Assisted Living: A Novel (22 page)

—Cry, cry, honeypie, the geezer muttered gutturally and lit a fatsocigar with his free hand.

At that, Grandpa pointed his Kalashnikov and yelled.

—Karl-Johan!

Without missing a beat, the old man glared back over his left shoulder. At the sight of Grandpa, different emotions ran a relay across his forgettable face. At first he seemed surprised, then spiteful, then cringing, and finally miserable.

—Be nice! he whimpered. Can’t you just wait a sec until I’ve done my thing!

—Pull your dick out now!

—Let me finish! Karl-Johan protested.

—Youheardwhatlsaid!

—Chill out, for fuck’s sake!

Grandpa fired. The volley hit him in the back and killed him instantly. He fell flat on his face, but managed to drive his cock in one last time. In a few strokes we’d reached land.

—Get the boy and cut the geezer’s right ear off! Grandpa ordered.

I sliced Karl-Johns ear off and dragged the brat toward the water. Then I stuck the kid in the back and shoved off.

—Karl-Johan was an idiot … he liked disposable Q-tips … he also used Daisy Midi, the adult diaper “for those who leak just a little more” … I had a few bones to pick with him, but nothing that’s worth rehashing now … Take us out to the reef by Tegeludden … Right at the dropoff where Ki Lu caught himself a Greenland shark. It was back when the summer of lovestories to end all lovestories was nearing its climax …

—Here?

—Nah, I changed my mind.

I rowed past Abborrudden toward Räften … After a while we reached a little islet. I dropped our rusty anchor, even though the water was mirrorsmooth. Then we rigged the net. Paul had a large tacklebox packed with wobblers, most of them magnum. I saw a waspcolored Swim Whizz, a silvergreen Cisco Kid, a rosy Heddon Tad Polly, a yellow-red Hellraiser, a darkly glittering Heimar Mene; the largest Rapalan was silver and black; the largest Hi-Lon was red and white; a flexible pikecolored Rebel, a bulging and bigspooned, perchcolored Rebel, and hundreds more … But Grandpa chose a dull old silver Kaleva. His rod was seven feet long and wicked stiff, crowned by an old crimson Ambassadeur. The line looked fresh, three hundred meters, 0.45mm. I had a limp little gasstation rod and an enclosedreel with no brake. A medium-sized Mörrum-troll was tangled in the worn line.

—Before we fish, let’s chew some peyote, Grandpa said, opening his leatherpouch. I got six and he took twelve.

The bitter nubs are gumnumbing and the tough fibers really challenge your jaws. We chewed and spit, blobs splotched where they landed … But nothing was different than before, the world was just as hard to make out … you sit on
förtvivlans giffel,
the croissant of despair … on your way to the Great Attractor in Centaurus … the two hundred billion brain cells you have before you drug yourself up still don’t know what darkmatter is … eventhough it makes up almost everything in the universe … making your way through life is hard, almost impossible … its best to do what Grandpa says … Right now he was casting with a practiced swing, swaying to the rhythm, real smooth … the line ran out … The dark was about to swallow us whole … night had come on quick … He reeled his line in … nothing bit … mist came off the cold water … everything was calm … Grandpa cast again and again … in all directions … toward the reedclumps … the openwater … into nothing … He let his lure sink and turned the handle in a spunky rhythm … I cast with what I had … there was hardly twenty-five meters of line … I reeled in as good as I could … suddenly I felt a bite … I pulled against it … tried to jiggle it up … fear gnawed at my so-called heart … I couldn’t see anything … the line was worn … it gave …

—Fuuuck!

—Why are you shouting, my unworthy lad?

—I had something …

—Got your hook stuck on the bottom …

—I don’t think so …

Grandpa grabbed his rod and came out swinging. The face of an absolute dictator … my reel jammed … Grandpa’s snarled … the rebound straightened it out …

—Now for some real action!

