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

going to leave and tell someone and didn’t and and and and. It could go on like that forever. Then one night Gravey saw me standing in the hall. He saw the weird light in my face and how I was frightened and the color in me and he took me by the hands and squeezed until I thought my skin was going to pop and he said, A human’s screaming is eternal music , and he punched me in the face so hard I didn’t fall but always from that point forward felt like I was falling and my body was the hole and Gravey was the space the hole was wrapped around forever and I would never land and never stop. All else after that was so easy, and totally awesome.”
     

 
     
     
     
    The first mother the boys brought to me wore blue slacks and a neck brace. They’d found her in the same school area I had come from though I could not remember then; even just the name of the school crusted a white foam against the inner tube of my spirit, then disappeared. Her head’s lips were painted purple. She had white shoes turned darker by the mud. I asked her her name. She said a word of breathing. She did not appear upset. No, I said, your name is Darrel. She looked at me not with her eyes. A small ridge of fatter flesh pounded electric above her eyebrow, pulsing out a beat I would use to write the bass line to a song that did not exist. I told the boys to take the mother in the bathroom and clean the disease from her hands to prepare the entrance. I had them fill her mouth with pills and gave her water. I blessed the water in her mouth and watched some of it work down the chamber laid in her neck on through her chest. Some spat back up on her yellow shirt and formed a pattern. I locked her in the smallest mirrored room and told the Darrels to take turns waking her organs. Through the walls for hours after you could hear her squealing at the roof, the rafters of the house rising from what the boys or her together made unmade. I waited in great patience raw with itching. Then when Darrel said we’d broke the lip of her private ocean inside her, I pulled the boys away and let her lie. An unnamed range of time required passage. At night, locked in alone, she lip-synched words to a song again I would not write, but would hear forever in my head rendered in bumps naming the word all there among her while in my own body I made paste till I was ready and I could feel in me the blooming moons. In the false silence of the house encasing darkness alone I entered the locked room after all the others had gone down where I could no longer feel them. I found the girl’s body on the bed with mouth wide open in a neon light from a glowing Timex. The watch’s face said the time in zeroes: never set, or reset since entering the house, or struck by current, or any of the hidden ways time is deformed. Her head faced away from where I stood, its reflection corroborated in the mirror parallel, and again at oblong angle from above and below on either end. The folds of her in such light formed a town: a mass of others smoothed into her in snowbanks of pale skin. I moved to flatten myself beside her. I flanked her central image with the mirror to cause twins. Up close I could see me better in the mirror. I seemed ugly. The hair curled from my lengths of extra face. Black rouge where I had applied none. Cysts surrounded both my eyes in tiny white pills, all of them cursing. My age today contained the number nine. The boys were watching through the walls. I don’t know who all inside the house was asleep, or where they slept when they were sleeping. I brought myself to tower above the female figure. I felt her skeleton under my erection. I made her trace a square across her forehead. I called her Darrel. She didn’t answer. I called her Joyce. I called her Margaret and Dallas. I called her any name of any woman I could remember. With each name I felt new cysts rise in my brain, working hard to tunnel fast to join my appearance. I brought my meat into her vision. She was