Blake Butler - Three Hundred Million - A Novel

Flood sees himself. He sees his body. His image is transparent somehow, so that even through his chest he can see the shape of the house around him.

The wall of the room on the tape is white like the wall in the room Flood had called his home, as many walls could ever be. The surface is interrupted by a window through which a greater white appears, light from somewhere else, almost exploding.

The film fills up Flood’s vision, and so is his vision. In seeing, staring, into the image, he can no longer tell it from the rest of the room, from where his blood was.

Flood is on the tape.

He looks down at his hands. The skin of the hands is stretched with colored veins and pale flesh, dry and aged as he remembers from the last mirror. His pores have grown so large he can connect them without looking closer, islands of the soft; the circles drown in other wrinkles where the skin has colonized its age. The hair of the flesh of his arms has been removed, a smooth, demonstrative expanse. The nails on his fingers are strangely long: white fantasies of skies of cities sleep lodged under the cuticle, aching the skin. He is wearing a white tunic, or cloak, or gown, drenched to translucence and clinging to the folds of him hid covered, where bones meshed in his chest are bending in: a process of the greater aging. Temples. White years. Gorges. Flood makes a fist and hears the bones pop in his fingers. He releases.

There are others in the room. There is an American woman dressed in a gown like his but thicker and well embroidered, standing at the room’s one window, looking out. She has a scar along her chin; she does not realize it is there. Her breath makes a small disruption of the flow of the building, letting other rooms build gray. Years have happened to her. She is the year now. The woman hums; there is no song.

Across the room, an American man sits halfway upright on a recliner holding a book before a TV, lids flickering in response to changes in the field. A television’s light provides another sort of color, and is silent.

In another room, through the wall behind the TV, Flood knows, lies a sleeping child, bone white, American. The child’s body is rigged with an electronic sensor in his night pants meant to detect urine; a reading lamp stays on above the bed. The child in coming years would go to school. He would see his first pornography under the table in the lunchroom during fifth grade. He would take turns with several other classmates kicking classmates in the chest. He would masturbate and eat breakfast cereal and go to school to learn to program code into machines and then get tired of that and begin writing paper onto words. I do not mean words onto paper.

The child is not asleep.

At the window, the woman sees herself framed against the billowed darkness growing larger still, sweating through its fibers at a universal rate, through all the holes. The window is really more a mirror now than anything to see through. It is silver in its blackness, extending on into the idea of itself. A subtitle reveals the woman’s present thought, filling her brain meat, The body of the body of the column of the city of the child of man . The woman inhales and holds it. She turns around, finds Flood before her. She does not react to this new stranger. The features of her face and the face of her husband half-asleep sitting beneath her hold calmly blurred in swimming textures, layers, whorls.

Flood feels a hammer in his hand. He feels the cool wood grip pressed with his flesh. It is a fresh hammer, unused, though it smells of the loins of the new skin beneath the soil pouring somewhere from a formless hole, feeding none. In Flood’s other hand he holds a dark knife, the leather handle of it molded as if to fit his hand pad to pad, to fit any hand of any hand model in America, or those shaped like them, or those shaped unlike them, or the dead. Flood knows the knife is long enough to stab straight through the ceiling and cut the eye out of god, who watches our dry moves and eats into us with the cancer, alive in the laughter of all generations.

Flood looks at his hands and sees his hands hold none. That is his skin there. This is the body. He stutters to meet the body with the word. He feels the blood run through his head down along his neck wide in heaving streamyards of witching visions through his sternum through his intestines along his legs, blossomed by force. He feels something amassing on the outside of his surface. Nodes. A false gray. His hands are heavy. He smells fresh rubber.

There is a nameless music pouring from the eyelets of the darkness beyond the window, larger than silence.

Flood’s body raises up his hands. His fingers point in ten directions, one for each finger, a splay of manifesting wish. In his chest he feels two big wheels turning, gyrating shapes among the flesh making tape burn in the threads between us.

Flood sees nothing. Flood floods inward. Flood closes his eyes.

Flood speaks.

The current fills Gravey’s body smiling and dressed in white upon the waiting bed where he lies with hands straight up above him, incarcerated with the light. His holes go slack around him. From the holes there is a sheen. Then, the white tape, surrendered spooling from his navel, hissing up like snakes evaporating.

There is a knock at the lone window. Old bells ring upon the air. The death machine is shaking.

Over the frying, our applause.

Over the applause, the husking flake of our surrounded flesh all turning dry.

The dryness of light no one remembers.

The day of the dryness of light.

Today in America, 208,135,180 people become killed, each and all killed and killed again forever amen until everybody in America is dead.

I woke in smoke. This time the smoke was the beginning, no longer unwinding into nothing as its layers grew apart. The light surrounded my body on the inside, contained in space that seemed hidden from all the rest of time that I remembered. I knew my name was or had been Flood but could not say it and it no longer felt like language. Instead I could hear several hundred interruptions anytime I tried to think.

The smoke was pouring from my face. From my eyes and from my earholes, growing even thicker when I would try to speak or breathe. The smoke made windows on the air. Eras opened. From the windows there stretched long columns that seemed to form the world, though every column extended only into further reaching. All directions led exactly the same way, like no matter where I went the smoke poured from me and obscured the rest of what could be into more of what it was already: inside and outside me, all of everything.

FLOOD: I don’t know where I am. I’m trapped inside here. I’m not sure where here is, what it connects to, but I am beginning to believe I’ve been caught. Recorded. Or, not recorded — rather, I am rendered as if on a film, an unscrolling repetition owned by the smoke’s repeating gesture, though at the same time, I am alive. My mind is my mind and I believe it but beyond me is something else, not the world as it always had been, but the shell of it. Something is altered. The air is flat and has no taste. It feels like there is something else surrounding the space here, and the something else is where I used to be .

I crawled and crawled along the floor of the ground of the extending darkness. The grain beneath me felt synthetic and did not stick to my body. Just beneath the layer of the ground the grit the surface stood on churned and buzzed, as if being processed and so created only as I touched it, as if underneath the floor of all creation the only thing keeping the floor from sucking in around me into some screaming hole was that I needed somewhere else to go.