Three Hundred Million: A Novel

by Blake Butler

  The click of the eye of the snap of the trick of the wet dream beneath the skin of god.

  * * *

  FLOOD: I could no longer think or move. The tape kept interrupting. Or I was interrupting. Or where I was thinking and moving now was different than it had been the way I understood it before. Like how soil is always soil, but never the same elements ruined into it. The film was pressing down. It knew I knew. Our silent gap no longer fit the frame of only now. It wanted all the rest of every era.

  The translucent space before me gleamed. I don’t know how I hadn’t seen it like this before now. Always now, always. The more I saw the shape, the more the shape seemed like just another house. Fucking houses. Illicit nowhere. It looked like the black house stuffed up with the smoke where I’d begun but wider than that, and older than that. When I looked at it directly, the shade would change, as if it could feel me wanting it, and knowing in my wanting that to be entered would cause its end. Every angle was another face to feel, both within my skin and pressed against it.

  The space held seated somehow propped between the whole space of earth and sun. It came with windows made of people’s sleeping, every person. It had reinforced itself in the absence of all vision. There was no door at all, no locks, not even walls or surfaces. The main face of the structure, once you could see it for a second before it shifted, was embedded on the rip of the air of the tape itself: the blank that held the tape together by showing nothing in recording where there’d been nothing ever to show. It wore the index of space forever invaded by the eras of people simply acting out their lives: asking, laughing, saying, eating, living, being, working, sleeping, knowing, kissing, thinking, rushing, pissing, singing, making, having, going.

  Gone. The house was not ours. It had been always. I could tell it had been waiting for someone to touch it once when it was young, and had grown lazy in its waiting. It had so many names: the House of God, the House of Demeaned Cities, the House of No Art We Could Remember, the House of America Without America, the House of Rape Fantasy and Weddings, of the Being of the Been, the House of Sod. If there was anywhere inside the tape where anyone like me might hide in fear, it was here. If nothing else it was the end of anything, the actual end of what the tape could be, the tape beyond my time and here containing everything I wanted, totally held inside which I might be able to stop the repetition and hold longer to the shape of belief I felt some days floating just underneath my face. It wanted me to have it and to know it and to never leave it there again, while also not having to feel me or become me. A shapelessness screwed beyond the idea of even shape.

  If I could reach the end-space of the tape’s helm, I felt, seeing the nothing where the edges of the space of tape itself began, I could maybe slither out; I could rise beyond my age into the rip of what was never promised but always had held me up.

  And yet the shape would not stay still. The very nature of it crested between levels of its own image. Like insects printed in the pixels of the landscape. As I moved, it moved among me. It was inside me and had been and knew what I would do before I did it. Some seconds it would just be instances of sky, or would be a fuzz of grain around some nodule too far off inside the recording to decipher. Regardless, I could hear it humming, in the absence. It was giving heat off. The only heat remaining.

  I wanted the space the most when I couldn’t see it. I went even when I wasn’t going, and couldn’t stop. For miles along the recording of the earth my body bled. The blood was lines I had no choice but to be. I took the lines and walked as quickly as I could manage with my icon forced through the repeating surface. Static was caking at my chest. Friction in variation on the norm of what the body mostly did upon the tape would be punished in the tape’s spool, flaking cells between us off from skin and celluloid alike, as if both accelerating rapidly in age. Any furor from the friction with the time code made me nauseated, my remembered flesh wanting out onto the recorded flesh even more the more the tape wanted me to slow.

  I would not slow. I had this itch in my threads. The taped air of the homes fumbled against me, forming white walls in my vision where the houses believed they ended and another house was, turning instead in rows to rows of houses with fences higher than many of me stacked up foot to head. I crawled down shafts through air vents in the places and laughing at the color of the grain of the metal trying to mirror-trick me back to some beginning, and I laughed at me trying to trick me, trying to be me backwards, trying to force me back into the smoke that soon would pour out of my mouth. I went on forever haunted in the furor of the trembling of the houses here in error every second I wasn’t totally erased, foregone forever from this endless land of murder fainting claustrophobia fevers death-faced shitty-feelings distemper sweat-pits vertigo, and far beyond, altogether acted out in all the wrong poses of the era and pauses in the absence of the presence of whatever held us in the world as it had been and was no longer.

  And so something in me continued going, something not even me but what I felt. Where my cords would bundle and build heavy unto sleep to disrupt the ease of anything just pleasant, I would rise and I would rise and not even wishing to rise I would do it and I would be popping and so here I was again curled in these unending fields. Here I am in fission in the tape wanting its ejection, sweating seasons long beyond the end of weather, as if somewhere there is a section of a tape hid in the tape awaiting my witness, wanting to be returned to where it belongs along the cord of my own eye, or whatever could be in there, underneath that, whatever could be.

