Three Hundred Million: A Novel Read Online Free PDF Page A

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.
     
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    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