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LIBERTYVILLE@ESPERANTIA

Charles’ very first recollection of Libertyville@Esperantia was glimpsing a part of its surrounding wall from the window of seat 21K aboard an aging Escudo.Amazonas Airways jet. From this airborne perspective, the initial impression for him resembled something that could just as well have been an infinitely long tapeworm. It was made of gray concrete and snaked erratically along the northern boundaries of the city, its tight embrace starkly highlighting the insular character of the place when viewed from above and afar.

To him, it looked just like West Berlin must have once appeared, tucked away from the rest of the worldmonde.Planet during the long decades of what was then referred to as a Cold War. What was different from the first glance onward was that Libertyville@Esperantia was geographically a peninsula of sorts. The wall was therefore most visible where the city bordered the mainland. Beyond it only water or a thin strand of shoreline were to be seen while, to the east, a wide river opened into the ocean.

The wall around West Berlin was different. It visibly circled the entire urban area of the city. But there was also another important difference: oppressive as it no doubt was to those within and also outside the wall surrounding the city at the time, a convincing rhetorical argument could be made that this sullen barrier looming between East and West nonetheless at least legitimately served a higher symbolic purpose through embodying the divide it literally cemented into place for so many long years. Seen through a semiotic worldview, it was absolutely unbeatable as a representative icon, a vivid reminder of the long enduring stalemate between the advocates of capitalism hunched down on the one side and those of communism on the other.

In fact, for someone with a simplistic perspective like that of Niklas, it actually supremely symbolized the days in which there were only a few ideologies worth making a stand for and that, for this reason, these were therefore much more inclined to be proudly contested and passionately defended.

“Good old days,” was a like a mantra which one could hear regularly from older folks when the subject of the past.time came up.

That was long ago. Swapping spooks at the Glienicke Bridge was a part of that era. And, even way before that, Chairman Mao.

L. Ron Hubbub and the Atomic Café and roads choked with fossil-fuel big-fin behemoths were the icons of that time, before which industrial-strength solutions for genocidal ambitions served to define the level of collective achievement for a handful of civilizations given to obediently following the leadership of various gangs of acknowledged miscreants.

That was even way before so-called new eras came fast and furious as their watershed moments were institutionalized or branded into the collective memory before they risked being bleached out by the ever faster turning of world events. The developed worldmonde.Planet was already gathering steam long before the advent of social engineers and cybersquatters, before facebooks and firewalls and spyware. The worldmonde.Planet was spinning at dizzying speed even before Chapman & Co. and a parade of Russian spymates became all the rage.

There were the ages of JFK, MLK and RFK, all being blown away in quick succession.

Or Nine-Eleven and the animosities, annoyances, angst and agencies it subsequently spawned. With the advent of smartphones, there came the art of sexting and, not long thereafter, the inevitable rise of reputation-restoration management agencies whose primary business model was to ensure that inappropriately bared body parts or unseemly bulges in undergarments disappeared from the ethernet before they could do any serious damage to reputations or careers.

All of these developments were soon accompanied by the radiant new TEPCO shine that much of the worldmonde.Planet and the agricultural industry eagerly took on post-Fukushima.

Naturally everyone liked Spikey Ike at one time, way back there in those dark days of pre-modernity, even if it took another few years before the presence of a wall like that in Berlin was finally a firm and physically established fact. In their minds, however, the more deviate architects of that particular age’s divisions, its reason and its politics were no doubt, somewhere in the back of their minds, already busily stirring cement and stacking bricks long before a gate went up at Checkpoint Charlie.

After all, in a logical context, walls serve no real purpose except as structures that serve to separate.

Those having the fortune or misfortune to one day find themselves on one side or the other.

In another time or under other circumstances, they might well be neighbors.

East and West. Or Arabs and Jews. Black or white.

First world, third world.

But who nowadays truly needed to pay attention to the often incomprehensible sensibilities of neighbors in a fully globalized age where physical location played little or no role anymore in the trade of goods or ideas?

There was absolutely nothing to be gained in being nostalgic anymore, if indeed there ever was. Such tidy states of affairs belonged to the irretrievable past.time now, to a period that dated back many long years before Charles’ time.

