Fire on the Mountain

 

This is my fourth book and major opus. It takes place 12 years after the events of American Refugee.  It is largely about the unlikely romance between an American rebel leader posing as a paramedic and a Russian spy posing courtesan, on the eve of a major revolution and civil war inside the United States. Taking place over ten years with a wide range of characters spread over 4 acts and 3 continents; this is also the story of a plot to steal the secrets of the Jews; or more specifically their ability to hold together social services and community without reliance on a state for nearly 2,000 years.

 

 

Fire on the Mountain

 

 

(How the great revolt began in four ACTS)

 

 

 

Adler S Walt

Dedicated to: Daria Andreavna Skorobogatova

& Yelizaveta Kotlyarova,

Elena Antolievna Komarova

& Valentina Stanovova

 

 

 

Set in a lower east side Bulgarian tavern;

 

On the eve of a doomed uprising in the heart of the American Empire, a newly immigrated Russian dancehall courtesan and a half-Hebrew paramedic share a tantalizing moment. Their forbidden passion occurs amid a full blown slave revolt in the United States of America orchestrated by clandestine forces. In a danger filled four acts, this novel traces the seven year revolution centered in Brooklyn and the hope or carnage caused of their affair.

 

In the newly liberated Brooklyn Soviet, there is great trouble brewing. Drones patrol the skies along the border and a new mile-high-wall has been built to prevent the traffic of people and contraband over the East River or Strong Island Sound into the United American States.  Home to three million “stateless citizens”; this wild coastal gangland and nearly lawless rebel Free State is dominated by Irish and Italian municipal unions, Postsoviet and Ayitian mobsters, Shi’a Islamists, Baha’i spies, Messianic Hebrew cults, Black Nationalist guerrillas, Gypsy Partizans and a highly organized Afro-Irish-Israeli underground network known only by its clandestine acronym: the Z.O.B.

 

This is the story of how the Great Revolt began and of the defiance of newly freed slaves in the face of an empire.

 

 

 

Prologue

 

 

Set in the Republic of Ayiti, 2020ce

 

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

 

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

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

I was not always such a man.

 

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

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

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

 

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

 

We are called the zealots after all.

 

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

 

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

 

Or called in Russian; Raspizdia.

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

No giving of fucks! Even really about their own sad selves?

 

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

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

That morning we look for one bad man in particular.

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

We march on.

 

The official name of our column is the Z.O.B.-Dublin Detachment also called the Fighting 99th. It is composed of Shtarkers[1], Shatahs, Fenians as well as a popery of the Ayitian peasants from across the southland. If you’re not familiar with these particular edged colloquialisms, well I suggest you look them up in the appendix of exotic foreign vernaculars. Suffice to say they are just different ways to designate a “bad motherfucker.” Except Fenian, that is an Irish political nationalist ideology of the early 18th century.

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

We march to this dead place to bear grim witness.

War on this island fortress, and war in the world of man have burnished us into unrepentant murderers that have killed and will surely kill again. That we kill to stave off an even greater genocide by murdering its perpetrators, is the rhetoric we hide our murder behind. And if each of us came to this wasteland below the Choke Mountains beyond Illubador out into the contested borderlands about the Valley of Antimonite with some noble pretense to liberate the Ayitian people from the iron heel of the M.I.N.U.S.T.A.H.[2] and the N.G.O. Republic and their Maccoute or F.R.A.P.H.-rapist militia bag man; then periodically, it is the low volume atrocities like this one, which sometimes take the greatest toll on our resolve.

This is sadly not G.I., the Joe; those stand for real and vile things.

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

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

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

“Cut him down!”

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

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

 

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

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A Listing of our Primary & Lesser Characters

ACT I: Str’ast

(Black, Black Hearts; or,

The Wild, but highly fickle passion of Daria Maccluskey)

2011-2012ce, AR0

 

Set in Moscow, Sophia, Penza & New York City

 

Starring;

 

Sebastian Vasyli AdonAEV, a paramedic adventurer.

Dasha Andreavna Skorobogatova, a wild Russian courtesan.

Capt. Mickhi Dbrisk, a righteous Jamaican gangster.

Capt. Watson Entwissle, Mullato Ayitian gun slinger

Capt. Nicholas Rosetree Trickovitch, a private detective.

 

‘Sasho’ Alexandre Dmitrievich Perchevney; the Great Bulgarian Oligarch.

Tania Magda Dimcheva Perechenova; Sasho’s wife, queen and Chief of Operations.

Slavi Dmitrievich Perchevney, Bulgarian enforcer & Sasho’s brother.

James White & Irish; retired cop/ Bratva enforcer

James ‘Behemoth’ Pérezes; Shapeshifting-Bratva enforcer

Justin Toomey O’Azzello, Mehanata General Manger

Mary Lia Lewis Monteleone (Amelia), a friendly French translator.

 

Alan Oleg Leondovich Medved, a former Soviet photographer.

Kudzai David Darious Chikwamba, a Shona warrior and biochemist.

Yulia Romanova, a fine Russian modal, informant & delta.

 

Dmitry Khulushin Koch, a lesser Oligarch, Prince of the Eastern territories.

Raphael Ernesto Lynch Contreras; a Peruvian disk jockey & guerrilla.

Victoria Christina Contreras Lynch; the artistic wife of Rafael.

 

Tanya T-Bird Tall Flame Luv, a healer and a Maagi for the Resistance.

 

Franny of Rainbows, a DHS police spy, and mystic

Jared Forgetter, a cool and California medic, reverted delta.

Avner Mikhail Kreminizer; a Lithuanian Israeli Pararescueman of unit 669.

 

ACT II: La Lingre

(The Longest Lingering Love)

2014-2015ce, AR3

 

Set Outside Greater Boston

 

Introducing;

 

Adelina Antolievna Blazhennaya; Sexy Russian linguist.

1st Lt. Irfan Khan, Pakistani military intelligence officer

 2nd Lt. Saiph Khan, Bangladeshi patriot

Cpt. Roj Eli Zalla, Iraqi Kurdish Patriot

Saadian Usmani, a liberal Pakhi mystic

Malcom Ricardo Veshanti, a Rastafarian Warrior

Gen Jefferson McIntyre, Guyanese philosopher

Eric & Joseph Ruhelman, Franco German Bikers

Gen Tiputti Capois, Premier Ayitian General

Charlotte Kamande, Ugandan princess

Nicholas Mapfre, film maker

Siegfried Sassoon, bartender & Cuban Actor.

 

Ilya Lubov Trubadoroff Trump, a Lesser Oligarch of Charlestown

McIan Murphy, a Fenian ghost hunter from the Dublin Fire Rescue Battalion

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

ACT III: Loyal’nost

(Tales of the Brooklyn Bath and Rifle Club)

2017-2019ce, AR5

Set in Breuklyn Soviet MicroRepublik

 

Starring:

Yelizaveta Alexandreavna Perechenova, a Ukrainian physician & vet.

Lt. Moishe Cohen Klein, Deputy Chief of Hatzalah

 

Capt. Anya Drovtich; Commander of left Rebel forces in Breuklyn, ZOB

 Mr. Hubert O’Domhnaill; bootlegger & Fenian freedom fighter, ZOB-FRB

Ysiad Ferraris; Suave Dominican businessman

Laurence Simon, PhD, founder of the American Jewish World Service

Capt. Mara Fitzduff; Fenian Minister of Agitation-propaganda, ZOB

Viktor Emile Cange, Ayitian Paramedic, ZOB

Michael Magnus Goldbar Allamby, Bajan money changer

Don. ‘Big Man’ Mathew Allamby, cousin of Magnus

Anahita Noor; Afghan Persian lawyer

2nd Lt. Kaveh Ali Shariti Atatable; Persian Agitprop officer

Ezra Pula Pound, Council for the Union Army

Mikhail Mastrovitch; Military contractor

                    Vanessa Birdy Rainwater; a talented singer and heartbreaker

 

          Toba Hadaad, Ivorist spy, nymphomaniac

Ruth Vered, Ivorist funding conduit, Hamptons Gallery owner

Ha Chi Yu Perechenova-Sassoon, General Manager of the Voodoo Lounge

 

 

Theodore Breria; Director of Homeland Security Services †

 

General Avinadav DeBuitléir, founder of the Resistance.

Maya Soraya Emma Solomon, the possible Messiah. Known as the Tsaddik Ha Dror.

 

 

 

ACT IV: Stojkost

(Code of the Haitian Gentleman)

2019-2020ce, AR8-9

Set in Hispaniola

 

Starring:

 

Gen Olu Obenson Étienne Dessalines,

Gen Watson Entwisle, HAC & SPLA[3]

Gen Ferdinand Prime Christophe

Gen Tiputti Capois, Premier Ayitian General, GAI-HEG[4]

 

 

Yelizaveta Alexandreavna Perechenova, a Ukrainian physician & vet.

Lt. Moishe Cohen Klein, Deputy Chief of Hatzalah, Hc[5]

Mr. Hubert O’Domhnaill; bootlegger & Fenian freedom fighter, SPB[6]

 

President of Ayiti Jim Basher Al-Talleyrand, French Oligarch

Dominic Strauss Kahn, French Oligarch

 

 

 

 

ACT ONE:   Str’ast

 

Set in New York City, 2011ce

 

Prelude

 

 

 

Moscow, 2019ce

 

 

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

 

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

 

With that indictment we ask the reader a Talmudic question; ‘a sane person in an insane world is what?’ And there by a conscious person in a sleeping world has what duty[7]? And furthermore, if the readers cannot be moved by the humble words of this theorist narrator, be moved then by atrocities that are carried out daily paid for in the taxes levied from the sweat of your work and the blood of your fellow humans.

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

Did you know that when the Oligarchy[8] cannot conquer a rebellion they conquer its narrative? Did you know that the truth is not ever truly known except by those who saw a thing with their own eyes? How did it begin? Who was the leadership? What were the demands! These are oligarch questions because the small man or woman; the humble ones; those who submit themselves to a higher power and therefore love life; the children of the believers; we do not beg a political context for the world; one is thrust upon us.

 

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

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

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

 

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

 

They always beat me and referred me back to these poems. Poems they claimed were “proof” of my highest-level rebel involvement. The uprising had not at that time fully spread to the Russian Federation or the People’s Republic of China. But, I remembered nothing, well almost nothing well. I did remember several things throughout the brutal interrogations that in a way sustained me through their inflicted brutality. Were these things real or imagined, implanted or devised I have no idea for I know neither science nor high-level majik[9].

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

Finally, I know that an uprising began in a place called Ayiti and that it continues to this very day despite major quarantine and most disastrous set back. I know that on January 1st 1959; that the same revolution spread to the nation of Cuba[10] and has been entrenched there sense were illiteracy has been irradiated and people live longer than in the United American States. And things come in threes, all things; for on 1st January 2012 that long quarantined revolt fought on the fringes of the developing word erupted on the streets of Port-Au-Prince and spread like wild fire worldwide.  I know that I am entitled to certain protections under the Geneva Accords I will not receive as a uniformed combat Pararescueman, shield 2952 of the 99th Airborne Detachment from Breuklyn Soviet, epicenter of the latest phase in our latest and most glorious uprising.

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

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

Therefore, I joined the rebel alliance as uniformed Pararescueman 2952 of the 99th Airborne Detachment, known also as the Fighting 99th. It was we who helped retake Port Au Prince briefly in 2009. It was we who took back Jerusalem in 66, 112, and again in 1210ce.

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

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

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

 

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

All I see now is her oy smile, beaming at me by the desolate Brighton boardwalk, there was so much hope that day that we could both leave this grim city and bleak life.

 

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

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

 

After reading me this trifle wearing both a hideous and vaguely comical mask; one my interrogators then smashes my face with a truncheon again. And such was the only evidence they ever presented me with. A stupid, non-rhyming poem. A ridiculous, minuscule Partizan Song.

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

It seems they are less interested in the recently murdered guard colonel my Ayitian partner and I played the part of recent highway men to gun down dispatch. Less interested in our baser affiliations. It seems that the strong arm of the Russian Oligarchy is most concerned with a brief end of summer liaison that happened seven years prior with a young buxom émigré from the little city of Penza whose name was Natalia Andreavna Skorobogatova who for some time I called Dasha, or Dashutka to be even more sweet.  Do not ask me to quantify my love and longing for I cannot.

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

 

 

 

Scene 1

140 Nassau Street, 2011ce

Financial District

 

 

 

Blast the damn heat, for my brow drips. For in New York it gets so hot in the late of August, a swelter box most people of any means flee to their dachas in Strong Island to avoid!

Dawn is now rising, breaking and expanding on the roof of the low roof of ancient print house converted at some time in the past hundred years to a seventeen story cooperative. District Financial and with the last manic burst of energy being expended by one of our antagonistic protagonists, Sebastian Vasyli Adon, over a huge bottle of illegally imported Basque white wine, tells old danger tales to those who will and can still listen.

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

Bottle uncorked and the debacle of his oratory may now unfold.

A fake gold watch dangles off his left wrist as he enunciates his wild tale with his hands, although it is known he is only one half a Yid. Covering his dark brown hair cut short for summer is a brown beret newsy cap, called a skally cap, if you were a rude boy from the two tone army like he was. It’s very 1943[11]. So very neo-hipster or proletarian-chic!

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

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

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

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

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

The stare down is punctuated by accusations of impropriety.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Less than a dog!” she proclaims.

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

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

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

Sebastian Adon removes his cap and says,

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

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

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

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

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

She participates actively in all she observes.

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

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

Puff, puff passes along this ill-conceived venture.

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

“Tiger-blooded,” notes Raphael Ernesto.

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

Her jaw drops.

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

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

So, he predetermines.

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

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

“He has such American beliefs!” She mocks.

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

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

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

His mind, his name, his face.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She offers to kill him.

He obliges her. Thinks she’s bluffing.

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

“From falling down stairs.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There was nothing healthy about his love life lately.

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

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

Something like that.

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

His studies are narrower now.

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

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

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

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

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

Absofuckinglutely,” she says.

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

 

A great setting for a hastily arranged assisted suicide.

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

 

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

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Scene 2

Pacific Ocean Deeps, 2011ce

Black Freighter

 

 

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

“I’ve never read his poems either.”

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

 

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

“I know my job.”

“My husband has a lot of potential.

“So I’ve read.”

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

 

Chapter 3

The Upper West Side, 2011ce

Penthouse J

 

 

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

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

 

By the mid-1980’s looters and vagrants were scaling the walls to steal anything not tied down. Well we thought it was the 1980’s, that’s what smart phones and TVs said.

 

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

All previous lessons are lost.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Does that matter slightly? Neither can decide.

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

 

Like Ms. Maria Parsheva now married and or Yelizaveta Perechenova, physician in training, soon to be a doctor of infectious disease s says the wire.

 

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

 

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

Nicholai remembers red headed Maria as something of a submissive Soviet Jessica Rabbit, complete with a cute little mole, slightly husky voice and marked non-fascination with much that wasn’t Russian in origin, besides Sebastian of course. She sure did hold her own on the “train job” though, that bloody mess in 2007.

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

Nikh remembers Yelizaveta emerging into the club picture, and Sebastian’s bedroom sometime in 2008. He remembers her at meetings and social functions as a highly mouthy Americanized blonde know it all little bitch who walked all over Sebastian publicly and privately, emptied out his pockets, put wild eyed ideas in his head, and reduced him to bawling tears when she eventually left him over her mother’s total lack of approval. She may or may not have helped them sketch out the entirety of “the Ayiti job” though. And probably pushed Sebastian into joining the original ground crew that three years prior took over the Port-Au-Prince general hospital triggering the uprising there.

 

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

 

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

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

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

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

That was the Z.O.B. in a witty little simplified nugget of Fenian witticism. The club now had a larger than life presence in certain regards or perhaps it should be said; circles. But that would still make Sebastian Adon into a humanitarian Mickey Spillane. Perhaps the analogy if that’s what it was, was poorly conceived.

Back to the task at hand.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Tortured her did you?”

“I did. With my words.”

“This is your main instrument of torture tovarish.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How American.

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

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

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

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

Sebastian shows the wound.

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

Nikholai had been married to a Syrian-Italian-Puerto Rican modal for seven years named Krissyiana, or Krissy for cute. She had wanted very little besides children and she was an agoraphobe. The product of near ceaseless sexual harassment and advances. Her father was wealthy and also CIA, disowned her for cohabitating with an Ivory, Nikholai. They married early at age 18 and lived together in District Midwood until their late twenties.

Adon rarely saw his best man then, but Nikholai was happy playing house, he was domestic in his soul. Eventually it ended, he wouldn’t bear her kids.

They divorced and then she completely disappeared, into smoke. He had been fucking and drinking his way towards oblivion lately. He felt nothing anymore now that Krissy was gone to god only knows where. Self-destruction or the arms of a rich man, who only knew?

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

 

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

Sounded logical now, but not in 2009. Her mother forbid them to see each other and a woman with only one functional parent will follow the will of her mother in the end.

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

He almost said, ‘his murdered wife’ but he decided that Nikholai would then really mock him. A damn construct man! Do not mistake your fucking black Israelite training for reality or it will consume you. That’s what Nikh would yell at him in simulations.

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

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

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

“She claimed to Raphael Ernesto she remembers nothing.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sebastian blows out smoke.

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

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

“Nikholai please do not judge me.”

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

 

That a full blown uprising is but three weeks away. And that enemy knows that the Z.O.B. has helped organize it, and keeps its factions coordinated.

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

Who in all likelihood, coming out of nowhere at this precise time; is undoubtedly an agent of the Mossad. The Mossad or even far worse, the inner most Secret Police, the ruthless agents setting up for murder all who resist the iron heel of the Oligarchy, the grand cartel of power and plutocracy.

The Jews will try and murder us faster because of the secrets we stole.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Scene 4

The Bermuda Triangle, 2011ce

Black Freighter

 

 

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

 

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

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

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

McIntosh is a very big guy, big in all four ways that matter. His biochemist brain, his black noble soul, his heart and his Shona warrior hands. And so is Oleg Medved, but they are big in different ways. Oleg is simply physically imposing, but his brain, heart and hands; they are smaller. McIntosh is Trinidadian, dark as night. Black even for the eyes of white men that turn many shades into enemy other. He stands over six feet tall. He is by far the most conspicuous person in the unit that was being briefed one hour before deployment in a hermitically sealed fast boat unto the shores of the United States of America; a border run to a rebel base on Block Island.

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yulia feigned a small, false pout.

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Drunk she carried out a most dramatic reading!

 

 

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

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

The pair then exclaimed in the voice of Solomon,

 

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

 

 

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

 

“Don’t overestimate the prophesy[12] and underestimate the cowboy libertarianism of the American underground,” she tells them, and pours the next round of shots.

 

“America, fuck yeah,” says Oleg!

 

 

 

 

Scene 5

113 Ludlow Street, 2011ce

Mehanata

 

 

The lights are dim no matter what happens. You can dance all night if you have to, but eventually someone has to herd the cats out the door and hide the bodies on the floor. The Mehanata Social Club is tucked away discreetly on 113 Ludlow Street. This is its second location since many times police raided and finally burned to the ground in an ugly incident that took place in 2005. Surely it will not be the final location, given the times.

 

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

There might was well be signs on the wall telling you anything not tied down will be carried away into the night, bags, souls, virginities. Come to think of it, there are such overt signs! One claims three teeth are needed for entry. One says anything not checked will be stolen. One says get naked get a shot, get fucked on bar earn bottle.

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

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

There are three floors to the Tavern.

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

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

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

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

The doughty wine.

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

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

She has the special constitution that a bartender needs to work the shit show around here longer than a month. Though many suspect she will quit soon.

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

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

Justin Toomey O’Azzello is the general’s manager. He has wandering hands. He is jovial and likes to tell elaborate stories about his days in the “air force”. He blames his flirtations with alcoholism over the years on bombing runs he inflicted over Bosnia[13]. But Justin was never in the air force or in Bosnia. His hands wander though.

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“That you did. You remember nothing?”

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

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

“Nothing? No recollection.”

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

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

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

“Well we all have our demons[14] in here don’t we. I’m good. Until I fall down. I fell down those steps one night,” she says pointing to a long downstairs plummet into the downstairs floor where the Ice Cage is hidden.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“And on the bad nights?”

“Vasyli Pveada.”

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

He nods slightly.

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

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

Martina the bartender comes over and gives Dasha a wink.

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

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

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

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

“Of course I am.”

“What are you drinking?” she asks.

Astika[15].”

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

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

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

“Wait,” she pauses.

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

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

She smiles with big bright eyes.

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

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

“Hand pressed everything,” she demands.

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

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

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

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

“That a problem?”

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

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

She smiles a lovely, practiced smile.

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

A song about the great and noble Commandant Ernesto Che Guevara[16] by the Buena Vista Social Club comes on and she thrusts herself into his arms for a last dance.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“He’s always dancing with Dasha.”

“You’re thinking of…” notes Justin.

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

“They just met boss.”

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

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

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

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

The corpse is pale from exsanguination.

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

And Sasho nods. Let the dead keep eating the dead, like they do in the Bronx.

 

 

 

Scene 6

The Hygeia Hotel, 2011ce

Block Island

 

 

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Where are your truest loyalties Mr. Medved,” Tanya Luv asks him suddenly before he heads up to his room to get his gear in order. She wonder can she just call him Alan?

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

“Fair enough, like all men,” she replies. A typical Israelite spy answer.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Most unnerving work conditions to be sure. Unlimited operations can get so fucking hectic, and fast. A real big steal and a zero sum game at this point.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Chapter 7

Block Island, New Shoreham 2011ce

The Hygeia Hotel

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Alex is a very, very common Russian name.

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

“You should call me Kudzai.”

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

“Do you feel uncomfortable playing a Russian businessman?”

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

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

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

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

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

“Or Adi B, is fine too,” she says. What’s in a nom de guerre?

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Why do you ask,” Lady Adelina.

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

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

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

“You are most right. None of the letters stand for anything. They are a ghost shirt organization[17],” Starr explains.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What is his mother like,” Adelina asks.

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

“Curses?”

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

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

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

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

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

“The suggestion has been made that the term “blue moon” for “intercalary month” arose by folk etymology, the “blue” replacing the no-longer-understood belewe, ‘to betray’. The original meaning would then have been “betrayer moon”, referring to a full moon that would “normally” (in non-intercalating years) be the full moon of spring, while in intercalating year, it was “traitorous” in the sense that people would have had to continue fasting for another month in accordance with the season of Lent[18],” notes McIntosh quoting from his Wikipedia update almost verbatim.

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

“Interesting cycle of events, and the last of the cycle falling on September 1st, 2012, the last possible moment before the B’ak’tun Long Count Calendar ends on 21 December,” Adelina concludes while trying to deduce via syncretism the overlap of old and new world Majik.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Hmm,” smiles Tanya, “we shall see.”

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

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

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

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

They feed not on blood they feed on our excruciating pain and hopelessness, all pain we release is energy they drink of our body,” quotes Tanya T-Bird Tallflame Luv from the New Social Gospel, written by Emma Solomon and dictated to a teenage Sebastian Adon in 2001, before she was crucified and he was wiped clean and dumped on a beach in Strong Island never to see the promised land again.

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

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

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

“My message to you both is simple, what little Emma Solomon didn’t brief you on I was to share. You are being given a special and enormous task. Anyone can make a little revolution. Tearing things down can be done with a herd of monkeys in any part of the world. Building things up requires open minds and the job of you four resurrectiors is to awaken the sleeping dead. Be bold, have no fear the Old Spirits[19], the New Spirits, the Old Gods and Goddesses, the New Oneness, the candidates, the sorcerers, and armies of Emma Solomon the Gold Lioness are behind you. You will both suffer much, but you will win; it is written and it will be made real. This slave uprising has been fought for 4,000 years since the first coming of the prophets. The scales will tip mark my words. Go city to city in this country from Boston out and seek out the ones this little Otriad, this group of 12 called the Z.O.B. find the ones they’ve touched and readied. Give them the vast freedom dreams, open in them the true knowledge. And when the hidden uprising does unleash itself see that we evolve, not devolve this people. The rest of the world has fought for the last two hundred years to liberate mere pockets. This uprising in the land of the eagle will fulfill the Baha’i Prophesy and then down will fall the Bear and the Dragon, good luck my magical co-conspirators,” says Tanya T-Bird Tallflame Luv with a jovial smile.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You have to about this life, thinks Oleg the Bear.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Scene 7

Lower East Side, 2011ce

Manhattan

 

 

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

I need another drink, thinks Trickovitch, he thinks it regularly. And as of lately resorts to smoked Ayitian Rum on the rocks. For their troubles were really just getting started. Well that same night Nicholai Trickovitch put together a little team to, “do a messy little big job.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Hectic shit,” mutters Raphael.

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

“We all know what was revealed about the h1n1 and Ebola[20]. The documentation has been widely circulated and now the community is ready. Enough outrages have occurred to spark riots. Stop and Frisk, weekly shootings, the Iran war conscription, and the drones of course. This time almost everyone expects street warfare,” Nikholai explained.

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

“What’s our precise role tonight,” asks Siegfried Sassoon. Siggy, who god or his parents made tall dark and handsome never goes to many meetings, he never votes in otriad elections except for Sebastian. He did however vote for putting Sebastian to sleep after the last Ayiti job. He’s a serious knock around guy. Only does jobs. Never ever meetings, rarely even the candle light salons.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mickhi Dbrisk chuckles at this plump washed in and out philanderer. But man, can the boy jump! Nobody has as many jumps as Rafflex, his nom de guerre.

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

 

Things were about to go bang in the night.

 

 

 

 

SCENE 8

140 Nassau Street, 2011ce

Financial District

 

 

Sebastian Adon was always reading some book, though he never seemed to finish any. He was always partly into a few.

A Russian lover always was being asked for a literary playlist. It was almost his way of saying it’s not a fetish, it’s a profound respect for your civilization. Most of them end with the death of the female protagonist and the imprisonment in a mental asylum of the male. Not to project a spoiler alert.

But he did have a favorite book, he used it to teach the dark truths of the uprising; one that there were no reinforcements and two, that the enemy was Oligarchical Collectivism, not an ideology or specific national imperial grouping, or really even a whole class, sucgh as the bourgeoisie of the Global North West.

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

 

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

They had utilized the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to squander the decade’s surplus and manufactured a financial crisis in 2007 to further consolidate their economic gains. Now 1% of Americans controlled 47% of American wealth. And 85 people on earth were worth as much as the bottom 3.5 billion. And the planet was dying to boot. Getting warmer by the year.

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

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

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

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

What year is this is the first thing he wonders. His gut says 2011, but that means he’s in the future. Doesn’t it?

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

“They gonna kill us all, them brutal pigs,” who’s voice was that the inner he asks himself, yours, or Huey P Newtons[21].”

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

 

 

 

 

Scene 9

East Bushwalk District, Bohemian Encampment,

 August, 30th 2011ce

Borough of Brooklyn

 

 

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

It is warming up further.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dasha ignores his arrival most completely.

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

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

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

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

And he passes out wine glasses wrapped up in socks.

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

 

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

Recently he became aware of the possibility of the small and short affair between Sebastian and another regular mistress, the French girl named Mary Lia Lewis; he was shocked that beautiful women could find pleasure with such a sad, broken man. This is the perception Sebastian Adon paints at the social club, that he is broken and must be pitied. Only Raffael knows this to be a partial ruse.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Your hips man! Move your goddamn hips.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But the more one drinks, the less they see.

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

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

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

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

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

“Spin me faster man!” commands Dasha.

He is under her spell.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So to clarify.

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

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

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

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

But angels quickly and immediately came to their rescue.

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

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

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

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

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

Some were true. And some were white lies.

Now, back at festival!

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

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

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

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

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

Night comes and darkness falls.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She colors quite enthusiastically.

Oh to live just two lives more! He thinks.

As you know, he will get to.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Soon, soon,” Adon says.

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

“Boys! Bed!” yells Dasha.

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

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

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

“Lie with me,” he says.

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

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

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

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

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

She stares into him with Old Soul eyes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“We almost died for nothing,” he says.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She sleeps indifferent to his hold or his guard.

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

 

And the big blue full moon lit up the sky marking on the lunar calendar the end of an epoch and beginning of an existential war for what will ultimately be the fate of this backward race or self-interested violent monkeys with guns.

 

 

Scene 10

Bohemian Gypsy Encampment, 2011ce

Borough of Brooklyn,

Day 2

 

 

He awakes on Onderdonk fields and she is still in his arms. She is warm and breathing deeply and clutching his hand to her ample breasts and thus is pressing her body against and besides him. Very much engorged he presses his hardness into the plump of her buttocks as if waiting for her to wine[22].

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Who was Mayakovsky,” asks Sebastian Adon.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Early deaths for most.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What is a Futurist,” Sebastian asks.

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

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

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

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

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

She give him dagger eyes and continues.

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

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

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

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

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

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

They’re looking for a Bodega in the wilderness.

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

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

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

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

“Quarantine?”

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

“There were other variables.”

“I am no apologist, but the Stalin I grew up with or should I say read about growing up for he was dead; was a very different Stalin than the one you maybe, or maybe not encountered in you college political science. To you all growing up the Soviet Union was an authoritarian gulag state of bread lines and deprivation. To us, growing up before the fall in 1989; it was our country. It was not spectacularly better or worse than yours. But we all could read and we all had jobs and no one was starving and since 1/3 of the world was within our red sphere the quarantine was less impactful. Our zone ran from Havana to Ho Chi Min City[23]; south ways as far as Angola[24].”

“Fair enough.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Surely I do.”

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

But, there is none.

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

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

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

“If you claim it,” Oleg.

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

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

The she suddenly exclaims;

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

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

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

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

“I don’t need you to get home safe.”

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

“What stupid code is this?”

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

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

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

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

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

“Well let’s get you home then,” it was like he was following a script.

Like an aroused, puppy dog blinded by the lights of lusting, he follows her out into the blue moon lit night. But they only make it as far as a little tavern down the road called the Cobra Club, where hipsters aleggedly drink and do  yoga. A few drinks later they change course back to camp and never make it to Brighton at all. They end up back on the forest floor in each other’s arms, holding tight to a memory neither can remember yet.

“You hold me so well,” she mumbles in Russian.

“I have three thousand years of practice,” he replies in Hebrew.

 

 

 

 

Scene 11

Bohemian Gypsy Encampment, 2011ce

Borough of Brooklyn,

Day 3

 

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Your eyes are now green,” she smiles.

“Normally they are,” he starts.

“Hazel, I know,” she smiles.

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

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

“I could help you with your anything.”

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

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

“Strangers.”

“You’re indomitable woman.”

Are you a jealous man?” she asks. Beware any woman that ever asks that ever in history.

He looks into her thinking; he could learn to be. There had been some deliberation on options, such are her joining him in the Hamptons at the family dacha (country home) or participating in the West Indian Parade[25]. Nevertheless, politely she said he could take her number and call her later since she had to soften the conspicuous blow to her keeper inflicted by two night’s disappearance. One had to have a little, just a little bit of shall we say tact, attention to protocol.

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

 

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

 

 

 

Scene 12

Two Holes of Water Road, 2011ce

East Hampton

 

 

 

Why are Chornay always fucking late, wonders Sebastian as he waits on 40th street and Lexington for the Hampton Jitney? And what’s so terrible about sometimes being early? But they had been slaves, maybe still are slaves and thus were excused from just about anything in his mind thereafter. Only a racist blan oppressor makes you work for free for five hundred years, reduces you to raped and broken human cattle, and then complains when you’re late, but they were about to miss the bus. But this was no way to regard one’s stalwart Chief of Operations, Jamaican gangster[26], Mickhi Dbrisk.

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

After Dasha replied by mobile phone she wasn’t leaving Brooklyn, the night before Labor Day Adon had called his bad man partner in crime Mickhi Dbrisk to run away from the city to the country to a place called Montauk for a midnight journey into a day trip, the night before Labor Day proper which locked down Brooklyn with 2.6 million masqueraders and full mobilization of the NYPD amongst other agencies. Each year they flipped a coin over Hamptons v. Jeauvert and it was “heads for Hamptons” this year. But really only because Dasha was occupied, Mickhi never actually ever wanted to out during the sometimes gun play active Juveaurt[27] nor was he ever particularly interested in trips to the Jewish elite Hamlet called the Hamptons where the Adon family had their second home. And he hadn’t woken up completely, Mickhi was supposed to be on the lines tom.

Surely, they needed to make a long palaver.

Mickhi Dbrisk and Sebastian Adon had met in LaGuardia Community College seven years prior in the EMT program. They helped found the Banshee Association and later the nucleus of the New York City cell[28] of the Z.O.B. underground. In the seven years that they had known each other Dbrisk had scene his friend through many ups and downs, many treacherous jobs, and many lives saved and thankfully none taken. He had seen just what Adon was capable of when he took his little salt pills and worked under the right woman. Dbrisk also had seen his partner fall down real bloody, horror show hard.

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

“I heard you a say that just after you came back from Port-Au-Prince[29]. And the next thing I remember is you with a sharp knife heading down to settle a score in District Garretson beach. And then came your arrest, your escape from Lennox Hill[30] and the beginning of the end for your municipal employee status. So forgive me if I worry every single time I hear that again.”

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

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

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

“So it seems.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

He is a bad mother fucker. A real Shatah.

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

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

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

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

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

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

As soulful pause.

“I’ll borrow you a real fast car, Guyanese[31].”

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

Soulful pause.

“I may, mind you may need a pistol.”

“Brother. I will get you a very good pistol[32].”

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

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

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

Mickhi doesn’t even have to nod.

“I have to roll in and save her, is that the right word, rescue? I have to get her out of Brighton Beach probably out of city, maybe tomorrow night.”

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

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

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

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

Mickhi can actually hear Sebastian think.

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

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

“Well that ain’t no good.”

No good at all.

After Festival and then some real Hamptons fuckery gets underway and Sebastian via his weed Roll-And and Mickhi with his dancing get four girls back to the dacha built by Adon’s parents. But no pants off fuckery goes down even as those girls splash naked about the pool because Mickhi and Sebastian are both in love with superior sets of women, the Maroon five song comes on that September 1st Labor Day weekend 2012 and Sebastian sleeps well alone in big Hamptons bedroom wondering, what kind of man am I? Do I possess the constitution to take this as far as it needs to go? What kind of woman is she? And all kinds of such questions. And Mickhi waits for Sebastian not to notice and steps out in the cool but still summer right to get a smoke and Newport. It’s exactly midnight, should be Juveaurt Eve back in the city, the march in the morning the strike at high noon.

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

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

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

 

 

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

One day more!

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

 

 

 

SCENE 13

85th Street, 2011ce

Penthouse j

 

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

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

“So this went on for just two nights.”

“And it was hot and heavy?”

“No, highly innocent.”

“You’ll have to paint another picture.”

“We did on the third day.”

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

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

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

“What does that mean again in reggae?”

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

“And forget your past old boy?”

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

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

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

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

 

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

 

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

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

“All we did was make cuddle, man.”

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

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

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

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

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

“There have been bad falls…”

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

“Nikholai. I cannot walk away from this.”

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

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

“You did deliver what you promised in Ayiti.”

“Only because you all banded besides me.”

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

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

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

 

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

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

“Ah, Birdy. A comic tragedy.”

He almost died.

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

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

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

“I didn’t promise her anything yet.”

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

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

“That’s banal enough I suppose.”

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

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

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

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

“I wrote her a poem.”

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

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

 

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

 

 

 

 

SCENE 14

85th Street, 2011ce

Penthouse j

 

 

Back on the safe house deck of Penthouse J, the sky is quite clear and the city has hardly gotten any less humid. From the deck of House Trikhovitch one can see the whole Hudson River valley and watch the concrete jungle spread up into vast monolithic canyons in Midtown or the highland of Washington Heights[33].

 

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

“Never ever-ever?” asks Fran.

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

“Tak,” pontificates Nikh.

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

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

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

“She’s pure Russian.”

“She’s taking her time,” jokes Franny.

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

“She’s not bored of me yet.”

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

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

 

SCENE 15

Zuccotti Park (called Liberty Square), 2011ce

District Financial

 

 

 

Don’t talk politics at the dinner table if you want to have an American family, and don’t talk about it all if you want to have friends. But that’s all Adon ever talked about, until he dated Russian women, then he compartmentalized, which is safer.

You shouldn’t draw attention to your views as a civilian, every American knows that part of the freedom to say and write whatever you want is the tact, not to do it meaningfully.

It should really always be time for political education, everyone has so much catching up to do. A year ago in September a group of Canadian & North American anarchists supported numerically by left leaning college students used live stream, social media and the internet to coordinate a nationwide uprising against corporate financial establishment based in the United States.

It exceeded the expectations of all involved.

That demonstration which began in Zuccotti Park on 17 September of 2011, quickly spread to over 4,500 encampments worldwide, yet, was crushed just after three months[34]. Though it was just a dry run, a spontaneous first attempt at an uprising in North America. In those three months many theorists put out pamphlets trying to place the uprising in a global context of events, here was one such written by Dissentious & Adon.

Franny’s big pretty Russian raver eyes roll in boredom.

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

They were speaking of the Snowden Affair[35], the Panama Papers, Occupy and revolutionary show trials.

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

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

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

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

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

“Oh please, please do,” moans Franny.

 

 

 

“My that was boring,” states Franny.

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

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

“You said 46,” Lia notes.

“There are also the Banking City States Singapore, Switzerland and Hong Kong[36]. There are military garrison sates such as South Korea, Taiwan, South Cyprus and Israel. These hem in the People’s Republic of China in the way that bases in Germany, Poland and elsewhere hem in the Russian Federation.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“The economists of all great power craft highly competing narratives of both history and financial prescription. Although evidence now clearly debunks the Washington Consensus which held sway from 1980 to 2001; encouraging deregulation, privatization, structural adjustment and integration into the globalized Western core market; it cannot be said that the effects of these policies did not enrich the core deliberately. The purpose of the proxy wars was of course a battle to control the resource flows.  As of 2011; the logical core contender is the People’s Republic of China. The financial mechanism it has deployed to support this claim is called the BRICS Bank; a counterbalance to the World Bank facilitating development lending from Brazil, Russian Federation, India, China and South Africa,” he concludes.

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sebastian speaks English fluently with a smattering of Hebrew and Ayitian Creole. He speaks often at late night dinner salons lecturing on conflicts in Africa, or the Middle East. Or various terrorist responses to atrocities and genocides. He is well versed, enough to conduct amalgamated services in the New Testament, the Torah, also Midrash[37] and Qur’an.

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

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

He plays quite an open militant.

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

Franny sips and Mary Lia drinks, very much paying attention, being a police spy.

“Well they’re gonna crack down on all of you and drag you away to the FEMA camps,” says Franny with ha-ha, tee-hee kind of giggle.

“They probably planned the uprising just to get you all together and WAM! The whole purpose is to imprison and execute a big illegal grouping of public enemies. Niggers. Ivories. Hispanics, people with tattoos. Illegals. The Faggots. The Russians. Shtarkers. Fenians. Communists and Revolutionary Socialists of all tendencies. Students. Unionists. People with dark skin. People practicing Eastern religions. Hippies.  Everyone that’s even want just a couple more human rights. Like Indonesia in 1965[38], yeah boom! Kill you all. They will round up all the usual suspects. Accuse them of putting a bomb in a building, then they execute nearly everybody. Even your high class and pale skin won’t protect you boys,” she says.

They are ten minutes to sun rise, where they will brave guard dogs and no guard rails to see the sun rise from the safe house roof deck as soon as the danger story comes to a conclusion.

“The purpose of a revolutionary show trial, is just to kill some alleged anarchists. But the reality is that they round up thirty, try twelve, and kill thirteen. They kill the public will to resist with a big forgery of justice designed to trap make believe anarchists,” Adon says.

 

            Thinks Nikholai; like they in the secret police, the proto-DHS did to us long ago over a so-called bomb in the Nike Mega Store.

“And they’ve done for thousands of years and they’ll do it again, and they did it to us in 2000 when they rounded up our student movement leaders and accused us of putting Earth Liberation Front IED’s in GAP, Nike and Disney over child slave labor.”

Slave labor eh, more bold, misplaced, lost on everyone words.

“Let’s get drunker and let’s hear another poem on the roof,” notes Nikholai Trikhovitch. “Before you make us sound like Jihadists or something far worse; anarchists!”

He’s verifying via operational protocol whether Sebastian is sleeping or sleep walking.

Sebastian has written a five page hand written poem called to Dasha #01. He plans to read it on the roof. It’s all about his feelings for Dasha Andreavna of course.

“The last words he said! Ladies we, are not mere anarchists. We are patriots and freedom fighters. But they, they being the security apparatus of the iron heel have already raided this very safe house just ten years before and as recently as one year ago. I once had storm troopers kick in that very door and beat me and put me in a sack!”

“Ladies, this is all a true story,” notes Nikh. “But the sunset…”

“Oh tovarish Trickovitch! The sun will still rise! Five more minutes of this fine story!”

Franny and Mary Lia are still smiling, half stunned by this zeal and hyper-Homeric story telling maybe real, maybe a total brazen invention?

“Tell me one thing,” interjects Franny, “Do the lovers of accused anarchists suffer too?”

A pause to consider.

“After they killed Jesus and be became a God again guess who suffers most? They round up Mary M, his mother and all the disciples and they kill his girlfriends and his kids, probably even kill people that owe him money” replays Nikholai Trikhovitch from a speech he knows so well.

He is anxious to open another bottle of delicious sickly sweet ‘Xhocolee’ wine, from Basque country[39].

“Ok, ok we’ll go to the roof,” concedes Sebastian, “but Franny, to answer your question, it is tragic and true, but people who love anarchists suffer even more.”

“It’s a high crime to love an anarchist,” he concludes, “but don’t be afraid we’re not anarchists. We’re just under-employed petty bourgeoisie pseudo intellectuals, just saying bold things to woe younger women, don’t be alarmed.”

“But no one loves an anarchist at all, no one cares how many get killed or for what, it’s an ideology of marginality” Mary Lia suggests is the real lesson.

“Can’t you guys just use the opportunities you were given to become Jew doctors like your fathers?” Franny asks.

 

Yelizaveta had asked Sebastian that question many, many times before.

 

 

 

 

 

SCENE 16

23rd Street, 2011ce

Isle of Man

 

 

 

            They wear these black furry hats on Friday. They often smell, and don’t ever make eye contact with gentiles. There are a total of eleven Ivoryish ghettos in New York City, but only one Russian Quarter, split into two zones; Brighton & Star City. The Brighton Ghetto, called by the Central Intelligence Agency Camp Alpha 1; It begins south of the Kings Highway and runs all the way to Brighton Beach, Manhattan Beach, Coney Island and Seagate (the gated community on the water). The Russian Ghetto’s Bravo Camp, called this because here would be settled the more dangerous and subversive elements was Starette City, also called Spring Creek. This was built on a swamp between the highway and the very worst part of town’ District East New York.

There are a lot of Ivories living on and around the Brighton quarter, but they get less religious the closer you get to the water front. They lived in the bigger, nicer houses, especially the Syrians. No Ivory’s live in Star City, and frankly a good deal of the second ghetto has been repopulated with African Americans after the triage decade of 1989-1999 when the newly arrived post and former Soviets were screened for communists, KGB (FSB).[40]

            During the week Sebastian goes to Southern Brooklyn twice via the Q train to attend paramedic academy on Kings Highway and Dasha goes North on the Q to Manhattan’s Clinton Murray Hill District in the east side 20’s accounting school at City University of New York Barack and they illicitly miss each other perhaps and so they meet on a school night and he reads to Dasha poem to her in park as the fall falls in. It will be the first of many poems where his emotions entangle her with worry, where she cannot read his English writing and has the poem read then re-read by a female confidant. The early poems didn’t rhyme as Sebastian began reading Mayakovski and assumed that to craft such pieces meant visceral images not rhyme. He missed the underlying reality of Mayakovski being famous for his rhymes, but in Russian, only the translations couldn’t pull that off.

Shortly after the seventeenth poem he changed his entire cadence back to rhyme. This impressed her far more, but that wasn’t until later. And it didn’t impress her enough even then do give him exactly what he was asking for.

“You’re always so well dressed, so fashion forward. English doesn’t have enough words for all the grades of beautiful I must be forced to consider whenever I see you,” he says.

 

“Flatterer.”

 

She peers back at him with big curious eyes. They are seated in the Park across from each other looking coy. She’s a flowing blue dress and her tight leather jacket and he’s all composed like he isn’t about to whip out a small pistol, don a mask and take over a subway car over universal human rights later in the week, don’t ever a tell a Russian woman that.

 

“You remind me too much of the artist Mayakovski!” she reminds him.

“Then allow me just to write like him. And act like him. And because this is set in America, with fearlessness I will walk the tightrope between idealism and pragmatic Postsoviet individualism.”

“What does that fucking mean?” she asks.

“I’m not sure yet.” He replies.

So over time he wrote many poems, each penned just for her then recopied, but they all had cadence alike extolling her virtue and ways, also declaring himself a true rebel, making great cause just for her. Fighting monsters for her real and mostly imagined. Urging her to run way to the West Indies with him.

Then she went back to her college and he off to carry out a wild plot to take over the A train on the anniversary of 11 September in solidarity with the Brooklyn resistance forces, coalescing around the General Assembly being held three times a day on the Barclay basketball courts and all Borough uprisings, Staten Island not actually being a real borough, not in anyone’s imagination at all, they say they’re Italian, but their just a bunch of newly soft Sicilian civil servants, they’re happy doing trash, contracting, police work, hose work and the work of the White Church[41].

 

 

SCENE 17

Brighton 6th Street, 2011ce

Tatiana’Blue

 

 

If one follows Brighton 6 all the way to the water you arrive at the two Tatiana’s, competing Russian restaurants on the Boardwalk, one blue, one green. The blue one has a better reputation for food and music, the green one for gambling and boxing.

They meet the next day they can for a picnic in the warm fall night of September 11th. She collects him from Blue Tatiana Café on Brighton 6. He carries a burgundy satchel where he’s put inside a four course home cooked partisan meal of rice and cheese and chicken and red wine. He was drinking Borjomi (Georgian Mineral water) when she found him. He was drawing what looked like a Brighton flooding, and practicing a couple Russian phrases that she’s taught by text message.

She collected him and led him to the sand.

They dine on the beach on a big blanket.

“When it comes time for Halloween festival, and I bite people with real fangs; am I part of your resistance war efforts too?”

“I think not.”

“Well I will have looked in my enemies eyes and tasted his blood!”

“Who are your enemies?”

“All those who oppose the will of Dasha! I am the once and future Queen of all Slavs!”

“To me you are a most benevolent queen.”

“What does it mean benevolent?”

“Compassionate and caring.”

“Ha! There is not even any word for that in Russian,” she lies with a smile.

Sun was setting in its subtle shimmers of red-yellow tones dwindling on the abyss of horizon, but on the desolate sands of Coney Island you can watch the cosmos illuminated retreat for some time before making an abrupt departure into the blackness and glow of a goodnight moon.

The sand is gritty graceful sand, it is populist sand and the untidy refuse of eleven million summarily visitations despite the best efforts of the parks department have left it a tainted oasis, but it has old school charm by the boatload. Adon has seen the beaches of East Hampton and Dasha has four times been off the coast of Turkey, so they have a high standards to work off of, but this place has je ne sais quoi?- It has sand and a mesmerizing effect on some type of minds.

They lay out a burgundy picnic blanket right below the parachute drop with the steeple chase pier in sight just to the west and it seems like they are very much alone in all directions, though a couple vagabonds are late night fishing. She has just come her boxing class at the Underground Gym she has as of lately been attending since the night a deranged man stalked her from the train to her lobby. She has on no make-up, but her hair is well brushed, maintained and flowing, her gym session doing quite little to alter her fresh faced and polished appearance.

That is a Russian art form too, being made up to get groceries, glamorously present oneself for buying coffee, not allowing the elements to chip the facade of womanly presentations.

Adon has just come from paramedic school on Kings highway and has a dark red picnicking back pack, and is dressed similar to how he was at festival, in ems ‘battle dress uniform’ blues and black boots and a skally cap and a red bandana tucked exposed in a back pocket, in case a woman begins to cry or a riot breaks out due a spontaneous eruption of the lumping proletariat.

He has set up before them a three course meal of sautéed mushrooms, broccoli rob, breaded chicken, and pilaf rice accompanied by Israeli avocado salad and three types of cheese that he cannot pronounce and bottle of Chilean red wine. He has brought red and white icon candles and they flicker in the spreading moonlit darkness. Picnicking is a poor man’s refuge at romance and he’s done all the cooking, though he hasn’t been on a picnic in two years. You don’t ever forget how to picnic if you were once good at it, it’s like riding a bike.

The rabbis say that an Ivoryish man ought to be able determine if he could marry a woman in but four dates, but Sebastian is only half an Ivory so perhaps it takes seven or eight.

“Beg me to let you take me on a date,” she’d once said the night she nearly killed him, and he’d told her he never ever learned how to beg.

But, how he’d learn with this one.

She had thought to break plans with him unsure if she could justify her prolonged absence after The Sly Foxing class, but she ran with it in the end, as he had seemingly put all this work in. The food fared much better than she had suspected he was capable of.

He looks so happy! She thinks. He makes jokes and he’s witty for an Amerikanski. Odd how he fetishizes us, she thinks. He cannot speak any Russian and has never been there. Curious fascination.

The sun down and the candles flickering she dispenses with small talk to pry out the root of his amorous fascinations.

“What is it that you think you know about this Soviet mentality you are always referring to,” she asks preparing well in advance to be disappointed by the answer. She already feels a certain pang of contempt when he switches out of the black suit into this blue paramilitary attire the ambulance workers wear. It was a reminder that this was not the prince in the suit and tie to carry her immediately from this coastal ghetto. It was vaguely unnerving for reasons she had yet to articulate or place why a child of solidly bourgeoisie parents residing in the financial district in that beautiful loft was playing hard not just at proletarian, but at a communist too! It was if anything vaguely a spit in the face of all the work she’d done to flee, that he who was born with a silver spoon in the greatest city on earth might be romanticizing the cold criminal empire she had fled. But he did it so sincerely that what first might be a laughable nativity took on a charm, a quirky little juxtaposition of opposites.

Well he is bipolar after all.

But what she couldn’t place and what made this boy so interesting was that he was so genuinely interested in her. He seemingly truly believed in these blue collar proclamations he made. Curiouser and curiouser, but she suspected that by the end of this picnic she would be ready to relegate him to a passing hello at the social club. Temper his courtship considerably. Before something happened that might get everyone in trouble. She has a full plate of suitors for a married woman anyway she thinks, what this crazy artist rebel will bring to the table but trouble.

“Well let me attempt that then.”

“Attempt away,” she smirks swallowing down her wine. He is aware that she is perhaps even more magnificent without her make up then when wearing it, he is aware that she is a wild eyed beauty and her coy happy smile never seems to leave her continence open to other interpretation.

“First let me say that I do not mean to casually lump some several hundred million of your former countrymen and women, into a pigeon hole.”

“A rabbit hole?”

“A pigeon hole, it means a stereotype.”

“And rabbit hole is a wild goose chase to nowhere yes?”

He smirks at the deliberate nature of her word games and nods.

“Nor am I so presumptuous as to think without speaking Russian I can mount any attempt at a psychological profile.”

“Less words man,” she smiles.

And he wonders to what extent she fully takes in any of what he will say or has said. And she takes in absolutely everything knowing the power of pretending to grasp a little less than she does in English.

“Ok then, you have no sentimentality to speak of. You have no romantic notions of rose colored thinking, you have no arbitrary beliefs. You have loyalty to no one, no country or code of law, no god, only a tight perimeter of proven personal or blood allies, and these except perhaps in the case of mothers can be severed off the minute they prove, disadvantageous.”

She grins at him and her eyes declare and admiration for what she’s hearing.

 

“More beyond more!” She demands.

 

“The mentality is like a cold ongoing calculation, it weighs the merit of all actions and all alliances. Its root were I allowed to play at the idea is pre serfdom, although that condition is history’s most long running subjugation of a people, by their own ethnic group. The only people to have completely enslaved your own people for over 600 years. And then the Soviet system generated a brutal regime of parapsychological survival of the fittest where by education and corruption were wedded wholly into the national character. And now, the world’s first open oligarchic collectivist mafia state masquerades as the fourth estate.”

“Why do you use so many fucking words man,” she says smiling again. She does like to hear him give these little speeches she realizes. His education is the only proof of his upbringing besides the large loft he resides in. It must be that he not only likes the sound of his voice, but also he perhaps has few people ready to hear him speak on these things.

“Because I think in Russian obviously Dvotchka,” he says. (Which means girl).

“Don’t call me that, I’m a lady!”

“Pardon,” he says but can tell she enjoys to berate him for his verbosity and his mispronounced bevy of Russian phrases.

“Alright then. But what in the world could be attractive about that mentality that so fascinates you? I consider myself a little sentimental mind you.”

“Cultural diffusion forges the greatness of this city. The merging of ideas and the fusing of mentalities. You can learn hope and romanticism here and we can learn rigorous pragmatism and parapsychology from you.”

“We, will eat you alive if these things you say are true.”

“I am not such a patriot as to assume that in the result you describe that is an impossibility. But the mentality isn’t so powerful if it is only used for pure personal gain.”

“What good for then? Seems good only for taking care of oneself. If what you describe has truth-ness then all we are commended for is our ability to sell one another, or sell ourselves without being tricked into seeing a purpose. Here is your mentality then, you Americans see miracles in the streets. You believe in too much destiny, in God in heroes. You are not an old nation so you’ve had no time to develop any real culture, and your world views, maybe not a liberal bourgeoisie part Ivoryish like you, but most Americans don’t have a world view. I will now use my words in English to speak to you on things. I’m not sure you know just how little I like Russia, like Russian things, Russian food and people. Everything. I hate Brighton Beach, I hate living in a ghetto. My mentality if you find such things interesting, as evidently you do, is shaped by living in a world where no one but my mother and a small series of men have offered to protect or help me. I’m not tough as you say so many times. I have had a charmed life and around me have been enough people to help me along. My mentality is that of anyone who has been hungry, I have ambitions and dreams. Believe me that my American dream is bigger than yours ambulance man!”

“If you say so darling.” And he pours himself another glass of wine.

“What is parapsychology to you? How do you define this term?”

“Mind games. Clever manipulations via social engineering to get your way. But that’s just the beginning.”

“I have no idea what you talk about,” she says but that’s what anyone who has a bit of game in them fronts like.

“Well you don’t have to put your cards on display at this juncture,” he says.

You’ll never see my cards, she thinks.

“How is the food?” He asks

“It much better than I expect. I would not eating it otherwise. Terrible idea to let men get false notions about their abilities. Especially kitchen and bedroom abilities. ”

“I couldn’t agree more,” he says.

And suddenly they are kissing again. Woops, she thinks with a smile. Passionately he presses her against the sandy ground and rolling about off the picnic blanket they wrestle for dominance lips never unlocking at any moment.

He reads her another stupid poem, which he wrote for her before the train ride. This is not that poem exactly, as she has long since hidden it away with all the others, but this once has a similar cadence. They extol her, they lament the world; they beg her always to take him back near her when the world is not looking, when the world blinks.

Dasha cannot always read the hand writing of Sebastian. She knows what he means because they text prolifically, but she asks him to read each poem in the beginning because she knows he will find the right way to explain his longing.

That night past midnight, after their meal which she appreciates, but isn’t writing home to her mother in Penza over locale; she allows him to read another.

She kisses him passionately again, for what else can she do. He is a hard worker. And then she pauses under the stars and by the coast of Breuklyn to lecture him again.

She has warned him that Mayakovski couldn’t ever get Tatyana his other great love and muse to ever leave Paris for his Soviet Socialist Republic. And he could never get Lily Brik to leave her husband.

“Poor Mayakovski had to listen to them make love from their kitchen. He tortured himself. What if you come to hate me? I cannot ever do anything but travel home with you. You know I keep another man, my boyfriend’s bed is always warm.”

“I will never hate you.”

“You cannot possibly love me! I am selfish.  I am demanding! I want to live in a huge house far from the Russian quarter and not worry about you!”

“I told you I’d never beg for a date once. I told you we’d just be associates of Ernesto and the Mehanta Social Club. I’m sorry to say that I cannot be rid of you.”

“If I order you go you will go?”

“Why the tortures? Are my poems not true, are my lips not soft?”

“All lips are soft when the man is still alive!”

“Dasha I love you! Does your man have this much desire in him?”

“We have been together for 5 years. He is the first and mostly the last man I’ve known here. He is hard working and good to me. He gives me things you cannot.”

What does a man say to the cold dead face of reality?

“This tryst is no real tryst. It isn’t an affair. You have tasted me, and I have nurtured your passion, and enjoyed it! But how far can this go! Please don’t beg for love that I cannot give to you. You will meet another woman in a month, I will be forgotten between the bed sheets! You have confessed to loving others before, you will again.”

He looks her dead in the eyes.

“I do not write frivolous things.”

“What is frivolous things?”

This is always the ice breaker to what will be a series of escalating fights on whether his love is real.

“I write to you from my heart which will not beat for another ever the same way.”

She kisses him again.

“What are all these kisses for when you say you will always feel nothing?” he asks.

“I didn’t tell you I feel nothing for you! I told you that we are nothing to feel anything about.”

She shoves him, then pulls him in close to her by his collar.

“I am going to tell you how to make love to me, with dripping hot wax on my back” she says.

“I’m going to try and teach you how to seduce me with much less words.”

They stay out all night holding hands and kissing in the late night Brighton Jazz Cafes. She pours the hot wax out of a red candle and presses their hands together and bites his tongue.

When they finally part neither can stop turning around and smiling at the other, checking to make sure it really is to be over.

They look, and they smile, and they walk a little more and look more, and look, and then it’s time to go home.

 

But finally she’s gone and he has to watch her go back to her man’s home and he just holds her memory close and boards the Q train back to the barricades near Atlantic Avenue, to make it on foot through the lines back to the heavily fortified district financial.

 

 

 

 

SCENE 18

116 Ludlow Street, 2011ce

Mehanta

 

I wanna pinch your big Peruvian baby face, thinks Sebastian, I wanna ruffle your salt and pepper hairs you happy droog (friend), he was overjoyed at his progress and again asleep to the plots underway. As if he hadn’t even plotted them.

Raphael Ernesto and Sebastian are seated across an upstairs gallery booth of the Mehanta Social Club. He’s more serious than he usual is, it may be because he hasn’t been drinking.

“You my friend are heading for some real, real trouble!”

“So is the whole City and nation as well, watching the news you can see the story breaking. I can’t stop now.”

Ernesto give me a baby faced look.

“How did you come to need her this fast? Is it sex hanging off her body? It is because you can’t have her so it makes her taste sweeter. Don’t you know brother how dangerous this is for a man! And of course the daily street fighting and arrests, and…” he pauses knowing what Sebastian may or may not know.

“I know. I know. I have felt in like this before.”

“And the others? There were surely others! I’ve seen you drunk over them before.”

Ernesto blows a kiss with his hand, “Amelia! Remember Amelia!”

He does and he regrets that episode fully.

“What are you plotting these days?”

Raphael Ernesto is asking a highly fourth dimensional question. He is Dasha’s old lover. He is a paid member of the Perchevney Bratva, as well as Mehanata’s resident jockey of disks. He is also rebel commander of the Bolivarian Hot Shots of the Cinqo de Mayo Battalion, planning to assault District Financial by air in just three week time taking part in the general rising.

“We may soon send medical workers to train the Syrian Free Army in Aleppo[42], I continue with my paramedic studies, but may be black listed from working in New York.”

It is clear that Sebastian Adon remembers nothing.

No Maria, no Yelizaveta, no Israel, no Havana, no Ayiti. Poor noble bustard.

Raphael orders another round of Astika from Martina D. also called ‘Hella’.

“Where do you find enough hours in the day for these plots and also Dasha Andreavna Skorobogatova?”

“This passion has burned hard and fast for three weeks since festival.”

“Did you take her to bed yet?”

“No.”

“Ha! She plays games with you friend. She is fearsome lover, I think I know, I did not bed her myself mind you, I have a wife, but she craves my male attention!”

Victoria Lynch is right next to them. For when Raphael Ernesto can fly off handle when their mutual friend Sebastian forlorn for the fairer sex.

“Darling! What my husband is saying about caution and taking time is valid. She is not a carnivore though Sebastian. Men buy her everything, but she always travels home on the subway alone and she is always not a floozy. She is strong and dangerous woman for you to be so smitten by. You haven’t the time or the resources for this I fear, and she certainly has a man. Somewhere.”

“Well, anyway that’s all a joke,” laughs Ernesto, “if he was so serious why is she so free to run about at such late hours?”

“More reassuring words please sister.”

Ernesto laughs off the contradiction and swills back his Astika beer. The Bulgarian bar tenders know the sober pensive Sebastian as well as the dumb faltering drunk Sebastian and they wonder what metamorphosis this tale will bring. Disaster has befallen him and glory too and he is not like all other Americans people know. But he believes in things which is dangerous.

The tavern attracts man tales and vice mongering spirits.

“Sebastian be careful!” orders Ernesto Lynch and gives him a cheers.

“Sebastian we love you as our brother, but be careful she is a Russian woman and you know well what we mean by that. You cannot compete in the ball park of things so you must just be steadfast and loyal and not come on too strong. Please be careful.”

Justin and Sasho are digging. There is hatch under the chamber called the ice cage; the wall to wall ice box where wall to wall two minutes of binge vodka drinking happens at fifteen dollars a minute. It’s all the same vodka bottled up and cut in various was. Well the floor it has a hatchway that drops quite deep into a smuggling tunnel out to Brooklyn via the old train lines and out to Coney Island.

They’re not digging a new tunnel; they’re digging a demolition bin so they can completely blow and seal the hatch and tunnel to Brooklyn behind them in the event of a raid.

Sebastian stands outside with the bouncer James.

“You’re becoming quite a regular,” says James White the former cop, “That’s what they call a poor life decision.”

“I used to come here when it was on Canal[43].”

“The old place.”

Raided often and burned to the ground in 2005.

The burly Fenian bouncer looks every bit like and off duty cop. Maybe, just maybe he smiles a little bit more.

They’ve spoken amicably of their blue collar nights many times previously. You see when Sebastian is heartbroken, as both Maria and Yelizaveta made him when those two relationships ended he takes back to the tavern, but his will as man is vanquished. That is a polite way of saying he was no ability or will to entice women on the dance or make small talk with young loose women that so fill the dance hall. It was in these periods he got to know Ernesto and Victoria in different capacities.

They had met three years prior at the Tabor Gypsy festival on Floyd Benet Field and he had become a confidant to Ernesto’s revolutionist notions and Victoria’s worries on her husbands’ ways. Ernesto it seemed lack anyone to palaver with on the issues of the world, philosophy or his long held beliefs in socialism, and Victoria on who’s shoulder Sebastian cried about his lost loves was also quite willing to console her about Ernesto’s alleged philander which was not quite real, but wasn’t either quite imagined.

“You’re becoming quite a regular I’d say for sure. Slavi lets you in without paying? I’d say that means you’re carrying the card now.”

“It’s a rebel friendly place.”

“For now. It’s quite getting bad up in the Bronx. We may switch loyalties back to those with the truest monopoly on violence.”

“Good to know.”

“All we retired civil servants have to stick together,” says James White, “no matter which foreign government might be paying either of our bills this week.”

 

 

 

 

SCENE 19

Kings Highway & 14th street, 2012ce

Breuklyn

 

 

On Kings Highway and 14th street sits the Methodist Center for Allied Health Education[44]. Most of the rising has stayed in the Ghettos and not penetrated the Ivoryish quarters. Sebastian has easily crossed the lines with his badge and grey bandana.

The bath room door of the men’s room at paramedic school is locked from the inside, the Austrian instructor got his head bit off peaking in while Artstien and his ambulance partner Shamel Edge count out about 1000 green ones in various denominations all handed over by the Z.O.B. and the paramedic class for the father of a fellow EMT whose father was about a week from passing, in a coma, in a Queens ICU (Intensive Care Unit).

They’re counting out the money for a 10-13 emergency as it’s called. When an EMT or a Paramedic gets hurt. They are sometimes sloppy under takings so the money is getting counted by three impartial men.

The Z.O.B. is the unarmed, well lightly armed, militant wing of a clandestine ambulance movement to unite 13,000 EMTs and Paramedics via a newspaper many secretly hand out and at least several thousand read. It is on its seven issue and looks menacing to the powers that be, but has cost a few their jobs and many more at least a few friends.

It is radical in that it demands living wages and recruits volunteers and materials for further subversive EMT training programs on the Island of Hispaniola in the Nation of Ayiti.

They seal 1,000 green back dollars in a big white envelope there was no card. Only that the monies came from the Z.O.B., secret arm of the Banshee Association as they paper distribution was titled.

If there had been a card, the card might well have ready “Happy almost Ivoryish New Year, We are sorry your father has nearly passed. Under anyone’s reasonable standard of good we have delivered our passengers over twelve years to the shore. Good, bad, we’re not the team with the guns but this meager envelope of cash is our thank you for secretly handing out papers.”

But their colleague is a woman of pride and quiet dignity and didn’t even know why Sebastian was helping. He promises more support, help from the union, he tells her this is what they built the organization to do; take care of one another.

“Thank you. You’re a really good person Sebastian. I hope you know that,” she says.

Watson knows Sebastian is great EMT from when they worked together at FDNY Station 35, but he can’t completely vouch for the sanity of the guy. I mean Ayiti had changed him. There were so many stories which circulate about the man, some that he perpetuates, others which his enemies do and Sebastian has more friends than enemies, but it is perhaps a weekly spiritual decision on if and when his God will destroy him.

That, realizes Watson Entwissle is that the man thinks he has the power of a god perhaps. The will to save Ayiti and also EMS and also Syria and also become a paramedic. Watson has seen Sebastian in the streets be a good EMT and he seen him in clubs drunk and dancing and racing for some woman to love him and pin a medal on him with a ring and say, you are my one true. But Watson knows too that Sebastian has impossible expectations. He has had his knees kicked in several time because he tried to fly with wax wings.

Watson sees it. They count the cash. And then the girl had a real idea of just how much her class of fellow EMTs could try and give when they had nothing themselves.

Outside is Paramedic Instructor Mikhail Mastrovitch Kreminizer, an Israeli Russian Pararescuemen born in Lithuanian before the Cold War supposedly ended.

“Safer than to just rob a series of banks I suppose,” the juggernaut declares.

A taste of things to come. Runners passed him a black satchel of cash for the young woman earlier, half from Stations in Queens, and half pulled off ATMS in unlimited coding scams.

“Her father is not dead, but he is not alive, and the girl claims they have no money to bury him and that she is already in debt. So we asked all to pass the envelope.”

“What is she to you?”

“A comrade[45].”

“You fuck your comrades?”

“Not unless the situation calls for it. And this time not so.”

“The Bronx is burning. The National Guard entered the city at dawn. I heard a rumor.”

“A rumor you say?”

“I heard a bomb is going to go off in the district financial, of similar make and modal to the one that blew apart the Consolidated Edison plant on the first of September.”

“What would I know?” Sebastian asks, “Am I a Chechen[46]?”

His eyes dart to assure the coast of the street corner is clear, that no one is in shot ear.

“I know you to be a good deal of many things. You are a marked man.”

“By whom?”

“You made a lot of enemies with your paper. With that train job in 2007. They lynched you in the court of public opinion after Ayiti. I admire you. You’re a zealot.”

 

Mikhail Mastrovitch likes to assure everyone he is not a man to fuck with. He has looked Sebastian in the eyes and said, “You will never work as an EMT again in this city, but history may absolve you of what you have done by not picking sides. Mikhail is a former Israeli Pararescueman and parapsychology officer for the Israelis security service Shin Bet.

“Do you ever fear putting yourself on a barricade that you cannot defend and ask all you’re closest to help you hold it?” asks Sebastian as Mikhail passes him a smoke.

The big man responds with a phrase in Russian.

“Dasha taught me that word a few nights ago.”

“Dasha, eh.”

Raspizdia, do you know what this means?”

“A person who doesn’t give a shit.”

“I’m not such a person.”

“So you learned a little, good…but not exactly. More specifically it means the indolent leisure class choosing to nothing with their lives. I know a lot about you. Enough to know you will never work in New York City as a paramedic ever again, know that you are a known radical and working is not really your objective anyway. I know about what you did on that train in 2007, I know about the Ayiti operations shall we say scope and scale.”

“What do you know about dragon fly tattoos?”

That caught Mikhail Mastrovitch off guard because he did indeed know a lot about dragon fly tattoos.

“Why do you ask me this?”

He had thought that his data on the student was more complete.

“What do you know about whores?”

“Very little.”

“Where is this young woman’s tattoo?”

“She doesn’t have one. She says she’s going to get it put on soon. I told her our people don’t allow tattoos.”

“Our people?”

“Ivories.”

“I’m an Israeli not an Ivory. And you’re more Chechen than Ivory.”

“How now! What’s it mean big fella?”

“The Bratva tattoos them on its slaves. The ones it sends to snuff and slaughter. Or a black widow job.”

“Which Bratva[47]?”

“Let’s not step too far out of civilian clothes, tovarish. Where does she say she’s getting the dragon fly tattoo?”

“She didn’t say where.”

“I want to pass you a perhaps un-subtle message.”

“Pass away.”

“Do you have any idea the kind of monsters you’ve antagonized since you came back from Israel?”

He pauses and breathes out smoke.

“I have some idea.”

“You are marked to die. As your friend and de facto mentor, as a future brother paramedic. You are about to start a war you are not highly likely to win. And they will punish you and everything you love will burn and suffer. Fighting from a position of strength has never been your strong suit. How’s you Hebrew these days.”

 

Ha Halom Sheli, Likhiot hoffshee.” (My dream is to be free.)

 

“I left you a good luck present in the third sub-basement of the garage.”

“What is it?”

“A racing bike. It’s going to get a lot harder to get though the lines tonight. And there’s clearly something you need to do in the district. Luck.”

Sebastian wonders if it’s also a remote controlled pipe bomb, like the old ones.

“Luck. Toda.

“Stay away from Ms. Dasha she’s a honey pot job at best and there’s blood in the honey. I’m not saying you don’t lay pipe right, but you live with your parents and are in school to be a paramedic; what the fuck is she doing with you?”

“She likes my poems. Who’s she work for then?”

“Probably no-one.”

“No-one is the most dangerous fiend of fiends.”

“Even worse somehow to work for no-one, but destroy the world yourself.”

“That’s a lonely road to travel.”

Shanah tova if I don’t see you.” (Happy New Years)

Shanah tova, as you probably won’t, black cat[48].”

“What year is this again,” Adon asks.

 

“It’s the year 5773.”

 

“No one knows anything anymore!”

“No One, knows a lot a more than you think Tovarish Adon.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

SCENE 20

116 Ludlow Street, 2011ce

Mehanata

 

 

Step down the hall go straight, not upstairs, go past the coat check unless you want to be robbed, open the second wooden door and leave the time, space zone.

The lights are now quite dim, the place is still cast in a dead, red light and loud gypsy Jazz is playing from the band below.

10 September, 2012, or also called the Ivory New Year. AR 0 as we call it now, ‘After Revolt’. The Bronx was being surrounded by the National Guard. All of the bridges into Long Island, which we all now call Strong Island were check pointed close. The National Guard opened fire in the North Bronx at a demonstration shortly before midnight. This was the Bronx though, the Bronx fired back.

Although Hebrew New Year begins right before sundown.

Card stock place holders on candle lit tables towards the back of the third floor declare several long wooden tables: “Reserved for the Banshee Otriad”.

Thirty two core and provisional members of the New York City Banshee Association, a clandestine organization of EMTS, Paramedics and Emergency workers are drunk and loudly occupying the third floor mezzanine of the Mehanta Social Club.

Except for the club’s current Chief-of-Staff Ayitian Paramedic Emile Cange, who is a nominally straight laced Seventh Day Adventist and his fiancé Praise Augustus, well it’s almost midnight and the music is blaring dancehall in their honor, and Adon is calling for a toast.

A running joke in the club was that for the past decade or so they never seemed to miss an opportunity to go drinking on an Ivoryish holiday.

There are a lot of Ivoryish holidays, approximately twenty of them resulting an innumerous number of work days to be taken off on top of the Friday into Saturday Sabbath, which man of the club members had paper work submitted to their employers, were their shops union stating that they couldn’t work on these assorted holidays and also, Fridays past 3pm.

At some point Trikhovitch had sat down with a calendar and made the calculation that utilizing the Ivoryish religion’s observances, one could get a whole lot of rest. And it caught on. Pretty soon over half the club carried bonifed conversion papers, certificates of bar mitzvah and briss where appropriate, kutb marriage contracts, the world.

Nikholai and the man named Lt. Moishe Klein, the clubs only actually practicing Orthodox Ivory had made some Russian rabbis in Brighton a good price and long term agreement they couldn’t refuse.

“5, 4, 3, 2, 1, happy new year!” Adon slapping Mickhi Dbrisk the back. Although, it is till two actual days to Ivory New Year, this being the Rosh Hashanah Pregame Party for the club’s inner circle. The New Year’s itself doesn’t fall on a weekend.

Adon, with a grey flash in his eyes is now dead sober somehow. As if the drinks he’d pounded, all five Astikas and three Stoli shots, and the bottle of red, then white there were glasses real cold glasses of bubbly Borjomi mineral water.

Somehow in the Melee of the dancehall, in flashing light and flickering candles of this tavern he had tuned out his fun and put upon the game face mask of his title, Chief Planning Officer of the Banshee Association. Surely not all thirty two of the guests were beyond all pale of corruptibility, but Banshee was proto-trade union with a 10-13 fund and an underground ambulance newspaper. Anyone could sign up.

But now at the round dimly lit table at the end of the long catwalk above the main dance floor, past an easily removed barricade was seated Dbrisk, the Bajan businessman Magnus Goldbar Allamby, who always carried in his own sweet wine bottles; Mara the half pint Fenian always drunk at these things, Trikhovitch, paramedic biker Anya Drovtich, Nicholas Mapfre (only there under peer pressure and perpetually nervous), Chief-of-Staff Emile Cange, a paramedic and Adon the leadership as it were, out of sight, out of mind looking over a document printed on grey card stock, downloaded and translated just the night before.

The Anonymous, the vast anarchist hacker underground had circulated a cut and paste manifesto. One which Banshee could never overtly endorse, but certainly various operatives of its armed wing, the Z.O.B. were certain to lend their talents behind. It is to be a collective response to the uprising and its grievances.

At all major Banshee gatherings, there was copious amounts of booze consumed, the Mehanata Social Club such a choice place for meetings and for gatherings for it was loud and rowdy and hard to bug, or hard to track the ins and outs, hard to see who signed what, under who’s name, easy to deny anything.

A version of this document had circulated for weeks, the uprising though aborted on the labor day weekend had to meet the popular response, the demonstrations happening in all the boroughs; the wild anarchy about to happen on 17 September, 2012 when the anarchist federations sought to again storm the District Financial.

This ‘ting they’re all signing, it’s written in Ivory.

 

Declaration of a State of Emergency in New York City

Communiqué #01

 

 

Activation of all Z.O.B. cells and working groups in New York City and Abroad.

In response to mounting grievances and human rights violations here and abroad.

 

The following institutions will effective 09.10.12 be considered ACTIVE ENEMIES of our people and the human race generally. Their businesses, affiliates and shareholders shall be subject to BOUYCOTT, DISRUPTION, SABOTAGE and GENERAL SANCTION for their crimes against humanity.

 

  1. OLIGHARIC COLLECTIVES IN ALL NATIONS.
  2. ALL WAR CRIMINALS AT LARGE.
  3. ALL INSTITUIONS ENFORCING LEGISLATIVE CAPTURE VIA CAMAPIGN FINANCE.
  4. ALL ASPECTS OF THE MILITRAY INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX.
  5. ALL ASPECTS OF THE PRISON INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX.
  6. ALL ASPECTS OF THE NARCO-TRAFFIC
  7. ANY ASPECT OF THE SEX TRADE OR SLAVERY RELATED ENTERPRISES.
  8. Pornographers
  9. Strip clubs
  • Escort Services
  1. Brothels
  2. Pimps
  3. Traffickers
  • Mail Order Bride Agencies
  • Bonded labor of any kind

 

  1. ANY LABOR EXTRACTING INDUSTRY EXPLOITING THEIR WORKERS
  2. ANY GROUP OR CORPORATION WHO’S PRACTICES DESTROY OUR ENVIRONMENT.
  3. ALL FINANCIAL INTITUIONS PARTICPATING IN OUR ECONOMIC BONDAGE.

 

THE Z.O.B., alongside the GENERAL RESISTANCE ALLIANCE-GENERAL COORDINATING COMMITEE (GRA-GCC) AND ALL MUTUAL AID BOUND AFFILIATED SISTER ORGANIZATIONS WILL POST BILLOTS, DECEMINATE OFFICIAL WARNING VIA THE LOCAL PRESS AND ALSO THE INTERNET.

 

ALL CORPORATIONS, RELIGIOUS INSTUTIONS, FINANCIAL FIRMS AND GOVERNMENTS WILL HAVE THREE DAYS TIME TO CORRECT THEIR INJUSTICES BEFORE ACTIONS AND GENERAL ACTIVE RESISTANCE OPERATIONS COMMENCE ON SEPTEMBER 17th and build toward a an international general strike on THE 1st of January, 2013.

 

  1. THE Z.O.B. IS EXPLICETELY AGAINST VIOLENCE TO PROPERTY AS WELL AS PERSONS AND PEOPLE. ANY VIOLENT ATTACKS, PROPERTY VANDALISMS AND ACTS OF TERRORISM ARE NOT ENDORSED BY THE MILITANT HUMAN RIGHTS MOVEMENT AND SHOULD BE PUBLICLY CONSIDERED THE WORK OF UNAFFILIATED RADICALS, AGENT PROVOCATEURS, SPIES, INFORMANTS, AND THE COUNTER INTELLIGENCE PROGRAMS OF THE STATE AND ITS VARIOUS SECURITY APPERATUSES.

 

  1. THE Z.OB. BEGINNING 17th September, 2012 WILL CARRY OUT ONE OPERATION A DAY AGAINST ALL LEGITMATE WAR CRIMINALS AND THEIR AFFILIATED INSTITUTIONS WHO BY THEIR ACTIONS VIOLATE OUR UNIVERSAL HUMAN RIGHTS.

 

OUR AIM IS TO STRIKE THESE VIOLATORS IN THEIR POCKETS AND BRING PUBLIC OUTRAGE AND ATTENTION TO THE MEN AND WOMEN WHO RUIN OUR NATION AND REDUCE THE WORLD TO CHATTEL SLAVERY.

 

  1. ANY ATTEMPT TO ARREST OR MURDER OUR ORGANIZERS AND SUPPORTERS WILL RESULT IN EXPONENTIAL INCREASE IN RESISTANCE OPERATIONS.

 

  1. THE Z.O.B. WILL NOT STOP FIGHTING UNTIL EVERY LAST WOMAN, MAN and CHILD HAS BEEN GRANTED THE FULL 30 HUMAN RIGHTS AS CODIFIED AND PROMISED BY THE UNITED NATIONS and ALL PARTICIPATING NATIONS in 1948.

 

  1. WE, HEREBYE ON 09.10.12 DECLARE UNRELENTING WAR ON THE CLASS OF THOSE THAT HAVE FOR GENERATIONS RAPED, ROBBED, CARRIED OUT GENOCIDE, AND INSTITUTED SLAVERY UPON THE COMMON HUMANITY TO WHICH WE ALL BELONG.
  2. NO QUARTER WILL BE ASKED, NOR EXPECTED.
  • WE WILL BRING THESE OLIGARCHS, BANKERS, BUSINESS MEN AND CRUEL DESPOTS, war criminals all to their knees to stand trial for what they have done and VIA OUR RESISTANCE WE WILL FORGE A WORLD OF DIGNITY, EQUALITY AND FREEDOM.

 

HUMANITY THIS IS OUR CALL TO ARMS.

 

NEW YORKERS THIS IS YOUR BATTLE CRY.

 

THIS IS A WAR TO THE DEATH.

 

 

The People of New York will lock arms with the people of the world and the dream of freedom which has been crushed for generations will carry our uprising to its full and inevitable victory.

 


 

That following evening of September 11th Sebastian and dozens of other activists using the Cely-Signal-Telegram text dispatch system, boarded the subway cars with flicker masks and blue fatigues. They took nearly every train line hostage across 5 boroughs, all numbers, letters and colors. Terror and spectacle abound! Not even one lethal bullet in the guns, which almost no units even had to brandish; the captive audiences were petrified or participatory in the aktion.

Sebastian’s unit A08; took over the A train Manhattan bound from the Rockaways alongside an anarchist named Spike, the actor Siegfried Sassoon, a younger women named Clare they recruited off of OK Cupid and a film maker named Nicholas Mapfre. And eight back up team members whose names and faces he didn’t have to know.

Sebastian once road this self-same train to and from his Star crossed lover Yelizaveta Kotlyarova Perechenova, but now in his rapid speeches and flying mannerisms he dedicates this to all his injured people’s in domestic and also far flung lands. One night, this raid to redeem his American hypocrisy; to take over a train because his love is a warrior’s love. He has been sleeping for how knows how long, but it’s coming back to him slowly. What his place is in the chain.

Dasha called out to him earlier on the black berry smart phone to ask him be careful. She is no damsel in distress and he is no Shamel Basayev, yet. But she knows him much better than he knows she or she works for. She knows he’s waking up from a day dream.

Trains are stormed all over the city for mostly militant public addresses and passing out of homework assignments from big grey bags. Although, all of them are emptied right before the District financial where many cross.

Emptied and dynamited. The bankers take cabs to work, caps or ferries or are driven. This is to keep all of their surfs away. Deter servitude.

The speech needs to be cut short because he gives it over each transfer of the cars. Sometimes Spike or Siggy or Clare give the speech. It begins with, “My name is Zachariah Artstien, an organizer with the human rights resistance! Affiliated with the Z.O.B., we are not here to hurt anyone or take your money! We are here to declare that you have human rights and we must now link arms and fight for them.”

“Today is the 11th of September, when ten years ago the Oligarchs manufactured an attack on us to secure their power and control. In six days the People’s Army of the General Resistance Alliance will attack the District Financial! If you ain’t running with it run from it!”

New York is the city of such disturbances. It’s also a mind-your-fucking business city. Its people are also heavily armed. But no on pulls on them tonight.

“Please don’t get yourself shot to ferment hope alone,” Dasha warns him and she hopes he isn’t killed because he is capable of making a woman care about him. But perhaps not her on a long enough time line.

Sebastian and his associates with their scary masks, one with a video camera tell tales of the Syrian Free Army. Of Israeli apartheid. Of the one black or Hispanic youth killed every 48 hours by the police. Of the 1 in 8 black men in prison. Of war, endless war consuming all around for the dubious purposes of Afghani and Iraqi and Persian “liberations”. The conspirators film the whole thing, in case they are captured or killed. For the viewers at home on the Livestreams.

After all the tales end, told by the three hostage taking narrators, “We are sorry for our operations washing aside considerations of your health and safety. You cannot join us, we are organized tight as drum, but go to your churches, mosques and temples, your gangs, crews and neighborhood councils, stay strong and carry on as we are all under siege together.”

 

And to a captive train load an adaptive audience held hostage, the cameras of Nicholas Mapfre running, Sebastian began a speech, about a four minute speech per car.

 

“Hyperdevelopment is the physical and moral state of core country populations that result from proximity to overabundance!”

“While each core country maintains an underclass of newly arrived immigrants, ethnic subturns, welfare subsidiaries and others are utilized for domestic exploitation on a variety of levels. Low cost wage labor, military or police service, undesirable or dangerous work, service sectors and prostitution; jobs considered below the acceptability of core ethnic identity in power.”

No one got up to open fire on them yet, which was good, as they were wearing blue uniforms and crazed masks in the age of public transport terror.

“Blacks in United States, Algerians in France, Turks in Germany or various former colonial groups in England. However, nearly every person citizen or undocumented migrant residing in a core country can despite low probability of achieving meaningful wealth; access a range of social services, enjoy relative security and purchase a full range of consumer goods. Hyperdevelopment affects all within the territories of the Core.”

“While clearly some of the highest Palma Index and GINI coefficient variances occur within the core at rate in the United States of 47 to 1 in wealth difference; hyper development is the result of goods, commodities and general capital flows back to the centers of financial hegemony; New York, Berlin, Geneva and London.”

Now Spike Timchenko jumped in, his mask was a grimacing ghost sleep no more mask;

“While the political directives of the USA form the overt course of policy and international relations; shared race, history and basic cultural religious values have allowed for Euro-American elite consensus to function more fluidly than its 1945-1989 core contender and nemesis the Soviet Union grappling with a far wider ethnic elite, a less structurally manageable economic system and a far new set of oligarchs; the inner circle of the Communist Party, KGB and subsequent energy moguls.”

He wonders if they understand anything he’s saying, wonders if they have unplugged from their smart phones and iPods.

Spike continues;

“Hyperdevelopment leads to things like the US obesity epidemic, high levels of moral decay such as the feminist consensus that 1/3 women in the US is a victim of sexual assault before age 18. It is access to too much food, constant imperatives to purchase more of everything, the owning of multiple vehicles per family, the imagined entitlement to home ownership and the ownership of homes far in excess of what a family unit requires. It is an exaggerated sense of importance and uniqueness.”

He concludes as the train rumbles into the upcoming station.

“It is a complete apathy as to what is occurring not only in one’s own community but certainly the rest of the world. It is media over saturation; constantly plugged in cell phones, movies, music and video games. It is a decline in meaningful literacy, a tacit embrace of ethnocentric white (in the case of the current hegemonic order) supremacy. It is over availability of print media and pundit debate, but relatively poor engagement of the political machine itself. It is the right to vote between red and blue flavors. It is a severely myopic world view manufactured by the educational system and media.”

 

 

“Power to the people!” an old black man says and pumps his fist.

 

“We are asking for you to work in sympathy with the resistance,” says Adon.

“We have a bag of homework assignments. Simple ways to assist the general strike and uprising coming on 17 September. The best way you can assist it is to join us in the streets. If you cannot stay at home. Wall Street will be a battle field. Support the Résistance anyway you are able.”

They were mostly greeted with quiet applause, but no one shoots at them or turns them in. And in this city that counts for something. Most people take home work, perhaps largely out of curiosity.

Later Sebastian and his three cohorts are at the end of the line and the job has been carried without any of the possible predictions of arrest by the authorities or mob violence against them. A sigh of relief.

“It’s nice to see that on the eve of September 11th, 11 years later, security is tight as drum,” notes Mr. Spike Timchenko an anarchist childhood friend of Zachariah, the nom de guerre of Sebastian Adon.

So when Sebastian gets back to the financial district and he confirms around 2am with Dasha he’s alive and she breathes back a sign of near panic. He writes poems for her. Places them on old school gold painted stationary, dedicating resistance to her, although to her, it is more like street theatre carried up on a moving, highly privileged stage.

 

She texts him;

 

“I made you a picture of your bleeding heart.”

 

Bleeding out yes, unasked for and unheeded, a mighty pump. His heart was quite known to hemorrhage over little and for nothing. And certainly at the invitation of No One.

 

Who then was this Mr. No One, the handler, the man in the control room playing with all the pieces and running the show?

 

 

 

 

 

SCENE 21

Brighton 5th Street, 2012ce

BRIGHTON BEACH

 

 

The Russian Quarter is always teeming with life. Were I to put my finger in it; my nostril to the whiff beyond her buxom chest; it smells like potato pancakes, cherry perfume, cigarette smoke and fish. Smoked fish. It runs along and below the above ground Yellow Q and Orange B Express train line which rumbles above like a mechanical wave breaking in the six story tenement row houses made of red brown brick. Following the Q line above ground the architecture of the quarter goes from a mix of these artless, durable six stories inter mixed with modest suburban homes running towards the coast. The Northern most boundary of the quarter is Kings Highway because it is here that street signs appear in Cyrillic[49]. Although the overlap with Midwood Ivoryish zone overlaps with the Russian quarter until avenue H where the Ayitian Bar Lev line was drawn in 1996. Drugs nor guns nor traffic can move north of that line or south. District Midwood is one of eleven Ivoryish ghettos in the greater New York area, a place of prayer and tunnels and coming and going. Sebastian Adon lived in that district for eight years on Ocean and H. He knows its comings and goings

The Russian quarter is awash with small restaurants with live music sung by comical tamidahs and various slender, busty, well made up on every level Slavic goddesses. And prix fixed meals. Its western border is Coney Island Avenue, which at Kings Highway becomes a Pakistani district where Shar’iah law is secretly enforced.

Coney island avenue runs parried. To Ocean Avenue to the east and ocean parkway to the west, and these three routes had to be thoroughly barricaded to turn back the advance of the National Guard and the 104th and 116th tank column of Christmas Eve; 2015 or in the parlance of the rebels AR 3. That is still three years to come.

The eastern border if the quarter was Nostrand Avenue. Where the Russian quarter ends and the West Indian quarter begins, largely composed of Ayitian s and Jamaicans. There were never walls around the quarter, not before the revolt or after not even when the southern rim of Brighton and Coney Island because the internationally famous green light district once the Soviet was recognized by Russia and China in AR 7, or 2019 common era. There were not physical walks but perhaps linguistic mental walls that trapped the mentality of those.in the quarter somewhere between the 18th and 21st century. Perhaps between the old world and the new. Perhaps rendering the seditious place it was and is, a place unlike any others where by huddled refugees and expatriate radicals were walled in Brooklyn habitations in a space that was neither Russia nor America, a purgatory. For had the three million souls of the future Brooklyn, excuse me Breuklyn Soviet ever been embraced by the Americans perhaps they would not have enjoined the rising. For what solidarity did those in the quarter have with Ivoryish spies and black revolutionaries? Nothing. Less than nothing. So little nothing that the majority of the quarter might have seat the whole thing out, we’re that an option. But with all the other tribes in arms and the National Guard shelling so indiscriminately well most joined in the rising before long simply to avenge or protect their own.

That is a characteristic that certainly embodies the Russian quarter. They rugged are social individualists. As in their circle of live work and loyalty contracts rapidly even in the face of minor hardship. No other race has ever been fully enslaved by its’ own people first via serfdom then via Stalinism. It ruined them as a collective or idealist species. That circle of loyalty contracts down to one. Themselves in away few other races do. At a certain point they might throw their children and wives into the raising seas. A wretched generalization but their individual will is harder than any. It is impossible to break. The social nature if their individualism is the solidly of the alliances they form. With anyone that properly secures their ends of individual betterment. They are turtle loyal and truly blind for those that aid them. They go inside a hard shell indeed and not god or insects can crack it. It is made of strongest stuff

Perhaps never not even ever having anything but predators as presidents and thieves for kings. Often the Russian quarter was festive, often feisty often a place of lawless abuses. You couldn’t ever know unless you knew the name of a song in Cyrillic.

 

She met on the boardwalk, I stood there smoking a Newport sizing up the Green from the Blue Tatianna’s nothing knowing how different they were. I was sleep deprived.

She had told me this rambling story about being the great granddaughter of a German baroness. This seemed like the kinds of stories all White Russian women concoct to erect a regal lineage that the revolution had maligned. Yelizaveta and Maria hadn’t made up such stories, they had others though that were comparable. But Yelizaveta and Maria’s fathers had been Red Russians[50] and inner party members. They were less fixated on the 19th century it seemed.

There were always these vague and ambiguous narratives Sebastian noticed about what their fathers did or didn’t do during the Soviet Union. Maria’s father had completely disappeared in Chechnya, allegedly been shot by friendly fire; he had been a General, but was dead before she was four or the family joined the exodus. Yelizaveta’s father had been a “dentist”. Or perhaps an expert interrogator. It was hard to deduce. What was the truth and what was the darkness that creeps out into his world any time he encounters them, these post and former Soviets.

Anyhow, Dasha was claiming to be part Ivoryish via her German Baroness Great Grandmother and that was her story for now. Her father apparently had just been a tramp and run out on her mom at fairly a young age.

She kisses him on each cheek and takes out a picture, wrapped up in papers and a bow.

“For you,” she states.

He opens it and it’s quite something, so black and dark and vivid. A heart. A black, black heart. But, his or hers? To what symbolic level goes it?

“Amazing, I love it,” he replies.

And for the nearly the first time in his life, he means it.

“I’m so glad.” She says with her big blue person eyes beaming?

“Shall we go get red wine?” she suggests.

That night long after midnight, late, late after a few shots, and some wine and a few dozen shared cigarettes in Cafes in and around Manhattan Beach they walk their walk, tumbled really toward to yacht yards and mansion of Sheepshead Bay.

And one point she yanks his collar close and says; “taste me”; she puts wine into him mouth to mouth.

The night gets early, he’s lost chasing her.

He runs his fingers through her thick blond lion’s mane. She leans into him on bar stools or when they go outside to spoke, let’s her tits rest on him, brush against him.

“So you’re really an Ivory?” she asks.

“Yes at least part.”

“I want to ask you silly questions and you will answer them of, she smiles rolling up into his arms, “and you will get a prize if you win, understand. True answers only.”

            “Would you denounce your Ivoryish God and become an Eastern Orthodox Christian to please my mother?”

“I don’t believe in either God’s monopoly, why not?”

“If we were poor would you work on Saturdays to support me?”

“As I have for years.”

“Would you steal for me?

“The moon itself. And whatever was needed.”

“Would you make love to me with my husband sleeping in the next room?”

“Your cries of passion would wake him, so only if he were drugged.”

“Would you kill to protect me?”

“Without a thought.”

“If I killed someone would you help me cover it up?”

“Yes of course I’d try.”

“Try?”

“Try. Depends on the mess not the risk.”

A mental picture flashes in his head of a memory. Was it real. The two of them dismembering corpses and melting them in acid?

“If I asked you to kill for me would you do it?”

“Are you in trouble?” he asks like a stupid American.

“You know I’m a married woman?”

“I’d like to suggest it lacks certain integrities.”

“Does it? How could you known. You’ve known me what, five weeks?”

“Time is relative.”

“Maybe. My husbands a monster and my boyfriend is boring,” is all she says and pulls away from him.

She shows him marks on her poorly hidden.

She has black and blue marks on her chest and under both arms. Like she got herself fucked ruthlessly. She has hand cuff marks on her wrists.

“What do you want me to do about your situation?”

“There is nothing that can be done.”

“I could take you away.”

“You could try.”

“You have to tell me what you want me to do, not what you assume is possible.”

“What’s the thing you Americans say, oh yes: You and what army.”

“What are those marks from?”

“Me being loved by three men.”

He looks sad, it breaks through. Sad for her and him both.

“You could leave with me. Tonight. I have enough money to get us away.”

“I doubt that.  I have expensive tastes.”

“Curb them?”

“Are you going to give me new clothes? And a beautiful home; and pay for my school. And give me a credit card. Give me money to send my ailing mother in Penza? Ivory.”

“I think I could give you a better life than this shit, this life. In this miserable city.”

“You can’t give me what I need. As sweet as you are.”

“I don’t think you’d be with me if you didn’t think I could try.”

“You’re broke. You’re in school. You’re up to shit, I know. Don’t think I don’t know what you and your friends are up to. You’re all gonna die.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Do you think I don’t know?”

“What do you think you know?”

“I got to know a lot of guys when they brought me here.”

“Who?”

“The Perchevney Bratva.”

“You’ve told me so many fucking stories about how you got here, who keeps you, what’s true. What! You play mind games like the best of us.”

“My girlfriend and I were hired to let a couple bankers work us up two nights ago. When I told you I was studying. I was being fucked by two Wall Street guys, swapping my friend and I for hours. These marks are from them, not my fake ass paperwork husband. Not my boyfriend.”

He wonders what if any of the story is real.

“The wall street guys were fucked out their minds. They were going at us for hours. Taking long breaks to do coke and talk about shit they own.”

He has been asleep because she keep feeding him booze. He wakes up sometimes and knows his role, but then goes to sleep and forgets what is about to go down.

“They know you and the so-called resistance are going to attack the exchange on 17 September. In two days. They know that you’re all going to try and take over the whole district and provoke a state of emergency. They know. The cops know. The National Guard know. The FBI know. The Bureau of Homeland security knows. Breria, knows. They are going to lure you all into those narrow streets and spaces. They’re going to wait one day. They’re going to kill every single one of you with gas. Now you tell me. What horse am I betting on? My fat American husband. My Russian accountant boyfriend washing money at the biggest hotel in midtown? My boss, the Israeli pimp who pays me one grand every night I take a Wall Street guy, a banker or celebrity out to dinner? Or you? The bipolar ambulance man, who has less than 400 in the bank, is on the B.H.S. (Bureau of Homeland Security) kill list, can’t buy me a new life, and can’t save me. All you have is happy noble Amerikanski ideals and some poems. You probably shouldn’t see me again.”

He knows she’s right about at least what’s in his account.

 

“I can get us out of this city, I can take you away from this life,” Sebastian says, “I…”

“You are going to tell me you love me?” she asks him.

He doesn’t respond, that word means nothing anyway in English.

“You better not even fucking dare.”

“I’ll give you my life and I kill anyone who is hurting you. I’ll bury your husband, your boyfriend your Ivory pimp. I’ll bury Breria[51] himself.”

She kisses him hard. Fuck it, she thinks he’ll probably be dead in a couple of days.

 

And that was how she began to suspect that he truly was the man she’d dreamed about as a younger girl with the powers she was born with, from a line of old souled sorceresses; and she of course recorded the entire conversation on her smart phone recorder as evidence for her handlers, well we all have them really.

Shortly they could cross this very, very loose and erratic cannon off their growing shorter list. He was so fucking out there, he was not to be allowed to walk off the map this time.

“I know a little hotel at the boardwalks end with mirrors on the ceiling,” she whispers to him, “I have to sleep at home tonight but he’s not gonna come home tomorrow. You can’t save my soul or fix my life, but you can do what you want to body, if I like it.” Now that was a value proposition, if he had ever heard one.

 

 

 

SCENE 22

Light House Inn, 2011ce

Sheepshead Bay

 

 

The following evening came and he was hard. In spiritual and conventionally phallic ways too. He sits there looking at the crashing waves and Eifel Tower of Brooklyn lit up red to the east, the parasol drop.

Dasha Andreavna arrives in the cold of night, met him as the usual place on the boardwalk, by Tatiana Blues.

One astounding thing about her was the variety of looks she wore upon her face. The way she carried her out worldly self, as well as her firm control of her surroundings via her deliberate metamorphosis from often carefree nymph to a severe and serious instructor of social etiquette and use of language. This perhaps this was the result of being born into the tender firm and earthly body of a non-aging and busty school girl, while her memory of events could trace its analysis across four centuries of wax and waning hardship were she ever to stop drinking. Her analogue disposition was that of vast kindness, but she resorted lately to various manipulations. It was the temperament best suited for dealing with savages and bonobos alike. For she was not descended from monkeys and her soul was not like any other he’d encountered.

They walk briskly toward the Sheepshead Bay district, which looks madly like a destitute and run down Tel Aviv, he always thinks so. Little second and third rate jazz clubs, micro mansions and the dirty boat canal.

He kisses her hard before she even closes the motel door behind her. He thrusts her against the wall clutching her tight and he smells like some cheap but ok 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 then?”

He always misses her now.

She’s all he thinks about. Her big blue eyes. Her stunning baby face. Her devil smile. How she fits in his arms. How he hopes he barely fits in all of her tight little spaces. He longs to suck on her big perfect breasts.

He hangs her coat and she grabs his ass.

He carries her over to the bed. All he can think about is how tight she is every single time he enters her pussy, how hard she kisses him, how much he thinks he loves her, and just how long she can take his cock. He’s insatiable. And she can fuck him for days he’s sure.

It’s interesting to think such things about a woman you’ve only just kissed. He’s had three weeks of dreams about it. About what it would be like to have her.

The motel room has off white walls, poor lighting and smells like scented candles. There are indeed mirrors on the ceiling and walls. But it’s better than the ones before, the gypsy tents and beach blankets. It was just under $200 US for the room, almost half what was in his account. In the room is a new red desk and queen sized brown wooden bed with posts. Nothings on the desk. He lays her on the bed and kisses her hard again. They make out and she rubs his big cock through his jeans wanting to taste it. Wanting to suck him off twice. She’s wearing a short skirt and red lace panties; a black short skirt and tank top which makes her thick pale tits look quite perfect. He’s already rock hard thinking about taking her. He rubs on her breasts.

He wants to rip off her panties and fuck her brutally until she screams. He wants to take off his belt and put it around her neck and fuck her over the red desk until his hot cum fills her pussy. She’s so prim and perfect. She’s young and luscious and graceful. He wants to put her on her knees.

“Slow down,” she whispers anticipating his hungry lust, “we have all forever. Take your time baby make me a few times cum and extra hard. Seduce me.”

He starts rubbing her pussy with his fingers while she sucks his thumb. He likes her to take him all the way down her throat to gag on big cock. He’s looking up a voodoo spell to double himself so she can suck him while his twin fucks her on her knees from behind. She’s not sure if she can take two of him. It’s hard to slow him down. He just imagines always the tightness of when he enters. Like she’s fucking for the first time. That tight. What an illusion. That tasty and pure. Once he’s in thrusting all he can think about is pleasing her. He loves her amazing pussy. Its taste and its shape and its fit. She always shudders when he goes in. He wants to fill her with hot cum and break her in. He wants to fuck her hard and everywhere, put her legs on his shoulders and ram his cock as far as it will go make her beg him for to empty load after load inside her…

“Slow baby slow” she whispers.

He breathes deep. His mind can’t stop running ahead.

“I’m going to suck your cock dry tonight baby,” she whispers in Russian, “I’m going lick that cock and stroke it so well. But first you gotta play with me right.”

He has no idea what the fuck she is or isn’t saying.

She takes his index finger and shows him how she’ll suck him. He’s beside her. Takes her panties down and puts a finger in her pussy. So amazingly tight. He rubs her up and down and wants her to be his baby forever. He wants to please her so well that she can’t even remember the faces of other men. Men like her pimp or her husband. He can’t think of anything but her all day at work. She sends him pictures sometimes in her lingerie and asks him to tell her what he’ll do when they get to the hotel.

Since she started class she only fucks two or three men a day.

He plays with her gently rubbing her pussy. Whispers in her ear, “I’m gonna love you hard tonight.” She moans and say, “Please, please.” But hopes he is gentle. Then throws that away since men are not gentle.

Her shirt is still on and she’s rubbing is cock thorough his jeans. He licks down her leg and rolls up the shirt. He grabs her thighs and licks and licks and licks. She moans and tells him again what she’ll do on her knees. He’s got one finger in her working back and forth, can barely fit a second. He looks up and she’s her happy moaning face.

When it seems like she is about to cum, which is charade for she can cum on demand, he whole body contorting in ecstasy; he pick her up and pushes her over the red table.

“You’re gonna take my cock everywhere.” Did he think it or say it?

Men say that shit all the time.

She looks like a sexy little foreign school girl when she wants to or sometimes like a grown ass woman of the night. She can also be anything else, but always beautiful and dignified and pure at heart for him. He wants her to be his boss outside. He wants to be her servant and student he knows she’s wise beyond her years by a hundred. But in their inner rooms of that Sheepshead Bay motel he wants her to let him break her in as his for now. He wants to tie her wild ways and fuck her so ferociously that she cannot remember another man but him.

He wouldn’t be the first of last to try.

He lifts her skirt and guides his thick cock inside her. He moans, she’s incredible to taste and even more so to ride. He big pale breast are in his mouth one by one. He likes her to keep sucking his big fingers while he tries to go slowly back and forth pushing deeper.

“I’m going to try and break you,” he says. So you’re calmer.

And then for the next few hours he tries.

She’s bent over the desk now with her panties in her mouth and can she feel herself convulsing as his penis rams up her cumming for the third time in five hours.

Was that real or was that witchcraft?

In the candle light in the mirror besides the bed and one the ceiling. She wants to civilize him. Make him her serf. For sex and smoothies. Can he be taught? Where did she learn to fuck like that?  For an agitation propaganda officer he’s quite good. He finally slowly pushes deeper and takes her hands. He begins going faster one last time. “I’m gonna fuck that tight ass baby. I’m gonna you have you beg for my dick for days,” he mutters in Ivory.

“Fuck me harder Jew,” she yells at him in Russian.

But she loves to beg him. Beg him to serve her. Beg him to make her cum again. She likes him to treat her like the goddess she is. He begins pumping faster. And cums in her. Lying there awhile then he bathes her. Washes all the blood and cum off them both. And they pass out eventually before dawn, on the springy motel bed.

Dead men get a last wish in every great culture she thinks, should she let herself out and go home, that would prudent. No, that would hurt him she things with mercy.

Now that she owned him, I guess she could help him finally die.

 

 

 

 

SCENE 23

Partisan Shrine, 2011ce

Sheepshead bay

 

 

 

Time stopped it seemed for Sebastian Adon between the double blue moons of Labor Day Weekend and the 17 of September, the date of the General uprising. It was as if the bite of Dasha Andreavna, through his index finger to the bone had altered his very electricity and chemistry. Was it the moon; perhaps for we are but 70% water; or was she something clandestine, if not supra-natural? With so many variables, no many players and plots vying for the most cost effective means to the biggest slice of the apple; well it makes a dizzying narrative.

 

But from the minute she bit into him, the night they perished in a fourth dimensional sense on that roof; the days became long. Sebastian had forgone the gift of sleep. At some point he had had taken some pills that abstracted his world, deduced him to a broken shell. The glory of his early life and past lives squandered, but Dasha knew his face; knew his capabilities; knew how to wake a sleeper sleeping. For four straight weeks neither she nor he slept. The one or two hours of snooze was purely for biologics sake; they flattened out time.

 

On 15 September they walked down the Coney Island boardwalk towards Manhattan Beach; towards the strip of mansions and yachts in Sheep’s Head. They came across a shrine. An iron torch wrapped in barbed wire about a pillar; around the base which extended out in a marble slab as if for human sacrifice. There were dozens of low cut tombs with the names of villages and families and entire peoples wiped out in the Nazi holocaust. Upon each a short story of things Sebastian knew, knew as if experienced. And they paused there in the dry docks and canals of Sheep’s Head, with the jazz cafes and lounges lined up on Emmons Ave.

 

Time stopped yet again.

 

“What is this poorly maintained shrine,” she asks him, “why do we linger here?”

 

And everything about his life he then knew to be a fabrication. His name, his parents, his religion, his country of origin. All a clever, highly cultivated disguise.

 

He was suddenly in many places and times at once. He was explaining to her the significance of the Partizan shrine; he was teaching her about his people’s history. She was telling him that her Ivoryish grandmother married a German baron and hid a Ivoryish lover in the manor for the duration of the purge. He told her about how when he was young he used to train with black guerillas in the shadows of these shrines all over the city; as if the younger he knew more of his past life than the man now; the man who has his face and memories wiped out repeatedly after being used by both sides of the war? Yes, the war. The oldest war; between humans and those that prey on them. And those humans which help the predators exploit us. The collaborators. They begin cleaning up the Partizan shrine which is gratified and defiled.

 

“What about the hatch?” she asks.

 

“The hatch?”

 

“I heard that under every holocaust shrine is a hatch to great behemoth craft; a black freighter ready to carry your people out to sea. If the purge, when the purge begins again.”

 

There appears to be a hollow in the base of the pillar upon which the flame site. She reaches in to brush the leaves aside, looking for the hatch. She cuts her hand on glass and bleeds out all over the shrine, until he goes in his jump bag for some bandages and iodine to pour. He secures her, she never cries out; just bleeds on her pretty dress, bleeds on the shrine.

 

“My personal paramedic,” she says, “no hatch.”

 

He is using much more of brain now. Able to be several places at once. He has seen the hatch open, seen that it needs a hand grenade to break the shrine and controlled explosion to pop the layer open to the great craft; the 24,000 person capacity nuclear powered black exodus freighter. And its sister crafts in Star City, Fort Totten, Fort Washington, Waterside and Seagate. And the corrupted one under Richmond Plaza. He thinks the freighters have been there since the 80’s. She shouldn’t know about them; unless, unless.

 

So it’s hard to describe fourth dimensional time; being in numerous reality states and historical times. She was her great grandmother he was the Ivoryish lover in the closet space hidden away. He’d been to Vienna; he’s bombed the theatre there also bombed a police station. So now, now in this state he knows that he’s not just a three dimensional man; 29 years old, a petty bourgeoisie of mixed Caucasian race in a paramedic program after the fire department put him on trial for Ayiti, after the Israelis locked him up briefly and deported him for treason; he’s self-aware. He remembers the camps. He remembers the Sharashka Waltham, which is to say remembering things that haven’t even happened yet.

 

“Where are you right now?” Dasha asks him.

 

“I’m in the Waltham Special Engineering Camp, inventing the blue print 5 module training system, three years from now.”

 

“Good. Well finally, you’re awake. Five weeks under man.”

 

There was this whole other life happening all at the same time, happening while he slept and the rational mind cultivated by the Pharisees told him that his delusions were delusions but the world was sane. And several times, several times Lt. Moishe Klein asked him, “a sane man in an insane world is what?”

 

And the least complicated answer was, “insane.”

 

“What are you after?” she asks him, there in the fall, there in New York, there in front of the Sheep’s Head Bay Partizan shrine, the pillar covered in barbed wire and former Soviet looking torch.

 

“I want to know the truth about our, nature.”

 

“You need to process the truth about yourself Old Soul, you need to ask why other men sleep and you are awake, ask why you attract the others with the full range view; ask about why people like us don’t die; we just get reborn in new realities or vessels, over and over and over; why? You tell me because you’re older.”

 

“Emma?”

 

“Man, I’m not your long dead wife,” she says in total scorn.

 

He sees all these things and times. The Black Freighters levitating into the air with the waters rising up and over the ramparts and swallowing up the bay. He sees massive flying fortress ships gas rocketing Brooklyn, Breuklyn? Breuklyn Soviet; the citadel of the un-born messiahs’ the son and daughter of the Mahdi?

 

“How many times have we danced?” he asks her.

 

“We’ve been dancing a lot since the 17th century poetic little gun slinger. I’m not as old as you, I’m just currently more self-aware. Ochen Bolshoi.”

 

He remembers another time and place when she found him sleeping at the base of the Shrine; Vienna maybe, 1804? 1886? Aren’t those the reset dates? Hard to say all made up dates anyway. She found him and he drew for her and they were lovers for a year until the secret police murdered her. Was that the oldest story? And there was the German baron, there was another time in the 1990’s maybe when he refused to leave the park because fucking Italians (Sicilians really) in the Columbus Association would come every year and sacrifice a virgin Ivoryiss there by gang raping her on the marble slab; the cops would never be there. They’d go to church and be absolved the very next day. They would be asleep. And she showed up the morning he was sleeping there and she said she’s help him defend the shrine, prevent this year’s annual Yom Kippur rape atrocity. And Mickhi Dbrisk showed up and the three of them with bats guarded the shrine so when the Italians from Garretson beach did show up to decorate and foul the shrink; they three of them reinforced by forty Crips with bats really fucked those nasty kids up, broke out a lot of teeth. Was that the 1990’s? Was that during the Crown Heights Riots, the Ivory-West Indian mass hate crime? Was it reality or should I say linear Pharisee[52] created three dimensional reality.

 

“Are you setting me up for someone?” he asks.

“Not me, No-One is setting you up,” she replies.

 

And the doors closed on me at Avenue H and the Q train southbound to Stillwell Ave. carries her home, to her husband on Banner Ave. Like I shall never see her alive again. That is what all nights have felt like since I have known her, but these four of five weeks. Parting with her is a type of death.

 

Knowing she returns to such an animal neither she nor I can control or break from. I begged her many time to leave with me to somewhere, to anywhere really. She only quietly laughed and loudly judged me.

 

The cabs could take us still thorough the Battery tunnel, but we often had to board the trains to get deeper into what was quickly becoming the most heavily armed and barricaded urban stronghold barring perhaps Baghdad and Mogadishu. Every ethnic group, every gang and mafia, every faction was warming up observing what was about to occur in the city the morning afternoon and next week days and weeks after 17 September. September 1st had been a Great Disruption, all listening to the f IRE switch, fire station radio broadcasts knew what was soon to happen; a great slaughter.

 

So in Brooklyn, Queens the Bronx and many other places like ATL, Boston, Flint, Hartford and Detroit the innumerous factions of resistance dug the hell in. They got ready to hold ground, room to room, block to block. No one thought it would be feasible to storm the district financial. A real one way trip. But Anarchists are always after hard, symbolic targets and by that stage the city unions and student movement were behind them in the raid.

 

The blood of the left would spray into and open the eyes of the right and the center so went the brinkmanship of the Planning Section chiefs in the Breuklyn Bath and Rifle Club called also called the Banshee Otriad. There would be no Anarchist Trials here, who even had time for such warnings; only massacre and atrocity. Followed by deceptions like ones perpetrated in September 2001 and again in January of 2009.

 

 

 

 

Chapter 24

Zuccotti Park/ Liberty Square, 2012ce

Financial district

 

 

 

On 16 September the clock counts, ticks, trickles down. The demonstrations are growing in size across the city stoked by the mismanagement and brutality of the National Guard and local police forces in Brooklyn, the barricade line on Atlantic and Flatbush seems to be holding.

The Fire Switch station has been guiding residents how to fortify their blocs, knock out walls and basements for mobile firing positions, how to build phosphorous grenades and Molotov cocktails, playing the right song when your block association needs to flip city buses and turn them into barricades.

 

There is a no fly zone over all of Brooklyn and the Bronx, although the government has all the helimonsters and drones in needs fueling in Jersey.

 

A flying fortress[53] is fueling up in the skies above Staten Island, that’s no good. You can’t fight a flying fortress with ideas or even long guns.

 

There is no Federal control in most of the outlying city boroughs except Staten Island where the National Guard is staging. Police officer of the NYPD are being ambushed and killed all over Brooklyn and the Bronx, Queens has been more quiet, but is barricaded up tight; most important players are the Latin Kings (newly political again), Chinese Mafia, the Bangladeshi trade union federation and the Polish Press.

 

Sebastian and Dasha wandered around the District financial, which appears all but empty. He took her heart painting to be framed by the one armed Egyptian Musa the fantastic framer. He took her to a small Cuban restaurant near the South Street seaport for late lunch and then his bank account said over drawn, so she paid with her husband’s black Amex, I notice the name on the card.

Wondered were it a taste of things to come?

He’s wearing a blue pin stripe suit and looks handsome for a nearly broke dead guy. They wander around the district both knowing from different sources what is coming down hard tomorrow.

 

Eventually Sebastian calls a Mexican Express car service, she drags him into the long perilous journey quite easily. They make out for a while, and then she demands a poem. He takes one out of his satchel. He read it for a while until it’s clear she is asleep.

 

Grim sureality sets in further. They split a cab through the lines back home for her, towards the Brighton Ghetto again via the Battery Tunnel the only passage still open, the Arab driver asks them if they want to fool around back there ‘people do all the time, it’s like I’m not ever here’; the shmuck says. What do you even say to that? They don’t even react, it’s banal to react to savages. Dasha gives him evil eyes.

 

The radio said that a Hurricane called Sandy would break ground the very next day. But you don’t need a weather man to know which way the wind blows as they say. Which is to say whenever there is serious warning of inclement whether there is about to be a crackdown ore a purge.

 

The cab had to stop at a two story rubble/ bus barricade across Atlantic Avenue. The Orthodox Ivoryish militia and several Ayitian sets of the Bloods were stopping all traffic from moving south of the Barclays, where rebel government was still in session. Only because Adon had lived on H and Ocean, only because he encountered a man he knew well Lt. Moishe Klein; were they allowed on foot to disembark.

 

“What a looker,” says Lt. Klein in Yiddish, “I’d hit that tookas for weeks.”

 

And once they clear the tertiary barricade wall on the Ocean Avenue Bridge, past the Avenue H bar lev defense lines staffed by hundreds of orthodox Ivoryish watchmen called the Shomriim (the Yid secret police army) as well as Garveyites and newly converted Crip and Blood sets; well they board the Q train toward Stillwell Ave.

 

The towers on Banner Avenue and Brighton 6th, the Soviet style high rises put up in the Russian quarter in 1988 to absorb the million plus Ivory, claiming to be Ivoryish and Ivoryish-ish refugees that took boats and planes, but mostly planes to New York City in the years that the Soviet Union collapsed; those concrete towers looks like purgatory on a bad day. The rains that used to be early snows were hitting them hard. Nothing worse that cold, wet New York rains.

Ghetto Camp Alpha was here in the Brighton zone and Ghetto Camp Bravo was in Star City, a much more controlled environment between utterly lawless East New York, the Belt Parkway highway system, a swamp and a river.

 

He’s seen pictures of her house. The place is white and low lit and clean and god only knows; is anything about her life real. There are no books except the ones he’s given her. He’s been in the lobby and there the sureality of the whole affair ends, each night for four weeks timeless.

 

“Once last kiss,” she says and lays it on him and they turn the corner to arrive at the departure point of the 44 Banner Ave lobby.

 

But tonight something was different. There are nine Slavic man in grey and black suits waiting in the lobby. They aren’t smiling, they aren’t taking any prisoners except the two they planned to take. Eight sets of muscle fall on them and grapple them both to the ground. They resist as best they can, but it happens rather quickly. One of them back hands her in the face. Then hits her in the stomach and she doubles over and is brought the ground.

 

A boot stamps on Sebastian’s chest and he feels something rip inside him, hopefully not a kidney. They hit him with electricity somehow.

 

The last thing Sebastian Adon sees before electrified black asps crack against him and he falls to the ground stunned is the grinning baby face of Dmitry Khulushin, his nemesis.

The ruthless Shtarkers quickly zip them up into body bags and carry them out to the running black bullet proof armored Escalades.

 

“Stop taking my stuff without paying” and Dmitry punches him in the face and knocks out his three front teeth.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Chapter 25

Under Foxy’s Nightclub, 2011ce

Brighton beach

 

He wakes up somewhere. He was walking on the Tel Aviv boardwalk, running into all these old friends. Everyone was going ok. He was heading back to his wife and kids.

 

And then he wakes up upside down. He’s fixed up on leg manacles conjoined to the ceiling. He’s chained up in some dungeon, in some sub-basement Bratva torture center, maybe. It’s not a large chamber; just enough space to hang upside down toothless and naked from the ceiling. He chemically sedated, that he can feel. There is a black X tattooed over his heart and small black tattoo marks indicating placement of chest tubes and central lines. Like this is going to be a really fucking drawn out ordeal. The light is off. They are probably not even going to ask him any questions, for he knows how to indomitably lie. Most ominous in that there is a king sized bed and small stage and a boiler furnace below him. Evidently the plan to make him watch a rape and then burn him alive. That’s how these things go. Paramedic save thyself.

 

He wiggles a little, cold and bloody in the darkness.

 

The difficulty with Mr. Dmitry Khulushin Koch is that is he is a genius but also a cruel and most sadistic animal. So whatever torture he has in mind will be protracted. The last time I saw you I burned down your home with you parents inside of it, thinks Adon. Was that a real memory? This was a most timeless beef.

Do I do things like that?

Hanging upside down above a low burning gas furnace, in the low to no light of this rape room, Sebastian Adon reflects on his feelings.

 

Did Dasha set him up? They are going to torture him very badly and there is nothing that is pleasant about that, but he would feel very guilty if he had gotten her roped in without cause. He thinks he loves her. Well whatever that means. Loved her in another life? He has these memories of seeing this all exactly before. Of forty men raping his wife? His brand new lover? Forty men raping her until she could never look in the mirror again. Then they slit her throat and covered him in her blood, lit him on fire while they desecrate her corpse.

 

New Romans, I think.

 

The past and present are fluid things. And he knows they are not interested in anything but his pain and humiliation. Her total degradation is their policy towards those with the chosen blood line. All the blood is going to my head.

 

White lights come on and they strobe. Yep, they’re going to rape the hell of us and burn us alive for sport or Christian ritual. Forty men in animal masks and red robes enter the room and they’re carrying Dasha in white bath robe bound and in manacles struggling like she’s aware of how this Cult performs its sacrifices. They bind her to the king sized alter.

 

Filthy fucking non-believers after a taste of the blood and body of their Christ.

 

And I’ll tell you, I don’t pray a lot like I used to. Even moments just like this where a lot of the pieces line up and you realize that they took so goddamn much from you and your people. Here I am upside down and helpless while they defile this woman I love, I love? Yes, I love because she is one of the Tzadikk ha Dror candidates; the potential candidates for our generation’s messiah.

 

   “Let’s fuck this little busty bitch to death! Then we cook their bodies and eat their essence!” yells Dmitry Khulushin unmasked dropping is pants to penetrate. He starts fingering then fucking her. She’s gagged, I’m gagged. The strobe lights are flashing, some horrible screeching dub step is playing. There are men hitting me with electric batons. Dmitry is raping Dasha and punching her in the face.

 

One of these goons flicks on the low burner and I begin to slow cook.

 

They have this all set up for their sick fun, I am rotated to be barbequed and held feet over flame. I can feel the searing of toes. I can’t scream out were I inclined. I smell the cooking of my own flesh and it sticks to you forever that smell.

I think the worst part about a rape room is that you realize they just plan to make others suffer at your expense until you do what they want. But Dmitry Khulushin is a vampire; he’s a demon and he just loves his work.

He begins hitting her in the face as he fucks her. Getting off on her helplessness and mine. The humiliation of seeing those your love suffer. I know it well.

 

And then suddenly Dmitry, or really the flimsy husk holding him, has an enormous hole in his chest. And then his head ruptures and bursts brains all over the place. And his blood and guts fly out all over her naked mid-raped body.

Gunfire erupts, louder than the movies.

Because Watson Entwissle in a brown leather jacket and submachine gun has raided the ceremony with brown haired pixy Adelina Blazhennaya and she has put a powerful spell on everyone. As is his way Watson and a twelve person crew in flicker masks and Uzis are preparing to unload live rounds on every single hostile they see in a red robe.  Kill every single person in that bloody cult ordered Emma Solomon. And burn that white church to the ground.  And Adelina was only using majik. They had gunned their way into the bowls of this enormous white church in the heart of Coney Island; yet another Catholic front for the work of these murderous devils. They had encounter minimal resistance, so as she took point and pushed open the doors to the sacrifice;

 

Davai,” she exclaimed. And with a small motion of her wrist, Dmitry’s heart exploded in his chest mid fuck, then she snap her fingers and his head blows off spraying blood everywhere. And before Watson Entwissle, the Mullato Ayitian and his fellow rebel gunman for the Z.O.B. can open their fire; forty devil rapist heads pop off. And forty dead cult members along with the latest husk of Dmitry Khulusin fall dead on the ground in crumbled bleeding piles. As if it were just that easy to dispatch evil.

 

Adelina pushes the latest body of the ancient devil Dmitry K. off the despoiled and now covered in blood pale busty body of Dasha Andreavna. She unlocks Dasha’s manacles and hands her a bathrobe to wipe herself and then tosses her a grey multiform. They will have to fight their way out of Bratva controlled Coney Island, best you believe.

The two women say nothing, not even hello or thank you. They know they are in competition for a lot more than the time, gun, sword or pen of Sebastian Adon. They are two of the most powerful candidates alive.

 

Watson turns off the flesh roasting fire and cuts Sebastian down, and he gets a hug and a thank you, and he can barely walk from the fire to feet. Sebastian has full thick ness burns to both his feet. They had flipped him vertical to cook and cook he did.

 

“Thanks for the nearly perfect timing frère,” Sebastian says in Ayitian Creole. Although Dmitry raped and black eyed his buxom candidate lover and they cooked his feet until he can’t walk thanks to the third degree. Other than that the timing, was nearly perfect.

 

They leave the ‘White Church’ in flames and all the ghouls headless like it is Paris 1789 all over again. With Sebastian on a stretcher they load up into three ambulances and take off for District Midwood, because even in this near lawless state of emergency you can’t just burn a big white church in Brooklyn with no reactions.

 

There are almost no cars on the roadway, a curfew was called on the radio. Which make is easier for the government drones to light up the convoy with air to surface missiles. And the missiles blow this ambulance convoy right off the parkway.

 

Around Avenue U hellfire rockets take out the first of the three ambulances in the convoy. The third shortly after. Dasha and Sebastian are in the middle of the convoy. She grabs the side arm off one of the rebel fighters and shoots him point blank in the chest. She sucker punches Adelina as hard as she can, and she goes down. And tires to put a round in Watson, but the gun jams. So she picks him up with her mind and throws him out of the back of the crashed ambulance. She tells Sebastian, “be cool, this is not a fruitful rescue party.” She tucks in note in Adeline’s bandoleer for later, explaining herself a little why she’s struck a candidate and country woman. “Sorry” is all it mostly says.

 

And she pressure strikes Watson in such an ancient way with four fingers, vasovagal and he goes out too.

 

She knows Sebastian can barely walk. So she throws him over her shoulder, like she was taught in the Black Cats Unit 669, when she trained under the mountain of a man Abner Kreminizer back in day; and she hauls his ass across the parkway before the drones can make their second pass for pick offs. She has no cash, no documents, no weapons, just was raped, but her mind and the extraction point at the Tavern is nearly 24 clicks north, across the barricade lines and down a three kilometer tunnel.

 

She has to get this man to her latest employer Sasho Alexandre Perchevney, bring him fully alive to the Mehanata Social Club so they can sit out this sure to be disastrous first phase of the American uprising alive and get the hell out this reality before it implodes. Either she has to carry him through the sewer and subway tunnels or listen to yet another disgusting Arab cab driver make degrading comments all the way back to Manhattan.

 

 

 

Chapter 26

1 Wall Street, 2012ce

Financial district

 

 

On 17 September over 144,000 demonstrators and over 10,000 cops (who knows where the papers got those numbers) battled across the tight & narrow ravines of the District Financial with bottle rockets, gas bombs and by mid-day were exchanging gun fire. The trade unions and socialists called in reinforcements around noon and soon the whole district was then awash in tear gas and broken glass and Taser fire and then quite live fire and protesters being beaten bloody in front of the stock exchange and the Deutsche Bank, something hit the mainstream prole feed media about a bomb going off in the Stock Exchange, and then, the TVs all switched to sports, commercials and giggling tits.

 

The rising on the anniversary of the occupation a year ago suppressed and the attempted recapture of Zuccotti Park was under way.

 

A national General Strike was declared in relation to the State of Emergency called for by the Anonymous and newly christened ‘Résistance Alliance’. It was observed only in L.A., Oakland, Detroit, and Chicago and partially in Boston, D.C. and Miami but then the internet went blank at 14:00. And the TV news babble junkied out misinformation, prole feed.

 

So then no one knew who has fighting where, resisting where, what was even happening. And so things then got a lot more violent than anyone had anticipated. Purge orders were issued by dreaded Director Breria of the Department of Homeland Security. Amidst a media and internet black out martial law had been declared. The District financial was surrounded. The Occupiers and unionists and students and innumerous others well over by then 600,000 demonstrators had over run most of the district and barricaded them streets leading into it.

 

The New York Stock Exchange was set ablaze around 22:00. A massive General Assembly held in Battery Park called for a full blown national revolution.

 

But, most of the country didn’t even know what was happening. The Department of Homeland Security activated FEMA, the Militias and the Guard. Then, just after midnight; sweet repression.

 

The Special Security Services, the NYPD, the Department of Homeland Security, the National Guard, and the rightist Patriotic Militias moved in; they gassed or shot virtually everyone. By the next day, there were corpses all over the streets, blood all over the trading floors and god only knows how many movement people were dead. No one knew. Almost nobody made it out of the district alive.

 

17 days from the initial rising at the Labor Day Parade the U.S. government had massacred over 50,000 activists and leftists, no one knew human many for sure; thousands of students and their supporters all but disappeared in the weeks to come. FEMA and the DHS under the strict leadership of Director Breria fanned out across the country and slaughtered 500,000 plus rebels and supporters, students and people they happened to know. It was as if these 500,000 persons had never even been. Or was it 50,000? 5,000? Or had there just been a storm and a flood.

 

And by the time in early November they finally cleared the streets, the waters had resided and most of the left and progressive opposition was gone. As if they had fought and planned and died for nothing and their countrymen had never even peeled away from the television tuned to sports or tits or adverting.

 

But, Sebastian Adon and most of his friends did not die in the purge, the historically hidden democide regularly committed by states! He survived because he and Dasha were ambushed by her husband and her husband’s friends in the lobby of her building which resided on 77 Banner Avenue.

 

And the comrades of Adon, his dearest friends; many of them survived the next 48 hours by fighting their way out of the district financial as it was overwhelmed by flame and gas; they shot their way out and managed to escape to the borough of Brooklyn via the old tunnels, guided by mole people and Oleg Megved and Mikhail Mastrovitch the Ivorite special operations agents sent to rescue them.

 

And it was young, wispy Adelina Blazhennaya that rescued Dasha and Adon, much to her better judgment; for it was not meant to be that leftists would lead the Great Revolt; it would come from the renewed consciousness of human kind, not old ideas or even new ones. But while Adon and men like Mickhi Dbrisk, Watson Entwissle and Michael Goldbar Allamby would all have great and upcoming roles to play; it was women keeping them all alive with pistols and magic the nights of 17th, 18th and 19th September well until early November when the U.S. Federal Government carried out Operation Garden Plot 2 to murder almost every single important rebel in the country in one stomp of the iron heel. All those years between 1968 and the present or permissive, liberal unabashed freedom of expression, by they were taking names and faces down for when it was time, for when the opposition to empire grew about 2,000 men in any group, the soft cage hardened and there was blood murder in the streets.

 

As so many were fleeing the carnage of revolutionary war and repression in lower Manhattan; Dasha Andreavna with Adon in a grey body bag was hiking in heading straight to the Mehanata Social Club dragging him over her shoulder, until a Green a cab finally showed up to attempt a final tunnel run, up the mountain and into the City.

 

Chapter 27

113 Ludlow Street, 2012ce

Mehanata

 

 

Hanging above the main dance floor across the third floor gallery area is a clothesline and from it hangs a wide variety of female under garments that were not there when the club opened and the evening began.

 

The origin of these under garments is a source of amusement for the casual patron and a source of unspoken shame for a variety of young women hired as trial waitresses and bartenders, also unseasoned patrons left drinking heavily and unattended.

 

Sometimes a seemingly small place can become a vast labyrinthine and impregnable fortress when inundated with a bit of black magic, vodka and immigrant elbow grease. Perspective is but a cheap pair of sunglasses after all, paradigms are but Costco contacts to be shed and quietly replaced at will.

Were you to visit Mehanata on a Thursday you might come to think it only a single story lounge. Friday and Saturday patrons might access the basement Ice Cage and third floor table galley, but when it gets past 400am Sunday morning, not only can carriages change to pumpkins, but the depth and girth of the rabbit hole here can delve expansively into the fourth dimension.

 

Oh yes, the tavern is a vast entrapment.

 

Its 4:09 am. And everyone that isn’t meant to be in the club has been pushed, cajoled or driven out like a herd of drunken cats and those that remain are only staff or spoken for card carrying regulars.

Astika and Corona bottles litter the establishment on any number of table booth perches, the dive bar black piss fluids of spilled drinks irrigate all floor space.

A flurry of activity directed at securing the premises from external assault comes quite suddenly.

Justin Azello bolts the door with the pull of a large metal brace and shortly after James White and James Behemoth begin piling tables against it. There is an urgency with which they carry out this task as well as efficiency. It is not the simple and previously observed urgency of men and women working long hours and just wishing to go home. The three man Mexican kitchen staff lines up and begins stacking crates and kegs and assorted furniture against the storm shutters now pulled down and latched closed over the second exit to the tavern.

Martina the bartender begins placing bottles of liquor below the bar, vigorously. Conspicuously absent is all of her clothing and in the strange new light of the bar her wild black curly hair for some reason appears fire red. How curious, thinks Sebastian through the haze of his own vodka and pilsner soaked observational capabilities, which maintain some attention to idiosyncratic detail.

Ernesto Lynch looks as though he is half asleep, a zombie casually examining his drink seated at the bar on the swing seat, taking dainty swigs his head drooping, intermittent half singing accompanies the dull steady thumping of his palm to the bar. Victoria Lynch is also entranced so it seems, seated beside him on one of the four two-person bench swings abutting the main bar.

The lighting has completely changed. It’s become eerie in here on the eyes. Everyone who smokes is now smoking which is absolutely everyone except the Mexican kitchen staff, the Lynches and James White the Fenian bouncer who used to be a cop and still carries himself like one, except more jolly. The plumes waft about like ghosts of tobacco island taking on shapes most various in the doldrums of the shifty light which remains other worldly, blue tones and greyscale which emphasize reds of Martina’s lick stick, reds of Dasha’s large pocket book satchel, and the reds of the wine.

 

Sebastian without using words makes a quiet Hebraic motion of his hands pantomiming a peace signed puff and his eyes go half black wolf, half-drunk rabbit and so thus alerting Dasha Andreavna that he wishes her to retrieve the packet of Newports out of her deep red pleather purse, and share one with him.

Her hand bag seems as though in contains an endless assortment of things that cannot via the laws of normative physics fit inside it. Were a sledge hammer to be passed out of it he wouldn’t even feign surprise.

As of lately they seem to share all their cigarettes when they are happy with each other and tonight the are indeed happy because she has plied herself with eight types of vodka infusion and he has sipped on enough Astika to be doing an accomplished impersonation of Latin American dancing all evening.

Sasho is watching everyone and everything from the end of the bar, his back to the wall of the kitchen. The boss is wearing a black leather jacket his face stern and commanding; he snaps his fingers and fire takes form off his index finger. From this miraculous flame he lights a long cigar.

An uncanny display of your black magic, thinks Dasha.

 

If anyone else notices this trickster subterfuge, then they hardly seem surprised. Martina takes from below the bar a chalice of usual size, Byzantine even in proportions and pours him off a tall glass of what is presumably a thick red wine, although the lighting, quite unusual as said, makes it appear as though it is thick sanguine blood.

 

But he doesn’t sip this concoction, just leaves it out.

 

Sasho remains at the head of the bar with his unusually large chalice of blood red wine having ordered the entire fortification effort with simple subtle nod.

 

Misha Korovyov with his flowing brown hair and one eyed squint, and playboy bi-winning manic grin with some European designer cigarette dangling out his mouth throws his arms around Dasha and Sebastian. It was a though the eccentric Bulgarian materialized behind them.

 

“Joyous epic times new friends! Where but five weeks ago we were all merry strangers now we are intimate coconspirators!”

 

As if to coincide with the subversions of reality and convention already underway, Dasha and Sebastian although aware of phantom lights, of the mezmerization and stupor of the Lynches; of Martina’s brazen nakedity; now also it appears James Behemoth mostly called “James Brown”, to differentiate him from “James White” the former cop in casual conversation, the sly and charming Puerto Rican bouncer; well for lack of a better description, he has now transformed into a hippopotamus sized black cat! Walking upright still in his leather jacket, James Behemoth is now at the bar and Martina is pouring a pint glass sized frothy frozen vodka shot and leaving him the bottle.

“Are we in the secret company of angels or demons?” asks Dasha in a whisper.

Misha grins, “That’s the spirit! What my lovely Mademoiselle if I told you that the combination of man’s primitive brain with his powers of creativity with his latent albeit savage thirst for self-importance, self-aggrandizement creates an ongoing wildly unstable variable where bye all manners of mythology have been generated turning vastly complex phenomena, into well, cautionary children’s tales?” rambles Misha K, the wild eyed Bulgarian millionaire.

“I’d go even further to say, to caution even the arrogance of making Judeo-Christian spiritual assumptions in this day and age. The utter epitomes of self-absorption most grand that would make you all assume that you were either the center of the universe figuratively. Literally or neurologically; more so spiritually. Even now putting these base ideas into Amerikanski I must use nine words when in my own native tongue I could use a hand gesture, a syllable.”

 

“He speaks a lot while not saying anything,” notes Dasha.

“Indeed.” says Sebastian.

 

“Good, Evil, Angels and Demons! Flabergashy I say. Well I’m sure someone from the former Soviet Union once has explained how there is no such thing. No such thing as either. I’ve never seen an angel before I laid eyes on this woman” he says taking Dasha Andreavna’s hand and kissing it gently.

Enchante,” she responds facetiously doing her famous micro curtsey.

“To which I attempted to refute that with my American understandings of hope and heroism there are both angels and demons battling everywhere, and certainly good and evil are quite real I assure you,” Sebastian retorts.

“Mere devices in service of the ego sir, you see there may be deeds that cause pain or deeds that cause pleasure, but all of them get accomplished without some god or the devil whispering in the ear of human kind.”

“I’ll believe what I believe and you believe what you believe,” Sebastian says paraphrasing the Prophet Muhammad.

“And I’ll believe what I’ve believed all along which is that you men say a lot of drunk bullshit when you all drink!” Mutters Dasha, “darling tovarish let’s leave now, these wily tricksters offer us little besides their temporary refuge, their wine and some vodka.”

“Darling tovarish, it looks as though they have sealed us in,” Sebastian notes.

The fortifications are very much in place.

It even appears that the enormous vodka drinking black cat that was once James Behemoth is welding the metal door behind the barricade right to its frame. Ernesto is singing some old folk tune in Spanish as he gently swings the bench back and forth. Sasho has not left his standing perch at the bars end.

“It is not to seal you in. It is to keep the law enforcers temporarily at bay when they arrive,” states Sasho.

“Well sit down,” Sasho commands.

There is age as well as gypsy wisdom expressed in the features of this strong man, though his Semitic black eyes burn with casual madness. But, it is also as if he has not aged in ten years, will not age in ten more. Perhaps he has never aged at all thinks Sebastian as a remarkable feeling of dejavu over takes him. He had wandered into this tavern many times over the course of the decade, but when had been the very first time?

 

What had that original indulgence cost?

 

Sebastian Adon and Dasha Andreavna seat themselves on the plank of the bar bench swing closest to Sasho. Martina drops shot glasses in front of them. Her nakedness is ignored by virtually everyone. Dasha notices. And out of his corner eye Sebastian does too. And in this noticing of her pale, curvy and naked Bulgarian body he sees although flawless in her nude form she has what appears to be a subtle ecchymosis of the neck, a hicky perhaps, but black and blue. The only deformity to her naked perfection.

 

“I have plenty of doubts about helping you,” Sasho begins. “Just because you’re adulterers doesn’t mean you came to play with a full hand of cards.”

“They’re not consummated adulterers, just wild reckless ones with intent to achieve adultery,” Martina interjects.

“Please do remain quiet, Hella,” Sasho commands.

“What is it you want from me again?” Sasho asks.

“A trade,” says Sebastian. “A job,” says Dasha.

Their answers came out at once.

 

“You have nothing that I cannot just take, either of you.”

 

“I respect you sir, your powers I mean and this establishment generally, but we are not afraid of you,” Sebastian says, “Unlike many others we are neither enthralled nor intimidated easily. Our regularity has not indebted us to your, tavern.”

Sasho grins and his smoke trails take form before then, out his lips the smoke becomes a floating diorama of urbanity unraveling into anarchy.

Misha K. interjects himself into the palaver with wild hand motions and flailing;

“You ought to be more afraid of your fellow humans. And each also other since both of you albeit human are both vigorously more endowed. There will not be dawn breaking in two hours. Outside lawless mobs are looting and burning, the whole city is on fire. Heads are being cut off as though this were Jacobin France. The police are killing people in the streets. Sheer and total anarchy! And as we speak cordons of police are marching their way across the Lower East Side, heading here! They are after you two who they wrongly suspect of being key players in this bloody revolution being carried out. The Authorities dejour mean to arrest you both for high crimes, conspiracy and treason! In any number of minutes they will be banging on these doors asking for your heads on platters.”

Martina pours shots for them from a deeply frosty unmarked bottle.

“Do you love her?” Sasho asks pointing to Dasha.

“Of course I do,” Sebastian says. “Of course he does,” she responds simultaneously.

She turn to him as if surprised, although it’s come out once before.

“She doesn’t love you at all.”

“I realize that.”

“She most likely and I say this respectfully but with great faith, she never will. Not in this lifetime anyway.”

Sebastian turns to Dasha and takes her hand. She doesn’t pull away from this grossly sentimental display.

“Well as we all know. It’s not as if you only get one try.”

Sasho grins and breathes about smoke.

“I’ve run out of people to help me run and places to hide are running short as you know. If I am not mistaken many of my friends and associates have been taken or killed over the course of this black night. If I am not mistaken, the authorities think I am higher in the non-existent chain of command of this uprising than I really am. If I am not mistaken some rather grisly crimes have been committed over the past five weeks, my alleged role the general uprising not withstanding; it seems that the authorities wish to try us not just for treason but for sick, an heinous offenses committed by some rampant cult in grey.”

“Well it is certainly not Behemoth and I who are the poster children of the uprising or the slaughters of young wayward women,” notes Justin Azello.

“We may be an establishment of handsome devils, trickster Gypsies and seductresses and thieves, but we are not sick fuck murders,” states James White seated now at the long bar with a Corona which is also the neighborhood in Queens that he lives in.

 

“Are you asking me for help?” Sasho asks.

“We don’t have anyone else to turn to, at this juncture” Dasha says.

“Are you saying your g-d is ignoring you?” Misha K. asks with a grin, “are you saying you tried to pray and nothing happened?”

“Imagine that,” says sly Martina.

“Look here,” interrupts Dasha, “we are not at your mercy. Although he doesn’t exactly look the part right now per-say, this man is or was; Vasa the gunslinger.”

“Vasa the gunslinger!” echoes Martina.

“Vasa the gunslinger,” repeats Misha with glee.

“Yes, yes I know the human protégé of Archangel Michael, guardians of the unborn children of potential messiahs,” states Sasho.

“If such fantasies are still believed in,” says Misha K.

“I believe,” declares James Behemoth.

“Me too,” says James White, the injured and retired cop. A mortal and a Catholic too.

“Martina, my Hella, what think you of us assisting agents of, the other side?”

“Well now!” She leans her supple frame over the bar painting up her lips deep blood red as she does, “Well most interesting is that neither of them reports to remember anything of their past lives and associations, in a word, sorcery made them mortal this round, but who’s sorcery? Not ours surely or we’d have known about it.”

Justin Azello with a cowboy killer in his mouth is now also seated at the devils bar table and declares, “We definitely would have known about it.”

Martina continues, “The mystics long believed that in each generation would be born one hundred and four candidates out of the bloodline of King David, house Judah that these candidates would be hidden from the so called forces of good and evil, that then three would reveal themselves by their 33 year as the Tzadikk haDroriim, the three potential candidates for messiah. Only these three; a warrior, a sage, and an oracle might reverse the tide of human suffering and usher in an age of reason and compassion. Suffice to say, a good much was invested to snuff this nonsense out. Many factions have at one time or another joined hands to abort this prophesy as close to the womb as possible. Mostly by killing or corrupting them before the year of their revelation. Often by getting at their mothers before they are born. Have you heard this Old Soul mythology before?”

“Emma Solomon!” yells Justin Azello suddenly and neither Dasha nor Sebastian flinch or appear to recognize the name.

“Who’s Emma Solomon again?” asks Sebastian with a poker face.

Sasho, with a poker face says, “Never mind.”

“If I told you that you were both super natural beings with auspicious births and no biological fathers, at least not genealogically speaking what would you make of that?” asks Sasho.

“I’d say stop fucking around with drunken people and get down to business,” Dasha retorts.

“Alright then, if it is in my power, I’ll make you both a good deal. For a job I require you to follow this man to the cross roads and keep him from selling his third soul to anyone, anyone at all. I will help you escape and you will be in my employ for three years of human time which is considerably more or less fourth dimensionally speaking, though cost no more than three life days here in this reality. As for a trade I will trade you her contract to me and help you both quite literally disappear if you will go on a little field trip on my behalf once you escape.”

“So my job for your establishment is to escort Sebastian on some mission into exile?” Dasha asks.

“Exile isn’t any place to hide. We offer you improved fourth dimensional time travel,” states Misha.

She looks at them all blankly, this cohort and Otriad of thieves, whores and devils.

“What in the fuck are you talking about!?” Dasha asks.

“Let me blunt, before I am specific because time is for once not really on your side tonight new friends,” says Misha, ” Sasho might I be so bold as to lay out the terms?”

Sasho makes a hand motion and a shrug indicating the international indication of; carry on.

“Dasha Andreavna Skorobogatova. We know what your keeper will do to keep you! He’s found Mr. Adon’s letters; he has your passport and Adon’s parents address and your mother’s too. He’s not going to let you just walk away, he’ll make all the people dear to you suffer first, that is the man he is. Sebastian; Vasyli, whatever it is you’re calling yourself this in epoch. Since the little melee on that train and in the district your little band of black brothers has been hunted down and exterminated down to almost the last woman and man. Not only are you all being accused of being of house of subterfuge and treason, when you are arrested they will accuse you and she and your associates in the Z.O.B. of being sadistic vampires cannibals! They will drag you before trial and say that the thirteen of you were kidnapping, raping and vivisecting young girls for sacrifice.

And then they will line you up and execute you all to make an example. Under any scenario your little five weeks of romance have yielded impending catastrophic dividends.”

Dasha shrugs. Sebastian again with a different Bulgarian hand sign often utilized by Sasho and Misha asks Martina to fill up their shot glasses and get Dasha a red bull chaser.

“How now?” he says.

“Most basic. We will hide you in the past and the future. She will belong then to us, and you can auction her freedom with your abilities. You will thus work under a contract with a devil like me for three days’ time. Which will feel to you like three years over three past lifetimes. And when it’s done you’ll both be free and your friends will be alive and your city will be secure and spring time will be near. Instead of torture, prison, murder, death, not just yours and hers but your friends and families, instead of another victory for one side or another, you get freedom. You get to absolve yourself of the burdens you were born into, and in five weeks flirted your way toward courting oblivion.”

“What does he have to do, for us to get that?” Dasha asks.

“Three day’s work,” claims Sasho.

“But three years in the eye of the mind,” warns Martina always quite a fan of Sebastian’s hopeless romanticisms and writing, also the way Dasha moves men.

“What is it that we have to get done in these three days, or lifetimes or whatever to save our families and friends and each other?” Sebastian asks.

“Hella,” says Sasho.

She open her pouty lips and pulls out a tiny scroll and on it reads: “Die, steal the moon, kill a lesser demon, and take good notes of your comings and goings. Return to life.”

“Miraculous levels of detail here,” says Dasha sarcastically.

“If you sign yourselves to me and my gang I will not only harbor you but I will aid you at all stages in getting this job done.”

“How will we convincingly die?”

“I will put your souls in new vessels and leave convincing corpses for the authorities and your husband to find.”

“Dance magic dance. The implications of your voodoo are not as interesting to me as what in past lives and other times you want us to accomplish,” exclaims Dasha.

“I want you to see for yourselves what happened to the man Yeshua ben Yosef in the year 33, I want you to kill a certain demon I compete with in 1933 and to this very day, and I want you to steal a diamond of enormous size in 1996 and trade it with an old Ivory who will give me something I require.”

“In just three days, what the fuck man,” Dasha exclaims, “What expertise do either of us even have for this black magical undertaking?”

“Three days here. Three years there. Over three lifetimes. Understand what you’re signing,” says Martina.

“And what is it you want from the old Ivory?” Asks Dasha as if the notion of time travel and other lives doesn’t perplex her in the slightest.

“I want leverage. I’m bargaining now to open a second tavern and I require a bargaining chip.”

“And on your three day journey you will take care of three variables I need adjusted.”

“What’s on the list?” Dasha asks.

“Names of auspicious women he wishes to employ at the new tavern,” Martina smiles.

“It’s a rather tall order. Infiltrate and revise the New Testament, snuff out a lesser Oligarch, and steal a precious stone to get a list of women’s names. Fourth dimensional mission impossible,” Sebastian says likening it to a great American film. His burned feet hurt even though she injected him with morphine.

“The things a woman will do for a man in the name of her freedom, sounds like Master and Margarita,” says Dasha likening it to her favorite novel.

“We’re going to help you,” says James Behemoth Brown.

“It’s not as if we’re just going to burn the social club to the ground and quietly plant your lifeless corpses about the city and vanish into blue smoke,” says James White.

“Although that was one plan,” says Justin Azello.

“Oh no-no, were gonna to that and transmography the entire tavern down the rabbit hole of time. We’re gonna help you run three mighty-mighty epic miracles,” claims Misha.

“For leverage,” says Justin Azello.

“With whom?” Dasha asks.

“The man who issues liquor licenses and cabaret licenses for the city,” smiles Martina.

“We’re not stupid,” says Dasha.

“And we’re not demons,” says Misha K with a smile adjusting his glasses.

“You’re definitely not angels,” says Martina.

“I am a devil though,” states Sasho, “not the devil, because there isn’t just one anything in a universe so vast, but know that if you two don’t live up to my powers of intervention, then the Bratva your keeper associates with, and the security apparatus of the American state investigating you, and the cult that pursues you will be the least of your problems,” explains Sasho.

“By far the least,” says Justin O’ Azello.

“Why us? Why help us though. What makes you think we can do what you want?” Sebastian asks.

“Because of your reliable Old Souls,” says Misha.

“Because I’m not dealing with paramedic student Adon son of a privileged bourgeoisie, and Dasha Andreavna, accounting student debutante, property of Khulushin Bratva,” exclaims Sasho, “once you leave these feeble bodies I’ll have put two very powerful creatures on my pay roll: Vasa the Gunslinger and Dasha Andreavna Skorobogatova Maccluskey; Candidate 64.”

“Candidate?” she asks.

“Oh poor unfortunate souls, the ethanol clouded all your past lives and past accomplishments,” says Martina pinching Sebastian’s cheek.

“Moonstruck until they can’t tell an angel or devil apart,” says Justin Azello quoting the prophetic verses.

Martina leans in, “Why, you’re Vasa the Gunslinger, Vasa the Sword, main disciple of the archangel Michael, the greatest killer of demons in Gregorian time! And you,” she says leaning into Dasha, “well via the blood line of the house of Judah traced only in part by our little gang, well you have full Ivorite blood, you are candidate daughter of a prior powerful Tzadikk ha Dror.”

“What does that even mean!!” Dasha half yells.

“You might bear the messiah of your generation and he is the man in the grey mask, a historical serial killer. Your blood and your womb and your collective memories will take us where we need to go and his deadly-deadly aim will let us acquire the things we need,” says Misha.

“If we do as you ask we can save our families and his murdered friends and we can return in three days and when we do what we change will set us free?”

“Precisely. And when the new tavern opens I’ll rehire you both happily,” states Sasho.

“Albeit in far more glorious capacities!” declares Misha.

Absofuckinglutely!” yells Sasho.

“All this for a cabaret license,” mutters James Behemoth.

“For a cabaret most subversive to the elites of this world and lucrative for me. For all of us. So if you would, Hella!”

Martina Hella Dubryska pulls a ball point pen of solid gold out her red lips.

Rising out of nowhere from each shot glass emerges a rolled scroll.

 

Dasha takes the one in front of her written in Russian. Sebastian’s is in Russian too and thus he cannot even read it.

“You trust her don’t you?” says Martina with a wink, “she’ll translate it.”

“What’s it say?” Sebastian asks Dasha not even thinking so hard about the content.

Slowly she translates:

 

“..I will own you and you will own me and the Perchevney Bratva will own us both until completion of our duties to Mehanata which include documentation and surveillance of the man Yeshua be Yosef and his wife Mary Tania Magdalena; the assassination of a demon in the form Mr. Breria head of the Stalinist secret police; the assassinations of Superior Oligarchs Kahn, Talleyrand and Trumpuldoroff; and the theft of the blue moon diamond. Once said duties are in order we are free people and all calamities unleashed by our brief passions will be un-made allowing us at that juncture to part as associates or should love or passion grow strong enough to marry and allow Alexandre Sasho Perchevney the honor of hosting our happy marriage.  It specifies that under no circumstances are you to be allowed to sell your third soul, nor am I to have sexual intercourse with you with results in child,”

 

“Avoid further sexual intercourse!” interrupts Martina, “we don’t care about the rest of it. No babies made between your races.”

 

Dasha without even squinting continues, “And we are prohibited from drinking alcohol while under contract as it will lead to babies being made.”

 

“And what does mine say?”

And she looks it over.

“It says almost the same thing except for a sub clause which establishes that should we fail at our tasks you assume full responsibility for all resulting actions.”

 

“Bro, just sign the thing, the cops are gonna be here to kick in the door any minute now, I have a good tip. You’re gonna get accused of harvesting and eating women’s sexual organs. Just sign the thing. Its three days of work and it your only way out,” says James White, who as the only human privy to the sorcery at work is rooting for Sebastian as a former civil servant.

 

“I love you,” Sebastian says looking into Dasha’s big blue eyes and he signs the contract totally unable to read it.

She marvels at this then calmly signs hers.

 

A banging on the metal doors shakes everyone out of their surrealist stupor.

 

“Welcome to the gang and the tavern staff,” Martina says extending her hand.

The banging continues muffled shouts through a public address system declare everyone must come out before the homeland authorities come inside. It sounds as though a battering ram has been deployed.

“‘James White and my noble Companeros please exit via the roof and see to it that the body doubles are put in place before dawn,” commands Sasho, “Tomorrow is Friday thus this is when Dasha must be found lifeless in Brighton and it must be believed that Adon murders himself on Saturday. And please call the Lynches a cab. Everyone else! To the Ice Cage.”

James Behemoth Brown still in the form of a cat kicks over an enormous canteen of petrol as does Martina. Everyone forms a line behind Sasho and then go down stairs. The stink of petrol is over powering. Justin Azello opens the freezer door. A hatch in the floor is then unlatched and they behold a bottomless pit.

 

“Down the tunnel you go, we’ll be right behind you as soon as we burn this place to the ground,” Misha K. declares.

 

“Remember, no matter where you end up find the tavern and there we will be,” Martina says.

Dasha turns to Sebastian and takes his hand as they enter the freezer box with wall to wall vodka for the very first and possibly last time.

 

“No drinking, no fucking and no selling his soul,” Justin Azello repeats.

“I’m sorry that I’ve gotten you into this whole mess,” Dasha says to Sebastian.

“Did you do it on purpose?” He asks her as they stand at the precipice.

“I did. But I had no choice.”

Contemplating the utter madness of the past five weeks, the misadventures the brushes with death, now the signing of a contract with the devil and a step into the unknowns of the past!

 

Bze platnee syr ve mishalovka,” Sebastian declares. The only free cheese is in a mouse trap. He pronounces everything correctly this time, for the most part.

 

“If you do a good job, and we get them what they want, then I promise ill make love to you until you don’t even know the difference between your wants and your needs, between lust and loving, I will give you everything you ever wanted from me.”

“For how long?”

“Three days of nearly forever.”

“Dasha, no matter what happens I’m glad that you found me on that roof top.”

“We shall see,” she says with her famous poker faced smile. I’d didn’t find you, death found you, she thinks.

“Is any of this even real?” he asks her.

“No, they’ve just tortured us so badly you’ve muddying the waters and are imaging other lives.”

 

Holding hands they step out and fall tragically into the abyss, a hole in the ceiling, in the floor of forever.

 

 

 

Chapter 28

Stillwell Ave, 2011ce

Coney Island

 

 

The failed double uprising and subsequent atrocities were over after just three days, most of the rag tag resistance forces were wiped out by the third week after except in Southern Bronx and Central Brooklyn. Very few people made it out of the District Financial alive. Blood and bodies were in the streets. The Stock Exchange didn’t open for a week later. A super storm hit the city right before Halloween, washed all the filth, failure and evidence of purge and war crime away. Sent most of the Russian quarter under the black brine of still water. They later found Dasha’s body in the Stillwell Station, over dosed on god knows what. Cold and dead. Rumor had it at Mehanata that she’d left with Adon, last anyone had seen them.

Another dead hooker, the Cops were unconcerned about it statistically.

He had turned up in the Bell House, loony as hell. Totally mind fucked. Got discharged, allegedly. He was unintelligible when Rafael and Victoria went to visit him. Somehow all he knew was that Dasha was dead. A normal Bell House stint is three weeks easy, but then, the wire said Sebastian was also dead. Two shots to the head and dumped down that very same abyss where he and Dasha had almost died.  But, now. They were both confirmed to be quite dead.

As the super storm tore apart the city.

Amnesia and the weather setting in.

As if there had never been an uprising at all. Never been a massacre.

Never been Sebastian and Dasha in the end of summer or at all.

Their funerals of course were very separate, but held on the same day because gentiles sit out on death display, but Ivories go right in the ground.

 

“They’re with Jesus now,” says Victoria gripping her husband’s hand. But didn’t she mean Maya Solomon?

 

Her husband is more a Catholic than she is. But the irony here, in a statement like that, is that if Jesus was now reincarnated and returned to us via a hidden dual bloodline as both a Ayitian revolutionary general and also a Sephardic Warrior goddess; and heaven was to brought to an island archipelago in the Caribbean then the story is evidently going to be harder to explain, and the plot will thicken like blood. Because the interesting thing about an idea whose time has come, when supported by old souls; killing the messengers will never silence the planned intention of their words.

 

The last thing Sebastian heard before his soul left his body after two gun shots was: ‘put them in the memory vats and torture them again and again, and again and again.’

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Fire On the Mountain

 

 

 

 

(In four ACTS)

 

Act 42

 

 

[The Work Of]:

 

 

 

Adler S Walt

 

Dedicated to:

Elena Antolievna Komarova

 

 

 

 

 

 

ACT TWO:   La Lingre

 

 

Set Outside Boston

In 2013-2015ce

 

 

Set mostly in a concentration camp outside of Boston and in the deep woods of Connecticut;

 

Three years after a failed uprising on September 1st and 17th, a purge put millions of Americans in death and labor camps. A Russian linguist named Adelina and a half-Hebrew paramedic named Sebastian are about to kiss and liberate each other from the camp they are held in. Their mixed motive passion occurs amid this escape back to Brooklyn Soviet where a new rebellion has fully liberated Brooklyn, Queens and the Bronx from the USA.

Prelude

 

 

Camp Shrakasa Waltham, 2015ce

 

 

The year is winter 2015ce, 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 Dasha 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 Ayitian 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 Ayitian 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 Dasha 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 Ayiti, 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, 2013ce

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, 2013ce

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, 2015ce

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 34th 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, 2015ce

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 Ayitian 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 Ayiti 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 Ayiti 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 2013 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 2011-2012; 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 2012 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 2012-2015 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 2016 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 2013-2016 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 Ayiti. 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 Saadiyan 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 Saadiyan 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, 2015ce

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 Ayitian 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.

Saadiyan 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 Saadiyan 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 Saadiyan 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 Saadiyan 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.

“Saadiyan 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, 2015ce

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, 2015ce

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 2012-2015; 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 2013.

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 damn 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 Sly Fox; I learned that truly nothing is as it seems.

Sebastian Adon, before he embraced the Baha’i nonviolence teachings of Sheika Saadiyan 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 Ayiti.

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 7th 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 Sly Fox 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 2012? I think so. 2013? 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 Sly Fox 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 2011 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 2012 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 2013. 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 explicit 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, 2013ce

Cambridge

 

 

Let us digress slightly into the divergent past. Two years back perhaps, which is to say Common Era 2013 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 2013ce; 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 2013 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 2013 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 2012, 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 2013 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 19th 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 Saadiyan 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.

Saadiyan 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?”

Saadiyan 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 Saadiyan 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 2009 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 2009. 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?” Saadiyan 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 Saadiyan 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 Alexandre 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 Alexandre 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,” Saadiyan 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,” Saadiyan says with a wink but not a smile.

 

 

Scene 10

Safe House on 16 Kings, 2015ce

Waltham

 

 

Adelina had been originally introduced to him first on the 12th of April, 2012 which was also in fact her biological 26th 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 Dasha Skorobogatova. 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 Dasha Skorobogatova; 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 2013 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 Ayitian 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-Ayitian 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, 2015ce

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, 2015ce

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, 2015ce

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 2012; 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 2012, the Separatist Wars went until 2016; 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 2012, 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 2016 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, 2015ce

Isle of Man

 

 

The Sly Fox 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 2012ce. 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, 2015ce

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, 2015ce

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 2015, 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 29th 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 Ayiti 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 14th 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, 2015ce

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 Ayitian sensation; in the protection of one very loose cannon Watson Entwissle, also a Ayitian. 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, 2015ce

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, 2015ce

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 Ayitian 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.

 

Ayitian 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 Ayitian revolutionary commander of the GAI; these four were the sole survivors of the 1st 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 1st 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 Ayitian 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 Ayitian 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 1st 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.

An audible grin from all.

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, 2015ce

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 Ayiti.”

“What’s so important to you about this Ayiti 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 Ayiti 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 2009 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 Ayitian oligarchy and their murderous collaboration with the NGO Class. First in 2009 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 Ayiti 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. Ayiti 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 Ayiti. 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. Ayiti 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, 2015ce

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 unto 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[54][55], Muslim Messiah of Muhammad’s like named Avinadav; and Meshiach[56] 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 Ayiti 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 Ayitian 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, 2015ce

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 Ayiti 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, 2015ce

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 Ayiti, 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 Ayiti,” 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 1st 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 2016ce. 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 Ayitian 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 Ayitian 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 Ayiti 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, 2015ce

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 Ayiti 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 Ayiti.

 

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 Ayiti 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 Sly Fox? 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 Ayiti where our enemies are less and raising an army there ‘cause we can do that, being Ayitian 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 Ayiti 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 Ayiti 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, 2015ce

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 1st 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 Ayitians 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 Ayiti, 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, 2015ce

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 Ayitian 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 1st, 2012 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 21st, 2013 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 2012; 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 Ayitian 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 2012 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 Ayiti and when they got there what exactly would they do. Moscow was so far from Ayiti. 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, 2015ce

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, 2015ce

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 2012 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 Ayiti 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 Dasha 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 Dasha Andreavna Skorobogatova 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 1st of January, 2012 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 2013 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 Ayiti 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 2016 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 14th-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 2013 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 Ayiti 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 29st 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 Alexandree 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 2011 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 Alexandree 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, 2016ce

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 Ayiti 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 2012 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 2013, 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, 2016ce

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 8th. 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 Ayiti 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, 2015ce

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 2012, 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 57th St, 2016ce

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 57th and 6th 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 Sly Fox Nightclub, 2015ce

Isle of Man

 

 

And the last date which was in May of 2015, 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 Sly Fox 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 Sly Fox 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 Ayiti. 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 19th 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.”

“2015?”

“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 Skorobogatova, called Dasha 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, 2015ce

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 2016 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 42nd 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 42nd 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, “what’s 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.”

 

This was novel, to them, but banal to me a sit had happened numerous times before.

 

 

So, without further ado, after I died in the Millennium Theater hostage crisis of 2015, I woke up on a beach in Ayiti, 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 Ayiti, 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.

 

 

Scene 38

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 39

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 Ayitian 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 Ayitian 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 Ayitian gentleman are on the same page. A man or a rabbit Ayitian 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 84th 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 Ayiti 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 Ayiti 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.”

 

 

 

 

Fire

On

The

Mountain

 

 

(In four ACTS)

 

 

Act 43

 

 

[The Work Of]:

 

 

 

Adler S Walt

 

Dedicated to: Daria Andreavna Skorobogatova

& Yelizaveta Kotlyarova,

And Elena Antolievna Komarova

& Valentina Stanovova

 

 

ACT THREE:   Loyal’nost

 

Set in Breuklyn Soviet MicroRepublik,

2019-2020ce, 7-8 A.R.

 

 

Set mostly in Breuklyn Soviet;

 

Seven years after a successful uprising on the Eastern seaboard which has liberated over 64 autonomous microrepubliks; but danger is everywhere. In the heavily armed, newly liberated Brooklyn Soviet, there is great trouble brewing. Drones patrol the skies along the border and a new mile-high-wall has been built to prevent the traffic of people and contraband over the East River or Strong Island Sound into the United American States.  Home to three million “stateless citizens”; this wild coastal gangland and nearly lawless rebel Free State is dominated by Irish and Italian municipal unions, Postsoviet and Haitian mobsters, Islamists, Messianic Hebrew cults, Black Nationalist guerrillas, Gypsy Partizans and a highly organized Afro-Irish-Israeli underground network known only by its clandestine acronym: the Z.O.B.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Prelude

 

 

Inner Moscow, 2019ce

 

 

The snow fall was exceptional. It was as if god had pulled a vast white blanket upon us to tuck Russia to bed, and then the devil and a host of petty bureaucrats did not take the time to keep the power running, and so this winter was the winter that tens of thousands across the country, were tucked in without heat into a long kiss goodnight.

 

Blat.                                                                                                                         

 

But I have a very supple and extraordinary woman lying naked in my arms and below a great burgundy comforter she slumbers gently as I prepare to read her epic verses of Amerikanski poems written in her name while I caress her soft blond lioness mane.

 

“Where did you find that?” she asks like a pouty German baroness.

 

I am paging through a leather bound compilation written in what she recognizes with a dismissive glance to be English. The room is dimly lit with the flickering flames of candles and a dim glow from the night stand casts a thrilling ambiance. The flat itself is on a fourth floor walkup just fifteen minutes strolling on the prospect up to the Arbat. And of course so close to the center of everything our heat is on just fine and the room burns with reverberations of a passionate exchange. But yesterday a general curfew was issued and the capital placed under martial law. Everything has been locked down and there are tanks in the street. So we bolted the door turned down the lights and made love in the only three ways we knew how.

Waiting for the government to lift the curfew.

            Having given her every bit of me, my life included several times via deed and also a contract she humors me sometimes when after love making I read her old poems from past lives we led long ago.

 

To remind us that while the great uprising is not yet over, we are free because we have finally found a quiet little place to love each other roughly and via our previous assignments, absolved ourselves of our past crimes. Thus our hard work has allowed us now to have a simple life where we can carry out the only justifying and partially redeeming characteristic of the species; expressive and wanton love. To do so we must now hide in plain sight.

 

In a well-fortified safe house buried in the heart of the Russian capital.

 

I lock eyes with a woman who in another life broke me down and sold me as a slave. Her eyes, her eyes! Even the bluest day on the Caspian contains no such expansive shimmer; there is no comparison for this level of captivation. All things we have done, or did or may even still have to do are only so that we might never have to bear again the painful agony of our tumultuous separation.

 

“Read then my little bleak one, my Mayakovsky,” she says disarming me.

And thus smiling I read:

 

 

Life of the slave show!

 

I will remove you from your castle and make you watch the way we live in the wilderness below.

And she slips off her high heels into a star-crossed stare down,

She always calls the shots,

Gun shots to blood soaked makeshift cots.

The shots she calls are complicated.

She must find me highly dedicated.

She mostly deals with the haves, and I am the have nots.

 

The rules are anything goes, but no know one “knows”.

If she’s been known to steal the weapon from my over coat,

I’ve been quick to remove my clothes.

 

I spill_ for the thrill of those invited, I can kill on compunction, I still have the will;

To activate the full facilities,

Of word play, and use of allegory_

To execute deliverance of a blue-blood-bleeding testimony_

A Former Soviet love story.

Involving a Chechen peasant and a woman once of Penza now mostly of night.

It will be of little glory, the way I tell the story.

It’s based upon real people. Real blood_ and real bleeding_

Of taking-of wanting-of feeding the need.

Of fucking and fighting and the will to survive in a City of glass, steel, and greed.

Real emotional explosions_ her eyes are always so bright,

She has long since urged me to put down the weapon and give up the fight.

But I have a last name that is easy to place,

I could buy some new papers, but not a new face.

They can spot us on site!

It’s the ongoing struggle of those who lead:

A tragic_ unyielding life of night.

We’ll sell a sordid tale.

I wish I had found her back when she was nineteen or twenty_

Before she had to do what she did,

And does what she still do,

To keep from starving in the shadow of plenty.

My objective and travail_ is to recruit the members of this audience into a clandestine apparatus_ And harness our collective clandestino_

To force a mighty train to prematurely jump the rail.

I wear suspenders with buttons, a Mayakovsky cap, and iron plated under shirts.

I dreamed up a plan to get revenge on a man, or a series of men, hit them in their pockets,

Hit them where it hurts.

 

I called her late at night_ bleeding all over the place.

She said don’t get your bleeding heart on my red carpet,

And her mother fixed me midnight supper.

Herring, Beets, Palemni.

And she wiped the cake of crimson off my bloody Chechen face.

(Small talk)

“And the snow fall is phenomenal this year”_

She retorts”

“Don’t get French with me my dear.”

_They really punched yer ticket_ did a number on you in the district, this time.

(She loves the way I make the Amerikanski noire lingo mix out eloquently with a touch of old Fenian rhyme.)

The pay phone call cannot be traced_

The weapons hidden in the drywall_

In the space your men replaced_

The ice cold taste of 9 proof Baltika is refreshing, albeit haram_

Those good patriot informers_ those zombies_ those follow-follow men.

They beat me for a fortnight,

Demand I sign a grim confession,

Attesting to the building and/or placement of some near but unexploded bomb.

 

“Why can’t you be like normal men?”

I told her: “I’m hungry for my freedom and I’m never going hungry again!” (Sung)

And she says;

“I cannot love you if you’re dead.”

Please put the house in order,

Use the lithium,

Use Russian Standard Vodka; use my lips if necessary,

To rectify the madness as it expands inside your head.

I’m not saying that I love you now or later,

Simply I refuse to cater_

To all the “incidents generated lately” when you do not behave_

Explain how you plan to court me_

From a black-bag-disappearance.

In frosty, shallow, unmarked open grave.

If you’re going to dedicate, in your exacerbation,

Resistance efforts to a woman (me) who can only love you out of pity,

In this bleak and foreign city_

Even if the words sound epic, also pretty_

Fuck it man! You’re doing it again!

 

I sigh and then reply:

 

“Did I tell you lately you’re my dorogaia and if not for loving you_I’d surely be dead a thousand times at the hands of ten thousand lesser men?”

 

Oh, when last we wrote I spoke of devouring her, for hours.

To tease her- to please her_to want her to need her- amid a bed of hand-picked, Peonies; or provincial-wild-flowers.

She isn’t one for single serving dancehall roses, she moves too fast for poses.

Her bright eyes beckon as they dart about the room filled with bluff and imitating glee_

“Accelerate your tempo of evacuation_

The checkpoints separate the have everything’s_

From the people who are dressed like you_

And carry paper work like me.”

 

I suppose you and only you_ the woman that I trust and choose_

Can entrap these men of business with their whoring,

With their thirst for further treasure_

With long lines of china white running from the mouse trap to their nose.

How many slaves does it take to keep this neon play ground running?_

I know via your profession you can undertake a series of transactions_

Blonde dynamite distractions_

Before any know exactly what’s in store.

Reduce the need for automatic weapons,

Acquire us the proper routes and channels_

And guide us through a tunnel to the vile trading floor.

She looks at me and rolls her eyes and says in Russian “Lord have mercy.”

I said “I don’t have imaginary friends; there ain’t no need to curse me._

 

Where we met is unimportant.

Did I mean to enlist her?

I couldn’t resist her.

I had causes and struggle and vengeance and plan.

I shouldn’t have kissed her

And longed for her touch,

For surely she lays nightly in the arms of some husband, some man.

We have become a most curious spectacle, lately.

You hate me? Push further,

Took you home from the bar stool,

Bite me_

Kick me_

Bait me.

She could have killed me that first night, just with things that she said:

I looked at her once.

And the wheel was turning quickly but the hamster was dead.

The wheel was her cold rationale,

The hamster was the morals that once governed the wheel.

And there were bright lights, that up lit her eyes_ and whatever that implies.

Separating what she does_

From that which she’s still willing feel.

 

“You take up so much clock!

Blood from a rock!

I must return to District work which begins at moon rise.

And the steel trap will slam shut_

And bind me behind those District walls.

And the men of that vile district,

Will use their credit cards_

To try and pay for my flesh and access to between my thighs.”

 

She said “root for me.”

I’m going voodoo out tonight_

To earn my money the City.

If you truly are my friend,

Understand that I’ve been hungry and I’m never going hungry again.” _(Sung)

 

I am looking down the barrel at my pin striped enemy.

And the columns we’ve been shaking

And lives we’re always taking,

I was seeking sweet surrender and I sought it at her feet.

You think you’re not a target? You pay your taxes don’t you?

Are you blind to their transgressions?

A cavalcade of charging bulls rampaging down the street.

 

Everything from here out, it’s true,

My bones rust, from your star dust, your fairy eyes_

I loose myself to you.

 

She says, “Oh the things you might do,”

Our harsh and untenable positions have emboldened us_ as we know no one cares or pays attention, or even has a clue.

 

If we want it bad enough we can get it:

“For the rest of our lives_

_we do.”

 

Even if that life, she says, will last no longer than another a day or two.

 

Kiss me _fight beside me Dorogaia,

Even if to you my name and words are sometimes strange,

For what they do to your body and mind,

And what they did to my family,

Help us create a major crisis at the Moscow Stock Exchange.

 

You’re crazy she said,

You’re crazy won’t get me dead.

We’ll talk about your ridiculous plan in the morning.

It’s all a slave show, and if you didn’t know:

Russians who help rebels aren’t even given a funeral, much less a warning.

 

 

Davai,” I exclaim, which means ‘enough’.

“Poem #038: Moscow Hostage Crisis Part One.”

 

“Dedicated to me, Dasha Andreavna,” she exclaims right back.

Her hands pantomime the ghost of quotations for that name is certainly not the one she was born with.

“Are you blushing yet?” I ask her in jest.

            “We know not how,” she is all she replies.

She then claps with excitement, kisses me wild eyed then retreats under the covers.

“Did you like it?” I ask following her under the vast red folds of the heavy blanket.

I like very much it when you try and talk so dirty to me in American,” she says in Aramaic with a devilish little smile.

I wonder when she learned to speak like that.

“I am capable of just about anything when you believe in me,” I remind her.

She laughs at that. Though knows the full extent of it.

“I believe, that you believe in Breuklyn Soviet,” she says softly and kisses my lips.

“You whisper always of dangerous things,” I tell her slyly.

“Story time tovarish lover. I challenge you now. One for one. Two for two,” she purrs.

“The trouble sweetness with your stories is that not a single one of them are true,” I say to her. She feigns a pout.

“The greatest fun with your stories is that so many of them are!” she retorts.

“Dasha, what will be the prize for the partisan with the premium story?”

“The usual my daring Vasa,” she says with a smile.

And licks her lips at my obvious arousal.

Her amusement and our perpetual survival had gotten us in quite a yarn of danger. She’s been worth every bullet. As well as dirty things I dare not reveal at this juncture that I do to women as well shaped as she. Or worse the tender things I do to balance those out and then so let my guard fall, completely.

