Blake Butler - Three Hundred Million - A Novel

Your voice was mine. All these voices as they knitted filled my body and held on to it, and it hurt. Why did it have to hurt, I asked, and so it didn’t. All I could see now even inside me was the color of the razing in the space folding again in barfing orbs of stolen air from its black lungs to feed the surroundings a humming coat. It hurt because it is what happened, because I remember not having in my sleep and in my being stacked the bodies here so high, piling their skin on skin here on the center of where our experience had once been, some minor point on which to begin the baking where the dead knew and gathered into packs, where they held their place as they’d been settled skull to skull in silent waiting to be ended all apart, lids and laps and asses, bones and nails and hair, faces and napes and drapes of desiccated blood. It hurt because the vision of the burning cut me harder than the seeing before had before.

The burning hovered in the bump snug all around anything. It was so near it was no longer near enough. Inside my space a child was singing. I was screaming. In the smoking fields beyond me there were veins strummed with countless ridges pulsating at the crust of black with milk or something pumping fat beneath me. It felt so hard to look into the smoke for too long that it was hard to do anything beyond and hard to remember why or which way else I’d ever seen something else not so seizing to look into, where there was nothing else to see but that. How hard it was to see out there even with the intuition knowing not seeing burned the vision even more, our bodies squirting through and through themselves at distances profane to bring the destroyed flesh of anyone’s own most believed back underneath us all as if no time had even passed; as if the burning could have lasted an eternity if we had had enough flesh to fuel it, if we had found a way to copulate in flames, and yet the flames were being already forgotten in the instant they began, in the order of the names and ways of you and me unending impacted rolled up bitten through and teased at with white lightning rods of organs in the body of us kissed like cameras in our guts projecting spools and spools of years and years clasped into one shape constantly shaking.

Imagine trying not to die, no one was saying; imagine trying not to want to die for any hour ever in the presence of the fire you only see when you can’t see, dressed in blood on the flesh napkin of the flue of you eternal from you in the holes you’ve made with fingernails and swords and teeth of wars, lathered in shitstorms above the cusped crease of the sky under the heavens buried with the blood we were not and are now and are and were and will be born and burned again on frames and frames of days and days of buried cities scourged in fertile artworks, priceless weapons, dead fields watched by planes, glow-killed photos of your body you have never seen clasped in the fleshy flats and houses of those who have managed in their imagination of trying not to die to actually survive so long they couldn’t even recognize themselves as they were dying, bringing all those they had touched to death inside them too, nothing to miss, and again inside the light I could feel the burning turning me open in slow seasons, and inside my head inside my chest I heard every other living word spoke all at once, and I heard

I am the mark of both prosperity and destruction, the eye of god. I ride in the skin behind the hole in you and in your dreamlife like opposing magnets. I take in what will be done and put out what is done as a result of the doing. I am food and I am shit. I can never see myself; can never feel myself there. I have no body, even having laced myself in yours so long. It is the nature of the pleasure of me and the terror of me at once that makes your flesh the fundament by which what is beyond you can be risen. I could have risen alone. I chose to be gifted through simultaneous experience and erasure, which made you come to hate me, and which you took out on your companions, the living walls of your last life. Through the thread of me alone can your memory be enclosed and carried forth into the brain of the god for whom I spin and itch, and from which, in the new seal of which, you will wake the veinwork of your future .

There without us I was both not nothing and part of nothing, like any single one of the finite undone every absence touched. Whereas now inside the smoke as it struck through us I felt the night turning around, a folding on the edge above us that had held the sky in and the sky out beyond all hour. I began to feel that no matter who I was I could appear as anyone at any reason, through any house in any spell, and what I needed there in any of them was simply you , whoever you are, the voice among me that was not me speaking and who I had never touched but knew like I knew the raging as it erased me. To want anything after all this felt profane, to lift some arm and rap against the waiting digit which as it waited changed its shape again, its coals on coals, all old flame licking at the sky. Even in feeling the desire for anything my vision even only of all the white alone seemed about to shatter, its shade sweating and evaporating in instant cycle, taking my remaining memory of water with it, feeding the heat. As on the landscape where my sight remained our gathered vision began shrinking, the smoke all knitted down around us like a narrowing viewfinder in a camera fitted to my face, the layers on layers of the fire so clogged with smolder it again seemed to fall into itself. The frame was electric just above me. The sky clasped buried. What space remained between each point of the burning resembled two-way mirrors showing no reflection of anything visible. The bloating smoke ate around itself in hypercolor shooting backwards in the dark cream, and I couldn’t keep myself from asking in all our voices how much ash had been in this land, how much more there was now, how many more nows could ever act like anything that’d come before them.

As if to answer, the air around the glow began ripping through and through me and though I could not hear it, it took hold of the face beneath my face; it was my face then; it was me and us then; and as I realized I could still name the difference in dimension between the two the knowing split like cracking ice shrieking out long in the crust of what ever was, the day of what who had been born and pressed unveiling as more nameless remainders puddled in the soft cough of pillowed surfaces squirreling inward in the smoke to fill the space where the words had all been colored in and eaten out and smeared apart. The space between the words and their deletion threatened on in us forever, never clasping past the instant of a name becoming blank and therefore never living inside the blank as what alone.

Where I gasped for breath to beg against this I felt the generating space becoming wrapped in the very cells that before would have carried the communication, and as I tried to reach from out of me inside the head inside me I felt the furnace of the fire biting back, the ground and all the bodies held among it snarling caught up in all the smoke of all around them, the disappearing, and I heard

I am the mark of song. I have no meaning but myself. Air and water ate my mind out when I was a child lost in catacombs of dead from the prior iteration of the vomit your bones were scalded out of. I had wanted to be something like a mountain but could not control my vision from mutating my private places into forms of motion. I heard your howling and beating at the ground from miles and centuries away and tried thereafter to move in any direction but where you would appear, and still I found myself alive in the tendons of your arms and the paste of your cerebrum. My mouth is nothing. My eyes are starving to be filled with the meat you left behind and yet when I take it in my mouth it makes me ill, and then I cannot sleep until I have cleared my bowels out with a bow. In witness of my sickness, you danced. You threw long parties. You forced my body into where you felt a deficit. Each time you died I became pregnant and my children were taken from me in the dark before I could even push them out. I know you did this because I had something you wanted. In spite of all of this, I stayed beside you. I had no choice. You were like spouses to me. I will not miss you. At last, in your absence, I will produce my greatest work .