Blake Butler - Three Hundred Million - A Novel

The fourth mother began giving up her birth. The scroll of wet carried from her organs to the air so we could inhale it quicker. I thanked her by putting my arm inside her. I clenched my groin and touched the center of my skull to her tummy nozzle. The child was in there. I named the child every name but Darrel. I gave him a religion and a cause, selected his sexual preference and sense of humor from the vast array of ugly possibilities. Each fiber of his then became mine, ours in the light that we could all smell him more than anything else. He was risen, in the past tense. The mother was shuddering so fast it was like she was rewinding, pulling her idea of the house in down around her, giving her everything over and over. The power sockets in the house around us began staggering with the hell of what they had to offer light to. Above the house I heard the voice of Darrel utter his commandments full of silence. My chest was cymbals. We’d kissed the crest. Above the house I heard the Eye of Darrel blink and brush the crust off some morning soon to come like any father. The baby coming out of her was dressed in gowns of beautiful lather and packets of acne. It looked so old already. There were so many wrinkles I could hardly see which part was its genitals he’d have tried to use to make another and which were the legs he would have spent years training to use to get to the source with which he’d make. He refused to look at me. He refused my forgiveness. This was all part of the act. The boys around me began singing absolutely nothing as I used my wisdom teeth to take the kid apart, to take equal mouthfuls each of him and her together, pausing only every so often to get a rip on the end of the mother’s tit. What dreamy milk. Layer upon layer, I revised them. I tasted spaghetti, apples, chicken in her character. The mother was shrouded in some sort of defensive mist now and eyes rolled in her head ecstatic. Just as I noted this, she closed her eyes so I could not see her come. There was more of the child in her than ever, then, as I removed the rope between her and him in long shanks, hand over hand, and her wet ran down the walls on all sides. The gift the mother gave the evening was my next jacket. Her breast meat would fortify my eyes. She slipped in glitch somehow now repeating her unborn baby’s name into the space where wet met air, and in her thickest mist of all now overflowing the mother bloomed.

Inside the fourth mother’s head there was a cask of chubby meat inside a bone cage. I raised the meat out of her threads. The remainder of her body clung to the removal in thin tendrils over which the breath of shouting in the house around me bowed. It was the worst song I’d ever heard, absolutely perfect. I brought the meat up to my own face and rubbed it to my temples and wore it as a crown I could no longer tell from my hair. I wondered what would happen later that evening and the next night to the stock market. Beneath me on the floor the mother sang along with muscle fission, the skin withdrawing up into itself doing player-piano-style grindsing, saying nothing. Yes. I kissed the mother’s eyes. Inside the remainder of the junk inside her skull I heard the older god lurking, emptying the remainder of the moan she could no longer offer to anyone within earshot. I held her hands and waited with her. I felt the residue of each time she’d been told I love you by someone who meant it as a ring placed on my finger and dissolved into more lard. I rummaged through her memories for the ones most vivid for recording and I smothered them zero. Through her, I placed my hands upon the child. The child was still and dumb as fuck and waiting for me and when I touched his face he smiled and he was done then. His life was my life. I pulled the tiny corpse out in a clap of pig-noise and cold froth. The child emerged the most blessed he had ever been while human, his genitals covered in putridity, his skull a handful. I kissed his eyes. I sucked the eyes into my mouth and sucked their vision, swallowed. Now that was good now. Yes. My wishes passed their own high limits, no longer ours. Sweet reason hulking in my bloodstreams gorgeous, without doors. I placed the baby’s corpse back into the mother and patted the skin around the hole as best it would. The mother’s color was soaking into the carpet. It could not find the earth there. We sat together, she and I, beneath a fine and uneroding skyline in our eternal summer. Every murder always went like this. With every inch I’d ever wished etched in my days I waited with her for her to disappear. I ate some of her sternum, and of her shoulders. Both tasted the same. There was very little left to recognize about her, so I had done my job, though most of me was somewhere else. I heard the bone of me tell me to find the rest of what I meant and I looked up and found that I could see straight through the ceiling, yes, and through the roof, and there I saw the electrifying slush of night becoming stone above us, the language chiseled in its stutter shaking more and more silence out of somewhere harder there above, and thereby raining it back down on other U.S.A. houses as a bright bath anywhere another person could be found, until the pulse inside my skull pulled my seeing back into my face, into my skull, and thereby back into the putty of me and thereby back into my speech and through the remainder of the mother and her child, which there vibrating in me made me hover and crust over in the center of a spine of someone in me I had never quite yet fully been, and so most worshipped. Within this body, in an instant there above the mother boiling, I grew old and ill and died inside me and saw that it was good and gave my word and rose again.

The child inside the fourth mother realized its lungs suddenly. It was screaming ideas of metal. It spoke in personas bled into it by the mother in her sleep, deleted Worship tomes in the Rolodex of names shat out of my mouth between me and the child forming a syllabic bridge of colored mush rising a language wind. The names between us became human names erected in tines of purple cells and hissing insects. Each name as it blew through me knocked the godblood out of my mouth. It splashed to kiss the crease of where the boys asleep now in the kitchen had exposed their holes for Shaking. Each name replaced a wish in Darrel and became Darrel and became. The space bar in my mind grew letters on it. Where each name went in, another name came out and fell upon the house’s carpet made of shining lymph. Soon the house was overflooded with the syntax icons of all Americans. They piled up in pyramidal mink. Each brick locked in with six bricks exactly of mosaic skin, pooing a movie I would star in when I died, screened in the long flat white awaiting. The inverse image of the movie sealed the mother’s false deleted children in their ripped nurseries into cubes of dentures and clean beds, already aged beyond the stage of memory making. The cubes heated with my smiling and turned to ovens where their bodies would be burned. The house’s oven opened wide and said our prayer. The prayers sealed in the bricks around the mother and the child, who as the sounding rose me forward from the house forever wished me luck with all his holes unsizing in all of where he’d never been, while behind me the house looked like any other house just built and sold upon the dead mountains of our country, its front door exit breathing in the word in the world where we all talked at the same time.

FLOOD: The remains of the fetus were handled differently from most of the other victims’ bodies, presumably because it had not yet been born. It was dispersed in two parts, the head sent to the set of a popular morning news-gossip TV program, addressed to one of the famous female pundits, though it was intercepted before receipt; the remainder of the body to the White House. Each was marked plainly and with return address leading each half back to the location where the other half had been sent, and their distribution in such a manner presents in my mind a willingness in Gravey not only to be found, but to become known for what he was doing, though of course we were not able to connect them to any culprit until the discovery of Gravey’s activities. Therefore, until now, it could have been anyone. I do know that looking back after I was assigned the case I had been receiving anonymous phone calls to my private extension for several days from someone who would sit on the line in silence, not even breathing. Whether this was related to Gravey or some sort of malfunction I don’t know, but the more I think about it the more I believe what I want to believe, which is that from the beginning this case always belonged to me, before there ever was a case .