excerpt
Fool, Jago, you fool . . . What notes I could have given you, Secrets of the
Lore, Secrets of the Chiefs! But I could tell Jago was an unholy fool, even all
those years ago, when Pol Pot—allow me to present my dear wife, Pol
Pot—first connived and connived and got the Three Doctors to put me inside
under the Forty-Seventh Section of the Act. “I am a man of power, ” I told
him, with quiet pride, that very first day Jago’s thugs manhandled me out of
the ambulance, “I have superior survival capacity. I have an exclusive entrance
into multi-dimensional lifestyles. I am researching the Lore of the Brazen
Head . . .”
If Jago had been a true scientist, a man of truth, he would have stopped
there and then, to test my hypotheses. But he is a bureaucrat, a baby-sitter, a
containment facility. He ignored me and went on filling in forms while Polytechnic
Pothead enacted her rant about me, my danger, my destruction, her
doom.
Jago has been filling in forms about me for years. I have been safely buried,
like a rusty old drum of plutonium encased in concrete. Buried in Oakhill, in
its walled garden, dayroom, washrooms, refectory, flaking dormitories, and
the overheating TV sets that zap the delicate folds of the brain with a new kind
of neutrino . . .
That is not strictly true. I must set the record straight. Like a secret missile,
I have been moved, in dead of night in a plain van. Men in suits escorted me.
I’ve been everywhere, like an epidemic, a dance craze, all across the nation,
west to east, north to south. So many rectangular washable spaces, just like
PP’s bloody classrooms, everywhere. But I’ve always returned to Oakhill, my
country retreat. It’s in the blood.
“So many roads to ride,” sang Otis Rush on the red and yellow Pye International
R&B label seven inch—still a nice collectable if it’s in good nick—but all
the Roman roads have the romance of Fascist Autostrada. Jago wants to make
my brains run on time. I can only run on four-star time! They always drive me
back into Oakhill. My burying ground.
You can hardly blame Jago. I accuse Pol Pot, the commissar of the reality
principle, who threw me out for a decadent bourgeois anarchist. And tried to
destroy all traces of my cultural production. And tried to purge my son’s brains
of my corrupting juices. No wonder the spells at the domestic residence, the
periods of communist caring, I mean community care, Officer Jago, were so
traumatic. It’s as well my conjugal visits are rare. Abort the very thought.
Let’s take a squint at the Group. The Rocking Roderic is soloing on his
cardboard guitar. All that guitar-hero phallic thrusting, into the circle of
crossed legs and knotted knuckles. But nobody notices his show-time. The old
lags are torpid as tortoises. Tanya is looking out of her time-window, …
Libros Libertad 