The Nation state is the macro unit of global economic harvest (Proudhon, 1876). The natural resources, the commodities, the manufactured goods and most importantly the human capital; their labor and their tax base are bound via this system into manageable units for exploitation. (Gellner, 2008). Under the guise of order the state system crystalized dynamic ethnic relationships and power differentials into control zones. As of 1 January, 2015 there are 206 such units, loosely organized into three major power blocs; sub-divided into nine world system dependency zones claiming sovereignty over shifting swaths of geographic turf[1]. The cultivation of false consciousness subsequently divides humanity further into dominant and subservient genders, ethnic groups, religions, nationalisms, political tendencies and sexual orientations; all with imagined identities that are wholly constructed via socialization and neuroscience for the purpose of disunity (Engles, 1893).

While almost all nation states have relative sovereignty; constant and repeated foreign and domestic assaults on this sovereignty lock each unit into a dynamic hierarchy of the world system. The metaphor of the world system; the mountain is subject to power shifts; thus via culture, warfare and economics the dominance of the core has shifted. Each nation state’s Oligarical collective controls its political leadership with few outliers regardless of proclaimed ideological tendency. Nation state level oligarchs enrich themselves by aligning the human and resource capital of their nation with economic prerogatives set by the core nations at both international forums such as Bretton Woods, Davos and the United Nations. As well as at closed meetings for oligarch coordination such as the Bilderberg Group and the Bohemian Grove. Ultimately whether the nation state takes the guise of authoritarian, theocratic, military junta, or trapping of socialism or democracy; via elite consensus, think tanks, policy groups, campaign contributions, as well as encouragement of soft or hard repression; the elite cluster in each of the 206 nation states formulates their capital accumulation in relation to taxes, labor management and trade relations with other states. The three power blocks; NATO, PRC and Russian Federation have since 1945 engaged in ceaseless proxy conflict at the semi-periphery and periphery (Lebow, 1994). Endless coups, interventions, wars, genocides and clientalisms have ensued. Their antagonism has led to vast destabilization of the state system. Because the nation state unit harnesses the competing identities of its implied constituents; those within its border are locked in combative contradiction between the citizens and the immigrant others; as well as a hierarchy of access, alienation and proscribed benefit ascribed to the citizens based again on arbitrary privileges; male over female, dominant ethnic identity over proclaimed outsider ethnic groups, citizen over foreigner an so on. With very few outlying examples most of these alienations and privileges have mutated or been purged via conquest, revolution and ethnic cleansings and have largely solidified their false conscious paradigm since 1945. Because every aspect of the world system is inherently an architecture for reducing us down to a profitable economic unit and telling us that our hard ‘work will set us free’.

The nation state rests its legitimacy on being a protector and provider for its citizens. It’s justification for being no matter upon what superstructure of ideology or identity it rests upon is to fulfill the obligations spelled out normatively in the nine human rights instruments. In reality it has to meet two more basic characteristics; secure collective needs, enable satisfaction of individual wants and provide security. If any of those elements begin to drastically disintegrate via warfare, invasion, occupation or pervasive corruption and impoverishment the nation state government loses legitimacy to rule.

 

The Nation state is predicated on the cultivated false conscious belief that the state of our human nature is [inherent self-interest] and that security for a small and privileged minority from the [imagined barbarism of the great majority]; necessitates an [endless war on that majority] and [an evolving sophisticated system of social control].

           

 

            The World System

 

The World System Analysis as conceived by Immanuel Wallerstein consists of a core, semi-periphery and periphery; shifting zones that are defined by their economic relationships to each other. As stated in his volumes of analysis Wallerstein outlines a multi-disciplinary modal that tracks the formation of the world system between 1500 and the present day (Wallerstien, 1974). While previous empires such as the Romans, Persians, Islamic Caliphates, Mughals, Aztecs and Chinese Han dynasties had been trans-regional powers capable of expansive influence and trade; none had, until the construction of the world system, been able to fully project hegemony upon the full mass of the species living in all continents. Advanced weapons, epidemiological resistance and industrialization allowed the Europeans a competitive advantage in outward conquest (Diamond, 2005). The epochs of conquest, slavery and colonialism allowed an unprecedented capital accumulation to take place in Europe. The Industrial Revolution had modernized these societies and subsequently organized their social hierarchy into that of global power administrators. This is not to say class and race and gender were not thoroughly established in internal hierarchies. The conquest of the rest of the world was an outward disposal of the mediocre into pursuits of war and profiteering. Inevitably according to this analysis the hegemonic power passed from Spain, to the Netherlands, to England and after a series of World Wars ultimately between Germany and the United States to a bipolar world of the US-NATO Block against the USSR. While the 1989-1991 implosion of the Soviet Union defeated authoritarian Communism. The Russian Federation, with the world’s second most powerful military, a comparable stockpile of nuclear weapons and the largest reserves of natural gas and oil on the planet is checked but not defeated. As stated the People’s Republic of China was only a minor antagonist within this struggle for core control, but is emerging as the most serious contender.

To fully understand the world system beyond the allegory of the mountain we must break apart the zones Wallerstien and dependency development theorists categorized to establish what is it is these ceaseless proxy wars, all this diplomacy, defense and development spending seeks to acquire. A false construct such as nationalism or ideology is a superstructure disguise for it means to acquire core control. As stated, the Oligarical collectives have a limited range of coordination and span of control. While an oligarch in the core may in fact collude with an oligarchy in the semi-periphery or periphery; the closer asset control and resources allocation is exerted to a core political and economic process; the richer and more powerful the fruits of the gain.

[1] Core Hegemon, Core Critical, Core Dependent, Semi-Peripheral, Peripheral, Peripheral Medium HDI, Peripheral Low HDI, Peripheral Failing, Failed States.

Chapter 11

Borough of Brooklyn, 2012ce

Bohemian gypsy encampment,

Day 2

 

 

He awakes on Onderdonk fields and she is still in his arms. She is warm and breathing deeply and clutching his hand to her ample breasts and thus is pressing her body against and besides him. Very much engorged he presses his hardness into the plump of her buttocks as if waiting for her to wine.

 

The sun has very much arisen. He finds it very tranquil and makes no effort to wrest her into wake field yet. The drumming has begun again and the camp is awakening and she smells of perfume and also cigarettes.

Sprawled out on a Persian carpet, on a now deflated air mattress the thick of him pressed against her rear parts, tits in hand he smiles happy victory; for she is most beautiful.

The Labor Day weekend is allowing about half of the teeming eleven million multitude of the NYC masses not to engage in much less Monday work. This Festival is well timed but is a small Gypsy side show to Winkle and Baltic’s production at Pzeier Chemical Factory, OR the Juveaurt festivities before the Labor Day Parade on Monday.

 

“Today is just Saturday which means there are three more to go!” declares Raphael Ernesto, “hooray for our liberated labor! Labor Day is designed to fall not anywhere near international May Day, which is communist international workers day to all other workers. Labor Day is designed to separate the bullets from the proverbial gun of the American proletariat,” Ernesto Lynch explains as Natasha rolls her eyes and throws back some breakfast Vodka Oleg Megved has obtained to wash down late breakfast.

Oleg Megved, the Ukrainian-Israeli photographer ‘from Boston’ exclaims: “This man looks just like Mayakovski!”

“You’re right, it’s the hat and uniform and red arm band. A little junior communist we have here,” agreed Natasha.

“Who was Mayakovsky,” asks Sebastian Adon.

“Mayakovski was the greatest Russian Poet that ever lived,” says Oleg.

Natasha had then cut in sardonically, “the second or third greatest of his period at the very least.”

“And you look just like him!” she says pointing to Sebastian.

“He had lovers all over the cities and the towns! Stalin let him tour Europe, Cuba, Mexico and America knowing he’d bring those capitalist pigs to their knees: Just with words,” puts in Oleg Megved.

“Let me put on this cap while you draw me more perfectly,” Natasha orders him.

He did as she ordered. And she looked like a partisan girl wearing it, a freedom fighter made so by the circumstances of her times, certainly not of individual ideals, bare and rugged necessity made fearless.

Early deaths for most.

“Spitting image of a Partizan,” said Oleg Megved.

A burly Russian gangster, although really of Ukrainian origin with a puzzling stopover in the Promised Land north of Tel Aviv, an Arab ghetto citadel called Nazareth, only an Amerikanski might dub him “a Russian”.

Or to use Adon’s favorite lexicon a “Former Soviet” or “Postsoviet.”

“Mayakovski was something of a total romantic and free radical,” Natasha then went on, “he wrote no less than thirteen volumes of Soviet poetry. A full third just to his tovarish, lover and muse Lily Brik.”

“Tell him about Lily Brik,” says Oleg the Bear.

“Let him read about it,” said Natasha Andreavna.

Sebastian who was earlier working on an epic caracatura of Victoria and Raphael; has turned his artistic abilities toward the capture of Natasha’s breasts on paper.

“Woman, tell him the goddamn story of Lilya Brik,” commands Ernesto.

Natasha grabs Sebastian Adon by his artistic medical coat tails and lays the sordid affair down in New Speak, Jive;

“So here you have Russia’s greatest poet and writer. Stalin gives him a Carte Blanche to get away with almost anything. So here we have his madness and his love life. He meets Lily Brik and her publisher husband early in career and they have a sick ménage where husband and Mayakovski have to share Lily while being partners themselves creatively.”

“They lived together right up until his suicide. He had to sometimes listen to her screw him from the kitchen even! That level of openness about the affair was absolute as her husband was a polyandrous man, a futurist,” she declares.

“What is a Futurist,” Sebastian asks.

“We believe in the future,” Natasha says calmly.

Oleg gives her a look, and grins a burly grin.

“A Futurist rejects all aspect of his past, the utility of pasts in general.”

“This is what I just said,” Natasha snaps at him.

“You didn’t say it gracefully enough in English for my liking,” Ernesto sneers playfully.

She give him dagger eyes and continues.

“In the end of many trials and many years Mayakovski couldn’t wrest her away from her husband, his closest friend and lifelong editor and then at age 36 he put a gun to his head and ended his foolish, albeit brilliant life over this Brik woman.”

“And then there was also the Tatiana affair in Paris to complicate the matter further,” breaks in Oleg Megved, “two perfect archetypes of unobtainable Russian women one red and one white.”

“Don’t kill all his limited American hope in one shot of story,” retorts Natasha, “Vasa will go acquire the books if he wants to hear the whole series of events.”

And shortly after Vasa and Natasha leave the encampment to wander the urban wastelands looking for a bodega and a place to buy more wine.

They make a curious spectacle walking together through the desolate warehouse district. There was not a Bodega in miles it seemed.

The district was quite bleak and they were alone on a lonely highway except for an occasional passing mac or semi-truck. Her yellow dress blows in the wind, but the sun still beats down and he offers her a water canteen and she drinks and hands him a cigarette.

They’re looking for a Bodega in the wilderness.

The grim warehouses are all one or two stories, all fortified and locked down with tall walls and barbed wire. The place is mostly without any life and smells of asphalt melting in the hottest heat of summer.

Eventually after a great deal of wandering small talk they find some foods and make their way back to gypsy camp.

 

 

“Could I be plain with you brother,” Sebastian asks Oleg the bear as they watch the girls fool around in the huge rubber inflatable pool, “what is the Russian mentality?”

“Oh, that’s just an American code word for building elaborate prejudices to former and Post Soviets. Or maybe the bunker mentality of thieves in law locked together under iron curtain quarantine.”

“Quarantine?”

“Quite so. That’s what you’re old government did to our revolution and then what our government did to us to preserve it. Locked us down in our Soviet Union.”

“There were other variables.”

“I am no apologist, but the Stalin I grew up with or should I say read about growing up for he was dead; was a very different Stalin than the one you maybe, or maybe not encountered in you college political science. To you all growing up the Soviet Union was an authoritarian gulag state of bread lines and deprivation. To us, growing up before the fall in 1989; it was our country. It was not spectacularly better or worse than yours. But we all could read and we all had jobs and no one was starving and since 1/3 of the world was within our red sphere the quarantine was less impactful. Our zone ran from Havana to Ho Chi Min City; south ways as far as Angola.”

“Fair enough.”

“Your government and your media spent early one hundred years teaching you red terror. The school house desk hiding fallout shelter raids, the numerous adventures with torture abroad, the missile crisis, the Reagan years it all built up a viral fear and hate. And anyway you know what you do with your enemy’s women! Ha. The men are supposed to be barbarians and the women all whores. This is picture your country painted of “Ivan”, well my country too now,” he laughs.

“Agreed, whores and criminals is the stereotype, but I’m talking about the so called mentality. The effects of the iron quarantine.”

“We like new things, this is true, but more importantly we like true security without being in anyone’s debt. Those that even remember the former Soviet Union remember only its hardships mostly via stories told to them. Deprivations and breadlines they really at this stage were too young to remember. I was born in Ukraine, but I really grew up in Israel so I’m not even so shaped by this past. And of course, I’m something of a Jew. At least below the belt. Those that grew up after the fall of communism likely tasted western things and culture and simply grew up knowing they could be better off here. So some like my family used their Jewish heritage to go through Israel then here. Some got stuck in Israel, enough for the fourth national language to now be Russian.”

“Yeah I remember that was about to happen when last I was there,” Adon says.

“Mentality? I don’t know, people are people, we all like a good laugh, some happiness, a toast and a good fuck!”

“Well I believe that, but I think people process data differently.”

“No comrade, not so differently at all. That Natasha you’re consorting with has just gotten off the boat. Whatever barriers between you both seem to have ben easily dispelled with vodka, wine and dancing did they not?”

“I’ve always had something for Russian women.”

“That’s because there’s nothing better than Russian women, everyone knows that of course.”

“Why is it though?! What is it about them,” muses Adon.

“Well I bet you have many most misguided theories.”

“Surely I do.”

“They make incredibly pliant whores” states Oleg to see a reaction.

But, there is none.

Oleg, who got off the boat quite literally three days ago wonders if he has the right mark. This Adon is a charachture of the potentially fearsome guerilla leader his file claimed him to be. This man was, well he was a nostalgic poet. A hipster even living in another age, perhaps uncomfortable in his very own skin. Not a leader of men. Could this really be the most fearsome operative the American résistance had?

“Russian mentality; this sounds like an American device to reduce us all to whores and vicious gangsters. Your media likes this kind of objectification to enable you to kill and rape us with less moral indignation” says Oleg.

“Perhaps that’s the truth though is that many of you do seem to have whore and gangster tendencies.”

“If you claim it,” Oleg.

Natasha storms up to them appearing quite distraught as well as intoxicated.

“Drink man,” she says foisting a bottle upon them. She shoves a cold bottle of red Georgian wine into Oleg’s hands. And he thanks her in Russian.

The she suddenly exclaims;

“I must leave! There is someone who will ask serious questions if I don’t.”

“Please do instead stay,” Sebastian lets alcohol speak for him, “nothing will happen if you do,” pleads Adon.

“You don’t know anything about what will or will not happen to me anyhow!”

“Please stay, its already night and if you leave I’ll have to follow my code and escort you all the way home and then I’ll be waking up drunk on the beach in Brighton certainly.”

“I don’t need you to get home safe.”

“Well the code says real men don’t let women take the trains’ home by themselves after dark.”

“What stupid code is this?”

“The Code of the Haitian gentleman,” he replies.

“Well I am bound by no such nigger code and now I take my leave man.”

“I’ll bring you home,” says Adon abandoning his responsibilities to protect the camp completely notes Oleg the bear.

She storms off and he follows after her and this in itself seems like a thing that has happened and will happen again as if a cosmic comedy.

“I live in Brighton,” she declares, which is very long way off.

