Three Hundred Million: A Novel Read online

  DEDICATION

  “The Part About Darrel” is for Molly Brodak

  EPIGRAPH

  Every hundred feet the world changes.

  —ROBERTO BOLAÑO, 2666

  CONTENTS

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  ONE The Part About Gravey

  TWO The Part About the Killing

  THREE The Part About Flood (In the City of Sod)

  FOUR The Part About America

  FIVE The Part About Darrel

  About the Author

  Also by Blake Butler

  Back Ad

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  ONE THE PART

  ABOUT GRAVEY

  This word occurs because of god. In our year here god is not a being but a system, composed in dehydrated fugue. Under terror-sleep alive we hear it heaving in and out from the long bruises on our communal eternal corpse, consuming memory. The wrecking flesh of Him surrounds, holds us laced together every hour, overflowing and wide open, permeable to inverse, which no identity survives. As god is love, so is god not love. Same as I could kill you any minute, I could become you, and you wouldn’t even feel the shift. Only when there’s no one left to alter, all well beyond any ending or beginning, can actuality commence.

  * * *

  E. N. FLOOD: This text was transcribed from a white notebook found at the foot of the stairs in the room beneath the home at address . The original handwriting has been confirmed as that of the home’s owner, Gretch Nathaniel Gravey, a forty-five-year-old Caucasian male, who, at the time of this writing, is being held without bond by the State for an as yet undetermined number of charges of murder in the first degree, as evidenced by the mass of human remains found occupying the same aforementioned basement. It is believed that other victims may exist outside the home, though the total tally and identities of even presently known victims remain uncertain due to the severity of their disfigurement and the intermingling of flesh. Gravey, beyond this document, stands mute.

  He who brought me brightest in the image of the human toward god was a series of shapes I knew as Darrel, though quickly I would come to see that’s not his name. His name had squirmed as any word, appearing burned into the pages of the unholy books composed alone in pens and tongues by men before we were we, beneath a sky propped up with our lunchmeat flab asleep and praying. Each syllable in how anyone would say his name would deform itself depending on whose mouth was being used, and so the name could lace within all language. His name appeared inside all ageless rails of light, invoked malformed in the mouths of all as corporations, entertainments, narcotics, art. But with my human mouth I called him Darrel, after the son I’d never have. I lived with Darrel in the black house for more than thirteen billion years before I ever had a body, years in which the flood of ideas we would erect from incubated and formed blood inside our brains. The ground beneath the dirt of our whole future pressed against everything we wanted, became so thin with all the scraping of the nails and all the one-day-buried no ones and all the nothing waking up in our new bodies in the night, that what was left of the foundation underneath us was something so clear and timeless and deranged we couldn’t feel it, and so wanted it again then even more, and in that wanting wanted every inch of now to produce further lengths to lust for, new skin to seethe inside of. I mean we began again like night again like night again every time we spoke or saw or felt anything. We were not us as we became us but someone else inside of someone else already all once again enslaved to live again as if we never had or known we could. Who we were from that point forward and what we did to all other bodies, to those hours and those men and women and people, was not us but someone we’d met long ago and wed and loved and killed, and buried over and again each time retaining less until there was nothing left to hump, and since then had wholly disremembered in a wish for preservation of daily sanity beyond where now the color of every mind appeared nightly inside my fleshless rest, wielding the knives of all my coming days repeating, and wearing skin made of all mirrors showing anyone but me, the silence of our deleted adoration so grown out all over our reflected faces and down our backs and up our asses we never even had to open our lids or mouth again to let the shape of night fill up our minds.

  * * *

  FLOOD: Whether Gravey is using this opening disorientation voice as a way of disclaiming his own actions I am unsure. He seems sometimes to be speaking directly to the reader, while at other times at you or through you or around you; perhaps, forgive me, inside you. Frequently one gets the sense of several of these modes in play at once. There are as well perhaps still other modes I’ve yet to consider, though I hope that in my exploration of his words I can begin to draw out what lies underneath. Unfortunately, my transcription here removes the context of Gretch Gravey’s particularly mangled/child-eyed/dogshit handwriting, which even after just minutes of staring at gives me a fever.

