Blake Butler - Three Hundred Million - A Novel

For each surface that I touched, no smoke rose and nothing crumpled into cinder. More so, it buzzed against my rind, absorbed the contour of my friction, splitting open against its private definition in my existence. It grew awake inside my glow, and as it grew to glow, too, not quite burning, then I could no longer feel what it had been to me before now, less and less to overcome of what had been and becoming instead more like any edge in any house forever, every and all. Soon in each room there were fewer and fewer things I recognized as ours or mine or someone’s, as anything but icebergs in an archive.

Glowing, I moved from shape to shape. The light of me erased the grade of any private understanding in each surface. The screaming light grew over everything I touched or saw. The weight of light collected everywhere I wasn’t. I was so slow now. I could see me moving before I moved. With every gesture, I could feel my image coming apart from what the tape was and what I’d been that made it. Every definition burying its head in its own face. Soon I could not remember which room my wife had appeared in, in any version. Then I could not recall the texture of her face, the smell of the sound around. Then I could not remember what a wife was. Then I could not remember having ever wanted to remember.

I watched me pass through all the rooms of all our lives, at every inch further and further from that day, slower and slower, disappearing, soon so bright I could not see.

FLOOD: The colors filled all through my head. They wrote over what I was trying to think with exactly what I’m saying. I no longer could control the way I was able to communicate inside myself with other layers. Or it had always been like that and I was just now allowed to know it, feel it. The smoke curled down into my pores; it pressed back at where the smoke of the repetition again was trying to push new smoke to cover up the old. Between the two of them the world was fuzzing into several of itself at the same time, one of each of me inside them. The light was growing wider than the tape was. I could feel the world beyond the tape again caving in, pressing at the presence of me in it, our final eye. Just as I could not escape death as an idea by hoping only to live on in my private memory alone, what slaved beyond death remained constant in us all, and could not be granted without the false originalities of massacre and aspiration having been at last truly compressed beyond the idea of any person: image or language , never or now.

All at once then there just above me I felt something pressing dry against my mind .

Where on the air the houses ended and still between the sky there was a surface .

Concealed in along the air. It was like smoke but without smoking. Heavy and rising .

It was held between the perimeters of the video where the frames of repetition gathered .

It was as if the tape itself were burning from outside it. Its continuity creamed to glue .

I could feel the burning also in me spreading. Our pixels curling. All air devoured .

My life divided every thought. Each thought broke open as it uttered, into nothing .

Light was upon me. It wound around me. It was settled on the air. It had been wanting .

It had always been this way. Crushed between the homes. Our air all latticed, closed .

I could not understand how I’d never seen this. All the fields speaking and reflective .

It was something wider than a house. It had rooms but did not have walls or windows .

It was just before me there and far ahead. I knew the tape did not mean for me to see it .

The tape had built the days to hold me out. It knew I counted time, so it could hold me .

I had always been in here, I remembered. What I remembered of before was just the tape .

The world and the wife and the dead and all else were not mine. The tape was not mine .

The light refracted in my mind. It beat the shit out of my seeing, thinking, needing. Who .

All around me. All of ever. I’d had to come through everything I knew to just now see .

I knew the air there of what the shape was held the thing I’d always been and wanted .

Never found. Something written underneath all faces. All my faces, shook beyond sleep .

The shape knew me better than I knew me. And couldn’t feel that. Burning and eating .

It wasn’t even there. It was a silence. When I tried to speak its name, I just blew breath .

Our lives had always been just out of frame. Just far enough removed to never notice .

Like crystal pushed against an eye. Needing it even more knowing you could never .

Tape in my teeth, tape in my lungs. Obliterating by simply being. And I grew wicked .

And you grew old. Between the walls the world had birthed to separate us. Slaving .

The shape hilarious and silent. Where when I thought my way toward it, it disappeared .

Where the longer I looked upon the shape and felt it, the more it was only everywhere .

The click of the eye of the snap of the trick of the wet dream beneath the skin of god .

FLOOD: I could no longer think or move. The tape kept interrupting. Or I was interrupting. Or where I was thinking and moving now was different than it had been the way I understood it before. Like how soil is always soil, but never the same elements ruined into it. The film was pressing down. It knew I knew. Our silent gap no longer fit the frame of only now. It wanted all the rest of every era .

The translucent space before me gleamed. I don’t know how I hadn’t seen it like this before now. Always now, always. The more I saw the shape, the more the shape seemed like just another house. Fucking houses. Illicit nowhere. It looked like the black house stuffed up with the smoke where I’d begun but wider than that, and older than that. When I looked at it directly, the shade would change, as if it could feel me wanting it, and knowing in my wanting that to be entered would cause its end. Every angle was another face to feel, both within my skin and pressed against it.

The space held seated somehow propped between the whole space of earth and sun. It came with windows made of people’s sleeping, every person. It had reinforced itself in the absence of all vision. There was no door at all, no locks, not even walls or surfaces. The main face of the structure, once you could see it for a second before it shifted, was embedded on the rip of the air of the tape itself: the blank that held the tape together by showing nothing in recording where there’d been nothing ever to show. It wore the index of space forever invaded by the eras of people simply acting out their lives: asking, laughing, saying, eating, living, being, working, sleeping, knowing, kissing, thinking, rushing, pissing, singing, making, having, going.

Gone. The house was not ours. It had been always. I could tell it had been waiting for someone to touch it once when it was young, and had grown lazy in its waiting. It had so many names: the House of God, the House of Demeaned Cities, the House of No Art We Could Remember, the House of America Without America, the House of Rape Fantasy and Weddings, of the Being of the Been, the House of Sod. If there was anywhere inside the tape where anyone like me might hide in fear, it was here. If nothing else it was the end of anything, the actual end of what the tape could be, the tape beyond my time and here containing everything I wanted, totally held inside which I might be able to stop the repetition and hold longer to the shape of belief I felt some days floating just underneath my face. It wanted me to have it and to know it and to never leave it there again, while also not having to feel me or become me. A shapelessness screwed beyond the idea of even shape.