Blake Butler - Three Hundred Million - A Novel

Flood squats to square down in the alcove, touching at the ground as a piano underneath him, the glass the scattered keys, careful not to cut himself again on the edgework, and still bleeding. He finds that when he speaks aloud no sound comes out beyond what seems just the inside of his head. He says his name; it is his name, only inside him. He cannot remember anyway it being different from this before.

This day is any day. The floor inside the subchamber, where it’s not glowing, is the color of his skin. It has a softness and quiet pliancy, a textured gruff. The glass bits on the surface from where he broke the mirrors seem to stick and cause no rupture in the smooth. Flood’s fingers tickle at the rubbish. He hears a tone snake down his spine. His posture loosens with warmth and sends a shimmer of clear liquid down his downturned sternum, to the head where days on days have hid and taken hold. He can hardly see beyond him. The liquid in the head seems suddenly to widen, casting in his vision, sudden memory:

him, Flood, nine, lost in a game in the white woods behind his grandparents’ home under a white sky, having fallen in a forest with mud up to his neck and in his teeth and hair and face, the muck he cannot make his tongue lurch past to scream for someone there inside the woods to come out of hiding, really, and pick him up, clean him up, lift up his body, take him from the night, though everyone is out there, everybody, where;

him, Flood, eleven, wrapped in a blanket, unable at all to breathe in, the white slick fabric hot and hard against him so close it appears black and seems to leak into his flesh, choking back up in the manner of a second skin around him, lurching down his throat to balloon outer, inward, snaking, coloring him in, the object like any object like a lining pulled out from his flesh and formed into a thing that he could touch then from the outside only and pretend to have never seen; thus is the nature of all objects, to any person, all of them, ours, displaced, undead;

him, Flood, of no age he can remember, upside down against an unseen surface in the air above his bed in his old home, flattened and pressed against it for such long time feeling like one instant that the whole world seems to hold, cogs of time aroused enough to keep him awake and out of resting but not aroused enough to let him move;

him, Flood, this morning, having stood up so fast that the blood rushed from his head, his limbs and balls and back and lungs thereafter weighing flushed out and dry light as a vacuum, as has been the way so many days, ambulating soft around the house and outside from room to room and space to space to face all feeling nothing where the blood was while still feeling air and motion on the outside of his skin, each day and all today in a kind of chosen bloodless automation, which some days is all that keeps him moving forward without thinking, even knowing that he knows, which as he thinks of here in this odd-lit room of this death home, if only to negate him, erupts the feeling of all that old blood suddenly flooding from a popping sound sent in his head, the blood all there at once rushing hot and fast from his skull’s orb of chortled memory and pregnant unnamed wishing back into him all at once with perfect frenzy, rain on rain, shelving colors in his vision, 3-D, 4-D, and again he pukes.

The vomit, made of liquid — water, coffee, orange juice, his own spit — reflects the cribbed in light a savage orange; it coats some shards, a little floor space, and flutters at his hands, while with his hands Flood stirs the slight air dying in the impression for some hold: a width to grip his chest with, a stirrup for his hands. He falls forward into the hidden area, in a way of falling that seems slower than it should be, in such a way it seems he can see himself from there above him again falling with his organs and his limbs, again becoming horizontal.

Here is Flood facefirst and chin down in the box. Flood feels flooded, ripe with windows being opened in his sternum and his ass. He could go to sleep here. He could sleep here. The lid above him, yes, could be replaced. Could be filled in with him into the house here. He cannot think what to do about the box or being in it or how to get out or to go, or what should happen, who should know this, if there is something else he needs to do, if there is ever any hour he is someone in his body, if his body is a wall.

A large lapse, like time defining zero, passes through him while he stares into the day on pause, unpaused. The day makes memory, mutation, affixing there to nodules of the memory regardless of their chronology. Each new instant, as it wishes, inside his head, may kiss each other, all. And the inhale of the next one, in the box.

Up close, along the low lining of the second floor right before his eyes, Flood reads a string of words printed faint into the surface, a message written there in tiny print and such slight indention, it is almost not there in the room at all, as if for him alone and him forever. The words scroll into him cleanly:

in god our blood the word of blood in god the name of god in god the name of god

The last word, god , in its last reading, seems, against the grain of Flood’s right eye to twinkle, turning its letters over and over on themselves as he absorbs them: god, sod, gap, dog, doo, gun, sun, goo, gad. The shiver of the shifting language curdles in his mind, the words gummed up against the shelves of words already waiting in the memory of books and days and years, folded into any thought whatsoever, like this sentence, like this urge. As well, the sentence set there on the box face begins spinning, shifting through new letters, compressing the language:

with you were with me wished I was you and you were I which wished not known

god wished if you if we wishing where wish we were we where cuz god

why cuz I would wish you wished beside me now always and again

what now exactly now none nothing in the city of our Sod

please help me help we help we please

The words burn and blink inside the house like countless tiny screaming people; they become again inside the words not the words they’d been before then. The floor down here is covered with sentences all over it, every inch shifting to become central as he looks.

With his middle finger Flood reaches up along the surface to rub its meat on the letters of the words as he takes each in, to trick their rhythm into holding still. He rubs along the letters while they grow warm with him. The words fold fast and slow and soft in lines: each sentence shrinking in silent compilation underneath the heat and presence of his going at it, like any hour any day, words disappearing into words:

Which which why now god now why now god now why now cuz

How help please cuz I am was nothing we were you were

Want if want was if god if

If I see I

Be I

Six smearing into five. Five into four and there again all smearing, like smells absorbing smells. Any word or letter looked at too long rolls and mutates, changing also where inside his brain he felt he knew what the word meant, the memory of one’s memory gaining blowholes, slaved erasures. As each sentence disappears, there is no floor where it had been written on it.

Flood blinks.

Flood hears the sound of all the houses filling up with blood throughout the world.

Flood has no idea how long he’s been rubbing at the new flat floor beneath him, now double-fingered, like a woman masturbating, and drooling from the mouth. Between the dry on the wall where words were, around his pads there’s something sizzling, a rising cream pushed through the walls through where there’d been the row of holes of changing letters. In the mass of glow above him he can’t see where he’d fallen through the mirrors, up into the old room, where all those bodies had been stored; he can’t see where the edges of the newer room around him begin or end, in such a way that it seems like the air is all just walls around him, with the language, deeper and deeper, disappearing as he rubs.