Blake Butler - Three Hundred Million - A Novel

My erection led me on. My spindly labia led me on. My undeveloped pubis led me on. My lifetime led forever forward. The ash left trails that blew away.

Our architectures had already forgotten us. The curve of concrete into metal plane against red brick wired together through and through the airspace lapped with glass and wood and bone sung no album against the unbreathed air squelching vast gap where speech had beaten at it daily; no thumb or nail to scratch its shape again but the wind and drip of its own cover over all. The earth was hollow with all our corridors through dark dirt of transit at last unburdened of the endless ramming and given time alone. Grass and foliage wrote itself over the surfaces we’d conditioned in our image without our image in them. All the eyes who could not see at last made open.

Always the silence moved beside me. It fell between the people, conducted among friction with the contours of their torsos and their necks and thighs. They would not look me in the eye; their gaze always aimed as if in taking but just slightly off, feathered instead wholly, stilly toward the flatness above. These people had had many names, some hundreds of them, names for nowhere, though none of these words would appear inside my vocabulary. They were anybody. Their arms were burned and scored with patchy lacerations, as if by years of being copied on the air, whirring with the dream of dynasty and orgasm.

I did not look back. The silence pulled me like a rope wrapped warm to tie around my neck. Where I tried to think or speak, the stars winked out in ricochet, falling from heaven’s meat clinging to no bones wrapped around this hemisphere. The stars had names, too, but we’d gotten every one of them wrong; in falling they screamed the name inside the silence wrapped around us and streaked the black with black again from tar and burned to ash before they hit the ground. The ash rained and rained in warbled strobe to stick against my cheeks and hair. It gave me new skin.

I loved the composition of the silence. I had gone nowhere. I closed my eyes. It was so black in there, it wasn’t even black. It was like a room with countless mirrors and all the lights turned on and aimed into them now so bright the colors come alive and eat into your face into your brain into a black so black it begins to seem that you are actually alive and that each instant you have lived has not only brought you to where you are now but has in bringing brought us all.

The body of the masseuse believed she lived unending, struck in the temple with the blow of the fist at the moment incanting in her head the wish for replication of self beyond the moment of making, pushing through herself the idea she could in god’s name go on forever if the wish grew strong enough and in her in the biblical sense of aging to ages in the high hundreds for centuries of waiting speaking being closer still to god. The function of bone through flesh through flesh on bone again knocked the color of the thought into her whole hard whitely, masking up in blood as salad dressing barfs its way through sinky murk. Curls of the thought lashed upon corridors of cells the brain wished to carry on inside of and struck there paused as by machine she could live inside her and go on and live inside her and go on with the teeth of the child she would never bear masked in the fat around her gut unmoving in the want of search of semen to impregnate the cycle of the moon’s egg she’d been desisting upon with pills in cycled practice since the blood first poured from the white cup in her heart undying and sometimes out in such force upon the padding in the seat cushions of the sofas she would fall asleep on before the TV with the blue glow of no screened communication between other machines glowing the room into a womb for her to wait in god’s name to wait for god to become god’s last and needing bride she believed to bring the son again to earth to lash the son here to the earth as had the book said but in the magic of distinctive pronouncement through her body rather than fluttering from sky; she would be the Mother of the gift of revelation to the choirs and vans and towering buildings of the city in her century she swore while the pill kept out the wet of the other father sacrificing as well something in his whole life to become closer to her in the spirit of the animalian wish for god he swore off screaming over the mashed potatoes and frozen pizza at the dinner table each night that god had forgotten and would not come again and not into this house and not for any and the sky would burn in fire for the moon before a jesus of the nature scrolled upon in ancient books would be again given to us as a people for we were people crushed into infinite recursion on a model of shitstorm centuries and rapefuck, he screamed, he screamed blue in the face, he screamed with both fists raised above the dinner table, though she knew, the masseuse, her hands worked in the fields of flesh that came unto her in the glove of night to be worked of stress of daily nattering and basking and drinking and heaving and working, as she hamslammed out the passion of her waiting for the Father above the father to come into her and come all through her and fill her with the sand of the child of the centuries who would take her human father and gnash him teeth by teeth before the animals in an example of the screech of fornication without promise without gift in the stroke of ego of making as he had, a child, and as he had, words outside the word of god, and the song of god would pour out from her in the birthing as the night strobed against her with its silence and unknowing, a human song so innate it could be heard in any singing they had given all these years, all these recordings, all the chewing of the food, it could be heard in every body and only by every body all at once for it was in the people that the song flew and only the song of god compared and she knew this had to come only by their killing, their bodies struck wide open in the daylight at their own hands knowing what was wider than the sky already in the back of their heads as they could not sleep or thought they could in the beds where ticks and sweat eons curdled in the coils of springs and rubber they forked down money for so as to not sleep close to the earth, as inside there too the sound, and the sound forever in the dead years everlasting until it did not at all and could not go on in the face of the fists of children beating teeth from their parents in the name of a word that seemed like someone else but yes was god and god was the sound and the song and the flesh and the killing and the name and the word and the buildings and skin of us and the life of us and the speech and the typing and the fingers up the holes and the holes itself and the nothing itself and the waiting and the want and the rapefuck yes too that was god too how could it not be she would squeal with the wet still pouring out of her inside the hour waiting and the wet then pouring out of her inside a light as the men yes came in his image yes to denude her before the horses they had ridden up on in the image of the ancient book to scream her name in the name of all their names at once together laughing and she would not look away she could see even in the human fecal fuckforce of the big blue cock of the incubating aimless fury stretching the murderers’ faces as they peeled her open ripped her wider did her in, rubbing hot froth and endless gnashing in the hole where the god would come into her and make the seedling this was god now yes this was god he was going to burst, and the men did too, and they took turns, and the come was washing out, and it was god’s come, it had to be god’s come, and so inside her the child, and so she would die, and so she would live forever on in the making of the child frozen in the bloodstream passion altar and you could see it in her eyes and you could see it in the archmeat where after having raped and burst her womb and scratched her lenses the men had dug into the flesh with their white swords and in the flesh they’d found her backbone curved from stooping in the house of man these years in waiting and they had pulled the backbone out and looked upon it in the bloodbath and the wishing under the color of the sunning eye.