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

derivation, though what they played stayed the same each night. Our cold machines captured the image and the sound, erasing what had been previously recorded by anyone ever. Each night behind our closed eyes the fire raged again. I loved each of the new boys in his own way, and I said so. I told him each what I believed about us for us and would give to him with all of me each time I could get my body going good and in the best ways. I taught them how precisely to explode and still exist.
     

 
     
     
     
    People from films began to appear inside the house beyond their replications. Their images were struggling to preserve the tradition of entertainment against my anti-comedy. From films I could remember and not remember I saw bodies I had seen on cartridges and in small apartments or rented warehouses and false velvet-lined screening booths at length materialize in piggish light and go on walking around the house in suits or without clothing. Their tattoos would reflect in the mirrors and try to remind my skeleton how I had lived among them as a witness, fondled their blowholes in my dreams. Men with necklaces made of a gold so false it made another light inside the light bend over. Men with no testicles and huge breasts. These were images my human mind had been trying to hide from my own spirit. I had to learn to shake them out, to kill the image of them as carried in me the same I would kill everybody else. One night I saw a man I’d seen at least in seven strong productions sit down behind my drum set and try to play with perfect limb independence. I punched him in the throat. He fell on the floor and coughed up language. He threatened me by god. He was worth billions and still as easily a phantom I could transmute through. I laughed at the word of his god splayed against me in my house of mirrors. I licked my thumb and pressed him dead in the fontanel. Though he continued to walk thereafter he was no one there again. His career went to commercials, then to appearing in newspapers catching men’s room promises and ruin. In each new image he now looked exactly like me, as he had always, though only in his mental death did I see how. I couldn’t even remember who he was in any other name from that point forward. It was so simple then to repeat this process against every other media, and with each my size grew more. Time grew shorter in between all of my people. It had been two days inside my mind since I was me last, though now I was more me than I was then. In the human air that moved in dog years we were older now already and so many of us had planned to grow fat only in the face. The boys in the house that I called boys had never been boys at all inside their lives, and were now even less boys and more just mobile walls around us bloating inward at the same rate, making the nearby houses horny with their friction. America had needs they did not know they had and we would show them how to know. We stacked more mirrors on top of the mirrors. The rooms got smaller. Something in me bent and I fell sick. We took the mirrors down but I still could then hear Darrel only under a trough of greater trembling that grew thicker the more I wished it out. I felt the curling in me trying to uncurl more where I uncurled it. I heard the dogs where their eggs had lain and my blood crushed them but this took power. We needed to begin to begin before this sickness thickened. There were so many possible mistakes. I asked Darrel what to do and in the throbvoice, in time in silence with the band, he told me that to begin I’d need to tell the boys to bring to us inside the mirror house a newer mother, made in my mother’s name to be renamed as Him, amen.
     
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    A. F. F. , age 18: “He said it didn’t matter what she looked like as long as she was American and everyday. He said all of them were mothers and all of them were His. He said we’d know, or if we didn’t know we would be led to her by just doing whatever. I didn’t want