Fire on

The Mountain

 

(In four ACTS)

 

 

[The Work Of]:

 

 

 

Adler S Walt

 

 

Dedicated to:

 

Yelizaveta Alexandrovna Kotlyarova

Daria Andreavna Skorobogatova

Elena Antolievna Komarova

Valentina StanOvova

 

 

 

 

 

 

Prologue

 

 

Set in the Republic of Haiti, 2084ce

 

“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, 2072-2076ce

 

 

Prelude

 

 

 

Moscow, 2083ce

 

 

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 Vasyli 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 2076. 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 2076 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 retake Port Au Prince briefly in 2074. It was we who took back Jerusalem in 66, 112, and again in 1210ce.

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 Ivories. 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:

 

    99th

 

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, amid the ranks of the Fighting 99th.

 

 

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 Ivory 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 Skorobogatova who for some time I called Natasha, or Natushka to be even more sweet.  Do not ask me to quantify my love and longing for I cannot.

 

I cannot tell these torturers what names I have invented, or under what puzzling circumstances came upon me when I shed the privileges of my imagined identity and lesser American aristocracy, to make new friends in the Russian quarter.

 

 

Scene 1

140 Nassau Street, 2076ce

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 low roof of ancient print house converted at some time in the past hundred years to a seventeen story cooperative. District Financial and with the last manic burst of energy being expended by one of our antagonistic protagonists, Sebastian Vasyli 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 gypsies 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 Mary Lia Monteleone and Victoria Christiana Lynch Contreras snap off photos and clink glasses bantering on care free flirtations and intoxications.

Mary Lia takes off all her clothing for green money, she’s a dancer she tells her parents back in the Cayman Islands by way of Italy and France. In another life she’ll hopefully take up photography or become a police spy, which pays a little less but has more dignity.

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 an all-inclusive 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 to sixty to seventy dollar ride, and more if you tip. Which is against all Russian cultural context, to tip a chornay driver.

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 slaves and assure them there is safe way out. The next stage then is to get our operatives into brothels to feign cardiac arrest and call ambulances and firemen in as reinforcements.”

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 Ivoryish 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-Ivoryish 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 alley way below.

 

 

Scene 2

The Jungles, 2084ce

Guyana

 

 

It’s very late at night, maybe soon early in the morning and the jungles talks, it makes all kinds of primal sounds, and they’re not a threat to us.

My name is Jefferson McIntyre II, I was born in New Orleans. A mad Ivory profit predicted I’d die in the upcoming battle of New Orleans which is still a year away, an effort on my part and that of Gen Tiputti Capois to open a second front on the Continent. This all remains to be seen.

When I was a young man I was recruited into the American intelligence community by my father Wade.

 

Although I consider myself a strong minded almost philosophical man, in my early adult life I experienced shall we say extranormal phenomena in the deep jungles of Guyana, I was taught to remember all of my lives.

 

I went to Guyana as part of an American intelligence operation designed to exacerbate the existing tensions between the Afro-Guyanese and the Indo-Guyanese, as Guyana is uniquely sealed off in autarky, removed itself from the world system economy, who sent us? Disguised as the Peace Corps; the CIA of course. We were a group of 40 sent to make the ethnic tensions worse via a little adult literacy and special programs.

 

Suffice to say I defected and changed sides, or I would not be here today, back in the jungles many years later helping to edit and compile the surviving collective works of Gen Avinadav DeBuitléir, the founder of the resistance; Commander Sebastian Adon my friend, my union brother and colleague from our two year internment in the gulag camps, and of course the woman now widely believed to be Messiah; Emma Maya Sorieya Solomon. Though there are and will be many more pretenders and threats to her reign.

 

Although the internet has long been shut down, couriers have told me that the three of them are all now in Haiti, where the worst of the fighting has been occurring. Sebastian is often rumored to be dead, but he’s never dead when you understand the science behind it.

 

Refilwe, my wife comes in with some cold brewed Yerba Mata, she’s stern and serious and then she smiles so beautifully. She too I met in the special engineering camps we were interned in during the early days of the Great Revolt of 2012ce Gregorian, or based on new revelations as to the correct year; 2076ce; the years the Oligarchs use, or AR0; year zero; the year we began to tear down the machinery of our slavery and fight back.

 

The literature we are compiling for the resistance is largely written by these three who met in the pivotal year of 2001 ce in the military colony of Israel; in Tel Aviv; members of an elite military unit called The Cherry.

 

Refilwe and myself, as well as Saiph Khan and Alina Gusev have been tasked with producing a definitive translation of their primary two works; The New Social Gospel (written by Solomon in Ivory language) and the Grey Book (Written by Avinadav and Sebastian written in Haitian Creole and Angliski). Presumably, and I’m one who by now based on the things I’ve seen am willing to presume; the New Social Gospel is the latest Baha’i Revelation, a piece of prophesy and also the word of the one true God in Its 46 character, genderless name. And the Grey Book, like many colored books before is the blueprint for the escalating uprising that we all now call The Great Revolt; the war for liberation form the Oligarchy.

 

I have not seen any of my friends in the leadership since the invasion of Hispaniola began a year ago, we have been tasked to take the spiritual and military documents compiled by the couriers and copy edit them. Yes, copy edit the so called word of god, quite intense. And Refilwe is a Christ follower from Botswana colony, and Saiph a Bangladeshi Sunni Muslim, and Alina Gusev a hippy pagan something, maybe secretly an Old Slavic spirit talker; and others on the team here are of various creeds, there is not intrinsic holiness in the words of Solomon, for she is a conquering lion. It is about establishing literary and linguistic unity to the vision of the Trinidad; the name those three are called.

 

We will together review the various translations and arrive at the definitive proof which will then be issues quickly out in other languages. Hopefully before the upcoming Battle of New Orleans where I am said to perish, or the Battle for Port Au Prince which aims to both corner and decapitate two Superior Oligarchs Kahn and Talleyrand; and liberate definitively the birthplace of the great revolution of 1804; the ground zero for the epoch.

 

Refilwe tells me that she will never let me set foot in the Wilderness of North America again and thus secure my immortality as her husband, no one has given me any directives otherwise. And as Minister of Ethics for the 17^th Congress, I am certainly high enough in the chain of command, though I rarely like to attend meetings of flaunt my rank.

 

Refilwe and I are reviewing an early allegory within the Grey Book called the Mountain;

 

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.

 

 

Scene 3

Canarsie, 2008 or 2072oe

Brooklyn

 

 

FLASH BACK!! It’s the 28^th of the month of December in the Common Era year 2072.

 

Jeremy’s been dead for about a year. Maria, she died about six months ago. It hasn’t been a good year, Sebastian’s a Jew at heart, and we call them Ivory now. At heart he starts counting the year from September. A real shit year all things considered, it isn’t rounding out to be the decade he’d hoped it to be either. Its late night, in the Brooklyn Old City; sometime around 4 in the morning. The lull when there are no calls until the bad ones come. The Transcare transport bus was seated somewhere out deep in Canarsie. Waiting of orders over the Nextel for more work. As Transcare tended to assign per diem employees random partners; Emile Cange and Sebastian Adon were total strangers. They met that very night.  It was a Sunday. Emile Cange tried to never work on Sunday because it was the ‘Lord’s day’, but he was an Adventist now and had recently been educated how the Lord’s Day was actually Saturday. Sebastian always tried to work on Sunday because everyone else had been fooled into thinking it was the lords day, and that drove the call volume down by a little. Even though Brooklyn was easily 1/3 Ivory. Emile is slim, trim, be-speckled and Haitian, which is apparently a major West Indian Island; full of history. Apparently 1/5 of the medical professionals in the greater New York area are also Haitian, but all statistic are invented. And Haitians have more millionaires than any other Caribbean émigré group. And they fought a two hundred year slave uprising and finally one in 1994…Emile is very proud to be Haitian.

 

“Why’d you become an ambulance man?” Viktor Emile Cange asks him.

“To do the lords work,” Sebastian lies. To himself and others.

“Brother, amen.”

 

The conversation then turned predictably to if God wishes to destroy the Ivories for killing his “first born son” or some horse shit like that, and it was a conversation that had gotten very old to Sebastian, as he’d had by now with what seemed like every other black person he’d ever sat with, a talk about god, late at night, on an ambulance, a talk about Ivories and what they had done. Blacks were obsessed with Ivories it seemed to Sebastian, couldn’t decide just how anti-Semitic they were as an overall people. The answer was, that blacks were pretty anti-Semitic as a people. Emile Cange wasn’t though, his old lady, one day mother of his child was a Ivory. He shows Sebastian a picture too, that’s supposed to be shocking to everybody except for Sebastian, who pretty much believes tits are tits, and sex is great and that racism has not much place in the bedroom.

Emile’s fiancé is a resident at Downstate Hospital. A sexy light skinned half Haitian, half Ivory a real rare mixy.

They talk for a while, their palaver leaves an impression on Emile, but to Sebastian it’s the same old song he’s been singing to chornay for years. That’s a medium not nice word in Russian for black people.

“The lord’s work is often done by an unwittingly righteous non-believers I’ll have you know,” Sebastian interjects.

“Amen to that. God has a plan, and man is filled with all sorts of arrogance that he can generate one, better to let the lord work through you.”

Black people are just fuckin’ loaded with biblical insight, thinks Sebastian. But Sebastian’s lungs are black and his liver too, so some of that knowledge he can relate too. But, Sebastian doesn’t believe in God, has no use for it.

It has seemed increasingly that he is to walk his life alone. In the past year, tragedy in the form of questionable suicide struck twice. First, his only love Maria had poisoned herself, then his closest friend, in a period of six months to the later had blown out his own brains. Everything had gotten a little surreal since then, he’d retreated into his work, the bringing out of the sick and dying. By the time he met Emile Cange, there wasn’t too much going for him, days he slept, nights he worked, and on free days he was drunk, bad, bad-evil drunk.

 

“Jesus even has a plan for you brother,” Emile had told him. Or did he mean Maya?

 

He doubted it. He deeply missed Jeremy and Maria, often wondered what kind of guy let’s his lover and his best friend off themselves without seeing it coming, if that is what even happened. Wonders what kind of piece of shit he is when that’s the lover and best friend he respectively takes on. He wonders if he’ll ever get the nerve to really kill himself.

Fling his body off that bridge.

 

Sometimes Sebastian sits on the Brooklyn Bridge, all horror show and wonders if he has the nerve to jump. He doesn’t mind the ambulance work, seeing all these dead people. He’s already dead, his body just has to catch up with his mind.

 

Has he jumped before, off every bridge in the city at some point? Over how many lives? Over how many women? Over how many people he could never ever make see, make safe? Emile Cange prays to Jesus for the soul of Sebastian Adon, but Adon isn’t looking to be saved at all.

 

He remembers these other lives, he must be crazy! He remembers things that can’t be real, remembers things that no one else sees. He looks out over Brooklyn is it spelled Brooklyn or Breuklyn? He looks out over the East River and he sees war in the distance and death in the night. The longer I go without sleep, the more I fucking remember.

 

 

Scene 4

Pacific Ocean Deeps, 2076ce

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 Mezzo-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 would like to examine something that Avinadav and Sebastian wrote in the summer of 2001, before my capture and russification, before the infamous martyr operation,” says Emma taking out a grey leather bound manuscript:

 

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

 

“I know you’re not, my beautiful one. 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.”

 

“We’ve never been this close to the edge before,” Adelina replies.

 

 

 

Chapter 5

Wall Street Banya Spa 88, 2009/2073ce

Manhattan

 

 

            FLASH BACK! To the wood ceilinged restaurant of a Russian Bathhouse that stinks of sweat and also vaguely of fornication, buried below the streets of the Financial District a long conversation is coming to a close. An emergency medical technician named Sebastian Adon is finishing up a good yarn to a young Ukrainian medical student named Yelizaveta Alexendreavna Perechenova who has recently become his platonic confident. The aim of such storytelling is that she might let him pour cold water upon her, let him gaze at her young tight and voluptuous, near naked body, captivate him with her eyes and take in his all his ambulance war stories. Of which he has plenty. He’s been writing her for months.

And this has been a great success for the last four hours.

Everything is fully dilated.

They know each other through an old associate of Adon’s named Dmitry Khulusin, a man of exceedingly low moral character. Sebastian Adon is an avid fan of former and post Soviets. They remind him of something that is tough and also fearless; loyal to a red line and of course exceedingly beautiful and open minded in the bed room to just about anything. Adon has been writing Yelizaveta letters for over seven months. He’s not sure why. Attention? It isn’t simply to sleep with her. Although as a man of course he would not turn that prospect down. He’s a man always highly in need of a confidant, for he’s nearly always in some form of emergency mode.

It has been a rocky road of activism, arrest, trial and tribulation since he first came back from the State of Ivory nearly ten years ago in 2001 shortly after the 9-11 martyr operation.

To her he’s a fiery train wreck of comedy and tragic idealism. She observed him at Hunter University and on the Book Face for some time. He cannot possibly be cut of normal Amerikanski cloth. He is a curiosity to which she can devote sporadic time. A minor deviation from her studies at Stonybrook.

The story this time has been about his moral descent post deportation from the State of Pal-Israel, called by some (the Canaanites) Palestine and called by others (the Ivory); Israel. He had recently attempted to return there to visit a long lost associate by the name of Maya Solomon.

He was immediately arrested at the airport.

His two days in Lod Prison were recounted and about Ivories not taking kindly to him working on a Canaanite ambulance for a week; four years prior was much of today’s yarn. The Israelis kind of hold a “whose suicide are you on” type grudge. About them beating him, water boarding him, hitting him with lights, electricity and kicking him repeatedly in the groin bellowing in Russian.

Sebastian Adon ethnically speaking is one quarter Fenian; one quarter Russian; one quarter Prussian; and some part Polish Iv; therefore he makes a good little Brooklyn mutt. Or perhaps at best an exceedingly good liberal New Yorker. He drives ambulances for FDNY going on two years in the South Bronx; he sometimes drinks too much liquor and brutalizes a girlfriend sexually; but nothing rapey or rough or violent. Cuffs, anal, threesomes with whores, foursomes with couples, loads on tits and faces. The product of a generation raised on porn. He’s got loose and transient morals that he justifies with his ambiguous vocation. He likes the idea of human rights, but isn’t sure if humans know they have any, or sometimes if they deserve them. He likes the idea of communism, but isn’t clear why the communist revolutions were mostly violent autocracies. He has basic values that are in essence good, Yelizaveta agrees, though she is vaguely appalled to hear him speak of his escapades’ and depravities.

She heard that Maria left him because he got drunk and swam into the Atlantic last September after a fight. The Russian rumor mill was faster medium than Book Face.

Sebastian has led a small revolutionist club since his return from Palestine in 2001 that has caused him considerable trouble; but alas capitalism still rules in the USA, despite his and others best efforts to defeat it.

“There’s a half black president promising to end the wars, forgive student debt and provide universal free healthcare,” Yelizaveta says, “you weren’t all totally defeated.”

 

Occupy was two years away and the general uprising called the Great Revolt about three.

 

“Why are you an ambulance man?” she asks him.

While completing a degree in Political Science at City University Sebastian took a job as an emergency medical technician and this seems to have tempered some of his previous radical fervor, but not by much.

 

“I like helping the people,” comes his scripted response.

Sebastian is just under six feet tall. After they get dressed and meet in the banya lobby where she tries to pay and makes sure not to let her. He’s wearing a blue FDNY job shirt he’s gotten personally emblazoned with the Israeli flag, an irony under the circumstances of recent events. The Irish had been putting on such patches for years, however the window for other ethnicities was about to be cut short once the West Indians began wearing their flags into battle so to speak. He has bags under his eyes because he works life’s night shift. He wants her in every way a man can desire a woman but has never told her thus so far in the two years he’s known her. After Maria left he intensified the courtship. That is largely because he at first was fooled into loving another, lesser woman, second because he’s a coward when it comes to his actual emotions and did little to pursue the more likely reaction to his affections; which was surely bewilderment and rejection. So he just kept the letters about big ideas not passions.

“I like some of your collectively written documents. But you go on and on sometimes and need to get to the point,” she says.

Yelizaveta likes things with references. She likes looking up anything that seems suspect, which when it comes to Adon, is a lot. She knows he keeps things from her to preserve a somewhat sanctimonious appearance of some kind of bohemian revolutionary ambulance hero.

Just fifteen minutes before they’d both been lying near naked in a Russian Banya called Spa 88. He was putting the story on her about something crazy that had just gone down on what was supposed to be his first vacation in three years. After some other story about a threesome with Maria.

But it isn’t a vacation if you spend the whole time in a prison. And it isn’t a real threesome if she runs out of the room crying while you fuck her best friend.

Which didn’t happen, it was just something that turned him on to say in front of her. In reality, he had gotten into a fight with her in September on Block Island and followed Jeremey McGaffey’s ghost out to sea for several hours.

The local police found him several hours later walking naked down the road with and carrying an enormous rock.

“I think you need to go back to school and get more medical training,” she says, “you’re a glorified cab driver with an oxygen tank. You’re not living up to your expectations of yourself.”

“I’ll forgive your lack of appreciation; we’re god’s avenging angels with sirens I’ll have you know.”

When Adon feels cornered he typically drops into grandiose rhetoric.

“Sebastian. You, are a terrific story teller, but let’s not forget where we stand in life’s chain of command shall we. I am a student and you are a truck driver with a stethoscope, if we wish to be more than that there is such a long road ahead. ”

He wishes she was less coy; less belittling of his profession and what was left of his idealism. He guesses it isn’t true love, not when sentiments of rough degrading sex run across the conscience. But if it was simply do her in the back of an ambulance type love, she’d have seen right through it, likely been appalled. He believes in impossible, undoable things. Kids himself into thinking he’s the man for the job.

But she’s not impressed by all that.

Sebastian Adon, is of course in the twilight of his young adult life. He has been driving an ambulance for three years thinking someone would call him a hero at some point, hoping, believing that there was gonna be a chance to save some lives.

“I’ve saved eight lives,” he informs her as he sometimes has before. It’s a justification for why he hasn’t quit the job yet.

“Well don’t let anybody take that from you,” she retorts.

“I want to reiterate that the reason we civil servants feel so entitled is that the rest of you are unwilling to work the conditions we are and face the raw un-adulterated bullshit the people of this city are quite willing to put us through. We guard you while you sleep and you pay us like pizza men. I think this job has taken more from us than we were able to give to our city. And when the city is gone I assure you it is because we have abandoned hope in it.”

“You’re so preachy and poetic, I kind of love it sometimes,” she utters as she rubs her fingers together, “that’s the world’s smallest violin playing just for you.”

Adon is the kind of man who at this juncture can still be motivated by even the world’s smallest violin.

At least to him life then has a theme song.

Shortly after banya she leaves him to take the A train back to Washington Heights to get back to her studies, leaves him alone with his black, black thoughts. She has sick father who has never acclimated well to this country, she has a very hard working mother who works as maid. Once she gets a white lab coat and the rank or doctor, they will finally be secured.

 

 

Scene 6

The Upper West Side, 2076ce

Penthouse J

 

 

So much light and so much air, still under nine hundred American, my to the chagrin of the Ivories 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. Well we thought it was the 1980’s, that’s what smart phones and TVs said.

 

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 Ivoryish 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 Fenian 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 Ivoryish 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 Ivories.

 

Like Ms. Maria Parsheva and or Yelizaveta Perechenova.

 

“In Russia we were Ivories, outside of Russia we are finally called Russians. We are treated the same,” once explained Yelizaveta’s father Alexandr, or Sasho 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 2072.

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 2073. 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 committees 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 Fenian 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-Ivoryish-Fenian-German mutt just like Sebastian. Neither of their mothers is a Ivory, 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 Ivoryish 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 Ivoryish 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 Ivory 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 Ivory, 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 2074. 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 Ivoryish 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 for murder all who resist the iron heel of the Oligarchy.

 

 

 

 

 

Scene 7

The Jungles, 2084ce

Guyana

 

We’re seated around a table way up in the trees, this place is called Fort Garlin, its deep in the countries interior, about fifteen days on foot from George Town which is now been renamed Grand Maroon; we’re de-colonizing rapidly.

 

Alina Gusev is Russian American, the daughter of an upper middle class biochemist. She was interned with us in the camps for two years to leverage her father’s capacity; which is to say she was hostage. I know, and Refilwe knows that Alina and Sebastian were very unhappy lovers for some part of the period Adelina was in Moscow. But that is not very privileged information, I will say this of my friend and union brother; he is incapable of independent work; he needs affection and attention to sustain just about anything he does.

Alina and her close friend, possible lover Dr. Mayaada Sadoun are working with a group of Baha’i on Emma Solomon’s New Social Gospel, a group of nineteen women from many different perspectives and plantations.

Men are not seen as being reliable interpreters of the word of god, as we failed quite honestly to interpret it for the last 5,000 years of lesser and Major Prophets.

 

Alina has short died crimson hair, had there been no uprising she might well have been discharged from those bleak and unhappy labor camps called the Shrakasa Brandeis without incident back to an upper middle class life. But she liked reggae music so she came to the dancehall parties of Ricardo Veshanti the St. Vincy Rastafarian, and that was how she came to be involved with us, and evacuated with us during the revolt when the camps were surrounded.

 

Dr. Mayaada Sadoun is Egyptian, slinky, curly black hair, she hasn’t practiced medicine in years. Something awful happened in Sharm Al Sheik, she alluded to it once or twice over drinks, she could get way too drunk sometimes. Some drunk tried to strangle her. Her father was another upper middle class from Cairo, interned in the camp for different but similar reasons.

 

Saiph Khan is one of the most important fund raisers in our Union, he is a sharp and witty guy, loves dancehall music. There are others here, survivors of the Battle of the Camps in Massachusetts, few of us have been to Breuklyn Soviet which has been walled off from the rest of the world except by submarine since 2077. It was nearly destroyed by the UAS Military in 2082, honestly it’s very hard to imagine the vibrancy, the audacity and resilience of a city of nearly 3 million completely under siege.

 

Saiph and I are under some disagreement whether people still know how to read, like actually obtain information from texts in any more than 30 % of the population, he thinks it’s more I think it’s less.

 

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, 2075).

 

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, 2075). 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.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Scene 8

Bob Marley Printing Corp., 2074ce

Long Island City

 

 

The underground printing press is under a bawdy strip club, it’s a compromise with a necessary evil; the Bratva owns the building and the girls, we run off Newspapers below the flesh market. I love to watch naked girls dance, and I’m sure history will find that objectionable, but I love tits. I love big naked breasts bouncing and moving in front of me, thinks Nicholai Trickovitch.

 

During the Snowden Affair in 2013, it was revealed to the world by a rogue NSA contractor that every single digital communication we made was being logged and filed away, every text, every porn site, every skype chat, and every phone call. This was revealed to the American public and forgotten in under three weeks, it was disregarded not suppressed. Snowden eventually died under house arrest in the Russian Federation. Data Aggregation services only became more sophisticated in the years to follow.

 

After the 911 attack, now a relatively obscure event akin to the attack on Pearl Harbor, cameras and surveillance went up all over the USA under the auspices of preventing terrorist attacks. But 2012, it was a well wired soft cage. The political opposition, quite marginal since the dissident purges of 1950, 1968 and 2011, went low tech. Went off smart phones, went back to couriers, radio and printed papers to survive. And ours was called the Banshee;

 

There’s really only one newspaper for your EMS communist crazy talk and that paper is “the Banshee” and its editorials rant along the lines of:

 

“They say there’s no rest for the wicked, but I haven’t done anything that truly bad in quite some years. These streets will run you ragged. Bleed you dry if you’re inclined to let the reaper take you.

But on a long enough time line everyone is going to die.”

 

Oh, Technician Adon sing the blues:

 

“Our mission, in so far as our misnamed, disheveled, brow beaten lot; can call the nature of our trade a profession with a mission; is that when you die you may do so in warm bed, surrounded by Ivory doctors, West Indian nurses, attentive and curious, cute, young residents keeping their hands off except to hand things, and of course your family, all around you pouring out that thing called love before your long kiss good night.”

“It has been said that on a long enough timeline our kind will lose all ability to feel. That one of our number might stand above a mass of splashed and splattered organs, avulsed intestines scattered across a black tarmac in the glow of streets cast upon our troop; to then light a cigarette, make a stupid fucking joke; and then take a camera phone picture of your son’s dismembered corpse. There are rules against such conduct, but not a one in our number would turn away. If your son’s body lay splayed across the freeway, before that thing called god one at least or more would say a silent prayer, reach down their blue gloved hands and wrap a hospital sheet shroud over the body, close his eyes. And perhaps the one of us with the camera phone might say something crude or racist, normally to cop doing crowd containment, to show our compatriots he or she felt nothing. But when your son or daughter fell, ingloriously in a bloody heap it was us who carried their bodies off that street, it was us who had gang rushed, blaring in that dead of night racing brave to save them. And we’d do anything in our means to bring them back to you for just one moment more.

We don’t want you to try and call us heroes. We just want you to know that we have given everything to our trade, every drop of our sweat, every ounce of our blood drained; to our or third or second marriages, to our child support bills, to our black lungs and swollen livers, before we find pension we’ve poured out upon these streets our humanity for you in the 25 years of servitude to our city of many, many lights.

We don’t want a Daily News two page Spread on the four through six; and I don’t think you’d buy a calendar of us topless in our PPE out-city, ‘heat resistant’ post-911 fireman pants to raise money for our fallen soldiers. Well maybe of you would. We don’t need their medal ceremonies, their cheap metal bars to pin about our blue collared breasts. We just want you to know we exist, and that we’re coming as fast as we can, and that we’ve sacrificed ourselves completely, become a people changed trying to help, and remember; you called us.”

 

So read the preamble ramble, the editorial of the Banshee Newspaper, Issue 4, the only rank and file controlled EMT-Paramedic Newspaper, released on February 13^th, 2073.

 

Mary Lia shakes her big old young tits and I leer. A necessary evil. Like putting the a missile battery under the St. Sophina Church or digging a tunnel from a Bulgarian Tavern to the the trading floor of the New York Stock Exchange.

 

 

Scene 9

The Bermuda Triangle, 2076ce

Black Freighter

 

 

“No, I’ve never read a thing, he’s written, I only just have encouraged him to write,” sates Oleg the Bear and all nod in agreement. Yulia Romanova doesn’t even know how to read in Russian, she’s paid to fuck men on demand and place satchel bombs.

 

Back in the present, 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 Ivory 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 Ivoryish 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 Officer 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. Every artist dreams of fucking their muse.

 

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 Persian 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, 2076 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 even believe?”

The Ivory 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.

 

Drunk, was the only way to even take in or put out this rhetoric, the theories of nonviolent resistance to oligarchy, codified by Emma Solomon, Avinadav DeBuitléir and of course; Sebastian Adon.

 

 

Drunk she carried out a most dramatic reading!

 

 

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, but authoritative 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 then 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 simply grinned. McIntosh smiled too. 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 yeah,” says Oleg!

 

 

Scene 10

Fort Marlin, 2084ce

Guyana

 

“The America I grew up in seemed so different,” pontificates Jefferson McIntyre to Refilwe McIntyre, his wife. It was after dusk and the forest jungle was twerking, it was saying and beginning to make its night noises.

 

Refilwe spent most of her life in a gated community for the petty bourgeois of Gaborone, Botswana; her father a technocrat, her mother a political adviser to the President for Life, married to the daughter of the Queen of England. Botswana was and still is a vassal state of metropole England, by default though not officially for the Commonwealth of Nations is a defunct entity.

“What was so different Jefferson?”

“There was a sense of hope. A sense of possibility, before all the violence washed up and the towers came down and we began to see how much killing had happened in our names, I don’t know, we all wearing rose colored glasses.”

 

“Well you were all naïve, we living in the periphery always knew.”

“Well when I found out, I defected.”

“Good, as I would never have married the son of a Mason and intelligence officer for the empire, or I’d like to think.”

“I cannot attest that he is or isn’t a Mason.”

She smiles.

“I think we did not fully grasp what the Empire was capable of, so much was white washed, I had to see it with my own eyes.”

Refilwe long knew many of these stories, told sometimes slightly Rum made honest, in bed lying in the camps in Waltham years ago. She knew most of her man’s stories. She loved him better for all those stories.

 

“When I joined the Peace Corps, I didn’t get it yet. Didn’t get what we were doing.”

“But you’re a good person Jefferson, so it didn’t take you long to see.”

 

The day he first arrived in George Town, he was told no talking politics, no talking politics at all, local or international, none. He was assigned to a remote village and told to teach people better English, as technically speaking Guyanese Patois is still derived from English, but then they started sending him other things to teach, things that clearly a sharp rational mind was about one thing; escalate tensions between the Indo-Guyanese and the Afro-Guyanese, a year ahead of a controversial election between Brigadier David Granger and Donald Ramotar, which Afro-Guyanese leaders Granger won.

 

It was clear that he had no future in the arms of the Empire, soon he helped dynamite the radio tower where the Peace Corps broadcasted from and joined the Big Truck Alliance, the Guyanese arm of the resistance.

 

For the next three years he lived in the deep jungles of Guyana, learned a lot more than he ever taught. It was these ideas called the Indigenous Knowledge by the World Bank that we absorbed and brought back to the United States with him in 2011, he moved north via public buses and was arrested crossing the Mexican border. His father managed to save his life, paid enough in bribes to arrange his transfer to Shrakasa Waltham; not a disappearance death camp. There in the foot hills of bleak Massachusetts, enduring two years of winter without end, he joined the otriad and then the Union, he helped co-author the Grey Book’s 2^nd Edition.

 

“I admire him, but I still fear him”, says Refilwe.

“He is not one to fear,” says Jefferson and they return to the manuscript.

 

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 2078, 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, 2074). It is expected that the cost of water will soon over take the price of oil after peak oil in 2084 (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, 2073).

 

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, 2078). It is believed that over 29.8 million people still live in chattel slavery (Global Slavery Index, 2077). 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 2077 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 2078). 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, 2078).

 

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.

 

 

Scene 11

The Spartan Club, 2074ce

Midwood

 

I pump my iron in a Paki meathead gym on the corner of Ave H and Coney Island Ave, next door to the run down and shuttered Kent Theatre. I see my old squad partner Sebastian there, once a year or so, looking like death coming back to life. He seems to step in and out of our realty here, sometimes I hear he’s in the Middle East fighting near Aleppo, sometimes he’s in Haiti training people there. Sometimes, well they say the Secret Police drag him away to hospital camps. It’s all humors.

 

‘Stop smoking, stop drinking, and think about your reasons.’

 

I normally the 58B 12 hour unit out of Station 58, in a forgotten little hood called Canarsie. Station 58 is the RCC regional command for the Brooklyn Division, Division 3. It is the largest Station in the borough, except for Station 43 which is technically in Division 5; Staten Island. The 58 is located on East 83^rd Street and Foster, in this ass end of town where there’s nothing but warehouses, truck depots, and people in need of Salvation Army. The base is an abandoned Sanitation Garage, steel shutters roll up to reveal a small fleet of our trucks and various stages of decay.

 

Everyone calls me by my last name “Mr. Ali”. But, my crew calls me Mir. I affiliate with the Desi Riders; posted up on Foster Ave; we sit there with our cars pimped; all official.

 

At the Fire Academy and by that I mean fire suppression academy on Randal’s Island which everyone dubs the Rock; there is a mini skyscraper which is being built to simulate and train for the management of a high-rise fire. There is a vast bunker some call the ‘gas room’ where the probies learn to trust their PPE Bunker gear in a simulated roll over inferno. The two weeks of Academics are taught on web cast, multimedia vid-terminals in pristine clean white on blue rooms. Their cafeteria is a veritable shrine to nearly 200 years battling the demons blaze in NYC.  There are climbing walls, training courses which light up and must be put out. There are several steel columns from the fallen towers fashioned into a bar for feats of public endurance. There are three cars worth of subway train to learn how to engage in rescue efforts in the MTA.

 

The whole compound takes up nearly 6 acres and includes nearly twenty buildings to train its cadet classes of sometimes up to 300.

 

I’ve been there only four times.

 

The first time I got paid a great deal of overtime to be a moulaged victim in a massive inter-agency counter-terrorism MCI cluster-fuck simulation.

Don’t hold your breath when the other shoe falls, homie.

The next two were to receive two days of Hazmat Training so the Department can claim plausible deniability when the ‘other shoe falls’ as they say of Al-Qaeda. The final time was when I graduated. First thing I’d ever graduated ever. Was kicked out of grade school, dropped out of high school, hadn’t finished college.

 

The cheap looking blue certificate hung on my wall next to my Good Enough Diploma. It has taken two rounds and eaten nearly six months. It was the hardest thing I had ever had to do. And I sort of did it twice, but I don’t tell everybody that.

Me and Adon.

But my point, that last time I went to the Academy I looked up at a plaque hanging in the archway where the cadets must enter to get their gear. That plaque read as follows:

 

“Let no dead fire fighter return from dead to say my training failed me.”

 

“Juxtaposition” is one of my new favorite words. I learned it from my academy squad partner and car pool buddy Sebastian Adon. The Fort Totten EMS Academy comparatively is housed in two wards of a rundown Confederate Prisoner Interment Camp cum multi-agency supply and training base. Its cadets utilize three relatively un-air-conditioned, relatively un-heated Cold War style buildings to engage in our medical training, one black tarmac run way to learn to operate an emergency vehicle and 7 to 9 miles of highway in either direction to undergo our physical training.

 

We share our base with a Battalion of the National Guard, an NYPD harbor unit, an NYPD Canine unit, the Park’s Department, a Historical Society, and perhaps a ground to air missile nuclear defense system that doesn’t work from the Reagan years of operation Atlas.

 

There is no slogan hanging on the gates of our facility or above the dirty stinking locker room we stow our gear three to a locker. But on a tree downhill from building 205 where we engage in medical examinations, timed scenarios, and general EMS re-education; carved on a tree near the water. Some old timer once carved these words in that ancient sycamore there, in tiny bloc letters as they looked out across to the Coast of Crescent Breach.

 

“Pray for the dead, fight like hell for the living,” that’s what they say in the Banshee paper, “whenever that shit comes out I take my stack and hide in the gear bag, and I help distribute.”

 

And my training never failed me, but when they send us into the field there was just so goddamn much we had to make up as we went along. I need to get out of this chicken shit EMS ambulance outfit and become the first openly practicing Muslim fire fighter, that’s the game plan. Bring glory to my team. They gonna put obstacles and I’m gonna surmount them one by one. Insha’Allah.

 

 

Scene 12

113 Ludlow Street, 2076ce

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. Though many suspect she will quit soon.

Outside and inside are James White, the retired Fenian 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 Ivory 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?”

“Vasyli 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, like they do in the Bronx.

 

 

Scene 13

High Bridge Outpost, 2074ce

SOUTH Bronx

 

Technician Lee Castro sings the blues too, but he does with a lot more subtlety. 7:14pm is 19:14 in paramilitary time Ambulance speak.

 

It’s Friday. I think. The job plays tricks on you with time.

Your loved ones never understand how your weekend moves through the week on the eight hour units. On five, off two, on five; off three.

It isn’t rocket surgery.

It makes cheating easy though.

Which I get accused of far more than I ever get to do.

Someone heard a crash in the night on the unpaved service road between the Deegan and the Harlem River called Exterior Ave. A bump that jolted us to sudden tachycardia, that is to say a fast heart rate, at our true 89 above the Deegan and Harlem River; which is to say where we are supposed to be stationed during our tour or within three blocks of. With the current staffing crisis we’re one of only six BLS trucks running in the South Bronx tonight.

It’s gotten bad like that.

I have my twelve years in the making; thick brown dreads tied off in stocking cap behind my head. I’m working straight time 17Boy Tour 3 with Leon Goldstone the ever eager emergency worker. The most enthusiastic employee we have. They sent me a notice today that I have to cut my dreads. It’s been an ongoing battle for the past two years. I had to claim “religious observance” and join a Rasta Mansion to get some papers! These cock suckers.

Enough to make me Banshee disturber, and accidental founding member.

Every time a Captain sees them I get more bullshit.

Now the Department is claiming it interferes with me getting my gas mask APR on.

As if I’ll ever use that thing.

But I’m civil service now. If they want to restrict me for my dreads I’ll take the four month vacation while the EEO lawyers sort it out. Not like I can lose my job now. You’d have to take titty sounds on an underage girl to get fired at this stage.

Which someone just did of course.

Rumor has it were functioning at 45%.

It’s a veritable skeleton crew these days. The rumors move faster than the ambulances; and they’re mostly lies and exaggerations. Excuses to complain.

We’re posted up at 17 Adam’s 89 location, on an off ramp no longer active above the Major Deegan right under the infamous High Bridge.  17A is the laziest goddamn unit in the whole South Bronx and that really says something. It’s a mentor truck so when they aren’t skelling out of their own devices they pass all the work to the rookies. I’m out here with Leon Goldson who’s doing overtime. Seems like he’s always doing overtime. Seems like all of us are doing overtime, all of the time like we live here. Doing overtime or working out. Guy’s a freight train. Sometimes we’ll work out during facilities, irregularly mind you; and dude is diesel. And a nice guy too. Real refreshing having a partner who still like the job, probably cause he knows he ain’t gonna be doing it forever. He’s at Lehman College for Social Work. I tell him this is a lot like Social Work. ‘But without a defiant result’ he responds.

I have no idea what he means by that.

“I can’t be sure I’ve ever helped any of these people,” he continues.

“With social work there’s more hands on,” he says from behind the wheel, “there’s a real feeling you’ve gotten up in their life and given um some resources. Something more substantial than air and aspirin.”

“Sometimes a little Oxygen therapy is all a person really needs,” I respond sarcastically.

“Come on now. Even if we drive fast they done mostly fucked up their bodies well before we even met um. And more to case; nothing you or I can say in the so-called golden hour is gonna make um hold off on the stoags, and the poison, the fast food, the red meat, the gang bangin’ ways. We’re a non-factor, is all.”

 

But he knew that I knew that.

 

We’d known that all from way back the first month we started. When the expectations got dramatically lower once in the field. From presumptive diagnosis to vital vision as it were. Sometimes Leon liked to pontificate. He and Adon were perfect partners because they liked to take turns pontificating. Going on with yarns spun by things they saw on the job. Not common war stories mind you; no trumped up version of strange days or odd jobs; I mean the two of them liked to talk it out. Me too, just not all the time.

Leon, apparently getting restless began to drive the bus down the off ramp to river level. Around the bend we’d go off ramp-off road and end up in the badlands under High Bridge; an interconnected mess of Amtrak storage/repair depots, industrial waste sites, a trailer park on the Harlem River, and a damn good place to lose a body. Used to creep me out down here. Adon always came down here. Always taught his partners was the back door to Richmond Plaza. Going down this service road you’d circumvent the anarchy that sometimes prevailed when doing a Richmond Plaza job.

 

Leon kept gamily talking. 17 Boy rolled off road along the river bed through the mist.

 

I had a wife and kid back home. It made everything a lot simpler. Wifey made more than I did; emotionally high maintenance. Kid was real cute. I made one beautiful boy; sometimes I thought that it was the only good thing I ever did in my whole damn life. The only thing I was proud of. I didn’t love my wife any more. We hadn’t made love in a year, I’d fucked her senseless out of blind rage a month or two back, didn’t do much besides make me cum. She’s crazy I think, can’t place the madness.

Bipolar disorder maybe.

It’s a bad co-dependence now.

I don’t love her, but I love my boy.

Sometimes things will get real rough, we’ll fight, she’ll fucking break things. But I gotta make it cool ‘cause I can’t have my crazy fucking wife run off to Indonesia with my son.

I think if it hadn’t been for my son I’d never have stepped foot in Peggy Quinn’s office down at 9 Metrotech. And I made moves to be a fire fighter, next promotional list that goes up I should be on it. I had to join the Rastafarian Church to keep my dreads, but mark my words, the day my number comes up; I’ll shave my goddamn head. Anything for a little respect and a living wage.

I say it makes things simple because my vices, my social life even are a day dream. I go online to Lastnigthsparty.com and viddy pictures of beautiful women doing debauched and compromising things in bars and clubs and lofts and where ever. I jerk off sometimes thinking about a couple strawberry blonde twins sharing my happy cock enthusiastically. I have fantasy life, that is to say in another life I’m the guy at last night party, I’m a rock star, I’m the artist; the next big thing. No terrible, evil draining city job, never got her pregnant, never got married to keep her sane, never moved to Harlem, never drove an ambulance.

In my day dreams I do Capoeira, and I bike a lot; used to be a messenger, and I still remember thinking my whole life is front of me. Not just a countdown to pension. In my day dreams I’m still the kind of person who believes in things.

I’m in the mood for a cigarette. Leon doesn’t smoke, only unhealthy thing he does is balance four girlfriends. It’s dark out tonight. The lights from the bus hit a sort of low mist that’s rolling over the speeding cars below us on the Deegan up off the Harlem River. We quite a lot of sitting around. That’s the worst part. You sit around for nonsense a large percent of the time, then right out of nowhere, right when you’ve hunkered down, then you get the arrest, the shot, the multi trauma right when you let your guard down.

I remember the first time Sebastian Adon and I went out on this unit, before he fucked up and got shipped to Brooklyn, or pulled strings and got shipped depending who you ask.

We were real eager two years ago. We both wore ties and collar bras then; part pride, part defiance. I’d long since taken mine off. Rumor has it he still wears his.  He’d quit smoking back then and I still biked to work every day. We were as eager as Leon still is.

I suppose 17 hadn’t gotten us yet. But Adon eventually got transferred Brooklyn side to Bedstuy and Leon lives ten minutes from the station.

They call Division 2, that is to say the Bronx; “the gentleman’s borough”; what goes on in the Bronx stays in the Bronx. It’s a big front. Most people at 17 aren’t from the city much less the Bronx, and ones that are from here; like Leon, or Watts, Ortiz, Medina, Santiago a few others are hardly proud of the neighborhood. The worst are the ‘kids on Safari’ as Leon puts it. He might have gotten that phrase from Adon. That’s all the Up State, Long Island, ‘Suburban trash’ as Adon calls um that came out here to play tough guy in the ghetto, forget they aren’t cops, and aren’t shall we say, ‘sensitive’ to the pluralism and diversity of the city. Basically Battalion 17 has a lot of good old boys loose with the words nigger and spic. Not the greatest formula for patient care.

But at Battalion 17 a lot of things fly that don’t fly in Queens or Manhattan. Like how Andrew Celluci wears a gaudy gold chain on the job, like how Jenny Jones never wears her boots Tour 1, or a myriad of small ops guide details that don’t ever become a disciplinary problem here.

Leon was in the middle of a yarn about social work and the importance of physical fitness to the welfare of the black community. I cut him off tastefully. ‘Look,” is all I mutter.

It’s where the trailer park is, was, should be normally. There’s a skinny crack head without a shirt flagging us. Blood dripping out the side of his head. A tanker truck has careened of the road, plowed right through the tenement camp- shanty town that congregates in this little trailer park. Leon flips on the left light bars illuminating the whole area in white light. There’s blood on the torn tanker. There’s blood on the wheels, the tanker overt turned on its side has taken out half the encampment. The crack head bellows something unintelligible then sits down on the ground his face in the mud. I see what looks like the arm of small person; a child underneath the tanker.

 

There’s still a fog that hangs in the air. Leon jumps on the radio to report a possible MCI and possible Hazmat incident. I think to myself this is little beyond my level of training. The light bar illuminates the whole scene.

 

“There are dead things floating in the Harlem River. Dead people, dead parts, dead fish,” I say.

Leon took the high power lantern and shined it on the scene of the accident on the river itself.  The river was blood red. Its crimson tides crashed against the overturned tanker truck. It was as if the very composition of the thing had changed; its texture a frothy oil of arterial red blood in which ten thousand squelched out creatures floated to surface. And anything that had once died in that river floated upwards too.

 

Units synchronize your watches it’s 7:25pm, 2074ce, welcome to the future. It’s not as futuristic as I thought it would be.

 

 

 

 

 

Scene 14

The Hygeia Hotel, 2076ce

Block Island

 

 

“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 Fenian 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 Ivorites, 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 truffle 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 shamanic sorcerous in Amharic.

“We don’t speak your dessert wasteland 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 15

Brooklyn Hospital, 2074ce

Downtown Brooklyn

 

Her government name is (was) Tanya Albert; she works on a Transcare 911 unit out of Brooklyn Hospital. In her own words:

 

Only reason I’m out here this gorgeous Friday evening is that I don’t make a living wage and thus do an insane amount of overtime to keep myself in the lifestyle to which I am accustomed. I want to be a firewoman. I made the list, I passed the physical, and then the recession bullshit happened. Come the fuck on, I said to myself; I’ve paid my dues. It’s time for them to let me the hell out of this chicken shit outfit, this EMS bullshit. Its 1905, and I’m gonna bang out at midnight. The rain is beating down on the windshield, and I’m praying’ to black baby Seventh Day Adventist Jesus that we don’t get any more damn jobs! That’s what I pray to in the open anyway, if anyone asks me.

Now don’t get me wrong. I have no romantic ideas about fire suppression.

A woman, a black woman, I know the deck isn’t stacked in my favor over there in the goomba-squad. But you know what? I been asking myself a lot lately; what it is exactly those people do for 90,000 plus a year that makes them so much more valuable to the department than me. My unit is in the shit. We could do ten jobs a day on a summer shift in the Stuy. I don’t wanna say some shit like those fire fighters don’t work, they work a bit. And a real blaze, albeit hard to come by these days happens and yeah they heroically run in.

But number wise; come the fuck on.

In my five years in 911 EMS I’ve gotten fifteen confirmed saves. That’s eleven returns of spontaneous circulation in the field post cardiac arrest and four ‘hauled my ass at the speed of light to King’s county after some young brother got blasted away.’ They only gave me nine little sheets of accommodation because I think one of the arrests bottomed out in the ER 40 hours in. And they don’t give out nothing for shots and stabs. For ass haulin’, lifesaving spectaculars.

I done carried three tight asthmatic peds out of projects and got worked up without getting intubated up in my bus and on the treatment. Nothin’ for that. I’m sayin’ I don’t want a bonus or nothing but the sum total of my work, of my personal life savin’ five year total is high as hell. And yeah I buff, but you gotta buff to keep it all interesting!

I’m a fast motherfucker. My hands move so damn fast at that wheel I can clock under four minutes on any notification anywhere in the borough of Brooklyn. I a demon behind the wheel. And if not for the recession I’d be getting’ mine. I’d make it through their academy and be up on a ladder by now. Savin’ property not life is where the green is. The fame too. Just last week the Daily News ran a two page spread bout a fire engine crew that delivered a baby on the Belt. Not to be a complete hater, but I done delivered six babies now, they even named one after my unit; Sonja “B” Carter. ‘

Cause I straight hold it down in the Stuy.

It’s aggravating that the press loves those fire fighters so much. Not that they don’t deserve it, it’s just we need a little love too. It gets to a tech when year after year they out in the trenches and they feel more like a cab driver than a medical professional. We always post the firefighter saves in the lounge whenever we see them, as if to say we do that shit too you know. We save lives too. It’s been near a decade since the merger and still they shit on us. They still think we’re the red headed step children of the emergency services.

