Three Hundred Million: A Novel

by Blake Butler

  * * *

  CHARLES: “The ssssssssssscreaming that night lasted forty-seven billion yearssssss. It came out of every inch of every perssssssson in the housssssssssse but the housssssssssssssssssse itself was still. Even right now it is in the wallsssssssssssssssss and all over your face.”

  FLOOD: Attempts to discern which among the many bodies believed undone by Gravey was the first have been pretty much absolutely impossible, given the nature of their undoing. Regardless, his intimation here of the practice of consuming flesh of the victim immediately after their undoing is indicative of his procedure across the board. In these early acts, his tendency would be toward consuming sections of the face of the victim (cheeks, jowls, cartilage, tongue), as if to place his mark on them in the most visible and personally associative sense; later, this habit will increase, and eventually disregard any seeming order to what is consumed, as his desire to “absorb the person wholly, all persons wholly, unto one body” becomes more central.

  I stood up from the mirror bed and flexed my mind inside the musics. Blood helicopters chopped across my slim cerebrum like fresh diamonds, rings in screaming on small hands coming awake inside my linings, each after its own way to reach beyond me. New light like ham bumped from my ducts and spilled against the floor gross for the worlds of corpses that purred in orbs beneath the floor. They’d wolfed up years of fake food in one hour in my gray space. Worms covered the house’s slim north wall to defend again against whatever light infected from a false national conscience. Birds had laid ancestors in our pipes. I smoked some of the girl’s hair out of a paper bong and ate the ashes. I loved the way she tasted like a soon-to-be-famous set of stab wounds: two to the head, five to the neck, and sixteen to the back. My bedroom’s hall was painted gold. There had not been a hall there that I remembered any day before the day before. Gold was how I would forget anything about this set of hours; tomorrow I would need another. Through the hall I found my way back into the house another way entirely and so the house began again. The boys were there and they were still boys and they were growing. Some had acquired such enormous stomachs. In their lard something was promised. I sent three of the biggest to go blow kisses in the attic to consecrate some space where we could keep the coming breed of mothers. Having had one I needed every, and even more than that.

  The beginning had begun and it was going and it was going fast and wanted more than what it had and more than what it wanted to want. I felt a continuous strumming connected in the fiber of my men. Our need made need need need. I shaved the hair off of my body so I could glide and do my best. I felt the rising hammer in my pudge where what I’d eaten all those years there sat upon me waiting to be fed what it had asked for every inch and hour in the theaters and the poll booths and the gas stations and the groceries and the houses of the other people who had let me down and those who had not meant to let us down, the same. It all welled up so fast between my heart and hands, in Darrel, in me, I could not hold it, so it flowed into the boys, and even then I had to teach myself to masturbate again by imagining the high mounds of our cities and the founts or mountains being lifted up and let to fall in fissure and land smashed into the earth. Through the window as far along the land I looked I saw more and more dirt, the bead of all the days surrounding going on in all ways and yet at the same time so hopelessly foreshortened and unexpanding it seemed to end right down the street. The dimensions had no dimensions and no dreamlife. The house was getting fuller faster yet, filling up with all our holes. Each hole could be the only one that led to what it led to. As they burst open, the earth spun. The distance between our house and the homes beside us seemed continuously to grow. I could see the lesions of the huddle of our neighbors spread like Pangaea in reverse to a new perimeter thereon, the bitchbrick of their sad fortresses unspasmatic as if right beside me. I could not keep still my aching meat teeth wanting more, a sweltering writhing so centered around nothing real despite the wars and wishing and the money and the motherfuckers and the cancer and what had I done all these hours until just right this second. Everything at once seemed so tired I could hardly hold my hands inside my hands, still colored in the blood of our first mother. I was grinding with impossible fury. The house asked questions. I went and set my drums on fire. I heard me call the boys in to surround me in the room to watch work burn and learn its tenor. It licked the walls and drums and left only the metal rims. The plastic stunk and got them high as fuck and then they like me were warm. We stomped the carpet clean. I gathered the ashes with a shovel and a blade. So all this black now. So our womb. I yelled over my yelling for the boys to go into the mirror room and bring the mother to me. Her body drug along the grooves between one mirror and another. I spread the ashes on the remainder of where I’d loved her, her posture firm, already of no smell. I tapped two boys to wrap her in a U.S.A. flag. The blue part went around her head so she could see the stars. Someone made a joke about a burrito and I punched him in the heart until he was no longer asthmatic. These were the stars we’d lived under as long as we’d been allowed to, wet with performance. The stars were screaming. The blue could no longer exist. I told the boys to lay with me now to listen near against the girl and learn the prattle of her linings through the American colors. I told them this would be the song they had to play to make the skyhole inside us all together want to be fucked and in reverse unleash upon our earth our worship, the heart of whom is not a kind of music at all but an itch that swallows one’s whole shape. Now I was the one screaming, with all the stars live in my shafts. I reached into my pockets and pulled out the teeth I’d removed from the girl’s head shaped like my mother’s and showed them to everybody. These are Darrel’s teeth, I said. Darrel no longer requires food to make his flesh. We are his mouths; he is our house. I put the girl’s teeth shaped like my mother’s teeth into my own mouth and on her teeth I chewed until I heard my own teeth in my head breaking and I swallowed and I smiled. My blood ran down my chin, my own blood, Darrel’s. I heard the floors beneath us multiply, and underneath them old doors open. All of us were watched, I heard me shrieking, by each of us again, and so inside us. I leaned to let my streaming blood pour onto the flag around the girl. Some time went on in this time. I squeezed blood from me. I was pouring black of night from every inch of me that’d ever healed. I felt one of the other Darrels touch my elbow. Where I looked to see him he had split his body sevenfold, alike in each way. He said my old name in a slow voice. I threw his hand off my arm. I reached up with my own arm there between us and wiped my blood (our blood) flat on his flesh. There before the many other boys I made him touch his face and taste the silk of how we’d lived. The boy was crying, so we were crying. Others stood silent, so we were that. Do you love me, I asked anybody. They didn’t have to answer. I knew they did. The house did. And the shells. The light today inside us loved me. The me inside the flag did. Inside the flag I heard the sperm of anybody sent inside our new god swimming for some flesh to set up shape in and teach its frame to truly eat.