He emptied the trough of aborted fetuses … Skellefteås romantic trials and tribulations made tangible … the whole redish-black, rotten, slimy mess of them … the blackwater swallowed them all … Grandpa fastened the Kaleva by the scalp … tossed the open tacklebox into the water … everything was lost … most sunk straightaway …

—Even Fehmi Varli’s twenty-six-kilo pike wouldn’t do for bait in this sea! Now let’s show them what we can do …

Grandpa took Karl-Johan’s little fucktoy … he’d fainted … stuck the kid on a meathook and used five pieces of nylonrope for a line … then he swung him twenty meters out … used a Tupper-waretub as a float … now that’s honest-to-god tackle … I was in the process of putting the oxhead on an ironhook … but I didn’t have line enough to get it more than a meter from the boat … The summer night had clocked in … we sat and hoped … The sky darkened … puckered up its eyebrows … from somewhere we caught the scent of gravity … A sheer cliff fell straight into the water … we had to imagine the rest … nothing’s possible, but everything’s imaginable … Grandpa waited … everything was still … time passed out … we began to despair … Suddenly I saw something circling my bait … it took a nip … a bite … swallowed it whole … headed straight for the depths … Grandpa cackled … I fought it … it was strong … it wanted up … no quarter … Carolines versus Muscovites … it was yielding … I fought like an animal … it came to the surface … it was terrible … no one would believe us … we moved counterclockwise … it seethed and gurgled … churned and shrieked …

—It’s a demon! A devil!

Grandpa threw down his tackle and took up mine … he swore up one side and down the other … He saw more than I did … Resolutely cut the line while I stood and heavyheaved … sat back on his seat … took a grenade in each hand …

—That was the Midgard serpent! Ouroboros! Forget what you saw, if you want to stay simple and true! Fishing time is over! We’ve got to make for land as fast as we can or were cooked!

I dipped my oars in the sullen sea.

—Row like your Grandpa was tied to a whippingpost dripping with benzine and Calvin came along clicking his lighter!

The land fell away … the water was dark and sullen, but still I dug in … Grandpa was uneasy … scared shitless … finally we were home …

—Look here, boy! Were going to go home and sleep it off … sleep as long as we want … And when you open your eyes again, you’ll have forgotten everything that happened tonight …

We dragged the boat up on land, shooed the mosquitoes away, and pretended everything was normal … Loons ransacked us with their desolate cries … a thousand times more worthy than we … The devil made himself known … mocked our every step … Grandpa didn’t dare say a word … only stopped to mumble a “Sour Father who art in ..We stepped into our home’s human warmth and fucked standing up … quick and easy …

Before we went to sleep I asked:

—Can we play Emil of Lymmelberga tomorrow?

—Nah … Tomorrow were going to hold up our end of the bargain …

__________

stinkhorns
—Phallus impudicus

Brothers Tigerheart
—Astrid Lindgren, a Swedish icon of “goodness,” wrote a book called
The Brothers Lionheart

Gabriel in a gray coat
—a little gray gadfly

raffset
—a Swedish word for sexy female undergarments

Satanstick
—slang for cigarette

aeaeae
—magic
witch’s herb
—St. John’s wort

birdsfoot-trefoil
—in Swedish “käringtänder,” or “old woman’s teeth”

Virgin Marys
—seven-spot ladybugs

norns
—Calypso orchids; also the Norse Fates (
Swedish norner
)

sri and sa-bdag
—Tibetan demons

But the sour flame’s still smoking
—
Men he ruk laing i surom bran-nom
, an expression referring to someone who’s suffering from a long, painful illness, and just won’t die

Bejn-Burman
—bought bones and turned them into glue

Nilapadhana
—some sort of necrophilic-sadistic Tibetan ritual, my sources tell me, wherein a man has to embrace a corpse, convince himself it’s alive, and afterward pry open its lips and bite off its tongue (the Chud rite, “the way of the corpse”)

Judas’s coins
—Lunaria annua

Abel Allmonikus
—Abel means mischief-maker, joker; allmonikus means tired

Möbius
—Paul Julius;
On the Physiological Deficiency of
Women

Weininger
—Otto; Sex and Character, that fascinating work!

ELC
—Evangelical Lutheran Church

Karelin
—Alexander, Russian wrestling champ

gooberdinky
—a booger, bogy, etc.

