Blake Butler - Three Hundred Million - A Novel

Name withheld: I’m not a police officer, but I have known E. N. for many years, and though I never actually became well acquainted with his wife, B., I find it extremely disturbing that Flood is talking about her as if he had been involved in her death. B. passed from cancer at the age of thirty-one. Reading all of this makes me feel very sorry for E. N., and for the stress he has been under with his work. I hope he can find it in him to regain focus, happiness, and a spiritual consolation, in whatever form for him that could take. I will keep both him and B., and any other here considered really, in my and my family’s prayers .

FLOOD: The night is black around me. I can’t stop my arm from writing sometimes. I try to think of anything else at all, beyond the bodies. I turn on the TV and I see him. I open a book to read any other kind of sentence and I find the books I’ve owned for years unread all blank, or I find words about me written in them, in someone else’s hand. There is nothing I have ever loved more than my wife, however hard it was between us, between any humans, each owning our own selves .

Flood, the detective, is American as a strip mall; he is as American as fried rice in a Styrofoam container tossed into the street and run over by a car hiding a machine gun that will kill no one in its duration, but exists; he is a cop. He knows he is a Cop: this is one thing he will always remember. He believes being a cop can be cured with a bullet in the mouth, and he knows how to do it. In some of every day he can be happy, even in the shriveling skin of researched understanding. There is a white piano in the room where he was born. He has a tattoo over his heart of a word he made slamming his fingers down onto a keyboard to see what happened, asldihfiuywef80, except to him it means even less than that; his night is the whole night. He watches Hitchcock in reverse, on silent, filling in the words. He loves god. He does love god.

Though most days, at the moment, Flood can’t remember where he’s been. He moves because he moves, because in order to be anywhere he must be moving elsewhere or be about to, so that there will be something he can have, something he can breathe and eat up and shit out and walk with and work with and maybe if he’s lucky and not dead that he can wish for or rub against or dream to cover up the only dream he’s ever really had. In this way, Flood is anybody.

Part of Flood not being able to remember where he’s been without quite knowing that he does not remember, is that he can remember anything the way he wants and have it feel like if it had always been that way for his whole life; this causes in him hidden self-hate, hatred of the hidden field of real, which manifests in silent ways; it appears to him in silence during hours he might imagine himself a person in a bed just at the cusp of sleeping, or a person opening a book to lay among the light of a warm house and read. It infiltrates his every aspect.

He is reading now. Right now he is reading, Flood is. He does not know.

Flood has blood inside his hands. When blood touches his hands outside his hands, this makes him remember even less.

Flood has killed at least eleven persons in the line of duty, as far as he remembers, though some nights he believes this happened only in his sleep: not even as a personal distortion, but in the way reality manifests itself outside itself while being called fantasy or allegory, as in the practice of the active life of books, in the way that any book forever is a person, acting.

Soon he will kill again.

SMITH: I have taken Detective Flood off the Gravey investigation until further notice .

FLOOD: No you haven’t, “SMITH.” No you couldn’t .

In mirror to the killed bodies in the house below the house, aboveground in the light, hundreds of living bodies aggregate around the center where Gravey’s person has been stored. There are several teeming factions: first, those grieving for the dead, sets of blood-linked sons and daughters, wives and husbands and lovers; the friends or wedded blood of these; and those who have felt the same lurch of nowhere run through their existence. These bodies congregate around the seasoned surface of the precinct/prison holding icons of the murdered, raising fists and lungs, screaming the word; they speak in a new Depression Language wrought from bull fury for what has been inflicted in the name of some black lord, this motherfucking bastard murder bitch fuck killer who stole our child who stole my love, the treble of their grief packed into lung quiver and burst noise rendered in old throes. Images of Gravey become burned under great sunlight making more heat making ash that falls and sends off strewn upon the earth. On unpadded knees they utter wishes for forgiveness or destruction or the twain of two in retribution on this unwanted and resounding human conflagration that has ripped into their lives. They know they will now no longer now remember how to laugh; inside the body they would have become or been again in coming years there is now no cord to that silk feeling; in its place now is only mud.

The second faction of the gathered wear the emblem of Gravey in His name. They operate a mass movement in the light of Him to drink the face out of the news and wear the unseen mask of him among the world, wrought up in some ecstasy of reality-entertainment despite having almost no word in their consumption to denote the moniker’s beliefs. These are people wide open all for something ever, waiting, their flesh hungry for any light; they simply want. They chant his name and wish his presence like in a film inside a home; these ways not history or act, but the present, in which we may take part. In this way Gravey’s authority replicates outside him without the requirement of his action, under the guise of history. Copy killers in the next weeks will lift the count of dead by handfuls in stiff gestures wishing to begin again; grown men rising to explode themselves in dark theaters or on the corner of a turf in the name of being done; rashes of abductions and consumptions, but that the papers and the screens and machines have manifested as a cause. In the streets there appear whole mirrors laid onto surfaces of all sorts, in the image of the Black House; the reflective panels are laid against the cars or trees surrounding their small conduit of land, shining fields of daylight into the light back at itself, showering the architecture and the ground before it at length with panels of lightning-organed hue like fattened fingers or distorted hexagons of simple madness, until the shapes are smashed by thrown rocks at the hands of the grieving or kicked down by the braver of these lost in gross mourning made into cruder engines of themselves. The glass rattle and rip of cracking flatness laces the human air with something shrieking, clocks and hammers in the hour of no night.

The congregations lather. The name of god becomes invoked. The name of another god becomes invoked. People curl their fingers into fists and fuck the fuck out of the air, swinging harder and not laughing toward the body of another baring toward the sky their burning wrists. We seethe.

Inside, Gravey is laying facedown on the earth.

The bodies couple in their anger, begetting motion, bone on bone. Where skin hits skin a sound is made. The sound rises into the nothing forming a new other shadow self that will follow them unnoticed for the remainder of their lives. Each of these selves created in this hour is only one of many they have made, surrounded in and on each of us as yet unslaughtered, skulking in the coming rooms where we will eat and fuck and ash and laugh and touch the machines and wait for day again and wait for night again in turns and handle cream and make a loved one love us less or love us more for certain hours, though ever knowing love is not a thing that shifts despite the earth, despite complex wantings and form of bodies aging and how another can betray and mistake the act of love for anything beneath it or against it like an arm. What I mean is, these people come to blows in the name of the name of Darrel who was not a life at all as yet to them beyond the word, and many received bruises that then will sink into their body before they are arrested or firmly told to go, such emphasis frequently depending on the nature of their cooperation, with more empathetic graces given in most cases to those who have lost someone who’d been eaten alive or not alive, though in other cases, depending on the actor in the authority, sometimes the better graces go to those in worship of this lone man from the Black House — though, in most such cases, the officers do not realize their bias, however wrecked or graceful, which may or may be a function of the actual power of the spirit of Gravey’s rising but may be just a ruined thing about some humans turning bluely in the extending stench of what will one day be remembered outside of all minds as the Organizing Wind.