Linda Perdido: A Novel

Five.

linda perdido 25 Five. once past the marches of Moon Trouble, the couple glides into (and over) what is known as the Hidden Quarter of Set County, holding hands. Their eyes sparkle; they are in love. Behind them the enormous sun is a blazing, burnished medallion of tremulous metallica. all is well; the world is a happy place for those aloft in the hot air balloon of their over-wandering, far above, between cloud towers the color of the rusty and bloody red badlands of new Marrowbone. Sweetly and severally, they blacken and reblacken each others’ teeth, and ride the wind known as the north american imp’s Breath as it wafts them, completely counterintuitively, from east to west, rising above the Shamrock Cordillera and over mist-shrouded Moth County, the place inhabited by old clothes and antique iron clothes-racks. They sing bad songs from yesteryear like “o arabella” and Mumblety-peg” and “i Shall Cast my Shadow as Far as Your Car.” Spike’s cloven hoof of a face softens in the moist warm steam rising off lake lucrece near the outskirts of Cananga, the old hub of transport for the 26 MaC WellMan entire region; and especially the made to measure and variable focus foam rubber flywheel industry, known world wide. Nearby heady New Dynamo’s flaming night factories churn out fantastic geysers and towers of semi-liquified scree and fiery clouds of Kanu-Kanu, slag and asphalt which when cooled is employed as a generatrix in various lively powders; in particular, Phenobotulene and pistolplasm, substances sought in all the capitals of europe and asia. Set County’s photopetropharoonical pride. Next the lovers shrill with delight at the sight, veiled through flat, black planes of a northerly cloud sheet dark as deepest indigo, of the towers of the Mohonka Extension Bridge, the last and greatest work of the famed architect Flatwood easthammer, a nephew of the great Mahoon and literary dilettante, p. J. Bojangles Crapley . The Crapleys and the perdidos share an ancestor in the person of Consternation p. (For perdido) “Buzzsaw” nightwalker, a member of the United States Senate just before the brief and unfortunate presidency of S. S. “Steamboat” Crowe; and also an inventor of a kind of circular saw, one given to lilts and tilts and thus off the main branch of technological advance. Sweet linda lifts a champagne toast to her distant relation as they fly over the Nightwalker Mausoleum in nearby Minsk, adjacent Mink Muscle, near east Fossil and West Hijack, along the crumbling two-lane highway that runs into the rolling grasslands surrounding the town of p— ; p for unpronounceable, near which Narthex notices line after line of dusty, yellowish clouds. Smoke or Smaze. Smunk even, daze. days of daze, he offers to his gal, speculatively stroking the jagged scar than runs up the north side of his face, from adam’s apple, around the cheek bone to a thin and hollow temple. looks to be a motorcade of heavy trucks, earthmoving machinery, backhoes, graders. Wonder what they are doing in such a far and empty place as that? His wonder wanders as the linda perdido 27 balloon turns about, and teased by a new, lighter wind, tizzies on for all the world like a child’s toy exponentially removed by some fluxion of airy nothings, by moon cats and goldish crickets, out of noplace into someplace. linda perdido is thinking about this glorious day of reckoning , recognition and plain old-fashioned wreckage. nothing can beat the feeling you get. Her crooked smile is so wicked you could read it, and her by implication, as an instance of innocence unalloyed . now those years of humiliation, the teasing of her social betters, the harsh punishment for petty theft and ladybird beetle larceny; for misdemeanors, miscreation, misdeeds and misdoods. Miscarriage in major and minor keys. That year at the Bad Girls’ School at Wemkie. Misconduct and misguidance at the drug rehab facility at Broom. Misery, years of it, just itching to be expressed to the full extent of the Second Digit, proudly erect, in the stony face of authority whomever and wherever he or she might dwell all over this colossal shit hole of Set County, a place more fit for the Japanese Beetle than for a person clued into her own minutely calibrated inner life. Her cold and gem-like gaze skims lightly over the landscape, a landscape she has...