Three Hundred Million: A Novel

by Blake Butler

  The next day 188,750 persons in America become killed.

  Fewer official numbers are placed on record. Less is known regarding whereabouts or names. The coverage is sparse upon the wires and yet heavy on the air; the local coverage goads more going. People take up weapons, wires, fires, teeth and muscle, ideas, arms. The sounds of slitting fill the night with something like the cutting of the largest paper doll. There is the whir of film being recorded to by light and no light.

  The president speaks. His voice is electronic, broadcast from far beneath the ground. He discusses tax cuts and public funding and pleasure dreams and cake.

  There are people in the folds of dry land who keep their hands over their eyes. Walls are extended over windows. Doors are rendered no longer doors. Those left to walk among the lapse of day and night go back and forth between work and sleep while disregarding how the air seems more creamy, shrinking, ready.

  This is an American disease. Beyond the normal borders, death proceeds apace; it is spoken of, recorded, but not necessarily the end—how could it ever be the end—despite the waters of the gulfs and twin coasts crumbing with the glimmer of dumped blood, a bright and shaking laughter singing off the buildings in the parlor of our peeling night.

  We can’t even find your body in the piles.

  You will not be buried.

  * * *

  SMITH: [stricken from record]

  The next day, in America, 212,100 become killed.

  The next day, in America: 290,030.

  These numbers being numbers because someone says so. Someone like anyone, like you or me or us. Each new day made out in the shape of a blue sun, in America.

  There are silent parades in the streets, each one made to look like car jams, lined with windows reflecting sky under the sky.

  “No one wants to exist,” Gravey says, speaking into his clavicle through a single long black hair that’s grown exactly long enough to reach his bottom lip.

  The rupture of the bodies by the bodies that ends the bodies fills the seconds seam to seam without a sound. Old houses go on being houses, organized with food and floors. What will come will continue coming, it is spoken, and so it does.

  The next day in America.

  The next.

  There are many other shafts off of the main shaft of the darkness. In fact, Flood finds, there is almost one for every word printed on the walls of the passage. There must be millions. Each exposed passage leads to someone else’s home, through a mirror marked with one of the seven symbols. All the homes through here connect.

  in god our blood the word of blood in god the name

  In every home, Flood finds the people sleeping, the contents impossible to touch beyond the flesh, and every door that might have led out of the circuit, free from the chambers, out of his reach. In many houses he lingers for some time, wandering from room to room after something accessible, some way to push beyond the purpose of a spectator, but only ever are the ways that he can change anything about the house but by the people.

  what now exactly now none nothing

  He feels an anger in his blood, a seething frustration at his inability to escape this pattern. In some of the houses, he plays dummy with the bodies. He covers their faces over with a blanket, or drapes them over the kitchen table, or takes their clothes off and tries to make them fuck. The men’s sex organs won’t become hard. There is little contentment in the dolling. It is as if they are dead, but they have a pulse, their skin is warm.

  For every home he enters, there are countless others he cannot. In every gap is buried so much he passes over. After a while, all the houses begin to seem the same, regardless of how different in their decoration, their low old smell, the shape of the people and their organs. The women always seem familiar and the men always seem like someone he could have been. Upon waking, they would return to their commitments and occupations, perhaps always not knowing someone had come in above them and felt their faces. Someone could have done much worse. Beyond each window, the same darkness.

  if god if

  Each time upon returning to the central passage he finds the wet has risen higher in his absence, as the passage continues going down. The flood is colorless in the low light, and smells so rich it’s hard to breathe: like loose earth and a banged head at the same time, fresh sex and summer in a jungle. It feels sometimes as if the air is breathing him. He can feel the open wounds along his arms and legs bleeding back into the congregation.

  Flood begins to enter fewer and fewer homes, taking less time to move among them, or even really see the words in the white of the walls beyond the curve. The walls begin to feel like just walls again, flat and long and ever-going. But going where. It is comforting to just continue forward. There is a direction to the passage, at least, unlike the houses, even if an end is never reached.

  see I

  Flood has no idea how far beneath the surface of the earth he’s gone. Soon he’s knee-stepping, then he’s wading, then it’s halfway up his chest. Swimming feels the same as walking feels the same as laying the stuff and letting his body float. There is a slow current to the surface, just calm enough to almost disregard. In the thick of it, he feels matted patches, like flesh or soft loose ground clumping together, aggregating.

  Underneath the lip of the wet, the space is light, though a kind of light he can’t see in. When he breathes or barks or screams words forwards or backwards at the extending nothing, he hears nothing but more air. Though he knows he must want food or water, he feels no concrete want or need, no grinding in the space inside him to be fed something; he continually moves on, while the only subject showing he’s made motion or day is passing in the silence is the wet beneath him rendered rising, lapping moist around his waist and then his nipples and then his shoulders, and still rising.

