Blake Butler: Three Hundred Million: A Novel

SAL, age 20: “He was very easy to believe in. Even if you didn’t want to hear it and were coming to get fucked up he would go on and on for so long in all these ways and he would give you shit if you said otherwise and after a while it was like, Yeah that sounds good, and no one else was saying anything else to us except in obviously fucking stupid ways before outside the house so like we just started saying the things too. I was going along at first kind of making fun I think in my vast private retardation seeing how everyone I had known before had failed me like they do and yet as I kept saying and hearing and saying and hearing the words showed up in my sleep and in my lungs and stuff without me even having to do it. It felt really good. Even if you didn’t think about it at all Gravey would do the speaking for you anyway in response. He would like make all these different voices come out of him and he would look at you and he had your voice and he could say things for you, and that was powerful. So you would let him. And then it just became this thing. It’s hard to explain. It doesn’t matter. The faster as well that it happened it happened faster and better and more and more, and just like that it was days passed and we all looked the same. We will forever. Even if he killed my parents and he made me wish I was somewhere else I still believe that.”

FLOOD: This section contains Gravey’s first reference to Sod, which as far as I can make out is what he believed would be created in the wake of his murders, a kind of palace of bodies through which the total spirit and history of his idea of God could be arrived at. When I have asked him directly what the city of Sod is, he just sits and looks straight on at me as if I’m part of the wall .

At night I played my drums. They would make anger. I would tell the boys to go to sleep and they would do that and then I’d go and sit behind the snare and raise the sticks. I might hover a whole hour or seven of them waiting for the scourge to roll up through my gut along my arms and make me shudder with the tremor of the phones and bodies turning yellow and the melting pyramids of every market in the ash of what overturning deathblow awaited all. I beat the shit out of the skins. In the drumming there was further music, which was also Darrel, and was war like all days. I had a job to do. I had this house now, and this body inside the house through which I could force others into service of it in the same way I’d changed me. I could not remember now what my body had looked like before Gravey, but when I looked down I saw nothing anyway. I mean I was not there: no teeth, no chest, no cock. I touched myself for days and never came. I let the drums into me as my purer fornication. I was a flesh virgin when I came into the house and I would be still mentally when eventually again by our negation we all died, and in the meantime, in the smallest room this mirrored black house could bear to bear, I lived inside the language. I was snowing like a crematorium on fire in the stem of August all throughout me. My mouth unlearned to dictate my ideas, which gave them precedence. When I was not playing the drums, the tapes would play what had already been played back louder and different from how I just had. I had an intercom installed, wired speakers in the bed frames and the kitchen and in the inches of the lamps, so that anyone could always hear. The hours lengthened. Each night for food we ordered steaks. There would not be no meat inside the house for any minute and there would not be food not of the flesh. Some of the boys had been confabulated into other ideas, and for this they had to learn. It did not take them long; in starvation, they might even bite into their arm and drink and laugh a little. We learned to see sound. I had FLAGELLUM change their name to Darrel, too; they set their set up in the den, in the room behind the room that held my drum sets, facing away. They believed in me at first as I was Gravey, then they began to believe in something else, the flesh of me in me surrounded in the body of Our Man. The players had to practice very hard to play a single lick about the music of what Darrel wanted from them. The new songs I had written for their music could be performed only in unnatural light. We began with neon panels, then to blacklights, then to candles; then we were there inside the blackness. The words the singer of the band sang were all one word. The word was Darrel. The songs were one note. The note was Darrel. They did not argue even once.

JOSEPH A., age 21: “I played bass in Flagellum before he made us change it. I was pissed at first because that was my name that I’d made up and I thought it sounded cool and weird, like sperm and like getting beat up and shit. Then this old hippie who likes just awful hippie shit comes in and starts telling us what to do, that the only way we’ll get famous is if he helps us, if we do exactly as he says. We were all like uhhh what could you possibly do about anything besides being a burnout but we didn’t have any other place to practice and it was mostly his gear anyway so we just played along to make him happy. At least that’s how it started. We never planned to actually do the change, or do any of his songs. But then something in them started making sense. We started playing his shit more and more not just to please him but because it just kept going. Our hands were playing. Our mouths were open. Pretty soon we forgot all those other songs we’d worked so hard on.”

