Assisted Living: A Novel (10 page)

—I’m Buddhist to the bone, Grandpa joked. I want you all to die for your desires, stop hating me, and let St. Lucifer dispel your errors.

—Oh Grandpa, you’re too much, Myrtle said carelessly and set out a round tray with seven different kinds of desserts: night—marefudge, Jewishbread, Dr. Ottaw’s Swedish Spritz, rectorynuts, Strassburgers, pretzelsticks, and chimneysweepcookies.

We were sitting in Signar and Myrtles kitchen, planning the next worldwar. It’s always transition time there: not winter, not spring, not this, not that. It was like life had stopped. Signar and Myrtle are peabrained, but popular. Meanwhile, Grandpa continued his wild ride on this latest cockhorse.

—The only thing that’s kept my engine running all these years is the dream of a neverending love! From Ascension Day to All Saint’s Day, my eyes have been locked on one prize, on our Savior’s pristine, white, ununspeakably sweet Godcock! Great will be his anger at those who don’t lube their assholes against the day of his return! Mighty are his hips! And his voice—sexy as shit! Like old Blue Eyes himself …

Grandpa came up short, he was running on empty. He fell back in his seat, suddenly dull and lifeless.

—Who knows if He’ll ever come back, at least not while the Social Democrats are in office, Signar continued.

His skinny, naked body was trembling in a cold watertub. He’s short as a seven-year-old and is on probationary discharge from the madhouse. His only hope, though, is a mongolstorm.

—Wherever you get people, you get trash, Myrtle threw out haphazardly.

She was busy as a whirligig in the kitchen, a ridiculously tiny person with limbs like toothpicks.

—Stop growing up if you want to find truelove. The others, the ones still growing, have no time or energy for their fallowman. It happens again and again. How many times have you seen someone throw out a judgment here, a complaint there, only to end up drawing the shortstraw? No one’s too little to love.

She hopped to the stove and jumped on a stool so she could reach the coffeepot. She had on a dirtygreen jacket with Elvis’s or maybe Kaltenbrunner’s face embroidered in purple on the back. Her clothes were made from crowskin and she had on a crepe-paper hat decorated with deadflies and kittenpaws. Finally, she clomped up to the table on mismatched clogs, climbed onto the rented sofa so she could serve us coffee, and then scowled over the dented brass mugs. Signar dried himself with a scouringpad and pulled on a pair of darkblue Landmann overalls. Instead of diapers, he used a copy of a newspaper called
Land.
Then he joined us at the table. Myrtle had set out flatbread and buns; with feigned irritation, she urged us to dig in. I had at it and came away sticky,but Grandpa just sat there and stirred sugary lump after sugary lump into his coffee.

—Were vegetarians now, Signar said. We only eat fallenfruit and animals who died from natural causes …

—How do we know a mans soul goes up to heaven, but an animal’s goes down to the earth? Myrtle asked cryptically.

—That from the Salter?

—Nah, the Preacher … We love all living things here … especially the AIDS virus …

The kitchen was warm and cozy, you had to give them that. It was papered with obituaries from North Västerbotten. They had an ironrange and an electrichotplate, just in case. On the win-dowledge were the twelve apostles, a clay Gorgon with a candle, and half a dozen Mochica statuettess showing different acts of bestiality, most of them involving vicunas. There were handmade-bags and cornsacks everywhere. To the right of the refrigerator were a couple of pictures:
Dog in Agony
and a Flemish sketch of hobos on the gogo. To the left was a slightly retouched photograph of almost all the king’s family. There was a prayer on a nail above the sofa. Embroidered gold on red, it featured the familiar words from the Sermon on the Mount: “Suffer the little children to come unto me, so I can fuck the shit out of them.” Over the sink, where a grouse sat still in a bottle, Signar had taped a naked picture of Upper Kågedalens soccer team. They were pink, hairy, and fleshy. On the wall behind Myrtle were her parents’ mummified hands and a few nailriddled dolls; they looked like neighbors and friends who had suddenly become ill or died. Outside the window, a rough-hewn old man in a peaked cap struggled forward on a tricycle.

Something was wrong with him, he was missing both neck and eyes. Plenty of people are like that in Kusmark: obese and blind.

Grandpa didn’t say anything, so I edged on in. I tried to be pleasant, but I had too little confidence to be convincing.

—Soooo … uhhhh … how’s the harvest coming? I asked in an unnecessarily serious voice. Not because I really cared, but just for something to say …

—What’s that?

—How did the crops do?

—What the fuck are you babbling about?

—Farming!