 

Under the folds of the burgundy comforter we languish in the sensual embrace of each other’s longing as our pillow fort assumes new dimensions. A vastness will unfold with the power of words and the only distraction from the yarn of escapade will be the fortified lusts we will unleash when a parable wears thin. She will draw on fairy tales and I will spin from the ghosts of my dead friends and the darkness still in me. Somewhere in between that space hope will float perhaps. We expect and encourage each other’s full participation.

 

“Ladies always go first, for this is the code of the Ayitian gentleman” she declares and launches right into her opening tale.

 

Let the mind games begin.

 

 

 

Chapter 1

Fadeeva 6 Safe house, 2019ce

Moscow

 

            Dasha thus exclaims;

 

“If I am woman, and he attempts to be man then we are easy prey.”

For the gods, the spirits, lesser demons and also human devils! Sin and general winter are historically undefeated. That’s a fact. Above all those forces seeking to make us base slaves, we are bound most to our own wild passions!

I am creature ruled almost selfishly by my passion, and so is he. Inevitable really that so much did burn.

I do not make any remembering when we had this conversation. Only that it occurred.

It was sometime after our very first meeting.

Sometime before I found myself handcuffed to a chandelier fixture in the Empire Hotel awaiting my deadly snuff and torture! Sometime after blue moons of their Bohemian festival.

Sometime before that murderous uprising called “the Great Disorder”.

Before I sold soul to devil without making ask of questions!

Certainly after I realize I love him as I have never loved a man before in this life or the next, or one after that.

Before I realized that I had loved him several times before. And that we are both so dangerous when in love. To each other. Also world at large.

I will now make careful my choice of my words.

Speaking his American language with my Russian thoughts is to attempt placement of entire Caspian Sea into hip flask. My English when spoken without any intoxications hints that I will speak more clearly with my actions.

Were he sober then when we found each other on that roof top, instead of passion punch drunk he’d not have ignored the threat our lusty adventures soon presented. We would have walked away. Despite his fascination with me. Despite my overwhelming beauty.

But that is not how the story was to write itself!

He could deny me nothing. But no one dare should point the finger to me that I did not give warning!

Perhaps we were blinded by the vodka lullabies, the bright lights of the towers and the good night moon.

“I’m going to use you,” I announced on the roof

of the district. And he didn’t care.

“Completely and utterly so that I may get from point A to point B.”

Did I say that to him, or did he say that to me?

“I consent to such use, use away,” he immediately retorted, “we will see how far in the alphabet we can climb with you on my shoulders!”

“The Russian alphabet, it has more letters. The letters also can take different meaning based on where they are placed. The sounds, they will completely change.”

“Place yourself besides me for now,” is all he said to that.

“I shall, but tomorrow this will be finished. How long can you make more of your favorite poetic noises, your rhymes in English as you devote your life to something hopeless that cannot ever be?”

He looked at me with big bright hazel eyes.

“I like the way that all sounds, he claimed, “I like way the way the word ‘hopeless’ rolls off your lips. I am an Amerikanski, as you accuse me. Hopeless is just a call to arms.”

What could I say in the face of mad idealism! His passion did touch me.

My eyes flashed blue silver back.

“I’m going to devastate you, you know,” I casually mentioned and I took his hand and thrust it against my heart so he could know that I was flesh and blood like him. No angel. Or Devil. Or ghost.

“Well we shall not later claim I wasn’t given a fair warning,” he whispered but for some reason did not try to kiss me.

“Had we met in another time, were I a different person wearing a different life; I would still know you,” he declared, “I cannot put the emotions that I wear like cufflinks to my funeral to bed as easily as you.”

In the darkness of the district night. In the wilderness of North America I repeatedly told him nothing but white lies. I did what needed to be done.

It is sad that it all has to end,” I remarked.

These were the first words uttered in acceptance of a risk and a warning between myself Dasha Andreavna and the mad idealist named Vasa Adon. Our love and the totality of our affair will be thing of Postsoviet lore and Amerikanski voyeuristic fascination. There have been many doomed loves before. Captured artistically in bright theatre lights of both empires. There have been tales of hard hearts which remain unbreakable. And wild bohemian longings that conquered heroically the conventions of their day.

Often Vasa, whose American name was Sebastian would ask me, whose Russian name is Dasha; “Is the story of our love to be more like Russian literature or more like American cinema, mere Paramount Pictures?”

I would cryptically respond,

“General Winter has never been defeated, not once ever.”

So then we performed miracles. In the wilderness to remain together a variety of strange longings took shape and bore most irregular fruit.

That much is clear.

 

 

            The first miraculous act was turning his tragic tears into vodka. This was my happy gift to him. To turn an unusual and storied past into a heroic song and dance. And make his dead mechanical heart beat like a war drum as the waves of the uprising crashed upon the nation we shared or really I should say, co-inhabited. Through me and other muses he did learn to love life and love himself and thus be resuscitated into the living via such love.

 

            The second miracle was the theft of the blue moon itself. Such a task was just a starting point for him to please me, also my ransom. We helped as was about debt to enable the oligarch Perchevney a means for unlimited theft.

 

He took to heart that the materialism of a Russian woman is but an ante up to play a most choice and high stakes game of loyalty.

 

            The third miracle was for us to put many bullets in the devil himself. In retaliation for crimes of the past committed against us, and our love, and humanity in general. He and his mullato, alongside other gunslingers purged from the oligarchy in retribution some 104 guilty lesser and upper devils too.

 

            The fourth miracle act was that I could truly come to love him. And forgive him for what he had to do in my name. In the name of his tragic long dead wife.

 

 

It took several lives and a solid contact between us to accomplish these four acts. They will make wild tale and epic song.

 

Mine I did with ambition first and then secretly, begrudgingly with love. His he did to please and save me and avenge his fallen tortured soul. Via my company and our secret series of kisses we made war on the devil and his entourage. And we painted together a portrait that in the end makes Russian literature look like tame romantic comedy, and Amerikanski Cinema, just flickering soma on telescreen.

 

To beat back brutal hunger and or feed those dependent upon them; to meet the benchmark called survival; human body and mind capable of any number of general sins.

 

At times grossly unpalatable to human soul. If you believe in such things! It is not just question of what we all must to do to preserve our own selves. The shifting of alliances in pursuit of securing our deliverance from the wilds of worldly living is exhausting. Strange bed fellows make and break even the strongest of hearts.

 

The wilderness at night is vast and treacherous place that to some is source of fearful panic. To others bevy of potential opportunity!

 

In darkness of night fallen angels appear as demons at times. Most treacherous are our human misjudgments. The nuances of intention are lost to perceptions of trickery. Violations of trust. Devils can look angelic for a time and humans with host of mixed motives can see best kept secrets revealed like so much dirty laundry blowing in the cold winds of night.

 

Not here to talk to you about night! Or about all the devils that thrive in its long shadow.

This just story about when feeling returns to the heart when the body has been dead for many days. So many that the world of the living is but a restored memory. Also about the selling of souls and the banding together of destinies.  Also about whether poems can feed anything more than hope in the face of hopelessness.

And whether more reckless and brazen hope, is indeed the only cure something so called hopelessness invites.

So it’s Ayitian love story, also a Vodka Lullaby staring brave Russian angel from Penza me! And devilish American paramedic born in New York. If that’s how like look at it. Little like the Christ Story, has less violence and more nudity and good deal more vodka from tears in place of water into wine.

 

 

And it also about trying to steal away another man’s wife.

Which is whole category of sin onto itself.

 

 

It’s about old souls coming back for each other, even if just for a fall.

This yarn is play with words based on true Breuklyn noire based on two people not “being in love” or “missing each other” or “being tortured by our supposed fate”, but instead some wide range of prophesized events which we set in motion via of our high impact knowing of each other. Maybe like in a biblical sense.

 

But with more carnality! And gun play.

 

Set not in heaven or hell like the Bible but in the Holy Land of Breuklyn and the Wilderness of the Financial District in the City of New York, mostly to glow of blue moon light at night and structure fires by day.

 

In Moscow! In New York! In the heart of Ayiti! In places that were and also soon could be!

 

This not just the story of Sebastian Vasyli Adon and I, Dasha Andreavna Skorobogatova; it is also a tale of forbidden-impossible love in the age of anarchist trials; of great train robberies in the former Soviet Union, and of a tavern in the wilderness where lost souls find short but wholly tumultuous company in post Capitalist America on the eve of a global human rights revolution.

 

And so begins the tale of Dasha and Vasa, a Russian me and a most irregular Amerikanski he and the partisans we led into a vile battle. Star crossed lovers with the moon as our witness, fuck and vodka as our means of cross interrogation and higher ground beyond the waves of hopelessness and fate as our primary objective.

 

He begins with a murder and a war. I with a warning but a promise of deliverance via passionate love, once adequately demonstrated.

 

And yet,

“We begin our tale with a double funeral!”

 

 

 

Chapter 2

Wakefield District, 2013ce

Bronx Soviet

 

Dasha Andreavna continues her grim parable.

Somewhere in the Bronx a sea of red brick high rise tenements hits a long highway bed and then the dead place of poverty becomes a green and hilly oasis. This juxtaposition is striking.

They all found their way north along that endless highway to a place called Wakefield.

Victoria Christiana Contreras was dressed in all black, a lace vale covering a pretty albeit heavily make upped face and contacts which turned her eyes vaguely feline brown blue. Her husband, Ernesto Rafael Contreras was in denim jeans and black shirt as he owned no funeral appropriate suit and had only sobered himself up long enough to attend the two funerals. He was unshaven; his baby face was markedly hard for the first time in many years.

The weather was most poorly.

It was nearly New York Winter, but it had refused to snow this year. They were in a crowd of several hundred mourners anonymously performing mass mourning while numerous people did so more dramatically.

The first Funeral was for Sebastian. It was very well attended considering all the bridges he had burned that year. But very few people believed he was really dead.

Everyone was speaking of “seeing it coming.” Also of his epic potential now buried just as many had suspected before his 30th year.

It was rather like a circus actually. There were way too many people speechifying, justifying and explaining, and there was an overabundance of booze flask flowing. And many of the mourners were black, and many were wearing blue ambulance Class A uniforms which was striking too. His parents were kind and bourgeoisie. They didn’t break down or cry. They just quietly held court and whispered on the sidelines, his mother in particular with select old friends paying their respects over whisper.

It was a closed casket. Sebastian had shot himself twice in the head with pistol and then toppled seventeen stories off a roof. There was very little left of his face.

It was theoretically a Hebrew funeral. But the only thing Yiddish about it was that it was done on the cheap. He went in the ground less than 24 hours after his alleged suicide.

There not being a note was the most un-nerving aspect of the whole thing.

Sebastian was amongst other things a prolific writer. Not leaving a suicide note was highly suspect, vaguely anticlimactic. But, the inner circle knew exactly why he’d gone and done what he did, what he thought he had to do.

“Over a woman that didn’t love him,” explained his best friend Nikholai Trikhovitch. And then he spat.

“I want to see the body,” demanded a woman named Anya Drovtich with thick black dreads and the blue FDNY uniform that many are wearing illegally out of respect for the fact that Sebastian had once been an EMT with that organization until they fired him.

She said what many were thinking, but few other than the parents, Trikhovitch or Mickhi Dbrisk had the cred with the dead to declare.

Victoria and Ernesto quietly stood in the background of the mob of sorrows. They recognized many of Sebastian’s associates and former lovers and comrades from the Z.O.B., his gang, clique, club, and ‘cult’ (which many have and did call it), whatever it had been, or still secretly was.

Victoria knows the female faces slightly better than the male ones. Ernesto was more involved peripherally in the internal club politics.

“The casket stays closed sister,” declares Mickhi Dbrisk, a tall Jamaican in a black pea coat. His grey-blue-black armband and the small silver pin on his left lapel indicating him as a person of authority here.

“I won’t believe he’s dead until I see the body,” Anya repeats.

The mob mills about in the brick house cold, the mother of the dead man nods to Mickhi Dbrisk. Sebastian’s mother has circular, red wizard spectacles. His father is portly and normally jovial, albeit not really such as his first son’s last first funeral.

Dbrisk opens the casket.

And there lies the body of the poet, paramedic and rebel hooligan Sebastian Adon. He appears to be wearing a pair of bootleg designer Ray Band dark sun glasses. A Ayitian flag is tucked in his left lapel.

Four hours, three shots of vicious Rakia, two Coronas and a car service ride later.

Somewhere on the coast of Brooklyn,

The second funeral is quite small and fancy. It’s on the other side of town. Ernesto and Victoria take a black town car hired out from the Mexican Express. Sebastian’s funeral was in the Bronx and Dasha’s is in Southern Brooklyn.

There are fewer than two dozen people there. No speaks anything but Russian and no one cries. Dasha looks as beautiful dead as she did alive, like a gently sleeping doll. The funeral was nominally Russian Orthodox, as that was her husband’s religion. And although Dasha was technically Ivoryish, the husband has spared no expense. Her mother had been flown in from Penza, on the husband’s insistence she was to be buried here and not brought back to Russian.

There were a couple lady friends that Victoria knew without knowing. There was an assortment of men, looking suspiciously at each other.

Ernesto’s Russian was much stronger than Victoria’s though it was his third language. He made out vaguely hushed interaction. Scene size ups.

Victoria knew very little about the nightlife of Dasha outside of Mehanta. Only that there was husband named Maccluskey and a boyfriend named Surge, and also a corporate lawyer named Dmitry. She had a best friend named Tanya.

She could basically only guess at who everyone else was besides the husband. Maybe.

Allegedly Dasha’s heart had stopped roughly 24 hours ago. The medical examiner inconclusively blamed a hazardous midnight cocktail of red bulls, vodka shots and cocaine, but Dasha wasn’t really known to play with that stuff, anymore.

The paramedics found her body at the Stillwell Station. She was pronounced dead at Coney Island Hospital.

She had in her purse, amongst other things a small book of poems written to her by Sebastian Adon. He allegedly killed himself just a day after confirming she was gone.

 

“Allegedly, blat” was the only word in English being bandied about this funeral.

 

“Who is to blame for the death of my daughter?” her mother asked Victoria in broken English when no one seemed to be paying attention, “which one of these men?”

“I don’t know.”

“Dasha told me that there was some crazy ambulance poet in love with her. She hinted that this man had been trying to steal her away for about a year. Who killed my daughter’s heart?”

“I don’t know,” repeats Victoria.

“Is that man here now, this Sebastian?”

“No. He’s dead. He shot himself twice after seeing your daughter’s corpse. We just came from his funeral,” says Ernesto quietly.

Ernesto looks like he might cry looking down at Dasha’s body buried in Peony flowers and fancy white casket. He had loved her too, while still loving his wife of course. Everyone had loved Dasha Andreavna, without knowing very much about here because she was young and free and exotic and beautiful and impossible to tame.

Many men here had tried, her husband included.

“Who is to blame for this catastrophe?” asks the mother again.

 

And nobody really knew. Allegedly a lot of fucking things had happened over the course of the year 2013, in the wilderness of New York City.

 

“A senseless tragedy. A senseless goddamn waste of…,” the very well-dressed man in the custom cut black suit whose name is Dmitry Khulushin, who had almost said ‘talent’ aloud, but instead, said “…of perfection.”

Dasha’s mother began to quietly sob which is permissible for a woman and mother to do at a Russian funeral. Her daughter had come a very long way to die for absolutely nothing.

Ernesto grabs Victoria by the arm, “It’s time to leave.”

And his eyes say he means it.

Ernesto looks as though the hard defenses of his man code machismo will crumple any minute now. They wait in the cold outside the funeral hall for another Mexican Express cab to take them home. Ernesto finally begins to weep heavily without sobs for Dasha whom he once very much loved and Sebastian who was one of his closest friends. He had introduced them and thus felt now more than any other moment in the year responsible for what had happened. In both Peruvian and Russian culture, real men do not by any stretch of imagination cry in front of mixed company. Wives included.

But cry he does wiping away the tears as they form. Victoria is an American, the children of Fenian Catholics. Fenian Catholics cry in front of whomever they want.

The cold wind blows deathly. The Mexican Express is nowhere in sight.

Victoria Lynch takes out a leather bound volume of Sebastian’s poetry on the subject of Dasha Andreavna. There were three copies only. She finds some solace in having the only copy that will survive the ordeal. He had always told her he hoped his poems would absolve him of the calamity caused by loving that woman.

Rafaela Ernesto mourns.

Victoria Christiana reads on.

There are 99 poems in total. Sebastian had loved her something endless. And when she died there was nothing on this cold earth left for him to love.

 

He included.

           

 

Natushka,                                                                        

 

I want dark-sunglasses.
I want them good enough to block out hope.
I once wanted it too bright.

Now I want to wear them until someone tears my eyes out.
I want them fearless and blacked out.

These glasses, so no one has to guess what’s underneath.
I want them glasses bad.
I want them to confirm
your worst fears about me:
To show you how much I care about you

And everything except what I’m supposed to want.

When I find them;

I’ll pull them spectacles from their shelf

Like I’m choosing new eyes to see the world properly;

Through the hate-cries and the love-cries too;

And I’ll wear them like armor.

Like a bullet proof vest.

Lest I lay my eyes on another thing of such profound beauty

That lies in another’s arms.

It’ll be the goddamned glasses they bury me in.

Cause she hates more than anything;

Than to see a grown man cry!

 

 

Her tragic tale then concluded, I, Vasa also called Sebastian think to myself; ‘we could blush at the pain we’ve caused others in the name of good causes. But, we do not.’

“We surely pulled that job off, albeit most traumatically,” I testify to her and the bugs in the wall of the safe house.

 

“Never send a man to do a woman’s job,” Dasha replies.

 

“Highly dramatic, I applaud you. A grand and deceptive opening. Though not the double funeral I was thinking of. Certainly that was indeed a most tragic day,” I tell her.

“We were only parted for a lunar month,” she reminds me.

“Well if my memory serves me correctly, prior to that month I had to wait 28 years to find you. I was speaking more to those we may have briefly traumatized with our out of body elopement.”

She gives me a stern stone face.

“You’re completely whipped. Is that the right word? Whipped?”

“It is dorogaia. And perhaps I am. Whipped like a planation slave until I can no longer feel pain or fear. Such was needed to love you as I did.”

“And to love me as you do?!”

Her face again feigns a pout.

“Possessing you has only intensified it I must confess.”

Then suddenly a mad woman’s devilish happy grin.

“Do you remember the games I used to play?” she asks.

“Used to, ha. Or, still do?” I say tracing a figure eight with my finger about her navel. When you used to make me prove how much I loved you with epic impossible feats?”

“I loved those games!”

“And I would deliver on them each time with a larger ante.”

“That was something. The moon! You shouldn’t have,” she smiles.

“My first story then to counter your opening reminder of our sad funeral will be about the only woman I’ve ever encountered who has more wild machinations in her head than you and the emancipatory mission to retrieve the man who made me the zealous partisan I am today.”

“Maya and Andrew,” she whispers her eyes now ready to devour detail.

“Emma and Avinadav,” I say using their truer names.

 

“My story begins in a seedy hotel on the outskirts of Addis Abba, Ethiopia. The only nation never brought under the iron heel of the white man and his oligarchy. Not even one.”

 

 

Chapter 4

Hotel Waka-Flaka-Flame,

Addis Abba, 2012ce

Ethiopia

 

 

Laurence Simon, PhD is the recently discredited director of a non-governmental organization called the American Ivoryish World Service, which he founded. He used to lecture idealistically at several places where ivy grows thick to ivory idealists, with soft hands. He filed over ten thousand reports over his career. Violations committed in every square corner of inhabited earth. But now, he has a sholem of medium-caliber in his mouth with the hammer cocked back. He’s been drinking a shit ton of fire water burn, but the pistol still tastes salty. And a pistol in the gob of the Gulliver well that always just tastes like self-righteous death quickly closing in.

 

The lights in the room are flickering in and out along with the city’s most questionable power supply.

 

He’s been holed up in small hotel (the Waka Flaka Flame) in Addis Abba, Ethiopia since he got news of the horrific murder of his wife and daughter. Sometimes he stays lucid long enough to remember the pictures he was shown of their faces beaten beyond recognition. Or the one of his daughter with her breasts cut off. Mostly he drinks to die. He’s coming to crescendo.

There was greater, more sadistic violence, which surely came before their demise. Laurence Simon’s written over a dozen books on Africa; on the Western sack of Eden and mass collective movement away from the norms of civilized behavior. The virus of slavery and the bacterium of colonialism

 

And after his immediate banishment from professional circles for as of lately urging support for the long running armed struggle against the Ayitian Government, he has remained there in his own hell and quasi-lucid liquid oblivion for one month’s time.

The Maccoute marauders raided the village of Cange about six weeks ago.

They killed the whole town of somewhere under a thousand unarmed men, women and children. Bayoneted a whole orphanage of skinny, half starving little girls after sexually assaulting them. Hearing things like that makes good people want to vomit, but most just tune it out by not reading valid news sources, or just looking in a different direction. This particular attack was actually on the cover of the New York Times. So no one could really be in denial about the true depravity of the regime. And dead, white raped aid workers sure did sell papers too.

 

This was sort of the Maccoute way.

 

Well documented. Preying on the defenseless, as the world looks the other way.

Degradation and utter violations of those abstract things called “Human Rights” take place every single day. In every nation on earth if you come right down to it. Albeit in varying degrees of what-the-fuckery.

 

These Maccoute marauders then stormed a monitoring outpost just outside of the village after the African Union peacekeepers fled without firing a shot. As they always almost do when not selling off their weapons to whatever faction pays top dollar and-or fucking around with local underage prostitutes. And there the Maccoute militia got their hands on the Ayiti regional staff of the Human Rights Watch. Including the wife and daughter of Laurence Simon and wrote everyone in the book of grisly slaughter.

 

Even in Chechnya, at the height of the conflict the Russian military didn’t go as far as killing the entire foreign national field staff of the Service. Well they did make good old resourceful Fred Cuny disappear. They were periodically abused, beaten and arrested, interrogated then deported, but this was the first time they were singled out of murder alongside those they were observing.  Generally the group has its members picked off one by one, not slaughtered in the middle of conflict zones openly, deliberately and with the militia men obscenely taking so many pictures.

 

There hasn’t been a sober moment since for the ghost of now broken Laurence Simon.

 

Maya Sorieya Solomon is a woman with two names. She can also gamble with a gun even with two bullets inside it. Her nom de guerre is Maya Rose. Her favorite color is purple. She has been in the dimly red lit hotel lobby for a three-quarters-an-hour sipping on a short glass of Knuckle Acre Blue label, mixed with something local. The world is still a nasty, terrible place where one often needs a series of stiff drinks anywhere they can be found to arrive at fleeting moments of inner tranquility.

 

There is a very real genocide going on in the land of Ayiti, a wild madhouse of an ethnic bloodletting.  Also in DRC, Syria, Iraq, South Sudan, West Sudan, CAR, Burundi, and also Indonesia.

These atrocities in Ayiti have been going on high and low for over three decades, particularly in the Southland and Ayiti the regions where under the sands lay so many oceans of black gold.

The intensity of the genocide is enough to barely bother those besides an Amerikanski neo-liberal or a university student looking for something to believe in, but thanks to some pop singers and occasional rapper, with this particular genocide one can at least attach a name to an African destination, provided you begin with the intellectual understanding that Africa is a continent, not a country. It has various parts. Africa is just so large and so full of such mass torment even the highly educated lose touch and tune out.

A heart of darkness, a broken defeated Zion, a bad man place full of gun toting highway men and people with communicable diseases that have long been eradicated in the West. And plague: lots and lots of it. The pharmaceutical giants won’t magic Johnson 24 million people if they can’t pay up.

 

A clandestine apparatus based in the newly liberated micro republic of Breuklyn has recently vowed to make a stand there and answer Laurence Simon’s late call as it were, though they’ve had their eye on Ayiti for some time. Maya Solomon was the undisputed leader of that band; a stunning mix of idealists and wild dagger merchants, until she was confirmed dead in a tragic series of events dubbed “the Millennium Theatre Hostage Crisis”, just three years prior.

“Neo-Jacobins!” once declared their Wall Street and Beltway detractors, back when anything of importance was happening in those respective places. Detractors and nemeses alike were always quick to bandy about the words “vile anarchists”, but there are no black flags flown here and the club now administers social services to 80,000 people in its seven district zones of control. These were women and men of the Breuklyn coast who like many across this planet in the turn of the millennium found the notion of a so-called hopeless battle for the good cause of human freedom more than just a thing to write a miserable French play about. They held a belief in their inevitable victory. A willingness to fight coupled with a duty to act.

 

Seven years after issuing the “Declaration of a State of Emergency in the City of New York” they are a hard proud people’s army of Human Rights oriented “Westies”. Called “the Breuklyn Otriad” in some circles.  Referred to as “the Breuklyn Bath and Rifle Club” by friends and nemeses alike. Bound closely by a secretive cohort, its name spray paint stenciled on all their zones of control: Z.O.B.

No one has yet to explain what that acronym stands for, or who is at the core of this radical club allegedly founded in Jerusalem at the turn of the millennium.

They are people with guns in hand who believe in high minded ideals and die for them regularly, loudly speaking of something called “real change”, utilizing “conscious thinking”. Very glamorous when one signs up, but rather inglorious long before you get your pension. The Israeli Mossad conservatively places their true military capability at approximately 780 combat tested fighters. The Russian Federal Security Services, the F.S.B. places them at 4,000 by counting all their foreign medical workers, engineers and teachers as “potential combatants”  and the American Joint Special Operations Command (J.S.O.C.) even via the National Security Agency (N.S.A. still has a great deal of trouble differentiating the club’s “enemy combatants” from “domestic terrorists”, its factions from its caucuses, its working groups from its wide sympathizer base on the East Coast of the formerly United States of America and throughout the Wild West Indies. But since the armistice, all three million citizens of Breuklyn Soviet have officially been declared “stateless people”.

Maya has been in the game for a very long time, but she doesn’t appear to be quite aged by the politics or hazards of it. You’d think by appearances she is in mid-late-twenties, and she would laugh at you for it and not even pretend to be vaguely flattered. Tell you about the wonders of yoga and the tantric arts! “The Club” is democratically run. It is led by an Executive of thirteen officers elected once a year. She was a founder of the club’s Israeli Branch. And was Chief of Staff of its American Branch for three years leading up the conclusion of the revolt. Now she does not hold an official title. Three years ago she was killed in the Millennium Theater Hostage Crisis and confirmed dead having given her life to liberate the people of Breuklyn.

She leads now from the field and from beyond the grave. When you die in this Club you often end up back in Africa. The old voodoo legends were in fact mostly true. As were radical advances in science long kept from the general knowledge of the people.

She finishes her stiff drink and the glass lands hard on the table.

She casually saunters ups four flights of piss soaked stairs. The power is once again out and the generators at the hotel have shut back to only the most necessary components, like supplying the crimson neon lights of the hotel bar, which flicker and flash “Live Girls” in both Amharic and Tigriti. It’s an inside, inside joke. There are no girls working here. She swipes the pass key to Laurence Simon’s room, which sympathizers have supplied her with. Though the wall paper of the hallway is peeling after being nearly a decade out of fashion; the electronic card reader works just fine even with no power. She walks in right as he’s finally about to pull the trigger.

 

“Please hold that thought just another ten minutes Laurence Simon.”

 

He almost shoots himself in stupid shock seeing the elegant Yid, blood descendant of King Saul skillfully wrest the burner away from him in a Breuklyn swipe. She has star qualities and long flowing auburn hair. Her skin is dark for a blan without being olive. The faded fatigues of her blue uniform do little to hide the voluptuous curvatures of her body. She’s stunning but even more lethal. A red sash is tied about her waste. But, she’s not a pinko these days. Her medium caliber burner is loaded with non-lethal Afula specials is only vaguely concealed on her left outer hip holster making just a small bulge over the leg of her uniform pants.  The Pin of Palmares, the universal badge of safe passage for the blan in most liberated zones of noire Africa and Gran Columbia is fastened to her right epaulette.  On her right shoulder is a button peel away, which if exposed would reveal her to be an internationally licensed Cuban paramedic. And her hands themselves are shrouded in the thinnest possible black polymer gloves to conceal the intricate tattoos that cover both her hands and wind their calligraphy up her forearms.

 

One marked as such is left alone or overtly aided these days in the Free City of Addis Abba. But this is not her outdoor attire. When not in an air-conditioned, window tinted vehicle she moves about in public a light weight grey synthetic fiber burka which was designed by the Japanese to keep the wearer remarkably cool, it leg covers tear off into a mini skirt; although such a practical joke has not found time to play itself out since she bought the thing.

To cut right to the chase, being a highly attractive white woman in the middle of East Africa is not very problematic. But, being an international martyr of the human right movement believed dead by the all of the security and intelligence arms of the various major oligarchies and then turning up alive, well that’s very bad for business.

There’s an international war, a multi-lateral bloodbath going on between the world’s populations and the world’s oligarchies. It’s really not clear yet who’s going to win. But when leaders of the resistance are confirmed dead and elaborate tricks were played to even produce their bodies, well let’s just say Maya doesn’t do soap box oration anymore or casual heartfelt spoken word like she used to.

“I plead sorrow for the horrific murders of your wife and daughter, as well as many of your many comrades. I am an avid reader of your research, longtime admirer of your work and addicted reader of your WikiLeaks contributions. If you wish to take your own life, that is a choice between you and the black baby Jesus, but I still require roughly five more minutes of your time.”

Baffled and sobbing, the foolishly inebriated Laurence Simon, whose brave activism brought original attention to the genocide in Ayiti before the rock stars made songs and t-shirt slogans about it, has lost everything a man on this earth needs to live a happy life.

And he’s just too old to craft his own vengeance.

Laurence Simon sputters, “Those sick, evil bastards have taken everything from me,” he looks both jaundiced and indemnified. Ready soon to die.

“And in five minutes before you decide to take your own life, know we plan to take from them.”

“Who, are you?” he demands.

“My name is Maya Sorieya Solomon. I am an Old Soul like you. I represent a faction of concerned individuals always prepared to act quickly and with near certain international impunity. We need something from you so we can avenge both the people of Ayiti and your murdered family. Just as your blue print calls for.”

The 77-year old, once fearless human rights crusader, a two time Nobel Peace Prize nominee and one time recipient, looks quite pathetic, as do most who are truly about to carry out an act of sincere suicide. The former director falls to his knees still ready to die.

“Give. Me. Back the gun so I can end this.”

It’s about to get endless.

He curls up in a pleading ball at her feet. Sobs and the stink of ethanol. In the part of the world that Maya came to age, which is to say the Middle East, it is viewed as completely dishonorable to let a group of men rape your wife and daughter, torture them, then murder them, and the only person you kill is yourself. If you don’t even take out at least one of them, then your claims at manhood went right out the window, no matter how old or young you are. And you will have a highly questionable place in the world to come. She puts her hand on his brow. Via such a sympathetic gesture she listens to his head with her vast powers. He did write quite a lot of good books though, she thinks, even if he happens to be something now of a broken self-murder coveting coward.

She quotes from his ubiquitous manifesto:

 

There are many evils in this world that are made far worse by the great distracted, faceless mob which does nothing but fixate on their own shallow existence, for the great enabler of our oppression is our narrow self-interest.”

 

“As I don’t surely need to tell you, there are far more potential villains than heroes in the ranks of men. But my compatriots are cut of very different cloth. We will hunt every single one of these Maccoute brigands down and we will bring massacre upon them.”

“The fighters we command are all called zealots by all who know the word. The Maccoute and those that shield them are cowards and swine. They will fall to our irons in legion. We will reduce their encampments to ash. In the three minutes before you decide to leave this world if you wish to tell me something, it will greatly facilitate our wrath to be brought upon them.”

“Please, why are you mocking me. I have nothing useful to offer you or the dead! I beg you to just let me come to an end.”

“My dear, dear Pieter, I am an avid student of your life’s work. It was all noble and via it’s non-violence rather touching. Suicide is never a victimless crime, but I will kill you myself without sentimentality if that is your wish. I need you to tell me where I can find a recently disappeared man. I need you to tell me the exact location of imprisoned rebel commander Avinadav DeBuitléir. And I need you to turn over to me the login codes to the virtual Underground Railroad that is the international human right movement database.”

“To what end,” he asks.

“So that all those violations you’ve had to witness don’t ever happen again without punishment,” she responds.

A bullet quietly finds its way into the chamber.

Five minutes later, as Maya Solomon sometimes called Maya Rose steps into a waiting electric Lincoln Town Car a gunshot rings out in the hotel room above the messy cobble street.

BRAKA! Goes the gun. And his brains blew out over the hotel wall.

She hums a somber Kaddish for a great albeit now self-murdered man. The Yid prayer for the dead is too long to really do the whole thing so she hums just a bit of it, time being short and life, unfortunately being rather cheap.

She picks up her bulky iridium satellite phone to call her sometimes favorite partner. A damn fine dagger man. Truly a bi-winning character. A legend in his own mind at the very least.  A dead man in the eyes of his former nation. But when he died for some reason he awoke in Russia. Because she had much work for him still to do.

Three years and war path later, he was again in Moscow and his work was almost complete.

Peace be on to you,” she tells him.

And also on to you that same peace,” he offers in customary reply.

Our long disappeared comrade associate Avinadav DeBuitléir is being held by the Department of Homeland Security at a prison camp called Angola 42 near Greed Lake. I will uplink with you later and hopefully convince you of my plan to liberate him. Carry out your last job and head home to Breuklyn.

Ain Davar,” that’s all Sebastian Adon ever says these days.

That means “it is nothing to worry about”, or “never mind”, or “fuggettaboutit”. Depending what you do with your hands and body language. It’s a phone call so she can’t see his hands obviously. But she knows his hands and his handy work about as well as anyone can. They’ve been legally married in the State of Ivory since they were eighteen.

“Five minutes to nation time Zamni Cherie,” she responds in Ayitian Creole.

            My “dear partner”, that’s all it means.

 

Most members of the “Breuklyn Bath and Rifle Club”, especially those in the Trinidadian Special Forces (ZOB) seem to speak Hebrew when whispering code on the iridium satellite phones or, Creole when making love. The revolution began in Ayiti after all. Though, it was in a place called New York City where the tide began to turn and after four thousand years of servitude the forces of human emancipation began to prevail in earnest aided by parapsychology, black magic and the fighting prowess of the Fenians.

Chapter 5

 

 

The safe house has fine wood work and dark red walls. Its floors are beige red Jerusalem tile. It resembles something of a cross between the old world and the new. On an old school record player in the next room comes over the soothing beats of a Tribe called Quest. The emergency radio we use to digitally stream the Interweb is set to the Fire Station; the Pan-Caribbean pirate satellite radio, “to tell da masses no fire ‘til day see de white in dem dutty man eyes o’da oligarchy!”

 

“Fire! More fire!”

 

There are only two sources I trust completely for my news.

The People’s Television Network that was founded by my old friend Nicky Mapfre which Livestreams efforts of our international movement. And; the pirate radio broadcasts of The Fire Station stoking the rebellion with dancehall, with Reggae, with Zouk, with Kompa, Calypso and Wild West Indian rebel music songs. Interspersed amid its songs it serves as the global public address system of the “Militant Human Rights Movement”.

Everything else comes over Sky Pager.

“Your turn,” I say.

“Let my plots be made thicker than the blood you shed for them,” she says using an Old Russian idiom that barely even translates.

Whatever that means to her.

“It was understood by all involved that the take would be vast. Idea itself dripped of currency. Huge, as in a leviathan level steal. ‘Unprecedented theft.’ Complexity of job vast. But architects of robbery had worked out their neurological muscles so that each of the stakeholders would be thoroughly invested,” she explains me.

“And anonymously capable of carrying out parts without need of centralized control.”

And again her yarn then assumes the grim narration.

Ultimately, they’d be emptying several hundred banks in 48 cities, across 18 countries in a 24 hour period. Visigoth, Arabian and Mongol hordes working in confederation could not carry off so much treasure from vaults of West.

“And by they; I mean we.”

 

Dasha lays down her yarn.

In an accent thicker than that which she ever uses around me she explains:

“Job took nine years to orchestrate. Planned in its grandiose entirety in Bulgarian tavern on Lower East Side of the Isle of Man. Place called Mehanata Social Club.”

 

Man who planned job was Bulgarian dentist named Alexandre Dmitrievich Perchevney, called “Sasho” by his closest confederates. Also wife.

In Gregorian calendar year 1999, because of technical glitch in computerized monetary systems sensationalistic-ally depicted on proletarian media as “Y2K”, many system analysts were worried about system wide failure of internet. And electronic military defense complex systems more generally to experience temporary shut down on New Year’s Eve’ December 31st, 1999.

In order to protect critical defense and money changing infrastructure, major digitalized commerce, and all sort of civilian surveillance databases; governments and major corporations had begun scrambling to back up data on fixed servers, secure from the effects of the Y2K glitch which many big brained computer engineers believed would wipe out digital control of commerce via internet.

 

Enter Perchevney Bratva.

 

At time of plot, really just consist of newly immigrated Alexandre Perchevney and his scheming, but quiet brother strong man Slavi, a Krepki Mushik.

Along with wife Tania Magda, and also three quite shady grinning characters named “James White”, “James Brown”, and “Justin Toomey O’Azzello” who all worked part time at “Bulgarian Cultural Center” on Canal and Broadway. Cultural front for a “cash for marriage agency”, an extralegal dental coverage program, and also planning center for lucrative racket called “no-fault-insurance”.

Also premium place to drink underage and dance naked, do cocaine; no questions asked.

Alexandre and Slavi, alongside millions of newly admitted “Soviet Ivory” began immigration to Brooklyn immediately after the Berlin wall came down and United States of America “defensively” begin total rape of former Soviet Union, Post-Cold War victory.

They came to coast of Breuklyn with advanced degrees, speaking multiple languages, and instilled with a profound skill in “extralegal entrepreneurship”; cultivated in a Communist society where graft and bribes was way of life. When informed by Amerikanski immigration officers that these degrees not worth the paper they were printed on, well perhaps this is how it all began. In former Soviet Union, Alexandre Perchevney was dentist, which there was really more like doctor specializing in dentistry. His wife, Tania Magda, was “engineer”.

That really could mean almost anything in former Soviet Union where almost everyone was some kind of engineer.

But, Tania Magda was computer engineer. And Slavi, well Slavi was good with machines and breaking man’s faces also with fists.

Alexandre, Tania Magda, Slavi and infant progeny of Tania Magda and Alex: four year old daughter Yelizaveta all moved from Brighton coastal ghetto to high ground of Washington Heights shortly after their arrival in winter of 1991.

It not take Alex and Tania Magda long to realize that not only would they be treated like fourth class citizens of vanquished enemy nation, but that as immigrants their own people would arrive not just with advanced degrees and “dubious moral code”, but accompanied by violent thieves and Voorhis with links to privatization under way transforming KGB, into large and ruthless mafia, or in Russian parlance a Bratva.

It was shortly after his first brutal run in with a New Russian Voorhi seeking an overtly grand percentage slice for protection of black market dentistry clinic run out of Alex’s basement in Brighton, that Alex realized that one; his daughter would be raised outside the clutches of new Russian ghetto, so called Little Odessa. And two; to operate anything mega lucrative in this new soft country he’d need the help of the natives.

So Alex embraced Judaism and made friends with some ambitious Fenian tough guys. And before long he, his brother his wife and daughter were humming away Kid dishes in good times and Radishes in bad times with congregation Bet Shalom on Fort Washington Ave. And this was how Alex met first met young Misha Kishbivalli, a young Bulgarian pretend Ivory like himself though much wealthier having gotten to America three years earlier and begun actively trafficking in uncut conflict diamonds traffic out of Liberia.

Over a round of Astika beers Misha and Alexandre envisioned an establishment “where criminality and philanthropy, stealing and borrowing, culture and crime could all intertwine, “volumptously” and thus the Mehanata Social Club was born.

This was no word in English, Russian or Bulgarian.

 

By winter of 1992 Alex and Slavi had rented out second floor loft space on the corner of Canal and Broadway and registered it as “Bulgarian Cultural Center”. Despite having no liquor license or paying any taxes to internal revenue service Alex hired a large menagerie of former Soviet women to work as “cultural hostesses”, and bartenders and “cultural attaches”.

Also to dance the go-go.

In the entire sixteen year run of Mehanata at its Canal Street location much was exchanged, culturally and financially.

The enterprise itself was careful gamble that under guise of “multi-culture and diversity”, just about anything could follow.

Alexandre used the Russian language internet to recruit a wide range of medical professionals of former Soviet extraction to offer black market healthcare to other new arrivals, and long stayed arrivals without paper work. Next, Misha and Alex worked out a technicality called “no fault” where by accidents could be staged arranged all over Breuklyn and insurance companies could be divested of millions upon millions. And they reached out directly to the Jamaican Mafia to help them. They were recruiting veritable Gypsy underground army all fueled by greed, music of Balkans and Astika beer.

 

But the greatest expropriation was yet to come.

 

 

 

Chapter 6

 

The safe house has fine aged wood work and dark red old school wallpaper. Its floors are beige red Jerusalem tile. It resembles something of a cross between the old world and the new. There’s some smooth jazz soul now playing in the next room.

Fortified for the events of dystopia, we hold ground and keep telling tales.

She tastes like Cherries, cinnamon and cigarettes.

As her story reaches cliffhanger she lays out to absorb the life impacts of the previous yarn. In her past depiction of our demise and our initial interaction at times her fingers traced out words or images over the contours of my scar covered chest. Though at various moments she might make the dedicated pantimimocry of Hebraic hand sign for effect, falling in an out of Russian to English she carried the discourse most fruitfully with her glowing blue eyes.

It’s unusual for her to sit still. I have also never seen her sleep successfully until she is incapable of exacting further commotion. Or, has put down enough vodka to pacify those wilding inner demons’ urges to fight furious and wreak dance hall havoc upon those who aim to fondle or just gawk and watch her gyrate.

 

“What’s a Shtarker,” Dasha asks me curtly.

“A tough guy in low Yiddish.”

“What then is a Shatah?” she then asks.

“A rough guy in island slang, a guy who pops off.”

“What are Fenians?”

“Fenian patriotic freedom fighters.”

“Gender neutral?”

“Yes sweetness.”

“Growing up I read the Ivories were extinct, the Fenian a recessive genetic trait, and the blacks a race of violent monkeys being exterminated in a controlled manner via the Bretton Woods Association.”

Those are the kind of half-truths I’d expect from a State school in rural Russia, which I’m unsure if she even completed.

The Fenian are not a recessive trait, red hair is. As for the Ivories, yes they are mostly extinct and blacks, well don’t call them monkeys that’s actually quite overtly racist.”

“Are you really an Fenian Ivory in the employ of black internationalists?”

“No baby. I’m a Chechen peasant.”

Suka blat.”

“You say real surely shit,” I say in a brogue and she smiles.

“Fenians! Tell me of them then. About your dear old comrade Hubert O’Domhnaill who you always manage to slip into your old yarns but is a character I’ve yet to ever meet while he was alive. Do it in your best Fenian brogue,” she demands.

“Hubert O’Domhnaill didn’t have a brogue in real life. And of course that wasn’t his true last name,” I tell her.

“What in two fucks do I give about real life?! Amuse me man. This will be a very long siege.”

 

I clear my throat.

 

 

Chapter 7

 

 

Allow me to introduce myself correctly and without subterfuge, my name is Hubert O’Domhnaill. Judge me not by me freckles and flaming red hair. If you do I will have to fight you!

 

I once saw a man beating a young prostitute in an alley across from the pub where I had my first real job, slapping the poor girl silly. And not knowing how to mind my business, being raised to always fight for something, always protect the poor, and never strike a woman; well me and my best droog Philly Hartman, well we jumped right in. We beat that pimp until he couldn’t remember his fucking name. Broke his goddamn ribs, his fuck face and his jaw. I don’t normally curse so much. But I hate pimps and I hate people who ignore violence right in front of them.

 

This was me first activist act.

 

Beating a pimp half to death. I’m a Catholic, but more importantly I’m a good human being and my father says that Jesus the Zealot used to beat the shit out of pimps too. They just can’t talk about that side of his life at church.

 

Cause of the kids.

 

Eight generations ago, or maybe nine, my descendants fled a famine engineered by the British to starve my people into oblivion and a bleak-black, hungry death. They killed over two million of us this way. Another two million fled on famine ships to the coast of Breuklyn. I mean we didn’t all go there. Some went to Australia, Boston, New Zealand, South Africa and other places in that poufy proper empire. But the great ones, the great ones went to Breuklyn. And I am descended from them. The best of the best, I can only assure you. We are the fearless firefighting, whiskey drinking, trade union loving, Catholic God fearing sons and daughters of those starving heroes.

 

Look at all that snow!

 

It hasn’t snowed like this in a decade since when a combination of global warming, the wrath of god and Department of Sanitation on strike made the roads of Breuklyn damn near impassible. The world has gotten hotter some reckon since then. This is the first hard Ruus blizzard in quite some time. Everything’s ground to halt. Sheets of pummeling sleet and fairy dust obstruct your windows and make all driving a tedious process. The Breuklyn Soviet doesn’t maintain a green collar aristocracy to shovel streets. Local commune committees do it out of civic duty. Or at times conscription. And only the main roads get cleared so ambulances can get in and kids can go to school. In the end a government really just only needs to provide roads, schools and the semblance of public safety. People can pretty much organize the rest of it themselves.

 

Since the Great Disorder, when the Separatist Wars began, well we’ve needed a lot of ambulances. Luckily we all belong to a revolutionary social club founded primarily by EMTs and paramedics.

 

The Sandooney Bathhouse is half an Avenue block long, one story tall and eight stories subterranean, ever tunneling, ever excavating underground. Its front windows are tinted black and are supposedly bullet resistant. A yellow-gold neon sign in Cyrillic advertises it as a banya, but it is also the headquarters of the “Breuklyn Bath and Rifle Club”, a prominent local Otriad, or “irregular military detachment established for mutual aid and collective security”. Tonight the snow falls hard and it’s a packed house, but no one is bathing. The parking lot is over flowing, and deliberately some city buses, ambulances and wrangler jeeps have been arranged to barricade Mila Ave on either side of the banya.

The snow is really falling now. As if the sky itself is collapsing in brilliant bombardment of white crystal. But a trained eye can pick out several sentries, some Noire some Postsoviet, in long grey coats walking the barricade lines with thermal scanners and automatic rifles. Now and again the laser trip wire shimmers through the storm.

 

One of the chornay, mutters, “It’s brik as shit out here.”

 

That’s Noire Ebonics for, it’s “very cold out”. And chornay is Russian for “blacks”.

Now, some of you may be saying how did that crimson haired, freckled, six foot Fenian volunteer fire fighter like me come to speak Russian!? That’s because we drill endlessly in parapsychology and all of the best books on the subject are in Russian and my brother Shane is a huge, huge communist. I’ll have you know too I’m a Bronx Science graduate. Learning other languages is vital! What’s parapsychology you ask?

 

Well that’s how we won the first round of the Separatist War and began to really turn the tide in the global struggle for universal human rights. With freeness of mind!

 

There are several things that are not always in place unless a Congress is in session. Like the crew that has set up on the train track running above the grand bathhouse on what used to be called the F Orange line. The train car with the surface to air missile batteries stands out in the storm. The presence of Noire and Postsoviet Russian sentries amicably sharing Newport cigarettes is not uncommon, but only really seen in this particular Otriad. That the Ruus sentries are sober is also an anomaly.

 

For those people don’t really do anything all that sober.

 

In case, just in case the security forces of the United American States (U.A.S.) or certain other rival clubs or neighboring factions “feel like getting crazy” while our Congress is in session that train can light up the borough of Manhattan on our behalf.

 

Seven floors below street level Congress has been underway for the past several days. We’re now watching a film. It features my dead friend Sebastian. Former Planning Section Chief of the 15th Congress, a founding member of this Otriad who was gassed and shot dead during an ugly siege three years ago of a theatre on Times Square called the Millennium. Along with his wife Emma Solomon, twenty two other fighters, and the eight hundred and eight civilians they were holding as their hostages.

 

Adon and Solomon are now martyrs to the human rights resistance. Two names and faces crossed off a vast list of over two million active domestic radicals, separatists and subversive terrorists; in the N.S.A. PRISM database at the Department of Homeland Security; the intelligence arm of the American Joint Special Operations Command (J.S.O.C.); one of the two bodies which currently makes most decisions in what’s left of the United States.

 

We are watching Sebastian from beyond the grave because before he perished he recorded thousands of short micro briefings to accompany various stratagems coming out of the Planning Section which he led for two years before his death. The micro brief we are now watching at this 18th Congress accompanies a proposal called “Operation Gold Lion” which our delegates are deliberating on the merits of ratification, and potential execution.

 

And its detractors are pejoratively calling “Operation Marcus Garvey.”

 

“Orientate yourselves brethren for soon we will be off again to bring this long game to conclusion,” utters a man whose name was Sebastian, but who most call “Adon”.

 

There had been few men in recent American history who from such a young age were gleefully planning their martyrdom.

 

In the film he wears a brown pleather skally cap-beret. His eyes on screen are hazel-green; if they were any other color it had meant he was losing his mind from sleep deprivation.

Oh, I’ve seen it, not a pretty site. Green into grey on grey! As they were the day he died. His face is almost former Soviet. We call our municipality a “Soviet” because it is a three million citizen, democratic worker’s state organized largely around trade unions, district communes and direct democracy via a General Assembly. If you hear me or someone else call something “former Soviet”, we’re referring to Russia or the Eastern European states that fell under Russian hegemony between 1917 and 1989.

 

Basically a tainted, dystopian version of the life we enjoy in our new micro-republic.

 

Sometimes Mr. Adon was ethnically profiled as a Croatian or an Italian. He told people periodically, almost systematically that he was an Ivory, but that my friend is called a big white lie. I know for a near biological fact that his mother is of Fenian stock like me. Ivories pass the linage on the mother’s side, which means that Adon was at least half a Mic, which means he may well one day get a street named after him in Dublin. But, all that legacy aside he was born a racially ambiguous white guy from an upper middle class American family. His father was a dentist, his mother was an arts lobbyist, and his brother was a shuttle trader. And it was that privilege that allowed him such gross and unyielding impunity when he and I first enlisted in the anti- globalization resistance movement at age 15.

On the left side of his face, right below the eye was a peculiar red birth mark that looked not unlike he was struck in the face, although it gave him character said his parents, and his lovers. No one else noticed it, or if it switched sides of the face. Perhaps the state security forces noticed.

 

In civilian life people just asked, “Did you get in a new fight?” Implying that most New Yorker knew him from the papers, by his infamy and also boldness. A hero or a hooligan, well that part was never clear.

 

I knew this man since we were but 14. I believe I genuinely knew him. Not in a biblical sense, but in a heart-to-soul Fenian sense. I saw him get in a lot of fights over the years that he was not predicted to win. I’ve jumped in on a lot of his fights. I still do, am. My shattered bones, and nose, and much of my treasure I invested behind the ideas of this tragic man.

 

The hall of our Club is filled with women and men who might appear at first to an outsider to be strange bed fellows. The Club’s “Hall of Unsung Heroes” is below the Sandooney Bathhouse located within the Midwood Commune, a district of at the heart of Breuklyn Soviet.

 

Breuklyn Soviet is home to roughly three million people occupying the entire traditional municipality as well as some large swaths of what were once the Borough of Queens and all of Long Island.

Queens is now called Goddess Soviet; Flushing-Metropolitan Avenue is the border zone.  It’s in the ever shifting hands of Latin Street gangs, Chinese Mobsters, and Orthodox Ivories which seem to own everything no matter who’s in power, yeah those people. Long Island, which we often now call “Strong Island” after the terrible battles of Fire Island, Block Island, Huntington and Farmingdale, is a highly militarized zone on its northern coast since the last ceasefire with the Federals, which was three years ago and still holding. Six months ago, the “Mile High Wall” went up cutting Manhattan off from the Bronx, Breuklyn, and what was once Queens. It’s not a mile high, but it’s still a rather sturdy apartheid barrier constructed along the Long Island Sound to hinder smuggling and human traffic in and out of the U.A.S. interior. Consult the maps in the map room if that sounds confusing. The ceasefire has held for just under three years.

 

Mostly. Discluding last month’s major atrocity, still hidden.

 

A sick provocation by our enemies where two families; twelve blacks and twelve Ivories were viciously killed and hung from a tall tree in Prospect Park overlooking the Grand Army Plaza.

 

The weather is brutally cold this time of year, but only really noticeably unbearable in January, February and early March. Speaking of and complaining about weather extremes is something of long standing local culture. Ice storms fall and make the streets outside difficult to traverse. It’s a real shit show.  The women and men assembled are largely West Indian, Fenian Fenian, Russian Postsoviets and a good number of uncapped Yids. Those are some of the major ethnic demographics on the Breuklyn Soviet, but there are dozens of other clubs, otriads, and paramilitary formations that are larger than this club, but by no means organized to our degree of solidarity and sophistication.

 

We all look up at an enormous telescreen set upon the wall above the wooden crescent of the command table where our current standing elected leadership is seated; the 17th Executive.

 

We have been called to this 18th Congress to take a vote on an invasion.

 

Some in the Club’s leadership have advanced a proposal for an armed intervention into a war torn African country. The name of that country is Ayiti. It is the tenth largest country on earth. Briefly it was two countries then after renewed epoch of civil war, one country again. The bunker’s hall is packed to capacity as a vote will be taken this very evening on a rigorous and costly venture. Seated at the long table with the large screen hanging behind them is the club’s elected leadership presiding over the delivery of the Planning Section’s general briefing. There are thirteen officers, three female, ten male. Most will likely be reelected to the Executive.

 

On screen Sebastian Adon clears his throat and reads from the micro-briefing. Here was a man who held the attention of crowds with his words and no microphone. His articulations were top rate. Cheers to you old friend. I hope heaven has a suitable bathhouse. I hope every night until the world to come you bury your face in the chest of that woman you so loved!

 

“Ayiti, officially the Republic of Ayiti, is a long suffering nation that occupies the western third of the mountainous isle called Hispaniola. It is the second largest island in the Caribbean and the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere. It is bordered by the Dominican Republic to the east over a mountain range, Cuba to the northwest by sea and Jamaica to the immediate west by sea.”

 

The several hundred club delegates each represent various Commune level Section Committees, interagency Working Groups within the Soviet in the seven districts that our Club provides the Parastate infrastructure to, and the elected delegates of our various battalions deployed abroad. For a Club best known for our bathing and shooting, we do a great deal of effective Parastate development work. That’s a fancy way to say that we: keep criminals off our streets; we put out the fires; we run a large network of schools; we keep the water running; the lights on; we operate the ambulances; we run the hospital clinics; and also manage a system of courts, libraries, and a large credit union. There is theoretically a General Assembly or something that the three million citizens can elect people to. But, they can’t seem to tax anyone or hold orderly mass meetings; so really, it’s mostly up to the gangs, otriads, mafias, religious factions, trade unions and ethnic clubs to keep life going and the black market economy running.

 

 

Seven years ago during the Separatist Wars that we call “The Great Revolt” things got rather dicey. To say the fucking least; a blood bath of man on man crime. The Federals bombed the city for many weeks straight and then occupied all five boroughs with over sixty thousand National Guards.

 

 

And along with the National Guards; the Homeland Security Secret Police; the American gestapo titled the Department of Homeland Security in their blue and black finest.

 

Thousands were rounded up and tortured in Barclay, Mets and Yankee Stadiums before our highly divided factions managed to acquire enough will and weapons to mount any effective resistance. Atrocities were committed on both sides. The exact body count is impossible to know. After two years of direct iron heel occupation, we finally drove the Regular Military and National Guard out of Breuklyn, Queens and the Bronx.

 

The manufacture of weapons grade uranium at Stonybrook University and the technical know how to build several small atomic weapons was in the end the second most effective piece of leverage to secure our independence.

 

 

 

Now, life is quite like Breuklyn in the early 1980’s, albeit with occasional ration lines, a very libertarian political processes and a different legal system almost Commune by Commune. That’s our word for neighborhood by the way, there are sixty four Communes in Breuklyn Soviet and we administer services to the largest and safest seven. Basically everything’s legal now accept slavery and just about everyone has a fire arm, so people try to walk with respect. I mean some say “crime is way up” and “a wide range of criminals have exploited this conflict to basically turn our borough into an international transshipment hub for drugs, women, weapons and terrorism into the U.A.S.”.

 

 

I can only speak with certainty for the Communes we directly administer: The Crown Heights, Brighton and Manhattan Beach, Bedford Stuyvesant, Greater Midwood, Greater Flatbush, Star City, and Coney Island excluding the Seagate Garrison and “the Green Light Zone”. But, I think we mostly export reverse engineered pharmaceuticals, vat grown human organs, micro brewed reverse engineered alcoholic products, Chinese knock off every things, and various high tech hardware and also development technology; and business as they say is booming.

 

 

Citizens of the Breuklyn Soviet wear blue uniforms if they serve in the elite Citizen’s Army as emergency medical workers, fire fighters or peace officers; grey uniforms if they are from the security battalions, black uniforms if they are in parapsychological or negotiations units, and unmarked smart civilian dress attire if in the Information and Intelligence (I &I) Sections. Someone will have to explain that later, but basically we won the war for our freedom not just with a few home built nuclear weapons, a hostage crisis and truly epic New York grit, but also mind games and the powers of suggestion, precognition, and a lot of other stuff beyond my pension and pay grade.

 

It’s a tad neo-Marxist leaning towards Islamic fascist at times if you ask me. The uniforms I mean. I don’t choose to wear one. No one says anything about it to me. But, I’m just the equivalent of a staff sergeant when it comes to the overall chain of command. My soft power is my social circle and my microbrewery.

 

The Breuklyn Soviet, one of many break away American territories is not socialist in the slightest, but everyone has work if they want it, everyone has free healthcare when they need it and people mostly wear uniforms to work unless they’re out binge drinking their troubles away. And troubles don’t go away no matter what regime you live under. I heard yesterday that Shar’iah was declared in some sub-commune of Bayridge, but I doubt that will last.

 

Drinking is really not any more or less of problem than it was when we were part of the capitalist mega hyper-power called the United American States. Which is still being led by the Democratic Party and Barak Obama in his now fourth term in office, but it is as per before the revolt the U.A.S. is actually led by the bankers, corporate oligarchs and elite who front the cash for campaigns.

 

For now the Ivoryish media conspiracy has sided with us separatists.

 

It is the dead of Breuklyn winter so many wear heavy scarves and thick layers of Japanese polysynthetic fibers below their jackets and have skally caps pulled over their brows. A skally cap looks like a news boy cap crossed with beret. They were and still are worn by many leaders and field commanders of the early resistance efforts, like my friend Sebastian Adon and I, but after this rapper started wearing one, well just about anyone who wants to wears one now. Partisan caps, that’s also what we call them.

 

The ghost of Sebastian Adon continues:

 

“We submit to this Congress a policy and operations package designed to safeguard our own hard fought independence and restore the national sovereignty of the nation which gave birth to the Great Revolt. To aid our comrades there to assert full control over their resources, ports and airspace, and forge a pathway whereby the citizens of their nation will know dignity, human rights, hope and opportunity.  The aim of our proposed policies are to dismantle the ‘Republic of NGOs’ and restore in its place an empowered, socially, environmentally and economically sustainable Republic of Ayiti.”

 

“A series of human and environmental catastrophes have befallen the Republic of Ayiti since the moment of her independence. It has repeatedly been stated that Ayiti bears a certain ‘uniqueness’. We assert that this ‘uniqueness’ is artificially enforced to the detriment of all her citizens and must be corrected by political and popular action. She is the most disaster casualty prone nation in the Americas. She is the absolute poorest nation in the Western Hemisphere and second only to India the highest perceived ratio of NGOs/to population on earth. Perhaps more striking is that her income inequality is seventh most unequal on earth with a calculated GINI score of 0.61. She is also the only nation on earth with a peacekeeping operation presiding over her military jurisdiction without a ceasefire in place between warring factions.”

 

“There are now 13 million citizens now living in that Republic and they are living with daily existential threats to their welfare. Currently her HDI is 168, the bottom billion outlier of the hemisphere. Ayiti has an adult life expectancy of 63.1. A full 50.16 % of her population is living in multidimensional poverty. A 2012 World Bank survey places 6 million Ayitians (59%) living below $2 (90 HTG) a day while 2.5 million (24%) are living below $1. Therefore 83% are below their own domestic poverty line. Adult literacy is at 48.7%. Only 5% of the population can functionally comprehend French their official language of education and administration.”

 

“This proposal will recommend policies in the following strategic arenas; direct military intervention via the People’s Army 99th Detachment, direct aid supporting the Famni Lavalas Party and long term mass capacity initiates and the consolidation of Hispaniola into the Federation of Autonomous and Soviet States.”

 

“The people of Ayiti have a long and bloody history extending from antiquity when in 1492 Henri Christopher Columbus invaded the island and within a mere forty years eradicated its indigenous population. This population was soon replaced by French and Spanish colonials with several million captured African slaves. The French called the western colony St. Domingue, the Spanish called the eastern colony Santo Domingo. By the late 17th century the slave driven harvest of sugar was killing these slaves at a rate of 40,000 a year. Intertwined with the history of Ayiti is the parallel and equally brutal history of Dominican Republic, the Spanish eastern 2/3 of the island, though brutal in a later and longer stage. The island of Hispaniola, which was united politically over several periods became a unified American colony from 1915-1934. Two murderous dictators took over and divided the island into modern Ayiti and Dominica Republic; Francois Duvalier in Ayiti; the infamous “Papa Doc” and Rafael Leónidas Trujillo Molina in DR; called “El Jefe” allegedly responsible for personally the raping of 1 in 20 women on his side of the island, killing 50,000 of his people and ordering the genocide of 20-37,000 Ayitians in the Parsley border Massacre of 1937. Thriving on racial antagonism between noire and mulatto; they colluded to sell Ayitians into virtual slavery at American owned sugar plantation from 1957 until 1988. Ayiti’s history has been plagued by endless coups and civil wars stemming from ethnic, religious, and economic conflicts between the Mulatto and Noire Ayitian elites.”

 

“The Mulattos make up around 5-10% of the population of the total 10 million control the drug transshipment infrastructure and dominate in actual land holding. The Noire Elite composing an additional 5-10% grew out of the father and son Duvalier regimes. They control most of the existing business infrastructure and visible political posts as well as the links to commodity transfer in DR and the largest groupings of right wing paramilitaries; the Ayitians of Middle Eastern descent who number less than 10,000 people own most of the telecommunications and legitimate service commerce such as super markets, gas stations and retail. Further complicating the picture is a standing neo-colonial population of an estimated 46,000 mostly white development workers and missionaries operating with 10,800 formations are scatted virtually everywhere in the Republic.”

 

“Say the recent Simon White Paper: “The NGO sector in Ayiti is best described as an uncoordinated mass of organizations de facto unaccountable to any governing or regulatory institution, i.e. no accountants, no auditors, no reviews, and no publication of poor or dishonest performance.”

 

“If these statistics are even remotely accurate; that would mean 83% or more of 10 million people, which is to say around 6 million are living in grinding poverty at less than $2 a day and mostly dying by age 64. To make things even more complicated, there is raging Cholera epidemic that has killed over 10,000 people, a long running CIA bioweapons testing program, a variety of narco-war lords in both DR and Ayiti with private armies, tens of thousands of child Restoviks slaves and over 200,000 stateless people; Dominicans of Ayitian descent trapped on the central mountain range by the MINUSTAH[57] authorities and army of the DR. And, a low intensity left right civil war daily escalating with targeted killings.”

 

And then after some brave words the film flickers off and lights go gracefully on.

 

With that introductory data a man named Mickhi Dbrisk rises from the command table. That’s pronounced “MA-KAI” in case you were wondering. Mickhi is tall with thick well-kept dreadlocks and is always wearing a black pea coat when winter falls. His eyes are “kind but piercing” woman say. He doesn’t wear uniforms or a skally caps, but he is quite well known in many circles. He is one of the club’s founders and throughout the revolt a front line fighter in some of the most perilous operations against the National Guard and Federal armed forces which occupied our city. It was Mickhi Dbrisk that negotiated the absorption of Breuklyn’s major Crip Sets as well as the Orthodox Ivoryish Shomriim (Watchmen) Auxiliary Police into the armed wing of the resistance. The influx of these several thousand trained women and men certainly helped the war effort at a critical juncture. Most notably Dbrisk lead the defense of the Battle of Brownsville.

 

Mickhi Dbrisk is currently our elected Chief of Operations of the 17th Congress Executive, also at times referred to as under boss of operations, or vice president of operations depending who we’re taking to.  Which is where has served for the past fourteen years. He is expected to be reelected, but not to that exact same post, we change the names. There are no term limits, democracy is used until no longer expedient. With an extendible pointer, not unlike a long thin asp he identifies the major cities in Ayiti which include:

 

“The entire country is covered in mostly deforested mountains on the Ayitian side and thick lush jungle mountains on the Dominican side. Upwards of 93% of the tree cover has been cut down for harvest for producing charcoal. The country is divided into ten departments, 42 Arrondissements and 140 communes. Let us concentrate now on the Ayitian western 1/3 of Hispaniola.”

 

“Port-Au-Prince is the capital, home to over 3 million; the only major Eastern coastal port in the country and the center of political power for the Mulatto & Noire Elite as well as Ayitian’s of Middle Easterner descent. It is the point of exit for the nation’s gold mines in the North. It has the highest concentration of NGO anywhere besides India.”

 

“Major cities in the North moving from the west peninsula to the eastern border with the Dominican Republic include; Mole Saint Nicolas, Port-de-Paix, Le Borgne, Cap-Ayitian: the second largest city in the country, and Fort Liberte. An island off the north coast called Ile de la Tortue is a major submarine staging point for drug runs into the U.S.”

 

“The departments of the Artibonite river valley include the large coastal city of Gonaives, and to the eastern interior there is Hinche and Pettit Riviere de L’Artibinite and Desarmes.”

 

“Cities in the Central Districts when traveling east toward the border with Dominican Republic are the Capital Port-Au-Prince, to the immediate east Croix-des-Bouquets, as well as Mirebalais to the central north and St. Marc on the central coast. The sprawling internal displacement camp complex called Penn-Mershing Central housing the 200,000 Dominicans of Ayitian descent expelled from DR in 2016 can be found on the border near Quanaminthe.”

 

“The three northern administrative departments of Ayiti hold some of the richest gold deposits on earth worth an estimated 20 billion and the site of an active genocide which has so far claimed the lives of over 460,000 Ayitian citizens,” explains Mickhi Dbrisk, “his genocide is linked to the conscription of mining labor and repression of Lavalas had been uncovered by most of the liberal or rightist media.”

 

“There are no major cities or good roads in the badlands bordering DR on the eastern border. Ayiti and DR have been formally at war for nearly a decade since the Dominican Republic denationalized and deported over 200,000 Ayitians in 2012.

 

“In the Southern departments moving west to east along the peninsula are Jeremie, Port Salud on the South coast, La Cayes the major tourist center and Jacmel the largest city in the south. And Marigot and then the tiny, but immensely defensible Anse-A-Pitre moving east to the border.”

 

“Geography is so vitally important. Most of our former American countrymen cannot even find Iraq, Syria, Iran, Yemen and Afghanistan on a map and their government has been sending young men to die and robots to raze over there for nearly twenty five years. Next to history and perhaps the ability to speak soothingly in other languages is the vital skill of cartography. Without maps we’d lose our way. Without signs, without direction; well I suppose we’d forget we were all in this together, and promptly begin eating each other. Like they currently do in Sub-Saharan Africa now that the pale nations are done eating the continent and pulled out finding their bellies full,” says the tall Jamaican named Mickhi who most here who have fought alongside him call Captain Dbrisk, although his rank is now that of Operations Section Chief.

 

We don’t really have a lot of pretensions around here.

Just a tight but responsibly democratic chain of command.

 

Dbrisk is wearing his black pea coat with a blue and grey armband and has his thick well-kept dreadlocks concealed below a large black tam. Clipped to his collar is the Pin of Palmares with its cannons and flags abutting the “Tree of Life”. Those that wear that pin fought not only in the Separatist Wars on the East Coast but had the distinction of serving in the early battles of the war for liberation in Ayiti, now sometimes called “Hispaniola”, renamed so after the epic maroon of bygone years when it merges officially with the Dominican Republic, one day in possibility. While numerous internal and foreign components had battled on the island, the island and her people remain in the hands of the various oligarchs there.

 

A maroon was a base of operations and resistance deep in the mountains founded by runaway slaves. Like the Breuklyn Soviet, like several dozen other micro republics that fought their way to independence in the past few year. Though we do not have many mountains in Breuklyn Soviet we do have one of the world’s tallest trees!

 

More on that strangeness later!

 

Mickhi Dbrisk is capable of a great deal of gangster on very short notice. His powers of improvisation are vast. He has commanded fighters in both the fabled siege of the Brownsville Ghetto and the earlier epic battle for Port-Au-Prince. He is regarded by all factions in the Soviet as an undisputed leader of the human rights résistance, a don as you’d say in Patois, Jamaican vernacular. There is not a single move or operation since the early days of the rising that does not have his hand or command in its execution.

 

“Cuba is the only regional nation to not fall under the heel of Western Imperialism now or ever. It also has fully resisted China’s developmental colonialism and now leads the non-aligned movement. It lies to the North East of Ayiti. As you know, in 2019 commandos from the Breuklyn Soviet, still then under siege stormed the Guantanamo base in Eastern Cuba to rescue numerous family member hostages of the resistance alliance. Since that time Guantanamo Bay base now reconstituted with the Republic of Cuban is our forward base. The nation of Jamaica also lies to the east by sea and remains a Narco-Garrison state, numerous dons there sympathetic to the Resistance Alliance and broader J1 Movement.”

 

“This will be no kid’s play. The gloves come completely on for this job. We will be fighting not only the predominantly Brazilian MINUSTAH army, a variety of right wing paramilitary armies under the control of Narco-Warlords and the Dominican army; but an American intervention is an undeniable high probability. To make things more complicated, we will be fighting the entire war with non-lethal weapons via Peacefare. Via the ways of the late Gene Sharpe. And to accomplish it many of us will have to be willing to lay down our lives. As per usual, and I speak for only myself and also our Chief Logistics Officer Mr. Nikholai Trikhovitch. This will be highly perilous. And both he and I are the first two volunteers stepping forward to carry out this operation if approved by you esteemed delegates of the 18th Congress,” he concludes with the predicable anticipated clamor of a quiet riot.

 

After four more hours of smoke and mirror clogged deliberation all the vile data is delivered and the club adjourns with a vote still not taken. This is not wholly new information to most of them for Adon wrote of such things at length and many knew his work. For several weeks the delegates have been reporting that a new mobilization is scheduled to occur. Many of these men and women fought or commanded fighters in the Great Revolt. Many are veterans of the successful mostly non-violent uprisings along the coast, especially those in Atlanta, Boston and Miami in the eight years ago which preceded it. The motion to delay the vote is but a formality. Certainly by tomorrow a plurality of delegates will vote to go to war. While the Breuklyn Soviet is nominally a people’s democracy lead by the General Assembly; the Combined Otriad is not, it is a Chinese style of decision making. Consultation with the general cadre but ultimate decisions made by a tightly elected central committee.

 

Anything can be done with enough green dollars or RMB. But you cannot purchase the kind of zeal this club can marshal when it fully mobilizes its forces.

 

The nucleus of our contingent in the greater rebel army of Breuklyn Soviet is composed of three differing, but overlapping factions that coalesced around something our enemies pejoratively dub the “Breuklyn Bath and Rifle Club”. Our “Club” is a sprawling underground association of former city university students, gangsters, active municipal emergency workers, public school teachers, civil rights lawyers; as well as businessmen of the clandestine economy and young professionals that enjoy the use of fire arms, the relaxation of the Banya, and also the full attainment of our United Nations promised universal human rights.

 

By the time of the “Great Disorder”, the mob riots which lead shortly after their violent suppression led to a wild international revolt; our three factions had several thousand of our members all reasonably proficient with fire arms and organized into flying columns.

 

Mutual aid, collective security and something we call Loyalnost rapidly evolved into a higher calling. The keeping of our asses alive in an urban war zone and wider civil war.

 

The three major factions that for some time had irregularly coordinated via this club as a means to drill for their respective ventures merged under fire into what many to consider the tipping point of the revolt in its New York theatre. One was the black revolutionist group Uhuru associated with the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement. The second was the New York Branch of the Fenian Brotherhood, which I am affiliated with, which is composed of Fenian Nationalists left of center and trade unionists. The third faction is the predominantly former & Postsoviet, black cap Yiddish and West Indian Caribe outfit, known either as the Banshee Association, Banshee Otriad or by its clandestine special operations arm: “the Z.O.B.”

 

I have no idea what that stands for and I’ve technically been a member since I was fourteen. These factions had very little in common except that we all distrusted the machinations of the Bush then Obama led Federal Government and seek a world more firmly founded universal human rights. We also all ran-run extensive trafficking-smuggling operations to and from the island of Hispaniola to a variety of ports of call.

 

In white collar finance you might call that the “import-export business.”

 

The leaderships of these three respective factions rarely ever spoke back then except via the informal alliances crafted by a group of childhood friends which all met in Bronx Science in 1998. That’s largely because the general membership of Uhuru didn’t trust or wish to associate with the blan or Ivory Caucasians which made up roughly half of the Banshee Otriad. West Indians making up the bulk of the other half of the faction are also generally antipathetic to African American blacks, Uluru’s core constituency. Fenian Nationalists and Black Nationalists have almost nothing in common except the wanting of our own countries to be built on our land stolen long ago by some devilish white man Protestants.  The brothers always get along with me and my best droog Philly Hartman just fine though. We teach our Dougie for free.

 

There was also some underling discord then because the Banshee Otriad during the years leading up to the “Great Disorder” and the subsequent “Great Revolt” was engaged in every manner of disruption against the war machine and was under constant surveillance by the eyes and agents of the state. Especially the Federal Bureau of Investigation (F.B.I.), the N.Y.P.D. Joint Terrorism Task Force, and the American secret police squarely coordinated via the Department of Homeland Security (D.H.S.) all reporting to the National Security Agency (N.S.A.) and of course the J.S.O.C. Their underground paper and their ambulance worker labor struggles with the hospitals and Fire Department didn’t make life easy then either. Banshee, mostly composed of emergency medical workers also provided tactical support and funding to the Occupy Movement before its evictions after its resurgence. This was something also that Uhuru scoffed at.

 

At least until the sonic pacification of Zuccotti Park that left scores of mostly young white affluent demonstrators brain dead? And the second anniversary assault on the District Financial that left the temples of the money changers in flames and lead to massacre of over ten thousand disappeared ones. And a rocket attack in Midtown Manhattan. Need I say more?

 

The Otriad’s members periodically accused Uhuru of being far too ethno-centric and Uhuru’s members viewed the members of the Otriad as “reckless adventurist blans with too little “skin in the game to worry about losing”. And of course we Fenians were mostly concerned with the conflict escalating then in Erin dubbed the “Latest Troubles.”

 

But, during “the Great Disorder”, when legions of National Guardsmen razed Central Breuklyn Ghettos, it was the intervention of Banshee and Fenian flying columns that saved many of the beleaguered fighters of Uhuru during the Brownsville Ghetto siege, and many black citizens from certain murder and eventual execution. For years our three outfits had trained and traded side by side in the Crown and Washington Heights despite having little more than a perceived common enemy and tactic. Acquire guns and use them against the Oligarchs.

 

Uhuru’s leadership and support base were all but decimated during the Great Disorder and the group found itself partially indebted to us, their at least half-pale allies.

 

Scapegoated in the current history of events by both the Eastern Confederacy of Autonomous Soviets (E.C.A.S.) and the United American States (U.A.S.) for initiating the “Great Disorder”, which certainly they did not, Netic Djbriel Okonkwo, the tall sometimes grinning sometimes glowering militant Chairman of Uhuru took an offer from then Captains Dbrisk and Adon to fully merge the New York Uhuru faction into a “Combined Otriad” of our three groups. As the iron heel of the National Guard swept down upon Breuklyn, Ysiad Ferraris a dubious ally of the resistance, arranged the first of his many promised exoduses via container ship of highly wanted rebel families and began his ever expanding traffic in first and second line rebel arms.

 

And we Fenians of course sided with these mostly Black and Ivoryish rebels because the U.S. Military was shelling our city and our homes and the rest as they say is the prelude to epic history.

 

We have finally secured our independence from the United States of America, now called the United American States (U.A.S.), after nearly four long bloody years of street fighting, occupation, and attrition, a bombing campaign across the country’s interior, a series of hostage crises and finally; threat of improvised nuclear force, which did in fact to our knowledge make Washington DC uninhabitable for the next 100 years. Suffice to say, much of the Eastern seaboard is now a series of confederated Free State territories running from Canada down to Miami, called the Soviets.

 

The real border is often hard to define.

 

As of lately we as a combined Otriad of three factions field abroad several hundred parapsychologists training the various “Emergency Groups” as we call them; underground militant human rights detachments. We support nine large battalions of development and medical workers; three in Ayiti, one in Dominican Republic, two in Jamaica, one in Syria, one in Gaza and one in Eastern Ukraine. A battalion is roughly 1,200 women and men. And everyone with internet access knows about our infamous “dagger men”; the Sicarri of the Z.O.B. In collaboration with hundreds of other left, progressive, Islamist, and human rights militant groups internationally who are currently working their way through a several thousand person database to kill and or capture wanted war criminals; enemies of the people and general scum of the earth affiliated with innumerous networks of pimps, traffickers and black collar criminals. Our Club’s commitment was to help capture or execute 104 targets off that list. By the last count I saw, the Sicarri units and the dozens of other factions they coordinated with online have polished off 103 war criminals over the past three years since the beginning of the ceasefire with the U.A.S. Federals. They find themselves in Europe a lot I hear on the Fire Station.

 

That’s where those kinds of people gravitate to.

 

Where the flashiest toys and choicest, perkiest prostitutes generally are.

 

This Ayiti operation will be a horse of a completely different color. Likely, it will ignite a far broader conflict. Ayiti was over two hundred years in the making. Breuklyn was our turf and that took four years of bloody struggle to win. Hitting mafia targets and whacking oligarch war criminals is sort of just a transcontinental contact sport coordinated by “the Anonymous”, the worldwide guerrilla hacker network.

 

No one cared enough about Ayiti and Dominican Republic to bother and suppress that series of events.  No one in the U.A.S. Oligarchy dares to reconquer the breakaway city states on the East Coast because we have atomic weapons. We will shortly be taking the fight for the fate of humanity to an entirely new level.

 

The fight that my childhood friend Sebastian Adon gave his life for.

Gave his life for twice or more!

 

 

 

 

 

Chapter 8

 

 

 

The darkness and the cold of night briskly greet Mr. Trikhovitch.

He has a long grey coat and black sweater made of Japanese polysynthetic. He has very short black hair and he looks foreboding until he smiles at you. He keeps his gun strapped to his chest and his hip flask over his heart. A solid gold zippo comes out to light up a Newport Standard. A puff ends the night.

 

The more friends he has to bury the less charming he gets year by year.

Nikholai Trikhovitch steps out of the Congress into the 5am snow. He loses the throngs of compatriots propelled by his own need for solitude. He fires up the stoag and blinks a few times. From sleep deprivation and methyl xanthine capsules and too much coffee and certainly too many goddamn meetings.

And knowing that tonight’s near declaration of war will change everything.

He’s been running the Breuklyn Otriad’s logistics section for seven years. That’s a lot of moving parts. That keep moving faster.

 

And now they’re finally going on the bold offensive.

The snow blows hard down the alley way out side Sandooney Bathhouse which sits on the intersection of Avenue I and Macdonald; renamed Mila Street three years ago because nobody could remember who the fuck Macdonald was or what significance he had to the future. This renaming had happened all over Breuklyn, and it kept happening so it was very hard to find streets sometimes.

Nicolai’s black Tanto-52 jeep is in the parking lot, but he likes the cold so he stays out in it. He knows his girlfriend Krissy with her Jessica-Rabbit red hair and tight body is asleep at home and will grasp him tender when he gets back there.

 

A woman he knows quite well is now heading toward him out the main entrance.

 

Anya Drovtich, with her long black dreads wrapped below a gray hijab, plated down in bike armor approaches him out of their bath house headquarters as the main doors are drawn closed and storm shudders bolted down behind her. The clang of the barrier gates sound out as the metal barricades are rolled. She salutes the sentries up on the rail line. And also the Muslim Brotherhood couriers heading back to District Bayridge to report on our midnight developments. She salutes the Russian sentries, the dagger men getting on their bikes, and also the crew up on the train.

 

“How now, Anya Drovtich,” is all he says.

 

“Was there something you wanted to tell me,” she asks him coldly, reading him.

 

“Nothing that can’t wait for tomorrow.”

 

“Shut the fuck up with your nothingy-nothings, brother. You have the forty yard stare of zombie or some traumatized civilian.”

 

“Fuck off, sister.”

 

“Tell me what you’re toying with. We’re too far up in the chain of command to have secrets anymore.”

 

He blows carcinogens into the night. But her words have a different provocation of death behind them and the cold of night turns all utterances into the wafting plumes of verbal gun powder.

 

“Every time I hear his voice I am reminded that had I not encouraged him, had I not told him I’d fight beside him to the end there would not have been any of this. He might well have walked away. We might have,” Nikh mentions.

 

“Or just have died more quietly,” she sharply replies.

“Very little was ever quiet in his head.”

“You give credit to a man who is made of the same parts you and I are,” says Anya Drovtich as the falling snow strikes both of them.

“He gave us all something to believe in. And then he was gone.”

“No. He put words to paper and set small fires with very old ideas that we all had held deep in our hearts and would have acted on had he called us to that first congress or not.”

 

Nikholai stops short of speaking his mind and then says:

“Is Sebastian Adon truly dead?” asks Nikholai Trikhovitch, “I have always heard it said that he was a very difficult man to kill.”

 

“I saw the bullets strike his body. I saw the gas overwhelm him and before we evacuated out that tunnel, I made sure he was really dead. If you’re looking to make a martyr out of him well he was. As you and I will be when our time comes. I know you loved him and I loved him too and had we all not been sitting in that tavern seven year ago when this truly began I doubt we would have found ourselves here at the center of this uprising. But I assure you. Our friend Sebastian is quite dead and what we are about to do will bring him a smile in the world to come.”

 

Their sky pagers both go off at the same time.

 

The sky pager developed by Daniel Fried the martyr modifying on the Iridium sat phone, bouncing radio waves between low flying satellites and then encoding transmissions into text bursts in Hebrew-Creole, Gamatria code. Defeating the smartest snoop hackers and follow-follow men of the National Security Agency via a low to medium tech approach.

 

The page was sent by Oleg Leondovich Medved, Anya’s primary deputy. A hard Russian bear. A thorough and complete Postsoviet gangster. He had missed the last evening of the 18th Congress to hammer out a final trade agreement with that house of thieves the Perchevney Bratva over tariffs in the new Port Coney.

 

The pagers read:

 

(!) Orange Alert. Report to Cadman Plaza Staging area immediately.

 

There has been another massacre.

 

64+ civilians have been slaughtered. (!)

 

Anya immediately gets on her Ducati and Nikholai jumps in his jeep and what they are wondering is what in the world will keep the ceasefire in check come dawn. Just one month ago there had been a slaughter.

A family of Blacks and a family of Ivories.

Exactly a month ago. Twenty four dead. Ripped apart and hung from the tallest tree in Prospect Park for all to see.

And now this blarney and blatnoy.

 

There are allegedly some sixty four men, women and children hanging in the snow storm, strung up on the rafters of the Breuklyn Bridge.

 

 

 

 

Chapter 9

Fadeeva Street 6, Building 1,

Apt. 67, 2019ce

Moscow

 

 

 

The safe house has wall to wall books in one room, illustrated versions of the Arabian Nights[58]. The Jerusalem tile is always warm. The storm shutters are bolted down and sealed electronically. I only know about the rumbling tanks and the curfew because it was announced on the Fire Station. We’ve been hiding here for what seems like a fort night, but could be more.

 

She has a way with taking up time.

 

“What a sneaky little geography lesson that was!” Dasha exclaims, “While you chose to give your life, most others amongst species had such circumstances thrust upon them and left to own devices would have been relatively happy just to give far less freely and live far more selfishly.”

“I don’t refute that point for even a second.”

“So don’t attempt to,” she declares.

“Some people; like you Russians,” I retort, “or children of the petty bourgeoisie who for whatever reason study philosophy; also people that work in finance; or base criminals; these people don’t always believe in objective standards of good and evil.”

“Certainly not,” she says, “a useless binary analysis.”

“But, whether you do or you do not, whether you sip red borsht or eat the biggest mac, even if god forbid you are a student of philosophy, and even if you don’t believe in international law, well no one, at least no one I’ve encountered so far of rational mind likes the idea of a band of men on horseback riding into town and raping their wife; then their mother; then their daughters; then killing everyone they care about, mutilating the bodies, burning homes and then getting away with it. Over and over again. Like the Maccoute do,” I conclude.

 

“Before you begin anew I will quote some Shteyngart,” she says.

 

Russians, Postsoviets in particular have little use for Philosophy when black comedy makes a far more biting critique of the brave new world in which we exist; “live” being too banal a term for what we are really doing here.

 

“Go on then dorogaia.”

 

“I quote,

 

Let us be certain: the Cold War was won by one side and lost by another. And the losing side, like any other in history, had its country-side scorched, its gold plundered, its men forced to dig ditches in far-away capital cities, its women conscripted to service the victorious army’.”

 

“What would you have me learn from your curious quotation?”

 

“We Russians are wholly familiar what happens to those who lose their wars. But that familiarity breeds contempt for weak, not solidarity with latest victims. But, tell me of your favorite long abused Chornay; attempts inspire me with your so-called, beliefs.”

 

She will have me telling my tallest tales of war and blackest history all night so it seems.

 

 

Chapter 10

265 Schenectady Ave, 2019ce

Crown heights

 

Mickhi Dbrisk’s alarm wakes him up out of Rosa’s arms and he heads out into the cold of night. His sky pager is switched off. His mobile has its battery popped. He’s on scheduled leave until Monday morning. He clocked out the minute the Congress broke session so he didn’t have to deal with that bloody mess up on the bridge that he’s to hear about in the papers later that day.

She kisses him hard before he goes.

He leaves an hour before day break. To avoid the traffic. He takes off south down Utica toward the coast in his Kumusabi-6, a black Japanese muscle car made in Detroit. It runs on diesel. It can get through the snow with eight cylinders and treads.

He kissed his ten year old son Malachi J. on the forehead and his two year old second son Liam T.O. And then Rosa kissed him one more time like she did through the prison bars the several times they took him.

 

He was sentenced to seven years upstate at the young age of fourteen. He served two for stealing some bread and not giving up a friend caught with a gun. And again at age twenty four he was sentenced ten years, reduced to one for a concealed weapon planted on him and Sebastian Adon at a political rally the police stormed on.  And the last time Rosa kissed him through the bars was when he was rounded up and sent to the filtration camp at Barclays at the age of twenty six when the Great Revolt began. That was the shortest incarceration of the three since shortly after the camp was over run and liberated by the Bolivarian Hotshots of the Brigade Cinqo de Mayo; led by the Peruvian General Raphael Ernesto Lynch Contreras.

This past 12 October, Mickhi Dbrisk turned thirty.

Mickhi Dbrisk has four children by three women and he has never missed a child support payment in or out of prison. In or out of country. He has four kids. Two by Rosa the St. Lucian a nurse and child hood sweetheart that he met as a youngster, right before he did his longest stint of time upstate. Malachi, age ten and Liam age two. And Two by Roxanna, a wild moody fickle Iytai. With big old things and a wild temper. She lives in Staten Island.

And he never misses a kid’s birthday party either, but that’s a logistical nightmare any way ya wanna cut it these days.

Because to the Department of Homeland Security; the most ruthless of America’s 17 intelligence agencies; he is not public enemy number one. He is public enemy number four. In front of him are Anya Drovtich, Erza Pula and Nikholai Trikhovitch. Which after the capture of Avinadav DeBuitléir, the deaths of the twenty four martyrs and the deaths of Maya Rose and Sebastian Adon; he is still just a “nigger” and a “perpetrator subversive”, albeit “Chief Nigger subversive”, the most wanted black man in rebel Babylon.

His parents and children are proud.

According to I & I Section inside sources there are 4.4 million “domestic and foreign radicals” under varying levels of surveillance in the break away free state territories and abroad. There are 44,000 secondary targets on the latest U.A.S. Obama kill list, technically on standby because of the ceasefire. And Mickhi Dbrisk, Chief of Operations of the Breuklyn Otriad is target 4 of 104 on the D.H.S. Primary Kill List.

His second baby’s mother lives in Staten Island as said; which is still a part of the United American States. His two daughters live with her. One is four, cute little Brook-Lynne and one is eight months, Sheila-Jade.

His baby’s mother Roxanne lives in a suburban garrison settlement called Camp Comfort on the North side of the island.

Mickhi Dbrisk can’t just go visit his girls in Camp Comfort. This is just about the largest US Military concentration on Earth these days, anywhere other than the Korean border.

Everyone calls it “the garrison town.”

Paying child support is getting harder and harder given the political situation. For one thing, not only does Breuklyn Soviet use the bitcoin not the dollar, there are no diplomatic relations between Breuklyn Soviet and the main land U.A.S. Federal Government. Right after they cut off our water and power the very day of independence they blacked out all of our ability to transfer money to and from the mainland. We began printing twenty dollar bills.

But Mickhi Dbrisk has always been a rubber band bank kind of guy.

Magnus Goldbar Allamby, the first richest man in the Breuklyn Soviet, some claim, is the Bajan entrepreneur who runs the Finance Section of the Breuklyn Otriad. The amount of money he has lent to Mickhi Dbrisk on and off the books to pay bribes getting him in and across the border is astounding.

 

They remember when they used to complain about the, “fifteen dollar bridge toll bridge.”

Just the fuel and pilot fee for the submarine alone costs 15 Grand Americans.

But for a man like Mickhi Dbrisk, snow storms, high tide flood waters, hostage crises and even the threat of nuclear missile exchanges have not kept him from one of his four babies’ birthdays.

 

Chapter 11

Cange Village, 1994ce

Ayiti

 

 

The Tonton Maccoute and the Janjaweed are not a singular, unified military formation. The phrase refers to the holistic identity of nomadic gun men on horseback and pickup truck contracted by the Jim Basher Al-Talleyrand regime to ethnically, albeit over perhaps five hundred years cleanse the island of Hispaniola of its Afro-Ayitian inhabitants. They wear very large white turbans and don’t seem to have very many qualms when it comes to indiscriminate brutality. They find it fun. One could liken them to the Cossacks of Sub-Saharan Africa, but there is something far viler about their work, frankly because it’s so well documented.

 

And smacks so highly of choreographed sadism.

 

They have a loose chain of command and zero accountability to anyone not paying them up front, which the Al-Talleyrand NGO Class Ordered government has done without question for many years. It has given them modern Chinese hardware. And air support. And that right there is why the International Criminal Court has designated Lieutenant General Omar Hassan Ahmad Al-Talleyrand, President for life of Ayiti a war criminal. Although a democratically so-called, UN appointed one.

 

And they issued a warrant for his arrest, once.

 

In the year 2002ce on the old Gregorian calendar, the International Criminal Court (I.C.C.) was established in the Hague which is in the Netherlands and the Rome Statute provided for the I.C.C. to have jurisdiction over genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes. The definition of what is a “crime against humanity” for I.C.C. proceedings has significantly broadened from its original legal definition or that used by the United Nations, and Article 7 of the treaty states that for the purpose of this Statute, “crime against humanity” means any of the following acts when committed as part of a widespread or systematic attack directed against any civilian population, with knowledge of the attack:

 

(a) Murder;

(b) Extermination;

(c) Enslavement;

(d) Deportation or forcible transfer of population;

(e) Imprisonment or other severe deprivation of physical liberty in violation of fundamental rules of international law;

(f) Torture;

(g) Rape, sexual slavery, enforced prostitution, forced pregnancy, enforced sterilization, or any other form of sexual violence of comparable gravity;

(h) Persecution against any identifiable group or collectivity on political, racial, national, ethnic, cultural, religious, gender basis or basis of sexual orientation;

(i) Enforced disappearance of persons;

(j) The crime of apartheid;

(k) Other inhumane acts of a similar character intentionally causing great suffering, or serious injury to body or to mental or physical health.

 

War criminals are sometimes also called heads of state. Vile genocidal heads of state are often opposed by fearless freedom fighters; who are accused by the oligarchs they oppose time after time of being “terrorists”. Sometimes the old adage is true about one mans this or that. And sometimes freedom fighters genuinely must resort to terrorism plane and true to bring such tyrants down. It’s a tactic not a belief system.

 

Since heads of state with large standing armies certainly cause more bloodshed and terror than any other faction on earth; and civilians are massacred virtually anytime an armed conflict begins. Really, the only legal differentiation between soldier and terrorist, combatant and civilian is whether they have on uniforms, and whether they have a chain of command.

 

When Avinadav DeBuitléir, first Chief-of-Staff of the Ayitian Emergency Group (S.E.G.) began his long career of freedom fighting in the name of his family, his people and the militant human rights generally; he was just fifteen years old. His uniform then consisted of denim jeans and a dirty grey t-shirt. His chain of command back then was that he was absolutely in charge and every other person that could fire a weapon, throw a rock, swing a machete or set off an improvised explosive device was his “Otriad”.

 

Had you seen the killing fields with your own eyes; had the victims been your family could you ever look yourself in the mirror again and say you did nothing to resist?

 

Avinadav DeBuitléir has very dark skin and is of modest build and rarely has been ever seen to smile. He has grey eyes, which are remarkable to rural villagers and equated with sorcery. He is extremely eloquent. Brief in his utilization of words to articulate his points and visions he speaks a good deal with his actions alone. His estimated age according to his U.A.S. Central Intelligence Agency (C.I.A.) case file is 43, but that is not his real age. The Federal Security Service (FSB) of the Russian Federation places him at 39 and the Israeli Mossad is closest at 33. He speaks nine languages and can communicate in two dozen of the Ayitian regional dialects. He is the first among equals in the realm of Ayitian resistance commanders acting independently of foreign interests. He looks as though he is in his early thirties, but his age is anyone’s guess.

 

He was born in Central Ayiti, in the village of Cange. At some point her traveled to Liberia, then Sudan, then Ethiopia before crossing from Egypt into Israel. He was higher educated in the Israeli city of Tel Aviv. He took refuge in the nation of Israel shortly after the genocide began but was deported back to Ayiti after just five years living in that country after being arrested in a series of mass protests on the status of east African refugees in Israel. That was a good many moons ago and much gun fire and injustice has erupted since.

 

When the Maccoute militia first came to his village it was the nearly winter of his fifteenth year, but in the Caribbean that certainly does not mean it was cold. The villagers had heard that a marauding convoy of Maccoutes with the blessing of the Al-Talleyrand government was pillaging their way across the Southern peninsula. They had heard several dozen villages had already been emptied; their women were savagely raped and mutilated and their men after being forced to witness were lined up and shot. They heard of hands being cut off, heads being rolled down the streets like a Mongol-Cossack invasion, with no need to hide it. No need to bury anyone or cover anything up or purchase quicklime. In fact the New York Times was taking a lot of pictures and was writing about it the whole time, for years. That sure sold papers.

 

This was the fate that awaited the Village of Cange, close as it was to newly discovered petroleum reserve.

 

The village of young Avinadav DeBuitléir had only forty families. Some of the families were nominally Catholic. A few were actual followers of the man Jesus, but most were animist honoring the old spirits and ways of the world before the arrival of blan. Blan means white, or the whites, when Avinadav DeBuitléir uses this word now though, he’s not ever referring to Fenians, Ruus, or Ivories. Like most Afro-Ayitians, the great suffering majority were practitioners of Voudoun.

 

Religion was really less important than the Kombits (work collectives) and blood intertwined loyalties. Anthropologists love to try and explain the Ayiti in regards to “how African” or “how Arabized” or how “Mulatto” a participant faction in the conflict is. The elite in Port Au Prince are nominally all referred to in the internationalist neo-liberal media such like  New York Times as “Muhammadian, Arabized technocrats, Mulattos or Noire Elites ”, but that really doesn’t do justice to how diverse Ayiti is theologically and also the root causes behind the current rounds of genocide. If our typical Ayitian civilian is an African “Voudoun syncretized, Noire (or Neg) agrarian peasant” and the Maccoute Militia is largely composed of “former Ayitian military and secret police of the old dictatorship” then religion certainly has no place here. But interestingly, if you’re a student of either history, or a freelance social-anthropologist, or even just read the paper every day, well then you’d begin to see a phenomenon occurring in not just the Ayiti Genocide and even the later stages of the American Separatist Wars, but in largely every nation of man in the past hundred years.

 

In the end, these atrocities, even the one amongst the blan in the 1940’s that we call World War Two and the Holocaust, have absolutely nothing to do with race and religion. They are about identifying a group that is powerless to defend itself, blaming that group for the strife of the nation, and then moving to exterminate them to shore up power in the nation in question.

 

In Ayiti what is so striking is that this gone on without any real outside intervention since sometime in the 1950’s. The elite in the mountains above Port Au Prince have at one point or another pitted the various major ethnicities at their periphery into constant wars whereby they can control one of the largest swathes of oil, gold and natural gas on the island; largely unexploited until 2010.

Cange village sat on the bank of a wadi, or river bed valley.

A wadi is a dry riverbed that contains water only during times of heavy rain. As a village it possessed little besides livestock and an oral history. It was a black ‘x’ on map of several thousand little black ‘x’s, places Maccoute commanders with their pickup trucks, Kalashnikov rifles and sharp knives were asked to eradicate so Chinese engineers might assist the government at extracting the black gold below deforested mountain ranges.

When they arrived at his village, Avinadav perched atop the highest point in the town, the bell tower of a dusty and abandoned colonizer mission, once a seminary for agriculture now derelict. Avinadav DeBuitléir began to fire at the advancing Maccoute-column. He was a crack shot apparently. He hit seven of them before he had to reload. The mission had been built in rundown monastery as if neither religion nor progress could do much to affect the character of this place in a lasting way. He’d climbed six stories into the bell tower.

He then began picking several of them off from the highest point in miles.

The Maccoute column was less than thirty men, certainly better armed than Avinadav with his dead father’s hidden rifle, the heartiest gun and only’iest in the village.

 

Famni Lavlas, the Peasant resistance has one gun for every 30,000 members and it is the biggest of the opposition underground factions.

 

And they had nowhere to run for cover. Nowhere besides their pickup trucks to gain cover. The sun was rising behind Avinadav’s position, rising into their yellow Maccoute-eyes.  They could tell they were being shot at, and return fire then did, but Kalashnikovs are not known for great accuracy.

 

Maccoute-men are also not known for their bravery. They are not normally fired upon while they do their filthy, evil work. Fifteen year old Avinadav DeBuitléir, the hero of Ayiti kept firing. Firing well after he ran out of ammunition. Then, using a single red flare fired into the air as a signal, the remaining young people of Cange Village, for only the young are quick to mount resistance to anything; several dozen boys in their early and late teens charged the small Maccoute convoy with knives, shovels and pelted the militia men with rocks and lit them ablaze with petrol bombs.

The Maccoute-column retreated in panic large white turbans blowing in the wind, but the ambush was well staged and the remainder were quickly overwhelmed and pulled from their horses and trucks.

When the dust settled, Avinadav DeBuitléir had personally killed nine, wounded five. His band of teenage partisans finished off another fifteen Maccoute only taking four casualties themselves. The surviving wounded had been left bleeding in the sand by their fiend-compatriots who attempted to flee. Avinadav and his friends finished them off with picks and shovels. Then they burned their bodies and hung the dismembered corpses from the poplar trees.

 

And that was how the latest round of human rights résistance in Ayiti began anew. With an ideology of simple strike back, hit and run survivalism. This, historically in its zeal can match any ideological conviction toe for toe, claw for claw.

 

Even rock for tank.

 

We remind you that Ayiti is one of the most ethnically heterogeneous of the world’s nations wide over 400 distinct African ethnic groups brought there as salves and over 2,000 recorded dialects forged into what is called Mother Tongue, or Ayitian Creole by the Blan. That must be said a second and perhaps third time lest the privileged elites of foreign capitals glaze over Africa’s complexity and attempt to disassociate the fullness of African diversity behind the word; “black.” Reduce Ayiti to buzzwords like “resilient poverty”.

 

That makes resistance to a powerful foreign backed oil regime such as President Omar Talleyrand’s a little hard to get effectively underway. The war in Ayiti has on gone without much interruption since the various colonizers left over two hundred and fifteen years ago. The military dictatorship and oligarchy based in the capital has generally always managed to pit one ethnicity against another utilizing an intricate system of imagined racial-religious hatreds. Fighting in the nation’s periphery secures the resources interests of those in the capital. Which until 2010; was exploiting the people of Ayiti for their blood and sweat. Keeping these low intensity genocides going is the basis of the Talleyrand regimes control. Baby Doc; the President for life Francois Duvalier was toppled in 1988 by liberation theologian priests and students with flaming tires.  If as of lately a full blown ethnic extermination is underway, well that’s because the eleven primary factions of the Lavalas peasant resistance movement are becoming fiercer and the Port Au Prince elites far more panicked. Since the People’s Republic of China, the most populous and resource hungry nation on earth covets the oil there under the brown craggy mountain sand, well let’s just say the killing fields have exploded in earnest. The Chinese in their thirst for resources have zero qualms to speak of selling the new Ayitian Military it’s fully modern first line armed hardware. And these tools are put at the disposal of the Maccoute, often these forces overlap.

 

After his boyhood battle at his now long obliterated home village, the slaughter of his friends and all of his extended family, following his several years in the State of Ivory, Avinadav grew up into one of the most fearless leaders of the Ayitian-Emergency-Group (H.E.G.), the largest and most poly-ethnic of the sixteen major armed and unarmed opposition factions united under the banner of Famni Lavalas.

The fearless, largely un armed peasant underground that brought down Duvalier in 1988; Ayiti’s largest political party banned since the coup of 2004; still lead by the liberation theologist Bertrand Aristede, the only person ever democratically elected in the history of Ayiti, elected and toppled twice. Current in solitary confinement in the Canadian built maximum security prison in Croix des Bouquets on trial for corruption and treason, soon they say extricated to France and then The Hague for another black/brown/Balkans despot show trial.

 

If Talleyrand executes him, the whole island will burn.

 

That first battle took place long ago and much as occurred sense. Blood in the eye!

Seeking to raise money and build greater awareness for their struggle and the wholesale murder of his people, Avinadav DeBuitléir flew to the Western coast of the United American States just days before it ceased to be known as the United States of America.

He arrived just one day before the outbreak of the Great Disorder.

The interesting thing is that while President Talleyrand  and several dozen coordinators and military leaders of the Maccoute, along with several thousand other I.C.C. war criminals have gone largely unmolested over a decade after these warrants were issued. Interesting that not a single I.C.C. indicted war criminal is an American, Russian or Chinese citizen?

 

Avinadav DeBuitléir while lecturing was dragged off the stage of Oakland University, body bagged, black hooded, chemically sedated and then shackled in chains. Initially the corporate media ran articles accusing him of “war crimes” in East Africa and linked him to various “Islamist terror networks.” And then several bombs went off mysteriously at the Boston marathon and he disappeared from the public discussion.  And just after that the general uprising began and he was lost in the tumult of slaughter and mass round ups that followed.

He thereafter mysteriously disappeared into a vast and secret prison camp system never presumably to be heard from again. And to most of the people of America it was as if he and his little country, the largest on in Africa; had not ever really existed at all.

 

And then for the next seven years he was ceaselessly tortured for everything they suspected he might know but was so hard thorough all the torture never ever revealed.

 

 

Chapter 12

Fadeeva Street 6, Building 1,

Apt. 67, 2019ce

Moscow

 

The rumbling, crunching, the steel plate grinding, the gritty auditory intrusion and rumbling of the foundations from a convoy passing outside means that tanks and half trucks and fearsome marching mechanical terra-drones are crossing through the district quite near to where we are hiding.

 

I smell tea tree leaves, tiger balm and aftershave on me. I smell her designer perfume but can’t remember what she uses. I guess. Its peony blossoms. The smell of sarsaparilla; its cherry, its frankincense and myrrh.

I want to tear all her clothes off and act like an animal.

She crosses her long legs and lights cigarette.

“No telling,” she says.

And I don’t respond. I just take her in.

“Very interesting,” Dasha notes, “very easy to make Americans forget things. Short attention span as nation. No history of anything.”

“We’re working on it I tell her.”

“Work harder man.”

“History then, give me some history,” I say.

“Your history is far livelier than my history.”

“Well I’ve never heard a story of yours that I didn’t hope might be true. Even the darkest ones. But no dragonfly tales tonight dorogaia.”

“Hmm,” she utters over-thinking, “I will tell you my favorite dragon tale.”

“Like the night we met?”

“Well, then night we met in America was a very different night then the night ten years before it when I watched you; and Emma called Maya and Avinadav called Andrew meet without you knowing I was there,” she grins.

“Intriguing!” I say, “I know for a fact you weren’t there. I met you right before the disorder.”

“But fourth dimensionally speaking, yet I was, and I will tell you the scene I saw out your eyes as you first met your new handlers, and eventual grand conspirators.”

 

“Out my eyes!” I exclaim, “Delightful, yalla then.”

Which means let’s go in Arabic.

She begins; “The year was 2001 of common era. The month was 2nd July on the Gregorian calendar. You were seventeen years old; Emma was eighteen and calling herself by her Canadian stripper name Maya Rose and Andrew DeBuitléir taken in by the Black Ivorites after fleeing from Ayiti was then twenty six and you were all about to hatch a rather zealous and evidently far reaching plot. It was the summertime and Tel Aviv was hot with war fever and intifada.”

 

And here is how it went:

Her Russian accent disappears completely.

It was incredibly hot in Tel Aviv that summer. Humid and hot, not just desert person hot. And the sea offers no relief. I have moved into a room at the Mugrabi Hostel on Allenby Street five blocks from the Opera Towers.

 

I am renting a cot for 33 sheks a night, which is manageable.

I closed early on Thursday night so I could make it to the club at some reasonable hour. For me closing early is closing any time before 11pm. No one even hits the clubs until around midnight in Israel. In New York you’ve done three bars already by this time. It’s the heat that keeps the nightlife hard, cool and strictly nocturnal.

 

            The Deep is located in the heart of Tel Aviv near the monolithic white tower of the Mitzrad Hapaniim; the Ministry of the Interior. The Ministry is the near tallest building in the city, and right below it two streets down is an underground hotspot nestled on a dark side alley below gas lights and red rope. It is known for its wild after hour’s parties. It is run and operated by Black Ivorites. Emma works as a promoter and a partner. For every twenty five people she brings to the club, her boss Andrew puts five hundred shekels in her pocket, which is about $125 American. Apparently Maya is the top promoter. She is able to bring in roughly two hundred people every Thursday and twice that many on the weekend proper.

 

A well-dressed Israeli Ashkenazi stands at the door with the guest list. Groups of drunken long legged Yemeni frekhot are trying to get into the club without paying. They argue in Hebrew, as I wait behind them to get in. The street is empty besides the girls, the gatekeeper and me. A Black male with a diamond earring in his left ear emerges from behind the red curtain. I assume he is Ethiopian, until I hear him talk.

 

“What the hell are your trifling bitches goin’ on about?”

It is the first time I have heard a trace of the Ebonics language in over a year.

“Excuse me,” I interject.

“Can I help you, cracka jack?” says a young black thug with the enormous diamond earring probably but not necessarily from the land of Zirconium.

I haven’t heard that since New York.

“I’m looking for Maya Rose. She said I was on your list.”

Like some fabulous ghetto St. Peter, this Middle Eastern gangster looks at his list scornfully. He shakes his head looking bored and tired. And then Maya emerges from behind the curtain in a red and white dress, hot and fabulous, tan olive skin.

“Dizzy, this one’s with me,” she says to him and takes my hand.

We walk past the black velvet rope down into a catacomb below the streets into a place that was once a blast shelter. The cavernous basement is packed wall to wall with Israelis who are black and brown. This bunker is dimly lit with red lights and strobes flashing to the beat of the music. There are huge black couches against the walls and white swings installed at the edge of the dance floor. The DJ is spinning Old School American hip-hop music; Tribe called Quest.

I take a seat at the bar with Maya. Other than her I’m the only Caucasian in the place.

“What are you drinking?” she asks me.

“Gold Star.”

“Gone pretty native I see,” she smiles.

She waves down the bartender and whispers something in his ear. I try to pass her some NIS shekel ten spot coins but she looks at me like I’m crazy.

“Drinks are on Andrew,” she says.

“Andrew is the guy who runs this place?”

“Indeed.”

“American?”

“Ayitian. Well, Ivorite now. He used to be from Ayiti, but his whole family got wiped out in the genocide and he snuck over the border to get here and got adopted by the Black Ivorites. Andrew and half the other people who work for this club are Black Ivorites from a little city in the Negev named Demona where the government keeps the nuclear weapons.”

She worked that in there is fluidly.

“You mean, the Ethiopian Ivories.”

“No, there’s a huge difference between an Ethiopian and a Black Ivorite. One’s humble and from Africa and one will call you a cracker and has a nasty jump shot.”

“Where did they come from?”

“Chicago and New York mostly. That was about forty years ago. There are maybe a couple thousand of them living in Israel now. Many like Andrew and other African refugees that end up here don’t have any citizenship. The State of Ivory still doesn’t believe they’re Ivories.’

“State of Ivory doesn’t believe a lot of people are Ivories.”

“It deports them whenever it can. Andrew built up the Deep’s rep for the past year or so a haven for Israeli Blacks who want to rock out. Ethiopians don’t have too many of their own places and I’m sure you’ve seen what happens when a Black guy dances with a White or Russian girl.”

A motherfucking zoot suit riot, throw back a bottle of beer!

 

We drink more and we dance a bit, her much better than me. The hip hop turns into jazz soul and I call her Maya even though she introduced herself originally a week ago as Emma. Use Maya in front of everybody except Andrew she said quietly. I get introduced to a few dozen ‘Black Ivorites’. She introduces me to everyone as Zachariah. I am thrilled to see something like this here. I’ve seen some pretty raw racist shit in the past few weeks of Tel Aviv nightlife. As the night goes on I realize that all of Israel’s minorities are rocking out down here. No one’s white except Maya and I.

 

I finally meet Andrew the Hustler, as some of the Ivorites call him, the man behind this little operation who introduces himself as Avinadav. In a manic little rant about names while rolling up a spliff, he tells me ‘everyone calls him Andrew, but he’s been thinking, dreaming really, that it’s better to use his ‘Hebrew name’ and not his ‘Babylon slave name.’ He is related via adoption to a good many people here. He is the big brother who came to the desert to the big city and made good for the rest of them. He comes across as generous, maybe to a fault.

 

It is really after hours now, like 5 am.

 

Maya, Andrew called Avinadav, and             I are hanging out in the courtyard across from the club as Andrew rolls up another spliff. It is the first time I’ve seen weed being smoked in Israel.

 

“I mean, I’m not saying that a Black guy can’t go to the G-SPOT or the Gat Ramon or any other jump off rave psyche trance party. It happens, it do. But, if they wanna kick game to some Ashkenazi or Russia sister then its problems nine through ten. I mean shit; this Eretz isn’t South Africa or Southside bad. I mean it’s not legislated. I’m just sayin’ all my girlfriends not from the community in Demona are Yemeni girls. They knew about being Black before the Ethiopians and other African refugees got here. Shit, they think of themselves as Black. I think of um like Puerto Ricans actually. I mean the Black man will always be everybody’s favorite nigger. But the Canaanites are givin’ us a run. I mean racism ain’t shit next to holy war. I want chu’ to know I’m not fucked up and high. I’m just wired a bit ‘cause I couldn’t sleep last night. I mean I talk, talk, talk but I feel like you got some shit to say kid.”

 

 

Both Andrew and Maya call me kid or kiddo, but neither is much older than me. Maya is 18 and Andrew is 26.

 

 

“There’s hate based on race and a hate based on religion. Those are just pretexts for political leaders to consolidate powers. Likud and the governing coalition can play ball for years by keeping everybody divided. I mean the Russians, Yemenis and Ethiopians all live in the same shit neighborhoods and go to same run down hospitals, but they can’t wait to fight each other over any stupid thing. The Canaanite Christians, Canaanites in Gaza, Canaanites in the West Bank and the so-called ‘Arab Israelis’ are not even different peoples and they can’t even work together on the uprising. Bedouins and Druze are Arabs but have more in common with the Likud coalition government than with each other. For a nation of eight million there’s quite a bit of disunity.”

 

“We only be unified over beating’ back the other Arab states. Even Canaanites hate the other Arabs. The Jordanians butchered um in ’71. The Lebanese butchered um in ’83, and any person with an open mind knows they aren’t gonna give the Canaanites a country once the Ivories get ‘driven into the sea’. Egypt would take the Negev and the Coast until Ashkelon. Jordan would take the West Bank to the Sea, and Syria would swallow up what was left. Like a football those Canaanites get thrown around to be a thorn in our side. Fools of prophesy.”

“So you consider yourself an Israeli then?” I ask him.

“Even if they don’t consider me one. I mean I ain’t even got Ayitian citizenship, I was never registered. I grew up in Demona. I was reborn in Demona and I ain’t even got a valid todat zeeoot. I’m a resident alien. Don’t even get me started on our troubles back in Ayiti. It was worse before. The state has at least somewhat accepted we ain’t goin’ back to Chicago or Africa.”

Maya barely says a word. We both just listen. I guess she is sizing things up too. Andrew is both articulate and wildly knowledgeable about theology and political science. Maya hasn’t gotten drunk even though she never seems to stop drinking.

 

Finally, when everybody is gone except the three of us; the weed runs out. And Maya says, “Alright Andrew, Avinadav. Drop the fucking ghetto act and let’s take this one to breakfast.”

 

And dawn breaks soon after and Andrew called Avinadav, and Emma called Maya, and I traveling under the name of dead Warsaw ghetto fighter named Zachariah Artstien are now having breakfast at a lonely outdoor café on lower Allenby Street.

 

Avinadav starts right back up.

“So, you a change maker then? That’s a damn good thing ‘cause I’m a change maker too. Something has to give or break because it can’t be like this much longer. To fathom one day one of us bringing a family up in this Balagan. Unthinkable. I mean the three of us, we ain’t gonna see no small change. We’ll soon see a great fight; see a lot of death, but nothing’ we can believe in is ready. We all gotta lay a foundation for the future generations, gotta give our children a higher ground to fight from.”

“Andrew” chuckles.

“But really now, both of you need to try and call me Avinadav even if the others won’t.”

I nod and light one of Emma’s cigarettes. Was I to call her Maya in front of Avinadav even when he called her Emma? Like me she responds quickly enough to both.

She’s looking into me. I don’t know how to describe it any other way.

“So what brought you to Israel, Maya?” I ask her.

“I’m not sure I’ll tell you the really. People are obsessed with this notion that God has the power to dole out property rights,” says Maya, “but I’m mostly here for the beaches.”

“Sure as a pillar of salt once was a woman, God willed this land to us,” interjects Avinadav, “If you ask some Israelis, they’ll tell you that God promised us this land. Ask a Muslim they’ll say they’ve always been here and it is Allah’s will that they remain. Christians wanna take the whole planet anyway. Muslims too, but mark my words, God gave us this stretch to be for the Hebrews.”

“Hebrews?” I ask.

“The title of our thirteen tribes collectively.”

“You mean the Ivories?” questions Maya.

“I think its twelve tribes,” I mention.

“That’s not the proper way we’re called,” he retorts.

“It’s semantics. Ivories, Ivorites, Hebrews. What’s the difference? Weren’t you born Muslim in Ayiti” Maya says with a laugh.

“When the tribes came back from exile in Babylon in the 5th century BCE there were only three tribes left, Judah, Simeon, Benjamin, and the Levites. The nine others, there were thirteen sister, were lost in Babylon, which means they intermarried, got inter-raped, converted or just never came back. Judah, which is also the tribe that Yeshua the messiah and King David come from, rose to prominence. Levi was the priestly tribe and Benjamin, they all had red hair and now they look Ethiopian. The Romans clashed repeatedly with the Hebrews in 66 CE during the first of three Roman Ivoryish Wars. Which led to rivers of blood, the leveling of the Second Temple and all of Jerusalem to its foundations, diaspora, rape and slavery. In 132 CE during the Bar Kokhba Revolt our people wiped out four Roman legions, the Romans knew these weren’t a people to fuck around with. Judah was the largest tribe so when Masada and later Betar finally fell and the full decimation and Diaspora all began, they derogatorily called our proud Hebrew people the ‘Yahuds’ or Ivories. It was like nigger, a slur imposed in bondage. Now think about the etymology. ‘ISH,” is kind of like. ChildISH, kind of like a child. IvoryISH, kind of like a IVORY. I’m a Hebrew. Even if I was raised Muslim, even if I grew up my whole like being told I was from a place called Ayiti. I’m Hebrew. You two are Hebrew. Not only is Ivoryish a watered-down degrading title, it implies that we are all from the tribe of Yehuda. But we could be from Gad, or Manasseh, or Ephraim or Asher or any of ‘um. It’s like the Nigerians. Or the whole country of Niger. Sure sounds like Nigger to me. Where did they come up with that name I wonder,” he says sarcastically.

 

“I don’t really care whose land Hashem says it is as long as the violence eventually ends,” says Maya.

“Do you believe in Hashem, Maya?” Avinadav asks her point blank.

“Every other Friday.”

“Pardon my candor, but what has Hashem done lately for us?” I mutter.

 

“That’s a loaded question if I ever heard one,” she says.

“Yeah, but let’s answer it anyway,” Avinadav says.

“Well Zach, I suppose not a whole lot. But if there is actually is Hashem, who are we to interpret her actions?” Maya puts in.

“Her?” I ask.

“Hey, if you guys wanna rename whole religious ethnic groups, I feel free to de-masculinize the so-called almighty.”

“That’s fine, fuck the dumb shit” smiles Avinadav.

“Look, to me HaShem isn’t like a be-all-end-all safety net. You don’t get blessed by just believing in her; It. You have to trust It works through the actions of good people more than miracles,” Maya responds.

“And there will be more miracles,” states Avinadav banging on the table.

“I’m not ruling out the existence of HaShem. All I’m saying is that maybe Its given up on us,” says Maya

“How do you figure?” Avinadav demands again attracting the attention of other people in the café more for being Black and loud than for just being loud.

“What if HaShem decided humanity just isn’t worth all the grief we cause. What if it looks at us as a failed experiment and stopped devoting time to divine interventions and the like?” Maya says.

“I’m with that opinion,” I say, “I don’t find it so hard to believe.”

“So you think HaShem has bailed on us?” Avinadav asks us.

“Completely,” she smirks.

“Don’t blaspheme and sound ridiculous at the same time,” Avinadav mumbles in a grin.

“Well let’s not hold our breath on that one. I’m just doing my part working on that miracle in case HaShem holds out,” I answer.

“What kind of miracle, kid?” Avinadav asks.

“The miracle of resistance done right.”

“I like that. The boy’s articulate and totally insane,” Avinadav weighs in.

“I like that about Zach, too,” she says.

“Most people do I bet. Do you ever wonder the purpose of it all, Maya?” Avinadav asks.

“The purpose of what?”

“The purpose of Hashem sending this kid our way?”

“Folks, I’m really not that much younger than either of you.”

“It’s totally random. He just wants to nail me,” she smiles, “There’s no purpose, Andrew.”

“Avinadav.”

“Sorry.”

“Folks, I’m sitting right here.”

“If there is no purpose and there’s no greater meaning to it all, it is pretty pointless to be alive. I mean the things he says are the things this country needs to hear right now,” Avinadav says to Maya.

“He’s just young and you believe in HaShem too strongly. I’m a cynic. I like watching you two talk though.”

“Cynics are fallen idealists frustrated with the failure of their original ideals,” I interject.

“Excuse me?” she utters, “I would like to say I still believe in the potential for a better world, but lately I’ve begun to doubt whether humans would actually tolerate a better world.”

“Our kind is often very-very fucked,” Avinadav reflects openly.

“Only mostly fucked. There’s always high potential for eleventh hour change making,” I say.

“I’m not discounting the fact that there are many good people out there, but certainly not the majority. And less than four dozen in the country that would join what you are talking about. Most people just want to go about their lives and not have to think big thoughts about brave new worlds and the governing factors behind the human nature and if HaShem taps people to participate in history or a higher plan. You’re making demands that never get answered, Zach. Sure people come up with relatively comprehensible concepts explaining certain things about our existence, but even Socrates was working bound the shadows of the cave,” Maya responds.

“What’s your point?” I ask.

“It’s hard to keep the attention of the masses. There is something wrong with the world, but the good people, the heroes you hope to find aren’t interested employing the right tactics for change. Everyone’s trying to survive underground,” Maya tells us.

“What tactics would you employ?” Avinadav asks me.

“The most zealous ones I could find,” I retort.

“Such as?” Maya asks.

 

“You know. Something that tells the people of this country that we rebels aren’t fucking around. Like targeting members of the Oligarchy in Israel and Palestine; the war profiteers, the demagogues, the criminals and the collaborators and executing them one by one on national television. Clearing out our own house first.”

They stare at me for a second. Then at each other and then they go on.

“Spoken like a true zealot,” Avinadav states.

“And what the high fuck would that accomplish,” Maya asks us.

“It would tell the world that no one is impervious to God’s justice,” Avinadav responds for me.

“It would tell the people that the oligarchy is not invulnerable. That we can hit our violators in the face and the pocket,” I say for myself.

Maya takes off her dark glasses and gives us both a ‘you’re both talking like murderous terrorists’ look as she lights another cigarette.

“And then for your second round of organized anarchic calamity?” she inquires under her breath.

“Occupy the temple mount with a few hundred fighters then proceed to blow up the Kotel, Dome of the Rock, and Church of the Holy Sepulchre so no one had any misconceptions about how unholy this war was gonna get,” I say coldly.

“That one I like more,” Maya says, “And for a grand finale black female Jesus could come back with a fleet of gold plated tanks to relieve our hunted and abandoned fighters with the force of her miracles?” she laughs.

“A black Jesus and a female Mahdi,” Avinadav corrects her stone faced.

“There would be a mass retreat into the Negev then over the border into the deep desert of Sinai to regroup. We will unite with the million Bedouin partisans already in insurgency with the Mubarak military regime and capture the major coastal cities with the aid of Iran, a natural ally against the Arab military dictators and the Israeli State. Then we’d capture everything south of Be’er Sheva. Via a coordinated general strike and massive defection within the army, we’d take the central districts and cut the country in half before closing in on Jerusalem.”

“Ah, well. What would you do about the Canaanites and other Arab states that would love to annihilate us while we civil war amongst ourselves,” she says cold and sarcastic, “aided by our new friends in the Islamic Republic of Iran, of course,” is her snide inquisition.

“Well it won’t ever work unless the Canaanites are involved from the beginning within the rebel leadership. We will have to help invalidate Fatah and their Al’Aksa Martyrs Brigade because they’re secular, corrupt puppets. We will have to eliminate Islamic Jihad completely because they’re too nihilistic about their fundamentalism or at least drive them into merging with Hamas.”

They are both staring at me vaguely speechless by my choice of allies no doubt.

“Our obvious ally is Hamas, who will soon emerge as the premiere representative of the Canaanite Intifada and will have to be brought to the bargaining table by pressure from the Islamic Republic of Iran. Hamas, ironically enough, will be our closest ally, the only Canaanite player to fully mobilize their people for this endgame.

“Then we just have to defeat the I.D.F., Shin Bet, Mossad, political machinations of the Knesset and American forces, of course,” sarcastically interjects Maya.

“As I said. After the south and the Sinai are in the hands of the rebel alliance, much of the I.D.F. will join the confederated rebels after the general strike begins if we have properly done or organizing with due diligence. The Knesset and their American supporters will order the I.D.F. to end the strike, and open fire on their own people. Which will seal the fate of the Ivoryish State, America’s 51st. And light the fire a global uprising.”

“How in hell could you even dream of allying with Hamas?! They want to murder us all. I think you have not been in country long enough to know your people’s will well enough,” Maya scoffs.

“They’re led by Muslim fundamentalists. That means they won’t be co-opted by the secular Arab dictatorships that are American proxies. They hate the leaders of Iraq, Egypt, Syria and the Emirates more than they hate the Israelis,” Avinadav interjects.

“And that’s sort of my point. We want to unite a lot of people who are pretty fundamentalist about everything they believe in,” I say.

She looks at me like I am a mad man.

“Then like magic, and a lot of miracle magic is involved in your plan, these groups fall in line into a united confederacy and then later a governing body of some strange pan-middle eastern free state called called Pal’ Israel?” Maya scowls in disbelief.

“Well actually it would be the “Pal’Israelian Free State” if you wanted to be more unified in the national title,” states Avinadav. “But everyone knows that’s just called Zion anyway. That will never fly with the Arabs though, calling it Zion.”

“What’s in a name?” Maya smirks, “when we have such wild imaginations and so much untested magic.”

“Whatever you build on the Hebrew side you gotta build in Gaza and the West Bank as well. Anywhere with a large Canaanite or Hebrew Diaspora you need to send delegates to address. In New York; in Baghdad; Paris, Deerborn and also Tehran. When the uprising begins it will begin with direct action, proceed to a general strike, and then open revolt in the defense forces and then a rapid move to realign the new nation with the third world, the non-aligned movement and human rights.”

“So like Beirut in 1982?” she says, “Or more like Iran in 1979, but replace Shi’a fundamentalism with populist nationalism founded in human rights and democracy?”

“More like Ayiti in 1791,” I tell her.

“Does he think it’s quite sexy when he says violent radical shit to strangers?” Emma says to Avinadav.

“Real sexy,” Avinadav says.

“Andrew the Hustler” is thinking hard watching a younger, whiter version of himself talk dangerously. He decides not to tell the kid anything about his teenage years in Ayiti. His personal motivations for a holy war.

Maya put her huge black sunglasses back on and is sipping on her coffee while smoking a Marlboro menthol cigarette. A waiter brings out a large platter of hardboiled eggs, a pitcher of orange juice, another of Turkish coffee and something sort of like hash browns and Israeli salad, which consists of diced cucumbers, avocado, tomatoes, Zetar spice and onions.

We’re all eating from the same plate.

“What’s the blue print then, boys? You’ve fallen in love. I can see it in your eyes,” Emma says to us.

“Well then, Zachariah. You got some big crazy fucking ideas. HaShem sent you to us. That I know. I got the means. She’s got the will when she’s willing. We can talk all morning but fuck the dumb shit, as I like to say, what you playin’ with here?”

 

I am smoking deeply from one of Emma’s Marlboro Lights.

 

“I’ve been dreaming for a long time about making a stand, about a small group of people showing the world that we need not live our lives like slaves lashed to a rolling engine of war. I know this in my heart. If we can rally the wretched of this broken land behind a banner of unity, then the land of tears and blood will yield the milk and honey promised,” I tell them.

“Bottom line. What’s the very first step?” Avinadav asks.

“I did not come here to lead. I came here to serve my people as a front line fighter and lend my voice to this cause,” I tell him.

“Well what’s the first course of action that might bind us together,” Maya asks me, “And what’s our final objective?” she asks, “how far would you like to take this little uprising?”

“What do you want long-term, Zachariah? What are we conspiring to really do? I want you to say it a simple sentence so we three can digest the severity of what we plan to set in motion,” Maya says.

“Say it once and never again ‘til it’s real,” Andrew says.

I smother my cigarette butt in the cheap grey plastic ash tray.

“Our aim is to topple the government of Israel and use this Promised Land as a base to export a global uprising to secure universal human rights,” I tell them.

It’s finally dawn. July, 3rd 2001.

“I’m with it,” Avinadav says his eyes never blinking, “like a nuclear armed Middle Eastern Cuba.”

He looks to Emma for her stance and approval.

“And of course I am too,” says Maya, “somebody’s gonna have to make sure women don’t get cut out as usual when the freedom starts getting handed out,” Emma grins darkly. “I hope you got some real good magic, kid.”

“Or hope someone is on our side that is good with those miracles,” I respond.

 

“You bring the New York magic, Avinadav will worry about the miracles and we will find the zealots together,” says Maya Solomon.

 

Dasha Andreavna drops back into Russian.

 

“And with dawn broken, your intentions made plain and your basic plot articulated you all then set yourself on a war path. And within one year both you and Avinadav would be deported back to Africa and America respectively, all your followers would be imprisoned or killed and Maya herself would be crucified and then disappear into thin air,” she says as if testifying to something she was a part of.

 

“And that is story of how the modern Z.O.B. was born or reborn if you over-stand me. In near perfect detail, if I am not mistaken,” says Dasha Andreavna as if she was there.

 

“How did you know all that I,” I say, or really exclaim.

 

“Because Maya Solomon the Tzadikk ha Dror told me right after she met you. She told me everything and let me see it from her eyes, from your eyes and from his.”

 

‘Zounds,’ says my silence.

“Now put me in your mouth,” she says.

 

 

Chapter 13

Fadeeva Street 6, Building 1,

Apt. 67, 2019ce

Moscow

 

The light flickers.

 

She’s really been letting me have it.

It’s on some kind of timer to conserve power. It isn’t connected to Moscow’s central power grid. The Fire Station informs us that there are nationwide black outs and that the civil unrest has spread to St. Petersburg, Yekaterinburg, Novosibirsk, Omsk, Nizhy, and Rostov-on-Don! We have a telescreen somewhere in the house, but frankly once the carnality and the drinking and the story telling got under way, current events have been the least of my concerns.

As Orwell once famously said, “we who remember the past will also control the future” or something like that.

When her story comes to conclusion, she jumps up, erupting in some new manic burst of energy. I love her gyrations; her naked glory. I had taken in the story ponderously quiet. The two tales spun of my mentors and dear departed friends Maya and Avinadav were quite comeuppance by the revelation that she knew every word of the first failed plot.

 

And now reanimated it is my turn.

 

Her foot presses down upon my chest. In her hands she holds the leather bound poetic volume I gave her right before my death.

 

“Do you want war stories or love poems?” she asks me.

She presses down harder bearing her weight upon me naked as the day she was so gloriously brought into the world. And I wish to fall upon her and tenderly kiss every aspect of her body, lay my lips to work upon the insides of her thighs.

But, she stares down at me like a stern and glorious Valkyrie.

“You plan to compose or simply read what I’ve written in your name?” I ask her.

Several times on the Brighton Boardwalk she’d read to me the works of Vladimir Mayakovsky. Before I spoke Russian and I had to follow along in English from a version that laid out his poems in the two antagonistic languages page by page.

She just presses her weight on me and leers.

“Well dammit man pick for me!”

“Read me Mayakovsky again then if you won’t compose a story.”

I do not flinch and relentlessly she steps upon my heart.

“Which one?” she asks.

Backbone Flute.”

            She shakes her head.

Her blond locks sweeping about.

Cloud in Trousers,” she counters.

It is I who shake my head in negation.

Breuklyn Bridge,” she asks peering into me applying her voluptuous pressure.

She makes herself weightless. Retracts her offensive. Blows me a coy kiss.

“As you like. You are stunning too stunning for much resistance,” I stammer.

“I am. What did you do to deserve so much of me?”

In my mind’s eye I see myself fighting through a whole carload of gangsters on a speeding train with a brief case and a ball pin hammer; I see myself jumping out of plane over Moscow a red and blue parachute erupting behind me. I see the hail of gun fire that cut me down at the Millennium Theatre. I see the armies of Caesar and Napoleon. I see the ghetto on fire. I see myself beaten within an inch of my life forced on my shattered knees to watch soldiers gang raping my wife, and then two shots to my head.

“Everything I could think of.”

“I am your total muse.”

“And the only reminder of my humanity,” I tell her and she seizes my hand to squeeze.

She then pounces beside me and thrusts the volume back to me.

“Declare it again! Read me a poem that without any rhyming declares how I own your mechanical heart completely. And after that I will give you Mayakovsky or anyone else, I will sing you songs; I will even make your war stories sound tame with mine. Tell me again that you will love me forever!”

 

“Of course. Until I have no words left at all.”

 

I rise to my feet sturdy upon the Jerusalem tile of safe house floor, and outside the snow continues to drape us under its unending glory. The tanks rolling through the streets and bugs in the wall are all upended in attention by the glorious woman in front of me.

 

 

Dasha,

 

 

I interrogated you with Newport cigarettes pursed at my lips.

And you sized me up like a slave on the market block.

 

Emergently my covered wagon has been jettisoned and set ablaze by a blonde haired savage,

A mercenary in clad multicolored finery,

With war paint under both blue eyes.

 

Brandishing a spear and also a bottle of Russian Standard.

 

She’s since infused my life with her Red Bull risings and cynical parables on the subject of snow ball fighting with General Winter.

 

“Drink!” she whispers out her demands.

 

“Until in naked oblivion you can pronounce my name in full glory!

Take in all its parts and thus know my demons and also my saints.

Extoll me as your eternal choicest muse. Make me your goddess and savior, secretly.”

 

And thus I went to work.

 

My pen and pipes, belting out prose, parable and promises to fight for her to the death.

 

And she beat me half to tears with the venyike.

 

In a wild Peony Ambush,

She put herself upon me,

Robbed me bandit blind.

Of my heart, and second soul as I made art to celebrate the coming of she into me.

 

Penniless as a proverb.

 

I marshaled all remaining vagabond tendencies into the rigorous use of my baller ball point pen.

 

Woman, you are a golden locked lioness.

Boxing with me, you strike incite and nerves unnerving furious fascination.

Womb to tomb!

You Caspian blue terrorist!

Thing of profoundest beauty!

Drag me down the Brighton Boardwalk and set me as an effigy of hopeless romanticism on the Sands of Sea Gate!

Sky high on fire.

Take me to pyre.

 

When our correspondence first began in September it was like a report on a Cherokee Indian massacre.

Communicated via the passing of notes.

We conducted then a lively human traffic in roses and poems and also in promises.

 

A triangle trade.

 

You dripped wax on me shortly after.

I wrote you a play.

“I will try to believe any stories I tell you and you will make me immortal!”

In words and in dreams.

Pull!

I produced on demand and she shot each product down.

Exploding clay pigeons with poems tied to paw, and smoke signals playing out on the prairie skies, steppes and later the chalk marks made on the promenade off Banner Ave were the guarded displays of my awe.

 

More fire!

She proclaimed, by not proclaiming.

 

You tied me to a post and blind folded me so that in a mirror I’d not see my manly limitations, my grinning devils leering.

 

I, the artist would then yell fire!

 

And poems would be fired off, absconding into night with you as their target; their words would roll out the barrel of my wit without even seeking to dress themselves in the fine garments of rhyme.

 

The essential quality of a muse is that she will be perfect.

 

While at the same time being deeply flawed.

 

At times she will desire to taste you and be fueled on your fluids, intoxicate herself on your writhing talents taking the form of depiction and futurist words.

She is thrilled to test my will, taking me into the shadows of some late night smoke inundated poorly lit alley way.

Kissing me to tears under gas lit wind swept boulevards.

At other times, she teases out my rough savant best by ignoring me completely.

Make me create in some wilderness cave like a mad Hebrew prophet,

In some Warsaw ghetto tenement, create brave new worlds, burn apart in the steams of the bath house old dead tragic pasts until the proper 13th hour when she calculates just when I will be ready to perform.

Then dripping I emerge!

The greatest show; the highest form of art is after all the private performance you give her,

While these are not immortal, their audience of one is the source, the very foundation and subject of all the war effort!

 

The muse is not there to please you.

 

She is there to drag you uphill, in an assault on the profane glory of false gods and the smallness of men who plot in listless towers.

Oh yes!

Only an artist can challenge the gods and the shackles of mortality they put upon us.

 

The essential quality of the artist is that he, or she, will possess some skill and some embattled implements that when rendering her muse perfections, and converting her human flaws into deeply troubling, yet inspiring cautionary apropos that;

This bi-pole, this anomaly of the creative process will then allow the artist the widest canvas to cast her into the form of goddess, a celestial being, a savior, a seductress, or an angel.

 

The artist regardless of his weaponry will be fighting his way up Bunker Hill.

 

When he gets there he will declare:

 

“Love me until your love overwhelms the white gates of heaven.  Ravish me blind until I only see myself in the blue ocean of your eyes!”

 

Her greatest strength as a subject is her ability to assume the form of desire but also to unleash a savage and indiscriminate rejection of the artist unless each piece produced is an improvement on her immortalization.

 

For were the muse to be a submissive Siberian doll.

An inanimate beauty. Well that is just an act of painterly masturbation.

 

Useless to me.

Please excuse for,

My Muse makes art a contact sport!

And in the steams of the Banya I assume the form of Krepki Mushik,

Strong man making fearless art.

She’s a most capable gypsy partisan.

A hooligan seductress.

A wild eyed savage, she holds herself up as a virtuous courtesan, lady at heart, source of great and the granddaughter of Ivoryish Baroness.

Under her folds I do utter when the steams clear and no one occupies the coffin ship but we:

 

I’ll Lick your tits and drink Borjomi!

 

And then compose a body of Amerikanski poems that will put all previous to shame.

 

 

Poem #012: Muse of the Brighton Bathhouse.

Dedicated to Dasha Andreavna. 

 

In loving awe,

 

 Vasa

 

 

Quietly, she puts a finger to her lips; points to herself and then traces with her free hand an upside down heart. Then points to me with bright blue eyes glowing. And perhaps it is only moments like these in which I do not mind the idea of living forever.

 

She gives me this look, it’s a wonderful look and I can tell that she’s waiting for a new compliment of some kind, though it is I who has performed all the labor of latest storytelling and poem reading. It is a look well known by all men who well appreciate the company of women, though Slavic women possess in particular a complete speechless vocabulary of body language and ocular “communicative” designated for the invitation of flattery. Verbal flattery being the least evocative. She could listen to me praise her for years, but only via deeds could she accept it as real. She revels in my awe sometimes. But she wants me to acknowledge her loyalnost.

 

Her participation in the uprising was hardly an act of idealism.

 

She also wants to see me acknowledge just how far she’s come in accepting “the blacks” from her more youthful days when we met last at the Mehanata Social Club in New York and she declared them all a “race of criminal barbarians incapable of civilized behavior, much less of guarding the bloodlines of prophets and potential messiahs.”

“Foreshadowing?” Dasha asks, “Is that the right word?”

Da,” I reply. This means yes.

 

“You love me a lot, this certain. I want another kind of story. Less about rebel chornay, more about we Russians in your next round,” she declares.

 

“As you wish,” I smile.

“Don’t princess bride me man, I know I’m breaking turn, but I want a story about the great infamous hit list. About the conspiracy hatched on the dawn of Breuklyn’s liberation where to secure human right a band of killers were sent out wild to violate them in their fullest. ”

“No more small talk?”

“Big talks from here on out. Big specific talks! With me and metal insects in the wall as our witness.”

“The retribution list or the purge list?” I ask. Another way to say; our crimes or those of the oligarchy.

“The purge list first.”

“The ante upped so early in the game!”

“Oh we have time. I suspect the curfew will not end with anything short of a brutalizing knock on our safe house door. But in the meantime. More fire. More tales. If I become bored I can always put you to work lying on my back.”

I stick my tongue out at her, which I know she despises unless it is between her legs. I kiss her on her cheek and then retreat quickly.

“They made a list and they checked it twice. It was a list of one hundred and four men who had to pay with their lives for a series of crimes against humanity,” I explain with glee.

“They coordinated it all online via ‘the Anonymous’.”

“Who are these anonymous ones?” she asks with a smug little grin.

I go right into the story knowing full well just how savvy via server she truly is.

“It began and it ended in this very city where we so sumptuously now hide.”

“Moscow!” she exclaims.

A true Russian patriot.

 

 

Chapter 14

Sandooney Bathhouse, 2018ce

Moscow

 

 

Aqua pebbles drip down the almond colored marble walls of the cavernous steam bath house. One can feel ones waters escape them. The white sheets of winter falling outside have no effect on them here. It’s the day before Yom-Kippur so everyone with two souls is trying to get their house in order on a tight time budget. Ysiad Ferraris, a Dominikani convert to the Yid-prayer-ways meets an old friend in the Sandooney Bathhouse in the capital city of the Russian Federation:

 

Moscow!

 

He is there to pledge money and first line armaments toward an irregular invasion of Ayiti and the Dominican Republic. He does so begrudgingly and not before terse deliberation is carried out systematically.

 

Ysiad is in the Russian Federation carrying out his perpetually shady and often aggrandized, although admittedly highly lucrative business deals and a man named Sebastian Adon, traveling under the paper work of “Vasyli Pveada” is in Moscow doing wet work. Both kinds. With both hands and no hands. Take that to mean whatever you will. His Otriad, an irregular paramilitary brigade holding seven districts of rebel Breuklyn, periodically executes a number of high level human traffickers and assorted war criminals before the high holidays and it’s been a black bag, grey mask kind of weekend. The long arms of the Breuklyn Otriad stretch wide around the world, and on the killing moon daggers are known to fall upon slavers, splayed in public to make an example of their crimes against humanity.

 

It began as a retribution act, had progressed to a global demonstration of will and reach, now it was just a bloody hobby sport, on his end at least. A man has to stay busy in his death and exile. The inter-web says 103 targets have been killed over the past three years, but certainly his squad is responsible for only a part of that bloody accomplishment.

 

In case one was keeping track of such things there are an estimated 47 million humans living in various forms of chattel slavery and it’s a growth industry. History will prove the great African extraction and serfdom itself far more benign. It will shortly beat out the transshipment of narcotics and street pharmaceuticals in profitability. Executing functional middle men on the supply end of the chain is not nearly as effective as killing the brokers on the demand side. Unfortunately the variable of most importance is men in first world nations purchasing sex and pornography. And that is so widespread retributive action would be completely confused with indiscriminate killings.

 

Sebastian and his Unit 808 for the past three years have been hunting down and liquidating targets all over Europe, Latin America and the former Soviet Union. Supported by an anonymous network of hackers and devoted Information & Intelligence Case Officers back in Breuklyn Soviet. They’ve left a very bloody trail of terror doing their part in the global purge of the corporate oligarchy’s worst henchmen and profiteers.

 

Sebastian’s regular partner on such messy assignments is the light skinned Ayitian Watson Entwissle. He has dagger sharp eyes and freckles. He dresses completely in blacks and grey tones except when the two of them make light attempts at leave and leisure. Mr. Entwissle is seated in the lobby waiting area above the steam baths. He has a burner strapped to his inner left torso and a concealed Sicarri blade affixed to his left wrist.

 

A Sicarri blade is like a long extending pin which extends from the size of a pen to the length of a forearm. Were you so inclined you could plunge the blade into a person’s heart from behind, insert it into their ear, or use it to administer heart stopping or clot forming drugs.

 

Typically, the kills are made in crowded public places like nightclubs, sporting events and markets. Generally by jamming the Sicarri blade into the base of the skull or through the ear of the target. But that kind of flourish is not what their infamous Unit 808 is known for.

 

They are now experts at making bad people die seemingly natural deaths. The blade can also far more subtly inject medication or radioactive isotope intramuscularly.

 

Getting away with murder has a lot to do with hiding in plain sight. And to cover bases, having a virtually unlimited expense account, a wide network of spies and sympathizers, as well as a flicker mask goes along way too.  A flicker mask makes the face indistinguishable on closed circuit television cameras. It can also be programed via its Nano-chips to project other faces. It has the texture of skin tight grey colored form fitting cloth.

 

“The Anonymous” drew up a long, long list of women and men guilty of crimes against humanity responding by the first directive issued by the so-called militant human rights movement to “draw up a black list of the violators”. It then circulated their photographs and their addresses if available. It circulated their locations via GPS if their sim card numbers or IP addresses became available. It froze their bank accounts when possible. It detailed their crimes and invited anyone with a weapon to carry out justice. The Sicarri dagger men of the Z.O.B. were but one group broken into four units of three killers taking part of this international scavenger hunt that would be known historically as “The Purge.”

 

“Neutralize the war criminals. Punish the profiteers. Disrupt the global plantation system at its primary, secondary and tertiary supply side manufacturing and transshipment points,” so states the website http://www.FRIENDSOFTHEPEOPLE.com.

 

“We have suggestions,” so the website claims.

 

Like many part-Noires Watson distrusts the very concept of the Banya. One is completely exposed. Sebastian Adon has been “dead” for three years. Watson has been entrusted by a variety of high ranking Club leaders, and Ayitian politicians to follow this man past his grave and through the heavens and hells of Eurasia carrying out the operation assigned down to the very last kill.

 

Now, three black years in, most of their task force has been “re-called”. Those that were not killed in the process of carrying out the club’s commitment to the purge. Properly killed after being thoroughly and brutally tortured. Every single execution, every job was authorized from the Executive in Breuklyn Soviet. A priority list of war criminals, profiteers, and agents of the oligarchy to be rubbed out were selected by the I & I Section off the greater purge list and the dagger men were sent to carry out the death sentences one by one.

 

Tonight is the last scheduled assignment. One last job and they can get on the flight back to Palmares Island; reach the sandy beaches of Ayiti-DR.

 

Watson has his fingers perpetually crossed. Retirement never looked so fucking sweet.

 

Maya Solomon has given him very explicit orders about the carnage to be carried out in the capital tonight. The Russian Federation is rather close to acknowledging the status of Breuklyn Soviet as a “free state”. Having a bloody crisis in their capital is highly embarrassing to the F.S.B. and is to be avoided all costs. Since you can’t ever have Putin as your friend, you try not to have him as an enemy. If you are in the business of exporting a human rights revolution you have to know it’s a long game, and the best deal you can make with a devil is not have him believe you can soon turn your guns on the gates of hell.

 

There are certainly two devils in the body of Sebastian Adon.

At least two.

 

There was the man he was before the uprising and there is the man he has become since.

 

The first devil was easily tempered by the lifesaving interventions he carried out as a paramedic, also by angels whispering noble causes into his ears. This second devil is far more savage. Watson remembers the man who helped found the militant human rights movement delivering a baby in the Rich Man Tower Projects, his care and love for strangers; his willingness to assume great risk for those he doesn’t even know. He has lately seen Adon cut men apart. Blow men to pieces. Carry out kill after kill so that European streets would run red with the blood of those that serve the oligarchy at the price of humanity. Watson Entwissle has helped him every step of the way on this high minded killing spree.

 

They are all that’s left of a twelve person task force. All that’s left of Unit 808.

 

Watson is upstairs watching comings and goings. Sebastian is having a long palaver with an old friend and associate. A man who doesn’t believe in anything except high stakes gambling where even his only real friend is but a wild card to hedge a bet.

 

Ysiad Ferraris is shaved bald by choice and muscular from years of Bikram yoga. Sebastian Adon is a brunette with a hard body covered in small, largely self-inflicted burns and scars. He does not permit himself tattoos, so these edge or fire marks suffice to remind him of vicious battles won for the girl that was taken away. Depends who is asking. He’s been known to tell elaborate yarns to cover a trail or justify his latest murders. His history like others with old souls is long. His yarn is far beyond the level of any casual parapsychologist, certainly more story that for a Sunday confessional. He’s half Yid, half Mic too if anyone’s ever asking. But he can make himself look like a Russian when he has to. And a flicker mask can make him look like anybody. And a clone of his corpse left at mass casualty incident can make him look pretty dead.

 

He has a tragic penchant for lost causes and Postsoviet women.

 

Rumors speculate that in some past life his true love was taken from him violently. It’s anyone’s guess about how true any of his back stories are. He’s fond of the phrase, “life is balance.” His interpretation of that is that if he spent ten years saving the lives of the wretched and poor, he can spend ten more brutally killing the perpetrators of gross human rights violations. Sometimes he claims he prays, but he’s just talking to himself or Maya Solomon. Watson has not seen him bed a woman in three years. If there is some clandestine courtship or fuckery occurring under his nose it would be hard to discern who it truly was that so possessed him. His marriage to Maya Sorieya Solomon was as much a charade as his cold corpse laying in the D.H.S. mortuary still the subject of negotiations for recovery.

 

Watson suspects that he still corresponds, and dreams of the Russian.

 

The bathhouse or Banya as called in Cyrillic is perhaps the most famous Banya in all of the Postsoviet Union. It’s a veritable palace of hot steam, marble and voluptuous working women always on beck, bend and call. Enough to make a dead Cosmonaut or the still unburied corpse of Lenin blush, or rise back to attention.

 

It has been nearly a year since they’d last seen each other.

 

“I heard a man once say that if you know history you can gauge his next move. I assure you that zealots don’t follow that rule on any individual level,” says Ysiad Ferraris.

 

Ysiad grew up within the sprawling slums of the Bronx in New York City. In a housing project in the District Morrisania he cut his teeth before the fall of the old regime in a red brick tenement shit hole whose elevators always stunk of piss and rot and feces. He seldom recounts this story. He doesn’t trust most people. Only his wife, a Yiddish named Daviyya and sometimes his friend the infamous Mr. Adon. Ysiad makes a lot of people nervous with the work he does. He now runs hedge funds for black collar criminals. Think development graft in Central Asia. Think large scale black bag real estate deals in the Saudi Peninsula. Business advising and tech support for men who take crude oil bathes. Think about creative uses for container ships and also social security numbers. The very worst connotations of the “import-export business”. Adon on the other hand is an avenging zealot, posing as an ambulance man. You’d think they had little in common, besides appreciation of bath houses and for mouthfuls and handfuls of big well formed Ruus-Soviet tits.

 

Adon has closed files with a few very serious intelligence bodies. A body is lying in a morgue somewhere that matches his DNA enough for the Central Intelligence Agency, Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Department of Homeland Security to have declared him “neutralized file closed”. The F.S.B. has its doubts as to his death. The Mossad knows him very well to be an asset as long as he is kept out of the Middle East. He’s only still alive because he’s proficient, works night shift and is officially dead. And bribes are punctually paid on his behalf and he is efficient at the returning of high level favors.

 

He often travels with an intricately forged Catalan passport declaring his name to be “Zacharias”. He is currently travelling as a Cuban citizen named “Vasyli”.

 

Maybe Bon-Dieu “the Good God” smiles on those who organize the murder of sex traffickers. Maybe the spirits like that Captain Entwissle and he for three years have been hanging violators swinging from trees and rafters, leaving blood messes in broad nightlight hits; quietly delivering evil men to the grave with radiation, blood clots and heart stopping pharmaceuticals. Men always need to think god or a woman is cheering for them.

 

They’re mostly always wrong when it comes to their killing.

 

Watson and Sebastian began this operation with ten other operatives and a blank check for mayhem. No one walked away unscathed. As designed the job was a scaled up version of the Israeli post-Munich Olympics reprisals. Scaled up quite considerably. The very first use of the internet to outsource extrajudicial targeted killings of human rights violators!

One survivor is back in Breuklyn Soviet. She is the current Information & Intelligence Section Chief, a woman named Anya Drovtich. Four are rehabilitating psychologically in Ayiti-DR and the other six were killed over the course of the assignment. The higher profile the target the more subtle were the kills, at least on this units end. The former dictator of Zimbabwe and the exiled Syrian Minister of Information died of chemically induced cardiac arrests. The head of Russian owned energy firm Gazprom died in his sleep from a pulmonary embolus. They spent entirely too much time in the Former Soviet Union. Bosnian concentration camp commanders died of asthma attacks. As compared to the owners of Amsterdam’s nine largest brothels which all were dismembered and dumped onto the streets. Or the Albanian traffickers executed in Kosovo in the middle of packed night clubs.

Or the expatriate leadership of the Ayitian Tonton Maccoute (Boogie Men with Sacs) all decapitated in France, Algeria and Morocco.

Or the primary shareholders of Samsung and Apple.

 

            What allowed the longest threshold of assassination was:

 

  1. a) That there was not a discernible pattern to the deaths.
  2. b) That the very latest in life saving technologies were used in the reverse direction.
  3. c) That “Anonymous” paid out lump cash rewards for data and confirmed captures or kills. And that kills paid more than captures.
  4. d) That the internet allowed civilians all over the world to send in data.
  5. e) That the crimes these men and women had been sentenced to die for were rather well corroborated.
  6. f) And, that no executions were to be carried out in Russia, China, or the U.A.S.

 

High-end bioterrorism met with full moon bouts of medieval barbarism. What let the body count climb so high so quickly with so little collateral civilian damage was that “the Anonymous” put the power of vengeance in the hands of the everyday people.

The Breuklyn Bath and Rifle Club just did its part in the effort.

Ysiad looks over his old friend and says:

“More people know you to be alive than you realize. And dangerous ones at that.”

“You came to me once and said you had “a complex plan.” I always told you all your plans are overly complex, and that’s just thinly veiled code for fucking insane. They often fly in the face of what I know to be human nature, or reasonable doubt. Your guerrilla medical apparatus in Ayiti was an inspired piece of work however. This is a prerequisite for an Adon style plan. Your inspiration I mean. You came to me first because I’m probably the richest person you can trust. You obviously have some strong patrons in your extended family and general war camp, but a trusted inside backer is so vital when seeking to accomplish the nearly impossible, your obvious distaste for all governments aside, even the seemingly happily leftist regime of your new little Breuklyn based micro republic. You have many times sought to suck me into the mechanics of your Otriad, and always failed due the outlandishness of your schemes. I have so little use for a buck wild revolutionist, and when you ceased to be a purely loud one it was easier to be friends with you. Suffice to say by dying and then ending the separatist wars and related secessionist troubles and in pulling off a now six year lasting defensible union of Brooklyn, Queens, Long Island the Bronx, well it’s been very good for my business. And of course your club’s position in that anarchic little micro-republic is very good for business too. Cheers to the pirate bays of Coney Island!”

They schvitz away.

The room is hotter than an elopement with a Ruus hoodlum’s lady property or a burner with cop bodies scattered across a district. The air is thick with Eucalyptus-Birch vapors and man sweat. Ysiad hopes hell has a halfway decent Banya, “cause that’s where we may end up going if you Yids are wrong about the whole there not being a punitive afterlife”.

“So planning the invasion of all Africa this time?” he finally asks Sebastian.

“Such was their vote,” Adon says referring to the 18th Congress of the Breuklyn Otriad.

“And your whole apparatus is now behind you on this?”

“Most of our people are behind us on this. Some think it too ambitious at a heightened cost in treasure and blood. Some feel we ought to be content with consolidation here and throughout the Confederacy. Others believe we ought to be turning our attentions to the home front. I’m in the go big or go home camp. The vote is on my side of this argument as of last week.”

“Solomon obviously is still calling the biggest shots?”

“Solomon obviously would like me think this was our collective plan, but yes. She leads the consensus via her powers of precognition.”

“For zombies in exile, you two have great amounts of pull. But, this goes against the grain a little tactically. Your home team, this isn’t exactly what you first enlisted them for. Para-state work and irregular warfare in Africa are horses not of nearly the same color. And you and she are supposed to be low profile and quite dead. The armistice holds, but this will complicate everything surely. And what the fuck are you doing in Moscow?”

“Well, I think a Trojan horse goes where the water is most cold.”

“What the fuck does that even mean man?”

“An old Russian saying.”

“Fuck them hard in every hole and compensate them for it, but don’t ever quote them. That’s what I always say.”

“Or fall for them hopelessly over and over,” Sebastian mutters eyes drifting to past lives and vanquished affairs.

“I only hope these days you’re staying away from all that. The world has no use at all for a serial killing revolutionist visionary who is also as hopeless romantic poetry writing puppy dog. No use at all.”

“Touché as always old sport. The general membership has voted in favor and when this is put in proper perspective the invasion will certainly occur. Now, it is just a question of the scope of accomplishment attached to our actions, just how much take we can take.” Adon smirks, “so what-cha say Easy?”

Smoothing this out by using his high school nickname.

“Prove to me in two-quarters you’ve got enough men to make a lasting historical impact and I’ll provide you the container ships and charter planes to move them into position with weapons in hand.”

“How much is enough men to make such impact in your mind?”

“Like three hundred, that worked for the Greeks right? If three hundred Yids and Blans get killed fighting those Maccoute, on a slow news week maybe you’d make cover of the New York Times.”

“We want the full attention of the world at large. We’re going to need shit tons of global populism to make all this work. And, you’d better have that capital ready old sport because we already got more muscle than that lined up.”

“Don’t get all Great Gatsby on me son,” Ysiad says with a grin.

“You’re gonna need a lot of rifles,” he then notes.

“As any as we can lay our hands on,” Adon responds, “and a few massive favors from the Cubans, Trinidadians, Ayitians & Dominican diaspora, Persians and also the Israelis as well as the full support and approval of the G.A.I.”

“What’s that an acronym for again?”

Gwoup Ayisyen Pou Ijans, the Ayitian Emergency Group.”

“Ah! Tiputti Capois’s outfit. Planning to do some saving and some killing while in Ayiti are you? Weekend in Port-Au-Prince then soon?”

“Soon as tonight’s job is done.”

“About that. I’ve heard a few rumors flying around that who you’re after isn’t going to be easy to reach. He’s not even a high priority hit. You’re just wrapping up a list.”

“I’m just finishing off that list.”

“Well just know that people know; certain well connected super violent former Soviet people know that you’re going after the guard colonel, tonight. I’d just be cautious and decide if it’s really worth it. You and your Ayitian are valuable players. This guy Putin would love to embarrass the U.A.S. authorities by taking you alive.”

“Well good thing no one knows I’m alive.”

“Well Alexandre Perchevney sure does. He’s going to be my silent partner in rearming your club. And if he knows then that information is for sale.”

 

“Sasho,” mutters Adon.

 

He is referring to one of the most prominent Russian oligarchs on the playing field. In reality; a Bulgarian-Ukrainian Ivory. But these days who’s counting.

“I once knew his daughter Hachi rather well. She’s married to my associate Mr. King.”

“Oh that I’m all too aware of. It’s good you’re almost done. You couldn’t really hope to keep killing people with power much longer before they got hold of you. Yelizaveta is in Havana is she not?”

Ysiad is referring to Alexandre’s first daughter.

All he gets in return is some version of the forty yard stare.

“Your war of letters isn’t nearly as captivating as your war of deeds Mr. Adon. I suspect she will always come around again to your neo-Jacobin advances.”

“Well that’s hardly what Ayiti has proved Mr. Ferraris.”

“Ayiti in the end just proved there is truly no such thing as a free black republic without a Yid keeping the lights on.”

“Give us four more years’ tovarish.”

“Never forget I am your friend, but my no stretch of imagination your comrade. You have two quarters. Get your house I order and I’ll make sure you have exactly what you need for the usual price of souls, glory and treasure. Hachi Yu is running a restaurant supper club in Las Vegas she will be the point person for coordinating arms purchases via the Perchevney Bratva. I’d forget about the Guards Colonel and fly to the Caribbean tonight. The moon is full and the FSB knows that your club has a unit in Moscow. If they don’t know it’s you, they at least know who you’re after.”

“That bastard is going to die tonight. And then we’re closing the book.”

“Are you still in touch with little Yelizaveta?” Ysiad asks.

He gets no response.

“I suppose the procedure worked just fine then,” he declares.

“So you’ll work out the logistics with the Israelis and the club can make procurements via Ms. Hachi Yu Perchevney?

“That’s right old friend. As soon as you’re ready and the contracts are drawn up about oil concessions and port access and pipe lines. We run a business after all. We don’t just help you people out of loyalty.”

“There is one last piece to the equation that must be squared away. Once it is then you will be the first person alerted via sky pager to the flashing green light for attack.”

“Avinadav DeBuitléir?”

“Exactly.”

“Well don’t get killed tonight and I’ll see you in Santo Domingo for Champagne and a fuck fest.”

“I don’t drink,” Adon says.

“You still fuck don’t you?”

“I mostly just save or kill when I must.”

“The poor martyr he says,” playing the world’s smallest violin.

“Don’t bullshit me! I know the little bitch ripped your heart out good and you’ve gone on a bit of a bender. But the reality it is that it’s not healthy for man to abstain from life’s best pleasures. All to be found on the eastern two thirds of Palmares Island!”

Ysiad can tell the procedure worked because the old Adon might have well struck him in the face for calling his Yelizaveta “a bitch”.

“Forget about Guards Colonel Yuri Dmitrievich Budanov,” says Ysiad Ferris, “you ain’t gonna get near him. Now let’s shake and toast to the liberation of Ayiti.”

Salud,” Sebastian says.

Ysiad clinks a shot of Russian Standard to Sebastian’s bottle of Borjomi.

 

Wouldn’t be the first or the last time Sebastian has made a deal with the devil for a noble cause. Upstairs Watson Entwissle looks down impatiently at his gold watch and wonders how soon they can get out of this cold, bleak lawless empire. He prefers his gangsters residing in the tropics. Easier to bury and then hit the beach. And without flicker mask he stands out like sore thumb in this country.

 

The snow has dropped a blanket of desolation over Moscow and no roof or high wall will keep its worst thieves safe tonight. Guards Colonel Yuri Dmitrievich Budanov of the 160th Guards Tank Regiment is finally going to pay for his crimes.

 

 

 

Chapter 16

East New York, 2019ce

Breuklyn Soviet

 

The candle light flickers.

The world outside might well be on fire and the sky may be falling but the Nina Simone playing on the record player in the next room, and our telling of tall to order tales takes our minds off the quickly spreading flames of the greatest revolution history has ever known. In our lusts of solitude, we hear Nina moaning heartbreak and 808’s over the old school sound system in the next room.

Tak. Switch narrator!” I declare.

Dasha looks truly upset.

“Unfair! It was just getting exciting! I have long wondered how it was that they got to the guards colonel and out of Moscow with their heads still on,” she says.

“Well I will only finish the story if you present me with a proper report from the Breuklyn Soviet.”

“Hmm, amid tournament trade of our most highly coveted data? I suppose.”

“These are but stories and fairy tales my dorogaia.”

She winks.

“Of course they are. What is it you’re looking to have whispered in your inquisitive Western ear on behalf of your beleaguered coastal city state, the mind of the general rising if Ayiti is the heart and Israel the soul?”

“I will finish the yarn on what led to the demise of that infamous guard colonel if you tell me a cautionary tale of the so-called Cult in Grey.”

“What about said cult?” she asks me cautiously.

“Oh, how they almost caused a war between the Ivories and Blacks of Breuklyn. Who sent them? And how they were dealt with; a short story.”

“Enough foreplay then,” she grins at me. Then like a crazed animal Dasha bites my shoulder as hard as she can drawing blood.

“Blood begets only more blood,” she spite out in Aramaic.

 

And then she assumes the role of grim narrator:

 

How many Zionist agents does it take to change a light bulb?

 

Night falls on a third Breuklyn blood bath. Another atrocity has occurred. This time at the Broadway Junction. You’d think these blacks were animals by just reading foreign papers about them. Blacks and Ivories hung from the great tree in Prospect. A month later in the rafters of the bridge. This time a far more subtle slaughter.

 

It’s a big full moon, a killing just like it was the last two times this happened.

 

“Something has gone terribly wrong,” mutters Anya Drovtich, the Polish Islamic paramedic who leads via coldness and example. A most un-closeted anarchist. The only known survivor of the very unit sent to help capture, but mostly to extra judicially kill one hundred and four war profiteers and war criminals in the three years following the Great Revolt in an operation dubbed “the purge”.

The Chief of I & I has dread locks and a lightning fast Ducati, like a big black cat.

“A real bad bitch,” as the chornay would say. To them that’s a term of endearment.

 

It came in as a double homicide on the Shomriim scanners. Shomriim is Yiddish for “the Watchmen”. But, double homicide was just a cover for the utter butchery of a family of Jamaicans, and the public inverted crucifixion of the son of a rabbi, along with his two sisters. Shit like this isn’t supposed to go down in our districts. It’s a hot mess to clean up. And when the local press gets hold of it; things are gonna pop off quick. One killing happened in our Zone of Control in a small park off Empire and Schenectady in District Crown Heights. That’s where the Watchmen found the three dead Yids. The second killing happened in in lawless District East New York, which isn’t really controlled by anyone.

 

People are gonna say, “It’s not safe to travel to the Breuklyn Soviet.”

 

Nikholai Trikhovitch got there first sealed off the area and then headed over to East New York. The Shomriim made a discrete phone call directly to him. Within an hour the four adjacent blocks off Schenectady and Empire were sealed off. The dead Ivories were found in a small park. Within an hour every trace of them was gone.

The second crime scene is on the third floor of a red brick multi-dwelling one block from the Broadway Junction in District East New York.

The place looks like a slaughter house. A killer, or large group of killers exsanguinated a thirteen person family, five little kids including two babies. Bled them dry. Hung um upside down. And soon as this incident leaks out it’s going to be hard to hold down the truce. When that falls apart, so does the soul of the Soviet. The blood pact between the West Indians and the Ivories is at the heart of things. Breuklyn Soviet has a population of three million. According to the last census that’s nearly one million Yids, one million Karibes and one million other; that other being highly diverse, but with the Gaels making up the next biggest ethnic block; followed by what we call “the Russians”, who are mostly every other kind of former Soviet besides actual Slavic Russians, followed by Poles, Arabs, Puerto Ricans, Chinese and also the Italians.

The Ivories and the West Indians went ham two times before as they say. “Hard as a motherfucker” on each other once in 1993 during the Crown Heights Riots, and again more recently during the “Borough Park Blood Libel”.

 

The Otriad, was suddenly again on the called “Orange Alert”. A Red Alert being that they were going to fire a nuclear missile at a UAS megalopolis on the mainland, so just a bit less alert than that.

 

Nikholai woke Anya Drovtich and Mickhi DBrisk as soon as he visually confirmed both sites of the slaughter.

“The body count so far is thirteen Caribes and three more Ivories. Just like last time but with far less dead,” sky pages Nikholai in sky code.

 

“That brings the total body count to 104, confirm,” sky pages back Dbrisk.

“Confirmed,” he replies.

 

Last time was one lunar month ago, the last night of the 18th Congress. Sixty four people from two families found the same way on the Bridge. Two months before that the same bloody mess but with twenty two dangled by their necks from the tallest tree in Prospect Park for all to see and speculate on. The killers were not only ruthless they were out to provoke war.

 

This time was the lowest body count and least public display of the crime but the dead were of the two most prominent families in the Soviet. Thirteen dead Jamaicans, the children of a famous babashanti; a Rastafarian priestess married to a famous Ayitian Ougan. And three more Sephardic Ivories from the house of Rabbi Akiva Tatz, including his son.

 

Anya Drovtich looks very good in dancehall red, also in a dark emergency blue multiform. Her long black dread locks when not tied up in a hijab dangle like bountiful black snakes wrapping down her shoulders. Anya is the Chief of I and I; the Information and Intelligence Section. She is the highest ranking woman in the entire Otriad, responsible not only for our networks of “whisperers” within the Soviet, but a vast array of clandestine sympathizers still in the U.A.S., other liberated Free States of the Confederacy  and also abroad.  The primary duty of her Section is to identify security threats to the Breuklyn Soviet, its secondary prerogative is to hunt, identify and arrange the extrajudicial killings of war criminals in collaboration with “the Anonymous”. The tertiary duty is to use her oracle powers and see ten moves ahead.

 

More on that later.

 

Anya started with the club nine years ago distributing the underground newspaper out of the Fire Department’s Eighth Battalion. Her second assignment was with the unit sent to train medical guerrillas for the Syrian Free Army. When most of the unit and most of the Free Syrian Army was obliterated in Aleppo, she and Sebastian joined the PKK and YPG fighters in Rojava.

 

Her third major assignment was to join the crew that by the end of that very same weekend was about to reach its 104th target, a Russian Guards Colonel who had brutally raped and murdered a young Chechen girl during the first Chechen war and was set to soon become  a minor politician in Putin’s United Russia Party. Anya had been reassigned after the first year and now she is an Otriad underboss.

 

“We have another seemingly serious problem,” Nikholai informs Anya.

 

So, Anya throws on her blue multiform and black leather jacket and jumps on her Ducati and takes off from her two bed room flat in the South Slope toward Broadway Junction. The site of far too many incidents before and after the revolt. The only reasonable explanation is that the junction is built on an Indian burial ground.

“A block most often hot.”

Mickhi Dbrisk rolls out of bed with his babies mother Rosa; throws on jeans and a grey button down; his tam; his chain, a burner, a shooter, a flip dagger, a thick stack, and two smart phones; also a scanner and a belt radio; and he walks up the street. In his inner pocket are a black bandana, a blue bandana, a grey bandana, and the yellow Lebvature Rebi Messiah Flag. Its 02:03am. The blue street lights are running on low power lithium batteries from solar power stored over the course of the day. He lives just a block from the crime scene. None of the rebel leaders have significantly upgraded their pre Revolt lodgings.

It would be against the code.

Well except for Magnus Goldbar Allamby, who lives by no man’s code.

They all agree to meet in their own turf, because passing into District East New York will require advance notice and an armored convoy.

The fourth person called in is the burly Russian-Israeli Oleg Medved; Deputy Chief of Internal Security, our secret police, who was born in Ukraine and educated in Israel. Or, more euphemistically referred to as the “Public Safety Branch of the Security Section” or “the Whisper Network”. In a General Operating Procedures Guide sense he serves as the primary deputy officer right under a woman named Erza Pula; the 18th Executive’s elected Security Section Chief. One tough, pale and lovely hard Albanian. It is rumored he quietly seduced and bedded his immediate superior thus muddling the chain of command with his constant womanizing. In reality, he now reports directly to Anya Drovtich as a major officer of the club.

He was also once in the employ of the Perchevney Bratva, the major Russian crime syndicate that has invested so much money into the new ports and reconstruction on Coney Island. He is loyal to the Club because of Loyalnost and his core Zionist ideology. He is still well compensated by the Bratva to insure that port stays open to everything except traffic in people. And he moonlights for the Israelis periodically as a fixer of fixers.

He has a lot of the citizens on his payroll.

When Anya Drovtich pulls up on her black Ducati, Mickhi DBrisk is outside smoking a Newport standard cigarette with Nikholai and Oleg Medved has just parked his black bullet proof Escalade and is looking over some data on his smart phone.

“We have two flying columns on standby ready to enter District East New York. The Shomriim is already preparing for crowd control. I’ve got four ambulances parked up the street ready to move the bodies. The Ivories have already taken away their own dead,” Oleg the Bear says.

“Call for suppression,” Anya declares.

Oleg   interjects, “If I may, this is a total violation of the ceasefire. We shouldn’t suppress it. We should document it and rally the people behind it. The other free states will rally behind us.”

“What we’re going to do is burn the bodies and cover it up, again. Yes, that’s exactly what I was going for,” snaps Anya.

Oleg is a dirty blond bearded bear of a man and off duty quite famous for his wild orgy parties and gregarious ways. In civilian life he is a fashion photographer of note and local celebrity. In his capacity as head of the Otriad’s secret police he keeps on payroll no less than four thousand “whisperers” largely modals, escorts, other fashion photographers, hackers, and urban outdoorsmen, a nice word for the homeless. This is the third time now they’ve all kept such late night company over gruesome particulars.

“This is the third group killing in three months,” states Dbrisk.

“It’s the same formula,” he continues, “a large dead family and some crucified children of clergy. They’re trying to spark a war here. So we can’t let that happen. So we’re gonna have to handle this the same way. With suppression.”

That’s two major votes without voting. “Suppression” is a euphemism for having the Fire Department burn something down to cover something up.

“How many people know this time?” Anya asks.

“The four of us, a few Yiddish detectives from Shomriim and the marijuana distribution agent who found the three dead Ivories in the park. And the one surviving family member of the Jamaicans; a thirteen year old hood, he came home to the height of slaughter,” says Trikhovitch.

“That’s a lot of people to pay quiet. This is going to get out,” warns Oleg.

“The Shomriim won’t talk. It’s the dealer and the young hood that might.”

“Dealer’s a hood or a hipster?” Anya asks.

“Hipster,” says Nikholai. There still are a few left.

“I vote to call a press conference and go public with the killings. It’s obviously a U.A.S. provocation using loyalists and Blackwater mercenaries sent to sew panic and discord in our ranks.”

“This is not up for vote boys. We’re going to suppress this and deal with it ourselves,” Anya informs them.

“Is the task force ready to enter District East New York?” she asks.

“Yes. The apartment is sealed off and we already have the surviving family member in custody. We can have fire engines in position in fifteen minutes,” says Nikholai Trikhovitch.

“Comrade Oleg Medved please take the hipster and the young hood to one of your safe houses and wipe out their memories. Please see to it that they wake up in the Caribbean by tomorrow evening. Trikhovitch and I will set up the incendiary devices and wait for the fire trucks. Dbrisk, if you’d be so kind; please call in Suppression the minute I sky page you that we are in position. I despise that part of town.”

“All I’m saying is that we can’t let this continue,” Oleg says.

“I have no intention of letting it continue. But we can’t have the population think a blood libel has occurred again.”

“Who did this? It’s pretty gruesome even for Blackwater,” Trikhovitch declares.

“It’s the Cult in Grey. They’re obviously back,” states Oleg Medved.

“Don’t jump to conclusions,” says Anya, “Let’s mop this up. I want to see everyone at a closed staff meeting this evening at District bunker 004 under Café Hadar on Avenue N no later than 18:00, Ayitian time. By that she means, don’t be followed, don’t be early, don’t be late. The code of the Ayitian gentleman is that it is one should never ever be late, but it is an egregious and inexcusable breach of proper conduct to be early.

 

And with that the four officers of the Club prepare to enter the gangland of the district to the east and guide fire trucks toward an atrocity that needs to be turned into ashes.

 

The high level subversive characters part ways and plan to regroup in the next day.

 

 

Chapter 17

1375 Ocean Ave, 2019ce

Breuklyn Soviet

 

 

The sun is now rising on Breuklyn. Nikholai Trikhovitch, the freelance detective, the former cop, the part time drunk and; the Chief of the Otriad Logistics Section has been left alone to his own thoughts.

 

Sip to ponder.

 

“I don’t like the responsibility that comes with this much power,” thinks Nikholai Trikhovitch. He has 5am shadow; he doesn’t remember when he last shaved. It was all so much easier when attendance at the meetings and the frustrations of never having enough loot in the war chest were the biggest concerns. Like it or not we are governing now. We are invading countries and carrying out extrajudicial killings left and right. We take our votes and people lose their lives. And as of the January census we are administering social services for over 80,000 citizens of the Soviet! It’s good I don’t sleep, he thinks.

 

Sip to forget.

