Nikanor Teratologen - Assisted Living - A Novel

— You’re about to get what’s coming to you … shitcunt …

Grandpa seemed to be getting the sunsetblues … Must be in the genes, because I usually feel pretty sour in the evening, too … He threw me across the table, yanked down my pants, shouted a few curses, and started beating me with the springy switch.

— How I hate you! Pampers and Semper! Kamratposten and Barnjournalenl And you actually dared to like them! You actually had the stomach for it! Evilevildevilllll! There you go! And there! There! Everyman! Tusenbröder! Tschandala!

He’d worked up a good sweat by then. But Grandpa wasn’t interested in just scratching the surface … Not by a long shot …

— Lie still! Meir Kahane take me if I can’t make you love me like I deserve!

While Grandpa went to the john to get the mulewhip, I thought of the words Jesus spoke in Sirach: “Bend his neck in youth, bruise his ribs while he is a child …” It looks good on paper, but death ispretty gruesome when it finally comes to call … Grandpa threw himself back on top of me, shrieking in his shrillest shrewvoice:

— You’ll never see Uno Myggan’s monstermember! because I’m going to beat the life out of you!

I cried and begged for mercy, but Grandpa just whipped out his oneeyedsnake, held me down on the table, and started up again … He walloped his heart out, bopped until he burst … I bawled until I was blue, promised to turn over a newleaf … but he was tired of being tired … he lit a Gauloise in the heat of it …

— Hushababy! chin up! simmer down! tickletickle! Not enough? … Here you go! You want some more?! Hooboy! Ubu-roi! Sanssouci! You make me sicker than Nathan Ratschild!

The leather left deep, bloody welts in my flesh … Grandpa beat me where a man keeps his pride, on the ass … the back … the back of my head, too … Wherever he could reach … it was all the same now … thin bloody ribbons of flesh …

— Littleshit! Pissrat! Frogboy! Nilsen! Berkowitz! Begin!

I hollered so it echoed from Mångberge to Storberge! … Grandpa grabbed some coarse brown tape and wrapped it a few times around my neck and mouth … then he continued …

— Dingbat! Hamhand! Klutz! Notail! Goedzak! Mercader!

He waxed into paroxysms and waned into deliriums … Went crazier than Ernst-Hugo … He couldn’t stop … he wasn’t just whistling Dixie … he changed hands because he’s ambidextrous …

— Hornboy! Marbuel! Makbenak! Agnus Dei! I’ll beat the evil out of you! Troglodyte! Trilobite! Starlet! Sweetthingwithacher-ryontop! I got the nigger by the toe! You’ll cry undeunde before I’m done!

Blood sprayed with every lash … shreds of skin dripped, too … it hurt so much I tried to stop breathing … Grandpa threw the whip aside … he’d gone semirigid … come to his senses … tried to rekindle the flame … get himself together … but it had burned down … bled out … he’d lost it … he told himself the same thing had happened to Stendhal … he was indecisive now … frazzlehaired … worndown … upsidedown and insideout … he lay back down on the sofa bed … sang in castrato:

— Nur wer der Minne Macht versagt, nur wer die Liebe Lust verjagt …

Snuffling and tearyeyed, I crept to the john to wash my backside as best I could … I worked the tape loose … bathed in punsch … put soaked vealbrawn and soggy bread on the wounds and wrapped gauze around my lower body … then I undressed and put on my wet nightshirt … I went back into the living room … Grandpa lay there reading The Temptation of Saint Anthony by Flaubert … the TV was still on … Bobby was giving JR a blowjob …

— Listen here, squirt: “The child is little like a dwarf, short, thickset in body with a miserable aspect, some white hair covered his prodigiously great head, and he shivered under a paltry tunic, guarding in his hand a roll of papyrus …” That’s your spitting image, boy! he chuckled. Instead of papyrus, though, you’re guarding a role of toiletpaper!

I knew it was true … I was the most pathetic thing on earth … anyone can have me, but no one wants me … I was ashamed to exist … I received life as a wound and I have forbidden suicide to heal the scar … just like Maldoror … as long as you don’t end up in North Västerbotten when you die … I sat down on the small woven rug … looked at the floor … I ached … that was probably the point … A nature program came on … bloodred, slavetaking brigandants were lapping up a Lomechusa beetles shitdope … the anthill goes down the toilet soon as they get addicted … Grandpa was jacking off … it was the idea that turned him on … insects fondling each other always makes him hot … especially when it involves interspecies action … He joylessly spewed a few wet drops … not long after that he went to sleep … walking through the valley of the shadow of death … I didn’t budge the whole night … I wandered lost … Empty within … cold without … longing for someone to put me out of my misery … Alone in the Milky Way galaxy … I’m so scared … I’m going to crash and burn …

__________

Portello — fruit-flavored soft drink

Ratatoskr — squirrel who scurries up and down Yggdrasil, the World Tree

Zarah Leander — Swedish actress and singer known for her controversial decision to move to Germany and work for the state-owned film studio UFA during the Nazi period

Farah Diba — married name Farah Pahlavi, former empress of Iran

Kamratposten —Swedish magazine for eight to fourteen year olds

Barnjournalen —weekly Swedish television news program for children

Semper — Swedish company that makes baby food

Tusendbröder — Swedish television series

Tschandala — untouchables in the Indian caste system. Also the title of a novella by August Stringberg

Uno “Myggen” Ericson — Swedish journalist, historian, and author

Nathan Ratschild — Nathan Rothschild, a London financier

Nilsen! Berkowitz! Begin! — two mass murderers, one prime minister

Notail — Pelle Svanslös, or “Peter No Tail,” the protagonist of Gösta Knutsson’s series of childrens books

Goedzak — Lamme; Thyl Ulenspiegel’s sidekick

Mercader — Ramón; hacked Trotsky to death

Ernst-Hugo — Ernst-Hugo Järegård, famously temperamental Swedish actor

Marbuel — child-devil in Werner Egk’s ballet Abraxas

Makbenak—“the flesh falls from the bones”; Freemason codeword

Nur wer der Minne Macht …—“Only the one who renounces the power of love, only the one who forswears passion,” from Wagner’s Das Rheingold

Punsch — traditional Swedish liqueur

Grandpa had kept his face to the wall for a whole week. He’d just lain there … he hadn’t eaten, drunk, spoken, or slept … He’d just smoked … When I tried to comfort him, he chased me away with a filletknife. It’s how he gets when he goes without drugs. I don’t understand why he torments himself like that. It’s also how he gets when the springsun slits open the curtains and knifes you in the eye. I went outside … slush was melting into drunken rivulets … pockmarked snowdrifts were wasting away in piles of ooze … bare flecks of muddyground were showing through … I flooded a few hectares … I was conducting an experiment … finding out which animals could swim … The sun was a shrill presence, more white than yellow … it didn’t quite have the bite it wanted, though … winter was bowing out, the air was filled with the heady sound of horny birdsong … clumps of snow tumbled from the evergreens, everything was melting except my heart … there the permafrost is perennial … sorrow has frozen the vital-nerve … The sky contained weak strips of blue … they were busy changing the decor …