The Lemon Thief's Ex-Wife's Third Cousin Read online

The Lemon Thief’s Ex-wife’s Third Cousin

  by Tom Lichtenberg

  Copyright 2012 by Tom Lichtenberg

  Chapter One

  My friend Hernan noticed a few unusual things about the postcard he received in the mail one Saturday in August. He couldn't remember the last time he'd ever received a postcard and was even a bit surprised that such things still existed and could be sent overland in trucks and cars. Such inefficiency offended his modernist instincts. Not only was the thing an actual postcard, such as thrived in abundance in an earlier century, but it had come stuffed inside of a regular envelope. He'd always heard of postcards as being self-sufficient. The waste was doubled, not to mention the increased cost, which was anathema to his current, if not consistent, mode of budget consciousness. Thirdly, the postcard displayed the image of an ordinary looking house, a brownish squat thing with a flat pebble roof, a pair of absurd rectangular granite columns bracketing a dull and lifeless porch, a front window hidden by a dirty gray curtain, and all of this approached by a cracked and ragged concrete pathway heavily colonized by dandelions and other unwelcome flora. There were no pleasant features about the place, and the only clue to its whereabouts, if anyone cared, was the number seventy-five tacked up in aluminum letters and half-hanging on a middle step.

  Hernan turned the postcard over to see what else might be waiting to dismay him there, but there was nothing written except a different address: 44 Misteranibal Street. This meant nothing at all to Hernan at first, except that the address had been scribbled unmistakably in his own terrible and peculiar handwriting. He turned the postcard over again, to make sure he had seen the number 75 instead of the corresponding 44 on the back, and while making certain of this fact, he suddenly had the most vivid recollection. He was twelve years old and his family was moving away. His best friend from childhood was standing on those very steps, just above the silver numerals, waving goodbye and sniffing back some tears. Hernan found himself nearly crying too as he stood there in the post office, still holding the key to the P.O. box in his hand. Mrs. Mary Holloway, a notorious busybody, took note of that unusual occurrence, and reminded herself to tell someone about it just as soon as she possibly could. Meanwhile, she stopped and stared at the middle-aged man she'd seen about town for years but whose name she had only discovered through the rumor mill.

  It had been thirty years since his family had moved away from Misterlittleton. In that time he had certainly heard about the eccentric developments occurring there, from the perpetual re-beautification program to the accordion freeways, the tremendous exodus followed by the equally dramatic immigration, the utter transformation of the city more than once, and the legends of the peculiar archaeological artifacts uncovered there from time to time. He had always thought of going back, but the idea had always been overcome by sadness, at the realization that literally everything and everyone he had ever known from there was gone and gone forever. Nature and mankind together had made sure of that.

  Enrique Cardoval. That had been his best friend's name. A shy boy with always too much hair hanging over his face, and barely enough weight to keep himself aloft. He had been a follower of sorts, an early version of the sycophants Hernan would later find himself surrounded by in his occasional and detrimental extravaganzas, but Enrique had been a friendlier rendition of that kind, a genuinely nice boy who seemed to always have something going on in that tiny furry head of his. He was forever laughing unexpectedly at his own little jokes which he'd never bother to explain to anyone else. Other kids thought he was a weirdo. That was what they called that kind of kid back then. Nowadays they have more official-sounding terms and diagnoses. Hernan remembered that he'd promised to write Enrique, but never did. Come to think of it, he told himself, he had promised to send a postcard! He snorted to have such memories evoked, another eccentricity duly recorded by Mary Holloway, who was running out of excuses to hang around the building. Hernan became aware of her presence, and darting a grimace in her direction, shut his box and locked it, and marched out to the sidewalk, still clutching the postcard and its ridiculous envelope in his hand, wondering how and why someone had managed to forge his chicken scratch.

  Chapter Two

  Of course, when he had lived there as a child, the town was not called Misterlittleton, nor did all its streets begin with such appellations. All that had changed much later, after the great event which had left the city floundering and desperate for desperate measures. It had been simply Littleton back then, and his family had lived at 75 Harrison Street, Misterharrison Street by now, no doubt. Hernan had often thought of what a blessing it had been when his father had been transferred from the former brewery outpost there to the main factory along the Wetford waterfront. They had missed the mega-storm which had virtually wiped Littleton off the map by utterly decimating its downtown and ruining its formerly boisterous port trade. The cruise ships had redirected themselves downriver, along with every other tourist-oriented and industrial business. The storm had been so destructive, and the consequent bills so high, that the insurance companies which had underwritten everything and everybody there had gone belly up, leaving the entire region in the hands of the city council. It was in order to avoid further liabilities and cancel any and all existing legal contracts that the council had renamed the town and every single street within it, settling on the convenient method of pre-pending them all with a handful of easy and memorable prefixes. As the council at the time was dominated by members of the PFR party (whose letters stood for Post-Feminist Redemption), it was doubly convenient to name everything in such a way as to call attention to the patriarchal origins of this, and most every other, locale in the world. So it was Misterlittleton now, and Misterharrison Street, and number 44 Misteranibal Street towards which the postcard was now directing Hernan's attention. Hernan had heard about all of the radical developments in his home town over the years but paid no more attention to them than if they had been happening halfway across the planet instead of a mere few hundred miles away. He had never seriously considered re-visiting the place, and now he had to ask himself why that was.

