Three Hundred Million: A Novel

by Blake Butler

  I stopped wherever I’d become.

  I stopped and saw all light resembling the same.

  The land was no one’s. Wherever I looked upon it, it opened on itself, into more of itself. There was more inside it than it even believed in, though it could do nothing with it now.

  Anywhere in this expanse I stopped and stood and looked and felt no dream.

  I could not remember where I’d come from or after who then.

  I could hardly tell where I ended and sand began.

  I did not know why there were no walls around me.

  I made a marking in the sand. The marking allowed my mind a small relief, as once within it I could no longer remember anywhere but.

  I knew the marking wore a door. Here the door was a preternatural idea and had no name beyond it simply leading to what would be the first room of the space, which I would build into a copy of the room where in my childhood I had sat on the floor with my hands before me and my mother behind my back, stroking my hair or humming or sewing or singing the song or silent in the night exhausted for the machines, the color of the TV shining low against our faces or the face of the books my mother planned to read aloud to me, bestowing its hidden crevices of nowhere upon the child I was already becoming in the machine of my brain alone.

  As I imagined the door, then, it appeared there. It was a white door, like my memory, leading to anything.

  The rest of what must be was up to me.

  To form the lengths of walls surrounding what the door was, I searched for sharper relics among the sprawl of local sand: ribcages, skulls and tibia, phalanges and sockets, spines and collarbones. They no longer felt like parts of people. The bones hissed and puzzle-clicked into new configurations to form grids, and from them doorknobs, stairs. I packed sand into the shapes to make the surfaces opaque held spindly and dense and fell immediately away, leaving holes through which the air outside could continue in through, while the day went on around, basking in my brain a second color to the home where the air had not been before.

  At some depths whole packets of new expanse appeared by nature worn into the innate definition of the space—an oven or a bathtub or a staircase—as if the house had always been beneath the sand there buried, waiting.

  The ceiling I left open wide. The light of the house would be moons and suns, whatever weather, though it would never again rain here.

  When I could do no more each day, I entered sleep. My absent dreamworld bristled around me overflowing every perimeter of what I couldn’t see completely overcome with everything not carried in me. Each instant just beneath the under of sleep’s nothing seized with a cream of flame around my mind, as if against its own image the whole house wanted to implode unseen, return to its elements. The ring I could not remember ever having not worn burned around my finger and fed off me; I couldn’t feel it, but I knew. There was in my head only the black, the long lengths of the house I’d built from death surrounding my life now.

  Inside sleep, I walked along the walls in place of everywhere through which I’d come. I pantomimed actions already lived through, wanting only there to appear those who’d been there then returned beside. My hands moved without me moving. Where no one spoke inside the rooms of the house inside the dark the doors stood open, chamber to chamber.

  “I am a hole,” I said aloud each time I touched a wall, but I could not hear it, allowing days to disappear between the words—hours haunted with the unheard words of vows of death, of forgiveness, the oldest colors.

  Through days I bloated in my home like it was mine; I could see my fat moving before me into where I was before I felt me be there; this also hurt though in a smaller place and one I learned to think around; I was able to do this by focusing on the pages of a blank book that appeared inside my head when my eyes closed without my knowing; a book I knew had never been; each page was larger than your head and brighter than I could stand to look at; the book shook with what could have been written, in any book, all prior books not realizing they were disappearing into this one book as they were written, carried and carried on, in vast precision in the image of what it could not at all reflect, a silent murder rendered forward by something old and made eternal now in every inch of my face and the walls inside me. In this way days inside the house did not seem days; lives could pass among my head each day hidden in blinking; terror here might seem as easy as having dinner or lying faceup on a bed or holding the mental hand of someone I’d loved under a sky that seemed to need nothing but itself to carry on. The way it gathered in the book unbeing it gathered in me also, sealing its total brightness into every gesture, so that while awake I began to feel I weighed the weight of ten whole people in one body, each of them breathing and eating what I breathed and ate also, replicating.

  For days I turned and turned inside the new long dark, trying not to remember there was nothing beyond the house to live with beyond the image of how it felt, or else the blurring bolts of what I could recall of what held near: splatter fragments of the skulls; tents of muscles slathered in a pig-white grease of centuries spooled through blood-browned sauce boiling; tissue shitting between nostrils in a head inside a second head; living rooms where babies fell and broke their brains; those were the days; attics in the attics above with blue bells ringing the coming hour to us counted down from zero into zero while names were read off of a list inside said broken baby skulls and gathered up packed back in entrails as cluster-semen replicated to be injected to eggs gifted on breakfast tables before god; windows; chasms; purple fabric; what else; what would you want forever; just ask; this world is ours.