In fact, to a time that was even long before the days of Niklas Vladimir.

It is unlikely that anyone today could say with real certainty why a concrete wall had ever been erected around the perimeter of Libertyville@Esperantia several decades ago. The official explanation, and thus the one that was still often stated to be valid to this date, simply declared it to be in the overall “national interest”, declaring it necessary to protect and to serve its citizenry in light of the many constant and enduring threats being directed at it.

This was an explanation that was very often mobilized because of its terrific all-round effectiveness. Lots of otherwise questionable endeavors, from dubious make-work programs to granting tax exemptions on chick flicks or even making mobile to go to war, have all been publicly and convincingly justified as having been in the greater national interest at one time or another.

The same general principle has historically applied to awarding concessions for selling everything from opium to tea to guidance systems for nuclear missiles, for printing reams of postage stamps and paper money, for licensing taxi drivers and tax auditors or prescribing a recommended cholesterol level for pork meat.

It was kind of like Isotype. Every moron could understand the implied symbology so its messages didn’t need constant explaining.

National interest. No questions asked. Period.

The beauty of the argument was of course that opposition to any idea or set of ideas could then nearly effortlessly be portrayed as boorish or unpatriotic, as a frivolous rejection of the carefully groomed values of the society that chose to institute this set of ideas.

National interest was the big buzzword then. Even if some of the actions in question might under different circumstances be judged ambivalently. Like running gambling casinos, subsidizing horse racing and lotteries or voting for latently horny fat politicians who eagerly wrap their hands around the slender waists of scantily-clad constituent beauty queens at important functions such as ribbon-cutting events and grand openings at gaming arcades, muffler shops or pick-your-own-strawberry and avocado farms where migrant laborers did all the toiling. Or, for that matter, at any number of other mindless photo ops created specifically for this purpose of perpetuating their political raison d’être.

And for someone whose cerebral matter was hardwired as minimalistically as that of Niklas, anything deemed to be in the “national interest” in essence constituted a perfectly adequate explanation. It was just like invoking the gospel. It was cute and simple. There was no compelling need for him or anyone else to have to think and rethink things over and over again.

Life could be simple if people would only allow it to be so.

As the airliner approached Libertyville@Esperantia on this particular sunny morning, Charles could clearly see that the whole expanse of the city, which essentially constituted the entire domain.state–their new soon-to-be home–was wedged in loosely between water and two broad expanses of what appeared to be largely uninhabited marshland. Along the northern and eastern edges of this area, the large, lazily meandering riverbed culminated in a shallow lake or lagoon. This had the appearance of being thick and muddy, probably due to the amount of silt being transported by this stream at this time of year. A handful of dredges, looking diminutive from up here, could be seen working on the river. As far as Charles could determine, there were no towns and really no significant settlements to be seen outside of the perimeter of the wall which closed off the city from the mainland. There were also only very few roads leading into the enclave discernible as he peered down from his stratospheric perch like a hawk on the lookout for prey.

But, much to his surprise, from his vantage point at some twenty or thirty-odd thousand feet in the long descent into Libertyville@Esperantia, Charles could easily make out a fair number of drilling platforms that appeared to be several kilometers offshore. Seen from his perspective, they resembled miniscule renditions of the Eiffel Tower protruding from the marble shiny rippled surface of the water. If one focused carefully on shadows on the surface of the ocean, one could see that the light was broken by tiny flames that produced even, uniformly shaped blobs of dense black smoke as they flamed off excess gas. The shadows of these smoke clouds on the pearly, seemingly stationary surface of the water deeply fascinated him.

It couldn’t possibly be long before they arrived now.

So as the jet continued to gently rock its way through some annoying morning thermal turbulence, traversing the boundary of Libertyville@Esperantia in the course of an increasingly steep descent, Charles strained hard to catch even a telltale glimpse of color flashing from somewhere among the dense cluster of drab green-brown-gray global age prefabricated concrete severity that was now beginning to spread out before him. He was seeking some sign of encouragement that he secretly hoped would permeate their lives, inundating their senses with a new sense of optimism, a positive, uplifting vibe to greet them once they set foot in Libertyville@Esperantia. Despite his mother’s sympathy, his opinion hadn’t counted heavily thus far in the long deliberations that had led up to this moment and his being a captive party to this adventure. Up to now, he had been an unwilling pawn in this grand endeavor so there was little else he could do except to wait and to hope fervently that something–anything!–might signal to him that things were finally changing for the better, even if his being subjected to this escapade in the first place was solely at the behest of Niklas. Charles was silently praying for something magnificent to manifest itself, something that would finally kick off the future.time for him with a bang.

