Eduardo Aquifer

“The world’s filling up. One positive aspect of this is that lyricism and self-psychiatry are on the rise.” So writes Eduardo Aquifer at the beginning of his novel. And he then proceeds to introduce the reader to amorphous, carrie-ridden and dentally challenged Black Riders, a shape-shifting beauty named über girl, a psychiatrist named Dr. Reilly who’s fond of Hamlet, an Indian/cowboy named Way bent on avenging the U.S. Cavalry’s use of pox-infected blankets in germ warfare against his fellow Indians, and of course, Eduardo himself. Are all of these characters masks for Eduardo himself in this romp of a novel posing as a . . . Socratic? Hamletian? Freudian? . . . investigation of Eduardo’s psyche? Will the real Eduardo ever stand up?

Yes, somehow, some way, he does, through a myriad of entertaining memories, stories, and family anecdotes. He does, because as Dr. Reilly, the novel’s resident psychiatrist, comments after missing sleep and food just to hear one patient’s story, “the play’s the thing, the patient’s story.” Wherein we catch the conscience of—the unconscious Eduardo? Seemingly so.

   The following all happened before I moved into the House Above the World. Of course, the house wasn’t actually above the world, it was just on 47th street in Austin, but I’d spent most of August without a roof over my head. Mostly because I couldn’t decide what to do. Some of those nights I’d slept in the woods off Loop 1, and some of it I’d gone to a rest stop off I-35. It made sense to do the latter, because people were even expected to be sleeping in their cars there.
      Years before I’d learned that one of my least favorite things was being woken in the middle of the night by a policeman; him kicking the soles of my shoe and shining a flashlight in my face. But sometimes this kind of thing was unavoidable. One night when I’d reached Dallas by bus, I was stranded because the workers were on strike. It was snowing outside. I’d wandered into a nearby bar. I sat there feeling anti-Union.
      There was a man there who struck up a conversation with me, some kind of international businessman. He was garrulous and generous and kept buying me drinks. These can be appealing qualities at first glance, but with time . . .
      . . . we eventually befriended another guy who was loitering in there like us. He was a small, almost albino fellow with thin, balding blonde hair and tortoise-shell glasses. He looked like a schoolteacher but he claimed he was in the French army. The three of us got drunk and left the bar hours later.
      We wandered through the streets until we came to a park. It was freezing cold. I was lying on the park bench in between them, under-dressed and shivering. They sat on each side of me like woozy bookends. We had a bag of beer. They piled extra clothes and traveling bags on me.

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