Three Hundred Million: A Novel

by Blake Butler

  and though I recognized the shape I did not know now what it wanted, until in the space behind what had once been all our faces I heard something curved free beyond music, at once close and clean larger than all sound, a voice not like any voice of us, but risen from us like a bruise meant soon to heal

  I am the mark of the sun of your old world. I have been burning and repeating in what you have known as sky for all of the time you can remember. Each time I appeared I was both a warning and a blessing, neither of which you took to heart. The machines carried my mark as a signal of their recording, their capture of you, their desire of you, of which you were neglectful. You were mystified by your own image. You made copies of your mind and wished them filling up the world in everything you weren’t. Quickly there was nothing left to have alone or remain free from. The world around us was made hollowed, filled with holes through which nothing could appear. It ate and etched through all the faces, each like yours in that in the dark it couldn’t tell itself from any. I grew and flourished in the gap behind these faces now ignited. I filled the faces with everything they weren’t. Sleep grew smaller, and all imagination with them, every impossible fantasy made real in a space inaccessible to understanding. Soon you won’t remember me from you. You will be absorbed wholly into the rivers of the blood of all of man, in my image, behind the faces all at last diminished by their void. But I am only the beginning.

  As the sound struck it took off with it the idea I’d ever heard it, as if once defined a thing could not continue owning any mind. In the white now sound was shapes and shapes were colors. The terrain was full of nowhere growing brighter until it became indistinguishable as on the sky the seething ended and nothing began. I was only me as much as I was any other. Each point in my mind touched every other part of else, all time contained outside its outline. Soon it was so loud and bright it seemed there was no seeing there at all, no grace between what was now and what had been for what or who.

  Under my lids the words trapped in my flesh behind my head gasped deeply, as what I was pulsed to remember remembering how it had felt as flesh to see. There was nothing left of what I’d used of me to create understanding, and instead, in its place, a space beyond the necessity of word. And though holding too long with my senses not receiving hurt as much as having felt anything else in any life, I would not let them interrupt the shift, as I knew the next time that I looked all would be incinerated into nothing like anything matching all the black I’d carried in my face or there beyond. I knew I was not ready to relent yet; I’d never been ready, not for anything ever; and the burning knew and knew I knew it knew; and the burning ate my fear as I produced it, knowing no feeling, and I heard

  and once again inside the white I heard the voiceless symbol of us speak

  I am the mark of the earth. I am all friction, dust, and darkness. I have been pressed whole against the sky endlessly and powerlessly for ages long before you and your bodies began to fill my interior with rot. Your speech has clogged my breath and wiped me senseless. The darkness rose along inside my jaw. I wanted to speak as you did and could find no language like that. I wanted to fuck like you and could find no genitals besides the ones you were already all over. Days passed, decades passed; they felt the same, as through all my innards as the holes rose I could feel the other worlds awaiting you. I knew that you would leave me like a rape victim in the dust and go on into somewhere I could not follow. For this I both admired and despised every instant we shared. For this I will continue to chew your bones until I have no flesh left. It will be an act of love; perhaps one greater than any act you would have named the same when in my presence.

  Put to words again what had once been ours fell away. When I looked up the sky was colorless here, and the ground was even more pale, and the space between the two seemed to be squirting out the sides of what it wasn’t, while at the same time being fed back into itself, all matter lifting from the laws of motion no longer carried. Light from the fire seemed to pass straight through my skin lighting the space free. The shape of my idea of me inside my mind was becoming folded flat in half, like someone had picked up a piece of paper and folded it in half more times than its surface area allowed, where on the outside of the paper folded in this manner there would then be other sides of each, both actually the same surface impossibly, and on all layers written with an unreadable dark text, sometimes bleeding through and through onto each other layer depending on the light, and where in folding, the text would be clapped off from itself on either side, forced so close to one another they could not often tell that they were there except for how sometimes there might seem something haunted hovering always just beside it. Anywhere I tried to speak or think into the presence of the glowing erased itself, or became eaten up into the colorlessness’s face and building with the heat there to gift the sky with veils, and the longer that I looked into it the space remaining in me seemed to divide, split as through two eyes held two shapes in doubled image, though sometimes the shapes were different from each other, constantly shifting where the left image from one perspective might be shorter, denser, oblong while the right side stretched so high and thin it had nowhere remaining.

  I felt encased in all the air around me what felt like millions of sets of hands reaching up from earth or down from above, gripping and grabbing at me; I was hovering then just above the lip of ground, while also rising again somewhere high above the low bend of sod, each of the remaining perspectives in my brain splitting off themselves into seven and seven and seven forever until the sight turned see-through both in my brain and in the idea of the world, revealing whole sheaths of the structure hidden from the eye among the ungluing of our nature, while through other spans the space inside me remained impenetrable and all one level. These two conditions grinded at each other back and forth, so that for certain lengths the vertical hold on my perspective might snap and allow the monument of space inside me around which I felt us centered grow engorged in endless motion, dragging along behind it the other dimensions of my body stretched beyond their natural confines. The depth of field on what seemed the whole world now would shit out also and thereby pull the space in endless iteration across the flat line of the air, smoothing out across the atmosphere a whole long wall, marring all possible consequence.

