Fire On the Mountain

 

 

 

(In four ACTS)

 

Act 42

 

 

[The Work of]:

 

 

 

Adler S Walt

 

Dedicated to: Daria Andreavna Skorbogatova

& Yelizaveta Kotlyarova,

And Elena Antolievna Komarova

& Valentina Stanovova

 

With a special thanks to Alan Medvinsky

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

ACT TWO:   La Lingre

 

 

Set Outside Boston

In 2077-2079ce

 

 

Prelude

 

 

Camp Shrakasa Waltham, 2079ce

 

 

The year is winter 2079ce, the setting, a grim gulag hidden from normal sight in the Eastern coast of the United American States outside the City State of Greater Boston. The snow falls so hard you can’t see the roads anymore, can’t see but ten feet in front of you. We are caught in a thick and deadly, white deluge.

 

Adelina Blazhennaya is lovely and petit, but very striking is her sense of presence, when you are with her you have her largely undivided attention. She is completely disarming, you let your guard slip. Which is dangerous as she is lovely, and you are surely mad. The very way she looks at you lingers long after she is gone.

 

“On ne voit bien qu’avec le cœur. L’essentiel est invisible pour les yeux,” she quotes to herself from the Little Prince, “one sees clearly only with the heart. What is essential is invisible to the eye.”

 

  There is a vast spiritual war going on, invisible for an extended time to most people and she has great soul, and is after a very particular soldier. It is still fashionable for Russian elites to know French. She was born of elite White Russian family, living in Zurek, and that is her passport cover story says, hiding that she is in fact a Grey Russian of a card carrying Red family from the City of Chelyabinsk.

 

Long live the Putinists!

 

She is wearing a blue and mostly white dress and her gold brown hair blows in the summer wind, but is now hidden under a most heavy almost yellow Shirling coat. Her big bright hazel eyes are concealed below some fashionable sun glasses. For she is a perpetually truthful person but has had to lie all day to get through layers of armed men to get at her assignment.

It has taken her half a day traveling from Camp Brighton-Allston to bribe sentries, to take three trains and an omnibus, to flirt most professionally, ensnare the camp guards in false paper works and transfer documents and thus make her way to Shrakasa Waltham, sub-camp Brandeis; the largest Special Engineering Camp built by the Ivories in the Americas, but really one thousands of “special population camps” built for citizens of suspect loyalty after the Great Revolt, a very incomplete revolution that happened four years prior to the events of this yarn.

 

This place that holds the mentally imprisoned and prisoners of this war, mainly Chornay, some Fenian surfs and deranged, crossbred Jeufs with their Christ killing ways and mental deceits.

 

Waiting for her is the “dead man” Sebastian Adon. And he has a feeling of nervousness in his chest. Steel butterflies. The kind of nervous anticipation that does not come from being more than intimidated by a very, very beautiful young woman. It comes also from secretly loving her. Or something about her.

Handsome for a dead man, she thinks. And nothing but fucking trouble, she curses sometimes inside but hardly ever outside.

The State run national television company News Corporation has been running his face and face of his “wife” Emma Solomon for weeks along with sound bites on the “dead terrorist ring leaders of the Millennium Theater Hostage Crisis.”

That bloody three day standoff which ended the union called the United States of America definitively breaking sixty four small city states and territories, Soviets, from the rest of the country including the black parts of neighboring Boston.

She looks him and down and he is not exactly the same man she had met years before, and had corresponded with since periodically. Along with the dreaming they did.

He is handsome but he has dark shadows below his eyes, which though hidden under hazel contacts are grey on grey associated with never properly sleeping.

The eyes of the Old Souls.

He looks recently broken. As though smiling comes with great difficulty. As if the words and beliefs he hides behind are in actuality no true armor.

She wonders what the proper body language to assume is; to cordially shake his hand as a comrade; or to kiss his cheeks has an old friend, or, well they were not lovers or even old friends. And this was their second time meeting. In the world of the real they had met just one single time, on one single evening. But in dreams they had something else altogether.

She was never nervous, but she did regard this man as a certain threat. A threat not to her life or her mind, certainly not to her heart because her heart was numb to all words and deeds done by men. Having kissed his very souls, having spent night, after night in his mind; she worried that he might know her souls a little too. And this was a very difficult thing to accept as a candidate.

Firstly, that this murderer was from the blood of the chosen. Secondly, that he seemed unable to die. Thirdly, that in the real world he might actually desire her. Lastly, that it was her duty to accept him as a courier from here to newly liberated New York City, when his driving, according to all accounts was much worse than her own.

It would be one thing to be killed or tortured by the enemy. This was the constant risk of aiding the resistance, but to die because an American never learned to properly drive; unthinkable.

The way that she moves is not like human women, she has elegance and force in equal parts, and there then emerges a disarming smile and she quite nearly thinks to embrace him. To hold him with a tightness that in dreams is so familiar, but in the world they have but shaken hands only once. She has done it in dreams a hundred times. And so many other things with him. She has raced dragons with him and explored the surface of the moon.

He stands there leaning against his vehicle a white Charger 2009.  Which, for all its lack of fuel efficiency will be worth nothing unless her paper work permits his release for if he leaves the boundary of Waltham Third Perimeter Shrakasa; his aorta will explode. Oh quite literally.

 

And what’s an exploding aorta to a man who has never been able to die?

 

A painful waste of a third dimensional opportunity to transform the human condition, that’s what. He is wearing the grey multiform, permitted to his faction. Her white skirt with blue linear patterns blows in the subtle but refreshing August winds.

Has he ever torn her clothing off in a dream? Has she ever let him reduce her to another conquest, another bedded woman making an excuse of her own lusts and her own physical wants? No not ever once! He has asked to be held and so she held him tight; he has held her delicate and painterly hands. They have danced under the stars in over a thousand and one sequences of brightly colored controlled dreaming.

And those dreams were beautiful.

She strides ever closer and she sees his half smile, the left side of his face mostly. There were so many reasons why a whole smile was impossible to the gun slinging, rebel hooligan Sebastian Adon; but she immediately feels the entirety of his gaze, his full attention brought to bear just to take in her. And that half smile, she knows is the fullest thing to showing happiness he can in this life bear to muster.

I will just extend my hand and then step back for the right hand salute given by otriad fighters to their commanding officers, he thinks.

I will marshal all my best parts, knowing that she is a sacred woman and that my place in the chain of command is now different since culmination of the uprising, since the eradication of my otriad, since, since the debacle of my relations with the woman named Natasha Andreavna Moonskaya, the tragedy of which I have not fully reconciled. And she is all but too familiar with the moving parts thereof. An embarrassment of my judgment.

My goodness, he thinks; I’m must suppress my longing for this woman before me.

She walks with grace and power, she is in control of all her moving parts and in control of the fields of energy which are in perfect coordination top to bottom.

I will never let this man seduce me, she thinks. He is a rough and primitive creature, despite the fullness of his soul’s ambitions. Despite his mother being of the priestly class. What is more, she thinks, how did this warrior get reduced to slavery over a wild woman? In certain circles he is still called the ‘American Shamel Basayev’. And most official circles think he is finally dead. But, the reason he was stashed away into the enemy gulag archipelago was not simply because this was good place to hide him in plain sight. It was because he was being punished by the leadership. He had been on trial awaiting sentencing for 38 counts of infraction including lack of spiritual discipline; conduct unbecoming a rebel Calvary officer; four counts of massacre; three counts of ‘incorrect use of the word love’ and one very serious count of ‘complete self-compromise accompanying jeapordization of mission via liaison with a woman possibly aiding the enemy.’

Enguarte.

The trial had not concluded, yet the full findings were complicated. And, of course his “wife” and partner is a woman with considerable influence with the rebel leadership and the Godhead.

Something tingles in the base of his spine. Like Tiger Balm.

Something glows in the gold brown depths of her eyes.

I will not allow my emotions to cloud my perception of the facts, he tell himself from the Code of the Haitian Gentleman.

I will not fall for this man and his tragic albeit heroic existence, she swears to the code of her own integrity.

Shake her hand, this is the second time meeting; salute and take her to supper while the transfer papers deactivate the Nanobots in my skull, he checklists.

She will take his hand, this is our second time meeting; accept his salute which acknowledges her leadership over him, let him take me dinner, while the paper works clears and bribes are wired, she thinks. Let him take me what was once four hours, but now is four days drive down the coastal highway from the United American States toward the mile high wall, New York and the Breuklyn Soviet. Where most likely the judges will order two shots to his head. His head cut off. And his soul bottled up forever in limbo as he pays for his roundabout decisions that cost everyone so damn much.

I’m thankful it’s her that I will be working with, he think. If they’re going to kill me in New York, at least I get to spend the last four days with her.

Shake and salute, he affirms.

Shake and begin the road to sentencing she affirms.

She’s less than four feet beautiful from him.

And best the best of preparations yield to passion.

They throw their arms around each other and embrace like two long lost lovers separated by battle and sea and fate and the cruelty, the duality of some very, very bad decisions made during the war. They are locked so tight cheek to cheek.

This is the second time they’ve ever met in the world of the real.

He can feel her heart beating, she can feel him breath. Their souls make love right there on the roof of his car, they don’t let go for what is in real time a hot minute. But time stopped for them both the minute they held each other again.

They step back. He then salutes. And he passes her a note without saying overtly what she knows may be in his heart. Inscribed on his very ventricles.

She takes glance at the note. It is quite obvious that the man likes to write his mind out. There are a thousand tiny characters in Cyrillic, she knows what they will tell her even if the grammar is a mess and the spelling is poorly.

They immediately embrace again. Tighter still. She looks into the note over his shoulder.

It is very poor form to love a man who in four days will be sentenced to a final death.

“Don’t say it,” she whispers. Nearly pleads.

“I won’t. I’ll just show it,” he replies.

“You have less than four days,” she whispers.

“I know,” he says.

“Why did you do all of those things,” she says right into his ear and grips him even tighter.

“My passion overwhelmed me,” replies Sebastian Adon.

She steps away from him, still so close though that that the angels inside of them may still be holding to their ecstasy.

“I find it nearly impossible to be charged with your fate,” she admits.

“The past is a useless story Ms. Adelina.”

“I have read reports of your future too you know,” she retorts.

“The highway to New York is perilous. If my driving makes you nervous we can switch positions ok?”

She now looks him into his eyes.

“That sounds ok. Both sides of you face are smiling at me,” she says.

“That’s because I’m standing before the woman of my dreams.”

“Watch you words little Prince,” she warns him.

“Don’t call me that please,” he replies.

“Sebastian, the road to New York is perilous and I want you to promise me that you you’re going to remain in control of your emotions. That you’re not going to break your word to me on any level. And, that no matter what they do to you in New York I’m going to be at your side and you need to be by mine, in the way that is appropriate.”

“I promise Ms. Val. Appropriately.”

“Ok, start the car. If you don’t make me completely comfortable with your driving I’m taking over and you’re going to have to ride shot gun all the way down. Which isn’t very manly in my cultural context.”

“It’s good to see you again,” says Sebastian Adon.

She nods in quiet agreement.

She never knew him in another life. And that was a little exciting. He’d never dreamed with a woman before. That was thrilling, that kind of investment in him. Even if she’d mostly been in his head tinkering with the wiring.

“Give me your gun,” she declares.

He takes out a small revolver and hands it to her. She checks the chamber and notes that there are no bullets in the gun. She puts it into her satchel.

“Do you remember why we used to take pictures of the sky and text them to each other,” she asks him.

“No. I always assumed you were just artistic,” he replies.

“There’s nothing like a beautiful sky to substitute for love when love is gone, or hope when hope hopeless,” she tells him.

“You’re Russian, you’re not supposed to believe in hope,” he says.

She takes his hand.

“Your American, you’re not supposed to know what the word love means at all but I’m giving you a shadow of a doubt. You have one chance left to make a man of yourself. Otherwise they’re gonna hang you for happened during the rising.”

“I’m glad you’re here,” he says.

“It’s nice to be appreciated,” she replies, “now let’s get ready for the road.”

 

He almost says it. But she gives him a look.

“Be a real man and check your passion until the proper time,” says the look.

 

The sky above Shrakasa Waltham is pink, blue vanilla and the weather is beautiful because the Ivories have developed cloud seeding weather apparatuses. There are no more open Ivories in the United American States except here in this camp of 70,000 in the Massachusetts foothills outside rebel Boston which, like New York is no longer part of America.

If you’re just tuning in to our frequency; if you want to know what kind of story this is. Well it’s definitely some kind of passion play; a Post-Soviet epic love story.

In the previous Act we learned of man who didn’t know how to die and his tortured love affair with an agent of the enemy. In Act One we learned something of his passion.

How there came to be a full blown human rights revolution in the United States of America had very little to do with those two protagonist-antagonists. And the uprising itself was not the work of men and women alone, but also gods and spirits, monsters and suffering old souls.

We began with loyalty because it is the basis for all good human acts. And now we jump seven years before the event of the first part of our serial; to account for the things which were unleashed by woman and men enraptured by their passions.

This interlude has taken place before Act One and after what you are about to embark on reading.

Adelina was ordered to accompany Sebastian Adon to newly liberated New York City; to a besieged place called the Breuklyn Soviet. It was not purely to keep him calm before his execution. It was also to directly ascertain the very specific particulars of what he had compromised to the enemy.

“I don’t judge you for anything you have done, but I am quite curious as to why you did it,” declares as he puts the Dodge Charger in drive.

“We were all in a most uncomfortable situation,” Adon begins as they take to the road, “there were past lives to account for, there was hope and investment in the future, there were debts to pay.”

“You need to tell me everything that happened in the six months before the uprising,” Adelina flatly tells him.

“Must I?”

“I cannot save you and I cannot fix you or tame you, but if you will tell me the truth and stick to your promises I will make sure that you get what you deserve one way or another.”

There is a dinner at a weigh station on the lip of the black tarmac highway. To get to New York they will have to take a more circuitous route. They will eat there and wait until the sun goes down. They will have to switch vehicles, they will have to evade bandits and other various gentlemen of the road. They will need to grease many hands at check points staffed by rebel and federal and gangster armies. And eventually they will have to fly over or find a tunnel under the mile high wall.

“There’s going to be plenty of time,” she tells him, “You need to go slow and get deep with me on this.”

“Must I?”

“Yes you must. You are accountable only for this life, but it is unclear to me and other interested parties not only what you did in your past lives, but who’s side you’re on now.”

He thinks about it.

“I’m only on your side now,” he whispers.

“Well that is because your old friends now want you dead and your enemies think you’ve been buried already. You have only two allies left and Oleg the Bear is still temporally missing in the Urals.”

Or perhaps at the weigh station just up federal Highway 95.

“My wife sent you?” asks Sebastian Adon.

“Yes. Emma Solomon sent me.”

“She’s not really my wife.”

“I know she’s not really your wife.”

“Does Emma think I betrayed the resistance?”

“No. Emma just thinks you mostly betrayed yourself.”

“And what do you think Ms. Adelina?”

“I think you have a brief window to prove your place in history. As a great hero or a despicable traitor who sold out his closest friends to make a deal with the devil over a two bit whore that he got tricked into thinking was his old soul lost companion.”

“Those are strong words,” says Adon watching the road unfold.

“I’m a very strong woman.”

“That’s why I might…” but he shuts off. You can’t put a timeline on a dream or series of dreams.

“When I met you on my birthday I thought you were a charming scoundrel. But I have come to realize that I believe you innately to be good. I am unclear still on what happened leading up to and during the rising and if I am to be your true friend I must know that in totality before we arrive in New York.”

“When I met you I knew immediately that I must see you again and that you were not like anyone I’d known before.”

“Honey, pick your words well.”

“Ms. Adelina, I’m worried I let my passions get the best of me.”

“Well we shall see and we shall hear,” is all she replies.

The car accelerates, the road unfolds faster. She tells herself he is a most precarious man. There are both merit and dangers to that. He tell himself to review what he knows about this world and world to come.

The highway has many, many perils.

“There were so many nights that I could no longer trust myself and you were there to teach me.”

“Start with the relevant beginning,” she says.

“I am sure that one cannot love another when one hates themselves.”

“Do you hate yourself Sebastian Adon?”

“In another life, because of beliefs I held and reckless actions I took in the name of our freedom the enemy took from me. A woman and a child. I have never slept well, nor lived happy since.”

“Tu deviens responsable pour toujours de ce que tu as apprivoisé,” she says in French, “you become responsible, forever, for what you have tamed.”

Again with the Little Prince, he thinks sardonically.

“If my inherited memories are true then I have caused some great amounts of carnage for cause and country.”

“I do not know if they are all true,” replies Adelina.

“I am quite happy you’re here. There is no more preferable a witness I could ask to vouch for me,” he says.

They’re gonna end you in New York, she thinks and he hears.

“I vouch for nothing honey, I know you only as a magical dream. But, the road is long enough for you to reconcile that. Don’t let me down ok.”

“I did many things in the name of our cause. I do many things still as acts of passion.”

She takes his hand right hand which he has extended to her, she squeezes it.

“Both hands on the wheel,” she then says.

It is sad to meet a good man four days before he will die. For no matter what he chooses to tell her she knows what he has ultimately done! And nothing can absolve him, nothing he says or does can save his souls. Oleg the Bear said be very careful with him. She has his gun, but she is not aware yet that she also completely has his heart.

If the mind is a limitless tablet, and his animal soul belonged now to devilish promises made, if his godly soul and hers are still quite playfully holding hands in spirit worlds and dreamscapes; what is left is a mechanical heart. A pounding, pulsing drum fueling his war path and guiding his way in the darkness.

The road unfolds empty as they speed to the diner at the junction.

“You don’t have to tell me everything, but please tell me what matters,” she says.

“Only you own and you rattle my bones, you turn me over and over until I can’t control myself,” comes over the Fire Station on the radio. The dancehall version.

She gives him a small look.

He changes the station to Tchaikovsky set with house music.

There are many people that want this man dead or alive. There are swarms of angry vultures circling above the car, metaphorically.

“I’m not in the business of saving souls or fixing people,” she tells him.

“Well how now, what business are you in then,” he smiles.

“I traffic in language and also dreams,” she softly replies.

“And also evidently me,” he says.

For eight months she has been in his mind and there was little she had seen there that would not make normal people nervous. But, Adelina is not like normal people and very little makes her nervous except the possibility that when she stops being numb for lucid intervals she realizes that this rebel bandit has quite possibly fallen for her.

And were it not for circumstances!

She might let herself fall too?

Impossibilities of fate.

The world of now was unfolding right before them and the world of dreams was inconsequential. She has been charged with a messy assignment and she has no back up, nothing to rely on but her will.

“Will you stay in control of your emotions for me honey?” she asks him looking now at the little note he gave her.

“I have made you promises.”

Seven of them she observes in his micro-Cyrillic scrawl.

“Then in good faith I take you as a man of your word.”
“After dinner, before the road I’ll try and explain myself to you darling.”

“Take your time, go slow. Nobody knows you’re alive in this part of the world and when we get to your city I’ll walk through the job.”

“There’s a job still for me then?” he exclaims.

“What you thought this was just going to be a dark Russian American love story?”

“Well I don’t know what the genre is.”

“What’s a rose to a fox,” she asks him eliciting for the third time the phrases she’s programed him with to access his dreams.

“What’s a jackknife to a swan,” he replies in the code that they have used for eight months on the satellite phone before bed.

“Don’t hurt me,” he says.

“I don’t have it in me,” she replies, “just show me your soul and I’ll show you mine. Try not to kill anybody on the road to New York.”

He wonders if she’s talking about his driving.

“In your culture what is more important; loyalty or passion?” she asks.

“What are you getting at?”

She pulls out the silver steel hand of the hamsa around her hung neck and flashes it for him out the corner of his right eye. Except he had given it to her in a dream.

“Don’t tell me you love me again until you can love yourself as well. I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t believe in your potential for good. But if you break your promises to me you’ll prove your enemies right.”

“Adelina, I…”

He wants to pull over and taste her again like it was in the dreams.

“Don’t say it,” she warns, “keep driving. I’m hungry and as a Haitian gentlemen you must of course never allow a woman to be hungry.”

She knows his code, she knows most of his story, but there is still a four day window for the highly unusual things to occur.

He watches the road, both hands on the wheel. He doesn’t want to let her down.

“Adhi, I…”

“Honey don’t say it,” she says again firmly.

“Please one time aloud. So you hear it in person as you have it in writing.”

“No. Not yet. Not until you really mean it.”

“I’ve done such crazy things in the name of it, I’ve killed so many people, I’ve invaded three counties, I’ve lost my wife and child, and I’ve died. Over and over again,” he murmurs.

“I know. So don’t say it to me until you know the right words. And you’d better be willing to back them all up with actions.”

“Fair enough.”

“I read your first manuscript, I’m very concerned about your dead wife and child, and also your relations with a certain woman named Natasha Andreavna. It is suspected that your claims to loving have often been subsumed and subverted. It is suspected that you were used. And that your passion over took your word and your loyalty. With most tragic results.”

“Do you believe that then? That I’m a traitor who knows nothing of love?”

“I know we women lead the resistance because we can truly love and you men do most of the killing because you cannot truly feel.”

“You read my first book, you’ve been in my head for eight months. Don’t you know what you’re looking at yet?”

“I’m not clear yet that you can separate your facts from your emotions. And I didn’t read all of your first book, just enough to get a taste of things to come.”

“Adhi, I…”

We wants to say it. He wants to make it into poems and novels and paintings and sketches and thousands of loyal deeds. He wants her to believe in him like he believes in her. He wants her to see that his past can be absolved by his present.

“Baby don’t say it.”

She uses sweet talk sparingly with men she hasn’t gone to bed with. But you go to bed with a man’s dreams, you spend months together in an imagined world you feel a certain intimacy that extends to the physical realm at times.

“We’re almost at the weigh station,” he says.

I will not judge him for anything he has done, she thinks but I will hold him to everything he says so the moment that he says that simple word aloud he will have wedded his cause to me, and that is a complicated and explosive thing indeed. And to repel his advances is a matter of time and orders, but were I to feel again, she thinks, well he is a bit my type.

From the moment that he saw her on her birthday he had known she was a very different creature. He wanted her as a partner by his side. But eight months ago he was blinded still by a distracting influence and reeling from the aftershocks of it. That was when she entered his dreams as the Great Revolt made the long simmering spiritual war a quite bloody contact sport.

Story time again. This time though our parables will draw attention not to violence done in the name of loyalty, but instead the acts done when we are overwhelmed with passion.

“Strast,” she says, passion in Russian.

“I’ll tell you how it came to be that I played my part in the uprising,” he says.

She doesn’t like politics, so she responds, “stick to the parts with passion and allow me some insight and judgment as to if you’re the man I’m looking for.”

“Darling don’t be numb,” he says feeling layers of loving that are impossible to verify the source of in the world of the real.

“Darling just be realistic.”

The sun is down. The stars are up. They park at the weigh station and get ready to fill their bellies with food in preparation for the long road to Breuklyn Soviet.

“One last sentimental thing,” he says locking up the car.

“Go on then,” says Adelina, “before I make you have a heart attack,” she smiles.

“If it comes out of my mouth in the next few days that I have done things that upset you I am sorry. Please understand that we all have complicated pasts, and some of us complicated past lives. I swear to you I did not betray the resistance. I swear I will make sense of all this actions; those in New York, those in Haiti, those in Israel and Africa. I swear to you that you will have my undivided loyalty.”

“Listen, if you must you can say it one time, as you have already written a song about it and started a war in its name.”

“Adelina, I…” but he does not say it for he knows how little in English the word means to her and what a mockery he has made of the concept too.

  For a second she turns away. Impossible, she thinks. This is the second time he’s met me! What does he know about love at all?

What a ridiculous notion to love another so quickly!

Based on shared dreams?

“I know. I’ll try and not say it again,” he says a bit ashamed at her reaction.

“It’s not that,” she starts.

“What then?”

“Your words have to count that’s all. You need to not say things just to hear how they sound, you need to say things to declare things that will be.”

“Why do I know you so intimately and still know nothing,” he says.

“Because this is our second meeting,” she jokes, “the rest was just a dream.”

“I…” he stammers, but the word is unable to form.

“You have only just begun to know me. In my culture there is a ridiculous arrogance in saying words you don’t mean when you can’t back them up, said only because you’ve caught up in the heat of something,” she says.

“It’s a very traditional feeling and it is backed up by eight months of dreams.”

“I will wait and see if you feel that way this time next week, for there are many things done in the name of passion, but they are not the same things done in name of love.”

Why can’t I say the word he wonders? And the answer is she will not let him, so strong are her powers over him. For if that word was good fuel in act one for poems, and the basis of the Partizan Song; then we must now examine motives of our Postsoviet Protagonist-antagonists yet anew.

“There is incredible power in language,” she tells him, “but sometimes talk is cheap. You’ve loved early and loved often, and that makes me suspect you also love easily, but all these things are beside the point. We have a treacherous four day journey to reach your city, and then you will be put on trial. It is my duty to inform you that whatever feelings you think you have developed for me in dreams, I am nothing to you now but friend and comrade.”

“I won’t use words I can’t back up with actions.”

“Well I suspect that you may try.”

“I’ve ruined myself several times before over the idea of a perfect woman.”

“Well don’t do that again.”

“You’re not an idea.”

“You don’t know me yet. They say that I have what science has yet to prove in the blood.”

“Well that I believe.”

“Your defenses are lowered, you dreams have been invaded by thoughts of me, and you write well and have pretty brown eyes like mine. But watch the things you say, I will make you put your money where your mouth is. I will make you ready for trial.”

“If things escape my mouth that proclaim some newly forming feelings…”

“We’ll be sure not to act on them,” she says.

And with that in mind they went cautiously to eat supper before they took to the road under the cover of darkness.

  And in real time not much longer.

The dinner at the crossroads is empty except for them two.

Though thoughts of her had pervaded his mind for the past eight months, now sitting across from her about to bite into his Ruben sandwich, the gun slinging ambulance man, a wanted rebel hooligan new little of what to say.

“Why is it that you do not speak any Russian,” she asks him.

“I have no talent,” he replies.

“No talent for language?”

“No talent for listening. It’s my most dishonorable trait.”

“No, being a murderer is your most dishonorable trait. Not speaking Russian means you’re just lazy. You’re file says you’ve had several Russian partners. I call it lazy, though I do not judge you for it.”

“Indeed, well then what is that you judge me for?”

“I have nothing to linger judgment upon at this juncture.”

“I am indeed then lazy and also a bit ashamed. For I do love the thought of knowing that which you think in.”

“I am merely surprised that living and working alongside three Russian speakers you acquired nothing.”

“I acquired some fucking and fighting words. Please believe I bring more to the table than my talent with English.”

“You bring a great deal from what I understand from you wife.”

“Not my…”

“I said before I know what you are to each to each other. It is clear to me that you are far more than a murderous American bandit who while trained to save lives spends most of his energies killing people. ”
              “Can you make no small talk woman!”

“Eat then happily and be quieter,” she replies.

He returns to the Ruben feeling vaguely that for one who claims to never judge she has arrived at some rather serious prejudgments and will be deterred from them.

She wonders if Oleg the Bear will arrive on time or make them wait, or whether he will get there early. She wonder is he will come alone, or bring a woman. And she wonders if that woman will slow them all down.

Sebastian is unnerved by silence. It reminds him of sleep, and also of death and nothing about a silent moment makes him feel at ease. It makes him feel also like an inadequate conversationalist. And he begins to second guess his feelings, having realized that when not allowed to speak of politics or feelings, he has little to work with.

“I have a soft spot for writers,” she finally says, “I understand you wrote a book once.”

“I did. A noire, it sold less than a hundred copies.”

“Well maybe if you’d written it in Russian it would have had a better reception.”

“Maybe it was just a bloody mess of a book.”

“If I recall it was about a paramedic and a whore on the eve of the revolution was it not?”

“It had a bit more to it than that.”

“Well of course. To you. I read some.”

“So not your style.”

“No. Not really. A little too violent. A little too sentimental about the wrong things. Your poems are much better.”

“I’m flattered you took the time to read them.”

“You began sending me them four days after meeting me do you recall. Under some pretext of soliciting my technical opinions on airplanes.”

“I was sincerely curious about airplane terminology. I was also sincerely interested in attracting your attention more general.”

“And here we are.”

“So the book was not to your tastes and the poems were all splendid?”

“Some more than others, but I will say that you have a good handle on the English language. Although your spelling is ad hock and your grammar most irregular.”

 

Oleg Leonidovich Medved enters most gregariously.

He is well dressed in various black and gray tones and carries a close cut beard which does nothing to disguise the Ivoryish aspects of his Slavic complexion or the Slavic attributes of Eurasian manly disposition. He is a man twice the size or other men who prefers to break others with conversation not brawn, but can resort to that if needed. Sebastian stands to greet him, they are old friends and they embrace before either man can or will acknowledge either woman, for he goes nowhere alone and with him is the young modal Yulia Romanova, a brown haired slender beauty.

“The American Mayakovsky is much alive! I am glad you are not really as dead as the telescreens now claim. The Millennium, I am aghast at the recent carnage. I only hope with you and you wife officially “dead” the ceasefire holds. Tovarish poet paramedic, glad to see you again!”

“The same Comrade Oleg, the same!” responds Sebastian. And the two men embrace in a gruff but friendly, eastern European fashion.

“This is Yulia Romanova,” Oleg says and goes to embrace Adelina whom he has known for some number of years. In fact it was he who introduced the two of them last April on her birthday.

They all are then seated at the dinner men facing men and women facing women.

“A perilous journey ahead,” toasts Oleg as soon as drink has been put in his hand.

“Cheers,” says Adelina. What a silly British thing to say, to toast well; nothing.

“Is it true they aim to finally kill him in New York?” asks Oleg as if he despises all pretenses or suspense. Which he does.

“There is reason to believe that the revolution’s leadership has arrived at doubts as to Mr. Adon’s commitment to the values of the resistance. There are certain factions that want him put on trial and put to permanent death.”

“Well I say we skip New York, and all fly out directly to lovely Cataluña” interjects Yulia.

“Do you know this man so well you are vouching for his safety on public airlines,” asks Adelina to Yulia with vague scorn.

“No, I simply don’t like trials and don’t like New York now that it has gone communist,” replies Yulia Romanova, a self-proclaimed white Russian.

“I liked New York capitalist, I like it communist. The issue to me is who knows Sebastian is alive and why do they suspect him of treason to the revolution?” asks Oleg.

“Because of circumstances,” states Adelina and as she even says the same she squirms a little inside.

“Fuck Circumstances. Quite literally. I will of course vouch for Sebastian Adon and testify that what he did for that woman was nothing of his own choosing. If anything it spoke well to his dedication to lost woman, or to saving, or to art. But I was there when they met and am privy to the entirety of the tryst, and I know this man did not betray a thing. Except is own heart perhaps.”

“Thank you for that friend,” Sebastian says.

“Ain Davar,” says Oleg in Hebrew having lived four years in Israel once, once when it was there.

“Let underlying facts be placed upon this table then,” states Adelina, “this man is most uncommon. Three years ago he became enamored with a Russian call girl. His relations with her led to the underlying causalities that triggered the mighty revolt. And then, to save her he signed a contract with the devil himself. And then souls left bodies, this man walked his way across time down a rabbit hole. And then became alive three years later. That in the revolt’s eleventh hour he and his wife could seize thousands of hostages and perish in a bloody sand off in Midtown Manhattan. And awake alive miraculously a third time in Shrakasa Waltham!

“His exile,” Adelina explains with a hint of banality.

“Ah, yes thank you both, and you too Ms. Yulia for delivering me out of this cold wretched place,” says Adon.

“It is nothing, droog as we are all fans of your work, and friends of the people and the wider goals of the glorious revolution,” smiles Alan Medvinsky, also called Oleg the Bear, who is paid in cash dollars, billing by the minute for his very tricky work.

He has worn many hats in other lives.

And thus begins our very rocky road running from Brooklyn Soviet to the satellite camps of outer Boston; to the City of Port-au-Prince, then to Santo Domingo and Havana; then Kingston and then Madeira, to the final invasion of Europe; then to Cataluña, then to Moscow burning our way across the great mountain fortress of pale Europe; to the remembering and also forgetting. And finally Burma. To all the places and possibilities beyond the narrow struggle to survive. But on that fateful cold winter day, we four never made it out of that dinner, telling stories to make it through the cold.

 

For before you try to storm the mountain, before you get to build upright human castles, battle white and black demons both and build your grand castell to victory; you must drill. For in the face of indomitable odds and opposition; zealous persistence and ineffable might are your truest weapons. You build your alliance, you ready your team;

 

You prepare for the day it is your time to join the Great Revolt.

 

Chapter 1

Safe House on 38 Prospect, 2077ce

Special Engineering

Camp Waltham

 

 

 

In fast fading lights of sunshine she appears to be my goddess, taking temporary refuge amongst the surely ranks of man. I am meager sinning hapless flesh, and why has she taken my feckless company, why do my trespasses make no rendered judgment?

 

She fails to tell.

 

She found me dying toothless lying on a third hand spring mattress long too used by rootless fuck, hungry, penniless and still sinful inhabiting a refugee ghetto, in bombed out special engineering camp in Eastern Massachusetts. Three years after I supposedly died in a Great Revolt.

I had no mind, I had no front teeth; my face was born mutt like. My mind had been recently lost. I filled my lungs with black smoke and poured poisonous behavior into my gullet; vodka, beer and wine.

She said I was not allowed to kill anyone, myself included and that I upheld. And she said we were to paint and write and adventure and also to heal, and that we did.

She said we might dream every night of beautiful places and things, which we could shut out the vile cold winter by making life between us warm.

She I said wasn’t to hurt her.

And I failed. I so completely failed.

Miserable me. Malicious, feckless damned. Curse me I failed; I reduced her and me to a ball of tears. When she wasn’t looking I again bashed my fists into a brick wall, I threw myself down stairs, I even struck at my own face!

“You are a fucking man without honor or integrity in words!” she wailed and clutched me and I begged and cried and reduced myself to sobs entreating her not to leave.

Well now where is all this going?

Ah.

Every night before we briefly moved out of that camp and into a small clean flat in the hills above town, as I lay in my squalorous dwellings, a place on avenue Prospect 38 packed and sub-divided into dwellings for thirteen Botswanans, Ugandans and Rwandans, Spartan and periodically food friendly; we would use our mobilblats to message back and forth, radio the details of our next dream.

Adelina and I, not the Africans. With them I dreamed in solidarity, not particularly longing for I knew with Adelina I would live forever, but in Africa I would violently die.

The drudgery of my assigned work in Shrakasa Waltham involved a manual of removing of mostly perished corpses from satellite camps and a mental of cataloging various atrocities, in the name of “co-existence studies” happening at that time in the Middle East and Africa.

She was tutoring the illegitimate sons of newly arrived Chinese and Saudi oligarchs how to speak in English. Until I acquired a vehicle she would drive to Shrakasa Waltham from Shrakasa Brighton-Allston which was always a matter of small bribes at several checkpoints.

In the beginning I saw here once a week, then twice a week, then as often as either of us could escape from our respective wage slavery.

Every single night since they dumped me in that wretched Eastern New England camp, since they dumped me raving mad and moon howling, toothless, as I previously said; ever sense our “third date”, really our third meeting; well soon after anyhow each night, right before midnight we’d use the mobilblats to pick a dream location, often in the Caribbean; or in out space; or Belize, or Fiji, or Trinidad and also Togo, once or twice Madeira, Prague and Paris too.

 

A small beep or vibration, a red light and I’d see a small message on the mobilblat:

Adelina: Hey babe, where are we dreaming tonight?

I’d pause from the Castaneda book she gave me which I never understood. Or perhaps the Incredible Lightness of Being I was reading on her recommendation, or from my human rights agitation propaganda work online, or if I wasn’t reading, maybe I was drawing her something colorful albeit unremarkable. Or, hidden away in that 13 way sub-divided slum on 38 Prospect perhaps I was beating myself to smut; if I was self-fornicating, normally to some big breasted sex slave bent over taking two or three men in all the holes of her body, and I’d turn that off without finishing myself off if she messaged me, because I couldn’t be in both spaces, I could also realize how much she felt the world’s energy.

You don’t text message sweet talk of dreams; razgo vorchiki to a goddess while you beat yourself, mentally satiating, participating in a vaguely closed case version of voyeuristic gang raping.

In this recollection I was just reading a book, trying to grok Castaneda, and failing to.

Adon: I was reading more Castaneda. I’m a little lost. They’re taking a lot of magical plants and smoking them.

Shortly after, beep; red flash.

Adelina: : ) Keep at it.

One weekend in late November we escaped the camps for a weekend to a small, desolate island off the coast and she gave me a bag of roughly used paper back and hard cover magic books by Castaneda and Pavel. I’d been trying to follow a path of healing she was intent to keep me on. Putting healthy things in my mind, not the violence, hate and smut.

Adon: I will. How are you?

And the two minutes of pause meant she was either getting ready for bed, or thinking about what to respond. Or whatever else I was darkly projecting happened over in Camp Brighton-Allston.

Adelina: Tired. The message comes in.

And I always want to tell her I miss her, but she lectures me all the time about it not being manly to be overly emotional, proclaim all kinds of things you don’t mean, can’t back up or validate. But I wrote it anyway.

Adon: I miss you.

Adelina: I miss you too. I’ll see you in dreams in ten minutes babe.

Adon: Burma then in the Bagan temple complex.

Adelina: A picture of rows of gold temples pops up on the mobilblat. She has imaged me several pictures of Burma to focus my mind on.

Sludkeh Snov. See you soon. She messages.

That means sweet dreams in Russian.

I want to just type, I love you. But I don’t for she had earlier threatened to break things off if I said it. I had not hurt her yet, that was much later, but I had kissed her several times, and we’d also made love and she put me inside her and I had and wrested her from another lesser lover, I had intentions shall we say of being her man, but then she broke things off over the “I love you.” No, it was not only that,  it was that she also hadn’t wanted anything serious after Alexei had lead her on and crushed her, last summer. A month before we reconnected in the camp.

Adon: see you Burma lady.

Adelina: Don’t keep me waiting ; )

And for the evil I think I did, and would later probably do, for all my brazen broken promises, my dashed high minded beliefs hiding a wretched core; I never kept her waiting for anything. And I almost always brought a gift; and I suppose that could count for something.

No.

Clearly not.

 

This went on throughout the first year of my internment in Camp Waltham.

 

 

Scene 2

Safe house on 16 Kings, 2077ce

Shrakasa Waltham

 

 

Adelina arrives in the cold of night.

 

Sebastian, oh Sebastian! Your nothing but trouble to all you claim to love. He called out for her and begged her nightly to acquire him.

 

He was always awake deep into the night, writing his shall we say; a manifesto, or a love poem. Deep in the study of maps and charts and reports from the killing fields; grim and boring. Her maroon KIA Soul Ranger from Korea is steaming from the thirty-eight minute drive from Brighton to Waltham. They’ll have to dig it out in the morning as it never seem to ever stop snowing, for the past three years blat. Over the river and through the woods she went to avoid the various checkpoints and bandits. Here was a scene that happened for year without getting tired, a night journey based on endless amounts of needing, some pushing some pulling, some romance the promise of love, but far too often something violent and degrading, masked as, well masked as longing.

 

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 listless school girl, while her memory of events could trace its analysis across four centuries of wax and waning hardship. Her analogue disposition was that of vast kindness. 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.

 

She rings the doorbell of the Waltham flat he’s just rented for them in the hills above the camps. A strong improvement from the sub-divided fire trap they’d nearly set on fire when she let him sex her for the first time. She’s wrapped in a long black fur coat and improbably balanced in heels despite the level of snow fall. She’s coming from a work party.

 

He kisses her hard before she even closes the door behind her. He thrusts her against the wall clutching her tight and he smells like Burberry cologne. She likes his taste now that he’s quit smoking. She can smell on him the desire to have her good and hard. He’s tender until he drinks a little, or gets her ass in his palm. He keeps on and off drinking, but he’s on his way of the bottle and into full and total recall, she hopes.

 

She pulls him in and tells him, “You miss me a lot baby?”

 

He always misses her, it is said all the time but need never also be said!

She’s all he thinks about. Her stunning baby face. Her smile. How she fits in his arms. He hangs her coat and she grabs his ass.

He carries her up the stairs. All he can think about is how tight she is every single time he enters her, how hard she kisses him back, how much he loves her, loves every single thing about being near her and just how long she can take his madness, well it remains to be seen for he is mad man indeed. He’s insatiable for her. And she can occupy his mind and body for many days. The flat has off white walls, poor lighting and smells like scented candles. But it’s better than the one before. In the room is a new red desk they picked out for his studies and writing and queen sized brown wooden bed with posts. Nothings on the desk at all. He lays her on the bed and kisses her hard again.

“Slow down,” she whispers anticipating his hungry lust, “we’re gonna be in this winter for years in this camp probably forever,”

“Slow baby slow” she whispers.

He breathes deep. His mind can’t stop running ahead. Running into being the past and future all at once when he’s with her.

The text in all day long on the mobilblats, they’re almost always in constant contact, messengering about everything and anything. She works in an English language tutoring camp near Newton for newly arrived affluent ones on their way to university; lots of Chinese and Arab. He works day in the Special Engineering Camp for Poverty Alleviation, every Saturday for 24 hours he works as a paramedic in a place called Wonderland; a camp in Revere Beach testing new control cocktails, opium derived on white surfs.