But the cops know. They see us out there more doin’ our thing with the shots, and stabs, and EDPs. I heard just a week ago some EDP put a gun up in some crews face and demanded that his girlfriend be given Narcs. EMTs don’t carry narcs. We got Aspirin (the ASA), Albuterol, Oral Glucose (a fancy word for a sugar tube) and Oxygen. That’s it. TV has everyone thinking we’re paramedics. Anyhow, I got upwards of thirty recognized and mostly unrecognized saves and I want out. I want my goddamn promotion ‘cause I’m closing in on 29 and then they cut ya.

I heard that EDP motherfucker near shot two of our boys last week on 44I in Brownsville. Heard he shot his girlfriend, hit an MOS close range in the leg, then shot himself. The crew member saved the cop by hittin’ that EDP with his asp thirty times in the face. Bleeding’ out his damn leg he called a 10-13 and held direct pressure on the wounded cop. Don’t see that in the Daily News. Don’t get any thanks when we have to act like enforcement. But a Fireman who delivers a baby is a god among men.

Or a firefighter who does just about anything in front of a camera.

Just shows the fuck up for his groceries.

I want out of this EMS hustle. I want into Fire. I need the stimulus money to stop getting ‘lost’ in paperwork before it trickles down to EMS. I need to stay in shape, not burn out, and not let the resentment over take me. They say it’s for the good of the service, but I’d like the service to do a little good for me.

“31Sam for the Multi Trauma on Livonia,” the dispatcher cuts into my thoughts.

“I hate East New York,” mutters my partner Melvin Clarke. And he’s a 6 foot 6 Jamaican from FDNY doing overtime on my truck.

“31Sam, I got trauma and I ain’t got any other units available,” the dispatcher Shirley states, too always too camp casual on the air.

She tones us up, the loud extended beep to wake up sleeping crews.

“31Sam pick up your radio!”

“31Sam; sent it over central!” I hoot into the radio. It comes over flashing on the KDT.

“That looks really, really bad,” Melvin mutters. I glance at it without reading anything.

“Yup. Let’s ride,” I say not lookin’. “Central show us extended!”

Clarke taps me on the shoulder, points me to the screen; he never mentions the job enroot unless it might matter.

Apparently a dog is eating a little girls face.

I move far faster now, faster than the speed of public safety, or life.

 

 

Chapter 16

Block Island, 2076ce

The Hygeia Hotel

 

After Yulia Romanova, this was not her last name just the name of any of the women that belonged to the Bratva of Yuri Romanoff; and Oleg Medved boarded the Port Judith Ferry wearing flicker masks and made their way thirteen miles west to the mainland to retrieve the black jeep wrangler waiting for them on the mainland under the name, “Atticus Crispy”; well then Tanya turned on the good weather.

 

For the weather was indeed a thing that some factions controlled.

 

‘Most peculiar’ thought McIntosh now clad in a black suit cut exactly to his figure. When they arrived there had been storm and fog, rain and midnight, it was freezing cold all night as they landed on the beach in the hermitically sealed baby schooner. He had wondered how it could be so cold in this North Eastern August. But, as soon as ‘the Russians’ departed it was a beautiful August late afternoon on a Thursday. Adelina Anatolievna, the spry and beautiful pixy was a sorcerer like him, a sorcerous like Madame Tanya T-Bird Tallflame Luv; so her Russian ness was only superficial; for all people of real magic; “Majik” knew themselves to be Gods and Spirits living in host horse forms called human; vessels for the divine multitude.

“Do you have a first name Mr. McIntosh,” Ms. Adelina asks as they sit and watch the late afternoon beauty of this green and rocky place from the back porch of the hotel Hygeia.

“It’s David; David Darious Kudzai Chikwamba Dorset. McIntosh is just the super stupid code name they gave me back in Port-Au-Spain because I retain data like a computer.”

“What should I call you then,” Adelina smiles politely.

“You can call me Kudzai in private or Alexei because it says Alexei on this intricately forged passport here,” he beams at her.

Alex is a very, very common Russian name.

“What should I call you when nobody else is listen,” she whispers.

“You should call me Kudzai.”

She puts out her slender and delicate hand for the shaking and he takes it in his large and powerful dark hand that is becoming lighter as he begins his transmogrification into a light skinned, blond haired blue eyed Russian man.”

“Do you feel uncomfortable playing a Russian businessman?”

“Less uncomfortable than with the boys in blue patting down my long and my vulnerable every single time you and I go out in public.”

“You know I was thinking I’d make myself black just to make a little controversy but low profile is now we need to work. I’m sorry you have to hide yourself. You are a very attractive man as you are undisguised.”

“Don’t make me blush until my complexion better allows it,” smiled Kudzai, code name McIntosh.

“Alexei, Russians don’t ever blush. You’ll give your mask away.”

“I will call you Lady Adelina if that is all right,” Darious replies.

“Or Adi B, is fine too,” she says.

Tanya T-Bird Tallflame Luv looking younger and more vibrant as the day recedes comes out with pitcher of lemonade, some more Scarborough Scones and a leather bound ancient looking manuscript with red stones embedded in its cover.

“Do you have word in the Caribbean called Loup Garrou?” asks Tanya T-Bird Tallflame Luv pouring Lemonade so chilled it reminds Adelina of the vodka served at the Trinidadian Special Forces “School of Alcoholism” where operatives train to accomplish tasks like driving, dancing, sword fighting, doing yoga, or flying planes completely under the influence, yet as if sober. The lemonade looks mighty cold.

“Are you referring to the werewolf sorcerous who steal young babies and ruins marriages in the dead of night? Those we call the Je-Rouge, or red eyes.”

“Perhaps it is the same. A particular breed of super natural creature; like a werewolf, a vampire and temptress are in one.”

“Particular to the Island of Haiti there is a spirit called Je-Rouge Loup Garrou which can take possession of person, normally a woman and turn them into a cannibal lupine creature. They keep mother awake all night to trick them into giving away their children and they keep men awake all night with shall we say succubus like luring, disorientate both; steal children and infect the very soul of the men with their dark and primal character.”

 

His skin moved still a few shades paler and his build diminished substantially though his musculature remained.

 

“Why do you ask,” Lady Adelina.

“What know you both of Sebastian Adon and his Z.O.B.?”

“The ‘B’ stands for Banshee does it not?” says Kudzai Darious (called McIntosh) in front of Ms. Luv.

“No. That is a deception. The B doesn’t stand for anything nor do the other letters,” says Adelina shooting from her hip.

“You are most right. None of the letters stand for anything. They are a ghost shirt organization,” Starr explains.

“I’m not familiar with this Majik,” ‘McIntosh’ says sipping the ice cold lemonade.

“They are twelve old souls that jump from body to body at will. They project incredible power, Baraka is the word on those around them. They can leave their bodies at will and be in other places, other realities, other lives. They are six woman and six men, though some are hidden. The leadership on paper is not the leadership in practice. The term ‘Ghost Shirt’ refers to the American Indian practice of painting the crest of the soul on their under armor before battling the invading white colonizers. They therefore by moving so fast in space and time deny their enemies any real conception of their hidden numbers and power.”

“This is most interesting, unknown to me that Comrade Adon had such power,” says Adelina Anatolievna Blazhennaya.

“Only a speculation on my part and this coven, and I know his birth mother well, so my speculations about his auspicious condition are not based on pure speculation.”

McIntosh hides in him what he knows as Kudzai Darious Dorset as he transfigures more into Alexei Thermadorov; acquiring the memories of new food groups, mostly bland, new letters, mostly strange, new ways of making love; mostly savage, and new skills like dog fighting and the selling of medical equipment on the black market.

Kudzai Chikwamba is a Shona warrior from Zimbabwe, stranded in Trinidad during the War of Lesser Antilles Succession in the mid 1990’s. He had been send by President for Life Robert Mugabe as part of an expeditionary force supporting the Garveyite faction of the 1994 Civil War in Trinidad against the Western backed Indo-Guyanese nationalist faction. Cut off after the ceasefire due to the American naval blockade he was naturalized in Trinidad, became a bio-chemist and as eventually recruited in the elite Trinidadian Special Forces.

 

“What is his mother like,” Adelina asks.

“His mother is wise and kind and raised him as well as she could given all the circumstances of the curses upon their house.”

“Curses?”

“Well his father was full blood Chosen so that would have been enough to mark them all, but this is America so being a descendant of Ivorites or Ivories, is not enough to be marked. No it was a deal his father made with a devil during the third War in Indo-China. And his membership among the horrid Bohemians that invited the cursing.”

“Enough for now,” interjects McIntosh looking ever more like a young Russian businessman, “speak of this Blue Moon, of the trigger it might play in this Labor Day Weekends events, tell us why you ask of Loup Garrou.”

“Well first the blue moon; you are both people of ancient knowledge; she a candidate and you a Shona Ougan. The blue moon itself implies a lunar cycle where in there is second full moon within a calendar month. One Lunation, the average lunar cycle is 29.53 days, there being about 365.25 days in the solar year there are therefore normally 12.37 lunation. Every 2 to 3 years in the 19 year Metonic cycle there will occur a 13^th moon. This occurrence, which will occur again tomorrow night is referred to as the blue moon.”

“As in, once in blue moon the Trinidadian Special Forces sends a raiding party to establish the readiness of the American resistance,” exclaims Adelina with delight.

“Yes, it’s been nineteen years,” replies Tanya T-Bird Tallflame Luv.

“The suggestion has been made that the term “blue moon” for “intercalary month” arose by folk etymology, the “blue” replacing the no-longer-understood belewe, ‘to betray’. The original meaning would then have been “betrayer moon”, referring to a full moon that would “normally” (in non-intercalating years) be the full moon of spring, while in intercalating year, it was “traitorous” in the sense that people would have had to continue fasting for another month in accordance with the season of Lent,” notes McIntosh quoting from his Wikipedia update almost verbatim.

“Very right,” says Ms. Tanya T-Bird Tallflame Luv looking herself younger by the hour as late afternoon stretches on. The weather is flawless.

“Interesting cycle of events, and the last of the cycle falling on September 1^st, 2076, the last possible moment before the B’ak’tun Long Count Calendar ends on 21 December,” Adelina concludes while trying to deduce via syncretism the overlap of old and new world Majik.

“The completion of 13 B’ak’tuns since August 11, 3114 BCE; which marks the Creation of the world of human beings according to the Maya. On this day, Raised-up-Sky-Lord caused three stones to be set by associated gods at Lying-Down-Sky, First-Three-Stone-Place. Because the sky still lay on the primordial sea, it was black. The setting of the three stones centered the cosmos which allowed the sky to be raised, revealing the sun,” quotes Tanya T-Bird Tallflame Luv from her red stone crusted book which has an electronic reading device inside it.

“Well what does that mean for our chances of success,” wonders McIntosh aloud who now fully every bit like a Slavic business man looks.

“Well there are two dates for the uprising are there not,” states Tanya Luv, ‘the political date and the spiritual date. The date of ‘the great disorder’ and the date of ‘the great revolt’ and the oligarchy knows neither.”

“I will tell you both well, coming from the political camp of things that the date of the uprising is certainly not set to a date of historical-spiritual-magnetic-geo-syncretic origin, but what do I know I am low in the chain of command” says Darious Dorset who now speaks in Russian as “Alexei Thermadorov”.

“I don’t care about the stupid politics of it all,” exclaims Adelina, “I want to know why you were asking us about the Loup Garrou!”

Tanya T-Bird Tallflame Luv turns to her, “Such passion!”

“You mistake inquisition for passion, I am quite numb,” she retorts.

“We shall see what you see in his head,” Tanya T-Bird Tallflame Luv replies.

“His head will be like the head of all men,” Adelina replies, “Self-absorbed, self-loathing in need of woman to pacify it. I was not chosen because I was just the best of the best of the candidates not committed. I was chosen because my Kaaba score ranks my empathic ability high and my sentimentality non-existent.”

“Hmm,” smiles Lisa, “we shall see.”

“Tell us now of the Loup Garrou, so we know what you are telling us in full.”

“Enhanced by the powers of the blue moon one will strike at Adon. It will be subtle, it will be nefarious. It will last. It will close him off to you completely except in dreams. If your associates Ms. Yulia and Mr. Oleg get out alive know you will have no ability to affect the outcome in New York the very minute she bites him. If she hasn’t bitten him already. I see blood and poison in the tea leaves. I see madness, treachery and betrayal. I see what nineteen years of planning non-violently will do, done away with a single bite. She bit him two weeks ago. Oleg will confirm the worst,” says Tanya T-Bird Tallflame Luv.

“Well this creature is not more powerful than I,” states Adelina Anatolievna.

“Beware the Loup Garrou, she is of old and primitive majik but she serves one who wishes this uprising to go bloody-bloody murder,” Lisa warns.

 

“They feed not on blood they feed on our excruciating pain and hopelessness, all pain we release is energy they drink of our body,” quotes Tanya T-Bird Tallflame Luv from the New Social Gospel, written by Emma Solomon and dictated to a teenage Sebastian Adon in 2001, before she was crucified and he was wiped clean.

 

“Perchevney,” says “Alexie Thermadorov” of the old devil himself.

“Part of the curse on the house of Adon was that for twelve years the eldest son Sebastian would spent the Sabbath in the House of Perchevney, that Tavern in the Wilderness called Mehanta. You must both stay out of New York and out of Brooklyn especially but above all things do not go in that Tavern or all is lost.

 

“Sounds like a damn good time,” says newly metamorphasized Alex in Russian.

 

“My message to you both is simple, what little Emma Solomon didn’t brief you on I was to share. You are being given a special and enormous task. Anyone can make a revolution. Tearing things down can be done with a herd of monkeys in any part of the world. Building things up requires open minds and the job of you four resurrectiors is to awaken the sleeping dead. Be bold, have no fear the Old Spirits, the New Spirits, the Old Gods and Goddesses, the New Oneness, the candidates, the sorcerers, and armies of Emma Solomon the Gold Lioness are behind you. You will both suffer much, but you will win; it is written and it will be made real. This slave uprising has been fought for 4,000 years since the first coming of the prophets. The scales will tip mark my words. Go city to city in this country from Boston out and seek out the ones this little Otriad, this group of 12 called the Z.O.B. find the ones they’ve touched and readied. Give them the vast freedom dreams, open in them the true knowledge. And when the hidden uprising does unleash itself see that we evolve, not devolve this people. The rest of the world has fought for the last two hundred years to liberate mere pockets. This uprising in the land of the eagle will fulfill the Baha’i Prophesy and then down will fall the Bear and the Dragon, good luck my magical co-conspirators,” says Tanya T-Bird Tallflame Luv with a jovial smile.

“What dream constructs are you using to tempter the hate and win the passion of Sebastian Vasyli Adon,” Tanya T-Bird Tallflame Luv asks.

“Prague Sunsets and Burma Nights,” replies Adelina Anatolievna Blazhennaya.

“And some Trinidad and Tobago,” to take his lusty edge off says David Kudzai  Darious Dorset, code name McIntosh agent of the Trinidadian Special Forces, now hidden below the skin of Alexei Thermadorov.

 

Sunset falls for some odd reason in the East on lovely, rock green New Shoreham with its prohibition era hotels, its farm of exotic animals, its pirates, it’s boat people, its witches, it’s descendants of Mohican Indians and Fenian bondsmen. Sitting on the porch above one of earth’s many tertiary chakra points; Tanya T-Bird Tallflame Luv read beat poetry, Darious accustoms himself with yoga to his new fleshy pale armor; and Adelina Anatolievna breathes in the universe, and readies herself for the greatest act of passion and battle she will ever know.

And the moon in the distance readies vast and often misunderstood powers for the re-writing or shall we say perhaps the universe auto-correcting human destiny itself. The Thursday evening into Friday morning that Oleg and Yulia spent in a gritty off road motel 6 between Galilee Rhode Island and New York. That night she spent three hours nervously improving on her make-up, while Oleg took a few glamor pictures to calm her down; that night. That night where in all the nervousness of initial deployment she thought he’d really tear her apart, he was mostly a big gentleman.

Don’t ever fuck the mark or the modals, Oleg had learned early.

Their papers got them through all the weakest check points moving south bound on I95 and by late afternoon they were posted at the Green Point, Brooklyn safe house in a ginger bread brightly checkered apartment; that of Raphael Ernesto Contreras and his wife Victoria Lynch.

 

Raphael was out when Oleg arrived; attending a so-called “political meeting” but she suspected he was drunk and with some yellow whore. But he was in fact tonight at a big meeting, glancing now through a new ZOB pamphlet going out all over town, which read:

 

 

 

 

The belief that we are progressing and advancing as a human civilization is a highly cultivated lie, an intellectual illusion; a highly cultivated and intellectual reinforced 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).

 

 

 

Chapter 17

Woodhull Hospital, 2074ce

Brooklyn

 

 

My name is Scott Sevastra. I joined the rebel alliance the day I met Sebastian Adon and subsequently despite a rocky friendship helped birth the trade union we risked so much for, the back bone today of rebel forces on the coast and in the West Indies.

 

I’m 33, slightly overweight with silver freckled hair and spectacles. I wear spectacles, not glasses. That’s different. Adon and I both work out of Station 35, Woodhull Hospital on something called vacation relief, which means we hardly ever work the same unit, with the same person twice. Vacation Relief is a fancy of way of saying ‘people not showing up to work relief’. If Adon has a friend on the job, that buddy would be me. I used to be a fire fighter, even studied fire science in Schenectady. He never lets me live that down, he despises them (us), but he doesn’t get how real it can get so deadly, so fast.

Adon and I work out of the Woodhull Hospital’s garbage hangers where Station 35 is based, the so-called ‘Belly of the Beast’. The whole complex looks like the death star, all cast iron exterior, towers and flood lights.

One would suppose the beast is called Bedford Stuyvesant.

Bedstuy is a shit hole, no matter what color you are. It’s a bunch of dirty row houses that get no light and the people get no opportunity to do more than collect government money and get into shoot outs over stupid beef and universal staring problems.

To some this work is like a calling. We were all drawn here for different reasons, some were quite noble, and some were not. Tammany Hall is fifty years dead but being an Irish grandson of a fire fighter still opens a few doors. They call it ‘legacy’. It goes in a file, then without being officially recognized other than a check box will wind a new E.M.T. in Station 43 Coney Island then over to the Rock in a year to promote to suppression. There are a myriad of systemic problems around here. But you have to have a fairly analytical mind to see their connectivity.

After the towers fell a wave of civil service activism-romanticism swept the nation and the FDNY were once again working class rock stars. A brief era of patriotism took hold and the ranks of the emergency services were stocked with young men and women who might have gone white collar except for the collective ejaculation of national trauma. The FDNY, the greatest full time-part time job secret the Irish and Italians ever kept were quickly re-cooping man power and by 2003 the waiting list for the Fire Suppression open competitive exam was nearly 25,000 deep. EMS was the expeditious way to cut that line if you weren’t legacy, hadn’t passed high school, and may or may not have been in the top of your physical class.

In 1995 Giuliani merged various emergency services to cut the costs of their respective civilian bureaucracies. FDNY was 98% white, catholic and male while EMS was heavily integrated. FDNY with a force of nearly 12,000 fire fighters couldn’t justify keeping that many trucks in the field. EMS was already doing nearly a million calls a year with a force of under 3,000. The merger was toxic to everyone involved and it took another decade for the firemen to even look us in the eyes when we arrived on scene.

I wasn’t here for most of that. I was a paramedic and a volunteer firefighter in the city of Schenectady upstate. I earned a degree in Fire Science and had promoted to paramedic via my volunteer company. Everywhere but NYC becoming an E.M.T. or a Paramedic is a promotion. In the city of many lights you promote to firefighting. I became an E.M.T. because my uncle was a paramedic and I grew up in the glow of emergency lighting. I was built for this mentally. In the words of technician Adon; ‘I possess the constitution to take this as far as it needs to go.’

There is no money in this. We probably lose 8 brothers and sisters a month to just about any other thing hiring. Attrition continues to thin the ranks. Studies report a disproportionately high rate of divorce, alcoholism, and suicide in EMS comparatively to Fire or Law Enforcement. We are asked and often mandated to work 12 to 16 hours a day in adverse conditions, in some of the most depressed regions of the country with outdated low-bid equipment, little public support, and virtually no encouragement from the city we serve. Moral is so low that the national statistics report that the average span of an EMS career is a little under four years. The department asks us for 25. Run the numbers and that’s why we’re always at 60%, that’s why you can find as much overtime as you can swallow.

Out of the 8 that leave each month, 5 quit, normally within their second year. 2; their number came up on a civil service test; normally PD, “Sanit”, Corrections or Suppression. The last one sustained a line of duty injury; real or concocted to get them off the streets on LODI for a few months to collect AFLAC benefits. We lose members far faster than they can recruit. There is a virtually endless pool of E.M.T.s to draw from, but most worth their salt go work for a Voluntary Hospital and can triple the wage we make. Others just know that the department will bleed you dry chasing a pension and a dream. They have recruiting posters in city shelters if that says anything.

The critical systemic problem is twofold. First because of low pay, hard hours and appallingly low morale we lose our toughest and bravest to the fire fighter promotional at a rate of a few hundred every three years. We lose our brighter and more ambitious members to the private sector and the field of nursing. This leaves us with a broken mish mash of skells, burn outs, a few buff zealots and a high rate of obesity in the ranks. The other side of this is the lowered expectations to close the staffing gaps.  That means on a segment 1-3 priority call you might get a truck load of CFR and long board trained fire men or a waddling glob of minority goo with a gold chain and an un-tucked shirt.

“This job is a calling, you either believe that or you’re on your way out,” I say to Sebastian.

But Sebastian is staring off into night. He’s chasing ghosts from the past.

“You can’t have unrequited love for a whole damn country,” I tell him.

He doesn’t hear me.

In November of 2073, Adon, myself and eight other E.M.T.s started a group called the “Banshee Association”, an EMS fraternal organization grounded in so-called militant human rights. We’d since put out three issues of our newspaper citywide and made quite a name for ourselves as a “Ivory-Commy-Nigger conspiracy to ruin EMS for white people and incite racial hatred in the ranks of F.D.N.Y”.

The Brothers and the Latinos, who make up over ¾ of the EMS work force seem to support it though. There’s really only one newspaper for true blue EMS sedition, and that paper is the Banshee. Our editorials rant along the lines of unity and diversity v. bigotry and being paid like summer camp counselors.

That paper made the Department crazy.

It wasn’t long after issue 2 they began their witch hunt. Adon was the focal point. Shortly after issue two he started getting jammed up for just about anything.

But, since the Israelis (who everyone now call Ivories) worked him up in Lod Prison, since his girl Maria Parsheva left him cause of his crazy, since he can’t get over his dead best friend’s death, since he may in fact be highly bipolar, well Adon isn’t talking so tough anymore. Our other Banshee Association leader Mickhi Dbrisk, an E.M.T. over at Transcare called me the other night.

 

“He ain’t got no woman; he ain’t got no country; he hates his job and slinging papers ain’t gonna save him. You better watch his ass,” Dbrisk had told me, “just the slightest thing could set him on a road to total self-destruction.”

 

It was nearly new years of 20:10pm, and we were all a little worried about Technician Adon, where his mind went, where his head was at, who he’d sold his soul to lately, over whom.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Chapter 18

Lower East Side, 2076ce

Manhattan

 

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 another 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 Fenian 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 Siegfried Sassoon, Ken French 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, Black Lives Matter Movement, the liberal and radical trade unions, the IWW of course, 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. Siggy, who god or his parents made tall dark and handsome never goes to many meetings, he never votes in otriad 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 again?” 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 2076; because this is where the department of Homeland Security over emphasized surveillance; that and few Americans still knew how to read.

 

 

Chapter 19

Brownsville, 2075ce

Brooklyn

 

 

Technician Mickhi Dbrisk reflects on the past.

 

All is quiet on the Eastern Front, the desecrated bad land of Brooklyn between Brownsville and East New York, the towers of Star City lit up by the coastline.

Paramedic Emile Cange is working Transport Unit 808 out the Transcare base in District Canarsie. He is slim and wears black spectacles. It’s Christmas and he shouldn’t be here, but his church teaches the Jesus wasn’t really even born on the 25^th, not even born in December. His partner is a tall Jamaican named E.M.T. Mickhi Dbrisk. Dbrisk is smoking a Newport out the Ambulance window, watching the snow, and thinking about his son Jayden.

Emile is judging him for smoke poisoning himself even though he was 5%.

“I just need to get off the night shift,” Emile mutters to Mickhi.

“This shit ain’t worth no goddamn $10.00 an hour,” Mickhi responds.

“When is yer medic upgrade class finishing?”

“It’s political.” That’s Dbrisk’s way of saying he doesn’t want to go into it.

Suddenly Dbrisk becomes more talkative.

“Son, no one has ever heard of our job classification. I am technically not an “ambulance driver” because I do not generally ever drive, being that I have no license to do so, and I am not a “medic” because that would imply I was a Paramedic in our EMS vernacular; and my qualification certainly prolongs life, but does little to diagnose and virtually nothing to treat. You can become State certified to do my job by sitting through a three month class and being over the age of 18. I believe people as young as 16 perform our skill set on Volunteer Ambulances and as young as 14 in developing countries. It’s about eight basic life support skills you need to perform for medical and traumatic emergency and sixty some odd sets of signs and symptoms it would be good to memorize, but a frighteningly small percentage of my graduating EMS class could recite off less than six months out of the program.”

“What’s yer point brother? Didn’t you read the memo, no one’s ever gonna say thank you except once in a blue moon the patients. ” Emile Cange asks.

“I can’t remember the last time that happened. I was one of ten brothers in my class of 65 at LaGuardia Community College which is viewed as one of the best EMS training centers in NYC. They made this game out a whole lot different than it turned out to be.”

“Well if you’re white in EMS: you’re crazy, a fuck up, or tryin’ to be a fireman for the FDNY. Then again, if you’re any other ethnicity in EMS you gotta be just a little crazy, a fuck up, or attempting to become a nurse. Because when it comes down to it: we are the hip hop of the Healthcare Industry. We make money takin’ lives. Ain’t savin’ nobody on the long enough; not even yo’ self.”

Emile continues;

“We can’t make you better like a doctor can, we don’t have to slightly pretend to care like a nurse does; we can’t stabilize in a pre-hospital setting via our own training like a PA can; we are EMS; people shoot at us because we look like police in the din of narrow housing project lighting; we might not know what you have but we can keep you alive for at least seven more minutes; and unless you’re missing your head, you’re not legally dead until we get you to a hospital.”

“Ain’t that truth,” says E.M.T. Mickhi Dbrisk.

On the wall of the Transcare Men’s room at the Brooklyn Base in Canarsie on 800 Bank Street: “We Scare ‘cause we Care” is scrawled in sharpie in the men’s room second stall.

“I work for the Wal-Mart of ambulance corps I’m fond of saying. At $10.00 an hour I have a worse healthcare package and wage than a Starbucks employee. And I don’t get any stock options after six months. We are the city’s, and soon to be country’s largest ambulance provider. I was hired exactly two months ago; most employees quit or transfer after six months when they go 911; and be nervous about the ones that don’t. Transcare is an enormous business like virtually everything else about Healthcare in America. I spent less than a day of the five day training being reassessed for skill retention; the remaining time went into how to prevent myself (and the company) from being sued, how to tastefully obtain patient insurance information, and how to properly fill out the Patient Care Forms so that that we can legal bind the patient incase their insurance won’t cover the cost of their trip.”

“This shit is business more than its medical profession,” notes Mickhi.

“Like most Americans, you and I are terribly misinformed when it comes to how the dark underbelly of how the Healthcare system functions in this country. It may be illegal for us not to transport a person who can’t or won’t sign, but this company will terminate technicians that transport those that can’t sign “too often”.

Mickhi tosses his mostly finished boag out into the falling the snow. Mickhi is an ambulance activist with the Adon’s club. On paper at least he’s Chief-of-Operations. Cange talks like an activist, but he isn’t one. Like most of EMS, he likes to explain, likes to complain, but it won’t lead to activism. Mickhi gets that. Sevastra and Adon don’t.

Emile pauses then resumes his critical stress debriefing,

“During patient assessment a transport E.M.T. obtains vitals; while the other ensures the airway, adequate breathing, and circulation. We gather a past medical history, a list of medications, any known allergies, and pick up any paperwork from relatives of the hospital or nursing home that might give us more clues to the patient’s current condition. At some point, generally when they’re loaded onto the ambulance, we ask them to sign a form that most E.M.T.’s describe as patient confidentiality statement, but it is actually a billing release. It is drilled into us in our retrain days 2 through 5 that we must always obtain a signature. That’s because it costs several hundred dollars for an ambulance ride. People wrongly think that calling 911 is a quick free way to see a doctor. That isn’t a very realistic conception at all.”

“Nope, FDNY shakes um for about 500 a run too,” says Mickhi.

“My work for Transcare brings me into the projects, townhouses, homes, and apartments of New Yorkers in all five boroughs. We also bring patients to places like Connecticut, Long Island, and Upstate New York. I always have a different partner because I work irregular shifts generally overnights and weekends. Most shifts will mandate you to work over 12 hours. One makes plans with a cushion when working; you’ll always be late if you have plans after work.”

Mickhi has heard all this before, said a hundred different ways. The paper articulates a lot of these basic points, puts in writing what most already now via word of mouth.

Says Emile Cange, “My partners fall into two categories of which I am in the second. The first have been here more than six months and have made a profession in EMS transport; that is to say non-911 pick-ups of the morbidly obese, chronically ill, or psychiatrically unstable. They like the job because by the third year it comes close to Starbucks pay and is particularly accommodating to larceny and laziness collectively. Going 911 would mean working harder, going to another Private company or FDNY might mean working harder and being more tightly scrutinized.”

Only about one/fifth of Transcare employees in EMS. They also operate a fleet of non-EMS Access-a-Ride Para transit buses are in this category.

Everyone else is out of here in six months. Mickhi and Emile included if they can organize it.

The remaining group is generally right out of school and looking to quickly accumulate experience before they either go 911 and transfer to better private or get accepted in to the FDNY Academy for EMS.

“A small subgroup of the second category is just logging the 200 hours they need to go Paramedic. The real difference in partners is those that want to do this career or those that see it as a complicated hustle getting paid to do precious little. It should reassure you slightly to know most of the people who will be doing this on a 911 level care enough to keep their skills sharp if not care enough to care.”

“I care enough to care,” admits Mickhi Dbrisk, “One day when Ayden asks what an E.M.T. is, I’m not going to recount even a single story about my work. There’s something really, really trite and cliché about an E.M.T. or Paramedic rattling off some crazy war story. The only thing more pathetic I feel is when an alcoholic or drug addict does it. You should take it for granted we see things that are crazy every single shift we work. It’s a big city full of people that are sick and dying.”

“I find that most of my partners from your second category have a micro/macro view of our work. On the larger macro level we are a vital link in the emergency response chain able to get the sick and wounded to a hospital that in NYC is never more than seven minutes away,” Emile responds.

“Our job at its most basic is to quickly bring the dead and dying to somewhere they can be kept alive,” says Mickhi.

“On the one on one micro-level we are the people bringing out the sick and dying when they are scared and with the people they love. More than any other link in the Healthcare chain we deal with people at their most vulnerable and it falls on us to earn their trust with our compassion. I keep songs on my cell phone in sixty different languages; people’s faces light up when I play them as we drive to the hospital,” explains Emile.

“One of my partners keeps several copies of the Malcolm X Autobiography for when we transport wounded prisoners to psychiatric wards and infirmaries. Another keeps teddy bears in his jump bag,” laughs Mickhi.

“A lot of people are a little out of it when we move them. Some beg for Jesus to take them or tell as terrible stories of tragic lives. A lot of people want to die because this life has been so hard on them. I try and make them feel special, or at least respected. Sometimes I’ll get people over a hundred years old and I’ll try and get them to tell me a story about their life. Sometimes I’ll transport a desperate middle-aged soul still quite totally confused about the purpose of their life.”

“It’s sort of easier to give someone a toy or a book and competently engage in a transport than to have that sort of universal empathy that lets you communicate your sympathy in a way that’s genuine; if it’s forced its counter productive and you should stick to the competency and giving of gifts,” says Mickhi.

“You can’t just nod you head and whisper sweet nothings of compassion; you have to empathize via a real experience to be related back. You have to honestly care, not transCare,” states Emile.

“People are either very scared or very intent upon dying. I’ve seen a person survive a nine-story drop because they were hyped up on PCP and believed in a thing called love,” war stories Mickhi.

“I’ve seen a partner restore stable vitals to someone with a “Do-Not-Resuscitate-Order” with a bag valve mask and the blasting of gospel music,” war stories Emile.

“I’ve seen people slip a twenty to bunch of kids when their single mother went to the ER so they could get something to eat,” war stories Mickhi right back.

“We are absolutely not paid enough to care. We can only engage in this line of work on a long enough time line because of the human good we are able to do. The death and suffering would surely take its toll on our mental health if we did not find outlets to make our works worth more than a skill set,” explains Emile, “that’s why I’m gonna become a doctor one day.

“I’ll tell you straight up; I would never have gone into East New York if it hadn’t been for this job. I wouldn’t be learning Spanish, I wouldn’t have such a large collection of foreign music; I wouldn’t know my city nearly as well as I’m about to in the next few years. This job is good because it is compatible with my sleeping habits, values, and allows me to flex my empathy,” says Mickhi lighting another Newport standard.

Emile cringes.

“You will learn to believe in a thing called love when you a carry a nameless 87 y/o woman in your arms who has no legs, has an external bladder you must also carry called a Foley Catheter that has made her sheets stink of urine; and although quite blind she “sees the light in you” and wants you to pray with her even when you ain’t been to church in a hot minute,” says Emile. Emile has been to Church yesterday. He’s rubbing it in with Mickhi as he sometimes does.

Emile continues: “I always feel like I’m bearing witness to the end of the world each Friday I go out. The clamor of the ER, the speeding around on lights and sirens, the murmurs of your dead and dying, and the precious little we’re good for except maintaining your vitals and proving to you we care. Or perhaps each shift we must prove it over and over again to ourselves; because it isn’t the paycheck and benefits that keep us out in that bus; it’s a love we can’t explain for people who we are not obligated to love or empathize for; but have to if we want to keep up this work.”

“There are a lot of sick people in this city; some made sick by circumstance, some by trauma, and many by ignorance about personal health. We will treat them all irrespective of class, race, religion, gender, or sexual orientation,” says Mickhi almost paraphrasing the Banshee Operating guide he helped write.

“But I’m only busting out the pillow if you’re old, or if you’re Haitian,” jokes Emile.

The night is brick as hell. Christmas dinner for Mickhi was Delhi sandwich and a pack of Newport regulars. He fills the tiny confines of the compartment with carbon monoxide.

“I don’t play games and I don’t take prisoners; I got some buck wilding debt, I got child support to pay and still got some big dreams. Just nine more hours of this grind and hustle to go.”

 

 

 

 

Chapter 20

140 Nassau Street, 2076ce

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 2076 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 varying effective 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 base 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, and the book within the book printed in tiny hard to read red text, like a test. 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 2072 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 2076, but that means 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 21

The Jungles, 2084ce

Guyana

 

 

The night time is a breath of fresh hair from the unending heat, which for a white man like Jefferson McIntyre is always hard to bear, despite the disposition of his soul.

The daytime is not a productive time, it is a sweltering and oppressive sweat. So all of the real work goes on at night, for lack of air conditioners, lack of fans. Two hours tops of power.

There was always a sense in the beginning of the revolt that our movement was a table where the people might dine on hope; kept upright by the work of four pillars, sturdy legs of dissent; camps of uneasy allies. Whatever allegory you prefer. There was the red camp; the trade unionists, the Socialists, the Communists; though last to move they had the highest levels of nuts and bolts organizing discipline and experience from over 300 years in the underground. There was the Green camp; the political Islamists; particularly the Iranian backed Shi’a forces affiliated to the Revolutionary Guard Corps but the Sunni Muslim Brotherhood also; they were and are logical allies as Muslims are murdered daily by the empire everywhere. The Black Camp of the anarchists was the smallest mixture of forces under arms, but engaged all other factions the most readily, and offered some of the most sophisticated technology at our disposal via what The Anonymous was able to steal from the Oligarchy. The final camp; a blue grey camp, a fusion of many patriotic and nationalist beliefs of the third world, the fourth world (indigenous people) and oppressed people’s looking for community in imagined identity; these were the Zapatistas, the Rastafarian Garveyites, the Uhuru Movement, the left camps of the Zionists, the organized factions of the wretched of the earth.

 

There were only two principles all four camps could share; human rights are baseline of demands, defeat of the oligarchy the objective of the revolt.

 

Sebastian Adon had driven Refilwe and Jefferson to the Logan Airport an hour before dawn, this was 2079, and they’d been the camps Sharashka camps for about two years. It was the last time they would see him in person alive, for the very next day with them safely into Africa; into Mali, into liberation war; it was then that Adon lead fighters into Charlestown to attack the Oligarchy head on.

 

In 2080; they took a black freighter to Trinidad from Liberia and had been based in Guyana since the advent of major fighting on the East Coast of the USA; the civil war in America. Refilwe was pregnant and Jefferson was tasked with codifying the founding documents of the revolt, as stated; the political works of Avinadav DeBuitléirs and the so-called new Social Gospel of Emma Solomon, the candidate for messiah for our generation, if you believed in those things.

But Jefferson is a spiritual man, and has seen with his own eyes in mother Africa what things Solomon and DeBuitléirs brought with their Baraka. Gleaning these texts which Adon shared in fragments in the camps; how much was who? How much were these the worlds of Emma Solomon through Avinadav and Adon; how much were these the theories of Adon, being traded under the names of the great leaders? Professor Raj Sampath and his wife had recently been smuggled out of the ivory tower camps and joined the archive and translation team at Fort Garlin, and Jefferson as happy for more eyes on the documents.

 

 

 

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, 2072). Under the guise of order the state system crystalized dynamic ethnic relationships and power differentials into control zones.

 

As of 1 January, 2079 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[2]. 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].

 

 

 

Chapter 22

Bronxville, 2075ce

Brooklyn

 

 

Thinks Technician Byron Abad; When I first met my old partner Sebastian Adon two years ago I couldn’t place him. He had entirely too much enthusiasm to have been on the job long, but he had more time than me; just over a year then. He’d just started some EMS newspaper, which just about everybody loved to hate on. We’ been partners for just a month when they shipped me out to 31 in Downtown Brooklyn; the Cumberland Station. He stayed in touch and did overtime together in Rossville 23 after our third 12 hour on, we’d bang eight, sometimes nine more. We’d sleep in shifts. Staten Island only has two stations; 23 and 22. They incorporated Station 43 in Coney Island to supplement the utter lack of call volume in Division 5. We do our dawn breaker tours together; that is to say 12 in Brooklyn immediately followed by 8 in Division 5. To be 20 hours out on a unit you need real solidarity.

 

Got trust you can go to sleep and your partner will stay up and monitor the radio.

 

There isn’t any real work in Staten Island. Low population, larger blue collar middle class. On job a day tops. It’s where old EMTs and Paramedics go before they retire to die.

 

Seven months later they brought me back to the 35, for the ‘good of the service.’ Everything was always being done for the good of the service. The good of the fire fighters, the good of the chiefs, the good of the city and some rhetoric about freedom never being free. When I came on there were 11,346 fire fighters and roughly 2,300 EMS which not including active fires were collectively handling over 2.3 million calls a year. Then they initiated a hiring freeze when the recession hit. Closed four fire houses, and then shut down 60 ambulance units. For the good of the service the 12 hours began, there was a lot of money to be made if you had the constitution to make it. By the summer of 2073 we were working at an attrition rate of 8 per month due to quitters, skels and injuries which wasn’t helped by the fact that we started that summer at only 65% staffing.

 

Adon sometimes did MUTUALs with this guy Mir Ali, who I didn’t know too well from the 58. You couldn’t do mutuals with people at other stations unless it was approved Captain to Captain, but everybody knew Adon and he’d made it happen. Being infamous is better than being obscure he always says. I took the regular approach of keeping my file empty and my nose clean. The night was looking like a solid no hitter on the graveyard Friday overnight. After Adon moved on to fire I still picked up overtime with Mir Ali.

 

Ali was a good dude, an Indian Muslim, and he even pronounced my name right. It’s not A-BAD, its AaBaad; with rolling A’s.

 

I normally work unit 37B tour 3, a twelve hour unit out of Station 35 at Woodhull Hospital. Homeland security used to follow me around until I proved that there is not a single Muslim thing about my family other than maybe my name. My mom came here illegally from Ecuador twenty years ago. I came in with papers, but I never forgot what my family had to go through to get to America. I never forget where I came from if you will.

An image of my Irish wife’s racist in-laws from Garretson Beach; I guess white is a state of mind and a skin color. I try not generalize or think too hard about what this guy is alluding too.

Woodhull was supposed to be a prison. It looks a lot like a prison all black steel and spires. No windows, crimson brick; smack in between the Bedstuy and Bushwalk Districts. Adon called in the Ministry of Love, from the book 1984. It does look like a place to torture people; certainly it is a place where people in this neighborhood come to die. Adon really only talks about three things when it comes down to it; being Jewish and bettering our lot on this job. And that he has a hot red head for a girlfriend.

Ali and Adon apparently were in the same squad, in the same Top Class 8001 and again in 8002, they’d both done the Academy twice for one concealed reason or another. They were close, but certainly not likely friends. It’s late and I’m tired and I want to pass out, but somehow can’t when I work with somebody whose style I don’t know.

We finally get a job a little after seven for what comes over as a segment 4 SICK on the corner of Dean and Albany. When we get there, and get upstairs a drunk, black EDP puts a gun in Ali’s face and demands Ali ‘give him the shit!’ Slowly Ali puts up his hands; I quietly press the emergency button on my radio; Ali says we don’t carry what the guy wants; the guy starts yelling at Ali calling him a ‘sand nigger’ a ‘camel fucker’; Ali doesn’t move, just keeps his hands up. THIS CRAZY FUCKING EDP is slobbering about his sick girlfriend, a moaning whore in the next room.

“57Adam: DO YOU HAVE AN EMERGENCY?” Central asks loudly in response to me pressing the button. My radio was on too loud. THE EDP flips. Puts two rounds right in my chest and knocks me on my back. Two quick flashes and I have this taste in my mouth of death. It tastes like sulfur and almonds.

 

The rooms spinning and there’s blood all over my hands and face as I lie on my back in the jerking spasms of shock. The last thing I see, Mir Ali swings the oxygen tank against the EDPs head in a swift loud ‘thwack’. I fade out, dying quickly; the only person who even wears the bullshit ‘stab resistant’ vest they issue us. Fuck me, I choke on my own blood. I hear Ali yelling,

 

“MAN DOWN! MAN DOWN! 10-13. 10-13!”

“MY PARTNERS BEEN FUCKING SHOT!”

 

And the next thing I know, I’m dead. My ex-wife is still my death beneficiary. She’s gonna be ecstatic.

 

 

Chapter 23

East Bushwalk District,

Bohemian Encampment,

 August, 30^th 2076ce

Borough of Brooklyn

 

 

Friday morning of the Labor Day Weekend. The sun is shining and thus the August humidity is oppressive, but the Flushing highway leads deep into the greener pastures of Queens. A heat wave of unprecedented proportions has been ravishing the city for the entire week. The globe is warm.

 

It is warming up further.

 

The New York Times, the local paper of the liberal elites says wild fires in Moscow and its environs are blazing completely out of control. As if allowed to burn.

 

Five to perhaps six dozen tents of assorted makes and models have been erected at the top of green hill whose perimeter is a steel fence; its base a small Dutch historic home and the rest a camp ground in the badlands of Industrial Bushwalk. A big band stage is almost finished in erection to blare live Gypsy Latin music is being set up and sound tested. A four day proclamation of lawlessness has been posted, but only the social club staff and its regulars will truly be encamping. At forty dollars a day, it’s a rather pricey venture to go camping in a field in the heart of a barren industrial wasteland between Brooklyn and Queens know for salvage yards, construction material stock piling, biker gangs, and various front operations.

A railroad to somewhere and poisonous green river called the Dutch Kills Creek separating Brooklyn and Queens officially.

Slavi, stone faced with black hair until he cracks a jovial grin only to those he knows is Sasho’s brother. The sometimes grinning Bulgarian enforcer is at the gate nominally charging people whom he doesn’t recognize as the spoken for “regulars”. Justin O’Azzello, “the General Manager” is cooking up “kielbasa” and barking grinning efficient commands on set up.

“What are the kielbasa made of,” asks Michelle Christina, who has booked all the bands and done much of the production work to make this Bohemian Festival occur.

“What are they made of pendaho,” repeats her husband Raphael.

 

“Chicken,” says Justin with his mouth, but ‘people’ with his teeth and she refrains from trying.

At various points Justin Toomey O’Azzello has come and gone as Mehanata’s so-called “General Manager”. He’s quit, gotten fired, quit, gotten sober, quit found god, rehired, lost god, gotten very drunk, gotten very sober, and now, he seems to be conducting business well enough and is back in good graces of the management. Which means Sasho, and maybe to a lesser degree in reporting and accounting; Misha Kishbivalli, but Sasho is undisputedly the boss.

 

The Onderdonk Fields are now held by a colorful gypsy mafia. Sasho and his young son join a game of football game now underway.

 

And then around 4 in the pm; arrives the medical team; Sebastian and Jared Forgetter.

Sebastian Adon shows up proudly. With his tall street aspiring paramedic partner from Methodist Academy Class 33. Jared Forgetter is carrying a large red medical tech bag, the one Adon was allowed to keep unofficially by his friends and supporters in the quarter master’s office after the Fire Department made him resign in lieu of termination after a long and draining trial over the event that occurred two years prior in Haiti.

The nature of those bloody ruinous events will be recounted in due course. But the big red bag, his experiences and ten thousand dollars were all he walked away with. And the cost of the years with that agency were yet to be calculated.

Jared is tall and dirty blond and lanky and looks exactly like one might draw all stereotypes of the laid back high fiving, dope smoking west coaster; is a skilled electrician and followed his college sweetheart out east.

Adon and Sebastian join Victoria Lynch and Raphael on the top of the hill by the main encampment.

Raphael and Sebastian embrace as they always do. They grin because they know what is coming in the next 72 hours.

A large and gregarious man rises to introduce himself, the slinky slender dark brown haired woman at his side does not. Also seated in the main encampment are Mary Lia Monteleone with her big French tits, Georgie Rabanca, and Natasha Andreavna Skorobogatova.

Natasha ignores his arrival most completely.

A burly Post-Soviet man with a cropped beard and fashionable dress with a camera around his neck steps up and offers his hand.

 

“My name is Oleg Medved, but you may also call me Alan,” the big Russian says.

“Sebastian Adon,” Adon replies, “this is my partner Jared Forgetter, medical partner for the encampment, not homosexual lover.”

Oleg grins and pours everyone drinks and Adon takes out a large bottle of Spanish red wine and uncorks it.

And he passes out wine glasses wrapped up in socks.

They all then dance and dance and drink and steal and make art and chat about the world. And the fearsome, but utterly kind hearted in disposition Ukrainian-Israeli gangster Oleg Megved “from Boston” takes a wide assortment of photos of former and Postsoviet models. Victoria has arranged a series of photo shoots and allegedly Alan, who most call ‘Oleg the Bear’ is local celebrity “up in Boston” and he takes tons of fashionable pictures. Sebastian in his blue paramilitary style EMT uniform with a red bandana arm band is soon dancing the half tango, half salsa with Natasha clad in a yellow mesh cocktail dress with blue Indian war paint under her eyes; it makes for a lovely picture.