  * * *

  A. F. F.: “Even when he was talking about it and we brought the girl back and all that I don’t think many of us really believed he was going to do anything really serious like that. I mean yeah I know kidnapping is fucked up and I knew he’d been doing things to her, but like killing someone is really beyond what I thought. Which sounds stupid because he’d been talking about it all this time and I’d already been involved with the clearly messed up shit going on but man there was something about the way he’d tell it that made it seem okay, or at least important, or even not real or something. But seeing what he’d done to that girl’s body and the way about his face when he showed us and how he just seemed to not even care that he himself was bleeding or what he’d done and how some of the other guys in the house were all about it and like fiendish for the ideas he was spouting out in all these other languages and shit, I don’t know. It was becoming hard to tell who was who in there anymore, but from this point forward shit really started changing, and the
people around the house were different. And yeah, I didn’t leave. I let me do whatever also and went along and I listened until sometimes I couldn’t even tell where I was anymore and sometimes it was just the brightest bright.”

  From outside the house the house was changing color in correlation to the earth. What it reflected in the grade of black paint became inverted. The roof had freckles that seemed mile-deep. Through the rasp of cavity the house hid from the backyard I could hear the boys inside us again at my order making my music again ring out between the rings of skyward foam and long along between the houses shaking glass. At certain windows even so far off along the stretch of city I felt families gathered pressed to bedroom walls inside their sleep wishing to walk into the next day’s sunlight and be burned. America, I felt, was changing under Darrel. Many times inside that first night there would be a city of gold when I closed my eyes, but there would not be any life inside it. There would be a tree that bore the fruit we would need to eat to be there. Each instant it changed kind. There would be places where water came up to the lip of the ground when I wasn’t looking and then it would go down again and we could not reach the water. It would come up again and come down again. There was a series of seven eternal shapes, burned in my vision on the face of all things: CIRCLE SQUARE HEXAGON STAR TRIANGLE DIAMOND RING. Each of these had appeared to me throughout my life emblazoned onto objects. They had formed the contours of the maps we used to find our way between the seas of people believing we were ending up somewhere we had not been. They defied all history. They rang and burned inside my brain, inert weapons allowing no ability beyond the fact of their creation. They had no eyes and no dimension. All else around them must be burnt, reduced to sand and dust, no water. Inside the house I knew a desert must begin. There must be a focus around which all the land could sink and pull the air down, and so after it, all other houses, cities, space. But to begin a desert you must have silence. You must remove the water from the mud. This means light. In each room of the house there must be so much light that there is no house at all. So much light that from the air outside the house surrounding the presence of America would be gored, stripped, and reversed of all its wet. With my mind inside my mind I sent all the boys not in the band to buy our new skin of electronic lamps and television. We began to fill the house with falsely burning objects. Light between mirrors. Light inside me. I felt the Wrath of Darrel strengthen with each added filament: his godmilk spurting through my vessels swimming and piling weight on and glorifying. His voice refracted in the pillow of the summoned light and held me hard. I looked down at my arms: the short arms I had seen once when I looked down trying to see me and seeing only part, the arms I’d come into the house with. I could not remember ever after going out, or how it might have smelled there, without the boys to need me, without the coming bodies of the mothers. My old arms on me again were black as charcoal, burnt and buried underground. In fear I touched me and I watched my old me chafe off on my hands.

