Thelmer in “The Land Without Love”

First draft sketch Geoff Marshall 2025

This is a story that could have happened to anybody, in a world so far away you can only visit it in your imagination.

This world’s name was Fud, and though they were not the only creatures on their planet, the Northern Fudlians liked to think of themselves as the sum total of everything the planet had to offer. With that attitude they came to dominate all their neighbors around them through a system of taking all that was good and free and turning it into a big pile of valuable tokens. 

You could imagine what they were worth.

These tokens could be traded in for anything you desired, anything at all.

Eventually, someone learned how to take love, slip it in a bottle, compress it, put a cap on it, put a price in the bottle, then put it on a shelf and wait for someone with enough tokens to buy it, and from this came the expression “a token of my affection”. It was an instant hit. “The Perfect Gift”.

Since now you had to have enough money to buy love, most people viewed it as a luxury they could ill afford and just got about their day without it. As a result, they could no longer appreciate the sky or the flowers or even their own family and pets,

The pets, for their part, barely acknowledged the existence of their human caretakers. They tolerated their people for providing enough food to get through the day without having to go and hunt for themselves. That was for lowlifes.

This was true for Thelmer’s pet Dat. Their family had a Cog as well, however Thelmer’s favourite was the Dat.

Thelmer rarely saw their parents, and would spend their days half-heartedly thinking up games that one could play alone. Truth be told, Thelmer’s parents couldn’t really feel much of anything.

Most Fudlian children had no interest in games. Instead, they spent their time thinking up new and crueler ways to make themselves feel superior to all the children around them. 

With all these children and people trying to feel superior and jumpstart their journey to the top of a pile, there was a lot of scrambling and not much actual progress being made. 

When you got to the top of the pile (or won the lottery) you could have anything you wanted, including as much love as you could possibly tolerate. It had been so long since anyone had genuinely felt love for another person or thing or activity that they only had a very abstract concept of what that might actually be like, if it were to be magically so.

To this everyone agreed: it must be the Dat’s pajamas, if Dats could wear pajamas, or you could get the Dat into some pajamas for a short time. Someone would have told you to leave the Dat alone, if they had only cared. What is a Dat, you ask?

That is a dat. 

Fud was a very quiet world because the boids didn’t bother to sing anymore. Everything was painted light gray because it was the cheapest paint they could find, and nobody bothered to look at walls.

In this, the largest city on this continent, there were towers that stretched to the sky, like dry spaghetti noodles, and once you got over their stupendous height you could be quickly puzzled by the purpose of going so high. when the entire thing could snap in the middle and come crashing down like so much straw.

Where there should have been beautiful parks and fields and forests, there were shopping malls full of items that nobody wanted. Parking lots full of bickering families trying to find their vehicle amongst a sea of vehicles that all look the same. It was a dull, uninteresting, and thoroughly ugly world of which no one took the slightest notice.

The only places still beautiful on Fud were the ones that nobody could develop for a buck. Folks were taught from birth that anything natural and wild was to be shunned as disorganized, inefficient, and worst of all, without a return on investment.

The only good thing to come out of the sale of love is that people were no longer in love with money, except people that had the money to buy the love of money, which they did the moment they could afford it. They usually spent the remainder of their fortune on the unconditional adoration of others.

Love takes many forms, and all forms of love weren’t sold for the same price.

For a very moderate one time fee, you could license a passing fancy or a mild attraction. On an affordable, multi-year plan (renewed every two years, with interest, restrictions apply) you could experience unrequited love, pining after somebody for years and getting nothing in return, unless you upgraded to the mild flirtation plan.

Genuine romance was far beyond the means of most people, and so marriages were arranged by lottery and children produced for the sole reason of propagating a system that would generate more money for the people involved. The people involved were just doing the best they could.

As it turned out the balance was not in their favor, and they spent entire lives saving for a kind of love they would never experience. Somehow it was always two payments away.

