Blake Butler - Three Hundred Million - A Novel

This new tape shows the image of a man who looks like me watching a tape of a woman watching a tape of endless white. It shows me watch the woman, take the tape out, dial the number into a phone set into the wall, as I just had, though in the recording now the phone is the color of my flesh. My face looks sore, different from what I remember. I notice there’s a dark symbol cut into the back side of my head, under the hair there, tender but healing; the shape of the bruise is too obscured to make out. I touch the back of my head inside the room where I am here and I feel nothing. My time on the phone on the tape seems to go on much longer than I remember, as it happened. When the tape ends, it ejects.

On this tape’s case, there’s another number, different from the first. I reach and take the phone again and dial the number; again the line doesn’t ring.

Hello, I say, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to not say anything the last time. I know there are things I meant to say and would now if I weren’t saying what I’m saying now instead.

I only hear the words inside me, and having heard them, they disappear. Where the words were, in me instead then is a feeling, unlike any feeling I remember being able to remember.

This is a process.

Nothing.

The other end hangs up. I try to call the number back but I can’t. My hands won’t hold still enough to press the buttons. It’s like my hands want to be several hands at once; the cells in my fingernails are screaming words I could have said to the voice in the phone, but they all blend together with my flesh. I keep pressing buttons in a panic with my nails and knuckles all dialing numbers I don’t mean to, and I am shaking.

I bang the phone against my face until it hurts. I put the phone down.

I take another tape and put it in.

This tape shows the image of someone who looks like me watching a video of a man watching a tape of a video of me lying on the floor pouring blood out of my eyes and ears. I am holding the phone in my hands still, and blood is streaming from inside the receiver. The blood is rising in the room, already half-covering my facedown body. The blood is so dense it’s black.

I realize I can’t remember anything before now. The first me in the tape, watching the woman, looks twice as old as I do. Where the phone should be in the image on the tape in relation to where I’m standing, there is a framed print of a map of the world. On the map all of the land has been replaced with gleaming glass and all the water replaced with more blood like mine rising under a matching monochrome sky.

I look down at my arms. I don’t recognize them. I look back at the tape of me bleeding and see the blood has filled the screen completely.

I take the tape out, read its number. I decide I don’t want to dial it. There were other things I’d meant to do inside the house today. That I do remember; I do remember; I do; yes.

I have to find the woman’s body. I have to carry the body to the police and confess what we have done. I will tell them everything, and what I can’t remember, I will make up.

Everything I say I do feels like it’s been done already. Like I don’t even have to move. Like if I did begin to move there would be nothing to move through and nothing moving.

The phone inside the house begins to ring. It rings and rings inside my face. It is louder than hell here. It sounds like molecules being torn apart. Like every molecule there has ever been being torn apart by every other molecule. I go to grab the phone and there’s no phone. Where the phone had been on the wall it’s just the wall. Any wall forever.

There are no words left in me to say. The ringing won’t stop ringing in my blood and in my heart. Through all the rings on all my tingling fingers.

There’s nowhere else.

I remember how it’d felt to be a child. It’s the only thing I can remember.

The ringing everything I am.

I make a phone out of my hand against my head. I had been shown this. I had done this many times before so young.

I say into the phone of my hand my name and then my name again and then my other name, and then my other name and all my other names then, and I am screaming and it is easy. Where every name was disappears each as I say it. The sound bursts out of my mouth like any breath, then there is no sound.

I love the feeling of it coming out of me upon the air there and I am all around me and I’m nothing.

I remember nothing but the ringing all throughout my body at any age in all locations.

This is a process.

There is nothing left to think.

I go to take another tape and see there’s only one tape there.

The tape is white and bears no number.

I take the tape and put it in.

On the tape, I stand facing the screen.

There’s a room behind me but I can’t see where.

In my hands, where before there’d been a phone, I hold a pistol.

I watch my hand raise the pistol upward in one motion to aim into my face.

I see me smile.

I can see then as if I’m seeing from my perspective on the tape, inside it.

Down in the hole of the gun on the tape there is an eye.

It is an eye like my eye, only white without pupil, never blinking.

It doesn’t have to say a word.

I watch my hand put the hole in my mouth.

I feel the hole there.

I see the color.

I hear the sound.

1. The year my eyes turned grew fat around them without clear provocation to become impossible to see through for several weeks, days between which whole years seemed passing, and I grew older, and no one would look me in the face; the rings around my eyes soon grew so thick and wide that it was my whole head and my whole body and then I looked like anyone again; even my parents could not remember who I’d been before; they could not see the rings, but I could see the rings; I slept and slept; I felt my disease spread

2. The year the food placed on my plate at dinner seemed to pour smoke from where it’d been burned, as my mother was a lousy cook; slab of turkey spitting fire fission from its erupted cell holes; columns of diffuse tar rising from my grits; most nights I could not eat at all; some nights I closed my eyes and thought of cream; the food would burn in me forever, being burned, becoming my skin

3. The year my father lost his brain; his recognition of me and my mother and his brothers and whoever turning in his field of cells to mush; how he could walk around the year forever seeing other people, calling after, rendering their names onto the air; I would hold the names inside me; I would wrap my fists with wire; my father never tried to open any doors; his body shrinking

4. The year the house beside our house began to sink into the ground; only I could see this; when I pointed to my mother or went to the door and knocked and pointed the people looked upon me with arcane names; I tried to stop the house from going with my fingers and then with branches and then with prayer or spells and then with ideas but the house kept going; there were other houses in this way too

5. The year my house was the only house left on the block or down the street or as far as I could walk forever and yet there would be people in the streets; they would go around for hours as if nothing happened; where they went at night I do not know

6. The year I almost died from laughing in my sleep; that year I did not dream

7. 0

8. All this had happened at once to anybody

9. The year then where on the ground the houses had sunken fully down into the earth, and there were no houses; the houses made of other colors and with floors and walls and people in them all reversed; this was any year at all, forever, at last removed; inside here our house still seemed the same; and inside of each house to the people in the house their house still seemed the same too; the houses rose toward the darkness all above us