Free Three Hundred Million: A Novel by Blake Butler

self’s skin a new history he would remember when he woke up some day. We. I would wake him up when when made when. The house was gold. I looked and saw where for both our twin mothers too late I’d made twin husbands of my friends of selves, my mashing hours. The other boys before me bowed. Their knees were purple like a machete in the mouth of a horse I’d loved and kissed and cannot remember now but for how one day he’d simply disappeared into my blood.
     

 
     
     
     
    You. You taking my words from me. I wish that I could find and lie beside you in the room where you have been preparing for this sentence your whole life, so that as you take it in I could press my scourging dick against your forehead, correct a red impression on the center of the skin between your eyes so that those who pass you hereon will know you’ve taken part of something from which now there is no exit. What you’ve seen is rendered in our common leather. I am written in you, and erased. I wish you’d lay this book facedown on your lap now and think about your life while there is light still. I know you won’t.
     
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    FLOOD : The morning after I read this section, I woke up with the book against my chest. I found I’d copied all the words above exactly onto the cover of my Bible, which I’ve begun keeping near me when working with Gravey’s pages. The handwriting looked like mine when I was a child more than it does now. The ink was all over my hands and face. I was clenching the pen so tightly even in my sleep that my nails had cut into the palm of my left hand, freeing the blood .
     

 
     
     
     
    The house began to fill. While the boys made boys between them, even more were mooring in. You could not throb a foot forward in the mess without connecting to another shoulder or coupling session. The house moaned for more house to move the house through, and the moaning moaned more for more mothers to make the house stay warmer than our machines, and the blood roared to match the need the incubating house had kept hidden long enough to turn invisible to the bored. The rising stink of all us becoming combined was never enough and made the boys even more horny to expand. The sea of heads the horizon promised yet to come were crispy, reproducing in my mind as we made mush from every love our house collected. I caught a little pinch of each boy’s private pleasure expressions and witched the air around their butts so that without me they could not fantasize on their own time and they would never jerk off right again. Their come should only wake them up for fire, so that they might appear inside themselves at last. Some boys I sent to carry knives and fires into small businesses and get the cash and bring it back to us and to bring meat back to us. That money I spent on mold, crushed into the form of blue pills I had more of the boys sell in the streets or feed into me and them from them to me by lips. Light, more light. We were training in the system. We swallowed glass or lengths of rope and wore them. My slow bone boys. I watched from inside me and overhead while work among us warm was done. I told the sadder ones to take themselves into museums and put their limbs through masterworks. I told them scrape a Kandinsky with their teeth. Lay some semen on a Johns. I felt the claw marks on my insides where Richter and Ruscha and Twombly and Warhol and whoever forever had been burned and buried in no future for their crimes. Fuck art. A fist could take the face out of the pigment, a newer, longer, death. These boys had sickles in their eyes already. They had lived long enough under developmental law. They would not come back but they would not need to. Their minds began with where the gash woke and hallelujah and amen with strokes larger than an eternity of media.
     
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    BILL L. , age 14: “There are no museums in this city.”
     

 
     
     
     
    I watched from inside me and overhead while work among us warm was done. Our heat