 

“I didn’t recognize you in the uniform and your little partisan cap,” she earlier exclaimed.

 

The four day Bohemian Gypsy Festival is in Friday day one full swing by evening.

It’s a very Old Soul-Old School movement of a moment.

They’ve taken a barren camp ground in bad part of warehouse district and turned into something of a cross between the Gypsies of Patagonia and or a cold war partisan encampment.

Adon has little medical work to do so Jared at some point disappears into a tent with a young Russian girl to smoke some weed and then later they see the tent shaking gently, arithmetically. Sensuously.

And Adon begins working on sketch of Georgie and the big French tits on Mary Lia, and Georgie with a laugh mentions he found black and blue marks all over his woman’s body the night she went back to Sebastian’s home two weeks prior. The night Natasha nearly killed him.

 

“I fell down some stairs,” is all Mary Lia says. And Georgie laughs it all off because he knows Sebastian is tragic man, a good man but a tragic man. He doesn’t have it in him to have any affairs. Georgie who is CUNY Grad center professor and also a computer scientist has affairs all the time, but he is not an American, or tragic, or rarely ever sad.

However Mary Lia’s black and blue marks are from Sebastian fucking her dirty and rough, and then fucking her with love making. Just one week ago.
Georgie wonders when it will be that Natasha Skorobogatova gives him the opportunity for a good long strong affair, but Sebastian has and does have affairs all the time, including with Georgie’s girls and main mistress. No regard at all for other men’s relationships. Admittedly such a conquest seems expensive in a few regards. Georgie feels sad for Sebastian at times, buys him drinks periodically with an ugly Romanian smile. He has never understood the complexity of the man, or the complex behind his tragedy.

 

Recently he became aware of the possibility of the small and short affair between Sebastian and another regular mistress, the French girl named Mary Lia Lewis; he was shocked that beautiful women could find pleasure with such a sad broken man.

 

And low and behold Natasha and Sebastian are dancing up a storm to the Latin Ska-Gypsy Jazz Band Eskarioka now playing. Followed by the Sunny Side Social club. George has never even seen the man dance more than two or three forced times. No use of hips at all!

 

She is the woman at the tavern that turns all the heads as per the usual lately. Even more so than that American girl Jessica who always takes off her clothes and climbs the downstairs stripper poles, even more than Amelia who after the Sebastian affair has been around a great deal less. Even more than the Moldovan twins who kiss! She arrived perhaps six months ago and now certainly has a regular card. Sebastian turned his in for some time and has just begun to reestablish it.

A regular doesn’t just show up early and stay late two of three weekend days open; they make themselves part of the tavern’s atmosphere. They have affairs, they get in fights, they make scene.

“Now I could not have seen that happening,” says George to Raphael, “he never ever dances!”

“She’s fucking that hot, prosto,” Raphael says, prosto is Russian for simple.

Sebastian Adon who is half of the medical team for a three day commitment here, but is also part of the back-up team if needed for Raphael’s planned raid on Citi Plaza Tower, the “big blue building in Queens,” has been given the green light to have a good time after three non-intensive demonstrations of his worth a competency paying for themselves. And the not giving of a shit on Sasho’s end if the house paramedics are intoxicated.

Jared Forgetter is kind to people and ‘really fucking West Coast’ as a spacy partner and is high as a kite making out with some young lady in a tent somewhere, she’s a just off the boat and he’s never had a “Russian girl” before. She’s not really Russian, she’s Moldovan, but Jared isn’t really sure what the difference is. He’s good long and uncut and after three spliffs the young girl drains him dry. His cock, not his pocket. Although she does manage to take forty bucks off him. While he was in the tent Sebastian attended to three small intermittent soccer related injuries.

Natasha is never far from the fact that Sebastian not only has steel toed boots and two left feet, but she takes him up on his hand to dance over and over.

Sebastian is so happy to be dancing again and he aims to do it well, but that is a highly subjective “well”. He swore to her on the night she almost killed them that he never dances anymore. So that night before the fall, she made him two-step as she watched and pressed her weight against his hip until he came correct.

“Your hips man! Move your goddamn hips.”

And he almost crushes her bare foot with a steel towed combat boot dip.

Ernesto is wearing a gold baseball cap and sits watching with his wife Victoria manically try and direct this shit show. Bands not showing up, nothing going to schedule everyone getting more and more furiously drunk. In yester year and future year Raphael commanded men, now he mostly makes life. With his music twice a week at the tavern as part of Bordel Dali and he also makes love with his camera twice a week and always maintains a slave job at a boutique blue jeans fashion blog.

But, a revolutionary is a revolutionary and when asked by the resistance three weeks ago to activate his cell and raid the big blue tower to deposit the transmitter for the Fire Station to broadcast orders and shut down government coms during the Labor Day Parade, he agreed.

Jumping out of planes, carrying out raids and building non-lethal bombs is like riding a bike, you never forget how to do it.

“I like to see him pretending to be happy,” says Raphael to Victoria.

“They are another tricky thing now moving too fast,” states Victoria as she watches out the corner of her eye. Victoria is very happy with herself for it was she who made this four day festival come together. And it is mostly out of control.

She has no idea her husband and most of the Peruvian Ska band Eskarioka are about to stage a raid on the tallest building in Queens. She has no idea that Oleg Medved and Yulia Romanova are poisoning half the camp with vodka based neurotransmitters. She was no idea there is dead hooker in the tent next to hers. She has no idea that an Islamic Sleeper cell is carrying a bomb into the heart of Times Square to black out the city in a thermo-electric pulse Monday morning. She has no idea that 2 million black woman, men and children are coordinating their revelry amid an armed uprising. She just isn’t aware of those things.

She doesn’t know about all of her husband’s affairs, she doesn’t know he used to lead a guerrilla band in Peru called the “Bolivarian Hotshots of the Brigade Cinqo de Mayo”. She loves Raphael her husband with all her heart, she loves Sebastian Adon as her tragic brother, she loves-hates Sasho who gives her a platform for her fashion, art and music. She wasn’t a child one day. She came to this city and got a job at the Tavern as events producer and tavern has taken over most of her life and time. She doesn’t see the world like Raphael does, or Sebastian did before his friends put him into sleep.

Sleep is the cousin of death, but not physical death. It is simply reducing the size of the world one can see, third, fourth and fifth and sixth dimensionally.

Sebastian and Victoria can only really see a couple days into the past and future. Whereas people like Raphael, and Natasha Andreavna can see things much further back and forward, see things happening in other realities. It makes them very, very functional in this reality.

But the more one drinks, the less they see.

If Victoria Lynch Contreras was aware of any of those above listed things, she’d have a baby heart attack. And probably move back to upstate New York where the world is safer. Back to her hippy parents Alpaca farm. Way out of the coming crossfire.

“She can’t be tamed by any man,” states Raphael Ernesto.

“He will try, but when he fails I’ll have to pick up the tragic pieces again,” states Victoria. She’s already had to coax him gently from his Maria to his Yelizaveta and then to freedom and then through the affair where he broke the French girl Amelia’s heart and it’s now back to the bondage of his wanton reckless emotions and habits of loving early and often. She admires that about him though, she’s a hopeless romantic herself.

It is Victoria’s shoulder where Sebastian does his most cathartic crying over the past three years since they all met on Floyd Benet Field at the original Bohemian-Gypsy-Tabor festival on the abandoned tarmacs of Idlewild airport.

A cool breeze breaks the city’s August humid heat wave.

“Spin me faster man!” commands Natasha.

He is under her spell.

She feeds him still more wine. He can be known to drink in uniform when a General like Sasho gives him the green light to do so. Sebastian has at least some discipline, but like a regular rank and file loses this discipline if the drinking lets him and the front seems far. And surely it takes a lot of drink to render him incapable of splinting extremities or dealing with overly intoxicated people, the most likely of injuries. But now, he’s really not good for much but chasing this woman. He knows nothing of Nicholai’s “great big job.”

And as a card carrying Banshee member he has several local ambulance crews on speed dial worse comes to worse.

There are endless bottles of wine and vodka miraculously stashed away about the encampment. All need tasting.

Adon is no obvious martyr today, or yesterday. Obviously for all his past mountains of zeal he’s built up, he saw the loveliest girl in the camp teach him how to dance and then try and kill him two weeks prior. He cannot be unaffected by the contrasts there. And if he was aware that his closest circle is up to something very large and possibly violent, he “is asleep.” He is out of the chain of command until reactivation after his paramedic graduation. Which is in January.

After his work in Haiti, the brought him to the bathhouse, they submerged his consciousness in the great waters of a temple buried in the earth; and to keep him safe they closed his eyes and made him aware only of what was around him in a small circle of seeing.

A hint that there was a close bout with death has been made. Did our protagonist antagonists actually plumed to death off a roof top?

In a futurist play, any bout with death has at least three angels standing guard over the protagonist antagonists. And if he had died on the roof how might he have died on the roof a second time as indicated in Act One, or at the Millennium Theatre after that?

So to clarify.

The night Natasha and Sebastian boxed ferociously after he yanked the cigarette from out her mouth, she shoved him off a roof.

That was two weeks prior from the night before the Blue Moon, now.

He grabbed out for her and they both died falling into the deadly drop pit.

She did shove to kill, but rather than make suicide assembled he pulled her along, to death. They toppled off the roof into that pit of death.

But angels quickly and immediately came to their rescue.

Only Nanoseconds after lying broken and dead in a pit of death, having killed each other over nothing, over posturing and arrogance and lack of respect for physics; reality reset.

The angels, on behalf of the spirits took their two souls from their corpses and went back in time five seconds. And put the souls into the bodies of Sebastian and Natasha, took control to make them step just one foot away from the pit.

So bang! When they toppled this time they just fell to the side and pissed the pit and their deaths by one single foot. A near death experience was now near life experience. Because the spirits were protecting them both.

Panting hard, as if post-coitus she grabs his right hand.

She bit down into his right index finger to draw blood. He makes no reaction his animal soul hasn’t fully absorbed itself into his new body. Then they lay panting by the edge of precipice staring each other down, bitten hand clasped and bleeding; and then she confessed to him things that were highly unnerving.

Some were true. And some were white lies.

Now, back at festival!

Now, “she remembers nothing” and keeps urging him to explain their first night of misconduct under good night almost blue moon and tell her what happened on the “roof of the financial district.”

Had they fallen into that pit having no spirits or angel to aid them you could have taken their bodies out a side basement door and it wouldn’t have even been real news. Senseless tragedy only bothers all of the living as everyone is missed by someone. So now they dance and self-seduce, she would say she is incapable he above it, so they self-seduce.

They are engaged in a passionate stare down, but it is more playful than hot. She is very used to drunken men desiring her. He is very used to being a sober gentleman and sometimes also a drunken man.

Victoria Lynch can see the steam and glow from the tent camp at the top of the hill. It reminds her vaguely of the wild passion that came over her several years ago when she wrested Ernesto from the arms of wealthy temptress and got the ring of marriage around his ways.

Sebastian is a marvelously incompetent, albeit enthusiastic dancer. Natasha drags him off here and there and they imbibe relentlessly without even seeming to stagger.

Night comes and darkness falls.

“It most was tender to see you saving the life of Sasho’s son,” Natasha had whispered earlier making a dry Russian joke out of his earlier handy work.

He had put an ice pack on a not that sprained ankle of the eleven year old son of the club’s owner. But, it was a smash hit. Calling an ambulance costs between $475.00 and $4,000.00 in the City of New York.

“Saving lives is much easier than taking them,” he says with a grin, “in the long run anyway.”

“So what happened again on our fateful roof! Tell me the whole story!” she demands.

“So no one meta died, or really died. Only almost died. Because when dawn broke two weeks prior we were still standing, I called you a cab and we begrudgingly agreed to meet again, only by fated coincidence, as we are both members of the same social club.”

“Fascinating,” she says staring out into the bonfires of the encampment. Pouring perhaps the fifteenth glass of wine. Knowing behind her bluff they were about five three dimensional seconds were warm, bloody broken and dead.

They had gotten quite drunk on wine then Astika, then Rakia and then Vodka, eventually.

Again she pressed him for, “The whole of the story.”

“We boxed. You drank and boxed me harder. Then we fell twenty stories to our deaths in a sub-basement pit,” he explains.

“And now we dance like two lovers who could have been just two separate funerals, in two separate languages, with Raphael Ernesto and Victoria being the only overlapping guests of note,” she notes and winks at him.

The festival has become an alcoholic blur to all involved by midnight thirty.

Natasha and Vasa dance, dance, and dance like they almost died for nothing just a week before. Under a bog moon taking shape in the night sky above the border between Queens and Brooklyn.

Earlier in the day Oleg Medved took a good many pictures of her and the three lesser former and Postsoviet models from Bucharest, Bulgaria, and Transdeisnester Republic. And also of lovely Victoria who always looks lovely and charming and caring for this rowdy band that gravitates to the tavern. While refusing to let the sometimes dirty laundry of her marriage ever be aired in public views. Though there had been improvements lately.

Sebastian kisses Natasha’s hand in the end of the song, then lets her swoop low and he catches her in his arms as she gets an inch from the ground with her long golden locks. It is not a smooth or graceful motion, but he tries the best he can. They nearly topple over.

Then she has her lips pressed to his neck. And they eye into each other, taking in the passion that they are generating without necessarily acting any further on it.

“I will call you Vasa!” she declares. “My name for you from this point out.”

“I will call you Natasha.  As I have from the beginning.”

“You like a devil have too many names,” she smiles.

Drunkenly they declare what each had planned to name to the other already.

Then more dancing, dancing and more dancing; sway and grind like they almost died for nothing.

Sebastian kisses her hand in the end of the song, then lets her swoop low and he catches her in his arms as she gets in inch from the ground with her long golden locks. For the second time now with not much more grace than before.

Then she has her lips pressed to his neck. Again. I could fall for her quite hard, he thinks, but he obviously, has thought such thoughts before. A rather ferocious amount of wine and vodka and Astika beer are consumed.

Finally around 3 am the camp gets quieter, the Bohemian festival dies down enough for Natasha and Sebastian to sit almost on top of each other, leaning in, coloring the sketch he’s made of their near fall and of her beauty over two pages of his black archive.

She colors quite enthusiastically.

Oh to live just two lives more! He thinks.

As you know, he will get to.

She, this wild woman Natasha is pressing against me and I feel no pain, he cries out in his mind. She just smiles and takes each color rendering his work into a superior rendition via the brightness of the combined war effort.

Finally around 5 am the camp gets quietest, the Bohemian festival dies down enough for bonfire calm without drumming. Ernesto, Natasha and Sebastian sit at the edge of a terrific fire now also dying down. They are quite drunkenly and “derangedely” speaking on the subject of “phantom physics” and “meta reality”. Sebastian is waxing philosophically, as Natasha’s eyes roll, on the theoretical possibility of parallel reality and past lives. He pulls this from somewhere, according to Natasha, “His own ass.”

A little faux-intellectual rant positing his personal theory of existence.

Raphael Ernesto Lynch Contreras nods in agreement, adding his own deductions. His own Mayan prophesies mixed with some Peruvian socialist folklore of the Arequipa Province.

“What if there are other lives running right alongside this one!” exclaims Sebastian Adon, “other possibilities, other potentialities had tiny little digressions been made on the course we follow in this waking life? What if, mind you the slightest digression and decision had yielded a vastly different outcome from what we experience now? And, what if there was some way to step from one reality to another. Moving about time, changing your body while keeping your soul and memories intact?”

Ironically, like as if he had ten thousand spoons and all he needed was a knife; Sebastian Adon has in his drunken stupor articulates exactly what has happened to he and Natasha just two weeks before.

“Fascinating talk boys before we die,” remarks Natasha yawning.

It is to Adon like one of those grand conversations he once one had in the East Village coffee house Yaffa Café over red wine when he was younger. Or on the Golan Heights hills in Syria. Sweet mental nostalgia.

“Do you believe in past lives?” asks Ernesto.

“Well certainly! It’s so primitive to think this is all a show down between god and the devil over souls, one person, one life one try! How pedantic!”

“So then you believe in alternative realities, and also reincarnation?” Ernesto asks.

Natasha makes faces at Sebastian as they go on. The fire continues to die down.

“Tovarish Philosopher I’m tired and have need to be put to sleep,” she says.

“Soon, soon,” Adon says.

“The Old Soul is what I heard it called once,” says Ernesto, when I was boy in Arequipa Province, “the body is but a vessel my father and mother said. Like a suit for the soul strolling across time, across many lives. An Old Soul remembers these lives and in doing so has a mission to accomplish, what the Hindu call a dharma.”

“Boys! Bed!” yells Natasha.

Sebastian asks her for five minutes to finish his idea. She scowls and gives him three and takes off in a pout.

Raphael Ernesto with a devilish smirk says, “Speak of reality later. Go after her or I will.”

And Sebastian catches up with her mid hill and takes her hand.

“Lie with me,” he says.

“That conversation was a lot a lot of bullshit you know,” she says.

“It’s fun to speak about this bullshit sometimes.”

“Where will there be the best sleep for us?”

“I have a blanket,” he says forgetting about the inflatable mattress.

Natasha and Sebastian sit almost on top of each at the top of the hill under the trees. He pulls a black and green Arabian blanket from his ruck sac. She finds anther bottle of wine as if out of thin air. Pours them both glasses. Watches him prepare the bare accommodations. She pages through and returns to late night coloring the sketch he’s made of their fall and of her vastness over two pages of his black archive.

She stares into him with Old Soul eyes.

“Will you be my tovarisha for the whole of festival?” he asks her, “We can share our wine and food and I will watch over you.”

“Ha, ha. Tovarish is gender neutral. It is not changed to “Tovarish-a” for woman. We are equals in Russian. Only word in Russian without gender inflection. Also I need not to be watched after. I am always safe.”

“Be my tovarish then and look after me then.”

“We will see. For now this an ok plan. Likely I will leave you in the morning.”

They draw closer into a cuddle and then complete spoon. She wraps herself within his arms and he holds her like it is his duty, but it is also a thrill of some buried passion. He holds her tight like a little partisan as the trees whisper and the two double blue moons that are out late can blot out reasonable doubt. He likes to hold her.

They curl together on an inflatable mattress and a green Arabian blanket. They are both, for a variety of reasons unaccustomed to the perfect fit of a well-intentioned cuddle.

The fall into what passes as sleep, her first. As if on demand.

“We almost died for nothing,” he says.

“What if I kill all your hope,” she mutters in a whisper.

“What if I loved you until you know just what hope truly is?” he responds to her in muted tone.

“Don’t speak now of such goddamn stupid and impossible things,” she whispers.

They lie together in that Gypsy camp draped into each other on the air mattress and floating on a dream the only two partisans without tents. He dreams of escaping the struggle against the reaper to be forever in her arms and she dreams of a big black cat with a fiddle while a man on the moon plays the world’s smallest violin just for her little Amerikanski. No that’s just a romantic little literary device. He dreams of her and she dreams of nothing at all. Nothing at all she will ever, ever talk about to a man. And that nothingness is a subjective, but not the objective of her inebriations.

A good night for Sebastian is not to dream at all his dreams are clusters nightmares. She has thus has rendered him peaceful. A good night for Natasha is to drink and dance until the night is blur of happy smiling, swirling dance movies and escaping in a peaceful haze. He watches the moon and feels her breathing heavily against him. He is reminded of some great peaceful moment. Whether that is because a beauty lays in his arms, or something more ephemeral, magically real forms an underling narrative, he cannot say.

She snores a little. Makes unintelligible little cute moans. The last thing he thinks holding her looking up at the big blue moon is that if some monster or bandit came from the tree line, if bad men, werewolves, monsters or devils came to hurt them, if they sky fell out above them, if the blue moon became a meteor, he’d never, ever leave her. He’d fight on whatever level he had to keep this woman safe, to marshal every ounce of his abilities to deliver her from any impending strife.

It all felt like déjà vu, as if it happened a few times before this very moment.

She sleeps indifferent to his hold or his guard.

She has survived a nation of thieves to get here and scuttled through a den of vipers since arrival. Sleeping in a park, with or without “protection”, with or without a mattress or a pillow, these are not so high on her hierarchy of concerns. Amongst many other pressing troubles, the Vodka sung her to sleep.

 

And the big blue full moon lit up the sky marking on the lunar calendar the end of an epoch and beginning of an existential war.

 

 

Chapter 24

Lincoln Hospital, January 12^th 2074ce

South Bronx

 

 

17Frank; that crazy unit that was just too fast to be allowed to live. They were a series of terrible law suits waiting to happen. They were the fastest unit in the South Bronx.

They were surly, sometimes prejudice while being diverse; masongistic while being charming and rag tag, but if you got jammed up they were the next best thing to a van load of impact cops. 17F3 was out of Battalion 55 which sits on Melrose and 154^th Street across from the so-called ‘haunted projects.’ An old fire house like 17; a little bigger, a little more respect for itself. A lot of good people at 55 who never forgot where they came from; most of them Puerto Rican or Dominican; most of them form the Battalion they served.

 

A real crack outfit that is. Few quite like it in Division 2.

 

17 Frank 3 was bad outfit.

Gregory on the A Platoon was Fenian, 6 foot 6; carried an asp on his belt. Just an ASP and some PPE gloves. Said that was all he ever used; everything else was cosmetic. B Platoon was a small half Italian; half ugly white kid everyone called Craig. He drove most of the time. He was lightning fast. Had the kind of palm techniques and hand eye you really have to born with. The third man in on the C Platoon was Jimmy. Jimmy was probably Latino, maybe a Sikh, maybe Native American. He was supposedly their real agitator and spokesperson. I once saw him drop a charging in EDP in Bronx Lebanon. Never carried weapons, liked using his hands. If he wasn’t on, then the Tech Bag was unlikely to leave the bus. They weren’t bad guys; they were the best when it came to trauma, because they stole everyone else’s jobs. 17 Frank was just too fast to live long, like star eating its one fuel, too big, too bright to occupy space for that long.

 

When shots went off they were always, “two minutes out.”

 

People would hate on um’ cause they were always buffing jobs. I’m sure the patients families never minded. The object was to get there quickly, no? 17F had three guys, three total gung ho trauma buffs, that is to say guys who could give a shit about EMS, could give a shit about patient care, they tuned a spare radio to PD frequency: shots fired; and they were off. The only guys who’d chase an EDP across a park in the dark of night or puppy pile a wild drunk who went buck wild in the ER. They should have been cops. But I don’t think they really were up for that kind of supervision.

It takes three guys to run a seven day, eight hour unit for one tour. There are three tours in a day. Tour one is the graveyard; all DOAs, fucked up shit, you earn the night differential which calculates to some fifty extra fucks a month. Studies say the graveyard takes five years off your like. It’s for burnt out H&H old schoolers or guys going to college. Tour 2 is the busiest; the day tour. People wake up and die as the sun comes up, lots of scrutiny, lots of bosses in the field making comments.

 

Tour 2 is for the family man. Tour 3 is the evening shift. They normally go out at 4, 5, 6, or 7pm. These are the trauma shifts; when booze, ego and gang color make the boroughs bleed.

 

As it stands, you need 9 techs to run a unit. Platoons A, B, and C indicate when people will be on. Two at a time. They say third guys always the asshole, if both your partners are cool you’re the asshole. But 17F3 were tight as a drum. They were ruthless in their pursuit of blood. The recession hit in the winter of 2073. They weren’t gonna close Fire Houses so EMS took it, like we always do. We signed a nonsense contract, which didn’t give us the 20 and out we fought for, for years like Sanit, Cops, and Suppression guys do. Built into the thing was this new 12 Hour day thing. Instead of 9 techs to run a truck 24/7 you now only needed 4. They piloted the thing in Brooklyn in the summer of 09. E Platoon and F Platoon; 12 hours each; these guys got a three day weekend on the actual weekend twice a month. It was a mix of the recession and the existing personnel shortage they just never seemed to fill.

 

At any given time there are around 2,200 Emergency Medical Technicians working for the FDNY in NYC and around 240 Paramedics. The word on the street (which you should trust as far as you can throw Manhattan) about our attrition; is 8 EMTs quit each month for a range of reasons. 4 go out on LODI (line of duty injury) every two months. 4 get fired every six months for outlandish shit. Each time a promotional exam is formed for Fire Suppression, approximately every two years until the recession hit; we lose around 100 of our Bravest and most physically fit. Out of the 200 Paramedics, that is to say all the personnel which can administer drugs intravenously, intubate patients, interpret EKGs, and are generally our brightest lot; of that 200; ¼ go on to be nurses of Pas thus we lose them after three years and change. ¼ go over to the private sector when their pay literally nearly triples from around $24 to $60 and change. ¼ promote to the leadership after around 10 on the job; the remaining quarter stay in the streets pushing. Burn out happens quicker with EMTs, but more severely with Paramedics.

Everyone, thanks to watching the idiot box thinks: ‘Someone’s hurt or sick!’ ‘Call 911 for Paramedics’. But you’re gonna get an EMT most of the time. Because we’re faster and we don’t have enough training to stay and play. All trauma goes to EMTs first. There isn’t much more a medic can do for a guy stabbed twenty times in the chest. Fluids, needle stick decompressions to prevent tension pneumothorax, and quick clot don’t compete with a solid 2 minute ETA, a three minute on scene rapid package and go, occlusive three sides on the chest, bleeding manually controlled, patient boarded and collared; at the hospital in less than four.

 

The more they bleed, the more we speed!

 

17 Frank was one for the thirty units to be cut in the recession based effort to not fire any firefighters. Thirty units were to be run down, staff transferred to plug all vacancies on 8 hour trucks. Brooklyn, Division 3 was to pilot the 12 hour tours. They’d tried in Manhattan (Division 1) some years back. It flopped big time. Everyone in the Bronx hoped Brooklyn would drop the ball, bang out in large numbers and ruin the chiefs’ hope of implementing it city wide. In the 12 hour mode a unit could run with 4 not 9 and they could stop paying out all the insane amounts of over time.

Seven months later; it was still all speculation and state of play. Only parts of Division 3 were 12 hour implemented. But tonight was the deadline for the 30 units to get run down. It was to be the very last tour of 17 Frank. And much to the annoyance of Greg and Jimmy; it was a real quiet night on the Southern front. But the night was still young. It was Friday after all. They were gonna go out with a bang.

Around 1925 the PD radio began giving inclinations some evil shit was a foot at the infamous Richmond Plaza Complex (Rich Man Plaza). Big bang. And then a fire, and a calling out of the Task Force detachment next to the Deegan. This was huge. That evil fucking den of sin was finally burning to the ground.

17F took off blazing lights and sirens even though they hadn’t been assigned.

 

“Gonna go out blazin’,” Jimmy muttered. Like a buck wild, blazing banshee; the unit ripped up the Grand Concourse. Richmond Plaza wasn’t even in their Battalion, but this was the gentleman’s borough.

 

Chapter 25

Bohemian Gypsy Encampment, 2076ce

Borough of Brooklyn,

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 Ivory. 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 Ivoryish 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 26

Fort Totten, January 12^th, 2074ce

Queens

 

Instructor Jon Healy

 

Back in time at 3pm, 1500; two training units left Outpost 53 at Fort Totten with two instructors, and two cadet probes each. One went to Brooklyn, one the Bronx. The one heading over the Throgs Neck bound for Hunt’s Point was being driven by Jack Carlson and his partner, the most senior, non-brass member of the service; Instructor Coordinator John Healy; who was also a founder and leader of the EMS Pipes and Drums band.

Further back, like a year back tragedy struck.

When the man most responsible for training the last two generations of NYC EMS drops to the ground in the middle of the Academy in cardiac arrest some might call that a taste of things to come. A whole class of cadets was sleeping through a lecture on the operating guide when he dropped to the ground; all 185 calloused, hard Irish pounds of him. He was a battle axe, but everyone knew this coming.

He dropped and went into Vfib.

Not gonna say everyone stood there, jaw dropped, these future new jack EMTs; but they stood there like a CFR circle of death for long enough for Instructor Paramedic Nick Barker to sprint across a fifty foot room, dive over crowd of jaw dropped, useless new recruits and being CPR. They defibrillated him right there in Totten Green after approximately 3 ½ minutes dead.

Everyone knew Instructor Coordinator John Healy. He’d been an EMT since the world knew what that was. He was a short guy, had Celtic tattoos up and down his brawny arms.

He’d been one of the first ambulance crews into the smog and death of the towers.

 

“We know now, not to breathe shit you can see,” was one of his favorite sayings.

 

He’d been in the trenches too long. Caught COPD. Later developed Chronic Heart Failure and positional dyspnea. Still smoked a half pack of Marlboro Red a day. Would ‘til the day he died. Which was today, one year ago. His partner of 15 years Instructor Jack Carlson was by contrast one of the healthiest fifty plus men alive in EMS. He went twice, sometimes three times a day on the up to 6 mile PE runs. He wore little red short shorts, was flamboyant as hell; everyone swore Jack had a million hot girlfriends half his age, but I think folks are in real denial about his ‘temperamental’ character.

Healy had a failed marriage and a ‘severely bipolar’ son, as he put it. He was slowly dying after days at the towers and thought sometimes about never seeing his son finish high school.

The Department gave Healy a quiet suggestion he might think about taking some paid time off from a bottomless pit of unused sick leave he had in his bank. Nobody even bothered whispering the R word, even though he had near 28 years on the job. Healy was back at Fort Totten in a month. Teaching again after three.

Healy was the man most responsible, second only to Peg Quinn of course, for all of us being here. He’d given himself to this city and perhaps, although he’d never admit it; been poorly compensated. People tried to protest, even a year after the heart attack when he insisted on taking out a unit with Jack to take two new cadets on a rotation in the South Bronx.

 

“It’s cool,” he said with a cigarette between his lips, “I ain’t cashing out ‘til the sky starts falling.” And like always, John was right. 12 January 2074 was the day he, and many, many others would actually die in the line of duty secondary to falling sky.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Chapter 27

Bohemian Gypsy Encampment, 2076ce

Borough of Brooklyn,

Day 3

 

He awakes on Onderdonk Fields and she is still in his arms, tits still plump and cutely snoring. 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.

 

It was Sunday and everything would repeat itself again. Indecisive lusty flirtations with nothing to support the imagined memories and Oleg the bear stood by taking pictures. The festival of the Gypsy’s continued as the city braced for Monday West Indian Day parade. The dress rehearsal for any insurrection.

 

Eventually Sunday evening Natasha and Sebastian broke camp and headed towards the underground.       They arrived at a small tavern across the street from the faded green light posts of the L underground train in bombed out warehouse zones of so called “East Williamsburg”. The tavern is paneled in old wood and is made up like some old school prohibition tavern; the name of the joint is the “Cobra Club”. It professes to combine mixology and light yoga. Much to the delight of Sebastian who cannot think of two activities worse suited for each other than drinking and yoga, perhaps drinking and driving an ambulance.

 

And it was here that he notices that Natasha has a dragon fly necklace and matching wrist bracelet, which he had not notices previously adorning her. Although not on her person for the previous two and part days of festival, now they were back on. And that all other times which has been twice before the festival she was wearing some accessory piece with this image it occurs to him. How curious.

 

“What then does the dragonfly symbolize?” he asks her.

“It doesn’t symbolize anything. I just like the way it looks,” she responds.

Impossible it seems to gauge if she is lying he thinks. After three days of general revelry, they are both a little out of body.

“Your eyes are now green,” she smiles.

“Normally they are,” he starts.

“Hazel, I know,” she smiles.

“And yours are now silver where before they were blue.”

“What kind of American are you? You’re not like them and yet you are them and you are certain qualities that are Russian and yet not of us at all.”

“I could help you with your anything.”

“But I need nothing from you. Not even physical help.”

“Where are you and we gonna be when the weekend is over,” he asks.

“Strangers.”

“You’re indomitable woman.”

“Are you a jealous man?” she asks.

He looks into her thinking he could learn to be. There had been some deliberation on option, such are her joining him in the Hamptons at the family dacha or participating in the West Indian Parade. Nevertheless, politely she said he could take her number and call her later since she had to soften the conspicuous blow to her keeper inflicted by two night’s disappearance.

“I do not know if we shall meet again stranger, but I did enjoy you,” she explained and then they took the L toward the city and went their separate ways.

 

In his sketch book on a drawing they colored together she wrote in Russian; “Shame that it all will end.” Though you could translate that several different ways, all were pretty bleak.

 

 

Chapter 28

Kings County Hospital, 2074ce

Brooklyn,

 

 

I am called Anatoly Garilov.

I am twelve hour unit of 35B3 from Woodhull.

I am only real Russian in New York EMS.

Other Russians are not Slavic, they are either half Russian, Ukrainian or Jews. I am real, 100% Russian from Moscow, actually true.  Before, in former Soviet Union I make drive trucks.

I am good driver, very fast. People they call me ‘the Russian.’

This is fine.

Also the stupid fat lieutenant, he not pronounce name correctly.

This is fine.

Also people make confuse with me other ‘fake’, weak, Americanized soft such as that pest Russian Ilya Razimov. My name not so much a problem, English not strong language like Russian.

But, I tell them I am not Ilya. Ilya is not a real Russian. Not a real man. Perhaps a homosexual, or mentally ill.

In Russian community I am not, what you would say; making use of myself in this country so I well. My wife asks me if when that Obama took the power I would be fired and replaced with the blacks.

I tell her this is not like in fatherland.

I tell her we are in America and Fire Department is auspicious distinguishment.

She ask me why I paid to be like Russian janitor.

This I make her be quiet.

She has no job, she is good for only two things.

I used to make drive trucks in former Soviet Union, as said previous.

Lived just on outside of Moscow.

There are no blacks in Russia.

We call the Armenians, the Azerbaijanis, the Tajiks, the Jew, the Kazaks, the Uzbeks, the wild evil Chechnee; these we call the Chiornee; the ones with black soul.

My son thinks he is very smart, we live in the Starrette City amid many blacks to which he calls REGGIN!

All day from his car, he yell to them “REGGIN, RIGGIN: WHAT IS UP?”

The blacks do not know what he means.

They think he greets them in Russian language.

I tell him one day they will shoot to him. They are wiser now, one sits in Presidential Palace of Washington.

I do not hate the blacks like my son and my wife, and all of New York Russian community.

They are tragic.

I have been offered to make transfer to Coney Island Station 43 where need is for Russian is speaking EMT.

I tell Captain I wish to stay at 35, I like to do the real work that is my job, not sleep and grow more fat like not Brooklyn units.    

At base I take not one shower, but two.

One before and after I take out my bus.

Everywhere the blacks live is dirty.

They make piss in elevators, they make piss in stairwells, they write scratch-scratch on many walls, they break or steal all the time.

I worry to bring disease from blacks to family, so always I scrub myself. Last two nights all patients making itch of themselves.

Everyone in city make itch. Cousin Bilo also. Not just the blacks. Lice all over city, creatures in hair. I will make twice a scrub. Not bring creatures to my home. In the hair of the blacks they hide. But not just blacks. Fat lieutenant also makes an itch; complains of ‘gnats’? What is?

I heard the screams on the radio, while in ER Bay at Brookdale.

Was the Indian Mir Ali, friend from Academy class two years ago; class 8002.

I think to self, it is what unit? Again more screams and static. Unit designation unclear. I see several crews make turn up of radio.

General alarm; nothing for us to do.

Nothing I can do. Have patient inside, still not triaged.

Would help if could, cannot go now. What unit?

Ali makes yell on radio; 37B; Sebastian Adon then is one shot?

Byron and Adon normal crew. Adon is look Russian, not real though.

More Russian than this boy Ilya blat.

Hope not Adon, probably not Adon, his luck is too much.

I turn off my radio. Nothing I can do. Cannot leave hospital.

Either Sebastian or Byron shot.

Tak.

Radio I turn back on at 8:16. Still at the Brookdale.

Is worst hospital in all of Brooklyn? Adon has much luck. Byron is dead. Announcement made at 8:19. Tension pneumothorax secondary to gunshot wounds, high caliber this is my guess. Pronounced dead at Kings County Hospital.

This very sad.

We drop like flies.

Without much problems we still die one a month.

My head begins to make itch.

 

 

Chapter 25

Two Holes of Water Road, 2076ce

East Hampton

 

 

Why are Chornay always late, wonders Sebastian as he waits on 40^th street and Lexington for the Hampton Jitney? And what’s so terrible about sometimes being early?

 

But they had been slaves and thus were excused from just about anything in his mind thereafter. Only a racist blan oppressor makes you work for free for five hundred years, reduces you to raped and broken human cattle, and then complains when you’re late.

Even if that was a racism to its own self. Which clearly it often was. It is impossible to exorcise ones racism, you can try so hard and the whiteness still returns.

 

After Natasha replied by mobile phone she wasn’t leaving Brooklyn, the night before Labor Day Adon had called his bad man partner in crime Mickhi Dbrisk to run away from the city to the country to a place called Montauk for a midnight journey into a day trip, the night before Labor Day proper which locked down Brooklyn with 2.6 million feters and full mobilization of the NYPD amongst other agencies. Each year they flipped a coin over Hamptons v. Jeauvert and it was “heads for Hamptons” this year. But really only because Natasha was occupied. And he hadn’t woken up completely, Mickhi was supposed to be on the lines tom.

Surely, they needed to make a long palaver.

Mickhi Dbrisk and Sebastian Adon had met in LaGuardia Community College seven years prior in the EMT program. They helped found the Banshee Association and later the nucleus of the New York City cell of the Z.O.B. underground. In the seven years that they had known each other Dbrisk had scene his friend through many ups and downs, many treacherous jobs, and many lives saved and thankfully none taken. He had seen just what Adon was capable of when he took his little salt pills and worked under the right woman. Dbrisk also had seen his partner fall down real bloody, horror show hard.

“It feels as though I have awoken again from a dream.”

“I heard you a say that just after you came back from Port-Au-Prince. And the next thing I remember is you with a sharp knife heading down to settle a score in District Garretson beach. And then came your arrest, your escape from Lennox Hill and the beginning of the end for your municipal employee status. So forgive me if I worry every single time I hear that again.”

“I’d like permission to step out of the chain of command to handle a situation.”

“Of course you don’t ever need my permission.”

“The full assault on the district will commence in seventeen days.”

“So it seems.”

“We have committed all of our best volunteers to serve in the medical detachment. It will raise eyebrows if you are not there.”

“I plan to be there. I just need to handle something first.”

“Well I plan not to be there, but you do whatever you go to do.”

Mickhi Dbrisk is a six-foot tall, smooth Jamaican paramedic. He leads quietly the one of the mightiest guerrilla squadrons of paramedics and emts history has ever known with its bases in Brooklyn, Haiti, Croix-De-Bouquet and; the little park occupied in the Financial District’s northern frontier. The public private park called Zuccotti which a year ago was taken over by students and radicals and has since become the epicenter of a national rising now most regimented and entrenched against the national elites.

He leads quietly because he is gangster. That is how a true gangster leads.

He has been held in prison for over a year where he marinated his gangster by refusing to name names of coconspirators. He now raises two children. He saves human life on three continents as a paramedic adventurer. In the diffuse and decentralized chain of command of the militant human rights movement he holds the position of a Captain. The name of the faction he leads alongside Adon and few others is the Z.O.B., also known as the Breuklyn Bath and Rifle Club or the Banshee Association of the City of New York.

He is a bad mother fucker. Shatah.

David leads the Operations Section of Banshee mostly, with, Sebastian Adon our romantic “protagonist” leading the Planning Section, Scott Sevastra leading Communications and Trickovitch leading Logistics.

Allamby was our Chief Financial Officer, Mara Fitzduff the most active deputy concerned with Newspaper distribution and fire switch radio. Anya Drovtich was the Minister of Information and Erza Pula Pound the chief legal counsel and Minister of Justice, our internal affairs.

 

And a very, very big operation is happening as they speak involving short wave transmitters, an electronic magnetic pulse bomb, and full mobilization of partisans.

2/8ths of the elected leadership of the Club’s Executive, one awake, one awakening getting quite removed from the front.

It is now the fourth day of Sebastian not sleeping and he is looking at a golden pistol in the men’s room the Hampton Jitney, while David Dbrisk, a co-passenger on a nearly empty Labor Day Midnight Express Bus jots down baby names for his third upcoming child.

“I may need a fast car,” notes Sebastian as he passes back the loaded weapon wrapped in a gangster bandana colored blue.

As soulful pause.

“I’ll borrow you a real fast car.”

Sebastian has been manically talking whispers about a kidnapped, a hostage bloneenet: a woman named Natasha he was just made a big picture of.

Soulful pause.

“I may, mind you may need a pistol.”

“Brother. I will get you a very good pistol.”

Mickhi Dbrisk has two; soon three children, lives out a hoopdee and three safe house in Bk and Staten Island, and he doesn’t have more than 5,000 green backs in the bank.

Sebastian lives within the Financial District, has no dependents and lives what’s left of savings he squirreled away while working for the New York Fire Department as an EMT.

“You are a dear and trusted comrade brother Mickhi Dbrisk,” states Sebastian.

Mickhi doesn’t even have to nod.

“I have to roll in and save her. I have to get her out of Brighton Beach probably out of city, maybe tomorrow night.”

The Maroon five song “Baby One More Night” comes on from his phone and annoys only the single hedge fund baby not sleeping on the midnight shuttle bus to Montauk.

“Sebby. You are going to have to free her without back up. I got a third kid coming and the uprising is just three hours away.”

“The uprising,” Sebastian mutters and she sees a forty mile high view of the city erupting in violence.

Sebastian contemplates if, what if, armed with a eight shooter set and a new sholem he can keep himself and the mission alive when it comes to Natasha Andreavna, this new dorogaia; maybe tovarish, maybe the sexiest woman living in the Soviet alive and happy and free.

Mickhi can actually hear Sebastian think.

 

“Brother, oh, brother you fell hard yet again, once a year you get the woman, but always lose your head. Keep yourself alive and you can save you, and maybe, just maybe daddy: you get the girl. But we been down this path ain’t we? Man you have to be asking yourself a lot these days just who you let pull your strings.”

            “She bit me,” says Adon and shows Dbrisk the bite marks on his right index finger.

“Well that ain’t no good.”

No good at all.

After Festival and then some real Hamptons fuckery gets underway and Sebastian via his weed Roll-And and Mickhi with his dancing get four girls back to the dacha built by Adon’s parents. But no pants off fuckery goes down even as those girls splash naked about the pool because Mickhi and Sebastian are both in love with superior sets of women, the Maroon five song comes on that September 1^st Labor Day weekend 2076 and Sebastian sleeps well alone in big Hamptons bedroom wondering, what kind of man am I? Do I possess the constitution to take this as far as it needs to go? What kind of woman is she? And all kinds of such questions. And Mickhi waits for Sebastian not to notice and steps out in the cool but still summer right to get a smoke and Newport. It’s exactly midnight, should be Juveaurt Eve back in the city, the march in the morning the strike at high noon.

Mickhi picks up his burner phone and short wave jammer at exactly 00:00 almost midnight Sunday, he relays a message to be bounced out via Sky Pager to the unit and detachment commanders; “Stand down on Wall Street. I repeat. Stand down on Wall Street. They know, I repeat, they already know the uprising is about to happen. We have infiltration. Get everybody off line. Secure the material. We are staggering the primary hit until the secondary fall back date.”

 

Before his eventual arrest and execution the father of Sebastian Adon held the social station in American society of that of a Duke, a member of the professional aristocracy that preceded the Lesser Oligarchy and Upper Oligarchy. The secret police executed his mother and father and made them ghosts, this occurred late during the melee of the Great Revolt.

 

And then Mickhi Dbrisk tosses the burner phone into the camp fires. He goes to bed in the cute little Hamptons Dacha knowing hell is breaking out in Brooklyn and it’s gonna get much worse in the morning. He looks at the latest ZOB pamphlet tucked into the latest issue of the newspaper.

 

Some of this rhetoric goes way, way over people’s heads, thinks Dbrisk. It’s like stuff out of the 17^th or 18^th century. It has zero effect on the 70% that can’t read and the upper 20% that don’t read except to escape into their own minds.

One day more!

 

There’s gonna be a street melee to write home about in history popping and erupting like and avalanche of rage and burning, all day long. Kop Tete, boulay maisons! Cut heads, burn houses. But do it nonviolently! Thinks Dbrisk, I would laugh in the face of futility, had we not been kissed on the cheeks by a divinity.

 

 

 

Chapter 26

Bronx Lebanon, 2075ce

BRONX

 

 

Thinks Technician Christopher Jacobs; a little secret that I never, ever share is that I helped found the original banshee underground, or at least contributed to clandestine circulation of their paper in the Bronx. I knew Sebastian Adon in another life, at another time. Back when we didn’t believe in much, if anything. I’m in a war of attrition to get my daughter back. I’ve been married to my second wife Karina, a beautiful Dominican social worker for about two years. My evil fucking crazy ex-wife Kat lives in Philly and has dragged me into two states worth of courts to keep my baby girl. Just when I think I’m winning her rich parents hire another lawyer and launch another suite. At least she’s living with me now.

 

A partner of mine in Astoria where I used to work before my redeployment told me her he a guy who knew a Greek who specialized in taking care of these kinds of things. It was tempted.

The prole papers today all said that the meat is no good.

That any meat available in the country is diseased. There are images on the TV of them burning livestock to fight the spread of infection. Images of supermarkets clearing out meat products. That all began yesterday. Lots of hysteria because people in Staten Island were developing festering boils and pocks all over their bodies 24 hours after eating fast food. Most of the cases were from Taco Bell and Burger King, but that’s only because McDonalds has a better press and legal team. The boils looked something like zoster or herpes, like late stage immunodeficiency. They were contagious as hell. Hadn’t spread to the other boroughs yet when I went to sleep. When I woke up there were outbreaks of these so called ‘incurable boils’ in Queens and Westchester. More pictures of flaming heaps of slaughtered livestock. I had taken a nap in the afternoon and woke up around 8:20 pm to get ready to go out Tour 1 03K out of 55 with my partner Danny Madrano. The TV was flashing images of the outbreak and was blaming Chinese imported beef. Other pundits said it was a bacterium. Livestock were being meeting holocaust nationwide while I was sleeping.

Karina packed me a tuna fish sandwich. A European sized one, which is to say way too small.

I live in District Fordham, North Bronx so it’s only a fifteen minute drive down to 55 on Melrose Ave and 55^th street. The streets were quiet for a Friday, for the Bronx, which means they were still packed and hectic, but there was less tension.

I glance at my phone and see I have a text from Adon. Says he is working tonight.

Adon fashioned himself more a leader than was his true ability to lead. This was largely due to the myriad of enemies he seemed to always make. He would admit that it was hard to be neutral on the subject of himself. He was arrogant, still in shape, highly loud and worst of all personally wealthy. The fact that he held a Bachelor’s Degree, had written a left leaning book and had gone off to launch a controversial newspaper is what probably rubbed people the wrong way most. He was disliked, truth be told; even in Brooklyn. He’d been hated when he first got deployed at Battalion 17; hated. I was in Queens then, but people told me stories. His tie and brass wearing, know it all, boots shining bourgeois pluralism made him quite a lot of needless enemies. He’d almost lost his job over something stupid two years ago. But for every twenty enemies he’d made in the ranks, he had an ace in the hole or two with the higher ups. He never said who.

