Blake Butler - Three Hundred Million - A Novel

The cameras replicate his face. This day will not be remembered.

Gravey hiccups in his sternum. He chews something. Swallows. Weeps a growl.

A peal of burn noise hurts the air as he goes to grip the stage mic with the hand farther from his heart: “Bullshit,” he says. “Bullshit city. Hey-o. I do everything I do. I’m a big boy. I get nasty. I’m so horny, I could fuck a hole in sleep.

“If any children kill or are killing other children because of this sentence,” Gravey says, “that is the desire. That is the nation under god. Adults killing adults and mothers killing mothers and fire killing fire and dogs surviving for the dogs. It is one condition of an attitude developed over the past three hundred thousand years.”

Someone behind a lantern asks a question, though on the playback of the recording, the words have been obscured.

Gravey stutters. He chips the microphone with his best tooth. He clears his throat, looks through his fists cupped into tunnels, winks. He puts his mouth around the entire metal conducting head.

“If I’m not here yet,” he goes, burbling with spit, “then invent me. Make me come.”

Back in his cell inside his sleep Gravey’s longer fingers trace his right arm open with his nails, cutting divots in his skin’s face like opening the mail. From the hole cut near his elbow he extracts a growth of blood that slinks along the air like wire and feeds back up to his face into his mouth around his tongue. He has not eaten in more days than he can remember.

The color of the room is erasure. Beyond the walls the knives glint sun for sun’s sake into the sun to blind it to the motion of our arms among the walls around the rooms where we have slept and soon will sleep again.

Gravey’s eyes are closed. His hair has grown down to his ass, cloaking his backmeat as it itches with such warmth. With his two longest fingers he traces on the cell’s floor the shape of the letter S , smearing platelets across the concrete where it holds him on the surface of the earth. Between the letter’s two endpoints, at each end of the snake of it, Gravey then traces slightly more faintly the shortest line possible between them, bisecting the body of the S to form a symbol like the number 8 , but flattened down one side: .

The S shape shines in the room’s mood. From the blood begins to rise a hissing steam. There is a stench, like plastic melting. The shape begins to change.

Gravey moves to stand face-first against the wall. His body accesses the space parallel to the room’s one locked entrance, positioned at the wall’s center. His back faces the symbol, the remainder of the room. He hums. The sound is somewhere inside his head; it is every song he’s ever heard, at once. The rooms he’d never been in. His hair rises to stand up on the air straight out in a line behind his head. The hair vibrates, emitting gold tone, harps and bells. There is a language in the stink, the sound of the smell of nowhere filling the room in impregnation. The door to the hall outside behind him sweats. The sweat is mammal blood, the musk of humans. Its shade, from certain angles, matches the pearling of the inside of a conch, houses we would never enter.

A light inside the room blows up. Microphones around the room for miles go mute, worms birthing in their handgrips in the hour of the anchor speaking the other language.

Inside the light, the door’s wall and the wall across from it change place. The door that had before upon the one wall opened into the remainder of the station now still opens onto the same building, but from the other side, forcing each room inside the building, and in the space surrounding, each instance of the air to lay inverted, in mirror image of itself.

The bodies of the people in the rooms go on inside the day. The clocks change colors, pocked meat and shining rings. There is singing, under every voice’s misuse. The eye of Darrel without name.

Gravey’s body folds to lie down on the floor, his mouth hole touching the endpoint of the high end of the S . From the low end of the same symbol, another pearl of smoke emits and rolls along the floor in a white wire, intersecting with the other wall. His nostrils flare, bringing the smoke inside his skull. He exhales again black with it, the color of the smoke having been changed. Out from his face the smoke rises toward the wall behind him, spreading up in packets; the smoke forms a face upon the wall, of a woman with no eyes no ears no brow no cheeks no nostrils. She has a mouth. The room around the smoke face shudders.

The smoke of the smoke lips begins to writhe, pulling open, inside which: teeth, a tongue, a humming. Smoke of a disintegrated sweat.

The head begins to lean out of the wall; its smoke flesh grows. The flesh of the grown face is reflective. A tumor on the head’s cheek glimmers. Somewhere money burns. Somewhere someone else is frying.

Gravey’s sleeping body rises from the ground. He floats above the S or 8 now having become many symbols in one face at once, stopping hung there on the paused air of the building, through which, for this instant, all other bodies in the precinct have been removed, evacuated into their memories beyond the present. The bodies will return again as they had been without remembering their disappearance.

Gravey rotates above the symbol in his glitchmoan, head rotating to the smoke-made Head. His hair, hung dry beneath him, sucks up backward, splaying out and turning white down to the scalp. The shifting symbol is written in the scalp meat. A matching tumor grows on Gravey’s cheek, pig-colored, every icon. His eyes fill up with blood. His eyes open. His body opens, the smokehead just behind his head, pressed glyph to glyph.

The smokehead speaks.

How many years have passed here, Flood asks the darkness. The wet by now is higher than him, filling the passage so completely he can no longer feel the bottom. He can find no edges where the walls were under the surface, no soft panels with which to find another passage through the black. The ceiling and the walls above the water seem to have spread wider, into something like an ocean under evening, no edges to the open air where he can find them beyond where in the rising darkness there seems a heaving solid surface in what could be the heavens. He can’t remember which way he came in from, where underneath him or behind him the descending passage went. It is as if the passage itself has wrapped back on itself, holding the time beyond it out. Even the idea of time before right now seems conceptual at best, an orblike surface drowned inside the water of his blood.

And yet inside the passage the rising liquid is still rising, a reminder of dimension. The higher the wet rises, the less air around him there must be. Less and less space remaining inside the passage every instant, no matter how hard he tries to think of anywhere else, ever. How many hours until I am too tired to keep moving , he hears a voice inside him asking, how many more until there is no air .

Flood himself is full; his chestmeat aches around his bone framing his center. He is not hungry or thirsty but not sated. Inside him, his blood presses back against the wet slaving his skin in silent war. His arms buzz hot like thousands of arms pressed into only two.

The wet goes down and down forever underneath him, it seems. However deep Flood forces his body, there is more depth opening into greater pressure and potential dimension. At the length of half his breath, the point where Flood knows inside him sure for certain were he to swim deeper there’d be not enough breathing stored inside him to get back, he feels another presence come lighted, way beneath him; a string of buried glow like some white city far below, swallowed over on some level ground surrounded in the cavity, he believes; long drowned along the nadir of the growing wet wanting to drown him in it.