The Unwelcome Guest Plus Nin and Nan Read Online Free PDF Page A

debate. I try to make it home, but I fall asleep and crash on the way—
"I can’t wait."
The grid engulfs me. My fingers and toes become enmeshed in it. Then the ground gives way. The city spires jut up at me, spearing me in the side. The churches have no idea what they’ve done, spearing the heavens.
The city is a confidence artist. No, not artist. The city hates the artist. The city is an assembly-line worker. What’s being manufactured are the citizens. I believe I am my social security number, my driver’s license number, my phone number.
This is no mere village.
Some things add just a fine eloquence.
Something’s adjusting vanilla quince.
Don’t you?
My nails are pulled from my fingers and toes. They are replaced by hatred, with hate, from the hateful.
And the north seems to beckon. Leave the city: go to the inhospitable zone, it suggests. But I see through that trick. If I crawl off to die in the woods, the city won’t have to deal with me. Well, me they’re going to find skewered on their main spire. Unless I succeed in shutting it down, which I don’t want to do. A shut down city is the scariest thing in the world.
I’ve seen fifteen cities shut down in the last thirty years—rioting, looting, excessive force, casualties—these are the results.
Waving back and forth in the breeze, the rhythm is ambient reggae. I’d say it was romantic, but I’ve been told I have no idea what romance is, so it must be something different. Ask my wives—they know how romantic I am. Ask the second especially. The first didn’t really like me much. Oh, that’s not true. She just tired of me quickly. It’s not easy living with me. For one thing, I do not like filling out forms.
Remember: you only have the right to assembly if you fill out the proper forms. You only have the right to free speech if you fill out the proper forms.
I remember one man, Lubjec, I think his name was, who couldn’t fill out forms either. He was a neighbor of mine in an apartment building in Old Town. He told me he so agonized over filling out forms, he’d gotten sick, so his job fired him. After that he just stayed home and filled out every form he could find. I do not want to become him.
Of course, he didn’t have a car like mine: a charcoal 2000 Toyota Camry. What a car—the best sled I ever had —or does "sled" only refer to motorcycles? I forget.
Nor did he have my wife. Well, she’s not really my wife, legally, but in every other sense she is. Know what I mean? And—I don’t mind bragging—she is amazing.
The President on TV asks, "Are you willing to make sacrifices for your country?" I imagine huge Viking pyres consuming domestic artists, but I guess he meant on a personal level, and, no—I will not sacrifice my wife for anything or anyone. I then notice the President is wearing a dark green suit. Excellent. The last one wouldn’t wear green. The Mayor had condemned him for it, which was awkward during the convention because the Mayor, of course, was a delegate in his home city, which hosted the convention. Lubjec of all people, ended up kidnapping the Mayor. Of course, the police, once they found him, shot him in self-defense while he slept. The Mayor, having been rescued, had ordered the shooting. And then all of Lubjec’s neighbors had to be questioned, of course. Wonderful. The Mayor’s secret police didn’t take long to find where I was, and I only barely escaped—my downstairs neighbor tipped me off when they came to her door. She called me and left the phone off the hook so I could hear everything. I was gone before the second sentence. No way was I going back to jail.
I moved to another city where, as I said, I became a church organist in a rock band.
No wonder a small place like Grand Rapids had had some appeal to me, though I knew I couldn’t be there long in the land of the thumped. I’d like to say we got there without a hitch, but my wife got very sick—I think from the morphine inhalant tubes we’d been