Blake Butler - Three Hundred Million - A Novel

If I could reach the end-space of the tape’s helm, I felt, seeing the nothing where the edges of the space of tape itself began, I could maybe slither out; I could rise beyond my age into the rip of what was never promised but always had held me up.

And yet the shape would not stay still. The very nature of it crested between levels of its own image. Like insects printed in the pixels of the landscape. As I moved, it moved among me. It was inside me and had been and knew what I would do before I did it. Some seconds it would just be instances of sky, or would be a fuzz of grain around some nodule too far off inside the recording to decipher. Regardless, I could hear it humming, in the absence. It was giving heat off. The only heat remaining.

I wanted the space the most when I couldn’t see it. I went even when I wasn’t going, and couldn’t stop. For miles along the recording of the earth my body bled. The blood was lines I had no choice but to be. I took the lines and walked as quickly as I could manage with my icon forced through the repeating surface. Static was caking at my chest. Friction in variation on the norm of what the body mostly did upon the tape would be punished in the tape’s spool, flaking cells between us off from skin and celluloid alike, as if both accelerating rapidly in age. Any furor from the friction with the time code made me nauseated, my remembered flesh wanting out onto the recorded flesh even more the more the tape wanted me to slow.

I would not slow. I had this itch in my threads. The taped air of the homes fumbled against me, forming white walls in my vision where the houses believed they ended and another house was, turning instead in rows to rows of houses with fences higher than many of me stacked up foot to head. I crawled down shafts through air vents in the places and laughing at the color of the grain of the metal trying to mirror-trick me back to some beginning, and I laughed at me trying to trick me, trying to be me backwards, trying to force me back into the smoke that soon would pour out of my mouth. I went on forever haunted in the furor of the trembling of the houses here in error every second I wasn’t totally erased, foregone forever from this endless land of murder fainting claustrophobia fevers death-faced shitty-feelings distemper sweat-pits vertigo, and far beyond, altogether acted out in all the wrong poses of the era and pauses in the absence of the presence of whatever held us in the world as it had been and was no longer.

And so something in me continued going, something not even me but what I felt. Where my cords would bundle and build heavy unto sleep to disrupt the ease of anything just pleasant, I would rise and I would rise and not even wishing to rise I would do it and I would be popping and so here I was again curled in these unending fields. Here I am in fission in the tape wanting its ejection, sweating seasons long beyond the end of weather, as if somewhere there is a section of a tape hid in the tape awaiting my witness, wanting to be returned to where it belongs along the cord of my own eye, or whatever could be in there, underneath that, whatever could be.

I began again again. The houses where I had been had learned by light to remove their markings and so were older but I still could not tell them from the rest and still knew I had to get on with it regardless because there are only so many sentences one might read in any life. The sun was ratcheting my back in a loop again like a mirror to the hallway underneath the ground where through the earth of film earth the bells began to ring. They were coming from the mush between the houses, which with the sound coagulated. It strung around the holes between them and made the air weird so I could not see where to go, could no longer make out any angle of the edge beyond, though with my hands vibrating before me I could still sense what was up and what was down, and behind me I could hear the smoke of where I’d been before waiting to take me, to become me, drown me out.

Inside the font of movement still regardless, patches then began to gather on the system of the air before me where I waddled, hands out, collecting between my fingers and in my curvature of tape. If I was to be free again, the tape wanted all the others I’d buried in me to keep forever, to feed and feed on, even if there was no one left to watch. Who had been before and what before those and where before I’d come the tape would crush out from my blood and use to tint itself with inimitable color, eyes and lips and mouths and cheeks made into more and more land; and from those carried in me, the tape could take part in what they’d wished to do thereafter, when and how, what inches I had pulled out of them to live on. We had all already lived our lights out; every word was already never ours.

This time as the tape clicked back to start again I felt it grinding at its code. Inside the video I was thrown forward; I could not hear me, no matter in what way you called. I kept waiting for the voice I’d heard beyond me to return, to give me guidance, or at least to grind me deeper in against it so far I could feel or want to feel the tape against me any longer, but I could no longer hear it. Rather, I couldn’t hear anything but it. It was in the fiber of the grain that made the ground go on beneath me, crushing to me, becoming impossible to distinguish from any pixel or glitch. It was in the soundtrack of the wind and sun and my own motion. It ran all through every gap and was the gaps. It spread the light around my mind. It carried everything about me regardless of whether I wanted to believe it could or couldn’t.

Where the glitches on the air around me hung and buzzed, I felt holes open in me too .

Holes behind my face, between my teeth and in my tongue and backbone. Zero planets .

In me, I found me waking. How old I had been. How old was I becoming in the becoming .

Scars all over my flesh. I wore every camera in my stomach. I had the skin of a woman .

It burned, the shifting of my recorded flesh, pulled out like drawers inside a flesh on fire .

The boning of me croaked. My teeth unlaced from gums where language wanted out .

I found, in the slick white mass of fat around my marbled tonsils, a period inflating .

The mirror of myself inside myself all encoded wrapped with electronic understanding .

Whereas for any inch I had forgotten, this has made me wholly who I was without image .

In the fieldwork of the earth too, I was in there. I could see my hours in the absent faces .

Smoke fed itself smoke and begat smoke and became smoke and died and rose again .

The tape adhering to itself, forgetting how to repeat now that I wouldn’t just go blank .

The white was in my brain and bones and eyes. I was way in there, packed with all death .

The dead who wanted nothing more than what they’d been before already but now new .

Not any one but all wide open. Black forests. Anti-electronic bloodstreams. Silver milk .

In each the hues screwed wide and carried over, splintered into every possible emotion .

FLOOD: No word we made was ever ours; none of what we’d said were the words we’d meant at all inside you or me and instead a word in our blood turned and turned, the same word over and over, all the hours, against the measure of the sand, until even you could not recognize you recognizing you inside you and instead inside the house we fell into something soft inside the silence between twin iterations of the word and there you were, and the years continue again and spin rewinding and inside the light inside the seeing .

The light moved through all mirrors. Our color cored inside the sound was only reflecting against itself. Inside the smoke I saw the skin of the sound around me come apart into a whorl, one of three hundred million films, each with innumerable films carried inside it, and in those too. All the longing. The whorl solidified around me until I was anywhere there could have been ever. I was in the room beneath the house. I was in the dry inside the fire baked with resin. I was walking along a hall. I was facedown in the living room awaiting bodies. I was falling through this.