 

Like an aroused puppy he follows her blindly out into the blue moon lit night. But they only make it as far as a tavern down the road called the Cobra Club, a few drinks later they change course back to camp and never make it to Brighton at all.

 

Chapter 9

Manhattan, 2012ce

Financial District

Sebastian Adon was always reading a book, though he never seemed to finish any; the title of the one in his hand now which was 1984, the year his documents had told to him that he was born.

 

Seated on the roof he could be seen from any number of vantage points or sniper posts. The roof of 140 Nassau street was adjacent from the Woolworth building with is copper green spires and the five story City Hall; as well as just three blocks from Police Plaza One; and below it the holding cells for all of the cities concentrated perpetrators. While no book in the Unites States of America was a “banned book”, 1984 was certainly a “flagged book” because the Department of Homeland Security viewed it as a “gateway book” to subversive thinking. By late August of 2012 it was not so much that the American public didn’t know how to read; simply that they chose not to for the most part. It was quite unusual for families to ever turn off their televisions; “telescreens” as described in the book. And while these devices were not two way transmitters; there was virtually no corner of Manhattan not under surveillance by a networked feed of public and private CCTV. Some guerilla efforts in Breuklyn, Queens and the Bronx has rolled some of that back; but Manhattan was fully watched.

 

Especially since September 11^th, 2001 when the towers came down and the security state rolled out into the open, like it had always been there.

 

In 1984 there are three world powers described; Oceania (the United States and England), Eurasia (Russian and the EU), and East Asia (China, India, Japan) and they square off in endless resource wars in the rest of the world. Although each power block claims to have competing ideological differences; such as Chinese Communism, Euro-Socialism, or Capitalism; each simply utilizes the ideological coloring to distract their respective populations from the real system of control.

A book within a book; in 1984 the heroes discover something called ‘the Brotherhood’ which is distributing ‘the Goldstein Book’ which explains the way the world is; a system called Oligarical-Collectivism; an international corporate oligarchy devoid of ideology which utilizes endless warfare as a means to dispose of productive labor and surplus value. The wars supposedly fought for control of resources in the Middle East, Latin America and Africa are actually utilized to keep the population terrified, patriotic and get rid of wealth that might otherwise trickle down and create valid middle classes.

Class consciousness is parlayed into hate and war mongering and fear. The book which describes a young couples efforts to join this clandestine network; the Brotherhood end with their capture, torture, and betrayal of each other.

Typically read in American colleges Political Science classes; George Orwell’s tome against authoritarianism of all kinds, alongside his more pedantic novel Animal Farm are used as part of the American Oligarchies perpetual indictment of Socialism in general and Russian Socialism in particular. Although the book is set in England, Oceania is clearly America; and George Orwell was himself a Socialist, shot in the face while fighting in the Spanish Civil War.

Sebastian owns many copies of this book. He likes giving it to lovers and friends on their birthdays. While he is unconvinced many have ever read it cover to cover; it is better reading and more radicalizing than say, the Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx, Days of War, Nights of Love or Howard Zinn’s People’s History of the United States of America or World System Analysis. Which are all very good books, but you have to be open or free minded to absorb them.

The book was waking Sebastian up though the others didn’t realize it.

This was perhaps the critical realization of the Z.O.B. underground. That to fight the mental slavery imposed on the American working class; a sophisticated range of media and parapsychology would have to be utilized to free minds. The release of Matrix, Fight Club, Hunger Games and a whole industry of black market films designed to erode this mass socialization had been deployed throughout the decade. Thinly veiled metaphors and overt subversive media made it through the censors; but it was in the bathhouses that the underground used to deprogram.

 

Bathhouses were of course Russian mob money laundering facilities and black market steering sites with the right references. And though the kinds had been worked out slowly; the movement soon learned to deprogram efficiently; using the bathhouses as “wake fields”. It was long known that the American Oligarchy was using Nano-bots in the water supply, social programming via television; as well as spraying from planes a chemical that encouraged tiredness and obesity. It was fully known that between alcohol, sports, TV, feature films, and schools the public was put to sleep; believing the American Middle class was quite large. While in fact the distribution of wealth was quite comparable to anywhere else.

They had utilized the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to squander the decade’s surplus and manufactured a financial crisis in 2008 to further consolidate their economic gains. Now 1% of Americans controlled 47% of American wealth. And 85 people on earth were worth as much as the bottom 3.5 billion. And the planet was dying to boot.

Sebastian Adon was reading his favorite book on the roof, where two weeks ago he dreamed he had fallen seventeen stories with a young woman named Natasha Andreavna. But everything was a dream now. He had been put sleep by the resistance after completion of his last job; a messy raid in Syria. What that meant was that he was now thinking three dimensionally. That he couldn’t see the parallel worlds; couldn’t see all the possibilities. Didn’t see his past and future lives.  Didn’t know that he had spent the last twelve years as staff sergeant in a vast international underground, a member of the Zionist movement.

The sun was out, it was completely beautiful. From the roof he can look up in the bourgeoisie fish tank called the Gerry Building shooting 104 stories up blue glass. He doesn’t remember anything about a wife and child. Doesn’t remember Kibbutz Ain Dor. Or Kibbutz Sde Bokr. He doesn’t remember his Pararescueman training in Cuba, Haiti, or Syria either. Science is a hell of a drug.

And doesn’t remember at all when he stood on this roof eleven years ago, wearing a flicker mask to hide his face and with a shoulder to air missile launcher to put a flaming hole in the World Trade Center.

 

He wakes up on the same roof. A burning sense of shame, of failure or is it the booze. Is it the late nights, the rigors of studying something he might have learned before in another life.

 

What year is this is the first thing he wonders. His gut says 2012, but that mean he’s in the future. Doesn’t it?

How many jobs has it been, and where’s Natasha? Is everyone ok? Did everyone make it out of the ghetto? Who has my back? Is my back got?

They gonna kill us all, them brutal pigs.

His mobilblat goes off. It’s a Telegram 2.0 text from Tanya. It’s a YouTube video, of the Soca artist Ricardo Veshanti, followed by a selfie of Tanya. Which is a signal for notification that the Trinidadian Special Forces have landed.

Chapter 8

Manhattan, 2012ce

Lower East side

 

For the rats in their races, this city never fucking sleeps. Its go go go, zoom zoom rush, slaves and serf to the trains for service, getting in early and leaving late, the master sin yellow cabs and black sports utility cars, the city is high tower high octane multi-diverse plus racial death trap.

 

I need a drink, thinks Trickovitch, he thinks it regularly. And as of lately resorts to smoked Haitian Rum on the rocks.

 

For their troubles were really just getting started.

 

Well that same night Nicholai Trickovitch put together a little team to, “do a messy little big job.”

There were big jobs and little jobs. Jobs where social engineering was need, others where brute force was the best approach.

This required both. Now, outside New York the Resistance eclectic as it truly was relied heavily on “black, white and grey magic,” as Nicholai was fond of saying, “In New York we do things the old fashioned way. By having a real tight crew.”

In the dead of night around a table on the fourth floor of 113 Ludlow Street, that is to say the restaurant immediately above the Mehanata Tavern a little talk is underway; a briefing.

There are thirteen leaders of the Z.O.B. Two are hidden, two are sleeping, that means at any given period nine are charge of all the cells in the division; Greater New York City.

The table is wooden and plates of Pan-Asian fusion tapas have all been cleared.

“Let me tell you how this is gonna go down,” says Nikh to his fellow partisans the tall, well-polished Jamaican Gangster Mickhi Dbrisk; who is wearing a black suit and tie. Also Mara Fitzduff Donahue; the half pint Irish dirty blonde famous for firebrand speeches on ‘the Fire Switch Radio’ and also present was Raphael Ernesto Lynch Contras; the Peruvian disk jockey, photographer and one time leader of a guerrilla band in Arequipa Province. The fifth member of this add-hock unit was Siegfried Sassoon; a bar tender and minor actor. A dashing swaggerous man of Cuban descent. And the sixth man in this late night call up was the light skinned Haitian Ken Francois, or ‘Ken the French’.

In the confusing and albeit vaguely disjointed chain of command Mara, Mickhi and Nikholai were are all title holding inner leadership while Kenneth, Ken and Raphael were called “volunteers”; though technically Ken the French was a “provisional member”, made but not sworn in. Not written in the books.

“The Labor Day weekend begins tomorrow and we all know what’s coming. The West Indian Day Parade isn’t heading south at the Grand Army Plaza; oh no; they’re gonna head north right over the bridges into the City.”

They were all aware of the score. This was being coordinated by the Pan-Africanists, the Garveyites, the trade unions, the IWW, the Muslims, the Occupiers, the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement and of course; Uhuru.

“Hectic shit,” mutters Raphael.

“Our role is quite basic,” explains Nikholai Trikhovitch, who knew indeed that the General Rising was close in coming, but not four days away.

“We all know what was revealed about the h1n1 and Ebola. The documentation has been widely circulated and now the community is ready. Enough outrages have occurred to spark riots. Stop and Frisk, weekly shootings, the Iran war conscription, and the drones of course. This time almost everyone expects street warfare,” Nikholai explained.

“The Z.O.B. has called up eighty eight street medics and agitation propaganda officers to support this parade & convoy. They will be attached to each major island band truck. Flying columns are all on standby in all five boroughs; an additional three hundred and forty three women and men.  As usual the Haitian Convoy will bring up the rear. Unknown to the parade organizers and hopefully the police intelligence forces; there are actually two Haitian bands this year of 10,000 marchers a piece. One ¾ up the route which will initiate the charge across the plaza and up Flatbush. And this is when the hectic bloody melee will begin.

“What’s our precise role tonight,” asks Siegfried Sassoon. Ken never goes to meetings, he never votes in elections except for Sebastian. He did however vote for putting Sebastian to sleep after the last Haiti job. He’s a serious knock around guy. Only does jobs. Never ever meetings, rarely even the candle light salons.

 

“We’re gonna install Fire Station Transmitters on four very, very tall structures,” says Mara Fitzduff. She has been the club’s chief communications officer for the past ten years.

 

“And then tomorrow we’re gonna blow up the NSA server depot inside the Consolidated Edison building,” says Mickhi Dbrisk, who has been the club’s Operation’s Chief since nearly the very beginning.

 

Nikholai holds the official title of Logistics Chief, but he’s more hands on than many before or after him, as logistic fixer should be.

 

“The transmitters will override the police radio system and turn whatever frequencies we feel like into dancehall radio stations. We need them hidden and we need them high,” explains Mara.

“We’ve gotten the four spots picked out. Each transmitter is about the size of a football. There are blasters and flicker masks in the bags at the downstairs coat check, but those are for getting out of the buildings. Soon as this meeting is done you’re all getting in the town cars outside and getting dropped near all three targets, one man one location. In the bags with the guns and masks are the addresses and names of three sympathizers. You’re going to get dropped at some of the tallest buildings on the island; masks go on to obscure your faces, sympathizers have you over for a drink. Don’t really drink. Then they will give you a parachute and send you up to their roofs. You will see on your smart phone a beacon; follow the beacon to the lower roof via a base jump. The beacon will guide you to where we want the transmitter hidden. Install it. And exit the building without being caught or your parachute found,” says Mara.

 

“Ken Francois you’re assigned to south Manhattan, Siegfried Sassoon you’re in Midtown, Mr. Raphael you’ll be setting up the Long Island City installation which is quite tricky because there’s nothing higher in Queens so you’ll have to social engineer it, while Nicholai and Dbrisk will go after the Hightower on Atlantic Junction also with the same predicament. But you’re all Pararescuemen and Parapsychologists so I’m sure this will all just be fun. Once you get to the safe houses you’re staying at feel free to relax and take a nap. This doesn’t have to happen at once or tonight, it just has to happen before we blow up the server depot on Sunday night. So enjoy. Some of these sympathizers are very attractive. I’m not saying any of you would take a whole a day to ravish the high end escorts at the brothels you’ll be staying at; certainly not as either husbands, fathers, or Haitian gentlemen; but well it’s an option. Can’t have you stressed,” grinned Mara Fitzduff knowing full well Raphael was married albeit a consummate adulterer; that Mickhi Dbrisk for all intents and purposes has three wives; that Ken Kin is married to the daughter of a powerful Russian oligarch; and that Nicholai is an incorrigible womanizer and that Ken Francois is a very loyal family man.

 

“We’re working out of apartment brothels?” asks Raphael, hope in his voice for he so loves Manhattan apartment brothels.

 

“We needed these devices set up high,” says Mara, “Three of you are working out of brothels. Two of you out of homes. Assignments are random you’re five of the best jumpers we have. And remember the database has be blown up before the disorder on Monday. Even Uhuru doesn’t expect this action to result in a general uprising. But if we knock out their communications and we neutralize a mega data store where they will start for the round ups and reprisals then we’re keeping to our end of the mutual aid agreement with Uhuru; without blowing our arsenal and fighters prematurely,” she says.

 

“Am I based in a brothel or a house of the seniorly,” asks Raphael.

 

Mickhi Dbrisk chuckles at this plump washed out philanderer.

 

“Four transmitters. Then we blow the Consolidated Edison NSA depot on Sunday night and EMP the district financial at noon thirty Monday with the anarchists. Monday; all of you are in the trenches and I’m running dispatch with Anya out of a most secure location. Things are going to pop the hell off prematurely. We’ll do the best we can.”

 

“A pubic library?” asks Raphael.

 

This time everyone chuckles cynically only on the inside. Because very few people could be found in Public libraries by late August of 2012; because this is where the department of Homeland Security over emphasized surveillance; that and few Americans still knew how to read.

The Cave

Perhaps you are familiar with the allegory of Plato’s cave where by humanity was enchained in darkness not even knowing the image of its’ own self, only a shadow and upon release was so horrified of the reality of their own reflection they preferred the mental and physical slavery of the cave to the emancipation of a brave new world.

We would go so far as to say that in our current reality our bondage is more like a mountain. One in which while perhaps you are fully aware of the security and riches present in other zones, districts or nations of the earth we are unable physically and mentally to advance to the comforts of the precipice heights bound not by chains, although such slaveries exist; more of us are bound by survival obligations to self and family that prevent mobility. And perhaps most striking about this social arrangement is that we spend most our existence fighting for survival and when capability allows; working long hours enriching others (Marx, 1887). We work ourselves to the bones to send up the mountain the riches of the earth, the wealth of nations such that faceless oligarchs and their progeny may have complete abundance.

Let us for analysis remove the national borders of the Peter’s world map the one where all elements are represented at their actual presumed size. Let us examine it inverted. Let us look at it East on top West, then South on top of North. Note the arbitrary placement of not only national borders but also spatial demarcations and hemispheric directions. As if the sun still was thought to revolve around the earth or that the earth was clearly flat. Let us again for analysis abolish those markings too.  Let us turn it from a two dimensional boundary marker into a three dimensional sphere, then pull up like a hand on a cloth the developed northern nations as if into a the shape of a mountain, a mountain where the OECD countries are the core on top and down the mountain are arrayed the middle income than low income town the bottom of this precipice.

 

 

 

The Mountain

 

We live on this vast mountain and the along with the 7-8 billion other humans we share its heights, valleys and miserable war torn crevices with; we are bound to that mountain by a system which is orchestrated via competing rulers we call the Oligarchs (Winters, 2011). To maintain that system in its place requires a systematic dehumanization and segregation of all inhabitants such that we are all so disunited that convincing us to work our whole lives and pay for the right to die in varying degrees of seemingly enlightened serfdom, is a privilege.