 

Our cell of the Z.O.B. has had only had between eight and ten active members any given time. I am often unsure whether ‘the organization’ is quite large and has its hand in everything, or, if exists in one man’s mind alone. As well as I think I know Sebastian I really know nothing. Especially of the things he saw when he was in the Promised Land burning before the towers fell. All other titles and incarnations spin loosely around that core eight. The nucleus of the Otriad. With Adon officially deceased and out bounty hunting in Eurasia; and Solomon officially deceased and organizing out in the Horn of Africa; and DeBuitléir in prison; we are down to only three of the original members including myself serving on the 18th Executive. The other surviving two still alive being Hubert O’Domhnaill and Mickhi Dbrisk, but Hubert refuses to join the Executive. The others were killed horribly over the course of the War Years, the Disorder and the Revolt. But, never underestimate what you can accomplish with even just a couple good zealous people on your team.

In the immortal words of my best friend Sebastian Adon, “One person has an idea, two have a conspiracy and three; an Otriad.” An irregular paramilitary detachment for mutual aid and collective security. It doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue.

 

All that was needed was a three character meaningless acronym. And course he’d needed Anya and I to tell him that the first job could be done.  But I digress.

 

I’m sitting on my seventh story rooftop, three months since the congress in the month of March. The seventh floor of my building has a good view of district Midwood and district Flatbush; the cradle of the insurgency once claimed the New York Times. With a bottle of Baboncourt Ayitian Premium Smoked Silver Rum and some Noblisse heavywiders watching the dawn get ready to break through the haze of my indulgences, I wait for dawn.

 

I hope third times the charm.

 

We torched the crime scenes. We interrogated everyone. We inundated the Crown Heights and East New York Districts with Crip enforcers, Shomriim, and about two hundred plain clothes on watch and deescalate duty. And we took the dealer and the family member into protective custody. They’ll end up in the Caribbean for a while until things clam down. No arrests have been made. And they won’t be. No one gets arrested anymore. More like accosted. I’d love to tell you that all the fighting and dying bought us a better freer life. We just traded an oligarchy for some mob rule.

The only thing keeping this place together is that it was pretty well organized to begin with. I’d love to say we’ve brought Human Rights to Breuklyn. We’ve mostly just traded an authoritarian government posing as a democracy for a gangster’s paradise posing as a rebel free state. Sure we arrest people. Sure they get trials. Except sometimes we don’t. Sometimes we just do things because they have to be done and we were elected to lead.

 

Like grab a suspect off the street, throw a hood over their head and hand them over to the New Russians to torture in the former psyche ward of Coney Island Hospital.

 

Oleg Medved has his network trying to track down the killers, see who saw anything. But no one did. No one ever does in East New York. Anya ordered sixteen more retributive killings to be carried out on the U.A.S. mainland. Nothing horror show, just an eye for an eye. It never ends. There’s always some latest big mess. Some threat of attack or some rumor to address. This borough was an ethnic powder keg before the revolt. It hasn’t gotten much better.

From my roof or just about anywhere else in the Soviet I can see the Tree of Life which arose miraculously out of the ground shortly after liberation three years ago. At first it was something of a curiosity; then it just kept growing. It’s easily forty stories tall now. Along with a number of other things its sureality incorporated around here in the past few years. The rabbits for instance; where the fuck did they come from? There never used to be large wild rabbits jumping around the Coney Peninsula. I’ve stopped sleeping entirely as I aid earlier. I’ve stopped asking about things that are “weird” and stick with things that are dangerous.

I was a Club founder by association alone. I did no heavy lifting until the Ayiti job. I met Sebastian when I was fourteen when he formed the first Z.O.B. incarnation called Youth United For Equality; the YUFE. It wasn’t until after the September 11th Attacks that I attended some meetings. It wasn’t until Ayiti when I took on a leadership role. Apparently I have some talent in getting things in and out of third world countries. I’ve been helping them move things ever since. My pay comes from detective work, investigating disappeared people, strange occurrences, cheating husbands and the like. I was elected to head the Logistics Section shortly after the armistice was declared.

 

Sip to not remember. I take my Baboncourt on the rocks and flowing freely off duty.

 

Half the bottle is gone before the sun breaks the horizon. Did I mention I have a bit of problem with not drinking? I’m never wilding drunk except at a good funeral. Or series of funerals. Like at Adon’s first and second one. Like at Rahula Mccaffeys’ or at Paul Mark’s. Like at David Sasha Dualde’s or those where we couldn’t retrieve the bodies like in the cases of Zander Apple, Mateo Lyons, Gene Dissentious, and Daniel Fried. Horrific cases like those of Yovanna Koracab. Fighters lost in the various engagements like Jeffery Hermanksy, Annabell Lewis or Justin & Jesse Thomas.

And I will never forget the way Hali Vik was executed. Not ever.

 

The martyrs.

They went after all of our families too in the immediate years of the revolt. Just to hurt us, try and break out will to fight.

Like my two little brothers Colin and Rafael. Or, my parents. Or the Mapfres, Or, the O’Domhnaills. Or, Sebastian’s entire family even distant cousins he never knew that never even aided the uprising, murdered everyone but his brother. The skinned his fucking father alive. The Oligarchy never forgets those who raised the children of the Great Revolt. The children of believers, as the Hasidim call us.

 

I don’t tip the bottle to the ground like the black man does. I don’t waste my Fenian whiskey or my Ayitian rescue rum. We have prayed for the dead and we fight like hell for the living.

 

I keep thinking about my Krissy. I keep missing her. That’s my ex-wife. There’s too much loss in the freedom fighting game if you ask me. Way too many funerals. Way too much stripping of a person down to an animal. A wild savage fighting wolf. I keep thinking that I’m not cut out to be affiliated with this outfit anymore. Maybe I’ll ask to be swapped out into one of the higher risk international battalions. Maybe I’ll just take leave until I can finally sleep. Maybe I’ll hang out with Oleg Medved in the “Green Light District” and fuck Ukrainian girls until my cock falls off. Fuck. Sip. Sip. Sip.

Maybe I’ll put on the iron vest and go make a loud statement somewhere. Or join a mine clearing unit on the Eastern front.

The roof top vista is completely unremarkable. For all “the freedom” we’ve won, much of what we govern is a red brick, low rise sprawl. Most of the building has gone on subterranean. Except in Coney Island where the Russians have built a series of steel and glass towers and a fully modern port facility near what we commonly call the “Green Light District”, where “anything goes”. Much of the old red brick sprawl was reduced to rubble during the war. Our districts did better than those held by the Uhuru fighters and the various other unions, factions and street gangs less prepared for a protracted urban siege. Brownsville has ceased to exist as a District. It was outright reduced to rebar pilings and ash. Twice now. Eventually it will be a lovely park with field of Peonies and Tom Ottorness sculptures memorializing the dead. Only half the rubble has been cleared. The Park’s Department isn’t exactly what it used to be after most of its best employees enlisted in the development battalions or were executed in the filtration camp massacres at the two stadiums during the revolt.

A whole lot of American citizens died to secure this red brick sprawl, the free ports on the Southern Coast, the Strong Island, and outpost Block Island where one of the three nuclear launch batteries is hidden.

 

Our best grad rockets can hit Chicago, where the new capital of the U.A.S. is. Now that Washington D.C. is irradiated and gone.

 

Sip.

 

What a huge fucking tree! As if the blood of the martyrs, the blood of the estimated 140,000 dead all watered the grandest act of botany ever. I climbed it one night with Anya Drovtich. We installed a fire station transmission boaster in it. But the electronics never work no matter what we tinker with. It’s only the most obvious example of the strange voodoo creeping into out micro republic.

 

We had to climb it three months ago to get all those bodies down.

 

The “Tree of Life” as we call it is the third tallest landmark only dwarfed by the High Tower in the Downtown District near what used to be called “Barclay Stadium” and the eighty four story Drake Hotel on Banner Avenue in District Brighton. The General Assembly convenes there three times daily now. There are still concerts. The Nets still play. What a draining cluster fuck of a talk fest populist democracy can be. No one can tax us. So the “legislative body of the people” is largely just a showcase for our total disunity. And no other faction trusts our little Club these days because we won’t share access codes to the hidden atomic arsenal deployed across Strong Island. This is in the end the only thing keepings us free.

 

Like Israel, North Korea, and Iran once we test fired, they had no choice but to freeze frame completely. Israel’s gonna be a Ivoryish apartheid state, Iran a Shi’a fundamentalist Shar’iah State and North Korea a brandy guzzling, twenty dollar bill printing, Stalinist big brother Disney land; well, indefinitely. To say the very least.

 

Sip, sip sip sip.

 

My Baboncourt on the rocks does the trick. But what the trick is I’m not sure. My eyes are grey on grey orbs, a symptom of the insomnia. I have to wear contacts to hide them. Insomnia has become something of an epidemic here. Also children being born with complete knowledge of their past lives. That too is major source of my income. Brining little toddlers, normally West Indians or Chasidics to verify claims that the child remembers “where he used to live” or “what he used to do”.  There have been numerous reports of these phenomena in the Druse Villages of Israel and Syria. Now it’s becoming common occurrence here too.

 

I can see Breuklyn College where I nearly completed university for a degree in journalism. I would have been a senior when “the Great Disorder” began. I can see drones making their early morning perimeter sweeps between us and “the City”. They trace the border but never fly over as that would violate the armistice.

Eventually I’ll go back down to my flat and I’ll watch the History Channel or I’ll stare at a picture of Krissy until I’m enough in the past that the now hurts much less. I’m depressed that she’s gone. I’m depressed I was suckered into a revolution I can’t control. As if you ever can. I’m depressed because I’m not really sure how the story is going to unfold.

 

Some people but their faith in God, but I’m a religious atheist. All of the blood of the martyrs, all the miracles and tragedies of the revolt, all of the hope for human rights and end of the long game; all that has made me quite tired. I don’t believe that a just god could preside over such a pack of self-interested violent monkeys.

 

The Chasidics are whispering that the Dror Ha Tzadikk, the generation’s candidate for Messiah has returned. There is a forty story tree growing in Prospect Park. There are rabbits of enormous size hopping about and drones darting across the skyline. We have smuggling tunnels under the East River and we have nuclear weapons aimed at major American cities and the rebel confederacy has no clear picture in the slightest what do with their new liberty.

 

There are a lot of strange things happening in the Breuklyn Soviet. But, personally I have no idea what I’m fighting for anymore. Or really more importantly, for whom?

 

Vengeance, love, ideals; this doesn’t sustain me for long. I haven’t even committed those so called Universal rights to memory. I’ve just been here since the beginning so there is little way out as I see it. But besides from Hubert O’Domhnaill, all the original members are dead.

 

I forgot to mention something to myself. Three months ago before the killings began I got a call from Krissy in the wee hours of morning or night. Or someone who sounded just like her. The voice claiming to be my ex-wife told me that Sebastian Adon was very much alive. And that they were going to have a train load of soldiers rape her in every hole in her body her for weeks on end; film the whole thing and send it to me, unless I shoot Sebastian in the head the first chance I get.

“But he’s dead, “I told the voice on the phone claiming to be my ex-wife. Love of my life.

That was a tall order. She left me fair and square. Walked out on me and broke my heart. Then got herself somehow abducted. And he’s been dead for three years. Can’t betray your dead best friend for a woman who left you for a richer man who couldn’t even protect her.

“He’s gonna turn up real soon,” she told me. Then the line went dead.

This was the night before the 18th Congress, two months ago. The night some vile war criminals hung those two families worth of blacks and Ivories off the Breuklyn Bridge. Killed sixty four men, women and children. A month before that twenty four were left hanging in that very tall tree for all to see on third anniversary of our independence. We couldn’t completely cover up the first two massacres and now all the factions are looking at each other.

 

If we don’t find out who did this there’s gonna be a big old Black on Ivory war.

 

 

 

 

Chapter 18

Drake Hotel, 2018ce

Breuklyn SOviet

 

 

Oleg the Bear, at his room in the Drake Hotel drinks vodka straight in a bath robe watching the sun rise over the Green Light District he’s helped build.

When he’s this drunk and he’s done with the second woman he turns to American poetry.

 

 

#24: Sometimes_the_Vodka drinks me

 

Sometimes,

I get drunk.

And I drive my car

In figure eight circles around the Adon Loop in coop city,

The only street which bears my name.

And from the wheel of my Lincoln I survey my high rise brick kingdom, All I can see!

 

Sometimes I drink to remember, sometimes I drink to forget.

And sometimes the vodka drinks me.

 

It’s a bevy of victimless crimes.

Most of the times,

There are no children playing at these midnight hours,

Or those that are carry various calibers or carbines as they carry on trade in nickels and dimes.

With each kiss of Stolichnaya I get further from all the accusing faces of friends lost,

And lubricated by the demons still waters I am forgiven for my broken promises. And that which such promises cost.

I sip and shoot shot and bottle tip. And the ghosts of past make clever cheers,

Nazdrovia!

They say as I sip. More shots.

To the last drop, a fast viscosity,

A deadly drip.

 

Cheers to little Malka who’s daddy abused her, and who’s foreign baby’s father used her like a Siberian doll and fled leaving a teenage mother with child in the slums of Shahoun Daled!

Shot to the head.

 

Cheers to Maya captured and bonded to brothels at the age of sixteen, pale white tits all the gawk of Montreal’s flying flesh carnival scene. Long white lines of supine mortgage, traumas of the slave trade never fully known, what they made her do.

Time supine, also prone.

 

Third shot for Ocasio,

Long behind bars for his cannabis dealing,

Also his class and his skin and later his new found political feelings. Three years breaking rocks,

And felling trees and chain gang walkathons.

A nigger like me.

 

Fourth shot for Rahula, also called Jeremy McGaffey, a soldier now dead and the dark things he saw before like Adon putting two rounds in the thick of his head.

 

For all that they went through these four in particular abused an accosted,

I empty the bottle to my useless gestures exhausted,

Having arrived too late to have saved them and too weak to have healed them, and play pretend knights making promises into an empathetic mockery.

 

Sometimes I drink to remember, sometimes I drink to forget.

And sometimes the vodka drinks me.

 

What does a half Ivory know about the Ghosts of Christmas past? Arrogance vast,

If sirens of suffering call free for all then have your crew insert wax in their ears and bind your bleeding heart to the mast!

Look at your most tragic failures look at your past,

Your sister, your brother, your comrade, the love of your life: raped and abused, self-murdered imprisoned and her young body used: you toast to their fortitude: who put the world on your shoulders man?! Whoever asked!

         Labriut!

There was nothing one person ever asked you to be, nothing they asked you to do.

No one expected a miracle. You battled demons in their name, and when it was done the world was exactly the same, man it’s too true:

 

Sometimes you drink to remember, sometimes you drink to forget.

And sometimes the vodka drinks you.

 

 

And with that poem she concludes her round of tale.

 

The Nina Simone fades into some soft, sensuous Kompa track, it’s quite lovely but the artist escapes me. I hate that poem she says, it makes you cry.

Dasha winks at me.

She looks so goddamn lovely, when she’s loving me.

She lights up a Newport standard cigarette and the smoke she exhales swiftly takes the form of a dragon fly. It sails across the room. Maliciously perhaps. Just one of her many colorful magic tricks. Her breasts are round and magnificent and she makes no effort to conceal her naked body. A pace, a pout and she cats off more dragon flies.

“You always make Nikholai sound more unstable than he was in real life,” I tell her.

“It’s because I never really liked him very much. And because he was quite unstable indeed. He’d have fucked me you know, you living or dead.”

I conceal my slight anger at such an accusation.

“Well he made a subtle art out of melancholy that I will say. You denigrating him as motif is vaguely low brow in my honest opinion. What with how he ended.”

“Ha. Low brow? You always seem to work a pair of enormous breasts into your little stories. I’m on to you,” she smiles vaguely biting her lower lip. She is always smiling until it is way too late to stop her demons from speaking their mind. I want to taste her immediately.

“I hope several more times within this very hour. But, that didn’t answer any of my questions about said cult, not even in the slightest. It was a wonderful portrayal of the mood though, back then. Although I experienced it quite vicariously.”

“Isn’t grey the secret color of the fighting faction called Z.O.B.?” she coyly asks.

I look her dead in the eyes.

“How would I know?”

“Yes, how would you know Vasa, how would you know?” she gives me the infamous Postsoviet look of ‘don’t play fucking stupid with me’. All women utilize this look meticulously.

“Well then perhaps you don’t really know who controls this cult anyway.”

“I know always more than I will easily tell for free my little bard tovarish. Even to the man I…” she pauses. I let her. She’ll never say it.

“I was certain you already knew what happened to the Guard Colonel,” I interject.

“The official story only. That Chechen gun men shot him on a lonely Moscow street.”

“Preposterous logic. Surely just a United Russia cautionary fairy tale.”

“Well then, entice me with your un-muddied version of the events. Is it true you corresponded at length with the journalist Anna Politkovskaya before she was assassinated?”

“She was the one who urged us to go after Yuri Budanov.”

“One might get the impression lover that all it takes for you to make a terror of yourself is to have a Russian woman whisper in your ear.”

“And yet what’s a whisper to a song?” I ask her and she knows just what I mean.

“Was your safe house this elegant the night you rubbed out the Guard’s Cornel,” she bluntly asks.

“Well you weren’t there, so evidently not.”

“Go on then, your turn two for two.”

 

And so I proceed.

 

 

Chapter 19

Safe House 16z, Zelenogradsky, 2018ce

Outer Moscow

 

Out the safe house window they can see the glowing hyperboloid Shabolovka Tower through the falling snow. A Cinderella steel spire lit up like a New Year’s Tree. Over thirteen million people currently reside in the greater Moscow area. Its layout is a series of concentric rings of hyper highway and major boulevards called Prospects.

 

The Moscow Automobile Ring Road (MKAD) has been Moscow’s unofficial internal class boundary since 1960 and there are absolutely no poor people living inside its circus. Not a single one.

 

The city of Moscow is subdivided into twelve administrative Okrugs and 123 districts. In the year 2008, the year of the global recession; Moscow had 74 billionaires with an average wealth of $5.9 billion, which placed it above New York’s 71 billionaires. However, as of 2009, there were only 27 billionaires in Moscow compared with New York’s 55 billionaires. Overall, Russia lost 52 billionaires during the first year of the recession. Now, according to financial analysts; there are over 403 Russian billionaires in Moscow averaging roughly $6.1 billion a piece, and only three are left in New York at the conclusion of the Great Revolt’s armistice concluded 72 hours after the Millennium Theatre Hostage Crisis which took the lives of exactly twenty four of those previously tallied billionaires.

 

The four who still remain in Greater New York:

 

A Bulgarian expatiate named Alexandre Dmitrievich Perchevney who resides part of the time in the enhanced Oceana Tower Complex of District Brighton Beach and is one of the most feared Voorhees alive in country. Ysiad Ferraris who owns multiple large commercial properties throughout the Bronx and Goddess Soviets; a tech empire, a venture capital firm and a fleet of container ships.  And the son of former Mayor Michael Bloomberg, Michael Bloom II. All the other billionaires have since fled inland or abroad, or had their assets vigorously expropriated.

 

Ex’ed is what it is called in the jargon of guerillas.

   
   

Also in the form of a circle is the main Moscow subway line; the Ring Line. And, the so-called Third Automobile Ring completed in Gregorian year 2005. The characteristic radial-circle planning continues to define Moscow’s further development. Contemporary Moscow has also engulfed a number of territories outside the Ring Road, such as Solntsevo, Butovo, and the formerly outlying town of Zelenograd.

It is in the Zelenogradsky Okrug where our lonely rebels have set up their shop.

After the rendezvous at the Bathhouse Watson and Sebastian sit for supper. Herring, beets, Palemni and some kind of fried potato based goulash. They wash it down with a frothy cold berry Kompot. And some iced black coffee.

 

Its 17:00pm and it hasn’t stopped snowing, not one bit.

 

Ivories always got a guy for everything. What that means is they don’t pay for services somebody didn’t vouch for first in their network. But they didn’t use their Chechen contacts or their friends at Human Rights Memorial for this time around. The Moscow Human Rights movement is very underground, and rightfully so because their orators and organizers keep being shot in the head. You don’t buy a gun if you can get away with using a dagger. You don’t use a dagger if you can buy a poisonous pill. You don’t ask a large possibly infiltrated underground to help what you can rely on the families of the dead and disappeared to render for currency, Loyalnost and just purely for revenge. The more elaborate a plan the more likely for something to go wrong.

But, Adon still wants to hang the guard colonel from the Shukhov Radio Tower on 37 Shabolovskaya Street. Real fucking subtle. Not.

 

“What does the code of the Ayitian gentleman ultimately say about revenge?” Sebastian asks.

Watson looks up from his meal and sets the silverware down on the table. He wipes his freckled mouth with a red napkin.

“Revenge is the diametric of courtship, as true hate is the diametric opposite of true love. If one is to truly love, the patience and care of courtship is an indefinite process, and by that reasoning so is the proper execution of vengeance if one’s hate is also true.”

“Ysiad suggested we walk away from the job tonight. That we close the book and get a flight out back to Hispaniola. He suggested that the colonel is highly protected and they anticipate our attack.”

“Well anything that Dominikani says, he says with his own pockets in mind.  On a long enough timeline even angels of death begin to draw notice. I think we should walk away then. This is Russia frère. And the Dominikani wouldn’t have mentioned it unless it was a realistic threat.”

“You definitely need to know when to walk away.”

If Sebastian Adon could only do that then the world would be quite different. Once many years ago while living in the slums of south London a seventeen year old Sebastian declared himself the “one who fights the losing battle” and for a time he thought to tattoo that as a personalized crest over his heart atop an eagle, two flaming towers, a bone and a rose. Before the Grand Rabbi Akiva Tatz convinced him fully against tattoos. Before he picked a couple battles he could win, and learned to like the taste of impossible victory.

 

“The honor of the underdog is not the same as betting on the Hindenburg. Old Russian saying. I don’t know if it fully translates,” states Adon.

Watson Entwissle by now knows full well that almost nothing Sebastian Adon describes as an “Old Russian saying”, is really ever an Old Russian saying.

One late night many years later after London just prior to “the Great Disorder”, over mint tea and jasmine rose hookah at the Footprints Café in Coney Island, a Russian woman named Dasha would tell him that there was nothing wrong with being a communist. Nothing wrong with believing in the cleansing fires of the revolution. But, to believe he could take on the oligarchy with a band of eight was simple foolish suicide. And he deserved to be tortured just for being so foolish. So she strung him up and tortured him. And that’s how he learned that lesson.

“Fight from a position of resources,” she told him. Shortly before drugging him. Stripping him naked and jarring him with stacked shocks of electrical current. “I believe in you even if I don’t always believe in your methods. But, don’t give your life for such bullshit, and don’t pick a battle you know you won’t ever win,” she had said. And then she tortured him for roughly six straight weeks. But, she did it against her own will.

“These Russians are a highly dangerous breed,” Watson states the known and obvious.

They’re having supper in a Moscow safe house owned by the extended family of a dead journalist. The only proven way to circumvent the web of spies, informants, dirty snitches and surveillance society is to rely on the time honored loyalties of family and blood oath. The thing you need to know about doing business in Russia is that virtually no one is loyal to anything besides the right price. And every single Russian has a pretty high price when it comes to being loyal to an Amerikanski, a Ivory or a chornay. But, in the end if a faceless institution murders your children, the enemy of that institution is your friend. They crossed the border three nights ago from the East. They both speak fluent Russian and the flicker masks completely distort their identities. They acquired automatic weapons at a country dascha to the southwest of Moscow and drove directly to the safe house in an electric Lincoln town car.

“When were you last here?” Watson asks.

“I don’t remember.”

“I have trouble believing you mon ami. You’re navigation was uncanny.”

“I don’t like being tortured,” he smugly replies.

“Well who does,” Watson laughs.

“Your thoughts then on doing this job?”

“Colonel Yuri Dmitrievich Budanov is not, in my mind, a high profile enough hit worth us falling into the hands of the FSB, but obviously you seem obsessed with this. This isn’t exactly some oligarch or some key player. This is a disgraced former military officer who raped and strangled a young girl. He did five years’ light time. Memorial lawyers even got his rank stripped and now he is just a token symbol of the total corruption here. ”

Sebastian Adon takes out a pack of Noblisse cigarettes in their crumpled green soft pack. He fires one up with a small gold zippo lighter. Watson had thought he had quit several months ago. Sneaky Ivory bastard.

 

You’re welcome to walk away, brother,” Sebastian says in Ayitian Creole.

`

I feel as though laughing in your face would not even begin to drive my point home. The code says that what you begin you will always finish or die trying. Though, I just suspect we’re not in Moscow for Yuri Budanov alone,” Watson relies.

 

“Look. I didn’t compose that list. Some of the people we killed were outright I.C.C. indicted war criminals. Others were various mobsters that just needed to be rubbed out because what they were doing was a human right violation, and poor human form. Others we hit because they made money on the backs of exploited workers. Others still because they profited off others misery. You, me, Anya, and the others who died in our unit we were not killing because it made any real difference. We didn’t even do it because those people needed to be punished. Otherwise we would have arrested them and set up some kind of tribunal. These 103 kills happened because a message needed to be sent across that world that if you violate human rights we can get you. And that message has come across loud and clear.”

“So why push on? There are now hundreds of little cells carrying out these killings independently. Every week the Anonymous is posting new confirmations on “the friends of the people” website. Look at the list frère, there are thousands of other targets to pick from. Dozens in this city alone. Why him. Why tonight? Why Moscow? My skin crawls from the cold, knowing just how wide open we are out here. And let me remind you that if we make a kill on Russian territory we are breaking one of the rules of engagement.”

“They’re not going to make him into a politician. But, he is symbol of new Russia’s defiance. He raped and strangled little Elza Kungaev. He broke into her home, he wrapped her in a blanket, through her in the back of his ATV, he then raped the shit out of her for hours, and then he sodomized her as he strangled her to death and quite nearly got away with it. It took the full efforts of Human Rights Memorial and the lawyer for the Kungayeva family, Stanislav Markelov, as well as the support of the opposition Newspaper Novaya Gazeta to even get what little justice they got. And they let him out after just five years in. My mentor Anna Politkovskaya was found dead in the lift of her block of flats in central Moscow on 7 October 2006. She had been shot twice in the chest, once in the shoulder, and once in the head at point-blank range. She had reported extensively on the war crimes in Chechnya and this trial. Stanislav attempted a last-minute appeal against the release of Budanov and was shot dead in Moscow on 19 January 2009 along with Anastasia Baburova, a 25-year-old journalist for Novaya Gazeta, an anarchist and friend of ours. Budanov has been free since paroled in 2008. To many on the Russian right he’s a “war hero” unfairly victimized by liberal and foreign journalists conspiring to undermine Russian security. So, for Elza, Anna, Stanislav, and Anastasia, and who knows how many others. We’re going to finish the job.”

And then he puffs the cigarette.

“I’m still unconvinced,” states Watson, “There are so many sins in this world to punish. Just last week some dagger men caught up with the Serbian concentration camp commandant accused of presiding over the rape and torture of some untold number of women during the war in Bosnia. The last big hit was the Rwandan millionaire who helped finance the genocide there. This is not the cold dark hill to die on I feel. Especially with what is soon coming.”

“This colonel is a pig! A murdering savage who directed his men to loot, burn, shell and murder civilians in the first Chechen war. Are there better targets? Who are we to truly prioritize! I’ve long thought very few living inside the Ring Road don’t have some culpability to what was done in Ichkeria, but that is not my call either. We could go after any number of other people here in the Russian capital. War criminals and profiteers abound here. The President himself is one of the world’s biggest war criminals in my mind. So, why end our tour with a disgraced military leader who did a puny five year stint when no one thought you could even try a war criminal in Federal Russia?”

“Yes. Why?”

“Because they kill journalists and they disappear dissidents out here left and right and no one can do anything about it. Killing an oligarch frankly is just too bad for business right now. We’d need months of planning and a big crew to get near one the worst billionaires. So, we’re going to take out a vile piece of low hanging fruit, hang him off the radio tower and get the fuck out of dodge. Trust me we’ll be back here.”

“You’re not being straight with me. Why is this target so important to you?”

Sebastian looks out the window and snuffs out the cigarette.

“He means nothing to me.”

Watson does not believe him at all.

“Just as long as there’s no hint of sentimentality. Then we shall proceed.”

“Not a smidgeon.”

“Then no theatrics. No hanging this man from a radio tower. No explosions. No games. Two shots in his head and we go home.”

Sebastian pauses, and then says, “There’s no art to that.”

“This is about attrition. Not justice, not art.”

Salud then,” says Sebastian raising his glass, “To the many deaths of cruel tyrants, in commemoration of the martyrs and to the many long lives of the peoples’ heroes,” he toasts Watson with compot.

Salud.”

Nazdrovia!”

They clink.

“According to the code of Ayitian gentleman, no one gets called a hero until they are cold dead and fully buried, and their people are fully free.”

“But I, my friend, was born a Ivory,” says Sebastian with a grin.

 

And into the cold, cold lonely night they depart to make their final bloody hit.

The streets are packed for this hour and the weather conditions by 23:01pm are unchanged. It is preposterous that there be so much snow in the month of June! They drive deeper into the city in a black jeep with tinted windows. They didn’t have to work too hard tonight because a man like this has made a lot of enemies. What you can always predict about corruption is that everyone is eventually for sale and that sale is acceptable. They have had a young woman watching him for some time and it was already clear that hitting him at his house was completely out of the question.  Ultimately, they had to get him out of his house on to a street to carry out a drive by and jettison. First, we had to get an accurate CCTV placement run down. All angles where we could be caught on film and thus plan out route of approach and escape. That they purchased long ago for but 250,000 Rubles.  We then had to ascertain the level of security protecting him. That was supplied by his shadow, the young woman hired to watch him. Three yellow code dry runs had been made already via our associates in Memorial to gauge the rapid response level times. He has two personal bodyguards and two cars of paramilitaries from the FSB stationed on his block, but tonight there were apparently four. His building was newly renovated but everything in the central district is accessible by an automated grid. Power, water, phone lines, and heat controls are all accessible to turn on an off via computerized control based on payment or the right tight hack. But they’re going to do this the old fashioned way.

“Under no circumstances are you to get in a gun battle on the streets of Moscow,” were the direct orders of Maya Solomon to Watson Entwissle earlier in the day via sky pager.

Before they reach the Central District we leave the jeep in a subterranean parking garage and exit into the elements on foot wrapped in multilayer pea coats with new faces before switching into a faster car left for them on the street which we will use for the drive by. There are road blocks in to the Central District but they have a satellite map to guide us to the several side streets which are less likely to be fully staffed. The streets are noticeably unobstructed the closer we get to the city center where in total defiance of the elements the Muscovites have enlisted a full time battalion of mechanized snow removal technicians to keep traffic in and out flowing.

 

At 22:05pm a man we paid 250,000 New Rubles through a fifth party cuts off the heat to the apartment of Yuri Budanov and then vacates the building via its lower parking garage. A 22:35 an automated dialer begins calling his flat over and over again posing as a series of incomprehensible Chinese telemarketers. At 22:45 all the street lights on his block are cut off. This is what enough installments of 250,000 rubles can buy. It’s very, very cold in Russia. And it shouldn’t really be snowing like this, in June.

Watson does the driving and Sebastian does the shooting. A sky page from our contact informs us that he’s just stepped outside his apartment block with his wife on to the street. They drive up Komsomolskaya Prospect at a gentleman’s pace. Sebastian crosses himself. So fucking odd that a part Ivoryish convert to Shi’a Islam will cross himself before a kill. The window comes down and Sebastian lines up, “for Elza,” he says.

 

Pop. Pop. Pop. Pop. Pop. Pop.

 

Six silent shots go off, four into the thick of Yuri Budanov’s bearded face and the blood and the brains checker splatter and spread in the white snow.  And then it happens. The entire street draws weapons on us. Men, women, children, Dvotchka even Babushkas! Everybody takes out machine pistols and levels them at our position. And tires all go flat, and several black vans open up and FSB storm troopers run out, dozens of them and they point machine guns at us. It happens so fast. So well-coordinated! Budanov’s wife is screaming hysterically and his body is face down in the snow in a pool of blood. We are completely surrounded.

Sebastian gives Watson a look. He takes his pistol and presses it to his own head.

“Inadvisable,” Watson says in French.

Click.

The gun jams.

Watson places his hands on the dashboard.

 

Bze platnay seer ve mishalovka,” says Sebastian Adon as he drops the pistol out the car window into the snow setting his hands also down upon the dash.

The only free cheese is in a mousetrap.

Shortly after thinking that a truncheon strikes his head.

 

 

 

Chapter 20

Coney Island, 2019ce

Breuklyn Soviet

 

 

 

Anya Drovtich is flying. Literally rocketing down the Belt Parkway at 240 kilometers per hour. We use the metric system in Breuklyn Soviet now. She rips tarmac down the coastal highway.

The first article of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights states that,

 

“All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.”

 

Anya thinks at lightning speed:

 

I’d like to tell you that we live by that. I’d like to tell you how much I’d like to assure you that the work our men and women do is building towards that first article. But, I’d be completely lying. As my Ducati rips down the Belt Parkway toward my next meeting in the Green Light District, I know that while we are all born equal, very few of us were born free.

The Judeo-Christian-Islamic God, that over two million of our Breuklyn Soviet citizens still pray to says, “An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.”

I rocket past a crew of ambulance workers attending to the collateral damage of abolishing the speed limit. I salute at 255 KPH.

The code of the school yard says, “Two wrongs don’t make a right.”

So who does one even believe these days?

There was once a very large strip club called “Flashpumpers” that used to be on Surf Ave, then it was called Squared, then called Foxy’s. The strip club itself was the target of a particularly grisly mass shooting a couple days prior when it was discovered that the girls had no union and were being pimped out on the side. A group of flicker hooded masked men executed every male employee and patron in the place, surviving witnesses claimed the attackers came out a tunnel under the kitchen floor. You can get just about anything on earth in the Green Light District, you can fuck animals, you can role play, you can acquire any conceivable cocktail of illicit pharmaceutics, you can engage in some pretty ancient Roman, Japanese hardcore, roaring 20’s shit;  but you can’t make people your slaves. Or dittle fuck little kids. Age of consent is still very much a universal 18 years of age throughout the Breuklyn Soviet.

Innocuously enough, just four blocks down is a small “Muslim Exclusive”, no alcohol on premises hookah café called Arabian Knights.

That’s where I’m off to.

I’ll have you know that I did not vote for the class order to have those mobsters gunned down. That was the death sentence of Erza Pula, the Albanian Chief of the Safety Section, or what Oleg   jokingly calls; the Committee for Public Safety.

Erza Pula has never been one flinch at killing slavers. My days of dealing in death are over. For the most part.

I park my black Ducati in front of Arabian Knights.

It was here, under the averted eyes of its elderly Chechen owner Sam “Ouju” Saladin that rebel engineers from the Breukland Soviet have built a smuggling tunnel complete with a functional subway three car Q train out an old maintenance tunnel all the way under the East River bed into the catacombs below the District Financial. Via this route Ysiad Ferraris will later this evening cross into the U.A.S. after his debauch at Drake Hotel with the Ivorite spy Toba Hadaad, not my favorite person.

I check my bike out front with the underage Canaanite valet Tariq. I nod to the door guards, members of the Party of God, I give them the A salaam Alekuum. They give me the courteous salute and Islamic reply. Then seal and bolt the doors behind me.

 

The entire place is an interlocking weave of curtained booths which bear an innocuous aroma of some unknown fruit, perhaps grape melon? Saladin, born a very long time ago in a Chechen town called Shali City cures his own shisha, or fruit molasses infused tobacco.

 

In the backroom of the Oasis Hade Bade, behind steel buttressed emergency doors, seated around a long table close to the ground are several partisans, some quite infamous at this stage for the desperate deeds they did to secure Breuklyn’s independence, others accomplices of lower profile. Though the audacity required for us to hold court on Russian Bratva district territory in uniform no less while recently having ordered the shutdown of several major brothels and gambling houses speaks to the brazen way Oleg Medved and I lead the Otriad these days.

Fair warning was given. The Green Light District went “union” six months prior and port tariffs were to be now collected at Port Coney and taxes were to be paid directly to the General Assembly. The Port may be owned by Perchevney and his people, but the District Coney Island was established long ago as Breuklyn Otriad turf.

 

Article twenty three clearly states that everyone has the right to “a fair wage, in a safe environment and to join a trade union.”

 

I am clad in my dark blue fatigues and along with burly well-dressed Oleg Medved and am briefing our assembled associates. My associates at this particular palaver are Kaveh Ali Shariati Atatable, a Persian Revolutionary Guardsmen cross affiliated with the Z.O.B. and the Party of God, the Indian-Yid televisionary Nicholas Mapfre; the recently elected Chief Communications Officer of the 18th Congress, and Hassan Askeri, Bangladeshi millionaire business man and Vice President of BRAC; the world’s largest NGO. Along with seven newly arrived commanders from the Party of God, the Persian backed Shi’a paramilitary organization that is one of the Z.O.B.’s closest allies. I am entreating them to produce a “Goebbels quality inter-web marketing campaign.”

We are about to let the cat out of the bag quite publically.

Oleg Medved is smoking a Cuban cigar. He has little taste for hookahs. And even less for shifty endless political negotiations, especially when they involve the Brotherhood of Muhammadian and the so called Party of God. His thinly veiled contempt for meetings is only subsumed at times for his respect for me. Anya Drovtich.

Kaveh is a heavy set and muscular Persian with a well-groomed mustache.

Nicholas Mapfre has long black hair. He smiles mischievously when asked questions that make him uncomfortable, like how many wives he has. Hassan Askeri has a boyish, preppy look to him as though he has stepped out of a Bollywood film, befriended some red radicals and fearlessly supports us even if just for the sake of danger, prestige and the sex. The seven revolutionary guardsmen present are all clean shaven and olive skinned.

 

Nicholas Mapfre went to Bronx Science and was a founding member of the original Club, albeit more of silent partner until four years ago when most of his childhood friends were martyred before and during the rising. Kaveh has been a card carrying Banshee for years before he returned to his beleaguered nation Iran to enlist in the Revolutionary Guards after a brief career in yellow journalism. Hassan encountered Sebastian Adon on the Q train mêlée in 2008 and their lives were shortly ever after bound together via thought crime and punishment.

 

I am standing, leaned against the wall; hand on my hip, hand holding open a micro brief. My lips painted are up in red lip stick and my dreads are covered in a red Hijab. Oleg Medved is intermittently reading a Russian poem by Vladimir Mayakovsky on his smart phone, while scrolling between the quasi erotic pictures of his last fashion shoot, while then sky paging one of his modals to meet him later at the Drake Hotel.

He looks vaguely tired.

Yet always stalwart. Ready to do what must be done.

Quite a stalwart droog.

As per usual I brief them multilingually and using Spectra Point; the 3d graphics system designed by Google right before they succeeded in fully turning over control of the internet to the Obama regime’s N.S.A. It projects holographic displays and is far more engaging than the data delivery systems preceding it.

Before he was brutally tortured on national television Dan Fried the martyr had open course improved on it. Right before he successful hacked into and eliminated the entire big data holding of the NSA two years before the Great Disorder.

“Brothers, let me begin by positing two variables which must be brought to bear immediately. We are as you know about to move ahead with these latest clandestine machinations. First, if the camera isn’t rolling the whole goddamn time, if people cannot tune constantly into our revolution rolling live stream on the inter-web; see with their own eyes not just hear about it on the Fire Station; if they cannot identify clear protagonists, clear protagonists that they at times get to see partially naked; take in the veritable laundry lists of resistance faction acronyms and see this whole bloody, bloody show down as an epic battle between “Good” and “evil”; human freedom v. oligarchic collectivism well then I suspect that we will all die in shallow sandy graves as the true blue “international cohort of Islamists, subversives, anarchists, commies, and nigger loving terrorists” the U.A.S. media already proclaims us to be,” I, Anya Drovtich, Section Chief of Information and Intelligence of the Breuklyn Otriad’s 18th Congress inform them.

I clearly have a way with my words.

But, I did not always.

“We are asking you as some of our most obviously capable cinematographers and media experts to develop the capability of live streaming the entire guerilla invasion of a major African country to take place approximately six months from now. We are also requesting Persian support in training the local people of that country in the finer arts of guerrilla war. And all this needs to be accomplished within the next six months. Understood?” she asked them.

“Five by five,” responded Kaveh Ali Shariati in Farsi.

 

Switch perspective.

 

Oleg Medved is watching Nicholas Mapfre, Hassan, Kaveh and the seven Guardsmen pass the Nagillah, the big blue water pipe filled with Grape-Mint tobacco back and forth. His girlfriend slash modal slash concubine texts him back that she can be at the Drake at 23:00.  He doesn’t need to tell her to bring the cuffs and Stolichnaya Premium. Anya always has everyone’s undivided attention except his.

But he’s her left hand man. Her best asset. Especially since his erotic tiff with Erza Pula Pound, the Albanian Safety-Security Chief. Another lesson of don’t fuck where you eat. Don’t ravish a woman who has her own army if she might fall for you when you don’t believe in such things as monogamy.

Oi.  

            What a headache.

            Nicholas Mapfre, guerilla film maker of the People’s Television Network, long time club member is certain that without the proper utilization of information technology it will be impossible to get good data out of the war zone and utilize it as propaganda to trigger the chain reaction of uprisings so critical to the victory of the militant human rights movement.

Anya fills the room with her vibrations.

“A quick parable before my second point,” she says.

“Years ago, in the Cinema Rex fire, the Cinema Rex in Abadan, Iran, was set ablaze, killing over 400 individuals, horrifically burning them alive while trapped inside.”

“The then ruling shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, said that Muhammadian insurgents set the fire, while many blamed the country’s intelligence service, Savak. There is speculation over the actual number of casualties incurred during the fire. Various sources draw their own conclusions concerning the death toll. A 1980 Amnesty-International report states that there were 438 victims, including individuals who were tried and wrongfully executed after the fire itself.

“The fire itself was “the third-deadliest terror attack in modern history,” after only the 11 September debacle. And a certain subsequent recent event called the Millennium Theatre Hostage crisis with which you are all now surely familiar with.”

Oleg Medved even hearing that phrases like “11 September” or “Millennium Hostage Crisis” gets a bad taste in his mouth. Since his unit organized both of those attacks.

“There have been many unfounded allegations regarding the circumstances which led to the Cinema Rex fire, but it is certain that it was a key event that triggered the Persian revolution. One such allegation claims that Mossad-trained Savak agents were in pursuit of individuals who ran into the movie theatre and used it as an opportunity to hide in a large crowd at the cinema. Later, either the fugitives, or the Savak agents chasing them decided to lock the doors of the cinema, and a fire was started in the theatre presumably by the fugitives. Unable to escape from the building, everyone inside the cinema died as a result of the conflagration. Another speculation is that the Savak simply bolted the doors and burned the place down themselves hoping to stoke local anger against the resistance to the Shah.”

She pauses and then says, “Second point. Not only do we require People’s Television and the Persian Revolutionary Guard to design, bank roll and administer the sophisticated media logistics for the world’s first live streamed international guerrilla war; we need you to produce a very, very moving film. And quickly. Something to make your Kony 2012 piece look like Saturday morning cartoons. I am asking you on behalf of the 18th Congress of the Club’s Executive to produce such a film juxtaposing the Cinema Rex fire in Abadan; the September 11th martyr operation; and with the Millennium Theatre fire of three years prior. They are not really all that similar in technicality, but the purpose of this film is to win international hearts and minds to cause of our micro-republic. We want a film that makes foreign nationals and their leaders want to help us. Because if we’re going to simultaneously keep the U.A.S. Federal government off our backs, keep things moving along plan, and attempt to liberate a certain country in the Caribbean, well were going to need the help of the Persian Revolutionary Guard Corps. And movies, as you three gentlemen know are the way into all human hearts and minds.”

She sold them before they walked in.

 

Three years ago, 808 American civilian hostages and 24 rebel fighters were killed in the Millennium Theatre in a 72 hour hostage crisis on the eve of the ceasefire which led to the Breuklyn Soviet Microrepublik’s establishment. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) had pumped some designer paralytic gas into the besieged theatre to supposedly incapacitate the hostage takers. At some point either the rebels or the Federals storming the theatre triggered an explosion in the ensuing exchange of gun fire. Blame went both ways obviously. As 800 plus 8 people lay in various degrees of incapacitation a fire swept the theatre. Virtually everyone perished.

 

The few civilian hostages that the FDNY rescue medics managed to pull from that inferno were dead shortly after from the incapacitating gas. It was virtually impossible for either the media or the DHS to differentiate hostage from “terrorist”, but 832 bodies were recovered from the smoking rubble of Broadways most prestigious new play house.

In reality 808 American hostages did indeed perish mostly from the gas used by the U.A.S. Federals and subsequent exchanges of gun fire. Of the 24 Otriad rebels that took over the theatre for 72 hours, none of them allegedly made it out alive. And two that were confirmed killed by the national press and DHS were none other than Maya Solomon and Sebastian Adon. The principle founders of the Breuklyn Bath and Rifle Club’s New York and Middle Eastern Branches.

The partially burned remains of the two famous “master terrorists” were confirmed by genetic matching the corpses and dental records. 832 bodies were recovered. Many riddled with bullets, many partially burned. Thus leading the FBI-DHLS to believe they had killed two major leaders of the national uprising called “The Great Revolt” which by that time had been bleeding the nation or three years.

But, the coroners of the DHS were tricked and mistaken. These were body doubles. Flesh bot clones of the 24 operatives taking the theatre by storm. Husks grown with no souls used primarily as replacement parts or sex toys for rich lonely sickos.

Adon, Solomon and 22 others made it out through the sewers shortly after the gas came

rushing in. These were students of history. They remembered what had happened in Moscow in 2003. They brought respirator masks with them. They left bodies, flesh husks for the authorities to find.    History only repeats itself when allowed to.

Nicholas Mapfre, Kaveh and their cocky, vaguely charming playboy partner Ryder Haske did terrific work throughout the battle for Ayiti, the great revolt and their unrelated tear jerker KONY 2012 on the subject of the Lord’s Resistance Army of Uganda raised 37 million dollars for the  club from unsuspecting liberal American college students. Given unrestricted access to Iran and its national archives during an unusually scary year of nuclear saber rattling between Iran, Israel and the UAS their movie had finished and screened as “humanizing tour de force” during a period of “globe shaking ethno-religious jingoism” right before the partisan invasion of Ayiti was to commence.

The message was to juxtapose the pre-revolutionary excesses of the Shah with the sinister Project for a New American Century-Mossad 9/11 Martyr Operation along with the brutal conduct of the U.A.S. Federal government during Iraq, Afghanistan, and the Great Revolt, exemplified by the Millennium Hostage Crisis a showcase of “state sponsored acts of terror”.

The film was beyond risky.

It was to be well-researched and also be sexy, fun and available for free on YouTube. And it was a polished piece of populist propaganda. It would be obviously firewalled in the U.A.S., Russian Federation, and People’s Republic of China, but by that time almost everyone on earth besides those living in North Korea still had unrestricted clandestine access to “the inter-web”; the people’s last free open source conduit of information now that the oligarchy had Silicon Valley in its war pocket and controlled completely every log in, every search, and every correspondence on the internet.

Even a U.A.S. citizen in the Midwest couldn’t help but sympathize with the people of Breuklyn bombed into the ground for months, killed by the tens of thousands, living in bunkers fighting in ghettos, and trenches and then the sheer audacity of us mounting four sophisticated hostage take overs in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago and Washington D.C. that all resulted in the seizure of some the nation’s wealthiest citizens, celebrities and politicians.

 

“Especially since that same vile clique of Bohemian Grove American oligarchs had just over a decade ago organized a massive terrorist attack on their own citizens on the 11th of September 2001 to send the country to permanent war and strip the nation of the last vestiges of its civil liberties,” notes Anya Drovtich.

 

The deadly martyrdom of Adon and Solomon, confirmed dead in the Millennium inferno caused by U.A.S. heavy handedness would now be exposed as a clever charade to conceal two of the top architects of the human rights resistance movement.

This was to be an epic film.

The blackest cat is now out of the bag.

“If we hadn’t all seen it coming and already had so much data to choose from I’d tell you this couldn’t be done in the time frame you’re suggesting. However, I think we all saw this coming,” states Nicholas Mapfre.

One of the nameless Persian guardsmen chimes in, “it is always said they were very, very hard people to truly kill.”

 

“That 808 American citizens died in a crisis we initiated is obviously still a major open sore for the U.A.S. pundits, politicians and right wing. Even if most of them were upper east side elites,” notes Kaveh Ali Shariati, “that it resulted in rapid succession of sixty four eastern free state territories, several of which with nuclear weapons is a real talking point too.”

 

Everyone was still getting over the September 11th Attack that launched the rather limitless and global war pitting the United States against the entire Muslim world. But this was the Post-Snowden IT AGE, so unlike in Moscow in 2003 when the F.S.B. pumped gas into the Budanov Theatre and killed several hundred of their citizens, or when China blacked out over one billion internet users from knowing what was going on outside of China, well they can get away with less now, cameras will always be rolling and we have the inter-web to ourselves. No paid advertisements allowed.

 

“The film will blame the oligarchy for ultimately forcing civilians to become terrorists and revolutionaries. It will profile Cinema Rex in Iran, the Budanov Theatre Hostage Crisis in 2003 of Moscow, and expose the details of September 11th, 2001 and the events of the Millennium. It will finally stress just how “not quite dead” Adon and Solomon are and set up the interest for the third wave; our irregular invasion of Ayiti,” explains Anya.

Interestingly enough, it was not the deaths of 808 rich, very rich New Yorkers at the Millennium, or the threat of setting off a very real nuclear device in Washington DC, or even that President Obama’s family was amongst the hostages seized there. The working group that took over the Democratic National Convention in Chicago was holding upwards of 8,000 hostages. That wasn’t the issue.

What finally led to the pressure to bear to end the crisis didn’t even come from Los Angeles. By taking over the Academy Awards the rebels were in a position to murder most of the nation’s Hollywood celebrities.

Or the nuclear test detonation in the Ocean outside Washington D.C. irradiating the city for the next eighty years half-life.

In the end, shortly after the full scope of the plot came to the attention of the nation’s security and intelligence community. A high level bureaucrat from the Department of Homeland Security called the wealthiest men in the country to brief them on the developments. Of course the media had been having a feeding frenzy already, but not everyone knew about the bomb in the capital.

In the end, not the military, not the security state, not the President, but instead the richest man in the nation, an anonymous man whose name you would never even recognize, he weighed the stakes, conferred with a few business tycoons and theirs lawyers in a thatched hut of the Bohemian Grove and they called Obama back an hour later.

 

“Give them all the sovereignty they can swallow,” was the message of the elite at least in the beginning.

 

The President was informed that the intelligence community and the military would be unable to stop the three working groups in Chicago, D.C. and L.A. from carrying out their directives. It was thoroughly advised that the President declare an official ceasefire with the separatists, end the siege and deal with the rebels decisively in “his third term in office.”

 

The ceasefire came 72 hours after the blood bath at the Millennium. The rebels along with a choice batch of some celebrity, athlete and political hostages as well as three atomic weapons built in the University of Stonybrook all took trains back to Breuklyn. Three years had passed without so much as a shot fired between the U.A.S. and the Breuklyn Soviet. The purge had occurred abroad, and it was almost complete.

 

103 dead war criminals according to the last reports. One more to die in Moscow before the evening is over.

And then three months ago the mysterious killings began. In just three months howling lunatics had slaughtered as many innocent people as our Sicarri had tracked down in three years.

“We will have the film ready to premier in six months,” states Kaveh, “as for the Guard supporting your so called ‘Operation Marcus Garvey’; we will have to wait and hear from the supreme leadership in Tehran.

“We will bring your proposal to our leadership this evening,” states Sayyid Ghaffarian leader amongst the Guardsmen secretly deployed in Breuklyn Soviet, “I suppose a serious question to ask is who exactly will pay for this risky venture?”

 

“Everyone’s gonna end up paying for it,” mutters Oleg Medved.

 

But he isn’t talking about the money.

 

 

Chapter 21

Fadeeva 6, 2018ce

Moscow

 

   
  Thinks Sebastian Adon, his head throbbing;

Something is odd about the lightning in here. But I fail to know what to say or think it worth speaking on.

What makes a safe house safe?

I have no idea.

Only the people in it ready to hold ground.

She’s a dangerous woman, all can agree.

“Well of course they were captured,” she says, “Moscow is locked down. Tight as a drum as you like to say. Nothing happens here without the full choreography of the authorities.”

“Including us?”

“Including the weather. I’d imagine what comes next will be very painful,” she says.

“It’s always been thrilling to observe the drastic change in energies and aura via the shift in a paradigm when one looks upon a complicated thing with new eyes.”

“What does that mean?” she asks, “don’t talk that Kundalini bullshit to me.”

“The most important lesson I ever learned in Ayiti was that you have to always separate fact from emotion; the brain from the heart, and the fakeness from the real. Would you recognize Alexandre Perchevney if you saw him in a photograph?” I ask her.

“Of course not,” she says, “nor would I recognize you. No matter what was done to me. Only by your wide eyes and kiss do I know it’s ever you.”

“Your round,” I say examining her Chornay cigarettes. Wondering why she still smokes.

“Smoking kills,” I mention.

“Your people know how to grow new bodies don’t they? If you truly love me you’ll get me new lungs. We can leave these bodies at will!” she pauses then begins to sing, “What’s one more cigarette she said? What’s the use of your lungs when you’re riddled with sixty four holes?”

That’s a line from a famous song.

“There is only one proven way to get information out of a woman like you,” I declare!

“Oh, do tell,” she says.

“The tickle method,” I tell her.

“Get on your fucking back man,” she declares.

“I’m going to tickle you until you can no longer stand.”

“Tickle better be your bullshit American code word for a violent hard fuck.”

“Well it might be.”

 

 

Chapter 23

Coney Island, Green Zone, 2019ce

Breuklyn Soviet

 

 

Spooning leads to forking, that’s what they always say.

Summer in the Breuklyn Soviet means that the boardwalk and beaches are virtually inundated with gyrating flesh; short-short skirts, loud dancehall, dub step or field music blaring over vehicle sound systems driven right to the water’s edge. All night sex parties. Endless overtime for the veritable army of push cart hustlers and hawkers and their civil servant protectors. The parachute drop tower is lit up at night for base jumping, but the wild lights of the Green Light District, Luna Park, Steeplechase Casino and over a thousand hot spot debaucheries; night clubs, spas and outdoor restaurants keep out citizens and adventure tourists from around the world quite busy.

But it hasn’t been summer for years.

The Boardwalk is now fully desolate.

Breuklyn Soviet is still in the full clutches of General Winter.

My god your tits are fucking huge, he thinks, respectfully.

Even your coat can’t hide ‘um.

Ysiad Ferraris is vaguely jet lagged. His suit however is well tailored and shows no signs of travel duress. You can’t fly direct from Moscow to what was once called JFK, obviously. All three of the New York’s major airstrips are now in the rebel zones of control. All major carriers refuse to fly there because it would mean losing lucrative contracts with the U.A.S. Since no nation officially recognizes the Free State territories except Iran, Cuba and a hand full of Caribbean Islands in the Wild West Indian Federation; the only way to fly to Breuklyn Soviet is on your own plane and land at Idlewild, Malcolm X (LaGuardia) or MLK (JFK). There is a theoretical no fly zone over Bronx Soviet and the Long Island Sound. Most extralegal commercial trade thus must utilize container ships, tunnel drums, subs and short planes to move goods and people into liberated Strong Island, or the pockets of rebel territory scattered along the coast between Maine and Miami.

“He’s supposed to play dead!” exclaims Toba Hadaad.

And Ysiad just shrugs.

Ysiad Ferraris meets Toba Hadaad, an agent of the Mossad for a brunch and Bloody Mary’s at the Yafa Café on the Manhattan Beach Boardwalk, just outside the Green Light District. It is decorated with red lights that adorn the walls like Christmas decorations. It had been a far seedier place when they were younger. The coffee was once a little more expensive then. People used to fornicate in the narrow enclosures of their rest rooms while coffee house philosophers would pontific ate all night about the existence of God and or Karl Marx. The food is vaguely Mediterranean. The owners are vaguely Israeli. The Yafa Café and its sister the Sunflower Café on Kings Highway are both known places of temporary employ for Hebrew speaking “new arrivals” to the Breuklyn Soviet getting acclimated in the numerous changes happening here.

They have history and quite a lot of it. A bit of the old in-out, in-out pound the shit out. A history built on deeds and deals between Sodom and Gomorrah. The Mossad, the premier Israeli foreign intelligence arm has a history of doing whatever it has to do anywhere and to anyone it has to on earth to safeguard the Israeli state. Including biting the hand that feeds it. Israel still has an 80 billion dollar weapons deal with the United American States and refuses to acknowledge the Breuklyn Soviet as a sovereign nation. But with one eighth of world Ivoryry living there, well under the table deals get made left, right and center.

“I just got back from Moscow! Guess who I ran into at the bathhouse?” exclaims Ysiad.

“What’s that Benzona up to now,” Toba asks Ysiad with a scowl.

“A whole problematic lot of things,” he grins.

“He’s supposed to be dead! The gate keepers should have ordered him liquidated years ago. I’m still just a tad sentimental because he’s your only friend.”

“What you should have done was let him in your fucking country and recruited him back in the day, before he ended up first in Ayiti and turned into such a majorly effective zealot on behalf of the blacks.”

“Whatever. A person like him has no idea how to play well in a chain of command. He thinks he’s so smart. So evolved! And thus he ignores every time honored understanding of what humans are and are not capable of.  We’ve done more than ok without him,” scoffs Toba.

“He thinks the world of you Toba.”

“As he should, he owes me still for that escapade on the subway.”

“That’s not really how he sees it. He feels like you cut him off and sold him out to the agency and got him thrown out of your country for good.”

“Him being a subversive, can’t pick a side-fuck is what did that.”

“Regardless. You look well. You’re still an evil opinionated bitch with huge tits though.”

“And you a soulless, paper chasing lackey to a series of demagogues. How’s the wife?”

“Barefoot and pregnant. She sends her love. How goes the war on Palestine?”

“Status quo. As we like it. So, why the fuck am I here again you sarcastic shit for brains? Oh, yes, to remind you that the agency is very nervous about conflicting reports that Adon and Solomon are out of retirement after just three years of being confirmed dead. And both allegedly soon enroot to Tehran. You could see how that worries us.”

Ysiad cocks a cocky eyebrow.

“Ah, that. Well, Sebastian and Co. are about to invade a certain gold and oil rich developing, perhaps long unraveling nation and they were curious how the Israeli intelligence community would feel. You know, like if they took over the DR and Ayiti.”

Her jaw drops only slightly. A tiny little bit revealing some last vestige of sentimentality. Her jaw never fully drops. It drops to reveal what Ysiad can’t possibly know which is that she never expected this plot to get this far.

It was a very impressive subterfuge that the club had pulled via its scientists ability to replicate bodies. Not only was the Breuklyn Otriad able to grow viable organs to sell to fund its efforts, they could grow entire soulless bodies. And that was how they planted twenty four corpses including two of their primary leadership at the site of secessionist ground zero during the Millennium Theatre Hostage Crisis. To the best of her knowledge only the Mossad and the Perchevney Bratva were still convinced Adon and Solomon were still alive.

 

“He’s was supposed to play dead for five years minimum,” Toba mutters, “That was the deal. Last time I checked.”

“Well obviously there was a change of plans on their end. I know your people have informants in their circle, but I suspect not their inner circle. They can play democracy in front of just about everyone else but we all know, elected or not, dead or alive the same circle of people has been guiding that club since 2000,” Ysiad suggests.

“Well actually it’s really only eight. And out of that eight really only three key original players are still alive. One in Angola prison camp, two in death or exile. ”

“Look we can waste time small taking about the Breuklyn Bath and Rifle club until the rabbits hop home, but bottom line, Adon and Solomon are moving about recruiting and laying down a conduit into the Republic of Ayiti. They’re training over in Cuba with the blessing of the new Lavalas government; they have a forward bases secured on the Isle of Youth.”

“Obviously we were aware of all that. It’s our back yard. But how many?”

“Now, that you don’t get to know, I don’t even really know. Suffice to say enough for a real state of emergency. Maybe not a true topple or a near over throw, but a big messy dent.”

“And why in the world are they orchestrating this?”

“He claims it’s to rescue the people of Ayiti from genocide, but you know, it’s anyone’s guess. He runs quite a spectacle generating club these days.”

“He or she?”

“What are you suggesting?”

“Have you ever seen Maya Solomon with your own eyes?”

“Well no, but I have seen Adon at a bathhouse without clothes just seventy two hours ago and I know he’s a…”

“Not what I’m suggesting. I’m saying she’s the boss, not him.”

“Well who cares, the American media says they’re two very dead master terrorists. The problem is that they’re gonna invade Ayiti in less than six months to a year and they need air support. Unlike the smaller operation they ignited, there are numerous armed groups already killing each other in Ayiti. And all that gold & oil to win.”

“Well this all sounds insane. Say hi to your wonderful wife for me.”

“Ah, he said you’d blow it off like that. Except here is the part where I say over 1,000 of their fighters are practicing Yids. If they do succeed in bringing the Maccoute to their knees, forcing a U.N. intervention in Ayiti and by default toppling President Talleyrand then Israel might stand to have one less regional enemy armed to the teeth with Chinese weapons. And of course the real tipping point, but you have to sit down for this one.”

She doesn’t sit down.

He looks her over with her Arab features, thick hips and her black curly hair and a rack that, well anyway, not to objectify such a powerful and deadly woman, but they are quite big.

“They’re gonna break the leader of the Ayitian Emergency Group out of U.A.S. custody and return to Ayiti with the one man that can unite the major factions of the resistance against President  al-Talleyrand  .”

“They’re going to break Avinadav DeBuitléir out from camp Angola 42? How?”

“Fairly soon I suspect if they aren’t all killed trying.”

She pauses, wondering if it’s about high time for the Mossad to put more West Indians on payroll this week.

“This is all quite fine and good, but what pray tell does the questionably sane Mr. supposedly dead master terrorist Sebastian Adon, excuse me, “former Chief Planning Officer Adon want from Israel this time around?”

This was her little way of impressing on Ysiad that yes, the Mossad is quite aware of the inner mechanics of the Breuklyn Otriad, since one eighth of world Ivoryry lives in that three year old anarchic little micro republic.

“They’re asking for a onetime deal on a Berlin style airlift from Sinai into Ayiti in exchange for Avinadav DeBuitléir’s guarantee on the future Ayitian recognition of Israel after the cessation of hostilities, which presumably they expect to win, as well as DeBuitléir’s promise of extensive trade and resource concessions between your two countries. They want a guarantee that if they manage to secure Hispaniola the I.A.F. will secure a no fly zone to prevent a northern retaliatory strike by the Chinamen.”

“Yeah, well if they win. Big effing if. And where is it we’d even have a base to fly sorties from?”

“What about your friends in Trinidad?”

“Well it’s a onetime gamble. It isn’t as if getting caught doing this could possibly make Israeli-World relations any worse.”

“It’s a negligible commitment of resources because they can’t possibly field more than 1,000 fighters on such short notice with the commitments they’ve already made. You are of course aware that we’ve already penetrated their Jacmel, Cange Outpost and Sinai training bases and have several case officers embedded in the detachments drilling there.”

“They probably have less than that committed actually. But, Toba you know what these people are capable of even with just eight members. Suffice to say, they have a lot more than eight members now.”

“Why are you betting on this foolish blood bath Mr. Ferraris?”

“He’s my dearest old friend.”

“That’s never, ever a good enough reason.”

“Well, one does like making a little history to absolve themselves of past, present and likely future war crimes, do they not? And who’s gonna lie? If that country sits on a sea of oil and gold then this war is incredibly profitable. But I am doing this more as a friend than a business man. And surely they won’t stop at Ayiti. They’ll take D.R. too, my motherland.”

“Indeed, you’re just all such a bunch of true believers.”

“Well we weren’t always. Miracles are lucrative these days. Anyhow, just pass the offer along is all they’re asking and let me know if anyone is receptive to this project on your end of the camel.”

“We’re following this rather closely.”

“The invasion will happen within the year. They want assurances now.”

“Tell them to go talk to Ruth,” says Toba Hadaad.

He passes her across the table a micro USB card taped into a book of matches from the KBG Bar in Manhattan; a den of drunken writers and also quite a few spies. It’s a love letter to the State of Ivory chock full of coded logistical particulars. Makes and models of planes and hardware they want to lend lease.

Magneav,” she declares. (Magnificent).

“Oh yes, what I came here to give to you,” she says.

 

She hands him a business card of a new restaurant called The Third Rasputin, which just went up on Avenue Z, it was called Second Romanoff in its last incarnation.

 

On the boardwalk a grey rabbit that is roughly the size of a hog hops by. Some Japanese adventure tourists try and take its picture.

 

“The new Mehanata,” Ysiad says.

“A certain cargo cased coffin just arrived there today from Moscow. I would suggest you tell your confederates that what is in that box will be worth the whole rebellions weight in gold.”

“I’ll be sure they send someone knocking.”

She smiles at him.

“Tell them to knock very, very hard,” she says.

There is an accusation in her eyes that he is uncomfortable with.

“I didn’t betray Adon,” Ysiad informs her, “we all just needed to do some house cleaning before the coming storm.”

“Purge, counter purge,” she suggests.

“Death to traitors and spies,” he counters.

“You’ve always been one big traitor. And I’ve always been one hell of a spy.”

“I’m staying at the Drake Hotel,” Toba mentions to Ysiad Ferraris.

 

 

 

 

 

Chapter 24

The Drake Hotel,

Coney Island, Green Zone, 2019ce

Breuklyn Soviet

 

Oleg doesn’t have to say one word to the valet at the Drake Hotel about what will happen if anyone so much as looks in the general direction of his black bullet proof Mercedes.

He gregariously takes a picture of the attendant with the vintage Leica camera he so adoringly carries about.

 

As if to say; if anyone goes even close to that car your death will be an entire gory photo shoot.

 

Since the total G42 embargo which has lasted now for three long years there has been no way to get certain luxury items into the nation easily.

To be the driver of a brand fucking new armored Mercedes Bends means only one of two things. You are a vicious, cut throat likely Postsoviet affiliated associate of the Perchevney Bratva, or you are Magnus Goldbar Allamby.

It would be unheard of for anyone else to have a designer car in the Soviet.

And since Oleg Medved is certainly not the Otriads famous Bajan money man. He must therefore work for the feared Bratva that owns both the Drake Hotel, the Free Port and most of the Green Light District.

They are now seated in place of conspicuous opulence.

A suite in the highly acclaimed, highly luxurious Drake Hotel which rises in an eighty four story spire off of Banner Avenue and Brighton 6th Street. It was built before the Great Disorder by a Russian business man named Dmitry Khulushin. He built a very tall tower to house a very important woman, but lost both the woman and shortly after the rights to the tower in a card game.

There are adornments made of marble, and things that shine. There is the veneer of exclusivity, but that exclusivity is only limited by how much you spend.

Thinking back a whole year before deployment, Anya and Oleg   worked the network for a way to communicate with all the African tribes they’d be dying to save.

Ysiad Ferraris owns several dozen assorted businesses, but the crown Ivoryels of his empire are largely high tech in nature or shipping companies. He plans to supply credentials for shipping the weapons and equipment into the Sinai Peninsula. He also has a very happy, happy Hanukah present he insists Oleg Medved and Anya must meet him at his penthouse suite 74 stories over the Brighton Bay to see a “flash new toy”.

Ysiad is a Harvard graduate and amongst many other things the majority shareholder of Caravaggio-Gould Electronic Group: a small start-up out of college now transnational corporation holding patents in rescue and maintenance robotics, solar energy harvesting, and most importantly military contracts for fun filled killing tools like the Niche 06-47 surface-to-air fighter drone and the Oksana 62-12 terra-drone which can march into a village and machine gun everything that moves and is over three feet tall or has a weapon. Also selling like hotcakes were stasis chambers in which the sick or wounded could be put to sleep for years at a time hovering in a dreamlike state while they recuperated surgically grafting cloned flesh back to them.

 

All of which were ever in demand with the ever escalating wars in Eurasia, East Asia and the disputed territories bordering Oceana.

 

Ysiad certainly isn’t the richest man in Babylon, nor has he moved out of his townhouse on the 53rd floor of Olympia Tower Complex on 53rd and Fifth Avenue although not as spacious as his wealth might indicate, but surely he had just bought his new summer home on Madeira Island with cash up front, which was something to really be proud of. He officially holds U.A.S. citizenship but he sure seems to own a great number of properties in the new free sates of the Eastern coast.

 

“So you’ve come for the high China tech shit, have you?” he laughs as they enter his suite at the Drake Hotel.

 

“I just started taking language classes on one of the new Parasimulator my company is about to release. It’s wonderful stuff,” he tells them. More announces.

Toba is fixing her hair and makeup in the women’s closet.

A Parasimulator is an electronic device designed by the Israelis and then vastly improved by the Chinese to generate neurological stimulation to in effect fool your five senses into believing the images, smells and sensations produced. Designed by the Israelis for combat simulation and torture, the Caravaggio Gould Group popularized them for elite entertainment. They are currently only available to the most wealthy and powerful, and military intelligence groups of the first world, Russian and China.

He passes Oleg Medved a head set that locks over his eyes and ears and connects wirelessly to tiny black box clipped to my hip.

“Why not just make it as one unit,” Oleg   asks.

“Well the factory that makes the software is in Israel, but the audio-visual simulator we can build cheaper in Vietnam. And anyway with the Boycott Divest and Sanction campaign in full swing and so many of my shareholders being Yids I couldn’t make the whole thing in East Asia, but I can’t risk all the fines for doing it all in Israel. You know the game.”

Anya is highly unimpressed with just about everything this schemer does.

A war profiteer is how she describes him.

Oleg   dons the head set and a husky female voice whispers to verbally select language interface for translation.

“Ayitian Creole.”

Select dialect the device whispers seductively.

“Jacmel Region.”

Select audio-visual translation output it says.

“Americano.”

“Select audio-visual translation output dialect.”

“Breuklyn Soviet.”

He can see Ysiad and his wonderfully minimalistic apartment through the glasses of the headset. This movie Southland tales once stated that “the future was going to be far more futuristic than originally expected.” They sure were right.

 

“Watch the words that appear in the left side of the screen,” Ysiad says to Oleg. As he talks his words are whispered to him in Creole and like sub titles appear phonetically across his line of site.

Ysiad now says something in Spanish, the device whispers soothingly to Oleg, “The client can upload tens of thousands of language groups.”

He continues in Spanish, “you will hear what the device hears in Breuklyn Americano and whatever you say will be put on the screen to repeat phonetically in the dialect you have selected for translation. As you can see, even other languages will be repeated to you back in the language you selected so it isn’t terribly hard to carry on with numerous primitives speaking numerous dialects. ”

“I think we call them ‘people of an underdeveloped’ country now.”

“Yeah, undeveloped people who don’t speak Chinese, Spanish or Americano: unfortunate primitives.”

“Well how much for a unit?” asks Anya Drovtich.

Ysiad looks at her like she just asked to face fuck his mother.

“How much green dollars?” Oleg repeats for her, but has already gauged the man’s intention.

“The usual price scumbag.”

“What’s the usual price again?”

“The opportunity cost of falling off the back of a transport truck, minus whatever cost-benefit I engage in over the years somehow convinced you and your zealots are on to something.”

“And the favor and access your curry with Perchevney when it comes time for us to re-arm?” Anya interjects.

“Thank you Ysiad for helping us all the years so selflessly,” says Oleg   with a shit eating grin.

“Remember the first time?” Ysiad asks.

“You always remember the first time somebody helps you,” says Oleg, “but I was not with the club then.”

“It was always my assumption you were just in this for the money,” confides Anya.

“Why the fuck-are you doing it again?” Oleg   asks.

“’Cause it never sit right with me that little bitty fucking African and East-Asian children were slaving away to make my dam khakis, and Bono says poverty is wrong!”

Anya scowls at him and makes the sign for the world’s smallest violin.

“You’re a man of great principle. Adon surely grins from the grave. Surely for it someone will kill you eventually,” Oleg   says.

“Grins or winks,” Ysiad says.

“What was that?” Oleg   asks.

“Surely hell has a good place for those of great principle and hopefully an exceptional bath house. But, I remain a truly hard man to kill,” Ysiad says quoting Adon.

Ysiad makes a half-hearted sigh.

“A lot of boxes falling off a lot of trucks this week,” notes Oleg Medved.

“Just how your crew prefers it,” notes Ysiad.

“If it’s free, it’s for we,” says Anya Drovtich quoting an old ambulance idiom.

You sly slimy fuck she now almost mentions.

Oleg Medved gives Ysiad a curt hand shake; where by Ysiad palms him the business card to Third Rasputin. On the back in Hebrew he’s written; “Investigate major cargo.”

Anya gives him a perfunctory salute and helps Oleg Medved wheel out the four enormous roller valises containing sixteen modified Parasimulators.

On their way out Anya and Oleg  bump into a second Toba Hadaad as she gets out of the elevator. Oleg winks at Toba in a most scandalous way. Toba glowers at Anya. Anya almost reaches for her gun and shoot Toba clone in the heart. But has the self-control to not. The women scowl secretly wondering when is the most appropriate time to ask for the other’s evisceration orders.

 

But no one is going to break ceasefire in the Green Light District a second time in a fort night.

 

Oleg, Anya and Toba 1 and 2 have not been in the same room since the night before of the Millennium Theatre job. And by the end of the weekend they will all quite probably be dead.

 

 

 

 

Chapter 25

Barclay Stadium General Assembly, 2019ce

Breuklyn Soviet

 

 

About the same time later when Ysiad was emptying his hairless balls on the chest of Toba Hadaad after she fucked and fondled stroked and gagged and put him roughly inside every hole in her dirty minded Ivorite spying busty body in a room in the Drake Hotel; where bye then using hallucinogenic designer drugs they left their bodies behind and fucked each other apart as spirit animals chasing across the Brighton skies and towers of the Green Light District;  Hubert O’Domhnaill and Mickhi Dbrisk were engaged in various efforts of containment. Clad in unmarked black battle dress uniforms with their HS Stars of David they sat across from two representatives of the Party of God, a major Shi’a Islamist faction running the show in Commune Bayridge; an early ally of the résistance and the biggest of the Islamist factions within the Soviet.

Mickhi Dbrisk’s sky pager goes off.

“R3. Ave. Z.”

It’s a coded message from Anya Drovtich. Typed in Gamatria base code:

“Major cargo has arrived. Confirm candidate name with Brotherhood. R3. Ave. Z.”

Under the iron dome deliberations are getting underway. Beginning every Friday morning at 08:00am in the People’s Grand Assembly within what used to be Barclay Stadium; all factions are asked to send delegates to various mediation and negotiation sessions held before the morning General Assembly session to sort out sensitive intercommunal business. Haggle out legal issues before they become dangerous. A tasteful web of movable wooden dividers allow for all configurations of negotiation in this veritable souk of political barter hundreds of whispers deep.

 

“We’re tired of the Ivories secretly running things around here,” the bearded negotiator from the Party of God declares. His name is Musa the Furious.

“We don’t need anyone’s permission to declare Shar’iah law in Bayridge! Our fighters do their part in the rebel army and we have always cooperated with the Breuklyn Otriad. But we are not tolerating booze, drugs, liberalism, short skirts and feminism in our district beginning next Friday.”

“Duly noted,” says Dbrisk.

“Can we come to some arrangement on mixed sub-districts?” ask Hubert.

“No negotiations.”

Then we’ll cut off your water and power, thinks Dbrisk.

“Look, we’re not Ivories. We don’t care whether the lights go out on Friday, or if you want to pray five times three times or once every third Sunday. But, as delegates from the Breuklyn Otriad we should make it clear that the executive won’t tolerate an imposition of religious law on even sub-districts with a Muslim majority,” explains Hubert.

“We were sent by the Shura Council of the Party of God with direct instructions to not negotiate with you. We were told deliver our proclamation and leave,” states their second representative, an Afghani lawyer named Anahita Noor. She has purple eyes.

We’re gonna wait until Ramadan when you’re all hypoglycemic and tired and then we’re gonna blockade your neighborhood and seize all your Hilal Meat packing plants and agro cooperatives in Strong Island, thinks Dbrisk.

“We all have our orders,” says Hubert, “but maybe we could work something out in the meantime.”

“They said you’d all say that,” says Anahita Noor.

“What about going ahead and declaring Shar’iah law in your Bayridge sub-districts and passing along the quiet agreement that as long as no executions, maiming’s, stoning’s, or harassment of non-Muslims occurs; we will assist in shutting down all alcohol vendership in the entire Bayridge District.”

“Not enough,” says Musa the Furious.

“We will also help financially support the expansion efforts for the Great Mosque and we will sell additional lands in Strong Island to your agro-cooperatives.”

“What do you want in return?” asks Anahita.

“A written covenant with your Shura Council that the Shar’iah law codes will not be applied to anyone who voluntarily opts out of them, Muslim or non-Muslim.”

“Unacceptable. These are the laws of God, we cannot selectively apply them,” says Musa.

“Then tell the Shura council we wish to apply for a twenty year hudna where bye your militia will not enforce the code on nonbelievers or Muslims by force, but may proactively bring various Muslim citizens in compliance as long as they abide by the universal rights codes of the greater Soviet.”

You basically offered the same thing twice, notes Dbrisk.

“Officially we will protest and denounce your godless collaboration with the Ivoryish communists and anarchists. Unofficially, I’m sure a twenty year ceasefire is acceptable, as long as we can do what we wish in the districts we administer.”

“As long as there are no misunderstanding about enforcement,” interjects Mickhi Dbrisk, “if we hear reports that women are being forced out of working, women being harassed into wearing chadors, if we have the usual clashes over virtue and vice, then you know what we will have to do.”

“We will denounce you publically, but privately we will preach moderation, in mixed districts we will respect non believer heresy, in majority sub districts you must begin dismantling institutions that…well are not virtuous.”

“Look, obviously we have to prevent internal fighting and we have to work slowly when it comes to social policy being carried out so radically differently. So, tell the Shura Council that we will help dismantle all alcohol vendership in a Bayridge sub district of your choosing and we will proceed piecemeal from there implementing Sharia law in compliance with human rights. But, prior to that a negotiating team must be put together in good faith to demonstrate to us that this is compliant with the universal code. Any deviation from that obvious will not be acceptable to our Executive and we will have to, you know. What we do when the talking comes to an end,” says Mickhi Dbrisk.

The second representative from the Party of the God doesn’t blink over the thinly veiled threat. She tugs twice slightly to adjust her hijab.

“It has been whispered that another horrific mass murder occurred in Commune Crown Heights yesterday and that tensions are rising between the Ivories and the West Indians.”

“We have no idea what you’re talking about, brother,” flatly states Mickhi Dbrisk.

 

“Everything in our various corner of this Soviet is locked down tight as a drum,” says Hubert O’Domhnaill.

 

The negotiator nick named Musa the Furious from the Party of God stares at Mickhi Dbrisk. They’re seeing who will blink first perhaps.

Salaam alekuum,” says Dbrisk.

Walaikum as salaam,” says Anahita Noor, Chief Litigator for the Party of God.

And through her chador, she winks at her old friend Mickhi Dbrisk.

 

As Musa stands and turns to leave Ms. Noor palms Mickhi Dbrisk a book of matches from the soon to open Third Rasputin Supper Club, R3 on Ocean and Avenue Z. Written on the inner flap is the name of the candidate, printed in Hebrew. In exchange for the confirmation of that name, the eye witnessed proof that she is still alive, the Z.O.B. is going to let the Party of God do pretty much whatever it wants in District Bayridge.

 

Mickhi opens the book of matches.

 

Dasha Andreavna S.M.

            Says the matchbook in Neo-Amharic.

 

Holy shit, he thinks. If it’s true. We finally found her. So, he sends a coded message back to Anya Drovtich and Oleg Medved.

 

“R3. Avenue Z. Confirmed. It’s her.”

 

 

Chapter 26

Bila Tserkva, 1987ce

Ukraine

 

 

Yelizaveta Alexandreenova Perechenova was born in the Ukrainian City of Bila Tserkva on July 2nd of the year 1987ce on the old Gregorian calendar used before the Great Revolt. The miraculous particulars surrounding her birth were manifest and many fold. Firstly, her mother Tania Magda seemed to have reversed age by ten years over the course of the pregnancy such that when she finally gave birth to her first child she bore the resemblance to a girl in her late teens, not a woman approaching thirty four. Of course Alexandre’s closest men patted him on the shoulder and said in Russian, “well played.”

 

The second miracle occurred shortly after her birth. All the animals in all of the forests surrounding Bila Tserkva began to show up at the city hospital. So congested with various fauna wandering about the city that a whole task force of Red Guardsmen from Kiev were needed to attempt removal of this glut of birds and bears and deer as well as animals that the authorities in the Ministry of Ecology had long thought were rendered extinct. These animals seemed drawn to the hospital and for a whole lunar month after little Yelizaveta’s birth they were drawn to family dascha of the Perchevney family to the south a day’s journey from the city.

 

The third miracle was that infant Yelizaveta called “Zivia” by her mother and “Yelizaveta” by her father was not only able to speak Russian within the third month of her alive hood, but by the  third year English, Spanish, Hebrew and a bizarre dialect of French called Ayitian creole. So marvelous was this behavior an infant which spoke four complex languages that Alexandre and Tania Magda agreed to conceal this from the world and hide the girl on the dascha as long as possible so no knowledge of this genius might alert the proper authorities to auspicious comings and goings which might result in the borrowing of their prodigious infant. Although the phenomenon of animals and birds flooding the forests and airspace of the dascha made a clandestine upbringing quite hard to arrange.

The fourth miracle occurred at Yelizaveta’s fourth birthday when she turned to her mother and said that as long as the family stayed happily in Bila Tserkva; no one in that city would ever die. And so it was.

As the Soviet Union began to unravel that very same year and life as they understood it in relation to the dictatorship of the proletariat came to an end; there was not one instance of a reported death in an hundred mile radius of Bila Tserkva. During this time Alexandre was away from the family for extended periods of time. As the only Ivory left in Bila Tserkva his admittance to the Party was highly unorthodox. Also, his admittance to Medical College and his marriage to Maria Tania Magdalena who came from a Soviet prosperous family of Slavic Russian intellectuals close to the local seats of communist power in Kiev. To win and even court Maria Tania Magdalena had been a complicated and costly venture. Men lined up longer than the breadlines for the chance to date the daughter of the local Party boss. And Alexandre was not only a Ivory by paperwork but from a family that had devolved slowly from yeshiva benchers to smugglers and then back into lazy migrant Rabbis.

By forging a passport and bribing several dozen people Alexandre was able to change his ethnic designation from “Ivory” to “Bulgarian” and then later with more bribes to “Russian”.  And thus was able to arrive in Kiev at age 18 to begin his medical training. It was there in university that he encountered the affluent and ravishing daughter of a party boss; Ms. Maria Tania Magdalena who was studying nursing in the same college.

After a lengthy and tumultuous courtship he gave her a tiny watch incased in a gold heart, and said that if she ran away with him to Sakhalin Soviet upon completion of their studies, an island to Russia’s far east past Siberia, north of Japan then they would one day escape to Israel and then America as soon as the Cold War ended in capitalist victory. This was the eighties and the writing was written clearly on the Berlin wall. One night she secretly packed her bags and joined him in a waiting car and they finally eloped in 1984.

He told her that by the time the watch stopped running they would be in America and by the time it started up again they’d never want for anything again. They barely made it as far as the city limits. Goons in black caps in the employ of her father Ivan Ivanovitch’s stopped them at a check point. They beat Alexandre rather badly; returned a crying distraught Maria to her father and threw the covert Ivoryish doctor Alexandre Perchevney into a jail for special prisoners who committed crimes that were handled in the cold and quiet.

The night of this attempted elopement and calamity the father of Tania Magda, Ivan Ivanovitch had a terrible dream.  He dreamt an army of many of thousands of four-foot Mexicans were parachuting out of the sky and attacking Bila Tserkva in an effort to save young Alexandre. He dreamt of the strange days of nightmare and plague about to wreak havoc on all of Kiev and the whole Soviet Socialist world if necessary should the detention of his daughters lover go on. In the dream his daughter Maria fell into some inexplicable coma and for each day of Alexandre’s captivity ten men disappeared without a trace. And then twenty men. And so on. Until by the end of the dream month of Alexandre’s imprisonment, there were virtually no Russian men left alive Kiev. The strange wave of disappearances swept through the local Party apparatus and military and leaders of state owned business cooperatives and even the secret police and soon like a strange and miraculous and ghostly purge had been carried out. Finally, finally Alexandre was not just the only secret Ivory in Kiev, but conspicuously the only person left alive with a passport that said “Russian”. And finally, after the third lunar dream month, it began to snow. To snow with such determination that obstruction and paralysis took hold. Throughout the eerie disappearances, the drop in temperature, the sky falling out, Ivan Ivanovitch’s daughter Tania Magda hovered in a mesmerized trance. Alexandre languished in prison although there was no one left to guard him besides Ivan though he did not even three months into the nightmare connect his interference with the love of his daughter for this Ivoryish medical student to anything so, other worldly. Yes, people did disappear from time to time, but not often the entire Inner Party Cadre of a major soviet capital city. Yes it did snow but not with the endless and unceasing siege of white deluge they were experiencing, or in June!

Finally, in the dream the sun itself ceased to rise. And without party leaders, bureaucrats, draped in over forty feet of snow, Kiev underwent forty days of night. During this time Ivan never left the dream police garrison where he and Alexandre Perchevney would bond intermittently over Chess and Vodka. Bonding begrudgingly, for Ivan spoke no Ukrainian and by the fourth month of these phenomena no one was willing to speak any Russian anymore under the superstitious belief that it would bring death. So Alexandre the Ivory and Ivan, party boss of Bila Tserkva spoke for the first time. First, on the subject of god, then on the subject of the devil. And then also a bit on women which both agreed were stronger in will than either gods or devils.

 

“You love my daughter, but what do I care? Love is bullshit and chemicals. You offer nothing,” Ivan informed young Alex.

“As I have never loved or even thought to love another woman so do I love your Tania Magda Maria!”

“You will never be accepted here as an Ivory. Even a party Ivory is suspect. Even with a new name and a medical certificate. Your Ivoryish horns and tail cannot hide.”

“You could adopt me. You can sponsor me to the Inner Party and allow me to marry her.”

“I’m not frightened by the Ivory magic outside. I know these are only cruel vodka lullabies, whispers in the ear of a man made hard and hateful by life. I will awake in my bed tomorrow! There will be no Mexican para-invaders, no disappearing apparatchiks, no endless snow or black endless night. You will be sent to Siberia for some infraction. Tania Magda will wake up and marry a Russian Calvary officer. Or someone from the foreign bureau.”

 

 

 

“How can you be sure?” Asked Alexandre Perchevney, “How can you know if your dreams are real or if some dark power has unleashed itself against your house for obstructing our love?”

 

 

“Because there is no love or magic allowed here. Those are of course bourgeoisie inventions. I will wake up soon, I feel it. And order you shot.”

 

And for nearly two fortnights General Winter took full hold of Bila Tserkva. It did not stop snowing. It did not become day again. And by third fortnight of his imprisonment and Tania Magda’s mysterious coma there were no Russian anything left in the darkness. Ivan in his solitude became like a prisoner too. The snow cut Bila Tserkva off from all of the rest of the soviet world and the wake field Ivan hoped would come; nearly a year later still had not transpired, nor had he ever slept.

 

“You cursed Ivory! What kind of magic have you unleashed?”

“This is not my doing,” muttered Alexandre defensively.

“When will I wake from this perverse nightmare of upsidedownhood, of idiotic dragfootery?! You cannot marry my Tania Magda. You are not a whole man and you will never give my daughter a good secure life.”

“This is not my doing. You’ve brought this nightmare upon yourself.”

“A typical Ivoryish response.”

Lost and asleep an endless nightmare Ivan Ivanovitch turned to mankind’s oldest imaginary friend. He implored the Russian Orthodox God to end this plague of darkness, deprivation and Ivoryish parasitic blight!

But as we all know, if there is a god, it is a long game if not vaguely soviet god, a go without understandable morals or temporal reward for the seemingly righteous. Whatever lesson it wishes us to learn is like algebra to an ant farm. It has been lost on us completely in it magnitude and scale.

The sun never rose and Ivan Ivanovitch never yielded. At the beginning of the spring of his imprisonment there dropped from the sky blue and red parachutists of four foot stature, one a day. Grinning bandoliered Peruvian Pararescuemen each gliding down into the outskirts of town and taking up position in the woods. One a day. With all the Russians gone, the Ukrainians began hiring these men as day laborers and yard workers. And Ivan Ivanovitch began to suspect that there was a growing secret army of these Peruvian Pararescuemen waiting in the shadows awaiting the right moment to break young Alexandre out of prison and spirit him into the wilderness.

 

 

While Alexandre Sasho Perchevney sat two years in confinement punished for his love and his Semitic race; the young aspiring dentist; future founder of the fearsome Bratva that would bear his family name and that would so loot the banks of the West; he sat in his own thoughts and laid a most elaborate plan.

 

Awaiting rescue and reunion with his beloved Tania Magda Ivanovna Magdalena, a most auspicious woman to be sure.

 

 

Chapter 27

Fadeeva 6, 2018ce

Moscow

 

 

I fill two wine glasses with cold Borjomi mineral water and bring them to the bed where she lies having wrapped up her round of the most seditious story. A reoccurring theme for her is the complexity of him. But using a sureality to tell a take she has yet again left out what it was that he did that made him so many enemies.

 

“My, my. By the time the story is over she may well be walking on water,” I say with greatest snark I can muster.

 

“The way you once talked about her, your dear little Yelizaveta Lubov, I’m not sure my little yarn did the woman enough true poetic justice! AS your chornay say.”

The horrific photographs are tucked away inside the writer’s desk used more for carnal leverage than for any sort of writing lately.

“I thought her birth auspicious enough without all those miracles you interjected. And the story of Alexandre and Tania Magda was quite a nice flourish too.”

“Fakeness, realness, openness and closeness have no usefulness to you anyway!”

“Well there is a truth to some stories and a labyrinth of fairy magic used as cloak to pull parlor trick parables over the eyes of your quarry. There are curious unseen bugs still in the wall listening for god only knows whom!”

“What’s the score?” she asks changing tone.

“I’m winning,” I declare.

“Bi-winning or regular winning?”

“You can win too if you want.”

“I just came off my back darling,” she says, “you’re always so utterly silly when you’re feigning happiness while hiding your tears. When you’re sad you’re easier to predict.”

I will do anything but to talk of Yelizaveta anymore dead or alive.

“You once predicted we’d never see each other ever again,” I mention.

“It was a realist expectation not a prediction. I’m not a sorcerous or some Kundalini like you and your gangsters.”

“As a skilled parapsychologist none the less you could have seen ahead to know I’d not stop loving you in the face of impossible.”

“Or husbands.”             “Is your husband real?”

“Was that little bitch Yelizaveta so perfect?”

“Certainly not perfect.”

“My husband’s existence is therefore perfectly uncertain.”

“I care as much as the first day I came upon you.”

“Your philanderous nature is evident throughout. That’s the right word?”

“No.

“Multi-amorous is not philanderous.”

“Loving early and loving often is so abjectly American!”

“It isn’t that I don’t respect marriage or that my lusts are uncontained. It was that your marriage, if it was indeed such a thing, smacked readily of variables indicating both your total unhappiness and it’s, shall we say, slightly compulsive nature.”

“Well, you will never know.”

“One day perhaps I will.”

“In the game of mouse and cat which one do you think you are my roguish partisan lover?”

“I am the mouse of course but you are not the cat you are the maze itself. Your challenges have only but enhanced me.”

“Is that so? I was obviously not put to the earth this time for wealth, security and leisure, so then being loved so thoroughly by you must be compensation enough until I have the other three.”

“As you have always somehow known.”

“Actually I’d imagined you a dashing princeling cavalry officer in training until you first opened your mouth on that roof exposing your hearts ideals. Be realistic about your love Sebastian for it is an anarchic as your politics or your work, which I suppose just the manifest of your love in some strange way. Tell me again why we cannot stop fighting. Right now. Forever.”

“We have not won yet.”

“It isn’t up to you to win this war! No one said go fight, go struggle forever! Go die a hundred times for this miserable species. They surely wouldn’t die for you. Look at all the violence so far! For what! For some stupid lawless islands where the standard of living is worse than before and the freedom just as unfree. Nothing has changed. All you did was get all your friends and family killed. You took the lives of men that didn’t even matter. So stop. For the love of god just stop! You have elected to assault human nature and hell itself but no one asked you to. So just give in.”

“That’s a very nice Yelizaveta impression,” I say.

“It’s voice of any sensible woman, or Russian woman.”

“I’ve never accused you of being sensible. You want me to stop?”

“Were we regular people not old souls in changing vessels I’d say yes thinking we live and love but once! I don’t know why a man born with everything should lose that everything for an idea alone. I know things happened to you. I know you are now insatiable. But if you love me as you say you do, if you desire me so wantonly; what about surrender?”

“But to whom do I surrender?”

“You will surrender to me.”

“I have already. Multiple times, over and over again. This is your oldest and favorite game is it not? To try and induce a man to abandon what he believes in. Impossible when all I believe in is you.”

“Well it doesn’t seem to work on you anymore. You obviously never went to business school and gave up on your unseemly notions of freedom, human condition, and American mentality. You don’t even seem so upset about your old love’s demise. And I pride myself at reading you well.”

 

“They always say don’t say dead ‘til you see the body, but what’s a body these days to an old soul still on the market?”

Enchante,” she exclaims.

“So what I want to know is what it was that Alexandre and his crew organized at the turn of the century that made that house, that Bratva so wildly rich. And made him the kind of enemies that would hunt him down and do what in the end made him to this day so indomitable”

 

“The take was just too big. Truly unlimited. There was no way they were going to be able to get away with it,” she says.

“So tell it then. Finish the story of his vast infamy.”

“There are more important things we will do first. I tire of this tirade on crime and punishment.”

“I enjoy kissing you. I also enjoy being ravaged like a petulant whore. I want a total ceasefire on the story right now. I want you to physically give me everything I could ask for as a woman if you are worth more than the warbles. Right now my Amerikanski. Right fucking now,” and she throws the book of my poetry at the wall.

 

We fuck like we’ll both be dead by morning.

Panting, I entered balls deep.

She pounds me apart. Rides me ragged. She writhes and rides and bucks on top of me. I suck on her supple white breasts and she arches back sending me even deeper inside her.

She gets close and licks my chest. She bites my neck and clutches my brown hair her blond main draping over me.

The sheets are covered in my sweat. Her hips they grind and bob and gyrate until I can feel my cock wrapped tight in her flesh. I’ve already came twice inside her. I grab on to her hips and rock with her. She fucks the life out of me. I’ve lost myself all over again.

 

The harder she goes, rocking the back board back and forth the more I need her. I can feel her red painted nails tear my shoulder she is pulling my hair with her left hand as she kisses my neck then chest and then brings herself erect so I can hold grab her beautiful ass and watch her big Russian tits bounce in my face, watch her moan, watch her use me to cum for the third time in two hours.

 

Before she cums again she leans in and kisses my lips and bites my lower lip drawing blood.

 

I watch her face as it builds into a blissful climax. Up and down, I watch her glide on sweat and semen.

When she’s done I throw her off me, I drag her off the bed onto the floor. Pin her down.

I’m like an animal with her. We savage each other. I yell her name over and over again fucking her blindly with all my dirty might.

I yank her up by the wrists to her feet and pull my belt from the crumbled pile of clothing by the bed. I force her over the writer’s desk next to the bed and slap her big ass.

The belt goes around her neck and I enter her from behind. I drive my cock as far as the limits of my manhood and her femininity do allow and tighten the belt as I fuck.

She yells out wildly as I buck behind her driving her frame over the table. The first round was puppy dogs and caresses. The second was our wide ranging arts of Tantra. The third was anything she wanted me to do with my cock lips tongue and fingers for all the life left in me and the fourth?

I’m just an animal.

A wild eyed runaway slave.

Everything stops for a while.

She’s lying in my arms still and gently panting.

“What is it that you dream of, besides me,” Dasha asks me finally saying something.

“Sometimes I go for a walk in the city of Tel Aviv, but it’s not in Israel, it’s in the Caribbean. As if the whole damn nation broke off and floated south west. And it’s like Tel Aviv is New York City and Brighton is the tiyeled and time and space are intermingled, as though every pleasurable exchange, every old friendship in a few dozen wonderful lives is entwined. All happy places of my life are like one.  And I’m walking home around dusk.”

“And what do you do in these dreams?”

“I walk around and run into old friends that I haven’t seen in forever. And we sit and have drinks or exchange numbers and time is endless even though it’s getting darker I can make time for anything. And all these inspiring women and men that I lost along the way have turned up in this calm and vibrant city, and I’m so happy. I’m on my way home to my wife and three little children.”

“And who is your wife in this happy world of nostalgia?”

“I have no idea. I’ve never made it home.”

“Story of your life my comrade lover.”

With her hand she wipes away tears that no longer are able to form.

Tears she used to so judge me for producing in front of her.

And for the first time in a long time I let my guard down completely and fall asleep in her arms. Unfolding the blackness of sleep.

 

When I awake the music is no longer playing and most of the lights are out.

 

Suddenly a strange sensation grips me. How long have I been in this safe house?

 

A day?

A fort night!

A year?!

Or two?

Three years!!!

And what about its safety am I even so sure about! I’ve been enjoying myself with these stories too much. I didn’t bother to remember that she and I have been dead for years.

What’s time to a ghost?

Nothing.

There’s a loud triple knock on the primary safe house door four floors down past a laser grid that cam cut you apart.

“Calm yourself tovarish lover,” she purrs. She gets up and slips on a grey bath robe. She opens the wooden drawer next to the bed and takes out an eight millimeter repeater revolver. Cocks it, slips it in her robe.

“The back stories are all bullshit, but the extracted lessons are mostly true,” she notes.

I remain where I am.

As if this has happened before.

It was as if in telling the story of Alexandre Perchevney I dredged up something. What year is this? And why of all places am I still in Moscow?

She slides open a side panel by the door and viddies the small telescreen by the portal which lets her scroll between the halls, the elevators, and the barrier walls outside.

“Ghosts like us,” she says in Russian.

She returns with a small envelope that somebody slipped under the door. She pulls up a stool and also the wooden sketch table over which just a story before I had bent her over and thrust myself inside her pounding her flesh balls deep.

 

She sits and opens the envelope.

Examines the contents.

She drops two photos on to the table.

One is of a pretty young woman in a green military cap. One is of a naked mutilated corpse.

“Your old partner Yelizaveta Kay has evidently been forgotten, captured and put slowly to death,” she states without any emotion.

I should feel a lot more than I do if that story is true. Maybe it’s the mineral water, maybe the wonderful fucking I just been receiving or the story about that very old school bad man Perchevney.

 

“Some things are now coming to light,” I say.

“Shortly, very shortly, everything about this dark plot against you will be fully illuminated,” she informs me, “in bright, white lights.”

 

 

Chapter 29

Fadeeva 6, 2018ce

Moscow

 

 

 

Dasha’s chest is heaving.

“I am not like you,” she begins, “there is not one speck of thing that in my life came easily.”

 

If I am to reveal how powerful man made great array of enemies. Built himself from impoverished, disfranchised and penniless expatriate to first among kings of thieves; well be you warned, you still will not know his motives until later. Or mine for that matter, or my fleeting moments of love and honesty.

Alexandre Perchevney spent two years in Russian prison. Then spent two years in Russian medical school and then little Yelizaveta turned four, Soviet Union imploded and whole family of Tania Magda, Yelizaveta, Alexandre and strong man brother Slavi arrive in New York as before explained.

They moved to Washington Heights. They befriended shifty diamond Ivory Misha Kishbivalli. And soon they opened Bulgarian Culture center on Canal and Broadway to make marriage contracts, plan no fault insurance schemes, provide illicit healthcare services, and plot biggest heist in 20th or 21st century, at least so far.

Alexandre never forgot his ambitious plan laid out in totality within his mind in the two years he spent in solitary confinement for loving the daughter of a Party boss, the cold hearted anti-Semite Ivan Ivanovitch.

He made new international friends in New York. Including two precocious youngsters that he took immediately under his former Soviet wing. Georgie Rabanca, a twenty two year old Romanian immigrant, winner of an international scholarship in computer science and young American with a big ass and curly hair named Feline Hall.

He took them in, he soon hired them both and soon Georgie was hiding his money in Dominican Republic, and Ms. Hall was tutoring his three daughters, and first son as well as instructing him on which investments to wash his no fault money.

And then the year was 1997 CE;

Georgie Rabanca the young Romanian computer scientist writes an algorithm that will allow the Bratva to generate an ATM card code that will not only appear in the system as being backed by unlimited credit, but it will also then deduct the credit one thousand fold from the wealthiest depositors of all of the major western banks.

And then they figured out how to scare the banks into uploading the backend software to facilitate the heist by hack.

Feline Hall, the young woman they recruited as a patron and then as a tutor and then as a financial consultant was by that time working at a lobby for a Swiss banking firm. It was she who helped them upload this algorithm, this brilliant heist code disguised as Y2K protective software into the Credit Suisse mainframe a year before the so called Y2K virus was to begin crashing all the world’s computers.

That “virus” was in fact another code generated by Mrs. Tania Magda Perchevney and charming George Rabanca to trick computer systems into resetting on December 31st, 1999 as the computer switched into 01.01.00.

While Americans were just becoming familiar with cell phones, ATM cards and AOL instant messenger; the Perchevney Bratva used a prototype of what we now call the Interweb, a closed communication wireless network to sell the world’s criminal underground the key code and the blue print for the heist.

Thus, by New Year’s Eve, December 31st, 1999;

Coordinating crews in 48 cities to begin withdrawing cash from ATMS using the code on the eve of the millennium, these coded strips would not only let the thieves take out as much cash as they wanted, but would then also deduct the balance against the accounts of the foremost depositors in each bank involved, some of the richest men in the West.

 

Bait and switch and switch again. While police agencies would spend the next decade chasing after all the disparate crews who walked away with $187 million in cash; each swipe they made transferred electronic tender into Alexandre Perchevney’s accounts in the Dominican Republic, while wiping out the savings of the richest men on earth.

And then the secondary program kicked in. Exactly five seconds into the new millennium, for every dollar pulled out of an ATM machine in those 48 cities, came out one million on the dollar transferred from linked accounts into the Bratva war chest.

 

By January 1st, 2000, Alexandre Perchevney was the richest man on earth. More liquid than any order before it.

 

 

And then she stops.

 

I notice that the safe house floor doesn’t have Jerusalem tile anymore. How curious. It’s sterile and white. I notice that the room which once seemed spacious is diminishing rapidly in size. I look at Dasha Andreavna.

“Darling have you betrayed me?” I ask her.

“No my love you are only betraying yourself.”

“I don’t believe it is so,” I tell her.

“Darling, do you remember what I said to you after they wiped out your mind in the hospital? Of course you don’t. They wiped your mind too many times for you to keep track of everything.”

“I have ways to remember things!”

She sings to me:

Poor darling! Poor tovarish lover. What have they done to me and done to you?”

“I know that song!”

She kisses me.

She keeps singing, “Where are you now my companero? I have been travelled from town to town!”

“The song,” I say in wonder, “you’re skipping whole parts, but I remember the memory you were asking me for, just sing a little longer then!”

She changes octave, “Temptress and seductress we, tapped and played on mine fields every day! In volatile slaves! You can love me less. You can love me more, tomorrow. But if given a choice. You will always be that man!

“I remember everything!” I claim, but really only that very specific conversation over hookah on the floor of Oasis Hade Bade, alone as the night swallowed us seven years ago in the Isle of Man.

“What is it that I told you lover?”

“We had just watched Ana Karenna and I told you I was nothing like a Calvary officer and you said I was a peasant, and worse a communist one. And you said you could never run away from your husband with a peasant communist with a very poorly thought out plan.”

“Get to the crux. We were sitting alone in the dark in that dim Middle Eastern smoke brothel, not even Sam Saladin in the next room could have heard what I said to you the night before the uprising began.”

“You told me that if I wanted to be a partisan that didn’t scare you. That you didn’t judge me for being crazy, for gambling my privilege, or even being a communist. But you said I was a mad man to thing I could lead a group of eight people against the oligarchy and hope to win. You told me fight from a position of resources.”

“Ah-men. Cheers to the power of song.”

“They punished Sasho three times hard man. He was for ten years the richest man on earth. You bumped his shoulder, you drank under his roof, but you had no idea the scale of his ambitions.”

“What’s going to happen next?” I ask her.

“If they can do what they did to Alexandre Perchevney, do you have any idea what they can, or should perhaps I say have done to you and I?”

“I recall you warned be about this several time before.”

“First someone punished Alexandre for loving. Two years of his life. He took all that money not out of greed but to shore himself up to fortify himself and his family and friends against anything ever happening again For ten years he lived the American life he had dreamed of. Then in 2010 someone punished him for stealing. He stole from the oligarchy, but only by accident. He stole more material than anyone ever has or will without firing a shot or taking a life. But Rabanca and Hall had set it all up so that he’d not be taking from the pots of the princelings, only the elites. The fact that he stole from Kahn was accidental.”

“Kahn,” I say, “the economist.”

“Darling I could sing all night so you remember, but we don’t have much more time together. So I will kiss you again.”

She does and reality, it shakes.

“Listen closely. You are in a mouse trap that you were tricked into building. I don’t know how much you will remember when you wake up from this dream, but please remember three things.”

“Dasha, please don’t tell me that we will be separated yet again!”

“Darling. They killed me and they killed you. They tortured and killed everyone we loved. They built a string of ghettos dressed up as rebel ‘soviets’ and put all the free minds inside them. And the trap is about to slam shut. If you and your friends don’t wake up, they are going to kill everybody.”

“Tell me lover. The three things.”

“When you wake up, if your friends can get to you and wake you up in time; you will not remember very much. There is a song. You know the whole song, it’s a wonderful and powerful and most excellent song and when you hear it you will remember all the best things that you did in my name and also for your people.”

“Go on about the things then,” I say. And I feel the de ja vu of knowing this happened a good many times before.

“One. Good will always triumph over evil. Never forget that. Two, DeBuitléir has the list and Emma holds the blueprint. And three I do love you. I love you I love you I love you and when it is done I will love you again and it will be I who you come home to on that boardwalk, it will be me who with you as my only partner raises our children and we will know peace. And the oligarchy will fall.”

“A most lovely dream,” I say.

She sits across from me on the floor with a candle between us and for the first time in a long time I am fully comfortable with my flaccid nakedness.

 

“Good luck,” she whispers, “when you wake, don’t forget the words to the partisan song.”

 

She kisses me and like that! She disappears. She crumbles immediately into thin air.

 

 

And the safe house room contracts in on itself and now I’m alone bolted to a chair, in blue ho chi min pajamas in a blaring white bright light.

A prisoner chained tight to big torture chair; naked, toothless and hardly grinning in a bright white interrogation cell.

I have already forgotten the three things! And my cause! And worse: her face!

The only name I remember is Alexandre Perchevney.

And my debt to the devil I know.

 

 

 

Chapter 30

Dubai, 2019ce

House of Perchevney

 

 

Waking from a beautiful dream into an uncomfortable reality is a jarring experience. And I’ve learned to hate it every single time.

Deep breath. Sing the lyrics you know. Partial recall. Deep breathe. Be good. DeBuitléir. He values your work. Solomon. She loves you.

Behold, it’s the devil we know.

“Ask me how much hard currency I paid for both your heads sans platter or guillotine,” asks Alexandre Perchevney.

His accent is remarkably rich, flavored via international extralegal trade and peppered with superior cadence for this man is fluent in English, Spanish, French, Bulgarian, Russian, Hebrew, some Yiddish, and also basic Mandarin Chinese.

The word you are looking for is savant.

The bright lights are completely blinding, and then they go dim. Waking up in hand cuffs is never, ever a sign of successful evening. Or a job done right. But, waking up in hand cuffs tends to be better than waking up without hands.

            Adon and Watson Entwissle are both seated in black chairs ratcheted into the floor and a rather serious set of manacles are set to both their hands and feet, bolted and taut. Watson has some cyber contraption box affixed completely around his head. I believe the word I’m looking for is Parasimulator. He appears to be out cold, but then he pulsates periodically, like a minor tonic-clonic tick.

 

The room comes into focus, the sensation of Benzo-sedatives relieved with flumazenil antidote.

 

They are in the clutches of an upper oligarch. When Sebastian recognizes which one it brings neither trepidation nor real fear. Better to belong to a devil you know.

And there he sits not on a thrown or behind some big mahogany desk, but in library of wall to wall books mostly on the subjects of God, Philosophy and High Finance. He’s reading the Torah, of all things. He still does his stock trading based partly on Gamatria, the character symbol into number code of the Kabbalists.

 

He has thick black glasses and black to silver hair and he is in rather very good physical shape for a man his age whatever that age is. Suffice to say he was trained as dentist physician before the fall of the Soviet Union and it fell some time ago in 1991.  And generally he would never meet a prospective business partner in person but he needs to look Sebastian Adon in the eyes and ask him a simple question; and then have his best men interrogate Adon and the chornay Watson Entwissle while he poisons them both with vodka, Polonium, whores and or Nanobots. And then proceeds to leverage what he knows for more American pie and more Postsoviet power. And the thing he wants more than anything else on earth. The best answers to the biggest questions aside. A simple thing, if this man Adon will get it for him. And if he won’t he will sell them both to the highest bidder.

“What’s the last thing you remember Tovarish Adon? What is your exact precise last memory? Time to wake up from your long sad dream.”

“I remember the tree of death,” says Adon wishing he might go back to sleep.

Alexandre takes off his glasses and looks Adon dead in the eyes.

“I know your Otriad has figured out how to do a number of sophisticated things using science, but how far you’ve gotten with parapsychology is of far more interest to me,” he states flatly.

“I remember the last time we met your English wasn’t nearly this strong,” Adon says.

“And when was that, remind me?”

“In the Scientologist command bunker below Fort Washington Avenue. One year after the great blizzard. Yelizaveta had just been sent to university in Havana. I had just been terminated in lieu of resignation from the New York Fire Department. The Disorder had just begun.”

“Who is she to me?”

Sebastian pauses.

“She’s your youngest daughter.”

“And what is she to you?”

Sebastian pauses for a moment digesting the full range of emotions even the utterance of that name brings on; Yelizaveta. There is a pleasure even in hearing it said aloud. But he cannot recognize a face, or formulate a real record of knowing-hood.

 

“Absolutely nothing now.”

 

“Good. So you remember less than she does evidently.”

“She doesn’t remember anything before Havana if my data is worth the money I paid for it,” says Adon.

“She requested this you know. She asked me, begged me to help erase you.”

“I could really sing you some sad Amerikanski songs about the film eternal sunshine of a spotless mind, and how at some point every single woman I’ve ever had tell me she loved me brings up said cinema eventually, but, I did not come here to ask for Yelizaveta’s hand in marriage. I came to kill Yuri Budanov, who is nothing to you. I am also here to carry out the orders of my commanding officers in asking you for what we need.”

“I don’t think you answer to anyone Sebastian. Do you know what the price could be on your head if it were discovered you were alive?”

“Do you know what you stand to gain by getting us back to our turf and agreeing to the proposition Mr. Ysiad Ferraris is currently soliciting support for?”

Alexandre smiles. “You still have your hands yes? Obviously I do. Arms and access for concessions and ports. Peanuts. But I want what’s in your head the very most.”

“What is it you think is in my head?”

“Quite a lot. But still, your head is less interesting to me than the head of Avinadav DeBuitléir. If only I could get both.”

“How’s your eldest daughter,” Sebastian asks.

“She doesn’t even know she’s my daughter anymore. And you can’t have her. I don’t think that it’s not healthy for anyone involved. Especially after the incident.”

“Which incident, remind me.”

There had indeed been a long list of incidents.

“Well good that you didn’t recall everything. It’s quite better that way. I doubt you even really remember meeting me. I think you were just briefed on your past. Were I a gambling man, and I am certainly not, but I would wager that the last thing you really remember is waking up shortly after the hostage crisis at the Millennium Theatre, and someone put a Parasimulator on your head and did a return briefing where even you cannot honestly corroborate what you did or didn’t do prior to the evening you and your partner Emma carried out that suicide strike against Manhattan’s richest citizens. Maya or Emma?”

“Well, I wish I knew,” smiles Adon, “our neuroscientists are easily a hundred years ahead of everyone else’s. Names upon names! What are even in names?”

“Would you like some vodka?”

“No. But I’ll take an ice cold mineral water if you have it.”

“I’m going to have Yelizaveta screen you herself, so you can see how little of an eye brow she will even raise in recognition.”

“You seem to think I’m capable of sentimentality.”

“Oh, I know for a fact that this trait is the only way your associates keep you in line.”

“Well it seems they’ve cut it out of me this time. Good riddance.”

“That remains to be seen.”

“I don’t believe that bullshit for a second,” says a Slavic man in a grey European business suit who has just entered the master office, or interrogation room, or whatever this library with torture chairs happens to really be. His overall sharp and immaculate dress is threatening. And an expensive watch guilds his left hand. His dirty blonde hair is neatly trimmed. He enters suddenly bearing a frosty cold glass of water and a shot of vodka and he grins and feigns handing it to Adon who obviously cannot move his hands.

“Do you recognize this man,” Perchevney asks him.

Adon looks him over with an expressionless countenance of hidden hate.

“Not at all,” Adon lies.

“Your water, sir,” says this businesslike Slav with clear control of his emotional projections.

“I’m no ‘sir’ cousin, I work for my money.”

“However you claim,” the grey suited Slav declares.

Alexandre raises a subtle toast and drinks back the vodka shot brought to him. The grey suited accomplice assists Adon in tipping the glass to his lips and thereby allowing him to swallow it down whole, and the Slav grins.

“Was it refreshing?” asks Alexandre.

“Indeed.”

“And this man raises no recognition, not even from a return briefing?”

“Absent he remains,” the lie goes on.

Dmitry Khulushin is appalled. But he doesn’t even hint at it. He simply takes the empty glasses and exits the chamber.

“Well enough fun and games,” declares Perchevney.

“Had no idea we were playing.”

“You are about to see her yourself and she will evaluate you. Tonight you will challenge my best man Dmitry in a three round game. If Sunday comes and you and your partner are still alive, then you will receive our fullest assistance in your upcoming operation in the dark continent of the chornay.”

“And she will be included in the contract.”

“She is off the table.”

“We do need your help to liberate Avinadav DeBuitléir and we certainly do need a steady supply of first line weapons for the fight in Ayiti. She means nothing to me. I’ll simply tell Solomon that all we want from you is the precise hour when they move our prisoner. I would wager that she would pay several million for that data alone and then everything else we will buy at market price no games or privileges at a later date.”

“Your ransom will be worth more than all that. But your money isn’t worth the hacker’s time to steal or the print maker’s time to print the bills you people roll out. And what’s money to the richest man alive. Which I was before and now after my troubles am again. Do you know what I’m really after Sebastian Adon?”

“I know next week when we regulate our coastal ports that you will be taxed to move imports just like everyone else under the authority of the Breuklyn Soviet’s General Assembly. I know that freeing our man deep in U.A.S. isn’t going to be easy and if we have to do it without the precision tools we need, when we succeed, however messy it might turn out; we will owe you nothing. I know that you know we can both print foreign currencies flawlessly, and run programs that give us limitless amounts of capital to spend. But Maya Solomon said we want your daughter included in the bid.”

“You speak like a man who has forgotten every single clue he was given in a dream,” says Alexandre Perchevney in Russian.

 

“If you do what Dmitry Khulushin wants. Is manipulating you to do. If you trade me to the Americans for Avinadav. Then you’re never gonna get what you’re really after.”

 

“So what am I after then, what’s my bottom line? Why help your Otriad do anything at all?”

“Pure, unflinching loyalnost.”

“Ha. Your gang is really not so large. There are only eight of you left, and I have verified the identity of seven. I have both American and Russian politicians on my payroll. I have spies in your camp and your kitchen. And why is it that I’d help you spread a revolution that radically goes against my own understandings of business and the human mentality?”

“Because of what I did for your family during the blizzard when you were at your most vulnerable and your enemies swarmed your position.”

“That’s not enough!” he bellows pounding his fists on the desk, “that obviously is not enough!”

 

“You’re the richest men on earth. You have power and influence that few come close to without being an Eastern head of state. But remember what happened during the blizzard. And you know that we are the only outfit that can get into that bleak desert country, penetrate the tightest fortress the oligarchy has and get the one thing more valuable to you than that the oil underneath it.”

 

Alexandre’s eyes shimmer with untold hate. His fingers drum on the desk in front of him.

 

“I want you to assure me that you’ll take that rat bastard alive so I can attempt to inflict upon him what he did put on me that cold winter.”

 

“I will personally guarantee you your revenge. But only with your daughter as part of the deal. I give you my word she will be nowhere near the major fighting.”

 

Perchevney weighs all the data.

 

“Swear to me that when the smoke clears you will deliver to me my sick nemesis on his feet so I can grind him to his knees.”

“On my word.”

“What’s the word of dead man worth these days? Swear on the life of the woman you love above all other loves.”

Sebastian attaches a name to that word, but somehow no face. Her name is the embodiment of all qualities those utilizing the English language might attach to that utterance. All aspects and dimensions.

“I swear on the life of Dasha Andreavna.”

Alexandre hearing those words understands then that the memory wipes; the rumors of mental reincarnation. It is a cheap facade.

He’s dealing with a mind as dangerous as his own.

“All right then. So you can swear it again a third time if you’re still standing come Sunday. Remind me again, the exact last memory you have of the night we last met?”

“I remember leasing the devil my soul at the Mehanata Social Club and agreeing to kill a large number of people so I might protect the woman I love. You want me to fight. I’ll fight. I’m very good at it. You want a comprehensive medical to get your hands on my material, I’ll submit to one. But your daughter is now to me a vague and hazy memory, that even photographs and letters do nothing to remind me of the past.”

“Why ask for her then? Why did Solomon include that in the contract?”

“Leverage I’d imagine. And because of your daughter’s fabled powers of healing.”

“Interesting to me that a man who seems completely unable to stay dead should be so interested and in need of the only woman who can heal everyone she touches.”

“I’m a pathological creature.”

“But terrorism is a surgical disease.”

They look at each other and though he is bound tight, but Adon’s eyes have fire power. They are finally looking eye to eye.

 

“I have one more demand,” Adon says.

 

“Speak comrade terrorist!”

 

“When you put that devil Dmitry Khulushin in the ring. Try and make sure it’s the real Dmitry, this time.”

 

 

 

Chapter 31

88 Fulton Street, 2012ce

Isle of Man

 

 

 

“I’ll use your cunt as a urinal! Your legs are my epaulettes of violent fucking!” yells Theodore Breria, Director of the D.H.S. the U.A.S. National Secret Police.

 

There are quite literally woman hanging from the ceiling of the subterranean Manhattan supper club 88 Bathtub Gym.

 

Located below the busy streets of the nearly abandoned District Financial it can be hard to find, harder to get your way in even with a black card. Since the lifting of the last call in all U.A.S. territories, the de-criminalization of prostitution and the subsidization of the three day weekend, the business of leisure is clearly booming.

Most of the rubble has been cleared on the east side since the summer offensive five years prior where the Fourth Citizen Army of Breuklyn Soviet’s crack artillery brigades and the insert proper us artillery unit had a six day missile exchange over the east river. In the process reducing most of the Breuklyn’s water front to rubble and rendering the midtown and Financial District skyline a pock marked ravine of debris and rubble. Three years since the ceasefire and all the Manhattan towers are back up. The trench works and bunker complexes running from Long Island City to Dumbo look like the German Seawall; a Bar Lev line of the 21st century; a web of unmanned missile batteries designed to fire payloads of Persian rockets into the Manhattan skyline.

 

The city is a ghost of its former self, but still a playground for service men on leave from Staten Island and other neighboring garrisons and of mostly young men of the lower echelon of the elite having a go at frontier lawlessness, their pick of tower apartments and servants and fancy cars.

 

The Eastern traders. The profiteers. The cream of the carpet baggers. The contractors. The petty elite sons of the oligarchy on holiday. But, the real money changers are gone. Wall Street is a red light district, the canyons of the world’s capital are now just a freewheeling circus of anything goes. The wild-west never allowed such depravity. Anyone of class left long ago for the West Coast or New England.

 

Back to the women on the ceiling.

 

Bathtub Gym is located three stories below 88 Fulton Street. It was once a Russian bathhouse. It still has Russians. It still has baths. It still is nominally referred to as “the water brothel”. What’s changed? Well you can kill the girls and still come back. That’s all that’s changed!

 

Dmitry Khulushin is an economist by Harvard graduate training. His U.A.S. Department of Homeland Security issued National Identity card designates him “White Clearance”, which means he can travel state to state without a visa, board commercial airlines, and leave the country without prior authorization. He was born in the city of Tashkent though both parents were Slavic Russians and inner party members prior to the collapse of the Soviet Union and their immigration to the United States.

Dmitry Khulushin was a face that is sly and Slavic, a boyish arrogance and a ruthless entitlement typical of all former Soviets who went from power to poverty then back to power. And no morals, not even one. A patter of fruits and a chilled bottle of Russian standard and a variety of untouched delicacies are spread before him in one of the very important person’s suites of the club where he lounges in a white bathrobe seated across from three associates powerful and affluent in their own ways; Michael Bloom II, the fat and repugnant Theodore Breria and none other than Ysiad Ferraris. A slender and thoroughly well-proportioned young woman hangs pale, blonde and naked as the day she was born from the chandelier above them ensuring their Champaign glasses never empty. Her feet are quite literally locked into the fixture, and periodically she arches her supple frame down to fill their cups.

Breria is hideous as usual and completely drunk. He spent several hours in the fun and games room and by his usual tendencies; Dmitry knows his bill will be considerable. But when one is entertaining the head of the modern gestapo; the Department of Homeland Securities Secret Police, and the two remaining billionaires left in this city; one doesn’t concern themselves with cost. You can’t take Breria anywhere. But he goes where he wants with his endless depravities.

A truly sick fucker.

Ysiad has just gotten back from “the other side”.

“What are they living like over there these days? Cannibalism I read in the Daily News!” exclaims Mr. Bloom.

“I didn’t observe any myself,” states Ysiad.

“Fuck those whores,” mutters Breria.

All that man thinks of and far worse. Quietly logs Dmitry Khulushin Koch.

“Is it true that the Islamiacs are gaining ground?” Inquires Bloom, “from what I understand they may have possession of the entire District Bayridge.”

“The Daily say they are instituting Shar’iah law next week. Cutting off hands and heads.”

“You own the Daily. Surely you more than me,” says Ysiad business casually.

“Well anyhow I don’t tell them what to print that’s Breria’s job surely!”

“Sons of whores and social scum!” he bellows.

Dmitry Khulushin sips his champagne and listens. Anything Breria says you just feign agreement with. Michael Bloom owns half the city’s lucrative industries, four major daily newspapers, eighty social clubs, the lighting grids, the water works, Broadway; everything but the boardwalk really. He’s the son of the mayor. Some people say the mayor lives through him vicariously. He’s a debaucher certainly. But not a totally sick fuck like the head of the secret police, king of rape and roses.

 

“You were in Moscow just last week were you not,” interjects Dmitry in Russian. Which Breria speaks but not Michael Bloom-Burg.

 

“I was. I was investing in absolutely everything,” cautiously replies Ysiad.

“A good investment, the Russian I mean, being a Russian once myself I know. I was thinking of acquiring more assets there. I too was in the capital just last week on some light business as well.”

 

In his mind Dmitry Khulushin Koch sees himself striking the husk body of Sebastian Adon with a studded black onyx baseball bat. The dull cracks of his human piñata not eliciting the response he prefers getting out of Adon, screams of pain and horror, the kind he elicits from the man sometimes when he dreams, but somehow never when he kills all the people Adon loves, how amazingly unsentimental.

 

Ysiad knows that Dmitry is playing a game with Perchevney, and Dmitry knows that Ysiad is thick as thieves with the rebels, and who cares as long as no one steps on big money toes. Bloom and Breria are the exact kind of people you have to bath with once and a while to lubricate the right channels of commerce. Politics is just a rich kid’s game for those not smart enough to have gone into economics. Once you get a person’s bottom line clearly established, everything else is just a fireworks show for the hoi polloi.

 

The nubile young beauty lowers herself to pour more champagne.

 

“I heard a rumor out in Moscow,” says Dmitry Khulushin.

Ysiad’ raises an eye brow.

“I heard that a certain very wanted corpse is very much alive and up to obvious no good.”

“This man you speak of, tell me, when did you see him last,” says Ysiad.

“Oh, right after you did sir.”

 

Ysiad remains business casual, a deadpan face.

 

“What are you two going on about,” asks Michael Bloom.

“Night life in Moscow is limitless,” claims Dmitry.

“Agreed,” Ysiad nods.

 

Michael Bloom Trump gets up to tinkle. Or brutalize a whore, either one or both. Breria’s eyes they roll back and he appears to be having some kind of absence seizure.

 

“Well then,” notes Ysiad.

“I have a message speaking as if I were Alexandre Perchevney,” calmly says Dmitry Khulushin, his blue eyes turning grey on grey.

“Go on,” says Ysiad.

 

“We have Sebastian Adon and we’re gonna turn him over to the U.A.S. for DeBuitléir and a tall finder’s fee. And then we’re gonna kill all your rebel friends in Brooklyn, spelled correctly on its tombstone.”

 

“Well what you are really getting out of it?” asks Ysiad, “what’s the ROI?”

“The Department of Homeland Security wants that Ayiti operation to go forward. It will give them a natural excuse to roll over the border wall, put down the sixty some autonomous zones and burn that Breuklyn Soviet to the ground with gas and fire. We definitely want to trade Adon for DeBuitléir, but not for that exact same end.”

“Why then, why risk all the gun play?”

“Sebastian Adon is a corpse. A zombie. He doesn’t have what we want. Believe me, in Moscow we looked. She looked for us.”

Ysiad knows who.

“DeBuitléir does then?”

“Oh yes. Certainly. They in the DHS gulag archipelago just didn’t have to right tools to extract it out of him. Despite seven years of non-stop torture down in Angola 42.”

“So you’re searching for Solomon like everyone else then?”

Dmitry Khulushin grins ear to ear.

Blat, want to see a fun little trick, an exercise in living vicariously?”

“I’m sure I don’t,” says Ysiad.

Breria jumps out of his seat and stands fat and naked at attention.

“Sons of black sluts!!” screams the regional Director of the Homeland Security forces.

 

He reaches up and grabs their Champaign pouring suspended hostess by the throat. He starts beating himself off as he strangles her. She struggles and he grips her throat more forcefully.

 

“We’ve been here for such long time, notes Dmitry Khulushin, “what in the world could make you believe in these violent monkeys, these fleshy husks and their rebel ilk? Do you have any idea how much power are playing with?”

The young woman tries to scream, she flails and struggles. Breria keeps choking her

Michael Bloom Trump II, the richest man in New York comes back from the bathroom. He’s holding a long steak knife. He stabs the young woman several times in the chest vigorously and then he slits the girl’s throat. Blood gushes everywhere. All over the bath house floor. Breria starts laughing hysterically beating himself off. Michel Bloom starts jumping up and down like a monkey painting his face with the dead girl’s blood.

 

Dmitry Khulushin takes a Champaign glass and fills it with her gushing sanguine fluids.

 

“Why don’t you get the fuck out of here you pathetic chornay profiteer,” says Dmitry  Khulushin , “go run and tell your Ivorite friends just what you think you know!” he sneers.

 

Ysiad doesn’t budge.

 

“What is it exactly you think that DeBuitléir has?” Ysiad asks.

 

“He has the Retribution List.”

 

The list of all women of child bearing age with the bloodline of the Tzadikk ha Dror.

 

“I mean all the ones we didn’t skin, rape, eat or taint beyond recognition already,” Dmitry grins.

 

For the first time in a while Ysiad’ face shows some raw horror, groks the big of it all, the mass and girth of the plot.

 

“We’re gonna snuff out the whole rebellion and the blood line with one mighty stone. Now get the fuck off my personal island. You have one hour before I send the dogs and zombies after you. ”

Dmitry Khulushin spits blood on the face of Ysiad Ferraris.

“Just kidding. This isn’t Paramount pictures. I’m gonna grind your bones right now and feed you like a meat pie to the Ivories.”

 

And then Dmitry grabs his wrist, yanks him clear across the table and cuts his entire right hand off with a meat cleaver spraying his gore all over.

 

 

 

Chapter 32

Bay 65th Street, 2012ce

Masjid Saint Sophina

 

Inside Majid St. Sophina on Bay 65 with its glittering green domes and gold minaret and tank barrier defenses Anahita Noor and Erza Pula watch as 8,000 Shi’a and Alawiite men who have just finished salat come to attention and salute a mosaic portrait of the Mahdi Emmina Saulomina Khadija and her two new born infants one black as night a male and one a ghostly albino. They are both in black fatigues like the men and wear chadors. They look nervous.

 

Erza Pula Pound, deputy minister of Public Safety has just ordered over 94,300 families below ground into the bunker vaults of the old, old sub-subway to newly Chinese built the gas bunker shelters.

The Oligarchy has leaked over the interweb it will hit Breuklyn Soviet tomorrow with Sarin rockets.

 

The First, Second, Third and Ninth Citizens Armies[59] have been called up but only half have been issued gas masks. Some 32 thousand fighters.

 

Erza hopes Allah is as merciful tomorrow as she is beneficent.

 

‘Death to these Kafirs[60] and their cowardly robots,’ yells Kaveh Ali Shariati, “long live the Prophetess, Mother of the Messiah and the Mahdi, Allu Akbar!”

 

 

Chapter 34

Drake Hotel, Mermaid Ave & w37st St, 2012ce

Seagate Coney Island

 

 

 

Oleg looks at his sky pager.

 

Before Dmitry’s goons grabbed Ysiad Ferraris at the water’s edge and prepared to grind him part into mincemeat for so called kosher hotdogs, zeal over took the wily Dominican. He flailed his way lose and still bleeding all over the place wrestled a pistol off one of the gangsters belts and put two in everyone around him until the gun jammed.

 

BANG. BANG.

 

And still bleeding and mostly naked he charged out the front of the on 88 Fulton Street club, with a makeshift tourniquet; into an alley way on Gold Street and dashed hemorrhaging everywhere toward the water front.

 

And before he threw himself into East River he fired off a voice call to Sky Page Central from a mobsters taken device. His dying voice would be low atmosphere bounced between satellites, rendered into a Gamatria[61] code and delivered to Oleg’s pager.

 

“Adon and DeBuitléir are alive! DHS and the Bratva are exchanging them as prisoners. Attack on the Soviet is inevitable. Bratva and Otriad inner circles compromised. Secure the candidates by any means necessary!”

 

And the phone went dead.

 

Oleg nearly bashes his sky pager against the wall of the parking garage below the Drake Hotel.

 

 

 

Fuck! Fuck! Fuck! It was all a trap. A huge set up. Blat.

 

 

 

 

We thought we were ten steps ahead but all we were doing was playing a long game for the other side! It was moments like this that Oleg remembered clearly his skepticism when several years before Adon had told him the Oligarchy has technology 200 years ahead of our own.

A deep breath. He composes himself.

Well then, he thinks as he clenches his bear fists. Time to do what has to be done.

He leaves car in the Hotel subbasement a

nd takes a special elevator right to the restaurant on the roof.

 

It’s a very premium view of everything from eighty four stories above the Soviet at Tatiana Purples on the roof of the Drake Hotel.

“Ysiad Ferraris is dead,” says Anya, “his body washed up on the coast an hour ago. They cut off his arms and his legs.”

“Show me the body I say,” he laughs.

Oleg Medved sits across from her at the table on the roof of the Drake Hotel, at Tatiana Purples, not to be confused with Tatiana Blue to the West of Brighton 6 or Tatiana Green to the East of Brighton 6, both on the new Navalny Boardwalk.

This one is eighty stories above the coast. And serves “Slavo-Asiatic Fusion Cuisines”. Or, Russian food with a wide menu of Sushi.

The place is completely empty.

Back in wind swept Breuklyn Soviet. Anya and Oleg Medved have light supper on the roof of the Drake Hotel with its wide winding wrap around view of the Coney Peninsula, the steel towers of Seagate, the casinos of the Green Light District, and expanded boardwalk, the hundreds of freighters in the port, and of course in the distance to the North a forty story tree of enormous size.

 

The Drake Hotel is so tall one can even see the ramparts of the Northern Mile High Wall. You can see the high tower in Manhattan. And the fortress of the City.

 

“I do not have very positive news to report,” he says.

“Well what’s fucking new,” Is all she responds.

“It has been a most tumultuous week.”

“I expect the heat to rise exponentially this weekend.”

 

“Tell me, why is it that they pulled you out of Unit 88 and sent you back home two years ago,” he asks her.

 

“I wasn’t any good at killing people,” is all she responds.

 

“Well the enemy doesn’t flinch about it.”

“Well the trouble with an eye for eye is that the enemy always has more eyes than we do,” she coldly says, “Now make your fucking report Oleg Medved.”

 

The Kompot is cold and fresh boysenberry, black berry currant. She sips it. If he lies she will have him shot. If he is in fact the traitor she will pick him up herself and throw him off the eightieth story to a splat of a death on the boardwalk below.

 

“This morning Ysiad Ferraris reported to me that that the Ivorite spy ring here in the Soviet is about to pull absolutely everyone out of town and is also preparing to evacuate tens of thousands of Ivories, and quite quickly. That’s ominous. Every time the Israelis pull out somewhere quickly things go up in flames shortly after.”

 

“Well you know those Zionist dogs better than I would ever like to. Did Mr. Ferraris give the spy ring the mutual aid agreement?”

“Yes, and they told him to tell us to go talk to Ruth Vered for final authorization.”

“And what did the spy ring back to pass us?”

 

“They confirmed that the Perchevney Bratva has betrayed you, us. Last week they captured Sebastian and Watson in Moscow. ”

 

Her face drops for one second.

 

“Who else knows Sebastian is alive?”

“Well, Ysiad does because he was the last person to see Adon the night of his capture last Friday. Right before they took out target 104.”

 

Budanov.

 

“Did Ferraris sell us out,” she asks.

“I don’t know. I don’t think so.”

“Who else?”

“Toba Hadaad knows he’s alive and therefore so does the Ivorite spy ring.”

“Considering that Unit 669 helped us fabricate his and Emma Solomon’s deaths that comes as no shock at all. Who else?”

“Well, since the Bratva has him, but no one has said anything to me, I would assume that Justin O’Azzello is in the dark too and rest of the thieves in law as well. There’s more though.”

“Speak quickly and quietly man and know I have a sniper ready to splatter you so pick your words well.

“I’m being accused now of being the traitor?”

“Well Oleg I suppose its high time you picked a side more specifically.”

“Anya. That’s hurtful.”

“Come on Oleg, finish the fucking report.”

Oleg wonders how up so eighty stories high in a completely empty restaurant, emptied because they reserved every other table; from what position her Sicarri assassin has a good bead on him.

The wind blows and he picks his words well.

“As you know when the group killings began three months ago our greatest concern was that they would trigger a civil war here between the Ivories and the Caribbean’s. And judging from last night’s attack, the assassins have now butchered 104 of our citizens just a fortnight after we finished killing 104 of their war criminals and profiteers. It took us three years. It took them just three nights over three months.”

“Oleg Medved, if you don’t speed up your revelation of reporting I will blink twice and my best sniper, she will empty your brains on the floor of the roof and that will be all she wrote.”

“I find your threats highly erotic,” is all he responds.

 

“When it began three months ago you asked me to convince Alexandre Perchevney it was in everyone’s interest to clamp down on this immediately. We sat down with the Party of God representative Anahita Noor, with Netic Djbriel Okonkwo from Uhuru-BLM, and James White and James Brown from the Bratva and we all agreed to pool resources and go after everyone responsible for the atrocities. For the sake of the Soviet, for the sake of business and because we all knew what might happen if we had another Crown Heights.”

 

“Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Check,” says Anya Drovtich,

“And so we all kidnapped, crippled and mind tortured a lot of people until we rounded it down in the very eleventh hour to forty confirmed horses. Bodies being used; programed in advance to orchestrate these horrific murders. And so as you know, right after the last killing. Right after we burned the bodies out in East New York our Sicarri, the Party of God’s revolutionary guardsmen, the Shomriim and the Bratva’s most hard hitting goon squads rounded up the remaining killers in a sweep and put them all in  the bathes under Third Rasputin.”

“Oleg Leondovich. You are one of my most favorite people to work with over the years, but speed it up. I’m going to order your death in two minutes if I’m not fully convinced you didn’t betray us to the enemy.”

 

“We carried the horses, the 40 civilian proxies selected by your enemies. Our enemies. We brought them down into the memory vat and ran the Parasimulators. But time wasn’t on our side so I asked Alexandre to send his best mambo to break their minds quickly.”

 

“And so he sent Hella?”

 

“Yes. But not only her. She arrived with Dmitry Khulushin and a very large back box.”

 

“What was in The Sly Fox?”

 

“Not what, who.” He says.

 

“Who was in The Sly Fox?”

 

“The Ivorite Spy ring told Ysiad this morning to tell us that in that box was something more important than solving the killings, more important than why it was that they were all planning to evacuate their beloved Ivories. In that box was the missing candidate.”

 

“Dasha is dead. They disappeared her seven years ago.”

 

“She was there the night of the Millennium Hostage Crisis.”

 

“You just saw a Ghost. While Ysiad was meeting that whore Ivorite spy Toba Hadaad we were trading with the Party of God, and Anahita Noor gave us that exact name. It’s a lie.”

 

“Dasha Andreavna Skorobogatova is very much alive. They’ve kept her asleep as a hostage since she and Adon asked Perchevney to fake their deaths seven years ago. I didn’t know the truth until the Millennium Hostage Crisis when she briefly was allowed to wake up. Adon said to keep her alive by any means necessary. These were his last word to me. And I knew then what I knew seven years ago which is that she would only be kept alive if she was of use. And now they’ve brought her from Russia with love to run the interrogations. Or god only knows what else.”

 

“So plot counter plot. You are the traitor,” she says.

 

“No woman I’m not. I protected Adon from the Bratva. I protected Dasha from the Oligarchy. And until Dmitry Khulushin made his power play this week no one was attacking the Breuklyn Soviet or any of the other Free states.  Does the Brotherhood or the Mossad even really know Adon is alive? Niet. Does anyone else in our own Otriad even know! Niet. Because we kept everyone at bay! Kept this war in the shadows while we strengthened our position. No one knows where Emma is. And no one knows about the twins. And that’s the only important thing isn’t it!” he demands knowing his time is coming up close.

 

“Now. Only me and you.”

 

“Well what now? You truly believe that I have sold this Otriad out to Perchevney or worse the Oligarchy itself?”

 

“You were the last person to see Adon and Emma Solomon alive other than me. How could you not have known they still had Dasha?”

 

“They told me she died after the events at Millennium.”

 

“Who told you that?”

 

“Dmitry Khulushin.”

 

“The world’s biggest snake he whispered that to you and you believed it?”

 

She blinks once.

 

“Anya. My loyalnost is to you personally as well as Sebastian. And to this rebellion supersedes my connections of blood. My thirst for treasure and any affiliations I have to the Ivorites or even the Pervechnvny Bratva.”

 

He says this all quite calmly for a man about to die.

 

“If I blink one more time you will die traitor so pick your last words well,” she coldly says, “If the Ivorites are pulling a mass exodus with their black freighter submarines on our shores. If they brought that witch woman here. If they have Adon and they know what to trade with the oligarchy to get DeBuitléir. Then I would say that an attack of the Soviet and to other free states is impending. I would say that you helped them set us up for slaughter.

 

“Damn you woman. Hold your eye’s desire to fire.”

 

“Good bye Oleg.”

 

“Wait.”

 

“For what?”

 

“I’m the only person that can get into the baths below Third Rasputin and walk away with their mambo Dasha in a bag. And only from what she knows can I prove my loyalty to you and this rebellion. Can we stop fighting?”

 

“Dasha works for Perchevney now, or always has. Why would she tell us anything?”

 

“Because she’s a prisoner. She’s in their debt not in their pocket. Other than when they woke her up to participate in the raid on the Millennium, she’s been under since the night of the Great Disorder. If she can see into the minds of these killers; these horses if she can pick out who organized this then we can figure out what if anything we can do to stop it.”

 

“Perchevney will have your whole killed for betraying him.”

 

“You’ll have my whole family killed for betraying you.”

 

“No. I’ll just have you killed. We don’t kill civilians without cause around here.”

 

“They have a man amongst the forty prisoners below Third Rasputin who helped found your club. Our Otriad. I wouldn’t know his name or face because I didn’t join your cause until the middle of the revolt, but you’d know him and you’d know then just how much we, I say we because I am your deputy I am your man, I worked for you and for Adon and for Solomon! My loyalnost is only to the Z.O.B.”

 

“Tell me why I shouldn’t just order the entire 4th Citizens Army to arrest everyone inside Third Rasputin. Right now.”

 

“Firstly, because you’ll never get into the caverns below by force. Secondly, because if there is an impending Federal raid on the Soviet, what we don’t want is to have a street war between the Bratva, the Breuklyn Otriad, the Party of God and all other major player in the Citizen’s Army fucking up access to the port; our only way of getting civilians out of the country. Trapping everyone here over the weekend in the middle of a gas assault, and making us look easy prey to the U.A.S. is a stupid, stupid stratagem. Lastly, because if Dmitry Khulushin in New York City. Which everyone seems to think he is. Well then Justin Toomey O’Azzello is no longer Voorhi in law, no longer the biggest local boss in charge. And Dmitry will kill all of the hostages, kill all of the Brava’s regional operators, and kill all of the horses and sure Dasha Andreavna too to keep what he’s doing, what he’s plotting from us.”

She stares at him without blinking.

“Prove it then Oleg. Go get pretty, lost lonely and lethal Ms. Dasha and go get me a traitor she can identify.”

“Anya.”

“Oleg.”

“Watch me prove my loyalty to you with blood and fire, yet again.”

Eighty stories above the Coast of Breuklyn, on the roof deck of the Drake Hotel Oleg Leondovich Medved finally picks his bloody side. He heads out to knock real hard on the door of shit ton of trouble.

 

 

 

Chapter 35

1375 Ocean Ave, 2012ce

Midwood

 

MORE MORE

 

It’s quite late. Late sometime Friday into early Saturday night.

The land line rings. No one has this number. It’s the same voice on the line.

It’s Krissy’s voice, a little strained by cigarettes maybe.

 

“If you love me please baby please don’t follow them to Las Vegas.”

 

“Krissy is that you?”

 

“Yeah Big Nicky it’s me.”

 

“Where are you babe,” pleads out into the night.

 

“That doesn’t matter, they’re gonna hurt me real bad unless you do what they say.”

 

He goes dead inside.

 

“When you get to Las Vegas you need to put eight rounds in the head of Sebastian Adon,” the voice says.

 

“Or you have no idea how much they plan to make me suffer.”

 

Chapter 36

Third Rasputin, 2012ce

Brighton beach

 

 

Oleg Medved bangs his fist on the front door of the Third Rasputin Supper Club Restaurant[62]. The enormous blue purple cube which occupies the entire block of Avenue Z and Ocean Avenue is seven stories tall and composed of various grafting’s of blue and gold metals interlocking to produce the effect of hypermodern futurism.

A giant wave of metal concealing the soon to open seven day a week showcase of Postsoviet debauches. Several incarnations of Rasputin have been mysteriously burned down over the years. This is the latest incarnation built within the past six months.

 

Its owner is Alexandre Dmitrievich Perchevney.

 

Suka Blat, open the fucking door!” Oleg the bear bellows.

 

Eventually skinny wild eyed young man named Maxim opens the gate. Maxim has the look of a happy zombie, a dead man with a smile dancing around the room as everyone’s best friend. He gives Oleg    a friendly hand shake and beckons him inside the dimly lit entrance way.

They walk through the passage way and past the ballroom and the dance floor and exclusive areas and then down a series of ramps into the basement, and then sub-basement. Finally he arrives at Mermaid Spa; the new bathhou[63]se below the club.

It’s here that Oleg and the secondary command of the Bratva has been interrogating the suspect prisoners associated with the group killings, three such in the past three months.

 

There are two burly men in black multiform carrying on a loud deliberation when Oleg    arrives. One is tall and wild eyed, long haired wild man Justin Toomey O’Azzello and the other is the burly enforcer James Parisi White, not to be confused with his Boriquen partner James Behemoth Pérezes Brown. James and Justin are both handsome in a defiant Fenian sort of way, Justin is a devious and sarcastic dirty blonde, James; a former cop is stocky and brunette. These are two of Alexandre’s Perchevney’s closest men in country. Justin is his New York General Manager and James his Chief of Internal Security. Along with Equadorian tough guy “James Brown”, these three are the only Amerikanski on his inner circle. The Russian call girls who work at and frequent the restaurant call the James’s “white” and “brown” basically only because James Pérezes is Hispanic and James White is a Fenian.

 

They came up with Perchevney years ago when his fortunes were quite revered an all he really owned was shitty Bulgarian dancehall on the lower east side specializing in Latin Music and arranged marriages. Both Justin and James are practicing Fenians.

 

“Howdy,” says James White.

“You’re not gonna believe what’s coming out of these people’s memories,” says Justin O’Azzello.

“Oh, believe me how I can believe almost anything these days,” says Oleg Medved.

 

Submerged in the main pool are forty human beings. Mostly men but nine women too.  They are submerged symmetrically in the water by a make shift scaffolding rig, respirator tubing attached to head set cylinders enclosing their heads in metal orbs. IV central lines are sutured into their torsos.

 

“These are the forty horses we suspect participated in the messy business of those Ivoryish and Jamaican group killings. A couple might be low hanging fruit circumstantially, but all of them were linked to cars, flats or IP addresses or new entries in the nights before the three group killings. So, we threw them in the bath and ran the Parasimulator full blast with the Bratva’s best mambo doing her thing for twenty four hours,” explains Justin.

“What simulation?” Oleg    asks him.

“Sleep No More,” says James, “then the Bulgarian Tavern, of course.”

He’s referring to the preferred disorientation simulations the Bratva’s interrogators run before they go digging around in people’s heads. One involves a massive hotel game of hide and go seek with intermittent bouts of mob violence and orgiastic rituals. The second mimics a three floor translational drinking game to separate people from their memories and information. The process in involves incapacitating a person with sedatives, submerging them in a warm water bath and uploading whole worlds of fictitious data right into their cerebral cortex. Once they get the subject’s mind to believe what they are experiencing is real a skilled male technician is called an Ougan and-or a skilled female technician called a Mambo can then do a great deal of data collection or memory replacement.

In industry terms, and a person reprogrammed via this medium is called “a horse”.

An unconscientious technician or an overly traumatizing episode will wipe out all memory and in industry terms produce a zombie.

“Who’s the mambo,” Oleg    asks, but he already knows.

“You’ll never guess,” grins Justin O’Azzello.

“More importantly what did you record?” asks Oleg Medved.

“Well for one thing almost none of these horses remember a single thing before arriving in Breuklyn Soviet three months ago, as if they didn’t exist. They were wiped and programmed and sent over here to swarm, slaughter kill. Finally after ascertaining that we were dealing mostly with zombies we narrowed down via optic nerve playback to two handlers in the cohort. The only two that didn’t have their clocks punched before,” says Justin.

 

“You did full neural play backs?” asks Oleg    referring to the process of playing back the images taken in via the optic nerve of the past ninety days.

 

“Well one bottomed out while our mambo went digging late last night. Highly trained. He punched his own clock. He’s a fucking palsy vegetable now,” notes Justin.

 

“The other one, the Muslim Brotherhood grabbed from the City and then we took him off them. Our mambo was pretty close to getting him wide open and then he went into neurological arrest. We sent him over to Coney Island Hospital, he’s shored up in Alexandre’s personal life support suite,” James Burns White explains.

James Behemoth Brown takes over the briefing, “They all came into the Soviet in a variety of different ways. They all checked in different places all over town. Full moon came each time and they converged on their targets like clockwork. They butchered all three groups the same way. Everybody was gang raped one by one in front of each other and then everybody was drained dry and hung up from the rafters after their sex organs were consumed. And then the attackers washed up and checked out. And they say the Russian-Albanian-Bulgarian mafias are the real animals? Even MS 15 doesn’t rock like this!”

Oleg the Bear weighs all the latest data.

“But the surviving handler what’s in his head? Who did they all ultimately serve?”

“Well we won’t know until we get him back from Coney Island Hospital,” states James White.

James Behemoth Brown spits in disgust at an unknown and abysmal evil they are now unearthing.

 

“We have another, complication,” says James White.

 

“The fellow we just sent over to Coney was a founder of your little Breuklyn Otriad. A club fucking founder that you all assumed was dead and taken during last year’s battle for Babylon, Strong Island.”

 

“Well then?” asks Oleg Medved.

 

Oleg the bear knows who that man is, but cannot speak his real name for he ever knew it.

 

“We suspect that whoever they are, they’ve infiltrated both the Bratva and the Breuklyn Otriad with their sleepers. If that’s correct we are most likely dealing with the Cult in Grey.”

Everyone shuts up when that name gets mentioned.

And that says a little something when the men in the room are hard bad man gangsters, one of which who can transform into a black cat of enormous size with titanium claws.

 

“Who can we trust these days, even in our own houses,” mutters James Behemoth Brown.

“All right, let’s get these horses out of the water and string um up,” declares Medved

“It used to be that you had to buy off someone’s loyalties! Or threaten the ones that they love! Now you can just pay to look into their minds and write things there for them to do,” exclaims James White.

“Takes all the fun out of interrogations if you ask me,” states Justin Toomey O’Azzello playing with a dagger of enormous size, his right index finger balancing the blade.

“I heard from a trusted source Alexandre sent his best mambo from Moscow to work on these pawns,” mentions Oleg Medved.

“He did indeed,” said James White.

“Dmitry Khulushin flew her in two nights ago,” states Justin O’Azzello.

“Little miss fucking trouble herself,” laughs James Behemoth Brown, “we’d all thought she was red dead disappeared! It took her just under a night to crack all thirty nine targets. Obviously she hasn’t lost her touch.”

“Although she left a few brain dead,” notes James Behemoth Brown.

“Is Dmitry in New York?” Oleg    asks, a little too casually.

“Good question,” says James White.

“Which Dmitry?” mutters James Brown.

“The real Dmitry Khulushin, not his double, not his twin or his clone,” says Oleg   .

“You think even Sasho himself knows that blonde devil face from his twins? Even Sasho can’t tame that fucking vicious rising demagogue,” says James White.

“He’d better if he knows what’s good for the business,” says Justin O’Azzello.

“Well I hope he’s not in New York, because it’s always a blood bath whenever he shows up,” says Justin.

 

“Take me to her then so I can taste the merchadise,” says Oleg.

 

Oleg Medved is about to make a bed and finally sleep in it.

And so they go deep below the streets of Breuklyn Soviet heading to the deepest crypt below the baths, below the ice cage, where they keep their most previous cargo.

Burly Oleg Medved knocks out Justin O’Azzello first with a crack to the head. He’s the most dangerous one. Since Dmitry Khulushin doesn’t appear to be on the premises.

He pile drives his way through the sturdy old enforcer James Burns White and a few other Postsoviet hooligans. James almost gets off a shot but Oleg    bashes him in the face with a fire extinguisher, and then empty’s the entire chemical contents out on James Brown who is transmogrifying into the terrifying black beast with claws and a tail that science and magic engineered for him

 

And then there was a big black cat of enormous size coming right at him claws bared!

And then there was James Burns White calling him a “fucking double traitor” and firing his repeater at him, metal mosquitos zipping about the passage ways.

And it seemed then like Justin O’Azzello who he’s hit so fucking hard he’d though he’d killed him drew up that knife of his and ran across the ceiling and plunged in twice in his back!

“SUKA BLAT!” Oleg    bellowed and then with that big dagger still in his gut he head butts Justin, and takes out his blaster and empties it in the General Manager chest.

 

BRAKA. BRAKA. BRAKA. BRAKA. BRAKA. BRAKA. BRAKA. BRAKA. Click.

 

And Justin just spits blood at him!

And so Oleg swings the extinguisher into the thick of his skull and knocks him back into James White and James Brown and whole pack of dangerous others.

Oleg the Bear had to fuck up a lot of his closest associates to get clear of that shit show. But he did what he needed to do.

A few doors and tunnels down below the supper club.

There she lay.

Naked as the day she was born in fluid bath, eyes flickering.

Oleg had not seen this woman since seven years before on the eve of the great disorder.

Those criminal associates that are chasing him and howling for his blood are banging on the blast door.

“Dasha. It’s time to wake up,” is all he thinks to say in Russian.

Oleg   Medved lifts her out of the bath, and places her in a big black duffle bag.

 

He then had to carry this full figured buxom blonde haired young woman out of the memory vat and charge through the facility with her in the bag. While bleeding out of back and chest with a fragment of a small caliber round in his shoulder.

 

They don’t make man like this after the fall of the Soviet Union!

With everyone in there trying to kill him it all got a little Zen. He couldn’t keep track of how many men he’d killed on the way out. And in doing so he’d burned his final bridge with the Perchevney Bratva.

He was shot at repeatedly, but only one connected low caliber thankfully. And he was stabbed twice in the back and once in the gut. But he had enough gut for glory.

He even had to bash poor Maxim’s face with heavy hammer blow and jump in his black armored Escalade with the girl still dripping wet from the vat.

He’d just stolen the most important link in the Perchevney Bratva’s chain of parapsychological war fare. He’d carried off their best mambo.

Tires screech.

He drives like hell out of the Green Light District rubber burning. He taps the blue ray in his ear.

“Dbrisk, I have her! I have the second candidate! Meet me at Safe House 07 in half an hour or immediately! And activate the Underground Railroad. We don’t have much time. You all have to leave for Las Vegas tonight. They have Adon and DeBuitléir. It’s confirmed. We’ve all been betrayed and set up for a great big fat kill.”

He tears asphalt up Ocean Avenue north toward District Midwood, then further into District Crown Heights.

In the back seat, a struggling kicking fighting bagged up woman his cursing his mother, his father and his unborn children in thick Russian!

 

But he’s sure that she’ll thank him with her eyes in about five minutes, if not her mouth.

 

 

Chapter 37

Ms. Lily’s Barber Shop, 2012ce

Crown Heights

 

 

Bumbaclot! There is nothing worse on earth than a traitor in the ranks of one’s own leadership!

 

Of the many serious differences that are real, as opposed to rakishly imagined between Noires and the Blan is that a Noire will compliment another man on his attire.

 

Mickhi Dbrisk is getting a shape up in his father’s barber shop on Utica and Empire. His father’s shop is well known and as it is customary in the noire tradition it is as much a small social club for gossip and business networking as it is a place to shape and style ones hair. Mickhi keeps his dreads in pristine condition. He began to grow them like this seven years ago when he gave up drinking and smoking. Things are calm and casual even though everybody knows what’s coming. His father keeps shaving away.

 

A black windowless van rolls up and parks outside. Two men jump out the back off load a steel drum marked “T.N.T Shipping”. They use a hand truck to roll the thing inside the barber shop. Right next to Dbrisk. His father motions in Yardy hand sign to the young men and old men seated inside to get gone.

 

Y don y’all com bak ina du pas hour,” forcefully suggests Mickhi Dbrisk in patois.

 

Nobody has to even be told twice best believe.

 

Pretty soon Dbrisk, his father and two of Dbrisk’s inner crew; his cousin Magnus Allamby and his lifelong associate Big Man Matthew are left inside. Matthew rolls down the external storm shutters and then activates the internal bullet proof barrier which slides down over the display windows and the door.

 

Dbrisk doesn’t get up nor does his father stop cutting his hair.

 

Magnus Allamby is in a blue pin stripe suit. He’s a boss like Dbrisk, but lives more like one. A little flashier. He’s the Finance Section Chief of the Otriad. He’s been running the books for nearly thirteen years. He’s a Bajan money man too. Educated at CUNY Staten Island and then later Columbia University Business School. He takes off his suit top and puts it on a rack. He isn’t carrying, he’s never carrying. He’s well covered. Big Man Matthew gets ready to pop open the steel drum. Matthew is a big guy, used to be chauffeur. Got a degree in urban planning from Medgar Evers. Matthew is here in an official capacity while Allamby was just hanging out, but sometimes business comes up on the fly.

 

They pop the drum. Mathew and Magnus Allamby hoist a sniveling broken young man out of it with a bag on his head. Already apparently worked over in Coney Island hospital. Bleeding out his eyes, a permaport in his left AC.

 

They throw him in the barber chair next to Dbrisk and cuff his hands and legs to the chair. He’s already been benzohyped.

 

The utilization of these drums was Michael’s idea years ago. The first business acquisition of the club was “Trinidad and Tobago Shipping”, a small outfit in District East New York that bulk mailed merchandise to and from the Wild West Indies. Michael had devised an elaborate system of logistics and supply where by these drums were not only used to efficiently smuggle things and people in and out of the Caribbean, but supply the various bodega routes more efficiently. And sometimes, when Oleg    or Anya or Erza’s people were done interrogating a suspect we drummed them up and put them in storage. There were always TNT drums being moved around the Soviet. Some with fruit and perishables, some with weapons and people, some with art, some with everything and anything else. They were classically very hard to open, they have global positioning systems, and they are all covered under our trans-Soviet search and seizure laws.

 

Magnus Allamby had figured out how to cut every two bit cop, hustler and border agent out of a cut.

 

“Emerge the wily traitor,” says Mickhi Dbrisk.

The man is wearing a black hood. And it appears someone has long ago surgically removed his tongue. Article Eight of the universal rights declaration forbids torture or cruel and unusual punishment. Beating a man, drugging a man into a dream state, tearing through his head like a DHS raiding party, and then sealing him in a steel drum isn’t standard operating procedure for the Otriad, but the Bratva found him first

.

It’s just been a long hot tepid weekend with a lot on the line.

 

“I know you man, though I will not say your name. The hate I have for you is nearly limitless. I would like to cut out your traitor heart for what you’ve done.”

 

“But, let me start by saying that I like your shoes. They’re pretty ok,” states Dbrisk.

“You can get shoes that look like that in the Soviet, but those are the genuine European articles. That’s how I know you’re coming from the City.”

“Look here,” says Dbrisk. I know you can’t talk; you don’t even still have your traitor tongue. But I know you saw things and did things we are gonna get them off your retinal imaging one way or another. And then we’re gonna box you up and bury you alive like the traitor that you are like that fellow in that short Poe story Casque of Amantioado. I know you were there when they slaughtered those all people. I know you gave us all over to the enemy. I’m not here to carrot you or stick you. I’m just in need to get the data you hold state of mind. We will now get it right? For even after they tortured you they still did not know what was behind your eyes or by your face what we know you know. The satisfaction they got down in Third Rasputin, or in Coney Island hospital working you over is beyond me. But best believe we will get what we are looking for and then you will be sent to grave. Matthew. Plug him in Big Man.”

 

Big Man Matthew puts a metal device over his head called a parasimulator and sets up the IV line pharmaceuticals into the right AC to sedate the traitorous prisoner, this time for good.

The Bratva and the Otriad have science and magic to match, but the Otriad used its powers for more good than for evil.

The device then overloads him immediately with chemical electrical stimuli, then generates a constructed world for him to be deceived into thinking reality is subjective.

 

Gold lion’s gonna show me where the light is,” hums Mickhi Dbrisk.

Take my hands out of control.”

 

Dbrisk hums an old classic while the parasimulator projects the man’s thought on the drop screen attached to the barber shop wall, “Tell me what you saw, tell me what you saw, I had the strangest dream. Inside, outside we must have done a thousand each!”

 

The way a parasimulator works is a long scientific lecture that even the inventor of the device and its pharmacological adjuncts Dr. Michelle Kaku-Tagomi-Goldberg of the University of Stonybrook feels is lost on even those with advanced degrees in Neurology and Phantom physics. The device can simulate whole worlds for those that are asleep, fourth dimensional simulations as it is called on the street. They can also be used to extract visual logs of real world experiences.

 

It can trick the mind into thinking it has left its body behind. It can download the soul into a new body.

 

On the wall of the barber shop the last three months of the traitor’s life and operations will shortly play out on screen. He only has three months of memory still in his mind. Though from the face they cannot yet see under the mask, he has been with the rebellion for the very beginning.

He has no tongue to speak his deeds or memories. But his retina will reveal who gave him his final orders. And who lured him from the table of the rebel leadership into the den of the oligarchy. And hopefully confirm the worst reports are true.

 

Only new European designer sneakers and a recorded log now playing on screen will tell of his spree. Even Judas had asked a higher price for his loyalty.

Dbrisk’s sky pager goes off.

“He’s close,” says Dbrisk.

Oleg pages Mickhi five minutes before he arrives on Utica Avenue and Matthew brings him in the side alley entrance. He’s carrying a woman in bag. Like back in the old country.

 

Talk to me,” says Mickhi Dbrisk in fluent Russian.

“Talk to her,” Oleg Medved responds.

 

He unzips the body bag and there is the ravishing albeit completely disheveled, dripping wet Dasha Andreavna Skorobogatova. Looking angry as fuck. She’s glaring at them.

 

“Give me a fucking Newport man,” is all she demands.

 

“Michael go get that thing handled. Matt, proper clothes please. This is the woman from the books.” he pauses, “sister, a multiform please for now,” requests Dbrisk averting his eyes from her dripping luscious nakedness. He hands her a bathrobe and then a Newport standard cigarette.

 

“And a fucking stiff drink too. Do you have any idea how long I’ve been under!”

“Where is he now?” demands Oleg   .

 

She lights up her cigarette and pulls on her robe in a huff.

“I’m not sure.”

“What do you mean you’re not sure weren’t you in the vat plugged into his head on behalf of Perchevney!” demands Oleg.

“Get me my drink.”

Dbrisk motions and Big Man Matthew comes back with an ice cold bottle of Russian Standard Vodka Premium, some Chinese synthesized red bulls and some iced glasses.

“Everyone’s in Moscow soon gonna be enroot to Las Vegas,” she says.

“Who’s everyone to you, sister,” says Dbrisk.

“I’m not your sister, black mister,” she responds.

He gives her a look.

“I’m sorry,” she says, “I’ve always been treated very well by you Mickhi Dbrisk.”

 

“Where is Sebastian Adon right now?” demands Magnus Goldbar Allamby.

 

“Sasho has Adon and his Ayitian partner Watson strung up somewhere in Moscow. Someone, probably Ysiad or the Ivorites sold them both out to the Bratva. The DHS has DeBuitléir as now you know. They’ve been working on him for seven fucking years in Angola 42. Both factions are trying to break into their respective heads and get the remainder of the list.”

 

“What list,” asks, almost sneers Allamby.

 

“Fuck you man. You know the fucking list,” is all she says in return. Though only Oleg Medved and Dbrisk are on that level. Allamby is a money changer.

Tak, and what else?” demands Oleg.

 

“They’re going to shut down your nuclear defense grid and storm the Breuklyn Soviet in two days’ time. They’re going to kill almost everyone using gas and blame it all on the Muslims. Like the 9-11. The crackdown is finally coming. With or without Ayiti as a pretext the Oligarchy wishes to bring this rebellion under heel,” Dasha explains.

 

“You were in his head?” asks Mickhi Dbrisk who hasn’t seen Adon since the night he left three years ago to raid the Millennium Theater.

“I’m always in his head,” she declares.

“You were in his head for Perchevney or for Solomon? Who?” demands Magnus Allamby

Tak. I can’t always remember what side of the bed I wake up on each morning. But man you know my blood.”

“I know every time this Russian witch shows up and shakes her ass we put all our best men in the fucking ground,” yells Michael Allamby.

 

Dasha Andreavna just grins.

 

“Enough,” interrupts Oleg Medved, “we never know what side anyone’s on these days, and it hardly ever matters. They love each other. Whatever that means. Now pull the traitors hood and run the play back and let’s see if she knows the devils by their faces.”

 

“Woman I want your word that when you see him you will be calm,” says Dbrisk.

 

“I promise nothing to you black man,” she snarls.

 

And Oleg doesn’t know if the him referred to is Adon or the masked traitor in the barber chair. Oleg joined up with these people seven years ago. He joined the uprising almost by accident. He used to work for the Israelis. Then the Bratva keeping track of the Otriad, now he was a one team player for sure. He hoped he’d bet on the right horse.

 

Sebastian Adon’s last words to Oleg Medved, the night they stormed together Millennium were, “get her out alive.”

He hadn’t specified under what and into what conditions.

“We already know what you’re gonna do when you see his face. But first we need you to watch what he saw for the last three months and figure out just how much trouble we all are in.”

“Alright, let’s begin,” she says, “you have oysters and popcorn?”

 

They all know she is completely serious and so Mr. Magnus Allamby orders out for them. What’s the use of running your own micro republic if you can’t get oysters and popcorn in the midnight hours for a beautiful and vital woman in your chain of command?

 

The first image is of four men seated naked in a bathhouse. Three faces are coming into focus and one has their back to the view of the traitor. Three months ago.

 

“That’s Khulushin, Breria, and Berlusconi,” she says, “You know who they are surely.”

“Who do you think the fourth man is?” Oleg    asks.

 

She shutters on the inside.

 

“Kahn,” she says.

 

“We have to confirm it,” says Mickhi Dbrisk.

 

Images fly in reverse. The first ones are of wild orgies and of consumption and of playing games of sex and violence and chance in the Bathtub Gym on 88 Fulton in the City. The next are of the traitor crossing under the river via a tunnel running from what used to be Police Plaza One to what used to be the Watchtower

.

The man had made great distances easy over a three month period. But he had the most powerful oligarchs on earth helping him as he went.

 

She sees the first slaughter three months ago.

Howling packs of zombies ripping into two families of blacks and Ivories. Rape, ripped flesh slaughter. Dangle, drizzle bleed and die.

 

Strangers programed to kill watching the telescreen feasting on sex organs.

 

She sees Dmitry Khulushin hitting a dangling Sebastian Adon with a studded black bat. Over and over and over again laughing hysterically. Now strangling him. Pissing and spitting and kicking his face. She sees Khulushin pin one dollar pills to Adon’s chest and crack him like human piñata.

She sees her own unconscious body being used like a rag doll in a gang bang as Sebastian is forced to watch. She doesn’t even shudder.

 

They watch the second slaughter, shot with traitor eyes two months ago.

 

Same carnage, but with way more victims.

On the screen they see three young tattooed hipster women taking turns swinging little babies heads against the wall giggling. They see a motely mix of zombies sent to pell-mell kill. Of all colors and creeds participating gleefully. All programmed via telescreen and Nanobots in pork or the soda. A pack of young men are raping a pretty young Ivoryish girl over a barrel.

 

Big Man Matthew asks for cigarette. Pours himself a stiff drink of bourbon whiskey. When they are done the zombies cut her Ivoryess limbs off. The traitor watched everything.

 

The second killing in three parts was a blood bacchanalia like the first. Bringing the body count up to eighty eight victims by the full moon of month two. Four entire families wiped out.

 

All the female family members were candidates.

 

Even Alan; called Oleg Medved and Magnus Allamby pick up the pack of Newport standards and light two up.

The morbid tale flickers on.

More torture of Sebastian Adon, more rape of Dasha Andreavna.

Oleg puts a hand on her shoulder, but she just says, “don’t fucking touch me.”

Alexandre Perchevney grinning on the screen as he shakes hands with Dmitry Khulushin. The traitor introducing Alexandre to a holograph of Director Breria, head of homeland security. The traitor agreeing to sell Adon and Watson to Perchevney. A deal being made. DeBuitléir for Adon, let them try and work on each other’s’ prisoners.

 

Dasha boxed up and sent from Italy to Moscow to keep Adon calm, mentally speaking. Them using her over the years to find candidates.  Using her for all kinds of things. Dasha boxed up and sent to Breuklyn Soviet to wipe out the minds of the zombies and keep them under control.

“How long were you under?” Dbrisk asks her.

“I’ve been under for nearly seven years,” she responds in Russian.

The traitor had sold out the entire rebel leadership for little more than some gold and pager. They hadn’t needed to threaten his family. They hadn’t needed to lean too hard. To betray his loyalnost and turn over the whole rebel nuclear defense system, the roster of major organizers in the Breuklyn Soviet and all twelve names of the surviving members of the  Z.O.B., they just had to promise him they’d let him live in the highest tower.

And like all traitors before him once they got what they needed they took his memories and his tongue and cast him off like a European designer shoe at a bread riot.

 

The screen depicts the grisly last killing, which occurred just 72 hours ago.

 

The traitor’s very last memory before the Otriad’s whisper network found his location out and the Muslim Brotherhood helped snatch him, he was standing on Steeplechase pier, whistling a song though he had no tongue to make the words. Everyone in the room knows that song. To the tune of the song he wrote down a series of codes, codes to the nuclear defense grid, locations of command bunkers, access numbers to our server vaults.

 

The traitor handed those codes over to the enemy. For permission to leave the Breuklyn Soviet for good. Last scene in the memory bank, sitting in Bathtub Gym Banya.

 

Dmitry Khulushin again on screen pats him on the back and finally we see the face of the fourth man. His beady old soul eyes. His French hook nose. His body caught between this world and the next.

Dmitry looks too happy with himself. The old French man says something in French.

Then the French croon too begins whistling that song. He twitches, eyes go black and he spits blood.

The traitor departs from the company of the two vile oligarchs. He then sits down at Tatiana Blue’s for last supper. He almost immediately gets clorophomed and has bag pulled over his head by the Muslim bus boys.

 

Everyone in the room knows the words to the Partisan song.

 

The projector cuts off with a Muslim brother chloroforming the traitor from behind and throwing a bag over his head.

A bag which has not yet come off.

 

The room is thick with tobacco smoke, and heavy from that horror show of hate.

 

Mickhi Dbrisk takes out a gun and shoots the man in the head in total violation of international law. BLAM!

 

“Thank you,” says Dasha Andreavna, “you beat me to it.”

There was no use but to kill him.

Everyone simmers. The hooded traitor who everyone would have recognized as a founding member of the resistance bleeds out from his bag masked face wet and dead. All his secrets made plain.

“They organized the Great Revolt so they could isolate you all into little ghettos, identify as many candidates as they could, neutralize us one by one, then bring down the heel,” she informs them.

“He’d been with us from the very beginning,” Allamby states the obvious. He spits on the dead traitor.

“The deadliest sting in history,” mutters Dbrisk.

“Who was that fourth man?” Oleg    asks her.

“The fourth man was Dominick Strauss Kahn, or anyhow that’s the vessel that devil is using.”

“So, they have Adon, DeBuitléir and the codes to the grid,” mutters Big Man Matthew.

“Well then. I suppose there isn’t any time left to lose,” says Dasha. “I do trust you saved me gas mask boys?”

“What’s the plan?” asks Magnus Allamby.

Mickhi Dbrisk gets to his feet.

“A save the world plan surely!” Dasha suggests.

“We’re going to assemble a crack team of our very best Pararescuemen. We’re gonna get over the border wall into the U.A.S., move across the country via the Underground Railroad and link up the crew in Las Vegas. We’re going to break Avinadav DeBuitléir out of federal custody by absolutely any means necessary, preferably through subterfuge but via anarchy and bloody mayhem if we must. And then we’re going to rescue our brother Sebastian Adon before Perchevney hands him over. And defenses walls come tumbling down.”

 

“Technically speaking it’s just a save the afternoon early evening plan. The world is still pending a good deal of deliverance hence all the bleeding and dying to keep you candidates alive,” says Oleg Medved.

 

“It’s nice to see you all again,” Dasha says to them begrudgingly, “your desperate hope for us has never ceased to fascinate me.”

 

“Welcome back to the land of free living,” responds Mickhi Dbrisk.

 

Enchante,” is all she replies with a slight if not contemptuous micro curtesy.

 

 

Chapter 38

A Secret Hospital Prison, 2012ce

DUBAI

 

“Do you know where you are Sebastian?” a female voice asks.

 

It sounded through the dystonia, the extrapyramidal haze that she has asked him if he knew when he was Sebastian

.

“On Tuesdays,” he responds with a slight lithiated, tripryamidal slur.

 

She wears a crisp white lab coat and a green former soviet officer’s cap. Dr. Yelizaveta Alexandreeavna Perechenova has been flown out to Dubai to examine Sebastian and she doesn’t remember him at all.

 

Lucky to remember all of her name she was born with if you get me me.

 

And the rest of the scene is in the perspective of out much abused protagonist:

 

I’m seated in sterile white examination room although the diagnostic equipment is of the developing world. Nothing is electronic. I’m no longer in any restraints. When she enters it doesn’t register as anything special.

 

Just a demure raven haired physician in a white lab coat and a green Soviet officer’s cap. Sewn to the coat in cold gold thread it says: Perechenova.

 

And she doesn’t seem to recognize me either.

 

“My name is Doctor Yelizaveta Perechenova, I need you to go through a few diagnostic tests and give me some samples. Some may involve me stroking your phallus erotically but I assure you this is just a medical procedure. He just imagines that she says that of course. All very straight forward to you I’m sure Mr. Adon. I understand you’re a paramedic and a skilled parapsychologist.”

 

I look at her trying to remember something that I should feel. Some sense of wanting? No a sense of remembering. Nothing comes. She is a photograph.

 

“Of course, comrade doctor.”

 

I disrobe what robe I am wearing and the Depakote nearly makes me fall over. She takes my blood pressure; 120 over 70 and my heart rate 58 strong and regular.

“You are aware that the Cold War is over and communism has sense been completely discredited except perhaps in Syria and Cuba,” she asks. Notes.

 

She looks in my pupils. She examines my mouth and my ears. She palpates my neck and then listens to my lungs in six different places and my heart in two.

Here hands press my abdomen. She’s going through the medical motions.

When she’s done she says;

“You need to take these lithium salt pills. If you don’t take them you will die.”

“Your employer,” I almost say, father, “is far too tricky for me. He went to so much trouble.”

 

“Do you know what free radicals do to the body?”

“You can tell me if you’d like to.”

“Well you probably won’t understand.”

“Certainly I won’t. But I like when you lecture me, it reminds me of; no, I can’t remember what, but I like you teaching me my science.”

 

She explains using terms she learned in Stonybrook and later in University of Havana Medical School exactly what are free radicals.

 

“Well then I suppose free radicals must be brought under control or the very system and all its components are in jeopardy!” I exclaim, and she takes a step back.

“Precisely my employers point of view.”

“So I’m poisoned am I,” says Adon.

“Quite poisoned. Dbrisk and Trikhovitch and all the others too. What does Z.O.B. stand for? Polish isn’t it? Something about Ivory fighting?”

“No idea.”

“I think it stands for ‘everyone dead when we say so’, in some old language you no longer remember how to speak.”

“Cynical. Interesting. And what is the mechanism of action then to do us all in?”

