Assisted Living: A Novel (15 page)
—Let s take the bus to Morö Hollow!
We cut across Possibility Square … lots of shops … Polarn O. Pyret … Stor eller Liten … got on the number 2 bus … Grandpa paid for us both … it started up … it was ten past two … it was nice to sit, even if the bus was full of the dying … a pimplefaced teen was reading Delumeaus
Sin and Fear
… a poster showed a cleancut retard with the words “handler wanted” … we crossed the traintracks and turned towards Lasarettsbacken …
—We should’ve stopped and said hello to Abraham Bessik in the longtermcarefacility, Grandpa suddenly remembered. He could use a little cheering up.
I sat quietly and stared out into hell. Grandpa flipped through an issue of
Siegrunen.
Over the E-4 … along Tors Street … I saw a little cavalierdog, absurdly happy—being dragged by two washedup old coots who waved at me … past Norrvalla and Eddahallen … Grandpa had had himself a nice jacuzzifuck there one night … or was that someone else? We continued east … towards Järnskogen … Morö proper was a ghetto … apartmentblocks and parkinglots … then Morö Hollow … a sleepy town … houses in rows … each one worse than the last … blocks of greenhouses … hatcheries … burning plastics … spiraea, hydrangeas, and blue mother-of-pearl clematis, all wilting, of course … peace and order, psychosis on Friday … A German shepard fucking a dachshund … a weimaraner, a papillon dog … the busgate was lifted …
—Here’s where we get off, Grandpa said. This is Dripdrop Street.
We strolled around a bit … past gloomy little houses … they might’ve been red and white … looked in on other people’s wasted lives … An old crone glared at us from between a Hoya bella and a busy Lizzy … A group of darkies were having a fight …
A henpecked husband sucked on a Volkswagon’s exhaustpipe and dreamed of suicide … A loudmouthed, middleaged, brown—haired whore in a Mickey Mouse T-shirt was getting her Daily Double on the kitchen table … she grabbed the balls that were beating her ass and bellowed like someone possessed … Teiresias sure had it right … Next door the light was dim … no one in sight …
—Bempa lives here … he’s Royal Marlenes son-in-law, and Popo Dahlbergs sister-in-law … Anyway: before I ring the doorbell … Remember on the old TV show, what was it called,
Juttu
? When Uncle Lauri carves a willow pipe for that six-year-old whore?
—Yeah … Why?
—No reason … just checking … Qué será será …
He rang the doorbell and knocked. A cautious shrew opened the door a crack … Grandpa forced his way inside …
—Hellandhighwater, what’ve you done with Bempa?
—What are you implying!? Get out of my house before I call the cops!
Grandpa backhanded her and she fell down.
—And I politely asked where Bempa was, pissbag! I’m Lieutenant Onada and this is Wiener Sångerknaben! he shouted, pointing at me.
—Bempa’s sick … he’s in the living room … he got a brainbleed at Christmas …
—No worse than a headache nowadays … probably the same thing … You aren’t exaggerating are you, cunt?
—Bempa’s done for … he can’t even swallow … sometimes he doesn’t even know me …
—I wouldn’t know you, either, not if we’d been slaving side-by-side on the same galley for fifty years … Who the hell are you, anyway?
—I’m Bempa’s wife, Livia …
—Wife? If Bempa is fucking crazy old whores it’s no wonder he’s gotten sick! But I’ll put a stop to it, if it’s the last thing I do! Grandpa swore, dragging the woman by her hair toward the garage. I helped. And no matter how much she struggled and howled, Bempa didn’t show his face.
The TV was shrieking … it was
Batman
… an old gray Mercedes stood in the garage …
—Partytime! Here comes the refrain!
He told me to run and get a hose, and then attach it to the showerhead, so we could have warm water. While I did that, Grandpa held Livia down and pried her mouth open with a hammer. I turned on the hot water and he forced it down her throat … liter after liter … up her nose and in her eyes … up her ass, too, but by then she was already dead … Grandpa had hammered too hard..
. We were banged up ourselves, but it was worth it. We went back into the house to look for Bempa … have us some guytime … he was in a urinesoaked leathersofa … entranced by the Joker … But Grandpa was the real thing … I turned the sound down … Grandpa walked in, plopped down, adjusted his glasses, and lit a Cinderella in an ivory ciggiholder …
—Hey there, Bempa, he smiled …
Bempa, though, was vacationing in the land where lollipops grow on trees and gingerbreadboys dance the hula … An inhumanly emaciated figure wearing a yellow collegejersey and sweatpants … frightened eyes … around fifty or so … just a baby, really …
—Grandpas here … everything’s going to be okay …
—Hogomooo …
—You’ve been a real champ, you know that … headaches are nothing to sneeze at, of course … you’re just a little skinny … you look an awful lot like that chess guy, Mikhail Tal … but never mind that, he’s my favorite …
—Gaa flaff motamaa …
—I’m doing fine! Fit as a fiddle! Fact is, me and the mite are going to paint the town red tonight. You got anything to drink?
