Linda Perdido: A Novel

Six.

linda perdido 31 Six. For a long time i would stand outside, all alone, looking at the moon. I had had a fight with my girlfriend, never mind the reason. and so. and so, one time after a long illness, never mind precisely what kind; and other disasters both personal and private (never mind never mind), i got my things together and set out (Set out! Isn’t that fortuitous?) on a journey of healing and meditation and (inner and outer) exploration. My journey, I reckoned, was to be a personal one, a private one; an internal search through the external world for that which is missing, had been missing from my life. i planned my journey as a kind of embodied spiritual projection , and introjection and postjection, a redemptive pilgrimage across the pluriform midsection of this country and beyond. of this country and beyond i go in wild search of whatever it is i have somehow lost. a less sophisticated and cynical time would have called this entity innocence, but in this low and shabby time all such concepts are derrided [sic], mocked and vilified by sarcastic know-it-alls, the politically correct of both wings, wings of 32 MaC WellMan our time’s fat, rufous, and grotesque flightless bird, an awk of the everyday. it is as though some crowd of sleazy hacks, with a scruple combining both our country’s mirthless secular optimism and a terrible bottom-line cunning, have confused us all, never mind the reason, in a stunt box of the soul, in whatever stage of recovery we find ourselves. At this I growl. I, I, I can barely contain myself when i consider the poisoned well, spiritually speaking, of the current north american condition. especially since that terrible event whose name is digit slash digit digit. For i, i do believe (in a way) in the existence of a terrible innocence, even if my own has fled terribly from me, dating from the days surrounding that terrible day of digit slash digit digit, when i, i, owing to an incorrectly diagnosed chemical imbalance, came to be a creature… well…unfamiliar, let us say, to all who know me, including tangentially at least, that creature who is myself. never mind the details: The tedious rube Goldberg gimmickry of historical sequence itself: My old and powerful family’s ascent to pride and fullness through the pursuit of Waste Management futures. our genius for mercantile telepathy, and ability to read coming events as a veritable fluxion, for almost to a one we are persons who are able to look around corners, apparitionally all seeing. Never mind never mind never mind. Our frequent changes of cognomen and local habitation. and so forth—never mind the specifics, for they can be looked up in books, books where such information is locked up. information such as our frequent sudden flight from lynch mobs, bailiffs and collections agencies, the unenviable and inevitable destiny of those with the gift of looking around corners. never mind the details. linda perdido 33 our new name was called—skip it. Currently we are known largely for a collection of unassuming products designed for the maintenance of the self as he is understood in a plausibly contemporary sense. products designed to afford dental adhesion; products to remedy gas and bloating, puffiness and her sad accomplice—small folds and furrows in the epidermal surface caused by age and frowning. and other useful things: A fluid that will grow hair on virtually any smooth ovoid; not to mention a medley of smallish disposable things: Certain marvelous paperclips and plastic cups, top-end toothpicks and prongs, paper plates and napkins of a hue not found anywhere in Set County…. Have i mentioned Gbooop, a whole line of popular soft drinks made from naturally occurring chemical by-products found in many parts of the remotest corners of the world? i do not think i have mentioned Gbooop. But perhaps i have. But now i have in any case. do you dare to not acknowledge this as fact? do you? er, i am called X and my father, Y, was a hateful and vile bean counter at WalMart (in the old days before W-M was W-M); a hateful and vile creature much afflicted by appetites and addictions . as were my mother, Z, and my two sisters, a and B. Though we prospered and erected our domiciles everywhere...