Blake Butler - Three Hundred Million - A Novel

Against the color of the eye I could not see the walls or what beside them; I could not remember how I’d made way here through any other sort of being, outside the way I’d always come before to every present instant always again; though on the air there was the itch of something older bloating; colors like ions; sound like glass filling the air. There was no reason this hour should have been any different than all the other years of any life, and yet here the eye was, all surrounding.

Up close the eye no longer seemed to have a shape; it held together like a corpse, organs made of letters made of blank space of dots and lines feeding a warping shape like ours, which the longer I looked into blurred inside the light unto a gray mass like a wall. I stared into the eye and felt it humming without language; all words now no longer language. I closed my own eyes and saw the wall there too and looked again, a mirror image in my body made of bodies; then I was there inside the eye’s own head; I was seeing at the wall inside me as if everything I wasn’t was at the far side of the wall inside the light again made clear.

There was no shift; I found inside my seeing how I could scroll along the light’s face with the motion of my hand; the eye inside me held there against itself slithering downward to reveal itself again inside the extant eye made hidden on space forced in the space as in the oceans of our blood consumed, evaporated, nowhere; the light of all our faces.

I let the light come on in ruptured flues; it swam sick past my face like meat to meat, light pouring through where words were not, straining in the light to scan the flattened fiber of the vein of mottled language engorged and disappearing. Time passed and passed and nothing had happened; nothing had not happened; I could no longer remember how I was different than anything else, how anything else could not become me; the space around us held on, our blubber wooing like an ocean in a shell; my body not my body sticking at the frame of the page of the light folding our absent organism to its skin in rising heat and burning not of fire but of where the flesh of all of us each instant shrunk and expanded both at once, under equal age and iteration, all ongoing, and the syntax burst between; each thought risen as a prison in our teeth and lungs and slapped ass screeching; eyes spinning locked in all our lids; speech mixing itself against itself to change itself and call itself the word inside the word against the word while outside itself the sand went on regardless, and each word as it came through us fell back out the other side, clung at old holes in landscapes, hopes unwinding.

I could no longer not quite think, or remember; the shapes of what was once clawed where my sound had never made a sound; feeding faster full of past thoughts, where every word a thought was made of wore a murder of its own; each death a death of all things and so nothing; there in the light the bread of time; the speech of all speech whaling in us where far along the shafts of script in my own self I reached a drop, something sticking in the wash of blood between living and not living, looking there into the white along the current seeing faster until the sound inside the eye were these words, the run of light forming this sentence becoming typed across the screen of the eye of all our eyes no longer seeing, appearing newly every moment like something carried in my skin, each inch another name for silence.

Now I could not remember what I’d done. I could not remember that I did not remember where I’d been forever or what the bodies had become among the night where knives were every understanding. I was all hours at the same time in every current instant of our lives arrived. I was in the homes beyond the idea of having lived. I was eating dinner or touching paper or swimming under sun or taking a child toward a machine to learn to read again a new way or was teaching myself another language to say what to someone else or I was at a desk staring where light was or I had hid again my eyes. It was all of any of us at once that made any of us nowhere else, held in the motion of any aspiration.

I thought to touch my face then but I did not. I felt something in me at last growing eons older in one instant, like any instant, and from the light I looked away. I stood there for some time then feeling nothing; I stood there waiting in the white unfurling hot and hard around all shape without intention or utterance demarcating. Some other of me in me tried to turn around and go back the way I’d come inside the world to now but when it turned around there were again the walls; where the world as I’d never understood it had moved again to fill the space behind me, so that where I tried to move on from what I was or felt again there was nothing but more of me, the erased eras in me going slump in spindles and pressing at where my nape and back and skull were just more flesh waiting to be smothered.

The world was what had lived. Within each inch there were colors; the colors each pixel held a sea; buried in the sea another kind of time under old blue lard of reckless dreaming; in each world, people wide awake, spreading flesh as they went aging around the holes of them that did not age or bloat. Overhead in every instance of right now the sky was caving; a second sky beneath that was more the way I’d once remembered the one we watched as ours, its dimensions bulging in soft places, puckered, growing in against itself, all the icons of every era swelling in against me with the world at once compressing into the sound of every recorded life. It was all of us and always had been, just like this. The eye saw.

Held in the eye, I felt us speak.

It was the same voice I’d heard traced through my whole life up to this point, though where before that voice had always been only me, now it was unending and breathless.

I couldn’t hear what the voice was saying through its layers, though I could feel it in my fiber.

The words weren’t words, but landscapes, mounds. I was looking up and I was up there and I was looking far down into our mud, and I was in the mud and all directions, and when I looked again above us I saw

countless suns

And beneath the suns I saw

the soft ground rising

I saw it piling all around, the house and the voice and my mind becoming comprised in the husks of anyone’s mortal remains, the memory of the person once carried in those husks, the mottled mass of presences inert and passed on pressed together full, waiting impossibly for every hour ever to return into the flesh of all the rest of us at once wherever with our common images split down the center writhing.

And I saw the sand again around the old world becoming buried in the sand of what my world had become

the sand of all without horizon

And as we spoke I saw the sand again falling away

And I saw

all negations

And I saw

agelessnesses

I saw

no walls forever in our love

And I did not need to understand.

In us, the shape of any sky was rubbing upward, sucking in nothing. The ground erupting antigravity and light. The light louder than it was actually. Planets were everywhere: dissolving, without surface.

Nothing had ever happened.

And from the sprawl I saw

the light blown open

I saw

no color rising underneath us

in time dividing

tunnels to nothing

Way out along the long horizon from where any form had been, the face of day split wide.

Our eyes were changing.

The eyes in mounds of eyes without pupil, lens, or image.

And I saw

no beginning & no end