Blake Butler - Three Hundred Million - A Novel

I closed my eyes.

Inside the black I could still see the land of the world surrounding empty, though here behind the land I saw the long veil of human history knitting in the light we’d left behind, a scrolling ream of memory-dimension beyond both time and space where all our lives fed through the same lens, the sunning voice burning even the glass out into air, and from the air then the burning image beyond all color, code, or era.

It was my own voice then I heard beyond me, saying nothing.

Inside no sound, each present edge still disappeared into the next. The white of the light inside the silence between language made my own skin seem miles denser in comparison, and the idea of all previous occurrences even thicker, to the point of impossibility. Along the air there was the void of something exploding continuously and unendingly, light pouring through where words weren’t.

I thought to touch my face then but I couldn’t. I could not remember anything except thinking this sentence. I could not remember what the sentence meant, that I did not remember where I’d been forever or what I wanted. I tried to turn around and go back the way I’d come, inside the air, but when I turned I found the world had changed to fit my shape, filled through and through me without color.

This was what had always been. Nothing had happened; nothing had not happened; and yet everything was ours. Our bodies stuck at the frame of the page of the light where the flesh of all of us each instant shrunk and expanded overwritten overrun false with all absent language lorded between any way ever. Each word held a murder of its own; each death a death of all things and so now nothing. There was so much light coming from all the holes now I could hardly tell what parts of me were me and what was time, all stretching out forever over what had been once.

All I wanted was to love and to be loved. I wanted to feel us loved and go on in love again and have a spouse and child again in love in endless light in endless repetition beyond the shape of any home you made beyond our image, though here the light kept frying out and walls kept turning into mirrors and the floors harbored under floors, cold colors longer than the house is, any instant stretched to oldest tone. Here I wanted to exist in the rhythm of a stunning surface grown from no sleep in all our excess all beside you beyond blood. I wanted to be free and laugh like fire, to watch the edge of the earth expand so wide it killed the color of the void, carved a peace for us to spread our lives out warm in ancient fat and growing ages. I would have given anything to stand beside you. I would give you anything.

I raised my arms into the light. I did not have arms but I could feel them rubbing against everything they weren’t. I heard me shouting long before the sound came. Each syllable stretched for longer than I could imagine ever existing. I opened my eyes over and again and each time saw the same long corridors of white against the white repeating nil.

Between each nil I lived forever. A century of centuries of summers in the bodies murmuring my head my head wide open with the faces, speech undone. Walls around us, light around us, above, below. Not in any place that had a name still, but simply here . In the end of asking, and of needing to be asked. The end of whatever you’d been waiting for forever in the long stand of electricity and putty. Wherever you could find a way.

Wherever we have been. In the end of commentary. The end of the end of anything we’d wished to conceive and not conclude. All those instants collected on the body of all of us and placed beneath us so that we could still walk and not need to remember we’d been deformed. With our tongues against the emblem, pupils swelled to fill out not only our whole eye, but the space beyond the eye. In the end of the out-of-frame, the end of seeing. The end of the pigment of our dreaming existing only forced encased.

Where all we wanted was to hold. In the end of shapes and endless endlessnesses. The end of something like falling through no hour. Here in the shower of all sound, wearing a skin made of the moment of eruption as our bodies finally gasped the dust out of the streets and stood up and bowed without an encore.

The end of will. In the end of needing form and fingers to exist beside the space you’d been forever and had suffered for to control, where when the lights come on in the house again we must swear we won’t remember how anything at all between us has been amended before appearing. Blown out and blotted in the loveless marrow of the present.

I opened my eyes inside no smoke. I was lying facedown again in the center of the floor inside a room of mirrors filled with bodies and their blood. I could not tell where one body ended and the next began.

The light was cold. No idea how long I’d been awake. I wore a kind of clothes not accustomed to the style that I remembered having. My nails were long, my stomach full, my arms all covered in tattoos. My hair had grown down past my ass.

The bodies smelled like life. From among them, there was a woman splayed beside me, pulled free from the pile. She had my mother’s arms and neck and cheeks, and my wife’s fingers and her forehead. Her eyes were sewn shut with blue wire.

In her arms, the woman held a child.

The child had no head. Where his head had been was gushing white shit. I had his head in my hands. The head was smiling. Where my fingers touched his skin they adhered, and when I could pull them away there were lesions on my flesh.

The child looked just like I remembered me. He wore a silver locket, as had I. Inside the locket, I remembered, was a photograph of god’s face, what god had been, though now the locket would not open.

I set the head down. It fell through the floor instead of stopping, just like that, then it was gone. I looked at the remainder of the child. He had a new head. He looked like someone famous whose name eludes me. His new mouth was sewn shut with the same blue wire as the woman. His new eyes were wide. The eye meat had no pupils or irises, only white.

My fingerprints were all over everything, though my fingerprints are yours.

Beyond this room, the world awaited.

Into the new air now I wandered out of what we’d already been to what remained of what we were. In total death, at last, all bodies appeared stacked up neck-high across the landscape, dead as fuck. They clung blistered in the skin of millions, all of whom were also me. The curvature of the earth seemed to have flattened. Museums of intestines held corded around the glinting onslaught of trailer homes beaten with stones and fists and asses cleaved from other bodies and rendered weapons, scratching names into the paint, names no longer affixed to the bodies that had slurred from and laughed and made more in the image of our kind.

Flesh splayed and stacked in accidental floes. Brutal rainbow fauna choked by maggots fleeing the carcasses through mud veins in the chest of the earth risen to brush at white sky lathered dry and caked replicating on itself. Flakes of dry skin hung on overdeveloped air, rasping in the dimension where the arms of time sung fat with knots, to slow the lap of the ocean forced against the land mass with the bodies mottled in incandescence. Wasps knitted homes out of the refuse pillbox bodies and twining in the hair of no one growing. What old white light beat at the teeth of countless exterminated babies stung under sky incidentally conformed with coarse grooves the night would blow against ejecting sound, wishing it were anything else like words that would have emerged between the pure enamel before it fell out in the learning of how age sits upon us and licks our easy resin out of the head into the want of worship, commingling forever alone.