Love-Shaped Story

Love-Shaped Story
Tommaso Pincio

A darkly enchanting tale set in Seattle in the 1990s – the fictional life of Kurt Cobain’s childhood imaginary friend…As a little boy, Kurt would insist that his mother set a place at the table for ‘Boddah’, his imaginary friend.Two decades later and the rock star Kurt Cobain is found dead from a gunshot wound to the head. Beside his body is a note – addressed to Boddah.Tommaso Pincio gives life to Boddah and conjures up a darkly beautiful coming-of-age novel, set against the rainy backdrop of Grunge America in the early 1990s…

Tommaso Pincio

Love-Shaped Story

Translated from the Italian

by Jon Hunt

Flamingo

To Kurt Cobain

‘Now it is well known that when there are many of these flowers together their odor is so powerful that anyone who breathes it falls asleep, and if the sleeper is not carried away from the scent of the flowers, he sleeps on and on forever.’

L. FRANK BAUM,The Wonderful Wizard of Oz

CONTENTS

Cover (#u4352dcec-4e32-5d5e-95dc-7cdacc612abf)

Title Page (#u1e9ae7e8-55de-5b32-958b-d036a89e0d4c)

1. Smalltown Alien (#ub3e469ad-a8ee-5011-9564-5430f8cb3fb3)

2. The American Sleep (#u0459f065-fe44-5748-9b13-a28f0dee3a2b)

3. High There (#litres_trial_promo)

4. Home Run (#litres_trial_promo)

5. Independent Days (#litres_trial_promo)

6. Smalltown Ghost (#litres_trial_promo)

7. Alter Echo (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)

Author’s Note (#litres_trial_promo)

Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)

1. (#ulink_052d91b1-e8c3-5769-9e94-9a792cd15fc4)

Smalltown Alien (#ulink_052d91b1-e8c3-5769-9e94-9a792cd15fc4)

What about love?

It was approaching the turn of the last century. The Nineties, as they were then known - the years of creeping unease, as they have since been called - had just begun. Homer B. Alienson, a human being who had already used up more than half his natural life expectancy, stepped out into the new decade with this question ringing in his brain: ‘What about love?’

Everyone was haunted by questions back then. Questions like ‘Who killed Laura Palmer?’ So there was no reason for Homer to be surprised when this unwelcome query started pestering him. It was in the air. Sooner or later, he too was bound to have his life needlessly disrupted, be confronted by a problem that had never before been a problem to him.

He was indeed expecting it. But he was hoping to avoid the problem, find some system for being over-looked, missed out, some tiny gap in the registers that charted the flood of living beings. But he was the first to doubt that he could really count on such unlikely eventualities, and even on his brighter days he couldn’t imagine himself truly safe. There are some things you just can’t avoid; they’re bound to happen sooner or later. But at least let it be later, let him be granted a reprieve.

It wasn’t that he’d never thought about it. It wasn’t that he didn’t know what love was. He hadn’t done anything about it yet, he was prepared to admit that, but what was the hurry, anyway? Why now? Why him? Why didn’t they take their questions somewhere else? Why didn’t they leave him alone, when with his space toys and his system of life he wasn’t bothering anybody? It wasn’t that he wanted to avoid the problem; all he asked for was a bit of peace and quiet. He would think about this love thing, he knew he was going to have to do something about it. Just, not now.

They came from far away, such questions. From far, far away - so far away, they were already posing themselves long before you were born. Formulating themselves in some dark primordial pit, they devoured lightless years to come and seek you out in the grayest holes in the universe, in places you wouldn’t have wandered into even by mistake - places you’d never have found even if you’d been looking for them.

And was there a grayer hole in the world than Aberdeen? It did nothing but rain there, the constant drizzle echoing the steady fall of chopped-down trees. Not a trace of its colorful past now remained; the ‘women’s boardinghouses’ of Hume Street were a thing of the past. All that was left was a wasteland of lumberyards beside the river Wishkah and the smell of rain-soaked wood. With time, even the loggers had been supplanted by machinery. The wood was cut with lasers now, and there was nothing left to do except go and get drunk in taverns like the Pourhouse, or jump off a bridge.

There were said to be more suicides in Grays Harbor County than anywhere else in the country. And yet people needed that record. It instilled calm, it seemed to explain things that didn’t bear explanation. People heard about their highest rate of suicides and it made them feel better. Not exactly good, just better. But this was a place where one of the highlights of the year was the annual chainsaw championships. Not to mention that sky, the cheerless evergray sky of Aberdeen.

