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Back Loudermilk
Chapters (60)
  1. Cover
  2. Title Page
  3. Personae
  4. I: Early Days
  5. One. Control
  6. Two. Doubt
  7. Three. Fate
  8. Four. Same
  9. Five. Fine Arts
  10. Six. In Loco Parentis
  11. Seven. Settling
  12. Eight. Neighbors
  13. Nine. Prospects
  14. Ten. The Lucky
  15. Eleven. Instruction
  16. Twelve. Same
  17. Thirteen. This Is a Pipe
  18. Fourteen. This Is Not a Pipe
  19. Fifteen. The Reason
  20. Sixteen. That Person
  21. Seventeen. Predictably
  22. II: Writing Teacher
  23. Eighteen. Early Poems
  24. Nineteen. Motivation
  25. Twenty. Allegory
  26. Twenty-One. Grief
  27. Twenty-Two. A Portrait
  28. Twenty-Three. Veils
  29. Twenty-Four. Soft Power
  30. Twenty-Five. Lists
  31. Twenty-Six. A Break
  32. Twenty-Seven. Elsewhere
  33. Twenty-Eight. Custom
  34. Twenty-Nine. Parity
  35. Thirty. Fortune
  36. III: Volta
  37. Thirty-One. Images
  38. Thirty-Two. A Very Interesting Young Man
  39. Thirty-Three. Letters
  40. Thirty-Four. We Prefer to See Ourselves Living
  41. Thirty-Five. Love
  42. Thirty-Six. The Iceberg
  43. IV: Your Best Reader
  44. Thirty-Seven. A Novelist
  45. Thirty-Eight. In Advance of the Broken Arm
  46. Thirty-Nine. Their Penultimate Encounter
  47. Forty. Détente
  48. Forty-One. Worlds
  49. Forty-Two. Recognition
  50. Forty-Three. Persistence
  51. Forty-Four. And Then
  52. Forty-Five. Mingling
  53. Forty-Six. You
  54. Forty-Seven. Persona
  55. Forty-Eight. Est et Non
  56. Forty-Nine. The Author
  57. Epilogue
  58. Afterword: The Libertine
  59. Acknowledgments
  60. About the Authors

The power vacuum led to looting and Disneyesque

Water jets that bent. Those looking for detail said

This would make some “things” more like “events.”

Revenge killings, crime, chaos—all this was so

Foreseeable, a result of changing the occupational

Structure scattered over an ever-messier world.

In elementary school we called it “playing.”

We thought of it as standing on a banana peel,

Awaiting our date with implosion, whether we

Are to be a two-planet species or not. No “fee

Simple” properties, no oranges or seed potatoes,

No sixty-billion-dollar hemp or sunny jellied after-

Life. We’ll dance but we won’t touch. We’ll touch

But we won’t shop. The only way out is to make

Foreigners more like us, which was when U.S.

Marshals stopped being vague and started getting

Recondite. This was the much-touted civilian-

Military difference. We were persuading the

Public to foot the bill for robot dogs and mice. We

Lived in a period that disdains bold colors but

Still, nearly every working group said, “Be like

Us,” with a destructive self-confidence, from

Her Connecticut friends to the least mercurial

Son on the roster. We each appeared in an info-

mercial astride a roll of polyethylene. What, then,

Is the American, this new man, if all his powers

Must be wielded through others? The solutions

Will be centuries in coming, and I pant for life.

—T. A. LOUDERMILK

Thirty-Seven. A Novelist

Thirty-Seven

A Novelist

Anton Beans pants. He sighs. He attempts to still his heart. Right now he is doing a kind of thing he has never done before. He is lying under Loudermilk’s bed and there is something sticky and probably chemically unstable affixed to his neck/skull base, just below his right ear. He is fairly certain it will turn out to be a used condom. Either that, or a mutant tapeworm parthenogenetically forged in the crucible of filth Loudermilk cultivates in all areas pertaining to his physical person, if not his very soul—if, for example, Anton Beans were a dualist, which Anton Beans is not.

The main thing distracting Beans from his bacteria-stocked misery is his sense of sight, and his sense of sight is unfortunately filled with Loudermilk’s manically tapping heels, sheathed in hunter-green Ralph Lauren Polo socks. In addition to damage to his immune system and spinal alignment, Beans has suffered an in-depth intro to the private fantasia that is the mind of Loudermilk, his bizarre machinations plus inordinately well-developed self-regard. This exposure is likely to be permanently traumatizing in a way Beans had previously believed only the mishandling of infants during breastfeeding could be.