As of now, this mountain is divided into 206 countries (193 acknowledged by the United Nations as officially being sovereign states) and into 5 dependency relationship zones. It is, because of the nature of sustained predation fostered in the world system since 1500 CE an inherently highly unstable environment, aggravated almost ceaselessly by warfare, deprivation, famine and poverty (Wallerstien, 2011). Following a series of World and Cold Wars from 1914-1989 the elite consensus shifted from ideological confrontation to shared illusion. The nature of the world system is referred to in political science as an inverse consiationalist relationship (Lustick, 1979); a political order where elites of every nation, with loyalty only to the ones in which their assets are deposited collude and complete via proxy from dominance of the Core; the legal, military and economic mobilization of state architecture to secure capital, and via hyper-influence and full enjoyment of the material world and use its inhabitants. The governance of the mountain which became so wildly unstable in the 20^th century has taken form around the growing multi-polarity of the Globalized 21^st century (Kupchan, 1998). The basis of a Consociationalist framework is that the Oligarchs in each state, via social and business groups referred to as elite clusters and arch-oligarchs, hyper-enriched via wealth accumulation at the core have imposed a relationship upon us. Via a dual needed illusion they keeps us not only from dissolving our national dependencies; they divide us, co-opt us, and prevent a global uprising by disguising the nature of their access to capital. They lower our consciousness, they force half the species into existential deprivation, and they utilize their intelligence agencies their spies and informants to encourage destabilizing violence. They have done so not with mere words (Orwell, 1949). Even linguistically they deprive us of a discourse.

They have turned plantations into nations. Resistance into terrorism. They made democracy into noise. They have made greed into virtue. They have turned servitude into work. They have turned rights into phrases, freedom into slavery. They have turned colonialism into something called “development.”

The Development Enterprise as we understand it began after the Second World War with the 1948 implementation of the Marshal Plan. The intention of this far-reaching US aid investment was to keep war-ravaged Western Europe from being absorbed into the Soviet sphere. Development subsequently evolved into an international architecture. Its newly stated intention within the Cold War context was to modernize & industrialize former colonial nations. Packages of civilian and military aid were coupled with technical assistance. Non-governmental organizations proliferated generally around poverty alleviation and cause specific programs. The United Nations ratified a wide range of human rights instruments as rapidly escalating armed conflicts accelerated in almost every nation in the developing world. By 2014, there have been 15 confirmed acts of Genocide by International Law since 1945, 37 if you include democide (Rummel, 1998). Environmental degradation has resulted in expanding disastrous climate change (Biermann, 2010). It is expected that the cost of water will soon over take the price of oil after peak oil in 2020 (Deffeyes, 2006). If usage and climate change continues unabated 1.8 billion people will be living with severe water scarcity by 2025 and 2/3 of the species will be subjected to water stress (Brown, 2009).

There are over three billion human beings living under $3.00 a day that are worth as much in assets as the top 85 richest people on earth (Oxfam, 2014). It is believed that over 29.8 million people still live in chattel slavery (Global Slavery Index, 2013). While the United 2global extreme poverty’, ‘doubling human access to clean water’ and ‘halting new infection with HIV-AIDS’ divested of all the many political, economic and religious superstructures the results of the development enterprise are highly underwhelming.

There can be no clear measure of data being generated in a variety of highly non-transparent countries. At the 2013 Interaction Forum, the broadest confederation of American development NGOs and Humanitarian actors, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees António Guterres admitted, “We are not entirely prepared”. More conflicts, deeply entrenched poverty, coupled with the targeting of aid workers will occur alongside decreases in funds and the impacts of global climate change. Yet, across the development enterprise, almost all of the academia and technocracy agree that the very worst of human civilization is behind us.  There is still massive disagreement regarding the hierarchy of needs for those 5 billion human souls that live on less than USD 10 a day; 3 billion of which live on less than USD 2.50 a day; and 1.2 billion on less than USD 1.25 (World Bank 2014). The question remains one of participation and empowerment. Will listening to the voices of the poor will be a meaningless slogan or a set of specific instructions to those invested in equality?

Amyarta Sen believes that development is a means to achieve freedom and freedom is achieved by enabling human capability. Jeffery Sachs believes poverty can be eliminated though coordinated action of a “Big Push” Global Marshal Plan. William Easterly and Paul Collier advocate basis of the Monterrey Consensus of 2002 forgoing aid in favor of improving trade.  A regular buzzword in the enterprise is ‘capacity building’, but this is often limited to technocracy and management training going directly to widely corrupted governments. Throughout the development and humanitarian sectors coordination is irregular, local participation is dictated top down, and dependency is fostered (Escobar, 1995).

            We must often remind ourselves about whose reality we are living in here at the top of the mountain, at the Global Core; here in the relative privilege and security of the so called North; the Developed World spanning North America, Europe, Japan, Australia and New Zealand in short the winners and losers of the World Wars excluding Russia. We must remember that the number one killer of citizens in the United States of America is heart disease from over consumption, poor nutrition choices and general gluttony (American Heart Association, 2014). While the leading killer of those 3.5 million living below $3 USD a day is multidimensional poverty, preventable disease and exposure to disastrous climate change.

The Westphalian State System was implemented to break humanity into more manageable units for economic exploitation. All 206 recognized states are pure inventions that have little historical basis, ethnic or religious homogeneity. They were established not to preserve an imagined order but to quantify human and resource capital.

Therefore, our indictment is not around a policy, a procedure or a political or economic methodology. We are leveling our counter attack, we are bolstering our defenses against an entire World System. A system which sense conceived has divided us into categorizations and work exploitation units called nations; disposed of abundance through the perpetual act of war and in the name of humanitarian imperative and now development practice fostered our dependency to a hand full of Oligarchic elite clusters that control the shifting Core. It is can no longer be said that what is happening is a phenomena. Poverty is genocide. Our duty and your duty to strike now against the profiteering and atrocity so integral to the World System’s economic order is based on needs, rights and ethics. On the basis of needs, the modern Oligarchic Collective is killing our human species in raw numbers before un-encountered except during the Mongol Expansion, Middle Ages, Spanish Conquest of Latin America, Epoch of Slavery and Colonialism or the grisly World Wars and Cold Wars. It is vital to remember that we do not even have any consistent system of historical record keeping available until 1848 (Foucault). That is to say most of history has been constructed for your pedagogic consumption. To enable you to believe that the world in which you live and your nature itself is fundamentally imperfect, yet improving, most likely after you die.  An important paradigm set, because you must arrive at level of conscious thinking or should we say frequency adjustment to process this incendiary macro briefing; here are three important starting points to realign yourself into the reality of your species. When and if you believe these things then resistance is fertile.

 

 

The Dual Illusion

 

The belief that we are progressing and advancing as a human civilization is a highly cultivated lie, an intellectual illusion; a highly cultivated enforced paradigm. Your consent in your governance, your indifference to affairs of those in other nations, your belief in the development enterprise, your willingness to pay your taxes and acquiesce to your governments’ polices at home and abroad are based on a ‘manufactured consent’ built on two very specific fundamental un-truths.

 

 

1. The Illusion of Development; the World System is not actually improving under stewardship of capitalist economists, neoliberal trade policies and expanding globalization. Wealth is being highly concentrated into the hands of untouchable, nearly omnipotent oligarchies in every state and this extreme mounting inequality is not only highly unstable, but the rational economic outcome of capital accumulation in the 21^st
2. The Illusion of Coexistence; war is not actually decreasing and poverty is not actually diminishing, it is simply being counted as different things and manipulated statistically to manufacture the illusion of stability, progress and control. Reduction of instances of developed nation warfare masks the proliferation of developing nation state collapse and non-state actor conflicts.

 

 

On the basis of rights an unenforceable legal code and subsequent series of treaty instruments were signed repeatedly in New York at the United Nations by all state parties. Human Rights are however trampled on in practice by government conduct in 206 states. On the basis of ethics, divorced from a personal or legal responsibility, divorced from the existential nature of the dialectic phase; all people have a duty to act. Regardless of what fostered disunity they cultivated amongst our ancestors; all humans are intrinsically bound to a mountain. That mountain is divided loosely in 206 plantations called countries; shifting along the mountain slope tectonically from the peak called the Core (Netherlands, England, and USA) since 1500; down that steep slope the core contenders (China, Russia, India, Brazil, South Africa[1]); followed by the semi-peripheral dependents (Israel, Argentina, Columbia, South Korea, Taiwan) and the semi-peripheral outliers (Ethiopia, Vietnam, Iran & Cuba); below them the periphery in their full dependency (Egypt, Angola, Nigeria, Thailand Bangladesh); and at the bottom of this mountain we perceive as a planetary globe; the 59 failing states (Sub-Saharan Africa & Former Soviet Central Asia); and the failed states (Sierra Leone, Liberia, Haiti and Somalia) and worst the atrocities spreading now into 35 national zones at the base of this wretched mountain; the killing fields (Sudan & South Sudan, Democratic Republic of Congo, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Yemen and Syria).  Welcome to the ethical dilemma of what will you do, how far will you go and how much will you risk in a full blown Global State of Emergency.  The answer is that most people are so caught up in survival obligations and their divisive false consciousness that until the manufactured consent of the nation state is shattered they are mentally still enslaved (Freire, 1970).

 

[1] South Africa is not by normative analysis a core contender; they are via the BRICS alliance elevated from Semi-Peripheral status to the hat geopolitical role.

Chapter 6

Block Island, 2012ce

Hygeia Hotel

 

 

“Don’t listen to the words I say, the screams all sound the same, though the truth may vary our ship will carry our bodies safe to shore,” she hums the Monsters and Men.

 

The boat ride to shore through sloshing blue black waters carrying their clandestine squad of four had gone off much more seamlessly copasetic than McIntosh had feared, who being West Indian did not know how to swim.

So after the submarine ride which had to round the Cape Horn and run both tropics twice to reach its drop off point undetected by the military intelligence of the U.S.A. a short boat ride thorough rocky waters brought Yulia, Adelina, Oleg and McIntosh to safe house on Block Island; via a small flashing green Beacon a woman named Tanya T-Bird Tallflame Luv guided them to shore, and quickly shuttled them in her jeep to the island’s underground railroad station at the Hygeia Hotel; where now they were most vulnerable for they were under the protection of a coven or witches, or shaman sorcerers it should be said, witches begin derogatory.

 

This coven could trace its origins back to the genocide in Salem when aligning with Irish pirates, bootleggers and Mohegan Indian they had fallen back to New Shoreham to take control of the island.

 

Tanya T-Bird Tallflame Luv looked like she was in her late forties long dread locks rapped up above her head in a taam, but by night she transformed somehow and looked half that age. Oleg when he awoke and came to find breakfast in the three floor yellow and red hotel that he barely recognized her. All the sorcery alarmed him and he wondered what drugs had been injected into by the sneaky Israelites, or fed to them enroot so he could be so susceptible to manipulation of the senses. Oleg had lived for some time in the Israeli city of Nazareth and served two years in its military police force before immigrating to America to not think the Israelis were one of the sneakiest, most manipulative peoples alive.

Oleg Medved feels the same way about Judaism as he does about witchcraft, but many a little more sentimental about Judaism because witchcraft doesn’t have any warm welcoming family holidays that he is aware of. Nor did the witches, shaman sorcerers rather help him obtain the blue American passport that makes him the only legal member of this little unit.

“So you want a Bajan scone,” asks Tanya T-Bird Tallflame Luv.

“Why thank you,” he replies and pops the crunchy beige cake in his mouth.

“The orders are in to separate your cell immediately. You and Ms. Yulia Romanova will leave for New York this morning from the mainland by car. The candidate shaman Adelina Blazhennaya will take her partner up to Boston and get your safe houses established.

“Don’t you think we need more time before we make contact,” he asks.

“No. The enemy made contact two weeks ago. We’re behind schedule as usual.”

“One ought not to be fashionably late to a revolution,” Oleg notes.

And Tanya T-Bird Tall flame Luv agrees. Even if he does not believe in the magic, it is clear to her that Solomon selected a very good team to activate the network, get this revolution back online from here to New York and then via underground rail road out to Oakland, California.

 

“Where are your truest loyalties Mr. Medved,” Tanya Luv asks him suddenly before he heads up to his room to get his gear in order.

“To the art I make and the money I’m paid and women that love me for both when I am so fortunate.”

“Fair enough, like all men,” she replies.

Yulia pops her slinky brundinite head into the dining room and says in Russian, “You have call from Moscow, they are saying we must be in New York by tomorrow’s nightfall.”

“The blue moon has a power that will dash the best of plots and largest of armies into lunatic disarray. You should thus make haste,” Tanya T-Bird Tallflame Luv says, “and please remember that for whomever you work for or actually report up chain of command to; you’re in the American Arm of the resistance now; we budget for bribing and drinking, but not for whoring and gambling.”

Oleg the Bear grins, “We are internationalists, and this is still a free country.”

“What the blatnoy is a blue moon,” Yulia asks in Russian.

“You’ll know when you see its effects,” says Tanya T-Bird Tallflame Luv the Pagan sorcerous in Amharic.

“We don’t speak your dessert gibberish,” Yulia declares, “Only English, French and Russian!”

But, Oleg inferred what she meant and decided that he was quite uncomfortable with the American resistance’s widespread use of magic. One could not bribe magic or placate it with whores, or get magic too drunk.

 

Most unnerving work conditions to be sure.

Unlimited operations can get so fucking hectic, fast.

Chapter 5

The Lower East Side, 2012ce

Mehanata

 

The lights are dim no matter what happens. You can dance all night if you have to, but eventually someone has to herd the cats out the door and hide the bodies on the floor.

The Mehanata Social Club is tucked away discreetly on 113 Ludlow Street.

This is its second location since many times police raided and finally burned to the ground in an ugly incident that took place in 2005.

At an infamous establishment such as this you ought to always know the names of the men “standing the watch” or women “pouring for your drinks” or the “holding down of your bags and coats. Most importantly you ought to be cautious of the seductive forces marshaled via inexpensive vodka and black magic to lead you to things you ought not to be playing around with.

There might was well be signs on the wall telling you anything not tied down will be carried away into the night, bags, souls, virginities.

Come to think of it, there are such overt signs!

One claims three teeth are needed for entry. One says anything not checked will be stolen. One says get naked get a shot, get fucked on bar earn bottle.

It’s a Gypsy Bar. And it lives up to that designation splendidly.

You wouldn’t find it unless you were looking for it. You’d only be looking for it is someone told you about it and perhaps you’d hate them for it later. But, in the wilderness a tavern of wild foreign and domestic people dancing to the tunes of the Roma can draw angels and demons by word of mouth and since 2001 it has been surviving pogroms, police raids and venue changes via fire.

There are three floors to the Tavern.

The website extolls patrons to “meet their future green card holding spouse.” There is live Latin music. Live fire juggling. Bulgarian contortionists on Thursday alongside with Bordel Dali; Ernesto and his business comrade Georgie who is from Romania. The cast of characters around here boggles the mind.

The club has the look of a vast lawless pirate ship or a wilderness brothel.

The waitresses and bar tenders are skinny or shapely, Bucharest or Sophia girls just arrived recently though generally well educated and for now, un-indentured. They mostly don’t stay long and the reason for that is partly because of the demands of the work, and because their boss is the devil himself. The club is only open Thursday, Friday and Saturday. There are private parties in the basement you’d do well not to crash unexpected or uninvited. The talent is highly various. There’s a rather pal-mal esthetic of transcontinental bacchanalia.

The booking agent is petit and elegant Victoria Lynch often wearing the hat of a Soviet officer the shoulder length locks of her hair falling over well fashioned skirts or flowing dresses. The primary live acts are Gypsy. Roma meets Latin American mostly. You get dance hall and reggae tone periodically.

The doughty wine.

The salsa, the tango, sometimes even a little Zouk.

The most popular disk jockeys are Raphael Ernesto Contreras Lynch also called the “DJ Rafflex” and Georgie from Bucharest also called the “DJ Mishto”. As stated “Romanian” but “not a Gypsy”.  The most famous of the bartenders is Martina called Hella Dubreskaya. She has been here a good deal longer than the others.