He plays with her gently. Whispers in her ear, “I love you.” She moans and say, “Please, please, please you love the whole world.” She hopes he is gentle, because it isn’t hard for him to go from puppy dog eyes and pillow talk and poems, to well, being brutal in the bedroom.

He looks up and she’s her happy almost forever childlike beauty, her never aging face.

She looks like a sexy little school girl, as cliché as all that sounds. She can also be anything else, but always-always beautiful and dignified and pure. 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 apartment he wants her to let him break her in. He wants to tie her wild ways and fuck her so ferociously that she cannot remember another man but him.

 

When it seems like she is about to cum, which is charade for she can cum on demand, her whole body contorting in ecstasy; he picks her up and pushes her over the red table. She knows there are both hand cuffs and a loaded gun inside that red desk. And he is a lot of things, but he sure as hell is not a cop. A cop like her ex-husband. He fucks like a cop though, well most of the time.

Like he wants to break you in, like he wants to hurt you somehow. Like he’s not mentally fit to be a father. He’s gonna be in this camp forever. Even thinking about handcuffs and she flinches. Many years later, later after the camps the only thing that could make him filch was seeing a Red KIA Soul drive by somewhere, sometimes it was all fairy tales. Sometimes it was base animal behavior.

 

The difference linguistically speaking between Horashow, which in Russian means ok or doing well, and ‘horror show’ in English, well it’s not a fine line at all. But he was a man that make seamless transitions.

Between being ok, and suddenly very not ok! But, I’ve read all his books so I know how the story will ultimately end. He kisses my neck he whispers her will get us out of this camp and to the freedom of the Wild West Indies; be tell me he’ll give me children and safety and his forever soul.

 

I peel back the false skin over each wrist and reveal my fully tattooed hands. He bows to one knee realizing just what I am. He drops to his knees and he kisses my feet and pledges himself to me again.

 

And again and again, for two years it was mostly like that.

 

Scene 3

Warehouse 32a, 2079ce

Charlestown

 

                                                                                                                         

  My name is unimportant, and you as a barely literate rabble of foreigners could hardly ever seem to pronounce it; so now my papers say Ilya Lubov, IL-YA LU-BOAV. I’m at my inner office auditing a company my firm just acquired. This office is listed on a website of tech firm I founded, but honesty you’d never be able to find it on your own. You’d need help.

You’d need to fuck me until I wasn’t paying attention to you, then you’d have steal some key cards and somehow even know where to find it; then you’d need a raiding party to shoot your way past both drones and Fenian hooligan mercenaries, then go down a trap door.

Good thing that didn’t happen, yesterday. Because what that bitch helped them steal was a list of people and places and assets and ins; well, I just got double penetrated!

Well, the quarter began well I was buying and I was selling and I waking a killing. I flew one girl to Mexico and had my way with her and blew her little mind, then left her back penniless in her mediocre life, they fuck you so much harder when they’re hungry and unsure of their future. That was fun. Things were going really well, at all my layers of finance and I was up for a promotion, was gonna get into better levels of club and higher heights.

I took another woman to Spain, she me met me in Madrid and we went to Barcelona. She was happy little school teacher, honestly not much to hold on to, but she looked perpetually 19, like brand new, even if she wasn’t all that un tested as they say. I think I just wanted to tear apart a school girl, and frankly when you’re getting around my age, 780 years, well you’ve done the real thing, gotten it out of your system, you need more. Like this one I heard on the wire was actually, possibly the, or a messiah of Chelyabinsk. Yes, imagine the thrill, I could buy an underage girl on the market, hell sometimes I sold them without even testing these days, I was busy; but imagine to break a chosen one, break a real life angel on the wheel with your own cock, how could I refuse that.

My standing at the club would rocket, my net and my shares all of it. But you have to be careful, you never know what will happen when you fuck with magic, with Russian magic in particular. There were not many of these woman left alive.

A little history, a little back story. My name isn’t really Ilya Lubov and I am 780 years old. How could I be that old, well because I pay my health insurance bills, which are different in caliber than yours. I pay for new parts, new livers new kidneys, new bones new skin, I have replaced almost everything since I began. I was born in Russia to a Mongol invader and the sorcerous he ravished. I am aware therefore of many things you are not aware of. So many things, like for instance that the human species is much older than you think it is and we have been much more advanced and much, much more egalitarian in the past than the present.

For instance when I was born for instance, in parts of Africa space programs had been in existence before the Gregorian calendar. For instance, by the time the Golden hordes sacked Moscow and Damascus, and killed all of the men, and raped every single one of the women inside; well humanity had been living in a general state of equality and fraternity for 8,000 plus years, except for three large quarantined zones in modern Europe, the region of the Great Lakes in Africa by the source of the Nile and the region of Modern Japan. Now this is all very, very well documented, there are holographic films on it. But go ahead, trust you national history book and your internet. I’m sure you were taught the world began in 1945 when the Allies defeated the Axis. I’m sure you were taught the Cold War was about nuclear weapons and ideology not breeding rights. I’m sure you associate the Holocaust with killing “Ivories”.

I could teach for a living, but instead I buy and sell things. I own all kinds of intangible things that allow me to profit off tangible ones. Like, the barely listed internet firm that offers web solutions to companies around the world, but just try and find our physical office in the mostly derelict Charlestown loft warehouse. I mean you can call and you will eventually reach a flesh-bot walking around claiming to be me, and someone will eventually provide you a technical solution, but that is honestly not the purpose of having a shell company.

Sometimes artists try and capture what we are, we old ones. I’m not even near the oldest. They make vampire movies or science fiction so maybe the public grows so tired of media magic they can’t fathom real, old dark technology and old dark magic. Which is real. And let me say, that sense we forced the Ivories to build us the World System; well we have sucked you all dry and frankly imposed a kind of manufactured poverty and scarcity that never ever existed before. We’ve build military machines that never, ever existed before. You may have heard about Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but you didn’t hear about all the other times we used an earthquake, or a flood or dropped a bomb and called it an inter-ethnic genocide.

You might read this in the West and think civilization is advancing or declining, I will tell you that you have no idea just how much we pray off you all. My favorite time of year is when we stage election in various countries and so many of you think you have options, think that it all matters. You actually have developed loyalty to your owners, you hang your plantation work camps flag as some symbol of pride.

780 is not that old, I’m called a baby in certain circles. I’m not invited to Bohemian or Bilderberg events, the Masons and the Order of St. John frankly freak me out a little. I’m not even on a Forbes list by proxy, for instance Gates and Buffet are just flesh-bots, pawns of people you’ve never even heard of. Let’s just say our own ‘Forbes list’ would have to calculate in human heads and land, not make believe currencies we use to impose the scarcity regime.

I did a vacation recently in space, you have no idea how fun it is to screw in space, but you need enough room and also a large cabin, if you’ve ever screwed in water and you liked that well try space. The earth, for your information is not the only habituated world, nor is it as salvageable as you think. Preparations to leave began in the 1940’s Gregorian, disguised as the World Wars, but that is a very long story what happened in the World Wars, because one it would blow your mind too much and two, well its dark even for me.

They, the humans, because when you can live a thousand years you do evolve are actually multiple species that look almost the same, but act markedly different. Generically speaking some come from Bonobos, and some come from Chimps. And, there has been marked evolutionary diversion into more loving and more war like breed. Chimps and Bonobos look similar, almost the same as German and a Russian naked, but! But they are different. Chimps will rips your eyes out and gang rape your chimp wife. Bonobos like cuddling and feeding each other. This is science man! What you learned in school was proll feed.

I’m a little drunk, that’s why I’m making this video. I have reason to believe that someone very, very close to be has sold me out to a peasant rebellion. I have reason to believe someone ran off with my latest girlfriend. And, my hard drives. And, they have client lists and they have old soul network lists and they even have aces codes to the floating fortresses and moon bases. Basically, you don’t actually evolve in 780 years to point where a young hot girl with a real tight pussy can’t still set you up.

Blat, I’m have to kill so many people to make this right. What a mess. And I take my 34^th shot this time from the bottle, this time not even commanding my liver to work faster.

The phone rings, rings, her voice mail. Blat.

“I’m gonna kill everyone you ever cared about” I tell the voice mail, “and I’m going to make you suffer indefinitely. And I’m going to keep him alive, forever, and torture him until he cannot even find noises to scream, for I know you didn’t think of this plot on your own bitch!!”

I crush the mobilblat in my hand.

In 780 years, and I’m young, I have tasted almost every major wine, eaten virtually everything including human flesh (tastes like Pork), I have climbed almost every major mountain, experimented with all know and some unknown drugs, I’ve done horrible, horrible things with female bodies. I’ve helped organize ethnic cleansings, for sport. Sometimes for profit, but often for sport. Like the time I bet the Koch brothers whether the Tutsi’s could beat the Hutus in a machete war. I’ve basically helped sell the majority of the human race into a reserve pool of parts and labor. I am a lesser Oligarch.  And I’m not sure how yet, maybe because I wanted to fuck a school girl not a horse this quarter, maybe because even after 780 I’m half chimp, basically. I’m gonna rape her to death and cut off her head. I’m gonna torture all of them! If I don’t move fast and ruthlessly, there will be serious repercussions. Because 72 hours ago a new rebel group voted to declare war on us, which is not new or exciting. But, that they could lay a long game clever plan, and steal from me names and numbers and places of old souls, that this band of rebels could go hard as motherfucker on dozens of lesser oligarchs all over the world and I’d be blamed, that troubles me a lot.

 

Scene 4

Safe House on 16 Kings, 2079ce

Waltham

 

 

She was sacred and crying and I’d never seen her this uncompromised.

Thinks Sebastian Adon.

She was curled up under the covers of three comforters, crying and shivering on my big red safe house plush couch. And I was holding her hand, guarding her seated on the floor of the apartment, a blaster in my other hand filled with bullets, bullets that kill. Everyone was on red alert.

The night before she had arrived back in the United States with Ilya Lubov who had done god knows how many depraved things to her in Spain. Made me want to throw up, imagine him leering over her panting.

Forty eight hours ago delegates from forty nations signed a declaration of war against the oligarchy in mountain bunker in the Western hills of Mass. The delegates signed and hugged and saluted each other, as they knew it would be the last time the 49 of them would likely see each other alive again; and then via numerous and multiple routes proceeded to exit the country and by the time Ilya arrived back, ‘Ilya the lesser Oligarch of the North East sector’ the majority were safely out of the country, only a dozen remained including Sebastian Adon & Amitai Ben Gurion, the Israeli delegates, the two Haitian delegates Watson Entwissle and Tiputti Capois and Arelene Daly of Erin, Charlotte Kamande of Uganda and a unit of six Americans.

Her hand was wet with fear and she was crying unstoppably and this was a poor sign if this was indeed the woman sent to lead us in the coming uprising.

I don’t know what Ilya did to her body and mind. I didn’t ask her about that. But I’ll tell you what happened, it happened really fast. And I’m sure everyone is mortified we moved so quickly.

A year ago Adelina Blazhennaya, the warrior marine Pete Reed and I infiltrated the Republic of Haiti and working with Tiputti Capois to drill hundreds of new medical guerrillas. After the rendezvous with rebel leadership in Santo Domingo and Havana I returned to the gulag camps in Waltham and Adelina left for Moscow.

As per the plan we would fake our brake up, declare tumultuous hate for each other, and via electronic correspondence build a plausible portfolio of distance and hate. And in when in Moscow, on behalf of the rebel alliance she would bed who she had to find the identity of the lesser oligarch who ruled North Eastern states, the greater one too hard to hit, and she would get us his name. But she got much further, she got this pig, this scoundrel oligarch to meet her in Spain.

Let me say that this was not my plan. Let me tell you that while I have been staff sergeant in the rebel movement since 2001, and as an old school myself it has been told to me that I am very old; well under no circumstances would I have colluded to send the mother of my only living children into danger, into heavily occupied Russia, to the fortified zone of Moscow (known to be the current summit of the great world mountain) to BED OTHER MEN! Never. But it was the orders of my ex-wife Emma Solomon that she follows, not mine.

 

Emma Solomon had come into her life and told her to put me back to work, to take me out of the camps and ready me for newer things and bigger battles to come. She flew to Moscow in September, she came back to meet me in New York in November.

 

I begged her in the Empire Hotel, I begged her on my knees to escape with me to the relative safety of the Wild West Indies or Cuba, or space or anywhere. And she told to shut the fuck up. She told me in that hotel room that there was no future for our children while the oligarchy ravished us all like this, there was no future for this species unless we carried out our directives. She told me I knocked her up long before Haiti and she took the child to Russia to give birth, that out first child, a girl was already born, safely being raised by her mother in Che, I told her I would give up my rank and I would cash in my chips, I even begged her to collaborate with me and be done with this war, and she told me to go fuck myself, called me weak. I cried and I begged and yelled and I called her a whore and I broke a mirror with my face. And she took me sobbing and bloody off the floor and made love to me for the very last time, and pregnant with our second child she left for Moscow this time breaking contact.

The camp, the Special Engineering Camp 44; Shrakasa Waltham was built in the foot hills West of Boston by half an hour in a vehicle. When the Blizzard of 2014 came in, we were cut off from the outside world for the rest of the winter; there were road closures, curfews and even to get into Boston took days. The camp held nearly 4,000 prisoners, several hundred in the graduate development program for ‘sustainable development’ studies. The resistance in New York had ordered me to infiltrate the camp in 2077 and capture tradecraft, and make international allies.

Although most of the world lives below $5 a day, most were not aware of the many uprisings which rocked the United States of America in 2075-2076; that rebels and leftists and unions and partisan fighters had captured cities up and down the coast from Miami, Florida to Bangor, Maine. Most of the world was simply informed by the media that hipsters, the homeless and various communists were participating in failed urban uprisings in the USA. Arab Spring protesters, Islamists and the underground had by 2076 knocked out the governments of Libya, Egypt, Tunisia; and major uprisings were launched in Syria, Yemen, Bahrain, Iraq and Saudi Arabia, all of which are ongoing in various degenerations of violence and civil unrest. However, no one ever was allowed to know that uprisings far up the mountain, far closer to the World System Core happened in Hong Kong (suppressed), Chelyabinsk (successful) and thirteen rebel Soviets were established between 2076-2079 in Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx, Newark, Hartford, New Haven, Boston, Miami and Detroit. And while the events of these uprisings never reached the world, by 2080 there were 13 Confederated City States autonomous of the USA.

It was long believed that the resistance was much stronger abroad and in the ensuing years numerous attempts were made to find the rebels in other nations. But a heavy quarantine sealed the 13 Soviets from most outside contact and in the subsequent war of attrition between 2077-2080 million starved, tens of thousands defected, Boston was recaptured and Detroit was obliterated completely.

The events of those tumultuous years are recounted in a variety of journals published as ‘The Partizan Song’ fictionalized and ‘An Oral History of the US Separatist Wars’ a more critical account by historian Michael Goul-Wackowsky. Though the second is disputed by many because Goul-Wackowsky was widely believed to be a petty bourgeoisie arm chair revolutionary at best or a police spy, at worst.

She was crying now for several hours, I had never seen her cry except once I made her cry when she came to believe I had an affair on the eve of our deployment to Haiti. The lights were off in the safe house and Irfan Khan, one of the two Pakistani delegates was downstairs with an assault rifle. Tiputti Capois had left with Saadiya Usmani, the Sheikha of Karachi via a cab to bring a brief case to the home of Ricardo Veshanti, the Rastafarian Chief Liaison Officer of the Union; his home a long time rebel base and meeting hall had a hatch in the floor which descended to the sewers where a courier team was preparing to copy the contents of the brief care and shuttle the contents though Konnecticut to the nearest rebel Soviet garrison in Hartford.

I have a gun and Irfan Khan has a rifle, and Tiputti and Saadiya have the brief case and in the brief case is all kinds of data that we need to unleash anarchy in the finances and logistical control systems and social clubs of the oligarchy; and Ricardo Veshanti is ready with his courier team and the messiah is sobbing.

 

Adelina will become the Dror ha Tzadikk, candidate for messiah in about one hour, when Ilya the Oligarch retaliates as hard as he can.

 

My portable radio goes off, it’s Roj Zalla the only Kurdish delegate, “they’ve mobilized a very large contingent out of Charlestown. I would estimate you have an hour. Copy.”

“10-4, we’re gonna leave the safe house and head for the hatch.”

“I’m not going anywhere,” she declares.

 

 

Scene 5

Safe House on 16 Kings, 2079ce

Waltham

 

 

Irfan and I had to the best of our ability barricaded and taped up the windows of the safe house which overlooked the parking lot and street. We had dropped the Haitian and Israeli flags off the balcony ledge which was a flag signal on our part that all positions were to be hardened and the volunteers were to be called up. There were only four roads of approach into Camp Shrakasa Waltham, and the safe house was amid a large cooperative housing development on the Western upper most slope of the great hill the whole camp and village rested upon. Thus, a spotter could see the flags drop, confirm via radio it was an activation, and then, climb one of the three massive radio towers called the three Eiffel’s of Waltham; and hang the flag of Zimbabwe; which was the signal for ‘get to your position, mine the roads, this is a call up’.

And it was just after high noon when we dropped out flags, and 12:15pm when the flag of Zimbabwe went up the tallest structure in town, and then it was no going back.

Saadiya calls me on the land line, “We are at Malcolm’s, are you all safe?”

“Roj called.”

“I know Roj called, you should get in your car and get down here to the hatch, I’d estimate we have 55 minutes,” the Sheikha Saadiya Usmani has a British accident.

“She won’t leave,” I tell her.

In the next room Adelina was taking a shower.

“Sebastian, we don’t have a lot of time. Tiputti, Ricardo, Botchello and I are almost done moving the files onto the inter-web and into the drive, when that’s done we’re heading down the hatch and heading to Hartford or Dover, the couriers won’t tell us.”

“I realize that. You may have to leave without us. She’s very stubborn.”

“Sebastian, I realize that you are sleep deprived, and may not be able to hear me. But I order you to get in the car with Irfan, and make the rendezvous. Or, as you know Ilya’s men will burn this whole place down and many of our supporters will die for nothing defending you and her, when we could make this painless.”

“Sheikha, what would you have me do?” he mutters.

“They’re coming with many violent men. We need to get all the delegates out of Waltham, we need to put all the supporters back to sleep. If you can extricate yourself in a timely fashion it could save many lives.”

“Sheikha, I’m trying. She’s in the shower right now.”

And Saadiya Usmani the prophetess knows that perhaps this the last time she will hear him alive.

“Don’t shoot until you see the whites of their eyes,” she says and puts down the phone.

I put on tea. Irfan comes up the stairwell; the safe house is a rather large two bedroom apartment with a now heavily barricade balcony overlooking the parking lot and main road called Kings Way. I can see the flag of Zim still fluttering, Kudzai the biochemist sure got that fast. The enormous IED’s that will take apart the two largest bridges into town were his doing; cooked up under Ricardo Veshanit’s home. If it comes to that.

I hand Irfan a mug of black tea. He’s of medium build, an older man who ages well, classy with thinning hair a heavy drinker and analytically minded. He’s former Pakistani military, before he was sent to the camp used to provide security for the present there. Alongside Saadiya he makes up the other half of the Pakistani delegation.

Where he had acquired a fully loaded AK-47, in this camp, at this time of the year under this state of affairs, who knew. Such a thing from Irfan Khan was not hard to believe, he had connections for worse things. Getting them and moving them for sport and for fun or for the welfare of country, his country of origin.

He sips the tea and slings the rifle over his shoulder. He too has a British accent.

“I have three clip and four hand grenades. I have placed an IED near the entrance to the house and on the first approach to the road. We can set them off by remote. Where is she?”

“She’s taking a shower.”

“A long shower.”

“She’s a dirty girl,” I tell him.

He winks, he has a good old boy sense of humor.

“Saadiya told me that I am to again order you to pull out of this position and head to the hatch immediately. She said if you refuse because you think you’re protecting the girl; I am to pull out,” he checks his gold watch, “in ten minutes.”

“You know I’m not going to leave her side.”

“I anticipated that you would say that.”

“She’s my wife and the mother of two of my kids.”

“Yes, I anticipated that you’d claim that.”

“I’m a Captain too, Saadidya can’t order me to do anything.”

“Look it’s a fully volunteer outfit, no one can enforce any of these orders. It’s about respect. Respect for the total fubar mess you’ve landed us in less than just two days out of Congress. Two days! I thought we had more time to run and hide.”

“I’m sorry, she came back.”

“You’re the fucking general man, you’re the chief. The top most leader really! You fucked up. You’re not allowed to play with other’s lives like you have, with hope like you have. They trusted you, I trusted you. In forty five minutes a private army will over run our position and obliterate this camp. Burn down every structure, kill anything with a pulse. I estimate that this entire encampment might, might be lightly defended by forty students with small arms.”

“Are those real bullets in you AK?”

“Do I strike you as man who would have not real bullets in my AK?” Irfan asks.

“No. I didn’t think you in the peace camp of the union.”

“And I am not.”

“And your gun, are those real bullets in your gun.”

“It’s not my gun. I took it from Ilya after I broke his jaw with it.”

“Your commitments to non-violence are thin, eh comrade captain Adon.”

Irfan grins, he grins a lot when he’s nervous or drunk.

“Is she really your wife?” he asks.

“In a very biblical sense.”

“I thought more like a mu’tah marriage.”

“Well it began like that. Then certain things were made clear.”

“Is it true she has two children by you squirrelled away, hidden in a fortress deep in the Urals, somewhere between Yechateranisbourg and Che?”

“The ISI doesn’t fuck around, do you?”

“I don’t know anything about that Captain Adon. I just know that if you reported to anyone besides yourself, and your idea of your God, well; you’d be shot.”

“Can I smoke?” he asks.

“Yes, but on the balcony, she can’t stand it.”

“Who pays the rent here eh?”

“The US Federal government is paying the rent, and they don’t like the smell of smoke either.”

They go out on the terrace into the freezing cold of June, it wasn’t almost ever cold in June here. Winter has carried on in the Northwest for three consecutive years now. Allegedly it has something to do with ‘climate change.’ In reality, there have been three years of non-stop snow because Ilya Lubov and Dmitry Khulushin, the two major lesser oligarchs of the Northeast sector lost a bet to the Koch Brothers; the two lesser Oligarchs of the Midland sectors; and the brothers shut off the heat, quite literally. Full climate control has been a technological reality for many hundred years.

I ask him for a smoke with my hands and my face.

“Well, what now?” he asks.

“You finish your smoke, I finish my smoke when she gets out of the shower we clorophorm her, roll her in a sleeping bag, booby-trap the house with a hand grenade and get in my car and we drive fast down the hill on the rum roads, we get to Ricardo’s we all go down the hatch and Kudzai orders a stand down, and the camp goes back to sleep, and we end up in Dover or Hartford, eventually ensheallah Breuklyn Soviet.”

“I like when you’re rational mind kicks in. I thought you completely whipped.”

“I just needed some smoke.”

“She’s a wonderful woman. A fierce, indomitable warrior.”

“I know.”

“That thing she stole, you stole; that information will blow a hole in the side of their system. Names, places, pass codes, license plates, and bank account numbers. Anarchy.”

“I had no idea she’d come back with his head on a platter like that.”

“Well he’s gonna to terrible things to you both if he catches you, and he may.”

Irfan looks at his watch.

“Who’s left,” I ask.

“Virtually all of the leadership has escaped. Jefferson, Refilwe, and Saiph Khan left last. Only Sultan plans to hold his ground here with the supporters. Ah, and the Afghans of course will not retreat.”

“So it wasn’t always snow in June,” he asks.

“There was never snow in June.”

“As we have perhaps a minute more before we take care of the businesses of rapid egress, as of course all three of us might be killed just getting to the hatchway; would you mind paraphrasing, what exactly the fuck happened between the day after Congress, and this morning.”

“The short version?”

“We don’t have time for a soliloquy.”

“My unit stole a list of names and bank account numbers of the fourth richest American oligarch. He was fucking my ex, who is also my wife, things flew off the handle in a violent rampage, and here we are,” I say.

“Um, more.”

“My wife infiltrated the close company of one of the richest men in the American lesser oligarchy then living in Moscow. He fucked her into a million pieces, god knows what else; he made her his concubine. She copied his hard drives, she identified where his data cache was in Charlestown. They went to Spain, my brother took procession of half of the data, but the rest was secured in Charlestown. They flew back, Ilya and Adelina the day Congress ended. He flipped on her and locked her in a room in his facility there. I raided it yesterday morning with forty volunteers. I broke his face with the barrel of a gun, I stole back my wife, I also stole his Russian and America hard drives. We got pinned down by his enforcers and private army. So I called in an airstrike and that sort of changed the color of the sky above Boston.”

“How much of this did you pre-meditate?”

Irfan asks knowing exactly how much of that story was in Adon’s head space, and how much was real.

“Very little. I hadn’t heard anything until she popped up in Barcelona a couple weeks ago. All I got next was a call from her friend Lana telling me she was in trouble, early yesterday.”

“Did anyone in the union know you were going to conduct a military raid, supported by bombers and artillery from Boston Soviet?”

“Roj knew.”

“Of course he did,” Irfan smirks. That sneaky Kurdish plotter/ patriot always does.

“So look,” I say and toss the butt over the barricade, “I don’t know where her head is at. She’s been through, well sinister shit. She’ll get out of the shower and sort of pretend everything is cool and Lana is gonna meet in Cambridge for dinner, and she’ll just kinda mentally detach herself from realty.”

As we’re all trained to do, Irfan thinks.

“And that’s when you grab her, drug her, wrap her in a sleeping bag and we carry her to the car?”

“Precisely.”

“Carry on.”

“It’s just a fifteen minutes’ drive down the Rum Road down to the home of Ricardo Veshanti; then we stick to the plan.”

“You realize this realty you and her have created are both deviant and unstable, you realize that if anything other than that; you, me she and the rest going out of this camp and the hatch closing behind us, you realize he will skin her alive in front of you and keep you alive for a thousand years for torture, for this set up. For this epic mess.”

“Listen, if I wasn’t afraid for her and these children I allegedly have I’d be less inclined to believe in her magic.”

“Brother, listen. All of us were brought to this place to report back to where we are from. You have orders, I have orders, we were sent here to network, and that we did.”

“Irfan, things happened very quickly. And got a little out of control.”

“You burned down half of the towns between here and Cambridge in the largest mechanized artillery battle anyone has ever seen since maybe the Battle of Brooklyn. You stole a list of lesser and upper oligarchs. You pistol whipped American Capitalisms equivalent of a duke. You made off with his property. You did all of that 24 hours after the single largest coordinated meeting of rebel fighters in the last 100 years met four hours from here. They’re going to kill us all Sebastian Adon, there is not going to be anywhere left to hide.”

“Well we can get as far as the hatch for now.”

Adelina Blazhennaya comes out of the shower in bathrobe, ignores us both and heads to my bedroom to change.

“What’s that beeping?” Irfan asks pointing to my open black Lenovo computer.

“Drones,” I mutter and look over the terminal.

“Lots and lots of incoming terra drones.”

 

 

 

 

Scene 6

Highway I95, 2079ce

Brighton-Alston

 

Thinks Ilya, a lesser Oligarch of North Eastern American sectors:

 

I underestimated these fucking Americans. And it is easy too because they have so little education, they have so little collective bargaining power, they’re completely deluded about their political system and they’re all mostly over weight.

But then out of the blue, they do wild cowboy shit.

I’m going to keep this man alive for a thousand years and torture him like he’s never been tortured. He clearly loves Ms. Adi B., so I’ll have to keep her alive in incredible suffering too to get at him properly, can’t just skin her on sight. Jesus I’m in a bind.

Our convoy of forty black bullet proof sports utility vehicles, jeeps and half trucks is plowing its weigh up Highway I95; anticipating that these terrorist bandits have the capability to blow up the bridge we need to take to get into the camps.

Waltham is basically on the top of a low lying mountain, there are four ways in that we can expect them to booby trap. We are not going to take any of those ways in. We’re not going to run right into a typical Chechen trick; convoy ambush. We are about twenty minutes from the camp perimeter. They’ve already killed or disabled all of the police guarding the town and camps. It’s very hard to control myself right now. I’m very emotional.

My mobilblat rings, it’s Dmitry Khulusin, probably calling to mock me.

“Faggot Piederass I told you he’s a sneaky Ivory bastard,” Dmitry says.

“What do you think will happen when we get to the camps?” I ask him.

“Niggers will shoot at you, bombs will go of left and right, they’ll burn down the whole place before you get your hands on anyone, and they also always seem to dig tunnels.”

“Right, and I need him and her alive.”

“Why? Bomb the whole fucking place. Kill as many as you can! They’re mostly niggers and Arabs and Ivories; nothing incredible is coming out of that Shrakasa anyway.”

“Dmitry, I need to take them alive. And I need to get my hard drives back.”

“Ilya, baby, droog. They already have copied your data to the interweb and foot shuttled it down the tunnels to old New York. Even if they can’t crack it all open yet, they will. It’s gonna be ready for anonymous decryption at every one of their terrorist bases by sun down.”

“Well, what would you do, in my shoes?”

“Kill yourself. Before the Kochs, the Slim Helus, the Buffets, the Bezozs, the Ellisons, the Bentleys, the Biggalos, and the Upper Oligarchy realize what you lost, set up over some tight pussy talking trap. And she doesn’t even have any tits.”

“You lost most of your best lands to this man and his friends, will you not help me?”

“I don’t have the energy to play with their Black Magic anymore.”

“Fuck off then blat!”

And I almost throw the mobilblat out the window.

She betrayed me, they used me they fucked me good. As soon as the other peers realize I’ve compromised half of the cream of the North Eastern Coast, Air Strip 1, Saxony, Normandy, the Spain Lands and frankly quite of bit else in Upper Europe and the Gulf Colonies; well they’ll cut my head off. And play with my brains.

I lived for 780 years, what I learned; humans are violent selfish monkeys that maximize pleasure and minimize pain, except for a small sniveling breed we’ve killed down to almost nothing that move and think collectively.

I wanted to fuck a chosen one up her ass. There all kinds of rumors that the Upper Oligarchs keep these witches as pets. Some of our best hunter killers are of Hebrew blood, I mean all of the white Ivories are working for us now one way or another. But I thought I bought and seduced her for a reasonable price. I thought she wasn’t awake.

We all read the reports that the Muslims and the niggers are protecting the last of the chosen. We all read about how many bonobo descendants are left. We all hear that stupid fucking word Dror haTzadikk! Dror Ha Tzadikk! I mean it’s outside my jurisdiction by from what I know most of the human slavery campaign was to sell as many of these witches into brothels as we could to breed ourselves a deterrent to various incarnations of the resistance movements in the colonies.

They’re going to cut off my head. I misunderestimated the Americans.

The phone rings again. The convoy is getting close to the underground tunnels we can enter the camps from below.

It’s Dmitry again.

“I pity you. So I’ll sell you a secret.”

“Go ahead then.”

“I want 50 million Bit Coins for it.”

“If it’s that good I’ll may in Swiss Francs.”

“You can wipe out the primary rebel leadership in one shot, you can hit the submarine black freighter with Emma Solomon and Avinadav DeBuitléir when it surfaces to rendezvous with people fleeing this camp.”

“I’m not sure that will save my skin.”

“Yes, they will skin you for this. But maybe killing Solomon and DeBuitléir will earn you enough credibility to be allowed to come back to a body.”

“No one is so hated as those two heinous scum, why would you do that for me? Why not advance your own station before the high peers?”

“Because I hate Sebastian Adon. I hate him so much I’d sell my own birth mother to spit roast him. And anything I can do to hurt him I will always do to hurt him, and to kill his leaders. That could hurt him a little.”

“Why do you think the two most important rebel leaders are on a black freighter submarine coming to rescue these bandits?”

“Because unbeknownst to you and your cock was up the ass of the highest powered candidate there is next Solomon, Adelina is her immediate and direct disciple. By killing Solomon she is next in line to be their new messiah.”

“I fucked the messiah up the ass! Amazing.”

“You’re a pervert, but that’s expected. Being very rich and powerful is scientifically proven to breed perversion as you know.”

“I’m going to put their messiah on a chain and break her completely.”

“So pay me bitch. And I will have a war head fall on them the minute they land on their stupid little island they value so much; the block and New Shoreham.”

“Alright. Done. But I’m going to take them alive somehow before they reach Block Island.”

“You need them to get close so they radio their friends to come get them. Which means just bomb the camps into the ground you know they’ll sneak out some hole into a tunnel and make their way according to their protocols? Yesterday’s truck rocket battles made you look like you’ve totally lost control of your serfs. ”

“You’re one to lecture. Half your city fell Soviet!”

“Route the money. Bomb that Ivory camp with drones and just wait for the informants to report strange things happening in Konnecticut on the roads to New Galilee. We can mop this up by the end of the weekend, and maybe you’ll just lose your skin privileges.”

 

 

Scene 7

Chelsea Garrison, 2079ce

ISLE OF MAN

 

 

There are only several places where they cannot hear you, see you, record you and file you by number. And these places are not one hundred percent secure, they only make your detection harder and prolong your date of capture.

 

Bathhouses, fitness clubs, loud electronic music venues, camping & wilderness activities, dancehall parties and in the back of municipal ambulances.

 

I’m not fully happy with some elements of my life, thinks Siegfried Sassoon the actor. I cannot exactly say that I am satisfied, though I do have many elements of a good life going; I am not using my human potential; not as an actor and not as a man.

 

I take to the woods; there are so many things we forgot to do when we became civilized; we lost innate mechanisms for our self-preservation; we became reliant on government, on governance on divisions of labor so infinite that we no longer possess any intrinsic individual use. Well, a great deal less any way.

 

I am following a new serial on Netflicks and Chill; the premium film station now that we get all out television from computers and cell phones. I have no stomach for film or TV! I was classically trained in Moscow for the stage! For the fucking stage, but that is a dead medium now. I have bachelors in philosophy, I wrote my thesis on the history of time travel. I work as bar tender at an elite supper club in the Isle of Mann. I have a pleasant and attractive girlfriend, she is not as amazing as my last girlfriend, but she makes me happy and keeps things mostly drama free.

 

My father works for the military industrial complex, I rarely see him. My mother is a hippie. It’s pace love and light, and then you marry rich; it’s good for your future, your children’s future. My father has a job I don’t know the details of; his company holds patents to space craft and commercial airlines, it builds them for thee United American States; the UAS has been the name of the 87% of the USA that was not lost to socialism during the Separatist Wars of 2076-2015; the Capital is in Chicago. The 13% lost is called the Confederation of Autonomous Soviet Republics, the Isle of Mann is just over the river from Breuklyn Soviet; which is one of the most heavily armed hot beds of the sedition. The Bronx and Queens are confederated with it; Staten Island is an enormous military garrison, it got very blood for three years, now it’s all quiet. The rebels threatened to use atomic weapons and took hostages, I will tell you what appears to work; terrorism it seems to work every single time.

It is actually understood to be far less bloody than conventional war, and a lot less expensive. Who fundamentally funds these rebels is a subject of great debate in the high class circles I run in. Oh yes, the upper classes are composed of big brained thinking men.

My club, like many of the establishments in cash rich, high stressed Isle of Mann, high tower living; caters to the millionaires and billionaires that compose what you might call were you to site rather populist rebel propaganda; the 2%. Wealth in the United States of America and subsequently in the United American States is a mal-distributed slope like absolutely anywhere else in the 206 Sectors, ehm, countries. In virtually all 206 national harvest units the distribution is about the same; though there are sharp gradients in the peripheral and semi-peripheral zones; social welfare systems and trickle down economies have enabled most of the 46 Core nations to eliminate all obvious forms of extreme poverty; life below $1.25 a day. Underclasses of course exist; the Muslims in Europe and the Blacks and Latinos in the U.S.; but they are not volatile, starving underclasses, but observe the slope; same in peripheral zone Kenya, as Semi-Peripheral zone Brazil, same are core zone France; a slope of the underclass and “middle classes” that in raw net wealth and assets are not radically disparate. Suffice to say you could call much of the middle class, the working poor. And in any society the distribution of REPORTED wealth, emphasis on REPORTED wealth would show that with welfare, with subsidy; the majority of the citizens of any county; 80-90% are all on slope that tapers off at its highest mark at annual earnings of $100,000 per year; then you have a 5-10% of the Bourgeoisie, the Upper Middle Classes, white collar managers, athletes and celebrities with earnings let’s say between $100,000 to 1 million per year. This still is not a radical accumulation of wealth, not in the scale needed to exercise power. Control of political and productive mechanisms. And then you have a class in itself, what they called in Occupy the 1% is actually 0000.1% of the remaining population; a kleptocracy; more appropriately called; an Oligarchy. Organized into clubs and factions that see national boundaries as brands, or more appropriately the names of various large scale mega plantations.

I did not come to any of that by reading the manuscripts or hearing the speeches of Adon, Solomon, DeBuitléir and other famous rebel leaders. I am no prole, nor were their Partizan songs written with my class in mind.

These men do not come to my club. But I pour their managers drinks, I pour their entertainment drinks, I stay sober sometimes while their supervisors drink and I know about things like robots, clones and the great salt mine. I knew that the ‘new Panama Canal’ had already been built in the 1980’s, I knew this from the mouths of babes; the call girls these lackeys bought. I have smoked joints with fellow help and shared what we’ve heard.

Adon tried to recruit me no less than twice to three times a year in round about and direct appeals to my level of awareness. I long suspected he would ask to spy for him, or something trickier. I’m a man of privilege, but not impervious. My father is well connected because of his company’s trade in trains and planes and missiles; but if the secret police took me there would be not very much he could do. I have friends too from the Club in which I work; but honestly when they take you they take you away. Your body is found in a tragic accident or a suicide, but that’s not your real body; you end in a container ship and then in a secret prison and that’s all she wrote.

I once wondered if Adon would analyze his own privileges being white, being raised upper middles class from a family with land; well his father is no lesser oligarchy but still they were the House of Adon! An esteemed house allowed into certain elite clubs, given land in both the District Financial and the Hamptons. Well suffice to say that house was outlawed and obliterated after the Great Revolt.

They stripped his Ivory father of all his land and ranks and executed his entire family, this is all I read. Sometime in the 2077.

The world is not a much changing world. There are always barbarians at the gates, slaves in cages and unrest in the colonies. It has always been this way, it will always be this way; who am I or Adon or any to clamor for a new way. Adon and I used to sit in the bathhouses and I would hear his yarns. I could hardly believe much of it was real. We were in university together, though I never joined his movement officially. Never took the plot outside the steam room. The House of King and House of Adon were of relatively equal social stations. He seemed to disregard my sympathies to him and grow angry as we got older that I didn’t wish to die on some barricade like him; but there are not barricades now; there are only strange events. Strange changes to reality that happen to keep up with the future science and black magic making war.

Nothing is what is what it seems. Are these vast plantation camps; or are they developing nations? Is democracy about speaking freely or is about governing together? Why has the winter not ended for three years in Massachusetts? Why do proles take trains to serve others in the Isle of Mann and those trains take 45 minutes, but I know and Adon knows that to get from Manhattan of Breuklyn Soviet you need a plane or a 40 mile base jump down a mountain. Are you a citizen or are you a serf? Did America win the Cold War? Why is it half of the lesser, and one third of the greater oligarchs all have Russian names? What is a Princlings? What is the Bohemian Grove? When is it time to smoke a joint and join a conspiracy theory, or get your cock rubbed via Netflicks and Chill? How much is a human life worth?

Make us a good price!

I came to much of these realities during my senior thesis called ‘A History of Time Travel’; which explores the metaphysics behind parallel reality states, fourth dimensional travel and such themes of Pre-Soviet parapsychology.

My ex, I can’t say her same as it was so painful to lose her. Her father is a Greater Oligarch, from her and from Adon and from the whispers at the Box; I learned that truly nothing is as it seems.

Sebastian Adon, before he embraced the Baha’i nonviolence teachings of Sheika Saadiya Usmani and was inducted into the Blue Lodge; well he was a killer, I watched him evolve. I saw him go between talk and action over a period of ten years, he was changed by his experiences in the colonies; Palestine first then in Haiti.

I will not speak to what did or did not happen during the Millennium Theatre Hostage Crisis, there are wildly different accounts. I never saw him again after that night when the whole country first learned his name. They say he died. As did thousands of hostages being held all over the country that night! And then a calm. And then, a great gold mist blew over North America. The internet turned off. The world outside our country was blacked out. And in that gold happy mist changes were made, and there was no more Adon. There was no more United States; the entire population was put to sleep.

And when we woke up out of the dream, out of the week following the Millennium Hostage Crises. 13 % of America was a wild rebel free zone, and 87% was called the United American States, had always been. And you couldn’t take a 45 minute train to Brooklyn, no this violent anarchic thing called Breuklyn Soviet was a 40 mile drop off a cliff where the East River used to be. There was mile high wall between the edge of that cliff; and I was still in the UAS, which had always been the UAS; but Brooklyn, Queens and the Bronx were not. These were now autonomous zones we were prohibited from traveling to.

I got a letter in the mail from Adon, I guess a courier moved it. The letter stated he was interned in a special engineering camp not far from Boston; another liberated City State. He told me that shortly his compatriots would be taking him out of the camp ad returning him to Breuklyn Soviet, which was of course (he claimed) now ‘free.’ And what did he want, why had he written?

