Correspondence: Phil Austin (March 22, 1991)

March 22, 1991

Dear Greg,

I am getting tired of these letters from your Evil Twin Brother, even though there has been only one of them. My attention span does not improve with age, but what does? I know your Evil Twin Brother. There will come more letters. You can’t control him any better than your Evil Twin Father did.

Don’t let him read this — or, if you are him — don’t you read this (and you know who you are):

Across the meandering sands and winds of squibbling time and scribbling fools is told the tale of Nothing and Nobody and the search for the Little Darling. Men have died, and this is nothing new, and men have wept and this is nothing new either, but what is new is what is oldest in the Siberian sands and the towers and bell-shaped enclosures of they who are rooted to their roots and rooting around their roots looking — frankly — for a woman who is half the woman that the Little Darling would have become if given half a chance. (I gave my Evil Twin Brother half a chance once, but he turned it in for half a jackpot. The dude lives in Modesto now, having invested in Coroner’s Delite and we all know how that went right through the roof.)

But the Little Darling is beyond all this. She sits in her teardrop-shaped tower, twisting her pale braids in knots, dashing her ewe’s milk against the concourses of bricks and inlaid tiles and driving her maidservants half crazy with her wickedness. She is beautiful beyond the ken of Saints and she is as clever as the wives of Presidents and she has a master’s degree in Afternoon Psychology from the University of the Crips, but still she weeps. She would like to meet either you or your Evil Twin Brother but she has an incredibly short attention span which has not allowed her to leave the exact place of her birth for more than five or six minutes.

Burn this,

[Phil]

Austin