She has the special constitution that a bartender needs to work the shit show around here longer than a month.

Outside and inside are James White, the retired Irish cop on ¾ pension after his ACL was torn chasing down a perp and James “Behemoth” Brown Pérezes a smart talking, burly Puerto Rican. Always outside is Slavi, the stone faced until a sneaked grin Bulgarian collecting the irregular admission wearing a Soviet wolf fur hat except during the time of summer.

You pay cash up front for everything unless, unless you’re a card carrying regular. James White and James Brown are sometimes easy going on admission and fierce to squash the fights which happen, generally around 2 AM, but often before and after.

Justin Toomey O’Azzello is the general’s manager. He has wandering hands. He is jovial and likes to tell elaborate stories about his days in the “air force”. He blames his flirtations with alcoholism over the years on bombing runs he inflicted over Bosnia. But Justin was never in the air force or in Bosnia. His hands wander though.

 

The owner of this place is a fearsome Bulgarian Jew called “Sasho”, but is real name is Alexandr Dmitrievich Perchevney.  He has a soft spot for revolutionists, debaucheries of fallen men, as well as a hard spot for undocumented woman of theatre. Misha Kishbivalli, the long haired millionaire playboy from Bulgaria also is his silent partner. The cooks are all from the tropic of Capricorn but nothing is ever very good eat except the soup or the salad; white cheese over fries or some type of Borscht which is rumored to sometimes contain menstrual blood. It is rumored also that there is tunnel running from under the club to places unknown. Some nights Misha Kishbivalli has pontificated outside of the American engineered mega tunnels that run under the country in case of insurgency or general emergency. The traffic around here is always hard to predict.

There are tall glass confectionaries of apple cider ginger vodka that sit atop the bar. There is a sign informing people that “get naked get a shot, get fucked win a bottle”.

Also that patrons must have at least three teeth to enter the establishment.

The music is always playing loud at the Mehanata Social Club where Natasha makes eyes then orders a Vodka energy drink confection, then slides up to Sebastian at the bar. He is wearing a black suit.

“It seems that we have found each other again,” she says.

“We were misbehaved I dare tell you,” he says.

“I was bad. Rude should I say? I am told I insulted you greatly.”

“That you did. You remember nothing?”

She just gives me a devilish smirk. And shakes her head.

“I drink a lot for fun. I don’t always remember my Fridays or my Saturday nights. I was told I was bad. So I’m saying the sorry. For the being of bad. What are you drinking? This is our custom.”

“Nothing? No recollection.”

“No nothing at all. Oh, you were wearing a suit that’s a different color from the suit you’re wearing now, this I remember.”

Sebastian is now in a black suit. The night she almost killed them last it was white linen.

“You never acted all that drunkenly. You were calm and in control throughout, your, shall I say, outbursts. My friends have told me that it’s too late to stop your vodka calamities from unfolding sometimes.”

“Well we all have our demons in here don’t we. I’m good. Until I fall down. I fell down those steps one night,” she says pointing to a long downstairs plummet into the downstairs floor where the Ice Cage is hidden.

The Ice Cage is a freezer box in the basement where people pay thirty a head to slam wall to wall cheap vodka over a period of two minutes. It never ends well for those who get in that cage. There is perilous flight of stairs down to the basement where they keep the stripper poles and the blue lit cage by a second bar and dance floor.

“That looks like if would hurt,” he notes.

“I don’t remember,” she smiles wide and seductively.

But that’s a silly thing to say. Seductively. She is the most beautiful woman he has ever seen with a proclivity for homicide. Describing just how beautiful she is almost doesn’t fit in a short play. Her golden locks are like a lioness. Her eyes are capable of quick swing between fierce, curious and loving. She loves to hear men say it, how beautiful she is, but beauty isn’t where a man falls from when he falls from the heart not the groin. Beauty is a thing of lust. It has no bearing on love when that love is real love and not lust with imagined feelings. Love is energy, a wave crashing over you. Sebastian has drowned several times before. He’d be very careful to use the word again. In that regard he is reckless to no end. He feels an attraction and can’t comprehend it, must be love. Previous formularies for the same emotion dictated that whatever woman resisted his affections the most adamantly and then let down her guard to an elegant seduction of deeds and art, must be love. There were loves at first sight, or interaction as well as friendships that became romances and he was unafraid to say the words again. The words often came out without his permission.

Overtime several women had accused him of bastardizing the loaded phrase via serial usage. There were over a dozen women he’d uttered it to over the course of his 28 years.

Generally after the conquest of kisses, but to a couple before.

They were all very different women of course and they all brought out very different rolls to his emotional dice. Sides to his coin being a limited idiom. Supposedly in popular fictions man or woman is supposed to have only one true love in a lifetime, to marry them or be parted from them tragically. So Sebastian was working hard by that standard, which truly in real life it can never be that simple, that limited.

“You’re really something to write about,” he says.

“Absolutely I am. And I never say sorry to men, but Ernesto said he would cancel his friendship with me if I didn’t say sorry to you. Apparently I underestimated that you are the favorite host, the dashing revolutionary saint, the darling, the grandeismo also the confidant of Rafael Ernesto and Victoria.”

“I’m just Sebastian on my good nights.”

“And on the bad nights?”

“Vasili Pveada.”

“Royal Victory? Where did you concoct this other strange and slightly atrocious moniker? Moniker, is that the right word?”

He nods slightly.

“I’m Sebastian when the drinks flow and the desire to dance returns to my hard hips. All other times I’m at war. With myself and my nature, with a world of sheep and a den of wolves. In such circumstances I require a hard Russian name, and the luck of a royal victory.”

“Hm. Well it sounds ridiculous the way you say it. I’ll call you Vasa sparingly. But, Sebastian is ok too. I’ll see what rolls better off tongue. All that other stuff, well I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

Martina the bartender comes over and gives Natasha a wink.

“This is sorry alright. Now I again reserve the right to be rude to you and forget about it later. Fair game yes?”

He looks deep into her blue eyes and gives a half smile wondering how much she really remembers. In her eyes he sees someone looking out at him below the swagger of her posture, behind her beauty is a much older beauty.

“Well aren’t you impressed with my new manners?” she asks

I find you quite a bit stunning, he thinks and almost says.

“Of course I am.”

“What are you drinking?” she asks.

“Astika.”

And she thinks, terrible piss but of course she orders him one from Martina the raven black haired Bulgarian bartender. Because Russian apologies are based on acts not words.

“Are you coming to festival?” she asks then almost casually.

There will be a four day Bohemian Festival happening Labor Day Weekend where all manner of fuckery will take place in a park in Queens called the Onderdonk Public Fields. Sasho the owner had let Victoria allow Sebastian do a benefit concert for their Haiti efforts at Mehanta a month ago. So a week from now Sebastian and his EMT, Paramedic in training comrade Jared Forgetter from California will be freelance EMTs covering the first two days of festival.

“Wait,” she pauses.

“You are working the festival as our paramedic,” she says as she presses her palm to his side burn and face side.

“Sharp as a dagger you are dorogaia,” he smirks.

She smiles with big bright eyes.

“Don’t call me dear ever again, I’m not so old. I’ll alert you that I may well come to some of it and if I fall down, drunk, I will ask for very intimate and professional service.”

“Hand pressed ice,” he promises reaching for her waist then thinking again.

“Hand pressed everything,” she demands.

“It’s at the service of all attending,” he declares.

“You are a true servant of the people,” she mocks with a wink.

“Natasha, you’re a tough act to follow.”

“You’re gonna keep calling me that are you?”

“That a problem?”

“It’s rather intimate, I don’t know if we know each other like this or that.”

“Well I suppose we can work on that over festival.”

She smiles a lovely, practiced smile.

“Vasa. Press me best you can. The risk is completely yours not mine.”

A song about the great and noble Commandant Ernesto Che Guevara by the Buena Vista Social Club comes on and she thrusts herself into his arms for a last dance.

“I knew you back in Cuba,” she whispers.

“I’ve never been to Cuba,” he replies.

She sashays him across the dance floor muscling out the other couples with her buxom. She lets him lead and he does a fairly good job.

“You dance like you’re from the Caribbean,” she says.

“But I’ve never been to Cuba,” he repeats.

He dips her slightly. A full dip might turn into quite un-romantic arms to floor plummet.

She’s a gorgeous powerful woman who will always get what she wants in the end so it seems. Except perhaps happiness which no power or money can so far buy.

“You’re good at being an Amerikanski,” she replies.

It is 4am now and efforts begin to clear the worst kind of rabble out the tavern have begun. Only card carrying regulars and lovers of staff can remain and light things up or pound things down. It’s now with the storm shudders sealed just over two dozen left lingering around the bar.

“Right never on schedule,” says Justin Toomey O’Azzello to Sasho, the burly owner smoking a cigar at the end of the ground floor bar passage way, packed up with intoxicated patrons, tight except around his circumference.

“Hasn’t changed his cap much in ten years,” Justin notes.

“I know him of course,” Sasho says without looking up, “with or without the ridiculous peasant cap.”

“He’s dancing with Natasha, good for him! She’s got great big ones.”

“He’s always dancing with Natasha.”

“You’re thinking of…” notes Justin.

“No Azello. I’m thinking exactly what I mean to be thinking. He’s always dancing with Natasha right before thing get interesting.”

“They just met boss.”

“You’re thinking of things three dimensionally and I am thinking of things fifth dimensionally and I know that when those two dance. Fucking trouble. Niggers with arms in the streets. Israeli mind games. Decapitations on camera and lynchings to boot. Lynchings and burnings of bodies.  It’s time to call up all our troops, every single man to the front.”

The lights come on and the remaining guests not vouched for are herded like drunk cats out the secondary exit on to Ludlow street until no one is left inside but the staff, a handful of regulars and of course Sasho with his cigar.

Out of the corner of his eye Sasho notices the Mexican weight staff are carrying the body of a man out of the tiny room upstairs where people go to fuck whores, or their drunk lady girlfriends, or NYU students, or he supposed less frequently, but evidently in case tonight; kill a man, drain his blood and empty his pockets. A little room to the very back of the second floor mezzanine. You can fuck or murder at the top of your lungs and no one would know.

Of the three little Mexicans none are taller than four feet a piece and they must carry drag the body down the stairs.

The corpse is pale from exsanguination.

“Into the soup?” asks Enrique from Monterrey in Mexican Spanish.

And Sasho nods. Let the dead keep eating the dead.

Chapter 4

The Atlantic Ocean Deeps, 2012ce

Black Freighter

 

Back on the monstrous underwater vessel called “the Black Mermaid”; traveling propelled by a Thorium reactor towards the United States; the extraction squad sits for black bread, herring, tea and Compot, sweet berry punch.

 

The Chinese had finished a canal across Socialist Nicaragua that was three times the size of the US controlled one in Panama.

 

But, for some reason no one in the USA even knew the thing was operational. And it was through this cognitively non-existent mega water way the Black Mermaid nuclear submarine was planning to pass on its run into American waters.

 

McIntosh is a very big guy. And so is Oleg Medved, but they are big in different ways. McIntosh is Trinidadian, dark as night. Black even for the eyes of white men that turn many shades into enemy other. He stands over six feet tall. He is by far the most conspicuous person in the unit that was being briefed one hour before deployment in a hermitically sealed fast boat unto the shores of the United States of America; a border run to a rebel base on Block Island.

 

McIntosh is muscular and very well trained in the arts of Voudoun. While his size stands out and his willingness to break the backs of any person who might lay their hands on the candidate he has taken a blood oath to protect; his main task one mission will be to allow Ms. Adelina to enter the dreams of Sebastian Adon, and keep him from unleashing his fighters in ways that might trigger a bloody, bloody bloodbath. In fact, their unit, now in massive black nuclear submarine owned by the State of Israel is hurtling toward the international maritime border.

 

Oleg Medved will be quick to tell you that “Oleg the Bear” is certainly not the nice Ukrainian Jewish name his mother gave him. But, it will be his name for now.

 

He is very likable. Gregarious in the right word! He goes nowhere without a camera and takes a lot of pictures some arty, some naughty, some of assets to note all of them quite professional. He even as Ms. Adelina giggling on the first time they met; which was a few weeks ago in Sakhalin, that cold vile place.

Oleg is the communications man for their little squad. It is his responsibility to work with his very stunning partner Ms. Yulia Romanova, to whom he sometimes called “his muse”, but alongside being a slender and sensuous brundinite she was very good at building bombs and also social engineering.

If it was the duty of Adelina Blazhennaya to enter the mind of Sebastian Adon and take control of the resistance apparatus working towards a vast national uprising set for an upcoming hidden date; no longer hidden to the N.S.A. and Department of Homeland Security; and it was the duty of McIntosh to use his spiritual training to help her enter that glorious rebel of mind of Adon’s; then it was Oleg Medved’s job to teach the resistance how to use the advanced communications and IT tools developed in the Sharashka in Seattle, Washington. This particular “Bureau of Experimental Design” was Chinese funded as said but really was bringing together some of the best offerings in the Iranian library vaults and cross collaborating with Cubans and Israelis. These were upside down cake times. And it was Yuliana job to seduce everyone they came in contact with and use her very specific charms to extract data needed. And Adelina being a powerful sorcerous shaman and considered a candidate since birth was to lead quietly the unit and ensure the outcome of prophesy foretold in a little book called the “New Social Gospel” revealed by some magnimonious higher power to Emma Solomon.

What politicians said on the international circus stage were hardly what their populations connected via the inter-web were ready to agree to, not a single year longer.

December 21^st, 2012 was to be the year according to the Mayan calendar that a great shift would occur in Humanity. Well that was not the date of the uprising. But those great spiritual cosmic forces were being factored in.

Before they departed to run the border via Black Freighter submersible they rendezvoused a week prior below the desolate Eastern coast of Russia’s Stanovoy Mountain range; on the island of Sakhalin.

They were all meeting for nearly the first time so to break the ice over vodka, Oleg the Bear got them playing a famous game of gradual interrogation called “Three Thing to Know about me.”

“Let me tell you three some things about me,” Oleg said to them back in Sakhalin, them being McIntosh, Adelina and Yuliana Romanova.  They were drinking vodka and eating black bread with herring, and salted tomatoes, goose patsy and strange orange vegetable that only grows below the soil of Russia.

“I am not a creature that will live vicariously!” he declared in English out of respect for McIntosh who spoke no Russian.

“I am not a believer like you three in some vast forces that I cannot measure hold and see. I am not here there therefore as a fact of faith in Comrade Solomon; I am here because I have money and orders and a contract to be here. And that is simple enough.”

“I was told to come and get these Americans a means to tell their story. The story of their uprising most precisely. I was told to set up these communication lines so Americans can join the global revolution underway for over two hundred years.”

“I am here too to enjoy myself and take pictures!” he declares.

“All the most reputable of foreign scholars have declared an American uprising impossible. That the nation on the mount would sooner watch sports than tune into see the world burning. As long as they keep the flights to Europe running, as long as they have their beer, football and porn, hookers for those who can afford them then they will be the grinning bastards, the opulent retards, their cities blue grounds for the world elite to harvest more women and treasure.”

“I’m coming as a highly paid tourist. I will take a million pictures; I will leave behind more than I take away,” and this was the conclusion of Oleg Medved’s little speech back in the Sakhalin Outpost.

“Have you any faith in the prophesy?” Yulia asked him. Yulia was every bit as beautiful physically as any woman Oleg had ever known, but Oleg had come to see women as accessories for men, adjuncts and muses for the doing of big things or even just fun sweaty things. And what he noticed since the Romanoff Bratva took over his contract was that he had more time to pursue his art. Money absolutely brought options.