Of course he wanted something. He never was capable of just having a friendship. He had taped a micro USB chip to the letter; it contained god only knows what. Nothing would shock me. He letter asked to go to 7^th FDNY EMS Outpost in Chelsea, find Anya Drovtich, buy her a drink and give her the chip. Just commit treason, matter of flatly.

I had met Anya Drovtich once before the letter said; the sexy Polish chick with the dreadlock and red Hijab. That narrowed it down a lot. What the rational person would do, despite having knowledge of a highly irrational world, even sympathizing with the resistance secretly. Having bathed and been friends with supposedly dead public enemy number three, behind DeBuitléir and Solomon, ahead of famed Jamaican Rebel Commander still at large in Breuklyn Soviet Mickhi Dbrisk. I remembered Anya, I let them both in the box on night against my better judgment; they were planning to take hostages. In the end they were ordered to stand down, Adon got drunk and pole danced for her in a private room.

He wasn’t humorless.

I look at this letter in my hand and I wonder what I should do. Turning it in means incriminating myself. The televisions have said he was killed in the hostage crisis along with Solomon; this is proof of sorts he is alive; maybe his prints are on this hand written letter. His security culture is sloppy I know. Maybe throw it away? What’s on the micro USB chip? Should I open it? Maybe this all a setup, maybe the Joint Terrorism task force is looking at anyone Adon used to know and I used to Banya with him twice a year, he’s been to half my theatrical openings. Maybe it’s another purge. And why would he send this to me, all of these years later. He’s been officially dead for three years. Yes, the hostage tragedy happened in 2076? I think so. 2077? Maybe, they say never forget but I do forget. So much happened, so much changed. SO many people died in the Millennium Theater Hostage Crisis. I know, what the public doesn’t know which is that the rebels were very close to using nuclear warheads against major Americans cities. Leveraging that was what allowed the Separatist victories. I know that Department of Homeland Security pumped gas into all of the hostage points, four if I remember and that gas killed most of the hostages, not the rebel small arms fire. And I know the official story is that Emma Solomon, a citizen of Spain and Sebastian Adon a dual citizen of the USA and Trinidad, some allege, also Israel lead some forty terrorists into a packed showing of a new Broadway play and held hostage some 850 people, mostly the crème de la crème of the lesser Oligarchy in New York and celebrities; and then coordinated seizures of buildings happened in Los Angeles, Atlanta, Houston and Chicago; and then there was 48 hour five site siege; and the terrorists called for an end to the three year Separatist Wars and independence for 13 Soviets; 13% of USA’s territory, including all of Puerto Rico.

And then, blood, fire, gas and then as if nothing had happened all. Just like a mass shooting or a bombing in Baghdad.

I ask myself, I ask you; what would you do? The world is falling apart, the wars are closer and closer to the top of the mountain; no one is safe. What is on this USB could be highly consequential, or could be a test or a set up. Plot upon sinister plot.

Anya Drovtich who I have met only once. How consequential is her role in the Resistance, how close is she to Adon. What should I do? We all know at the Box that the Secret Police are cunning; 17 whole agencies spying on us. You never know when you’re being filmed only when you’re maybe not being filmed; we carry these fucking phones everywhere like the mark of the beast.

In the woods I am free; there are of course cameras in the woods too, there are even cameras I read inside dogs and cats; inside bees! It can make you a little insane to keep reading. There is no conspiracy your rational mind declares! There is no oligarchy! There is just the high, the middle and the low classes; a product of their merit and work ethics. Whites are on top because they work hardest, we all know that! And life is certainly better in the United American States, which has ALWAYS been the name of our country; then anywhere. Definitely better than that corrupted, vile violent mafia federation of Russia. Which I do live dearly having studied their as an actor for a year. And evil red China with its pollution and one child woman killing polices, which I do love dearly, my ex the love of actual life being half Russian, half Chinese. I digress. Well most of the proles have never left America. Most of the upper middle class if they have left America they’ve gone to Europe or the tourist garrisons of the Caribbean. Or banal Costa Rica; the eco colony. Who can say they’ve seen the world! Who has laid eyes on the Salt Mines! On Kandahar! On the night train of Beijing to Moscow. Almost none, and thus they cannot believe the things the resistance says are happening, are even real.

On year, maybe 2075 Adon and I went to the bathhouse on 88 Fulton, now called Bath Tip Gym; and maybe he liked the Banya so much cause we can talk freely, no phones no hidden mikes, you’d hope, no cameras, you’d hope. Or at least the illusion of privacy in the stream and sweat.

He took out an envelope and showed me pictures of the atrocities in Syria; told me they were preparing to send fighters and medics; would I go? Would I raise money? Well I feigned enthusiasm but ultimately contributed nothing. Like when he’d asked me to carry out some operation on the trains they were planning.

Well anyway, everyone they sent into Syria was killed. He was shortly after arrested and tortured for sedition. And by September 1st, Labor Day 2076 the Great Revolt had begun and the rebels soon took Brooklyn, Queens and the rest.

History will absolve almost everyone. I have looked this man dead in the eyes in the steam of the baths and heard him say seditious things and never informed. I am still absolved. One day people may look back at their uprising and say they committed atrocities, they were extremist, anarchists even! They tipped the arch with their fuckery! If you showed me video of Adon executing four men with a shot gun, like the one they played on TV. If you tried to tell me Adon was really an Persian sleeper; a Shi’a tripled agent. Like they said on TV. I wouldn’t believe it. I wouldn’t believe he’d killed a single person.

I ask myself again what on this USB? I could bring it to China Town, they would tell me for a small price. Or maybe I’ll bring it to Anya Drovtich. Hand it over to the Banshee underground to get it where it need to go. Those people can move anything.

I want this last thing clear. I am an actor. I am here to capture the human experience and make it relatable. But the craft on stage is dying, it’s a bourgeoisie fringe event. That Hamilton brought back black face/ white face, claiming to empower people of color, forgive me while I quietly vomit in my hands. I am making the last round of drinks on the Titanic, and knowing what I know, seeing what I saw; you cannot escape the coming war. Too much was accumulated for too long and now, well now I need a drink.

A whiskey maybe. Something Smokey. I’ll just head to work and if I can think of a clever way to get Ms. Drovtich this token of our mutual friend’s appreciation, I’ll do it not for some cause, not because of the atrocities, not because of anything. Because if Sebastian Adon is alive, if he’s passing women notes again. Well a loyal droog, and I think myself a loyal droog to him; I will pass his note along.

I am not an old soul, but I do remember the past. I did write a book on time travel; I know that Sebastian is a serious person who has suffered a lot. That he is also a mad man and possibly a terrorist, well cheers he is also my friend.

Comrade, I know you cannot hear me. I know it is not safe or prudent to hand Anya your calling card. I will either follow her after her shift ends on the ambulances, or I will call 911 fake a medical emergency have her take me, or some accomplice to the hospital and in the back of the ambulance where we believe no one is filming us; I will hand her the USB.

They used to say on the TV; ‘if you have nothing to hide why do you care if we watch you’. And then there was Snowden who defected to the Russians and testified that every single cell phone call, text, email, even ToR and snap chat was stored in NSA server warehouses, filed and linked to social security numbers. Even when Patriot Acts I, II and III came out; basically cancelling out whatever proud rights Americans thought they had; we said we were not terrorists, who cares, drink booze, and watch Sports; Netflix and Chill! They used to try and tell us on TV Democrats and Republicans were different somehow. Well they things they say are different, but now both parties are suspended under the War Powers Act of 2077. Who’s the President of the UAS, that’s what Anya the paramedic will ask me, or my accomplice after out name and maybe if we know where we are. The orientation questions.

But if she asks me who’s the President of the United States of America, instead of asking me who is the President of the United American States; well that’s resistance code.

Adon told me in the letter, ‘when they take you pretend you’re very drunk.’

I wonder if I will see my old supposedly dead friend ever happy. What would make a man like him happy, a nice girl; a year on the beach? A fast car, a published book? Well everyone has a price do they not, we all have a price.

Sadly, what I think will make my old friend happy, as happy as he can be at this juncture. “Falsify a medical emergency, avoid detection by using some proxy you seduce and pass off that card to the underground. That would make me happy.”

 

Well he said as much in writing:

 

“The aim of the entire Great Revolt therefore is to take full control of the means of development at the most localized level without using violence to do so and harness our collective might to secure our human rights entitlements once and for all.”

 

 

 

Scene 8

Baha’i Outpost 443, 2077ce

Cambridge

 

 

Let us digress slightly into the divergent past. Two years back perhaps, which is to say Common Era 2077 or AR 1, one year after the beginning of the Great Revolt; but still in the satellite camps and shanty towns outside Boston.

 

We, at times are too enamored in our literature and film with the theatrics and heroics of men, thinks Adelina Blazhennaya.

 

They are most unstable creatures! So easily aroused and so readily violent. Hark I will tell you why I was flown all the way from lovely sane and stable Chelyabinsk; Tank City, to be building boiling plots in the North Americas; amid their anarchy. They were hardly tame before the Great Revolt, but now! And any little thing can trigger a mass shooting or an ethnic hysteria. Anything.

 

I did journey from Philadelphia to Boston on horseback, (yes horseback) and I wear the elegant and more importantly insulating fur of the Siberian Black Bear; I with my lovely brown locks falling out from under look like where the wild things are. There was no other way to travel, except by horse because then, and then was 2077ce; the Separatist Wars were raging. There was a no fly zone down the east coast imposed by the United Nations; New York City was burning to the ground and the rebels were one day winning one day facing decimation and massacre.

 

There was no longer Fung Wa bus service; there was Fung Wa horse-donkey convoy and believe me you me it cost more than $25 American. But I was not paying to be sure, the management was.

 

They offered me a bold Dmitry as an escort, but I adamantly declined. Robots and clones are a sign of the times; and the princely warlord cum lesser Oligarch Dmitry Khulushin, lesser oligarchy of the Tri-State area is both a sadist and serial philanderer turned himself into a product line called Epic Escort, hire and program your own Slavic prince as body guard, or whatever else you need. Having a second of third, or hundredth Dmitry in this world was a serious array of problems onto themselves. It will one day lead to a crisis of Dmitry’s.

 

With the rebellion clearly forcing the United States of America into the behaviors of a maldeveloped country; well the roads between New York and Boston were so bad we of this Chinese lead convoy had to move four weeks atop animals to reach the People’s Republic of Cambridge; for in 2077 Metropolitan Boston was largely in rebel hands excluding some of the Satellite towns to the South; Quincy Center was still part of the USA, but North all the way to Salem was the Rebel Confederacy. My quarry, the man I was send all the way from Russian Federation to find was interred in a concentration camp called a Shrakasa, held there since 2077 near a town called Waltham; where with a bomb stitched to his neck was both designing the rebels technology for the revolt and via his dreams giving the Oligarchy shockingly accurate predictions of the rebellion.

 

This man, supposedly dead since 2076, has been locked in this camp with his mind wiped out. He has forgotten a great deal about the past and future and he is being used.

 

What a game we all play. Everyone a serf to someone, and I suppose you will ask who is my master? Well you’d have to burn me alive like the others! I am from an old order, older than either the rebellion or the oligarchy. Older than anything. I serve women who are wise, and that is all I can say at this juncture. My paper works gives my name, as Adelina; thus must be my name! My profession is that of an apparatchik to an education firm; teaching English is the pretext. Which one I cannot say, I have signed a non-disclosure agreement, but a big one!

So in October of 2077 I arrived in the People’s Republic of Cambridge and arranged to be brought to the Baha’i Temple Outpost 433, at the home of some Persian Harvard & MIT professors. They plied me with hot sweet tea and cherry juice and gave me hugs. I would never openly say what my birth religion is, but I am certainly no stranger to Baha’i’ events and customs.

 

The Baha’i’ of Greater Boston, like Baha’i everywhere are apolitical, hyper-educated, hyper-diverse and explicitly always non-violent, charming but often boring. That they are also much massacred has driven them into their long standing alliance with the Israelis and thus, have entangled them messily into the Great Revolt. There are many Baha’i in the Breuklyn Soviet and that they are so protected by both the clandestine services of Iran and Israel speaks to their importance in events.

I am a delicate flower, but I have managed to cross the Ocean by steamer-sub and make this four week ride north to the outpost. Because of heavy fighting near Newton there is no reason to believe I can meet Sebastian Adon soon. But they tell me that he will travel in a fort night to partake in the Night of Power, a 19^th day feast. And I trust these people are they are sober and sincere and blessed heavily by the one true manifestation of Allah. Yes Allah, the part of a name not the useless conjecture of a noun, or worse using a listing of qualities to describe a majesty instead of thing who loves us and wants us to win.

 

If this pretext doesn’t work then Oleg the Bear my friend will bring Adon to my birthday on 12 April, which will work; as he seems too infatuated with Oleg, looks up to him in some strange way. Like an older brother he never had.

 

After a long hot bath and much tea and delicious food I sit with the Sheikha Saadiya Usmani who while they have no clergy is a prominent local leader. A shapeshifter they say, I have just arrived so I don’t believe in magic until I see it.

Saadiya is a magical woman, she is barely four feet tall and moves as though there were no fixed joints, she moves as though her vessel is pliable. She is a Pakistani and speaks with a British accent. But she moves and thinks like a Maagi, a so-called white witch. She has been here in Boston for some time and has been elected one of the nine Baha’i; of the local assembly.

“Welcome to Cambridge, it’s a little more tumultuous since the war broke out last year, but we have for some time been out of harm’s way because of MIT’s missile shield system, and the minute men,” she says to me calmly in her British accent.

“The minute men?”

“Yes, the paramilitary irregulars of the Libertarian Party trucked in six months ago from Burlington and the Vermont Free Zones; they are far better organized than the militias from BLM and the Ivoryish partisans; very little of the fighting has affected us except for shortages.”

She opens a map.

“As you can see the UAS Military is concentrated in Quincy to the south and on the Brighton-Alston line to the West, and there in district Charlestown is a massive Bratva garrison, because of all the smuggling routes. The People’s General Assembly is located in lower Boston; on the Jamaica Plane; the four biggest factions running the operations here are the BLM Alliance, the Democratic Socialists, the Freemen and the Libertarians. Other than us technically it’s a Muslim free zone.”

Enough small talk my eyes say.

“Where is Adon?”

She points to a mountain to the West of Boston by four days convoy. Waltham.

“And where more importantly am I, Adelina Blazhennaya to make my home?”

Saadiya points to a town called Brighton-Allston, on the Federal side of the demilitarized zone. And with her powers asks Adelina who is actually more important to the cause then Sebastian Adon we can’t get both of you out alive; Adelina responds silently, with her powers; I don’t know, probably we leave him behind.

“Is he awake?”

“Not in the slightest. We’ve just begun a liaison of letters which indicate he remembers nothing before being brought here.”

“What’s you pretext for being here in the camp?”

“Teaching English.”

“And him?”

“He’s studying and designing training modals, he believes them to be cutting edge, but it’s all recycled Cuban technology that we’ve had for years, maybe decades. He’s applied for a para permit to move bodies around as a paramedic in Revere, he’s get cleared in November.”

“Why do you think he’s still asleep, a rather dangerous liaison this could quickly turn into. It doesn’t seem very random at all they sent you; who sent you Maya Sorieya Emma Solomon? As she someone put you together.”

“An Israeli agent absolutely put us together.”

“Well who is more important an asset to evacuate, in the event of outright nuclear chaos’ you or him?”

“We’re both important in different ways. We need him out of the camps and back in the bosom of Soviet safety. This area’s security is highly artificial. We’re not so much in a free zone in the same way New York mostly is; we’re in a strategic buffer zone where the oligarchy is conducting a great deal of, shall we say research.

“I have read that there is a train under the Charlestown district that goes all the way up the mountain.”

“Up the mountain, all the way?”

“Yes, this is what I’ve heard. And I have heard that neither Adon nor any of his colleagues are really sleeping, I’ve heard they’re very much plotting how to get on that train and take it all the way to Moscow.”

“You presume that Moscow is the very top?” asks Saadiya Usmani.

“I know it be.”

“I am not sure if there is really a train, but we believe there is a hatch their up the mountain as you suggested.”

“Who is the main oligarch running this sector, before the Great Revolt began?” Adelina asks.

“He is called Ilya Lubov. He has a fortress in the Western mountains by Mt. Greyloch. He lost a bet to the Koch Brothers in 2074 so they turned off the geothermal weather grid, that is why it has been hard winter here ceaselessly for 6 years.”

“I heard 3.”

“6.”

“So it is possible that below Charlestown or perhaps Quincy is a hatch to a tunnel that may lead all the way up the mountain?”

“Yes, as you know much of the Great Revolt was a pretext to capture control of black freighters, space dirigibles and fourth dimensional weapons.”

“Who does Adon work for?”

“That’s a tricky question, his ex-wife we can only hope and not Perchevney the great devil.”

“Not the Baha’i World Congress?”

“He’s more of a card carrying Baha’i than a real genuine practitioner. He contacted us a month ago stating he had some complex case to resolve. He had formally resigned his membership and faith under Israeli direction attempting to make Allehya in 2074. It is my understanding he is coming here to ask for re-admittance.”

“Who does actually work for then?”

“We can really only again speculate.”

“Can he be brought under control somehow?”

“Well that’s what you Adelina Blazhennaya were introduced to him to do. Who introduced you?”

“An Israeli sleeper, a photographer named Oleg Medved, also called Oleg the Bear.”

“So the Mossad is assisting to get him out of the camps?”

“Well, people who speak Hebrew are trying to get him out of the camps, I can’t say of this is a Mossad job. They have their hands full.”

“Adelina Blazhennaya are you a Russian national from Chelyabinsk?”

“Soon a dual citizen.”

“Your mother…”

“Yes.”

“You been here for quite some time have you not, since age 17?” Saadiya asks.

“Yes, but I go to Russia once a year to see my family.”

“But you’re not linked to Oleg and the Israelis, via shall we say by payroll?”

“No. I was contracted directly by Emma Solomon to work on this unlimited operation. Having a direct liaison with Sebastian Adon is new news.”

“He’s been seen with Oleg Megved all over the twenty towns. He can’t pass the ring road or the aortic bomb in his neck will kill him. He may, or may not remember the events of the Great Revolt and Millennium Theater hostage crisis. He may, or may not remember his wife.”

“Emma Solomon?”

“Yes.”

“The…”

“Yes, we think so.”

“That mercenary, that brutal hunter killer was actually married to the Tzadikk HaDror?”

“Yes. But they’ve haven’t consummated the marriage with living children and they haven’t seen each other in over twelve years. And Emma is rumored to be a clone, as the woman actually he married was slaughtered by the Israeli Oligarchy on request from the Order of St. John’s in 2001, a day before the Towers fell.”

“Which was so long ago, I have almost forgotten that that even had happened!”

“So much back story!”

“You’re coming into the story during an intermission, but there were many acts and many partisan songs before you were destined to meet this great anti-hero.”

“So if Oleg was sent by the Israelis…”

“It’s not actually clear that he’s been sent, or if he is setting Adon up for either greatness or murder, they may well be just be connected by a shred of Chosen blood and common interests in their life of night,” Adelina states.

“What are you here to then, make him great or try and kill him?”

“What am I here to do? I’m here to try and make sure he is serving the cause.”

“Well since your people built his modal maybe you can get him to turn off.”

“He’s not just a robot,” Adelina says flatly.

“He’s not a robot per say. He’s an old soul inhabiting a fleshpot drone your people designed.”

“And who do you think my people are Saadiya Usmani?”

“People of Old Slavic Majik,” she says with a wink, “he’s occupying a mechanical person your combine designed. He did in fact die in the Millennium Hostage Crisis. He’s died a good many times before. So we are using deductive reasoning to assume he is not a flesh and blood man any longer.”

“Well if that is so why does he worry about the bomb in his neck?”

“Have you heard of the Greater Oligarch Alexandr Perchevney?”

“Yes of course. The devil.”

“A devil.”

“Adon if he serves anyone, he serves Perchevney.”

“Was not Perchevney an architect of the Great Revolt alongside Solomon and DeBuitléir?”

“That is believed now to be true.”

“What bloody games are these? What is it all for?” Adelina asks.

“The Baha’i World Congress believes that for Alexandr this is a power grab, but I believe it is much more. I believe he is seeking to annihilate the bloodline in a roundabout way. He is making sure that his seed is impregnating the candidates. He is annihilating those with bonobo blood and he is readying the entire house of Jacob for another big purge like in 1943.”

“All hidden up in this populist uprising around proletarian human rights demands?”

“Well just like Beria did. Or Hitler. Stir everything up and wipe out more of the bloodline.”

The both pause, touched by the bloodiness and gravity of collective history.

“I have read there’s nothing left in Israel. That it’s all been obliterated with atomic missiles. That it’s a clever illusion that the State of Ivory is real, that the Congress still meets in Haifa; but in truth it’s a blighted nuclear wasteland,” states Adelina.

“I cannot confirm or deny such a report,” Saadiya smiles, suffice to say I’ve never been there. I was born in Pakistan and trained in India & Burma, I arrived here via California and was soon after captured and sent to this camp.”

“So Adon will come here to the outpost for the Night of Power Feast, and then what?”

“You need to find out if he’s real or a just robot. Killer, zombie, hero, hooligan, freedom fighter; you have to get it out of him. You need to make him do, what we need him to do.”

“And what is that then, to you?”

“Bring his army of shadows under the actual direction of the Congress, move that army to link up with the larger divisions in Jamaica, Hispaniola, Trinidad and Cuba; move those armies to the hatch in Madeira; invade Europe. Obliterate the second peak of the mountain. With no guns.”

“How will I get him to do that? He doesn’t even remember his own birth name, he is not even aware of what has happened back in New York.”

 

“You’re a linguist, white witch and engineer. Just use your training.”

 

“Engineer, ha.”

 

“Or whatever other training you might have,” Saadiya says with a wink but not a smile.

 

 

Scene 10

Safe House on 16 Kings, 2079ce

Waltham

 

 

Adelina had been originally introduced to him first on the 12^th of April, 2076 which was also in fact her biological 26^th birthday, how auspicious. She was and is quite baby faced while strikingly attractive and slender like a modal, maybe even more than the Euro-American conception of impossible physique. She has auburn hair, but it was dyed blond in Russia while she was gone.

She lovingly smiles without much hardship, but is always a real smile coming from a place of actual enjoyment to share company with others. Her physical life span at birth was over two hundred years, but she was irradiated in Tank City, like everyone in Tank City living in a closed city near the nuclear arsenal and testing facilities.

She might have lived indefinitely in her body as it was born, but she’s actually dying slowly of cancer. Her spine has bulging disks and has developed scoliosis, though she hides the tremendous pain with mediation and constant yoga. She in the meantime has looked 17 for a decade.

Sebastian Adon had been interviewing for acceptance at Shrakasa Brandeis; you had pay your way into the camps after all; and had become a correspondence and bemused ally of her casual friend, a Ukrainian Ivoryish fashion photographer named Oleg Megved; also known playfully by his modals as Oleg the Bear, which is exactly that which his name means in Russian.

Oleg and Sebastian had met a year prior at a Gypsy Festival, called the Bohemian Festival in the borderlands between Brooklyn and Queens. Their post-soviet bromance revolved around Sebastian’s incredibly reckless pursuit of the girlfriend of a ferocious Russian businessperson named Dmitry Khulushin Koch.  A manipulative and tragic digger of gold previously mentioned named Natasha Skorbogatova. Sebastian proceeded while perusing this quite taken woman to compose upwards of sixty-four poems. However, most of them spoke more to his suffering and poverty of agency rather than any particular thing about the woman he sought to steal.

 

And shortly after the revolution called the Great Revolt in the United States began.

 

By the time she was really done, he defeated  her with him he would composed those sixty four odd poems and several hundred-page novel, though the novel too like the poems were not really about her, they were about his suffering demons and tragic  beliefs. You need to have more than five hundred American in the bank to carry off a Russian woman from a well-resourced man, even if he cracks her face once in a while with the ultra-violence. That then said this literary courtship impressed mostly Oleg Medved who took to calling Sebastian “the American Mayakovsky”, and introducing him to Boston’s many Russian women.

 

Moreover, that was how on her birthday, still very much “in love” with Natasha Skorbogatova; Sebastian met Adelina. And they began texting each other just perhaps two weeks later. Texting him daily words in Russian. Tring to educate him and get in his head.

Later, perhaps six months of texting words in Russian later, well then it was the Fall of 2077 and Sebastian Adon, in an effort to overwhelm her skepticism of any amorous or literary thing he was capable of producing.

 

He wrote her a new kind of Post-Soviet love poem; one that didn’t even cause him any suffering and he wrote for her alone, and performed it on a gaslight street corner of the Waltham Camps near Prospect Ave.

 

She beamed, and he recited;

 

“She Sometimes Amazed Me; How much!”

Сама иногда поражаюсь как меня много.

 

To my love: Adelina Anatolievna Blazhennaya

 

Every time we kiss it takes me out of this place!

And there will be more time for kisses!

Hold me fast and take my tongue from me as well as all my new found essence.

Absorb for me and let me then carry you further than ever before.

When man is submerged in the flood water of his longing,

When the rapids break the legs below him,

Voluptuous folds of over powered temptations yielding bed sheet utterances, belonging.

The desire to muster his best qualities,

His full works brought to bear for that singular woman thrust before him.

As my rough parts are made a puppy faced rabbit!

And my soul into a naked exposure,

Your hands, hips lips a flush of all endless ways to bring the winter to better closure.

And then tight ripped verse.

To chainsaw the rough cut marble of composition, to bash apart the inadequacy of poor form which might hint that all done for you was not unique.

Depart.

Comrade Blazhennaya! You sometimes amaze me how much.

Such, I shall tell you what rights mean to me, dare we be glutted, yet so cold in Babylon make plain your wishes, I will get us free!

I see you not judging, or hiding well judgments!

From my past escapades or the demons in me!

Not judging we! I am beyond aleaved that we is now two and has been cleaved down from three.

Yet, wet lips still spout insurrection.

They bite the tongue, I bite my tongue in only one language. And lips which once from words but strike keys into bloody history, misconception.

See the melee!

See the thrill of “to us impending victory”

She asks:

        “How many of your poems sound close to same? The want of affection of a daughter from Russia, the toll of such women, the toll of your struggle, the playing too hard of no rules at the game!”

She says:

        “Take a short blade and cut the warble off the words, trim the American vernacular down to half the size.

Surmise, drop vanity, your chornay like use of countless profanity. Make again proud form, verse you rehearse until we’re ready to perform.”

“Make language a beautiful thing!”

No instrument to bludgeon about thy demons an enemy’s down with the Winter and up with future, the coming of Spring!”

“And who,” she asks “art thou biggest enemy? Thyself-Thyself Comrade, squandering don’t you dare, stare, look in the mirror see the source of past troubles, he’s laughing at you or crying at you! Comrade take care.”

 

“Thyself if so untrue is pleasing to no one, not one single no one, not even the darkness in you,” she declare.

I respond; “Comrade Blazhennaya, my sweet Adelina I will moan every moment touching you and beside you render myself a smiling man with a past of no great countenance, you’re not like other woman we can’t be labeled by our continents!”

“Our consonants!”

“Most wanton. Touching you or looking through!”

“I long every day for your touch!”

She sometimes amazed me how much!

Сама иногда поражаюсь как меня много.

 

Scheming into dreaming, another bridge called Karlov!? I love to dream beside you, separated by nothing but desire, but happy always for the dreaming we do.

The duct tape that when I lived impoverished I used to patch my dressing shoe.

Take that blade that you were offered,

Cast that thing aside!

Seize control that vessel, bleed it red or bleed it blue.

What mean that Haitian flag to you?

 

“Talk of love or talk of sin or talk of rights;

You are too happy now to die before winter has finished setting in.”

I want nothing more or train robs, nothing more of winless fights.

“I want us to dream of ways to win!”

It’s all or nothing motherfucker! She imitates; “For a Baha’i Russo-Haitian fighting Fenian you sure still like to make your dradel spin.

 

“What’s now not haunting you ought make your words more beautiful,” she says, “No more Victor Gin.”

“And are not small beautiful moments, dreams and things, smells and tastes and landscapes also dangerous to make tunes and tomes too?” she asks.

“Are not sad barricade ballets just belligerencies to thine enemy self?”

“Do not invite fire into your home, the Victory Gin is for self-murdering men, who don’t know how to begin the sniff of a win. Onto the shelf.”

“Your guns and your bullets your lies and worthless desires of dueling with devils!

 

“DREAM CORRRECT! You command my respect, your humor in nightly visitations to Burma to Paris to Trinidad; you call that all love, your love is forever suspect!”

When I see the smile of Comrade Blazhennaya, I know her as a plural woman.

I profess her my longing and I take her commands.

A woman who like I is disconnected from aspects of realty so she might better love the place where she lands.

A pause again, cheers to now and cheers to never again; might never loving trysts rip out hearts asunder, might never ideals take needless lives, cost rivers red of blood, denying life all grace or wonder.

I cheers to total truthfulness, a pause’ I’LL SEE YOU; WHEN?

Again and Again and Again.

I speak freely before you, I dare.

Until fireworks over Bagan’s skies are but a symphony of promises kept to me and you, and Blood red balloons of the Banshee insurrection not a spark compare.

She asks:

“What for then comrade! When you kiss my lips and write your poems on the softness of my stare; what is you’ve set yourself to do?”

 

“If you promise we, or the entire Breuklyn Soviet our liberation true then mark my words your words will return to stab a blade in you, and dash yourself and burn apart for the emptiness of the promises you sew.”

My hand overtakes her finger, her hand on the clutch.

She sometimes amazed me how much!

Сама иногда поражаюсь как меня много.

How much she knew my heart and yearned to know the plots of my soul. And perhaps I could amaze her too, not with all the adventures to come or the tall orders of deeds I had promised her and the world I could do,

I say.

“Just remain by my side and all of the happy you put on to me, I’ll reflect it actions right back on to you.”

 

Fini.

 

She smiled and smiled and smiled, and we kissed and kissed and kissed; and when her Red kiawagon tumbled off in sputters into the night back to the settlements on the Brighton-Alston line, I loved her and missed her immediately though we would dream together every night for nearly two years. Yes, doubt my claims to love, but I did love her and she did me under impossible conditions!

 

But woe is me, for I have said such things before to many lesser women.

 

 

 

Scene 11

266 Bigmar Street, 2079ce

Charlestown

 

Everyone up the mountain wanted to know what had happened in Charlestown; wanted to know if their name was now in the hands of the terrorists. Wanted to know and couldn’t seem to get the answer; was the hatch compromised? Did the rebels know about the train up the mountain to London, Paris, Berlin and Moscow? You need another train for Beijing. The rails are just different.

Dmitry had dealt with Adon and his ilk for years. You never knew what you were dealing with for the man was/ is a lunatic; he was simply not grounded in this realty. The reality of the way things ‘actually are’.

They had served in the Frontier Calvary together for two years. They had been unlikely but rather seemingly chummy friends for before Adon become a Muslim, or releveled himself to be a Muslim; he was hard drinking, womanizing Calvary Officer.

We digress, what the fuck happened in Charlestown on the afternoon of 28 May, 2015?

Sebastian Adon, wearing a grey battle dress multiform, and a weathered brown leather jacket parked his grey charger mod in the mostly empty parking lot. It was just before dawn and snow fall was light for late May; light for the fact that it almost never ever stopped snowing in Greater Boston, it had been like that for as long as anyone could remember. The charger steamed in the tundra of the warehouse district and many people were watching this dawn raid, though none could be immediately seen. And there was urgency, it was in the air.

Urgency looks mostly like smoke.

On a small red pad was an address and a room number and he had hardly taken an indirect route. He was about to barge into 266 Bigmar Street, into a multi-site warehouse which housed thirty to forty shell companies and trucking firm; barge right into a front company called Solutions Comprehensive LTD; and planned to shoot Ilya Lubov in the face. It was the very early morning of 28 May, 2017 Gregorian; or common era as is normally marked. It was also AR 5; five years since the uprising began in New York. It was two years since the bloody murderous chaos of the Millennium hostage crisis. It was 48 hours since the founding Congress of the Development Union; it was just one day since Adelina Antolievna Blazhennaya messaged him; “I’m back.”

According to Adelina’s friend Lana, Addy was strung up in that warehouse. And Ilya Lubov was thus a dead man. Sebastian Adon, in his own mind alone was carrying a .45 automatic repeater. In his deranged mind he was about to violate primary standing order #1; do not take human life and primary standing order # 2; do not destroy property; because in his mind, his mind alone right now union members and affiliates were positioning truck mounted artillery launchers in the hills around district Charlestown, and on his signal, they’d light the whole vile traffic point up.

But in reality the gun he grabbed was empty air! He gripped nothingness, firmly. The forty fighters thought to have his literal, lateral back, there were none. None at all. The death trap toward which he was barging, was fully loaded.

No one stopped him in the perimeter, though a bead was on him since he got out the car. Which did transform in the eyes of all other beholders from a Grey modified Charger; to dinged up puny Honda Civic. The district was eerie and silent at this hour, 05:04. This was a place of whores and truckers, bunkers and tunnels and spies.

 

He made it into the dim lobby the front doors were not even locked and the buzz board had the listings of dozens of fiction based and highly questionable compiles; there was what he wanted ‘Solutions Comprehensive Limited’; on the fourth floor, but probably anywhere. No one had mopped the floors in a decade.

It was all just a shell, just a cheaply lit cover story for nefarious transactions. Did anyone even actually believe that it was a real business, which ‘real’ things happened in this barely warmed ghost town called Charlestown? All these trucks coming and going from the ship yards, all these containers on these trucks. What was in them? No one ever asked certainly not the Boston police department, in the pocket of the Fenian Mob. When your circle of existence is small, you never know the names of the underbosses. You never wonder what’s in the trucks.

And the answer was that mostly banal things were in the trucks. Consumer goods, agricultural products. Women sometimes, but really that wasn’t anyway to get a woman you planned to work the bed on a contract into the country.

You just paid for her to come and married her off to someone. That was more cost effective then getting caught somehow with dead hooker asphyxiated in a shipping container. Solutions Comprehensive, according to the website was a tech support maven & global supply chain logistics fixer. Big words to say nothing. Sebastian tries to find the floor and office, but the place isn’t really designed for anyone to find anything.

 

He just pushes it all along, follows long poorly lit hall ways past big locked doors. He walks a very long time, covers three floors it seems, the lights flicker. This place is built to deft perceptions. His hear is beating faster. Where is she hidden?

A man put his hand on Adon’s shoulder, makes him jump. The man is a Fenian foreman dressed in coverall, he has a thick brogue.

“Eh, whatya looking for lost?” he asks.

“Sorry, looking for Solutions Comprehensive.”

“Eh, well I know thinking yer lost.”

“I’m sure it’s at this address.”

“I’m the superintendent, I know every nook. I don’t know any Solutions Comprehensive paying to lodge here.”

“The super?”

“Super.”

Adon takes out a smart phone and shows the man the site. The man nods.

“I think ya have the wrong building, brother.”

“This is the only building on the whole block.”

“Above the block yes, but what about below and beside the block. It’s a tricky area. People are lost all the time. Trespassing by accident on the turf of the others..”

“You’ve never seen this man,” and Adon shows the super a picture of Ilya Lubov.

“Never seen that bald bustard.”

“He’s a very bad man.”

“Is it?”

“I’m gonna kill him.”

“Eh now, listen, ya can’t say things like that here, no kills here.”

“He’s holding my baby’s mother hostage in a blue duffel bag.”

“Is it? And yer here to find her, and subsequently kill him; in this very building?”

“I know she’s here.”

Tricky fucking Fenians.

“Maybe she is, but I never seen that man, never seen the blue duffel, on this floor anyway.”

“What’s your name, brother?”

“I’m called, Ian Murphy, Superindenant of facilities, card check time then is it?”

“Card check away.”

And Ian Murphy hands him a green badge which identifies himself as Ian Murphy O’Grady O’Connell McMurphy, Superendeant of facilities, Teamsters Local 240. And Adon hands over a blue card which identifies him as Walter Sebastian Adler, paramedic, Uniformed EMT & Paramedic Union, Local 2507.

He then takes this all more seriously.

“And ya have no front teeth then?” Ian asks.

“The rumors are mostly true.”

“Is it true you once murdered forty men with a ball pin hammer?”

“No, that’s not true.”

“Is it true you decapitate and then drink the blood of Slavic prostitutes?”

“Not true, slander even!”

“Hm. Well, Mr. Adler. Should I call you Ilya Lubov today then?”

“Yes, that will do.”

“Welcome to your new office, sir, looking for a big blue bag with a young Russian girl inside it then are we, at Comprehensive Solutions?”
“Yes, that is what I’m looking for.”

 

“You seek a Russian girl in a blue bag, bound and naked?”

“Well I have no idea. I just know she’s here. I know she’s in the office.”

“I have to make a quick phone call, I need to check in.”

“We’re still good? You and I?”

“Oh yes, pull out your teeth a second,”

And Adon drops out his tree front teeth with his tongue.”

“Thick with madness, its maybe really you.”

“You can never know a gift horse, but to look it in the mouth, old Russian saying.”

“Mr., eh-hm, Lubov, we all know that isn’t an Old Russian saying at all,” he says with a cheeky Fenian grin.

Ian Murphy takes out a clunky phone to call the Secret police.

Sebastian Adon takes out a mobile phone to call the regular, normal person Boston Police and they both make the calls reporting suspicious behavior in the warehouse, give a precise location and ignore each other and put down the phones.

 

Adon notes, the battery on his phone is suddenly only 2%.

 

Ian McMurphy he puts down his phone, as if one hold, “You should go, you’re in imposter. Place will be flooded with the constables soon, ya ain’t gonna get out alive, not that ya care, but the girl might care, the one in the big blue bag.”

“Listen to me Finnegan, where the fuck is she?”

“Haven’t the foggiest. You’re a trespassing deranged EDP,” he then whispers, “take fucking salt and go to sleep, or they’ll get unruly on the Gulliver, put you down again.”

“Ok. I’m going to shoot you in the heart in you don’t tell me where she is,” I say and take out a make believe invisible gun.”

 

“You know you’ve got nothing in your hand man, you’re in a world of psychotic make believe, dancing a mad jig on a hatch way to the other side.”

 

“Is that even a real brogue, or do you put that thing on to get chicks cause you’re ugly,” I ask him putting my inviable, invisible blaster to his chest.

 

“Boyo, you know not what dark forces you toy with today and yesterday,” Ian says, “there are not ghosts or gods only dark sciences you do not understand.”

 

“Bang,” I say. And a hole rips open his chest, how curious.

 

I hear my baby screaming, screaming down the hall at the top of her lungs and I leave the body of Ian McMurphy on the floor dying, and run towards her. De ja vu, the horror of my loves screams disappearing into some vortex where I am completely powerless.

 

 

Scene 12

266 Bigmar Street, 2079ce

Charlestown

 

“The rain in Spain is mostly Champaign,” Ilya Lubov says.

 

I tell him he’s a dead man and he won’t leave this room alive. So many break out a gun and the result is deadly, I aim to hurt him bad, rearrange his ugly Russian Ivory hybrid bald disgusting face.

Nonviolence can suck my cock. Stupid nonviolence I’ll break your ugly face too!!

 

The dull wet noise of fists on his face. Did I even flinch? I hate him so damn much.  So I forget nonviolence and keep trying to kill him, as hard as I can, this vile rat won’t die. The best I can do is murder the biological host.

 

I’ve dealt with these demons before, for I am one. Everything is bleak and disempowering, everything is useless. I continue to beat him and I hear the thud and rupture of shells coming down outside. I guess Roj finally called in the air strike. I guess I don’t have much time with this snake.

 

Of all the pain and humiliation I have suffered in this life and all the ones before it, all the snuff and torment. Its worse that they wipe me, they make me forget, they manipulate me into doing things I didn’t agree to, Emma and the oligarchy both; they prey on my fearless immortality.

 

But I’m awake now! Bombs are lighting of outside I can feel it. Roj has ordered artillery strikes to level this township apart.

 

You bald snake, you yellow rat bastard! And I threw myself upon him, I fly tackled him and brought the butt of my gun to his face, frack!

 

His desk was kicked over and his papers his useless front papers covered in dust got a coat of blood from his oozing Gulliver.

 

Fwack! I brought the barrel down again and Ian Murphy must’ve just excused himself into Irish death, kept out of this bellicosity. I beat Ilya’s face with my fists and the gun, the dead thudding of cracking open his face, sitting on his chest brainy him to death. Could you even really kill these animals? Wasn’t that too good. Too easy.

 

Sometimes, when I’m killing or I’m saving at a high enough intensity I can remove myself from linear time into some hyper sonic Zen, it’s actually not very different muscle memory patterns I use to murder people or save lives. I am sad to say.

 

The building shakes, the Chechens have been seriously improving the range of their rockets and the force of the war heads. Roj either assumes we were killed, or assumes we are impervious to arterially bombardment.

 

There is Adelina’s big blue bag, she’s in it, still screaming. I take out a big knife Trickovitch once gave me and I scalp Ilya Lubov.

 

Then I run to the bag and I take her out, and she looks hysterical. I’m covered in his blood. And the building shakes again from a shell landing nearby, Chechens don’t really aim. I carry her outside, all kinds of things are on fire, and there’s my Charger, and I put her in it, and I drive like hell toward the bar lev line; where hopefully we can reconcile.

