Three Hundred Million: A Novel

by Blake Butler

  [Gravey again laughs. His laughter this time sounds completely different from the first way his first laughter sounded, higher, more rapid. The recorder in my pants begins to buzz. I feel it burn at where my skin is. I hear my phone. My phone is ringing. It seems to stick against my leg. My leg has spasms. My teeth won’t let my mouth around them close. I’m sweating. I hear numbers. A light is rising.]

  JB:

  Darrel?

  GG:

  [not smiling] Yes, son?

  JB:

  I am

  GG:

  You are

  [I feel better. The room is cleaner. I sit straight up. I breathe.]

  JB:

  I want to understand.

  [Gravey closes his eyes; I watch them roll back underneath the flesh as the lid comes down. Suddenly I smell something, like he’s shit his pants, but neither the expression on his face nor his position belies any strain. He begins to speak now through his lips without opening his mouth, a childish murmur.]

  GG:

  He is in a room. There are no doors in the room. There is a screen. A kind of light coming from somewhere on the side opposite the screen feeds at his chest. It is the Day. Inside the room he watches the day go on beyond him in the end of itself. He does not know what he sees, or that he’s seeing. Where he is is going to end but it will begin again. No murder and no mirrors, but a fleshless, edgeless, ageless frame.

  JB:

  And you? When will you die?

  GG:

  I am only here on pause. For a moment my home touched the room beyond the screen and gained its level but this soon will be ended, for the pyre. This body too will be destroyed, at the hands of all our hands, like mine, so we no longer have to have.

  [His sweat is almost like a well. It fills his mouth. I taste the salt and cannot chew. I’m sweating also, more now than I ever.]

  JB:

  Gretch Gravey, are you guilty as an actor in the death of the four hundred and forty persons?

  GG:

  On Tues., 7-23-XX, Gretch Gravey knew homicides that he forgot real. Upon asking him to mention in which skulls he performed the original interview, he stated the above information. For this work I would like to be paid fifteen million dollars.

  JB:

  Were you alone, or were there others?

  GG:

  During the rising I was the second suspect in his body, an offense. Some of the skulls Gretch Gravey had picked up and requested to speak with were found in front of me again.

  [Each time I inhale, he exhales.]

  JB:

  You keep referring to yourself now in third person.

  GG:

  At this time I was the thirty-third skull he sprayed. There had been ones before and there would not be others. I proceeded to the fifth floor of the house. At this time I also locked myself up in Sod City, where there appeared a black paint. The neighbors knew. Their faces shook in the night while they were sleeping and they grew.

  JB:

  There were others involved, or there weren’t?

  GG:

  All the victims in all eyes. All the knives the verbs had given in the books and speech of human color.

  JB:

  You aren’t making any sense.

  GG:

  Our last transmission. More phones all ringing in the blood of them with each new inch. When asked into the interview room where the numbers were placed onto where they could become the Mother Body, He stated he had boiled the skin and hair we conducted from the skulls in order to spray away an hour’s time. Each hour must be peeled into the Mother to forgive it. He at this time gave them an artificial torso that he wished to look like in case someone he had taken from a state talked to us about a victim while we were not there in our bodies. He had also two additional feelings that could not be boiled out of us, either one.

  [There is so much liquid on the floor, I can feel it. I can’t look down.]

  JB:

  What were the feelings?

  GG:

  A sleeplike state, the state of ether; and the pyre, where to this . . .

  [Gravey’s face begins to emit sounds of biting, from inside his throat, like something in there tearing. His eyes are wet, and making gleam. He refuses to make words, despite the nearly constant ream of guttural and convulsive sound seeming to come from all over his body. I watch. I hold my hands close. I feel hungry: I wish I didn’t have to say I did.]

  [I cannot speak.]

  GG:

  GG:

  [some kind of breathing coming from him in the deepest voice I’ve heard] The world revolves around the world. Other orchestrations [planetoid, celestial, debris, silent striation, columnar bodies, fable/myth, the unseen] are totalities manifested by the world’s revolution of itself. Its revelation. To change the earth, the earth must be deceived. One way is paper, one is blood.

  [I cannot speak and do not wish to.]

  GG:

  [More time goes on. I am seeing colors. I close my eyes and can’t make them open up. I keep waiting for the guards to come and get me. I feel nothing. Later, standing up from where I’d been seated, I would imagine it had been at least weeks since I had left the room, as I would find my legs so stiff and weird beneath me it was as if they were not mine. I find myself again compelled against speaking.]

  JB:

  [Gravey’s sternum is shaking. It stinks.]

  JB:

  [The whites of Gravey’s eyes have become grayer, packed with bluish spindles. The pupils rolled down to look toward me, not at or into me, but straight through, as if focused hard on something on the far side of my head. I could feel a little burn like boiling wine where my memory packets swirled around a cold spot in my cerebrum. I turned around to look where he was looking on the wall. There on the wall, a black square printed at eye level into the white surface, hazy, floating on my vision, and just thereafter, sunk away into the cream.]