 

But right after his first BITS trial last November he was transferred to 35 Brooklyn, went to Haiti maybe a year after that, not much later on. Has been on trial since.

 

You never knew who might help you or try and fuck you around here. But, you had to stick to your guns. Better to be a black sheep than the crews thinking you were a push over. Sebastian had allies too. A few friends even. I was one of them. We did couples stuff every other month or so, his lady friend Maria and my wife Karina really get on. Our schedules rarely worked out well. I was on an eight hour unit on the B Platoon; he was 24 hour on the F. So it was once in a blue moon, but we always followed up.

He backed me when my driver’s license expired and they suspended me for a year and made me do the Academy all over again. I backed him when he fell asleep after hitting the 63 on a segment 2 Pediatric asthma and they damn near fired him. He isn’t a bad kid. He just doesn’t have a true EMS mode like the rest of us. He doesn’t dissociate properly. You gotta do that on this job. When you take a patient to the hospital; they get better, that’s it. If your partner is an ass you turn on the radio and tune them out.

You don’t bring the job home.

I’ll repeat.

YOU DON’T BRING THE JOB HOME.

Because if you do it will eat you up.

And you will die alone!

 

Sebastian Adon once told me he never tells his family or small group of friend’s war stories. He’s got half the mode down. He doesn’t bring it home. His problem is he brings his ideals from home to work. He wants so damn bad to help, to heal to make some little change. And that attitude will get him killed. Because we’re not here to make a difference. We’re here so the dead don’t clog the streets. But I don’t really believe tough talk like that.

Karina says Adon and I need each other; love each other even because we both came here to make a difference. Came here not because there wasn’t a better option came here to make our pasts right by our present works. Sebastian will never let me forget that in another life we both were not such good men.

 

My favorite call, his too actually is a good delivery; bringing a new little life into this world. Everyone else, ourselves included is tainted somehow. Except for the nine little babies I’ve delivered in the field; everyone else; Sebastian Adon, Karina, even me: we brought this upon ourselves, as eternal sinners.

 

 

Chapter 27

85^th Street, 2076ce

Penthouse j

 

Sometime around noon on 1^st September a bombing knocked out the power in Lower Manhattan when the ConEd Building blew up. Lead by ZOB agitators, Uhuru fighters and the Garveyite Militia masqueraders broke the police lines at Grand Army Plaza and began marching north toward the City.

 

To the beat of steel drums and Soca, the uprising had begun in great disorder.

 

The Labor Day Parade and its 2.6 million marchers were violently turned back at the Manhattan Bridge with tear gas and water cannons. A good deal of Downtown Brooklyn was put to the torch in the block to block street battels which carried on until September 3^rd, when the barricades hardened at Atlantic and Flatbush; a General Assembly was organized on the first day of the rising and based itself at the Barclay Stadium. There were a wide range of street battles driving the first Labor Day Rising (now called the Great Disorder) which would continue for several weeks in the National News cast as urban looting. The bulk of the rising didn’t utilize short guns or bombings or arson burnings. Just days of rioting and economic disruptions that got recast somehow as black on black crime.

 

The National Guard was called up on 4 September. Barricades and assemblies went up also in the South Bronx, and South Queens triggered by same faction that planned the Labor Day rising. It was getting tense as hell. It would not be long before the rebellion spread to other cities in the USA.

 

From Manhattan one could see the signs of smoke rising from Brooklyn below.

 

The safe house roof deck of the House of Trikhovitch is on the 17^th story and looks north over the Hudson River valley rolling towards it is the heavens on the Side Upper West, a predominantly Ivoryish district. The George Washington Bridge and Riverside Park form a noble causeway of greenery against the back blue river, scenic but polluted.

“Cuddling is very sensual,” explains Trikhovitch, “my ex-wife and I used to cuddle, before and after having amazing tantric sex. Hot sensuous fucking that sometimes went on for like nine hours. Always, always began and ended with cuddling and candles.”

“So this went on for just two nights.”

“And it was hot and heavy?”

“No, highly innocent.”

“You’ll have to paint another picture.”

“We did on the third day.”

He refers to the two page drawing Sebastian and Natasha made of each other. He began it during the fashion shoot and she came back over and took a picture facing the colorless sketch and later they drank and colored and danced and drank and colored and it came alive.

 

“I worry about the girl who’d separate my bullets from my gun,” reads Nikh from the picture in the black archive binder where Sebastian keeps his sketches and pictures of women he enjoys capturing, caressing and making into his muse. Pictures of beautiful former Soviet women and post cards to prove it. He’s gotten a much more serious taste for the former Soviet Union in the last six years which has led to monogamous inclinations.

 

As most former and Postsoviet women demand. Partners as sponsors highly in need of undivided attention if you can’t throw a rubber band bank at a problem, at least worship it.

 

“What does that mean again in reggae?”

“She makes me want to live Nikholai. She makes me forget the wars we are fighting in Haiti and soon in Haiti and Syria. She makes me want to live and call out to her Natasha Adon until we are old. Have children with her. Not die on some barricade a million miles from home. Not face anarchist trials and accusations of treason and mental illness. She makes me want to take the salt.”

“And forget your past old boy?”

“Especially my past! No more a thousand and one lives of torment and struggle!”

“Old souls! That’s what we are, it is not our destiny to die or have boring lives” Nikh declares.

“Promise me I won’t die poorly in your next narrative!” Nikh exclaims.

He is referring to the latest manuscript being circulated about their club and circle, an epic war story love tragedy revenge opera set in Sudan. One in which Nikholai is cut to smithereens and hung eyes cut out from a tree.

 

A dramatic pause: “Nikholai, this, this is to be the content of my next play, and surely the greatest one yet!”

 

Sebastian doesn’t write “plays” so much as hard to follow multi character Noires loosely spun off of his life starring his friends, over and associates.

“What about your gun? And the old devil blue moon? Did she pull out all your bullets until you couldn’t shoot at her anymore!? What are you now but a love sick puppy! I have seen your 808s and heartbreaks, I have seen you in your glory and also you a toothless loon howling at moons and lost, last lives,” Nikholai proclaims.

“All we did was make cuddle, man.”

And on that drawing they made in a wilderness tavern before Sunday evening when they parted, her side of the drawing has a note in Russian which translates several ways.

“Sucks it will soon end. Or it is a shame it must end. Or, thanks for the memory its over,” as soon as Sebastian has his Russian friend Marina translate it via a camera phone picture his heart went to his sleeve.

“I will have you know that you speak of too easily of love. You have many times rendered the pandemonium of your emotions into this word, you have unleashed it like these metaphorical bullets on the often undeserving, offering yourself up as bush to be burned before the higher power of your emotions.”

“How now? What makes you so sure my emotions are so hay wire? Why can’t I be of an old soul, old school in which I act on the things that I feel? Why can’t I look into the encounter with this woman and not be overwhelmed? No woman has so effortlessly rendered near murder into tender longing. And the wild fire of her nature consumes me still.”

“You’ve known the broad for two days and a bad moon black out,” Nikh reverts from devilish poeticism back into American English, “No more new speak jive old friend. What I have seen in the decade I have been your closest friend and companion is not like the cycle of moons. It is like the Phoenix. Soaring heroic adventures punctuated by dissents into foul broken madness. Need the laundry list be read before the trip to the super market?”

“There have been bad falls…”

“Only matched by the heights you were reaching before them.”

“Nikholai. I cannot walk away from this.”

“How now! Tovarish you have said this before ruinously! Mali, Israel, Hali, Haiti, Yelizaveta, and Tiputti all were all impossible mountains you climbed in the name of love and good ideals and each time your back broke. See there is your list. The only true victim of your epic promises was you, each and every time.”

“There were more than those. But each ones listed were the epic failures of my human vanity.”

“You did deliver what you promised in Haiti.”

“Only because you all banded besides me.”

“Hear me now friend; you will be remembered by all who truly knew you as a romantic first and a revolutionary second. Your war of words are parlor tricks your ability to lead is what draws so many to you to carry long these overlapping missions, each which you dedicate in hindsight to your love of a woman. Saving lost children, saving whole nations, saving girls who never knew their fathers; these things I will list off at your funeral. But friend, Sebastian, you must check your passions before they make that funeral an event quickly upcoming.”

“Death puts no great fear in man who knows of true love.”

“I will not ever try and temper your ideals, or tell you that you are not really loving these women you invest so much time in. But the broad almost pushed you off a roof friend. You almost took her right along with you. And you’re response to that, is that you love her? What fuckery is this? That is what Dbrisk will say too.”

 

“Mickhi Dbrisk has said that I ought to ride into battle alone on this.”

“Well remember that battles you fight for love or wars you start for ideas will be always be rallied to by your companions. You dragged me into the fray over Haiti. I served there honorably because of your pipe dreams. And some good we did surely. Hear me when I say that if you ruin yourself again over a woman, all I will be able to do is give warning. This girl is trouble. And a love battle field is not your historical point of triumph. I’d forgotten too about Birdy.”

“Ah, Birdy. A comic tragedy.”

He almost died.

“A tragic comedy? Who fucking cares. You’ve send your friends off to danger and possible death and risked your life for many worthwhile things in the cap city of being an American. But, but! But please don’t die for a woman who you’ve known but for two nights of cuddles and one night of near life experience. You have a lot to give the world if you can just survive your reckless adventurist youth. Hear it from me, as you heard it from Captain Dbrisk.”

“I’m sorry. This will be the seventh big promise. I will keep it this time. Without reinforcements.”

“You kept your promise to Tiputti. The rest were not even in your powers to promise.”

“I didn’t promise her anything yet.”

“Oh. Well. And what is it you plan to promise then?”

“I promised that we’d see each other again.”

“That’s banal enough I suppose.”

“I suspect that’s easy enough to keep. But there is some question of her man. She asked me am I jealous. Surely I am jealous if this proves to be new love.”

“I assure you it isn’t. But your promises invite trouble.”

“I saw Mickhi Dbrisk the day I left here. We traveled out to Montauk. I told him that I plan to steal her from this man and take her away from the life she lives. I plan to promise her a better life with me at her side.”

“You’ve made a good deal of presumptions about her life. How bad it is. How unhappy she is or isn’t’ Are you the knight in shining armor or just a mark, a shill.”

“I wrote her a poem.”

“Then I know it’s already too late to talk any sense into you. I suppose I’ll just stand back and watch the buildings explode. And of course stand ready to play the violin at the funeral.”

“Stop being so melodramatic poor droog, I’m sure she’ll partially appreciate it.”

 

The poem is numbered #17 and is entitled: 

BANG! There just went Midnight!

 

 

If I had only one bullet in the chamber

I’d have to get the target close

To not blow it.

The shot.

Not the target.

Though, I’d let the target blow me in the chamber close.

Given all the variables.

See Amerikanski word games.

I took chances when it came to my target,

Which was moving, and still is.

Am I objectifying my sole objective?

Of course I am.

For hilarity.

And because American men have no tact.

Not a mind game tonight!

Dorogaia, I beg, please just a word game.

Three for three.

Not an objective mission: A lesson or an aim.

One has to keep love for one’s life,

Away from the love of one’s life,

Always at arm’s length,

That’s some man’s wife.

Use the pistol in the bedroom, if necessary.

She writes like she draws.

She draws a crowd.

And her morality is former Soviet.

What she does with her heart,

Isn’t not at all what she sometimes does with her eyes,

And her thighs,

Her hips_ her lips.

And especially her lies.

It comes all over me like a shudder sometimes.

Or a blindfold before a Saturday night weekly execution.

Pure lust between those angel wings.

Don’t be fooled by whose side I’m on by dawn.

Hold me tight again before we part for days.

What he don’t know won’t hurt him,

Since you guys don’t have the same last name.

So, what if I miss you_ kiss you_ imaginary bliss, true?

I bet you take issue.

To hopeless target acquisition,

Running afoul of all common sense.

I’ve lost my etiquette.

I guess I’m an Amerikanski when the cap comes off.

And thus she separates my bullets from my gun.

And BANG!

 

There just went midnight.

 

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!!

 

That was certainly not the first, last or best poem to be generated in her name and handed over with intent to take her long to bed, and out of Brooklyn and anywhere else on earth, she wanted to go. And it didn’t take but four feckless days to see her again.

 

Chapter 28

Station 17, 2074ce

South Bronx

 

Hi, I’m Lt. Moishe Klein and I don’t need to be liked.

I just need to be vaguely respected to my face. And if not respected I just need these units to not be sitting around a couch 99 at 17 when the Bronx is burning and we got BITS running around inspecting people when they aren’t 89. BITS isn’t out tonight, but Richmond Plaza is finally burning down.

I once told Adon when he came to me ready to quit not last August, but the one before after he’d been out here just two months, “A sane man in an insane world is?”

It was a Talmudic question, it didn’t have an answer, it was just meant to provoke bigger questions and knock them around for a while.

I haven’t been in the Bronx for at least six months, but I have to do a whole run around now picking up mutuals so I can get off for Shabbos. The trick to being a religious Jew in the FDNY is to find a few Catholic guys who want off Christmas, Easter, Lent or Super Bowl Sunday. You dangle out a years’ worth of coverage along with the goys kid’s birthday, his anniversary, the list goes on. You try and find four trusty gentiles that will mutual with you so you cannot be here Friday sundown ‘til Saturday dusk.

It was harder when I became a Lieutenant because half the lieutenants are Ivory Jews. Not too many of us make Captain and brass above, although the Deputy Chief Gumbo is a Sephardi.

So, here I am covering this bullshit old station of mine. I was here almost three years before my ins got me back to Brooklyn at Cumberland 31. Battalion 17 in the rundown old firehouse on 1095 Ogden Ave has a skeleton crew. Only places with fewer personnel are the Outposts. Like the Outposts, 17 is where they dump those that can’t play well with others. They hated me, I hated them; wearing a yarmulke doesn’t help, but they didn’t hate me for being a Yid they hated me because they were used to not having to follow any rules. This place is a rejects kindergarten.

Let me dust off this run down:

On 17A2 have Celluci, Devon Howard, and a vacancy.  Celluci thinks he speaks Spanish and is sexy; he does not and certainly is not. He has two sexual harassment EEO violations in his file from a previous station. He’s big on being an I-Talian! But he’s actually only half Italian, a quarter Ukrainian, and some other part, part asshole. He failed the CPR segment not only in his Academy practical exam, but again at a Core training. He’s been here six years, failed the Medic screening three times. Not the worst guy, just a little loud with the ladies on his units PA system. Devon Howard is middle class black from Brooklyn who posits himself as mini-thug, but is too effeminate to pull it off. He’s clean cut and hardworking, but a huge Queen. The reason there’s a near permanent vacancy on 17A2 is that Devon files EEO charges against anyone who says anything to him. Although Adon once said, ‘you people’ in an argument and that went all the way to a formal hearing. They have taking it easy going to the next level; they do three jobs a day tops; sit on everything. They both always parade hot girlfriends of the month around the station, but I’d speculate they fuck each other up the ass. 17A sits on the ramp above the Deegan, right under Highbridge.

On 17B2 they have Santiago, Montgomery, and some new guy I don’t really know. Santiago threw a tantrum after some other Puerto Rican Lieutenant called him some Spanish slang word back when he was at Station 26, the ‘Tin House’ on Boston Road. The story goes this lieutenant called him the Spanish slang word for fag, Santiago flipped out and threatened to kill him. Suffice to say the brass dumped him here. Montgomery came out less than a year ago, he came out enthusiastic not knowing a damn thing about anything. They promptly turned him into a skell. Santiago has about three years and knows how to his job, these other two are useless without him and he, like 17 Adam 3’s guys, likes to do as little as possible. 17B sits on 165^th and where ever they feel like.

17 Charlie 2 is hands down the most bipolar unit in Division 2. Leon Goldson is this body building Jamaican cadet, out two years now who works hard, has charisma out the ass. He’s well liked and surprisingly motivated for someone with two years on the job. Ilya ‘Razz’ Razimov is an EDP. Probably at least a little bipolar. He he’s a rich Russian kid that just doesn’t get it. He makes all these sarcastic comments that no one gets. He’s gonna get beat up one of these days. When its Leon and Goldson on the truck they do real fine work. When it’s Razz and the third guy, Leacroft Walters, its silence or outbursts. Craig has a temper. He told off a doctor, got restricted. Cursed at a nurse, got restricted had to meet with Dr. Gonzalez. Tried to strangle Razz; lost five days pay. He wants to be a nurse. But I really doubt it. He wants to skell out hard core. Suffice to say Leon and Craig will only do 3 to 4 jobs with increased grab-assing and social engineering. Leon is the mediator of the little triumvirate. Things apparently settled down after the scuffle. 17C sits in front of the Jamaican restaurant, the Feeding Tree on 161^st and River.

17 Henry 2 runs 0600 to 1400. Right now its Juan Ortiz and, wait; Juan Ortiz: double Vacancy. The Hazmat people are all fucking insane, excuse my language. The worst of the worst, who got their two weeks nonsense training (that is never ever used); for the craziest, most paranoid reasons imaginable. John Martinez, the fast talking, perpetually absent Union Delegate is off in Iraq. Paul Casson was fired after leaving a little girl in the ER by herself on New Year’s Eve, forged the nurse’s signature, and then proceeded to go lights and sirens to a fast-food spot running eight red lights. BITS was there and took pictures of everything. Casson had EEO violations in nearly all 26 protected categories. He had eight years on the job when they finally terminated him a month ago. Margaret Brown, an old battle axe with 31 years on the job had a heart attack while cursing out a co-worker; she’s been on LODI sense. The Old bitch needs to retire. Eddie Aldridge shot himself in the head with a .45 last autumn. Got a full FDNY Funeral, but only five people showed up. The last Battalion 17 Hazmat EMT is a fat, surely Irish alcoholic named Brandon Shipley. Shipley was out of his mind spent more time at Sin City than at his mother’s house. Six months ago he went to a health screening at BHS and they found him unfit for duty due to his pulmonary output and his elevated Cholesterol levels. He went on light duty at Station 43 shortly after.

If those Tour Units sound like people you don’t want to pick up your grandparents, don’t even get me started on Tour 3. Thank god those disgusting skell divas Jones and Barbour are both on A/L.

All BLS Units run Tour 2 and 3. Only Charlie runs Tour 1, Henry used to, but doesn’t these days do to the Juan Ortiz Battalion 17 Hazmat army of one. Oh wait, 17 Charlie 1 has a double vacancy too. Only the stoic, Old School Jamaican Leacroft Sebastian was left apparently. The man could sleep though a missile strike. Adon’s old partner if I remember correctly before they nearly terminated him. What a mess that was.

Asleep at the goddamn wheel.

17 also runs two paramedic units out of 17 as well. 17 Zebra and 17 Young. Zebra is an ALS Hazmat Unit, 17 Young; standard ALS. The medics here mostly keep to themselves and stay out of the ever raging Station politics and civil war. Most stations had some degree of dysfunction, but this place was the dumping ground. Besides the few new Jacks, everyone was here at 17 because no one wanted to work with them at their old stations or were awaiting termination. There was always someone in plain clothes on the couch. Some restricted person they couldn’t fire right away because of civil service status.

The last guy on the couch, an actor now on Third Watch and an extra on Life on Mars named Vincent Ceiola was sitting there two years after he refused to work up a cardiac arrest, proceeded to punch out a lieutenant, and couldn’t be promptly fired.

You’d never have all these vacancies at a normal station. They’d run down units, or merge crews. But it was different here; some of these people would literally kill each other if asked to spend 8 hours on a unit. There was no choice but separate them, put on kiddy gloves, tray and handle fights in station, and post overtime on the KDT. Everyone was KVO here. They all signed up for three OT shifts so they didn’t run the risk of having to work together.

I look at 17 under a certain, Captain not to be named from Germany that was in charge when I came in and the new regime of Captain Miller two years and running. There is stock room up front, while before there was just piles of boxes dumped in stack in the back of the bay without rhyme or reason. Under the old Captain 17 produced in a single year the most EEO violations filed at a single FDNY Battalion or Station. Now, there is some degree of mediation. Back when I came here the other lieutenants covered everybody’s ass on things that should have produced CDs like chronic lateness and ridiculously low uniform standards. It made me fully understand why we Yids have Hatzalah. These people shouldn’t be trusted with human life. Captain James Miller was an activist. He pissed off upper brass with something while commanding in the Rockaway’s Station 47. They dropped him here. They dumped me here after I fucked up a bad call in Brooklyn just after getting my bars. They dumped Adon here cause of that thing on the Subway. This was a place for rebels, fuck ups and trash. And I credit Captain Miller with almost cleaning up 17. He almost single-handedly re painted the bay doors, cleared the trash, branches, and piles of human feces out of the tiny side lot. He installed INSERT WHAT IT IS on the walls inside the bay. He got them a real BLS stock room re-organized; he sent Adon and Scagnetti into the basement to turn a shit stable into a storage depot. He even installed an external ladder which allowed these shells to open up the third floor bunk room and got equipment s they could have a gym. Miller used the restricted guys as his work horses and may have cut them deals. When the renovations were done Adon got sent to Brooklyn and Scagnetti resigned without a messy lawsuit and criminal charges. Shortly after he got his break on Third Watch. Captain Marty Miller poured his energies into proving everyone wrong about 17. People had low expectations and he surpassed them wildly. But I say he almost because all that work to change the nature of a station could do nothing to change the way these people felt about themselves.

In the immortal words of Jenny Jones, the chubby Irish-Cuban mentor on 17A3: “We run a cab service. We ain’t shit. This job is total bullshit and will always be total bullshit. It’s a stupid summer job for people who got nowhere else to go.”

“Conditions 17 for the assignment,” central tells me over the radio.

“Conditions 17,” I respond.

“Report for staging on Sedgwick and Exterior Ave. We have a three alarm fire in the Borough of the Bronx. The fire has been reported at the Richmond Plaza Complex.”

 

20:12pm.

 

That place is such bad news.

What a nightmare. I really, really, not in a million years would pick up overtime on Shabbas. I haven’t worked on Shabbas in my entire life. But tonight there are a slew of pre-rendered events setting themselves in rapid motion and I was ordered, yes ordered to be on hand to pull my weight. Why, well because I was chosen.

 

 

Chapter 29

Rich Man Tower Complex, 2074ce

South Bronx

 

 

Thinks Technician Leon Goldson; ‘Fit is the new rich.’ And I know that to be true as I’m carrying Castro on my shoulders, running through the woods after those fucking crazy kids stabbed him and then lit our bus on fire.

I hear 17 Bravo explode in flames behind us. It’s 8pm.

 

How ya doin’? Name’s Leon Goldson, I work on 17C Tour 2. I study social work at Leman College and yes, I have an undercover, part time job training at Manhattan sports club. I shouldn’t even be on this unit tonight.

 

I’m a big dude, I worked for it. Now I’m running through the badlands under High Bridge with Lee’s blood leaking all over me. And I realize we got ahead of those kids and that Lee is bit of a buff and keeps some occlusives in his utility belt. There’s some kind of tenement shed on this dirt road called Exterior Avenue that runs along the river toward Richmond Plaza. I kick open the door and drag Lee inside laying him down on a dirty mattress. I’ve never been one for a utility belt, but I guess they’re for 10-13s not abdominal pains. He’s gagging and convulsing. First I slap him in the face.

“Calm down,” I mutter, “it’s gonna be cool,” I say. They tell you not to lie to your patients. I mostly only lie to my partners.

I tear open his job shirt. I wipe the gush of blood clear so I can see the injuries. None to the chest; looks like three in the mid lower abdomen. Fuck. I grab a large multitrauma dressing, cut off his uniform shirt and cover the three puncture wounds to his stomach. I hoist him to a sitting position and circumvent his chest with two inch tape. Castro makes a gurgling noise, coughs some blood then I drag him up to his feet.

The thing about this job is you can’t ever get complacent. You might go a whole year with nothing but sicks, and abdominal pains and drunk people. Then disaster strikes and you gotta be ready. You can’t ever turn off your game face.

There was an accident. A truck driver fell asleep and careened off the highway ad jumped the ramp. Rig landed in the trailer park on exterior. Lots of dead homeless women and kids. Survivors flipped out. Radio went dead. Couldn’t put enough people in the back of the bus. Blood, lots of dead kids, screaming people. Screaming at us to do something. And then the mob that had gathered, lots of bloods from Richmond Plaza. Yelling, tension, someone stabbed up Castro. I left my patients on the scene. Few were alive anyway. I dragged Lee to this shed.

Radio still doesn’t work. His nor mine. I pick up my cell and call the conditions NEXTEL. Klein picks up. I jabber something all at once.

“Slow down, what’s going on out there?” the Jewish Lieutenant asks me.

“Radios are dead, it’s an MCI; unknown number of casualties; a truck hit the trailer park. Mob of kids stabbed up Castro. It’s real bad. We’re in a shed on Exterior, ‘bout a hundred feet south of Richmond Plaza.”

“I’m enroot; it just came over as an MCI and three alarm fire.”

“If we stay here he’ll bleed to death before we can get extracted. If we struggle on towards Richmond plaza, he’ll likely go into shock. Lee is bleeding like a stuck pig and that bandage isn’t gonna do it. I can’t leave him to get help.”

“Stay where you are Leon,” Klein says. “I’m coming to get you guys.”

“When it rains around here it pours,” I say to him.

I have a hypothetical night life. As far as my co-workers are concerned I’m hypothetically pounding out every cute ER Nurse south of Tremont Ave. I have a hypothetical future as a social worker and owner of a small business. I have a hypothetical notion that I can keep my buddy Castro alive. Hypothetically I can carry him back to the highway.

I hear yelling. I hear a big angry zombie mob. I get off the phone.

“Stay alive!” I encourage.

“I’m trying,” he says coughing blood, “I’m”, pant cough, “really fucking trying.”

 

I throw him over my shoulder and dash towards Richmond Plaza where the Security booth in the lower access check point should have a radio and a phone or hopefully a gun. I’m nearly there. It’s as if I’ve been training for this moment all my life.

 

And then I see Richmond Tower 40 explode, something fell out of the sky and ripped the complex into fire and bricks.

 

 

Chapter 30

Weather Up Mixology Bar, 2076ce

Battery Park

 

 

Life is a series of calamities punctuated by stiff drinks, but some taste pretty good in the right company. Weather Up is a dimly lit mixology bar with white and blue tiles in District Battery Park.

 

The fall came up on them all suddenly. The trees became good socialists giving up everything and turning red, at least some of them. The leather jackets came right out. The first kiss had to occur properly. There was so much dynamic tension.

 

Our two scar-crossed lovers have a drink off at the Weather Up, and she wins because he pays, he a man he’s always expected to pay. Even though she has a black card in her inner thigh pocket.

 

They go for a walk in the park where the creepy anti-capitalist Tom Ottorness statues haunt my many haunts, I used to try and use the sculpture park by the Hudson to explain proto-socialist views, he thinks.

 

Climbing on one statue and pontificating; he falls somehow.

He twists his ankle and falls, and she catches him with a hard kiss. A real one planted right to stop him from ruining anything with his chatter. She blows hope down his lips, gives him so much reason not to feel pain.

He fell before he could tell a long, old soul story.

She had just begun to craft her tale when in his big leather cowboy boots balancing himself on the back of a large copper turtle pedestal he tripped himself up coming down hard on his right foot as it twisted making wet crunching noise in his mind.

 

He’s in terrible pain and thinking something in him is torn. And then comes her kiss.

 

It was opportune. She keeps kissing me, upside down while putting on the song, black-black heart, but not until she uses her tongue to never let him utter a cry or a yelp even.

She swallows his tongue. Upside down.

I only kiss you because you are in pain, she thinks.

Please, please Natasha; just keep kissing me he thinks.

            But eventually the time for kissing has to end, late on a Wednesday. She recalls her warning, “Are you a jealous man?” She has a bed to return to in Brighton and he buys her a cab. He presses green notes into her hand.

I am a jealous man when it comes to you he thinks. Cuddled just twice, kissed just once.

“I belong to another man. I do owe him a lot,” she warns him.

“I’m not in trouble, or abused. I am a happy girl.”

“Kiss me again.”

“I will. But don’t get used to it happening forever.”

The cabby shuttles her off into the night and he curses his ongoing unrequited love life. He asks the heavens which are blotted out by the district; “Why me! Why must I always go after that which I can’t have so all claim, even her.”

 

But the first kiss was a true kiss and Natasha who has sworn off affairs as of lately likes the way he felt on her lips and she therefore swears that she will see him yet again because he is passionate and she has read long Russian tales of men and what they do when they open their hearts and then close their eyes so it seems this Sebastian has.

 

“I’ll call distraction and will keep you from wanting me to have your last name,” she vows to the moon as she crosses the old bridge back to Breuklyn.

 

“But you do distract me, and this may end so terribly. What have I done this time,” she wonders. Then she yanks him into the cab and off toward Brighton Beach they go via the Tunnel which is the only way in, the only way the through the blockades and street fighting lawless tumult.

Her tits in his palms, her tongue working his mouth the cap driver as if non-existent.

 

Chapter 31

9 Aerotech, 2075ce

Brooklyn

 

 

Bureau of Investigations and Trials

 

By the third month of the investigation (into the series of extreme events that occurred on January 12^th, 2074) there were six separate BITS investigators working on this particular case. They were told from the very top to be cautious and methodical. This wasn’t about Adon’s political beliefs, his newspaper, his proto-union, his medical condition or even what he did or did not do in Haiti. Ultimately this investigation was about stealing time.

In an off the record interview conducted by the Bureau of Investigations and Trials:

“You know what gets me with all you tree hugging “save the world” psychopaths? You all go running down for the latest cause, and then leave, having made yourself feel good. How come none of you want to relocate to Haiti? I mean come on, you are all gonna save the planet, and everyone on it… Why not go live there? Oh that’s right… because if you tried the shit you all pull up here they would cut your fucking heads off with a machete!”

“Tell me Sebastian “I must be a legend in my own mind” Adon, hypothetically speaking of course… What is your opinion on a person who leaves his post on his City Ambulance to just run down and play hero for two weeks? Do you think that person should be butt fucked when he gets back to work?”

“What kind of a message does that send to the rest? I mean, a person just leaves his post because he feels the need to be a raging asshole? And what about the people who work at that job whose lives get disrupted because they are now forced to work in the slots created by the self-absorbed liberal scumbag who left his post? What do you think about a scumbag like that, hypothetically speaking?”

“I can tell you my opinion… Hypothetically speaking, I hope that the employer of that raging scumbag bends him over and drives the ambulance he walked away from straight up his ass…Sideways.”

 

In a letter to the Bureau of investigations and trials:

 

With all due respect, I do not approve of anyone using profanity, or launching personal attacks on anyone, in any forum. While Sebastian is to be admired for his drive, there is a reason that protocols are put in place, and it is not “as you put it, the piece of paper” that is essential, but the background, education and experience that is the most important asset in working mass casualty incidents.

Mr. Adon, not only misrepresented his level of training, but attempted to circumvent the Command structure established for the safety of all working on the ground in Haiti. Furthermore, he violated several well established and venerated safety procedures that in fact, placed others in grave jeopardy.

Among the worst of his transgressions, was believing that he had the authority to try take command over a compound that was being led by individuals with more experience, knowledge and organizational skills based on years of performing disaster emergency medicine.

His behavior ultimately disrupted the continuity of care, he refused to accept what his designated role as not important enough, and decided to freelance, because working within the team concept was unacceptable to him. It is a shame that he did not want to be humble and learn and a further shame that he had to be detained by the USMC to ensure that he left the country.

Lastly whether he likes it or not, he has a job in NYC, and he is relied upon to show up for work and perform that job. Having his relatives call him in as sick and lie about his whereabouts is just plain wrong and dishonest and places a strain on an already heavily stressed 911 system.

His intentions might have been well placed, but his poor judgment and actions cannot be excused, nor should they praised, because he became more of a problem than part of a solution.”

 

In a letter to the Bureau of investigations and trials:

 

“The actions and tactics used by EMT Adon were dangerous to personnel on the ground. They exhibited a total disregard for authority and leadership structure of any kind.”

In the end, 77 EMTs, Paramedics, Firefighters, doctors, nurses, cops and soldiers testified to the boldness of actions and the fundamental goodness of his character exemplified by the courageous, although high unorthodox actions of January 12^th, 2074. It only took four letters and four recorded testimonies to seal his termination.

In a letter to the Bureau of investigations and trials:

“That paper is one big Communist manifesto, a seditious embarrassment to the department. A liability. You need to figure out a way to shut it down.”

Chief Perugia

 

 

Chapter 32

85^th Street, 2076ce

Penthouse j

 

 

Back on the safe house deck of Penthouse J, the sky is quite clear and the city has hardly gotten any less humid. From the deck of House Trikhovitch one can see the whole Hudson River valley and watch the concrete jungle spread up into vast monolithic canyons in Midtown or the highland of Washington Heights.

 

Nikholai is sometimes dashing, sometimes just a drunk. That’s the only word for it. And he doesn’t like Russian Banya, and doesn’t trust Russian women, though he is sleeping besides one as of lately.

But she, the woman in question, is a Ukrainian Ivoryess from Brighton Six and had Crimson hair, and she sings in drag, and she will soon be a Physician Assistant, or a nurse from Hunter University.

Nikh for short has few close friends and works for the club’s logistical arm, but the Red Cross is his bank check and his education is continuing, in bursts at the Breuklyn College in Journalism, Marketing, as well as dabbling in Disaster Relief with employment.

 

His new lust-or partner in his crimes, new in that he has never dated his own before, his new lady friend is Francesca or Franny for short.

 

She was once a happy little Burner, but then she got Rocaroonied and repossessed on the Playa; enlightenment never followed. Sebastian has just met Franny Rainbows (not her real name at all), who at the safe house is listening to Sebastian get a lecture from Nikholai about “the kind of Zamni Cherie a man really needs.”

 

Zamni Cherie is a Haitian Creole interjection that basically means “the dear partner”. The Z.O.B., amongst the other services it renders to the ambulance men and women who affiliate with it has for nearly years’ time since the great earthquake killed over 316,000 in Haiti, been building a volunteer ambulance system on that island.

 

“When she kissed me, I think I didn’t long to die ever again.”

“Never ever?” asks Fran.

“Ever never. I just wanted to come back, alive to that moment and keep getting kissed.”

“Tak,” pontificates Nikh.

“Tak, is quite right,” notes Sebastian, “She kissed me upside down and had the dexterity to tune her mobilblat to ‘Black, Black Hearts.’ That takes commitment to continued passion.”

“If she’s Russian, she’s just restless and sees you like new puppy,” says Nikh and Fran nods.

“I’m not so concerned,” retorts Sebastian.

“She’s pure Russian.”

“She’s taking her time,” jokes Franny

“She’s bored and you are certainly a colorful catch,” states Nikholai Trikhovitch wondering why it seems as though on the eve of every major stage of the war plan called the “the blue print” a Russian woman shows up to sweep Adon off his feet. To prop him up or knock him down, that is just too hard to call.

“She’s not bored of me yet.”

“You have gone down this road before and you know where the road ends,” states Nikholai Trikhovitch remembering the past which his friend has wiped clean for the sake of the coming rising.

 

“Are you Ivory or Gorski; are you Cossack? An Uzbek? Or are you Chechen like me,” Trickovitch asks, more perhaps demands, or maybe even channels.

 

 

 

Chapter 33

Station 17, 2074ce

SOUTH BRONX

 

 

Technician Charlie Moto can sing the blues too.

Years ago it was 2050ce, I been here a real long time.

I don’t drink, I don’t smoke, I never had any kids and I keep a Mediterranean diet. Which is easy ‘cause no one can afford clean meat anymore.

That was when I joined this outfit. Back when we wore green and it was called the “Health and Hospital Corporation.”

I got many years on this stupid, fucking job. This crazy fucking, fuck your shit up job. Fighting for custody of my daughter, smoking two packs a day; that’s mostly what I have to show for it. I’ve been at this same station; Station 17 in beat down former fire house, in a beat down part of the Bronx, on a beat down stupid unit that does a little too much work for my liking. In my Italian childhood the Bronx was burning, and now it simply smolders.

I’m Charlie Moto. Fuck you.

I’m just a beat down guy so it works, but look at me funny and I’ll knock yer lights. I’m from the H&H Old School; these new jacks, these green rookie fucks don’t have any respect.

I came to Highbridge after the Academy. It was just a step above an outpost with roughly more than sixty members of service holed up in single engine, abandoned fire house in the 4^th most depressed neighborhood in the united states. Highbridge is the Western edge of the South Bronx; a rising set of hills that rise above new and old Yankee Stadium. The Deegan hems us in to the west, the hills drop of into the Grand Course to the East. Nothing up here but deadly poor Dominicans dying of aids. After I peered through a classified study last year on the epidemic level of HIV infection in the South Bronx; some estimated 72%; I stopped fucking the locals. It’s bad up here, not East New York bad where my girlfriend is from, but real bad. I’ve been on 17 Charlie Tour 3 for the past seven years. These Captains come and go trying to bring 17 in line with the Department; they don’t mess with my slot. It’s been called a Station, then a Battalion, it’s had activist Captains, didn’t give a fuck captains, rank climbing captains, even all out skell captains.  The story of Highbridge Station is the story of EMS; it’s been kicked around and put down so much in its short thankless life it’s too used to failure to advance itself. Failure makes us comfortable.

 

So after that fire I took up drawing, you know animals doing stuff.

I hope to team up with the right people and make a kids book.

 

They always warned us after 9/11 another shoe would fall, and it did. On the Bronx in a deadly inexplicable way flame and disease, falling planes and fogs, death of the first born, rivers into blood, dead cattle, it ain’t even a metaphor. On the 12^th of January, 2074 I walked away. Scene not safe, not safe at fucking all. I walked away like they always said I could. Everyone else on duty at Stations 17, 55 and 14 died from what I remember.

 

Hero’s get well attended funerals, that’s all I know about that. Most of us only get one life to lead why the fuck should it be squandered?

 

 

Chapter 34

Zuccotti Park (called Liberty Square), 2076ce

District Financial

 

It should really always be time for political education, everyone has so much catching up to do.

 

A year ago in September a group of Canadian & North American anarchists supported numerically by left leaning college students used live stream, social media and the internet to coordinate a nationwide uprising against corporate financial establishment based in the United States.

 

It exceeded the expectations of all involved.

 

That demonstration which began in Zuccotti Park on 17 September of 2075, quickly spread to over 4,500 encampments worldwide, yet, was crushed just after three months[3]. Though it was just a dry run, a spontaneous first attempt at an uprising in North America. In those three months many theorists put out pamphlets trying to place the uprising in a global context of events, here was one such written by Dissentious & Adon.

 

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.

 

 

Franny’s big Russian raver eyes roll.

Reading to Franny and  the French girl Lia with a back flip and tales of danger and anarchist trials; Nikholai, Sebastian, Lia, Franny and a big bottle of Spanish White Wine are all Sunday morning rising in the Adon Otriad Safe House on 140 Nassau Street; Northern edge of the Financial District.

They were speaking of the Snowden Affair, the Panama Papers, Occupy and Anarchist trials.

 

“Anarchist trials always begin and end, with an explosion of some kind. So they necessitate there first being a bomb plot,” explains Sebastian Adon tipping the Basque wine.

The other three look on. They are all after partying after the Mehanta Social Club around 5 am. The entire several dozen human leadership had run up a several thousand dollar food and drink tab, but only paid 700 American when it all gets settled and that’s with a 43% tip to all the staff serving.

 

Ernesto and Victoria opted out of this Safe House roof after the pre party and there by skipped out on the lesson and parable of Anarchist Trials. They have been to many such performances before.

 

“What’s the Core, what countries are in it?” asks Mary Lia.

“Well, I can read a little more, but there is both core critical and core peripheral states.”

“Oh please, please do,” moans Franny.

 

The Core

 

 

The guiding features of the core include a unified financial architecture and banking system, stable governance which can safe-guard property rights and currency valuation and can upkeep the impressive military and intelligence forces needed to coerce compliance to its economic directives.

 

Out of these 46 nations; 4 are Medieval City States, 1 is a Catholic Religious City State, 1 is a Jewish military colony, 5 are oil petrogarchy City States, 4 are the so-called Asian Tiger states and 2 are newly re-absorbed Chinese financial hubs (back into PRC two-systems one state in 1997); all participants align their economic and political directives with the OECD, North Atlantic Treaty Organization, International Monetary Fund and World Bank; The United States is the dominant hegemon in this block, supported by the financial prowess of the European Union lead by German and the economic strength of Japan. Interestingly these nations are all of the primary belligerents of the World Wars and hold all seats of the United Nations Security Council; excluding the Russian Federation and People’s Republic of China.

 

These 46 primary beneficiaries’ nations of the World System according to the 2077 World Bank estimate (of OECD countries) be 1.054 billion people. These national entities ca be sub-divided into three internal groups; core central, core critical and core dependent.

 

 

“My that was boring,” states Franny.

“You didn’t list who was what though, who’s in the critical core,” Lia says.

“The Imperial Center, for now is Washington DC administratively and New York financially, America is directly coupled with France, United Kingdom and Germany. Core peripheral states via OECD, NATO, World Bank and other alliances in include; Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Ireland, Portugal, Italy, Japan, Sweden, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Spain and technically Greece, though Greece is in foreclosure.”

“You said 46,” Lia notes.

“There are also the Banking City States Singapore, Switzerland and Hong Kong[4]. There are military garrison sates such as South Korea, Taiwan, South Cyprus and Israel. These hem in the People’s Republic of China in the way that bases in Germany, Poland and elsewhere hem in the Russian Federation.”

“That still isn’t 46,” she petulantly repeats.

“There are Euro-Royal City states he skipped, because they barely matter,” interjects Trikhovitch, “Such as Vatican City, San Marino, Luxembourg, Lichtenstein, Andorra, Malta, and of course Monaco.”

“And then there are invented Petro-States such as Kuwait, UAR, Brunei, Qatar and Bahrain,” Adon adds, “that’s the core 46, discluding several hundred former colonial territorial small holdings such as the Virgin Islands, Madeira, and French Guinea.”

 

“So we are at the very top then? Top of the Core,” Lia asks.

“Yes the United States is the Core Central, France, UK, Germany and Switzerland are core critical, the rest are core peripheral; 46 states,” says Adon.

 

“And who aims to challenge us,” Lia asks.

`           “Russia and China,” Trikhovitch replies.
“Russia is the defeated core contender and China is the emerging one,” Adon adds.

“A Core contender is an economic and military block lead by a robust, well populated and resource endowed nation state with the military, diplomatic and economic capacity to challenge the hegemony of the current core block central power,” Adon explains.

 

“From 1945-1989 there was a bi-polar world dominated by the US and the USSR each with their own competing systems of dependency. After the 1950-1952 Korean War in which the PRC directly battled the US-NATO block a combination of the Cultural Revolution and Den Xiaoping’s embrace of state capitalism pulled the PRC largely out of Cold War confrontations.”

 

“The economists of all great power craft highly competing narratives of both history and financial prescription. Although evidence now clearly debunks the Washington Consensus which held sway from 1980 to 2001; encouraging deregulation, privatization, structural adjustment and integration into the globalized Western core market; it cannot be said that the effects of these policies did not enrich the core deliberately. The purpose of the proxy wars was of course a battle to control the resource flows.  As of 2076; the logical core contender is the People’s Republic of China. The financial mechanism it has deployed to support this claim is called the BRICS Bank; a counterbalance to the World Bank facilitating development lending from Brazil, Russian Federation, India, China and South Africa,” he concludes.

 

“That’s some real big useless talk boys,” says Franny.

Nothing quite like petty bourgeoisie arm chair revolutionaries, she thinks.

“Well look what’s happening in the boroughs,” Sebastian replies annoyed.

“The niggers are rioting again,” Franny shoots back.

“Whatever you’d like to believe,” Sebastian replies.

“Yeah, dirty uneducated monkey men are yelling about black lives matter! We want jobs! Give us more handouts! My family came here with noting, now we’re fine,” Franny says.

 

Franny has been staying with Nikh since Labor Day, it has been impossible to safely travel back to Brooklyn because of the so ca-called rioting and black on black crime.

 

“Things are bad and then; Ya Basta,” Nikh enunciates for some reason in Italian, though he often claims to be prejudiced to Italians. “Enough.”

 

Sebastian speaks English fluently with a smattering of Hebrew and Haitian Creole. He speaks often at late night dinner salons lecturing on conflicts in Africa, or the Middle East. Or various terrorist responses to atrocities and genocides. He is well versed, enough to conduct amalgamated services in the New Testament, the Torah, also Midrash and Qur’an.

 

“This is the beginning of a great and historical event. But we, not that I am an anarchist, the proverbial royal and esoteric “we”; never throw the first punch, and by punch I mean light off the first bomb.”

Though they did on 1^st September bomb the power plant.

He plays quite an open militant.

“I don’t even know how to build a bomb, but the point of an Anarchist trial is not about the alleged bombing plot, or success of the bombing operation or campaign. It is about accusing civilian non-combatant activists of all kinds of stripes and colors of being one big Anarchist plot,” he says with fire in his drunken eyes.

 

Franny sips and Mary Lia drinks, very much paying attention, being a police spy.

“Well they’re gonna crack down on all of you and drag you away to the FEMA camps,” says Franny with ha-ha, tee-hee kind of giggle.

“They probably planned the uprising just to get you all together and WAM! The whole purpose is to imprison and execute a big illegal grouping of public enemies. Niggers. Ivories. Hispaniacs, people with tattoos. Illegals. The Faggots. The Russians. Shtarkers. Fenians. Communists and Revolutionary Socialists of all tendencies. Students. Unionists. People with dark skin. People practicing Eastern religions. Hippies.  Everyone that’s even want just a couple more human rights. Like Indonesia in 1965[5], yeah boom! Kill you all. They will round up all the usual suspects. Accuse them of putting a bomb in a building, then they execute nearly everybody. Even your high class and pale skin won’t protect you boys,” she says.

 

They are ten minutes to sun rise, where they will brave guard dogs and no guard rails to see the sun rise from the safe house roof deck as soon as the danger story comes to a conclusion.

 

“The purpose of an anarchist trial, is just to kill some alleged anarchists. But the reality is that they round up thirty, try twelve, and kill thirteen. They kill the public will to resist with a big forgery of justice designed to trap make believe anarchists,” Adon says.

 

            Thinks Nikholai; like they in the secret police, the proto-DHS did to us long ago over a so-called bomb in the Nike Mega Store.

 

“And they’ve done for thousands of years and they’ll do it again, and they did it to us in 2000 when they rounded up our student movement leaders and accused us of putting Earth Liberation Front IED’s in GAP, Nike and Disney over child slave labor.”

 

Slave labor eh, more bold, misplaced, lost on everyone words.

 

“Let’s get drunker and let’s hear another poem on the roof,” notes Nikholai Trikhovitch. “Before you make us sound like Jihadists or something far worse; anarchists!”

He’s verifying via operational protocol whether Sebastian is sleeping or sleep walking.

Sebastian has written a five page hand written poem called to Natasha #01. He plans to read it on the roof. It’s all about his feelings for Natasha Andreavna of course.

