Love-Shaped Story. Tommaso Pincio

his thoughts had calmed. They seemed to have become at least partly his own again. He passed by the North Aberdeen Bridge and stopped to talk to Kurt. He wanted to tell him he’d tried the system and to thank him.

      He was bursting to talk, which was another new experience for him. He’d never been much of a conversationalist; he was often at a loss for words, and sometimes for subjects too. But on this occasion he spoke fluently, describing in meticulous detail what had happened and what he thought about it.

      Kurt listened in silence, nodding as if he already knew that Homer would say all this. He didn’t reply until Homer had already bid him goodbye and was walking away, when he called after him:

      ‘Boddah?’

      Homer turned. ‘Yeah?’

      ‘Go easy with that stuff.’

      Homer walked on, wondering what Kurt had meant. As soon as he got home, he went over to the couch and slumped down on it. He hadn’t eaten all day, and the TV had been on since he had gone out. But he didn’t notice his hunger or the TV.

      Question: how did the system reach Aberdeen?

      Answer: by a long, circuitous route. The earliest written evidence of man’s infatuation with the system dates back to the invention of writing itself, when the Sumerians divulged the secret of the system to the neighboring Akkadians, the latter handed it on to the Assyrians, and the Assyrians, through their trade contacts with the Egyptians and the Syrians, extended the system both westward and northward, taking it even as far as Greece.

      Then, thanks to the mercantile enterprise of the Arabs, the system reached China, where with enlightened instruction from the Portuguese the population achieved a degree of integration into the system more total than any previously attained in history. The Portuguese taught the Chinese that there was a method of integration far more powerful than their own one of mixing opium with bamboo juice and boiling it with oatmeal. The new technique, inhaling the system through a pipe, proved highly popular in China, and soon opium dens were opening all over the country.

      The Europeans discovered that the system was highly profitable, because it could be used as a cheap exchange commodity for silks, spices, and other exotic articles which the Chinese usually sold at high prices. Consequently the Portuguese were followed in rotation, first by the Dutch, then by the French, and lastly by the British. All of these countries traded with the Chinese, offering their opium system in exchange for precious goods.

      The British may have been the last to arrive on the scene, but they were the shrewdest operators of all. They gave an entirely new impetus to the lucrative trade by founding the East India Company, thus laying the basis for addiction to the system on a massive scale. By 1840, there were about three million Chinese doing nothing all day but systemizing themselves in opium dens.

      Although the three million Chinese derived great benefits from the system, and regarded it as an indispensable part of their lives, the Chinese government for some reason frowned on this development and decided to ban the system in all its forms. This did not go down well with the British, who risked losing a rich source of income. The result was friction, which on two occasions flared up into open conflicts, referred to in the history books as the First Opium War and the Second Opium War.

      While quarrels and battles raged in that part of the world, a considerable number of Chinese - some seventy thousand all told - sailed across the ocean and disembarked in the United States, where they worked on the railroads and in the West-coast gold mines. Some of them, naturally enough, took their pipes with them and began to proselytize among the whites, opening opium dens like those shown in some well-known film footage of the story of Wild Bill Hickock and Calamity Jane, starring Jeff Bridges and Ellen Barkin.

      Today many people still imagine that when the gun-fighters and cowboys of the Old West came into town, parched with thirst after riding for days across prairies and deserts, the first thing they did was to head for the inevitable saloon - complete with pianist and cancan-dancing hookers - to down a couple of whiskies, usually after limbering up with a hearty fist-fight. In actual fact many of them preferred the exotic peace of the opium dens, where they could drift off into dreams of the system, with an attentive young Chinese girl by their side to keep their pipes primed with opium. That’s how it all started. That’s how the system reached our country.

      Question: Okay, that’s clear enough as far as it goes. But what about Aberdeen?

      Answer: Well, to be honest, the system never actually got that far. Aberdeen was off the circuit, so to speak, and any inhabitant of the town who became dependent on the system was in deep trouble. But Kurt got to know Grunt, a disreputable character with one redeeming feature: he could get you any kind of system you wanted, because he went around robbing pharmacies with his sidekick.

      It was Grunt who initiated Kurt into the great world of the system. Kurt was a perfect candidate for addiction: he was sick, he was neurotic, he was a mass of tics, he hated people, and he harbored grudges by the wagonload. He himself was convinced he’d end up as a teenage schizophrenic, the kind of guy that turns up at school one day with an assault rifle and wipes out half his classmates.

      Kurt definitely needed something to soothe him and Grunt had him try Percodan, one of the many system-derived painkillers. Before he knew it, Kurt found himself taking ten a day, so euphoric and relaxed did it make him feel. He almost began to like people.

      Then, one summer night, Grunt and Kurt systemized themselves with heroin. Kurt thought he would never let himself get truly integrated, never become a real addict. He thought there wasn’t enough system in Aberdeen for anyone to become hooked on it. What he didn’t know was that all that Percodan he’d swallowed had been more than enough to systemize him. He had been fully integrated from the very first time he had taken it. He was wholly and utterly dependent on the system, though firmly convinced that he wasn’t. It’s quite normal for integratees to think they depend on nothing and nobody.

      The ubiquity of the system did the rest.

      He tried the system for the second time that same evening. He would have liked to lull himself to sleep with a nice piece of video, but he only had that film of the body snatchers, and he’d already seen it three times.

      He decided to settle for a night of television instead.

      The first item was a newscast, then came: a commercial break; the weather forecast for the next forty-eight hours; a game show whose rules he couldn’t quite understand; a documentary on the sex life of tropical insects; more commercial breaks; some old film footage of gangsters starring James Cagney; a show where people argued; the fourth inning of a baseball game; another newscast about sports events; a discussion show about incurable diseases; a show featuring a man with an ingratiating smile who talked about God and urged viewers to call a number that scrolled across the screen; another show with a young woman in her underclothes touching herself and panting who also urged viewers to call a number flashed up on the screen, which was not, however, the same number as the one recommended by the man with the ingratiating smile; one of those shows where people talk about their problems, that focused on a boy with a serious form of insomnia whom Homer would have phoned to advise him to try the system, had it not been for the fact that in that show there weren’t any numbers displayed on the screen for you to call and that something warned him against talking to strangers about his relationship with the system.