He had a morally ambiguous relationship with Yulia founded on the principle that her partner back in Russia was not her boyfriend or her husband. These were times of fun and games with papers and loyalties.

They took a lot of pictures together; he of her and she and he from his hip. His burly part beard and broad shoulders were quite the opposite of her elegant spindle form, her black brown hair falling back and forth over shoulders as she let him capture her.

“No faith at all in anything, or anyone, certainly not the Americans,” he declared.

Yulia feigned a small, false pout.

While beauty was not a question her eyes lacked what the parapsychologist called the “Old Soul depth” of Comrade Blazhennaya.

“And you little Mosquito,” exclaimed Yulia referring to the American translation of Blazhennaya’s fictionous name, “Do you believe?”

The Israeli handlers had put them up in windswept bunker safe house in Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk waiting for the black freighter sub to arrive. The streets were empty because of the snow. Yulia and Oleg were flown in from Yekaterinburg by the Romanoff Bratva that held their contracts. Oil and Gas oligarchs. McIntosh and Adelina arrived together from Seattle.

In the cultural context of both Russia and Trinidad it was necessary to drink a lot of toasts and shots in celebration to possible; the hopeful success of their mission. And secure potentially physical privileges to be allowed of their either female leadership!

 

And before Adelina could answer Yulia Romanova’s inquiry, her face grinned with a hard and quiet smile now into the thirteenth shot of Russian Standard Vodka.

 

Her eyes began glowing a brown into turquoise, Yulia jumped in her seat, then Adelina’s eyes went grey on grey and McIntosh arched his back contorting into a Bhutto type posture, spasmodically twitching! Grinning obscenely. Oleg lurched out of his seat but then by the force of her mind and found himself saluting her.

And then Emma Solomon in husky voice of a warrior woman spoke out the mouths of Adelina and McIntosh perfectly synchronized, and that was when Yulia and Oleg realized that neither the Romanoff Bratva nor the Israelis were in charge of this ‘job’ at all.

The pair exclaimed in the voice of Solomon, “by the time we are done here there will be no more safety for the men in high towers perched atop the mountain of any faction. You were all born serfs or various types of half casted slave, but your unborn children have been assured their emancipation via deeds to come.”

 

Everyone dropped back into their seats. Oleg grinned. McIntosh smiled. Yulia looked truly scared, emotions breaking through her control of countenance. And Adelina Blazhennaya in all her petit and unassuming compact grace then uttered, “Trust that among the Americans are many who have cried out over what happened in the killing fields and sprawling slum cities. They have more going on than dancing, fornicating and erection of taller towers and bigger, brighter stadiums.”

 

“Don’t overestimate the prophesy and underestimate the Americans,” she tells them, and pours the next round of shots.

 

“America, fuck the yeah,” says Oleg!

Chapter 3

The Upper West Side, 2012ce

Penthouse J

 

                                     

So much light and so much air, still under nine hundred American, my to the chagrin of the Jews who own the building; the House Trikhovitch is rental controlled!

Penthouse J has been in the hands of the House Trikhovitch Family the early 1981 Common Era. That was not a hey-day for New York City as some newly arrived hip individuals have come to believe. Heretics.

 

By the mid-1980’s looters and vagrants were scaling the walls to steal anything not tied down.

 

Crack is wack, they say, but who do you know that has tried it, sucked the moon rocks, boom! The CIA brought it here in 1980 to help kill all the black people, get them hooked on that vile addictive substance; then arrest loosely 1 in 8 of them. The book about this phenomena is called the ‘New Jim Crow’. That’s what Pacifica Radio says anyway.

Located on 95^th and Riverside it is now one of the Z.O.B.s most luxurious and safest of safe houses. It is rent controlled and guarded by Albanians. They are warlike these Albanians. Good at moving people and things, also safe guarding things for others. They do not practice Cannibalism. There are two garden terraces that look out over the Hudson River to the North and Midtown to the south. The place has wall to wall books and a rather large aquarium filled with amphibious turtles. The building has gone coop and they are the last holdout sitting on a highly choice property paying $850.00 American a month for it. A good number of Jewish lawyers have been paid to figure out how to extract them from this property, so far unsuccessfully.

 

It was once a little more of zoo filled then filled again with animals and young girls with long legs.

 

“The most striking thing about her is the murder in her eyes which beg a man closer with the promise of bliss then deny him everything,” utters Sebastian Adon looking out north toward the palisades and George Washington Bridge.

This is the place to jump when you really want no mistakes made on the outcome.

Fleetingly he thinks of the Fort Washington district, the highest point on the isle of Manhattan. He thinks of all the times he’s wandered Fort Tryton Park with a lover holding hands. One lover in particular for after her none of the other previous ones had mattered.

But, then his mind quickly reverts to his newest fascination with the fairer of the species.

All previous lessons are lost.

On an adjacent bench in the roof garden, shirtless with a Noblisse dangling out his lips is his best friend and long-time partner Nikholai Trikhovitch.

Nikholai was briefly a police officer for a short period, and is now working for the Red Cross in a vast housing and logistics Ponzi scheme, he is also one eight the leadership of the Z.O.B. and the editor of its newspaper, “the Banshee”.

From time to time he picks up work as an unlicensed private detective helping cheating wives get their proofs of infidelity or parents find their dead kids in Newark, New Jersey.

Rudely we have introduced Nikholai without introducing the Z.O.B.; the clandestine organization of ambulance workers and West Indian entrepreneurs that bind many of our characters into a pact of lawless mutual aid. The group is best known by its clandestine newspaper and this is often called the Banshee Association, but these three letters better indicate the club’s inner circle, and its place in the international human rights movement.

“It’s a human rights version of the Westies, that’s all I can tell you for now,” says Sebastian often.

“What’s the Westies again,” people ask.

“Um, a small but ultra-violent Irish gang from the 1980’s,” he often adds then distracts.

“What’s that stand for?” people ask Adon.

“If I told you….” and then he orders a round of water shots.

So many people just call them the Banshee Association, some kind of emergency medical service proto-union alluded a recent write up about them in the blog DNA info.

Regardless. They all just called it “the club”.

Nicholai has heard all about, literally all about “the Russian Girl” as he calls her.

“This one, despite all your most base prejudices is actually Russian. Not Jewish Ukrainian like Yelizaveta or Maria,” remarks Sebastian.

Does that matter slightly? Neither can decide.

They are not Russian speakers though they are the mutt descendants of them, Sebastian and Nikh are four generations made American. Their mothers are 8^th generation Americans. Their fathers are third generation Ukrainian Jews.

 

Like Ms. Maria Parsheva and or Yelizaveta Perechenova.

 

“In Russia we were Jews, outside of Russia we are finally called Russians. We are treated the same,” once explained Yelizaveta’s father Alexandr, or Alexi if you knew him well for he was a fierce and indomitable man, but also a gregarious buffoon behind the doors of his home when no one was looking but those he mostly trusted.

 

Not that these things have anything to do with two fucks of an anything. Those were the two other Post-Soviet lovers Sebastian had taken as his closest partners in the past four years. It would be incorrect to say he dated “Russian Women exclusively”; as later inferred by the Russian photographer and Israeli gangster Oleg Medved; he had simply intimately engaged only just two, one right after the other. And that was enough for him to suspect there was something remarkable about the character of a “Russian woman”. The first, Maria who was ever calm but he did not love for she did not excite in him full passions; and the second Yelizaveta who was headstrong and wild whom he could never forget.

Nicholai remembers red headed Maria as something of a submissive Soviet Jessica Rabbit, complete with a cute little mole, slightly husky voice and marked non-fascination with much that wasn’t Russian in origin, besides Sebastian of course. She sure did hold her own on the “train job” though, that bloody mess in 2008.

Sebastian would forever view Maria as his “Betty Shabazz” as their black nationalist associate Justin Thomas described her; a strong woman who stands behind her larger than life man. Nikh just thought of her a Russian geisha, until he watched her do the train job, which we’ll have to consider the details of later. In that moment under fire her realness did come out.

Nikh remembers Yelizaveta emerging into the club picture, and Sebastian’s bedroom sometime in 2009. He remembers her at meetings and social functions as a highly mouthy Americanized blonde know it all little bitch who walked all over Sebastian publicly and privately, emptied out his pockets, put wild eyed ideas in his head, and reduced him to bawling tears when she eventually left him over her mother’s total lack of approval. She may or may not have helped them sketch out the entirety of “the Haiti job” though. And probably pushed Sebastian into joining the original ground crew that three years prior took over the Port-Au-Prince general hospital triggering the uprising there.

 

“Your women are never far from the very center of your goriest war stories,” Nikh notes.

 

The two comrades Sebastian and Nikolai had been partners in human rights defense and general thought crime since 1999. The year they did their first “job”.

 

There had been a lot of great and mediocre women and a lot of “jobs” since then. But not for nothing, since Sebastian Adon entered his “Postsoviet amorous period”, as Nikh liked to call it, well the jobs had gotten quite a lot more ambitious. The man needed an iron clad muse all assumed. In reality he simply needed to be loved so that the love he put on the world could find a singular dedication, another soul to whom he could do all his work for.

The Human Rights Westies did some wild work in Russian amorous period.

Their associate; a proud Fenian named Hubert O’Domhnaill had coined that phrase. “Human Rights Westies”, and also his “Russian Amorous Period”.

That was the Z.O.B. in a witty little simplified nugget of Irish witticism. The club now had a larger than life presence in certain regards or perhaps it should be said; circles.

Back to the task at hand.

“How do you think that bodes for longevity? More importantly love making? The full blown Russianness of her” asks Nikh.

“Referring back to this new lady being a full blown Slav?”

“Certainly. Slav is only one letter from you being a slave after all. And you and I know full fucking well that it isn’t the female who’s the slave in these flings. Those woman walk all over men with their parapsychology and high heels.”

Sebastian had come to believe that Nicholai harbored some rather bas prejudices against Russian but had never determined why. Nicholai had come to believe that Sebastian unable to love himself at all found himself enslaved by a series of party damaged dangerous women, Russia and non-Russian alike.

Sebastian had not previously thought of how Natasha acted in bed. It was as if he had known that already from first sight as she sized him up like a slave on an auction block being told to try a cocktail. She could fuck a man into pieces.

But this was not the immediate attraction. There was some great familiarity she bore to someone he used to know. And it most certainly wasn’t either of his previous Postsoviet partners.

“I bet she is most ferocious,” remarks Nikh.

An apt word for her, all things considering what transpired on that rooftop.

“I can’t stop thinking about her. She’s made more remarkable not by her sheer dangerousness, but by some feeling I have of having seen her before in another time. A true predator not even posing as a house pet! And the things she confessed to under torture.”

“Tortured her did you?”

“I did. With my words.”

“This is your main instrument of torture tovarish.”

Tovarish is former Soviet for, comrade-brother-worker. Nikholai is a Russian-Jewish-Irish-German mutt just like Sebastian. Neither of their mothers is a Jew, so the black hats would of course disavow them and they can’t marry lawfully in Israel neither. They both look like “the Russians” but they speak and they think like children of the American intelligentsia. Both of their fathers are medical professionals; Nicholai’s father is a neurologist and Sebastian’s a puller of teeth. Both fathers being Jewish Atheists and both gentile mothers being American sorceresses perhaps predisposed the young two men to “communism” as they’d be denounced as over and over. But they were not communists. They simply were two young men of privilege aligning their lives with the plight of the much trampled masses. They were only about as Jewish as their value for education.

Until the “Russian Amorous Period” they had been concerned with propaganda and human rights, but their jobs had not been ambitious.

It was the end of Nicholai’s marriage and Sebastian’s deportation from the State of Israel that got them working together again on the cause.

And it was perhaps Nicholai’s inner misery over the fate of his marriage and Sebastian’s inner misery over being denied a homeland he’d imagined was his destiny; that put them back together; left them open to suggestion.

And let us all be frank that women can give men any number of tremendous suggestions and wield a power that shapes a man’s deeds. Perhaps you could say women, with more love for the world and more investment in its future can direct the violent ego driven nature of men.

And in the past four years the Z.O.B. accomplished things no one had though possible. Like organize a newspaper, which organized a general billing strike in EMS, which lead to a trade union of all the cities EMS, which build an ambulance guerrilla movement on the island of Haiti; and developed a training blueprint for international medical guerrillas. All was poised to smash the trafficking and prostitution infrastructure of the biggest Apple on Earth.

“She didn’t tell me everything, but enough to conclude she is a victim of sorts. Another dark Post Soviet past to unravel all of her callous behaviors and the smile she hides behind.”

They had toppled backwards together toward the precipice and in the free fall he had pulled her with him to death only averted because of certain laws of physics. Well it was impossible to truly know, Yelizaveta the scientist could have explained it but she was long gone these days.

Rather than fall into a pit of death, his grabbing on to her altered the trajectory of plummet. She had made every effort to follow his deadly command and rather than go through with it honorably he had tried to take her with him.

How American.

“So what the fuck happened on that roof?” Trickovitch asks.

“Well we landed on top of each other half off the edge panting and realizing that she had almost just killed me and I had almost just taken her with me.”

“That’s hot. And by hot, I mean real fucking stupid.”

“Well, anyway. So panting and looking down into seventeen stories of death she grabs my hand and bites down into my right shooter.”

Sebastian shows the wound.

There were a literal ring of red bite marks around his right index finger.

“I think I know her from before,” he finally admits.

“You’ve always been a sick fuck. And you need to not let fourth dimensional things interfere with the growing war effort.”

“Well then she calms down and we do this kind of half swoon, half reevaluation of an enemy and she tells me that she paid 25,000 dollars to come to America and have an arranged marriage set up. She said she had to work the debt off and the work was highly unpleasant. And she told me she will help me identify the biggest trafficker targets in the city. ”

“Don’t project and don’t believe her lies. You always seem to tell a tale always darker than is. The world is evil enough on its own comrade story teller. As for her offer to help? Why? What’s in it for her? I think you should ask where this woman came from, ask why she ended up meeting you at this stage. You know, right before the biggest job to date. Don’t think with your dick. You’re not her type. The whole thing looks fucked at every angle of evaluation.”

 

“She told and made most illicit references to what she did to come here. Perhaps she wants out of who holds her paperwork. Or maybe something else.”

“I’m not sure she did anything but prove you’re easier to kill than the rumors suggest, you’d both been drinking and we all know just about anything can come out of a Postsoviet woman’s mouth drunk or sober. We both know all women lie.”

“Just about anything true, but given the entirety of the encounter, it seemed she was alluding to her own imprisonments and debts. Whatever their current state might be.”

“But are they true? All women lie and these Soviet women lie highly convincingly as if it were story telling as art or parapsychology. You magnify and exaggerate all suffering to fit in the contexts of your often convoluted radical politics. You’ve done so time and again. Remember your truest partner Ms. Hali Vik, the one you quite nearly married? Before you dated and slept with former Soviets in endless succession you did date and slumber erotically with Americans for a time.”

 

“Nikholai. I had two partners after Hali. I know what you’re getting at. But really man, there was Maria and then there was Yelizaveta. And there were a couple short stands in between, but they meant so little and felt like so nothing that I all but stopped my fucking for fun.”

“Hali Vik was the kind of woman you need to find, not these cold, possibly morally vacant Russians. They will never understand you and they’ll never join this cause,” says Nikholai.

He’s referring to the only woman that anyone ever thought had made a realistic and well suited partner for Sebastian Adon. He’s also referring to the “Lowell Job”. Which had been a messy over exertion of well-intentioned violence due to the fact that Hali Vik, had gotten herself in a lot of trouble, but Sebastian may well have made up stories in his head too.