“The last words he said! Ladies we, are not mere anarchists. We are patriots and freedom fighters. But they, they being the security apparatus of the iron heel have already raided this very safe house just ten years before and as recently as one year ago. I once had storm troopers kick in that very door and beat me and put me in a sack!”

“Ladies, this is all a true story,” notes Nikh. “But the sunset…”

“Oh tovarish Trickovitch! The sun will still rise! Five more minutes of this fine story!”

Franny and Mary Lia are still smiling, half stunned by this zeal and hyper-Homeric story telling maybe real, maybe a total brazen invention?

“Tell me one thing,” interjects Franny, “Do the lovers of accused anarchists suffer too?”

A pause to consider.

“After they killed Jesus and be became a God again guess who suffers most? They round up Mary M, his mother and all the disciples and they kill his girlfriends and his kids, probably even kill people that owe him money” replays Nikholai Trikhovitch from a speech he knows so well.

 

He is anxious to open another bottle of delicious sickly sweet ‘Xhocolee’ wine, from Basque country.

 

“Ok, ok we’ll go to the roof,” concedes Sebastian, “but Franny, to answer your question, it is tragic and true, but people who love anarchists suffer even more.”

 

“It’s a high crime to love an anarchist,” he concludes, “but don’t be afraid we’re not anarchists. We’re just under-employed petty bourgeoisie pseudo intellectuals, just saying bold things to woe younger women, don’t be alarmed.”

 

“But no one loves an anarchist at all, no one cares how many get killed or for what, it’s an ideology of marginality” Mary Lia suggests is the real lesson.

 

“Can’t you guys just use the opportunities you were given to become Jew doctors like your fathers?” Franny asks.

Yelizaveta had asked Sebastian that question many, many times before.

 

Chapter 35

Rich Man Towers, 2074ce

SOUTH BRINX

 

 

Everybody calls me Danny, my full name is Danny Madrano my family is from El Salvador. I work 26F Tour 3 out of Station 55 in this wild part of the South Bronx called Melrose. I got transferred here out of the Academy. It’s a tight little outfit. At 55 we go hard.

 

I was told and experienced soon after that death comes in threes and patterns begin to emerge in the calls you do. If it gonna be sicks, it’ll be sicks all day, same with trauma, same with the death as well as the bullshit.

 

Once I was doing an off work job on the Kosciuszko Bridge, still in Academy Blue and whites; out there on this towering bridge between Brooklyn and Queens. Some women and her car had been forced through the railing and was hanging perilously over the edge. And there were myself and Sebastian climbing perilously toward her with a collar and a stethoscope and a BP cuff. We had less than a month on the job, we had not even cleared our scenarios of field rotations, but there we were climbing out into this crumpled wreck that for all we knew might plummet nearly fifteen stories to the industrial park and Dutch Kills creek below. And why were we doing this, because we wanted to be heroes.

 

We were beyond green, we weren’t even ripe yet. I had nearly a year doing transport out of Midwood Ambulance and Oxygen Corp, Adon a few years more as an Action Medic in Israel, but nothing of note in the city. We still believed, as we had been indoctrinated then to believe that we were an elite lifesaving apparatus, the largest and best on earth.

And we believed that then. He still might.

As that woman and that car made scary grinding, we’re-all-about-to die noises, as Adon crawled deeper toward impending death with a 200 foot rope wrapped around his waist tied back to his white Chevy blazer the woman just screamed hysterically flailing getting blood all over us.

There was a loud slow grinding, the woman flailing hit the gas and before Adon could yell ‘GET OUT’ he shoved me out of the passenger door before the car toppled over the side. He bear hugged her and they flew out the back window, the car disappearing ingloriously into the river below. With a Channel 12 news crew filming everything, I hauled the two of them back onto the shattered bridge. That was how Adon got on the cover of the Post for a second time in a year. That was how Adon and I got called heroes in the papers and brought a little more glory to EMS. How we became friends.

To get any credit for being an EMT you have to do dangerous things like a Cop or a Fireman.

Adon, in retrospect could not have picked a possibly worse evening to do overtime on my unit. He was picking up the meager overtime the department trickled out with by making his way back to the Bronx. We live about four blocks from each other in Flatbush, but he got transferred after that mess with the little kid, the little kid’s asthma and he and Leacroft Walters passed out asleep. These thing happened, and thankfully no one died.

The night started with a bullshit sick call, moved on to an EDP after our taco dinner on a 10-100, and then this thing happened. The radio let off a loud piercing screech then they started handing out priorities all over the Bronx like a war was on. Within five minutes half a dozen gun shots, stabbings, motor vehicle accidents and the like came over, they stuck us first on a stab, but upgraded us to an MCI 21 at the Richmond Plaza complex.

We got there quick enough cause Adon drives crazy, the complex was a war zone it looked like a 747 had flown into Tower 40, the burnt out Hull of Vision Air ripped apart on the plaza. Smoke everywhere, already engines were on scene and ladder company boys getting’ ready for what was shaping up to be a poor man’s 911.

There were screams and smoke and fire and then at the worst moment our radios began admitting this weird static, we couldn’t reach anyone.

Out first patient was EMT Lee Castro, carried out the back of a Conditions car bleeding all over the place by Lt. Klein and Leon Goldson. Adon and get him boarded and collared, fire men are running everywhere on the plaza. The next unit on scene is 17Frank, followed by  17 Henry with Ortiz and Jacobs on crew. There isn’t a staging area, the plaza itself is burning smoking mess, we should pull our units out, but Castro is crapping out and then, and then a second plane hits Tower 30.

The déjà vu factor is phenomenal. Everyone stops and stares and watches a plane fly over head and strike the building in a ball of fire. Castro stops spontaneously breathing, Sebastian is desperately trying to save his friend. The sky is black with falling ash.

“GET HIM OUT OF HERE!” yells Lt. Klein, as a fireman runs over to help dragging along a wounded compatriot who’s passed out form the smoke and is bleeding from his head. I’ve got the two firemen and Lt. Klein on the bench, Sebastian is bagging Castro, then the plaza floor cracks and crumbles in a bash and BOOM.

Its total cluster-fuckery. A lot of people are trapped in the apartment blocks, a fire engine is overturned and flaming. The bus is tipped on its side, we ain’t goin’ nowhere. Screams snap me back out and I climb out te side of the vehicle in a half daze, got blood and sweat in my eyes.

In the Academy they stress scene safety over and over and over again. You, us and them. You have to stay alive to be of use to anyone. There are a lot of dead people on this scene, Tower 40 just cracked and game down, blocked us off. Leon has run over to our overturned bus with Ortiz and Jacobs, there’s a ringing in my ears, Ortiz and Jacobs have on their yellow protective glow suits and APR masks, I got nothing, there wasn’t really time. Leon pulls me out of the driver seat. I cough out ash, a bit of blood. I don’t look in the back. Lt. Klein has dragged Sebastian Adon and a wounded fireman out the back. Castro is dead, the second fireman had his neck snapped in the impact.

Still no radio, no way to call for help. Hard to see who else made it. We’re pulling out. Scene safety and nothing around here looks safe. They got Adon on a long board, and the nameless fireman on a second one, Jacobs and I got Adon, Ortiz and Lt. Klein got the fireman and we take off over the rubble to get clear of the smoke. No working trucks, to way to save anyone, there are protocols for how to handle some real shit like this. Only Klein probably knows them, but his radio is dead too. There were three engines and two ladders on the plaza when it collapsed trapping out two trucks.

“Where the FUCK did those planes come from?!” yells Leon.

Nobody knows so nobody answers, we run with our two guys ‘til we’re clear, over a rubble pile the size of Union Square away from the two flaming towers and the falling complex. It was an evil place that complex, more convicted sex offenders per square mile than anywhere in the country.

Eventually we get clear, get down some emergency exit down to the water front. You can smell the world burning, you can see the worst thing you’ve ever scene in your life and know all you were capable of doing is rescuing only two rescuers.

Lt. Klein checks the vitals on Adon and, well, what the fuck, a fireman that looks exactly like Adon. They’re both out cold on our boards. Adon has brown hair and has this familiar face that makes everyone swear they’ve met him before.

“What the fuck?” mutters Jacobs, just out of harm’s way realizing it too.

The name on the black fire coat says ADON.

“They’re carbon copies, Sebastian has a twin?” asks Leon Goldson dumbfounded.

“Sebastian Adon, doesn’t have a twin,” responds Lt. Klein setting off a blue smoke signal flare. A huge plume of dark blue jets off from their little rest point down by the water upwind from the inferno on the plaza.

We all know Sebastian Adon. We all know him well enough to know he doesn’t have a twin. Leon was his partner for six months and is a member of a certain underground organization affiliated with the Banshee newspaper. Jacobs was locked up with him in juvenile for a year almost a decade ago. I’m his drinking buddy and Lt. Klein might as well be his rabbi.

Everyone stands around the two wounded identical rescuers with nothing to say. Lt. Klein bandages the gash on Sebastian’s head, then the gash on the head of the fireman look alike Adon.

The blue smoke rises high above us, we should hear sirens coming, we should be able to call for reinforcements, we can’t we don’t.

“What the hell is going on Leu?” Ortiz asks finally.

“There is a long version which I can recount later, for now you all have two options. You may do what most are doing right now and defect to go find your family members, or in about three minutes a Hatzolah airborne unit will be arriving to transport myself, Adon, and FF Adon to an appropriate receiving facility.”

“What about all this?!” yells Leon.

“And what are we gonna do about it?” Klein responds sharply. His Nextel goes off. It’s Jimmy on 17Frank, they’re driving up the dirt road from the Deegan underpass. Jimmy and Gregory of 17 Frank the unit too fast to be allowed to live. Klein speaks to them in Ivory, which is the latest weirdest thing now happening. You never heard those guys really admit to where they were from, ambiguous nationalities, surely ghetto demeanors learned from working in the Bronx.

“Lt, just what the hell is happening?” Ortiz mumbles. Two planes had dropped out of the sky and obliterated the two towers of wretched plaza, a place everyone had hoped would burn down for over two decades, a place they still chucked bricks off the roof at the ambulances. Sebastian had a fire man clone, and the rough and tumble boys Jimmy and Gregory were speaking’ Yiddish, or was it Ivory?

 

“You know in Church when they told you guys the Jews killed Jesus and your religion was the only true faith. Well, my catholic friends. Your religion was totally wrong and ours was a day by day survival tool for when the end finally came. The world is ending boys, tend to your families or join us on a one way boat ride to the Caribbean where we plan to try and save the world.”

 

He was this slightly nebbish, over weight Lt that nobody really liked except Sebastian Adon. Now he had fire in his eyes like a biblical patriarch, in his element finally.

“I’m out of here Leu, if the world is really ending, I’m Puerto Rican and I got family all over the Bronx that probably need my help,” says Ortiz.

“Karina and your little girl are safe,” Lt. Klein says to Chris Jacobs, “We evacuated her before the event and its disorders began half an hour ago.

“Who the hell is we?” asks Leon, whose whole family is in Jamaica.

“Why the Chosen people of course, the massive Jewish conspiracy highly organized to save humanity from the devil, aliens, mad scientists, voodoo magic and all other forces so very determined to blight you all out.”

17Frank pulls up to our pillar of blue smoke. Both Gregory, whose real name is Simcha Rathejazer and Jimmy whose real name is Mikhail Mastrovitch Kreminizer are no longer wearing fire department blues, they’re wearing olive Israeli greens. Without saying anything they load Adon and his perfect double the FF Sebastian Adon onto the two beds set up in the back of 17 Frank.

In accents which are devoid of ghetto drawl or sentimentality, once the load on is complete, once the man who I’ve gotten beers with for nearly two years with and his doppelganger are hooked up on oxygen, Jimmy salutes and says, “Reports came in four minutes ago from 35Gold and 43Myrr; both are currently securing the packages, rendezvous has been set four hours from now at the Seagate Basis.”

“Lt, I’m getting’ out of here, gonna huff it back to 17 and steal a bus, go find my family,” states Juan Ortiz, a standup guy.

“Best of luck brother,” says Klein.

“Well Gold Lion, I’m stickin’ with you all. I got nowhere to be and I’m just itichin’ to hear the long version and see the big picture,” says Leon Goldson.

“Can I hitch a ride to Brooklyn?” I ask.

“They say Brooklyn’s the borough,” Klein grins.

 

The smart phones tell us that planes and satellites and helicopters have all dropped out of the sky above New York and that thousands of people are dead and dying.

 

“This is the end times?” Leon Goldson asks Klein.

Klein chuckles, “No brother, not the end times. It’s just the Oligarchy fucking around with their future toys, maybe settling a bet, maybe causing havoc for fun.”

“Why?”” Leon asks.

“Because they can, and they do.”

 

 

Chapter 36

23^rd Street, 2076ce

Isle of Man

 

 

            They wear these black furry hats on Friday. They often smell, and don’t ever make eye contact with gentiles. There are a total of eleven Ivoryish ghettos in New York City, but only one Russian Quarter, split into two zones; Brighton & Star City. The Brighton Ghetto, called by the Central Intelligence Agency Camp Alpha 1; It begins south of the Kings Highway and runs all the way to Brighton Beach, Manhattan Beach, Coney Island and Seagate (the water). The Russian Ghetto’s Bravo Camp, called this because here would be settled the more dangerous and subversive elements was Starette City, also called Spring Creek. This was built on a swamp between the highway and the very worst part of town’ District East New York.

 

There are a lot of Ivories living on and around the Brighton quarter, but they get less religious the closer you get to the water front. They lived in the bigger, nicer houses, especially the Syrians. No Ivory’s live in Star City, and frankly a good deal of the second ghetto has been repopulated with African Americans after the triage decade of 1989-1999 when the newly arrived post and former Soviets were screened for communists, KGB (FSB)[6]

 

            During the week Sebastian goes to Southern Brooklyn twice via the Q train to attend paramedic academy on Kings Highway and Natasha goes North on the Q to Manhattan’s Clinton Murray Hill District in the east side 20’s accounting school at City University of New York Barack and they illicitly miss each other perhaps and so they meet on a school night and he reads to Natasha poem to her in park as the fall falls in. It will be the first of many poems where his emotions entangle her with worry, where she cannot read his English writing and has the poem read then re-read by a female confidant. The early poems didn’t rhyme as Sebastian began reading Mayakovski and assumed that to craft such pieces meant visceral images not rhyme. He missed the underlying reality of Mayakovski being famous for his rhymes, but in Russian, only the translations couldn’t pull that off.

 

Shortly after the seventeenth poem he changed his entire cadence back to rhyme. This impressed her far more, but that wasn’t until later. And it didn’t impress her enough even then do give him exactly what he was asking for.

 

“You’re always so well dressed, so fashion forward. English doesn’t have enough words for all the grades of beautiful I must be forced to consider whenever I see you,” he says.

 

“Flatterer.”

 

She peers back at him with big curious eyes. They are seated in the Park across from each other looking coy. She’s a flowing blue dress and her tight leather jacket and he’s all composed like he isn’t about to whip out a small pistol, don a mask and take over a subway car over universal human rights later in the week, don’t ever a tell a Russian woman that.

 

“You remind me too much of the artist Mayakovski!” she reminds him.

“Then allow me just to write like him. And act like him. And because this is set in America, with fearlessness I will walk the tightrope between idealism and pragmatic Postsoviet individualism.”

“What does that ducking mean?” she asks.

“I’m not sure yet.” He replies.

 

So over time he wrote many poems, each penned just for her then recopied, but they all had cadence alike extolling her virtue and ways, also declaring himself a true rebel, making great cause just for her. Fighting monsters for her real and mostly imagined. Urging her to run way to the West Indies with him.

 

Then she went back to her college and he off to carry out a wild plot to take over the A train on the anniversary of 11 September in solidarity with the Brooklyn resistance forces, coalescing around the General Assembly being held three times a day on the Barclay basketball courts and all Borough uprisings, Staten Island not actually being a real borough, not in anyone’s imagination at all, they say they’re Italian, but their just a bunch of newly soft Sicilian civil servants, they’re happy doing trash, contracting, police work, hose work and the work of the White Church.

 

 

Chapter 37

The Broadway Junction, 2074ce

BROOKLYN

 

 

I am Emergency Medical Technician Mark Poyer, I’m an African American. It’s great!

 

“Are you guys having fun yet,” I cackle and they ignore me. It’s raining ash.

I bet it’s highly disconcerting when the world goes to hell and you didn’t have a backup plan other than call 911 and beg for help. But the phone lines are down and the only people with working radios are the Jews. The Ivory ones.

I catch up my former co-workers from Station 35 at the Broadway Junction. The firemen were scrambling to put out jet fuel fires, but fuck um, it’s what they’re paid to do. I wasn’t in uniform cause I’d been out line of duty injury a year, I just lived around the corner. When the lights went out and the rioting began someone lit my building on fire and I chased away a band of looters with a .22 pistol. Then there I was at the junction watching it all go down. The planes falling out of the sky, the pillars of smoke, the great unwashed eating each other, burning everything.

 

I’m wearing a bomber jacket and my turnout pants and the ridiculous orange FDNY turnout Helmut. That’s all the gear I could find.

 

It takes a lot to come into work with regularment. I’ve been an EMT for thirty odd years, been in the FDNY for 23. I’ll be 53 in the springtime, if it ever comes again. You know they say every station has one guy that no one wants to work with and if you don’t know who it is, it’s probably you. Well that’s me; “I have no idea who that person is.”

 

EMT Mark Poyer is my name. I’m independently wealthy. Which is important for a black man, or any man in EMS for that make. I’m not hyper-educated, but I’ve got valid opinions! I’m not a theorist, but I’ve sure got lots of theories.

 

Here’s a theory. The fundamental problem is not that people absolutely abuse the welfare system; it’s that they don’t demand enough. I mean, if you really think about it; not everyone is cut out to work right? It’s a done gone shame we deprive these people like we do, my co-workers get angry, but I embrace them. God bless um, they just don’t like working, and who really does? MORE, more, and still some more that’s what we need to give um. Not for slaveries sake, or some abstract concept of redistribution of wealth. It’s just that welfare isn’t done right, it’s not enough fun.

All this talk of working makes me sincerely tired and hungry for a sandwich. A good Jewish sandwich mind you, with nice warm pastrami not an EBT WIC sandwich, no government cheese for me, no sir.

My sister is a celebrity. I can’t tell you which one, except her name isn’t Poyer and we’re originally from St. Lucia. So I go out to the Kit Kat club, the Brown Sugar Club, the Pink Elephant, the Russell Simmons Hamptons white party where they give away free white sneakers. Love it. I tell people I’m and EMT, doesn’t really impress those hard partying Hamptons people much. The poor folks love us though even if our own department won’t, can’t whatever. There will be a revolution one day, and when that happens those poor folks will ask what you were doing before the revolution.

I’ll tell um I was an ambulance man, pronounced just like that. And they’ll let me live. All those cake eating rich people will hang for sure though.

Two years ago I saw Melvin Clarke the Jamaican paramedic mentoring a new jack not much newer than himself, some kid they call ‘Adon.’ I told that kid to take a picture of himself and look at it again in a year to see how the job changed him.

Here’s another theory. For those of us that study things like quantum physics, time travel and fourth dimensional operating systems know that no two identical life forms may occupy the same objective realty or they risk destabilizing the physical plain in which they occupy. Like say if a plane load of passengers was dropped out of the sky a month in the future from embarking in the past of another reality. If that plane load of passengers crossed into a parallel reality where say all of the people on it were working, living, sleeping as if nothing had gone wrong, because in this realty the critical event hadn’t ever happened, well these travelers upon encountering their doubles, the closer they got to them in fact could determine just how unstable the objective realty for us could become. This is just a theory mind you. I suspect you have a few of your own.

So, when not one, but forty something planes fell out of the sky, well if I hadn’t been in the Blue Lodge then I suspect I totally would have been unprepared.

Two hit the Richmond Tower complex in the Bronx. One, Vision Air 808 an hour after it left Miami, on January 17^th, 2074, which means it fell out of time. The other was Vision Air 801 an hour after it left Haiti roughly a week later with most of the original first wave. A third has hit Woodhull Hospital, that one hasn’t been identified and a fourth one has hit the Broadway Junction. Opening salvos in a vast and unnatural spiritual voodoo war. Ash falls on my brow and the sky is black with the darkness rolled in on us.

“Are you having fun yet?” I yell over to Melvin Clarke again as he’s getting ready with some of our brothers and sisters to do something not in his job description. He ignores me again.

There’s a cluster of cops and EMTs and medics all clustered around a burnt out ambulance and an overturned fire rig in this Beirut cum Brooklyn of a Junction. Adon once told me the Broadway Junction has ‘bad black voodoo magic.’ He was probably right.

That smell we’re smelling isn’t chicken, it’s two someone’s we know, but the bus is too burnt up to tell us what unit and we just don’t know who’s cooking.

 

The firemen kept battling the blaze where the 757 hit the junction tracks like a divine and fiery comet. There were likely a lot of people trapped in the tunnels below, but the firemen were spread thin, if you could believe it the whole city was on fire tonight, except for Manhattan. The highest ground. Don’t tell the new jacks about the mountain and holograms, they just won’t get it.

 

Towering, courageous Jamaican paramedic Melvin Clarke turns to me and says, “We’re going down into that tunnel to evacuate the people trapped in the trains. Wanna make yerself useful Poyer?”

 

“Let me lead the way,” I said taking my pistol out from under my turnout coat.

“What do you think you’re gonna need that for?” a white boy Firefighter who used to be an EMT whose name is Ross asks me.

“Crowd control,” I respond gleefully, “or rats!”

 

 

Chapter 38

Brighton 6^th Street, 2076ce

Tatiana’Blue

 

 

If one follows Brighton 6 all the way to the water you arrive at the two Tatiana’s, competing Russian restaurants on the Boardwalk, one blue, one green. The blue one has a better reputation for food and music, the green one for gambling and boxing.

 

They meet the next day they can for a picnic in the warm fall night of September 11^th. She collects him from Blue Tatiana Café on Brighton 6. He carries a burgundy satchel where he’s put inside a four course home cooked partisan meal of rice and cheese and chicken and red wine. He was drinking Borjomi when she found him. That’s a Georgian mineral water. He was drawing what looked like a Brighton flooding, and practicing a couple Russian phrases that she’s taught by text message.

She collected him and led him to the sand.

They dine on the beach on a big blanket.

“When it comes time for Halloween festival, and I bite people with real fangs; am I part of your resistance war efforts too?”

“I think not.”

“Well I will have looked in my enemies eyes and tasted his blood!”

“Who are your enemies?”

“All those who oppose the will of Natasha! I am the once and future Queen of all Slavs!”

“To me you are a most benevolent queen.”

“What does it mean benevolent?”

“Compassionate and caring.”

“Ha! There is not even any word for that in Russian,” she lies with a smile.

Sun was setting in its subtle shimmers of red-yellow tones dwindling on the abyss of horizon, but on the desolate sands of Coney Island you can watch the cosmos illuminated retreat for some time before making an abrupt departure into the blackness and glow of a goodnight moon.

The sand is gritty graceful sand, it is populist sand and the untidy refuse of eleven million summarily visitations despite the best efforts of the parks department have left it a tainted oasis, but it has old school charm by the boatload. Adon has seen the beaches of East Hampton and Natasha has four times been off the coast of Turkey, so they have a high standards to work off of, but this place has je ne sais quoi?- It has sand and a mesmerizing effect on some type of minds.

They lay out a burgundy picnic blanket right below the parachute drop with the steeple chase pier in sight just to the west and it seems like they are very much alone in all directions, though a couple vagabonds are late night fishing. She has just come her boxing class at the Underground Gym she has as of lately been attending since the night a deranged man stalked her from the train to her lobby. She has on no make-up, but her hair is well brushed, maintained and flowing, her gym session doing quite little to alter her fresh faced and polished appearance.

That is a Russian art form too, being made up to get groceries, glamorously present oneself for buying coffee, not allowing the elements to chip the facade of womanly presentations.

Adon has just come from paramedic school on Kings highway and has a dark red picnicking back pack, and is dressed similar to how he was at festival, in ems ‘battle dress uniform’ blues and black boots and a skally cap and a red bandana tucked exposed in a back pocket, in case a woman begins to cry or a riot breaks out due a spontaneous eruption of the lumping proletariat.

He has set up before them a three course meal of sautéed mushrooms, broccoli rob, breaded chicken, and pilaf rice accompanied by Israeli avocado salad and three types of cheese that he cannot pronounce and bottle of Chilean red wine. He has brought red and white icon candles and they flicker in the spreading moonlit darkness. Picnicking is a poor man’s refuge at romance and he’s done all the cooking, though he hasn’t been on a picnic in two years. You don’t ever forget how to picnic if you were once good at it, it’s like riding a bike.

 

The rabbis say that an Ivoryish man ought to be able determine if he could marry a woman in but four dates, but Sebastian is only half an Ivory so perhaps it takes seven or eight.

 

“Beg me to let you take me on a date,” she’d once said the night she nearly killed him, and he’d told her he never ever learned how to beg.

But, how he’d learn with this one.

She had thought to break plans with him unsure if she could justify her prolonged absence after the boxing class, but she ran with it in the end, as he had seemingly put all this work in. The food fared much better than she had suspected he was capable of.

He looks so happy! She thinks. He makes jokes and he’s witty for an Amerikanski. Odd how he fetishizes us, she thinks. He cannot speak any Russian and has never been there. Curious fascination.

The sun down and the candles flickering she dispenses with small talk to pry out the root of his amorous fascinations.

“What is it that you think you know about this Soviet mentality you are always referring to,” she asks preparing well in advance to be disappointed by the answer. She already feels a certain pang of contempt when he switches out of the black suit into this blue paramilitary attire the ambulance workers wear. It was a reminder that this was not the prince in the suit and tie to carry her immediately from this coastal ghetto. It was vaguely unnerving for reasons she had yet to articulate or place why a child of solidly bourgeoisie parents residing in the financial district in that beautiful loft was playing hard not just at proletarian, but at a communist too! It was if anything vaguely a spit in the face of all the work she’d done to flee, that he who was born with a silver spoon in the greatest city on earth might be romanticizing the cold criminal empire she had fled. But he did it so sincerely that what first might be a laughable nativity took on a charm, a quirky little juxtaposition of opposites.

Well he is bipolar after all.

But what she couldn’t place and what made this boy so interesting was that he was so genuinely interested in her. He seemingly truly believed in these blue collar proclamations he made. Curiouser and curiouser, but she suspected that by the end of this picnic she would be ready to relegate him to a passing hello at the social club. Temper his courtship considerably. Before something happened that might get everyone in trouble. She has a full plate of suitors for a married woman anyway she thinks, what this crazy artist rebel will bring to the table but trouble.

“Well let me attempt that then.”

“Attempt away,” she smirks swallowing down her wine. He is aware that she is perhaps even more magnificent without her make up then when wearing it, he is aware that she is a wild eyed beauty and her coy happy smile never seems to leave her continence open to other interpretation.

“First let me say that I do not mean to casually lump some several hundred million of your former countrymen and women, into a pigeon hole.”

“A rabbit hole?”

“A pigeon hole, it means a stereotype.”

“And rabbit hole is a wild goose chase to nowhere yes?”

He smirks at the deliberate nature of her word games and nods.

“Nor am I so presumptuous as to think without speaking Russian I can mount any attempt at a psychological profile.”

“Less words man,” she smiles.

And he wonders to what extent she fully takes in any of what he will say or has said. And she takes in absolutely everything knowing the power of pretending to grasp a little less than she does in English.

“Ok then, you have no sentimentality to speak of. You have no romantic notions of rose colored thinking, you have no arbitrary beliefs. You have loyalty to no one, no country or code of law, no god, only a tight perimeter of proven personal or blood allies, and these except perhaps in the case of mothers can be severed off the minute they prove, disadvantageous.”

 

She grins at him and her eyes declare and admiration for what she’s hearing.

 

“More beyond more!” She demands.

 

“The mentality is like a cold ongoing calculation, it weighs the merit of all actions and all alliances. Its root were I allowed to play at the idea is pre serfdom, although that condition is history’s most long running subjugation of a people, by their own ethnic group. The only people to have completely enslaved your own people for over 600 years. And then the Soviet system generated a brutal regime of parapsychological survival of the fittest where by education and corruption were wedded wholly into the national character. And now, the world’s first open oligarchic collectivist mafia state masquerades as the fourth estate.”

“Why do you use so many fucking words man,” she says smiling again. She does like to hear him give these little speeches she realizes. His education is the only proof of his upbringing besides the large loft he resides in. It must be that he not only likes the sound of his voice, but also he perhaps has few people ready to hear him speak on these things.

“Because I think in Russian obviously Dvotchka,” he says.

“Don’t call me that, I’m a lady!”

“Pardon,” he says but can tell she enjoys to berate him for his verbosity and his mispronounced bevy of Russian phrases.

“Alright then. But what in the world could be attractive about that mentality that so fascinates you? I consider myself a little sentimental mind you.”

“Cultural diffusion forges the greatness of this city. The merging of ideas and the fusing of mentalities. You can learn hope and romanticism here and we can learn rigorous pragmatism and parapsychology from you.”

“We, will eat you alive if these things you say are true.”

“I am not such a patriot as to assume that in the result you describe that is an impossibility. But the mentality isn’t so powerful if it is only used for pure personal gain.”

“What good for then? Seems good only for taking care of oneself. If what you describe has truth-ness then all we are commended for is our ability to sell one another, or sell ourselves without being tricked into seeing a purpose. Here is your mentality then, you Americans see miracles in the streets. You believe in too much destiny, in God in heroes. You are not an old nation so you’ve had no time to develop any real culture, and your world views, maybe not a liberal bourgeoisie part Ivoryish like you, but most Americans don’t have a world view. I will now use my words in English to speak to you on things. I’m not sure you know just how little I like Russia, like Russian things, Russian food and people. Everything. I hate Brighton Beach, I hate living in a ghetto. My mentality if you find such things interesting, as evidently you do, is shaped by living in a world where no one but my mother and a small series of men have offered to protect or help me. I’m not tough as you say so many times. I have had a charmed life and around me have been enough people to help me along. My mentality is that of anyone who has been hungry, I have ambitions and dreams. Believe me that my American dream is bigger than yours ambulance man!”

“If you say so darling.” And he pours himself another glass of wine.

“What is parapsychology to you? How do you define this term?”

“Mind games. Clever manipulations via social engineering to get your way. But that’s just the beginning.”

“I have no idea what you talk about,” she says but that’s what anyone who has a bit of game in them fronts like.

“Well you don’t have to put your cards on display at this juncture,” he says.

You’ll never see my cards, she thinks.

“How is the food?” He asks

“It much better than I expect. I would not eating it otherwise. Terrible idea to let men get false notions about their abilities. Especially kitchen and bedroom abilities. ”

“I couldn’t agree more,” he says.

And suddenly they are kissing again. Woops, she thinks with a smile. Passionately he presses her against the sandy ground and rolling about off the picnic blanket they wrestle for dominance lips never unlocking at any moment.

He reads her another stupid poem, which he wrote for her before the train ride. This is not that poem exactly, as she has long since hidden it away with all the others, but this once has a similar cadence. They extol her, they lament the world; they beg her always to take him back near her when the world is not looking, when the world blinks.

Natasha cannot always read the hand writing of Sebastian. She knows what he means because they text prolifically, but she asks him to read each poem in the beginning because she knows he will find the right way to explain his longing.

That night past midnight, after their meal which she appreciates, but isn’t writing home to her mother in Penza over locale; she allows him to read another.

She kisses him passionately again, for what else can she do. He is a hard worker. And then she pauses under the stars and by the coast of Breuklyn to lecture him again.

She has warned him that Mayakovski couldn’t ever get Tatyana his other great love and muse to ever leave Paris for his Soviet Socialist Republic. And he could never get Lily Brik to leave her husband.

“Poor Mayakovski had to listen to them make love from their kitchen. He tortured himself. What if you come to hate me? I cannot ever do anything but travel home with you. You know I keep another man, my boyfriend’s bed is always warm.”

“I will never hate you.”

“You cannot possibly love me! I am selfish.  I am demanding! I want to live in a huge house far from the Russian quarter and not worry about you!”

“I told you I’d never beg for a date once. I told you we’d just be associates of Ernesto and the Mehanta Social Club. I’m sorry to say that I cannot be rid of you.”

“If I order you go you will go?”

“Why the tortures? Are my poems not true, are my lips not soft?”

“All lips are soft when the man is still alive!”

“Natasha I love you! Does your man have this much desire in him?”

“We have been together for 5 years. He is the first and mostly the last man I’ve known here. He is hard working and good to me. He gives me things you cannot.”

What does a man say to the cold dead face of reality?

“This tryst is no real tryst. It isn’t an affair. You have tasted me, and I have nurtured your passion, and enjoyed it! But how far can this go! Please don’t beg for love that I cannot give to you. You will meet another woman in a month, I will be forgotten between the bed sheets! You have confessed to loving others before, you will again.”

He looks her dead in the eyes.

“I do not write frivolous things.”

“What is frivolous things?”

This is always the ice breaker to what will be a series of escalating fights on whether his love is real.

“I write to you from my heart which will not beat for another ever the same way.”

She kisses him again.

“What are all these kisses for when you say you will always feel nothing?” he asks.

“I didn’t tell you I feel nothing for you! I told you that we are nothing to feel anything about.”

She shoves him, then pulls him in close to her by his collar.

“I am going to tell you how to make love to me, with dripping hot wax on my back” she says.

“I’m going to try and teach you how to seduce me with much less words.”

They stay out all night holding hands and kissing in the late night Brighton Jazz Cafes. She pours the hot wax out of a red candle and presses their hands together and bites his tongue.

When they finally part neither can stop turning around and smiling at the other, checking to make sure it really is to be over.

 

But finally she’s gone and he has to watch her go back to her man’s home and he just holds her memory close and boards the Q train back to the barricades near Atlantic Avenue, to make it on foot through the lines back to the heavily fortified district financial.

 

 

 

 

Chapter 39

9 Metro Tech, 2074ce

BROOKLYN

 

 

Thinks Peggy Quinn; you have to position your forces way ahead of the enemy. We had to get this band of forty thieves and killers in a real convincing cover. What could have been better than emergency medical technicians?

 

In one way or another, they all have themselves to thank for being here. I just smiled, sized um up, and asked um when they wanted to start. That was the interaction they remember. But behind all that was days of thorough investigation on the part my staff, days of back ground checks, of testing, of sorts. I mean, I had my favorites, ones I knew were gonna make the final list.

We dug up everything on these kids, we drilled um with questions, we sampled their blood urine and hair, we made up take physical screens and psyche profiles where they had to answer questions about their fathers and draw trees.

Patrick Baunkin was on the phone with me every other day. This was a big deal drawing up the list for the 8000 series, I mean this was what my work was all about, picking the right candidates, drawing up with my investigators the right list.

The Academy was gonna run ‘um through the wringer after all, so if I wasn’t picky they’d just get chopped at the auction block. Class 8001 which went in on January 6^th, 2072 was the tightest Otriad we ever had put together to date. But even 8001 only graduated 64 out of 102 cadets into the force.

 

You have to be so careful now with demographics. We gotta make sure my Black and Hispanic numbers are up. We gotta make sure women get in. I gotta see who has the potential to really make FDNY EMS force its destined to be. And most importantly, we gotta make sure all the sample 17, genome 342, and blood type 0 Positive Blue Lodge approved candidates get packed in as the countdown to the great event scheduled on February 14^th, 2074 was inevitably approaching.

 

Our attrition rate in massive. Each month in a force of roughly 3,000: 8 quit, 2 are critically injured, and 1 is out medical leave long term; uselessly collecting checks. It takes the Academy roughly 4 months to roll out a class of 100, which is always whittled down by 20%. The start salary being $29,700, and with the smartest quitting when the finish college, the bravest promoting to fire, and the situation of moral being what it is means we’re always just a bit short staffed.

 

The Blue Lodge and Local 2507 do what they do best, cast bets and make predictions. EMS has come quite a long way in 33 years because of their work. Patrick called me up one night in 2007 and said, “You gotta get my guys and gals in the next class, this is the list we’ve been waiting for.”

 

And it sure as shit was. 8001 & 8002, top of the line investments in true talent.

 

 

Chapter 40

116 Ludlow Street, 2076ce

Mehanta

 

Raphael Ernesto and Sebastian are seated across an upstairs gallery booth of the Mehanta Social Club. He’s more serious than he usual is, it may be because he hasn’t been drinking.

 

“You my friend are heading for some real, real trouble!”

“So is the whole City and nation as well, watching the news you can see the story breaking. I can’t stop now.”

Ernesto give me a baby faced look.

“How did you come to need her this fast? Is it sex hanging off her body? It is because you can’t have her so it makes her taste sweeter. Don’t you know brother how dangerous this is for a man! And of course the daily street fighting and arrests, and…” he pauses knowing what Sebastian may or may not know.

“I know. I know. I have felt in like this before.”

“And the others? There were surely others! I’ve seen you drunk over them before.”

Ernesto blows a kiss with his hand, “Amelia! Remember Amelia!”

He does and he regrets that episode fully.

“What are you plotting these days?”

Raphael Ernesto is asking a highly fourth dimensional question. He is Natasha’s old lover. He is a paid member of the Perchevney Bratva, as well as Mehanata’s resident jockey of disks. He is also rebel commander of the Bolivarian Hot Shots of the Cinqo de Mayo Battalion, planning to assault District Financial by air in just three week time taking part in the general rising.

“We may soon send medical workers to train the Syrian Free Army, I continue with my paramedic studies, but may be black listed from working in New York.”

It is clear that Sebastian Adon remembers nothing.

No Maria, no Yelizaveta, no Israel, no Havana, no Haiti. Poor noble bustard.

Raphael orders another round of Astika from Martina D. also called ‘Hella’.

“Where do you find enough hours in the day for these plots and also Natasha Andreavna Skorobogatova?”

“This passion has burned hard and fast for three weeks since festival.”

“Did you take her to bed yet?”

“No.”

“Ha! She plays games with you friend. She is fearsome lover, I think I know, I did not bed her myself mind you, I have a wife, but she craves my male attention!”

Victoria Lynch is right next to them. For when Raphael Ernesto can fly off handle when their mutual friend Sebastian forlorn for the fairer sex.

“Darling! What my husband is saying about caution and taking time is valid. She is not a carnivore though Sebastian. Men buy her everything, but she always travels home on the subway alone and she is always not a floozy. She is strong and dangerous woman for you to be so smitten by. You haven’t the time or the resources for this I fear, and she certainly has a man. Somewhere.”

“Well, anyway that’s all a joke,” laughs Ernesto, “if he was so serious why is she so free to run about at such late hours?”

“More reassuring words please sister.”

Ernesto laughs off the contradiction and swills back his Astika beer. The Bulgarian bar tenders know the sober pensive Sebastian as well as the dumb faltering drunk Sebastian and they wonder what metamorphosis this tale will bring. Disaster has befallen him and glory too and he is not like all other Americans people know. But he believes in things which is dangerous.

The tavern attracts man tales and vice mongering spirits.

“Sebastian be careful!” orders Ernesto Lynch and gives him a cheers.

“Sebastian we love you as our brother, but be careful she is a Russian woman and you know well what we mean by that. You cannot compete in the ball park of things so you must just be steadfast and loyal and not come on too strong. Please be careful.”

Justin and Sasho are digging. There is hatch under the chamber called the ice cage; the wall to wall ice box where wall to wall two minutes of binge vodka drinking happens at fifteen dollars a minute. It’s all the same vodka bottled up and cut in various was. Well the floor it has a hatchway that drops quite deep into a smuggling tunnel out to Brooklyn via the old train lines and out to Coney Island.

They’re not digging a new tunnel; they’re digging a demolition bin so they can completely blow and seal the hatch and tunnel to Brooklyn behind them in the event of a raid.

Sebastian stands outside with the bouncer James.

“You’re becoming quite a regular,” says James White the former cop, “That’s what they call a poor life decision.”

“I used to come here when it was on Canal.”

“The old place.”

Raided often and burned to the ground in 2005.

The burly Fenian bouncer looks every bit like and off duty cop. Maybe, just maybe he smiles a little bit more.

They’ve spoken amicably of their blue collar nights many times previously. You see when Sebastian is heartbroken, as both Maria and Yelizaveta made him when those two relationships ended he takes back to the tavern, but his will as man is vanquished. That is a polite way of saying he was no ability or will to entice women on the dance or make small talk with young loose women that so fill the dance hall. It was in these periods he got to know Ernesto and Victoria in different capacities.

They had met three years prior at the Tabor Gypsy festival on Floyd Benet Field and he had become a confidant to Ernesto’s revolutionist notions and Victoria’s worries on her husbands’ ways. Ernesto it seemed lack anyone to palaver with on the issues of the world, philosophy or his long held beliefs in socialism, and Victoria on who’s shoulder Sebastian cried about his lost loves was also quite willing to console her about Ernesto’s alleged philander which was not quite real, but wasn’t either quite imagined.

 

“You’re becoming quite a regular I’d say for sure. Slavi lets you in without paying? I’d say that means you’re carrying the card now.”

“It’s a rebel friendly place.”

“For now. It’s quite getting bad up in the Bronx. We may switch loyalties back to those with the truest monopoly on violence.”

“Good to know.”

 

“All we retired civil servants have to stick together,” says James White, “no matter which foreign government might be paying either of our bills this week.”

 

 

Chapter 41

Station 39, 2074ce

BROOKLYN

 

 

Technician Rostantine ‘Ross’ Kruzuy says, “It’s 8pm, do you know where your children are?”

Somebody call an ambulance! That’s old TV gimmick form the mid-nineties I remember from when I used to be a kid.

 

My old man is a Chauffer for the 92 Engine Co. in the Bronx. My grandpa was fireman too. We got it in our blood I guess, like a family thing you know. It kills my pop I got work up all this homies in wild, wild East New York, but he said I gotta pay my dues if I wanna get on an Engine. That was three years ago.

 

By buddies call me Ross; I work 39D Tour 3 at Station 39 on Pennsylvania Ave.

 

Station 39 is not like the other places. It’s been abandoned by everyone except the emergency services. The Broadway Junction is what hell looks like, that circle for those too broken, angry and beaten to help themselves. I thought I’d be a Fireman by now. It’s the only reason I became an EMT in the first place. But the recession hit and rather then cut the ranks of the 12,000 Firemen they opted for attrition by retirement. But firemen don’t retire as fast as the papers claim. The force was real young after 911 when their ranks swelled. Now I’m pushing 27 and their might not be a promotional exam for another three. And that was how I got stuck being an EMT.

 

Pennsylvania Station is located on Pennsylvania and Pitkin, the building looks like a bombed out, one story postal depot. Single bay holds no more than six ambulances. Very few other white people here. I’m a German-Irish-Ukraine mutt, everybody Caucasian normally leaves after the initial thrill of constant trauma wears off and they become medics or opt for somewhere less dark. The city drew the ‘Bar-Lev line’ as Adon calls it at Fort Greene. The white bohemians finally moved out of Bed Stuy in 2075 and the IMPACT troops were redeployed to hold down the lines around the more ‘middle class neighborhoods’. Crime has sky rocketed here in the 75 Precinct back to levels far out pacing the 1980’s, Bed Stuy’s slogan in once again ‘Do or Die.’ East New York never had a slogan. But ‘Abandon All hope ye who enter here,’ might do.

 

I’m not the only white guy. There’s a tough as nails Irish Lieutenant, a Jewish Captain and Adon came over from 35 after he started his Medic rotations. For a guy in Medic school he sure does a lot of BLS overtime, but he’s a quick study. He tried to get me to take the medic promotional with him. Him and his little Otriad of Banshee Association guys are stacked the lieutenants exam and a few of them are gonna break through and promote eventually. They got a lot of people against them and a few more thoroughly behind them with that little brad sheet of theirs. They took over a bunch of delegate seats and keep preaching the good word of one big EMS union united with the privates. Adon once wanted to be a fireman and a paramedic; the first Jewish fire chief he’d gag. But he likes it out here, one of the few. When he went to get his eyes lazered to be eligible for the Fire Promotional they told him there was some risk of losing his night vision. He opted out of it; said he was a creature of the night. He called me an hour ago and said he was doing some OT at his old Station 17 in the Bronx. Something big is going down out there.

An all hands fire.

Wish I could facilitate my transfer to the other side.

That’s exactly what I was thinking January 12^th, the 48 hours of infamy. When the Chinese attacked with strange technology that wasn’t in our arsenal, that’s what Bill O’Reiely said, and I was inclined to agree. In a barrage of fire and hallucinations, all of the stuff in the sky fell down and landed on the Bronx, Queens and Brooklyn.

 

 

 

Chapter 42

Kings Highway & 14^th street, 2076ce

MIDWOOD

 

 

On Kings Highway and 14^th street sits the Methodist Center for Allied Health Education. Most of the rising has stayed in the Ghettos and not penetrated the Ivoryish quarters. Sebastian has easily crossed the lines with his badge and grey bandana.

 

The bath room door of the men’s room at paramedic school is locked from the inside, the Austrian instructor got his head bit off peaking in while Artstien and his ambulance partner Shamel Edge count out about 1000 green ones in various denominations all handed over by the Z.O.B. and the paramedic class for the father of a fellow EMT whose father was about a week from passing, in a coma, in a Queens ICU.

They’re counting out the money for a 10-13 emergency as it’s called. When an EMT or a Paramedic gets hurt. They are sometimes sloppy under takings so the money is getting counted by three impartial men.

The Z.O.B. is the unarmed, militant wing of a clandestine ambulance movement to unite 13,000 EMTs and Paramedics via a newspaper many secretly hand out and at least several thousand read. It is on its seven issue and looks menacing to the powers that be, but has cost a few their jobs and many more at least a few friends.

It is radical in that it demands living wages and recruits volunteers and materials for further subversive EMT training programs on the Island of Hispaniola in the Nation of Haiti.

They seal 1,000 green back dollars in a big white envelope there was no card. Only that the monies came from the Z.O.B., secret arm of the Banshee Association as they paper distribution was titled.

If there had been a card, the card might well have ready “Happy almost Ivoryish New Year, We are sorry your father has nearly passed. Under anyone’s reasonable standard of good we have delivered our passengers over twelve years to the shore. Good, bad, we’re not the team with the guns but this meager envelope of cash is our thank you for secretly handing out papers.”

But their colleague is a woman of pride and quiet dignity and didn’t even know why Sebastian was helping. He promises more support, help from the union, he tells her this is what they built the organization to do; take care of one another.

“Thank you. You’re a really good person Sebastian. I hope you know that,” she says.

Watson knows Sebastian is great EMT from when they worked together at FDNY Station 35, but he can’t completely vouch for the sanity of the guy. I mean Haiti had changed him. There were so many stories which circulate about the man, some that he perpetuates, others which his enemies do and Sebastian has more friends than enemies, but it is perhaps a weekly spiritual decision on if and when his God will destroy him.

 

That, realizes Watson Entwissle is that the man thinks he has the power of a god perhaps. The will to save Haiti and also EMS and also Syria and also become a paramedic. Watson has seen Sebastian in the streets be a good EMT and he seen him in clubs drunk and dancing and racing for some woman to love him and pin a medal on him with a ring and say, you are my one true. But Watson knows too that Sebastian has impossible expectations. He has had his knees kicked in several time because he tried to fly with wax wings.

 

Watson sees it. They count the cash. And then the girl had a real idea of just how much her class of fellow EMTs could try and give when they had nothing themselves.

