Three Hundred Million: A Novel

by Blake Butler

  Each body is mostly still. Small adjustments occasionally occur, like inhalation, the book’s page turn, the movement of a limb, as if to remind us the shot’s not static. The space inside the room is calm. Any noise is subtle and mostly covered over by the larger sound of nothing, like the feeling one gets when passed by something larger than one would wish to be near.

  A floor-length mirror stands along the far wall, copying the room. The reflection shows no filming camera in the frame, despite the fact that at this angle, the camera should, by proximity, appear. This glitch in continuity suggests some alteration of the record, an outside guidance.

  On further inspection it becomes apparent there is something off or wrong or different about the child’s reflection. Such as, in the skin of the face of the skin of him there in the mirror appear patches of discolor like the scape of glimmer in gasoline splayed under sun, while his unreflected skin is creamy. The hair around the lips and ears of the child in certain reflected angles appears to be thicker than what actually appears on the child’s head. He looks older than he should.

  What is wrong with the reflection of the child?

  What about he here must be different from he there?

  No one seems to notice, or else they have accepted his condition as a fact of life.

  All is calm.

  The woman at the window stands seeing out with her face near the glass, breathing against it. The changing light of the TV in the room makes it impossible for us to see what she is looking out at; only the room again appears reflected, doubled, extending the room out into the night. We cannot see from here where the reflection in the window meets the reflection in the mirror. The woman’s hands are clasped before her, her hair pulled back tightly around her skull.

  The man turns a page again. The page’s turning makes no sound, though on this page, open before him, still unseen by the camera eye, the man seems to see something unexpected; his face changes, clenching; he brings his head down toward the page; he seems to be reading or looking in whatever way at whatever is there more carefully now, taking the words slow, as if to parse it clearer. The color of his face changes. He looks up suddenly toward the viewer, out of the film, though it is unclear what he sees there. Suddenly he is pouring sweat, visibly spewing and misting in the TV light. He stares as if transfixed in horror with the viewer, while beside him the woman and child go on exactly as they have been.

  The toy camera in the child’s hands is blue. The camera is leaking something. There is a wet mess on the floor and on his clothes and in his hair a little. The way the child cajoles the machine, bats and shakes it, hugs it hard with the lens aimed into his chest, causes the machine to take pictures of the world without the guidance of a human eye, filling up its electronic memory.

  The viewer can’t stop looking at the child. The child looks so much like how the viewer remembers looking as a child, however long ago that was. The hour seems familiar. The color of the hour.

  With this realization, another man steps into the screen. He seems to move in from somewhere just behind the lens, where a camera would be. The viewer views at first only his shoulders, then his whole back, his arms and waistline. He is naked. His hair is grown down to his ass. His skin is wrinkled, leathery, sopping wet. His body pours water from his fingers, from his hair slick, from his arms; it seems to gather on the floor inside the image, pooling up in the room over the carpet rising.

  The man has no reflection.

  The man moves forward in the image until he is standing at the center of the room. The array of light around him has come bright white, from the TV or the window or both or neither. The man with the book is shaking now, as are the edges of the house, only slight enough to make the walls seem blurry, ruining the mirror. The shaking causes the wet to come out of him faster; he is crying, sweating, then begins bleeding from the eyes. His crotch is wet as are his pores. He can’t seem to do anything but sit as he had been before, holding the book, frozen wide-eyed. The child and the woman are also sweating, though they don’t seem to notice; they do not react at all to the man.

  The viewer realizes he or she is also filled with liquid.

  This white around the language on the page before you is a mirror.

  The figure raises up his arms. As he does, the woman at the window raises her arms, too, then the seated man, and last the child. The light beyond the window is strobing slowly with the TV in time as the wet pours from them each at once together rising in the room, quickly enough already to have covered up the carpet and the feet of the furniture. Or time is faster now. Life is faster.

  The child now sees the wet but does not stand up or attempt to move away onto the furniture or into the man or woman’s arms, only holding more tightly to the camera, its flashwork going off at adverse time in relation to the TV and the sky beyond. The child clings to the object so hard its white hands turn even whiter. He tries to make a word but it is covered over by whatever sound of nothing inhabits the film’s soundtrack. It is a calm and simple silence.

  Soon the liquid rises over the child’s head. Underneath the other accumulating liquids of the people, there is brief cloud of his blood, which rapidly bands together with the rest of it. In his hands, the camera too has been sealed under, its electronic memory licked clean and thereby absorbed into the wet held now visionless forever.

  In the image, to the viewer, the screen inside itself is filling up, the liquid pouring off the bodies. As with the child, it gathers quickly above the seated man’s knees and waist and chest and neck as he sits still, beyond response. His mouth is open.

  The viewer’s arms go numb, but seem not numb, to him or her.

  Somewhere a fire is being ignited; somewhere stairs lead down and down.

