Three Hundred Million: A Novel

by Blake Butler

  It does not feel strange to walk naked among the home of strangers. This way his skin can breathe, and he is more open to understanding. He can’t remember anytime he hasn’t ever been just skin like this, breath like this.

  There are other rooms off the first room. There is a kitchen and dining room and a half bathroom. Off a slightly longer hall there are two doors to separate bedrooms. In the first room a child is sleeping, the air around him illuminated by a single pink-swathed bulb low to the ground. Images cover the child’s walls every inch, as if trying to cover the flat white space out with shiny famous faces and cartoon bodies. The child looks like any child, the way all children do to Flood, never having been a parent. The child sleeps clutching a toy camera to his chest; a camera instead of a bear or blanket, as if at any moment he will be called on to document the world.

  In the second bedroom there are two adults side by side, facing opposite directions. Across from their bed, a mirror, doubling their image, and the image of the open door. Again Flood does not see himself reflected in the mirror.

  Flood comes into the room. He comes to stand over the bodies. Their breath is low and steady, and does not react to his presence.

  There is another window here, over the bed, and here the curtains have been pulled back. Though beyond the window, Flood sees nothing but more darkness. No streetlamps and no moon. No strange edge to the way the absence of light lies over objects underneath it. Just flat unending black, profuse as hell. It is a different sort of darkness than that from which he’d come out of in the tunnel. He can feel no language in it. No sound.

  Flood finds that, unlike all the objects, he is not prevented from touching the people. In fact, almost the opposite is true. He doesn’t know why, but he can’t seem to control his left limb from rising up to pet the long arms of the sleeping woman. Her skin is soft and covered in light hair. She is very warm. The man is warm, too. Flood lingers over both, caressing their scalps and tracing the veins along their limbs. They don’t seem to feel anything, or don’t respond with more than slight alterations in their sleeping posture. Their eyes are rolled back under their lids, jerking hastily under the flesh there as if in desperation for some icon lodged into the skull.

  Flood feels a great desire to lie down. More so, he wants to pull the man out of the bed and stuff his body in the closet, and take his place in the bed beside the woman. Just to sleep some. He is so tired. It has been long years coming up to now. But the man’s body is too heavy to move, even an arm alone. Flood can do nothing to change the way they are; he can only brush and breathe against them, feel them, try to try. The woman’s face seems so familiar; the lips around the mouth, the groove of the neckline, the shoulders. He wants to hold her, to lie against her. Instead, he tries to wake her, shaking gently at her shoulders. He says a name he believes could be hers, could be anybody’s. She goes on sleeping, always sleeping, no matter what now.

  Under their skin, the eyes looking out seem to see nothing.

  Flood leaves the room. Coming back along the wall, he finds the child’s door has been closed and locked from the inside. Flood pulls at the knob and whispers into the gap under the door and no one answers.

  Other windows in the house reflect the same black matter as the first. Flood can’t force his arms up to try to turn the latch or bang the glass out, the blood inside his arm turning to stone. The same is true of the three doors he finds leading into the space from outside; he can’t reach them, even the one he finds ready to be unlocked, the key left turned in the deadbolt for anyone to use.

  He could stay in here forever, Flood feels. He could move from room to room and continue his life like that. He would feel fine here. Nothing would have to happen. The people could sleep and sleep and say nothing to him. He feels no hunger, no fear, no boredom, and can’t imagine having to feel these ways again. And yet he knows, inevitably, these feelings will find him, grow into him, change him. He knows he has to leave the house before anything can take his heart; to keep the feeling he feels now inside him, held inside him, untouchable.

  Flood returns to try to wake the woman twice again without result before he leaves the house the way he came. His body passes though the mirror, and then, once clicked locked behind him, he continues back down the passage into different darkness.

  * * *

  FLOOD: Whatever else I can’t remember I remember was my eye forever.

  They realize Gravey must be moved. In the streets and cities there’s demand, creamed in the people. The smell of the blood of the city says his name inside them. The people wish. The warden’s worried all the people begging banging shrieking fucking licking at the doors around the center will find some way to beat their whole way in, and worse than free the killer, kill him. Gravey must suffer for his crimes. All must suffer, all days, in the name they’ve built to walk and live among. The warden wants to get him somewhere undetected, with thicker walls and wiser locks. Four men in black suits come in and hold him down and stick his forearm with three different kinds of needle, leaking juice. Thereafter there’s a large amount of light.

