Blind.Faith 2.0.50. Tomasz Tatum

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СКАЧАТЬ 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, flooded in the garish yellowish-orange glow 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 СКАЧАТЬ