He peered down again. Maybe he could find something blue out there. Or green. Red. Even yellow would do.

Anything.

“Life is gonna be so full of blessings,” was Niklas’ mantra, his almost standard promise to Jacqueline whenever the subject made the rounds again in the family. “Things are going to work out just fine for us.”

And, as usual, he ignored Charles.

As the edge of the city passed under to the airplane now, one very fatigued and not quite early-adolescent boy on board, seated at 21K, silently stepped up his vigilance. His curiosity was so great that he nearly held his breath, quaking slightly in his seat in anticipation. As silly as the idea may seem to an observer, Charles was bent on obtaining, absorbing and preserving his very first impression of their destination. Squinting as he shielded his eyes with one hand from the searing cold glare of the sun reflected between the two exterior window panes of the aged Sonic.Cruzeiro, he found his gaze fixed on a landscape that somehow appeared as empty and instantaneously distant as the pictures he’d seen of the dark side of the moon. The only color was a small rainbow prism of light scattered among some ice crystals which had formed within the aircraft window during the flight.

He rubbed his reddened eyes with the back of his hands and flexed the muscles in his arms and legs shortly, doing what little he could to restart the circulation in them while still confined to these very cramped quarters. Sitting up straight in his seat again, he then pressed his nose against the window and again devoted his attention to the awesome spectacle of the worldmonde.Planet passing beneath the wings.

Although he had flown on only a handful of occasions before as a small boy, he had always remembered it as being a very special and very enjoyable experience. Best of all, he recalled how, after he had finally learned to read, he had invariably spent those final few minutes of each flight, about the time that the airplane would be vectored onto its final approach course, intently scouring the panorama before and below him in a concentrated search for the very first words to become legible upon arrival at his destination.

In truth, this wasn’t always an easy task which he had taken upon himself. As a young boy, the challenge lay in the fact that he either couldn’t read fast enough or that he simply never managed to find anything suitable until just before the airplane would come careening across the airport fence. But it had always been great fun trying.

In the past.time, on those occasions on which he flew together with his parents, the first words which became visible as the airplane approached the destination runway were almost inevitably ANOTHER ONE TRILLION SERVED! Perhaps this was because the restaurants gaudily proclaiming this success were by now truly ubiquitous. Or maybe it was because his eye would be involuntarily attracted by the telltale golden arches, often mounted on tall poles that seemed to be a hundred miles high. Perhaps it was a kind of reflexive conditioned response?

And then there would follow a second glance, this time across the road or highway. DoubleWhopper indemnity was usually assured.

Charles neither knew nor did he really care what the reason behind this activity was. To him, it was just plain fun. Maybe it was a bit like playing peek-a-boo with a baby, he reasoned, as the outcome didn’t seem to matter anywhere nearly as much as playing the game itself. Just like the bambinos, he understood that the fun was not about winning anything, but all in the action.

And it wasn’t important to impart any deep logic to all of this anyhow. In the end, it was only one more tiny detail, one diminutive stone finding its place in a kind of surreptitious mosaic image in the back of his mind which he was forging from secrets which he was certain were revealed only to him as he wrested them, bit by bit, from a state of invisibility brought on solely by the fact that he was airborne. He somehow found this exercise exhilarating, as though he alone was capable of snatching these cryptic clues from the jealous clutch of distance, assisted only by the speed of the airplane in which he was sitting.

It was a game which he used to play with his father, Fulton. Who would be the first to find something that was useful or meaningful? What kind of loony word constructs, headlines or sentences could the two of them form when they teamed up, spontaneously juggling with all of these odd lingual snippets?

As Charles invariably managed to snare the window seat, as children somehow always mysteriously manage to do, he was always in the pole position. At least that was Fulton’s tongue-in-cheek explanation when the aircraft would taxi to the gate after landing and the overhead seat belt sign, the incorruptible official referee of these tournaments, signaled that time was up, that the game was now over.

