Blake Butler - Three Hundred Million - A Novel

The absence of the people on the land here was written over by what grew in behind it. Nowhere the cords of backbones and pillared skull shifts missing refracted on the dry air overrun with centuries of cigarettes and cash and floppy hate sex and grieving terror. Where the bodies did not have to persist now, days smelled better and doors did not open and plants began to grow over the mucus of the interminable graves, erupting in white opera a leak of the song of thriving air all hot with something unlike people. Mites that once would have eaten out our eyes instead went into their own ways to purr in the white sun choked against a thicker plank of netting, our continuity disregarded. The grass unburied rose, licked and whispered at the homes’ faces like pubic hair around a hundred million dicks.

No one needs you, the dream was saying. There is always something.

The homes alone hid everything we believed we could be completely carried on by. The gorgeous clothes clapped in the closets, replicated for endless forms of bodies, went on in the dark and wore their own lives. No object itself actually believed in what it had been envisioned to embody. Death already understood and so did not require the cooperation of gloves and quilts and books and urns and knives and wire, or even trees or nests or glass or lengths of cold air left hanging in a pasture without marking. You didn’t have to see or name the essence of anything to feel it trying to continue without us. The walls of every inch seemed thicker even just knowing what they were forced to contain, a future without new blood: phantoms not of us but ideas of time still caught counting among the homes and days we’d been in where there was nothing left to be now. Both as if we still were there and had never been, leaving the air unconsumed to clap around itself and squirt from centers a waking layer in which something else would be spread onward and licked upon the landscape.

Streets grew longer than the earth beneath. Doors would open from a surface and nothing coming through or going on. Stock rose and fell inside the peace, making warmth in which an aging color grew, sermonizing and baptizing and giving thanks sung in the floors of the homes of the American unveiling of a graveyard in which I alone was left to walk, trapped for no reason other than that I insisted, wanting only anything like what I had once, and felt and held dear, and now can hardly separate inside my mind from feeling ill, despite knowing through and through that I was someone once who in my dreams could never die, and so never was my body, and never aged a day, despite eternity, like how often in the light of certain other eras for hours and hours we would sing all together the same words, celebrating the mark of the word of the end of the door of the day toward our disappearing hope.

FLOOD: I knew I wasn’t even me. I knew the land that let me touch it was only an idea. And yet what choice did I have but to go on. To look for anything to hold fast or wait to be absorbed by. If others were alive inside here with me, I could not find them. I had the sense at once of being followed and following someone else who could feel me following but could not find me. Often I would turn around to look back where I had just come and see nothing but the same stretch I saw looking the same way, as if I were standing where a mirror was. As if I myself were the mirror reflecting two halves of a world with no one in it but the shit everyone but me had left behind. Who else could I have ever been. Sometimes again the smoke of the beginning of the world as I understood my appearance in it would appear, rolling over the long horizon far off and coming over. I imagine this meant there could be another face like mine somewhere out there ejecting the hell of the black of the smoke that comprised exactly what confined me. But as soon as I saw and understood the smoke this way, it rolled apart. It would spread and flesh out so generally into the distance I couldn’t tell it from the sky or whatever stood behind the sky or any of the houses that from here just looked like nothing but more indeterminate color. Whoever could have been there waiting to find me became again as nowhere as any stretch of air behind a wall. And the same of me to them. To even just the idea of them, anybody .

The years came and came on me again. They came and came on me. They held me .

The years did. They loved me. I could see out through the screens. I watched you dying .

In every inch of the zilch of nowhere I could see out into everything you lived through .

You looked gorgeous. Don’t fret about it. You did something with your life that hung .

All eyes did. They wore the same color, in spite of how they seemed to vary or shift .

The oceans of red money spilled for hours in the furor of the gnaw of dying laughter .

Blood poured forever in your mind. You were dead before you understood the idea .

The humans died and didn’t realize any better. They couldn’t feel the difference .

I wish I’d known you better than I do. The machines took you apart upon the dirt .

Your organs were ribbed with words. I couldn’t read what all the words said at all .

Your body became buried under bodies, which were buried under grass that grew .

That’s what I believe love is: doing something again because it’s still there and is and is .

I don’t know where all the other bodies went. I used to know a couple people. Persons .

Friends and family. Salesmen. What. They lit me up. I didn’t know they lit me then .

I didn’t see the cracks dry in my whole flesh until there was no flesh left to press against .

I am thirty-one years old. Some day soon I will turn to thirty-two, though I am dead .

Is that a good thing or a bad thing.

What, the being dead, or my new birthday.

Either.

Yes. Yes it’s a good thing. And I need you.

I need you, too. Hold me.

You know I can’t.

I did not know that. No day goes past without you wholly of my whole mind.

What does it feel like to think you have a mind still?

It’s all right.

Can you show me?

I cannot show you.

Why. Why can’t you.

I can’t do anything but see.

FLOOD: I don’t think being inside this tape means I am here forever, or that I have to be. I don’t think I am not in some way living, though I seem now to be the only one. Even the voice is not a person here before me, with legs and arms and eyes and someone’s face. I’ve walked for so long among the buildings and the fields here in search of any shape still taking breath like me. But they all killed each other. They are all ended. They are all stacked up in thick piles. I don’t want to think about it, not when all I have to think about when I can’t actually think is what there isn’t versus what there never was .

I already knew I needed out. Though I couldn’t feel anything in the grain it was the feeling of no feeling that burned worse, and knowing that underneath that there must be something silent and corroded lacing through what I was meant to use as a human to understand another person. That there was no one here to apply that understanding to made it a weapon against itself, a private bloodbath where whatever what my blood was now should have been pumping, filling my organs with inspiration. Wherever anyone wasn’t now forever was space that pounded at my lack of awareness of the pounding, bruising anything remaining of what I’d been or was beyond the point of any recognition. The houses and the wires and the pixels in the sky didn’t want me to do anything but not take part in my own image.