Three Hundred Million: A Novel

by Blake Butler

  Gravey’s kitchen contains a more colorful decor, if little else of more substantial means of living. The refrigerator, like the front room’s bureau, is stuffed with ash so thick it obscures the contained light. Buried in the ash here are occasional remnants of what might once have been intended for consumption: a full unopened carton of whole milk, several sealed cans of tuna, cardboard encasements for packs of beer, fourteen one-pound containers of store-brand butter riddled with knife divots, a water container full of something white. Later, teeth will be discovered buried in the chub of certain of the butter tubs’ masses, way underneath; the teeth will be later identified as dogs’ teeth. The freezer remains empty beyond a cube of ice forming a globe.

  The surrounding floor is likewise thickened, albeit higher than the foyer’s, with used food wrappers, tissue, and containers, as well as many unfinished portions of the food. The pyramid of rotting glop and Styrofoam and cardboard stands nearly five feet high at the room’s far wall, trampled down into smoother avenues and valleys in the mix. The stench is intense, weaving many different modes of rot into a kind of choking blanket. Somehow the stench seems not to leak into the house’s mirrored sections.

  Underneath the junk, in excavation, the men will find a massive ream of loose eight-millimeter film. Each frame of the several miles of exposed framework, unlike the other tapes found in the house, will show nothing but a field of pure black, of no star, as if the film had never been exposed. The soundtrack of the film, when played, if played, will feature a sound resembling a young man speaking in reverse, though when played in reverse the language sounds the same, word for word.

  * * *

  R. BLOUNT: There was something else about the house besides simply (however unsimply) being the scene of I don’t know how many murders. It was hard to stand in any room for long and breathe freely. Felt like someone was trying to choke me in certain rooms from behind me, not a phantasmagoric presence, but something soft inside my mind, something spreading. I did not sleep for several days, and have never felt quite like I was sleeping even when I found a way to seem to sleep again.

  A padlocked door is centered on the kitchen’s northwest wall; it is the only secured location in the house. Behind the door, a humming sound, which becomes louder once it has been heard with head against the frame, and thereafter seems loud enough to hear all through the house and even miles around: a hum like that of bugs against bugs in a slow hive being constructed, the rhythm of which raises patterned gooseflesh on the skin. The door’s face, matched with the same black as the outside, has a hand-carved mark along its top seam: city of Sod.

  The shape of the S in the word Sod, the men realize while reviewing pictures later, is replicated all throughout the house, in seemingly unnatural ways: the crease of mirror against mirror edge forming the snaked line, the formation of a certain clod of puffy trash, the shape of Gravey’s body as they’d found it not unconscious and unmoving, traced in skin resin many places all across the reflective floor. At either end of the shape’s snake’s length there might appear from certain angles a slim eye that watched the seer of the eye until with further motion the eye seemed to disappear, and would not reappear when they went back to find the eye where they had stood before because it would be impossible to stand in such a way the same exactly ever again. And yet, inside their head, the eye is there.

  The padlock is adorned with unusual markings in the shape of tiny pins that stick up from the lock’s face spindly and obstructive, with residue of saliva or some kind of glue; its keyhole is the size more of a small finger than a key. The metal is white gold.

  The padlock is removed and placed in a sanitized container and taken to sit on a white shelf in a small room unexamined for the next sixty-seven hundred years until it is uncovered in the Fire of the Night of Seize by a young being who takes the lock into his head and walks with it into a blue house the size of him built by a tiny sea new on the land.

  * * *

  FLOOD: This last paragraph is not meant as an abstraction; I believe it to be true. I can’t say exactly what it is that brought me to want to say it and then to know it should be said, but it should be known that it was not done with any intent but to serve the nature of this investigation. Ask me in the face if I believe that and I will tell you the same: paper and flesh.

  The men stand briefly in silence before the lone secured door in the house, now unsecured. The humming has seemed to mute. The man nearest to the door’s handle, which is not the man who had cut the lock off, turns the knob with his left hand to open the door. The door opens backward, into the house, and thus is blocked by the pyramid of trash before it can open more than inches. Through the crack a stink of something piggish and uncurling wafts through the gloss of rot already familiar on the central length of the men’s heads. It is as quickly gone, wrapped as a weird gift upon them without question and then quickly common to their air. Nothing roars.

  When enough space has been cleared for the door’s path, the officer pulls the door back further, wide enough to see inside. For lengths the room is black, impenetrable to eye. It appears at first as if the room is just a closet. The pupils move to adjust in the men’s heads, some breath between them, communal meaty fidget of old limbs.

  Then, deeper back into the room, a light seems to emerge: low at first, then rising; a stream of panels of bluish neon indexing the air into squares, a corridor; no, a column; no, a cube.

  The men’s pupils shift inside the seeing, the shape of lenses and composed holes changing in the machine of their heads.

  Set in the dark, a set of stairs. The stairs reveal deeper and deeper on, seeming to extend down into the space farther than one would think a basement should be in a house of this dimension. The stairs are plasticine, kind of glossy. They do not groan, but squish a little under the weight of any man.

