Читать книгу Blind.Faith 2.0.50 - Tomasz Tatum - Страница 10

NIKLAS’ WORLDMONDE.PLANET

Despite the charm that he worked hard to project initially, it can rightfully be asserted that Niklas Vladimir was always somehow mentally challenged, if not outright stupid, possessing an intelligence quotient that very likely ranked only marginally above the average mean water temperature of Viscount Melville Sound on the day of the Winter solstice as expressed on any commonly used scale of measure. His drinking habits only served to exacerbate an already ugly situation. As a consequence, the incessant subjection of his new family to his almost surreal pseudo-intellectual excursions through the helter-skelter elements of his interpretation of modern morality proved to be an unnerving experience for Charles as a young boy.

“Who?” he would often growl, or even yell, in the course of these mostly aimless intellectual exercises.

“Just tell me who, dammit!”

The coarse hairy tips of his graying moustache would quiver aggressively in such moments.

Who was going to shoulder the immense responsibility–no, the blame!–for the 21st century’s deeply alarming developments? Who was going to be called to account for the speedy unraveling of a superficially orderly worldmonde.Planet, whose rules Niklas, by his own repeated admission, had just barely managed to comprehend before everything started to come undone again? Who was going to be accountable for making wonderful places like Gyurgyan or Iowa, Michigan, Mazatlan and Moldavia vulnerable to the heartless, egoistic whims of nothing more than a handful of ravaging elitist circles of cheaters and liars?

“Lenders and vendors, investors and speculators!” Niklas would often hiss and spit in response to his own rhetorical ramblings, dousing his surroundings liberally with clouds of sour saliva droplets before pausing to take yet another drink from a small, ornately engraved but tarnished pewter flask that he always carried around with him.

“Like markets doing their magic, my ass!” he would sometimes scream in the course of some of his more irrational rampages. “Markets? Listen, there really was conspiracies and black helicopters and crap.scheiss like that. I tell you, good, honest people used to see them globalized bastards flying around in the skies out there somewhere and nobody nowhere believed them when they tried to warn the rest of the world. That kinda stuff was happening all the time and nobody did a goddamn thing about it. They could as well been sending alien messengers straight from the gates of hell and the goddamn government woulda still lied to everybody about them! The market’s gonna do this, the market’s gonna do that, was all that they’d ever say if anybody with even a dime’s worth of common sense had the guts to ask what was going on.”

“You bet,” observed Jacqueline without looking up from the e-newspaper screen.Shot she was reading but with a pointedly glaring streak of irony, obvious to anyone but a complete idiot, in her voice.

Even if he himself didn’t quite register it to be the case, Niklas was sparing no effort at mutating into a complete idiot back then.

“And, of course, while you’re on the subject,” she added, still whisking through the pages of her e-newspaper. “… I can’t tell you often enough that everyone should have been reloading instead of retreating back then when they were lying to grand juries and to you about stuff like that clandestine intergalactic ranger station that the UN built out there in Roswell with tons of our tax money that all the tax-and-spend types took away from everyone while they weren’t looking. That was my tax money and yours that they poured into concrete …”

Then she zipped the page and tried to concentrate on reading again.

“Yeah, right, er … our tax money. Yeah, that too!” a slightly befuddled Niklas would respond in wholehearted agreement after recovering from the initial fumble in his monologue. While he sincerely regretted that he couldn’t recall all the sordid details very well anymore of that particular discussion at the time, he paused to mentally pat himself on the back, feeling very pleased with himself that he had succeeded in elucidating his point so clearly to Jacqueline.