  The man goes under the water, seated, holding his book. There is another burst of blood. The gift of his blood to the rising aggregation shudders, lapping at the flat of glass and at the thick shape of the figure, still at center, motionless.

  The screen is almost two-thirds covered over. Underneath the layers of the liquid too the light is still somehow coming off the TV in matching color beam bent into malfunctioning bright blips each hardly colors, squirming pale under the wet surface, growing paler as the liquid rises, thickens. The room is filling faster. The less room is left the faster still it fills. We can already seem to not remember the child and the father having gone beneath the surface, buried, turned to liquid. We can hardly tell how this began; it seems now to have always been happening.

  Beyond the window, the waiting night.

  In silence then, and without fanfare, the woman at the window mesmerized goes slump. Her knees weaken beneath her. She slides without sound or gesture down under the surface of the liquid. The wet is too dark now to show the cloud of blood she leaves briefly behind as it joins the rising mass.

  The back of the head of the man before the camera, inside the gathering liquid, is all that now remains. In the window, now no longer blocked mostly by the body of the woman, we can see his front side reflected in the glass, though the image is too blurred somehow to make him out. Beyond the glass the black holds up the night unending.

  All is calm, yes.

  Yes, only as the last laps of the liquid squirm to reach above the frame of the viewer’s perspective, the remaining man at the center of the room turns to face us.

  * * *

  FLOOD: What voice asks the questions, and what answers. Help me. What questions do the answers ask. What has been said in my name was not me. What sound has been constricted in the liquids the body finds a way a while to contain and yet can’t force itself to contain itself unending in the name of to which the liquid must return. I did not mean to be this. What hour is the hour described in this passage. What are you going to do about it. My memory dividing. My mind dividing.

  Blood violence. Scrying violence. Schools’ doors locked door to door. Homes surrounded with a netting. Pastries rolled up with the asp. Tomahawks in hands of children come down on dolls and friends,
come down on ants, come down on me. Fathers kill their fathers and their sons. Sons kill their friends. Wives kill their husbands and their doctors. They kill the babies in their guts. War violence in the home. Sky violence writing itself white into the cover of the hour with the screens’ electrifying prismlight. What would have been watched in place of doing is become doing. Runes are written on the heads. Lawns are cut in slurs or glyph stakes, calling for the meteor or blank invasion. A burning planted somewhere in every city near the homes. The wash of the bathwater on the drowned self. The pills. The pills to erupt the cells out of the body. The naked turned to breadloaves. The football hero with the Luger to his temple on the fifty-yard line. The banker handing back a withdrawal in the form of a sheet of his own skin. Gas station attendants robbing the customers of their consciousness. Of blood. The dogs walking the dogs. “What is happening in America? The homeland commissioner is up in arms. We must act now. This is our home.” The black rabbit in the east sky rises and vomits a column of dust onto the air. Troops deployed for the protection of the people stab each other in the chests. Intestine dinners. Ageless, graceless. The face of god: torn in strips off a billboard and used to wrap the dead. This is an art project, someone stutters, and the teeth fall out of their mouth onto the ground and are eaten by the starving some days layer. Enamel over all. Video game machines going blank. Wires doing blank. Email reading these same words in every head. A package is delivered to the homeland commissioner and it is opened by him on live TV, though we know it will explode. The pets’ names are changed to Darrel. The children’s names are changed to Darrel. The nation’s name is changed to Darrel. Michael Jackson’s name is changed to Darrel. Human instances of Darrel are caught in mobs and crucified inside the streets as nonbelievers. The name of Darrel in the mass of names is silence. The days. The occasionally clean are surrounded by their own flesh and bone. No metaphor left behind. No building not written whitely with the curse word over the crush of any city now called Darrel. Order again is demanded. Vegetable delivery is mandated by the state to arrive each evening in a long white limousine. This we believe in, which makes us calmer. It does not happen. Another 340,000 die. Another 417,550. Another 589,000. The rising numbers count themselves in the blue of pigs’ blood in cursive on the sky below the blank where there might have been a moon once, and still might be, though we can’t remember where to look. The instance of the number is attacked by air force bombers to obliterate as smoke. The smoke maintains the will of concrete underneath the cluster bomb. The fallout rains us birds. We eat them. The flesh of the bird delivers awful vision inspiring awful art. A mechanic kills a man who’s come to have his wheel replaced; he kills using the machine of his daily labor; another day he might have simply changed the wheel. Someone is counting down the hours on the fingers of those who pass him in the street. Rotting frottage underneath the street puts a disorienting sound in cats’ mouths and the houses rub where none of them touch and so it spreads and fills and holds. Someone with a hammer appears in one in 144 houses in one evening, mimicking at once a series of different people in one body, tolling the present number of the murdered bodies higher. There is no going backward. The faster we die we all will die. Sickness is not a shaking but a way of looking across a breakfast table or giving thanks. Anywhere this does not happen yet, the air remains. Turnips in fields turn up with dried blood centers. The trees bow down to kiss the ground. 700,010 dead. 880,789 dead. Telephones. Locks sold from the hardware station come without a key. Each four killed make eight kill eight more and then kill themselves or kill another set of eight, bodies branching off of each eight killed kill at least sixteen or toward twenty-four, each body desisted initiates replication in the spool of those surrounding; not by plague or viral idea or passion or brutal ministry or campaign, but by something they’ve not named and yet knows each better than any could, and in the unnaming of the so-occurring the day goes on and renders shorter while the skin flies at the light above in reams of hiss and collects in lathered wreaths around the public breath. The remaining bodies of their living go on tasting each other body in their mouths because they must. The colors of us giving up only one color, of little sex. The cars turning themselves on. A day at last to come of our vast creation returning to its fury. Crystal visions. Winking paper. So ends the beginning of our summation of the dead.

