Blake Butler - Three Hundred Million - A Novel

The viewer realizes he or she is also filled with liquid.

This white around the language on the page before you is a mirror.

The figure raises up his arms. As he does, the woman at the window raises her arms, too, then the seated man, and last the child. The light beyond the window is strobing slowly with the TV in time as the wet pours from them each at once together rising in the room, quickly enough already to have covered up the carpet and the feet of the furniture. Or time is faster now. Life is faster.

The child now sees the wet but does not stand up or attempt to move away onto the furniture or into the man or woman’s arms, only holding more tightly to the camera, its flashwork going off at adverse time in relation to the TV and the sky beyond. The child clings to the object so hard its white hands turn even whiter. He tries to make a word but it is covered over by whatever sound of nothing inhabits the film’s soundtrack. It is a calm and simple silence.

Soon the liquid rises over the child’s head. Underneath the other accumulating liquids of the people, there is brief cloud of his blood, which rapidly bands together with the rest of it. In his hands, the camera too has been sealed under, its electronic memory licked clean and thereby absorbed into the wet held now visionless forever.

In the image, to the viewer, the screen inside itself is filling up, the liquid pouring off the bodies. As with the child, it gathers quickly above the seated man’s knees and waist and chest and neck as he sits still, beyond response. His mouth is open.

The viewer’s arms go numb, but seem not numb, to him or her.

Somewhere a fire is being ignited; somewhere stairs lead down and down.

The man goes under the water, seated, holding his book. There is another burst of blood. The gift of his blood to the rising aggregation shudders, lapping at the flat of glass and at the thick shape of the figure, still at center, motionless.

The screen is almost two-thirds covered over. Underneath the layers of the liquid too the light is still somehow coming off the TV in matching color beam bent into malfunctioning bright blips each hardly colors, squirming pale under the wet surface, growing paler as the liquid rises, thickens. The room is filling faster. The less room is left the faster still it fills. We can already seem to not remember the child and the father having gone beneath the surface, buried, turned to liquid. We can hardly tell how this began; it seems now to have always been happening.

Beyond the window, the waiting night.

In silence then, and without fanfare, the woman at the window mesmerized goes slump. Her knees weaken beneath her. She slides without sound or gesture down under the surface of the liquid. The wet is too dark now to show the cloud of blood she leaves briefly behind as it joins the rising mass.

The back of the head of the man before the camera, inside the gathering liquid, is all that now remains. In the window, now no longer blocked mostly by the body of the woman, we can see his front side reflected in the glass, though the image is too blurred somehow to make him out. Beyond the glass the black holds up the night unending.

All is calm, yes.

Yes, only as the last laps of the liquid squirm to reach above the frame of the viewer’s perspective, the remaining man at the center of the room turns to face us.

FLOOD: What voice asks the questions, and what answers . Help me. What questions do the answers ask . What has been said in my name was not me. What sound has been constricted in the liquids the body finds a way a while to contain and yet can’t force itself to contain itself unending in the name of to which the liquid must return . I did not mean to be this. What hour is the hour described in this passage. What are you going to do about it . My memory dividing. My mind dividing.

Blood violence. Scrying violence. Schools’ doors locked door to door. Homes surrounded with a netting. Pastries rolled up with the asp. Tomahawks in hands of children come down on dolls and friends, come down on ants, come down on me. Fathers kill their fathers and their sons. Sons kill their friends. Wives kill their husbands and their doctors. They kill the babies in their guts. War violence in the home. Sky violence writing itself white into the cover of the hour with the screens’ electrifying prismlight. What would have been watched in place of doing is become doing. Runes are written on the heads. Lawns are cut in slurs or glyph stakes, calling for the meteor or blank invasion. A burning planted somewhere in every city near the homes. The wash of the bathwater on the drowned self. The pills. The pills to erupt the cells out of the body. The naked turned to breadloaves. The football hero with the Luger to his temple on the fifty-yard line. The banker handing back a withdrawal in the form of a sheet of his own skin. Gas station attendants robbing the customers of their consciousness. Of blood. The dogs walking the dogs. “What is happening in America? The homeland commissioner is up in arms. We must act now. This is our home.” The black rabbit in the east sky rises and vomits a column of dust onto the air. Troops deployed for the protection of the people stab each other in the chests. Intestine dinners. Ageless, graceless. The face of god: torn in strips off a billboard and used to wrap the dead. This is an art project, someone stutters, and the teeth fall out of their mouth onto the ground and are eaten by the starving some days layer. Enamel over all. Video game machines going blank. Wires doing blank. Email reading these same words in every head. A package is delivered to the homeland commissioner and it is opened by him on live TV, though we know it will explode. The pets’ names are changed to Darrel. The children’s names are changed to Darrel. The nation’s name is changed to Darrel. Michael Jackson’s name is changed to Darrel. Human instances of Darrel are caught in mobs and crucified inside the streets as nonbelievers. The name of Darrel in the mass of names is silence. The days. The occasionally clean are surrounded by their own flesh and bone. No metaphor left behind. No building not written whitely with the curse word over the crush of any city now called Darrel. Order again is demanded. Vegetable delivery is mandated by the state to arrive each evening in a long white limousine. This we believe in, which makes us calmer. It does not happen. Another 340,000 die. Another 417,550. Another 589,000. The rising numbers count themselves in the blue of pigs’ blood in cursive on the sky below the blank where there might have been a moon once, and still might be, though we can’t remember where to look. The instance of the number is attacked by air force bombers to obliterate as smoke. The smoke maintains the will of concrete underneath the cluster bomb. The fallout rains us birds. We eat them. The flesh of the bird delivers awful vision inspiring awful art. A mechanic kills a man who’s come to have his wheel replaced; he kills using the machine of his daily labor; another day he might have simply changed the wheel. Someone is counting down the hours on the fingers of those who pass him in the street. Rotting frottage underneath the street puts a disorienting sound in cats’ mouths and the houses rub where none of them touch and so it spreads and fills and holds. Someone with a hammer appears in one in 144 houses in one evening, mimicking at once a series of different people in one body, tolling the present number of the murdered bodies higher. There is no going backward. The faster we die we all will die. Sickness is not a shaking but a way of looking across a breakfast table or giving thanks. Anywhere this does not happen yet, the air remains. Turnips in fields turn up with dried blood centers. The trees bow down to kiss the ground. 700,010 dead. 880,789 dead. Telephones. Locks sold from the hardware station come without a key. Each four killed make eight kill eight more and then kill themselves or kill another set of eight, bodies branching off of each eight killed kill at least sixteen or toward twenty-four, each body desisted initiates replication in the spool of those surrounding; not by plague or viral idea or passion or brutal ministry or campaign, but by something they’ve not named and yet knows each better than any could, and in the unnaming of the so-occurring the day goes on and renders shorter while the skin flies at the light above in reams of hiss and collects in lathered wreaths around the public breath. The remaining bodies of their living go on tasting each other body in their mouths because they must. The colors of us giving up only one color, of little sex. The cars turning themselves on. A day at last to come of our vast creation returning to its fury. Crystal visions. Winking paper. So ends the beginning of our summation of the dead.