Charles recalled thinking, even when he was a pre-adolescent boy, that Niklas Vladimir Bratislav, prior to his setting out to find the good life for himself, long before his dubiously arranged emigration from a faraway place formerly known as Gyurgyan, must have in all probability been merely one of the numerous useless drunks who, at the time, could readily be found loitering about filthy dilapidated wooden kiosks plastered with reams of colorful posters and paper and plastic flags, banners and stickers gaudily harking the spirit of liberation and adventure that was perceived to go hand in hand with smoking particularly prominent western brands of cigarettes in the vicinity of Baku’s suburban train stations or similarly drab locales. Despite Niklas’ occasional rambling heroic narrations to the contrary, Charles instinctively surmised that he must likely have been just one of any number of perpetually idle men here who appeared to be cursed with the necessity to age even faster than old newspapers yellow, probably standing huddled closely together, almost conspiratively, as the whole troupe–every man for himself–braved the brisk cold chill of Eurasian early-morning air each and every day, their faces enveloped in the clouds of both blue smoke and the condensation caused by their breath.

Prior to this period in his life–during the time when crude oil was still so highly relevant to just about everyone else on the face of the worldmonde.Planet and also apparently still gushing plentifully in what was then known as Azerbaijan–Niklas was, in fact, for some time one of the imported proletariat who could be found lurking regularly and hopefully around the lines of dark and dubious limousines haphazardly parked and idling sinisterly on the fringe of Primorskovy Park, their rear windows expertly blacked out by shades or dark adhesive foils while the attorneys representing their former owners, living in relative comfort at least two or three time zones further west, crossed swords in a near futile combat with renitent insurance companies. He could, no doubt, have been seen standing here for hours on end, surveying the scenery patiently through his ludicrous cheap imitation DeeGee-brand-name sunglasses as he watched hopelessly destitute children eagerly peddle small brown paper bags of roasted sunflower seeds or an occasional SpeakEZ to passersby, the obligatory cigarette butt always gracing his dour countenance.

Whatever the scenario, Charles was certain then and as he grew older, Niklas was very likely utterly unproductive in the sense of being little more than the sum total of cheap clear liquor–juniper or sugar cane-based if he happened to have a bit of money in his pocket, potato-based if he didn’t–and an entire arsenal of disincentive social politics.

Nevertheless, Niklas was probably largely harmless in his former life in the old worldmonde.Planet. At worst, he was busy simply challenging the odds against his statistical life expectancy on a daily basis. Whether this was strictly due to his own inherent lethargy or whether it was simply attributable to the sheer number of others just like him was at best an academic point to Charles in his later recollections. But not long after the time when he had entered the lives of Charles and his mother, Niklas had become an angry, suspicious and increasingly stupid drunk who consistently proved himself increasingly loathe to adapting to even the simplest challenges or changes life presented him with.

And, as Charles soon appreciated, Niklas’ thick skull filled to the brim with little more than Spam awash in ethyl alcohol was without a doubt an extraordinarily explosive combination in any kind of setting.

To Niklas, the so-called new economies translated only into some incomprehensible blur of people uninterested in, as he put it, the “sherished walues” that gave the lives of hardworking people order, depth, sense and meaning. If they even bothered to take note of hardworking, honest people at all, so his worldview, then it was solely for the purpose of devising new schemes to cheat them out of their rightful share of the collective wealth. Niklas often referred to the new elite derisively as dotcommunists. He considered them to be nothing more than evil opportunists, the whole lot, harvesting the poisonous fruits of a fictional paper wealth, derived from the hard work of others, as they pursued what they described as lucrative opportunities. In reality, so Niklas’ reasoning, they were shamelessly infringing on his own God-given right to an easy life meant to be dedicated to the pursuit of both happiness and freedom. These bastards were godless pagans in his eyes, ugly parasites who were unwilling to relent to any form of decency if a conflict in values made itself apparent between them and the society from which they ceaselessly and mercilessly sapped their existence.

What was it then that made these people so supremely confident as they worked day for day pursuing their grand and almost pornographic visions of material wealth and a social order that could only be termed blasphemous at its very kindest? Did these people really seriously believe that they would be entitled to rely upon the prayers of Niklas and others like him to ultimately liberate them from Purgatory’s fiery grasp when they departed this worldmonde.Planet, as they must, lying prone in a pine box in the back of a ZIL limo like the corpses outside the bronze-plated gates of Primorskovy did way back then?

