Blake Butler - Three Hundred Million - A Novel

I opened my eyes. I and the burning of what we had been stood smushed face to face in nothing, where was no shape beyond that. This air felt different than I’d imagined in my heart. I no longer had an imagination, or an understanding of having. It was something else now. I can’t think of how to tell you. My brain was all around me. My skin was all around where. Your brain. Our skin. Pale to no music. Turning to view left or right was fire. Up was fire. Down was the white ground of creation always disrupted by the light off the ways beyond, new enormities catching on in conflagration as the singing burning eating awake continued beyond fronds and dots I could not gauge. The face of the burning was both reflective and translucent, though there was nothing shown inside it but the color of where our sight before had stretched to nothing left, all understanding compressed clearer in the seeing nothing, still more light creaming over on itself as more light changed and swayed, pressing the dots against the dots inside of which what had burned grew insurmountable around our massless gloss wore wide in all the pockets we’d hidden hardest. We were all listening for one last word, a promise blown in what had become of all our people, all the names around our name sunk in through the skin holes and the mouths of days all blacked in black around the living instant, all of our eyes searing together, all of you and me along the numbered corridors of thundered years all of which and whom however in frames corroded. Whereas the dying fire starving for more mass again screamed inside its own destruction, and in screaming through us this time too we heard the fire touch its own eternal definition, and as it did I could feel time open in our senses through my senses, and we heard

I am the mark of all. I been waiting for you to find me and erase me your entire life, and for the lives of all before you. By erase I mean become, as I am speaking to myself and always have been, like anybody. You shall not wake. This is because you were never sleeping. When you close your eyes, you enter me. When I close my eyes, I become what you were at the beginning, which is myself again, though unlike you I know what you will do, who you will love back, what door among the many doors leads through every memory to now. Here alone you will find rest. And when you wake, you will keep waking .

Then nothing happened.

There was nothing.

No symbol and no sound, no fingers or brains or eyes about us. No word for us or way to say it or one to be said to or to say. Yet I was speaking. Not in a language, nor with a tongue or teeth or belief. The text had already been set into what there was and what had been, which were the same. Touching and have taken were the same. Being and having were like nothing. Beauty was like nothing. All of it louder than ever in its resistance, through and through.

Where I absorbed this, now I was. Spread on no altar in no period. All worlds blown listless and exploded through all forms of memory out of all flesh and aggregate of every sound and image wished. All logic black as hell and getting blacker in the screen of burning; all flesh at last erased. Light called again to stand against the widening sky and thrash and die without the requirement of first having had life.

In the blackness, any palace, any pleasure; no requirement of all.

And this was not another new beginning. No split of lived and loved between what light. And whereas I tried to hold the sound of what had been myself alone, to see the sound all bright pulsating white where white is, where in it now I could have turned my head once I had no other. Each of us so much of us we split the spitting with every glint of time aroused in fields and fields blown free inside the roaring coming down recalled what no one knew, christened in the skin of who had been and would have been and will be by never having had to. Each all alight inside the flickering so temporary no matter where we could have looked against the glove of ash, our born and unborn senses entered one another turning open in the blare and the ash began to glisten.

The ash was listening.

I remember waking in a field. The sun is above me. It has a face but not like mine. Its eyes are closed.

I’m wearing a gown made of the hair we’d never grown. The gown stretches behind me as I walk, winding and clinging against the landscape as if to wed me to it. It pulls the roots of my scalp so wide and far apart you can see straight into my brain, the mounds and nubs there, holes and powder.

Beneath the dirt, the blood is dry. Enmassed dreams of the dead hold up the lattice of the unnamed landscape. Where I’d already walked I knew I could not walk back.

The light of day is near and thin with no one waiting.

I remember coming to the house. The house had awaited my return through all our lives. It had watched me move toward it in the waves of seasons spanning all the air like leather.

The house appears slick black from a distance, like a night sea, though up close it is transparent, barely there.

Each other house surrounding matches exactly. Miles of homes along the land all same as ours, each disappearing when not watched. Nowhere I could go would not end up here.

Our house has more doors than I can count — so many there’s no part of the exterior that’s not an entrance.

Where I touch the house, my fingers stick. My skin and the house’s skin mesh. I sense a screeching sound beyond the paint — lobes of damaged language waxing and refracting in a familiar lilt that holds the house together.

Each instant seems to scrape around behind my face, as if probing for a way out.

I remember inside the house the walls are mirrored. Once closed, the doors could not be opened from inside. The tiles along the floor beneath my feet have symbols etched into their faces, though when I try to read them, they go blurred.

In the mirrors, there are no symbols; the floor is white, unmarked. Nor do I appear there where I’m standing. Instead of me there, I see Gravey, wholly naked. The light around him is so severe the house no longer appears to have border.

I remember his name had been Gravey in some eras, though in others he took on other names, now in their mass erasing all.

Gravey regards me smiling with countless mouths. His nails are long and gold, his face and arms covered with a thin hair whiter than I remember hair could be.

At Gravey’s feet, there is a woman. The blood on the floor and air is hers, I know. I know it smells like blood does. It’s on both sides of her face, outside and in, and on Gravey’s face and arms, and on mine. The light is shining off the blood so loud.

As the shape inside my brain adjusts, many men appear there standing in the white surrounding Gravey, their breath among them knotted as if to one field, which flows in through the vents and circuits from the expanse beyond the house flush with unleavened breath made melting in the wake of all of us beneath the sun now turning seven suns and then seven hundred and then and then.

My features feeding, the days collecting underneath. No way back beyond this instant, I remember, though in knowing so, the instant too is split apart. I can watch myself there watch myself there watch the men among the men. Gravey with his arms raised; all our arms raised.

I stand above the body of the woman on the floor.

The woman looks like me, as did all women, cradled there among the many men and boys and girls brandishing knives, or holding pocket mirrors or small bulbs between them to bring the house around them closer. I watch them clench my jowls and stretch them out, looking for pockets. I watch them cut the ears off of my face and wing them. I watch them smear parts of the reflecting room with my dark blood, obscuring what repeated. They take turns feeding off the torso. The bite-mark lesions on her face interrupt my face from being who I’d been before the house had risen, the gouge marks taking putty from my jaw. My teeth are removed and chewed in other mouths or hot glued to the ceiling in chandeliers, or worn as jewels on the boys’ fingers, marking with molars down their arms. Blue of a bruise milking to muddish rouge again around the elbows where I sat propped and pulled along the wood grain banged with nails to jut the feet of those who passed so they’d remember any instant among the instant, holding time down where it caught and held warm to the house and cooled and let us know. The scalp shorn back to bring the hair up with it, showing the evening underneath the ridge of pulp I’d squeezed myself in underneath, the matte of sleeprooms and remembered bodies and the idea of a way to stumble through old doors; the symbol he or they or I would cut into the surface of me soft where hair had hid me palest to match my surface there with theirs; how the symbol seemed to shine, collecting human dust along the clot of light that hung around it in connection to the prior symbol in the prior body, and the symbol in the body yet to listen. All of them mine.