Chapter 1 Teaser - Little Booker Arrives

Little Booker arrives, again

The messenger sits and traces his revolving thoughts in the window glare of a high speed train. He’s the only passenger left who’s made it this far across the continental plain in the worn and outdated carriage. He might as well be invisible. Effortless invisibility has always been one of his talents. It’s what makes him an excellent bicycle messenger. He can blend his diminutive plainskin self into even the most lurid backgrounds and think. By his reckoning, four sunsets have come and passed since he boarded. Since then, he’s stagnated with his thoughts in this plush high speed seat with its worn hyper-tone velvet. Since he left the wind-scoured and rain-soaked port, the train has sped and slowed and sped again in its pacing through hills, across the endless plains and now it approaches the mountain and valley region that will mark the end of the line and Paraganda (That one) where he will disembark, sometime long after midnight he reckons. The ear worms of foreign languages of the scant few other passengers he’d seen enter and exit mix and sift in his ambient inner hearing memory. Now there’s just the tight whine of the colors and lights whizzing by. The passenger voices had all left on this the final day of his journey. He’s alone - service people don’t even bother to check the carriage at intervals. The fluorescent flicker continues to play on the tired, worn plush saturation of the train car. The flicker synthesizes with the machine oil and cleaning fluid smells obscuring that mixed smell of the thousands of bodies and their covering perfumes who, like himself, had nested in this long distance car. He thinks of the whispered languages he’d detected along his journey: different dialects in his own reckoning and several related cousins in the whispering senses around him. The dialects came to him in varied colors.He wishes he could have slept, dozed even, but the colors and sounds surrounding him have prevented it. 

The endless plains of the last sunsetting had given way to blank and dry hills that morning.  he makes out factory-stack redlights marking a collection of habitations. The agrobiz platform towns have given way to rusted oil rigs. Transmission towers blink in the rolling drylands and fore-flattened dusty plateau hills before the great mountains; signs he’s nearing a large city. He has stared all this down in a highspeed flick of frames.

Győrgi ‘Little Booker’ Kadeemah, the ‘Esteemed Akkadeem’ of an ancient clan of scholars takes all this in. He sighs and his thoughts thread the chain loop of his past. He thinks of how the threads of fortune in his own life and in his ancestry place him as a most purposeful traveler and wandering chronicler. Booker’s leather-bound notebook sits open on his lap, but he hasn’t even scribbled a letter this entire ride. He thinks of the biggest picture where myth and history, and speech and writing meet: The Ownership, The Exodus, The Captivity, The Wanderung, exits and entries, inspections of persons and validations of documents, the repetition of the ash pits of indignity, the temples scraped and rebuilt from which bones and water rise and flow again. All of this swirls into his thoughts as the mangey rattle-trap train that was once a sleek bird hits one of its faster paces in its final stretch toward the city sitting atop the plains and in the foothills - That Paraganda, its terminus, where he will disembark tonight. He stares out the window, his reflection coming on, superimposing over the landscape as dusk sets in. The scant bush and small shrubs toss in the wind outside. “That breezy Time of day,” Booker exhales. He thinks of writers and of tellers. Chronicler in his own mind, he tells himself he mirrors Benjamin of Tudela, the ancient chronicler of cities and relations; the ‘Tudelic Toodler’ that’s his nickname for either the famed chronicler or his unseen, effortless invisible self. Győrgi  Kadeemah, called ‘the Esteemed Akkadeem,’ back at the school he came from and known as ‘Little Booker’ among the bicycle courier brotherhood who he’s worked with after leaving school. Here he is, running off to visit far flung cousins and the remarkable and the less markable in the history he lives at present.

