Blake Butler: Three Hundred Million: A Novel

The next day Gravey was not there, or at least not Gravey as I had understood him. There was a slim window of excess time I spent between our transference. Our bodies now were both the same, like a shitting doll with several accessory skins you could force onto it. The quickening difference left in my memory a gap opened between who I’d been in my false youth and the present sack of meat I called my ongoing complexion. I’d spent my last night in the child awake inside the mirror chamber, pressed against it flat and laughing, waiting for Darrel to turn my hand into a saw or give me hope. The must of the room’s lining and my dreams of human leather and fire cities in the closet fill the skin around my eyes with birthing pimples. I had to pick me clean for hours. I came out of the dark covered in fuzz and walked into the kitchen with the itch risen and resounding, ready to take him alive by my own hands as had been commanded by Darrel in my blood for him and us brightly colliding and in the kitchen where he was most days most often he was not. I didn’t know that, no sooner had I made the decision to really kill him, he was me. He had always been me and always would be, just like for each new victim that I took I was always them also. The skin of every slipping minute passing as my human brain rattled to catch up to my condition sealed me deeper in our flesh, a vessel desperate for itself. In the needle den, no Gravey. No Gravey in the yard or in the drum rooms or rolled inside the closet where when I slept I dreamed of horses’ blood, though here were seven boys there passed out in no shirts and white jeans with the word FLAGELLUM stitched along the seam of their bellies and their hair done up like people meant to be wished upon, another band. I hated when fucking shitty bands slept in the fucking shitty house because I could hear the fucking shitty music coming out of their fucking shitty face holes and their fingers, though I could not remember in the night before there having heard them making any fucking shitty noise. I closed them in the room and locked the door. Today was Saturday or Wednesday in October or July. It was 1981 like it was 1440 like it was last month when you were born. Like it was 2667. My arms inside me kept on reaching after my own life. Gravey wasn’t in the yards. He wasn’t in the bunker where the shit went or any of the bifurcated rooms the house had made where it had learned to pull apart. I called his name saying just nothing. It was way way back behind my brain. I was way way back behind my eyes’ eyes in there with it wrapping gifts of undying adulation and absolute mirage.

FLOOD: Time also seems to be a problem for Gravey’s sense of person, which is not surprising considering he dresses like a mixture of the ’80s and the ’60s and the ’40s and the dead. His bouquet could as well be considered a mash of many generations. Either way, we’ve apparently reached the point in the concurrent story where Gravey can attempt a plea, though there hasn’t been a single detective or attorney who’s spoken to him and not come out saying the whole thing is an act, that he is aware of every inch of him, and not only is he aware of where he is, he’s just ahead .

In the hallway bathroom I ran into another body, someone I knew I’d seen before, though now he looked like he’d aged a hundred months. He was busy flossing blood out of his teeth and chewing. Where is Gravey? I said, saying it seven times before it came out of my mouth. The other body looked at the me inside the mirror with his red gums gushing. His pupils looked like some pixels. Nice, he said. I feel you. He had a circle tattooed on his nose. I looked at him looking at me in the mirror and then I looked at me and back at him. Some of his mouthblood had flecked out on the flat reflections of us like confetti, a little party. Shut up with shit, I said. I’m after Gravey, I have a word to give him, have you seen him. The mirror bending. We watching we watching we watch we. Yeah, I see you, dude, the guy said, doubled. His many eyes drew slightly lighter. I felt much more tired now than before I’d ever gone to sleep at all.

CHARLES, age 15: “I remember coming in one night and seeing Gravey standing with his back against the wall of the room and looking with his eyes so big at everyone like he’d never seen not only any of us but any person ever. He wouldn’t let anybody come within a few feet without swinging with his nails. He took some of my skin off, I remember, and then he started like licking at it, chewing it really hard and shit. It freaked me out then but later I would realize what gratitude was required of such honor. Whoever in him died to bring the making was the first of many necessary deaths, for which I am still praying to be given mine.”