FLOOD: Tapes marked with the name “Darrel” found in the house contain no sound .

At times there were bits of me before me-as-me that still occurred. While the boys ate or played or slept or burned a fire I might go into the first, locked mirrored room and lie down and hold still in the shape of nowhere. My prior self, the child in me, occurred again at slow moments: the grind of our shared cells against the house began to learn how there were layers to the world, layers to those layers. All of us were in all of these walls the present day touched, I knew; in every mother. Any way you drove or flew or typed a word or made a claim, our history was in all of those. Don’t think you weren’t there with me in the small locked room while noise through walls jostled my false flesh and made me warm and I ejaculated virgin semen into the mattress and made it swim alive. Each time I came I felt the future of the world becoming changed around me. The children I would never have of them, my creamy daughters, sons, spilled dead for the passing of the day tricked in the friction of my palms. Through this, too, Darrel entered. Darrel fluttered in my cavities. Soon I did not even have to hear the phone inside me ringing to feel him right there in my wires, on my buttons, calling home. Then just as quickly as I entered inside the house I began seeing on the mirrors all these movies I had not seen played on the flesh inside my head. What the movies were were operations. They had only partially survived themselves. Some I could still remember from before in darkened rooms bent by a slow strobe, but here in remembrance slightly off. Like in that one I’d watched once with my mother on the floor of our first apartment, where the machine kills men in outer space by turning against them; instead of that world ending with a tunnel of long color and a white room and a baby large as many earths, in this version it just drove itself straight into the sun and filled the night with so much screaming that the sky around the sun filled with milk. Another movie I remembered, where all these frogs rained out of the sky and brought the characters together, ended instead with the frogs continuing to rain and piling up and up on all the buildings and the people until there was nothing left to film or breathe except the frogs. Instead of in my mind me remembering how once I had remembered my mother making me a grilled cheese and some ham squares and putting me to bed, now here I was in this man’s body and I could not even think of anything before the day I’d heard Darrel murmuring my heart. I knew the alterations in the movies meant that I would die before I became the age that people die at in this era, that I was an altar, not a person, but that was also soon to change, and also did not really matter, because when I died there would be finally a novel night, as in this nothing we are nothing, and in the nothing in the nothing we have all the days to come. I knew I must obliterate the films, record over them in every memory, to make space for the virtual flesh, to dream the blood of our god in total being. Every image must be fused, each death brought open wide into the same sod of His body, all private histories carried into language outside continuum. This was beyond any future, every future. Before Darrel had appeared in me I was no one and it does not matter and all is coming and you already know my mom is dead or will be and you know my father is nobody either and is dead or will be. Darrel at least through me is capable of showing love to the boys inside the house where light is made the widest. Darrel shows me how to stroke their heads though they are taller and older than me and can do more drugs and love me more than I love them since Darrel was so smart as to put me in the body of a person who gave everybody drugs. Everybody loves drugs even if they do not love drugs like my mother claimed to never, instead they love the lord because the lord is drugs really, and even if when I die I see the lord and he is a man standing above me in a white shroud pouring blood from palm to palm, and if I say to him before Him that I believe he is a man who came to walk among us and a man who always was, what I mean is that I think he is drugs. I want all of this inside my life. It takes the place of Passed Days, which were doing me no good to begin with as had I not come to Darrel I would have either failed or finished school; I would have left the school out of one hole or another and gone to work for Dad with his machines; I would have learned by him to love air too like you did and to be machines and fuck machines and live machines and eat and drink and want through every day and still have nothing real and die. I would have ended up before god having nothing.