More immediate timing slips the chain of his thinking onto a new set of effable teeth. How had he gotten here? A question he always uses to ground himself. A few sunsets previous, he had waited on the platform, rain from some perpetual tropical storm lashing the rundown station he departed from. He had hauled the steel frame touring bicycle that doubles as his messenger rig up the steps and had found the place he’d reserved for it and locked it to the metal loops in the cabinet in the vestibule. He was thankful he didn’t have to argue a spot for it in the tongue of this continent. He was further thankful that the train had appeared as advertised and wasn’t a slow local train lie. He’d read about the transport scams out here before he decided to take the call of this journey. He'd taken the plush high speed farben-polyester saturation seat reserved for his own biker frame in the passenger carriage. The place smelled of sweat, machine oil, dust, and cleaning supplies. In three days he hadn't slept, just the restless dozing of multi-day continental train voyage. The lag of sitstill travel is not his usual style. The stagnation in this interior wore him out quicker than a bicycle journey: worn national subsidized designer colors, synthetic fabrics, chipped grayform office cubicle plastic, chrome and aluminum showing patina and stains, the steel bogeys outside, he knew, had  patches of untrustworthy rust, the tracks grating beneath them.

This train has held to no rigid printed timetable. It goes one direction, then reverses. Connections are few along the way, the continental line has few branching spurs. Passengers who had boarded with him at the port have since disembarked. No new faces or dialects have boarded at the last few rural stations the high speed is worthy of calling at. “The high speed is a Time eater,” he mutters. The high speeds of this continent are much more upgraded than the classless, hard-seat utilitarian coachways from his youth back home but they are fading into the same form: chipped and cracked paint, hotseat summer arsch stings, cherry or canoed burn holes in the poly-velvet. His head flashes to the invisible trade in dyes and other synthetic petrochems that make up the interior of this fluorescent national train designed by some fashion artist of the Postindustrial Lurid Age which was pre-yesterday. Today it’s the Neo-Post Lurid Tensile Substructural Age, with new swatches of saturation getting reimagined. There was no poly-velvet plastic falsch luxury on those trains of his youth, hard-seat class alone with its textured orange rubber eraser hard seats saturated with two or three generations of tobacco smoke. Little Booker doesn’t smoke tobacco, but someTimes on journeys like these he considers taking up the habit. This tobacco growing continent still allows it in public in designated places.

Bruised purples rainbow into oily greens along a scratch in the edge of the plexiglass as the train flexes around a slight curve. Booker watches as twilight comes on. Zwilicht, that untrustworthy light of false friends - the breezy time that asks: “dawn or dusk?” He watches his reflection slice and superimpose itself on the landscape through the plexiglass as day falls again. Patterned and overpatterned mix of black on orange shadows speed by in his eardrums. Light flashes pop in his upper pitch register as the train slides past small, burned out and scorched flatland village sidings and backcountry overcrossings where the line narrows down to a single track and three or four orange sodium lights mark out a chipped cement utility platform or a commuter line connection. This aging high speed leviathan would not so much as blink, let alone alight at these insignificant steigs. He was glad he’d reserved the seat in advance to enjoy the show. The past was perfect. The present: certain enough while the train moves. The future? Well, that’s the dämmerung he is speeding into now, isn’t it? The thrill of the moment and the wanderlust that calls him – balancing on the head of the unknown ruin at the terminus.

Booker enjoys staring out windows like this and contemplating with thoughts revolving, cycling, slipping, while flavored in melancholy and the scent of ketten öl. This is where he finds his comfortable invisibility. He’s never stepped on a train like a slip-heeled wheeled suitcase schlepper. Booker prides himself in that effortless invisibility he longs for. The selection of things he carries matters, going unnoticed and without need, standing in vestibules and near the ends when platforms and carriages overcrowd. He’s not a viewer, he’s a traveler, he couldn’t be a good chronicler for Doğon of Ephesus the archivist if he was begging to go somewhere ‘on a vacation.’ He can’t be vacant, he has to be present, and presence lends itself to invisibility. He doesn’t moan or complain, he presents neither coming, nor going, nor grimaces. 