  Having already lived forever now beyond flesh like anybody, I knew I needed actual hands. I needed something I could touch myself with, and so touch others, link their lives. I took the body of a child first, that creature of the widest open brand of devotion. This kid was only one among the millions, arbitrary and impractical as any object is in its design; it could have been you, and maybe was you. Is you now. Like any other costume, then, inside the child’s flesh, I had to absorb his human past; what itching infernal plagues and future lust he was wound up by, all the countless forms of bliss and hell crammed in a person even so young. My presence in him rapidly aged him. A week died with his every wet dream, false skies in all fantasies. Years he felt were, to me, only more wallpaper, phlegm in a baby. The more he grew the more I was him and always had been, and likewise his whole frame of orchestration, every fissure. Quickly he was large enough to want to touch others, to fuck others. Through the full child I began then to see in the eyes of others the asphyxiating spectrums they carried, the hues of their assgrabbery. It was easy to want the spectrums for my own; more color and more color’s color. Inside the child I began to seek out ways in the world I would be granted access to everything not yet public—I began making friends, using prisms and medication and excess giggling as gifts I believed I enjoyed giving. I took part in pornography and vacations. Though more and more, these weren’t enough. No matter which media I perused or substances I ingested or buttons I pushed or hole I inherited, I knew there was something always just beyond my contour, a veil shuddering and vast with the glimmer of mortality all through my gums and tongue continuously, hypercolor with internal wounds of aging. The more I knew I wanted more, the slower time dragged, the more impossible any actual future became as chained to mine. I needed someone less entirely alive than some teen to spread my mechanisms—someone whose brain was already halfway gore, a totem in the house of the human plague that had taken of our spirit so completely, over and over, they could not even feel me making a costume of their organs, their ideas. While on TV I watched the ruin of man go on half-assed in the hands of hilarious dicklickers, I held my place and waited for my promise to reveal the kernel of its cyst, the teething hole through which our becoming could bloat to burst its human frottage.

  * * *

  FLOOD: Boxes of photographs of a recurring child were discovered in a hidden compartment under Gravey’s bed. It was unclear at first if they were evidence of a particular victim, or mementos of his own childhood. The photos seem too recently developed, of contemporary technologies, but the look of the dress and architecture in the photos seem much older. The child doesn’t look much like Gravey, and yet neither does he exactly not look like him when in the dark. As it stands, we have yet to find a body living or deceased who seems a right fit for the child,
and none of the other boys in the house remembers anyone like him coming among them. In the photos, the child seems happy, even pleasant, though, oddly, in none of the pictures are his eyes open.

  I met Darrel cuz of Gravey. I met Gravey cuz of Josh, and Josh cuz where I went to school there was a breakspot in the fence and during our time between lunch and nothing they would let us out into the yard and we could go out there and wait till no one saw us and slip back through the fence to this long trail that Josh promised went to somewhere awesome and I believed him because I thought the most of all that Josh had ever said. It might have even been true I loved Josh in my soft life then, but I could not admit it to me because he was boy and I was boy; still the rat-make of his hair and how it fell along his shoulders in the yards and other hours not around us would appear when I felt nothing alone in my flesh too, and from his hair inside me I saw his shoulders and could imagine what would be connected just to those, and from there soon in the night I’d be inside him and could be him even and when I was him I put my hands into his (my) pants and with my (his) hands I spread me open and made me go on and even up till now that might be the biggest feeling I have made. Each of us was filled with semen; we wore the worry scars around our holes. There was so much music all those nights each night I died and still was there. And yet, I knew Josh was not my future body. He was too real to me, too much a man. I might have would have wished to enter eternity through Josh instead of Gravey but Josh just liked knives and money and getting messed up, which is why even that afternoon he took me from the school through the mudyard to the house where we met Gravey, who gave us drugs for taking off our shirts and socks and pants and sometimes something else. I knew the instant I saw Gravey I would become him, and he would fill me, and in our collision, god would bend. Gravey didn’t try to fuck us mostly, he just did seeing and some fingers in our hair, the heavy breathing, but it was enough to leave him in me ever still, in a different way from Josh, in a way I could never learn to love. His eyes had dartboards in them and some gravel. He was very, very old. While he jacked off we inhaled gases and sometimes too we ate some pills or smoked the earth. Any I ate did big upon me: I was open. I could see then in each a new manner of operating color: how it was true that I had lived seven lives before mine started, like a pet, and how each life inside the life inside the one before it held seven more lives inside it too, though inside no life could I recall the resin of those before. It was the seventh life that made us humans, gave us the symbols through which we could believe we were only ever here and now. This in this as Gravey told us while we splayed before him on the floor in black of smoke-seas that seemed to rise invisible around him. Maybe Gravey did do more things while we were like that, to our bodies. Some hours for days I could not see at all, could not feel the color in me beyond what paper feels like rubbing in my palms.

