Blake Butler - Three Hundred Million - A Novel

As I imagined the door, then, it appeared there. It was a white door, like my memory, leading to anything.

The rest of what must be was up to me.

To form the lengths of walls surrounding what the door was, I searched for sharper relics among the sprawl of local sand: ribcages, skulls and tibia, phalanges and sockets, spines and collarbones. They no longer felt like parts of people. The bones hissed and puzzle-clicked into new configurations to form grids, and from them doorknobs, stairs. I packed sand into the shapes to make the surfaces opaque held spindly and dense and fell immediately away, leaving holes through which the air outside could continue in through, while the day went on around, basking in my brain a second color to the home where the air had not been before.

At some depths whole packets of new expanse appeared by nature worn into the innate definition of the space — an oven or a bathtub or a staircase — as if the house had always been beneath the sand there buried, waiting.

The ceiling I left open wide. The light of the house would be moons and suns, whatever weather, though it would never again rain here.

When I could do no more each day, I entered sleep. My absent dreamworld bristled around me overflowing every perimeter of what I couldn’t see completely overcome with everything not carried in me. Each instant just beneath the under of sleep’s nothing seized with a cream of flame around my mind, as if against its own image the whole house wanted to implode unseen, return to its elements. The ring I could not remember ever having not worn burned around my finger and fed off me; I couldn’t feel it, but I knew. There was in my head only the black, the long lengths of the house I’d built from death surrounding my life now.

Inside sleep, I walked along the walls in place of everywhere through which I’d come. I pantomimed actions already lived through, wanting only there to appear those who’d been there then returned beside. My hands moved without me moving. Where no one spoke inside the rooms of the house inside the dark the doors stood open, chamber to chamber.

“I am a hole,” I said aloud each time I touched a wall, but I could not hear it, allowing days to disappear between the words — hours haunted with the unheard words of vows of death, of forgiveness, the oldest colors.

Through days I bloated in my home like it was mine; I could see my fat moving before me into where I was before I felt me be there; this also hurt though in a smaller place and one I learned to think around; I was able to do this by focusing on the pages of a blank book that appeared inside my head when my eyes closed without my knowing; a book I knew had never been; each page was larger than your head and brighter than I could stand to look at; the book shook with what could have been written, in any book, all prior books not realizing they were disappearing into this one book as they were written, carried and carried on, in vast precision in the image of what it could not at all reflect, a silent murder rendered forward by something old and made eternal now in every inch of my face and the walls inside me. In this way days inside the house did not seem days; lives could pass among my head each day hidden in blinking; terror here might seem as easy as having dinner or lying faceup on a bed or holding the mental hand of someone I’d loved under a sky that seemed to need nothing but itself to carry on. The way it gathered in the book unbeing it gathered in me also, sealing its total brightness into every gesture, so that while awake I began to feel I weighed the weight of ten whole people in one body, each of them breathing and eating what I breathed and ate also, replicating.

For days I turned and turned inside the new long dark, trying not to remember there was nothing beyond the house to live with beyond the image of how it felt, or else the blurring bolts of what I could recall of what held near: splatter fragments of the skulls; tents of muscles slathered in a pig-white grease of centuries spooled through blood-browned sauce boiling; tissue shitting between nostrils in a head inside a second head; living rooms where babies fell and broke their brains; those were the days ; attics in the attics above with blue bells ringing the coming hour to us counted down from zero into zero while names were read off of a list inside said broken baby skulls and gathered up packed back in entrails as cluster-semen replicated to be injected to eggs gifted on breakfast tables before god; windows; chasms; purple fabric; what else; what would you want forever; just ask; this world is ours .

Behind my lids, the black no longer was ever black; or not the same black there’d been when I was younger and knew more than I knew now, or how it felt; instead the shade inside the skull contained a thickness branched from the vision of all of whom; every blink or whip of eye along the long yards of the days undone; each of us seated only at the center of the space we could not see and now would never be anything but. It felt easier for me alone instead to think nothing, in this home devoid of anything but my own touch; it felt warm like endless milk, even so minor; as the only drawers I found in the walls of the ways here were mostly only filled with ash or fat or ice; the ice would never melt, no matter how much I rubbed at it, and the fat, it held no flavor; the ash was just ash though its color was monochrome and it did not float and it would not stay on my hands.

Often I couldn’t recall where the next room was from one day to another even seeing my body leading the way, even having lived in this house already my whole life, as I remembered; or I couldn’t remember what any room was for, why there were walls between this room and this last one. In all the rooms the floor was bright. No matter where I looked I saw more space before me waiting; I saw space between the spaces merging and emerging from itself inside itself to split the room in many parts, each as undone as the other, desperate for anything but what it was.

Days went by in weeks and weeks in days. Some days the days lasted longer than days and lashed themselves to surfaces that colored my face the way a winter would have in the realm of cells and in my face I felt the heat of time rubbing against anything it wasn’t, disrupting the inner knit of even rest. With the base of home as some new center inside the sand I began to patrol the sand for miles ongoing, finding quickly how in relation the light would turn me deaf and blind. There was only so far to go before I could hear and see absolutely nothing but white against me and throughout me. I had to always be looking back to remind myself which direction home was; I used a language dreamed up in myself to count, a series of clicks of tongue and teeth against the gristle of my cheek, pushed through the holes inside my head to blow against the grooves my dying memory escaped into its flesh. I left trails of the language burned into the sand and light without even intending; my very presence wrecking the idea of death itself; among which I could find, each day, a hallway back to the hole I’d drummed up to collapse into and once again black out.

Each time I returned to the house having seen nothing I would find, grown out from the house I’d left, sets of new rooms. From the further nodes and bulbs of skulls and cages littered in the sand for miles forever, there might appear a stairwell leading into the ceiling, which then days later manifested into a landing filled with doors. Through all the eye of the sky above alone stayed constant, though it was changing; veined with something cracking on the far side as if to match my tread beneath. Some stars might seem to read a word burned out into them, though in a language I could no longer understand. Only in sleep could I begin to fuse my clicking language with the words the sky wanted to say. I could not tell how reciting what they intended altered my vocabulary, the palate catching slowly in new grooves and gristle patches the gums and spittle, adjusting in the arch of the sound I spoke for me alone, my arms around me doing anything they could to keep me from waking, going back into the sand again, for no one.