NEW WORLD TRILOGY (Trilogy Title) (16 page)

Two weeks later: 10 a.m.

Sitting on the windowsill of their recently leased, second-storey apartment in Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg, Ikaros stares out at the street below with several cars driving past and people entering and exiting the market just opposite their building.  He's been sleeping in late and sitting around reading and watching TV without really going out much, wanting time to think about the things that have happened over the past two years or so, just trying to organise his thoughts and process his feelings around this.

Although he superficially denied it, Sascha suggested that he might actually be suffering trauma; she decided to let it slide for a while to give him some space to see if he could work things out himself.  Nevertheless, being quite concerned about his symptoms — excessive sleep, reclusiveness, quietness, rumination, and negative affect — she's forced him to get out of the apartment in the evenings and at the weekends on several occasions.

This morning, though, his mood has lifted slightly, which allows him finally to shake off his idleness.  He decides to make an immediate change: he walks to the cupboard and pulls out the warm winter coat and the beanie Sascha helped him buy on his second day in the city; he then heads for the door with the intention of exploring for the rest of the day.  During his six-hour expedition, he comes to a decision about what he should do next in terms of his productivity and general ambitions.  He eventually heads back to the apartment, ready to get started first thing in the morning.

8:15 a.m.

Ikaros gets up early — just after Sascha has left — and sits down at her computer and writes a title on the first page of a document that he intends on being a detailed account of the preceding several years — excluding certain unmentionable acts — and an elaboration of a particular philosophy he's been considering and developing for some time now:
The Philosophy of Action in Extreme Conditions: The Memoirs of a Free Agent
.

• • •

Over the following months, as the winter set in further, Ikaros sat at the desk by the window and frantically wrote chapter after chapter, happy to have a quiet and calm activity in his life that allowed him to avoid other people and the continuing build-up of snow outside.  He hoped to get the whole thing completed before the first signs of spring.

The winter eventually gave way to a could-have-been-sooner spring as he continued writing; he only managed to finish a rough draft two days into the first heatwave of what proved to be a blistering and prolonged summer.  To Ikaros's complete surprise and frustrated disappointment, after critically appraising the lengthy document, he lost all hope that it would be ready by the end of summer; he turned to the beginning and started editing in earnest.

• • •

Over four years after starting the book

In a New York café at the beginning of his US6 tour, Ikaros was interviewed by a freelance journalist who was asked to write an article about him for a political book review blog.  Already on tour when he was contacted, Ikaros decided to hold off for nearly two months until he was in the country and could meet face to face — if he didn't have anything promotional to do in New York, after all, it would just be a holiday.  The blog became interested in Ikaros after the success of his online publicity and marketing campaign, most of which was provided and set up by a prestigious and expensive
e-pub
licity firm — funded by the extraordinary amount of funds and time that he was able to put into it to cut through the near deafening noise created by other aspiring authors from anywhere and everywhere.  This drew the attention of nearly three and a half million netizens after being featured in various high-end blogs and Internet-based newspapers and magazines over the twelve months following the e-book's release; in that year, a modest one hundred thousand were sold and copies were shared to many thousands more.

Needless to say, he soon developed an infamous reputation, which was anything but unexpected or discouraged considering the e-book's content and the
zeitgeist
of the times; as a result, his work was often lambasted and targeted by aggressive conservatives, angered by what they saw as being puerile anti-establishmentarianism.  Actively seeking out negative attention as an opportunity for promotion, exposure to it also served to toughen him up and prepare him for a range of ways of being attacked, yet he still found that he had a threshold of tolerance that was being gradually whittled away at by the near-constant bombardment.

What follows is an extract from his only New York interview:

Interviewer: What makes you think people will believe what you say about your supposed past and the things that have happened around you?  I mean, they're pretty extreme stories.  And it might sound like you just intend to shock.

Ikaros: Readers don't have to believe it.  I didn't write it under the delusion that people would just believe every word I wrote without any doubt about their veracity.  It's not something I can control, anyway, so that can't be the point, can it?  All I can do is write the best I can and hope that it will occasionally be appreciated for what it is.  Anyway, I think the book works whether the things happened or not.  That's the point: the ideas and the narrative have their own validity whether they're factually based or not because much of it is theoretical, which can be adapted to people's own circumstances as they see fit.

Interviewer: Well, that's a bit of a cop out, isn't it?  I mean, with all due respect, Ikaros, some people consider the truth and the way you present yourself to be more than just a narrative curiosity, particularly when you're supposed to have written your 'memoirs,' of all things.

Ikaros: It extends way beyond just that, though: it's a kind of world systems analysis, a critique of cultures, and a theoretical discussion regarding our agency and potential.  Anyway, I didn't say it was just a 'narrative curiosity' or that it didn't happen.

Interviewer: But whether these things happened or not is part of the issue, isn't it?  Moreover, as far as your claim to it being 'theoretical' is concerned, isn't the book really just a thinly veiled treatise on killing and ultra-violence: an injunction to do so indiscriminately with a complete lack of regard for the law wherever you are?

