GLASS SOUP by Jonathan Carroll (funny books to read .txt) 📕

the old days, Vincent. Things have changed. We’re very aware of what we do now. Chaos doesn’t come at random anymore—there’s always a reason. Using your analogy, it’s as if cancer specifically chooses its victims.”

Ettrich petted the dog. “But you haven’t mentioned one important thing.”

“What’s that?”

“Your history, what Chaos used to be like. Back in the bad old days when you didn’t have brains and just destroyed things. That part is still in you, John. You can’t get rid of it, anymore than I can get rid of my gene sequence. The problem with being conscious is your past always lives on somewhere inside of you. Take a dog—if you corner it and it gets scared, it reverts back to being a wolf and bites you.”

Ettrich drew a folding knife out of his pocket and opened it. With a quick vicious thrust, he stabbed it into the fine leather sofa.

Flannery froze. “Hey! What are you doing?”

Something welled up out of the gash in the leather. Translucent white and gelatinous, it looked like some kind of hair gel. About six inches long, it skimmed very fast up the side of Ettrich’s leg, across his arm, hand, and then onto the Great Dane’s face. The dog pulled its head back but the thing was already sliding into its eye socket. It felt nothing.

Chaos entered the dog’s eye. The first chaos that had been Luba at the dog’s beginning; a pure form that once was and still was immutably part of it.

When he touched the place on the couch where the dog had once lain, Ettrich found Luba in the same way he had found Kyselak when he touched the tree in the forest. Only this time he did it consciously. Then he had gone all the way back to the dog’s beginning when Luba was just-created, pristine chaos. That’s what emerged from the couch now and reentered Luba. No thought, no sophistication. Like cancer, this simple chaos only knew how to do one thing—multiply.

Chaos evolved was no match for chaos in its first and purest form.

Ettrich did not see its effect on Luba because he was watching Flannery. The dog was dead the moment chaos entered its eye. A living body is an ordered thing. All those cells and complex structures work together in harmony for a common cause. Drop frenzy and disarray into the center of it and that fragile sophisticated engine breaks immediately.

Flannery watched Luba die. Because they were made of the same stuff, he saw and understood exactly what happened next. The chaos that had been summoned continued to work. When the dog was dead, it moved into what the animal had previously been and began to destroy that too.

Everything that Luba had ever been was first infected and then wiped out. Life after life, incarnation after incarnation, disappeared before Flannery’s eyes. He could not stop watching. Never before in all of his many lives on earth and elsewhere had he seen anything like this. It was so hypnotic that he did not notice when Ettrich reached over and gently touched him on the knee. He did not see Ettrich close his eyes, turn his head away, and then turn back. He did not see that Ettrich’s eyes were confident when he opened them again, as if something significant and final had been decided. Flannery could only watch in awe at the ongoing sight of every trace of Luba being erased.

“John.” Ettrich waited and then eventually said much louder. “John.”

The expression on Flannery’s face was that of a child encountering a twenty-foot-long feeding python—mesmerized and appalled.

“Do you see that, John? I did it. Do you hear? It was me who did that to her.”

Stunned by everything, Flannery could only nod slowly. Yes he heard. Yes he understood.

“And now I’m going to do it to you. For what you did to Leni, for everything that you’ve done here. Everything you’ve hurt and destroyed; you and your dog. You and all your dogs.” Ettrich spoke quietly but with a cold rage in his voice that Flannery heard and couldn’t resist answering.

“Hey well, fuck you, Vince. Your Isabelle’s right where we want her now. Nothing you can do about that, is there?”

“Nope. But I can send a message, John, and you’re gonna be it.” Ettrich stood up and without looking back walked toward the door.

Flannery watched him leave. He also kept glancing at the gash in the couch, fully expecting something else to emerge from there any second. Nothing would though because Ettrich had already found Flannery’s first chaos and set it loose when he touched John’s knee.

The front door clicked close. Soon after, John Flannery felt the beginnings of a faint tingling throughout his body, like the prickly sensations up and down a leg when it falls asleep. Or when you drink ginger ale and the bubbles fly up your nose. It was a funny feeling, strange but almost pleasant.

For a little while.

Drownstairs

“Where are we?”

They were running, that was for sure. The three people were running as fast as they possibly could because they were being chased by a space alien, a Komodo dragon, and George W. Bush.

Before this, it had all been going so well. It had been going spectacularly. They’d found Isabelle. Simon and Leni had put their heads together and came up with a plan to find her in Haden’s afterworld. It didn’t work. But then purely by coincidence they had bumped into Haden’s childhood dog Floyd the bull terrier which told them it had seen Isabelle and Simon’s mother walking down the street together. They rushed over to Simon’s house and found the two women sitting on the porch, talking about Chinese medicine.

To celebrate the reunion, they’d taken Isabelle to eat at a heurigen they all knew well and liked. When he was alive, Haden had gone there often on his trips to Vienna so he had dreamt about the place four times. That was why they could visit it here and now.

A wine garden/restaurant