FivePointEight liters worth of motorization in a Zavod imeni Likhachova for the final ride to the state-sanctioned compost heap?

In God we trust?

Leeches. They were all goddamn atheistic dotcommunists, the whole useless lot of them.

Who in their right mind was gonna be keeping the faith for them when push came to shove?

Was it gonna be Dow Jones or Bloomberg or the Footsie?

“It sure as hell ain’t gonna be my merciful God that helps them there bastards,” he growled. “No truth, justice or American way for them bastards.”

Heroes of the sort oddly embodied by the hordes of AstroBoys and UltraMen in days of yore, back in the days when comics were never computer-generated, or characterized by the likes of some Clark-Kentish alter egos had simply vanished from the scene probably a gazillion generations ago. At some point that no one seemed to notice until everyone and everything was well past the threshold that defined the next step into modernity, these heroes, too, simply overstepped a boundary into a state of complete and utter irrelevance, not at the hands of some stupendously nasty rivals, not because of massive and lethal doses of deadly kryptonite glowing light green, but simply for lack of any kind of following as their adventures exceeded their useful shelf life and it became readily obvious to everyone that their symbols, causes and values were void of sufficient validity to commercially justify any form of artificial resuscitation.

It might conceivably be argued that Niklas Vladimir Bratislav perhaps felt that he had escaped a similar fate as he downed what could just as well have been embalming fluid by the pint. He continued to hang in there, always on his watch and solemnly ready to face down the army of dotcommunists which today embodied evils to him that were far more sinister than any of Lex Luthor’s vilest, or Goldfinger’s most fiendish, ambitions.

In fact, to him it was simply inconceivable that not one of these lecherous bastards would ever be called to account for their repulsive role in this treacherous and corrupting loss of common spirit, not to mention wealth. Niklas was convinced that everyone–by this he generally meant the liberal media as well as the pussies who both made and consumed its content–was looking the other way these days, submitting complacently even as some dark and grand metamorphosis stealthily crept into the very heart of modern society. This blight was sapping the souls of the righteous.

And not only this! Even Niklas’ modest savings were being bled away by these leeches.

Or so he often claimed.

He often began posing the question to himself–and others–why it was that just about everything seemed to be coming apart at the seams ever since he’d arrived in what was still at the time the United States of America?

What exactly was going wrong here?

Sometimes, if he closed his eyes and allowed his mind to wander back, he could still recall a cheap cardboard sign posted in a corner delicatessen he had chanced upon in America shortly after his departure from his homeland. It was one of those shops in the city where the stark and heady aromas of garlic and onions, pickles and smoked meats blended with the brazen delicious earthy scent of rye and sesame, caraway and cilantro leaves. Such an incredibly long time had passed since those wonderful days back in Gyurgyan, but he nonetheless reminisced how, whenever he would step through the entrance door of this deli store, he would often find himself being slammed by the most poignant recollections of various episodes of his own long-lost youth.

Of course the memories triggered by the olfactory sense, even if they are often particularly vivid, are not burdened with the necessity to enhance any kind of honesty in judgment or contemplative thought associated, however closely, with the memories they elicit. As it was, Niklas was never objective enough anyhow to admit to anyone, least of all himself, that his was a youth spent and wasted in his destitute but now often glorified native Gyurgyan.

The thing that made a lasting impression on him, however, when he reminisced about his occasional visits to this deli, was not so much the atmosphere in the store itself or the eclectic character of the corner on which it was located, the people, the smells, even the sound of the traffic outside the door. What he never forgot was the simple cardboard sign that caught his eye whenever he paid for his purchases.

