Blake Butler - Three Hundred Million - A Novel

Each time while using the computer, or any of the machines, in any of the houses, the machine died, right in the midst of its own time; there was no power in the outlets, no way to make my access to their memories extend. I could feel the shutdown in the machine stutter upward also through my fingers in a frenzy, clicking and pressing buttons, trying to find something else to have, desperate for familiarity, for a window, the sound of all of my wanting running wildly up my arms into my flesh. My body wanted something I could remember of me in these images, these gone people, something I had lived for in them or them in me. Their eyes just watched me flat undying as the black of the unpowered electronics came on and ended just like that. Then it was me again, the world again. Each machine that lived and died inside those hours made me older, though I did not age. I was not aging on this tape, no matter how hard I wished to wrinkle, for the dark to fill me.

There were always other houses. When I came back again inside another instance, the machines would die again the same. They would die and die again, no matter how many times or ways I shuffled to do something right for us for once here. I carried on as I’d been taught to, taught by myself in the form of someone long forgotten: the parent I’d been before I’d made me. I kept looking. I went and wanted more to go, even already suspecting what the latent nature of the world was, and how much ground I could cover before I was forced to start again.

As I began to learn the motion and approximate duration of the tape’s face, I tried to get as far as I could, unveiling new space despite still knowing it was all in the same image. The more houses I came to, the harder it was to remember any of them from the rest, which I’d already been through and found no one nothing not a person nobody at all no one I could hold or eat or be, all of this only refortifying how I knew there must be something or someone I wanted, and wanted even more in knowing less of anything about it, for which all things in me went on relentlessly regardless of whether I could find the name or definition of what or who there — what had once been that lit me up, what had moved me before it ended in me, somewhere crushed in memory, where despite the fact that all I touched here and went here among the recurring video was always continuously ending. There was something lurking underneath its current surface, something there beyond even the memory of the idea of it, the name of it, which I could not remember, a space beyond the space of itself

Which is

Which is

Please fill in the gaps. My mind won’t do it. I feel a pressure in my knees like I am kneeling though I believe I’m standing. Help me.

Help me.

I am sorry I told you to be silent. I don’t want that. Please come back.

I can’t find an exit. I give up.

Please.

Please rewind the tape. Record it over. Make it all white.

I couldn’t help it, please, I’m sorry, I am.

I am here. I never left. I couldn’t even if I meant to. No one could ever. Your arms are both my arms. You are my eyes.

Thank you. Oh, thank you. For that. For speaking.

What do you need.

I can’t stop the unending iteration.

You will never.

So what am I supposed to do.

Who am I.

I can’t remember.

Who am I.

What do you want.

I don’t know. To be happy. To not understand what it’s like to want to kill people, or know they can be killed. To surpass death. To be calm and quiet. To lie down. To be full of something warm when I am waking up alone or beside someone. To walk across a bridge and find the water at both ends. To know the someone that I loved again. To have silence. To have all of that and none of that.

So just do those things then.

How.

How do I do that.

I don’t know what to do.

You are doing it already.

I don’t know what I’m doing.

You are.

Just tell me who this is.

You know who this is. And you know I can’t tell you.

Why.

Because I don’t have a name.

How can I find you if I don’t know what your name is.

It is the same name as your name. I’m in all names now. I’m any of them. So are you. Hi, I’m your wife. I’m your neighbor, your child, your brother. I killed all those people and gave them life. I’m not anybody. You’re the one pretending you don’t remember what all these words mean, though I know really that you do.

I am waiting for you. There’s no answer. There is an answer.

I am the color of the house. I am your bedroom. I have waited here for so long I can’t even remember.

I need to see you now to know that you are there.

Here I am.

I can’t see anything. I don’t know where to go now.

I am right behind your face.

I can’t stop me from the talking. I want to stop now.

Stop me.

Stop.

B.: There was the wind around the sand beneath us. Even I don’t know who I am often, either, though I do, too. The color in the smoke. The sound of every one of us forever, before and after the possibility of birth. Still I still can’t crush the one of me in me who knows what I had always as a person felt most: to hear my loved one say my name. A name that is not my name at all to me and yet inside which I can sleep, and feel no time, though I know all the rest goes on unending, and what is left now is more than ever was. Death is not a question of becoming nothing, it’s a question of everything at once, ending where the edge between the two of us was always rubbing in us, craving no break between .

The mirrors in the homes were flat and long. I went to press myself against one. I did remember. I remembered how the rooms could be opened into from the outside, from someone beyond the cut of the way the home supposed itself. I remembered how behind the flat copied image of myself there in endless rooms the world had offered I’d found in each a way into a common space. The long, buried backbone of the black house just underneath the feet of any homemaker, provider. Any child. Somewhere in the welding of the dark network behind the rooms here there must still be a way back into the world from where I’d come, if anything remained of that by now. Somehow out from this recording I’d caught myself inside I could feed myself back through the lens and out into the eye, and if it was only death there waiting for me on the far side, into the brain of the body of the present, in this way at least I would have lived and died. I would have been a person in the system of faces and beliefs, another square inch in the last era of our death.

The face of the mirror in the bathroom of the house as it was in the present surrounding version was about as wide as my own chest. It was as tall as me there, affixed against a blue wall in a bedroom where whoever last had lived inside the room had left their bed unmade, though there remained no smell of them left in the fiber.

I had tried. I had lain down in the bed first, hoping somehow it would fall out underneath me, or at least that I would sleep. Here when sleep came it felt the same as waking, and when you dreamed you saw what you would see awake again. The sleeping hurt worse than the being, an inverse of how I remembered our prior understanding. My skin seemed colder against the glass of the mirror. Where my image touched my image it felt electric, like cells knitting where we touched without quite touching, only wanting to be closer, through the glass.