Homer could sit musing for hours on that color, and on the real substance of what were perhaps only apparently clouds. Prehistoric clouds that had already been there in the age of the dinosaurs. Clouds too heavy to be scattered or dragged off somewhere else by the wind. He looked at those clouds and it occurred to him that they were the reason why there was no space base in Grays Harbor County. You wouldn’t have a hope of getting a rocket into space from there. He imagined the rocket lifting off, then dwindling in size till it vanished at the end of a trail of whitish smoke. Then he heard a boom and saw bits of metal raining from the sky, and he realized they were the fragments of the rocket falling back to earth. Not even rockets could pierce the evergray vault of Aberdeen.

What about love?

He couldn’t remember exactly when the question had first appeared, but he had reason to believe that it had been on one of those hopeless noontides when he would slump on the couch and sit there motionless, contemplating the grayness that seeped in through the window. It must have fallen from the sky in a single frozen moment, a rain effect in stop-motion created by fragments of one of those rockets that failed to pierce the vault of Aberdeen.

This kind of inductive memory only served to insinuate the question yet more deeply into his mind. Homer knew very well that he wouldn’t break free of it easily. He knew very well that it wouldn’t let him alone till he’d given it an answer. And not an evasive answer, either. He would have to present a plan of the steps he intended taking to address the total lack of love in his life, give a precise and credible account of what he meant to do, how he would go about it, and above all, when. In other words he would have to show some initiative - that is to say, venture onto ground that was definitely not his forte.

At the time when the question first appeared, Homer B. Alienson’s life was drifting along on a current of placid sadness, like one of the dark logs dragged along by the waters of the Wishkah. The only difference was that whereas the Wishkah had a goal in the ocean, the river of his life flowed monotonously on toward nothing. Or rather, given the manner in which whole days died without the slightest hope of being remembered for anything, the waters of the river Homer followed a course more similar to the cycle of a washing machine.

On the first of every month he went to the Laundromat, stuffed his dirty, malodorous washing into the drum, trying not to touch the metal because it gave him the shivers, elbowed the door shut, put the detergent in the drawer, selected the program, switched on the washing machine, sat down and allowed himself to be melancholically hypnotized by the vortex of the washes and rinses. The movement of his dirty washing took on the features of his thoughts, those thoughts that for a whole month he had not been aware of having and that he could scarcely now recognize as his own. The noise that accompanied the end of the cycle always caught him unprepared and when the drum came to a complete stop, Homer felt a grief take the place of his soul, as if somebody had died, whereupon he clicked open the door with his elbow and stuffed his washing into his bag. The thoughts that a short while earlier he had seemed to descry in the maelstrom of the rinse disappeared, swamped by that familiar, cruel smell of damp, metal and detergent. He zipped up his bag abruptly, as if that gesture in itself were enough to immunize him from the feeling of emptiness into which he knew he must plunge, but there were the plastic chairs and the false ceiling of the Laundromat, and the grayness and the wet streets outside, all just waiting to seize him by the throat. And it was in that frame of mind that he’d go home.

Still, apart from the monthly episodes at the Laundromat, Homer didn’t feel things were going all that badly. Not a great deal happened in his life, and that in itself was an advantage, because he wasn’t the sort of person who could face up to things, and coming to terms with a new situation cost him a good deal of time and energy. By adopting a particular system for living he had also solved an insomnia problem that he had formerly suffered from. What’s more, business was thriving and his mail-order sales of space toys brought in what little he needed to live on. The thought of the number of people who were interested in those objects and the sums they were prepared to pay in order to possess them was sufficient gratification, his childhood’s revenge on the laws of the civilized world.

When he was a kid he adored space toys; he was so crazy about them that he cajoled his parents into giving him the same one over and over again. They weren’t at all happy about this fixation of his; they were afraid he’d become one of those rather dumb, introverted kids who can’t cope with life when they grow to adulthood. So it was with good intentions - though in vain - that they tried to get him to see reason, bring him back to normality.

‘What the hell do you want another one for? You’ve already got five,’ they’d say, but he just wouldn’t listen. There was no way of getting him to change his mind.

For Christmas 1964 he asked for a flying saucer gun. He already had four, but he wanted a fifth and was determined to get it. His mother refused. She told him she had no intention of continuing with this nonsense. She defended her decision with nebulous arguments about the immoral wastefulness of continuing to spend money on the same toy.

‘Immoral?’ said Homer, who harbored doubts about the logic of her argument, let alone the meaning of the word immoral.

‘Immoral is buying the same thing five times when once is more than enough.’

‘You go to the store every day and always buy the same things.’

‘That’s different.’

‘Why’s it different?’

‘Because the things I buy get used.’