It wasn’t the one that proclaimed, tongue-in-cheek: WE MADE A DEAL WITH THE BANK–THEY WON’T SERVE BAGELS AND WE DON’T CASH CHECKS!

No, it was the other one, taped rather haphazardly with yellowing cellophane tape to the front side of a gray mechanical cash register so antiquated that it couldn’t even read bar codes at the time, let alone today’s ZipperCards.

It simply stated: MONEY IS THE ROOT OF ALL EVIL!

The very same deli owner who had this sign taped to his till in those days after Niklas’ emigration proudly laid claim to no fewer than two houses and four cars that he called his very own. He also laid claim to three wives but, as polygamy was, and continues to be, frowned upon in some official circles, he prudently never made a point of bragging too loudly about it to every stranger who crossed his threshold with the intention of buying humus, onions or the occasional lox bagel. And he quite obviously earned more than enough money in his small fiefdom to easily afford not only three-fold matrimony but also regular visits–at least once every year–overseas to that part of his family that was still living somewhere near faraway Odessa or Sevastopol.

Was he thinking global acting local, too, when he worked selling pickles and samovars and baloney and bagels, saving for a lifetime of pussy galore and holiday excursions to the Black Sea?

Was that what it was all about? Was this a reasonable or even feasible solution in this day and age? The deli fellow was an expatriate, just like he was. He was pretty much the same generation, the same heritage and almost even the same spot on the map. The geography and the biographies were superficially nearly congruent and, then again, they weren’t. Try as he might, Niklas never managed to figure out why this was so.

No wonder he was so damned confused. Something in his life had to change for the better soon.

And thus motivated, he decided to solve his problems in the most practical manner that availed itself to him. He elected to turn to God for inner guidance. But in order to do this, he knew that he needed to find good interlocutors.

“Seek and thou shall find,” it says the Bible.

And in the course of an erratic and largely drunken sojourn he actually did one day get lucky: he for once chanced upon an angel and he actually managed to realize it. She was the freshly widowed Jacqueline Lester, Charles’ mother. She was the new twist in his utterly limited sobriety. If he had ever once found himself caught in a rare flash of brief but honest introspection, Niklas Vladimir Bratislav would have certainly had to concede that, if they hadn’t subsequently married, he would very likely be dead as a doorknob by now, afloat face-down in a deep sea of Hundred.Proof.

So everything seemed to be working out OK for him.

This was evidence enough that God must be up there somewhere watching out for him after all, he surmised.

Charles was eleven years four months sixteen days old on the morning that the family locked the front door behind them for the last time and deposited the keys in the mailbox as agreed with the new owners about to move into what had been their home. The brief tinny-sounding rattle and clatter of the key ring hitting the metal floor of the letter box rang like the stunted chime of a cracked bell in Charles’ ear as they left behind their home and existence in New England and together set off on the journey to what would ostensibly be the better life.

As the proceeds from the sale of the house were largely consumed by the outstanding mortgage, they embarked on their journey on that morning with little more than what had remained of Jacqueline’s depleted savings and the small amount of luggage which they were able to carry with them as they traveled. The family was prodded onward by Niklas, in search of himself and what he felt would be their worthy and rightful place in this harsh and unjust worldmonde.Planet. With all bonds now severed, he was at long last in control, viewing himself as a captain of sorts, as being finally endowed with an authority befitting but thus-far unknown to him, doggedly determined that they were going to find this place within this better society he had envisioned and which had been promised him.

He would see this adventure through to the end, even if it turned out to be the last thing they ever did together.

But this time was different. This time, he was dead certain that he would get it right. Their new home to which they were headed would be a just and equal society whose humble denizens were–by virtue of believing in the same God and belonging once more firmly and irrevocably to the same nation–incapable of even the most petty transgressions against their fellow citizens and believers, against nature and, most importantly, against the sacred word as spoken by God.

Niklas’ cherished values would once again be intact.