Ikaros:  That's just ridiculous … and completely simplistic and reductionist.  'Injunction' and 'indiscriminate killing' … these are extremely strong words, and they didn't get used in the text at all, and there's no equivalent meaning in there either, as far as I'm concerned.  Also, I've been on tour for a while now, visiting a large number of countries, and I've as yet to kill anybody, let alone commit an offense of any kind apart from jaywalking.

Interviewer: Well, I don't know that.  More importantly, I wouldn't have expected you to have used those exact words, anyway.  You simply needn't have stated it directly in order for it to be clearly represented, although it may well have been honest if you had; you implied them indirectly and in an underhanded and manipulative way, which is something that would come across clearly to any reader.  Isn't it just an attempt at subversive writing that ultimately fails by being too transparent in its commitments and awkwardly simplistic?

Ikaros: Look … what are you talking about?!  It's not like I didn't expect this to go badly; I mean, I
am
an easy target.  I know it.  But screw you for taking the opportunity rather than being bold enough to discuss the events and ideas seriously.  We're never gonna get to the content, are we?

Interviewer: I thought we've been discussing the content.   And, yes, you're right: you are an easy target and you need to be exposed.  This book is …

Ikaros: Shut the hell up!  This interview is over!  It's fools like you who'll never understand the seriousness of the situation we're in right now.  You've got no capacity for anything close to real thought or comprehension; otherwise, if you do understand, and you're still talking to me like this, you're just a pathetic tool.

Interviewer: That's cheap.  Just because I have a different perspective to you, I don't or can't have a legitimate understanding …

Ikaros: Look, dude … ah, screw it!  Have it your way.  There's no point in talking to a nutcase like you.  Do and say what you want.  Time will tell.

Interviewer: Yes, yes, it will.

Following the abrupt end to their conversation, Ikaros immediately got up, harshly discarded a twenty-dollar note on the table and headed towards the exit of the café while most of the other customers and staff either watched in silence or giggled and sniggered softly to each other, no one really knowing what to make of him and his sudden and loud aggressive outburst.  By the time the manager came out from the back to take control, it was too late; Ikaros had already gone.

When published, a number of carefully chosen extracts of the transcript were preceded and followed by an analysis that attempted to dissuade readers from being enticed by Ikaros's extreme perspective, which was nevertheless full of misinterpretations, over-simplifications, and over-exaggerations; further, readers were urged to view his rhetoric as being dangerous to the stability of society and all the forces that are attempting to achieve progress.  Unsurprisingly, the comments from readers that made it through moderation were overwhelmingly supportive of the journalist's position, although this was partly a result of censorship and fabrication; there were only a small minority of comments opposed to the authorised view, but, for the sake of appearances, only the mildest were approved.

It was increasing opposition like this that gained strength and dominance as Ikaros moved further into the limelight, overwhelming and vastly outnumbering the niche-based supporters he managed to pick up along the way.  With a certain degree of relief, Ikaros's commitment to the direction he was heading with his marketing and media presence was dramatically altered on the US6 leg of the tour due to his meeting with Henry 38 in Houston; immediately abandoning the tour, he also withdrew from the public eye by cancelling all further promotion, preferring instead to allow his book to take its natural course in the charts.  Despite this neglect of it, however, the foothold that he had created, mixed with the effect of his other activities in the years that followed, enabled the book to continue to be circulated, eventually becoming a cult classic and revered by many who were sympathetic with what Ikaros was communicating in it — the requirements for people to become effective change agents who were fit to make use of available resources in an ambitious and determined manner while understanding and rejecting the preponderance of prevailing forces that were attempting to control action and gain consent to the ultimate determinant of just about everyone.

• • •

Early July: 8:05 a.m.

A few days ago, Ikaros started editing the first draft, which took him nearly seven months to write; throughout this time, although he's had some trouble maintaining motivation and getting enough sleep, he's generally been in good spirits.  He now lies in bed half asleep as Sascha gets dressed quietly; she wants to get to university to meet with her supervising professor about handing in her thesis, which she's been trying to complete for the past eighteen months.

Ikaros rolls over and pulls himself up in the bed, leans across, grabs the remote control and turns on the TV hanging on the wall beyond the end of the bed.  The morning news is in the middle of covering some run-of-the-mill, domestic political issue that neither of them pays much attention to; however, as Ikaros arranges the pillows behind his head, he notices that the next report is covering the emerging situation in an African country but misses the name even though it sounds similar in English.  Despite being unable to understand the vast majority of what's said, he readily grasps from the images and his expectations based on basic background knowledge that the situation has been deteriorating and becoming increasingly violent.

"Ethnic cleansing … again?" asks Ikaros exhaustedly.  "Where did they say it was?"

"Demokratische Republik Kongo," replies Sascha automatically as she watches intently and does up her shoelaces without looking.

"Demokratische?!" sniggers Ikaros as he suddenly finds sleep more compelling; he slides back and pulls the covers up over his head, quickly falling back to sleep.

He wakes up nearly three hours later — which is quite late even for him recently — and finds the TV has been turned off, evidently by Sascha before she left hours earlier.  He gets up to make himself what he plans to be the first of several strong cups of coffee.

Several minutes later

Standing in front of the toaster and looking down into it, waiting for the raisin bread to turn the particular shade of brown he likes, he sips at a coffee and considers what he'll edit for the day.