Blake Butler - Three Hundred Million - A Novel

Name withheld: “We were all pregnant, and all beyond turned on, and it was growing. You were in there. The walls were white. The flood of the birthwater would soon run down the legs of the earth and flood the prism of the eye of the earth, all in Her name, born, and here again. By now there was no turning back regardless of what you believed about the way the words curled on your eyes, or how fast you turned off from them, hid them away. It was no longer about light.”

L. S., age 19: “Just try to breathe. You can’t, can you?”

It was Becoming. Through the phones in all of us god spoke a language that could not be transcribed while night inside itself continued its devolvement. The last body of god rose through a white hazing oil that loved anybody who would exist before it while the morning tore itself apart; it lathered down in clear down blankets wrapped around us. Each vitamin begat an exorcism of the safe word between two doors along the birth hall of our rapidly increasing mass, which by now had bulldozed every inch of breathing air within me. Where the verbs fell from their protection grew a new road to walk along unto some sea. The sea would appear to not be boiling. Inside our future minds the language babies writhed and pupated with babble cockles, deriving the next language to be spoken in the swoon of nothing. Our black house smelled like a bowling alley full of pig heads. The mother bodies were snuffed in dozens and leaked their juice so loud sometimes I could see it coursing down the empty streets where no one soon would be walking and up white mountains to be burned off into the sun, while underneath us the blood grew bluer and then blacker, leaping maggots from where the flesh collected. Often I couldn’t tell the difference now between a new mother and a pickaxe; they mostly passed as water, air, and sleep. And yet the sixty-seventh invocation of the mother looked just like me again. I still didn’t remember any hour there before or after, though, but here where this one had my skull and sacs and all my dismantled grievances recombined. This one wanted all the same things I’d ever wanted, if I remembered rightly, which I didn’t, as held in scar flesh on his love handles and in the hair around his anus hiding what he was. I put a mirror to him and he looked like a simple yellow dot. From the dot there rose a little cake. I ate it with my ear, and then could hear his contribution to god’s most recent face: his own phantom mother, delivering the replication hurt, the want for being somewhere further soon and so then trying and gaining more flesh by rubbing that want out. Our god filled the other organs in with colored pencil. Our god rubbed a grease eraser over folds and made them colonize. The bodies seared, gave smoke, and disappeared; it made us starving. Every lick of nothing was a gift we didn’t need and so consumed that much more quickly and bulged the wordless seam within. I broke the mirror. I ate the mirror. I ate me. I ate the home, and went back out, and came back in.

I rose. I was the mothers fully, their organs, their eras, spaces, eggs. In the many houses all the hours were my eyes. Killing the fathers and the mothers and the children with my hands of other men made my void voracious and I needed to be fed. I looked like any other person. I worked at Subway and split meat. I rubbed the bread with colored substances and chortled near the glass. I said I rose. I am the god too. I told this to anyone who would come near. No one came near. No one had fingers. I walked among the light. The Black House spread to color many other houses. This was seen by most as night protection, as defense of weather, but the surfaces and symbols and keyholes made the houses sicker, made them absorb my laughter. Any house wants only at last a life too and would take the worst in your not letting it at all move. It ate the leeches and the termites from the floor of the earth on which I walked and drank them hard into the walls so soft you could not feel it breathe. When the rasp of rats or something shaking brought the house out to flood or when someone knocked at windows with a gun or came in and killed your family or you or took your money or your clothes this was the safest you could ask. Every other minute I was rising. I work in shifts. I take no knee for you. My robe is folded on the coming pyre made for all of us to begin again in. I need you to write me back, and yes you will.

I rose again. Inside, the night was puffy. The mirrors turned red, then blue. The white lights did not affect this despite being hyper-crowded. I said the name of Darrel to have the boys lie down before me and make a bed for who I was turning into. They did not move. There were men who were not the men I was at the windows and in the vents speaking the outdated language. I could see the eye sockets of them dripping with a kind of language. I’d thought I’d had those removed from their spirits, that they would not even be able to see me. Their radios were heaving bullshit. I told the boys to bend over and defend me. To lean down and listen hard to what the people in the submerged room were doing. I felt something in me coming from an opposite direction. The red lights turned to diamondcolor. The boys refused to blink. The beams of lights between their eyes were weaving into layers upon layers in the reflection through the glass made to see itself again. Together all at once they raised both hands hard in tragic gesture toward the false hole in the ceiling that had opened unto the hyperventilating night. The night looked less false than I remember. It had a sternum etched upon it, bruised into hiding with the blue. All across it were these eyes, like thousands of them, all seeing down on us, all never blinking. The boys’ arms began to quiver. Light emerged somewhere between each of their sockets and aimed directly at my skull. The boys did not lie down. Between the dots of each there slimmed a pleasure scripture caricatured by where I’d had them build their skin thicker to defeat against the melting temperatures of invocation. The boys did not lie down. I tried to go on as if nothing I didn’t want was ever happening. I asked how many of us were still at work out there in the houses preparing the extension of our nest into the farther space of being. My voice spilled on my shirt and changed its color to match my flesh. My flesh was older than I remembered. In each of the mirrors I saw only one of me, covered in old ink. A tattoo on my breastbone revealed a combination to a lock. I said the numbers aloud and nothing happened. My flesh was older. The boys did not perform as we’d rehearsed. I went to stand up from my throne and felt three hundred feet where both my feet were. The whole air of the world around me squiggled in evacuation, replacing silence with psychic acne lathering against everything I felt. Each pustule held another camera filming where between the light of the boys were disappearing. The best of the boys’ arms were growing longer, taking pain. The skin around their fists poured batter over any free space. All the neighbors’ houses were farther apart than ever, through the world, suddenly, like being cut out of a womb. I smelled wigs and iron. I went to say the name of Darrel and instead said Gravey. My lap was full of beans I was already eating and shitting out. As I looked back up to see again if the boys had done as I had asked them yet finally I saw the lid of night turning itself on. It was a hissing panel. It had a center. It lit my body through and through. There was nowhere left to move between the wall of us and outside except for where I didn’t want to.

SAL: “The day they came in through the doors wearing the blue suits Gravey didn’t even flinch. He went on as if these people coming through the doors were in his convocation, as if he’d ordered them to come. He greeted the officers speaking back into the glare as if they were any one of us. The blood was on his face and hands from his last supper in the house still and in his eyes I could see from down there on the floor standing behind him I could see he was no longer in the Gravey body anymore. His skin was so dry it kind of flaked off on the other men’s arms when they touched him.”