There would be no more of that post-modern crap.scheiss about diversity, choice or tolerance. Life was once again going to be simple, all about instinct and faith and trust.

And life would finally be just, its rules once more predictable and easily understandable. The way it ought to be, the way he had longed for it to be ever since his departure from Gyurgyan.

They were going to succeed at establishing themselves in an intact society, one that could rightfully declare itself to be safe from the countless distractions and ideological quagmires that plagued the many legions of simple, working people. People who, through no failings of their own, suddenly found themselves struggling or even completely mired down in the travails of a modern life few of them were able to understand.

And there was no mistaking that there was an infinitely long list of distractions to be found in the ever-increasing number of so-called open societies.

But in Niklas’ eyes, he could recognize only one grand underlying purpose behind all of this socialist empowerment and pussy activism that supposedly served to advance the kind of liberal agendas that defined modern life but also constantly undermined his core values: it was all a vicious conspiracy to mask the incessant trivialization and commercialization of daily life.

Their new safe haven would be in the midst of a God-fearing society that embodied nearly Anabaptist notions of community. It would be a safe and secure society to live and work in. It would be one that took great pride in not being meekly submissive to the great number of temptations that steer honest, hardy men and their faithful women astray daily through loud and egocentric demands for ever more involvement in an endless welter of purportedly democratic empowerment. Their new home was going to be a place where fighting back was not only acceptable behavior but actually noble and desirable.

Their new home was going to be a thoroughly homogenous society whose ideals promised to remain easily accessible to him and everyone else. Niklas was convinced that this place was going to be as close to Shangri-La as he would likely ever come in his lifetime.

And life in such a society would surely be a leisurely affair compared to what he had experienced thus far, not unlike that of those renowned Maytag.Men who sit around in the telly.tube all day, every day, waiting patiently, but ultimately in vain, for something to finally break down.

He was going to belong. He would even submit to foot-washing rituals if that would be the price he was going to have to pay for the cherished opportunity to finally live the better life.

It was going to be utterly unlike the rotten rest of this worldmonde.Planet, where collective identity had dwindled rapidly, evaporating in the course of only a few short years. This development had forced everyone and everything to seek refuge in exclusive membership in one or more of an exploding number of ever smaller denominations, as more and more specialized groups engaged in an increasingly public and progressively more secular battle for the general recognition of rights specific only to their own causes. In such an atmosphere, several of Niklas’ friends had convinced him, it was easily apparent that God’s voice was waning precipitously. Indeed, it had almost ceased to be heard at all. Instead, everyone was today claiming some obscure kind of democratic empowerment. Everyone was busily blowing their own trumpet, wanting their particular agenda to be heard first.

There were PTAs and NGOs and bricklayers’ guilds. Deadbeat dads.

Presbyterian Lumberjacks and Mothers Against Drunk Drivers.

There were teachers’ unions and the hearing-impaired.

Automobilists and ecologists and milieuterrorists.

Heteros and Homos and Metas and Metros and everyone else who was lost somewhere in between.

There was serendipity and Scientology and singularity.

Apostasy was rampant everywhere. Everywhere he looked, people were denouncing the faith or on the run from something or someone.

Things had gotten so bad that there were even people united to save humanity from itself.

“Bullshit like that,” observed Niklas. “Why can’t they all just be like me?”

Although it was probably a waste of his own time, Charles would later think back and try to recall at what point his stepfather had started seeing white elephants in addition to his otherwise just plain obnoxious behavior toward his mother and himself. The episodes of toxic insanity seemed to have simply started at some random point and then gained in frequency.

He could remember Niklas sternly lecturing his mother on his plans.

There were the seemingly endless–and often hopelessly convoluted–arguments with her, as well as with anyone else who had the misfortune of being in the wrong place at the wrong time, over who was at fault for the steady decline in what he saw as the decent, common values that were brought to this country by, among others, his own God-fearing ancestors, willing to take hardship and deprivation upon themselves if it helped them find their promised land. To hear it from him, the values embodied so faithfully by him were today heartily cherished by only a small and dwindling number of forthright men in these discouraging times.