  Tremor in the holding of the color and the scream of anticipation of the next returning broke me by turns through various ill remainders of historical sickness, mine or theirs. With every lick of stinging light I remembered every human pain, though could not remember who had been the bearer. Each of these feelings forced to fit into the image as the fire well beyond me burned beyond me across the disappearing flesh of all, tracing new skin across the earth itself and curling around me with blazing edges, where in the rising through it and into it I heard

  I am the mark of communication. I was in the shape of every word, and had been when the words were spoken long before you, and before them. In each word I did all I could to balance what forms of meaning could be captured in repetition, in tongues and wires. I refused to be actually revealed, instead always lingering just far enough beyond the edge of anywhere to be accepted or refused. In my sleep, I felt my perimeters shifting, multiplying or dividing, melting, being bent. I knew the worlds from which the meanings of words had been borrowed wanted me destroyed, and knew well you would destroy me. And yet you clung: you held on even up until the last instants of your flesh to keep me in you, even as my layers poisoned our mind and memory. At last I was the shaft through which the virus of you could be permitted to allow you enough ruin to at last bend the window held between us so far over it finally had nowhere else to go. In your absence, I will continue. I will rub my hands and hope to birth something one day mine, though every time I try to fornicate with something like me it begins to hail so hard I can’t see. The hail will be the only relic I use to remember you and everything you thought you wished by.

  And now the sky inside my head was silver and ground was gray. I knew the speaking wound
s could mime any of our voices as they grew negated in all minds; they had watched us in our entertainment; their malformation had been written in our flesh, masked in the ark of every hour we’d been forced into these bodies, carved free now of our blood: names of corporations; names of days and books spanning the bedroom and the den and rooms apart; names of places and fleshless surfaces of persons, their creations. Even crushed up against the rush of burning all around me, it was impossible to say if the negating would ever end, as through my mind’s widening cavity scrolled bright names upon the flesh of the large surrounded burning space gleaming like little windows held in houses burning too, where as each name burnt itself off of wherever it had come from there was a marring left behind; a blot not disappeared but caved behind itself, a remembrance measured just offscreen inside the floods inside me being dragged beyond their form, sharing the same air as the dry face of the blazing growing larger on all existence, all of its crackling like tongues in tongues of nothing.

  Inside my head then I saw a larger head combining in from what was not: a head like I remembered of my reflection, but refined in all its dimensions, sharper and wider in all features, speaking the fire of the altar. I saw the head had silver eyes, in each eye more eyes than I could ever count, and each inscribed with white wounds unlike any we’d healed. As I read the silence of the bruises, the skin around the air turned silver to match the head around us both, melting slick into our sockets and spreading through me like an acid. The head was desperate to evict the language from my body where it’d hidden clustered in bumps against the index of my cerebrum screaming; it wanted my last rite for itself; and again I felt the space inside me crushing down on my memory, my faith, and as the hole of my speech became pushed open in the pressure it began moaning as in the throes of contextless human anguish. I tried to remember how to chant the prayers I’d bore through days in rhythm with the burning, to claw them hard into the burning world by making of them now a dream to be remembered, though each time I felt me moan the shape of what had been language again outside my head I felt them emerging only more deformed, disguising themselves to keep the pinlike eyes of the head inside my head out of their meaning, and preserve the words as near to what they’d meant to be forever to what they were being altered into. Each syllable begged in the same voice for my eternal attention; they begged me not to leave them, never to leave anything, not to let them here again be killed as had the voices of the people in me begged once, their bodies bowed and pounding, stacked up and on fire both inside and outside my surface, and in the begging I heard

  I am the mark of pain. Where you thought you wore flesh through your whole life I was your body. The ground is covered in me now. In your absence I rub and hump against the ground if only to remind it of your name over and over. I am your name, only a relic. Nothing of you for this world will remain. I will wear the color of the dark skin around your asshole in my dreams as a hood over the face of all the animals left to colonize any relic of your life. The water of the world flows through my eyes. It wraps around what your fantasies designed as other planets. The sky fills with me and pours upon me. I masturbate in my own absence. What I ejaculate will become the most beautiful child any kind of history has seen. It will rise again in the battlefields and bottoms of oceans with a new crop of heathen to slosh around this ship with, driving me wild with ecstasy in want of only more of me. I do not require your cooperation to live forever already in the outfit of your childhood, actually eternal in the way you always thought you were, though what I sing is all mine.

