Name withheld: “The boys were killing each other anyway. They wanted to be killed and become part of the body. They did not want to die as dying is, and instead to be incorporated. Really Gravey didn’t touch anyone, they were doing it to themselves, and some were trying to talk the other into doing them up and arguing who should do who and what the flesh was and the smell. It was a disease waiting to be called on. Whoever ended up dead got put in the mirror room for incubation. It seemed like Gravey genuinely couldn’t even tell who was dead or alive, as he talked to them all the same way, as they were all dead already in the name.”
With all the blood and night surrounding, the mirrors slickened and inverted and turned white and collandered the air beneath the curl of sun. It wasn’t sun; it was the first cells of the first series of the bodies of the mothers pearling. It wasn’t like rotting, though it seemed that, orally; it was their unpacked flesh at last crystallizing its first layer where once our mission was complete we would wake dynasties repeating in the hyperventilating light beyond this race. The floor above us in the first level of becoming still would not allow us to step foot or even wink its presence but we were accumulating power quickly. The gifting blood of the women and not-women flooded through the house and juiced the day against itself in fast formation and laughed and laughed and air was hours in an instant like me becoming mine. I felt me get fucked by every cock of life inside the coffins I carried in my brain until they could erupt inside me cold at once and fill me with the unending spirit of our hope, hidden in all of us forever bred. I felt the boys becoming steadfast in their ability to split apart, their cells cartooning instant to instant as they flashed and spread the vision. All the names of the new and certain dead were falling out of the air like little 4-D scabs the TV weathermen mistook as hail. Each house ever had a number you could use to speak into it, and so often I would use the phone inside my brain to call these people I’d soon visit and just sit there breathing my dinner into their head. The resulting music of these communications gave new inspiration for that band of ours to turn inside out and fill their lungs with reproductions of all the highest-grossing hits, regurgitating would-be future classic albums as absolutely nothing into the lymph of the first ancestors of Darrel, in the dead world. In all our mirrors I could see infinite rooms of the house exaggerating all around us in the insane light, splitting each like me into sevens and sevens of versions we could fill soon. The splitting of the rooms fed my hunger with more hunger. It filled me with the seasons I would eject into the nation, opening every man to my disease, while by my heart the bells of our incoming curd of god blurred overhead, a descending limit on the cities’ ambient ability to withstand anything we uttered.
A. F. F.: “Leaking out of the house into the other houses was reckless and essential. There were boys who wanted Gravey calmed, and some who said they had a plan to slit his throat soon in the house if he did not slow down. Those boys were killed by other boys. The loyalty to Gravey’s vessel in the mode of Darrel by now was real, and would become only more real the further the curve rose. It is still rising, there is no longer time. It would not be stopped will not be stopped. Kill me or him or anybody on the cross of your machines and I would smile through blood and what has been done has been done. The splitting of the houses will continue even right now where you are standing, underneath you, and how you cannot feel it means it is at work.”
As the light of Darrel slathered up and under all around us in the flesh of mankind, I began to see through other minds. I could shoot from one spine to another, becoming more people the sharper the silence got with death. I mean that when I closed my lids there wasn’t black there or teeth or wolves but simple perspectives. I would close my eyes inside the house a mini-instant in my body and where the skin was I’d have vision through another set of meatholes, they among the houses of the living all surrounding now. I’d see a lawn, a store, some hands slicing a melon, driving a golf cart, washing. I might occur into a small man standing at a register where food was being served, his small tattooed arms and long veinwork in a far light making food and taking cash; within him I could remember all the things I’d touched with those weird hands before, could see how despite my best intentions and whatever faith I’d had there were these darker rings inside my body, which whether or not I felt a part, I was. The set of all present current thought clicked around me in a silence permeated with slow blood, among the hours spent surrounded by others who might be the next one the self inside me would click inside of and see from there, no longer recalling; years lived in each human separately and so, infinitely, if all packed into a space too small to allow even grace. These weren’t memories but more made in the way I’d been inside a schoolboy’s body before and was now a middle-aged user. I didn’t have to move into the body to control it or change the words inside the skull and how they’d come out. I’d simply inhabit the limbs and speech as I could see them there within me and take the workload over. It was only a way of life, the way any day there is the list of commands you must process and exist in, no matter how benign. The length of time I spent inside these would shift; I might go on elsewhere for many years or hours, held uncounted beyond the wall of being them. In each it felt like very little. In each there was a world. My methods were always tending toward rupture of what was given. Inside a housewife I would hold the hairdryer so long against the scalp that the hair burned through and skin came open. Instead of squealing, I would laugh. Inside a man tending his yard I’d ride the lawnmower over concrete scraping sparks and ram a fence or side of neighbor’s house, or mine. Once I had touched myself as me into this human passage through the shift of body, I no longer needed to stay inside the body to continue guiding my vision for the ending of all narration; and though once I left this body it would not remember my having come inside and known and given vision and kissed the cold word of our Sod against the lips, the person would go on in this way; he or she would cohabit the organism of our total future. The longer I did the act and however more often, the greater lengths I could involve myself as they were fully. I had the person all throughout them in me like a geode. And yet when my eyes were open I was inside my own space and felt nothing. Then I could do two of them at once, like screens side-by-side and parallel in time, then seven. Each mother we killed and body I consumed fed me more ability. It was like I had the energy of the dead cruising my brainlocks. Eventually it got so I could operate so many at the same time they moved in flights: I’d have a horde of geriatrics go bananas inside a Walmart, or a gang of seething boys overtake their PE class with biting maneuvers, or a series of fires in a hospital. Brownouts. I turned a prison upside down and no one noticed. In this manner we took form, spreading out into the feeding flesh for what the light of us required. This comes not a proclamation of judgment or of absent faith, but the natural proclivity of the necessary destruction that feeds in the body of the human to make more humans who then must fold; it is not good or evil, light or opaque, gross or gorgeous; it is a paste I ride. In the blinking I went on to more bodies behind their thin doors and started to use their bodies to infect into even more other bodies too. I spread the edges of me into whoever I could imagine. It didn’t matter why. Each time it seemed outside me like only more of what the world had always wanted. The news corporations assisted my integration beautifully. I didn’t even have to have them read the script, nor did I need to keep my mind on anything to have everyone inside me focused, a bank of captured feeds so high and wide it felt like celebrating all our birthdays at the same time always. I moved into the skulls in floods wearing the vision of the seven symbols and there I placed them across the land: inside the bodies of the teacher, the carpenter, the homemaker, the mime, the masseuse, the actor, the artist, the surgeon, the child, the mother, the father, the killer, the reader of this book. My power was conflagrating and masturbating at the same time; I could feel it most focused in my ring finger. I would kiss the knuckle and touch anything and let the buzzing fill all possible other sound inside anyone around me. I mean our senses. The mechanisms of control infected everywhere they fantasized of or saw on the films or through my boys’ extending visions patrolling the streets for who was next. The boys were all my senses, and therefore those of all my brain absorbed, altogether weaving and arranging quietly in private among the congregating holes and fibers of us a rapidly evolving apparatus that soon would be filled with all I had felt inside the name of Darrel consecrated in full across a space as wide as the only continent I’d ever touched, therefore the only land that really exists, which soon would find itself made truly and forever the wanting void it’d always been, our names credits for a commercial our emotions couldn’t begin to witness.