Blake Butler - Three Hundred Million - A Novel

FLOOD: Photographs of the remains found in the room beneath the house are almost impossible to look at, in that they more resemble abstract art than corpses. The level of dismantling and removal is almost machinic. I can’t help thinking of grapefruit. A fellow officer made a joke how one shot resembled the walls in his grandparents’ living room when he was little. I found myself laughing. I couldn’t stop laughing .

The dying god releases a map of the world. It looks like a map of the world.

FLOOD: I submit another request for the paperwork explaining the details of the manner of detection leading up to Gravey’s arrest, being as I had not been involved with this case throughout that time, having moved over to this precinct just before his arrest. The previous lead detective had transferred or gone on extended leave just immediately before the date of apprehension, or this is what I’m told. I don’t know why I haven’t gotten this information passed to me already. I have to submit three more requests before the work finally shows up: a file only eleven pages long, with information pertaining only to Gravey’s prior record (clean), a note regarding the difficulty of finding almost any public record or testimonial about Gravey’s position in the community or details of his past, and the contents of his home at the time of booking (of which I was already aware). Upon request for the rest of the files, how we found out about Gravey’s existence in the first place, etc., I am told this information “does not exist,” meaning that whatever other files there were, beyond essentially what I’ve put together on my own, went with the prior detective, , who I never actually met directly, and is “no longer accessible,” according to our would-be mutual superior. Any further attempts I’ve made at unraveling the story end with the forwarded phone calls, questions answered with questions, and blank stares that come with the territory of my work, which of course is frankly part of what I love about it: the infernal collaboration of creativity and fate .

Under the wake of all of night we went again. We wedded the public with the private; tunneled through the holes in the houses the darkness graced as welcome mats made of the dirt of the buried, gifting access into each home, and enough desire to slip into each denatured, dragging the future. Into each I went, too, split in my dimension to replicate across the universe of homes. In each we found a version of the mother to behold and hold above us and render into godflesh. Often the mother was a child. When the mother had testicles, we removed them and placed them in one of my boys’ mouths to bring them home. These must be fed into the incubation outlet for the prison system of the next year to feed with, reproteinizing any face. The hair would grow out on us so thick there would be no cavern but for Him who firebreathed no flame in the Name. In each house we bound the husband’s hands with leather thongs we’d rendered from the excess pets we’d bred. Many of the houses had second floors the inhabitants had not realized. These floors were full of beds. The sleeping of the Darrels there in coming years would knit the house into the ground, pushing down as well the submerged layer of the buried persons who were speaking always in our organs. They knew nothing of me, but they slipped into my speeches. They were nothing like lyrics. Each husband would be dispatched with a chrome lever affixed to his throat. The lever lifted brought his voice out like from a spigot and spilled upon his chest and wrote the Word. The Word would in the proper configuration, with the word placed on the next victim, I believed, erase the voices with the downing as they lowered with the sentences of Darrel, and so this was done some nights ten times or fifty in a row. Stabbing with the left hand then the right hand then with the lever wedged in my ribcage. Whatever wet the bodies shot upon me stayed, became my coat worn in a sheath to explicate our absolute and shapeless deathgod’s phantom body. Each house we entered was a new cell to be filled in with the makings of the night. Some stabbing hit upon the buttocks so that they might stand for many years and feel the blood mush in their legs, learning the posture of the Darrel as they held the marks of the language of the new god up upon the temple of their heads. In each house I removed the DELETE key from any computer and ate it into my belly and heard it affix to my tubes. Behind my eyes the typing fired.

R. A.: “By now he was seeing through the eyes of each of all of us at once, he said, and through the eyes of the building body of the mother made from all of those we’d taken apart, so that upon the rooms he could see the other rooms coming and going and all that had and would be done. One night I watched him lean so hard against a mirror the mirror split around his head. We weren’t even playing music anymore for all the times as at last Gravey said the song was playing itself and so we were playing it as we walked and woke and said nothing, as no speaking in the house was allowed but his and he mostly didn’t ever so we could listen to the becoming of the day despite it looking like it had all the other days surrounding.”

There was nowhere to hide all that we had not begun consuming. We packed the cavity under the house with more bodies and more bodies and soon it would overflow and we’d dig further to make the chamber bigger and the ground below us moaned and caved more space again to fill. We covered each new layer with more mirrors and more light. We made the shapes that Darrel commanded in the walls there with our longest fingers and ejected the seedchild crust; and once the musk of innards had settled in the chamber we went to Petco and bought all the darling parasites they had for sale: hamsters and guinea pigs and white mice and fancy rats captured in cages. These could do some of the eating in our stead, as my teeth were getting sore from all the flavor, and my lips were about to fall out, and the boys seemed old as hell. The U-Haul full of our pets became a superior Rauschenberg of actual excrement and fur immediately. The traffic lights came on red all the way returning. At an Exxon I bought a candy necklace and wore it around my chest and let it do my speaking for me so I could set my brain on pornography of an everlasting nature. Our death would never have to die. At home we put the temporary pets into the incubation chamber and let them go to work among the bread bed of corpses, demolishing the remainders. We watched them pack the mush of every corpse into dens of blue intestine. Into these mounds they laid packs of eggs all colored gold, or squirted repeated pregnancies into the beautiful lard as we’d provided. Each time the animals and we inside ourselves ate enough mother to brine a child inside the shit, the babies immediately would inside the house begin again to make themselves again and lay themselves into the blacking mass. It made a sound of gnat accordions and secondary wishing in the name of Sod. The eggs were spooling harder and where they birthed again into themselves the corridor became packed. Each new birth was a cell in the new god. It would be my rite to raise him on the lawn of the Black House while the cameras rolled and our song sang and shat and sang and kissed every hour underground rolled up above and born again. For each new generation more mothers had to be made witness to him in donation of their American memory of how cells die, which meant there was more work for the boys to do to bring them to me and to help me continue to remember to want to need. Their airs immediately combined, the rising air all together not just of man but of the louse in man most recognizable, beyond the ark of the old god. The stench cells under sky’s devoid rim shaking while we waited more through shorter periods while in the wet of noise the song of hours became stiller still and harder to acknowledge. To pass the time we practiced coronations and mind vibration. Of course we filmed it. The films were in our skin. The soundtracks were the same lack of everything we’d always wanted. Inside the newer no sound our undrummer got entranced; he cut his right arm off to control his fortitude for doing nothing better than ever. Our guitarist tried to unshred with all the notes at once and became actually immaculate enough to throw his mental children to their deaths inside the well of his ability. The toilets all began to overflow inside the zilch and vermin pregnancizing. Our musk flooded fast to fill the blush above the houses, the lawn around us bluer and inculcating burrowing vermin for miles under the earth, each laying their eggs in the grown sod to be nearer to our affection. The piping of my sermon fed them grace through holes I did not want to provide for free but could not contain because I am loud when I am ejaculating which is always which means sometimes I can’t bring myself to clear my throat and when I vomit from the air of this world it clings inside me and becomes more lingo I have to dethrone into silence.