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,