“Nanobots.”

“Haven’t the faintest fucking idea what that means. Excuse my language.”

“My employer’s people can kill all of you with a switch. These microscopic robots will release neurotransmitters that will form emboli and will shut off blood flow to your brains.”

“Very sophisticated stuff.”

“Developed by your favorite people, the Israelis. Well anyway they’re in me too; they’re in my father and mother. All of Perchevney’s people. He leaves nothing to chance.”

“I think Solomon will consider this a serious breach of contract.”

Sebastian has watched post and former Soviet women fake a good number of things but there are two things they don’t fake well.

Actual fear or an orgasm.

“Well your boots are going to be on the ground rather now soon if they don’t sell you o the Americans that is and my employer,” she almost says father,  “has every willingness to out-supply anyone else who wishes to arm you. The weapons you’re currently holding are third line. Eventually you’ll run out of bullets and want to upgrade. Your Domikani businessman can’t keep up with us, well with Alexandre I mean; I’m just a serf too.”

“I think I’ll be refusing your employers pills regardless, I really think poisoning is rather shameful behavior.”

“Well medically speaking you’re not poisoned yet.”

“How am I to know he won’t just kill us all when the worst work is done? Anyway we are looking at a rather protracted fight be in Breuklyn, be it in Ayiti-DR or be it in the heart of Africa.”

“Well the pills will not do anything but fight potential cancers caused by what fuels the Nanobots. It is you who sought out my employer; he did not go looking for you and your Otriad.”

“So who’s been implanted then?”

“Everyone who drank your Kool-Aid soldier. The toast at the last salon supper. New Year’s 5773 at the Mehanata Social Club, the report says you were all given the cocktail by a traitor in your midst.”

“That fucking traitor,” Adon says darkly.

“Just because they caught you coming doesn’t mean they have to catch you going too.”

“Tell me his name.”

“His or hers? Ha. I don’t know the real name. I just know that you and your crew were used to such an extent it is fully mind blowing.”

“And apparently I still have use for the using.”

“Indeed, as you like to say.”

“How do you know what I like to say?”

“I’ve watched a few of your movies,” she Postsoviet half giggles.

“Indeed.”

“But do you know me?” she asks him.

“Not from the hole in my hand,” he replies in Russian.

“That’s quite crude tovarish[64] Adon. The reports then are true. You are a scoundrel not a gentleman of any kind at all.”

 

 

Chapter 39

A low flying plane, the Flickering Flame 2012ce

Enroot to DUBAI

 

Everything changed for us on 1st September, 2012, escalated during the atrocities the Department of Homeland Security committed on 17 September shortly after and I’d say as much for the world as well as did our revolution build exponentially toward 1 January, 2015. It was on that day our American barricades went up and we held the streets for many years at great costs.

 

I am back! Hubert O’Domhnaill. For a time as your humble narrator. For I did love that man as my brother so dearly! And what a price my family paid to serve Solomon, to fight for her cause. Well we all lost a lot as they say.

 

But I know that there is nothing we gave that Adon, his family and the others did not give as well. My parents before they were taken from me never met his parents who were taken from him, but I’m sure they would have seen eye to eye.

 

I will tell you now the day that the world changed forever. The day that marked the shift. When we gained turf and held territory inside the mountain fortress of empire called the United American States! When rebel fighters with union and 2.5 million West Indians behind them marched over the bridges and stormed government buildings across the city.

 

Death to the Oligarchy that so gleefully thins the ranks of the rebels!

 

The Great Revolt in the United States began on Labor Day of 2012.

They asked me three times to betray my friend Adon. And then they killed my family, all male O’Domhnaills except my eldest brothers Shane and Cormac.

 

“How do you win a war without any lethal weapons?” once asked Sebastian Adon to his mother Barbara Adon O’Nunnelly, which were one to understand true Gaelic patronymics; means ‘Son of Nunnelly’, when in fact it should have been Ni’Nunnelly, but they were born in American exile.

 

This had been a reoccurring problem for the house of Adon for some many years.

The answer was always the same year after year.

 

“No you cannot stockpile nuclear armaments in a subbasement under our home in East Hampton. No, not even a few,” she told him and her husband, his father surely agreed.

 

Ivories are funny like that. They give to causes all the time, a very generous people despite the collaboration of their ancient leadership with the Roman oligarchy that tortured and executed the family of god as we understand her to have been.

I’ll get to that theory another time.

The Ivories and revolt was what I was on about.

You see, my family being a good Fenian family has had arms in our subbasement for years. It was always rather intuitive that we’d never get the British out of Erin and then later the six counties, well except by shooting at them. And blowing them up.

What’s funny to me about the Adon family is that with all the money they’ve put into the foundations of the revolt, and the human rights movement generally they still never seemed to grasp that violence was completely inevitable. Perhaps the patriarch of the family Avram did as his younger brother Benjamin, but his mother up until the disorder itself did everything in her power to keep weapons out of the hands of a club that was founded with intent to acquire them.

 

When “the Great Disorder” began during the second year of the Swine Flu hysteria, when the rioting exploded in earnest over the discovery that the vaccine to the “hizzy nizzy” was making more people sick than better; the Adon family was divided between four boroughs. Benjamin, the youngest son, an orange belt in Krav Maga and importer of Basque Wine was in the Financial District when the disorder began. That was one of the only places along with Riverdale and the Upper East Side which escaped almost all of the violence and destruction which broke out. All Benjamin had to do was stay put at 140 Nassau Street, where he kept his New York residence in a loft adjacent to his aging parents.

 

Dr. Avram Adon who by age 84 was still working three twelve hour shifts a week at his practice, was at his clinic on Staten Island, which is home to half the city’s police force and thus by mostly staying put he too avoided the mayhem.

 

Barbara Adon with a client in the South Bronx. Unlike her husband and youngest son, she was well aware of the impending riots and was also relatively plugged into the networks that the club had established for such emergencies.

 

And Sebastian Adon was at EMS Station 39 in Breuklyn, district East New York distributing the underground newspaper of the club to the EMS workers there.

The riots began on Grand Army Plaza when the police attempted to disperse the West Indian Day/ Labor Day parade and shots were fired. 2.5 million then stormed the Grand Army Plaza police checkpoints and a riot rolled North down Flatbush Ave and toward the City. Soon spread via social media and word of text to all the major ghettos the tristate area. Some supposedly ‘rouge’ scientist at MIT had dropped a big old white elephant in the healthcare room. The h1N1 Vaccine was spreading the h1n1, and it was targeting the genetic codes found in Noires, excuse me, the black people.

 

And then the Noires started reliably burning-shit-down, because that’s what they do when they’re angry, every single time. Except this time it wasn’t their own neighborhoods like the last uprisings in 1992 and 1993. Nope, this time they burned the rich white, gentrified neighborhoods down too. And the anarchists in the Occupy Movement started putting up barricades and shortly after setting off bombs. And then the major Unions called a General Strike. And the Autonomous Movement was born in the first seventy two hours of the conflict.

 

And history calls this moment the beginning of the “Great Revolt” in the Unites States.

 

The swine flu vaccine was of course just the spark. There were and still are many long standing grievance in a nation where 1 in 6 people live in poverty and 1 in 350 people are at any time held in prison camps.

 

“The Great Disorder” which history now refers to as the first three months of the subsequent “Great Revolt” claimed more lives than the September11th attack on the World Trade and burned more property than the Fenian v. Noire Draft Riots of 1862. Pre-arranged logistical packages are so vital when the cell phone network goes down, the inter-web gets cut of, the lights black out, the firemen begin stealing blue jeans and the Federal government starts shelling your city.

Sebastian Adon wasn’t stealing blue jeans, or stealing apparatus for Otriad use as per one of the ready made plans. He, although no longer a member of the FDNY ambulance was ordered by the club to assist in life saving efforts as member of the flying medical column sent into Downtown Breuklyn where a great mob was attempting to light fire to all of Downtown Breuklyn. Razing Central Bookings ‘brick by hypocritical brick’ in particular. The reason he was still on that ambulance, and not attempting to steal it was because he had been told the fires and riots were still limited enough in scope to issue a command order for the ‘O’Domhnaill Plan’ and not the ‘Hadaad Doctrine’. Which is to say all members of the association were mobilized and sent to fortify and safe guard regional commands, safe houses, and critical properties the Otriad controlled.  Several hundred club members and support personnel were to set up shop in the five regional command centers, also called safe houses and protect the some odd 7,250 men, women and children supported by the Otriad.

 

The reason Adon was allowed on a municipal ambulance unit was because the club is roughly half composed of professional emts and paramedics.

 

Luckily the leadership had scheduled a drill just one month earlier, so it didn’t all go as fuckery as it could have. While Adon, Dbrisk, Trikhovitch, myself and others battled blazes and provided medical attention to the casualties of raging angry mobs; eight flying columns, four medical and four security mobilized to usher family members to fortified urban strong points to do a quick security census in case the order for an exodus came.

And it eventually did, but not until the Great Revolt which was yet to come.

Logistically speaking “the O’Domhnaill Plan”, named after me of course, involved reporting without issued order within “two hours of a cataclysmic event’” to a safe house in the borough you were in without attempting to reach friends or family.

I was named after me because at a very early meeting back when the club was less than a two dozen strong I suggested that we’d always be safer making a stand in our own city then putting ourselves at the mercy of the heavily armed typically right wing, typically Ivory, Fenian, Black adverse of the rural interiors population.

 

As per later reports, a full majority of the Otriad’s family members, supporters, and members of service were able to reach the safe house strong points within the first six hours. With the exception of the Isle of Man’s primary safe house in Fort George which had to defend its position with hard will, fire bombs and small arms, all other safe points remained secured for the week of rioting and arson that was the dubbed Great Disorder.

 

Of the roughly 7,252 women, men and children in network only fourteen perished.

 

Four who were trampled by a mob trying to reach Grand Central Station; three died due to indiscriminant mob violence, and seven perished when the shelling of Harlem began on the eve of the fourth day. Those who never reached the higher ground of Yeshiva University and peripheral bases in Fort George sat out the Disorder largely secure at Seagate, Rich Man Tower Complex, Fort Totten, and the Staten Island Mall. These five places had been largely via hording and social engineering converted into safe havens for the clubs network and civilian supporters.

 

By the time the dust settled, suffice to say, the Adon family and many other skeptics were thoroughly convinced that the Otriad organizationally and militarily was able to do the things it claimed. Most importantly those things in regards to taking care of the security of its members. And that there were thousands of independent citywide clubs, gangs, associations, religious groups, networks, and Otriad’s of many-many other stripes and colors thinking just about the same think with their own general operating guides. The madness was mitigated by just how well New York was already organized for mayhem.

 

The worst of the mass riots for lasted seventeen days. “Rioting” is exactly what the corporate media kept calling this, but by day three the riots were taking on the form of a semi-coordinated revolts. Especially when a Breuklyn General Assembly established a command center in the Breuklyn Public Library.

 

Staten Island, where the rioting was limited to the North coast was pacified by the second evening. Magnus Allamby, the Bajan entrepreneur responsible for the clubs finances coordinated with Dr. Avram and is large informal network of cops and sanitation workers keep a lid on things. Most of the Otriad members on Staten Island showed up at the Costco at the mall, and locked themselves in until the end of Martial Law was declared five days later.  Queens was pacified in most places by day fourteen. The Bronx burned well into the second or third week, but was re-occupied on day fifteen. Isle of Man was declared pacified by the first day, but Harlem and the Heights remained liberated zones, although much of East Harlem was completely destroyed in the subsequent shelling. Breuklyn was brought under control on the seventieth day after the shelling and tear gas bombing and street melees of East New York, Brownsville and Bedford Stuyvesant which reduced all three districts to rubble.

It took U.A.S. Federals, National Guards, and the Police forces seven days to put down a spontaneous rising that few had seen coming.

 

This event would go down in history as “The Great Disorder”, a precursor to the subsequent “Great Revolt”. That is because this was the name the corporate media gave us; a disorder not an uprising, similar to in your reality, Black Lives Mattering and Occupy.

 

The municipals sure as shit earned their overtime that week. The National Guard had to be called in from Upstate, New Jersey and Pennsylvania as there were few active duty troops to send with ongoing wars in Eurasia, East Asia and the disputed territories. There were quite a few atrocities carried out in the re-occupation of the City.

The siege of East & Central Breuklyn in particular. Some of those good old boys from Virginian and the Adirondacks ran amuck. Enough to trigger the chemical electrical signal in the minds of millions in the major cities of the East Coast: Ya Basta!

 

Which in Iytai jib-jab means “enough.”

 

What we all now call “the Great Disorder” which began on the Labor Day weekend of 2012 went on for seventeen bloody days. “The Great Revolt” which followed lasted seven months of firefight though lasted three years before we drove the government off our lands. Although many would attest it is still going. The Détente has lasted for over a year. Soon after the population realized the full extent of the atrocities committed in Breuklyn and the other ghettos. Soon after the h1n1 spread to the blans, the white people as we call them now. Coordinated on the internet by the trade unions, street gangs, the libertarians, the Occupiers, various Communist & Socialist factions as well as numerous Left Clubs of the Democratic Party; the Great Revolt broke off the Eastern coast of the U.A.S. and aligned it politically to Canada and the West Indian Federation. And so was born both the Autonomous Movement (AM) and then the Eastern Soviet Confederation (ESC).

 

We hold now a patchwork of autonomous zones running from Maine to Miami.

 

Starting with hard battered Breuklyn, whole communities decided they were just better off alone, or in heavily armed loose confederation with neighbors.

 

The Breuklyn Otriad grew throughout this period.

As did thousands of other such clubs, the revolt was designed to be very, very decentralized and very very diverse.

 

These were long partnerships many years in the making. These were women and men whose minds and interests were so intertwined it became possible to predict each other’s moves, a drastic synergy had developed over time, more than a decade had the wed the abilities and interest of these men together such that one’s failings were made into another’s strengths. They could never betray each other’s ideals, for so long had they walked along that road together.

Mr. Adon with his stalwart friends and fellow comrades hadn’t had to pick a side of the ocean after all to stage their grand little revolution.

 

Such were forces beyond plot or orchestration of human control on any level.

 

 

 

Chapter 40

Vered Gallery, 2019ce

EAST HAMPTON

 

Behind her the triple decker armored train rumbles east toward Montauk, now a quasi-autonomous city state held by former Manhattan elites and their paramilitaries.

 

The Hamptons seems to have weathered the Revolt nicely, notes Anya Drovtich.

 

It’s Friday near the end of your world do you know where your Ivories are?

 

Your Ivories are plotting, cousin. It is what they do the best.

Three submersibles of enormous size have surfaced in Port Coney Island and they are called the Black Freighters, named for various Hebrew prophets. Or “Coffin Evacuation Ships”, as in when you need to get your masses out immediately because flying fortresses or African militias with machetes are going to kill absolutely everybody they can.

 

Her legs are long and she’s business casual in red and her back wavy hair in dreads bounces off her shoulders as she strolls briskly from the train station.

 

Anya Drovtich walks briskly down quaint Hampton streets thinking how completely and utterly unaffected by world events this haven has been. A civil war and separatist movement and the world at war for a decade haven’t really altered the quaint bourgeois calm of this place at all.

 

She hasn’t been here for over a decade, when long ago Sebastian brought her to Montauk and asked her to be his partner for the first time in this lifetime.

 

At the Rose Gallery in East Hampton a party is going on without interruption. It has spilled over from the Hampton art crown Jewel, goods-hip friend of Ivoreal art world fascination onto the street, bottles and all. And this time no one will be putting Ms. Vered in handcuffs because she has paid for all of the East Hampton Police Department to attend a “sporting event” in Las Vegas.

 

Ruth Vered the gallery owner and possible Ivorite sleeper agent is pleased with herself.

 

She had not so much been sent from the fertile-crescent to the Hamptons to separate plump rich Yids from their money as she had been partially self-exiled there. After a prestigious tour of service in the Israeli Defense Forces, three years instead of the mandated 1 and ½ for a woman she basically bought a plane ticket to the New York City, told her father and mother from a pay phone in the airport she had had enough of thankless war and flew to Idlewild International to make a new life in America never to return. That was no long in the past. She had kept mostly true to her word.

Her art gallery named after herself brought in some several millions and hundred thousand change each year as per the Regional Station of the Mossad, Israel’s intelligence arm. The realty was that she kept quite a lot off the books and on the side made more. She deals in Viks, Pollacks, DeKoonings, forged Picassos, and every other eccentric, wild Hampton shut in of note in the last hundred years. Once a year Vered hosted a Gala fundraiser for relief in Israel selling off paintings at record high bidding costs to notable Hampton socialites and Yids holding high denomination master cards.

Despite the heart of sedition, succession and rebellion being just three hours away by light rail, East Hampton remained firmly a part of the United American States where private property was still legal.

Like the Russell Simmons White Party, the Gala for Israel was a must do event for any person of standing or station who could tolerate Yids, which was most of the Hamptons at that point.

And it was to that party that Ms. Anya Drovtich was not often a regular. Ryder Haske had gotten her onto the fancy guest list and invited to the after party.

Yelizaveta is quite impressed with the art of Ruth Vered’s new protégée, oft compared to ‘a new Arab-Basquait, but more dashing’, a one Mr. Ahmed ‘Ah!’ Azeal. He is a handsome Canaanite who’d never even dreamed of going home and painted similar to if one mixed the subject matter of Dali and the brushmanship of say, Caravaggio[65], then enameled photo-shopped images of his own penis, as well as massive replications of Aramaic gospel, Hindi mantras and hip hop. He was made even more ‘hot’ by the fact that he grew up in the Louis Pink Houses, which meant not only was he about as down and out in his upbringing as humanly possible, but he was totally self-taught.

 

“I need something from you in the way of a reference. We have a mutual friend with new cause,” says Anya to Vered in between social sets.

 

“I do not like new causes. There are plenty of expensive old ones. Who is this mutual friend?”

 

“An allegedly dead ambulance man.”

 

“The biggest trouble maker ever you mean whether dead or alive. Anything he touches becomes balagan.

 

            Balagan is am Ivory word which means “nothing but big fucking problems”.

 

“My associate feels you may think well on this latest venture given recent developments about your country of origin in the press.”

 

She is referring to an Israeli missile strike two days prior on Rosh Hashanah, the Yid New Year. A missile strike intended to kill the Canaanite resistance leader Khalid Mishaal[66] for the fifteenth time. The latest one which hadn’t killed him but obliterated and collapsed the Gaza General Hospital killing sixty nine Canaanites, largely children, largely under the age of nine.

 

“They say the Ivs control the media. How can we control media if Israel never looks good in the press?”

 

“I mean birth control in the water supply? Did you people really think you’d get away with that?”

 

Anya was referring to the recent debacle where it was uncovered all the drinkable water being routed into Gaza[67] contained epic quantities of preemptive baby killer and no one had gotten knocked up in half a year.

“I think that was perhaps the funniest thing I’d ever read,” Vered giggles in her head while face dead pan.

 

Anya giggles too, but aloud. In her head she’d like to slap this cold Iv bitch.

 

“It was definitely, far more funny then hell-fire-rocketing a hospital of sick kids.”

“Ok, so things are really much worse now. What is there to do? Leave? I think not. Strong Island is not the Promised Land and Breuklyn Soviet has too many people already.”

“This ambulancing friend of mine thinks he can deliver Israel the biggest public relations coup since the Six Day War.”

“Even bigger than fighting off a train full of Iytais with his humble brown belt Muhammadian side kick?”

“Don’t mock me Vered. With all honesty you people need this.”

“You people?” She smirks, “just kidding I make with you.”

“They’ve contacted an old friend in the agency. She tried, but the brass torpedoed the whole thing.”

“Hadaad?”

“I’m not at the liberty.”

“No one likes that little batzona back in the home offices. She looks like a sand gypsy.”

“They called in another friend in the Services. Then she got shut down by Beebee himself.”

Batzona is Hebrew for “daughter of a whore”.

“He’ll be out of office in two months. They are indicting him for all those Soviet hotel concessions, the alleged rape charge, embezzlement, other things with Strauss-Kahn and the numerous dead call girls.”

Dr. Kay shutters a little inside.

“What is it with your fucking government Ruth?” mumbles Anya.

Ain davar! Look, if you’re coming to me you must think I’m somebody. I’m nobody. I’m an aging art dealer on Strong Island. I make them some money. I help pay for the star wars laser grid above Sderiot[68], but I’m not working for them. I’m just a nostalgic exile now.”

“Don’t bullshit us around Vered. Sebastian told me all about who you are.”

“And what the hell does this can’t seem to stay dead zealot ambulancer whatever know about anything. He was, is a shiftless agitator. He’ll say anything to set people off.”

“Sebastian Adon was a very good man.”

Is or was is the real question right now.

“Oh? A romantic revolutionary that with his words get many killed. I know already about his undertaking. It is a mad fool’s mission, pure machuga[69].”

Which means “crazy”.

 

“So you won’t help?”

 

“I will not help him. I don’t even work for the people you think might help him.”

Anya looks away and waves to Ahmed ‘Ah!’ Azeal who is attempting to juggle four bottles of Bubblefizaire[70] half-naked on the street to the great amusement of his guests. It is moments like this that sending the East Hampton PD to Las Vegas pays for itself. He smiles at her and sends 5,000 Presidents worth of designer liquor sailing into the air then mostly crashing upon the pavement.

 

“Send my regards to your bipolar-mad man of a partner,” says Ruth Vered warmly embracing Anya Drovtich.

 

And then she whispers in perfect high Hebrew,

 

            “Prove your Otriad is ready at the gates and help from above will be quite forthcoming. You have my word that the agency will deliver whatever is needed to get you all on the road to Port-Au-Prince.”

 

The whole country is on red alert and all of the U.A.S. guard units have all been activated.

 

“Remember how there were no Ivories in the towers or at work the morning they came down?” Vered asks.

 

“What about it?”

 

“I’d get your ass back to rebel Breuklyn.”

 

“Why is that?”

 

“Because by dawn tomorrow, there aren’t going to be any real Ivories left in Breuklyn Soviet either by hook, crook, lottery bribery or Uzi point everybody Ivorist or Ivoryish’ish, Hebrew, Israeli maybe even a few hundred Canaanites[71] are getting on those three submarines and holy landing home.”

 

“What is it that you know that makes you so sure we are gonna lose?”

 

“We traded the right to leave for the codes to the nuclear grid. The final crackdown and total reoccupation begins in three days at midnight. Pretty soon there really and officially won’t be any Ivories left in the United American States.”

 

As if all according to plan.

 

 

Chapter 41

The Voodoo Lounge, all the way up, 2018ce

DUBAI

 

The lights are low and there is saw dust all over the floors.

A small three piece live jazz band is playing in the speakeasy called Dutch Kills near the border where they have a last round before the road at a joint owned by Richie Bocotto[72]. The drinks are good and strong, the job gets done quickly. And made with real booze; nothing Chinese.

 

And Mickhi Dbrisk knows they gonna kill his family by the end of the week if his 40 thieves a mega Crip Set armed with Uzis[73] cant grab everybody and get them out and over to Jam Rock. Garrison out for the duration of hostilities.

 

They all share iced glasses of “Border Run Rum” with the actor, bar tender Siegfried Sassoon and the owner Richard. Mickhi Dbrisk drinks Jamaican coffee, rum with coffee. Hubert O’Domhnaill has a Guinness with a splash of Rum. And Nikholai Trikhovitch, a Baboncourt on the rocks. Straight Ayitian premium rescue rum.

 

It didn’t take long to bury the traitor in a shallow grave of an acid bath[74] and mobilize for a war path and a double rescue. In nine more hours nearly one million citizen soldiers would be in position in the Bronx, Goddess and Breuklyn for counter strike if the gas came down.

Nuclear defense grid[75] was still fucking down. ATL, Detroit, Newark and Boston were armed up now too.

 

Their lives in the Breuklyn Soviet were a ruthless juggle of part time responsibilities and full time revolt and part time child support. Towards the last desperate days of the revolt the Department of Homeland Security had rounded up as many extended family members of the resistance as they could and put them in a type of sanitized concentration camp in Staten Island. Included among those taken were Mickhi Dbrisk’s daughter Brook and his baby’s mother Vanessa Barg the Italian mama. Also all of his brothers and sisters. And their children his nieces and nephews.

 

When Mickhi was younger, a little wilder maybe, less friendly with the Yids, he’d been locked up at Spofford Correctional[76] in Hunts Point, Bronx then later brought upstate way for a small part he played in an armed robbery and allegedly in a certain high profile murder. He was only thirteen then. He did two years full time for not naming names. Eventually beat both charges while he sat tight and got hard.

Not naming names is really one of the most important lessons a young hood can ever learn in Breuklyn before or after the revolt.

 

He he’d fathered a child before he went inside with his then boo Rosa, little Jayden was born by the time he came out. Then he had a second child, a daughter Brook, when Jayden was eight with Vanessa. Vanessa was suing for him not to be the father and she’d taken off to Staten Island which was rather behind enemy lines these days.

 

The blood was often very bad.

 

And it gave him a lot more of a reason to get out of that way of old life, to make something of himself more than a revolutionary hustler or a Shatah[77], gave him a reason to think about others fondly. Spend less time hearing Adon talk. Spend less time a gangster. A bit less time in the religion called “the great revolt”.

 

Once you make two children the world asks you for more, to rise to the occasion as if by making a life you are responsible for your own conduct in a more certain way.

Malachi, Liam, Brooke and Sheila fortified Mickhi Dbrisk on a newer path he had now to depart from. Made him keep out of a shallow grave. Sent him back to school where he learned to save lives in league with Mr. Adon then higher in training to P.A. Kept him off shift work differential. No life’s night shift until now.

 

He’d done his trench time hard.

 

The boy was bigger now, but not a full little man. That pained Mickhi, he’d have to leave his son and daughter behind in all this without having raised them fully as he had meant to. Vanessa would write him out of the picture for sure in any court in Staten Island.

He was the exception to the “no one married or with kids serves abroad rule”. He was a don in the Otriad after all.

Good Don’s don’t send young men to die.

He was the boy’s hero, his devoted father. Brooke was too little to speak out yet on things. Gurgles and coos. They’d want for nothing if in Nevada Mickhi met with death. But he’d want for everything too, not having himself alive to raise his offspring.

 

“You don’t have to go through with this,” begged his wife Rosa on the night before the border crossing, before his perilous trip to liberate Avinadav DeBuitléir.

“You’re a pig,” once yelled Vanessa in Iytai, but he hadn’t seen her in three years.

“So exciting,” said Dasha.

“No, I do have to do it,” Dbrisk responds, “I have to do it ‘cause no one else will do it as well as I can. I have a duty to act as one of the leadership surely, but also as a friend to Adon.”

“I won’t wait around for you!” Rosa curses him now in patois she wasn’t even raised with.

“Brooke will be dead to you,” shrieked Vanessa over the phone.

“This is so exciting. So much danger,” said Natalie the fashion student. She always seemed to understand him.

“I gotta do it anyway,” he responded.

“And your son?!” yells Rosa.

“And your daughter!?” yells Vanessa.

“You have a son and daughter, with different women? So interesting,” says you know who.

“They will all want for nothing and will be told by someone officially what I did this for,” he states in a video.

“DO YOU EVEN KNOW?! THAT ISNT YOUR COUNTRY! AFRICA IS NOT WHERE WE ARE FROM! THEY’RE GONNA KILL YOU AND YOUR SONA AREN’T GONNA CARE WHY!” yelled Rosa from St. Lucia.

“FUCK YOU AND YOUR NEO-JACOBIN CULT!” yelled Vanessa Tomay.

“FUCK ME!” yelled Dasha who always seemed to keep calm and carry the relationship on asking only for regular post cards.

“I’m doing this for you, I’m doing it for my parents, I’m doing it for my kids. We’re gonna make a stand in that country. It’s not about anything I didn’t learn in Church, it’s about doing right by others, strangers even cause nobody else gonna fight for ‘um,” he tells his father and also the video.

“You will lose everything! Think of your children!” cries Rosa.

“You are just lost,” cries Vanessa.

“You are such a man of danger,” cries Natalie.

No more hysterics now on the Island. Mickhi got dressed and got his black pea coat on, strapped on his irons, his tam, his wallet, his passport. He kissed the boy age 8. Kissed a photograph of Brooke new born. Had wild sex with Natalie a couple hours before boarding.

“I love you all. I’m sorry I gotta go.”

“It’s okay Daddy,” Malachi mumbles half asleep.

“You gotta go fight the bad, bad men.’

“I love you all as I always will. I’ll come home as soon as it’s done.”

But no one really forgives him besides Jayden. Maybe Natalie too. The eight year old is highly ware of his father’s role as a rebel saint. The FIT gal orders him to upload a lot of desert war pictures to her Instagram. Jayden probably forgives him because he’s still too young to know what dying is.

 

Real dying, where your body rots and souls leave the body. Real death. Not like his close friend Sebastian Adon and their voluptuous preconscious associate Maya Solomon who are just about the highest profile dead people he’s ever heard of other than maybe Mary Tania Magdalene and Jesus Christ herself.

 

That very evening after wishing good byes to those they were most intimate with, under the cover of darkness, Mickhi Dbrisk, Nikholai Trikhovitch and Hubert O’Domhnaill advance unit of the 99th Special Operations Task Force were loaded into T.N.T. “Steal Drums”, placed on a high speed underground train, and smuggled into the Bronx destined for Las Vegas.

The very hour they left forty Crips lead by Big Man Matthew Allamby blew their way through Camp Comfort and shot up a whole hand full of follow men DHS.

They had every Dbrisk and near associated relative out country and safe in Jamaica in under sixteen hours.

 

Chapter 42

Dubai, 2019ce

United Arab Emirates

 

Each drum is about twice the size of a normal sized human being.

There are many ways to run the U.A.E. border.

And some are a lot more subtle than others. Getting people over and under or across the East River is actually a lot more complicated than it looks. Crossing the rebel territories by convoy it is possible to make it from Breuklyn to Goddess Soviet in under a day’s bribes and haggles. Under the cover of darkness two hundred selected Pararescuemen from the Bolivarian Hot Shots of the May 5th Brigade, led by Raphael Ernesto Lynch Contreras, will by land, sea, tunnel, and air infiltrate the United Arab Emirates from Iran to rescue Avinadav DeBuitléir and Sebastian Adon from the clutches of the Oligarchy.

 

There is Cumbia music playing over the small sound system in Hanger 5 of Idlewild airbase where greenery peaks through the tarmac and derelict buildings litter the facility which is largely below the surface, like most installation of importance throughout the Soviet.

They are checking and rechecking their drop shoots, braiding out the long chords and packing then repacking. They are gathering a lifetime of memories into small strap on compartment bags.

 

Companeros! it is a fact that once we get over or under the mile high wall some 33 percent of us will be killed or captured within just hours of crossing the border,” explains Rafael Contreras Lynch dramatically banging his fist on the table. He is the Peruvian elected commander of this crack team of predominantly equal parts Mexican and Ecuadorian Pararescuemen backing up the advance Special Operations Task Force 99.

 

We have been asked to embark on a secret mission to liberate our dear compatriots Avinadav DeBuitléir and Sebastian Adon, who are quite alive my eager friends! Oh yes. These two long thought dead leaders of our resistance are in the clutches of our sniveling gringo enemies and we are going to bring them back to Breuklyn! Or die trying!”

 

       “For that very reason all of us will be broken into two man units with the hopes that some of us will get through the enemy lines! For one thing, we will be crossing several thousand miles through U.A.S. loyal Saudi territory via an underground railroad of sympathetic safe houses many of which may well be compromised already. Second, although you will all have fabricated national identity cards, it remains to be seen if these will hold up past casual scrutiny.  The final evil variable my Companeros is that whoever out of this detachment manages to arrive safely in that decadent Petro Colony Dubai, we will all be at the mercy of the Perchevney Bratva who has yet to formally sign any treaty on the extrajudicial extrication of Mr. DeBuitléir or agreed to the broader aims of operation Marcus Garvey, and may well be deliberating handing over out comrade Adon right to the U.A.S. gringo secret police! Anyhow, we will be running the border from one hundred different approaches hoping some portion of our task force will arrive in Dubai in one weeks’ time. Any preguntas?”

 

No one had any preguntas.

These hermanos never did. From the earliest days of the revolt the Bolivarian Hot Shots of the May 5th Brigade had furnished some of the finest Pararescuemen in the entire rebel army. Four foot tall heroes who could climb; drill; tunnel; swim; skydive; cross night and day; open battlefields; rocky desserts; cross high seas on make shift rescue rafts! These men “Mexi-could.”

The Brigade Cinqo De Mayo was utilized periodically to extract families seeking immediate political asylum out of hostile nations and back to Breuklyn Soviet or the liberated states of the Wild West Indies.

Dbrisk, Trikhovitch, and O’Domhnaill had evidently managed to slip across the border the evening before inside some TNT “steal drums” just the night before.

 

Most people who try are killed getting over that wall, but we are not like normal men!” bellows Raphael Contreras, “we are elite Pararescuemen! We are true Bolvarians!”

 

This group of Mexican-Ecuadorian-Peruvian Pararescuemen fears nothing. They will get over that wall or under it by any means necessary, cross a howling sea of slightly overweight, well-armed mad dog gringos and support the previously deployed special operations trio of O’Domhnaill Trikhovitch and Dbrisk emancipate the two men most responsible for launching this revolt.

And so help the Old Mayan Gods; we will liberate the two men who founded this movement or die trying! Victory or death my brothers.”

Hasta la Victoria siempre!” shouts the Brigade Cinqo de Mayo.

AND HELP COMES NOW FROM ABOVE!”

 

And then, in Spanish, breaks out the tragic ‘song of the Pararescuemen’, which loosely followed in an English language translation composed by Sebastian Adon goes something like this:

 

I was flying!

She said:

“That’s what dead men

On magic carpets do.”

The cold coast and leaden casket,

Of the Breuklyn Soviet departed;

And now I’m just a brightly colored parachute

Draped over a handsome smiling corpse;

A memory to you!

And a paratrooper leaps out over ten thousand free fall landings!

Falling for you hard and ever forwards is what I trained in all my other lives to do.

Have you no nostalgia for that place that made you?

She once asked me.

I said that’s the only clue,

To the place that I am from!

We remember trials to hold the simple two feet of crimson earth on which we’re standing;

I declare!

I remember working you for hours.

I remember passing notes across an Ocean!

Begging you to come.

Do you have any idea how miles I fell to forget my gods my darling?

Look upwards!

There are many more of us to surely come.

 

“And you’ll return to me the minute I demand it,” she declares.

“I know how hard you worked to steal that fire,

And I know that just to keep me warm forever you will surely bring me some.”

 

But put simply,

I was so long trapped in hell!

“Inside your head two different breeds of competing demon dwell!”

And it is not my place to dance or fuck for both of them, she said.

When our peerless passion eyes are changing color from a host of sleepless evil nights,

That means the devils peering out you, and I know the devil well!

Look out, Old Soul!

It’s true.

I asked for her the fullest of forgiveness.

As ashen eyes of silver overtake the oldness of our pastiness sorrows with the fires of the new!

I stare into the inkwell of mother night and ask for mercy.

“You will be ignored,” she said.

You must stare down your indifferent maker,

And fight battle after battle against a million savage evils as contained within the universe of tragedies playing out like motion pictures inside you fearsome princely head.

 

The conviction that divine forces root for you is but amusement.

No, the gods they spit on us and pass grapes as we in darkness losing die.

We are but speck; is all she knows to cry.

“For the love of god man, lay down that fight and fight to lie besides me,”

“If help is coming it will not be from above!”

 

Unless those are the paratroopers of Breuklyn Soviet, I remind her.

Don’t look back! Look up and see that help is coming and the paratroopers will risk everything not for the gods but for the women that they love.

 

#015: Pararescuemen of the Breuklyn Soviet.

Dedicated to Dasha Andreavna.

 

 

Dasha Andreavna watches these brave micro chornay prep for the predawn jump drill.

Raphael Ernesto, when he saw her and found out she was alive, he wept in her arms and clasped her hard with joy and attempted in Spanish, then kisses, then Russian, then more kisses and finally then English, then briefly in Hebrew to praise her for her steadfast defiant endurance and mourn loudly for the seven years of her torture at the hands of the enemy.

We thought you were both dead,” he kept repeating his eyes big and alcoholic yellow with tears.

He had loved her too; no woman other than his wife Victoria had Raphael ever loved that intensely, except for this one Thai hooker in Bangkok, the things she was able to do!

 

“Avenge me best by putting him back in the arms of someone who loves him,” Dasha told him. But that is not what she knows is about to happen, nor even what she wants.

 

And Raphael Ernesto Lynch Contreras gave his Bolivarian word as a man; as a son of the Arequipa Province that he would sooner die a hundred painful deaths and be tortured in all the worlds to come; tossed in solitary within the Angola 42 fortresses for one hundred years than fail to return Sebastian to her by the end of a fort night.

 

She quietly thanks him. She kisses both his Peruvian cheeks. And passes a hand drawn sketch of a pomegranate and short letter to be delivered to Adon the minute he is rescued written in Russian.

She bids the one hundred companeros good night, and good luck suspecting that most of them will not make it make to Breuklyn alive.

 

And the border raiders take off just before dawn. And all of the blood is arterial red and all of the cleavage is real.

 

It’s gonna get choppy, but prepare for be a bang haul hell of a ride.

 

Some of this tome is culturally antagonistic, some an attempt at wax philosophical. Some is vain erotica some part is also epic love.

This part unfolding now is but a very long gun battle on dopamine and speed.

The Steel Drums are all placed on a fast train that will travel under the countryside between New Jersey and Nevada along the deep underground monorails the government utilizes in the event of land war in the Americas expands.

Their conversation centers on what each had been offered to flip.

“Look here. No matter what happens back in Breuklyn. Gas rockets. Death from above… No matter what anybody offers us or threatens us with in Vegas. No matter what. We stick to the goddamn plan,” states Mickhi Dbrisk over the radio.

 

The fearless triumvirate of O’Domhnaill, Dbrisk and Trikhovitch arrives in and around Dubai via the Persian Underground Railroad about two weeks later. One hundred Bolivarian Hotshots are right behind them above and below the borderlines of the endless desert.

 

 

Chapter 43

The Voodoo, 2019ce

DUBAI

 

Flashing red and blue lights of wild magnitude blind you as you make your way down the packed streets of Dubai. Endless black town cars with fully tinted windows shuttle creatures of the night point to point. Glass and steel towers house the world’s most complete collection of flesh for sale and games of trickery to separate a person from their savings. This whole complex once arose out the sands of the blood oil badlands. It’s a place of slaves and lesser Oligarchs on parade and acting badly.

 

The sands will swallow it only when money to spend on sinning runs dry.

That isn’t going to happen anytime soon.

 

Vanessa Rainwater who everyone knows better as Birdy, sings Jazz-Gypsy-Soul-Afro Funk in a speakeasy-cum-lately in a half-way hipster part of Las Vegas known as the Bondalla District. It’s a place of sin, sand and endless neon lights that can be seen from space. Its brothels are clean and efficient. Its games of chance are limitless. It has very well-funded public school districts for stripper moms and black jack domino dads.

Vanessa has curly brown hair, freckled pale skin. And stage 3 brain cancer, though she looks great. She hits all the notes in a tight gold sequined dress, far too curvy to really be a white girl thinks Mickhi Dbrisk, a Jamaican paramedic. Her presence takes over the whole damn room. Makes them all forget themselves watching her. She’s a place in France where the naked girls dance.

What a show to watch.

 

“She’s objectifying you with her eyes,” notes Nikolai Trikhovitch, a private detective by trade and a gun man for the Otriad when needed or called.

“Whatever her mama feeds her, she gotta keep sippin’ on it,” says Mickhi to Trikhovitch.

 

Nikholai just nods. He is wearing a black suit with the thin tie opened. He’s chain smoking, loving that one can do that in doors here. His brooding former Soviet complexion is made easier on the eyes by his Yid smirk. He’s two days from a goodnight sleep and a shave. But he always kind of looks that way. They’re three days now in Las Vegas waiting for Adon to get into town.

 

Birdy Rainwater and Sebastian Adon have quite a lot of history of the old in out in out as it were, as she is one of his biggest fans and the holder of one of the most extensive collection of his art, poetry and song.

 

People once upon a time called Dasha “the New Russian Birdy.”  And then there was a bloody revolution.

 

“He’s an artist too! People never remember that,” she often reminds his detractors.

She’s singing a song he wrote her back in the day, when he thought of little besides her. Some women have had that effect on him. Three in this life at least. He has had no shortage of muses to his madness. She sings it with husky bootlegger-gilded age candor. She’s a Taino looker, Pocahontas as Nina Simone. She’s a stand in for a poster girl from the old wars. She’s broken Adon’s heart no less than three times. Back when he had one.

“I’m sure he still does!” she sings hitting a provocative crescendo.

A bombshell in a gold dress.

She sings for him still. In between one of these balmy, epic songs a part-Persian man in lethal leisure suit brings still more drinks to the table of Mr. Trikhovitch and Mr. Dbrisk. On a folded piece of manila card stock with a ruby red kiss upon it, Ms. Rainwater is passing notes:

 

 

Hey-ya boys. Wait for the lights to go out then just follow our lead to the tallest tower in Las Vegas. Just past midnight at the Voodoo Lounge. Ask for Hachi. Best of luck in your terrorist escapades, remember to tip the staff unless you want the house to win.

 

 

It’s not just gawk and wax ragtime, Ms. Rainwater is a sympathizer, part of the vast whisper network of the Breuklyn Otriad and they are being instructed how to elude U.A.S. follow-follow men from the Department of Homeland Security and reach the most high profile rendezvous point in town follow-clean.

 

Birdy sings and struts and wiggles and every inch of her is a distraction. And as the song cuts, so do the lights.  And the lights stay out amid a cacophony of applause. And the part-Persian man in the lethal leisure suit quickly leads Mr. Trikhovitch and Mr. Dbrisk to the kitchen and the Mexican weight staff directs them toward a hatch, into a tunnel and out of the Bondalla District underground. Their follow-follow men are evaded.

Less than an hour later, Nikholai Trikhovitch and Mickhi Dbrisk, enter the fourth sub-basement of the one hundred and four story mega hotel called La Fantasia. They are greeted by two massive Noires and four Mexicanos all in smooth black suits, don’t ask how this many Mexicans ended up in Dubai. They are ushered into a private elevator and shot into space. Atop this behemoth is the tri-level rooftop pleasure bar known as the Voodoo Lounge and they get there a little after midnight.

 

They step into what appears to be a festive pansexual sex party.

Girly boys in gold flapper attire act out like they were drunk in the tower of Babel itself. Ass to ass is happening gleefully on every other table.

They ask a towering security man for Hachi.

They are ushered into a private chamber by a mullato girl with big not at all fake tits wrapped in more black sequins. The chamber has a view of the valley of earthly delights. They are presented with a bottle of Israeli wine, also a bottle of bubblefizaire, also offered a menu. The menu is in Cyrillic, Han Chinese and Americano. It is Hachi’s pleasure to have them, everything is taken care of: so they are informed by their voluptuous new friend.

Mickhi orders strong black coffee which he knows will not be as good as one from Breuklyn. Nikh orders a whiskey Jamison on the rocks. The booth is completely private black box with an amazing view of all that flashing neon sin peddling below them.

“She’ll be with you momentarily.”

“Who is this Hachi?” asks Nikholai Trikhovitch.

“She’s the half Soviet-half Han lady friend of the famous actor Siegfried Sassoon, a friend of ours from the club. She’s a woman who begrudgingly peddles in low grade sin and is amicable to arming us properly for our trip to liberate Mr.  DeBuitléir so deep behind enemy lines.”

Ah, the reason they are in Dubai. It is pretext and prelude to an epic rescue mission. They are under covenant to liberate a so-called terrorist, a great Ayitian patriot. A man cut of their very cloth so to speak. They are also under strict orders. Orders being a funny word for free men such as themselves with power and a vested vote. Yet, these were orders. The leadership had voted that Operation Marcus Garvey was green light go. And it couldn’t just be a bunch of high minded armed Yids and Noire Karibes leading the charge after all. They’d need a truly inside man whose boots would be recognized on the ground.

Recognized as official.

Hachi is brutally elegant and her smile is radiant as she enters the booth in a gold dress.

She had met Mr. Adon years before through her talented rising star of a husband, Mr. Sassoon, the lead of the latest Martin McDonough Broadroad blockbuster. Sebastian and Piggy’s mutual friend Ysiad Ferraris is a partner in trade with her father. One needs a couple references these days to do business with the corporate oligarchy of any reputable mob, former Soviet or Ruus institutional.

 

Siegfried Sassoon is currently starring in a play about the Noires which fought in the “Le Great Revolt”, the uprising which liberated the West Indies and much of the Eastern seaboard from the United American States. It is rumored he may be a card carrying volunteer in the Breuklyn Bath and Rifle Club. At the very least he and Adon are regular Banya buddies.

Adon and anything he touches turns to agitprop via the Breuklyn Otriad. One of the leading social clubs responsible for the pitched battles of the uprising fought in what was once called New York City, and Ayiti.

 

Hachi is wearing a gold DVF wrap, the new line cut for figure, not the old one to disguise it, or the ones before that where it all hung out to ogle over. Patrician women always liked to brag about DVF dresses being one of kind, made just for the wearer, even given as presents by Mr. W himself. Hachi won hers in a card game. But the real prize was what the girl in the dress had to do when she lost it.

Hachi King Perchevney is the manager of both Fantasia and the Voodoo Lounge her father the owner of the building. The building is private property, which means it’s within the territories of the United American States although all its shareholders reside in the Ruus Federation. She runs the place with a staff of mostly Mexicanos, Mulats and Noires. They work harder than the Blan, a proven fact. The Voodoo Lounge boasts the world’s highest outdoor dance floor and cage dancing fire spectacles, also bare knuckle boxing. Its elevated viewing deck gives one a view of the entire sinful city. The blue glass tower which houses it was the tallest and largest thing built before the economy imploded and recessed indefinitely right after the war years in the beginning of the century.

Hachi’s father is nominally a former Soviet although more a transnational biz-ness-man of the clandestine economy as far as a point of identity. Her mother is also in the biz, albeit the Han one. It was as if in her birth the two most ruthless forces of strong arm venture capitalism produced a single vision of invisible handed, ruthless thirst for money. With gun running, drug dealing and prostitution so vigorously engaged in throughout the planet, the Perchevney Bratva focuses mostly on sophisticated real estate acquisitions, regime change and sometimes the reinstitution of serfdom in non-aligned states via debt peonage.

Hachi isn’t too invested in all the evil around her though.  No wife of the altruistic and enlightened Siegfried Sassoon could be. She compartmentalizes her life you see. After the revolt in the Eastern territories it became important to own your own plane. She does her business in the Southwest desert then flies back to the City of Many-Many-Lights four days a month to be near the radiating goodness of her man who prefers life in the Breuklyn Soviet. She just sometimes plays fixer to her father, who no one ever gets to meet.

The Voodoo Lounge has strange powers absolving its guests of sin by way of anonymity. “Sojourners into darkness do need company,” she says slyly taking a seat with Mr. Dbrisk and Mr. Trikhovitch in the private viewing booth called the Papa Legbe Terrace.

“Thank you for seeing us Ms. Sassoon on such short notice.”

“Well the sky is about to fall out above Breuklyn Soviet darlings. We are all a little pressed for time. Also, please call me Hachi as you’re both close friends of my husband’s close friend. And we are all friends of the great revolution after all,” she says with the sly smile of a Postsoviet woman and the cunning diplomacy of the daughter of a Han.

 

“Cheers to that very same notion,” says Mickhi.

 

Nazdrovia,” says Nikholai.

 

“This is a wonderful place you have here,” Mickhi remarks.

She gives him a funny look with a smile as if to say: of course it fucking is. My father is one of the richest, most dangerous oligarchs in the entire former Soviet world. But they all have at least a little ESP, so it is unnecessary to say that aloud.

“So, my father gives your whole take over Hispaniola operation his black blessing. Obviously without a little bit of sentimentality he supports the notion that your backers pay very, very well and that the prospecting concessions he has been promised if you succeed will make even him crack a tiny former Soviet half smile.  So, while I love my husband, and am a big fan of your compatriot Mr. Adon, and am obviously not going to stand in your way; but, I have but several questions before we release our three hostages to you.”

 

It gets serious quick around here.

 

“Ask away Ms. Hachi,” Mickhi says. Mickhi takes a green pack of Newport cigarettes from out the inner pocket of the black pea coat he is wearing. For a six foot two Jamaican with thick polished dreads he is soft spoken to the point of incredible charm.

“You’re all really, really fucking insane,” she tells them.

“That isn’t a question Ms. Hachi,” Mickhi notes lighting his delicious Newport.

“You’re right. That was a statement of fact,” she replies with a smile.

“So what’s the second question then,” asks Nikholai.

“I think she’s still on her first question,” says Mickhi.

“We’re in the crazy shit business. You’re in the flesh, cocaine, arms and supper business. Your father well he’s into almost everybody’s business where a dollar gets made illicitly. We need some equipment surely but we need permission to take back three people your father currently owns,” says Mickhi Dbrisk.

 

At that moment Mickhi Dbrisk was quite unaware that his associates Mr. Entwissle and Mr. Adon were handcuffed to the interrogation chairs of well-lit questioning room on the outskirts of Moscow. So technically the Perchevney Bratva owned four people they needed back.

 

“So let’s make a deal shall we. How much will you pay for DeBuitléir?” she asks.

Trikhovitch looks at Dbrisk. They were told not to haggle.

“He’s priceless. But we were told to offer you 187,000,000 RMB.”

“Cute. That could buy your very own large harem of mostly white women and some sports cars for the weekend, but I’m afraid the cost of getting a man out of the deep gulag who is suspected of being a high placed terrorist might cost you, something more.”

“Maybe we should haggle about the equipment first,” says Trikhovitch.

“You’re not supposed to haggle,” Hachi says.

“How do you,” starts Nikholai, “never mind.”

“So let’s get to that then. How many irons you need?” she asks.

“Just two,” replies Mickhi.

“Just two? I had heard this was a big job.”

“Well technically, Ms. Hachi, we haven’t figured out exactly how to extract him yet. So we figured we’d just take hostages of our own all over the country tonight.” Trikhovitch says.

“He’s being held in the Angola 42 Penal Colony near the border with Abu Dhabi. In a fortnight they move him to a facility abroad,” Hachi says, “this is your last shot before he disappears into some black bag foreign torture camp complex.”

“Two? Really only two?” she repeats.

“We only are going to need two burners for the ambush. I just failed to mention the caliber of these said Irons we’ll need.”

Mickhi passes her a slip of paper. She unfolds it. Gives them ‘you have to be fucking crazy’ eyes and shakes her head.

Mickhi shrugs back with his cold eyes.

“I mean, if you think we don’t know how to get regular blasters in Las Vegas, what kind of bad men ganstas do you take us for?” asks Mr. Dbrisk.

Hachi sips her bubblefizaire passive aggressively.

“I wish you to remember that portable laser guided surface to air missile launchers with anti-drone capabilities are very hard to come by this time of year, in this part of the world especially. You are aware this is the age of global gun control. But as I’m a very, very big fan of Mr. Sebastian Adon; and a fan as well of the work you boys do as both municipal employees and bad man freedom fighters; surely I can do my best to acquire them.”

“For how much?”

“Make us an offer.”

“Black diamonds and pearls,” says Dbrisk with a smirk.

“For a gang allegedly led by the Ivories you all really don’t know the price of anything.”

 

“We ain’t led by Ivories,” states Dbrisk.

 

“My father would surely ask you to attempt to keep from knocking government choppers out of the sky as part of your rescue plan. You know, lest yer actions reignite the civil war a day early and what not. That’s not good for anyone’s business.”

“Well if you just sell us the prisoner for the price offered I’m sure we wouldn’t have to resort to such strong armed tactics such as an elaborate raid riddled in gun play,” says Trikhovitch.

The boys grin slightly at her.

“I mean he isn’t our prisoner. He’s in U.A.S. Federal custody, as you know this colony facilitates all kinds of things for all three core power blocs. Your price is too low because to get him we’re gonna have to lend you a small army of contractors and bribe a small network of bureaucrats to time this properly. And that can’t even assure us that a) you can even breach the defenses of Angola 42, and b) not trigger a new round of world war holocaust by doing so, a day early.”

“We’re not paying for man power. We’re paying you bribe the bureaucrats already on your payroll. We have a very valid plan drawn up. We can do this job better with a smaller team,” explains Dbrisk.

“My sources tell me you may have moved as many as eighty eight Mexican Pararescuemen over the border in the past week to support this raid,” she says.

“Not at liberty to say,” notes Trikhovitch.

“Well how do we know it won’t be an embarrassing little blood bath on the border?” she asks.

“We can’t really promise anything. But, we’ll try hard to just snatch and run,” says Nikholai, “we also want to buy another Bratva asset for the same price. A two for one.”

She sips her non-synthetic Champagne.

“Let’s talk crazy, sure,” she says.

“250,000,000 RMB for the bribes and the necessary hardware. And your house physician, the lovely little Ukrainian Dr. Kay on standby in case something goes wrong ready to work.”

“You certainly can’t have our little doctor. Adon asked already,” she laughs.

She gives them a funny look.

“Something is off about all this. First your prices are wild. Second the weapons you’re requesting are absurdly hard to get these day. Finally, why do you want our doctor? You have doctors. Isn’t one of you a doctor?” she laughs.

“I’m a paramedic,” says Dbrisk.

“I find dead kids for money,” says Nikholai.

“I guess I was wrong. Something’s funny though about this though.”

Trikhovitch takes out a photograph of a slim and beautiful young lady in green military cap with a white lab coat and a stethoscope and a second picture of the shoulder mounted anti-drone grad launcher and a third picture of a presumably younger Avinadav DeBuitléir.”

“187,000,000 for all four purchases and in writing the Perchevney Bratva will get a contract explicitly giving trade rights and port access in Breuklyn Soviet on the eve we all your competitors get strong armed out. You will get carte blanche to traffic anything but people.”

“You know we don’t traffic people anymore,” she says.

“More importantly Avinadav DeBuitléir will agree to drilling concessions and first access to the vast array of natural resources under Ayiti when we seize the country.”

“I presume you’ll need some really fast cars, also maybe a long range capable plane to get your imprisoned friends and anyone who survives the raid back to your base in Ayiti?” she laughs, “and a magic carpet maybe or some fifty foot mechanized robots?”

“Wow, Hachi, yer accommodating as hell,” smiles Nikholai.

“No. All we need is the right people bribed so we know where and when to hit that pick up convoy and take back our man. And to do that we need those fancy hard to get weapons and your sexy Ukrainian doctor in case someone in our crew takes a bullet,” says Dbrisk.

“But yeah, we’ll absolute take a plated Mustang Lancer, four type two ambulances and we will need a fast plane ready on nearby airstrip, preferably with anti-drone capabilities capable of reaching Port Au Prince without refueling as soon as the lights go out,” says Nikholai.

“For just $187 RMB?” asks Hachi Yu.

But that is real chump change compared to what these rebels are offering out long term.

“Are you going to need extra serfs?” she asks.

“No, we never like to outsource person power,” explains Mickhi.

“I’d forgotten about your secret Mexican army. You have a less than minimalistic plan I take it?”

“You might say that,” says Mickhi Dbrisk who looks real sharp in his dark, dark black pea coat as he fills the booth with smoke.

“We like to maintain a true monopoly on violence,” says Mr. Nikholai Trikhovitch.

“You all have yourselves a deal then.”

“And Madame it is the deal of the millennium!” exclaims Dbrisk.

And they all clink glasses.

“Ah yes, one thing though,” she says.

“My father has explicitly put a clause in the deal.”

“Our leadership has made it clear that we will not haggle or take sneaky last minute addendums,” says Mickhi

“Hm. Well this one is rather straight forward.”

“Go on,” Trikhovitch says.

“My father wished to have definitive proof that Mr. Adon is quite alive. And a real man, not a robot or some superior alien military fuckery. So when he was arrested in Moscow last week rubbing out one of your listed lesser oligarchy war criminals we took him off the hands of the FSB for the good price of 300,000,000.00 USD, him and his mullato partner.”

They glance at each other.

“We just wanted a bit more collateral. Something we could trade to intelligence services if say, it becomes complicated associating with you. What better than him, isn’t he one of your leaders and an old chum?”

 

They now give her man hard eyes.

 

“Where is he now?” Dbrisk growls.

“My father requires three things from everyone he owns. He wants a full medical evaluation conducted by our house physician. Dental, blood, bone marrow, and DNA. He requires sperm samples, for growing more serfs. And finally. He wants Sebastian to box our best guy in ring. If we don’t get those things. You don’t all that hardware you need. You don’t get the right people bribed. And you sure as shit don’t get to walk out of our territory, our fucking American pie occupied petro field with that very auspicious prisoner, and our highly talented young Ukrainian doctor to boot. And very little would stop us from just selling him to the Department of Homeland Security at that point. I mean just so we have you by the balls to make it clear we’re not gonna let you fuck us in the ass, at least not without a condom.”

“So really we’re talking about more than I thought we were talking about,” says Dbrisk.

“Sebastian and is partner Watson will arrive in Dubai in two days. So that’s when the fight will be scheduled for.”

“He isn’t really much of a boxer,” Dbrisk says.

“That’s not what we hear,” Hachi says.

“Wouldn’t you say this negotiation is getting a little uncivilized,” Nikholai asks DBrisk.

“What’s a little uncivilized between oligarchs, gangsters and terrorists?’ she asks with a smile.

“We prefer the phrase ‘freedom fighters’,” Dbrisk notes.

“We prefer the phrase ‘big league extralegal black market entrepreneurs’.”

“Duly noted,” Dbrisk says.

“See you at the ringside then,” she says.

“Fair game,” says Nikh.

She hands them a glossy gold flyer inviting them to the 50th Annual Police & Fire Games of Dubai, known also as the Battle of the Badges.

 

 

 

Chapter 44

The Voodoo Lounge, 2019ce

DUBAI

 

 

“There sounds like there might be a lot of money to be made each time he gets hit in the head,” Alexandre Perchevney remarks in flawless Mandarin although he thinks in Russian and Ivoryish algorithathematics too.

 

“I have a man of  influence from the Dominican Republic on the phone here willing to put it in writing that some very specific oil drilling contracts are to be signed with our family Bratva if the invasion is made successful,” Hachi informs him.

 

She’s referring to Ysiad Ferraris and General Obenson Etienne who has led the Lavalas underground for the ten years since Avinadav DeBuitléir’s disappearance.

 

“We like oil concessions daughter, we truly do. But it’s not yet in our interest to trade with these free radicals until we can get confirmation that DeBuitléir is in fact alive. These DHS use a lot more than a water board these days to get what they’re looking for.”

“The Breuklyn Otriad and it’s Haitian allies are offering us unrestricted access to their port facilities in Coney Island, Jacmel, and Santo Domingo as an opening confidence builder. Also a fifty year no-tax lease of facilities as long as no slaves come through those facilities,” Hachi states referring to the contract provided by Dbrisk and Trikhovitch.

Wink.

This was particularly relevant because three years now since the signing of the armistice and the granting of regional autonomy it was becoming very clear that the Breuklyn Soviet was not to remain a lawless trader frontier forever.

 

“Tell the Department of Homeland Secure that we wish to trade Adon for DeBuitléir. Once they agree to move him out of Angola 42, help the rebels assault the convoy. Obviously they’ll also take a bunch of fat Amerikanski hostage. We will keep our bases covered. Inform whoever is or is not leading that wild Otriad that they need not worry about where to get guns and keep them in the dark as long as possible that we are dealing the DHS. I will arrive in Las Vegas in two days with Adon. If he survives the tournament, and if the rebel price for DeBuitléir is higher than the U.A.S. price for Adon, then we win regardless, but you know where my priorities lie.”

 

“With enough American dollar bills papa,” states Hachi, though she knows that what he wants will ultimately rely on Adon, DeBuitléir and the phantom Emma Solomon unleashing their war of liberation in Ayiti and the colonies.

 

And so with the stroke of a few men and a phone call Alexandre Perchevney ordered his Somali pirate sub-contractors to seize the hulking cargo ship the Bialystok and its vast payload of Chinese long guns and rockets. They were ambitious these pirates and seized not one but two ships traveling reroute from East Asia that day. The first with Mr. Perchevney’s “decommissioned” arsenal and the second, an NGO supply ship, the Viceroy which was carrying sixty four armored ambulances, crates of medical supplies and vast unending drums of Spiruleena algae compound and the equipment necessary to set up farms of it.

 

The Somalis gave him a two for one special. Both vessels were traded with an Israeli-based middleman for a staggeringly low rate of just 4.4 million dollars. Their contents were offloaded onto trucks in the Sinai Peninsula. It was then just a question of securing trucks and pretext to move them southwest toward the forward based in Isle of Man.

 

Hachi King’s father Alexandre Sasho Perchevney has three daughters.  One is missing. One is happily married to a Cuban-Amerikanski actor named Siegfried Sassoon and appears relatively happy. The third is quite dead to him.

There are actually some things money can’t buy. But for nearly everything else big favors and other people’s money work just fine. He has subcontracted some Somali pirates to capture a U.N. chartered container ship as though he might order out for sushi or for a man to be disappeared long term.

Quickly and without a sentimental second thought.

There is of course an international industry in unloading surplus products of the first and second world off on the third and fourth for internal subsidy. Sometimes grain, sometimes guns. Often both, often whatever needs unloading and subsidizing.

 

Several weeks earlier a shell company of his called “Pveada International” had brokered the decommissioning of fourth generation Chinese small arms and their eventual sale and transfer to the government of Kenya. A neutral country in theory who’s elite sometimes is attempting to become a U.A.S. client state, but whose middle class would often rather align with the People’s Republic of China. This containership arsenal load of U.N. decommissioned long guns, rocket propelled grenades, truck mounted battling guns, shoulder mounted rocket launchers, and assorted missiles only made it half way to its destination.

 

Off the Somali coast the massive craft was captured by a pirate named Musa Mohammed and his band of forty thieves on small watercraft. They so intricately knew of the vessels coordinates and movements it seemed almost an inside job. Which it certainly was. Mr. Perchevney had only finished brokering this illegal weapon’s swap between China and Kenya when he received four subsequent offers for their redirection. Various credible sources informed him that the same brigade of Amerikanski that helped topple the U.A.S. forces and ignited the second civil war was outfitting a new army.

And they needed weapons and their money was green.

 

The Perchevney Bratva had prospered incredibly from the developments of the Separatist wars. Dozens of urban areas across the Eastern Coast were now veritable shuttle trading station for his group to sell any number of previously illegal things to the interior. In addition, there came into effect dozens of new micro republics which required any number of goods and services previously available from being part of the United States of America, but were now rouge states and under embargo.

 

Opportunities to enrich oneself were exponentially increasing.

 

If this little brigade seemed rather zealous, rather quick to murder many of his competitors operators over human trafficking, all the better. This wasn’t his trade anyway.

The first offer came eight days prior to the transfer of these coveted arms. It came from his own daughter Hachi. The second offer was via a well accredited Islamic middle person with vast untraceable portfolios in Bangladesh. A third was linked to the Fenians mob in Boston and a fourth to some wild gangsters in Kingston, Jamaica. He had called his daughter directly and asked her what all this “rapidly re-arming the fourth world” was all about.

In fact all four brokers were looking to have these arms end up in the exact same hands and were making e exact same big figure bid.

 

There are so many places to get a gun in this world, but bids on a hot arsenal however are less frequent. Mr. Alexandre Perchevney being a man of cautious curiosity, with no sentimentality or respect for rule of law was updated by his daughter regularly about the irregular invasion being planned in Breuklyn Soviet with an eye toward the land of Ayiti.

 

Chapter 45

The Grand Stadium, 2019ce

DUBAI

 

 

Three rounds with four fighters is a Russian bare knuckled boxing match gone berserker.

 

Sebastian is wearing a Captain America mask smuggled into the POLICE FIRE GAMES.

In a Las Vegas boxing match has just begun between Sebastian Adon and Josepi “the Stallion” Vespasian in a stadium filled civil servants. After the “Great Revolt” a good number of Catholics and whites most generally were absorbed into the interior rather than stay in the “liberated territories”.

 

“Hot beds of Ivory Commy-Mic-Nigger sedition.”

 

Suffice to say the betting odds against Sebastian are 343 to 1.

 

“That Yid is gonna get his ass handed to him,” a cop from Mississippi smugly told the local press.

But there is a good bit of money on this fight. Middle America was less than amused at the inclusion of fighters from the Confederated breakaway territories.

 

The Sly Foxing Bravest was once the premier Firefighter boxing team in the nation so less than year after hostilities ended the earliest peace gestures of the detente began with sports. President-elect Barak Obama, then in his fourth term in office was attempting to extend   an olive branch to the Soviet Confederation. While it was difficult to negotiate with no less than forty three break away territories running down the east coast from Maine to Miami, bloody-bloody fighting and rumors that the Breuklyn Soviet had purchased several nuclear warheads from North Korea convinced the U.A.S. Congress and Executive to embrace a temporary ceasefire.

 

The FDNY, which on the eve of the Great Revolt had less than 400 black firemen out of 12,000 total dedicated to fire suppression. It had an emergency medical service corps of roughly 4,000 EMTs and Paramedics which was highly diverse in demography and still is. Now, roughly a year since the riots and the rising; since the breaking of the five boroughs into three Soviets, a confederated territory, and one UAS occupied strip called Satin Island; after many of the white FDNY firefighters fled the City of Many-Many Lights worried about a genocide or forced socialism that never came; well now FDNY Fire Suppression and the FDNY Boxing Bravest, is as diverse as EMS always was.

 

And they were invited back to fight in Las Luna Stadium albeit this time with a mostly black team since few of the original FDNY Caucasian firefighters remained in the Breuklyn, Goddess, or Bronx Soviet. Nor could they afford to live in the Isle of Man now technically non-aligned zone, albeit largely a bourgeoisie micro-state with the NYPD as an army. And Satin Island, still a part of the UAS has been mostly emptied of civilians and is military fortress 94 clicks behind Confederate lines.

Sebastian had joined The Sly Foxing Bravest long ago as a Yid and an as an EMT, in those circles still something of an oddity. At one point the FDNY had forced him to resign shortly after the disorder, but he was rehired after the revolt.

 

Now he was squaring off in a stadium of angry UAS colonial gentiles and foreign and domestic firemen and cops, howling for his blood.

 

Dave Briscoe and Hugh O’Domhnaill have a lot of money doubled down that he’s going to win. Even with the odds never in good favor. Because they know something these gentiles don’t.

In the first round Sebastian dances around grinning, feigning attack, the Stallion lunches but never connects. Around they go, the Catholic mobs howling. In the ten seconds of the first round the Stallion lands a punch dead on, knocks Sebastian on his ass bleeding.

As the bell rings there’s blood on the mat, blood in his eyes.

Round two, he gets clobbered. Dull wet cracking noises, flashing lights, the room spinning howling shaking, stomping for Yiddish blood.

Briscoe and O’Domhnaill keep making bets with the bookie. The odds jump each round. Sebastian is all fucked up. THWAK, his jaw looks broken. THWWAK.

Another badly swollen eye.

CRACK and the bell rings for this deadly dance drags on into Round three. Still Sebastian hasn’t landed a good punch.

He splashes water on his face. He looks into the bleachers, waves to Hugh and Dave. Spits blood. He says the only prayer he knows.

 

Then, amid cries of ‘KILL THE IV’, ‘KILL THE IV’ he draws inside himself, tunes out the world. Seven years ago Hassan Askeri posing then as a local bus boy, brown belt and the Prince of Dhaka told him what to do.

Hassan is with him now, in a fourth dimensional kind of way.

“Hold out, hold out. Let him weaken himself. Let him grow arrogant by tasting your blood. Wait for it, wait more then don’t strike ‘til you see the whites of his eyes, the paleness of his very soul exposed before you strike him.”

Sebastian explodes on the Stallion. Beats his face, knocks him down with his Koah power swing. The Stallion tries to get up. Everything slows down to timeless bellowing, stale air of the stadium, and the taste of his own copper-almond blood. The Stallion, Henri Christopher Vespasian thinks quietly ‘never seen a man move that fast.’

It’s the last thing he thinks. One hook punch breaks his ribs; the jab opens up his face. Sebastian sees his whites. CRACK. A hammer blow breaks the stallions jaw.

A fireman on cop zoot-suit-riot breaks out; bludgeons, blood, broken bottles and tear gas, a bi-national debacle on late night news. The heroes of the divided nation involved in an indiscriminate hate crime, cluster fuck of a brawl. A Mexican weight staff sneaking Sebastian out the back into a tunnel and out to a garage. Hugh and Dave getting half rich. Hundreds of arrests. Firemen over turning a cop car setting it ablaze.

After a good deal of saber rattling and arrests for disorderly conduct, the Battle of the Badges had almost become a way to call off the Détente.

Finally they got clear of it all. An electric Lincoln town car is taking them back to the hotel. Sebastian has a swollen bloody face. He’s nursing it with a cold-pack and bottle of Sweet Surrender.

“You lost your teeth yet again brother,” notes O’Domhnaill.

Sebastian spits up some red blood.

Two more fucking rounds.

How Sebastian lost his three front teeth is one story very few know except the three women he’s thought he was in love with and of course his best friend Nikholai Trikhovitch, also known as Nick Taylor, or Tricky Nicky by some.

Nikholai is waiting for his friends after field stripping and oiling their weapons. He lights up a Noblisse cigarette with a gold zippo lighter and tells his audience of well-oiled weapons what he knows:

“It was the summer, the setting, occupied Palestine, called by some Israel. A slightly younger Sebastian Adon and his partner in crime Emma Solomon, a tough cookie, and sometimes Yid had journeyed to the Sin Peninsula to rendezvous with a man named Anil of Aqaba who was willing to smuggle them across the security wall into the Balata Refugee Camp near the West Flank City of Nablus. This was during the “Second-off-Shaking’. The Israelis had erected a mighty mile high wall between them and the Canaanites and Sebastian wanted to see the other side, as well as build a gun tunnel under it. Solomon, near devoid of political loyalties was following him along, because possessed by her own hate, her own plans.”

 

Nikholai Trikhovitch is about five foot nine inches of tall dark and handsome. He’s wearing a black leisure suit. He has a sholem strapped to his side. It’s loaded with Afula Specials, like most of their weapons. Israeli made non-lethal ammunition. They try and keep the body count within a 3 % margin of “motherfucker-you-deserve-to-die”. His tobacco smoke fills the dimly lit room. On the bed are four 8mm pistols, four shrink wrapped dark grey flicker-masks and uniforms, a box of white phosphorous smoke grenades, a box of 8mm pistol clips with very live American made ammunition, a carton of Noblisse, the keys to a black Mustang, and the keys to a single engine Givati-Tesla G8 airplane. On the bedside is an ECG monitor, a red combat medic kit, and a large silver box which contains Lithium Carbonate, topically applied tiger balm, assorted injectable anesthetics, grey berry smart phones and roof of mouth mounted dentures for Sebastian’s three front teeth. It’s a medical kit accounting for their unit’s propensity for bipolar operatives with high likelihood of mental and physical injury.

 

How Sebastian lost his teeth in its shortest most objective form continues something like this. Dahab City is a town of under 3,000 mostly Muhammadian souls located on the Eastern shore of the Sin Peninsula, the wasteland that separates the State of Ivory from its often belligerent neighbor the Muhammadian Republic of Cleopatra. It is one of the most acclaimed scuba diving locations on the planet and a long time staging point for the sand-gypsy insurgency against the Egyptian government. It is also the key transshipment point for gun running into Gaza, the quarantined hot bed of the Canaanite insurrection against the Israelis, their real and perceived occupiers.

The tourism industry of Dahab had seen better days.

The night before a young Sebastian Adon and the lovely young “Ms. Violent Dangerous Thing” who is also known as “Maya Rose” by some and Emma Solomon by others, depending on what you’re paying to know, arrived in Dahab; a rowdy band of Caucasians painted the town red, acted the fool and offended the honor of the Sheik-of-the-Mezzina tribe’s daughter. The night after negotiations, Sebastian was laid out intoxicated at a table in a night club called the Black Prince; a band of some fifty fellaheen attacked the place with Molotov cocktails, rocks and their sand-gypsy fists.

Young Sebastian, quite near unconscious from drinking a Sweet Surrender caught a flying chair to his face. He was taken to the village hospital in quite a lot of pain via Donkey Ambulance.

The Egyptian police then arrested every sand-gypsy male in Dahab; which they had wanted to do for some time anyway. And then, they beat and tortured as many of them as they could get to before lunch the next day. Egyptian police are no fans of the sand-gypsies, no fans of seeing Americanos get hurt, and no fans of once popular tourist location maintaining a reputation for civil unrest.”

Long story short, a Sheik’s son was accused of striking Sebastian with the chair. The boy’s “uncle” came to the Nirvana hotel where Sebastian was nursing his face with more whiskey and pled with young Sebastian to pardon the boy.

 

Sebastian took a hammer to the prison, when informed Anil of Aqaba that “this is Cleopatra, eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth country.” But, upon seeing the thirteen year old son of the sheik, his alleged assailant, he decided not to bribe the guards to smash the young boy’s grill, because he wasn’t “a savage fuck like the sand-gypsies who assaulted him.”

So he signed a pardon and the boy went free. As the boy was being explained in the Muhammadian dialect what had transpired, he mustered all his Americano, spat in Sebastian’s face and flatly told him:

 

            “Your people are weak.”

 

But Anil of Aqaba didn’t think so, and invited Sebastian to be his guest any time the kid was in Sinai ever again. To this day Sebastian swears this was all far less traumatic than the later loss of his dearest partner over Operation Marcus Garvey and general heartbreak. The loss of his family due to his own negligence. And the loss of his soul through a deal with the devil herself. Loss, loss and more loss until a man becomes a zealot.

But in certain parts of the world you can trade three teeth for a very large favor.

Later in the day they get back to the Voodoo Lounge for the Second Round on the Roof. The wind is blowing.

 

“What kind of fuckery is this,” utters Mickhi Dbrisk.

 

The man was easily twice or four times Sebastian’s size. On one day’s notice they had assembled a rather intimate local run down of Voorhees big shots, just a couple, who wanted to bet on this fight. It was also to be videotaped. It stood to reason that if the Otriad either failed to deliver on its open port promises, or if its adventurous little battalion was wiped out not having liberated an inch of Ayitian turf, or if the Federals came knocking, then proof Adon was alive would be established.

But having him fight was only a matter of sport. He was the face of this thing figured Alexandre Perchevney. If he was the kind of man up for the job, then surely he could beat in a ring their biggest fighter, and a bear.

Fun and games.

As per the terms if he submitted to the medical exams and won the fight they would sign the deal and turn over exactly what was needed to get the job done. And if he died, oh well. These radicals were unpredictable.

 

But Alexandre Perchevney has been watching them work a good long time.

 

Insert fight, blat.

 

Sebastian is again all bloody and panting and spitting some blood and missing his three front teeth after killing his way through an enhanced clone of Dmitry Khulushin four times his build.

And then they roll out a big metal box and out of it emerges of growling black bear and Alexandre giggles ferociously. And Mickhi’s eyes get wide, and he grabs his sholem out of his inner pocket strap.

 

“Not part of the arrangement,” Nikholai declares.

 

There is not first among equals when people are not equal,” says Alexandre.

 

Now that’s a real Old Russian saying.

“He’s fighting the bear.”

“He’s not fighting your fucking bear.” And the bear howls and charges out toward Adon.

Adon throws up his dukes.

 

Pop. Pop. And Mickhi shoots the bear twice in the head.

 

But it doesn’t die yet.

“The fucking chornay shot the bear!” A voorhi yells and various attendants and strong pen pull out their shooters and start yelling at Dbrisk in Russian, and Mickhi takes out a second pistol, and now Nikholai is yelling for everybody to be cool in Russian:

“Be cool! Be cool!”

“You shot my fucking bear,” notes Alexandre.

And the big ferocious creature lands on top of Adon who upper cuts but that doesn’t stop the thing at all.

Pop. Pop. Pop. Pop. Pop. Now Nikholai is firing also.

And then three more until click.

Dbrisk gets off the rest of his clip into the dome of the bear.

And it finally seems to die.

In his head Nikholai hears Krissy scream.

 

“Everyone put down their fucking shooters down immediately blat!” Commands Alexandre Sasho Perchevney standing now.

 

Adon covered in his blood and bear blood staggers to a stand.

 

“Perchevney!” He yells.

And everyone gets quiet.

Tak!” Adon yells.

Alexandre is grinning.

“Keep your chornay cowboys at bay,” he shouts back in guttural Aramaic.

“No more games. Sign the goddamn contract you shtarker fuck. You King of Oligarchs,” Sebastian bellows in Hebrew.

“Three ports. Monopoly on Coney Island Importing. Guaranteed rights on 5 percent revenues on outgoing gas and crude. Rights on Port Ayiti pipeline. I want this in writing signed by you, Solomon and the prisoner Avinadav DeBuitléir as soon as you have him,” states Perchevney.

“Vehicles, hardware, bribes in place, exact movement times of prisoner convoy, a landing strip for our plane, and the physician you own by the name of Dr. Yelizaveta Perechenova, and you’re going to get us all the first and second line armaments we can pay for. And any third line you lay your hands on.”

“Get me my pen,” Perchevney smiles. Get this man a towel and some vodka and his teeth,” laughs Perchevney.

“Dmitry get the latest contract we drew up.”

 

The real one? Who ever knew! You could kill a hundred Dmitry Khulushin s’ and the evil in the world would never die. Yet another Dmitry Khulushin emerges from the bowels of that Lounge alongside Watson Entwissle in some hand cuffs and a blind fold.

Dmitry Khulushin and Sebastian Adon glower fiercely and each other and Sebastian spits out a glob of blood in his direction.

 

“Peasant,” spits back Dmitry in Russian.

“Epic times for all you baby faced fuck,” Adon replies.

“Alright, I think we’ve done enough damage here,” states Mickhi DBrisk.

He takes out a radio.

“Hotshots do you copy?”

Copiar alto y claro.”

“Take the collateral, companeros.”

      

Chapter 47

The Bunga, 2019ce

DUBAI

 

It was nearly dawn in the deep Arabian Desert and the cracked rocky earth was a dead place, thirsty for the waters of the living.

 

There are no good deserts there are only vaguely scenic deserts and empty deserts but all deserts are good to bury things you don’t want found. Or do things you want less seen.

Now the card Perchevney was holding was Adon. And he suspected that the Department of Homeland security would pay or trade just about anything to get their hands on him. And Avinadav DeBuitléir, if you didn’t really know what he was capable of, or holding in his mind was to the DHS Directorate, “low hanging fruit”, valuable mainly because he and Adon had allegedly worked together a decade ago on some jobs in Israel. So, at a lonely airstrip in the deep desert Perchevney would supposedly exchange Adon for DeBuitléir.

Now, what Perchevney knew because his daughter Hachi-Yu had been briefed on it by operatives Mickhi Dbrisk and Nikholai Trikhovitch it was that a crack team of several dozen Mexican and Peruvian Pararescuemen were going to bushwhack the prisoner exchange.

Add a slightly bigger crew.

Sometime a little after dusk Mickhi Dbrisk, Sebastian Adon, Watson Entwissle, Hubert O’Domhnaill, Nikholai Trikhovitch and a crack team of eighty Mexican, Ecuadorian and Peruvian Hotshots backed up by the infiltration of the infamous Zapatista rebels head off to break Avinadav DeBuitléir out of his captivity with pistols, parachutes, fast cars, rocket launchers and flicker hoods.

 

Or even more specifically strong arm the government of the United American States, in the middle of one of their Arab petro-colonies. Mucho grande in a five stage plan.

 

PHASE 1:

 

Lure the U.A.S. diplomat in Dubai to a promised swap of Adon for DeBuitléir many miles away from the camp he was being held.

 

PHASE 2:

 

Mostly Non-violently bushwhack a separate prison transport convoy on the red-brown wasteland of a desert road between Angola 42 and the secret UAS airstrip near Lake Greed heading to move Avinadav DeBuitléir to the exchange.

 

PHASE 3:

Seize four major casino brothel supper clubs in Dubai and hold hostage the patrons as collateral and as a secondary diversion to the real raid.

 

PHASE 4:

Kill everyone at the prisoner exchange, quietly raid the maximum security torture camp Angola 42 and leave with General Avinadav DeBuitléir alive. Kill all the hostages if there are any serious complications to the raid.

 

PHASE 5:

Flee over the border into Iran and board fast planes for the Wild West Indian Federation. Get DeBuitléir to the Hotel Olofsen in Ayiti and negotiate his consolidation of leadership of the rebel armies in Hispaniola, supported by the Cubans, Iranians, Israelis and Trinidadian Special Forces of course.

 

                                                                                                                           And the music of the Monsters to Men begins to play.  

 

So they piled into eight black and grey armored vehicles, four Type 2 Ambulances, three Golden Touch Splinter Vans the last a black Mustang Lancer. From his blackberry smartphone Nikholai activates the tracker a paid sympathizer has planted on the undercarriage of the prisoner transport. Enrooted to acquire DeBuitléir at Prison Fortress Angola 42.

 

The narrow, craggy desert road they drive down is highly susceptible to avalanches caused by stinger missiles. Periodic sandstorms make drone activity hard to coordinate.

 

The same networks that were good for getting people out of the country were still good for getting people in, and the same types of jobs where people employed the paperless and the undocumented, were still much the same before and after the great revolt. The yards and gardens, the dishwashers, the fruit pickers, and the migrant workers; the nannies, the maids, and the unskilled day laborers. So there were and always were places to hide in plain site from the Department of Homeland Security, there were jobs whites just wouldn’t do no matter what the state of emergency.

 

They arrived at safe houses scattered across the south west from a number of routes across the hinterland. Of the eighty dispatched, sixty four made it through. And once the Perchevney Bratva agreed to terms the Pararescuemen took position.

 

This couldn’t be a snatch grab load and go job. For one thing it was still quite unclear where Avinadav DeBuitléir even was precisely. There were no less than four hundred prison camps known to the resistance, and probably twice as many hidden abroad. That he was still in the country and in the state of Nevada was all that could be confirmed beyond the pale, though money was placed on the recently self-murdered man’s good data.

That was extracted from now quite cold and dead Laurence Simon.

Regardless, with the help of the Perchevney Bratva to grease the right wheels and serve as an intermediary, the plan b through z was for these brave Pararescuemen to infiltrate four major casino-brothel-supper clubs across Vegas and take hostages which would serve as the collateral for the swap ideally with a couple celebrity athletes and politicians patronizing them.

They would seize these “establishments of ill repute” simultaneously just as a swap was taking place, as insurance. Just in case the DHS had tricks, or the Bratva decided to sell off Adon.

 

“I’m not saying they come from a culture of rampant hostage takers and Chechen cowboys, but they do,” claimed Hachi and then she put the phone down.

 

A one-for-one prisoner exchange was the fruit she dangled. Adon for DeBuitléir. But the department of homeland security contact had for some reason declined. Officially. Because Adon was dead they claimed, but she insisted that he wasn’t. She had a courier bring them his bio samples, his lab work and a short film of him fighting a black bear. Waited a day. And still no remarks or offers.

A classic bait before switch rejected off hand. But her sources said that the department would come around.

So one elite combat team led by Raphael Ernesto Lynch Contreras was quietly integrated into the staff of the Bunga Bunga Club, named after the former Italian Prime Minister’s hooker and pool parties. And three more were set up on standby.

Once activated, each group would seize as many hostages as possible, barricade and fortify the restaurant doors and announce that if Avinadav DeBuitléir was not released they would execute all of everybody inside.

 

“It’s all going down right now as we speak,” Hachi told her father over the iridium and then put down the phone.

 

“I love watching all the quickly moving parts,” Perchevney states to his empty office.

 

The earth was ragged and the tarmac cracked. There was a white surrender flag idiosyncratically flying half-mast.

The valley was choked and barren and then gave way to a small airbase off the cross roads where there were twelve vehicles parked in some aggressive formation: eight black SUVs and four black jeeps and a dark blue windowless prison bus.

These were storm troopers without their usual costumes, bulky men with itchy trigger fingers partly melting, the ones with the DHS had on dark blue shirts and sub machine guns, the ones contracted from the Bratva; Postsoviet business casual, shorts with the latest banana clip Uzis.

 

They all onsy and twosy.

 

They stare each other down. There are eight black SUVs, the kind of rugged gas guzzling bullet proof apparatus the DHS generally prefers driving even amidst the OPEC total embargo, and the Bratva offered up just four wranglers and filled them with the kind of low rent hired contractors they can order online from the Russian equivalent of black water. And Adon was led out blind folded and in cuffs, and the government storm troopers led out a burly black man, also blind folded, also in cuffs.

And the deal was one for one.

The DHS Director Breria didn’t really care why exactly this particular African revolutionist was so interesting to the Perchevney Bratva, but they sure wanted Sebastian Adon and the codes to black out the eastern nuclear defense grid.

 

At the cost of almost anything. Because if he was indeed alive, he was one step higher on the chain than DeBuitléir. And with the defense grid down General Petreaus could storm the Soviet and put down the revolt once and for all.

 

Hachi had deliberately selected the hottest part of the day, when the visibility was the worst because a sand storm was blowing and the sun made everyone exhausted and quick to shoot. And she selected her entire entourage based on who didn’t speak a word of English or have any data about the stakes of this trade.

She also deliberately miscommunicated the particulars of the exchange, as per her father’s last written instructions.

 

One of Hachi’s big fellers set up a fold out titanium table and there he laid out a laminated head shot of Sebastian Adon and one of Avinadav DeBuitléir, and slid them over. So nothing could really be lost in lack of translation.

 

The DHS point man, some mid westerner took out a device and spoke into it turning his words into seamless Russian.

 

Take off the hood,” the device says in low street Russian.

 

The Bratva goon killers amused at the device take out one of their own.

 

You first, my nigger,” their device says back in low street English.

 

“Adon” is seated at one side of the table and “DeBuitléir” at the other. The hood of the DHS prisoner is pulled, but the man revealed is hardly the man matched in the photograph.

For one thing he’s Caucasian; Ah ha.

A standard operating procedure, but neither underling had been previously informed of the ploy. Fingers point guns are leveled.

Both point men carry red lines.

Phones that go off if last minute serious problems emerge. Like showing up to a prisoner exchange with fake prisoners.

The Russian red line rang first.

The DHS one shortly after.

The hooded body double engaged gamely nods.

“A heavily armed group of Mexicano gunmen just took over a Brazilian themed steak house-casino-brothel in District 4, Senator Bago is amongst the hostages. Their single demand is the release of Avinadav DeBuitléir and Sebastian Adon.”

 

“Inform the point person from the DHS that we will trade only real Adon for a real DeBuitléir and that we cannot negotiate the release of the hostages or stop what will shortly follow. We have zero relations with the wild terrorists that run Breuklyn Soviet.”

 

That was communicated via the devices.

 

And soon everyone was on edge, a bit of low grade yelling began. As the DHS men start pointing at hooded Adon, telling them to pull the hood. And the strong men, her least literate krepki mushik began yelling for them to pull DeBuitléirs hood, though the likelihood of genuine identification for a Russian to pick out a chornay even with a recent photo would be low.

 

Finally, the Russian strong man pulls the hood.

 

But alas, tricksters all. That was by no means Adon below that hood, nor was the black man in custody apparently Avinadav DeBuitléir. The sand storm was building in intensity. It stung them all across the face. It rushed and rippled sands through the valley, intruding on the airbase. And the confusion seemed to be growing indeed over who was to give over whom first.

The DHS red line rang again.

“Separatist gun men have taken over two more night clubs in Dubai and fourth one in Abu Dhabi. All demands are coming in the same. Release DeBuitléir and Adon.

 

“Please patch me through to Deputy Director of Homeland Security Theodore Breria, if you’d please,” says Hachi to her Mexican lady secretary.

 

 

Chapter 48

The Barclay General Assmbly, 2019ce

Above Breuklyn

 

Tak.

 

A floating fortress look something like a sports stadium and a vast drone bomber. There are five now hovering above Breuklyn and the Bronx.

Lesser Ariel Drones dart everywhere.

Rebel airmen in Idle Wild are arming up planes with whatever is left.

 

Gas is expected.

 

Back in Breuklyn Soviet the remaining high leadership Anya, Gold Bar Allamby, Pula, Medved  and Mapfre are worried about this fleet of flying fortresses now hovering over the city state and rumors that a full mobilization of the UAS nation’s entire National Guard has occurred.

Disinformation is flying everywhere.

 

Also the corporate media keeps on repeat that:

 

“FOUR RESTAURANT CLUBS OF HOSTAGES TAKEN BY SEPARATISTS IN THE HEART OF DUBAI”.

 

Erza Pula Pound goes over the Fire Station and calls up the First through the Tenth Citizens Armies to get ready to shell Manhattan into the ground and defend Bronx, Goddess and Breuklyn. In the Masjid St. Sophina under the Green Dome 8,000 Party of God Mujahedeen beat their chests. There are 20,000 more being called up and armed. The youth brigades of course.

Ysiad returns, swimming over the river with only one arm, thanks to yoga!

 

He offers to get everyone big time out of the Soviet before the major U.A.S gas attack begins via the enormous Ivorite submarines called black freighters which are loading up with Ivoryish refugees.

Some are running and hiding on these three mega bunker boats bound for Israel called Black Freighters. Some are staying fighting. The Ivories are always like this. Two Ivories, five organizations. Sky falls. Some pray some fight. Most run.

 

On the corporate news U.A.S. politicians are screaming about the hostage crisis in Dubai. Especially Senator Bago being one of the hostages. He’s next in line they say for Republican Speaker of the House.

 

In the middle of the crisis, a public housing complex in Los Angeles is blown up by the D.H.S. All four “restaurants” erupt in a fire fight as the DHS simultaneously storm them.

 

Obama shortly after orders the U.A.S. Armed Forces to retake the entire east coast and put an end to the general uprising based in in Breuklyn Soviet.

 

The Adon body double has a bomb in his chest which maims one Dmitry Khulushin and maims several dozen men from the department of homeland security.

 

It is revealed that Perchevney knows what Dmitry was plotting.

 

            Tak.

 

Chapter 49

The Dessert, 2019ce

DUBAI

 

Four supper clubs had been taken over rapidly and with brute force.

The mostly gringo, Arab and Chinese colonist’s men and women and also children alike were spread eagle on the floor and booby trapped with explosives.

 

When the DHS black jacket commandos stormed everyone got hit with everything they were holding. No one was innocent of anything.

 

Watson, Trikhovitch, O’Domhnaill, Dbrisk, and Adon had boarded their captured prison bus and scoped up DeBuitléir under everyone’s noses dressed like DHS black jackets.

 

In the meantime, the six male hero antagonist-protagonists are pulled over for speeding and being suspicious by terra drones and cops, a shootout breaks out and Adon is shot eight times in the chest.

 

BLAM.BALEM.BLLLAAM.BLAM.BALAM.BALAM. Blam!! Blam again.

 

Fire fights enlarge and break out at all four hostage spots. Raphael and several dozen others escape into the sewers holding people still hostage.

Hachi organizes escape routes via trucks sewers and town cars, and brings Yelizaveta to treat Adon.

The assault on Breuklyn begins with a full exchange of rockets over the East River. A small armada takes off from airbases all over town to attack the flying fortresses and drone squadrons buzz about.

 

Bam! Bam! Bam! BAM!

 

Bleed, bleed, and bleed all over the goddamn place for a woman or a cause, he thinks as he dies.

Cut to the wild car chase across a lost highway, the song called “Mr. Brightside” blaring in the back ground. Trikhovitch is driving the ambulance like bat out of hell while firing non-lethal ammunition from his hand gun out the window at three police cars and the Federal meta-chopper pursuing them.

The local border police, DHS irregulars, paramilitaries and regulars as well as U.A.S. Federals are firing perfectly real lethal ammunition back.

Sebastian Adon who has been shot multiple times in the chest is bleeding all over Mickhi Dbrisk who is attempting to stabilize him on the stretcher in the back.

O’Domhnaill who was clipped in the shoulder is for now bleeding controlled.

 

A vaguely bewildered, hooded and handcuffed Avinadav DeBuitléir is basically trying to figure out what is going on as it has all happened so quickly. He’s seat belted into the technical chair.

Nikholai Trikhovitch is speeding, while Mickhi is yelling for him to “change the fucking sound track!” and mentally preparing to pull over and load a grad rocket into the surface to air shoulder mounted missile launcher.

 

The raid had mostly gone according to plan.

 

But, mostly meant that Sebastian was bleeding to death from eight shots to the chest and abdomen.

And mostly meant that a missile induced avalanche had killed several carloads of UAE Federals.

And mostly meant that all four restaurant/ club takeovers had erupted in bloody, bloody gun battles into the streets of Dubai & Abu Dhabi.

 

Mostly also meant that deadly force was now going to have to be used against representatives of the U.A.E. and U.A.S. governments who couldn’t all objectively be verified as the fabled 3 % who deserve to be killed in combat.

Mostly meant a serious violation of a ceasefire in a long running civil war and the quite possible displeasure of massive Postsoviet crime family.

These things, they happen quickly. Things fall apart. People get shot and things explode. It isn’t fun like a movie. You loose friends.

“What a fucking mess Boichik!” yells Trikhovitch while turning on the Ambulance sirens while firing up a Newport standard.

“We’re making a stand brothers!” yells Trikhovitch.

Nikholai swerves the ambulance ninety degrees eliciting a screech from the brake lines and burst of dust cloud. Sebastian bangs his already bruised face into the equipment bin coughing up more red frothy death.

Nikholai is a veteran of the major conflicts in Breuklyn and Ayiti and is a crack shot with the hardware.

He aims the grad launcher at the meta-chopper and it explodes in ring of fire.

He aims the remaining rockets at the law man fast cars bearing down on them.

 

Three fly cars and six UAS federals explode and horribly die.

Nikh may once have been a cop by vocation, but no one likes being shot at, even by your brothers in former trade. And he hadn’t been an officer half as long as he’d been a highway man.

Sebastian is dying, but slowly. He’s historically rather hard to kill. Dbrisk has two lines worth of Colloids flowing into him wide bore and the bleeding controlled with quick clot and multi-trauma dressings. Nikh surveys the carnage and tosses the grad launcher into the back of the bus and dials a number from his grey berry smart phone.

“Yeah, it’s done. We need you have your doctor meet us at the runway for extraction. Yeah, someone got clipped. O-Positive tovarish.”

Dbrisk pulls the hood off Avinadav DeBuitléir. Sebastian coughs up more blood. O’Domhnaill helps them back into the truck.  DeBuitléir stares down the bandits.

 

He, once-overs um, twice or three times even.

He’d not seen this escapade coming. Had figured he’d be a far longer in Angola 42 camp captivity indefinitely.

A hard fast drive later, they’re all in the back of a small silver airplane getting ready to “fly towards a foreign”. After the ambush, the great escape in the back of the ambulance with Mr. Adon near death bleeding about like a stuck pig, they were met at the airport by several of Hachi’s men and a slim, blonde former Soviet woman. A Cuban trained surgeon named Dr. Yelizaveta Kay. She’s wearing a white lab coat and a green soldier’s cap. She doesn’t look amused. Not in the slightest.

She’s a registered U.A.S. veterinarian, but also a Cuban trained MD of tropical medicine and infectious disease.

On a make shift operating table set up in one of the hangers of this desolate retired airbase, Dr. Kay goes fishing for the bullets in Sebastian’s abdomen, having caused cavitation and damage well up into his gut. This is not the first bullet the young Ukrainian had pulled out of some wounded outlaw.

 

Not that she thinks Sebastian is a mere shtarker.

 

She knows he’s something far worse. She knows him to be a zealot not to fuck with; figuratively, tantrically, also medically. Capable of true blue terrorism written off in the rhetoric of some idealistic promise of human rights.

But kills are still kills to a healer like her.

She knows this because they were pen pals nearly ten years running allegedly based on the bale of letters she was handed last night by Ms. Yu.

The second she lays a hand on him she knows she’s breaking the terms of her contract yet again.

She’s touched his chest before once but it was all a dream. Even though ordered not to. Serfs fall in love. The name of the plane is the “Flicking Flame”. It was once registered to quasi-famous Bollywood film maker Nicholas Mapfre. Now it’s a ghost ship ready for exodus.

 

Adon wrenches in pain, she has Dbrisk sedate him with 100 mcgs of Fentanyl to keep him still. He’d lost a lot of blood in the rapid transit of their high speed getaway.

And they want everybody on that plane for an exodus in fifteen minutes.

“He’s going to die if he isn’t properly attended to,” she tells them cold and flat. She has no accent to speak of. Being shot is after a surgical disease when it all comes down to it.

One of Hachi’s former Soviet bag men points a burner casually at Dr. Yelizaveta Kay.

“Then you go with them blat,” he bark-commands in Ruus authoritatively, tuning to what had been the plan/ agreement all along.

The pretty young doctor doesn’t argue.

She puts a PICC line into Sebastian’s femoral artery to compensate further for blood volume lost. She’s giving him back his own O-Positive blood, which the boys graciously provided her in sealed packets. But he’s in terrible shape, should be in a Hebrew themed hospital. The men load Sebastian onto the plane in a gurney and she goes with them, because she is essence is under contract with Hachi’s very dangerous father to do exactly whatever the fuck she is ordered to do, and has what one might call a special relationship with Mr. Adon long standing. There are several complicated loyalties being juggled about in this exchange that are certainly worth examining later.

The line is often blurred on what she owes Maya verses what she owes Perchevney and those things often overlap. In just four years her contract will be over and her father’s health secured.

Adon has a good deal of special relationships as he must, being so completely and utterly focused on the little war he’s spent about a decade waging, positioning pieces, making speeches with his hands and hazel eyes.

 

The Flickering Flame takes off under cover of sand storms and fading darkness around 04:03 am.

 

They’re flying to a Kurdish air base in Rojava, then taking an Israeli escorted cargo plane to Sinai where they can rendezvous with the Bedouin sand gypsies to move them toward the coast to catch a black freighter nuclear submarine. Nikholai Trikhovitch tells the sexy blonde Soviet taking care of his friend. She looks unconcerned, unsurprised by their tricky zealot subterfuges.

 

She’s never been a big fan of Sebastian’s close friends and they’ve never really liked her either.

“Why have you rescued me sir?” asks DeBuitléir to Dbrisk.

“No need for sir, we all work for our money brother,” says Dbrisk.

This is a highly common colloquialism in the Breuklyn Soviet.

“It is our ambition to be of service to the people of Ayiti and we’ve got a highly serious venture we aim to convince you to the take leadership of,” Dbrisk responds.

“Emma Solomon sends her fullest regard,” interjects Watson Entwissle.

Mickhi passes him a thick light grey leather binder containing the blueprint for Operation Marcus Garvey.

“Where are we ending up tomorrow tonight boys?” Dr. Yelizaveta Kay asks.

“We’re all going back to Africa eventually,” says Mickhi Dbrisk. But that just means they might all get killed.

 

In the cockpit Nikholai Trikhovitch is lighting up yet another Newport.

 

Dr. Yelizaveta Perechenova shrugs. She is after all under a long term contract and has in the last hour violated a principal sub clause. The close quarters of the cabin fill with tobacco smoke, the men remain mostly quiet while Mr. Avinadav DeBuitléir reads through an operations guide positing the logistics necessary to topple the government of Ayiti and liberate his long violated native land. The heart monitor beeps and an automated blood pressure cuff inflates and indicates that Adon is still alive. This is good, given the amount of data he’s carrying around in his head, and his place in the chain of command.

 

“For fuck sake, blat; put the fucking cigarette out Trikhovitch. I’m working here!” yells Dr. Yelizaveta Perechenova.

 

He obliges her. Only because his best friend Sebastian Adon once put a gun in his face and said, “My dying wish is that you follow that woman’s orders on my deathbed.”  And it was shortly after that moment of relative calm when some loud computerized beeping indicates that a squadron of fully weaponized predator drones unleashed their payload of rockets directed against the airship Flickering Flame.

 

 

 

 

Chapter 50

The Citadel, 2019ce

Breuklyn Soviet

 

 

Back in Breuklyn Soviet the end seemed nigh. Sky Drone raids had begun and terra drones were massing for deployment via huge airships and landing choppers. The Shi’a Muslim Brotherhood was digging in around Kensington, Bensonherst and Bayridge (Citizens Army 1); the ZOB and Uhuru had fortified the heavily urban zones of Downtown Brooklyn, DUMBO, and Brooklyn Heights and left a strategic reserve along the Eastern Parkway and Ocean Parkway lines (Citizen Armies 2 & 3). The Ultra-Orthodox Shomriim Militia men were preparing to hold Boro Park Commune and Crown Heights Commune (Citizen Army 4); the ZOB and Hezbollah had dug in deep around the Masjid St. Sophina, just north of the Green Light Zone, they were perhaps three stories below ground protecting the GHQ, protecting the pregnant Emma Solomon.

This subterranean base was also called the Citadel.

 

Two days ago Anya ordered a labor battalion to take all of the tombstones in the cemeteries around the Jackie Robinson Highway and build a barricade in case they tried to land drones on the Queens (Goddess Soviet border); and march into lawless East New York, which was presumably defended by Bloods, Crips, Latin Kings and King Pin Zoe Pound; but who knew. It mostly ate itself over the years and no one had really bothered to secure it.

 

“The missile defense grid remains down,” Anya states devoid of sentimentality, as long as it is down they have no ability to retaliate with a nuclear strike if attacked, as is inevitable.

 

“They can just roll right in and kill everybody then,” Dasha explains to her mother nervously watching on Skype from Russian Federation.

 

And then, shortly before midnight, the internet and interweb are cut off.

 

 

“Hold on to your asses,” says Oleg Leondovich Medved to his commandos departing into the vast web of tunnels and bunkers systems built in preparation of the re-occupation, everyone who can shoot has a gun.

 

 

Yet fatalistically no one high placed bought a seat on the Black Freighters. Not a single person except a couple hundred scared Ivoryish reform families and a couple thousand Russians with papers claiming to be Ivories. None of the Ultra-Orthodox budged.

They loaded out rifles and gas masks through.

 

And the air raid alarms went off shortly after midnight. Gas was rolling through the streets. And people began choking and dying in their won fluids and filth, even ones that had attended the Sarin drills.

 

As per the protocols, everyone knocks out their walls to allow roaming firing positions and the sub-basement tunnels have been du long ago.

 

 

At Midnight thirty the U.A.S Join Special Forces Operations Command orders the inevitable Attack on Breuklyn Soviet first with thousands of drones, then with incendiary bombs and finally with the gas. The nuclear defense grid is cut off and all fighting back must be done now by hand and on our turf alone.

 

 

Tens of thousands die in their homes from the Sarin type gas. A simultaneous attack takes place on all free eastern states; the UAS has assaulted 64 positions of the confederacy but is focused on Atlanta, Newark, New York, Boston, and Detroit.

 

 

 

Tens of thousands hide in make shift bunkers as mechanical drones and resistance fighters from all factions armed with assault weapons and homemade bombs cat and mouse tooth and nail; eye for microchip all of over town, position by position, district by district. Rocket crews begin firing fire bombs back over the water at Manhattan.

 

 

But almost everyone has been evacuated except a few sickos watching the repopulation called a “re-occupation”, from their high tower multiplexes.

 

Every single thing we’ve been building here is now on fire.

 

 

 

Chapter 48

The Deep Desert, 2019ce

DUBAI

 

 

The low grade sputtering of air and space and moisture striking the hull makes an erythematic distraction from the moans of this dying rebel in front of me. At least he is no longer bleeding all over the place. I am already quite stained by him. I am sewing the port of the second arterial line into his right thigh when they yell back for me to secure myself; with quickness and immediacy.

 

“Incoming!” yells the pilot, the man who had introduced himself as Nikholai back at the derelict airstrip.

 

I buckle myself in adjacent to my critically injured patient. Sebastian Adon the famous Eastern-Western Rebel. Or, the cold blooded indiscriminate killer of woman and children. Sexual deviant and practitioner of black magic. Depending on whom you believe. I don’t have beliefs. I have a contract that explicitly prevents those.

 

And then something explodes right beside the plane and it pulsates and brutally shakes the whole cabin asunder.

Suddenly my blood pressure skyrockets from catecholamine release and it feels like we are falling. Like the pilot has totally lost control, and if I vaguely remember the past, which I mostly try not to anymore; then these men are better trained at driving ambulances than airships of any kind, and my ears; they go pop.

 

I smell smoke, but its tobacco smoke and I start cursing in Russian. And I’m annoyed that Nikholai the pilot is smoking again. Even in a shit show I’m working back here! As if there weren’t already enough good ways to die today.

 

            SUKA BLAT! (Shit Bitch!)

 

Although now buckled in three ways adjacent from my patient who is tied four ways to a red long board barely lucid, we all are viciously rocked about. There are periodic shock waves which send shudders through the plane, and the pressure bursts behind us rattle through the hull each time the plane ejects sensor flack detonating the rockets fired at us midair before they hit us.

 

Each time a rocket explodes it rattles the airship which is making my work harder, the work of keeping this subversive alive.

 

Adon. His name means very little to me sentimentally, now.

 

I met him again two days ago, but I knew him when we were younger allegedly. And so says a large bale of letters given to me last night by my boss’s daughter Hachi. Alexandre Perchevney told me that he’s connected to one of the radical separatist movements back east and that he’s now entered into some agreement with them. Alexandre Perchevney r told me that he’s worth a good deal to us alive, but I don’t need to know so much about him. Alexandre Perchevney says save and I save he says heal and I heal, he says fly and I get on the plane. And it will be that way for at least eight more years until I pay off my debt to the Bratva. 

 

I was briefed only partly as to who he is and was informed only ten minutes prior to their tumultuous arrival that he had been shot several times in the chest performing a messy little job for my employer. Some kind of prisoner exchange. My medical opinion had been that if they cared for his outcome it would have done us all well not to be flying anywhere, and then of course the federal authorities stormed our base shot just about everybody and it was all very much out of my hands from that point out.

 

The three other men on the flight are in various states of hiding panic. The two in the cockpit are yelling at each other about the drones that are firing on us. That there are three of them bearing down us, or so claimed the muscular black copilot with ted red locks wrapped up in a black cap tam.

 

The prisoner with dark black skin and black eyes is strapped in the cabin with me. He’s reading a document in a leather binder, periodically he looks up to see what I’m doing.

Lifesaving interventions.

 

The bullets are still deep inside Adon so there isn’t anything we can do outside an O.R. definitively. Except hemorrhage control and reperfusion with his own blood via the central line in his femoral artery. And maintaining the chest tube keeping the air and blood from collapsing his lungs. And digging out the bullets with a Cuban magnografter. All that fine science put to work.

 

“Put the cigarette out tovarish pilot!” I yell. And they ignore me.

 

            BLAT! The plane is flying rather fucking low. I can see out the window in their efforts to evade the drones we must be only several dozen meters above the desert floor. From what I know about aviation and the Mexican border, which is only a little; but that once we fly nine clicks south all manned craft will break off pursuit because the Chicano Narco-gangs have acquired SAM systems to take them down.

Presumably us too. But the drones will keep coming until we go down.  But who knows. From that I gather someone wants this chornay prisoner pretty bad. Because otherwise they’d just have shot our plane down and not be attempting to disable it.

 

“They must want you back pretty bad black man,” I tell him in between running my protocols.

“Me or your patient,” he says with a smirk.

“I’m nobody,” he says.

“Nobody’s nobody to somebody,” I say. But that Russian idiom doesn’t translate.

Another several shock waves hit the compartment. The prisoner doesn’t seem alarmed, or stop reading.  And then there’s what sounds like hard rain hitting us, the rattattat of burst machine gun fire and it rips apart the left wing.

And the plane begins to fall.

As the plane goes down, I don’t think so much about it. I will not say I am unafraid, but I am certain that this is not how we are meant to die. Although knowing what I know of both physics and biology, there is reason to suspect death is quite quickly encroaching.

The drones finally took the plane down.

And we careen out of control in a wild plummet of smoke and flame falling toward the red desert floor on the Mexican side of the border. There is all this shouting the men are doing. It is needless yelling. They hadn’t properly gauged the full capability of their adversaries.

 

You can’t just steal a political prisoner these days and hope to fly off over the border to freedom. This is the future after all!

 

Pause. The men keep yelling. My blonde hair is tied up under my green military cap and there is blood on my white medical coat and it’s the blood of my patient, who was also once my longstanding lover, fine I’ll admit it, who is also the accused terrorist named Sebastian Adon. Who many think are dead and soon might be again. This time with more permanence. And less than an hour ago he was shot four times in the chest and stomach and I’m not sure I can save him. And this plane is going down fast.

 

Observing my actions and reaction to our collective doom is the rescued prisoner. Still quit calm through all the smoke and flashing and fire and yelling.

 

As we free fall toward the desert and all these impending signals of death are lighting up and beeping and I feel as though if they had only listened to me earlier on, we’d all not be in this situation.

 

And I was trained in Cuba so I have my life saving interventions far beyond the level of Western medicine and in all this chaos, all this fubar muck and the men in the pilot seats are loudly deliberating whether to jump and jettison, or try and land this wreck in the rocky desert sands.  I was almost certain I could save Sebastian Adon and then the plane began to come apart when hit innumerable times with machine gun fire from those mechanized drones in pursuit.

 

I begin to recall a bit about these men I will perhaps soon share a flaming meteorite coffin ship demise with. Not via a micro briefing, but a Purim dinner party years ago in Breuklyn did I meet them. Not sure how that escaped me. The things you remember as death approaches.

 

And the former police man Nikholai Trikhovitch with his dark complexion and black suit is saying he’s going to try and emergency land the damaged airship and Mickhi Dbrisk the muscular dreadlocked Jamaican with his dreads tied up in a black Tam cap is saying we all need to parajump and the dark skinned political prisoner they just broke out an hour ago in a fire fight high way man ambush has black on black eyes and he doesn’t argue, but he urges them to pick quick. And I yell in Russian which I know the Jamaican and the former cop speak.

 

“I’m not trained for this and Sebastian is highly unstable!”

 

And it was a mostly good plan to steal this man in the middle of a prisoner exchange. It was well thought out and well-funded and these four men I’m flying with all possess exceptional abilities to survive nearly anything. And the prisoner had disappeared years ago and no one knew if he was even still alive, and according to the national press Adon had been confirmed dead three years ago. Confirmed dead and body recovered in that hostage crisis near Time Square. And this former cop has nothing to live for since he lost his wife, and me, well I’m someone’s property. I belong to the Russian Crime family that paid for my education. A house doctor for the Perchevney Bratva.

 

So if this plane goes down it’s a skeleton crew of the already and dead and disappeared.

 

But Mickhi Dbrisk, the bad man Jamaican paramedic has a rapid change of heart.

He tells Nikholai, “I’m taking control.”

“Dr. Perechenova please make sure Adon is completely secured,” he yells back at me.

 

Because he has two kids and a third on the way and he isn’t ready to die. And even if we’re all hard to kill, even if on this plane are four of most wanted human rights activists, or hardened terrorists depending on who’s side you’re on or what briefings you’ve read. Even if all of us have some mental training that lets us see further ahead and much further behind.

 

Mickhi and I have something to live for. He’s the father of three. And I have an old man that needs me to stay working so he gets the care and help he needs.

 

So I stay strapped in holding the hand of Sebastian Adon who’s not in very good shape. And Mickhi Dbrisk sets up the airship controls, and Trikhovitch watches the desert floor get closer and closer and beeping of sensors and smell of smoke increases. And the prisoner looks at me with black on black eyes.

 

And as death closes in on us all I achieve total recall of the past ten years. And I place my hand on Sebastian’s chest and the bullets pop out and his abdomen closes and bleeding stops. And the prisoner with black eyes grins at me.

 

And in the face of death, I wink. It’s been a wild ride.

 

Chapter 51

The Deep Desert, 2019ce

DUBAI

 

 

Flames and smoke and carnage. The hull is a crumpled metal skeleton.

 

“We don’t have to try walk to Kurdistan, but we cannot stay here,” says Mickhi Dbrisk. And the survivors quickly pick each other up and grab what is left and portable.

I look over the hull mangled massacre of steel and siding that once was Mr. Ryder Haske’s private plane. I look over Sebastian Adon unconscious and wrapped up in blankets on a carry stretcher that these three men will soon have to schlep several clicks to the east where we will wait in some gully until someone can come get us.

The drones are the least of my concern and that is not because we have a means to knock them out the sky, it is because I am more concerned about various thing I remember.

 

Amongst them that this famous terrorist is my husband under Ivoryish law. Freedom fight rather since he’s never killed anyone. Or has he. The fog over my past didn’t lift in one burst. It came back right before I…and I throw the bullets I’m clutching into the red sands.

And then in the sky the red and blue parachutes appear and we know we are rescued. In the skies above us are nearly forty four parachutists descending upon our position from the Brigade Cinqo de Mayo all 44 Bolvarians Hachi had helped smuggle out of town and over the border and back into the skies.

 

Bedouin flown fast planes are right behind them. And over the radio we here that the Cubans are flying in low with Med-EVAC choppers and all of us will be in Kurdistan by nightfall.

 

Atrocity, resistance and historic defense of the free eastern states goes on all night and into the day break of morning. Then they managed to get the internet back on to report who’s flags were still where.

 

The Bronx Bombers bring down a flying fortress by ramming 747’s into it from Idlewild Airbase. A second flying fortress goes down the same way over Breuklyn shortly after.

 

In vast bunkers below the Masjid St. Sophina mujahedeen guard a pregnant woman in her late teens in a plush and supportive suite. She has been in a coma for 1,001 nights, the duration of the three grouped killings and four full strange moons.

 

 

The name of this woman is Candidate One, an identical twin of Emma Solomon or perhaps the real one all along.

 

 

News arrives via People’s Television satellite communications and the Fire Station that the survivors of the “99th Special Operations Task Force”, that is to say Dbrisk, O’Domhnaill, and Trikhovitch, have successfully shot their way out of Las Vegas with Adon, DeBuitléir, Entwissle and a Ukrainian physician; crash landed in Mexico; hoofed it thirty miles under cover of darkness to an extraction point; and were retrieved by the survivors of the elite Pararescuemen detachment the Bolivarian Hot Shots of the Cinqo de Mayo Brigade, led by Raphael Ernesto Contreras. And now sixty four Pararescuemen, six rebels and the Ukrainian doctor are on Cuban fast copters headed straight for Ayiti.

 

 

But, Detroit Soviet no longer exists, bombed and gassed into nothing hood; and hand full of others took major-major bloody hits, atrocities carried out everywhere.

 

 

 

And that despite heavy hits and overwhelming casualties. The MicroRepubliks of Boston, Newark, ATL, Miami, Bronx, Goddess and Breuklyn along with virtually all of the others have held out against the many armies of General Lance Petreaus.

 

We all tip the bottle for the Detroit Soviet, where over a million citizen defenders perished.

 

At dawn it was confirmed by Rabbi Akiva Tatz, Imam Muhammad Ben Bah’allulah, and Babashanti All Stone that the mother of the messiah in the sub bunkers below Masjid St. Sophina has given birth to two bouncing auspicious babies, twins. A girl and a boy, one noire one blan.

 

And now the escapees are less than one hours estimated flight time out from Cange Outpost says the Fire Station. With them alive and well is the liberated Commander of the AyitianEmergency-Group. None other than Mr. Avinadav DeBuitléir. With them, and bleeding internally shot eight times and just barely alive is Sebastian Adon.

 

One certainly tense wrenching and fairly bloody hour later.

Amid a thunder of chopper blades, the mountain forest shudders. There are shouts from the night watch that the Commandos have arrived! Flying out of the Arabian deep desert a convoy of three Cuban Medevac choppers zipped across the deep desert just four hours prior and have touched down at the make shift airbase four kilometers from a Kurdish PKK Outpost.

They radioed ahead and said a member of the rebel leadership had been critically injured in the fire fight.

Paramedics from the Kurdish-Emergency-Group accompanied by a physician from the Kurdish Workers Party medevac Sebastian Adon back to a Medical Outpost along with Dr. Yelizaveta Kay. He is by then suffering from hemorrhagic shock the etiology being eight small round penetrating wounds to Left lower abdomen. For two nerve wracking hours Dr. Yelizaveta Kay has performed a range of medical interventions to keep him alive including using a snatched side arm to attempt to convince Commander Nikholai Trikhovitch to land the plane.

She clutched his bloody hand after all that could be done bio-medically seemed to only buy time; bags of colloids, the shock position, quick-clot packed into his open wound. He was bleeding inside himself. She was never helpless on the flying fortress crossing the Gulf she employed Cuban tricks, eastern tricks and Voodoo magic and biomedicine to keep him alive.

At some point Adon whispered something to her. She had turned Soviet winter pale and wiped out memories flooded back to her. Trading away ten years of life to forget him.

Dr. Emile Cange the chief physician of the Ayitian-Emergency-Group and a founder of Zamni Lasante met the dying Mr. Adon at landing field. For eight more nerve wracking hours, Dr. Cange assisted by Dr. Yelizaveta Kay, elite Cuban trauma surgeons and their Kurdish paramedic staff worked to save the pale officer’s life.

 

 

She finally wanders out of the medical bunker to find Adon’s tovarish and closest comrade puffing away on a menthol cigarette. She’s never forgotten just how hot it gets down here. She lived in Cuba for three years studying medicine.

 

 

“So you love him, again do you?” Nikholai asks Yelizaveta.

She shrugs indifferently.

“He’s been through lot. Birdy, you, and then Dasha.”

“But so have we all. He’s a troublesome man to have love you.”

“What did he whisper to you back there on the plane,” asks Trikhovitch.

She thinks about how to phrase her white lie.

“He begged my forgiveness and asked me to remember him,” says Dr. Kay.

“Sebastian never asks forgiveness for things he cannot control.”

“Believe what you want. I’ll have you know I’ve seen him beg on his knees more than twice. He was sorry I’m being hustled off to Africa when I have a sick father in Switzerland to worry about.”

Nikholai wonders how much Yelizaveta remembers. Or if Sebastian knows Dasha is very much alive back in Breuklyn Soviet. There hadn’t been time to talk heart shop.

“All he said was forgive me.”

That wasn’t true at all. He’d said another foolish thing about their past and completely failed attempts at their past love.

“Africa? You aren’t going in there. Standing Orders say no women in the war zone.” That was passed in close vote of the general membership at the last Club Congress. A hard vote and contentious issue since most of the leadership and many of the best fighters the Club has are women.

Yelizaveta just smirks, blood on her white lab coat, her hair a bit of a mess. She’s tells him to go fuck himself as her eyes flash grey, then back to gold.

Dr. Kay of course has the option to return to the U.A.S., but will chose to stay with her old friends and estranged associates for reasons not yet to be known. The contract is transferable.             Once Adon is stabilized and once DeBuitléir is sold on the plan and committed they will board a massive black freighter in the city of Port-au-Rebel, once called Port Au Prince and arrive several weeks later in the Persian Gulf.

And Adon will break and bend rules for her like usual.

 

Yelizaveta knows this because Maya has told her it would come to pass as it was written in the New Social Gospel.

 

It will take a month to get Sebastian back to relative health and ready for travel to Sinai Peninsula, then be smuggled down to the Wild West Indies. He’s in good hands on the Island nation who’s slave revolt two hundred years prior gave birth to the militant human rights ideology that the club came to fully embrace.

 

In the meantime. Sixty three rebel Free States resist union. A new ceasefire holds. And the nuclear option has been restored.

 

Most importantly. The candidate is in her third trimester.

 

Alexandre Perchevney informs his third daughter Hachi by 5am Las Vegas time, eight days after the single engine TELSA-Galati Airship named the Flickering Flame arrived safely in Rojava, that the arms and ‘assorted other collateral’ would be making its way by convoy to the Basis-Wadi-Faran as per plan sometime the following week.

 

“And where is Dr. Perechenova currently?” he asks.

“She is attending to Sebastian Adon who was shot several times during the liberation of Mr.  DeBuitléir. They are in Rojava.”

“Well then. They can keep her.”

“She’s been dead to you a long time father.”

“Well I doubt she even remembers.”

“Well you can always wake her up if it seems strategic.”

“Of course. Wake her up right next to that sleeping hero who so loves her.”

“He is incredibly hard to kill.”

“He’s more interesting and useful alive really.”

“Why are we doing this again? Helping these people I mean” asks Perchevney to his daughter Hachi in Bulgarian.

“For all the money my papa? For the power and glory added to House Perchevney?” she responds.

But Perchevney is one of the top richest self-made men on earth. And it isn’t about the money at all because sometimes, just sometimes you can’t buy revenge. You have to work hard for it just like everyone else.

 

That wasn’t just a doctor for hire after all that they borrowed. That was his first daughter Yelizaveta. Quite literally he now had skin, flesh? In the game, even if she is dead to him already emotionally.

 

Even if she doesn’t quite viscerally remember a day of her life before Cuba.

Whatever money cannot buy spiritually, it sure can buy enough sex, weapons or the high science to accomplish nearly anything else.

 

Chapter 52

Olofsen Hotel, Port-Au-Prince,

2019ce

Ayiti

 

Three of rest and love making, three months later.

 

In early 2019, once called the month of September, after just a month recuperating in the nation of Cuba; Adon, Dr. Kay, Dr. Emile Cange, and Watson Entwissle travel by jeep to Port-Au-Prince under the invitation and protection of Health Minister Geraldine Capois (twin sister of Tiputti) of the Lavalas Party; Ayiti’s predominant political organization. Minister Geraldine Capois and her younger brother the Minister of Public Emergency Tiputti Capois are now serving on the Cabinet of current government led by the ageing rebel leader elected now for the fourth time Jean Bertrand Aristide. Tiputti and Geraldine are dear old friends of Sebastian and Yelizaveta having served with them both five years prior in the Ayitian-Emergency-Group guerrilla medical column before, during and after the Great Revolt.

 

It has been rumored before and now clamor confirmed in the U.A.S. Corporate Press that he is in fact not dead, at all.

 

Sebastian is now a very, very wanted man in the U.A.S. But he couldn’t have picked a safer island to hide on. The Breuklyn Soviet and other sixty two entities in the eastern confederacy are riddled with assassins, snitches and spies. In Ayiti he and she might be the only blans in a hundred miles, but having bled for the Ayitian people in innumerous ways, both bear the Pin of Palmares which lets all know on whose side they stand.

Shortly after watching a beautiful Caribe sunset from a sprawling balcony at the Ayitian People’s Medical College in the mountain heights above the city in an area once called Kenscoff, now called Commune Amis-de-Peuble (Friends of the People); Watson, Sebastian, Yelizaveta and Dr. Emile Cange drive their black open side Jeep down Rue De Toussaint L’Ouvature, the newly built modern highway into the Capital with its solar powered street lamps, shade embankments, and fluttering flag canopies of blue and red.

This is Sebastian’s first night out since he was shot in the exodus. He is wearing a white linen suit which matches Yelizaveta’s white linen dress. Paramedic Watson Entwissle, who is an officer of high rank in the Ayitian Defense Forces on top of his affiliation with the Breuklyn Otriad, is wearing the olive green uniform of the national service with a simple pin of his rank, that of a Captain on the left lapel, the flag of Palmares on his right arm, the palm tree surrounded by cannons and flags and the tree of life. Dr. Emile Cange is in business causal having met so many world leaders over the past four decades it is rarely any cause for fancy.

 

Dr. Cange who painstakingly helped vastly expand the vast multi-national Parastate medical apparatus known as “Partners in Health” is never tired or will ever be retired. What a great man named Paul Farmer once began in the village of Cange so many years ago with the martyrs Paul Farmer, Ophelia Dahl, Thomas J. White, and Dr. Jim Yong Kim is now providing a “preferential option for the poor in Healthcare” in over sixty four nations worldwide.

He is a dear old comrade to Adon though abhors violence of all kinds. Yelizaveta Kay did her residency alongside him at the HUEH, Port-Au-Prince General Hospital at the height of the Great Revolt. Even when former Present a Second time for Life Jean-Claude Duvalier ordered the massacre of all blan on the island as final desperate measure, even after the second quake, the hunger strikes, and the flooding she stayed with Emile serving the medical needs of the Ayitian people. That’s how she earned her pin.

The jeep’s headlights cut through night, but it isn’t as bad as the old days. There are street lights now, also electricity and sanitation. Watson is driving, though Farmer knows the roads best, most of Watson’s live was spent in the Breuklyn Soviet until he and Adon returned five years ago to enlist in the ranks of the uprising led by Aristede, Lavalas, and the Ayitian peasantry against the Dictator Jean Claude Duvalier; the Brazilians, U.A.S., and Nepalese Occupational Authorities, as well as the paramilitary forces of the Ruus, Columbian, Mexican, Dominikani drug cartels. The incomplete disorder they are here to finish and bring to level.

They arrive at the fortified gates of newly renovated Hotel Olofsen at 8pm on the dot. Its white wooden gingerbread spires, its walkways draped with voodoo flags, its epic deck with view of half the city; this is where the uprising essentially began. Armed guards in black suits look them over and quickly salute Captain Entwissle, though they recognize Farmer’s face immediately and Kay shortly after and salute them too. Adon holds the rank of Staff Sargent in the Otriad, but abhors wearing uniforms unless he has to.

 

They all salute back; such a silly ritual thinks Dr. Emile Cange.

 

From the table they are seated at one can take in the full majesty of the island capital, see what has been accomplished in the years since the temblor killed 300,000 and reduced the place to its very foundations.

They can see Independence Day preparations underway across the city.

 

“What you’re proposing is not possible to accomplish so fast if you do not allow the use of lethal force against the enemy,” states DeBuitléir.

They all meditate on that, each thinking of the many thousands slain so far in the previous seven years of the revolt.

“Maya proclaims that it is,” Adon finally counters.

“It is,” she declares, “but of course not without incredible courage and risk.”

He looks into the ginger bread horizon.

“And why should I feel alright signing off my nation’s resources to Russian mobsters, and northern radicals, put myself in the debt of the Israelis and Persians, and allow thousands of armed men to run lose in my country? I feel as though you already know what I will say about your contract and operation Marcus Garvey as you call it.”

 

“Don’t forget about the Cubans and the Dominicans, they want their pieces too,” says Maya Sorieya Emma Solomon.

 

The real fucking Maya. Not the candidate brought back and protected because she was shot so many times in the Millennium raid she could never bear the promised ones again.

“Blessing to you on the birth of your children by proxy in Breuklyn Soviet,” says Dr. Emile Cange bowing his head to the two foremost leaders of the revolution; DeBuitléir and Solomon.

“Thank you brother,” Avinadav says, “peace be unto you.”

“Let us read together the communique in a seated circle,” states Maya, “as we used to in the days before.”

 

 

Communique 02

[Observances of the January 1st Movement]

 

Please remove the battery from your phone and read this pamphlet aloud with a small group.

 

Distributed 1 January, 2015, 5775

 

  • Partisans Oath

 

  • We all have a duty to act.
  • In our hearts,
  • We know that people should not live as they do.
  • Humanity was born free and equal,
  • Yet, across this earth lies broken,
  • Dying hungry and in chains.
  • It is our duty to act that unites us.
  • To act in association for these promised rights.
  • Medicine, Education, and Emancipatory Development;
  • Are our primary tools against injustice.
  • We promise to wield these tools on the front lines of suffering
  • We will build the world we wish to see.
  • Seed by Seed.
  • Brick by Brick.
  • We carry the torches of the change makers who fell before us.
  • Fighting boldly for an idea.
  • That we were born free woman and men.
  • That we will never surrender.
  • That we will never accept anything short of full freedom.
  • Our numbers are man and each day multiply.
  • In the face of mounting injustices.
  • For while fighting isolated and in darkness,
  • We have become resourceful.
  • As realization spreads that this is not how we must live.
  • We stand ready to defend
  • The Impoverished.
  • The Wretched.
  • The Victimized.
  • The Enslaved.
  • We are prepared to struggle as long as we must.
  • Generation by Generation.
  • Until every last man, woman and child is also free.
  • In unity there is great strength.
  • Because I love my brothers and my sisters,
  • My mother and my father,
  • My children, my friends, my comrades
  • And also the suffering stranger
  • This is why I have joined the Association
  • And it’s Partisans,
  • Placed myself on the side of humanity,
  • And enlisted in the Resistance.
  • Now that my eyes are open,
  • I will leave no person behind the lines of war and poverty.
  • I will live my life as friend of the people.
  • I will never look away from the truth.

 

Resistance, Development, Consciousness and Emancipation in the 21st Century begins with our boldness. Our complete rejection of the atrocities and structural violence forced upon us by the world system.

 

  1. We Respect our bodies and minds.

We respect the fundamental power of teaching and learning, popular education as a means to advance the condition of our collective human people. Conscious, critical thinking is the most powerful weapon we have. Our minds and our ability to utilize them in the process of the liberation struggle and beyond is the opening through which emancipation takes the form of mass awakening.

 

We can only be kept as slaves if we allow our consciousness to be subsumed by lies, stress, brutality and oppression forced upon us to keep us divided, working and weak.

 

We don’t put poison in our body. We don’t eat disgusting and unhealthy things. We don’t take drugs that don’t have an overt medical purpose for a chronic condition. We abstain from alcohol and cigarettes whenever possible. Alcohol depresses your central nervous system and lowers your consciousness for thirty days. Tobacco smoke is one of the most holistically unhealthy things you can put in your body. Avoid over consumption. We engage in regular physical activity and meditation. We dance, run, play, sing and enjoy our lives. Above all we avoid television; as well as violent pornography and video games by every means necessary. These things pollute us and prevent us from seeing the world as it really is.

 

  1. Don’t believe the lies about false consciousness and identity.

 

Other than biological function, sexual orientation and the physical presence of your sex organs

all other aspects of identity; gender, race, class, caste and especially your proscribed religion and your assigned nationality were constructed specifically to divide and exploit you. We continuously urge all people to refrain from acts of organized violence driven by imaginary, unseen entities they cannot see or invisible lines across territories put there to control your movements, harvest your taxes and complete exploit you.

 

All free thinking, good people are welcome in this movement. There is no discrimination to involvement as long as the observances are strictly upheld. No identity politics. No identity based organizing, this is a movement for achieving human rights and needs; securing environmental sustainability on this earth and achieving economic equity. Securing for all people Maslow’s needs & the United Nation’s codified Human Rights via the 3 pillars of human development; these are our movement’s ends.

 

We respect and enhance the power of indigenous knowledge and do our work on the basis of indigenous need. We need to keep engaging the people in their own liberation. We need to make the raising of consciousness and the enhancement of capability the most integral aspect both the resistance and the Great Revolt.

 

  1. We lead with our deeds.

 

We have no centralized leadership. We have no titles or chains of command, except when necessary to designate operational function. It is better to enter the movement with your own reorganized group, party association, union, religious or social group, chapter, detachment, otriad or cell. It is best to come to the table alongside your family and friends.

 

  1. We save lives, we don’t ever take them.

 

No killing, no harming or injuring people; no weapons, no violence, no vandalism no destruction of property. Any who kill or any who destroy property [that is ours by having been paid for it with our work and taxes] is immediately disqualified from this social movement. Nothing on earth pleases then oligarchy more than violence for it lowers human consciousness to the most animal level. They have and always will attempt to provoke a violent response from the resistance.

 

  1. We don’t ever underestimate our enemy.

 

 Our enemies means of surveillance and widespread application of torture and violence in particular. Their control of linguistics, history, and science. Their vast resources and their willingness to kill to protect them. No cell phones at meetings, batteries out. No transmission of sensitive materials over computers. No rosters or taking attendance. Don’t say loud and unnecessary things in cars, homes or public places. We believe in unity and only trust what we see with our own eyes. We submit every activity or endeavor to randomized control trials, we advocate and replicate things proven to work in three or more places. Do not allow the oligarchy to define the aims and aspirations of the movement. Do not allow traitors, spies and government agitators to breach your security. Do not make it easy for them to kill, imprison, harass and disappear members and sympathizers of the movement.

 

  1. [Besides killing people or destroying property]; EVERY AND ANY OTHER tactic may be actively deployed against the 206 national oligarchic collectives and their exploitative agents.

 

Members of the J1 Movement are strictly committed to militant nonviolence. Violence is counter to human rights. Counter to consciousness and proven to escalate all violations of rights when implemented. Members are completely prohibited from taking human lives or destroying property. Those we fight are monsters and we must refuse to degrade our noble struggle by succumbing to their vile methods.

 

Via sustained and strategic militant nonviolence and supply side resistance we shall hit them in their pockets. It is the only thing they care about. Hit their assets; their financial architecture; their banking systems; their media communications; their elite institutions; their leisure assets; their advertising and control systems; their supply chains; their work sites, the commercial centers of major cities; especially anything that encourages labor exploitation, slavery and human rights violations at the periphery.

 

Prevent goods, commodities and energy resources to be easily carried back to the 26 nations of the global economic core.

 

  1. 7. Control over the means of development is the pathway to our freedom.

 

The Resistance is founded on the world we build in front of us not upon the ashes of the Oligarchy. We are a movement founded on life and vibrancy. We are a teaching movement. We are a healing movement. A school and hospital building movement. A movement that places emancipatory development as the highest priority to activities and operations. We are therefore attempting to teach 3.5 billion people how to fish movement. We are based among the people in all 206 national plantations that suffer most under the iron heel of oligarchy. The J1 Movement and those that support it believe the best offensive against corrupt rule is to demonstrate viable functional alternatives. The duty of each state is provide for needs, rights and human development. The illegitimacy of our oppressors is based upon the notion they protect us.

 

Vast abuses in all 206 plantation states demonstrate that these governments are wholly illegitimate. Rather than fight states we shall construct parallel ones and give our people true alternatives to bondage.

 

  1. Solidarity forever. Every single other human is your sister and your brother, as an injury to one is an injury to all; this movement and all its sympathizers, brigades, detachments, party groups, cells and affiliated sister groupings must keep the resistance disciplined and in the field until all 206 national oligarchies are completely defeated. Generation by generation; as long as this war must continue. Not one woman, man or child is to be left behind the lines.

 

If you sympathize with and seek to actively support the general aims & objectives of the J1 Movement; endorse this pamphlet and pass it along to another group. Do not await reinforcements or look for further direction. Engage in critical consciousness building, emancipatory development and [or] resistance planning operations in your immediate community.

 

You, your working group and your partisans must sustain the struggle as long as necessary until reinforcements are available. Do not take lives, do not take prisoners.

 

We salute you in advance for your heroism.

 

 

 

 

“That very well written, who wrote it?” Victor Emile Cange asks. Not Sebastian, it was far too succinct and to the point.

 

Emma Solomon smiles and turns to Avinadav and says, “Yalla.”

Arabic or Hebrew for, let’s go. With General Obenson Etienne, Anya Drovtich and Hachi Perchevney on the holophone; Adon witnessed DeBuitléir and Solomon sign the declaration of war on the government and occupational forces of Ayiti on behalf of Breuklyn Soviet.

 

It was immediately via Ayitian General Tiputti Capois, Watson Entwissle and Dr. Emile Cange endorsed by the Republican Forces of Ayiti-D.R and shortly after all of the Wild West Indian Federation, submitted also to BRICS, ALBA and CARICOM.

 

It had looked like rain before but right now over Port Au Prince now, it looks beautiful and clear. But that can change in the blink of an eye.

 

Chapter 53

Pic de Macaya, 2019ce

Ayiti

 

 

A year before the infamous jail break they had once sought out a man in fading years who wished to perform one more glorious act. The Commandant was a well-traveled salesman of death, when they finally caught up to him he was well within the wilderness of place called Chain de la Sella.

 

All the way up in the mountains it got cold and they could see the lights of the burning embers of villages for miles and hear the voodoo drums everywhere.

 

He’d been running from himself again. They found him using satellite tracking, but still needed to hire a native to hunt him into the Island’s desolate mountain heights of mountains beyond mountains. Now they were up on the slopes of Pic de Macaya, the highest point on the southern seaboard.

 

Watson Entwissle and Sebastian Adon, humping Israeli military frame packs led by a native boy on their goude coin named Adme, a fearless young Ayitian.

They walk up on his ‘89’ around twilight. He draws his iron on them.

“Who the fuck are you? Sand Gypsy bandits?” asks the Commandant Mikhail Mastrovitch, a Chechen War Vet and Special Forces Pararescueman with a fully loaded sholem.

And then he recognizes Adon, his old student whom he has not seen in seven whole years. Believed to be dead by all.

 

He’s got salt and pepper hair that was once according to photographs curly blonde.

 

“We are here to buy you, and also cook dinner,” states Adon.

“Buy me dinner where exactly? This is Desert ducking Island.”

“Buying you is the main objective, the Afghan dinner is complementary,” says Watson.

 

Adme in his native language Ayitian Créole says something unintelligible.

 

“I don’t speak yer native language little cousin,” bellows the Commandant.

“I said these are not blan to trifle with,” the boy responds.

“He’s quite right,” explains Watson, even though he isn’t all that blan to be called that.

There is a desperate silence in the cold, northern air of this place. No light besides the setting sun on the outskirts of civilization.

As Sebastian Adon prepares a kosher dinner for the four of them of marinated lamb, yams and pilaf, Mikhail Mastrovitch gazes off into the abyss looking for a way to absolve himself of a highly militant and at least partially wasted life. Watson Entwissle in a dark black thermal pea coat explains the particulars. Of which there were many. Mikhail stares off into the wilderness taking it in so it seems. Watson notes that the mountains here remind him of his home Black Mountain back on Ayitian Island, but certainly much colder. He also deliberates internally why his partner Adon trusts this wild aging mercenary or that Dominikani bagman that told them where he was hiding.

“Well how much combat experience to these men have?” Mikhail asks.

“Irregular amounts,” states Sebastian.

“Almost none,” purposefully lies Watson Entwissle.

“Cousin, these days no one has none,” Mikhail Mastrovitch retorts.

Watson remembers the three day battle for Kenscoff where the Lavalas peasant militia battled the Brazilian and Nepalese forces to a near standstill. And the epic mechanized surprise attack the Ayitian-Emergency-Group engaged in aided by an airborne regiment of the Breuklyn Otriad. The world hadn’t seen asymmetrical warfare like that since the Israeli land grabs of 48, ‘56, and ’67. Also ‘82, ’05, ’12 and also ’13 on behalf of the Canaanites fighting back.

“Well I’d say we’re light on our feet,” says Adon.

Sebastian Adon thinks briefly of the amount of times he and Watson have cut open sex traffickers and slavers in the fortified places they thought they could hide over the past few years.

“Well I’m glad he’s so optimistic,” smirks Watson.

“How many men did you say?” inquired Mikhail Mastrovitch.

“Right now just fewer than 2,000 committed.”

“All with guns and equipment?”

“About that pending. Actually all they have at this point is strong will and green money,” lies Watson.

“So you don’t yet have a means to even wage yer war?”

“Let me interject,” states Watson Entwissle, “our money is very, very green money. We’ll pay you handsomely to train this little battalion. And they don’t have to be able to win a land war in East Asia neither. They’re off to neutralize a marauding band of rapist brigands with pickup trucks and Kalashnikovs that won’t be but three times their number.”

“So says yer intell.”

“So says the Israeli & Cuban intell too. And that cousin is damn good intell,” cuts in Sebastian.

“You can outfit a force this size quickly?” Mikhail Mastrovitch says munching, noshing really on a cigar.

“We can have the whole battalion on the Isle of Youth by the end of the year, outfitted and armed.”

“Isle of Youth? In Cuba?”

“We’ve been offered a bunker facility by the Cubans and possible air support pending survival by the Israelis. And the administration of our own government has pledged a small sum in a round-about way.”

“Are you guys U.A.S. or Confederates?” Mikhail Mastrovitch asks.

This is serious question these days as the Second Civil War looks so inevitable, much of the ex-pat population is in general sympathy with the Autonomous Movement and the Soviet Confederation, but Mr. Mastrovitch holds several colors of passport.

“Let’s just say we all voted Obama only in the last two elections,” says Sebastian Adon.

The little Indian has his hand out for green backs. Watson Entwissle pays him. Communicates in hand-sign the boy can stay for dinner if he’d like. And everyone’s hungry who climbs mountains so the boy expediently digs in.

“How long do you expect your battalion to drill for?”

“Three to six months. Then three columns organized by ethnicity will proceed to invade the North, South and Central Ayiti by land, sea and air respectively,” explains Adon.

“Why are you dividing your men by ethnicity?”

“He’s not at liberty to say,” cuts in Watson.

“What kind of ordinance will be at your disposal once deployed?”

“Kalashnikovs, Han replications, Israeli high-tech, irregular small arms all with non-lethal ammunition and a couple dozen bullet proof ambulances,” says Adon.

“Well, I guess a bullet proof ambulance is a little better than a pickup truck,” notes Mastrovitch.

“I know who you are working for,” Mastrovitch suddenly says to Adon.

“Well I doubt you know their real names,” Adon responds.

“You’re that noire-Yid human rights mafia from the Breuklyn Soviet aren’t you?”

Adme laughs. Says something in his native.

“What was that frère?” Watson asks.

“He said, you get what you pay for,” says Mastrovitch who speaks the native language after all.

“What’s in a name?” Watson pontificates.

“So you’ll help train our people?” asks Adon.

Mikhail Mastrovitch doesn’t say anything hasty.

Watson takes a briefcase clipped onto his rucksack and opens it in front of Mikhail Mastrovitch, the brief case sneaks open with a piercing click.

“In case your civic duty fails you, here’s half a million up front, as per contract, one million more at completion of training, and four million more in the event of successful ground operations at culmination of invasion. It’s a merit based outfit.”

Mastrovitch is staring at what’s sitting on top of the money. Laminated photographs of his wife, three sons, their grandkids, and a spread sheet of every friend he has with home addresses and contact numbers. He’d thought he was a more secretive man.

“Everyone says you’re quite good at bombs and murder and to be trusted at the arts of war, and we’re bad people sometimes too, but we’re not hard criminals,” explains Sebastian Adon, “But, since we’re about to do serious work and we need you to be cognizant that we are not to be fucked with.”

“The point I think has been made before introduction. You are after all two of the founding members of the Breuklyn Bath and Rifle Club,” Mastrovitch mutters, “I’ll need three weeks to round up a suitable training crew, about a dozen men. I’ll include in my contract their salaries of course but I will need your leadership to procure some basic training equipment as per a list I’ll submit.”

“I think you’ll find our Isle of Youth facility quite amicable to the needs of your training potential team.”

“So one year from now, for a year straight after than in Isle of Youth as per contract?” has asks.

“Any questions?” Watson asks.

“Well the only one that matters. Who do you all work for ultimately?”

“For G-d and Breuklyn cousin, that’s all you got to know,” says Adon.

Commandant Mikhail Mastrovitch had trained the mujahidin who started Al-Qai’da in the Reagan-Bush years, the Anti-Contras of Gran Columbia now responsible for South to North trade in Women and Cocaine, and had built up the brutal right hand men of dictators on three continents. He’d never trained actual freedom fighters before. It would be a good last mission. A reason to come out of extended exile and early retirement. Maybe even go to heaven.

“You sure I’m the man for this job?” Mastrovitch asks.

“After all the murder you’ve created in the world to secure the white man this is the last chance you’ll ever have to cross over to the other side,” Adme retorts in flawless Americano before anyone can respond.

 

Adon grins. Breathes out cold air which looks a lot like smoke.

“What the funny little Ayitian said,” asks Sebastian Adon.

“Just teach us all how to dougie,” says Watson Entwissle.

 

 

Chapter 54

Jacmel, 2019ce

Occupied Ayiti

 

 

In Jacmel on the Southern coat of Ayiti it is almost time for another Carnival. Masques, revelry and paper machete abound. Sebastian is up and about three months into recuperation walking on the main rue with Dr. Perechenova by his side.

There’s was an amour obscure.

 

All Dasha Andreavna’s brutally short letter, handed to him in the hospital against commandant Rafael Ernesto Contreras’ better judgment told him was that she had gone back to her “husband” in Breuklyn Soviet. That she might be killed in the coming attack and real world life was too short to squander on any long distance relationship. And, that their life time was timeless, there was room for the old and the new. She wished him luck though. They just didn’t share any of the same afterlife goals.

He broke open his hand bunching a flood barrier.

 

And then the woman that saved him, the woman that he’d once saved. The first daughter of Alexandre ‘Sasho’ Perchevney who he’d saved from an upper Oligarch named Kahn and the blizzard of 2010 kissed him.

 

To keep his stitches from coming open.

 

Look blan kissing! Every Ayitian smiled and yelled and began taking camera pictures. He had her in a cab an hour later. It was just that congested with voyeurs.

The first time he put it in her it hurt. She ripped him down to size first emotionally, humbling him in nine months of letters directed to expose the arrogance of his ways. She asked him, well he begged asking, questions about all his plots, schemes motives and dreams.

That was almost ten years ago. Before the Revolt. Before the Great Disorder. Before the trial and before he first arrived in Ayiti on the eve of tremors and carnage.

They had tried to make their letter writing not turn into anything invasive. She tried rather hard not to let him kiss her too often, or to let him become an interference in her highly Soviet individualist life. But, on the last night of Hanukah and nearly seven months into their highly old school hand pressed courtship from the back of his ambulance to the University in Stonybrook by mail, well he’d won her, for a least awhile.

And soon after she let him have her. At least for a time.

He had been so dashing then, so polite and impressive in his blue uniform driving out to her university to visit on his pass days. He was an escape into a world of grand plots and mystery and foreign adventure and he saved lives for a living then. Even the idea of letter writing had been wonderful she used to lecture him on scientific advancement, marine mammals and also had tutored him in Russian and he exposed her to the wide world of the human right movement. Together between her classes and many rounds of naked showers and make out sessions where she’d deny him any gratification but to caress her, they designed the first blueprint. The operations guide used to train Ayitian emts and mass smuggle equipment and trainers into that nation. It was the only semester in in university she got Cs.

She made him wait three months before she sucked his cock and four months before she let him get take her completely. She had reveled in the control she had over him even going so far as to make him produce medical documentation that he had no diseases of the bedroom. She had only let five men sleep with her up until then and he was a carnal animal, and even though he would refuse to specify how many women he’d had, she delighted in making him work especially hard for her.

There had been some high minded thoughts about love making. But when she gave into him he ravaged her like a little whore. He pulled her blonde hair, he pushed her to her knees, he pressed her roughly against the bed, and the floor and staircase and he fucked her hard as she ordered him to. She loved it, it went on all night. It was nice to have a man make her cum with his own cock. She wanted him for quite longer then she’d cared to admit, but her powers over him were addictive. The waiting was vital. And he sure could enthusiastically fuck. There was a truly dark side of her that craved this kind of hard handed affection. But he was unaware of how to truly love then even if he thought otherwise. He had to be taught. And there were a lot of issues of course with his condition that complicated everything. But the carnal side of them both kept the relationship going far longer than she might have normally allowed a man who lived so lawlessly. And he was always getting arrested. Or faking his own death.  Most importantly her mother did not approve.

And he was a terrorist! She could never forget that. But most importantly the daughter of bipolar doctor carried away long ago to the mental hospital gulag by ambulance men, could never have a life with a bipolar ambulance man, terrorist or not.

But she loved being fucked by him. He could go for hours and hours and he’d do what she told him to and he’d love her and then brutally take control of her. But it ended outside the bedroom. He was a puppy to her when they got off a bed. Foolishly devoted and she could get anything out of him she wanted.

And then their prolonged separation at her insistence helped nothing. He erased her for some time to orchestrate the next stretch of the war. First they took Breuklyn, then all of Ayiti. And then she allowed the letters to resume, but would not entertain even the thought of a public visitation or a private one.

And all his words since Ayiti had been so sweet, so longing. But it was rough and prolonged violent sex, nine months’ worth the first time. Her naked body ravaged sometimes for several days when time allowed. He’d cuff her hands sometimes. He’d bite her tits and slap her big Russian ass as he entered her ferociously from behind with a belt around her neck.  Sometimes he could really cross a line, but she was dirty and he was bipolar, which meant he could go from very degrading hard sex to playtime and pillow forts, almost on command.

 

Now this was different. On a soft huge grey blanket on the ridge, on the eve of invasion he channeled ten years of sadness, failure and longing into rounds of pleasure worthy of her for the first time.

Sometimes long ago after their violent fucking she caught him smiling, beaming really at her like a love drunk school boy and they took each other again sometimes, sometimes with remarkable attention to depth of their passion. Not just fucking slowly as she had always assumed was the only way to teach a man from America to make love.

But tonight his rough ambulance-man hands grip her thighs as he thrusts inside her and he tells her he loves her and kisses her over and over again delighted and writhing in pleasure from the full scope of her attentions. She pushes him on his back. She bites her lip and pulls his brown hair, groaning in delight. Sweat drips across them as they slide into and thorough each other and he calls out her again into the desert night.

“Yelizaveta!” he yells out in ecstasy. If there was another name he had yelled wasn’t it just the name of ghost who had inevitably betrayed him?

What happened in Ayiti during the earthquake was a subject of some great debate.

They’d near been inseparable lovers up until his third expedition there, but that collapsed in madness too. They’d been day to night, letter to letter saving in the killing fields of Port-Au-Prince, but why-why so long apart each time?

That is because the first time was rife with tragedy and violence.

The night before deployment when Yelizaveta truly loved Sebastian within an inch of his half-Hebrew life, she swears one cannot love a dead man if you yourself fear death, but a man setting himself up to die for cause needs a good witness and partner. But this was a bit untrue. He’d have tried to do it all alone if he could have willed it. And anyway he’s very hard to kill. Supposedly so he claimed several times in pillow talk that he dreamed he’d live until age 88 and die in fire fight in the Bronx. Crazy talk from a love drunk crazy man. She loves him sometimes because he is so ready to rise to the occasion. She hates him for so many things he can’t even remember.

He has same condition that ultimately did her father in and drove the whole family into huge debt that she is still paying off with her work for Perchevney.

 

“You’re not a bad lover for a man shot just three month ago.”

“You’re not a bad lover for a woman who swore I was dog and that she could never lay eyes or hands on me again.”

“I’m staying with you here in Ayiti you must realize Neshama,” she declares.

She’s hasn’t called him that in years. My Soul. It’s what he always has called her.

“Maya says you’re wide open after saving me.”

“I told Maya you haven’t killed anyone, lately.”

“I haven’t,” he lies instinctively.

“You’re full of complete shit as usual.”

“What does your contract say you can’t do?”

“I don’t really care anymore. Who is even working for whom! My contract with the Perchevney Bratva is a little less specific than my contract with your, shall we say, your partner in high thought crimes.”

“Solomon’s a great trickster.”

“Solomon’s the big boss. A goddess amongst insects. The queen maker and the king.”

“What’s a god to a non-believer?” he asks.

“You don’t believe in anything,” retorts knowing he’s sometimes called an anarchist.

“I believe in the messiah, in the Mahdi and the blue print called the New Social Gospel written by their mother father. I believe also in love. And in limiting my killing. I didn’t kill anyone who didn’t deserve it. Even all those people held hostage shot blown up in the four so called restaurants of Vegas were buying sex and rolling dice.”

“Well you shouldn’t kill anyone anyway. It’s a war crime. Your rescue escapade certainly provoked them into attacking Breuklyn. Tens of thousands lost their lives in every Soviet.”

“We’re in the middle of a huge war in case you hadn’t noticed.”

“Well stop killing people, or I can’t love you anymore like I used to. Fucking you is phenomenal. You give too much of shit.”

“I’ll try, but I think we will have to kill a few more people here and there. We’re about to, you know, invade a whole war torn genocidal country. I haven’t killed anyone lately like in the past month.”

“But you soon you will again?”

“Well only people that deserve it.”

“Fuck man!”

“Can you still love?”

“Yes, but I won’t be able to treat you. I have a real sick old man. I signed a long contract. That you do remember.”

“I know. Perchevney is paying for your father’s care in Switzerland,” he says sarcastically. Not like he’s your father.

“And my mother’s newfound life of leisure, don’t forget my loyalties.”

“And Solomon?”

“Sold her my soul. Perchevney only owns my body. So don’t get yourself shot again. I’ll treat the suffering strangers as you provide the appearance of more New Social Gospel type miracles. I can’t believe I’m following a dead man into his own hell, yet again, but it’s a ten year contract and you aren’t supposedly supposed to dying anytime soon.”

“I’d say don’t come, but you’re real a tough woman to argue with. So I’d be honored if you were watching my back again. And it’s been said I can’t die until the age of 88, so you have a good long time if you claim it. To come as many times as you see fit.”

“All I’m going to do is watch,” smiles Yelizaveta Kay. He imagines she’s blushing, but Post Soviets don’t blush.

“I like it when you watch. It makes me work harder,” he responds.

She presses a hand written note into his palm, looking at him with guarded thanks and near certain longing.

 

The note says:  “If you want it you can get it for the rest of your life.”

 

They head back to Isle of Youth to rejoin the Cuban detachment and prepare to fly out to Ayiti the very next day.

 

 

Chapter 55

The Alexy Navalny Campaign Safehouse, 2010ce

Odessa

 

 

Dr. Yelizaveta Kay has there golden eyes that fluctuate between hazel, green and stunning. She has never met an Amerikanski that can properly pronounce her last name, and it doesn’t properly fit on her identity card, so she had it shortened down to ‘Kay’.

Her eyes pierce you and judge you at the same time and that judgment is normally rather harsh.

 

They often mean to say “go fuck-you”, but they still seem to drive all the boys wild. In the summer she’s a natural blonde, in the winter a red head. She can have any man she wants, but has a very sick father and this places upon her a number of obligations. A man who in another place called the former Soviet Union was a physician, a man of power and a puller of teeth. Then, something broke in him just after they arrived in the United American States. He was quite brilliant once, perhaps still is under all the salt in the wounds. He languished for a time in and out of psychiatric facilities and the family accrued increasing debt. So Yelizaveta became Zivia Kay, and put aside other men as well ideals for cold ambition to keep her mother out of poverty and her father from the hands and needles of the hospitaliers.

And that is her story and she is sticking to it.

She was a premed Postsoviet Beauty.

The breeze is blowing on a beautiful black sea. Two women of alarming, head turning disposition sit across from each other. One has brown flowing hair and a leather jacket. The other once a blonde, now her hair has been died former Soviet crimson.

On the table is rather substantial contract. They are seated on a veranda looking out upon on the Port of Odessa. In the next room a unit of Ayitian medical officers and their Ukrainian counter parts are setting up a makeshift O.R. in the living room of the safe house. She fully intends to sign the contract in front of her.

It will affect her whole entire life. It comes with a scripted back story. She must never waver from it. And she was just eighteen years old when that happened. Shortly after a certain incident which drove she and family to the very edge. That was almost a decade ago. But she remembers the conversation she had before she signed her life away. In a playback that she rehashes periodically, it occurs as if in present terms.

 

Conducted in hushed low Russian:

“Who do you work for exactly Ms. Solomon,” she asks a buxom brunette with a brown leather jacket a red bandana tucked in the left pocket.

“Certain mighty factions that prefer three letters to a name-nameless, but nothing particularly likely to worry a god fearing, human loving person like yourself Ms. Yelizaveta Kay. I prefer, as does your potential employer your former Soviet name. It has far greater connotations of your true hadar.

“What does that mean again?”

“A lot of things. In this case; your utter strength of will power.”

“You can call me Dasha Andreavna for all I care if my father gets better, the debt goes away and I end up with a valid western medical license.”

“Did you read the whole thing?”

“Of course, I read the whole thing.”

“The ‘patients, prisoners and students’ clause?”

“Yes. I can only treat certain people.”

“Who can’t you treat?”

“People that kill the innocents. Or kill at all.”

“Do you speak passible Spanish?”

“Yes. I used to date a passible gentleman who put me on to it.” Or bellowed it while he fucked the life out of me in hand cuffs, she notes mentally.

“Do you get along well with Noires?”

“They’re ok. Not like Adon does.”

“Fair enough. Sign and date right there, there and there. Also behind page seven, eighty six and three hundred and forty two; at the green line margin.”

“I don’t get a copy of the contract it says.”

“No, but I’ll let you read it for another twenty-five minutes if you think you missed something really, really important.”

“What happens again if I treat a killer?”

“Baby girl, you lose your second soul. Man is evil not because of his nature, but history and a dark socialization. I find the best way to program a man is to deny the validity of his history, case in point Sebastian Adon,” explains Maya Solomon to Yelizaveta Kay.

An awkward moment.

“He still loves you?” Yelizaveta inquires.

“No. He surely only writes to and about you these days.”

“My contract said nothing of what to do about Adon.”

“You’re thinking sweetly of him still are you not?”

“I wish to train to treat the body, not be distracted by yet another sick and angry mind.”

“He’s a prisoner and a student so you can treat his brains out for now my little sister.”

“What are you all plotting Emma?”

“Man is evil, is he not capable of little else but war, rape and some genocide?”

“Yes, that is mostly true.”

“Who are Dbrisk, O’Domhnaill and Trikhovitch?”

“Sebastian’s closest friends.”

“They’ve all signed contracts too you know. Why did you sign your contract?”

“To help my father and to get my mother made a hotel wage slave out of debt’s bondage. I owe you ten years and then I’m a doctor of infectious disease.”

“And such is your story and you will stick to it.”

“Humanity has caught an infectious disease when it comes to morality. Men fear neither law nor god. Your contract is to treat certain men, not others remember.”

“You are not to treat to any of the friends of Adon should they end up as your patients. They fall outside your jurisdiction. Even if he asks you to treat them you cannot.”

“What about him. I have various feelings for him that need an ocean in between us not to act on the passion they sometimes, mind you only sometimes; illicit.”

“We invested in Adon the seeds of a dream and mission. He signed a blood oath once that’s term will never expire within our camp. Come the time you are free to go: We own Adon, for him nothing is ever written, but on his shoulders quite a lot rides.”

“If I had to hedge a bet I’d say you’re setting him up for martyrdom again.”

“Don’t let his brave words allow you to absolve his ignoble past.”

“I don’t remember the past well anymore Ms. Solomon.”

“That my little tovarish is probably for the best. You won his black heart fair and square, but in the now I own both his first and second soul.”

She then signed the yellow contract with a red ink plume. There were a wide range of motivations behind it.

She undressed herself quietly, as all but one of the three male Ayitian paramedics avert their eyes. She was handed a light grey latex thin body suit. Maya kissed her forehead. Once garbed she lowered herself into the big steel bath basin. The water was warm and thick with salt.

The last thing she remembered before waking up in Havana for her first day of medical school were the Ayitian technicians preparing a series of medications as Maya Solomon inserted an IV line in to her left external jugular.

 

A doctor from the Ukrainian-Emergency-Group (U.E.G.) then dimmed the lights and put her to sleep in the bath. Away went the world, into a land of dreams and forgotten pasts swallowed by the waters of the bath and voodoo salts which entered her blood stream.

 

Chapter 56

South Overlook, Masada Citadel, 66ce

Roman Occupied Palestine

 

In a dream as Adon, Yelizaveta and eighty-two Cuban combat medics cross the Caribbean Sea, Mickhi Dbrisk and Sebastian Adon look down upon the eight Roman legions that have encircled their position and are building a slave labor ramp up one side of the cliff. The aim of these legions is to torture, foul and snuff the surviving leadership of the insurgency against Caesar.

Against all of Rome if need be.

 

“I fear that this thing will again destroy you,” says Mickhi Dbrisk.

 

Sebastian tosses a lit cigarette and hopes it lands on a Roman not a slave.

“I doubt it will be a fait accompli. They say I’m very hard to kill.”

“The Rabbis say there are no secrets between brothers.”

“The rabbis say all kinds of things. Sounds like the words of someone who wants to know a secret.”

“I know that you die every time you watch them die, and that when you are crying you are imitating a grief that you explicitly do not know how to feel. But do you cry ever for yourself?”

Sebastian flexes his arms into the warrior pose and then says.

“When no one is looking except she who I so love.”

“If you love her so much why don’t you stop fighting? Like she sometimes pauses to ask. You’ve done so much already and here we are having the same conversation we had four thousand years ago, allegedly. Four hundred years ago. That we will be having again and again we wage war epoch to epoch, husk to husk!”

“Do you remember the first job we ever did together?”

“The first job we didn’t do right really.”

“You always remember your first job.”

“When you leave your body where do you go?” asks Mickhi Dbrisk.

“I go back to Zion.”

“And what are you doing there.”

“I’m walking around on a long boardwalk. I’m running into old friends. I’m with my wife and my family.”

“How many times do you remember dying?”

Sebastian Adon looks up into the eyes of Mickhi Dbrisk.

The body is a vessel for the soul. The flesh is a vehicle by which the soul carries out the work of Gods in the world of man.

“Don’t recite the N.S.G. to me old friend. Don’t put on your mask when you speak to your brother.”

“Sometimes I look at my face in the mirror and I don’t recognize myself. I cannot always be clear about what I did in this life or the last that cut me so deeply or burned me so asunder. I have memories that I cannot say match records of objective reality. I would not recognize god from the devil except by the conduct of the vessels they occupy. Tell me brother when you leave your body where do you go?”

“I go back to Jamaica. I’m on the boardwalk. Running into old friends. On my way home to see my wife and my family.”

“What happened at the Millennium theatre?”

“You, Emma and twenty two fighters went in and for three days the held the elites of the city hostage. They pumped in gas. Everybody was killed.”

“I don’t remember anything about it.”

“So maybe you’re not really you.”

“How many times have you been to my funeral?”

“Twice. Right before the revolt when you and Dasha eloped into time. And right before the revolt ended, when you and Emma Solomon led the raid on the Millennium Theatre. ”

“And I died on the night of the great blizzard. And I died in Ayiti during the revolution also right after the quake.  And I died on the trains. And, other times.”

“The other times I cannot speak to. You were taken to the hospital numerous times. I have no idea. But I saw your corpse. I saw your cold dead grinning mangled body with two shots in it when we buried you the first time. I saw your corpse on national television nearly four years ago when the department of homeland security announced all of the terrorists at the millennium were dead.”

“Well here I am. How now brown cow?”

“Tell me what’s happened to you. Tell me about how you come back with all your memories intact. And so quickly. I know its all disinformation about the cloning programs and the neural uploading and the parapsychology program. I know that neither we nor the Israelis have the science exact and we will never have the science to save a man’s soul and transfer his energy with all its memory in the span of a human lifetime.”

“Do you know me Mickhi Dbrisk?”

“In a biblical sense? No homo.”

“No homo.”

“What’s your earliest memory of me?”

“You were the baddest thief and I was the goodest thief and they nailed our bodies to the tree of life alongside the promised messiah. And her name was unpronounceable by men, so we called her Emma Rose Maya Sorieya; the mother of the changes. I remember before my body died I looked out on Jerusalem and I saw ten thousand of our people hanging from the trees. And then I woke up in Africa one hundred years later and the real killing began.”

“And when the body dies the energy of the soul is reborn in another living vessel. Old souls find each other so it seems.”

“Have you no understanding of what it might be like to be like normal men?! I know I do. I know that I enjoy the caress of a woman more than a god I have never seen. I know what it’s like to see myself in my offspring and want for them to grow into proud and free beings. I don’t live in the past Sebastian, I live for now. In several lives I found you and I aided you each time. We fought wars and launched bloody revolutions, we drafted documents articulating freedom, we protected the bloodline of the chosen ones faithfully for the past 2,000 years! You tell me brother why you and I can’t just stop. And walk away. ”

Sebastian Adon says nothing.

“Every human is loved by God and that love is exhibited in the compassion and solidarity extended by the righteous to the suffering masses trampled on by cruel devils.”

“I know what the book says. I helped write it. Don’t quote low think prophesy to me. If you please.”

“What are we doing?” Asks Mickhi Dbrisk.

“We’re sticking to the goddamn plan.”

“You’re plan or God’s plan? Emma’s plan or Avinadav’s. The Cuban plan? The Blue Lodge? The Grey Cult? What about the Scientologists, the Chassids, the Baha’i, the Muslims the Buddhists’? Who’s plan? You are my oldest friend, you my brother by blood and by deed, but let me tell you one thing before we set the sky on fire yet again. I’ve seen you die. I’ve seen you be tortured. I’ve seen the oligarchs lay waste to our best laid plans. Over and over and over and over. I’ve seen man burn our people and our prophets each time we rise. Right now we are precariously holding seven districts on a war torn micro republic and the island of Hispaniola. Every single organized government on earth is fixing to break out backs. I need to look you in the eyes, and ask you, are we going to win this time?”

 

“I just don’t yet know.”

 

Dbrisk pulls off his tam and lets his thick lion locks drop out. He shakes them more a shudder than any kind of battle roar, and then he says;

“Well that’s very discomforting. To say the very least.”

 

Ha Halom Sheli Likhiot Hofshee,” Adon thinks, my dream is to be free!! Adon wakes up on a ferry full of Ayitians and Cubans drifting toward the Isle of Youth. Yelizaveta in her green Soviet commandant hat, pinches him. And Mickhi Dbrisk, well he just makes a mental note, an estimate of the size of the payroll and army he’s gonna have to bill to protect his family in both Breuklyn Soviet & Jamaica once the war resumes.

 

And everybody dreams about their vengeance, their redemption, dreams about their baby’s face; what it used to look like. We dream about the world to come; about all the things we sacrificed to get here. This close to the mountain top. All those who died standing on the shoulder of giants. We dream about all the loose change multiplying in the world, about rubber band banks. Day of love and nights at war. The fear in our enemies’ eyes, knowing we are advancing. Despite so many setbacks! Blat.

 

We dream about the old constant grind, when we worked the plantations as wage slaves and regular slaves; when it will end; hopefully on a beach naked in our lovers’ arms. And we also dream about our coming freedom. What it will looks and taste like for our grandchildren, for those of us who survive the coming liberations wars. The grand defense; a Great Revolt mounted to achieve our rights and defeat the oligarchy in every nation on earth.

 

Her grey eyes flashed in my mind for a minute, in another waking dream. The last look she gave me before they dragged her off to die.

 

 

 

 

And then, we went back to the war.

 

Fire on the Mountain

 

 

(In four ACTS)

 

 

Act 44

 

 

[The Work Of]:

 

 

Adler S Walt

 

 

Dedicated to: Daria Andreavna Skorobogatova

& Yelizaveta Kotlyarova,

And Elena Antolievna Komarova

& Valentina Stanovova

 

 

 

 

ACT FOUR:   Stoj’kost

 

Set in Hispaniola (Ayiti & DR)

 

1 January, 2019-2020ce, AR 7-8

 

 

Set mostly on the Island of Hispaniola (Ayiti and DR);

 

Eight years after a successful uprising on the Eastern seaboard which has liberated over 64 autonomous microrepubliks; it is vital to the revolt to expand its base of support to the defeinsible West Indian islands. Amid atrocities and mounting manufactured genocide in the NGO controlled UN occupied Republic of Haiti; rebel fighters and foreign partizans from the Breuklyn Soviet will do battle with MINUSTAH UN troops, the French, the English, the Spanish, the Argentinians, the Brazilians, zombies, robots and whoever else stands in the way of completing the revolution of 1804.

 

 

 

Set in the Republic of Ayiti, 2020ce

 

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

 

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

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

I was not always such a man.

 

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

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

We are not patriots or “freedom fighters” in the traditional sense of what that means in Geneva. This is not our land, nor through the fog of war do I see freedom as our figurative or even literal ends. Our means however will certainly not absolve us in the text books of history whether we be the winners or the losers. Cloaks and daggers have long been used to abet our cause. But, the ripping of human flesh with sharp blades in close quarters and the bursting of bullets though our enemies black hearts will perhaps tarnish our family names and simultaneously bar us all from the gates of any reputable heaven. I have left men hanging in trees! But, I’m not one to believe in fairy tales. They will have to torture me for a very long time, and they will not get much for their troubles. Neither my motive nor my names are easy answers. And you probably won’t be able to pronounce it anyway.

 

I am not acting alone. If I am a so-called “terrorist” committing acts of semi-selective murder I am alongside many fellow blood soaked bandits. Our cause has a certain appeal to at least a Breuklyn few. And if she’s right about me not knowing how to love well, or at all, I absolutely do know how to struggle until the lights in my eyes go out.

 

We are called the zealots after all.

 

We are hunting vicious killers. We are grinding down these sly villains where they hide, cutting bits and pieces from this rapist ilk. We work thanklessly to remove a large array of very-very cruel, bad men from the earth. Vile parasites that suck our blood and steal our meager earnings and reduced us all to slavery. Along with their secondary officers, tertiary command of vicious enforcers, and basically anyone that gets in our way. And if we cut our way through enough of these people we will then begin to lay hands on the oligarchy.

 

Let it not be said that before we picked up our daggers and rifles we did not first spend a good many years trying all other means of more civilized change making. I loved my people, and more specifically my family, before I hated our nemesis and the cruel minority of oligarchs and war criminals that so hold humanity on a vast plantation under their iron heel, but also our common apathy.

 

Or called in Russian; Raspizdia.

One who doesn’t give a fuck about their fellow human beings?

No giving of fucks! Even really about their own sad selves?

 

Amid the thankless grind I see the face of a young woman following us where we go to commit murder. She follows just behind to save lives and heal. A physician who found herself trapped on this perhaps morally ambiguous road we travel as ruthless knock around highway men. Or so she claims. And every time I pull that trigger I fly further from the place I was boron and the good man that she once thought I was. Were it not for her, I’d have forgotten I still had one soul left with which to barter.

Our irregular military column of hearty partisans clears a rocky ridge. Forty men and one woman, all clad in dark grey or dark blue multi-forms, wrapped in tactical bandoleers carrying the tools of our respective trades—murder and healing. We men are here to kill. The solitary doctor amongst us with her implements touches the collateral of their war, but has sworn not to treat a soldier. On either side.

That morning we look for one bad man in particular.

It’s just before dawn when we finally catch up with his trail in the barrens of this dusty, dying and terrible place. The poplar trees sway heavily in the rustling morning wind, which offers our lonely column no real relief. We mill about gauging reactions, sipping gingerly on our water. A few lay down their battle rigs but keep their dusty irons always on the ready. We are hard men in rough grey khaki stained with sweat and grizzle but never tears. Some wear black or dark blue partisan caps. Others have checkered sand-gypsy scarves about their shoulders or brow. Most carry various calibers of former and Postsoviet rifles. Our doctor, she still wears a lab coat, a blue uniform, and wears a dark green military cap.

We march on.

The official name of our little outfit is the Z.O.B.-Dublin Detachment also called the Fighting 99th. It is composed of Shtarkers[78], Shatahs, Fenians as well as a popery of the Ayitian peasants from across the southland. If you’re not familiar with these particular edged colloquialisms, well I suggest you look them up in the appendix of exotic foreign vernaculars. Suffice to say they are just different ways to designate a “bad motherfucker.” Except Fenian, that is an Irish political nationalist ideology of the early 18th century.

We go one foot after another. We walk with a heavy defiance, with cold eyes that view the barrens like hungry wolves. We are each a raw material mined from a foreign conflict, smelted at some point on Breuklyn’s coast into the violent war machine we now compose. Sun-burnt freckled faces, which had first turned cherry red in the glare of the Caribbean high noon. Dread-locked islanders with accents well edged for song. Also some post and former Soviets with shifty morals and a small band of self-proclaimed Yids that never lift a finger on a Shabbos but refrain from emasculating headwear. And the native people that had not asked us to come here look. I suppose they wonder if we foreign faces are to be the turners of a bloody tide or the worst harbingers of an impending catastrophic event. At this juncture the book is still open.

We march to this dead place to bear grim witness.

War on this island fortress, and war in the world of man have burnished us into unrepentant murderers that have killed and will surely kill again. That we kill to stave off an even greater genocide by murdering its perpetrators, is the rhetoric we hide our murder behind. And if each of us came to this wasteland below the Choke Mountains beyond Illubador out into the contested borderlands about the Valley of Antimonite with some noble pretense to liberate the Ayitian people from the iron heel of the M.I.N.U.S.T.A.H.[79] and the N.G.O. Republic and their Maccoute or F.R.A.P.H.-rapist militia bag man; then periodically, it is the low volume atrocities like this one, which sometimes take the greatest toll on our resolve.

This is sadly not G.I., the Joe; those stand for real and vile things.

Roped up from the highest palm tree visible to all we men and single female of the Z.O.B.-Dublin detachment is the ghastly site of a hanged man we all knew and like a brother loved. A thick sanguine pool had formed below him. He is eviscerated. Slashed to fleshy ribbons perhaps just a few hours before we came upon him. He had broken camp at dusk, spirited himself away and wandered out from our garrison in Cange right into enemy hands. Had our ruthless jackal opponents had some notion of who the man was, he’d have been taken to a filtration camp like the others—the poor founding bastards of the Famni Lavalas Alliance- and flayed for information, tortured until he could no longer remember his Yiddish name. Perhaps this was better albeit completely inglorious. There is nothing about the condition of his corpse to make us think his end was particularly quick.

I knew this man so long that it was like stumbling upon a fresh crime scene of a beloved family member. To others, he was a tovarish of sorts, a less than humble man who sustained so many with his savvy and stalwart acts. The rest knew him as a fearless comrade and champion to so many souls not cut of his tribe’s cloth.

We find our close compatriot hanging disemboweled from a hook—his eyes gouged out, hands lopped off, bayonet marks slashed about his body— exsanguinated in a tree of death. He is now cold, wet and dead.

“Cut him down!”

“Cut him down and bury him deep,” commands a Pale Officer.

The future was evidently to be far bloodier than the scientists and high priests had originally prophesized and predicted. The physician’s blond hair, it blows in a swift desert wind. She looks away from the bloody mess we’ve made just for an instant.

 

Violence is the longest road to nowhere, but we seem to be making great time!

 

 

 

Prelude

 

 

 

Fuck. Where the fuck am I? Where, the fucking hell am I?

What did they do with her!

Damn my weakness!

I’ve shot myself in the face and the foot, again! I know it.

 

Sebastian Adon wakes up in a small locked room in Coney Island Hospital. He’s wearing aquamarine scrubs; the left leg has the hospital name and logo on it, that’s just about the only way he knows where he is, or what time zone he may be in. Déjà vu, in the worst possible way over takes him. The last thing he remembers, or suspects is a party valid memory; he was riding in the rear of tap-tap truck into the tallest mountains of Ayiti. He was dying of thirst, amongst other things.

 

He thinks he remembers the smell of iron. The taste of his own almond bitter blood, the smell of rotting corpses and their rankness magnified by the impervious heat clearing out into cool mountain air. He is in cuffs. He is blind folded. He is huddled with other prisoners. He is then taken and shot twice in the head and the last thing he remembers is the smell of the grass.

 

            BRAKA. BRAKA.                                      

 

Gunpowder.

 

But now he’s back in Breuklyn, or is it Brooklyn; which means quite a lot hasn’t gone to plan; at least also for those that had meant to put him in the ground.

