The Spectral Link Read Free

mutant.” Here would be an apt place to explain some things about my upbringing and, more strikingly, my heredity.
    I was raised in various foster homes, a cast-off infant found in a bus station lavatory who subsequently became part of the government’s child services system. For most of my life, though, I never had a hint of my genealogy, not that I had any reason to be excessively curious. I had my interests, but the identity of my begetters wasn’t one of them. Actually, it seemed something of a vulgar topic to my way of thinking. Then one day, soon after I had to leave my longtime position at a publishing firm because of my debilitating mental state and prior to my becoming a client of Dr. O, I received a letter with no return address. It was postmarked somewhere in the southern region of the country, specifically a region that might have been within the “swamplands” that the Dealer mentioned in the dream occasion at the opening of this autobiographical confession or complaint. Since leaving my job, moving in with Dr. O for a time, and then relocating to a one-bedroom apartment, I have lost all but a few pages of the letter and the envelope in which it was contained. For a time I thought the letter was a ruse of some kind, especially given the integration of articulate learnedness and plain idiocy within it. But later it began to take on meaning when incorporated within the whole of my biography. In my effort to explain something of my origins and heredity, and perhaps suggest other qualities of my life and character, I will transcribe those pages below, somewhat edited for clarity.
     
    …and so, as I was spraying, cousin, “spraying” you see, jeez sometimes I crack myself up, we orphaned you without meaning anything by it, left you behind in that bus station toilet, nothing personal, we just forgot, having such a big family and all. We had all gone to town to see one of those horror movies where northern folks get massacred by backwoods hicks so inbred, as I should know, that their females can reproduce by what you call parthenogenesis, no joke, while the males sodomize farm animals and unfortunate Yankees who stray onto their property. Southern pride notwithstanding, we love those pictures about swamp-dwelling, murdering crackers, by my granddaddy’s crusty asshole we do, never seen a roll of toilet paper in his miserable life. Not that we’re much better off. Damn if we ain’t shotgun-shack poor. Why, just the other week, me and Clem, my half-ass brother got the other half bit off by a gator, had to bear-trap a couple of tourists wandered into the swamp, probably sight-seeing or whatnot, to get some money so’s we could keep the electricity on, otherwise we might fall down the hole in our parlor room where we shit and piss and other things, snicker. Yankees they was of course. Screamed like coons on fire, yes they did, before Clem put ’em outta their misery by blasting their brains with daddy’s good old rifle what once went off whilst our common sire was picking his nose with the barrel end of it. Clem’s got the gift of doing business with that piece. He’s got other gifts, too, like being able to draw you into his dreams, sometimes you don’t know you’re even in there until a zombie or suchlike comes after you or the planets start moving in funny ways. But shooting’s his speciality, even if he’s got no more than two fingers, the other eight being bit off by our dear mother in the fires of holy passion whilst they was at the business of making three of our half-brothers, two sisters, sundry half-and-halfs, as we call ’em, and them such that live in the cellar, don’t rightly know how to go about describing them or how they got that way. Sometimes they send up vibrations like they was angered, though mostly they leave the rest of us be. All family freaks considered, though, there’s not a fag among us, even if sometimes it can be difficult to say when we’s all in the dark, which is