Blake Butler: Three Hundred Million: A Novel

FLOOD: This quasi-sentimental bit about his mother and his father (apparently once again presented in the lurking residue of Gravey’s identification as a child) seems to imply, if not a human side about Gravey, at least one capable of some semblance of reminiscence and pining, the likes of which I’ve seen no evidence of in person. Efforts to locate Gravey’s parents at their homeplace have proved fruitless, and we have found no evidence of communication with Gravey among their suddenly seemingly abandoned belongings, nor any photographs of Gravey as an adult or a child. Likewise any other family or social relation beyond those who claim to have lived with him inside the Black House, though again no evidence of outsider involvement has been confirmed. I take all signs of desperation or emotion in his speaking as further elements of ploy, reinforced by the creeping feeling I get even just being in the same building as him that he is only ever looking for any number of entryways into my or anybody’s mind .

Some nights there were so many boys there I could not see beyond the walls of all their limbs. Boys heard the word I said and took it from me and went into the night and came back with more boys. While the mirrors and the low light and the songs of Darrel throttled through the backbone of the home, the boys would fold themselves over and over in the new flesh shared between us. The rising color in their output made me shriek more in my deathwish, thereby causing my vision and my body to sometimes split again, though this time in a way I slowly realized I could organize. I could see myself from there inside myself storming room to room in removed slo-mo, speaking in a language no longer ours or mine into the heads that floated past my face. The others of me did exactly what I wanted while I continued only sitting. I rarely suffered any pain. If I ran into a pane, it did not hurt and would not shatter unless I told it. Beyond the windows where the night curled I could see how in the sky the stars were going deaf, pocked out by something far behind them seeing. The world was full of others I could be. All the houses stacked like teeth around our lives holding the sleeping people. I needed all of them. Like god’s own faith in god. The boys came and ate meat off my chest. They sucked until the pressure wrote out gorges through their heads, though which then I could place my destroyed treble. Their moaning made a roof against the night, covering the aspirations of our bodies against those who would never understand, the winking worship service trapped only ever in their own lives. They were out there putting their hands and mouths all over anything they wanted. How could we breathe now when there were even more alive now on the earth than had ever lived and now were dead. This was a balance that needed correction. The dead’s number, I said, in Darrel’s name, must soon rise. When we were born, I went on, in Darrel’s name, the sky had been all written opaque with our speech, cut with a great yellow-font-on-melon shaping the Zodiac. The light of a dead star is not something to fuck around with, and yet all these people go and go. I said a lot more I can’t remember beyond the necessity of massacre, the becoming out-of-world. To make my point clear I made the new boy with the long black hair go and look behind the clock hung in the room where most of the most recent people had been circle jerking in their sleep. At my command, Black Lock Darrel went and got the clock and pressed it to my hands. On the back side of the clock’s face the flat black of the coming sky reflected. I heard my forehead bend in on my brain a bit. I hit Black Lock Darrel in the mouth with the whole clock’s head and then again against the floor with my own head, then both my fists into his two cheeks, then the clock again. This was my first violence in this body. My boy’s face bled long with the smell of gracious pussy. I felt his blood tell me to Begin, while Black Lock Darrel, weeping, kissed my hands with his long tongue. I heard him tell me Please, Amazing, Yes, Again. All I could hear then was applause.

JOHN R.: “There really were a ridiculous number of people coming around already. I don’t know where they came from or how they knew, but some nights there would be like several dozen guys all just standing around to wait to hear Darrel talk. There were girls too but Darrel made Gravey make us say that they were boys. Once you saw him once you wanted to see him again, so like it just kept getting bigger like that, and Gravey was very quickly losing anything about the way he’d been before to all the speaking. I can remember the smell in the room that first night when he killed the first boy right in front of us. It was like take all of the perfumes they sell at one of those department stores in those long glass cases and spray it all into the room together. There was even some kind of color about it. You couldn’t not breathe it all up in, and I have to say that once I’d smelled a little I wanted to smell more. I tried to not want that but the voice was all up in me.”

Name withheld: “Man no there were never that many people. Especially once dude started getting weirder and not giving drugs unless you’d listen to him less people were coming. Yeah he was talking to himself a lot and shit and thought the mirrors were alive but some nights it was just he and some nights I was him myself because I loved him so hard. I mean, I did this. No I really did. It was me. Please kill me.”

The band practiced long hours on our absence. They recorded new takes every night, where each take sounded like the old one but with new void in it, as I grew stronger. We were multiplying, every one of us, all overflowing with ripe brain beatbox. The endless angles of the mirrors made each chest become seven. Boys invited friend boys to the house and fed them what they’d come for and then they too would go on and take the sound to other houses. Some of the people were animals and family pets. I couldn’t tell the difference between a dude and an aardvark. They were all Americans. I wasn’t even never speaking any longer, but now so continuously you couldn’t tell it from nothing. My outgrown silence went on in the brains of two boys I’d asked to extricate their lungs on plates for me to coat with gel and wear as a ball gag. I’d sewn their lips shut. Their bodies worshipped outlet malls like anyone alive. In this new year I could already shrink down if I wanted, I remembered, and witness anybody’s most unfortunate fantasy. I was so busy and there were all those people out there and all these hours wired. I had to name two more boys to do my doll play for me and count my money and make up lyrics for my songs so that they then could be deleted and adhered to what the drums inside my wombs were doing. Today was our best day yet already: I had been saying this each day all through the year, and I would say it here tomorrow and the days before and when again it came into me the same thing again regardless and still every hour it held true. The worming word within me was wanting out even more now knowing exits in the day again begun again cut from the mother and she was only anyone. There were millions more, and just one sky. Under that dumb sky there, through the window in the kitchen where I’d cut into the mirror to remind it who was who, I watched the yard becoming spraytanned to match the shores of flesh the older gods had loved. Each new day that came and went forever gave the ground around us a riper shade. I began to wrap my wrists with wire. I heard Darrel in my knees, teaching me to kneel without actual motion. I heard him in the pistons of the car cold in our driveway, the keys to which I’d swallowed in my sleep. I set the car on fire by thinking of it only in one light in one way, like a promise. I heard the gas tank explode through the wall. Then the yard too was on fire. Then the windows and the roof, though it did not destroy our house as it could not destroy our house. It made us stronger and stunk like rubber. It added new black layers to paint I’d painted in my last days, bringing such heat down on the house that boys were fainting in droves, all sweating eons. My own sweat rained inside the home. It rained for forty days and forty nights, each new day finding more new gloss-unfolding persons arrived to become drenched and sewn into the fold. I had to touch each arriving body on the center of the forehead to hear what was in there before they could be pronounced removed from their past life, given over to the invocation. The band was really bending up the air. Their songs were changing even inside the derivation, though what they played stayed the same each night. Our cold machines captured the image and the sound, erasing what had been previously recorded by anyone ever. Each night behind our closed eyes the fire raged again. I loved each of the new boys in his own way, and I said so. I told him each what I believed about us for us and would give to him with all of me each time I could get my body going good and in the best ways. I taught them how precisely to explode and still exist.