  Beneath the earth, under the house there, piled like prisms in low artificial light, the officers come upon the bodies of the women and the children and the men.

  Flesh.

  Flesh tongued in the grip of ceiling to expanse of wall to wall between them, caught as rooms do to form a space stood beneath the face of earth.

  Skin turned to cream. Skin slipped and rendered fat and pummeled between metal weapons and instruments of decreation found popped in the pillows of the things they had undone, buried and gagged up with firming secretions and the lip of cellular disarray, grown silk upon the air so warm it cannot be inhaled.

  Teeth, hair, jowls, blood: packets, mush.

  One can, in the fiber of the room, hear a tone of what has been.

  Bones jut from the substance crushed in the lardy stillwaves of our pink and black and brown and yellow and gray and gold and white.

  Seated among the encasement, as upon thrones in silence, lie certain still living, pulsing boys, starved and demolished, thinning, nothing: their eyes also refusing to come open, give no murmur.

  A scrim of salt.

  On the ceiling above the heads of the detectives, the ceiling reads: THIS BODY LED ME TO SHIT INSIDE MY LIFE BLANK AND SCREAMLESSLY UNENDING WHILE THE WAR OF THE YEAR OF TOTAL DEATH CREAMED BETWEEN OUR FACES AGAINST THE FURTHEREST WALL THE WALLS COULD MANAGE AND THERE YOU WERE AND THERE I AM ENDLESSLY GYRATING IN THE EYELESS FORCE FIELD OF OUR FUTURE LOVE AS WE ARRIVE. None of the detectives see or note the sentence, for the record.

  The living boys are lifted each away. They make no sound, cause no commotion.

  The other bodies, who could ever move them now.

  * * *

  FLOOD: The smell was—I hate to say it—sweet. It reminded me of waking up in a grassfield having slept all through the night without coverage against the night sky. I mean, I don’t want to sound morbid, it was revolting. The sweetness was revolting. But it was also—I breathed it in.

  The men lead the body of the man who will not respond to any name along the long precinct hall intoned pale white. The facility is quiet and dully lit in the mode of lampshade blocking out a stream of air that seems to
stand outside the building.

  Long textured lattices of ridge set in the precinct hall’s walls’ face in the same color of the wall allow a running joke among many of the guards that the building is “ribbed,” for the pleasure of something that passes through the unseen logic of the hour daily, or hourly, or is ever present, yet always gone. Regardless of the number of days that pass for any body inside the chamber most find the ridging something they can never learn to disregard, the eye always pulling up inside the skull to see it.

  The body, though, whom they refer to in the name of Gravey, as it fits the ridges set into his fingers on his hands, does not seem to see, acknowledge, or want to know any inch about the ridging, or the hallway, or the building of the walls themselves. He walks in silence, still with closed eyes and closed mouth; when not led by the shoulders forward through the building or wherever Gravey ceases to proceed, and yet he does not fight in being pulled along the corridors through check-ins, through registration. No form of coercion leads the man to act alone, including body shots and threats of further marks against his name.

  A strip search of the suspect’s body reveals a diamond hung by black cord around his waist. The diamond is false diamond; it obscures the eyehole of his belly button, around which the hair has been removed. The remainder of pubic hair around the genitals has been shaved into a pattern like the beams of an aggravated sun. The shaft and glans of the unit are bruised, blood busted beneath the skin in thicket clouds.

  A gun strap around the sternum holds no weapon; tucked into the holster is a tiny leather-surfaced notebook, water-damaged with his sweat. No language has been written into the unlined paper.

  The anal cavity is overrun with brittle hair, so thick that they almost do not find the tiny transistor that has been stuffed into the crevice, matted in and clung with fecal residue. The transistor does not transmit.

  Beneath the nail on the second longest toe of each foot a wedge of glitter has been lodged; on the face of the glitter occur words, none of which will be recognized, or read.

  Water sprayed onto the body in the small stall comes off in foamy blue.

  For some time in the hour he is made to lie on the cold floor naked without whimper, until the men are tired of looking at the raw colored markings on his chest and in his pits: like something there had scorched his flesh wide open and then resealed it, prim pockets of aggravated fat that stay so still.

  Somewhere an old smoke rises.

  * * *

  B. LAPUZIA: When Flood asked me to take a look at his ongoing log about the case, handing me this outlandish collection of scattered notes, some of which he claimed to have found in Gravey’s residence, and which were not reported as evidence, I was seriously uneasy. For a while we had been partners, and though eventually I was reassigned, we’ve always been friends. He’s been through a lot, and I try to be there for him when I can. I told him I’m not much of a note taker, and didn’t really have anything to add in this manner, but that I’d take a look when I had time. I must admit, I was disturbed by his notes. They did not, to me, reflect a natural manner of investigation, or, even more so, a manner of living. Flood seemed fixated on his work in a way that went beyond it being work, even a life’s work. The more I tried to figure out what was going on with what he’d done, the more I wasn’t sure how to respond. I felt I had no choice but to mention it to the boss, though I can’t say the Sgt.’s tone in our private speaking set me at ease. He had the same quaver in his voice that Flood did, the same something slightly off. I myself haven’t felt right recently. I don’t know what it is, though for some reason I’m afraid to look in the mirror. I move through rooms with mirrors now, whenever possible, in the dark.

