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

to do it but several of the others were so incensed and ready by now to do almost anything Darrel asked that he didn’t have to ask more than once. Mostly it was the new ones. I was recognizing less and less the faces of the people around me each day when I woke up. Yeah, some might have been famous before but no one gave a shit about legends. It was all changing way too fast. I tried to leave that night after he started talking about the woman. I went right out the front door. No one tried to stop me. I walked and walked and the further I walked from the house the harder it was to breathe. I mean about like halfway down the block I was gasping and turning blue in the face, like I was in outer space. I went back and felt fine. The next day when a small group of us got ready to go and find the woman to take off the street I put my clothes on the same way and I got up and went without saying anything. I had no trouble breathing at all. In fact I couldn’t stop laughing.”
     

 
     
     
     
    No. Not amen yet. I didn’t want to. Behind my lids inside the mirrored room my mother’s head wore the bruises of where I’d lived. The blood poured from her eyes through slim cylinders in curlicue over the back side of her skull and out around her ears forming a helmet. Her breath condensed on no clear surface. She wanted to keep me. The face she was had become deformed from the gears and brakes and where she’d screamed into them trying to stop the cells coming apart, where she’d sang the song she’d sang at me in smallest hours trying to reverse in me the urge the blood of me had made. Though she was all these other mothers also. Where had I been, she asked; when would I come home; why was I fraught in this wishless virus while in all the other houses the babies grew into their own versions of the women and the men, deserving life. I knew her image was not memory, not even desire, but my own native resistance to simple faith. That I cared so much for anyone ever invigorated my ability to want more for everything surrounding all. Through the floor I felt the many floors: other layers to the house where other rooms were with others stacked in deep refraction, none of which I could reach. There would need to be another way to descend into the inevitability. These rooms, too, would lead beneath America into the other houses in the night. If I could find my way into the center of the mirrored house of our human network I could access any home for all it was, then we could replicate our kill. The bodies of the boys were the beginning. I could smell the teeth inside their balls having sex lessons with themselves. More would soon commence to fill His motion’s promise. Through the walls I heard the band not playing and it was louder still than all. My mother’s head spun around above me and showed me the face she’d always hid behind her head throughout my years beside her, one shaped like mine exactly. And yet my face was only one of several thousand faces that she’d carried in the corridors of eggs and sperm she lived with, from which I had been selected like an emotion on the way out. These were my people; cells in my best image; my negation and deletion. In seeing them, I named them, and they began to spurt. She leaned with her whole life to kiss me. I was awake again and so was Darrel, the most awake we’d ever been. I walked through the kitchen over the piles of sleeping or prone pleased bodies to pretend I could see out through the mirror over the window to the flat backyard. In the yard the flies had not arrived, but they were coming. I could not hear them because I wanted their cock so bad that I became them.
     
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    Name withheld : “I was confused about it and I didn’t know about it and I didn’t want to and I knew that I should leave and I knew that it was wrong and I wanted to stop them and I thought I could try to stop them and I wanted to and I was going to and then I didn’t and then I didn’t and was