Into this world was born Thelmer. Thelmer was just a kid. A kid who was born different. Unlike the other children of Fud, Thelmer liked pets, even though every time Thelmer would approach one, the pet would putter away in indifference. Putt, putt putt. They would  probably have bit Thelmer, if they could have been bothered.

Fortunately, because the market for love had been cornered, marketing hate wasn’t viable. The people involved had come to the conclusion that it just wasn’t worth it. Besides, it was more profitable to have indifferent crowds shopping than angry mobs yelling.

Even though their dat found Thelmer disgusting, they, too, could not be bothered to really sink their teeth into Thelmer’s leg. Thelmer also had feelings for grass, flutterbyes, trees, the street they lived on in, and even their parents.

Thelmer enjoyed the company of their parents, and liked following them around to see what they were up to, which annoyed Thelmer’s parents no end. Unfortunately, no one had yet seen the worth in being annoyed, and so people could be quite annoyed for absolutely free.

Thelmer’s parents made it very clear that they did not welcome the attention which,  in certain cases, was detrimental to the family’s shopping, and so Thelmer was left to play strange games and think strange thoughts all by themselves, all day long, when they weren’t in school.

When Thelmer’s parents could tolerate each other’s presence, they sometimes discussed Thelmer’s future in quiet tones, because worrying about the future was free, and they had to do something with their spare time.

The parents discussed investing in a little admiration from afar for only 10 tokens a month (with coupon), or a vague feeling of belonging, or any of the other third tier options available. The parents’ solutions to life’s little problems mostly centered around buying things, for that was all they knew how to do. 

Thelmer’s strange ideas and constant dreaming went ignored until they entered the educational system of Fud. The students, of course, ignored their teachers, and the teachers couldn’t care less if their students ever made it anywhere in the world except to the mall. Their objective was to produce the buying public and, if they worked hard, maybe they could even afford a little love for themselves, not that they would know what to do with it once they had it. 

The years passed, until one day found Thelmer alone in the schoolyard playing with a stick. It didn’t take much to keep Thelmer entertained. Thelmer was born with something almost as priceless as true love. Thelmer had been born with an imagination, and if the authorities could have been bothered to figure that out, they would have immediately set upon Thelmer, drained the imagination right out of them, and placed it on display with a hefty price tag where it belonged.

The truth was, nobody could figure out a place for imagination in the massive stores that dotted Fud. There were no imagination departments because nobody had a love for the unknown that would allow their imaginations to imagine an imagination department, and indeed imaginations were so huge that they wouldn’t fit in a box in any case.

Many departments  in the store were empty rooms with a coming soon sign set in the middle of a spotless floor.

Meanwhile, Thelmer was playing with the stick. Underneath the schoolyard topsoil, murms and rants scuttled away from the prodding intruder. Thelmer was feeling a little low that day, and didn’t know why. There seemed to be a massive hole in their life that should have been filled with something, but they didn’t know what.

Ironically, the bus stop on the other side of the fence near which Thelmer stood announced a lottery for love everlasting , to be granted to one lucky winner, conditions upon request. The lucky few that managed to win actually received a cheap imitation of love, which they  would promptly squander on all kinds of things,  people and activities that didn’t really deserve their love at all.

Having never experienced true love, they couldn’t recognize the cheap imitation for what it was, and were too embarrassed to talk about it once it was gone. The authorities weren’t very concerned by this. The whole point of the lottery was to provide people with a glimmer of hope, which was all they needed to get them out of bed in the morning, get them shopping, get them back the next day and so on.

People began to notice Thelmer’s odd relationship with the things around them. They couldn’t figure out what it was, because they’d never met anyone who generated love spontaneously from their heart and mind. Thelmer had tried multiple times to pick up thier dat, only to get scratched multiple times. Eventually they gave up trying, not because the dat repeatedly scratched them, but because they felt sorry for the dat.