In the midst of my becoming, the mirrors from my bedroom spread over the floors. They became affixed too to the ceiling and the framework of the walls along the places where we would walk most first and then the lesser places, patch by patch and row on column. Where we got the mirrors from was anybody. The thing about a mirror is they always act the same, no matter how much the price or who had been in them previously or for how long hurting what meat or touching what where with what hand. My own reflection in the mirrors began changing. My hair grew out on my hands. Like Gravey, I began stooping, and I began to answer to his name, slick from the boys’ mouths, toward who I now felt erotically charged. Some of the boys were women, though I felt nothing for those, and so learned to no longer know the difference. I tried to smile a lot and say not much of anything, in Gravey’s manner, and when I said a thing at last it would be immediately done, as long as I had cash or pills to place on open palms, which I always did. The fortune poured out of my pockets or my fingers. It came and came like kin. In time the mirrors appeared procured from any nearby space with doors that opened; from dressing rooms and washrooms and display rooms we took the ones over the beds, long ones set in the backs of doors or thumb-sized ones inside lockets, all of them someone else’s, wholly used. Soon there was no inch about the house that did not hold me seeing, and all the others. When someone walked, you heard it splinter. The blood was gorgeous, a temporary replicating gift. I rose.

FLOOD: A theory: Child-Gravey and Adult-Gravey have apparently at this point, as a narrator, become fused, a process tempered by Spirit-Gravey (AKA Darrel) (AKA, I think, perhaps, Gravey’s idea of God? The future of god?) (who I might suggest is only Gravey too, or at least an idea in his mind, though I would not be surprised by the emergence of an actual OTHER Darrel, who for all we know, to Gravey’s way of thinking, could be absolutely anybody ever in history and time). Quite a bit of me believes, too, that the Child-Gravey is actually just Gravey at a much earlier age, a kid who once was normal and natural and grew up into the animal Adult-Gravey, in mediation of which Adult-Gravey bisects and distorts, in an apparently conscious fashion, the time of for his own psychological purposes. Though I am also open to the idea that there was a kid, someone outside Gravey, who came to Gravey’s house, and whom Gravey took to so completely that he truly believes they became one. As for whether this would have been one of the kids who lived in the house with Gravey over the many years he occupied the house, or another kid he killed or did away with on his own, what is real seems almost impossible to decipher by now .

It was hard in the first hours under Darrel to figure out how to make the voice come out of my lungs the way the blood in those lungs meant to barf the syllables rejected from the vocabularies of common man. Gravey had not spoken so well in so long and I newly here inside him burned like burning books searching for the locks to keyless ways. I had to breathe way hard deep inside me like I was to be going under water; then I would close my eyes and listen hard, and through the phone over the rolling of the water I could hear the things we meant to verbalize in bone. What came out of my mouth was different from what the flesh in me was screaming. I could feel the mirrors in me spurting ash all over all my other organs, black on black. I watched me tell the boys to gather around me and put their fingers on my head and let more words come out of me and into them so they could speak when I was not speaking which would be mostly. They listened to what I was saying without me listening to what I was saying. I don’t know why they did that except there was something wrong with all their eyes, screwed up as if with the meat of past lives raining through them continuously. They looked at me as if I too was the mirror, and their mother, and their lover, which I was. I was our fingers and our rings. With my new mouth inside the common shaking I changed all the boys’ names to Darrel. I spoke from all my holes: “There has been a long world in this world before us, a long world in this world the world has hid on the same air where we awake. The problem is is we believe this world cannot be touched. We see each word all as a different word, imagining we’re actually here somewhere inside us in our speaking, faking muscle out of blood. The seed has leaked into our homes and flakes and cables. It has wrapped around our minds, and stirred in the gloss an internal fantasia, inside which we will go on eternally in fear: knitted to the Sod of Nothing. The night collapsing underneath itself. Leaving a hole where we were bigger than our time. What happens between the hour of the light returning to us and the rest of where we are today inside this Eating is every body in America must die, must be killed at once and all together at our own hands. This will be where we begin to become.” My holes closed up then. The house was older. The boys were older. I was fine. The mirrors in the room encased us, held the day out. I threw up water, and we drank.