Blake Butler - Three Hundred Million - A Novel

I come into the house and there is snow. Beyond the house it’s snowing, too. The snow is cinder and skin. It rains forever and has rained forever.

I close my eyes and open my eyes and the man I was once is there before me, not anyone I know by name but someone crushed between the sum. His body is made of all the bodies having been consumed into a single flesh. He is translucent. He stands craned with his arms above his head and eyes wide open, so much skin he has no features. The mass of his body is wet with blood pouring through his openings.

The blood runs off of his body into the ground, caking layers that lick beneath my feet and hide the world. I realize I am bleeding too, gore from each pore of me erupting off to match the other man. I see my arms are raised like his; our skins are knitting, while beneath them congregate the rub of days I can’t remember living.

The world breathes with us. And the days. The screws and bolts turn in their sleeves. Blood pours in from the window and the sockets. It pours in from the speakers in the walls also, through any gap it can imagine.

Today above us all the stars are bleeding, and the sun’s face, and the planets. Birds raining blood and the idea of god. And the corridors removed of destination. The age of the earth gathers packed in and still pouring hot and on inside itself all at once and never-ending.

I close my eyes and at the same time feel the eyes of all the bodies around me open and behind the skin there is no lens.

I fear I am not ending or beginning, but that I am.

I remember believing you could remember things about the days that surrounded your whole life and became carried in the place where you were meant to live forever in you.

I remember how the teeth fell from my mouth. They were beaten from me, or I lost them growing older. What’s the difference. I remember how where the teeth fell out more teeth came in behind them. And behind those teeth, more blood, and behind that, any memory.

I remember remembering I folded up a forest and I ate it. I’d chewed the dirt out from between the roots and felt it grow out in the long locks of my hair.

I come into the house and who is there. I ask the question and the sound goes bang along the back side of my face and ricochets inside me and redoubles and makes splitting, the words raining back through me down in mirror-sound, beating out my shape from the inside. Each time I ask again I’ve become older and the words have gone slipped in what they mean, no world of what they were remaining.

I remember a watch I found burnt in some dirt that had no hands. I carried the watch thereafter faceup in my palm, never releasing or relaxing, never using the little strap. The leather of the watch’s band was so bright in direct sun you could hardly stand to look anywhere else, even to read the time.

I remember there are more things I cannot remember than things I can remember, though I can’t remember any of those now, or what about me makes me think that what I’ve just said now is true or ever could be.

I come into the house and it is full of every instrument, the guitars and the pianos, cymbals, amps; all the chords and their strings unstrung at one end from their tuning pegs and tied to something at the center of my mind, underneath which awaits something I have never seen and will never see.

I know I can’t remember how inside this house to get from room to room; or I can’t remember where the next room is, even seeing me go there ahead of me before I get into it; or I can’t remember what the room is for, why there are walls between this room and this last one as the condition is the same; or I don’t want to move; or I am already there before I’m there even ahead of me already in my bloated body; or I have never moved at all, at any point in all the time I felt me moving.

I can’t remember I do not remember typing that last sentence and then deleting it from there and then retyping it again without the memory of having typed it or realizing ever before that all of this was going on. I can’t remember how I fear this may be the case with everything I’ve ever said here, and what of it.

I’m saying this so it can be erased.

I remember corridors and chambers, buried in my finger.

I remember every ever eaten bite of food, how it spanned the cells between the cells, the space of light slowly made gathered, the eyes of the man or woman who placed the food before me on the table. I remember the voracity with which I took it all down against my teeth and holes to make more of me as if in the world forever I had been the only one.

I can’t remember how I would wake up with so much in my mouth I was no longer breathing and there was no longer any way to speak or write, though I still am, and how is that. I can’t remember to take what I just said seriously and erase everything, burn the buttons, accept fate.

I remember wallowing in bodies, sucking their fingers, humping their knees, starved as hell for death and never dying, even in dying. And then, now.

I remember the way a hand might come against me and I’d shudder and then feel happy to have been touched and feel myself more in being touched and turn around to try to face the touching person and find nothing there but night.

I remember you there, then I don’t.

I can’t remember sound.

I can’t remember where on the silent light we floated, language leaking back and forth between the countless holes where we had leaked out our innards. The meat of the earth stuck to my lids and to yours and wished me open and you open and soon we were wide as we had ever been.

I remember the remaining span of days on earth of those beyond the length of fabric where the reverberation of the holes sung forth, passed for those who wished to see it as a lifetime as all of time forever, while in us it passed as now, all instants and instances passing through a single focus, spreading out in each span with their own whorl.

I remember you as pixels in the mask I wear to stand before the mirror and see beyond the shape of us.

I do not remember what a face is or a hand is or how to not believe in anything.

I remember a box inside a room. Both the room and the box could have held anything, before or after. It was a black box with a black lid. There were no tapes. I stood there above the box and thought about the shape of the box and the frame of the box and its space inside it held. I thought about the cells of the box and the cells inside the box and the burning in my hands. I thought about the walls around the box and the walls around me. The box just sat there. I watched the box sit. I watched the box until there was nothing left that I had not imagined had been inside the box forever, every inch and every hour, and then I went on watching. I watched the box until the night arrived and the box was still there and nothing about the box had changed and then I left the room and locked the door behind. The box did nothing to stop me. I walked along the hall and went downstairs and the house was just the same. I found my mother at the kitchen table writing a letter she would never mail. Her hair was white and she was thin. She had lived a whole life since I saw her last. I sat down at the table with my mother and we spoke. Whatever the words were that went between us made the air there in the house feel clean and calm, and ours. I can’t remember what else then happened. I never thought about the box again.

I remember each room is the room where you are born, the room where you are killed, the room where you make skin and speak in someone else’s code. As no one knows when they are dead, it doesn’t matter. They are carried and carried on in vast precision in the image of what had been, each world both old and made eternal, under a sky that needed nothing beyond itself.