  * * *

  FLOOD: Like any of those mentioned by name in this proceeding, including the amorphously rendered “Darrel,” no Josh has been identified or come forward. Though we have apprehended numerous suspects believed to be involved with the occurrences at during the period of , the actual number of those involved, like the number of victims, remains in question. It is also as yet unclear to what extent, if at all, any parties who have claimed to live in the house with Gravey were active in his crimes; though some claim compliance and even pleasure, there has been no evidence implicating anyone but Gravey in the physical activity of murder. Many of the stories do not line up. Most of the boys do not acknowledge each other. Some seem to have suffered extreme emotional damage, not to mention what was done to their flesh.

  The space I lay in when I stayed at Gravey’s had real mirrors on the walls and ceiling. There were so many of me in there underneath that and beside that I could not see me in the middle of us where I was: a throne of self made of my bone and flesh repeated. Asleep I’d hold so still and never move a second. I thought about asking Gravey some nights if I could come and live there when my father locked me out of the house as he often would for wearing black and speaking in voices that weren’t mine, but the question hung inside me plane-sized. I felt devout to nowhere. I slept in the tall grass beside the shed full of old tools when I could not find a way to force my way in through Dad’s locks. My father loved being alive: he was a photographer; he understood the human body, and machines; he had all these ways he meant to work inside the math of human ash to build from the deforming light of our great cities an empire of celebrated image memorized forever; models and actors; the living and the dead. He did not care how many other kinds of media there were inside this life already competing for the cash sold on corners and packed onto plastic. Soon anyway he fell too into wreck of air of America like anybody would; I could not spare him; I didn’t want to. He was not really my father any more than where your eyes hit this silent sentence, the same way my mother mattered only long enough to push me out, then there was always this hidden air between us. From outside Gravey’s house at night alone through the beams of the house freckled with ancient aging I could still hear what went on inside: walls not walls but idols. Could hear Josh and some of the other kids we went to school with who had come too to be around Him laughing or saying something in pig latin or whatever or eating angel dust up through their eyes and sometimes there’d be louder noises from the machines that made the house live so much you couldn’t hear anybody else above the churning of the cooling of our bodies off and modems barfing back and forth at one another. Once inside the house again I remembered to try not to listen to the sound of the machines so long as all those others so I would be smarter when I got older and less hurt inside for certain whiles about the way things went on without me in the daily organism, though as that went on too I began to feel too I wasn’t changing and anyway the effect of our inbred-from-Adam-and-Eve origins were beginning more and more to make effect in all of us. Some days inside the house the days inside the house went on so long and still the digits on the machines’ clocks would not blink; I could feel inside me, as the time stayed like that sometimes for some great lengths, the old National Anthem squirting through my organs into the surrounding furniture and glass, sucked out of my teeth and face in all its daily iterations of ads and silent thinking and holy money, into the house where then the house would chew it up; soon each time the house would kill the Anthem into a silence longer than all my cells lined up one after another in a queue inside my wanting and that silence was the new Anthem and that was warm. As long as day went on in this way I could sleep there right inside my posture without feeling any older, weaker, guilty. Eventually I would always wake up back inside the mirror room; there I could see myself standing beside me and this was very beautiful, and I remembered my body, what it wanted me to bring it. Being with my me’s long teeth made me less timid around the larger, higher boys and among the general community of people. One night I remember now I said some dark words to my father through a ham radio I found underneath my bed, its countless knobs marked with foreign symbols: this speaking through the wire would be the last tongues the we of me and Dad did to one another in America. I knew my dad’s destruction need not be by my own hand, as had my mother’s giving birth; there were so many other people past the mirrors; there was He in each of them, and so in his spirit each as much the father and mother of any other person ever as mine, and I too was their parent and always had been. In further time the room alone became my room; I did not have to ask, though often I might share the space with one or several others of us, which in the dark all looked like more of me. Some nights like these I would wake up and could not force my arms to move at all again for all the others we’d packed in. I’d find there hung above me so many of me I could no longer see the mirrors at all, and therefore the walls beneath them. Sometimes all I saw were all my eyes, through which I often found I felt if I could bring myself to press my own eye against my eye again, I could see far beyond this space, down a long glass into somewhere very gone and going further under each time my own sight inside
me buckled into black, because it is not time to speak of that yet.

