Blake Butler - Three Hundred Million - A Novel

No matter knew no door. No echo sat where the hawks and crows dropped shit on the sternums held together as a forest, the hovered eyes knowing better and staying above ground looking for land to land on where there was something still remaining to be feared. The stink of the organs rose above the buildings of the people in a scarlet dome shimmering with spittle of condensation. Still pools of ideas in the long miles of the corridors of cells hidden forever and half unveiled wishing its surface something larger like a mall or a pavilion or a collection of hammers used to build something not of flesh beneath which the flesh might mimic sleep rather than the vast death cotillion inflicted fast upon it by our own hands inside any mind. The bodies removed of their emotions had been packed together into igloos, towers, bales. There was more space now than one might imagine all this time under our thumbs.

The remaining portion of the bodies lingered, tightened. The sun upon the skin continued to tan them like bitches. The phantoms of animals remained indexed to their locations, dogs in homes taking from the bowl left out in light or sniffing through broken glass to buildings full of food they might corral not even tasting. The dead were dead. Ribcages ripped clean of the casing of their bodies formed crowns upon slim structures of other bones, for no reason other than they did, the way love at last connects a person to a person, and the veil between the living and the dead grows ever thicker.

The body of the grade school teacher had been copulated upon in her last hour fourteen dozen times. This was well after the year of her having given in to a young man in a white room on a bed, the dress her mother had given her in celebration of a fruition of an idea about the celestial bodies written onto paper having been bestowed with the ornament of an award; in years to come thereafter she would not remember the ideas of or the presence of the award at all, its paper turning blackened in a drawer, the dress of purple cotton removed from her by the aged hands of the man old enough to be her father in theory, thirteen years as he was and therefore full of childcream the day she herself had become a child. He had handled her with care, as she would have liked to be handled in the hour of the parting of the flesh that would mark her in the experience of the mode of human replication, which through her flesh had made no sound. This was well after the years of other making in this practice in various campgrounds and hotels and bedrooms and cars and theaters and small places of the nature someone of the passion might have brought the flesh against their flesh in desire despite her practice in the method as a child of god; she loved and loved; she smelled of candles and of purpose; she had a nameless flower tattooed beneath her hair. This was as well after the year the friction-making had borne in her a son, who’d died thereafter, coming out into the name she’d given years back before any of the shapes of fornication; she had heard his name in her for many years; she would say it only once aloud in his presence before the blood matching the color of her blood already spread upon the table also burst from him. Since then she’d lived alone. She’d practiced herself into the mode of loving god even that much harder, for giving her the gift of sacrifice, as had he; in the night she could see the child above her anyhow, neither speaking, beyond the color of their eyes; each sleep cycle between them spent in these paused hours unrepeating, populated each with new instants, she knew, despite the way the nature of their seeing into one another did not change. Time could go on this way forever some nights; she’d lived inside some nights before him and before Him several hundred thousand years. She was thirty-two today, blind each minute to the waking hour beyond certain shapes of darkness in some darkness. Such as: the men, of no particular coalition beyond local inhabitance, having shared the same streets and visions between them daily for many years in this American neighborhood named using the same letters as the blind mother’s son’s name had been inside its single iteration, fucked the mother turn by turn spurting whatever into wherever in a whitewalled blanket for the innards, to become, though without the shift of actual becoming, as there soon after too they each took turns eating inches from her body by knives and fistfuls, their eyes not on the mother but up at something else above them that had no color and no sound and filled the reflective surface of their pupils with what seemed simply more light and yet warmed nothing left inside them ever but in the mother’s seeing gave them shape.

FLOOD: Through the woman’s eyes, I could hear Gravey. His voice buzzing with every human voice combined in every syllable, writing over any thought of my own I could have had then: You could find an ending in any eye. I had learned this as a child when staring hard into the sunlight even so briefly and still it cut the meat out of my eyes, and wrapped around in my surroundings with its blackness, handcuffing my imagination. In the blindness there and then only had I learned to see the ways between the houses, between minds. Death at last was no longer an inevitability; it was the mass of the ground that we grew out of.

The body of the carpenter was found dismembered into five equal parts, divided in halves along the center of the sternum and halved again across the middle, and lopped off at the head. The head was gorged of its softer parts, the eyes, the lobes, the cheeks, the lips, the gathering beneath the chin. The face would be recognizable to the wife were she not also pulled apart. The mother’s head was all intact except the hair, which had been shaved to match the balding father, with a ring of pubelike stragglers crowning the elongated cranial peak. An orange plastic stitching, rendered from cloth of stretchy sack designed for carrying potatoes, was used between the eight bodily sections of the two parents, lashing chest to chest and chest to chest and waist to waist and waist to waist, creating from the two previously independent parties a pair of hybrid halves. The genitals of the mother had been sewn shut on the side of the lower body that remains bearing the bits (her left); the genitals of the father had been removed, and buried with his left index finger beneath the land the home of the family lived inside, and grew together through years of light and pigment and dinners and language unto the day when the five children would take the parents clean apart. The coupled neutered bodies meshed lay head to head forming a flatline at the concrete mouth cupping the local street unto the home’s stoop; the left and right arms of each of the prior bodies reach to cup the hand of the other arm on the other body to which they previously by flesh had been attached; the palms were cut open and sewn together, forming a circuit. The wedding rings had been switched. The mouth of the mother splayed open toward the sky as if in waiting for something to rain into them and be fed. In the concrete were scratched the initials of each of their children, along with a large blockade of tracing that to the parents had always looked like a picture of a sun rising over a large square pond. The concrete ended at the mouth of the house where the home had been burned to char against the ground. Cremains of the five children could be found strewn among the rubble, each demolished in kind one by one by age from oldest to youngest, knives, ropes, fists, vices, confounded in the remains of incineration of the pillows, place mats, clothing, photography, trash, uneaten food, books, dolls, board games, toothbrushes, chairs, mattresses, sofas, calendars, crib notes, new envelopes, desks, carpet, hair, in all a thick gray field visible from several hundred yards overhead. A corresponding oval of shared blood between the two parental torsos at the mouth of the ash field glistened even in the dark.