Blake Butler - Three Hundred Million - A Novel

He runs his palm along the long white surface. It is cold, synthetic. An odd sensation there in where he touches as the contact seems to make his skin come alive, as if there’s someone underneath his flesh touching on the inside where the wall touches. And, too, like someone is there on the wall’s far side, also touching.

Flood has no choice then but to proceed by facing sandwiched soft between the twin walls and sideways stepping into the oncoming alternating dark. He could wait, perhaps, for someone to come and find him, though there’s no telling how long.

The plane of the passage going forward descends rapidly by lengths, cutting at such a slight grade as it goes on that it is nearly impossible to tell it’s going down at all; one could conceivably continue down the narrow stretch for hours and still believe they’d only ever stayed aligned with one horizon.

Flood finds the tunnel floors becoming slick. Farther still and he is splashing in inches of liquid underneath his feet. The deeper in he goes, the more there is. He stops to sniff the smell and smells no smell. He puts some in his mouth and he tastes the salt of blood; he knows what blood tastes like; we all do. We all have. If it’s not blood it’s something just as common. There is no sound outside the repetition of Flood’s pace, though inside him he hears words: a murmur mirroring the murmur through the wall, hid under motion, as if someone there is speaking only when he moves. He can almost, underneath this, understand the syllables or shapings of the language, though not enough to take it fully, and not inside this night.

Not inside this night . Who is that speaking, Flood thinks. He repeats the phrase aloud, though his voice doesn’t sound like him now. Each word wants him to speak more, like having opened up the gates inside him now there’s so much more there, if all of no recognizable syntax. The voice just comes and comes. He bites his mouth to shush himself and does it too hard. A little blood comes up in his mouth. He swallows the blood. Inside him the blood continues loose. The blood tastes cold against the other blood inside him.

The width of walls begins to open up. The widening increases at a clipped rate, like the descending, such that as he goes along Flood can hardly recognize the change; each time he gets the sense he’s no longer in a passage tight with darkness but somewhere edgeless, like the night, a massive humming chamber; the tunnel turns again to narrow off. Sometimes it grows so narrow, even within three strides, that he must turn to sidle flat along, pressed between the walls’ sides, and sometimes even coming so thin there against his flexing belly he’s unsure he can force through.

The texture of the walls remains as ever, with the sound against his frame, and the far-off knobs of white light still oncoming, pulling him forward, rebegun.

Rebegun, that’s not a word, Flood hears himself say inside him, squeezing the voice down and in to hold it. As if to fill in where the sound is, the blood he’s swallowed washes hot into his throat across his tongue. His bowels tremble, wanting to shit. The vision where his eyes see straight ahead is kind of fucked, causing there to appear several tunnels spreading out forward in the eye of the one tunnel.

Or are there actually that many tunnels, that many different thumbs of light? It is difficult to know which among the sprawl he should lurch toward now. At certain junctures, it seems, branches will open, allowing him the choice of one of several ways to proceed, though no matter which way he chooses, the walls all seem the same, as if repeating, and stride by stride the wet continues rising slowly underneath him, making it slowly more and more difficult to walk. No matter which way Flood chooses, all lengths of the passage look the same. Wherever it is, the tunnel’s way goes on forever, as far as Flood can tell, every stretch threatening to disremember where they ever were, on toward some expanse as uncontained as any day.

Rebegun, his voice says again inside him with the blood all in his mouth and through his mind. Sure, sure, that’s a word, it says. Sure, you can say that.

Any word is always ours now.

In the darkness, there is text.

Deeper down, and once his eyes have grown accustomed, he sees that what had seemed only space without light in the passage isn’t just solid, but has fiber to it, layers to it. Where there seemed walls there, a language holds the space together hard, so many syllables collected in the same pixels it feels impenetrable. The dark, then, is not actually solid, but so overrun it has no choice but to present nothing.

Up close, though, Flood can read. He finds the walls of the passage imprinted in the same way as the floor had been above him, wherever that was, in god our blood the word of blood in god the name of god in god the name of god, the layers of sentences laid atop each other often obscuring each beyond a language Flood feels he knows. The text is so thick it’s hard to make out any word unless his eye is right above it, tracing where the lines of one letter break free from those beside. It wraps around his face like a loose mask. It brings him nearer.

Each string of language contains small softer sections, Flood finds, like buttons lodged in on a monochrome piano, open wounds. As before, some of the words can be pressed down with pressure aimed in the right way, though now the action is clearer, more like life. He has become acquainted, inculcated, opened, but it had always been this way, in every surface, always. In every surface and word and shape and face ever remembered, ever touched.

Among the black knit, there are panels shaped with different outlines: letters that turn to new shapes as he sees; ring-shaped, star-shaped, squares and diamonds. Each button causes an alteration to the surface just beneath it, the exposure of a branch. Pressing down on the word wished, for instance, in one of its many repetitions along the surface, right before his face, causes the wall right behind him to come open. There is no sound. The wall simply slides away, almost so calmly you could miss it.

Behind where had once been wall is now a shaft, extending far on into its own dark cavity. The walls at the mouth of the shaft are the same white as the main passage, quickly disappearing into black.

Flood hesitates some long second standing staring down into the hole he’s made open. For some reason, he can’t immediately bring himself not to continue into its eye, despite the fact that he’s already surrounded by unknown in totality, all directions. There is still the latent fear that once behind it, the wall might close. He could become sealed in down here. He could be made trapped for the remainder of his life. Even in the dark beneath a killer’s house, he worries about his own preservation, if only long enough to hesitate a beat before giving in, again, toward what, he does not know.

FLOOD: All the colors in my eyes. All the machines inside the machines in my body, the other bodies . I swear this is not me speaking. I cannot control my mouth or hands. The nightwave knitting though the fields, coloring [his name] in the space between me and where I am, which is becoming several more places every minute. It is splitting. We are splitting in it . No. Each of the strings of images begets the next . No. Try not to think of me as disappearing, but simply always being. Where I am, there you are . This is not me. I did not want this. I will not believe this. It has gone on this way for all of time . Stop it. It will go on this way for more than time is, every instant, so loud I cannot hear . Stop.

Inside his sleep Gravey turns over to face up along the ground rather than face down.