 

Chechen rocket men are hitting this town with everything they have. My phone is dead, I can’t tell Roj to have them back down. Light it up then, den of pimps, traffickers and thieves. Whatever we do to their property, they have more property. Whatever we do to their bodies, they have more bodies.

 

 

Scene 13

High Tower Complex, 2079ce

Isle of Man

 

 

So, that little red flashing light on the starlight map on my smart top; it tells me that serfs are storming the hatchway in Charlestown, pushing the line demonstrating that my associate Ilya Lubov has lost control of his section, that the serfs might seize a train or compromise the hatch or worse still march an army through it toward Moscow. So completely unacceptable, even if the rebels and the serfs don’t know the hatch is there.

 

My name is Dmitry Khulushin Koch, the real one, the darkest little prince; 2,000 years an Oligarch. I have dirty blond hair and smug un-aging grin. My father is one of the Upper Oligarchs of the Pan-American sectors and the East Siberian plain. I once won the city of New York in a card game, then lost most of it to fucking niggers and communists. Sometimes I am unsure if I live in the last ‘free’ city on earth, or rather I live free in earth’s last real city.

 

By that I mean such a violence has over taken us, such a clear and present danger to the power centers that maintain the global core; the inner 46 zones are threatened. I say “free” not like the commies do, free to do what I want to whomever I want, now that the war is declared.

“Let me begin this yarn by telling you something about my little rugged feudal homeland that the local leaders like to call the Big Apple, the control room of the rest of the country even still. First, let it be said that a small place one has rarely left seems like a big place, a central place, a world of mythology springs from it, one’s first love is always the best love, if one never had the opportunity to love after.”

 

The place we, in the inner locust circle; myself, Khan, Brera and Perchevney; the call the ‘Republic of Man’ is something of an island on a hill, a mountain fortress we disguise with holograms and such; but made so not necessarily by virtue of being surrounded by the sea. It has only two major adversarial population centers on two colliding sheaths of rock we call the North and the South Isthmus: ‘Isle of Man’ on the North Isthmus which in hologram looks like it has a very large harbor, but few seaworthy boats as all the water has been cluttered with increasing multitudes of various war machines; if we turned the illusion off the Isle of Man would be 64.2 kilometers sharply above sea level; the third highest point on the mountain of the Core. It has very tall wrought iron buildings, but no respectable jobs: everyone is some kind of serf or some kind of prostitute, or overlord to service. It is built on a sloping monstrous hill where all the richest citizens congregate near the top, right under heaven but never, ever touching it and still even in those heights the rich need air purifiers. On the South Isthmus, which is much lower to the water and much-much larger is the city of Breuklyn, or the Breuklyn Soviet depending on parlance of tabloid of faction. A micro-republic with two sectors Breuklyn Soviet to the South shore and Goddess (once Queens) Soviet on the North Shore; they both absorbed part of the rest of Strong Island out all the way East to the anti-nuclear defense facility in Montauk, and the hatch there to Space Dirigible 718; one of the largest crafts.

 

This is a place largely populated by the non-white Ivories, Noires and Chornay which are known for hording gold, stealing cars and copious amounts of handgun violence, as well as worshipping all the incorrect old deities. There is deep and heavily mined valley in between the two cities and the toll of the single bridge between them is very high. It appears due to hologram that there are many bridges and that the Isle of Man is level to the Breuklyn Soviet; but that is again an illusion. It is impossible to get across the bridge without the proper papers, and completely impossible to cross the shield Wall on Wall Street without six degrees of multipass on your mobilblat and a UAS approved pass card.

It is perhaps incorrect to describe our micro nations as two grinding, mountainous Isthmuses connected by a single bridge; there’s those by the water, living in six story bunkered poverty like cock roaches and us like gods in great towers. An Isthmus geographically connotes a narrow winding land corridor between two larger land masses. So called North Isthmus certainly is just a small mountainous island of indiscernible size made highly vertical by towers of glass and steel. South Isthmus is certainly a considerably larger island: called Strong Island; one could say is quite long. Both islands are surrounded by sand, not by water so to call it a sea or even an island is a misnomer. Grey rock drops off into red sand. There was once a great ocean, but like many other things: it dried up.

The hologram allows the serfs to imagine that seamless travel is possible to all parts of the United States of America; but that is not true. They go where we direct them. The “Manhattan” of “Brooklyn” they see is just a mind game.

Our historians sometimes say that the calling of the two departments Isthmuses was a play upon the idea that at one time the North Island was very prosperous and highly connected to the world of the future, while the South Island was connected deeply with the old world, the old country and the forgotten past. So in truth, neither was a proper Island lacking water, nor were either truly an isthmus because they were equally isolated connected to nothing, but in a country where only 5% of the population can truly read, well such nuances are truly lost to the rubbish bin of words used correctly.

As said, the United American States is 87% of the territory of the old USA; which crumbed out of being in 2076; the Republic of Man, nominally part of the New York State plantation is based in a land of high of mountains and deep sand. Roughly 100 hours’ worth going easterly from either city and the wanderer will encounter a very high steel and concrete wall cutting the south Isthmus into the Administrative Department of Breukland Soviet, independent and isolated now for three years; and presumably over the wall some worse and treacherous place. There are no gates in the wall, and it is to be thirty bistouries high. There are also many landmines and un-exploded bacteria crystal bomblettes. The only thing I know for certain is that to the west there are mountains and a vast and impassible desert, and to the east over more mountains a very high and completely impassible wall. And then it’s all plantations and suburbs and factories and prisons; I fly over it sometimes to reach the other citadels.

Our leaders zealously fortified the boarder against our enemies in the “Republic of Brooklyn” which presumably lies over the wall to the East. Our people and the Brooklynites, Brookynians, or perhaps “Brooklyneers”: it changes within our three newspapers periodically as well as nearly interchangeably; well we and they were at war for a very, very long time. Before terrible shortages of just about rumored everything began to drain our once proud nations’ resolve generation after generation of our youth will be sent to engage in large scale, bloody and always indecisive skirmishes with Brooklyneer youth over the borderlands between the two states of being; there are 13 such breakaway zones and we have been unable to crush them; they seceded in 2076, the Separatist Wars went until 2080; there was almost a nuclear exchange and a boat load of terrorist attacks.

Our leaders never attempted, and our history books never explained why we were always killing each other, humans I mean; but there are many credible rumors on the subject largely related to theft of women, also the eating of pigs. Back when there were pigs. Which taste like people, so we eat people now cooked to look like old pigs, oh well.

I have never met a “Brooklyneer” I liked, and I only seen a picture of a “pig”, but once a very old man, a veteran of the thousand year war, or at least the very end of it gave a lecture at the local canteen about when the ‘Former Great Space Powers’ decided to help us build the mile high wall.

He had told us, in between shots of Parv Blue Label and long swig swells of Barlakh, that roughly a generation or two before his time there was something called the “Roman Empire” and they were a very powerful empire and we were one of their most important economic satellites; then called the Empire State. An outpost really. Maybe a rich city-state on the border. The “People’s Republic of Han” was another great Empire, far larger in population, also apparently handier with crafts and known for their sly looking ‘chinky eyes’, whatever that meant. The “Republic of Brooklyn” then called a “borough” was their landing point of invasion, their beachhead in the UAS or occupied whatever. There was also a rival hegemon called Eurasia; or the “Russian Federation”. Sometimes I let these drunks old men try and process reality, then I’d drain them of their blood.

We Slavs were poorly understood until we shed rhetorical socialism and conquered Europe. Except for the rogue elements like Putin and Navalny who want to bring the USSR back!

For a very long time apparently both the People’s Republic in East Asia and the Russian Federation helped pay for us to be at civil war with what conceivably had once been our own people living in occupied Brooklyn, so that they wouldn’t have to fight a far more costly war with each other, they being the States United and the hordes of Eurasia. And that’s about the extent of what the old man at the bar had known.

I am not interested in politics; I am into cars and rape.

Oh, and at some point “peace” became briefly fashionable so the Han, who the proles call the Chinese helped the Brooklyn separatists constructed a very, very tall wall between our small micro-Republics and that was all before the known world imploded and we took our local leaders very, very seriously.

The Administrative Departments of Brooklyn and Queens had, until 2076, an official census population of roughly 8 million subjects; 7.8 million are serfs who could leave their masters land some several hundred thousand are mulattos, they are some part Chornay but are land holders, card carriers and have valid points of the multi-pass. Across the bridge in there were Administrative Department of Man there are 2 million free citizens, and no Chornay except as house slaves.

Here a man can be a man, they say.

My mother, a Russian Slav of Kazakhstan said you can always tell a Chornay because he neither prays correctly, nor looks symmetrical physically. My hair is very blond and my skin is very white, so I know I look correct, and I pray to the one true god Jesus King of Christ, orthodoxly so I know my religion is the right religion, wink.

The Republic of Man is very logical actually, and it has to be being perhaps the only true free city left on earth, I keep saying that because Han Oligarchs and Slav Oligarchs have imposed strange systems that make doing business hard. There are now many new small wars waging far and near because of the competition of the great firms within the three power-bloc. I have not ever been anywhere else on earth besides the mountain tops, once Mexico; but this is what our leaders tell us our free press. The higher one lives on the hill of man, the more one has contributed to things surviving efficiently around here. The biggest contributors are the financial planners, medical scientists, the law-makers, the magnates and the senators. They all live high up above the Financial District, the Mid Towns, the Park and the Sides; one side for white Ivories one side for white protestants and above the labor reserve pools of Harlem and Washington Heights and certainly very high above Breukland in a pleasure castle called Fort Washington Acropolis; the Citadel. The more Chornay you are the lower on the land you live, the closer ultimately to the security wall and the sea and the terrible raping, murdering hordes of Brooklyn that if not for out hydrogen bombs and bacteria cluster rockets would surely storm the wall and kill everyone. So we’re told.

 

It is mostly terra-drones that go in to fight the rebels. As it should be. In 2080 there was an incident in the Isle of Man called the Millennium Theatre Hostage Crisis; in a newly opened hippodrome showing the Opera Carmen; rebel gunmen took the lesser cream of our city hostage along with thousands of international heads of state at the UN General Assembly. It degenerated into a blood bath; many foreign leaders and great local lesser oligarchs perished.

 

Is that the future? It’s like I know the future.

 

While it has been said the terrorist leaders Adon and Solomon were killed, I know that not to be true. I also know the Persian Revolutionary Guard Corps furnished them with intermediate range thermos nuclear warheads and we only gave independence to the 13 separatist zones because they nuked Washington DC, yes indeed they did.

 

A tumultuous couple of years.

That was the decisive moment in the three year war, when we could no longer kill Brooklyneers indiscriminately largely using bacteria crystals and robots. Or perhaps it was only a thousand days. New metrics have been introduced clarifying old fallacies of Gregorian time. The latest multi-dimensional poverty index assures us that Africa’s average 33 year average life span is far ahead of the international curve; even though there is now longer a UN we still try and measure things in their rhetoric.

Our minds have certainly expanded since those primitive days of globalization when our leaders had though the world was getting smaller. And for some reason flat.

So there you have it, my micro-country, and my brave little world. And it belongs to me! Perchevney lost it in a card game in 1998ce, a very long time ago except to us.  The Senate has announced that comparative productivity is up, vice is down, serfs are happy, Mulattos are quiet about their political ambitions and Blan on Chornay violence is down from last year. And human rights indictors in all sectors show our sustained societal progress.

 

Aided by high science, bacteria crystals and hydrogen bombs there have been no skirmishes with the People’s Republic of Brooklyn in nearly three weeks.

 

 

Scene 14

Box Night Club on Christie Street, 2079ce

Isle of Man

 

 

The Box Night Club, on Essex Street still in the United American States. Enter Siegfried Sassoon, a Cuban Actor who reads alone aloud on a dark and smoky stage from a ZOB Pamphlet, distributed circa 2076ce. The drunken Bankers, the new money the celbritards are all under the influence, and he’s supposed to insert a large onyx dildo into two twins dressed like maids, that’s the “scene”. But the curtain comes up, and there are two young girls, from Eastern Europe.

 

And he drops the dildo to the stage, out of his back pocket he pulls out a widely circulating pamphlet, and he reads:

 

“The Enemy of Human Rights & Development is called the Oligarchy!”
The Enemy of Human Rights and enemy of the people is a disciplined, and vicious network of elites. No matter what nation we are referring to, we refer back to these elites as local branch of a Global Oligarchy.
They are our certain enemy and the enemy of humanity generally.
Learn the word for it is what we call our abject opponents and should always be used appropriately and with discerning discipline.
At all times they empower themselves at our expense and exacerbate the high crimes and violations caused by the more powerful oligarchies and highly entrenched elite in each nation. While these are numerous mass human rights violations of our day, all Human Rights categories and entitlements under attack in every nation on earth.
Questioning the source of our misery and combatting the resulting mass poverty like we were in fact waging a people’s war for the survival of vast segments of our human kind is the core of our methodology.
Our enemy, once again, is called the Oligarchy.

 

A transnational global elite that not only controls supply routes and natural resources; they affect all of the inequity of distribution that so perpetuate poverty.
They do so completely selfishly and with little to no common ground other than their total greed. They share no creed, color, ideology of belief. They simply are united in their excessive and wanton power.

 

And what it, they, perpetuate is the exact mass poverty that is greatest killer of the poor and three quarters of the human species that has ever existed.

 

Our enemy is the Oligarchy and resistance to it must be strengthened in every nation. We cannot measure human progress in narrow and banal economic terms. We are far more than numbers. Statistics of productive workers learning to read and having our children survive birth. More than wage slaves or chattel slaves. Human progress to the Oligarchy is about securing their position indefinitely at the expense of the rest of humanity. Sustaining our productivity measuring our world in GNP, infant mortality, and literacy.
We demand the fifty eight human rights entitlements as ours to be enforced and safeguarded just as our baseline measure of that thing called freedom.
Our demands are not only directed at the U.N., the confederations of the NGO’s, or the political leaderships of Core Hegemons.

 

Beijing, Washington, London, Paris, Moscow, Geneva and Berlin.
These are not the only seats of their power. There is an aristocracy in every ghetto, a kingship of every slum and of course bosses on every plantation, camp and factory.
They have everything to lose because they have mostly everything in their possession and we are asked to give our lives to get them even and ever more. This is not just an indictment of the wealthy and insatiable. This is about organized traffic of slaves, guns and narcotics. The manufacturing of genocide and war. This is about competing power centers, perhaps thousands of Oligarchies that all functioning without coordination will eradicate us.
And many of them are completely insatiable.
There are those that ought to be tried as war criminals under the standards of the International Criminal Court. There are other that are just mega-criminals. What makes an Oligarch part of this Oligarchy is not only his or her sheer power over the lives of regular people, the masses. Us. It also involves to what degree do they violate our rights or turn us into a productive or profitable resource. A slave, a wage worker or an uneducated consumer!

 

 

Exit Siegfried Sassoon, to a nervous applause, if any. (What the fuck was that sill shit?)

 

Surely someone has already called the secret police, if they are not already here. There is an App for that! There were no tits! No Jazz and no tits, no evil sex monkeys? What kind of performance was this to be! For this shit they bought 900 American dollar bottles of vodka!?

 

A bouncer he knows James Brown, a big black cat of a fellow, James tells him he had better go out the back door and ‘run for his life’. So foolish to pick convictions over tits and cash and work. I would never, ever do that, thinks James Brown. I would never gamble on the unseen or the impossible, or the possible unverified by my own eyes.

 

 

Scene 15

Highway I95 near Newton, 2079ce

Massachusetts

 

 

Ilya was really pissed that I scalped him and stole my woman back. And that the Chechen Minute men rocket razed his warehouses and such. So he ordered his private army to level Waltham Special Engineering Camp, kill everyone there, and take us alive so he could violate and torture us. He was also of course after the list of names and numbers and places that so exposed him and the lesser Oligarchy to attack should it reach the resistance, which it did immediately after I tucked her into bed.

 

I ran her a bath, I bolted the safe house doors, I called up Irfan Khan to be my wing man/ gun man; and in under an hour of the Battle of Charlestown; Jefferson McIntyre, Refilwe and Saiph Khan were already moving down the hatch tunnel to Hartford with the list, and we’d successfully uploaded it to secured drop locations on the interweb.

 

And then with Irfan Khan watch the roads with and a Carmelite repeater and an AK, and Kudzai’s team mining the roads; and then the motherfucking robots swarmed us.

 

Lots and lots of drones bombarded and rampaged into the camps; we held them off as best we could with rocket bombs and electromagnetic pulse burst cannons. These metal monsters soon over ran us, and we retreated into the tunnels blowing up, or lighting on fire most of the Shrakasa research facilities in sub camp Brandeis, Bentley, McCullum and the (testing on) Children’s Hospital.

 

We retreated back to the GHQ under the home of Ricardo Veshanti; and then he wished us luck and he took a team out towards Dover along with his family and we took a team out towards the parking garages where we hoped to steal some cars and run the highway after dark.

 

Oleg and Yulia rendezvoused with us hastily.

 

The Interstate 95 Highway, barely visible due to heavy snow falling upon us! A weigh station on the road South to New York, the City of Many Many Lights. Enter Oleg the Bear, Sebastian Adon, Yulia Romanova and Adelina Blazhennaya running from a hail of law man bullets! Bang! Bang Bang! RATATATATATTATTRTATTATATTATATATATATATATATTATATTA! RATATATATATTA.

 

Thinks Sebastian:

 

Everything was on fire and my ears were ringing. I could smell black smoke of our vehicle on fire struck by the rocket from a drone.

It did not take us very long to get noticed. It occurred at rest stop in Konnecticut. For all the bribes that had been paid to allow the four of us to depart in certain quiet, sometimes you miss something critical, like an outdated registration on the vehicle. Or, an expired Easy Pass.

 

And then a gun battle erupted in that weigh station, between the broken glass of the McDonalds, the spilled coffee of screaming patrons fleeing and everyone got separated. Yulia pulled Adelina under a car to hide and Oleg the Bear and the local police shot it out for a bit, until Oleg’s gun ran out. Adon didn’t have his gun.

 

Thinks Sebastian:

 

The two local cops unloaded their shooters on our position and we were unable to see where the women went to.

 

The sirens were very loud, the terror sirens that go off when accused terrorists are doing anything, and Oleg and I are running into the woods. He’s limping like he took one, but that doesn’t slow him down much.

I’ve gotten slower, I used to move so fast when shot at back in Palestine. I don’t have my gun, Adelina took it, blast! Where are the women? It doesn’t really matter now. I’ve seen this before, I can’t seem to escape from these camps! We get pinned down, Oleg runs out of bullets. The Secret Police, the department of homeland security show up. We run through the woods for a while. I’ve been smoking for two years in the camps and I can’t run like I used to.

All that talk, all those bribes, it didn’t matter. They catch us using helicopters and drones and flood lights.

 

We’re both pinned down somewhere out in the woods.

But, we die on our feet not our knees! Little consolation really.

 

The bodies of the four “Red” terrorists are displayed on all the leading channels of the evening news.

 

Exit Sebastian, Oleg, Adelina and Yulia too from this version, this episode of the world. I was killed several hundred times in this way, sometimes in cars, sometimes in planes, sometimes shot to pieces, sometimes burned alive, sometimes lost lonely and lethal she tried hard to keep me together, keep us together, but I always came back and she was there waiting. What a keeper.

 

Her auburn eyes blink, just for a second and there we are, reborn in another time and place. Another possibility.

 

Scene 16

Sheffield, 2079ce

Konnecticut

 

 

The Woods of Konnecticut, near Sheffield stand thick and green even in this wild winter. Enter Nicholai Mapfre, a film maker from the South roads via modest Zip Car. Enter Adelina Blazhennaya, a Russian linguist, from the North. Enter the brothers Eric and Joseph Ruhelman, Franco-German bikers, from the West near Buffalo. The first unit was lost, but the body of Adon is still warm.

 

Nicholai Mapfre, who has sleek straight black hair like the beautiful mutt that he is had to zip-rent a car under a fictitious identity and drive three hours into the plantations of tobacco country Konnecticut due to a misunderstanding about the pick-up as well as the state of comings and goings. His contacts in the underground told him the Israeli team were all killed.  The pickup was the corpse of Sebastian Adon. The year was 2079, and the world revolution, the union, the events you may or may not have read of had and hadn’t all happened yet. You see reality, is not like a corpse. It doesn’t need to be bagged and tagged. It happens for different people at different times. The body was warm, and it needed to be because the South bound car dispatched because of the confusion around to whom the body should go needed to be resurrected by a sorcerous so she could testify on what it saw.

We are not banal, pale monotheistic Christians, so we do not live in the reality of black unchangeable static metaphor. Sebastian Adon died when bullets stopped his running, and then when electric currents stopped his heart. He was tied to a gurney and they were giving him the juice as per protocols. But with a kiss and bottle of vodka that corpse could tell many things to us. So Nicholai sped Northbound and Adelina sped Southbound, and she hated him so much now because he had betrayed her so many times before he died. In ways that made her livid to breathe him again.

Everyone was now dead. Everyone that have ever known him had been put to death in the jealous rage of young Oligarchs Ilya and Dmitry. Also Laurence Koch. Nicholai Mapfre was alive because he had never joined the union and mostly stayed out of Adon’s cell records for ten years. Adelina was alive because she had the power of a coy young god. And Ilya wanted her badly back for fuck and conquest. So badly he cracked her jaw and Sebastian had changed the color of the sky above the City State of Boston.

He’d ordered Charlestown razed and rocketed into the ground and fire dust, simply because Ilya worked there. That was just 45 days ago. 41 if you counted the interruption of the Bangladeshi Wedding.

The Franco-German Ruhlmann Brothers had paid 9K in bribes to steal the body and switch it out with the body of a homeless lune from Buffalo, NY. They didn’t affiliate with anybody but Princess Akhtar, the newly Muslim wed where they’d shared a table and rounds of juice with Adon, a day before his second capture. But, we’re jumping around too much. Too many names and places and you were raised on TV. It’s impressive you’ve even reading this. Words are so boring.

On 28 May, Adelina Antolievna Blazhennaya returned from Moscow. The day after the ZOB came out from fifteen years of the underground and formed a trade union with about eighty other delegates from dozens of international partisan groups. What did the ZOB stand for, shut up, say the Ruhlmann Brothers; Eric and Joseph. Eric is dark and Joseph is more Nordic looking. That guy Adon was a dead man. And had we not been well paid and respected his general odd character we would not have converged with our muscles, Catholic icon tattoos and fast cars to steal a dead Ivory, excuse me, a half Hebrew, half German Fenian terrorist.

 

The sky was still black above Boston.

Thousands; almost a ten of thousands had died over one strike to the face of Adelina. Ilya slapped her when she walked home with a bag of groceries Adon had bought her, that was one story. Adon moved her out. He tucked her into bed. He had every reservist called up by the 29^th rockets blew away Charlestown with everyone in it. Ilya lost three days earnings and a hand and an ear. Most of the camps around Boston were put to flames by the serfs. This was not the old Adon, the peaceful-nik. He killed a small City over one hair on the head of his intended.

Intended? Yes, Adon had long proclaimed he would marry the high priestess Adelina Blazhennaya, but they had been separated by Moscow. By Moscow? Yes, but Moscow she had fled for Moscow after witnessing so many things she could not explain in Hispaniola, in Haiti the heart of so much darkness and raw ambition.

Well it was 17 July now. 45 days later. The Akhtars were married and on second honey moon. Charlestown was a crater. Ilya was missing an ear and a hand. Adon had been brutally tortured, and was evidently now dead. That’s what the certificates said. Nick was speeding, except until Konnecticut; Northbound. And Adelina was speeding, except in Konnecticut South. And Kudzai Chikwamba was back in Sharashka Waltham because he was too black to bring anywhere. You’d get pulled over driving the actual speed limit. But of course Kudzai, being a believer in the prophesy was a supporter of the companions of Adon.

 

And Adon, well he was quite dead.

 

So the Ruhlmann Brothers stole the body. And Nick brought a video Camera, and Adelina in deep wooded hide away poured the Vodka over the corpse. Reached her hand into his chest via the mouth and pulled out a black, black heart. It was still, then it was again ticking. And she wound a small lever upon it. And miraculously the bullets feel out of his body. And she quickly, quietly made the three men turn away and she kissed him. And he came again to life, his 14^th incarnation.

 

“You bastard,” is all she said, in Russian, “You damn cheat.”

The dead man Adon, he may have blushed.

 

Scene 17

Camp Stafford Springs, 2079ce

Konnecticut

 

They all sat there wondering what this man could possibly know that made him so valuable that were running around this tobacco ginger bread village country waiting for him. And, yes Adelina Blazhennaya, the daughter of messiahs could answer that. The ‘there’ was firstly, the nifty trick that Adon didn’t die as other men did, he became reborn with only some tinkering and his corpse no matter what degree of harm came to it; reformed, slightly overweight and slightly burned yes, but a knock around guy who doesn’t die was hard to come by. More importantly he possessed a certain more interesting trait. He drew people to him how were awake and had their own Allah given abilities.  And doggedly, sometimes with guns sometimes with speeches he had for over 4,000 years been protecting the bloodline of the prophesy.

 

The bloodline of prophets, messiahs, high priestesses and the Mahdi; Emma Solomon. Now, this was a dying reality. The Great Revolt had not happened. The Union had gathered great partisan factions, then inadvertently set them all up to die. Or be assassinated as Ilya and Dmitry had ordered and ordained. That meant, that in protecting Adelina, his intended wife’s honor he had finally incurred the wrath of oligarchs he couldn’t give a heart attack to. Whose money wasn’t tied up in the burned out semis and blackened sky above Boston. He had fallen for a Queen Helen; he’d burned out all his closest allies over a woman.

 

Wouldn’t probably be the first time. Just the most self-destructive time.

 

“Not, because I was in danger, or because he had to, because he slipped up,” Adelina reminded the camera being welded to the moment by Nick Mafre, rather Nicholai Mapfre Bruckman, the last living friend of Sebastian Adon. They had even captured the Bear Ivory Alan Oleg Medved. And cut him into little tiny pieces to feed to dogs. He couldn’t talk or fight his way out of that one. Because Adelina was way more than a friend and the Princess Akhtar was the Princess Akhtar; royalty. You couldn’t be friends with superior species. You could be rooted for and root for them back; fighting!!

“You fucked up chicken, and you just got fried like suicide,” notes Joseph Ruhlmann the big French German Viking with both arms tatted.

“They even got to your man Mickhi Dbrisk,” noted Adelina.

Sebastian just assumes that cannot be true.

Sebastian flinched, his life energy moving throughout the body the Buffalo boys had stolen and Nicholai was filming and Adelina had turned her back to.

“Will she ignore me forever, or just for all of this life?” Sebastian asked Joseph.

“The words that Princess Meftahul Janaat S Akhtar Khan told us; you’re the best killer the world has ever seen, the gunslinger of Tel Aviv and Be’er Sheva. She’s the daughter of an imprisoned high priestess. And since your so called ex-wife Emma Solomon is dead, and Avinadav is dead; well the candidacy for savior is nigh. And we’re Catholics so we get behind Miracles when we see them,” states Eric R.

“Indeed,” reverberates Joseph.

“Is anyone paying anyone to be here?” Nick asks.

“My brother and I were paid by the Akhtars to be here, but since home boy came back to life and the birds above us circle above Adelina, we’re here to learn,” says Eric who has a black brown beard and a picture of what could be the Virgin Mary, or could be the whore of Babylon, or could be Adelina Blazhennaya shifting eerily on his right forearm.

“Your tattoo is moving,” says Joseph.

“I can hear you think man,” states Adelina, “I’m no whore.”

“Well how now new friends, what are we doing out here supposedly so hunted in Tobacco country?” asks big blond Joseph R.

“Wait for it,” says Sebastian.

“What?” asks Nick Mapfre the tragic little filmmaker?

“Now we are five, but soon we will be forty,” Sebastian says.

“The dead man talks in useless riddles,” says Eric.

“Wait for it. Wait. Now.”

Out of the thick green bush erupted men on all sides with hatchets. Ugly toad like men. Planters sent on a scavenger hunt for five heads. Four marks and one young brunette slim lustful capture. ‘Do what you want to the men, lottery tickets for all hacks!’ had smart phoned in Ilya. ‘You bring me the brundinite young lady, unmolested if possible, but things happen in a hack fest I can’t control. One million a body, 10 million for the girl alive,’ these were the orders than sent all forty of Dany McFadden’s planters, hookers, hangers and bangers into the woods with their hatchets to flay four and take one sexy, young, auspicious prisoner.

“Blat,” was all Adelina said.

The Ruhlmann brothers drew their side pieces and mentally counted the bullets in the clips and chambers. Sebastian, who was not fully here yet drew his index fingers out like pistols.

“Wait for it,” he repeated.

The grim mob moved in, but as the lesser, lower base prophet JZ says, ‘what’s a babe to mob, what’s a mob to a king, what’s a king to a god, what’s a god to a pack of non-believers, who don’t believe in anything, make it out alive!!’

“Make it out alive,” Adelina whispers as the hatchet men move in and the Ruhlmann brothers get the itchy to pump clips. And Sebastian looks looking crazy and Nick just keeps filming.

“Make it out alive,” and suddenly plant roots shoot up to hold their paid assailants in place.

“Don’t waste you led fair escorts, brothers Ruhlmann, Sebastian; hold fire.”

“The roots squeeze them until they tangle above shoulder level all forty bandits. She seems to guiding the roots with her hand.”

“A second most auspicious miracle,” notes Nick Mapfre. Three to be a saint, four to be a martyr and five or more; the Tzadikk ha Dror; female candidate for messiah.

The mother of nature squeezes until they have all dropped their hatchets.

“What now brother, shall we dispatch them as they would have us?” asks Joseph.

“Nay. They will know us for while they have slaughtered our people, we will not kill.”

Sebastian looks lovingly to the woman her calls his God, the manifestation of his God as a Valkyrie; a warrior angel, no more. If he has woken from the hands of hospitaliers and Emma and Avinadav and all his brother/ sister allies are dead; then how now, she is Mother of Messiahs now.

“Who is this Ilya man your now feeble friend here has so slighted? What kind of gods are we warring with in assisting you?”

“He is an old god, a creature that has managed to survive very well through all the transitions. And Sebastian burned out one of his major American trafficking points Charlestown, and he thinks her stole me.”

“Think,” smirked Sebastian and the brothers laughed at that.

“Let’s just keep it moving,” Adelina says. “I have made a rendezvous with Arelene Daly of the Fenian Republican Army on my mental. It seems if we just keep moving two of Adon’s choice collections are alive. Arlene of Erin and Tiputti Capois the Haitian sensation; in the protection of one very loose cannon Watson Entwissle, also a Haitian. And then we will number eight. And Watson has a plan to steal an air ship and bring us to liberated Ayiti out of this Babylon slave farm.”

The wrenching faces of the over nourished hatchet men grimace as they pass through the woods. The Ruhlmann Brothers help Sebastian who can barely walk. Nick keeps filming everything. Keeps filming the miracle miles to come. For as they pass through the woods, these chosen five; the birds circle overhead, the birches bend toward her, the path opens itself to them; 44 clicks south west to where Watson is hidden in a tobacco barn watching after Arlene and Tiputti. Make it out alive. Make it out alive.

“Had you not said all my friends were dead?” asks Sebastian.

“They are my friends now, and I don’t let my friends die for silly causes. And you ushered in a world of death and killing to avenge Emma and then me, but my efforts are towards art and meditation. Singing, dancing, healing and dealing with the misery made by men. Can you dig it, blat?”

 

“I can dig it,” is what he thought in her general direction and she heard in her magnificent head. At that very juncture he could dig just about anything she said.

 

 

Scene 18

Camp Enfield, 2079ce

Konnecticut

 

They moved through the thick forest woods as best they could Adelina advised Nicholai Mapfre that there would be nothing good to film, but the half Indian-half Russian film maker told her they needed what was called B Roll, and she didn’t fully see why or even in her vast powers completely get why they even needed to make movies of these happenings when so many would get to live it.

 

Sebastian was slow to his new body and the brothers Ruhlmann had to carry him most of the way by slinging a branch under his shoulders and lifting him on theirs. And they gruffly nearly asked why the messiah couldn’t get dear or birds to do it. Or just levitate him.

“I’m ignoring him until the time I feel he is penitent for what he has done. As G-d has done to man, but not to woman,” she replied before they could get the words out.

“Why are you still filming us comrade,” asked Eric, “nothing very miraculous is happening. We’re just carrying your mildly heavy droog.”

“I’ll carry him awhile and you can film,” Nicholas Mapfre suggested.

“Is it Brick Man, or Bruck Man or Mapfre,” Joseph asks.

“It’s both and all. Bruck when I film and Brick when I shoot, Mapfre when in Europe as it’s my step fathers name,” he replied.

“Are you a guns slinger like this man Adon? A righteous killer across reality and time?” Eric asks. And then it damn near escaped him but now he realizes, he is a Bruck-man and we are Ruhle-men. And Adon is Adon. What serious stuff to be named a name Adon and not be a man, be someone’s man. To be independent born. How curious.

The forest opens before her but remains thick. It is the hot-hot heat of mid-summer and they are traveling North by North West following day stars only Adelina sees, they march as slow as the Ruhlmann brothers can carry the resuscitated corpse of Adon and Mapfre can b-roll. Where are they trekking; away from threats and towards beloved comrades. For after the merry holocaust Sebastian unleashed on Ilya; came Ilya’s reprisal; death and lots of it. He had wanted to degrade Adon to nothing and keep degrading the daughter of prophets and kings Adelina as was the oligarch way. Rape seduce and befoul all women that might become champions. Turn them to lovely irrelevant side pieces or just level them to whores. One did not keep power for 6,000 years as they had by not knowing to get their potential enemies young.

 

“Tell us a story as to the how now Ms. Blazhennaya,” Joseph requested.

 

She begins in her stalwart, commanding voice, “Now, we are not Christians so we need not make brief basic story telling. We can divulge mystery and divert to camp. In the beginning there were two races of monkey; chimpanzee and bonobo. The chimps were selfish and violent, the Bonobos were loving, calm, cool, and collective. They both loved sex but the Bonobos asked for it and chimps just knock rock took; like the later Neanderthal men then spawned. Now we all are educated rebels, so we believe in evolution. The Adons’ are half chimp half Bonobo; as are the Mapfres’ and the Ruhlmanns’; you are lovely and sensuous mutts.”

 

“She did indeed call you sensuous,” Joseph said to Eric.

 

“And the other men too, mixy mutts. Now around 6,000 years ago, remember that the Hebrew reality is now only 5775 years old; just shy of the Mayan B’ak’tun calendars; 26,000 years of servitude came before they came from the sky; aliens guys. It’s all very real. Superior alien military that in also two dichotomous species crashed hear and also liked sex, liked continuing their line and there ways. And then there were four species here all making love and rape, war and compromise. And more arrived because something was so interesting about woman and man; bonobo and chimp kind; they were veritable energy bags. They carried energy much more seriously than the aliens did and this allowed all manners of things to be powered. Great ships and hanging floating gardens. Pyramids and great walls. Are you following me; you are the sons of waring apes and benevolent and exploitative extra-terrestrials.”

“No stop for now, it seems like a silly movie script. Easier to believe you’re the daughter of King David, 28 generations or more removed,” Eric says.

“Well I am of David. But David was of something and I tell you that he was of gods, but what are gods really? Have you been to space? Have you at least seen all these stars and not known each was a sun that could produce the life forces we have here and did?”

“Yes I believe woman, but how now? What mission are we on?”

“Well I will tell you this; the oligarchy plans to obliterate Adon and befoul me bare foot and pregnant and materialistic. They plan to wipe out you all clearly and take me as a toy for the likes of Ilya Lubov; Ilya ‘I Love you’ as that demon goes on about, Sebastian too, to often.”

“Why were you dating him then this Ilya?” Eric asks. Eric was the brash one and Joseph the strong silent type. Both could do what they had to do in uncomfortable situations.

“Don’t make a martyr out of me yet,” she replies, “I have human wants and human needs. They hold my brother in the thrawl of opium demons. My parents are entrapped in Tank City with no will or way to leave. Adon was my man and he gave me adventure, but Ilya held a key to my family he had potential to help me free them.”

“You collaborated then and Adon made a jealous holocaust,” Nick suggests. These conversations are worth the lithium batteries.

“I am a woman of bonobo breeding. My mother was a high priest and my father a Pararescueman and flying fortress pilot.”

“The best men to the airships and the best women to the pilots,” Adon mumbled.

“What did he mumble?” asks Nick.

“I heard nothing,” definitively says Adelina Antolievna Blazhennaya; which means in English; Lena daughter of Anatoly, the Holy Fool.

“Why are you such a holy fool,” demands Adon.

“Speak not or I will close my ears and eyes to you and you will be left as a mad man in the wilderness howling on about your love Adelina who runs with the stars birds and moons while you turn your back on love peace light and guided meditation. Cease talking to me now for you wound me up and caused much useless hardship. I had almost wooed that king to give me my family back passage to Babylon where they would be safe. KNOW YOU how much plutonium glows in or near Tank City. KNOW YOU what happens when the opium demons get into my brother with dirty re-used needles and aids. Quiet please Adon if you claim to love Adelina be quiet.”

 

“Told him she did,” Joseph tells the video camera.

“Did I tell you that should I be made the candidate of choice for Messiah, now that the choicest candidate Emma is dead; should I survive the hassle and ordeals; we will all lie around naked, make art and meditate. Will you follow me out of Babylon?”

 

And many were watching. Because Nick Mapfre, was live streaming hoping it could make someone watching from home care. You see if an Ivory dies in a forest and no one saw him die; you can break him into parts, and eat him as a cracker.

But if a Bonobo warrior woman and her resurrected gun slinging paramedic ex-boyfriend do magic on camera; then in Babylon, the Eagle, the Dragon and the Bear have a clear and present danger to contain.

 

 

Scene 19

Camp Mansfield, 2079ce

Konnecticut

 

Nine is an auspicious number and that was the number of their little band once they came upon Watson Entwissle carrying a sub machine gun filled with plastic bullets. Watson was a true gentlemen and gangster, and also a paramedic, and he had saved and killed alongside Adon in the days before and during the Brooklyn Soviet, the “Breuklyn Soviet if you wished to spell it correctly. He has seen Adon die several times and gotten his light skinned freckled Haitian ass tortured by Russians before over Adon and his flirtation, constant fucking flirtation with Russian women. His Bent Uzi can flight up eighty men before he has to reload the clip. The plastic bullets will break their ribs and drive them to his boot strap. He’s wearing a thick leather jacket and had a grey beret tucked in the inner pocket. He’s never wear that queer shit like a French fuck.

 

Haitian baby, Sak Pasay!

 

Nap Boule bitch, all of Charlestown was on fire over this latest Russian woman. According to “the prophesy” the most important earth Chakra lay in Moscow and that is why such dark power is harnessed from there. The vampires, I use that name exclusively for these blood sucking white oligarchs we war with; they used the blood of their own people to water the holiest ground in existence. And “the prophesy” says that when the Moscow ground is liberated the other chakra points will radiate peace love and light. The so called Age of Aquarius, on us any day now. Water being brought to us all for long time poor people have struggled. So went the wonder words of prophesy.

Charlotte Kamande is the buxom, beautifully placed together and quite Ugandan lover of Watson Entwissle so-so much does she care for him that she put on a leather jacket too and loaded up a Bent Uzi, and jumped out of a container plane above Konnecticut miles high above to rescue Arelene Daly, a blonde and Fenian and Tiputti Capois, the famous Haitian revolutionary commander of the GAI; these four were the sole survivors of the 1^st Union Congress. All forty-four major other delegates were tracked down and cut down. Had Watson and Ms. Kamande not so valiantly jumped out the sky, and her strapped to him in tandem having never sky jumped before; had not holograms and a barn been used to hide three blacks and one blonde in Konnecticut; then Adon would have been the sole survivor, no wait they got to him and had killed him too.

 

“Do you know the cross he bears, the Ivory one,” mentioned Watson. “I say Ivory meaning Hebrew because he sure as fuck ain’t a blan no more.”

 

Charlotte Kamande she preferred him to be European sometimes than Breuklyn ghetto fighter. She once read that he and Adon had killed over 100 men in Europe; hunted out and used Voudoun, their secret powers to wipe out 100 slavers, traffickers, petty oligarchs even a Russian general named Budanov; wiped out a whole wing of the lesser Oligarchy as a Brooklyn Good Evening!

She preferred to think that at the 1^st Union Congress Watson had transformed from adjunct to a murdering band of underground rebels; to respectable politician. They were good and naked an on leave in New York, just outside the Soviet in a village called Yonkers when Watson’s bat phone went off and it said the Oligarchy was wiping out delegates as fast as they had come out the underground; like a set up. And Tiputti called him and said he was hiding in a barn in a place called, or just outside of Sheffield, Konnecticut. Lord have Mercy!

And Adon was dead, again.

“Do you know how many times that man has seen the oligarchy kill his friends, he isn’t ashamed that zealot, maybe he should be. Do you know these beautiful eyes of mine are grow backs, they cut them in another life in Moscow? Why do I follow that man? No I don’t we follow each other we are all following god. You a Catholic, that’s cool. There’s a lot of books and a lot of gods, our god is one true god.”

“Adelina?”

“Who?”

“Sebastian’s new woman.”

“She ain’t his woman. He is just worshipping her like he’s supposed to.”

