Blake Butler - Three Hundred Million - A Novel

FLOOD: It was actually raining the day our squad went in for him, into the Black House. Raining so hard it seemed like the sky had been ripped off and behind it all that blue up there had always been a liquid. It rained like it didn’t want for you to walk. And warm. So warm. The warmest rain I can remember. I recall the sun was out under the storming, a summer color. It seemed like it would go on like that forever until it didn’t .

The many eyes became one eye, an eye set in a head, set in the horizon of the house. The eye was looking down into me. It had a pupil in the color of our floor, which was as well my color, which meant the eye had always been. It was just above me: a whole other sort of surface pressed against the public. It had no lid and didn’t stutter. Behind the eye the boys were growing. Their sex organs plugged into the eye on its far side and lit it alive with a growing light that filtered with their eggs and sperms. The eye began to spurt. It gushed out from it a string of drumheads and guitar strings and stripping throats and thumbskin. The mash fell down upon me and rolled me in a coat of newer silence. Where I could see now too around the house the outside was so near there was none of it left. The walls between the outside began peeling with all bloomed layers bent toward me. The house around the eye pulled inward and coated the walls with black again and again over anything to make it small while expressly, from the inverse, my skin continued to turn hard and fat. Wrinkle mass and all my anger trembled in me as I grew and rushed to meet the house as it came nearer, surrounding what of me remained. With this wish, the song knew nothing. It was nothing: it held no sound. It sung nothing. It had, at last, begun to have been always. In my skin my skin was singing nothing with it, not nothing, no new thought. This was the absolute silence of us. The lost words finally matching each in full the only one I’d ever really imagined. No longer only any brain lined by itself. No longer me again alone in me. All puzzles laughing in their fixtures. The blacking house unwound, a mouth for the breadth of us, alive. The eye was just against me. I was around the eye.

Name withheld: “Oh, I was waking. You were waking. Even as it seemed the end of the beginning, the moon was wrapped in all her skins when she combined inside the mind of all the air ever around us, sounded around us, wound around us.”

FLOOD: [ stricken from record ]

I’m wearing white. I’m wearing clean beekeeper veils. I’m sewn in the color of me sunburned aged seven scared of holes slit in the sand with my head under my mother’s shirt to keep the flies off of my head. I’m wearing neon yellow. I’m wearing someone. I’m walking through a prism gorge, cut so deep along the bottom of the skull I one year found underneath a rosebush outside the food court at the mall. I’m wearing wish robes. I’m walking with the trowel. I’m looking for a spot left loose enough in a pasture to dig myself an imprint wide as me but all the ground is foil. When I listen I hear men dividing into futures, into sternums, into more of now than I can stand to force to rest, so I do not listen until there’s nothing else about me, which is always, which is how I learned to write.

Gretch Enrique Nathaniel Gravey is apprehended by authorities in on August 19, 2 at 7:15 A.M. He is found facedown in the smallest room of his seven-room ranch-style home with legs bound at the ankle by a length of electrical wire, apparently administered by his own hands.

He is unresponsive to officers’ commands or to the touch.

When lifted from the ground his eyes remain open in his head, unblinking even to the sound of the canines, the men.

The light inside the room is strong. It blinds each new being at their admittance, bodies shielding eyes and swinging arms until the space has been secured.

Gravey is dressed in a white gownlike shift affixed with reflective medallions that are each roughly the size of an eye and refract light in great glare. No underwear, no ornaments.

His hair has been shorn sloppily, leaving chunks and widths around his ears and the back of his head, an amber lob of curls the color of beer.

An open wound cut on his left breast appears to have been also self-administered, though not deep enough to require stitching; his wet blood has soaked a small head-sized oval parallel to where he lies; from the pool, traced by finger, the word OURS appears writ in the ink of blood along the mirror-covered carpet.

Questions and actions delivered to the suspect do not seem to occur to him as sound; he does not flinch or turn toward the shouting, the splinter of their entrance, canines barking, the commands.

The meat around his eyes seems to be caving, black and ashy.

There are no other living persons apparent in the house.

Gravey is unbound, cuffed, and taken to a local precinct to be booked, processed, and held.

His eyes in motion do not open, though he is breathing.

He does not speak.

FLOOD: The above and the following are my ongoing log of the time following Gravey’s arrest, and the ongoing investigation, over which I have been appointed lead. I have given electronic access to specific colleagues assisting in the case for their perusal and review .

SERGEANT R. SMITH: These notes were discovered in Flood’s shared files online sometime shortly after he disappeared. Several of the quoted sources claim to have not written what they are said to have written. I myself remain uncertain .

The front foyer of the mouth of the entrance to Gravey’s home is caked up with shit nearly a foot high; human shit, packed in tightly to the face of the door, which has been barricaded and blocked over with a paneled bureau full in each drawer with ash. Testing reveals the ash is burnt paper; among the powder, lodged, the leather spines of books, photographs overexposed to blotchy prisms, fingernail clippings, mounds of rotting cat-food-grade meat, plastic jewels.

The same ash found in the drawers is found in larger quantity in a small den down the hall, along with the metal rims and scorched remainders of a drum kit, bass guitar and amplifier, small public address system with corresponding speakers, and fourteen seven-string guitars all of the same make, each variously destroyed by flame to disuse but still recognizable as instruments.

A small sheet-stand holds up an empty tabbing book, which on some pages has been rendered with whole glyphs of blackened scribble, matching the front color of the house.

Inside the house is very warm, caused in part under the concentration of the sun’s heat on the black paint even-handedly applied to the north, east, and south faces of the home. Only the west face remains its original cream-tan, the same shade of roughly one in four houses in the neighborhood.

The lawns of both houses on either side of the Gravey homestead are overgrown high enough to nearly block the windows. Gravey’s lawn is dead, a radial of whites and yellows like the skin of a giraffe. An ant bed in the side yard of the unpainted side of the building is roughly the size of a very large sandbox, pearling in sunlight, though there are no ants among the runnels to be found, their turreted bed evacuated.

The majority of the other rooms in the Gravey home are bare. Furniture, adornment, and objects have been removed or were never there. The walls are covered for the most part with lengths of mirror that seem to have been gathered from local dumps or flea markets or trash: platelets sized from that in a bathroom washstand down to the face of an armoire down to the eye-sized inner layers of a blush case or a locket have been affixed to the drywall with a putty adhesive that leaves the rooms smelling synthetic. Many mirrors have crisped to dark with more flame or cracked in spindles from impact with perhaps an elbow or a fist, or having been dropped or otherwise mishandled prior to their installation. The mirrors’ coverage is extensive, leaving mostly no inch of the prior wall’s faces uncovered; even the ceilings and in some rooms as well the floors receive a similar coverage treatment. In many places, too, the mirrors have been applied doubly or triply thick, sometimes to cover something ruptured. Large smudges dot many arm’s-length sections of the more central rooms’ mirrored dimension, rubbed with handprints, side prints, whiffs of sweat, and in some cases traces of lipsticked mouths, running saliva, feces, blood, or other internal and sometimes inhuman synthetic materials, all of it Gravey’s, incidentally or by cryptic, unnamed logic spasmodically applied.