Assisted Living: A Novel (25 page)

—Grandpa looks like a god, I said to myself, then his remaining eye popped out of its socket. He trembled and quaked and turned red as a lobster. His colostomybag burst, his dinner came up. I saw in and through him. His heart broke, his brain burned, his soul shriveled down to nothing.

Olga rolled off Grandpa with sperm dripping from her sick cunt. Then I was pulled away and woke up with evil still muttering in my flesh. I lay on a big offalheap about a gallstones throw from Silvergrans yard. I was burned, scraped, and stung, but I was impossible to subdue. My ass ached and my crown smarted, but Grandpa had fared far worse. He was on his stomach next to me. I turned over and saw he was dead. They’d cut off his balls and nipples and sliced off his cock. He had it in his mouth.

I stole Hugo’s wheelbarrow and wrestled Grandpa into it. Then I plowed my way through bogs and pinemoors, shrouded by night, frozen by wind, whipped by rain. When dawn finally poked a hole in night’s hoary pupil, the freezing rain turned to sleet. I huddled naked under a logdump in Ersmarksbodarna, took a catnap, and ate a rat. When evening came, I shoved off again. The capercailliewoods were like a thousand bombedout cathedrals. The night entered my bones and whispered lewd propositions. Firs brooded over an ancient evil, they’d wandered down from Siberia to spread darkness over the Aryan heartland. They had to be sure they settled close enough to suffocate each other, though. The tufts of grass were springy, but groves of berrybushes made a stand, and stones and roots lashed out. Fallen trunks barred the way, mud turned slick as ice. The darkness had no heart, the paths had forgotten why they existed. But I trudged on and made good time; well after nightfall I was there. I stole into the Lansförsamlingen churchyard and found a good resting place next to an old conifer, maybe a black-or turpentinepine. I grabbed a spade and dug a hole and tipped my Grandpa in. Then I went to the mortuarychapel and dragged out a reinforcedconcreteslab. Iscratched the word “Grandpa” into it with a nail. Then I read a Mass. Since I had a cold and was frozen to the bone, though, I tried to fill in the hole as quick as I could.

I leaned the gravestone against an ashtray and then sat down on a treeroot. Kama-Mara came by and babbled about violence and sex, and I promised to do my best, since I owed Grandpa that much. He bellowed, full of hatred and lust … the Kali Yuga will ramble on … And then I was alone … As it was ordained from the beginning. As it has always been. When the light finally forced its way through nights hymen, slow but stubborn, I stood up.

—I loved you, I mumbled and pissed a few salty drops on Grandpas grave.

I wanted home.

I’m Grandpa now.

__________

lues
—an old name for syphilis

Svensk Damtidning
—Swedish equivalent of the
Ladies’ Home Journal

Master Hämmerlein
—the Devil

MBD-geezer
—MBD stands for Minimal Brain Dysfunction, now known as ADHD

Ernst Röhm
—Nazi leader, well-known homosexual

kekkonencigar
—Urho Kekkonen, a former Finnish president

Per Albin
—former leader of the Swedish Social Democrats and fourtime prime minister

Fru Öberg
—an old, weird, quarrelsome pipesmoking woman

Henry Rinnan
—Gestapo agent

piepel
—young ass in a concentration camp

Tommy Alexandersson
—killed five people in 1989, nicknamed “The Butcher”

Tonton Macoute
—Haitian paramilitary force

Sven Wollter
—Swedish actor

Sighsten
—Herrgård: Swedish fashion designer, well known for his unisex clothing designs; he is credited with “giving AIDS a face” in Sweden

Ebbe
—Nils “Ebbe” Knut Carlsson; Swedish journalist and publisher who revealed his homosexuality, and the fact that he had contracted HIV, on television in 1991

Siljabloo
—Gunnar “Siljabloo” Nilsson, popular Swedish jazz musician and renowned scat singer

Gadarene Swine
—the herd of pigs Jesus cast demons into

Gunde
—Gunde Svan, Swedish cross country skier and oddball cloaca—old term for sewer

Kama-Mara
—Siddhartha Gautama’s adversaries, the demons of desire and death

Kali Yuga
—worst of the cosmological cycles

It’s been a week since they killed Grandpa … Eons … I can’t stay here alone … I’m going to Skellefteå …

Skellefteå … I live in a garbageroom again … nothing but sourdough and mustardseeds to eat … I wander around like the dead … I remember all we did together … Drink my cares away and stare into the black empty heavens, the soul’s darknight … That’s all there is left … nothing else to tell … just fragments … “Do I alone hear this melody, which so wonderfully and softly …”

If anyone ever reads what I’ve written, they’ll wonder who I was …

Just a nameless boy who was forced to be a Grandpa, but couldn’t do it …

Just another animal in the chaos …

Christmas … I visited the grave last night and talked to Grandpa … Begged to go to him … Said I couldn’t do it anymore … He said it’ll all be over soon … Abaddon’s angels will take me away … He knows I’ve written about him, but he’s forgiven me …

I’m sick and crazy …

Death take me …

Grandpa, I’m not worthy …

Eloi … Eloi … lama sabachtani?
 … .