  Gravey grins. He blinks his eyes hard, feeling giddy. He looks into the men.

  “My friends,” he says. “My me again.”

  His forehead shudders, quaking in moonlike ridges.

  The men stop. The men stand around Gravey in a circle. They watch him lie. There is a kind of smell about the session, skin in glisten. The dark clothes of the men begin to darken more. They do not look up at one another. The drugs in Gravey’s arm trace through his veins. His eyes remain open. He does not look at the men. The men adjust their positions in the circle without speaking to form another kind of shape. Gravey seems to puff up some. A smoke somewhere rising. Gravey gives the men new names. The names appear inside their head. The shape of them shifts again, again. The walls are wet.

  The men leave the room. They leave Gravey on the floor there with the door open.

  The largest of the four men walks along the long hall to the exit corridor. He comes into a series of other rooms and goes into the first room not already occupied with warming bodies and takes a service revolver off the wall. He shoots himself in the shoulder, that with which he’d given Gravey the injection, then shoots between the eyes. His blood runs from his body in a star.

  The second largest of the four men walks along the long hall to the exit corridor into the door to the outside. He walks straight ahead from the building bypassing his vehicle and the gates, walks without looking in either direction into traffic across the main thoroughfare abutting the complex, causing two family-sized vehicles to swerve to avoid him and crash into several vehicles, which crash into several more. He walks four point four further miles causing similar dysfunction resulting in an uncounted number of accidents or deaths until he arrives at his home, where his wife and three-year-old daughter are napping in the smallest room of the house. He locks them into the house. He sets fire to the house using propane from the grill and gasoline siphoned from his car. He goes back into the house. He locks the front door, tapes his knees and wrists together, lies down on the floor there below the bed beside his child and wife.

  The second smallest of the four men goes about his day; he feels tired but rather happy somehow, giddy even; in the morning he will make a routine visit to his physician, who will find a small blue growth in the flesh around his kidneys, and in the flesh behind his eyes.

  The smallest of the four men goes into a break room with a telephone. He begins calling numbers from memory of the people and businesses he has known inside his life, dialing rapidly each one in an order subscribed to his emotion. He will speak to bodies, to machines. He will speak to the presences at the end of the line and give into them not a word but the Name of God coursed through him without sound. Each of the called will act on their own calls burned in their own brains until they have sent as well the waking message to hundreds of others, who do the same. Each person, having completed some precise number of calls already written, kills themse
lves with knives or ropes or pills or whatever way it is they always privately fantasized on at their grossest or most bored.

  Gravey closes the cell with him inside it.

  * * *

  RUTHERFORD: [stricken from record]

  INTERVIEW WITH GRETCH GRAVEY, CONDUCTED BY J. BURNS. 10/16/2, 1:30 P.M.

  JB:

  Why did you kill [more than] four hundred and forty people?

  GG:

  What.

  JB:

  You have been accused and will most likely be convicted of killing a lot of people. The number’s yet to be concretely established, but by what we know so far it is at least four hundred and forty. Why did you do it?

  GG:

  [Shakes his head hard.]

  JB:

  No comment?

  GG:

  No condition. [Inhaling slowly.] Do you have a gun at home?

  JB:

  I’ve never owned a gun. My father was against it. I probably should, though, shouldn’t I? Do you own a gun?

  GG:

  Many.

  JB:

  How many guns do you own?

  GG:

  As many as there are bodies in America.

  JB:

  America? Why not the whole world?

  GG:

  When the hole is open the rest will enter. [Exhaling slowly.]

  JB:

  Is there a reason more than seventy-five percent of your accused victims were women?

  GG:

  For what any of us is and was and is again and will be again beginning. To awake the Eye.

  JB:

  So you did commit the murders?

  [Gravey’s face changes. He shudders raptly, arms convulsing, then looks at me again.]

  GG:

  No, that was you. That was your father and my father. That was windows or was water. I am online now. The gown is raising. In almost any home you can find written at least once the word delete.

  JB:

  Your father. He’s gone missing, but we haven’t found his body in your house.