Charles would proudly present the results of his collection. The result might, for example, read something like: EAT SUVS NOW! XXL PAYBACK & LONG SHOPPING CARS. LOVE PRIME POLAR DAILY NIGHTLINES ME LOGISTICS. MIX AND MATCH CUSTOM GRAVY TRAINS. SCENT SAVERS. 1-888-CASH-LOVERS. HOLZMANN EXITS VIA 104.4 FM. BETHLEHEM & BREAD BAGS COOL.

Even when he was a very young boy back in his earliest school days, Charles had always found reading and the search for the hidden structures and meanings of words to be an intriguing preoccupation. On many an occasion, and often encouraged by his parents, he found tremendous joy and pleasure in learning and playing with words and with language. Later on, however, after a man named Niklas Vladimir Bratislav somehow managed to enter his life via that of his mother, Charles was also very quickly tutored to learn the unhappy lesson of how much pain words could also be capable of inflicting.

But prior to that time, in happier times and on those first few flights, back in the days when his father was still alive and at his side, those first words that made themselves apparent upon their arrival at any new destination always seemed to possess the capability of mysteriously forming the nucleus from which sprouted some kind of narrative, often kooky and irrational but always a story that he alone could then subsequently carry around within his own head. In this fashion, he enabled himself to place his travel, his experiences and his boyhood adventures in some frame of reference that was always and exclusively accessible to him. It was like being the keeper of a key to some mystery-laden treasure chest: he could share whatever he wanted of its contents if he wanted to but it remained entirely up to him to decide if and when–and who, if anyone, the beneficiary of such largesse might eventually be. It was for him as though he was empowered to plant a tiny seed from which his subsequent impressions would intuitively derive their own uniquely comprehensible form of inner logic as they grew.

Years earlier, as a very small boy who had just started school, Charles’ father had been quick to recognize both his ability and his enthusiasm, encouraging him by participating and sometimes even competing with him. Many times, they found themselves playing these kinds of silly games to simply see who could succeed in bringing the other to laugh first. Later on, as Charles’ ability to read grew and flourished, they would use these foundations to begin spinning wild chains of words like an intricate web, words with which Charles would later structure the impressions he had gained, building memories and, at the same time, finding confidence in his ability to communicate.

Charles later on realized how fortunate he had been then to have had a father like Fulton to share in these games with him as a young boy. It was plain that someone like Niklas would have simply and harshly refused, not caring nor understanding that more than just his ability to read might wither away forever.

“Words are the worst weapons of a goddamn liar,” Charles heard him declare on more than one occasion.

The jet was by now well into its descent, winding its way through a series of turns as it followed the arrival procedures to establish itself on the final approach. Charles covered and rubbed his eyes at length once again with the open palms of his hands and glanced wearily over to his left at his mother sitting in the middle seat.

She appeared to be lost in deep thought, her eyes open but unseeing. Had he not known her better, he might have assumed that she was perhaps steeped in some sort of inexplicable prayer or meditation, perhaps trying to reconcile herself with the idea that whatever might come next, it was because the entire family was now engaged in a search, no longer to find just itself but God’s very own form of mercy instead. Charles knew, though, that whatever was going through her mind at this moment, she most certainly wasn’t praying. And he was surely sensitized to the fact that this excursion was, in his mother’s eyes, very likely Niklas’ last chance at getting something right. But Ch.ase was also acutely aware that, by even daring to venture this far, she had just wagered just about everything that life had offered them thus far and that there was really no way back for any of them. Jacqueline had begun grasping desperately at straws in the aftermath of Fulton’s death and following Niklas’ turbulent entry into their lives thereafter. Right or wrong, this was her last-ditch attempt to arrest the free fall that she had, perhaps in an exaggerated sense, perceived herself and her son to have been in.

To Jacqueline’s left, occupying the aisle seat, sat Niklas, stretched out as much as practical in the limited space that was available in economy seating. Ch.ase didn’t bother looking but just assumed that he was probably either half-pickled or asleep at the moment–or possibly both. And as always whenever Niklas was nearby in recent days and weeks, Charles thought that he could here too detect a fetid smell, reminiscent somehow of horse shit and turpentine, whenever he opened his mouth and exhaled.