“No, I disagree,” interjects Tiputti Capois, the young Haitian general with his piercing inquisitive eyes that dart about the room, “When they were last in Ayiti, just this summer, I could tell he loves her.”

“Friend, you’ve only known him in Ayiti,” Watson responds.

“That may be the case, but I know him well enough to know that when he cries her cries for us sincerely and when he sings he sings for us sincerely, and he is Haitian in certain ways as he is Hebrew in others. And the rebellion here has been suppressed with the blood of his closest. The Oligarch is switching things. They are erasing people. I hope Ayiti is still there when we return to her.”

“Don’t worry this bad motherfucker will steal us a plane,” says Arelene Daly in a thick Belfast Brogue.

“That’s right I will and the little Messiah can fly it for us and make the fuel not run out, imagine that.”

“What makes you so sure she’s what she says she is,” Arlene asks.

“She didn’t say nothing,” says Tiputti.

“It’s the prophesy,” jokes Charlotte.

“It is the damn prophesy,” Watson replies.

“She arrives from the East on coffin of eighty eight good men. She brings the dead to life and she moves the world around her with light and love. That ain’t here well we’ve been tricked behind enemy lines into Sheffield Babylon for the last time. Because no planes I can steal without bullets and men will take us out of Babylon on just jet fuel. I need a messiah, and she’s from the east and bat phone said they stopped Adon’s heart noon yesterday with electric current.”

“Is Jefferson dead?”

“I don’t know. I just know that Ilya went after just about everybody. People Adon had just had polite conversation with, his family, his brother, people he used to causally fuck. Ilya wiped him out in just three weeks over this woman and the Charlestown rocket siege,” Watson reports.

“Why are we alive?” Charlotte asks thinking of all the murdered faces of the 1^st Congress.

“Because I’m Watson’s lady,” she smiles.

“So you’re saying a living breathing Sebastian Adon is gonna walk through that barn door,” Charlotte asks.

And then the barn door swung open and walking nearly on his own now a living breathing Sebastian Adon, smelling a bit like sulfur, almonds and Vodka walked in.

“Tricky devil,” smirked Watson.

“How now gun slinger,” and the two embrace. And followed into the barn are Nick Mapfre the film maker, the Ruhlmann brothers and of course Adelina Blazhennaya securing the tobacco rafter barn door behind them.

“I don’t know none of ya’ll but Ady-Lee, nice to see you and Sebastian; you my Ivories.”

“We’re Eric and Joseph,” Eric says pointing and they shake hands.

“I’m Nick,” says Mapfre, “we met once upon a time in Brooklyn Soviet the last time these fools disrupted the stratosphere. We filmed it for posterity.”

“Can you walk yet,” Watson asks him, “we gonna have to bum rush a plane.”

“We’re gonna fly a train into a plane,” Adelina states.

“Are we now, well as long as you can fly a train I’m your gun slinger,” Watson says.

“How long have you been here,” she asks.

“Two days,” Tiputti says and she embraces him very happy he made it out alive.

“What have you eaten?” she asks.

“MREs and Gatorade,” Watson says.

Adelina gathers up the hanging tobacco and she piles it, then begins rolling it. And it changes slightly. The tobacco rolls become midnight sushi from the sea and she serves it out to everyone. A fuck ton of midnight sushi.

“Of course the Russian messiah can turn tobacco rolls to sushi rolls,” says Joseph Ruhlmann.

“And then there were 9, I didn’t know you’d bring a girlfriend,” Adelina says, “I’m Adelina.”

“I’m Charlotte Kamande.”

“I read about you, you’re an oracle.”

“Tough men with non-lethal guns guarding two candidates from the East,” she smiles.

“I don’t like it when they call me Messiah, so far these are just parlor tricks. Sebastian and Watson once killed 100 men with needles and voodoo. I just came online. Four weeks ago I thought I’d marry rich and move my parents to Southern California. It’s very hard to know Adon, but he’s loving when he’s able.”

“Ladies I’m not dead anymore, I’m standing just right here.”

“So a train into a plane, that shit ain’t subtle,” Watson says, “you big guys give me your guns I want to see if they’ll take Afula specials.”

“We’re more than happy with real ammunition thank you,” Eric says. Having seen too much magic in too short a period.

“Fine, but don’t kill anybody it’s against the rules of management and also the new covenant,” Watson says.

“We didn’t make any new Covenant,” Eric says.

“Brother, and I rarely use Muslim/Union talk to strangers in front of Adelina, she mocks me for it, but you’ve all see a dead man come back to life, the woods swallow our aggressors and before long a flying train; can you just empty you clips and fill up with non-lethally. I’m sure Watson has a few extra clips of Afula Specials,” says Sebastian Adon.

“Says the greatest killer the world has almost ever know,” Tiputti Capois.

“That man is the pale Dessalines,” Watson says, “but I’m Petion.”

“Jacobins be at ease, fill your bellies with Sushi, they will kill if they have the need to kill. I have often decided not to make great men good or bad men great. I have faith in my own powers,” Adelina says.

 

“I’ll give him my gun if you can turn water into wine,” Joseph says.

She touches an open canteen and it turns into white wine and Joseph and begrudgingly Eric hand Watson their burners to tinker into heavy handed, non-lethal toys.

 

 

 

Scene 21

Camp Sterling, 2079ce

Konnecticut

 

Now that there were nine of them they were very powerful, especially protected by so many guns and so much magic. Marching slowly South East in the deep woods toward the coast.

 

The woods were thick and they waited out the day in the cool of the vertical tobacco hanging barn. You may not know this but one of the largest production sites for cigar tobacco is the American Babylonian state of Konnecticut. Now what’s with the Babylon? What does that even mean a civilian might ask. You see, the Hebrew; the Ivory had twelve tribes; thirteen if you counted the divided tribe of Joseph. So these tribes were descended of 12 brothers who sold their brother Joseph into Egyptian slavery which triggered the events of the later book of Exodus in the Torah, or Old Testament. The word Old seems to imply that that the New One; the one about Jesus and his fine work somehow abrogates or replaces laws that are so exhaustively laid out in Leviticus and Numbers and Deuteronomy.  613 sets of laws for The Ivories; and 7 Noahite; laws of Noah for the Gentiles; everyone else; like don’t rape, rob murder, covey and kill. Basic shit for non-covenant observing people. Now you can’t buy into a covenant until Jesus and Muhammad come and Muhammed one of the first things he does in Medina is restore most of the laws the Romans pulled out. We’re jumping around here but I’m sure this was written for Gentiles and Ivorites that know how to read and can handle dissonant, abstract thinking.

Babylon was ancient Persia and Iraq and more. It was the place that 10 of 12 tribes; well all buy Judah, Levi and Dan never came back. It just offered more than endless tribal wars to extinction with Canaanites and Philistines. It was a modern, pluralistic, developed ancient empire and ten tribes just stayed put. Lost like an American Ivory. America is called the Eagle in Rastafarian tradition to show its prowess as an aggressive empire; one of the four horse men is another allegory along with the Hawk; Europe, the Dragon China and Russia the Bear. We call America Babylon because once you manage to get and stay there, as long as you’re not the black race; you forget where you came from.

“You might send money back,” mentions Tiputti Capois.

You very well might. Remittances make up a tremendous source of livelihood for the people back home. But the longer you stay in Babylon you learn not miss war and ethnic tribal Chimpanzee purges. You learn to not miss Cossacks and the pale of Settlement. You get a house, you ante up in the debt game; you work until you die. You die until you get to work.

This is called a Reality Shift. Like the one that happens every time Adon gets his life so foolishly taken, or kills his damn self. He once shot himself twice and fell off a roof over a call girl that made him write boat loads of meaningless poetry.

“I don’t date Russian women exclusively. I date tough women that might be able to keep me from reality shifts; needless dying.”

“So you used to date that hot little Messiah,” Joseph asks him.

“I did. She never committed much to anything until Haiti.”

“What’s so important to you about this Haiti place, and why are we trying to get there,” Eric asks.

Watson and Tiputti raise eye brows knowing the shpiel of Adon quite well. It is a good shpiel. It tells of the historic nature of the struggles for the fate of the divided Island and its people.

“We are so interested in that island because its people were the first to defeat the Oligarchy. Others had tried. The Greeks took on Babylon and held them back for some time. The Hebrew Roman Wars went on for over seventy years. We were massacred and decimated and turned into sex slaves. The French defeated the worst of the French, but it didn’t last long until Napoleon began empire building and marching on Moscow. Whether anyone knows it or not they are all marching on the Chakra points and all trying to march on Moscow. Genghis Khan knew, he’s the only one to take that sacred ground and now we’re all a bit Mongolian. I would say the Russian Oligarchy with its Ivory advisors is about half Mongolian, a quarter Ivory and a quarter slave; that’s where the word Slav came from. The Tartars used to round us up and take us back to the Islamic Empires. So much history they never teach you. We’re going to Haiti because in a people in land is power, and if we are captured here they will kill all of you and make me a slinky court jester happy house wife,” Adeline explains for him, she isn’t in the mood for his yarns.

The Ruhlmann Brothers take in all the comings and goings in their Franco-German burly way. The leather and blue and grey clad paratrooper, paramedic Watson Entwissle paces without smoking. The bullets he gave them from his bag of strapped clips expand on contact and break bones not flesh. Afula Specials because they were designed in the Israeli town of Afula to keep the Canaanite body count low, well until 2074 when a high degree of who gives a fuck set in after the Sudanese and Russians genocided their own citizens and the DRC mineral wars broke the Ivoryish body count of 6-7 million in the Holocaust; you round up because no one counts babies really. Anyway the Israelis have a whole line of non-lethal weapons for putting down a lesser armed enemy. After the great purge when the resistance wiped out about 104 lesser oligarchs then foolishly lost all its own and more in ruthless civilian kills it was acknowledged that an eye for eye will make everyone blind, but a tooth for a tooth; the oligarchy takes more teeth.

“What is this Oligarchy you keep thinking so much about; these men that killed everyone that mattered in the resistance that Adon ever even smiled at,” Nick Mapfre asks.

“Before we talk about them, let’s talk a bit more about the island we will escape to during the night’s fall,” Adelina says, “Tiputti, would you and Adon like to give us a history lesson on the Peasant movement called The Waterfall Family. Now that the Z.O.B. maybe but we nine; and the Brooklyn Soviet may or may not exist and the resistance maybe over, but for we nine and the forces on that island. You see in another life Adon twice brought forces to defeat the Haitian oligarchy and their murderous collaboration with the NGO Class. First in 2074 he brought medical worker. But it wasn’t enough. In another reality he raised a guerilla band and out of Brooklyn Soviet brought 1,800 fighters to liberate the place. But it was a blood bath and million, literal millions died and the Dominicans all but conquered the place and tricked 200,000 into leaving D R for Haiti never to return. When it was done, again Adon had gotten many of his closest killed, this time perhaps for a cause. The resistance took 1/3 of the Country, but the Dominican influence made sure that nothing changed. Avinadav Butler was arrested and deported, and executed in the middle of the Atlantic. This was a reality not meant to be. So we re-started it,” she explains.

“There is way too much magic going on for us, I’ll speak for me and my brother. We are simple, brutal tragic, god fearing family loving men. We have a rock band. We drive motorcycles. We break skulls only when have to and we only have these guns because Princess Janaat told us that once we stole Sebastian’s body we’d be hunted like dogs. I’ve seen plants attack hatchet wielding white trashlings, I’ve seen you bring him back to life; hold his very heart in your hand. I’ve seen bullets that don’t kill and heard all kinds of interesting mythology. You even told me you’re going to steal a train and make it fly. We, are appalled by the magic seen here. What use have you for us, or even video cameras?”

“Because no one is going to believe in our candidacy if we just leave another trail of destruction along the road to Zion,” Watson proclaims, “I was the only one besides Sebastian there the first and the second time. Haiti is nearly impossible to hold.”

“It is truly impossible, which is why we love her so much and are so invested in here candidacy,” states Capois.

“How do you, restart reality?” Joseph Ruhelman asks.

“We go into the Great Temple and we ask the great and only true God to let us leave our bodies and go back to a marker point. A place where we agree to meet when we die. Adon does this as easily as he draws or writes Russian women poems, almost with glee. We love life more, it is almost traumatic. So we store our best fighters and compatriots in a Temple under the tallest mountain in Haiti. And when we fail, and we have failed so many times it is irreproachably taxing on all of us; we pull back to the Temple and there we emerge. Something has gone wrong though this time it’s all a mess.”

“Ilya wiped out the temple, he wiped out the bodies and maybe the spirits. If you don’t hear one of America’s most talkative revolutionaries yammering on; it’s because I’m cold shouldering his corpse, but it’s because he fucked up. He fucked up real bad,” mutters Adelina.

“He fucked up so bad because he exposed the Z.O.B.s list to Ilya when he moved against him without authorization,” Watson explains.

“We pledged not to kill. At the first Congress most of the awake ones were getting ready to pull the underground out of hiding and fight in the daylight. We had just lost Avinadav and Emma. Haiti and Brooklyn Soviet never were. It was as if we gambled a whole arc of our loss and struggle to wage a struggle with no violence and then; a major leader wipes out Charlestown over an injury to Adelina that is problematic at best to understand,” Watson says.

“I was never even any threat. It was pure jealous rage,” Adelina says, “I was tasked by the late Emma Solomon to ascertain why Adon seems to fight losing impossible battles, concentrate incredible forces, and then lose. For like 3,000 years. He even fought Xerxes once at Thermopylae as an Acadian.”

“I determined that he doesn’t serve the enemy on purpose. He’s just simple insane.”

“I am not insane, I am in love,” comes a voice that is more used to talking in other yarns and realities.

“He is in love with an idea of himself, as all men are. It was our curse and blessing that he both cannot seem to die and he so attracts such mighty defenders, lord knows even as a daughter of Russia I believe humanity needs defending from itself.”

 

Scene 22

Camp Griswold, 2079ce

Konnecticut

 

Before the barn structure caught flames and they found themselves locked in a ring of fire our band of heroes waited out the day and they all took time to reflect on what was inevitably coming from inference and from prophesy.

 

Now allow us to recount the events of the previous books, but those transcribed by and about Sebastian Adon and the big books too; the ones people make religions around. We begin big to little as Adon would die many times before anything he wrote made print.

The Old Testament is a collection of writings chronicling the rise fall, temptations and betrayals and massacre of the Hebrew people. Abraham the first Hebrew has two sons; Yitzhak and Isa; the Ivories all descend from Yitzhak who has twelve sons; and one day the Prophet Muhammed will descend from Isa. The tribe of Judah which returns from Babylon with the Dan and Levi tribes gives rise to King David. Fourteen generations later Jesus is born to Mary. It’s about six hundred years between when the Romans pretty much martyr Jesus, fight three wars with the Ivories between 60 ce and 135 ce; then take on Christianity and change everything. The New Testament is pretty much written over ninety years later by Roman collaborators that drop out the laws of Moses. Now in 646 the Prophet Muhammed arrived in Medina and begins working on the Qur’an, although he is functionally illiterate. This book reconstitutes most of the stories in the Old and New Testament; he also raises and army of slaves, whores, peasants and orphans which will conquer about 1/5 of the earth in the name of Islam. Both Islam and Christianity are taken over shorty after they are propagated by the biggest opponents of the new faiths. In the case of Christianity the Romans, in the case of Islam the Yazidi tribe that butchers the biological family of the prophet Muhammed including his grandchildren Hassan and Hussain. The Seal of the Prophets remains for the most part sealed until 1864 when the Baha’i faith emerges based on blood descendants of Jesus and Muhammed; Bahaullah and the Bab. In 2001; based on prophesy Emma Solomon and Avinadav DeBuitléir carried out the warrior work foretold in the Baha’i prophesies, but they did it much more violently than had been written and some say they invalidated their mandate. Now, Christians think Jesus is coming back. More educated Christians except that it’s a blood descendant, not the actual original guy. Most people on earth don’t know how to read. About 1/3 of the species is Christian or Catholic; a Christ follower. About 1/3 is Muslim. The next biggest faiths are Hinduism and Buddhism. Hinduism is highly problematic in that it reduces hundreds of millions to chattel caste slavery. Buddhism is more like a philosophy that everyone could use a healthy dose of. Most problematically is that there is no “J” sound in Aramaic or Hebrew. So Jesus was certainly not his name. His name, agreed by non-Canonical sources was Yeshua ben Yosef; Yeshua son of Joseph. There could also be no word Ivory; which was pretty much a Roman invention after they fought three major wars in Palestine against them which resulted in total Hebrew defeat in 135 ce. They leveled the temple in 70 ce. Ivory was Latin or nigger. Jesus got his whole name and race changed. It was impossible someone born in Palestine could be white. Muhammed tried to correct a lot of that but he too was used for empire building. The Baha’i almost 1,700 years later came with unity peace love and light. But no one was paying attention until a Mahdi, Muslim Messiah of Muhammad’s like named Avinadav; and Meshiach of the house of David and “Jesus” named Emma conquered the Eastern Sea Board of the United States after an event called the Great Revolt.

It began at the West Indian Day Parade and spread out into most major cities of the East Coast. The largest most successfully held was the Brooklyn Soviet, which perhaps fell or perhaps still stands.

The Ivories, which still call themselves that are still waiting for Meshiach. They reject everyone who has come. Their leaders betrayed Jesus, their leaders betrayed the Brooklyn Soviet. Emma and Avinadav spread the uprising to Hispaniola, and for some time even conquered Haiti as said. But there was so much blood. And this blood tainted the houses of Emma and Avinadav. It was agreed to return to the Temple and restart reality, abandon this one and begin again.

But something has gone wrong because here we are, nine of us in a barn. A barn that is now on fire. And where are our messiahs now? We have a pale skinny Russian brunette that does periodic miracles. We have two Franco-Germans with muscles and know not fear. We have a dead man who all heard was dead, but he walks better each hour fueled by unrequited love. There’s an Indian-Russian film maker. There are two Haitian freedom fighters one black one Mulatto. There’s a sexy Ugandan, priestess but no one has seen her full power.

 

You notice I keep saying nine, but it’s really eight. Nine is the Holy Spirit?  But as the smoke roles in and Adelina Blazhennaya freezes up, as they get ready to think of plan b, c, and d. The thick black smoke brings death, and the Holy Spirit doesn’t suggest anything useful.

 

Scene 23

Camp Griswold, 2079ce

Konnecticut

 

Very satisfying at first, the smell of smoke.

Thinks Adon;

 

Yes, something was burning down, but I couldn’t think anything about it because I was so love sick, so broken so totally down over this girl that I couldn’t bring myself to stand and fight. I will tell you that if unrequited love tastes like almonds, well when it goes on longer as it had it isn’t like almonds at all; it’s like punching yourself in the face and then it tastes like your own blood. Because love is supposedly self-less so when you’re eating yourself up over a woman, like Adon had done for two years well it’s all your own fault.

The barn was burning and they just stared at each other for a bit.

I hate you, she thinks. You brought me out of my basic American life and you thrust me into the revolution in Ayiti and I lived in squalor for what seemed like a year and now, now I just almost squared myself away with an ok guy, fine a major oligarch and you ruined it in jealous rage. You completely fucked up and got fucked by Ilya. You tried to burn him down but you’re just not big enough. That’s the damn problem; why can’t you be a man not some ghost not some martyr not some space creature.

They stared so long everyone else began getting a little nervous because they seem to have distracted each other from the hairy business of impending death. Ah, death. Everyone mostly feared it but they and this Mexican stare down was a product of that kind of bluff.

I will say this, he thought; that there may be only a couple things I took into and out of the hill of Waltham. And the one thing I cared about it very much gone. What know any other person of this kind of self-loathing, wondering why she could not see in me my worth? Had I not been through hell, had I not offered her everything? But she truly doesn’t believe I can deliver and it is breaking me worse than the deaths I die. I never have feared death, but I fear that I won’t get over this woman nor can I afford to get out from under her.

You see, if we were meek un-orthodox Christians we’d never even fathom that the daughter of the Messiah might love a hooligan like me. And yes, that is what I am. I reckless knock around hooligan that in every life have acted more like a Barbarian than a child of God’s people. The name be named; Yahweh must often wonder what to do with me. Smite me and bring me back to fight some more.

I wanted to lay down all my fighting when I met Adelina Blazhennaya. I wanted to not die. I wanted to not fight. I wanted to forget about Congresses and Unions. Even the glorious higher power of the cleansing flames of revolution! About uprisings and the struggle itself. She made me not want to struggle; she made me want to have kids.

 

Yes, you who know we know I am a hooligan and a zealot and all kinds of unstable things, but Adelina made me want to have babies. More than two, well maybe just two to start out. I remember catching the garter belt at a wedding and then like a horrible ass when she caught the flowers I denied that marriage was impending. I’m a horrible person, a total self-absorbed miserable person that will certainly die alone. And have before.

The building continues to burn and Watson rather stoically assesses that the door is barricaded so some party is looking to burn all of our heroes alive. A nice group of nemeses they’ve acquired since Charlestown burned down, as if that were the only thing this band was linked to.

So look, her look said; I can’t love you anymore, you took too much and now I have to live my life now, which may involve super hero shit, or maybe I’ll sell out like I was about to. That’s all my choice you know you bastard, yes bastard, you underground man; you delight in your own suffering but not I. I want peace light love and flowers, lots of flowers. I don’t want to hide guns in my purse, see everyone I know die. I don’t even think I can get us out of this flaming mess. You’ll have to do it.

Me, he thinks? You want me to do it? You want me to kick some ass for you again. No you don’t care. You don’t want to burn up, but you don’t want me to do anything. That’s the hall mark of unrequited love; it doesn’t matter at all what I do, you don’t care.

Well, thinks everyone else I hope the super naturals do something or we’re just gonna start shooting.

Look, thinks Adelina, there are things I admire about you. You’re super committed to fighting for your crazed zealot beliefs. That might make good father material, scratch that, might have made. You might have been a good father and it might have changed and matured you and maybe you’d focus on me and a family and not the god damn cause, your impossible vile cause.

Watson almost says, ‘could those of us that have been invested by god with certain super natural powers could you perhaps jump in before we are choked and burned alive, and I shoot up the door trying to bust out.’      

He thinks, I’m in so much pain. I’m being punished for what I said to her in the Empire Hotel in November when I called her a you-know-what. And then I bashed my face against the mirror and begged to die. Because she wouldn’t come back from Moscow and she wouldn’t trust him that he would quit the game for her.

And neither did anyone else. Their stare down was like mind sex with their clothes on a horrible tease. He wanted everything from her and she wasn’t going to budge. And what happened next, Capois, Watson and the Ruhelman brothers opened fire at the door ‘til they could kick it in and then they burst out the barn with the others in tow; they unloaded clip after non-lethal clip at farm boys, hatchet men, bangers and hangers on the payroll of whatever local farmer was now after Ilya’s golden ticket; but had forgotten don’t toast the main prize.

Eventually they shot up everybody, bang, bang; bang!

And eventually Sebastian grabbed her by the wrist and they got up out of the fire and he said, “Maybe you’ll never love me. And maybe I’ll destroy myself over you for everyone else’s amusement horror and sport. And maybe I’ll got to an early or a late grave actually thinking you were the one! I caught the garter like it was a fucking movie! Maybe I could have been a father! I don’t know anymore. I was in a hospital. My heart exploded and I died.”

This little tif is going un-filmed because Nick is watching a non-lethal fire fight conclude with more bang, bang, and bang!

“Sebastian. I need you calm, cool and collected,” she says.

“I may in fact have to rise to the occasion of greatness and I cannot, will not have you like a puppy begging for my undivided attention. What if I have to part a sea or move a mountain?? What you will be all sad faced and bush tailed? No, get it together. We may be over but I need you to act like the child of a god who will never turn his back on his people so I can act like the daughter of a god who turns trains into planes and gets us back to Haiti in one piece, can you do that man?”

“I love you.”

“Shut up.”

“I love you.”

“Stop saying that.”

“I love, you.”

And she picks up the entire flaming barn and all of the remaining henchmen and she flings them 100 miles into the sky. So, she pretty much got pissed and killed like fifty people in a ball of fire. Boom.

We’re making this up as we go, thinks Watson.

“They’re so tumultuous,” says Charlotte Kamande.

“So is the Old Testament and also the many parts of Star Wars,” says Eric Ruhelman.

“I don’t care what you blow up, what you level, what you save or don’t save. I love you and I will follow you until I die and give you my life gladly. And I wish, I wish my destiny was with you,” Sebastian proclaims.

Watson grabs his shoulder, “be way cool man. She stopped loving. And you gotta respect her because she’s the candidate now ‘cause Emma is dead and she’s not the lost, lonely and lethal miss thing you fell for. She’s a growing god.”

Sebastian drops his head and the pound he gives Watson says, he’s not the man he used to be. Watson remembers once telling him over a phone line, tapped into his prison cell; telling Sebastian a lot of people look to him for inspiration, so don’t fuck up.

“Adelina, Yulia, Oleg? What happened to them after the drones and the shoot out?” he asks Watson.

 

“They probably died, this is the effect of your friendship on many.”

 

Scene 24

Camp Voluntown, 2079ce

Konnecticut

 

They aimed to capture a train and somehow make it fly off the tracks.

 

It was easier in those days to hijack trains over planes. They would then take this flying train over the Sea of Galilee, Rhode Island out of Konnecticut and to a place called Block Island; 16 miles off the eastern seaboard, a fallen star ship; and there a powerful woman named Ms. Lisa Star could arrange their submersible transport to Haiti, re-fuel, take on fighters and then, who knew what things were possible, hopefully many.

“Why can’t the levitating train just make it all the way to Haiti,” Eric Ruhelman asks.

“Don’t be greedy with my magic,” Adelina says.

They had survived two serious onslaughts of hatchet men. She’s basically murdered the whole second batch fighting with Adon and that was what you get fighting with a jealous ex; nothing but useless black, emotional and real time death.

The 1^st Congress had declared ‘all killing is a crime against humanity’; a violation of the noble human rights. But she, had not signed shit. Her candidacy was based on three things. One, she was one of the last people to see Emma Solomon alive, had served her will well as ‘the steel hand of Emma Solomon’ so many took that has an anointing. Two, she was from Russia so the likelihood of her being a candidate was way up anyway, as most other nations had murdered all in the houses of prophesy by 2080ce. Three; she could turn water into wine, make plants attack people and she brought people back to life and also turned them into butterflies. Which is what she did with all the henchmen she threw fifty (not forty) miles into the air, as to be in solidarity with this new Congress covenant, although all its signatory delegates were dead, except Charlotte, Adon, Tiputti, Arlene Daly and Watson Entwissle .

Had Adon not decided to go after Ilya so flagrantly perhaps none of that would have happened, because oligarchs don’t make trouble needlessly; they don’t do show big dick/ little dick show things, they just have big dicks and use them to fuck. They don’t fuck to show their dicks, they fuck when they feel like fucking and there was not great reason for Ilya I Love Everyone Lubov to go on such a colossal killing spree except Adon had just spat in his face and fucked with his money too, in the same five minutes.

Now, what did or did not happen between the oligarch and Adelina; who only knew. A girls sometimes gotta do what a girls gotta do. But Adon, a few days after Congress got it into his head that she was in bad trouble. And he was used to his women always being in trouble because he dated a lot of beat up whores, trafficked women and the abused mentally ill; I mean real pillars of stability so he basically in his mind’s eye could paint anyone a victim.

Whatever, before we get to how trains are made to fly with magic it’s important to remember how alone Sebastian Adon felt when he came back to life. Other than Nick and Watson these were all mostly strangers. Adelina was giving him the total cold dead shoulder and the others too, were like; weren’t you just in the hospital? Didn’t you just die?

Ilya got his money fucked with when Adon ordered a brigade to torch and level Charlestown where Ilya did all his this side of the Atlantic dirt. Adon also ran off with Adelina which flew in the face of his ego as well, though she was a side piece.

 

So he came down real, real hard. The smoke cleared over Boston and then Ilya send goons flying in all directions. Gunned down Congress delegates, gunned down old friend. Killed his mom and dad, killed his brother; killed and killed and killed until no one was alive that knew Adon. Even Brooklyn Soviet was gone. It was just this man and his Haitian generals left to kill and he’d thought he’d wiped out their temple too; no more tricks. No more fourth dimensions. But no, the bitch brought him back to life.

“It’s a terrible place to survive a massacre you provoked,” Watson states.

Adon put his face into his hand. So much loss over a woman that wasn’t even that wronged, at least not by Ilya Lubov.

“You don’t have Perchevney to protect you either, they locked him up for some spurious offense,” said Watson referring to Adon’s oligarch protector antagonist.

“What do we have?” Adon asks.

“Two Haitian generals, a film maker, two hooligans, your ex and her powers and my girlfriend from Uganda.”

“What have I done?”

“You took for granted your power and you anted up everything and you lost almost everything over a woman who won’t even look you in the eyes.”

“I thought she was in trouble…”

“Will be printed on your god damn grave.”

“I didn’t realize who Ilya was.”

“I don’t think you cared.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I know you are.”

“What do I do?”

“We get on the flying train she plans to hijack and levitate. We fly that shit to Block Island. We get blessed, we get on a black freighter submarine, and hopefully Ilya hasn’t managed to killed Lisa Starr and sink her submarine fleet. Then you pray, you pray hard. They even killed Mickhi Dbrisk and no one loved you more than him, maybe your parents. I didn’t even know they could kill that bad motherfucker. But they killed him real good.”

“Do you hate me now?”

“I can’t hate you. I was pretty pissed in Moscow when they took my eyes, but I got new eyes. This too will pass. She’s very powerful your old lady. Even Emma didn’t so easily move magic.”

“What about Ilya?”

“He’ll kill and capture us, or he won’t. We’re going to Haiti to raise another army and then we’re marching on Moscow. Even with nine of us we are a force.”

“Such a force.”

“You don’t die man. Do you have any idea what that says to the rest of; god or devil we need a friend like you son.”

“What am I?”

“I know you’re basically a good person, but you get very reckless over these young Russian girls and you forget they are all perfectly capable for taking care of their own bad selves. You are a colorful side show.”

“I wanted to kill Ilya, purely because he touched her. Good or bad touch I didn’t care.”

“You got reckless. You burned his shit, you ultimately took a house wife and set her off down the path of the fire minds. You got Emma killed, but strange shit happens, how many times have you died and was it always your fault? You are always mostly to my knowledge on the side of human kind. Ilya is an oligarch, you pissed in his soup. He flipped out and was a lot less loving than his name implies.”

“Don’t believe his lies,” Adelina says dispassionately, “he isn’t clear even in his own mind who he serves.”

He sometimes let’s her be cruel, I mean he did before fly off at her sometimes when she went too long. But he was man and she was Russian, which means she had a loyalty tree. Around a tree was a circle and in hard times up into the tree she’d go waiving anyone not of her blood or feeding her. Which made it curious what she would do now.

“I’m going to stop a train. We’re going to storm and evacuate it. Then I’m going to pick it up with my mind and fly it.”

“I don’t doubt for a second she can do that, but can they be separated once it’s in the air so she concentrates only on the flying and not how angry she is at him,” Joseph whispers.

“I’m fine, the flying train will have my undivided attention,” she nimbly replies.

I wonder, wonders Charlotte what she will do if she has to. That is the question to ask will she turn us all over? Will she drop us and secure herself with Ilya if he allowed it? Why does a beautiful woman spend time around bald men; everyone knows bald men are either evil or have poor genetics. These were the things Charlotte Kamande wonders.

What I want to know is what she will do if she’s backed in a corner, if we can’t clear these rolling woods or if she gets distracted. She has so much power and we are just perhaps play things; what loyalty does she really have? She brings a man back from the dead but won’t even look him in the eye. Won’t even kiss his heroic cheek.

 

 

 

Scene 25

Barn Island, 2079ce

Konnecticut

 

I will tell you what a palaver is; it is a serious sit down talking to; it is a scheduled tune up for the mind. We take perhaps a break from the over stimulation of intrigue and great escape to have one right now.

 

A palaver is needed when reality breaks. It is you needing to affirm with another person that you’re centered, that you’re still there. Because when reality shifts the people you were with are not going to be there with you anymore.

I give you my word before G-d everyone will freak out and abandon you as soon as things get a little scary, even your blood and you will be a loon howling at the moon and no will care. That was always what Anya Drovtich always warned would happen, he’d just break and he’s be a zombie a walking dead man howling at the moon and the young ass punk kids would ignore him.

 

Sweet palaver, a heart to heart to heart like Watson and Adon used to have in their cell in the fire house; when a white officer called Watson nigger and Watson broke that white shirt crackers jaw. And Adon went AWOL to help in Haiti during the great big killing quake and the FDNY jammed him up. And they used to sit locked up in that cell and make big talk on everything, that’s how there shattah bromance first began, before they went on their great big hit of bad men in Europe. Before the world ended several times and began again. Before the second invasion of Haiti.

 

Because when you got to live a few times, fuck it, live right, live hard.

 

It had been a very long time since any of our heroes had a palaver and honestly where could they have found time, they could only just gawk at miracles and strange happenings. Charlotte had tandem dove out a plane to end up in this fire fight, now there was a lecture or two later about following those you love into wild adversity. The Ruhelman brothers were knock around guys, but they hadn’t grocked it all yet. They hadn’t certainly sat to talk it out. The palaver was a great talk out. It was a sit in the dirt and unload the realness off your chest about that which was killing you, and this crowd, well a lot was.

Charlotte Kamande had only been dating Watson for less than a month when he informed her he had to go on the warpath, board a drop ship and jump out over the sky of Konnecticut and that if she followed him there would be greatness, but most likely death and she hadn’t even gotten a small piece, not one small piece of affection since the drop and pall mall here. Eric and Joseph wondered was the paying price for this high enough. Would there be really weird shit differential in the future, and how much more. Was this super natural Russian babe a goddess or did they die in a moto cycle accident and wake up in the LSD realm of heaven and hell. Watson being a stone cold mother fucker was not even for a second going to put his gun down and breathe, not even one second. There was very big bad wolf trying to murder them all. Much worse than usual, that wolf ate up all his partner’s friends.

And Adon, he felt guilt and shame. For he was coming to terms with his reckless actions. He felt like he’s done fucked up. But there was raw obsession eating him each breathe he took and each step be jostled out. He was walking dead this time for real. He was empty because she wouldn’t speak to him or look at him she wouldn’t even pretend he was special, that he had touched her well.

Had he touched her well? Had he done enough? Had he given her a better or a worse life getting her all missed up with tumultuous vagabond change makers that didn’t have the resources Ilya did to safe up parents or wipe out tribes. It was like the eight of them were coming out of this fiery dream. A dream which kept trying to kill them.

And what was this about a flying train, really a hijacking of a train? When oh when was anyone on in the leadership of this little outfit; Watson and Adelina going to sit down and say; here’s the plan, Susan. Here is the meaning of it all. Here is what we are out to do.

You heard things like raise and army in Haiti and march on Moscow and you got palaver fatigue, like you didn’t even want to hear the whole thing. You didn’t care to. Wasn’t there an easier way? Wasn’t there a job to get to? A house to save up for? Didn’t the old god just need you to sit in the Church every Sunday and talk out your sins in the box? Didn’t you just get to keep calmer. No flying fucking trains? As if that was something more outlandish than the midnight Sushi trick or the water into wine. This was appearing to be very scary and real. March on Moscow eh?

Not without a Palaver to top all Palavers!

“I am sorry that everything is happening so fast. I’m doing the best I can. My mentor Emma Solomon was bit more tightly with her tradecraft. I’m a novice. If it looks like I’m feuding with my ex-boyfriend in the middle of our latest emergency it is because I was deeply hurt by his lack of discipline. You have no idea how much training was poured into this man. You have no idea how many times he came so close to victory and then it was like a laugh in our face from the devil, he is a most tragic man,” Adelina explains.

“But I cannot love right now, certainly not him as he has acted badly and most of all, unaccountably.”

“Are we all having a group Palaver? Can we palaver by group?” asks Joseph Ruhelman.

“We are having a sit down, this is not a true palaver, because right not my whole essence is racing and I can’t really comprehend anything you all might tell me. It’s all very one sided and I’m sorry.”

“It’s ok,” says Watson, “you have sick crazy powers, and we all just want to know our part.”

“Is there a plan?” Eric Ruhelman asks.

“We’re going to hijack a train and get out of American airborne, then cross to Spain by submarine,” she says.

“Yes. I’d caught the flying train part. I meant more existentially. Like is there a divine plan you are adhering to, or are you making this up? Are you going by Old Books, books we haven’t seen, it’s all disconcerting. A little anarchic really,” Joseph says.

“Sorry. I’m totally shooting from the hip with all these new responsibilities,” she says.

“So there, responsibilities, that word sort of connotes a plan,” Joseph says.

“No, I assure you there is no plan, per say” she says.

“Well raise an army and march on Moscow is something of a plan you must admit,” Sebastian Adon says.

“I don’t fully endorse that plan,” she says. And Arelene remembers an old quote from the history books, something about the Third Rome never to fall.

“Well we’re gonna stop following you unless you make us bit more comfortable with the ways you make decisions,” Eric says.

Nick Mapfre films the whole, not-a-palaver.

“I want a word,” Sebastian says.

“Wait, before you go on a heartfelt soliloquy putting together words she is not going to hear I think we are all owed an explanation as to what exactly is happening,” Eric says.

“Ok, big fucking time out,” Watson says.

“There are. Not. Going to be easy happy answers given out. We are also not at this time about to stomach Adon, who is a good man hurting himself with unrequited almond spread love. Big time out. She has even said she don’t have THE PLAN, she has a loose plan it’s a good common sense plan. It involves getting to Haiti where our enemies are less and raising an army there ‘cause we can do that, being Haitian generals, “Watson takes full control.

“Emma had great five year plans and they seemed very thought out, but Emma is dead and we’re never gonna find her body. Avinadav was cunning military leader and he conquered almost all of Haiti and half of Africa then lost it in under a year. So plans are plans they get fucked up. This little smoke stack here is powerful and we are all here to help her and if you don’t want to help her go home. Go home to TV and porno and beer and whatever the fuck, shit,” exclaims Watson.

“I just had to ask because it was already weird and to my knowledge I die, I am a man. I don’t come back. I die and hopefully go to heaven,” Joseph says.

“That too is my world view,” says Charlotte Kamande.

“Well I can’t take that away from you,” Adelina says, “but I can tell you that it is a narrow view. One that might not be so glaringly in your face like Adon’s powers, but I would suggest there are many lives to live before and after.”

It was clear that this is what they were after to make them less afraid; a message.

“If I am to be fair with you all, if you follow me we all may die and the lives you end up with will be very different. But we are after the great liberation if I am not mistaken, we are after the creation of human events that liberate the great mass of long abused humanity from war and poverty; and these events take a mighty army; where ever that army may one day emerge and march to; that I cannot totally plan. But if you follow me to Spain and then to Haiti I will keep us safe as I can and use my powers for awesome.”

“Aye, we’re all with you don’t worry,” Eric states.

“Good, cause I’d have to shoot anyone that disserts,” Watson smirks.

“Can I get a word please, for the love of the gods,” Adon says.

“No, I’m sorry. I can’t! I can’t have you begging for me right now. I need you to be a man independent of my woman-ness and power. I need you not to beg, not because there is some horrible ignobility in begging, but because you don’t need to. And it won’t get you what you are after. I can’t give anything but myself into my work, because the stakes are too high.”

“For the love of Emma one word,” he says.

“Fine for the ghost of Emma take your words and then we must get some rest before make a great train robbery.”

“I’m here when you need me,” is all he says.

There was no other woman he wanted in the world to impress so badly and it wasn’t for her powers, he loved her before she had powers. People sometimes get the powers of the gods they forget where they came from, but no.

This was an issue of trust.

 

Scene 26

Camp Misquamicut, 2079ce

Konnecticut

 

We were not far now from the beach, only a nights walk.

At times a person in life, like a great and epic story cannot decide what kind of story it wants to be, it has to find its way into its true character. And you all seem to have forgotten in all the melee of hatchet men that this is a very character driven story, although the characters are very different perhaps than you.

The stuff of miracles is how this began, but we must draw a noose around it and reign it in for you will reject reading too much more of these miracles coming from the hands of a lonely, lost and albeit fearsome Russian teacher of English as a second language; there are some other variables to square away.

For one thing, who paid the Ruhelman brothers to be there and was it enough money? That is a serious question because it is not so often you are pulled off your bike, barber tattooed punk rocker ways and asked to steal corpses that get resurrected and then march off to foreign lands on flying trains. What if they were not paid enough, would faith sustain them?

What of other whats’. We are told Adon has had many lives, but how has he used them? Has he squandered or has he done what he could with a lot against a lot? Has he just basked in the privilege of reincarnation and used it to awe and fuck a laundry list of Alina, Natalia, Yelizaveta, Alina II, Maria and Adelina; a list of six cold but loving Russian women, was that what he used all those lives for? No, periodically he also fought evil doers too.

What of Arelene the quiet when sober Fenian Republican who was also at the 1^st Congress? She was mistaken with the Holy Spirit she was so quiet but she had seen terrible, terrible things in the coal country of Australia. She’s survived Ilya the butcher’s blade because she’s flown home to Belfast out of his reach, and now she was here. She woke up in the barn after a long flight and short flight a jump out with Watson; she two was in the blue and brown; blue uniform and brown leather jacket and she also had a gun but hadn’t gotten it warm in the fire flight. She was just stunned, what in the holy fuck were they all getting into?!