  There had been another side to the family's relocation, he recalled. Not everyone had been thrilled about it. The fact was, his mother had not wanted to move at all, and this was probably the main factor leading to their subsequent divorce. She had moved back there not much later. He had stubbornly taken his father's side in the matter, and had not even once seen his mother since then, in now nearly thirty years! It must have been a pretty bitter divorce, as nasty as his own was to be another fifteen years later. He'd heard that she remarried and even had another child, a half-brother much younger than himself, a half-brother he'd never met and whose name he couldn't recall. Strange how much can pivot on a single event! Hernan had never given much thought to it. Now he could remember the fights, the yelling, those dark days when, as the only child and the center of every struggle, he had fruitlessly willed himself invisible but had managed at most to shut out the bad feelings that were resurfacing in volume right there in the parking lot. He tried to shake them out of his hair and walked back to my house, where he made himself a cup of peppermint tea and proceeded to show me the postcard and tell me all about it.

  "You've got to go," I told him when he'd caught me up. "That much is obvious." He was sitting in my own favorite chair, still holding the postcard and turning it over and over in his hand, as if he was going to see something on it he'd somehow missed the first few thousand times.

  "No way," he protested, standing up out of his seat and nearly spilling his tea. "That's the last thing I want to do."

  "Aw, come on," I said, "it'll be fun. I'll go with
you. I've always wanted to see Misterlittleton. There's been some amazing stuff going on over there. It's weird how we never went before." I was serious. Some things you see on TV and read about for years and yet it never occurs to you to go and see for yourself. A lot of kooky stuff had been written about that place. I'd just assumed most of it was lies. Was it true they had this law where all the buildings had to be completely redesigned, if not outright torn down and rebuilt, every decade or so? Ridiculous, but a lot of people said it was true, even more people than believed in Bigfoot or reptilian aliens among us.

  "I'm not going," he insisted, but of course we went, otherwise there'd be nothing else to tell you about.

  Chapter Three

  Mostly I remembered pictures of the devastation. Littleton was a town demolished. The entire center of town had to be fenced off and ultimately brought down to dust, one high rise at a time, by men and machines working day and night for weeks and months on end. Nothing was deemed safe anymore. Even the streets and sidewalks, torn open in massive rifts, had to be dug up and re-leveled. Around the perimeter of this ghost land, house after house was declared unfit for habitation. Even up in the surrounding hills, where not even a cemetery gravestone remained upright, the homes of the rich and merely old were evacuated and then bulldozed. In the meantime, families were left with nowhere to go, businesses were completely lost, and who knows how the people coped. Many moved away, but many others were loyal or seduced by promises of easy loans on good terms. Then the wheels of incompetence and bureaucracy kicked in, and those offers seemed more and more like carrots dangling on an ever more precarious stick.

  There were all sorts of great plans. It was going to be the city of the future, as most cities start out proclaiming themselves to be. There were competitions among architects and urbanists and sociologists and even politicians to see who could be the furthest ahead of their time. A few things even got done here and there, like the radical renaming, and certain edificial wonders, like the virtual museum, which existed only in the minds of its visitors, provided they wore the elaborate hi-tech costume required for the experience. Homes, of a sort, did start to spring up, on curious financial terms more reminiscent of an employee stock purchase program than a conventional mortgage. Eventually the stories of the city faded from the regular national news, as other more recent disasters overtook it. The attention span of the world, never much to brag about, continued to shorten its gaze and soon enough any new bits about the new Misterlittleton were fortunate to make it to the bottom links of the page.

  I felt some share of guilt about that. I had never even gotten around to texting H E L P to have a few bucks of charity charged to my account, and now it was years and years ago. It was probably back to being the rather dull and ugly town it had always been before. I had only been there once, as a kid, on a fifth grade field trip to see the famous loading docks, where nearly half of the states' television sets were brought to shore in gigantic red and blue containers. I remembered those things, but mostly I remembered sitting next to Hayley Goodage on the bus not only all the way there, but all the way back home too. It was the pinnacle of my childhood romantic success before I had even come across the problematic proposition of sexual preference.

  Well, pictures in the news were not going to be enough anymore. Now I had a good excuse to finally go and see for myself. But this isn't my story. It's Herman's story, so it's time I got back to it.

  Chapter Four

  It was simply a matter of deciding how to get there. There was no problem of 'when'. Anytime would be a good time, and therefore 'immediately' was as good a time as any. Hernan did not need to get permission for time off from his employer, for the simple reason that I was his employer, and I had no need to ask for time off from my employer, since I had none. I ran the business, and the business was one that could only benefit from such a journey. I published a journal, or a newspaper, as I liked to call it, consisting of stories which did not occur. Hernan helped by translating these stories into several languages, some of which were recognizable as such and were actually spoken by real people on this planet. The others obeyed their own rules and internal logic, and could be considered potential candidates for future languages to be spoken and/or written, at least by somebody somewhere. My favorite of these was Finglish, our mutually developed version of next millennium English, derived from heritable laws of language development which I had studied in my time at the University. Before you go about dismissing us as useless cranks or eccentric fools, please remember that languages have to come from somewhere, so why not from us? My paper was called El Editorial Espreso. We sold a few thousand copies an issue, at a very reasonable price, both online and off.

