98 Wounds by Justin Chin

Author:Justin Chin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Manic D Press, Inc.

Adam is dreaming. What can the first person on the planet possibly be dreaming about? What could be lurking in his mind given the vast expanse of unnamed terrain that lies before him: a colossal ice desert, an equally eternal sand desert, immeasurable forests, the acrid savannah teaming with insects, rainforest upon rainforest filled with flora and fauna, beasties and buggies. Time he knows of. Seven days to be exact and many more of this cycle will follow. Until weeks turn to endless years. But apart from that, he has no memory, no history; he was born an adult, slapped together with primeval mud and the snot of God.

The only clues we may have in understanding his experiences are those of amnesia victims and Donald Duck.

Amnesia victims are the easy one. Car crash, severe shock, visitations by evil spirits, and some folks’ minds are blasted into a state of chaos, their neurons and synaptic switches become as tangled as a phone cord and suddenly, they forget everything prior to a stated moment. Some manage to get jarred into recovery; others wander through life and eventually recover their memories in bits and pieces. Some become another person completely, a person born an adult with no past and no lived references. The only remnants of this past lived life are a language that the person has no idea how he learned or even how eloquent or mumbly he ever used it, and mementos, lots of them, which their past gleefully foists on them. But in vain: the teddy bear with the punched-in nose has no sentimental value anymore. A once cherished wedding ring reeks with crassness. Photo albums become useless burdens and gather dust on the top shelves. The record collection does not trigger any memories, fond or foul.

Forced to live within the locus of their bodies, the amnesia victims are nothing but humans wrecked on a seashore of foundless memories, fogged in by their billion imploded brain cells. They will recollect or recreate.

On the other hand, Donald Duck, the hot-tempered, lovably mischievous but well-intentioned character that Disney created to shadow Mickey’s bland niceness and squeaky clean-cut values, lives beyond his plump feathered body. He has traveled to the center of the earth, beyond Neptune and Pluto, to mythical lands of legends and lore, to every continent in great adventures, and still he has no memory of his travels, his experiences, the people he met, the creatures he fought, the exotic food he greedily scoffed down, or the pleasures of which he partook. In some narratives, he’s foolish, the dunce, unable to remember facts accurately; in another, he’s a mechanical genius; in yet another, the rugged outdoorsman. The only constants in his life are his nephews, his miserly Uncle Scrooge, and his passion for Daisy Duck. And even then, their own mental states are somewhat in question, too.

In a parody postcard that can be found in gift shops, Donald is sitting on a green stool, the yellow stripe on the right sleeve

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