us and a man who always was, what I mean is that I think he is drugs. I want all of this inside my life. It takes the place of Passed Days, which were doing me no good to begin with as had I not come to Darrel I would have either failed or finished school; I would have left the school out of one hole or another and gone to work for Dad with his machines; I would have learned by him to love air too like you did and to be machines and fuck machines and live machines and eat and drink and want through every day and still have nothing real and die. I would have ended up before god having nothing.
FLOOD: This quasi-sentimental bit about his mother and his father (apparently once again presented in the lurking residue of Gravey’s identification as a child) seems to imply, if not a human side about Gravey, at least one capable of some semblance of reminiscence and pining, the likes of which I’ve seen no evidence of in person. Efforts to locate Gravey’s parents at their homeplace have proved fruitless, and we have found no evidence of communication with Gravey among their suddenly seemingly abandoned belongings, nor any photographs of Gravey as an adult or a child. Likewise any other family or social relation beyond those who claim to have lived with him inside the Black House, though again no evidence of outsider involvement has been confirmed. I take all signs of desperation or emotion in his speaking as further elements of ploy, reinforced by the creeping feeling I get even just being in the same building as him that he is only ever looking for any number of entryways into my or anybody’s mind.