Well anyway, Hali was safe in Italy now and while there may have been a little bit of torture utilized to get her there, well nobody was dead and buried in Lowell that didn’t deserve somewhat to be dead, burned and buried in Lowell.

Nikholai and Sebastian being best friends talked a lot about their women. But there was one woman that Nikholai new precious little about and that was Emma Solomon, but he was correct that Hali Vik the only American was in fact the only person he might well have married in a normative sense of what that word means. For in the State of Israel, he was in paper work still quite married to Emma Solomon.

But bigamy of paperwork is not the same as bigamy taken to heart.

It was these four women that had made him believe in the struggle as if it were love? No, only Emma did, and fine perhaps also Yelizaveta in a completely separate way. There had many lovers. He had well ripped the heart out of young Polish comrade Joanna who loved him as no other woman had or perhaps could but to whom he felt youthful nothing. But that was decade ago.

Nikholai had been married to a Syrian-Italian-Puerto Rican modal for seven years named Krissy. They divorced and then she completely disappeared. He had been fucking and drinking his way towards oblivion lately. He felt nothing anymore now that Krissy was gone to god only knows where.

“I am only suggesting slowness and loads of needed caution is required are you to obsess, I repeat the word obsess! Further about another woman you meet by the brink of your crazy pursuit of wild partly damaged women. Joanna was great to you but you never felt anything and that destroyed her and perhaps forever cursed you if you believe in the dealings of Erzuli Danto. Hali Vik was the closest thing I’ve ever seen to you to being unadulterated happy for a brief fuck of time. But let’s not forget just how much we had to burn down and knock around over that little lady, and that you may have saved her life but she well near killed you. Maria Parsheva was a loyal little Russian geisha, but between various factors that we need not rehash, that too was doomed. Though, on the train, what a little gangster she was! Perhaps you did faster more far reaching organizing so moved as you were by Ms. Yelizaveta Perechenova, but you have such a way of making women into these wild muses and then yourself into tragic fucking art. And to be frank, all the women you take as your serious partners, well none of them have fathers and all of them of dark pasts. Except Joanna who you destroyed. Poor noble woman. Which was rather sad because none of them loved you as fearlessly as she.”

Yelizaveta had a brilliant father. But he was highly bipolar and the ambulance men carried him off all the time, like every other year. So it went to reason “that the daughter of a bipolar man carried away by ambulance men should perhaps not marry a bipolar ambulance man.”

Sounded logical now, but not in 2010. Her mother forbid them to see each other and a woman with only one functional parent will follow the will of her mother in the end.

“Natasha is a continent on to herself. I ask you not compare and contrast my various past uses of love and longing. I can’t even truly say that I know her well enough to speak anything like love to her. I simply felt like I was in the presence of…”

He almost said, ‘his murdered wife’ but he decided that Nikholai would then really mock him.

“You love dangerously and inappropriately. Just remember that Ms. Hali Vik was also the closest time, in my memory to you being killed by another man over a woman. I suspect that is something you are secretly craving in some reminiscence of an older life.”

“Well maybe she hasn’t got a man. Maybe she hasn’t got a dark past. I’m very hard to kill as you know. Natasha has already tried.”

“You might have easily both died. And truly this time for nothing!”

“She claimed to Raphael Ernesto she remembers nothing.”

“A black out as a reconciliation for your near arranged murder? Neat, so if she had killed you she wouldn’t even have remembered.”

“A black out woman hides a dark past in my experience.”

“I fail to see what at all is attractive about her willingness to murder you.”

“I’ve always fighters, but this is something surreal. They say she has been coming to the Mehanata Social Club for a little under two years. Never pays, always leaves alone. Drinks like she needs to part the Red Sea via consumption. I’ve never seen her at the club before.”

“That my friend is only called the thing called too much trouble. She is not what you or we need right now.”

Sebastian would perhaps not have noticed her because for the past year and a half he had weaned himself off that den of Bulgarian sin and former Soviet misery by convincing himself no woman on earth could be as angelic and pure as his Yelizaveta, his last and most imperfect love. He pulls glasses on to make a mythology out of the world starring him and his overbearing sense of mission. Often with an unwitting female who tries to love him, but he’s from a house called trouble.

 

“The trouble is you’re not a hopeless romantic,” says Nikh getting a second cigarette fired up, up off the first, “It’s far worse that you’re a real romantic. You usher in the 18^th century for the coldest of post-Soviet hearts. Some of these poor girls have to learn how to protect themselves from whether you’re sure you’re serious or not. More precisely you need to protect yourself from your projections of love and the cowboy like way you shoot cupid’s arrows off in your artistic yet unpredictable shifting of moods.”

“I’m deadly serious with this one, and will not weigh its risks against the others.”

“All of them. It’s either a blessing or a curse you love early and love often as you do. I suspect a curse upon your own well-being. You seem to enjoy these unstable, untenable trysts as if pursuing the romantic ideal of poorly constructed epics might necessitate your own energies to live a more basic life. Not that anything you do is basic, but I suspect you’d always be happier as a wandering poet than as a loosely grounded resistance fighter. ”

“I have no idea anymore. I haven’t written a truly good poem in many years. If quite a little good art was made under Yelizaveta it was because she asked for it and returned it. They are all quite different loves. One loves the struggle because one always thinks it noble, or heroic and the cause just and the suffering of our people, all people immense. One loves a woman because she emboldens him. Makes him a real man by showing love as something justifying of our human condition.”

“Different Sebastian’s have said differing things on the matter over this decade mind you. You must look yourself in the mirror more often or more deeply. For one thing you’re too lean for my liking and you hair is too short it means you aren’t eating. That is always a giveaway that you are about to do something reckless. Police and imprisonment tend to follow old friend.”

“You’re being a Jewish mother now. More praying is perhaps in order too?”

“I certainly don’t care what you pray to this week, but you do need to eat more, drink less and certainly not be chasing around a woman you hardly know. And for the love of god: You just got over Ms. Yelizaveta and were beginning to sleep around more casually, so please just don’t get drunk on any more roof tops. Just be cautious of what a wild woman you are dealing with. And please, whatever you do, just don’t tell her you love her until you can pronounce her last name. And have done the homework on the skeletons in her closet. This is a Russian fucking woman after all. They play no games, not with one damn thing.”

Nikholai then asks Sebastian quite specifically, “What really happened up on that roof?”

Sebastian blows out smoke.

“I died and was reborn, like the last few times,” quietly responds Adon puffing his cigarette, “we toppled to our very deaths. And miraculously awoke panting in the alley way my penis in hand. Walked out as if nothing happened. I put her in a cab.”

“And you think you see the soul of your dead wife in her, is that the story?”

“Nikholai please do not judge me.”

But Nikholai Trickovitch does not judge him because he too knows what it is like to bear forced separation from one you love. He simply is aware of something that Sebastian Adon is not because Sebastian is “sleeping” and Nikh is completely awake.

That a full blown uprising is but three weeks away. And that enemy knows that the Z.O.B. has helped organize it.

From which one could infer that the enemy will be moving in on any of the known leadership. And although security culture is tight as drum; Sebastian is a known operator no matter how many faces or deaths her passes through. And that there is no reason in the world why one of the leaders, albeit even one “put to sleep” for his own safety should be getting into a tryst with some new dangerous Russian blondie.

 

Who in all likelihood, coming out of nowhere at this precise time; is undoubtedly an agent of the Mossad. The Mossad or even far worse, the secret police, the ruthless agents setting up to die all who resist the iron heel of the Oligarchy.

Chapter 2

Pacific Ocean Deeps, 2012ce

Black Freighter

 

 

Far below the waves of the black blue Pacific, a vast underwater leviathan of a craft named the “Black Mermaid” hulks its way gradually toward the surface. The vessel is forty miles off the Western coast of Nicaragua, sloshing bashing water; cascading aggressively all of these things as its crew makes way toward “New Shoreham”; a tiny settlement on Block Island.

And, says McIntosh, a member of the Trinidadian Special Forces, “A quite stupid name for a town overtaken by the simple name of its own island,” and he knows about such things being a Trinidadian.

Adelina Anatolievna Blazhennaya with her soft auburn hair tied behind her head has just graduated from a prestigious Sharashka in Seattle, Washington. This particular “Bureau of Experimental Design” was paid for by the Chinese and therefore into her studies were incorporated the most elite techniques for parapsychology cultivated over 4,000 years of Middle Kingdom, as well as appreciations for those aspects of the Mezo-Americans.

Shortly after graduation she took the instance of her America husband’s infidelity to promptly divorce him and renegotiate her contract to the higher authorities to which she came under employ.

She’s doing her make-up, red lips on beauty. She is very agile looking, big brown eyes and light cedar brown hair; she looks through the mirror into the eyes of Emma Solomon, her commanding officer watching her from the portal door.

 

         “The greatest trouble with Russian men is that they are animals, though quite good at being men in all other regards were we all measured by our fuck and our fight, our bite and our valor. The greatest trouble with Americans is that while good at being gentlemen, in many regards they fail at being men for they are quick to make and break promises,” reads Emma Solomon from a book with a grey and black leather binding.

 

“I have never read his writing deeply, but I hear from others that he makes sweeping cultural generalizations throughout his novels. Many of which are harder on Americans than is fair and certainly reflect that he did indeed grow up here and not somewhere else,” Adelina says while painting her face for war.

“And I don’t think you can lump us and them into simple gender roles, mentalities and generalizations,” Adelina adds.

“I’ve read them all,” says Emma Solomon, “he’s my husband after all, and they get better as the serial progresses. The poems I cannot stand.”

“I’ve never read his poems either.”

“You’re missing nothing. Think communist Dr. Seuss with a slight swagger of Mayakovsky.”

“Well I think highly of his contributions to the resistance. I could give a damn about his artistic abilities. Husband?”

“Well a long story is a long story, but suffice to say the need for documents was once involved.”

“Ah. Well that doesn’t concern me either.”

“You’re a wonderful creature dear Comrade Blazhennaya, your work will not be so hard. We have to activate a chain of cells he’s built up and down the coast. I will see to that, but you have a sensitive task. You must make him love you and trust you mostly with a mobile phone and a radio.”

“I know my job.”

“My husband has a lot of potential.”

“So I’ve read.”

“The Oligarchy knows the general date for the rising. Numerous operators were compromised due to sloppy work on the American end, not his fault, but it’s locked down tight as a drum over here.”

“Tight as a drum?” asks Adelina, though trained a linguist and a parapsychologist she sometimes misses vernacular which comes out of hip hop.

“The resistance movement has evaded the American State Security apparatus for twenty years. Everything is going according to plan.”

“According to prophesy?” asks Adelina who can converse with the higher power when she feels she must, but trusts completely in the Baraka, the Devine charisma of Emma Maya Sorieya Solomon, the hidden candidate for Messiah of their generation.

Emma nods and places her left hand on Adelina’s shoulder.

“Little darling, just stay out of the New York City.”

Adelina looks at her bulky satellite watch made by an Israeli company called “Superior Alien Military”. In eight hours’ time she and her “unit” will be launched from this briny abyss via a hermetically sealed fast boat, they will then land on Block Island and be taken to the Hygeia Hotel; given new identities and “Americanized in the greater Boston area”.

 

“I’m not afraid of anything you know,” states Adelina to Emma.

“I know you’re not, beautiful. That’s why you were selected to keep him under control. His mind is now in a dark and treacherous place. He’s been in the field for too many lives.”

“I will not fail you Commander Solomon,” she says.

“I know little sister,” she smiles, “And when it gets crazy in Babylon you can rely on the rest of your unit. Oleg the Bear, Yuliana Romanova, and McIntosh are, well suffice to say we don’t use anything but the best minds when we’re this close to the edge.”

 

Scene 1

Manhattan, 2012ce

Financial District

 

Blast the damn heat, for my brow drips.

 

For in New York it gets so hot in the late of August, a swelter box most people of any means flee to their dachas in Strong Island to avoid.

 

Dawn is now rising, breaking and expanding on the roof of the District Financial and with the last manic burst of energy being expended by one of our antagonistic protagonists, Sebastian Vasili Adon, over a huge bottle of illegally imported Basque white wine, tells old danger tales to those who will and can still listen.

It is the second to last weekend of August and soon summer will end.

Bottle uncorked and the debacle of his oratory may unfold.

A fake gold watch dangles off his left wrist as he enunciates his wild tale with his hands, although it is known he is only one half a Yid. Covering his dark brown hair cut short for summer is a brown beret newsy cap, called a skally cap, if you were a rude boy from the two tone army like he was. It’s very 1943. So very neo-hipster or proletarian-chic!

Behold the faces of off duty urban partisans and gypsys who refuse the gift of sleep!

On the 17th Story roof deck of the old converted print house on 140 Nassau Street, slim and enthusiastic Europeans Lia Monteleone and Victoria Christiana Lynch Contreras snap off photos and clink glasses bantering on care free flirtations and intoxications.

Lia takes off all her clothing for money, she’s a dancer. In another life she’ll hopefully take up photography.

Raphael Ernesto Lynch Contreras, a Peruvian revolutionist is baby faced with flowing black hair with but a couple salt and pepper streaks is the husband of Victoria. He sits with his dear friend Sebastian and a ravishingly beautiful Russian dvotchka named Natasha and attempts a boozy mediation as the two evil eye each other viciously across a low wooden table.

She has big beautiful crazy person eyes the color of the Caspian Sea. Adon’s soulful orbs are auburn hazel slowly becoming green with sleep deprivation progressing.

The stare down is punctuated by accusations of impropriety.

The two are both “aspiring paramedics”. Ernesto is their introducer and is a frivolous and womanizing artist tamed as of lately by his marriage to Victoria.

Adon is in school to push away death with needles and relative high voltages. Natasha is partially knowledgeable on how to pour away sadness and sometimes temper internal evils with liquid poison and that which she doesn’t know how to mix she bluffs, knowing men are staring at her eyes, amongst other things.

He a brunette normally clad in a dark brown leather jacket and brown skally cap beret. Tonight he is in a white linen suit with his hair cut short. It’s a vaguely irregular look for him that he hasn’t pulled out in some time.

The reason he is dressed like that is because prior to his arrival at the Mehanata Social Club he had been at a White Party, a river cruise of wild Latin salsa based gallivanting circumventing the Isle of Man.

Natasha is a siren to which many men have smashed there ships with a proverbially loaded firearm called her fearsome wits to survive and the belligerencies that pour from her mouth when intoxicated. She captures much attention anytime she steps in the room and onto a dance floor. Her style is quite Postsoviet in its cut and colors. There is well put together sashay and flurry to her movements to be sure. And she has an unnerving look, a cross between a size up and seductive stare, a dismissive dart of her eyes to cut men down.

An affectionate rendering of Natasha is Natasha, and this is what Sebastian has been calling her all night. They had been introduced several months before, but both had been too drunk to remember. They both are regulars but he more on Saturday and she more on Friday, but without rhyme or reason despite being regulars for over three years, they had rarely crossed paths before.

Natasha is a stunning high octane mix of wild blonde partisan with her azure silver eyes darting between warfare and wanting; and the bright eyed curiosity of a child in a large affluent glass and steel playground. She is wrapped in a tight to the curves light brown leather jacket. She is never cold on the outside.

They are locked in scowling death match of heavy unguardedly hostile words and also a few thinly veiled threats.

He said “don’t smoke in my father’s house,” so she smoked in his father’s house, so he had to yank the fucking smoke out her pouty lips and talk harshly about throwing her out in a cab back to Brighton. Then he “classlessly” handed her forty bucks for that cab, even though it’s really a fifty dollar ride, and more if you tip. Which is against all Russian cultural context.

To which she debased him as a useless man living off his parent’s wealth. And said never in her life had she been so offended by the callous, pompous behavior or an American dog such as himself.

“Less than a dog!” she proclaims.

