— Which is …? I snooped.
— It’s not that one about being raped by miners, is it? cackled Myrtel, lighting a lazaretcigarette with Gandhi’s platinum lighter.
— Nah, I never had the guts to talk about this one before …
— Tell us now, because our warcouncil is over if Grandpa doesn’t come around soon!
Grandpa, however, showed no signs of returning to earth. He’d already emptied the sugar bowl. Now he sat with downcast eyes, stirring so thoughtfully that it echoed.
— So here’s my hottest, girliest fuckfantasy …
Signar blushed at his own daring.
— Lanz von Liebenfels’s Theosofy and the Assyrian Beastmen talks about a twobodied, fourarmed, fourlegged Hindu named Lalao … I’d like to fuck a freak like that … mercilessly … He’ll croon folk love ballads in a shrill, cracked voice while I’m pounding him … At the same time, he’ll fuck Bhagwan in the mouth, while the guru is being devoured by a Komodo dragon … When Bhagwan is all eaten up, Reagan will take his place … then Thatcher … Schwarzenegger, of course, will be pounding me from behind … it’ll be an honest-to-god Apachefuck! And I’ll look, and before my eyes I’ll see a thousand newborns carried away by condors, eaten up by wildpigs, drowned by barricudaswarms … Legions of godlygirls and pregnantwhores will be caught in lavaflows, quicksand sinks, and ratinfested bunkers … they’ll have to stroke themselves and talk dirty till their dying breath …
Myrtle was smoking and obviously enjoying herself, and I was listening like a wideeyed peeping tom. Grandpa was as lost to us as before.
— A cheeky old Soldier of Christ will lash my back and ass with a cat o’ nine tails … When I’m one bloody weepingwound, he’ll be decapitated and I’ll open my mouth and receive his last repentant shout while I kiss him deep, deep down in the gaping wound where the blood’s already starting to congeal … Cities will burn, hydrogen bombs will explode, cultures will go kaplooey … Tom Jones and Julio Iglesias will gnaw off each other’s cocks … “Plura” and Thåström will sliceanddice each other with chain saws … Me and Arnold will come … And an that very moment, the universe will explode …
Signar’s fantasy had brought him to a boil. Now he wanted a straightup, nofrills fuck. Myrtle obediently went down on all fours and shut her little peppercorn eyes, the better to fantasize with. Signar called his pinkyfingersized cock up from the underworld and chose door number two. He spewed after a dozen repulsive little rabbitjerks. Myrtle grunted in disappointment. Signar wiped his bloody cum on his sister’s wrinkled chin. She lapped at it greedily while she came. The fire died down and they resumed their places. Signar started in about an overlyserious Betaniaboy in Byske who already spewed blood instead of sperm. Myrtle told about the triumphant moment when she’d finally emptied a boiling pan of toffee over some swankpot’s head at her sewingclub.
— She was an old gossip, she said, explaining the why of the enterprise, which had been short and sweet. Do you remember how pious and pure you were before we got together? she asked flippantly, reversing course midway.
— We lived like catandrat when I was a drooling and panting twenty-one year old …
Signar’s eyes were distant and uncertain.
— I’m still researching the Kusipoho Ritual of the Bikomoloise Tribe … They’re native to the corrugatedcardboard regions north of the Ngorongoro Crater … and they worship Harri Tularemi … When their oldest innocent gets his first morningwood, they get the lowest geezers together at a seedy pub … and then they draw lots to see who gets to give the boy what he wants … They begin with a Chimbu handshake …
— We’ve heard it all before!
— Yeahyeah … so, anyway, you’re wanting me to remember how unsexy I was … God help me! I was more of a prude than Aloy-sius Gonzaga and Johannes Bermanns put together! Selivanov’s chastity was my polarstar!
— And now it’s just the opposite: you want it so bad it shames you, and when you get it, you die! I busted out, right to the point.
I don’t know what had gotten into me …
— Be polite, boy! the tetchy little man exclaimed and slapped me with a flyswatter. You only have a voice on Holy Innocents’ Day, and then the crows will drown you out!
— The younger the child, the worse the devil, Myrtle recited as she bent over, grabbed my hair, and spit a snuffwad onto my forehead. I could feel it sticking there, but I didn’t dare to wipe it off … Minutes dragged by like Achilles’ cloven heel.
And they just sat there and stared at me … they seemed inhuman … their eyes weren’t their own anymore … I couldn’t return their gaze … I just trembled in my seat … pissed myself, of course … fixed my eyes on the linoleumfloor … piles of ratshit … a moldy smell getting stronger by the minute … until it became unbearable … The gaslamps dimmed … it got dark … they only got clearer … though they were the last things I wanted to see … a Christmascandle burned on a shortwick … it was epileptric … They were in my head … screwing around … trashing the place … feeling me up … laughing … on their way through to my innermost parts … lurking around the outermost of my defenselessness … needing to hurt me … to make me beg … To force me to see myself clearly … the boy behind the babble … the face behind the wankoff s fist … OhnoohnoohNO! … I struggled … put up a fight … they weren’t expecting resistance … they pressed harder … but I was defending the most precious thing of all … the thing you never surrender … no matter how bad you’ve got it … it’s the primal thing … in you before the beginning’s beginning … I’m talking about boyhood … the magic seed … the thing that makes you a Grandpa … It may be small and warm … but when it counts, it’s the strongest stuff of all … I didn’t want them to get their filthy hands on my hidden treasure, my boyhood … the Godgiven heart of us all … protected and sealed within us …
Signar and Myrtle growled and spit … they were used to getting their way … a mere boy couldn’t defy them … but the harder they tried, the worse it went … They redoubled their efforts, brutaled up their attack … he came in through the eyes, she through my fontanelle … They wanted to reach my psyche … but my heart’s root is somewhere else … farther in … I didn’t surrender … I called on all my love for Grandpa … I called on him, too … “Help me … I can feel myself disappearing … soon your mite will be gone!” … The demons were certain of victory … they wanted to defile me, to drag me away where no one would find me again … forever and ever … ruin me for all time … I called on Grandpa … I could feel my head splitting … I bledfrom my nose and ears … and I told them again and again: “I’ll always be a boy, since I have to become a Grandpa..
“you’re not a boy any longer,” they mocked … their voices like a swamp in winter, all ice and sludge … “you don’t have what it takes to be a Grandpa..
“i’ll be both and much much more,” I said … “i’ll hate and love and live and die … I’ll be animal and man and angel and demon..
“all you’ll ever be is a demon, the most useless demon there ever was” …
They’d broken through the outer layer … turned my fear to selfloathing … I’d never really liked myself, but this was a thousand times worse … I crumbled up … hunched down … began to break apart … but still I resisted … didn’t give in … put up a fight … they raged and burned … brought all their strength to bear …
“see how pathetic you are, taste your bitter failure, your defeat, your wickedness and lies … you’ve betrayed what you were, there’s nothing left in you that’s pure and true … aren’t you disgusted by your thoughts, sickened by your feelings, shamed by your actions … you’re no germinating Grandpa, no, you’re too cowardly and fragile for that … but you’ll never be a boy again, either, not after what you’ve thought, said and done …”