To his silent bemusement, Charles registered how, on each of his numerous forays to the lavatory to offload the liquor that had accumulated in his bladder before and during the flight, Niklas invariably returned to his seat muttering that some imbecile before him apparently kept opening the lavatory window shade. As oddly comical as it seemed to Charles, it was apparently even a challenge for Niklas to retain a sense of privacy when pissing into a vacuum drain at 37,000 feet with the window shade open.

Charles decided to forget about his stepfather and returned to silently surveying the scenery before and below him.

This was the second and final leg of their journey. As the jet cruised smoothly along through the stratosphere toward Libertyville@Esperantia an hour or two earlier, Charles had leaned back in his seat and absently surveyed the vast blue and grey emptiness before him, trying his best to come to terms with an odd but sudden swell of anxiety that seemed to have pounced upon him during and after the airliner’s scheduled fuel stop at cayman.City before continuing onward.

Despite giving it his very best effort, he had not succeeded in finding any words whatsoever beneath the jet as he peered eagerly out of the window during their descent and approach. This was in part due to the fact that it was still fairly dark during their early-morning arrival and, secondly, because most of the airport’s arrival route was apparently flown over the open sea. For Charles, however, there was something deeply unsettling about this experience. In fact, it was the very first time in his modest travel activities as a young boy that he could recall something like this happening to him. While it might well have seemed less significant to anyone else in a similar situation, it somehow frightened him. It hadn’t occurred to him that he might register nothing more than a blank page at this crucial point in his life on account of the darkness. It was all very disquieting, this realization that he lacked the foundation stone, the starting words of a new narrative as he stood directly on the threshold between his new and his former life.

It was an eerie feeling for him. To Charles, it felt as though Fulton had left his life a second time, like a long shadow had snatched away both the memories that he and his father once shared and, with them, the building blocks that he had hoarded and treasured, the cornerstones for his own future.time narratives.

There was only the deep dark expanse of the ocean to be seen below him this time. Looking down into the gloomy void beneath, Charles could see only a handful of dim yellowish lights, spaced irregularly on what was likely a number of small boats at anchor near the shoreline. The lights whizzed by silently and effortlessly below them as the Sonic.Cruzeiro and its passengers descended over what was most likely a bay or some sort of natural harbor.

And once the aircraft had finally crossed the shoreline during its final approach, Charles’ attention immediately became fixated on a bustling cloverleaf intersection of two highways that crossed each other near the coastline, only seconds prior to the airplane sailing across the airport boundary fence and touching down just beyond the runway threshold in a light drizzle. These two perpendicular motorways intersected directly adjacent to one corner of the airport boundary and were a mesmerizing sight to him, flooded in the garish yellowish-orange glow of sodium gas lights that seemed to bleed like watercolors in the wet morning. Charles could see the headlights and taillights of dozens–or perhaps hundreds–of cars and trucks weaving their way swiftly through the morning rush hour traffic, threading themselves nervously into a hectic series of new but very fluid constellations. To him, in this very short instant that he was able to see and register them, they appeared to him to resemble tiny blood corpuscles, some form of illuminated industrial-age motorized plasma nervously hastening to some grand objective, heeding some higher intelligence whose ultimate purpose would remain hidden away from him, either because of the brevity of this impression or because he unexpectedly found himself lacking an adequate foundation upon which to construct the subsequent saga.

What electrified him was not the motorway itself.

Nor was it even the surprising density of the traffic at a destination that he half-expected would probably present itself like a kind of tropical Sleepy Hollow.

The roads, the traffic and the associated bustle were nothing really new or foreign to him in any fashion; in fact, what he was observing was simply a symptom of the usual metropolitan malaise even if he was almost certainly still too young to truly perceive it as such. But what unnerved him was that, instead of radiating a sense of activity and hurling energy furiously in every direction like some gigantic celestial star, this gigantic intersection imparted an illusion diametrically opposite to his youthful expectations: it made the impression upon him of being an implosion of dark concrete and eerily-lit cars.

