Savage Love by Douglas Glover

naming customs; the winds in southwestern Ontario generally come from a westerly direction) — his wife was doing the herky-jerky above their marital bed before a live video camera, gasping, gurgling, wondering irritably where Nedlinger was as her violent twitchings intensified. At the obligatory coroner’s inquest (Canada’s answer to reality TV ), there had been some question as to the couple’s sexual inclinations, but since there was ample evidence in Melusina’s diaries that Nedlinger had no sexual inclinations (see tractor accident supra ), this line of questioning proved fruitless.
    Among other unpleasant and hitherto-unsuspected (by the eternally unsuspecting Canadian public) discoveries, the coroner’s inquest revealed Nedlinger’s festering, nearly psychotic hatred of modern life and all things Canadian (how it disgusted him that UNESCO routinely listed the country as one of the top places in the world to live), how he increasingly dwelt in the distant past, the past of the Sun Lord, the Arthurian ruler of the enigmatic Neutral Empire, how he gradually came to identify with the Sun Lord (played, as I say, by Nick Nolte in the movie), whose epic doomed love affair with his sister (see long name above) spawned court intrigues, divisions and rebellions that fatally weakened the nation, leaving it vulnerable to foreign invasion, heterodox religious proselytizers and disease.
    It seems that in his cups or in moments of psychic breakdown due to the stress of maintaining his position as a world figure and notable forensic archaeologist, Nedlinger actually believed himself to be in touch by ESP or some other alchemical emanation with the Sun Lord; worse, he sometimes believed he was the Sun Lord reincarnated as a so-called forensic archaeologist, and this is how he knew that the dead baby my father had discovered in expanding the milking shed was not just any Neutral child but the very offspring of that mythic, aberrant union between the ancient Sage King of the Neutrals and his sister, the trembling, voluptuous, savage beauty known to us as Morning Rain That Comes After The Night Of Clouds From The Day Before In The West.
    The inquest also brought to light the embarrassing fact that Melusina and I had conducted a brief, tempestuous affair while we were undergraduates at the University of Toronto and Nedlinger was at Berkeley pursuing his earlier, less famous work on exhumation and reburial practices among the prehistoric Ontario Iroquois, a betrayal for which Nedlinger instantly forgave me at the time of the coroner’s inquest, well knowing, I assume, Melusina’s fatal charms, her insatiable lust, and the documented Canadian penchant for secretive, hypocritical, adulterous, compulsively polymorphous sex congress (one of the main reasons, Nedlinger thought, that the country never really got ahead of its puritanical neighbour to the south despite having all the geographical and historical advantages).
    This affair, as I say, was brief, amounting to practically nothing on the scale of such things. To be perfectly honest, I did once throw her over the hood of a silver Lexus IS in the Bedford Road Municipal Parking Lot down the block from the Royal Ontario Museum, tore the crotch out of her panties and rogered her like a Holstein-Friesian bull, tears of happiness pouring from my eyes, her orgasmic shrieks filling my ears; in her frenzy she ripped the windshield wipers off the car and employed them to belabour my innocent shoulders. I do not know if my lust was driven by fondness or the universal human desire to hammer the lover of a more successful friend. I do not know if she used me or I used her or whether or not there was ever a glimmer of love between us. At the time I had no idea what love was, believing only that Nedlinger knew, and I envied him for it, envied him with a blind hatred that expressed itself as lust for his inamorata, the fair Melusina.
    As I say, this affair was trivial