  [I got up and walked out of the room.]

  [I mean I get up. This is happening in present tense.]

  [I walk along the long hall through the building seeing nobody else. I have to piss. I’m freezing cold. None of the doors in here will open. Nothing would open. The door to the outside is no longer where I remember it was. I don’t know where anybody is. Through the window into another holding chamber holding a shitload of dogs inside it. The dogs are gnawing at each other.]

  [None of the other rooms is really a room. There are beds. There are thimbles and money stacked in piles like pyramids and globes.]

  [I have to piss. There is all this liquid in me. My arms are heavy.]

  [I find a water fountain and try to take my dick out to piss into the hole of the fountain because whatever, but I can’t get the opening open on my pants.]

  [I piss my pants. My piss is white as paper and has writing all the fuck over it, every word I’d ever said. It has your name on it. It has the date, and all the dates before today’s date. It does not have any dates after today.]

  [I walk back to the room where I’d left Gravey. I feel I need to see him. I have to hurry. There is this want. It is the greatest want I’ve ever felt, all of a sudden. I hurry for the room. The room where He had been before me. Along the walls now, though, the hall keeps going on. Where the door was supposed to be, the door to He, each time I think I’m there along the long wall, I find a little piece of paper in my hand. The paper is always blank.]

  [The paper is blank until it wasn’t. Until when I opened the paper, there I was. Then there were no doors. There was no city.]

  [I put my head against the floor. I heard Him again right there in me, answering me again, in my own voice, with the questions I had asked, and the answers I had answered.]

  [There are all these motherfucking words. They were shaking in me. They knew who you were.]

  [Inside His voice aloud I hear me also speak. I hear me speak and speak and speak in all these other rooms around us.]

  [I’m bleeding.]

  [holy fuck I’m bleedin
g]

  * * *

  SMITH: J. Burns was a member of our police force from 1961 to 1967. He was killed in service during a routine investigation of a property at , suspected to be harboring a multiple felon wanted on evidence of additional homicide, pedophilia, and distribution of narcotics. Said suspect fled the scene and successfully escaped through an unlit wood behind the house. Burns was an extremely dedicated cop, and more so a good man. I have no idea why his name appears here, though I do recognize a few of the exchanges presented above from segments of a videotaped deposition of Gravey on the morning following his arrest.

  Four more mothers kill more friends. Four friends of each of the killed persons kill another four persons, and from there, each four more. Four of the relations of each of the victims of Gretch Gravey kill four more people, and four of each of those killed by the mother kill four more people. Each, having killed four, kill themselves. Other bodies choose to replicate the Gravey method, killing many in a silence without public detonation or self-snuffing, requiring capture by police, and forthcoming investigation, and prosecution, which, for each, takes more time, a form of worship.

  In waves of four new sets of four more kill further bodies immediately again. The work occurs in dark or light: women and men are stabbed inside their cars or closets or beds or bathrooms or at work or on the bus; children and babies are smothered in their cribs or inside day care or before their parents at their park; guns are placed in mouths and eyes and earholes, knives inserted into slits of flesh the flesh had held for life, waiting for the injection of the knife to be the key turned in the lock the flesh makes at last forever once and only ever by his hand. Homes are intruded upon by those taken up in spirits or stone sober or somnambulating or quite calm; wives, judges, bag boys, busboys, window shoppers, roofers, tourists, police officers, designers, homemakers, the poor, the elderly, the lame turn fists and fingers and teeth and trowels and machetes and steel bats on the homeless, the work-from-home, stockbrokers, students, demolition experts, body doubles, waitresses, the faithful, the faithless, chefs, producers, writers, actors, window washers, architects, the terminally ill. The function of the action spreads in doily-motion, turnpiking out from each to each, so that by lengths the victims activate the guilty and the guilty in turn beget more of both.

  Begetting is the purpose; this is a word we all have heard; it replicates in the backwards process from the book known by some as the story of creation, though this time in reverse: John debegets Nancy debegets Richard debegets Tom debegets Tony debegets Alison debegets Chris debegets A. debegets B. debegets Joseph debegets Olinea debegets LaRichea debegets Paul debegets Paul debegets Paul debegets Tia debegets Michael debegets Yon debegets Sina debegets Portia debegets Jericho debegets Lon debegets Richard debegets Owen debegets Lanaisa debegets Chad debegets Andy debegets Lucy debegets Arnold debegets Oona debegets Don debegets Allen debegets August debegets Toya debegets O. debegets Ron debegets Ronnie debegets Ronald debegets Sal debegets Sagat debegets Andrew debegets Timothy debegets Mary Louise debegets Marticia debegets Joan debegets Joanie debegets O. debegets Person debegets Chu debegets Quia debegets Jose debegets Lania debegets Sue debegets Ham debegets Sara debegets Sing debegets Kandy debegets Hsu debegets Rory debegets Clive debegets Blake debegets Halla debegets Sancho debegets Janice debegets Matt debegets Susi debegets Pad debegets Alicia debegets Fal debegets Nan debegets Janet debegets Percy debegets Ronaldo debegets John.