He now rubs his most groggy head.

Stands shakily up in his small locked padded room. Looks in a wall mounted mirror, all his hair is gone. He looks a little fitter, looks a little tanner, but he still doesn’t really recognize his face. His last memory of Ayiti is sitting in the back of a flatbed truck, driving into the hills to train guerrilla medical workers. Being captured and shot for it.

 

Something obviously has gone quite wrong.

 

He takes water from the sink and splashes his face. The name “Cassidy Vale” is stuck in his head, but he doesn’t remember who that is, completely, if at all. The last thing he was thinking was how fresh the grass smelled lying in it and how the tropical soil smelled as he bled into it.

How the Island might bring him back to life?

The Island and what was buried below it, and the machines that caused the earthquake.

The machines? Yes, the machines that caused the earthquake. The flying saucer men!

Mad thoughts of a Harp.

His no good, terrible, very bad year when all had completely fallen apart was now coming back in parts. 2010, a shit show. The view from an Israeli prison window was emerging; Jeremy and Maria were dead; Theodore Becker too. He was attempting to piece everything back together. And then the ground shook below him.

Knocking him to the floor, yet again.

 

            The year is 2010 Common Era in the Gregorian calendar, I live in the American Empire. He tries to repeat what he knows about himself like crazy people do in movies or bet noire lit. ‘I’m a City EMT. I’m locked up in the funny farm, again. Except, something, everything has been changed.’

 

What the hell was he doing back in New York City? This was not the plan at all.

He dashes the face he can barely recognize against the mirror.

Plow! BASH! Haldol.

 

            The next day, they discharged him as if nothing very serious had happened.

 

            They said some “special lady friend” was coming to collect him; told him to take it real slow, that he needed to take his meds and not let his mind wander; that he was “one of them”, “a hero”, part of “the department”. They told him he might have some memory lapses, but not to worry; everything was going to be fine. He had the Seroquel blues and five other various vials, lithium of course; the hand-shakes, the world was a black and white copy; he’d done this all before and it didn’t seem real.

 

This broad, who he doesn’t recognize at all, though tries to play along, with long black hair picks him up in a white Honda Civic that she says is his, but he remembers driving a white Chevy Blazer. Or a grey charger, a Civic? Who drives fucking Civic?

 

She says her name is “Maria”, but Maria is dead as far as his inclinations tell him. At least that’s what he remembers, not only is Maria dead, but that she was a red head with a little mole on the right dimple; and this girl’s hair was raven noire. He plays along though. She tosses him a pack of Lucky Strikes, but for shit sure he always thought he smoked Newports. Or Noblisse; what’s Noblisse he asks himself.

 

Never mind.

 

‘Maria’ says she’s taking him to a good Russian banya, the best one in town. The Mermaid Spa in Seagate to lounge out and get his stress out.

“My head’s all back fucked,” Sebastian says to this broad, who is apparently also his old lady, “what’s today’s date?”

 

“It’s February baby, February 13th, 2010. You better drop on flowers and dinner for me babe.”

 

“When did I get back from Ayiti?”

 

“Ayiti? What are you talking’ about babe?”

 

“I went down to Ayiti on January 16th.  Right after the earthquake. With the Bedstuy volunteers and the Church of Scientology. When did I get back?”

 

She looks at him a little crazy person look. She quietly takes a pull of his cigarette, she looks a lot more like a “Jessica” than a Maria, he’s not sure who “Jessica” is, but she doesn’t really look at all like his dead ex-girlfriend.

 

Maria Parsheva, who he left behind on Block Island when he swam out to the Black Freighter. And then the world ended there. And Maria was dead.

 

“Baby boy, listen, you gotta try and remember that not all you remember is real. You tried to kill yourself on February 2nd, the anniversary of Jeremy’s death. You took a lot of those blue pills. Near OD’ed; you’ve been in Coney Island Hospital since then. About forty days they wanted, but you’ve got friends in the management. Which isn’t that bad. You kept asking the doctors about Ayiti, telling um you were down there as a medic, but baby, you ain’t ever been to Ayiti. There’s no such thing as a Ayiti.”

“What about the earthquake, I mean I vividly remember going down to a place called Ayiti after an earthquake.”

“What earthquake? What’s Ayiti?” But he can see in her eyes she knows what Ayiti is.

“The big fuckin’ earthquake. That just happened in Ayiti.”

“What’s Ayiti? What are you talking about?”

She gives him a look.

“There wasn’t a big earthquake. There’s no such place called Ayiti. The doctors say you concocted this whole fantasy world after your attempted suicide to cope with the problems in your life. But it’s going to be ok. I’m not gonna leave you un-attended.”

“What do I do for a living?”

“What? Are you serious?”

“Dead serious, before I tried to kill myself what did I do for a living.”

“You’re a fire fighter baby.”

That didn’t any logical sense.

“I thought I was an EMT.”

“You used to be an EMT before you took the fire fighter promotional a year ago. You really don’t remember?” She looks at him sympathetically. Puts her finger quietly to her lips.

“Everything is big grey mess,” he says.

“Baby, you gotta be careful, you gotta take your pills, this bipolar disorder is gonna do you in. You make me so worried about you.”

“But I don’t know how to fight fires. I drive an ambulance, I carry fat hysterical Puerto Rican women down stairs. I give people their oxygen.”

 

“Are you sure about that? Think harder about that.”

 

Then pins begin to fall and Sebastian gets a shiver up his spine. He doubles over a second, and low and behold, she was right. He hadn’t been on an ambulance in over a year. The Republic of Ayiti never existed at all. He now remembers becoming a fire fighter at the age of twenty five; remembers working first on a ghetto Engine in Brownsville before getting sent back to the South Bronx, remembers it all more clearly than any of the vague notions of this “Ayiti” he’s clinging to.

Something has clearly been changed. Maria never died. Jeremey never died. They just broke up. Friends move on to different places. No one was suffering, no one he could effect. He never stayed as an EMT, why would anyone do that shitty miserable job even if it paid more than enough to survive? He’d never gone to Israel and been viciously programmed and tortured. And the earthquake never happened, because there was no such real place as the Republic of Ayiti. There had been a switch, and he was clinging to fragments of memories from a reality that was unraveling quietly.

“Get it Sebastian? What happened on that island was all in your head. You have bipolar baby, shit, you’re a sad mess my brave battered lover dear. But you baby are a hard bodied, sexy hero. New York’s Bravest. And I’m gonna stick by you no matter what, and ride the shit out of you when we get home.”

What’s real?

This broad, this broad who he’s never seen before in his life was certainly not his dead/ ex-girlfriend “Maria”. Maria Parsheva was dead, because Maria had killed herself about a year ago, and Maria was a coy red head; this girl’s hair is natural blond, but he now had fewer doubts. The name “Komarova”, was stuck in his head, who that really was he had no idea either. She’s to model like, too blond. She’s physicaly perfect and had big wandering blue eyes, that stay with him the whole time.

“How long was I in the bin?”

“Forty days Daddy. They had to use the current on you, get the pins to realign in your crazy man head.”

“It felt so real, I was in Ayiti; and I was an EMT!”

“Like a lesser paramedic baby? In Ayiti? If I didn’t love you so much I’d never be able to put up with your way too crazy shit. You know I love you so much baby, right? Otherwise I couldn’t put up with this mad shit.”

“Yeah.”

And yet he thinks, who are you again?

She’s just a Valentine present waiting to happen.

 

What had happened? The airlift, the medical internationalist column, the revolution, Cassidy, Dominich, Tiputti Capois and the machinations of DeBuitléir and now, back in New York it faded away like a bad dream. His “girlfriend” was alive, he’d never become a medical worker that long, he’d never gone to that evil Jerusalem colony; and he was severely bipolar. But you can forgive a New York City fire fighter just about anything except pension fraud. Sebastian Adon looking out the car window onto Ocean Parkway begins to cry with joy.

 

It was all just a terrible nightmare!

 

“Don’t cry baby. Men don’t cry,” the woman he’s never seen before tells him.

She opens the glove compartment of ‘his car’, and hands him a soft embroidered plain grey bandana. He covers his face with it to wipe his less than manly tears.

 

 

She makes him ride a horse. They eat steak lunches at Tatiyanas. They hit the Mermaid Spa hard and do massage and oak leave.

By the time they’re done with the banya, nine hours later and he’s naked in her arms fucking her like an savage animal, it’s as if the whole “Ayitian” episode was a spooky dream, the “girlfriend” feels and fucks familiar, as he packs his cock inside her from behind he thinks her hair color seems to change color as they tantrically thrust. Like maybe she is Maria. Or maybe she is an enemy or a set up. Or maybe, she’s all of them or none of them. Her eyes get big as she sucks on him.

He fucks her violently, it’s the only way he knows how.

 

“Val, Val, Val, Valentina!” he yells out and cums inside of her.

 

He still has a job on Engine 808, because it’s a civil service position and even firemen go crazy once in a while.

 

Firefighting. A good gig.

 

After screwing this curvy stranger in every single orifice he goes on to the roof and opens the door to the elevator gear room where he remembers there to be a small metal box. Rubber banded to the top of The Sly Fox is a dusty laminated placard which states, “IN CASE OF EMERGENCY”.

 

Inside is a pack of Noblisse cigarettes, a green signal flair, and a grey leather bound book filled with poems, some naughty drawings, some photos, letters and diary entries.

 

And that is how he begins to separate the fakeness from the real. With the help of the smoke monster, and maybe also god. All he’d needed to be well has a good hard fucking a hot banya. Good and well as new. There are many lives to live. My life is hers to give.

 

Despicable self-hate and pity, I feel almost nothing. She fucked me like an animal right back though.

 

 

 

Chapter 1

Isle of Youth, 2019ce

CuBA

 

 

When this begins, they’re gonna try and hit us all at once. They’re gonna try and hurt the people closest to us, they’re gonna go after everyone we ever cared about, everyone we ever loved even people that owe us money. They’re gonna bomb our cities. They’re gonna demolish places we went to school, burn down our churches, synagogues and mosques.

 

They’re gonna go on the news and find people to say we’re sex offenders, and cult leaders and terrorists. They’re gonna use maps and sound effects and subject matter experts to make us look like we’re thieves and killers; criminal bandits.

 

The day our boots hit Ayitian soil, there is no going back for any of us. No surrender, not even in the event of our deaths. Our three detachments number roughly 1,001 women and men, there are 20,000 lightly armed peasant fighters in position who have, maybe, one pistol, or an aging rifle to every 500 of them. We may rely on limited Cuban and Trinidadian air and naval support for resupply and evacuation of casualties. It’s a potentially small war, a company & a brigade[80] against a division of regular troops, maybe the entire Dominican Army, which has no discipline in the field. Only good at raping its own people.

 

We are facing over 10,000 heavily armed Argentine and Brazilian soldiers with full air support, helicopters, bombers and drones from the United Nations. We anticipate incursions from the Dominican Army, and likely if effective the UAS Military Garrison in Puerto Rico, which means terra drones. So, maybe one well trained division and one poorly trained division, and some fucking robots.

 

We believe we will have full popular support in the uprising, and can conquer the island with minimal loss of life.

 

 

Chapter 2

Aquin Township, 2020ce

Ayiti

 

Over and out, the speakers affixed to the sides of an armored column of type -two ambulances rolling into the township of Aquin clamor and belligerently blast the hip-hop track “Breuklyn-we-go-hard!”

 

It’s a rather loud for a surprise attack all things considered.

 

Sodium Phosphate[81] grenades labeled “MADE IN BREUKLYN” explode against the largest stucco colonial villa built years ago in this small pleasure compound in the South West Isthmus of Ayiti. The premier wakes up from his slumber next to foreign bought trafficked Russian two whores, still very goddamn magic carpet high.

 

His compound is on fire. That is his first realization.

 

His second is that apparently ‘Breuklyn goes hard.’ He hears machine gun fire everywhere. He scrambles for a fancy blaster that he just acquired in a card game with a Han oil technocrat. But he’s never fired it and he’s high as hell off Afghan brown. The door to his bedroom is being ratcheted open. Splintering apart when met with hate and zeal.

 

He, the Amir, is the Regional Section Chief of the Maccoute militia. His name is Jean Claude Duvalier II, former President for Life of Ayiti’s only son. He is feared and powerful when he walks among the powerless, but he’d have gotten robbed three times just trying to cross Flatbush Junction these days. Tonight he will die violently. Irons of Jam Rock will surely make that happen. We killed his father in 2014 with a Heart attack.

 

He screams like a frantic dying animal. His facade of dignity is completely lost in the face of impending death. His concubines are awake and shouting, looking to escape and hide. He smells the pummeling plumes of smoke. The door finally splinters apart. He can’t find the clip to his blaster. He’s never fired it before.

 

Commander Mickhi Dbrisk is the one who finally kicks in the door.

 

“For your high crimes against the Ayitian people: Die you murderous fuck!” Dbrisk yells as he blows off the Amir’s face with blast from his high powered revolver repeater. It takes off the right side of the Amir’s jaw and crimson on the tits of one of his screaming slaves.

 

DBrisk does the triple tap. One in the heart and another two in the face, they plan to use finger printing to identify and confirm the targets. The young slaves run screaming out of the villa master bedroom. Mickhi Dbrisk and his men pull on respirator masks because of the smoke. Commander Magnus Allamby works quickly to secure the Amir’s satellite phone, lap top and document case as well as the gold plated USA shooter, “for prosperity and hilarity” also because it’s made of gold.

 

Dbrisk points down toward the dead Maccoute, son of an assassinated tyrant. He’s warm dead and ugly. Gore all over a fancy bed purchased for private pleasure expropriated from poverty at the barrel of a gun. And the web cam in his helmet transmits everything to the interweb.

 

“Cut a hand[82] and take a couple pictures. Let’s get the fuck out of here,” mutters Dbrisk.

 

Bodies litter the streets of Aquin. Like a bunch of opiated Hessians on Christmas Eve these marauding mercenaries hadn’t put up too much fight. The Scarborough Column had bled them while they slept. They had reduced “Gold Boy Pleasure Compound” to ash and taken thirty eight hands: anyone with a Maccoute-band, or anyone who fired at them. As they withdrew past the shanty towns of subjugated guest workers and villagers who serviced these rapist brutes the Scarborough column dumps bags of cash they’d snatched from the pleasure compound out on the roads.

Blood in the brown dirt deforested sand, blood in their eyes, green money, green blood money fluttering down and Ayitian agro-peasants cheering gathering it up.

 

Welcome back to the long road back to mother Africa thinks Commander Mickhi Dbrisk, happy birthday black baby Jesus, the ground war has finally begun, as per the prophesy of the New Social Gospel. All blessings and praises to Commanders Debutelier and Solomon.

 

By dawn all over the inter-web they were twittering about this. On Blackberry’s and also White berries. In Moscow coffee houses & salons in Angel City, even under the bamboo-iron cyber curtain of Beijing; certainly on Ayiti and New York and far beyond. The videos and the photos were everywhere by 3am Ayiti time, soon no one could deny how hard Breuklyn went. Nick Mapfre’s team saw to that.

The invasion was being live streamed. White people love watching people get killed on live television and this shit was actually real, mad hits.

 

The cover of the New York Times reads:

 

“IRREGULAR INVASION OF HISPANIOLA ATTRIBUTED TO MERCINARY BANDS FROM THE BREUKLYN SOVIET”.

 

 

The Isle of Mann based daily’s scramble to find reports with a sensational sexualized spin, but most of the rags just copy and paste internet reports, tons o’ videos of the raiding goes up on YouTube, then comes right down. Roughly three hundred Maccoute and their ilk have been wiped out in midnight raids across northern Ayiti by an unknown irregular column of American and Fenian nationals.

 

No one takes credit immediately, but there sure were pictures to prove it had bloody, bloody happened. A photograph was emailed to all of the media outlets that “tell less lies than others”. Roughly 1,200 men lined up in columns with dark and light and blue grey fatigues by battalion. And a link to an encrypted website where they can watch live streams of the war, as well as purchase exclusive material form People’s Television News Service.

 

It was morning on a new kind of news day. The vultures would be selling papers by the blood bundle. The three columns were coming ready or not propelled by their duty to act. Out to bleed the worst kind of men as a means to send a message.

 

In the opening round of hostilities, the eleven detachments of roughly forty men apiece had blown part, set fire to, took wild pot shots at, hacked limbs off of, scalped and or emptied many a clip into the Maccoutes’ core leadership.  Many of those they had killed had been hunted and cut to ribbons in a wide range of hard to pronounce towns and villages in the North of the country.

 

The three foreign detachments are working off a sixty-four target hit to kill list of wanted war criminals facing charges in the International Criminal Court in Addis Abba, affiliated with the Neo-Maccoutes & FRAPH, the Neo-Duvalierist former Army death squad, as well as Argentine and Brazilian MINUSTAH[83] war criminals. These men had been pin-pointed by the Ayitian-Emergency-Group and were being tracked with relative precision by the intelligence arm of allies in the Lavalas[84] faction of the general résistance. The G.A.I-H.E.G. is composed of eleven factions of Ayitian EMS, civil servants and rescue workers being the best armed and supplied via Cuba.

 

“I mean, we are gonna certainly kill them all before they get to face those charges in a court, but really now, these are the real bad dudes whose guilt is assured and recognized,” explains one Commander Djbriel Okonkwo, “Kill them on site and upload the kill confirmations to the white boys at PTV. No trials gonna ever happen anyway.”

 

Now, I’m sure some people notice a real v/Q mismatch between action and rhetoric. There sure was whole ton of talking and writing and planning about non-violence; so how did the first 4 hours alone get so bloody?

 

The gun fights had gotten pretty Mongolian firebrand in the townships especially where a large brigade of the Brazilian regular military showed up to back up the Maccoute militia and shelled the local population for nine hours. Really peacefaire[85] failed immediately here.

 

The People’s Television Network via the inter-web declares that as of 1600:

Ali Kushayb: Former senior member of the Maccoute, currently wanted by the International Criminal Court (ICC). Killed by small arms fire at approximately 0005 on Brumaire 8th in Aquin. Execution carried out by the Gold Lion Detachment of the Scarborough Column.

  • Ahmed Mohammed Haroun: Maccoute ‘Coordination and Command Council’ also Ayitian State Minister of Interior. Incinerated in a rocket propelled grenade attack at approximately 0036 in Jeremie. Execution carried out by Malik Shabazz Detachment of the Scarborough Column led by Commander Djbriel Okonkwo o the Uhuru Faction.
  • El Tahir Hassan Abboud: Maccoute ‘Coordination and Command Council’ also member of insider NCP party. Decapitated and hung upside down from the gates of Cayes at approximately 0032.
  • Charlie Baker II; second son of local white Oligarch Charlie Baker sweat shop lord killed in his bed of a heart attack. And then someone took off his hand with ha knife.

 

Numerous Maccoute bases have been demolished and an estimated 371 confirmed combatant kills have been reported by the Associated Press attributed to the “irregular foreign invaders”. Due to poor intelligence, bad logistics, or overwhelming defenses the eight other Scarborough raiding parties largely failed to kill ranking Maccoute leaders in the South.

 

But widespread damage had been caused throughout the country and the spot light was back on the perpetrators of the genocide.

 

 

Chapter 2

Breuklyn Soviet, 2019ce

Sandooney Bathhouse

 

 

2nd January, 2019 It was time to deliver a message to howling mobs, wanting to know how it had gotten so bloody so quick when what they were being told by their leaders in Breuklyn was that this was liberation; this was an expansion of the effort to defeat the oligarchy into other lands.

 

A press conference is being held in the main Amphitheatre of the Breuklyn Bath and Rifle Club under the Sandooney Bathhouse on McDonalds Ave, Z.O.B. command. Just 24 hours after deployment. Information and Intelligence Section Chief Anya Drovtich, the fierce Polish Islamic paramedic takes only three questions.

 

The BBC, Global Rev, Ayitian-Libertad, Al Jazeera, Der Spiegel and the New York Times were the only media syndicates allowed to attend in person.

 

The rest are local “freelance journalists” vetted by the Breuklyn Otriad and People’s Television, and the Ministry of Agitation Propaganda, Barclays General Assembly.

 

“What is the objective of the invasion?” asks the New York Times reporter.

 

Anya Drovtich has pale vanilla skin bellow her red Hijab and curly luscious black hair in well-kept dreads below that. She is wearing a grey dress suit-shirt, with a Pin of Palmares attached to the left lapel. It has been three months since rebel Breuklyn held off a full frontal assault by the UAS Military and brought down two flying fortresses over Bronx and Breuklyn.

 

“The objective is to capture or eliminate the leadership of the Neo-Maccoute militia and to completely break its operational capacity to carry on its campaign of genocide against the Ayitian and Dominican people. They are to be routed, neutralized and pacified.”

 

Well isn’t that the job of MINUSTAH?” asks the BBC rep, “Isn’t that the responsibility of UN peacekeepers, not leftist militia groups?”

 

“To clarify, we are not operating unilaterally. The intervention force is just over 1,000 soldiers and support personnel, the majority of which are Ayitian. We are also acting on the invitation of the Famni Lavalas Political Party, which while still banned is the largest party in Ayiti,” Anya replies.

 

 

 

“Could you define blan for them,” Erza Pula Pound, the Albanian black frizzy haired lawyer and deputy communications chief interjects, also in Hijab.

 

“Evil white outsider or evil insider of any color propagating anti-Ayitian, anti-Dominican subjugation.”

 

“Who is funding and supporting the invasion?” asks a reporter from the BBC, the Black Broadcast Confederacy.

 

“It is self-financed foreign policy. The Breuklyn Otriad is merely supporting the actions of the eleven Rebel factions in the Ayitian-Emergency-Group lead by Commander Avinadav DeBuitléir.  I repeat. We have no official or unofficial support from either the United American States, the Union of Confederated States, or any other state power. Certainly, as a revolutionary human rights movement we take nothing from the People’s Republic China or the Russian Federation. This is basically a foreign legion of civilian volunteers fighting independently of at state control to end the genocide in Ayiti.”

 

 

“How much are you going to end up in Cuba’s pocket?” asks Vlad Teichberg of Global Rev, the chief media outlet of the Anarchist League, which to be honest has experienced a lot of discomfort with the Barclay General Assembly being rather dominated by Socialists, Black Nationalists, Russian Mafia Groups and Islamists sectioning off neighborhoods of the Soviet.

 

Erza responds sweetly, “This was all bank rolled in house via loans from the Bratvas. Which ones, I don’t even need to say why I can’t wont’ say. Three put money in for the weapons and logistics. Not one Shekel of Breuklyn Soviet Citizens Coin went to the intervention, nor is one single Cuban national in the ground forces.”

 

“Well, not yet,” says Vlad T.

 

“If I understand this correctly, your Association, your ‘Otriad’ is attempting to replicate its methodology and tactics four years ago on the Eastern Seaboard except this time on a far larger scale on the largest islands of the Caribbean. Is this the official beginning of a human rights revolution? Shall I go so far to say the second phase of the Great Revolt, as you call it in house” asks a reporter from Ayiti-Libertad.

 

Ayitians always ask lead along questions.

 

“I would say that is a remarkably accurate assessment,” responds Anya Drovtich, acting now as the Minister of Defense for the Barclay General Assembly, and remains a card carrying member of the Breuklyn Otriad.

 

She tosses her black curly hair over her shoulder and smiles.

 

 

 

Chapter 3

Cap Ayitian, 2019ce

Ayiti

 

 

3rd January, elected Field Lt. Olu Okonkwo of Uhuru is a soft spoken Nigerian and a Bronx Science graduate. He has a degree in business and a slight stutter, which since being deployed outside of the city of New York has ceased to trouble him. He is so light skinned he is often confused with being a mullato while on Ayitian Island, but he is not a mullato, by the racialist definitions of the blan oppressors he is technically a quadroon.

 

            Commander Okonkwo leads a platoon of his men, infiltrates them in civilian clothes into Cap Ayitian, the nation’s only deep water port and exporting point for the entire nation’s illicit blood oil and gold pumped and drilled just to the West from Cap Ayitian and the Southland.

 

Here in Port Ayiti his detachment ambushes and executes via the rat-tat-tat of repeater rifles one Mohammed Salih Al Sunusi Baraka, a Maccoute coordinator and member of the National Assembly. They blow him away while he sits at a red awning restaurant overlooking the massive Han renovated harbor along with his wife and two eldest sons.

 

Many of the Maccoute killed in exile are Neg, or African black, many of the upper leadership being killed now are part of Haiti’s Arab population of around 20,000 Syrians, Lebanese and Palestinians, vultures that have been here since the 20’s.

 

His wife doesn’t die right away, she screams in tongues, screaming soaked in her children’s blood, and pleading with her god to avenge her husband’s death.

 

One of Olu’s men then shoots her too. A young Grenadian from Brownsville named Jerome Marcus with long dred locks. He then rolls two hand grenades into the Restaurant Omar where Baraka had just been alive eating lamb and pilaf with his family. Boom!

 

And it was all pretty ethically downhill from there as far as indiscriminate violence in the streets of a major city goes.

 

The Fela Kuti Detachment kills seventeen off duty Ayitian Soldiers, four Han Oil technocrats, and nine children under the age of whatever in the ensuing fire fight. The Qassam 4 rocket-grenades are hard to aim. The detachment loses four men getting out of Port Ayiti, another three on the roads fighting their way back to the safety of the Eastern Front safe house.

The engagement reduces the size of the Detachment under Commander Okonkwo to thirty three men.

 

“Why’d you shoot the woman,” Olu asks Jerome later at their camp.

“She married that animal. We’re not playing games,” he coldly responds.

 

We roll with some cold niggers, thinks Olu who was entrusted to lead because he is not one. He is a principled soft nigger. He is raised to not think much about race.

 

Two weeks in they’d seen further battle at Township Gros Morne, and lost four, but killed many more. The Schenectady Detachment was now working hand in hand with Commander Okonkwo’s Fela Kuti Detachment. Backed up by Lavalas Movement and JEM[86] guerillas they sabotage oil infrastructure across the North.

 

They’d managed to blow up two big Chinese and Canadian tankers in Port Ayiti with harbor mines just two days before. The Associated Press now maintains a full time field office in Port Ayiti.

 

 

The Scarcity Regime, or genocide planned by the Class ONG, (NGO Class) had at the time killed 3 million since it began in 2005.

 

 

They attempt to minimize civilian casualties by carefully picking targets and utilizing the PTV telecommunications to verify that their targets were exactly where they were supposed to be. They also are blessed by having a lot of local sympathy, which ultimately is keeping them alive. The Port Au Prince Regime is hated in the provinces. They keep collateral damage low preferring more targeted strikes.

Not killing little kids in growing numbers like certain other Detachments, monkeying around with the hearts, minds and of course the yellow media war.

 

Late Night January 31st in the City of Marmelade, a unit of Schenectady partizans under the command of Magnus Allamby enter the hotel where Omer Baabas, a Maccoute Major sleeps in his bed. They shoot his two body guards through the heart with silenced pistols. They unlock the door to his room. He’s fat and snoring.

Eight men lay knives into him, Specialist Jeffery Derose from Staten Island seals tape and clamps his hand over the major’s mouth as the seven others dagger-man him, slicing him to ribbons.

They slip out of Marmelade without a fire fight.

            A couple days later on February 3rd, 2012 in the city of Saint Raphael, Mohammed Ibrahim Ginesto, a Maccoute Brigadier gets his brains blown out with a high powered Elephant hunting rifle fired by Netic Kinari of the Nostrand Ave Detachment.

Netic could have died an Afro-Punk favorite and star athlete. He joined Uhuru in 2003 and ended up both  5% and Talented 10th.

 

 

Chapter 4

Greater Gonaives City, 2019ce

Ayiti

 

9 January, 2019

 

 

Upon deployment they had been dropped closest to the bases of the Ayitian Emergency Group (G.A.I.-H.E.G.)[87] command so that they might deploy themselves with the guerillas already operating against the Maccoute, establish a permanent base for resupply and logistics, as well as coordinate attacks within the occupied Ayitian & Dominican Island States.

 

Gonaives is the coastal, regional capital city of the Artibonite region. It is a sprawling sweat shop boom town in the northwestern Ayiti, 120 meta clicks Northwest from Port Au Prince, which we sometimes call Port Au Rebel. A historical caravan post, an birth place of the Ti Ligliz[88] movement called Lavalas the toppled Baby Doc Jean Claude Duvalier; Goniaves is located on an elevated plateau. The town serves as an agricultural marketing point for the cereals and fruits grown in the surrounding region. It is also home to the largest concentration of Han oil technocrats and military advisors in the country outside of Port Au Prince, the capital and the resort citadel zones of Cayes and Port Salud.  It is a major refining station for oil and natural gas before it is pumped out to Port Ayiti next to Cap Ayitian.

 

The 0100 am January 10th raid on Goniaves had been planned three months before by the local H.E.G. fighters. Its large military garrison was poorly fortified and there was some reason to believe that it served the main arms depot for the Maccoute militia in the area. O’Domhnaill and Rand had come to realize the same genius for putting out fires might be applied to start them.

 

There are many French engineers in the town so many they have their own quarter. A good many years of work and money had been invested in Ayiti to exploit their expansive oil reserves, work only the French had the wherewithal to perform in the name of national hegemony. It was unfortunate the club hadn’t launched the campaign ten years earlier when the bloodletting began, back before they killed 700,000 civilians, back before the Chinese and French gave the Ayitian Defense Force[89] and Macoutes a modern air force and a whole division’s worth of third grade former Soviet tanks.

 

Irish Fenian Specialist Robert Flannigan, an Otriad member since 2002, a childhood friend of Nikholai and Sebastian on command detonates charges planted along the massive oil pipeline. It is the nexus by which oil flows from Ayiti out Northeast toward Port Ayiti. On the outskirts of the city the three hundred fighters of the St. Patrick’s Battalion strike at the nine major pumping stations by which the crude is sucked out from the bloody desert the Maccoute had been instrumental in clearing of its native population.

 

They blow base charges[90] along the pipe three years in the building.

 

A mighty series of booms awakens a sleeping city. Thick black plumes of smoke go up and black crude ignites a flaming sludge running down slopes into town.

 

At 0101, as Maccoute-fighters, French engineers, Ayitian regular military[91] and the population of Gonaives lay mostly asleep, the Ayitian-Emergency-Group begins pounding the city with mortars and Katusha[92] rockets. There are certain ethnic rivalries that are playing out that few of the St. Patrick’s Battalion are fully aware of. The city comes awake to the indiscriminate explosions. It is hard to aim these Cold War era, truck mounted rockets. They fell where ever they fell, and kill where ever they land.

 

Economics analyst Adam Ahmed states that the “people of Gonaives are beginning to think in a more business-minded way” to make the most of their situation. Their situation being the forced migration and murder of over 200,000 original Ayitian inhabitants to make way for white (BLAN) settlers from in and around Port Au Prince.

 

Assholes. 46,000 mostly whites living with nannies and drivers and fancy French bistros while 10 million Haitians starve and die of preventable disease.

 

“It’s an NGO city now so we’ll burn it to the ground,” is what one H.E.G. commander has declared. O’Domhnaill knew this wouldn’t end well. If enough Han are killed they might provoke the escalation of an un-needed Han military presence in Ayiti.

 

But these rockets can’t be aimed. The H.E.G. fire dozens into the Han quarter deliberately. The St. Patrick’s Battalion sends their John Riley Detachment of a hundred men to destroy the Maccoute-base, kill everyone inside and capture the arms cache. The H.E.G. fighters blow up the power plant with grad rockets around 0140 and the Detachment strikes at the Maccoute munitions base shortly after.

 

They hardly put up a real fight. Many are cut down fleeing out windows. Many are murdered in their beds as H.E.G. guerillas[93] and the John Riley Detachment overruns the base.

 

Once the compound is secured Commander Rand lines up all the Maccoute militia men against a wall. They are flexi-cuffed and blind folded. The smoke is getting thick and the mostly wood buildings catch the blaze one by one. There are about seventy prisoners. Six are identified as quasi-important functionaries with the local leadership. Dozens are regular Ayitian military. Some are just boys mostly younger than sixteen. Three are Han military attaches. The John Riley Detachment loads their battle jitneys with as many crates of munitions as they can secure while Rand gets on the sat phone.

 

Thick black Smokey unbreathable death rolling out in your eyes.

 

The city is burning down, pummeling plumes of black smoke amid the crackling and gusts of ash. They don’t have proper firemen worth a damn out here. The Fenian gunmen are starting more fires. Commander Shamus Rand orders his men to torch the oil ministry.

Commander O’Domhnaill and the Wolf Tone Detachment have occupied the central rail terminal and bus depot at the edge of town. The ringing of the sat phone notifies him that that they are way ahead of schedule.

 

“John Riley to Wolf Tone,” says Lt. Rand over the uplink.

 

“Wolf Tone copies. What’s your situation?”

 

“The package is secured. Seventy prisoners being held, some are French military attaches, others rather young, NGO worker kids.”

 

“Blind the surviving French, free the young and liquidate the rest,” replies O’Domhnaill.

 

But before Rand can give any signal the H.E.G. fighters gun down everybody.

Osman Yusif Kibir the State Governor Dar Ayitian and Maccoute coordinator and a man named Sukeirtalah, the Lieutenant Colonel of the Maccoute are among those executed. Thankfully they didn’t blow away the little white bastards and trigger a French intervention, yet[94].

 

Commander O’Domhnaill orders a pull out of Goniaves at 0230. The H.E.G. fire more rockets into the city. At 0245 everyone is clear and the St. Patrick’s Battalion blows the rail station as they retreat into the desert back toward the command base.

 

Specialist Philly Hartman keeps muttering, “I killed some little kids. I killed a bunch of little kids.”

 

Father O’Sullivan holds a wake for the fallen back at command. He does his best to comfort Hartman and a few others.

When questioned, Rand replies, “The little fucking kids all had machine guns.”

They’d lost fourteen men in the assault, among them only three from the St. Patrick’s Battalion. Extensive damage had been done to the city from flame and rocket fire. Oil pumping out of Dar Ayitian ground to a halt. For about two months.

Three days later a massive Ayitian military deployment drives the H.E.G. and the St. Patrick’s Battalion a hundred clicks into Chad. Newly acquired Han bomber jets make punitive strikes on the refugee camps.

The Maccoute execute several hundred in villages around the city of Mirogane for collaboration. Nine surrounding villages are suspected of harboring the H.E.G. militants their and pale officers. Reprisals continue as long as it takes to rebuild the pumping station. About two months.

As the sun rises, those nine villages are surrounded by Ayitian military cordon. Several hundred Maccoute Militia men brought in from Kusti then enter and proceed with their foul work.

 

The New York Times runs a front page spread of the ash and rubble that was left of the nine towns. It was an aerial shot like usual. The last reporters that had gone into Ayiti were beheaded. The international press denounces the massacre of around 3,000 civilians, but mostly blames the Combined Otriad for escalating the violence.

 

Oil pumping out of the Ayitian 1/3 of the Island has been brought to a complete stand still. Gold mining has dropped to below 10% yield. You have to always hit the bastards in the pockets before anyone even cares.

 

 

 

Chapter 4

Block Island, 2002ce

First congress

 

 

A little bit more on how so many Fenian nationals, so many leftists, so many Zionists so many everyone which had never even really thought of life and conditions in Ayiti ended up fighting, and dying there. Those which served in the a) St. Patrick’s Battalion (Detachments 1 & 2), b) The Hadar Column (Detachment 3) and Garvey Brigades (Detachments 4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11 & 12) got tied up in this very bloody ground war, five minutes from nation time.

 

Let’s take it back over ten years.

 

There is a little isle off the coast of Galilee home to some eight hundred indigenous souls by their last New Year’s Eve census.

 

They are technically still part of the U.A.S., but have been a functional hub of the Autonomous Movement/ Soviet Confederation and thus the Great Revolt for over a decade. Since before 2001.

 

This little patch of rocky removed Erin green sixteen miles out into the Atlantic is called Block Island. It was once a haven for pirates, for the Sons of Liberty, a rum running prohibition busting flappers paradise, the place the Mohegan Indians met their untimely and final demise. There was black magic here, or some other worldly thing at work amid the taverns and farm houses and low lying rock walls piled by Indians and slaves at the behest of the original white settlers. There was one Catholic Church, one Prod one; the synagogue had burned down a year ago by some witchcraft. There were few indigenous Yids that arrived in the 20’s when the bootlegging sky rocketed. There was a hedge maze that took four to eight hours to navigate. There was a high rate of alcoholism, a vague sense of isolation, a separatist flag even, but only as a joke. There were definitely a coven of witches, but not particularly malicious ones. Old Man Abrams and his daughters owned three of the biggest hotels, both of the whore houses, all of the speakeasy’s, the airport, the ferry and the exotic animal farm.

 

That’s how Zebras came to New England and Kangaroos too.

 

When Nikholai, Mickhi Dbrisk and Sebastian Adon got off the boat they were not short stares. There were seldom tall, dread locked Jamaican men on the Island. Sebastian wore a brown skally cap with a yarmulke underneath it, tight faded jeans with tsetse hidden underneath, a pistol as well; a faded blue  job shirt with a Ivoryish star emblazoned within the Maltese cross, a ruck-sac with everything else he needed. Nikholai was wore a black leather jacket and a black suit with a white button shirt, Iytai and a black tie. He wasn’t carrying a sholem anymore. He’d been suspended from the NYPD for eight months after an incident he’d rather like to forget. And Dbrisk, dressed the most casual, jeans, a blue winter pea coat, a Sand-Gypsy scarf and he had rosary beads his fiancé of eight years had given him, but he never used; he also carried a small duffle bag. Filled with paper work mostly, paper work and endotracheal tubes, laryngoscope blades and IV kit, cuff, scope and gauge and the basic tools of a rescue medic. Adon basked in his Hebrew ambulance status, adored the trade, the juxtaposition, the romantic chic of it. Nikholai regretted becoming a cop, never talked about it. Mickhi Dbrisk compartmentalized the job and his life and didn’t let one war bleed into another. The three men were all in their late twenties, civil servants all Dbrisk and Adon in the Fire Department, Nikholai at least for a while more in the NYPD.

 

On the Island waiting with a car was red headed Hubert O’Domhnaill a fire fighter and rising union leader in the International Federation of Emergency Workers.

They arrived on Block Island a little after Sundown on a Friday on the 6th of Frimaire.

 

A cop, two paramedics, and a fire man take a ferry to a New England Island begin to lay the ground work for the irregular invasion of the Ayiti.

 

They were booked into the empty Hygea Hotel on a tall hill overlooking the harbor bay. A creaky old wooden guest house painted red and white and orange. There were twenty-two club delegates at the sixteenth Congress established to merge several factions into more cohesive alliance post victory in Breuklyn Soviet.

 

It was here the latest plan was laid and outlined on the shores of Galilee.

 

Adon, Dbrisk, O’Domhnaill and Trikhovitch were at the core of the club’s conspiracy. Another silver haired Yid Paramedic named Scott Sevastra. A pair of Bengali princes named Arman and Hassan Askari. A pint sized Trinidadian sex worker named Katchya Patel. An EMT from Ghana named Thomas Ansu. An Persian exchange student named Kaveh Ali Shariati. A Unitarian priest named Kristin Reiersen by way of Norway. A Bajan businessman named Magnus Allamby. And two journalists, an Afghan named Anahita Noori and Ms. Mara Fitzduff who ran and edited the club’s now infamous newspaper, “The Banshee”. Also the human rights lawyer, a Kosovar named Erza Pula Pound. Three film makers named Justantine Tomas, Ryder Haske and Nicholas Mapfre were there filming. Justantine Tomas was a long standing member cross affiliated with Uhuru.

 

Toba Hadaad was then a newly minted Israeli intelligence case officer, assigned to channel big Ivory money into the partisan band. And also business man named Ysiad Ferraris, who was frankly an unabashed opportunist, but later 1/3 funded the insurrection in Hispaniola.

 

Also present, importantly was Maya Solomon, the first Chief of Staff, who founded the original Israeli branch of the Club with none other than Avinadav DeBuitléir, from Ayiti by way of Demona, and a teenage Sebastian Adon.

 

Those two flew in the next day. The Ivory connection is surely plain as day, now as if a beaten dead Trojan horse. This was the last American Congress they attended, as she made her way to Russia and he made his way to Libria, in Africa.

 

 

 

Chapter 5

Lower Belfast Soviet, 2009ce

Erin

 

 

The connection to Erin actually more subtle. Than the IRA connections to gun running and raising in New York and Boston that are 300 plus years old, the Irish make up over 37 million of maybe now 340 million North Americans. But, how did they end up in Hispaniola, which is this little tale; explains Hubert O’Dominhail.

 

Within a month of the 15th Congress, held not on Block Island but in Chicago, USA. Hubert O’Domhnaill and Sister Kristin Reiersen were back in Erin, explanting the new tactics advocated the February Protocols of the Congress. They traveled North by mini-bus to Belfast to attend his father’s wake, struck down by Prod[95] gunmen during a speech just a week before. It was a very well-attended funeral[96].

 

His father was viewed as perhaps the one man who might have brokered a good end to the New-Troubles. As after Mari Faitzduff passed no one could hold the factions to the table.

 

The funeral was attended by a young lad named Dashiell Duffy, a Cajun-Fenian boy of just under seventeen who introduced Hubert O’Domhnaill to an excommunicated priest, one Father O’Sullivan.

 

There were then fifteen days of Prod rioting in Belfast due to Orange Order marching season which caused O’Domhnaill to miss his return flight. He helped put out these Fenian fires as best he could as a volunteer in one of Father O’Sullivan’s flying columns.

Father O’Sullivan was excommunicated long go for trying to bring closure and exposure to the abuse of young boys rampant in the Catholic Church for decades. Sister Kristin was a disciple of his, liberation theologians both, of the Dublin based Ti Ligliz.

The Prods then kept trying to burn the Catholics out of Belfast with renewed zeal. An orange mob burned Father O’Sullivan’s parish to the ground on the ides; Secure cables coming from the Breuklyn Soviet notified Hubert that he is needed back in the States, and he wants to go home, but he can’t.

 

Mrs. Sister Kristin around this time informs Father Sullivan of the Otriad’s designs in Ayiti.

Hubert O’Domhnaill soon after returned briefly to Dublin City in time to see his ‘mah’ on her birthday and then see worse troubles resume. The Orange Order ran further amuck. The New Provisional IRA gets back to the active bombing of chip-shops in England and Prod funerals and also pubs. Things really exploded on St. Pats with regular North –South border raiding along the border and over it..

Hubert went back North to serve as a volunteer fire-fighter. The arson got so bad in Belfast and then Derry and then more places North East. Father O’Sullivan and his men are clinging to a little patch of tenements and barely holding out in what’s left of Catholic Belfast.

The Orange Order burns their homes and shoots their volunteer fire fighters. The Catholics are being fire walled out of the North this time for good.

 

Hubert by then had become quite close with the hunted, hounded and besieged Father O’Sullivan and also the young Dashiell Duffy his young lieutenant and can man. The Imperial Black and Tans were arresting anyone the fires didn’t suffocate. All three men were on Orange hit list. But they had Catholic enemies too; the good father especially. The church is not a liberal institution.

 

“The violence in the North this time is a pretext to push the Catholics South and the Dublin government doesn’t really mind,” muttered O’Sullivan, “they’re just frothing for succession, and a reason to finally invade the north.”

 

He’d just outrun sniper bullets twice that week. A car bomb took his nerves the week before. The siege was closing in. Warrants had been issued for O’ Sullivan in the South as well as North.

 

“We could get out of country awhile,” says Lt. Duffy one night over a pint at Molly’O’Rork’s Pub, the last one un-scorched in the quickly shrinking Catholic quarter.

“Get out to where son? Any day they’ll make a mark of me,” sighed a tired Father O’Sullivan. Blood shot eyes all.

“We stay up here, the B Specials or Orange legions will hang us all. We go South the Church that is the Southern State we’ll burn me at the alter fer speakin’ of their inside crimes. North and South the Provisionals want me dead fer “escalations”. Escalations? We were just defending our homes! ”

“Look, it’s much worse here now day by day. The Catholic quarter is but less than twelve blocks and most of the civilians have evacuated. We can stay and put our burning tenements out day by day, but we all know Dublin and Derry and London are negotiating a full population exchange. All yer boys will fall into the hands of the Dublin Government and be arrested for ‘escalation or agitation or treasonous sympathies’ as soon as we get dumped on the other side of the border,” says O’Domhnaill.

“So what do ya suggest then boy?” the priest asks.

“We leave awhile. All yer boys too Fatha’. We’ve been sold down the river by both sides. Sister Kristin’s told you what we planned. Let’s go make a demonstration of ourselves in that cruel place Africa where you know is in constant deed of men with our talents.”

“Yer speakin’ of Ayiti again I see?” the father said.

“I know your far-away cause. But it is just as lost a cause as this without needin’ ta die for it so far away from home,” mutters Lt. Duffy.

Other men in plain green olive fatigues nod in agreement.

“It’s a lost cause in Breuklyn too! Of course ‘cross the lake and the sea are millions doing slaughter daily over invisible gods, and the colors on flags and that all and the like. But we ain’t doin’ any real good puttin’ out blazes that been burnin’ fer over a hundred years,” exclaimed Hubert O’Domhnaill.

“What makes ya to think our volunteers we’ll leave Erin, travel to Africa where were just as sure to burn red and die, on the basis of us declarin’ our cause in Erin lost?” yells Duffy.

“Haiti is not actually in Africa, fer the record,” states Hubert.

The fighters gathered in the basement of Fifty Shades of Green Roadhouse all nod aye.

“Because if father orders ‘um to they will. Follow him in-ta hell they would. And the fires of hell are on the edge of this embankment. And if ya tell ‘um the long stakes, it looks quite respectable for a Fenian man to have a part in Adon’s wild scheme. It’s not just a moral group suicide bombing like, it’s another way to show the world they should care about occupied Erin because Erin bleeds far and often ‘fer others too,” retorted O’Domhnaill

“Where the fek is this Ayiti anyhow?” asked Dashiell Duffy.

“It’s deep in the Caribbean boyo,” responded Father O’Sullivan. He paused thoughtfully and nursed his whiskey. It seemed the only thing the father didn’t do was take a woman to his bed room. Although once the Vatican strung him up all supposed he might.

“They will surely hang us soon, one side or another. We are after all completely surrounded here in this burned out quarter.  At least in Africa we might die as proud Fenians, sons of Erin fighting an evil and clearly murderous nemesis. Here, we mostly fight each other and it isn’t so black and white, we’re now caught between orange and green,” he said in that basement.

 

“How soon can you get our men out of this burning ghetto seige Mr. O’Domhnaill?”

 

“Just got to make a quick phone call to the Dominican Republic,” Hubert responded.

 

Two days later several hundred fighters and their families evacuated the Catholic quarter of Belfast through the sewers.

 

The North now somehow Catholic free declared its independence. The Dublin government ordered the construction of a Separation Wall to box in the six enemy counties. And a large black containership, with a naughty black mermaid painted on the side is met sixteen miles off the coast by vessels carrying O’Domhnaill, O’Sullivan, Sister Kristin, Lt. Dashiell Duffy and three-hundred-and-forty Fenian fighters off to the American bases on of the Isle of Youth, Cuba.

 

 

Chapter 6

Croix-Des-Bouquet, 2019ce

Ayiti

 

 

Deployed on the dawn of 1 January, 2020 was a total expeditionary force of roughly 999 combat troops, many emts and paramedics, 2 doctors (Perechenova and Asbunovich) and thirty-two armored solar-diesel Type-2 ambulances. Perechenova was as stated a Cuban trained physician, the only female in the column besides Katya Patel. And Dr. Dominich Asbunovich had trained in Grenada, served with Cassidy Vale and Sebastian Adon in 2010 in Ayiti.

Katya Patel was allegedly there to support the phscho social needs of the troops.

 

The South Column of around 300 was led by Captain Watson Entwissle, the Central Company was led by Captain Tiputti Capois and the North Department Company by Captain Obenson Christoph. They were nick named Petion, Toussaint and Christoph Divisions. The detachment of mostly Russian and Ivoryish foreign fighters attached to Capois was called HADAR Column, the mostly Fenian foreign fighters under General Christophe was called the St. Patricks’ Battalion, and the Pan-West Indian Brigade was called the Schenectady Detachment. These 999 fighters were supporting roughly 20,000 Famni Lavalas militia men in their assurgency. Also smaller but heavily armed groups like the J.E.M. and the S.P.L.A.

 

 

 

 “Sometime last night a song came on the radio of my ambulance and I came to think of you more fondly. To imagine you, although having only spoken with you a few times in person; to be exceedingly elegant, obstinate, determined and quite truly tough. So, quite removed from the idea that I might ever sway ‘yer energies toward the work that our Otriad performs I had a separate notion. I would like us to be friends. And our time being limited and devoted to respective industry, I humored the notion that I might write to you at times about the fleeting ideas I have at my work or the delusions and freedom songs I cling to in deed or rhetoric. And you may find this silly or random, but I like to write and I appreciate a critical audience. The act of putting pen to paper is a lost art. I hope not to suspend ‘yer offensiblities, but tell me if this game has any appeal to you, my dear.”

 

Yelizaveta reads this old letter Sebastian had written her.

 

She is seated at the wheel of one of the Herkimer Medical Jitneys her former employer Alexandr Perchevney has borrowed long term from the U.N. to sell to the Pale Officers. Like pilgrims and cowboys of the fabled wild-wild West thirty two of these armored, solar power supplemented, diesel powered ambulances are lined in circle with sentries on their roofs all bivouacked in the valley.

 

The men have been broken up into detachments of two hundred fighters each commanded by two Captains. Their force was the largest of the three deployed columns composed of sub-detachments, columns of 40 men apiece named Bielski, Golani, Betar, Jabotinsky, and Jacobi, traditional Ayitian names?

 

They had been dropped in Ayiti at dusk before New Year’s 2019 and continued to fight by night.

 

Adon made contact with the main Factions[97] less than a week on the ground. Two detachments and four Persian handlers crossed the border with them into Ethiopia to negotiate a logistics base at the City XXXX. The remaining 600 troops of the Hadar Column, guided by Eastern Front scouts began harassing the Ayitian supply lines between XXX and XXXX.

After taking increasing casualties they were pushed south toward XXXXX

On 27th, the Dominkcan Government granted them a base outside of XXXXto refuel their ambulances, convalesce wounded fighters and cache arms. Delicate negotiations are underway to open up a sea road to Djibouti for resupply frustrated by total a diplomatic blackout between Eritrea and Ethiopia.

On January 3rd the first major Hadar raid is carried out by Commander Sevastra head of the Jabotinsky Detachment blowing up a troop train between XXX and XXXX

On Jaunary 9th Hadar General Staff is informed of the attempted assassination attempt on President al-Talleyrand  in Port Au Prince and the decapitation of the Maccoute command in the capital carried out by Scarborough Column fighters many of which are presumed dead.

On January 14th the Bielski Detachment under the command of Nikholai Trikhovitch raids an arms depot in the city of XXX, killing twenty eight Ayitian police and military men. They left behind them a trail of death and smell of burning buildings.

Using Ethiopian bases and calculated limited engagements the Hadar Column and their new allies in the Eritrean backed Eastern Front bring trade and traffic in Eastern Ayiti to a grinding halt. News comes in daily from Northern Command of intensive casualties and fighting in Dar Ayitian and the North.

 

 

Chapter 7

Croix-Des-Bouquet, Rue Double Harvest Basis

2019ce

Ayiti

 

3 February

 

Sebastian Adon is field stripping his Carmelite 55mm[98] long gun alone within his blue-grey sand-gypsy tent when Dr. Kay returns from her medical rounds of the neighboring villages escorted by Watson Entwissle, who felt forever obligated to protect her as Sebastian has protected his wife and forever lover Charlotte. She has a few questions she cannot answer easily. Like whom she once was and who were they really to each other. Like the full extent of her previous relationship with Commander Adon. She asks Watson to take break.

 

Her Ayitian body guard, also a General soon in the war, Sebastian’s quiet cunning partner allows her to pretend that is his intent.

 

She barges into the tent making everything less still.

 

“How did O’Domhnaill convince three hundred and forty two Fenians to up and come to Ayiti? They don’t even really like Black people!” Dr. Yelizaveta Kay demands of her lover Sebastian Adon.

 

“I suspect he has a gift of beyond adequate persuasion.”

 

“How’d those Persian Revolutionary guardsmen end up authorized to tag along? They don’t even like Ivories much less all the sneaky Israeli spies you hang around.”

 

“I suspect they like the end game of the project. The Fenians too. Everyone wants all the walls to come tumbling down or imagine that they get some stake of the black gold once the liberation occurs.”

 

She looks quite angry in her sudden thirst for direct answers.

 

“What’s the end game then for us neshama?”

 

He shudders when she calls him that, he hasn’t heard her say it in a very long time.

 

“Yelizaveta, the end game for us is still rather complicated.”

 

“I know you see it all intertwine my love.”

 

There is a seditious way she uses the word.

 

“Seeing it is one thing, explaining it is another, grasping even more elusive. But I suspect you carry the blueprint too, did we not meet in Sde Boker once a long-long time ago?”

 

“Are you telling me or asking me?” she says.

They had many years of a life together mostly in conceived in letters. They had many more years if you counted the imagined past. It was very relative what actually happened in Sde Boker, when Maya offered them the chance to bring the messiah by sacrificing their first born love.

 

“Can we talk seriously about our lives before the incident Sebastian, what do you remember?”

 

“Ah, the incident. I remember you went to Cuba to get medical training and that I wished you’d stayed behind forever with me.”

“We are hardly free agents Sebastian. I remember signing a contract with Maya to take care of my father and mother in exchange for ten years’ service to the Perchevney Bratva as a doctor.”

 

“My contact said I needed to recruit 1,001 fighters before I could set a foot back down in Zion, and then I ran the border. And Maya said she had to locate one black man who could be trained as a messiah. We all co-signed each other’s contracts.”

 

“Our memories are not our own. I remember the night we were attacked on the train and you were in the hospital. I’m fairly certain that all happened. But, that wasn’t our first date. That I know for sure. I was born in a town in the Ukraine called Beile Circov. I know my family moved to Washington Heights in the years before the Great Disorder. I know that very little after that is not a memory implant. Did you even write all those letters to me?”

“I think so. I have memories too of things that happened, but might not have happened objectively. I thought I helped found the club to fight for human rights.”

“Did you found the Breukland Bath and Rifle Club or did Maya Solomon.”

“I don’t remember.”

“Did the club get founded on Block Island or was it planned out in Sde-Boker?”

“You ask a lot of questions,” he says to he her in Yiddish.

“What’s the long game?” she retorts in Ruus.

“Some people whisper that you’re only fucking me to find that out.”

“You really don’t care do you?! They wiped your fucking mind Sebastian. You remember what we had before the incident was beautiful? You remember feeling like you could spend the rest of your life with me? Then the war separated us. That’s utter nonsense.”

“We were in love once.”

“Says who?” she yells.

“I have memories. I have a pile of letters.”

“Someone said to keep track of you. I’m not fucking you for any other reason than that.”

“Why are you telling me all this? Do you think I am unaware of how many spies sleep in our tents, of how many big powers are invested in our cause? Did you think I mistook your partnership for sentimentality? Take your fucking salt.”

She’d completely forgotten.

“The Ayitian tribe are surely not the most prolific gossipers, but they are watchful. I’d suspect your new insecurities are logged within your own ego sweetness. Everyone sees the work you do and view you with admiration. Everyone assumes you’re a Russian or Israeli spy surely, but the Hadar column is riddled with quite a few of those.”

“I am not the pale commander’s whore for fucking. I am his partner and tovarish.”

“I’d have it no other way.”

“I think you don’t remember everything I’m afraid my dear Sebastian.”

“I must concentrate just to execute the direction of this war. I remember less and less the more we soldier on. The only thing I can say is not invention is the love I have had for you.”

“That’s an invention too.”

“Take your salt Yeli, before it’s too late.”

“How can you know that even this is based upon something tangible?”

He grabs her by the arm and pulls her close.

“All the other candidates are now dead. The options are down to you, me and Solomon. Now take your goddamn salt before you go fourth dimensional and start raving like a mad woman.”

“As if any of that Tzaddik ha Dror shit is even true.”

“Our whole lives were manipulated to a higher end. We have sold ourselves to some higher cause and traded in our souls to serve our people. If in the end all that is left is our love and this war, then at least reconcile yourself to the fact that we can taste each other for a little longer.”

“It is sad that you think the war will never have to end.”

 

She takes the two large pills he has thrust into her hand and swallows them down with water from the canteen on her belt.

 

 

Chapter 8

Mirogane City, 2019ce

Ayiti

 

On 10 February the badly sun burned St. Patrick’s Battalion loses thirty eight more men in fire fight near Mirogane.

 

The Battle Buses, as the armored ambulances are called, are still running and armaments are not yet at dangerously low levels, but they are constantly pursued. The surface to-air-missiles are effective against helicopters, but not the Han bomber drones that were now being used against them. Sixteen of their men had been cut down in various skirmishes, twenty by strafing and bombing raids. Two died of wounds sustained in the battle of Mirogane.

 

The Persian Guardsmen have established a small military academy to retrain the Lavalas Army., which is not a particularly disciplined outfit overall, mostly proficient at machete charges and tire burning barricade maneuvers.

 

Commander Avinadav DeBuitléir is now commander-in-chief, the mostly undisputed General of thirteen separate guerrilla armies united under the banner of Allied Rebel Forces which seem to have no cohesive vision for what to do if they actually won the war.

 

So far removed has been the possibility.

 

Deep in the boarder wastelands between Ayiti and Dominikani Republic is a simple farm where nothing grows but the H.E.G. has established a fire base.

 

The twelve Persians have been drilling a new officer corps regularly and adjusting the loose, underground cell based Lavalas command and control modal to that of a more structured armed service, slowly and through translators.

 

Some of the Persians speak French, most of the Ayitian peasants certainly do not, but a large amount of French nouns are found in Ayitian Creole.

 

No one very much trusts the Persians and it affects the cohesion of their drills. Most of the H.E.G. factions other than the JEM are not Muhammadians. Currently Commander DeBuitléir is cut off from the most loyal segments of his army by new Ayitian military deployments in the area. The men under his direct command are not of his tribal religion or ethnic confession, but defer to his authority. His faction’s militia, some 2,000 troops are across the border in Southern Ayitian. Under increasing military pressure and falling moral he orders an evacuation of all H.E.G. fighters to several outposts in lawless Chad on the other side of the border to be rotated in an out of the Persian Military Camp. This is as much pressure from the Ayitian Regulars as to have his own faction close to the pales officers and their growing stock piles of arms.

There is a pressing need to coalesce H.E.G. and the Front into an actual army before the factions begin infighting as sometimes-sometimes happens in these Sub-Saharan guerrilla insurgencies. Small platoons of St. Pat’s fighters with H.E.G. scouts are sent back across the border to direct the pull out.

The Monday just before the mass trek into Chad a platoon of St. Pat’s fighters went on a recon mission and got hacked to bits by a Maccoute column. They have better Chinese weapons now. They are getting faster via their desperation and more merciless toward the civilians these Fenians seek to shield.

 

The Tonton Maccoutes gutted and hung the twenty men along the highway to the West of Mirogane. Vile in both triumph and fear of defeat.

 

A two weeks before Christmas most of the H.E.G. hardcore are bivouacked in the bad lands of the border region concentrated in four positions.

Commander Hubert O’Domhnaill orders the Wolf Tone Detachment of just 80 fighters under the command of Captain Philly Hartman and Captain Hunter McCord along with a few hundred of the H.E.G. men more loyal to DeBuitléir to do their best to protect the refugee camps near Lascahobas. The objective is to tie up the Maccoute and Ayitian Military in Dar Ayitian while the H.E.G. is properly regimented over the winter.

Three Persians of the twelve person team led by Kaveh Ali Shariati leave with the Wolf Tone Detachment to organize the refugee camps into a civilian defense force and prepare fortifications around the camp complex.

Now thinks O’Domhnaill: We have killed many of them, but they recruit quickly, mostly from the young and unemployed youth.

The Detachment has killed a lot of men half their age.

The New Ayitian Military (NHM) has so far avoided making deep incursions into Ayitian’s ten departments or certainly into neighboring DR, it has virtually no tested record of combat except on its own people. They have stepped up supplying weapons to the Maccoute and it is not uncommon now to see regular army officers among Maccoute columns. They’ve set up check points everywhere in cordons around the oil pumping boom towns. With new overwhelming force their focus is to crush the insurgency in the North still being carried out by the decimated Scarborough Column. Daily battles and assassination attempts and bombings have been increasing since the eve of the invasion. Scarborough dagger men are hunting down war criminals in the north and cutting them to ribbons. The Hadar column will hopefully open the Southern Front and further spread thin the Ayitian Regulars.

But with every attack against the Maccoute and Military brings more stories of civilian reprisals increasing in scale.

A deep sense of uncertainty has set in. There are grumblings, which one can hear without language hardware that the ‘pale officers’ are to blame for the government’s new thirst for atrocity.

Commander DeBuitléir has over sixty men shot, lined up tied and executed for insubordination, an apparent plot on behalf of two of the factions to kill the Persians and seize the weapons stock pile. More fighters are being processed through the camps in Chad so he can tighten his command.

Eight days before Xmas they Germinal a force of 180 St. Patrick’s Battalion troops from the Scott Riley and Michael Collins Detachments as well as nearly eight hundred Ayitian Emergency Group forces from six of the factions across the border to relieve the Wolf Tone fighters harassed by fly over bombing strikes.

 

On the back roads a mine rips through the legs of one of the freckled boys, a specialist from County Cork. He has no legs on which to stand. They carry him back thirty miles, but he bleeds out and dies for want of medical attention.

 

There’s just only so much you can do in the field.

 

Seven days before Xmas the Wolf Tone fighters securing the camps begin trekking back to Chad and the Scott Riley and Michael Collins Detachments take their place.

The three Persian Guardsmen have barely organized a trench system and civilian reserve. The nine Guardsmen still based Chad are half way through drilling a new H.E.G. officer corps.

Thus so far, in this Port Au Prince Centric country, tanks and elite troop divisions remain in and around the Capital and Port Ayiti as heavy handed mop up operations go after the decimated Scarborough fighters.

Waves of hit and run terrorism/ freedom fighting have petrified the Port-Au-Prince, Petionville elites and mortified the NGO elites. Most of their fearsome army called a defense force and national police are being used to secure the oil lines and twin cities of the Capital.

 

Sometimes called the Twin Cities because the green zone of Petionville and Kenscoff are notably different from the sprawling camps around the base and up the sides of the mountain.

 

On the evening President al-Talleyrand signs the security and liquidation resolution there are less than 1,080 armed JEM and H.E.G. and St. Pat’s men protecting roughly two dozen internal refugee camps in and around Southwest Ayiti with little more than long guns and armored ambulances.

 

The largest concentration is known as “the five camps” or Penn-Jenkins-Mershing Complex[99] resettled earthquake and economic refugees huddled out in a bad lands called Canaan.

 

Chapter 9

Fort Liberdade, 2019ce

Ayiti

 

Oxo, we blow our families kisses in the form of courier letters from the Island fortress front. Shortly after regrouping from the long march from DR two front line detachments of the Scarborough under Dbrisk and Okonkwo mobilize to intercept a Maccoute column closing in on Camp Al-Atrun known as the deadly Buffalo Brigade[100]. They are backing up the smaller John Riley Detachment, one of the three Fenian fighting units led by Hubert O’Domhnaill.

Its leader, a principle founder of the third generation Tonton Maccoute, Mr. Mercredy Mercedes is their primary target. But also with him meeting are CIA handlers Stacy and Spencer Labrundi.

Newly trained Ayitian-Emergency-Front men evacuated the camp-town the day before and all seek to ambush this particularly nefarious man Musa Halal, who is believed to have been in charge of the reprisals against the nine camps after the Gonaives raid.

The Maccoute militia rolls into an NGO township just outside Fort Liberdade expecting to slay civilians in the dust and make hard violent rape. They are the first prong of the newly approved cleansing operation.

But instead of defenseless Ayitian civilians they find over three hundred heavily armed fighters firing from dug outs and fixed positions.

From dirt huts and sand dug outs the John Riley Detachment of the St. Pats Battalion and the newly formed Nkrumah Column of the H.E.G. light up and incinerate the infamous Buffalo Brigade with automatic weapons. Three hours of gun fighting later the Maccoute are warm, wet and dead. The rebels have their hands on the mean killers, probably also CIA assets, named Spencer & Stacy Lebrundi. Looking fat and stupid as always, as they came to see a killing of what they were creating for their oligarch masters.

 

They get their hands on Mercredy Mercedes and string him up cuffed to the rafters of an old pharmacy near the edge of the camp. All his men have been lined up and shot.

“We’re going to have to torture you,” says Mickhi Dbrisk without emotion or a hint of intimidating compliance.

“Not for information, not for revenge, were gonna just plain torture you because it will send a message to your followers and your government and your country.”

The infamous Maccoute commander snivels, then spits out, “Fuck you nigger.”

The men standing in the hut snicker.

“At least he knows where we come from,” smirks a ginger haired Specialist named Mickey Donovan glibly.

“Back to the whole message,” interjects Mickhi Dbrisk, who had been a paramedic in the Breukland Soviet for sixteen years and has saved more lives than he’s so far taken.

David cracks the Commander of the most nefarious Maccoute-brigade in his ribs with a bat.

“The message is that we hunted down each and every one of your murdering, rapist friends. We hunted you all down, and we shot you, we cut you, we killed you all on by one. Sixty four fucking targets acquired and wacked in just two months. Everyone except you and the President dead.”

Mickhi Dbrisk cracks him on the other side of the ribs with the bat again. The feared and infamous Maccoute commander bellows and spits out blood.

Specialist Mickey Donovan flips on the digital camera they’ve set up to put the whole thing on the internet. He takes out a quite-official looking clip board and unseals an envelope from inside.

“We must insure the legality of the whole thing otherwise it’s just called terrorism right?” interjects Mickey.

“Read it,” commands Okonkwo.

“You, Maccoute Commander Coordinator Mercredy Mercedes are found guilty of war crimes against the people of Ayiti and Greater Hispaniola. You have been tried and sentenced by a military tribunal under the auspices of Combined Otriad’s Committee for War Crimes in Ayiti and sentenced to die.”

Mickey shuts off the camera, and says, “Death by clobbering. You have no right to appeal, you have no right to jury of your peers, you will be beaten to death on camera and the words RAPIST will be cut into your murderous face. Do you understand the charges and implementation?”

The commander snivels blood ready to die. The camera comes back on.

“Do you have any last words?” Dbrisk asks.

As the commander appears to be trying to say something, Mickhi smashes his face again with the bloody bat.

“No one gives a fuck what you have to say,” yells Mickey Donovan picking up a second bat, “NO ONE GIVES A FUCK!” he shatters Musa’s pelvis.

“YOU KILLED ALL THOSE FUCKING PEOPLE YOU RAT BASTARD!”

Crack. Crack. Blood all over the place.

They proceed to beat him into a bloody screaming pulp. Stacey barely avoids a nasty gang rape as she is taken prisoner as a CIA operative. She’s a notorious snake and killer, but punitive rape is something the enemy thrives on and we are strictly against. Her partner Spencer is summarily shot without any qualms.

 

The footage is later streamed on YouTube, around midnight, before NSA manages to shut down our feed. Once uploaded to the internet the usual pontifications and Western apologies begin a new and a-fresh. The bulk of the previous condemnations had been directed toward the veritable “indiscriminate blood bath” being carried out by Hadar and “wild urban terrorism” Scarborough detachments, this was the first time the St. Patrick’s Battalion had been denounced by name in the New York Times and the NY Post in a single day as they usually never agreed on anything.

 

The West Indians and Ivory and Yids had thus so far mostly been shooting up the North and Central districts raiding homes of Maccoute commanders and blowing up buildings. The St. Patrick’s battalion had instead focused on disrupting oil infrastructure, blowing up troop trains, placing IEDs on roads, and carrying out drills with the newly formed A.E.F. Ayitian-Emergency-Front, the merger of the G.A.I.-H.E.G., Lavalas and J.E.M. with just about everybody else fighting the MINUSTAH/ NGO Regime and foreign armies of imperialism.

 

 

 

Chapter 10

Dalliers Roadhouse, 2019ce

                                                           Ayiti

 

‘Where we’re going there are no roads’, an old quote from ‘Back to the Future’ which applies to almost all of Ayiti.

 

On February 20th, they’re piled inside a desolate weigh station on the outskirts of Vallieres at a roadhouse called Dalliers Bon Bon. Kompa is blaring on the streets outside. It’s so damn hot that they drip into loose formation and stand at attention when the commanders enter the station.

 

The roof is made of tin.

 

The floors creak and the several dozen fighters packed inside have run out of places to sit. They are caked in desert grit. A shower for some has been a long way off. After nearly two months of bloody mayhem, the three columns of the Otriad alongside their Ayitian allies have wiped most of the primary targets on their list. It’s been pretty Wild West out here. A rendezvous in a wilderness shanty tavern has been arranged to set up the final offensives. Once this is complete the Scarborough Column cross into DR and regroup with the St. Patrick’s Battalion in defense of the Mershing Camp Complex in Canaan that that idiot Sean Penn came up with years ago after the quake. Motherfucking celebrity charity.

 

Commander Mickhi Dbrisk reviews the photographs pinned up on the tavern wall.

 

  • Mohammed Salih Al Sunusi Baraka: Member of the National Assembly
  • Mohammed Yusif El Tileit: Western Ayitian Department State Minister
  • Hussein Abdalla Jibril: Major General, Member of the National Assembly
  • Hussein Tangos: Maccoute Major
  • Charles Baker: major sweat shop king
  • Andy Apaid: major sweat shop and recent hotelier
  • President Jim Basher al-Talleyrand, the current President of AYITI and the head of the National Congress Party. He’s been in power since 2004 when he, as a colonel in the Ayitian army toppled the previous government in a coup.

 

All of these men will be attending a business meeting in upper Port Au Prince (Kenscoff) within five days according to sympathizers to the resistance affiliated with Lavalas.

 

“There’s too much fucking icing on that cake to not attempt to jump out of it,” mutters Commander Okonkwo across the long table in the saloon from Commander Magnus Allamby, a wild eyed Bajan. The heat and fog of war have clearly clouded his deployment of Russian proverbs.

“You must all be getting crazy from too much heat brother,” Allamby responds, “Even if we could get enough men inside Port Au Prince to pull this off correct, no one’s getting out alive.”

 

“But if we pull it off we’ll liquidate the top names on the hit list,” mutters towering former rock star, Commander Netic Kinari, who had just three days before added the latest kill to the much followed online score board at http://www.peoplestelevion.org and the sister site covering the war http://www.tricolor.com.[101]

 

“You’re all taking pretty crazy,” Mickhi mutters, “Tantamount and his men are all dead. We haven’t heard a thing from Clemons and the Bobby Seale Detachment in over three weeks, last thing we heard they’d call been Maccoute-wacked in the Township of Wad-Madrani. Darious Dorset we presume is dead. If any of his men in the Douglas Detachment are alive they might be hiding in Eretria. Jermaine Dbrisk is alive, I mean Maya says he is, but we know all but four of his Ocean Ave men are dead. Disraeli DeBuitléir and the Ben-Ami Detachment have ended up stranded in Northern Chad totally decimated after their raid on the Oil Refineries,” he pauses,

 

“What I’d like to stress is that it’s not even the end of February and we’re in a devil’s shit can already.”

 

Everyone at the table, in this empty piece of shit, wasteland store front dance saloon reflects. Although there hasn’t been a precise head count, it is likely more than 1/3 of the column has been obliterated in less than two months or carnage.

“Clarke and Marcus have merged their troops into the newly formed Selassie Detachment, mostly the Grenadians and Jamaicans not under the command of Uhuru. They number a little under two dozen now,” Netic says, “Dbrisk, your Schenectady Detachment is supposed to be negotiating is capital for bases and arms, Maya says they have at least 100 men with some locals looking to join up.”

 

But Scarborough numbers were otherwise thin. Nostrand Ave Detachment (led by Netic Kinari) has only 9 warriors standing. Malik-Shabbaz Detachment (led by Djbriel Okonkwo, Olu’s brother) has 13 fighters; Fela Kuti Detachment (led by Olu Okonkwo) has only 17 left alive. All these fighters are currently deployed in DR backed up by a couple dozen local enlistees. Selassie Detachment is deployed north of Croix des Bouquets way on the other side of the line. The roads are getting harder and harder to traverse without hitting a heavily guarded check point.

 

“The Schenectady Detachment is not up for suicide mission,” says Dbrisk, “With all our detachments working in union that only gives us roughly four dozen men.”

 

Commander Jaiwarrior Stroud the leader of the Yeshua Warrior Lion’s Detachment is in a military hospital operated by the H.E.G. along with Specialist Brandon Lewis, the only two survivors on the failed bombing mission carried out on January 20th against the Complex for Heavy Industries. Thirty-five rebel lives lost.

Decepticon Detachment are all confirmed dead-41 lives lost. As are the Bobby Seale Detachment-43 lives lost, the Trinis in the Douglas Detachment are status unknown, commander presumed deceased, and the Ben Ami Detachment is status unknown, presumed decimated and scattered in the inner Dominican Republican mountains.

 

“Well somebody better get his ass on the radio with Solomon and ask Marcus and Clarke to bring their asses back into harm’s way and back us up,” demands Djbriel Okonkwo, “We need more fuckin’ men to pull off this raid.”

 

“And what about those Mics and the Yids?” ask Djbriel Okonkwo.

 

“They’re fighting smart, and we’re fighting stupid,” stammers Olu, “Every time we run amuck in a major city we get blown apart. We haven’t even been here a full two months and half of our men are already dead!”

 

 

“That’s ‘cause we engage the enemy while the crackas hole up behind the local resistance!” Djbriel shouts back.

 

 

“You stow that shit Commander,” interjects Netic Kinari who in civilian life is sem-famous Rock Musician in the Breuklyn Soviet and an old college friend of Adon’s from the time they did in Purchase State Penitentiary. He’s a real crack shot and a sick rock and roller back in Breukland.

 

“It’s fuckin’ true! We the goddamn field niggas, evry time. We get fuckin’ parachuted deep behind enemy lines pickin’ Maccoute-fuckin blood cotton!” yells Djbriel.

 

“We are performing a part in the operation. As are our brothers in Hadar and St. Patrick’s,” says Justin Thomas restoring order.

“For obvious reasons the most dangerous operation on the table,” yells Djbriel.

“Stow that shit now!” yells Netic. Djbriel draws his side arm. From the door way comes clapping. In walks Commander Marcus Jerome, co-commander of the Selassie Detachment, they all figured his outfit hadn’t been able to sneak through for the command council meeting.

Netic snickers and sucks his teeth but Djbriel doesn’t lower his gun.

“Ama-dem jus give yo’ one ‘dem munt den Africa, don make black’an make move ta kill ona dem own men, bumbaclott,” sings Marcus in Grenadian Patois. He is skinny and wearing a black uniform his long dreds tired up behind his head in a tam.

“What the fuck did he say,” laughs Djbriel Okonkwo lowering his gun finally.

“Ah say, Sellassie hai, Jah don give da powa to wen dem snakes bite they own heads aff.”

“Go dem Yiddies and Paddy Dweet danger bound to boy, lower dem der burner, point ya iron not atcha brother black man.”

“I have no idea what you just said Marcus, but thanks for showin’ up,” laughs Netic.

“I said,” says Marcus turning off the Grenadian Patoi, “We’re all in this shit together man. You wanna hit Port Au Prince, well we’d better work quick. Emma Soloman says we can get another 40 men down here in half a day. The Trinis and Cubans are behind us, they’ll parachute the boys in and fly by bomb the capital to make chaos on Eid.

“So that gives us how many?” asks Netic.

“Sellassie got 27 men, 90 with locals involved, we can march to position in 24 hours,” Marcus explains.

“So now the score is better, with all assembled we’re rollin’ just under 300 deep,” says Djbriel Okonkwo.

“We can do this,” says Netic, “We can decapitate the leadership in one swift blow, if we get killed, fuck it. We knock out the biggest targets on our list. I mean most of us are on borrowed time anyway.”

“The longer the war goes on, the harder it will be to breach Port Au Prince and the more of their leadership will go underground or flee abroad to Saudi,” says Dbrisk, “The time to strike is now.”

“This is so fucking stupid,” mutters Olu.

“That’s all this nigga ever fuckin’ says,” responds his brother Djbriel.

The hasty operation was scheduled to take place five days later on Frimaire 6th Eid al-Adhah, the night of sacrifice.

In the end, the Eritreans refused to bomb Port Au Prince, nor would have such a raid been very effective against the SAM defense grid lining the city. In the end, Commander Melvin Clarke convinces Marcus Jerome that this is a ‘foolosh bumba-clot death trap’ and pulls Sellassie Detachment deeper into the desert away from the capital. In the end, Dbrisk only agrees to send 20 men from Schenectady and orders Allamby to stay put in Asmara with the rest. Such are the pitfalls of a democratic army.

The combined force which smuggles itself into Port Au Prince is only 149 deep. The Malik Shabbaz, Fela Kuti, and Nostrand Ave Detachments fuse with a platoon of Schenectady men under Mickhi Dbrisk’s command, unable to agree on a new name and become The Black Hand.

 

Commander Solomon is not a fan of such an aggressive commitment on such short notice, against such a hard target. But, she has little say over hot headed men she can’t see, touch or even give orders to.

 

Commander Adon gets patched through to Dbrisk via the iridium-sat-com link, “Good luck and don’t get killed for nothing,” is all the Hadar leader says to his old dear friend.

            A simple plan really. Enter Port-Au-Prince without guns. Obtain edge weapons in the city. At the Tara’s Opera House where the seven primary targets will all be in attendance. Plunge sharpened knives into our targets.

 

“Pretty fuckin’ high school if you ask me,” mutters Mickhi Dbrisk.

 

So the Black Hand 149, most of what’s left of the Scarborough Column enters Port Au Prince in groups of 3, 4 or 5 over the course of the morning. They make or obtain edge weapons over the course of the day. They line up in the grandest of Caribbean church-mosques to celebrate something random positioned in rows behind their very, very famous targets.

 

The rest they say is people’s history.

 

 

Chapter 11

Fort Liberdade, 2019ce

Ayiti

March 5

 

The smell of smoke to the non-smoker in close quarters is ghastly, but to the renewed smoker it is not unlike a steak. O’Domhnaill has had three in the past hour.

In a dune bunker forty clicks over the border into Chad Commander Hubert O’Domhnaill smokes another cigarette and mourns the recent slaughter of many of his close friends. In the yellow-white dunes outside Persian Guardsmen drill several hundred new H.E.G. recruits. Their shouts and orders are in Ayitian which reflects the successful graduation of the new officer corps.

 

All around is a mood of desperation and encroaching death.

Commander Hubert O’Domhnaill writes in his report to Northern Command:

 

“It is now March 5th, three months since original deployment and more than half of our men are indeed quite dead, but not one has lost his will to struggle on. All of the Wolf Tone Detachment was gunned down in the recent Battle of Fort Libertade.

 

They had marched east to strike at a MINUSTAH Regional Congress alongside a surviving detachment of Scarborough Column men. Now called the Selassie Brigade they numbered over two thousand armed men via enlistment of native Ayitians in the H.E.G. Nkrumah Column. The Scarborough men were led half by Commander Magnus Allamby and his men recently returned from Eritrea and several dozen others under Commander Jerome Marcus.”

“The emergency fielding of such a large force was done anticipating the leaked liquidation orders we received from Northern Command. We had hoped to neutralize their expeditionary force before it got too close to the IDP Camp network near Mershing Complex. We over committed with improper planning. It was terrible judgment on the part of St. Pats, Scarborough and H.E.G. leadership.”

“We stepped right into a trap. They had a fleet of Canadian and Argentine tanks as well as the expertise to use them. Also thrown against our men were Han Drone bombers and an assortment of sophisticated airships. Captains Hunter McCord and Robert Flannigan in addition to one hundred other Fenians were cut down covering the evacuation of refugee camps near Babanusah Junction as were over a thousand fighters from the new Selassie Brigade, more than half its total force. It is still unclear who is alive from the Scarborough Column and who is dead. By all reports Commanders Allamby and Jerome are impossible to kill. Suffice to say all our available forces are digging in around the Mershing Complex IDP camps anticipating the intended genocide any day now.”

 

“I spoke yesterday with Commander Adon and he says Hadar Column seems to be doing better investing more time in alliance building. They are encamped still in the Ethiopian city of Gonder and raid regularly between the border and Juba City with the help of the Ayiti People’s Liberation Army and disparate forces in the Eastern Front. By acquiring anti-aircraft guns trucked secretly across Ethiopia they have made the FANMI LAVALAS Zone less vulnerable to air strikes from the Ayitian air force. Adon has promised reinforcements for our impending clash, but they are many days away and the roads in between are still in the hands of the Ayitian military. They will be unable to reach our position in time I fear.”

“There are rumors a few surviving squads of Scarborough men are still killing secondary target Maccoute-leaders in the North, but largely the invasion and rebellion has been quarantined into two zones.”

 

He pauses to snuff out the smoldering cancer stick.

 

“South Ayiti, the southern most of the three states of the region is loosely under the control for now of what’s left of St. Pat’s, Selassie and the Ayitian-Emergency-Front, a fusion of the old C.E.G. with numerous underground fighting factions organized in the refugee camps as well as factions still training in Chad.  We can’t get anywhere near the other two northern states of Ayiti, which have largely been sanitized of their local population and placed under military control to keep the oil flowing. The Hadar Column and their new allies in the Ayiti People’s Liberation Army (FANMI LAVALAS) have established a zone of control 48 clicks south of the City of Mirebalais. The FANMI LAVALAS have liberated the towns of Nimule and Juba in the Southland of Ayiti. They must now battle north into the City of Marmalade to open up a solid land route to the Port of Cap Ayitian, but they don’t have nearly enough firepower to do it.”

 

“The Ayitian Defense forces and MINUSTAH Military Contingent will begin to attack our positions in the next 72 hours.”

 

As dawn comes to the first Friday after New Year, Commander O’Domhnaill asks Father O’Sullivan if he thinks they can hold out even another month.

The Father doesn’t really know. He can’t remember when he’s prayed so regularly or sincerely though.

“I suspect we’ll be with the Jesus shortly. Or at least in time for St. Pat’s. We are training men far faster than we can arm them.”

“I don’t know any more father; I don’t sleep well with what we’ve done at times. I wonder if me Pa is watching me and judging me for what we’ve done so far from home,” utters Hubert.

“This is a terrible war son, but all wars are quite terrible. Every war is supposed to be the last war, so says the politicians. But the war is in the end just between a man and his god,” says Father O’Sullivan.

 

“I’m so fucking far away from home,” mutters Hubert O’Domhnaill, he thinks, ‘from where I should even really be!’

 

“No, you’re not so far as you think. Our Island is in better hands because of deeds like these.”

 

“I miss my Pa, I think at times he’d not want me here.”

 

“I cannot tell you what you know in your heart, but we are in a New Christian year, our last year perhaps, but surely a decisive year in the greater war.”

 

“What is the greater war father?”

 

“When a woman or man looks into their heart and can make a sacrifice, a terrible sacrifice for a house of strangers. The greater war is always fought between ones comforts and ones convictions. We are pawns in a great game, but we are noble pawns. Surely the best of our kind, and your father too will absolve us if we succeed and remember our martyrdom if we should fall.”

 

“Two nights ago in Saint Raphael an old woman with no legs asked her Mambo to bless my very rifle. She asked me to avenge her and her granddaughters. They were internal refugees from the Nine-Camps. She touched my face and she told me to kill the horsemen who did all this to her tribe.”

 

“This is a dark place, Commander O’Domhnaill, but there is too much sadness, too many tears and red bloodshed already for us to stop.”

 

“We’ve escalated the war I feel. We’ve put in motion something beyond our control.”

 

“Well you’ve said it. And I agree. Our stand will not restore her legs or her granddaughter’s dignity, nor will we wage to win the final battle on earth to come. But your rifle will slay more evil men. That is all you came here to do. If schools and clinics are built in our zone, if the roads from Chad stay open for aid to resume, if we break the legs on which this monstrous regime stands, well, a little more, a little more, humanity marshals on. Kadima, as the Hebrews say, forward humanity will rise from this war knowing the weak can shake off the blood sucking fleas of a repressive government, when strangers move to fight for the fallen.”

 

“We’ll hold the Mershing Camps with daggers and bottle bombs if we have to. Just like families of Jesus and Muhammad, Messiah and Mahdi would want us to,” states Raphael Contreras, Peruvian field Marshall of the once and still proud Pan-Mexican All American detachment killed down now to but eight fighters.

 

 

Chapter 12

Pic La Salle, 2019ce

Ayiti

 

March 8

 

Operations geared to harassing the MINUSTAH and FAd’H and slowing their assault on the hard pressed liberation forces garrisoned at Pic La Selle are being mounted with renewed vigor. Rocket attacks on troop trains.

 

The razing of the Croix des Bouquets prison and military barracks.

The fragmentation bombing a police cadet class in PAP carried out by Lavalas Peasant Militia.

The now nightly placement of IEDs along the north sough Highway 2.

 

Hadar and its allies in LAVALAS and the Ayitian People’s Liberation Army have pushed the DMZ DR Ayiti border lines east by 97 clicks[102].

 

The City of Croix des Bouquets will be captured by the rebel alliance any day now.

It certainly appears they are gaining on the ambulance. They are nearly one hundred and seventy riders in number all racing after one of the armored solar-diesel type 2 ambulances they’d stripped of its ordinance and utilized for the ambush. Yelizaveta supposes the only reason they went after it on horse and camel back was that they thought it was a real UN Ambulance and not part of our detachment. Well, they’d painted it baby blue and put UN plates and logos on it, so why the hell not.

 

We’ve been shooting, sniping really at UN troops from Brazil and Argentina affective last week.

 

 

The UN Secretary General was complaining loudly yet again to the world that every time the Combined Otriad did things like this they made it ever harder for relief and NGO workers to do their jobs. In fact it had been nearly seven years since there any were real relief workers in Ayiti. Just missionaries and neo colonialists disguised as development practitioners.

The UN had been Para-dropping bags of rice and corn for years, but then the  al-Talleyrand   government ordered that all non-UN MINUSTAH crafts flying over Ayiti be fired on and the bags of provisions burned. That was easily three or four years back.

 

 

But in the important and immortal words of Nikholai Trikhovitch Commander of the Bielski Detachment: “Really now? Fuck the UN and the NGOs. Fuck them ‘til they’re chokin’ on it. They had their chance to help here and everywhere else.”

 

So those 170 Maccoute on horse-and-camel back with their massive, crazy looking turbans and white multiforms and daggers and Kalashnikovs were actually gaining on the converted battle bus ambulance flying down Highway 4. So great was their zeal to kill, their blood lust, their drive to rape a blonde ‘war whore’ as they considered Yelizaveta; that they are actually fucking gaining on them.

 

Paramedic Scott Sevastra is behind the wheel. He is one of the most seasoned drivers they have. Dr. Yelizaveta Kay is riding shotgun loading up a 12 gauge in case it comes down to that. Sebastian Adon is in the back with Watson Entwissle, one of two black men in the Hadar Column and they were getting ready to kick open the back and unload a good number of bullets on these 170 Maccoute-bastards with a gas powered Carmelite-Sten Gatling Gun.

 

They had spotted this mini-Maccoute column riding in from Jacmel. There were ‘mop up operations’ scheduled to ethnically cleanse 38 southern rim villages before the beginning of Ramadan. Now that most of Ayiti had been emptied of the Fur tribe and the military was turning south to push the FANMI LAVALAS further south. Increasingly these southern Maccoutes were coordinating with the regular military and working as scouts.

 

They’d wiped out 52 Maccoutes the day before fairly easily. “Cut off their heads, stripped um and hung ‘um from trees,” Trikhovitch had reported before being lectured about saying things like towel heads. Although the Maccoute did tend to wear comically large white wrapping turbans unlike anything they had seen.

 

Today these 170 Maccoute horsemen were marked by Hadar scouts coming in from the east 10 clicks out. So the column sent a decoy baby blue ambulance in with Sevastra, Adon, Yelizaveta and Entwissle all dressed up as UN Medical workers on picnic. They got about 1 click away saw Dr. Kay in a mini-burka and went bat shit.

 

The 170 rape crazed, murderous horsemen were on their way to loot, murder and befoul villages of defenseless women and children. It was that simple. They had been doing this devilish work for nearly eleven years before the three columns got here. The Maccoutes have no qualms with the tasks Jim al-Talleyrand gave them. And the Hadar column has no qualms with the tasks assigned by the Pale Officers.

 

“I do not ask you to dehumanize your enemy, or to glorify the work of our men and cause. The Maccoute-kind are indeed men like you. Albeit sick fucking scum of scavengers men, but men still. Our mission, is not a humanitarian mission, not a state building mission, not a democracy spreading mission. We have come here to kill, torture and be cruel. We have come here to wipe these Maccoute-men off God’s green earth. Or in this case, God’s sandy, cruel forgotten earth,” explained Nikholai Trikhovitch to his detachment called the Bielski Sub-Column[103] of 200 men, one of five Hadar detachments.

 

These 170 murderous bastards were chasing a UN Ambulance attempting to kill and or rape its personnel. Hadar was to show these swine no mercy.

 

“Now,” yells Trikhovitch into his radio.

 

The back of the ambulance flies open and Watson Entwissle the Ayitian and Commander Sebastian Adon unload a spectacular amount of armor piercing Sten-Carmelite shells into the mob of wild horsemen and motor cycle enthusiasts.

 

 

RATATATATATATATATATATTATATTRARTATATATTATATTATTA. BraKA. BRAKA, RATATTAT. BRAKAK BRAKAK! BAM! RRRATTATATATATATATTATATATATATATAT!

 

 

Death and ripped flesh and shells flying everywhere as Maccoute-riders are felled from their horses.  The ambulance has lured the 170 riders into island wadi rift valley where one hundred and ninety six of their boys in the Bielski Detachment are hiding in eight dead man’s ditches a shallow system of concealed and partially buried ambush trenches. On Nicolai’s command they burst from the ground and finish off the Maccoute riders that had somehow survived the Sten-gun’s wrath.

 

It is over rather quickly. Even Dr. Yelizaveta Kay is smoking a cigarette. Commanders Scott Sevastra and Sebastian Adon are restoring the ordinance to the “battle bus” and checking its engine. Men are reloading weapons and breaking down camp.

 

Commander Trikhovitch takes out his crock-a-dile Dundy’esque battle-dagger.

 

“Let’s switch it up people,” he says, “give me a pile of both heads and hands.”

 

Then men set about their dirty work while the Doctor looks away. Commander Adon tries to satellite-radio a report over to Northern Command at the Basis-Wadi-Faran. But they get no response. There’s been no response for a week.

 

More garbled static. Pic La Selle reported a similar black out.

 

The last contact was two weeks before during the ethnic cleansing of Ayiti. Maya Solomon before logging off had repeated her distaste that “Dr. Kay” was still in the fire zone.

To which Sebastian responded he couldn’t well force her to leave.

 

Chapter 13

Jacmel, 2019ce

Ayiti

 

It’s night and the air is cold and still. The blue grey tents lie within the battle bus stockade. Watson Entwissle gazes out into the darkness. He can hear the tension of the surrounding 4 clicks, can hear the click of lighters, the howl of beasts, he can hear the writhing and grunting of fighters with their Ayitian lovers who depart before dawn.

 

He can hear his partner the Commander playing more games with his own mind. He can hear the Ruus spy playing more games with the commander.

 

Soon Watson will leave his old friends side to lead his own army; he is being groomed to take over the 12,000 man Southern People’s Liberation Army; the Mulatto funded powerhouse on the rise.

 

“I wish there was some way I might make myself a beast. Offend you so greatly and thus drive you to return to relative safety,” whispers Sebastian Adon in his tent to Yelizaveta Kay.

 

“Where in the world now is safe?” she responds softly with a hard pale face, “We were born to a world at war and have set further fire to the places we touch down upon. The Breukland Soviet is always under siege. The U.A.S., the Han, the Ruus: Eurasia, East Asia, Oceania all hungry leviathans swallowing up resources as they grind their young to fodder with cannons and greed. And what even of our liberated territory, the free lands of the Wild West Indies? Could I live so far away and know that while safe on Ayiti the whole world was ablaze?”

 

“I haven’t taken the salt[104] in three days, I am beginning to remember things,” he says, “I remember what they did to you father.”

 

She ignores him.

 

“I make you fight harder perhaps to keep me safe,” she whispers.

“You are the only woman in the column.”

“But hardly the only woman in the camp.”

“I wish you were safe somewhere.”

“You make me feel almost safe. I make me safe with my own steel.”

“An iron you mean? All irons you’ve so far refused.”

“No my steel, my resolve to try and love you no matter what foolish things you fix yourself upon to change to help, to save. I have followed you about for quite some time in this life an in the last few, devoted my energies to loving you now despite my better judgment. You think I’d leave your side on the eve of your revolution.”

“My revolution?”

“Well Maya’s revolution that you and your club have helped to execute.”

“I’m glad you’re here with me, but I can’t help but,” he pauses.

“But be a chauvinist, protectivik man? Do you think I’m going to wait at home or in some bunker while the men go off to war? Don’t be absurd. I have a sick father.”

He looks away.

“You’ve chosen to gamble in Ayiti with everyone’s lives. Let it not be said your woman wasn’t there with you to pull bullets out your side.”

“Are you my woman then?”

“Do you require such conventions? I sleep in your tent do I not? I followed you into this hellish desert darkness did I not? We have a history of violence, remember? Take the salt now before something goes wrong.”

If it was genuine concern or utilitarian concern he couldn’t tell.

“If we survive this balagan I’d like to convince you to have my children.”

She makes no indication of the vile, vile feeling it does in fact relay.

“Only when I can convince you to put down that gun forever do I come off the pill my sweet, mad and tragic fighter. Both of them. The one that kills my womb and the one that kills our memories of each other.”

There’s a grey flash in his eyes. She knows from that flash it has been much longer than three days off the salt. The unraveling will begin soon.

“The pill which dissolves the past like a pillar of salt,” Adon says.

“Take yours now or tonight I’ll sleep elsewhere,” she says quietly.

“Yelizaveta, I love you and I wish we’d been born into yet another life.”

“All is your projected dystopia my warlike love and so this club was collected to fix the times in which you were thrust.”

She unclips a metal vile from her waste. She picks up a canteen. She passes him two pills.

“I’m sorry,” he says.

“You believe in the struggle as if it were love,” she whispers.

He takes the pills.

“But it isn’t love at all,” she reminds him.

 

Not even one tiny a little bit.

 

Chapter 14

Sai-Ah Industrial Park, 2019ce

Ayiti

 

 17 Mars

 

The John Riley Detachment and the Michael Collins Detachment now number under 116 men combined. They are encamped in grey tents by the hills outside of the Internal Displacement Camp, home to some 47,000 civilians.

 

They are leading a four new battalions of newly Persian trained Ayitian-Emergency-Front fighters largely from the JEM faction and H.E.G. Factions numbering 4,000 men armed with the former Soviet rifles largely supplied by the Perchevney Group utilizing smuggling routes across DR.

 

Two thousand Selassie Battalion fighters are fifty clicks to the West covering potential lines of egress. Five hundred under the command of dreadlocked wild man for Grenada, Jerome Marcus.

This force is protecting Mershing Camp from an onslaught predicted the next day by two full divisions of the Ayitian regular military and what’s left of the Maccoute. They are awaiting support from the Southern factions within the Ayitian-Emergency-Front notably from the well-armed pro-Ethiopian FANMI LAVALAS, the Ayitian Southern People’s Liberation Army that along with Justice and quality Movement and the Ayitian-Emergency-Group have always resisted co-option into the Port Au Prince governing coalition laid out in the Santo Domingo accords. Five hundred Hadar column fighters and several thousand FANMI LAVALAS are in convoy attempting to reach the Southern Ayiti to reinforce their position.

The international media is predicting a total slaughter.

Four rings of mines and trenches surround the approaches to the Mershing Camp Complex. The plan is to hold the first two lines as long as possible then hold the last two while as many of the civilians can be evacuated to DR and the Southern Zone of control as possible.

 

 

 

 

Chapter 15

Sai Ah Industrial Park, 2019ce

Ayiti

 

18 Mars

 

 

A terrifying roar breaks at dawn out when the FAD’H Ayitian Air Force begins dropping gas bombs and grad rockets on Camp Mershing killing hundreds of civilians.

Ratatatatatatatatatatataatta. Blam. Blam.

MI-24 helicopter gun-ships, F-7 fighter jets and fourth generation fighter planes such as the MiG-29 murder thousands in cold blood as more are gunned down by the advancing Ayitian Army.

Boom.

After a bloody series of clashes the first perimeter line falls after just two hours.

Ayitian-Emergency-Front soldiers use petrol bombs to slow the tank columns, but soon wave after wave of rebel fighter are cut down literally rushing the advancing wall of armor with pistols and grenades. !!

Everywhere someone is yelling or bleeding or dying and you cannot make out much except the inevitability of death. Airships overhead light up the killing fields.

The second line falls a little after high noon.

!!Commander Rand is shot twice in the right leg and is carried off the field by a JEM fighter in a donkey cart towards the retreating exodus South West. There are mangled bodies everywhere from every faction. O’Domhnaill and the Michael Collins Detachment supported by thousands of fighters under the command of General DeBuitléir flank an advancing three brigade prong of Ayitian soldiers in captured Shreef-2 type armored cars, ambulances and Han armored personnel carriers. Firing Qassam-4 rocket grenades, Katusha missiles and raining heavy machine gun fire at near point blank range they tear into the enemy.

By this time the third line has fallen and screaming civilians are being herded into exodus by Ayitian-Emergency-Front fighters rallying everyone to head on foot in columns toward rebel positions in Chad and the Southeast. Each column is being escorted by a dozen fighters. It’s really about buying them as much time as possible now.   !!

The Ayitian 3rd Expeditionary Task Force takes thousands of casualties. The Ayitian Air Force continues to bomb Camp Mershing into the sand, but the Ayitian-Emergency-Front and the boys of St. Patrick’s Battalion keep holding the fourth line of defense. They soon learn that the Air Force is now bombing internal refugee camps all over Dar Ayitian. Fifteen straight hours of bloody fighting draws in a large tank column of over 60 Type 63 Han tanks which finally break the lines, tipping the battle against the rebels with terrible quickness.

It is estimated by the New York Times reporter Thomas L. Friedman that that March13th, marks the single bloodiest day in the history of the genocide. In a simultaneous re-conquest and ethnic liquidation of Mershing Complex and all major IDP camps the death toll is numbered somewhere above 9,000 murdered civilians and an unknown number of Ayitian military personnel, Ayitian insurgents and foreign fighters.

 

Possibly as many as 50,000 overall casualties in a single day of fighting.

The S.P.L.A. and Hadar forces arrive too late to help. Their mechanized columns intercept a trail of tears and refugees led by platoons of John Riley Detachment, Selassie and Ayitian-Emergency-Front men 32 clicks south of what remains of Camp Kalma.  Roughly ten thousand refugees are guided south towards the Hadar bases in the FANMI LAVALAS liberated zone near Juba by a few platoons of John Riley men under the command of now Captain Dashiell Duffy and Commander Adon. Most of that number reaches the DMZ outside of Juba a week later. Another seven or eight thousand civilians escorted by a column of Selassie fighters flee towards Chad.

Sixteen hours into the March 13th holocaust, Commander Hubert O’Domhnaill orders his beleaguered forces out of Camp Mershing’s ruins two hours after the fall of the fourth line of defense. There are only thirty two men left alive in the Michael Collins detachment.

 

At nightfall they and other survivors begin falling back toward the border.

 

The crippled, nearly assassinated President of Ayiti Jim Basher Al-Talleyrand from his private hospital bed announces a week of national holiday to celebrate the eradication of terrorist infiltration in Dar Ayitian and the reclamation of the three lost Ayitian departments by their rightful heirs. Friedman and the world press corps dub the day “the darkest hour in the twelve year genocide” and blame “the provocations of foreigners” for the overwhelming loss of life caused by the grisly reprisals carried out against the traitorous masses of disloyal Ayitian people.

 

 

 

Chapter 16

Belle Anse Rebel Bunkers, 2019ce

Ayiti

 

24 Mars

 

The sandy red rock bunker is dug deep into the mountain.

The cries of bloody, dying men echo through the narrow, dimly lit tunnels. The infirmary looks like a slaughter house. It can be accessed via a tunnel lit with LED glow bulbs and then down a freight elevator powered by generator, or via an intricate series of chiseled catwalks and perilous winds. The bunker was built by the H.E.G. and Lavalas as an operational command hub for South-Eastern Ayitian department near Belle Anse. It has two massive water purifiers and a hanger for vehicles and small planes. It was never meant to accommodate the upwards of five thousand refugees now packed into available underground inch of the place hungry and bleeding and scared.

 

Writes Commander Hubert O’Domhnaill in an encrypted report to Maya Solomon:

 

“The camps are in total ruin. They were literally raised to the ground. We’ve pulled back with what’s left of the Ayitian-Emergency-Group and the St. Patrick’s Battalion to the rebel base at Belle Anse. We are dangerously low on ammunition and fuel.”

“There are only nine serviceable trucks left in our Dar Ayitian fleet. Most of the others were blown to shreds at Mershing when the bombs started dropping or participated in the evacuation south toward the liberated zone.”

 

Shamus Rand was bleeding all over the place yesterday and some of it is still on O’Domhnaill’s grey uniform. There was a rather frantic if not manic concern among the surviving leaders on how to get 5,000 refugees into the bunker before Ayitian drones or the international media reported their location at this mountain facility.

 

There’s shrapnel lodged in Rand’s legs and lower back. Half dry blood is caked all over his face. He may not survive the night. Dashiell Duffy is probably still alive with some portion of the John Reilly Detachment that was with the southern exodus. Hubert’s best childhood friend Lt. Philly Hartmen was cut down on the road here holding back advancing waves of Maccoute-rider infantry and his body was not recovered.

 

“Hadar has reported an influx of Ayitian tribe refugees fleeing the debacle of our counter-offensive maneuvers. By our best estimation fifteen thousand civilians fled South escorted by the John Reilly Detachment and two battalions of Ayitian-Emergency-Front. Some 5,000 were evacuated by our Michael Collins Detachment and the Selassie Battalion to the Pic La Selle bunker complex. Based on data coming in as many as ten thousand civilians have been slaughtered. It is unclear yet how many we killed in the Ayitian Military, but half our fighters, over 5,000 men have been lost. Some unknown number of them were captured and are defiantly being tortured, but should be presumed dead. The location of this bunker complex will be known to the Ayitian state shortly.”

 

“Just thirty-two men are left in the Michael Collins Detachment, among them my brother Shane, Father O’Sullivan, and a perhaps mortally wounded Commander Rand. Some three dozen John Riley men under the command of now Captain Dashiell Duffy and the O’Rafferty Brothers, as well as Lt. Micky Donovan have safely escorted ten thousand refugees to the safety of FANMI LAVALAS Zone in the South.”

“Most serious, if one can ignore the capture of your childhood friends and their presumably gruesome demise to be somehow not tragically serious; I saw General Avinadav DeBuitléir take shelter in the thick of the fire fight in a warehouse and then the warehouse explode via death from above.”

“I repeat that there only thirty-two men are confirmed alive in the St. Patrick’s Battalion still in Ayiti, half not fit for combat, perhaps a few dozen more moving south with the refugees. Most of the camps and cities under our protection are being bombed by the Ayitian Air force. Commander Avinadav DeBuitléir is presumed dead. I repeat we are pinned down outside the City of Belle Anse at our outpost in Mount Pic La Selle.”

 

“Avinadav DeBuitléir is possibly, actually dead.”

 

The com links must have been damaged in the fire fight. All he hears is static. They say hope floats, but Hubert doesn’t have much hope left for this mission of theirs left in him.

 

The thousands of poor suffering ones            they couldn’t even save. The backbone of the Ayitian resistance cracked at Mershing, in the rains and filth the terra drones cut us down. Their Ayitian leader the glue which held the factions together is now dead.

 

In the end, it appears the gig is up.

 

Chapter 16

Grand Army Plaza, 2019ce

Breuklyn Soviet

 

A massive rally is held on April 19st at the Grand Army Plaza (also called Four Fathers Plaza after Malcom X, Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela, and Huey Newton); the  Plaza Arch in support of the Combined Otriad; the interventional forces in Hispaniola in the largest single demonstration the city of Breukland had ever witnessed outside the Carnivals of West Indian Day Parade, Puerto Rican Day Parade and May Day.

 

 

Mara Fitzduff, the Otriad’s longest serving Chief of Communications, a half pint blond Fenian in her early thirties takes the band stand with fiery Captain Erza Pula the otriads’s  main legal council lawyer. They are both clad in blue BDU fatigue uniforms each with the Pin of Palmares, any old school metal trinket you want to make say something about your hadar.

Erza Pula takes the microphone.

 

“This is not a war of ideas, but instead a show down between two differing types of men. Unfortunately the Ayitian people are caught in between.”

 

Erza Pula is not only an out spoken personality in the press on behalf of the Otriad but has for three years lead the team of lawyers modifying the ICC Cases against the sixty four targets, sixty three of which now executed by the Combined Otriad.

 

“I do not moralize when it comes to the actions of the Combined Otriad,” states Captain Mara Fitzduff to the mighty crowds assembled, “this is the people of a free city, in pitched battle with the murderous bandits of another who have slaughtered over 700,000 unarmed men, women and children. This is Breukland’s Army against Port Au Prince’s and the forces are not evenly matched! But that’s just how our boys like it!”

 

“SOSOSOO STUPID,” thinks Yelizaveta antagonizing that mob as she listens from a lie stream.

 

The teeming mobs assembled at Grand Army Plaza cheer and buy WAR BONDS as Lauren and Erza’s positions on the U.A.S. Homeland Security board dedicated to the Club and Combined Otriad rise in position. Ayitian volunteers from the security battalion fan out around the band stand using sensor arrays to jam bio-metric readers and identify U.A.S. spies in the crowd.

“Our men are Noires! Our men are Fenian Catholics! Our men are Maccabean warriors! We as a city have raised them and this club has helped liberate not only our families from the U.A.S. but Ayiti from the clutches of its empire! These are the sons and daughters of the Great Revolt! They have gone to that dark place not on some civilizing burden, not for some religious war or obligation, not to spread our free ideas. They have gone there to strike back at those that took the lives of so many, while so few lifted a finger at all,” bellows Mara Fitzduff who at one time could barely address a salon of 20!

 

“Those men are our sons, our brothers, our husbands and our lovers. They have made a demonstration of themselves. Of their will and of their constitution. We must stand by them now even if the world will not, just as they have done for the people of Dar Ayitian,” says Erza Pula from behind dark sunglasses.

 

800,000 citizens of the 3 million citizens of Breukland Soviet pump their fists with the V for victory. Victory in Brooklyn and Victory in the West Indies!! March next on Europe and Moscow!

 

“Up the Otriad!” she yells, “Stand behind the fighters of the Human Rights resistance!”

 

Nearby, across the River in the Isle of Man Ysiad Ferraris, with a bionic hand, is making quite a lot of late night lunches these days as they begin to mass acquisition uniforms, long guns and more armored personnel carriers, as well as fourth party hire an Eritrean trucking company to begin shuttling the goods across the mountains once Hadar Column can punch a hole in the front and secure the roads to move on the backs of horses over 80,000 kilos of rockets and guns.

 

 

Chapter 17

Mirabalais, 2019ce

Ayiti

 

 

At the last minute the People’s Republic of China pushes DR via trade and development concessions to refuse access to its ports and drop support for the insurgency to gain a wide range of bamboo curtain aid packages.

 

On Monday Tiputti Capois personally put the eyes out of a MINUSTAHA soldier accused of having a penchant for sodomizing young girls.

 

A few more weeks of hard fighting and Hadar and the 4th Lavalas Brigade  still hasn’t secured the City of Mirebalais much less come close, thanks in part to PIH refusal to collaborate and lots of guns wait in container ships off the Island of Jamaica cutesy of Persian Revolutionary Guards based in Honduras amid the 100,000 Palestinian diaspora.

The St. Patrick’s column was all but shattered attempting to protect South-western camp network. Most NGOS in the area have pulled out completely though.

The Hadar column has lost half its 1,001 men trying to crack a sea road and negotiations between Cuba and Trinidad are mostly amicable to getting the insurgency more guns. It is widely believed that Commanders Dbrisk, Netic Kinari, Okonkwo and virtually all of the Scarborough men are dead following the raid on Port-Au-Prince.

 

A grisly series of reports issued by the oligarchy in Port Au Prince reach St. Pats and Hadar commanders via Northern Command.

 

They all state that just before New Year the crippled President al-Talleyrand has signed an order to expel or exterminate the entire African-black population of Dominikani Republic.

 

In the early morning courier news arrives from Pic La Selle and also via Iridium satellite phone that even though Commander DeBuitléir is presumed dead the remnants of St. Patrick’s Battalion have brokered a firm Alliance with new Lavalas fighters eight other factions now to be called the Ayitian-Emergency-Front. Another truck convoy organized by the Perchevney Group has reached their Command Bunker. They have been supplied with surface to air missile batteries from Trinidad. With these they have and knocked down several airships and drones. Marshaling to the best of their ability the Ayitian men and women of military age under their protection they cleared have cleared Maccoute and regular military forces from the valleys around Mount Selle although they remain fully encircled.

The only mobile insurgent combat force in the north-west of the country is the Selassie Brigade led by Jerome Marcus, Magnus Allamby and Melvin Clarke which is preparing to break the siege of Pic La Selle with their all black legion grown now to over 10,000 armed men and most of that number who fight with spears, swords and daggers.

 

The full extent of the massacre of the Five Camps is currently being placed around 48,000 dead children, women and men. Much higher than originally predicted. They use even numbers to indicate there is no clear or accurate calculation. Nearly all of the Ayitian tribe has been driven into Chad or South into the FANMI LAVALAS Zone exacerbating the already crippling refugee situation.

The camps were emptied once and for all. Just under half a million Ayitian fled on foot, on buses, on camels or donkeys or horses and trucks and any and every other means.

 

A massive armored deployment out of Santo Domingo is expected any day. If the Pic La Selle bunker falls the resistance in Ayiti will be crushed and the remaining refugees massacred. The Hadar force has little or no popular support besides from the FANMI LAVALAS which is at least nominally allied with the Ayitian-Emergency-Front and loyal to the aims of now pronounced deceased Avinadav DeBuitléir. They are lucky to be allowed in and out of Ethiopia given the international climate. If not for the Eastern Front (1199) and the Domikani Congress (DC37) tacit approval of their ground work as well as the government in Havana and the Cuban consensus they’d be but a foot note in this war still four months in.

 

Chapter 18

Villa Nicole, 2019ce

Israel

 

 

It is cool dusk in southern Ayiti forty clicks east of Jacmel City and Sebastian is nearly sleeping in his tent besides Yelizaveta. They are both topless and her fingers trace his scars. All evening he has begged to be inside her and place his mouth on her soft white breasts. She has finally resisted his emotions by succumbing to his carnal needs.

He has just returned from the road along time assisting in the evacuation.

She first chastised him for being away so long. Then again for not washing the blood off his uniform before entering their dwelling. She then stripped him, and washed him and gets on her knees for him.

He has seen things again. And she wants to know them, but first she will have him writhing underneath her. She will fuck for him so many times that he is pliable. He will forget the present and focus on the future and the past.

It takes her some hours to be completely finished with him. It is not completely enjoyable work. She remembers something, a good many things that he cannot.

While Commander Adon slumbers she remembers the past. The real past not the construction grafted upon them both with salt and lies and science and repetition.

 

She traces his scars with her finger and remembers the past as it actually was.

 

She hasn’t taken the salt in seven days.

 

He dreams quietly, and she remembers the past, the way back past of 2000ce. The Villa Nicole of Tiberius.

 

The night before they had to say long goodbyes, Yelizaveta and Maya Solomon lay in each other’s’ arms in the rolling hills of Galilee, above the fortress of the Ghetto Fighters Kibbutz. They speak in Ruus Soviet as is their tendency since that language was invented. It has so many ways to articulate complicated emotions and tenses and oh the idioms.

They love idioms these three. Yeli loves to hear Maya mispronounce everything trying to enunciate in Spanish which is her favorite langue to think in the last few hundred years.

When they get their bodies drunk they all fall back into Aramaic.

The year of this particular conversation was a distant memory. But as the three of them and Old Souls like them have such a propensity for living over and over again, then it was important to have moments, occasionally life times of rest, and not worry at all what trouble these single souled humans were getting themselves into.

“Can we just run away from it I wonder, can we just forget the responsibilities placed upon us?” Maya asked them then.

Yelizaveta slaps her hard, the moment ruined.

“Listen to me you sniveling love struck coward, you Raspizdia!! Don’t fuck this up.”

“You play the part well,” Maya laughs.

Normally Yelizaveta is more the archetypical angel, not the demon.

“I’m gonna miss him more than you will,” Yelizaveta wonders out loud as the statement slips out of her.

“You’re both not gonna remember missing me until the world to come,” says Sebastian returning with another bagbouk of Gerolsteiner.

“Which one of us gets the hero I wonder in this epoch,” mutters Maya Solomon.

“We all know you’re the real hero dvash,” says Sebastian Adon.

“Who are you referring to baby?” Yeli asked.

“Yeah, who?” smirks Emma.

“Both of you. Nasdrovia, Cheers,” he raises the bottle of salt water.

It is a clear beautiful night and from the hills they can look down upon the blue black sea.

“We’re all gonna be humble little heroes right ladies except I’m the one who has to hang from the tree in the coming next act alone.”

“Well we all know that for you nothing is written baby, whatever the fuck that means,” Yeli spits out.

“His name Zachariah, means God Remembers. HaShem will utilize him depending on the needs of the ephoche.       The men are gonna do what men do best, get riled up fight bleed and die. The women are gonna do what women do best, pick up the mess and get things hopefully better organized. If he dies again this time, which I doubt he will, then maybe this one will cry a little on the pages of the book of life. Me, I have total faith in HaShem, so I already know how the story ends,” brags Maya Solomon.

“When I see the blueprint, I’ll just have to tell you if you were correct Dvash,” Sebastian had told her.

“Ah, the Blueprint, the scroll hidden inside the tree of life which tells the fate of human kind. To only be able to read that, just for a year!” says Solomon.

“What a save tonight pandemic. I suspect that this might get harder every life time we do it in,” comments Yelizaveta Kay as Sebastian wrapped her in his arms.

“The humans are always seemingly better armed, more inclined to fascism and atrocity and whereas once I thought they were basically good they are now mostly Raspizdia, the not givers of even one shit about each other or God.”

“Shall we just defect Neshama? Leave these violent monkeys to their own devices and go run away to some lush island and please each other tantrically for the next thousand years!” grins Yelizaveta.

“If he could he’d steal you away from here and kiss the whole blueprint goodbye, remember like he tried to do during the third Judeo-Roman War?” Maya jokes.

“What was your human name then?” Maya asks.

“I don’t remember. Agreed then, Maya tell HaShem I’m defecting!”

“No,” laughs Yeli, “He won’t really do it. I asked him to do so last night and he flatly shot that down and this was while he was drinking demons into himself to give me rougher ride.”

“That all remains to be seen sweetness, we have eight more hours,” laughs Sebastian Adon.

“We have easily 800 more years life lifetime my old souled tovarish,” states Emma.

“Some lifetime you’re gonna to have to choose between what makes you happy and what makes you free. What is your duty to God, what is your commitment to humans. That’s what I want you simmer on when the salt takes hold, in your long kiss goodnight, in your violent road ahead you’re going to also have to decide, her or me,” said Maya Solomon.

Sebastian then gets dead serious. He looks his two historic partners dead in the eyes.

“I’m going to do one last job, then Hashem and freedom be damned I can steal her away and be happy. I’ll have earned the right to.”

 

“You say that every life time Neshama,” said Yelizaveta Kay.

 

Mickhi Dbrisk walks into this heady love triangle, as he has for centuries, being an Old Soul too, but only playing on this particular team, otriad, for the last 600 years.

 

“It is of my honest opinion that Sebastian Adon will not pick either of you. He simply can’t. He talks a big game about love, love, more love. But he always just picks his own freedom. Is he an old soul narcissist? He’s been accused of worse by both of you. Has he fallen in love more times in this episode than I can number the bullets in my blaster, certainly! I love this man. He was total devotion to humanity, but also total devotion to love. I can testify that Emma, whenever you have been his partner he plays a harder zealot. And Yeli, I suspect your ways remind him more of human life, why we do this work to begin with. We could all play for the other team if we wanted to. RAZPIZDIA is the devils middle name. How, now. We have seven hours before they submerge us again in the salt waters and position us for more warfare. Let’s make better use of our time.”

 

And out breaks a wild Hebrew Jamaican Russian Spanish old soul orgy. Just like old times. But they’ve all become a little Soviet in the past 200 years, unlike when they were Greeks, the men don’t ever touch anymore, don’t blush anyone.

 

When you have the collective memory of over four thousand years of existence, you don’t typically pick a hetero-normative identity.

 

Unless your essence were created in Jamaica. Then, you certainly do because no one is openly gay in Jamaica. That’s a sure death sentence these days sadly.

 

 

 

Chapter 18

Filtration Camp Fort Demarche, 2019ce

Ayiti

 

 

Vultures fly above the filtration camp. Here there are always dead things to eat.

But even in this place of isolation and continued suffering, rebel spies can see things, repeat things and tell stories to the outside world as a warning. As if the buzzards weren’t warning enough. The Ayitian Alex Tantamount, who no longer has any fingers and Commander Mickhi Dbrisk along with the Afropunk rock star Netic Kinari, Philly Hartman and two dozen other captured rebels are being held at this prison camp.

 

News that they are alive has come in from sympathizers to the G.A.I.-H.E.G., but it is unclear what kind of shape they are in, or if their embattled comrades can even get to them.

The conditions in a Ayitian prison are quite bad.

 

“Men would be hanged naked for hours and whipped until they lost consciousness, then revived with salt or chili powder rubbed into their wounds. A naked prisoner would be forced into a car tire with his legs and backside in the air, then whipped, wounded, and salted. Plastic melted under a flame would be dripped onto prisoners’ skin. According to recruits who were able to escape, prisoners’ genitals would be placed in skillets of boiling-hot oil, and fried while the men were held down. Between interrogations, prisoners would be confined alone in tiny cells, bound hand and foot. If the cells were full, a prisoner might be buried alive, with a steel pipe in his mouth to allow him to breathe. Water would be poured into it occasionally. When word came that the commandant wanted the prisoner executed, a bullet would be fired down the tube instead, then the pipe removed and the hole filled in.”

 

Governor President al-Talleyrand is still in the hospital and expected to recover slowly. The government is preparing for another major “clean-up operation” and has sealed the roads around Pic La Selle. Although the greater threat so say the rebel spies is the impending FANMI LAVALAS capture of Jacmel. Entrenched also in Juba City and Nimule, the Southern Command composed of Hadar Column, Dominikani Congress, and FANMI LAVALAS leaders are  still completely unprepared to deal with the full onslaught of the modernized army of Ayiti should it be fully deployed against them.

The spies tell the rebels that the al-Talleyrand government seeks to overwhelm the insurgency based out of Pic La Selle then turn its guns on Mirebalais.

Mickhi Dbrisk has been badly tortured. And not with some pussy water board neither.

Restored to some health and tortured again. They bury him with a pipe in his mouth for nearly two days, but no bullet comes. The Canaan 3 Camp is a special gulag for resistance fighters of international origin. There is some rumor they are being held to barter with the U.A.S., ransom them perhaps. Largely though they seek to locate the commanders of the invasion, although they have no names of primary command. They do have DeBuitléir; but it is the best kept secret in the gulag. That they do not know that they have him is what keeps him alive.  DeBuitléir was badly burned in the Battle of the Five Camps on Canaan; he speaks Spanish so they are unsure he is anyone of note. They beat their captives constantly. The deprive them of food, but they are generous with the whip, truncheon, water board and electricity.

 

One day while hanging from a whipping post Alex Tantamount bites out the jugular of his assailant, rips it clean out of throat. Blood and gore splatters all your page.

 

The Ayitian case officer bleeds all over the ground clutching his neck. Alex rips himself free, can’t fire the captured pistol with no fingers, fumbles for bloody keys. A bloody, man handled Mickhi Dbrisk is hanging next to him in the interrogation room. Much worse shape, lost a lot of blood, left eye beaten shut.

Alex wakes him from the edge of death with a pale of water. Cuts him lose, gives him the throat-less officers gun. In about 20 minutes they’ve freed most of the still ambulatory fighters, murdered most of the camp guards, armed themselves with rifles and loaded up about forty surviving fighters into two flatbed trucks.

Many of the men can’t walk on their own.

Dbrisk and the others have been tortured for almost a month, but zeal is with them, hunter gathering zeal to strike back like animals in a trap. They kill every other enemy soul and put down two of their own number who beg them to do so. They douse the torture camp in diesel, burn it, raze it asunder.

A little too late they alarms are sounded. A little too late they make chase. One of the escaping trucks makes a wrong turn, a tragic last stand and all are gunned down just north of Black Mountain. One truck with twenty men careened south at the crossroads and survive because of it.

Finally flying down Highway 3 in the dead of night, killing their way through two check points, crossing into the Eastern Front zone near the Ethiopian boarder on foot carrying their wounded, before capturing a supply truck; that truck makes it to a Dominikani Congress/Eastern Front outpost and the seventeen survivors of St. Pats and Scarborough are secretly ferried to a military hospital in Addis Abba.  DeBuitléir is with them. His identity was the source of punishment they all bore together in Canaan 3.

Which used to be called Fort Demarche 2.

 

Their enemy bled them and refreshed them, tortured without mercy to confirm the death of Commander General Avinadav DeBuitléir. It is finally revealed that Avinadav DeBuitléir is now confirmed alive one of the seventeen warriors; alive and nursing grievous injury at the DR under fake names as an outlying General Hospital outpost. Amen.

 

 

Emma Solomon’s Sermon

 

Let me tell you a story about a woman and a man, that you have always been told as the most important story ever told about a man, a man who was also God.

 

There are things you know you know, such as that the religion based around the man was called Christianity. And that roughly ⅓ of the Human race believes this story and its slight deviations of form. There are things you do not probably know, such as that man’s real name and how many children he bore and to whom. And there are things you do not know that you do not know, such know such as the command structure of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard corps, the names of the 5,000 tribes of Africa, what language your messiah sang in, and the access codes to the bunker complex below Jerusalem (Yetushaliim) where a tunnel system goes deep Into the mantle.

 

You may know, that your messiah was born in Bethlehem (Bet Lekhem). You may know that he grew up in Egypt (Mitzrahium)  and that at the time of his battle against Rome he was employed as a carpenter in Nazareth (Natzetet). You may know a Romanized, Latin version of his name.

 

You may not know that he sang in Aramaic and wrote in Hebrew and Greek, and that there is no J sound in those languages. Anything called J, is the designation of an occupier or conqueror, a Roman legion in Palestine perhaps.

 

Here again are things you do not know that you do not know, you do not even think about hearing these  things. You do not when Pesach begins, or why. The calendar you use is a Roman Catholic and or Christian Orthodox innovation; the Julian and Gregorian calendars are solar, the pagan, the Mayan, the Hebrew, Persian, Arabic and Chinese calendars are lunar. You do not know that you do not know who invented time.

 

Here again, you do not know that you do not know so many things. Such as the spatial spiretial chakra points, such as the importance of Moscow. You do not know where your food came from or what’s in it, or how many hours it takes a child to make your clothing. You do not think about hearing these things because, they make you culpable. They imply your collaboration with the empire: with and by default your implicit acceptance of the fate of the slaves.

 

You know there are several large religions, you can reject all of them which is easy, or pick a tendency of a block, all of them are based on events you did not see, interpreted in languages you functionally cannot speak and you call that faith. You are generally when born to pick one, or have picked for you generally speaking you are to be a Christ follower, a Mohammadian (One who submits to God and his prophet Myhammed), a Hindu or under the rule of the Chinese Communist Party, therefore living under confusicism. Or, you’re in some much much lesser marginal sect, or a Buddhist, keeping out of the cosmic wars. Anyway, three of the four major religions are at war at all times. Almost always historically due to a Chrisitan offensive.

 

Hindus have kept hundreds of millions of people locked into servitude and subjugation. Christianity and Islam have been in direct warfare since the Crusades approximately since 1000ce. Today, there is not one single county where Muslims are not being slaughtered or persecuted. All of the central cores to the core 46 states are Christian, except Japan and the Petro states. All of the poorest most ravished nations are Christian and Muslim, converted during the colonial epochs.

 

I’m sure those things don’t come up in your Church. And we are very much not fighting a cosmic war. It is absolutely a war grounded in base human inequality, or less mildly; the suffering of five billion plus humans while some, less than one billion drink, use drugs, fuck hookers, watch sports, tune out to netflix, buy things and more things and stuff their faces until they all die of heart disease, and head to a church to absolve their daily sins. A church where a man who was not white is white on the walls. A church where the things that man, and his wife and their 12 deputy officers and several thousand supporters stormed the temple and declared war on Rome. And for the next 100 something years 66-136ce over three major military uprisings fought the Empire on all fronts.

 

You know only what you want to know to justify that you are in the wrong side of history paying your taxes to the new Rome, running around with those smart phones checking in checking out, selfies with the mark of the beast.

 

You don’t know the acronyms to the secret police organizations that are organizing the terror Attacks and mass shootings. You don’t know the names of the men who meet every summer in California to manage the county. You don’t know the names of almost any of the countries raped to keep your consumer goods so cheap. You can’t even read a map.

 

You don’t know, that you don’t know that when the children, the great descendants of that man you eat the body of and drink the blood of and wait for him to return, make themselves known to us, he’s dead. You are praying in the language of the oppressor. You are masquerading along to a fiction story based nothing on what actually happened. You are hanging crosses , the symbol of Roman rape and repression around your very neck. You are celebrating holidays that are feasts to the devil, glutting your face on your thanksgivings, a mockery of Indian genocide. You are worker proles and sleeping zombies and serving a vast killing machine. Your countries of the west are colonial killing machines sucking the rest of us dry.

 

I am not toussaint I did not come to lead the army I am not not debutellier I do not speak for the oppressed. And I am not commander Solomon I have never heard the voice of God, I posit myself neither as savior conqueror nor general. Nor some lesser mad Hebrew prophet.

 

I am only one partisan and friend of the people. Uniformed pararescueman, 2952 as my shield says. I am here in the wilderness not tell your religion, but to warn you that we are planning a new uprising. Not one one based on imaginary masculinized voices in the sky, not one based on beliefs. It will not be directed at the north west but instead all th the dark forgotten brutalized places in the periphery, in the colonies. I did not come to warn you or make you change your ways.

 

I am a partisan practitioner, not an agitator to the deaf and mute and blind. Hidden in the stories I can tell you is a simple truth. Humanity ought not wait for some white washed savior, humanity ought not live as they do.

 

Christendom is a sickly mockery of the heroes martyred in our cause. Time wrote your bible. Islam is a sickly mockery of our second major rising. The Umayyads wrote your Quran. Everywhere I look I see Christians feeding the devil machines, I see Muslims dying and dying but not knowing their own prophet, the cousin of Yeshua Ben Yosef, who the Romans and Saul called Christ. Everywhere I look i see the oligarchy grinning and glutting themselves in every nation.

 

I did not come to the Wilderness of North America to bring you a New Social Gospel, for that was brought by women and men before me. I did not come reconcile your scriptures, this too was done by the Baha’i.

 

I came to tell you to pack your bags and wear blue cloth, to march with us in columns and fly in convoy, to fortify 144 positions in the periphery where men and women die like dogs. Are killed everyday in plane sight.  I came to tell you that we will organize the next uprising to starve the core, to embargo the high places to encircle the citadels of the oligarchy and free our people. They cannot kill us all!

 

And whether it be us, or the leadership, be it us or our great grandchildren we will march into Yerushalayim with ten million fighters, having put down Rome, put down Washington, London, Paris, Geneva, Berlin, Moscow and Beijing too, brought the killing machine of the world system to a halt.

 

And you will then know that your God did not send you more lambs. It sent avengers.

 

 

Chapter 19

Mirebalais Hospital Compound, Partners in Helath

2019ce

Ayiti

 

 

In the month of May to celebrate American Mothers Day, International Working Men and Womanes Day and Victory Day; the Ivory Yids and Ayitian fighters of Lavalas Brigade 3, under Adon and Tiputti Capois capture some brand new turf.

 

Some blood in the eye and blood in the sand for everyone. The Bielski, Golani, and Betar Detachments supporting newly Persian trained guerrillas from the Dominikani Congress (DC 37) and FANMI LAVALAS after a nine-hour fire fight capture the sprawling City of Mirebalais. They lose over two hundred and thirty men in the whole battle. Lt. Cohen is injured as well as Lt. Isaac Zucker.

They are greeted in Mirebalais as liberators. The Muhammadian overlords of the Ayitian Occupational Authority had made very, very few friends among the Dinka people with their “give us you wives and daughters on the first of the month policy”.

 

An embattled Ayitian-Emergency-Front holds the heights of Pic La Selle reinforced by the Selassie Brigade which broke the siege in last few days of April. There is one fire arm for every forty men in the Selassie Brigade. Battles get very medieval, machete charges happen when bullets run out.

 

The latest stream of tide turning successes seem to stem from the Persian Revolutionary Guardsmen and their relentless efforts to improve the command structures, tactics and effectiveness of the Ayitian and Ayitian fighters enlisted in the Ayitian-Emergency-Front’s army. There are eight Persians and their Ayitian drill sergeants operating out of Pic La Selle and four more with the Hadar Column under the command of, yes sir; Kaveh Abatable.

 

With the fall of Mirebalais, the operational center of the Southern Front has been relocated there from the mountain outposts deep in the mountains of the Dominikani interior.

 

At what was once the Customs House of Mirebalais, a colonial structure of white stone looking something like a post office and something like a fort, the rebel leaders in the Southern command are holding a staff meeting to establish defenses and restore social services throughout the newly liberated city. As well as sign order to arrest and execute all traitors and spies left behind.

Outside half-trucks filled with supplies, armored ambulances and thousands of Hadar & S.P.L.A. fighters roll into town from San Juan to the East and from the FANMI LAVALAS Liberated Zone in the South. The capture of Mirebalais will surely provoke airstrikes and the diversion of the 3rd Expeditionary Force of the FAd’H.

Mirebalais is the central pumping station for Southern oil north toward Port Au Prince.

Iranian Persian Commander Kaveh and his three other brave lonely Persians have just established the latest rebel training academy in the sports stadium of the city.

It was brutal fight to take the city. It will be even more grueling to hold it. Barricades are being thrown up at all the approaches. The IED Corps of the Dominikani Congress are mining the northern approaches. It is estimated that air strikes will begin later in the night.

The People’s Television Network is operated by Nick Mapfre and his partner Ryder Haske. Haske from the Isle of Man and Mapfre form the Hadar Detachment called the Bielski Column. The fight for and the capture of Mirebalais was live streamed to the web. Mapfre’s company donates media equipment to human rights activists abroad and trained camera teams are embedded in each column. PTV also operates the cached servers from which the broadcasts of the actions and exploits of the three columns are routed to. These servers are costly, well hidden and utilized by the world’s largest database of revolutionary human rights operatives. No one not even Maya Solomon knows where they are cached. This just about guarantees to Mapfre that the Otriad of which he is a reluctant and defacto member for over a decade and a half, is able to craft its own message.

Nicholas Mapfre did not invade Ayiti as he was expecting a child and not much for African civil war zones. He did agree to sometimes staff the Northern Command at Basis Wadi Faran and work in conjunction with Israeli agent Mikhail Mastrovitch to disseminate propaganda on behalf of the three columns and operate their IT communications.

 

And Haske did so partly because of his friendship with Nick Mapfre, partly out of an unspoken desire to possess Yelizaveta Kay.

 

As well as these vital services rendered Haske and Mapfre have provided four million in green cash dollars via their friends in Hollywood. And of course Haske as a majority shareholder of Habash Industrial, a tech firm made rich by rising China, has established the encrypted satellite communications of the three columns.

The camera is still running as the rebels fortify the City of Mirebalais.

Shipments of small arms begin to arrive in Jacmel hidden in steel drums after night fall. The single engine Givati-Tulsa is being used to ferry heavy ordinance over the Dominican border from landing strips in Isle of Youth. More weapons and armored ambulances acquired from the Ruus mob arrive from the south.

Still no air raids.

The video archive footage shot by Nick Mapfre on his first night in Mirebalais depicts tough, young and rugged South Ayitian and Ayitian refugees working side by side to secure the city with Yid fighters and Persian drill sergeants. It is the dead of night. The power in the city is still cut off. Big LED white lights illuminate the feverish securement of the citadel and its outlying districts.

“What a web of overlapping ideals, interests and raw ambition fuel this project,” muses Kaveh to Adon.

At some point around 3am over a burning sweet mint tea Commander Sebastian Adon palavers with him about the prospect of getting further Persian support for the rebellion under the auspices of Shi’a hegemony in the region.

“Not publically anyhow,” was Kaveh usual response.

“The Persian Mullahs won’t be in power forever and we get more hits from Iran than any other single location” Nick Mapfre says to Kaveh.

“Farsi is the fourth most prolific language on the internet I read,” notes Adon.

“I bet I can get a few dozen more drill instructors once the smoke clears tom.”

Sebastian smiles, Sebastian hardly ever smiles. His smile insinuates a half thank you.

“Any word from Northern Command?” Adon asks Mapfre.

“Nothing at all.”

“It’s highly dangerous when Maya Solomon gives a man the silent treatment,” says Sebastian Adon.

Or when any woman does, means she’s livid.

“You know I know her birth name right,” says Mafre.

“You’re an intrepid little journalist. Of course you do.”

“So you were briefly married, openly fucking the shit out of the most likely person to deliver humanity since Yeshua and Muhammed?”

“I know you’re a Jew and Russian, but that’s a little crude for a description of the Mahdi no? We were married briefly and made love often.”

“Well it’s true.”

“I guess I was.”

“Hali Vik is Emma Solomon?”

“Yes; that’s mostly true.”

 

 

 

Chapter 20

Road to Camp Pilor, 2019ce

Ayiti

 

May 15

 

Commander & Captain, a title presiding over a Battalion of 1,200 fighters; retired peace officer Nikholai Trikhovitch is driving a truck full of Hadar Column men at the head of a convoy speeding south with a Newport dangling out his lips.

Sebastian Adon is yelling something in Creole into a smartphone linked to a sat-com relay hoping he gets through despite them being likely being jammed.

The convoy is composed of eight grey armored ambulances and three flat-bed trucks. All are moving south as fast as fuel and physics allows, pursued down the wide black XXX Superhighway by a swarm of the New Ayitian Military bearing down behind them and gaining with choppers, mechanized half-trucks, armored personnel carriers supported by over 50,000 infantry men.

 

The dawn is breaking. It’s been a long night.

The air is hot and the breeze nearly stagnant, but Nikholai is about to break a hundred miles-an-hour. The rocky stretches of barren nothing out here in the deep desert play games with the mind and tricks on the eyes. One hundred men under the command of Scott Sevastra and Thomas Ansu who had both been paramedics back in the more normal life before, lay buried in dug outs along the black Highway Pilor that cuts like an eight lane ribbon against red dunes and white wasteland about twenty minute hard driving ahead of the convoy. Each man lays buried in his own grave, dug the night before along the highway’s edge twenty feet apart. Each had dug three feet down then gone to sleep on benzos. These dead-man-dives were then insulated with refrigerating cooler-bunting, inside each man lay with an oxygen tank, two liters of water, his rifle and his spare bullets. It can get quite hot in your own grave even with science as your friend. Each dug out was then covered with a weighted earth colored tarp. Another 100 men camouflaged the tarps buy covering them lightly in the sand. Each man has an air tube and a tank of oxygen good for 6 hours.

Like well-armed moles, as the sun rose they were buried with roughly less than 6 hours before they’d begin to truly suffocate in their dead man dives.

The ground crew of 100 then blockaded the road with four of the armored ambulances, covered them in sand-tarp cameo, then with pessimistic goodbyes; 96 took recon positions throughout the wadis to set up sniper positions and listening posts while four hiked the ten clicks out of the fire zone to Wadi Gerba where the field camp is situated near an abandoned mine shaft. From their they’ll use the lap tops and satellite uplink to command and control the forward defense of Highway Pilor north of  Bor. And bear the first wave assault from the FAd’H regulars as well as what’s left of the Maccoute Militia.

Highway Pilor is the only paved eight lane highway the Maccoute militia will take to chase what’s left of the Bielski Detachment led by Commanders Sebastian Adon and Nikholai Trikhovitch after they blew the shit out of Maccoute Administrative Facilities in Jacmel with Katusha rockets and Qassam 4 rocket-grenades just two hours ago.

For two hours a fierce fire fight has been raging across the city between 200 men under the command of Adon and Trikhovitch and several thousand irregular Maccoute troops. At some point most of the Bielski fighters had run out of ammunition and begun to retreat on foot out the Southern sewer system and camp complex still under heavy fire.

 

 

 

While the communications with Northern Command were lost four days ago, Nick Mapfre has been using the PTV servers to relay messages back and forth from Pic La Selle.

It had been just an “ok plan” on paper.

But the Captains never counted on Regular Army reinforcements with armored personnel carriers being nearby and a “whole fucking Division” of the Ayitian military on hand to press a counter attack.

The Bielski Detachment had gone north to shell Jacmel in the hopes of prolonging the assault on Pic La Selle which has a greater concentration of civilian juxtaposed to armed rebels with guns. A rather bloody rampage later and eighty-seven of their Yids are dead, Jacmel is half aflame. A lot of civilians be clipped getting in the cross fire. Little kids too. The raid was met with a heavy defenses, air support and a determined enemy. The Ayitian tank columns run over screaming non-combatants and open fire mercilessly on their own countrymen.

Rebel spies from Dominikani Congress (DC 37) brought word the city’s population was considering joining the general rising. That was very poor information. That was their trap and the Yids sprang it at the cost of half their detachment. But the rebels have a trap too.

Counting on their men making it out alive, they figured they’d get chased down Highway 4 right into the blockade and ambush of their dead-man-dives. 100 buried men rising from the earth to open fire.

Adon, Trikhovitch, Mapfre still shooting grisly B-Roll and roughly 110 at least partially wounded survivors pile hurriedly onto flat-bed trucks and armored solar-diesel ambulances bivouacked at the city’s southern limits. It is now getting near sun rise and they only fight by night. That’s that is the reputation anyway.

So fifty clicks south of Jacmel on Highway 2 the men in the Betar Detachment receive a garbled transmission by satellite phone that “quite a lot of_enemy vehicles_are trailing” their brothers bearing rapid retreat south under fire. They figured it would be the usual pick-up truck armada ambush against a few hundred Maccoute-tops. But they’d made a shit storm out of Jacmel. The 113 surviving fighters with virtually no ammo left are drawing half a Ayitian military Division and a few hundred Maccoutes into that checkpoint.

 

So, this was either pay-dirt or death for two whole detachments roughly a third of the Hadar Column’s remaining muscle. 400 men, 87 already dead and the weekend has really just begun.

They have less than half an hour to either reinforce the ambush point quickly from Bor or order then men to get the hell out of harm’s quickly gaining way. Commander Scott Sevastra is relayed the information from Adon and told to make the call. If Adon and Trikhovitch were to perish he is the next up the chain of command.

 

A portly silver haired fellow in his forties Commander Scott Sevastra comes from a long line of emergency workers, cops, firemen and paramedics. He holds a masters in Emergency Management and is the father of four black children one of which is biologically his own. He is married to the famous Uhuru Movement spokeswoman Jasmine Howard and has helped raise three of her children from earlier less fruitful relationships. Jasmine Howard, the human rights lawyer Erza Pula Pound, and Chief of Communications Mara Fitzduff  are the tough, lovely and articulate three faces most of the world now associates with the club’s Lobby on Ayiti back in the U.A.S. and the Breukland Soviet.

 

He is also a club founder.

 

“Why are you doing this again,” Jasmine Howard had asked him the night he flew with several hundred of the Ivoryish fighters on an Ysiad Ferrias paid for charter plane to Sharm-al-Sheik from Ayiti. Her question was more about his being a father than her zeal and support for the mad plots of Sebastian Adon.

 

He had told her he believed it was important and she endorsed him still.

Sevastra, now informed that the Battle of Jacmel has drawn an entire half-Division of the FAd’H and some several hundred Maccoute into their under equipped checkpoint cum death trap has only twenty minutes to make a bad call. Either pull out the fighters in the Betar Detachment from the ambush point and leave the Bielski Detachment victim to its diminishing fuel and bullet ratio; or reinforce the checkpoint with another 96 Betar fighters holding sniper-recon positions which would still make them outnumbered some 300 Hadar men to a 50,000 strong force of Ayiti regular military with choppers and air support. Scott Sevastra has read Herodotus and isn’t really so happy with the Spartan outcome and they had a narrow pass going for them at Thermopylae.

He keys up and attempts to radio the command base at Mirebalais and is patched through to dispatch. A woman answers the phone. It’s Maya Solomon. Her voice is hoarse. She’s just Para dropped in to see what position their condition is in.

“Sebastian, Trikhovitch and roughly one hundred more survivors just shot their way out of Jacmel and are just under twenty minutes North of your position bearing down fast on Highway Pilor. They are being pursued by an entire division of the Ayitian military, easily 50,000 men,” calmly explains Solomon. “You are ordered by Commander Adon himself to pull your men out of the valley, break down the ambush and leave them to God.”

“You can’t be serious,” mutters Sevastra. No one’s ever given any orders in the Breukland Otriad before. He doesn’t know how she got down there to command and as of when they started taking orders.

A rank and file fighter named Abner Washington places his hand on Scott’s shoulder, gives him the shniah hand sign, and takes the comset from him. Scott Sevastra, vaguely mesmerized doesn’t offer resistance.

Abner begins to speak to Solomon in hard guttural Yiddish which Scott cannot understand. He then turns and barks something authoritative to the radio man Karl. Scott notices his radio man Karl salutes Abner and then shuts off the uplink. This is odd because Abner is just a Staff Sargent in the Hadar Column and Karl Katzer is a Radio Technician First Class.

“Pull our men out of the valley Commander Sevastra, so they do not get incinerated in the missile strike,” says Specialist Abner.

“Missile-strike?”

Several memes bounce of inner dialogue bounce around Scott Sevastra’s head all at once. What missile strike? What did those guys just say in Yiddish? What the fuck is going on here?

“Oh wait.”

“Let me introduce myself in another capacity commander,” says Staff Sargent Abner Washington. My name is Case Officer Abner-Mikhail-Washington-Ringelbloom of the Mossad here to infiltrate your column on behalf of the Israeli State. We have men in all of your three columns to advise our government on the progress of this wild operation.”

Commander Sevastra was impressed with Israel as always, without still yet admitting he was a benefited Yid.

“Order the pull out quickly. Four squadrons of Ram2 and Sufa4 fighter planes have just been ordered out of Uvda Airbase in the Negev to bomb the living piss out of that approaching Division. It appears you’ve all made quite an impression on the government of my country. And it wouldn’t be the first time we’ve cluster bombed Ayiti.”

Sevastra doesn’t say anything. He gets on the internal radio and orders the 196 Betar Detachment fighters out of their dead-man-ditches and to quickly scramble toward forward base. Case Officer Abner on his own satellite phone speaking in more hard Hebrew to a general in the Negev is told he has less than 10 minutes to get all non-hostile vehicles “painted true blue” so the incoming IAF doesn’t wipe out the babies out with the tide of bath water.

Sevastra gets on the garbled medium-coms with Sebastian, who’s firing an assault rifle out the back of a Herkimer Medical Jitney now in the rear of their retreating convoy.

 

“I CAN’T HEAR YOU!” bellows Adon.

“I REPEAT! YOU NEED TO PULL THE FUCK-OVER! YOU NEED TO PAINT ALL YOUR VEHICLES IN BLUE WITH THOSE CANS THEY STOWED IN THE BUSES! YOU NEED TO DO IT NOW BECAUSE THE CUBAN ISRAELIS ARE ABOUT TO BOMB THE LIVING HELL OUT OF THE DIVISION PERSUING YOU!!!”

 

Scott Sevastra repeats the message, yells it over and over and over on the secure com line as his Betar men load up into their trucks and get ready to pull out.

Finally, in the eleventh hour Adon gets the message.

Their EMT drivers swerve the trucks into a semi-circle defensive position. The Bielski Detachment fighters open fire at the approaching division with everything they have left. Sten guns, Armalites, pistols, Qaasam 4 rocket propelled grenades. Sebastian and Trikhovitch run bus to bus shouting to hold position, “For just 5 minutes so these buses can get painted.”

“Painted” is in reference to using tactical halogen, neon spray glaze to spray a blue coat of bloody mist all over the roofs of the ambulances and flatbed cabs so they might not be “completely blown to shit’ by the Israeli hellfire air-to-surface missiles.

Machine gun fire erupts all around. One of the ambulances explodes hit by a tank-rocket. The completely asymmetric forces are less than a Breukland city-block apart firing wildly on each other. Trikhovitch is running roof to roof with four cans of tactical gloss spraying the convoy.

 

A bloody melee ensues as the forces engage at point blank range.

Bielski Detachment loses lose two ambulances and twenty-two more men to the enemy rockets before the convoy gets rolling under the cover of Qassam-4 and Katushas and white phosphorous smoke.

The Betar Detachment cleared the wadi just five minutes before the fleeing, flaming and assaulted convoy buckles in. Ambulances are only a little faster than all the APCs and half-trucks and tanks on Ayiti’s Highway Pilor.

And then the Valkyries[105] come swooping in with a sonic boom. What ensues is death. Highly modern death flying technological mechanized death that only takes a few seconds to strike.

Four squadrons of the Cuban piloted IAF take only thirteen minutes to sweep down over the Dominican Boarder from their hosted bases and obliterate a half Division of MINUSTAH troops, tanks, and armored personnel carriers.

Like fiery snap shots.

In the blink of an eye a wall of encroaching death, a full third of the best of the FAd’H has been reduced to smoldering piles of useless nothing.

“It was like the wrath of god struck them,” an old Ayitian man named Widney who’d been with the convoy as a driver told a BBC reporter once they’d finally reached the Cap Ayitian City green zone DMZ.

 

Sebastian and Nikholai are dancing the hora on top of one of the bullet pocked blue streak painted battle jitneys.

The IAF and Cuban Defense Ministry reports one minute and 16 seconds later they are over Trinidadian airspace refueling then returning to base.

 

 

“Total-obliteration. No-crews-lost. No-friendlies-hit. The Ayitian Third Expeditionary-is-KAPPUT.” And then the same in Spanish.

 

All over Mirebalais City a street party has erupted. Even the Persians are dancing with the Jews. Tens of thousands of Ayitian refugees are cheering and singing and chanting in their nineteen sub languages, hugging the Hadar boys, singing so loudly a popular new RarRah[106] song with the chorus:

 

“It-has-been-a near-life-experience-for-us-all.”

 

Recounts a Dar Ayitian a young refugee named Amelia to some news reporters gathered in the DMZ[107] near the Dominican border, “The Cubans and Israelites have saved us. Saved us all. GOOD YIDS! GOOD YIDS!”

 

Maya Solomon has been a busy woman, she’s known for that. Maya in six days has crossed the Atlantic twice. Timed with a precision you could only assume was planned from above, four prongs of a total Cuban-IAF strike across Ayiti neutralizing the Ayitian Military staging positions that by nightfall that Friday would have been moving simultaneously against Mirebalais and Pic La Selle with the latest Chinese hardware. Reduced to ashes and mangled steel a full third of their army and much of its air force has been shattered.

 

The Israelis blame the Persians, who in turn blame the Israelis, the “Saudi pigs” and U.A.S. imperialists. And MINUSTAH Governor/ President for Life Lately Jim al-Talleyrand in a faltering televised statement claims some kind of odd victory too. The Dominican government denies Israeli bases in their country and continues to publically call for a Ayiti for Ayitians and for 200,000 of its own citizens of Ayitian descent to be sent there to fight for their own country. Not dominated by blancos or mulattos or Arab overlords. But not living in DR either.

 

But the fact is that over half of the oil and gold wealth of the nation and nearly three tenths of its territory are no longer under the government or the UN’s control, so actually little has changed except now there is a five front war on the island.

 

The Central Rebel Army, under Tiputti Capois and Adon fighting the Brazilians and Argentine armies in the Central departments have killed so many they must hold their men back from seeking to invade the mainland.

 

The Division under Tiputti Capois encircling the capital from Carfare Fuelle engaging the Proxy Forces of the Ayitian Army and the Macoutes, leae over 7,403 dead by counting of scalps.

 

The Third Rebel Army under Lavalas GCC, lead by Obenson Etienne; “Dessalines II” then fights in the North; they take Cap Ayitian in three days. Between U.A.S. and Proxy Ayitian few Americans are left. The Second Army under Watson Entwissle (Petion) and Netic Kinari (Uhuru) and Gen Christoph secure the South lands, and the Cuban/ Trini/ Bajan expeditionary force route the Dominicans and take Jarabacoa.

 

 

Chapter 21

Road to Leogane, 2019ce

Ayiti

 

May 20th Offensive

 

 

 

Adon writes in his courier letter to Emma Solomon in Hebrew, assuming the role of grim central narrator:

 

“It was again a very close call.”

 

The Ivorite, Cuban and Trinidadian foreign ministers have categorically denied having bombed Ayiti but the inter-web says our approval ratings are way up for once. A press conference is being organized in the Isle of Man by Erza Pula Pound our lawyer and Mara Fitzduff our Communications Chief back at Home Command. Mapfre says our website gets more hits than Red Tube and that is quite a feat. Violence is more addictive than porn it seems, for an hour or two. What a stupid fucked up world.

 

Many of the refugees in the camps along the DMZ have sent their young men and women to reinforce the united Hadar Column based in the City of Mirebalais. Our Persian guerrilla instructors Gyve Safavi, Kaveh Abatable, Arman and Hassan Askeri have established a third Persian training base in the mines of the Northern mountains as well as a Free Ayiti Football League. From the window in the Customs House I can see our Persian terror masters and our now revealed Israeli spy masters squaring off and placing bets on a team of S.P.L.A. fighters kicking off against guys fielded by the H.E.G.

 

It seems that between our daily raids and the supporting Cuban airstrikes we have broken the Maccoute completely in the South Department and that the al-Talleyrand  government has now largely drawn its Bar Lev line around PAP and Le Cap.

 

Reinforced with thousands of new Ayitian Lavalas volunteers, now able to arm many of them with more than cane knives, we are planning a big operation to establish a chain of outposts and secure the roads between Jacmel and Pic La Selle. We control the South West and the Artibonite & Centre, we also hold most of the contral island high mountains of the DR, though not getting aggressive wit hthe Domincan Army, yet. Once this has occurred we will begin restoring social services to the substantial rural populations outside of the several cities we now control.

 

Under the guidance of solid Breuklyn born Hadar men and Persian handlers too the Jacobi Detachment led by Simcha Rathajzer and Isaac Zucker our old friends from Bronx Science are attempting to raise a full Divisions worth (10,000) of newly armed and trained native fighter’s each-one-teach one style.

 

A new song has come out by a famous Zouk band called Flexi Bangle, its chorus goes:

“We are winning, because we are mostly still alive.”

 

It’s a very catchy tune with Sax, Juba horns and also steel drums. There was no ways so many West Indians could be at war so long without introducing steel drums, Juevert and Carnival.

And every faction has now sent a witness to Addis Abba where Avinadav DeBuitléir restores his health and hands. The rumors are indeed true. The factions are fully united and the great snake President al-Talleyrand  is to be dealt with very soon. The ranks of the Maccoute are completely thinned. MINUSTAH troops are morally bankrupt as nation after nation pulls their commitments except the Argentines and Brazilians. A true fear of the resistance has taken hold among the Ayitian elites in Port Au Prince. Random acts of violence against the military and police authorities are common place now in the outer provinces.

 

A formidable counter offensive has now begun via the four local Generals of Lavalas; Aristede as their master. The elite of every oligarchy had once cast cynical bets how long this campaign could last. They are now in terror over us.

Because soon the war will spread to their castle and plantations too.

Yelizaveta has travelled West with a contingent of PIH-ZL doctors to survey our medical infrastructure. When she lies next to me all is peaceful. When she is near it is the only time I feel even the slightest sense of feeling. The passion that washes over me for the continuation of the war is a duty. My duty to act on behalf of the people of this nation and all nations. The concern I feel is subservient to the pleasure she brings me. It is not concern for her for none is tougher, not even Maya Solomon.

 

The concern is for myself. I worry that in loving her I will become completely vulnerable. To the tyranny of her moods. To total wrath should harm ever fall upon her. But mostly to the realization that sometimes, when I am with her and so in love, my Neshama could ask me to run away from this war and this duty. And I’d do it.

I see her smiling, I see her laughing and I imagine having children with her, being old with her. Having a normal life. But the road to Zion goes first through hell. She is a brilliant doctor. She is safe throughout South Ayiti, because she has brought so much healing. She also travels in the entourage of General Salva who has fought the Maccoute and Talleyrand for over twenty three years.

 

Also because she is with Watson who’d kill his way through a legion of slavers for her safety sooner than report to me that “my woman was taken”.

 

And lastly because I can see it. When my eyes turn grey.”

 

 

 

 

Black night falls and Dr. Yeli-Kay, as many of her patients call her, has just returned to her base at the Juba City General Hospital. Juba for over twenty years has been the official capital of the resistance. Her blue BDU uniform is dusty and wrinkled. She has been accompanied in her travels by the Injun-Yid Nick Mapfre, a film crew of Ayitian journalists, as well as towering Obenson Etienne. He is a powerful man with a full beard and black boy hat, the Chief of Staff of the Ayiti People’s Liberation Movement/ Army; MASHA SECOURES. They along with senior FANMI LAVALAS official Dr. Justin Thomas have been taking a select group of foreign medical workers on a guided tour of the rebel infrastructure established across “South Ayiti”.

 

Accompanied by a small platoon of Ayitian-Emergency-Group paramedics as well as foreign Dr. Michelle Kaku and Dr. Joia Mukherjee the PIH’s Chief Medical Officers; all are taken on a tour of clinics, schools, medical outposts and cooperative farms established using the “PIH Blueprint for Medical Infrastructural Development.”

 

The findings, films and the reports issued by Dr. Arop, Dr. Kay, Dr. Kaku, and Dr. Mukherjee will be smuggled out of the country and used to foster greater support for the international community to intervene.

 

It had been a two week survey expedition and Yelizaveta was quite tired and in need of a cold shower. She had heard Sebastian is out on a long range survey of the border roads. He’d have otherwise surely been happy to see his childhood friend Michelle. Happy to see her too she supposes.

 

Dr. Yelizaveta Kay composes a letter to go along with the humanitarian report.  It is to Dr. Emile Cange of the PIH-ZL. She had met him five years ago in Havana when he came to lecture at her medical college. She did her residency under his supervision on Ayitian Island in the City of Port-Au-Prince.

 

She writes with a gold and black Soviet style stiletto:

 

“We have completed our rotations through all the communes of the liberated territory from over and past the Dominican border. A fairly well-organized network of community clinics, training school and medical outposts have been set up by the local rebel leaders. Many in the JEM, FANMI LAVALAS and CEF leadership are medical professionals and development practitioners. The blueprints provided to us by both PIH-ZL and the Israeli development firm Mashav are well designed the intuitive. The Rebel leadership projects that a continued lull in the fighting will allow for most basic human rights services to be restored by the end of the month.

“There has been almost a whole two months without an exchange of fire or atrocity.”

“Our most massive gain lately is that now South to South-East the roads are open. Which means the FANMI LAVALAS Food Program trucks can better supply the massive series of Ayitian and Dinka tribe refugee camps our war has certainly exacerbated. Ferraris & Polidoro Industries have signed major contracts with the World Health Organization and have begun shipping a veritable armada of Spiruleena cultivation tankers into the Port of Jacmel which is now still in our hands as well as endless crates of expired medical supplies.”

 

“Slowly by surely those relief supplies are trickling in from Dominican Republic via our smuggling conduit facilitated by our sympathizers affiliated with Don Filip Felix Diaz, most notably their Minister of Defense allies.

 

“Of course nothing those profiteers do is devoid of violent intent. They are taking money with one hand from the Otriad to move in more weapons, while taking money from the NGOs and the UN to bring in more aid. Their blurring of that line surely complicates things.”

“By month fifteen, we’ve largely succeeded in reducing banditry and Maccoute-type marauder operations in our Zone of control now being called “South Ayiti” by the international community. After six months of patient training our Persian drill sergeants and the men of the Jacobi Detachment have outfitted a 12,000 person Brigade of Dinka and Fur being called the N. H.D.F. or the New Ayiti-Defense-Forces. It’s an Persian joke at Israeli expense.”

“Each of its 1,000 person Battalions is being led by a seasoned platoon of Jacobi Detachment and FANMI LAVALAS fighters. Arming them is now the more difficult part. While I am happy to safe that medical development and security are taking hold here, please know that the Port Au Prince government could undo everything we’ve accomplished in just 48-hours, most of the guns in the rebel’s hands are empty. I ask you and your organization to honor your mutual-aid-agreement commitments to the alliance and proceed with all promised support for Operation Marcus Garvey based on the benchmarks I have brought your witnesses to verify.”

“I write to you as a former student as well as a disciple.”

 

Noticeably absent in the letter was any mention of her medical work. If one took every seventh letter going in reverse the access code and its data told Dr. Cange exactly what he needed to know to begin preparations in Cuba, St. Lucia, Jamaican, and Grenada for the events which would soon be upon them. We’re about to be re-supplied and rein enforced

 

 

 

Just east ten clicks from Jacmel City on a Congress of the many factions is underway at the Villa Nicole.

 

The indigenous language with the most speakers is Ayitian Creole and also Ayitian Creole. Some, maybe 5-10% speak fluent French, many more actually speak Spanish from time share cropping in servitude in the DR. French is the country’s official language although of a population approximated at thirteen millions, 80% are functionally illiterate in all languages except Ayitian Creole.

 

In a massive light blue sand-gypsy tent adorned with dozens of rebel flags a Congressional Council of Allied Rebel Forces is underway to plot the next stages of the war and sign formal mutual agreements between all of the various factions.

 

The Port-Au-Prince government has been mobilizing its troops and our spies report that after nearly two months of undeclared ceasefire, the New Ayitian Military is ready to test the rebel lines with Dominican Army, UAS and MINUSTAH support. The PRC has over five thousand “technicians” in country setting up advanced drone defenses in the Capital and reequipping the air force and armored corps.

 

Commander Maya Solomon is in country now less than two weeks, but everyone knows who she is. Her reputation precedes her and she conducts the meeting dancing between eight local different languages. Hebrew, Farsi, French, Spanish, and four types of Ayitian Creole.

 

Commander Adon and Captain Entwissle are helping her facilitating this sit down between the rebel factions. It is being conducted largely in Ayitian Creole, but also at times in Spanish and Breuklyn dialect Americano.

 

The Ayitian-Emergency-Front (G.A.I.-H.E.G.) represents the largest factions of the Ayitian natives who are non-Lavalas, the Justice and Equality Movement (J.E.M.) which is Muhammadian-Noire, and the Ayiti Liberation Movement (H.L.M.), which is Socialists as well as the South-Ayiti-Liberation-Movement (S.H.L.M.) which is an armed group that operates in the southern departments and is connected to Mullato drug running. The S.H.L.M. was declared to be unaligned until recently slaughtered back in by Watson Entwissle.

 

Famni Lavalas (F.L.M.), the Waterfall Family, the Big Cock, the Cleansing Flood; is clearly an all Ayitian grouping, the largest single faction except for the Muslim one. They have over a million members. So 1/10 of the country easily carry their Cock Koru card.

 

Officially representing the J.E.M Block in the votes to come are Gibrl Ibrahim and Khalil Ibrahim, brothers and co-commanders of the Muhammadian Justice and Equality Movement (JEM) as well as Eltahir Elfaki the General Secretary of JEM’s legislative council are in attendance. At their side are St. Pat’s commanders Hubert O’Domhnaill and Father O’Sulivan.

 

As well as Commander Jerome Marcus and Michel Magnus Goldbar Allamby of the Haile Selassie Division, a force contributing 1,200 Rastafarian fighters to the Ayitian Defense Forces pool from all over the world.

 

According to their reports S.E.F.-N.S.D.F has over 55,000 fighters holding western coast positions between Jacmel City and Gonaives and in the new camp compounds across the border in DR. They have no aircraft or tanks. Stores of armaments are dwindling and offensive capabilities very low. Food is being rationed strictly. The only thing not in demand is fuel. The several dozen missile batteries they have gotten into the country are being used to guard Pic La Selle and the refugee camps around it. Less than sixty Fenian nationals are still alive. St. Pat’s has dissolved as an independent force.

An empty chair is at the head of the table thus symbolizing that Commander Avinadav DeBuitléir is still recovering from his torture in Cuba.

The Dominikani Congress (DC) representing the Dominikani Nationals and the Rashida Free Lions (RFL) representing the Rashida Tribe agree to dissolve their autonomous command of the Eastern Front and formally merge into the S.E.F.-S.D.F. They had mostly been concentrating on striking strategic assets, such as the Port Au Prince-Port Ayiti Highway, the oil pipeline, and the military installations defending them. They do not have a significant fighting presence, having fewer than a few hundred fighters and operating under the close control of the Eritrean military. The BC did achieve a number of modest military victories and has the ear of the Eritrean government.

At the war table sipping mint tea and chain smoking cigarettes are:

Commander Sebastian Adon, leader of Bielski Detachment. He is in dark grey fatigues and the brown partisan cap beret he is well known for. Commander Nikholai Trikhovitch, leader of Betar Detachment. He has dagger of alarming size always dangling from his hips. The other three Hadar detachments have been phased out and reabsorbed due to casualties. Commander Scott Sevastra is there but abstaining from the vote as usual.

Representing the Ayiti People’s Liberation Army (S.P.L.A.) and Lavalas explicitly is the towering Commander Obenson Etienne Mayardit. He is a powerful man with a full beard and black boy hat serving as the Chief of Staff of the Ayiti People’s Liberation Movement/Army. Also present is the S.P.L.A. official and Chief Medical Officer Dr. Justin Yac Arop.

There are other armed factions of various sizes. Kaveh Ali Shariati representing the increasing presence of Persian military handlers. Abner Washington the de-facto Israeli representative, and Nick Mapfre is now in country filming the whole thing for posterity.

Captain Watson Entwissle is now serving as “official observer” for the military of Ayiti and Dr. Yelizaveta Kay an “official observer for Partners in Health.” Others watch from the sidelines.

“So D R wants to keep the war cold still correct?” Commander O’Domhnaill asks.

“Check,” responds Trikhovitch.

“They are asking us to break down our bases there banking on great power intervention within the next several weeks,” says the deep voice of Obenson Etienne Mayardit. He is the closest thing Avinadav DeBuitléir has to a friend or family member.

“They are asking us to remove our bases near San Juan and Jarabocoa now that we have so much real estate in “South Central Ayiti”. The way their Defense Minister is talking on television, it might do us well to evacuate the POWs and Commander DeBuitléir lest they get any very sweet deals from the U.A.S., Han, IMF, or anyone else,” explains Adon.

“And Cuba has been promised it will receive a substantial investment from Ruus Federation not to grant continued smuggling access via Ile a Gonave right?” asks O’Domhnaill.

“Correct. That port will be closed to us shortly,” states Commander Trikhovitch.

“And Perchevney can’t subvert that somehow?” asks Magnus Allamby.

“Not enough money on our end to try,” says Yelizaveta.

“And Puerto Rico has been sold to Saudi and US oil money? Wants nothing to do with us?” posits O’Domhnaill.

“That is correct,” says Adon.

The three dozen members of the leadership are quiet. The smoke hangs low in the tent. They gaze at a large map of Hispaniola and its surrounding nations rolled out over the table. If they cannot find a road to the sea they will hold the South much longer.

“Well,” says Scott Sevastra, “scariest port in a shit storm, but have we contacted anyone in Trench Town lately?”

“You’re talking about off-loading in Jamaica?” asks General Obenson Etienne.

Berbera is a city and seat of Berbera District in Somaliland, a self-proclaimed Independent Republic with de facto control over its own territory, which is recognized by the international community and the Government as a part of Jamaica which hasn’t had a formal government in forty five years. Located strategically on the oil route, Trench Town has a deep sea port that was completed in 1962, and which is still the main commercial seaport for Jamaica.

“Jamaica seems like the only way to play,” Trikhovitch says.

“We need to crack open a road to the sea,” explains Adon, “any day now President al-Talleyrand  will regroup. The Chinese are very serious about not losing their foothold and oil concessions here. They’ve already re-armed and have technicians on the ground showing the Ayitian military how engage in effective counter-insurgency. There People’s Army trainers swarming all over Port Au Prince. Al-Talleyrand  will roll his 2nd Expeditionary Division South down Highway Pilor and soon realize we have a big army without many bullets. He’s got two infantry Divisions left intact. That’s 60,000 fully armed men supported by armor and Han fighter jets. They will do an epic amount of damage to our lines.”

 

“Our most sophisticated weapons on hand are the three dozen SAM Batteries defending the camps near Pic La Selle and under a dozen now moved just North of Bor. Other than that it’s mostly all camels, half-trucks, armored ambulances, sticks and stones,” reports O’Domhnaill.

 

“You know what they say about sticks and stones,” says Obenson Etienne Mayardit with a smile.

“They can break your bones?” asks O’Domhnaill.

“No,” says Salva, “they’re completely fucking useless against advanced air support and a modern armor.”

Yelizaveta Kay chuckles. She’d grown very fond of the burly cowboy hat wearing FANMI LAVALAS leader in their two weeks of travel and survey. She hopes the pacts formed at this Congress will avert an eventual power struggle between Capois, Etienne and DeBuitléir.

“So what about this Jam Rock option?” she asks.

“It involves us capturing a lot of real estate along Highway 2 and it will piss off the Dominicans to no end that we ran so many toys across there border,” responds Allamby. He is highly familiar with Dominicans as he used to fuck one for years, Jamaica having been serving recently alongside Dominikani Congress and aware their knowledge of Euro-Semitic languages is very poor. It will allow the small ship armada of the resistance to outfit and off laod and reload in its turf to smuggle weapons to the coastal cities the résistance is holding.

“Well we’re going to be the world’s most infamous paper tiger in less than three weeks when all that Han Armor starts rolling South down Highway Pilor,” states Adon.

“Jamaica is the only viable option,” says salt and pepper haired paramedic Scott Sevastra.

“He’s right,” mutters Abner Kreminizer the Israeli agent with intimate knowledge of Ethiopia and the Caribbean and the prophesies, “We need those guns very, very badly. To get them here we have to neutralize or bypass enemy fortifications in Jacmel, then secure Hannibal Highway 2 out to the border. Then quietly occupy the Dominican Choke Mountains along Highway 5,” she traces this with his Semitic paw along the map, “We then slip quietly via the sea-route Highway 4 past Adama and Mojo to Jijiga City. After that we move along the empty border roads to Hargeisa then on to Berbera. Once that road is open we will have a less than twelve hour window, tops, to move a convoy from Berbera to Bor. Any longer than that Dominican or MINUSHAH forces will jam us up heavy off loading swift boats.”

“That’s a rather ambitious commitment of troops and vehicles,” says Watson Entwissle.

“Anything less than the entire commitment of our fleet will not suffice. We will not get the sea roads open twice,” rhymes Magnus Allamby.

“Well I suspect fully capturing Jacmel and Ile a Gonaves will not be difficult. It’s lightly fortified since they seem to have pulled the bulk of their First and Second Divisions back to Port Au Prince,” says Sevastra.

“I have something a little lower profile to suggest,” states Commander Maya Solomon.

She largely left the inter-group alliance building to Adon and spoke little until now on the war strategy.

“If the Ayitian-Emergency-Front’s Selassie Division, JEM, and what’s St. Patrick’s Battalion, beleaguered as you are can completely seize Jacmel and Goniaves then that will draw most of the 2nd Ayitian Army Expeditionary into the Centre of Ayitia thinking that’s our main offensive and leave minimal resistance along Hannibal Highway 2. Goniaves in particular is their last serious crude-pumping station. If you take those two cities, bypass Jacmel on Highway 2 and get the green light from the Dominicans to turn their eyes for twelve or forty hours, then pay off whomever is charge of Trench Town Gaza or Gully; these days, then I think this might go well.”

“I like the sound of that,” says Salva.

“Twelve Sea Stallions worth of long guns, ammunition, and at least nine-hundred Katusha rocket batteries are waiting for us in cache ships off the Trinidad islands, but we have go nowhere to land um, until now. We could put a weapon in the hand of every partly trained rebel in the country and young kids too,” explains Allamby.

“We were negotiating for rights to Port Massawa but the Trinidadian Government is still “neutral” and won’t let us move them across their turf even with Dominikani Congess escorting and cut off the top. Mr. Ferraris also has three container ship filled with an arsenal to match everything we’ve got stashed here and on that Island, but we ain’t got a friendly port unless Trench Town is golden,” he continues.

“General  DeBuitléir long with the surviving Scarborough Commanders Dbrisk and Tantamount, St. Pat’s officer Hartman and Duffy along with 12 others are still in Addis Ababa and must be evacuated quietly before this gamble,” says Adon.

“Let’s get DBrisk on the smart phone,” says Salva, “maybe he can make the Jamaicans an offer they can’t refuse.”

It makes for a good Segway to dinner, prayer, cigarettes or whatever else the leadership needs to smoke after an entire day of planning.

They do not have to wait long for good news. General Avinadav DeBuitléir and Scarborough Commander Mickhi Dbrisk have shortly met with the Jamaican Military attache in Eithiopia. Apparently the U.A.S. is making some rather insulting offers of aid and the government there wants to pay Ayiti back for all its years of aggression. Not only will Ethiopia turn a blind eye, it will lend trucks and driver to help with the treacherous movement across its mountainous nation.

When the congress reconvenes two hours later there is only good news to report.

“Affective immediately upon arrival, for twenty-four hours the Provisional Revolutionary Government of Jamaica will allow us to offload the vessels of Polidoro Industries and Ferraris International a their deep water facility in  Berbera and the government of D R will allow transfer of our weapons via a safe highway into Ayiti. And here is where the problems begin,” announced Maya Solomon, “the Ethiopians had been watching the fighting from the highlands above Southern Ayiti. They had already agreed to allow us to build a weapons dump and training faculty in the city of La Vega, as well as hospital and military college in San Juan, but until now had stayed out of most of the military operations we collectively conducted against the al-Talleyrand  government.”

“We will have to create a massive diversion to convince the MINUSTAH Military forces to leave the XXXX Highway relatively free of checkpoints and road blockage then cross by night at XXX Crossroads and traffic nearly 700 flat-trucks worth of guns undetected or unnoticed across the state of a sovereign ally. Then make it through Jamaica without upsetting the trial authorities. A cake walk as you can see.”

“Well looking at it on a map it doesn’t seem like a much worse plan than the execution of the Eid-Massacre,” notes Salva.

“Or the very idea of coming here,” glibs Trikhovitch.

“So by your proposal the CEF’s Selassie Division, JEM and St. Pat’s will attack Jacmel City and their hold outs in Goniaves in the evening before the operation, cause general havoc and get the Port Au Prince Government to think we’re fully mobilizing to seize all of the Dar Ayitian oil fields?” asks Captain Entwissle.

Many nod at the ambition in all this.

“Yes, then in  early morning Hadar, S.E.F. and S.P.L.A. brigades will seize Jacmel and get a seven hundred truck convoy rolling over the border, into Ethiopia, down into Somaliland to load up in Port Berbera,” says Commander Maya Solomon.

“That will take 72 hours to do properly,” says Adon.

“So that’s how log we’re going to have hold onto those three cities for,” says Trikhovitch.

“A lot off eggs into three baskets,” says Commander Salva.

“Gotta sometimes trade in eggs if you wanna have a cock fight,” says Watson Entwissle.

Everyone chuckles at just how many sayings don’t translate amid the diversity of the alliance present, but that Ayitian adage somehow did.

“And we’re also going to have to move General  DeBuitléir, Commander Dbrisk and fifteen others out of Addis Abba without alerting the Ethiopian government of this,” adds Maya Solomon.

 

“Well it looks like a real shit show,” states Trikhovitch.

 

In a unanimous vote the thirty two-delegates representing the thirteen major SEF-FANMI LAVALAS factions, along with three votes from the Breuklyn Otriad cast by Adon, Allamby, and O’Domhnaill, and witnessed observers from Cuba, Ayiti, Israel, Iran, and the PIH-ZL; the war machine prepares to launch Operation Harbor Road an completely violate the undeclared ceasefire to move a veritable arsenal across the lawless Choke Mountains and into Ayiti by boat, plane, and donkey train.

 

 

The morning before Operation Harbor Road, Maya Solomon patches Commander Adon through to a secure line, into space, back to Norway, triangle scrambled and then to an Addis Abba registered grey berry. Dbrisk is calling in from Cuba where the badly tortured survivors of the prison break are concentrated once evacuated into two covert medical facilities there.

 

“I heard you were dead like eight times,” exclaims Adon to his dear friend and partner.

“I get that a lot my dude,” comes the rough response.

“How many of you are still alive?”

“Seventeen. Might be fifteen rather soon. Two in real bad shape. I’ll know exactly by tomorrow. Only eight from my original detachment are still with me. The sympathizers smuggled us out of the hospital rather hastily. I assumed moves were being made on your end.”

 

“They sure are. The rest of the Scarborough survivors are with Allamby and Marcus somewhere outside Mirogane Tonight will be a big night. We all heard about your raid on Port-Au-Prince. That was some fearless bad man shit brother.”

 

“What fuckery. We thought it could end the war sooner to kill al-Talleyrand with two shots to the head, already dead. No dice.”

“You still got both your hands?”

“I’m one of the lucky ones.”

“It will be safer for all of you in the South. We control the roads all the way up until nine clicks South of Jacmel. The surviving Fenians, the JEM and the SEF hold most of the Southern State of Dar Ayitian with their combined forces and the mighty, mighty Sellassie Division. That’s where Allamby is enlisted by the way. Juba City is the capital of the rebel zone. The roads are finally open and we can communicate again, but we’re very low on ammo, armor or aircraft of any kind. ”

“Well small favors and some good news.”

