Blake Butler - Three Hundred Million - A Novel

FLOOD: Already more time has passed here between my ability to comment on myself than I remember having passed in prior iterations. My voice itself was bleeding. The whole thing was a trick. I was not really aware that I could count time in this manner but I could feel it. It reminds me more than any of this how it felt outside the tape to live inside the day: time leaping or erasing when I most wished it wouldn’t, and going by the longest when I wished it wouldn’t. It feels like how I’ve always imagined it would feel to die, though slowed down so slow it seems like living .

Another problem is is that there’s like seven hundred ways to talk here, to the no one .

Some of these ways of talking become deleted. Some things you say don’t get uttered .

Like one night I woke up remembering everything I’d ever done in life. Its transcription .

I tried to say everything about me at the same time aloud to anyone so I’d remember .

But when I tried to say it like that or say it at all inside that or speak at all I blacked out .

As if the tape got paused and rewound, or stopped and edited, by someone else. Not god .

Someone outside the machine fucking with the machine because I was learning about me .

I blacked out in the black and saw the black inside me and it was black inside and out .

In the second blackness there were people all around me, beating at me, laughing, knives .

I closed my eyes to hide from being beaten and behind my eyes I saw the world .

The world exactly as I wanted. Without death and beyond number. Held against another .

When I woke again it was like any other time. I remembered remembering but not what .

The years of anyone subtracted, hid forever. The contracting skin and lesions of the dead .

Here all surrounded by the absence of anyone I did not know, which is everyone but me .

I see their belongings and touch the surfaces and can imagine them being killed .

Can smell their blood without the smell there, in a necklace or a doorknob, a bit of land .

I can tell the dying had to hurt. That it must have, though who would really know .

I imagine I’m the one who killed them. I’m who was right there, laughing too .

In every instant every death revises itself to the instant dragging on without the rest .

I ate the skin off of your face. I remembered that just right now. I’m about to forget .

But when your skin came off there was this color like I’ve never seen in any body ever .

It was nothing different than the rest. It felt the same as every other. It wasn’t mine .

I saw the same color emit again when I killed someone else again the next day .

And the next day. The tape wound on. I wound the tape. I was the tape and I was you .

My flesh feels like it’s made of all the other flesh I can’t remember. It must be everybody .

You mean me too. You mean I am in you.

You are in me. It hurts.

But if everybody is also in you, then so what. That’s nothing special about me. All those bodies, all of them in death shaped just the same.

I don’t even remember who you are.

I can’t help it.

And that is worse than having died.

No it isn’t.

How would you know, you didn’t die.

How do you know I didn’t? I can’t feel me breathing. I can’t seem to do anything I want. I can’t seem to get where I am going, no matter where that is. How is that any different any day from dying?

You are alive.

Prove it.

There’s only one way to prove it, and then it would no longer then be true.

Go ahead.

You know I won’t. I mean, I can’t. Not to say I wouldn’t. God knows there have been times I wanted to. What person ever didn’t want to kill every person ever, in the history of the world.

You can’t because you’re dead, right? So you are not real.

Yes, I’m dead. And so? So what. I’m as real as any pixel in your face. What’s any different about me now than I was ever, to you or anybody, including me.

Not dying when everybody else did die is like dying harder than everybody else.

You’re dumb.

I am dumb. So what if I am dumb. So what if I’m alive. So what if what. So. So. So .

Stop it. That’s not what life is. To say it like that. That’s not being alive. I would know .

Did I tell you I tried to kill myself too. I tried to come along. To be a person with the rest .

Did I already tell you. It didn’t work. Me killing myself, I couldn’t do it. I tried hard .

In my life before people started killing each other more than usual I tried so many times .

I tried by not trying. I said words like, Fuck god, and Fuck America, and Fuck fuck .

Every day I would say something like, I am going to fucking kill myself motherfucker .

But I never even really tried. To be honest, I couldn’t imagine the world without me .

I continued living. I lived in America. I tried in America. A lot of other people did die .

Then all of you died. Every single one of you. Except me. I went on on this tape alone .

Pretty much if you are reading this or seeing this, however, you are dead and I’m alive .

Though in another way it could be like I am dead and you are living in the flood function .

Because where you are, beyond human existence, it will probably seem like life to you .

Whatever you are experiencing there will feel like your life going on forever and yes .

Even if everyone in America is dead as fuck if you are hearing this you will think: Life .

Even if you are in there wanting to kill yourself you’ll still be thinking something yours .

That is so yours. Please take it. Please let it be you. Forget your arms. There is the word .

I wonder if you’re having a great day in your world there, either way. I hope you are .

I hope you are. I need a message of hope here so I will make one, even if it is nothing .

FLOOD: I didn’t believe anything I said even as I said it. It kept on coming out no matter what I did behind my face in the language. It would not stop. I could already see what was coming for me in every element and yet when it hit it felt like nothing I could have expected. Like histories erased. Like light that didn’t want me in it but was the only fiber of the world .

How many years could I have gone on in here in repetition. How long could the tape continue to repeat me without becoming thin in places, blacking out. It was like the tape went on because I knew it shouldn’t. It was like the tape was my whole mind. Where was my mind in anyone now not appearing. Would I be able to tell the difference between when my body began to be eaten apart by the wear of the reading eye over the band of color language that made me what I was. Already my hands and body seemed so old, so pulled apart from how they seemed to want to remember having felt all they ever had, though I could not remember any actual time and setting attached to that. Only the gaps. The tape was the gaps in us. Every sense of myself was only a residue floating on the cusp of a world long disappeared from underneath itself.

I kept expecting the ground to fall out beneath my feet, to light me down into a space beneath the image, even less than nothing. The blight of my mind inside the tape hid in a secret mind like what we’d always thought of as heaven, or a black hole carried in the grain of the make of everything unseen until you were encompassed by it. Suddenly anything the tape could not contain made more sense to me than any of the ruins and wrecks of landscapes, or the terrifying forms of empty homes, however inconceivable, no less real, whereas here I was only pressed forever in no understanding, no longer even sure how much of me remained in me and less so every second.