  The houses fill with blood. The blood is eaten from the bodies, becoming body for the body to activate itself. Each body made debegetted is taken unto the body that debegetted it, absorbed. One by one, in sets of four, then eight, then sixteen, the bodies pair and congregate, compile. Oceans open, settle, dry. The rooms of evidence aggregate behind locked doors in silence, cataloged, unwatched, while in the rooms surrounding other hours the as yet undebegetted people continue to try inside themselves to still go on. Streets for miles divert the massive traffic held in blue white red green gray black red husks of hurried cars enslaved in slick packs from lot to lot in the susurrating Costco light the magnanimous Wendy’s light the sainted stitching Barnes & Noble light, the BP light the PetSmart light of light hung street to street in knit across the homes the OfficeMax light the Office Depot light the neon signs of deathtraps in one nation under god, the Chili’s light the silent beeflight of the Outback and the Gap and Best Buy moving hurried in conditioned spasm to Exxon and Taco Bell and Moe’s and Ben and Jerry’s and Dunkin’ Donuts in the husk of cells fussed off gross streaming trays of shitting days and laughter pyramids set in the gaudy lips and teeth like tumors on a tonsil turning black and turning swollen aisle to aisle in room to room in the Target light of America the Kroger light of America the Ross light the Home Depot light the Coca-Cola light the jabbed shit rib sandwich canary visions peeling off the borders of the bodies of the On the Border and the T.G.I. Friday’s and the T.J. Maxx farting blood beams from the eyes into the mouths of the murder puppies screwing big holes in blind butts wallowing in mud of Gap light of Google light of Yahoo light in the machines of aborted dick shelves robbing tanning beds while folders of folders brim with files sent from number 1 to number 2 among the walls of mumbled birthing rooms and mail centers and dead video rentals and carpet cleaners and the husks of names clipped by a bacon-smelling surface rising in the lid of the limousine yards of the mall crapped and crapping blue-gray beauty on the table of the sword like lettuce peeled from plastic boxes under the lid of E! light of ABC light of CNN light of dad of dad while babies screw up stabbing ornamental pygmy trash on wax paper in the bedrooms while their parents snorf pepperoni cubes in the light of Papa John’s in the light of Walmart light Applebee’s light American Apparel light dicklight pornlight mashlight hammers falling from blowholes scripted by torches under afghans skewed from worms sold by Pep Boys light Duracell light Facebook light changing its profile and its name against the edge of beds pushed together under houses hiding from scrawling bloodgush peeing in their ears and arms of daddies going whoa going holy fuck the football game is on my dick has scabies the delivery guy has no change I can’t get my car out of the driveway I’m several years gone I’m under water in my briefs this red light has been red for eight hundred years and I’ve lived for only thirty and I feel eighty and I’m ten and I don’t want to be me anymore or be the body beside me in the night from whom my babies twinned were made and kissing rabbits in my sleep praying for lasers to shoot the grease out of my eyes to scrape the Windex light the Comfort Inn light the NBA light the rapeshitfucklight strobing from my human-wounded ass from my tits and arms and flab and mustache, I can’t even breathe my own breath here any longer I can’t taste this pie can’t smell this ball I want a new job I want a city I want a wider grave a bigger boat I want bigger to have one hundred g’s in it I want rap music dentistry I want a cut of beef Pamela breast-sized Brad Pitt cock-sized a cut of beef the size of me I want to swim in god I want a god I want a life an Uzi a condition I want the best pills you can prescribe I want to live in the name of no prescription I want national jailbait body Party City Citgo Waffle House chop suey full flavor less value more blue prose more delete-mind more screen so wide I can’t see the end or the beginning I want parsley I want panties I want me of me in me of mine.

  Today 137,800 persons in America become killed.

  The current total population of America after the murders is 310,733,965.

  * * *

  RUTHERFORD: [stricken from record]

  BLOUNT: [stricken from record]

  LAPUZIA: [stricken from record]

  SMITH: I’m not sure why I’m even taking time now to update this file again but all the other persons who have commented on the above are dead (barring “Rutherford,” as I have no idea who that person is; she is definitely not the same psychiatrist assigned to Flood for examination, though that person is now dead, too, as are more members of our precinct than I can figure how to count). I am writing this from a locked room with several weapons at my disposal. I am no
t sure where I should go. Armed forces have arrived to help secure the building and watch Gravey’s chamber around the clock, though I am not sure that I feel safe even with them here. Everything seems to have changed. What was written in the above is making its way upon our bodies. I don’t know how it is being updated, or from where. Flood still has not surfaced since my last note regarding my inability to make contact, though he seems able to update this file at his ease. Flood, if you are reading this, obviously I need to speak with you immediately and in the most dire way. Please contact me, immediately. This is your sergeant, Reginald Smith.