Three Hundred Million: A Novel

by Blake Butler

  The jury, held at gunpoint, among lasers, finds Gravey guilty.

  The judge proclaims the fate. This judge in fear in his electrified cadaver, in his waiting for the day of the Shape of He, slave of three hundred million tongues.

  Gravey, by the state, will become killed, is the decision. The killer put to be killed by machine. By a machine. The weapon: electricity, buttons, wires.

  The machines are waiting.

  The smoke will rise.

  The audience inside the courtroom sits in gyrating silence with the verdict on their lips. They watch their hands clap and hear their lungs give out the word of praise of this day having come at last, this day at last.

  The bells in Gravey’s sentenced body ring.

  Today in America, 41,080,101 people become killed.

  Across the many skies all our screaming does not weep.

  The bodies form a mount.

  The bodies filling in the space between the earth and sky with rising meat to match their minds of spooling film.

  The darkness behind Flood’s fully submerged vision narrows. The surrounding wet solidifies again to walls, too black to tell the open air from impenetrable surface. All space seems to move around him, in absence of his intent. Inside the drawl, old colors blur. The black of many colors in his forehead and his fingers. There is nowhere else. The single word repeating over any way he tries to think. Through the depths, he’s dragged forward like a cursor with the space bar held down, on a computer, blinking out and in.

  There is some land then, and a gap. The land is synthetic to the touch and bone white, just wide enough for him to stand free at the edge of the liquid, somewhere way down under masses, a bulb of air sucking the world around him forward. The linings of the walls elongated in their passing, becoming light from dark, transparent from light, reflective from transparency. Mirrors totally surround; all the same mirror, over all lengths. This time, in the mirror, Flood appears, head-on in every inch no matter how he sees it, though he can barely recognize his body. He looks to have aged decades since he last felt anything to know. He looks more like someone who’d gone on to live forever, constantly aging over decades, than anyone he’d ever been. The skin around his eyes could almost break.

  Like in the passages to other homes, the mirror has a latch, a latch in the eye of the face of every face of the plane before him always, all the same. The shape of the symbol marked in on the latch’s head seems to waver at its edges, making many shapes of itself mutating and transmogrifying, while held in the mind all as the same. Flood finds himself mesmerized watching the shape mutate between circle, square, hexagon, star, and so on, endless other unnamed shapes between each. He does not want to lift the latch. He wants to take the latch into his mouth, swallow it down. He wants the latch to open in him.

  There is no sound as with every latch the mirror opens. The space beyond it is dark inside the room, a different kind of dark of night of passages of lives he already can’t remember having passed through.

  Flood moves into the room. He closes the mirror behind him immediately, locking away the passage to prevent anyone else hidden behind him from following. As the mirror clicks into place he feels his blood run with a sudden sense of irreversibility, against which the veins along his arms protrude and pulse. But the mirror, once closed, cannot be opened from this side. He is sealed in here.

  Into full darkness, Flood fumbles hands-first. He reaches into the space unseeing for something, feeling only more space and more space there, like a dry inverse to the cavity of wet. As if this space is no different than the drowning chamber of the world of passages, but made of air instead of fluid. His skin holds the same tone and texture as the air around him standing. He feels a rising fear of nothing, fear of edgelessness forever, even the mirror behind him now somehow not there when he turns to feel its slick face harboring the copy of him in the dark. He calls out and feels no language.

  He walks into a wall. The wall bangs into his face and he can feel himself bleeding again, though he can’t see or feel the arms themselves. Once there is a wall, there are other surfaces to feel onto, connecting outward. There is a table and some chairs around it. There is another wall hung with framed pictures, which in the darkness, searching for anything, one by one, Flood removes. He sits each frame facedown on the floor, not having seen the images they carry. What if life went on this way forever, Flood thinks, all surfaces without faces. All creation beyond seeing.

  And then again as if to negate him, he hits something on the wall that fills the room with light. It is so bright at first that it’s like the dark but backwards, just as unyielding, all against him. Slowly, though, the shape of the space around him conforms to its underlying structure, and reveals itself, like day.

  Flood is standing in his home. It takes a moment before he recognizes the rematerializing elements of space as ones he’s spent the years in, the objects infused with his time and smell and feeling, nodes without eyes who had as yet seen him through hour after hour among others. It all fills in around him like flashing panels rising out from concrete. There is oddly no relief, only the awareness of I have been here, this is a place where I have lived, where I have disappeared the hours, where I have known others or hid from others, where I sleep.

  Despite having passed them day in and out so many years inside here, he can’t remember what the pictures placed facedown on the ground now ever pictured.

  The carpet is white. Had the carpet always been white.

  On a low table are his papers, notes and words regarding recent casework he’d brought home, though he can’t remember really what the case had been. The papers are blank. If there is someone else in the house there with him, he cannot feel it.