The fact was Thelmer  saw and heard and felt and tasted and smelled everything in the world around them, because Thelmer was the only one born in a long time with a natural faculty for imagination. This frightened Thelmer’s parents so much that they took them to the doctors. The doctors found nothing physically wrong with Thelmer , and prescribed a mild depression to make Thelmer appear like other people from the outside, at least. This was “good enough” because most good citizens rarely looked very deep below the surface. Too much bother. Other doctors tried to cure Thelmer with extreme cynicism, which was practically free in its generic form. After a strict regimen of three months, you were guaranteed to disregard everything and everyone around you.

For Thelmer the pills didn’t take. The glow inside them could not be put down or masked, and so it was decided that Thelmer should be put in a quiet place away from other children, not because it would be better for Thelmer, but so that everybody else could just get on with their lives, which were hard enough as it was. 

Thelmer tried to love their parents as best they could.

Thelmer tried to make friends and they couldn’t.

Thelmer is just a kid. This kid is nothing special, they merely did a simple something that was very selfless. So how does Thelmer get their love out into the world? Through small acts of kindness. Thelmer slowly changes the people around them to think twice before making a selfish decision. To consider for a moment how decisions will affect the people around them. This did not go unnoticed by the powers that be, such as the parking attendant who found Thelmer’s parent quietly admiring their new car.

There was nothing to indicate that this car was any different than any other car that anybody else had ever owned. They were all the same. There was no reason to differentiate. And yet it was obvious that this person and this car had a special bond, so the parking attendant did their job and asked to see a receipt for the obvious affection that this good citizen bore for their vehicle. When they couldn’t produce a receipt, they were fined 90 doleurs and given a warning not to repeat. “Eventually, this kind of behavior leads to a street festival, or a block party. That’s when corporate headquarters intervenes, putting everyone in vehicles and shipping them away.” Thelmer’s parent looked sufficiently frightened. “It won’t happen again”.

However, the people had seen what was on the other side of the wall, and now there was no going back. They gathered their courage and marched straight down to the Bank of Love. How did they get past the heavily armed guards and security systems? Everyone later said it was an inside job.

Eventuallythe bottom fell out of the market for love because why would you buy something when you could manifest yourself? The more people felt better about themselves, the more sales dropped drastically, almost overnight.

The price of love dropped to an all-time low, and those people still buying were getting mutual admiration and even outright, deep affection for as little as 3 tokens a month, plus applicable taxes. Said one, “You can’t ignore a deal like that.” Said the other, “That used to be the price of a passing fancy.”

On the day that LUV Corp went into receivership, a large popular parade with balloons marched down to The Amour Corporation buildings. They went through the courtyard to the large marble structure with triple-thickness iron doors. They said to the gatekeeper, “Open the doors.” The gatekeeper asked, “By whose authority?” They replied, “No one.” He asked, “Why?” And the crowd said, “Because we love you.”

In the face of this credible outpouring of love that they never thought they would ever be able to afford or experience in their lifetime, the gatekeeper suddenly realized that their alliances naturally alinged with the people who loved them, rather than with the Amour Corporation. It was an inside job. They took the large key from around their neck and inserted it into the lock. The doors swung open slowly.

Once inside, to everyone’s amazement, they were faced with a large, empty chamber, except for a bubble gum wrapper in the far corner, left by a workman on the day they’d finished painting the place. Nothing was in the room except air. It was devoid of stuff of any kind. 

Not only was there no love to be found – no mild affections, no brief flirtations, not even a mild dalliance – these good citizens quickly realized that there had never been anything in here in the first place.

By the time Thelmer had grown up and was no longer considered a kid, the large retail box stores selling love had collapsed. People now carried love around in their hearts for free. There was much rejoicing in the streets.

Rather than feel distress or sadness about how they had been duped all their lives, people decided to just get on and enjoy their newfound love of everything and everyone around them, moving past this difficult time. They’d had enough regret for one lifetime. Thelmer was still Thelmer,  different from everyone else, which was okay, because now everybody else was different from everybody else as well,

and they loved it.

The End