Blake Butler - Three Hundred Million - A Novel

“There is a public demand to kill. This was all simple negotiation. Millions of women will take only a few weeks more; the rest must automatically collapse. They will become absorbed. The few remaining bodies should be of use to a consecrating fuckfest for whoever’s got a dong still in this country, male or female. With complete automation of our disease and old age we will mark the beginning of an emotional morality. There will be celebration on the face of every final breath. There will be no wake. We’re not god because what god is does not end. The silence must expand between notes until there is no awareness. I call on you to stop. Death is all over. I’m glad it is. Peace in their lives a million times. If you knew what was ahead of you, you’d rest. Because what are people but the peddlers of we and all we’re doing is I don’t care.”

CHARLES, age 15: “As his voice started to get raw he began whipping his hands around in front of him like I guess it was supposed to be sign language. After that he traced the words in some dark liquid along his arms and chest and face. I knew I understood, and had been waiting in my life to find these words presented, opened, burned onto my mind.”

The second and third mothers the boys brought to me were much older than the first. They were sisters and had made babies before with other men. I could see where on their arms they had been bruised by the boys in handling from wherever they had come. I did not want to know the origin because here we were now. The smell of meat was flooding from their pores. I could hardly look at them, I was shaking so hard, with all the ascendancy inside me that they triggered. He who gives must give and give. This is the nature of the music. I told the boys to leave me now. I told them to all go in the band room and hold their instruments against their chests and think about what in them should not exist. On the floor inside the mirror room the women wept. Their gift was not at all like silence. For my pleasure I wept too. The wet upon my wide face sizzled and spattered in the mirrors and evaporated into flavor. I matched the women note for note resounding while their brownish nipples shook and shook. There was milk inside them. There were eggs inside them. There was a space inside them. They were mine. Ours. Today. I moved inside the room hearing my mother’s inhale brushed in every inch of how my own meat fit together waiting to be made larger. I reached my arms to touch the twins both on their heads. We made a leaking tripod. Our fluids needed killing too. I took their tears up on my hands and licked them off me and could taste the aspiration of their young years becoming gifted in my blood, endless gifts of hell and semen I’d take for mine in contribution to my work. This had been a long time coming, in all those books and movies, and masturbation fantasy and bloodlust and laughter and church and days unwound in rooms with those we’d loved. Which was now too. I loved these mothers. Where I licked the skin burned and left a bruise in the shape of someone turning off a lamp inside a hive. The light around us mattered. It mattered even more. I touched their heads again. I drew a hexagon in light. Each place I touched turned wet around my flesh unto the air and therefore inside made them drier. Their clothes had been remaindered. They wore stuffing they had pulled out of the bed to hide their naked. Tufts marring their nipples and obscuring the marks the boys had left where they were kissing on their way home to bring the mothers to me or where they had or had not found their way in. I hated to think of the men before me in these women’s lives, and the women in their lives, and the women in my lives, and the men in my lives. I was kind of spinning in the minute. I touched the women harder. I wished my blood into their chests through my celebrity. I could see the way they felt it as their eyes grew open and they stopped sobbing. They were warm against me. I felt they wanted in me too, and so instead I brought them on and in and in into my body, inch by inch, face first. My coming birthday would be bluer. The newest New Year’s would have no color ever again.

FLOOD: The bodies of a pair of twins we believe to be those referred to here were located buried among the primary mass grave that would be created in the room beneath the house (frequently referred to as “the mirror room”). The flesh surrounding both victims’ features (cheeks, nose, forehead, eyelids) had been stripped in large part from the bone; as well, various small incisions of flesh from the chests, backs, thighs, and forearms of both females. The cutting is crude, and will remain so as Gravey’s ritual consumption of his victims’ bodies becomes more and more important in his procedure. Many future bodies will be rendered unrecognizable .