Nils Poppe
—a Swedish actor

Baphomet
—Satanic symbol, often represented by a goat head; also, see Klossowski

Gilles de Rais
—a Breton knight, companion of Joan of Arc and a serial killer of children

Sutcliffesteak
—Peter Sutcliffe was the “Yorkshire Ripper”

Sevesogrogg
—Seveso is a river and town in Italy; “famous” for the eponymous disaster in which several kilograms of the dioxin TCDD was released into the atmosphere by a nearby chemical plant

chloracne
—an eruption of cysts and pustules

SRB-cunt
—Swedish Red Breed, breed of cow

Ulva intestinalis
—green sea grass

Delesseria sanguinea
—red algae

delimitation
—delimitation period: the process by which parts of the Swedish crowns land was transferred to private ownership; in Västerbotten, delimination can be said to have ended before 1870

psychomor
—Swedish, lit. “psycho-mom”

PJ/SE
—Practical jokes/Special effects division

Heimar Mene
—Heimarmene: the oppressive cosmic wasteland in Gnostic belief

Förtvivlans giffel, the croissant of despair
—Cioran’s first book, brilliant of course, came out in German with the title
Auf den Gipfel der Verzweiflung
, or, literally, “On the Peak of Despair”; the Swedish anti-writer Lars-Olof Bengtsson thought
Gipfel
in this context meant
giffel
, Swedish for “croissant”

Carolines
—soldiers of Charles XII of Sweden

Emil of Lymmelberga
—“Emil of Lönneberga” is a fictional character in a childrens book series by Astrid Lindgren; in Swedish, “lymmel” means villain, whereas “lönne” means maple

When Grandpa gets tired of me, I play by myself.

Sometimes I play the quiet game … sometimes I play dead … sometimes I draw old geezers I’ve met and then I pretend I’m them … sometimes I lay on my back in a September field and listen to the earth hurtling through space … to victims shrieking at all the evil-deeds wrought upon them … then I try to sink into the light, soft, fluid grass and become a part of its mystery … Nature thrives on destruction … everything starts soft and small, but ends hard … they hound you till you’re hard as a rock … sometimes I try to figure out how many fucks are going on at a single moment … sometimes I think of everything I won’t ever get to fuck … When I can bear it, I try to look ahead … but all horizons are equally galling … sometimes I force animals to fight to the death … mink vs. weasel … rat vs. rooster … shrike vs. jay … beaver vs. badger … ant vs. earthworm … sometimes I think I’m going crazy … sometimes I play Grandpa-daddy-boy … sometimes I’m my own imaginary friend …

Most often I play with my plasticsoldiers … they’re from different WWII militaryunits … Grandpa knows all there is to know about the war, since he was one of the ones who started it … He knows alot, but he won’t talk about it … Every now and then, when things are getting too comfy, I get an earful about Florian Geyer or Götz von Berlichingen, Kharkov and Cherkasy, the Children of Nemmers-dorf and Papa Eicke … I stole my plasticsoldiers from Grandpa … when he thinks no ones watching him he plays with them … I play on the livingroom floor or out on the rocks … Outside there are cracks and crevices, reindeerlichen and bears bedmoss, heather and wildrosemary … its all so natural you forget about time and space …

I have two collections of bluegray Germans, the Afrika Korps and the Japanese … they fight the gray Russians, the sandcolored Eighth Armyrats, the Yankees, the Aussies, the Commandoyankees, and the Commandobrits … the Rommels and Japs are also khakicolored, so Grandpas bought me a few special collections … some partisan fighters from Prince Eugen’s Mountain Division … and a handful of Bad Tölz Junkers from the Nibelungen Brigade … Playing with my plasticsoldiers has taught me how cheap life is … how easy it is to die … how soon it’s all over … When I gather up the victors, and the good guys always win, they seem a little confused … the slanteyed swordslinging officers … the German machinegun troopers … the SS-Junkers … When you’ve killed your enemy, there’s only one thing left to do: shoot yourself … preferably in the spleen …

When I walk home through the tired, brightwhite wildoatfields after having waged a war, I’m numb … that’s the good thing about life … most of the time you don’t have to feel it …

__________

Rommels
—soldiers under the command of Erwin Rommel, also known as the “Desert Fox”

—You’re the only thing in this life that’s never disappointed me, boy … because I never expected a god damn thing from you!

Grandpa and I were out on the terrace getting ready for my party. It was going to be outside, even though it was late October and sleeting to boot.

—How old am I, Grandpa?

—Nine or ten, I guess …

Grandpa had dressed up in a darkgray suit with a starched shirt, loose collar, and a preknotted tie. I had on a knitted woolsweater, balloonpants, and gummyshoes.

