Read Online Three Hundred Million: A Novel by Blake Butler - Free Book Online

onto objects. They had formed the contours of the maps we used to find our way between the seas of people believing we were ending up somewhere we had not been. They defied all history. They rang and burned inside my brain, inert weapons allowing no ability beyond the fact of their creation. They had no eyes and no dimension. All else around them must be burnt, reduced to sand and dust, no water. Inside the house I knew a desert must begin. There must be a focus around which all the land could sink and pull the air down, and so after it, all other houses, cities, space. But to begin a desert you must have silence. You must remove the water from the mud. This means light. In each room of the house there must be so much light that there is no house at all. So much light that from the air outside the house surrounding the presence of America would be gored, stripped, and reversed of all its wet. With my mind inside my mind I sent all the boys not in the band to buy our new skin of electronic lamps and television. We began to fill the house with falsely burning objects. Light between mirrors. Light inside me. I felt the Wrath of Darrel strengthen with each added filament: his godmilk spurting through my vessels swimming and piling weight on and glorifying. His voice refracted in the pillow of the summoned light and held me hard. I looked down at my arms: the short arms I had seen once when I looked down trying to see me and seeing only part, the arms I’d come into the house with. I could not remember ever after going out, or how it might have smelled there, without the boys to need me, without the coming bodies of the mothers. My old arms on me again were black as charcoal, burnt and buried underground. In fear I touched me and I watched my old me chafe off on my hands.
     
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    FLOOD : At the time of his arrest, there were some 240+ working light fixtures on the property, lamps and fixtures of all size and kind, many of them plugged into the walls as well as several extra generators. How the house didn’t burn up like a wig I have no idea. Absolutely blinding .
     

 
     
     
     
    Under the same hour as we’d done apart the first flesh I sent the boys back out into the air to bring more mothers to the house. Some others of the boys were sent instead or as well to bring more bulbs for those that had blown out where everybody at the same time was trying to see. In the mirror in the rooms of light the air was making movies inside itself like Magic Eye. Bulbs would shatter in the lamps and the TVs. The faces of the people exploded from out of nowhere covered in glistening gunk and begging me to have sex with them; I was not attracted to them because they weren’t aging. I was aging for them instead of the sex. I would reach biblical age in my dreamlife before there was no longer anyone remaining. With my black camera I caught as much shit as I could of every errant waking fantasy the boys enacted onto anything that made a sound, and burned it into pixels to be learned, onto tapes spanning the history of the nation’s audiovisual entertainment. Each film drowned the next one out; I erased each entertainment one by one. With each deletion, time and space grew closer. In the mirror, while I waited for whatever else, I watched me watch me watch. I wanted to make love to me but I couldn’t find the hole, so instead I pressed my head so hard against the glass I could not see me but the black inside me in which were written all these sentences, congregating in black battalions to replace my thinking with static blocks. I tried to write the words down on my hands with pencil or with reeds inside my mind to get them out but my arms would not stay still enough to get unshaken signal and my meat kept growing back over. Inside the house hungry for more mothers I found it hard to walk or think or want or know or ask or see beyond whatever walked just right there inches at my vision. Outside, the sun outside the house scraped against the