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’