In this fleeting instant, there was no suggestion of movement toward the periphery, no discernible outward momentum. It was like a dark star or a huge magnet hungrily sucking all movement toward its core. And, in doing so, it drew toward its midst his spirit of anticipation and even his fantasy in the same obscene all-consuming breath. With only this split-second, photo-flash glimpse at this buzz of traffic from above to build upon, it felt as though what limited curiosity and enthusiasm he might have possessed for the adventure to come had been inexplicably swallowed up by the powerful and merciless gravity of some black hole cloverleaf.

Something was entirely wrong this time.

To Charles, it was at once a sensation similar to watching a film in rewind. It was as though one was capable of recognizing what is happening on the screen while, at the very same time, all sense of logical progression is being instantly undone. As though the future.time is being unraveled as it evolves. The logic of an event’s development becomes suddenly and irretrievably lost. Changing the direction of the film would subsequently lead back to a future.time which will have by then already transpired–otherwise the viewer would not already know the outcome! And, under such circumstances, since the events depicted had already occurred in reverse for the viewer, any renewed reversal can at best only represent the past.time being undone once more.

To Charles, it was an unsettling omen. It was almost as if the traffic he was observing had suddenly lost its way simply because he had suddenly become unsure of his own inner destination.

An old Asian adage that he remembered from childhood–maybe it was even Confucian?–proclaimed that a journey of a thousand leagues begins with but a single step. But this time around–on his very first longer journey without Fulton at their side!–there were no words to begin marking this first leg of the trip, this first step of his very own and very personal million kilometer journey. It was as though he had courageously started forward and stumbled foolishly upon taking his very first step. Even at his still young age, he was acutely aware that he had doubtlessly just made a transition of some sort but, for some reason which he simply could not place his finger on, that first critical threshold denoting this had already ceased to exist in his head.

He felt ill. He felt like throwing up. His stomach immediately drew itself into a tight knot. Deep within, he wished that Fulton were with him and that all would be well again.

As he once related this sensation many years later, on a largely barren beach located at the fringe of Libertyville@Esperantia, a very smart and very sexy young woman would mention to him that she had once, in the course of her studies, actually enjoyed reading theories attributed to a fellow named Monderman, a Dutch traffic analyst of yore, who had gained renown for his astute observation that traffic and humans represent parallel realities that, by their inherent nature, are incompatible but damned to a state of uneasy coexistence with one another.

In any event, on that particular morning his momentary exasperation was finally punctuated by the sober thump of the airplane’s landing gear as it settled down on the runway. After touchdown and the subsequent rollout, he leaned back in his seat and mutely watched the usual small armada of service vehicles on the floodlit apron slowly approach as the aircraft taxied to its parking position at a small terminal and came to a halt. Everything that he could observe was moving in the wrong fashion here. Busses and baggage loaders jostled for their positions in a stream of traffic heeding rules odd and foreign to him.

And it wasn’t only his surprise at the realization of the left-hand traffic, which he was observing for the first time in his life. The impression was like a negatively-laden ion or the wrong pole of a magnet, pushing itself away instead of being attracted, going against the grain of his perceptions. This in itself might have otherwise represented one of the anecdotal mosaic stones occupying its rightful place in the narrative. But it didn’t fit–or Charles was unable to recognize how it might.

For him, the problem was that the cue for which he was waiting and hoping was still missing and the opportunity to grasp it had already disappeared, relegated to the past.time before he could begin build upon it.

So, although this was technically only a simple fuelling stop on the journey to their new home, what he saw underscored his insecurity, heightening his awareness that, from this day onward, everything was going to be entirely different than it was before.

It was already exactly as Niklas had promised.

Or threatened?

Parked on a concrete apron at an airport on a tropical island for now, this family of spiritual castaways was geographically probably only halfway to Libertyville@Esperantia. But Charles keenly sensed that the past.time was already being permanently wrenched from his grip while the future.time was not even close to being within reach.

He glanced wearily at Niklas and recalled the drunken tirade on the porch that morning not so long before.

“When we’re gone, we ain’t coming back. No visit or nothing. Never!”

