Read Online The Unwelcome Guest Plus Nin and Nan by Eckhard Gerdes - Free Book Online Page A

took some painkillers and decided to try a third time shortly before dawn. My third, round, though, also yielded a 59. I had a 52 going into 18, but my spasms were so bad that I got a 7 on that last hole. Perhaps my endgame’s not so good as Beckett’s either.
The fourth night the fifth hole led into a periscope of a decommissioned Russian submarine. A frightened old man was on the other side. His wild white sideburns quivered when I asked him about Lubjec. He placed an exploding scone on the sixth tee and blew himself up with his driver rather than answer my questions. Perhaps I was getting close to the truth. When the brine flooded the sub, I knew I was in a pickle. I figured this was a hell of a way to lose weight.
I made my way to the surface and began to notice my sentence structure. Fragments everywhere. Was it true that Lubjec existed only on paper?
Debriefed by the naval officers who picked me up, I felt naked. My pen was taken from me and broken.
I saw Ed...win.
I was sunk. I was bottled in, and I was in the drink.
I was the gin djinn, and only the reading of my tale would let me out. So, Lubjec, what will you do with me now?

Nin & Nan
Chapter One: The Sign
    Nin and Nan sat at the top of the hill together and observed the goings-on below. Nin's mind was sufficiently empty. Nan's was insufficiently so. The future was never not far enough away. Enough that neither of them would never know.
    Nin liked straw. Nan liked Styrofoam. The hill obviously disliked the straw because the hill did all it could to free itself of the itchy stuff: it begged the winds to come and blow it away, it enraged the fireflies and it shook itself fiercely. It didn’t mind Styrofoam, which was just fluff, but everyone else did, especially the bugs who came to rest on the hill, and because the bugs were such terrible whiners, the hill decided not to tolerate Styrofoam either.
Nin said to Nan that one fateful morning, "Look— beans are encroaching upon our hill."
    Nan looked around. True—the beanfields seemed much closer than they had just a few months earlier.
"No, not those beans," said Nin, pointing to the beanfields. " Those beans." Nin pointed at a newly constructed billboard alongside the not-too-distant highway.
Nan at first did not see it and imagined a different billboard: "Coca Beans—put some toot in your toot!" But Nan quickly dismissed the idea as too silly to even mention to Nin, and by then Nan saw the offending blot on the landscape, a billboard so enormous and gaudy that why Nan hadn't previously noticed it was worthy of some psychological investigation perhaps. But that would have to wait for another time, for at the time the only item being investigated was the billboard: a fifty-foot wide by twenty-foot tall luminescent green-and-pink lettered atrocity featuring a photo of a smiling, dancing string bean in top hat, tails, cane, can and spats. The bean was ascending a spiral staircase. The advertisement text read, "Dance up a stair to good health with Rogers' brand beans."
"Oh, that has to come down, Nin," said Nan.
"Exactly, Nan," replied Nin.
Nan rolled down the hill, across the highway and along the shoulder up to the billboard. Fortunately, it was cheaply constructed of soft pine. That gave Nan an idea for the moral justification for the destruction of the sign.
Back up the hill, Nan said, "Nin, they've killed the trees that went into the manufacture of that sign."
"True, Nan."
"And they've drained the trees of their life energy." "True again, Nan."
"Would it be wrong... wouldn't it indeed be a holy thing for us to restore to the trees their energy?"
"Yes, indeed."
"And what are the spirits of pine called?"
"Why, turpentine, Nan. We have some at home."
"Yes, we should get it."
"Yes, and then we'll soak the sign in the spirits of pine and restore the life energy."
"Yes."
"But Nan?"
"Yes, Nin?"
"That may not be enough. For this to be a holy transformation, we need more. Do you remember the holy transformation of