Blake Butler - Three Hundred Million - A Novel

FLOOD: In these elapsed eyes now I could hear nothing, grinding on nothing, louder than life .

The body of the actor had been strewn across the land. His organs were removed one by one from his body and not tasted for fear of what has gathered through years of being shot by cameras and then through the cities on the air, the replications of his image sent through homes and wires and on discs and drives and printed onto paper and surfaces and dimensions and printed onto cells in such syndicated aggregation there is no center and no star. The actor’s spleen has been placed into a small glass cage and displayed under synthetic yellow light, prodded at by mushy fingers in the waiting space of a long hall now destroyed. The actor’s gallbladder has been spread thin and refashioned into a garment draped around the surrounding landscape of his birthplace as far as it could cover, which is not far. The actor’s ureters and the fleshy sacs attached thereto have been placed into the sockets of the eyes of another well-known actor with exciting teeth and medium-sized cock; the configuration is shot on digital video and edited with seven tracks of varying cartoon music, symphony, black metal, banjo, then uploaded to a file-sharing server under the name of a once-popular teen heartthrob mp3 anthem machine, spreading in the final hours of the American breathing conglomerate a facefucking of the beloved by the beloved. The actor’s lungs have been rendered into cream and smeared across the long bow of one of several dozen high white crosses done up in the center of a field, where many several other hundred had been done in matching fashion in the name of pleasure. The actor’s pancreas was placed plainly on a white breakfast table with blue flowers and a blank ream of white paper. The actor’s rectum ejects prayer. The actor’s eye turned inward in the skull socket to face what for years had clawed behind it dying.

The body of the artist lay half buried with her face and right fist under moss. The skin along her back has been removed, replacing the stretch between her shoulder blades where before there’d been a tattoo of a blue tree. The mother’s fingernails are pink, done fresh for her attendance of the wedding of her sister to a man she’d never met. She believed in the love of the two people despite knowing nothing of them, even her sister; so many years had passed between their taking turns combing each other’s hair under the white blanket in the field pretending to be nowhere near their home. She’d not been able to go sleep out there in the field that night, hearing the moving tubers in the ground, the oncoming piddled rush of liquid between dirt somewhere beneath them. She watched her sister’s face croon in its sleep. Of all the days, that would be the one she most remembered, despite whatever else of her own life: the coming of the child; the spheres of sky forever counted in endless days unrepeating for form and color despite the constancy of their return; the fission of any word. Her child, before he had been ended in his own rite, had murdered forty-seven bodies, in the service, with a baton. Her face pressed in the soil left fully naked to the white sun overhead sees nothing beyond the mush upon the stone.

The body of the surgeon has sewn her whole self shut. With a thread colored in the same hue as her hair she rendered seamless her eyeholes, nostrils, mouth. Her ears have been tucked over and sewn to crude pods that seem to want to bloom. Her asshole and vagina have been sealed. Here, in distension, a kind of gathering of released fluids has swollen her abdomen and belly bubbly with something opened up inside of her. The crude gash strikes of the stitching have in some places caused in operation further gash holes that then she therefore had to seal again, working fevered, seeing several of herself. She would not be entered. She would not exit. She would exist without form, she wished. With the same hands prior, she’d sewn shut both her daughter and her son, whose heights against the back door of the bedroom where she’d locked them in to hide them from the world show they had both grown several inches in the past year, shooting up toward some wished distance only remaining between their temples and the sky.

The bodies of the seventeen young pregnant mothers were all hung in a birch tree by their hair. Their clothes have been removed to show the rounding of their bellies, arranged in order from the flattest to the most ready to burst. The mothers’ eyelids have been removed to match the clothes. Around their foreheads, crowns of wire pulled from machines in neon colors pink yellow blue gray maroon gold. The mothers’ gristle groaning ham stench. The names of each child are stitched inside the bellies, all the same name, with red thread above their navels, the end and beginning of the thread continuing from where it ends emerging from each mother’s skin unto the body before and after in the round, forming a circuit without power.

The body of the child is glimmer white. He was not old enough yet to have seen a horse or held an egg. Along the inside of the flap of meat where the chest has been slid open, a series of impressions in the folding appear to mimic a crude language scribbled with a heated iron bit. Had he grown to age thirty-seven the child would have cured the common cold. He would have lived without a wife or child and learned to cook from a machine. He would have loved his life. In the wormhole of the air not gone forward through by his flesh in propagation there is a ridge formed to the light, into which a ream of seeing might sink and become butter and make the grease from which would rise another hour vibrating hard and fast against where right now, seated in your room reading, your body waits, in seeing. This could be said of any day.

The body of this member of the congregation was clawed apart like trash.

The body of this Boy Scout was peeled neatly and hung as shades for windows in a house.

The body of this daughter was struck from a large distance apart by something unseen.

The body of this beggar held up longer than most would under the knives.

The body of this butcher began to masturbate just before it could expire, desperate to feel anything again before it couldn’t.

The body of this body had already been reduced in life to an immobile thing, unconscious, shitting itself alone in rooms it could not tell from food or laundry.

The body of this author was brought to an end in exactly the manner he’d described after completing writing a fictional description of his own death.

The body of the reader felt itself still reading. Miles and miles of lines like this in no imagination or remorse.

The bodies free of their bliss and wind and wonder.

Bodies piling up or disappearing into weather or digestion or being compacted by machines brought online to do the work of humans or ripped apart by birds caught in the bloodlust of the human spirit replicating to reenact its own demise in repetition.

Bodies called to give their color to the night, in soil ecstatic with our blood without us, human mud becoming sucked into the fundament.

Here is the body of the long old spirit beaten holey by heads of hammers in the hands of children thrown to dust and screeching in their bloodstreams and wanting nothing more than the end of the sun brought on forever blanketing the ground in nowhere.

Here is a skull against which light would purr and stroke its sound out in echo of the banging bone on bone filling the hour slick enough to not remember.

Here is the body of whoever.

FLOOD: The light was bending back against itself, accelerating. It kept opening before me, like a tunnel inside-out, leaving less of me to see there with each impression. Or this was happening again and had never happened. Or the brain would shrivel inside the endless air of all our time blown wide. Or I am a map of all the days we have not spent and never will be spent. Or I am right here in a way I can’t even operate, some kind of god inside a god. What would be the difference in any of these definitions. How could it not be always all of them at once .