Blake Butler: Three Hundred Million: A Novel

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 .