 

Outside is Paramedic Instructor Mikhail Mastrovitch Kreminizer, an Israeli Russian Pararescuemen born in Lithuanian before the Cold War supposedly ‘ended’.

 

“Safer than to just rob a series of banks I suppose,” the juggernaut declares.

A taste of things to come. Runners passed him a black satchel of cash for the young woman earlier, half from Stations in Queens, and half pulled off ATMS in unlimited coding scams.

“Her father is not dead, but he is not alive, and the girl claims they have no money to bury him and that she is already in debt. So we asked all to pass the envelope.”

“What is she to you?”

“A comrade.”

“You fuck your comrades?”

“Not unless the situation calls for it. And this time not so.”

“The Bronx is burning. The National Guard entered the city at dawn. I heard a rumor.”

“A rumor you say?”

“I heard a bomb is going to go off in the district financial, of similar make and modal to the one that blew apart the Consolidated Edison plant on the first of September.”

“What would I know?” Sebastian asks, “Am I a Chechen?”

His eyes dart to assure the coast of the street corner is clear, that no one is in shot ear.

“I know you to be a good deal of many things. You are a marked man.”

“By whom?”

“You made a lot of enemies with your paper. With that train job in 2072. They lynched you in the court of public opinion after Haiti. I admire you. You’re a zealot.”

 

Mikhail Mastrovitch likes to assure everyone he is not a man to fuck with. He has looked Sebastian in the eyes and said, “You will never work as an EMT again in this city, but history may absolve you of what you have done by not picking sides. Mikhail is a former Israeli Pararescueman and parapsychology officer for the Israelis security service Shin Bet.

“Do you ever fear putting yourself on a barricade that you cannot defend and ask all you’re closest to help you hold it?” asks Sebastian as Mikhail passes him a smoke.

The big man responds with a phrase in Russian.

“Natasha taught me that word a few nights ago.”

“Natasha, eh.”

“Raspizdia, do you know what this means?”

“A person who doesn’t give a shit.”

“I’m not such a person.”

“So you learned a little, good…but not exactly. More specifically it means the indolent leisure class choosing to nothing with their lives. I know a lot about you. Enough to know you will never work in New York City as a paramedic ever again, know that you are a known radical and working is not really your objective anyway. I know about what you did on that train in 2072, I know about the Haiti operations shall we say scope and scale.”

“What do you know about dragon fly tattoos?”

That caught Mikhail Mastrovitch off guard because he did indeed know a lot about dragon fly tattoos.

“Why do you ask me this?”

He had thought that his data on the student was more complete.

“What do you know about whores?”

“Very little.”

“Where is this young woman’s tattoo?”

“She doesn’t have one. She says she’s going to get it put on soon. I told her our people don’t allow tattoos.”

“Our people?”

“Ivories.”

“I’m an Israeli not a Ivory. And you’re more Chechen than Ivory.”

“How now! What’s it mean big fella?”

“The Bratva tattoos them on its slaves. The ones it sends to snuff and slaughter. Or a black widow job.”

“Which Bratva?”

“Let’s not step too far out of civilian clothes, tovarish. Where does she say she’s getting the dragon fly tattoo?”

“She didn’t say where.”

“I want to pass you a perhaps un-subtle message.”

“Pass away.”

“Do you have any idea the kind of monsters you’ve antagonized since you came back from Israel?”

He pauses and breathes out smoke.

“I have some idea.”

“You are marked to die. As your friend and de facto mentor, as a future brother paramedic. You are about to start a war you are not highly likely to win. And they will punish you and everything you love will burn and suffer. Fighting from a position of strength has never been your strong suit. How’s you Hebrew these days.”

 

“Ha Halom Sheli, Likhiot hoffshee.”

 

“I left you a good luck present in the third sub-basement of the garage.”

“What is it?”

“A racing bike. It’s going to get a lot harder to get though the lines tonight. And there’s clearly something you need to do in the district. Luck.”

Sebastian wonders if it’s also a remote controlled pipe bomb, like the old ones.

“Luck. Toda.”

“Stay away from Ms. Natasha she’s a honey pot job at best and there’s blood in the honey. I’m not saying you don’t lay pipe right, but you live with your parents and are in school to be a paramedic; what the fuck is she doing with you?”

“She likes my poems. Who’s she work for then?”

“Probably no-one.”

“No-one is the most dangerous fiend of fiends.”

“Even worse somehow to work for no-one, but destroy the world yourself.”

“That’s a lonely road to travel.”

“Shanah tova if I don’t see you.”

“Shanah tova, as you probably won’t, black cat.”

“What year is this again,” Adon asks.

“It’s the year 5,773.”

“No one knows anything anymore!”

“No One, knows a lot a more than you think Tovarish Adon.”

 

 

 

Chapter 43

Station 43, Coney Island, 2074ce

Brooklyn

 

 

Thinks Technician Jon Remington; It’s 7:42 pm and I’m racing though “the pit.”

They say on the telescreens that the Chinese somehow knocked all our electronics out of the sky and poisoned the water so we all flipped out and saw things, but frankly I don’t believe that shit! The war with China is about to begin, insane times.

That’s what we call Coney Island’s little sea of Projects and Mitchell Lama between Stillwell and 37^th street. Cortes is really gunning it. We should be off right now but we got a late job, he’s the type to really cry over a late job. Cry over late jobs and crash ambulances trying to reach them.

In the last fifteen minutes of your tour you can return to station and go 99 with a basic understanding that they won’t assign you anything that isn’t a priority 1 through 3, that is to say the good shit. But from time, sometimes with just a few minutes to go we’ll get something called an unknown. As in not even the dispatcher could decipher what in the hell was going on.

An unknown generally means bullshit or dead.

It’s either some old timer who accidentally set off their medical alert system, or that old timer is sincerely gonna be in arrest when we get their door open. Hopefully it’s assisted living and somebody has a key. The Suppression guys are always pissed when they get called out to take the door this early in the morning.

When we reached Seagate the guard at the gate told us a member of the Seagate PD was assisting with CPR two streets down. Must be Terk. Terk doubles here as Seagate cop when he isn’t working 43H1. Nobody likes Terk, but Terk is the only Seagate cop who’d be doing more than guarding the wall. Some young girl just dropped to the ground on her porch and went into arrest so says the KDT, but I know better. When young people go into arrest it normally has to do with drugs. It’s too early for this shit. And I know exactly who this is going to be. I’m working the bus with Danny Cortes, the maniac, as we call him. A maniac behind the wheel. A half Italian, half Puerto Rican with less than a year on the job, still no civil service status and already on his fourth accident. He knows who were going for too.

She’s drop dead gorgeous. You might try and awkwardly get her number if she wasn’t a Russian call girl. And tragically mentally ill. And a patient. Her government name, the name on her documents is is Natasha Maccluskey, the last name belongs to the man in Seagate who bought her.

It wasn’t her fault, Johnny figures: she’s ‘Bipolar’.

Everyone who worked the trucks in the Pit, our name for the Coney Island Badlands knows Natasha Andreavna. The stripper. The call girl. The whore. I mean we don’t know if she’s anything of those things, but that’s how we talk about the Russian girls out here in Coney.

The sometimes Kingsborough students. The little whore EDPs.

The prophetess some call her on the street.

I mean I don’t call her the slurs or call her prophetess.

A regular frequent flyer. She always pretended it was her first time. On the bus, or in general. She had been living in Seagate for less than a year. Seemed like she never left Coney.  She was a red head, but she’d died her hair black as of recently.

Johnny Remington already regretted letting Cortes drive. Something heavy and wet slapped against the windshield then splattered on the pavement behind them.

“What the fuck was that,” I yell.

“Nothing man, the niggers probably just threw something off the roof of the PJs,” Cortes responds going even faster.

Then another slimy thing hits the windshield, and other.

Cortes, hydroplanes at nearly fifty MPH on Neptune Ave and nearly flips the bus. He screeches to a halt and I nearly fly out of my seat. A thud drops another something on our hood. “RIBBIT. RIBBETTE,” a sound chirping out of the darkness. There’s rain pouring down and amid the rain are smiley black-green things. They hop about around us. Cortes shines the emergency signal light out the window in front of us down a dark and desolate Neptune Ave. They’re on the houses, and in the street; they jump around like grasshoppers. Cortes, never one to flap his lips on the PA or radio, is white as a half-Puerto Rican, half-Italian ghost.

“43H, we have….it’s raining frogs,” he tells Central.

 

Chapter 44

116 Ludlow Street, 2076ce

Mehanata

 

The lights are now quite dim, the place is still cast in a dead, red light and loud gypsy Jazz is playing from the band below.

 

10 September, 2076, or also called the Ivory New Year. AR 0 as we call it now, ‘After Revolt’. The Bronx was being surrounded by the National Guard. All of the bridges into Long Island, which we all now call Strong Island were check pointed close. The National Guard opened fire in the North Bronx at a demonstration shortly before midnight. This was the Bronx though, the Bronx fired back.

Although Hebrew New Year begins right before sundown.

Card stock place holders on candle lit tables towards the back of the third floor declare several long wooden tables: “Reserved for the Banshee Otriad”.

Thirty two core and provisional members of the New York City Banshee Association, a clandestine organization of EMTS, Paramedics and Emergency workers are drunk and loudly occupying the third floor mezzanine of the Mehanta Social Club.

Except for the club’s current Chief-of-Staff Haitian Paramedic Emile Cange, who is a nominally straight laced Seventh Day Adventist and his fiancé Praise Augustus, well it’s almost midnight and the music is blaring dancehall in their honor, and Adon is calling for a toast.

A running joke in the club was that for the past decade or so they never seemed to miss an opportunity to go drinking on an Ivoryish holiday.

There are a lot of Ivoryish holidays, approximately twenty of them resulting an innumerous number of work days to be taken off on top of the Friday into Saturday Sabbath, which man of the club members had paper work submitted to their employers, were their shops union stating that they couldn’t work on these assorted holidays and also, Fridays past 3pm.

At some point Trikhovitch had sat down with a calendar and made the calculation that utilizing the Ivoryish religion’s observances, one could get a whole lot of rest. And it caught on. Pretty soon over half the club carried bonnifed conversion papers, certificates of bar mitzvah and briss where appropriate, kutb marriage contracts, the world.

 

Nikholai and the man named Lt. Moishe Klein, the clubs only actually practicing Orthodox Ivory had made some Russian rabbis in Brighton a good price and long term agreement they couldn’t refuse.

 

“5, 4, 3, 2, 1, happy new year!” Adon slapping Mickhi Dbrisk the back. Although, it is till two actual days to Ivory New Year, this being the Rosh Hashanah Pregame Party for the club’s inner circle. The New Year’s itself doesn’t fall on a weekend.

Adon, with a grey flash in his eyes is now dead sober somehow. As if the drinks he’d pounded, all five Astikas and three Stoli shots, and the bottle of red, then white there were glasses real cold glasses of bubbly Borjomi mineral water.

Somehow in the Melee of the dancehall, in flashing light and flickering candles of this tavern he had tuned out his fun and put upon the game face mask of his title, Chief Planning Officer of the Banshee Association. Surely not all thirty two of the guests were beyond all pale of corruptibility, but Banshee was proto-trade union with a 10-13 fund and an underground ambulance newspaper. Anyone could sign up.

 

But now at the round dimly lit table at the end of the long catwalk above the main dance floor, past an easily removed barricade was seated Dbrisk, the Bajan businessman Magnus Goldbar Allamby, who always carried in his own sweet wine bottles; Mara the half pint Fenian always drunk at these things, Trikhovitch, paramedic biker Anya Drovtich, Nicholas Mapfre (only there under peer pressure and perpetually nervous), Chief-of-Staff Emile Cange, a paramedic and Adon the leadership as it were, out of sight, out of mind looking over a document printed on grey card stock, downloaded and translated just the night before.

 

The Anonymous, the vast anarchist hacker underground had circulated a cut and paste manifesto. One which Banshee could never overtly endorse, but certainly various operatives of its armed wing, the Z.O.B. were certain to lend their talents behind. It is to be a collective response to the uprising and its grievances.

At all major Banshee gatherings, there was copious amounts of booze consumed, the Mehanata Social Club such a choice place for meetings and for gatherings for it was loud and rowdy and hard to bug, or hard to track the ins and outs, hard to see who signed what, under who’s name, easy to deny anything.

 

A version of this document had circulated for weeks, the uprising though aborted on the labor day weekend had to meet the popular response, the demonstrations happening in all the boroughs; the wild anarchy about to happen on 17 September, 2076 when the anarchist federations sought to again storm the District Financial.

 

This ‘ting they’re all signing, it’s written in Ivory.

 

Declaration of a State of Emergency in New York City

Communiqué #01

 

 

Activation of all Z.O.B. cells and working groups in New York City and Abroad.

In response to mounting grievances and human rights violations here and abroad.

 

The following institutions will effective 09.10.12 be considered ACTIVE ENEMIES of our people and the human race generally. Their businesses, affiliates and shareholders shall be subject to BOUYCOTT, DISRUPTION, SABOTAGE and GENERAL SANCTION for their crimes against humanity.

 

1. OLIGHARIC COLLECTIVES IN ALL NATIONS.
2. ALL WAR CRIMINALS AT LARGE.
3. ALL INSTITUIONS ENFORCING LEGISLATIVE CAPTURE VIA CAMAPIGN FINANCE.
4. ALL ASPECTS OF THE MILITRAY INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX.
5. ALL ASPECTS OF THE PRISON INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX.
6. ALL ASPECTS OF THE NARCO-TRAFFIC
7. ANY ASPECT OF THE SEX TRADE OR SLAVERY RELATED ENTERPRISES.
8. Pornographers
9. Strip clubs

• Escort Services

1. Brothels
2. Pimps
3. Traffickers

• Mail Order Bride Agencies
• Bonded labor of any kind

 

1. ANY LABOR EXTRACTING INDUSTRY EXPLOITING THEIR WORKERS
2. ANY GROUP OR CORPORATION WHO’S PRACTICES DESTROY OUR ENVIRONMENT.
3. ALL FINANCIAL INTITUIONS PARTICPATING IN OUR ECONOMIC BONDAGE.

 

THE Z.O.B., alongside the GENERAL RESISTANCE ALLIANCE-GENERAL COORDINATING COMMITEE (GRA-GCC) AND ALL MUTUAL AID BOUND AFFILIATED SISTER ORGANIZATIONS WILL POST BILLOTS, DECEMINATE OFFICIAL WARNING VIA THE LOCAL PRESS AND ALSO THE INTERNET.

 

ALL CORPORATIONS, RELIGIOUS INSTUTIONS, FINANCIAL FIRMS AND GOVERNMENTS WILL HAVE THREE DAYS TIME TO CORRECT THEIR INJUSTICES BEFORE ACTIONS AND GENERAL ACTIVE RESISTANCE OPERATIONS COMMENCE ON SEPTEMBER 17^th and build toward a an international general strike on THE 1^st of January, 2077.

 

1. THE Z.O.B. IS EXPLICETELY AGAINST VIOLENCE TO PROPERTY AS WELL AS PERSONS AND PEOPLE. ANY VIOLENT ATTACKS, PROPERTY VANDALISMS AND ACTS OF TERRORISM ARE NOT ENDORSED BY THE MILITANT HUMAN RIGHTS MOVEMENT AND SHOULD BE PUBLICLY CONSIDERED THE WORK OF UNAFFILIATED RADICALS, AGENT PROVOCATEURS, SPIES, INFORMANTS, AND THE COUNTER INTELLIGENCE PROGRAMS OF THE STATE AND ITS VARIOUS SECURITY APPERATUSES.

 

1. THE Z.OB. BEGINNING 17th September, 2076 WILL CARRY OUT ONE OPERATION A DAY AGAINST ALL LEGITMATE WAR CRIMINALS AND THEIR AFFILIATED INSTITUTIONS WHO BY THEIR ACTIONS VIOLATE OUR UNIVERSAL HUMAN RIGHTS.

 

OUR AIM IS TO STRIKE THESE VIOLATORS IN THEIR POCKETS AND BRING PUBLIC OUTRAGE AND ATTENTION TO THE MEN AND WOMEN WHO RUIN OUR NATION AND REDUCE THE WORLD TO CHATTEL SLAVERY.

 

1. ANY ATTEMPT TO ARREST OR MURDER OUR ORGANIZERS AND SUPPORTERS WILL RESULT IN EXPONENTIAL INCREASE IN RESISTANCE OPERATIONS.

 

1948. THE Z.O.B. WILL NOT STOP FIGHTING UNTIL EVERY LAST WOMAN, MAN and CHILD HAS BEEN GRANTED THE FULL 30 HUMAN RIGHTS AS CODIFIED AND PROMISED BY THE UNITED NATIONS and ALL PARTICIPATING NATIONS in 1948.

 

9. WE, HEREBYE ON 09.10.12 DECLARE UNRELENTING WAR ON THE CLASS OF THOSE THAT HAVE FOR GENERATIONS RAPED, ROBBED, CARRIED OUT GENOCIDE, AND INSTITUTED SLAVERY UPON THE COMMON HUMANITY TO WHICH WE ALL BELONG.
10. NO QUARTER WILL BE ASKED, NOR EXPECTED.

• WE WILL BRING THESE OLIGARCHS, BANKERS, BUSINESS MEN AND CRUEL DESPOTS, war criminals all to their knees to stand trial for what they have done and VIA OUR RESISTANCE WE WILL FORGE A WORLD OF DIGNITY, EQUALITY AND FREEDOM.

 

HUMANITY THIS IS OUR CALL TO ARMS.

 

NEW YORKERS THIS IS YOUR BATTLE CRY.

 

THIS IS A WAR TO THE DEATH.

 

 

The People of New York will lock arms with the people of the world and the dream of freedom which has been crushed for generations will carry our uprising to its full and inevitable victory.

 

Signatories:

 Sebastian Adon

Katusha Shah

Kaveh ALI SHARTI Abatable

Emile Cange

Mickhi Dbrisk

Magnus Goldbar Allamby

Hubert O’Domhnaill

Nikholai Trikhovitch

Mara Fitzduff

Erza Pula Pound

Anahita Noor

Kwame Ansu

Scott Sevastra

Anya Drovtich

Nicholas Mapfre

Raphael Contreras

Siegfried Sassoon

Avinadav DeBuitléir

Emma Maya Sorieya Solomon

 

 

 

That following evening of September 11^th Sebastian and dozens of other activists using the Cely-Signal-Telegram text dispatch system, boarded the subway cars with flicker masks and blue fatigues. They took nearly every train line hostage across 5 boroughs, all numbers, letters and colors. Terror and spectacle abound! Not even one lethal bullet in the guns, which almost no units even had to brandish; the captive audiences were petrified or participatory in the aktion.

 

Sebastian’s unit A08; took over the A train Manhattan bound from the Rockaways alongside an anarchist named Spike, the actor Siegfried Sassoon, a younger women named Clare they recruited off of OK Cupid and a film maker named Nicholas Mapfre. And eight back up team members whose names and faces he didn’t have to know.

 

Sebastian once road this self-same train to and from his Star crossed lover Yelizaveta Kotlyarova Perechenova, but now in his rapid speeches and flying mannerisms he dedicates this to all his injured people’s in domestic and also far flung lands. One night, this raid to redeem his American hypocrisy; to take over a train because his love is a warrior’s love. He has been sleeping for how knows how long, but it’s coming back to him slowly. What his place is in the chain.

Natasha called out to him earlier on the black berry smart phone to ask him be careful. She is no damsel in distress and he is no Shamel Basayev, yet. But she knows him much better than he knows she or she works for. She knows he’s waking up from a day dream.

Trains are stormed all over the city for mostly militant public addresses and passing out of homework assignments from big grey bags. Although, all of them are emptied right before the District financial where many cross.

Emptied and dynamited. The bankers take cabs to work, caps or ferries or are driven. This is to keep all of their surfs away. Deter servitude.

The speech needs to be cut short because he gives it over each transfer of the cars. Sometimes Spike or Siggy or Clare give the speech. It begins with, “My name is Zachariah Artstien, an organizer with the human rights resistance! Affiliated with the Z.O.B., we are not here to hurt anyone or take your money! We are here to declare that you have human rights and we must now link arms and fight for them.”

“Today is the 11^th of September, when ten years ago the Oligarchs manufactured an attack on us to secure their power and control. In six days the People’s Army of the General Resistance Alliance will attack the District Financial! If you ain’t running with it run from it!”

New York is the city of such disturbances. It’s also a mind-your-fucking business city. Its people are also heavily armed. But no on pulls on them tonight.

“Please don’t get yourself shot to ferment hope alone,” Natasha warns him and she hopes he isn’t killed because he is capable of making a woman care about him. But perhaps not her on a long enough time line.

Sebastian and his associates with their scary masks, one with a video camera tell tales of the Syrian Free Army. Of Israeli apartheid. Of the one black or Hispanic youth killed every 48 hours by the police. Of the 1 in 8 black men in prison. Of war, endless war consuming all around for the dubious purposes of Afghani and Iraqi and Persian “liberations”. The conspirators film the whole thing, in case they are captured or killed. For the viewers at home on the Livestreams.

After all the tales end, told by the three hostage taking narrators, “We are sorry for our operations washing aside considerations of your health and safety. You cannot join us, we are organized tight as drum, but go to your churches, mosques and temples, your gangs, crews and neighborhood councils, stay strong and carry on as we are all under siege together.”

 

And to a captive train load an adaptive audience held hostage, the cameras of Nicholas Mapfre running, Sebastian began a speech, about a four minute speech per car.

 

“Hyperdevelopment is the physical and moral state of core country populations that result from proximity to overabundance!”

 

“While each core country maintains an underclass of newly arrived immigrants, ethnic subturns, welfare subsidiaries and others are utilized for domestic exploitation on a variety of levels. Low cost wage labor, military or police service, undesirable or dangerous work, service sectors and prostitution; jobs considered below the acceptability of core ethnic identity in power.”

 

No one got up to open fire on them yet, which was good, as they were wearing blue uniforms and crazed masks in the age of public transport terror.

 

“Blacks in United States, Algerians in France, Turks in Germany or various former colonial groups in England. However, nearly every person citizen or undocumented migrant residing in a core country can despite low probability of achieving meaningful wealth; access a range of social services, enjoy relative security and purchase a full range of consumer goods. Hyperdevelopment affects all within the territories of the Core.”

 

“While clearly some of the highest Palma Index and GINI coefficient variances occur within the core at rate in the United States of 47 to 1 in wealth difference; hyper development is the result of goods, commodities and general capital flows back to the centers of financial hegemony; New York, Berlin, Geneva and London.”

 

 

Now Spike Timchenko jumped in, his mask was a sleep no more mask;

“While the political directives of the USA form the overt course of policy and international relations; shared race, history and basic cultural religious values have allowed for Euro-American elite consensus to function more fluidly than its 1945-1989 core contender and nemesis the Soviet Union grappling with a far wider ethnic elite, a less structurally manageable economic system and a far new set of oligarchs; the inner circle of the Communist Party, KGB and subsequent energy moguls.”

 

He wonders if they understand anything he’s saying, wonders if they have unplugged from their smart phones and iPods.

Spike continues;

“Hyperdevelopment leads to things like the US obesity epidemic, high levels of moral decay such as the feminist consensus that 1/3 women in the US is a victim of sexual assault before age 18. It is access to too much food, constant imperatives to purchase more of everything, the owning of multiple vehicles per family, the imagined entitlement to home ownership and the ownership of homes far in excess of what a family unit requires. It is an exaggerated sense of importance and uniqueness.”

 

He concludes as the train rumbles into the upcoming station.

 

“It is a complete apathy as to what is occurring not only in one’s own community but certainly the rest of the world. It is media over saturation; constantly plugged in cell phones, movies, music and video games. It is a decline in meaningful literacy, a tacit embrace of ethnocentric white (in the case of the current hegemonic order) supremacy. It is over availability of print media and pundit debate, but relatively poor engagement of the political machine itself. It is the right to vote between red and blue flavors. It is a severely myopic world view manufactured by the educational system and media.”

 

 

“Power to the people!” an old black man says and pumps his fist.

 

“We are asking for you to work in sympathy with the resistance,” says Adon.

“We have a bag of homework assignments. Simple ways to assist the general strike and uprising coming on 17 September. The best way you can assist it is to join us in the streets. If you cannot stay at home. Wall Street will be a battle field. Support the Résistance anyway you are able.”

They were mostly greeted with quiet applause, but no one shoots at them or turns them in. And in this city that counts for something. Most people take home work, perhaps largely out of curiosity.

Later Sebastian and his three cohorts are at the end of the line and the job has been carried without any of the possible predictions of arrest by the authorities or mob violence against them. A sigh of relief.

“It’s nice to see that on the eve of September 11^th, 11 years later, security is tight as drum,” notes Mr. Spike Timchenko an anarchist childhood friend of Zachariah, the nom de guerre of Sebastian Adon.

So when Sebastian gets back to the financial district and he confirms around 2am with Natasha he’s alive and she breathes back a sign of near panic. He writes poems for her. Places them on old school gold painted stationary, dedicating resistance to her, although to her, it is more like street theatre carried up on a moving, highly privileged stage.

 

She texts him;

 

“I made you a picture of your bleeding heart.”

 

Bleeding out yes, unasked for and unheeded, a mighty pump. His heart was quite known to hemorrhage over little and for nothing. And certainly at the invitation of No One.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Chapter 45

2507 GHQ, Long Island City, 2075ce

Queens

 

 

There was Paramedic Lt. Scott Sevastra, with everyone right where we wanted them, it only took ten years.

 

The room was filled with members of service from all 16 citywide EMS organizations, all four unions representing EMS were there, but this was a wildcat meeting. Lt. Scott Sevastra of FDNY EMS, Station 35 addresses his colleagues;

 

“We have all in retrospect interpreted the event, the attacks, however you identify them; the evets of 12 January as an attack on our city. Over 443 EMS providers predominantly in Brooklyn and the South Bronx lost their lives attempting to rescue civilians from harm’s way.”

 

“To some this work is like a calling. We were all drawn here for different reasons, some were quite noble, and some were not. Tammany Hall is fifty years dead but being an Irish grandson of a fire fighter still opens a few doors. They call it legacy. It goes in a file, then without being officially recognized other than a check box will wind a new EMT in Station 43 Coney Island then over to the Rock in a year. There are a myriad of systemic problems around here. But you have to have a fairly analytical mind to see their connectivity.”

 

“After the towers fell a wave of civil service activism-romanticism swept the nation and the FDNY were the rock Little Wayne meets the Beatles. A brief era of patriotism took hold and the ranks of the emergency services were stocked with young men and women who might have gone white collar except for the collective ejaculation of national trauma. The FDNY, the greatest full time-part time job secret the Irish and Italians ever kept were quickly re-cooping man power and by 2003 the waiting list for the Fire Suppression open competitive exam was nearly 25,000 deep. EMS was the expeditious way to cut that line if you weren’t legacy, hadn’t passed high school, and may or may not have been in the top of your physical class.”

 

“In 1995 Giuliani merged various emergency services to cut the costs of their respective civilian bureaucracies. FDNY was 98% white, catholic and male while EMS was heavily integrated. FDNY with a force of nearly 12,000 fire fighters couldn’t justify keeping that many trucks in the field. EMS was already doing nearly a million calls a year with a force of under 3,000. The merger was toxic to everyone involved and it took another decade for the firemen to even look us in the eyes when we arrived on scene.”

 

“I wasn’t here for most of that. I was a paramedic and a volunteer firefighter in the city of Schenectady upstate. I earned a degree in Fire Science and had promoted to paramedic via my volunteer company. Everywhere but NYC becoming an EMT or a Paramedic is a promotion. In the city of many lights you promote to fire fighting. I became an EMT because my uncle was a paramedic and I grew up in the glow of emergency lighting. I was built for this mentally. In the words of my colleague technician Adon; ‘I possess the constitution to take this as far as it needs to go.”

 

“There is no money in this. We probably lose 8 brothers and sister a month. Attrition continues to thin the ranks. Studies report a disproportionately high rate of divorce, alcoholism, and suicide in EMS comparatively to Fire or Law Enforcement. We are asked and often mandated to work 12 to 16 hours a day in adverse conditions, in some of the most depressed regions of the country with outdated low-bid equipment, little public support, and virtually no encouragement from the city we serve. Moral is so low that the national statistics report that the average span of an EMS career is a little under four years. The department asks us for 25. Run the numbers and that’s why we’re always at 60%, that’s why you can find as much overtime as you can swallow.”

 

“Out of the 8 that leave each month, 5 quit, normally within their second year. 2; their number came up on a civil service test; normally PD, Sanit, Correction or Suppression. The last one sustained a line of duty injury; real or concocted to get them off the streets on LODI for a few months to collect AFLAC benefits. We lose members far faster than they can recruit. There is a virtually endless pool of EMTs to draw from, but most worth their salt go work for a Voluntary Hospital and can triple the wage we make. Others just know that the department will bleed you dry chasing a pension and a dream. They have recruiting posters in city shelters if that says anything.”

 

“The critical systemic problem is twofold. First because of low pay, hard hours and appallingly low morale we lose our toughest and bravest to the fire fighter promotional at a rate of a few hundred every three years. We lose our brighter and more ambitious members to the private sector and the field of nursing. This leaves us with a broken mish mash of skells, burn outs, a few zealots and a high rate of obesity in the ranks.”

“The other side of this is the lowered expectations to close the staffing gaps.  That means on a segment 1-3 priority call you might get a truck load of CFRs and long board trained fire men or as described in an internal Emerald Society memo “a waddling glob of minority goo with a gold chain and an un-tucked shirt.”

 

“And for all those reasons and more I helped found the Banshee Association on Block Island in November of 2073 and am here today to bring into being with you all the International Association of Emergency Medical Professionals; the world’s first pan-EMS union.”

 

And a great cheer does go up!

 

“I wrote the following article for Banshee Issue 1:”

 

“In the course of nobility in public service, sacrifices are made on a personal and familial level. Those sacrifices are seldom seen or acknowledged by the beneficiaries of great deeds. In the course of a societal shift from respect and honor to entitlement and selfishness, the value of public service has been lost on the public. We, as providers of care, hope and second chances, encounter diminishing returns of respect, honor and a living wage. We have learned the hard way that we can count on no one to provide assistance to us when needed, or even requested. In these revelations, our small subset of society has to learn to rely exclusively on each other.”

 

“In our most dire times of need and assistance on the job we utilize the 10-13 radio code to call for help. We all know exactly what it means. No one asks questions, no one makes value judgments, we just go and help. It just gets done. Why do we not have the same unmarred dedication to each other’s well-being when we are not in the streets with a radio in hand? We must provide this support to our own, and not just at memorials and funeral services. “

 

“EMS providers know what they’re in for when they sign on for this life. We’ll never drive fancy European sports cars, we’ll never have a summer house on the lake, and we’ll never be on the cover of a magazine. We live paycheck to paycheck struggling to make ends meet. While some people are deciding between the V6 and the V8, we are deciding between the light bill and the grocery bill. Dare we think about sending our kids to college, saving for retirement, a down payment on a house or god forbid we get sick or injured and can’t work at all? Well, we probably can’t give each other educations, retirements, or homes but it’s not unreasonable to think that we can help our ‘brothers-in-arms’ keep the lights on and some food on the table when times get tough.”

 

“Efforts have been made for years to help one another in times of need but let’s be honest, the reliability of charity is scarce, regionally limited, agency limited and sometimes popularity biased. Specifically in this great city of New York, the world of EMS is quite conflicting, territorial, convoluted, hierarchal, and tribal. Any attempt at joining providers together for any reason is traditionally an act of futility and serves to embellish the juvenile portrayal we strive to vanquish. While we perpetuate this 100 Years Civil War, the powers-that-be look at us humorously like a joke and reinforce their notion that we are undeserving. We reap what we sew. In the meantime, those of us in the rank and file still need a hand and in the thick of battle, the only hands around to reach down and give us a boost are our own.”

“In seeing the need for self-sufficient assistance for our ‘brothers-in-arms’ and recognizing how entangled we all are in the modern social interactivity of the technological world, it seemed only obvious to take to the web. The first step of this movement to reach out to all providers in a uniform way is information. The focus is on putting information in everyone’s hands. If you don’t call 911, no one knows you need help. The same applies here, if the community doesn’t know one of our own needs help, no one will. Modern social networking is the perfect platform for getting this information out to the whole EMS community.”

 

“We are all familiar with 10-13 parties and fund-raisers. We should also be familiar with the fact that advertising for such events traditionally doesn’t go much further than a particular agency, station or maybe borough and that unfortunately usually depends on the popularity or name recognition of the member in need.  In the municipal services of this enormous city, it is not uncommon for providers in one borough to never hear of 10-13 events of other boroughs. It is almost unheard of for individual agencies, whether commercial, volunteer or voluntary, to expect their call for help to be heard outside the walls of their own garage. If we as a service and a community are to progress to a better quality of life, these deficiencies need to change.”

 

“I present to you the first step in the journey of change, One Big EMS Union, whereby all 13,000 City EMTs and Paramedics might lock arms just once year after the catastrophe of 1-12 and declare our right full place in the city services, top revenue generator and top saver of human life!”

 

“An individual won’t be able to feed a comrades family while they’re out on medical leave, but thousands of brothers and sisters pitching in what little they really can afford to spare, now that goes a long way. Before that can happen, the brothers and sisters of this community need to know who needs their help. I call out to all of you, take off your patches, put down your shields, dust off that pink and blue card that unites us all and join me in doing what’s right for our ‘EMS family’.

 

 

Chapter 46

Brighton 5^th Street, 2076ce

BRIGHTON BEACH

 

The Russian Quarter is always teeming with life. Were I to put my finger in it; my nostril to the whiff beyond her buxom chest; it smells like potato pancakes, cherry perfume, cigarette smoke and fish. Smoked fish. It runs along and below the above ground Yellow Q and Orange B Express train line which rumbles above like a mechanical wave breaking in the six story tenement row houses made of red brown brick. Following the Q line above ground the architecture of the quarter goes from a mix of these artless, durable six stories inter mixed with modest suburban homes running towards the coast. The Northern most boundary of the quarter is Kings Highway because it is here that street signs appear in Cyrillic. Although the overlap with Midwood Ivoryish zone overlaps with the Russian quarter until avenue H where the Haitian Bar Lev line was drawn in 1996. Drugs nor guns nor traffic can move north of that line or south. District Midwood is one of eleven Ivoryish ghettos in the greater New York area, a place of prayer and tunnels and coming and going. Sebastian Adon lived in that district for eight years on Ocean and H. He knows its comings and goings

 

The Russian quarter is awash with small restaurants with live music sung by comical tamidahs and various slender, busty, well made up on every level Slavic goddesses. And prix fixed meals. Its western border is Coney Island Avenue, which at Kings Highway becomes a Pakistani district where Shar’iah law is enforced.

 

Coney island avenue runs parried. To Ocean Avenue to the east and ocean parkway to the west, and these three routes had to be thoroughly barricaded to turn back the advance of the National Guard and the 104^th and 116th tank column of Christmas Eve; 2079 or in the parlance of the rebels AR 3. That is still three years to come.

 

The eastern border if the quarter was Nostrand Avenue. Where the Russian quarter ends and the West Indian quarter begins, largely composed of Haitian s and Jamaicans. There were never walls around the quarter, not before the revolt or after not even when the southern rim of Brighton and Coney Island because the internationally famous green light district once the Soviet was recognized by Russia and China in AR 7, or 2083 ce. There were not physical walks but perhaps linguistic mental walls that trapped the mentality of those.in the quarter somewhere between the 18th and 21st century. Perhaps between the old world and the new. Perhaps rendering the seditious place it was and is, a place unlike any others where by huddled refugees and expatriate radicals were walled in Brooklyn habitations in a space that was neither Russia nor America, a purgatory. For had the three million souls of the future Brooklyn, excuse me Breuklyn Soviet ever been embraced by the Americans perhaps they would not have enjoined the rising. For what solidarity did those in the quarter have with Ivoryish spies and black revolutionaries? Nothing. Less than nothing. So little nothing that the majority of the quarter might have seat the whole thing out, we’re that an option. But with all the other tribes in arms and the National Guard shelling so indiscriminately well most joined in the rising before long simply to avenge or protect their own.

 

That is a characteristic that certainly embodies the Russian quarter. They rugged are social individualists. As in their circle of live work and loyalty contracts rapidly even in the face of minor hardship. No other race has ever been fully enslaved by its’ own people first via serfdom then via Stalinism. It ruined them as a collective or idealist species. That circle of loyalty contracts down to one. Themselves in away few other races do. At a certain point they might throw their children and wives into the raising seas. A wretched generalization but their individual will is harder than any. It is impossible to break. The social nature if their individualism is the solidly of the alliances they form. With anyone that properly secures their ends of individual betterment. They are turtle loyal and truly blind for those that aid them. They go inside a hard shell indeed and not god or insects can crack it. It is made of strongest stuff

 

Perhaps never not even ever having anything but predators as presidents and thieves for kings. Often the Russian quarter was festive, often feisty often a place of lawless abuses. You couldn’t ever know unless you knew the name of a song in Cyrillic.

 

She met on the boardwalk, I stood there smoking a Newport sizing up the Green from the Blue Tatianna’s nothing knowing how different they were. I was sleep deprived.

She had told me this rambling story about being the great granddaughter of a German baroness. This seemed like the kinds of stories all White Russian women concoct to erect a regal lineage that the revolution had maligned. Yelizaveta and Maria hadn’t made up such stories, they had others though that were comparable. But Yelizaveta and Maria’s fathers had been Red Russians and inner party members. They were less fixated on the 19^th century it seemed.

There were always these vague and ambiguous narratives Sebastian noticed about what their fathers did or didn’t do during the Soviet Union. Maria’s father had completely disappeared in Chechnya, allegedly been shot by friendly fire; he had been a General, but was dead before she was four or the family joined the exodus. Yelizaveta’s father had been a dentist. Or perhaps an expert interrogator. It was hard to deduce. What was the truth and what was the darkness that creeps out into his world any time he encounters them, these post and former Soviets.

Anyhow, Natasha was claiming to be part Ivoryish via her German Baroness Great Grandmother and that was her story for now. Her father apparently had just been a tramp and run out on her mom at fairly a young age.

She kisses him on each cheek and takes out a picture, wrapped up in papers and a bow.

“For you,” she states.

He opens it and it’s quite something, so black and dark and vivid. A heart. A black, black heart. But, his or hers? To what symbolic level goes it?

“Amazing, I love it,” he replies.

And for the nearly the first time in his life, he means it.

“I’m so glad.” She says with her big blue person eyes beaming?

“Shall we go get red wine?” she suggests.

That night long after midnight, late, late after a few shots, and some wine and a few dozen shared cigarettes in Cafes in and around Manhattan Beach they walk their walk, tumbled really toward to yacht yards and mansion of Sheepshead Bay.

And one point she yanks his collar close and says; “taste me”; she puts wine into him mouth to mouth.

The night gets early, he’s lost chasing her.

He runs his fingers through her thick blond lion’s mane. She leans into him on bar stools or when they go outside to spoke, let’s her tits rest on him, brush against him.

“So you’re really an Ivory?” she asks.

“Yes at least part.”

“I want to ask you silly questions and you will answer them of, she smiles rolling up into his arms, “and you will get a prize if you win, understand. True answers only.”

            “Would you denounce your Ivoryish God and become an Eastern Orthodox Christian to please my mother?”

“I don’t believe in either God’s monopoly, why not?”

“If we were poor would you work on Saturdays to support me?”

“As I have for years.”

“Would you steal for me?

“The moon itself. And whatever was needed.”

“Would you make love to me with my husband sleeping in the next room?”

“Your cries of passion would wake him, so only if he were drugged.”

“Would you kill to protect me?”

“Without a thought.”

“If I killed someone would you help me cover it up?”

“Yes of course I’d try.”

“Try?”

“Try. Depends on the mess not the risk.”

A mental picture flashes in his head of a memory. Was it real. The two of them dismembering corpses and melting them in acid?

“If I asked you to kill for me would you do it?”

“Are you in trouble?” he asks like a stupid American.

“You know I’m a married woman?”

“I’d like to suggest it lacks certain integrities.”

“Does it? How could you known. You’ve known me what, five weeks?”

“Time is relative.”

“Maybe. My husbands a monster and my boyfriend is boring,” is all she says and pulls away from him.

She shows him marks on her poorly hidden.

She has black and blue marks on her chest and under both arms. Like she got herself fucked ruthlessly. She has hand cuff marks on her wrists.

“What do you want me to do about your situation?”

“There is nothing that can be done.”

“I could take you away.”

“You could try.”

“You have to tell me what you want me to do, not what you assume is possible.”

“What’s the thing you Americans say, oh yes: You and what army.”

“What are those marks from?”

“Me being loved by three men.”

He looks sad, it breaks through. Sad for her and him both.

“You could leave with me. Tonight. I have enough money to get us away.”

“I doubt that.  I have expensive tastes.”

“Curb them?”

“Are you going to give me new clothes? And a beautiful home; and pay for my school. And give me a credit card. Give me money to send my ailing mother in Penza? Ivory.”

“I think I could give you a better life than this shit, this life. In this miserable city.”

“You can’t give me what I need. As sweet as you are.”

“I don’t think you’d be with me if you didn’t think I could try.”

“You’re broke. You’re in school. You’re up to shit, I know. Don’t think I don’t know what you and your friends are up to. You’re all gonna die.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Do you think I don’t know?”

“What do you think you know?”

“I got to know a lot of guys when they brought me here.”

“Who?”

“The Perchevney Bratva.”

“You’ve told me so many fucking stories about how you got here, who keeps you, what’s true. What! You play mind games like the best of us.”

“My girlfriend and I were hired to let a couple bankers work us up two nights ago. When I told you I was studying. I was being fucked by two Wall Street guys, swapping my friend and I for hours. These marks are from them, not my fake ass paperwork husband. Not my boyfriend.”

He wonders what if any of the story is real.

“The wall street guys were fucked out their minds. They were going at us for hours. Taking long breaks to do coke and talk about shit they own.”

He has been asleep because she keep feeding him booze. He wakes up sometimes and knows his role, but then goes to sleep and forgets what is about to go down.

“They know you and the resistance are going to attack the exchange on 17 September. In two days. They know that you’re all going to try and take over the whole district and provoke a state of emergency. They know. The cops know. The National Guard know. The FBI know. The Bureau of Homeland security knows. Breria, knows. They are going to lure you all into those narrow streets and spaces. They’re going to wait one day. They’re going to kill every single one of you with gas. Now you tell me. What horse am I betting on? My fat American husband. My Russian accountant boyfriend washing money at the biggest hotel in midtown? My boss, the Israeli pimp who pays me one grand every night I take a Wall Street guy, a banker or celebrity out to dinner? Or you? The bipolar ambulance man, who has less than 400 in the bank, is on the BHS kill list, can’t buy me a new life, and can’t save me. All you have is happy noble Amerikanski ideals and some poems. You probably shouldn’t see me again.”

 

He knows she’s right about at least what’s in his account.

 

“I can get us out of this city, I can take you away from this life,” Sebastian says, “I…”

 

“You are going to tell me you love me?” she asks him.

 

He doesn’t respond, that word means nothing.

 

“You better not even fucking dare.”

 

“I’ll give you my life and I kill anyone who is hurting you. I’ll bury your husband, your boyfriend your Ivory pimp. I’ll bury Breria himself.”

 

She kisses him hard. Fuck it, she thinks he’ll probably be dead in a couple of days.

 

And that was how she began to suspect that he truly was the man she’d dreamed about as a younger girl with the powers she was born with, from a line of old souled sorceresses; and she of course recorded the entire conversation on her smart phone recorder as evidence for her handlers.

 

Shortly they could cross this very, very loose and erratic cannon off their growing shorter list.

 

“I know a little hotel at the boardwalks end with mirrors on the ceiling,” she whispers to him, “I have to sleep at home tonight but he’s not gonna come home tomorrow. You can’t save my soul or fix my life, but you can do what you want to body.” Now that was a value proposition, if he had ever heard one.

 

 

 

Chapter 47

Major Deegan, 2074ce

South Bronx

 

 

Thinks Technician Leacroft Walters:

 

I’m the grim reaper, I’m the angel of death man. Feel like me ‘ain seen the sun fo’ long time. I sit next to the Deegan man, I sit in 17Adams atom so those lazy girls get hit first, I sit right next to the Deegan so I can get up and out quick.

 

I got me like seven years at this job, on this unit, I do the minimum asked. 17 Charlie Tour 1; I Walters. Nobody call me Leacroft but me wife.

 

I worked with Adon briefly, no problems. It was the summer’s end in 2072. People hated him ‘cause he’s self-righteous. Thinks he’s doin’ favors for us being here. I don’ care ‘bout station politics.  One night a crack head wanders out into the Deegan right under the Macomb’s bridge where the lighting is bad, some Puerto Rican kid plows him down goin’ close to 85 an hour. Tears the crack head right in two. Drops his organs sprays his blood volume over fifty feet.

 

So the policeman shuts down the Deegan, seals it all off crime scene like.

 

First unit on scene out of Station 14 takes the babbling traumatized young man off the scene in psychogenic shock. His car was covered in another man’s blood, think he thought it was a child. Wasn’t a child, it was a crack head I told him. Didn’ listen. We were second unit on scene. Not much to do. Adon was green then, less than three months. Might have been his first of second DOA, maybe not dem bodies pile up in the South Bronx quick like.

 

The cop made jokes, thaz what they do. Stupid jokes if you ass’ me. We don’t carry body bags I told um’ not no more. They try an pass the body on us body that ain’ how it work. They stuck ‘ere as long as the high way is closed.

 

Some vultures from one of the Daily’s, prob-ly the Post like, were takin’ pictures of us. I hate that shit.

 

He took a sheet out our truck and with blue gloved hands he wrapped that sheet around the upper torso of the fallen junkie, the lower extremities of the crack head were fifty feet up the road. He went and covered those too. Now there were just two piles of blood splattered sheets, and a trail of blood and organs.

 

“You like touch the bodies eh?” I said breaking his chops.

 

“What if it was your son?” he asked in anger, “you’d want the Post camera phoning your son on the Deegan?”

 

“Me son’s no crack head, would know better not to run out into highway traffic,” is all I told him.

 

 

 

Chapter 48

Light House Inn, 2076ce

Sheepshead Bay

 

 

The following evening came and he was hard.

 

Natasha arrives in the cold of night, met him as the usual place on the boardwalk.

One astounding thing about her was the variety of looks she wore. The way she carried her out worldly self, as well as her firm control of her surroundings via her deliberate metamorphosis from often carefree nymph to a severe and serious instructor of social etiquette and use of language. This perhaps this was the result of being born into the tender firm and earthly body of a non-aging and busty school girl, while her memory of events could trace its analysis across four centuries of wax and waning hardship were she ever to stop drinking. Her analogue disposition was that of vast kindness, but she resorted lately to various manipulations. It was the temperament best suited for dealing with savages and bonobos alike. For she was not descended from monkeys and her soul was not like any other he’d encountered.

 

They walk briskly toward the Sheep’s Head Bay, which looks madly like a destitute and run down Tel Aviv, he always things so.

