Seven Demons Aidan Truhen (reading an ebook TXT) 📖

And then I leave and he does not say goodbye.

—

I see Volodya across the street just going into a shop. It is a hat shop. I run across the road and nearly get hit by a car. There is a lot of honking and shouting in Swiss. Swiss is a great language to be pissed off in.

I get to the hat shop and go inside but of course it is not Volodya it is a fat man from Sion.

I nearly kill him for having the nerve to be a fat man from Sion and not my friend.

I cry a bit instead. I sit down to cry on a bench and I see something so I duck my head. There’s a noise like ZVOVVvv above my head and something lodges halfway through a metal sign pointing the way to the Bärengraben: a metal marble the size of a human eye.

I look across the road and I see Evil Hansel with a heavyweight fisherman’s catapult. With the right projectile these things are lethal up to forty feet but they look sort of scampish. Scampish such that a small boy might carry one without getting arrested and such.

Evil Hansel looks at me and shrugs. He doesn’t even reload. His face barely registers anything at all.

We stand there and look at one another across the road for a while. Then a bus comes and he’s gone.

I slightly like this kid.

I mean he stabbed me while his grandfather shot my friend. It’s not like we could ever be friends.

But Volodya was right man this country has interesting people in it. People and stuff I guess.

I go back to the pig farm and I wait for Doc to notice I am there. Rex has disarmed the door and now it looks kinda sad. It is a murder door with no murder left in it.

—

“Hi door.”

LOOM

“Hi door my name is Jack how are you today?”

LOOM

“I hear you man but there has to be something that you want like something that you can’t get just with the opening and the closing.”

LOOM

LOOM

LOOM

“Yep I guess in the end that is really just your whole thing isn’t it?”

LOOM

“That and the killing—”

“So if I just—”

“If you were activated and I reached out and—”

ZzzzzZZZ-CLICK

“Wow. Yep.”

CLICKACLICKACLICK

“I feel ya big guy.”

LOOM CLICKACLICKCLICK

“Yeah let it all out that’s right—”

“Price?”

“Hi Doc.”

“Price are you talking to the door?”

“No?”

“Mr. Friday called it’s time to go.”

“Go where?”

“A place called FischFisch.”

—

FischFisch is hard to find because if it was easy to find there would be a risk of un-Swissness. Once you know there is a place like FischFisch you almost have to have an opinion about it and having an opinion on something that is not your business is not Swiss. The avoidance of that situation by obfuscation and deliberate blindness is absolutely a form of high polite Swissness all by itself.

“Hi I am Banjo Telemark and this is totally my jam.”

“I am sorry sir you cannot come in it is a private club.”

“Big guy I can totally come in I am a renowned artist.”

“You cannot come in.”

(Guy has a neck like a structural steel and giant ridiculous arms. He is just so obviously a tough guy and now I have déjà vu.)

“This is weirdly familiar you have a really huge neck is it possible that you are a fan of French film noir and a student lawyer?”

“No.”

“No?”

“No.”

“Well that is the thing about déjà vu I guess it is not a reliable guide to tangible reality.”

“Reality cannot be said to be tangible sir the truth of the universe is not observable and in any case takes place at a level below the Newtonian human understanding and in many ways also above it our scale is habitable but not relevant to the extrinsic cosmos. Even if it could the tactile is mediated by fallible sensory apparatus.”

“…In like ten seconds I am going to walk up your face like a cat on a curtain and bite off one of your ears.”

“That is quite unnecessary Herr Telemark I am yoshing you the management is delighted you have come.”

“What is it with the yoshing in this country wait Doc did you—”

“Get in the club Banjo.”

—

So here under the Hotel Kieselstrand’s original art nouveau ballroom there is a modern-built art deco bar called the Jahrhundert and it is only when you go through Jahrhundert to the private dining area and down in the executive lift that you come to FischFisch, and FischFisch has a heavy velvet door and when you get beyond that door and take a seat it becomes rapidly apparent that FischFisch is a sushi bar wherein you can throw sushi to attractive somewhat naked people somewhat dressed as seals or indeed dress yourself in a manner of wet foot-binding plastic flipperslipper and bark for your futomaki from the preternaturally attractive hospitality team who are themselves wearing a cutaway interpretation of Yupik hunting gear that has as much to do with the original activity as the chaps of a woman riding an electric bronco at Joe Lariat’s Rodeo Grill in Miami, Florida, where I have not been and nor should you the pie is awful.

FischFisch offers numerous other sushi-based activities that have names in Swiss German I thankfully do not understand, because this is the most bespoke and salubrious fetish establishment on the planet. There is literally not one surface here from which you could not eat your dinner, and indeed people mostly are although technically I am not sure a person can be a surface.

All of which is very educational and Rex in particular appears to be learning a great deal and much of it stuff he would acquire in no other way. I do not know if this place is culturally appropriative or just so fucking weird as to belong to some other category of shit for which previously I had no name.

We are here because Elena Riccardi comes here with her husband twice every month and she is coming tonight and aside from being a really good amateur