Seven Demons, Aidan Truhen [english readers txt] 📗

am not small. Straight back and strong legs. Smells like pomade. Snorts again like a bull seeing a very small dog.

Tiny dog.

“No of course it is not simple as I say it is obvious that you live an untidy life.”

“Untidy. Heh. Yeah I like that.”

“I am Martin.”

(MAAAHR-tin like tin should apologize for even being there.)

I can’t remember what I’m supposed to say my name is right now and it’s not like Martin is a damn computer. He doesn’t know Jack Price or he’d be handling this different. So I tell him the truth.

“My name’s Jack.”

Not what it says in my wallet but I don’t have my wallet. Don’t have my phone got nothing where IS everybody? Where’s Doc and Volodya where’s Charlie and Lucille and Rex?

Martin goes up some steps fucking skips up like I weigh like a bouquet of flowers it is the ballet up we go.

He says oopla. (Oh-op-lah.) This is a general purpose thing that Swiss people say. It can mean that you have fallen down a crevasse and they are holding you over certain death by one arm or that you have dropped your ice-cream cone. It can mean you are starting a downhill ski race or getting out of a chair. It is extremely scalable I like it.

“Oopla.”

At this point we have to talk about Swissness because Martin being a thousand years old and carrying a bleeding stranger up a hill like that is totally normal is a Swissness thing and Swissness will totally keep coming up.

There are countries that have identities and there are countries with civic pride but there is only one Swissness. I will tell you but you will not believe it until you have seen it. So first of all Swiss people are basically immortal and they can bend steel using only their disapproval and that is just normal here. That story where grandma lifts a car off a kid that would not make a Swiss newspaper and if it did people would write in to say that standards are falling because she used both hands. But more than that Swissness is a way of being in the world that is very very Swiss. Like for example: a while back they passed a law here banning minarets because oooo scary Muslims! So right away a Catholic guy builds a minaret in his fucking yard because restricting personal freedom and freedom of religion is un-Swiss. He basically took the whole country out and spanked it and heads were hung in shame. Being un-Swiss is about the worst thing you can say here about someone who actually is Swiss. Foreign people are naturally not Swiss and that’s like a tragedy for them on every level but you know with application and study and wealth and focus it’s not totally impossible for them to become Swiss or at least Swiss-like even if they never get an actual piece of paper saying they are Swiss because not everyone wants to hold a Swiss passport. That is respectable to a Swiss person: there are three or four other passports in the world that are very almost as good and everyone should be allowed some choice and identity of their own. Being un-Swiss is something that can really only happen to you if you are Swiss but you do something that has actual negative-energy anti-Swissness like publicly fuck a chicken. It has to be public because fucking a chicken is disgusting and whatever but private chickenfucking is a matter between a person and their poultry and likely one day the poultry will get its shots in because chickens are dinosaurs with those mad little eyes and you fuck them at your personal risk. But while you’d be a fucking degenerate if you were forever fucking one chicken or another you would only be actually un-Swiss if you either sold that chicken for human consumption—because that is a risk to the health of society—or fucked a chicken in public because then everyone else would have to deal with your degenerate chickenfucking. They would have to contemplate a window of reality which actually encompassed the idea that a Swiss person would fuck a chicken. You would have damaged the concept of Swissness and just let everyone down and that is fucking un-Swiss which is like dying only you don’t get a headstone.

—

Martin has a cot in a little wooden house. I’m pretty sure he built the house himself. It has initials carved into the wooden wall by the stove top and the first one is M. There’s another set alongside and I figure them for his wife’s and that is sad because there’s two dates right under.

Martin puts a towel on the bed and then puts me on the towel and says he’s going to do some things and not to move.

I tell Martin that I am really good at that right now.

And he laughs.

See Martin thinks I’m funny it’s just you assholes.

I go to sleep smelling woodsmoke and snow.

—

Did you ever do a thing knowing it was a bad idea but you did it anyway because you thought it was what you wanted and it was not and then you did it and wished you did not?

I have never done that.

I wanted this and now I have it and that is all.

But looking out of this window at a gray blizzard with your actual lightning somewhere out there I got to admit—and that lightning is like horizontally far away not vertically—I got to admit that this has not gone in the direction I totally foresaw.

This fucking house is made of wood is that good or bad? Like I mean they make airplanes out of metal so that the lightning goes straight through them because if you insulate them they just explode. Fuck me Martin you better not have just built this place knowing fuck all about the mountains you better not be some wannabe homesteading trader retired and jerking off to his long-held log-cabin motherfucker fantasy—

But