Blake Butler - Three Hundred Million - A Novel

GRETCH GRAVEY: Blood drying against concrete slathered baking in such daylight as glass shattered in metal crunching bone beneath bright planes banging bullets on the fields of women and men until the pilot too turns on the party of himself. What colors where the air mixed and filled itself in with private liquids, the brains removed of desperation, fire. Stone through cranium. Metal through surface. Why would it ever rain again. Who was counting up the numbers, all mirrors watching unwatched on old walls, while elsewhere, in a large unmarked room, the further image dreamt in the new dead were piling up inside the nothing rising .

The jury, held at gunpoint, among lasers, finds Gravey guilty.

The judge proclaims the fate. This judge in fear in his electrified cadaver, in his waiting for the day of the Shape of He, slave of three hundred million tongues.

Gravey, by the state, will become killed, is the decision. The killer put to be killed by machine. By a machine. The weapon: electricity, buttons, wires.

The machines are waiting.

The smoke will rise.

The audience inside the courtroom sits in gyrating silence with the verdict on their lips. They watch their hands clap and hear their lungs give out the word of praise of this day having come at last, this day at last.

The bells in Gravey’s sentenced body ring.

Today in America, 41,080,101 people become killed.

Across the many skies all our screaming does not weep.

The bodies form a mount.

The bodies filling in the space between the earth and sky with rising meat to match their minds of spooling film.

The darkness behind Flood’s fully submerged vision narrows. The surrounding wet solidifies again to walls, too black to tell the open air from impenetrable surface. All space seems to move around him, in absence of his intent. Inside the drawl, old colors blur. The black of many colors in his forehead and his fingers. There is nowhere else. The single word repeating over any way he tries to think. Through the depths, he’s dragged forward like a cursor with the space bar held down, on a computer, blinking out and in.

There is some land then, and a gap. The land is synthetic to the touch and bone white, just wide enough for him to stand free at the edge of the liquid, somewhere way down under masses, a bulb of air sucking the world around him forward. The linings of the walls elongated in their passing, becoming light from dark, transparent from light, reflective from transparency. Mirrors totally surround; all the same mirror, over all lengths. This time, in the mirror, Flood appears, head-on in every inch no matter how he sees it, though he can barely recognize his body. He looks to have aged decades since he last felt anything to know. He looks more like someone who’d gone on to live forever, constantly aging over decades, than anyone he’d ever been. The skin around his eyes could almost break.

Like in the passages to other homes, the mirror has a latch, a latch in the eye of the face of every face of the plane before him always, all the same. The shape of the symbol marked in on the latch’s head seems to waver at its edges, making many shapes of itself mutating and transmogrifying, while held in the mind all as the same. Flood finds himself mesmerized watching the shape mutate between circle, square, hexagon, star, and so on, endless other unnamed shapes between each. He does not want to lift the latch. He wants to take the latch into his mouth, swallow it down. He wants the latch to open in him.

There is no sound as with every latch the mirror opens. The space beyond it is dark inside the room, a different kind of dark of night of passages of lives he already can’t remember having passed through.

Flood moves into the room. He closes the mirror behind him immediately, locking away the passage to prevent anyone else hidden behind him from following. As the mirror clicks into place he feels his blood run with a sudden sense of irreversibility, against which the veins along his arms protrude and pulse. But the mirror, once closed, cannot be opened from this side. He is sealed in here.

Into full darkness, Flood fumbles hands-first. He reaches into the space unseeing for something, feeling only more space and more space there, like a dry inverse to the cavity of wet. As if this space is no different than the drowning chamber of the world of passages, but made of air instead of fluid. His skin holds the same tone and texture as the air around him standing. He feels a rising fear of nothing, fear of edgelessness forever, even the mirror behind him now somehow not there when he turns to feel its slick face harboring the copy of him in the dark. He calls out and feels no language.

He walks into a wall. The wall bangs into his face and he can feel himself bleeding again, though he can’t see or feel the arms themselves. Once there is a wall, there are other surfaces to feel onto, connecting outward. There is a table and some chairs around it. There is another wall hung with framed pictures, which in the darkness, searching for anything, one by one, Flood removes. He sits each frame facedown on the floor, not having seen the images they carry. What if life went on this way forever, Flood thinks, all surfaces without faces. All creation beyond seeing.

And then again as if to negate him, he hits something on the wall that fills the room with light. It is so bright at first that it’s like the dark but backwards, just as unyielding, all against him. Slowly, though, the shape of the space around him conforms to its underlying structure, and reveals itself, like day.

Flood is standing in his home. It takes a moment before he recognizes the rematerializing elements of space as ones he’s spent the years in, the objects infused with his time and smell and feeling, nodes without eyes who had as yet seen him through hour after hour among others. It all fills in around him like flashing panels rising out from concrete. There is oddly no relief, only the awareness of I have been here, this is a place where I have lived, where I have disappeared the hours, where I have known others or hid from others, where I sleep .

Despite having passed them day in and out so many years inside here, he can’t remember what the pictures placed facedown on the ground now ever pictured.

The carpet is white. Had the carpet always been white.

On a low table are his papers, notes and words regarding recent casework he’d brought home, though he can’t remember really what the case had been. The papers are blank. If there is someone else in the house there with him, he cannot feel it.

There is a tape. The tape is marked with a string of digits. The casing is white, too, in contrast to the dark tongue of the film spooled up inside it. He picks up the tape and holds it near his face and stares, as if waiting for the images encased there to appear broadcast on the room, or all inside him.

The TV is on. On screen, long shots of human bodies amassed in daylight in the streets and inside buildings, waving their fists and running in hordes and banging at windows of buildings and cars, exhibited in silence, the volume apparently muted. The faces all bleed together into a kind of total body with countless heads all held together where they touch or do not touch. Other shots show tanks, horses, swords, explosions, fences, cages, weapons, flashing text.

Flood doesn’t understand how he couldn’t have seen the light of the screen of the TV in the dark before the light appeared. He tries to read the words on the lips of people pictured in the masses but it just makes some feverish language he can no longer understand. Through the window on the wall over the TV, the air is dark and still.

Flood takes the tape and puts it into the machine attached to the TV. His hands feel oblong, tighter once again emptied, as if coated in the tape’s plastic. The receiving machine makes sound, its own small language. The light in the room changes, opens wide. There is static, then the whiteness, then nothing but the whiteness through the room.