  There is a tape. The tape is marked with a string of digits. The casing is white, too, in contrast to the dark tongue of the film spooled up inside it. He picks up the tape and holds it near his face and stares, as if waiting for the images encased there to appear broadcast on the room, or all inside him.

  The TV is on. On screen, long shots of human bodies amassed in daylight in the streets and inside buildings, waving their fists and running in hordes and banging at windows of buildings and cars, exhibited in silence, the volume apparently muted. The faces all bleed together into a kind of total body with countless heads all held together where they touch or do not touch. Other shots show tanks, horses, swords, explosions, fences, cages, weapons, flashing text.

  Flood doesn’t understand how he couldn’t have seen the light of the screen of the TV in the dark before the light appeared. He tries to read the words on the lips of people pictured in the masses but it just makes some feverish language he can no longer understand. Through the window on the wall over the TV, the air is dark and still.

  Flood takes the tape and puts it into the machine attached to the TV. His hands feel oblong, tighter once again emptied, as if coated in the tape’s plastic. The receiving machine makes sound, its own small language. The light in the room changes, opens wide. There is static, then the whiteness, then nothing but the whiteness through the room.

  Flood sees himself. He sees his body. His image is transparent somehow, so that even through his chest he can see the shape of the house around him.

  The wall of the room on the tape is white like the wall in the room Flood had called his home, as many walls could ever be. The surface is interrupted by a window through which a greater white appears, light from somewhere else, almost exploding.

  The film fills up Flood’s vision, and so is his vision. In seeing, staring, into the image, he can no longer tell it from the rest of the room, from where his blood was.

  Flood is on the tape.

  He looks down at his hands. The skin of the hands is stretched with colored veins and pale flesh, dry and aged as he remembers from the last mirror. His pores have grown so large he can connect them without looking closer, islands of the soft; the circles drown in other wrinkles where the skin has colonized its age. The hair of the flesh of his ar
ms has been removed, a smooth, demonstrative expanse. The nails on his fingers are strangely long: white fantasies of skies of cities sleep lodged under the cuticle, aching the skin. He is wearing a white tunic, or cloak, or gown, drenched to translucence and clinging to the folds of him hid covered, where bones meshed in his chest are bending in: a process of the greater aging. Temples. White years. Gorges. Flood makes a fist and hears the bones pop in his fingers. He releases.

  There are others in the room. There is an American woman dressed in a gown like his but thicker and well embroidered, standing at the room’s one window, looking out. She has a scar along her chin; she does not realize it is there. Her breath makes a small disruption of the flow of the building, letting other rooms build gray. Years have happened to her. She is the year now. The woman hums; there is no song.

  Across the room, an American man sits halfway upright on a recliner holding a book before a TV, lids flickering in response to changes in the field. A television’s light provides another sort of color, and is silent.

  In another room, through the wall behind the TV, Flood knows, lies a sleeping child, bone white, American. The child’s body is rigged with an electronic sensor in his night pants meant to detect urine; a reading lamp stays on above the bed. The child in coming years would go to school. He would see his first pornography under the table in the lunchroom during fifth grade. He would take turns with several other classmates kicking classmates in the chest. He would masturbate and eat breakfast cereal and go to school to learn to program code into machines and then get tired of that and begin writing paper onto words. I do not mean words onto paper.

  The child is not asleep.

  At the window, the woman sees herself framed against the billowed darkness growing larger still, sweating through its fibers at a universal rate, through all the holes. The window is really more a mirror now than anything to see through. It is silver in its blackness, extending on into the idea of itself. A subtitle reveals the woman’s present thought, filling her brain meat, The body of the body of the column of the city of the child of man. The woman inhales and holds it. She turns around, finds Flood before her. She does not react to this new stranger. The features of her face and the face of her husband half-asleep sitting beneath her hold calmly blurred in swimming textures, layers, whorls.

  Flood feels a hammer in his hand. He feels the cool wood grip pressed with his flesh. It is a fresh hammer, unused, though it smells of the loins of the new skin beneath the soil pouring somewhere from a formless hole, feeding none. In Flood’s other hand he holds a dark knife, the leather handle of it molded as if to fit his hand pad to pad, to fit any hand of any hand model in America, or those shaped like them, or those shaped unlike them, or the dead. Flood knows the knife is long enough to stab straight through the ceiling and cut the eye out of god, who watches our dry moves and eats into us with the cancer, alive in the laughter of all generations.

  Flood looks at his hands and sees his hands hold none. That is his skin there. This is the body. He stutters to meet the body with the word. He feels the blood run through his head down along his neck wide in heaving streamyards of witching visions through his sternum through his intestines along his legs, blossomed by force. He feels something amassing on the outside of his surface. Nodes. A false gray. His hands are heavy. He smells fresh rubber.

