Blake Butler: Three Hundred Million: A Novel

ADAM A., age 17: “I uh didn’t know about Gravey’s parents. Or like I didn’t meet them. Sometimes he said he kept his mother in a glass cage in his brain and fed her money. He would have me pet him on the skull. He was exceptionally affectionate. He was nice to be with, even if he was always really fucked up it seemed like though I never saw him eat pills or snort or smoke or whatever. I don’t know why he’s talking like he’s not him, though he was always going on about how we were all made of the same person, or soon we would be, which is why we had to kill them, all of them. I do know there was no one else that was allowed to sleep in the mirror room with him, before the other rooms got mirrors anyway, because that was Gravey’s room, though sometimes he’d let you go in there with him and whatever, though like of course when he was done you had to get out. I don’t remember ever seeing anybody staying the whole night in there but maybe I just didn’t ever see it. Sometimes he like would go in the room and lock it and not come out for a long time and that was fine because we knew where he kept some of his shit and there was always more there even though I don’t think I saw him leave the house. Like any family, I only know as much as anyone would show me.”

Everyone young that I could remember having been around before in rooms outside the house inside that false year, we hung out where Gravey lived without seeming beginning and without end. It came to be our days and evenings, small countless hours slipped under sweat and what the hell. I was still working up the ways within me I could find a way out of this body and into the next one, and I still had no idea, beyond how when my arms or face would go to sleep before my brain I’d feel this shaking, this speaking in me, like something fumbling through my cells. During this era, Gravey wore his white hair like a robe a lot, wrapped around his fangled body with the weird bruises at his softer points such as his calves and pits and chin, as the networking womb inside him widened. He never said a word. If he had any of what was going on between us, he smeared it in him with more smoke. Around him I felt older faster. I began to come around as who I was more. I put a picture of my dad I’d burnt the paper mouth off of with a blunt butt underneath my special mattress, which, when I was not there, other kids would use to be me too. Sometimes someone might come and stand above or lie beside me in the long haze of anywhere around us. I did not stop them. I did not feel nothing. Some nights the house would shake like a bead inside a baby rattle in another home. Other nights it felt as if there were no floors, and everyone kept just falling at the same rate through the same air with the lights out and the moths collecting on the eaves. We were not aging. In Gravey’s house surrounded we listened to his recording of himself or someone else playing the drums: long looping thud of arrhythmic kick and floor tom stuttered like shitty pasta. Other tapes were only loops of long whats of muffling and chime beat, which reminded me of electronics being pulled apart by time. Gravey in the sound would turn to stone. His face hated itself. In some other era he, I think, Gravey, had been attractive; now he seemed unto himself alone, destroyed, a body walking around in the light of what he’d needed and not gotten like anybody else, waiting for something to blot him out or at least say his name. The growing kids who came around to be around Gravey daily rotated through a central corridor of spines, or I was unlearning how to recognize who. Me and Josh were the smaller of the standards. Some nights I knew no one’s face. In my head I would refer to them by something wrong about them with their bodies, like Eternal Shithead or the Wolf Who Bleats Ash or simply You. Soon even that would fall away inside another kind of speech. Their faces would become mounds of hell and skin all run together in all our memories at once, even just seconds after having seen. No one knew me either. Often we boys each named and nameless all ended up faceup on the floor all bone, as the pills Gravey began to get from someone out there on the earth would make your body feel like it’d turned inside itself to stone too and shit upon you so hard that what our blood really awaited soon awoke.

PETER S., age 15: “The most people I ever saw come over at once was like five. Mostly Gravey didn’t like a lot of people in the house until he started whatever. Everybody around school was talking about wanting to go to Gravey’s since they could get fucked up there, to the point that I think he started being scared that someone was going to find out he was hanging out with all those kids and like what so he told us to shut the fuck up. All the music he ever played us that he had made when he was our age or whatever really sucked.”

Then oh hey yeah one night at Gravey’s we, I mean us people, guys or whoever, we were floating inside the house again like ever and the bubbles in my brain became a phone. I picked up the phone inside my skull and heard someone at the far end screaming in a slow striation, syllables splashing at my face. As I learned to listen harder I could make out little bits of what it was, and though the language wasn’t mine quite, I learned to separate the sound that up till then had been my name inside me. The name no longer sounded like my name. Other guys inside the house around me not inside the phone were also screaming around the sound of the screaming coming through me in the phone, though these bodies were screaming at each other, swimming limbs and prodding sockets. The walls rammed in around me seemed higher than they had been before right now. The phone cord curled in my head meat made dizzy music with my blood in fury. I couldn’t hear the voice. I couldn’t hear Him; I heard me capitalize that pronoun in my aorta. I went in the mirror closet and closed the door with me there swimming in black fabric with the lights off. It smelled like going to the dentist. My hands were nothing. Inside it I could hear. This was the first time I heard Darrel. I heard Darrel tell me his name was Darrel. The mirror room closed around me closer even then. I knew right away he did not need me but I needed him. I could no longer find the door. Why Darrel, I said, what is a Darrel, why not another name, and I felt the receiver holes press through the back side of my skull, making little stirrups for the Listening. The syllables were curls, clenching licelike in my shape. Darrel said some of the things he had already said again. He gave his location in the house in a part of the house I had never been in and did not believe was in the house at all. Darrel told me he had lived inside the house as long as houses had been around and even longer than that. Then Darrel told me to kill Gravey. Darrel said I would understand why later maybe I had to do this and it didn’t matter if I did or didn’t, because by the time anybody else who could do anything to stop me knew about it it would be over and done with most exactly unremembered and this was the nature of the disembodiment of passion. Darrel’s forehead was so large, and the tongue inside it whorled; I could hear him right beside me in seven voices all the same voice everlasting. Through the script I heard the wail of home trying also to come into the room and stop the word and be between us, slurring my sternum: I heard Josh laughing, Gravey laughing, someone someone someone someone else. How will I kill Gravey, I asked Darrel, in my inside-voice, and now inside the phone inside me Darrel too began to laugh throughout the house’s hidden laughter saved like the maker’s breath inside a stick of butter. Darrel’s brand of laughing made me go goo-juiced and feel weirdo; it combed my hair and I was clean. Darrel said then that I would kill Gravey over time. He said that he would help me with this part, because we were married. He said I was married unto him; in the black book of years and sermons we had been written. He said once Gravey was dead we would begin. He said I was to enter Gravey once I had killed him and wear the body like our body and then the next phase could occur. He said we had time because time was coming and uncoming, because all of this had already happened and was happening right now, and would happen again in the near future. He said don’t you remember. He slammed the phone down in my head; it shattered hard straight through my neck into my lungs into my belly, making red sleeves on my reams of vision, which when I shook my head still stayed. There with the voice still there inside me after, my teeth felt colder than my jaw and I was laughing in the sound of Darrel’s laughing like I had always been and always would again all through my chest filled with the slowlight and I knew what I would be and then I instantly forgot. I felt along the closet for the knob and felt a wet thing surrounded by dark hair. In the dark I could not see my arms or anyone. This was our new daylight.