Blake Butler - Three Hundred Million - A Novel

From out of the rubble between homes I sometimes took things I thought might make me feel more alive again, or at least more like something like myself. So much junk had been drug out into the light, lying in packs or droves along the circuits of the world of man. There was nothing or no one now to stop me from claiming as my own whatever had provided that security to endless others in the years their bodies still had color, warmth. Money meant nothing now but it still felt ingratiating in some way to heave hundreds of hundreds out of an unlocked bank and rub them on my body, covering my face. Cash actually seemed to mean more now that there was no way left to spend it, like countless little copied quilts, full of the stink of men and boys electric with the intention of what this image could be traded in for, anything. Each bill was its own minor work of shitty art. It felt even better still to burn the bills and watch them turn to ash on the air and breathe it. I could see inside the incinerating flames long years of barfing colors just as quickly again gone.

I could feel the houses watching me. I did not want to go inside them. I was afraid of the color of the beds, of the glass in the frames over the pictures of the people who had lived inside them. No essence to the maps. I knew what they could be hiding, and wanted to keep the possibility of that existence in existence as long as possible without actually having to verify or deny it.

There were many other sorts of cover, niches to impose myself through. Sometimes in stores or buildings built for storage, I found gowns and suit coats, pajamas, bras, piled in pyres as if someone had meant to erase them from the world. In the fibers of the most worn-out garments I could almost hear the breathing skin of who had worn them, wishing for the cells again to fill the fabric out, but the light of the unending tape was brighter, louder. I could hear nothing in them but what they were, the fabric and the clasps, all as if always only ever never worn.

In piles and under dirt I found candles burnt and unburnt; in kennels I found ID tags for pets long buried or otherwise now disappeared; in office buildings I found dead phones that gave no dial tone and held no voice beyond the one I could hear wanting its way there refracted back throughout me; in restaurants I found whole drawers of polished silver, used in their private ways to feed the bodies more mass to build themselves out of. How many mouths had been on any fork or knife forever. I couldn’t taste them in the curves, though I could hear them chewing, digesting, barfing. It sounded like falling asleep in sunlight. It didn’t burn. I could forget how anything had felt now beyond what it was actually doing. In libraries, every book I touched seemed to just be saying nothing in a language no one had ever actually spoken. In rooms no one had ever slept in I read aloud until I couldn’t feel my face, always waiting again for the range of the tape to come to its current end and begin again in a state wherein upon finding anything it seemed all new. No matter how many times the tape of me began again, I still came each time to the same lack in every object, the same lingering presence of anyone but me removed from anything I could ever understand now.

FLOOD: Worse than the sense of following or being followed was the sense that the presence I was after or that was after me was something held beyond the possibility of the world. Always where there was smoke or totem on the tape there was a greater sense of what it had been created by, curated by, who had loved it and in what order, what began and ended in its presence, what it carried and enabled by simply being. The past was always not enough to not stop the present from still being exactly as it was, even if what that was now was an impossibly repeating recording of a world where no one remained alive as far as I could see but me. But there was something to it also more than time. Something outside the potential aspect of god or what had been or could be. Something a language didn’t own. Even as I’d always felt I could not have a relationship with this sort of surface of experience in the human world, and so too in this version copied from the reality of itself, having been relegated in this way to such an atmosphere devoid of all active presences outside my own mind, I felt a pressing at the edges of all things inside here even more than ever. It was as if at every rounding aspect of the world there was just at the cusp of the face it demonstrated itself to me through, something like a reflection buried in its own idea of being. As if each point of the world existed only bearing completely on the idea that it could at any instant be completely ripped apart, and then inhabited by its destruction, the resulting nothing. Every object or field or sense of air was as much exactly everything it wasn’t, and depended on that constantly, in such a feverish state of ongoing death and bliss it couldn’t do anything but be exactly what it was. And so the same was true of me and always had been. And even more so now that I could feel it in all else, even if the way I understood it was only in this buried way of speaking, this private communication I couldn’t even feel me having. This meant there was something of me wholly in you; you being whoever has heard a word that I am saying; and of course that could be no one; and maybe even better being no one; but regardless, it was in this sense of a constant ongoing impossible-to-quantify-or-even-acknowledge-fully network of senses of relation with everything beyond myself that I was allowed to go on being whatever I was. It was in the aggregate of all those negations, and the worlds buried in the access points our bodies had used for centuries to understand them — such as the money and the clothes, and even other people — that I had any chance to live at all. My life, then, and yours, all of whoever, was simply the beginning of the outline of a pixel in an eye inside a face connected to a form that fed off everything we could never develop into while alive. Though that thing had a life, too, and had a death, too, and an understanding of something like god. And that was also our life and our death and god. It was the sum totality of all these fields on fields and lives of lives forever in the tape that I could feel suddenly depending on me every instant to do whatever I would always, and what was always just beyond that waiting to become. Each second that I went on in this understanding was the skin of the beginning. In the light of that beginning, I also knew I would forget all of this the second I stopped thinking it, like right now .

The days went on and on inside me. During the days I lived repeated days as days do .

Even as I continued in repetition of the days repeated, age gathered in me under lard .

And of course still I wanted out. Even having felt a possibility of totality presented in me .

I wanted out. I wanted out. I needed out, more so. And the tape depended on this .

The tape could only be the tape inasmuch as I wanted there to be something more to it .

My face refused to change. I was already wrinkled beyond recognition to me and all else .

Blood curls rose up in my hair like lanyards, though only in the hair inside of my skull .

I went on being exactly me, no matter how much I fought against it by trying to be more .

From outside me I look nice. I feel I am nice: a nice person. I feel no beast, though I am .

In every hour that I lived I could feel your death, see your death in everything you did .

When I watched you die just like anybody I was using both my hands to help you die .

You were any person, ever. You would not survive me. Your relics and icons would burn .