To show he wasn’t a push over to bombshell, star lit scarlet that no one probably ever said no to he did all that, also because he’d been drinking a lot. And he’s not always the gentleman that he presumes himself to be. Letting any person show such appalling disrespect was cheapening. Men make up all kinds of stories about the motives of beautiful women. Her light up was belligerent and far beyond any international definition of respecting the host. And that’s pretty much how she rolls. Over anyone she feels like.

And yet because she is stunning and pouty and her heels take too long for her to fasten, in effort of perestroika he’s asked he to stay and ten they all ended up on the roof to catch the sun rise.

Now he’s telling a dangerously insensitive story. And she is again beyond appalled.

Sebastian Adon removes his cap and says,

“The job, and operation; call it whatever you want; involves calling on high end prostitutes whose numbers one acquires in the association of men of your former Soviet back ground, mostly at the Banya.”

Banya is Russian for bathhouse. In the past few years Sebastian has been bathing with Russians regularly to wash increasingly dirty hands from stakes that keep mounting and knock around work that just keeps coming.

He loves the way music sounds in Russian. Though he knows under three dozen phrases and cannot even read Cyrillic.

She watches his words take form with her big predatory eyes.

They peer right into you, and they are not always as happy as the smile she plasters on so regularly for photos. That is acquired art in itself. Either they are blue or they are grey or they are silver when sleep deprived, but they are not the eyes of a spectator.

She participates actively in all she observes.

Maybe not rules men try and make or overly hard work though.

“So shortly after they arrive and give you some fictitious cover, you take a coat and as they walk in and settle on a price that will involve no bit of touching at all. Then, you tell them that they’re being filmed and recorded, but that you’re not a cop, agent or a Mossadnik or who-ever dangerous, you’re not there to entrap for absolutely anything. You tell them you’re an abolitionist”

Puff, puff passes along this ill-conceived venture.

“You tell them to call down to the pimp’s driver, and say your John is layered out like Charlie Sheen.”

“Tiger-blooded,” notes Raphael Ernesto.

“Then you make tea. You tell them a story, a personal tale about why you are not a dog or a pig, and how you came to hate this line of work because you had loved someone forced into it. You convince them to take and perhaps disseminate to other persons a number to arrest traffickers and pimps, also to get trafficked and victimized people the resources they need to escape. They get half the job cash for nothing but a number and a way out. They get a number on a card, you ask them to put it in their phone. Eventually, the poor soul either will pass the number or report it directly to the pimps, but you force a violent hand and spread the knowledge that there is in fact a networked way to escape slavery. It’s cheaper and more effective than lobbying or political routes, we must go directly to the salves and assure them there is safe way out.”

Her jaw drops.

“They would kill you just for that,” she spits out.

“For bullshit man! For a lot less than bull shit. A number! I spit on your American number. For insulting low grade bullshit that changes nothing. You will die, they will kill those dear to you, and nothing at all will be fixed about anything, not one woman will walk free” retorts Natasha in all of the glory of women few if anyone has ever said no to.

So, he predetermines.

Not a debutante, not a true New Russian. All the regality of being born all Slavic, but outside the great dividing highway that loops the capital separating the have everything’s from the have nothings or have only little something’s. Being born so radiantly beautiful and tough and Russian after the triumph of Capitalism has left her charming and capable of fighting. But she is far from Russia with love, rootless and floating in glittery fairy tales that don’t expel the hardships of her new country.

“I am not afraid to die for a thing I believe in sweetness, I am not afraid to try and save only one life at the cost of all my American privileges” he flatly retorts.

“He has such American beliefs!” She mocks.

Ernesto always has applauded his radical specifications and foreign adventures over the past three years they’ve known each other and well before. He’s done his trench time, Ernesto. He can recognize a latent revolutionist, from a sleeping one, from a broken man reborn as a hero.  Palestine, Egypt, Haiti, the worst of Europe too and the street battles to occupy the District last fall that went so bloody poorly playing out in split skulls and tear gas all over national television.

“I guess you’ve never had to work for anything completely or work to keep something you fought hard for, so you give away most easily. Your life seems so easily offered, to take if you ask me,” she snaps at his bait.

“Hey, lady, you are insulting to my dear friend and our gracious host,” sternly interjects Raphael Ernesto, “This man, you have no idea what he’s been through to back up these words.”

His mind, his name, his face.

His mind flutters something about heroics under siege in land place called Haiti. His face; vague recollection of doing his job over and over again in bad situations.

A few many baton cracks in the Gulliver. I few to many months in cells.

He’s given lots and lots of militant speeches but never done a very violent action with his hands. Like, Ernesto had to in Peru.

His name? Sebastian is only one of his names He’s piloted an ambulance for the Fire Department for three years in all the city’s worst districts. He has traversed the Levant as Zachariah trying to free slaves and end occupation, the American occupation of Israel and the Israeli Oligarchy’s occupation of Palestine. Vasa, he’s dissident poet.

He’s told people of their human rights over and over, until not over, and over again. He delivered a baby once, helped do it many more times!

She could care less. Bold wild statements don’t get first impression credential checking.

She was appalled by the rude cigarette yank and further appalled by his cynical bourgeoisie story about call girls passing itself off as completely vain and stupidly incompetent activism.

She offers to kill him.

He obliges her. Thinks she’s bluffing.

I’ll kill this over privileged American hypocrite too, maybe she thinks. A civic duty to my new country and old country too. Mostly, she maintains a mighty level of the not giving of a shit. She’s also on an off day. She only remembers every other night out when she drinks. The rest of them a blur black haze punctuated with irregular black and blue marks.

“From falling down stairs.”

If she kills him, the tragedy, as far as a memory, will belong to no one.

Ernesto implores her to be more, “Suave, Suave”. To be more calm and “Tranquillo.” The famous Peruvian revolutionist now a New York low key digital disk jockey cannot even barely modulate Sebastian’s posturing and Natasha’s swaggerous, murderous taunting.

Now they’re waving invisible pistols at each other’s’ faces like wild Middle Easterners. They fuel a veritable bonfire of ego and prideful feuding.

Ernesto urges Victoria and Lia Monte to intercede but they are taking lots and lots of pictures and have seen Natasha make a properly rude scene before, of things when men, “get smart”.

“When men get smart with me I cut them apart,” she lives by that.

The job of any and all men as far as she is concerned is please her by makings sure her drink is never empty and that life is a series of taken care of attractions, to make her life more easy. He has failed at both in his utter self-serving arrogance.

“So you’re gonna kill me or just threaten on about it?” says Sebastian secretly hoping she might actually kill him. He hasn’t felt so alive anyway since the last girl ripped his heart out with a dagger in a long game of masochistic sex coupled with co-dependent longing.

There was nothing healthy about his love life lately.

Even the use of the word bids a mind of shame for perpetually having to beg back affections from those he’s thought he’d die with or for.  A year ago his previous partner finally cut him off and the struggle, the paramedical one and human rights one and abolitionist one, all firmly linked; that struggle itself has overwhelmed him lately with his purported role, his Icarus sky walled expectations, his place in the chain of command remaining unclear. Truly only the existential problems of an overly privileged first world revolutionist, as Yelizaveta used to declaim. His last six months have been a black hole of studies on how to beat back death with drugs and electricity. There is also a lofty, high risk plot underfoot to smuggle himself and small team into Aleppo to train Syrian Free Army combat medics. But what faction! There are over forty groups of fighters there. All predict a poor end to such a venture, but the same neigh Sayers neighed the same on Haiti.

When he sleeps he barely dreams, when he dreams its nightmares about the city of Port-au-Prince or about the last woman he was foolish enough to cry love for whose name was Yelizaveta Perechenova. Who left him eventually for a young physics student and with the declarations of his madness by her mother were the nails in the coffin of their two years of life together.

Something like that.

A veritable blur of a broken dreams to lay down his irrational struggle and pursue medicine, choose life over vain pretenses as a prelude to inglorious martyrdom. His life has taken a turn for the worst now several times “believing in things”. “Being a hopelessly real romantic.”

His studies are narrower now.

He is enrolled in a one year paramedic upgrade program. He had though to jump country, apply for work abroad. He was ordered to hold post in the city and keep working. Lt. Moishe Klein, the orthodox Jewish lieutenant on the grave yard shift of Station 31 Cumberland outpost, a sympathizer of the resistance arranged his hasty enrollment in the paramedic academy of Methodist Hospital on Kings Highway.

Or perhaps better focused on saving the individual life here and there; not the world in its totality. Which no one asked of him or expected that he deliver on.

His weekends are soaked in vodka and with wine, sometimes one poured in the other. And the booze keeps his eyes closed to certain things. And now he’s drunk now again. Acting poorly in the company of a Russian woman, yet again.

Kill me for the sake of it, he hopes. It’s what the world would surely not mind all too much. Drunken thinking of an angry man who’s been hit in the head a few times.

“So you’re gonna kill me or just threaten on about it?”

“Absofuckinglutely,” she says.

And then before drunken Ernesto who is now very, very drunken, and also very, very tired, after spinning all night can talk them down they’re up a ladder up to the 18^th story, more of a top, Easterly deck on the 17^th story roof with a deep and deadly edge of death into an 18th floor down plummet with the Geary Building looking out, a million cubicles of an upper class aquarium. Like a Sorcerer’s tower of steel rising up to the East at them by proximity of less than three times an alley way.

 

A great setting for a hastily arranged assisted suicide.

They’re now boxing. Natasha is properly in boxing school. She strikes at him hard then harder. Die you fucking Amerikanski, you damn wasted one, she thinks.

 

Ernesto and Lia and Victoria who are always so very stylish, now have stopped their art making over white wine and look up with some very now real concern. Not a bird or a plane could have killed him so far. Not spy agencies or police forces with much bigger better threatening fish to fry.  A beautiful woman might get close enough.

“You don’t want to live here forever?” she taunts him.

Their boxing and taunting has them perilously near the edge to the pit.

The roof deck is a glamorous lit up garden trip into the sweet hereafter where one might fall dead on to the front porch of New York’s highest high rise residential where the rent is now 40,000 Amerikan a month on the month before.

The pit is just a dead drop, it’s a Fire code ordinance for building in late 19^th century, a ventilation shaft for the 19 real story print house now a new riche-intelligentsia-queer-Jewish coop on the districts northern most edge.

She is striking hammer sickle hits and he is just taking her hits and then, then it comes.

“Hit me to kill me! Just knock me into that fucking pit and make a good inglorious end to it all,” he swagger demands in bellow.

 

The most beautiful woman he has ever seen is just a side story in his own mind to his own tragedy. She cocks back and doesn’t blink.

Natasha hits him with one big shove and he tumble crumbles backwards into the abyss.

Kill me he beckons and then, she tries so really kill him.

 

As he plummets back, he grabs out and yanks her with him in a tumble off the very ledge of the roof, plummeting to a certain death in the ally way below.

 

Prologue

 

 

Set in the Republic of Haiti, 2020ce

 

“What in two fucks do you know about being in love my tovarish,” she once asked me.

 

At the time I gazed off into the night. One does not even fully comprehend the depth of incorrigible things a truly Russian woman knows how to say to an American man in eight different tenses of a lover spurned. She now says I am a terrorist! Or at best a baltering zealot.

A frank and unrepentant potential killer of other men. But you cannot always trust women. They often lie to protect the things they cherish. Their children. Also the future.

I was not always such a man.

No ideological calling or message from the unseen put me on this path. I don’t kill because of mere ideas. Or because of poetic visions rationalizing some means to a so-called “better world”. The terror we have unleashed was born of misdeeds perpetrated against me and mine as well as against you and yours. It is no abstraction to embrace violence when an aggressor tramples on your face. It comes quickly or it remains unthinkable. I have no time these days for pacifists and certainly not for cowardly sheep. Turning the other cheek to these people we are fighting will get you far, far worse than killed. I have bloodied my hands before as a savage avenger and certainly soon will do so again. But, I don’t kill alone like some deranged fanatic.

Oh no. We laid an elaborate plan and have subsequently received extensive support.

We are not patriots or “freedom fighters” in the traditional sense of what that means in Geneva. This is not our land, nor through the fog of war do I see freedom as our figurative or even literal ends. Our means however will certainly not absolve us in the text books of history whether we be the winners or the losers. Cloaks and daggers have long been used to abet our cause. But, the ripping of human flesh with sharp blades in close quarters and the bursting of bullets though our enemies black hearts will perhaps tarnish our family names and simultaneously bar us all from the gates of any reputable heaven. I have left men hanging in trees! But, I’m not one to believe in fairy tales. They will have to torture me for a very long time, and they will not get much for their troubles. Neither my motive nor my names are easy answers. And you probably won’t be able to pronounce it anyway.

I am not acting alone. If I am a so-called “terrorist” committing acts of semi-selective murder I am alongside many fellow blood soaked bandits. Our cause has a certain appeal to at least a Breuklyn few. And if she’s right about me not knowing how to love well, or at all, I absolutely do know how to struggle until the lights in my eyes go out.

 

We are called the zealots after all.

 

We are hunting vicious killers. We are grinding down these sly villains where they hide, cutting bits and pieces from this rapist ilk. We work thanklessly to remove a large array of very-very cruel, bad men from the earth. Vile parasites that suck our blood and steal our meager earnings and reduced us all to slavery. Along with their secondary officers, tertiary command of vicious enforcers, and basically anyone that gets in our way. And if we cut our way through enough of these people we will then begin to lay hands on the oligarchy.

Let it not be said that before we picked up our daggers and rifles we did not first spend a good many years trying all other means of more civilized change making. I loved my people, and more specifically my family, before I hated our nemesis and the cruel minority of oligarchs and war criminals that so hold humanity on a vast plantation under their iron heel, but also our common apathy.

 

Or called in Russian; Raspizdia.

 

One who doesn’t give a fuck about their fellow human beings?

 

No giving of fucks!

 

Amid the thankless grind I see the face of a young woman following us where we go to commit murder. She follows just behind to save lives and heal. A physician who found herself trapped on this perhaps morally ambiguous road we travel as ruthless knock around highway men. Or so she claims. And every time I pull that trigger I fly further from the place I was boron and the good man that she once thought I was. Were it not for her, I’d have forgotten I still had one soul left with which to barter.

Our irregular military column of hearty partisans clears a rocky ridge. Forty men and one woman, all clad in dark grey or dark blue multi-forms, wrapped in tactical bandoleers carrying the tools of our respective trades—murder and healing. We men are here to kill. The solitary doctor amongst us with her implements touches the collateral of their war, but has sworn not to treat a soldier. On either side.

That morning we look for one bad man in particular.

It’s just before dawn when we finally catch up with his trail in the barrens of this dusty, dying and terrible place. The poplar trees sway heavily in the rustling morning wind, which offers our lonely column no real relief. We mill about gauging reactions, sipping gingerly on our water. A few lay down their battle rigs but keep their dusty irons always on the ready. We are hard men in rough grey khaki stained with sweat and grizzle but never tears. Some wear black or dark blue partisan caps. Others have checkered sand-gypsy scarves about their shoulders or brow. Most carry various calibers of former and Postsoviet rifles. Our doctor, she still wears a lab coat, a blue uniform, and wears a dark green military cap.

We march on.

 

The official name of our column is the Z.O.B.-Dublin Detachment also called the Fighting 99th. It is composed of Shtarkers, Shatahs, Fenians as well as a popery of the Haitian peasants from across the southland. If you’re not familiar with these particular edged colloquialisms, well I suggest you look them up in the appendix of exotic foreign vernaculars. Suffice to say they are just different ways to designate a “bad motherfucker.” Except Fenian, that is an Irish political nationalist ideology of the early 18^th century.