As the decision to emigrate to Libertyville@Esperantia finally and irreversibly crystallized, Niklas’ interpretation of his religion and its role in his spiritual life remained a source of great mystery to Charles. Additionally, as a soon-to-be budding teen it was not all that unusual that he was both too young and often too distracted to have any really meaningful comprehension of the many intricacies of modern politics that tangibly affected such a move.

Charles nonetheless later recalled having found it very odd that instead of simply getting into the car or a plane and heading directly to this place of his dreams called Libertyville@Esperantia, which had more or less unilaterally been decided upon to be their new home, Niklas had spent many weeks and months whispering furtively, trading secrets with an endless stream of old men who came to sit on the front porch and then bade farewell again.

In retrospect, it was little more than a veritable procession of elders who had some mysterious stake in the family’s well-being, continually urging Niklas on while they themselves remained right where they were.

The tribulations involved in giving up an entire household–the family ultimately ended up donating everything they could not sell or carry, much of it to the very same group of old men who had incessantly encouraged Niklas to move on–wore heavily on him and especially so upon his mother. Years later, it would dawn upon Charles that having to travel what seemed like halfway around the worldmonde.Planet and then most of the way back again to reach this place was nothing more than just one more step in an intricate series of choreographed maneuvers designed to relieve unsuspecting idiots such as Niklas of a significant portion of their last savings while continuing to raise their expectations and to heighten their sense of isolation in a world they have no real stake or even interest in.

Niklas explained it to Jacqueline again and again.

“Look: it’s simple, honey. No diplomatic recognition means no goddamn traffic rights. We can’t just go there like we going on one of those sit-on-the-beach vacations or driving to the goddamn grocery store. We gotta go there from somewhere else. I know it’s bullshit, but that’s politics. That’s what I mean. That’s why we wanna be leaving here in the first place! And that’s the reason why we gotta go fly to a place like cayman.City first.”

Libertyville@Esperantia perceived itself as a modern and industrious city. It was a city that lauded its hardworking craftsmen, that took great pride in the many carpenters and electricians, machine toolers and clerks, masons and butchers and bakers whose hard work and solid traditions dominated daily life for nearly all of the inhabitants dwelling within the boundaries of the city and state.

It regarded itself as a modern city, too. This was perhaps because it was firmly in the grip of an immense and arguably self-perpetuating civil administrative apparatus that was required simply for the purpose of maintaining and entrenching the status quo.

For these reasons, it was also a city that decided that it didn’t require a great number of airports and seaports, networks and motorways to facilitate trade and commerce with goods that were regularly deemed to be far too abstract or markets that were often considered to be way too remote. It was a city that was more than happy to find itself insulated from most, if not all, of the crazy convulsions and dynamics that were part and parcel of a very quirky and dynamic outside worldmonde.Planet

It was a city that prized the gift of stability and predictability over everything else.

It was a city that felt compelled to outwardly celebrate diversity but, deep within its heart, cherished conformity.

Charles later found it most unusual that there were not even golden arches to be seen prior to their landing in Libertyville@Esperantia. In fact, there was little else that he could readily recognize as his gaze scanned over the city during the final approach.

There was very little written advertising. There were a few stern-sounding messages, more like slogans actually, apparently alluding to the greatness of the nation but which left no lasting impression on him, that could be seen here and there. But, most remarkably to him, there were almost no logos or symbols of any kind to be seen.

To Charles, the first impression that presented itself at the end of their travels and the beginning of their real journey that commenced with their new life was therefore largely one of a semiotic void.

A queasy feeling gnawed at his stomach for the remainder of that day as they were herded through the mind-numbing procedure of initiating naturalization. Something sinister and unspoken within him seemed to suggest that the ragged old Sonic.Cruzeiro which had so effortlessly carried him through the boundlessness of the heavens had alighted in the midst of some indescribable blur of consciousness. Charles wasn’t sure if he was the only person with this sensation or whether everyone was collectively afflicted. He was eleven years four months sixteen days old on that day. For the first time in his young life that he could ever remember, his new narrative was without any semblance of a suitable beginning. He had just arrived and the first page of this new life was already blank.

Although he was later unsure whether it might have only been his imagination, he nonetheless thought for a fleeting instant that he could even smell the odor of burning cow dung as the doors of the airplane were opened on the tarmac after their arrival at the terminal.