—Schwuuu …
—That’s a no, huh … best go on a boozerun, while the boy keeps you company … he sticks out a like a sorethumb, I can’t be raiding stashes with him along … he doesn’t know how to behave himself …
Grandpa limped out and I was alone with Bempa … We watched Robin and the Penguin to avoid looking at each other.
—You know anything about Count Gyula Andråssy of Csikszentkiraly and Krasznahorka? he suddenly asked.
-Huh?
—Noopuulosch … Ngugi … Humwawa … Mangu …
—I don’t understand …
—Mokélé-mbémbés are found in Likouala …
—Uh huh …
—Sickan Carlsson gave Thor Modéen head … Ludwig II of Bavaria frenched Sacher-Masoch …
—Did she now?
—Kroogoshwiiri … Anticimex … Baubo … Mushoyoku …
—Don’t worry about it … Even Nietzsche ate his own shit and drank his own piss when the going got tough …
—I remember when King Filimer ordered us to march through the Pripjet swamps toward the Pontian Steppes … and that was after we’d destroyed the Harappan civilization … Blubblubbuuuwy! Kaiomortz! Nyarlathotep! Igjugarjuk!
—Take up piano … write to Saida in the
Hemmets
Journal …
—Hyynokoruta! Waaaaa! Wholottalow!
—Yeah … it sounds like you’re the toast of the town, all right …
—Craaaa … Toush … Boohoo …
—Yeah, it sucks … just be happy there are people in the world who have it worse than you …
It was already a quarter to six. Someone had taken a couple of hours and flushed them right down the toilet … The front door flew open and an arrogant voice sliced right through us:
—I’m back, fotzelovers! With war spoils from fallen Ilion!
Grandpa clomped on in like a porcelainelephant. He sat three bags holding three bottles in front of each of us.
—Let’s see your true colors, Little Boys Blue … The Holy Ghost guided my steps straight to a pair of lugubrious butterballs … We discussed Sigmund Fraud and then I beat them to death with a coffeepot … they had a good stash, too … enough for a real boozefest … They also had a few amphetamines tucked away …
He chugged half a liter of Smirnoff while standing, hurled the empty bottle at the wall, it broke a mirror and a clock, and then fished a scalare up out of the tank and swallowed it whole. He took a seat on the sofa, put his arms around Bempa, lit a joint, and farted contentedly … then Grandpa began to fire off his usual fusillade of fustian ideas and cackling harangues … he was in his element … flying high … Luthers and Hitlers table talk had nothing on Grandpas when he was like this … I only remember parts of it … his heads a real randomgenerator …
—Jesus is the posterchild for animal desires! Peter should’ve cut off his cock instead of his ear! “Suffer the little children to come to me and don’t stop before they’re bleeding from both ends …” —Matthew seventeen and nineteen … A thousand thanks, oh yes! Christianity says it’s okay to cast newborns before swine! That kind of talk makes me blush! Same with Luke fourteen twenty-six! And if that weren’t enough: you shouldn’t make representations of Gods likeness. He’s too ugly! If God exists, he owes me an apology! compensation for pain and suffering!
Grandpa scooted closer to Bempa and let his fingers shuck and jive a dirtylittleditty down his collarbone.
—We should stay light and transparent like “Mazdaznan-Hanisch” says! Erect a new Aryan high culture, where people sing of me and my adventures alone! Me and Tintin were named on the same day, in the same breath! They’ll print my divine mug on T-shirts and posters! like Che Guevara! Humanity’s most intimate little critters, crabs, and tapeworms, haven’t gotten the praise they deserve … Fuck me, but I’m going to devote an epic to those little bastards!
—Or to the brown rats stealing the world from the black rats, I piped up.
