JB:
Darrel?
GG:
[not smiling] Yes, son?
JB:
I am
GG:
You are
[I feel better. The room is cleaner. I sit straight up. I breathe.]
JB:
I want to understand.
[Gravey closes his eyes; I watch them roll back underneath the flesh as the lid comes down. Suddenly I smell something, like he’s shit his pants, but neither the expression on his face nor his position belies any strain. He begins to speak now through his lips without opening his mouth, a childish murmur.]
GG:
He is in a room. There are no doors in the room. There is a screen. A kind of light coming from somewhere on the side opposite the screen feeds at his chest. It is the Day. Inside the room he watches the day go on beyond him in the end of itself. He does not know what he sees, or that he’s seeing. Where he is is going to end but it will begin again. No murder and no mirrors, but a fleshless, edgeless, ageless frame.
JB:
And you? When will you die?
GG:
I am only here on pause. For a moment my home touched the room beyond the screen and gained its level but this soon will be ended, for the pyre. This body too will be destroyed, at the hands of all our hands, like mine, so we no longer have to have.
[His sweat is almost like a well. It fills his mouth. I taste the salt and cannot chew. I’m sweating also, more now than I ever.]
JB:
Gretch Gravey, are you guilty as an actor in the death of the four hundred and forty persons?
GG:
On Tues., 7-23-XX, Gretch Gravey knew homicides that he forgot real. Upon asking him to mention in which skulls he performed the original interview, he stated the above information. For this work I would like to be paid fifteen million dollars.
JB:
Were you alone, or were there others?
GG:
During the rising I was the second suspect in his body, an offense. Some of the skulls Gretch Gravey had picked up and requested to speak with were found in front of me again.
[Each time I inhale, he exhales.]
JB:
You keep referring to yourself now in third person.
GG:
At this time I was the thirty-third skull he sprayed. There had been ones before and there would not be others. I proceeded to the fifth floor of the house. At this time I also locked myself up in Sod City, where there appeared a black paint. The neighbors knew. Their faces shook in the night while they were sleeping and they grew.
JB:
There were others involved, or there weren’t?
GG:
All the victims in all eyes. All the knives the verbs had given in the books and speech of human color.
JB:
You aren’t making any sense.
GG:
Our last transmission. More phones all ringing in the blood of them with each new inch. When asked into the interview room where the numbers were placed onto where they could become the Mother Body, He stated he had boiled the skin and hair we conducted from the skulls in order to spray away an hour’s time. Each hour must be peeled into the Mother to forgive it. He at this time gave them an artificial torso that he wished to look like in case someone he had taken from a state talked to us about a victim while we were not there in our bodies. He had also two additional feelings that could not be boiled out of us, either one.
[There is so much liquid on the floor, I can feel it. I can’t look down.]
JB:
What were the feelings?
GG:
A sleeplike state, the state of ether; and the pyre, where to this…
[Gravey’s face begins to emit sounds of biting, from inside his throat, like something in there tearing. His eyes are wet, and making gleam. He refuses to make words, despite the nearly constant ream of guttural and convulsive sound seeming to come from all over his body. I watch. I hold my hands close. I feel hungry: I wish I didn’t have to say I did.]
[I cannot speak.]
GG:
GG:
[some kind of breathing coming from him in the deepest voice I’ve heard] The world revolves around the world. Other orchestrations [planetoid, celestial, debris, silent striation, columnar bodies, fable/myth, the unseen] are totalities manifested by the world’s revolution of itself. Its revelation. To change the earth, the earth must be deceived. One way is paper, one is blood.
[I cannot speak and do not wish to.]
GG:
[More time goes on. I am seeing colors. I close my eyes and can’t make them open up. I keep waiting for the guards to come and get me. I feel nothing. Later, standing up from where I’d been seated, I would imagine it had been at least weeks since I had left the room, as I would find my legs so stiff and weird beneath me it was as if they were not mine. I find myself again compelled against speaking.]
JB:
[Gravey’s sternum is shaking. It stinks.]
JB:
[The whites of Gravey’s eyes have become grayer, packed with bluish spindles. The pupils rolled down to look toward me, not at or into me, but straight through, as if focused hard on something on the far side of my head. I could feel a little burn like boiling wine where my memory packets swirled around a cold spot in my cerebrum. I turned around to look where he was looking on the wall. There on the wall, a black square printed at eye level into the white surface, hazy, floating on my vision, and just thereafter, sunk away into the cream.]
[I got up and walked out of the room.]
[I mean I get up. This is happening in present tense.]
[I walk along the long hall through the building seeing nobody else. I have to piss. I’m freezing cold. None of the doors in here will open. Nothing would open. The door to the outside is no longer where I remember it was. I don’t know where anybody is. Through the window into another holding chamber holding a shitload of dogs inside it. The dogs are gnawing at each other.]
[None of the other rooms is really a room. There are beds. There are thimbles and money stacked in piles like pyramids and globes.]
[I have to piss. There is all this liquid in me. My arms are heavy.]
[I find a water fountain and try to take my dick out to piss into the hole of the fountain because whatever, but I can’t get the opening open on my pants.]
[I piss my pants. My piss is white as paper and has writing all the fuck over it, every word I’d ever said. It has your name on it. It has the date, and all the dates before today’s date. It does not have any dates after today.]
[I walk back to the room where I’d left Gravey. I feel I need to see him. I have to hurry. There is this want. It is the greatest want I’ve ever felt, all of a sudden. I hurry for the room. The room where He had been before me. Along the walls now, though, the hall keeps going on. Where the door was supposed to be, the door to He, each time I think I’m there along the long wall, I find a little piece of paper in my hand. The paper is always blank.]