  There is a nameless music pouring from the eyelets of the darkness beyond the window, larger than silence.

  Flood’s body raises up his hands. His fingers point in ten directions, one for each finger, a splay of manifesting wish. In his chest he feels two big wheels turning, gyrating shapes among the flesh making tape burn in the threads between us.

  Flood sees nothing. Flood floods inward. Flood closes his eyes.

  Flood speaks.

  * * *

  The current fills Gravey’s body smiling and dressed in white upon the waiting bed where he lies with hands straight up above him, incarcerated with the light. His holes go slack around him. From the holes there is a sheen. Then, the white tape, surrendered spooling from his navel, hissing up like snakes evaporating.

  There is a knock at the lone window. Old bells ring upon the air. The death machine is shaking.

  Over the frying, our applause.

  Over the applause, the husking flake of our surrounded flesh all turning dry.

  The dryness of light no one remembers.

  The day of the dryness of light.

  Today in America, 208,135,180 people become killed, each and all killed and killed again forever amen until everybody in America is dead.

  THREE THE PART

  ABOUT FLOOD (IN THE CITY OF SOD)

  I woke in smoke. This time the smoke was the beginning, no longer unwinding into nothing as its layers grew apart. The light surrounded my body on the inside, contained in space that seemed hidden from all the rest of time that I remembered. I knew my name was or had been Flood but could not say it and it no longer felt like language. Instead I could hear several hundred interruptions anytime I tried to think.

  The smoke was pouring from my face. From my eyes and from my earholes, growing even thicker when I would try to speak or breathe. The smoke made windows on the air. Eras opened. From the windows there stretched long columns that seemed to form the world, though every column extended only into further reaching. All directions led exactly the same way, like no matter where I went the smoke poured from me and obscured the rest of what could be into more of what it was already: inside and outside me, all of everything.

  * * *

  FLOOD: I don’t know where I am. I’m trapped inside here. I’m not sure where here is, what it connects to, but I am beginning to believe I’ve been caught. Recorded. Or, not recorded—rather, I am rendered as if on a film, an unscrolling repetition owned by the smoke’s repeating gesture, though at the same time, I am alive. My mind is my mind and I believe it but beyond me is something else, not the world as it always had been, but the shell of it. Something is altered. The air is flat and has no taste. It feels like there is something else surrounding the space here, and the something else is where I used to be.

  I crawled and crawled along the floor of the ground of the extending darkness. The grain beneath me felt synthetic and did not stick to my body. Just beneath the layer of the ground the grit the surface stood on churned and buzzed, as if being processed and so created only as I touched it, as if underneath the floor of all creation the only thing keeping the floor from sucking in around me into some screaming hole was that I needed somewhere else to go.

  And as if only because it was truly what I needed, out of the smoke the world resolved. There were mounds, then there were horizons. I began to recognize out of the stretching amassments local zones of scenery: fields and skylines, holes and corners, foliage like icing, invisible stars. One stroke of familiarity procured the next, aligning the space into further aggregates of definition.

  Out of the color of the night, there appeared buildings in the distance, houses, homes. There were networks of understanding and direction. Wires draped the air like no one’s trees. The unfamiliar felt familiar. I began to recognize coordinates of locations I had been through sometime before, though I could not remember when or why. None of the homes seemed like mine. And yet I could read from a long way off how it looked inside architecturally. As if the maps were in my brain. Or as if even where the walls were they were just like more of the smoke I’d spit up; all lines made totally of me. I could not feel any people.

  The world was silent. There was no one. All air was nothing but itself, every inch captured into the residue of what it’d always seemed to be to anybody altogether. The only place that wasn’t all the rest was where I felt me in the color of my mind. My thoughts burned on through where my skull was, slowly. They wrapped around me and repeated no matter how much I wished they wouldn’t, or wished they would so hard at least I couldn’t control it. Often the words would take over my brain so much I could not see anything when they were being spoke
n.

  * * *

  FLOOD: Mostly I can’t alter how I move. It’s like there is this dictation of my presence that tells me what to do, or what I am already doing, or what I have done. And within that, there will be these moments where I am unable to stop myself speaking aloud in a very specific way. The language rips out of my mouth, though it is not actually me speaking. It’s like subtitles in a film. I’m made to say it shaped exactly where I am, as if the continuity of the air were dependent on it, defined by it, could not go on without. It is only in here, far inside me, that I can speak freely, and can understand the terror of believing I was wholly me when I was not. Anytime could be the last time I can speak to you as I am now, though I would likely never know. The tape flutters back and forth between these modes without my knowing. I could go on being beyond myself maybe forever, repeating the same things all seeming each time to me new, forced to continue in a loop, while through all the land, a shapeless language scrolled in silent history, rising against me. To be honest, it doesn’t feel that different from always, only now I know I used to not be the only one.