Free Assisted Living: A Novel by Nikanor Teratologen Page B

walker,” name for a native bushman

XVI
    —You may think you’re a boy, but you’re just a fuck, my own dear Grandpa said, laying it all out for me. Anyway, the one measly adventure I remember was taking the bus to Auntie Eskil’s out in Tåme. He was gentle as can be and always offered you a mix-edracejuice and priestscurfpowdered kannibiscroissants stuffed with livelampreys. Weather willing, we’d look out onto his grisly little courtyard. He’d also turn on the radio, which must’ve gotten screwed up somehow, because it was always playing the same program.
    —Andthenwhat?
    —Uncle Sven would force his commando rod deep into some creep named Nils, who lived out in Rykhyttan. Auntie Eskil was small and plump and sugarysweet, but he was a terrible talker. He never said anything you expected, his voice stuttering and limping along. He was so deranged and dejected it was a wonder he was allowed to roam free. He kept up an erotic correspondence with Eugén Andersson, the busty cherubchef from Burträsk. He had an original copy of Death and the Maiden by Hans Baldung
    Grien up on the mantel. He’d written a forty-thousand line epic in alexandrine verse about the Emperor Caracalla. But Auntie Eskil couldn t stand other people’s eyes and voices for long, so after coffee heel get hotheaded and give us the coldshoulder. If we were lucky, he’d teach us to drown cats and geld mice. Fuck me, how we’d bug him to show us his cock! Then whoever wanted to could touch it …

XVII
    I tried to creep up into Grandpa’s lap, but he wasn’t having it. Then he saw how sad I was, so he relented.
    —Come on up here, then.
    The canechair creaksqueaked and outside the windows, which were all nailed shut, twilight creatures squawked out their foolish desires. The TV is homemade, it’s round and square, and usually all it gets is shit. Above the TV—to one side of the Mandela poster and the postmortem photographs of Rosa Luxemburg, Béla Kun, and Benno Ohnesorg—there’s a rabbit strung up by its back legs. Stuff is starting to grow on it, but Grandpa doesn’t think it’s time to throw it away yet. On the other side he hung up a velvet portrait depicting the popular motif of “chainsmoking infants.” The wallpaper in the sittingroom is a patchwork thing and curls at the edges. That’s where I’m writing now. That day the north wind was huffing and puffing away, it was a normal evening, where everything that exists seems like it’s over and done, and the autumn night was busy destroying every tie that, oddly enough, still bound. I was in the mood to get cozy, but Grandpa put a stop to it. No wiggleroom for me tonight.
    —Sit like a real person, parasite!
    If I’d pushed my luck, I would’ve seen a rampant bull … I would’ve found out why Zarathustra burst … he would’ve made a Spanferkel of me … I had one knee hooked over the arm of the chair and my whole upper body was unsupported, but I had to stay stockstill and couldn’t twitch a muscle. Grandpa fussed restlessly with the controls. All at once, Gyllenhammar was sobbing and begging forgiveness for his “pitiful vermin existence” … On Channel 2, Lena Liljeborg was red, bloated, and bursting with laughter as she talked about the teeming animal life in Jane Bjorck’s blondebush … He fluttered between one flickering channel and the next. Afrosport was showing the tongueswallowing championship in Djibouti, Screamsport reported on a qualifying match in propheticdreaming, MTV was featuring the Headbanger’s Ball, and RTL Minus a long cavalcade of deathjumps, mostly from rooftops and bridges. The Children’s Channel was playing Transsexual Videos, Hyper Channel was running an installment of that autopsy series called Bibersmut, the Loser Channel had a special report on stuffedanimals demanding tribute from their owners. Here in Hebbershålet we also get the channels you cant find in other places. One runs shows by Swedish TV personalities like Jan