Linda Perdido: A Novel

Twenty-Five.

linda perdido 159 Twenty-Five. What i could really use, says Gary, is someone in Home and Security as i have this hunch that what we are dealing with is an instance of terror. annabella, you see, was known to have visited the pyramids in Cairo, egypt, and she was known likewise to have frequented certain establishments in Arab town over in, over in New Baghdad, a place that was thrown out of both Utah and new Belial on account, you know, on account of the parable of the cat and the cave. The C/T brightens and suggests, i have some friends in Home and Security who may be able to assist you, Mister d’amico. Ha, says Gary, ha. Your card here says you are an elementary school drama-therapist, certified in Set County only; so: seriously, my friend, what good would your help be in the matter? Besides it is getting late and i have a lot to do so if you don’t mind? in a quick moment the C/T finds himself once more in the hallway, a man unable. Unalike all the others, his inner Biblical Vox roars (This a remainder of his early days amidst his Monitor family 160 MaC WellMan in upper Motorized Heights and adjacent Mount Fuji park and the Amphitheater of Balboa Parkway where shards of amplified Bible would sheer drop, sideways, into the soft stuff of his unformed Monitor Consciousneth). no one knows this about him except his high school girlfriend, Candy, a girl almost as shy as he. Holding hands one quiet evening, just on the rim of the amphitheater , the two intertwined and suspiciously so till an inner vox, a Vox Monitor issued from deep within, possibly an echo from Sunday’s habitual theme, urging surcease and restraint under the auspice of surveillance and detection—an amatory terminus. But his gray-green eyes met hers, and overthrew the prohibition. love happened. love and all love’s wickedest intertwining that teaches from within and gives shape to all that is without. She and he, taut and structured as theatrical plays were once imagined to be, to be born, until the moment of total (near total) release; eye to eye; fingers so entwined that if they were a vehicle they would have failed to negotiate the U-turn atop old Mount Conboberation (which lies ambiguously, a total mess, all over the four-state area) and plummeted how many thousand feet down, down, into the dep gulch of , otherwise known as no name Creek. These two loved, but did not know how to talk of the matter save through the Vox Monitor. The Vox Monitor which Care had put in place. Thus the young are brought to heel, taught to obey a voice as empty as the nothingness we confuse the air with. Candy’s half-clad image, one that has comforted him through many a bad time, now slowly recedes as he bumps, half blind, into the wall of the hallway next to his door, 3B Casita Nuevo, and trips over something on the floor next to his door. It is now six thirty in the morning, way past his bedtime and way before the habitual hour of his awakening. indeed he almost trips and falls; then to his horror he spies, lined up so neatly as to be almost LINDA PERDIDO 161 the work of his own delusional arrangement, seven black leather valises, each one of a darkness so glistening as to be almost transparent , as of obsidian or some other dark rock of a fiery origin. Hurriedly he unlocks his door and brings these within, one by one, so as to conduct a further examination. The confusion he feels is like…is like the weight of a hundred years, a phrase that even at the moment he considers inapt, curiously inapt. But now the early morning sunlight is pouring in the window, light from one world to another, as a tunnel or passageway connecting one world to another. ra, he says. ra. Somewhere a Galton’s polyhedron flips, night becomes day, and the thick glasses of the C/T glaze over; he thinks of the seventy-two avatars of radiance and refulgence in that old book Spider once mentioned; and of the 72 avatars of north new dwllwich, a place said to be secretly known to every child in Set County, and one told of...