Blake Butler - Three Hundred Million - A Novel

Still a third faction of the public stands in relative unabashment watching the disorder and the building seated at its center as if from it somewhere might rise a conflagration of firework or other boom, a thing they might remember having seen regardless, even in the early stroke of evening the sun’s preemptive cloaking of this earth in a low darkness held off by pretend light as our star leaves again and does not return for longer this day than any day in the whole year, or any year before this or thereafter, for what reason I do not know — as I am angry too and tired and have all this time forward found no rest.

DETECTIVE F. N. DOOLE: Which kind of onlooker are you?

This room is small. This room of air around him, around Gravey, holding other bodies through the walls, making a room inside the rooms where Gravey, inside his body, sees the face of the someone larger than him walking on false water in the grain of the TV. The face begins far at a distance on a field set back in the set, some kind of tone of color exaggerated from its form like magma. The duration of its approach to Gravey feels immense, the distance of dozens of lifetimes passing in what could only be an instant of the real — without inhale, between two heartbeats. The head of Darrel rises in the color, growing by lengths to match each dimension of the innards of his head in mirror, a mute impression of himself. The color of the red pulls hard up in the mesh of Gravey’s head: the index of the memory of the House, the Grave, the Spirit, the flesh of the dead— Which hour is this now, pressing against me? he hears himself ask inside the wave of self where the meat comes crumpled soft around the mushing forward of the Head. His hands against his chest outside the skull of his own head inside the auditorium of his second senses seem suddenly heavy, sinking flat into his fat. They grip there in the tissue about his chest a second layer of remembering, unto a realm of self the corridors of aesthetic longing in him had slurred to stutter: his growing older in a room; his having spurted from the hole of someone in a white clod to walk into the other bodies and be named; the fuckmove of flagellum into squirmy bulb inside another body, no longer living; the cracking thoughts of years of those who’d built him up from the moment of the spurt; the smoke and dark inhaled by father and by mother, two minor beings he can’t recall beyond those monikers, made aged; before them, too, some cloud of hybrid netting that squirreled around all eras. Then the Head is only inches from him, its electronic skin writhing and transmitting, spooling outward in the fire of the minute to wrap around them both, enslaving Gravey’s mind into the image of the Future Head of the One We All Must Become. Where Gravey’s mouth sits so sits Darrel’s, that name now nothing, male and female, cold and dry. Gravey, on his back cannot stand up under the pressure. Each instant kissed behind his eyes is solidified in choiceless faith, as from the black mouth of their locations touching through the wires, the voice between them speaks: Rise, take up your Jerusalem, for if you retain the sins of any, truly, all sins will trespass a heaven’s joy. Therefore I tell you, be forgiven the sons of Heavenly Father, every sin and blasphemy made of man ; and on the air the words are writ in puffy flesh swimming pinkish from the red of Gravey’s chest; and on the air the words slid soft and spread between the cells of cells to elevate the room alive, hotter than three hundred million ovens as the silence of the spacing between language slid electric tongue from tongue along the air to shatter there where it touched, and spreading on the air now fully like lotion on a baby’s ass big as America.

BLOUNT: I had to tell Detective Flood to stop sending me his papers. It was literally becoming an almost daily thing, him coming by my office with more notes that he required my review of, asking for notes, calling me, calling. I hated to have to go to Smith about him, as I knew he was going through some real trouble, but I felt I had no choice, though by this point it was already a much larger problem than I realized .

Multiple bodies employed in the incarceration proceedings thus far toward Gravey within hours kill themselves. One man assigned outside the door where Gravey sleeps or does not sleep nights gets off duty at the crack of dawn having stood parallel to the wall between them for most of seven hours, walks to his car, unlocks the door, enters through the driver’s side seat, slides across the leather into the passenger side, straps on his seatbelt, takes out his service revolver, puts it in his mouth, and shoots his body dead. His blood writes a sentence on the side window that by the time he is discovered will have slicked its way away.

The head of service in the cafeteria where Gravey has still been refusing consumption, during the stretch of planning hours over which she would have planned the course of action of the next eight weeks of meals, locks herself in the meat freezer then takes a paring knife and filets the length of both her arms. Many hours pass before her meat is found among the other meat to be served to the imprisoned on plastic trays, which now, contaminated, must instead be buried in the ground, as must be the chef. Her blood too, from her arms into the meat locker, writes the sentence.

Three to eight further members of the law enforcement network working out of the building do not appear at work over the coming week; each is found in his or her apartment in various states of decomposition with necks broke by ropes or having jumped from something high and or affixed in the bowels with chemicals or otherwise in forms just like the first two self-murders previously performed as if in want to become like those who’d been undone already and would be undone again. Behind the mirrors in these houses a small adornment to the hidden plaster, the marking of a symbol, may or may not have been made, and none will know.

For each office dispatched in this new method a new body for the office moves into its place. The bodies populate the system, and proceed. Between them moves a changing language.

FLOOD: As the human body decomposes it loses two degrees of heat in the first hour, then one degree of heat each hour held thereafter until it meets the temperature of its surroundings. Brain cells are dead within the first seven minutes. In the first thirty hours after death flies lay eggs in the body, and maggots appear in the flesh; production of ammonia begins in the lungs and seeps out through the nostrils and the mouth; ammonia is lighter than surrounding air, and so diffuses quickly; over time, production slows. Within hours, the deceased body begins to produce heavier amines among the deadened flesh, including putrescine (1,4-diaminobutane), and cadaverine (1,5-diaminopentane), and other iterations of the name. The decomposing tissues issue gas including hydrogen sulfide and methane; the skin blisters and turns blue; the abdomen swells; the tongue may protrude; a fluid ejects from the lungs; this happens at half speed when under water or one-quarter speed when underground. During the first year, a deceased human’s bones will slowly bleach and grow with mold; over the first decade the bones develop larger fault lines. Without animals to deconstruct the body, teeth, nails, and hair become detached from the flesh in a few weeks; within a month the flesh is mostly liquid, cavities bursting; the uterus and prostate may last several months .

Flood stands alone in the mirrored room below the house, the room left marked as the city of Sod. He has come in plainclothes, his badge removed and left inside a black bag in his bedroom. He has walked back to the Scene of the Crime(s), at least the end point of them, at least the ones so far discovered. The house has been photographed and notated and marked off from the remainder of the world in totality now; no one wishes to return but him.