Blake Butler - Three Hundred Million - A Novel

JB:

What do you think of the Bible?

GG:

God of Heaven believed that he was a sacrifice rich in mercy, numb, and prophets were goats, oxen, red men ignored, heifers. A Law, but also a way, an escape for those who learned the sophisticated Repentant Souls and social impacts might fall short of the virgin, toward a very prolific type of glory of God’s law. We would conceive and bear a system of worship. The prophet had to slay a lamb for hope for a world. It has only partially begun.

[ Suddenly I’m having trouble breathing, like the room is too small. Gravey looks. I’m kind of choking. The air seems to catch hard in my chest and spin there. Gravey’s not blinking. I can still manage to make words .]

JB:

Is it true you ate many of your victims’ bodies?

GG:

I ate them all. All of them, each component. I mean just by breathing. You will become it, too. All flesh must be returned into one flesh. What seems their remainder is not there. It is a bag I placed to leave the evidence of my being in the hands of the cameras for the proclamation. They weren’t victims. I’m just around.

JB:

How would you describe the taste of human flesh?

GG:

Like mashed potatoes in a ball gown. Sometimes pianos or a lock. It depends on the flesh’s eventual location in our total future mass. [ begins to touch himself all over quickly ] Hey, do you have fire?

JB:

I don’t smoke.

GG:

I don’t either. Do you have fire?

[ Again, my voice comes pouring from me .]

JB:

My father used to burn leaves in the yard. It made more smoke than anything else. The ground around the pile was black.

[ My choking in my chest is simmery, like on the cusp of welling up .]

GG:

Did you love your father?

JB:

I think I did.

GG:

No, did you love him?

JB:

He was my dad, yeah.

GG:

[ suddenly angrily, baring teeth ] I said did you love him?

JB:

Yes, I did. I do.

GG:

Then you love me.

[ Gravey at this point is drooling from the mouth to match the sweat; the drool slick makes a long reflective window, as with dishsoap water, before it pops between the index of his face between his hands. His eyes are blinking so rapidly it is as if the function of the lids has inversed: blinking when they would other times be held open or closed, staying open or closed when they would blink. Gravey begins grunting in a rhythm .]

JB:

Hey, are you okay?

GG:

[ snorting ] Let’s have dinner. I like tacos. I enjoy the light inside a cow’s right eye.

JB:

It’s not quite dinner yet. I’d be glad to join you.

[ Gravey again laughs. His laughter this time sounds completely different from the first way his first laughter sounded, higher, more rapid. The recorder in my pants begins to buzz. I feel it burn at where my skin is. I hear my phone. My phone is ringing. It seems to stick against my leg. My leg has spasms. My teeth won’t let my mouth around them close. I’m sweating. I hear numbers. A light is rising .]

JB:

Darrel?

GG:

[ not smiling ] Yes, son?

JB:

I am

GG:

You are

[ I feel better. The room is cleaner. I sit straight up. I breathe .]

JB:

I want to understand.

[ Gravey closes his eyes; I watch them roll back underneath the flesh as the lid comes down. Suddenly I smell something, like he’s shit his pants, but neither the expression on his face nor his position belies any strain. He begins to speak now through his lips without opening his mouth, a childish murmur .]

GG:

He is in a room. There are no doors in the room. There is a screen. A kind of light coming from somewhere on the side opposite the screen feeds at his chest. It is the Day. Inside the room he watches the day go on beyond him in the end of itself. He does not know what he sees, or that he’s seeing. Where he is is going to end but it will begin again. No murder and no mirrors, but a fleshless, edgeless, ageless frame.

JB:

And you? When will you die?

GG:

I am only here on pause. For a moment my home touched the room beyond the screen and gained its level but this soon will be ended, for the pyre. This body too will be destroyed, at the hands of all our hands, like mine, so we no longer have to have.

[ His sweat is almost like a well. It fills his mouth. I taste the salt and cannot chew. I’m sweating also, more now than I ever .]

JB:

Gretch Gravey, are you guilty as an actor in the death of the four hundred and forty persons?

GG:

On Tues., 7-23-XX, Gretch Gravey knew homicides that he forgot real. Upon asking him to mention in which skulls he performed the original interview, he stated the above information. For this work I would like to be paid fifteen million dollars.

JB:

Were you alone, or were there others?

GG:

During the rising I was the second suspect in his body, an offense. Some of the skulls Gretch Gravey had picked up and requested to speak with were found in front of me again.

[ Each time I inhale, he exhales .]

JB:

You keep referring to yourself now in third person.

GG:

At this time I was the thirty-third skull he sprayed. There had been ones before and there would not be others. I proceeded to the fifth floor of the house. At this time I also locked myself up in Sod City, where there appeared a black paint. The neighbors knew. Their faces shook in the night while they were sleeping and they grew.

JB:

There were others involved, or there weren’t?

GG:

All the victims in all eyes. All the knives the verbs had given in the books and speech of human color.

JB:

You aren’t making any sense.

GG:

Our last transmission. More phones all ringing in the blood of them with each new inch. When asked into the interview room where the numbers were placed onto where they could become the Mother Body, He stated he had boiled the skin and hair we conducted from the skulls in order to spray away an hour’s time. Each hour must be peeled into the Mother to forgive it. He at this time gave them an artificial torso that he wished to look like in case someone he had taken from a state talked to us about a victim while we were not there in our bodies. He had also two additional feelings that could not be boiled out of us, either one.

[ There is so much liquid on the floor, I can feel it. I can’t look down .]

JB:

What were the feelings?

GG:

A sleeplike state, the state of ether; and the pyre, where to this…

[ Gravey’s face begins to emit sounds of biting, from inside his throat, like something in there tearing. His eyes are wet, and making gleam. He refuses to make words, despite the nearly constant ream of guttural and convulsive sound seeming to come from all over his body. I watch. I hold my hands close. I feel hungry: I wish I didn’t have to say I did .]

[ I cannot speak .]

GG:

GG:

[ some kind of breathing coming from him in the deepest voice I’ve heard ] The world revolves around the world. Other orchestrations [planetoid, celestial, debris, silent striation, columnar bodies, fable/myth, the unseen] are totalities manifested by the world’s revolution of itself. Its revelation. To change the earth, the earth must be deceived. One way is paper, one is blood.

[ I cannot speak and do not wish to .]

GG:

[ More time goes on. I am seeing colors. I close my eyes and can’t make them open up. I keep waiting for the guards to come and get me. I feel nothing. Later, standing up from where I’d been seated, I would imagine it had been at least weeks since I had left the room, as I would find my legs so stiff and weird beneath me it was as if they were not mine. I find myself again compelled against speaking .]