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Show Anting Alone Page 153 The Big Fucking Mystery Tent (Axlerad's appellation) was not big, but its aura of mystery was. Whenever he had approached it in the past he'd always been suddenly washed away by a strangely coincidental sea of Companions, bustling him in another direction, lovebombing him with volleyball invitations, or enlisting him in overtime peagarden detail or something like that. In some Intruder Alerts previous to this one the Big Fucking Mystery Tent and its contents had simply been made secure where they stood and dusted over with a quick layer of camouflage. In other Intruder Alerts the Big Fucking Mystery Tent was the very first to be dismantled, its contents rushed up the mountainside in thick khaki shrouds to a special Big Fucking Mystery Cave that usually had someone posted out front, looking and acting and armed not like a sweet, salty old grampa, but like a real sentry, under no orders to hold his M-16 fire. Now over the synthetic woodpecker Axelrad could make out not the words, but the overtones and inflections of what sounded as lovely as Mendelssohn to him: a genuinely human voice lilting from within the Big Fucking Mystery Tent. After so many months of nothing but the nasal monotones of Companions and the occasional visiting voice of the bullyboy (only slightly less inhuman) , months broken up only intermittently by the truly mellifluous voice of the old man - which, filtered through the radio-phone, was a buzzing, static-filled travesty of itself that only left Axelrad even more starved for human sounds - , this mysterious voice drew him like a sirensong. In the midst of panic and rush, Axelrad realized that he must have been lonesome for a long time. |
