The Unwelcome Guest Plus Nin and Nan Read Online Free PDF

drinking. I had to get her off the bus long before we made it to the city. I can’t remember where exactly it was—we were pretty high— but it was a big city. I remember seeing a bar open from seven am to seven pm.
I remember jeeps rolling though the streets. It was a city under martial law, I think. How we escaped the city I don’t recall. My wife might know. But probably not. We woke up two days later back in our city and we weren’t sure if we’d actually gone on a trip until I found the gas receipts. I’m not sure who signed for half of them—the handwriting’s neither mine nor hers, but it resembles Lubjec’s, strangely. But that couldn’t be. He was dead. Or so the police had told us. Who knows if they are telling the truth, though. Frequently they don’t.
The President has formed a commission to look into reported abuses by big city cops. I’m sure the commission will never be heard of again–it was a salve announcement.
It’s a Salve New World, Little People. Do as you’re told and you won’t get hurt. I think that’s the gist of his message.
Of course, we freaked out when we came to. I mean, there we were, hunted for questioning, and we returned to our lair. We got out of there fast, amazed that the police hadn’t staked our place out, or had they? Had our return been at their hands? Were we being watched? We weren’t sure. How could we be? When I caught her looking at me suspiciously, I knew we had to move again. That would keep her distracted. We moved six times in four months, until she trusted me again. By then, we’d picked up six species of cockroach in our boxes. We finally decided to fumigate. We set off our bombs and went to a motel. When we got back the next day, our apartment had been ransacked. They had found us again.
You can imagine this wasn’t easy on my wife’s nerves. She Who Has Thus Far Been Unnamed needs a name. She’s not Beckett’s—she’s mine. Her name is Suzette.
Ah! So you say that she and Beckett were both French? No! Beckett was as Irish as James Joyce. Ireland always pushes her young away from her bosom. In this, she and America are sisters. America only lets multi-national oil conglomerates suck on her tits. Blessed are the French, who accept us from peasant stock!
A French woman, out of some incredible generosity, took us in. We stayed in her house and were given a room with southern exposure. Suzette loved it, and brought dozens of plants: green, white, red, gold, blue.
How we met her is interesting. I was carrying a book by Raymond Federman, Aunt Rachel’s Fur , around, and this woman at this restaurant came over and told us she’s read it—in French, of course—and that she thought it the funniest, most ribald writing since Rabelais. We hit it off. Suzette seemed a little jealous, but when Suzette–yes, they had the same name—invited us to coffee, my Suzette immediately accepted, which allayed my fears. I love my Suzette. I would never betray her. The Suzettes became good friends, actually. They played tennis together at least three times a week.
I kept myself busy by reading avant-garde fiction—you really should read it if you haven’t. Oh, you have been?
And now, five am, after a night of writing, my demons confront me. Not with any ferocity. See? City is at the heart of many things.
For two months I had no idea that the other Suzette had known Lubjec. Lubjec had, apparently, survived and had gone underground. Literally. Supposedly he’d built himself an underground city, a project he’d been working on for twenty years. As the underground city grew, it dug deeper, because it knew the surface would crash down eventually.
Each underground city was built under a big city. When the top worlds collapsed, the lower worlds would dominate. Like icebergs, big cities showed only ten percent of their mass above surface. Then they collapsed. The lower worlders were already too deep to be affected. The upper worlders died. Most of them. A few of us made