  GG:

  I grew up in a family of nature, a more graphic, wonderful home. As children we were happened. We regularly encountered church. I wanted five hundred brothers and sisters. My parents did not drink or visit grocery or drugstores. Their softcore pornography was no physical abuse, just not enough. In our neighborhood it was a fine, solid people that would dream garbage and, from time to time, tragedy. The days would scream. The days are screaming now but you can’t hear them and soon even that—

  [Gravey is laughing. He makes a terrified face, then a deranged face, then suddenly appears calm. I start to open my mouth to say the next thing and before I can he speaks.]

  GG:

  There is a law revolving around God, from this Word of God, and the Prophets made flesh, as far back as Mary the Virgin. So that all who would highlight God’s mercy would make everyone believe in what was coming; that who would seek god for where there has been other, when Christ was forgiveness, and writing, writings of the conceived. We had to bring God’s writings, search the Scriptures, and slay it, as who do not usurp the authority become the arguments themselves. The confronted Christ knew the real meaning, but yet said to him, “There’s an additional God.” Be not sons, they were commanded, born of fornication, so we were.

  JB:

  You mean God told you to kill?

  [There is a long silence. My lips won’t open. Gravey sees me. Then he shakes his head. My lips seem to unlock. I find it hard to take a breath. I feel the ground beneath me kind of moving. Again I try to speak and again Gravey speaks instead.]

  GG:

  God’s name isn’t God. The word has not been formed yet. I am forming the word.

  JB:

  Are you a prophet?

  GG:

  I am whoever.

  JB:

  Anybody? Everybody?

  GG:

  Neither. It is a folding.

  JB:

  So it was a moral act?

  GG:

  No. It was written. There is no author.

  [I had not realized until right now how much sweat is pouring from his face. His clothes are soaked through and into the bed and on the floor almost with such range I can’t believe it. The wet is on my pants a little. I try to forget at all about my body or the air here.]

  JB:

  What do you think of the Bible?

  GG:

  God of Heaven believed that he was a sacrifice rich in mercy, numb, and prophets were goats, oxen, red men ignored, heifers. A Law, but also a way, an escape for those who learned the sophisticated Repentant Souls and social impacts might fall short of the virgin, toward a very prolific type of glory of God’s law. We would conceive and bear a system of worship. The prophet had to slay a lamb for hope for a world. It has only partially begun.

  [Suddenly I’m having trouble breathing, like the room is too small. Gravey looks. I’m kind of choking. The air seems to catch hard in my chest and spin there. Gravey’s not blinking. I can still manage to make words.]

  JB:

  Is it true you ate many of your victims’ bodies?

  GG:

  I ate them all. All of them, each component. I mean just by breathing. You will become it, too. All flesh must be returned into one flesh. What seems their remainder is not there. It is a bag I placed to leave the evidence of my being in the hands of the cameras for the proclamation. They weren’t victims. I’m just around.

  JB:

  How would you describe the taste of human flesh?

  GG:

  Like mashed potatoes in a ball gown. Sometimes pianos or a lock. It depends on the flesh’s eventual location in our total future mass. [begins to touch himself all over quickly] Hey, do you have fire?

  JB:

  I don’t smoke.

  GG:

  I don’t either. Do you have fire?

  [Again, my voice comes pouring from me.]

  JB:

  My father used to burn leaves in the yard. It made more smoke than anything else. The ground around the pile was black.

  [My choking in my chest is simmery, like on the cusp of welling up.]

  GG:

  Did you love your father?

  JB:

  I think I did.

  GG:

  No, did you love him?

  JB:

  He was my dad, yeah.

  GG:

  [suddenly angrily, baring teeth] I said did you love him?

  JB:

  Yes, I did. I do.

  GG:

  Then you love me.

  [Gravey at this point is drooling from the mouth to match the sweat; the drool slick makes a long reflective window, as with dishsoap water, before it pops between the index of his face between his hands. His eyes are blinking so rapidly it is as if the function of the lids has inversed: blinking when they would other times be held open or closed, staying open or closed when they would blink. Gravey begins grunting in a rhythm.]

  JB:

  Hey, are you okay?

  GG:

  [snorting] Let’s have dinner. I like tacos. I enjoy the light inside a cow’s right eye.

  JB:

  It’s not quite dinner yet. I’d be glad to join you.