Blake Butler - Three Hundred Million - A Novel

One might find held in the white a field of color secreted in the blank’s breadth pushed way down into the field, such that as one moves against it nearer still inside the seeing one might find how one can feel or seem or be as if he or she has shifted somehow from being surrounded by the room’s walls now into the color. One might look back from where one is now and find his or her own body watching, eyes wide open loosely as if drugged, looking even bored inside his or her life spent staring head-on into the white where his or her own self sits seeing from inside the white as if not even seeing his or her self. One might go even further than even that then, in the white of fields of days of years inside the tape.

Turning back away then from where the self of flesh was into the shaping of the film, one might loosen sight so deeply in the white of such film seeing that beyond the cusp of where one had seen one’s self last the space might slur; one might, inside the silence of the white, then disappear there into a kind of color not even color hidden in the white, but many colors crammed in colors, crammed in crams, made of the mute, a set of space so trapped or dry or sewn up from the seeing of the body that once one sees inside the self released, one cannot remember what air is or what time is, there, and in this seeing in the white so deep in colors a sound emerges, a tone so seized and gone it has no tone at all, has nothing but its own presence, which once acknowledged, might expand.

In the minute of the taking of the color under the color hid inside the screen, one might no longer recall how to get back to where the self was there beforehand, prior to this, in the body, nor might one want to or even remember what it would feel like to want to, to feel anything beyond here, absent from the names of names of days. One might not remember one had been ever anywhere but where one is now, flooding, flooded, for forever, wrapped and lifted in the white that bloats still deeper dry inside itself. Perhaps there never even was any other moment, or ever will be, outside of this one, out of this long and lengthless void of breadth, even as outside the color, the body watching or not watching, the body goes on in its war. There might never have been or will be any instance of the self or selves beyond the color, the end of color, white. One might live on only ever now inside the idea of itself. One might become nothing but the absence of the presence it had never fully even been before then. In the fact of disappearance, one might now actually exist.

MARY RUTHERFORD, MD: Pardon my late entry into this notation, as I have just been given access to these files as a result of my psychiatric examination of Detective Flood, but what I am most concerned by is the complete lack of comment regarding Flood’s investigation of the “Gretch Gravey” character? I know that not all police operations are made public, and even medical doctors involved with officials under duress in the line of duty are often kept out of the more gory or legal details of a case, but considering the apparent attention surrounding this particular case as described by Flood, and in my understanding of his current involvements, I wonder why no one has mentioned that this case does not seem to exist. I can find no evidence in reports personal or private at my level of access to the investigation or holding of a suspect by the name Gravey or the acts attributed to him above. Flood’s growing mania for what seems to me a potentially fabricated line of investigation wherein several dozen women have been brutally murdered and had their flesh eaten, and the subsequent lack of attending to said fabrication’s presence in the mind of an officer of the law, is baffling, sad, disturbing, and problematic in ways we have as yet not begun to scrape the face of. I would like to request counsel not only with Flood directly, but with Sgt. Smith in regards to the nature of Flood’s recent work, as if I am being withheld of this information, I don’t know how I could ever begin to do my job with a clear mind. I’m not sure what else there is to say, besides that I honestly don’t know how I will find a way to bed tonight, as there now seems about my air too something leaking .

SMITH: ???

On this fourth day of the viewing, the fourth officer of the video review squad of the white films of Gretch Gravey ends the lives of the three other officers in the same employment using her service pistol placed against their skulls: not by shooting any of them with a bullet, but by blows, an estimated more than several hundred per cadaver, deployed between the eyes. The officer, a mother of three, is able to complete this triple murder despite walking covered in blood out of the station after having performed the first kill in the adjoining viewing office. Somehow knowing the locations of the two remaining male viewing members’ homes she performs the same gun-butt beatings on both their bodies among descending dusk: the first alone in his apartment eating microwaved spaghetti, the second in the presence of his wife and child near the TV. Having finished off the other viewers, the murdering officer returns to her own home, to dispatch herself before her own spouse and her two oldest children, calmly, neatly placing the gun at last against her own white head and pulling the trigger with open eyes.

Into fifty microphones gathered in bouquet and a feed of cameras sucking his image hard across our electronic fields, Gravey presents an oral statement into America: “Not guilty,” he says. His voice is ashy. He chokes on something else. The air is still beyond all birds. The images burned of him in the instant will show how, during the duration his mouth comes open, Gravey’s head seems to slightly blur around the nostrils and the eyelids, rapidly blinking. Mouth closed again, he raises his locked arms toward the sky; appears to pull something down into him; inhales with his nostrils; shudders; closes back his eyes. Flashbulbs again and the sky unflinching, soon again to grow opaque like chocolate wrappers from the inside, sealed against the flesh of the dark bar. Gravey remains still and hard-shaped, saying nothing for the duration of the melee of questions without answer and the still surrounding public screaming ricocheting off of all the seeing teeth, until by other hands he’s led inside, led down a corridor unto a corridor unto a corridor unto a floor, where on the zigzagged tile in silence is placed a single hard-boiled egg on a black platter, which Gravey eats still in the shell and stands to sleep.

BLOUNT: No one has seen Flood in several days, or is it hours — what is the word for the period in which daylight ends and then again begins? The detective assigned in Flood’s place as lead investigator has also gone missing. I can’t remember quite his name. Now they are asking me to take the helm. Or rather, it doesn’t seem like they are asking. I go to Gravey’s cell sometimes and just stand there near the wall there, and I listen. I hear me talking .

Flood finds his eyes.

Where he is now standing in a passage. He is naked. He doesn’t remember how he became naked. There is a wall behind him, against his back, on which he finds that he’s been leaning. New dark continues going forward toward an unreadable distance. Graded panels light the hole, the same glow as what had laced the space beneath the mirrored floor in Gravey’s basement, though here only occasionally deployed, so that the illumination comes with great gaps, smaller and smaller in the distance. The light seems natural, as if brought in by shafts from actual daylight.

The walls are white.

Flood is somewhere underneath Gravey’s home, he realizes. The second floor had been also false. He must have fallen through it like the first one, and landed down here, whatever here is. His entire body hurts; it feels like he’s bleeding from every inch of him, a kind of constant sensation of sweating and absorbing at the same time, but there is no blood, or if there is, he hasn’t seen where. Above him, the ceiling is high up and nestled in a dark, somewhere among which must be the surface he remembers rubbing through, or into. He can’t see anywhere to have fallen in from, or any way back out. If anyone can hear him shouting, they don’t answer.