Booker's thoughts make a recapitulation on that theme, another revolution on the chain rings as the colors confuse, reframe and obscure in the scratched plexiglass. He loves to watch people. In his effortless invisibility, he categorizes people – traveler, tourist, commuter, transport worker, messenger or courier (like himself), pilot, captain, engineer, officer, conductor, herder, guide. They’re all there at the platform, all standing in line waiting to board, all these industrial leads, going somewhere – the quick and the rushed. He’s not rushed. He watches, he waits for a place, the train arrives, he boards casually after the ones with children and large luggage (schlepwheeled). He grabs his bicycle, stands when necessary, jokes stoically with the locals about the rail service not being what it used to be, an almost ritualistic oral exchange among travelers since movement on steel rail was invented. Some ask about his travels seeing his loaded bicycle. He never gives specifics, speaks in general and vague terms about his origins. The reserved cars are boring, stuffy; full of people trying to get the fill of the seat they paid for and leaving greasy finger stains on the bunt-colored farben-synthetic cushions to prove it. He liked those old proletarian ‘hard seat’ orange eraser vinyl carriages of his distant youth. 

Little Booker’s thoughts do a lever flip into the present again. He thinks of Time and of the varying condition of peoples’ response to it. He considers that notion of ‘being rushed.’ There exist that particular strain of humanity, forever frantic before Time. He must always re-remind himself of this fact in dealings with others, especially in his line of work as a courier. He cannot understand the rush; it is a madness he observes but never enters. Ironically, his work as a bicycle courier fills exactly this gap. He gets paid to complete other peoples’ last minute work. Rushes by bicycle in the mekanischen cities that they, the frantic client, request unto themselves in this era where the new energy costs create the same old scarcities. One can exploit that rushed mentality – getting a rush, having one, completing one. You have to be up early and at rest to take a rush, or wait until the end or beyond the end of a work day, and get paid the after hours double rush run rates for taking Time slow to work a rush. Getting a rush to run involves sitting still and waiting, being ready. When Little Booker works his courier rushes, he never misses a thing, most people rushing corridors forget everything in their madness - business papers, phones, chargers, magazines and drinks, wallets full of cash, small children even. His reflection in the train window grins back at him as he thinks of this. He chuckles privately at the thought of that in the twilight and irri-candescent exchange of natural and synthetic shadows as the train pursues its final paces toward the continental headwall of mountains barring any further westward mechico-industrial progress. 

He squints out the window at an almost deserted interstate highway parallel to the tracks. The highway line distorts across the glass as the light confuses the strobe of the flickering carriage lights on the interior. He has to squint and the colors go all goofy. Used to be the automobile interstates were crowded carrying the wagons of private kraft this far and beyond the mountain passes. For the last half century, though, in light of the slow civil war waged without shots but economic excuses and politically underfunded engineering, and faddish commitments to taste, the interstates through canyon and across basin have all long been barred and barricaded. In the Glenwoods, beyond the Iron Hewer pass, the cantilevered marvel highway fell into the river rapids almost a century ago. No services beyond bicycles bother to heave themselves into the river lands and new wet zones in the Basin and Range where the waters still have no direct communication with any ocean, but the legendary deserts are burgeoning grasslands and the salt pans evolve into permanent inland seas, not just mirages, after each snow season. 

Little Booker’s thoughts slip chain rings again, he back pedals on the hemispheres he has traversed this and last season. How did he get here? Two months prior, maybe three now, he'd lost count of Time in terms of moons even though he’d been sleeping outside and traced its waxing and waning among the stars and crowded satellite spaces overhead. At the end of a long summer’s work doing river runs, he’d paid a premium for an ocean ferry ticket on one of the ‘budget’ (which meant gray market) hulks that took him on the seven to fifteen day crossing of the great Atlantean waters to the continent. The imprecision of the arrival Time had to do with the unpredictable and constant hurricanes that lashed the coasts this side of the ocean. Booker had seen the storm maps from hurricane seasons from previous centuries in the archives of Doğon of Ephesus, the librarian and interpreter of his school. The storms’ single and categorized little tracks and quaint alphabetized proper names were curious to him when he read them in the librarian’s archive.