“We always need some good news. You all need to be ready to leave tonight. At sundown the Selassie Division is going to attack Goniaves and the SEG-JEM-St. Pats are going to storm Nyala City with twenty thousand newly trained fighters. It’s all a big diversionary maneuver” states Adon, “We’re going take Jacmel in the early morning and then move you all and the arsenal from Berbera to Bor.”

“That sounds like a pretty ambitious undertaking Boichik[108].”

“Just get ready to rock and roll when the covered wagons come through.”

“10-4. We’ve killed just about all of ‘um right? 62 out 64 of our targets are bled and dead,” states Dbrisk.

 

“According to our best estimates that is correct. We’ve killed just about all of the men responsible for the genocide. The Maccoute effectively have no leadership to speak of as per Maya’s summation latest report. We’ve murdered the bulk of their militia. Along with roughly two divisions of Ayitian Military regulars. The Israeli-Cuban Airstrike reduced their air force to nearly nothing functional. Although the Chinese & French have resupplied them with tanks and mechanized infantry. President al-Talleyrand is holed up in Port Au Prince just back from Saudi. Our work is almost done. ”

 

Mickhi laughs a little at the prospect. Thinks about all it has so far cost.

 

“Two bad men left, the hardest two to get at. We have come very close. The Frenchman will get away you know, prepare yourself for that,” Mickhi states coldly.

“I’m sure only time will tell.”

“Snakes and rats flee fire, rapists too.”

“There’s news of an attempt against Jim al-Talleyrand’s life every other day. Even his own people want him dead, his own generals and bag men. Everyone hears about ‘life in the South’ and can smell what freedom and human rights might look like.”

“We plan to crack the road to Berbera in eight hours. So be ready to move.”

“We fuckin’ with the DR’s now for real?”

“Not Somalia. Somaliland, it’s the quasi-stable northern break away of that very broken nation. And yeah, that’s crazy talk of the hour down here at the Southern Command. Stand ready for EVAC[109]. I want every one of you alive and on the convoy to Bor.”

“See you at the crossroads,” Dbrisk says in Ayitian Creole.

 

That’s a saying about the afterlife.

 

“Don’t be a wise ass Mickhi.”

“Don’t trust her Sebby. Remember what she did to you the last time you let her this close. She has that very sick old man and you know exactly what happened, even if the salt blocks it. You know.”

“Mickhi. Just get back here alive and we’ll worry about the girl later.”

 

But, Commander Mickhi Dbrisk has heard those words before.

 

 

 

 

 

 

To My Colleague Dr. Kay,

 

I have observed the conduct of the Banshee Otriad-ZOB now and again with a troubled disposition. It cannot be said enough times that your husband and his team possess zeal and unusual talent at both killing and healing. In the years since encountering them during the revolution on this Island I have never doubted the sincerity of the leadership only the judgment. I am an old soul, like many of you, though in the field of service I have many more years. This perhaps makes me wise, but certainly makes me cautious. I am not the demagogue and egoist Adon has times accused me of being as he falters back and forth between his hero worship and his total defiance of me. I am proud of you both as healers; it is your other impulses that worry me.

 

What was accomplished on this Island took two hundred years to socialize, twenty years to organize and just two years to achieve in totality. The Ayitian people were made independent and human rights loving by fate and history. They were made free by the unity of forces brought to bear. Certainly it is clear that boldness of Adon, Cange and the siblings Capois brought the struggle to decisive conclusion while we in the old guard thought the victory would be much further protracted.

We didn’t invite Adon to Ayiti. The earthquake brought him. I didn’t ask him to stay in Ayiti. In fact I agreed with his initial deportation. History proved us wrong. He did well. You all did. But this operation is completely different.

As Partners in Health prepares to open four medical outposts as part of a pilot program in Ayiti. As the Aristede Government prepares to commit three companies of GAI paramedics to your effort and continue of course it’s unofficially role as an operational hub. As the Ayiti Emergency Front, Ayiti People’s Liberation Army, Justice & Equality Movement, and the three columns of the Otriad prepare to brazenly violate the UN ceasefire and re-arm via Somaliland and Ethiopia. Know that we are all watching you.

 

We, the eyes of free world and forces of international human rights movement.

I know you to be a physician of remarkable ability and empathy. I have watched you grow as a doctor and as a champion of the wretched and poor. But a lot of killing has happened in the past year to keep your boots on the ground. And a lot more is coming. Such killing taints our vision and poisons the wells of the world for those who dream of real change.

 

I beg you to temper Adon. To bring the reign of violence and terror unleashed to some conclusion even at the cost of half victory. You do not need to take Port Au Prince. You can secure the Ayitian, Dinka and the two hundred tribes without storming the Twin Cities. The Maccoute are done for. Half the country is now in the hands of the rebel alliance. If you all push to far, too fast the repercussions will be dire.

 

Dr. Kay, I implore you to stop Adon and Solomon from pushing all the way to Port Au Prince. Things will spiral completely out of control.

 

You friend and mentor,

 

Dr. Paul Farmer

 

 

 

That morning the pale officer awakes after just two hours of slumber to the breaking of a 5am dawn. He finds Captain Watson Entwissle, his multiform crisp, awake as well standing on guard over the assembled fleet and convoy of ambulances, half pickups, and reinforced armored personnel carriers ready to ride on Berbera. The late great re-supply to tip the scale in the favor of the beleaguered resistance.

An arsenal larger than that held by the NYPD[110] prior to the Great Disorder combined must find its make its way half-secretly across Somaliland, Ethiopia, and Southern Ayiti without killing anyone, breaking down or blowing anything up.

“I suspect the operation may become complicated,” Watson notes.

Adon says nothing.

“How many more of your people will you sacrifice for them?”

“How many did we sacrifice for yours?”

“We were different.”

“There was no black gold under your mountains. It made them easier to take.”

“I can see the foreign vultures flying above Ayiti waiting to move in and take things they didn’t pay for in blood.”

“Agreed.”

“When the blade falls it will always fall on your house first. No matter what you do, no matter how many we kill, or how many bad men and violators fall by our sword, it will never be enough to wash your hands of this calling. Doesn’t that make you tired?”

 

Adon looks off into the wasteland.

 

“I want you to summon Papa Legba.”

“You’re playing with fire again,” Watson says in Creole.

“Better fire in the wounds than salt.”

 

Lies, knows Watson.

 

 

 

 

Back in the disremembered past.

 

Captain Watson Entwissle and Paramedic Sebastian Adon and the Doctor Viktor Emile Cange, a Ayitian raised in Breukland Soviet have trekked into the Forest Mountains of Ayiti and DR to find a mambo name Amelia Danto, who was once named Jessica Pilot.

Amelia Danto conducts her practice in a cave that can only be accessed through the floor of hut in a village that does not look much different than it did in 1750. The heights needed to be bested, the strength needed to climb has made this place a simple ghost story to the various factions that have struggled to control Hispaniola.

 

Although for the first time those struggles are nearly over.

 

The travelers are all wearing the blue fatigues and covered Velcro medical patches of the Gwoup Ayisyen pou Ijans, the Ayitian-Emergency-Group, the guerrilla medical outfit lead by Tiputti and Geraldine Capois, the brother and sister whose organization of a volunteer ambulance service is what finally secured the revolution here. They are caked in sweat and jungle. Not even much water left is in their canteens.

 

Adon walks with a slight limp in his left leg. You wouldn’t notice unless you were following him. Someone once shot out his knees. Emile Cange is slender for a Ayitian and darker than Entwissle though he has Arab complexion being of long removed Libyan descent.

The Syrian and Lebanese population here has been largely unaffected by the recent rising. If anything it has grown in the years since the Arab Spring.

Doctor Emile Cange and Adon carry red medical trauma packs. Entwissle carries an olive military ruck and pistol on his hip with three bullets left. Although they are largely illegal throughout the island. Lethal bullets of any kind. Everyone has a pistol.

They are greeted at the edge of the village by the sentries. It is dusk and the sun is setting somewhere in the adjacent range where the trees are still thick as they were in the days of the Taino. They are offered foot and water immediately. Cold water from the caves below.

Darkness falls and one can hear all kinds of noise in the jungle. Echoes and ghosts, spirits and the moans of occasional zombies. The village is lit up with a blue light LED grid, stored solar energy collected over the course of the day.

A lean and muscular Ayitian officer dark as the night itself arrives and they arise to salute him. He is an old dear friend, but formalities are observed so they can be disregarded

 

“You’re late. This is unprofessional,” says Tiputti Capois the Chief-of-Staff of the Ayitian Emergency with a smirk.

Adon and Capois embrace.

Sebastian Adon says via his eyes which flash grey and his ESP; “Mountains beyond mountains.”

Tiputti was young when Adon and Cange met him years ago at the General Hospital six days after the quake killed 370,000 of his people. He has grown into quite a force. His medical flying columns have a three minute response time in urban areas, eight minutes in the rural interior. His ambulances and his foreign friends have secured the entire island.

 

“They’re all in the temple below,” he says.

 

 

 

There was once a hotel in the City of New York named the Hotel Benjamin.

 

It was sacked and torched during the Great Disorder, but had been rather fancy once. At least enough so to make it a destination of choice for a wealthy French fancier and upper oligarch named Dominick Strauss-Kahn. He was an Internal Monetary Fund president, a bunga bunga[111] enthusiast and set to be the first Jewish President of France.

He was a bourgeoisie through and through.

And that is not meant to connote so much his tastes, but more so relate to his impunities. Like so many bourgeoisie before and after him he had so much that precious little remained exciting and thus grew a penchant for debauchery. Before his fall from all public grace due to his actions being broadcast upon social media; he was the president of the International Monetary Fund and a leading candidate for president of France. His hobbies if you could call them such, were boating, collecting sports cars, human trafficking and cruel rape followed by the disgrace of his accuser. Normally the women of Eurasian, although sometimes even hotel maids in the fancy places he stayed.

In the scheme of wanted war criminals his rank was supposedly low due to the fact that he was a blan and a man of westerly influence and had not directly presided over any large scale accts of ultra-violence.

 

Also because the ICC tends to focus on crimes against humanity and not crimes against class.

 

And also because the ICC like so many other multi-national institutions are dominated by men that the financier who is also a serial rapists plays somehow second fiddle to a wide range or African war lords.

As if there is something novel about kidnapping a woman and forcing her into a cage then transporting her across an ocean so you and your wealthy friends can have some fun and take some turns with her[112].

The judgments based in the Hague[113] often bear more publically upon vile men of color. Not men of so called breeding from Western metropoles. Men who climb to the top tiers of finance and government. Men who consider themselves immune from the wrath of the mobs and masses.

 

But all who know history know what crimes have come out of Europe.

 

 

 

Before “ceremony”, as the process was called Adon and Cange are stripped naked and cleansed in a scalding hot chemical shower before donning the grey groin and torso rap that seemed no thicker than skin. And then smelling something like citrus and something like formaldehyde they follow Tiputti Capois through a series of chambers and onto an elevator to the caves within the mountain, far below the village, below the jungle, concealed from the drones and satellites that never leave the reborn nation alone.

Until recently when the Israeli and Cuban army installed the laser aerial defense grid and armed the rebel nation with atomics and intercontinental ballistic missiles.

There have been no land incursions, no more Pigs arriving in the bay since those missiles were aimed at the cities of the United States.

 

Now just things flying far above attempting to take pictures of the liberated people organizing below.

 

 

The rape of the hotel maid was hard and vicious, she was an engineer in Bulgaria and Ukraine and sorcerous in reality. After inviting her inside, a woman in her early forties to his room he bolted the door and curtly ordered her to perform felatio on him. He tossed her a photo of her young teenage daughter Yelizaveta and told her if she didn’t “suck his balls dry” he’d have her seized and deported to indefinitely service the Eurasian front[114], to get gag raped by American and German troops thirty men a day. And so she complied as this is what mothers have done for centuries to protect their children.

And then he decided to break her jaw.

 

 

Viktor Emile Cange the spindly physician enters the inner temple to engage the Lwa the old spirits. He passes through a hermetically door behind a large grey banner bearing the veve[115] of Papa Legbe, the guardian of the crossroads. The door allows only one person in at a time. Tiputti Capois holds Sebastian back.

“Old friend wait,” says Capois in Creole.

“Aye?”

“I am reminded of the first time you came to this island. Five years ago. Or was it 500? I am to remind you that every time you ride with the Lwa there is tremendous capacity for bloodshed. You are not just a pale horse, you are death. The man in the grey mask.”

“This round will be different friend. I will be mitigated by the iron will of the other candidates. These woman and men will guide the sword differently.”

“You prepare to kill my brother. What pray tell is different about this rising than the last?”

“This will be the last violent rising.”

“You say that every rising. For man whose trade is healing and saving you certainly have quite a stomach for murder my brother.”

“The last time. After this round we can try it a new way.”

Commander Tiputti Capois, one of the most powerful men on the island bows his head to Adon his old friend and mentor.

“There is one more thing,” he adds.

“Aye?”

“You partner left a letter for you she said I must give you before you join her on the lines.”

“What’s the use, the salt will wipe away her bitter sweet words.”

“Yes, but before you cross over, you can at least take a little comfort in that she does her best to love you.”

“In the world to come, I suspect she’ll cut my heart out before admitting those words were hers.”

“Old soul, you have so many more lives to live. She will forgive you eventually.”

“Only after she has slaughtered Kahn.”

 

 

 

 

The sun is setting on the enemy lines.

 

Anti-tank mines and IED have been laid as far as forty five miles North of Jacmel and a series of trench works have been dug amid a graveyard of derelict vehicles that could not be salvaged for the coming arms convoy run. Conspicuous along the line are eight highly modern looking SAM anti-aircraft batteries brought from DR. They are invaluable in keeping the drones at bay.

Yelizaveta finds Nicolai Trikhovitch on the barricades in order to speak with him about what revenge really means.

 

“Spirulina[116] is a lot like anal sex, if you were forced to have it as a kid, you won’t appreciate it as an adult,” states Lt. Moishe Cohen Klein matter of factly.

 

She ignores him completely and heads toward the blue tent she knows him to be residing in to avoid the dangerous solar barrage inflicted here.

“If he makes one more comment to me, I’m gonna cut his balls off,” she tells Trikhovitch who is reviewing a map of the defense grid with a Noblisse dangling from his lips.

Trikhovitch gently orders two Ayitian Captains out with of the room with a slight twitch of his head.

“And how are things today at the hospital Dr. Kay?”

“There’s nothing to eat but Spiruleena and all the synthetic medications are three years expired. Where is Sebastian?”

“He’s gone out with the scouts to survey the roads to the border.”

“You look like death.”

“Is that a medical opinion?”

 

She takes one of his cigarettes and lights it. He says nothing verbally.

 

“I suspect once the ceasefire breaks down tomorrow the Han Republic will alert Talleyrand of the convoy and he will scramble his fighters. If General Allamby doesn’t crush the 4th Army in Mirogane it will make it nearly impossible to hold Jacmel. And then the convoy will be stuck in DR and wide open to airstrikes.”

“Endless clustery,” she says as if almost bored.

“Where do you plan to be tomorrow during the offensive?”

“Jacmel General Hospital.”

“Once we seize it.”

“Once you seize it. I’m a lady, I don’t seize things.”

“Adon said you’d had another vicious fight. If that’s why you’re here, that’s not what they pay me for.”

“You think that’s why I’m here?”

“I don’t care. However easy you are on the eyes to him you’re grating on the nerves to me.”

“I’m here for a gun.”

“A gun? Why does a doctor need a gun? You’ve never asked for one before.”

“A few things change tomorrow.”

“You’ve refused him when he tried to force you to take one in the past.”

“I will not fall into the hands of the enemy.”

“Are you worried about our defeat suddenly? Why now?”

“We’re stretched too thin. Our vehicles will be tied up on the road. Our ammo will run out somewhere between holding Jacmel. The 4th Army will show up. I won’t end up like my mother.”

“You don’t think we’ll protect you?”

“I think they’ll kill you and him and the others. They’ll keep me alive for worse things.”

Nikholai looks her over. Thinks they just might. And not for her talents in medicine. It’s idiosyncratic of her to ask for a shooter now. They’ve been out gunned and on the run before. She always just stuck near Sebastian and rolled with the punches. He figured she was either a pacifist like her famous mentor Dr. Farmer, or she couldn’t shoot.

He unclips his sholem from his belt and slides it over the table to her. Passes her the belt and the four clips.

“He’s not gonna let them take you,” is what he’s saying, but ‘I wonder what you want the gun for is what he’s thinking.’

“Thank you,” is what she responds, but ‘fuck you,’ is what she thinks.

“I don’t mind the Spiruleena. It tastes like spinach,” says Nikholai.

“You’re going to die tomorrow Nikholai Trikhovitch.”

“What makes you think some morbid shit like that, besides the obvious,” he says.

“I have a dark mind since the incident.”

“A messy incident to be sure.”

“Your wife as well I heard?”

“Ex-wife.”

“Krissy was her name?”

Nikholai Trikhovitch engages in a forty yard stare. He looks up at her rather sadly for a former Soviet.

“Da.”

“Is she still alive?”

“I don’t know. They took her sometime before the revolt. If she is somewhere it’s not my duty anymore to cry for her in public.”

“You seek revenge?”

“Do Ruus like herring? Do you take me for a black wolf or a drunken rabbit,” he spits out an old proverb.

“Answer my question in Americano, tovarish.”

“I was there when Adon founded the club. He says I played some part in that. I don’t believe him. I was there in Ayiti the day it was liberated. I was the third volunteer to enlist to come here to fight and shed the blood of our enemies. I had this blood on my hands before and after the rising. Revenge is not the right word. Revenge is what you two do to each other every round, epoch, whatever. Revenge is his letters and your mind games. Revenge is a low burning flame. I don’t take the salt like you two do. I live with what happened to Krissy every single moment of my life.”

“She left you long before the revolt did she not?”

“Aye. The slavers took her sometime during the anarchic battles for Strong Island. I can only hope that if taken has she killed herself. I can only pray she isn’t at some comfort camp near the Eurasian Front.”

“So revenge isn’t why you enlisted? It’s redemption then like Adon? Duty to act? You’re a noble a zealot?”

“Who ya gonna shoot with that there burner Yeli Kay?” he says changing the subject.

“Myself if captured. I have no taste for double anal.”

“Not that I in any way doubt your capacity for self-destruction matches that of my dear tovarish, but I must now ask. What did you really come to speak to me of? You’re the only blonde blan bombshell in this heart of darkness, the lover of Adon and a physician of wild renown throughout the liberated communes. If you wanted a fucking shooter, there isn’t a person who’d deny you anything around here.”

“You’re not a drunk rabbit after all.”

“How now Dvotchka?” he says slamming his fist on the table.

“Vendetta. I’m here to kill one man whose death means more to me than the liberation of this entire pathetic species. Do you think when I kiss him, stroke him; let him cum inside me night after night that I can forgive what he once did? Even a whore has honor. Has motive for being a whore.”

“He knows not what he did. And he did it in another life.”

“And only because of that is he still alive.”

“So you lie beside one you truly hate? To what end does he serve?”

“He is the only one that can get me close enough to put my blade into Kahn.”

Nikholai Trikhovitch allows himself a rare smile.

“I know you love him as a brother. So I will tell you what I plot to do. So you will help me for his sake.”

“Will I now?”

“For Krissy’s sake too. If you cannot find her or the men that took her away, know that Kahn is guilty of the crimes that separate you so horrifically from your estranged love. Know that helping me kill him will avenge her too.”

“I don’t see how. The world is wide and filed with slavers, violators and rapists it seems. That is why we are never able to switch tactics. We’re always doing bloody damage control. Perpetuating the violence we fight I increasingly have grown to believe.”

“Jacmel will fall. And before it does you will have the opportunity to get me to Port Au Prince before this revolution swallows the whole land and makes my quarry hard to find and there by murder.”

“Jacmel will not fall, because we will hold it securely until the convoy breaks through.”

“So you won’t help me cross the lines and strike at Kahn?”

“Not for your sake, not for his, and certainly not for Krissy’s. You are a candidate not a murderer. You will wait to have your revenge along with everyone else here.”

“HE WILL SLIP AWAY! He always does!”

“Not this time.”

“What makes you so sure of that?!”

“All I know is that by this time next year I will be on beach in the Caribbean. The war may not be over, but I will have a bottle of Baboncourt and a sexy Caribe by my side, and I will certainly know that we liberated not one, but two nations, two hopeless places. And I am sure, like I am sure that I like rum and also fucking, that as I relax on that beach I will hear the noise of your bickering and his.”

“So sure are you of this?”

“As sure as I know that I can’t get you and I alive anywhere near Port Au Prince to strike against that man, not until the re-supply, not until we arrive at the gates of Port Au Prince with seven full armies and spill an ocean of our blood to end the battles here for good.”

“Tell him not what I’m planning.”

“I’m sure he’d help you. Don’t become a killer like the rest of us.”

“Have you ever questioned that we are not serving the same Lwa?”

“And that’s why some of us are candidates and the rest of us are comrades. We serve our human loyalties before we serve your old gods.”

“Don’t tell him I plan to slip away.”

“If you slip away, I will chase you and I will return you to him in cuffs.”

“He’d probably find that arousing.”

“Certainly more arousing than news of your gang rape and capture.”

“Touché.”

 

They tear into each other with passionate glee and fuck like animals on the carpets of the Sand

Gypsy tent, she takes him again and again and again. Wild eyed, mad passionate fuck is what they make, he takes her everywhere she’ll let him and she lets him put it everywhere. They have hard Arab fucking, wild passionate Africa tent sex. All the killing, all the war, his dead friends and brothers, his shattered mind, his lost ideals translated into ravenous passion. She is the water in the warzone and he drinks deeply.

 

More!?

 

“I love you even if you can no longer love yourself,” is the last thing she whispers to him slipping out of white satin and into a dark blue multiform.

 

In the morning the Human Rights Commission tries to convince her to fly out toward Cuba or at least the DMZ and soon by dawn the next day, the initial shelling of Jacmel began again in earnest. She refused of course to evacuate. She got ready to storm the City alongside the Hadar and FANMI LAVALAS men.

Adon is not the same without her by his side, but those that have come to know him before and during the war doubt he can ever be whole again until his zeal is exhausted and in some Zion, some world to come he’s laid to rest.

It has taken all the energies he can muster to convince her to leave of the front lines as they prepare to storm the heavily fortified Jacmel lines. He had only nearly succeeded with a deal. If she agreed to wait in Mirebalais until the assault he will promise that this will be the last war.

Yelizaveta contemplated traveling south into the DMZ but knowing she may have been lied to eventually refuses.

“How many times into this escapade have I risked exactly what you risked? Don’t make me suffer the side lines while you and the men move in for the final kill. If you are to die and I am to live a relic of your protectionism, how could I go on?”

“It was of course a test which you’ve passed time and time again.”

“I’m not like other girls. I don’t need your tests.”

“You’re not like other girls, but everyone needs tests.”

Yelizaveta strikes him with the back of her hand.

“What’s wrong with you! How far do I have to go to show you that you are loved by a living breathing person?! Can’t you be content with that! Can’t you act like a human being and not a fucking slave to your own zealotry? How far does this all have to go!”

He stares at her enraged. Wasn’t the first or last time she’d struck at him.

“That’s what you loved in me Yeli isn’t it?”

“That’s not true at all. I love you as a man, a good man taking on always too much and going too far, but still a good man. But you have to stop after this. How many more friends will you have to bury before you get to this Zion in your head.”

“As many as I have to.”

“Including me?”

“I told you to travel south didn’t I? I want nothing to befall just one hair on your golden head. But I can’t change my stripes to the tune of your harp and fiddle; I cannot.”

“You’d have me flee south to save me from your martyrdom. I followed you to Israel. I followed you to the Port-Au-Prince. I’ve stuck by you through the hospitals, though the terrorism charges, when my own mother disowning me. After all that you have the gall to send me south for my alleged safety?!”

“Fair enough. Don’t go anywhere.”

“Don’t be indecisive. It makes me love you less.”

“Know that I live a life of night my dear Ms. Kay, know that as long as the night persists there can be no quarter given, no time to sleep as we Germinal on that the den full of predators.”

“All this time we’ve tried to love each other is just part of game then? You never had any intention of calling it quits?!”

“I think we all have our orders do we not.”

“I haven’t been under contract since I followed you out the jump of that plane.”

“Follow me only as far as you need to.”

“I’ll follow you only as far as the gates of Port Au Prince. If you leave me there, know I may wait for you until the sky falls down, or I may soon move on, but it was you who lost your chance to be a man when you put me in that position.”

Adon looks at her in the flickering candle light. Her golden eyes tell him stories he’d like to believe are real.

“I for one know quite well why the road stops for you in Port Au Prince. Don’t play me for a fool,” he says.

“The round will be ours, but I have an itch that even you cannot scratch.”

“I can’t live without you. Please, never leave my side again.”

 

She kisses him with a gentle passion, on his forehead and then on his lips.

 

“I will love you forever, no matter what you think I’ve done. Or what you do to me,” he tells her, “I am dedicated to you completely. As I promised your father.”

 

“My father is a very, very sick man.”

 

 

 

 

The sun sets behind towering Pic La Selle and distant border-wastelands with Chad.

The lights go out and the war resumes.

Commanders O’Domhnaill, O’Sulivan, Allamby Goldbar, Jerome and twenty thousand lightly armed rebels in blue, grey and civilian dress with a pistol gun for every fifty of them, a rifle for every hundred follow narrow mountain roads on foot, horse, donkey and camel toward the town of Menawashei? No one knew if that was its actual name, the NGO had invented it.

 

Where the Selassie Division divides at the crossroads after capturing the town without much enemy resistance. Most of the men are armed with daggers, swords, kitchen knives and sharpened wooden spears. There are no vehicles on hand to participate in the coordinated attacks on Nyala City to the South and Goniaves to the North.

Marmelade is a hot bed of rebel sympathizers and should be easy to take. Goniaves is swarming with government collaborators, former Maccoute, and Han technicians. It is also the primary crude pumping depot of the region.

They plan to burn it to the ground for the second time after bleeding the 4th Army there for seventy two hours first.

Anything that rolls and can carry cargo is heading toward Jacmel to storm the enemy defenses along the White Nile and then drive over the border to participate in the greatest arms smuggling run the world will ever know.

At 1845 ten thousand Ayiti Defense Force fighters from the Selassie Brigade ALEF led by General Allamby attack Goniaves with Katusha rockets and morters. Another ten thousand fighters from the BET Brigade lead by Jerome Marcus attack Cap Ayitian from the South.

At 1900 after passing through the rebel controlled villages of Dibbis and Kas; 15,000 lightly armed JEM fighters attack Cap Ayitian from the West in the second prong of the assault. The garrisons of the FAd’H are quickly overrun.

By 2300 Cap Ayitian is completely in rebel hands with no massacres having occurred or scalping. This time men that surrender are hand-cuffed and taken as POWs, not slaughtered.

Goniaves for the second time this year is heavily shelled and in again in flames.

There is at least nine Companies of heavily armed Ayitian Military regulars and Han People’s Army handlers operating Pegasus anti-infantry guns.

News of the fall of Le Cap invigorates the fighters under the command of recently promoted General Allamby. He is told to expect reinforcements from JEM and B Brigade in under an hour heading North in captured armored personnel carriers and civilian pick-up trucks.

Ghost fighters in 9 person units line the ridges to the North, East and South of Goniaves. Katusha rocket batteries on portable launch silos are fired down at the city in the hundreds, then the men shift before the Han can return more accurate fire.

The objective is to lure the Ayitian 4th Expeditionary Army away from its base in El Obeid prior to the FANMI LAVALAS, BC, RFL and Hadar Column raid on Jacmel.

Scouts have radioed that the 4th Army is now mobile heading our way. Satellite images collected and transmitted to the Rebel Commands in Juba City and Pic La Selle reveal that the 4thArmy will arrive to secure Mirogane no sooner than 0300. Giving General Marcus and the JEM ample time to support the attack.

The objective is to fight in the city for as long as possible, doing maximum damage then fall back hold the mountain roads pinning down the 4th Army down in the highlands outside Goniaves and if necessary Cap Ayitian.

Shortly after midnight the FANMI LAVALAS and Hadar seize Jacmel opening the highway over the border. Wearing grey cloaks thousands of rebels surprise and quickly overwhelm the army regulars. Many of the enemy surrender without a fight and are placed in the Jacmel stadium and the Central Bus Station under guard.

At 0100, with confirmation that the 4th Army is heading West toward Mirogane, the massive convoy of seven hundred vehicles begins to make their way toward the Red Sea to load up in Port Berbera, refuel and turn around as quickly as humanly possible. General Salva leaves Commanders Adon and Trikhovitch along with 502 hardened Hadar fighters, 10,000 FANMI LAVALAS fighters, and 45,000 poorly armed CDF irregulars to hold Jacmel for at least the next 72 hours.

Commanders Entwissle, Solomon and Sevastra, and 64 of the best Hadar fighters supporting 2,000 FANMI LAVALAS regulars are to secure the convoy.

 

By 0245 they have crossed the border into DR.

 

 

3 am in Cap Ayitian:

The City is deathly quiet and the power station has been occupied and the juice turned off. The population is very sympathetic but whispers fly everywhere that the 4th Army will massacre everyone here once they are done with the rebels fighting fiercely in Goniaves.

Everyone gathers around radios turned low or TV sets with satellite access to watch Al Jazeera’s front line coverage of the Goniaves inferno. Many in the population are part-Ayitian or part-Dinka from all the years of sexual violence. Even the Arabized-Noire population has been brutalized by the secret police, the Maccoute and the military.

A skeleton crew has been left to hold Le Cap while the bulk of the fighters travelled North in captured vehicles. Father O’ Sullivan has been left in charge of Le Cap with only 5,000 men, only thirty-six survivors of the St. Patrick’s Battalion.

 

There are whispers among the men to massacre the hundreds of Ayitian soldiers being held in the Agricultural Ministry. Commander Father O’Sulivan triples the guard detail around them.

 

There are no more massacres to occur. This is a command order from the very, very top. All the way up!

 

 

4am in Goniaves:

The night is ablaze. General Allamby orders wave after wave of fighters to storm Goniaves’s defenses. Black plumes roll like cloudy towers into the stars. Helicopter gun ship from the 4th Army strafe the outlying districts held by the Selassie Brigade Alpha. Missiles are flung without any sense of aim into the heart of the city.

Screams of the dead and dying are heard everywhere. Sometime around 04:30 with the arrival of the 4th Army at the Eastern outskirts, Commander O’Domhnaill orders a team of sappers to demolish the Ministry of Oil, the primary refinery, the pumping station, and thirty other installations.

A free fire zone has been declared throughout Gonaives. Any male of military age can be shot without question. But everyone remembers the last time. Remembers the Massacres, remembers the Battle for Mershing and the five camps.

 

RAT TATATA. BLAM BLAM, atrocity. The onimonpia of war.

 

With fires burning throughout the west of the city, with rebel troops digging in throughout the districts they’ve captured. The 4th Expeditionary mechanized infantry brigade is ambushed near the city center.

 

General Obenson Etienne orders his commanders to, “Give them a third Grozny[117].” Kill everyone with pale skin.

 

 

 

4:35 am in Jacmel:

Reports reach Jacmel via the sat-coms that Gonaives has erupted in block to block urban warfare and Nyala has been captured without much of a fight. Solomon says that the convoy is making excellent time and near the border with Somaliland.

 

There are 2,082 Ayitian Military prisoners held in the Jacmel Stadium and another 423 in the Central Bus Station.

 

They had taken the city rather quickly aided by sympathetic locals who poisoned the water supply plant used by the enemy troops. Most of the city was taken intact and the sick and puking prisoners were all now concentrated in two locations.

 

General Salva and Commander Trikhovitch have been arguing what to do with them for about an hour. They are only planning to hold Jacmel until the return of the convoy much to the chagrin of the locals. Salva argues that leaving alive this many prisoners will be a seriously liability.

 

“And our enemy Jim al-Talleyrand has so far not taken many prisoners either,” he states.

 

“In the beginning of the war, when our numbers were few will killed indiscriminately and murderously because we thought that would terrify our enemy and break their resolve to fight. What our media specialists told us was that while the word was highly sympathetic of our cause, they were appalled by all our blood thirsty carnage.”

 

“I don’t answer to the whole wide world. Fuck the stupid UN and its evil occupation of my country. I answer only to Ayiti,” says Salva.

 

 

5:45 am in Gonaives:

 

Flame and death. Ever small a burning body wrapped in tires to burn it alive. That’s what was happening to the Argentine soldiers. No differentiation of innocent and guilty, civilian or combatant. The City burns and the black gold jets burst from the earth like dragon breath and explode into the night. Gun fire is unceasing. The rebel advance is turned with Han Tanks, this time with Han People’s Army operators. Hugh O’Domhnaill refuses to order the retreat. General Allamby has promised Rebel Command that they will keep the 4th Army occupied. They must hold out until the morning, and not retreat until the trucks reach Jacmel laden with arms.

 

The fighting goes on. Cat and mouse, street to street, burning building after building.

 

 

5:50 am in Jacmel:

 

The dawn is about to break. Adon fought with him about it until the end. Trikhovitch threw down his rifle and yelled they were no better than their enemy. General Salva is insistent that all the Ayitian military prisoners be executed.

 

“Look what these animals did? The 600,000 murdered before we invaded. The 80,000 since?! Millions more driven into exile their homes looted and burned. It’s an eye for an eye brother,” General Salva explains.

 

“An eye for eye?” AN EYE FOR AN EYE! We killed the Maccoute because they were rapist brigands. These men are prisoners of war! If we butcher them, if we slit their throats while they sit blind folded and tied on their knees we are no better than Al-Talleyrand  himself!” yells Trikhovitch.

 

“I don’t condone it either,” says Adon but then, “but I am not a Ayitian. A Dominikani or an Arab. And we didn’t come here to lead we came to tip the point.”

 

“Of course we came here to lead! WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT! WE HAVE SACRIFICED EVERYTHING FOR THESE PEOPLE. I WILL NOT PARTAKE IN ANOTHER NEEDLESS SLAUGHTER HOUSE!”

 

Nikolai Trikhovitch throws his dagger on the ground and storms out of the command center. The Ayitian logistics staff doesn’t understand Americano, but they know exactly what the fight was about. General Salva, who never yells or loses his temper gives an order in Dinka.

 

He speeds through the narrow street toward the General Hospital. He knows that Dr. Kay is the only person who can influence the sometimes rash and violence nature of General Salva. Surely she can persuade Adon.

 

He is informed by the FANMI LAVALAS and PIH-ZL medical team at the four story hospital that Dr. Kay has not been seen for any hour. He is handed a letter by one of her orderlies.

It’s in Hebrew so he can’t read it. But he knows where she’s heading.

Before he departs he orders the Hadar men guarding the prisoners to turn their guns on anyone, including Adon who orders the killing of the 423 POWs held in the Central Bus Station by the Nile River.

 

Nicolai in a bloody, bloody rage jumps in his jeep and takes off onto the north road. Sentries tell him she left by motorcycle an hour before.

 

“Why the hell didn’t you stop her,” he yells in Ayitian Creole.

 

“She is the Pale Commander’s woman she can do as she wishes, as he has always said.”

 

Idiots. They don’t care how many of us blan die for them, thinks Trickovitch.

 

 

 

0600 in Mirogane.

 

General Magnus Allamby’s parents were born on Tobacco Island and then moved to Staten Island just south of the Isle of Man before he was born. He remembers the Noire Ghetto at the North of the Island and clearly remembers his Iytai and Fenian neighbors burning and looting the district during the Great Disorder.  Now Staten Island is a listening post and military garrison for the U.A.S.. And he’ll probably never see his parents, if they are alive, and his home if it wasn’t destroyed ever again.

 

Magnus Allamby doesn’t have what you might call “beliefs”. The war is not a war of ideas or dreams or promises. His legacy is entwined with that of the club. He will capture Mirogane not because of the blueprint, but because it expedites the needs of the Otriad. He is the cousin of

 

Mickhi Dbrisk and was there the day they put the machine in motion, but blood is always, always thicker than ideas.

 

The sun begins to rise and through the falling ash and grim fog of war the rebels still control more than half the bombed out, burned down city. The Han military handlers and half of Ayitian 4th Army have retreated to the eastern city limits and dug in.

 

The other half of the 4th Army is dead.

 

Battling all night in the allies and low rise urban trenches with small arms and gasoline bombs, 44,000 rebel fighters are dug in and waiting for the orders to storm the enemy lines.

 

 

At 0700 am an hour west of Port Berbera Commander Maya Solomon watches the endless metal snake wind its way through the rugged mountains short range aircraft on flatbed trucks, armored omnibuses and 4,000 camels laden with sacs to move rockets, ammunition, long guns, small arms and all the rest of the inventory needed to wage this war. More than 800 assorted vehicles are being utilized in the second largest, irregular military resupply in the 21st century.

Mickhi Dbrisk and the other fourteen escaped prisoners are with her and also General Avinadav DeBuitléir who jokingly suggests that in his absence General Salva will likely launch genocide of his own.

They are greeted at the water front by the Defense Minister of Ethiopia, the President of Somaliland, and Ysiad Ferraris himself. A vast welcome center has been set up by the loading docks. A buffet has been set up and meals packed for rebel drivers. Showers, coffee, and the full works courtesy of Polidoro Industries. Each vehicle had two drivers on it, one for each leg. They will be loaded back up to the hilt with arms and routed right back the way they came.

“I’d say this is as logistically sound as we can get it,” says Solomon.

“Well your boys have basically burned Goniaves to the ground to capture it. Oil exportation completely halted. They continue to hold Jacmel and Nyala without any opposition. And the 4th Army is dug in outside of Goniaves with only half it men alive, looking like they’re ready to fall back to Al Umayyad. That’s what the reports and the satellites are now confirming,” says the Ethiopian Defense Minister, an old friend of Maya Solomon.

“Massacres anywhere?” asks General DeBuitléir embracing the President of Somaliland, an old friend and ally.

“None so far,” says Solomon.

“Smashing,” says the Defense Minister of Ethiopia, “so hopefully we’ll all be back where we’re supposed to be by this time tomorrow.

It’s been a happy past three months for Ethiopian and Somaliland infrastructure. As a part of the ongoing negotiations between DeBuitléir & Dbrisk and the governments of Somaliland and Ethiopia, over two thousand miles of freshly paved road was laid from the border with Ayiti to the sea in contract with Ferraris International, aid for in an oil-for-access and development pact signed by Ethiopia and the internationally unrecognized micro-nations of South Ayiti, Somaliland, and Puntland.

Over breakfast, as vehicles load up at the Port up one after another like a conveyer belt of circulating mechanized death, the President of Ethiopian, the Defense Minister of Somaliland, along with General DeBuitléir and Commanders Solomon and Dbrisk discuss just how much oil lies under the Ayitian State and Ayiti Southland. They discuss just how many miles of paved road, how many modern hospitals and universities that black gold can buy in all three of these nations, ranked lately in the bottom billion poorest nations on earth.

 

“With the completion tomorrow night of Operation Harbor Road, I would suspect that not only will the rebel alliance be in control of 2/3 of Ayiti, but you will be well armed enough to hold onto it for some time” says Ysiad, “if the right deals can be negotiated there is lot of good this nasty war can bring to the people in all three of your countries. And I know that both myself and my business partner Vincent Polidoro would like to invest in the infrastructure to turn your newly liberated reserves into an investment in your people’s future.”

As talk of education, medicine and infrastructure goes on so does the endless convoy of trucks, buses, ambulances and camels sending the tools for more killing back to Ayiti.

 

 

Around 10 am the ruins of Gonaives are all in rebel hands and the murder of the prisoners begins in Jacmel. News that what’s left of the 4th Army is being re-routed to attack the returning convoy under orders from President Jim al-Talleyrand. Informed by Chinese Military intelligence that a vast and alarming arsenal is being moved into Southern Ayiti all available troops not guarding Port Au Prince have been sent south.

The Ayitian Air force is on standby. An Israeli diplomatic cable has been sent to the Chinese Embassy stating that if that if the Ayitian Air Force is deployed against vehicles traveling through the territory of its ally DR or Trinidad, the Cuban IAF will have no choice by but to intervene.

 

The People’s Republic of China politely informs Israel and Cuba that if it so much as flies a cargo plane south or east of the Sinai Peninsula:

 

“We will fire atomic weapons at all your major cities, with little regard for the consequences. What’s Chinese for wipe out all Cubans and Jews with just three missiles? Confucian story time.”

 

In the meantime the head of the convoy had just crossed back into Ethiopia.

There are no Ayitian Military prisoners left alive in the Jacmel Stadium and still 423 in the Central Bus Station due to the insistence of Adon and Sevastra. Adon is informed just a little after ten am that Yelizaveta has deserted the hospital and headed north on a motor cycle with Trikhovitch pursuing her.

 

“What do you want done about it,” asks Scott Sevastra.

 

“We will hold the city until the convoy returns. Either Nikh will find her or they will both be captured, but our job is to hold this road open and that is what we will continue to do.”

 

If the man was blinded by love, it was he who put his own eyes out to not see it before him at moments just like this.

 

 

It’s now 1400. The convoy is now just south of Addis Abba with helicopter gunship escorts from the Ethiopian army. Nyala City is being fortified with the aid of its population. Over 60,000 rebel fighters on foot scorching the earth and oil fields behind them are marching on the city of Al Ubayyid.

 

Oil is no longer flowing out of Ayiti. Over the course of the evening hundreds of Han technicians and soldiers posing as engineers were killed in the mêlée street battles in Mirogane, now a bombed out, scorched, leveled and looted ghost town. The Han People’s Republic has moved their 7th Fleet into the Indian Ocean off the coast of Djibouti.

 

The Israeli Air Force is on red alert. The convoy rolls on, music blaring through the mountains. All are aware that the Han supported Ayitian air force has the capability of obliterating them on the mountain roads.

 

Without much effort the JEM Brigades and the Halle Selassie Division take the towns of Hinche, then St. Marc, Gros Morne, Wad Banda and then before 1500 En Nahud and Mole St. Nicolas. This brings most of the North and Centre under rebel control as well as all the countries oil under rebel control.

 

Emma Maya Sorieya Solomon is looking over some satellite maps on her laptop as the armored ambulance being driven by Mickhi Dbrisk grinds along near the front of the convoy. The mountain roads wind, and although recently paved just for this undertaking, have perilous guard rails leaving all staring into the deep ravines below.

The Cuban helicopter gunships fly overhead, but will not provide any true protection from the several squadrons of Ayitian MINUSTAH bombers about to take off from Sennar Airbase to obliterate them. She is also aware that a reinforced 4th Expeditionary Army is moving south from Kosti toward Jacmel.

 

“If there are any gods you gain comfort in praying to Captain Dbrisk, now would be an excellent time to remind them of your piousness and the righteousness of our cause,” says Maya Solomon. Her brown hair blows in the wind.

 

 

NSG

  1. A Good Friday to you all in Babylon. Struggle people, struggle on.
  2. I say to you this Friday I am a woman who has been bred for struggle. When our leaders emerge are you ready to struggle with me?
  3. The gate and messenger, the long lost brother and sister.
  4. The House of Yitzhak is the House of David, of Yeshua, and Baha-ullah. The House of Ishmael is the House of Muhammed, and the house el Bab.
  5. A son from the house of Yitzhak has been born within its gates.
  6. A daughter from the house of Ishmael has brought to this city.
  7. It will soon be time for our people to arise and fight.
  8. All tribes await her by the tree of Life in Brooklyn. So long have our kind been crushed under the bloody iron heel of government and religion.
  9. The Mahdi need not expel, nor slay her enemies. The Mahdi wins her wars first with reason and second because she is the bringer of unity.
  10. The Army of the Mahdi will march from the City of Many, Many Lights, the Oasis of the Apple; 12 million strong.
  11. But whereas Muhammad and his Otriad over time was pitted against his original three protectors, and was forced to slay and expel each.
  12. Far Far more.
  13. Our Mahdi will find more opinions and more challengers and more spectacles of debate in the Apple than Muhammad had at Medina.
  14. And if the Islam of Muhammad was a product of Hebrew and Christian questioning and influence (as surely it was).
  15. Yet this daughter of the house of Ishmael will correct our four thousand years of wandering in darkness.
  16. I will tell you that the coming of the Mahdi will cause calamity.
  17. I will tell you that the Mahdi will be challenged first by her own people then the world at large.
  18. United we are stronger, more voices and more opinions on what is God’s word and what is the voice of man.
  19. And the man called Jesus, Yeshua ben Yosef; what know you of his 30 years in Mitzraiim (Egypt)? What can you tell me of El Amin?
  20. Moses was but one man of a vast tribal confederation in the Wilderness of Sinai to whom would argue with him on his revelation?
  21. Will weave and wind from those of the 270 ethnic groups at our Oasis of the Apple. Just imagine such a thing.
  22. So as a man such as Muhammad took refuge from persecution in an oasis with two different religious groups imagine what our coming Madhi must face.
  23. She would say that God needs numerous voices, numerous mediums numerous narrators. Yet still is one.
  24. And the night as it dissipates; And the dawn as it breathes away the darkness.
  25. (Then) shall each soul know what it put forward; So verily I call to witness the planets, that recede; Go straight, or hide.

 

As Gonaives smolders and General Allamby presses the attack toward Fort Al Umayyad, as the convoy passes the “red line” the Han have declared will be the bench mark for air strikes, as the Persians sink derelict vessels and mine the narrow Straights of Tiran cutting off the spigot on a quarter of the world’s oil; as Israeli fighter jets are readied across country, as two U.A.S. carriers sail toward Port Ayiti while a Han Vessel waits 18 miles offshores; as President Obama and

 

Chairman Hu Jintao haggle in Mandarin about hegemony, as Father Timothy O’Sulivan argues with is men about killing the prisoners in pacified Cap City; and as Maya and Mickhi continue to watch the skies above the convoy:

 

Nikh speeds off to toward death. He follows the only road north knowing if he doesn’t catch her she’ll run right into the enemy lines. Maybe that’s what she wants. The sun rises and the heat gets real and he never finds her. He finds the enemy first.

Nikholai Trikhovitch meets a gruesome end along with thousands of others that vicious afternoon. His jeep speeding north encounters the entirety of the 4th Army advancing its lines just outside of Kodak.

He is pulled from his vehicle, tortured, mutilated and hung upside down from a poplar tree.

And he awakes as if still dreaming, yearning if for a moment to break away from something intangible as if for a moment to cling to precious cognizance of life before all this. And the dew of dust and ash he found had settled upon him. In the twilight he realized how far he’d come from what was once his home but also what was once his conception of himself. And the less he slept, the less he tried to escape or dream away his life the more he focused his will and cunning on the terrible task at hand. And he made himself a black machine, a forge of some arcane old notion of death and heroism. Like a Soviet novel he unwound himself and looked deeply upon intention. And as the nights were made less, left to his own notions of what was fate to be made he drew inspiration from a single dark fact. That he had been asleep too long already, that it was in fact death’s cousin, and the more he slept the more tired he grew as death was made a bed fellow.

And he missed the thought of her. His other distraction from sleep. His lost lady love Krissy. A woman he’d divorced years ago and was the only thing tying him to the word of man anyway.

Once his lady had told him that when the night became us he was found more alive, more alert, more ready as if the daylight exposed something in him he did not wish to see. As if oblivious to basic laws of nature, the moon was his balm and he basked in it.

But disgusted by the war he’d driven far north into the enemy hands and their advancing lines. Nikholai had found many others like him, those cheating death hour by hour, grappling with the dawn as if locked in mortal struggle with the inevitable reaper being kept at bay.

Nikholai awakened now with a light yawn from something some called sleep with a twitch and shudder.

He was alone under a sea of oil black azure illuminated by a blood red moon and each star itself like a glimmering candle for a murdered foe or fallen friend. Into the heart of darkness they had thrust themselves uninvited by man or nation, or maybe invited by those same whispers that drew him to distrust sleep.

 

His trusty barking sword, his lance of wood and iron and the death it threw lay abandoned in Jacmel. His pistol he’d given the girl and his long dagger tossed. Even his second dagger he threw out long the road as the dawn broke. He only wished to be again nestled in the arms of his last lover who he hoped was always watching him. There was no god to a man like Nicolai Trikhovitch. Only really comforting were the face of his lady, the moon and also the inevitable face of death.  Who shortly before noon he was staring at both.

 

And the faces of dead friends whom he had mounds of hope and trenches of faith he’d never see again.  Nikholai stumbled into dreaming-hood, he had fought off sleep, and hard enough though he’d tried with is his body and forced his mind into retreat.

 

If the battery of human life was a rough a hundred years; then the bottle and the Noblisse would steal at last twenty, his love of wakeness compensating maybe five years more of waking life, his friendship with Mr. Adon would make all these calculations of longevity arbitrary.

Nikholai Trikhovitch, called the Pale Officer, called the Golem, called pookie, called Nikh, called a lover, called a dear friend. Nikh was about to wake up dead, a month before his 29th year.

 

He had driven too far from the false safety of Jacmel and the safety of the sentries, he’d left himself exposed. He found himself driven off the road and completely surrounded. He was trying to prevent the lover and comrade of Adon from doing something very, very stupid. He had failed.

 

He awoke briefly from his beating to the butt of a rifle striking his face. A bag pulled over his head, and then true, true sleep.

It was just like death.

 

“Do yer fuckin’ worst,” were the last words of Nikholai Trikhovitch. And they did. As is done in war time to a pale enemy in a black place. Or a dark enemy by a pale officer. With a drone you see nothing. These men used their hands.

 

 

 

And everything else that afternoon was called history.

The Army of D R with over 100,000 Ayitian mujahedeen light infantry invades from Fort Aswan and advances with armor and mechanized infantry all the way south along the Massacre River to Croix des Bouquets.

 

Their motivation was the settling of a long border discrepancy with Ayiti and kicking an enemy while they are distracted, as well as ensuring that their deal with DeBuitléir and the Otriad is honored via their boots on the ground.

At 1600 what’s left of the Ayitian Air force takes off from the Sennar and Singa Air bases. Most of the pilots are Han nationals. Their objective is to bomb the convoy into the ground. At 1604 the Israeli air force takes off from bases in Ethiopia to engage them in the skies above the Choke Mountains.

Chinese Air craft Carriers are eighteen miles from Port Ayiti. Then the Persians announce they will permanently close the straights of Tiran to oil shipping and cut off supplying East Asia and Eurasian companies until Han interference in Ayiti ends.

The United American States warns the Han People’s Republic that if they even think about attacking U.A.S. allies Israel, Egypt, or neutral Ethiopia they run the risk of total war.

The red phone that directly links the U.A.S. Capital in Chicago with the People’s Republic Capital in Beijing goes off.

 

“Well of course it’s about the fucking oil,” says President for Life Trump in a press conference at 1420 to the nation the media no reporting extensively on the quickly escalating conflict.

 

The Cuban Air force smashes the Ayitian Air force in the skies above Mt. Gonder, Mt. Gore and above Hannibal Highway 2. As the rebel convoy glances at the flames, fireworks and fury in the sky above they mostly keep their eyes on the road home to Bor.

 

Emma recalled Sebastian’s favorite threat, “you harm one hair on her head and I’ll change the color of the skies above our city!”

 

Around 1530 the rebel army nears Fort Al Ubayyid but stops outside it twelve miles to the west in the made up NGO town of Bethel. At 1600 the Battle for Jacmel begins as the 4th MINUSTAH Expeditionary Army advances on the Northern fortifications erected by the Hadar and FANMI LAVALAS fighters.

 

The whole world has their eyes or their hash tags on the war. #1804

 

 

 

 

The People’s Television press release on YouTube racks up 100,000,000 + hits in the first five minutes quickly going viral three minutes in. The website used by the club to host the live streams apparently has over two million viewers watching by the time the air skirmishes began.

 

 

“This is Nick Mapfre a People’s Television Correspondent reporting live from the Jacmel defensive lines. As many of you know from watching the live streams we are currently engaged in a risky three front offensive and resupply across the border with DR.”

 

 

Capois, Adon, Sevastra and General Salva savagely hold the city of Jacmel against the 4th Army. The fighting is some of the bloodiest in the whole war. Dug in all over town fighting their enemy outnumbered 5 to 1, the rebels bleed the 4th Army; lure them into the narrow alley ways. Set them on fire with Molotov cocktails and booby traps and blades. By the time the convoy can be seen from the sentry towers, after almost all ammunition has been exhausted and bodies litter every street in the city, the Nile red with the blood of martyrs, the 4th Army is in shambles and retreats.

The convoy shores up the Jacmel defenses. The beleaguered survivors embrace their comrades as hundreds of vehicles head south and south west to shore up the tremendous gains of Operation Harbor Road.

Three major cities and three dozen towns are in in rebel hands. The Ayitian Air Force is finished. Egypt’s Army has invades the North and Ethiopia’s Senate is voting to invade from the East. U.A.S. has forced the Han to back down. Iran has sealed the Straights and cut the world off from a quarter of its needed oil. And re-supply has occurred.

 

But when Mickhi Dbrisk sees the face of his friend Adon he knows before he is told.

 

“Zamni Cherie, what foolish things has she done to you now?” asks Solomon.

“Give me forty of your best men, we’re heading north,” says Mickhi Dbrisk.

 

He knows what they’ll find.

 

“A waste, a silly waste,” says Solomon.

“At least wait for night fall.”

 

That very evening with little sleep in any of them, Solomon, Dbrisk and Adon lead a reconnaissance team heading up river toward Kodak. Solomon knows what they will find but says little.

Sometime around the dawn they leave the river boats behind and trek to the place where Maya has located Trikhovitch via a tracker she once put inside him.

Sebastian finds his best friend in the world hanging disemboweled from a hook, eyes put out, hands cut off, bayonet marks slashed about his body, hanging from a poplar tree, cold wet and dead.

 

“Cut him down and bury him,” commands Sebastian Adon.

 

In his pocket is a letter written in Russian. There is no sign of Dr. Kay. The letter has To S.A. written on the envelope. It says:

 

I’ve gone to Port Au Prince. Don’t be afraid for me. I do love you. I will make quick work of this. Stay calm and carry on.

 

It is signed Y.K. It says also:

 

 

            P.S. If you love me too you won’t forget to take your god damn salt.

 

 

 

At a press conference is being held at the Baha’i World Center on the Southside of Union Square in the Isle of Man. It is perhaps the best attended press conference focusing on a foreign rebel movement in the history of the City of New York since the Cuban revolutionary Fidel Castro spoke in Harlem almost a hundred years before. They might have had it at the UN except the Secretary General had spent the last year condemning the actions of the Breukland Otriad as a “vile terrorist cult hell bent on setting back development and relief efforts in Africa by 400 years.”

 

Lights flash and cameras roll. It is a starship spectacle. Mara Fitzduff in blue fatigues facilitates the interviews and presentations alongside Erza Pula and Paramedic Jasmine Howard.

 

At this press conference numerous rebel leaders including Avinadav DeBuitléir, General Obenson Etienne Mayardit, Mickhi Dbrisk, Djbriel Okonkwo, Hugh O’Domhnaill and Scott Sevastra address the free press via PTV sat-cam and paint a carbon copy of the situation on the ground in Ayiti. Testimonies from civilians are live streamed via the website and the elected representatives of Juba City, Bor, Nyala and Jacmel attest to the real developments on the ground. Schools, hospitals and agricultural cooperatives where once there were only missionaries, NGOS (10,800 of them) new oil wells, disease, cholera, repression and brothels.

 

The world gets truth this time. Sees the full magnitude of it all. Sees the heroes’ faces, hears the voice of a people on the eve of being free. About to rip asunder the limbs of the iron heel upon their neck. The media puts faces to rumors, puts people’s names to deed and legend.

Erza Pula, the famous human rights lawyer and attorney on call for the Breukland Bath and Rifle Club reads off a list of the executed Maccoute and Ayitian military leadership and for what heinous crimes they were cut down.

 

Of sixty-four primary targets only President al-Talleyrand is still alive.

 

Commander Maya Solomon via satellite holo-cast from Juba City says it well, “We’re just everyday people acting on a promise they once made to our grandparents. They once sat in ivory and iron towers and wrote down “rights”. So called “human rights” and dangled them in front of us for over one hundred years while kicking in the faces of our children. They told us that this was your nature. That without government and without religion you’d all be eating each other. And then they dined on you. What we have started in the land of Ayiti will soon wash upon your shores. What we did in Palmares took less than five years without much blood. But you didn’t pay enough attention. If you’re watching this from home, just tuning in: we’re just five minutes away from nation time again. There are no borders we are prepared to respect. It’s time you asked your governments about the human rights they took from you. We had a non-violent modal to attain universal human rights. And now we have violent one too. Those that aim to keep you from dreaming, know we possess the zeal to keep them from sleeping and bringing their oligarchies one by one to their knees.”

 

Erza Pula faces the camera with her pale beautiful face and hard thankless Albanian eyes.

“Let me tell you now viewers at home the issue at hand. Let me make this explicit so into your minds it will sink. I come from a place called Albania and you have heard of it, but tuned it out. Once a decade past a people called the Serbs came to my city Pristina and did unspeakable things to my family and my people. And you in the West did almost nothing until the deed was near a-fait-complete. In the last twenty years there has been more ethnic warfare, more vicious blood-letting, more human slavery, more human rights violations than in the totality of the last two hundred years. The marked difference between this holocaust and the last was its diversity. The pot my friend’s has finally boiled over and all of us are made black. And with your wireless access to the world-wide-web, your plethora of so-called free news agencies, your broadband, your satellite radios and your smart-smart fucking phones you are all accountable for what has happened. You are unable to look me in my beautiful eyes and tell me that you didn’t have knowledge of what was happening. And you did nothing. You watched more movies, and drank beer and made babies while more than three quarters of the human race wrenched and wrangled and found itself crushed under the iron heels of despots and tyrants. Mark my words. The rising has begun and there truly are only two sides. Our enemies are minuscule in number. Their greed and vile rapes rely on your complacency. My name is Ezra Pula. I am a human rights lawyer. I would have liked to see President al-Talleyrand and his ilk dragged before the Hague years ago like the brute Milosevic. But to be perfectly honest, and I think I speak for many Dinka, many Ayitian and many Ayitian when I say this: maybe we have to get ultra-violent so we can send you all a message in Eurasia, East Asia, Oceania and the U.A.S. If you don’t give us our human rights, our democratic process, and our total freedom: we’re going to burn your capitals to the ground one by one. And the rapists, the violators, the collaborators and those that sit on the fence as humanity is marshaled. Your numbers up.”

 

Just before midnight http://www.tricolor.com and http://www.peoplestelevision.org and http://www.wikiresitance.com begin uploading the Blueprint, “a digital manual for organizing, development, and general human rights based resistance.” Viewers at home can download to their smart phones and computers a veritable media compendium of lessons and tactics learned over the course of human resistance to tyranny.

 

In one single hour the servers hidden in Norway register that there have been 39,775,992 blueprints downloads. Ryder Haske and Nick Mapfre are on PTV-Secure-Skype. Ryder winks from the Isle of Man, Mapfre fires up a Cuban cigar from Juba City Media Operations HQ.

 

“Let the hungry games begin,” says Nicholas Mapfre.

 

 

 

For eight days the remnants of the Hadar Column retreat with the body of Nikholai Trikhovitch to the D R highlands near Gore where they bury their dead. They take with them in chains the 423 Ayitian prisoners they had held under protective custody in the Central Bus Station. On the road to DR Sebastian shaves his head and upon arrival in Gore fasts for the period of Nikh’s Shiva.

 

After a single year of fighting there are less than two hundred men left alive in the column.

They are a wretched and haggard lot, all seen desperate evil things men do in wartime.

For eight days their commander Sebastian Adon is utterly despondent. When no one is looking besides his God or sometimes Mickhi Dbrisk, he cries out his water and beats the red earth with his feeble fists.

 

He feels for the first time, that this place had taken from him more than he is ever able to give. Lt. Moishe Cohen, a few years his elder, by far the most outwardly devout man in the column when not making dirty jokes takes a census of the surviving fighters. They had taken quite a beating in Jacmel. For every four that marched in one had marched out.

 

Not a one among them wishes to return home. Surely they would no longer be recognized by their lovers, friends and families. They in fact surely can no longer recognize themselves.

Out of the 1,002 Yiddish and Soviet fighters who had crossed the border in Brumaire only 193 are left alive. Most had not had the luxury of either burial. Only luxury was a quick death which not all got. The makeshift cemetery in Gore has only thirteen bodies interred inside it. They sing a vodka soaked Kaddish for all their fallen brothers. It echoes through the valleys. Some agree to keep the Shabbos with Lt. Moishe Cohen leading some degree of the observant in prayer. To others religion is a dirty joke.

 

“Who better than Moishe to personify it in this yarn,” states Scott Sevastra.

Moishe tells a joke to the men.

“The queen of Sheba was going to marry and evening of her marriage King Solomon wrapped upon her chamber door, and she said I offer you my honor, King responded I honor your offer and then it was on her and off her all night.”

Fewer laugh than even usual at Lt. Moishe Cohen’s latest dirty joke.

As sun fall on Sabbath. Adon emerges from his tent accompanied by Watson Entwissle. They are carrying Machetes. Sevastra and Moishe Cohen attempt to stop them, but they are ready to play hatchet men again. To slaughter and sacrifice, sin against the God of mercy for the old gods who thirst for blood and play on men’s emotions. Some of the men eagerly follow them, their blades ready. Others lack the will.

Sevastra sits with Moishe by the fire they have just kindled, the Shabbas over.

“Nikh’s last orders before he got himself killed going after your woman were that these men would be spared,” says Sevastra.

Adon doesn’t miss a beat. Doesn’t think about it. Doesn’t care.

“There he goes again,” says Lt. Moishe Cohen.

 

The massacre of the 423 prisoners with hatchet and machete, musket and with dagger takes less than sixty minutes. Their grisly screams travel throughout the valley. The slaughter and gore and wet work of hatchets is made easier in that the prisoners are all bound.

The screams go on for sixty four minutes. Adon returns completely covered in blood.

 

They rest another day, burn the enemy dead in a shallow grave petrol pile and get back to their terrible work.

 

 

 

 

Writes Adon in a letter to Jessica Pilot, his highly fickle self-absorbed Jewish American princess literary agent, who is also a Mossadnik:

 

“A lot of saber rattling goes on in the days to come. And some saber swinging and heavy iron barking too. Bangladesh, Egypt, Ethiopia and the United American States all pledge forces for a UN Peace and Stabilization mission. An oil grab by any other name. The Selassie Liberation Legion and the remnants of St. Pats strike mercilessly at Al Ubayyid held by remnants of the 3rd and 6th Brigades of the FAd’H (the New Ayitian proxy MINUSTA Army). Retaking the city, they slay its Ayitian military occupants and dig in reinforced by every man the Ayitian-Emergency-Front has in the area.”

 

“The vast and Chinese and French modernized Armies of Ayiti are not worth much now. All the remaining hardcore loyalists are being called back to the twin cities,” states General Salva.

“They do still have vast warehouses of artillery shells and drones and they use them against us with brutal effect. Waves of drone airstrikes have reduced much of Al Umayyad, Nyala and Jacmel to ash, but the population soldiers on building new settlements below the ground of these rocket scarred battlements once called cities,” states General Allamby.

 

“We have evacuated most of the non-combatants back behind the SAM batteries which guard expanded South Ayiti,” writes DeBuitléir.

 

The survivors of the Hadar Column; Sevastra, Mapfre, Rathajazer, Entwissle, Cohen and the others merge with what’s left of the St. Patrick’s Battalion to form the Z.O.B.-Dublin Detachment to hold the lines at Jacmel. General Allamby along with the surviving fighters of Jerome Marcus, Okonkwo, Dbrisk and Tomas hold the lines from Al Umayyad.

DeBuitléir leader of the SEF has brought his full forces to Nyala and the Al Umayyad Front. General Salva leader of the FANMI LAVALAS has his armies ready Jacmel.

 

“The only thing President for the rest of his short life Jim Basher al-Talleyrand controls are the three cities of the Capital where he has dug in to hide,” says Adon to  DeBuitléir.

 

He pauses.

 

“Her letter tells me her intention is to murder Dominick Strauss Kahn before he can escape the impending siege of Port Au Prince. She tells me not to be scared for her well-being. That perhaps she can kill Al-Talleyrand and Kahn together and avoid the bloodbath of the final siege. She tells me she will consider forgiving me. A girl has to avenge her mother.”

 

“Apparently at the cost of your best friend,” DeBuitléir responds.

 

 

She jettisoned the motorbike not far North of Bor. She then took off her blue medical multiform and donned the black burka so readily imposed now in the Capital. She clipped Nikh’s pistol to her waste below the folds. Fluent now as she was in Arabic she then paid some fishermen to bring her up Nile until the outskirts of the city during the night. By this time the 4th Army has been decimated. By this time the rebels are unloading an arsenal in Juba, Nyala, and Bor. Then carefully, very carefully she arrives at the forward lines.

 

In flawless French with her hands in the hair she walks into the hands of the enemy and says,

 

“My name is Dr. Yelizaveta Kay, chief physician for the rebel armies. I am here to negotiate a ceasefire with President Talleyrand. I am armed.”

The Republican Guardsmen keep their rifles trained on her as she slowly prostrates herself and carefully lays the burner on the ground.

 

“I am acting as the direct emissary of Emma Solomon and Avinadav DeBuitléir. If a hair on my head is harmed not one of you will escape this country alive and my husband Commander Adon will change the color of the sky above the city to black grey and ash,” she says.

 

Through her dark grey burka the only thing her enemies can see are her eyes flash grey.

 

 

In the bunkers below Al Ubayyid all are pacing restlessly.

 

“The rumors are true brothers,” states Avinadav DeBuitléir, “At 0600 this morning four brigades of the U.A.S. Marine Corps have landed at Port Cap Ayiti and conquered the city without much resistance.”

“President Obama himself has ordered and I quote ‘an immediate end to the genocide in Ayiti via the multi-national occupation of the country’,” the soft spoken leader Commander Avinadav DeBuitléir informs the council.

 

“In coordinated maneuvers the D R forces have advanced forty kilometers north of the Capital and the D R armored corps has advanced forty kilometers to the east,” he states.

“The enemy is boxed in within the Twin cities and Port Au Prince down to 80,000 soldiers, two of the hardest divisions. At least a thousand tanks. Down to their loyalists and their profiteers. Everyday thousands flee the city. Talleyrand now has to keep his own people under siege. Nine million civilians locked down at the fork of the Massacre River.”

Sebastian embraces DeBuitléir. This is what they’ve spent nearly two years fighting to accomplish. They’ve finally dragged in the Eagle and the Bear. They finally have Talleyrand surrounded.

“The Maccoute are finished. Their scattered rank and file fear for their lives and have gone into hiding or fled the country. Suffice to say we are in the last stages of the national struggle, but we have not won yet,” explains General DeBuitléir.

“The Ayitian Military is preparing to mobilize a thousand Han tanks and half its remaining 80,000 troops against us. Despite our superior numbers these are the hardcore of the enemy forces. They are better armed and better trained and they are fighting with their backs to the edge of total oblivion. President al-Talleyrand has pledged to burn the entire country into the sands before the Americans can capture Port Au Prince,” announces Commander O’Domhnaill.

“In just two day’s time the last of serious forces will arrive at Rabak cross the White Nile into Kusti before they Germinal on the gates of Al Ubayyid,” states Commander DeBuitléir.

 

“We must destroy them in the dunes before they reach those gates,” he coldly states.

 

Children are playing in the green fields of the south land and pointing to the sky. Thousands of red and blue parachutes are descending carrying men and crates. These men possess medical training. They are also skilled in nation re-biding having to have had recently rebuild their own countries from scratch.

 

The people cheer, “It is the Cuban and Breuklyn Soviet reinforcements!”

 

A vast wave of foreign volunteers takes a real leap of faith out of a fleet of Sea Stallion Cargo planes in the skies over Jacmel and the Southland. There haven’t been this many Caribes & internationals in Ayiti since the blood lettings of the Earthquake, the first and last colony. Thousands of Cuban and Ayitian paramedics, nurses, surgeons, teachers, engineers and development practitioners shoring up the rebel zone on the eve of the final battle. Jumping with them are elite teams of Israeli combat medics, civil engineers and parastate specialists, also members of the Black Cats, otherwise known as Unit 669. They land near Jacmel City, Mirabelais, Gonaives, Nyala, Al Umayyad and proceed to erect many blue tents. Nine 4,000 bed hospitals sprout out of the ground just beyond the two lines anticipating the coming clash of wills and destinies.

 

GAI medics and PIH-ZL MD are supervising physicals and psyche exams on the men in the trenches. Behind the lines they are fighting mass illiteracy and rebuilding homes.

Dr. Yelizaveta spends much of the week in a cell. It is widely believed that without some divine intervention of massive and unexpected Han air support then the allies in the Ayitian-Emergency-Front and the FANMI LAVALAS will overrun the capital before the American, Ethiopian, or Egyptian reinforcements can be put to use to secure their claims.

 

The Ayitian military is executing any person who flees the capital.

 

The 1st Division of the Ayitian Military has dug in around the capital. The first division is also called the Black Hand all from the house of Al- Talleyrand  and the oligarchy. What’s left of the 4th and 5th Divisions batter Al Umayyad, Nyala, Bor and Jacmel with drones and rockets, but the Banners of the Combined Rebel Forces are united under the leaders Avinadav DeBuitléir and General Salva and vow to hold these cities against the aggression of the usurper, “his name be cursed and a black death upon him.”

On the ninth day of the offensive, 9 Floréal, the four captured cities are still in rebel hands. There flags still fly and President al-Talleyrand , his name be forever cursed he hides in his capital, and an international arms embargo has prevented the Han from getting him more fire power.

He has kept the Ruus doctor as a hostage for a week. But is aware that she is perhaps a bargaining chip. She has said nothing and he has asked nothing. As the Chief Physician to the insurgency she must have quite a message.

Still he leaves her in the dungeons below the Imperial Palace in isolation.

The beleaguered remnants of the 4th and 5th Armies are again ordered to attack the major rebel formations garrisoned at Al Umayyad.

And soon after they are broken.

 

The New York Times runs a full page spread on the cover:

 

“The Battle on the Dunes of Al Umayyad Township: the latest serious Ayitian government defeat in the war. No air support to cover tanks.” Burnt out hulls litter the badlands. Cheering rebel armies are advancing now from the South and West. In the days that follow the Armies of the Ayitian-Emergency-Front capture the Cities of Kusti and Jeremie. While less than 100 men of the original invasion forces are alive each now leads newly trained Ayitian-Emergency-Front Battalions in Emiley after bloody victory against the Army of Ayiti.

Closing in day after day on Port Au Prince.”

 

In a letter written by Sebastian Adon:

 

“This week brought the closing in on the Northern fortress built about the capital. To the West the Liberation Legion of Haile Selassie led by Commanders Jerome Marcus, Magnus Allamby Melvin Clarke is now 85,000 strong. A much smaller St. Pats Battalion is along with it with several dozen Fenian staff sergeants now made Captains. The Alpha Brigade of U.A.S. 82nd has fortified Port Ayiti. Along with an army of refugee Volunteers from Chad they are a mighty albeit irregular force. To the South two divisions of the FANMI LAVALAS, CEF, and the small hundred man Z.O.B.-Dublin Column amount about 130,000 men. They are supported medically and logistically by thousands of volunteers from Cuba and Palmares Island. To the East the D R Armored Division exploits this disorder and digs in ready to shell Port Au Prince. They have roughly 700 Merkava tanks, the only true armored section supporting the rebellion. To the North, the full the forces of Dominican President Ayman Nour are gathered some 100,000 Mujahedeen light infantry and the second company of the 82nd Airborne called the Bravo Brigade.

 

That is a mighty force assembled. All eying each other suspiciously with very loaded ready weapons.

 

A meeting of the factions is again called. A mighty war tent is erected.

 

“We must secure the capital before another government can,” said DeBuitléir on the field phone to Commander Adon, called by many a man between towns.

“I fear that we must secure also it before he burns the country to the ground.”

“And how might he accomplish that?” laughs Salva, “We control almost the totality of Ayiti. Before the end of the month we’ll be turning our concerns from Talleyrand to each other and all these foreigners in our midst. I jest, but let’s be realistic. Many promises have been made and not all will be honored.”

Maya speaks up.

 

“He has atomics. Possible a dozens of them purchased from the North Koreans. And he certainly has enough drones to fly them toward us, toward everyone who’s been working to make his regime fall,” says Maya Solomon.

 

“Why hasn’t he utilized them before?” demands Salva.

 

“Because he didn’t think all was hopeless until Fort Al Umayyad fell and all the foreigners invaded and then were routed. It has always been understood that DR was a U.A.S. Client, Ayiti a French one and Israel a U.A.S. client. But now whispers will be less influential. He is desperate. We are on his very doorstep and he’s down to his last men. He’s killing his own people now just keep them in his lost city.”

 

“The creation of a recognized DMZ in southern Ayiti has been a boon to the humanitarian and emancipatory development endeavors as well as the war effort. But about us vicious vipers set to section off the people’s victory if we don’t act and act fast. The U.A.S. troops safe guard Port Ayiti because from out it flows the oil. The Cubans and everyone else wish to see the war end and the spoils divided with minimum engagement.”

 

Watson Entwissle bursts into the room, “The capital is now completely surrounded. We must prepare at once to attack.

 

“It has been taken care of already my brother. Dr. Kay has requested an audience with President Talleyrand to deliver our terms of his surrender. She is in Port Au Prince about to be granted audience with Talleyrand,” states Solomon.

 

“She will tell him there are to be no terms for surrender.”

But women sometimes lie.

 

Mr. Adon has grown despondent and prone to flashes and floods of anger most directed against their nemeses but also himself. He is often alone and without Yelizaveta to instill him with a lost humanity he is gone for hours on walks about the ridges swooning as a lover does, although never in front of the men. They were odd in public toward one another, but it was of course obvious whose tent she shared. He has lost the two things closest to him after Nikh’s execution and her disappearance. Little to restrain him now.

There was much talk about the commander’s love life, as if the rumors of it make good yarns. In between meetings of administration and command or killing runs against the enemies of his latest adopted people he might be seen upon the ridge composing letters to his lover, making sketches of the forces arrayed and towns liberated as if to impress her. Increasingly, below his raven nappy hair tucked below his brown skally cap beret, the men might look upon his eyes and see a dimming fire. As if by each step, each battle that brought these motley forces toward the capital he calculates how soon until he might finally spend peace time alive with his love.

“If she is alive,” says Watson.

But Adon sees things others don’t always see.

But, was his love a tangible one? Was it based on dreams of progeny, of retirement from war and political machinations into the arms of soft and lasting embrace? There was only one man who might have adequately answered that, and that man they had buried. Separated by the theatres of war from Mr. Dbrisk and Mr. O’Domhnaill, the men Adon leads know him not as who he once was but by zeal he exhibits at present.

Yelizaveta knows him. At least she thinks she does. And she swears that one day she’ll cry for him, because when this is all done, if he is destined to survive, there might not be much left of him to love if she isn’t alive too.

“I know your eyes Sebastian when something you are seeing troubles you,” says Watson.

 

“We are at the crossroads mon ami. I see a good many possibilities, but they are all quite bloody before the dawn breaks.”

 

“That’s’s not what Im referring to.”

 

“Komarova?”

 

“She’s gone.”

 

 

 

 

“Bring her to me,” says President Jim Basher Talleyrand.

Dr. Yelizaveta Kay is still wearing her black burka. She has been unmolested not because of this piety but because she is a messenger and evil a brutal tyrant wishes to hear a message. She is lead into the Imperial War Palace in leg and arm irons and locked to the floor before his desk throne. Forced on her knees.

“Speak,” he says to her.

“I speak on behalf of the rebel armies assembled at your gates. I bear a message from the allied rebel supreme military council. DeBuitléir, Salva and the foreign insurgent commanders Adon, O’Domhnaill, Allamby and Dbrisk AND Solomnan. I speak with their authority.”

“If what you say lacks merit I’ll feed you to the men.”

“I fear none, but the wrath of my Generals should this message not be delivered to you in full.”

“Your grey eyes reveal you are a voodoo witch. Speak witch before the flames consume you after my men do their worst.”

“Your capital is completely surrounded. Your army is in total shambles. There are no less than thirteen insurgent armies composed of your own abused countrymen. There are no less than four world powers with boots on your soil. Your air force is in shambles. Your drone fleet is exhausted. Your one mighty army has been decimated. Even in your dungeons I can easily buy the information I require. The oil has been cut off now for a month and even your Han handlers are making deals with the rebels and the U.A.S. to get the pipes flowing again. The only thing keeping the nine million hostage civilians in the capital is the butchery of the first division.”

“These facts are not unknown to me. You might have purchased them with your mouth witch doctor,” he sneers.

“There are many men who want you dead. Others who want you arrested and put on some international stage for the human rights trial of the century.  DeBuitléir wants your skin for what you did to his whole family. Salva for what you did to his four sons. The JEM wants you to be put to death as a kafr. The Breukland Otriad wants to make an example out of you. The Egyptn, Han, Rus, Persians, Ethiopians, Israeli, and what’s left of the U.A.S. just want your black gold.”

“I will burn you all, and the capital and the twin cities and the Nile itself and the oil below the ground if I must. I will never allow you victory. I will light the world ablaze.”

“I know you have atomics. I don’t know how many but I know you have enough to scorch the region. I know you are planning to incinerate Israel, Egypt, Ethiopia and Iran. I believe you have the cruel will to do it.”

“Quite a mouth you must have.”

“It’s my eyes I am known for President.”

“Grey like the soulless demon Yid God you serve.”

“What time is there now for talk of piety? You have been made no offers by the rebels because they aim to kill you or if they are kind humiliate you on the world stage and use your former republic as a springboard for world war against despots and tyrants and so-called people’s republics. I speak for the intentions of the rebels, but I have a master as we all so. We all answer to someone, especially when we do not answer to God.”

The fat President is astounded at her audacity and gaul.

“Leave us alone!” he commands the black uniformed imperial guards out of the room. The doctor in in manacles and he has a pistol on hip. He rips off her shawl and draws and cocks his weapon. He levels it to her face.

“What offer can you make me that I could tolerate? And on whose behalf!?”

She stares up at this dictator in full defiance.

“The Perchevney Bratva.”

There is no a man alive who deals in sin and violence who has not at one time made a deal with that brotherhood.

“Tell me your name.”

“I am Yelizaveta Kay Perchevney Adon. My mother is Marina Kay a former hotel maid. My father is Alexandr Perchevney head of the Perchevney Bratva. And we require a man that you trust be delivered to us to pay for his treachery. A ruinous treachery against my mother’s honor and my father’s sanity. You harbor him in this very citadel. And my father will ensure you safe passage from Ayiti, along with your family and your fortune to any place you desire if you turn this man over to us.”

“You are also the wife of the Pale Officer who brings with him death.”

“Yes, but only you and I know that President. It is a marriage of vast convenience.”

“What if instead I make you my hostage and trade you for my passage.”

“That would gain you nothing. Adon has sacrificed me before and I am not my father’s only daughter.”

“You are very brave.”

“I would like you to spare millions of lives including your own. I would like you to yield not to the god of pride, but the gods of profit and self-interest.”

“You think I have no honor? I can reduce this country to a land of ash. I would sooner do that than give your father my only friend and ally as a sacrifice. I ought to give Dominick you instead as a bound present. He’s still very feisty although advanced in years. He’d make quite a sport out of the daughter of Alexandr Perchevney. That would get his blood pumping in the final hours we have.”

“He is not such a martyr as you. I would suspect that he’ll flee you like a rat on a sinking ship the minute the rebels distract you enough.”

“Do you have any idea what they will do to you tonight? Have you any notion?”

“Do you have any idea what my husband will do to you if a hair on my head is misaligned?”

“I have atomics. I will incinerate the black fields and reign death on my enemies! They will know the wrath of Ayiti. You will serve you last hours as the whore of my old dear friend Kahn and then we will burn together.”

“Do it from Kingdom Saud. Burn these rebel scum and your own land if you must, but survive. I am the only one who can offer you that. I know you can fire the atomics from the air. I also know that Kahn is fleeing you as you speak.”

“How do you know so much witch?”

“I either have a great tongue, or grey eyes and deep, deep pockets. And only a captain goes down with a ship, not a French Yid opportunist. Besides, you and he both are unbelievers so the whores in Saud Kingdom are more real than whores in the world to come.”

He yells for the guards.

“Find my Dominick Straus-Kahn. Find him now!”

 

 

The Black House of Chicago is very structurally similar to the now long destroyed White House of now long evacuated Washington District of Columbia. Except that it has a better ER and deeper fallout shelter on premise, which is important when right before the beginning of your sixth term someone shoots you in the face.

 

The couple that managed to execute U.A.S. President elect Barak Obama with two plastic snub nosed Calvary Zip guns made in Utah did so because they believed their Mormon God had wanted them to do so. They believed that by murdering the President they were carrying out an act of great faith. Ushering in the end times. He died from his wounds less than an hour later in the ER below the Black House. The Mormon’s that executed him, Mr. and Mrs. O’Domhnaill are a young, good looking couple from a small polygamist town near Salt Lake City, in the Mormon Free Zone. They were not on the guest list for the Passover State Dinner for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. They simply crashed the party by being young, white, well dressed and reasonably attractive.

 

The State dinner was to have been a pretext to quietly and informally negotiate a peaceful settlement in Ayiti. Israeli involvement in the raging and internationally divisive Ayiti-War is making it hard for the U.A.S. to sell this as “Peace Keeping Operation” and not a “Resource Grab”. Obama was hoping that the War in Ayiti might result in a deal sealing for the separation and economic development plan he’d been long arranging along the Israeli-Canaanite Green Line which was believed to be imminent. And the paving of the way to peace with Iran.

Mrs. O’Domhnaill cuddled right up to the President while Mr. O’Domhnaill took a photo. They then took out two guns and shot him in the heart and the head. They then swallowed cyanide and died soon after.

 

They died believing they had the man Christ in their hearts even if they were controlled on remote by the Church of Scientology.

 

American public opinion in the hours to come stymies much of the now murdered President Obama’s Ayitian Intervention Initiative. Most Americans have absolutely no idea where Ayiti even is on a map.  Hilary Clinton briefly becomes President but is toppled in a coup led by the rightest Giuliani-Trump-Romney triumvirate which cancels the Détente with the Confederacy and vows to crush the newly independent Eastern Seaboard Soviets with force to restore the Union. Martial Law is declared in the U.AS. Both the U.A.S. and Confederacy ready themselves for war and round ups begin on both sides.

 

There is very clear evidence that everyone with power in the post-coup government of the United American States wants this intervention in war torn Ayiti to end. The rhetoric of the new oligarchy is “Union by Force!” No more foreign adventures, no more wars of conscience, not while America is divided.

 

“Focus on the family and focus on the home front,” proclaims Palin. And an American public which has an ongoing taste for bread and circuses applauds loudly.

 

 

A man like Perchevney has for years learned how play vicious games of cost benefit analysis with the lives of whomever he must. And when comes the call so close to the end game that informs him so viscerally of a certain ransom he has long prepared himself for, he prepares to pay because it will facilitate the vengeance that so much blood and dollars can buy. He thinks back to days long past before the war and remembers a certain pact.

It was very cold that winter. The blizzard and a Sanitation strike made the city impassible. Adon was ten years younger, fewer scars from the trials of Palmares Island. He was still reckless and in love though. That never seemed to leave him.

 

Perchevney was living then in a two bed room apartment in Fort Washington and so was his wife Marina and his daughter Yelizaveta Kay. And Marina was a hotel maid and Alexandr was an underground unlicensed physician and the incident hadn’t happened yet and this young dashing EMT in a beige-gold protective suit had just crossed that blizzard twice to retrieve their daughter who’d broken her leg and was stranded in the storm. And Adon went to get her, and bring her to a hospital and they loved him, loved him like only Soviets truly can for doing reckless heroic things to rescue people they love. And the night was dark, and the city was impassible and the lights were out and Marina and Yelizaveta were asleep and Adon and Alexandr were sitting smoking Noblisse cigarettes in the narrow kitchen passageway and they had a bottle going.

“What-did was very-strong.”

Alexandre barely spoke English then. And he was a former Soviet unlicensed physician not a king of pins, not a vory-v-zakone[118], not a boss not an engineer of serfdom, not a black business man.

And Adon wasn’t yet a zealot, not a yet a killer, not yet a person myopically driven toward his own self destruction.

 

And they drank as a young blond shivering, Yelizaveta slept doped up on her pain killers, her left leg cast, slept under quilts and covers. And Marina took the next week off from the Benjamin Hotel, proud her daughter had a good man now and a rich one too, an Ameikanski that was shaped like a Soviet and was at least tough like one, and rich which was important too.

And Adon and Alexandr embrace.

 

“You-love-daughter?” He asks, heavier then. Thick black glasses. Sly eyes with the bipolar grey flash.

“I will do anything for her.”

“I will have you prove this.”

And that is why so many years later, as Yelizaveta lies in a prison cell far behind enemy lines of the fortified citadel and Alexandr receives a cash figure from a Ayitian middle man, how much he must pay for Mr. Strauss-Kahn and his daughter, he feels still like haggling. Because he knows that Adon will do absolutely anything to free his daughter.

 

He’s seen Adon do it many times before.

 

 

Tense times for the world at large.

Everyone everywhere has their eyes on “the Crisis in Ayiti”.

 

The United American State pulls out of country just one week after assassinated former President Barak Obama ordered them in. A new political regime is taking power in the United American States one which looks forever inward and has no time for ‘wars of conscience.’ Personified by Donald Trump and Rudolf Guiliani.

 

The daily shelling of Port-Au-Prince and skirmishes at the gates are told in the world’s papers that the end of the al-Talleyrand regime in only days away.

 

Vast piles of sandbags are now gone up around the twin cities of Port Au Prince and Petionville where the Massacre River forks. The enemy forces are massed just five clicks outside its gates. They’ve set up artillery, heavy machine guns, the dead sand around its suburbs a death maze of mines and booby traps. This is the citadel, the largest city on earth home to some 4, many NGO affiliated million souls who benefited generously from these twenty years of internal war. Finally as the rebellion hardens its lines all have moved their forces to the evil center of this dark place.

 

An estimated 80,000 Ayitian soldiers, the hard core, the elite.

Holding hostage over over 3 million privileged citizens and their salves and dependents. Armed with Atomics that can hit as far away as anywhere but East Asian, Eurasia or Oceania.

 

100,000 lightly armed Muhammadian Brothers to the North. Two Divisions of Ethiopian Armor and light infantry to the East. Over two million irregular fighters in the Ayitian Defense Forces and rebel Alliance; a million under General Salva west of Port Au Prince, and million under  DeBuitléir to the south.

This is not to mention the 10,000 Israeli, Cuban, and Ayitian medical contingents and “engineers”. The 40,000 Han support staff still in Port Au Prince. The Persian navy blocking oil flow from the Straight of Tiran.

 

And U.A.S. and Chinese Atomic saber rattling.

And enhanced proxy arming.

Calls for calm coming out of Europe.

And the Russian Federation too is wondering just how to get in on the game this late I the blood bath. Perchevney tells Putin to wait it out.

 

The President al-Talleyrand  sits in the Imperial Palace, his last city under total blockade, he sits at a computer screen reading that the world has largely abandoned him. The blond witch is in one cell, his former financial advisor who his men caught fleeing in another. Bodies lie rotting in the heat as his army guns down thousands trying to flee.

“We cannot have a situation where foreign armies of any kind remain in capital after it falls. If they seize the city first then they will remain after to claim the oil as their prize,” notes Avinadav DeBuitléir to the assembled staff and leadership within the command tent.

“Well then we’d better make sure that all factions bleed equally in the capture of Port Au Prince,” says Salva.

“This is a bloody mess no matter how you run the war game,” states Father O’Sullivan.

 

 

Everyone stands except for General Salva and Avinadav DeBuitléir as Adon and Solomon enter the room. Then both Generals rise to salute Solomon.

 

“We are requesting you delay the final offensive by four hours,” she says.

“We are certain that as soon as we breach the gates, that that vile beast will fire off his atomics and order his army to assist the population in collective suicide,” says Adon.

“We would like four hours to attempt to secure the Imperial Palace with an airborne assault of the Z.O.B.-Dublin Company. We’d like to fly in tonight, real-real high, paratroop about a hundred men right down on top of them at the Palace while a crack team flies four 747s  loaded with explosives into the Ministry of Peace, Ministry of Love, and Ministry of Truth as well as the Trade Tower,” says Solomon.

“We think we can pull this off with just 99 fighters,” Adon remarks.

“Which is actually all the Breukland Bath and Rifle Club has left alive or combat functional in country,” Maya notes.

“We can wipe out the government administration centers for war, torture, propaganda and trade, storm the palace, capture Al-Talleyrand  and Strauss-Kahn, halt a potential nuclear inferno, and maybe even save his girlfriend.”

“Wife,” Adon corrects her.

“In your mind alone sweetness,” says Maya playfully.

“So you’re basically going to pull a Condoleezza Rice-Paul Wolfowitz circa 2001?” asks     General Salva.

“I think we can give you four hours,” smiles DeBuitléir.

“You’re going too, warrior woman?” asks Salva to Solomon.

“Of course Gentlemen, I wrote the blue print for the whole fucking plan.”

“You sure are one surely Messiah commander Solomon,” says DeBuitléir in Hebrew.

Black cat’s out the bag,” echo’s General Salva in Aramaic.

“What’s the word of a Messiah to her cousin the Mahdi,” she replies.

“Touche mon Cherie,” says Avinidav, the 14th generation descendant of the Prophet Muhamaed hidden until now in occlusion.

 

 

Across the country the Ayiti Defense Forces under the banner of DeBuitléir’s Ayitian-Emergency-Front are rebuilding the nation in the wake of the war, rebuilding infrastructure and villages the Maccoute once wiped out. This is nation where not an inch of earth or a single centimeter even is not pocked with a bullet mark or liberated with the cost of much blood.

After two whole years of total war, the Dar Ayitian region knows some peace.

Every woman and man above the age of 13 who is not a coward has packed their bags and headed to the outskirts of Port Au Prince. A sprawling encampment of tents and artillery, barricades and civilian patriots with arm are growing daily ringing the line of siege.

There will be one last battle to end this war and it may be fought block to block, house to house. Across this land the people of Ayiti realize that the massacre of their brutal government is near.

There are many things in abundance that there were only some of before. Spiruleena is as if a national dish. Where two years before Ayiti, as per the policies of President al-Talleyrand  over 82 % of the population was illiterate, now there are schools in abundance, where before only the madrassas taught. There are arms in the hands of the minorities whereas before only the Muhammadians had arms. All in the liberated zones have healthcare.

There is a vast and epic array of battle works and war weapons to be found in the blue tent city erected in but three week on the Western edge of Port Au Prince, just four clicks for the Citadel. The total liberation is in its last few hours and the factions have assembled to lay the final plans. There will be no quarter asked or given. It has been like this since the first day of the war. As Ayitian and Dinka and two thousand other tribes oil and load their weapons; as Israeli technicians set up field hospitals and communications arrays; As Persian handlers drill up until V day itself; as JEM fighters trade war stories with young boys from the Eastern Front; as Ivoryites and Muhammadians tell jokes and compare notes on who’s G-d is on who’s side and if this is prophesy. Or just bloody comedy.

 

These forces have pledged to defeat the army inside Port Au Prince and topple the Ayitian Government once and for all in a war that began so long ago in 1956.

The rebel troops will begin storming the gates at sunrise.

On a landing strip prepared for “Operation Project for a New American Century” 150 Z.O.B.-Dublin brigade fighters take supper together after wiring four 747’s with enough ordinances to vaporize three metal pyramids and on high tower. There are no speeches. There isn’t anything left to say. All of them are experienced paratroopers.

At 2300 eight grey Givati-Tulsa airships carrying 142 fighters will take off and climb high until they get way above the SAM grid and drop the fighters en mass over Port Au Prince around midnight. Using a tracking signal from the GPS inside Ms. Kay left tibia, they will lock the position of the Imperial Palace.

 

With five minute lag, the eight Z.O.B.-Dublin pilots will utilize 747’s are missiles above attempt to   get out of the vessel’s before impact.

 

“Many of us will soon be joining our brothers tonight in the world to come,” says Moishe Cohen.

 

“See you all on the other side,” says Maya Solomon.

 

She rips off the Velcro of her patch cover. It is a six sided star of life with a snake around a staff,

blue, black and grey. Its writing is Hebrew. Once side says “Paramedic”, the other side says

 

“Banshee Airborne.”

 

 

Darkness falls on a bad man place. The Flickering Flame 2 and seven other Givati-Tulsa airships are lined up on the secret runway. Behind them are four 747s acquired in the last 48 hours via Polidoro-Ferraris International Development Firm, written off for tax purposes via the newly formed NGO “Foreign Friends of Ayiti”. Miles and miles, kilometers even of distance to the East one can see through the wastelands and dunes to the millions encamped outside Port Au Prince, a people’s army of two million CDF fighters, 100,000 DR Ayitian Fedayeen and 160,000 Dominicans with armor from the days of the Great War on Terror which caused only much more terror.

“This is a suicide mission friend?” asks Mickhi Dbrisk to Hugh O’Domhnaill as they prepare to join 25 Scarborough and St. Pat’s fighters in the hull of the Flickering Flame.

“I suspect only if the shoot doesn’t open,” Dbrisk responds.

As each fighter double checks his partners shoot, each one rips off the Velcro of the left arm patch to die, if it is their fate to die true colors exposed.

“You find yourself praying the longer the war goes on,” says O’Domhnaill.

“1,001 fighters went in, and now there are 125 left including Maya Solomon. And we’re going to fly three miles right above Port Au Prince and say a quick prayer and jump out the belly of these planes. And we’re going use our jump training, and our kill training, and our 4d powers and the rest of everything Mikhail Mastrovich taught us. And the fuck it, yer right, we might all get killed, but we been knowing that for years,” says Dbrisk. Stubs his Noblisse cigarette rips off the cover patch.

“You know this isn’t gonna be the last jump” says O’Domhnaill as he rips off his covering too.

“Ya know, you just keep saying that until the world to come comes.”

“Remember serving under Bolivar?” asks Dbrisk.

“That’s what he was calling himself then? Yeah those were some jumps.”

“Remember serving under Collins?” asks Dbrisk, his eyes flash grey.

“And Gandhi?”

“Or Nelson Mandela?”

“These humans are getting closer and closer.”

“The trouble with the humans is that they have been enslaved for so long they know longer remember their initial potential,” notes Dbrisk as they head up the ramp and hydraulics begin raising the hatch.

“Don’t lose hope old soul; I suspect the world to come is finally coming.”

 

 

The plate in Yelizaveta Kay’s left leg, affixed to the tibia has a tracking device, a neural transmitter, and a tephlon dagger. These are all gifts her father gave her. Fear or anger produce neurotramitters, pressure points and osteopathic activators do the rest. And there’s also the ESP, all guiding 125 Z.O.B. fighters on eight small planes over the city, right to the palace. Helping guide her boys and Maya to the choicest targets.

 

She knows her father has paid off Al-Talleyrand, knows the President will take her, and Kahn and some of the haram, and his family, and a platoon of his Imperial Guards and take a long tunnel from the palace to an airfield just outside the city where he thinks he will be escaping to Kingdom Saud.

She’s cuffed and dragged from the cell, stood against the wall with Kahn, sees him old and shriveled and vicious and thinks of triggering the blade right then and there. They arrested him the day before attempting to flee. The deal is safe passage to Kingdom Saud in exchange for Kahn and her being turned over to Perchevney after safety is achieved.

 

His yellow rat bastard, rapist French stink is appalling. Her quarry is close and he has no idea. She’s nothing to him.

Another girl in the harem.

Not long now to the kill.

The big-fat kill of listed target 105.

 

 

The moon is full but the planes fly very high and death from above strikes quick as gravity will allow. The Givati Tusla pilots are all Ayitian airmen. They will transmit the second the Z.O.B.-Dublin Column jumps and the 747’s will take of shortly after. If the Lwa are riding with us and the Good Lord allows the jumpers will be crawling over the palace just five minutes before the 747’s obliterate the three ministries and the trade tower.

And as soon as the rebel armies see the tower go up in flames a four hour clock will tick down. The Z.O.B.-Dublin Column will either report the kill or capture of the enemy leadership and the negotiated surrender of Port Au Prince and the Twin Cities, or at 4am the rebel alliance and the armies of Egypt and Ethiopia will storm the city, at a very high cost in blood.

 

The Givati-Tulsa squadron takes off at 23:00 as planned.

 

Other than a few Ayitian technicians and the Persian ordinance experts that are running a final check on the rigged up commercial airliners, of the rebels its only 8 left on the runway partners doing final checks on the shoots. This is a complicated jump, as the airliners will be making a high angle nose dive it is often tricky to clear the jet. But all the best pilots are Yids and the Yid god says suicide is a huge thankless sin, so no one plans to die except for Adon who always hopes to. So he never has any more duty to act, never has to worry about is she alright, worry about does she love him really truly. The others though, they want to live. They’re drilled for this maneuver hundreds of times.

Adon checks Maya’s shoot. And Watson checks Moishe Cohen’s. No dirty jokes at this 11th hour. And Dashiell Duffy checks the shoot of Father O’Sulliven. And Thomas Ansu checks that of Scott Sevastra.

“You’ve all done this drill numerous times,” says Solomon.

“Lock the clutch, secure the throttle, activate the extrication rip cord, blow the side door, clear the plane at mid altitude, and glide toward to tracker in Dr. Kay’s heel. Don’t get killed,” states Adon.

“A wrist tracker lights up on each of them.”

“Luck,” says Solomon to all.

“Luck!” they all say back.

“Have anything to add Father?” Adon asks O’Sulliven.

“Good Lord Bon Dye, Ha Shem, Allah, Mother love and Jesus Christ also, and Papa Legba and the Virgin Mother, Erzuli Danto all the other spirits too. Bless us in the completion of this most dirty work. Allow us to strike most finally at evil men, and retire promptly and alive to a warm beach in the Caribbean.”

“Amen,” they all say.

“We are equal opportunity miracle employers,” says Raphael Ernesto Contreras.

 

 

Once Mickhi Dbrisk stepped out into the sky above Port Au Prince the ground races toward him.

Mickhi hates swimming but learned to do it for the sake of the survival. He hates jumping even more. It’s not natural to tempt god and physics so. There could be little else as dangerous as a 3 mile high jump.

Perhaps moto racing in the Breukland Soviet, or being the best friend of anarchist revolutionaries.

But they had practice in the jumps. They were near effortless. But she still always crossed himself and prayed to the man Jesus and also Legba the Guardian of the Crossroads, and often by the time he could begin to see the lights below, he might even ask Bon Dye directly to help him survive.

The jump is like dying, each time the rush the prayers the total exfiltration of loss of control. A three mile jump utilizes the atmospheric disturbances caused by global warming which make anything flying that high untraceable even via satellite. And an upper atmosphere jump also puts all the fighters high enough above target that landing where you need too gets easier.

The lights explode out of the clouds. Port Au Prince’s sky scrapers and search lights and spot lights and the lights of the rebel army encircled in siege and the thick blue vein of the Vile River, the crosshair of the landing where the White Vile and the Blue Vile split south into Sub Saharan Acadia. The lights are blinding.

Mickhi Dbrisk deep, deep in prayer, in drop formation with 117 other Otriad fighters glances at this altitude clocker, and he prepares to rip the cord. This is the most dangerous part because although these shoots are designed for death from above raids, for the next five minutes the 117 paratrooping guerillas will be snipable floating ducks. And then five minutes as soon as they land the others are going to light the city up.

The rush the Epi hitting the Alpha 1,2 Beta 1,2,3 receptors taking fighting and flighting to the next goddam level. Jamaica never had a great bob sled team and neither had Erin or Israel, but they took skydiving to new dare devilish heights that night.

Rip chords. Back flash. Swooping impending doom. Stabilized descent. 117 Blue and Red circles with a symbol at the center ot a tree and six cannons, and six flags in the shape of star. A snake wrapped around the tree. Ayitian Parachutes. The Vile Crossroad’s speeding towards us. Bright, white tight light and prayers not to die, not to die. Five minute on the clock until the diversion the flaming jet fuel, light up like 2001 plus one diversion hits. The ground looks close. Blasters and burners are now out. Touch, touch, touch down. Thump thump thump,  one hundred fighters whisper prayers, landing all over the tennis courts and gardens of the Imperial Palace. They each kiss the ground, cock the rifles. Rush across the grounds and get in position.

Hugh O’Domhnaill using hand sign directs one group up the marble stairs. No shot fired yet.

No resistance. No guards.

Everything is lit up, the whole palace.

“Place is a graveyard,” says Dbrisk with grey eyes in ESP to O’Domhnaill.

Empty sentry points.

Dbrisk and sixty fighters gain entry the Breukland way. O’Domhnaill leads his detachment through the maze of well furnished rooms. The palace is empty. There aren’t even any guards.

Beep. Beep. Goes Dbrisk’s watch.

That means two minutes to the secondary strike. And he knows something is wrong. No one is home.

The blue print to the Imperial Palace paves the way. One detachment moving up on side of the palace, one securing room after empty, suspicious room. Not even one shot fired.

“WTF guys,” says O’Domhnaill in grey flashes.

117 fighters arrive at the big wooden doors to the Presidential Office of Talleyrand in two prongs.

Hugh says with hand-sign “take the door?”

“Door is open B,” says Mickhi Dbrisk breaking the silence, “there ain’t no one home.”

The room is filled with maps, its filled with books, It stinks of cigar smoke even though the ceilings are fifty feet tall. And a balcony opens up on a vista of the whole city. Which is all lit up in military strobe and for a city of 14 million is suspiciously quiet.

“Where is everyone?” asks Rand.

Dbrisk is going through papers on the desk. They are in Arabic, but he can read Arabic.

The vast palace officer and its thick onyx throne were all abandoned hastily.

“So he’s fled?” asks O’Domhnaill.

Mickhi Dbrisk puts his Sten Gun on the long mahogany desk covered in scattered war papers.

“Everyone’s dead,” he utters.

“What are you fucking saying?” says O’Domhnaill.

“They’re poisoned all the water. Everyone in the city is dead. And if we kill Talleyrand it’s going to make things go from real fucking bad to pretty much a lot worse.”

The wretched veneer of modernity which encases this city was built with oil money and Han expertise in a gold rush and genocide that’s nearly a hundred years old. And everyone living in Port Au Prince was living well and they knew what was happening in Ayiti and the Southlands, but they had a near European life expectancy and creature comforts and so they let it slide. The city of glass and steel was so bright and so quiet and you could almost hear the rush of the mighty Vile River.

Mickhi looks highly concerned.

“Where the fuck is that bastard Talleyrand?” he asks.

“How should I know,” says O’Domhnaill.

“He’s rigged his neurals. If he dies it’s gonna trigger a few dozen atomic happy endings for the whole damn region.”

“Beeeeep.”

Goes everyone’s trackers.

Having a good and epic view of a terror attack is really the specialty of Philistines and Israelis. But its only terror when you kill indiscriminately. Or kill the innocent. Or so they write it off rhetorically.

A 747 is not unlike a very, very large fast Molotov cocktail.  The Ministry of Peace was where they planned war against their own people. It explodes first lighting up the whole skyline. And then like a ripple seconds later KABOOM and there is no more ministry of Truth where they for a hundred years made so many lies. And BLAM a third pyramid erupts as the empty airline loaded with ordinance incinerates the Ministry of Love where all the worst brutal tortures occurred. Last went the Trade Tower build by the Han. And the 117 fighters gathered on the balcony of an empty Imperial Palace, stood witness to a smoldering four structure fire where no one died. Because everyone was already dead. Everyone smoked um if they had um.

 

“Do we have anyway to raise Solomon?” asks O’Domhnaill.

“Nope.”

“Hmm. Fuck my life, as the chornay say.”

 

 

 

Hardest part when you light up a mostly dead city with four 747’s is you have to be careful to not land in the smoldering jet fuel which burns for days and blackens the sky. They all have oxytanks and respirators because although they’d jettisoned half a mile ahead of impact, the smoke would be quite thick.

It was a pretty, well lit although mostly dead city below.

Mostly dead city because there were about forty thieves and Ms. Kay still alive. Not everyone drank the Kool-Aid called the city water supply with Polonium 402 for flavoring. But twelve million did. And most of the remaining troops too.

The forty thieves include President Al-Talleyrand , his three wives, his nine children, and an assortment of  choice concubines and bodyguards, an oil minister, Dr. Kay and of course Strauss Kahn. The tunnel they are driving through in a small convoy of jeeps heads out from below the Vile River to small landing strip where a fueled Han jet awaits.

But this plan was very well conceived.

And when the convoy reaches the hanger all the technicians are dead and there are eight rebels seated in the wings of the evacuation plane.

“Don’t do anything rash Zamni, he’s wired to blow,” says Maya Solomon.

“Slick-Ha?” Adon says excuse me in Hebrew.

The convoy slows to a halt.

“She said don’t do anything rash,” says Watson.

“What’s rash to you?” Adon asks. His heart is lighter seeing his wife alive.

“Don’t, I mean by any means necessary Do not let Al-Talleyrand  die. He flat lines and his neurals trigger drones strapped with atomics to take off toward, well everywhere else fun around here,” says Solomon calmly.

There about twenty black uniformed Imperia Guardsmen yelling in Arabic brandishing fearsome Aramalite blasters.

Kahn, Kay and Al-Talleyrand  and the Oil Minister are in the rear most car.

Moishe Cohen cocks his rifle, adjusts his kippa. Scott Sevastra and Thomas Ansu keep their burners trained on the enemy. They’ve spent their save a long time ago. Father O’Sullivan and Dashiell Duffy drop off the wing and get some cover on the tarmac. Watson Entwissle sights the highest ranking guardsman.

Maya Solomon lowers her burner and yells, “ENOUGH!”

She then drops into flawless Arabic.

“President Al-Talleyrand , order your men to put down their weapons. We are not here for you and your family, or your guards or whores or certainly your oil minister. We want the Frenchman and the Doctor. And you can then get on your way to Kingdom Saud.”

No one lowers anything. It’s a standoff on the tarmac and each is either a Mexi-can or a Mexi-can’t.

“You know the terms. I know how much Perchevney paid you. And I will double it if you get on that plane. All I’ve wanted for nearly three years is to see you dragged in front of the Hague. Now that you’ve poisoned 12 million of your own mostly loyalist citizens something tells me that we won’t be the only ones after you. ”

“You my friend are the definition of a war criminal. But you know what? Giving us our friend and your sniveling bourgeoisie rapist Frenchman is going to probably secure you financially in exile and let you live out your natural life on some Sand Gypsy Oil Sheik’s pleasure compound. If you don’t let her go, if you don’t give us the man who raped the wife of one of the world’s most ruthless and connected Voorhees well then, it’s anything goes.”

Talleyrand  stutters. “She is my collateral, so is the Frenchman. Once in Saudi you can reacquire them.”

“We all know that what goes into Saudi is often hard to get out of Saudi,” states Adon.

“We know your black heart is a nuclear ticking time bomb. That in itself kept our bullets from piercing your flesh before you even saw us. That in itself is quite a lot of collateral.”

“Let us on the airship or we will eviscerate this Ruus whore right in front of you!” yells Talleyrand .

“You aren’t taking them with you to Saudi. We’d rather just unload on you and slaughter your whole family right here,” says Solomon calmly, “that’s what I meant by ‘anything goes’ in case that didn’t translate.”

Watson Entwissle lines up a second target slowly with his sure shot revolver. He counts out twenty Imperial Guards each likely a damn good shot. They all have Carmelites which means they can light off a pretty full clip in under thirty seconds. He glances at Maya who hasn’t even drawn her burner. Ansu, Sevastra, Duffy, Adon, and Cohen all have Macro-Uzis which you can barely even aim. Father O’Sulliven has a Sten Gun. Even with all their Voodoo magic and powers of the fourth dimension they are still a bit out gunned.

You can feel the building dynamic tension, the catecholamines racing within these vaguely scared, poorly rested and heavily armed men.

 

“Give us our lady doctor and you keep the dirty old pervert Frenchman,” suggests Solomon.

 

“Those are not acceptable terms, this kafr dog!” yells Yelizaveta.

“We can triple all your money,” suggests Solomon.

“There are too many Maccoute,” whispers Watson to Adon. We can’t kill all of them fast enough.

 

The black shirts are looking increasingly twitchy. So does Talleyrand  who is sweating like a pig profusely.

 

“I do not negotiate with fucking little terrorists!” yells Talleyrand .

“Fair enough,” mutters Maya Solomon, “Kill everyone with a gun folks.”

She quick draws her 8mm shooter and puts down three black shirts before diving toward the floor. And a fire fight erupts on and across the tarmac.

Macro-Uzi’s have no aim. You point and spray and hit everybody you can. And it all happens damn fast. Scott Sevastra gets his right knee blown apart and falls to the ground bleeding while lighting up a jeep load of black shirts in his bellowing back fall. He keeps firing from the ground. And Dashiell Duffy is shot multiple times in the chest and he gets off a round or two then dies quickly.

 

And Dr. Kay is in cuffs but gives Dominick Strauss Kahn a good kick sending him sprawling out the vehicle. She head butts the Oil Minister and makes him bleed all over his suit. And she drags Talleyrand with chains around his neck down on to the ground, under the jeep and out of the line of fire.

 

Adon glances left and sees Father O’Sulivan picking off blacks shirts one by one with lightning fast wild-west Belfast speed. And then he looks back and priest is slumped over dead. Bullets ran him through him and he topples resting in a bloody pool.

Ansu drops and rolls and fires his macro-Uzi until all the bullets are done. And takes cover behind a baggage truck and reloads. And then he gets shot in the shoulder and cries out.

Moishe gets clipped and he loses his yarmulke as he falls backwards on his ass. But he’s wearing a vest so maybe he isn’t dead.

And there are dead black shirts and empty shells and blood everywhere.

And Adon and Solomon move like they are dancing. They cover each other and advance on the remaining survivors rolling and ducking and unleashing fire. Firing 8mm parabellums and macro-Uzis until everyone’s dead except Talleyrand , Kay and Kahn.

And Watson Entwissle can’t help but be a little sentimental that he’s standing over the dictator’s dead family. A few of the children were rather young. But Jean-Claude Duvalier was rather young once and keeping him alive and enriched in exile once cost many-many Ayitians their lives.

Everyone’s panting and smeared in various red and clear fluids. Everyone who’s left alive. Shattered windows in the cross fire.

“On your fucking knees,” says Cohen.

Maya frees Yelizaveta from her manacles. Kahn and Talleyrand  are placed on their knees.

The Fenian priest is dead. As well as Duffy and Ansu. Sevastra is dying. Watson attends to him best he can with what he’s carrying.

“There are no words of magic that I can say that will make the world freer, but perhaps your trial will open some eyes. Though ultimately this was a harm reduction mission above all other things. You and your bloody hordes have done great harm. And now you are finished.”

“Hold him for me,” Yelizaveta commands Adon. And he does. Adon lifts Kahn up from the ground and grips him by the biceps bracing himself for what’s coming.

“You don’t have to_,” Maya begins.

Yelizaveta has a dagger out of her leg before the sentence bears completion.

She stabs Kahn again, and again and again. Jams the knife in his chest over and over until he wretches up blood. Then she cut his throat and Adon lets him drop to the floor.

“Well that’s all she wrote,” mutters Watson Entwissle. He gives Sevastra some morphine sulfate IV and lays him down likely soon dead.

 

And then Al-Talleyrand drops to the tarmac.

And that isn’t good because neurals link the firing of his neurons to a wireless signal which activates a launch code. And that is all he wrote.

 

“Fuck he’s warm and very dead,” shouts Maya checking his carotid.

“What!?” exclaims Watson.

“He’s infarcted. He has no pulse.” And Adon gets Al-Talleyrand ’s cuffs off and begins CPR.” “GET THE FUCKING JUMP BAG!” Maya yells to Lt. Cohen.

And if there ever was a mega code this was it. But they’re all medical professionals. Though other than Dr. Kay all they’ve done for two years was kill, and kill some more.

And Solomon intubates him, and Cohen gets the monitor on him, and Entwissle takes over CPR, and Adon gets a 16 gauge line in the right AC, and Kay sets up the Vasopressin, and the monitor says ventricular fibrillation, and they shock him at 200 joules, and more CPR, and they shock him at 200 joules, and more CPR, and 40 units of Vaso go in; and then 300 mg of Amiodarone go in, and the CPR and ventilations continue, and they hit him with EPI 1:10,000, and shock a third time at 200 joules. And holy shit. He’s got a pulse. Thank god. Nuclear holocaust adverted, and they get cold fluids in him and they raise Commander DeBuitléir on the radio.

 

And they package up Talleyrand in an extrication taco and hold tight. And Adon has blood all over his uniform, and Moishe Cohen Klein can’t find his kippa, not at all. And Maya is on the radio. Watson fires off the blue and red flares to signal the helicopters for medevac.

 

And Yelizaveta takes Sebastian’s hand wrapped in blood bandages, like the last scene in the capnography of Fight Club.

 

The dawn is breaking. And they’ve won. The battle is finally over. But all around them is black smoke and smoldering rubble and piles of bodies and the ghosts of friends that perished along the road to Zion. The West Indies and eastern seaboard have been taken, fighting is happening all over the United American State with the military in full revolt against the Oligarchy and Trump secret armies and militias, and the white supremacists.

 

 

 

Interim acting President of the new Ayitian Free State (the Third Republic), the second largest autonomous entity in the Wild West Indian Federation behind Cuba but above Jamaica; General Avinadav DeBuitléir, the Lion of Zion looks into the broken eyes of his old friend and comrade, the pale officer Sebastian Adon.

 

These are eyes of a 4,000 year old war torn tribe. It is unclear still when the rebel leader will eventually go to sleep. His eyes are pure green.

 

There are millions of bodies that have to be buried in mass graves outside of Port Au Prince. Before plague sets in. General Salva has moved the Second Army North in case the Egyptians decide not to fully remove their forces off Ayitian soil.

 

Al-Talleyrand is being held in Port Au Prince General Hospital under heavy guard.

 

Port-Au-Prince has finally been completely liberated. The revolutionary war in Ayiti has been won!

 

The full extents of Al-Talleyrand ’s and the Class ONG crimes are now clear to the world at large. News has arrived via the People’s Television Network and the Fire Station that thousands of arrests are being made in the U.A.S. They are rounding up our sympathizers across the nation real and imagined. We all watch the telescreen as they announce that the Breukland Soviet may be attacked any day now.

 

Many members of the club’s families have been seized as hostages and prominent sympathizers have been detained. Many of our friends and lover fell in the terrible Grozny battle’s for the Bronx and Goddess Soviet.

 

Again Adon’s head is shaved morning his scores of lost friends and comrades. Also the millions of lives the revolt has claimed so far. He has become quieter. At least for now.

 

Sebastian salutes President Avinadav DeBuitléir as he enters the chamber where the man has established his command just four hours into 22nd of Nivôse, just three hours after news of the collateral obliteration of the city’s population at the hands of the deposed regime.

 

“Completely unnecessary, old soul blood brother,” DeBuitléir tells him.

 

“Tomorrow you and what’s left of your detachment leave for Madeira Island?”

 

“Such is our plan.”

 

“Do you have any new news of your families’ locations?”

 

“Not yet. Thousands have been put into detention camps. The only free states left standing on the East coast are Breuklyn and Atlanta.”

 

“There is a very high price on your head old friend. And no one, not anyone wants you taken alive.”

 

“My skin has been made thick here Avinadav, but we are not short of friends as you know. They’ve arrested our families to punish us for what we organized. The U.A.S. Federals have attacked our city and burned our homes twice this year unsuccessfully.”

 

“Tell me anything you require and I will get it to you. Don’t be rash. Let the smoke clear and we can send you back with men and arms and the support of a new nation.”

 

“I am no longer sure I am welcomed by this club you speak of. I think all of us will have to answer to our own community on what has transpired here. We must now expedite our return. To secure our city. And rescue our families. ”

 

“We welcome you here forever. You and your club will be hunted when you leave Ayiti. You will be hunted, captured and handed over to your government to face charges as master terrorists. The world calls now for still more blood, you and your Otriad are marked.”

 

“Still, tomorrow we leave indirectly for home turf.”

 

“You will sleep here tonight?”

 

“No sleep ‘til Breukland Avinadav, it’s kind of the survivor’s song these days. Our warriors must not abandon our kin to that alien land.”

 

“I expected no different reply from you Sebastian. My generals want me to impart that if you decide to remain here in Ayiti we will grant you all full pensions and positions in the Provisional government. But I have told them you are zealots and will return to Breukland.”

 

“You understand why of course?”

 

“I know of what cloth you and your columns are cut, yes. We will await your return.”

 

“The Satmar Rabbinate in Breukland has called us the bringers of catastrophe. Most global media outlets call us the Abu Nidal-Jabotinsky Cult of Adon. My parents are long murdered. My brother is under arrest in the Russian Federation,” he doesn’t go on.

 

“Your god, our god I should say, the only G-d Jah; will not abandon you Mr. Adon. And my people will never, ever forget what you and your Otriad have done here.”

 

“I hope you are correct. Fidel Castro said history would absolve him. It didn’t and I have ten thousand times the blood on my hands.”

 

The two men sit across from each other. Sebastian in normal tradition would fire up a Noblisse cigarette, but he’s run out.

He finally just quit.

“When you bring your people up out of bondage you will be welcomed here like conquering kings. My people will learn to survive as your people have, by embracing your faith in humanity, your endless well of hadar and your fascinating ability to uphold unity,” he utters.

“I have lost much of my faith my dear comrade.”

“But, you still carry fire.”

“Much to my woman’s chagrin.”

 

“Which woman,” he laughs, quite literally there had been four that probably all still controlled his heart and governed his behavior.

“Ha.”

 

“I was surprised to hear she permits you to head so flagrantly toward certain death or capture.”

 

“I am surprised I do so little to act like a man in more love.”

 

 

“You believe in the struggle as if it were love,” notes Avinadav DeBuitléir, “that doesn’t make it love.”

 

 

The now 35 year old Sebastian Adon and the hundred-handful of surviving fighters prepare to re-enter the now highly militarized post-coup United American States to rescue their families as the newly elected President Avinadav DeBuitléir, a survivor of the genocide adopts the UN Declaration of Human Rights as the charter for Dar Zion the new name of what was once called Ayiti. He separates religion from state and opens the doors of his newly un-recognized country to Iraqis, Persians, Afghanis, Sand Gypsy, Philistinians and Israeli fleeing the wastelands and war zones that are now their respective countries.

 

The world’s governments are moving toward full containment.

 

Night falls and it is Rosh Hashanah, the dawn of a New Hebrew year. The surviving members of the Breukland Bath and Rifle Club cross the Atlantic from Madeira Island on a Polidoro Industries container ship crashing through black waters for the coast of Breukland. The ship has a naughty black mermaid on its side. Hugh O’Domhnaill looks out into nothing, the black blue stormy abyss. Mickhi Dbrisk is smoking a cigar on the deck with his cousin the Bajan General Magnus Allamby and Watson Entwissle contented that Sebastian is finally asleep in the cabins below. The four commanders are joined by Moishe Cohen who everyone has nicknamed “the bad rabbi” who was once a Lt. in the F.D.N.Y. before he joined the rebels. He passes them two small loaves of bread, and they remember what to do because they did it once in Brighton Beach with Sebastian what seemed like a life time ago.

 

The five men toss crumbs into the water for sins which each committed in the war. They make their tashlik together as perhaps some Hebrew god codifies the things to come and amends which must now be made as the book of life cracks open yet again.

The waves crash against the hull. It is a lullaby to these weary men made violent.

Yelizaveta is not with them. She has been asked to serve as an attending Physician of Hadar Hospital, what was once the Port Au Prince General Hospital. Maya Solomon is not with them either. She is leading the armies in the North against the armies of Egypt who have treacherously invaded to claim oil they didn’t bleed for.

Sebastian had asked Yelizaveta to stay there and attempt to wait for him. She promised nothing. Maya doesn’t ask anyone anything. But she has seen the world to come.

 

That evening as their remaining men; the survivors of the Fighting 99th bordered the aircraft to the rebel base on Madeira Island Dr. Kay wept just a little.

 

She cries with a measure of cruel nobility over a letter Sebastian wrote her long ago on the 6th of Brumaire, a year before that most terrible blizzard.

 

Yelizaveta,

 

I believe only strangers can present to each other honest opinions or accomplish together great works. In my line of work which is to say ambulancing, art making, and war, to parlay Palahniuk, ‘life is one of single serving friends’. That is to say the incredible honesty of strangers is routine.

 

Your friends will tell you what is in your interest, but not always what you need to hear. I think friend too is a term misused. I may know of you and you of me, but about each other we know precious little. I say all this as a preface. We are not always what we appear. I do not like phone calls. I like to work with my hands to form ideas even. It is old soul what I propose, but I have an old soul. If I wrote you where you sleep would this offend? I would like us to write to each other the slow way, because it has more character.

 

More hadar.

 

You gave me your address once, but I have lost it about my houses. I will write you eloquent letters on large things if you will promise to attack them or critique them or put a stranger in his place. I dream one night the strangest dream my Yelizaveta dear. I dreamt from out a deep abyss, an endless mine and cave I crept towards the light and light soon found me. Squinting I heard whispers, which said that for me nothing is written. Indeed? I asked these whispers in a dreamy haze.

 

Ain Davar; I respond, it is good to die for your people’s final freedom. With nothing apparently written I seek to write for you my open soul and sincere convictions.”

 

She finishes yet another letter to him, seals it with blue wax and the seal of Dar Zion (House Zion) and goes to sleep in her suite at the Imperial Palace. Her father had called earlier from Switzerland to chastise her for dispatching Kahn so quickly. Her husband, a funny word as there’s was something of a desert marriage, had lay in her arms the night before. It didn’t need to be said, but she said it “don’t tempt god.” She was not much of a true believer.

But after all this war, she doubts he can know peace.

“God grant him all the fucking luck he ever needs,” she whispers.

And God says she will.

A man like him could never quit, never retire, a man like him was almost impossible to love. If Maya was the promised messiah she’d gambled high with the lives of the Ayitians. If Adon was a soldier; well most of his original army was dead and buried.

And what of Dr. Kay young Ms. Yelizaveta Kotlyarova, the third candidate from Sde Boker who also refused to die. Well she’d treat the patient and hold out while step by step her classmates moved to eradicate the disease.

 

That old epidemic called Raspizdia.

 

She finally, finally after all this fog and fire of war she cries. For her brave partisans and the terror unleashed now by what they’ve done and the future still being written by what the viewer and reader at home chose to do.

 

“Fight, fight, fight; night to day and day to night, the burden of survival is that one must continue to pray for the dead and fight like hell for the living,” and that was all she wrote.

 

 

Epilogue

 

 

 

“We really have to separate them completely. They do that every single drill,” notes Tiputti Capois in Ayitian Creole.

 

The steam from the bathes rolls throughout the cavernous bunker of the Sde Boker Medical Outpost, “the third temple” deep in the mountains of southern Ayiti. Flashing LED lights and the clamor of heart monitors alerts the medical support staff and doctors on call that the candidates are coming out of hibernation.

 

“She’s so angry. He’s too caught in foolish unquestioning love. It’s a terrible look for a candidate either way,” says Nikholai Trikhovitch groggily overcoming the prolonged sedation of his parasimmualtion. He is handed a smoked Baboncourt on the rocks.

 

He’d tipped 4,000 Goude (about one hundred old American USD) to make that happen expediently upon awakening against all medical advice.

 

Maya Solomon nods in relative agreement as she helps Nikh climb out of the chemical bath and into a soft grey robe. They’ve been in stasis for three long months. Even with the neurostimulants and calcium aggregators their muscles are very weak.

 

“You all set some new records in there,” notes Dr. Michelle Kaku sweetly in her best Ayitian Creole.

 

The caverns of “the third temple”, as the villagers above call it are massive. There is a veritable honey comb of medical stasis bathes installed in long rows. The set up allows parasimulations with up to 1,200 participants, although this round was only run with just eighty four candidates due to its projected mental toll and extended duration.

 

The Ayitian Emergency Medical Corps paramedics and nurses are running physical exams across the floor, helping the eighty eight candidates into recovery pods. Taking vitals, offering encouragement and passing out robes, and protein-mango smoothies. In the case of Nikholai Trikhovitch, getting himself another drink.

 

Standing before them is Instructor Coordinators Mikhail Mastrovitch and Abner Kreminizer as well as Commander Avinadav DeBuitléir himself. All men who never waste any time.

 

Avinadav addresses all assembled in the Third Temple.

 

“Everyone, everyone! Much congratulation is in order. This was one of the best simulation runs so far. We all fought like hell and it has made quite an impression on President Aristede, Defense Minister DeBuitléirs (his wife) and the Eighteenth Congress most generally. You gave us three months in real time, but I know to most of you it felt like ten whole vile years! We were going to cut it shorter, but the data was just too goddamn real, you’ve given us names, logistical hubs, bank out account numbers, predicative movements nuclear launch codes even digging into the minds of the enemy. So we’re all off, soon as you all are vetted to Port-Salud right after 48 hours of medical evaluation. You friends are going to get six months of R & R, right in time for Karnival Season. You performed very well this round brothers and sisters, we believe that now we have the elements in place to assure victory over the Oligarchy. The President himself thanks you for your trying and terrible commitment yet again to the people of Ayiti and surely the world at large. We’re going to put you up in some swanky safe houses and give you six whole months to get fat, tantric, tan and sated before we throw you back in the bathes again. The Command Orders have been issued by the Eighteenth Congress. Based on the data from this simulation, we are officially moving into Phase Four. If you agree to it and sign the new contracts you will be lithiated after your break and sent under again. To run the same scenario from the top. This time with no guns. No bullets. No weapons of any kind.”

 

Everyone in the bunker clamors with excitement and the room erupts in cheering and embrace. Phase Four is what they’ve been drilling and training for all this time, for nearly 300 years. The end of the world system and the defeat of the oligarchy.

 

“We’re going to let you play hard then we take it again from the top. After the successful completion of the Fourth Phase Trials the simulations are over and you will be carrying out the blue print of the New Social Gospel on the African Continent in real time. Real stakes. Real Victory. The Nation is rooting for you and so is the world.”

 

“It’s time to bring the revolution of 1804 to its final fruition. L’union fait la force!” bellows Avinadav DeBuitléir the founder of the Z.O.B. and a major leader of the militant human right movement.

Emma Solomon lights up a Noblisse Standard, knowing that the flesh is finite but her old soul is infinite.

 

L’ Union fait la force!” she yells and salutes the candidate fighters emerging from the bathes. A grand orgasmic battle cheer. And all jump to casual attention.

 

The end is pretty goddamn nigh.

 

Everyone is waiting for what Emma Solomon the Messiah is about to say.

 

“Death to the Oligarchy and long live humanity free,” she proclaims.

 

L’union fait la force!” we all bellow together. “Zealots over battalions, zealous over battles!!  MESIACHK! MAHDI! Power to humanity and defeat of the oligarchy!”.

 

“This is not a war to the death,” she declares, “and we are not prepared to die without our children being brought forth into first into Zion. The Oligarchs are scared, they know that we have magic, and weapons and outnumber them a seven billion to one. They know that the people are now awake. They know we have operating bases in every city, every village every plantation. They have brutalized our people, they have hit our families to defeat our will. What began on this island will soon be at the gates of London, Washington, Beijing and Moscow. The Vietnamese said they would fight generation by generation. Every effort on earth to genocide the Ayitians has failed. You my sisters and brothers will not have to wait a generation to see the liberation times. Its 5 minutes to nation time, their age is over. We have survived the night and will now hit them with everything we have in the morning.”

 

And such were the words of our G-ds chosen candidate to deliver us from the evil and greed of man.

And all in the bunker we break into Partisan song.

 

With over forty-five active violent conflicts raging across the earth; with many millions outright starving or dying of preventable disease, and over 3 billion human beings caught in varying degrees of wretched poverty at living on less than $2.50 a day we declare that “Northern” economic policy; NGO “development enterprises”, and multilateral conferences on broad based humanitarian goals have been a true and horrific failure.

 

In a most unreasonable framework, the former colonizers have dictated economic terms and trampled on our universal rights, which via so-called “aid” buttresses the most despicable regimes on the planet.  We believe that in every nation on earth there is a spirit of resistance growing stronger as the conditions resulting from rights violations grow more egregious by the day. We wish to enlist you in our movement as active partisans or sympathizers and thus may we all be networked in horizontal alliance to bolster our international efforts.

 

We ask you to join us in building Massive Capacity. That all communities should be trained to administer social services and possess needed skills and management systems to vastly increase their own agency and control their means of future development.

 

We ask you when necessary to wage all out resistance; that by any non-violent means necessary we will secure and advance universal human rights for all. That even though our nemesis is nasty, brutal and heavily armed we will demonstrate the futility of waging armed conflict. Regardless of the scale of atrocity perpetrated or the crimes against humanity unearthed.

 

We are advocating the full international coordination of a resistance movement within the mechanisms of the Development Enterprise into a fully mobilized and highly decentralized tactical alliance. We will ascribe a name to that movement in this pamphlet, but of course, a movement in the shadows has no agreed to name only a common cause.

 

For several hundred years, the vile forces moving against the will and interests of humanity have relied on their brute strength, overwhelming resources, savage barbarism and our disunity. Lacking good data and lines of communication most of the resistance had been cut off from each other until the advent of the internet in the end of the 20th century. We should not trust statistics and data collected by any apparatus of the oligarchy.  For all those reading this document. We must organize ourselves into a broad yet highly decentralized framework. This is not a revolution. We must examine the last three hundred years of freedom struggle and declare that we are holding on to besieged and tainted turf. The “nations” liberated in the last two hundred years have been quarantined, ghettoized and driven into proverbial bunkers of their imagined identity. The children of believers and populations they have “liberated” are in some of the darkest corners of the killing fields. They have no collective unity of theory or ideology, race identity or creed. The only thing these slivers of turf and those that govern them have in common is that they have temporarily delivered their population from occupation, subjugation or genocide often at the expense of normative civil and political rights. Some are far worse than others, some more reactionary some more progressive, some not even bound by territory. We must however reinforce them with every available tactic. They are not asking for reinforcements to hold their positions but it must be made clear that no regime, not a single government on this planet has will or intention to relinquish power once it is seized. Be clear that what was done to and inside France, Ayiti, Russia and China was the perversion of emancipatory revolt. Be clear that we are not in an ideological confrontation or a spiritual war.

 

We are engaged in a visceral battle against extinction.

 

We are offering to reinforce any position from a block to a barrio; from a village to a city; from rebel zones to quarantined states; to lonely outposts deep in the core nations being held in or outside the Parallel State.

 

For the Para State is not a specific place, nor is it the cumulative land mass liberated in years since some amongst our species came to believe that we were not born to be chattel slaves. It is also not some utopian ideal. It is the reclamation of both minds and spaces. More precisely, it is the creation of functional infrastructure and realization of human rights via mechanisms that unleash human capability. It is the maximization of life via the conquest of the means of development. It is the balance of the ecological, the economic and social spheres under a theory of abundance. It is a realization that we do not have to confront governments and topple states to enjoy our rights and freedom. There are ways to organize the good things of life without engaging the corrupt and self-serving architecture of the state system and those it serves.

We aim to bond our struggles and experiences with those of you and your compatriots who share an affinity with our cause. Our cause is full actualization of the universal human rights as a starting conversation in the dawn of a newly conceived epoch. Our mass capacity will now be unleashed.

 

We aim to marshal our detachments, utilize our networks, partisans and sympathizers; call upon our allied sister organizations working in direct coordination with yours to stage a rising the likes of which the oligarchs have never seen coming. We are calling not for an insurrection or a general strike; (at least not in historical terms) but instead the embrace of emancipatory development used towards a highly particular end.

 

Governments everywhere have justified themselves on our supposed nature; that we are supposedly savage, selfish and disorganized as a species. Under the auspices of our projected “nature” they have reduced us serfdom via a sophisticated management system this manuscript will outline. It is not our aim to engage the state system in warfare. That attempt has failed every single time it has been utilized in human history.

Our aim is to use the development technologies to sever unnecessary dependencies. Woman to man; subordinate worker to management; urban to rural; peripheral nation to core humanity to the oligarchy and the people to their governments. It is time to break bonds built to extract from us the enjoyment and goodness of life. They, and it surely is a ‘they’ that profit off of how the world is organized today; they gave us tools so we could be more productive serfs, subjects and consumers but we will train each other in the means of development and we will make them obsolete. We were all born into bondage but we will not die as their slaves.

 

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.

 

 

 

 

 

 

THE Oligarchy’s GLOBAL NETWORK

 

DYNASTIC FAMILIES AND INSTITUTIONS

EUROPEAN DYNASTIC FAMILIES

CHINESE PRINCLINGS

RUSSIAN & POST SOVIET OLIGARCHS

HOUSE OF WINDSOR (Great Britain)
NETHERLANDS
BELGIUM
LIECHTENSTEIN
LUXEMBOURG
SPAIN
DENMARK
NORWAY
SWEDEN
MONACO

INTERNATIONAL BANKING DYNASTIES

ROTHSCHILDS
ROCKEFELLERS
KUHN LOEB
WARBURG
LAZARD
LEHMAN
GOLDMAN SACHS
ISRAEL MOSES SEIF

 

INTERNATIONAL INVESTMENT BANKS

ROTHSCHILD BANK OF LONDON
ROTHSCHILD BANK OF BERLIN
WARBURG BANK OF HAMBURG
WARBURG BANK OF AMSTERDAM
LAZARD BROTHERS OF PARIS
ISRAEL MOSES SEIF BANK OF ITALY
KUHN LOEB BANK OF NEW YORK
GOLDMAN SACHS OF NEW YORK
J. P. MORGAN CHASE BANK OF NEW YORK
LEHMAN BROTHERS OF NEW YORK

 

THE CITY OF LONDON CORPORATION

THE “CROWN”, THE “CITY”, THE “SQUARE MILE”

THE VATICAN

THE VATICAN BANK

BANKS

CENTRAL BANKS

BANK OF INTERNATIONAL SETTLEMENTS
FEDERAL RESERVE
BANK OF ENGLAND
CENTRAL BANKS OF MOST NATIONS

 

GLOBAL BANKING CONGLOMERATES
THE 25 LARGEST BANKS

DEUTSCHE BANK
HSBC
BNP PARABIS
INDUSTRIAL AND COMMERCIAL BANK OF CHINA
MITUBISHI
CREDIT AGRICOLE
BARCLAYS GROUP
ROYAL BANK OF SCOTLAND
JPMORGAN CHASE
BANK OF AMERICA
CHINA CONSTRUCTION BANK
MIZUHO FINANCIAL GROUP
BANK OF CHINA
CITIGROUP
AGRICULTURAL BANK OF CHINA
ING GROUP
BANCO SANTANDER
SUMITOMO MITSUI FINANCIAL GROUP
SOCIETE GENERALE
UBS
LLOYDS BANKING GROUP
GROUP BCPE
WELLS FARGO
UNICREDIT
CREDIT SUISSE

 

CORPORATIONS & FINANCIAL INSTITUTIONS

TOP 50 TRANSNATIONAL CORPORATIONS AND BANKS WITH THE GREATEST GLOBAL IMPACT

1 – BARCLAYS PLC – GREAT BRITIAN
2 – CAPITAL GROUP COMPANIES INC. – UNITED STATES
3 – FMR CORP (Fidelity Management) – UNITED STATES
4 – AXA FR 6712 – SWITZERLAND
5 – STATE STREET CORPORATION – UNITED STATES
6 – JPMORGAN CHASE & CO. – UNITED STATES
7 – LEGAL & GENERAL GROUP PLC – GREAT BRITAIN
8 – VANGUARD GROUP, INC. – UNITED STATES
9- UBS AG – SWITZERLAND
10 – MERRILL LYNCH & CO., INC. – UNITED STATES
11 – WELLINGTON MANAGEMENT CO. L.L.P. – UNITED STATES
12 – DEUTSCHE BANK AG – GERMANY
13 – FRANKLIN RESOURCES, INC. – UNITED STATES
14 – CREDIT SUISSE GROUP – SWITZERLAND
15 – WALTON ENTERPRISES LLC – UNITED STATES
16 – BANK OF NEW YORK MELLON CORP. – UNITED STATES
17 – NATIXIS – FRANCE
18 – GOLDMAN SACHS GROUP, INC. – UNITED STATES
19 – T. ROWE PRICE GROUP, INC. – UNITED STATES
20- LEGG MASON, INC. – UNITED STATES
21 – MORGAN STANLEY – UNITED STATES
22 – MITSUBISHI UFJ FINANCIAL GROUP, INC. – JAPAN
23 – NORTHERN TRUST CORPORATION – UNITED STATES
24 – SOCIÉTÉ GÉNÉRALE – FRANCE
25 – BANK OF AMERICA CORPORATION – UNITED STATES
26 -LLOYDS TSB GROUP PLC – GREAT BRITAIN
27 – INVESCO PLC – GREAT BRITAIN
28 – ALLIANZ SE – GERMANY
29 – TIAA US 6601 – INDIA
30 – OLD MUTUAL PUBLIC LIMITED COMPANY – GREAT BRITAIN
31 – AVIVA PLC – GREAT BRITAIN
32 – SCHRODERS PLC – GREAT BRITIAN
33 – DODGE & COX – UNITED STATES
34 – LEHMAN BROTHERS HOLDINGS, INC. – UNITED STATES
35 – SUN LIFE FINANCIAL, INC. – CANADA
36 – STANDARD LIFE PLC – GREAT BRITAIN
37 – CNCE – FRANCE
38 – NOMURA HOLDINGS, INC. – JAPAN
39 – THE DEPOSITORY TRUST COMPANY – UNITED STATES
40 – MASSACHUSETTS MUTUAL LIFE INSUR. – UNITED STATES
41 – ING GROEP N.V. – NETHERLANDS
42 – BRANDES INVESTMENT PARTNERS, L.P. – UNITED STATES
43 – UNICREDITO ITALIANO SPA – ITALY
44 – DEPOSIT INSURANCE CORPORATION OF JP – JAPAN
45 – VERENIGING AEGON – NETHERLANDS
46 – BNP PARIBAS – FRANCE
47 – AFFILIATED MANAGERS GROUP, INC. – UNITED STATES
48 RESONA HOLDINGS, INC. – JAPAN
49 – CAPITAL GROUP INTERNATIONAL, INC. – UNITED STATES
50 – CHINA PETROCHEMICAL GROUP CO. – CHINA

 

MONEY LAUNDERING CORPORATIONS

HSBC
BANK OF AMERICA
JP MORGAN CHASE
CITIGROUP
WELLS FARGO
WESTERN UNION
AMERICAN EXPRESS

 

OIL CORPORATIONS

SHELL
CHEVRON
BRITISH PETROLEUM
EXXON

 

WEAPONS MANUFACTURERS

LOCKHEED MARTIN – USA
BAE SYSTEMS – BRITAIN
BOEING – USA
NORTHROP GRUMMAN – USA
GENERAL DYNAMICS – USA
RAYTHEON – USA

INSTITUTIONS, ORGANIZATIONS & JURISDICTIONS

SOCIETIES, CLUBS AND ORGANIZATIONS

UNITED NATIONS
WORLD TRADE ORGANIZATION (WTO)
WORLD BANK
INTERNATIONAL MONETARY FUND (IMF)
COUNCIL ON FOREIGN RELATIONS (CFR)
TRILATERAL COMMISSION (TC)
BILDERBERG GROUP
CHATHAM HOUSE / ROYAL INSTITUTE OF INTERNATIONAL AFFAIRS (RIIA)
CLUB OF THE ISLES
PILGRIMS SOCIETY
CLUB OF ROME

 

THINK TANKS

CENTER FOR STRATEGIC AND INTERNATIONAL STUDIES (CSIS)
BUSINESS ROUND TABLE
EUROPEAN ROUND TABLE OF INDUSTRIALISTS (ERT)
INTERNATIONAL CHAMBER OF COMMERCE (ICC)
WORLD ECONOMIC FORUM
WORLD BUSINESS COUNCIL FOR SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT (WBCSD)
BROOKINGS INSTITUTION
RAND CORPORATION
HERITAGE FOUNDATION
AMERICAN ENTERPRISE INSTITUTE

 

TAX-EXEMPT FOUNDATIONS

ROCKEFELLER FOUNDATION
FORD FOUNDATION
CARNEGIE ENDOWMENT
GATES FOUNDATION
SOROS OPEN SOCIETY FOUNDATION

 

TAX HAVENS, SECRECY JURISDICTIONS AND MONEY LAUNDERING CENTERS

HONG KONG

WALL STREET (NEW YORK CITY )
STATE OF DELAWARE

CITY OF LONDON

LUXEMBOURG
MONACO
SWITZERLAND
ANDORRA
LIECHTENSTEIN
CYPRUS

PANAMA

BAHRAIN
DUBAI

UNDER BRITISH CONTROL
ISLE OF MAN
ISLAND OF GUERNSEY
ISLAND OF JERSEY
BAHAMA ISLANDS
BRITISH VIRGIN ISLANDS
CAYMAN ISLANDS
BERMUDA ANGUILLA
ANTIGUA AND BARBUDA
BARBADOS
DOMINICA
GRENADA
ST. LUCIA
ST. VINCENT AND THE GRENADINES
ST. KITTS AND NEVIS
TURKS AND CAICOS ISLANDS
MONTSERRAT

UNDER NETHERLANDS CONTROL
ARUBA
BONAIRE
CURAÇAO

 

THE OLIGARCHY OWNS OUTRIGHT OR CONTROLS

CENTRAL BANKS
LARGEST PRIVATE BANKS
CORPORATE MEDIA (AND MUCH OF THE ALTERNATIVE AND PROGRESSIVE MEDIA)
MOST INLFUENTIAL TAX-EXEMPT FOUNDATIONS
MOST INFLUENTIAL THINK TANKS
MAJOR UNIVERSITIES AND OTHER EDUCATONAL INSTITUTIONS
LARGEST ENVIRONMENTAL ORGANIZATIONS
POLITICIANS AND POLITICAL PARTIES
NATIONAL ECONOMIES
NATIONAL CURRENCIES
MAJOR STOCK MARKETS
LARGEST TRANSNATIONAL CORPORATIONS
LARGEST INSURANCE CORPORATIONS
LARGEST PHARMACEUTICAL CORPORATIONS
LARGEST ENERGY CORPORATIONS
MAJOR ENERGY RESOURCES INCLUDING OIL AND GAS
GOLD, DIAMOND AND ESSENTIAL MINERAL MINING AND DISTRIBUTION CARTELS
AGRICULTURAL LAND
WATER AND WATER SYSTEMS
LARGEST WEAPONS MANUFACTURERS
DRUG-MONEY LAUNDERING NETWORKS
INTERNATIONAL DRUG TRAFFICKING NETWORKS
MAJOR ENVIRONMENTAL ORGANIZATIONS

 

 

 

 

Gotta catch them all.

http://www.friendsofthepeople.org

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Walter S Ⱥdler also called Zachariah by his friends and comrades in the resistance, when, one day dead; to his lovers, to his Wife and Children; his living children, his New York and EMS and Hebrew and Carribean and Post Soviet people, other people’s people, his brothers & his sisters, his comrades, the D/U, the Z.O.B. and the Banshee Otriad, Jah-Jah bless us all and keep us on the path of the righteous. We walk the Zion road. Thank you to Valenina Stanovova who pushed me to finally complete this five year undertaking.

 

http://www.waltadler.co

http://www.developmentunion.org

 

If you enjoyed this book; American Refugee is the Prequel, Anfom Frere is the story of our times in Haiti, Unlimited Operation is a book of poems for Russian women and this is Epoch tale of the Zionist War called the Great Revolt. My poltical writings are mostly aviailable on request as PDFs and white papers.

 

 

 

 

 

[1] Means gangster in Yiddish.

[2] The UN Military Occupation of Haiti since the 2004 Coup against President Aristede.

[3] Southern People’s Liberation Army, 12,000 mostly local Mullato fighters based in Montaigne Noire

[4] Gwoup Ayisyen Pou Ijans; 2,000 local men means Haitian Emergency Group, mostly previously medical.

[5] Hadar Column; 300 men, 300 deployed to Ayiti

[6] Saint Patrick’s Battalion; 1,200 men, 343 deployed to Ayiti

[7] http://www.un.org/en/universal-declaration-human-rights/ for their most basic list of demands.

[8] The hyper-organized collectives of hyper elites in each nation presiding over the World System economy and political process imposing their will on humankind and reducing us to slavery.

[9] Majik is a generic term for Eastern & Pagan sorcery of the Golden Age Old World, pre-1492.

[10] World’s last functional Communist nation.

[11] The year of the April 17th Warsaw Ghetto uprising against Nazidom.

[12] The New Social Gospel of Emma Solomon and the collective Ba’hai revelations.

[13] Where a Civil War in 1989-2000 resulted in a genocide over 300,000 people, largely targeting Muslim Albanians and Bosnians.

[14] Demons, or Djinn are both human and spirits, they are devils which feed on human discord and madness.

[15] Bulgarian national beer.

[16] Heroic revolutionary commander alongside the Castro brothers in the 1959 Cuban Revolution.

[17] A Ghost Shirt organization is a skeleton crew carrying out agitation propaganda bluffing its strength and actually quite miniscule forces. Ghost Shirt organizations are either carrying out a false flag for a larger, organized intelligence service or are acting out of scarcity and desperation.

[18] The Catholic time of giving up things to mourn the death of Jesus.

[19] The Old Spirits of Africa and Siberia. Also called the Lwa, not to be confused with Greco-Roman Pagan ‘Gods’.

[20] Two diseases manufactured by the Oligarchy to reduce the global number of Africans and Afro-Americans.

[21] Founder of the Black Panther Party for Self Defense

[22] A dance mostly from Jamaica and Trinidad where a woman backs it up and grinds her bumper all over a man’s business.

[23] Capital of Communist Vietnam, Cuba, China, Vietnam and Laos are the only four countries with a governing Communist Party, although really only Laos and Cuba are socialist countries economically speaking effective 2017.

[24] Angola fought a global proxy war on its territory that went on from 1975-2000, during this proxy war the Apartheid Regime of South Africa was defeated by the armed forces of Cuba in 1981.

[25] The two million plus person carnival which is about to trigger the Uprising, also called the Labor Day Parade, or the West Indian Day Parade.

[26] Gangster, or gangsta, or Shatah can mean many things but generally it means a tough guy character affiliated with some form of organized crime. In the case of Mickhi Dbrisk, he was a made man in the Jamaican Mafia, but relinquished his earning power to join the resistance and take on leadership of the Banshee Otriad, and subsequently the Z.O.B.

[27] This is the rowdy all night pregame party to the parade which normally claims the lives via gun murder of 5 to 10 people.

[28] A cell is tight, decentralized unit of 8-12 persons carrying out clandestine terror or guerrilla operations behind enemy lines usually in an urban environment.

[29] 3 million estimated person capital of Republic of Haiti.

[30] A psychiatric torture facility on the Upper East Side of Manhattan.

[31] Known for their acumen with moto vehicles, racing them and modifying them. Guyana is on the east coast of northern South America across from Trinidad. Guyana has been a long time base for resistance forces before and after the CIA massacre of the People’s Temple Agricultural Project training base as a “cult” in 1978.

[32] A good pistol according to Nicholai Trickovitch, Chief Logistics Officer of the Z.O.B. is either the Glock 19, the S&W 5946 or the Sig Sauer P226 DAO, as these are the three fire arms the NYPD carry.

[33] The highest and most defensible district on the Isle of Man.

[34] This national uprising was crushed completely with infiltration, batons and tear gas within the first three months.

[35] Where an NSA consultant made off with an enormous trove of intelligence data.

 [36] Hong Kong was territorially reabsorbed in 1997 into the PRC, but will retain financial linkages and independence until 2047.

[37] Jewish Oral History accompanying the Torah.

[38] In 1965 with logistical support from the CIA, the government of Indonesia brutally killed upwards of 500,000 people with explicit or inferred Communist beliefs. At the time the Communist Party of Indonesia was the third largest on earth, behind USSR and China.

[39] Separatist region of Northern Spain/ Southern France largely contained by the year 2010.

[40] The KGB’s successors are the secret police agency FSB (Federal Security Service of the Russian Federation) and the espionage agency SVR (Foreign Intelligence Service).

[41] The White Church is the broader derogatory name for clandestine secret societies embedded in the Catholic and Orthodox Churches linked to Crusading orders which plot the Jewish return to Israel, their obliteration and their perceived return of Jesus Christ, their perception of the Messiah.

[42] The Syrian Revolution/ Civil War broke out in 2011 and the largest concentration of rebel fighters were then holding the city of Aleppo. At the time until the inevitable bloody suppression of the Syrian revolt in 2016, we viewed some of the leftist factions as our allies in a parallel fight.

[43] A major street demarcating China Town from the Financial District.

[44] A training center for Paramedics, Radiology Techicians and Sonographers.

[45] A colleague in a political struggle, an antiquated term associated with the USSR. Tovarish, in Russian.

[46] A Muslim minority population of Southern Russia’s Caucus region associated with the criminality and terrorism of the 1994-2010 sepeartist war which killed somewhere near 270,000 Chechens.

[47] Russian Mafia term

[48] An elite Israeli Pararescueman unit called unit 669.

[49] Created by two Greek priests to teach the Russians the bible.

[50] Pro-Communist Russians, as opposed to White Russians which supported the Czar.

[51] Much feared head of the Bureau of Homeland Security, known for his personal rape and debauchery and atrocities against accused subversives.

[52] The Pharisees were a faction of the Jewish priestly class that killed Yeshua ben Yoef; Jesus.

[53][53][53] An enormous unmanned flying bomber and rocket drone the size of a stadium.

[54] How

[55] The Muslim messiah of the blood line of Muhammed.

[56] The Jewish messiah of the blood line of King David, tribe of Judah.

[57] MINUSTAH rapes children, kills protesters and is largely staffed by 12,000 regular troops from Brazil and Argentina the two favorite ironically Football teams of the occupied people.

[58] A compendium of Persian stories.

[59] 1st: Fighting 99th, 2nd; UHURU, 3rd; Muslim Brotherhood, 4th; IWW + CCP, 5th Party of G-d (Hezbollah), 6th; Satmar, 7th Irregular, 8th Conscripted, 9th Garveyites

[60] Infidel non-believers.

[61] Every Hebrew letter has a numerical value.

[62] Ocean Ave and Z; used to be called Romanoff.

[63][63]

[64] Comrade

[65] Famous painter.

[66] Leader of Hamas

[67] Western 1/3 of Palestinian territory; 1.3 million person cage.

[68] A city in Israel in rocket range of Gaza.

[69] Fucking Crazy in Yiddish

[70] Synthetic Chinese champagne.

[71] A derogatory word for Palestinians.

[72] Owner of Dutch Kills & Weather Up, two Banshee friendly haunts.

[73] A favorite Israeli export.

[74] Melting people in an acid bath is the preferred Chinese way to dispose of a body in an urban setting.  Hydrochloric acid is best.

[75] Chai Feldman advocates any country worried about invasion to have nuclear weapons.

[76] A notorious youth prison in the South Bronx, NY until 1999 when it was renamed Bridges Juvenile Center and 2011 when it was closed for a history of poor conditions and brutality against children of color.

[77] A gangster, one who shoots first.

[78] Means gangster in Yiddish.

[79] The UN Military Occupation of Haiti since the 2004 Coup against President Aristede.

[80] A company typically has 100 to 200 soldiers, and a battalion is a combat unit of 500 to 800 soldiers. Three to five battalions, approximately 1,500 to 4,000 soldiers, comprise a brigade. A division is a large military unit or formation, usually consisting of between 10,000 and 20,000 soldiers. In most armies, a division is composed of several regiments or brigades; in turn, several divisions typically make up a corps.

[81] What is Sodium Phosphate you ask? A simple improvised explosive device of thick white powder fog.

[82] Scalping takes longer and leaves for a variety of psychosocial problems. Hands allow for finger print ID, one finger is rarely enough to be certain.

[83] MINUSTAH is the UN lead military occupation that took over Haiti in 2004.

[84] LAVALAS is the largest pro-democratic, pro-socialist, pro-Cuban party in Haiti and the largest in general. It has been banned since 2004.

[85] Peacefaire is using non-lethal weapons for combat against armed actors violating human rights.

[86] Justice and Equality Movement (JEM) is a Arab Haitian movement to oppose the occupation lead by Arab Haitians in diaspora. It is the second largest opposition group to Lavalas.

[87] Gwoup Ayisien Pou Ijans G.A.I. Haitian Emergency Group (H.E.G.)

[88] Means little church, or the liberation theology church Socialism + Gospel = New Social Gospel

[89] The Army was restored in 2017 it’s acronym is FAF’D.

[90] Blowing up oil pipelines is one of the major tactics advocated in Adon’s guerrilla war guide The Encircling Game, available at http://www.developmentunion.org

[91] Called FAF’D

[92] Soviet era rockets that can be fired from metal tubes fastened to trucks. A Palestinian and Shi’a Lebanese favorite.

[93] Partizans typically focus on terror and infrastructure and are urban and forest, guerillas are more often combat troops utilizing deep jungle cover to attack troops. Almost synonyms.

[94] The French regular armt invded 4 months into the Liberation War on April 17th, 2019.

[95] Deragotory slur for Protestants.

[96] His father was Catholic, his mother was Protestant and both were lifelong Sein Feiners.

[97] JEM representing the Arabs, Lavalas repensting the poor blacks and SPLA repreenting the interests of the middle class Mulattos.

[98] An enoumous non lethal  shot gun cannon.

[99] Actor Sean Penn for whatever reason helped build and pay for one of the biggest concentration camps in Haiti post 2010 quake to clear a gold course for the Petionville elites.

[100] Notorious Killers with chapters in both CONGO DRC and Sudan.

[101] The colors of the Resistance are Black, Grey and Blue.

[102] I have no idea what a click is, probably a kilometer.

[103] A Column has less than 100 men typically.

[104] Lithium Salt is commonly used by people with bipolar disorder to stabilize their powers.

[105] Modified Soviet MiG fighters.

[106] Haitian voodoo music heavy with drums.

[107] Demilitarized Zone

[108] Yiddish for, “my boy-brother”

[109] Helicopter based flight medic evacuation.

[110] The NYPD had before being disbanded in 2015 an arsenal bigger than 144 developing national militaries.

[111] Raping hookers and escorts by a pool.

[112] This is what DSK and the President of Italy & Prime Minister of Italy call Bunga Bunga.

[113] Bombed in 2019.

[114] War between the E.U. and Russian Federation resumed in 2012.

[115] Voodoo symbol

[116] Seaweed algae food mix for the ultra poor.

[117] Grozny is the Capital of Chechnya, the southernmost state of the Russian Federation which attempted to separate in 1994. Between 1994-2010, over 270,000 people lost their lives and Grozny was twice raised to the ground.

[118] A Thief in Law, or the Russian mafias word for boss.

 

 

American Refugee

This is my first book, the entire manuscript in its current edition. It is the prequel to Fire on the Mountain, the story of the birth of the Resistance in Israel (Z.O.B.) and largely based on the real event of life between 1998-2001.

If you’d like to purchase a hardcopy you can get one at ZOB.PRESS@gmail.com

 

 

 

“If you remember nothing of my story throughout the long night with no sleep, remember this Trikhovitch. If there are but two people sitting in a dimly lit room, their minds bent on hatching conspiracy and composing freedom songs, then no one can turn and say humanity is sick, humanity is evil, selfish and cruel. If no one can see it, God can. IT sees everything at once. Look there! Humanity has not made itself a total cowardly, traitorous whore. There are two. And two who love knowledge, love freedom and would offer themselves in sacrifice for a broken junkie, an orphan, the poor and the enslaved. These two can light a fire. These two can organize a million to teach, to heal, to fight. We will make our stand right here in the city of our birth. For those who love freedom, even two can beat their drums and use their words like artillery.”

This is a book about American Dreams & Nightmares; about growing up on the top of the Mountain; about how a former stripper, a black Israelite, a Russian orphan, some ghetto youth and a street painter planned to launch an uprising in the Jewish military colony. This is how the Resistance in Israel was born.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

American

Refugee

 

 

 

 

The First Play by

Adler S Walt

 

Manuscript completed on 12 August 2004.

Consolidated 10 December 2014.

Dedicated to Joanna Kocab,

As to relate the events that occurred immediately before we met.

 

 

 

 

 

 

PROLOGUE

 

 

 

8 November 2001

 

 

 

They are sitting quietly in a Haifa hills café that is small and dimly lit. The last light of day falls softly on the Carmel. A fleeting splendor ripples over the harbor bay.

 

The boy is too thin to look American. His eyes have a lean and hungry look and are bad eyed and deeply sunken. They are filled with hate.  His clothing is worn and torn. He might even be mistaken for a Russian street kid. The dirty gray corduroy cap on his head is encrusted with sand and sweat. It conceals his natty brown hair and gives him the appearance of a child like Che Guevara, perhaps in his own mind alone. The loose, blue pin-stripe suit he wears had been kosher cut in Golder’s Green, but is now a patchwork of torn threads and desert dust. He removes a crumpled green pack of Noblisse cigarettes from the inner pocket, puts one in his mouth and lights it. He takes long drags.

 

Like he’s learned to smoke by imitating some noire movie detective.

 

It looks as though he might cry out at any moment, or lash out across the table throttling the chubby preacher with his bare hands. If he lets down his guard down long enough though, he might have to admit defeat.

 

Occasionally the boy looks up to stare across the table at the man who is so determined to save him.  This true Christian soldier has a cherub-like face even though he is in his forties and sports a brown scraggly beard. The chubby man is a proselytizer disguised as a tour guide.  The man is uncertain whether this meeting will lead to more violent outbursts. His last encounter with this boy in Jerusalem was a debacle. The man says a quick prayer and begins to talk in his soft Midwestern drawl.

 

“I’m sorry,” the preacher says.

 

The boy looks up. His response is steady and calculated despite his condition.

 

“They fucked her within an inch of her life before they killed her. They ripped her to shreds. The body was cut into pieces and they dumped her along the southern highway as if they knew there wasn’t even any use in covering the thing up. Where was the man Jesus then? What do you know of good hard pain?”

 

It is a sharp and biting response. There is a quick pause and the flash of yet another silent prayer as the fat man’s eyes dart up.

 

“I know plenty about plenty. Do you remember what I said that first evening we met Sebastian?”

The boy’s eyes focus intently. He is uncomfortable with anyone using his real name. No one has used his real name for a long time. Suddenly there is some frustration in his voice.

“Why do you insist on calling me that?”

 

“Because it is your name.”

 

“My name is Zachariah Artstien.”

 

The preacher give him a ‘boy don’t talk crazy’ look.

 

“Your name is Sebastian.”

 

“Bu there is no such a person anymore. If you wish to carry on this conversation you will not refer to me by the name of a man who is rotting in the ground,” he responds sharply.

 

“You know I don’t like to humor your devils.”

 

“You know I do not like to humor your just about anything,” the boy retorts. “You cannot save me. I don’t believe in your religion. You are wasting your time on me, yet again.”

 

“Please calm down, Sebastian.”

 

The boy gets up to leave.

 

“Sit down!”

 

There is authority in the man’s voice for the first time.

 

“I told you the first time we met that I saw a well of pain in your eyes that was so deep that you might drown in your own sorrow. The night we met I laid awake praying for hours in the hope that you might find peace.”

 

“Redemption being some man called Jesus of Nazareth, of course. Shut the fuck up.”

 

“Could you please stop?”

 

He looks like the kind of person who says ‘darnit.’

 

“What do you really know about me? About this Sebastian you’re trying so hard to save? I grow very tired of people these days. Especially those with penchants for doing the Lord’s work through lost children.  There is nothing you can say to me to make me forget everything that has happened.”

 

“You can forget the past, Sebastian. Even the immediate past.”

 

“Well thank you, you quintessential, self-helping faith healer!”

 

“I killed two people last night.”

The preacher stares into him and knows that cannot possibly be true.

It’s not in the prophesy.

 

“Not everything you saw actually happened to you. You are not a corpse, but you have allowed hateful demons to possess your body and speak on your behalf. It is time to go home!”

 

“My home is a place near two flaming towers where men of finance sacrificed three thousand of my former country men to their false god and those that rule this country collaborated with them!”

 

His words sear the man’s heart as he continues.

 

“Thank you for telling me what everyone always tells me, just in case I had forgotten the misery and grind of things since yesterday? Perhaps another brilliant cliché is in order like ‘be myself?’  Or forgive my enemies perhaps! I’ve been trying. I swear I have. In all honesty I think your coming here was a waste of both of our time. I have no home at all.”

 

The man’s tone changes.

 

“I figure you tell lots of tales. Throw around theology at people and radical rhetoric. You’d tell your secrets to any stranger who’d care to listen if you thought it would teach them something. But that doesn’t make your secrets true.”

 

“I don’t follow you.”

 

“How many people speak out of your mouth boy? Who’s that imaginary friend whispering in your ear? It’s gotten worse since you arrived here in the land hasn’t it? Can you tell anymore who is talking, you or the devils?”

 

“Don’t worry your neurons. So what’s the moral, Brent Avery? The take away?”

 

“What I want you to do is to tell me how you came to be the way you are without Zachariah doing the story-telling. Why are you so angry at your tribe and country of birth, the world in general and even God himself? ”

 

“You would never understand that story, Brent. It isn’t set in places where the wind blows lightly on the plain.”

 

“Try me then, boy. Believe it or not we’re not so different. God cries for all of us.”

 

“Oh really!?  I don’t believe that for a second. He spits on us with his indifference! I doubt that there are two people who could be more different than you and I. You have your Lord, your God. You serve him blindly like a sheep. My only higher power is the coming revolt. I will get what I contribute.”

“They are one and the same these higher powers you speak of.”

 

“Really, Brent Avery? Do you think I believe that?”

 

“No. I don’t think you don’t know what you believe in anymore. Other than in the hate that never leaves you, other than the demons whispering inside you to pick up arms and kill without compunction for cause.”

 

The thin boy smiles with a shit eating, devilish grin.

 

“At least I can believe in my hate. But if faith is what governs us–you in your God, and me in the coming revolution–what makes you think we should see eye to eye on anything? You play the preacher pray boy and I’ll play the rebel with righteous cause.”

 

“You should confide in me because we all have nightmares about the things we can’t control. Your demons have taken their toll, Sebastian Adon. An ocean, a new name and some ten thousand miles later ain’t improved your sleep, boy. Is that truth?”

 

The coffee shop has all but emptied out, still the boy doesn’t answer. The Arab Christian is keeping it open for the sole prospect of what these Americans might buy. He will stay open all night as long as they keep drinking and eating things. The Carmel is sometimes slow on a Tuesday night. Especially since the uprising began.

 

“You want to hear a yarn?” the boy asks.

 

“I want to hear a true story.”

 

“There’s no such thing as a true, Brent. There’s only the mostly true, the heartfelt and remembered past. It’s a long story. It goes well with vodka and cigarettes.”

 

“We’ve got all night, but you’ll have to settle for coffee. I’m not much of a drinking man. I’ve come a very long way to get you home and I don’t have anywhere else I’d rather be.”

 

“Well, let us all hope this Arab can tolerate the sound of English and take mental notes. It begins with the tale of a rude boy on the last days of summer. It ends with a hooker beaten half to death on a lonely desert high way. A black man hanging from a tree and an early deportation. And we know exactly who brought the towers down, and more importantly why.”

 

Tough talk from a seventeen year old.

 

But the boy is still just a walking corpse with a demon inside him and the if the lord works in mysterious ways maybe Avery can him back to Babylon before someone, something or even himself will cut the story short, or worse change the underlying narrative. Take a boy meets girl, meets some Negro revolutionaries and twist it until you don’t even care who lives and who dies.

 

 

 

 

 

PART ONE:

Concrete Jungle

 

 

 

 

1

 

 

My oh my.

 

Tickle me Tamerlane. I wish I were part of a religion important enough to have my God housed in that thing, thinks the pilgrim as he looks up at the sprawling temple complex on the mount in this little desert town.

 

This is the Pale City in the badlands.

 

The streets are dark. An eerie twilight dances upon the cobblestones and the happy laugh of children is missing. The pilgrim senses that this place is just no good. There is no moon and someone has turned off the stars. He has been here many times before. He has wandered these cobblestone streets lost while searching, drinking deeply from the puddles of his own soul. Time has no meaning here. There are only the ghosts and the growing darkness surrounded by an endless desert of the mind. Each time he returns to bow down and to venture towards the light glimmering in the darkness. He is no longer sure this light even exists. Behind every locked door is some route to the horror freak-show of his subconscious, some lurking subterranean display of rape or torture. The place is good at making a religion out of violence.

 

The pilgrim passes by a towering Ferris wheel at the town wall; a Bregna barrier, an apartheid separation wall made of pyramid bricks and barbwire. The wheel sits in a thorn garden. Its operator is a hideous harlequin whose face is painted white, red, and black and who laughs like a mad man carries himself like a pederast.

 

There is no way out.

Every night the pilgrim returns to this personal hell, this Pale City in the desert, this home of perpetual blackness. His pilgrimage begins anytime he goes to sleep causing him to return to pay homage over and over again, to bear witness to hell as he understands it.

 

Tonight there is a great commotion coupled with alarm. The town’s transient population waits on the central square called umslagplatz. Their faces are twisted in grimaces too close to death to be truly alive.  Everything appears grainy, toned in black, white and gray scale unless it needs to bleed. Then it is the color of bright red arterial blood, like a 1970’s B movie grindhouse.

The temple looks like a cross between the Hagia Sophia and the Luna Park housing projects, or maybe the Alhambra mixed with Astroland in its heyday. Robed clerics on the balconies of the temple drone out prayers from behind their grey hooded robes. One can never see their faces, accuse them of their crimes. The holy men are never from the pilgrim’s tribe.

 

A tall and twisted tree stands in the center of the square, bulus and ghatly.  It looks like the last standing cherry tree in the parking lot at Chernobyl. It has flowers, but not the kind you would give a loved one. The pilgrim knows what is to come for he has read about it in a banned book called the New Testament. You can’t get a good translation of it within ten thousand miles of Brooklyn.

But most versions agree on one detail at least. When the messiah came back, well the forces of evil got him, got him good.

 

An illiterate and rowdy mob has assembled around the main square. A large garrison of foreign troops forms ranks and bars all the entrances and exits. A big black man crowned in barbed wire, already beaten nearly to death, is being dragged through the streets as the people pelt him with rocks and garbage screaming for his blood. The crowd exists as a single entity, a twisted sweating creature of manipulated rage. The black man carries a long wooden board over his muscular African shoulders. Grisly avulsions run down his back. His blood and sweat only lubricates the mob’s resolve to hurt him further. It emboldens them.  Many would have begged for mercy or made an indignant show of fortitude toward their captors but this man simply marches along with a sad look in his grey eyes. His humility makes them hate him even more.

 

The pilgrim is watching the spectacle from his hiding place in a bombed out café at the edge of the square. He is too scared to get much closer. Finally, the man is lifted by the mob onto the tree. The beam is fastened. They begin nailing his hands to the ends of the board. Then they nail his feet with one great big rail spike right into the tree. Two more pitiful figures, some alleged criminal that the pilgrim didn’t know and some revolutionist are fastened next to this dying rebel. Their bodies form a triangle above the base of this crucifixion tree.  The mob is cheering with an orgiastic glee, dancing about the tree. Soon they begin fucking each other right there on the square.

 

The pilgrim shudders. He is only thirteen and can’t speak the language much less really protect himself from that mob. He uses a pair of binoculars to look up from behind the counter of the derelict cafe into the eyes of the man. There is no fear or agony on the man’s face, simply the grim realization that he has failed in his mission. The black rebel spasms and coughs up blood as life drains out of him.

A soldier stabs him with a bayonet to seal the deed.

 

A young girl in a dirty white dress is hiding in the bombed out café also. She is only sixteen or seventeen and pregnant. She could be Arab or Puerto Rican but passes for blan. She has red hair like Jessica Rabbit, bright died red hair. She is sobbing quietly. Her hair is tied in the light grey wrap that pilgrim women wear.

 

She whispers accusingly, “Collaborator.”

 

 

The alarm rings. It’s an air raid siren blaring the pilgrim out of slumber.

 

 

 

 

I wake up quickly in a pool of sweat. I nearly fall out of the bed that is a raised bunk bed with my desk underneath. It has been another in a string of nightmares. They all started sometime in 1997.  I never remember most of the details, only the horror.

 

It is 6:15 am on a Monday morning of a new school year. I live at Waterside Plaza on the island fortress of Manhattan. My school is an hour north by subway in what some call the Boogie down, but what I call the fucking Bronx.

 

It is time to go to school.

 

My name is Sebastian Adon. Believe as much or as little as you hear about me. That goes for the things I tell you about myself as well.

 

The mind works in cycles and patterns, innate behavioral conditioning brought about through external governing factors that mold response and reaction. How strong or beautiful a person appears is genetic, but that the mind is a clean slate, a great evolving tapestry, a mostly unused muscle. With discipline, this muscle can be harnessed to radically affect a person’s surroundings, sense of time and ultimately, the character of an individual’s life. The mind is a beautiful piece of organic clockwork that we are largely unable to understand, regulate or control.

 

I’m sure that I’m not using more than 8% of my brain, but like all things that will change.

 

I get up quickly and shower. I jerk off in the shower thinking about my dick with two chicks–one Black-Irish, one Asian. I towel off. I dress in whatever is lying about. Some days I undress again when the socially conscious part of my brain realizes my threads look ridiculous.  I run back to the bathroom. I throw Queen Helene, that thick mix of hardening green goop, into my hair, slick it back, spike it and sculpt the devil horns that swoop and curl. I use Scope instead of brushing my teeth because it is quicker. If I’m late the teacher will make me sit in the corner.

 

I run down the stairs and drop by the steel shutter coffee stand to wait in line for my morning fix of that nasty, bitter stimulant that will keep me awake long enough to do last night’s homework on the train.

 

It is “essential” that this work be completed, because it is essential that one finishes high school. That’s the place you memorize facts you do not need to know in pursuit of a so-called “body of knowledge” necessary to be considered a civilized member of Western society. This is nation-biased bullshit that paints our consumer-frenzied culture as truth and light to the brown barbarians.  But learn it you shall, for college is only four years away. There you will be further tuned and refined into a cog, screw or girder in mainstream society. Eventually you will choose a career you hate, making enough money to one day join that promised upper middle class bracket of the American socio-economic stratosphere. You will marry, have 2.3 kids and move to the dream home in the suburbs. You will go on vacations to places with beaches or European cities you can’t quite pronounce and hopefully sip fancy drinks. Your children will grow up to be accountants, doctors and lawyers if you’re a Jew or athletes, musicians, or entrepreneurs if you’re black.

But the main goal is to get rich. This is the American Dream.

 

I board the uptown #6 train on 34th Street and transfer at 42nd to the #4 Bronx-bound uptown express. The train is packed like a fetid Polish cattle car, a sea of inter-tangled flesh, crammed into a metal can and shipped to its respective destination.  People push and shove, fighting over every inch of cubic space. The heat is unbearable. The stale air is cross-pollinated with the odors of aftershave, raw armpits and cheap cologne.

 

Right now all I am thinking about is the history homework I didn’t do, the sleep I didn’t get and the utter monotony of the life I am currently leading. The roar of the train car through the underground tunnels is deafening. People peer through the glass divider giving me annoyed looks as I finish off my cigarette. I once read a story about a boy who was thrown to his death from the train while riding between cars as the train made a sharp turn. I am sure these rumors are propagated by the old to make the young less daring. Wouldn’t want to be fucking statistic!

 

I arrive at the Bedford Boulevard station at 8:30 am.  It’s the second to the last northbound stop on the #4 train. I’m fifteen minutes late. It will take another five to ten minutes to cross Bedford Park Boulevard and Harris Field and smoke another stoag.

 

My school is the Bronx High School of Science. I have been going here for two weeks. I spent the nine years of elementary and middle school at the private United Nation’s International School.  But it was pure luck that I tested into this school a month before UNIS suspended, then expelled me.

 

Bronx Science is a magnet school. The school draws its roughly 2,400 students from throughout New York City. Like many other New York City Public magnet schools, the classes are over-packed and the kids are largely middle class. Unlike almost all other New York City public schools, Bronx Science will, in theory, get you into a good college. I took the admissions test back in 8th grade.  I got in by a single point.

 

I am walking through Harris Field, the dilapidated expanse of gnarled-down lawn that is a massive sports field where teenagers smoke pot. This morning students are clustered across the field indulging in the morning reefer madness amid patches of dying grass. There’s no cover, just gonna-see-the-law-coming-from-a mile-away cover. A part of me notices that it isn’t even 9, so what is there to celebrate? Maybe they have first period off because they commute from Staten Island, but they’re probably cutting. Maybe they just like the green.

 

The school is a T-shaped, red brick building that is three stories high. The object is not to learn, but to absorb it sometimes seems.

 

There are exceptions. My first period teacher, the one who is about to put me in the corner, is rather on point. His name is Dr. Maskin. He wears real tight pants and has crazy person eyes. I keep falling asleep in his class, even if it ain’t so boring.

 

I run up the down staircase as I rush toward Dr. Maskin’s first period global history class. I dash past a group of Asian schoolgirls sitting in the corridor talking. They are legion at this school.  My homework is only half-finished. I will most definitely be placed in the corner. My only hope is that he will have checked the work already. There’s a slim chance. I have another worry as well. I push open the door.

 

“Good of you to join us, Mr. Adon,” he says sharply. “Your presence and your homework were greatly missed.”

 

“Sorry, sir.”

 

“Quite alright, Mr. Adon. Your homework please.”

 

Dog ate it, I think to say but mostly give him a stupid look like it was news to me we had any. It was me or the dog.

 

The class is staring at me. I look for the sympathetic eyes of Case Yadger, another sometimes denizen of the corner. I see him smirking in the back of the classroom, his blue baseball cap pulled tightly over his brow. Also smirking is Tamar Dreyfus; the Greek-Jew girlfriend of my latest friend Donny Gold.

 

“Sit in the corner. You’re late and unprepared.”

 

“Yes, sir.”

 

“Stop calling me sir.”

 

“Yes, Dr. Maskin.”

 

The theme of today’s class has something to do with cavemen and fences. My eyes feel heavy. Sleep begins creeping into my mind. The room periodically blinks out of existence. The class drones on. Reality melts away. I slump over at my desk. The room fades to gray. I fight it but just can’t win.

All I see is the great desert expanse and the Pale City, dimly lit in the never-ending twilight of my mind. I’m on the tree. My hands are nailed to the branches. I look to my side at the Black man nailed next to me. He eyes pop open and his head swings in my direction. Although his mouth never opens I can hear his thoughts in my head.

