Blake Butler - Three Hundred Million - A Novel

And I saw

nowhere

I could not see more than in long fits and whorls, because of what had happened to the light.

I did not want to see, but what I didn’t want was as much me as what I had been.

I had no skin. I had no organs.

Each instant wore through all our lives.

The walls around the words we could not remember rose beyond us.

Light fell into time fell into flesh fell into speech; word fell into syllable fell into letter; z fell into y fell into b fell into a ; shape fell into line fell into dot fell into gram; kilometer fell into meter fell into millimeter fell into volume; home fell into house fell into den fell into bed fell into frame; film fell into picture fell into pixel fell into color; body fell into sternum fell into ribcage full into bone; skull fell into brain fell into memory fell into where; 1 fell into 0; you fell into me fell into us fell into we fell into I; now fell into now.

Now was the color of all our skin and sins and fingers. Of water and oxygen elapsed. Every film at last erased, all books cured of their language, all ideas of their ego.

There was no longer any other voice. They were all my voices. Sound and light unfolding in the skin of nothing. Not a present moment as much as a pyre on which the world turned, all the sand not sand but breadth combining in reverse, where from out of the land the smoke of the dead of the land each node of creation ate back onto every inch it’d never been and always could have.

And in the thrall of all, I closed my eyes again where I no longer could see.

And I saw

Against the flood of where the eye was, I turned to face in total silence what the world had left behind a final time. Through white so bright it crushed itself by simply being, I saw where every inch of now touched every color grinding in the ground broken and blown apart. Where as I turned the air around me smiled and nodded and said the words I’d said already back into me again in a language without nature, and as I turned back, nothing held. No kind of sight but what the light was.

I could no longer tell any difference between the world and what I knew. Between myself and you or anybody. Between the eye and our skin and what sky. The lack of color matched our worship without surface. No way back and no way out of nowhere being dreamed. No belief but in every faith we hadn’t lived and held within us, between anyone and zero.

I closed my eyes a final time. Inside my head the dead within me began glowing; they grew inside me with great force, dressed in the long white hair of no one, and in the eyes behind my sight I felt the glowing filling up itself like future hearses. I felt the eyes close inside the eyes again, the dark among them erupting definition.

The light was screaming between voices, mine and no one’s. Any inch of where we’d been appeared not glown by glow, but cut into the grade of the sand of all of our remainder melting into the face of what remained.

The air where we were born filled in unwinding over fields of white on white, while underneath, the rimmed earth sung thick with the old poltergeists of our eternal seething seed.

Time strewed lengthwise and widewise in batter-buried color of no reflection laid wide open on the land; all years coagulated in spite of sense, passed hours upon hours beating the surface of the earth with hellish cells that felt like homes where all the unborn men and women drowned within us came and went. I could not stop them with my mouth or arms or flinging hope so hard into the sky it might knock the sky down, or shrieking our old name shaped like their old name walking up and down and up the streets and giving off the friction stink we mistook inside our skins as how the air itself just smelled like the color of our hair. Like the longing for the pleasure of having had hair, grown and cut and grown again.

You were beside me; I was beside you.

I held our melding sight up without hands, not feeling either where through the white again into glown points I saw the air of the glow bloat again for whom in furor rose from all our last attentions piling aflame in the infinite incarnation of all conception, each when made to roast why and wish who and blow long the breath into the next ones of we beyond recording opened wide and curled and curling lost around a shape inside a shape spilled vast and spilling from its innumerable faces where in us lighted night engorged within the baby fat of time, rasped in the skin of us as we were wedded why to walk why in me for whom forever slowly elapsed.

Without seeing then I spun to press fast our size against the white in full. At last I solely wanted all of all the nothing. My whole nonexistent head and sternum stung flush with our blood and our unchildren’s blood and yours and mine within this nowhere I pressed me hard against the world I could not watch. I pressed us there also pressing in the reflective surface on the back side of our vision, against the flesh, each possible instant in us rolling backwards and coming out the far side of understanding. I felt the mass wrap in around me and through this could not hear our narration screaming for me at last to just look up, as walled in behind the light there was a hole that went so far back behind the house there was no longer any space there and I was at last here at home where someone had spread a wall over any mirror so I could not see in where I was. There was only white on white and some long sound like all our bodies in me here pulling the world down crushed against itself; each word chiseled with its own eye becoming forced so wide open it had no cell. All the words once hidden among our bodies had been split apart in heat, held constantly imploding inward like the black of any pupil.

We were so loud I could not see. I had all this fission in me, pressed among the light inside my skin and bones turned together throbbing forward longways through this remainder of a shape of a place like our own life, each pixel pregnant with more days that would no longer, each day pregnant with its own glass, where the longer it manifested itself in continuity the more there was between us and the less any inch of any of us may remember how it felt or ever could have, endlessly forwarded and reversed at once against and through and into the perimeter of the cusp of every possible context. The deleting bright was all around me and still spreading and divulging.

Beyond my sight, the era opened into curves. It hissed the light back at me like a putty, reflective, impossible. There grew between us all a single face, a face of endless faces, and in the light now all around me I could feel it inhaling all our voices, never looking back. From within the face I watched the face open its mouth of all our mouths, and in its mouth there was a common darkness, born from the space inside all heads alone, and from this darkness without motion came all possible pronouncements, all language not yet released out of its unliving breath. It wasn’t sound and did not speak. The stretch of the skin of the mind of the face could not contain any word we’d confabulated for whatever. Nothing unquantified in its conception, the lanyards of our cerebrums, singing, sleeping. I heard the memory of all passed bodies in the face’s features being cracked into tablets, drugs for the light to swallow and become, and in becoming to contain all continuity forever. Every eye we’d watched anything go on through basked full in the face’s total common future, consummating every air into its inherent definition: ( all the light that had been shined into our face ) ( all our past laughter ) ( the sound inside us anchored to history unclaimed ) ( what we were too young then to remember ) ( all that had not happened and one day could have ) ( all holes forever ) ( nowhere, now ).