  “Again again again again again, I say, I have done nothing,” Gravey says into the machines. “I am nothing. The thing of nothing flutters through my hands. There is something climbing on me. Something see-through. It is climbing onto you. Whoever said I said I said that said something false. I am ham clothes. I am a hole. I did nothing and am nothing and am silent. I should not be held up to the light for what’s been held against me while I am anybody too.”

  The cameras replicate his face. This day will not be remembered.

  Gravey hiccups in his sternum. He chews something. Swallows. Weeps a growl.

  A peal of burn noise hurts the air as he goes to grip the stage mic with the hand farther from his heart: “Bullshit,” he says. “Bullshit city. Hey-o. I do everything I do. I’m a big boy. I get nasty. I’m so horny, I could fuck a hole in sleep.

  “If any children kill or are killing other children because of this sentence,” Gravey says, “that is the desire. That is the nation under god. Adults killing adults and mothers killing mothers and fire killing fire and dogs surviving for the dogs. It is one condition of an attitude developed over the past three hundred thousand years.”

  Someone behind a lantern asks a question, though on the playback of the recording, the words have been obscured.

  Gravey stutters. He chips the microphone with his best tooth. He clears his throat, looks through his fists cupped into tunnels, winks. He puts his mouth around the entire metal conducting head.

  “If I’m not here yet,” he goes, burbling with spit, “then invent me. Make me come.”

  Back in his cell inside his sleep Gravey’s longer fingers trace his right arm open with his nails, cutting divots in his skin’s face like opening the mail. From the hole cut near his elbow he extracts a growth of blood that slinks along the air like wire and feeds back up to his face into his mouth around his tongue. He has not eaten in more days than he can remember.

  The color of the room is erasure. Beyond the walls the knives glint sun for sun’s sake into the sun to blind it to the motion of our arms among the walls around the rooms where we have slept and soon will sleep again.

  Gravey’s eyes are closed. His hair has grown down to
his ass, cloaking his backmeat as it itches with such warmth. With his two longest fingers he traces on the cell’s floor the shape of the letter S, smearing platelets across the concrete where it holds him on the surface of the earth. Between the letter’s two endpoints, at each end of the snake of it, Gravey then traces slightly more faintly the shortest line possible between them, bisecting the body of the S to form a symbol like the number 8, but flattened down one side:.

  The S shape shines in the room’s mood. From the blood begins to rise a hissing steam. There is a stench, like plastic melting. The shape begins to change.

  Gravey moves to stand face-first against the wall. His body accesses the space parallel to the room’s one locked entrance, positioned at the wall’s center. His back faces the symbol, the remainder of the room. He hums. The sound is somewhere inside his head; it is every song he’s ever heard, at once. The rooms he’d never been in. His hair rises to stand up on the air straight out in a line behind his head. The hair vibrates, emitting gold tone, harps and bells. There is a language in the stink, the sound of the smell of nowhere filling the room in impregnation. The door to the hall outside behind him sweats. The sweat is mammal blood, the musk of humans. Its shade, from certain angles, matches the pearling of the inside of a conch, houses we would never enter.

  A light inside the room blows up. Microphones around the room for miles go mute, worms birthing in their handgrips in the hour of the anchor speaking the other language.

  Inside the light, the door’s wall and the wall across from it change place. The door that had before upon the one wall opened into the remainder of the station now still opens onto the same building, but from the other side, forcing each room inside the building, and in the space surrounding, each instance of the air to lay inverted, in mirror image of itself.

  The bodies of the people in the rooms go on inside the day. The clocks change colors, pocked meat and shining rings. There is singing, under every voice’s misuse. The eye of Darrel without name.

  Gravey’s body folds to lie down on the floor, his mouth hole touching the endpoint of the high end of the S. From the low end of the same symbol, another pearl of smoke emits and rolls along the floor in a white wire, intersecting with the other wall. His nostrils flare, bringing the smoke inside his skull. He exhales again black with it, the color of the smoke having been changed. Out from his face the smoke rises toward the wall behind him, spreading up in packets; the smoke forms a face upon the wall, of a woman with no eyes no ears no brow no cheeks no nostrils. She has a mouth. The room around the smoke face shudders.

  The smoke of the smoke lips begins to writhe, pulling open, inside which: teeth, a tongue, a humming. Smoke of a disintegrated sweat.

  The head begins to lean out of the wall; its smoke flesh grows. The flesh of the grown face is reflective. A tumor on the head’s cheek glimmers. Somewhere money burns. Somewhere someone else is frying.

  Gravey’s sleeping body rises from the ground. He floats above the S or 8 now having become many symbols in one face at once, stopping hung there on the paused air of the building, through which, for this instant, all other bodies in the precinct have been removed, evacuated into their memories beyond the present. The bodies will return again as they had been without remembering their disappearance.

