Blake Butler: Three Hundred Million: A Novel

I met Darrel cuz of Gravey. I met Gravey cuz of Josh, and Josh cuz where I went to school there was a breakspot in the fence and during our time between lunch and nothing they would let us out into the yard and we could go out there and wait till no one saw us and slip back through the fence to this long trail that Josh promised went to somewhere awesome and I believed him because I thought the most of all that Josh had ever said. It might have even been true I loved Josh in my soft life then, but I could not admit it to me because he was boy and I was boy; still the rat-make of his hair and how it fell along his shoulders in the yards and other hours not around us would appear when I felt nothing alone in my flesh too, and from his hair inside me I saw his shoulders and could imagine what would be connected just to those, and from there soon in the night I’d be inside him and could be him even and when I was him I put my hands into his (my) pants and with my (his) hands I spread me open and made me go on and even up till now that might be the biggest feeling I have made. Each of us was filled with semen; we wore the worry scars around our holes. There was so much music all those nights each night I died and still was there. And yet, I knew Josh was not my future body. He was too real to me, too much a man. I might have would have wished to enter eternity through Josh instead of Gravey but Josh just liked knives and money and getting messed up, which is why even that afternoon he took me from the school through the mudyard to the house where we met Gravey, who gave us drugs for taking off our shirts and socks and pants and sometimes something else. I knew the instant I saw Gravey I would become him, and he would fill me, and in our collision, god would bend. Gravey didn’t try to fuck us mostly, he just did seeing and some fingers in our hair, the heavy breathing, but it was enough to leave him in me ever still, in a different way from Josh, in a way I could never learn to love. His eyes had dartboards in them and some gravel. He was very, very old. While he jacked off we inhaled gases and sometimes too we ate some pills or smoked the earth. Any I ate did big upon me: I was open. I could see then in each a new manner of operating color: how it was true that I had lived seven lives before mine started, like a pet, and how each life inside the life inside the one before it held seven more lives inside it too, though inside no life could I recall the resin of those before. It was the seventh life that made us humans, gave us the symbols through which we could believe we were only ever here and now. This in this as Gravey told us while we splayed before him on the floor in black of smoke-seas that seemed to rise invisible around him. Maybe Gravey did do more things while we were like that, to our bodies. Some hours for days I could not see at all, could not feel the color in me beyond what paper feels like rubbing in my palms.

FLOOD: Like any of those mentioned by name in this proceeding, including the amorphously rendered “Darrel,” no Josh has been identified or come forward. Though we have apprehended numerous suspects believed to be involved with the occurrences atduring the period of, the actual number of those involved, like the number of victims, remains in question. It is also as yet unclear to what extent, if at all, any parties who have claimed to live in the house with Gravey were active in his crimes; though some claim compliance and even pleasure, there has been no evidence implicating anyone but Gravey in the physical activity of murder. Many of the stories do not line up. Most of the boys do not acknowledge each other. Some seem to have suffered extreme emotional damage, not to mention what was done to their flesh .

The space I lay in when I stayed at Gravey’s had real mirrors on the walls and ceiling. There were so many of me in there underneath that and beside that I could not see me in the middle of us where I was: a throne of self made of my bone and flesh repeated. Asleep I’d hold so still and never move a second. I thought about asking Gravey some nights if I could come and live there when my father locked me out of the house as he often would for wearing black and speaking in voices that weren’t mine, but the question hung inside me plane-sized. I felt devout to nowhere. I slept in the tall grass beside the shed full of old tools when I could not find a way to force my way in through Dad’s locks. My father loved being alive: he was a photographer; he understood the human body, and machines; he had all these ways he meant to work inside the math of human ash to build from the deforming light of our great cities an empire of celebrated image memorized forever; models and actors; the living and the dead. He did not care how many other kinds of media there were inside this life already competing for the cash sold on corners and packed onto plastic. Soon anyway he fell too into wreck of air of America like anybody would; I could not spare him; I didn’t want to. He was not really my father any more than where your eyes hit this silent sentence, the same way my mother mattered only long enough to push me out, then there was always this hidden air between us. From outside Gravey’s house at night alone through the beams of the house freckled with ancient aging I could still hear what went on inside: walls not walls but idols. Could hear Josh and some of the other kids we went to school with who had come too to be around Him laughing or saying something in pig latin or whatever or eating angel dust up through their eyes and sometimes there’d be louder noises from the machines that made the house live so much you couldn’t hear anybody else above the churning of the cooling of our bodies off and modems barfing back and forth at one another. Once inside the house again I remembered to try not to listen to the sound of the machines so long as all those others so I would be smarter when I got older and less hurt inside for certain whiles about the way things went on without me in the daily organism, though as that went on too I began to feel too I wasn’t changing and anyway the effect of our inbred-from-Adam-and-Eve origins were beginning more and more to make effect in all of us. Some days inside the house the days inside the house went on so long and still the digits on the machines’ clocks would not blink; I could feel inside me, as the time stayed like that sometimes for some great lengths, the old National Anthem squirting through my organs into the surrounding furniture and glass, sucked out of my teeth and face in all its daily iterations of ads and silent thinking and holy money, into the house where then the house would chew it up; soon each time the house would kill the Anthem into a silence longer than all my cells lined up one after another in a queue inside my wanting and that silence was the new Anthem and that was warm. As long as day went on in this way I could sleep there right inside my posture without feeling any older, weaker, guilty. Eventually I would always wake up back inside the mirror room; there I could see myself standing beside me and this was very beautiful, and I remembered my body, what it wanted me to bring it. Being with my me’s long teeth made me less timid around the larger, higher boys and among the general community of people. One night I remember now I said some dark words to my father through a ham radio I found underneath my bed, its countless knobs marked with foreign symbols: this speaking through the wire would be the last tongues the we of me and Dad did to one another in America. I knew my dad’s destruction need not be by my own hand, as had my mother’s giving birth; there were so many other people past the mirrors; there was He in each of them, and so in his spirit each as much the father and mother of any other person ever as mine, and I too was their parent and always had been. In further time the room alone became my room; I did not have to ask, though often I might share the space with one or several others of us, which in the dark all looked like more of me. Some nights like these I would wake up and could not force my arms to move at all again for all the others we’d packed in. I’d find there hung above me so many of me I could no longer see the mirrors at all, and therefore the walls beneath them. Sometimes all I saw were all my eyes, through which I often found I felt if I could bring myself to press my own eye against my eye again, I could see far beyond this space, down a long glass into somewhere very gone and going further under each time my own sight inside me buckled into black, because it is not time to speak of that yet.