Blake Butler - Three Hundred Million - A Novel

My wife was pawing at my eyes. It was as if she could sense me feeling what I felt and did not want me to. Some amount of time had passed between the thinking and the being. I was much older. Again, I could not respond, nor could I hear what sounds were coming out of me between us. She pawed me harder. Her mouth was open, full of black. In the black I heard every word I’d ever heard again ongoing over every other word. Itching at me. Lathering at me. Not any voice. Not her. Deformed.

I felt my arms rise up to strike the image. To strike the sense of what she wasn’t off of what I knew she was. I was filled with such a violence. It didn’t feel like my arms were where they were. I didn’t want to. I only wanted what was meant in what was always nearly in there, in every inch of every edge, in any person. The voice was changing. The words all clustered and flooded with the ash of the idea of what they’d been called up to represent in us. I was striking with my mind. My hands beat at the air I knew was not the air it claimed it was now. Where I struck the flesh I could not see. It was only black then. Black of millions bruised all in the same place. Creaming eons. Healing into nothing. No longer see-through, but unappearing.

FLOOD: It was not my wife. I did not want to leave her. It was not her. It didn’t have to be for now. There was no speech in the rooms between us or beyond us. The house was many different colors. Where I did not look, the colors did everything they could to be what they meant to be. They were the world the tape believed. What had been recorded could have been anything but what it really was. At the center of me, a long cold wind blew, the last wind I remembered, or would remember .

I appeared inside the smoke again. The smoke felt colder now, and thicker. I wondered if the world as it emerged would appear different from how it always had, but soon out of the smoke again the homes appeared, the endless homes in the same order, empty, endless. And yet, now I knew exactly where I was. My house was any of the houses, and always had been. I had always gone in through the wrong door. The door was in my hands. Each of my fingers. The nails on every finger buzzed. Any of the walls I wished were the same that’d always been my own, and there inside each the apparition of my wife waited for me to return to her as I had always, daily, like a person.

And I did. In the mirage of the repeating tape, even knowing it was nothing, I could not stop myself from going back, the throb of the grease of the voice each time raising louder and louder over all sound as I neared, the colors blending white in my periphery, to zero.

Every time I found my wife inside the house inside the tape of our world, I found a different future mocked up in her translucent flesh. There was a future where together we grew old, had seven children, each who had children, grew old, and time went on. There was a future where cancer ate into her brain, removed the idea of me from her wholly. There was a future where I died long before her, and she went on in my memory alone unto her own death. Both of the deaths only begat the tape again, placing me firmly back in the suspension of the world there, seeking the same solace anywhere, only to begin again with her there, in the image.

No violence in me changed what the tape held. No murder of my own, or of myself, no brain damage caused by throwing my body down a flight of stairs, by eating poison from the bottles in the bathroom, by banging my face against her face, would do anything but cause the tape again to repeat. Our death was always incomplete. It could still taste where I lingered beyond my own being, the false conduit of what had passed.

I knew I could not change now, nor could I ever, in this contortion. The tape was everything I was, or had been. I could no longer differentiate the shift. I could not feel where anyone who’d ever been had been anything different than what they were always through and through the conduits of dirt and dying light that stroked us all into our graves.

And yet, when I closed my eyes inside the replicating leather of instance upon instance, I saw fire. I saw it burning in the flesh behind my face, through the lanyards of my brain vats, my skeletonic weaponry, my avenues of video-laid blood. The fire had no heat and yet burned all throughout me. It turned my organs black, my tongues. It lapped over the edges of my being throbbing as I walked and warred directionlessly against anything I could find to bear difference with.

The fire lived inside its smoke. It curled around me in my sleep and held me down and beat me apart and woke me up and made me walk until I could no longer walk and was wide open and could be had again, forced on. The fire was the light that lit the day here bright enough that I could see anything apart from what I wanted in the spindles of homes of all the others having lived beside me in matching desperation, in death now compressed together, forming the ground of which I walked, the pixels of the tape in which I lived on in me even having nothing, preventing in my absence from the totality of death a shapeless singing no one could hear in any present future.

My hands were overrun with light. Where I had touched my wife so many times, first in hope she’d feel the way I remember her having felt beyond the tape, and then in anger in finding nothing of us carried on, my flesh stung and bubbled inside itself, if on the surface always remaining only the image the tape of all my memory of me allowed me to appear as.

The light was slow. It became slower still as in the tape I moved my hands to raise against all overhead, the endless eye unseeing. I could feel the tape figuring me out; I knew it knew I recognized the way its image of my wife was not the wife that I remembered, that I could not go on in any of its multitude of humming futures without inside me always knowing what was off, where the colors it gave and gave me did not match the ones they really were, or were no longer now but had been, and so could not be shaken from their loom. It was only I, the last living breathing being, even recorded, who held us back from never needing any frame again against no time, no limb, no wish. Beyond the edges of us always something waited to become all of us at once without a face, or any era.

I entered any of the homes. I closed and locked the door behind me.

The tape was clinging at my grain. It knew I knew it knew I did not wish to live it out like this forever, and so against me began trying to split apart my widths. It slid interference in my image, made me slower, made rooms not connect to their right maps. It could do anything it wished and say it always had been like that. It spun its own mind, wore its own air. I wasn’t even breathing.

I was burning. The flames of the friction of my mind against the tape were not even as bright as the light the color of my hissing flesh blew out around me, trying to blind me, to hypnotize me into faith. The more it stung the more I burned. I watched my skin wriggle around me, covered in uncontrollable color.

The fire glowed within my hands. Its discontinuity with now fed into my seeing and made me open even further. I wanted more glow, more light. I wanted to be everywhere at once. Where I touched the room, the room took fire, too. It made no sound outside its body being eaten by the color. I watched it calmly. I was calm. My teeth were eyes. My eyes were laughing.

One by one I touched and lighted off my glowing the things inside the home I’d spent a life beside. I lit the sofa where we’d lain together watching films. I lit the carpet pressed imprinted with every motion. I lit the books I’d read and hadn’t read yet. I lit the edges of the frames of the photos on the walls who watched me moving, any of them believing in their context they were as alive as I was, even now.