—You’re a timesink, a milksop, you’re stupid and you suck like a girl! FYI, this is your last birthdoomsday … I can’t do it any longer! I can’t stand the sight of you!

Grandpa squirted Schick’s shavingcream onto the Styrofoam-cake. I decorated it with red marbles and pennies.

—There now, all finished …

—Soon it’ll all be over …

The time was pushing three and night was storming down. The powersthatbe had cheated the sky … the day wasn’t wortha plugged nickel. Cold and gray, a foretaste of times to come. Grumpweather.

—Are they going to show soon, Grandpa?

—Did you tell them three?

—Yeah,three …

—Probably on their way … cant imagine where else they’d be …

We sat down on foldingchairs and waited. Grandpa passed the time squishing the lice he’d grown tired of … He spared the artists among them. With trembling underlip, I checked an estrustimetable … We’d done ourselves proud, the kids would like it. We’d hung balloons, garlands, and wires. There was popcorn, pepper-mintcandy, and caramels. Paperplates, plasticcups, and cum—and barfbags too. AROM condoms, Absolut Citron, and blackcurrentschnapps. Amphetamine tablets, cannabismuffins, and burnt gingerbreadbiscuits.

—Can I ask you about a few words, Grandpa?

—Is there anything but words in that sick brain of yours?

—I want some more to play with … Just this once, Grandpa!

—Fine, what are the words?

—First I want to know what “solidarity” means.

—Well, solidarity can mean a shitload of things … injury for others … losing yourself in the herd … hating the next guy as much as yourself … But it actually means that some people are worth more than others … and they have the right to do whatever the fuck they want … To be like liliesofthevalley … to not give a shit, because nothing’s worth a shit anyway …

—What’s “stress”?

—Let me see: the Nibelungs had stressgut … the LO and SAF-bigwigs arrange a yearly stresshunt of sick retirees … Stress is Gods foremost quality …

—Who’s Oskar Ernst Bernhardt?

—The Messiah.

—Why doesn’t a creek get tired of flowing?

—All creeks are tired! Don’t you hear them sighing that all is vanity?

—What does kal-lukä mean?

—Killdeathkill.

—Why do we talk in dialect?

—Västerbottens dialect is the language Guido von List talks about in
The Primal Language of the Aryo-Germans and their Mystery Language …

— 
Is there life after birth?

—No.

—Is there intelligentlife on Earth?

—No.

—Who was my daddy?

—Some
Homo erectus …

— 
Was it Gazin or Aristov who wrote
Doctor Chicago
?

—Neither … It was Kharlamov …

—Why shouldn’t you write?

—Writing is like pissing truisms into the Pleonastic Ocean … Though the Almighty Public, the misshapen crowd, has definitely earned a good pissing on …

—What’s the difference between Platonic and Aristotelian love?

—The difference is huge! Platonic loves means you can only jack each other off with two fingers while wearing rubbergloves … Aristotelian love means you can fuck armpits and kneehollows too …

—Why does it feel better when someone forces you to do it?

—Desire is hard to distinguish from nausea and suffering … pain, terror, and shame … Pleasure is knowing its not possible to go any further …

—Which is worse, a sobbinggrunt or a groaningwhine?

—Both are the same …

—What were Jesus’s last words on the cross?

—“My honor is loyalty,” according to the Synoptics. But the Gospel of Python claims he said: “Life’s a piece of shit, when you look at it!”

—Why are there so many people in the world?

—They’re practicedummies.

—Why do so few of them give a damn about us?

—I’ve wondered the same myself …

—What are we made of?

—95% hot air.

—Why are we here?

—To give each other hell … shame each other …

—What are we really?

—Cenobites.

—Why do we live in a grayzone, a nomansland, a waste?

—That was decided September 2nd, 1809 (or eighty years before my own personal calendar kicks in: when Nietzsche saw the light and Hitler issued forth into darkness), when Sandels and Kamensky drunk themselves blind at a buggerinn in Frostkåge and agreed to an armistice … Russia’s main base became Pite and rural Sweden’s became Ume. Ever since then, those of us who live in between must exist in a powervacuum, an interstellarvoid, the windblasted and lambasted waitingroom of a Veterinarian that only has one treatment and one syringe … Two weeks after the Frostkåge boozefest, we lost the faithful Suomi-cocks to the Russians. Norrbotten was separated from Västerbotten and then was abandoned to miscarriages, cavemen, and liedown comedians …

—Why does anything exist?

