Blake Butler - Three Hundred Million - A Novel

On the third day, at the station, a large blue box the size of Gravey arrives for Gravey. His name is swabbed onto the box in mirrors cut in shapes to form the letters of the phrase, which thus from certain angles seems to make other utterances, or colors. A series of special forces are dispatched to the delivery platform, where the box is inspected for explosives. X-ray scanners reveal that the box is empty. The men open the box. Along the inside of the box’s wall words are written in white ink, each letter large as someone’s head: This word occurs because of god . Inside the box unfolded one man, a senior officer, gets down on his knees; he does not know why. He had been an atheist for his entire life. He looks up at the other men surrounding as he makes a prayer shape with his hands, the other men watching him in confusion, reaching for some reason for their guns. The senior officer’s eyes stay open as he tastes his tongue begin to pray, in the language of the Computer. In the language, he is collapsed. Over the next six weeks, all dogs within a one-mile radius of the opening of the box will die; for many seconds each day leading up to those dispatchings there is a tone that makes the dogs lie down on the ground and shudder, feeling something in their throats.

On the fourth day, hundreds of letters arrive again in exactly the same quantity as the first day, one each from the same address that had been sent from before, though this time all of the pages inside the envelopes are blank. On the fifth day it occurs again; the same letters in the same erased condition. The letters, instead of being stored, are burned. The destroyed matter of the letters disseminates among the air; the ash is buried; the ash floods into the earth.

On the sixth day, a man rides a white horse into the station carrying a baby on his back. The baby has birthmarks in the shape of several symbols down his spine: CIRCLE SQUARE HEXAGON STAR TRIANGLE DIAMOND RING. The man is detained and questioned, fined for public disturbance, and eventually released. The child does not cry or speak a word inside the building, where Gravey is also awake, not speaking, though he is now no longer asleep.

The excavation of the bodies in the basement of the black house lasts several nights. The slough of curving flesh and popped-up organs smush together in the walls enframed in smarmy pockets that make it (the flesh) want to cling unto the house as if forever as if please no not me please this is all mine. Blood of many bodies mix: the cholera of its stank has peeled the room’s walls tarnished bruisy. Skin peeled off of torsos like white apples liquidated in the bloat of something else half-yellowed and grown cold and hardened into tiny temples and round baubles that crunch under the sole. Several dozen knives and steel-grade blenders, those are in here. Dice ’n’ chipchop. Fractal. Veins of what must be hundreds knit together no longer pumped. Time here seems to do nothing. Men armed for removal in neon suits with years of knowledge vomit inside the suits and fill the suits with their own bilge. These liquidated people, their bodies, already dried of wet they’d lived with and lived off of. A crust formed on the aggregation, not slippery or convulsive. It does not make sense, the lodes of colors. Up to their knees, the investigators count the eyeteeth and what they can of fingers. No one’s phone is ringing. Hammers, drill bits, mortar, blank. In silence there is the sound. Someone says, It must have taken this freak fucker Gravey hours on each inch of flesh in this whole house; with each word of the sentence the speaker speaks louder till he is screaming. The crushed human stuff does not vibrate. Soup of skull and dented throat and testes and the envelopes of hidden eggs. In the musk already grows a mold, popped with globed discolored pulpy mushrooms and spindles of expanded fat. All this that comes out of a person in becoming opened could never seem to all fit back in, the screamer screams down to a hoarse bark, then faints face-first into the soft. It is the first day of a new week.

FLOOD: [ stricken from record ]

No. No really. Not at all, thinks Detective E. N. Flood, man of the blue and badge. Here at the end of working hours he refuses to believe, or if not to not believe then to not let bloodcolor kill his head, or if not to not to kill his head, then to just be. In the room of the house where Flood sleeps at night, having seen the innards of the room where the peoples’ bodies fountained soft, a splay of pygmy organs nuzzled in puzzled correction in their mortal furor underground, the wet of the bodies is only all one black unfurlment in his mind, one he has seen before in fragmented iteration though here in seeing it is all arrived; it is as if all the blood from all the prior hours seen has landed again in the belly of the day. Flood laughs in silence toward the picture window above his bed that he now covers in the light of the new morning with thicker sheets that show only faint defeats of their former colors, as it is the presence of those colors, he’s determined, that keeps him not only sleepless, but wakeless to alarms, sleeping often hours through the machine of the body’s resting and on into long day. Had he been this way years before he would be shiftless, under water, cooking grease food in traps late hours unto pockets dripped with rats, or selling gas or cakes or glass to fucks in cities, or, or, or, or, or, or. Even now, with colors covered, often he cannot force himself inside his half-wake to rise rightly despite even some screaming, as on the night his prior home had burned thick to the ground — the cream of what he’d been rendered ash and pocked in puzzles with no insurance that month after years of having paid into the coffers of other men. He sleeps in his police suit now. He sleeps and rises in the office regularly, so that there are guns nearby his sleeping self he might rise and hold, might aim, or else someone might use those guns to wake him up if they needed, if they could not shake him from his progressively corroding dream. In the pocket of sleep Flood can often see himself from above himself there sleeping, in what should be the calmest moments, but are instead often a long extending gnash. Years inside sleep pass some nights watching his whole body go on as if crumbling from the inside curled underneath his desk with paper as a blanket and a pillow and the arms of a wife who no longer will appear. Yes, he’d loved someone some years some way back before he was him now and can’t remember anything about her but her teeth, which he now feels having grown in behind his own teeth, eating what he eats before he eats. Her name. Her name. Hers, he swears, was not one of the bodies in Gravey’s makeshift mausoleum, he remembers. She could not be. She’s been so gone, before all this. She was already always dead, the gun pulled in the night there right beside him and placed to take her spit and soiled blood out of her head onto the concrete for the money neither of them had — all of that had happened years before, in a season of long black, one that still rolls in his surfaces of layers laughing, rolling mental maggots in his knees and ass and arms, his sperm a bakery of killed decisions made by doing nothing in the presence of all potential motion and this vast lattice of human holes, his guilt of all he has and had not done — but all of this regardless of its logic and false healed remembrance in his internal history does not relegate the vision in his mind of her body twisted up in all that murdered gray and pink, crushed with arms and eyes removed into human putty and still there watching as he’d at last come down to find her in the flush of it again too late, which is why he’d become a policefuck in the first place, her there lapped again and ruined again before him in his vision (which is all real) transfixed onto a surface of the earth not in his arms and having never made her understand the form of love or even magic fucking or even comfort of the dollar or some lob or lobe or even puppet understanding of a god, a place to surface into after having been dismantled while he inside him and with no name of her walks on. He has failed her again. He has failed her. Every body belongs to her. Every murder is her murder. He cannot help but hearing in the space inside him where he wants to say her name replaced with a widening and hellish silence that’d seem to exude out of the skin along the back of Gravey’s head, Gravey whom he’d only glimpsed for only one clipped instant in the hour of the body through the tiny window of the holding cell, the killer’s form facing away, his face remaining in a swathe of memoryblank like all the other unnamed hours while all conscious he holds haunted, though which here, inside his body on the cusp of sleep and waking, holds the form of all he sees: wormed black curls of greasy nit hair and the weird ridge of scar along the killer’s nape, the unmuscled scape peels that form the back mask of Gravey’s earlobes and the flesh connecting sound to funnel down into his brain, to hear; a skull that turns to face him each instant, just before rising, slowly, the flesh rolling like a globe toward the lens of who he is, to scream out from its face the color of the air the room breathes in around him as he now, Flood, again, inside himself, is there.