  Behind my lids, the black no longer was ever black; or not the same black there’d been when I was younger and knew more than I knew now, or how it felt; instead the shade inside the skull contained a thickness branched from the vision of all of whom; every blink or whip of eye along the long yards of the days undone; each of us seated only at the center of the space we could not see and now would never be anything but. It felt easier for me alone instead to think nothing, in this home devoid of anything but my own touch; it felt warm like endless milk, even so minor; as the only drawers I found in the walls of the ways here were mostly only filled with ash or fat or ice; the ice would never melt, no matter how much I rubbed at it, and the fat, it held no flavor; the ash was just ash though its color was monochrome and it did not float and it would not stay on my hands.

  Often I couldn’t recall where the next room was from one day to another even seeing my body leading the way, even having lived in this house already my whole life, as I remembered; or I couldn’t remember what any room was for, why there were walls between this room and this last one. In all the rooms the floor was bright. No matter where I looked I saw more space before me waiting; I saw space between the spaces merging and emerging from itself inside itself to split the room in many parts, each as undone as the other, desperate for anything but what it was.

  Days went by in weeks and weeks in days. Some days the days lasted longer than days and lashed themselves to surfaces that colored my face the way a winter would have in the realm of cells and in my face I felt the heat of time rubbing against anything it wasn’t, disrupting the inner knit of even rest. With the base of home as some new center inside the sand I began to patrol the sand for miles ongoing, finding quickly how in relation the light would turn me deaf and blind. There was only so far to go before I could hear and see absolutely nothing but white against me and throughout me. I had to always be looking back to remind myself which direction home was; I used a language dreamed up in myself to count, a series of clicks of tongue and teeth against the gristle of my cheek, pushed through the holes inside my head to blow against the grooves my dying memory escaped into its flesh. I left trails of the language burned into the sand and light without even intending; my very presence wrecking the idea of death itself; among which I could find, each day, a hallway back to the hole I’d drummed up to collapse into and once again black out.

  Each time I ret
urned to the house having seen nothing I would find, grown out from the house I’d left, sets of new rooms. From the further nodes and bulbs of skulls and cages littered in the sand for miles forever, there might appear a stairwell leading into the ceiling, which then days later manifested into a landing filled with doors. Through all the eye of the sky above alone stayed constant, though it was changing; veined with something cracking on the far side as if to match my tread beneath. Some stars might seem to read a word burned out into them, though in a language I could no longer understand. Only in sleep could I begin to fuse my clicking language with the words the sky wanted to say. I could not tell how reciting what they intended altered my vocabulary, the palate catching slowly in new grooves and gristle patches the gums and spittle, adjusting in the arch of the sound I spoke for me alone, my arms around me doing anything they could to keep me from waking, going back into the sand again, for no one.

  Weeks soon went by then in months or things named with sounds that have no syllables to suffer. One second might last a lifetime inside a dry day with the heap of blue air rising from no hole over the remaining fields and fields as yet untraveled though it does not matter and any way I walked in resumed the same. I was awake. I was not awake. I could or could not remember the difference between a bookshelf made from kneecaps and any bed or length of sand expanding, the maps of the universal dead. The house around me was always what it always had been, and yet always felt like nothing else.

  There was the quaking of the word. What the book wasn’t. What I wasn’t. Whereas before outside the home I’d hear no shudder for miles in sand on sand, alone again at home some blue voice appeared buried in the throat behind a wall, spreading underneath my head wherever I would let it. As if the house itself was speaking from a space it only wasn’t, or the house itself was not what I believed. The voice began to fill me through and through me. I knew its way along my lungs and down my legs and near my heart. I recognized the feeling; I was the feeling. Had been. Was not now.

  I closed my eyes and saw only the blood. Blood of the dead I wasn’t and could more and more not tell from anything. In the blood the rooms were there too. Rooms that would not stop being. In sleep I moved into the blood and felt their sound. It wound down in around me, awaking more space in waking day against the frame of what I’d meant to render only mine eternally. Each room was any room that I could call: the room where I’d been born, where who was murdered; each room the same as every one, revolving at no center, never touching. There were so many of us in me. The black I saw was wider than my skull, and spanned enough to wrap the solar system, like an eggshell, side by side among the million other eggs in every load, endless cells silent in all future inside my mouth with lips ripped out of characters burnt raw in the minds of the dead and their last fractions spilled onto a white of pages the maps must become erased against like birth canals in mothers turned to sand, to glass, to now.

  I went into the kitchen to make food and found I’d already eaten every inch before I’m there. The room was slowly slowing.

  There was nothing to renounce. No way to end anything I could imagine being the ending. Where I felt I was a man I had no hands; where I felt I was a woman I had hair all over my body; where I wished to be a child I had no grace. My scream sounded like I remembered feeling eating ice cream or walking in warm sunlight. Everything was just beside itself. The light was alone.

