Blake Butler - Three Hundred Million - A Novel

I felt encased in all the air around me what felt like millions of sets of hands reaching up from earth or down from above, gripping and grabbing at me; I was hovering then just above the lip of ground, while also rising again somewhere high above the low bend of sod, each of the remaining perspectives in my brain splitting off themselves into seven and seven and seven forever until the sight turned see-through both in my brain and in the idea of the world, revealing whole sheaths of the structure hidden from the eye among the ungluing of our nature, while through other spans the space inside me remained impenetrable and all one level. These two conditions grinded at each other back and forth, so that for certain lengths the vertical hold on my perspective might snap and allow the monument of space inside me around which I felt us centered grow engorged in endless motion, dragging along behind it the other dimensions of my body stretched beyond their natural confines. The depth of field on what seemed the whole world now would shit out also and thereby pull the space in endless iteration across the flat line of the air, smoothing out across the atmosphere a whole long wall, marring all possible consequence.

Tremor in the holding of the color and the scream of anticipation of the next returning broke me by turns through various ill remainders of historical sickness, mine or theirs. With every lick of stinging light I remembered every human pain, though could not remember who had been the bearer. Each of these feelings forced to fit into the image as the fire well beyond me burned beyond me across the disappearing flesh of all, tracing new skin across the earth itself and curling around me with blazing edges, where in the rising through it and into it I heard

I am the mark of communication. I was in the shape of every word, and had been when the words were spoken long before you, and before them. In each word I did all I could to balance what forms of meaning could be captured in repetition, in tongues and wires. I refused to be actually revealed, instead always lingering just far enough beyond the edge of anywhere to be accepted or refused. In my sleep, I felt my perimeters shifting, multiplying or dividing, melting, being bent. I knew the worlds from which the meanings of words had been borrowed wanted me destroyed, and knew well you would destroy me. And yet you clung: you held on even up until the last instants of your flesh to keep me in you, even as my layers poisoned our mind and memory. At last I was the shaft through which the virus of you could be permitted to allow you enough ruin to at last bend the window held between us so far over it finally had nowhere else to go. In your absence, I will continue. I will rub my hands and hope to birth something one day mine, though every time I try to fornicate with something like me it begins to hail so hard I can’t see. The hail will be the only relic I use to remember you and everything you thought you wished by .

And now the sky inside my head was silver and ground was gray. I knew the speaking wounds could mime any of our voices as they grew negated in all minds; they had watched us in our entertainment; their malformation had been written in our flesh, masked in the ark of every hour we’d been forced into these bodies, carved free now of our blood: names of corporations; names of days and books spanning the bedroom and the den and rooms apart; names of places and fleshless surfaces of persons, their creations. Even crushed up against the rush of burning all around me, it was impossible to say if the negating would ever end, as through my mind’s widening cavity scrolled bright names upon the flesh of the large surrounded burning space gleaming like little windows held in houses burning too, where as each name burnt itself off of wherever it had come from there was a marring left behind; a blot not disappeared but caved behind itself, a remembrance measured just offscreen inside the floods inside me being dragged beyond their form, sharing the same air as the dry face of the blazing growing larger on all existence, all of its crackling like tongues in tongues of nothing.

Inside my head then I saw a larger head combining in from what was not: a head like I remembered of my reflection, but refined in all its dimensions, sharper and wider in all features, speaking the fire of the altar. I saw the head had silver eyes, in each eye more eyes than I could ever count, and each inscribed with white wounds unlike any we’d healed. As I read the silence of the bruises, the skin around the air turned silver to match the head around us both, melting slick into our sockets and spreading through me like an acid. The head was desperate to evict the language from my body where it’d hidden clustered in bumps against the index of my cerebrum screaming; it wanted my last rite for itself; and again I felt the space inside me crushing down on my memory, my faith, and as the hole of my speech became pushed open in the pressure it began moaning as in the throes of contextless human anguish. I tried to remember how to chant the prayers I’d bore through days in rhythm with the burning, to claw them hard into the burning world by making of them now a dream to be remembered, though each time I felt me moan the shape of what had been language again outside my head I felt them emerging only more deformed, disguising themselves to keep the pinlike eyes of the head inside my head out of their meaning, and preserve the words as near to what they’d meant to be forever to what they were being altered into. Each syllable begged in the same voice for my eternal attention; they begged me not to leave them, never to leave anything, not to let them here again be killed as had the voices of the people in me begged once, their bodies bowed and pounding, stacked up and on fire both inside and outside my surface, and in the begging I heard

I am the mark of pain. Where you thought you wore flesh through your whole life I was your body. The ground is covered in me now. In your absence I rub and hump against the ground if only to remind it of your name over and over. I am your name, only a relic. Nothing of you for this world will remain. I will wear the color of the dark skin around your asshole in my dreams as a hood over the face of all the animals left to colonize any relic of your life. The water of the world flows through my eyes. It wraps around what your fantasies designed as other planets. The sky fills with me and pours upon me. I masturbate in my own absence. What I ejaculate will become the most beautiful child any kind of history has seen. It will rise again in the battlefields and bottoms of oceans with a new crop of heathen to slosh around this ship with, driving me wild with ecstasy in want of only more of me. I do not require your cooperation to live forever already in the outfit of your childhood, actually eternal in the way you always thought you were, though what I sing is all mine .

And so our pain had disappeared then, replaced with new pain, where for what it was now there was no analog. No color clasped close enough to be believed in human language. Inside this rising smoke I heard your roar. Even among the many millions of whatever I could make you out. It was any of you. You were begging to be held, you were calling the names of those you spent your life beside in small rooms waiting, though now their names were also any word, and so the speech came flooding from you, and you did not know, and you were frightened.