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

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.
     
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    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