We go one foot after another. We walk with a heavy defiance, with cold eyes that view the barrens like hungry wolves. We are each a raw material mined from a foreign conflict, smelted at some point on Breuklyn’s coast into the violent war machine we now compose. Sun-burnt freckled faces, which had first turned cherry red in the glare of the Caribbean high noon. Dread-locked islanders with accents well edged for song. Also some post and former Soviets with shifty morals and a small band of self-proclaimed Yids that never lift a finger on a Shabbos but refrain from emasculating headwear. And the native people that had not asked us to come here look. I suppose they wonder if we foreign faces are to be the turners of a bloody tide or the worst harbingers of an impending catastrophic event. At this juncture the book is still open.

 

We march to this dead place to bear grim witness.

 

War on this island fortress, and war in the world of man have burnished us into unrepentant murderers that have killed and will surely kill again. That we kill to stave off an even greater genocide by murdering its perpetrators, is the rhetoric we hide our murder behind. And if each of us came to this wasteland below the Choke Mountains beyond Illubador out into the contested borderlands about the Valley of Antimonite with some noble pretense to liberate the Haitian people from the iron heel of the MINUSTAH and the NGO Republic and their Maccoute or FRAPH-rapist militia bag man; then periodically, it is the low volume atrocities like this one, which sometimes take the greatest toll on our resolve.

Roped up from the highest palm tree visible to all we men and single female of the Z.O.B.-Dublin detachment is the ghastly site of a hanged man we all knew and like a brother loved. A thick sanguine pool had formed below him. He is eviscerated. Slashed to fleshy ribbons perhaps just a few hours before we came upon him. He had broken camp at dusk, spirited himself away and wandered out from our garrison in Cange right into enemy hands. Had our ruthless jackal opponents had some notion of who the man was, he’d have been taken to a filtration camp like the others—the poor founding bastards of the Famni Lavalas Alliance- and flayed for information, tortured until he could no longer remember his Yiddish name. Perhaps this was better albeit completely inglorious. There is nothing about the condition of his corpse to make us think his end was particularly quick.

I knew this man so long that it was like stumbling upon a fresh crime scene of a beloved family member. To others, he was a tovarish of sorts, a less than humble man who sustained so many with his savvy and stalwart acts. The rest knew him as a fearless comrade and champion to so many souls not cut of his tribe’s cloth.

We find our close compatriot hanging disemboweled from a hook—his eyes gouged out, hands lopped off, bayonet marks slashed about his body— exsanguinated in a tree of death. He is now cold, wet and dead.

“Cut him down!”

“Cut him down and bury him deep,” commands a Pale Officer.

The future was evidently to be far bloodier than the scientists and high priests had originally prophesized and predicted. The physician’s blond hair, it blows in a swift desert wind. She looks away from the bloody mess we’ve made just for an instant.

 

Violence is the longest road to nowhere, but we seem to be making great time.

 

 

 

ACT ONE:   Str’ast

 

Set in New York City & Moscow, 2012ce

(August-December 31^st)

 

 

Prelude

 

 

 

Moscow, 2019ce

 

 

It is not our intention that we should compose such an indictment of the Oligarchy that our reader throws down the manuscript and declares him or herself a revolutionist, for cruel experiences of this world and living in it breed more revolutionaries daily then our pens can expend on poetic syllables.

 

Instead we wished to put to paper an ethical argument that condemns our oppressors, clearly states their means of oppressive control and thus allows the reader to take what actions thou wilt to participate in the abolition of our collective slavery. We posit like others before us that the system in which we live is exploitative to all within; top and below. We declare that the World System and the Oligarchic Collectives that operate it are but agents of a vast killing machine; sentencing us all to toil ceaselessly; suffer long and die early while they glut themselves on ill acquired wealth.

 

With that indictment we ask the reader a Talmudic question; ‘a sane person in an insane world is what?’ And there by a conscious person in a sleeping world has what duty? And furthermore, if the readers cannot be moved by the humble words of this theorist narrator, be moved then by atrocities that are carried out daily paid for in the taxes levied from the sweat of your work and the blood of your fellow humans.

 

We remind you as have others before me, it is not a revolution we are fighting. It is battle for the survival of our species and is still an open question of who will win, for this is a very old war began long before us and will end long after we are gone. But, far more specifically by what conduct, what actions are appropriate in the face of such a holocaust to ensure that there is still a just and equitable world for our children and grandchildren to inherit.

 

The victory of the resistance movement is question of consciousness. The victory of the Oligarchy is a death sentence for all.

 

My name is Sebastian Vasili Adon. I do believe some of that to still be the name I was born with, but now I have multiple names. In the dead of winter, seven years into the Great Revolt; I was captured along with my gun slinging Haitian partner Watson Entwissle after a firefight in the icy heart of Moscow. We were taken three parts-alive by the Russian Federal Security Bureau and then turned over to their inner most secret police for a most highly spirited interrogation.

 

They ripped out poor Watson’s eyes; then broke most of my ribs as then beat us both for many days and soon I was pissing out blood!

 

I will begin by saying that no matter what “changes” or revisions may occur in depiction of my narration that the world changed forever in a very specific way on the 1^st of January 2012. Of course in the constellation of dates there cannot be one discovered moment of alteration total; but instead linkages of great historic movements; migrations toward our human evolution out of darkness and barbarity and inequality; into our natural way.

 

How does one chart such movements; such milestones when they are but realized memes? Realized intuitions that came that pass as world events based on total boldness.

 

I have not the arrogance to claim a high rank in the revolution. Or the audacity to claim that my role was of some significant aspect for I was but a staff sergeant in vast chain of command were the ranks of war to be applied to the ranks of those who fight for peace. I will have you the conscientious readers to know that I am a poet. Yes a poet; once who delights in making words tell stories; who if left to my own devices would have been happy as a small farmer and passionate lover of my wife and the word; had not the violence swept upon my lands.

 

Did you know that when the Oligarchy cannot conquer a rebellion they conquer its narrative? Did you know that the truth is not ever truly known except by those who saw a thing with their own eyes? How did it begin? Who was the leadership? What were the demands! These are oligarch questions because the small man or woman; the humble ones; those who submit themselves to a higher power and therefore love life; the children of the believers; we do not beg a political context for the world; one is thrust upon us.

 

Later on when I was asked or should I say interrogated with beatings, drugs and electricity why I joined the “Great Revolt” and became one its so-called “leaders” they asked me many times to declare the moment when I embraced these “zealous beliefs” or by what life event wedded my totality to this cause. They pestered me with these questions though throughout the events I had played no part except as a member of a small medical detachment putting our meager resources to good use.

They, they being the agents of the Oligarchy referred me to a poem published in one of the newspapers of the underground press I had submitted. It was only once piece of the “evidence” against me, but they claimed my role larger than I ever knew it to be.

I am able to say that I understand the world differently because my memory is longer; because I read books about the past, because I enjoy reading and because as a poet, a sensitive soul I delight in writing down my base human ideas and sharing them; making common cause with other suffering souls.

They would beat us many times and make us many offers. It was fortunate the resistance wiped away my mind so I could betray only myself. In addition, that Watson Entwissle is a Haitian and therefore impossible to break.

They always beat me and referred me back to these poems. Poems they claimed were “proof” of my highest-level rebel involvement. The uprising had not at that time fully spread to the Russian Federation or the People’s Republic of China. But, I remembered nothing, well almost nothing well. I did remember several things throughout the brutal interrogations that in a way sustained me through their inflicted brutality. Were these things real or imagined, implanted or devised I have no idea for I know neither science nor high-level majik.

I know that there is a secret sleeper organization called the Z.O.B. that is at war with those in total power called The Oligarchy that control the world system core. I know that no one knows what those three letters stands for nor are they originally in English. I know that agents of that Oligarchy raped and brutally murdered my wife while pregnant with my child; they burned my city, they killed my family and my friends, my friends of friends and even former lovers and then there were no ideas or beliefs I needed to then learn to fuel my un-ending resistance after those most hideous events. There after I then breathed in the smoke monster, drank only on blood and nourishing hate.

Finally, I know that an uprising began in a place called Ayiti and that it continues to this very day despite major quarantine and most disastrous set back. I know that on January 1^st 1959; that the same revolution spread to the nation of Cuba and has been entrenched there sense were illiteracy has been irradiated and people live longer than in the United American States. And things come in threes, all things; for on 1^st January 2012 that long quarantined revolt fought on the fringes of the developing word erupted on the streets of Port-Au-Prince and spread like wild fire worldwide.  I know that I am entitled to certain protections under the Geneva Accords I will not receive as a uniformed combat Pararescueman, shield 2952 of the 99^th Airborne Detachment from Breuklyn Soviet, epicenter of the latest phase in our latest and most glorious uprising.

They then beat me for many more weeks. They ripped out my finger nails and drugged me into nightmarish worlds of grisly torture. They called me terrorist as though it were my surname. They demanded I tell them “who are my true leadership”, “where is Emma Solomon?” “Where is Avinadav DeBuitléir?” They have nothing to gain because I know nothing but what I have already told you. I am a poet who makes silly rhyming poems to bed young women.

You murdered my entire family, I periodically think inside me self.

Therefore, I joined the rebel alliance as uniformed Pararescueman 2952 of the 99^th Airborne Detachment, known also as the Fighting 99^th. It was we who helped re take Port Au Prince in 2010. It was we who took back Jerusalem in 66 112 and 1210.

And such was the only thing still etched in my mind under vast torture. Periodically I wondered if I could hear Watson screaming, but it is against the code of the Haitian gentleman to break under torture and I doubted therefore the screaming was coming from him.

In another life. Before knowledge of their atrocities sent me to first to Cuba; then to Haiti and Syria where I saw with my own eyes the fullness of genocide the Oligarchy was capable of. Before I read my Orwell, my Marx, my Zinn, of course me Wallerstien, and Chomsky; peppered in with my Mayakovsky, my Hooks, my Goldman, some Rist, the great Kropotkin and many others. So many books and not enough life times!

Those doomed idealists and wandering; those seculars; those unrepentant exile Jews. I was living on a kibbutz in the land of American occupied Israel writing small poems, laying out my first novel, working the land; laying sprinkler drip lines, making small art and being very much in love.

 

They refer me to some poem that supposedly appeared in something called the “Banshee News Service” several months ago. Of course I deny anything they claim I am party too. Banshee isn’t that a ghost, I ask. And a truncheon strikes my jaw.

 

The poem which is numbered #99: Human Patria,

 

It reads:

 

99

 

We consider your rallying and your hee-haws,

An aberrant and arbitrary designation!

We do not fly all flags evenly. That is sure.

Some had more to them than others, some, the very thread, the liniature was, earned.

There was a name tattooed on the back of her neck!

And we best believe she didn’t choose it.

When they splattered those fierce Syrians in the newspaper, did you feel it?

Did you feel their faces crack; their lives leave us?

Nothing?

Not one speck of a thing!

When they broke that hooker’s jaw for sport you still daily subscribed to late night flickering of the inter-web hand cock!

What time did the sunset in Babylon that day?

You vile fucking thief.

I make accusations on myself and at others.

When they scalped 800,000 was it just a cautionary tale that the niggers still can bleed more?

Human.

That’s just a breed of hyper-violent monkey.

Worse somehow, it grins at the notion of a good bleed.

Likes the site of an explosion far from home.

You’re paleness is to me unsettling,

But I could absolve it if you had some “human patria”.

What’s that?

Solidarity with your kind man!

Never mind.

When they kicked your face, broke all your teeth the first time did you beg your god to let you die one last time?

Did you plead, pissing blood to never again be their target?

Coward!

Pile the corpses outside your village, offer your daughters bare breasted ass for rape.

You my pigeon holed associate are the vile ones.

The smidge I pick from my teeth.

You are a speck.

When inserted up her tight shaft, the softness of those pale legs were a cushion.

If I digress into sex. It is because I both hate police and love firm round breasts thus proving I am not any one’s martyr, no icon or virtue nor desirous of your speculations on my gray motives.

I am just a man and I fuck.

Both myself, women and the world back on to me fucks hardest.

What.

Yes what!

Bleeding from my head like Syrians do,

The humiliation of 4,000 years of a petulant subjugation.

I’m am impervious to your zombie ways.

Your turn the other face.

Your blindness.

Pale-ness.

Your collaborator scheming.

Fuck.

When the noose is again about my neck at least I will go through the motions to die a hero.

At least, perhaps, as my last breath bellows Ya Basta Pig in face of my Roman enemy.

At least my gun will be completely empty when they finally taka the hill.

You.

Damn you coward.

When there was no one left.

When it was just you, me, and the overwhelming urge to surrender.

Indomitable.

The richest man in Babylon Mountain was to be just a pebble with a gold cane.

And I. Oh I.

I was invested in my brother and sister too. I wanted for strangers what my own self craved.

Human Patria! I say. Not so farfetched if a blan like me subscribes in totality.

And so right then and there,

Kissing her neck,

Wishing no one had done those things to her.

That name on her neck.

I will kill them all if I have to!!!

I’ll slaughter them all and feed them their own children as delicious meat pies!! RA! Baraka!!!

But tell me cousin, she asks…

If, when we avenge us;

Tell me that I at least will learn to know my Human Patria.

She soothes my tremors of delirious rage, she takes my callous hand; she says;

Absolve yourself of pastiness my eternal love,

For Human Patria relies, and in fact demands that the hero and heroine act not like monsters. Act not like Romans or Amerikanski, instead, she says;

Love me more than you hate the beast and the beast will have no power.

For to save one life, open one mind, live one on life with honor.

We strip the monsters of their claws when fighting vile monsters we become above them,

In conduct.

I will teach you man of Human Patria.

 

 

Ⱥdon to Natasha.

 

            Who or what, how now, why is my Natasha?

Dorogaia (dear one) I have failed you, where are you now! What have I again done!!

 

After reading me this trifle wearing both a hideous and vaguely comical mask; one my interrogators then smashes my face with a truncheon again.

And such was the only evidence they ever presented me with.

A stupid, non-rhyming poem.

A ridiculous, minuscule Partizan Song.

Written in Gamatria (Secret Jew Code), ah ha; you’d have to know what that is pig!

In another life I wrote a boat load of little poems. Interestingly enough, or perhaps commonly my mind retreats into itself to escape the shame or torture and also the unending pain of total human sympathy. My memories it seems are crafted devices, walls of data to waylay my opponents and thus shelter my closest friends and associates. What for are then these ridiculous poems? I call them but a masochistic hobby horse. Though they are not all without some talented intent, they serve me no good, not once or ever.

I wrote them all to four various Russian women. Though that cannot be used to say that all four women were properly loved, or that I loved each with equal rigor. Poetry, song and art itself are manifestations yet they are not equal and they are not all backed up with the same stuff, the same longing, the same level of doing of deeds after words.

It should be clear that though I slept in and beside these four women over a period of some six years; I did only love one. And only one loved me.

 

Now they’re yelling something in Russian and I pretend as though I do not speak it not at all. But how could I not for all and every of my strangest loves taught me my greatest lessons in that language.

They are demanding all these pieces of myself I cannot even hope to deliver. These interrogators and also those four women. Though I took more than I probably gave.

 

It seems they are less interested in the recently murdered guard colonel my Haitian partner and I played the part of recent highway men to gun down dispatch. Less interested in our baser affiliations. It seems that the strong arm of the Russian Oligarchy is most concerned with a brief end of summer liaison that happened seven years prior with a young buxom émigré from the little city of Penza whose name was Natalia Andreavna Skorbogatova who for some time I called Natasha, or Dashutkha to be even more sweet.  Do not ask me to quantify my love and longing for I cannot. I cannot tell these tortures what names I had invented, or puzzling circumstances came upon me when I shed the privileges of my imagined privileges and lesser aristocracy, to make new friends in the Russian quarter.