—Do you know what pimpleface is saying?!

—How did your seeds do?

—Owwdjrseedsdo! mocked Signar. Thanks for asking, but our shoots and sprouts got all froze and drowned!

—We shouldn’t be like that, Myrtle said decisively. I’m not one of those … So how’s school going? she asked, just so I’d be at a loss for words.

—I don’t really go … I’m out sick at the moment …

—You’ll sure have to repeat a lot … Probably too much …

—So what’s your problem?! yelped Signar.

—Pretty much everything, I guess … my stomach … my head …

—You’re telling me! you look like you’re at death’s door!

—And me, I’m just your ordinary whiny rheumatic … so it’s not going great for me either, Myrtle sighed and dug a maggot out of her rotten nose. It’d been bitten off by a badger last fall and resewn.

Grandpa ignored us and kept on stirring in sugar.

—Grandpas gone beddybye …

—Headed for the hills …

Signar heaped a couple of tablespoons of snuff on a piece of bread and scratched a scar that ran from ear to ear. That was a souvenir from the time he and Grandpa had come to blows, long before I was even a gleam in the worlds eye. Grandpa had said that of the four stooges in the
120 Days of Sodom,
he was most like the Due de Blangis, at least in character. Signar had insisted he was more like the Bishop or Curval.

—Curval s an old drunk, a filthy bag of bones with two inches of shitcrust around his immense assholecrater …
Tat tvam asi
! Signar had shouted.

When Grandpa gets mad, he turns red, white, or blue, just like Torgeir Håvarsson: “For his heart wasn’t anything like a bird’s crop. It didn’t hold blood, it would never tremble in terror, since it had been hardened by the best smith on earth.” So Grandpa had hatched a plan. He’d plied Signar with porn and snuff. When the miscreant was finally out, Grandpa had jumped him in bed, slit his throat, and headed for Finland. But Signar wasn’t done for … He woke up in the morgue when someone fingered his anallobes. Since Signar was so short and he didn’t actually die, Grandpa only had to pay a sixteenth of a weregild: a half kilo of coffee and a packet of sugar …

—It was just a goddamn accident, he’d complained, and Signar had bided his time.

A couple of years later, Signar had jumped out of a draina-geditch and tried to shoot Grandpa. Good plan, except that the gun exploded and Signar lost a thumb and an eye. At that point, Grandpa declared them even. Signar wasn’t handsome, but he was a greedy little bugger and Grandpa wanted to keep him around. After all, you can fuck everything that shits …

—Have more, Myrtle urged, and I made it a point to praise the pretzelsticks and strong coffee.

—Is it just me or is this a little surreal? Signar asked.

—Nahhh … just a little strange, I said.

—Goddammit, you’ve gotta stop cioranizing! Think pussyteev! demanded Myrtle. Life’s a goddamned fine thing! Live modestly, talk honestly, you’ll be alright! Think of what a blessing it is to wake up every morning with a sob in your throat!

—I dreamed the strangest thing last night, Signar began. I sat beside the river of Babel and cried … I was thinking about Zion.

—Did you hang your harp on a willow tree?

—Yeah … how the fuck did you know that?

—I saw a man with clear eyes and another wearing a muzzle … They were shrewd as snakes and harmless as doves …

—Matthew ten sixteen …

—The cleareyed chap said his name was Aappo Kiimainen and the other one was Jyrki Muostalainen … Then he read from a big book called
Finnish Bad Behavior from Mommilakalabaliken to Mainilaintermezzot
 … It was printed on babyskin … After that, he fucked me every which way … And while we were loving it up, he made me tell him my favorite sex fantasy …

—Which is … ? I snooped.

—It’s not that one about being raped by miners, is it? cackled Myrtel, lighting a lazaretcigarette with Gandhi’s platinum lighter.

—Nah, I never had the guts to talk about this one before …

—Tell us now, because our warcouncil is over if Grandpa doesn’t come around soon!

Grandpa, however, showed no signs of returning to earth. He’d already emptied the sugar bowl. Now he sat with downcast eyes, stirring so thoughtfully that it echoed.

—So here’s my hottest, girliest fuckfantasy …

Signar blushed at his own daring.