Now the Ruhlmann’s being Ruhelmen were not going to die without being well paid and they weren’t going to follow this fuck train of preposterous magic much further because the contract, albeit the oral contract over the pay phone with Princess Akhtar was, get the man’s body and wait. That period of waiting was over days, at least two days of walking ago. And their phones were dead, no one had asked the aspiring messiah could she charge phones; only could she produce Sushi out of midair and turn water into wine; they got spoiled.

And the Haitians were taking it as it came because anything this powerful had to be respected and implored; could it be utilized to save their people. Watson and Tiputti had lived several lives enough to see this as a great game and they as soldiers in a great old war. And whatever could make a train fly could unseat the musician, the president for life of Haiti, and burn the Dominicans, and this time for good.

And Charlotte was following Watson because she had this fire in her and she didn’t know when again a man like that, a gentleman and gangster would be her part of the world again. The film maker Bruckman, we he made films, because if an Ivory dies in a forest, you know how the old saying goes.

No one cares if he dies even if he gets caught on film, but you have to keep a record of all these people dying so nobly in all these forests.

I’ll tell you what will happen before they get to rob a train and levitate it, this isn’t X-Men or the New Testament. Things are going to burn down and out gang will thin. Because no one, not one person trusted Adelina Blazhennaya. Not because she was Russian, but because she kept clearly doing what she had to do for so many years to survive. And how would that translate now that she had powers, no expected her to keep burning for them much longer. When Ilya caught up to them she might really be tempted to just do her, become some kind of trophy with some magic and get her parents safe.

Adon, since he woke up from being dead was having a harder and harder time remembering what the Great Revolt was for. He basically woke up feeling emotionally defiled because that who had been his one, well latest true love well she had lay in a bed with that bald Russian oligarch and professed her love for him.

That’s all that mattered to Adon, that he was no more to her. Since she pulled his corpse back to life, and she should be thankful, but he wasn’t. She had left him for another man and he was mortified and the cause, well the cause was going to have to wait a day or two more because all he could think of was pain, the pain of rejection. Of not being good enough, no matter who lives he’s lead, no matter how many saves he’s made, villains defeated, battles one; he could not get this woman back; Adelina; who he loved so much.

They were sitting in the woods a nightfall. The Konnecticut woods are very thick and very hard to break through without a path finder. They were all still following her. In their own ways, for their own reasons, even though no one trusts her at all.

 

Sebastian thought back to something Avinadav DeBuitléir once told him when they used to preach on soap boxes in dusty Be’er Sheva, “In the days to come we will have to be our own Messiahs.”

 

He hoped they would be up for all that.

 

 

 

Scene 26

Camp Burlingame, 2079ce

Konnecticut

 

There came a point when it seemed like they all had to rest because even young Adelina was having trouble making the fabric of the forest comply with her beck and mystic demands. So they all sat in a small clearing back to back, deep in the green hill country of Konnecticut, perhaps eighty clicks from a place called Stafford Springs where Adon had been pilfered from the Catholic Hospital St. Francis of Assisi. Surely he’d done some miraculous things in his day.

They all sort of crumbled to the ground unable to remember when they had last slept, but Arlene knew; she hadn’t slept since Belfast. Which was about four or more ago, she was good on little to no sleep, she kept positive, which was vital to surviving life.

Eric and Joseph were snoring. They went out cold, no one had really agreed to take watch by Tiputti Capois slept with one eye open, which was the Haitian way when danger seemed near. Watson slept with an arm around Charlotte Kamande and Bruckman snoozed on the ground, the camera finally dead and off. Well he had a backup battery but figured he’d wait for great insight or fire fight, either or. Adelina wasn’t sleeping, just sitting and meditating, and Adon wasn’t sleeping, because being dead is like a very long nap. And a satisfying one.

Then there was no one left to count, nine renegades.

There were all these variables that Adon and Adelina could see because of their powers. He wanted to trust her, but he didn’t. Emma had been so good a proving she was the boss. Adelina was making this all up a she went. She had little to formal training it seemed. Emma had tasked her years ago to get Adon’s head right before the Great Revolt; the 3 million black man uprising at the Labor Day Parade on September 1^st, 2076 that was the precursor to national revolutions that had sense all but taken the USA out of the Great Game. The dismembered United American States regime based in Chicago was lead for Barak Obama for three terms before he was assassinated. Was that real? Since the massive shift in the consciousness that took place on December 21^st, 2077 what was real and what was illusion seemed very hard to ascertain. That was because lots of conscious people recruited at Burning Man festivals and TED talks had just out right sided with the oligarchy. Lots and lots of them, yoga doing, meditating, healthy eating tech and sorcery that just one way or another stayed out of the Great Revolt.

The power of the Revolt had been that it broke American as a hegemon, but certainly not as a people; there were as of 2015 about twenty micro-states mostly on the East Coast; the biggest one had been the Breuklyn Soviet. After a lot of fighting and terror many were brought back into the UAS; but Brooklyn held out because it acquired nuclear missiles from the Russians. Detroit and Boston fell. When this happens in Africa, which it does all the time; do people hear or think about it in China or the US? No, not really. It just wasn’t real. So the fall of America didn’t mean a lot to a lot of poor black and brown people, because Europe still exploited them and now so did the People’s Republic of China. There were just more English speaking whores now it seemed, maybe less English speaking pronouncements for democracy. Actually it was quite a lot like what happened to the USSR in 1989, and what happened in Brooklyn in 2015 was often compared to Chechnya to the glee or Russian commentators, the chicken had come home to roast.

But was it real? Who knew; what the fuck was happening in Syria since 2076; no one really knew; Sunnis killing Shiites killing Alawites killing Druse killing Christians; Islamic State some other groups like the Turks and Kurds; who knew. Just because the Age of Aquarius was steadily bringing consciousness; it didn’t mean you could make a chimp into a Bonobo.

Adon was soon  on his feet deciding to stand full watch, not one eyed Haitian half watch; though he did trust in that. He wanted Adelina to see him vigorously in the game. But she would not see him because she did not care.

Every man would like to imagine himself a real winner but not Adon, for every time he died he took it as a colossal failure. This time was worse because he so underestimated an enemy that caused so much carnage.

I don’t think a lot of people understand what a bitch reincarnation is, what a curse it can be made worse by remembering your past lives quite well.

So Adon was thinking about that. How much he hated disappointing his tribe, getting people killed without really changing the game.

There were bonobos, there were chimps and there were aliens and the mythologies of trying to cover the chimp bonobo wars, the alien proxy conflicts; well you had to be creative. When millions of people had their consciousness way upped in 2076 it shed no new light on the genetic and species level wars for this diminishing return of turf.

You have to take a deep breathe sometimes and realize you’re not wired the same as the other ones. You’re not as risk adverse, you’re not as easily tempted by wealth and flesh, though flesh is always a temptation. He looked on her and felt her grow colder just the small act of that.

He looked on the merry band of rebels here and wondered which would make it all the way to Haiti and when they got there what exactly would they do. Moscow was so far from Haiti. If Brooklyn Soviet still stood maybe some fighters would come, unlikely as most everyone he knew had been killed.

All of a sudden he wanted a cigarette, it was just his default way of remembering pain. Why had acted so stupidly? Why had bitten off a bigger bite than he could chew. The answer was that he loved Adelina more than he could recall loving anyone else and he was both horrified that she was in danger, and horribly jealous that a balding oligarch would take his woman.

Maybe that was his worst fear, maybe which is what kept the war going for him all these lives and all these years. His worst fear was that a woman that he loved would leave him for a man who had money simply because she wanted security over love, and that had happened a lot it seemed in different ways. Another way to look at it is that no woman wants to be with a fourth dimensional revolutionary who seems to wake up yearning to get himself killed again. No one is into that at all.

And yeah, he had some issues with women. He didn’t really trust them, he pretty much other than Emma had never met one that he didn’t equate with being something of a whore; at least in the idea that it seemed all women basically slept with how would feed them. That’s crude but a t some point he turned to Russians because they were more basic about the whole thing; there was romance, there was affection, but really the triple bottom line of dating one is why he did; they never judged you, they always improved you, they always walked away with a clean break almost like surgery if it got crazy, and with Adon it did a lot.

 

The mark of an insane man is doing the same thing and expecting different results, but it also shows persistence, which is attractive in the Russian world; dogged single minded pursuit\ of what you want at all and any expense.

 

She looked asleep, Adelina, but she wasn’t. She wasn’t judging him. She wasn’t missing him or dissecting what could have should have would have; they were done. Done a year ago. She had brought him back because Emma would have told her he’d be useful. And she didn’t hate him that much. Enough to not speak to him, for a while. It was torture to be alive next to the woman, the latest woman of your dreams and she wouldn’t even hand you midnight sushi. She wouldn’t turn his water into to wine. She wouldn’t cuddle. She was done with him.

That was their way Russian women were. They could just turn you off with no lingering. They had no sentimentality that perhaps made relationships linger, when their mate was no longer a viable partner the deal was done.

In the cold forest twilight, the forest spoke in tongues and moon had gone out at some point. The little otriad band was puppy piled and most happily snoring. Adelina was meditating on what was about to happen and Sebastian Adon was trying to keep guard, stay awake and stop thinking about her, which was impossible. He’d have to shoot himself to stop.

Which could be arranged if one thing had to come to another. All he wanted was a soulful and understanding palaver; but he wasn’t going to get one. She was making a point and her point wasn’t a Russian or American point; it was a simple human point.

You are unstable. You brought danger to me and mine. I can’t pretend you’re going to get better, that there is going to be a happy wedding and cute kids. That thing I used to say about you being a changed man once you got me pregnant; a real man made from a father; it isn’t going to happen. You caught the garter and I caught the bouquet, but I’m sorry Sebastian this is not an American movie; this is a Russian American noire. You’re gonna die in a hail of bullets for a ‘cause you didn’t have to believe in, I’m gonna marry on older richer man and if push comes to shove jump in front of a train.

No, no it could be so different he thinks. If I only have just one more chance, one more life to live let me use it to make proud this woman I love so dearly. They tell me what of me? What of my individualism. I know it not so well. I am a merely a gunslinger with a cause who like the sound of his own voice making rhymes, likes drinking, likes riding horses likes fucking as often as he can and likes painting paintings of women with large breasts. I’m a classic man.

 

But if she is a pragmatic Russian collectivist take on new, potential Messiah, I’m just the guy who won’t die, holding the gun with all the rubber bullets. Put the non-believers on their asses if we have to. I’m just at the end of the rope.

 

If she won’t love me, can’t love me, after all this struggle all this ado about her and only her; then I clearly have very, very little to live for. I did not say that makes me wish to kill own self, simply returning to the realization that I am unafraid of impending death. For they will catch us.

 

Scene 27

New Galilee, 2079ce

Shores of the Atlantic

 

It’s sad when seemingly smart people don’t learn from their mistakes, ever. It’s a true measure of the breed of animal we come from. Chimp or Bonobo; from the earth or from the stars. It’s also not fair to push your alien cultural values or even our beloved universal human rights on people that have had so much bad hard vile gritty shot happen that idealism is an afterthought. I don’t think many people know any of their rights, so they sort of begin praying and plotting and grinding; and they just say, “Ship is sinking boys, get to the life rafts. Climb over everyone you have to.” Well the biggest, brightest rafts are called England, France, Switzerland, Germany and the United States. Maybe all of Europe really.

But, when you get there by any means you find that there are countries within countries, plantations within plantations. You don’t get free that easily, nothing is easy. The white people are cruel and they take a lot out of you. They don’t really want people there that don’t look like them, they make you work jobs that aren’t really very dignified.

 

The sad thing about people, the idealists that keep trying to get the bonobo out of the chimpanzee; get the holy spirit back in the howling mobs; it’s that they are fighting against something they don’t ever really comprehend the evil of, the thing the whites call the nature. There’s no proof to all that nature; but humans act poorly indeed.

 

Adon had talked a lot about not being violent, but really it was all just talk. It was as if he assumed everyone else came back when they died as well, which was incorrect.

 

I will tell you what the raid on Charlestown looked like; about one hundred men surrounded it and parked pickup trucks on the surrounding hills and then the shelled the industrial district from homemade mortars attached to the back; like they’d learned in Lebanon. Then like two thousand rocket propelled grenades rained down on a lot of things that Ilya Lubov owned, warehouses full of guns and coke and spice. And they shelled a bunch of houses too that had nothing to do with it. Overall it was a cowardly raid, but Adon himself drove down to the office that was listed on the company website as 87 Roland; and no one was there because a Russian Ivoryish businessman never had the true address of this office on the internet; but Ilya watched his whole payload go up in flames, not his empire; just his American weigh station. Adon kept his promise to change the skies above Boston blue to black; and you could smell all that drugs and software burning.

As he drove in with so much hate in his heart, jealous hate; he forgot that he hadn’t picked up the tab on Adelina Blazhennaya since November around the Indian Turkey festival; and in her culture that means he was burning down a whole lot of things he didn’t have rights to.

She called him early in the morning the night before crying, saying he needed to get her and that’s what co-dependent American cowboys do best; charge off trying to be heroes where they are not needed.

Well he’d picked up the tab for late lunch one more time before he foolishly ordered the raid; left her with her friend Lana before going on a needless war path.

He never found Ilya, he never saw Adelina again in that life. Charlestown burned for three days then Ilya tracked down everyone he knew and had them killed to make a point; stay away from all my shit. Stay the fuck away at pain of death from breaking and burning my things over a whore. That’s what Ilya basically assumed all women were; varying degrees of whore.

Well 40 days later Ilya had ordered the deaths of around 4,000 people; friends, family, people Adon worked with or had recruited; wiped out most of his outer and inner, outfit. And Adon died too in a Konnecticut psychiatric hospital, Ilya didn’t count on her bringing him back.

Everyone was dead, and they were alone in the deep woods of Konnecticut talking about turning trains into planes or some such fuckery.

There was now growing suspicion and also doubt. It all seemed like magic tricks so far, no matter what they thought they had seen; everyone knew the world contained magic, but when you see it you doubt it; it isn’t at all like the movies. I will tell you how the human brain deals with things it cannot accept, it refuses to believe, it invents perfect doubt or then it shuts down. It shuts down so that it has no obligation to absorb big thought.

The forest was quiet, it contained big black bears and evidently men with hatchets. It seemed denser than many American forests, it seemed to over good cover from birds and drones. It didn’t rustle but at night it made eerie noises that forests make. Like there were animals out there lurking and circling and moving in for their kill. Which was correct in several regards because Ilya had paid very large amounts of green money to turn over gun and axe in Greater Konnecticut against our nine protagonists and slaughter all but one; of course he aimed to turn a potential predator into a sexual house pet.

 

There was something very underage looking about Adelina, although in the years of man she was 27; she looked mostly like a pre-pubescent girl. Nothing slightly curvy about her. She had endless men after that attribute, in order to defile it. Sebastian included for he was part Cowboy part Barbarian as well, one was needed to be one to fight them.

 

She looks like a ‘miss young thing’.

 

Suddenly there again the smell of something burning. The crackle of flame and they were all up out of their huddle; the whole fire smelled like napalm. Ilya was apparently going to use a less surgical approach. I know not if you have ever been close to a ring of fire, but it is not catchy like the song is, it is terrifying and it sucks the air out of your lungs. From vessels above goons were burning the forest down.

 

It was suddenly so, so hot, and we were all choking in the smoke from the rising flames. And where was magic now? We were clearly now going to be burned alive and die horribly!

 

 

Scene 27

Port Galilee, 2079ce

Shores of the Atlantic

   It was suddenly so, so hot, and death was upon us, we stayed together best we could flushed out the forests by flame. They must have dropped napalm on us. I remember Tiputti Capois and Watson Entwissle take point and rear respectively; and guided out band to the coastline, out of a choking hot death, the trees were all on fire. I could hear the terra drones, the grinding of metal men charging us, I remember the Ruhlmann Brothers opening fire with their pistols, emptying clip after clip into these killer fucking robots! Adelina Blazhennaya picked up man with her mind then shattered them, but there were thousands, endless waves of running metal skeletons bearing down on us from all sides. Nicholas Mapre filmed it, he never flinched, never got involved, but never stopped filming ever, and well I suppose someone had to. The Terra Drones made a screeching noise as they swarmed, they emitted a shriek to deafen us. Arelene and Charlotte were back to back firing Uzis into the robot hordes. Mapfre filmed on, believing in his hear this was the last stand for sure. Watson lobbed a regular grenade and bunch of robots blew up. There were too many, so Adelina drew a force field around us, a barrier they could not pass, but it so strained her magic, she sweated, she groaned, there are a million metal men trying to dismember us all. And there I saw Watson and Tiputti reloading, saw the Ruhelman brothers cross themselves and load the last bullets they had, thinking about boxing a machine, or a swarm of them, and Arlene and Charlotte they took positions, Mapfre looks finally afraid. What was I doing? What could I do? I had no blaster, I had no weapon at all. I just stood near Adelina should some robot hunter killer get through.  To one side, a burning ring of fire and to the other side the sea and metal men, killer Terra drones bearing on both sides. And then, I looked up and it was too late, an Ariel drone fires a concussion rocket into us; Adelina threw up her palm and it went flying into the drones; woooshe, BOOM!   She is so powerful, is Emma dead is she assuming the thrown?! It can’t be, this isn’t what was written at all. I have to do something, I have to help my……..friends. Yes, these are my friends are they not, only the brothers Ruhelman were paid, all these other were sent to rescue me from Waltham. “The Black Freighter is close, stay tight and we will wall get off this beach alive,” Adelina proclaims with power. The robots howl, I keep looking above scanning the skies for Ilya, this is all wrong, it isn’t like this at all in the New Social Gospel, no dying on a beach, no losing Emma. They’ve been hunting us for weeks, for days! If the Black Freighter surfaces it is vulnerable. And then I realize what they’re doing. Using me as bate to kill her. To kill Emma Solomon and Avinadav DeBuitléir, the leadership. I don’t know how these drones howl, everyone is tight back to back. Adelina looks determined and tired, but weakening. “As soon as they surface everyone follow me into the water,” she commands. The skies are black with vultures, more drones, and a helicopter way up, high enough she can’t bring it down and hold off the sea of metal death all around us. They’d rip us to shreds if no for her, the band is virtually out of ammunition. I smell fire, I smell impending death no matter what happens. I can’t remember seeing this before. Mapfre films for history I guess, Charlotte and Watson clutch hands on each other and their semi-automatics. Arelene prays quietly, Tiputti too. Adelina watches the water, and the black freighter begins to rise the enormous behemoth; the Israeli nuclear submarine which moves the movement leaders around. And my worst fear comes true; rockets hit that ship from all over above, below the tree line. They strike at the ship blowing it to bit before our eyes.  Was Emma on the ship? Was Avinadav? `  “NO!!” yells Adelina and the force field drops; and the drones rush our position. I see Eric Ruhelman fire point blank and punches a robot in the face, it hurts his hand a lot.   The Black Freighter sinks back on fire, a ruined ship and failed rescue. What a botch.    “When I say go, everyone follow me!!” Adelina opens up the sea like Moses. She opens up a 16 mile corridor out to Block Island and we run down it as fast as we can, the eight is us just barreling into the canyon of water held open with her mind.   “Whatever happens keep running!!” she bellows in Russian, then English course no one speaks Russian here.   A metal tentacle grabs my leg and yanks be back to the shore, we had not gotten far even. “KEEP GOING I YELL,” and I didn’t need to tell anyone twice. Except Watson and Adelina turn back, the others run they run as hard as they can with all they have left running through the Atlantic seawall being chased by drones, the water held up by a powerful young woman.   There is a big flying Ariel drone dangling me, it is hundreds of Red eyes, it tightens its grip and shatters my left ankle.   Adelina with one hand motion hurls hundreds more drones into the brine, “Watson keep moving,” she commands!   I’m like forty feet off the ground being strangled.   “Watson, run.”  But he doesn’t know how. It’s not in the Code to run. That thing is so big and I have no more bullets, he thinks no powers like these ones. I hope Charlotte gets clear, and Charlotte runs back firing an Uzi at the Ariel Drone, and when the bullets run out, her eyes go Grey and hit it with fire ball of kinetic fire, it explodes and drops Adon to the ground. Watson didn’t know she had the old majik too.   “Guys, go now. I can’t keep the sea open much longer and it’s a sixteen mile run!” Adelina says. She looks less in control.     “We can’t run that quickly. Let’s just grab him and let’s go!” says Watson, declares Watson.   But before they even get to me hissing green gas hits us, we all fall down, choking. I can’t see where the others are, running like hell, not looking back at all. Mapfre, the Ruhelman, Arlene and Tiputti. And the sea crashes in on them, drowns them all as we choke to death on the beach. And more drones bear down on us four, holding us all down. Merciless metal arms and steel tentacles.   A helimonster lands, and there is Ilya and Dmitry, grinning. The drones force me and Watson prone and jerk our heads up.   “What a chase bitch, what a chase,” says Ilya in Russian.   He then immediately executes Charlotte and Watson; two bullets in each head. Then with me watching he takes out a knife and he cuts off Adelina’s head slowly while I just bellow in sick black helpless rage, seems familiar. He throws her pretty little head into the sea.    “You, you shit, you worthless devil shit,” he says, “no matter how many times I kill you, I never forget how much it hurts you when I kill all your family & friends first. I love it! This time I’ll torture you for a hundred millions years, it will never end your torment!”   He kicks me in the face as hard as he can.   “Behold the bodies of your companions, behold your latest dead messiah, another whore I ravished first.”  He puts his dagger into my eyes, pop.  And then he cuts my eyes out, my blood and the blood of my latest and most durable love tether crimson on the sands of Galilee.

 

Scene 28

Time traveling?

The past

 

 

Every time, that I am killed, I return immediately to the past. I have died many times, each is quite painful. It is very painful to inhabit the world so powerlessly and so indefinitely.

I always think of a woman, I always try and hone in on her face, remember what she felt like sleeping next to me, or what her smile looked like on the face of my un born children.

I have never died a painless death. I remember my suffering, my families suffering. My people’s suffering. I remember what they did to my woman.

 

I’ll tell you what time travel feels like, it feel like jet lag. It feels like getting a shit night’s sleep before a big day, or clearer still, a big new opportunity. You wake up knowing something went wrong.

 

When I first saw this woman, I knew only but two things! One, was that she was very attractive, exuding high class and the second that she spoke her English with an unusual accent indicative of either speaking Czech, living in Germany or have a Swiss lover; all of those things made me vaguely uncomfortable. For I am highly prejudiced to Europeans. While I was unfamiliar with her physical and also mental terrain, I had come across the woman architect in a Baha’i meeting in the People’s Republic of Cambridge, a liberal bastion of the separatist movement; a pocket of tranquil intellectual flatulence loosely north of Boston Soviet about forty and some five checkpoints to West to Sharashka Waltham, the prisoner camp I was being held at in the Winter of 2014. Now say you, there are no prisoner gulags in the United States of America; nor are there Soviets or free zones; is not that fat and happy place a great giant tranquil cream puff of make some money and gain some weight? Ha, well it was for some time. But by the time I met the lovely little architect, a civil war had been raging for two years, it’s very epicenter the city in which I was born New York, New York! Her name, yes what was her name it was also unlike a usual Russian name, but she was vaguely unusual woman with her accent as I said, but also her name, Adelina Blazhennaya. And she was a linguist and vaguely interested in my work so we exchanged our information at her birthday, just two days before the Chechens blew up the marathon and I didn’t see her for over a year. These were the years of the civil war, the so called Great Revolt and I was in this miserable prisoner of war camp, under a fake name with bomb embedded in my chest in case I chose to leave. I quite hated and still hate provincial Massachusetts, quite despised the chill of just three hours north. Despised my duties in the camp. And my ghosts, I was playing dead about to be shipped overseas in the service of the revolt. I was an agitation propaganda officer working as a paramedic.

 

My death had been arranged in 2076 to assist my companions and we were bring a certain system of training rebels out to places abroad, but then I was ensnared.

 

A bomb was placed next to my aorta or somewhere besides! Whatever technology you think brings so much innovation to your life via the internet and smart phones is nothing compared to what the ruling elites and oligarchs and real power brokers have. I was forgotten in this cold dead place of purgatory while in New York and in Haiti my comrades and family, my lovers and friends thought me dead, and Great War raged inconclusively!

 

A great wall went up around Long Island cutting Brooklyn and Queens off from the USA. Heavy sanctions and drone raids and state of emergency.

 

I will tell you the worst thing that happen to a man is to forget his face, to forget who and what he is. What he is doing in life. Worse still, for him to wander so far from his companions that none no him and anything he thinks he could be, he is. That was me. Trapped in that special engineering camp walled in my highways and radio towers. The bomb that was put into my chest come with special instructions; build us a training system or you die. Die alone and forgotten. Your city burning yonder will be the fire under your feet, design us a system to unleash whole societies against the oligarchy.

For you see, while I served the rebellion; I was also a serf to the Oligarch mad man Sasha Perchevney who told me that if I did not design him a system he would sell my former lover Natasha Andreavna to the soldier brothels on the Western front. Powerless me, a scrappy intellectual and Ivory what could I do but what that mighty war lord wanted. And I was thought dead so no one came to look for me in Waltham at all.  And it seemed to snow in that place nearly all the time. Like American Siberia, manufactured with great hidden machines.

I’ll tell you what, I was thinking! That’s never been the problem, not at all. And the snow was falling hard, compared to what? I have no idea. Seemed hard for America anyway. What I was thinking then was that I was late, again.

That’s a terrible look in every single culture, except for chornay culture; it’s normal and expected. If a black friend shows up early, well, don’t worry that won’t. But I am not a Chornay, I am a part-Ivory half caste and it is quite cold in New York now, quite over snowing, quite utterly miserable and you wonder why people even choose to live in this country except for the ability to make some money. It’s worse in Boston, I can tell you first hand. Some better money is made here evidently, and they build a family and mythology around that.

I think I know some things about some things, but I don’t know anything at all about women, Russian women in particular. I can’t tell you anything of substance about Slavic culture, only stereotypes and inventions based on being around them so long. I would say with certainty that I’ve never met a Russian idealist, never met a Russian man at least not overtly claiming he’d commit any kind of high or low crime for some rubbles or better still Renminbi or Euros. There are perhaps over one hundred reasons Russian and Americans should or should not date; but they come down to aesthetics, culture, balance and improvement. This too, a stupid mythology because its’ all banter and barter and pheromones and fuck; it’s just about attraction to what you’re told is decadent or, self-improving.  The Cold War is not after all fought between individual antagonisms; but over politics. Most so-called ‘Russians’ I have met in New York City State are not actually even Russian, they are every type of other former Soviet Ivory; or Ukrainians, Uzbeks, Tajiks, Georgians, Moldovans and Armenians; most Slavic Russians stayed in Russia. The Americans call anyone who speaks Russian, the Russians; but quite frankly outside the tallest of Manhattan towers and the highest of the high end; well there aren’t that many Russians here. For whatever it matters, in the scheme of the story.

I have met causally only a few in greater New York and Brighton, Boston, most in Brooklyn Soviet’s Russian quarter and all but one forms or shades of a Jeuf. Dmitry was born in Uzbekistan, but was Slavic Russian Orthodox as could be and a scheming hoodlum. I shot him and he wounded me in a duel for insulting the honor of Maria Parsheva, also a Slav but born in Ukraine claiming to be a Ivory. He lived together for two years she and I; a quiet geisha mostly. She was afraid of blacks, wanted to leave Brooklyn. She sucker punched a hooligan one night and pulled me bleeding form under a sixteen person pogrom. Yelizaveta is she half Ivory, born in Ukraine but her mother was Slavic Russian. She never loved me like I loved her, I chased her for over a year. It was more sentimental until they locked me up after the blizzard, for an unrelated series of events. I was then abandoned on Mondays and fucked apart on Fridays. I have no regrets, her mother didn’t approve of my condition or my profession. And, then there was Natasha Andreavna Skorbogatova from Penza; who looked at me with bright and completely fascinated alien eyes who I rallied my mighty little Otriad around her suffering and declared war to the death with the Oligarchy to avenge.

 

She was carried away into night. And the rising that occurred on the 1^st of January, 2076 was violently suppressed its supporters killed, imprisoned, driven underground or into early exile. Made to have never existed to the outside world.

 

I was transferred to exile in Shrakasa Waltham in the fall of 2077 and spent two years in that Special Engineering Camp. I met there perhaps the hardest and most glorious woman of my life then so far Adelina Blazhennaya, the coy brunette from Chelyabinsk; we fell in and out of love and finally escaped together to Hispaniola, D.R. and Haiti to train young partisans participating in the Great Revolt there.

But I owed a debt to Perchevney, so he took her away from me too and said finish your mental toils, finish your system or both your women will be sold to the Western Front to fuck Germans and U.S. troops. If you run again I’ll explode your Ivory heart! Little did I know that both my lovers were perfectly safe and Sasha Pervechnvny the Voorhi just liked to manipulate my weak American emotions!! But, it was for the best because by 2080 the rebellion was going quite poorly and the rebels were being massacred and encircled in both New York and Port Au Prince, and here I was complaining about the cold!

Why trade one cold place for another, when people will treat you like an enemy alien, a whore or a criminal, or both. Maybe if I repeat this story enough times it will take on the veneer of recreational anthropology. For I had read their books and know their leaders ideas, and know their history and studied but failed to comprehend their language multiple times, I and my countrymen have no gift for language. I waver at times between extolling the hope and idealism my land cherishes, and denouncing the Americans as hypocrites and man babies, silly violent monkeys. I artistically and rhetorically paint with a wide brush, but I would not think any high civilization comes from the interior and the provinces. I am regularly accused of romanticizing the Soviet Union, but frankly not everyone on earth has a human right to television, two cars, two homes, a two course, four increment meal 2,500 daily calorie diet; and to get as fat they wish then die of heart disease. That’s not in the UNDHR. I’m sorry it is not. Nor is it a human right as I see, or have read to enrich yourself well beyond need on the backs of others; and the Americans have certainly done that.

 

While on leave twice a week I managed to see the Russian linguist three times even sometimes. Once for to paint together in Chinese restaurant, once to ain’t together in a Canaanite restaurant. Sometimes for personal poetry recitals, sometimes to hear jazz at the Bee Hive; I was unimpressed with my choice of eating, had wanted to be charming, but I was distracted. We kissed for the first time at a masquerade ball on Halloween. Eventually I took her to fancy fish restaurant, we drank a bottle of white wine and made love in the attic of the hovel in Waltham I was then living in.

 

The candles set the bed partially on fire and damn police towed her car.

 

I should keep all these views of mine more cards to chest. I should not paint myself into a cliché, or my lovely new associate into a cultural strong hold. She has a strange cute accent, so it’s not so clear that she is shaped by Russia, well of course she is, but she has been here since 18. It is not a passport or a world view it is a way of being. Like being a New York Ivory; but I and she are nuanced by experiences and by interaction. Every time I kiss a Russian I tighten myself, I tighten my circle I fight inwards, clasp closer to my family and associates; I learn about my failings and correct accordingly. Does every time a Russian woman kisses me; do they become more fiscally savvy? Do they earn more wide beliefs? Do they see a Slavic face with an American mentality; or do they fuck me and with me, one me and about me mostly because I am so curious, or just a curiosity. Oleg Medved the photographer, the Israeli Ukrainian who is most familiar with my artistic and agitation work he doesn’t try and answer questions like that; he just assumes I have an exclusive taste for Russian women, he doesn’t see anything peculiar in that. They are fearless, hard and very beautiful. As well as highly educated, combatively non-judgmental and quite literally rolling off planes and boats since 1989ce.

 

They being Oleg and I had once tried to have a series of talks about the so-called Russian mentality; but we were both ultimately Ivories. The Ivory has never ever found an empire more long term hostile to it that the Russians, short of the Germans gassing everybody 1939-1945 and the Spanish inquizitioning everybody in the 14^th-16th century perhaps Iran as well. The Pale of Settlement and Siberia were cold places where Ivories were sent along with others to starve and die. It’s just that when a Russian says Ivory, their skin crawls a little. Americans have learned to suppress that twitch, publicly.

 

It was in the Fancy Fish restaurant in the fall of 2077 that I found her smile most assuring and she blushed several times, and that was incredible because he didn’t know they could blush. “We’re human too you know”, she smiled so much they stayed much longer in the French restaurant than either had though and then it was a bit after midnight. He wanted her clothes ripped off and to taste her all night.

 

All his people were hostages. In Haiti and New York, the military and secret police were cutting down his friends and family. He felt at times that he was worse than dead; he was alive and inanimate. Allowing by doing nothing the oligarchy to slaughter all those he ever cared about. These were his dark thoughts; that instead of courting this young woman he should shoot up the place; should kill these chubby junior banker around him in the streets of the District Financial; gun them down helter skelter like the police did his friends and associates.

But he was no terrorist! He had taken an oath of total non-violence, though he knew and so did his god that in many other lives he had been a killer.

The lovely linguist was so completely charming, it came so naturally to her and so incompletely to him. She was teaching petty aristocrats in a small school in Newton. What made everything so much better than almost any dinner he’d had in the last several years was that one thing flowed to the next and it was all small talk. Which he didn’t even know he could make.

His 29^st birthday had happened the day before, it was his reason to be back in New York and confer with his associates, approved four days leave from the special engineering camp signed off by Alexandre Perchevney himself, Sasho. She had given him an art book on New York architecture for his birthday which was classy. And he had found a short and debaucherous story within it, about a playground for underage girls some robber Barron built on Madison Square Garden.

Now, from her perspective it was only medium small, but the dinner was nice and he was medium charming and medium handsome and reasonably intriguing because he was designing some kind of training system in a medium famous Sharashka, was a Baha’i and evidently a petty bourgeoisie based on his family living inside the District Financial, but what she liked the most was that he was educated. He was mildly funny. And she might have had a few drinks with him and seen where it went or maybe not. He was a little surreal. And normally they parted a little after midnight with a soft kiss on her cheek and he thought to himself he’d like to see her again, or a few times. It was happy to feel things un-extremely, to not be made into zealous creature about every single thing. But she leans in and makes out with him, tells him they’re going back to his place in her red KIA Soul ranger.

 

“You’re gonna name love for me ok,” she smiles.

 

I will tell you what the loneliest thing on earth is, it is to feel you are insane for seeing something as evident as the sky being blue or the grass being green. To believe that poor people are poor because of the decisions of the powerful. To feel like you are incapable of being a participant in a great crime.

 

The third time he saw the last queen of Russia, he was late. He was getting his hair cut. He was about to load a small crew of internationals into a car, get in suits clear fifteen check points and make contact with the Cuban special interest section in the heart of Washington D.C. He was late. It was rude and third impressions are really important. And he promised her dinner the night before but had to change plans because one of his crew was losing her shit, an Egyptian doctor, she kept talking about suicide. And he had really wanted to see Adelina the last queen of, not over morning coffee but over an intimate dinner. He’s wanted her to make a good blue print of his chest, use her keen eye, ask her to utilize her engineering skills to take him all part and remove the bomb and the heart too perhaps so he could stop with all his sentimental feeling to his species. He wanted her maybe to take him apart down to base components, dismantle all his usual malfunction. She wasn’t certified as a human architect but he knew she could do it, if he earned her trust.

 

They met for less than twenty minutes, he bought her some crappy green breakfast truffle candy and a coffee. Promised he’d write a story and take her to dinner. He didn’t tell her that the Egyptian doctor was brutally raped during the 2075 uprising and her parents were dead. That as they spoke an Afghani named Farooq and an effeminate fellow named Juan Mishanga from the Republic of Congo were loading several large bags of simtex into his Honda civic. Of course not, she wouldn’t understand why the National monument was a superior alien military weapon and needed to get blown apart. That wasn’t third date style talk. No not one bit.

She was annoyed and he could tell that easily, being an expert in women being annoyed. Should have gotten up earlier. Should have gotten a haircut on the road down to D.C., let barbers of Baltimore have a cynical go, the Cubans didn’t care what his hair looked like, just that he was not a spy for the wrong side. Should have said to the Egyptian doctor Mayaada, ‘bitch be cool’ we have to bring 500 pounds of simtex across fifteen check points and three damn states. He should have just made the time, social engineered things to get her ass to dinner. Oh well.

There was a small nano-explosive wrapped around his aorta. So Alexandre Sasho Perchevney could blow a tiny whole in his heart and send him into a horrible stroke. And he still thought Alex, Sasho as most called him was going to send his two ex-girlfriends to a German brothel, which truly to an Ivory is worse than personal death. I’m not a terrorist at all.

But I will tell you what the worst thing in the world is to feel; that you were built of different stuff than others, constructed of other parts. I remember some old phrase about that which does not kill you makes you into stranger form and now here was I, a relic, an antiquity. He wished he could make the Russian architect understand all that fuckery. Maybe run away with her for a week or two to Cuba or Israel one day, the only places he didn’t watch his own back much. Had others to do it.

It was better sometimes to live in a world where you didn’t have responsibilities to others, or at least only one or two others. It would have been nice to be able to write poems and paint and listen to jazz music and see the wave’s crash on the sea wall or the shore, every single day before and after work or play. Sometimes, sometimes he wished that he could be renovated like a building, brought up to speed with the rest of the monkeys. He had so much he thought he could offer, but time had taken a gristle toll not reflected on his face.

He suspected maybe she’d see him again a fourth time, unless the short story was so outlandish that she might question the validity of his thought process and mind. But what of it, he had very little these days to do but write and tinker on that what he was building with the field trials approaching as soon as the white walls of winter subsided and he would be released from this cold and miserable place.

He had wanted when he was younger to be an architect, but now he was convinced that before anything might be built that was of use to those he answered to, well first he’d have to focus on knocking a few things down. There’s a dream I have, he told her. I wander down the board walk and end up in the White City of 4,000 Bauhaus structures, the golden age of Tel Aviv. And the war is over and we won, and the justice and rights are real. And everyone is ok, and I’m working on my third major book, and I see you again after all these years of struggle and I say, you wanna get a coffee with me? You wanna hear jazz over dinner? And nothing else is on my mind because it’s over, we won.

But there’s a bomb in my chest. The Bratva took some hostages I care about this time. My mother and father have high Ivoryish expectations about my medical education. I’m locked in an American gulag, at least three more timeless. I may have just helped some foreign agents bring a large IED into the Capital. I haven’t slept well in days, I haven’t gone to yoga and all this blatnoy with my case officer about this system I’m designing, well fuck it. It leads a man to smoke and drink, this vast and evil game.

You’re beautiful you know, the way you smile. I hope your stadium gets built before the rebels take Atlanta, which they might in 2017, all a matter of Afula Specials. We don’t have a lot of use for stadiums, but I bet without knowing you know that there are things you can build that won’t get swallowed up in the war effort. Like the Greeks, like the Bauhaus school. If form follows function, trust me that what’s in my blue print will keep us all building another ten thousand years.

 

But I would like to see you again, and I’ll make it happen. Somehow, despite the prevailing factors weighted against me. The commons sense to ask you to not see if you knew what were better for you.

Disjointed, that’s what time travel feel like. Bits of this reality, bits of that. My soul trying to hold into a corpse with duct tape and zeal, a zeal for something.

 

The bus ride on the Lucky Star Express cost $28 American and sandwiched him between two gay Canaanites or really, he was the outer crust to their love sandwich. American had just made gay as American as Apple-Cherry pie and mass shootings. The Empire State building was lit up like a rainbow. It was one of the new reforms to slow the separatist movements.

 

He caught the 8:45 out of South Station evading a small man hunt for him after he pried the impediment off his face and squirreled down an tunnel it took him 32 days to dig with a silver spoon in his mouth, well he was covered in filth in a blue kibbutzinik shirt, grey pantaloons and the bandana of Adelina Komarova, his now cold as Chelyabinsk steel ex-partner. She was working for the Germans now. He alliance with him most tenuous. He washed the tunnel dirt off at South Station, in rubbed into his dirty brown main a little Choco Latina General Product and he saved with a two blade razor to look more like plumped Ivory writer and less like a stone cold assassin, and Israeli killing machine he was sometimes written into being.

 

Before he swiggled down that tunnel his cell mate for a time in the camps, a Zimbabwean bio chemist yelled; “the memories are not real! YOU HAVE NO DEAD WIFE! YOU WERE NEVER AT THE DOMLPHINARIUM BOMBING! You’re ABSORBING THE TRAUMA OF OTHERS MY DERANAGED ASSOCIATE! MY DEAR PALE DROOG! You are not going to get any answers at that wedding in New York!! Take your damn salt!”

 

But he left Kudzai prying at license plate machine and got clear of Sharashka Waltham; the Zionist Internment camp they had been toiling at for over two years in winter and worse winter. A hell.

 

I would have the young dvotchka professional teacher know that I had to chisel through a plastic cage and with a hair pin remove from my face the mask that was keeping me speaking soothing words of poetry. Eyes glued to a telescreen unveiling world horror after horror! I would have her know I then had to tunnel nine hundreds aquariums, yes aquariums the bizarre system of measurement that is used in Gulag Camp to say just under three kilometers, in civilized measurement.

 

She smiled at him. What was real and what was so surreal about Sebastian Adon, Hebrew named Zachariah pronounced Zechariah with that kh-h-h should only Ivories and Arabs make. He would write and he was almost never one time. And he had designed her an eighteenth wonder of the world to honor her Mother Russia on the Apple of the Empire.

