as everything else while she slept.
She propped herself up on her elbows and looked around. She decided that she wanted to respond to his question after all. As she swallowed, though, she could feel salt and sand in her mouth and in her throat. She withdrew her hand from under the blanket with which she was still covered and scratched absent-mindedly at her ear with her left index finger. It, too, was full of sand. Sand seemed to pour down everywhere as she then finally sat up halfway and brushed her hair back with her open hand. There was sand everywhere: in her T-shirt, in her hair, in the corners of her eyes, in her nostrils and probably in the crevice of her butt. This cloud of fine white sand was quite obviously endowed with both a will and a way to cover or infiltrate anything and everything.
More annoying to her than the sand or the momentary stiffness of her bones that she supposed were now protesting a potentially rheumatic chill, however, was the very rude surprise of having been discovered here by someone absolutely unawares. And, while it wasn’t entirely rational, she found herself to be more than just mildly irritated about the fact that this person had dared–and successfully, at that!–to violate the unspoken sanctity of her very own twilight.Zone. Her mind was bouncing back and forth, to and fro again like some nervous tiger confined to a cage, continually circling back to the disquieting thought of how and why he was able to surprise her like this while she slept. Inwardly, she seethed momentarily at the realization that her quest for independence not only seemed to have left her vulnerable but also with a strongly heightened perception of her own weakness.
She rubbed her eyes tiredly with the back of her hands, the ultimate result being that they, too, now had miniscule kernels of sand in them. Fishbo.Nelly sat there mutely, blinking repeatedly in an attempt to cleanse her eyes.
“Hey! Come on. Say something. Are you alright?” insisted Ch.ase. He was now half-squatting, half-kneeling. He was a bit out of her reach, staying perhaps a meter or so away from her. She eyed him fleetingly now and again, as though he were simply a fixture in the landscape, and tried her best to quickly fathom his motives and intentions. He seemed to be harmless, she deduced. In fact, to her surprise, he even seemed to be genuinely concerned about her.
Her mouth was still way too dry for her to formulate any sensible answer to his question coherently. She was thirsty. Her lips and tongue were parched by the salty air and the sand.
She took a deep breath, sat completely upright stretching her back and shoulders as she looked around, waiting for her head to clear. Then she turned around and faced Ch.ase, her eyebrows arched slightly in a look of only provisional resignation.
“Have you got anything to drink with you?” she asked him in a hoarse voice.
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