Blake Butler - Three Hundred Million - A Novel

God began again inside the burning as I watched. For each of the unbelieving bodies splayed up rotting in persistence, he made a mark upon his flesh. The first mark bore the shape of a circle, an unbreaking pact made with itself; the band of the clasp of the circle walked forever in the furrows of sand that would become the bodies of our bodies in the years before the years; from the sand the sound would form dimensionless, to be demented in man’s image, and so from the symbol of the circle every other symbol fell. There were the urges and the bees who stung the urges in us. There were the numbers and acolytes of hope and certain gestures grafted into the limbs of us by fright. There was nothing to fear so we feared the nothing. The heat of the breath of god formed the spaces among the fibers for the sicknesses to dwell in. Each time the day began again, a new great sickness. The dreams placed in our teeth supplied a yearning for communication and definition crowded in among what must have been our eyes. Around the eyes arose the lungs, nose, nostrils, cheeks, aorta, gonads, urethral lips, large intestines, small intestines, thumbs, as well as the anatomies forever cursed by lightning where black refracted in the corridors of the house of god’s black mind, begetting spleen, gallbladder, ureter, lung, pancreas, rectum, each of which would teach itself to swim wide in the chosen moments while the body lay upon its back. Having been given flesh, then, the urges returned and overtook us and filled us with their speech; inside our shapes was placed a strobing that bore the mark of the endless death soon to be made witness unto us as soon as we realized we’d appeared here in the world at once always both alone and not alone, so that we’d never shake the wish both to be and kill our own creator.

Out of the burning, land is born. The land is vivisected, given new names, which all are the same name again, with many different ways to say it. Weather stirs the dirt and water into lather that dictates certain corridors the way that air alone once had been meant to. Between the corridors we make our homes, confining light in ways among which we can sleep. Each motion takes us further on toward its own ending.

There is that which cannot be seen. Houses in the name of god are built with colored glass and high ceilings and the long pews and the cash plates and the casks of water and the blood and the body and the pipe organ and the restrooms and the books. Here a language will be spoken, the word after the word. With one’s head against the wood in the right condition with the head aimed and open to the sun and charcoal underneath the building and the correct cluster of buttons pressed hard inside the head and a draft of cold air for several sleepings and hours under water, one might hear the words as they all are: the name repeated, the name repeated.

Every name is given a new name. It does not matter what the name is. In the reiteration of each whichever, we hear the damage rendered as new words. We hear the echo of the bodies of the prior iteration of the hour in the rising acts of evisceration, iteration. We hear us lying on our backs in the cornfields under a white sky being cannibalized outside the black house of the scene of the crime inside this book which must only go on forever in its own presence in its instance of the past and yet also so again and so must become silence must become and through which we go on. We wear the void plain on our face all waking hours already knowing, and so clothing, makeup, colors, mirrors, walls.

Death feeds itself already with our phantoms, the daily killings we have yet to take form to commit. Early infanticides and hyperventilating sermon are pummeled out with stone on stone between the making where in the last hours the dying president had stood and sworn in tongues in the thronelight already burning mirrored above and below our chorus and what else. And where god stood strobing before a marked door in a machine and farted through the word of words snatched from the mass of confetti blood pouring eternally in the pilgrimages where our death Worship made and sold our organs into slavery for the N th time and gnashed us bit from bit along the ridged backbone neoning beneath the trammeled cistern pouring blood back into the blood all black inside every father of the child aping cold prayer service behind the steering wheels of cars and in the hair of horses and in the teeth of pets and in the eye of the coin stamped with the false image of our eye.

The cities box themselves in wallwise, already folded with the magma still in swill beneath where here we were again with he among us and he within us. Each new ending wrote itself over the last, always beginning already again before it could, the copies clogging up like water gnashing around a hole in the floor of the ocean beneath the putty mirror marker disrupting boats and knocking white planes out of blue skies downward to crest into the mapmash of this blood foam lubing up the face of the ocean to mirror the mirror again back at itself squealing the death jokes on a gray stage underneath yellow headlamps in green boxes in the pink belly of the worship we wrapped around each old gold city shit upon from birds white as the eye purple as the eye brown as the eye clear as the eye inside the eye, and where in vast collaboration more cogs catch and flip and shiver bronzed between each other turning milk out of the retch, caught in flesh flasks unto the body of god already whored into a dome, god on god now rising fast and fresh around America in snaking portraits called museums called beautiful evenings called new food, its whipping weight peeling high along the unseen ceiling so bunched double that the future too is pulled, drafted like icons obscuring even the wish of television in our heart, gnarling the dream seed even as it rises and shapes in pleasure caked in objects like a rash, whirring hot to open sores so tiny they could not be sniffed by the promise of our children having children. And so the coming comes again bearing the deadliest birthmark underneath prismatic post-god scrim, while yes, thank god we scream saying the name again the wrong way, thank god, there is a new day, here I am.

The years go on in sevens. Each of the years is its own veil, surrounded by each person’s private birthplace in all minds. The names of the colonies and states seem imbued with past days each in their own way, fat full of exit language that on our lips all make the same shape. We worship light in Smexas, New Xork, Cruxisim. We worship in harbors, getting haircuts, growing fat. These are the names of god not god. Our history is overrun already with commercial demand, and demand for demand, which means we put the butter in the freezer and the ice cream in the cupboard, believing this is correct, and never knowing any different. We turn on the water in the sink at the faucet to watch it run and are surprised when it is cold and we try to answer the phone but it keeps ringing though we are speaking into the mouthpiece saying hello hello hello hello hello and the words do not exist and then we shit our pants again and cannot feel it and the history goes on.

You already know about the wars. You know about the lengths of leg and laughter that rolls from the holes we had been given and woke again in new shapes each day to wrap around the air between the pillars of the house that squeezes itself in pockets of our fat. Each house is the same house and knows all colors secreted together into mirrors. The singing is not songs, but a certain form of itching that crawls along our spines and jellies and makes along the sky appear the moons, the eyes of long dead light arriving. Each instant holds more work than any one cell could hold through any other instant. In this way we repeat even our present moments. We build the boxes and the homes again and again as has been told, while waiting through any instant for any ending. No one word or face or image can hold the center, and so without center, we reflect. This happens every instant every hour. Where we walk is where our killer awaits us. It feels good to be wanted. We watch the killer writhe inside his wishing to kill and kill and kill again, the singing taking shape inside the killer’s body as thunder, sunshine, writing, by which we learn to plan our days. This is our history, we imagine, language buried in a song no one is hearing. Each sentence thought or spoken indicates the coming birth and death of thousands.