  I began again again. The houses where I had been had learned by light to remove their markings and so were older but I still could not tell them from the rest and still knew I had to get on with it regardless because there are only so many sentences one might read in any life. The sun was ratcheting my back in a loop again like a mirror to the hallway underneath the ground where through the earth of film earth the bells began to ring. They were coming from the mush between the houses, which with the sound coagulated. It strung around the holes between them and made the air weird so I could not see where to go, could no longer make out any angle of the edge beyond, though with my hands vibrating before me I could still sense what was up and what was down, and behind me I could hear the smoke of where I’d been before waiting to take me, to become me, drown me out.

  Inside the font of movement still regardless, patches then began to gather on the system of the air before me where I waddled, hands out, collecting between my fingers and in my curvature of tape. If I was to be free again, the tape wanted all the others I’d buried in me to keep forever, to feed and feed on, even if there was no one left to watch. Who had been before and what before those and where before I’d come the tape would crush out from my blood and use to tint itself with inimitable color, eyes and lips and mouths and cheeks made into more and more land; and from those carried in me, the tape could take part in what they’d wished to do thereafter, when and how, what inches I had pulled out of them to live on. We had all already lived our lights out; every word was already never ours.

  This time as the tape clicked back to start again I felt it grinding at its code. Inside the video I was thrown forward; I could not hear me, no matter in what way you called. I kept waiting for the voice I’d heard beyond me to return, to give me guidance, or at least to grind me deeper in against it so far I could feel or want to feel the tape against me any longer, but I could no longer hear it. Rather, I couldn’t hear anything but it. It was in the fiber of the grain that made the ground go on beneath me, crushing to me, becoming impossible to distinguish from any pixel or glitch. It was in the soundtrack of the wind and sun and my own motion. It ran all through every gap and was the gaps. It spread the light around my mind. It carried everything about me regardless of whether I wanted to believe it could or couldn’t.

  Where the glitches on the air around me hung and buzzed, I felt holes open in me too.

  Holes behind my face, between my teeth and in my tongue and backbone. Zero planets.
>
  In me, I found me waking. How old I had been. How old was I becoming in the becoming.

  Scars all over my flesh. I wore every camera in my stomach. I had the skin of a woman.

  It burned, the shifting of my recorded flesh, pulled out like drawers inside a flesh on fire.

  The boning of me croaked. My teeth unlaced from gums where language wanted out.

  I found, in the slick white mass of fat around my marbled tonsils, a period inflating.

  The mirror of myself inside myself all encoded wrapped with electronic understanding.

  Whereas for any inch I had forgotten, this has made me wholly who I was without image.

  In the fieldwork of the earth too, I was in there. I could see my hours in the absent faces.

  Smoke fed itself smoke and begat smoke and became smoke and died and rose again.

  The tape adhering to itself, forgetting how to repeat now that I wouldn’t just go blank.

  The white was in my brain and bones and eyes. I was way in there, packed with all death.

  The dead who wanted nothing more than what they’d been before already but now new.

  Not any one but all wide open. Black forests. Anti-electronic bloodstreams. Silver milk.

  In each the hues screwed wide and carried over, splintered into every possible emotion.

  * * *

  FLOOD: No word we made was ever ours; none of what we’d said were the words we’d meant at all inside you or me and instead a word in our blood turned and turned, the same word over and over, all the hours, against the measure of the sand, until even you could not recognize you recognizing you inside you and instead inside the house we fell into something soft inside the silence between twin iterations of the word and there you were, and the years continue again and spin rewinding and inside the light inside the seeing.

  The light moved through all mirrors. Our color cored inside the sound was only reflecting against itself. Inside the smoke I saw the skin of the sound around me come apart into a whorl, one of three hundred million films, each with innumerable films carried inside it, and in those too. All the longing. The whorl solidified around me until I was anywhere there could have been ever. I was in the room beneath the house. I was in the dry inside the fire baked with resin. I was walking along a hall. I was facedown in the living room awaiting bodies. I was falling through this.

  I closed my eyes.

  Inside the black I could still see the land of the world surrounding empty, though here behind the land I saw the long veil of human history knitting in the light we’d left behind, a scrolling ream of memory-dimension beyond both time and space where all our lives fed through the same lens, the sunning voice burning even the glass out into air, and from the air then the burning image beyond all color, code, or era.

  It was my own voice then I heard beyond me, saying nothing.

  Inside no sound, each present edge still disappeared into the next. The white of the light inside the silence between language made my own skin seem miles denser in comparison, and the idea of all previous occurrences even thicker, to the point of impossibility. Along the air there was the void of something exploding continuously and unendingly, light pouring through where words weren’t.

  I thought to touch my face then but I couldn’t. I could not remember anything except thinking this sentence. I could not remember what the sentence meant, that I did not remember where I’d been forever or what I wanted. I tried to turn around and go back the way I’d come, inside the air, but when I turned I found the world had changed to fit my shape, filled through and through me without color.

  This was what had always been. Nothing had happened; nothing had not happened; and yet everything was ours. Our bodies stuck at the frame of the page of the light where the flesh of all of us each instant shrunk and expanded overwritten overrun false with all absent language lorded between any way ever. Each word held a murder of its own; each death a death of all things and so now nothing. There was so much light coming from all the holes now I could hardly tell what parts of me were me and what was time, all stretching out forever over what had been once.

