(This is a continuation of Bolt)
His entire understanding of American society (and geopolitics by extension) was informed by Metallica. Everything could be categorized into one of two neat piles: From within, the facts that he knew about himself, his family and his hometown. Everything else fell into the Metallica related cosmos that kept ever-expanding. The micro and macro.
This theory of the world and of the self originated back in May of 2012, when Luka was invited by an elderly cousin to visit Belgrade for a music show. He doesn’t remember the specifics before the concert, like the car ride from Obrenovac, or the mandatory visit to their baka, although he knows that when the lights hit the stage and the first WOW hit his eardrum, and his life changed forever, he still could taste jam in his mouth, and his fingers were sticky with powdered sugar. “Hit the lights” hit his teenage brain, and by sheer force of sound managed to alter his chemistry in such a way that from then onwards he’d always, invariably, return to Metallica.
Understanding the lyrics would be an intellectual exercise of decoding the vibrations of the air informing his cochlea into electrical signals understood by the brain, with several complicated processes in the middle. This explanation would fall short on accounting for the profound changes that erupted in his soul. What happened to him was akin to an awakening, and by the time the concert was finished and his cousin was driving him back home late at night, Luka could feel that his world had quadrupled in size.
His dad, an engineer at TENT, had insisted on him learning English from an early age, which had only served to make his boredom insurmountable during the mandatory foreign language classes in school. So he spent those hours looking through the window of the classroom, seeing the worm-like trains going in and out of the city, transporting coal, emerging or disappearing from tunnels connecting to the plant. Exit light, enter night.
During his first lunch break back at school, he ran into the computer classroom and begged the TA to explain to him how he could get some music burned into a cd. The man (an adult only in age, but still interested in networks and videogames, with a knack for finding easy to do jobs that could finance him while he kept doing nothing about his life ) took pity on him, and showed him eMule, explaining peer to peer file-sharing in the process.
“10 guys have the same picture in their notebooks, and you want to copy it. You’re really really good at copying pictures, so the end result would be identical to the one they have. But it takes you some time to look at the picture and make a perfect copy. And nobody wants to lend you the picture for too long. So what happens is that instead of looking at the picture of one of these guys for 10 hours, you look at each picture, from each different person, for 1 hour. Now imagine that instead of you drawing the copy, you have a really capable machine that does it for you. And this machine can do this process in parallel. So the 10 guys with the picture agree and show you their copies, and your machine spends 1 hour copying different pieces of each one, ending with a new version just for you. People all over the world have songs stored in their computers, and they’re sharing freely for you to make copies into your own. And the more people have an available copy, the faster it gets to make another. Like a single organism would be weak against elimination, but if multiple redundancies exist, then that organism is capable of living forever.” More is all you need, dedicated to how I’m killing you.
Almost exactly two years after Luka’s lifepath had been irredeemably changed by american heavy metal, the weather got funky.On the first day the Sava river nearly doubled in size, flooding the area. On the second day, the rain kept falling, and the trains were now taking people up north exclusively, trying to find them a new place as their homes got swallowed by the muddy water.
His mom had some relatives living in America, the land of Metallica. She had secured passage for him to travel to the land of fury and asphalt. The plane departed Tesla’s airport, giving him his first and last aerial sight of his hometown. It was hard to connect the landmarks he’d been so familiarized with growing up with the swamp that merged all rivers. On his earphones, fittingly, the first verses of Welcome Home were playing. “Welcome to where time stands still, no one leaves and no one will.”
Already in the new world, looking at the landscape from the car of his uncle, a funny looking man that had left Zemun to “spread his wings” in his youth, he asked how close they were to Los Angeles. He knew that’s where his band was from, and he was sure that a truth about the universe would be revealed to him if he could see the place where they had originated from. His uncle laughed a raspy chuckle, before informing him that Detroit was in fact very far away from the city of Angels. How far away? Roughly 2 days of driving by car. The land of Edison was far broader than he had imagined.
Thinking of the journey as one with a fixed start and end, It took him 14 years to make it to L.A..
