Blake Butler - Three Hundred Million - A Novel

A. F. F.: “Leaking out of the house into the other houses was reckless and essential. There were boys who wanted Gravey calmed, and some who said they had a plan to slit his throat soon in the house if he did not slow down. Those boys were killed by other boys. The loyalty to Gravey’s vessel in the mode of Darrel by now was real, and would become only more real the further the curve rose. It is still rising, there is no longer time. It would not be stopped will not be stopped. Kill me or him or anybody on the cross of your machines and I would smile through blood and what has been done has been done. The splitting of the houses will continue even right now where you are standing, underneath you, and how you cannot feel it means it is at work.”

As the light of Darrel slathered up and under all around us in the flesh of mankind, I began to see through other minds. I could shoot from one spine to another, becoming more people the sharper the silence got with death. I mean that when I closed my lids there wasn’t black there or teeth or wolves but simple perspectives. I would close my eyes inside the house a mini-instant in my body and where the skin was I’d have vision through another set of meatholes, they among the houses of the living all surrounding now. I’d see a lawn, a store, some hands slicing a melon, driving a golf cart, washing. I might occur into a small man standing at a register where food was being served, his small tattooed arms and long veinwork in a far light making food and taking cash; within him I could remember all the things I’d touched with those weird hands before, could see how despite my best intentions and whatever faith I’d had there were these darker rings inside my body, which whether or not I felt a part, I was. The set of all present current thought clicked around me in a silence permeated with slow blood, among the hours spent surrounded by others who might be the next one the self inside me would click inside of and see from there, no longer recalling; years lived in each human separately and so, infinitely, if all packed into a space too small to allow even grace. These weren’t memories but more made in the way I’d been inside a schoolboy’s body before and was now a middle-aged user. I didn’t have to move into the body to control it or change the words inside the skull and how they’d come out. I’d simply inhabit the limbs and speech as I could see them there within me and take the workload over. It was only a way of life, the way any day there is the list of commands you must process and exist in, no matter how benign. The length of time I spent inside these would shift; I might go on elsewhere for many years or hours, held uncounted beyond the wall of being them. In each it felt like very little. In each there was a world. My methods were always tending toward rupture of what was given. Inside a housewife I would hold the hairdryer so long against the scalp that the hair burned through and skin came open. Instead of squealing, I would laugh. Inside a man tending his yard I’d ride the lawnmower over concrete scraping sparks and ram a fence or side of neighbor’s house, or mine. Once I had touched myself as me into this human passage through the shift of body, I no longer needed to stay inside the body to continue guiding my vision for the ending of all narration; and though once I left this body it would not remember my having come inside and known and given vision and kissed the cold word of our Sod against the lips, the person would go on in this way; he or she would cohabit the organism of our total future. The longer I did the act and however more often, the greater lengths I could involve myself as they were fully. I had the person all throughout them in me like a geode. And yet when my eyes were open I was inside my own space and felt nothing. Then I could do two of them at once, like screens side-by-side and parallel in time, then seven. Each mother we killed and body I consumed fed me more ability. It was like I had the energy of the dead cruising my brainlocks. Eventually it got so I could operate so many at the same time they moved in flights: I’d have a horde of geriatrics go bananas inside a Walmart, or a gang of seething boys overtake their PE class with biting maneuvers, or a series of fires in a hospital. Brownouts. I turned a prison upside down and no one noticed. In this manner we took form, spreading out into the feeding flesh for what the light of us required. This comes not a proclamation of judgment or of absent faith, but the natural proclivity of the necessary destruction that feeds in the body of the human to make more humans who then must fold; it is not good or evil, light or opaque, gross or gorgeous; it is a paste I ride. In the blinking I went on to more bodies behind their thin doors and started to use their bodies to infect into even more other bodies too. I spread the edges of me into whoever I could imagine. It didn’t matter why. Each time it seemed outside me like only more of what the world had always wanted. The news corporations assisted my integration beautifully. I didn’t even have to have them read the script, nor did I need to keep my mind on anything to have everyone inside me focused, a bank of captured feeds so high and wide it felt like celebrating all our birthdays at the same time always. I moved into the skulls in floods wearing the vision of the seven symbols and there I placed them across the land: inside the bodies of the teacher, the carpenter, the homemaker, the mime, the masseuse, the actor, the artist, the surgeon, the child, the mother, the father, the killer, the reader of this book. My power was conflagrating and masturbating at the same time; I could feel it most focused in my ring finger. I would kiss the knuckle and touch anything and let the buzzing fill all possible other sound inside anyone around me. I mean our senses. The mechanisms of control infected everywhere they fantasized of or saw on the films or through my boys’ extending visions patrolling the streets for who was next. The boys were all my senses, and therefore those of all my brain absorbed, altogether weaving and arranging quietly in private among the congregating holes and fibers of us a rapidly evolving apparatus that soon would be filled with all I had felt inside the name of Darrel consecrated in full across a space as wide as the only continent I’d ever touched, therefore the only land that really exists, which soon would find itself made truly and forever the wanting void it’d always been, our names credits for a commercial our emotions couldn’t begin to witness.

FLOOD: The night I first read to this point in the manuscript I paused here because there was something knocking at a window in the far end of my hotel room, which I’d rented to read inside a different space from where I sleep. I’d not told anyone where I was staying; there was no one to tell. I went to the window and looked out. It looked like any kind of time. No one was out there. I looked at long angles with my head against the glass to try to see what had done the knocking. I got my gun and opened the door. On the ground there was a picture of me sitting on the bed in my hotel room, reading the book. You were in the picture, too. I don’t know who you are or what you look like, but it was you. You were on the bed asleep. The photo was taken from the perspective of the bathroom mirror. The next morning the picture had gone pale .

FLOOD: This page at first glance appears blank. Up close, though, in proper light, there is a kind of indecipherable font, or more like little pictograms that don’t seem to form any image. I find myself staring into the page here for too long at times, waiting for the build of it to compile correctly, but instead I end up feeling sick or falling asleep. Then I look up and see it’s as light or dark outside as ever, like no time passing. After more time spent studying the pictograms I feel certain I have seen them elsewhere in the world, like signs of corporate logos or textures on the sides of buildings seared somehow into my unconscious, but of course this is me searching for meaning. Likely there is no meaning but it is my job to persist in the identification of tragedy nailed to nothing, and so I will. Honestly at this point I want to burn the book. I also find myself thinking I want to eat it, that I want to get the sentences tattooed on my body. The thought snakes through me in my voice. I have been sleeping with the book at night whether I do or not, like suddenly it’s in my arms, or it feels like it is. It is a pressure. A dress. It kind of itches. As an afterthought, I have covered up the mirrors in my home, though not those in my car. Suddenly I feel over-aware of the number of mirrors I come into contact with daily, often without having even noticed their presence in the room. The book continues .