Christopher WunderLee - The Loony - a novella of epic proportions

He even saw it in the encyclopedia.

So, that was the whole ride… now, here he was in yet another highway colony motel, somewhere in the peripatetic purgatory of America’s missing heart, after another day in the car with Them, the whistle of the radio attempting to tune in a tower far too distant, his only company, his pictures, his notebook (which is confiscated on a hebdomadal basis), some magazines haphazardly chosen for him by G-man 2 (none of which he finds very interesting), and his envelope-packaged candy-colored compulsory pills.

The painting, glued greedily to the back cardboard like adolescent’s tongue to a wintry pole, is in watercolors and indigo ink, distorted finely, Pissaroesq with faint winks of Cezanne and a Gaugainain mulatto woman disrobing beside a pool of Picasso goldfish, mixed indelicately with the scope of the Chinese landscapers of the Ching dynasty, only with that faint waft, like a subtle California burgundy knock-off, of pure bipolar Van Gogh shrubbery bordering her halo of a cunt. The woman bends anatomically towards the focal point, but her left arm, raised to provide perspective and highlight the artist’s gift for movement (the left breast mimes her stretch), tosses the entire structure into disarray, causing the acrylic syllogism to collapse upon the weight of its own perversity. The room is dominated by the painting, a room shot from some photographer’s tricky lens to look like a suite at the Hilton, but when you get right down to it, is a little sparse for three men of middle age, all with their own agendas, and ideas of place, and thoughts of domination, and duty, and purpose, simply two king beds with wholesale furnishings, personal lamps, a single-serving coffee maker that squawks like a demonic bird from the apocalyptic drama of Bosch or childhood sweating death sleep, and an overhead light illuminating languidly and undramatically, diffusing the perfect miserableness of the whole affair and all the collective regrets, which are voiced by Doctor Lochner as he plops unceremoniously onto the bed nearest to the bathroom/sink room/coat closet.

The location was Topeka, Kansas, although no one ever told anyone else. It had to be Topeka, or Duluth, or Okie City, or Toledo, it was definitely not New York, or Frisco, or Seattle, or Boston, or New Orleans, perhaps Baton Rouge, or Tacoma, or Sacramento, or Providence, or Clarksville, that was a distinct possibility. In Topeka, as the corona of Apollo’s buttocks slid craftily below the western ink of the horizon, the incessant peel of porn, televised, moving, jerking, sloppy, grotesque, kept him company as he sat at the corner of the bed, smoking yet another fine Danish cigarette, the splotch of the synthetic vine on his shirt the only thing left of his jug, twisting between his scalpely fingertips, hypnotized like a late night infomercial participant or a twilight evangelical eunuch who’s just been cured by the loving hands of the best con-man in the lower forty-eight by the moving contortions of Gomorrah flesh and the mighty howls of ecstasy, until the star of our show’s over-doing the whole banshee bit and caterwauling the way men wish they could make a woman sound (and resonating through Doctor Lochner like memory burps of Harris).

Beside the unbleached titanium curtain covering the champagne evening, the lone G-man checks for his partner’s return by deftly caressing the valence with his unoccupied left hand, as he fingers the knob of his service revolver neatly nestled in its holster inside his Gagalooloo & Vincent sports coat, and surveys the parking lot with predator eyes. Doctor Lochner calls him “G,” mainly because of his official function, but more significantly because he always remains and the other one, the one he calls “C,” always runs their errands. Tonight, it’s for dinner and another bottle of syrupy red Idaho wine for the dear doctor. G is always present, a constant, a peripheral figure in the corner, faceless like a pagan statue that’s been molested by zealot Christians, missing fine edges, lips, a definable nose, but still not abstract, that blurry memory of nameless meetings kind of impression, it makes him good at his job. G watches Doctor Lochner like a divine shepherd eyeing his sacrificial lamb, the savior of the flock, a small donation to the wild fangs of chaos, harnessed by the burning projectile from his gun, bringing down the nightmare, one lamb for the safety of them all… He watches as Lochner masturbates in the lunar glow of the street lamp peering through the voile blinds, he stares absently out over the room as a local prostitute named Penelope wriggles like an ashamed vermin, belches out great guttural groans of sublime grace, like a siren finally getting the sailor towards the homicidal rocks, never tenting his service trousers, never grabbing the loud whore and sloppy-seconding her into puddling oblivion, never watching the naughty vignettes of sensual epicure on the television screen, just watching impassively.

“…oh yes, yes, yes, that’s it, that is it, yes, yes, yessss, yessss, harder, har-der, har…der, yes, yes, yessss, yesss…”

It has been two years, 734 days, moving in at night, packing up in the morning, driving onward, his place in the backseat a warn spot in the characterless sedan no one would ever notice moving along with weeknight traffic, the shaded windows, the government plate, the continual migration to another, unknown destination. The fast food drive-ups with the young girls on roller-skates and nude legs, the convenience store taste clinging to his molars (no matter how hard he brushed), the cheap beer piled in disposable garbage cans, the road ahead, the families passing on vacations, the summers, the sights of festivals, of picnics, of commuters.

* * *

There on the crusty vomit green couch of his grandparents' Sunday morning sunshine wreck room, with the eunuch kitty Buster spread eagle sacrilegiously in one fragmented doorway of light, “for a castrated cleric of the feline faith, he sure was immodest,” and the fronds of Grandma's favorite fern as his crown, the ten year old version of Albert sits fresh and expectant, flipping the pages of one of the old man's ancient magazines, the Southern Literary Messenger , June 1835 edition.

He's perusing, with the interest of the dirty mind of his age, a Poe tale, knowing the author as a seedy peddler of horror and suspense, he's a little unimpressed, although perked enough to continue, since its presented like an article in a newspaper, and little Albert, even at that juvenile age, adores the sullied slop of the news, with all its violence and scandals and politics and outrage.

Hans Pfaall, a Dutchman guiding an interstellar balloon through the paroxysmal avenues of space, departed earth on All Fool's Day and spent nineteen days on the ethereal ocean, but though Albert finds the voyage altogether very appealing, what with “arms set akimbo” and all, he is disturbed from his restful reading slumber by an impulsive inflection in the background noise, which, quite unexpectantly, begins to sound like the crackling fire of an A.M. radio. Albert, slowly growing more aware of the alteration, looks up to see if something is amiss, the refrigerator broken and leaking, the clock on the wood wall in the shape of sea-faring vessel stopping, the heat revving up (although not needed), but sees nothing immediately that could cause such a change. He returns to journal, just as Hans has sent his lunar emissary to the Mayor of Rotterdam (where folly lives, he will later uncover), when the ripple alters again, this time distinctly, absently, purposefully, as he is straining to hear, perhaps, a word or more, perhaps confusing the random bombardment of noise for ordered tonality.

Buster, laying prone, very uncatlike, on his back, radiates his triangular ears like a sail in the wind, and Albert, who's grown hoarse and nervous, someone is surely taunting him just below a whisper, reaches out to give that furry belly a bit of rub in an attempt to remain composed, only to be mauled quite violently in a persnickety four arm clutch, with claws imbedding themselves in his forearm. He picks up a brief chuckle as he retrieves his arm and gives Buster a head full of all the explicatives he's picked up from the playground, highlighting the barrage with “mother fucking, titty sucking, two-ball bitch,” his best string as yet debuted before human ears.