  All I wanted was to love and to be loved. I wanted to feel us loved and go on in love again and have a spouse and child again in love in endless light in endless repetition beyond the shape of any home you made beyond our image, though here the light kept frying out and walls kept turning into mirrors and the floors harbored under floors, cold colors longer than the house is, any instant stretched to oldest tone. Here I wanted to exist in the rhythm of a stunning surface grown from no sleep in all our excess all beside you beyond blood. I wanted to be free and laugh like fire, to watch the edge of the earth expand so wide it killed the color of the void, carved a peace for us to spread our lives out warm in ancient fat and growing ages. I would have given anything to stand beside you. I would give you anything.

  I raised my arms into the light. I did not have arms but I could feel them rubbing against everything they weren’t. I heard me shouting long before the sound came. Each syllable stretched for longer than I could imagine ever existing. I opened my eyes over and again and each time saw the same long corridors of white against the white repeating nil.

  Between each nil I lived forever. A century of centuries of summers in the bodies murmuring my head my head wide open with the faces, speech undone. Walls around us, light around us, above, below. Not in any place that had a name still, but simply here. In the end of asking, and of needing to be asked. The end of whatever you’d been waiting for forever in the long stand of electricity and putty. Wherever you could find a way.

  Wherever we have been. In the end of commentary. The end of the end of anything we’d wished to conceive and not conclude. All those instants collected on the body of all of us and placed beneath us so that we could still walk and not need to remember we’d been deformed. With our tongues against the emblem, pupils swelled to fill out not only our whole eye, but the space beyond the eye. In the end of the out-of-frame, the end of seeing. The end of the pigment of our dreaming existing only forced encased.

  Where all we wanted was to hold. In the end of shapes and endless endlessnesses. The end of something like falling through no hour. Here in the shower of all sound, wearing a skin made of the moment of eruption as our bodies finally gasped the dust out of the streets and stood up and bowed without an encore.

  The end of will. In the end of needing form and fingers to exist beside the space you’d been forever and had suffered for to control, where when the lights come on in the house again we must swear we won’t remember how anything at all between us has been amended before appearing. Blown out and blotted in the loveless marrow of the present.

  FOUR THE PART

  ABOUT AMERICA

  I opened my eyes inside no smoke. I was lying facedown again in the center of the floor inside a room of mirrors filled with bodies and their blood. I could not tell where one body ended and the next began.

  The light was cold. No idea how long I’d been awake. I wore a kind of clothes not accustomed to the style that I remembered having. My nails were long, my stomach full, my arms all covered in tattoos. My hair had grown down past my ass.

  The bodies smelled like life. From among them, there was a woman splayed beside me, pulled free from the pile. She had my mother’s arms and neck and cheeks, and my wife’s fingers and her forehead. Her eyes were sewn shut with blue wire.

  In her arms, the woman held a child.

  The child had no head. Where his head had been was gushing white shit. I had his head in my hands. The head was smiling. Where my fingers touched his skin they adhered, and when I could pull them away there were lesions on my flesh.

  The child looked just like I remembered me. He wore a silver locket, as had I. Inside the locket, I remembered, was a photograph of god’s face, what god had been, though now the locket would not open.

  I set the head down. It fell through the floor instead of stopping, just like that, then it was gone. I looked at the r
emainder of the child. He had a new head. He looked like someone famous whose name eludes me. His new mouth was sewn shut with the same blue wire as the woman. His new eyes were wide. The eye meat had no pupils or irises, only white.

  My fingerprints were all over everything, though my fingerprints are yours.

  Beyond this room, the world awaited.

  Into the new air now I wandered out of what we’d already been to what remained of what we were. In total death, at last, all bodies appeared stacked up neck-high across the landscape, dead as fuck. They clung blistered in the skin of millions, all of whom were also me. The curvature of the earth seemed to have flattened. Museums of intestines held corded around the glinting onslaught of trailer homes beaten with stones and fists and asses cleaved from other bodies and rendered weapons, scratching names into the paint, names no longer affixed to the bodies that had slurred from and laughed and made more in the image of our kind.

  Flesh splayed and stacked in accidental floes. Brutal rainbow fauna choked by maggots fleeing the carcasses through mud veins in the chest of the earth risen to brush at white sky lathered dry and caked replicating on itself. Flakes of dry skin hung on overdeveloped air, rasping in the dimension where the arms of time sung fat with knots, to slow the lap of the ocean forced against the land mass with the bodies mottled in incandescence. Wasps knitted homes out of the refuse pillbox bodies and twining in the hair of no one growing. What old white light beat at the teeth of countless exterminated babies stung under sky incidentally conformed with coarse grooves the night would blow against ejecting sound, wishing it were anything else like words that would have emerged between the pure enamel before it fell out in the learning of how age sits upon us and licks our easy resin out of the head into the want of worship, commingling forever alone.