Blake Butler - Three Hundred Million - A Novel

Some hours, diamonds light the way. They appear in the darkness overhead and bake .

If they aren’t diamonds, I don’t know what they are. They refuse to take my language .

Between the houses sometimes briefly steaming cakes of wet surface appear and hiss .

The substance aches when stepped on. It has blood. It is blood. It is still bleeding .

I want to give it mine. When I cut my hand the blood comes but then the tape starts over .

Fuck. And so I want to go further, right. I have to. I have to go further. There is more .

Even if there is not a reason to live inside a film one must imagine there must be, living .

If not I must pretend. If I can’t pretend I have to anyway, as this dying is not death .

I have to go on in hope, like life was, searching for answers I know will never come .

And so on between the houses to the next house which for the most part is the same .

But in the house there will be different relics of the people who had been there wanting .

I have to assume they died. But what I’m looking for is someone not dead or like me .

What am I. What I find instead is more of bedrooms and rooms and places and food .

I find sometimes lengths of long hair left curled on the rug or on the objects like a brush .

Or like the air. There is a breeze and a kind of heaving, which means it needs me .

So, see then, yes, you are needed. See that. What you said.

I didn’t mean it. This isn’t even me speaking.

Who then.

I don’t know. I cannot stop it. I try not to talk and I still talk.

What if I told you that everything that you’ve seen happen has not happened? That you are spinning. The world all waiting in the day. What if I told you that you have been staring into the same mirror in a small room in the house that you grew up in for so long now you can no longer see your face?

I’ve never seen my face anyway. It’s always just beyond me. Reflections and photographs are masks.

What if I told you I was Gretch Gravey? That I was you and you were me. That everyone I killed was by your hands as I had moved inside you, or just the opposite: you through me. That Gretch Gravey was not a person but a feeling. What if I told you that through all the days of your life, no matter what you felt that you were doing in them then, you were only standing in the dark before a mirror? What if I told you you’re an idea, and what all you’ve felt or said has happened was my mind, that all the heads and all the bodies of all the people ever sleep inside you, feed around you, color the light behind your eyes? What if I told you this too was a recording: what I’m saying, all the colors, all the sound, all your memories and histories and mine and all of everybody’s ever, every inch of where even held beyond the tape you slave on, tapes in tapes in tapes, with no perimeter, no dimension, no rest coming for all era? What would you do then? Who would we be then?

If you told me that I would not believe you. I have lived this. What is said is what was done.

What if I told you you are dead then? That what you feel right now is what it feels like to be dead, and that all this waiting for the coming death that ends the body you believe in will begin another life again? That no matter how many times you reach the ending the space goes on? Not an afterlife or many lives appending, but one long and white unending thrall, against which when you pause inside the going you pick up somewhere else. That eventually you will see through all the eyes there have ever been. A mass of eyes around a silent center.

Why can’t the end just be the end.

A center another cell in another form of world.

I am still in here.

Millions and millions of white halls. Three hundred million is just a number, each death a color, each house a hole into the eye, each body a condition cracked in the edges of a longer length of organ on a gold field undulating in no sound.

I believe when I am dead it will be black.

Close your eyes and look at what that black does. It wraps around you.

It needs no skin.

All I want now is silence.

Then I’ll be silent.

Thank you.

I began to force myself to enter every house as I came to it. I could no longer stand the lurking presence of all possible space I felt waiting in every window. The shaking still came on after me, but I moved on through the shaking and each time came out the other side still full myself. All I had to do was not stop and let the shaking overcome me, just keep going, and not consider what or who might appear. I simply walked into wherever, regardless of what seemed open to my presence or not. The doors would do their job without a key or any sound, and behind them the tape continued, now revealing new kinds of space I hadn’t felt.

The walls inside the homes felt different from the walls of the world outside. It wasn’t necessarily a smell or sound or texture, but the feeling of what had transpired over time in the presence behind closed doors, worked in the weave of the video. It was like another film beneath the film’s face, something the world I knew had been copied over onto. I hadn’t escaped the tape as I understood it, but I had found within it at least something unlike the shape of its unwinding, something previously undefined from my perspective.

In each house I made sure to enter every room. Every possible next place resolved itself as I touched through it. I moved behind the drapes and through the closets. Stairs couldn’t stop me, aiming up or down. I heard the hum of the machines the house had lived with, though if they weren’t already on they wouldn’t turn on. Anything could do only what its extant reality allowed it. Many rooms were still lighted by something I could not tell what.

Anyone had lived once in these homes. In rooms alone I lay in beds where other people presumably had slept and fucked for years, unless all of this was just a set decorated to divide me. This hidden air surely wasn’t mine. The house would get really cold for certain minutes when I went into a particular area with my hands out in the dark looking for something firmer than air to hold onto. I was looking for something else, not even really people. I could not tell what I was looking for beyond the shape of myself, in the same way I could not remember what I did not remember though simply by knowing I was looking meant there was something to be found, and this provided me the silence of ongoing responsibility in the face of what could have otherwise been an overwhelming hell.

FLOOD: I could not remember that I’d already done this. Over and over. Every possible action I could make here had already been performed long before me just by the fact of being. The strings of me vibrated like an instrument on fire coming through any door where anyone I hadn’t been had lived their life in rooms alone. When I closed my eyes I saw everything the same, there playing also on the inside of my head, beyond all vision .

Into the night of homes I walked in waver. The shape of the homes forced me to feel my shape within them while I shook them down for what they pretended not to be. Along long panels in the house I would rub my face or hands or chest to feel what sound the house hid when I could not find what I felt I’d been meant to. Like people shuddering in the eaves in fear of what had passed and what was passing. Or like a passage that would walk me back into my life. In the walls I found the eggs of rats and spiders; I found the color of night packed in long strands of oozing black slick that had aggregated where we’d breathed together while we could. The unseen held the world together. In some homes I’d find jewelry that I’d wear and make believe had always been mine. I could feel where the wedding rings were missing their intended fingers, necklaces missing necks. I wore them anyway. I sucked the taste out of them. I’d put on so much gold I seemed to burn the air around me. The clothes here also itched, alive enough outside the ongoing light of outside that when I rubbed my face into their fiber or in desperation put them on I could hear them speaking in my body as if my body were their body. They would beg me to lie down and never move now. They would ask me to put my arms around them where they weren’t. In all the voices were the same voice, the same long warmth of nothing stretching where it wished to believe itself again as something compatible with what I might be, heavier than any sunlight or understanding.