 

He kisses her hard before she even closes the motel door behind her. He thrusts her against the wall clutching her tight and he smells like cologne. She likes his taste. She can smell on him the desire to fuck her good and hard. He’s tender until he drinks a little, or gets her ass in his palm.

She pulls him in and tells him, “You miss me a lot baby?”

He always misses her now.

She’s all he thinks about. Her big blue eyes. Her stunning baby face. Her devil smile. How she fits in his arms. How he hopes he barely fits in all of her tight little spaces. He longs to suck on her big perfect breasts.

He hangs her coat and she grabs his ass.

He carries her over to the bed. All he can think about is how tight she is every single time he enters her pussy, how hard she kisses him, how much he thinks he loves her, and just how long she can take his cock. He’s insatiable. And she can fuck him for days he’s sure.

It’s interesting to think such things about a woman you’ve only just kissed. He’s had three weeks of dreams about it. About what it would be like to have her.

The motel room has off white walls, poor lighting and smells like scented candles. There are indeed mirrors on the ceiling and walls. But it’s better than the ones before, the gypsy tents and beach blankets. It was just under $ 200 for the room, almost half what was in his account. In the room is a new red desk and queen sized brown wooden bed with posts. Nothings on the desk. He lays her on the bed and kisses her hard again. They make out and she rubs his big cock through his jeans wanting to taste it. Wanting to suck him off twice. She’s wearing a short skirt and red lace panties; a black short skirt and tank top which makes her thick pale tits look quite perfect. He’s already rock hard thinking about taking her. He rubs on her breasts.

He wants to rip off her panties and fuck her brutally until she screams. He wants to take off his belt and put it around her neck and fuck her over the red desk until his hot cum fills her pussy. She’s so prim and perfect. She’s young and luscious and graceful. He wants to put her on her knees.

“Slow down,” she whispers anticipating his hungry lust, “we have all forever. Take your time baby make me a few times cum and extra hard. Seduce me.”

He starts rubbing her pussy with his fingers while she sucks his thumb. He likes her to take him all the way down her throat to gag on big cock. He’s looking up a voodoo spell to double himself so she can suck him while his twin fucks her on her knees from behind. She’s not sure if she can take two of him. It’s hard to slow him down. He just imagines always the tightness of when he enters. Like she’s fucking for the first time. That tight. What an illusion. That tasty and pure. Once he’s in thrusting all he can think about is pleasing her. He loves her amazing pussy. Its taste and its shape and its fit. She always shudders when he goes in. He wants to fill her with hot cum and break her in. He wants to fuck her hard and everywhere, put her legs on his shoulders and ram his cock as far as it will go make her beg him for to empty load after load inside her…

“Slow baby slow” she whispers.

He breathes deep. His mind can’t stop running ahead.

“I’m going to suck your cock dry tonight baby,” she whispers in Russian, “I’m going lick that cock and stroke it so well. But first you gotta play with me right.”

He has no idea what the fuck she is or isn’t saying.

She takes his index finger and shows him how she’ll suck him. He’s beside her. Takes her panties down and puts a finger in her pussy. So amazingly tight. He rubs her up and down and wants her to be his baby forever. He wants to please her so well that she can’t even remember the faces of other men. Men like her pimp or her husband. He can’t think of anything but her all day at work. She sends him pictures sometimes in her lingerie and asks him to tell her what he’ll do when they get to the hotel.

Since she started class she only fucks two or three men a day.

He plays with her gently rubbing her pussy. Whispers in her ear, “I’m gonna fuck you hard tonight.” She moans and say, “Please daddy please.” But hopes he is gentle.

Her shirt is still on and she’s rubbing is cock thorough his jeans. He licks down her leg and rolls up the shirt. He grabs her thighs and licks and licks and licks. She moans and tells him again what she’ll do on her knees. He’s got one finger in her working back and forth, can barely fit a second. He looks up and she’s her happy moaning face.

When it seems like she is about to cum, which is charade for she can cum on demand, he whole body contorting in ecstasy; he pick her up and pushes her over the red table.

“You’re gonna take my cock everywhere.”

Men say that shit all the time.

She looks like a sexy little foreign school girl when she wants to or sometimes like a grown ass woman of the night. She can also be anything else, but always beautiful and dignified and pure at heart for him. He wants her to be his boss outside. He wants to be her servant and student he knows she’s wise beyond her years by a hundred. But in their inner rooms of that Sheepshead Bay motel he wants her to let him break her in as his for now. He wants to tie her wild ways and fuck her so ferociously that she cannot remember another man but him.

He wouldn’t be the first of last to try.

He lifts her skirt and guides his thick cock inside her. He moans, she’s incredible to taste and even more so to ride. He big pale breast are in his mouth one by one. He likes her to keep sucking his big fingers while he tries to go slowly back and forth pushing deeper.

“I’m going to try and break you,” he says.

And then for the next few hours he fucks in every single hole in her body.

She’s bent over the desk now with her panties in her mouth and can she feel herself convulsing as his penis rams up her ass cumming for the fifth time in seven hours.

Was that real or was that witchcraft?

In the candle light in the mirror besides the bed and one the ceiling. She wants to civilize him. Make him her slave. For sex and smoothies. Can he be taught? Where did she learn to fuck like that?  For an agitation propaganda officer he’s quite good. He finally slowly pushes deeper and takes her hands. He begins going faster one last time. “I’m gonna fuck that tight ass baby. I’m gonna you have you beg for my dick for days,” he mutters in Ivory.

“Fuck me harder Ivory pig,” she yells at him in Russian.

But she loves to beg him. Beg him to serve her. Beg him to make her cum again. She likes him to treat her like the goddess she is. He begins pumping faster. And cums in her. Lying there awhile then he bathes her. Washes all the blood and shit and cum off them both. And they pass out eventually before dawn, on the motel bed.

 

Dead men get a last wish in every great culture she thinks.

And then she sucks him off again.

 

 

 

Chapter 49

9 Metro Tech, 2075ce

Brooklyn

 

 

Demands to the New Commissioner

 

Let us make it plain, regardless of who is appointed to the position of Fire Commissioner, our demands remain the same. We say demands, not requests because those with nothing, not even a living wage for our highly profitable toils are in no position to be patiently making requests. We hear the PBA and the UFFA; the power house labor unions of Police and Fire Suppression make war cries over whether their men and women have to pay into pension, or whether their salary will jump from start pay 70,000 to start pay 80,000. Their demands and their requests, when compared with our own, are to pit the claims of further appetite versus those of starvation.

 

Compared to Fire Fighters and Police we are a rabble, politically and economically speaking. While an estimated 12,000 women and men hold the EMS blue card in the Tristate area, no one speaks for us collectively. We are unable, and apparently unwilling to throw votes and money into political races so we reap the benefits of more of nothing. Listen to the votes of 38,000 Police officers and 12,000 Fire Fighters and their children and spouses for change and these are suggestions the New Commissioner might listen to. But we have demands.  Let it be stated again, as the simplicity prevails:

 

We need immediate parity with NYPD and FDNY Fire Suppression.

 

In simple terms all objectives and tactics in our struggle as a work force may be summarized as such: We require a 20 year Pension, we require base entry position pay equality, we demand reinstitution of promotional exams on all levels of command, equity in our benefit package and civil service status established before hiring. That is to say, what the other two services have possessed for years.

 

The Commissioner must understand that if we are not given these things we will grow critically distressed and we will grow bold. We will become not a tale of a young service given the respect its due in proportion to its municipal contribution, but instead a political liability.

 

We are the life savers, as we must always remind the public and ourselves. We are not the trash collectors, the law enforcers, or the fire suppressors; our job is to always be there when the public falls down sick, injured, maimed or broken. Lest we forget there is a green cash money side to things. Other than Traffic Enforcement, no single city agency generates near the green cash money we generate in revenue each day. To the ballpark figure of $473.00 for a basic, no frills BLS transport up to nearly a Grand for ALS work, each day our units bring this Department many tens of thousands of dollars in revenue which certainly does not seem to trickle back down to us.

 

We see that most Police Officers and Fire Fighters own homes in the five boroughs, hold second jobs often at a business they own, have happy marriages and can put their kids through college. Can the same be said of EMS? The answer is ‘hardly’.

 

Honoring promises to construct new facilities, replace antiquated accident prone equipment like the two person stretcher and the stair chair, renovation of our tenement training facility and the more expeditious maintenance of our fleet. There is a laundry list of desired changes we can suggest/request later. But now is a time for urgency. Our women and men generate your revenue with their blood, sweat and tears, they pay into a pension they may never see for 25 years. Yet rates of injury and extended LODI leave do not come close to those of the other emergency services. Beyond that gut, visceral reaction that the life savers are being paid like pizza delivery boys or a simple look at the state of the EMS union; times are lean it’s true, but we are pulling more than our weight.

 

Civil service titles may be stripped from us right under our noses. This pandemonium over boots and the efforts to grind us under heel are moving faster than you know. To not mince words, a fireman knows every single gain EMS makes is a dollar less for them, as sad as that paradigm is. But we are not in a position where we can bandy about waiting for another measly 4%.

 

We walk a fine line, but let us make it plain; WE HAVE DEMANDS and we MUST organize and struggle until they are met. Whoever is appointed as the new commissioner must know that we are not a playing card in his deck, we are a powder keg of despair and frustration. You cannot ask a woman or a man to toil for 25 years of their life and keep telling them ‘they are special’, ‘they are heroes’, and they are ‘moving at the speed of life.’ This city loves us, and it will rally behind us. If the city knew the truth about the conditions in which we toil, and the luxuries a fire man enjoys they would support our aims and our struggle.

 

In conclusion, there are human wants and human needs. A want is perhaps not to be based out of former single engine fire house hand-me-downed to EMS after the suppression boys were upgraded (17, 55, 44) or for that matter to be based next to a medical waste/trash extraction center (35). A want would be for the dangerous apparatus they tell us is called the ‘two man stretcher’ be systemically decommissioned and replaced with the current standard. A want would be to have leaders promoted based on merit.

Alas, we are now in times of need. We will not slave for 25 years, break our backs, scar our minds, poison our relationships, lose our ideals, lovers and friends to keep 12,000 firemen with rights, privileges and pay we don’t come close to enjoying ourselves.

 

The new commissioner, if he ever reads a Banshee paper in his life would do well to heed these words; EMS has been beaten, mismanaged, underappreciated and almost broken. Be forewarned, broken women and men have very, very little to lose.

 

Commissioner we have simple demands, must we prepare to fight for them? Will you do the right thing to prevent this battle?

 

 

 

Chapter 50

44 Banner Ave, 2076ce

Brighton Beach

 

 

 

One old soul Cold Night,

It was pouring again on her low rise,

High risk hell by the sea shore.

I’ve always said that the waters will wash the rats away,

But not the deeds-done by all in middle passage.

She says we will be ok, one day.

I’ve never been a killer.

She’s never been a whore.

The sky broke open like a shotgun burst in Grozny at close quarters to the knee cap:

An ambush, oh well.

Who keeps score?

It all came down in a freezing deluge,

Dripping like a sweat soaked sheet after a good ravishing tear about of a violent fuck.

The kind that breaks bed stands best reserved for last stands.

Cue thunder bolt Bang!

In a sky-break-the-jaw free for all with no sign of stopping:

Good luck, better duck.

Soon you’re back in Eastern hands.

 

All torn asunder_ and brackish above.

 

She says:

 

“Real Men don’t waste their weakness via their liquid.

In the company_

_Of those they are claiming to love.”

 

-Good Night Moon! –

 

I drank too much Astika,

Now I’m wasting my blood, sweat and tears!

No fuss. Really_ No fuss.

 

We’ll get back to heaven soon.

 

And-if-hard-rain-is-the-piss-and-the-wrath-of-the-gods,

Then lately the gods_

Are beating the shit out of us.

 

Looking up out the train at the sky falling out_

Rat-Tat-Tat_

On the pock-marked-Plexiglas windows_

Looks as though I could get out and swim.

 

I say:

“Dorogaia, I’ll go home when I get you home_ from the City right back to him.”

 

Take warning!

Or should I say Good-Gracious to the latest early morning,

Escapade_ this train is my casket,

An empty bed is but some temporary grave with sheets.

A wasted youth on some lonely barricade.

-“Who offered you redemption?”

– “Who asked it?”

Good warning.

She doesn’t give them now.

I fear nothing_  Not even total destruction!

Re-execution_ the wrath I daily incur,

I’m just an arrogant devil, who’s stealing an angel from hell_

_Defying the last thread of reason:

Commandment Ten too so it seems

To make some destination with her.

 

And then she says in her pre-Brooklyn post-Soviet Cyrillic:

 

Her eyes switch blade sleep deprived to silver,

From blue.

“Awake–on-the-Q-again-my-devil- tovarish_ Boxing-the-demons in-you.”

If you play you play to win.

Night train to Brighton.

With-Vodka-in-our-vessels and pumps.

Come-on-in-sin!

Rationale swallowing,

Morals repressing

I’m no longer giggling.

Or humoring your rough handed caressing,

Dripping wax after gradual tantric undressing.

Your attempts at beseeching

My former soviet teaching,

It comes out like preaching sometimes.

Break the siege!

We’re clawing with word.

I’m an occupied country.

You’re re-opening wounds,

I’m your devastation_.

Fuck what you know about me as some angel,

And forgive me at least half that you heard.

 

She said “Man go home.” (Sung)

 

Again I implode.

And thus flew by the Beverly Road.

 

She thinks:

 

We-were-fighting-about-feeling,

I can beat him with my eyes.

More fun than bawled fists or a knife.

Sometimes I tell bright, white, victorious lies!

About various financial or legalous men in my life,

He doesn’t know Nothing!

But “former soviet” pillow talk.

I say: “You call me Bright Eyes!”

Why fly off the handle at first or last tries?

Why even run_ when first you must master the walk.

 

Bright Eyed Angel_

Take back the blood you bled.

I’ve wounded, you stabbed, but you’re Russian

You’re taking your time!

This place is far beyond heaven though laid out like hell,

Are we alive or are we just the working-half-dead?

 

I’m on borrowed clock:

Face punched bloody, long overdue.

Remember September when we almost died?

What if we did?

– “What’s it to you?”

– “What’s love when you’re already dead?”

Eternity is just the name_ Of a long waiting game.

If I ride this train too long_

I will never beat the dawn rise to that place I keep my bed.

You’ll draw further attention

To the contradictions in my head.

So speak of morals,

And logic,

And devotion, and never of my latest-wild-plan!

 

She says:  

 

“Do you know how far you’ll have to go to steal me from this man?”

 

To kiss is so easy.

But to take me with you is dire.

Don’t you know_ we have no place to go_

And my kisses seem to set your fragile devil heart on fire.

 

She says: 

 

“Man go home!” (Sung)

 

And there just went Cortelyou. Everything she says is mostly true.

 

I say:

 

“I’ve got no home except when I’m with you.” (Sung).

 

She reviews the balance sheet:

 

I-cannot-discern_ your-truth from-your-lies,

Romantic –propositions-are-getting-bound-in-reckless-adventures,

Picnics on steeplechase beaches,

Epic half tries!

Defiance in the face of my torturous lies!

Your life: Pledged fearlessly_ naively to mine!

Our hand cuffed, bloody hands bound together at the foot of the Partisan shrine,

I asked for seduction!

You’ve brought complication and pain.

What the blat happened on the roof in September:

Remember!

There’s no reason to think we have something to learn_ or to gain!

There’s a contract, but there is no obligation.

There are no witnesses to what I call proof.

I could have killed me and you could have killed you,

And we both would have died for not a damn thing!

And then you went and took on all those cops on your roof!

• “You put on masks!”
• “I was born with the face I wear now.”

No more last tries!

I’m nothing like former Soviet women!

I still have my feelings intact.

You have only your bloody ideals and a cause:

So you’re certainly not like other eligible American guys.

 

She says man:

 

“It’s all mostly true.”

 

I sing “I have no home, except when I’m with you.” (Sung_)

 

And-that-fight-in-the-night-was-the-same-old-fight,

That has kept us up and awake since the first blue moon in September:

I said to you_ won’t you run away with me_

And we’ll see if your husband will even remember.

 

She slaps my face with her eyes.

She says:

“I don’t take this kind of bullshit_

From much more gracious and generous guys.”

 

         She says: “Man go home!”

 

I’ve survived for this long in this country of yours,

I came here with nothing but blonde hair and dreams,

What do you know of my man who keeps me on this coast?

Who feeds me_ and clothes me_ and says that he loves me,

I will go home to his arms and you know what I’ll do

I’ll do it until he screams.”

 

“Man!

Find your way back home!”

    

I said what do you know of me?

She says I know you’re weak because

You grew up much higher up on the hill of life,

You grew up privileged in this City.

“Does it hurt the hear that? Does it scar?”

“I know that you should be much stronger than the peasant that you are!”

Now find your way back home.

I retreat

No heartbeat.

An epic defeat.

And the failure of deeds to woe her-to love her-to see her again.

I know she’s away from this husband every night of the week,

Running and hiding and dancing,

Mostly in the arms of other men.

 

“Don’t you even look at me that way”, she says.

“Don’t you look at me again!’”

Man find your way back home!

 

You kiss me each time like you’re going off to war!

You talk like a poet,

But don’t you understand yet,

Words are useless to me_ and anyone else who has ever been poor.

Listen, MAN I’m doing this because it’s true.

I can’t go home to Penza,

I can’t feed myself on poems.

And I can never be,

In epic love with you!

 

The Q train rumbles toward the coast,

Brighton Beach arrival!

It’s like I’ve died before,

And this hell is mine alone,

Russian roulette with a ghost.

She says:

Keep to the contract,

We wrote it ourselves,

You know the rules man,

Do what you should.

If you love me and kiss me and steal me away,

You’re breaking the tenth rule:

And as your muse and tovarish;

_We cannot allow our evil to triumph over our good.

 

“I will always love you.”

“You’ve said that to other women before.”

“I wish there was a way to go back and undo,”

She says, “At least when the storm ends you’ll be back in your bed,

And the roof was a dream and I didn’t kill me, and I didn’t kill you.”

 

“What was this even for?”

 

I walk her brisk umbrella’ed down Banner Ave as the rain cracks down,

I bring her Q train to bombed out lobby door.

Hard-times-and-sky-falls-and-rivers-run-over-red_

And this nation erupts in on itself white and blue.

“You could learn to be as good in deeds, as you are in speech”, she says departing.

I said “I hope there’s a will for that way.”

She says “I’m doing this for mostly for you.”

 

The rain beats my brow.

Exit the hazel haired devil,

Angel’s got wild gold locks on fire as she looks back at the torrent from the door.

Our flirtation has been on fire from the start.

And now, I show signs of first submission,

And the storm smolders my position.

As I can no longer tell heaven from hell or

An angel or devil apart.

 

Poem #039.

“She says: Man_go_Home! “

Dedicated to Natasha Andreavna.

 

 

And the doors closed on me at Avenue H and the Q train southbound to Stillwell Ave. carries her home, to her husband on Banner Ave. Like I shall never see her alive again. That is what all nights have felt like since I have known her, but these four of five weeks. Parting with her is a type of death.

 

Knowing she returns to such an animal neither she nor I can control or break from. I begged her many time to leave with me to somewhere, to anywhere really. She only quietly laughed and loudly judged me.

 

The cabs could take us still thorough the Battery tunnel, but we often had to board the trains to get deeper into what was quickly becoming the most heavily armed and barricaded urban stronghold barring perhaps Baghdad and Mogadishu. Every ethnic group, every gang and mafia, every faction was warming up observing what was about to occur in the city the morning afternoon and next week days and weeks after 17 September. September 1^st had been a Great Disruption, all listening to the f IRE switch, fire station radio broadcasts knew what was soon to happen; a great slaughter.

 

So in Brooklyn, Queens the Bronx and many other places like ATL, Boston, Flint, Hartford and Detroit the innumerous factions of resistance dug the hell in. They got ready to hold ground, room to room, block to block. No one thought it would be feasible to storm the district financial. A real one way trip. But Anarchists are always after hard, symbolic targets and by that stage the city unions and student movement were behind them in the raid.

 

The blood of the left would spray into and open the eyes of the right and the center so went the brinkmanship of the Planning Section chiefs in the Breuklyn Bath and Rifle Club called also called the Banshee Otriad.

 

There would be no Anarchist Trials here, who even had time for such warnings; only massacre and atrocity. Followed by deceptions like ones perpetrated in September 2001 and again in January of 2074.

 

 

Chapter 51

The Deep Nightclub, 2001ce

Tel AVIV

 

 

We’re in Guyana, we being me, Jefferson, my wife Refilwe, Raj Sampath and his wife Sara, Alina, Maayada, and others and were’ watching a recorded speech given by Avinadav DeBuitléirs at the Deep Nightclub, recorded in a Hip Hop Speakeasy after hours in the summer of 2001. The year I’m familiar with it being now, in my objective three dimensional reality is 2085, but Sampath teaches us time is not linear, time is fourth dimensional. This was of course his minds rationalization of the powers of Solomon and DeBuitléir, how they so influence events.

 

Throw it back way back;

                                                                  

            “Let me tell you a story about a woman and a man, that you have always been told as the most important story ever told about a man, a man who was also God,” Avinadav told a crowed club below the streets of Tel Aviv and the ministry of interior white towers.

“There are things you know you know, such as that the religion based around the man was called Christianity. And that roughly one third of the Human race believes this story and its slight deviations of form. There are things you do not probably know, such as that man’s real name and how many children he bore and to whom. And there are things you do not know that you do not know, such know such as the command structure of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard corps, the names of the 5,000 tribes of Africa, what language your messiah sang in, and the access codes to the bunker complex below Jerusalem (Yerushaliim) where a tunnel system goes deep into the mantle.”

“You may know, that your messiah was born in Bethlehem, the ‘house of meat and bread’ (בֵּית לֶחֶם Bēṯ Leḥem). You may know that he grew up in Egypt (Mizraim  מִצְרָיִם) the house of bondage; and that at the time of his battle against Rome he was employed as a carpenter in Nazareth (Nasrat  נָצְרַת). You may know a Romanized, Latin version of his name, one that begins with a J.”

“You may not know that he sang in Aramaic and wrote in Hebrew and Greek, and that there is no J sound in those languages. Anything called J, is the designation of an occupier or conqueror, a Roman legion in Palestine perhaps.”

“Here again are things you do not know that you do not know, you do not even think about hearing these things. You do not when Pesach begins, or why. The calendar you use is a Roman Catholic and or Christian Orthodox innovation; the Julian and Gregorian calendars are solar, the pagan, the Mayan, the Hebrew, Persian, Arabic and Chinese calendars are lunar. You do not know that you do not know who invented time.”

“Here again, you do not know that you do not know so many things. Such as the spatial spiritual chakra points, such as the importance of Moscow. You do not know where your food came from or what it is in it, or how many hours takes a child to make your clothing. You do not think about hearing these things because, they make you culpable. They imply your collaboration with the empire: with and by default your implicit acceptance of the fate of the slaves.”

“You know there are several large religions, you can reject all of them which is easy, or pick a tendency of a block, all of them are based on events you did not see, interpreted in languages you functionally cannot speak and you call that faith. You are generally when born to pick one, or have picked for you generally speaking you are to be a Christ follower, a Muhammadian (One who submits to God and his prophet Mohammed), a Hindu or under the rule of the Chinese Communist Party, therefore living under Red Confucius hybrid thinking. Or, you’re in some much, much lesser marginal sect, or a Buddhist, keeping out of the cosmic wars. Anyway, three of the four major religions are at war at all times. Almost always historically due to a major Christian offensive.”

“Hindus have kept hundreds of millions of people locked into servitude and subjugation. Christianity and Islam have been in direct warfare since the Crusades approximately since 1000ce. Today, there is not one single county where Muslims are not being slaughtered or persecuted. All of the central cores to the core 46 states are Christian, except Japan and the Petro states. All of the poorest most ravished nations are Christian and Muslim, converted during the colonial epochs.”

“I’m sure those things don’t come up in your Church. And we are very much not fighting a cosmic war. It is absolutely a war grounded in base human inequality, or less mildly; the suffering of five billion plus humans while some, less than one billion drink, use drugs, fuck hookers, watch sports, tune out to the telescreens, buy things and more things and stuff their faces until they all die of heart disease, and head to a church to absolve their daily sins. A church where a man who was not white is white on the walls. A church where the things that man, and his wife and their 12 deputy officers and several thousand supporters stormed the temple and declared war on Rome. And for the next 100 something years 66-136ce over three major military uprisings fought the Empire on all fronts.”

“You know only what you want to know to justify that you are in the wrong side of history paying your taxes to the new Rome, running around with those smart phones checking in checking out, selfies with the mark of the beast.”

“You don’t know the acronyms to the secret police organizations that are organizing the terror Attacks and mass shootings. You don’t know the names of the men who meet every summer in California to manage the county. You don’t know the names of almost any of the countries raped to keep your consumer goods so cheap. You can’t even read a map.”

“You don’t know, that you don’t know that when the children, the great descendants of that man you eat the body of and drink the blood of and wait for him to return, make themselves known to us, he’s dead. You are praying in the language of the oppressor. You are masquerading along to a fiction story based nothing on what actually happened. You are hanging crosses, the symbol of Roman rape and repression around your very neck. You are celebrating holidays that are feasts to the devil, glutting your face on your thanksgivings, a mockery of Indian genocide. You are worker proles and sleeping zombies and serving a vast killing machine. Your countries of the west are colonial killing machines sucking the rest of us dry.”

“I am not Toussaint I did not come to lead the gathering armies. I am DeBuitléir, of Haiti, Sudan and Palestine, but I do not speak for all the oppressed. And I am not commander Solomon; I have never heard the voice of God, I posit myself neither as savior conqueror nor general. Nor some lesser mad Hebrew prophet.”

“I am only one partisan and friend of the people. Andrew the Hustler, as my Todat Ziyoot says. I am here in the wilderness not tell your religion, but to warn you that we are planning a new uprising, to drive the European devils and their collaborators out of this colony, out off this holy land . Not one based on imaginary masculinized voices in the sky, not one based on beliefs. It will not be directed against the Ashkenazi collaborators with the North West Core but what beings in this colony will inspire instead all the dark forgotten brutalized places in the periphery, in the all the colonies. I did not come to warn you or make you change your ways.”

“I am a partisan practitioner, not an agitator to the deaf and mute and blind. Hidden in the stories I can tell you is a simple truth. Humanity ought not wait for some white washed savior, humanity ought not live as they do.”

“Christendom is a sickly mockery of the heroes martyred in our cause. Time wrote your bible. Islam is a sickly mockery of our second major rising. The House of Umayyad wrote your Quran. Everywhere I look I see Christians feeding the devil machines, I see Muslims dying and dying but not knowing their own prophet, the cousin of Yeshua Ben Yosef, who the Romans and Saul called Christ. Everywhere I look I see the oligarchy grinning and glutting themselves in every nation. White faces, yellow and black masks on white souls.”

“I did not come to the Colony in Palestine to bring you a New Social Gospel, for that was brought by women and men before me and it is the manifestation of Candidate Solomon to divine and interpret. We did not come reconcile your scriptures, this too was done by the Baha’i.”

“I came to tell you to pack your bags and wear blue cloth, to march with us in columns and fly in convoy, to fortify 144 positions in the periphery where men and women die like dogs. Are killed every day in plain sight.  I came to tell you that we will organize the next uprising to starve the core, to embargo the high places to encircle the citadels of the oligarchy and free our people. They cannot kill us all!”

“And whether it be us, or the leadership, be it us or our great grandchildren we will march into the hills around Yerushaliim with ten million fighters, having put down Rome, put down Washington, London, Paris, Geneva, Berlin, Moscow and Beijing too, brought the killing machine of the world system to a halt.”

“And you will then know that your God did not send you more lambs. It send avengers.”

 

And the video although shot with outmoded technology captures the palpable Baraka of this man who was born in Haiti, traveled to Liberia then Sudan, then Egypt then down river to Cairo, across Sinai; through a tunnel to Gaza City; and to Demona then Tel Aviv, who rescued Emma Solomon the Tzadikk Ha Dror, and trained young Sebastian Adon as one of his couriers and officers.

 

            He continues,

 

“Let me tell you something about Pharisees; the holy pretenders. No one appointed them to interpret g-d. No one gave them the right to what Muslims call Shirk separate the unity of the higher power into inexplicable, incomprehensible parts.”

 

“That is what Pharisees excel at; making themselves powerful by making the unknown overly complicated, but still derive profit from their complex explanations.”

 

“Now, why speak us of Pharisees now with so much underway? Are there not enough complications; the former Soviet mobsters, the American revolutionists, the gangsters, the Haitians and the Ivorite sleeper cells; No-One is holding all the cards, The Name, HaShem, if such a force is one our side; surely it utilizes a most motley band of executioners and opportunists to achieve equilibrium.”

 

“Pharisees now days where white coats and white collars. They demand huge fees, tributes to “keep society running”, keep “development advancing” they perpetuate a mythology that tribute to them is tribute to the gods of science, technology, engineering and mathematics; to law and management, to economics and medicine; these are our Pharisees. And despite their brilliance half a fully 3.5 billion half of the human race is starving, perishing and sick. The Arc of development is led by these technocrats. It floats on the backs of the rest.”

 

“Did you know that there is no such thing as time?”

 

“It was invented to make your work weeks, you work lives in fact more cost effective. In Agrarian society the sun and seasons were markers, but they were not part of the countdown to the sweet hereafter. Your lives and all the parameters formed to hold you in your cage of identity, your work plantation and bind you to your toil was an irrational constriction of space and energy into something called time; that fails to exist to any other species or sentient race except in ours. Curiously, time is the most precious commodity we have; for work absorbs a vast percentage of our life span.”

 

“It is believed that if not for malnutrition, poor health, disease and environmental pollution the possible human life span, as reflected by the Buddhists and ultra-rich is 125 years. The life span of African American males in the United States is 53 years. 63 for Haitians. 70 for white Americans and 80 for Advanced Welfare States. Where did your time go? Probably working like a wage slave.”

 

“Did you know that in the year 32 CE; a raiding party of several hundred Zealots overpowered both the Roman guards and temple custodians of the Second Great Temple in Jerusalem and put to sword dozens of the Pharisee collaborators? Extorting alms while enabling Roman occupation. Were these Pharisees murdered, or were they driven out peacefully? A matter of both revisionist history and Ivorite logistics. Were there money changers in the high temple because the high priests commanded it or The Name, HaShem? Were they all drugged in a feast and removed from the Temple alive, or were they lined up on their knees and beheaded all? As we think we know; the prophet Yeshua ben Yosef, later called Jesus the Christ was executed a year later on Passover; crucified in 33 CE; that he was reborn three days later. And the Great Revolt against the Roman Empire commenced on 60 CE and continued until total dissipation, decimation of the Hebrew people and their allies in 117 CE, X years before the total fall of Rome shortly after its embrace of the Prophet Saul, Paul’s heretical transfigurations of Yeshua be Yosef into the so-called Jesus Christ. But there are all these things that we do not know, and these things are what modern Pharisees divine for you dressed in their white robes and collars. No matter what they say on that Goebbels level TED talks serial.”

 

“There exists a serious unquantifiable problem of measurement. Foucault did not believe we had proof of measurement of objective history prior to 1948. Pinker on the other hand in his recent tome uses so-called hard data in a very lengthy work to state that the better angels of our nature are driving us to more peaceful and equitable times. Claiming times are more stable and improving when compared to Crusades, Mongol Invasion and World Wars is indisputable to those who believe that Yeshua ben Yousef was a white hetero-sexual male, born in 0 CE in a Virgin birth to redeem a perpetually sinning species from war and poverty.”

 

“The new order of Pharisees exists to create the illusion of time and most importantly the illusion of progress. Which are matters of monopolizing both socio-economic measurement and communications; revising history to fit the political narrative of the day.”

 

“Because they, they being the privileged 0.0001% of the upper 2 billion humans consuming 80% of the world’s resources while owning 50% of the world’s wealth; they have a story they need to believe and require others to accept. They need to believe their ethno-cultural if not racial superiority earned them this development; they need to advance the narrative that they give as much as they take.”

“But, this is a lie. For if wild, unprecedented wealth concentrations are now such that 87 individual people own the wealth of 3.5 billion; well perhaps the great Pharisee deception is also a matter of linguistics; taking control of words to make them mean nothing.”

 

And then the video ends and past with it, and it is the year 2084ce again.

            Not necessarily according to Sampath the philosopher, and he and Jefferson stay up late speaking about it, the nature of fourth dimensional time.

 

 

Time stopped it seemed for Sebastian Adon between the double blue moons of Labor Day Weekend and the 17 of September, the date of the General uprising. It was as if the bite of Natasha Andreavna, through his index finger to the bone had altered his very electricity and chemistry. Was it the moon; perhaps for we are but 70% water; or was she something clandestine, if not supra-natural? With so many variables, no many players and plots vying for the most cost effective means to the biggest slice of the apple; well it makes a dizzying narrative.

 

But from the minute she bit into him, the night they perished in a fourth dimensional sense on that roof; the days became long. Sebastian had forgone the gift of sleep. At some point he had had taken some pills that abstracted his world, deduced him to a broken shell. The glory of his early life and past lives squandered, but Natasha knew his face; knew his capabilities; knew how to wake a sleeper sleeping. For four straight weeks neither she nor he slept. The one or two hours of snooze was purely for biologics sake; they flattened out time.

 

On 15 September they walked down the Coney Island boardwalk towards Manhattan Beach; towards the strip of mansions and yachts in Sheep’s Head. They came across a shrine. An iron torch wrapped in barbed wire about a pillar; around the base which extended out in a marble slab as if for human sacrifice. There were dozens of low cut tombs with the names of villages and families and entire peoples wiped out in the Nazi holocaust. Upon each a short story of things Sebastian knew, knew as if experienced. And they paused there in the dry docks and canals of Sheep’s Head, with the jazz cafes and lounges lined up on Emmons Ave.

 

Time stopped yet again.

 

“What is this poorly maintained shrine,” she asks him, “why do we linger here?”

 

And everything about his life he then knew to be a fabrication. His name, his parents, his religion, his country of origin. All a clever, highly cultivated disguise.

 

He was suddenly in many places and times at once. He was explaining to her the significance of the Partizan shrine; he was teaching her about his people’s history. She was telling him that her Ivoryish grandmother married a German baron and hid a Ivoryish lover in the manor for the duration of the purge. He told her about how when he was young he used to train with black guerillas in the shadows of these shrines all over the city; as if the younger he knew more of his past life than the man now; the man who has his face and memories wiped out repeatedly after being used by both sides of the war? Yes, the war. The oldest war; between humans and those that prey on them. And those humans which help the predators exploit us. The collaborators. They begin cleaning up the Partizan shrine which is gratified and defiled.

 

“What about the hatch?” she asks.

 

“The hatch?”

 

“I heard that under every holocaust shrine is a hatch to great behemoth craft; a black freighter ready to carry your people out to sea. If the purge, when the purge begins again.”

 

There appears to be a hollow in the base of the pillar upon which the flame site. She reaches in to brush the leaves aside, looking for the hatch. She cuts her hand on glass and bleeds out all over the shrine, until he goes in his jump bag for some bandages and iodine to pour. He secures her, she never cries out; just bleeds on her pretty dress, bleeds on the shrine.

 

“My personal paramedic,” she says, “no hatch.”

 

He is using much more of brain now. Able to be several places at once. He has seen the hatch open, seen that it needs a hand grenade to break the shrine and controlled explosion to pop the layer open to the great craft; the 24,000 person capacity nuclear powered black exodus freighter. And its sister crafts in Star City, Fort Totten, Fort Washington, Waterside and Seagate. And the corrupted one under Richmond Plaza. He thinks the freighters have been there since the 80’s. She shouldn’t know about them; unless, unless.

 

So it’s hard to describe fourth dimensional time; being in numerous reality states and historical times. She was her great grandmother he was the Ivoryish lover in the closet space hidden away. He’d been to Vienna; he’s bombed the theatre there also bombed a police station. So now, now in this state he knows that he’s not just a three dimensional man; 29 years old, a petty bourgeoisie of mixed Caucasian race in a paramedic program after the fire department put him on trial for Haiti, after the Israelis locked him up briefly and deported him for treason; he’s self-aware. He remembers the camps. He remembers the Sharashka Waltham, which is to say remembering things that haven’t even happened yet.

 

“Where are you right now?” Natasha asks him.

 

“I’m in the Waltham Special Engineering Camp, inventing the blue print 5 module training system, three years from now.”

 

“Good. Well finally, you’re awake. Five weeks under man.”

 

There was this whole other life happening all at the same time, happening while he slept and the rational mind cultivated by the Pharisees told him that his delusions were delusions but the world was sane. And several times, several times Lt. Moishe Klein asked him, “a sane man in an insane world is what?”

 

And the least complicated answer was, “insane.”

 

“What are you after?” she asks him, there in the fall, there in New York, there in front of the Sheep’s Head Bay Partizan shrine, the pillar covered in barbed wire and former Soviet looking torch.

 

“I want to know the truth about our, nature.”

 

“You need to process the truth about yourself Old Soul, you need to ask why other men sleep and you are awake, ask why you attract the others with the full range view; ask about why people like us don’t die; we just get reborn in new realities or vessels, over and over and over; why? You tell me because you’re older.”

 

“Emma?”

 

“Man, I’m not your long dead wife,” she says in scorn.

 

He sees all these things and times. The Black Freighters levitating into the air with the waters rising up and over the ramparts and swallowing up the bay. He sees massive flying fortress ships gas rocketing Brooklyn, Breuklyn? Breuklyn Soviet; the citadel of the un-born messiahs’ the son and daughter of the Mahdi?

 

“How many times have we danced?” he asks her.

 

“We’ve been dancing a lot since the 17^th century poetic little gun slinger. I’m not as old as you, I’m just currently more self-aware. Ochen Bolshoi.”

 

He remembers another time and place when she found him sleeping at the base of the Shrine; Vienna maybe, 1804? 1886? Aren’t those the reset dates? Hard to say all made up dates anyway. She found him and he drew for her and they were lovers for a year until the secret police murdered her. Was that the oldest story? And there was the German baron, there was another time in the 1990’s maybe when he refused to leave the park because fucking Italians (Sicilians really) in the Columbus Association would come every year and sacrifice a virgin Ivoryiss there by gang raping her on the marble slab; the cops would never be there. They’d go to church and be absolved the very next day. They would be asleep. And she showed up the morning he was sleeping there and she said she’s help him defend the shrine, prevent this year’s annual Yom Kippur rape atrocity. And Mickhi Dbrisk showed up and the three of them with bats guarded the shrine so when the Italians from Garretson beach did show up to decorate and foul the shrink; they three of them reinforced by forty Crips with bats really fucked those nasty kids up, broke out a lot of teeth. Was that the 1990’s? Was that during the Crown Heights Riots, the Ivory-West Indian mass hate crime? Was it reality or should I say linear Pharisee created three dimensional reality.

 

“Are you setting me up for someone?” he asks.

 

“Not me, No-One is setting you up,” she replies.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Chapter 29

Zuccotti Square, 2076ce

Financial district

 

 

On 16 September the clock counts, ticks, trickles down. The demonstrations are growing in size across the city stoked by the mismanagement and brutality of the National Guard and local police forces in Brooklyn, the barricade line on Atlantic and Flatbush seems to be holding.

The Fire Switch station has been guiding residents how to fortify their blocs, knock out walls and basements for mobile firing positions, how to build phosphorous grenades and Molotov cocktails, playing the right song when your block association needs to flip city buses and turn them into barricades.

 

There is a no fly zone over all of Brooklyn and the Bronx, although the government has all the helimonsters and drones in needs fueling in Jersey.

 

A flying fortress is fueling up in the skies above Staten Island, that’s no good. You can’t fight a flying fortress with ideas or even long guns.

 

There is no Federal control in most of the outlying city boroughs except Staten Island where the National Guard is staging. Police officer of the NYPD are being ambushed and killed all over Brooklyn and the Bronx, Queens has been more quiet, but is barricaded up tight; most important players are the Latin Kings (newly political again), Chinese Mafia, the Bangladeshi trade union federation and the Polish Press.

 

Sebastian and Natasha wandered around the District financial, which appears all but empty. He took her heart painting to be framed by the one armed Egyptian Musa the fantastic framer. He took her to a small Cuban restaurant near the South Street seaport for late lunch and then his bank account said over drawn, so she paid with her husband’s black Amex, I notice the name on the card.

Wondered were it a taste of things to come?

He’s wearing a blue pin stripe suit and looks handsome for a nearly broke dead guy. They wander around the district both knowing from different sources what is coming down hard tomorrow.

 

Eventually Sebastian calls a Mexican Express car service, she drags him into the long perilous journey quite easily. They make out for a while, and then she demands a poem. He takes one out of his satchel.

 

#808: Fearless_Hopeless_Hearts

“Tell me Storytime!”

She curls up on me_her ethanol engine exhausted.

I want to fly us_so far away:

This cab is now a magic carpet for a story cabaret.

Using-a-punchdrunk-kitten in the back seat of a  Breuklyn-southbound-gypsy as my muse. One doesn’t choose,

_the muse they use. Or when.

There were worse assignments.

Given to more cowardly men!

And my constitution is and always will be_a wide canvas for futurist painting_

My-heart-when-fainting_

Is grinding, then breaking it_causes Brighton to flood and post Haitian earthshaking:

My soul is for barter_sign the dotted line,

I’m a phantasm now-shaking collapsing-and up for the tainting.

Exsanguination! Being bled dry!

There’s blood in my eye,

A mind game, that’s fine, but the mind can unravel before the right time, and the things it envisions; the things you complete; like a thousand lifetimes emptying out of your whispers_

_Like two shots in the dark_unloading my heart on the cold of the street!

Vasa, she whispers:

“Why so sad all the time?_Tell me a story  with Camels and Bandits and rhyme!- and keys strung to kites_ mix your bi-winning antics and Arabian nights! Make more epic poems! Can-we-not-agree_the audience cannot swallow_ an endless account, as you wallow in all of your feelings for me.”

 

Starry night burns bright, I begin again:

I have the will!

In a previous life she believed mostly in kill-or-be-killed.

She comes from place_ So brutal, so base, frustrated, consumed by the men in her face,

The following ointments, which vodka let boil to a brine of pure hate_ juxaposed with the partisan flame of  my zeal,

I’ve been reborn in a futurist gate.

_And invested with powers to steal or to heal!

Absorb all of your pain_ and restore your ideals! And  you will open my chest with your fingers: And start spinning the wheels_

It’s Russian Roulette, the way that she feels!

Magic carpets to carry us so far from this place where we are_Highspeed races and chases_

_ Drive bys taking place without use of a car!

Her kiss is the bullet of deadly surrender.

The sweetness of service she’s willing to render greatest by far:

To enroute replace my pumping mechanism, without medical training_without even leaving the hint-of-a-scar!

A pipe dream_a pipe bomb_ a zen.

Near endless composition, the art of story telling unleashed from my phone or my pen_

In base thirst for a woman I’ve known in other lives.

And desire to keep knowing forever_

_If forever could just be again, and again.

I am trained to fix a broken heart, my own excluded.

For the heart is a time bomb_ your emotions are fire ball bearings_

_Your wiring is now made faulty,

Your rational mind is at times misguided-deluded…

 

 

• “Vasyli, please, I’m lying here counting on your story to ease, I want erotic adventure, daring or fun, no more talk of feelings or the latest bombastic-head-fuck-with-a-gun, I like allegory, the-cave-with-the-thieves? What’s the name of that story?! No more tales of the mechanical heart, right before bed,”

 

• “I’ll tell you my dreams about star crossed Chechen peasants instead”.

 

II.

 

How can I, live so many lives; but be without you so many nights?

Cold sweats. And the ache of separation, imprisonment and then exile:

Broken bottles or spears or my pen’s wronging rights,

Sweat itself often passes as tears.

While writing my politics off as mere hooligan fist fights?

I didn’t mean to trouble you with me, But we seem unable to end it quickly,

Or end me quietly.

I have been hunted like a partisan and I found refuge in your secret kisses.

Now we are partisans together I suppose, but you warned me you prefer the cities to the forests. The Peony to the Rose.

What about Peony verses Prose?

I prefer bath houses to General Winter_and the wearing of my solitude below four layers of my clothes.

So how now?

Where will we find shelter?

We’ve run helter-skelter on the glass-bottle-broken-beaches or that Bulgar tavern where we hide.

            They have done so many things to me,

Until now I cannot recognize my own face.

I listen it seems, but prefer to confide.

But it is just the face of a man claiming love!

Cupid’s arrows mutilate.

The barrage burns apart my barricades like katusha rockets, raining from above.

Don’t fail me fearless heart,

Ill get back to you!

From Shali, the mountains, Brighton or Grozny too!

With black eyes, black ties, last tries; this is no mere seduction, or simple desire:

It’s a visceral longing to woe.

Putin has declared war! But foolishly I long for just peace on this front line fight_

_A lull in the violence allowing me to steal my way back to you_guided by moon and my tragic-parachute-knock around-dagger man-incite.

The barricade-we-made was cobbled together with useless albeit pretty word;

Damn all my grandiose promises,

The misuse and abuse of fables and myth that confuse what I see with that which you claim that you heard.

I am almost quite old.

In old soul time.

I bought what you sold. Dash my face against Dagestan’s rocks, break all my bones if in this life I am more coward more villain than hero and bold…

“Silly Vasa,” she giggles, pulling her supple body supine even closer to closeness of mine, “Your passions on fire when you press your fingers to prose, I’m drawing a line_ press your fingers to hold, I want Ambulance Action Peony ambush_No thorns of the Rose, and my grand design for the story this time is to hear about the dark in your soul, the black rabbit hole where your ambulance goes!”

III.

A Poet paramedic: warm body, heart now made stone cold. I have the will, I carried bodies in piles through Bed Stuy,

Up moutains_we always will battle the Reaper uphill.

I never cried then, I did not even wince,

Every night I’m not dreaming of loving your company, kissing your lips_I’m flashing right back_senses under attack: to life tremors we trembled_in the City of Port-au-Prince!

We carried legions off to what passed as hospitals.

I’ve had to watch ten thousand die, now all I want is to carry you away from the coast of Brooklyn, magic carpet fly.

Fly in the face of your husband, your secrets;

The dance I do with my stories, in trains or in cabs, returning with you

To the place that you lie.

But I dance again from time to time.You bring it out of me.

“Why cry old soul?” She whispers.

“I saw things I wasn’t meant to see.”

“Women like me?”

“You’re a dangerous creature we both can agree.”

She gives me fourth and fifth tries, the body dies, but the song of the heart is timeless, therefore free.

 

IV.

 

Because when you are gone there are only words. Words make the basis of poems_ forming a plee from the deepest depths of my heart’s agony.

When each parting seems so long my mind invents monsters which lurk which are not even there!

In a silky, billowing dress_ I’d hide under your covers, I’d caress the folds of your being, run fingers through darkness through the locks of your hair.

• “Until I’m safe too?”

 

• “Like my fallen angel with her wings on gold fire; Dorogaia I need you.”

I pace the Brighton Boardwalk so long that all these lives mesh together ’til the story seems too wild, too Noire to be true;

• “Turn this cab toward the seaboard, turn Idlewild, let’s run away, before we break day_”

 

• “You haven’t a clue! Mad man! A poorly laid plan!”

