Blake Butler - Three Hundred Million - A Novel

Upon the night hiding the bloodbath there haloed seven moons. Each of the moons had seven moons about it. Each of the moons’ moons was engraved with one of seven symbols, huffing smoke out from the edges where the night’s anger surged against its own surface, wanting to destroy the speech from all horizons. Where before the sun had been, there hung an orb the same color and dimension of the prior bulb that watched us among along with one vast unending pupil. Even my boys did not imagine such eternal confirmation. They were all so engorged with how we’d fed, they had to drag their ass across the earth. Their skin cells left no trail behind us, indistinguishable in this era’s light from soil. Each house howled as we passed it; each house wanted us to revise its content also, include them in the narrative. And in the morning, when we all woke again together invalid as ever, there was no mail, and the malls stayed closed an extra half an hour, during which, for once, I wept, which felt like rape, and after which I washed my hands and aimed at the old idea of god and waved.

We put new mirrors up over the mirrors in the black house. We harvested the chuff of our deadening emotions for the glue. Mushed them. Wished them whiter. Soon there was no inch we couldn’t see ourselves in. My bloodstreams were going bonkers from the new meat and blood all rolling through them, already starving. I needed to calm down inside my pleasure, so said Darrel, which would cause accidental detonation music. Over the mirrors we laid another mirror layer, then a layer of magnifying film. Each boy was then commanded to cleave the skin off his forehead with the sharp end of a magnet. We rubbed the oily side of the skin on the wall for lubrication, then fed the rest into the kitchen sink, forcing raspy floods of us into the pipes that carried air in knots of to and from in network under universal homes. What opened over our eyes was not a wound, but many eyes. When we were healed it would be the first day of our Sod, a day designed for destroying any gifts we’d ever been given by any human. The stink that rose out of our common facial bleeding amplified the innards of the house, over which we laid a final layer made of newer mirrors snatched from newer nearby houses we had sacrificed to flames, and over this at last we painted over the mirrors in our minds to match the black like our house’s outside. Consecrated altogether with our spittle, the new wall’s rapt heavy face remained reflective just the same, a total window to the holes of holy era already coming. And now the flies between the walls and wounds began to laugh and lay eggs and eat them. Everything from here on would go much quicker, each instant of it that much easier to lie down inside of, like a prison.

FLOOD: Each of the boys we’ve brought in thus far does indeed have a marking on his face, some of which they claim were self-inflicted, while others, they insist, were branded in a medicinally induced unconsciousness. The marks are specific for each person, one of a series of seven total designs (as far as I have counted). The symbols are: CIRCLE, SQUARE, HEXAGON, STAR, TRIANGLE, DIAMOND, RING , the same ones previously noted. I’ve had no success in gathering further information from those bearing the symbols on their bodies, as they seem to have no idea themselves, though some, when prodded, will open their mouths and strain their throats and face skin as if they are being throttled from the inside. Otherwise, they often act as if they don’t realize the marks are there, or feel pain. A surprising number of the wounds caused by the markings have yet to fully heal, and they emit a yellow pus. There are no visible marks on Gravey’s own head or body other than distinct markings from childhood acne and a tattoo in his right armpit of the numbers one through twenty-one .

The fifth through fifteenth mothers were made makeshift from the boys. The shrinking house was packed in angles of mushy arm meat and abdomens in such ways I couldn’t walk to see who was there or what food I would not eat. The sexdrives of the molding prior bodies of the dead refracted through me in the silence of the act of spreading of our silence outside the house. We clearly knew one day we’d have to all kill one another to become All, and why not begin now? Which boys we’d dismantle among our own first would be selected on the basis of those I didn’t most want to beat the shit out of the second I saw them, notarized by Darrel with a shudder of rushing breath through the shafts becoming woken up beneath the house. Because these boys were boys and therefore most of them came equipped with testicles and no wombs, I had to have their junk removed to make them inhabitable. I performed each operation with a butter knife and several lengths of wire from a clock I bought online that was said to once have been kept inside a deaf-mute astronomer’s bedchamber. The boys took turns holding the others down. They sprayed all they had left into the room, their rancid death-urine foaming up among the lashing of their limbs and clouding the house fat enough to believe in friendship. The unspent semen would be harvested and spread over the walls and on the ground around the house to keep the machines out. During these operations the band played their nothing music to steady my nerves, not even holding instruments between their hands now: they’d learned through proper practice and my hissing to speak the music through the skin around their knees. The music turned the house into a spitbath for air, lacing the whole bloat of the discharged-choking space between the walls with numbing aether through which the motion of me rendered slower, and I could see my hands move before me before I went to move my hands as all of we already had in the marbling of history. Each hour, to match the new boys, more mothers were being brought in and processed. They were being broken down into component parts again, in sweatshop. The legskin of the mothers was sliced off in neat precision so as to fashion costumes we would wear out for the final Halloween. The brains were packed together in the smoking closet as an ashtray. The scalps and cheekflesh of the mothers were fed to Darrel through the plumbing. The remainder of their fleshes was turned into a couch. The backbones became fishing poles and back scratchers. The remainder of the bones we simply saved; together, as the dead fell, they would interlock across the continents, forming a freeform pyre spanning all homes in total larger than the homes themselves, an incidental holy location thereafter to be worked down over time, as sun and rain continued in our absence. The blood we always totally ate, or at least all together would lie down in and fake sleep.

Name withheld: “The boys were killing each other anyway. They wanted to be killed and become part of the body. They did not want to die as dying is, and instead to be incorporated. Really Gravey didn’t touch anyone, they were doing it to themselves, and some were trying to talk the other into doing them up and arguing who should do who and what the flesh was and the smell. It was a disease waiting to be called on. Whoever ended up dead got put in the mirror room for incubation. It seemed like Gravey genuinely couldn’t even tell who was dead or alive, as he talked to them all the same way, as they were all dead already in the name.”

With all the blood and night surrounding, the mirrors slickened and inverted and turned white and collandered the air beneath the curl of sun. It wasn’t sun; it was the first cells of the first series of the bodies of the mothers pearling. It wasn’t like rotting, though it seemed that, orally; it was their unpacked flesh at last crystallizing its first layer where once our mission was complete we would wake dynasties repeating in the hyperventilating light beyond this race. The floor above us in the first level of becoming still would not allow us to step foot or even wink its presence but we were accumulating power quickly. The gifting blood of the women and not-women flooded through the house and juiced the day against itself in fast formation and laughed and laughed and air was hours in an instant like me becoming mine. I felt me get fucked by every cock of life inside the coffins I carried in my brain until they could erupt inside me cold at once and fill me with the unending spirit of our hope, hidden in all of us forever bred. I felt the boys becoming steadfast in their ability to split apart, their cells cartooning instant to instant as they flashed and spread the vision. All the names of the new and certain dead were falling out of the air like little 4-D scabs the TV weathermen mistook as hail. Each house ever had a number you could use to speak into it, and so often I would use the phone inside my brain to call these people I’d soon visit and just sit there breathing my dinner into their head. The resulting music of these communications gave new inspiration for that band of ours to turn inside out and fill their lungs with reproductions of all the highest-grossing hits, regurgitating would-be future classic albums as absolutely nothing into the lymph of the first ancestors of Darrel, in the dead world. In all our mirrors I could see infinite rooms of the house exaggerating all around us in the insane light, splitting each like me into sevens and sevens of versions we could fill soon. The splitting of the rooms fed my hunger with more hunger. It filled me with the seasons I would eject into the nation, opening every man to my disease, while by my heart the bells of our incoming curd of god blurred overhead, a descending limit on the cities’ ambient ability to withstand anything we uttered.