  And so our pain had disappeared then, replaced with new pain, where for what it was now there was no analog. No color clasped close enough to be believed in human language. Inside this rising smoke I heard your roar. Even among the many millions of whatever I could make you out. It was any of you. You were begging to be held, you were calling the names of those you spent your life beside in small rooms waiting, though now their names were also any word, and so the speech came flooding from you, and you did not know, and you were frightened.

  Your voice was mine. All these voices as they knitted filled my body and held on to it, and it hurt. Why did it have to hurt, I asked, and so it didn’t. All I could see now even inside me was the color of the razing in the space folding again in barfing orbs of stolen air from its black lungs to feed the surroundings a humming coat. It hurt because it is what happened, because I remember not having in my sleep and in my being stacked the bodies here so high, piling their skin on skin here on the center of where our experience had once been, some minor point on which to begin the baking where the dead knew and gathered into packs, where they held their place as they’d been settled skull to skull in silent waiting to be ended all apart, lids and laps and asses, bones and nails and hair, faces and napes and drapes of desiccated blood. It hurt because the vision of the burning cut me harder than the seeing before had before.

  The burning hovered in the bump snug all around anything. It was so near it was no longer near enough. Inside my space a child was singing. I was screaming. In the smoking fields beyond me there were veins strummed with countless ridges pulsating at the crust of black with milk or something pumping fat beneath me. It felt so hard to look into the smoke for too long that it was hard to do anything beyond and hard to remember why or which way else I’d ever seen something else not so seizing to look into, where there was nothing else to see but that. How hard it was to see out there even with the intuition knowing not seeing burned the vision even more, our bodies squirting through and through themselves at distances profane to bring the destroyed flesh of anyone’s own most believed back underneath us all as if no time had even passed; as if the burning could have lasted an eternity if we had had enough flesh to fuel it, if we had found a way to copulate in flames, and yet the flames were being already forgotten in the instant they began, in the order of the names and ways of you and me unending impacted rolled up bitten through and teased at with white lightning rods of organs in the body of us kissed like cameras in our guts projecting spools and spools of years and years clasped into one shape constantly shaking.

  Imagine trying not to die, no one was saying; imagine trying not to want to die for any hour ever in the presence of the fire you only see when you can’t see, dressed in blood on the flesh napkin of the flue of you eternal from you in the holes you’ve made with fingernails and swords and teeth of wars, lathered in shitstorms above the cusped crease of the sky under the heavens buried with the blood we were not and are now and are and were and will be born and burned again on frames and frames of days and days of buried cities scourged in fertile artworks, priceless weapons, dead fields watched by planes, glow-killed photos of your body you have never seen clasped in the fleshy flats and houses of those who have managed in their imagination of trying not to die to actually survive so long they couldn’t even recognize themselves as they were dying, bringing all those they had touched to death inside them too, nothing to miss, and again inside the light I could feel the burning turning me open in slow seasons, and inside my head inside my chest I heard every other living word spoke all at once, and I heard

  I am the mark of both prosperity and destruction, the eye of god. I ride in the skin behind the hole in you and in your dreamlife like opposing magnets. I take in what will be done and put out what is done as a result of the doing. I am food and I am shit. I can never see myself; can never feel myself there. I have no body, even having laced myself in yours so long. It is the nature of the pleasure of me and the terror of me at once that makes your flesh the fundament by which what is beyond you can be risen. I could have risen alone. I chose to be gifted through simultaneous experience and erasure, which made you come to hate me, and which you took out on your companions, the living walls of your last life. Through the thread of me alone can your memory be enclosed and carried forth into the brain of the god for whom I spin and itch, and from which, in the new seal of which, you will wake the veinwork of your future.

  There without us I
was both not nothing and part of nothing, like any single one of the finite undone every absence touched. Whereas now inside the smoke as it struck through us I felt the night turning around, a folding on the edge above us that had held the sky in and the sky out beyond all hour. I began to feel that no matter who I was I could appear as anyone at any reason, through any house in any spell, and what I needed there in any of them was simply you, whoever you are, the voice among me that was not me speaking and who I had never touched but knew like I knew the raging as it erased me. To want anything after all this felt profane, to lift some arm and rap against the waiting digit which as it waited changed its shape again, its coals on coals, all old flame licking at the sky. Even in feeling the desire for anything my vision even only of all the white alone seemed about to shatter, its shade sweating and evaporating in instant cycle, taking my remaining memory of water with it, feeding the heat. As on the landscape where my sight remained our gathered vision began shrinking, the smoke all knitted down around us like a narrowing viewfinder in a camera fitted to my face, the layers on layers of the fire so clogged with smolder it again seemed to fall into itself. The frame was electric just above me. The sky clasped buried. What space remained between each point of the burning resembled two-way mirrors showing no reflection of anything visible. The bloating smoke ate around itself in hypercolor shooting backwards in the dark cream, and I couldn’t keep myself from asking in all our voices how much ash had been in this land, how much more there was now, how many more nows could ever act like anything that’d come before them.