“Collaborator, do you see it?” he questions me in rasps.

 

I awake with a sudden start. I have fallen asleep at the wheel once again,  with too many witnesses.

“Mr. Adon, perhaps you could give us some insight into this subject,” says Dr. Maskin smugly. I have been caught sleeping in class yet again.

 

“I can tell that you are particularly enthralled by the discussion and won’t hesitate to add some of your own vast wisdom to our dialogue.”

 

The class bursts out in faggot chuckles.

 

“Well, I suppose I could repeat the question for you, Mr. Adon. I know a mind like yours requires periods of, thoughtful hibernation.”

 

“Yes sir, it certainly does,” I respond to the amusement of my peers.

 

“We were discussing early human socio-economic development, Mr. Adon. As you know from last night’s reading, which I am sure you read in depth, hunter-gatherer societies evolved into the classic city-states of antiquity. We are now debating how.”

 

“Well, um. I suppose when the rich folks started building fences around their homes and telling all the little brown people what to do, tricking um like to relinquish control over property that nobody really owned.”

 

Dr. Maskin looks vaguely intrigued.
“So, like, society evolved from a concept of ownership and property, a mass theft really. Hunter-gatherers did not understand the concept of property. But it was this concept that created the early foundations of the city-state. The moment the biggest, toughest caveman built a fence and declared that the land inside was his, modern society was born.”

 

“Once again, ladies and gentlemen, the young philosopher king redeems himself. He may pass this class, yet. You may return to half salute slumber, Mr. Adon.

 

I lean back in the chair with a smug grin.

Only seven more periods to go.

I hate school. If there weren’t girls here I wouldn’t probably even show up.

 

 

 

2

 

 

If you’re outside of school and it’s not a free period and you don’t have an ID or a silver tongue, the pigs are going to nab you for truancy and ship you halfway across the Bronx for truancy violation and leave yer ass at Lincoln High School where all the Ghetto trash go. Screw that noise. School gets out at 3:15 pm.  That’s when it’s safe to move about the periphery.

 

It’s 4:30 pm and I’m good and clear of the mostly brown borough. I am sitting in the park on 53rd Street and East End Avenue smoking weed with Donny Gold. The sky is pale and the light is fading. The cars zooming past on the underpass below us race quickly home, carrying the beaten-down dregs back to their telescreens and TV dinners.

 

We have a latest tradition. Every day after school Case, Donny, and I meet up to shoot the shit and harass pedestrians on the Upper East Side. I have known these two for about a week. We met in my homeroom class. Donny and Case used to go to Wagner Junior High School, a public middle school in Manhattan. They are both nice Jewish boys from nice Jewish families, solid upper middle class Americans, like me. Donny loves to smoke pot. I have never met a person who smokes as much pot as Donny Gold. He smokes pot before school. He smokes pot during school, right before math class to be precise. He smokes when he gets home and he smokes before he goes to sleep. Case on the other hand doesn’t smoke at all, doesn’t do anything for him spiritually I guess.

 

Donny and I light our cigarettes from my silver plated Zippo lighter and watch the traffic on the underpass expressway. It was this same Zippo that got me started smoking in the first place. I had seen people with them in the movies and had always thought they were really cool. I used to ask my parents for one all the time, but they always said that it would get me to start smoking. All the girls in junior high smoked. I justified that if I had a Zippo, I could light their cigarettes and be a cool guy. A month later I was smoking stoags. I never liked the way they tasted. I always knew how bad they were. But I wanted to look cool just like everyone else. There was a big uproar about the Marlboro Man and Joe Camel. The media said they were marketing smokes to kids. That shit never got to me. I blame junior high school girls. I man I was just trying to get laid like everybody else.

 

Donny cracks the paper of the blunt as the light dims over the river, empties the guts onto the ground, and hands me the outer paper to steam. Then he produces a dime bag and puts its contents into a hollowed out, cheap cigar.

 

Donny starts smoking the blunt.

 

“You really hassle Maskin man, I sometimes wonder how you ever made it through middle school” says Case.

 

“I didn’t,” I respond, “my ass got kicked out. But dude, what did we ever learn in grade school that was worthwhile anyway besides the moral quandaries of celebrating Thanksgiving?”

 

“I mean, if ya think about it,” I begin again, “We just spent eight years learning things that were pretty simplistic retarded. And now, in high school, we are learning that half of what we learned before was just, well simple lies. Like how Columbus didn’t actually discover America and like how Lincoln didn’t want to free the slaves.”

 

“That stupid ‘ish.”

 

“If you hate learning so much, why even go to school?” asks Case.

 

“I don’t hate learning. I just hate school.”

 

“Same shit. You learn in a school.”

 

“No not really. That school hones us into becoming pliant sheep with credit cards.”

 

“Young people won’t just educate themselves,” says Case, “Just look at Donny, he’d need an electric GPS collar and piss test to make it out of high school kid.”

 

“Fuck you, Case, I’m like the brilliant undercover scientist, the genius’ist person you’ll ‘eva know son” sputters out Donny, coughing on pot smoke.

 

Then the blunt is finished and then there’s nothing left to say.

 

 

3

 

 

Six or seven hours later we are beginning’ to gather on the south side of Union Square around 7:30 eve. Most of my crew went to a public junior high school called Wagner. Donny and Case had introduced me to the bulk of their elementary school friends. Most of them live on the Upper West Side. It is an area of the City I have never been to prior to coming to high school.

 

I walk over to Donny through this mob of kids ready to go drinking. There are about twenty of us Bronx Science kids. They brought friends from other schools like Lab, Beacon and UNIS. Donny and I had gone to the Upper West Side after school to pick up our share of the alcohol. There is a deli on 84th and Amsterdam that has been selling to the Wagner kids for years. They don’t card for shit, which is rare during the Mayor Giuliani years. No immigrant Arab or Korean businessman ever takes the risk unless they know the kids. There are two Red Dog 40s and a Woodchuck 32 in my backpack. I have never drunk a 40 before, Donny put me on. They are huge and dirt-cheap. I love it, early 90’s hip hop bearing influence on the rich white kids firmly and finally.

 

I look at the faces of my two-week-new friends.

 

Daliah is thin, chesty and Dominican, a bit outspoken. Geanie Goto is half-Japanese, half-freckled, maybe Irish. Michelle is half-Japanese, half-Chinese. Her father is a famous theoretical physicist. Cute girls have cute girl friends. And Michelle has dragged out a handful of Lab school cuties. Tamar is Donny’s Greek girlfriend, Brandy is the only black girl in the clique. And there’s Lisa, and Nona and Elle and Dora and a bunch of other shorties.

 

The guys in this crew are some real solid, young motherfuckers. A lot all some type of Jew. I have brought along my little brother Benjamin to teach him the ways of it, even though he is only 12. My guy Donny Gold skates like a madman, smokes three blunts a day and never takes off the blue FR hat, cuts class incessantly. Case Yadger is a smart-ass joker who drinks like a fish, but won’t smoke anything. I like to go over to his massive crib in on 53rd Street and box with his older brother. Donny and Case are both third-generation Russian Jews. Nike Brickman is half-Indian, half-Hebrew but looks a little Latin. His father, a venture capitalist, is arranging to sell the Chinese Government a laser that destroys nuclear weapons. His mother is currently estranged from his father and is seeking a divorce. Nike’s only brother Christopher is a savant pianist who used to bang out Paris Hilton so the rumor goes. There’s Saul Metternich, who looks like a grunge skater with a worn red baseball cap and Isaac Zucker who we all call Crack. Both of them are Yids as well, but don’t look like it. Olu Okonkwo is a quiet and stuttering Nigerian with a White mother. He is the whitest Black man on earth and lives at Waterside. People call him an Oreo Cookie, which is crueler than it sounds. There’s Max Pomegranate who was in this movie ‘Searching for some fucking chess player’, his whole fucking family was once wiped out by the Nat’zis. Rammy Detroit is the one wasp, a diesel motherfucker. Hubert O’Domhnaill  is the only Catholic, and my Catholic I mean red head freckled, brolic rude boy Mic.

 

My best dude Julius Zarr from my UNIS days is half-Lebanese, half-Italian. He lives in Stuy Town. He taught me about Ska music, how to grind, how to pick up girls, where to cop drugs and using lies on the authorities. He taught me how to fight dirty.

 

That then is the composition of said convoy and crew, an irregular underage drinking brigade.

 

I can see my little brother Benjamin in the crowd just ahead of me, young and innocent; sort of. He came with some little up-and-coming thug from his new public school. I heard the kid going on to my brother about the Kings. I am half worried about why he is around such delinquent company, not that I particularly know what a King is. Some spic gang.

 

My mind is drifting little as we wander East to the river and the Murphy Park.

 

Murphy Park is well situated between Stuy Town, the Power Plant and the FDR drive. It is secluded enough for drinking outside, weather permitting. There is one gate in and out of Murphy Park. This presents a bit of a problem should an elderly woman living on the fourth floor of the Peter Cooper housing development decide to call the police because there are drunk and rowdy teenagers partying a little too hard in the adjacent park.

We are sitting on the bleachers overlooking the field smoking a poorly wrapped blunt. Donny passes it my way. The weed comes from a dealer called Culture. We page said dealer and wait for a callback. He tells us to wait about an hour, which really means two or more. He shows up in some piece-of-shit car and one of us goes for a ride. He has twenties and fifties. We know he sells in greater quantity and quality, but this is all he will offer to people of our age and rep. There is another dealer named Cartoon Network that only sells 50s and up for higher prices than most of us can swing. And you need a buyer reference.

I am nursing my second 40. We kids mingle and drink, try and hook up. I leave the ciphe to talk to Michelle Tagomi, the cute ass half Chinese half Japanese girl, with the genius father from Socialist talk radio, from my bio class. Girl is fly.

 

We didn’t hear the sirens until they were two blocks away. People started running from all corners of the park toward the main gate. I am still on the bleachers with Michelle. My brother and Donny run up to ask what the plan is. It’s run like hell. I fuckin’ hate law men.

 

“Split into two groups and meet up near Union Square,” someone yells like we’re in B Double D horror movie.

 

Everyone is clutter-fucked at the gate unsure of where to flee. Forties are hastily emptied onto the ground, lobbed into the bushes. People split into two groups and rush off thinking two parties in an unfamiliar turf is somehow logical.

 

 

My group contains most of the males in the crew. The other group is substantially smaller than ours. As the sirens get louder, we take off in separate directions.

 

Everybody takes off hap hazard in two groups. Were there really even cops coming?

 

After smoking two blunts and polishing off our forties in that second PJ park, we head west on 14th Street. Max P. goes into the Ray’s Pizza on the corner of Avenue A and 14th Street to get a slice. The rest of us are waiting outside, high out of our minds. Except for me. I am just really drunk, puffing slowly on a Philly, feeling pretty slick smoking the world’s cheapest cigar.

 

A kid in a red Jordan jersey wanders up to me and asks me if I want to buy trees. He is showing them to me. It is obvious that all he has done is to pour oregano from the pizza place into a sandwich baggy.

 

“You think I’m fuckin’ stupid punto?” I ask him. He yells back in Spanish.

 

I try to put out my cigar on his face. He jerks away. He starts cursing at me loudly in Spanish.

 

As we’re crossing the street, a 40 bottle shatters next to me. A group of Puerto Rican kids are throwing 40s right at us. Max lobs one back.  I do too.

 

“You cracka-ass motherfuckas!” one yells, “stay the fuck out of our ‘hood!”

 

Another 40 almost lands on me. I see some empty Heineken bottles in an overflowing trash can and throw one across the street. Since I throw like a girl, it smashes against a parked car setting off the car’s alarm.

 

“Like this!” yells Donny as he rips his half empty 40 at them.

 

It crashes on the roof of a cab across the street. I see Rammy fire off one that nearly hits the Puerto Ricans who are flinging at us.

 

We hear the police sirens and take off north into Peter Cooper Village. The park security guards riding around in a green double pig-in-a-box, get out of their car to try to stop us.  Case body checks one as we dart past and get away. Rent-a-cop pigs in green don’t run for shit. Pretty soon we hit the ramp over the highway from 23rd Street to the plaza at Waterside, my home territory.

 

 

4

 

 

 

Benny Adon is not exactly sure where his brother has gone. He isn’t even entirely sure if proper directions was given to his group. Daliah keeps looking for a “small park.” There are a lot of small parks throughout Stuy Town and the LES, but the other group isn’t in any of them. Benjamin’s group is wandering through Peter Cooper in the direction where they believe the park is located in, but not one of them are really from this hood and its all red brick and shit all looks the same.

 

“It would have been smart to have taken someone who knew where we were going with us,” states Geanie Goto.

 

“I know where I’m going,” insists Daliah, obliviously drunk.

 

“Sure ya do,” mocks this kid Jackson.

 

“Wewwwwwewwererrr, so fucking lost,” stutters Olu.

 

“Look, I’ve hung out down here before. Just follow me and I’ll get us there,” she insists.

 

They stop in yet another small park.  Benjamin takes a seat on the bench. It is a cool September night and he pulls the hoodie of his sweatshirt over his dirty blond hair. Daliah goes up to a group of Puerto Rican kids smoking weed on a bench at the edge of the park. Stuy and Peter Cooper are a maze of virtually identical red brick, short-story buildings.

 

“Wuz up, mommy?” one of them asks.

 

One of them gets up and tries to squeeze Daliah’s ass.

 

“Get the fuck away from me!”

 

“Or what? We’ll done fuck your faggot friends up.”

 

Benjamin comes to Daliah’s defense. Juan, his ghetto friend from school, runs over to get his back.

 

“Leave her alone, puta,” yells Juan.

 

“Come on Daliah, let’s get out of here,” says Geanie.

 

Street violence happens fast over nothing important. The sound of a plastic bat hitting someone in the face sounds something a lot like, “FWAC!”  Benjamin hears it as the kid nearest him gives him a crack.  He yelps in surprise, but not really pain. A kid not old enough to shave or hold a hustle, had picked up a wiffel bat and cracked Benjamin across the face. Daliah tried to get out of the way but got whacked, too. Juan quickly jumps into the violence throwing punches and duffs the kid with the bat square in the face. Juan can kind of fight for a 12 year-old. He grabs the bat and starts frantically swinging it at anyone from that crew in reach. He aims the plastic bat like a spear in one kid’s eye.  Benjamin recovers quickly and jumps on the kid who had hit him in the face. Juan gives the kid on the ground another kick. It is a peculiar fight being that all the kids are about eleven or twelve.

 

Stuy Town security rolls up and everybody scatters. The others from their crew flee leaving their friend lightly beaten on the asphalt.

 

A few blocks later Daliah is drunk and crying. Olu comes over and puts his hand on her shoulder.

 

“Are y, y, you al-al all right?” he stutters.

 

“Those motherfuckers hit me,” she cries.

 

“I think we she-should ge-get back te to Waterside,” stuttered Olu.

 

“The others will head over there anyway when they realize we can’t find the park,” says Daliah.

 

“What a fuckin’ rude evening,” mutters Benjamin Adon, still totally unsure of where his brother wandered off to.

 

 

 

The next thing I know I’m making out with Daliah Rodriguez at the bus stop. We all met up at Waterside Plaza and decided it was time to end the evening after the little mishap in Peter Cooper. I can’t remember what I have said to her to get her to kiss me, but here we are. I press her up against the side of a building holding her tight as we kiss. Withdrawn for a second, as if before was forgotten. In a pause:

 

“Ya wanna like, go out sometime?” I ask her.

 

“Go out where?” she giggles.

 

“Like be my, you know, my girl.”

 

“Yeah,” she says, “I’m with that babe.”

 

 

5

 

 

 

The streets are silent. I am being followed. Someone or something is stalking me down the cobblestone boulevard of New Lots Avenue. There is a gentle rain. Odd for this arid climate. The rain is blood. The crimson trickle stains my forehead and white garments as I quicken my pace. The weather here is always peculiar. A gray mist that covers the Pale City greatly limits my visibility.

 

The town is silent except for the clang of the rusty gears of the machinery working deep below the street surface. Whatever is pursuing me is getting closer. I can feel its presence. It hungers for me. It is hunting me, coming in for the kill. I begin to run through the side alley and into the square. I head toward the only place that I know where there are people, the game shop. An old man lives the north edge of the square with his wife and daughter. The shop specializes in restoring old board games.

 

I run quickly now. The thing is right behind me. I tear up the steps to the shop and bang on the large mahogany door, desperately seeking entrance. Any second now, the thing will be upon me. The old man opens the door. I push inside and bolt the lock shut.

 

“You look like you’re in a hurry,” he says.

 

His hands were combing his think gray beard.

 

“Someone was….”

 

I have forgotten why I had come here.

 

“I came for my game,” I say, remembering he was restoring a board game for me.

 

“It is still missing the most important pieces. It will take time to ship them in.”

 

“Ship them in from where, old man?”

 

“From outside the Pale City, little pilgrim. Where trees still grow tall.”

 

I feel the same sickening déjà vu knowing this exchange has happened a thousand times before.

 

“What is beyond the city limits?” I ask.

 

“I have no idea,” he replies.

 

“Make something up,” I ask him.

 

“Life, lights and trees perhaps?”

.

I wake up in a cold sweat. More goddamn night terrorism. Only this time, I remember every detail clearly. I stumble toward the bathroom to get a glass of water. It is 3:03 am. I know that if I don’t write down what I dreamt that by dawn the whole experience will be forgotten.

 

 

 

6

 

“What defines the moral standards of a society?” Dr. Maskin asks in his eighth period Global Studies class.

I’m making up for lateness by doing some overtime in his late session during my Thursday free period.

 

“Are we inexplicably bound by a predestined course or does the societal collective shape its own sense of justice and morality?”

 

He’s pacing back and forth around the room.

 

“You all probably consider yourselves free agents, detached from the social mainstream of modern day America. But let me stress this. There are really only two schools of thought applicable to this debate. Either the individual determines his own fate, or external factors govern the way our lives progress.”

 

“I think society is shaped by the individuals within it and that each person subjectively determines how much or how little they are bound by its standards,” I respond.

 

“Ah, Mr. Adon, ladies and gentlemen, he enjoys my class so much that he comes twice a day.”

 

“I feel as though a person can define his own set of standards the further he can break loose from what most find so-called normal,” I posit.

 

“Everyone conforms, Mr. Adon. That is the very nature of society. You sacrifice a degree of individualism to obtain a greater sense of security.”

 

“Security is over rated, and the world is fucked, excuse my language. Freedom is my ability to flourish without the restraints of these social standards. Prove myself moral without being forced into it” I respond and people giggle.

 

“Your definition is Utopian at best, anarchistic at worst. Such a state cannot exist,” he counters.

 

“I differ to beg. Granted, it is the exception not the norm, that a person becomes truly free without the desire to exploit the weakness of those still oppressed, but you can’t make a blanket statement like ‘Everyone is a conformist.’ It’s not in our nature to just make babies and die, we’re not beasts.”

 

“Mr. Adon, there is nothing that you do that was not in some way influenced by your external environment and your genetics. Everything from your clothing, to the music you listen to, to the girls you go out with, was all based on patterns that society established for you. Those patterns, that set of social standards you adhere to, were formed by our society.”

 

“I don’t buy into all that sir.”

 

“Do you think you’re free, Mr. Adon.”

 

I pause to consider the question.

 

“I’m workin’ on it.”

 

He pauses then says smiling, “Well who are we to tell this rebel otherwise? Good luck with that Sebastian.”

 

“Thank you sir, in the immortal words of Captain Han Solo, We’ll need all the luck we can get.”

 

 

 

7

“Yo, woman, just leave me to my drinkin’.”

 

These words ended my relationship with Daliah. It happened quickly just about two weeks later. Once again I was drunk. It had been meaningless, hasn’t even gotten too far. The breakup was as unofficial and as sudden as the beginning. We were at Murphy Park for the second Friday night in two weeks. I had been right in expecting a greater attendance. Once again the law had routed us and our retreat had scattered us to a broken-down pier ten blocks north of the park. My dismissal of Daliah has sent her storming quickly in anger without saying good-bye. She had been going on about something.

 

Julius Zarr and I are sitting on the old pier overlooking the waters of the East River that are filled with eels and would make you slick with oil for a week if you dared to fall in. You would for sure get poisoned if the rip tides or hypothermia didn’t do the job. The derelict remains of a Volkswagen are protruding out of the icy current. Just the remains of the passenger compartment peering up at us like a fucked up transformer.

 

“No great loss to lose that mouthy spic,” Julius says.

 

“Girls are bitches. It’s fuckin’ true.”

 

“Easy come, easy go.”

 

“I’m retarded drunk my dude.”

 

The world is spinning but I’m standing still, I will ‘tip my bottle still for my homies that killed.’

 

 

 

8

 

 

 

My father had built the dacha in Long Island before he met my mother. After finishing dental school, he enlisted and was sent to Vietnam in 1967. Because he was a dentist they promoted him to Captain and attached him to the 198th Light Infantry Brigade based in Chu-Lai. He was awarded a Bronze Star for his work with the villagers and for designing a preventive dental program for the Army. He doesn’t talk too much about the war. Whenever you ask him about it, he tells a story about how the villagers invited him to spend Tet with them in ’68 and how his commanding officer wouldn’t let him go. It probably saved his life because that was the night the Vietcong launched the massive Tet Offensive.

 

After getting discharged he went traveling in Europe in a Volvo P1800. When he got back he built a dental practice on Staten Island, eventually saving the money to buy land and have a house built in East Hampton. The four-and-a-half acre property was ideal for a well-to-do dentist and his rabble-rousing friends. Before settling into the life of a family man, he played a young, wild bachelor. He never talked about that part of his life because he was afraid it would encourage my brother and me to get into trouble.

 

East Hampton is exactly what you make it to be. The lower brow you are, the more likely you are to have grandiose misconceptions about what it’s like. These hedge fund, dot-com, corporate shit-bags found it in the nineties, but my Dad always says it was different when he bought land in the late 1970’s. It was always an old money retreat by the water near Georgica Beach, but there were great local village communities and tons of artists. It was largely Jewish for a while, because Jews were excluded from American aristocracy beachfronts like Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket.

 

The Hamptons technically include East, West, and Southampton, Amagansett, Water Mill, Montauk, Bridgehampton and Sag Harbor. There’s a lot of money being flashed around out there in the form of cars, homes and benefit galas.

 

I didn’t grow up with that around me. It was just a weekend in the woods near the beach. It’s was all green fields, forests, sand dunes, crystal clean blue-water beaches and the crash of Atlantic waves. It was campfire picnics on Main Beach and the Art Barge in the dunes and tumbleweeds of Montauk. It was my brother and I swimming, running, biking and going to Pathfinder’s Day camp. It was movies and adopt-a-road trash pick-up on Two Holes of Water Road where my father subsidized a 25-cent a bottle or can pick-up rate for my brother and me to sweep and clear trash off a section of our road.  It was a real nice place to escape the City. If the City is a rat race, they say it’s a lobster race out there.

 

Donny and I ride bikes down back road trails rich with autumn foliage. The leaves have begun to fall and the way the light hits the trees makes it look like they are on fire. We hit a clearing in the woods and pause to rest and smoke cigarettes.

 

Back in New York City, Julius Zarr fumbles with the keys to 20 Waterside Plaza, Apartment 27 A.  He’s accompanied by a dozen or so of Sebastian’s old friends from UNIS, among them Ronny Lestor who looks a bit like Sebastian Adon, but chubbier with a ghetto lisp. He was born in Chile, but looks completely European. A middle class Jewish family had adopted him.  He continues to fumble with the keys. He’d fumbled about like this in front of 27A, the Adon home, three times before over the summer. It was always a bitch to unlock that top lock.

 

They go in their ‘friend’s’ house, do a ton of dope and whip its, steal a bunch of random shit. But Sebastian’s mom isn’t in Long Island, she comes home and finds the door bolted.

 

No way out but over and around. When my Mom unlocked the door, the safety chain was latched. She smelled pot smoke and heard voices and freaked out. Before she could even think of what to do, a dozen kids practically knocked her over dashing out the apartment and into the nearest staircase.

 

The Waterside rent-a-dopes didn’t catch a damn anybody. The elevator cameras are not ever working, but my Mom recognizes Ronny Lestor and Julius Zarr. And she mostly blamed me. One way or another for everything that’s about to happen.

 

 

9

“He robbed the house,” explains my brother.

 

“What the fuck?” I ask. It was more a statement than a question.

 

“Mom came home and they were there stealing shit–CDs, movies, cash. She said there were fifteen or so kids.”

 

“Julius Zarr?” I ask, incredulously.

 

“Yeah.”

 

“Is she fucking sure?”

 

“Dad thinks you gave him your keys,” my brother informs me.

 

He was often the bearer of parental insight.

 

“I have my keys on me,” I protest.

 

“Well tell that to Dad. He’s livid.”

 

“They robbed our house?”

 

“Yeah. Mom caught them in the act. They almost knocked her down on their way out.”

 

Maybe Donny can see the look of revulsion on my face. I feel like I am going to be sick.

 

“What’s the next move?” Donny asks.

 

I thought for a moment. My best friend had truly stabbed me in the back. Made himself a robber in my home. A rat yellow bastard. The blow strikes me hard like a fist. The person I trust the most in the world had betrayed me completely and publically. He’s sold me cheaply.  I try to imagine why he did it and who else was involved? I pause before I answer Donny’s question.  I resort to the basest of human emotions.

 

“The only question I have for you, Donny, and for anyone else is:  Are you gonna help me hit this bastard back?”

 

 

 

10

 

 

The hateful little fuck. Roughly $200 bucks in cash, gift certificates, and jewelry had been taken. About twelve CDs were missing. That was the extent of the tangible robbery, but they’d taken far more.

 

My mother had found empty beer bottles and whip it casings scattered around the apartment. The sheets on our beds stank of sex. She was hysterical. She cursed my friends, accusing me of orchestrating the whole thing. It had not been Julius Zarr alone. Ronny Lestor had been there. So had Kimberly Babiano, the girl who had ODed on pills and poison in my home a year before. All the people at UNIS whom I had considered friends had been in my apartment stealing things. We dropped Donny off with his mother out in Greenport on Long Island and returned to the City. My Mother was on the verge of yet another nervous break down. Obviously the whole mess was my fault. It always was according to my Mom.

 

“You little shit,” she yells as I entered the apartment, “Your trash heap friends stole from our house, had sex in our beds, and did drugs all over the place! You gave them those keys, you little asshole.”

 

“Bitch I never gave anyone keys!” I yell back.

 

She gets up in my face and slaps me as hard as she can. The bible says you can stone to death a child for cursing their own parents.

 

“You little fucking bastard! Look at the kind of people you hang out with! They used you. They knew you would let them party here! I feel like I’ve been raped!”

 

When my mother gets angry, she gets really angry. She is sobbing, pausing only to heap abuses upon my father and me.

 

“And you!” she points to my Dad. “You let him get away with this bullshit. Tell the little shit  he’s grounded!”

 

My brother retreats to his room. As usual, I would fuck up and he would later comfort my mother back to a reasonable degree of sanity.

 

“Sebastian,” says my father, “until we know what happened consider yourself under house arrest.”

 

“I didn’t fucking do anything!”

 

“Shut up, you little shit,” she shrieks.

 

“Tell this bitch I didn’t do anything!”

 

“Don’t talk to your mother like that,” my father implores, knowing it is already out of control between my Mom and me.

 

“I’m calling the cops!”

 

“Don’t bother,” my Dad replies.

 

“Why the hell not, Dad? We know who did it!”

 

“I talked to Gary Zarr earlier today. Julius Zarr is grounded and Gary has agreed to give us $500 to replace anything that was taken,” my Dad announces.

“That isn’t fair! He needs to pay for what he did. I’m gonna fuck that kid up!”

 

“You won’t do anything. It has been settled. They only thing you should be doing is thinking long and hard about who your friends are,” my Dad adds with exasperation and sadness.

 

My father always attempted to turn a negative situation into a paternal moral lesson.

 

“This is bullshit. I’m gonna settle this in his bloody face.” I add clearly missing my Dad’s “lesson.”

 

“Look at you with your ghetto street trash mentality,” screams my mother. “Real life isn’t a movie. You don’t settle things like a nigger!”

 

“GO FUCK. I’m gonna handle this right.”

 

“No. You’re grounded.”

 

“Fuck you! I’m out of here.”

 

I storm out of the apartment slamming the door behind me.

 

 

 

 

12

 

 

Julius Zarr had given me no justification for his actions. I walked out of my apartment resolved to retaliate. Beginning another new tradition I moved onto Donny Gold’s couch for a few days to escape heat at home. My hate consumes me. I cannot live down such a grievous insult, even if I still love him like a brother.

 

My crew shares this conclusion. Donny is down for a fight. So is Case Yadger, and so is everybody else because they all knew they’d request the same aid if they had suffered this kind of injury. By the end of the week my crew, the Bacardi Mafia, is lined up to help me get retribution on Julius Zarr and the others involved.

 

Despite all the external distractions, I could think of only one thing, the crunching sound a bat makes when it is brought down on someone’s head. The color the pavement turns when it is wet with blood. The anguished cry that comes when a person is beaten half to death.

 

“He’ll be down in five minutes,” announces Toby, another old UNIS friend whose lured Julius out of his house on some pretext.

 

“Just get him out of the building and we’ll take care of the rest,” I declare.

 

We are waiting off to the side of the entrance to 3 Stuyvesant Oval. I watch the falling leaves tumble from the trees and the children playing in the adjacent playground. An elderly couple walks by giving us a suspicious look as if we are about to commit a crime. Fitting, I think.

 

I clench the bat tight in my hand and take a practice swing. Donny gives me a nod as if he knows what I am thinking. To the others, this is just a part of being a city teenager. Standing up for your friends. To me, more. It goes beyond rep at this point. It is a matter of betrayal and someone has to pay. Case points toward the entrance. Julius Zarr emerges and heads toward Toby.

 

“Now or never, Sebastian,” says Donny.

 

He is less than twenty feet away from me. I signal with my hand for the crew to move in. Before Julius Zarr knows what is happening, he is surrounded. I know everyone is waiting for me to take the first blow.

 

“Just do it,” he says, wincing.

 

And then I freeze. I can’t bring myself to hit him. Everyone just looks at me waiting.

 

“Just fucking get it over with,” he says

 

“I’ll ask you one more time,” I half bitch mutter, “Why?”

 

He looks at me with sunken eyes. I am holding the bat ready to swing it into his face. People stop to watch what is going on. It is now or never.

 

“I’m sorry,” he says quietly. “I never meant for it to go down like that.”

 

I pause, muscles tense, ready to swing. It is now or never.

 

Donny looks at Case. Rammy takes a step forward. Max blocks the entrance to the building. Nike Briickman looks at Toby. Olu the Nigerian speaks.

 

“Ya-ya d-don’t ha-have to d-do it.”

 

“Fuckin’ smash him!” says Donny Gold.

 

But there with my guns drawn, my crew’s fists good to fly, I tell everyone to back away, to back down. In the end I don’t do anything. I do nothing to my old best friend, wgo I’d half grown up trying to emulate. He is now transformed into an enemy and a stranger.

 

He looks really sad and broken; he already has two black eyes. I bet his Dad hits harder than I do. Everyone here is from a nice middle and upper middle class family, playing hard for very little. Fronting all over the goddamn place, like would Holden Caulfield blush.

 

Nothing worse than betrayal. Well maybe self-aware hooligans.

 

 

13

 

 

My suit doesn’t fit. It’s about two sizes too small. My arms run longer than the sleeves by about four inches and the jacket restricts my movement. Guess I haven’t had to attend anything classy in awhile.

 

The music is horrible. I’m not entirely sure how I was tricked into this. I think while trying to have sex with a half Japanese girl. Geanie is sitting next to me pale with freckles. She looks amazing and amazed, like she really likes this opera stuff. She’s wearing a slinky black dress that she changed into when I picked her up from Gotham, her fencing studio.

I’ve wanted to fuck her for awhile.

My brother had outright refused to come. After a lengthy fight with my parents, it was agreed that I should bring a friend in his place. This was my second opera. I had seen La Boheme in the sixth grade. It needed subtitles and a rock set.

 

For the life of me I could not remember the name of the performance or make out a single word, maybe this opera is La Boheme. It is in Italian.  It might as well be in gibberish. I don’t believe anyone really enjoys opera.  They must go purely to appear sophisticated. My parents are always going on about how kids don’t take enough advantage of the wealth of New York City culture. For as long as I can remember, they have always brought my brother and me to Broadway shows.

 

During the intermission I manage to convince a middle-aged hipster to buy me a Jack and Coke. It’s pretty watered down and I wonder what kind of guy buys younger kids booze.

 

I close my eyes taking in the music, tuning reality out. I’m getting real good at doing this. I concentrate on an idea, and fade out.

 

The theatre is empty. The walls are gray. The seats are red. Not some subtle off red, but bright as fuckin’ scarlet. I’m wearing a white suit. Arabic music is playing loudly in the background intermixing with techno.

 

The walls of the theater begin crumbling upwards into the heavens, ceiling first. The theatre is metamorphosing around me. I see Geanie dancing on the stage spinning and thrusting with her sword, enacting some arcane, ritualistic death mantra, fighting imaginary demons of the night. The metamorphosis continues.

 

Now I can see the sky. I hold a glass of red wine in my left hand, a pocket watch dangling from my right. The steel and concrete are replaced with marble. The modern opera hall now has the look of a Roman amphitheater. The music is getting louder. Geanie dances faster and faster. The amphitheater gets bigger and bigger. I can see the endless desert behind the stage. I sip the wine.

 

Geanie looks beautiful, her movements quick and fluid. I notice that there are no stars. A million candles ignite one by one illuminating the stage. Faceless soldiers in black uniforms march in formation toward where Geanie stands. She has stopped dancing. There is a look of terror in her eyes. I try to stand up, to call out to her to warn her they are coming. I cannot move from my seat. I take another sip of wine. It is thick and bitter, almost metallic. The wine is blood. The soldiers surround Geanie. One of them knocks her to the ground. They all begin kicking her. I shout out, but no sound escapes my lips. Finally after what feels like hours they drag what’s left of her beaten body off the stage. I get a glimpse at what is left. Her black dress is in tatters. She has been beaten beyond recognition as if to say back into a clot.

 

The theatre begins to fade. All I hear is the sound of applause.

 

I come to with a start. Instinctually I look over toward Geanie. I am relieved to see she is still all right. Everyone in the theatre is clapping. The audience is giving the performers a standing ovation. Geanie looks beautiful and smiles at me.

 

“Wake up sleepy. You’ve gone and missed the whole the thing,” She says sweetly.

 

My parents drop Geanie at her home on 125th Street. She lives near the river where the neighborhood is still upper middle class. She and my father chatted the whole time in the car. I can tell he likes her.

 

The nightmares have begun creeping into my waking life. I must feign control. I can only describe the sensation I am having as remembering. Remembering something absolutely horrible.

 

 

 

14

Now it’s October 1998.

 

Nicholas Trikhovitch, this new drinking buddy of mine has been getting with this girl Lauren Zivia, for about two weeks. They aren’t exactly going out, but it isn’t as if they are getting’ with other people. Lauren has long black hair and elf ears. She is cute in girl-next-door-might-be-a-whore sort of way. They had met at his friend Dorothy’s birthday party at the church on 79th and West End. It was a drunken hook-up that had worked its way toward fuck-friend status. Lauren is a Dutch Jew who goes to Bronx Science. The Murphy Park parties die, with my short rep, now it’s all about Rock Parties Upper West and I’m the one whose gotta make that trek.

 

Nicholas and a kid named Izzy found a big secluded Rock in Riverside Park off 83rd street and figured while warm it was suitable place to get hammered.

 

There will be another Rock Party in three days. Nick Trikhovitch had heard that the Murphy Park parties weren’t going to happen anymore since each one ends with someone getting hit in the face or robbed. This would make each successive Rock Party a little bit bigger. Nick was ultimately aiming toward a Bacchanalia.

 

I walk down 95th until I reach the building where Nick lives, he’s invited by me to chat about dreams and smoke dope. His family’s home on the 15th floor is a rent-stabilized penthouse. His parents remember way back in the 80’s when the neighborhood was still sort of bad. Giuliani has rolled back the dregs of Harlem twenty blocks at least.

 

Nick’s father is a neurologist, which is fitting, considering his mother is pleasantly insane. Catherine Trikhovitch is in treatment for bi-polar disorder. A loving mother and upbeat person for someone her age, Catherine’s medication isn’t quite keeping the disease in check.

 

Nick has twin little brothers named Raffy and Rolan. They are nearly identical in appearance although Rolan is far more sly like his older brother. The Trikhovitch residence is a crazy place to be. The five-person, slightly dysfunctional Trikhovitch clan are not the only creatures to reside in the penthouse. Fond of animals, the Trikhovitch’s own two tanks of fish, three turtles, a cat, a snake, a lizard and two French Angora mountain rabbits that resemble something of a cross between a cat and a hamster.

 

Nick’s room resembles the captain’s quarters of a submarine on LSD. The walls are painted arterial red. He sleeps in an elevated bed with leopard print sheets. A desk and computer are under the bed. Nick is fascinated with technology and considers himself something of hacker. This self-perception had been validated by the movie Hackers. A set of katana blades hangs from the wall along with a set of black and white photos depicting scenes from Vietnam and World War Two. There is a highway stop sign on the wall that he had found just outside of Rosendale where his parents have a country house. Next to it is a bookshelf with a cow skull on top of it. The bookshelf contains volume upon volume of Chose Your Own Adventure books. Nick always gets himself killed while reading them. A battered parking meter leans against the wall near a box of tools that Nick has employed in an attempt to open it. The glass face has been shattered open. Nick has begun looking for a jackhammer. He is certain that he will get the thing open. The last resort scenario is just to lob it off the side of a building. But that is the surest way to loose all the coins.

 

Nick pushes Lauren Zivia giggling off the bed, as I peak into the room.

 

“Welcome to back to Babylon brother,” he says passing me a spliff.

 

Lauren Zivia waves to me, wrapping herself in a bed sheet, scampering off to the bathroom to spit out cum. However, hip-hop tells us that bad bitches swallow.

 

 

 

 

15

 

 

We met on the green benches on the traffic island of 86th and Broadway. Nicholas Trikhovitch gives orders. He is directing people to the non-carding deli on 84th and Amsterdam and telling people to make more calls of invitation while greeting old friends and new acquaintances.

 

Some people say they don’t like the taste of beer. I don’t mind it at all. We drink purely to get drunk, but there are some subtle differences between a Red Dog and Woodchuck or a Heineken versus a Colt 45, or an Olde English 800, a Ballantine and a Miller Light. A 40 tastes like shit if you’ve ever had a European half-liter on tap. Since most of this crew hasn’t, they have no basis for comparison. For roughly two bucks you can help yourself to an array of choices. They taste about the same served in 22, 32, or 40 oz glass bottles that we wrap in brown bags, as if that fools a cop or makes us any less underage. It’s all malt piss water. The only real variation is a Woodchuck, which tastes something like apple cider and costs a bit more at $3.50. Our crew mostly goes with either Red Dog or Woodchuck. Olde English and Colt 45 are more watered down and maybe only a quarter cheaper. The more hip-hop influenced kids jump on these. The girls mostly buy wine coolers or Coronas. You’ll never see a guy with a wine cooler. Not unless he’s faggot. We all look like we’re 12 years old. Bars and liquor stores are out of the question. In a year or two we’ll start mass-producing fake IDs on Photoshop and some of us, especially the ones of us that can grow facial hair, will be able to get into some East Village or Williamsburg dive bars where the levels of police scrutiny are lower. For now we’re strictly seedy parks, 40s and house parties.

 

I watch the crowd grow on the Broadway traffic island at 86th. Nick is still giving orders like a teenage general with a deep-seated need to promote underage drinking. Nike Brickman has started a hack circle. I’m too uncoordinated to participate. I always just fuck up the hack.

 

“What’s good?” asks my man Donny Gold.

 

“That dumb cunt Daliah wrote my home phone number all over the walls of the 161st subway station along with ‘call for gay sex’.”

 

“How’s the home front?”

 

“It’s still fucked up at home after the robbery. My mother has never gotten over it. Its fights and bullshit whenever I walk in the door. ”

 

We head for Riverside Park around 8 pm. The Bacardi Mob is well represented, but I’m not the main guy if I ever was. It’s Nick’s crew now.

 

There are drunken teenagers all over The Rock. Empty 40 bottles are strewn around the base. Someone has used a thick black Pilot pen to draw an Afro on the placard of some old, rich, dead man whose face is affixed to the rock in copper plating. Case assumes Donny Gold did it.

 

There are couples making out on the ground around The Rock. Young kids think they are much older than they really are when they are getting down in drunken, sloppy hook ups in the middle of a park. They kiss people they might not, if they weren’t piss drunk. This drunken kissing hardly ever leads to anything else thinks Nick R. Lauren Zivia is smooching Sebastian on the grass in front of everyone. Spread the damn love, thinks Nick R. But he was pretty upset on the inside.

 

Case Yadger climbs up The Rock toward Hugh and Toby. He is watching some hook-up on the grass in front of the rock amid a veritable sea of empty 40 bottles. This isn’t the most discrete location to be getting down.

 

“GIVE ME AN H!” shouts Micky.

 

“You’re an H,” says Case.

 

“GIVE ME AN O!” he shouts again.

 

“What is he shouting?” asks Case to Toby.

 

“Look at Lauren,” said Toby, “she’s getting fingered in front of like thirty people. Stupid slut.”

 

“GIVE ME AN R!”

 

“Sebastian Adon, winning classy gentleman points as usual!” yells Micky.

 

“30 MORE POINTS!” yells Toby.

 

“Does he know Lauren is sort of Nick R.’s girl?” asks Case.

 

“I don’t think that would stop him if he did,” says Toby.

 

“GIVE ME AN E!” shouted Micky.

 

“Wow. Literally everyone here is getting a free show,” says Case Yadger.

 

“WHAT’S THAT SPELL?!” yells Hugh on the top of his lungs.

 

“You forgot the ‘W,’ stupid,” shouted a crowd of girls near the base of The Rock.

 

I wonder where her damn vagina is? My hand has been in her pants for just over a minute and I haven’t had hit the right spot. Lauren is moaning and completely drunk. Is her name Lauren or is it Katie? Or is it Julia? I couldn’t even remember how we had hooked up. We were talking and then it just happened. What the fuck is this girl’s name and where is her vagina?

 

Her kissing is sloppy and mildly disgusting or maybe it’s mine. The grass is moving, the world quickly rotating beneath me. I have drunk roughly 120 ounces of malt liquor and feel too wobbly to stand. Doubt I can stand. I stop hooking up with this girl for a second to check my watch. It is 10:05 pm. My curfew is 10:30. By cab it would take about fifteen minutes. Easily forty-five by subway. Some drunken fool is shouting something from the top of The Rock. The girl heard it. I was too far gone.

 

“Fuck you!” the girl yells up at them.

 

“What did he say?” I ask her.

 

“He called me a fucking whore!” whatever–her-name-is cries drunkenly.

 

Who the hell is this prick calling this girl a whore? She is really upset now, cursing up towards the top of The Rock where the catcalls are coming from. Filled with drunken anger I get up to throttle whoever is being a cock-blocking, jackass hater. Up the side of The Rock ready to punch whomever was yelling. Fuckin’ haters. I swing aimlessly at the first person I see.

 

“Get off me dude!” yells Toby, as I yank him by his shirt.

 

“WHY THE HELL WERE YOU CALLING HER A WHORE!”

 

“Chill the fuck out, big man,” smirks the instigator Hubert O’Domhnaill, an Irish man with which few can be angry.

 

I shove Toby. Rammy and Case run over to see what all the yelling is about. Rammy is ripped like a tin tank and Case is just as strong.

 

“Yo, Sebastian, be cool!” yells Case.

 

“We’re all friends here,” says Toby, “You’re just being a real drunk ass.”

 

“You were calling that girl,” I pointed out the female figure slumped over, puking on the grass, “a whore.”

 

“No beef, Sebastian, no beef” says Toby as I let him go. “We were just fooling around.”

 

“I think someone needs to put Sebastian in a cab,” says Rammy Detroit.

 

“I’m beyond fine,” I mumble. And then I fall over drunk.

 

 

 

 

16

 

 

Dr. Maskin asked me to meet with him after school in his classroom. The desk is cluttered with opened books with highlighted segments streaked throughout the text. He has a big mug filled with cold black coffee. I can see the students outside the barred windows streaming out of school towards the buses and trains.

 

“You need to stop showing up late to my class. I have a girl who comes from Staten Island with a better record than you.”

 

“Sorry. I’ve just been having trouble going to sleep at night.”

 

“You sleep well enough in my class. You’re a good student, but I’m going to have to mark you down because of the lateness.”

 

“Is there any way I can pick up my grade?”

 

“Yeah…show up on time. I talked to your other teachers. You show up late to all their classes, too, and you never do your homework. What is it that you do with all your time?”

 

“I hang out.”

 

“Hanging out is a problem.”

 

“Why?”

 

“Because kids that hang out get into trouble.”

 

“Everyone hangs out. What’s this really about?”

 

“I’ve worked at Bronx Science for nearly fifteen years. I’ve seen students come and go and I see a lot of kids screw up their lives hanging out and getting into drugs and alcohol. I see you out across the street smoking cigarettes with your friends. This is a tough school and you’re not living up to what you could be doing with yourself.”

 

“Everyone always says that.”

 

“There’s a reason everyone always says that.”

 

“I just feel like this is all a bunch of bullshit.”

 

“You think learning is bullshit?”

 

“Not learning. School.”

 

“So drop out then. You’d have more time to hang out.”

 

“My parents wouldn’t go for it.”

 

“But you would?”

 

“Look, I like your class a lot, but I don’t really care about all the other shit. All those stupid books we read in English class. All those stupid formulas in math. Biology crap twice a day. I don’t see how any of this stuff applies to what I want to do with my life.”

 

“What do you want to do with your life?”

 

I stare at him in silence. I try real hard to come up with something smart to say, but I can’t. I draw a complete blank.

 

“You don’t have a clue do you?” he says with sadness in his voice.

 

“I want to…” I stop.

 

“Do you know why I teach history?” he asks.

 

“Why?”

 

“Because when you understand what has happened before, you know what’s going happen tomorrow. People are just like the civilizations we study in class. They rise, they fall, and they are left behind. You, my friend, are on a path to self-destruction and you are too young to leave behind anything that you will be remembered for.”

 

 

 

 

 

17

 

 

 

“Boy Pilgrim. Open your eyes.”

 

And suddenly here I am in the desert on a bluff overlooking the Pale City, infinite sand in every direction. I can see the dunes miles away shifting in the wind. The sky is black and there are no stars in the sky. The moon is black and bright. The city looks larger than I remember. I’m not seeing out of my own eyes just yet. I’m rotating above my body. I am translucent. And then I see clearly.

 

“What is it that I’m looking at?” I utter.

 

The girl is tiny. Her white dress is dirty and her feet are bare.

 

You are looking at the occupied desert.”

 

“But what does it mean?”

 

“You’re not ready to understand.”

 

“Why did we come here?”

 

We are legion, nothing is barred from us. Look ahead, boy pilgrim.”

 

She points across the desert to a dune of slope maybe a hundred miles away. A convoy is moving away from the Pale City. She hands me a sea man’s opticon.

 

We begin to levitate. In seconds we are flying quickly over the desert until we are directly above the convoy looking down. There are hundreds if not thousands of figures below me. They are chained together and torture-porn hooded being led by huge metallic creatures with black cloaks. Gears turn as spindle-like metallic limbs grind together towering over the enslaved. Their faces glow like TV screens with a woeful countenance. The evening news from Yemen is displayed on their brow. They move on two legs and then on all fours, more like beasts than men. Each prisoner is entangled with barbed wire. Tentacle like appendices slither out their backs with video cameras recording everything for posterity. I hear organ music playing as they grind their way to sandy oblivion.

 

“Where are they going?”

 

“In this place, no one goes anywhere.”

 

“What are they?”

 

“The control systems.”

 

“They’re out of control. I’m out of control too,” I tell her.

 

“There are numerous ways to control a human monkey. But generally one can split them all into two classifications, force or conditioning. Like monkey into man Maskin taught you.”

 

“These people are being led to die.” I observe.

 

“An extreme example. Their eyes have been removed and the sockets have been sewn shut. Molten lead has been poured into their ears. Their mouths have been stapled. They are in chains. The collars around their necks detect deviant thought and admit a piercing shriek directly to the brain if they continue thinking.”

 

“Who are they?” I ask.

 

“People who needed to be controlled and removed from the population, thought criminals all claiming to possess the new social gospel, criminals of low morals; they may threaten stability here at the temple.”

 

“If we’re so dangerous, why not just kill us?” I suggest

 

“Us?” she laughs, “Killing a rebel creates a martyr and every martyr will generate a thousand new rebels. We are reducing the cancer of resistance.”

 

“Resistance to what?”

 

“One must bear in mind that to the governing bodies your shortcomings towards utopia as a species are quite secondary to our maintenance of power. You are violent little monkey’s who seek to maximize pleasure and minimize pain, that is all.”

 

“What does the second type of control entail?”

 

“You should know quite well.” She responds.

 

“Why is that?” I ask.

 

“It’s working its way over you as you slumber.”

“I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about,’ I say.

 

“It’s just neuroscience. The people that control the world are about two hundred years more advanced technologically. You just don’t see it benefiting you,” she says, “do the rich even die anymore?”

 

 

18

 

 

Its five days until Halloween, I’m depressed as fuck. Always a little high or drunk, cutting class trying to sleep more, end up dreaming more, can’t ever sleep for long.

 

Everyone in the city is looking for a costume. Ricky’s is always a safe bet. Halloween Adventure works, too, if you’re willing to spend a little money, which I never am. The original plan had been for everyone to dress up like the X-Men. Unfortunately, no one got their shit together and the plan fell apart. We are at an odd age to participate actively in Halloween. We are too old to trick or treat, too young to go bar hopping and not suburban enough to egg people and toilet paper homes.

 

You can make a real haul as far as candy goes in the right areas of the City. Even if you hit two of the four Waterside Plaza buildings alone, you can nearly fill your bag. Fat kids always have huge bags. UNIS always gave us Orange UNICEF boxes. I have no idea what that stands for or what Halloween and raising money for third world relief efforts have in common, but for the past seven or eight years, I’d been asking people for pennies to fill my box. There is a table stating where the money you raise goes on the back of the collection box. Probably to giving fishing pools to every single child in whatever African country has no fucking rivers.

 

I wonder if the UNICEF aid workers tell the people they help where the money comes from. Do they just say it comes from the UN or do they say it comes from the US? Does it go directly to feeding people or do they use it to subcontract building companies for schools and hospitals? Imagine if they told these kids where the money really comes from. I can imagine a conversation between a refugee child and an extremely blunt UNICEF worker.

 

“In America they have a holiday where children dress up like monsters and fill large bags with a sweet food called candy.”

 

“What’s candy,” a tiny malnourished Ethiopian refugee asks.

 

“It’s nutritionally useless and fun to eat.”

 

“They collect this candy for us?”

 

“No. They collect pennies for you.”

 

“What’s a penny?”

 

“It’s the currency of such limited value that most Americans leave them lying on the street.”

 

The little dark child starts crying, but only in a UNICEF commercial.

 

Every Halloween I try to come up with a good costume. In the end I settle for what I know. I’ve been Batman at least six times and Luke Skywalker at least thrice. I’ve always dress up as my favorite fictional hero of the moment. One year I was Optimus Prime.  My mother dressed me up as an eggplant for my first Halloween. I’m told it was precious.

 

I heard on the wire that Rory is having a Halloween Party. I’ve been over to his house a few times before when there was nothing to do.

 

Rory broke his leg a few weeks ago playing football. Or he slipped in the shower masturbating when his kid sister walked in depending on whose story you believed.  I heard he’s on crutches and he’s having the party so he doesn’t have to go out. I think Rory is one of the least interesting people I know, but that might be because I don’t know him very well. Everyone has a lot of respect for him so I leave it alone. I’d prefer drinking in a park to “sober fun” at his parent’s house any day. Sober fun generally means me drinking a 40 locked inside his bathroom.

 

Rory lives in a three-bedroom apartment on 81st and Riverside, around the corner from our infamous Rock. It has a relatively fancy lobby and a doorman in a uniform. People go to Rory’s house when there is nothing to do and I mean that in the nicest possible way. Rory doesn’t go out too often and he never drinks. He has parties fairly regularly if you can call not being allowed to drink or smoke while his parents are in the house a house party.

 

Rory is very soft spoken wasp that acts and looks like a vaguely nebbish upper west side heeb. He’s one of the only people I know that gives you his undivided attention when you speak to him. It’s a good quality that I don’t claim to have. As far as I’m concerned, you go to Rory’s if there’s nothing else to do. Otherwise you’d be drinking in a park or a house, or out at the movies which are always bullshit and you never score.

 

Odds are I’ll end up at his house on Halloween. I follow where the girls will be at you know what I’m saying.

 

 

19

 

 

I snuck out under the Pale Cities sewage system and walked for what seemed days of night following the tracks of monstrosities called ‘systems of control’.

 

I’m now standing parched on a hill overlooking what appears to be a mass grave in a dirt quarry surrounded by dunes. There are bodies with black bags over their heads being pushed into this enormous hole by large machines that look like a cross between insects and bulldozers. Their metallic limbs scoop and drop the bodies into the gaping pit. An enormous stone monolith is stuck in the ground next to me. It towers into the black sky so far that I can’t even see the top. The Old Man is seated on the ground next to me. He looks sad and befuddled, a bit jaundiced too.

 

“I thought you never leave the store.” I say.

 

“Normally I don’t,” he responds.

 

“What’s the occasion?”

 

“They wanted me to write something meaningful.”

 

“For what?”

 

“For the tombstone of a generation.”

 

White lye is sprayed out like a snow storm from extendable gaskets harnessed to these foul metal, killing beasts.

 

“Got any good ideas?”

 

“Drawing blank,” he mutters and coughs.

 

“That’s a lot of death in that gully. I’m sure you’ll think of something.”

 

“That is nothing. Eulogize the faceless masses, harder than to kill them.”

 

“Who are they?”

 

“They don’t exist anymore.”

 

“That’s a lot of nobodies.”

 

“Millions more every year.”

 

“Well doesn’t somebody miss them?”

 

“Who knows? No one keeps track anymore. Not unless you’re in the priestly class or getting filthy rich of this.  Or even higher, but those don’t die the same way. These are just disposable dregs. They got sold out in the spiritual war and we caught them in foreclosure.”

 

It was a veritable sea of corpses. They were piled up high as far as the eye could see.

 

“Aren’t you gonna tell him where we are?” says a voice behind me. I turn to see where it came from. Standing next to a dried out trunk of a tree stands a man in blue pin stripe suit and a beige trench coat with a grey furry collar smoking a filter less cigarette. I can’t see his face because of the dust and gloom.

 

Emblazoned upon the right arm of the trench coat are the letters ZOB on a red and grey armband.

 

“Don’t tell him yet,” says the Old Man, “He needs to figure it out himself.”

 

“Who the fuck are you?” I ask.

 

“That’s not very relevant at this juncture,” says the man in the coat.

 

“All right. I love how helpful everyone is. Not only do I have night terrors, I have obscure hard-to understand night life.”

 

“This isn’t night life,” mutters the Old Man.

 

“He’s right,” says the man in the coat, “you need to pay more attention.”

 

“Pay attention to what?” I ask both of them.

 

“We’re trying to teach you something. When you finally get it,” the trench man pauses, his hands extend out simulating a silent explosion. Then he nods as if I’ve understood him.

 

“You’re doing a hell of a good job!” It echoes through the valley.

 

“You’re doing a hell of a good job. You’re doing a hell of a good job.”

 

At least I thought it was echo.

 

“They’re complimenting you,” says the man in the coat.

 

“Who?”

 

“The sea of them.”

 

“You’re doing a hell of a good job. You’re doing a hell of a good job.”

 

It isn’t an echo. The sea of bodies is mumbling in dead unison. There is no life in their million sunken corpses, and yet something is moving in each of them as they mouth words in unison beneath the black bags tried over their heads.

 

“Eureka,” shouts the Old Man

 

He begins chiseling something at the food of the monument at an incredible speed.

 

“We’re gonna get you through this,” says the man in the coat, “You may be kicking and screaming, but we will get you ready to become aware.”

 

“You’re doing a hell of a good job. You’re doing a hell of a good job,” says the sea of corpses.

 

“Aware of what?” I ask, more confused than ever.

 

The old man is done chiseling. He puts his tools back into his belt and starts off back down the slope toward Pale City.

 

“Aware of what!?” I demand once again.

 

The man in the coat is gone. The Old Man is gone, too. I walk over to where the Old Man had been sitting to read what he had inscribed on the monolith.

 

In death, all are finally equals.

 

“You’re doing a hell of a good job,” says the faceless sea.

 

I run down the slope toward the City and catch the two of them sauntering along the road.

 

The Old Man turns and extends his hand to the ZOB man in the trench coat, “Mike Washington I presume?” he says.

 

 

20

 

 

Olu the stuttering Nigerian, my brother ‘Little Benny’ and I end up as expected at Rory’s Halloween party together in a yellow cab. My parents and I are in a fight because I refused to come home on time for dinner this week. They have taken away my allowance. I am pretty broke and don’t have the money to go out and get a costume. I acquisition, steal some devil ears and paint up my face red. We arrived at Rory’s crib on 81st Street around nine.

 

A big group of Stuyvesant kids show up right after we do. The only one I know is the brown bagger Julia Shoot. Most of these Stuy girls are pretty beat. One reminds me of a blonde Velma from Scooby Doo, says her name is Zivia. She isn’t ugly, just real girl-next-door  plain. She wears glasses and has a bookish complexion. She isn’t wearing a costume. Her home girl Julia Shoot is a brown bagger with big tits. I say that because everyone says they’d like to bang her out cause of her D titties, but she isn’t pretty, so they’d ‘put a brown bag over her face.’ It’s just a saying. The other two are prettier and are wearing costumes. Both are skinny blondes, one dressed like the devil the other as a vampire. The devil girl and I have identical costumes, but she doesn’t exactly act too interested when we get introduced.

 

The cold broad Roxanne slips past me as I talk to KayKay and Zivia. Roxanne is definitely the prettiest of the four. KayKay keeps on talking, but I’m not really paying any attention to her. Boring ass Japs.

 

Nick Trikhovitch calls the house to tell us the 40s have been bought. Everyone who is drinking is supposed to meet outside in Riverside Park. This kid Robert Flannigan and a group of about ten other guys whose names I don’t remember take the elevator and stairs to the lobby.

 

 

“Why do they want to get all stupid and drunk,” asks Roxanne.

 

“It’s because they’re not very confident,” says little Zivia Lubetkin.

 

Most of the Bronx Science boys have left the party to drink. It is mostly Stuy kids in the living room now. Roxanne figures this is because there isn’t the same culture of alcoholism at her school. Roxanne compares the Bronx kids to the Stuy kids and realizes that there is a substantial difference between the two mentalities. Bronx kids are drunk and wild, perhaps only interesting because their asocial tendencies are justified somehow by their proclaimed self-proclaimed intelligence. Stuy kids have more of a sense of what they are doing, like their homework.

 

“They should see themselves,” Zivia says.

 

“The Genie gets power from the bottle,” mutters Roxanne.

 

“Huh?” asks Geanie Goto turning around looking like she wants to fight.

 

“Nothing. Just a saying,” Roxanne responds to her.

 

“Oh.” Geanie resumes her palaver with Daliah thinking, ‘better not be talking to me bitch’. Now having a chuckle at Sebastian’s expense.

 

Roxanne had met that kid dressed like the devil before. His name is Sebastian and he is definitely a case in point for why teenagers should be barred from the smoke and bottle until a much later age. They had met originally at a Rock Party that KayKay had brought her to. He hadn’t made a very good first impression. She doubts if he ever did. She is actually reasonably embarrassed that they are wearing the same costume. Now he’ll get drunk and wanna get with me she thinks.

 

They say in an egg and bottle fight, better to have the bottle. Not again, is the first thing that comes to mind when the Dominican kids from the projects in the West 70’s start throwing eggs at us while we drink. There are twenty of them and they chuck eggs from the street level down into the park. We respond lobbing 40 bottles. Three minutes later we’re still pinned down on West End Drive exchanging fire. Looks like both sides have the eggs and bottles. Our ammo runs out first.

 

Rory and Max P. take off back down the street toward his house. He’s faster on his crutches than I am on foot as we evade the flying eggs. There are about fifteen of us and we probably could take them but they take off uptown. When we get back to Rory’s house, we are all winded. Rammy and Nike have disappeared. Someone said they had just gone to get high on top of Mt. Tom.

 

“Let’s get some eggs from my house and go get um,” says Rory. And this is from a guy on crutches.

 

Everyone feels pretty much the same way. I can’t believe that Rory decides to tell his mother what has happened and much less tell her what he intends to do. She tells him to call the cops and that there is no way she is going let him go get into a fight in the condition that he is in. While he is bickering with his mother Nick R. and Katzerbaad remove all the eggs from the fridge and put them in a backpack. I can’t decide whether Rory has told them to do this or if they just decided that Rory isn’t getting anywhere by trying to convince his mom.

 

The vibe is that the party that had never really been a party is over. Most of the guys want to go out and look for a fight. Benjamin and Olu left the party while we were out and have presumably headed home.

 

Roxanne notices that the guys are all riled up about something and stink of booze. Daliah calls KayKay, who also has a cell phone, and tells her that there is another house party on 106th Street. Daliah tells her that she should come, but not with any of the boys and not with more than six people.  The Stuyvesant girls say their goodbyes and head out. Rory’s parents won’t let Rory leave. About twelve people stay upstairs and the rest of us head down to look for the kids who egged us lead by Nick T. and Katzerbaad Katzer.

 

 

I light a cigarette when I get outside. There are seventeen kids, mostly guys from the Bronx crew, and the rest from Beacon. We all head towards the Park in the direction someone thinks the Dominican kids have gone while the Stuy kids start walking to the 1/9 train to get to the next party. As I finish off my cigarette and am about to follow the guys into some dumb rumble, I see Roxanne turn and give me a real stank look.

 

It was a look that simply said, “I think you’re a rude, fucking idiot.”

 

“Die you uppity straight-edge cunt,” I say under my breath.

 

“Go get fucked up!” I yell.

 

It is the beginning of a long, cold night and an endless road to nowhere.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

PART TWO:

Rude Boys & Girls

In Babylon

 

 

 

Interlude

 

January 30, 1984 8:02 pm

 

 

My earliest memory is of being in an enormous strawberry field somewhere near Montauk. My mother brought me here. I’m tiny and helpless. I am eating more strawberries than I put in the basket.

 

There are sirens blaring in the distance. The paramedics are on their way. Someone is dying. The sirens don’t frighten me.

 

The sky has no stars at all.

 

Paramedic Nick Barker is telling my father that my mother might not make it. Paramedic Barker has lost his ability to push hope even though doing so is in his job description. We’re all still in the strawberry field. They can’t find a doctor.  I’ve been in this field a whole month more than I should have been. It’s killing my mother. The moon is a huge purple half-circle hanging over our heads and the horizon.

 

West Indian nurses hover around my mother. Paramedic Barker is telling her not to push. The words “emergency C-section” get thrown around. Still no doctor.  My father is solid, but pale like a ghost.

 

I love the strawberries, but I have no basis for comparison. I don’t think I’ve ever tasted anything else.

 

A doctor finally rushes in. The West Indian nurses are frantically professional. My father prays fervently to whatever he calls god for the first time since the night of the 1968 Tet Offensive during the Vietnam War.

 

My mother who should have died, doesn’t. I am delivered via Cesarean section after ten months in the womb. Paramedic Nick Barker goes back to pushing hope.

 

Another baby born in Babylon.

 

 

 

1

 

November 1998

 

You know, I was given roughly nine years of private European style, elite education. I grew up with a nanny who was the daughter of Trinidad’s protocol minister and French babysitter who was in law school. I speak three languages and am learning Chinese. I know how to set a table, the true mark of class in America. But I learned how to be a scum bag, a little fucking rude boy thug in just under three months of undoing my lower gentry life.

 

We’ve have been learning a great deal through negative repetition, the mother of socialization.  Clearly coming at us from the ideations of the inner city, not a sickness in the culture itself permeating out in all directions!

There are so many pundit and academic opinions that try and blame drugs, Negro music and some ambiguous conspiracy via the Media. They blame violent movies, they blame hip hop, they blame rock and roll and punk; they blame gangs, they blame jazz, or reefer, or communists. They want to know! They need to know! Why are the children of aristocrats and educated white collar people, why are plump happy white kids in the suburbs acting like hooligans?!

It must be mental illness. It must be ADD. It must somehow be the fault of the niggers. No, no, no it could not be our European style education or being born in bored abundance high in a citadel, glutting ourselves while something wicked this way comes from the squalor below of those billions who starve in the shadow of our plenty.

 

I personally am getting much more effective at my own self-destruction. I am capable of drinking prodigiously and without remorse. What previously would have made me pray to the porcelain gods now barely gets me buzzed. Smoking weed is like eating breakfast. If a girl won’t jerk you off or at least let you titty fuck her, then she’s a useless prude. I smoke a lot more stoags now. Fights with my parents never seem to end.

 

I used to be a really good student.  Now it’s a rarity if I show up to school on time or even have my homework done. My grades are moving into the D-range in Math, Chinese, Music Appreciation and Biology, and to the C-range in subjects in which I used to excel like Global Studies, English and Art.

 

Virginity is being taken left and right; and I’m not just talking about hymens.

 

I’ve fallen in with a bad crowd. I like to drink. I like to smoke. I like foul language and I love chasin’ pussy. My feet have hit the concrete jungle running. It isn’t a revolt against my parents or a rebellion against authority. It is not as intellectual or child-psychologically packaged as that. What resources can you devote to rebellion when you are in the middle of waging a full-out war against yourself?

 

There is something eating away at me. I can’t just blame the drugs or the parties, the underage drinking or even the quest for degrading premarital sex. “K” is no longer just a letter. We are careening out of control.

There was a movie called “Kids” made about our older brothers and sisters generation in early 90’s NYC. I saw it once. It looks exactly like us, but no AIDS.

And I heard from Nicholai Trickovitch the AIDS was just a plot point they needs to carry a movie pretty much about our lives; party, fight, drink, smoke try and get a girl to fuck. I still tell people that movie is tamer than us, but much tamer than whatever goes down in the inner city.

Deleon told me things as different since the early 90’s. He said Mayor Giuliani doubled the amount of police up to nearly 40,000. That’s why Manhattan seems safe.

My compatriots and I live in a city that offers up international power and the green money of opportunity to most; one of the most diverse intellectual and cultural environments on the planet. It gives some of us a free education. But instead of asking the profound questions of our day, we merely ask where the next party is, what hook up is next.

I am plunging further into the land of red brick, blue steel towers, concrete floors, canyons of the citadel and a ceilings without stars.

 

2

 

 

I get dragged to a Bar Mitzvah during the weekend, some friend of my father’s or maybe a distant relative from Long Island. A Bar Mitzvah is one third of the secrets of the Jews; exposing both their boys and girls from age 11-13 to double the education; law, language and a 5,000 year old people’s you never knew. I didn’t know anyone there. Maybe that’s why I was in the cloak room foraging for stoags and the occasional loose wallet. I was in a synagogue no less and the very temple where my parents were married up on 72nd Street. Cream of the New York Jews.

The service wasn’t very long or Orthodox thankfully. I remember having to do a lot more at my Bar Mitzvah, which was little more than a year ago. I smoked up before I go and keep nodding off. I am always pretty broke so I employ an old hustle that I learned at East End Temple, the shul on 23rd Street where I got Bar Mitzvahed. While everyone was upstairs I went down to the unguarded coat check. Once I made sure no one was down there, I start going through people’s jackets taking out cash, cigarettes, and wallets of anyone stupid enough to leave a wallet in the coat check. I remove the cash and stuff it in my inner suit pocket. In less than five minutes I had stolen about $275 and two packs of Marlboros, I don’t fuck with anything light.

 

I wanted to go home but my parents made me go to the party. Like most Bar Mitzvahs, the music is a decade off hip old and the proud parents have spent too much money on the catering. All the kids looked like they were ten years old. The star of the day is this chubby little Yid with curly black hair.

 

A young girl followed me when I went outside to light an expropriated cigarette. She is pretty damn cute. She has short black hair and is wearing a pale yellow dress that looks expensive. Her eyes are brown. She can’t be older than twelve or thirteen.

 

She looks around to see if anyone she knows is watching and then asks me for a cigarette. I tell her she is too young to be smoking, but I have every intention of bumming her one. She keeps demanding a stoag. She insists that we go up the block and find a stoop so no one will see her. The party is in the Meatpacking District, the club goer haunt south of Chelsea with all these huge hanger-sized party spaces where I guess meat used to get packed.

 

The girl’s name is Dinah. And I was close. She’s thirteen ‘going on sixteen,’ whatever that means. She goes to a boarding school in upstate New York and is back for the weekend. Her parents live on the Upper East Side and she is the cousin of the Bar Mitzvah boy whose name I don’t know or care about but am now sure is not one of my relatives, I have only a few so probably not. My tribe is wide though.

 

I am watching her smoke her cigarette. She doesn’t know how to inhale. She is tiny and I imagine what a tight pussy she probably has. Odds are she’s a virgin. She’s only a year younger than I am. I want to fuck this little baby. I was supposed to cut out and meet Donny, but I decide to stay and flirt with her. We stole two beers from the bar and drank them in a bathroom. When I take her hand and put it down my pants, she has absolutely no idea what to do. She doesn’t pull away. She just kind of sits there on the toilet for a minute giving what could be called the world’s most confused hand job. She’s blushing and says she has never done this before. I tell her it’s cool and that she should keep doing it. After about five minutes she stops. I haven’t gotten off because she has no idea what she is doing. She is real embarrassed. I tell her not to worry. I take her number down and say I’d call her the next weekend she’ll be in New York.

 

Just one Saturday later she came to New York from boarding school.

 

It is a Saturday in early November and I have a six-pack of Red Stripe lager in my red GAP backpack with the checker-striped straps. I’m not going to lie. I plan to get her drunk and see what I can get away with. That’s kind of half my bag these days.

 

Dinah lives in a brownstone on 73rd and Madison. Her family owns the entire building–the fabled brownstone. She is an only child and her parents lavish her with anything and everything she might want or need. Long story short, she got a little anorexic, a little depressed, did a bit of drinking and got sent to a boarding school. When I arrive at her place we are the only two people in the house. It is lavishly decorated.

 

“How was your week?” she asks me.

 

“Uneventful. My ex-girlfriend wrote my home phone number in the 161st train station and I’ve been getting calls at home about the gay sex her little graffiti ad offered.”

 

Dinah laughed. “Your parents must be flipping out.”

 

“Not really. I don’t really see them too often. I never really go home when they’re awake.”

 

“My parents are strict. If they knew you were over here right now they’d flip. I used to go to Horace Mann, but my parents caught me smoking pot and sent me to this all girl’s boarding school.”

 

There are a few things I get excited about hearing; all girls’ boarding school is one of those things.  We head up a long stairway carpeted with a blue rug and go up to her room on the third floor. There’s a Spice Girls poster on the wall and ‘Got Milk’ posters taped above her bed. The room is pretty large and I can see a walk-in closet filled with designer labels.

 

“What do your parents do?” I ask.

 

“My dad is some corporate lawyer for an oil company and my mom is a trophy wife.”

 

I see in the pictures downstairs that her father looks old enough for her mother to be just that. I see it all the time in East Hampton, men with wives half their age. It’s a good look.

 

“You want a beer?” I take one out of my backpack. “They’re from Jamaica.”

 

“Sure.”

 

We drink and talk about nothing of real interest or importance. She tells me about her school and what she likes to do. Apparently she’s on the school volleyball team. Three beers and forty-five minutes later I’m fingering her on her bed. This time I find it. I can only get one in. I can tell she’s trashed. She lies on her back moaning. My shirt is off and we’re making out. Her tits are tiny and firm. I finger her for about ten minutes and push her head down to my crotch. I don’t ask her shit. I just whip it out and tell her to suck my cock. When she doesn’t do it on her own I shove my penis in her mouth? She’s so drunk she barely knows what she’s doing. I get off eventually. She’s crying by then. With my cum still on her red face and mascara running smudged under her eyes, she locks herself in the bathroom. I hear her crying. I let myself out of the house without saying good-bye.

 

I have to be at the Met Museum at 4 pm for some culture.

 

 

3

 

 

Nearly everything typically associated with the all-American high school hierarchy just doesn’t accurately describe our scene.

 

A lot of our crew likes hip-hop music.  It’s impossible not to be influenced by this music when you have grown up in the City and go to a public school.  This group smokes weed at parties. They drink 40s. They say, “yo” and call people “son.” Some even say “my nigga” even though they aren’t Black. Some of these kids rob people. They dog-out girls. They join crews like Beer Squad, TFO, SOS and Bacardi Mafia because they need people to have their back in stupid fights that go down every other week. They aren’t criminal enough to join a real gang. These kids might want to fit the “thug” label but would deck someone who called them a wigger.

 

A lot of the kids are athletic. Donny, Case, Sam Roebling and Max P. organize football games in Central Park on the weekends. Roller blades are strapped to Donny and Deleon’s outer backpacks. I want to buy a bag like theirs to get more skate time. A bunch of kids carry skateboards everywhere and do tricks on the other side of Harris Field during free periods.  Braunstein, Rammy Detroit, and this new kid in our crew, Yoshi, are all on the school gymnastics team. Kayo is on the fencing team. Brandi Stewart and Daliah Rodriguez are cheerleaders. I go running every week and was on the UNIS track team. Bronx Science doesn’t have a football team, but a lot of the ‘kids smoking across the street’ as Dr. Maskin calls us, do a lot of athletic activities without being what you might call  “jocks. “Jocks” are not very high on the school’s social hierarchy.

 

There are no “Preppies” at Bronx Science. That is to say, there are no kids running about in Abercrombie and kiss-my-ass. There are not a lot of GAP-wearing, metro-sexual rich kids even in magnet public schools.

 

There are some kids who play hacky sac and smoke weed three times a day like Donny. Some even have tie-died shirts like Saul Metternich, but these kids aren’t called the “stoners” or “hippies” nor do they listen to Rusted Root and Grateful Dead like some upstate throwback.  There are people like Akila, Hubert O’Domhnaill, and that kid Zach Soloman that go with me to punk shows at the Knitting Factory, the Wetlands, Coney Island High, and Tramps before Puffy bought it made it another jazz club. Akila and I have Operation Ivy, Inspector 7, Link 80, NOFX, and Suicide Machine patches sewn on irregularly to various articles of clothing or our back packs. Hubert O’Domhnaill s wears black combat boots, jeans, red suspenders a tight white Dropkick Murphy shirt and a green bomber jacket with cropped short hair. I wear ties, patches and have checkers painted on my back pack, but we aren’t “punks” or “skins.”

 

Our scene is real eclectic in its fashion sense and musical tastes. Most of our lifestyle choices make us the “bad kids across the street” with our cigarettes and house parties, baggy jeans, hip-hop music and raves.  But Hubert, Akila and I were into something a bit different from that crowd. Hubert and I were rude boys. Akila was a rude girl. Unlike most of our friends, we moved to the trumpets and horns, the sax and bass, the Ska-Punk, Ska Two Tone vibe born in Jamaica, raised in England and represented in America by the Boss Tones, the Toasters and Reel Big Fish.

 

Akila Abulaffia is of Moroccan descent. Nearly everybody in our extended crew, like the city we live in, is a mutt. Akila is “thug” because she fought in a Bacardi Mafia brawl. She smokes a blunt every other day. She likes hip-hop. Her jeans are baggy. Akila is also a “skater.” She can roller blade better than I can. She is one of the few girls who go out with us to drink and grind. Akila is a “jock” because she’s the only one of us serious about being a professional athlete. She dreams of getting to go to college in Canada where she could join an ice hockey team at the school. Akila wears a Rangers jersey every other day and is also one of the only girls to play in the football games in Central Park

 

Akila lives with her mother in a small apartment in Hell’s Kitchen. There are no rules in her home.  We can drink and smoke there and even have parties. Ska and Punk shows only happen at a handful of New York venues and normally on school nights, so Hubert and I always crash with Akila on her futon and couch when we go. Her mother is a licensed nurse. Her father was murdered when she was a little girl. Akila and I are pretty close mostly because of the Ska scene. Later on she became my ‘female shrink of the year,’ a confidant to what was happening in my mind.

 

Looking at the way we dress, I look the most like a rude boy wearing ties all the time. Akila looks like a punk with her died crimson red hair, lip piercing and band patches all over her jeans. Hubert looks like a skinhead, but his hair is crew cut, not ever totally shaven. We go out to a Ska show a month. Sometimes this kid Zach Solomon, a friend of Donny’s from LaGuardia, joins us. We saw Less Than Jake together at Roseland Ball Room. We saw the Pilfers, Stand Pipe Siamese, and Edna’s Goldfish play at the Wetlands down in Tribeca near that creepy red steel highway sculpture. Coney Island High is in a single room, barely-100-capacity venue on St. Marks. That is where Step Lively plays.  Hubert and I saw Inspector 7, a skinhead Ska-Punk band tear up Tramps where you can hang off the pipes on the ceiling. Whenever mosh pits open up Hubert and I “skank about” swinging. Skanking, as the dance form is called, is a sort of one-person swing dance with a West Indian reggae shuffle. Ska comes out of reggae and rock, lots of horns and singing about love. Since Hubert O’Domhnaill s is huge, it’s better to mosh with him when the dancing just degenerates into tons of rowdy, pumped up White kids swinging at each other. There’s Punk and there’s oi, oi that is skinhead Ska. There’s two-tone, which sounds more melodic and is better for skanking, and emo which isn’t really punk or Ska at all.

 

The three of us are the only people in the crew besides Zach Solomon that even listen to Ska. It got popular briefly in a third wave in 1997, but hip-hop and trance won out as the premier sound of the New York youth culture by the end 1998. Zach and I go to Stand Pipe Siamese shows at the famous punk venue CBGB’s on the Bowery. Our only real bond is the music. Take away the Ska and he’s a drug-dealing wigger. Julius Zarr put me onto Ska back in UNIS. I can’t say why I like it, but the only times I feel what you might call happy is skanking about the pit at one of these shows to the sound of the horns.

 

I like Akila because she facilitates me going to these shows without massive fights with my parents. She is outspoken. She’s ballsy and rude. Akila likes me because I am amusing and I’m a reckless adventurer. I’m always up for everything. I’m pretty sure that Akila doesn’t participate anymore when she hears people saying I’m an asshole or a psychopath.  It’s not because I’m fun, Its because I take her mother to AA meetings, which she says is both “wildly hypocritical and sweet.”

 

We don’t hang out much at school but I drop by her house several times a week with Donny and we get mildly weekday drunk with her mom. Akila’s mom thinks I am well mannered, completely crazy, and should marry her daughter. Akila tells her mom that I’m not manly enough for her. And she’s a bit too Tomboy for me.

 

I am hurrying to meet Akila and Donny to go to a lecture at the Met Museum for art class homework after my little escapade with Dinah from Madison Avenue.

Akila is waiting impatiently on 86th.

 

 

4

 

 

You can’t really call Akila’s building a housing project. It is either run down Section 8’d or Mitchell Lama or combined low income housing. After all, it has a doorman and not everyone one is Section 8 subsidized, but the layout is similar. The apartments are small and the stairwells are an endless mess of graffiti and empty 40 bottles. The floors are sticky enough to make your sneakers creak. It always smells like Clorox and urine. It is one of the few holdover blocks from when Hell’s Kitchen was a rough part of town. The stairwell system is odd. There are four sets of stairs that open onto either even or odd floors. One can easily get lost while intoxicated in a winding maze of neon lit bleak floors and stairwells that never lead back to where the party is.

 

Just eight hours after the lecture at the Met Museum, I am blitzed nicely on vodka and lost in this maze.

 

I had stepped out of the party after making Daliah start bawling. I’m not sure what I said. I remember something about repeating some rumor about her to everyone I met. I went for a walk to get away and now I am lost. I can’t remember what apartment Akila lives in. I had thought the floor was seven, but the stairwell I am in leads to a different seven that looks nothing like the hallway I remember seeing before. I change to another stairwell and it takes me to the fifth floor. As I stumble around the building I bang on people’s doors demanding directions back to Akila’s house. No one opens their doors. Perhaps they are used to the late night disorderly.

 

When I finally found Akila’s apartment again it was even more crowded than when I left. It is a small two-bedroom with a small living room and an outdoor terrace. It is wall to wall with drunken teenagers. Daliah is sitting on a couch. Her friends are giving me dirty looks. Silly bitches.

 

Nikh Trikhovitch sees someone puking over the balcony. Nikh is sitting outside in a foldout chair with a girl from Hunter High school on his lap. He thinks her name might be Pia or maybe it’s Sophie. He’s really too drunk to care. Nikh thinks that the wack thing about this party is that there really aren’t a lot of rooms to hook up in. At a solid party there are enough rooms so that at least two or three couples can hook up. Nikh has no real problem with getting with a girl on a couch or on a lawn chair on the balcony. It’s just that to get a girl to give you a hand job or suck your dick, you need to get her alone. Only a real slut lets you finger her in front of a party load of people. Nikh realizes in his drunken stupor that the person puking off the balcony is Sebastian Adon.

 

Trikhovitch thinks back to the Rock Party where Sebastian fingered Jantina Boz in front of like fifty people, right after he helped Sebastian retaliate for the robbery. That was pretty damn tasteless. He guesses that some people don’t need a private room at all.

 

I’m out on the balcony washing the taste of puke out of my mouth with the rest of my 40 slumped down on a lawn chair next to Nikh Trikhovitch and some girl. The dry heaves keep me hanging off the terrace edge in case I blow again. Nikh says something to me. He’s asking me a question, but I’m not really taking anything in. As the girl tries to give him a hickey he keeps asking me the same question that I’ve been running over the whole night. Am I going to be all right? I think about it for a second. As the drunken girl on his lap sucks tastelessly on his neck, he passes me a smoke and waits for me to say something.

 

I don’t speak, but just give him thumbs up. We both know I’m lying. But we both know that we’re going to play this game as hard as we can and until someone comes along and gives us a reason to fear our wicked ways.

We are going to drink up, smoke up, and bang out. Bottoms up.

 

5

 

 

I’ve been getting into some pretty get-stoned-to-death-in-the-Bible-type fights with my parents since I turned 13. That’s when I started drinking and smoking, although there wasn’t necessarily a pure correlation. By that time I was calling my mom things like bitch, whore and cunt. She’s bellowing something at me right now.  I think she got a letter from school saying my attendance was lacking.

 

“GET THE FUCK OUT OF THIS HOUSE, YOU FUCKING LITTLE SHIT!”

 

“Fuck YOU, YOU STUPID WHORE,” I yell back.

 

Something in my gut tells me that you aren’t supposed to say things like that to your mother.

 

“DON’T TALK TO YOUR MOTHER THAT WAY!” bellows my Dad.

 

“FUCK YOU!” I shout back.

 

“You’re grounded for the weekend,” he yells but then realizes I was supposed to be grounded anyway.

 

“HE NEEDS TO LEAVE NOW! HE NEEDS TO JUST GET OUT,” yells my Mom hysterically. “HE NEEDS TO LEAVE RIGHT NOW!”

 

“FINE, YOU CUNT. I’m leaving!” I slam the door behind me.

 

These fights followed a simple pattern. Something minor would always come up. My Mom would start yelling. I would yell back. My Dad would try to calm us down and then be unsure of whose side he was on once I really went off. Sometimes he’d end up in a fight with my Mom over what she said to me. I would either storm out of the apartment or just go to my room. My Mother would follow me into my room yelling and then I would take the next logical step and flee. It hardly ever got physical. A part of me wished they’d just hit me so I could be justified in hating them so much. They never did.

 

I have a few ideas about why there is so much domestic strife. My parents want me to be something I’m not, which is to say a ‘good kid’. They have a preconceived notion about what a teenager should and should not be doing, its part Hebrew part WB.

 

Whenever shit gets really bad or hectic around the house, I always bounce and go to visit my old babysitter Natalie Desmond. She is a woman in her mid-thirties who lives in Building 30 of Waterside Plaza in a three bedroom, rent-controlled apartment.  My brother little Benny and I call her our sister. Though she is Trini by birth, but she has lived in the U.S. for most of her life. She attended the U.N. School just like me. Like me, she is outspoken and confrontational. Most of what we know in the way of manners came from Natalie. We have a joke. She raised us and my parents provided the financial backing. This is not entirely fair to my parents, but it did contain a certain amount of truth.

 

Natalie lives with her boyfriend Dan, the son of a famous rabbi in New Jersey. She was married to a guy named Mick, but it had only been a convenient way to get citizenship when her mother returned to Trinidad. Dan is Jewish. The third roommate always changes. Natalie has come to the conclusion that the third bedroom room has bad energy and is cursed after a long string of bad roommates.

 

When Sebastian buzzed up from the lobby Natalie mentally prepared for the latest drama. He only really comes to see her when things at home are really bad. Things had been less than stable in the Adon household since the robbery. Natalie has always known that Zarr kid was nothing but trouble.

 

“Your parents aren’t assholes boy. You realize the robbery has them wound real tight. If you just settle down for a couple of weeks things will blow over. Then you’ll get all that freedom that you would have had in the first place if you weren’t in trouble all the time.”

 

“I can’t believe Julius Zarr robbed my house.”

 

“I can. Never trusted him at all. He always acted shady around me.”

 

Natalie lights a cigarette, locked in a endless battle to quit. I always feel like an adult when she does that because when I was a kid she would always hide it.

 

“My mom is fucking losin’ it.”

 

“You say that all the time.”

 

“For real though this time. Every time I’m around her she flips shit over the cigarette thing.”

 

“You have to be smarter about doing shit that you know makes them angry. I’ve been telling you that for years.”

 

“I know.”

 

“I don’t think you do. Your parents are real good people, but there are certain things that set them off. You guys play into each other all the time, like the whole smoking thing. You know your Mom hates it. So why won’t you use Fabreeze and gum to keep her from knowing you smoke?”

 

“It’s too much trouble.”

 

“So don’t complain to me when you get caught.”

 

“My Dad won’t shut up about this building trust thing either. They tell me if they trusted me I could have more freedom, but they won’t let me have any now so I feel like I have no incentive.”

 

“Stop being a child.”

 

“What do you mean?”

 

“You get into fights with your parents. You break curfew. You smoke cigarettes, and from what I hear from your brother, you cut school. You think they’re gonna just let you do whatever you want and that you don’t have to follow their rules?”

 

“I just feel that we’ve been fighting worse and worse ever since around the time of my Bar Mitzvah. I just wish I had a clean slate and could prove that I should be able to do what I want.”

 

“Once again, you’re being a child.”

 

“No, I’m not!”

 

“Being an adult is about showing that you can be independent. You want to be independent, but you won’t do any of the basic things that will make your parents sleep easy. I say you’re being a child because you still can’t seem to avoid stepping on their toes.”

 

“Stepping on their toes?! They have a completely unrealistic expectation for how kids grow up in New York. I have a ten-thirty curfew. I have to do my homework every night and study. They won’t shut up about studying. It’s like they think I have a test every day. They harass me and harass me. My Mom still blames me for the robbery even though I had nothing to do with it.”

 

“Calm down. What makes you think you deserve all this freedom anyway? What have you done to earn their trust?”

 

I can’t think of anything.

 

“Yeah. Exactly. You got kicked out of UNIS. Then you got kicked out of summer camp. Then your house got robbed by your good friend Julius Zarr and all you want to do is stay out late and get fucked up.”

 

“I get fucked up ‘cause its somethin’ we do.”

 

“I know you believe that, but if you don’t take care of school and your parents, then you’re not gonna be able to party with your friends cause you’ll always be grounded.”

 

“Did you get in fights with your parents a lot when you were my age?”

 

“Of course I did. My Mom and I used to go at each other like you couldn’t even believe.”

 

“Trust me, Natalie. I can believe.”

 

“Yeah, you’re pro’lly right.”

 

“So how did you deal with the whole growing up thing?”

 

“I did my school work. I studied in front of them. I stopped yelling at them and made them think I was always on the straight and narrow. I didn’t let them smell smoke on me. When I got fucked up I slept over at friends’ houses.”

 

“How come they don’t get it?”

 

“Don’t get what?”

 

“They don’t understand what it’s like to be young here.”

 

“They come from a different time. Different values. Parents can’t get why kids are growing up so fast. I blame television.”

 

“Natalie?”

 

“Yeah?”

 

I wanted to tell her about the nightmares, but I didn’t. The best way to deal with them is to treat them like they don’t exist.

 

“Can you bum me a cigarette?”

 

“For a moment there I thought you were gonna say something deep.”

 

“What do you think this is,” I ask, “the WB?”

 

I’m sure as soon as the future arrives that reference will be lost on nearly everyone.

 

 

 

6

 

 

 

Ah, Gregorian Calendar New Year 1999!

 

People whisper the world is going to end next year. I tell them the far older Mayan, Chinese, Hebrew and Islamic lunar Calendars don’t have any world ending proscribed in the cards so we shouldn’t presume that 2000 years since the alleged birth of Jesus means all that much.

But, Akila says the vanished ancient Mayans have something called the Baktun Long Calendar and that it’s cycle ends on December 21st, 2012.

We still have a while to party I tell her.

 

Akila and her Mom are hosting a New Year’s party this year. It will actually be the first time I won’t be spending it with my parents. Instead I will be spending it with Mr. Red Dog 40, Mr. Woodchuck, Mr. Ballantines and a shit load of my so-called friends, which I suppose is preferable when you think about it.

 

Andy’s Deli knew it was us when we called to tell them we would be buying $300 worth of forties and that we will pay for their cab back and forth from 84th and Broadway to 54th and Tenth. They knew it was us in a figurative sense anyway. By us, I really mean a group of underage drinkers.

Though the Wagner kids had been buying from the Muhammeds for a couple years.

Akila’s Mom is one of the few parents you don’t have to wait until she goes away to throw a party. She even throws in money for the 40’s. Akila told me her mother is an alcoholic. I just figure that is one of those terms that gets thrown around a lot to describe people who really like to drink. I feel that it really is more of a state of mind than a disease. It isn’t as if someone catches alcoholism. Akila’s mom just adheres to the philosophy that we are going to be drinking anyway so we might as well have a house to do it in. It is sound reasoning. At least she has a realistic understanding of how kids really are. I can really respect that enlightened approach to child rearing.

 

A Muhammad from Andy’s showed up around 6 pm with about twenty brown bags worth of 40s. It is a terrorist attack on our livers. We have gone half and half between Red Dog and Woodchuck. There is so much beer that Benjamin, Akila and I filled the bathtub with ice once the fridge filled up, to keep it all cold. Muhammad smiled as we gave him the money and wished us a very Happy New Year.

 

The apartment filled up by 8 pm. By that time I was already pretty drunk. There simply isn’t enough room to move around. I go out on the balcony terrace to get some fresh air. Issachar ‘Izzy’ Vitz, a friend of Donny’s is out here smoking a joint. I’ve seen him all over the place but we’ve barely spoken three words.

 

“Wanna hit this?” He asks.

 

“Fer sure.”

 

“What’s up, kid?” he asks passing me a thick spliff.

 

“I’m trying to think of a New Year’s resolution.”

 

“Bone more bitches. That’s mine,” he suggests as he hits the grass puffing.

 

“I was thinking a bit more along the lines of dealin’ with my shit. Drink less. Do more school work? Make things right with my parents.”

 

“No. Bone more bitches is a much better resolution. You’ll end up not keeping the other one.”

 

I take another deep hit.

 

“I seen you about.” Says Izzy. “You need to tighten your game.”

 

“My game is tight,” I reply.

 

I’d seen Izzy a lot at the Rock parties. He always wore this white hoody with a huge tribal design on the back and a green cameo visor with the word IZEKIAL printed on the cap. He always showed up with some private school broad. Always asked around for condoms he knew mad guys carried in wallets but never used.

 

“Gotta change out your condoms every few weeks. They sit around too long in your wallet and they sure to break,” he says finishing off the clip.”

 

“How do you bag so many fly girls my dude?”

 

“My game is tight. And I’m the straight lady killing gentle man. I could put you on. Bitches just seem to love Izzy.”

 

He speaks in the third person sometimes I’ve noticed when he gets stoned.

 

The hands down hottest girl at the party, a Lithuanian Japanese sophomore from Hunter High school named Jackie O’ Niche comes out to the balcony as if to illustrate his point. She’s a half pint, eyes painted like a Gus Meyer film. She curls up in his arms like a pussy cat.

 

“Jackie, this is Sebastian,” he says. Izzy always introduces his latest girly. As if to say to everyone, easy come, easy go, but not until he’s done.

 

“The crazy one,” she smiles as we shake hands.

 

“That’s flattering,” I respond. But crazy is always better than ‘weird’.

 

“Is it?” she smirks and lights a cigarette.

 

“Happy almost New Year, Mr. Vitz. You too, Jackie,” I say talking my leave.

 

“Indeed,” Izzy says, “You too, motherfucker. Happy damn New Years. Let’s resolute to hang out sometime, just in case you’re first resolution falls through.”

 

“What’s your number?”

 

“Ah, the most important three words, I hope I’ll ever teach you to say.”

 

The evening ended around 5 am with Zivia Lubetkin, the little Stuyvesant pip squeak, Akila, Benny, and me lying uncomfortably and drunk on the fold out couch in the living room watching the Twilight Zone marathon in a haze as the dawn broke. I feel as though the entire evening is a taste of things to come. The taste of things to come tastes a whole lot like Malt liquor.

 

 

 

 

7

 

 

 

I am sitting in the middle of the desert. I notice that I am handcuffed to a dead man. A fucked up corpse. He appears to have blown his brains out with a WW2 service revolver. Obviously, the booze isn’t helping this dream situation much anymore.

 

I’m not alone. A campfire is burning and the old man is sitting under a tree looking off at the dunes. In the pitch black I can only see a slight glow coming from the Pale City miles away. There is a wooden stool across from me. A beat up television sits on top of the stool buzzing with static.

 

“Wanna tell me what this is supposed to mean?” I ask the old man.

 

“You know, before I came to this place, I remember being happy, sort of. I remember having a family and trying to write a good Russian style novel. There was a lot of joy in that. I remember thinking that my book was really going to ‘change the world’. Open a lot of closed eyes. Wake the zombies up like salt. I thought that it would shed some light on why people are the way they are, why things happen as they do. But I kept getting tired. Or they kept putting me to sleep. They seem to have burned my latest manuscript.”

 

“What was the book about?”

 

“It was about your life. More specifically, it was about how your morals died inside you.”

 

“How did they die, old man?”

 

“When you stopped carrying the fire.”

 

“What in three fucks that means, you spew a whole lot of flim-flam my pasty old beard friend of a nightmare.”

I look at the corpse. It looks a whole lot like me. It is missing part of its head.

 

“I think you’re just fucking with me again. None of what you say has any bearing on the real world. You’re just people with ideas.”

 

“Who says you’re dreaming?”

 

“Well for one thing, in real life I wouldn’t be handcuffed to my corpse in the middle of the desert.”

 

“Have you considered that maybe we’re dreaming of you not vice versa? Maybe we dream of being a terrible little student with a quickly developing set of a-social tendencies. In this place we’d dream of that and make you our beleaguered young messiah by comparison to forces ruling here. Come on boy. This isn’t a book that will sell well in Babylon.”

 

“No. That sounds like true blue bullshit.”

 

“There really is no way of knowing. But if I prick you with answers, you may swallow and die.”

 

“You don’t give me any answers. You and the wild girl, and everything about this place are my own personal Hell. I have no idea what you’re trying to tell me, but I sure as Hell know that I made you all up not vice the versa.”

 

“Whatever you have to tell yourself to get by, Michael.”

 

“That’s not my name.”

 

“Did you know that the Hebrew people wandered the desert for forty years before God let them into the Promised Land?”

 

“Why did you call me Michael?”

 

“Before they reached their destination they had to be purged of their tainted ways acquired in the house of bondage. They had to become righteous.”

 

“I asked WHY YOU CALLED ME MICHAEL?!”

 

“None of the original Israelites made it to the promised land. They all died in the desert. Only their children saw the freedom they were promised. They simply couldn’t unlearn their sin. You have one foot in the door, Michael. You’ve got one in the house of bondage and the other in the desert. Mark my words. You will die before you see the Promised Land too. Your near self-destruction is an integral part our plan.”

 

“There isn’t a plan, you ancient fuck! This is all in my head!”

 

I scream unintelligible Middle Eastern profanities at the sands and the moon.

 

The TV on the stool stops flickering static and I see an image coming into focus as I struggle to get free from the body I’m chained to. I see an empty grave and the next thing I know I’m lying in it, the body right next to me. I scream ‘til I piss all over myself clawing out my own eyes.

 

I wake up wet, still screaming, hand clenched like a pistol pointed out into the darkness.

 

 

 

 

 

8

 

 

 

Nikh Trickovitch likes to tell elaborate stories. Not outright long lies like Izzy, just wild exaggerations. More plausible yarns. Embellishments if you will. Populist youth story-telling like how he and Katzerbaad expropriated weed pretending to be police officers.

 

Anytime that I was at a party intoxicated, I would demand that Nikh recount one of his stories to the strangers we had just met. One went like this.

 

Nikh claimed that a young Black kid had accosted him as he was walking back from playing video games at Blake Braunstein’s house. The robber had a chain. Nikh pulled out a small blue crow bar that he always carried out as the chain swung in his direction. He pulled the chain away with the crowbar and the robber was left unarmed. Now it was Nikh who had the upper hand.

 

“The tables have turned now, bitch!” he yelled. “Now give me your wallet.”

 

The confused and unarmed kid handed it over. Nikh claimed he took the cash and threw the wallet over a fence. No one ever thought Nikh was telling the truth. People just liked the “chain story” because it was so far-fetched. You have to understand that every 14 year-old American boy lies about something. Nikh just figured it was better to at least make it interesting.

 

Nikh was a little more mature than the rest of us and he reeked of charisma. Although he mostly led the crew to drink and do drugs in parks, and would end up popularizing cocaine on the magnet school level, he was a good guy. He was the first person to have a cell phone. It was a clunky black box. This was right before the second Palestinian Intifada made cell phone technology accessible to young people as a means by which parents could theoretically always touch base with their kids. Nikh was sort of the life of the party for all the wrong and right high school reasons. He would always show up with girls and later with girls and drugs. His cell phone was the coordinating mechanism for Rock Parties, a sort of switchboard for underage drinking. And he knew all the deli guys on the Upper West Side. This made everything real easy.

 

There was a subversive depth to Nikh hidden under all that party-boy exterior that few saw. Sometimes when I stayed over at his home on 95th Street, we’d stay up smoking stoags, having long talks about human nature. Talks about god or love. The kind of sophomoric intellectual nonsense NYU college students ramble on about in coffee shops. Rosy, as I sometimes referred to him, was filled with secrets. Darkness and demons just like me. I kept mine kept somewhat in line with the bottle. Rosy kept his in check with sex and with tales.

 

The bonds of friendship are being remodeled within our crew. Donny’s brand of escapism bores me. Weed has lost almost all its appeal. I am tired of watching Donny smoke trees and Case play video games like Star Craft. I am spending more time with Nikh Trikhovitch and Izzy Vitz. Izzy explained that while the booze could drown out my past or whatever causes these demons, that girls can take my mind off everything.

 

Lately Trikhovitch is believing in that thing called love so much that we rarely see him. He fell for this Beacon girly, Sabine Pubar, a precocious little blonde, emotional vampire that likes literature and plans to immigrate to the Czech Republic one day after high school. The girl has a dark secret and Nikh shared it with me. Her father’s friend fucked her up the ass when she was little. So now she’s into hard and dirty sex. Likes getting roughed. I see him less and less through December and January.

He is catering to this secret’s needs.

 

Donny Gold, Tim Finnegan and I go roller blading at night amid the towers of blue glass in Midtown the night before my 15th birthday on January 29, 1999.  We steal a couple six-packs of Red Stripe Jamaican lager from a supermarket and an enormous can of Fosters from a deli. We get so drunk that at one point we are skating as fast as we could into this wall with a reflective mirror surface. It was just the three of us male-bonding with smokes, Jamaican brew and skates.

 

The next day Finnegan and I went to go steal more beer for my birthday party. We got caught the first try. Apparently grocery clerks are more perceptive during the day. I tried to talk my way out of it, but we ended just booking it out of the store. I wasn’t trying to spend my birthday in the Tombs.

Your privilege around here goes only to a point.

We plan to meet up on 86th and Lexington around 4 o’clock. Donny thinks it will be good to invite everyone down for a birthday party even though I don’t have any money or any idea about where we can go.  I haven’t been home in a week. I have been living with Donny and his Mom Bonnie. She likes having me around because I clean shit up around the house and make sure Donny goes to school.

 

Izzy Vitz is waiting on the corner with a couple other kids. By the time four o’clock rolls around most of our crew is hanging out on the corner. People start giving me money. I don’t really understand why they came out to my birthday. Izzy is trying to figure out a place to have the party while I walk around making small talk with these people that are apparently still my friends.

 

Its later now and brik as shit. That means VERY cold.

 

The wind is ripping across the rooftop where we huddle nursing 40 ounces to freedom. I spent most of the money I was given for my birthday on 40 poison and assorted six-packs of Coors bottled beer. There are about twenty people drinking on Nikh T’s roof. It just keeps getting colder.

 

“Screw this brik ass weather,” says Blake Braunstein. “Why don’t we just go over to my house?”

 

No one was about to argue with him. A free crib, was a free crib.

 

I down my third Red Dog 40 within the 15 minutes it takes us to walk to Braunstein’s house.  I think back to my 14th birthday that I spent alone on a street corner. My 13th birthday was worse, my bar mitzvah. I didn’t like dancing to the hip-hop that had been popular four years ago with lots and lots of relatives I didn’t know and so-called friends I didn’t like. What is it about my birthday that spells melancholic relief? It is as if each year I gain a greater understanding that my few years on this earth have been wasted and lonely. I am entirely too down for someone my age.

 

Everyone has a 40 or some assorted smaller bottle of beer once we arrive at Blake’s house. There isn’t the same frantic binge atmosphere that normally accompanies our parties. Things are slowly going down frame by frame as I walk room-to-room trying to capture the jist of fifteen conversations. The topics range from Rammy Detroit babbling on about Navy Seal recruitment benefits to the construction of a foot-long joint. I like the fact that in about an hour I will really see an attempt to smoke a foot-long blunt. We at least have that going for us.

 

That girl Roxanne has been hangin’ around all night for some reason, guess Buffy the Vampire Slayer went off the air. We had a halfway civil conversation on the way over to Blake’s. It turns out that she goes to grade school with a few of my crew. She warms up to me when I stop trying to be cool. Izzy had schooled me. Girls smell phony game three lines away.

 

Roxy is sitting by watching me drink. We are having this easy conversation that is pretty far removed from the things I usually talk about. We’re talked about theatre and art. She knows all the words to Rent and Les Mis. We are sitting in Blake’s stairwell debating the message of Les Miserable. It’s so offbeat to even talk about this, but I’m fascinated with it. She doesn’t drink or smoke. She’s totally straight edge. She’s the calm, confident one always putting people in cabs at the end of the evening. That’s me as well, I said smiling as I drink my Red Stripe. She smirks at me. She’s got this innocent blonde schoolgirl thing going on.

 

 

“You’re cleverer than you let people think,” she says suddenly.

 

“It’s easy to talk shit when you don’t get to know a person.”

 

“I’ve seen you in action before, Mr. Adon. Your actions are pretty shit.”

 

“What, like on Halloween?”

 

“That was some pretty testosterone-fueled, male bonding.”

 

“You know how it goes sometimes,” I laugh.

 

“Right. How does it feel to have ‘matured’ so quickly at the ripe old age of fifteen?”

 

“Considering I spent my 14th birthday on a street corner without any friends or family about, it’s a step up.”

 

“You fight with your parents a lot?”

 

“Once in a while,” I say with a serious look in my eyes.

 

“I heard from Akila you haven’t been home in like three weeks.”

 

“I’m on a little winter vacation you might say.”

 

“You don’t seem like a bad kid, despite what everyone seems to say.”

 

“That’s because haters wanna hate.”

 

“Why do talk like a wigger. Misunderstood are you?”

 

“Tragically.”

 

“I think you smoke and drink too much, but you’re smarter than I would have thought. Did your Grandpa really read you Les Mis when you were five years old?”

 

“How else would I know it so well?”

 

“Spark Notes.”

 

I clink my 40 oz. against the stairwell wall.

 

“You see through my French-literature-cramming-to-impress-Stuy-girls game. I’m surely finished.”

 

She smiles and kisses me on the cheek. Its a little too Hollywood for me. I don’t know how to react. I’m embarrassed to say I’ve haven’t kissed a girl sober since 6th grade. Well, I’m sort of sober.

 

“I was wondering what it is you’re always so deep in thought over. Sometimes I see you at parties staring out a window or at a Rock Party by yourself pondering something away from the others.” Roxanne says suddenly.

 

“You really want to know?”

 

“Kind of. If the answer’s good enough it will be your saving grace.”

 

“Saving grace from what?”

 

“I don’t kiss boys that do shady things unless they have a good back story.”

 

“I have no such good story. There are no good excuses for the things I do.”

 

“You’re really kind of funny. And well read, and cute in a way. But it’s late, and I think one thing will lead to another with you if I hang around.”

 

“There’s a question I’m stuck with, Roxy.”

 

“Yeah?”

 

“It might be too much for you.”

 

“Try me.”

 

“No seriously. If I put you onto this and you were to let people know and someone figured out the answer before I could, I’m not sure I could live with myself.”

 

“I promise. It won’t go further than me.”

 

“On your word? You really want to know what I think about all the time.”

 

“Yeah.”

 

“Alright. The question is this. Who’s a better hero, Batman or Superman?”

 

She has a blank, boys-talking-about-Star-Wars kind of look on her face.

 

“And the answer is?”

 

“Batman of course.”

 

“Now why do you say that?”

 

“Because being a good detective by night makes up for being an undeserving billionaire by day. And he gets to go home with any girl he wants, while the invincible Super Man has to pretend to be a big dork just to hide in a sea of mediocrity.”

 

“Is that what it’s about to you? Going home with any girl you want or not deserving all the things you have?”

 

“Neither. I just like super heroes. I’m just making small talk from something I saw in a movie.”

 

“You always silly play games like this?”

 

“With people I kind of like.”

 

Akila and Roxanne leave the party around midnight to sleep at Roxanne’s house. There were only a dozen people or so still around anyway. About ten minutes later Akila calls Blake Braunstein and tells him that she is coming back. They decide that Roxanne will sleep over at Akila’s where the curfew is real nonexistent. Some combination of Akila wanting to fool around with Case Yadger and Roxy intrigued with me led to this logistics change. That means they can now be out all night.

 

Roxy came back. Without too many more words, we were making out on Blake Braunstein’s sofa under that historic Tyra Bank’s poster that hasn’t left his house since my I lost the election. We’ve become a giggling, passionate ball of tender kisses. We tumble off the sofa onto the floor wrapped in a huge red sheet. We curl up together and make a blanket tent. The kissing goes on until nearly dawn, I don’t try for anything else

 

Less than five feet away from me on the other couch Nikh Trikhovitch is losing his virginity to a girl named Sabine. Sabine, who is full of secrets, is not losing her virginity to Nikh, but is humoring his ignorance of this fact a little longer. They are enjoying themselves. Roxy and I fail to notice that they are in the room. I am in some thankfully dreamless, peaceful sleep in her arms.

 

When I wake up in the morning, she is gone. But like any type of junkie, even a blissful sobering moment is clouded quickly with time. I am back to my wicked ways only a week later; and with them comes the darkness my head contains.

 

 

 

9

 

 

 

I’m terrified of clowns, but I’m doing my best to cut a deal. He doesn’t say a word, the creepy pederast grinning miserable fuck. He communicates in hand signals, the motions of guerrilla warfare. Periodically when he isn’t feeling what I have to say he’ll burst out laughing. Why am I talking to the clown, the creature that always mocks my escape attempts? I’m talking to him because the only way out appears to be up. And the clown sells balloons.

 

The clown looks likes like a fighter up close with more war paint than makeup. He’s grotesquely fat. I guess the only difference is what you do for a living. His head is wrapped in a black turban. He wears a beige trench coat and over the coat is an ammo belt that holds six clips for a Kalashnikov rifle.

 

We communicate through one of the chain link fences that surround the Pale City. He motions for me to cut my payas, Jew curls. I wasn’t even aware that I had them. I’ve been here so long without a mirror I haven’t the faintest idea what I look like. He passes me a scissors through the fence and motions that he’ll send me up if I pass him the payas. SNIP. SNIP.  A slot drawer opens in the fence. I drop the payas in it as they slide over to the other side.

 

Next thing I know I’m flying high above the desert. A fan that propels me forward is strapped on my back, as I am kept afloat not by one, two, or three, but 99 red balloons. I am whistling the lyrics to a song. I don’t know the words because they are in German and I will have nothing to do with that particular language.  They did, after all, slaughter around six million of my people.  Right now I’m just trying to put as much ground as humanly possible between the Pale City and me.  My whistle is a nervous whistle. The sky is pitch black but something tells me that if I float high enough I’ll break into daylight. Wishful fucking thinking.

 

Why am I trying to leave this place when I know that just hasn’t been in the cards? I’m trying to get a message out to God. Yeah, the Big Guy.  I’m tired of the old man and his bullshit. I’m tired of the torments of the little suicide queens. And of course there is the ever-elusive man in the beige trench coat who I gather is either what I want to be or am supposed to be eventually.

 

I wonder if I’m dead and I just don’t know it. It is entirely possible that I’ve gone to Hell and am dreaming of being alive. The engine on my back sputters low on fuel. I see another form rising out of the desert in the darkness. It’s a lobster attached to a mass of red balloons. I’m sharing the air with a creature that feeds from the bottom and then gets boiled alive. The propeller stops. I undo the straps and let it fall miles below me to the desert floor. The balloons take the lobster and me straight up. Weighing less, the lobster passes by me. As it does it turns its little crustacean head and says,

 

“What does it tell you that I’m much smaller then a camel?”

 

It would take me a very long time to find out what that meant. The lobster floats out of sight. I hear the squawk of birds and I see a swarm of birds heading toward me. I sense it more than I see it. They fly past tearing at the balloons and me. Occasionally one pops, but it doesn’t seem like this slows my ascent. I realize that one bird in particular isn’t in any hurry. This bird is bigger than the rest. That is because this is not a bird. This is the man in beige with pin stripes with a Daedalus flying contraption of wooden poles, wax, and weathers. Only in ancient Greece and psychotic hallucinations is such an apparatus actually airborne.

 

“I’m here to tell you, you don’t have permission to meet with It.”

 

“Who?”

 

“You know who. You’re acting like a child and a presumptuous child at that.”

 

A bird pops a balloon right above my head.

 

“How do I get an audience with him then?”

 

“The sooner you stop thinking of it as a him, the quicker your departure from this place.”

 

“And who the fuck are you?” I demand.

 

“Me? I’m Mike Washington. You ask me that every time like you got a condition.”

 

“Is this my afterlife, Washington?”

 

“That would imply you were alive before you got here.”

 

“I was. That is. I am. This dream is Hell and I can only thank God that I get to wake up from it.”

 

“Do you really mean that?”

 

“What?”

 

“Do you actually can thank God?”

 

“It’s a figure of speech.”

 

“Well in that case I only know as much as you do.”

 

A bird pops another balloon. They are literally flying past us. Mike Washington seems to glide effortlessly upward as I rise parallel to him on my red balloon rig.”

 

“I didn’t understand what the lobster said.”

 

“Lobsters don’t talk, pilgrim.”

 

“I forgot.”

 

“So whose side are you on?”

 

“There are sides?”

 

“Yes. There are always very wide curving porous sides. People that can’t pick a side are fickle. No one likes the fickle.”

 

“Well, Mike Washington, I don’t even know what each side stands for.”

 

“And that’s why you don’t get to meet Him today. Of course Him is the wrong term, but that’s how Western civilization has socialized you to think of our maker.”

 

“Until I negotiated with that sad fucking clown to buy this flying machine, I don’t know that I believed in “Him” at all. My faith is transient. You might say I haven’t seen any convincing miracles.”

 

“You’re flying three miles above the desert talking to a man flying on wax, sticks, and eagle feathers. That’s pretty fucking miraculous. And call me Mike.”

 

“So how do I get upstairs, Mike?”

 

“Isn’t that the question everyone keeps asking these days and forever? Until the day of judgment that is?”

 

“What religion are you, Mike?”

 

“I’m gonna put you on to something,” he whispers still soaring.

 

“What?”

 

“Religion is for drunks, the poor and children.”

 

A McDonalds is sitting on a cloud floating miles above the ground. Seated on the cloud is a camel trying to put its head through the eye of a needle. A crowd of people is cheering on the effort. Shirtless men and women with white cotton tunics stand around making bets on whether this camel will get through. They munch on burgers. When Tupac asked if heaven had a ghetto, I wouldn’t be able to answer. I do now know that what I call Hell has a McDonalds.

 

“Fancy a meat burger?” asks Mike.

 

But it’s too late. Unable to control my flight path, I am unable to land.  I just keep going up and up.

 

“So where are we exactly? Hell, purgatory, the rocky road to Heaven?”

 

“You’re thinking in terms that simplify the greatness of God.”

 

“Are we heading in the right direction?”

 

“Every which way is the right direction if you get the feeling that your purpose is close to realization.”

 

“Then cut me loose, Mike, ‘cause I haven’t the faintest idea what I’m doing here. I don’t have a purpose.”

 

“You do. Mark my words you do. It just hasn’t made that purpose clear.”

 

“Yeah, I stopped paying attention after all the floating camels, and the talking lobsters, and the torments of the little girls with the homicidal intentions.”

 

“Sebastian…”

 

“What?”

 

“Lobsters don’t talk.”

 

The birds begin attacking the remnants of my balloon cluster.

 

POPOPOPOPOPOPPOPOPOPOPOPOPOPOPPPOOOPPO!

 

Suddenly there are only three balloons left.

 

“The lobster was talking, Mike.”

 

POP. POP. There is only one left.

 

“You have to separate what is devilish from what is divine or you’ll be lost in Babylon forever.”

 

A bird is perched on the final balloon keeping me afloat.

 

“What is Babylon?” I ask, eyeing this bird whose presence spells my three-mile drop back into oblivion.

 

“Babylon is a place where one cannot hear God.”

 

POP.  And down I go falling.

About to fall hard.

 

 

 

10

 

 

There’s this cat that goes to my school that I really look up to. His name is Deleon. He’s the only Black Jew I’ve ever met, and he ain’t from Ethiopia.

 

He’s always reading books on spiritual and political shit, stuff I never took an interest in, but probably should check out. He’s pretty tall for a junior in high school and has well-kept dreds. Deleon has this backpack that contains everything he needs to get by for a couple of weeks without going home: a change of clothes, a couple of cans of food, and a sewing kit. His skates are attached to the back of the bag. I don’t know too much about his domestic situation except that he usually stays over at his friends’ houses. Deleon is also strait edge like Roxanne. He doesn’t do drugs or drink or even smoke cigarettes.

 

Like Roxanne who I only called once, twice and three times after that night and never heard from again. Puppy love bullshit feelings type shit.

 

I’ve never met a straight edge guy before who wasn’t a herb. We don’t have much in common, but we talk a whole lot sitting on the concrete steps outside the school.

 

“Why the Hell don’t you drink, again?” I ask incredulously.

 

“That shit is poison.”

 

“And you don’t fuck with drugs either, right?”

 

“Nope. Poison too.”

 

“So what do you do to have fun?”

 

“I read. Get with mad shorties and skate it up grind style. You don’t actually need drugs to have fun, kid. The crime-fighting dog was right. So was Carmen Santiago.”

 

“That’s just crazy talk. Being straight edge really isn’t normal.”

 

“What makes you think taking drugs is so normal?”

 

“’Cause everyone does them.”

 

“You ever think that maybe only your circle of friends does them?”

 

“I don’t think that’s right.”

 

“So you really think that all kids your age are smoking dope, drinking 40s, and having banging out bitches?”

 

“Pretty much. Yeah, I do.”

 

“You just hang out with the bad crowd, kid.”

 

“What? Your friends don’t do that shit?”

 

“They do. My crew hangs out across the street, too. I just don’t think you can make blanket statements about youth and absolute delinquency. I don’t think that most kids get into what your friends are doing now until maybe when they go to college.”

 

“I think American youth are overall pretty fucked. They should just legalize everything and let us say no to whatever we want.”

 

“Trouble is, taught to consume, we say no to nothing. The last thing our generation needs is easier access to drugs and alcohol. You do realize that drugs and alcohol keep people from revolting, keeps you all doped up and sedated so you never question the grind of it all? There’d be revolution if you got these poisons forever out of the minds of youth and the masses.”

 

“What are you talking about?”

 

“If people didn’t get drunk and high, tune out all the damn time, they’d realize how the government fucks them. Trick them. Makes um hate things they don’t need to hate, buy things they don’t need to buy. Pay motherfucking taxes. How it grinds us under its heel.”

 

“The government doesn’t fuck anybody.”

 

Although even then I had my doubts about what they were even good for.

 

“You say that because you forgot how to read.”

 

“You’re telling me that the government is responsible for what’s wrong with us? What?!”

 

“It just isn’t exactly that simple homie.

 

“So elaborate, motherfucker.”

 

“What do you know about the capitalist system?”

 

“I know it’s about making money and that it works pretty damn well.”

 

“You’re brainwashed, kid. Straight brainwashed hardcore.”

 

“I didn’t know you were a pinko.”

 

“I’m not a communist, but do you even know what that means?”

 

“That I can’t buy McDonalds once the Russians ruin our economy?”

 

“Russia isn’t communist. Wasn’t even communist before it fell apart in ’89. Certainly isn’t now. No country is pure this or that. But capitalism takes something out of everyone because it alienates people from both the means of production and boils human interaction down to pure economics. ”

 

“I don’t think I understand your little diatribe.”

 

“You’re not using that word right.”

 

“Which one?”

 

Diatribe.”

 

“Whatever. What do you mean about making everything about economics?”

 

“Materialism, kid. We are completely living our lives for material gain. Everything we do is about getting rich. The reason so many kids get into drugs and alcohol is that they have a sick desperation that comes from subconsciously knowing that they are being turned into parts for a machine that does not actually benefit them.”

“So us being all fucked up is really the fault of the government? Is that what you’re saying?”

 

“The government perpetuates it and exploits it, but they don’t cause it.”

 

“So who do we blame, Del?” I ask belligerently.

 

“Well first we gotta blame ourselves.”

 

“What do you mean blame ourselves? Aren’t we the victims?”

 

“Nothing is simple, kid, but I’ve come to believe that the only people not tainted by the system are the ones who separate from it.”

 

“And how does one go about that.”

 

“Not doing drugs and drinking is a good start. When you’re not fucked up all the time, you see things a lot more clearly. Remember how to read.”

 

“I know how to fucking read, Del.”

 

“But do you own the right books?”

 

“What would the right books show me?”

 

“The world’s fallin’ apart all around us.”

 

“I don’t see that.”

 

“You’ll just have to take my word then son.”

 

“Everything seems pretty solid. I feel like it’s us that are falling apart.”

 

“Youth are the spiritual barometer of a nation.”

 

“What the Hell does that mean?”

 

“I mean that you can gauge a society based upon the condition of the youth.”

 

“Why is that?”

 

“Because youth are the ones that are supposed to change things, be the most fervent idealists.”

 

“So our desperation comes from our inactivity in response to a decadent society?”

 

“Something like that. The death of idealism leads us to accept the less than perfect reality.”

 

“I don’t accept it, but I still can’t tangibly figure out what’s wrong.”

 

“Seems like you know what’s up,” he says.

 

“Yeah, but I’m not really doing anything about it. Not putting down the bottle anytime soon.”

 

The period bell rings and kids start heading across the street to get to class. I don’t really feel like going. I feel like if I stay out I might learn something, but Vance is out this period and he’ll start fucking with me. I give Del a pound and head to class.

 

Vance has been fucking with me nearly every day. He puts me in garbage cans and rolls me down the hill. He’s a big motherfucker and I’m not sure what to do about it. I really need to deal with that fuck. Later after school when I see Del again I ask him what I should do about it.

 

“What you really should do about it is turn out his sister,” said Deleon as we sat on the Harris Field ledge that overlooks Bronx Science.

 

“How the Hell would I even go about finding her?”

 

“Well, for one thing you could come with me to BBYO.”

 

“What’s BBYO?”

 

“It’s a Jewish youth organization that Samson and I go to bag chicks. Vance’s sister is a member. Her name is Trish. I bet you’re just her type.”

 

Samson is my Jewish brother from another mother.

 

“What’s her type?”

 

“A little nerdy, a little bad.”

 

“Why the Hell are you part of a Jewish youth organization?”

 

“That’s really not the issue here. The issue is you fucking Vance’s sister to get back at him for fucking with you all the time.”

 

“That’s a little underhanded don’t you think? But why are you in this BBYO thingy?”

 

“Slutty White girls.”

 

“Say no more. But why would banging the sister hurt him?”

 

“It’s called guerilla warfare. Peripherally striking the enemy when you can’t meet them in open conventional combat. Besides, you’re not exactly one to adhere to any rigid moral scruples from what I hear. You’re the ill sexual terrorist.”

 

“Whatever that means.”

 

“She’s kind of cute anyway, a little young for me though.”

 

“How old is she?”

 

“12, 13 maybe.”

 

“That is pretty young.”

 

“It would really make him angry. Especially if everybody knew about it.”

 

“It certainly would.”

 

“Such a score is easy enough to advertise.”

 

It doesn’t escape my attention that for all of Del’s talk of youth and redemption he isn’t above using me to use Vance’s sister to hurt our common enemy.

 

Del took me to a BBYO meeting later that week. It was held in an office near 34th Street. They serve pizza while talking about Jewish shit and how much fun Israel is.  Yay! The room looks like it’s decorated for a high school dance. There are big color posters of smiling Jews hanging on the walls. Vance’s sister Trick is real active in BBYO. I saw Samson at the meeting and it’s surprising because I didn’t even know he was very Jewish. He looks and acts like an I-Ty Guido. It’s hard to figure out what BBYO actually is. Zionist propaganda from the look of it with free food. I flirted with Trick most of the evening. There are some pretty cute girls at the meeting and Del says, “They all loose as Hell.” I get Trick’s number and we decide to hang out later that week. It was all entirely too easy.

 

 

11

 

 

Fuck the bridges and blow the tunnels; somehow I ended knee deep in Queens. I’d linked up with Case after a Saturday spent smoking at Donny’s crib. Next thing I know I am in some land beyond train lines called Bayside. At a god damn Hebrew-BBYO dance, some acronym for young Jews being drunk sluts. I am so fucking drunk by this point I’d been up for anything, I’m at this little Zionist dance off to get the number of this kid Vance’s kid sister. Vance is a sophomore who fucks with me at school, I’m gonna knock his sister up.

 

But then one huge fucking ethnically charged brawl later we are zipping down Bell Boulevard, being chased by copper skinned umpalumpas. Case, Donny and I are running from some Jewish Italian mob of wanksters and wegros. Apparently even in the world’s most multi-ethnic borough, a black city boy like Del can’t get caught kissing a white Queens women when they have boyfriends, in the bathroom.

We run like hell to out flank a brawl and a hate crime.

 

Eventually we get clear. We split a Gypsy cab and get to the last stop of the # 7 train for an evacuation. We get as far away from that dance as we possibly can.

 

“These are not the Jews you’re looking for,” I say to myself.

 

Donny and I end up at another house party back in Manhattan. When we arrive there are only a few people left at the party, but that kid Isaac Zucker, who everybody calls ‘Crack’ is passed out on a bedroom of the host’s parents. His wallet, pager, and keys have all fallen out of his pocket. No one is watching. Donny and I look at each other.

 

“Don’t do it, man.” Donny tells me.

 

“Why the Hell not?”

 

“Isn’t he your boy?”

 

“No. Not really.”

 

“It still isn’t right.”

 

“Who cares? I want to take a cab home,” I say nonchalantly.

 

“This is one of those moments we talked about where you can choose to actively be a part of the problem.”

 

Crack is a stupid fucking stoner. He won’t even know we took his money.”

 

“I absolve myself of this.”

 

“Absolve away.”

 

I open the wallet and take out all of the money and two Metro cards. It comes up to about fifteen dollars. I think about pocketing his pager, but that really doesn’t get me anywhere. We say goodbye and leave. I hail a cab on the corner.

 

“I can’t believe you just robbed Soul Train.” Says Donny Gold.

 

“You getting in this cab?” I ask.

 

Donny thinks about it for a second.

 

“No. I’m gonna find another way to get home.”

 

“Suit yourself.”

 

I sometimes think that I do some pretty damn tasteless things. Things like taking people’s wallets even when I don’t even need the money. Things like fingering twelve year-olds in maintenance closets. Yeah, fingering a twelve year-olds and putting my dick in their mouths in a maintenance closet to get at her older brother who fuck with me at school.

High minded shit.

Just two days after the dance in the Styx, I call Vance’s sister Jill and ask her to meet me at Waterside. I could have hooked up with Jill in my parent’s apartment. I could have taken her to a museum or a movie or bought her a flower or done something sweet. Instead, I bring her to my place and try to think of the grimiest place in the world to get with her. Waterside has all these tunnels and sub corridors filled with dodgy little unlocked rooms. There isn’t even a couch. There isn’t anything except the two of us in the dark hooking up amid mop buckets and shelves that hold bottles of disinfectant. She is a real lousy kisser. The worst part about it is that she actually has some crush on me, some stupid feelings. I probably should feel like I am taking advantage. But I don’t feel anything at all. I see getting with her in the cold hard terms of getting back at her brother. That’s the kind of guy I am. I am not a very good dude. I push her on her knees and unzip my pants.

However, I have no allusions about my lack of moral scruples. None at all.

‘Put it in your mouth and suck it off you little bitch’ I say to her.

She giggles that I call her a bitch, like it’s sexy or funny? And she gives me head in a maintenance room. That’s the City I live in.

 

 

12

 

 

 

I’d gotten suspended for fighting in school. They gave me a week off. So I went to hang out down on Chambers street in lower Manhattan and say what up to my buddy Karl Katzerbaad, maybe bump into Roxy; that was the real goal. She hadn’t returned any of my calls.

And there she was.

My parents once took me to a good musical.  I’ve been taken to plays and musicals my whole life. My parents always urged my brother and me to take advantage of all the cultural events that happen in New York. Roxanne had mentioned that she knows all the lyrics to the play. It was called Rent. It’s a Lower East Side takeoff on the famous opera La Boheme. It’s about being poor, being in love and dying of an incurable disease.

 

“The real message is that true love can surpass hardship,” says Roxanne.

 

We’re sitting on this low concrete wall across the highway from Stuyvesant where she goes to school and where I’ve spent all day waiting for her.

 

“It wasn’t love. They shared a need for companionship as they quickly approached death.” I tell her.

 

“That’s a pretty shitty way to look at a perfectly real vision of romance,” she replies.

 

“Never been in love. So I’m wholly unfamiliar with the emotion.”

 

“No need to cheapen something beautiful.”

 

“Fictional characters, Roxy.”

 

“Representing a story that goes on across the world. I believe that if you saw the bigger picture, you’d come to understand that our existence as a people is worth precious little if there were no such feeling as love.”

 

“Alcohol.” I flippantly respond.

 

“Excuse me?”

 

“The other substitute when love is missing.”

 

“In the kindest way that this can be said, that is the most silly and pathetic thing I have ever heard. But coming from someone who just got suspended for smashing someone over the head with a wine bottle, little you say could surprise me.”

 

“Then I’ll have to just try harder.”

 

“No you don’t. No need to debase yourself for my amusement.”

 

“Harsh words.”

 

“You need to hear them because people are saying that your behavior is getting a little out of control.”

 

“People are always saying things.”

 

“Why’d you come to Stuyvesant, Sebastian? Do you have a crush on me or something?”

 

“Maybe. A tiny, stupid kind of crush.”

 

“You need a hobby, Adon. A cause maybe? I’m not gonna be another little conquest for you.”

 

“I think the things you hear about me are true for the most part. I think I’m not your type. I’d ask you not be hardened against me in your thinking. I might be a better man one day.”

 

“What does it matter what I think? You’re young and wild. Go chase other girls. Did our little hook up mean anything to you? I doubt it. Your crush is groundless. Does it make you smile to think of kissing me again, spending time with me?”

 

“Come to think of it, it doesn’t,” I lie.

 

“Then we should leave it at that.”

 

“Why’d you tell all your girls I can’t kiss?” I ask. That’s the word on the wire that had gotten back to me.

 

“Cause you were real drunk and you forgot how to kiss.”

 

“It was that unbearable? We hooked up for hours.”

 

“If it was unbearable it wouldn’t have gone on that long. What do you care? It was a stupid

hook up to you in a slue of stupid hook ups, right? You’re a player.”

 

“I’m not a player.”

 

“Would be if you could be. Why’d you make out with Kelly then, like two weeks after me? And then you got with Annie. Come on, I go to school with these people.”

 

“You told me you had plans on Valentine’s Day. I was hurt. Then I heard about you telling people I can’t kiss, so I hooked up with two girls at your school. And, I wanted to hurt you.”

 

“You didn’t prove me wrong about anything or hurt me. I was with my little brother on Valentine’s Day.”

 

 

She hopped off the wall as I sat there stupidly, smoking.

 

 

 

 

13

 

 

 

Public high school students get one week off for spring break in early-April. I had, once again, run away from home. I was living with Izzy Vitz and his parents on 86th between Amsterdam and Columbus. Izzy was not cut out of the same cloth as the rest of us. His parents were far more permissive.

 

He and Trikhovitch were leading the extended crew through the gateway of harder drug use.

 

Izzy was not exclusively responsible for introducing Jungle Music and rave culture to everybody we knew, but he was partly responsible for making it accessible. I started going with him to an all-Monday-night-into-Tuesday underground rave called Koncrete Jungle that started at the Ska-Punk venue Coney Island High and then moved to the Acme Underground basement further downtown near Houston Street. Izzy was always selling E pills, or at least getting them for people at a mark up.

 

How I came to live with Izzy Vitz was a combination of my mother and me being unable to tolerate even the sight of each other without a fight, the state of constant grounding I was living in, and the fact that Donny’s full blown burn-out was depressing to observe close up. Donny was a mess and just like McGruff the crime-fighting dog had told us, it began with weed. It also ended with weed, as that was mostly what Donny continued to abuse.

 

Izzy tells everyone that he ‘adopted me’. His parents were nice people and were sympathetic to the trouble I was in at home. Izzy told them the things he’d seen and heard around my house. His parents took me in because they believed what was going on between my Mother and I was unhealthy, whoever’s fault it might have been.

 

Izzy drinks and womanizes far harder than I do. And he’s is better at it. He claims he gets straight A’s at Hunter and he always keeps the drugs away from his parents’ attention. He is a weekend warrior for the most part. He says that you have to keep drugs for raves and booze for parties and that you have to keep totally clean for the school week, except for weed, which he doesn’t smoke all the time. Weed isn’t in the category of drug or drink to him. The girls he gets with are always cute as hell. His parents like me a lot. They are these nice, well-tempered Jewish people. They are actually similar to my parents in temperament, but are a quite a bit more mellow. They like me so much that they give me an allowance. I am learning how to behave.

 

Izzy always has girls over when his parents are away. He always has a bottle of something that he wants you to drink with him, mostly vodka or so-called good whiskey. He smokes probably as much pot as Donny, but there is something more extravagant about the way he smokes. Like Donny, he would sit around all weekend at his house smoking blunts and playing video games. Izzy would try to roll a foot long joint and would fool about with various elaborate paraphernalia. Donny would smoke blunts with his friends. Izzy would smoke blunts at school with his teachers, or claim to. I think what I like the most about Izzy is how he claims to live his life. He always has a good story.

 

I never feel like anything I ever do is worth repeating. I can’t really figure out why he’s helping me so much. I don’t really feel like I deserve it.

 

Izzy decided he wanted to have a tequila party during spring break. His parents have taken off to Florida for the week. His home has turned into a den of sin in their absence. A few phone calls later I am doing tequila shots with a bunch of girls from Hunter while Izzy hooks up with Elle Takaway in his parent’s room. She’d forgiven me. She came over, got real drunk and is hooking up with Izzy.

 

We got the bottle of Jose Cuervo from a liquor store up the block.

 

I’ve always thought Izzy was a violent, temperamental drunk. And he’s confirming my notion right now. He’s cursing out his window at someone on the street nine floors down. I don’t really want to get involved. I want to stay here, get drunker and keep hitting on this private school broad, but I get this feeling that Izzy wants me to have his back at this particularly senseless occasion. Next thing I know Izzy’s telling me that there’s beef and that I need to get his back. Izzy runs out the door with a small baseball bat.

 

I haven’t the faintest notion of who the beef is with or over what, but I pick up a pair of bolt cutters and rush downstairs to fight. As we rush down the stairs I wonder what in the Hell I’m actually going to do with these clippers I’m carrying. I think Izzy intends for me to hit someone with them. I feel very sick, not in the least bit interested in whatever beef my new best friend is apparently dragged me into. As we get out onto the street, Izzy takes off up the block towards a group of random wiggers in Northface.

 

Izzy is yelling about as he waves the bat in the air. One of them glowers in Izzy’s face daring him to swing. Then suddenly it’s as if the beef has ended. Izzy has invited them up to drink. It doesn’t make any sense, but I’m way too drunk to think about it too hard. I don’t think either of them recognizes me. They look stoned out of their heads. Izzy and the silly wigroes all head upstairs. Beef and then no beef. As abruptly as it started, now everyone is just friends. Kids on the Upper West Side are a lot of talk. I reach into my pants pocket and pull out a cigarette. I really don’t want to go back upstairs. Hunkered down on the sidewalk I watch the cars fly by on 86th Street. The lock clippers are sitting next to me. I’m ruining the neighborhood I bet. I close my eyes, black out for a little while.

 

 

 

Next thing I know there are two people standing over me. I think I recognize them, but I feel real sick and everything is kind of hazy. I feel like I might pass out again at any moment.

 

“Jesus kid. You look like shit,” says Saul Metternich wearing that same dirty red cap.

 

I don’t respond.

 

“I told you he would be here. He lives here now,” says Akila.

 

“Why does he have lock clippers? Why do you have lock clippers dude?”

 

“God only knows,” says Akila.

 

“Sebastian? Anyone home?” Saul waves his hand in front of me.

 

I mumble something.

 

“We really shouldn’t just leave him like this,” Akila says.

 

“Wanna take him up to Izzy’s house?”

 

“Nope,” I mutter, “No more booze. Don’t wanna drink anymore.”

 

I pointed up in the air in the approximate direction of Izzy’s apartment and yelled at the top of my lungs.

 

“DEN OF SIN!”

 

They pause a second.

 

“Wanna go to Roxanne’s house?” Akila asks.

I didn’t respond. They pick me up and I stumble through the streets in a daze like a wounded weekend warrior. I feel poisoned. I don’t know where we’re going. The last thing I remember thinking is that I can’t believe Roxy said I couldn’t kiss.

But they don’t care what I’m mumbling Seth and Akila hoist be up and carry me up Columbus Avenue.

 

 

36

 

 

The sexiest thing a woman can do is help bring a man back from the dead with compassion.

I feel like someone has taken a jackknife to my liver. The room is dark. The digital clock on the bed stand next to me tells me in neon green that it is around 12:30 am. I am hung over and I taste the after draft of puke on my lips. After a few dry heaves, I try to get up. I’m parched. I wolf down a glass of water that is on the nightstand. I sense that there is another person in the room. She’s is lying on a bed next to mine in this dark, little room.

 

“Drink some more water,” Roxanne says.

 

“How long have I been here?” I mutter.

 

“Longer than I probably should have let you stay.”

 

There’s a long awkward pause. Why the fuck did they drag me over here.

 

“I’m not a bad kisser,” I say as I take another drink from the cup of water from her.

 

“You’re still on that?”

 

I think about it for a second.

 

“Yeah, I’m totally still on that.”

 

“Well you shouldn’t be.”

 

“That’s a major affront to my manhood.”

 

“No. A major affront to your manhood would be if I said you had a small penis. I just said you were a bad kisser. It’s not like I told anyone besides Akila and Kelly and Julia Shoot and Zivia.”

 

“That was nice of you. To be so discrete, I mean.”

 

I drink more water as my eyes become more accustomed to the darkness.

 

“You really shouldn’t be as concerned with it as you are.”

 

“It’s embarrassing.”

 

“Oh, you thought that girls like it when you get slobbering drunk and grind all over them having no feelings for them at all. You presume we like that. That we enjoy ‘hooking up’?”

 

“That was the basic assumption.”

 

“Oh. Well, just so you know, booze makes you a useless lover, Sebastian.”

 

A bit more silence.

 

“Roxanne. Why did you let them bring me here?”

 

“Cause you have nowhere else to go and my Mom won’t be home until tomorrow afternoon.”

 

“Where’s your Dad?”

 

“I don’t have a dad. Do you want more water? You were vomiting for an hour. You puked all over my bathroom, probably lost a lot of fluids.”

 

“I’ll clean it up,” I say trying to get up.

 

She gets up faster, “I cleaned your mess up already. More water?”

 

There’s a heaving in my chest, but there is nothing less to expel. The poison has soaked in.

 

“Please.”

 

She fills up another glass with ice from the kitchen.

 

“Thanks.”

 

“Try to be quiet. My kid brother is in the next room.”

 

“I’m sorry I came here. I couldn’t stay with Izzy anymore.”

 

“Akila says she’ll take custody of you tomorrow.”

 

“Ha.”

 

“What’s funny?”

 

“Custody.”

 

“Well you can’t or won’t go home. You don’t go to school. We all have to look after you, don’t we?”

 

“Like a child?” I ask.

 

“No, like a broken young man.”

 

“I think I’ll leave.”

 

“You’re sick. Just spend the night. I’ll make you breakfast when you get hungry.”

 

“Why are you doing this, Roxy? Is it like Izzy, to have some power over me to feel all altruistic without having to care?”

 

“I’m in it because Akila asked me to do it and Akila is my friend.”

 

“Why are you awake?”

 

“I don’t sleep well when my mother is away. The house is empty. I don’t like night.”

 

“Where did your father go?”

 

“The coward abandoned us before I was born. My mom remarried, but I hate the bastard for leaving us.”

 

“Sorry.”

 

“I don’t need your thanks or your sympathy. I need you not to puke anymore, not to be sick. And not to wake my kid brother.”

 

“Thanks for taking care of me. I’m not well.”

 

“I already said you don’t need to thank me. Just don’t drink anymore. Girls won’t want to smooch with you if you poison all the passion out of yourself.”

 

We talk until the sky gets all purple before the dawn. This blonde Jew from Stuy with her father’s Cuban last name is quite a special broad. I feel like some wounded animal made docile only when broken, which is what I am. Will I have learned anything when I wake up? Feel anything? Or will I just reach for more poison? She tells me that she will tutor me in algebra if I promise to go back to school. She says that I should apologize to my parents; make things right with my Mother.

 

“I need to get out of the City.” That’s the last thing I remember saying.

 

“If you don’t change soon, they’ll send you away anyway. You’ll disappear like everyone else.”

 

 

 

37

 

 

 

The sun is shining in the window and it hurts my eyes. I feel hung over and the alcohol shakes are taking hold of me. I shudder as the poison still sits in my liver. I smell something cooking. Is it eggs or pancakes? You always feel a little grimy when you sleep in your clothes, but I am pretty used to it. The digital clock next to bed says it is 11 am. She must think I’m such a fucking drunk. A bad kisser and a drunk, but I guess she knew that before she let me crash here. I rub the sleep out of my eyes and get out of bed.

 

Roxanne is wearing a red Little League shirt and matching sweat pants. She is cooking eggs at the stove. Her shoulder length dirty blond hair is pulled back with a black hair band. She is so petite. I remember holding her in my arms that night worrying in my drunken stupor that I might break her.

 

“You want some breakfast, sleepy?” she asks me smiling.

 

“Yeah. That would hit the fucking spot. Sorry.”

 

“About what? I don’t care if you curse in front of me.”

 

“I mean more about being a hooligan. Coming here.”

 

“You were shit-faced. Akila brought you here to coalesce.”

 

“I’m an asshole.”

 

“No. You’re a drunk and a bad kisser, remember?”

 

“Oh yeah, I forgot.”

 

She smirked as she turned back to flip the eggs.

 

“How do you like them?”

 

“From chickens.”

 

“Oh. These are from cows. I guess you’re not eating.”

 

“Cow eggs are good too. That shit is kosher, right?”

 

“Oh yeah, completely. Us all being observant Jews and everything.”

 

There is a brief silence and I feel like I need to say something.

 

“Like, I know I said it…but thanks.”

 

“Whatever, man. It’s cool. I told you, Akila is my home girl.”

 

Another silence.

 

“So . . .What does one do if they don’t drink at parties?”

 

“Get hit on by guys that can’t kiss. Sometimes hooking up with them.”

 

“You’re funny.” I say figuring that I couldn’t have been that bad.

 

“You know. Nobody ever complained before.”

 

“That’s because they’re drunk out of their minds when you hook up with them. Your reputation precedes you.”

 

“How bad is it?”

 

“There are those with worse.”

 

“Like serial killer worse?”

 

“No not like your buddy Vitz. Like, you’re-not-the-only-grimy-guy-in-NYC worse.”

 

“I’m not that grimy.”

 

I remember that I hooked up with her best friend Kelly two weeks ago.

 

“Whatever you have to tell yourself to sleep at night.”

 

“Believe me. I lose sleep. But not over that.”

 

“And pray tell what does Sebastian Adon lose sleep over?”

 

“I was abused as a child.”

 

“That, I find difficult to believe. A nice Jewish boy like you?”

 

“Excuse me?”

 

“I hear that you’re as bad to your parents as they may be to you.”

 

“Maybe? They’re fucking insane. I don’t live with Izzy for my health.”

 

“That’s an understatement if I ever heard one. Is it true you pulled a knife on your Dad?”

 

“No.”

 

She looks me dead in the eyes and has a face I can’t lie to.

 

I say nothing but she knows.

 

“Don’t go into politics, Sebastian. You’re a shitty liar with a notorious past.”

 

“Why the fuck, would I ever go into politics?”

 

“Yeah, I forgot how little you care about anything or anybody, besides yourself.”

 

“I care about things.”

 

“What? Like booze and girls?”

 

“I bet you didn’t know I write poetry.”

 

“That I didn’t know. Is it any good?”

 

“Like William fucking Shakespeare.”

 

“That good, eh? That the only poet you know? The eggs are done. Go have a seat.”

 

I show up drunk, puke all over her bathroom, and she is serving me continental breakfast. A fucking amazing sweetheart.

 

“How’s Stuy?”

 

“Hard, building a future with a dream. How’s Bronx?”

 

“I don’t really go anymore. I can’t stand math and they keep trying to expel me.”

 

“Assaulting people, of course, has nothing to do with that.”

 

“You certainly know a lot about me.”

 

“Word on the street is that you’re pretty crazy. How crazy are you?”

 

“I’m not crazy. I’m misunderstood.”

 

“In meaningful and fulfilling ways, I hear.”

 

“Well we can’t all be fucking perfect, can we?”

 

She glares at me for a second and then stops. I shouldn’t have said that.

 

“I can teach you math,” she says suddenly. “I’m in the advanced class.”

 

“I think you’d be wasting your time better spent on anything else.”

 

“You need to go back to school.”

 

“Why are so interested in what I do with my life?”

 

“You know. I’m really not. I didn’t show up at you home.”

 

There is yet another awkward silence as we return to our eggs.

 

“Look. I’m not really used to girls like you.”

 

“Oh?”

 

“I’m not a charity case, as much as Izzy might make it seem.”

 

“That’s not why I want to help you.”

 

“So why then?”

 

“Because I don’t have anything else to do tomorrow.”

 

I don’t give a shit about math, but I want to see her again.

 

“My schedule appears to be wide open.”

 

“So call me tomorrow. I have to study for my finals and you can’t be here when my Mom comes home in an hour.”

 

“Can I take a shower before I go?”

 

“Sure. Just don’t puke in it again. Or make a mess jerking off.”

 

“I don’t jerk off at girls homes on the first date,” I tell her.

 

 

 

 

38

 

 

 

I stay happy and completely sober and in love, at least that’s what the emotion feels like for the next two weeks.

The girl keeps my mind here. She keeps me out of trouble too. She teaches me math and how to kiss. I am spending my days with her to avoid both Izzy and substance-based escapism.

 

It’s nice to have her tongue in my mouth and not a cigarette.

 

I don’t want to spend more than a day without seeing her. I believe that Roxanne is pleasantly surprised when I suggest a picnic. We had the picnic with several other friends. It is my first picnic with a girl that I love. The food tastes better than anything I’d ever eaten. There are no alcohol or drugs. Someone took a snapshot of us that afternoon. The others all look so young and clean cut in the photo. I look like a loser. Roxy has a look of partial concern on her face. It is the look of someone who appears to be sizing up a situation and wondering where she stands. There’s another picture of Roxanne faux smoking a cigarette, something she swore she would never do maybe mocking me half way.

 

She is pleasantly surprised again when we spend the day on Long Beach. It is her idea to get me out of the City. We walk several blocks to the boardwalk on the beach from the train station. We took some friends with us. Ari Wilmer who likes playing Risk; Max Young who is quiet and looks like he’ll be a cop some day; Zivia Lubetkin who has become my little sister, or female shrink of the month as Izzy calla it; Isaac Zucker from Bronx who people called Crack or Soul Train (who I robbed without his knowledge and must pay back); as well as Akila Abulaffia who has been one of the crew for quite some time. I am wearing a black T-shirt that is too tight and ugly khaki shorts that I borrowed from Ari. Roxy has on blue short shorts and a powder blue sleeveless, collarless shirt. It is brilliantly clear, but there aren’t a lot of people on the beach.

 

 

“Happy again?” Akila asks me when the others left us to get some food.

 

“She makes me pretty happy.”

 

“Make yourself happy, Sebastian.”

 

 

 

I am back at Izzy’s house the last night of spring break getting shit-faced, turning off my head. My little acts of prohibition did not last long. We have already knocked down two Red Dog 40’s each. The room is starting to spin and is full of cigarette smoke. His parents are still on vacation.

 

“So you love her, do you?” mocks Izzy with wild eyes.

 

His bedroom is cluttered with books, dirty clothing, and wires leading to a computer, an alarm clock, and a slew of other electronic devices. We’re both pretty hammered. I’m not sure why we are getting so trashed in the absence of girls or a party, but both of us are celebrating my seduction of Roxanne. He had told me to abandon that as a lost cause weeks ago.

 

“Yeah, head-over-motherfuckin’-heals, my man.” I slur.

 

“I want to warn you that teenage love is stupid and fleeting. Your seduction might be useless once your reputation renders the fling undone.”

 

“Seduction isn’t the right word, Izzy.”

 

“It was the first one that came to mind. She didn’t even think you could kiss a month ago. That’s a pretty rampant affront.”

 

“She’s making me good again. She makes me feel like Sebastian isn’t this grimy piece of shit that hooks up with too many girls, steals and does all that other disreputable shit I’m known for.”

 

“She knows your rep in the third person?”

 

“I gather as much.”

 

“I’m tellin’ you, kid, you gotta start getting with private school girls. Private school guys put your rep to shame. These girls won’t know who you are when you meet ‘em.”

 

I pound back another 40. Some of the liquid dribbles down my chin.

 

“I’m not that interested in other girls,” I say, taking another drink. “I want to go out with Roxy. Get her to be my girl.”

 

“You’ve spent a week getting with the same person and you think you’re in love. That’s cool. Who am I to say that isn’t real to you? But if you want my two shiny cents, that girl is gonna get bored with you. Her friends are gonna talk her out of you, and you’re investing quite a bit in what? A stupid fuckin’ fling.”

 

“It ain’t a fucking fling.”

 

“Sebastian, my dude. Love doesn’t exist to us. It was raped, murdered, and left bleeding by the side of the road by Maxim Magazine, Sex in the City, and the Hollywood movie industry. By that I mean you have no conception of what love is. Wouldn’t know love until it asked you to punch it in the face.”

 

“I feel sorry for you.”

 

“Why?”

 

“Because I’m telling you about being in love and you say it doesn’t exist. I think that’s sad.”

 

Izzy chugs his 40 and then dumps the empty bottle in a blue mini-trashcan. He pulls a pack of Camels from his pocket and lights one with a black Bick lighter. He doesn’t offer me one.

 

“They really did a number on us. We can’t love. We can’t feel. We spend our whole lives chasing that pie in the sky and all we might get if we’re lucky is a house, a woman we are somewhat attracted to, some kids, and the promise of what comes next proclaimed over every TV screen.”

 

I wasn’t sure what he was talking about.

 

“If you’re in love, man, power to you. Just remember that it isn’t going to last.”

 

“You’re wrong.”

 

“You know that this girl you’ve fallen in love won’t actually fix your head. You’re off chasing a girl who’s gonna break your heart.”

 

“Roxanne is gonna help me get away from this shit. I can’t do it myself.”

 

“She ain’t gonna help you, son.”

 

“Why shouldn’t I do the only thing that has ever brought be any real happiness?”

 

“The objective of life is not happiness, that’s fucked delusion” Izzy sneers.

 

“What then?” I yell back.

 

“Freedom.”

 

“Freedom from what?”

 

Izzy has a really crazy look in his eyes. It looks like he might cry, or punch me in the jaw. He stands up suddenly from the green futon he’s been sitting on.

 

“You know what’s going on! We all do. We’re spending the most idealistic years of our lives seeking out every available means to pacify our own resistance. Render ourselves blind!”

 

“What the hell are we even resisting, Izzy?!!”

 

“I don’t want to die like all these other people knowing that my eyes were always this blind. I want to live in a country that doesn’t taint everything it touches with escapism and false or useless dreams!! I know that our generation could change the entire world if we weren’t so busy getting fucked up. THEY GAVE US SO DAMN MUCH TO WORK WITH! We have the City, and some wealth, and a good education; but we are running from everything. SO DAMN scared to face the reality of what happens when we grow up. WE DRINK, we SMOKE, and we bandy about words like LOVE? Love, Sebastian? IT’S ALL THE GREAT ESCAPE!!! I need you to focus with me on this. I’m drunk and high all the time. I feel nothing. Nothing at all. Neither do you! I’ve made an invention of my life. A story to make people excited, to hear a crazy tale! Freedom from this is what we went looking for down the rabbit hole. We took that potion, took lots of fucking potions. Smoked everything that was dead and green. BUT FREEDOM!”

 

He’s ranting now, knocking things over.

 

“You are SO LOST, kid. SO DAMN LOST. Who is this little trick Roxy Martinez? Distraction. Distraction like the drink and smoke. You don’t love her. You don’t even love your stupid self.”

 

“Why are you saying these things?!” I yell at him.

 

“Because you can’t pick a side, Sebastian. You can’t be a straightedge, little goodie-goodie and a womanizing drunk on the same ten square city blocks. You can’t light people on fire or hit thugs with wine bottles and then plan a faggot fucking picnic.”

 

“Fuck you, Izzy, you’re a being a dick. You’re jealous because I’m rejecting this lifestyle that’s killing me, killing you too.”

 

“Fuck me? I feed you. I house you. My parents give you the only money you have. YOU HAD A STRING FOR A FUCKING belt when I met you.”

 

“Yeah, fuck you, you pathological fuck. I don’t need your tainted fuckin’ hospitality.”

 

I get up to leave. He jumps on me. We crash to the floor hitting each other. He’s bigger than me and a better fighter. I try to claw his eyes. He hits me in the head. I punch him in his right kidney. He kind of backhands me as we roll across the floor knocking things over. I finally manage to strike him in the balls. He doubles over howling in pain. We both lay bruised and winded on the floor of a room hit with the tornado of a volatile broken friendship.

 

After about a minute of us lying drunk and winded on the floor of his room, he tosses me a cigarette.

 

“Was it good for you, too?” he asks me.

 

“What, the fuck, is wrong with you?”

 

“I think we’re both, in serious denial, about the things that make us happy.”

 

“Then let’s not try to rain on the false happiness parade okay, Izzy? She’s made me happy in the short term. Why are you rambling on about freedom?”

 

“Cause love’s a harder drug, than malt liquor and cannabis, my dude. Harder to get off of, harder to rehabilitate a person from.”

 

“What’s this really about?”

 

“I just don’t want the broad to fuck your fragile little head. You’re on the edge enough without a dumb little tramp like that. And she can’t love a kid like you. Don’t forget that, Sebastian.”

 

“What’s a kid like me, Izzy?”

 

“Like a goddamn jungle boy. Swingin’ around with no damn supervision. Breaking the laws, blowing the Conch! Living like the lord of the flies.”

 

 

 

 

 

פ

When Columbine happened, I thought it was funny. My first thought was that those jocks got what they deserved. That’s where I am spiritually. The Matrix has just come out and everyone is trying to say that the movie had something to do with the massacre as opposed to every other piece of media that teaches young boys guns are fun and that shooting is the manly way to solve a problem. It was only a matter of time. Looking at why those two boys did what they did, it really didn’t have anything to do with their school, or their domestic environment, or the stupid Matrix, or video games, or mental illness, or the use of drugs and alcohol or all the other things people are blaming for their condition. Maybe it is true that they had a condition, but what happened next was merely the logical conclusion to a string of unfortunate circumstances and poor judgment. Chinua Achebe says it better. On a long enough time line all “things fall apart.”

 

 

I’ve always liked guns. I mean what young American boy doesn’t who’s not a faggot or a Mormon or some kind of pansy-conscientious-objecting-hippy-coward. My father had bought my brother and me two toy rifles when we were eight or nine. We were always running about the woods on Long Island at night hunting things that make young boys afraid.  After I saw The Matrix I bought a bunch of water guns and painted them black. Neo had this crazy scene in the movie where he whips out a dozen loaded pistols and battles a room full of guys. And it is water gun fighting season. A water gun painted black doesn’t really look like a real gun at all unless you are, in fact, Black also, especially when you paint it with a Sharpie. But the teacher that found the guns thought this was a particularly alarming piece of asocial behavior, especially since it took place right after the Columbine shootings.

 

I left the guns in my lunch bag in Dr. Maskin’s classroom. So I suppose it was the only teacher I really liked that ended up turning me in. When I went back to look for my bag later in the day, he told me to report to guidance counselor’s office. It always seems like guidance counselors are particularly annoying and misinformed. There’s always been loads of guidance to go around when it has come to me and always after the fact. Today is no different. She had heard that I wasn’t doing so well. She wants to know if I am thinking about hurting others or myself. I assure her that I just think The Matrix is a swell movie. This reconfirms how terrible action movies are for young American males. I honestly see no correlation between my guns and some Colorado kids on a shooting spree, but apparently she does. She tells me that I ought to inform my parents that there will probably have to be follow up action. I didn’t tell her that I was neither living with nor talking to my parents. When I got out of her office, I bounced from school in the middle of 7th period.

I have a last shot date with Roxy.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I borrow a gray pinstripe suit from Nikh Trikhovitch for my date. Izzy had told me about a couple of places where I could take a girl and be classy about it on a budget. The restaurant is on 83rd and Amsterdam. It is an upstairs Italian joint. I order something elaborate sounding. Roxy orders simple pasta. For every gesture of hopeless romanticism I perform, there are 1001 rumors of wrong-headed behavior that make Roxanne wary of association, much less romance with me.

 

We barely speak a word during dinner even though just three days ago we’d been rolling around in the sands of Long Beach. I swear to myself that I will never go on a stupid clichéd dinner date ever, ever again. The taste of all Italian food is bland, fatty and vile. It is an awkward meal. She keeps asking roundabout questions about rumors friends have told her about me at school. I feel uncomfortable playing dress-up. She is not the same person. She believes everything they say about me. Her friends have turned her heart against me, but I’d never won it over in the first place. Nothing I can say will really make this love of mine go anywhere. As soon as we can, we split the bill. A date never goes how it’s supposed to when a woman pays half the bill.

 

 

ק

 

 

 

 

After dinner we found out that everyone is going to a rave at a trance club called Vinyl down in Tribecca downtown by the entrance to the Holland Tunnel.

 

I am sitting on a couch three hours later waiting for half a pill of Ecstasy that I have split with Elle Takaway to take its effect.  Elle and I bought the Ecstasy pill for $25.  I took it with a tab of acid that one of my old UNIS friends gave to me. The club is lit up a million shades of neon and the thumping of the bass line sends shivers down my spine. Everyone I know decided to come out. They let us all in without IDs, everyone except for Zach Cooper, one of the Hunter boys. This is my first rave and it is exactly how I expected it to be, a visual and auditory orgy of light and sound. I left the suit at Izzy’s house and am wearing my gray camo pants and a green Serial Killer T-Shirt with an image of a man putting a gun to someone’s head. It is a scene from the movie The Usual Suspects. I don’t know the actors’ names. I want to say Kevin Spacey. My mind is moving quite quickly. I feel like a cop working on deactivating a ticking time bomb, racing on a very tight timeline with all or nothing stakes. I have to find Roxy to tell her what I feel. I lost track of her somewhere in the mob of dancing, gyrating, drug-infused candy ravers. My search is complicated by the Ecstasy and acid, a narcotic combination known as Candy-flipping.

 

I scan the dance floor. The lights make it seem like we are all dancing in thigh-high water. I make my way past a sea of dancing flesh toward the chill out room in the back of the club.

 

The dancing mass is clad in all the colors of the rainbow twirling their hands quickly with glow sticks that leave lines of light zipping here and there. I eventually spot Roxy on a couch by herself. I sit down next to her awkwardly. The couch is made of tattered green fabric and is surprisingly comfortable.

 

“I won’t deny that you intrigued the shit out of me,” she says. “But it must be obvious that I can’t be with a person like you, despite my Pygmalion complexes.”

 

“What is a person like me like, Roxy?”

 

“A person who drinks heavily, like blackout heavily. A person who gets with prepubescent girls. A person who gets in fights all the time, robs even his own friends, hates his parents, cuts school and is always running away from home. We have very different sets of values. You’re not a very good person, Adon.”

 

I stare blankly at her trying to think of the right words. There aren’t any. She looks away. In the psychedelic ambiance of the club I put on the world’s-most-serious-face for my world’s-most-serious-moment.

 

“I’ll admit that I’ve done a good many things that I should regret. I assure you the rumors are probably no worse than the reality.”

 

“Even your own friends tell me not to get involved with you.”

 

That hurts quite a bit and I maybe wince a little.

 

“I know there is nothing I can say that will communicate the way I feel adequately. So I’ll be as blunt as I can. I love you Roxy. The last two weeks have been the only time in the fifteen years of my life where I went to bed content. No drugs, no hook ups. Nothing has come close to how much I have enjoyed the time I’ve spent with you. You’re telling me that in those two weeks you felt nothing?”

 

“I like you, Sebastian. I just can’t be with you. The last two weeks were fun and we can be friends. We just can’t be lovers. And you don’t actually love me. You just think you do.”

 

“So how do I prove what I feel is real?”

 

“You can’t. And you shouldn’t. A person can’t treat everyone around them like shit and act as selfishly as you have for as long as I’ve known you and then one day, because you claim to be love, convince me that you’ve changed. That’s all I can really say, Sebastian. This isn’t a teen movie with a Hollywood ending. In REAL life people are judged based on what they cumulatively have done to the people around them. DO I even need to run down the list of things you’ve done to the people around you?”

 

As soon as she says it, like a processing computer, I see faces flash before me. People I’d stolen from. People whose girlfriends I hooked up with. My parents who I’d disrespected and abandoned. My brother who I corrupted. Girls I’d gotten drunk to get with. It’s all running through my head quickly and a part of me is proud of it all. The sheer volume of it all. She is right though. I can’t change.

 

“I don’t want to be another girl you use and abandon. I’ve always been blunt with you, Sebastian, so I’ll leave it at this. You’re just not a very good person.”

 

There is only one thing I can say to that.

 

“I know and I’m sorry.”

 

“Have a good life, Sebastian Adon.”

 

“Have a good life, Roxy.”

 

She gives me a weak informal hug and a small, passionless kiss on my cheek and then leaves me sitting on the couch in this jungle. The drugs took hold soon after. The floor of the club turned into sand and all I can hear is the baseline.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

ר

“AND I can’t live without her so I won’t even try!”

 

I hear the Reel Big Fish Song “Beer” playing that line over and over again as if on repeat. The people are dancing out of control as I push through to get to the exit. I need to go outside because there’s something I have to do.

 

“AND I can’t live without her so I won’t even try!”

 

 

I see Mike Washington in his trench coat near the exit. He’s smoking a cigarette. My blood pulses through my body to the rhythm of the base. I hear Mike’s voice in my head.

 

“Come on, we have to get out of here.”

 

He grabs my arm and we go out the exit that leaves us on the ridge of a canyon. We quickly make our way carefully down the ridge. It takes over an hour but I know that when nightclubs turn into dreamscapes, time is the least of your concerns.

 

 

“If I give you a burner and you’ll probably shoot yourself, right?” Mike Washington whispers quickly.

 

My vision is like a split-screen videogame. I can see my body slumped over in the club and I can see the rocky desert trail I’m on following Mike towards the canyon floor. A third screen opens and I can see the Reel Big Fish playing.

 

“AND I can’t live without her so I won’t even try!”

 

“Trust me. You can live without her.”

 

“I’ll blow my brains out if you give me a weapon. Not that that will get me anywhere because none of this is real. I’m not even sure why I’m following you.”

 

I hear a roar and people start running out of the club down the ridge toward us. They move like insects sometimes walking on their hands doubled over, possessed. They’re not wearing raver gear. Their eyes are black and they have dollar bills pinned to their chests with safety pins.

 

“What are they?”

 

“They’re the reason we had to leave that club. NOW move!”

 

They screech like high-pitched sirens as they scamper toward us. I see Mike slide a clip into the gold pistol he’s carrying.

 

“Mike. I’m getting tired of all this bullshit. I’m not running anymore.”

 

“Don’t be an idiot. This is your last chance…”

 

He turns and puts a bullet in the head of a creature that looks very much like Izzy Vitz. It had leapt 40 feet from the ridge above us and landed right next to me. The swarm is gaining on us. Finally we reach the canyon floor.

 

“I think you just shot my friend.”

 

“It’s not real, remember?”

 

“Oh yeah. I can’t believe Roxy thinks I’m a scum bag.”

 

I’m so detached from all three realities I’m watching. Most of my attention is stuck on the Reel Big Fish verse that keeps playing,

 

“AND I can’t live without her so I won’t even try!”

 

“You have done some pretty bad things.”

 

“No worse than anyone else my age.”

 

“No, pilgrim. Worse.”

 

There’s a gray motorcycle with a sidecar waiting for us on the canyon floor. Looking back up the side of the ridge the swarm has grown enormous. They tear at each other when they get in each other’s way. They bare only a slight resemblance to humans. I jump in the sidecar while Mike starts the engine. We move quickly through the canyon, dust flying everywhere. Mike passes me the loaded pistol. It’s heavy in my hand.

 

“Don’t shoot yourself. That would be such a fucking waste.”

 

“I don’t care about anything if I can’t be with her.”

 

Mike turns and snatches the pistol back from me.

“Never mind.”

 

The creatures are running after us, but the bike is fast and we appear to be losing them.

 

“AND I can’t live without her so I won’t even try!” says the Reel Big Fish.

 

“I’m worried about you, pilgrim. You hardly knew the girl. Anyway, when you see what’s on the menu for tonight you’ll cheer up. We’re getting out of the desert.”

b

“No one gets out of the desert.”

 

“IT says we do today.”

 

“As of when do you get to talk to Him?”

 

“We got a letter inviting us to a wedding. It includes travel papers and everything. All we have to do is get to the airport on time and we’re out of here. Once we’re out we never have to come back to this freaky fuckin’ place.”

 

“I wish I believed we’d make it.”

 

“Fine. Just shoot yourself then or better still feed yourself to those zombies.”

 

“Those aren’t zombies. Zombies can’t run.”

 

“Yes they can.”

 

“I’m a Zombie movie expert and I know for a fact they don’t run.”

 

“Sebastian, do you know how many actual real Zombie attacks I’ve survived. Trust me. They run.”

 

“Oh and pray tell, where were these attacks?”

 

“One was in Paris, one was in London and one was in Tel Aviv.”

 

 

I grind my teeth. I am, after all, still lying on the couch in the club on Ecstasy although this image has faded completely along with the Reel Big Fish.

 

 

On my left as Mike and I zoom down the desert road is an enormous red statue made of steel girders that twists like a huge knot into the heavens.

 

“What’s that thing? Other than the statue I saw outside of Vinyl.”

 

“Whenever one of you appears to be ready to awake they build more idols to confuse us.”

 

Someone has strung a piece of wire across the road. It takes off Mike’s head in one clean slice and knocks him right off of the bike which in turn crashes into a rock throwing me several feet from the vehicle. I knew it wasn’t going to be that easy.

 

 

* * *

 

 

The others find Sebastian curled up biting his right hand, eyes rolled back on a small green couch in the chill out room. Izzy, Donny, and Akila took him in a cab to Akila’s house after the rave ended Saturday morning around 7 am. Sebastian is despondent. His head is on Akila’s shoulder most of the ride. Akila figures it is over Roxy, and, of course, the after effects of E. While Donny and Sebastian slept on the floor of Akila’s room, Akila and Izzy 69ed on the bed; which means she sucked his cock while he ate her out.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

ש

 

I slept late on Saturday afternoon at Akila’s. When I woke up Donny and Izzy were gone. Akila says that the seniors are having a graduation keg party in the financial district and that it will cheer me up to go. I doubt it.

 

Our day went something like this. First, we prepared a pitcher of Screw Drivers, drank half and put the rest in a camel pack. Then we met up with these two guys, Karl Krauswitz and Ari Wilner, who watched me write “Roxy, I love you” and her apartment number in huge letters on a bench outside of her house. Then the four of us drank several 22s of Heineken and headed down to the West Village to see about a party. While the three of them waited outside to see if Kelly could get us in I went into the back room of a Ray’s Pizza place across the street. I ended up in the back office while I was looking for the bathroom. I found a huge envelope filled with bills as I rummaged through some drawers. I pocketed them quietly. Just a big envelope of $5’s and $10’s. There had to be a couple hundred dollars in that envelope.

 

After we couldn’t get into the Stuy Village Party, Akila and I went to a Bronx Science Senior party in the Financial District, where I did keg stands aided by a couple Bronx Science seniors and proceeded to drink myself into oblivion. Around 4 am we met up with Zivia and Julia Shoot and returned to Akila’s house; but not before drinking a Ballentines 40 with a homeless Black crack head in some Hell’s Kitchen lobby.

 

It’s 5:30 in the morning, just before the purple dawn. The City hasn’t gotten its great wheels spinning, but it rumbles. It never sleeps. I can hear the supply trucks rolling in on the West Side highway, provisioning the City for daybreak. And I think I’m ready to kill myself. I think I finally have it in me. If it’s taken as a cry for attention, the joke’s on me because I won’t be around to bask in it.

 

Ain’t even going to leave a note.

 

I’ve been thinking about it for a while. I’m not entirely convinced that I’m truly alive. If I am, I am certainly not of the same disposition as my compatriots. I don’t act right. It is debatable that this world is any more or less frightening than the one I see when I go to sleep. At least in the Pale City I play a hero of sorts. I am a petty criminal, a petty rapist, and a vile ungrateful son in this City. The reason I’m going to take my own life is that I have nothing to live for. Nothing to hope for or hold out for. I’m tired of drinking myself stupid every weekend to silence the friends in my head. I’m tired of the vicious fights with my parents who I should love and honor like a normal child. I’m tired of people putting trust in me that I betray. I try to think about what I’ve done with the fifteen years of my life and all I can remember is being unhappy and waiting for things to get better.  They never do. I’m just going to walk off the 7th floor balcony of Akila’s apartment. The jump ought to do the trick.

 

I climb over to the other side of the railing. The girls, Akila, Julia Shoot and Zivia Lubetkin are all in the next room still awake. They keep playing songs over and over again. Different songs. Slow and fast, mostly EMO, Punk and SKA, a bit of drum and bass.

 

I look up into the dark night sky and say,

 

“I don’t believe in You, but if You’re down here, give me some sign. If the next song the girls play is fast, I’m jumping off this ledge. No more grind. If it’s a slow song I’ll climb back down to do your will completely. I put this ball in your court, my God.”

 

There is a great pause, perhaps not for the world, but inside my mind. The pigeons freeze in mid-flight. The highway traffic falls silent as the truckers and cabby’s turn off the vehicles on the West Side highway. The wind stops rustling through the towers of the city. All the lights turn off. The stars we never see are already off. And suddenly the music stops too. The whole jungle grinds to a halt.

 

Karma Police by Radiohead could be heard over the small sound system next door, the only song or sound in this whole damn city of many lights.

 

That’s a slow song for those of you who don’t know.

 

In my head I suddenly hear a voice. It is the first one I’d ever heard quite like it. It’s a voice that speaks words enunciated with an endless collection of images.

 

You will suffer far more before you are truly ready to do my will. You must be made righteous.

 

I drop down on my knees. I put my head to the wet concrete of the terrace facing the south of the City. I am conscious of that entire grind approaching the City with its many, many lights burning through the darkness, an hour before the breaking of dawn. I clutch my hands over my heart lying on that cold, damp balcony praying that It will tell me what to do next. I cry and cry. Bellow with no sound. My tears fall on the pavement. I’m begging. Not for forgiveness or direction.

 

 

Only for a worthy punishment.

 

 

 

 

 

 

ת

 

Everyone wants to believe they’re hard. They want to show people they won’t take shit from anybody.

 

There’s a wine bottle in my bag. I drank it last night in the stairwell. There’s a wine bottle in my bag because I’m going to smash Vance in the head with it. I’m going show that cocksucker that he can’t intimidate me. Can’t rough me up. Can’t put me in trashcans without a price. I guess what’s different about this little revenge story is the motive. You might say I got pushed to the edge a long time ago and I’m just trying to find the jump off with the scenic view. This isn’t about a vendetta. I don’t feel any hate for Vance, believe it or not. Maybe in twenty minutes when the police bring me in, someone will suggest I drank the bottle before I hit him with it. I’ve never been more sober in my life. It seems like everyone knows I have the bottle. It seems that even Vance suspects I’m going to try something. The whole day went by slowly. I could hear the clock ticking in class and knew it was a count down.

 

I’m going to hit him because I have something to prove. I’m going to hit him because it seems like a fitting way to put our relationship in order. I’m going to hit him because I’ve been taught that when you’re hard you don’t take any shit from anyone.

 

I see him walking with two girls on the main drag after school. There are people everywhere. They’re all going to go home today and tell their parents about what I’m about to do. I take the bottle out of my red bag. Out of the corner of my eye I see Hubert O’Domhnaill s running down the hill to stop me. Too late for that.

 

I’m standing just fifteen feet behind him. I get right behind him and in my moment of righteous rage, my moment of sweet public revenge. I come up behind him and bring the bottle down on his head with the epic battle cry.

 

“YOU. . .”

 

The glass of the bottle hits him and the girls next to him. BASHment. I never get the expletive out. I am caught up in the act.

 

I realize that I probably could have come up with something better to yell as he turns to see who hit him. He is dazed from the blow with little pieces of glass stuck in his head. I could have used a bigger bottle. Vance is bloody and dazed, but he’s a real big dude. Maybe I should have hit him in the temple? He’s twice my size and appears like he’s going to jump on me. There’s a huge crowd all around us. Hubert O’Domhnaill s is running down the hill to intervene but the damage has already been done.

 

Vance grabs me. The crowd wants more blood even if it won’t yell for it. I see cops running up the block. Vance doesn’t have long to retaliate. He’s got my shirtsleeve. My fists are up and then before he can get in a good punch, Olu Okonkwo fly tackles him. Olu, who isn’t a big guy, just leaps on him. That distracts him. He hesitates before he hits me. The cops jump on all of us. Then the cops put Vance, me and of course, Olu in cuffs. Everybody is yelling something different about what happened. I have some of Vance’s blood on my face and on my shirt. I’m smiling for the first time in forever as the cops drag me away.

 

 

 

32

 

 

 

 

48 hours later, on a Monday afternoon, the New York City Police Department sent two officers to pick me up from my 8th period bio class to escort me to the psychiatric unit of Mt. Sinai Hospital on 116th Street.

No one found my water guns funny after all. The gig was up.

 

 

Part Three:

Winter’s Dregs

I leant upon a coppice gateWhen frost was specter-gray,And winter’s dregs made desolateThe weakening eye of day.The tangled vine-stems scored the skyLike strings of broken lyres,And all mankind that haunted nighHad sought their household fires.

 

 

Excerpt from The Darkling Thrush by Thomas Hardy

 

א

May 1999

 

The cell is perfect in its cleanliness and sterility. The bare walls are a pale, baby blue. Every corner has been rounded so as not to pose a threat to the prisoner, excuse me, the patient. The windows are thick and double paned.  Any thoughts of shattering them are impossible because all the furniture is securely fastened to the floor with bolts. The sheets of the bed are clean and white. There is a small water closet with a toilet and sink, but no shower.

 

I am filled with an implacable rage. This perfect room in this perfect hospital is becoming harder to bear. I have been lying in this room since they brought me over from the adult ward on the other side of the building. I try to get up, all but forgetting that I am shackled to the bed. I am thoroughly drugged.

 

I’m not going anywhere.

 

I rack my brain to ascertain what I have done to be shackled up like this. I can’t remember for the life of me. My head aches. A dull throb really. It feels like someone has hit me with a padded pipe.

 

I’m in the Crazy Nut Bin.

 

The door to my cell is closed. There is no particular need to lock it because the entire unit is sealed tight with electronic doors with identity card readers and a dual release system. There are enough orderlies on the ward to put a swift end to any trouble.

 

The shackles are on tight. I must have put up a fight. The correct term for my shackles is the ‘four-point-restraint-system.’ The guards four-point the patients when they get out of control and needs to be sedated. I had been four-pointed once before; at least, I thought I had. Each extremity of the shackles connects to the frame of the bed. There are leather manacles and taught binding straps. They can add a webbed netting and head immobilizer if the patient is resistant to psychotropic drugs and chemical tranquilizers.