  I was all for taking the train, because I really like trains, but Hernan was all for driving because, he argued, we were going to need a car when we got there anyway, so why go to the trouble of renting one when I already had a decent automobile. He did not, having lost his own in a wager the previous Christmas. Hernan was not the sort to take risks unless they were calculated ones, but unfortunately he did not excel at calculation. He never seemed to mind his losses. He had a deep-seated feeling that nothing could really belong to him anyway, as if he did not deserve even the most basic of belongings. This had been the case with his families, first the one he was born into, and later the ones he helped put together. At the time of the postcard, his possessions consisted of the sleeping bag and pillow I had given him, and a backpack's worth of clothing, his usual khaki pants two sizes too large, a meager selection of cotton polo shirts, socks, and underwear. He slept in the tool shed behind my house, and performed his feats of translation at my kitchen table, on my computer.

  In every other respect, his life's internal rhythms carried on as usual despite external circumstances. As a teenager he'd withdrawn into a bookish solitude, interrupted periodically by outbursts of gregarious sociability, which in turn led directly to furious fits of futility in which he was apt to throw away anything, including friends or lovers, jobs or homes, material possessions or previous opinions. He had a decided tendency to wipe slates clean and begin all over again. There were not many people or objects or even ideas that had been able to stick with him for longer than a decade. We, those of us who did become attached to him at various points in his life, had a watchfulness over him while we waited for our turn to be discarded, yet we loved him nonetheless. He did have ideas, even if he didn't remain overly faithful to them. He was often original and fresh, and had a flat but wicked sense of humor that would catch you off guard every time. He was also quite skilled at language invention, and I personally had no doubt that at least one nation would adopt an idiom of his making at some point in the far distant future. In the meantime, you would most often find him hanging around a library or sitting on a bench staring out into the world as if it was an incomprehensible but somehow very popular show.

  Now I'm afraid I've given you the wrong impression of my friend. He was not homeless or utterly alone. He did still have a house, sort of, but his ex-wife ruled over there and he had had to sign away any claims he might ever have upon it. Magdalena was as stern as she was unforgiving, and that car I mentioned a moment ago had actually belonged to them both. It was only a matter of luck that he hadn't offered up the house at the same gaming table. He was, shall we say, a person in transition at this time. His previous career as a rather more professional translator had slid away through neglect and a mountain of missed deadlines. My newspaper, fortunately for him, had no such restrictions. Any story could be published at any time in any language and in any version of its telling. It did not need to be consistent, or even accurate, from one language to another or from one issue to the next. We had a decided habit of re-telling the same stories in different ways from month to month. In these ways we were very much like the corporate cable news channels.

  I agreed to the car but only on the condition that he drive, because I'm lazy that way, and so that's what we did. We left at eight o'clock on the very nex
t day, a Sunday morning and arrived at around four o'clock in the afternoon, stopping only once for lunch, twice for coffee, and three times to go to the bathroom. I have never enjoyed driving long distances, or even riding them except on trains. An hour at a time is all I can usually stand without getting out and stretching my legs. Hernan could drive all day, however, and even though he still claimed he didn't even want to go on this trip, I could tell he was impatient to get there if only on principle.

  "If we're going, then let's go," he scolded me one time when we had stopped and I insisted on walking around the gas station four times. The weather was clear and dry and hot, the usual, except as we came closer to Misterlittleton we began to see the hovering thick dark clouds for which it was famous. These clouds had come at the time of the mega-storm and had somehow never dissipated but clung to the region like a foul aroma. Meteorologists from around the world came to study this dark phenomenon but the best they could do was give it a name, The Neumena, thereby anointing themselves Neumenologists. It sounded ominous and certainly looked that way too. The transition from bright blue cloudlessness to the heavy gray mantle was instantaneous and crisp, day turned into dusk right where a roadside sign proclaimed it would. Welcome to Misterlittleton, it said, City of the Great Gray Cloud.

  Chapter Five

  It was not only the sky that changed but the road as well. Up until then we had been traveling along a typical state highway, smooth and predictable with its periodic reminders of who and where we were, its consistent stripings and markings, and its median strip of identical succulents and cacti as far as the eye could see. Without any indication or warning, the road turned into rough gravel and the level ground gave way to irregular dips and undulations. A forest of orange cones appeared, seemingly strewn about randomly along the shoulder while the occasional sign warned of temporary speed limit reductions to impossibly low numbers. Hernan began swearing as he had to reduce the car to barely a crawl in order to manage the suddenly hostile terrain. We were barely on the outskirts of the city, but there was no sign that the road would ever improve again.