 Little Booker pauses for a moment, stares at his split-framed reflection of his face, distorted beams from the dryland nightscape outside showing through and bending with the movements of the train. He back pedals again. There’s almost nothing left to do but to wander. He’s on a westerer path he can’t now steer himself from, locked in and sent as he is, and he’s got a solid steel touring frame locked there in the vestibule cabinet. He’s cased in this Leviathan like Jonah himself. Jonah: Little Booker’s thoughts trace the name, toxic even to Leviathan itself, and Leviathan, the Almighty’s plaything. Jonah, comical in his resistance to the play. What right had Jonah to be furious with his lot? Little Booker isn’t furious, he's still in all of this for the fun of it, he wouldn’t love being a bicycle courier if he were. Still, he can be ambivalent, anxious, but definitely not furious with anything.

Thoughts coast. Here he is, Győrgi  Kadeemah, the Esteemed Akkadeem, known as Little Booker among invisible courier colleagues too small to be anything but the lower Fates’ plaything. Here he is, locked on steel rails with a steel messenger frame and steeled flesh. “If it ain’t steel, it ain’t real,” the phrase that is raised as an argument comes to his head. Here he is in an aluminum crinkle tube, upholstered in synthetic high speed colors, supported by rusting steel bogey and rail. The train shifts in its carriage, the electric hum of clean energy changes pitch to the colors in his ears. The scratched plexiglass staggers the reflected light on the window again. “Suffocating science future perfected present will-have-done white noise,” he mutters and scribbles in his notebook along with a rough sketch of the physics and geometry of the light interactions. The first time all day he’s seen fit to put some little snippet or fragment of verse in his journal. It is full night-Time outside now. He looks back out on the color superimposition false patterned and framed on or in the window. He thinks how useless to ask where the light is, particle or wave it is coming at him.

His eye moves from the window to the dim vestibule between the train cars where his bicycle remains stationary and secured. His thoughts derail onto a new ring again. He has spent the whole journey listening and staring first at the vague dark pine hills outside the forgettable port where the rust hulk of an ocean ferry left him. Next came the vast, parched plains with the tower monitors and the agro-business work crews off in the distance. He thinks of scripture again, the ancient disagreements about how to build a city and remake a better temple. He’s never understood mega-city needs, the bicycle is, after all, his own perfect temple. Finding the source of that temple isn’t in the parts, not in the bottom bracket, not in the chain rings, not in the cables or their housing. It’s that partnership of flesh and steel, he decides, reminding himself, yet again, of the art and flow he lives in with that simple wandering machine chained up in the vestibule. It is the fact of Little Booker’s systematic art that takes him away from the work gangs and sends him packing, compelled by unknown forces out into a sinister-seeming sameness filled with all the things he ends up loving after a Time.

Thoughts click-shift again. He stares back out the window, the distorting frame glare of his face in double plexiglass bending with the momentum of the train is all that comes back at him in the dim and flickering lights of the high speed carriage. The train slows. It is approaching the city –That Paraganda run by another well read boss better than he who will provide him with means of housing and employment and all the other allowances the wanderers come questing and besting for. With discomfort the anxiety veil falls, his thoughts slide out of rhythm with the grate of the rust stained bogeys on the rails outside. He thinks of how he’d earned and saved and inherited enough from the family fortune to chase his compulsion way out here. The discomfort and anxiety of having to move into a new unknown, at night no less, flavor his final thoughts on this ride. He’s felt this before.

