Blake Butler - Three Hundred Million - A Novel

Weeks soon went by then in months or things named with sounds that have no syllables to suffer. One second might last a lifetime inside a dry day with the heap of blue air rising from no hole over the remaining fields and fields as yet untraveled though it does not matter and any way I walked in resumed the same. I was awake. I was not awake. I could or could not remember the difference between a bookshelf made from kneecaps and any bed or length of sand expanding, the maps of the universal dead. The house around me was always what it always had been, and yet always felt like nothing else.

There was the quaking of the word. What the book wasn’t. What I wasn’t. Whereas before outside the home I’d hear no shudder for miles in sand on sand, alone again at home some blue voice appeared buried in the throat behind a wall, spreading underneath my head wherever I would let it. As if the house itself was speaking from a space it only wasn’t, or the house itself was not what I believed. The voice began to fill me through and through me. I knew its way along my lungs and down my legs and near my heart. I recognized the feeling; I was the feeling. Had been. Was not now.

I closed my eyes and saw only the blood. Blood of the dead I wasn’t and could more and more not tell from anything. In the blood the rooms were there too. Rooms that would not stop being. In sleep I moved into the blood and felt their sound. It wound down in around me, awaking more space in waking day against the frame of what I’d meant to render only mine eternally. Each room was any room that I could call: the room where I’d been born, where who was murdered; each room the same as every one, revolving at no center, never touching. There were so many of us in me. The black I saw was wider than my skull, and spanned enough to wrap the solar system, like an eggshell, side by side among the million other eggs in every load, endless cells silent in all future inside my mouth with lips ripped out of characters burnt raw in the minds of the dead and their last fractions spilled onto a white of pages the maps must become erased against like birth canals in mothers turned to sand, to glass, to now.

I went into the kitchen to make food and found I’d already eaten every inch before I’m there. The room was slowly slowing.

There was nothing to renounce. No way to end anything I could imagine being the ending. Where I felt I was a man I had no hands; where I felt I was a woman I had hair all over my body; where I wished to be a child I had no grace. My scream sounded like I remembered feeling eating ice cream or walking in warm sunlight. Everything was just beside itself. The light was alone.

I continued getting older, but did not age. I was being watched from the inside and nowhere shining. No one was waiting for my mind. I drank the color from the light and felt no terror. I loved the sand for how under any shade of sky it all seemed irreplaceable.

I still had seen no inch of the new stone.

I went on doing anything I felt in my own image.

I mimed to laugh and heard no laughter.

I tried to make a drum out of my skin.

I banged the drum for hours.

No one was singing and our song contained no words.

I scratched where what I missed less and less felt near me in the darkness.

I made a crib.

I made a child inside my mind to fill the crib with.

I filled the crib with sand.

I clasped my hands.

This was how the hours went.

The ways went on and days did raze against each other.

I grew my hair.

The days repeated.

I said a phrase and it was wind.

I lived and lived in nothing like silence.

I turned and turned.

Nothing was counting what the day was.

The house continued shrinking.

Inside my likewise shrinking mind I went to sleep.

Inside my sleep I walked the same way I had for hours waking.

I came upon a book.

I read the book and found it was the same book as this book now.

In every life.

The words fell through me like a word will.

I remembered nothing.

I was no older.

I was only alone still.

Inside the house in veils I hurtled forward in and on, trying to live on full with all absence; I could not hear any voice I understood, no matter how the edges of the space’s language called against my presence; the night went on and house went on around me as a house in the era of man; the days were old. Each life we’d lived was lived again inside me throbbing in all absence and would stay there like this now always.

I walked on in the color of the world, dragging back what I’d carried with there behind me humming till I’d dragged it so far through the world there was no world remaining to collapse in, or space to clean the image from my being, as in the wake the sand blew there lurked all these diamonds and hexagons of human crystal crushed in the color issued forth. Each color dragged on behind itself too every other color also dragging something there unseen, unlike what death was. Where I was alive now the light all turning pigged-out stroboscopic, to wake the rising melting flooding through the poreholes of our ex-begetters and relics, and therefore us as well — one long last note colored in the smell of walking and this mash of giddy marrow becoming mashed again around my tonsils and longest teeth. It made me hiss from holes I’d never known I had and soon would not again no matter what kind of perfect words were fished out from my ability to recall them beyond any light as all our essence.

I could hear several hundred hands surrounding in each instant and more so then with every knowing. Sand rolled limbs around my face’s blank — sand in no color I’d imagined, like the veils of smoke I slowly remembered from before, from worlds of tape not like this present moment, but no less false. The sand was inside me. The smoke was inside us mirrored. The air thugged thick, ticking no dream’s remainder away. There was nothing burning down. No matter where I went in any blackness I could not find the hallway to the integral rooms of what had felt like my own life in this world. The pillows of the darkness made each room each time I saw them seem to stretch more and more toward forever. Each time I thought or said a word aloud or tried to inhale, the caving in me emerged more. It was grinding in me. It was always.

I crawled along the floor, whatever a floor was. Inside the rising volume of my mind I slapped on hands and knees among the slick of surfaces between the earth and every body the air had made to keep us framed in; the sand beneath it swishing, as if being sucked into a hole, as if underneath the floor the only thing keeping the rest of the world from sucking in around me and you and everybody with it into some screaming hole focused from all the endless in what had been. My clothes seemed searing, knitting tighter, like every surface of my home, which in its latest alterations had become so close against me there was nearly nowhere left to move. I felt the walls where everything was not, no matter what I wanted. It was easier then to move without thinking where to go, though still the choking and croaking of my body, the unbelievable breadth of everything else. The shapeless sound coming from my mouth was feeding right back up into my nostrils, feeding my face full, covering over every memory again with the new deformation of what hours did, overwriting every idea of itself, every inch of anyone but me in me.

In me, then, the house could grow no smaller. I found it fit exactly with my mind. I’d become surrounded wholly by the same shade, the color of no color, all directions.

The color opened.

It was an eye.

Any eye.

The white of the light of the eye inside it was brighter than the house had ever been, wider than sky was, than my memory. Even thin as the film over the eye’s white seemed to be from far away, it held more edges than I could count; it held a past that hadn’t happened yet; it had always been in the house before there was a house; it gave the room around me its dimension; it had appeared in every age; it had observed every action; the eye of anything but now, of anyone but no one.