The bodies of the women. They came apart like women. They came apart like men. The bodies of the bodies. They came apart. In the mirrors there we were. We were not there. We were not us. I turned around and closed the room. I heard the house expanding. I was inside it. I was expanding too. I heard the boys. Heard them coming back in from our night in the cloak of the long ongoing vault of ash that rains. Have you seen me in rain. I know you have. I know you. I went out to see the boys with both my hands. My mouth was full and I was talking. I said the words the second and third mother made me say. They said to close the door. The boys were holding new lamps. I took the lamps out of their hands and broke them on the ground. I told them to move against me. I told them there were more wives. Mothers. Wives. There were other men. I told them to bring the bodies to me so we could write the word that closed the window on the house for good and opened new windows in the floor. Their eyes were pyramids. They stretched beside me. I think one said another’s name not in the name. I grabbed him by the throat and made him spit into my hands on my chest. I made him spit till he was ugly. Till he was not a body made of him. I will wear him, and he will be me, I told another, whose eyes were rubbing at my head. I grabbed him by the throat too and bit with teeth that taste of women still and tasted in his self’s skin a new history he would remember when he woke up some day. We. I would wake him up when when made when. The house was gold. I looked and saw where for both our twin mothers too late I’d made twin husbands of my friends of selves, my mashing hours. The other boys before me bowed. Their knees were purple like a machete in the mouth of a horse I’d loved and kissed and cannot remember now but for how one day he’d simply disappeared into my blood.

You. You taking my words from me. I wish that I could find and lie beside you in the room where you have been preparing for this sentence your whole life, so that as you take it in I could press my scourging dick against your forehead, correct a red impression on the center of the skin between your eyes so that those who pass you hereon will know you’ve taken part of something from which now there is no exit. What you’ve seen is rendered in our common leather. I am written in you, and erased. I wish you’d lay this book facedown on your lap now and think about your life while there is light still. I know you won’t.

FLOOD: The morning after I read this section, I woke up with the book against my chest. I found I’d copied all the words above exactly onto the cover of my Bible, which I’ve begun keeping near me when working with Gravey’s pages. The handwriting looked like mine when I was a child more than it does now. The ink was all over my hands and face. I was clenching the pen so tightly even in my sleep that my nails had cut into the palm of my left hand, freeing the blood .

The house began to fill. While the boys made boys between them, even more were mooring in. You could not throb a foot forward in the mess without connecting to another shoulder or coupling session. The house moaned for more house to move the house through, and the moaning moaned more for more mothers to make the house stay warmer than our machines, and the blood roared to match the need the incubating house had kept hidden long enough to turn invisible to the bored. The rising stink of all us becoming combined was never enough and made the boys even more horny to expand. The sea of heads the horizon promised yet to come were crispy, reproducing in my mind as we made mush from every love our house collected. I caught a little pinch of each boy’s private pleasure expressions and witched the air around their butts so that without me they could not fantasize on their own time and they would never jerk off right again. Their come should only wake them up for fire, so that they might appear inside themselves at last. Some boys I sent to carry knives and fires into small businesses and get the cash and bring it back to us and to bring meat back to us. That money I spent on mold, crushed into the form of blue pills I had more of the boys sell in the streets or feed into me and them from them to me by lips. Light, more light. We were training in the system. We swallowed glass or lengths of rope and wore them. My slow bone boys. I watched from inside me and overhead while work among us warm was done. I told the sadder ones to take themselves into museums and put their limbs through masterworks. I told them scrape a Kandinsky with their teeth. Lay some semen on a Johns. I felt the claw marks on my insides where Richter and Ruscha and Twombly and Warhol and whoever forever had been burned and buried in no future for their crimes. Fuck art. A fist could take the face out of the pigment, a newer, longer, death. These boys had sickles in their eyes already. They had lived long enough under developmental law. They would not come back but they would not need to. Their minds began with where the gash woke and hallelujah and amen with strokes larger than an eternity of media.