Linda Perdido: A Novel

Nine.

linda perdido 53 Nine. Spider Getuli. nowhere. and it was true. Suddenly Slow Burn Slipp is gone. Spider Getuli stumbles off to a far, far room, around a corner, perhaps to the crawl space behind the stairway to the attic and next to the occluded area (Area B) behind the old bathtub now walled up and over where he may be smoking an illegal cigarette. other customers move about in the moonlightspangled gloom, odd humpish creatures, alarming in their slowness of thought and gesture, yet for all the world possessed each and all of a singular affectionatedness. Qua and the C/T likewise are talking low, in an affectionate manner. Explaining mutual interests, family secrets (the burden of being a Monitor, the detriment and impairment pertaining to the perdido); and each to each suggests the need for letting go; which is accompanied by a tousling of the other’s hair and a sudden clutchery of each other’s wicked fingers. Qua, says the C/T, what a perfectly lovely name and however did you come upon it? She darkens a little, bows forward slightly to resemble a pieta 54 MaC WellMan from the Siennese old school. Qua. i was not thought to be, in fact. The family were missionaries in the far, far west of perdidistan . never mind never mind never mind. The C/T is aglow with magnetic animal inquisitiveness. And she as well. You can practically see the myriad lines of force attaching them limb to limb, finger to finger, eye to eye, pelvis to tiled pelvis. Obsterics in the far, far west of perdidistan simply beggars description and so it was not known whether i was to be born one or two. Turns out it was two and i, being the second (Twoth, number of the evil one, incidentally, according to minsters of the proclamation Church in new dabble) and the Twoth and Thoth and Tooth, my parents had no name prepared in advance. at the advent of my voiding and expulsion into this what passes for a world, my mother gave what sounded like a cry but was more a question caught in mid smack halfway between a quake and a quack. Quake hence qua; quack hence Qua. Father…. But she is cut off by the reappearance of Spider Getuli who offers drinks on the house, and proffers a dark and igneous and ligneous liquor from Rumania and ruby-streaked in the veering moonlight and said to be a Raki. The spell is broken and Qua is left forever with her question , forever forever forever: What is your name? Hanging in lost space and time, on the edge of her delicately molded lower lip, curved like a slice of ripe peach. Spider Getuli. no one knows anything around here. no one. The town of p— for instance, the name of that town off some ways in that direction (his digit like a small fierce mammal on a mission somewhat dire but of instinctual fervor), that town p— that no one can pronounce is actually a town in White russia, near Kurk. i mean Kursk. Qua ? The C/T ? Yes and it is it is so that the neither of both of you have i suppose ever heard of the Kursk Salient? Qua and the C/T?? Yes no linda perdido 55 we suppose we do not and what of the fact (sub rosa twenty itchy fingers are itching to get on what they are twitchily most impassioned about, namely interdigitation)? name of the town nobody hereabouts can pronounce is ah and he leans forward as though to receive a blessing a secret an admonishment meant for someone else, is prochorovka. Qua and the C/T. oh. Silence. pause. pause. The outer sphere of The Toy World has receded to an infinite distance from the three figures hunched here, in quiet confabulation . Spider Getuli. near prochorovka was fought the decisive battle of the last good war this country ever. Kursk Salient in July 1943 that is. last major nazi offensive on the eastern Front and the most spectacular military encounter possibly probably ever no certainly so two thousand tanks on both sides the russian T-34 the German Panther and Tiger Tank and what a helluva fight it it must’ve been. prochorovka a place there and a place here diametrical and the same kind of town, prochorovka, same kind of flat open farmland. Tank...