Blake Butler - Three Hundred Million - A Novel

Our shattered speaking sang and sang. It ate its singing and barfed its singing up and ate it back and sang it back to nothing. Where each old era opened, the blood of light flowed awake and was flowed into and all over. The words themselves began to speak. The words were burning in my face. They had been written here wherever on everything at once and eaten up or absorbed among the living no longer living. Every passage of being caressed all that I wasn’t. I rolled along inside the sweat and let it leave me clearer. I was bleeding light and signal. The colors around my eyes kept changing textures like organisms. The words kept coming. I began to be the words there, though I could not understand the breadth behind; they felt like words I’d never said or heard before wherever, words erased inside a book I’d read every night inside my sleep in every other version of me. The book was in my skin now. The skin was peeling. It came off where all along inside the enervating wash my body split and bubbled with the friction and the language as the flatness came and went and the skin came off me where I rolled along inside the light inside the sand all pouring smoke from the friction as the flatness changed and bent and grew and flooded. I could not stop seeing and hearing and tasting and taking of the soft space rising all around my body so surrounded there was nothing left of what it was, beyond contour and no horizon.

Each way I felt then wore away, as if the world at once within me turned numb or gone. I did not know what was becoming of my thinking with the sound inside me splitting into halves, and those halves splitting in their utterance again to others though already they were lost along the unrolling understanding of the land, upon which I saw not sand but space between the sand and light of what there was, one day made of all the days we’d meant to fill with all of us and yet had not, not knowing how. What had been sand then was all the glass in all the mirrors, in each of which I could see the hues of what had once been hidden behind us in the frame, our bodies packed with all cells dragging heavy on the radiance unknown.

I could no longer tell even now which one of me was still there hearing me speaking and which was watching from outside whom. The more I thought about the difference the more it burned me, and the less that I could remember having felt at all, there as our body full of bodies filled with colorless blazing, within which wherever my form ended there were others, much like me too, once the only center of their worlds, and the heat was licking up and off the deformation, the dead desire in their own bodies all soft like mine somehow unlocked, marring their most undisplayed desires in private eternal lust to at last be burned by light in full, reduced to char, and that char too to be burned immediately thereafter, and so on like that, along the ground too now our flesh, the ground and all gloss around me rubbing through the surfaces with a strange and gold bliss, where as the sky sucked up the shape and sound of our cremation it slung to spin, and at the center of the spinning I saw the miles of our disintegrating bodies in their last throes sprawl for longer depths than I had mind, and in great grief I closed my eyes, which closed all of our eyes at once, and with our eyes closed I heard

and though I recognized the shape I did not know now what it wanted, until in the space behind what had once been all our faces I heard something curved free beyond music, at once close and clean larger than all sound, a voice not like any voice of us, but risen from us like a bruise meant soon to heal

I am the mark of the sun of your old world. I have been burning and repeating in what you have known as sky for all of the time you can remember. Each time I appeared I was both a warning and a blessing, neither of which you took to heart. The machines carried my mark as a signal of their recording, their capture of you, their desire of you, of which you were neglectful. You were mystified by your own image. You made copies of your mind and wished them filling up the world in everything you weren’t. Quickly there was nothing left to have alone or remain free from. The world around us was made hollowed, filled with holes through which nothing could appear. It ate and etched through all the faces, each like yours in that in the dark it couldn’t tell itself from any. I grew and flourished in the gap behind these faces now ignited. I filled the faces with everything they weren’t. Sleep grew smaller, and all imagination with them, every impossible fantasy made real in a space inaccessible to understanding. Soon you won’t remember me from you. You will be absorbed wholly into the rivers of the blood of all of man, in my image, behind the faces all at last diminished by their void. But I am only the beginning .

As the sound struck it took off with it the idea I’d ever heard it, as if once defined a thing could not continue owning any mind. In the white now sound was shapes and shapes were colors. The terrain was full of nowhere growing brighter until it became indistinguishable as on the sky the seething ended and nothing began. I was only me as much as I was any other. Each point in my mind touched every other part of else, all time contained outside its outline. Soon it was so loud and bright it seemed there was no seeing there at all, no grace between what was now and what had been for what or who.

Under my lids the words trapped in my flesh behind my head gasped deeply, as what I was pulsed to remember remembering how it had felt as flesh to see. There was nothing left of what I’d used of me to create understanding, and instead, in its place, a space beyond the necessity of word. And though holding too long with my senses not receiving hurt as much as having felt anything else in any life, I would not let them interrupt the shift, as I knew the next time that I looked all would be incinerated into nothing like anything matching all the black I’d carried in my face or there beyond. I knew I was not ready to relent yet; I’d never been ready, not for anything ever; and the burning knew and knew I knew it knew; and the burning ate my fear as I produced it, knowing no feeling, and I heard

and once again inside the white I heard the voiceless symbol of us speak

I am the mark of the earth. I am all friction, dust, and darkness. I have been pressed whole against the sky endlessly and powerlessly for ages long before you and your bodies began to fill my interior with rot. Your speech has clogged my breath and wiped me senseless. The darkness rose along inside my jaw. I wanted to speak as you did and could find no language like that. I wanted to fuck like you and could find no genitals besides the ones you were already all over. Days passed, decades passed; they felt the same, as through all my innards as the holes rose I could feel the other worlds awaiting you. I knew that you would leave me like a rape victim in the dust and go on into somewhere I could not follow. For this I both admired and despised every instant we shared. For this I will continue to chew your bones until I have no flesh left. It will be an act of love; perhaps one greater than any act you would have named the same when in my presence .

Put to words again what had once been ours fell away. When I looked up the sky was colorless here, and the ground was even more pale, and the space between the two seemed to be squirting out the sides of what it wasn’t, while at the same time being fed back into itself, all matter lifting from the laws of motion no longer carried. Light from the fire seemed to pass straight through my skin lighting the space free. The shape of my idea of me inside my mind was becoming folded flat in half, like someone had picked up a piece of paper and folded it in half more times than its surface area allowed, where on the outside of the paper folded in this manner there would then be other sides of each, both actually the same surface impossibly, and on all layers written with an unreadable dark text, sometimes bleeding through and through onto each other layer depending on the light, and where in folding, the text would be clapped off from itself on either side, forced so close to one another they could not often tell that they were there except for how sometimes there might seem something haunted hovering always just beside it. Anywhere I tried to speak or think into the presence of the glowing erased itself, or became eaten up into the colorlessness’s face and building with the heat there to gift the sky with veils, and the longer that I looked into it the space remaining in me seemed to divide, split as through two eyes held two shapes in doubled image, though sometimes the shapes were different from each other, constantly shifting where the left image from one perspective might be shorter, denser, oblong while the right side stretched so high and thin it had nowhere remaining.