__________

Do I alone, etc …
—from Wagner’s
Tristan and Isolde
.

Eloi … Eloi … etc.
—My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?

André Sundlund, 91 years old, childhood friend

—You bet I knew poor Holger. We went to school together and during the last few crappy years we’d shoot the shit about God, Satan, nearlife experiences, and the foundations of agrarpriapism.

Holger was always a handful, everyone says so. Even before his eyes opened and he’d stopped babbling babynonsense, he was off on a crookedpath. He was raised by a man who lived only for death. Holger’s own Grandpa was named Holger Holmlund and he’d been the devil’s bitch for as long as any forcepsdelivered old-fuck could remember. Old Grandpa was said to be cruel as they come, a savage to everyone he met, he worshipped the devil and scorned men who lay with women and weren’t brave enough to sow the darkground. Anyway, he eventually called forth and then fanned the flames of forces he couldn’t master, and they took him just as little Holger learned the noble art of selfgratification.

But let me tell you what I remember about Holger from our elementaryschooldays. It was a crime to be alive back then, that’s a lesson we all learned early on. Up at three every morning to pack a lunch of stalebreadcrusts and moldyleftovers, then haul ass forty kilometers to school for a quickie on Mistress’s chair. Sex didn’t matter, most kids were usersandabusers, getting drugs was easy, all you had to do was lift your skirts and bat your eyes at the sextons and old eccentrics. Holger was the worst of us all, but he knew how to play his cards right. The teachers were devils in the flesh, anorexic beanstalks. They held out as long as they could, and then it was off to the loonybin with them. Either that, or they’d hang themselves with the guts of unwantedchildren. I especially remember one, a retarded hunchback we used to call the Spider. He was wordblind and proud of it, and he wouldn’t tolerate us kids using words that weren’t his. We probably had him about a year, and every class he’d drone on about how Joyce from Dublin died for our cysts’ sake and how no matter how much we moaned and groaned, we could never make it goodygoodygood. One time he wanted Holger, the quickest of us peatbog children, to read a sentence out loud. The problem was, Holger was so drunk he couldn’t see straight, so he just said: “Man was created in God’s image.”

At that the Spider cooed:

Then he stuck a pointer up his nose and into his brain.

At recess, we pegged kiddos with pebbles or blew frogs and toads up with straws and then poked them full of holes. Halfwits had to pay with their balls. If someone fell, the herd was on him lightningquick, set to kick him while he was down. Suddenly, tattoos were all the rage. Most kids chose scenes from the Acts of the Apostles, but I remember that Holger got three sixes tattooed on his crown. Still, he was sweet, and how sweet he was to the bosses and other bigwigs! He was never stingy with compliments, even if they only got halfway inside! Back then, though, times could be tough. When you got home, it was just wipe your ass and off to bed, pronto! You knew you were alive, and what a damn shame that was. Not just for your mom and dad, but for your family and friends, race and kind, material and energy! Superstrings and subquarks!

“I was just wondering,” … my dad said when he finally noticed me, “if we should let the calf live.”

Mom had been stuck in the kitchen for the past few years. She looked up and you could tell she’d been pretty before she’d eaten it all away.

“Nah, you know, Papa, he’s had his time in the sun … he’s had his chance, but he didn’t take it …”

Grandma saved me, though, because she wanted to do me. But Holger kept mostly to himself. After three years, we were fully trained, we knew all about making our rumps blush in the bath and why everything under the sun gets up and off. One time Holger and I hung out after school, we were going to go hunting with slingshots. There was this oldcunt who wrote shit-books and lived in a carwreck out near Dire Straights. She was the one we were gunning for. Holger had always been real out-doorsy and so he found us a willowbed beside the path that gave us an open fieldoffire. It had rained and so it was pretty slickwhen she finally came huffing along. There was nothing special about her … she was just annoying … that was enough … we were fed up … She put on airs, pretended to be a fortuneteller, made herself out to be a psychic. And you know what, she looked right at where we were hiding and shouted at us, even though there was no way she could’ve seen us. It wasn’t what you’d call the perfect shot, but Holger wasn’t going to lose any time. He aimed and sent that ball flying. It took her eye out! And before she could get a real fire going in her pipes, he’d put her other eye out! Then we rushed out and talked some sense into her! Guess if we were proud!