There was no need to be subtle about this either: when Niklas was talking about real and true men, he always meant men like himself.

At the time the family’s–or actually Niklas’–decision to emigrate began to crystallize, Charles could recall, his stepfather continually justified his intentions over and over again by arguing that life was going to be ultimately better for all of them because things would finally become so much simpler again. One particularly idiotic early morning encounter was forever branded into his memory. Charles was perhaps ten years old at the time.

“Whatever it is that the good life brings us in our new home,” Niklas announced loudly and rather abruptly one fine morning as he brandished a mug of steaming hot black tea in his hand, “… it’s sure gotta be a helluva lot less complicated than this here place. Even breakfast has so gotten goddamn complicated in this country.”

“Not that I’d disagree with you entirely about things often times being more complicated than they truly need be, but, frankly, I think you’re finally going nuts on us,” ventured Jacqueline in an amused response, nodding to no one in particular without looking up from a website that she was engrossed in. She was sitting at the far end of the table, facing sideways toward the window as she surfed on the tablet formatted machine which she was balancing on her lap. She scrolled onward to the next page and half-chuckled to herself as she asked: “So what is it that you’re trying to tell us with that last observation?”

Niklas stopped dead in his tracks and his eyes narrowed, looking as though he were a Napoleonic field marshal focusing on a point somewhere on the faraway horizon behind which the next battlefield awaited his unbridled heroism.

“Well, you know, just sit back and imagine for just a minute. It’s like really early in the morning. And you get up and you’re already hungry,” he now began to explain as a wide-eyed expression grew on his face. His accent, always discernible, tended to become much more prominent when he had been drinking. Despite the fairly early hour, this seemed to definitely be the case now.

Niklas barely moved as he began describing the vision that was wafting through the neurons composing his pickled grey matter. It was an eerie sensation, a bit like a séance or speaking long distance with the spirit of a ventriloquist holed up in the Caucasus somewhere.

Jacqueline glanced up at him and furrowed her brow. Up to now, she hadn’t paid much attention to what Niklas was up to on that morning.

“Well, maybe it’s some kinda special day today, you know? Or maybe you just already on your goddamn way to work. Maybe you just gotta have some peace and quiet for a change,” he continued. “So you, you know, you decide to go eat breakfast. Instead of makin’ it yourself, you know?”

Charles rolled his eyes in silent disbelief at what he was hearing. Niklas Vladimir was incapable of as much as even knocking over a pail of water without someone helping him. The notion of Niklas making his own breakfast was without the least bit of exaggeration completely and utterly out of the question.

Niklas continued his explanation stoically: “So you just wanna sit down in the goddamn diner and before you know it, up strolls some middle-age housewife workin’ there, right? Bleached hair tied in a bun and oversized boobs, lace and doilies. You know, some babushka bitch who’s gotta go at it breaking her ass from five to nine every damn day. And you know why? Because she needs the goddamn money to feed all her brats at home. You know? Why? I’ll tell ya. ’Cause her old man just hopped on, knocked her up and then just kicked out of there. That kinda stuff. No goddamn common sense, some people just got no culture. They’re like goddamn rabbits. You know what I mean ...”

He ran his hand through his graying hair at the back of his neck for a moment and cast a mildly contemptuous glance, his dark eyes darting not at but straight through Charles, before continuing.