  * * *

  FLOOD: At the time of his arrest, there were some 240+ working light fixtures on the property, lamps and fixtures of all size and kind, many of them plugged into the walls as well as several extra generators. How the house didn’t burn up like a wig I have no idea. Absolutely blinding.

  Under the same hour as we’d done apart the first flesh I sent the boys back out into the air to bring more mothers to the house. Some others of the boys were sent instead or as well to bring more bulbs for those that had blown out where everybody at the same time was trying to see. In the mirror in the rooms of light the air was making movies inside itself like Magic Eye. Bulbs would shatter in the lamps and the TVs. The faces of the people exploded from out of nowhere covered in glistening gunk and begging me to have sex with them; I was not attracted to them because they weren’t aging. I was aging for them instead of the sex. I would reach biblical age in my dreamlife before there was no longer anyone remaining. With my black camera I caught as much shit as I could of every errant waking fantasy the boys enacted onto anything that made a sound, and burned it into pixels to be learned, onto tapes spanning the history of the nation’s audiovisual entertainment. Each film drowned the next one out; I erased each entertainment one by one. With each deletion, time and space grew closer. In the mirror, while I waited for whatever else, I watched me watch me watch. I wanted to make love to me but I couldn’t find the hole, so instead I pressed my head so hard against the glass I could not see me but the black inside me in which were written all these sentences, congregating in black battalions to replace my thinking with static blocks. I tried to write the words down on my hands with pencil or with reeds inside my mind to get them out but my arms would not stay still enough to get unshaken signal and my meat kept growing back over. Inside the house hungry for more mothers I found it hard to walk or think or want or know or ask or see beyond whatever walked just right there inches at my vision. Outside, the sun outside the house scraped against the house all hours for what it knew we grew and incubated. This was wearisome, like aging twice. It made the scraping appear again also mirrored in me welling over with such blood the films blurred. I did not want to masturbate again and yet my balls screamed between my legs and my shaft stood up doing stand up, the oldest jokes I’d ever heard. The mouth of the head would sometimes speak in Darrel’s voice and beg and beg me. The corridors of Darrel were turning and unfurling. On every finger, Darrel’s rings, ripped from planets falling into orbit of our bone.

  * * *

  Name withheld: “We made films of everyone we killed. We copied over the movies in every home’s collection with the evidence of their ending. Their VHS death providing the death of cinema itself. As soon as you copied over, like, Gone with the Wind, it was also copied over in all the copies of it ever sold. It was fucking awesome. The cameras clung to our hands and tried to love us as creators. The majority of the films did not need to be filmed by us directly, as they had already always existed in the brains and layers of the mnemonic American mush. The tapes would fill the bloodstream of our future, and in it we would bathe and wake and so dissolve.”

  FLOOD: The films, like the audiotapes, taken from the house of Gravey have as yet all appeared all blank, though the number of these films is significant, and the tapes appear to have been regularly played (the media inside them slightly battered, sometimes broken). Investigations into what content might be hidden among the archive is in process.

  “There is a public demand to kill. This was all simple negotiation. Millions of women will take only a few weeks more; the rest must automatically collapse. They will become absorbed. The few remaining bodies should be of use to a consecrating fuckfest for whoever’s got a dong still in this country, male or female. With complete automation of our disease and old age we will mark the beginning of an emotional morality. There will be celebration on the face of every final breath. There will be no wake. We’re not god because what god is does not end. The silence must expand between notes until there is no awareness. I call on you to stop. Death is all over. I’m glad it is. Peace in their lives a million times. If you knew what was ahead of you, you’d rest. Because what are people but the peddlers of we and all we’re doing is I don’t care.”

  * * *

  CHARLES, age 15: “As his voice started to get raw he began whipping his hands around in front of him like I guess it was supposed to be sign language. After that he traced the words in some dark liquid along his arms and chest and face. I knew I understood, and had been waiting in my life to find these words presented, opened, burned onto my mind.”