Christopher WunderLee - The Loony - a novella of epic proportions

Every time the doctor thinks of it, he rides it out to completion, knowing full well that the same questions, the same ruinous ideas, and the same morology will make him consider, in the paroxysmal glitter of his mind’s eye, if it all didn’t really begin with the iconography of the fiction, which will, without fail, lead him to consider how he went from pragmatic scientist to mythopoeic weaver of the tallest tale since the globe went flat after the reasonable good fellows of the 18 thCentury had their way with it. The story, the tradition, the beliefs, all the prerequisites for a proper myth…

However, he has not gotten that far, not this morning, not the morning of chardonnay twilight, with Riesling spindles of light breaching the moldy curtains and Windex deficient windows. He’s still dwelling, like a very content Purgatorite, on the beginning of his lust for invention. When Lochner tries to analyze his own desires, his own actions, his own Freudian absurdities and Jungian nuisances, he’s taken captive by the sort of reel-to-reel imagining of a brute, oftentimes vulgar, more often than not, nonsensical superciliousness of a pride and true mythomane. They are rides on his neurosis explored by the self of a drunken bodhisattva who has come to realize: the big question’s not: what’s the sound of one hand clapping, that’s easy “clap, clap,” but what’s the sound of one finger snapping? He is convinced, more often now than before, since he’s had quite some time to contemplate it in the backseat of the government plated sedan, that he has always believed in tangential velocity. Like many children, he was told the tall tale of the man, who is said to smile down on his satellite TV screen, falling at a random eight kilometers per second, and grant the wishes of pure innocence and faith. But Lochner never saw the face, never saw the kindly wrinkles and gentle eyes, the mona lisa lips or the enlightened brow. He saw, when he looked up at the great balloon of refracted light, a lone silhouette in a rocking chair with his profile glaring out into the ether, a dying grandpa of the expanding universe who sat lonely and betrayed upon his lunar throne. But this was all fiction, like the Martian skull, or the canals of Venus, or the rotten apple core in the middle of the earth, where dragons dwelled and little midgets with hippie beards frolicked gaily with skinny little homo elves on Tolkienie quests.

The fantasy, the pure construction of the eventual ego, had been with him from the very start, from the plop of his shoulders out of the gooey loins of his own private Eve, to the first word he’d ever spoken, to the one giant step of his toddler foot, to the decision to study astrophysics, and speak, as perhaps Newton prophesized, the language of the almighty. It was the fiction of it, the complete and utter abandonment of reality, and the trappings of the outrageous laws of control, the abstract artistry of tabulating the stars and comprehending the roars of the sun. It was boundless fiction, complete enrapture, an unknown mythology just waiting to be manufactured.

He was born in Oxnard, Mississippi for some anomalous reason, at two minutes to midnight, on the first day of winter, in a very unprofound leather seat, about a mile and a half from the Great Grace of the Lovely Watchmaker Hospital and Health Institute, and slipped like a gooey sausage from his mother’s loins and landed with a plop onto discarded cigarette butts, and receipts, and salted nuts that hadn’t made it properly to waiting mouths, and strange tumble weeds of lint from some unforensically explored former episode in the automobile, forcing his mother to pick flakes of tobacco and white lint shards out of his matted hair for days afterwards. His father was a latter-day troubadour who sold domestic engineering implements with the poetry of commerce and convenience door-to-door throughout the south. He was a big, red, slightly acned Nordic man of Viking heritage who steered his big Valiant like it was a ramming vessel and was about to get some serious Lindinsfarne ass. Lochner’s mother said he looked like Thor after a few too many millennia of hurling thunder and wrestling angry chaos wolves and drinking to the health of yet another resident of Valhalla. That was all he knew of his father, for the very night that he’d plunked like loose change onto his crimson floor, he’d dropped the young beauty school grad at the corner of Woolfe and Wolfstencraft and sped away like a feral cat, honked one, rather pleading honk, and veered on to the highway, never to be heard from or seen again.

Lochner’s mother, the daughter of a camera man for the British Secret Morphology and Metaphysics Society, whose largest claim to fame was they believed ardently that John Donne and William Shakespeare had written all of Francis Bacon’s works, was, at one time, a model for a major Italian pin-up calendar outfit, but had retired after one too many photographers phallically ravaged her with their equipment, and had immigrated with a cousin and an acquaintance to the grand ole US of A, to start a new life and become a movie star. The three split up though, in DC, after one professed her love for Regina (Lochner’s mum) during a bacchanalian bout of absinthe and lemon twists, and the other decided to join a book club that later turned out to be a cult, known singularly as the Membership, and was later arrested along with eighty other members when they tried to liberate their fellow citizens by gassing a subway car with opium smoke and strategically placed laudanum soft drinks in several soda jerk fountains. After the threesome went their own eumoirous ways, Regina Lochner slipped like a specially treated throat lozenge into the seedy, contrectated terra incognita of the Louisiana Francophile militia, recruited by a motherless gypsy trader by the name of Zapata as she waited for a Zephyr coach to take her to California, where she believed, she’d perform, in various illuminated casting couches the obscure art of movie starlet manufacturing.

Once the Confederate Rangers broke up the Gaul procumbent movement, finding dear Regina starving and wearing only a long hair-do (“in the way of Joan,” she was told ahistorically), she sputtered unevenly from town to city, practicing the very undemanded science of psephology in the back rooms of Oriental rug shops and kitty ranches, until she’d saved up enough dough to buy herself a man. When she came upon Upton Svardsgoordjarne (a Swedish noble, he attempted, exiled to the land of moving pictures and motor cars due to a failed coup against the Emperor of Umbria), she bobbed her head and puckered her lips and swung her meaty hips like they were flagging him in, until poor Upton yielded to her fleshy charms and impaled her with his manhood (she read quite a few of those novels, her favorite being, of course, the Wives of Buckskin Buccaneers hexilogy, by none other than Chaste Peckerton). The two were nycterent lovers for a vainglorious thirteen months, busy in random hotel rooms sneaking up on each other every night after Upton returned from hocking hoovers, irons, mops, and a very technologically (for its time) advanced flat-grill charring unit that was too difficult to explain and sold dismally. However, when Regina’s pouch elongated outwards so that her inny became a champagne cork, Upton took a stable position in Ogden, Utah as an exterminator and began to provide for his new family like the pleasant pagan boy that he was.

Albert’s mother, whom fancied a nomadic romance on housekeeping linens and was not exactly ready to begin the posturing of an unfamous knave with her kitchen and family room and wreck room and squeaky four-poster that went thump in the night, began to hunt around for a rodeo clown or a sailor. She figured some fellow would rocket her to Hollywood and leave her waving on the studio’s doorway with a thank you ma’am wave as they pulled out onto the busy highway and she began her laborious ascension onto drive-in billboards (always the thought of advertising to god, so titanic and lavish and loud, he must have noticed, all the famous people are going to heaven). She was caught, not even having the chance to recline her stretched body before the man, by Upton, who lifted the offending penis off the Berber and tossed him headlong, like an angel ousted from seraphic ranks, out a third-story window, causing the poor Okanogan red to break his leg in four places, his wrist, and fracture his pelvis. The heat was on, Johnny law was gunnin’ for Upton, and he fled like a millenarian from a lunar eclipse just a half an hour after Albert wailed his first mad cry.