“Anyhow, so, before you know it, here she come rollin’ up to ya. And she’s dressed up, you know she’s like wearin’ some kinda Baby Doll outfit they stuff bitches like her into before sending her out to get orders, wearin’ some damned pink rag decorated with a frilly doily hardly big enough to cover a fat ass big enough to hide the goddamn Titanic. And ya know what? She even says Sweetheart to me. Can you believe that kind of bullshit? Good morning, Sweetheart! So, well listen up anyhow. I tell ya. I’m not done yet …”

He rotated the mug nervously a few times in his hands, looking at it but not really capable of registering the tea stains adorning it. Then he put it down and stood, leaning forward ominously on the kitchen table, his feet spread far apart as he half-stood, supporting his weight with his elbows. His gaze wandered around the kitchen momentarily and he swallowed hard a few times. Then he cleared his throat loudly before letting himself drop with a thud onto one of the wooden chairs.

“So then she gets out her pad, some TouchBoard thing of hers and starts tapping and typing. And without even looking up at you anymore, she starts asking all kinds of crap.scheiss: Hey Sweetheart! Smoking or nonsmoking? Gonna be tea or coffee this morning? Regular or decaf? Whole milk or two percent or cream? How about the daily special or menu? Scrambled, over-easy or sunny-side up? Ham, bacon or sausage? Fries, potatoes or maybe some hash browns with that? Plain or toasted? White, whole-wheat or sourdough? Buttered or plain?”

An incredulous, nervous quiet hovered in the air in the kitchen for what seemed like a very long moment.

Although everything he had said in the course of his exegesis thus far could be understood as a farce, Jacqueline didn’t dare to be amused any longer at this madcap sermon. It dawned on her that Niklas was dead serious about what he was telling them.

And she now quickly deduced that he had already not only been drinking, which was perhaps not that surprising, but doing so heavily. More aptly, she surmised, it was quite possible that he hadn’t stopped after last night. She regretted that she had underestimated this and thus not tried to defuse the situation beforehand.

“She was probably only asking you about the ham and the bacon because she maybe thought you looked kinda Jewish,” remarked Charles wryly from his side of the table without looking up.

“Didn’t ya see what I meant, what I was tryin’ to tell ya?” he suddenly bellowed at them, deeming this to be an utterly unsatisfactory reply to the point he was trying to communicate.

At this very instant, the dishwasher behind them clicked onto the next program and began pumping out the waste water with a soft but audible burp.

A broad band of withered, yellowed teeth, looking like long, weather-bleached marble tombstones against the early morning light shining through the kitchen window, arched across the lower half of his unshaven face. His breathing suddenly turned labored as he sat there with a grin as wide as that of a hyena thanking the heavens for dead meat, inwardly triumphant at his own perceived success at once again pouring a pound of salt into the wound of his recently acquired wife’s insecurity.

Jacqueline sat in stunned silence on her chair, the computer still resting on her lap, dumbfounded as she considered how to best de-escalate the situation. While she was sometimes able to interpret a kind of morbid humor into his whacky behavior, at this moment she found herself helpless–unable to take Niklas’ tirade seriously but suddenly apprehensive of the explosive undercurrent present in his voice and the aggression that now permeated the atmosphere of the kitchen.

Slowly he turned and leaned forward toward her with a hard, earnest expression chiseled into his features, looking as though he were trying to hypnotize a rabbit while simultaneously balancing his chair on its two front legs. He distorted his face grotesquely and raised the pitch of his voice until it approached a squeak, inquiring mockingly: “Hey, honey! Is it gonna be cash or credit card today?”

Jacqueline clapped the lid of the laptop together and placed it on the floor next to her, unintentionally allowing one end of it to drop the last few centimeters. She turned her head away in a mixture of disgust and frustration before rising from her chair. She stood silently with her arms folded across her chest and looked wordlessly through the open window.

A magazine slid over the edge of the table where Niklas was sitting and hit the floor before his feet with a loud slap.