—Because Gods evil.

—What’s the true order of the universe?

—Chaos …

Grandpa made a sign that the séance was over. He took out his gold watch and saw it was a quarter to four. The day darkened and the wind whistled and wet snow covered the terrace and extinguished the torches.

—It’s just going to be you and me, boy …

—I don’t know why they didn’t come … they said they’d come …

—It is what it is, we’ll just have to make the best of it … You’ve got no friends, that much is obvious … you’re too small and insignificant … you’ve never had luck when they’re picking the lottonumbers … you’ll just have to live with the menu as is … Don’t pout or the boohooboogieman will come and take you away …

So we ate and drank and sang and played … We played Jews and Nazis … kicked shiprats to the curb … suffered … The seas stormed … the earth burned … all Sweden must go … Then Blind Man’s Bluff, Where’s the Penny, and The Pot’s Boiling Over … We played Watch Your Tail, Guess the Jew, and Find Your Pain Threshhold … Mark My Words, Lose Face, and Hang Your Lip … Charades, Monads, and Doodads … Hang Out, Cast Stones, and Crack a Grin … Hawk and Dove, Ratcatchers, and Face to the Wall … Dodge the Louse, Ormen Lange, and Chainsmoker Tag … Pull a Tarzan, Roll the Foreskin, and Hide the Salami … We played Trashpoker, Sink the Boatpeople, and Jago … Khmerchess, Dominance and Submission, and Amnesia-Memory … Starve the Bengals, Solitaire, and Stylite … Grandpa made noises like howler monkeys and hyenas … Holmér and Lönnå … There’s a lot you can come up with on the fly … We sang “It Was so Funny I Had to Laugh” . . the one about the baker and the little frogs … about Mother’s little Olle and the priest’s little crow … “Gulligullan Koko” and “Zum Gali Gali” … “Follow Me to Syracuse” … about the raindrops falling on my head … And last of all, I opened my presents from Grandpa. There were two books wrapped in old waxpaper:
The Most Clever Jewish Ritual Murders: Adapted for Children
and
Moomins Run Amok
 … a puzzle showing the bombing of Dresden … some pajamas Lenin had pissed in … and a pitbullterrier that unfortunately had suffocated in the package …

Then the party was over … we froze so our bones rattled and our joints squeaked … neither of us had the energy to clean up … I’d never had a nicer party … But it didn’t make me happy. I lay awake a long time … Thinking of all that had been … memory is a maggotinfested dump … I’ve only seen the sea once and it was gray and roared … I’ve only seen the mountains once and theywere floating in a soup of fog as thick as rootmash … I’ve only been happy once and it gave me fevershock … If you’re not up and coming, you’re down and out … In the end, all you can do is sit and chew your nails … How will I live if Satan won’t teach me to laugh at suffering … I wonder if I’ll ever do anything worthwhile … like Gavrilo Princip … or Paul Tibbets … Life is a rebus no one can solve … a hairsplitter … a cruel pun … Before I slept, I prayed I wouldn’t have any more birthdays … Forgive me … then forget …

__________

AROM
—Artificial Rupture of Memuranes

stressgut
—lit. translation of Swedish
stresstarm
: Irritable Bowel Syndrome

LO and SAF
—the Swedish Trade Union Confederation (
Landsorganisationen
) and the Swedish Employers Association (
Svenska Arbetsgivareförening
)

stresshunt
—lit. translation of Swedish
stressjakt
: when the hunter gives his prey no respite and so wears it out

kal-lukä
—dear-cut

Kharlamov
—Valeri: great Soviet hockey player

Oskar Ernst Bernhardt
—an imprisoned merchant in Weimar Germany who founded the Grail Movement and claimed he was the Messiah

Gazin or Aristov
—see
The House of the Dead
by Fyodor …

Holmér
—Hans: Swedish police chief responsible for the (botched) investigation after the murder of prime minister Olof Palme

Lönnå
—Kjell: Christian choir leader and TV host

Moomins Run Amok
—Moomintrolls, characters in various comic strips and books by Tove Jansson

Gavrilo Princip
—assassinated Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo and started WWI

Paul Tibbets
—dropped the Hiroshima bomb