  Gravey stands before the courtroom, no attorney (having refused), his head aglow in flat light from the neon panels in the ceiling holding the natural light out. Seven of the twelve jurors seated in the box are wearing all black; three are wearing white; they look exhausted, taut of skin; the remaining two jurors are dressed in clothes they might have another morning worn to church. For each member of the jury an armed bailiff is located somewhere in the room, in addition to the extra battery of officers at each door and window, and surrounding the buildings. Through the walls it is so silent between speaking it is as if one can hear the sun. The local premises are being patrolled round the clock by helicopters, federal troopers, private hires, and overhead, remaining unseen. This trial will have no real beginning and no end. This is formality. The jurors speak in tongues. The judge speaks in tongues. The judge’s dying mother on the phone with the judge during lunch recess speaks in tongues. The D.A. speaks in tongues. The assistant to the D.A. speaks in tongues. The witnesses speak in tongues. The loud interlocutor whose daughter had been killed by Gravey and who has come to the courtroom wearing a mask over her face screaming suddenly amidst the silence for Gravey’s blood speaks in tongues. The other grieving speak in tongues. The press pundits speak in tongues. The windows do not speak. Gravey does not speak. It has not rained in thirty-seven days.

  When not waiting in silence in the courtroom, Gravey stands all hours at the center of his cell. He will not sit or sleep or eat or speak or close his eyes. He finds his chest so thin it is translucent. His organs and orifices in the cold clear gel have neon colors, their edges bloating and retracting into plastic puzzle shapes: his spleen a circle; his gallbladder a square; his ureter hole a hexagon; his lungs a star; his pancreas a triangle; his rectum a diamond; his brain a ring. His blood is thin and turning clear. Among his flesh, he’s disappearing: his chest, his arms, his neck. He tries to summon from his memory a mirror, but there is nothing there like that at all, nothing beyond the ringing in his sternum, pages turning. Each time he thinks another sentence, the earth begins again around it.

  * * *

  FLOOD: Each time I try to call a name out, I can’t make my mouth open. Trying to remain silent, I hear the wind run through me where I am not. Everything I look at shows my reflection. And behind me: nothing.

  There is very little room now left to breathe.

  Each time he pushes up out of the dark liquid, Flood finds the walls of the chamber nearer, slicker. The surface tension of the wet is turning hard. The blood inside him also is stiffening, becoming heavy from his fingers to his head; he finds it hard to move his joints, or harder to want to. Behind his eyes is all the black.

  He goes under into the wet again, again, spreading his arms out, looking, looking, that something from the darkness might emerge; another kind of light inside it, or a person, though he cannot remember who now, or perhaps a second darkness darker than the first, something he can move inside of, become filled by.

  Marking each inhale reemerging, somewhere in the larger world far outside the chamber another several thousand people die, and therefore many several thousand other future people who would have come from them are now never born.

  * * *

  FLOOD: My body full of spit and blood. My mind full of holes leading to rooms full of the dead. Through the surfaces conferred their final concentration in the film containing all other film, upon which there is no rewind, no eject. A world awaiting.

  Other tapes among the tapes of Gravey begin to reveal themselves as holding shapes. Hid in the white the act of the destruction of the family occurs again, again. Each tape begins in a new but similar location, with different set
s of families, though it is difficult to remember one apart from any other by the end. There is the liquid. There is the child’s camera. In the rising wet, the people become drowned upon the presence of the man arriving at the center of the room, whose face is never shown. The blood will wash out of the bodies, raising it higher. The scene will end then, cutting out.

  The tape could be rewound. The tapes could be played again, over and over, as long as there is someone there to operate their mechanism, to have the wish to.

  The video is not proper evidence of Gravey as a killer, despite the resemblance of him from behind. Each time the camera faces the face, the film there ends, just at the instant one would see him seeing. The shape of the figure could be anybody, legally, from this angle, and so is anybody.

  Anybody.

  All who see the tape there for all days coming can recall only the white.

  Today in America, 2,441,560 people become killed.