I would have the young, elegant and truly stunning dvotchka linguist know that for 35 days I was a captive. To my ambulant planation surely but then to a fiercer master that of Sharashka Waltham which seems to hold me in its thrall and not let me leave it’s westerly prison for what how now-pow! Two long years, nearly three.

How now, she replied, still grinning. She was at a new work site now the fearsome dome completed. The gladiator thunder dome of Atlanta, or Chinese internment camp deepening whom one asked at FEMA, those fucking people. She remained a happy optimist.

Well then she says, “All that escapery had in fact taught you to be on time!”

And he blushed. For it was true.

What did they make me a Master of he wonders? Sustaining International Development or sustaining himself for unrelenting struggle. With some coexistence thrown in there as if he didn’t play well with black and brown people.

“What was the last thing you remember, that made you happy, she asks. Ultimately settles on.

“I remember being at the Baha’i meeting and catching the eyes of a beautiful woman, so I spoke more. And I remember they had cherry juice, juice of every kind and it wasn’t too cold in Cambridge, so it was leather jacket season and I felt quite cool, and intellectual, and like you were watching me.”

 

“You just wanted to draw me like your other Russian girls,” she replied.

 

 

Scene 29

Port Galilee, 2014ce

Rhode Island

 

 

Her decapitated body is lying on the beach next to mine.

 

  I’m still dead. My head cut off on the shore of Galilee, they my body dumped ingloriously into the ocean. I knew we’d never reach Brooklyn, I think more in death about the past. Then I can remember when I’m alive.

 

I think about her all the time, even when I’m dead.

 

  I wasn’t very ready to see you, all of the times you were able to see me but you should not confuse that with apathy or disinterest, for au-contraire I have been interested in you in ways that have propelled your full being into the near pinnacle of my desire. But on several times I was unable to break away because I have been pursuing my work at the expense of my sanity. I was also kept in the course of our contact in the arms of two women that neither loved me nor knew what to do with me, neither encouraged my work nor bettered me as man, they just took what little was of my time and rewarded me with more nothing.

 

Sex sure is something, but it is really quite not that much of something when there is no passion or mutual respect. By my best count I saw the lovely little linguist; one in a Baha’i meeting, once for dinner, once late and briefly for coffee, and once for a picnic and some theatre, so four times, she had popped into my dreams on occasion, nothing pornographic, just smiling happy Adelina asking me something about skiing and the meaning of happiness, and once she brought me many books by Castaneda. She was such a classy dame, and I was somewhere in the middle.

 

I can count the number of times she cancelled our dates; about three times and I on her only once, annoyingly so perhaps because she thought I was getting her from a bus stop.

So that was the balance sheet, but I still found her so interesting. There was clearly the hard of elegance, class and sexy of a former Soviet woman to her, but she smiled, and while superficial there was something to her that seemed completely out of the mortal world, as is she compelled fierce power, as is she was an aristocrat?

  Flattery gets one no-where, I’ll have you know that in May I sat in a café and made you may lovely sketches of our plan for central park; to impress you as you impressed me, but a hard rain came and you cancelled and I put those sketches in a green trash bin. They were silly, I am talented I think I bit, but we have very different talents. I was vaguely hurt, as perhaps you were vaguely annoyed each time I cancelled or was late.

I find you fascinating, in a better setting we could be classy and dance all night and I could dance and you could understand me, which is hard because I’m not really form here, I just play the part well. You teach so patiently, well I’ve written nine books no one reads. You are very, very elegant, and I can be only sometimes. What I want is to write you a good book and you tell me what you like and don’t like, I want to make you art but have you never feel muse like. I want to know a lot about you and I want you to know the real me, not the many me’s I play on the streets. I want us to be very old school and I want you to feel fundamentally desired.

Well what would this little book be about then?

It could be about whatever we want it to, this is America!

Adelina so many people bore me because I don’t know how to speak their language and I don’t know why they see the world from so low down, but if this is to be great story, a story about more than a mad paramedic American falling, or jumping or leaping toward a lovely Russian architect, then their must clearly have to be plot twists and robots. Yes, robots and while I had thought I was interested in writing about our plan to build a pleasure dome over central park, that might just be a center piece.

I will write you a page or so every day, but you have to encourage me, by telling me whether this thing I’m building is enjoyable to your continence. If the game is no longer fun tell me to stop, If my emotions become un-understandable, tell me to stop, but if you like the thing I want to build you, a book of your own then just tell me where you want to go to dinner and I will attempt to be the very best American writer you can handle, and great man as well.

I want you to see a greatness and cultivate it, but I have had a very hard five years in a variety of fields. So, I am very vulnerable and very manipulative and I will hide nothing from you, but I can’t write alone as you can’t build alone, and I am not suggesting me need each other, not all. But I’d like to make you a damn fine novel, and I’d like to see your smile and Russia and also China and I’d like to have a great life, you know like everyone.

What’s this book about then?

Well for now it’s about a brilliant American writer, who writes books no one reads falling in love with a fearless Russian linguist. But he doesn’t know if he loves her yet, as they’ve only been on a four dates, only two of which were real, and certainly they know nothing about each other really, can only speculate. So beginning in the fourth chapter as this takes off, this is about building a floating pleasure garden over central park, about building, blue printing people, that’s where the robots come in, and probably there will be references to other things.

“One time we said good night and I wanted to kiss you, but it wasn’t there, you know, the magic,” he remarked.

“Well only in your culture is it four dates, kiss and marry. My culture we take as much time as we need, you know to make sure you’re good for kissing.”

“See me again as soon as you can,” he says.

“Don’t be late and don’t let me down,” Adi replies, “I’m clearly gambling with a few things dating a Ivory, a paramedic and a writer. None of those things is in the American dream.”

“I want you to understand I’ve always, always wanted to spend more time with you, but there were other women, there was exile, excuse, excuses.”

“Well write for me then, make me somehow immortal in an age where none can read.”

“I’ll do as good a job as I can, for a Ivory writer paramedic.”

“Don’t pigeon hole yourself,” she smiles.

“Do you believe you can miss a person, if you don’t know them, miss the idea of them, and miss the potential?” he asks.

“You think I miss you? I don’t know you well enough, you’re a curious character courting me, irregularly and also inconsistently.”

“Is that what I’m doing?”

“Well I think so.”

“I won’t make any more excuse then, I find you very captivating and dagger sharp, I want you fully interested in me and my work, and yes I want you all to myself, want to earn that. But for now just see me as often as you enjoy and know that 4 times in nearly three years is very weak game, so we have to both try harder.”

“But be on time, be decisive and no excuses.”

“Yes, I’ll improve.”

“See you Tuesday evening then, before we fly away.”

“Where are we flying off to again?”

“Me to Moscow and you to Barcelona, to inform the underground of the things we have seen here, the rumors of miracles in the North woods, the liberation of Brooklyn, the approval hopefully soon of the Grand Castell; my masterpiece soon to be built in central park; if we do not tell them these kinds of stories they will believe the news, and the rebellion will mean nothing.”

 

Kiss me again I beg her with my eyes. And she does, happily.

 

“When you wake up, you’re gonna be back in Breuklyn.”

That makes me happy I guess, If I can’t be back in my country, if I can’t be with the woman I love because Ilya just killed her, well dreams of Coney Island and the Brooklyneers I guess will be lesser nightmare. I’ve been in these camps so long. Haven’t been home in a while. I read in a letter things have really changed, I may be irrelevant.

 

Scene 30

Ave H, District Midwood, 2080ce

Breuklyn Soviet

 

 

My heart skips a beat sometimes, it’s called a congenital abnormality, non-pathological, my heart just is irregularly irregular, and really so am I.

 

I was at the gymnasium, disguised in a flicker mask, the skin tight back to hide my ace from cameras and people I know, who think I’m dead. Might be dead, it all might be just an afterlife.

 

The Spartan Gym on Coney and H, near the Kent Theatre where the fifth Ivoryish Quarter of eleven in total meets the Pakistani district, the only one, a den of cab drivers and spies of the ISI and well, I work out with them. I was closing in on mile three, I want to look good naked. I have over the years gotten drunk and taken most of my clothing off, but this is different. There’s finally going to be an EMS calendar and I kid myself I can get diese fast enough to be Mr. January, but realistically speaking I want to be desired. The calendar is a running joke. The firemen have had one for forever, twelve beef cakes raising money for vets and injured brothers, but they blocked us all the time when we wanted one. Without a long story interesting only to ambulance people, the FDNY EMS and the Fire Suppression side are very different places to work and be. And, again they have separate paygrades, EMS far lower, and also the EMS don’t have a calendar.

 

It was kind of a running joke I’d be Mr. January. I am not fat like most Americans, but I have some terrible burn scars on my chest, a small bullet wound in the right lower quadrant and I wasn’t gonna beat out a number of actually fit people to the slot even if I had a whole year in Spartan gym, I don’t look terrible naked, but I hate how I look naked or clothed in any mirror. Because in a mirror I see so much that isn’t real, or should I say I cannot prove I real, I see a madness in me. A squandering of potential. A million voices whispering; what the fuck are you doing in this shifty gym on the borderlines of the Paki-district; trying to get your body in shape for the next time you see Ms. Blazhennaya, that is when and if she ever wants to see you without a shirt. You’re in this gym trying to be Mr. January; but really out of 13,000 Ambulance workers, surely 12 are hot and fit to shoot. I’m running myself in circles to dancehall music, covered slick in sweat, and the voices, the allegorical voices and the face in the mirror say; that woman doesn’t give a flying fuck about how you look naked, the very minute she learns what you really do; you’re wasting your time. She designs stadiums for Christ sake. You put bombs in buildings and give speeches, there’s no future in that.

 

What did the voices say?

 

A mad man, except as the Rabbi Moishe Klein once said; “a sane man in an insane world is what?” And he really-really loved the same 40-60 dancehall songs, now some electro-swing as Oleg Medved was still trying to make a Slavic man out of him, for whatever reason, pity.

I’d been working all of Saturday into Sunday morning on the ambulance, but no one died. Two were sick, one was going to die eventually as she was very old, but we are all going to die eventually. I was one of the original voices for the EMS Calendar. Because I helped found the only EMS newspaper that fought for our living wages and rights, but that was before the Great Revolt, my exile, my faked death and my time in Russia and then my time in Haiti and the camps.

I’m an old/old soul and when I run I feel something take hold. Telling me to do more than I’m doing here, in the safety of the shadow of the mountain top. Even in this Ivory-Pakhi ghetto of Midwood, I’m just a stone throw from the man in the high tower, the men.

She’s an architect, it’s been a few months, I wonder if she remembers my face. I don’t really know anything about her, I just want to impress her. I want to be able to look her in her dreamy eyes and say, “my love I may have to lead commandos into the United Nations building and take all of the delegates hostage, hopefully without much violence, but I swear to god if you invest attention in me I’ll be very dear to you and one day, one day I’ll calm it all down and be a business man or politician and you and I can have beautiful exciting international life, grounded in Manhattan of course.”

 

She won’t buy that shit. Write her a poem, start a war.

 

Now, across town in the Isle of Man, which I’ll remind you is part of the United American States, not the sixty odd breakaway rebel autonomous zones; such as Breuklyn Soviet, Bronx Soviet and Goddess Soviet (once called Queens), the Isle of Man has very tall steel glass towers and Federal troops pointing rocket batteries over the East River, and the mile high wall still stands even after the 2017 major breach of the ceasefire. The towers took some fire and several went down during the 2017 War but really, they just build them taller and taller. Now how do you cross from liberated rebel territory back to the U.A.S.? With money and passport, real or fabricated of course, you can still take the subway from the Atlantic junction. Between 2076 and 2017 there was pretty rigorous attempt to quarantine the zones. But Russian and Chinese intelligence services, and the cunning of the Zionists shorted that up. There was the famous 2015 Millennium Theater hostage crisis that turned into a bloody gas choked flaming debacle. There was the 2017 War where Detroit Soviet was wiped off the map and there was nearly a thermos-nuclear exchange.

 

But things have thawed, a little. He met her in the People’s Republic of Cambridge in 2077, when he worked in the special engineering camps for the rebel alliance. Now, he was in fact seeing someone and she was too and none of their four meetings had what you would call sexual tension, but there was very lively banter and she charmed the living hell of him.

 

Now as he toiled in the Spartan Gym post shift official, thinking about what was coming soon, a very un-wieldy assignment. She was working late on a Sunday, drawing up the latest job. Her job was legal. Well mostly legal as she was not technically speaking in the United American States legally, or legally allowed to engineer sky scrapers and stadium, or even really certified as an architect, she was just talented enough to have her skin in the game. They call her a solution specialist, but she was doing the work of four architects, paid quite a bit less. She had real and unvarnished talent, and she came here to build.

That he existed to largely level almost every institution that funded her building; the wealth, the powerful the developers of what was left of the American dream. She didn’t know that yet, and he wanted to hide it very badly. But it would never take so long to discover that his paramedic work was a highly cynical ruse.

She was in the office alone, not always but on Sunday she was. She was using a computer program to tell her how much weight the structure could bear if she made it twist in on itself getting wider and wider as it rose, she was designing through a proxy of her companies highly paid architect a new citadel on the West Side near the latest portion of the Skyline.

 

She was building a staircase to heaven, once pylon at time. She was raising steel bouquets as offerings she was making herself immortal, even if in someone else’s name. And building on the West side was more sensible because the rockets mostly ended up East of Second Avenue.

She sometimes invented that she was going out town. And sometimes her lovers took her out of town, but most often she was drafting monoliths. She was late night in once office or another and she was trying to make sure she left her mark on this country, before it further unraveled into civil war and fading importance.

 

Adelina was all about her work because it was a means to an end and that end involved two very important things, and you will not easily guess what they are, but trust they are most unconventional.

 

 

Scene 31

Ave J, District Midwood, 2080ce

Breuklyn Soviet

 

 

  Even masked off my sleep never found me, I rolled around in the small, dirty Breuklyn safe house wondering exactly what was coming, as the way time moved for me was different. Let me explain, it’s vaguely unnerving.

 

I was living my entire life all at once, with a reckless disregard for boundaries. I had accepted a world view in which there were many lives to lead and while this one was important so were the ones before and after it, which made death seem a trifle, danger a thrill and awake I was living in the past and the future together, I was in other words wholly distracted.

A woman once told me that when I became a father I’d be grounded, but I wasn’t afraid of that, I just wasn’t fit yet to be anyone’s anything.

I don’t wish to come across like some mad Hebrew prophet; no not all I was remembering things that were not objectively real and envisioning things that were unlikely to happen, happen soon anyway. So let me speak to that. I was unable to sleep because I truly desired this woman in a very real and total sense, but I was completely aware of ability to shall we say, well not be what the modern man is supposed to be or what I presumed she wanted. I just found her totally engaging. And beautiful, which is wonderful, but she looked kind and also fun, and I needed fun because I’d been doing very not fun things for the past few years. Not all, but quite a lot of not fun looking into an abyss.

When I was little I used to build. I used to build wood cities and populate them with soldiers protecting women and children from, well I guess Imperial Storm troopers. My brother would build an equally elaborate citadel of blocks and tinker toys and populate it with soldiers, as of course eventually we would invade each other. But that didn’t happen as often as you might think, him in one room building, me in another, sometimes high, sometimes wide; often we’d build cities all night long, fill up two rooms at least of the dascha, country home in Russian, we’d never even bother to talk, we’d just build bigger larger cities and fill them with soldiers and tanks and fighter planes. NO PLOT, just tale of a rebel city and an imperial city and we were always forever at war. Troop engagements were limited. Eventually, we’d go out of the dascha into the cold and we’d wrestle and I’d always win because I was two years older. Very civilized wars, the two generals would just wrestle, and house guests to the dascha would see what they wanted to see; two young savants building cities, but the cities were only a vessel, they were just high walls to hide princesses from storm troopers, I’m sure my brother had his own internal mythology. As we got older we’d stop wrestling, we’d assume the form of ground troops and we’d raid neighboring Dachas dresses in green fatigues. We’d blockade roads, we’d capture American flags, we’d burn some, we’d level football fields, we’d lob water balloons at cars, and we’d make hooligan terrorists of ourselves. I think the local cops were involved only once, may have burned something down.

But we kept building those cities until I turned 13 and he was 11, when we discovered girls and alcohol and marijuana cigarettes, raves and hip hop. And it was really all downhill from there, no more pretending. No more time for bourgeoisie make believe.

You see the reason I became a subversive and worse, instead of becoming an architect was not because of math and science. It was because I got involved in a host of questionable pass times. And that’s a whole other story.

I lay up all night worrying about something that seemed outside my normal worries. I worried stupidly that I wasn’t good enough for her. Which is the Ivory in me, always secretly a nebbish. Always worried that he’s not man enough, not strong enough. That’s the shit that got Israel into so much house of violent crazy.

But sometime after 3 am, when it was dark and the CCTV grid went blank for just fifteen minutes. After he’d done some writing for her, done some writing for him, tried hard and failed to not look at naked girls on the computer, waited and then at 03:05; down the five stories out the back ally, quietly West on J. taking advantage of the just fifteen minutes when the Yiddish mafia wasn’t watching the grid officially anyway.

He made it to the garage door of a very big Sephardic house on J and 8^th. A big thing of beauty, of self-acclaim, not he can’t really say what the style is, it’s a little old world, a little Tel Aviv suburbs he wraps on the sub-basement ramp garage door, about ten minutes before the cameras will go back on.

 

“Nice of you to join us boobala,” says the Rabbi Moishe Klein, “you look like shit, it’s bad to never sleep.”

 

“I can sleep when I’m dead,” I say.

Moishe grins, knowing I’m dead.

Moishe is a little over weight, pudgy is the word, brown hair not in uniform tonight. And clean shaven and this is not his house, it belongs to some Sephardic doctor, but we use the basement, its Kosher. Someone told the Syrian doctor it’s a Mitzvah to let the rebel Alliance use the basement. The room is a big steel death trap.

“You used to be a real boss, now you’re confined to a shitty two bedroom on house arrest and you have to sneak around. It’s sad. You need a new face. Gonna cut some hair off you, well not me, you know who, she’s a vet.”

“I have a date on Tuesday.”

“You don’t have bupkuss. You’re gonna do a nasty job that no one wants to do, you’ll do it cause you don’t fear death and you got no real attachments.”

“I have a loose, date on Tuesday.”

“You need a new hobby, you need to remember the stakes. I should slap you around some time! You need to be a team player. You need a shave and a new car and a new face and you need to get out of Breuklyn, where nobody trusts you, nobody believes in your shit. Well I do, I do!  But it’s time to do some more work, you were in the camps too long, you let the Russians fuck your head too long, you put on weight.”

“I’m gonna be on the calendar!”

“You aren’t gonna be on shit. The camps they messed you up. They got you mixed up between Breuklyn and the Isle of Man, between Haiti and the Promised Land. What did you even build for them?”

“I built a new mental system.”

“Well my fine Golem, off with your clothes. Yelizaveta is gonna fix you up with a new identity, some new papers and we’re gonna wait right be for dawn and we’re gonna get in a nice car and drive you to Manhattan, and tuck you in at the Empire Hotel. And you’re gonna be German tourist. And then rest, well you know the rest, you’re gonna have to do another job.”

“And my date?”

“You have absolutely no business leading on civilians.”

“She’s a linguist.”

“Yes, and you’re a paramedic.”

“I am a paramedic.”

“Yeah. Well you know a lot about drugs, needles and electricity.

“Moishe, you‘ve changed. You used to be funny.”

The lights flicker, and a robot walks in, and she’s really quite a lot like what he remembers Yelizaveta to look like. He wonders if Moishe tried to fuck the med-bot.

“Wow, superior alien Military?” Adon exclaims, “you look pretty much just like her.”

“Spacebar. Please disrobe, we have to get this done in four hours. I’m an android not a miracle worker,” says the blonde robot in the white lab coat, with a green Soviet cap. She opens a huge medical valise pack of drugs and knives. Sebastian, me, he takes off his coat and drops down to his naked and lies on the steel operating table on a blue sterile field.

“You look like my ex Yeli,” he says.

“I’m designed by people owned by her father.”

“Moishe, you’re a married man with two kids, don’t fucking sex harass my robot ex-girlfriend when she puts me out.”

“Yelizaveta isn’t your or my type, she’s a skiksa fembot.”

“Lie down Mr. Adon,” she says, and Moishe gets an IV set up in my right arm with an 18 gauge and she knocks me out with some gas.

The last thing I think about before the blackness takes me out and they shave me and alter my face and die me blonde and make my eyes blue and make me in to German tourist, so I can get to my targets in the City; I think, what life is this? I just want to walk. I just want to be dancing with Adelina in cocktail jacket and I want to make love to her and I want to work at some basic job and not do, this, this work. That I do with my needles and my speeches and my electricity and my drugs and my, well Baraka.

 

She’s gonna think I’m a…….mad Hebrew prophet, a loon.

I go out like a light. Thanks to the gas, and robot, excuse me, an android replica of someone I used to know with world’s most dangerous man as a father. She cuts up my face and makes me ready for prime time.

Maybe also some time travel.

 

 

Scene 32

The Empire Hotel, 2079ce

Isle of Man

 

 

I awoke in a hotel room, rested, reasonably; and interestingly not hungry. It was the month of November I’m fairly sure. The room smells like Burberry cologne and crushed boysenberries.  I have used hunger to wake myself for years, unfortunately. I step off the big California king bed, obscenely more bed than I at this time need and I feel my feet crunch a pristine white fluff carpet like bunny grass. In the mirrored ceiling I know I have a new face, and with it new and tragic obligations. I awake in the Empire hotel and the year is 2018, is that really the year, there are many systems of time if you ask a mystic. I am now a German businessman, great success! Reborn as a man named Tillman Rheinshagen on my documents, of Frankfurt. And anything I ever was before is now ash. The year is 2015 and I am nominally in the United American States to earn a passive income. And unofficially I am to call a contact of the ZOB underground and begin the preparations for a hostage taking exercise. I flex my fingers and note that my nails are maneuvered they are not ground down from tearing. I note that I have blond hair. And blue eyes and all of my wounds are gone! This is a new body! The rabbi and the robot did miracles indeed.

 

I’ve never been blonde and blue eyed and muscular in my entire life.  And the year is 2015, which means as I flex my mental that Maya and I are about to lead a few dozen commandos into a highly perilous siege.

 

I may have stood up my fifth date (in this life) Adelina Blazhennaya, as honestly I had gone back three years in time down some Ivory rabbit hole. I’d not be taking her to the Russian tea room after all and enjoy smoked black hop-song-oblong in all its glory amid Romanov chic.

 

And watch what a magnificent giggle she has and her curious ways. I’m three years in the past. The revolt has just occurred and the siege of Brooklyn and Queens tight. The barrier wall had just begun going up along the FDR and a very-very nasty Third World War has erupted in Syria, Iraq, and elsewhere.

 

I’m an aberration! In the past of an alternative future and I’m still alive and there are several things I know will happen, but a date with Adelina Blazhennaya is not one of them.

 

There were of course so many things he wished to do on a fifth date with Adelina besides drink smoked tea in the Russian tea room, it was actually limitless. He’d put some thought into a lot of angles, but he mostly wanted just to sit near her and watch her body and her eyes dart and Rivet and see what a smile she had, it was a real smile not an American one. And whatever darkness she was hiding she hid well, but delight she was delight. And had he not been turned surgically Aryan, been sent back in time. Well he’s have gotten to the Russian tea room Tuesday night at 10 pm sharp. He’d have opened every door for her as she would expect him to. He’d tell her about his ambitions and contradictions and try and see was she really an architect or was it. Cover. A front for other ambitions and motives.

 

If things had been different he’d have laid more of himself on the table so she could begin examination of his body of self. Fuck, but then there this small duty he had to his comrades and the cause and the Brooklyn Soviet Free State.

 

Monday he’d not slept well at all because if it were possible to anticipate things that moved fourth dimensionally he had wagered that the rabbi would send him deep into oblivion. Had he been able to die like normal men or sleep like normal men or make valid small talk he’d have not feared her. Not feared the fifth date.

 

Not real the first three times were not dates they were rendezvous. Coffee in the district financial. Only when a man had gumption to choose venues buy meals and dance is it a date in a true sense. But anyhow logically she has lovers, and time is a commodity here.

 

She wouldn’t even recognize his face anymore.

 

So he looked into the mirror and he removed the top row of his teeth, separated out his two front teeth and pulled a tiny USB and put it in his cell phone a Black Berry 2008.

 

And the names now in the phone were just a bunch of colors and one name; Adelina Blazhennaya.

 

Curious. When had he met her? What was the objective year? Curious questions. Anytime he left his body he also left behind parts of himself, aspects of his more universal being.

 

There were now only little flashes of memory. The year was, 1014? What had happened then, no nothing he’d objectively lived through? 1410? No this was a most futurist postmodern urban hotel. It was 2015. It was November. The day was day number November the 18 this was a smart phone, smart phones know the real date, of course thy do. Especially Black Berry which is the product of choice of the Superior Alien Military.

 

I stand, and the room shakes. No have not been drinking last night. I was in the basement of a big Sephardic Ivory Doctor townhouse, and there was a Russian designed android medical robot and she was allegedly doing plastic surgery on me while my Lt. Who I call a rabbi reminded me all the Ivories were dead, I was a Martian one of the last real ones, and it was a shame to turn my pretty brown hair golden and pretty brown eyes blue, but this was it. Another big job. Not my first or last.

 

What was this sureality all about? Are robots even real? Is time not linear? Are not there over 14 million Ivories?! More Ivories than anyone needs? I wobble again looking at my pretty Aryan face in the mirror. What year is this? 1943?

 

The smart phone says 2015, another feature says is also 5775, very future! Also 1410, for the Muslims pretty past. But in my back parts of my brain where I keep a picture of my dead wife and child, my scorched farm and my real name; it is AR 3. Three years after the beginning of the Great Revolt of 2076, quarantined into little pockets and ghettos supplied irregularly by the Chinese to spite the fading empire of America.

 

The smart phone begins to ring. Curious. I look again in the mirror to remind myself this is not another perverse dream.

 

The call is from Adelina. Which is even stranger as she never calls or texts only messenger or emails.

 

“Sebastian, listen to me darling you are being manipulated again. You’re being taken for a ride, again. They are riding you like a horse I should say.”

 

“Adi, I don’t know what to make of that.”

 

“Don’t say anything, all the lines are recorded. I want you to listen to this song. Put on your clothes. Check out of that Hotel and meet me in the Tea Room.”

 

“Adi, sweet Adi I don’t recognize myself.”

 

“Darling, you’ve been asleep too long. Now close your eyes and think my loving eyes on you and listen to the song, and get of that hotel as quickly as you can.”

 

The song plays “Hello, it’s me

I was wondering if after all these years you’d like to meet

To go over everything

They say that time’s supposed to heal ya, but I ain’t done much healing, can you hear me.”

 

And I begin a quiet wearing out via quiet weeping of my new pretty Germaine Azul eyes.

 

And then I know. Instinctively as I know I am no robot, no alien, no Aryan no mad Hebrew profit:   I can see clearly. That if I don’t get out of the Empire Hotel and make it to the tea room ten minutes before her, 10:10pm, then I’m not ever going to see her again.

 

And I almost throw up. Contained in the lyrics of her partisan song were recollected data of my past 3,000 years of memory. What have they done!? The bastards. To us and me.

 

A dark grey suit is ironed and ready and I strap what appears to be a small caliber fire arm, a seven millimeter loaded with non-lethal ammunition to left ribs and comb my new hair and I run out the door and out in the 2015 city, Common Era. And from this point out I suppose it will be largely her narrative because she’s the only number in my phone besides strange colors.

 

Inside the suit is a business card. “Call Watson it says. You’re no Sherlock.” And a number for ‘fire base 18’ is written. This is all a wild dream and I’m sure that soon it will not be over.

 

Not looking anything like my old self I run out of the Empire Hotel and flag a yellow cab and take it to 57th and 7th.

`

It is 10:15 pm when she arrives under the red awning of the Russian Tea room and she smiles and kisses me on the cheek and takes me under her arm and we briskly switch the rendezvous point to another venue.

 

For someone I know nothing about, I was surprised she could pick me out so easily.

 

“I think you were sexier as a Spanish gypsy, but I was raised to love people for their inner most parts. Again, don’t speak yet. Your words too will betray us. We will go to a more private place and talk of things we plan to build together.”

 

There are things I wish to tell her.

 

“Hush, my darling, nothing is true and everything is possible.”

 

Her smile and her ways lead me to believe I should trust her. What choice do I have? If she hurts me I won’t feel it. If she learns to need me I will never leave her side. Who is she again and for whose cause does she work for?

 

 

Scene 33

Wolfgang’s Supper Club on 57^th St, 2080ce

Isle of Man

 

“It’s important that you for now minimize your personal shall we say, underlying cultural mythology. What you suspect is happening, right now is either a powerful thing far beyond yourself, or degenerative mental illness and late stage alcoholism, only you can decide. If your mind is unraveling. I have already decided for you, as I would not have allowed you to enter my orbit if you were a bad man, murderer, a loon or a drunk.”

 

There is something about her accent that is clearly a cultivated fabrication. For I wish I was less primitive and she would make hard love and interrogation of me in Cyrillic.

 

“I must question you, because it is you who are idiosyncratic not me. I am spoken for as they say, I have an apartment in Midtown rented to my name, I have a middle class, maybe even upper middle class job at a prestigious firm. I am not suspect, you are. I can see past the skin you wear, the body swap, I can know your inner parts.”

She smiles and I smile back because there is great affection I have built, in knowing and being denied her.

We are seated in the reserved upstairs area of a bar called Wolfgang’s, on the corner of 57^th and 6^th Ave, no one has offered us drinks and no one has asked us to buy anything, and no one is here but us. I had suggested we simple seat ourselves, as the Russian Tea Room is a more scrutinized place. Wolfgang’s has a smart phone and weapon check and it is found that she is carrying an exotic hybrid from China and I am carrying a Black Berry 2008, and a nine millimeter, unloaded except for two blanks and two/two rubbers, ‘what happened’ to the rest of the clip the negro bouncer asked me and shrugged.

And she picked the Tea Room and I like that place in principle, but it’s owned by Albanians and a real bourgeoisie haunt so it’s totally wired, and Wolfgang’s is a neutral place, and whoever has a phone check has an eye to privacy.

“There is no such thing anymore as privacy,” Adelina states. “We didn’t want the terrorists to win, true but privacy is for people who are hiding. We could well have conducted your interview, our date, in the Tea Room, but yes, I have some sensitive things to ask you. I think we have to assert a right to privacy sometimes, like the oligarchs do, like made people, make it fashionable to hide your hand behand tinted glass, don’t you think, no wait, don’t speak.”

The first time I laid eyes on her I had brown hair, brown eyes I wore a suit. I was speaking at a religious meeting, in the home of a Baha’i leader in Cambridge. A most pluralistic creed. There had been many debates happening at this assembly of forty odd souls and cherry juice and pear juice and tea. There was a woman hurting me at the time, she was keeping me as a lover and telling me I wasn’t good enough to be a more primary man, and my only recourse was that when any other women were to catch my I could offer only my card. And there was this spirited, sexy wonderful woman; Adelina saying little, but looking kind. And I had just begun my two year interment in Shrakasa Waltham, so I was just beginning to taste exile, and she had papers to move between Boston and New York. She was something of an architect. My childhood dream profession. And she was in town for only the weekend, but I hoped she would see me again and I told her I write, because what else was there to say; I do not paint well. My drawings are vaguely pornographic. And no woman in my 3o (then) years of life have ever told me my political theories make them wet, because this is not life. And I am nearly penniless, then and now, and was interred in a camp with bomb surgically placed in my hear tif I left.

I said then (now three years ago), “I write.”

“What do you write about?” she had asked.

“I write powerful and tragic ballads and poems and plays about the Russian and American dialectic; the mentality of our historic 100 year war.”

“Who won do you think,” she winked.

And I wanted to make love to her so passionately and with such force that she wished to read everything, wished to make me a better man.

“I think no one won but the nameless oligarchs of either.”

“Interesting.”

“Can I send you some poems and make a critique? They say I’m going to be the American Mayakovsky.”

 

“Do they say! You should blush,” she told me.

“I don’t know how.”

 

And she gave me her card and for three years I was with two women who never liked my writing and never read my theories, one who thought I should be a business man, the other who thought I should go into Democratic politics, and or join a hippy commune. And I mostly, mostly had to work in the camp, designing a legitimation of my life.

 

Adelina and I saw each other often, weekly even sometimes more, and I was allowed visas periodically to New York for Ivoryish holidays; I saw her immediately after twice for coffee and coloring, one for fancy fish and white wine dinner, once for a picnic and a play. It felt, each time like I was stealing her from her plantation, or her other lovers, but it always seemed like a slight haggle to keep the date going over an hour, but the dates were always lovely.

 

 

Scene 34

The Box Nightclub, 2079ce

Isle of Man

 

 

And the last date which was in May of 2079, on the eve of my exit for miserable barren cold windy Massachusetts we went to go see the actor Siegfried Sassoon in a bit part of Cool Hand Luke at the 59/59. I like him to weigh the energy of things, of people or persons I would like to drink from, would like to taste, I would like him to tell me if they are good for me, that’s what your close male friends are for. But he was surrounded by admirers and Adelina departed before he could make anything but a post play introduction, and all he said was “She is different, but a beauty, and I hope she understands you.”

 

He took all that in in two minute handshake post-play, and then he, me and the four Russian and black modal pretty bar tenders of the Box Speakeasy; we all drank on the company’s expense until 5 in the boker.

 

That night had ended with my face between some lovely breasts, and they were beautiful naked breasts and Siggy was making love to a co-worker, a sexy mulatress, and then the young women we’d bedded were asleep in his house and it was him and I on the roof and he said, “You really liked that woman, or you wouldn’t have brought her. Why did she run away into night?”

 

“I’ve seen her only three times before, I’m very taken by her. Adelina hurt me very badly and then left again for Moscow. Alina cheated on me, twice before the Congress told me after. Then she left for her hippy commune, some weird sect in Guatemala. Maria was boring.”

“Those names are very similar, your exes. Was that deliberate?” he asks with a smile.

“Shut up.”

“Why did Adelina run off, we were clearly going to go drink champagne with beautiful people for free all night in top end clubs? Maybe you bore her with politics?”

“Maybe your acting is trite?”

“No, clearly neither.”

“I have no idea?”

“Did you like Natalia?”

“She was very beautiful, and yes. It had been awhile since I enjoyed it. Neither ex had much passion compared to her, or endurance.”

“I hope you will not be offended.”

“I worry when you say things like that Siggy.”

“I paid her to sleep with you, you have a right to that disclosure.”

I didn’t know what to say, I just opened up my Newports and lit up another, I felt like I needed a mikva.

“I mean I’m sure she enjoyed it too. She’s not a prostitutkah. I just though you needed it. That we should celebrate your coming emancipation from the Shrakasa, my new play! It was more like she won a bet, then I paid a bribe!”

Natalia had fucked me for several hours, she had made love to me and rode on top of me with her blond hair falling all over my scarred chest, and really it was beyond nice being fooled into being desired. My two recent exes were terrible in bed, one she had apparently been brutalized several times in her life so she was only capable of making love for under twenty minutes before she claimed my manhood hurt her and needed to be cuddled or played with. And my more recent lover, the cheat Alina; she was into things that struck me as vaguely masochistic She used to have me choke her with a belt when I entered her. Was I even into that, well maybe a little I was?

 

“You shouldn’t do stuff like that,” I tell him, “It upsets my integrity.”

“Come on, your integrity is never under question by me.”

“I don’t pay women to sleep with me, or accept paid for sex from a droog.”

“I don’t know why Adelina Blazhennaya departed, but I do know she had aimed to depart after the picnic on the high line, and changed her mind. Thank you anyway for comping us.”

“I wish to make you feel like a respected man my droog!”

“Don’t pay your female friends to fuck me then, brother droog.”

“Alright, never again.”

“You are a beyond rowdy character Siegfried Sassoon.”

The phones are in the Chelsea apartment he rents on the side to disguise his families actual wealth, like his bar tending job at the Box or his BA in Philosophy from Columbia University. He’s the son of a lesser Oligarch.

“Having not seen you in two years, what is it then you’ve been getting up to. Being that I have not seen you, you have not asked me to do any real work for you,” he says.

“I’ve been living in the confines of a Shrakasa camp, designing a means to train medical workers, cost effectively.”

“How was Cuba? I heard you found a way to escape to Cuba and the islands, doing research of some kind.”

Siggy is Cuban, was Cuban one half at least via his mother.

“It was magical, and also un-understandable without speaking Spanish.”

“I’ve never been. We should go together in the winter. Try and buy property somewhere! You can drink and write and I can act, you can make new friends, get that bomb cut out, we could be freemen!”

He is already a rather free and untouchable man.

“I would like to figure out a pretext to get back as soon as possible, I find their current operations well in synch with my own theories and aims.”

“How does Natalia fuck?”

“Can’t you be serious?”

“Tell me, for I paid her damn well!”

“She fucks indifferently, as though she is neither here nor there, but she has hips and she uses them well and I have not had that much physical pleasure in two years, she was amazing then. Though your game has cheapened me.”

“I offered her too much money, which was all. You’re not some Wall Street pig, you’re a bohemian, an intellectual! A revolutionary and poet. She was easy to grease. And the seven of us put down perhaps over 20 thousand milliliters of vodka, white wine and Champaign.”

“I hope to go back to Havana in January if I can find the means.”

“Good, I’ll come along. We’ll have a good time. You can get up to new things. It has been two years since we did that job on the train. I know you’re connected to new and nefarious plots amidst the separatists surely. I am a free agent.”

 

But Siggy was not a free agent, for as radical as his impulses were he was an actor above all things, surrounded by wealthy, famous people and beautiful women. We had met in university years ago, but when push came to shove he’d refuse the call of the underground, he’d never risk the resistance. And I was forever uncomfortable with beautiful women and free things of any kind. I shuddered to think what this son of lesser oligarchs had paid his co-worker to fuck me. I felt disgusting. I have a clear line about these things.

 

Adelina had wanted to make me into a very different man, she refused to be seen with me intimately in Russian Boston and hid we were dating from just about everyone. She left me for Moscow after our deployment to Haiti. Alina was young and crazy and to my knowledge wanted little but to live on a hippy commune and have dirty sex. I felt tired, tired from things I had seen and had read in the camp. I’d wished Adelina had been there instead, maybe not naked writhing in fuck in my bed on the fourth date, but I wished she’d stayed out with us and prevented this meaningless thing, this needless gift from Natalia and Siegfried to me.

 

It would be over a year before I saw Adelina Blazhennaya again, and here she was in red light sitting before me timelessly smiling into me.

 

 

Scene 35

Baths of Air, 2014ce

Isle of Man

 

 

And then suddenly, interrupting my afterlife, she came back to me and invited me to the Russian Tea room and then a fancy bath house it was December of 2014, we were back in New York and dating!

 

I need to work hard, and I need to get distracted in this woman. I need to pull this blond hair out and eyes and remake myself as the day we met, and assure her with my actions she can depend on me. I’m not a frivolous bourgeoisie, nor am I blue collar ambulance serf, nor hipster artist. I am complex as I hope she is.

 

“Why you are still all dressed up in German skin?” she demands.

“I had nothing else safe to wear.”

“And you’re boots are made of Italians?” she asks me.

I have on tall brown leather boots that barely match the futurist grey suit at all.

“You’d have to ask my Albanian tailor.”

Quiet silence.

“Is it true that you and your friends drink the blood of Russian girls and throw them off roof tops for sport? Because that’s what the paper says.” She doesn’t bat an eye.

 

 

So after her bold accusation she informed me she was doing some research for a German Intelligence Service and I ought to come with her and make a report “on my intentions” in the quiet dim light of the Air Bathhouse, where she at least believed the secret police had no wire.

“Ok, so now that no one can hear us. Let’s make real talk,” she says, basically whispers. We’re completely naked in the dim banya, in the Baths of Air, we’re back to back in a blue pool of lukewarm salt water barely touching. The place is empty besides us, a wonder cavern of steam and tepid pools.

“What year do you think it is?” she asks me.

“It’s 2015.” I tell her.

“No it’s not. The correct answer is that no one knows what year it is.”

“The smart phone says 2015.”

“But you’re smarter than the average man, so ask yourself again, what year could it be?”

“Ok, I don’t know.”

“How many hours are in a day?” she asks.

“24; that is my scientific guess.”

“Why do you believe that though,” she asks.

“My watch says so.”

“Who built the watches?”

“Probably the Chinese.”

“Does it improve your life, the watch with 24 hours?”

“I need to arrive on time to my meetings do I not?”

“Why?”

“It’s polite.”

“What’s your real name?”

“It’s Sebastian Adon.”

“Why do you think that?”

“That’s the name my parents gave me, it appears sometimes on my W4 forms.”

“Where are they now, these alleged parents?”

“Spain, I think. What are you alleging?”

“That you have parents, that’s what I’m alleging.”

“Look, darling. We make up mythologies every day. They help us cope with uncomfortable reality. Like Orthodox Christianity, and what it does or does not have to with one of the biggest historic betrayals of the Christ. My mythology, which helps we get through the day; is that I never die.”