 The infinite loop of thought catches Booker up again. He wishes he could have slept, the journey is winding to its final slow down now. The train is crossing vast city railyards now, the comfort he’s had of sitting and thinking is coming to an end and the anxiety of having to move wells in him as the lights outside shift and shine brighter into the flickering interior. This late at night there are so many freight trains crossing the track yards that it becomes a slow crawl to the station. As the city nears his instinctive perception assumes that dawn is coming on. He knows better, it isn’t dawn. It is the artificial glow of electric lighting, more of a rarity each day as the energy costs. Industry keeps the lights on, its workers burn candles and lamps at home. The range mountains rising from the mid continent glow in that strange surface-feeding blue-green algae light that the city sprawl throws on snow-heavy bedrock above. Colors distort all the more and slash with the bend of the windows in the carriage as the train crawls over points and switches. Closer to the track the glow from the windows and warning lights on the train mix in another oversaturation that presses his day-skipped sleepless eyes with strange reverberations. Gloom lights peer up from the strewn gravel of the track bed and ditch beneath the bogies as the train creeps at slow, station-length distances through the railyards and loading cranes along backchanneled freight canals in the city’s central industrial zone. The micro-strobing train lights reflect the rust yards and warehouse leftovers of the city sprawl strung up here in the tracklines and blacktop grids. The grids he’ll be out there riding and working soon enough on short runs: economy,  standard, and rush courier deliveries.

‘What am I doing out here?’ Booker mutters to himself. He already knows the answer. He's driven by some representation beyond himself leading him out here. He stares at gray-green tinted concrete abutments inching past his window. He decides to get up and unlock his bicycle now, at least a viertelnach out from the terminal station. The bicycle cabinet door bangs as he flings it open with too much force and the train  jerks on a switchtrack at the same time. He unlocks the two locks he uses. He thinks of galvanic corrosion – seizures between chrome and steel, his lock is steel cable, the bicycle frame is too. He avoids chrome. He thinks of his own terms, his own terminus, here it is, this beautiful machine, loaded with his life of travel items in its two waterproof bags. He thinks of the drop-Time phase he’s just been through. The dread of journey’s end sends an anxiety pang through him. The high speed movement he's been through the last few days creates a tunnel, a void, in his Time-sense. He sees himself back down there and across the water, on the river he’d just spent a season riding. He thinks of the miniscules in wages written right to left on the payout receipts received through the Digitalia out here. He needs to be back out there, this side or that.

The train starts again, jerks, slows as if it is a coughing living thing, tired of its journey. Standing in the vestibule, bicycle balanced in hand, he is the last person waiting to disembark on this late train. He stares back at his reflection in the train door glass through to the building blocks, storage for Mensch and Makings strewn outside. He looks at the blocks of plattenbauten around the station; wrapping it up in stand-up strict-form worker storage discipline. ‘All this to build a better city,’ he mutters. He thinks of the exiles working their way out there, converting the whole process into a series of workarounds. In fact, that’s all courier work is - working around. He finds himself kidnapped by voices, callings, motives he himself mishears. This set of rims he holds in his hand – two alloy bespoked things bolted to a steel frame, driven by two hardened metal chain rings. It speaks from a forked tongue, this little quizzical machine that makes his life more than he himself. 

“It’s hard not to see the thing in itself,” he mutters, staring further out the window, straining his eyes into the vague watercourses beyond the railyard lit by the fluorescent city towers. Commercial tracer light goes up just there and flashes out his vision for an instant. Some sleepless late night party or rave event is going on. The same afterhours raves going on. He wonders what interest in late findings the underground night markets will bring.

“Back here in another one of these wrecked, flustered, and flurried towns,” he mutters as if in prayer. “Filled with the work of wise blood and cooler heads. There must be a lot of cool-handed and hot-headed wisdom going about in this better built, art of the state city. Where all the believers are seekers.” The train pulls parallel with the platform. The lights out there match the worn flicker of the ones inside the carriage. He thinks of good lady wisdom and how he will need it now. The train jerks to a final stop, the air brakes apply, the door releases and he pulls the handle to open it. He steps down out of the carriage. The dry smells of coke ovens and static ions of metal welding flash in his face. He is surprised by the warmth down here in the valley, given the snows on the high peaks. He thinks of wisdom again. How far wisdom is from what he’s doing out here being courier and chronicler; a satyr on rims among the living ruins of the sons of men.