Three Hundred Million: A Novel by Blake Butler Page B

Country, which is our world. We felt nothing beyond whatever natural border in our minds existed. This was painless to abuse; in passage it became true of every house surrounding: a nation of no father while the mother waits to die: the true nature of adultery. In the house becoming ours the mother wore her whitest gown. She appeared before we even found her. Her name was all over everything, in the sound of her sexlife and want for future, food in the fridge waiting to become more of her. The house clearly wanted her dead, too; it wanted to eat the food itself, to live for itself alone, to be itself and no one’s box; its cells were taking shape in full cooperation for the translation we would provide for what desperately everyday hope she’d tried to smush into the home’s walls to refortify what was not there. Everything had already happened and yet I had to play the part as had been promised. I walked along the long hall lined with pictures of the mother in different bodies than she had now and could never have again, alongside what other bodies the mother had met in nearby rooms and made time with, alongside the kids she’d pushed out of her hole, each of them as well in bodies that no longer fit them. I could hear the mother quiver through the house’s circuits, burning like star meat. She had a few more thoughts to think through unto the becoming zero. Her god was off duty tonight, somewhere like Disney. My teeth were greasy with intent to do exactly what I was doing. I had a boner and a cough. I heard Darrel in me getting stoned on our blood bowling open like locked darkrooms, black cabinets full of speaker coils. I was so ready to be. The smoke raised through my shoulder blades and made me scream in places where my own cells were turning square-shaped like STOP symbols on VCRs. I stopped along the wall and groaned our song some out of my mouth, holding my breath. I could hear this mother on the far side of the drywall. She was reading romance. I pressed my palm flat on the paint and said each word aloud as it crossed across her eye. She looked up at where I wasn’t yet. This turned me imminently blacker with the fury. The grain of the glass made reflective over the pictures shifting past from each new angle showed secret films of every hour in the house as this family had lived it, filled with great pus and totally false senses of inhibition. It was in me too, so it was in her. It was in the babies we had not had yet and for whom the future had to end. The house’s present children were asleep, dreaming of tunnels. Along the hall as if to match this vision in reverse my boys come coasting forward with the mother borne between them in another Christ pose. They’d given her a pretend choice between sex and death and she’d said nothing. They covered her mouth so the song would come out of her nostrils. I raised my arms and said Hello, pointing in every direction I could think of. Her head shook swoopy with her looking as she followed me with her face trying to understand anything. The book she’d read tonight had made her dreamlike. I had a new book. I bent down and said Hello again. She had another belly on her, someone else’s trimester. Her curvature was silly and elaborate. It kept begging me to kiss it. As I did, I heard her other children in the bedroom getting snuffed inside their dreams as one word from my lips sent through the wires in their new brother sent wide black swords into their sleep, and then their sleep went on forever. Each of their last cries was better entertainment than anything I’d ever rented. I moved to press my own belly against the mother’s so we’d match, my own gut full of the rite of fast food, hers the pustule of the future baby and diet shakes. My laughing gave her a massage until she was warm enough to pry apart in all the places her creator had designed for me to do so. I used my fists first, then my forehead, then my teeth, and then my eyes. I used the edge of her own