“It’s 2952. That’s your real name. The serial number on your mechanical heart,” she tells me.

“I’m a person, not a robot babe.”

“You looked very different in Cambridge. What’s the name on your new documents?”

“It’s Tillman Rheinshagen.”

“I know that’s not your real name. Who’s Herr Rheinshagen?”

“He’s a German businessman from Frankfurt, currently living in Cataluña.”

“Do you have many other fake names?”

“I think you know most of them. I’m no robot.”

“Humor me, as this is my first official interrogation.”

“I write noire books as my hobby, I write about a fourth dimensional gun slinger named Sebastian Adon, a heroic hyper-masculine version of my residual self-image. I think I was also the Warsaw Ghetto fighter Zachariah Artstien. And a Chechen gangster named Vasili Pveada.”

“What year to you believe it is, in your mechanical heart, in your most inner database.”

“I’m not a robot.”

“I built you, shut up.”

A pause, I can smell rose petals and hear the strings and chants of gentle Sufi melodies. She thinks I’m a Robot. She thinks she built me. I’d still just prefer to make love to her on a beach in Cuba. A good beach, not a populist beach.

“It’s 5775 on the Hebrew Calendar, I believe the Separatists call it AR 3, third year after the Great Revolt,” I tell her. It’s a line from a book no one ever read.

“Do you think that with over 2,000 extra man years to figure out how to keep slaves working the masters didn’t get very sophisticated in their technology?”

“What are you? And who do you work for” I ask sweetly. I’ve always wanted to be in a B movie, get interrogated by a sexy Russian lady in a bathhouse.

“No, I’m the one asking the questions for now, sweet thing.”

She turns and rubs my back. This is the greatest interrogation I’ve ever been privy to. I recall I was pissing blood in Moscow once. But, I have said that before. I’ll tell her almost everything.

“The technology they have can be defeated by going even more back to the source, although even as here we lie naked underground in this Mikvah; we cannot ever be sure how much technology they have,” I tell her only what’s plainly written in the New Social Gospel.

“Well, all human made things have limits, no matter what adverts claim,” she tells me.

I want to turn around and see her being naked and amazing.

“Don’t turn around,” she says.

“What year do you think it is,” I ask her.

“It’s 2015, as this is what not just smart phones, but International calendars and government planning ministries say. People who pay and collect taxes. The 19^th of November in Common Era 2015. Americans place the number after the month, but that is not common in other countries I will have you know. If you don’t trust that, you’re a mad man, or worse.”

“You just said no one knows, you’re being confusing. I am certainly smarter than the average man and I know that I can hold contradictory beliefs in my head at the same time believing either to be true, or have elements of the truth. It is both the year 2015, and 5775 and also the year no one really knows.”

“2079?”

“If they tell us it is.”

“Have you been to the mountain tops?” I ask her.

“Are you trying to be gay and poetic?”

“Have you seen how they live at the very, very top of the mountains?”

“Did you and your gang kill Natalia Skorbogatova, called Natasha Andreavna?”

“I’m not in a gang. I’m in a political organization. We have uniforms and a chain of command and therefore under international law we are not a gang, we are the nucleus on an army.”

“Yes, well, the paper says you’re in a most terrible gang, perhaps so a sect or cult as well. It says you killed many women for sport. That you’re a rapist, a pederast and a sex fiend.”

“You and the papers have me confused with Dmitry Khulushin and his people, I only killed men, and frankly men who deserved to die and were sentenced to die by a tribunal court. And that was another life, in this life I’ve killed no one.”

“Well No One has set you up and the papers are saying you’re a dangerous, murderous sex abusing terrorist, who has bi polar and takes drugs.”

“The State owns those papers.”

“So you allegedly did not kill her?”

“I certainly did not.”

“But your associate paid her to have sex with you, is that correct?”

“That was my knowledge, after the fact. If it was real, Siegfried is the son of a lesser oligarch, he has protection and powers.”

“So she was a whore then?”

“I think she was mostly lost lonely and lethal, like most modals right. I don’t know very much about her except she was and pretty, and that he paid her cash.”

“Who killed her then?”

“It’s a mystery to us all, probably famous Breria and the secret police.”

“Do you want to see me naked again?”

“That’s a forward question.”

“Tillman, that’s the name you’re using now is it?”

“Tillman Rheinshagen, yes that must be me, as my papers confirm it. Also my nice watch with its 24 hour time keeping features, my watch is Swiss but I am quite German.”

“Tillman, do you want to turn around and see me completely naked,” she repeats.

 

And oddly. Most disappointingly, I wake up back at the Empire Hotel. I suspect she major tazered me, or perhaps subtly injected me with a form of paralytic. I don’t leave my drinks lying around.

 

And then, my imagined future was gone.

 

 

Scene 36

Bryant Park Rink, 2079ce

Isle of man

 

Enter Adelina and Sebastian, awkwardly into a happy crowded ice rink. No snow at all, not even a hint it was coming. Bryant Park, late December 2015 common era; it isn’t very cold at all, and Adon couldn’t really skate. He tried to bluff it. He was skating after her figure, she had done it before clearly. She owns her own skates. They were squirreled away conveniently in her old office overlooking park. Conveniently Adon found parking in Manhattan.

 

It was nearly winter in the Wilderness of North America, but this time the machines had been running for so long that it was neither cold nor impassible, nor even vaguely uncomfortable. It was still leather Jacket season just a week before the Christ Mass. And Sebastian Adon, this time in his own body and grounded in reality was humming and strolling with his hands in the brown leather jacket he’d owned for fifteen years. It sowed as much.

Alkaline, the Jamaican philosopher says ‘Everything in life just takes time,’ and that was the song in his head and that song sustained him. It was the water to parched lips and limbs and it was the kiss before jumping out a plane into the black sky of night.

In Hebrew, ‘he’ means ‘she’ and ‘who’ means him. And right now though, for the first time in a while since he became a civilian again; he; was Sebastian Adon and wasn’t using any fake papers, faces or nationalities. And she was Adelina Blazhennaya, aloof and whimsical and strangely interested in checking up on him.

 

He hadn’t heard from her in four and some months.

After the scary episode of fourth dimensional travel, her accusations in the Air Bathhouse, the wearing of the German suit for the first time. He was shook up, and even deleted her social security number and cell phone too. He knew he was gonna get out gunned, out spent, out classed and quick too. She was so real and so powerful, he had not been near magic like that since, and well dare he even say.

 

Curiously the next time Adelina Blazhennaya popped into his life; it was via an email inviting him to go ice skating in the globally jeans and t shirt warm late December in Bryant Park; filled with those who skate fast and those who dash their booties hard on the ice for all to see. And Sebastian Adon remembered that he used to roller blade when he was young which could not be conceptually much different. He hoped.

 

It was only her smile and little hand clasping his that prevented him from becoming a casualty of the ice and hoypaloyik mobs flying by all around them. She was so patient, she let him take her hand and slow her down and they spun by, several times he almost toppled them both. This was nothing like sky diving, nothing like gun play, nothing like painting, nothing like giving public speeches, nothing like evasive driving, nothing like hard fucking; nothing at all like several of things he believed he was good for. This was so pleasant. And it wasn’t very cold at all, and he genuinely felt that Ms. Blazhennaya didn’t judge him. Didn’t have man expectations at all.

Around they went. He was happiest holding her hand though she pushed him to find balance on his own, as many women ultimately did. There seemed like hundreds of people watching them, pointing waiting for people to wipe out. He’d give them a run for their money.

I’ll tell you what the strangest part was. She couldn’t read his mind so she didn’t see him scanning the crowd for a suicide bomber to blow apart all these happy people. She didn’t hear him ask himself were they being watched, all the paranoia of all his other work.

She couldn’t hear him being crazy, basically. Because this was the temple mount, this was the top of the citadel. There weren’t gonna be any bombings here. This wasn’t a backwater colony on the edge of the empire, like say Tel Aviv. This was a hard an monitored place.

“You know” she says, “you can buy a pair of skates on Amazon, we can make a little habit out of all this,” and she smiles at him. And he breaks his mental train of thought about wondering what year it was.

 

“I should, I mean I like it,” he replies.

 

The skate on and then she heads to the center of the rink to practice her precision amid some little cones. He mostly watches. The war is so far away, it was maybe like; there was no war?

“I love skating so much, I love all winter sports; do you ski or snow board, maybe we can make a trip later on, when I come back.”

She was always coming or going this little architect. She was supposed to have been visiting family in Russia, but had ended up in Hong Kong. She was soon to be off for Moscow, but who knew it was all so effortless her various movements. She had changed her architecture firm about four times since they met, maybe that was normal. She was an artful dodger, filled with wanderlust like him, but perhaps with more means to act on it casually. She was either wealthy herself or had a patron, like everyone else in this city.

A massive airship was moving directly above the city New Jersey bound, these ‘floating fortresses’ were massive cold fusion powered leviathans. They could wipe out whole cities, they housed vast drone fleets and terra drone soldiers for mop ups. Actually no one could see it seemed, but him. He’d seen on brought down over Strong Island two years before in the Battle of Brooklyn Soviet.

“Stop day dreaming droog, look at me, look at my moves!” she says and executes a little spin twist, twirl.

“How now!” he smiles.

Was it real? The airship and the Battle of Brooklyn? Can his soul be loaded like a wetware microchip into a German businessman’s flesh suit? Was that real, did that happen? Did the map that he had seen in the bunker on avenue J indicate that the elevation of Manhattan, therefore the entirety of the Isle of Man citadel was actually almost 40,000 kilometers above sea level; therefore like a veritable mountain above the mostly flat Brooklyn Soviet? Was it disguised by hologram?

“You’re doing it again Sebastian,” she laughs, “you’re spacing away when you should be here with me. Are you having fun with me?”

“I’m having more fun than I’ve had in a year,” he says, which is true as this is very fun and you cannot line up tantric sex and ice skating, because they are not even the same category of fun. His last couple ex-girlfriends were not that ‘fun’.

“I’m happy too, this is great,” Adelina says and they return into the fray of clockwise movement, dashing, darting, moving fast and slow.

Had he ever been ice skating in this decade? No, he doubted it. This memory pops into his head suddenly; of the ice cracking, or shattering and his falling into a frozen lake and then, black.

“We could try more places too,” she says. She notices he’s taken her hand again even though maybe he doesn’t need to, she lets it go, and he is a sweetheart. A beautiful minded Amerikanski, so rare.

The Bryant Park rink closes and they’re sitting in his battered white Civic sipping tea.

There are these rules the Resistance codified called the ‘Security Culture’ it’s an understanding that you can be recorded almost anywhere, but cars, homes and public places are always recorded. Cell phone microphones are always on, even though most think it wipes out your battery quickly to real time record. Sending anything electronically is all recorded. Searching for anything unorthodox is flagged. Public libraries are all flagged. You basically can’t have a secure conversation except on a hike, with no phone, in a bathhouse, except the ones already wired up, you can have one by passing had written notes. Was he going to pass her the note that he wrote, not this time.

 

All smiles and tea, all free loving and also quick to block him out for months on end with no explanation other than she was busy, or a family emergency. What were they going to do with each other!

 

He offered to drive her home, and she said simply, “I’m not sleeping at my home tonight.” And that broke his heart a little that that was so overt.

 

Boyfriends and husbands never stopped him much before, but it was 2080 soon, it was time to have a higher opinion of oneself. Stop being a thief of a side piece. He’s never even thought to try and kiss her, it just hadn’t been appropriate, and wasn’t now. They sipped more tea.

Waited to part company soon, the white bent up, economical Honda Civic faced East on 42^nd street, parked next to the Grand Library where he used to study medicine with Ariel El-Malay. Just several clicks ahead was the United Nations building whose big white tower could be hit by almost any errant rocket fired from the coast of Breuklyn Soviet, visually speaking but in reality to hit that tower would require Persian fire power, not made in Brooklyn basements; because it was an illusion that the World Trade Center, the UN Building and Empire State building could be seen from places like Dumbo or Williamsburg; an illusion! Rockets couldn’t easily hit these edifices because they were high above, higher than third dimensional perception allowed. He knew that to be true, like he knows he is a lefty.

 

Maybe he’s drifting so far away because he knows there isn’t anyone to center him back, no one who cares to take the risk to do that work. Certainly not her.

 

“I wonder what you’re doing with me,” he says.

“I enjoy your mind a lot.”

“What if I didn’t want to see you again?”

“I would discourage that, we have fun don’t we. Don’t cheat me out of clean fun.”

“You make me feel marginal you know, you’re real busy. I for the very first time have too much time to know what to do with. But I don’t have anything to offer you, I have dirty job, a shitty car. No money.”

“You have a lot more than most. Your mind is exciting and I would never encourage you to not see me, but you need to respect my time and my; shall we say circumstances.”

“I think I will develop feelings for you and ruin the little magic you might feel.”

“Take whatever risk you must.”

“What am I good for?”

“Remains to be seen.”

“Do you remember the last time we were together?” he asks her.

“Live in the moment Sebastian, droog, wake up, this is all real. I go to Brazil in 5 days, there will be no time to see you before I go, its not personal. I’m working on a complex teaching structure at work, something like we always talked of. Exciting right, as we always talked about.”

They had been on four or five or six dates, some were not really dates some were just sweet palavers, maybe they all were since she had a boyfriend or a husband or a patron or a keeper and they’d not even done more than barely hold hands on ice.

The second date he told her an idea of building a floating pleasure garden above central park and it stuck in her head and now she had done it; she had found the backers to erect such a thing and political will bought to uphold that plan.

“You’re so impressive,” he tells her.

As long as he’s known her he’s though so.

“Wonderful that you think so, I think so too, about us both.”

“Well what now?” he asks, “when again will I see you?

She hands him a little envelope and inside it is a picture of her looking blonde and ravishing shot by a professional photographer. There is a red lip stick kiss on it. Some numbers are written on the back. There’s a lot of reason to believe he shouldn’t call those numbers. But he will.

 

“I’m worth so much to so many, just go slowly,” she says.

“I don’t know when you’ll see me again, but I know you won’t forget me,” she says.

“You’re sweet,” he says.

“Don’t get a cavity,” she replies.

 

A great Rabbi once said ‘in love don’t ever come empty handed’, but he did. He didn’t have anything to give her before she left, just a letter he wrote in the glove compartment, but he wasn’t gonna open it now. It wasn’t even sentimental like her photo, although a few guys probably had that photo for Christmas, whoever she was going to Brazil with something better still. Maybe, but maybe that was all a story in his head. Maybe she was sweet. Honestly, who knew?

 

The things I might do, he thinks.

“The things you might do, is why I keep coming back to you,” she says.

“Can I take you on a real date after Brazil?”

“You can try.”

“I’m going to think about you a lot when you’re gone,” he says.

“Not too much,” she says, “just enough so a smile forms on your lips and then it passes. Not like your other girls, not like anything before. Think about me until it hurts, and stop there. Think about your future.”

“When you come back from Moscow, it will be the future.”

“That’s true. I must go, please know that I have never had any intention of hurting you.”

“Good bye, have fun in Moscow.”

“I will. Have fun wherever you are.”

And they kiss professionally on the cheek only one time, and she get out of the car and takes of briskly into the streets and the night.

 

And he is sure he will never see her again. But he’s thought that before. The Civic takes off down 42^nd street heading to the FDR where a bridge, an illusionary bridge between two words or a tunnel, a paid tunnel will take him back to the tiny Brooklyn safe house he is staying on Avenue J and Coney Island Ave.

 

His body hurts, he’s uncomfortable in his own skin, no matter in what life, or its color this time around. He’s beginning to remember everything in bursts of total fourth dimensional recall, the salt is wearing off and everything as they say, is illuminated.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Scene 37

Karaganda Camp, 1934ce

Eastern Siberia

 

Phillip Dastagirzada and Dato Koreintelli were the first to notice that there were two foreigners dumped in the camp in the snow from the trains, covered in blood and shit. Watson and Sebastian had literally been thrown out of a moving train passing through the Siberian tundra, they had been tortured and dumped in the snow to die.

 

This was the way most people arrived in the gulag.

 

“Help me, brother please,” Watson had yelled in gibberish to them, the two convicts spoke only Russian, Georgian and some Azeri. But they could see the white one was bleeding out of his eyes and the darkie was trying to bandage him, but had been badly beaten. Had had all his finger nails pulled out.

 

“We have been badly tortured, please assist us!”

 

They do not understand what the darkie is saying, but they get the gist of it. They yelled for the camp doctor Dominick Asbunovich, they then buddle the new arrivals in bear skins and burlap and help carry the eye gouged, tortured new arrivals to the shelters.

 

“What year is this,” Watson begs, demands. They don’t know what he’s saying. And then both of the strange broken traveler go unconscious.

 

Adon and Watson awaken in long cabin bunk house lit by gas lights. They awake to the sound of Russian arguing, light arguing over what and who these men are, what duties or not the camp has to them, what is correct procedure. They have been mauled before and will be again.

 

The act of thinking in Russian comes back slowly, and Adon with third degree burned feet and Watson with no eyes; they are not in great shape.

 

“What year is this,” asks Watson in Russian. He speaks it now, he had to remember where and when he was.

They are amazed to see a Chornay speak Russian, not sense Pushkin!

“It is 1881ce,” Phillip Dastagirzada replies.

“We are in the wrong time,” Adon tells Watson.

“That is quite true,” Watson replies.

“Where are you both coming from, I mean before the Czar’s police took hold of you?” Dato the Georgian asks them.

“We are coming from the future brother, from the source!” Watson mutters.

Dato says something gruff in Georgian which translates to ‘the yellow nigger lost his mind in the cold.’

“What my friend means to say is we are from America,” Adon says.

“America!” Philip says and a whispering in the bunk house of the camp internees goes out, there are Americans here.

“Where are we?” Watson asks.

“You’re in a Gulag camp in Siberia, a special camp for Jews and scientists where they build special ships and futuristic contraptions for the army of the Czar.”

“It seems I can never escape,” Adon says.

“You have only just arrived American,” says Dato, “I’ve been here five years!”

 

The doctor Dominich Asbunovich arrived finally and rebandages Watson’s bloody gouged out eyes and Sebastian’s very badly burned feet. They have clearly both been tortured for many days. Eventually they are seated in a long house clear of the evil snow, eating some meat and drinking some borsht and passing about a bottle of home aid rescue Vodka.

 

“So you’re from the future you say,” Asks the Doctor, “whats it like?”

“It’s quite a lot like the past. There are still serfs, there is still misery war and grinding massive poverty, though most of it among the non-whites.”

“Is socialism triumphant or is democracy,” asks the doctor.

“It’s a mostly bloody stalemate when we left,” says Adon, “Pretty evil things happen for the next several hundred years in the name of both ideologies.”

“How did you get here,” asks Philip, “This is the year 1881, you’re in Siberia, in the middle of fucking nowhere blat!”

“What’s the last thing you remember,” the doctor asks.

“We’d just murdered the Guards Colonel Budanov, when the FSB seized us in Moscow, maybe one hundred plus years from now,” says Watson.

“No I don’t remember that,” Adon says.

“What do you remember,” Watson asks.

“I remember us all being massacred by fucking robots on a beach in Konnecticut,” Adon replies, and puts his hand to his face to not cry in front of all these Pre-Soviet gentlemen.

“How did you come to the past?” Phillip asks what all are drunkenly wondering, unsure about whether these men are just mad crank pout broken fools, or purely mad time walkers.”

“The last thing I remember is they trapped us on a beach and cut off the head of the woman I loved,” Adon mentions, feeling like he’s sick, feeling like he wants to cry.

“Well how will you get back to where you are from,” Dato asks them.

“We will probably have to die again, doing something stupid in your present,” Watson says.

“We were told you were coming, that is why this is not sounding so mad,” the Doctor says.

“Told by whom!” Adon asks but knows.

“We were working on the ridge one day when we beheld the Virgin Mother Mary, she came to us out of the trees and was herself on purple fire, and she said we should anticipate you. She said that you have a list of names memorized. People we should help to save and people we should try and kill for their treacherous crimes. The Virgin Mother Mary came and said you were both mutilated angels, that you’d need black bread, and borsch and vodka. She is a magic apparition, she comes to us all in your dreams and places ideas about the future in us here in the camps. This is how we knew the exact day they would fling your bodies out of the train.”

 

“Her real name is Emma Maya Sorieya Solomon,” Watson says, “Mary is an entirely different person, that was not the mother of the man Jesus you saw, that was his great great great great many times great granddaughter, who hides us in time to save our souls for more struggle.”

“Yes, as I said, Mary mother of Christ,” says the Doctor with a wink, for the doctor is a Sufi Muslim and knows well of the magic of the blood line of the chosen.

“Have you some names, for friends of the people,” Phillip asks.

Watson takes a drink, “yeah we got a long list of names.”

“Well before your soul should leave your corpse again weary fellow travelers, we will sit by the fire and you will instruct us how to best protect the unborn candidates.”

 

Scene 38

Skorbogatova Family Dascha, 1931ce

Berlin

    Let me tell you mother, he is most un-orthodox. The things he is writing about are nearly incomprehensible! It’s all a mix of sectarianism, neo-Marxist rhetoric and some deranged proto-messianic gibberish. I think we are wasting our time on a lunatic. 

 

 

Scene 39

XXX, 2081ce

Isle of man

 

 

So, without further ado, after I died in the Millennium Theater hostage crisis of 2015, I woke up on a beach in Haiti, and then I went back to my tedious sometimes even evil work. The smoke didn’t even wait to clear.

My old body, the body this group of friends mourned was lowered into the ground but I was soon in a new body, grown to look just like the one I prefer, with brown hair, and brown eyes and white skin to get into where I need to go.

 

And there was Watson, waiting for me to wake up. He showed me the televids and the newspapers, and I said, where’s Emma; he said she’s already back in Jerusalem, which is to say deep in the bunkers, because the old place called Al Quds, or Yerushaliim; well that went up in a nuclear blast in 2001. All the Ivories are white Americans, all the Ivories are now underground.

 

I woke up in Haiti, they had laid my body on the beach to hatch out. Watson handed me a glass of water, my sicarii dagger and my kit. The kit we can use to heal or to steal or to kill, my red paramedic bag.

 

It wasn’t a dream, it was time for killing and I was certainly good at killing having learned to kill perhaps as far back as the beginning. I can, or should I say I have and probably can skin a man in under four minutes. That’s really a thing in war sometimes.

 

UM?

 

 

 

Scene 40

Safe house on 16 Kings, 2014ce

Waltham

 

 

Adelina arrives in the cold of night.

 

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 listless school girl, while her memory of events could trace its analysis across four centuries of wax and waning hardship. Her analogue disposition was that of vast kindness. 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.

She rings the doorbell of the Waltham flat he’s just rented for them. A strong improvement from the sub-divided fire trap they’d nearly set on fire when she let him sex her for the first time. She’s wrapped in a long black coat and improbably balanced in heels despite the level of snow fall.

He kisses her hard before she even closes the 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.

She’s all he thinks about. Her stunning baby face. Her smile. How she fits in his arms. How he barely fits in all of her tight little spaces.

He hangs her coat and she grabs his ass.

He carries her up the stairs. 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 loves her, and just how long she can take his cock. He’s insatiable. And she can fuck him for days. The flat has off white walls, poor lighting and smells like scented candles. But it’s better than the one before. In the room is a new red desk they picked out for his studies and writing 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. Takes off her jacket and realizes she’s wearing a short skirt and black lace panties; a black short skirt and tight tank top which makes her small and supple body look lean and quite perfect. He’s already rock hard thinking about taking her.

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.”

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 down. He just imagines always the tightness of when he enters. Like she’s fucking for the first time. That tight. 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 you cock dry tonight baby,” she whispers, “I’m going lick that cock and stroke it so well. But first you gotta play with me.”

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. 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 home.

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.” Put 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 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 tonight baby.”

She looks like a sexy little school girl. She can also be anything else, but always-always beautiful and dignified and pure. 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 apartment he wants her to let him break her in. He wants to tie her wild ways and fuck her so ferociously that she cannot remember another man but him.

 

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 likes her to keep sucking his big fingers while he tries to go slowly back and forth pushing deeper. She’s bent over the desk and can feel him thick inside her in the candle light in the mirror besides the bed. She wants to civilize him. Make him her slave. For sex and smoothies. He can be taught. He slowly pushes deeper and takes her hands. He begins going faster. “I’m gonna fuck that little pussy baby. I’m gonna you beg.”

 

But she loves to beg him. Beg him to serve her. Beg him to make her cum over. She likes him to treat her like the goddess she is. He begins pumping faster.

 

When he comes she waits a little longer and she punches him hard in the face, as he has no respect for her body or her time.

 

He barely winces. Savage barbarian American male. Psycho fucking killer, fresh out the camps. They cannot be civilized these people, total chimp blooded barbarians and I will write as much in my report back to Moscow.

   

Scene 41

Bagan, 3000AR

Burma

 

It is nearly dusk and there are more colors in the sky than he or she had seen in their lifetime; painted in the heavens, buttressed by the mountains there from the lower ledges of foot hills they can finally see the 2,000 plus gilded spires of Bagan.

 

“It’s not called Burma anymore,” she had informed him and he absorbed, but persisted to call it that in his mind for the naming of new names was the work of men and to him this was place of dreams associated with monasteries, monks, magic carpets, hot air balloons and great escapes.

 

He clutched her small hand as they take in what they had planned so long to see for many moons. It was nothing like the photographs, in appearance true, but in had epic majesty, nothing you could capture in rendition. And everything like a world in some place to come, or place that was.

The train ride from the capital had been a tumult of shifting moving humanity but they were unaccustomed to judgment or complaining for he saw the world as it should be and she loved the world for what it was and the people here they see as two travelers here to bring more than we would take away.

He remembered his first attempts at yoga, all the sweating and aching and some cross between moments of mind blowing tantra and at the same time, an Israeli head fuck work over for mind data. A little like sex, more like torture in the beginning then later like neither, a happy work toward Zen. She remembers his early art for her, its primitive pastiness that was also from his heart but not his soul, that would be later. And past lives were left in Babylon and with earnings they scraped together for an escape they find themselves at the spires of Bagan as the heavens unroll flame into blue night.

She squeezes his calloused hand and smiles at him. And that is by far his favorite thing on earth to see. This epic magical place making her smile and that reflects into him deeply, the accomplishment of her happiness. They are taking in the wonderful present together.

A magic carpet suddenly shoots past from the tallest gold Temple to the outlying hills.

“AH ha! I told you it was real,” he exclaims in glee.

One thing about them was that if he was wrong, and certainly he was wrong often, she was patient in correcting him. He was so dear for her so early because she cast no judgment about his previous life as a train robber.

“So you rob trains,” she asked once him back on a date in the basement of the Andalla Café in the People’s Republic of Cambridge, “well I can’t be with a train robber.” She had sipped her mint tea and thought about the risks there. A woman must have limits. Although he cuddled quite well and his lips were soft, no one in Russia or the American States can stake her love life on train robber.

“It was long ago I did that work, but I promise no one was ever hurt.”

“You used guns?” she asked him.

“Well of course but I never used any bullets!” he replied.

“Well I still can’t be with a train robber because I have to think about my family and my future and robbing trains is very risky business as you well know.”

He paused to sip his mint tea way back in Cambridge a year ago.

“Could you be dear for a retired train robber if he robbed no more train and only drove ambulances?”

“Well in Czech literature they say once a train robber, always a train robber.”

“But you are not Czech my dear Adelina, you are able to use discretion. I am Retired.”

“You have a very beautiful soul. If you won’t rob any more trains, not ever again, then I’ll see you next week for more painting.”

And so he began to paint ad write for her and ask to see her as often as she would allow without ever asking her to love a retired train robber, he simply made persistent his original argument that even a retired train robber could strike balance between feelings, fear and future.

The map says they are about two hours from the Hotel which is nestled in the foot hills approximately twenty kilometers for the train station. He is doing a god job navigating and she is doing a good job watching over his steps.

It is warm, but moderate and there is gentle breeze. The jungle has sounds and smells they are unaccustomed to, but neither of them has any fearful parts in their bodies or their souls. There are now twenty eight billion stars in the sky and the moon casts a glow over the temples and shrines built over a thousand years ago for each and every major deity that could raise a cohort.

“If you’re tired of walking I’ll carry you,” he tells her. He has been carrying people for many years and has good form. She is so dainty and graceful, her auburn hair flutters over her shoulders and she replies, “or I could carry you, but then we’d be breaking your code of Haitian gentleman wouldn’t we?”

She doesn’t believe that the code is anything more than his chivalric improvisations which she does like, so she humors his parables about some Caribbean male honor code that she can neither confirm nor deny was ever set into a real list.

 

“You have the dearest and happiest of smiles,” he says, “especially when they are mischievous.”

“I challenge you to a race to the Hotel!”

“A gladly accept! But, while your powers are greater than mine, I have secretly perfected my Cobra Three fourth dimensional flying techniques. Not only can I turn my little prayer rug-towel turban into an airship I can loop that great temple three times.”

“Well my happy retired bandit I have tricks too. I will fire my inner bioenergetics and through my heart chakra call a rabbit of enormous size to bound through this jungle and right to the hotel bed!”

“I’m already jealous of this mystical grey rabbit,” he laughs.

The moment stops for a minute. The huge yellow moon casts glimmering beams that hit the towers and precipices of the temples. She remembers momentarily his first and last jealousies before he learned to accept she was a partner to be played with and delighting in freedom was no object to woe or win. He remembers the very first time he told her jealous nonsenses and stewed and stormed and wasted energy over nothings.

“Stop wasting energy on your past misconceptions and let’s race. First one to the hotel will bath the other in lotus petals and perfumes and also sing. Though if for some reason I win, which I will, you can bathe me and perfume me and improvise poems because still your singing is a little suspect my dearest.”

“Listen sweet teacher I have many hidden tricks. I have sense learned enough Russian to sing and dance for you in Russian. But I will be the one to surely win.”

“Tak,” she smiles and kisses his cheek.

She kneels in prostration and then extends her hands and erupting from her bosom is a red yellow light.

He throw open his sac and pulls his grey blue carpet.

A rabbit the size of an elephant gallops out of the jungle and she blows him a kiss and the creature on its hind huge rabbit legs darts off into night.

She is gone before he is even airborne. Summoning all his magic, mostly learned from this woman who is his companion and the subject of all of his latest writing, but still never fully his. He asks Allah to make lighter his burdens, then he asks the universe to propel his craft.

And next thing he realizes he’s flying through the night sky. He can see the enormous rabbit crashing through the jungle path. She waves to him. At ten thousand kilometers an hour he shoots past the hotel turning road and dashes toward the biggest temple, the gold spired monolithic center piece of their new wonderland.

She and he have little radios and she whispers to him, “I you show off I’m sure to win!”

“We shall see,” he replies. And with terrific speed makes the first loop of the temple.

And with a manic burst from his third eye he propels the carpet right across the temple face, right over the valley and right into the hotel bedroom just as the enormous rabbit courteously olds the door for Ms. Adelina  Blazhennaya, the subject of his undivided passions though still a very independent woman.

“Your rabbit is a Haitian gentleman like me,” he says.

“Will you invite him in for tea then?” she asks.

The Rabbit gives him a knowing nod, and politely declines in Bamar dialect. In fourth dimensional ESPN the rabbit and the retired gun slinger following the code of the Haitian gentleman are on the same page. A man or a rabbit Haitian gentleman knows when not to be a third wheel.

“Poker and cigars tomorrow though below Temple 1,006 though when she goes to meet the high priestess,” the huge fucking rabbit says, “Sak passe?”

“Nap boule,” the retired bandit replies meaning that “they’re on fire.”

And the rabbit departs. The hotel room is massive and decked in gold silk finery and a massive indoor bath pool and mahogany panels. They are the only guests in the hotel because Myanmar has sealed its borders the day after they arrived because of rumors of another Buddhist monk uprising against the military junta.

“Well who won?” he asks.

“We both won. We’re here,” she smiles dropping her bag.

“Welcome to Burma,” she says.

“I’ll think of the poem and you run the bathwaters my dear teacher.”

As the story was about to become a highly erotic tale of rose petals, the flying lotus position, eastern perfumes and cuddling for many hours our heroes the retired bandit and the cunning linguist fire priestess are blinded by a vast white light.

 

Flares are in the sky and helicopters are flying over the valley. From there hotel rooms they hear the grinding of tanks and the marching of the army.

“But it wasn’t prophesized to happen until Friday,” she utters.

“How could they have known,” he exclaims.

“Darling your highly erotic rose petal bathing escapade will have to wait. We have to get to the high priestess before the military seal this place down!” she exclaims.

Bringing ourselves back into a world of magic and dreams, hope and the conquest of hearts. The Hotel Mandalay has nine hundred rooms, but only two are occupied. One by large Cuban cigar smoking rabbit, who’s name we have not learned, a retired gunslinger named Sebastian Vasil Adon and a woman who’s beauty steals the air out of train station, where men fall down staring via the spin of their heads, she is also a fourth dimensional fire priestess from the order of Shabazzni Calfraian, or called in Ruus-American Ms. Adelina Antolievna Blazhennaya.

“Lock the doors,” he proclaims.

“Run the bath water,” she replies.

“What about the army?”

“We shall see about the army in the morning. There is no reason for them to come here now and we are far more likely to get into trouble crossing the jungle at night to where we know they are heading.”

Man guided by passion seeks confrontation and swipes and stabs toward heroism while women are rational and that rationality is the best defense we have for the continuation of our species.

“Indeed,” he says hearing her think.

“I suspect that with your wild daring the army will be most under prepared, but right now I have uses for you.”

The bath basin is made of silver and sit above the floor or aquamarine and gold tiles. It easily accommodates her small frame and will when infused with warm waters, honey blossoms, rose petal and his hands all over her body make for a premium implement of relaxation.

 

“Why does calamity follow you where ever you go?” she asks sweetly. She has placed a white rag over her face and he positions himself behind her first kissing her neck five time on each side and the reaches into his 84^th mind chakra to grow a kinetic battery of other hands. With his eyes closed his magic sprouts twenty four sets of hands that will with care and delicate intimacy rub Ms. Adelina’s back and arms and all other places that she finds pleasing to have so many hands work adamantly upon her.

  “It feels amazing, as if you are massaging me with twenty four set of hands!”

“Ha. Well that is because I am. Fourth dimensionally.”

“To respond to your question about calamity. I didn’t bring them here. They were coming to find the chosen ones working under the high priestess, despite what you sometimes worry I am not a trouble beacon.”

Push harder she order his twenty four spatial projections. And she transmogriophies herself behind him so that she might surprise him by kissing his neck and biting his ear, licking the side of his face and then before he can react; disappearing.

“I find that sense I fond you my objectives have shifted substantially,” he says.

“I think you bring calamity, I don’t mind because you are well equipped for it, but I think that you drew the army here with your aura. That had I been the first to come we’d have had more time. I appreciate your new fond devotion for me, but we have to tread carefully with you change making, war mongering ways.”

“I’m here to learn under your guidance teacher.”

“You’re also madly in love with me.”

“It’s plain as day that I haasansi tulibot ti”

“I think that just means love.”

“So many types of love, so as you know I have to invent words from languages that never were or still could be to elude your training as a cunning linguist.”

“I still don’t think you know me well enough to love me, even if you are a most tender kisser, a prolific scribe, and very good with your hands, devoted as you may seem to be, love AS the universe intends it is not yet what we have.”

“Tak,” he says and dissolves his twenty four massaging part.

  The aroma of roses also of lotus blossoms and also of cherry wafts over them, as low burning candles, hundreds of them dart from mirror to mirror on side panel and ceiling alike.

He climbs into the bath his black bandit sash removing nothing but his hat and boots.

He clutches her toward him pressing the naked ness of her body to his proximity he kisses her with the very same force, t ever same total and utter longing as he had Halloween night under a year before in the parking lot of the Crystal Restaurant. She kisses him like the great man in the well of tragedy he is. She kisses him with such compassion that she forget even for minute that he still must prove his love.

 

They sit across the bath tub palm to palm.

“You have orders to be back in Breuklyn Soviet you know,” she says.

“I don’t leave the safety of a woman I cherish up to the abilities of enormous grey rabbits,” he replies.

“You still write about a lot of woman who aren’t me,” she says.

“The past is painful pass time, but I never got into psychotherapy so I just had to write the whole thing out.”

“I like your all your poems. I like all your pictures. I need you to tell me that they’re all just for me now.”

“Everyone else is over. And to no other inspiration do I draw my power except from you.”

“You’ve known me less than a year. And don’t give me some old soul line, I’ve never set my eyes on you in this life or another until my last birthday.”

“I’m here ok. I’m not anywhere else. Every story and every painting will be for you.”

“You’re said that to other woman before!”

“Well I cannot be apologetic if I love loving and can do so early and often! But I must declare that each love is a different love, almost needing its very own word. Each time passion washes over me life a tidal wave and I pledge to you my fierce loyalty know that it is acts that prove it not words or, poems or art. I beg you to understand me. These other women, your other men are a pastiness. And here I am ten million leagues away from Breuklyn Soviet pledging my sword to your cause, my lips to your use and my glory to your every need.”

“Wow, when you learn to speak Russian there will truly be no end to your pontification on emotion!”

“Ms. Adelina I beg you take me day by day and never find my emotions misguided.”

“Have no stupid jealousies then. If you are good to me, truly god to me, as you have been then never think my eyes deviate either from your unruly retired gunslinger countenance.”

“No take off your damn clothes retired Bandit,” she says.

Completely naked the sit across from each other as explosions can be heard from the valley below. Screams and tumult abound and her eyes say, wait until dawn.

I’ve never know such peace he thinks to himself. I’m so far from what I know, I’m in Asia for fuck sake. I swore I’d never go to Asia until everything was settled back home in the Soviet. And his friends’ faces flash before him, the battles ongoing in Haiti and the United American States, the wars in the Wild West Indies. He’s so exposed out here. Not just without his Otriad, no just no speaking the language or being a novice to the weirding ways. He should be back in Waltham finishing his training, back in Haiti leading his men, or back in Breuklyn safeguarding the revolution; BUT NO.

She is best teacher he has ever had to remember his humanity. For without knowing that humanity what is it that he has spent 7,000 years fighting for!

“Rub me head toe,” she says,” climb behind me and massage out my arms back and sides any glimmer of the stresses caused by impending soldiers, tanks and doom.”

“I’ll slay every last one before a hair on your head is harmed,” she says going to work on her body in the ways she taught him to do.

“I had thought after Sudan you all took an oath to strict non-violence!” she exclaimed.

“Well I will slay them without killing them.”

“You are awash in contradictions my mighty Sebastian.”

“Leave all that to me reconcile. I’ll get you to the temple safe.”

His hands press-compress and rotate up her inner thighs. He head rotates 180 degrees and her tongues does things in his mouth that make his body burn with sweet temptation.

“Such powers you and I,” he says.

“I can make you stronger but I cannot ever fix you.”

Her soft tight body is absorbing over half of his three dimensional concentrations.”

“I mashva pilootika you,” she says.

“Does that mean I love you too,” she asks.

“I could say that word in English every time I see you but I can’t unless you believe it, which you can’t until I prove it, so I can’t leave your side until you know I’d cross the earth and battle a horde of mercenaries, climb temples, cut through jungle and save the day in your name.”

“Not necessary,” she says.

‘What,” he replies.

“All I need you to do is make me happy and never break your promises. All that other stuff is fine, but if you want to say I love you all the time I need more time to see you being a man. I don’t judge you for being a gunslinger, but I need to make sure that all your powers for to proper use and aren’t squandered on anger and past hood. Tomorrow we may well have to fight our way through 10,000 men and rescue the High Priestess and her students from these mercenaries. This isn’t your fight. If you’re here to prove you love me, just follow my lead. Happy and promises kept.”

“On my honor as a son of Breuklyn,” he says.

She embraces his and kisses each cheek five times, ten put her tongue to his lips.

“We have seven hours ‘til dawn,” he says, “we can draw or make love on the ceiling!”

“My dear, as disappointed as you may be, I know that when you and I are in bed, or on the ceiling sleeping is the last thing we will be doing for you are afflicted with the Breuklyn wandering-hands-technique and I as a daughter of Chelyabinsk am afflicted with passionate-tongue-disposition. You must sleep on the couch I am afraid because from the look in your eyes I can tell you wish to ravage me quite severely.”

Blast he thinks.

“As you wish,” he says feigning disciplined acceptance.

“If we get through tomorrow alive dear Sebastian Adon, you and I will have time for kisses, for levitating love making, for tantra for art, for days!”

Oi. He looks at her tenderly, blows her a kiss and starts making up the couch. In her naked beauty she is best reminder that he’s going to take every measure to live past tomorrow and also age 88.

 

The manuscript, it means nothing. It goes to nowhere, for no one came to bring us a new religion. What we are holding too fast, beyond our love and imagination is the promise of inevitable evolution. As the whole mountain is set on fire;

 

I CRY OUT TO HER:

 

“I thought myself a mad man! Crazed about a world that seemed to be unravelling, believing I had some duty to stop the floods and the needless dying, I dreamed I was a paramedic in the city of New York! That we fall in love under most desperate circumstance, traveled the world together in the service of the people; that we had a life of tumultuous happenings, heavy in love and love making, and then…”

 

An awkward, long silence.

 

Oh no.

 

She cradles me tight in her magic, she says, “I’m sorry Sebastian, my darling, my once and future baby; but the things you are dreaming darling, are sometimes very real. I’m dead.”