Three Hundred Million: A Novel (58 page)

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.

On the far wall is a mirror. It is the same mirror I remember my wife brought into our marriage, inherited from her mother, which had hung on the wall across from our shared bed all our nights.

The mirror has no frame. Where the edges of the reflection end, the walls begin.

I close my eyes and touch the mirror.

The door inside the mirror is not locked.

The door leads out into the front yard where I find the sun is out and sky is pale. The trees are reaching out with arms I never knew. The house is whatever color I remember it having, which is no color.

There are no dead behind my eyes. No bells or hymns for the dead along the heavens.

The ground is soft. Or what seems like the ground is soft. Or what beneath it. Or all of what I am. And I am laughing. And what is laughter.

The light seems to close in and on down, blurred with its luster.

It is a quiet day.

I do not remember walking from the light.

I do not remember the shape of the world around me falling out around me and the warm grade of where I had fallen there into the wake of what I’d been as someone wider in a space beyond destroyed. There was some glass then there was something not glass then there became a different kind of texture altogether.

I do not feel where the wreck of what had been absorbed clings around whoever had been quaking, forming the aging of our skin: the cut of it collecting in one stride to sing a surface, and the paper, and the dust. Where no fire laps, the field turns over, and turns over, and there it is.

It is, regardless of what remains here or does not remain here. Something yearns, the way the mass of my body grows gold with old nameless layers. The space clocked between the lost organism of all our years in its own absence becomes more firm, and firming fast again against itself again and through itself again, squashing the pockets held in shelves among their collision. The air condensing what it is with what it has been and where it hopes to be again and who will let it.

Who is who to remember anything about any of us; each instant clicking in its own mind with each around it in no word; the body of anybody and all regardless glowing obese with old intention, with the want the words could not hold down, what desire could not beat the sense out of so eyes could see it in our houses, and so grew on babbling up in packets like a flagellum in all our fantasies combined. The gift of births born burst and eaten up wedged into cement or buried wide open on some paper, or vibrated brief through singing sacs; tapes untaped and white residing in the action slaughtered in a wake of all the music slaved by music.

Endlessly blood funnels through the years all nonexistent. I remember not to bear in mind the slurring rooms where we had been in crush; where the years were not here in the world; where I could see ahead a growing light wanting some little inch to rise upon; where I hear me let me know inside me where I was before I showed up here; and so I am late for my own presence, caught where my hair comes growing where the glass inside the house around the maze of making turns against what would have been my wishes; until at last I came aware inside me in my skin of an indention in the ageless perforation, some presence not a wall or air but nothing. I feel with my fingers there cursor shaped up like I am, of no era, ending any other instance all instantaneous, hitting hot and turning hard and strumming shut against my pretend sternum thick as what a dog is where he learns commands. Strobes of wakeless sound in which he learns to love the owner, needing no reason.

Inside the sound I am confounded in the history of any gesture. Against the silence of the graph of evening I knock hard with both hands this time against the absence of us again, where when I feel it touch against the space of any of me in the instant I feel my formation wanting bursting through the instant, my lengths inside me needing permission to separate from the memory of our bones deflecting light.

In you I know I knew I needed, I remember, though I cannot remember who I mean by you or I. I know I knew I needed the wash of sound to color through my gut, needed the blood of all our damage flooding from endpoints of my fingers and the cells around my head, where each time I blinked or asked to quit the hour my skin awoke and burned me so thick I could not stand, though I could float, and the pain made me come so hard I sprayed my face and could no longer remember who I was or what pleasure had brought me here again.

Here when I press my head against the voice here there comes the sound of my skin becoming ripped apart, the chime of convalescing mechanisms rubbing their frames against the land and when I pull back my mind at long last from its own intrusion, I found I had lived out in one instant every life. I found along my arms my hands were open, and on my palms vast sores all healed full over, and our blood had fit all back into me, and I knew at last which way was ours; and so inside the house I rose and walked again, and went unto the want again and forgot the voiceless voice there like I had all else. I went on through what I’d wished and wanted until the beginning of this same impression came again, finding again inside the shrieking prisms of night no one to sleep and wake with, and no one to poke or fist a hole though, slick in my skin to let the mass out again when I was full of all this air.

Then just as quickly this again was over. No idea at all about forever in this instance of us but the house made of more floor and floor made to begin again at every measure. What had just happened had just happened and was not yet set for happening the next, though I knew it would or knew it would not and knew I would not remember either way, and so could never at all tell, and either way was gone as ever and as always.

When where what now I am again. So sized there is no sun and not a longing. No lap of tongue where blubber fills the space of action named unmade, the pillow of a rind around a fissure. Each instant clapped as old fat gathered through its mirror-instants strung with our skinned knees and all our teeth, the space burnt out alive inside its last remaining color, pulled through its own center like a dot. All through the abused membranes of finite years in popping intersections of transitory ornaments, beyond soil or water, blood or bone. Each inch where we had unwound at last locking full into whatever could not be. Each syllable and pixel past repeating where it wore against us on every tongue as bright as light beyond mirage, over the whole blank of whose conception, breadth filling up what it could not.

I remember that the light here is and was the only thing not missing. It is and was an old glow, opened and curving without core, alive there where it is and only there. Above me and above you, prismatic rooms where absent bodies lay and lavished prostrate upon the whitened tables of countless sheeted altars hardened with the sweat of uttered worlds turned back and in against themselves, absent of age. Death hid and hidden in the shape and strobed so deep enough it could not etch the lungs of any recollection, and yet still must and never would, could not but never become gathered in the make along our flat gyrating ancient fate. We in laughing dens where any of us all lay chained and fat as old kids, awaiting freedom, no, not that word; awaiting a simple lick of trance to swim in with the smoke shattered from our eye, the single singing glassy eye of eyes so small and so surrounded by more film than sight could hold together in any all, throughout the exploded light of our conception, where the end is what we are.

BLAKE BUTLER
is the author of five books of fiction, including
There Is No Year
and
Scorch Atlas
; a work of hybrid nonfiction,
Nothing: A Portrait of Insomnia
; and two collaborative works,
Anatomy Courses
with Sean Kilpatrick and
One
with Vanessa Place and Christopher Higgs. He is the founding editor of
HTMLGIANT
, “the Internet literature magazine blog of the future,” and maintains a weekly column covering literary art and fast food for
Vice
magazine. His other work has appeared widely, including in
The Believer
, the
New York Times
,
Fence
,
Dazed and Confused
, and
The Best Bizarro Fiction of the Decade
. He lives in Atlanta.

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FICTION

Sky Saw

There Is No Year

Scorch Atlas

Ever

NONFICTION

Nothing: A Portrait of Insomnia

THREE HUNDRED MILLION
. Copyright © 2014 by Blake Butler. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

FIRST EDITION

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.

ISBN 978-0-06-227185-3

EPub Edition October 2014 ISBN 9780062271860

14 15 16 17 18   
OV
/
RRD
   10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

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