  Gravey rotates above the symbol in his glitchmoan, head rotating to the smoke-made Head. His hair, hung dry beneath him, sucks up backward, splaying out and turning white down to the scalp. The shifting symbol is written in the scalp meat. A matching tumor grows on Gravey’s cheek, pig-colored, every icon. His eyes fill up with blood. His eyes open. His body opens, the smokehead just behind his head, pressed glyph to glyph.

  The smokehead speaks.

  How many years have passed here, Flood asks the darkness. The wet by now is higher than him, filling the passage so completely he can no longer feel the bottom. He can find no edges where the walls were under the surface, no soft panels with which to find another passage through the black. The ceiling and the walls above the water seem to have spread wider, into something like an ocean under evening, no edges to the open air where he can find them beyond where in the rising darkness there seems a heaving solid surface in what could be the heavens. He can’t remember which way he came in from, where underneath him or behind him the descending passage went. It is as if the passage itself has wrapped back on itself, holding the time beyond it out. Even the idea of time before right now seems conceptual at best, an orblike surface drowned inside the water of his blood.

  And yet inside the passage the rising liquid is still rising, a reminder of dimension. The higher the wet rises, the less air around him there must be. Less and less space remaining inside the passage every instant, no matter how hard he tries to think of anywhere else, ever. How many hours until I am too tired to keep moving, he hears a voice inside him asking, how many more until there is no air.

  Flood himself is full; his chestmeat aches around his bone framing his center. He is not hungry or thirsty but not sated. Inside him, his blood presses back against the wet slaving his skin in silent war. His arms buzz hot like thousands of arms pressed into only two.

  The wet goes down and down forever underneath him, it seems. However deep Flood forces his body, there is more depth opening into greater pressure and potential dimension. At the length of half his breath, the point where Flood knows inside him sure for certain were he to swim deeper there’d be not enough breathing stored inside him to get back, he feels another presence come lighted, way beneath him; a string of buried glow like some white city far below, swallowed over on some level ground surrounded in the cavity, he believes; long drowned along the nadir of the growing wet wanting to drown him in it.

  Sometimes, in the windows of the buildings, somehow becoming clear across great leagues of distance, he feels certain he can see behind the panes inside the small light. And within that light pockets of remote people moving inside rooms; living bodies warbling in muffled silence without even pulse, the word there also buried in the liquid formed around him, rising at his head, today.

  With his chest tight, wanting new breath, knowing he should turn away and swim to surface, Flood feels his eye pass through one specific window across the stretch of cheek of a lone woman in a gray dress; a woman alone, standing at the window staring back up at him; a woman who looks in some way like his mother, then like his wife. Her face changes with each expression as Flood swims up and back to look longer, each time more winded than the last, the woman at the glass there standing stolid and looking up into him from so far in and down they shouldn’t be able to see anything of one another. Behind her in the room the light continues changing, fleshing out the endless wet between them with ambient clouds of mottled color.

  There is a terror in her eyes, some kind of churning screen of remove in her complexion, but also a desperation for the ability to grant respite, a want to forgive, to cave in to the worst part of anything he has been, could be; some soft understanding coming open in her with his returning presence, as if, in her tiny world, through all the darkened liquid, she could feel him, need him.

  Unlike the bodies in the past houses, Flood knows he knows her name; knows who she was and would have always been beside him if he could have let her. But then just as quickly he must rise; kick in frenzy back up through the water to fill his lungs enough to swim back down, each time returning to a smaller and deeper expression of the image of the woman, of the window, of the city, among which he knows for sure now she is held forever there and he is not, his body screaming against the pressure to stay under longer, lower, until on some future iteration, there is nothing.

  Among the long blank hours of the tapes of Gravey, an image emerges.

  It is difficult at first to decipher the dimensions of the contour from the flat white after all these hours burned upon the viewer’s face. There are floors, then there are walls. The outline of a room there, then a room there. The room itself is mostly white as well, though by method of slow accu
mulation an underlying texture in the surface rises. One sees rise among the air the form of furniture, and hair; hair, yes, attached to limbs of bodies attached to people in a space, the aging heads of humans, their vertices of assembled flesh emerged in neon connection from the first suggestion of their presence, then as well: persons, objects, a window, light.

  As quickly then as anyone could remember, the image continues on as if it had always been a film of just this room, as if all the hours of the white had never been.

  The time code on the tape’s playtime, at the instance of the image, resets on the machine to 00:00:00.

  In the film, the people sit in silence holding postures that only slowly and occasionally adjust: one man holding a book with no word written on its spine or face sits on a sofa, beside which a woman stands at a window with her back turned to the viewer. On the floor, before a TV, a small child grips a toy camera, the rim around its lens gnawed up. From this angle we cannot see the content of what is being watched by the family this evening, though its color fills the room.