  In his containment unit, Gravey’s body stands through the evening without fold. Aimed facing toward the entry door of his chamber, its form sealed in with one thick window’s eye into the public tunnel, he stands with arms flat at his side.

  He does not bend to eat from the tray of dinner that is brought in and laid before him; the food will be fed instead into a disposing machine. He does not sit or lay or stand throughout the first night into the morning with the shifting of the guards. He does not open his small eyes in the crane of light beamed at his gray brain through his skull where the room around him remains lit. He does not utter language at the body assigned to his body as an attorney. He often does not seem to visibly breathe: no chest rises in the orange cloth, no nostril flutter, though to the touch his skin is warm in patches.

  His temperature is three degrees too low.

  Days pass in the standing. At intervals he barfs onto his chest; the upchuck is transparent. The hair stands on his arms; it grows further down his head and face, building a mask.

  During his trance, the living bodies who were found there beneath his house each die, of what seems no particular occurrence, in their sleep. They are identified or not, buried or cremated, given to the ground to be absorbed into the earth again, where food grows and the foundation of all homes is laid. Other boys will soon come forward.

  Pictures taken of Gravey’s body in his cell seem off-colored, tinted redder in the cheeks and down the arms. A glass of water placed beside him on a white stool stutters selectively in ripples on its circular contained face, briefly quaking in indexed repetition as if nudged by something silent, until again the air around the air is calm.

  Urine is released and wets his institutional pants in shade; it collects around his feet in spreading puddle on the concrete. The urine has no smell, no color. It sizzles as it is wiped.

  The skin of Gravey’s lips is peeling, rapidly, in sheets. The remainder of his skin retains its pallor, becoming cleaner seeming, even, unclenched, somehow more young.

  At the end of eight days without food, water, or motion, his body collapses beneath itself, remitted horizontal, open mouthed. For the next four days he sleeps wadded, waking briefly only when jostled by whoever, calmly blinking, red-ringed; when he is left alone again however long thereafter, he returns into the shakeless corridor of sleep.

  * * *

  FLOOD: Video recordings of Gravey in his cell are often marred by what seem magnetic disruptions in the tape, including long blacked-out sections in which the sound in the room can still be heard. What appears here in my descriptions of Gravey’s cell-held activities is therefore subject to interpretation, as well as gaps in the field, though sometimes even in staring into the black of the screen it seems that I can see him.

  Inside this sleep, with limbs crossed and eyes wide, Gravey confesses to the crimes. His mouth lists out the names of those who’ve been inculcated. Among the list are women, men, and children, rendered therein first, middle, and last. His speaking is discovered already partway through the list, therefore the totality of the list is missed, left to hide in his saliva, leak through his cells. Each instance of each name is as well appended with the age and date of death and how the body was dispatched, each by the hand of Gravey, though in his own air he gives himself a series of new names, each rendered in the word Darrel: Darrel the Divorcist, Chalk Darrel, Darrel of No Leak, Darrel Who Has Become the Book Beheld And Only Awaits What Reader To Choose Prey As Well Inside the Mounds of What Cannot Yet Be, Darrel the Magnet Eater, Golden Ash Darrel, 65432Darrel1, Darrel then White.

  Audio recorded in the cell during the confession is obscured on the tape by some high hissing signal. Two hundred and sixty-seven names are witnessed firsthand, and therefore transcribed. Many of the names correspond with those who have been corroborated as victims; others match those who’ve been listed missing but who have not otherwise been identified among the flesh. Four to eighteen additional accomplices are included in the crime sketch of the series, including the bodies of the boys found inside the locked room, despite the apparent residue of their own personal abuse, bringing into question the complicity of their behaviors. Still other names match no one rendered suspect, and so investigations must begin. There are no longer enough breathing bodies to assign. There are many months ahea
d of every day and only so much time. In his image, jobs are created; bodies become fed.

  Gravey will never speak the names again, regardless of how many times they are referred to in his presence by the proceedings or the loved ones or what old coils might simmer in his mind. After the confession, still inside his sleeping, a massive boil shaped like a bird’s egg appears on his left hand between his point finger and his thumb. When medics drain the boil, from the pustule’s face floods a creamy darkish oil. The runoff will be stored in a glass vial in a black locker several miles from Gravey’s fleshy self, no one seeing what the wet does in the darkness when no longer watched.

  * * *

  FLOOD: The boys, the fateful boys and girls. What they had not known. Bless them, take them from this scrawl and keep them clear and sound as whatever holds the air up. Do this for us all now.

  Days turn white. The days turn white. They turn white with cream between them. They pale in memory still continuing to beget more. Between cracks in what had just been the present and is now no longer the present there is a small constantly slaving sound of someone breathing in.