—You’ve hit the nail on the head, sprout! I’ll do it after I’ve finished my psychic war against the vibrators of Tinnitus XI! My other big project is rewriting the librettos to Wagner’s musical dramas! Cleansing them of all that unnatural sex! I want happy, girly, loser endings! Let Tristan have Kurwenal! Let the Dutchman be filled with spectral seamen! Let Tannhäuser party with the four nobleboys! Let Lohengrin, King Heinrich, and Friedrich von Telramund wear out other’s middleaged dreampipes with their plucky little karatepricks … let the fucking swan get in on it too! And I’ve thought of a fitting punishment for all those virtuous, cuntstinking temptresses, too … Elsa von Brabant will be fucked to death by the last group of mountaingorillas! Elisabeth will get knocked up by her father, Landgrave Hermann von Thüringen … then the fetus will bite and claw its way out like a bloody little gnome … Senta will get a job at a truckdriver cafe in Uganda … Isolde will take up with Fassbinder … Siegmund and Hunding will hook up and torture Sieglinde to death with rough old kikejokes … Siegfried and Mime will live happily ever after in the smithy … Brunhilde will burn up on the pyre that Wotan wisely enough tampered with … But I won’t change a note of the music! It’s just devilish!
Then Grandpa switched tracks, took another detour …
—Pataphysics, petrochemistry, and pornobiology are the cornerstones of the bestialfaith … the secret teachings of saprophytism … Apropos: what wouldn’t you give to see the Olympian play of expression across the Geheimerat’s face while he jerks off into a paraffinsmeared erminemuff?
—How do you spell Goethe?
—G Ö T E … like it sounds …
—Koroo … Sonyhaiku … Pobbolollysatori …
—I think you’ve gone around the bend, my sweet … tuataras are pinealeyed, but don’t fret … a third eye is just one more thing to miss … during its centurieslong dozerregime, the Sassanidians conducted research in the field of oblivionstudies … They were blinded by moonlight and didn’t give a damn about appearances …
On the news, they were talking about a Bolshevik statue toppling happening in the Baltics …
—I wouldn’t mind having that Dzerzhinsky statue, Grandpa said with a rare tear in the corner of his eye. You’ll never hear me say a word against the Cheka, GPU, or KGB … Felix was a gentleman … And all the others, too … Yezhov, Pavlov, Mikhailov … Nijinsky and Stravinsky … I could best be described as a proud member of the Peoples Party … What else is there after Mundebo and Jan-Erik Wikström … If Bildt hadn’t been such a tedious fish fuck, who knows, I might’ve been a moderate … a neoliberal … newlysaved …
He spit at Anna Lindmarker and hit her between her beady little eyes … the blob ran down between her boobs … from the way her lips were moving, she was talking about something hot … Now Grandpa was telling a story about a sly old fart who’d lived undetected in a dumptruck for decades … And another who’d collected a lifetime’s worth of piss and shit in big barrels … and how his father had done the collecting for him when he was too young to do it himself … And about a bigshot farmer in Kågemarken who’d had special cages built for all his fuckable domesticanimals; only their noses and assholes were exposed; that way they could snuffle around and get fucked in the ass, but couldn’t put up a fight: he had bulls, boars, foxes, bears, gray owls, golden eagles, and everything else imaginable … He gave it up, though, after he installed an aquarium, got drunk, and tried to fuck a fifty-poundpike through the food opening … And Grandpa told us how to dig kiddietraps on the beach … Catch them with boathooks under the docks … And told us how it feels to fuck someone whose upperbody is stuck in a burningoven … He claimed that sourcecriticism is only valid when performed by the disabled … He told us how you can make a typewriter sound like an Einsatzkommando, just by pressing the right keys … He said that Max Stirner s
The Ego and Its Own
is the only philosemitosophistic work worth dragging yourself through … that the phrase “Ho Chi Minh sucks dead cocks” in
Apocalypse Now
is the only thing you need to know about the Vietnam War …
—Is there anyone else who thinks Bempa is a little down in the dumps?
—Me …
—You won’t say no to some fish and booze, will you deary? Grandpa asked, tickling him under the chin.
Then he went and got a colander from the kitchen and three tiger barbs from the tank. A last meal … He tried to feed Bempa the fish and to force some Bacardi down his throat.
—And now take a bite for Ohlendorf … and another for Pastor Paisley … and one for Pogonophorans …
But Bempa couldn’t swallow … the barbs came right back up … they flopped around on the labialhued broadloom carpet … Grandpa dumped twenty centiliters of alcohol over Bempa’s head. Then he sat and smoked quietly for a few minutes … half-watching TV …
—Am I the only one who wants to play Bismarck? … Oh well, spoilsport! enough of that! What are we supposed to do now, exchange luberecipes and talk trappingmethods?
—For Robespierre! yelled Bempa. Gmoopoffbaluuu …
—Shut your mouth, brainfry! Manu says, he who garbels language garbels everything … From his viewpoint, you’ve been found guilty … You’re worse than Michael Finnigan’s Wake …