Blind.Faith 2.0.50. Tomasz Tatum

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 СКАЧАТЬ