  * * *

  ADAM A., age 17: “I uh didn’t know about Gravey’s parents. Or like I didn’t meet them. Sometimes he said he kept his mother in a glass cage in his brain and fed her money. He would have me pet him on the skull. He was exceptionally affectionate. He was nice to be with, even if he was always really fucked up it seemed like though I never saw him eat pills or snort or smoke or whatever. I don’t know why he’s talking like he’s not him, though he was always going on about how we were all made of the same person, or soon we would be, which is why we had to kill them, all of them. I do know there was no one else that was allowed to sleep in the mirror room with him, before the other rooms got mirrors anyway, because that was Gravey’s room, though sometimes he’d let you go in there with him and whatever, though like of course when he was done you had to get out. I don’t remember ever seeing anybody staying the whole night in there but maybe I just didn’t ever see it. Sometimes he like would go in the room and lock it and not come out for a long time and that was fine because we knew where he kept some of his shit and there was always more there even though I don’t think I saw him leave the house. Like any family, I only know as much as anyone would show me.”

  Everyone young that I could remember having been around before in rooms outside the house inside that false year, we hung out where Gravey lived without seeming beginning and without end. It came to be our days and evenings, small countless hours slipped under sweat and what the hell. I was still working up the ways within me I could find a way out of this body and into the next one, and I still had no idea, beyond how when my arms or face would go to sleep before my brain I’d feel this shaking, this speaking in me, like something fumbling through my cells. During this era, Gravey wore his white hair like a robe a lot, wrapped around his fangled body with the weird bruises at his softer points such as his calves and pits and chin, as the networking womb inside him widened. He never said a word. If he had any of what was going on between us, he smeared it in him with more smoke. Around him I felt older faster. I began to come around as who I was more. I put a picture of my dad I’d burnt the paper mouth off of with a blunt butt underneath my special mattress, which, when I was not there, other kids would use to be me too. Sometimes someone might come and stand above or lie beside me in the long haze of anywhere around us. I did not stop them. I did not feel nothing. Some nights the house would shake like a bead inside a baby rattle in another home. Other nights it felt as if there were no floors, and everyone kept just falling at the same rate through the same air with the lights out and the moths collecting on the eaves. We were not aging. In Gravey’s house surrounded we listened to his recording of himself or someone else playing the drums: long looping thud of arrhythmic kick and floor tom stuttered like shitty pasta. Other tapes were only loops of long whats of muffling and chime beat, which reminded me of electronics being pulled apart by time. Gravey in the sound would turn to stone. His face hated itself. In some other era he, I think, Gravey, had been attractive; now he seemed unto himself alone, destroyed, a body walking around in the light of what he’d needed and not gotten like anybody else, waiting for something to blot him out or at least say his name. The growing kids who came around to be around Gravey daily rotated through a central corridor of spines, or I was unlearning how to recognize who. Me and Josh were the smaller of the standards. Some nights I knew no one’s face. In my head I would refer to them by something wrong about them with their bodies, like Eternal Shithead or the Wolf Who Bleats Ash or simply You. Soon even that would fall away inside another kind of speech. Their faces would become mounds of hell and skin all run together in all our memories at once, even just seconds after having seen. No one knew me either. Often we boys each named and nameless all ended up faceup on the floor all bone, as the pills Gravey began to get from someone out there on the earth would make your body feel like it’d turned inside itself to stone too and shit upon you so hard that what our blood really awaited soon awoke.