In his mental filing system, Detroit proved to be an easy continuation of his homeland. An Obrenovac 2.0 for Luka fell in the “me” category. There were always clouds of black smoke somewhere, and the hints of iron, ozone and coal mixed in the air were the same in any part of the world. Here too, there had been a once mighty empire of human industry, now decayed and lifeless. Colossal metallic tendrils slept undisturbed, no longer busy with feeding raw materials into the hungry mouths of factories. And of course, there was water. It wasn’t a set of orderly rivers, but it made explicit and rose to consciousness something that, he suspected, all humans knew: Life and water were inexorably linked, and the former always followed the later. A second thought became ingrained as a truth of the world: too much of it, like back home, or too little, like in neighboring Flint, was deadly. You needed a balanced supply or you were a goner.
While trains had once been an important part of the detroitian life, cars had long since taken over. And even in the midst of the depression of the late 2010s, Luka learned another important fact about himself. He loved driving. As soon as he was able to place his hands , eleven and one on the bakelite, hot under the sun, that covered the wheel of a having-seen-better-days Mustang, he understood that distance exists as a relative concept, in which any two points in space can seem to be almost touching if you apply enough speed to connect them. He also appreciated the ingenuity and foresight that Ford engineers had possessed at the time of developing such a car, for it had considerably less legroom for back seat passengers, giving him the perfect excuse to only focus on picking up one girl and not their entire friend group. Those blessed Ford engineers had also thought of the cushiony capabilities of the back seat, which Luka and his dates got to enjoy until he upgraded to a more convenient car. Convenient in this case referring to, depending on who’s asked, different things: the salesmen would say the comforts of modern cars with computerized dashboards and integrated bluetooth, while Lukas’s dates would assume it meant the actual look of the vehicle, as it no longer produced a black cloud of exhaust under any RPM above three thousand. In his own mind, convenience meant faster.
Further education happened in the way of applied work, first running deliveries in the city, and then graduating to larger, long-haul escapades further and further westward, where L.A. awaited for him, so close no matter how far.
He made it into the city some weeks before turning 30. He’d gotten into the habit of making extra cash by running packages from some associates his uncle introduced him to, so he wasn’t terribly surprised when a large order of blow got him to a rich asshole’s penthouse up in the Marina. He wasn’t too keen on interacting with the PRAs (punchable rich asshole), so he excused himself after the delivery, as they discussed construction opportunities in Delgado, and took the elevator down. As the doors closed, he saw a bunch of them doing lines on the baranda overviewing the harbor. They seemed like hyenas, circling hungrily a packaged brick. “Bunch of King Nothings”, he thought.
He spent some days walking Mecca, trying wordlessly to obtain communion with gods that no longer roamed this land. Should he have gone to San Francisco, where Metallica eventually settled? No, there needed to be a radical truth about the universe that still eluded him, tucked away between the boulevards and the asphalt. He kept walking away from the skyscrapers and the coast. The humans hoarding the water all seemed like a bunch of dicks to him, and if they represented humanity, he felt deeply disconnected from it. When he reached Skid Row, something in him broke. Like a dam past its limit, overflowing emotion poured through him. How could there be such a disregard for others, did no-one care about anyone but themselves? He was confused and teary eyed when the knife went into his shoulder.
He woke up still confused and still teary-eyed. Only the location had changed, as he was now occupying a scrawny bed in a badly ventilated room. Angry voices were coming from outside, and as he tried turning his neck to identify the source, he felt searing pain radiating from his ear all the way to his right shoulder. He couldn’t help himself, and the loud “Jebote!” quieted the voices. Footsteps followed, and a woman opened the door. As she spoke to him, telling him to stop trashing or he’d break the stitches, her thick accent placed her on the latin side, maybe Italian?
She let him know he’d been mugged and left for dead on the side of the street. She, Gloria, had the habit of volunteering at one of the shelters in the periphery of the neighborhood, and found him.
She had called her brother Flavio to help her pick him up and they drove him to her place.
When Luka learned what date it was, he sardonically celebrated having entered his 30s.