Blake Butler - Three Hundred Million - A Novel

I can’t remember how no book was a book. How no one had lived and none had passed. No flesh was a body. Whatever was said was said by all people or was not said and the word was just the word and I had needed you so long.

I remember how I tried to copy my own wish inside your head and then could hear it continually thereafter shaking where it didn’t fit, no matter how I turned your head and pushed you oblong through a place like home or under sleep into grand halls and fields of light. How in my own body still I can feel you also in my image always and forever.

I can’t remember how you are the only person who can read this.

I come into the house draped in all gowns.

I come into the house and find no house here.

I come into the house and it’s a sea. The level of the water rises with my presence in the volume, spreading quick to lap along the drywall, and behind each wall another wall in its same image.

I remember how we’d drowned. What had come from water must return to water. The house from inside larger than the earth itself, the water sagging up and overrunning, up to my chest already, creamed with pearling cream and pattered ash. It slaps against me in even repetition, one long fat strobe that hits me squarely in the breasts, though I can’t remember I have breasts. The water wants my milk. It sucks my glands, though I am sand there, the nipples sore from being had by someone I can’t remember in the silent purr of ageless language up my arms and down my back, curtains spurting layered in all air I can’t remember.

I remember the water did not exist.

I remember how I grew; how I had been the child and then grown through my own life into the man who finally killed every other living person and consumed them; how then that person disappeared; though as I try to tell you now again I can’t remember which or how I knew to tell you.

I am in the home and in the home. I turn inside the mass of heavy nothing to look and wade back into the stretch I’d just come through, though as I turn I see the house is not the house there but every human liquid: blood, eggs, semen, saliva, sweat. The wet goes on in every way, white and shining, depth erupting warm and clean and fast into wherever I cannot, depths deeper than there need to be as I will never know them.

I remember my mother wiping my face with a cold washcloth on the morning I learned I would not remember dying.

I remember waking up three hundred million times. How I had been some mornings as a blind woman, as an actor, as a masseuse, though even in the knowing of this knowing I can’t return to any of them, as if my idea of even this is another old disease where I must come to and rub and mutter, be again speaking words that mean nothing to anyone, an image waiting to live the remainder of his or my life out tick by tick unfunny, recorded over.

I remember what it felt like to feel my body fill with fire. Or with nostalgia.

I can’t remember why I’m soft.

I remember the strange feeling of wandering through the dark with arms extended, looking for a wall, or someone’s arm, another me there anywhere.

I come into the house and everyone is still alive. They are all there, all our people. They wear the frame of face and dress they’d felt the most themselves as, at whatever age. They have children and are children. It is a celebration. There are candles and white balloons. There is a cake white as my mind, shaped like a cone. The eyes all watch me enter without recognition. They blink and smile all gapless and no words, while beneath the skins awaits an expectation of coming song, though there is no breath left to lift.

I can’t remember how in every instant I was the lips of any person; I was the color of all birth, the canals the bodies had been sent through from blood into a common light; I was the hair that had not grown; I was the hair that had been shorn from the heads of the living and the dead and laid upon the ground to hide it through crucial minutes in which the eye inside that ground must rise for air; no one else was coming; this was our iteration; a wider milk rose in the seas; from even feet away no one could see this; the tables carved initials in themselves; I was the shoulder blades and the manes of ice over the homes’ roofs and the ring fingers; I was the ring around each hope; each body I became I had been always and inside it there it felt the same, a mutual darkness lay awaiting when the skin rolled down over our eyes, the days beginning as they ended, waking mirrors all around the beds; the mirrors then must be walked into; I was the organ of the totality of glass; every inch of what we’d eaten; ornaments held on the shelves in rooms where no one moved; bulbs left on to burn out, dreaming wire; I was the words following our last words on the lungs; I was the trachea and pelvis; I was the grinding of the teeth.

I can’t remember how I felt myself falling in around us, pinched in the patient way of every instant’s instant seize as it passed in and on around all bodies to hold its shape forever as it had been and all remembered in the eye of what would grow, which was nothing, which did not stop it; the color blazing; where in the face of all this you could not remember anything about me besides how there was nothing left where I was not. I was the lip of the land where all we’d called ours went under water to stay hidden from the eye of god in fear of no longer having organs, each zilch becoming collapsed in proper sequence, its absence raised like humans packed in bleachers doing the wave; I was the larger wave our blood had begged to form at our whole ending as among the days in counting lost we sloshed, to rise and crest and crash and kiss against the idea of a home inside no home, to be holy, to go on.

I remember a silver necklace that when I put it on, the room went upside down and inside out, and I was sitting where you are sitting, awaiting anyone but me.

I remember the dream of living skin filling all possible space, all edges of all worlds, the dream replacing all other memory, without end.

I can’t remember that I remember nothing.

I come into the room and find the child. The child has no arms or legs or face or chest or hair or teeth or eyes. The child is lying on the bed, on the floor inside the house devoid of mirrors, as all the glass of them has lurched, become rooms there beyond the pane where before the house had ended.

I can no longer tell the difference between what the child remembers and what I remember, how we’d ever been apart. His presence burns me where I no longer have a body beyond the many millions no longer living, the hordes within them each.

I take the child and lift him to me. I cup the head inside my palm and speak: You will believe we are alive and well, for real, together, and everyone has found their love, that nothing could end our lives but life itself, no matter how it feels. No word ever of death again as yet but all this light and all this color in the ground and spots worn on our faces and the hours crushed with sleep with eyes closed on beds beside bodies recounting nothing of the mirrors underneath our skulls which when removed replace themselves with new skulls; and so here I am again and will be again all crushed forever .

The child says nothing. Its mouth is open, toothless.

I hold the child and was the child. I have the child inside me and I’m inside it. I sleep without sleeping and do not grow older and some time later I wake and rise. I stand in a cold darkness on the edge of somewhere else, seeing no mirror, beyond sun.

I remember standing with my eyes closed at a thin, warm window in the beginning.

I come into the house and the house is all one room.

There is a door in the room but the door is locked.

The walls are white.