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