Read Online Assisted Living: A Novel by Nikanor Teratologen - Free Book Online Page B

brains boiled: the first World Cup in sprinting, eighteen teams in three divisions, twelve branches per year; then the World Cup in skiing with twelve legendary competitors in different places around the world and with different distances and styles, also with eight teams, four from each team in the individual runs; then a little boxing and wrestling to wind down. All it takes is dice, a will of iron, some schizofantasy, and paper and pen. Then we played soccer with a hundred and twenty-eight teams; a hockey tournament with sixty-four teams—tabletop, of course—then the World Cup ’90 and tennis on the Sega; then Risk, chess, and Beat the Homo; and, finally, a homemade game involving exterminationcamps, where each of us plays a different commander. And now for the rest. We played Dragons and Demons, Lords of the Rings, and an awesome wargame Grandpa dreamed up about Diadochi. Now that I think of it, a few days and nights must’ve passed …
    We heated up sandwiches in the microwave … with tonsils, two jars of bustedappendices, and the dailynews …
    We drank beer from casks and then pissed in them so we wouldn’t have to get up … To play like we played, you’ve got to forget everything else … You’ve got to have a nativebestiary, a true cornucopia to populate your teams with … You have to like protocol … talking big and talking small … simulation … When Grandpa and I play together, I feel there’s a bond between us … No one else could’ve done it … When we play, it can sound like this—it was the ninth-year A-division, I had cerebralpalsy-women, Kåge-Suburbs, and Schools, and Grandpa had the Bush, Kåge-women, and Finland …
    —Who’s running for the CP-whores in the marathon?
    —Who ran last year?
    —Let’s see … They were in B then … Konda Forssell … time was three hundred and fifty-six … three points …
    —Nah, I don’t trust her … Has “The Ant” run yet?
    —Nope … she’s just sitting there scratching the skin off her nose to make it smaller …
    —Then we’ll take “The Ant” … she’s a fighter …
    —I’ll take a wild stab … I’m bringing in “Sinbearer”!
    Then Grandpa took his sweet time telling me about “Sinbearer” a nasty old tramp who’d lurked around Skellefteå in the ’20s …
    —He was big and fat and popeyed … not to be confused with “The White Boss,” who was another guy entirely, had dandruff for eyebrows … but everyone was terrified of “Sinbearer” … he wasn’t right … He limped along with a sack bearing all the world’s sins … He didn’t say much, but when he talked, his words were both timid and perverse …
    —“You don’t eat pork, witch?!” he’d laugh, or: “Badluck and pigslop! that’s all I’ve ever met with!” or: “Best meat’s between the legs, best sausage between the stones!” That’s what he’d say, when he got someone alone. He had a coarsemade pillory and testes like pitepalt.
    Grandpa told one tramptale after the next …
    —A good story is always sterile, monotone, he liked to say. Spleen and ennui are all you can hope for … Then it got even more longwinded …
    I got to hear about “Five-Penny Jonas,” a sullen little caramel and thimblehawker, who liked to eat live colts … about “ByeBye,” also known as the “Gypsy Dancer,” who was beautiful as a näken and liked to seduce young men with his accordion and then slit their throats … about Åkerström, who drank more than a hundred liters of water per day and had a habit of suffocating snakes by sticking them up his ass … about “The Hobo King,” who worked the roads and never stopped crying … about “The End Times,” who ran steelwire at faceheight across the road and killed forty-three cyclists … about gypsy Karlsson-Tydén, who made whisks but couldn’t bear to part with them … he wandered between Skellefteå and Ume his whole life and never got anywhere … about