Henning Mikaelsson, 87 years old, farm owner, former comrade of Holger Holmlund

—I hung out with out with him in the fifties, back when Irma was still alive and kicking. She was a piece of work all right: sleeping higgledypiggledy with the livestock and creeping beneath the bin-gotable to suck on any blowhard she could find.

Holger was pretty stylish back then, even though his hair was going thin and his ass was getting bony. He wasn’t nearly as interested in sex as he was later in life, though. If you want someone to blame for the fact it was all downhill for Holger Holmlund, it’s Irma. She’d go to town on any old pieceofmeat, but she wouldn’t touch Holger’s with a pair of sugartongs. I don’t know how Holger took it. We didn’t talk cunt. We massacred bugs with modeltrains, and every now and again I’d play the accordion and Holger would sing spirituals. Sometimes the devil would take him and he’d lockhimself in his room and work like a hellion on his Biblecommentary, which was so horrible that just thinking about it made you want to scrape your foreskin right off.

Sometimes he’d recite whole passages from memory, and I’d weep and pray for him. He read up a storm, and he knew every language under the sun.

He borrowed thousands of books a year, a lot of them musty and gray and from far away places. And man, how he wrote! Up one side and down the other, roll after roll of cheap toiletpaper, while the devil sat on his left shoulder and dictated.

“If only the apemen don’t off me before I’m done,” he’d say. He hated Judeobolshevism, but he was totally crushed when Stalin died in ’53.

“He really gave them hell,” he sobbed.

And he’d say, “Everyone’s a devil,” every now and again.

He stayed out of the sun, so his skin wouldn’t get dark. He thought shampoo made your hair black and curly, so he washed his with sagopearls. He was afraid snuff would make his nose crooked and his lips thick, so he smoked twice as much.

“What are you going to do if you get rikscancer, Holger?” I asked him once.

“Kill them all,” he answered, catching a blowfly in his mouth and swallowing it.

Margot Sandmark, 81 years old, Grandma Irma’s friend

—Holger Holmlund was the nastiest wretch to ever dirty up a cunt!

The fact that there were ever people like him in the world is unbelievable. I’ve seen some things in my day, but he took the cake … He murdered Irma, I’d swear it on my husbands grave! And Doris, too! He was so ugly, it was a disgrace … And what’s more: if a specialevent was happening, a party or a wedding, say, he’d make sure to humiliate Irma in front of everyone … He lied to her when they got married … Said he was polite, charming, virile, and rich … Promised her Happily Ever After … He was a shitbag! Emergency-rations were all he had to offer! He pretended to work in the church congregation … consoling survivors … crying over newborns … He brought people nothing but grief! Longwinded as he was, you’d go into metestrus just listening to him … He said God was invisible! that there’s more than one sun! that it’s bad to torture livestock to death! that movies aren’t real! You’ve heard it all yourself! Toys in the attic! gadfly! galorum! gawd! grainworm! An abomination! He was sick! What a wastrel! A donothing! I felt so sorry for Irma, I nearly drank myself to death … I don’t know how many times I stuck my hands between her thighs, looked her in the eye, and said: “You’ve got to put an end to him … he’ll make you crazy … he may seem like he’s been good and tamed, but I know the type … he’s out of his mind, Irma! … listenhere! beagood-girl! there’snootherway! it’syouorhim! he’sgotmurderinhiseyes! dowhatl’masking! hellsbellslrmadon’tyouseewhathe’sdoingtoyou! nobody’llbreatheasyuntilhe’sgone!”