A split second later, he shot up from the table and shoved his chair aside, sending it skidding across the wooden floor, a resounding screech filling the room as the chair hurtled toward the wall. He then turned and reached for a bright green, sweat-stained baseball cap which he had placed on the window sill. To Charles, Niklas nowadays always had a peculiar odor. Charles wasn’t sure why, but Niklas seemed lately to smell like a combustive mixture of horse shit, old sweat and turpentine. Charles harbored the suspicion that Niklas perhaps never bothered to brush his teeth anymore. He only occasionally shaved. Charles suspected that he never bathed or showered on days like this, on days when he had been having one of his binges.

And it was difficult for Charles to say for sure but he suspected deep within that Niklas seldom bothered to sleep anymore. The only consistency that Charles could discern in his stepfather’s behavior was the fact that he continued to drink like a fish.

Charles, as he sat witnessing this scene from his vantage point across the kitchen, came to despise his stepfather more and more with each passing day. He thought about what it would feel like to reach out and just kill him, right then and there. He fantasized in his mind about what it would feel like to just grab the small swell of chest hair that poked out through his open collar of his red-checkered shirt and choke the last vestiges of life out of the sleazy drunken bastard with his own two hands, simply to alleviate his mother’s misery and conveniently, in the process, that of his own.

Strangling him was out of the question, though. He fretted that Niklas probably didn’t even need to breathe oxygen to be mean, let alone live. He was probably one of those arsenic-based life forms which scientists were certain existed somewhere in the black void of space.

So, if strangulation was not an option, what would be the best method to go about dispatching him instead? In an academic fashion perhaps, employing simple brute force and the wonder of physics to gauge and explore the critical junction in the relationship between Niklas’ cranial stability and the momentum of a pole or a wooden two-by-four in full motion–would his skull then split like a ripe watermelon? Would it contain just as many seeds? Feeding him to an oversized snake was another intriguing option for a young boy of his age, but he had recently learned in school, much to his disappointment, that there were unfortunately only four indigenous kinds of poisonous snakes on the entire continent and not one of them was even close to being large enough to do the job–to meet with any kind of success, he would be forced to import one. Explosives were a further option. They were spectacular and usually pretty efficient, too, but they also tended to be messy and apt to attract undue notice. Charles knew that people in the suburbs could be notoriously nosy, he sighed, and few people would be willing to consider selling any sizable quantity of dynamite to a minor like himself. If anything, a low-key inconspicuous solution would probably work most effectively: Niklas’ bare feet adorning a vat of cement while he slept off what would then be his final hangover, headed for a moonless nocturnal rendezvous at the mouth of the wild and treacherous Andrew.Scoggin sound, for example. Or, if all other ideas and efforts failed or simply proved impractical, he could always simply flatten the son of a bitch out front in the driveway with the four-wheel drive when there was no one around. The rear-view camera in the car would make the task fun and easy. He just needed to grow a bit more for his feet to reach the accelerator.

Deep within, though, Charles knew that neither he nor anyone else would ever do any such thing. And Niklas probably did as well, if indeed the thought had ever occurred to him. Which is why he continued to make the lives of everyone around him resemble one long nightmare.

Donning the green cap as he left the kitchen, Niklas threw the door wide open and stepped onto the porch. The screen door protested, creaking loudly on its bent hinges.

Without turning to face his wife, he continued his irrational discourse on the porch.

“And you know what I’m gonna do next time?” he roared. “Huh? Do ya?”

He didn’t wait for anyone to respond but continued.

“I’m not gonna order anything but a goddamn bagel. No cream cheese. Nothing. And no tip either for the goddamn fat bitch!”

Neither Jacqueline nor Charles moved. Their life with Niklas was turning into a never-ending series of sermons highlighted by bouts of lunacy and punctuated by occasional episodes of random horror.

After standing wordlessly for a few seconds, Niklas wobbled slightly back and forth before turning on his heel.

“And you better remember something: when we’re finally gone off to the better life, we ain’t never comin’ back. There ain’t gonna be no visits back to here or none of that crap.scheiss. Never! Never! Never! Nev …”

Niklas spun around quickly and belched loudly one time. Then he vomited over the railing of the veranda.