Linda Perdido: A Novel

Thirty.

LINDA PERDIDO 187 Thirty. As far as Spider’s testimony before the Lord High Mixologist of Set County, the truth is that what he told was peripheral to the truth, more or less parallel to the truth, but not in all respects true. True enough, the Bar of Many names (which is what the place should have been named if the place had been lifted out of time and rotated in four-dimensional space by an eye careful to catch all instances of nominative metamorphosis. The Bar of Many names was nearly empty on that day, it is true, and both the girlie boys alluded to above and Slow Burn Slipp were in place, true. The day (or was it late afternoon or was it early evening? No man can say, no man can say—except the Contriver himself and we know one exists because is it not the case as they say down at the proclamation Church at nobodaddy, in domely, there is no contrivance without a contriver?) Spider Getuli and Slow Burn Slipp had never really talked that much. Something about each made the other wary, almost the way one must instinctively react seeing oneself in a not-quite-right mirror. 188 MaC WellMan Seeing oneself not as one would care to see oneself, but oneself in a circumstance where the self seen has obviously chosen a life very very different from the life one would have chosen had one, perforce, been oneself (as one obviously has and had, being oneself): different taste in clothes, shoes and stockings; different manners and bearing, in all aspects of general comportment; different in taste in food and drink and music and song; different in the manner of combing what hair remains over the expanding area, or craton, of baldpate. and thus, odd as it seems, in this way, the conversation between selves had not taken place. So—what i said to the authorities was incorrect, Spider— Slow Burn I meant to say! was not dead, only removed from our county and state. For after the freak meteorological anomaly that cleared our hearts and skies, and after days of dread and doom, enchanted!—as I opened the bar to all comers; we persisted, enchanted , and for a time in high spirits. We sang old songs, made toasts in languages now lost and spoke in hushed tones of the old country and what our people had endured as they made their way here, on rickety wagons, in old cars with four square wheels, miserable sail boats and rusted steamers, all seeking seeking seeking a reasonable return in a questionable investment on a new lease on life. Someone, i recall, performed a sword dance with bagpipe accompaniment, and a fine looking black man from someplace in West Africa preformed a trick that involved filling his mouth with living fireflies. Someone sang a song out of old Ireland, the 19th century that is, a song about having fun again and fun again fun again and a corpse coming back to life to love his wife after being splashed with whiskey. as the time passed the bar began to clear. For a time all the fun again fun again fun again seemed vague and tired. i began to think about things pertaining to the world outside, like the war (now in his umpteenth year) and taxes and LINDA PERDIDO 189 death and all the loose ends of people’s lives and how storytelling inevitably results in time flowing in two directions at once, so that one can never be certain whether what was being so passionately recounted as ironclad certifiable bona fide historical fact might not only be a possible world, a possible world bound to come into being some time as the misnormal result of a room full of monkeys mindlessly hammering on the keys of a thousand and one royal Corona typewriters (what in the name of Murgatroyd is that, someone says who looks like someone over in Tungsten who looks like Caesar and is under the age before which the personal computer was only a pipe dream and did not exist—furthermore, who in the name of Murgatroyd is Caesar? augustus, Vallejo or Sidney?) So i was talking to someone who very much resembled the Perdido girl, and there was a guy with a FedEx uniform and pieces of what looks like turf on his face, and a black delivery boy...