  I continued getting older, but did not age. I was being watched from the inside and nowhere shining. No one was waiting for my mind. I drank the color from the light and felt no terror. I loved the sand for how under any shade of sky it all seemed irreplaceable.

  I still had seen no inch of the new stone.

  I went on doing anything I felt in my own image.

  I mimed to laugh and heard no laughter.

  I tried to make a drum out of my skin.

  I banged the drum for hours.

  No one was singing and our song contained no words.

  I scratched where what I missed less and less felt near me in the darkness.

  I made a crib.

  I made a child inside my mind to fill the crib with.

  I filled the crib with sand.

  I clasped my hands.

  This was how the hours went.

  The ways went on and days did raze against each other.

  I grew my hair.

  The days repeated.

  I said a phrase and it was wind.

  I lived and lived in nothing like silence.

  I turned and turned.

  Nothing was counting what the day was.

  The house continued shrinking.

  Inside my likewise shrinking mind I went to sleep.

  Inside my sleep I walked the same way I had for hours waking.

  I came upon a book.

  I read the book and found it was the same book as this book now.

  In every life.

  The words fell through me like a word will.

  I remembered nothing.

  I was no older.

  I was only alone still.

  Inside the house in veils I hurtled forward in and on, trying to live on full with all absence; I could not hear any voice I understood, no matter how the edges of the space’s language called against my presence; the night went on and house went on around me as a house in the era of man; the days were old. Each life we’d lived was lived again inside me throbbing in all absence and would stay there like this now always.

  I walked on in the color of the world, dragging back what I’d carried with there behind me humming till I’d dragged it so far through the world there was no world remaining to collapse in, or space to clean the image from my being, as in the wake the sand blew there lurked all these diamonds and hexagons of human crystal crushed in the color issued forth. Each color dragged on behind itself too every other color also dragging something there unseen, unlike what death was. Where I was alive now the light all turning pigged-out stroboscopic, to wake the rising melting flooding through the poreholes of our ex-begetters and relics, and therefore us as well—one long last note colored in the smell of walking and this mash of giddy marrow becoming mashed again around my tonsils and longest teeth. It made me hiss from holes I’d never known I had and soon would not again no matter what kind of perfect words were fished out from my ability to recall them beyond any light as all our essence.

  I could hear several hundred hands surrounding in each instant and more so then with every knowing. Sand rolled limbs around my face’s blank—sand in no color I’d imagined, like the veils of smoke I slowly remembered from before, from worlds of tape not like this present moment, but no less false. The sand was inside me. The smoke was inside us mirrored. The air thugged thick, ticking no dream’s remainder away. There was nothing burning down. No matter where I went in any blackness I could not find the hallway to the integral rooms of what had felt like my own life in this world. The pillows of the darkness made each room each time I saw them seem to stretch more and more toward forever. Each time I thought or said a word aloud or tried to inhale, the caving in me emerged more. It was grinding in me. It was always.

  I crawled along the floor, whatever a floor was. Inside the rising volume of my mind I slapped on hands and knees among the slick of surfaces between the earth and every body the air had made to keep us framed in; the sand beneath it swishing, as if being sucked into a hole, as if underneath the floor the only thing keeping the rest of the world from sucking in around me and you and everybody with it into some screaming hole focused from all the endless in what had been. My clothes seemed searing, knitting tighter, like every surface of my home, which in its latest alterations had become so close against me there was nearly nowhere left to move. I felt the walls where everything was not, no matter what I wanted. It was easier then to move without thinking where to go, though still the choking and croaking of my body, the unbelievable breadth of everything else. The shapeless sound coming from my mouth was feeding right back up into my nostrils,
feeding my face full, covering over every memory again with the new deformation of what hours did, overwriting every idea of itself, every inch of anyone but me in me.

  In me, then, the house could grow no smaller. I found it fit exactly with my mind. I’d become surrounded wholly by the same shade, the color of no color, all directions.

  The color opened.

  It was an eye.

  Any eye.

  The white of the light of the eye inside it was brighter than the house had ever been, wider than sky was, than my memory. Even thin as the film over the eye’s white seemed to be from far away, it held more edges than I could count; it held a past that hadn’t happened yet; it had always been in the house before there was a house; it gave the room around me its dimension; it had appeared in every age; it had observed every action; the eye of anything but now, of anyone but no one.

  Against the color of the eye I could not see the walls or what beside them; I could not remember how I’d made way here through any other sort of being, outside the way I’d always come before to every present instant always again; though on the air there was the itch of something older bloating; colors like ions; sound like glass filling the air. There was no reason this hour should have been any different than all the other years of any life, and yet here the eye was, all surrounding.