Blake Butler - Three Hundred Million - A Novel

The weight still wasn’t enough to push me underneath the ground. It would not bring me royalty from nowhere, and yet all I had to do was say it had. I was the ruler of this era and it felt ageless. Everything remained for me to make of it what I could. Overhead coming back outside between the houses again into light, unlike what crept away, the sun bit at my ass through all its black with laughing. It screeched like children being smothered and tried to kick the color from my eyes, into the flat of lesser black the houses harbored. The sky wanted everything we’d been keeping from it always in what seemed the safest places and yet were always just rooms. I waited, laughed back, told it to take me over. I shouted words of the new language I was making in the space between the tapes at no one there and felt them shatter. I believed in nothing. Didn’t I? Wasn’t everything I did exactly as I said? The houses bulged with nothing. No matter what I believed each time I found my thoughts still there inside me when the tape began again, it felt hard to recall how I’d come to that, as any prior logic in my head from prior iterations seemed like mazes I’d took the name of and called mine, having again found my way to nowhere, every minute the most now. Anything that held up was just more of the nature of how I was meant to understand it.

FLOOD: Among the tape all things feel the same, one thread and then another, each as it begins just full of hope, though when I am here again only in my mind with sound and can think again I realize it’s because the shrieking sound inside my recorded body is so high and shrill there that it’s beyond my human register. It just feels like being ripped apart at a high speed, over and over, and then resealing, inside the baking furor of the light, then ripped again, each time so quickly I can’t tell that anything has happened besides the fact that inside the silence here I am .

Yeah.

Yeah what.

I don’t know. I don’t know what I’m saying. Sometimes I am only ever talking to myself, which feels better than talking to someone who isn’t really there.

Sometimes it’s nice to make the talking to myself seem like someone else, even when they don’t answer, or when they use the voice of someone I do not remember to try to make me feel some pain or edge of itch inside me.

I don’t need to have someone speaking to me to know that I am somewhere else and looking for any evidence of exactly what doesn’t exist.

I don’t need it.

Please.

I don’t, really. I don’t miss anyone.

I must maintain rigor in the nothing.

I found nobody in the name. I called the words of those I felt written in my insides, the residues, though I did not remember them beyond the clasp of something dry around my lungs or jutting in my abdomen. The names fell out between my teeth onto the floors. They rasped and clung against the dry grind of the shitty carpets or the wood grain. They fizzled, issued smoke. The smoke would hang around my head for minutes after, sometimes longer, reminding me the end was coming soon, and through the end so the beginning. I could inhale it and feel fucked. Some awful squealing in my sacs permeated every instant I found nothing, no reflection, no one to put my word in, no eyes or hands.

Even my flesh would not work with me. I’d masturbate and issue a gallon of black stones. Each stone leaving made me want it back inside me: what could I build with this, what walls to keep every other idea out. Instead, the stones sunk into the earth and hissed and burned there without purpose. And that was fine, too. The skitter of the cells about me burst upon the air and made me shortly warmer and less destructive while also contributing to the curvature of the landscape, even if, having absorbed my children, its surface appeared the same. Coming back, too, some time later, in some future iteration of the tape, I would find the house grown over with a moss or fine-hued silt of aggravated sand where I had touched it, changed its future, which meant then that the tape was not my god , I thought, which meant then that if this is a tape I am awake in, there must be somewhere else a full machine that plays the tape; if there is a machine that plays the tape, there should be a hand that puts the tape in and presses play; there must be a room around this room the image enters, there must be eyes . Even if from here I could never move between the tape inside the machine to the world around it, even if the hidden spaces here were just as open to all else as anyplace beyond, there must still be a way to speak into the head attached to the eyes, to the brain. Communication with the presence beyond my reality could then affect the shape of the reality itself, which then might change the nature of the relation of the presence to the tape, and what between them; might even make the space between them disappear .

I hated each of these thoughts as I had it, a blue foam burning in my eyelids, though once they’d begun they would not stop shaking in my brain until they broke. For long periods then thereafter in meat of wandering and peeping my vision would vibrate just slightly for what seemed days. Clusters of color where before there’d been the clear-glass plate of space at which point my eyes ended and the world began, each shift of hue causing the earth itself to seem that much nearer to my head, and coming closer each time the vibration made me close my eyes and touch the ground to keep from barfing and rub my face in dirt and wish for the beginning to begin again already, to end the colors from my head and make them black again like all the houses and the sky behind the helmet of the world. Every instant like this was pure panic, glossed in the solitude of absolute misunderstanding, the foundation of the world.

In some modes the earth between blinks would get so close up to my face that I would move forward even by standing still; my flesh would flood beyond my head; even sometimes also I would end up going backwards, my eyes behind me, and find, no matter how hard I pressed to stay exactly where I was, I’d feel the rest of my body briefly leaking back into who I’d always been before now: back to stand in the first room of the first black house’s whitest center, standing, with someone’s blood all on my hands: the blood of everyone at once, one final body, who in the world outside the frame of tape I knew I’d killed, because we all had, as a fact of being, breathing; the me there in the body of the man I knew I’d been when I put my hands around the skin of the murdered people, regardless of whose hands they really were; the me of me in anyone, all history.

Sometimes, in those clearest moments splitting, by no longer blinking I could see my head leave my head; I could find me seated in a building on a cot with my hair full of the black again and my arms measured with tattoos and the sound of other people talking and making on the far side of the walls, despite how from where I sat I could find no door or exit, no return even in remembrance to the people in their temporary hour all alive; faces alive again beside me, and me part of it, fabric or fantasy regardless, no longer dead, or if dead, all of us and not just not me; I heard the flashbulbs; heard a woman; liquid squirting from my pores; I would feel on my skin the light of the white inside the tape through which I had inhabited my body, the room filled up with wet in which I’d killed the image of the mother, father, and the child; then just as quickly again the smoke would rise up all around, engorged and pressed against me, shifting the memory of how or when, and still inside me still no matter how, my skull would make me blink again and the smoke would part and I would be inside the tape again and I could no longer feel any part about me beyond this land, the blood upon my hands again having turned translucent or sunk into my veins to join the rest; and then again the tape would end; the tape would stop and rewind and I’d be right there beginning in the same place where it’d ended, with nothing left but me there in my head. Then I would begin again at the beginning, if with another hole inside me, if with the pressure of the presence of the same day ready now to take me in its code.