Linda Perdido: A Novel

Eleven.

LINDA PERDIDO 67 Eleven. one MiSSinG, one dead: That is what the newspapers will say; papers around here are so predictable: The Tribune, The Tattler, The Trapeze; therefore, that is what will be said, or scribbled by that idiot, Anne Doyle, who filched my boyfriend Arthur Rockefeller some years ago. new Samara County day School over in domely. i believe it was my Junior prom. Wish i could just skip over the whole damn ukelele, but i cannot. as if. as if. damn it, what is the proper metaphor? as if being borned naked and bloody wasn’t bad enough. Being borned, and thrust into a wide, hollow and uncaring place. Call it a world if you like, but all that calling does is dignify what should not be. names. names are so much garbage. Names are the stuff of filths: Hard, cold and unyielding . Why can’t i call who i want what i want when i want to? and where and when i want to, as well. people want location; they want a thing localized and nailed down because, being people they imagine there is some security in all that. What for? Because there you are, the new born, a sucker, literally. Yowling and ungainly and 68 MaC WellMan scrabbling like an animal that does not know, and that is all you are, and all you know could be printed in twenty-four point type on the head of a pin. all there is is what you do not know the nature of, not to mention evil predilections. You are in fact just a sitting duck, surrounded by all those boneheaded and evil predilections. Stared at and being stared at by future abusers of you, your trust and your body, and the very semiotic integrity of your body and soul. Something’s puppet. Worse yet, two of the same, the same kind, caught in the same bag, and caught twice in the same bag; hence the double dose and double burst of rage; ll and Qua lost and truly lost hence her lust for all things pertaining to the soul’s lechery. darkness and confusions and wow…. and primal unhappiness at the whole hellishness of a dawning reality. no, i’d rather be a. no, not that. But no, not that either. Too late. Too too late for anything but the wrong choice; better yet for all choice, wronged and shamed. Choice as a gummed up machine. What you are chosen for you, as what you are is named for by some damn fool of a parent, an imposter, in the capacity or character of being a parent. parent qua parent, but clearly and obscenely not up to the task. What you are (two of them) burst upon you, and another one, almost the same. once is enough and what is that blinding dazzle that drives hard at eye level, catches you full in the face so hard it saws, cuts my young face quite in two. And I do not even know knife from saw, saw from sawhorse. all these all these things doubled, eyes and ears and the boneless boneheaded dance of multiple knuckles and something called a fist. Born bursting, bursting into a world of farting and mystery fluids and all of the same ungraspable matter, an ill-fitting reluctance, an upside-down beetle dance of you and the world’s largest spider. learning how to hold on to something, a moth, a mother and learning how to scream. okay there’s a spider at your head and your spider sis- LINDA PERDIDO 69 ter why. Why? okay. okay? Why because now you are learning a language and language boils down in a word in a world like this to two things two being the devil’s number one of them is the language of death and the other is the search qua search. if i could only if i could only skip the whole damnable doubleness if only if only. The convulsiveness of being alive at, at this precise point; punt; of being alive at all and the furious bilateral symmetrical duplicity of self within self and self without self; and all the world’s junk and all of the broken shoes and lost gloves and boxes of no one’s belongings and musty old blankets and awful sheer awfulness . Wiggle the snap and snap the dragon, and that blasted plume of...