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

up, you! Shut up, you! Grubs spraying, worms of wisdom. Shut up, you! They were just crumbs in my kitchen, crumbs in my kitchen. Open my vein! I’ll bet you’ll think I’m betting against you. Won’t you? Won’t you? Mothra went up to the Mansfield Pen to see the total éclair of the shunned. I had whipped cream for their coffee, but they were just crumbs in my kitchen, crumbs in my kitchen.
    "All right! Out, you crumbs! You heard the lady! And Mothra, don’t forget this grub of yours. Where’s the other one? Hey, anyone? Has anyone seen Mothra’s other grub? Ah—there it is, snackin’ off the kitchen floor. No surprise there—there’s a week’s worth of food spilled all over the floor. It cost over a thousand bucks. Why should mere mortals consume it? Oh, no—let’s give the good stuff to the grubs!"
    Like the leeches in the hospital whom we feed precious human blood all in the name of the reduction of swelling, we don’t care about the reduction of swelling. We just want to feed the leeches. I found that out as a young orderly. I had no where to go—I was homeless, but the hospital staff did not know that, so I would find odd rooms to hide in and sleep or shower in when I was off duty. I was able to find a forgotten engineering room behind a false wall. I brought a perfectly okay TV up from the repair shop and was able to stay there undetected for a long time. During that time, on a nocturnal scouting mission, I found the leeches. They looked like they’d been placed in tanks with amputated limbs and freshly removed internal organs. I would have done more to investigate, but that night a medical delivery came to the hospital—an enormous truckload of drugs and supplies. An intern went from department to department, cleaned out all the tills, and paid the trucker for the delivery. Cash. Almost a quarter of a million dollars. Can you believe that? So the clamps came down. Security swarmed the building and found my nook but never connected me to it. But I could no longer sleep there, so I also lost interest in working there. I just stopped showing up. I knew of easier places to live.
    The library, for example. Except my son could be a problem. One time I was in a hurry to get to the main floor and leave, so I took escalator after escalator from the living quarters on the top floors past the restaurants and stores on the middle floors to the second floor exit in the library, which one would walk through to get to the final escalator down to the street. My son, by going slow, got lost behind me twice. The second time, I went back to look for him, without success. He could have been outside alone for an hour and I wouldn’t have noticed. I’m not always observant when I’m in a hurry. He finally came back, but I was scared. So scared that I had to find a secluded spot in the upper floors of the library to have a beer to calm myself. No sooner had I found that spot, in a corner of never-read antiquarian phonetic texts, then someone remarked, "Look! They’re fighting!" and pushed past me to look out the window in that corner. On the adjacent rooftop, a couple of stories below, five or six women were arguing. One, with enormous sores on her face, yelled at another about "stealing" her "man." The yelled-at one was the flabbiest of the women and reached over one of her two defenders, who were also yelling, and landed a fist in the face of the one with sores, who dropped to the roof tar like a bundle of shingles. A crowd had gathered by the window. I wouldn’t be able to drink my beer there. Damn! Come on, I said to my son, and we went to the literary criticism collections to see if I could drink my beer unnoticed there.
    Then I wondered if Thoth might not be that shared man the women were arguing over. I smiled. That’d mean that he was diseased and dying already. That he had a penchant for gummatous women was interesting. A weakness I could maybe exploit sometime.
    Driving down the street, I saw his name on a