—Lanz von Liebenfels’s
Theosofy and the Assyrian Beastmen
talks about a twobodied, fourarmed, fourlegged Hindu named Lalao … I’d like to fuck a freak like that … mercilessly … He’ll croon folk love ballads in a shrill, cracked voice while I’m pounding him … At the same time, he’ll fuck Bhagwan in the mouth, while the guru is being devoured by a Komodo dragon … When Bhagwan is all eaten up, Reagan will take his place … then Thatcher … Schwarzenegger, of course, will be pounding me from behind … it’ll be an honest-to-god Apachefuck! And I’ll look, and before my eyes I’ll see a thousand newborns carried away by condors, eaten up by wildpigs, drowned by barricudaswarms … Legions of godlygirls and pregnantwhores will be caught in lavaflows, quicksand sinks, and ratinfested bunkers … they’ll have to stroke themselves and talk dirty till their dying breath …

Myrtle was smoking and obviously enjoying herself, and I was listening like a wideeyed peeping tom. Grandpa was as lost to us as before.

—A cheeky old Soldier of Christ will lash my back and ass with a cat o’ nine tails … When I’m one bloody weepingwound, he’ll be decapitated and I’ll open my mouth and receive his last repentant shout while I kiss him deep, deep down in the gaping wound where the blood’s already starting to congeal … Cities will burn, hydrogen bombs will explode, cultures will go kaplooey … Tom Jones and Julio Iglesias will gnaw off each other’s cocks … “Plura” and Thåström will sliceanddice each other with chain saws … Me and Arnold will come … And an that very moment, the universe will explode …

Signar’s fantasy had brought him to a boil. Now he wanted a straightup, nofrills fuck. Myrtle obediently went down on all fours and shut her little peppercorn eyes, the better to fantasize with. Signar called his pinkyfingersized cock up from the underworld and chose door number two. He spewed after a dozen repulsive little rabbitjerks. Myrtle grunted in disappointment. Signar wiped his bloody cum on his sister’s wrinkled chin. She lapped at it greedily while she came. The fire died down and they resumed their places. Signar started in about an overlyserious Betaniaboy in Byske who already spewed blood instead of sperm. Myrtle told about the triumphant moment when she’d finally emptied a boiling pan of toffee over some swankpot’s head at her sewingclub.

—She was an old gossip, she said, explaining the why of the enterprise, which had been short and sweet. Do you remember how pious and pure you were before we got together? she asked flippantly, reversing course midway.

—We lived like catandrat when I was a drooling and panting twenty-one year old …

Signar’s eyes were distant and uncertain.

—I’m still researching the Kusipoho Ritual of the Bikomoloise Tribe … They’re native to the corrugatedcardboard regions north of the Ngorongoro Crater … and they worship Harri Tularemi … When their oldest innocent gets his first morningwood, they get the lowest geezers together at a seedy pub … and then they draw lots to see who gets to give the boy what he wants … They begin with a Chimbu handshake …

—We’ve heard it all before!

—Yeahyeah … so, anyway, you’re wanting me to remember how unsexy I was … God help me! I was more of a prude than Aloy-sius Gonzaga and Johannes Bermanns put together! Selivanov’s chastity was my polarstar!

—And now it’s just the opposite: you want it so bad it shames you, and when you get it, you die! I busted out, right to the point.

I don’t know what had gotten into me …

—Be polite, boy! the tetchy little man exclaimed and slapped me with a flyswatter. You only have a voice on Holy Innocents’ Day, and then the crows will drown you out!

—The younger the child, the worse the devil, Myrtle recited as she bent over, grabbed my hair, and spit a snuffwad onto my forehead. I could feel it sticking there, but I didn’t dare to wipe it off … Minutes dragged by like Achilles’ cloven heel.

And they just sat there and stared at me … they seemed inhuman … their eyes weren’t their own anymore … I couldn’t return their gaze … I just trembled in my seat … pissed myself, of course … fixed my eyes on the linoleumfloor … piles of ratshit … a moldy smell getting stronger by the minute … until it became unbearable … The gaslamps dimmed … it got dark … they only got clearer … though they were the last things I wanted to see … a Christmascandle burned on a shortwick … it was epileptric … They were in my head … screwing around … trashing the place … feeling me up … laughing … on their way through to my innermost parts … lurking around the outermost of my defenselessness … needing to hurt me … to make me beg … To force me to see myself clearly … the boy behind the babble … the face behind the wankoff s fist … OhnoohnoohNO! … I struggled … put up a fight … they weren’t expecting resistance … they pressed harder … but I was defending the most precious thing of all … the thing you never surrender … no matter how bad you’ve got it … it’s the primal thing … in you before the beginning’s beginning … I’m talking about boyhood … the magic seed … the thing that makes you a Grandpa … It may be small and warm … but when it counts, it’s the strongest stuff of all … I didn’t want them to get their filthy hands on my hidden treasure, my boyhood … the Godgiven heart of us all … protected and sealed within us …