But Irma wanted him … on a shortleash, of course … She needed the money, poor thing … Holger threw a fit every weekend, Irma had to whip him back into shape … Damn, he was difficult! Irma loved to dance, you know, but boy you should’veseen him fuss when we were getting ready to go out! Just begging and hollering and making a scene! “Irmadon’tyoudaredoit, you’llbethedeathofme!” and “Iloveyoumorethanfinalvictorypetyouknowthat” and “Youcandowhatyouwantwithmejustsolongasyoudon’tleavemeineedyoudamnit!” and “Forgivemeforlovingyousomuchl’mgoingtoburst!” He’d grab her around the knees, but Irma knew enough not to give in … She just made herself up even bolder than before, she didn’t bother to wear underwear under her dress and she made fun of him when our girlfriends came by … If she found some tasty morsels at the bar, she’d bring them home, work them up, tie Holger down, and force him to watch … Irma was the finest woman you can imagine … homely, surly, portly … It was never the same without her … She loved a good romp in the sack … What stamina! From dawn to dusk! Up and down, front and back! She knew everything about everyone! and she could talk your ear off, that’s something anyone’ll you! With a smile on her lips the whole time! She had Doris in fifty-six … The girl got along fine … she was unbelievably like Irma, both in her attitude and around the mouth … Holger wasn’t allowed anywhere near her … He read like a maniac … Irma burned his books, but he always got new ones …

I told her: “Put his eyes out, that’ll stop him from reading those wicked books …” All for nothing! She was too sweet and kind to make it when the prince of this world kicks up a rumba with Conway Twitty … What I’d been telling her was going to happen finally happened … thank God, Doris was at her Grandma’s, Permesiva, who lived out in Gråberg … Irma had got the cockshivers … They found her in a ditch … he’d used a vacuumcleanerpipe to force meltedlead into her cunt … They never arrested him for it! the buggerfucks! Three old friends swore he’d been with them all weekend making pineconeanimals … So they left him free to wreak havoc … A wolf in the flesh, that’s what he was … a leftist … He held nothing sacred, he left nothing in peace … They took Doris from him, but he murdered her, too! And then he took her boy, Helge! How that boy’s going to make it now that Holger has so obligingly up and kicked it, is something I don’t even want to think about … All you can do is hope he doesn’t understand too much about what’s going on … he always was feebleminded …

Lillemor Lundberg, 38 years old, social worker

—Holger Holmlund needed a lot of support, but he was extremely difficult to help. He never came to us, we always had to go to him. You never felt welcome, though.

“Jabbercunt!” he’d spit right between your eyes. “Scurfbag! Cloacalwhore! Cancernode!” he’d keep on going. He’d been on disabilitypension since childhood, on account of rectalcancer. And in the last thirty to thirty-five years, he received economicsupport in the form of incestbenefits and a BSDM-subsidy. And he also got a widowager’s pension after his wife died. He made a bit by volefarming in the bakery, and every now and again he earned a couple of kronor by writing letters for the town’s old never-wed analphabetic geezers. He had a severe drinking problem, but all he did was laugh scornfully when someone tried to set him straight. I remember this one time Mari and I visited him. His answeringmachine was just one long, awful string of abuse, so wedrove out to Hebbershålet unannounced. It was spring, the sap was rising in every cunt, but Holgers yard loomed dark amidst the suninseminated forestglade. The shutters were closed tight, and from inside the stereo was thundering forth a weird Mass. Hard, heavy primevalsounds were drowned out by bestialhowls, children’s tears, and women’s wails. Metallic cadences and insane choralstanzas, unnatural sybariticgroans, and piercing cries of pain. Mari pushed the doorbell, which by the way was shaped like a penis. I could tell by her nipples that she was scared. All at once the soulshriveling music stopped. We waited a couple of minutes, and then I pushed the dickhead myself. A piercing sound like the matingcall of the pale sprucebarkbeetle echoed through the tired house, which had already witnessed so much misery. Grumbling, Holger wrenched open the door, and I asked him how he was and if we could come in.

“New deal, God,” he babbled. “You won’t get me, you Satan you!” He was barechested and had on a pair of brightyellow long underpants. He was bleeding from deep gashes on his stomach and breast. As usual, he stank of alcohol. His knotty hands held an Arabian deck of pornocards. His goateyes stared shrewdly out at nothing. Mari tried a little kindness, but he kneed her in the mons pubis and she fell back off the porch.

“Sorry, what did you say?” Holger asked, cupping his ear with his hand. “If it’s about the offer to teach Sundayschool for the kiddies, I’m still interested. But I want free booze and lubricant.”

“I was just asking how you were and if we can do anything for you—”

“Aren’t you old Suctionpump Desiré?”

“No, Holger, its Lillemor from socialservices. Now you listen here, you have to stop drinking—”

“I’ve had more than enough of you, you slimeball. Get out of here before I sic the boy on you!”

“Actually, we’d like to talk to you about how it’s going with Helge—”

“Go to hell, harpy!” the boy shrieked, peering out between Holgers legs with a blackandblue, bonetired face.

“If you don’t cooperate, Holger, we’ll have to call the cops.”

“I’m so fucking fed up,” he sighed and slammed the door again.