 

Begging for some proof of goodness of his kind.

 

• “The validity of his mind!”

A million cold stones acquired over long tenuous adventures, but regrets are for traitors on rewind.

Battles and then conflicting accounts of my enemies treacheries abound.

An escape plan is successful only when the underlying logic is found!

The logic is half based on a whisper, and half on a dream.

Their scissor hands dripping from love of the kill. Demons enter the portal with intention to scheme. To make you a mark, turn me to a skell or a shill.

They separated me from my humanity, loving you is against my rational will.

She’s half in the old world,

and half in the new,

half iron curtain, half crystal glass shoe.

The cab nears the Verrazano precipice, the Brighton abyss where we will be separated anew.

Tell me Odysseus: What mean me to you?

Was that voyage anything but unjust for all involved?

Once I had a white motor cycle, I was a fugitive slave, I was evolved. I killed the master and stormed the plantation and then half of the problem was solved!

And on it you waited to escape north toward the blue moon.

• “Sooner than soon? Did your love for me grow after the rooftop fist fight in the light of my murderous swoon?”

 

• “Dorogaia that’s right.”

 

• “I don’t want such a life; a life of no humor, a life or death struggle, the terror of night.”

 

• “Stories for night, are about all of the wrongs swept away by the dawn and the light. I require one muse only. One significant. One longing. Never again in the trenches so vast, so empty and so lonely.”

 

• “The story of us? Us is a wild tragic roundabout fuss!”

 

• “Is_to_be_a_tale_of_triumph. Over the hopeless heart via the art of romantic prolonging!”

 

• “Righting or wronging?”

 

• “I sought out your company.”

 

• “Do it again.”

 

• “I do it still out of the longing.”

I have a voice and I have a loud pen.

And I have passion and it overflows my body until I see miracles in the streets.

The strength of forty men!

And the moon winks.

Then on Banner Ave. the story completes.

And then again, the world’s smallest violin plays just for us, she thinks.

Why does such a long shadow fall over his house every time he drinks?

We are not star crossed.

We are not divided by a sea.

Or by barricades. Maybe we’re just in defiance of destiny.

Or the flaming up of the ghettos in the latest Caucasian raids.

When I looked to the sky I saw three ships sailing us apart.

You off to marriage and the world of the continent.

Me, bound forever to the belly of the ship enslaved only to my own fearless heart.

And as they sailed us apart, to never meet again,

Some sailors sang out, “The Nina, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria!”

“To the glory of the new world!” they toasted.

Vain Braggarts and white men.

But I begged the moon:

“Dasha, Dasha, Dasha! Why can’t you love a wild peasant like me?”

What fate was this where we have to part our story time in endless tragedy?

Death itself could not stop this kind of beating in my chest.

If am reborn another thousand lives,

Each time waking from a long kiss good night,

Each life I will call out to you again as my test.

The body will die, but its sleep is the cousin of rest.

So, tied again to the mast.

Shackled and blinded I swagger on hopeless, fearless heart.

In dreams, don’t forget me.

This was begged long ago.

I will steal away and climb to the roof of Mt. Olympus if I must to give the gods a show.

I’ll ask for the help of the spirits if God has no time for us mild artisans.

Wild peasant partisans, from good families with magic carpets and reckless bi-winning minds. The heart yearns, the back breaks, the soul is on fire, the real man, he grinds.

Black until blue.

Carrying me, one day, with wings home to you.

And if you read my verses see if I still appear a slave.

And we can say we knew each other when I was a free man and you were a free woman. I’ve traded my weapons of war for the power to save.

There is only one chain I cannot learn easily how to break.

And that, is the one I first broke to be by your side. By your side, give or take.

I long for you.

It will always be that way. It has been that way since Labor Day.

But then, story time is easy for an old soul with a pen.

• “You’re not like other men.”

 

• “Hopeless, Fearless Heart how long apart must I wait to stay gone?”
• “Vasa, I don’t know, forever. Or Until Dawn.”

 

Written By: Sebastian Adon

Dedicated to Natasha Andreavna Skorobogatova

 

 

 

Grim sureality sets in further. They split a cab through the lines back home for her, towards the Brighton Ghetto again via the Battery Tunnel the only passage still open, the Arab driver asks them if they want to fool around back there ‘people do all the time, it’s like I’m not ever here’; the shmuck says. What do you even say to that? They don’t even react, it’s banal to react to savages. Natasha gives him evil eyes.

 

The radio said that a Hurricane called Sandy would break ground the very next day. But you don’t need a weather man to know which way the wind blows as they say. Which is to say whenever there is serious warning of inclement whether there is about to be a crackdown ore a purge.

 

The cab had to stop at a two story rubble/ bus barricade across Atlantic Avenue. The Orthodox Ivoryish militia and several Haitian sets of the Bloods were stopping all traffic from moving south of the Barclays, where rebel government was still in session. Only because Adon had lived on H and Ocean, only because he encountered a man he knew well Lt. Moishe Klein; were they allowed on foot to disembark.

 

“What a looker,” says Lt. Klein in Yiddish, “I’d hit that tookas for weeks.”

 

And once they clear the tertiary barricade wall on the Ocean Avenue Bridge, past the Avenue H bar lev defense lines staffed by hundreds of orthodox Ivoryish watchmen called the Shomriim (the Yid secret police army) as well as Garveyites and newly converted Crip and Blood sets; well they board the Q train toward Stillwell Ave.

 

The towers on Banner Avenue and Brighton 6^th, the Soviet style high rises put up in the Russian quarter in 1988 to absorb the million plus Ivory, claiming to be Ivoryish and Ivoryish-ish refugees that took boats and planes, but mostly planes to New York City in the years that the Soviet Union collapsed; those concrete towers looks like purgatory on a bad day. The rains that used to be early snows were hitting them hard. Nothing worse that cold, wet New York rains.

Ghetto Camp Alpha was here in the Brighton zone and Ghetto Camp Bravo was in Star City, a much more controlled environment between utterly lawless East New York, the Belt Parkway highway system, a swamp and a river.

 

He’s seen pictures of her house. The place is white and low lit and clean and god only knows; is anything about her life real. There are no books except the ones he’s given her. He’s been in the lobby and there the sureality of the whole affair ends, each night for four weeks timeless.

 

“Once last kiss,” she says and lays it on him and they turn the corner to arrive at the departure point of the 44 Banner Ave lobby.

 

But tonight something was different. There are nine Slavic man in grey and black suits waiting in the lobby. They aren’t smiling, they aren’t taking any prisoners except the two they planned to take. Eight sets of muscle fall on them and grapple them both to the ground. They resist as best they can, but it happens rather quickly. One of them back hands her in the face. Then hits her in the stomach and she doubles over and is brought the ground.

 

A boot stamps on Sebastian’s chest and he feels something rip inside him, hopefully not a kidney. They hit him with electricity somehow.

 

The last thing Sebastian Adon sees before electrified black asps crack against him and he falls to the ground stunned is the grinning baby face of Dmitry Khulushin, his nemesis.

The ruthless Shtarkers quickly zip them up into body bags and carry them out to the running black bullet proof armored Escalades.

 

“Stop fucking with my stuff!” and Dmitry punches him in the face and knocks out his three front teeth.

 

 

 

Chapter 30

Under Foxy’s Nightclub, 2076ce

Brighton beach

 

He wakes up somewhere. He was walking on the Tel Aviv boardwalk, running into all these old friends. Everyone was going ok. He was heading back to his wife and kids.

 

And then he wakes up upside down. He’s fixed up on leg manacles conjoined to the ceiling. He’s chained up in some dungeon, in some sub-basement Bratva torture center, maybe. It’s not a large chamber; just enough space to hang upside down toothless and naked from the ceiling. He chemically sedated, that he can feel. There is a black X tattooed over his heart and small black tattoo marks indicating placement of chest tubes and central lines. Like this is going to be a really fucking drawn out ordeal. The light is off. They are probably not even going to ask him any questions, for he knows how to indomitably lie. Most ominous in that there is a king sized bed and small stage and a boiler furnace below him. Evidently the plan to make him watch a rape and then burn him alive. That’s how these things go. Paramedic save thyself.

 

He wiggles a little, cold and bloody in the darkness.

 

The difficulty with Mr. Dmitry Khulushin Koch is that is he is a genius but also a cruel and most sadistic animal. So whatever torture he has in mind will be protracted. The last time I saw you I burned down your home with you parents inside of it, thinks Adon. Was that a real memory? This was a most timeless beef.

Do I do things like that?

Hanging upside down above a low burning gas furnace, in the low to no light of this rape room, Sebastian Adon reflects on his feelings.

 

Did Natasha set him up? They are going to torture him very badly and there is nothing that is pleasant about that, but he would feel very guilty if he had gotten her roped in without cause. He thinks he loves her. Well whatever that means. Loved her in another life? He has these memories of seeing this all exactly before. Of forty men raping his wife? His brand new lover? Forty men raping her until she could never look in the mirror again. Then they slit her throat and covered him in her blood, lit him on fire while they desecrate her corpse.

 

New Romans, I think.

 

The past and present are fluid things. And he knows they are not interested in anything but his pain and humiliation. Her total degradation is their policy towards those with the chosen blood line. All the blood is going to my head.

 

White lights come on and they strobe. Yep, they’re going to rape the hell of us and burn us alive for sport or Christian ritual. Forty men in animal masks and red robes enter the room and they’re carrying Natasha in white bath robe bound and in manacles struggling like she’s aware of how this Cult performs its sacrifices. They bind her to the king sized alter.

 

Filthy fucking non-believers after a taste of the blood and body of their Christ.

 

And I’ll tell you, I don’t pray a lot like I used to. Even moments just like this where a lot of the pieces line up and you realize that they took so goddamn much from you and your people. Here I am upside down and helpless while they defile this woman I love, I love? Yes, I love because she is one of the Tzadikk ha Dror candidates; the potential candidates for our generation’s messiah.

 

   “Let’s fuck this little busty bitch to death! Then we cook their bodies and eat their essence!” yells Dmitry Khulushin unmasked dropping is pants to penetrate. He starts fingering then fucking her. She’s gagged, I’m gagged. The strobe lights are flashing, some horrible screeching dub step is playing. There are men hitting me with electric batons. Dmitry is raping Natasha and punching her in the face.

 

One of these goons flicks on the low burner and I begin to slow cook.

 

They have this all set up for their sick fun, I am rotated to be barbequed and held feet over flame. I can feel the searing of toes. I can’t scream out were I inclined. I smell the cooking of my own flesh and it sticks to you forever that smell.

I think the worst part about a rape room is that you realize they just plan to make others suffer at your expense until you do what they want. But Dmitry Khulushin is a vampire; he’s a demon and he just loves his work.

He begins hitting her in the face as he fucks her. Getting off on her helplessness and mine. The humiliation of seeing those your love suffer. I know it well.

 

And then suddenly Dmitry, (or really the flimsy husk holding him) has an enormous hole in his chest. And then his head ruptures and bursts brains all over the place. And his blood and guts fly out all over her naked mid-raped body.

 

Gunfire erupts:

RATARAATARARRATARRARATATRATRATRARARTARTARTARTARRATRATRATRATARATATRTRATRATRATRATRATRTARATRATRTARTARTARTAR!

 

Because Watson Entwissle in a brown leather jacket and submachine gun has raided the ceremony with brown haired pixy Adelina Blazhennaya and she has put a powerful spell on everyone. As is his way Watson and a twelve person crew in flicker masks and Uzis are preparing to unload live rounds on every single hostile they see in a red robe.  Kill every single person in that bloody cult ordered Emma Solomon. And burn that white church to the ground.  And Adelina was only using majik. They had gunned their way into the bowls of this enormous white church in the heart of Coney Island; yet another Catholic front for the work of these murderous devils. They had encounter minimal resistance, so as she took point and pushed open the doors to the sacrifice;

 

“Davaj,” she exclaimed. And with a small motion of her wrist, Dmitry’s heart exploded in his chest mid fuck, then she snap her fingers and his head blows off spraying blood everywhere. And before Watson Entwissle, the Mullato Haitian and his fellow rebel gunman for the Z.O.B. can open their fire; forty devil rapist heads pop off. And forty dead cult members along with the latest husk of Dmitry Khulusin fall dead on the ground in crumbled bleeding piles. As if it were just that easy to dispatch evil.

 

Adelina pushes the latest body of the ancient devil Dmitry K. off the despoiled and now covered in blood pale busty body of Natasha Andreavna. She unlocks Natasha’s manacles and hands her a bathrobe to wipe herself and then tosses her a grey multiform. They will have to fight their way out of Bratva controlled Coney Island, best you believe.

The two women say nothing, not even hello or thank you. They know they are in competition for a lot more than the time, gun, sword or pen of Sebastian Adon. They are two of the most powerful candidates alive.

 

Watson turns off the flesh roasting fire and cuts Sebastian down, and he gets a hug and a thank you, and he can barely walk from the fire to feet. Sebastian has full thick ness burns to both his feet. They had flipped him vertical to cook and cook he did.

 

“Thanks for the nearly perfect timing frère,” Sebastian says in Haitian Creole. Although Dmitry raped and black eyed his buxom candidate lover and they cooked his feet until he can’t walk thanks to the third degree. Other than that the timing, was nearly perfect.

 

They leave the ‘White Church’ in flames and all the ghouls headless like it is Paris 1789 all over again. With Sebastian on a stretcher they load up into three ambulances and take off for District Midwood, because even in this near lawless state of emergency you can’t just burn a big white church in Brooklyn with no reactions.

 

There are almost no cars on the roadway, a curfew was called on the radio. Which make is easier for the government drones to light up the convoy with air to surface missiles. And the missiles blow this ambulance convoy right off the parkway.

 

Around Avenue U hellfire rockets take out the first of the three ambulances in the convoy. The third shortly after. Natasha and Sebastian are in the middle of the convoy. She grabs the side arm off one of the rebel fighters and shoots him point blank in the chest. She sucker punches Adelina as hard as she can, and she goes down. And tires to put a round in Watson, but the gun jams. So she picks him up with her mind and throws him out of the back of the crashed ambulance. She tells Sebastian, “be cool, this is not a fruitful rescue party.” She tucks in note in Adeline’s bandoleer for later, explaining herself a little why she’s struck a candidate and country woman. “Sorry” is all it mostly says.

 

And she pressure strikes Watson in such an ancient way with four fingers, vasovagal and he goes out too.

 

She knows Sebastian can barely walk. So she throws him over her shoulder, like she was taught in the Black Cats Unit 669, when she trained under the mountain of a man Abner Kreminizer back in day; and she hauls his ass across the parkway before the drones can make their second pass for pick offs. She has no cash, no documents, no weapons, just was raped, but her mind and the extraction point at the Tavern is nearly 24 clicks north, across the barricade lines and down a three kilometer tunnel.

 

She has to get this man to her latest employer Sasho Alexandre Perchevney, bring him fully alive to the Mehanata Social Club so they can sit out this sure to be disastrous first phase of the American uprising alive and get the hell out this reality before it implodes. Either she has to carry him through the sewer and subway tunnels or listen to yet another disgusting Arab cab driver make degrading comments all the way back to Manhattan.

 

 

 

Chapter 31

1 Wall Street, 2076ce

Financial district

 

On 17 September over 144,000 demonstrators and over 10,000 cops (who knows where the papers got those numbers) battled across the tight & narrow ravines of the District Financial with bottle rockets, gas bombs and by mid-day were exchanging gun fire. The trade unions and socialists called in reinforcements around noon and soon the whole district was then awash in tear gas and broken glass and Taser fire and then quite live fire and protesters being beaten bloody in front of the stock exchange and the Deutsche Bank, something hit the mainstream prole feed media about a bomb going off in the Stock Exchange, and then, the TVs all switched to sports, commercials and giggling tits.

 

The rising on the anniversary of the occupation a year ago suppressed and the attempted recapture of Zuccotti Park was under way.

 

A national General Strike was declared in relation to the State of Emergency called for by the Anonymous and newly christened ‘Résistance Alliance’. It was observed only in L.A., Oakland, Detroit, and Chicago and partially in Boston, D.C. and Miami but then the internet went blank at 14:00. And the TV news babble junkied out misinformation, prole feed.

 

So then no one knew who has fighting where, resisting where, what was even happening. And so things then got a lot more violent than anyone had anticipated. Purge orders were issued by dreaded Director Breria of the Department of Homeland Security. Amidst a media and internet black out martial law had been declared. The District financial was surrounded. The Occupiers and unionists and students and innumerous others well over by then 600,000 demonstrators had over run most of the district and barricaded them streets leading into it.

 

The New York Stock Exchange was set ablaze around 22:00. A massive General Assembly held in Battery Park called for a full blown national revolution.

 

But, most of the country didn’t even know what was happening. The Department of Homeland Security activated FEMA, the Militias and the Guard. Then, just after midnight; sweet repression.

 

The Special Security Services, the NYPD, the Department of Homeland Security, the National Guard, and the rightist Patriotic Militias moved in; they gassed or shot virtually everyone. By the next day, there were corpses all over the streets, blood all over the trading floors and god only knows how many movement people were dead. No one knew. Almost nobody made it out of the district alive.

 

17 days from the initial rising at the Labor Day Parade the U.S. government had massacred over 50,000 activists and leftists, no one knew human many for sure; thousands of students and their supporters all but disappeared in the weeks to come. FEMA and the DHS under the strict leadership of Director Breria fanned out across the country and slaughtered 500,000 plus rebels and supporters, students and people they happened to know. It was as if these 500,000 persons had never even been. Or was it 50,000? 5,000? Or had there just been a storm and a flood.

 

And by the time in early November they finally cleared the streets, the waters had resided and most of the left and progressive opposition was gone. As if they had fought and planned and died for nothing and their countrymen had never even peeled away from the television tuned to sports or tits or adverting.

 

But, Sebastian Adon and most of his friends did not die in the purge, the historically hidden democide regularly committed by states! He survived because he and Natasha were ambushed by her husband and her husband’s friends in the lobby of her building which resided on 77 Banner Avenue.

 

And the comrades of Adon, his dearest friends; many of them survived the next 48 hours by fighting their way out of the district financial as it was overwhelmed by flame and gas; they shot their way out and managed to escape to the borough of Brooklyn via the old tunnels, guided by mole people and Oleg Megved and Mikhail Mastrovitch the Ivorite special operations agents sent to rescue them.

 

And it was young, wispy Adelina Blazhennaya that rescued Natasha and Adon, much to her better judgment; for it was not meant to be that leftists would lead the Great Revolt; it would come from the renewed consciousness of human kind, not old ideas or even new ones. But while Adon and men like Mickhi Dbrisk, Watson Entwissle and Michael Goldbar Allamby would all have great and upcoming roles to play; it was women keeping them all alive with pistols and magic the nights of 17th, 18th and 19th September well until early November when the U.S. Federal Government carried out Operation Garden Plot 2 to murder almost every single important rebel in the country in one stomp of the iron heel. All those years between 1968 and the present or permissive, liberal unabashed freedom of expression, by they were taking names and faces down for when it was time, for when the opposition to empire grew about 2,000 men in any group, the soft cage hardened and there was blood murder in the streets.

 

As so many were fleeing the carnage of revolutionary war and repression in lower Manhattan; Natasha Andreavna with Adon in a grey body bag was hiking in heading straight to the Mehanata Social Club dragging him over her shoulder, until a Green a cab finally showed up to attempt a tunnel run.

 

Chapter 32

113 Ludlow Street, 2076ce

Mehanata

 

 

Hanging above the main dance floor across the third floor gallery area is a clothesline and from it hangs a wide variety of female under garments that were not there when the club opened and the evening began.

 

The origin of these under garments is a source of amusement for the casual patron and a source of unspoken shame for a variety of young women hired as trial waitresses and bartenders, also unseasoned patrons left drinking heavily and unattended.

 

Sometimes a seemingly small place can become a vast labyrinthine and impregnable fortress when inundated with a bit of black magic, vodka and immigrant elbow grease. Perspective is but a cheap pair of sunglasses after all, paradigms are but Costco contacts to be shed and quietly replaced at will.

Were you to visit Mehanata on a Thursday you might come to think it only a single story lounge. Friday and Saturday patrons might access the basement Ice Cage and third floor table galley, but when it gets past 400am Sunday morning, not only can carriages change to pumpkins, but the depth and girth of the rabbit hole here can delve expansively into the fourth dimension.

 

Oh yes, the tavern is a vast entrapment.

 

Its 4:09 am. And everyone that isn’t meant to be in the club has been pushed, cajoled or driven out like a herd of drunken cats and those that remain are only staff or spoken for card carrying regulars.

Astika and Corona bottles litter the establishment on any number of table booth perches, the dive bar black piss fluids of spilled drinks irrigate all floor space.

A flurry of activity directed at securing the premises from external assault comes quite suddenly.

Justin Azello bolts the door with the pull of a large metal brace and shortly after James White and James Behemoth begin piling tables against it. There is an urgency with which they carry out this task as well as efficiency. It is not the simple and previously observed urgency of men and women working long hours and just wishing to go home. The three man Mexican kitchen staff lines up and begins stacking crates and kegs and assorted furniture against the storm shutters now pulled down and latched closed over the second exit to the tavern.

Martina the bartender begins placing bottles of liquor below the bar, vigorously. Conspicuously absent is all of her clothing and in the strange new light of the bar her wild black curly hair for some reason appears fire red. How curious, thinks Sebastian through the haze of his own vodka and pilsner soaked observational capabilities, which maintain some attention to idiosyncratic detail.

Ernesto Lynch looks as though he is half asleep, a zombie casually examining his drink seated at the bar on the swing seat, taking dainty swigs his head drooping, intermittent half singing accompanies the dull steady thumping of his palm to the bar. Victoria Lynch is also entranced so it seems, seated beside him on one of the four two-person bench swings abutting the main bar.

The lighting has completely changed. It’s become eerie in here on the eyes. Everyone who smokes is now smoking which is absolutely everyone except the Mexican kitchen staff, the Lynches and James White the Fenian bouncer who used to be a cop and still carries himself like one, except more jolly. The plumes waft about like ghosts of tobacco island taking on shapes most various in the doldrums of the shifty light which remains other worldly, blue tones and greyscale which emphasize reds of Martina’s lick stick, reds of Natasha’s large pocket book satchel, and the reds of the wine.

 

Sebastian without using words makes a quiet Hebraic motion of his hands pantomiming a peace signed puff and his eyes go half black wolf, half-drunk rabbit and so thus alerting Natasha Andreavna that he wishes her to retrieve the packet of Newports out of her deep red pleather purse, and share one with him.

Her hand bag seems as though in contains an endless assortment of things that cannot via the laws of normative physics fit inside it. Were a sledge hammer to be passed out of it he wouldn’t even feign surprise.

As of lately they seem to share all their cigarettes when they are happy with each other and tonight the are indeed happy because she has plied herself with eight types of vodka infusion and he has sipped on enough Astika to be doing an accomplished impersonation of Latin American dancing all evening.

Sasho is watching everyone and everything from the end of the bar, his back to the wall of the kitchen. The boss is wearing a black leather jacket his face stern and commanding; he snaps his fingers and fire takes form off his index finger. From this miraculous flame he lights a long cigar.

An uncanny display of your black magic, thinks Natasha.

 

If anyone else notices this trickster subterfuge, then they hardly seem surprised. Martina takes from below the bar a chalice of usual size, Byzantine even in proportions and pours him off a tall glass of what is presumably a thick red wine, although the lighting, quite unusual as said, makes it appear as though it is thick sanguine blood.

 

But he doesn’t sip this concoction, just leaves it out.

 

Sasho remains at the head of the bar with his unusually large chalice of blood red wine having ordered the entire fortification effort with simple subtle nod.

 

Misha Korovyov with his flowing brown hair and one eyed squint, and playboy bi-winning manic grin with some European designer cigarette dangling out his mouth throws his arms around Natasha and Sebastian. It was a though the eccentric Bulgarian materialized behind them.

 

“Joyous epic times new friends! Where but five weeks ago we were all merry strangers now we are intimate coconspirators!”

 

As if to coincide with the subversions of reality and convention already underway, Natasha and Sebastian although aware of phantom lights, of the mezmerization and stupor of the Lynches; of Martina’s brazen nakedity; now also it appears James Behemoth mostly called “James Brown”, to differentiate him from “James White” the former cop in casual conversation, the sly and charming Puerto Rican bouncer; well for lack of a better description, he has now transformed into a hippopotamus sized black cat! Walking upright still in his leather jacket, James Behemoth is now at the bar and Martina is pouring a pint glass sized frothy frozen vodka shot and leaving him the bottle.

“Are we in the secret company of angels or demons?” asks Natasha in a whisper.

Misha grins, “That’s the spirit! What my lovely Mademoiselle if I told you that the combination of man’s primitive brain with his powers of creativity with his latent albeit savage thirst for self-importance, self-aggrandizement creates an ongoing wildly unstable variable where bye all manners of mythology have been generated turning vastly complex phenomena, into well, cautionary children’s tales?” rambles Misha K, the wild eyed Bulgarian millionaire.

“I’d go even further to say, to caution even the arrogance of making Judeo-Christian spiritual assumptions in this day and age. The utter epitomes of self-absorption most grand that would make you all assume that you were either the center of the universe figuratively. Literally or neurologically; more so spiritually. Even now putting these base ideas into Amerikanski I must use nine words when in my own native tongue I could use a hand gesture, a syllable.”

 

“He speaks a lot while not saying anything,” notes Natasha.

“Indeed.” says Sebastian.

 

“Good, Evil, Angels and Demons! Flabergashy I say. Well I’m sure someone from the former Soviet Union once has explained how there is no such thing. No such thing as either. I’ve never seen an angel before I laid eyes on this woman” he says taking Natasha Andreavna’s hand and kissing it gently.

“Enchante,” she responds facetiously doing her famous micro curtsey.

“To which I attempted to refute that with my American understandings of hope and heroism there are both angels and demons battling everywhere, and certainly good and evil are quite real I assure you,” Sebastian retorts.

“Mere devices in service of the ego sir, you see there may be deeds that cause pain or deeds that cause pleasure, but all of them get accomplished without some god or the devil whispering in the ear of human kind.”

“I’ll believe what I believe and you believe what you believe,” Sebastian says paraphrasing the Prophet Muhammad.

“And I’ll believe what I’ve believed all along which is that you men say a lot of drunk bullshit when you all drink!” Mutters Natasha, “darling tovarish let’s leave now, these wily tricksters offer us little besides their temporary refuge, their wine and some vodka.”

“Darling tovarish, it looks as though they have sealed us in,” Sebastian notes.

The fortifications are very much in place.

It even appears that the enormous vodka drinking black cat that was once James Behemoth is welding the metal door behind the barricade right to its frame. Ernesto is singing some old folk tune in Spanish as he gently swings the bench back and forth. Sasho has not left his standing perch at the bars end.

“It is not to seal you in. It is to keep the law enforcers temporarily at bay when they arrive,” states Sasho.

“Well sit down,” Sasho commands.

There is age as well as gypsy wisdom expressed in the features of this strong man, though his Semitic black eyes burn with casual madness. But, it is also as if he has not aged in ten years, will not age in ten more. Perhaps he has never aged at all thinks Sebastian as a remarkable feeling of de ja vu over takes him. He had wandered into this tavern many times over the course of the decade, but when had been the very first time?

 

What had that original indulgence cost?

 

Sebastian Adon and Natasha Andreavna seat themselves on the plank of the bar bench swing closest to Sasho. Martina drops shot glasses in front of them. Her nakedness is ignored by virtually everyone. Natasha notices. And out of his corner eye Sebastian does too. And in this noticing of her pale, curvy and naked Bulgarian body he sees although flawless in her nude form she has what appears to be a subtle ecchymosis of the neck, a hicky perhaps, but black and blue. The only deformity to her naked perfection.

 

“I have plenty of doubts about helping you,” Sasho begins. “Just because you’re adulterers doesn’t mean you came to play with a full hand of cards.”

“They’re not consummated adulterers, just wild reckless ones with intent to achieve adultery,” Martina interjects.

“Please do remain quiet, Hella,” Sasho commands.

“What is it you want from me again?” Sasho asks.

“A trade,” says Sebastian. “A job,” says Natasha.

Their answers came out at once.

 

“You have nothing that I cannot just take, either of you.”

 

“I respect you sir, your powers I mean and this establishment generally, but we are not afraid of you,” Sebastian says, “Unlike many others we are neither enthralled nor intimidated easily. Our regularity has not indebted us to your, tavern.”

Sasho grins and his smoke trails take form before then, out his lips the smoke becomes a floating diorama of urbanity unraveling into anarchy.

Misha K. interjects himself into the palaver with wild hand motions and flailing;

“You ought to be more afraid of your fellow humans. And each also other since both of you albeit human are both vigorously more endowed. There will not be dawn breaking in two hours. Outside lawless mobs are looting and burning, the whole city is on fire. Heads are being cut off as though this were Jacobin France. The police are killing people in the streets. Sheer and total anarchy! And as we speak cordons of police are marching their way across the Lower East Side, heading here! They are after you two who they wrongly suspect of being key players in this bloody revolution being carried out. The Authorities dejour mean to arrest you both for high crimes, conspiracy and treason! In any number of minutes they will be banging on these doors asking for your heads on platters.”

Martina pours shots for them from a deeply frosty unmarked bottle.

“Do you love her?” Sasho asks pointing to Natasha.

“Of course I do,” Sebastian says. “Of course he does,” she responds simultaneously.

She turn to him as if surprised, although it’s come out once before.

“She doesn’t love you at all.”

“I realize that.”

“She most likely and I say this respectfully but with great faith, she never will. Not in this lifetime anyway.”

Sebastian turns to Natasha and takes her hand. She doesn’t pull away from this grossly sentimental display.

“Well as we all know. It’s not as if you only get one try.”

Sasho grins and breathes about smoke.

“I’ve run out of people to help me run and places to hide are running short as you know. If I am not mistaken many of my friends and associates have been taken or killed over the course of this black night. If I am not mistaken, the authorities think I am higher in the non-existent chain of command of this uprising than I really am. If I am not mistaken some rather grisly crimes have been committed over the past five weeks, my alleged role the general uprising not withstanding; it seems that the authorities wish to try us not just for treason but for sick, an heinous offenses committed by some rampant cult in grey.”

“Well it is certainly not Behemoth and I who are the poster children of the uprising or the slaughters of young wayward women,” notes Justin Azello.

“We may be an establishment of handsome devils, trickster Gypsies and seductresses and thieves, but we are not sick fuck murders,” states James White seated now at the long bar with a Corona which is also the neighborhood in Queens that he lives in.

 

“Are you asking me for help?” Sasho asks.

“We don’t have anyone else to turn to, at this juncture” Natasha says.

“Are you saying your g-d is ignoring you?” Misha K. asks with a grin, “are you saying you tried to pray and nothing happened?”

“Imagine that,” says sly Martina.

“Look here,” interrupts Natasha, “we are not at your mercy. Although he doesn’t exactly look the part right now per-say, this man is or was; Vasa the gunslinger.”

“Vasa the gunslinger!” echoes Martina.

“Vasa the gunslinger,” repeats Misha with glee.

“Yes, yes I know the human protégé of Archangel Michael, guardians of the unborn children of potential messiahs,” states Sasho.

“If such fantasies are still believed in,” says Misha K.

“I believe,” declares James Behemoth.

“Me too,” says James White, the injured and retired cop. A mortal and a Catholic too.

“Martina, my Hella, what think you of us assisting agents of, the other side?”

“Well now!” She leans her supple frame over the bar painting up her lips deep blood red as she does, “Well most interesting is that neither of them reports to remember anything of their past lives and associations, in a word, sorcery made them mortal this round, but who’s sorcery? Not ours surely or we’d have known about it.”

Justin Azello with a cowboy killer in his mouth is now also seated at the devils bar table and declares, “We definitely would have known about it.”

Martina continues, “The mystics long believed that in each generation would be born one hundred and four candidates out of the bloodline of King David, house Judah that these candidates would be hidden from the so called forces of good and evil, that then three would reveal themselves by their 33 year as the Tzadikk haDroriim, the three potential candidates for messiah. Only these three; a warrior, a sage, and an oracle might reverse the tide of human suffering and usher in an age of reason and compassion. Suffice to say, a good much was invested to snuff this nonsense out. Many factions have at one time or another joined hands to abort this prophesy as close to the womb as possible. Mostly by killing or corrupting them before the year of their revelation. Often by getting at their mothers before they are born. Have you heard this Old Soul mythology before?”

“Emma Solomon!” yells Justin Azello suddenly and neither Natasha nor Sebastian flinch or appear to recognize the name.

“Who’s Emma Solomon again?” asks Sebastian with a poker face.

Sasho, with a poker face says, “Never mind.”

“If I told you that you were both super natural beings with auspicious births and no biological fathers, at least not genealogically speaking what would you make of that?” asks Sasho.

“I’d say stop fucking around with drunken people and get down to business,” Natasha retorts.

“Alright then, if it is in my power, I’ll make you both a good deal. For a job I require you to follow this man to the cross roads and keep him from selling his third soul to anyone, anyone at all. I will help you escape and you will be in my employ for three years of human time which is considerably more or less fourth dimensionally speaking, though cost no more than three life days here in this reality. As for a trade I will trade you her contract to me and help you both quite literally disappear if you will go on a little field trip on my behalf once you escape.”

“So my job for your establishment is to escort Sebastian on some mission into exile?” Natasha asks.

“Exile isn’t any place to hide. We offer you improved fourth dimensional time travel,” states Misha.

She looks at them all blankly, this cohort and Otriad of thieves, whores and devils.

“What in the fuck are you talking about!?” Natasha asks.

“Let me blunt, before I am specific because time is for once not really on your side tonight new friends,” says Misha, ” Sasho might I be so bold as to lay out the terms?”

Sasho makes a hand motion and a shrug indicating the international indication of; carry on.

“Natasha Andreavna Skorobogatova. We know what your keeper will do to keep you! He’s found Mr. Adon’s letters; he has your passport and Adon’s parents address and your mother’s too. He’s not going to let you just walk away, he’ll make all the people dear to you suffer first, that is the man he is. Sebastian; Vasyli, whatever it is you’re calling yourself this in epoch. Since the little melee on that train and in the district your little band of black brothers has been hunted down and exterminated down to almost the last woman and man. Not only are you all being accused of being of house of subterfuge and treason, when you are arrested they will accuse you and she and your associates in the Z.O.B. of being sadistic vampires cannibals! They will drag you before trial and say that the thirteen of you were kidnapping, raping and vivisecting young girls for sacrifice.

And then they will line you up and execute you all to make an example. Under any scenario your little five weeks of romance have yielded impending catastrophic dividends.”

Natasha shrugs. Sebastian again with a different Bulgarian hand sign often utilized by Sasho and Misha asks Martina to fill up their shot glasses and get Natasha a red bull chaser.

“How now?” he says.

“Most basic. We will hide you in the past and the future. She will belong then to us, and you can auction her freedom with your abilities. You will thus work under a contract with a devil like me for three days’ time. Which will feel to you like three years over three past lifetimes. And when it’s done you’ll both be free and your friends will be alive and your city will be secure and spring time will be near. Instead of torture, prison, murder, death, not just yours and hers but your friends and families, instead of another victory for one side or another, you get freedom. You get to absolve yourself of the burdens you were born into, and in five weeks flirted your way toward courting oblivion.”

“What does he have to do, for us to get that?” Natasha asks.

“Three day’s work,” claims Sasho.

“But three years in the eye of the mind,” warns Martina always quite a fan of Sebastian’s hopeless romanticisms and writing, also the way Natasha moves men.

“What is it that we have to get done in these three days, or lifetimes or whatever to save our families and friends and each other?” Sebastian asks.

“Hella,” says Sasho.

She open her pouty lips and pulls out a tiny scroll and on it reads: “Die, steal the moon, kill a lesser demon, and take good notes of your comings and goings. Return to life.”

“Miraculous levels of detail here,” says Natasha sarcastically.

“If you sign yourselves to me and my gang I will not only harbor you but I will aid you at all stages in getting this job done.”

“How will we convincingly die?”

“I will put your souls in new vessels and leave convincing corpses for the authorities and your husband to find.”

“Dance magic dance. The implications of your voodoo are not as interesting to me as what in past lives and other times you want us to accomplish,” exclaims Natasha.

“I want you to see for yourselves what happened to the man Yeshua ben Yosef in the year 33, I want you to kill a certain demon I compete with in 1933 and to this very day, and I want you to steal a diamond of enormous size in 1996 and trade it with an old Ivory who will give me something I require.”

“In just three days, what the fuck man,” Natasha exclaims, “What expertise do either of us even have for this black magical undertaking?”

“Three days here. Three years there. Over three lifetimes. Understand what you’re signing,” says Martina.

“And what is it you want from the old Ivory?” Asks Natasha as if the notion of time travel and other lives doesn’t perplex her in the slightest.

“I want leverage. I’m bargaining now to open a second tavern and I require a bargaining chip.”

“And on your three day journey you will take care of three variables I need adjusted.”

“What’s on the list?” Natasha asks.

“Names of auspicious women he wishes to employ at the new tavern,” Martina smiles.

“It’s a rather tall order. Infiltrate and revise the New Testament, snuff out a lesser Oligarch, and steal a precious stone to get a list of women’s names. Fourth dimensional mission impossible,” Sebastian says likening it to a great American film. His burned feet hurt even though she injected him with morphine.

“The things a woman will do for a man in the name of her freedom, sounds like Master and Margarita,” says Natasha likening it to her favorite novel.

“We’re going to help you,” says James Behemoth Brown.

“It’s not as if we’re just going to burn the social club to the ground and quietly plant your lifeless corpses about the city and vanish into blue smoke,” says James White.

“Although that was one plan,” says Justin Azello.

“Oh no-no, were gonna to that and transmography the entire tavern down the rabbit hole of time. We’re gonna help you run three mighty-mighty epic miracles,” claims Misha.

“For leverage,” says Justin Azello.

“With whom?” Natasha asks.

“The man who issues liquor licenses and cabaret licenses for the city,” smiles Martina.

“We’re not stupid,” says Natasha.

“And we’re not demons,” says Misha K with a smile adjusting his glasses.

“You’re definitely not angels,” says Martina.

“I am a devil though,” states Sasho, “not the devil, because there isn’t just one anything in a universe so vast, but know that if you two don’t live up to my powers of intervention, then the Bratva your keeper associates with, and the security apparatus of the American state investigating you, and the cult that pursues you will be the least of your problems,” explains Sasho.

“By far the least,” says Justin O’ Azello.

“Why us? Why help us though. What makes you think we can do what you want?” Sebastian asks.

“Because of your reliable Old Souls,” says Misha.

“Because I’m not dealing with paramedic student Adon son of a privileged bourgeoisie, and Natasha Andreavna, accounting student debutante, property of Khulushin Bratva,” exclaims Sasho, “once you leave these feeble bodies I’ll have put two very powerful creatures on my pay roll: Vasa the Gunslinger and Natasha Andreavna Skorobogatova Maccluskey; Candidate 64.”

“Candidate?” she asks.

“Oh poor unfortunate souls, the ethanol clouded all your past lives and past accomplishments,” says Martina pinching Sebastian’s cheek.

“Moonstruck until they can’t tell an angel or devil apart,” says Justin Azello quoting the prophetic verses.

Martina leans in, “Why, you’re Vasa the Gunslinger, Vasa the Sword, main disciple of the archangel Michael, the greatest killer of demons in Gregorian time! And you,” she says leaning into Natasha, “well via the blood line of the house of Judah traced only in part by our little gang, well you have full Ivorite blood, you are candidate daughter of a prior powerful Tzadikk ha Dror.”

“What does that even mean!!” Natasha half yells.

“You might bear the messiah of your generation and he is the man in the grey mask, a historical serial killer. Your blood and your womb and your collective memories will take us where we need to go and his deadly-deadly aim will let us acquire the things we need,” says Misha.

“If we do as you ask we can save our families and his murdered friends and we can return in three days and when we do what we change will set us free?”

“Precisely. And when the new tavern opens I’ll rehire you both happily,” states Sasho.

“Albeit in far more glorious capacities!” declares Misha.

“Absofuckinglutely!” yells Sasho.

“All this for a cabaret license,” mutters James Behemoth.

“For a cabaret most subversive to the elites of this world and lucrative for me. For all of us. So if you would, Hella!”

Martina Hella Dubryska pulls a ball point pen of solid gold out her red lips.

Rising out of nowhere from each shot glass emerges a rolled scroll.

 

Natasha takes the one in front of her written in Russian. Sebastian’s is in Russian too and thus he cannot even read it.

“You trust her don’t you?” says Martina with a wink, “she’ll translate it.”

“What’s it say?” Sebastian asks Natasha not even thinking so hard about the content.

Slowly she translates:

 

“..I will own you and you will own me and the Perchevney Bratva will own us both until completion of our duties to Mehanata which include documentation and surveillance of the man Yeshua be Yosef and his wife Mary Magdalena; the assassination of a demon in the form Mr. Breria head of the Stalinist secret police; the assassinations of Superior Oligarchs Kahn, Talleyrand and Trumpuldoroff; and the theft of the blue moon diamond. Once said duties are in order we are free people and all calamities unleashed by our brief passions will be un-made allowing us at that juncture to part as associates or should love or passion grow strong enough to marry and allow Alexandr Sasho Perchevney the honor of hosting our happy marriage.  It specifies that under no circumstances are you to be allowed to sell your third soul, nor am I to have sexual intercourse with you with results in child,”

 

“Avoid further sexual intercourse!” interrupts Martina, “we don’t care about the rest of it. No babies made between your races.”

 

Natasha without even squinting continues, “And we are prohibited from drinking alcohol while under contract as it will lead to babies being made.”

 

“And what does mine say?”

And she looks it over.

“It says almost the same thing except for a sub clause which establishes that should we fail at our tasks you assume full responsibility for all resulting actions.”

 

“Bro, just sign the thing, the cops are gonna be here to kick in the door any minute now, I have a good tip. You’re gonna get accused of harvesting and eating women’s sexual organs. Just sign the thing. Its three days of work and it your only way out,” says James White, who as the only human privy to the sorcery at work is rooting for Sebastian as a former civil servant.

 

“I love you,” Sebastian says looking into Natasha’s big blue eyes and he signs the contract totally unable to read it.

She marvels at this then calmly signs hers.

 

A banging on the metal doors shakes everyone out of their surrealist stupor.

 

“Welcome to the gang and the tavern staff,” Martina says extending her hand.

The banging continues muffled shouts through a public address system declare everyone must come out before the homeland authorities come inside. It sounds as though a battering ram has been deployed.

“‘James White and my noble Companeros please exit via the roof and see to it that the body doubles are put in place before dawn,” commands Sasho, “Tomorrow is Friday thus this is when Natasha must be found lifeless in Brighton and it must be believed that Adon murders himself on Saturday. And please call the Lynches a cab. Everyone else! To the Ice Cage.”

James Behemoth Brown still in the form of a cat kicks over an enormous canteen of petrol as does Martina. Everyone forms a line behind Sasho and then go down stairs. The stink of petrol is over powering. Justin Azello opens the freezer door. A hatch in the floor is then unlatched and they behold a bottomless pit.

 

“Down the tunnel you go, we’ll be right behind you as soon as we burn this place to the ground,” Misha K. declares.

 

“Remember, no matter where you end up find the tavern and there we will be,” Martina says.

Natasha turns to Sebastian and takes his hand as they enter the freezer box with wall to wall vodka for the very first and possibly last time.

 

“No drinking, no fucking and no selling his soul,” Justin Azello repeats.

“I’m sorry that I’ve gotten you into this whole mess,” Natasha says to Sebastian.

“Did you do it on purpose?” He asks her as they stand at the precipice.

“I did. But I had no choice.”

Contemplating the utter madness of the past five weeks, the misadventures the brushes with death, now the signing of a contract with the devil and a step into the unknowns of the past!

 

“Bze platnee syr ve mishalovka,” Sebastian declares. The only free cheese is in a mouse trap. He pronounces everything correctly this time, for the most part.

 

“If you do a good job, and we get them what they want, then I promise ill make love to you until you don’t even know the difference between your wants and your needs, between lust and loving, I will give you everything you ever wanted from me.”

“For how long?”

“Three days of nearly forever.”

“Natasha, no matter what happens I’m glad that you found me on that roof top.”

“We shall see,” she says with her famous poker faced smile. I’d didn’t find you, death found you, she thinks.

“Is any of this even real?” he asks her.

“No, they’ve just tortured us so badly you’ve muddying the waters and are imaging other lives.”

Holding hands they step out and fall tragically into the abyss, a hole in the ceiling, in the floor of forever.

 

 

 

Chapter 33

Stillwell Ave, 2076ce

Coney Island

 

The Uprising and subsequent mass killings were over after just three days, most of the rag tag resistance forces were wiped out by the third week after except in Southern Bronx and Central Brooklyn. Very few people made it out of the District Financial alive. Blood and bodies were in the streets. The Stock Exchange didn’t open for a week later. A super storm hit the city right before Halloween, washed all the filth and failure away.

 

Sent most of the Russian quarter under the black brine of still water. They later found Natasha’s body in the Stillwell Station, over dosed on god knows what. Cold and dead. Rumor had it at Mehanata that she’d left with Adon, last anyone had seen them.

Another dead hooker, the Cops were unconcerned about it.

He had turned up in the Bell House, loony as hell. Totally mind fucked. Got discharged, allegedly. He was unintelligible when Rafael and Victoria went to visit him. Somehow all he knew was that Natasha was dead. A normal Bell House stint is three weeks easy, but then, the wire said Sebastian was also dead. Two shots to the head and dumped down that very same abyss where he and Natasha had almost died.  But, now. They were both confirmed to be quite dead.

As the super storm tore apart the city.

Amnesia and the weather setting in.

As if there had never been an uprising at all. Never been a massacre.

Never been Sebastian and Natasha in the end of summer or at all.

Their funerals of course were very separate, but held on the same day because gentiles sit out on death display, but Ivories go right in the ground.

 

“They’re with Jesus now,” says Victoria gripping her husband’s hand. But didn’t she mean Maya Solomon?

 

Her husband is more a Catholic than she is. But the irony here, in a statement like that, is that if Jesus was now reincarnated and returned to us via a hidden dual bloodline as both a Haitian revolutionary general and also a Sephardic Warrior goddess; and heaven was to brought to an island archipelago in the Caribbean then the story is evidently going to be harder to explain, and the plot will thicken like blood. Because the interesting thing about an idea whose time has come, when supported by old souls; killing the messengers will never silence the planned intention of their words.

 

The last thing Sebastian heard before his soul left his body after two gun shots was: ‘put them in the memory vats and torture them again and again, and again and again.’

 

 

 

 

 

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

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

[3] This national uprising was crushed completely with infiltration, batons and tear gas within the first three months.

 [4] Hong Kong was territorially reabsorbed in 1997 into the PRC, but will retain financial linkages and independence until 2047.

[5] In 1965 with logistical support from the CIA, the government of Indonesia brutally killed upwards of 500,000 people with explicit or inferred Communist beliefs. At the time the Communist Party of Indonesia was the third largest on earth, behind USSR and China.

[6] The KGB’s successors are the secret police agency FSB (Federal Security Service of the Russian Federation) and the espionage agency SVR (Foreign Intelligence Service).