 

I attempt to roll around and to stretch myself out of these bonds, all to little avail.  The drugs have not yet faded from my system. The white neon lighting gives no indication of the time of day and there are no clocks. When you wake up after being injected with Thorazine, you are not quite unconscious, but never quite awake.

 

“It takes 72 hours to fully clear your system,” my inner dialogue tells me out of nowhere.

 

Everything has become a timeless moment fading slowly into delirium. The day after a ‘restrainment’ is a peculiar experience. The nurses act as though you are a clean slate everyday, as if you will not remember them sticking a needle into your lower leg the night before. But it’s a nervous calm. Eventually they will release me to eat. I try to remember the Patient’s Rights hanging on the wall. I think one of them is the right to a tuna fish sandwich at any time of day.

 

“Mr. Adon, if we take you out of the restraints, do you promise to behave yourself?” asks Dr. Zebulon.

 

That’s a real pristine lab coat the doctor has on.

 

“Yes sir.”

 

“Before we do, do I have your promise you’re going to take your medication and stop riling up the other patients?”

 

“I can refuse the medication. It’s my right as a patient.”

 

“Not as a minor. You’re fifteen years old, remember?”

 

“Is it nice to play a god, Dr. Zebulon?”

 

Had I asked that aloud or just in my own head. It came out like a mumble.

 

“What was that?”

 

“I said, let me up.”

 

Two orderlies in black scrubs enter the room and unfetter the restraints. There are welts on my wrists and ankles from my struggle to break free. It is difficult to stand with the drugs still in my system. The room is spinning. After a second groggy attempt I stumble back onto the bed.

 

“How long will the drugs remain in my system?” I ask.

 

“Another few hours,” says Dr. Zebulon scribbling notes in my chart.

 

“Can I get some lunch?”

 

“I’ll have someone check when I’m done with my paper work. There might be something left over. Tuna fish probably.”

 

He leaves the room and I try once again to stand up. How long have I been here? I have no conception of the time or date. All I can remember are brief clips. Nothing is clear. I try to recount what I did to get put in here, but I draw a blank.

 

“Start with things you know,” the inner dialogue tells me.

 

I look out the window. I see Harlem, maybe? What have they given me? I feel so tired and almost unable to form a concrete thought. I walk over to the dresser and it’s filled with hospital clothes and two pre-wrapped pairs of foam slippers. I find an empty sketchbook but can’t find any pens. The book has some photos in it. I know these people but I can’t remember anything about them, just their names, and a couple of images that seem like memories–Roxy, Donny, Case?

 

I push open the blue cell door and step out into the hallway, which is also illuminated in white neon light.

 

“What up, white bread,” says a skinny Black girl whom I don’t recognize.

 

“Hey. I have some questions. They’re gonna sound a little stupid, but I need to know them.”

 

“Aight, white bread, ask away.”

 

“What’s the date today?”

 

“May 3rd.”

 

“How long have I been here?”

 

“Sweetie, you just got here a week. They drug you good, didn’t they? Wuz yo name?”

 

I think for a second.

 

“Sebastian.”

 

“You was across the ward in the adult section but some alta’cation got you transferred. Thaz’ what the word is anyway.”

 

“Why am I here?”

 

“Now ain’t that just da question these days.”

 

“What do you mean?”

 

“Thas what we all wanna know. Why we here?”

 

I walk down the corridor past a couple pay phones and can’t help but notice there are no sharp corners anywhere. There are some panoramic photos of waterfalls and sunsets attached to the wall behind a closed plastic frame cover for tranquility’s sake.

 

Everything is so somber you know right off the bat that you’re in the bin, the place they toss out the crazies.  I reach a lounge with a locked cabinet containing board games, coloring books, and other keep-ya-busy-esque activities. There are two kids in the lounge, a scrawny Black kid and a Latin kid who looks like he’s twelve. I sit down in one of the chairs and pick up a Choose Your Own Adventure Book someone’s left on the table.

 

“Yo. White bread. You okay? Sebastian right?” the Black kid asks me.

 

He doesn’t look familiar at all. How does he know my name, though?

 

“Don’t trust him,” the inner dialogue says to me.

 

“How do you know my name?”

 

“We talked last night after they drugged you and restrained yo ass to the bed.”

 

“You’ll have to pardon me. I don’t remember anything.”

 

“It’s cool,” the lanky Negro says to me.

 

“What’s your name again?”

 

“It’s Malik Little,” the Black kid says, “and dat’s Jesus.” He pronounces Jesus, Haysoos.

 

“What’s good,” the young-ass looking Spanish kid, Jesus says.

 

He reaches over and I give him a clumsy pound.

 

“You wuz on some crazy ‘ish last night,” says Jesus.

 

“I think they call it Thorazine,” I respond.

 

“Naw, he mean what you was saying,” says Malik.

 

“What was I saying?”

 

“You don’t rememba’ nothin’?” Jesus asks me.

 

“No. Not really.”

 

“Guess them drugs took you down hard,” says Malik.

 

“To be absolutely honest with you I have no idea how I got here and until you just introduced yourself, I could swear I’d never met you before.”

 

“This cracka’s real fuckin’ crazy,” mutters Jesus.

 

“You really don’t remember our good conversation?” asks Malik again.

 

“Naw,” I say looking away.

 

“You were talking all night. You were talking to me, but you thought that I was–shit, iz crazy man, I got’s ta tell ya.”

 

“So go on and fuckin’ tell me.”

 

“You thought that I was a God.”

 

“Excuse me?”

 

“You called me ‘Yah-Ho-Vah.’ ”

 

“Stop fucking with me.”

 

“No joke. You wuz saying it on my word. Like one oh dem 5% cats.”

 

“So say, I thought you were God. Say the drugs hyped me up and I didn’t know what was going on and I rambled on about some shit. It don’t mean nothin’.”

 

“You told me you thought the world was coming to an end. You said that when it’s gone only the City will remain. I didn’t catch much else. You weren’t makin’ sense.”

 

“The City?”

 

“You tell me, white bread.”

 

“I don’t know, man. I don’t remember my dreams.”

 

“You weren’t dreaming. It was like you were ina psycho  trance.”

 

“I’d just write it off and blame the happy pills if I were a betting man,” something inside                   responds for me. I let my inner dialogue do the talking.

 

“Fine by me. I don’t wanna to be locked up in a hospital if the world really gonna end.”

 

“Now that you’ve shared that little gem with me. How do we get out of here?”

 

“You can’t get out,” says Jesus.

 

“Bullshit. Wills and ways, Jesus.”

 

“Seriously. All the doors is ‘lectronically locked and wit’ a press of a button they can bring as many guards as deh need onto the ward.”

 

“Who has the keys to the door?”

 

“All the staff do and then there’s a button behind the desk that let’s people in and out. But, there’s anothah problem.”

 

“What?”

 

“Once you get outside the ward you need anothah key for the elevator.”

 

“No you don’t,” says Jesus, “You just gotta clear the dual access door.”

 

“We iz in disagreement. And yes you do,” exclaims Malik.

 

“We can’t leave  no-ways,” Jesus says.

 

“Why the Hell not?” I ask.

 

“Cuz we sick,” Jesus says.

 

Malik now scowls at Jesus.

 

“I’m not sick. They just killin’ time before I get placed upstate. My days are motherfuckin’ numbered.”

 

“What did you do?” I ask.

 

“None of yo damn business,” Malik scowls at me, “what are they gonna do with you?”

 

“I don’t have a clue. I don’t even remember how I got here.”

 

“I know why you here,” interjects Jesus, “you here because you brought a bag full of guns into your school. They thought you was pullin’ a Columbine.”

 

“And I thought I did some shit,” said Malik obviously amused. “You an me might be gettin to know each other better than we thought. They gonna transfer you to Spawford, too!”

 

I wondered how that could possibly be true.

 

“It’s not,”  the inner dialogue says.

 

“Are you sure?” I ask Jesus.

 

“I heard the nurses talkin’ bout it.”

 

“I just don’t remember. Wouldn’t I be in jail if I had done that?”

 

“You ain’t in jail ‘cause you White. Guards said you is rich too. You member dat, rich boy?”

 

Malik says this with some out-of-the-blue, newfound hostility.

 

“I’m not rich.”

 

“Compared to us you probably are,” says Jesus.

 

“Why can’t I remember anything?”

 

“Iz cuz you crazy,” Malik says.

 

“How many people are on this ward?”

 

“Twelve including you. You got a lot of stupid questions, but whatcha gonna do ta get out of here?” Jesus yells at me.

 

I grab Jesus by the shoulders. He’s easily a head and a half shorter than me. Malik tries to pull me off him but I elbow him in the ribs and he falls back across the table.

 

“TELL ME WHAT YOU GODDAMN KNOW!” I bellow in rage.

 

“THIS CRACKAS GOIN CRAZY!” Malik yells to the guards.

 

A nurse hits an alarm and four more guards arrive within the minute. They drag me off Jesus as I flail my arms and kick them as hard as I can. I hadn’t realized I was choking him.

 

“Fuckin cracka’s goin’ nuts!” Malik yells to the girls in the Rec Room up the hall.

 

The four guards have me pinned down on the floor. I’m struggling to get up and one of them is pressing his weight down on my neck. I can’t breathe. They’re all bigger than me. Out of the corner of my eye I see the nurse prepping a needle.

 

“Hold him still so I can sedate him,” the nurse says calmly.

 

This all feels real familiar. I manage to kick a guard in the face. I notice my shoes are made of foam. The blow doesn’t stop him and he gives me a quick punch in the side.

 

“MOTHA FUCKAS!” yells Malik as he fly tackles two of the guards.

 

I manage to get free for a moment and grab the nurse’s needle and smash it against the wall. It shatters and the clear liquid Thorazine spills out onto the floor. Malik punches a guard in the ribs. Jesus is sitting huddled in the corner with his eyes closed and his hands over his ears. The girls from the next room are all watching from a safe distance.

 

I’m struggling to get out of a head choke one of the guards has me in. The other three are struggling to pin down Malik.

 

“WE NEED MORE ORDERLIES UP HERE, NOW!” the nurse yells into a guard’s radio.

 

She begins to refill another needle with more Thorazine. Five more guards run onto the unit from the adult side. One of them is huge. Like a nigger freight train.

 

“Get Malik sedated first!” the big guy yells.

 

Four guards now have me pinned to the floor of the Rec Room. Jesus and a group of colored girls are all watching from the classroom across the hall. Malik gets free for a second but gets tackled as he runs down the hall. He hits the ground hard. I can’t see anything but the floor. My head is pinned down. One of them is sitting on my legs; another has his knee on my neck.

 

Malik screams as the nurse sticks him in the left lower leg with the Thorazine. One minute later I get jabbed and sedated too. They make no effort to be gentle as they jam it in my leg. I suddenly feel a little drugged as they drag me still kicking into a “quiet room.” There are eight smaller, locked and padded quiet room cells in the bloc that runs between the youth and adult units. Malik is put into the room next to me. They bolt the doors. Everything gets slow and things seem to be slipping away. I feel sore all over. I’m lying on the dark blue mat under the glow of perpetual neon light.

 

“Sebastian!” I hear Malik yell out.

 

I mutter back something unintelligable.

 

“You aight?” he yells again.

 

I feel nauseous and can’t sit up.

 

“They drugged you?” he yells. I can tell he’s getting woozy too.

 

“…yeah…”

 

“We done gave um hell…didn’t we…?” I can hear him mutter slowly.

 

“……y…eah.”

 

I realize I’m trying to form words but can’t. My heart is beating quickly and I feel like I can’t breathe. I try to scream as everything fades to gray. And then the neon lights fade slowly to darkness. They put our bodies to sleep, but our minds are still screaming.

 

***

 

I can’t move. I can’t turn my head. I can only see the Old Man in the red leather ottoman chair directly in front of me. He’s smoking a pipe and the smoke seems to coil toward the ceiling like a slow-moving tornado or snake. The whole room is melting upwards with the smoke.

 

“What a mess you’re in now,” the Old Man says to me.

 

“Don’t I know it.”

 

“This is bigger than you, you know. Now all of us have to reap the repercussions of your madness.”

 

“I’d say, you are my madness,” I mutter.

 

“Whatever you have to tell yourself to help you sleep. Don’t hate the doctors for the disease. Listen. You have trouble listening but if you take in anything I have to say listen to this. You’re in a bad place, Mike.”

 

“Why are you calling me Mike?

 

“You’re not gonna walk away from this one completely.”

 

The whole room is dissolving in front of me.

 

“Whatever happens. Don’t trust them when they say they’ll make you better. Don’t trust your parents. Don’t trust your friends. Don’t trust the doctors. AND definitely don’t trust Sebastian Adon. We’ve wasted enough time on that little raggamuffin.”

 

The old man is a mess of squiggling lines and streaks of color. He sits up and reaches up to the one solid object in the room. The dirty light bulb. He pulls its cord. Darkness. And just like that the Old Man was gone and the game store itself swallowed down into the sands.

 

****

 

“Sebastian,” yells Malik, “Can you hear me?”

 

No response comes from the next cell. I can hear Malik yelling to me, but can’t see anything in the pitch-blackness of gloom that has enveloped me.

 

“I hate White people. I think yer all no good,” he yells.

 

I hear him, but am too drugged to respond. I’m drooling all over the floor. The Thorazine is completely overwhelming my central nervous system.

 

“Since we’re gonna be buddies. I just thought you should know.”

 

The neon light beats down twenty-four/seven. It makes it hard to tell what time it is or how long you’ve been in the room. I eventually stumble up and prop myself up against the one-way glass, looking into my own reflection. I know that behind the two-foot-by-two-foot panel lies the nurse’s station. They can see me through the one-way glass and they can see me through the little camera up in the corner of the ceiling.

 

Malik tries to sleep, content with his confession.

 

***

 

I’m lying on a long black table and I can’t move. There is no ceiling. All I see is the black night sky. I think I’m in a roofless barn.

 

“You’re all tied up,” says a voice.

 

The voice belongs to a little girl.

 

“I can do anything I want to you. I could give you a hand job or I could cut out your liver,” says the little girl.

 

“You don’t want my liver,” I respond.

 

“So you’re saying you want a hand job from another twelve-year old?”

 

“That’s not what I’m saying.”

 

“They took my Father because of you!” she spits at me.

 

“I wish they’d take you, too, then. How many of them are you? You little fucking demons always running about.”

 

“We’ve told you that before.”

 

“You’ll have to forgive me. My memory is fleeting as of late.”

 

“Mike, I’m really worried about the boy pilgrim.”

 

“My names not Mike, it’s….”

 

“Of course it is,” she cuts me off.

 

“I’m worried that he’s trying to forget about us, to block us out.”

 

“Somehow I doubt he’ll’ manage.”

 

“You think after they experiment on him he’ll still want to play with us all? They plan to fix him you realize.”

 

An uneasy silence.

 

“Sweety dear, you wanna let me loose?”

 

I am bound with slimy black ropes, thin like twizzlers, more like tentacles than rope. The girl climbs onto me and sits down on my chest. She is incredibly heavy.

 

“No silly. You’re still the pilgram, remember? I get you both mixed up.”

 

“You can’t win, you little fucking terrorist,” says a deeper voice from behind me.

 

It’s Mr. Washington. A trench coat flutters and I smell burning tobacco. But that’s just the old memory, the 3-D residual projected image. They chopped him up good. Real horror show.

 

“They plan to rid him of us,” says the little girl.

 

I crane my head to see him. I see his silhouette on the wall and he’s wearing a gray fedora hat. His severed head is in a vice. Someone, probably the girl, put a hat on him. His body is slumped on the table next to me. The trench coat is soaked in gore.

 

“It’s not as if it’s his fault. He’s barely in control anymore,” says the head of Mike Washington.

 

“So now who is?” asks a second girl coming out of the doorway. Like infernal, inverted little Catholic school girls.

 

“Our maker is gone,” says a third.

 

“Who’s to blame?” says another. “Who’s to blame?” says another.

 

“Who’s to blame?” says another still.

 

We are completely surrounded. Just like old times, except no guns blazing, no pithy comments, no legs to stand on.  In seconds thousands of the little girls surround the barn and pack the room, each with a dirty white dress, each identical. She’s a doppelganger, she is legion and she swarms.

 

“I’m not gonna pretend you don’t have the upper hand,” the head says, the head of Mike Washington.

 

“We’re growing furious. He’s so fucked he doesn’t even understand the balance of the mission,” all the little girls say in unison.

 

“We don’t like you both,” they repeat and it echoes in my head a thousand times. The tentacles that bind my hands slither all over me choking me as they force me to sit up. There are thousands of little girls peering darkly into me, each identical in their hate.

 

“Let’s get rid of them before they can get rid of us,” a thousand little voices say.

 

I try to fight them off the tentacle ropes. They again quickly overpower me and the girls haul me onto the steel table next to Mike’s dismembered corpse. I guess I’m so crazy, my imaginary friends fight among themselves.

 

“IF YOU KILL HIM NOW, THIS WAS ALL FOR NOTHING,” shouts the head of Mike nWashington; and, for some reason, I feel a reciprocal relationship.

 

The tentacles slither their way around his torso. The girls tear the clothing off both of us.

 

I don’t see much of what happens next. They cut me right down the side from my left shoulder, across my chest, leaving me twitching violently on the table minus a leg, an arm, and half my torso. I should be bleeding everywhere, but I’m not. Their blades cauterize while slicing.

 

All I feel is the pain. I scream and cry. Mike doesn’t.

 

They’ve done the same thing to him. The tentacles recoil into the ground and the tables we lie on are pushed together. They begin stitching us together, binding us like Siamese twins. This little orgy of blood and mutilation drags on. They gouge out Mike’s right eye, perhaps to spite his face. He still doesn’t even wince. Blood is now dripping out of the socket where Mike’s eye once was. They back away from us and then Mike makes us stand up.

 

“We’re eliminating the confusion about who’s who, about who’s responsible for what, but more importantly whose controlling whom,” they say to us in shrieks.

 

They pick up wrist-thick canes from the ground and drive us out of the barn, lashing us as they go. The barn is in a cemetery of low-lying, broken gravestones each with the name of one of my compatriots. The little wailing girls beat us and beat us. We run as fast as we can. For once the gate of the Pale City has been left unlocked.  Down the bluff of dunes and into the desert we run. We don’t stop running until the Pale City is gone, swallowed up in the sands as we flee.

 

***

Good morning.

 

The night nurses finish their paperwork and turn the ward over to day-shift nurses, the day-shift orderlies, and the doctors, who never can be found at night. Breakfast is carted into the mess room as the nurse distributing the morning meds wakes up the nine girl patients and Jesus.

 

Malik and Sebastian are still in the quiet rooms at least partially sedated. Malik has awoken and is tapping on the door asking for water. Sebastian is still out cold.

 

“We should let them out for breakfast,” says Sid.

 

He’s a towering Black orderly built like a football player with a deep voice, like Ving Rhames, but less terrifying to White people. No, scratch that, just as terrifying to White people. Like Ving Rhames, but doesn’t act. He guards a psyche ward in Harlem.

 

“We need to wait for Dr. Zebulon to sign off on that,” says one of the interns, a Columbia University med student named Ronny. Orderlies can’t stand nurses. Nurses can’t stand interns. And the interns can’t do a damn thing that the unit doctor, Dr. Zebulon, doesn’t approve. Sid mediates a lot on this battlefield of class and ethnic strife that is the Mt. Sinai Hospital Adolescent Psychiatric ward.

 

“Let me bring them some tuna fish sandwiches and some juice,” Sid says in a gruff, deep voice.

 

He’s got easily two feet and change on Ronny the intern.

 

“I don’t think we can give them any food in the quiet rooms.”

 

“There are always tuna sandwiches and apple juices in the fridge. I can open it up and bring it to them myself. I’ll supervise um while they eat. I’ll do the paperwork.”

 

“Just as long as you do the paperwork and take full responsibility,” says Ronny the intern.

 

“Not a problem,” says Sid. “Sid done love paperwork.”

 

A young White female nurse with jet-black hair named Suzy smiles at him.  Sid has always been good to the kids on the ward, she thinks. She thinks she should ask him out one of these days. That would piss off her Dad for sure.

 

Sid uses his key card to open the electronic door leading from the youth ward to the quiet room cell bloc. The cell bloc is shared by the adult ward and is the only place teens and adults can interact. Most of the interaction involves begging, drooling, and cursing.  He opens the cell with where I lie barely conscious with thorazine shakes.

 

“Kid. Wake up.”

 

I’m mostly out cold.

 

Sid tapped him. “Wake up, kid. You want breakfast?”

 

“Why the fuck is your head on my shoulder?” mutters the inner voices of Sebastian Adon.

 

“What?” said Sid confused. He tries to shake the kid a little. The boy is rolled up in what healthcare providers call the recovery position, left lateral recumbent. No response.

 

According to the log Sebastian had been chemically tranquilized four times in the last three days. Log says Benedril has almost no affect, which means he drinks a lot and that he was extremely resilient to Thorizine as well. It took much longer to fully take affect at the protocol dose.

 

Tough little motherfucker, thinks Sid.

 

“Mike, I can’t run any further.”

 

The kid was talking crazy talk, babbling in his chemical stupor. Sid figured he was a tuna-fish- sandwich-kind-of-guy.  In a serious violation of quiet room policy, Sid left the juice and the sandwich by the door of the cell.

 

***

 

I have two heads. I’m standing out in the sand. The Pale City is nowhere in sight. One head is my own. I reach up and wipe the sweat and grime from my brow with the one hand I control. The other head belongs to Mike Washington. He is missing an eye.

 

“Stop running,” he says.

 

I try to walk, but he controls the other leg and we stumble to a halt.

 

“Where are we?” I ask.

 

“Out in the wilderness. You’ve been making us run all night.”

 

“How the fuck did this happen?”

 

“I don’t know. I was sleeping and then I woke up out here on your shoulder.”

 

“So here we are.”

 

So, here we are.”

 

“I have to level with you, Mike,” I finally say.

 

“Yeah?”

 

I struggle to get a better look at him, but it’s anatomically difficult.

 

“I’m having a lot of trouble telling what’s real anymore.”

 

“Yeah. Me too, but the fact that we’ve been sewn together alive testifies that perhaps someone is still dreaming.”

 

“Did I dream you up or did you dream me up?”

 

“It is not of terrible concern to me. All I have is a certain duty to my orders.”

 

“Your orders?” I ask.

 

“I’ve been ordered by the management to get you out of this desert in one piece. It seems I’ve failed miserably.”

 

“So now what?”

 

“We wait for dawn.”

“What happens then,” I ask him.

 

“Reconstitution.”

Dr. Zebulon is at a staff meeting with key nurses, security staff, and interns doing evaluations of each patient’s progress and condition. These evaluations place the patient on a treatment level ranging from “1” to “4” with each ascending rank earning the patient more privileges. “1” meant that you had to go to bed early, couldn’t watch movies, and couldn’t wear civilian clothing on the ward. Level  “2 “ got your normal clothing back, let you watch movies, and make outgoing phone calls. “3” meant you could play Nintendo 64.  “4” meant you could be discharged. Malik and I are both on level 1.

 

I am clad in aquamarine hospital clothing with metal snap buttons and wearing green foam slippers sitting with Malik in the Rec Room. Malik wears the same hospital pants as me, but had found a striped white gown that resembled a thin trench coat for the mentally ill. I am drawing a picture of us fighting the guards. It was inaccurate as a depiction of our capacity for resistance. In the picture we are winning and have handguns.

 

I say to Malik a few days later:

 

“Fightin’ wit’ um ain’t getting’ us nowhere. All they do is drug us up and throw our asses in the quiet room.”

 

“Duly noted,” I concur. “What about trying to get out through the ceiling?”

 

“That shit only done work in movies, white bread,” he responds.

 

“The ceiling panels won’t support our weight anyway,” he adds. He’d obviously seen the movie Aliens also.

 

“Is your memory working yet?” he asks out of the blue.

 

“They have me so loaded up on Seroquel that I can’t yet make sense of anything.”

 

I am embarrassed at the extent to which I cannot remember what had gone on in the last week that I had, supposedly, been here. Long-term memory is returning. I know why I am here. I just cann’t believe I did the things on the outside that got me committed. Those bad, degenerate things. Had I really done those things or are they all the dreams of Mr. Washington? Is he dreaming now?

 

“So you was a bad dude out there, Sebastian?” he asks me.

 

“I don’t have much as a basis for comparison.”

 

“You waived some guns around school.”

 

“I think not. Where’d you hear that?”

 

“It was a rumor I had heard.”

 

“From who? Jesus?”

 

“Naw. Don’t worry ‘bout it. I believe you if you say that’s bullshit. You still don’t remember what got you in here?”

 

“No. I don’t remember anything,” I respond.

 

“You evah considah that we both be actually crazy?” he asks.

 

“Sometimes.”

 

“I mean, you have all this blank memory and I just wanna box up every motha fucka I see.”

 

“The more I remember, the more crazy I think I am. If these memories that I have are real, then I was a pretty bad person, a person that maybe needed to be locked away.”

 

“Fuck dat. You couldn’t have been worse than some of the cats I grew up with. I knew some mean niggas.”

 

Enough bonding.

 

“So let’s think. How do we get out?”

 

“I’m drawing blank,” he says, “Look. Maybe you ain’t worried ‘bout where they gonna send you, but I is. I ain’t tryin’ to do some time and iz looking like I might. Juz help me get off dis ward and I’ll owe you fo life.”

 

“I need more time to think.”

 

There’s an announcement over the speaker, “Line up for meds.”

 

It is almost lunchtime and they are gonna dope us up again. I get there first and am at the head of the line. When my turn comes I look down at the cocktail they have assembled for me. There are four pills of various shapes, colors, and textures. They sit in a tiny paper cup along with a glass of water. I can see the staff eyeing me nervously. Have I done something before?

 

“What are all these pills for?” I ask.

 

The nurse lists off three types of meds and what they do. As far as I’m concerned she’s speaking to me in Cantonese.

 

“I don’t want any.”

 

“Please don’t be disruptive, Sebastian. Please just take your medication.”

 

“I choose to refuse. I don’t want to be drugged up anymore.”

 

“Just take the meds, Sebastian,” the nurse says sharply.

 

I see Dr. Zebulon come out from his office in the nurse’s station. Fuck this, here we go again. Here comes the pop off.

 

“HEY DOCTOR!” I yell.

 

I grab the tray from the nurse and the pills go flying through the air as I chuck the tray like a boomerang right at Dr. Zebulon. He throws up his arms and it bounces off him scattering an entire ward’s lunchtime meds all over the ground. The cups of water are all over him.

 

“SECURITY!!!!” he bellows.

 

Two guards come running from the adult ward. One of them is fucking huge. The name Sid comes to mind.

 

I run down to the end of the ward near my room. Malik is right behind me.

 

“Wuz the plan?” he asks.

 

“I don’t have one. I just didn’t want to take the pills.”

 

Another three guards arrive. Malik and I have our backs to the wall and the five guards advance with a nurse behind them, once again preparing a syringe full of Thorazine chemical- sleepy-time.

 

“Sebastian. Malik. We can do this the easy way or the hard way,” says the huge guard that I thought was named Sid.

 

“We just don’t want to be doped up,” I yell.

 

“The drugs aren’t to dope you up. They’re to help you remain in control,” he responds.

 

I don’t really believe him. Dr. Zebulon is nowhere in sight. Apparently he has a certain aversion to the dirty work of mental health and hygiene.

 

“SUCK. MY. DICK!” yells Malik.

 

Then, it all happens very quickly. Check. The five guards pounce on us. We are quickly subdued and sedated and then hauled back into the quiet room cellblock. I got bruised, welted and winded and I am starting to feel the affects of the drugs, but am not ready to give in. I start kicking the one-way window. I kick it as hard as I can over and over again. I throw my body weight against the door, slamming into it again and again. Eventually I hear the outer cell bloc door open and I know they were coming to put me in restraints.

 

When the cell door open I run at them. I manage to knock down one of the smallest of the three guards, but am quickly yanked off him. It took four of them to hold me down while the nurse jams another needle in my leg.

 

It’s like a rape. My vein gets penetrated. As the chemicals rush through my bloodstream I fight desperately to hold on. I flail my limbs trying to break free, but they hold me tight.

 

Still flailing, I am carried back to my room. One guard sits on each of my limbs, as the shackles are prepared. First my legs are clamped down. Then the shackles are attached to the bed frame with thick, flat blue rope. Shackles are placed around my wrists. These too, are fastened to the bed.

 

My body spasms. I desperately keep fighting to keep some clarity, but the drugs are beginning to take effect. Everything seems to be moving slower and slower. I blank out for a minute and then everyone in the room is gone except for one big guard seated in the chair next to the bed. I slam my head against the back of the bed.

 

“Easy buddy,” says the huge orderly. “Take it easy.”

 

Now I’m crying. Tears flow down my face and I feel like I am trapped. Images of old friends and old times flash before me. I deserve this, don’t I? If half these memories are true. They come in bursts. I deserve this because I am a criminal piece of shit. I’m a self-centered, manic scumbag that no one wants to deal with anymore. And here I am, strapped to a bed in a mental hospital in the Crazy Nut Bin.

 

I am about to lose consciousness. I hang on to reality by hitting my head again and again against the bed frame. The guard tries to stop me and I spit in his face. I’m screaming and crying, but I can’t hear it. Everyone else can, though.

 

The guards return. I can see them but everything gets blurry. When they undo my cuffs I barely have the strength to even try to break free. A straight jacket is put around me. It fastens me down so I can’t move at all, immobilizing my head. A net comes over me pinning me further down, smothering me. The shackles are reapplied and as I lose consciousness I realize that I’m getting what I deserve. And then everything goes slowly gray. It feels like a meandering oblivion.

 

***

 

I wake up some time later. It’s nighttime. I’m still in four-point restraints. I’m not alone in the room. They have me on constant supervision now, one-to-one as they call it in hospital-speak. I feel like crying some more, but I can’t make myself do it. An overwhelming weight is pushing down on me and I don’t think that I can bear it. I’m smothered in drugs.

 

“Who’s there? Mike?” I mumble.

 

“It’s Sid. Who the hell is Mike? You don’t remember me, do you?”

 

“You’ll have,” I pause feeling winded, “to refresh, my memory.”

 

“I’m the guy that keeps having to hold you down when you go nuts and start attacking the patients or staff. I honestly, prefer coloring.”

 

“I’ve attacked the staff?”

 

“A couple times now. I guess you can’t really help it.”

 

“I’m not crazy,” I mutter, but don’t completely believe it.

 

“Maybe not. But you are sick.”

 

“Sid?”

 

“Yeah?”

 

“Do you have a cigarette?”

 

Sid chuckles at the absurdity of the request.

 

“I don’t smoke.”

 

“Oh.”

 

We don’t say anything for a while. I feel out of breath.

 

“How long, am I gonna be here?”

 

“Not much longer. The doctors and your parents are looking for a better facility for you. Mt. Sinai isn’t equipped to deal with a patient like you.”

 

“What, is that supposed, to mean?”

 

“It means that it isn’t good for the other patients if you’re running around riling everybody up all the time.”

 

“I wasn’t always like this, Sid.”

 

“I know.”

 

“I used to be good sort of.”

 

“What happened to you, kid?”

 

“For the life of me, Sid,” I pause, “I have no idea. Maybe it’s a short story. I brought this upon myself didn’t I?”

 

“Yeah kid. You did.”

 

“Sid?”

 

“Yeah?”

 

“My head hurts.”

 

“That’s because you kept hitting it against the bed frame.”

 

“That’ll do it.”

 

“That’ll do it,” he responds.

 

“Can I have some water?”

 

“Sure.”

 

Sid walks over to the adjoining bathroom and fills up a small, white plastic cup.

 

“I’m gonna have to pour it for you.”

 

As I struggle to sit up, he pours cold water down my throat.

 

“Thanks.”

 

“No problem, kid.”

 

“Sid?”

 

“Yeah?”

 

“Can you get me a cigarette?”

 

“Naw son, your fire’s burning hot enough.”

 

***

 

I believe that it is time for a change of tactics. The odds are not in our favor. Malik and I have been wrestled down and sedated six times according to my last count. He normally cuts the fight at the tranquilizers, but I push on until the restraints get busted out. Six incidents. Six futile attempts to flee to nowhere on this stupid locked-up youth unit.

 

Sid kept me company the last two times on overnight “one-to-one.”  He says I’m creating overtime. I’m awake now and my last memory is of him reading to me from my global studies text as I drifted into a medicated slumber. Herodotus was describing the subjugated national make up of Xerses’ million-plus expeditionary forces during the second stage of the Persian war. The only nations I can remember are the Spartans and the Medes.

 

I’m still wearing aquamarine hospital scrubs. The legs on the pants are too short and fall something close to high waters. I ripped the arms off the hospital gown that I’m wearing and made it into a vest. They still won’t let me have my clothing back, not until I prove that I can behave and take my meds.

 

Donny tried to visit me, but they wouldn’t let him because he’s only fifteen. Donny and Izzy are the only people that call anymore. Izzy says he’d been pouring over legal books looking for a way to get me out. I’d like to believe him, but I don’t. Donny keeps me updated as to what’s been going on. This one’s rumored to be pregnant; that one had an overdose. It’s all very uplifting news. My conversations with them are my only contact to my immediate past. I feel shattered, incomplete.

 

Between the Happy Pills, the lack of sleep, the hospital and more Happy Pills, I can’t be sure what is real and what is still a dream. My world has become disjointed. I can’t remember my world of dreams at all since I have been on the Happy Pills.

 

Mike Washington and I, as a mutilated, bleeding Siamese twin, half-thing, had finally wandered beyond the city limits out into the dunes. Out in the badlands he wilted away, withered and became ash as I reformed. The winds had carried him away in the darkness. I was alone, a broken half, left in the wilderness.

 

The pills make me tired, not sleepy, just generally malaised. I do a bit of drooling on myself from time to time.  I try to take naps, to sleep the whole thing off. I’m never hungry except after a restrainment. It takes me longer to make decisions and I am physically slower. I think they’ve upped the dosage. I try real hard to not take them voluntarily, but there isn’t much you can do when three guys have you pinned to the ground and they drive a needle into your upper leg.

 

Now it’s lunchtime and I’m slowly digging into a tuna sandwich covered in mayo. I look out the window of the small mess hall and down at the parking lot right below us. The hospital is connected to it and it is only a one-story drop to where the cars are parked. I think hard about how I could get down. I could make a rope out of torn strips of hospital clothes. I could tie the rope to the base of the table, which is bolted to the floor. I could shatter the window with a chair and rappel down the side of the building to the garage and then run to freedom.

 

Yeah, and maybe I’m a Chinese jet pilot. I know the rope won’t hold me. I know the window won’t break. There is no way out. I finish my sandwich staring out the window watching the pigeons perched on the outer sill.

 

ג

The have started running tests on me. I have to assemble puzzles and read off animals that begin with the letter ‘A.’ I have to fill in word bubbles of diagrams on flash cards and say what I see looking at inkblots. The tests are an amusement. I do not believe these doctors know what to do with the results even if I take them seriously. There is suddenly all this talk of me having a mental condition. I haven’t shared with anyone that I heard the voice of God, our celestial management, and that he prevented me from killing myself. That would pretty much assure that I’m here all summer. It’s not really as if I have anything better to do. School will be over pretty soon.

 

The social stigma of being in a mental hospital is great. Sickness of the mind is not understood in Western society. Since it’s not physical, people just don’t believe it’s real.

 

My memories are hazy. I remember two officers of the NYPD asking me to come with them to the guidance councilor’s office. I remember the guidance councilor, a fat Latin woman, telling me that I was very unstable. This and the wine bottle incident were more than they could afford to ignore given my proclivity to violence. The Columbine incident has raised consciousness about mental illness and violence. They said I needed to be evaluated. The next thing I knew, I was strapped to a bed at Mt. Sinai Hospital bouncing off the fucking walls.

 

I wonder if Roxy thinks of me, fondly or ever. She took this opportunity to call to curse me out for vandalizing the green bench outside her house. I vaguely remembered that incident from talking on the phone to Nadia. Everything else that is going on in my life seems secondary to the vile pain inflicted by Roxy’s rejection of me.

 

I view the world through a black and muddied lens. Absolutely nothing is in focus.

 

I sit in my cell and wait as head shrinkers, nurses, doctors, and orderlies create mounds of paperwork determining my fate and ultimately my sanity. I have no concept of the date or the time or anything that is going on outside of the hospital. I feel like I’m in a prison for my mind. Nowhere to run and nowhere to hide. I can’t dream anymore. My last dream a week ago was of running out of water then exploding to ash at sunrise.

 

I occasionally do something violent like hit somebody or throw something at a window. I end up in the quiet room over and over and over again. I keep repeating the same pattern, complete with Thorazine and four-point restraints, like some kind of exercise in futility. I try to tell myself that it will be alright.

 

It won’t.

 

If Roxy says I’m not a good person, if that’s what they all say, then my morals and my mind need some fixing. They can send me anywhere or load me up high on whatever drugs they want. I don’t even bother cheeking the Happy Pills anymore. Roxy cut my heart out.  There are no more feelings in my chest, but I ache in my gut. I am sick of myself.

 

I am sitting on one of the blue couches in the Rec Room staring aimlessly at the green and bluelines on the floor. It is after dinner and I have been given a heavy dose of happy pills. My perception is slightly off. It’s not like I’m high. It’s more like I’m tranquilized. It would not be a stretch to act out again, to run, to hit someone. It’s not that the energy is not there. It’s that the will to act has been taken away. I melt into the couch with a big Kool-Aid smile on my face and unbeknownst to me a little drool hangs off my lips. My eyes are glazed over and there is not a thought in my head.  There is just the sickness and my lack of connection to the impending and uncertain future.

ד

“Has anyone ever accused you of being an extremely violent young man?” asks the English shrink.

 

He’s a real fuddy-duddy. That is the first term that comes to mind when I look at him. I wonder if he might be faking his English accent to sound cultured and professional so people pay him more. We’re sitting in my cell. I am restrained to the bed and the shrink is on a blue plush chair firmly secured to the floor.

 

“I’m not violent,” I state.

 

“You bashed a young man in the head with a wine bottle. Stabbed another with a pencil.”

 

“They had it coming. I’ll have you know that I’m also, not crazy.”

 

“I don’t think you’re crazy.”

 

“So why are we still in this hospital having this conversation for the fourth time?” I ask.

 

“Do you know how many times you’ve been in restraints since you’ve been here in the last two weeks?”

 

“I haven’t the faintest idea. A thousand and one times?” I add sarcastically.

 

“Eleven times. That’s really quite a lot. All resulting from physical attacks on either the staff or other patients. Your perception of time is a little off, isn’t it?”

 

“I don’t have a clue what time it is or even what the date is, if that’s what you mean.”

 

“You seem proud of that. Think its fun in here?”

 

“I don’t know if I made it clear, but I don’t give a shit what you all decide to do to me.”

 

“Do, you even know where you are?”

 

“France.” I say.

 

“But of course. And how did you get to France.”

 

“The hospital moved itself there while I was sleeping. It walked on enormous metal pontoon legs.”

 

“You really believe that you are in France, then? Why not England or Spain?”

 

“Why not? I get to see Hell every time I went to sleep. I have imaginary friends that battle demons with golden handguns; and about two weeks ago, I heard God tell me that I was going to me made to suffer. That the hospital moved to Europe in the middle of the night is not hard for me to believe at all.”

 

“You, have a very tenuous grip on reality.”

 

“Ain’t that the truth.”

 

“So why is your reality so violent?”

 

“I never did anything to a person who didn’t have it coming. Everyone used to pick on me for whatever reason at the UN School where I was in grade school. There was this little fucker by the name of Hans who always harassed me. He was the son of the Consul General of South Africa. One day he got on my nerves, so I stabbed him in the thigh with a pencil. I’d do it all over again if I got the chance,” I explained to the English shrink.

 

“It’s statements like that, which make the people around you very nervous about releasing you from this hospital. You hit someone else over the head with a wine bottle and brought water guns painted black to your school. You don’t seem to have a very clear grasp of the appropriate behavior necessary to live in this society.”

 

“What society?” I ask.

 

“American society,” he responds.

 

“But we’re in France.”

 

“No. We’re in America. I don’t believe that you actually think we’re in France. You love your little mind games. You like confusing people with these games to keep them from advancing your treatment.”

 

“I’m bored, Desmond Heath. Are we almost finished with this session?”

 

“Ah, you remember my name this time. Fourth time’s the charm, is it. This is not the right hospital for someone with your condition. You require long term treatment in a more structured environment.”

 

“So where will I be sent?”

 

“We’re thinking that the San Marcos Treatment Center in Texas is the most appropriate place.”

 

“I mean, that’s what they pay you for,” I say derisively.

 

“Your indifference is a little alarming.”

 

“You have to look at it from my perspective. Nothing your prattling junk science has to offer me comes close to what my God can do. So do your worst. I will be made righteous one way or another.”

 

“You need to stop looking at me and the staff here as your enemies. You are very sick and we’re trying to help you. A healthy spirituality is important to your recovery, but you have to accept that God doesn’t talk to people. What you heard were manic voices in your head. You act like a deviant, Mr. Adon, and you’ve hurt every single person you’ve come in contact with in the past few years. A person like you is a little despot. I told your parents that you just need an island to run as your fiefdom. But as there are no islands available that are seeking tyrants, we must send you to a treatment facility. Do you accept that you have mental illness, Mr. Adon? Or do you want to hide behind your megalomania, your delusions of grandeur you refer to as the voice of God?”

 

“Nope, you’re a quack. I heard God, daddy. Do your damn worst. I got all summer.” I say defiantly.

ה

Dr. Maskin keeps sending me the readings and assignments for class. I guess he thinks I’ll be out of here soon. I have stopped even pretending to do class work and fixate on Sparta. When the drugs make me too dopey to study, I draw. I draw pictures of Leonidas with a black flowing beard and a twelve-foot long spear. I only have three sources: Introduction to Global Studies, Volume 1, Herodotus and the Frank Miller novel 300.

 

The so-called teacher in the hospital is an older Black man with glasses who wanders around the classroom making sure we are doing something. This is just another way to occupy our time. There is nothing structured about it whatsoever. There is absolutely nothing educational about it. It’s a joke that this is an accredited New York City public school.

 

Having no options and no future, I revel in my daydreams about the near past.

ו

How long have I been in this blue room? I’m not sure. It feels like we might be approaching a month. I heard Dr. Zebulon telling the English headshrinker Dr. Desmond Heath that I’m a “disruption to the unit at large.”

 

Then one day I’m told to gather my things. I’m being transferred. Transferred to Texas. Sid has been assigned to escort my parents and me down to San Marcos to a treatment center operated by an organization called The Brown Schools. I can go calmly with Sid and my parents. My other option is to go shackled in a patient transport van. An ambulance ride to Texas is a long-ass time to be chained up in an ambulance. After thirteen restrainments in a month I’m not feeling particularly fond of a forty-hour van ride doped up and in a straight jacket.

 

We fly out of LaGuardia with nobody saying much.

 

The last time I’d seen my parents I had gotten dragged across the conference table and shackled to my bed. Sid and I talk throughout most of the flight. I like Sid and I wonder if I can out run him when we set down in Texas. I wonder why I didn’t try to run in New York. I don’t say a word to my parents. There is nothing to talk about. I am going to spend the summer in a concentration camp for deviant youth, the San Marcos Treatment Center. Not a terribly fun prospect.

 

A large dose of Happy Pills makes me not feel. It also hinders my coordination and tampers with my energy level. One month in the Bin and I had turned off as a person. I don’t hate the orderlies, my parents or Doctors Heath and Zebulon. I am, after all, the only enemy I need. I have myself to hate. It’s hard to understand that you can prefer physical restraint to rotting in one’s cell doped up on god-only-knows-how-many psychotropic drugs all day staring at the wall and wishing you were a Spartan. Mental prisons are the most infinite and total in their captivity.

 

Looking over at Sid I remember all those nights he’d loosened my restraints or got me a glass of water or talked with me about how shitty it was to be a Black man in America. Right now, I’m not on an airplane. I am running through a field on the Peloponnesus with a red tunic and spear. I’m chasing the English shrink who I plan to impale, the yellow rat bastard.

 

“What are you thinkin’ about kid?” asks Sid.

 

God he’s huge, I think looking at Sid.

 

“How shit my summer is gonna be.”

 

“The brochure looks nice. I have a maxim for you though.”

 

“What’s your maxim?”

 

“At least it’s not prison. Repeat that every time you think these institutions are rough.

There are two million people who have it a whole lot worse then you. God willing, your friend Malik won’t be joining them.”

 

“I had it pretty good growing up, Sid. How the fuck did this happen to me?” I asked him.

 

“Well, according to the hospital, you have a mental condition.”

 

“And what do you think?”

 

He glances over the seats behind us to make sure my parents don’t hear.

 

“I think God is giving you a taste of the wretched. I think it might be in your future to learn quite a bit more about how nasty this country can be. I see a lot of kids come through the hospital, mostly poor and colored; but from time to time we’ll get someone from your class. The poor ones come in because they just can’t stand life anymore. It gets you down to know you don’t have a future. Fanon says that the mental disorders of the impoverished and oppressed are many and severe.”

 

“Who’s Fanon?” I ask.

 

“Someone you should read one day.”

 

“The doctors tell me to ignore the voices and visions. They have me on so many pills I can hardly think straight.”

 

“What is it you think you’re seeing?”

 

“Nothing coherent. A reoccurring dream about a Pale City in a sea of sand. The house of my misery. Imaginary friends that like to suffer less than silently in mixed company. Horror. When I sleep I see a shit load of horror.”

 

“Do you believe in a God, Sebastian? Something to play a counter balance to your horror?”

 

“I ought to. For all intents and purposes, I think It spoke to me.”

 

“And what did It say?” Sid asks.

 

“Who?”

 

“Your God.”

 

“It told me I’m going to suffer.”

 

“Do you know who the Buddha was, Sebastian?”

 

“A peaceful Chinaman who never ate.” I answer flippantly.

 

“Only if Christ was a Jew who liked fishing.”

ז

On the way to the San Marcos Treatment Center near Austin, Texas, we pass an enormous poster of George Bush Jr. for President. He grins at me pasted three stories tall on a blue and yellow background with an American flag in the background. We’re passing through what looks like a business district.

 

“Who’s George W. Bush?” I ask.

 

“He’s the Governor of Texas,” says my father.

 

“Is he going to win the Presidency?” I ask.

 

“He doesn’t stand a cowboy’s chance,” my father tells me.

ח

I spent the first 48 hours at the San Marcos Treatment Center under constant surveillance. They have me on something called elopement watch, which means that I have to sleep in the hall and have to stay in full view of the guards. The lights hum, so I stay up talking to a guard named Jim Camden. He tells me not to call him by his first name in front of the other guards or other patients. They discourage patients from knowing the guards’ first names for some stupid reason. Its all part of the behavior modification process I am about to under go. Sounds like a blast.

 

Eventually they let me move into one of the tiny cells on the unit. The room has a wire mesh bed with a blue mattress, white sheets and a blue, disposable pillow. There is an old desk covered in faded graffiti and a chair bolted to the floor in front of it. The room is incredibly bland. Unlike the Mt. Sinai cells, which one could call sterile, I would call these earthy. The walls are painted beige and the cell doors are red. My roommate is a little kid named Junior. He asks me a million questions and seems to always be plotting something. Right away I knew I wanted to beat him very badly, if only I had the energy.

 

It seems like we’re in our cells for most of the day. There is very little to do. I can’t draw and I can’t read because you can’t draw or read until you move up to Blue Level. I am on the first level, which is the Pink Level. There are about eight color levels in all with more privileges and responsibilities as you move up the proverbial sanity ladder. It seems overly complicated, but I guess that’s just what’s necessary when you’re young and crazy and out of control.

 

I’m sitting in my cell with Junior staring at my pink behavior mod card wondering if the plan is to bore us all to death. You never go very far in places like this. Minimization of movement is all a part of the behavior modification process. There is an exercise regimen, however meager, involving a real beat-up swimming pool and a big gymnasium with a basketball court. Junior is working on one of the ward’s 3-D puzzles, assembling what looks like the White House in our cell. He says I can help him if I want even though I’m still not allowed to play with puzzles. Come to think of it, I’m not allowed to do much.

 

Several times a day, depending on how crazy they think you are, you line up at the med counter in the Rec Room and receive your poison in a little paper cup along with a separate cup of either water or juice. I take my Happy Pills without any problems. You don’t feel differently; you just think differently. No more lucid dreams and, certainly, no more voices. Your perspective becomes different. You are no longer unique. You are, indeed, crazy. Looking back at the short fifteen years of my life, I see very little to be proud of. And this feels very much like the end.

 

I stand at the edge of the cell and yell out into the hall,

 

“Adon requesting permission to come out into the hall.”

 

“For what purpose?” asks a guard named Smith.

 

“To break the tedious monotony of spending hours on end in this cell, sir.”

 

We were told to refer to the guards as sir or m’aam.

 

“Smith informing Adon that monotony is just as tedious in hall. Please return to your cell.”

 

And so it went. Rather than get to know Junior, I devoted my time to doing push ups, sit ups, and drawing on the down low. We have markers to write our sanctions. Every hour a guard cals out that sanctions are due on a particular subject. Every hour, on the hour, we have to turn in one hand written page on anything and everything. I doubt that anyone really reads the sanctions. If we want to earn our checkmark for the hour on our mod cards, we have to do them.

 

I don’t know why my unit is on a lockdown. No one has elaborated. I am no fan of all these rules or of being with only guys. I don’t have the faintest idea what to do with my time. SO I draw and I draw and I draw. There are pictures all over the walls of our cell. Junior and I never talk. Over the course of the lockdown, which lasted about a week, Junior finished his 3-D White House puzzle. For that entire week we didn’t go anywhere. We took our meals in our cells off Styrofoam trays. The meals are always lukewarm by the time they reach us. We eat powdered eggs every morning in one form or another and basic cafeteria stuff for the other meals. The overall quality is somewhere between summer camp and a bad school cafeteria.

 

The day before the lockdown ended, a guard named Kelso took a look around our cell and decided that my drawings are negative. Since I was on the Pink Level, he decided that I shouldn’t have been drawing in the first place. He took down all of my drawings and informed me that I was no longer allowed to make “negative” art. I’m not sure what he was talking about.

 

There are so many rules that I can’t be bothered to attempt to remember them. The guards vary extremely on what they choose to enforce. Some of them are regular college kids trying to make money, albeit in a rather unorthodox profession. Only Kelso and a female guard named Salinas are real tight with things. That doesn’t make it any better though. A desperation has set in.

 

Mental hospitals give you a lot of time to simmer in your sins. This is not a very positive activity. You spend most of your time alone in your head trying to trace the course of events leading to your current incarceration. You think in circles, passing out blame to society, to God, and to circumstances. Anything to keep prevent you from believing that you may, in fact, be crazy.

 

There is a ventilation panel on the ceiling. In a dream which requires no sleeping, I pry it off and find myself crawling through a vast network of tiny metallic tunnels that lead to an enormous cavern. The metal fuses into a grand rock catacomb in which a great underwater lake of black water sits undisturbed for centuries. The water looks freezing and I dare not jump in, but I know if I swim deep enough I will emerge on the other side and be free. But I’m actually still sitting in my sweaty cell. Like I said, the mind runs amuck when left unoccupied. My grasp on reality is already tenuous without the monotony and the Seroquel.

 

“Why are you staring at me?” I ask Junior.

 

“I’m bored. And you’ve been staring at the ceiling for like an hour.”

 

“Don’t you have a puzzle to work on or a coloring book to fuck with?” I ask trying to distract him.

 

“I’ve built them all. There are only two in the game closet.”

 

“Junior, what are you so glum about?”

 

“I bet you’ve gotten with a lot of girls.” Junior speculates.

 

“A few.”

 

“What’s the trick to it? I’ve never had a girl even talk to me besides my Mom.”

 

“How old are you?”

 

“Twelve.”

 

“You’re making bad time, but it isn’t over for you yet. You gotta figure out your game as we call it in the City.”

 

“SO where do I learn game?” he asks.

 

“You gotta have confidence and you gotta be bad. And I find that drinking a lot of booze with a girl seems to make things easier, too.”

 

“Neither of us is that smooth if we’re here in this mental house.”

 

“There’s some truth to that.”

 

“Anyway, I can’t drink. Alcoholism runs in my family,” Junior admits.

 

“I don’t believe in alcoholism. It’s a fairy tale they made for the Irish.”

 

“What’s there to believe in? My father gets stinking drunk and beats up me and my Mom. Most people just go out and get drunk, but he can’t hold a job and he’s a real scumbag. And we’re all Irish anyway, whatever the fuck you mean by that.”

 

“Sorry to hear that shit, Junior. And was grandpa a bad drunk too?”

 

“Yeah, far back as anyone can remember, the men in my family have had serious problems with the sauce.”

 

“You ever hit your Dad back?”

 

“No. Of course, I never hit him back.”

 

“I’d fucking crack him next time you’re in that situation.” I say.

 

“You talk a big game, Adon, but when you’re in that situation, when you live it; it’s too fucked up to deal with. It’s the person that brought you into this world. It’s the person you’re supposed to look up to.”

 

“So you’d never fight back?” I ask incredulously.

 

“Nope, faced with that you just can’t. You freeze up.” he shudders slightly remembering something. “You can’t do nothin’. You don’t know that. It’s never happened to you. You have to experience it to comprehend how terrible it is.”

 

“I guess I’ve been lucky. My parents never hit me growing up. They probably should have though,” I tell him.

 

“What exactly did you do to get in here?” asks Junior, obviously trying to change the subject.

 

“I didn’t do shit. But why are you here if your father is the drunken asshole?”

 

“I have a condition. I’m manic depressive.”

 

“So they put that on you. What does that even mean?” I ask.

 

“The doctors say I fluctuate between highs and lows and that I manipulate my parents against each other. They call it cycling,” Junior explains.

 

“Maybe they’re the crazy ones. Maybe we work just fine.” I suggest.

 

“I heard Smith mention you hit someone with a wine bottle.”

 

I look at him a little crazy.

 

“You gonna believe what that frat boy shit kicker says?” I ask.

 

“I think we are probably right where we belong,” Junior declares.

 

“The fuck I hit with the bottle had it coming. Your father fucked you up. Don’t sit here and try to tell me we are the ones to blame. Don’t try and call an apple an orange ‘cause you can’t place the fruits.”

 

“You gonna blame society your whole life? You gonna tell me we are innocent? That we’re victims, Sebastian?!”

 

“We’re all victims of something, Junior.”

 

***

It’s three in the morning.  I’ve been reading the Herodotus.

 

I decide to peak outside the cell and see who’s on duty. They don’t lock the individual cells because we’re locked on a unit amidst a highly fortified compound in the middle of god-knows-where.

 

“I can’t sleep,” I tell the skinny guard with black glasses and a goatee.

 

He’s wearing a brown button-up shirt with jeans. His jeans are too tight for a Texan.

 

“I wish there was something I could tell you that would enable you to find the peace necessary to get some shut eye, but you are, of course, a patient in a mental hospital.”

 

“If I had lived in ancient Greece, would they have put me away like this?”

 

“Maybe. Or they might have made you the Oracle.”

 

“Don’t ya gotta be a skirt to be the Oracle.”

 

“You may be right, kid. I know a lot of people that feel they would have been better off at some other point in history. Truth is, being a product of your times you are, in fact, particularly suited for exactly when you happen to be living. You perceive things differently because of what’s wrong with your brain. Perception is what makes you so-called crazy, not surroundings. The ancient Greeks were as confused as you are. Odds are they looked back to earlier times and imagined things were better. Everyone needs to have their golden age.”

 

“What’s your name, sir?”

 

“Winter. Not sir.”

 

“I’m Sebastian.”

 

“I know who you are, kid, but nice to meet you.”

 

I take a seat on the floor next to where he’s sitting.

 

“It’s not ancient Greece you know,” he says.

 

“What isn’t?”

 

“That place in your head that you’re trying to get to.”

 

“Huh?”

 

Was he talking about the dreams of the desert and the Pale City?

 

“Your Dystopia.”

 

“What’s Dystopia?”

 

“It means twisted nowhere. It is the term for the bad places of the future and past.”

 

“I didn’t say it would be ideal if I were born in ancient Greece. I said I’d be better suited for it.”

 

“I’m a student of history. I’ve studied numerous civilizations across time. They all make terrible mistakes, fight needless wars, fall victim to the gross enabling of human suffering.”

 

“Didn’t we get better with time? People say things are fucking amazing now.” I say.

 

“In the last hundred years we’ve almost wiped ourselves out twice via war alone. What does that tell you? How do you quantify human suffering?”

 

“So since Utopia is nowhere, where can I go? I flee the world in my head as much as this flaming shit I’ve been interred in.”

 

“You don’t have to go anywhere. Wherever you go, you will continue to find suffering. You cannot change this.”

 

“But there are places I’d suffer less than others, right?” I ask hopefully.

 

“What does it matter where you go when the horror stays with you inside your little head?”

 

“No. There is a place I can run to where the process of flight will redeem me. What I will do is make a list of those places I know to be a horror and put a big fat black line on the side of the map to mark off where I’m likely to suffer more.”

 

“What kinds of suffering are you trying to avoid?” he asks.

 

“The ones that make me act like a devil.”

 

“That would be all places on your map is what I’d guess. You’re not talking about physical suffering. I mean you come from a comfortable New York family. You went to a private school. I’m gonna presume nothing too traumatic has happened to you. Ever experience rape or witness murder?”

 

I stare at him in anger. There must be something to justify my madness, my devilish behavior. An inner dialogue that has made not a whisper since Harlem now speaks up.

 

Inside me a noire voice utters, “Pathfinders.”

 

When I was about six years old I made a crayon condolence card to a young boy’s parents, a boy my age who died for no good reason at all. They ran out of stationary. I had to make it on a pink piece of construction paper. I was very young, but I knew pink wasn’t a color for dead things.

 

“I saw a boy die once in the waters where I was swimming. I didn’t remember until just recently. Harlem and the Happy Pills jogged my memory. I hadn’t thought about it in years. It’s one of two childhood memories I can recall in some detail now. Besides these, I remember nothing with clarity before I turned 13.”

 

“Do you think that boy’s death has made you act as you do?”

 

“No. I don’t blame my asocial behavior on past traumas that I have to grope in the darkness to recollect.”

 

“Your file says you think you can talk to God. Says you stabbed a boy with a pencil, hit another with a wine bottle.  Says you’re suicidal, possibly manic-depressive, suffer from insomnia, as well as chronic alcoholism.”

 

“Don’t forget night terrors and lucid dreams,” I remind Winter.

 

“When you do manage to sleep, what is it that you see?”

 

“More horror.”

 

“Do you tell the doctors the specifics?”

 

“It will just prolong my time here.”

 

“Then you’re never gonna get better. There are demons in your head, Sebastian Adon. They will torment you anywhere you run to on that little map of yours.”

 

“You actually think this camp helps people?”

 

“No, not really. But we can’t just euthanize the mentally ill now, can we?” Winter responds.

 

“I suppose not while there is still money to be made. Just camp concentrate us and put our minds to sleep with sedatives and Happy Pills.”

 

“Welcome, Mr. Adon, to the mental health and hygiene gulag archipelago.”

 

“What the Hell is a gulag?”

 

“It was term for a Russian prisoner camp,” Winter explains.

 

“Like a concentration camp?”

 

“Similar in lay out, but intention is everything. Jews were sent to concentration camps to be exterminated. It takes a wild ambivalence to ones national resources to wipe out 6 million people. Lenin, then Stalin, Khrushchev and Brezhnev had camps built for thought criminals, political prisoners opposed to the Soviet State. This group of over a thousand camps across the Steppes of Siberia was dubbed the ‘Gulag Archipelago’.”

 

“So I’m a thought criminal is what you’re saying?”

 

“Not in the Orwellian connotation of such a label.”

 

“Orwell-a-who?” I ask.

 

“George Orwell. He wrote the seminal work of political fiction, 1984.”

 

“Or’owell was a Soviet?”

 

“No. An Englishman.”

 

“And this Englishman was locked up in some Soviet, gulag?”

 

“No. He wrote the most definitive piece of literature on the state’s ability to dominate and crush the free will of the citizen.”

 

“Well if I’m not a so-called ‘thought criminal’ what the Hell does any of that have to do with my internment in this crazy nut camp? You think you’re so fuckin’ intellectual, but you don’t even make sense.”

 

“Don’t lash out at me. I never told you to put down books for girls and the bottle.”

 

“Don’t throw stupid cliché diagnostics in my face and play God to insects, Winter.”

 

“You’re an insect are you?”

 

“Figure of fuckin’ speech.”

 

“Well you’re not an insect. An insect would lay its life down without a second thought for the good of its kind. Not for your family surely, not for a cause, what do you know of a cause? You’d lay your life for what? For your rep? Your goddamn, silly rep?”

 

“For my crew.” I answer.

 

“For your crew or for your friends?”

 

“My friends are my crew.”

 

“They’ll come for you, then?”

 

“Excuse me?”

 

“They’re gonna find a way for you to escape the Hospital Camps of the Gulag Archipelago?”

 

I feel my pale face gape at his question. We simmer in silence for what seems like a very long but can’t be more than ten seconds.

 

“I’ll talk to my friends when I get phone privileges in a day or two.”

 

“You won’t be honest with them.”

 

“And why not?”

 

“Because you’re the kind of person who has his game face on with just about everyone.”

 

“What the fuck is my game face?”

 

“The person you put up to hide who you are to the rest of the world.”

 

“Are you like the undercover doctor they disguise as a guard to get the insomniac to jabber?”

 

“No. I assure you I’m just a college student engaging in just-above-minimum-wage voyeurism.”

 

“Does working in a hospital camp pay good emotional dividends?”

 

“It’s more rewarding then serving coffee, how bout that? But, back to the point at hand. I believe people are more honest with total strangers because there isn’t any long term investment in an expectation.”

 

“Expectation?”

 

“Yeah. Your game face is what you want people to know you as. You like being the rude boy who they call crazy. That’s the rep back in your City.”

 

Once again I meet his question with a pale face.

 

“My rep is infamy. In so much as a 15 year-old can be such a thing—infamous—then I am that. The world has strong feelings about me and I have more enemies than friends. As for being ‘crazy’? Better crazy than bored.”

 

“A sane man in an insane world is what?” Winter asks.

 

The inner dialogue whispers that been we’ve asked such a question before and will be asked it again.

 

“A sane man in an insane world ought to act insane or face imprisonment?”

 

“You’re exactly as fucking smart as the files and tests claim you are,” Winter responds.

 

“Then I am sane and you are all mad?”

 

“Well I haven’t raped any pre-pubescent girls or assaulted peers with a wine bottle. I suppose you missed my point entirely.”

 

“Rape is a very strong word,” I respond.

 

“And I suppose if I gave your daughter a liquid poison to cloud her judgment then had forced her to perform felatio in an altered mental state that would strike you as romantic?”

 

“Are you trying to get a rise out of me?”  I ask and then continue, “you can read my file all day long and play head-shrinker all night, but just come out and make your point. I know I’m shit. You want me to say it? I’M SHIT. I raped and robbed and cracked a fucker in the head with a wine bottle! What do you want me to say?!”

 

I am screaming now.

 

My outburst suddenly ends. I stare at him in a dead rage.

 

“War.” Winter responds.

 

“Excuse me?”

 

“A sane man, in an insane world is a man at war. First with himself and his irreconcilable surroundings, second with those around him in the strange land he encounters. What I’m trying to get at is that events and places such as your new obsession with ancient Greece has nothing to do with your condition. You are indeed a product of your sufferings but are also struggling with something inside of you. Inside your mind you are at war. Spiritual warfare refers to the battle you wage outside the physical realm of the waking life for all those things that can’t be explained by science and technology. What makes a rich boy evil when raised in luxury and taught only good? I assure you, you’d feel very similar in ancient Greece. And thus we have to ask. Are you really crazy? Are you really a criminal, a rapist? Or are you coming free? In the world of the Pale City that you and Michael flee across those sands in ancient Greece or somewhere else, is there something you can’t describe?”

 

“How do you know about Mike Washington and the Pale City?” I ask.

 

“Because I am paid to watch you while you sleep.”

 

“I’ve never talked with you before.”

 

“Are you sure of that?”

 

A pause and the feeling of déjà vu. He sees it in my eyes.

 

“They say what the French call déjà vu is actually the mind processing information it can’t totally understand. A glitch. We’ve talked about déjà vu several times before,” Winter tells me.

 

“I don’t remember. The pills….I don’t want to be free. I just want to be happy.”

 

“Given the opportunity, nearly every person on earth would substitute freedom for happiness, or at the very least, wealth. Although the vast majority will die with not even a third of that trinity.”

 

“I’m not really sure what you mean by free?” I ask him.

 

“The insane world you live in built vast camps in Russia for the revolutionists that opposed the evils of the party. Millions of souls disappeared into them. Freedom dashed under an iron heel, contained in the steppes behind barbed wire in Siberia. In America, wealth made most too fat to want freedom, wealth was enough. But there are criminals, millions of people shut out from the wealth or tempted too much by profit. There are also millions whose minds became sick from unknown causes across class, ethnicity, and religion. What was our government to do with millions and millions of so-called crazy people and criminals?”

 

He pauses.

 

“They built camps.”

 

I stare. He’s got eyes like a jackknife to a swan.

 

“The criminals go into dirty concrete gulags and the ones with the illness of the mind go into hospital camps with high fences, electronic doors, and a cornucopia of chemical tranquilizers for mind and soul alike.”

 

“WHAT’S YOUR FUCKING POINT?!!” I bellow at him.

 

I see his hand grip the radio. Code green will swarm this unit with a dozen guards. Code yellow will light up the compound in floodlights. Green: Fight. Yellow: Escape.

 

“You’re crazy and a criminal, so what should be done with you?” he asks.

 

“Shoot me, I guess. Or lock me up.”

 

“You’d trade freedom for death only because you’re too weak to struggle.”

 

“Well I’m not free anyhow so I have nothing to barter with.”

 

“The doctors generally write off most of what you experience as psychosis, but I believe that you, so-called criminally insane, see something that I do not. You are violent. You have raped young girls, robbed people close to you, destroyed your brother.”

 

“How deep is the file, Winter?”

 

“The amazing thing is that you remember none of our previous talks.”

 

“I just met you tonight,” I say, again.

 

“You say that every time. I’m not even allowed to read your file, Sebastian Adon. I know about your brother Benjamin, about Pathfinders, about your life in New York and about Mike Washington and the Pale City because you can’t sleep and you come talk with me.”

 

“I didn’t destroy my brother,” I say fiercely.

 

“You will find a very different city when you return, when your ‘crew’ comes to liberate you.”

 

“I love my brother more than anything in the world. Don’t play games with me, you fuck.”

 

“Rage. Great. It’s good to be angry. Who’s gonna raise him when you’re gone? Your crew I bet.”

 

“My boys will take care of him.”

 

“Grow him up just like you?” he goads me further.

 

“I’m gonna break your faggot jaw.”

 

“Do it.  Prison is less boring than this hospital camp, but you’re more bark than bite. They’ll toss you in the big chill and then transfer you to a more remote camp. You’re rich after all. The gulags have a bit of a race/class hierarchy-of-needs thing going on.”

 

“My brother isn’t gonna be like me.” I stammer.

 

“Your condition is hereditary, so if it isn’t in the genetics alone, you’ll have your crew to blame.”

 

“Do these doctors say I am sick? That my mind is not a normal mind?”  I ask.

 

“A doctor in an insane world must think of maintaining the whole. The world is insane because it is not just. But this sanity, this thing I call free is a wild, scary thing to those that have lived forever with insanity. The doctor must treat the aberration as an aberration, not make an exception that might crumble a great house of cards.”

 

“So I’m sane?” Now I’m really confused.

 

“A doctor will tell you an objective standard of the health of the human body. That it is x, is y or is z. That doctor knows what maintains a body. But they don’t have a way to say what is going on in your mind. When your actions are not normal, your actions are in fact criminal, and then you become insane. Your sanity is purely in relation to the whole.”

 

“Then, Dr. Winter, what condition is my condition in?”

 

“You see something that I do not and it makes you the special person you are.”

 

“Everyone around me seems to be looking at the world from a much safer perspective. I get the impression my condition isn’t good for much. All it does is make me miserable and get me in trouble. But, I don’t care what happens anymore. When I went to sleep I saw a personal Hell that carried over into my waking life as realistically as if I were there.”

 

“You are not a villain, but name a good thing you’ve ever done.”

 

And for the life of me, I could not.

 

 

ט

 

There are a variety of things that are illegal to have in this place. Some things are deemed negative and thus, prohibited. An example of a negative item might be a comic book with graphic violence, anything that would trigger an emotion or an idea contrary to the goals of the behavior modification. There are other things they call contraband, anything that could be used as a weapon or some kind of substance to abuse. They’d found quite a bit of it on this unit a week before I arrived and had locked the unit down tight.

 

The lockdown ends the first week of June. I am sitting in the Rec Room of my unit, Sugar Hill, with several other patients–Asher, Junior, and Corncob Duran. Asher is a little taller then me, a Black kid with pimples who has been here for over two years. Asher is good humored. He cracks jokes and fools around with the guards, and endlessly tries to steal things. He’s like Idi Amin with a slight southern drawl. He totters between being the charming joker and a brutal, violent thug. And he’s just fifteen. Smith says he’ll be here forever.

 

“I’ve been here a very long time,” Asher says, matter of factly.

 

“How long is that?” I ask him.

 

“Long enough, to not know much else. I have severe memory loss. It is as if I was born and raised in this place. I remember nothing but it.”

 

“So you can’t remember anything before the hospital?”

 

“I just know I’ve been here a very long time,” he repeats.

 

“I’ve been here a little over a week and that feels like forever.”

 

“I think I’ve gotten used to being here.”

 

“How the Hell could you get used to this shit? You apparently don’t have much of a basis for comparison. Let me be the first to tell you that being free beats the shit out of this.”

 

“I doubt it.”

 

“Asher, we aren’t even allowed to talk to girls here. That in itself stands as a glaring motivation for flight or recovery.”

 

“Maybe. Girls are trouble,” he states emphatically.

 

“No, not ‘maybe.’ Getting with girls is fucking great. It’s a reason to leave your house. You must remember kissing a girl once in your life before you came here, right?”

 

“No, not really. I mean, I may have, but I just don’t remember.”

 

“It’s a good time Asher and you can’t do it here.”

 

“Well the food is good. You get three meals a day.”

 

“The food is not good. You get three meals a day on the outside.”

 

“I didn’t. The only memory I have, or half a memory is always being hungry.”

 

“You remember how many meals you ate but not if you kissed a girl?”

 

“Asher is full of shit, Sebastian. He remembers everything just fine,” says Corncob Duran, a skinny farm boy from Boise, Idaho whose voice is nasal and shit kicking.

 

“Why don’t you shut up,” snaps Asher.

 

Smith and Asher call him ‘Corncob’ because he shits bricks in the shower. The size and shape looks like an ear of corn, which Asher explains to me means that he was repeatedly anally raped. Duran’s high-pitched voice is obnoxious and he looks like a junkie, which he was on the outside. He’s only seventeen but has, apparently, fathered a child with some girl on the outside who is fifteen. He is now a ward of the state of Idaho. They sent him to the gulag down in Texas. He won’t see his son for quite some time. He’s got track mark scars on both of his arms. He’s a junkie, a father and a near total mess.

 

“He’s in denial. Believe it or not Asher’s life has been much for the better since he checked in here,” whines Duran.

 

“Shut up, you skinny little faggot,” shouts Asher.

 

“Asher got raped by his father,” whispers Duran in a hushed tone. “I’m in the incest group with him. That’s how I know.”

 

Asher flies across the Rec Room table and begins choking Corncob Duran. He’s pencil thin, might break easily, but he’s actually already broken. He gags. His eyes bug out. A medication nurse yells for the guards. I don’t get in anyone’s way. Little horses, soldiers, more horses, and cannons fly everywhere as the Risk board crashes to the ground. Junior and I scramble out of the way. Both of us hope that Duran gets hurt while knowing that the guards will break it up before anything happens. Asher is much stronger than Duran and has him pinned to the ground for about twenty seconds without air before the guards Smith and Salinas drag him off. Salinas calls a code green, which indicates that they need more guards to come to our unit. But Smith almost single-handedly drags Asher to the tiny Quiet Room on our unit and locks him in. Salinas yells for us to go back over to our cells.

 

An hour later and change, Corncob Duran goes into some kind of psychotic seizure that leaves him howling at the moon all night. He fucks up his whole room, tearing open the mattress and drooling all over himself. I saw four guards carrying him off the unit as he flailed his arms wildly. He spit all over the place and pissed himself judging from the smell.

 

Asher is up in the Big Chill, the large central lock-up known for its freezing temperature. They tossed Duran into the Quiet Room at first, but then took him off the unit on a stretcher sedated and in four-point restraints.

 

My cellmate Junior slept through the whole ordeal.

 

Doctors say that a good way to keep mentally ill patients on their meds is to videotape their psychotic episodes. Seeing Duran, I remember of how I acted at Mt. Sinai. I remember what it feels like to be carried into seclusion. I remember the needle going into my upper thigh. I remember the fade-to-nothingness, and how unquiet the Quiet Room can be.

 

I feel the dry Texas plain’s heat seeping into my skin. I realize that it has been several weeks since I have had a dream. I meander in a surreality that is the sad merger of my fractured reality and an imagined future. I look out my window hoping to see a burning giraffe, which will reveal to me as much as it apparently revealed to Winter. The giraffe probably appears in a different form to each person.

 

How many times will Corncob Duran flip out and what is it that he sees? Does he see something similar to Winter’s homeless man? Is Winter really a doctor in disguise? I thought I only spoke with him once before. He says we have talked many more times.  But why don’t I remember anything accurately?

 

Maybe I’m accomplishing the worthy feat of completely dissolving my wretched past. Maybe one day someone will ask me what it was like being in mental hospital. It is surreality incorporated. I won’t be able to tell them anything of substance. My days here are for containment. The treatment is a total illusion.

 

י

There is a small enclosed swimming pool across from these interlocking buildings on the bottom of the compound basin. We get to go swimming when we have achieved the right color level designation in our treatment.  I have worked my way up to the Green Level as I always get my sanction checkmarks for the hour and I never cause problems. It’s hard to understand what caused this transition from my previous bellicose behavior. It might be because I came here as a stranger. I can start with a new, clean slate and act better at this new camp. But that isn’t it. The Happy Pills take most of the fight out of me. The violence has moved from my body to my drawings. It comes out in my underground marker, pencil and stolen-pen cartoons of the ancient Greek Spartans, time travel and the philosopher king rebels. They fight not only the Persian invaders but their own oligarchies, and the men who murdered Socrates and called the Republic a treatise for anarchy.

I finally get it out of Asher that no one knows where his parents are. The state of Louisiana is paying for him to be here. I don’t know what I’m bitching about. He’ll be here forever. Although I guess on a long enough timeline, he’ll turn 18. Or go to prison.

 

I spent all of Tuesday in another part of the compound undergoing endless tests: catscans, EKGs, IQ and general intelligence evaluations. I put together colored blocs into various shapes as quickly as I could while they timed me. Then I had to rattle off all the words I know that begin with “A.” I was asked to repeat this pattern all the way through the alphabet. I had to look at cartoon images and fill in the quotation bubbles. I had to interpret ink blots. They really all do look like bats. The testing went on forever. I guess these absurd exercises mean something to someone. I gather that cumulatively, these tests will piece together an image of how my mind works. At least this broke the monotony.

 

The camp psychiatrists ask me tons of questions. Some sit with a pad and take notes just like the Hollywood stereotypes, while others ask me to break down specific events and motives. They ask me a lot about the wine bottle incident as if that is the most blatantly deviant thing I have done. I tell them what I think they want to hear.

 

It came out during these sessions that I witnessed a boy at my summer camp die in the swimming pool right next to me when I was little.  He cracked his head on the bottom. They’re making a big deal about how traumatic that must have been for me. I play along because we all need a root cause for our madness, at least in the minds of the so-called professionals. I actually don’t even remember this incident very well. In their version I think I’m somehow responsible for the kid’s death. Why not? They’re the experts, right? They all wear white lab coats that make me feel like I’m being experimented on. I remain cooperative. We must, after all, determine what condition my condition is in.

 

A couple of days after the interviews and the tests they change my drugs again.

כ

A bunch of silly little bitches I have no relationship with wrote me letters because little Asian Michelle Tagomi who I had passed notes to in my biology class gave them my new address. Julia Shoot and Zivia Lubetkin from Stuyvesant co-authored a letter as well as mailed me some photos of people from Stuy. One was of Roxy. It gives me something to pine over. They write mindless pleasantries and I figure they’ll only write once. My parents send me several letters a week, which I don’t really read at all. Various relatives send their love, but my brother doesn’t write, but then again, he doesn’t have to.

 

The only letters that I really wait for are the ones from Michelle, who is now the only person who corresponds with me as if nothing changed. The utter sympathy in her letters and the degree to which she has refused to accept my insanity is the only comfort I can feel. It seems like everyone else is writing because they think they should. Michelle writes as if she wants to understand what has happened to me. She had seen one side of me at Bronx. She hadn’t known the destructive, vile drunk, or the thief or the womanizer rapist. She had seen me at my moments of carefree charm and casual flirtation. She imagined me fondly. To think she had not heard rumors of my deviancy would of course be inaccurate. Through her letters she has become the only person in whom I can confide. And what can I say? I’m shocked by sincerity.

 

I have grown to think of myself as abandoned by my parents, obviously to the care of the hospital camps, but also by all the people who called themselves my friends. Not a single one of my guy friends, except Case, write or call. Not Donny, not Izzy, not Trikhovitch or Nike Brickman. Maybe guys don’t write letters. Maybe I should be happy so many people even take the time to halfway care. I just really need my boys to be with me on this and they are not. Winter is right. My crew isn’t ever coming for me.

 

The worst feeling is that I have been completely forgotten.

 

Each day feels very, very long. Minutes pass quite slowly. I have entirely too much time to sit around in my head and figure out what went wrong. The poor, dead kid in the Pathfinder Camp swimming pool didn’t hunt me, haunt me and make me steal. I don’t even remember his name. I just remember how I felt when I was making the stupid pink condolence card. There is no way to keep track of time except every hour on the hour when the sanction cards get signed. Blue card. Red card. The staff is paranoid over our possible confiscation of pens. We might make a shiv, a homemade knife; or we might alter boxes on the mod cards.

 

I don’t completely believe Mr. Winter’s theories.

 

The events that put this all into motion elude me completely. My condition is something that happened to me along the way, not traceable to a specific event. I wish I could trace it to something, find something to blame. I don’t come from the same place as Corncob Duran, or sad little Junior, or Asher, the battered Negro. There has not been even close to a comparable level of trauma in my case as compared to theirs. I haven’t been raped. I don’t have abusive parents. And I’m not poor. But my sad pain is very real.

 

The Crazy Nut Bin lets the mad sit and simmer. Lying here on my cot staring at the ceiling of my cell, I realize I have regrets about nearly every major decision in my life. It’s a real bad state of mind when you think too hard about what could have been or should have been. So here I am in Texas. You are supposed to learn from your mistakes. This is the mark of a rational man. I have learned nothing. Surely I am lost.

 

What was I doing out on that balcony ready to throw myself off over a song? I hear murmurs from the doctors about a condition, a chemical imbalance in my brain. I don’t even know what that means. That’s what society needs to hear when rich kids start acting crazy.

 

Poor kids are just criminals, but rich kids have chemical imbalances in the brain.

 

ל

Contraband gets brought in three ways. First, there is contraband that comes in with an internee, normally stuffed up their ass. Second, there is contraband the guards bring in. This type is hard to get a hold of unless you’ve been locked up here for a long time. The third type is what we steal or make like the prescription pills traded among the internees, weapons made out of sharpened metal or wood, and finally, things the guards leave lying around.

 

Asher has a whole cache of pens that he has stolen, but he never uses them to change his card. To him the card is something sacred, constant and true. He’s been living under its rule for close to three years. That’s how long it’s been since he was free. I got a pen off Asher so I could draw. I had always drawn on the outside starting as far back as Hebrew school when I started making Spaceman Adon comics for my friends. Since there really isn’t much to do sitting in my cell all day, drawing seems like a good way to pass the time.

 

There are shakedowns every time something goes missing. That means you have to hide your contraband really carefully. Asher taught me to put things in the radiator. You have to first unscrew the cover and then place your stuff inside. The guards never look inside. It is just one of those secrets Asher has learned from being locked up for so long. The secret is that they underestimate us all completely. They associate the mentally ill with the mentally retarded.

 

The guards tear your room apart based on how much they like you. Asher and I get pretty descent treatment and they only really ruffle the sheets and look in the dressers. Corncob Duran always throws his psychotic tantrums all night and flips out frequently.  His room looks like a hurricane swept through it. The guards really hate Duran and he knows it. They search his stuff hardcore even though he never steals that much. There are exceptions. Kelso and Salinas for instance are guards that are strict but fair. Even though you can’t get away with anything with them on the job, everyone is guaranteed equal treatment. This doesn’t sit well with Asher and me who are used to getting away with everything.

 

Some of the guards warmed up to me quickly, especially ones that pull the night shifts. Since I hardly ever sleep, I stay up all night having conversations about everything. I think some of them find me entertaining. Wild, fratty Smith is built like a fire fighter. Camden is a West Coast stoner. Jeremy Winter finally told me his first name against the hospital camp protocols. They are the ones I am closest to. They all bend the rules in little ways to help me out. Camden lets me read books that are obviously negative that he brings in when he works the graveyard shift. He lets me borrow his pen to draw under supervision. Winter is strict about negative behavior, but he lets me stay up all night talking philosophy and he gives me good behavior marks on my card. Smith just never shuts up about negative shit. He talks on and on about drugs and booze and sex with ‘loose and whorish women.’ He is more than happy to completely hear you out and then top you with a war story. What he is doing working here is beyond me. He’s just a Texas frat boy. Just the other day he had been telling Junior how crack can be used recreationally.

 

“You’re a popular little fucker,” he says handing me another letter from Michelle.

 

“What’s your point, Smith?” I ask.

 

“There’s no need for attitude. Just be grateful people give enough of a shit to write you at all.”

 

“You’re right, but it doesn’t change the facts.”

 

“The facts that what, kid? That you have to spend your summer locked up? Maybe not, but you could be somewhere worse. You could be dead.”

 

“What would be so terrible about that?”

 

He looks at me real funny, mostly like I’m stupid.

 

“You see. It’s those comments. It’s those wanna-kill-yourself, talking-to-God, and hitting-people-with-wine-bottle nonsense, crazy talk that keeps you here. It’s called crazy talk. When you stop acting crazy and get your shit together you can fuck all these little girlies that write you letters. You can drink beer in parks and do fun shit. If your IQ is so fucking high, how hard is it to figure out that if you just take your pills and do what they tell you’ll be out by August and you can go home.”

 

“That’s just it. It isn’t actually that simple,” I tell him.

 

“Oh? Why not? We’ve had a bunch of conversations. You act like you’re on top of your game. You haven’t flipped out once and you’re moving up through the card system faster than usual.”

 

“Nothing that got me here has been dealt with. These drugs take all my energy away so I act tranquil and content. I might not flip out, or cry, or break the rules; but I’m fucking miserable.”

 

“Who’s Roxy?” he asks.

 

“Where the Hell did that come from?”

 

“You call her name out when you sleep.”

 

“So what?” I say.

 

“Who is she?”

 

“She’s a girl.”

 

“Did she break your little teenage heart?”

 

“As a matter of fact she did.”

 

“Fuck her.” Smith comments.

 

“Fuck me. She didn’t love me because I acted like a piece of shit.”

 

“Don’t buy into that mentality of completely demonizing yourself as a frame of reference for your recovery.”

 

“What is that supposed to mean?” I ask.

 

“It means that when it comes down to it, only three categories of things will get you sent to Hell– raping, robbing, and murder. You don’t do those things. You’re in the clear with God.”

 

“That’s a pretty bold statement there, Smith.”

 

“I digressed from the main point however. What I meant to say is that if you were so fucking bad, why aren’t you in one of the criminal units? They want you to think everything about you was shitty so you’ll do this mystical one-eighty and emerge from this place a shiny new example of behavior modification. Life isn’t that simple and what you did wasn’t even that bad. You’re on Sugar Hill, my little nigger.”

 

“Says you. She thought I was a piece of shit.”  I say.

 

“Have you ever considered that your behavior may not have been the decisive factor? Maybe she didn’t like your stupid haircut or maybe she didn’t think your jokes were funny.”

 

“I don’t tell jokes.”

 

“What I’m getting at, kid, is that sometimes girls just aren’t that into us for whatever reason. You get over it.”

 

“I love her, Smith.”

 

“A fifteen year-old in love is absolute chicken shit to grownups. What kind of silly broads did you mostly get with before this special lady?”

 

“I don’t know. Stupid ones. Ones that drank and never had intelligent things to say.”

 

“I’m not trying to tell you what you feel isn’t real because if it’s real to you, who am I to argue? Then again, you are in a mental hospital. So maybe I will make the bold statement that what you feel is just you being imbalanced.”

 

“Fuck you.” I tell him.

 

“Fine, but that doesn’t change anything.”

 

“I think you only talk to me to rub this shit in my face,” I tell him.

 

“Listen to yourself. Here I am trying to encourage you not to drown in self pity and you turn this into another reason to be sour about your situation.”

 

“I sit in my cell all day with not a shit to do while doctors do tests to see what level of crazy I am.”

 

“Well, cry me a river. The world’s smallest violin is playing just for you. At least no one tries to rape you in the ass on this unit.  At least all your personal shit isn’t being stolen every time the guards turn around. Boo fuckin hoo. You’ll be out of here by August. Some of these motherfuckers will be here for years. Put things in perspective.”

 

“A least I’m not in prison you mean?”

 

“To say the least.”

 

“I’m in a prison for my mind,” I declare.

 

“Yeah, well the real ones are a shit load worse.”

 

“Says you.”

 

“Says me indeed. You wouldn’t last a minute. You’d be some little nigger’s bitch. Every time your parents send you something they’d take it. They’d beat you. They’d fuck you and you couldn’t do shit. You couldn’t do shit because you’re a scrawny, White boy from Manhattan. You should thank God you got sent to this veritable Hilton of mental health.”

 

“I’ll run when I get a chance,” I say.

 

“And where will you go? You’re in the middle of fucking Texas.”

 

 

***

 

Another kid joined our unit later this afternoon. He is a blonde and handsome Alaskan named Eugene. He looks really young and won’t talk to anyone. He sits in the corner staring off into space while we all play Risk in the Rec Room. I tried talking to him but there is no response. He stares out into space with cold, dead eyes. The massive doses of Seroquel they give him enhance his already positive outlook on life and social interaction. Even Smith refuses to divulge what has befallen him. Smith sits in the office reading the file with a serious look on his face. There will be no smart remarks or self-amusements with this new one. Eugene’s past is too terrible, even for Smith.

 

מ

 

The cafeteria suddenly exploded. One person shouted at someone else and suddenly, I find myself trapped in the middle of a brawl in a sea of flailing arms, of bites, kicks, and strangles. I throw my plastic tray at a Black kid fighting with Asher and then dive on top of a pile of bodies striking at each other on the ground. I don’t hesitate for a moment. I don’t even stop to think about how this trouble began. I am eager to involve myself in the chaos of it all. Someone hits me in the side. Then I bite someone’s arm as hard as I can and kick someone else in the balls. I feel an elbow strike my chin.

 

It hadn’t been over anything important. This mêlée went on for sometime, but it was not long before the guards dragged all the principal combatants to the ground and restrained them. I realize as I lay there on the dirty cafeteria floor with Kelso’s knee against my neck that there is no reason for me to have joined this fight. There is no reason except my own boredom.

 

All the other combatants are Black. After additional security arrived they decided to bring nine kids, including Asher, to the big chill. The dozen or so that are left, including me, are taken back to our units to be locked in quiet rooms there. The hundred or so other internees were made to line up in columns and marched back to their cells to be put on a general lockdown for the rest of the day. With my arm twisted behind my back and nose dripping with blood, Kelso marches me back to Sugar Hill and locks me in the quiet room right next to the phone.

 

 

נ

 

“Now what was the point of that?” asks Winter peering through the quiet room window.

 

I’m lying on the blue mat that sits on the floor. I’ve been lying in here for several hours since one of the nurses gave me a sedative. I’m still sore from the take down.

 

“Just trying to break the monotony I suppose.”

 

“You’re like a week away from Level One.”

 

“I was just trying to protect Asher. I didn’t start that fight. I don’t even know how it began.”

 

“You’re not in any serious trouble,” Winter informs me.

 

“How do you know?” I asked.

 

“Because the doctors said so during the shift change report.”

 

“So can I get the hell out of this room?”

 

“Another forty minutes and I’ll let you out. If you want I’ll unlock the door.”

 

“That would be cool.”

 

Winter unlatches the quiet room and drags his chair into the entranceway.

 

“Can I use the phone?” I asked, pushing my luck.

 

“You’re joking, right?”

 

“Just seeing what I can get away with.”

 

“You can use the phone when I let you out.”

 

“I think I bit someone.”

 

“You may want to keep that to yourself,” Winter advises.

 

“Probably.”

 

He looks as if he means to say something and is trying to phrase it just right.

 

“Wanna hear something funny?” I say.

 

“Sure.”

 

“When I was wiling out in Mt. Sinai I started writing poetry. I apparently composed this one poem and kept reciting it over an over again while drooling on myself in the quiet room. Know what it was called?”

 

“What?” he asks.

 

“Winter’s Dregs. I don’t think I even know what a dreg is.”

 

“It’s the refuse and waste.”

 

“Like how we’re the dregs of society all locked up in this place under your guard?”

 

“That is in fact the common usage. Do you remember how the poem went?”

 

I think for a moment. Of course I do.

 

“As ambiguous as ever, the ethics of the mind; a twisted backwards clockwork, you surely are to find: that nothing ever makes much sense, no black and white just grey, and Winter’s Dregs lay desolate as logic slips away.”

 

“You rip that off from somewhere? Thomas Hardy maybe.”

 

“Nope, I made it up myself while teetering on the brink of insanity.”

 

“What a strange coincidence,” Winter observes.

 

ס

 

Give a man JUST a little power and he’ll think he’s something of a god. People don’t take jobs as guards for their health. It’s the fringe benefits. It’s the control over the lives of others they’re after. The guards spend more time with us than anyone else. They tell us when we can leave our cells. They tell us when we can shit and piss, when we can eat and if we can make a phone call. They have absolute control over us in a way that the doctors don’t. We are victim to their follies and amusements.

 

Things are tense on the unit. The compound has been locked down for the last three days because of the fight in the mess hall. No one has been allowed to leave their cell and we are all writing sanctions every hour on whatever topic Kelso and Smith dream up for their own private amusement. It is just a way to kill time. I continue to work on my Taj Mahal 3-D puzzle that I got in the mail from my parents. Junior sits on his bed reading a Spiderman comic book. Every fifteen minutes before the hour Kelso announces that another sanction is due if we want to earn our behavioral mod points.

 

The guards are on edge. Two of them had to go to hospital as result of the mess hall incident. Nothing serious of course, just cuts and bruises. It had all happened so fast. Over what, no one could remember. No one from our unit had done much. Asher hit one of the kids from Cherry, but that had more to do with an old beef than any desire to fuel the riot. Most of our kids had run out of the hall and given themselves up when the shit hit the fan. I figure it is because most of our people are pussies. Winter told me that we were the easiest unit to work with because most of us are only mentally ill not criminally insane.

 

I hate being stuck on the Sugar Hill Unit. Anytime anyone interesting gets placed on the unit they’d get transferred to another area just as soon as I get close with them. Smith tells me I am  lucky, that on any other unit I’d just get beaten up and have my shit stolen. Sugar Hill is apparently safe, but I can’t stand the kids. Asher is okay, but the rest are fucking too much to deal with. Junior is a manipulative little shit. Duran is off his fucking rocker. I swear that if I have to hear him flipping out in the quiet room while I am trying to sleep one more time, I’ll kick the shit out of him myself.

 

Asher has been bounced around a lot in his three years of captivity. He has been on half the other units and has enemies on most of them. I can’t figure out what is up with him. He just seems to like to steal and fight, like it is all he knows. He has been here since he was twelve and it isn’t likely that he’d be leaving soon.  Three days later, he still isn’t back on the unit.

 

The guards Smith and Kelso are an odd mix. Smith can’t give two shits about protocol. As far as he is concerned this is just the best job he can get. It supplies him with endless opportunities to amuse himself at our expense. Once and a while I get the feeling he is my friend, like the time when he woke me up at 4 in the morning and took me outside to smoke a cigarette. His kindness is deceptive. As much as one might think he is being friendly, Smith is the most sadistic of all the guards when it comes down to it. He often tells me that the best part of his day is putting kids down when they get physical with him.

 

The thing that amuses Smith the most is to aggravate the internees and get them to fight each other. Just last week he was telling Asher that if he beat up Junior, Smith would give him a four second lead before he called it in. We’re all real restless. It just seems to get hotter and hotter around here.

 

 

***

 

June is finally over.

 

Everything’s back to normal on the compound, at least as normal as deviants under lock and key can be. Because all of our levels are high enough, they take Duran, Asher, Junior and me down to the pool. Eugene can’t go because he’s still on Blue. The pool is down by the schoolhouse and the library. It’s small and a little run down. The water is chock full of chlorine to the point where it feels like it’s seeping into your skin. The water is cold and refreshing even though it reeks of chemicals. We’re splashing around and Smith is lounging in a deck chair. Salinas, the other guard, has just responded to a code green on the radio and has taken off up the hill. Green means fights and yellow means escape attempts. Smith normally jumps all over those, but he looks exhausted. I climb out of the pool and sit on the ground next to Smith.

 

“What’s your first name?” I asked.

 

“We’re not supposed to tell you.”

 

“Come on. Tell me your name.”

 

“I feel like the level of respect would decrease. Let’s keep this formal shall we?”  Smith responds.

 

“What would I have to do to get you to tell me your name?” I continue.

 

“You’d have to go back in the pool and hit Duran in his stupid head.”

 

“Done. You ever get the feeling you work here because we remind you of yourself. Like how we just act out on your impulses, but we’re crazy and you’re the guard?”

 

“That’s a little too profound for me. I work here because it’s easy money. If I was a smart motherfucker, I wouldn’t be making my money guarding crazy people now, would I?” Smith responds.

 

“You work here because you get to be the authority not the deviant.”

 

“Want to know my name or not?” he asked.

 

I jumped back in the pool. The chlorine soup is making me sick. The others are horsing around. There’s no good reason to do what I’m going to do. I mean, Corncob Duran is really annoying, but he’s been through some sick shit. But why not? I wasn’t going to get in trouble. I wanted to know Smith’s name so we’d finally be on even footing. Knowing a man’s name gives you power over him. I read that once. An old Indian squaw saying I picked up in Missouri.

 

I swim up to Duran and I sock him in the side of the head. My knuckles connect with his scalp as he yells out in surprise. Smith starts laughing from the side.

 

“Why the fuck did you hit me?” Duran yells clutching the side of his head.

 

“I didn’t hit you,” I say.

 

“Smith! Sebastian hit me!”

 

“I didn’t see anything. Asher, what just happened?”

 

“I didn’t see anything,” says Asher treading water.

 

“Neither did I,” said Junior with a smirk.

 

Duran is really scrawny. I’m less then three feet from him and he doesn’t do anything.

 

“Why the fuck did you hit me!”

 

“I didn’t hit you.”

 

“He didn’t hit you, Duran,” says Smith.

 

Duran looks real confused with a painful look on his face as if humiliated. No one cares what happens to Duran. I could beat him to death and no one would stop me. Maybe Smith would eventually because it would look bad if one kid killed another on his watch. He’d have to think over if saving Duran was worth getting wet. I realize then and there, looking right at Duran who I’d just punched in the head for nothing, that I am a cruel person. So I punch him again, this time in his face. There are several dull thuds of fist hitting flesh amid water splashing. He tries to hit me back, but I’m a bit bigger than he is. I grab him pulling him under the water as I hit him. I’ve killed someone in a pool before, haven’t I? Duran struggles to breathe as I choke him under the water. No. I’ve never killed a person. That kid whose name I don’t remember, that kid who the doctors think I take responsibility for, I never had anything to do with that. Why am I choking Corncob Duran? My hands clamp against his throat.

 

“Sebastian! Let him go!” yells Smith, getting up suddenly.

 

There is absolutely no point to this. Just as suddenly I let him go and shove him away from me. He heaves a huge breath gasping for air.

 

“Pool times over boys!”

 

Asher and Junior jump out of the pool and grab their towels. Duran is left alone in the pool still trying to catch his breath.

 

“What the fuck, Smith?!” he yells.

 

“Listen to me very carefully. You were all horsing around in the pool and it got a little out of hand. That’s all,” Smith replies.

 

“I’m gonna tell Salinas,” says Duran.

 

“That would be both unnecessary and inadvisable. Because, Duran, who are they going to believe?”

 

“Asher and Junior saw him attack me!”

 

“I didn’t see shit,” says Asher.

 

“Neither did I,” says Junior.

 

“Fuck you both!” yells Duran.

 

“As I stated, Duran, it would be highly inadvisable for you to make up stories. You were all fooling around and were unclear about each other’s strength. Don’t be a crybaby, Duran. Are we clear on what just happened?” Smith states.

Duran looks around the pool and realizes no one will believe anything he has to say anyway. He looks like he’s going to cry as he gets out and gets his towel.

 

“You’re such a bitch,” says Asher.

 

Duran doesn’t respond at all. Far worse things have happened to him in his short miserable life. This would just be the latest insult in a life of injury. I no longer care whether I have a condition or if it is my society that has made me this way. I have just contributed, once again, to the suffering of others. I am right where I deserve to be.

ע

 

It’s the Fourth of July in Texas.

 

I’m looking out the window and I see the fireworks. I remember when I was younger my parents took us out to East Hampton and we’d watch fireworks on the beach every 4th of July. We’d have these big family picnics with our neighbors. Their daughters were terribly boring though you could tell the younger one was going to be cute and fuckable one day and the older one would venture into something idealistic. To think I used to complain about having to spend my weekend out there.

 

Now I’m watching these fireworks out of the Crazy Nut Bin window. I never took in the significance of the day, America free from British tyranny and all that jazz. I watch the red, blue and gold explosions illuminate the night sky and I realize that as America celebrates freedom here I am locked away. I am just missing the party.

 

 

Time moves sinisterly slowly. I fill half this time with reading and half with mind games. These games are subtle manipulations. Sometimes they set Duran off. Sometimes they make Duran and Asher fight. I might try to convince myself that I am being rehabilitated by the books and by the conversations with Winter, but my deeds belie the truth. Kurtz’s words were profound even if his actions were just a psychotic outburst. Yet with all this time on my hands and with the dulling of my emotions via psychotropic drugs, no sensation is very real, including the voice of my conscience.

 

Another letter from Michelle came earlier today. I wanted to savor each word once my head had cleared; but when was my head ever going to do that? I abandon Kurtz’s words and the fireworks for my cell. The letter reads:

 

Dear Sebastian,

 

I can’t tell you how much your letter meant to me. I truly think that you are one of the greatest and deepest friends I ever had. Your advice and telling me you care really touches me and I cry whenever I think how far away you are to me, and how I can’t see or touch you. Last night I watched this movie “A Clockwork Orange”, about these four guys in the future and how their life was a game, just like you said in your letter. They did whatever they wanted whenever they wanted and did some messed up shit. One day, his friends betrayed him. He was arrested and put in some freaky jail. They did weird experiments on him where they forced his eyes open and made him watch movies of murder and rape until he felt sick and nauseated. They messed up his life. When he got out, everything was different. This strange guy had taken his place in his family and his friends were now cops and beat him up and shit. It was a pretty scary movie; it kind of reminded me of you, and what they’re doing to you in that place. It’s sickening. Not seeing sunlight for a whole month is the most messed up fucking thing I’ve ever heard. But I know his story is different than yours. When you come out there are always gonna be people there for you. I guarantee it okay? I know I’m not the only who cares about you. You’ve made an impact on many lives and whether they be negative or positive, those people are who they are today because of you.

 

Me and Matt have this really weird thing going on now. After we broke up, it was really hard for me. I thought it was gonna be really easy to just stay close friends, but it doesn’t work that way. Last Thursday I got really drunk and me and Matt ended up having sex. Now we chill like we never broke up. We’re not together or anything but we’re closer and it’s cool. It’s kind of hard to explain. Like seeing other people and shit is not a problem. If you haven’t heard Donny and Alana broke up a little after we did. They’re still mad close though.

 

Things are weird without you. Life’s going on, it’s just really different. Especially for me. Two days ago I tried weed for the first time, definitely not something to be proud of. But I guess there’s a first for everything. By the way, we got an A plus on the whole teenage depression survey thing. It turns out, the thing that makes people the most depressed is their friends and the people they go to when they’re depressed is their friends; pretty ironic eh? Well that’s life for you. I really hope you come out soon. I don’t know what else there is to say.

 

I miss you, I cry for you, I love you.

 

Always,

Michelle Kaku

 

 

***

 

It had to be close to 3 in the morning. Winter was seated on a chair at the end of the hall. I was in my boxers and a t-shirt. I kept rereading the letter without saying anything. I had been going over Michelle’s words for the past three hours.

 

“I swear, Winter, if not for this girl, I’d be ranting and raving like Duran does everyday. I’d be totally out of control.”

 

“I hear you are out of control anyway.”

 

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

 

“I hear reports from the guards about the things you do. I hear you teach Junior all sorts of negative things. I hear you encourage Duran to flip out. I even heard something about you and Eugene getting caught snorting something. I know about the cafeteria and I heard about what happened at the pool,” Winter informs me.

 

“Smith has loose fucking lips. All that shit is only half-true anyway.”

 

“People sometimes lose track of what kind of kid you are because of how articulate you tend to be. You never get in any trouble because we all like you too much.”

 

“What can I say, I’m a likable guy, Jeremy,” I say using the forbidden first name.

 

“Winter. Back to Winter I’m thinking,” he says. “This girl Michelle, that you talk about all the time, she was your girlfriend?”

 

“It’s not even like that. She just is a good friend. I can’t figure out why she likes me that much. No one else has stuck with me like she has,” I tell him.

 

“What about your parents?”

 

“They put me here. What do you want me to say, ‘I’m cool with that?’ ”

 

“Do you take any accountability for the things you do?”

 

“Here or on the outside?” I ask.

 

“What the fuck does it matter?”

 

“Nothing I do here matters. This I know.” I say.

 

“The tests they do here determine where you get transferred.”

 

“Smith says I’ll be out by August.”

 

“Smith doesn’t give a shit about you.”

 

“And you do, Winter? You fucking care now?! Don’t lecture me about anything. You with your constant probing and your talk about philosophy haven’t gotten me anywhere.”

 

“What’s with the outbursts? I thought we were friends.” Winter says.

 

“We’re friends? Be a good friend an open the unit door so I can get the fuck out of here.”

 

“You know I can’t do that.”

 

“What can I say? I do shitty things. I didn’t do anything irreversible. I’m not like the rest of these fucking kids. There is no good explanation for why I did the things I did.” I tell him.

 

“The things you do, Sebastian. What about the things you do?” Winter asks emphatically.

 

“I’ve been in pain for a very long time.” I tell him.

 

“You and the rest of the species. What did you think, that everyone else is happy? Did you think that you were suffering alone?”

 

“What’s the point of it all!? Why the fuck am I in a mental hospital in Texas? What did I do that was any worse then all the other people I knew growing up?”

 

“We both know the answer to that.” Winter says.

 

“There are things files can’t report.” I tell him.

 

“Your lips are as loose as those of Mr. Smith. You’ve admitted to getting girls drunk to take advantage of them. You’ve told me how often you stole from people. You’ve told me stories of your drunken debauchery, of terrorizing your family, and of humiliating your brother. You’re not supposed to call your brother a fag every five minutes. And you’re not supposed to assault people with wine bottles. I know everyone rubs that one in your face, but come on.” Winter reminds me.

 

“Michelle doesn’t know about most of those things. I think that’s why she writes me while everyone else has stopped.”

 

“You’re the infamous Sebastian Adon. Of course she knows. I imagine that you do, in fact, find plenty of time between your misdeeds to have profound conversations with people. You might not remember these conversations, but believe me, your friends do.”

 

“Why is she the only one that writes?” I ask again.

 

“Other people write. You just don’t really hold them in the same regard.”

 

“My boys don’t write,” I say.

 

“Guys don’t write letters, hadn’t ya heard?”

 

“Sure other people write me. They write me to remind me of all the fucked up shit that I did or that is going on while I’m here. They say ‘get better’ while Michelle tells me she loves me. I don’t want to hear about their bullshit.”

 

“What is it that you want to hear about then?” Winter asks.

 

“There is something about the way Michelle writes that makes me think I might not have been all bad. I never had a girl say she loves me. I can’t figure out why she cries about me or even why she bothered to keep writing after that first letter. I got a first letter from a bunch of people.”

 

“From my count you have at least eight girls writing you,” Winter reminds me.

 

“They don’t write the same way she does. Bless um all, Marina, Julie, Nona, Emily, my little sis Zivia Belkin; they all sent a letter or two but they didn’t ask the questions Michelle asked. It wasn’t the same at all. And my boys could at least call.”

 

“Guys deal with this shit differently,” Winter says.

 

“Maybe they just never gave a shit.” I reflect painfully.

 

“If that’s what you want to tell yourself.”

 

“Why did this happen to me?”

 

“You keep asking that like I’m gonna be able to tell you.” Winter says.

 

“My ass, this was all due to a chemical imbalance.”

 

“What is it you want me to say, that you’re the victim? That society made you like this? That you aren’t accountable for the things you continue to do? You want me to absolve you of everything you’ve done? Tell me what you want.”

 

“I am a vile selfish person,” I admit.

 

“So change.” Winter responds.

 

“It’s not that simple, Winter.”

 

“But it is. You’re fifteen years old. I know it may seem like your life is over, but there are things to come that will make this hospital look like summer camp. There will be joy and sorrow like you have not yet imagined and there will be a moment when you will look at your life and be proud of the things you have done.”

 

“So says you. I look at the fifteen years I’ve been alive and I can’t think of one good thing I’ve done for the people around me.”

 

“And yet people write you letters. And yet you are still loved. Were you the villain you claim to be, this would not be the case.”

 

“My family is my family and we can all appreciate the misadventures of a charismatic villain.”

 

“So explain Michelle.” Winter challenges me.

 

“I can’t.”

 

“I want you to remember something. You wrote a poem about it and it stuck in my head. I know you don’t listen to the doctors and I believe that you do not even really comprehend what goes on around you with the amount of drugs they have you on, but try and listen anyway. Nothing in life is black and white. There is no pure evil or pure good. Everything is complicated. If you believe you have hurt people the only thing you can do is to change your ways. Some people touch the lives of the people around them. Maybe that’s the kind of person you are. Whether your impact was negative or not, you have contributed to the way they are today.” Winter tells me.

 

“Michelle said something just like that in her letter.”

 

“I’m not finished. You’re not a villain, Sebastian Adon, but the ways in which you pacify your demons leave much to be desired. Where your demons come from is as complicated as your actions. Maybe you didn’t have it as rough as the rest of these kids, but remember that suffering is subjective.”

 

“What the hell does that mean?” I ask.

 

“There is suffering everywhere and no one escapes it. Duran and Asher were raped and you weren’t, but you’ve all tried to end your lives and you all cry out in pain every time you try and go to sleep. Subjective suffering means that everyone suffers in a different way, but the pain cannot be measured one life against another. To a person in pain, their pain is absolute. ” Winter says.

 

“Their suffering is real and mine’s in my head. That’s the difference. At least they have a reason to act the way they do.” I say.

 

“The mind is the window through which we see reality.”

 

“You’re some kind of stupid fucking Buddhist, aren’t you?” I ask him.

 

“My spiritual practices are not relevant to this conversation. Just know this: One day you are going to die and on your deathbed you are going to have to ask yourself, are you proud of what you’ve done with your life.”

 

I stare at Winter for about a minute.

 

“Are you ready to die then?” he asks.

 

“No, Jeremy, I’m not.”

 

“Well the clock is ticking and you’d better get to work.”

פ

My parents look tired, perhaps ten years older. My father’s hair has turned from a dark grey to partly grey white and my mother looks like she hasn’t slept properly, not in weeks. My father is wearing khaki shorts and a white cotton polo shirt. He is optimistic and rotund as ever as he asks me questions about how I’m doing in his lighthearted way. My father is older, but emotionally unchanged, my mother has sunken eyes and doesn’t look at me as she did three years ago.

 

We’re sitting in a gazebo at the top of a small hill within the hospital camp compound. I’m not at Level 2 yet so they’re not supposed to take me off the facility. There was some miscommunication and my Mom is furious because they didn’t come all the way from New York for a two-hour visitation. We’re waiting for the doctors to see if a verdict can be reached signing off on the outing.

 

“We tried very hard with you, Sebastian,” my Mom says.

 

“I know.” I say quietly.

 

“We realize that this has been a rough summer,” my Dad starts.

 

“Hold on, Avi,” Mom says, cutting him off, “What you have to understand is that we love you and that we are very frightened of what you were doing to yourself.”

 

“I know,” I acknowledge.

 

“All the drinking, all the drugs…not to mention all the other things. We just think that right now going back to New York would not be very good for you,” she concludes.

 

“I never did that many drugs,” I say.

 

“That’s not really the point, Sebastian,” my Dad says.

 

“You were going to kill yourself. You might have killed that kid you attacked. In many ways it’s fortunate that most of this trauma has been emotional,” he says.

 

“I know.”

 

“The doctors are saying that you have a mood disorder. They’re advising long-term treatment.”

 

“Here in Texas?” I ask reaching for my water glass.

 

“No,” says my Mom, “We want to move you somewhere closer to New York.

 

“Where do you have in mind?” I ask.

 

“We’ve hired a consultant to help find a place. In a couple of weeks we’ll have some options,” she answers.

 

“What kind of place? Another hospital camp?” I ask.

 

“We’re looking into therapeutic boarding schools,” says my Dad.

 

“I don’t think I really know what that means. Sounds like a fancy word for another lock-up, another damn camp.”

 

“You could go to school and hang out with other kids your age coping with similar problems,” says my Mom.

 

“Would I still be under lock and key?”

 

“Probably. But not to the same extent as here,” she tells me.

 

They watch me closely for a reaction. I look at my Dad and then my Mom and then take another sip of water.

 

“Whatever you think is best,” I say.

 

“That’s it?” asks my Mom, surprised.

 

“That’s it. I mean I can’t go back to New York and I don’t wanna stay here. It’s too fucking hot all the time. So, I guess whatever gets decided on by these doctors is what I’ll go along with.”

 

“Do you want to get better?” she asks.

 

“I’d like not to hurt people all the time. I’d like our family to get back together. Pretty much I’ll do whatever makes that happen.”

 

“That’s really good to hear, Sebastian,” says my Dad.

 

“But then again, I’ve said things like this before,” I say.

 

“You certainly have,” says my Mom.

 

“Although not ever from a locked mental health compound in the middle of a state I wouldn’t be caught dead in otherwise.”

 

“I don’t understand how this all happened,” says my Mom, “This was such a happy family when you and Benjamin were growing up.”

 

“If you are waiting for me to say it’s not your fault, it’s not your fault.” I say looking at her.

 

“This isn’t about blame,” my Dad says.

 

“Well someone has to be blamed eventually. Better to put it on myself,” I say.

 

I realize that they have both been minor characters in my life in the past few years. I associate my home with endless fights about curfew, or smelling like smoke, or sneaking out, or being accused of being on drugs when I very rarely was. The terrible things my mother and I have said to each other made being at home uncomfortable at best and emotionally draining at worst. I hate being yelled at. I would have preferred it if they hit me. Izzy used to ask me if I hated my Mom for the things she said to me. Hate is a pretty strong word and it is not a word I can attribute to anyone in my own family, even my Mom. I had initiated all these fights anyway by doing stupid, miserable things. Then again, it’s a little over the top when your mother tells you that you are the source of all her misery and that she wishes you had died in the womb. I don’t hate her though because hate really can only be focused strongly in one particular direction. I hate myself too much to bother hating my Mom.

 

“Who can say why things turned out like they did? All I know is that it won’t help anyone to keep worrying about the past. You have your whole future in front of you and if this mess leads to you finally being happier, then it was a blessing in disguise,” says my Dad.

 

Ever the optimist. I guess he has to be.

 

“You’re our son. There’s nothing you can do that could make your Mother and me not love you and wish the best for you.”

 

I take another sip of water.

 

“I could sit here and tell you both that things are gonna get better like I’ve done a million times before. It’s more a question these days of what I’m going to do.” I tell them.

 

“What are you going to do?” asks my Mom.

 

“There’s one part of me that wants to flee into those woods and then hitchhike back to New York. There’s another part of me that’s too terrified of what I might become if I don’t get better. I know I don’t want to die feeling like this.” I tell her.

 

“You might hate us for putting you here, but there weren’t any other options. You were way over the edge,” she says.

 

“I don’t hate you. I don’t hate you at all.”

 

“I wish I knew what made you like this,” says my Mom.

 

“Got to stop running and finally confront your demons,” my Dad says.

 

“I think that’s a terrible idea,” I tell him.

צ

Someone took a shit in the shower on the second of August. Two and a half big brown logs lie in the first stall I open. I guess that they are Corncob Duran’s because of his sexual history. I know this because in his latest all night ravings. Duran loudly proclaims that he was tied to a tree and butt fucked by a friend of his father. He’ll scream all night in the Quiet Room, throw himself against the walls, and scream some more, assuring that no one on our unit gets any sleep.

 

Winter is right on a certain level. I might tell myself that suicide will put an end to this madness; but, I do know that right before the lights go out, I will be ashamed at how little I have done for my fellow man. This is not idealism. This is a moral inventory that doesn’t rate me very high on the doing-things-to-help-your-friends list.

 

There are religions that say you should be stoned to death for disrespecting your father. I can’t even imagine what God must think about some of the things I’ve said to my Mom. There has been so much trouble in my life. There are so many things I probably shouldn’t have done, but that I did anyway only to keep life interesting.

 

Sitting in this cell amid my drawings and books is definitely not interesting. I feel nothing on these terrible pills. The doctors increase the dosage each week. There are drool stains on my pillow every morning. I lack the energy to conclude anything decisive. The doctors tell me that by the end of August I’ll be ready to be transferred back to New York to a therapeutic boarding school. I wonder if this whole summer has been spent just to make the diagnosis of “mood-disorder.” Prolonged confinement has prevented me from doing further social damage, stopped my abuse of substances and stabilized my mind. It has not addressed any root cause of my actions.

 

I get up out from my cot and walk over to the hallway alcove. I see a guard who I don’t recognize sleeping in the chair. Eugene, who has not said a word, is sitting in the entrance to his cell. He motions for me to come across the hall. What the fuck? I figure I got nothing else to do. I dart across.

 

We sit in silence in the dark.

 

“You finally gonna say something? Gonna drop some life lesson that will blow me away and put all this shit in perspective?” I ask in a whisper.

 

He shakes his head.

 

“So why am I over here if you aren’t gonna say anything?”

 

He shrugs.

 

“What is it you want?” I whisper.

 

He doesn’t respond at all.

 

“I’m going back to my cell.”

 

He grabs my arm.

 

“What happened to you that made you not speak? What terrible thing came over you that words can’t describe? Or maybe you just don’t have anything useful to say. I pity you regardless.”

 

I see him scribble something on a piece of paper. It says: ESCAPE?.

 

“What is that supposed to mean?” I ask.

 

He shrugs with a sneer on his face.

 

From under his mattress he produces a small bag of what looks like mushrooms.

 

“How did you smuggle those in here?”

 

I realize he just isn’t going to talk.

 

“I’ve never eaten mushrooms before.”

 

He hands me the bag.

 

I have heard stories about magic mushrooms. I heard they open your mind and let you look right into your soul. I know that if I eat them, I’ll see things I don’t want to see. Something tells me that I’m not the kind of cat that will converse with the closet or stare blankly at flashing lights. Why does this kid want to give me these drugs and where did he get them?

 

“Why are you giving me these mushrooms? What do you want? I keep thinking that if I ask you enough questions you’ll answer me.”

 

But he’s not going to. So I’d better just swallow these mushrooms and take it from there. I try to think what to do. I don’t have any role models except Mr. Smith and Mr. Winter. Winter would say not to, and Smith would say ‘swallow the fuckers whole.’ So there we go.

 

“How much should I take?”

 

He motions that I should eat all of them. And down the rabbit hole I go.

ק

One moment I am sitting here telling Eugene that these magical mushrooms had no effect on me. . . .

 

And now, here I am splashing in a pool. The pool is on the top of a hill. The water is cold and fresh, not chlorinated like the pool back in that place in Texas. I’m smaller than usual. I can’t be any older than six or seven. Everyone’s splashing around and having a good time. A short green mesh fence encloses the pool. There are lush and green trees all around us. We’re at summer camp.

 

I’m in the pool with lots of other kids. Some are on the deck and some are in the water. A man in a beige trench coat sits conspicuously next to the pool. He’s smoking a Marlboro Red. I don’t have a care in the world. I’m splashing around and having a good time. The man has his eyes on the ridge above us looking out for zombies. And if he sees them coming? Well, that’s why he carries a pistol. We aren’t looking at each other. In fact it doesn’t even seem natural that we inhabit the same time or space. Why is he looking out for zombies at a summer camp in Montauk? That’s where I must be, and I know for a fact that there are no zombies in Montauk. I have to focus to remember who I am.

 

Who’s real? Who is the figment of my imagination? How long can you tread water before you just give up and drown? I think I recognize the man, but he’s from a later point in my life. I am just a six-year old at summer camp.

 

As I turn in the water I see Donny. What’s Donny doing at my summer camp? I haven’t met him yet.

 

“Remember when you brought Case and me out here right after you got out of the mental hospital for the first time?” he asks.

 

“Donny what are you doing here?” I ask him.

 

“Do you remember what you told us?”

 

“Hold on, Donny. What are you doing here? Aren’t you in New York?” I ask.

 

“You were upset I never called. So here I am making it up to you. Sebastian, do you remember what you told us?” Donny asks.

 

I’m treading water not saying anything.

 

“You said you were responsible for some kid’s death,” Donny says.

 

“Did you believe me?”

 

“No, not really.”

 

“Well, was I?” I ask.

 

A kid in a red bathing suit standing by the side of the pool waves in my direction.

 

“Hey there, Sebastian. In about ten minutes I’m gonna jump in the water, crack my skull and drown. It’s gonna traumatize everybody!” he says excitedly in high-pitched voice before running off to play with some kids on the other side of the deck.

 

“What’s your name?” I yell.

 

He turns from playing with the other kids.

 

“How important could I possibly be to you?” he asks.

 

“See that,” says Donny, “You had nothing to do with his death.”

 

“Donny…”

 

“Yeah?” Donny responds.

 

“Where’s Case?”

 

“He’s learning to fire a rifle.”

 

“Why is he doing that?” I ask.

 

“Because Mike Washington can only take out six zombies before his pistol runs out of ammunition.”

 

I point to the man sitting by the pool looking out over the surrounding hills from the lifeguard chair.

 

“Is that Mike Washington?” I ask Donny.

 

“Well who else could it possibly be?”

 

“I’m pretty sure I’m responsible for that kid’s death,” I say again.

 

“No, that’s just something you tell yourself to justify your insanity. You had nothing to do with it. You don’t even know his name.”

 

“So, you think I’m insane, Donny?” I ask him.

 

“Hey, look! That duck has a blunt in his beak!” he says climbing out of the water.

 

“Donny! I’m not crazy!” I yell at him.

 

“And I don’t love weed…” he says, “Come here, little ducky.”

 

I look at Mike Washington and he shrugs. Donny follows the duck as it waddles along the side of the pool. Case enters the pool area with a hunting rifle slung across his shoulder. He squats by the water’s edge. He’s wearing the blue baseball cap he always wears.

 

“When you told us the story about that kid dying we played along because we knew the hospital had been rough for you. It was just too convenient of an explanation. You’re a complicated guy,” Case tells me.

 

“A part of me believes that I had something to do with it.” I repeat.

 

“And that’s why we’re all here to watch it go down and judge for ourselves.” Case tells me.

 

There’s a pause.

 

“You’re really a funny guy. Do you have any idea how much I’ve missed you this summer?” I ask Case.

 

“We’ve missed you too.” Case reassures me.

 

“Was I real bad on the outside? Do I really deserve to be here?” I ask Case.

 

“Yeah. About that. I like you a lot, Sebastian, but you are way out of control.”

 

“You and Donny were my best friends. How come you never stopped me or told me that I was doing bad shit.”

 

“Because we never realized how sick you were until it was too late. We never really understood that you had a condition,” Case explains.

 

“What does that mean?” I ask.

 

“It means you’re different from the rest of us, Sebastian. Your brain is doing something screwy. You’re wired different.”

 

Mike Washington yells for Donny to stop chasing the duck and to guard the entrance to the pool. Donny grabs the blunt from the duck’s beak and throws the duck over the chain link fence. Mike Washington checks his watch.

 

“Five minutes,” he yells to Donny.

 

Donny jumps back in the pool.

 

“I want you to know that no matter what happens, I’m going to continue to smoke my brains out everyday until my emotions are gone and I can no longer hold an intelligent conversation,” says Donny.

 

“I’m probably going to move to Israel and fruitlessly pursue peace in the region until I lose a son to a suicide bomber and completely harden myself against the Palestinian cause,” says Case.

 

“Why are you telling me this?” I ask them.

 

“Because in less than five minutes, the only thing between us and an army of undead, flesh eating cannibals are the six rounds in Mike Washington’s pistol and the sixteen bullets in this bolt rifle,” says Case.

 

“Donny doesn’t get a gun?” I ask.

 

“I’m too high to shoot straight,” says Donny.

 

“Four of Mike’s six rounds are to put ourselves out of our misery before we get eaten alive, if it comes to that,” says Case.

 

I realize that since they’ve been talking about our last stand, I’ve aged to about fifteen.

 

“Looking more like yourself every minute,” Donny says with a smile.

 

“So, what’s the plan then?” my fifteen year-old self asks.

 

“Mike is going to get you to safety, like he always does, while Donny and I die a violent, horrible death.”

 

“What’s the symbolism of the zombies? I don’t really get it,” I ask.

 

“There isn’t symbolism, Sebastian. These are real zombies.” Donny answers.

 

“Oh. Why can’t we all get away?” I ask.

 

“Because my jet pack will only carry two people. Now stop asking so many pointless questions,” interjects Mike Washington, “You have to focus on that little kid. You have to understand how unaccountable you are for this particular tragedy.”

 

“I’ll be jumping any moment now. Gonna die young and pointlessly. Just another joke’s-on-us from God,” says the kid from the sidelines.

 

“Is there anything else you want to ask us?” says Case.

 

“Why do you think Roxanne doesn’t love me?” I return to this tired old theme.

 

“Stop obsessing over that stupid girl,” says Donny.

 

“What would I have to do to change her mind?” I plead with him.

 

“I said, stop. Your two best friends will be dead in about a minute and a half and you’re asking us girl questions?!! She wasn’t even that cute,” says Donny.

 

“She is the most beautiful woman I will ever know,” I say.

 

There is a faint roar coming from behind the ridge. We all know what it means. Only my friends real and imaginary seem to hear it. The kids and camp counselors play on like nothing is wrong.

 

Case stands up and shoulders the bolt rifle. Mike Washington sits up and cocks his golden pistol. The jet pack is sitting on the ground. It looks like a rocket with backpack straps and interlocking buckles on two sides. The cone of the rocket is bright red and the rest is silver.

 

The roar slowly increases. Donny and I get out of the water and find to my surprise, but not to his, that we are not wet at all.

 

“Do you know how much I love the two of you? I say two, because Mike is obviously not real,” I tell Case and Donny.

 

“I resent that,” Mike says.

 

“Whatever. You two have been my best friends in the whole world. There’s no way in hell that I’m going to let you die while Mike and I blast off to safety.”

 

“We know what we’re doing. You had better take your one ticket out of this mess and go,” says Case, “I should also bring to your attention another dynamic to this whole mess.”

 

“Which is?” I ask.

 

“Look down there,” he says passing me binoculars and pointing down the slope of the hill. I see Roxanne tied to a tree. She’s struggling to get free.

 

“You have thirty seconds,” says Mike Washington, “You ought to make some pretty quick decisions about who lives and who dies. Jet pack holds two and I go where you go.”

 

“I do have a question for the two of you,” I say to Donny and Case.

 

“Yeah?” says Donny.

 

“Why would you die for me?”

 

“Because this isn’t real,” answers Donny.

 

“In real life we probably wouldn’t,” says Case.

 

“Will the imaginary versions of you suffer?”” I ask.

 

“Yeah, we’re gonna get eaten alive,” says Donny, “That’s gonna hurt like hell.”

 

“I’m going to free Roxanne and then we can all plan accordingly.”

 

“Make this quick, Sebastian. Oh, and she DOESN’T LOVE YOU AT ALL,” says Case.

 

I jump the chain link fence and run down the grassy hill as fast as I can. The roar of the undead is growing. I can’t see it but there are thousands of them running toward the summer camp. Roxanne is wearing a red t-shirt and white short shorts. Her wrists are tied tight to a board which is nailed into the tree. Her arms are hyper-extended as she hangs down the trunk.

 

“Not you…”she says.

 

“Let me help you down,” I say to her.

 

She spits on me.

 

“I’d rather die horribly then be saved by you,” she responds sharply.

 

“Roxy, I love you! Please don’t say that. We have to get out of here.”

 

I hear a very undead moan coming over the hills. I try to untie her wrist and she tries to kick me, but her legs are tied to the tree.

 

“There’s a jet pack on the hill by the pool. My friend can save you. If you stay here you’re going to be eaten alive!”

 

“So be it. That is how much contempt I have for you. I can’t bear to think that I would owe you my life,” Roxanne taunts me.

 

“Please,” I say as tears role down my cheek, “Please, let me get you down!”

 

“Sebastian,” she says, “Nothing you could do will make me love you. I have never cared about you and I never will.” She spits on me again.

 

“You don’t hate me this much in real life do you?” I ask.

 

“You’re not worth hate. That’s too strong an emotion. That’s too much time spent on you. You’re a distasteful after thought is what you are,” she responds derisively.

 

“Harsh words, Roxy. I am sorry about the vandalism thing though.”

 

“Get away from me. I’m done talking to you.”

 

She struggles as I cut the ropes that bind her. I’m cutting them with a shard of glass I’ve found on the ground in front of us.  I try to help her down but she takes a swing at me. Finally down on the ground, she refuses to move.

 

“Come on, Roxy, let’s go!” I yell at her as the ground shakes from the coming onslaught.

 

“Nope. Not coming with you,” she states emphatically.

 

I think for a second. Then I punch her in the stomach. She doubles over and I throw her over my shoulder. She’s a skinny little Jewish girl and can’t be much over a buck-fifty. I race up the hill.

 

“That was rash,” says Donny as I pull Roxy through the gate.

 

“Come on, Sebastian. This isn’t part of the plan,” says Case.

 

“We need a new fucking plan then,” I say.

 

Still dazed from me hitting her, Roxy doesn’t say much as I strap her into one of the two jet pack seats.

 

“Whatever happens, I just want you to know that by the time you get out of being locked up I’ll be a completely different person and the innocence you see in me will be gone,” she says.

 

“You hear that?” says Donny, “NOT WORTH YOUR TIME.”

 

I run across the deck and grab the boy with the red bathing suit and drag him to the where the jet pack sits. He’s light as a feather and doesn’t struggle at all.

 

“Whatever happens, I just want you to know I’ll still be dead by the time this story is over and you still won’t know my name,” says the little kid.

 

“You’re no super hero, Sebastian. These gestures don’t change anything,” says Case.

 

I pull the ripcord and Roxy and the boy fly into the air with a roar. I smell burning jet fuel. Up into the clouds and they’re gone.

 

“Pointless,” says Donny.

 

“Well, he’s made his decision,” says Mike Washington throwing his cigarette on the ground and crushing it with his brown leather boot. “Now it’s just a question of bullet accountability.”

 

The roar and rumble increase.

 

“18 bullets total,” says Mike Washington.

 

“How many zombies?” I ask.

 

“Quite a few more,” says Case.

 

“What will they do when they overwhelm our position,” I ask.

 

“They’ll eat us alive. That’s what zombies do.”

 

“Well then we should shoot all these people and then shoot ourselves because that sounds very painful,” I say.

 

“Very pragmatic of you, for once,” says Donny.

 

“Give me the guns,” I say.

 

“Do you really have it in you to kill these little kids?” asks Mike Washington.

 

“Should I alert them to what’s coming?” I ask.

 

“They won’t understand,” says Case, “Just get it over with.”

 

There are fourteen kids playing, half are boys, half girls. There are two camp counselors. Both female. There are terrible things bearing down on us. 16 bullets to end the lives of these civilians and two for Donny and Case. Mike Washington and I will share the remaining terrible fate.  With an eerie calm that I never thought I could muster, I pull back the safety. There is a look of smug understanding on the faces of the kids as I shoot them in the head one by one. When the rifle clicks empty, I use the pistol. Finally, standing over bodies in the pool and on the deck, I turn to my two closest friends.

 

“You sure you’re up for this?” asks Case.

 

“I am if you are,” I respond.

 

“Let’s end it then.”

 

BLAM. I shoot Case in the head with Mike’s gold handgun. It bucks in my hand.

 

“Peace, Sebastian,” says Donny.

 

I shoot him next. It’s just Mike Washington and me standing over a bunch of bodies. Thousands of zombies spill over the ridge running towards us, decomposed jaws exposing torn ligaments and putrid flesh. They make a noise like a deafening hiss-slash-growl. They will be on top of us in a matter of seconds.

 

Mike lights another cigarette.

 

“Was there a plan B?” I ask.

 

“Nope. It was either fly away on that jet pack or die a horrible death. You made your bed I’m afraid.”

 

“Jump in the pool,” he says.

 

“I don’t like getting wet.”

 

“Do you like getting eaten alive?”

 

We both jump into the water. One of the camp counselors has big tits and I’m disgusted that I admire her breasts even after just having blown her brains out. The zombies tear down the fence and howl at us from the edge of the pool. Mike Washington and I are standing back to back in the bloody pool water with bodies floating all around us. The zombies don’t enter the pool. There are so many of them.

 

I see a handle with a sign that says “Flush” on one of the pool walls. Mike Washington nods his head. I pull the handle and down we go. A huge vent opens on the bottom of the pool and the two of us are sucked through it. Wish we’d known about that before we shot everyone, I think as we get sucked into some subterranean drainage system.

 

After holding our breath for what seems like an endless amount of time, Mike and I emerge in a cave. The walls have white glowing letters written in a language I don’t recognize. The whole cavern is lit up by floating paper balls.

 

“We safe from the Zombies?” I ask gulping for air.

 

“At least for a little while,” he tells me.

 

“So what’s going on? We’re not in the Pale City and we’re not in the desert. This has to be the most realistic dream I’ve ever had.”

 

“Now that you’ve saved your lady love and killed your two best friends, I figure you’re more inclined to put all the pieces together.”

 

“But that wasn’t real. I know that I’m dreaming whenever I see you. You’re my imaginary friend Mike Washington and everyone knows there’s no such thing as zombies.”

 

“Do you know that right now, you’re screaming your head off in a quiet room because you just flipped out in the mental hospital where you have been locked up all summer?”

 

“Sorry, what did you say, Mike? I was staring at the writing on the walls. It’s beautiful,”

 

He hits me in the head.

 

“Listen to me, god damn it. These dreams are here for a reason. We’re on the brink of oblivion right now. I’ve been trying to tell you something all along. You just don’t ever hear me.”

 

Mike is screaming at me, finally losing his composure.

 

“So what is it then?” I demand.

 

“Do you know what I am?” Mike continues yelling.

 

“An imaginary friend?” I ask, still not knowing what else to say.

 

“Not exactly,” he says more calmly.

 

The tunnel we are walking through opens onto an enormous strawberry field that goes on for miles. The sun is bright above us and there are fluffy white clouds in the clear azure sky.

 

“This is my earliest memory,” I say.

 

In the middle of the field there is an operating table. A doctor and some orderlies are desperately trying to keep a woman alive. The woman looks like my mother.

 

“Is that my Mom?” I ask slightly detached.

 

“Yep. She almost died giving birth to you.”

 

I pick an enormous strawberry and eat it.

 

“Would that have been such a huge loss?” I say casually.

 

“No me and no you.”

 

“I could live with that.” I say taking it all in.

 

“This wishing-for-death shit is getting old. If you had died, your Mom would have died, your Dad would then have killed himself; and, a whole cycle of events that needed to happen would not have reached fruition.”

 

“And the world goes on,” I say sarcastically.

 

“You know the saying that when a butterfly flaps its wings on one side of the world, a tsunami wipes out a village on the other?” Mike says.

 

“I’m sure that’s not a real saying.”

 

“I assure you that it is,” Mike affirms.

 

“So what, then?” I continue cavalierly.

 

“You’re a big fucking butterfly,” he states.

 

A fleet of rotary crop duster planes soars by above us in perfect formation spraying a liquid gel over the strawberry fields. I realize they are spraying napalm. Suddenly the field erupts into fire. Mike grabs me and we run through a burning wasteland of fire and smoke. There is a stairwell that leads underground. Down the stairs is a bunker with a pool table in it.

 

The doctor, the orderlies, and my mother are all down here still in the process of trying to deliver a baby. She’s thrashing around, cursing and sweating. Everyone’s nervous because of the napalm and because the baby’s head is stuck in the birth canal.

 

It’s real hot in this bunker. Less then fifteen feet above us, the earth is on fire. Smoke finds its way down into the bunker. For once Mike Washington isn’t smoking a cigarette.

 

“We have to go deeper,” he says.

 

“Deeper than this?” I ask.

 

“Deeper than this.”

 

The doctor has cut my mother wide open. Mike Washington leads me over to the pool table.

 

“I’m sorry I said the things I did, Mom,” I say as I see her in horrible pain.

 

“It’s alright, Sebastian. You’d better move quickly or you’ll suffocate down here,” she says gently.

 

She motions for me to climb inside her, to step into the now gaping cavity. One of the orderlies helps me onto the pool table. I follow Mike Washington into my mother’s belly and inside of her we crawl through a slimy dark passage. It gets wider and wider as we squirm through. Eventually we are in a metal tube or tunnel, which leads to an opening. As we twist open the metal door we arrive at a train station.

 

“This is getting weird,” I say.

 

“This will be over soon enough,” Mike assures me.

 

“You say that now, but I don’t believe you.”

 

The train pulls into the station. It is a carbon copy of the #4 train. Mike Washington and I get on in the last car.

 

“We’ll take this to the end of the line and then we’re done.”

 

“Whatever,” I say exhausted and mildly confused.

 

We start walking through the cars. Everyone is looking at me but their eyes have all been cut out.

 

“What’s this supposed to mean?” I ask.

 

The train is plowing full speed ahead and we have to hold on to the handrails to keep from falling over.

 

“Why are all their eyes gone?” I ask.

 

“We’re gonna let you come to conclusions on the symbolism on your own from this point on,” Mike tells me.

 

“This dreams is fucked,” I mention.

 

“This isn’t a dream,” Mike says.

 

“Sure as shit isn’t real.” I tell him.

 

“There is a lot of very sound reasoning on the tenuous nature of your reality,” he says as we continue to walk through the train cars crossing between them.

 

“Where is this train going?” I ask.

 

“To Wakefield,” He tells me.

 

“What’s at Wakefield?” I ask.

 

“A partial conclusion.”

 

“A partial conclusion to what?”

 

“To our perilous journey across your mind,” Mike says.

 

Someone clutches my arm.

 

“They took my eyes,” says a slightly more brow beaten Izzy Vitz.

 

“Who took your eyes,” I ask.

 

“Pigs in blue uniforms, men in white lab coats, and glowing gods with many faces. I fucked a Catholic school girl in the ass before they could do it though.”

 

“Well at least there was that,” I say squeezing his arm gently.

 

“Is that you, Sebastian?”

 

“Yeah, buddy. It’s me,” I tell him.

 

“They got us all pretty good didn’t they? They pulled the wool over our eyes and then, when we weren’t expecting it, they took the eyes themselves.”

 

“Why did they take your eyes, Izzy?”

 

“They needed to make sure we didn’t see…” he stops suddenly.

 

“Didn’t see what?!” I ask.

 

Blood is running from the gaping sockets where his eyes once were.

 

“They got us all.”

 

“Do you know where this train in going, Izzy?” I ask frantically.

 

“At least we’ll all be together, right? At least the old clique never gets broken up. Have I ever told you the story of how I got high with my principal?”

 

Seeing him lying still, even like this, is the most pathetic thing I’ve ever seen. Even with his eyes cut out he still has to make up stories.

 

“Why do you lie so often, Izzy?” I ask him.

 

He pauses a moment.

 

“They aren’t lies to me,” he says softly.

 

“Let’s keep moving,” Mike Washington says.

 

“I don’t want to leave him like this. He always put me up when I had no where else to go.”

 

“You can put him out of his misery, if you are so inclined.” He says, offering me his pistol.

 

“You should go kid,” Izzy says, “At this point it’s too late to do anything for me anyway.”

 

“You and me were a good team,” I tell Izzy.

 

“But now you’re locked in a hospital camp and I have no eyes. Try starting a dynamic duo with that combination.”

 

“Thank you for trying to help me all those times,” I say.

 

“That’s what a crew is for.”

 

We leave Izzy slumped over bleeding on himself. We continue moving on through this massive train. In each car I see more and more people I know. It seems that there is not a single person who I have interacted with that isn’t here. And there we all are speeding along these tracks heading to a place called Wakefield.

 

We finally reach the front car. It is the only car, which does not look like a New York City subway car. The ceilings are twice as high and the walls are covered with varnished wood and ornate metal work. There is a bar staffed by a broad in a red cocktail dress with a green beret. There are two soldiers standing in front of the door to the control room. They wear dirty khaki uniforms stained with grease, blood, and sweat. They wear black balaclavas, which cover their faces and they have green berets held onto their left shoulders with a strap. They carry rifles.

 

“Who’s driving this train?” I demand.

 

“Please remain where you are, sir. We’ll be arriving in Wakefield shortly,” says one of the soldiers.

 

“I want to know who’s in charge!” I scream at him.

 

“You’re in charge, sir. You and Mr. Washington,” says the second soldier.

 

“I’m having a drink,” says Mike as he takes a seat at the bar.

 

“I order you to let me in that control room,” I say.

 

“It’s not that kind of army. Please take a seat at the bar. We have strict orders to beat you to near pulp with our rifles if you try to gain access to the control room,” the soldier tells me.

 

“Boy does that sound painful,” says the attractive female bartender wearing a white veil that partially conceals her face.

 

“She’s right,” says Mike Washington.

 

“What are you drinkin,’ sweetie,” asks the masked bartender.

 

“Whiskey,” says Mike Washington, “Jamison straight if ya got it. Johnny Walker Red if you don’t.”

 

“Everything for the two of you has been arranged compliments of the management,” she says.

 

Mike Washington leans over the bar and looks her dead in the eyes to say, “Let’s keep it cheap anyway.”

 

I keep at it with the soldiers.

 

“If we’re in charge then don’t we give the orders?” I demand.

 

“There are no orders given after final consensus has been reached in this army, sir.”

 

“What happens when we get to Wakefield?” I ask.

 

“Do you believe we would tell you something like that?” the soldier responds.

 

“I guess not.”

 

I back down and sit next to Mike at the bar.

 

“What you drinking, sweetie?” asks the bartender.

 

“Brueklin Tap if you have it.”

 

“We do indeed.”

 

“She told me that she never cared and that she never will.” I tell Mike.

 

“No, Sebastian. That’s a line from a Reel Big Fish song,” says Mike Washington feeling around in his coat pocket for a pack of cigarettes.

 

“I think we can take these guys. You with me?” I ask.

 

“Sit tight. There are some answers that just never get revealed no matter what happens. You shouldn’t feel so entitled,” he tells me.

 

“They don’t look so tough,” I say.

 

“That’s what they said about the Israeli army.”

 

The bartender is smiling at us intently from behind her mask. She could be anyone, depending on the angle of the light. She’s a skinny, pretty non-descript brunette. When the light changes, she’s sort of shaped like Michelle. She keeps smiling.

 

“In about five minutes you’ll have to make a decision affecting every single person you know. No pressure, of course,” says Mike Washington.

 

“It makes me a little nervous that everyone I know is on one train.”

 

“That’s the least of it,” says Mike.

 

“Why do you do the things you do?” the bartender asks me.

 

“I guess I was always trying to lead an eventful life,” I say.

 

“To what end?” she asks.

 

“That’s a damn good question,” says Mike Washington.

 

“To be proud of what I have done with myself I suppose.”

 

“Well are you?” she asks.

 

“This girls on point,” says Mike Washington.

 

“What the hell do you want me to say?” I ask them both.

 

“That not once in your entire goddamn life have you done a single thing to help someone other than yourself,” says the girl.

 

“I’m not all bad,” I say defensively.

 

“No one ever said you were,” says Mike Washington, “The reason we’re in this situation is because the world is composed of people just like you’.

 

The train rumbles to a stop.

 

“I’ll be rootin’ for ya, sweetie,” says the bartender who looks just like Michelle wearing an Islamic face covering.

 

A door just past the bar slides open. One of the soldiers stands at attention while the other one removes his balaclava. As the mask is pulled off his face, I realize that it is my best friend Nicolas Trikhovitch.

 

“You need to be careful, buddy. There’s a war going on,” is all he says as Mike Washington ushers me out the door.

 

Wakefield is in the middle of a forest. A cavernous bunker complex of white marble, like Petra in a depression. The station is an empty plaza. As we cross the plaza I turn to see the train entering a tunnel bringing my whole world down under the ground.

 

“Very few people in Wakefield,” I mention.

 

“That’s just on the surface.”

 

“Where’s that train going?” I ask.

 

He does not respond.

 

We have exited the plaza and are walking into the pine woods. I hear laughter from the brush ahead of us. Seated on the ground with a bottle of vodka is Roxanne drunk completely out of her mind.

 

“I thought you didn’t drink,” I say.

 

She looks at me and rolls her eyes. She tries to get up, but falls over drunk.

 

“Who are you again?” she asks slurring her words.

 

“You know who I am Roxy.”

 

“Oh yeah. You don’t kiss so good.” she slurs.

 

“That’s all you remember me by?!”

 

“Yeah, that’s all,” she says as she takes another swig from the bottle. “Now leave me to my drinkin.”

 

A bloody teardrop falls from my left eye and hits the ground. I smell the scent of pine trees and realize that we have to keep going. I have to see this to the end.

 

Mike Washington and I walk on deeper into the woods. Hanging from a tree is the little boy in the red bathing suit. He’s bleeding from his head and has a note pinned to his chest with a safety pin Cambodian style, which reads, ‘See.’

 

Another bloody teardrop falls from my face. There is a clearing ahead of us. Standing in a clearing is an enormous wooden guillotine.

 

“Do you know what we’ve come to Wakefield to do?” asks Mike Washington.

 

“I have a guess.”

 

“Are you aware what the stakes are?” Mike asks.

 

“As aware as I will be for now.”

 

“So then. What has to be done to put us on the right side of things?” he asks.

 

I think hard about what he is and about what I am. I have a moment where I see the faces of every person on that train.

 

“We have to put my head on your shoulders,” I utter out.

 

“Presto,” he says and it’s the first time I’ve ever seen Mike Washington smile.

 

Next thing I know I’m strapped into a guillotine. The blade comes down and my head comes off into a basket. I don’t see a white light. No angels singing. The lights in my eyes go out and everything fades to grey. It takes a very long time for me to tell myself that I am finally, maybe just hoping, quite possibly dead.

ר

What a mess the last few nights had been on Sugar Hill. Something happened to Sebastian and no one knows what. He attacked Junior and caused quite a disturbance. Junior is in the hospital with scratches on his face. The decision has been made to isolate Sebastian completely. It is as if he snapped one night and lost all conception of reality. To outside observers it seems like he is acting out some perverse alternate reality on the internees around him. It had taken three hours to restore order to the unit. For two long days and nights he screamed out the name Roxanne and thrashed in his shackles until the nurses repeatedly sedated him.

 

He lay on the floor of his cell in silence. The door is locked. The guards have been instructed to not communicate with him nor respond to his attempts to manipulate them. All his notebooks and personal possessions have been removed from the cell. No letters. No phone calls. All meals to be taken in confinement. The doctors told the guards that another facility has been found for Adon. The transfer will take place in two weeks. Now it’s just a waiting game.

ש

It’s after dark when someone opens the door to my cell. It’s Mr. Smith. He puts his finger to his mouth illustrating the universal sign for ‘shut the fuck up’ and tosses a letter into my cell.

 

It’s from Michelle postmarked August 23rd, 1999. I tear it open.

 

Dear Sebastian,

 

I don’t know if this letter will reach you in time, but here’s hoping. Another school year starts in 2 weeks. I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to get through it without you. I don’t think I’ve ever felt so close to someone who could be so far. Every letter I receive from you is a present in itself, just like the love in our friendship. Your letters have made me laugh, made me cry, made me hurt. I don’t think I’ll be able to survive without your letters of comfort and knowing I can’t still talk to you. Please find a way to write me. I don’t mind so much that people read our letters as long as they get to us. Tell me what day you bust out. I’ll be counting down. If this transfer is one step closer to us seeing each other again, let it come. I love you with all my heart.

 

If she never again felt the warmth of his touch,

Nor the soft brush of his hair on her skin,

She promised herself that with all her strength,

She would overcome the pain and loss within.

 

Michelle Tagomi

 

 

What made Michelle write poetry? Maybe it was trying to express love outside the limits of language. I know I can’t write her back. I can’t pass a message or make a phone call. I can’t even thank Smith for giving me the letter because I’m not allowed to talk. There is moisture dripping from my right eye, but with a flinch it is gone. A hard flinch with my eyes clenched shut. Tears are a worthless display only for women.

 

I know this might be the last contact I have with her. The doctors came to tell me that I would soon be transferred to a place called the Family School. I was only half listening to what they were saying, but Smith told me about the place. It is a religious work camp. He said that it is a school only in as much as it has classrooms. It is in an isolated part of the gulag in the Catskill Mountains.

 

I slowly beat my head against the wall of my cell because she is the one thing that has held me together all summer. Despite the Happy Pills, the ultra violence and endless days of heat and sterility, I have kept going because I know she is still thinking about me.

ת

I spent my last night in Texas in isolated boredom. I’d been under lock and key for two weeks. With little to do I engage in what one might call quiet meditation, but which I refer to as sitting on the ground talking to oneself. Not out loud. That’s what crazy people do. Just tossing over what I had been seeing in my head.

 

Mr. Smith is the only guard that violates the ban on talking to me. He told me what had happened. He says that I wigged out, started yelling, attacked Junior, ran over to the girl’s side and freaked out some pregnant girl. Then I wrapped it all up by brawling with the guards in the Rec Room. By brawling he meant that I had been tackled, pinned to the ground and sedated. There are bruises on my forehead and knees. He says I wouldn’t stop yelling the name Roxanne. I didn’t tell Smith I had eaten mushrooms, though he would have probably been  amused.

 

I gave Smith my parents’ address. He says he will send me a post card after I’m transferred. That way when I get out of the Family School in two years I can drop him a line. He had looked the facility up online and found out that two years is the minimum stay. He told me that it is located in upstate New York. Smith says that I probably still belong here in Texas with the way I had acted. Since my parents have money, I am bound for slightly better climes.

 

My last night in Texas was spent thinking about how much I miss the soft words of Michelle Tagomi.

 

Michelle has stood by me throughout the summer and her letters are the only things that eased the tortures of this long, hot summer of imprisonment. This transfer means that I am two years away from seeing her again or two years closer depending on how one reads the glass. Mine appears to be pretty fucking empty. I resisted the behavior mod because of her. Now I can only try and live up to the friendship she has shown me. She is the only person who still sees some good in me.

 

I had not acted very sane the other night. I am glad she will never see me like this.

 

A little after midnight Mr. Winter opens the door to my cell and stands in the doorway.

 

“Have you learned anything this summer?” he asks.

 

“Nothing of note, Mr. Winter.”

 

“You’re being shipped out in the morning. Back to New York and then upstate to the next camp. Thought I’d break the blackout and say good bye.”

 

“I’ve fallen down, Winter. I can’t get up again,” I tell him.

 

“You have the will. You’ll run free again some day, better after all of this.”

 

“How can I be redeemed for the sick fucking things I’ve done? These camps have taken me out of my city and cut something out of me.”

 

“You say that now, but your mettle has not even begun to be tested. Cull the sad little boy from your routine. Your malicious little Holden is pleasing to no one. You mock yourself, Sebastian.”

 

“I wanted at some point not to be great but just good. That kid with the quarters and the whale- saving idealism.”

 

“That’s pretty trite seeing as how you made yourself a thief, a rapist and a great coward.”

 

“They’ll break me upstate. I dreamed of it.”

 

“Things always get much worse, before they get a little better.”

 

“I find no comfort in that.”

 

“There is no comfort, no sanctuary and no encouragement on the brutal road you’ve apparently chosen. Your eyes, once lean and hungry, have the zeal of a fighter behind them. You were told to suffer hard on the road of the righteous, right?”

 

“That was the message of the vision on the terrace that night.”

 

“Then one more lesson and we will part forever.”

 

“Go on.”

 

“Whatever happens to you in the darkness of that gulag they will ship you to in the morning, you accepted the deal when you didn’t throw yourself to your death that cold, cold night. Never forget that you sold your soul to a greater thing. Traded away an easy death to be made righteous. This was the wage of the transaction was it not?”

 

“To what end?” I ask.

 

“Proof of the light outside that terrible cave. You’re to be a demonstration.”

 

“Of what, Mr. Winter?”

 

“That help is coming.” Winter assures me, “You’re here to give us something to believe.”

 

PART FOUR:

Camp Concentrated

 

 

“Young people need to be educated – that is, ‘led from darkness into light.’  So, several years ago, pressed for the need to provide an education, we decided to start a school. In the beginning, it was literally in the basement of our little brown ranch house. Now, it has grown into a spreading campus of dorms, classrooms, athletic fields, dining areas, and a chapel.”

 

Tony & Betty

Family Foundation School Founders

 

“Never shall I forget that night, the first night in the Camp, which has turned my life into one long night, seven times cursed and seven times sealed. Never shall I forget those moments, which murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams to dust. Never shall I forget these things, even if I am condemned to live as long as God himself. Never.”

 

Night

Elie Wiesel

 

 

א

 

I am driven through an unguarded metal gate into a large farm compound about three hours northwest of New York City in upstate New York in the Catskill Mountains on the crisp, early autumn day of September 2nd, 1999.

 

I have seen a small brochure describing the facility.  It looks like a desolate, Russian farm on a small ranch of brown, rocky earth cut from the mountains and forests of the surrounding badlands.  It is a farm where nothing grows easily. The surrounding area is awash in economic depression. There are jagged hulls of useless, broken farm equipment that is a bone yard of rusted iron and steel.

 

The camp compound is built into the side of a big, deforested hill. The main administrative building is on3 story and sprawls over a plateau that haw been cut at the base of the hill. It forms the shape of a cross with a red tin roof. A 500-foot, enclosed glass tunnel connects the main building to another structure that looks like a deteriorated three-story, wooden ark that has run aground. The brochure had described this wooden building as the Family Area, the place where all the healing begins.  These two buildings appear to be the only permanent structures on the compound, though the brochure had described a stone chapel. Some twenty fixed-trailer, barracks in earth tones dot the hill above the main administration building.  I assume this is where the internees lived.

 

Welcome to Camp #3, the Family Foundation also called the Family School.

All my stuff has been carefully packed into a metal steamer trunk. A couple internees meet us in the lot to help carry my trunk up the sixty-plus concrete steps to the administrative office.

 

We pass by a pale, marble statue of the Virgin Mary at the entrance of the building. This stone rendition of the mother of has been chiseled to endow it with a merciless, cold indifference. I catch a brief glimpse of the internees walking by in the halls. They appear normal enough. They are dressed in GAP and Abercrombie. They peer intently at me as they walk by.

 

We carry the steel trunk into the office. A tall man with silvery hair and glasses orders two kids to take the trunk into the back room. He introduces himself as Terry Quimper.

 

Terry tells me to follow him into the back room. He reminds me of an evil Mr. Rogers.  I am told to stand in the corner as they search my trunk. I watch as each piece of clothing is searched and sorted. One kid, with olive skin and curly black hair reads off each item while the other kid marks an inventory sheet. I watch quietly wondering what they hope to find.

 

“Those pants are too baggy,” says Terry.

 

The Volcom cargo pants are put aside.

 

“That shirt is bright red,” he says.

 

The work shirt is added to the pile.

 

“That shirt says Porn Star, need I say more.”

 

“That shirt has a naked woman on it.”

 

“Too baggy.”

 

“Too bright.”

 

“That’s a raver visor.”

 

Roughly two-thirds of my clothing is deemed unacceptable. I am left with the new preppy dress clothing my parents had the foresight to buy on the way up.

 

They move on to other items.

 

“I notice you like to read,” says Terry.

 

He leafs through my worn copy of Plato’s Republic.

 

“Yes sir.” I answer.

 

“Don’t call me sir. My name is Terry.”

 

“Yes, Terry.”

 

“You have quite a collection here. It’s a shame they are all on secular topics. They’ll have to go into storage,” Terry tells me.

 

“But…why?” I ask.

 

“No secular books for your first three months here. Those are the rules. We need you focused on your treatment. Moral, respectful children are reared here, not philosopher kings.”

 

The search team finally arrives at my most treasured possession nestled in the bottom of the trunk, Volume One of my archives, the photo, sketch and written journal of my stay in Texas. It contains months of work and my practice sketches and collage.  I watch as Terry pages through it. He shakes his head slowly, in some mental halfway house between contempt and fascination.

 

“Rubin, make a note. Sebastian Adon, Family 4, first sanction.”

 

The kid with curly black hair writes this down on a clipboard.

 

“First sanction. No drawing.”

 

I don’t even know what to say.

 

“You’ll come to see the logic behind this sanction, believe me.”

 

Volume One of the archives is placed on top of all my forbidden possessions.

 

“Rubin. Vincent. Be so kind as to bring Mr. Adon’s trunk to the Family Building, Family 4. I don’t know what a Mustard Plug or a Reel Big Fish is, but surely they can’t be good if they were affixed to young Adon’s trunk containing all these things he can’t have. Scrape those stickers off the his trunk!,” Terry says, deliberately mispronouncing my name again.

 

“Sure thing, Terry,” the taller kid named Vincent Alba says with a stupid grin.

 

“Mr. Adon, follow me,” says Terry.

 

“What happens to all the stuff that isn’t allowed?” I ask.

 

“It will be put in storage until your parents can pick it up.”

 

He leads me into a small room connected to the back room of the office.

 

“Strip down.”  Terry orders me.

 

I’m half used to this by now.

 

He puts on a plastic glove. I remember this from Texas all too well. The things you can stuff in an asshole.

 

“Place your hands on the wall, bend over and cough.”

 

I do as I’m told. I feel two fingers work their way into my asshole. I grind my teeth. It is over very quickly.

 

“Fold your clothing, Adon, and change into the blue work suit on the table,” Terry commands.

 

I do as I’m told. My clothing is placed with the rest of the restricted items.

 

“Stand up straight. Follow me.”

 

We walk into the outer office and out into the hall. The enormous sprawling cross building is lined with dark blue lockers, near enough to the color of Mt. Sinai’s psyche ward. Everything always looks so sterile in these camps. Terry calls out to a student on his way to class. He looks like a dirty-blonde, preppy jock dressed in a blue crew neck, button-down.

 

“Erik Blaire, this is Sebastian Adon,” Terry says.

 

The kid sticks out his hand.

 

“Adon will be the newest member of Family 4. I’d like you to bring his screened personal effects and paper work over to the Family Building with Rubin so Mr. Alba can give him a quick tour.”

 

“No problem, Terry,” this kid Erik says. He looks wholesome and British.

 

The two of them head off toward the tunnel with my stuff. The kid named Vincent Alba is tall and lanky, olive-skinned and Middle Eastern looking with black hair parted in the center. I doubt he is really Middle Eastern. Probably a mutt of I-Ty and some kind of Latin.

 

“Vincent, Mr. Adon will be in your family unit. Please escort him down to the barbershop. I find the blond streaks all sorts of negative, faggoty and generally unbecoming,” says Terry in a one more final insult.

 

“Sure thing, Terry. Am I going to be his shadow?” says an eager Vincent Alba, lanky also in his movements and a whole head taller than me.

 

“It hasn’t been decided yet. That’s ultimately up to Tom and Mary.” Terry gave the orders and Vincent follows them.

 

Vincent Alba is real chatty. He asks me questions. Loads of them. Where am I from? Why am I here? How did my parents hear about the Family School? He only provides the vaguest of answers to my incessant questions. We walk out the front door, down the concrete stairs, past the steely Virgin Mary, and into a large red wooden barn across the gravel road near the parking lot that is empty except for two large, unmarked vans. The barn has the same red tin roof as the cross-shaped administration building. Maybe when this was just a farm and not a camp there was just this old ark of a home and the barn, before the barracks, chapel and compound center changed the nature of the place. As we walk to the barn I notice what looks like six or seven people up on top of an adjacent hill picking up something from the ground.

 

“What are they doing?” I ask Vincent Alba not really expecting a real answer.

 

“Don’t worry about it, buddy. Let’s just concentrate on your haircut. Everything’s going to be just fine. It all gets explained in the end.”

 

Now it’s my turn for questions.

 

“Why do I need a haircut?” I ask.

 

“Because your hair is bleached partially blond.”

 

“So?”

 

“Listen. I know this all seems real weird, but like I said, it all makes sense in the end,” Vincent tries to reassure me.

 

“Okay.” You jaded, goofball motherfucker.

 

We enter the red-roofed barn. My blue work clothing is too baggy. Without a belt, I have to hold up my pants with one hand.

 

A fat black woman with blond hair waits in what looks like makeshift, two-chair barbershop. She looks like she digs on chicken and waffles. She tells Vincent to head back to class and that she’ll bring me to my family when she is done. I sit in the barber chair and she drapes a blue cover cloth over my work suit and puts a towel around my neck so the cut hair won’t get under my shirt.

 

“How are you doing, honey? What’s your name?” she says sweetly.

 

“Sebastian.”

 

“Sebastian, what a nice name. I’m Lafonda. I do the haircuts. Do you know what family unit you’re in?”

 

“Family 4 I think, but I’m not sure what that means.”

 

“I’m from Family 5. We’re right next door to you.”

 

“What’s a Family Unit?”

 

“You really don’t know?” she asks as she starts clipping.

 

“No one has told me anything.”

 

“Yeah, people are like that around here. Cagey at first. Sometimes, no one knows who’s supposed to know what or who they’re allowed to talk to.”

 

“Why is that?” I ask Lafonda.

 

“There is anonymity for every family. What gets talked about. Who is on what sanctions. Who’s on blackout and for how long. You’re not allowed to share Family information except to tell another student how to enforce your sanctions.”

 

“What’s a sanction? I think I have one.”

 

“Yup, you can’t draw. Normally new kids go a few days before the sanctions start piling up. A sanction is a personal regulation, which governs the way you are allowed to live while at the Family.”

 

“What’s the point of them?”

 

“They help bring you away from your own self-destructive disease.”

 

“Disease?”

 

“The sickness that got in our heads to bring us here to Hancock. Now, let’s cut your hair.”

 

“Just a little off the top, okay?”

 

“Sure thing, darling,” Lafonda chuckles.

 

Ten minutes later my head has been shaved bald.

 

***

 

After that fat bitch Lafonda cut off all my hair with a buzz razor, she turned me back over to Vincent Alba who had been philandering about outside the barn.  He is supposed to give me a tour.

 

Apparently there are six families with roughly fifty kids each. Each family has two barracks up on the hill above the main buildings. The cross-shaped building is the school building where the students attend classes. It also contains an auditorium that doubles as a basketball court. As we walk outside from a door in the auditorium, I hear shrieking and banging coming from somewhere in the theatre.

 

“What the fuck was that?”

 

“Watch your language, buddy. Cursing is not allowed,” Vincent tells me.

 

“Where is that damn noise coming from?”

 

“Don’t worry about it. It isn’t any of our business.”

 

“Look here, my dude, someone is definitely screaming bloody murder and you’re acting like you don’t hear anything!”

 

Again I hear the soulful wail. It sounds like an animal dying in a trap. I had made sounds like that before. It is the sound of the quiet room.

 

“But I don’t hear anything.”

 

“Listen, Mr. Vinny. I’ve been in places like this long enough to know the sound people make when they’re drugged up and confined in a small room!”

 

“You should lower your voice.”

 

I wave my hand in front of his face.

 

“Anyone in there, Vinny? Where are the quiet rooms? In the main building?”

 

“They’re behind the stage.”

 

“Was that so hard, Vinny?”

 

“It’s Vincent buddy, let’s just get on with the tour, alright?”

 

You silly brainwashed piece of shit.

 

Vincent leads me down the enclosed glass tunnel connecting the Main Building to the Family Building. There are three family units on each of the first two floors. The third floor is divided in half. One part is a small screening room with a digital projector; the other is an extra barrack used by Family 4 due to male over-population within the Camp. A large room on the north side of the building facing the barracks and the hill houses the kitchen facilities and a supply room.

 

“Why am I getting sent to a family that already has too many guys?”

 

“Each family focuses on a different area of treatment.”

 

“What does Family 4 focus on?”

 

“I really don’t know,” says Vincent.

 

I am starting to get annoyed.

 

“Does anyone here actually know what’s going on?”

 

“Everyone knows what they need to know. You’re new, but it all gets explained eventually.”

 

“I bet,” I say in exasperation.

 

I am told there will be religious services twice a day at the chapel on the top of the hill. The first is at 06:30. The second is at 19:00. Vincent tells me they alternate religious faiths each day. Tuesday is ‘Jew day’ as he calls it. The Jewish population of the Camp is less than twenty internees. Only one girl in the whole camp is Muslim so they don’t feel the need for a day of Islamic devotion. The other six days are different sects of Christianity, which in my honest opinion are all the same. Catholicism on Sunday. Protestant on Monday. Non-denominational Christian devotion Wednesday through Saturday. That the ‘Jew Day’ is Tuesday, not say, Friday or Saturday, rubs me wrong enough, but conscription prayer hadn’t been in the brochure.

 

There is a small lake to the south of the family building at the base of the hill. A little wooden dock floats in the center of the lake. Vincent Alba won’t tell me what it’s for. Across from the lake, there is another distant structure. It isn’t red. It looks like a derelict farmhouse, three stories tall, built right into the base of the hill. Vincent tells me that it is off limits for students to enter that building. It is where all of our ‘negative’ processions are stored. A thick brick chimney vents smoke into the clear mountain sky.

 

“So how long have you been here, Vincent?”

 

“Fourteen months and 23 days.”

 

“What are you here for?” I ask, “If you’re allowed to tell me.”

 

He seems real nervous talking about anything that isn’t related to the tour.

 

“I’m a raging alcoholic.”

 

“How long since you had a drink?”

 

“Fourteen months and 23 days.”

 

Small, simple questions.

 

“How many people are there?”

 

“You mean students? Roughly 300.”

 

“All drug addicts and alcoholics?”

 

“You have all sorts of people up here. Nymphos, bulimics, kids with extreme ADD. The Family School is a place for young people of many different backgrounds who exhibited asocial behavior on the outside.”

 

“Nymphos? Like girls who love to fuck?”

 

“Woo, you gotta stop with the cursing,” he mutters, “I don’t want to have to bring you up your first day here.”

 

“Bring me up?”

 

“Report on asocial behaviors to your family. That’s how you get on the sanctions.”

 

“What sanctions are you on?”

 

“I’m on blackout with girls.”

 

“What does ‘blackout’ mean?”

 

“It means that as far as I’m concerned girls don’t exist. I can’t talk to them. I can’t look at them. For me, they just aren’t there.”

 

“What do you mean ‘They aren’t there?’ You’re a guy. Thinking about females is where you spend half your time.”

 

“And that’s why I’m on this sanction.”

 

“Cause you think about girls too often?” I ask incredulously.

 

“Yeah, basically. Yeah.”

 

“This place gets a little weirder the more I talk to you people.”

 

“All I can tell you is that you’ll get used to it pretty quickly,” Vincent assures me.

 

We hike up the hill so I can see the chapel, the pray house on the mount. From up on this hill I can see a densely forested valley with rough and rocky, rolling hills. These are the mountain hills of the Western Catskills. The ground gets hard up here in the winter.

 

The Chapel is relatively small and I wonder if it can really accommodate 300-plus people praying each morning. The Chapel wasn’t built in the red style of the main building and it wasn’t here before the Camp like the Family Building and the barn. It is a new stone chapel with stained glass windows depicting the Christian Nativity, decked out in aged ornate wood.

 

We enter the empty chapel through two sturdy, wooden arched doors. Two rows of pews are set up in two long columns, one side for girls and one side for boys. Each row has a buttress for some limited comfort for kneeling for prayer. On the left of the arched front entrance is a small confession room. On the right is a small classroom with a board where the theology class is irregularly taught. A big old, life-sized, more-Caucasian-than-normal, crucified Jesus hangs from the rear wall behind a pulpit. There is a life-sized icon of the Virgin Mary in the left rear corner.  An icon of Saint Francis of Assisi is in the right rear corner. I had learned who he was back at the United Nations School.

 

“Do you have to go to church on the six Christian days if you’re a Jew?”

 

“You’re Jewish?” Vincent asks. Nobody ever suspects.

 

“Indeed.”

 

“Of course you have to go. It’s all the same God.”

 

“Where is the synagogue?”

 

“On Tuesdays this is the synagogue.”

 

“How can it be the synagogue with the Christ-man hangin’ from the wall?”  I demand.

 

“On Tuesday the statue gets covered over with a drape. As do the icons.”

 

“Does a rabbi run the services?”

 

“No. The services are led by a kid named Rubin Carter.”

 

“That kid that did the intake with you and Terry Quimper?”

 

“The self-same Jew.”

 

“Are these Christian services led by a priest?”

 

“Father McMullins runs the Catholic services and Pastor Palmer runs the Protestant services. Students lead the services the rest of the days. These are non-denominational prayer days. As for Tuesday Rubin does his thing with a kid named Ian from our Family.”

 

“Do you have to go to this church if you don’t believe in God?”

 

I keep trying to find some way out of this part of the treatment.

 

“Of course. Everyone says they’re an atheist when they first get here. The Program teaches us the definitive need for a higher power. Once you accept your higher power the prayer stuff becomes quite natural.”

 

“Don’t you think it’s a little unfair to have one Jewish day and six Christian days?”

 

“There really aren’t a lot of Jews here.”

 

“How many are there?” I ask.

 

“Out of 300 students, maybe twelve. I think a few are only half-Jewish and doing a sort of closet-rebel thing with it. Once a month, the Jewish kids take a bus to a synagogue in Liberty to keep shabbos with this guy Rabbi Donny.”

 

“They stay in Liberty over night?”

 

“Of course not, where would they stay?” Vincent laughs.

 

“Traveling by bus during shabbos is against Jewish law.”

 

“Rabbi Donny says since the bus driver isn’t a Jew, it’s alright. It doesn’t affect you. You don’t believe in God remember?”

 

“Isn’t that a little hypocritical?”

 

“Huh?”

 

“That the Family School puts a lot of focus on religion but doesn’t let its Jews keep their laws.”

 

“Like I said, it’s a small Jewish population and no one seems to be complaining so far.”

 

I ask to see a barrack. I wanted to know where I’d be sleeping. Vincent Alba says we aren’t allowed in them during the day. I ask if the barracks are locked at night.

 

“Thinking about making a break for it?”

 

“No, just curious.”

 

“Alarmed not locked. Opening the door sets off an air raid siren.” Vincent tells me.

 

“Do a lot of people try to escape?”

 

“We get maybe five or six attempts each month.”

 

“Do they make it?”

 

“Never. Most don’t even clear the perimeter fence.”

 

The so-called perimeter fence is a low wooden property demarcated with a flood lamp irregularly spaced. I could leap right over it.

 

“Did you ever try?”

 

“I tried once my third month here.”

 

“What happened?”

 

“I got picked up on the highway trying to hitchhike to Binghamton. You learn to accept being here, to accept your treatment. After that you understand that escape will lead back to the disease.”

 

“What disease?”

 

“The disease they call alcoholism.”

 

“That isn’t a real disease.”

 

“But it is. If you put a drink in front of me, I don’t know that even now, I wouldn’t drink it. If I let the disease win it will destroy my life. Or worse, kill me. So I stay put and get better.”

 

“You still want a drink even after being here as long as you have?”

 

“I’ll always want a drink. That’s the curse of the disease.”

 

“You’re confusing the medication with the disease.”

 

“The disease made us wanton, the Blue Book says, it made us creatures of gross excess. We turned on others and then upon ourselves.”

 

“What the fuck is the Blue Book?”

 

“Don’t curse, Sebastian. I’m serious now. It’s an AA thing. This place is part religion, part school, part AA, part, I don’t know, part recovery I suppose.”

 

“You’re not recovered yet, Alba?”

 

“No, not yet.”

 

The trouble with letting us guard ourselves is that you could get a well-meaning pushover as a guard. I like him. I plan to ply him full of questions, extract some logistics, and then make a good break.

 

***

 

Everyone’s attention is on the teenage girl with the big tits. She is standing in front of the table. She has long brown hair and hazel eyes. Her face is dotted with a few freckles. She is wearing jeans that are not tight or revealing, and a t-shirt, which, while modest, hides little when a young girl has C-plus breasts. She is wearing glasses, but they make her look more like a sexy schoolteacher than a Thelma. Her name is Angelika Vine. And she’s taking inventory before dinner in Family 4. The other guys call her sister, but I know they’d all tit fuck their sister six ways to Sunday and would like to dump a bucket of water over that loose grey shirt.

 

Angelika Vine has been in this Camp for almost two years. She is a ‘senior member’ who is trusted enough to go home on her own once in awhile and come right back. She plays the cute Catholic schoolgirl. She is the senior editor of the Family School’s monthly internal rag, but she’d look like a stripper with the right pout and some red lipstick. I haven’t seen a girl my age in three months. She rambles on sweetly to us all and I just keep thinking about fucking her on a pool table. Sister.

 

“As you know, I just returned from a home visit over the weekend. I stayed with my Dad and we went out to the movies on Saturday.”

 

“What movie?” a woman with black hair sitting at the head of the table asks.

 

She had told me her name was Mary Thénardier. Some movies are considered too negative for the internees to view and it is a treatment violation to watch them. The Family Leaders aren’t too concerned however. Angelika has been thoroughly indoctrinated.

 

“The new Star Wars movie.”

 

“Was it any good?” asked a man with a thick black beard who had introduced himself to me earlier as Tom Thénardier. Tom and Mary are married. They live in a house within the compound up the road from the school building. They have two little bouncing boys that always follow the senior members around. No need for a babysitter with 300 surfs.

 

“It was just okay,” Angelika responds.

 

“What else did you guys do?” Mary asks.

 

“We went out to dinner at an Italian restaurant.”

 

“What did you order?”

 

“Pasta Alfredo.”

 

“Tell us about your interaction with your Father.”

 

“He was really happy to see me. He went out of his way to make sure I would avoid any negative situations. He told me that my Mother would have liked to come, but was on a business trip in New York City.”

 

“How did that make you feel?” Mary asks.

 

“A little sad, I guess. I really wanted to see her.”

 

“Understandably.”

 

“It was a relatively uneventful weekend.”

 

“Before you sit down I want you tell the family what we discussed earlier. Your encounter with your ex-boyfriend.” Mary says.

 

“Certainly, Mary. As many of you may know from my story, I thought that I was in love with a boy named Anthony. We had been going out for close to a year and it was Anthony that I ultimately lost my virginity to when I was sixteen. He was a bit older, in his twenties. My Father hated Anthony because he thought Anthony brought out negative characteristics in me. It was with Anthony that I drank my fist beer and smoked my first joint, did my first bit of coke. Because my disease makes me want to have a lot of casual sex I found myself sleeping with Anthony a few times a day. Anthony was an aspiring filmmaker. Sometimes we’d film ourselves having sex. He started bringing me to sex parties in the City, you know, Swingers Parties. I deluded myself to thinking I was in love him. Soon enough he was making films of me sexing up three sometimes seven other men. Sometimes they’d hit me, tie me up, piss on me,” Angelika relates.

 

A scan about the room shows faces awash with empathy, but no judgment or shock. I‘d like to pee on you, I thought to myself.

 

“I now know that our entire relationship was based around sex. I realized he preyed on me. He exploited me and sold these tapes on the Web, ruined me emotionally. It got pretty bad in the weeks leading up to my being brought here with the heroin and all.”

 

“Anthony came to visit me when I was with my Father. I hadn’t seen him or heard from him in over two years. He came drunk as hell to my father’s home and started banging on the door, told my father he’d turned me out like a whore. Yelled, ‘he wanted his little bitch back.’ My Father called the cops and he fled before they got here. My Father cried a lot. Anthony was all coked up. I wasn’t sure what to do. I just froze up terrified in my bedroom as he raved and raged at my Father like a maniac through the door.”

 

“You did the right thing, Angelika,” says Mary solemnly.

 

“This is an important example that we all should learn. People from our past are negative influences. Old friends. Old lovers. These are the people that make us return to our disease,” states Tom.

 

“You may sit down, Angelika. You certainly have come a long way.”

 

Angelika Vine takes a seat at the U-shaped table and returns to her meal of peas, carrots and an undeterminable type of meat.

 

“Would Marius and Cosette please stand,” says family leader Tom.

 

A boyish looking girl with short blond hair and a lanky guy with brown unkempt hair stand up and walk to the front of the table. They look surprised to have been called. The girl wonders who has informed on them. Someone always informed. It was only a matter of time.

 

“I’m bringing you guys up because of the negative contract you’ve formed with each other. I have watched you carefully over the past few weeks. I’ve watched you walk together going and coming from chapel. I’ve seen you talk together whenever you can. I even saw you hold hands one night when the power went out in this building. I feel it is my obligation as a member of this family to stop you two from ruining all that you’ve managed to accomplish and give in to your disease,” said a fat ugly, slob of a half-girl, half-cow named Faith.

 

“This is quite disturbing. You are both senior members of the Family having been here for over a year,” sneers Mary sternly. “This is the kind of shit people pull when they first get here,” she shouts.

 

“How long has this been going on?” Mary asks.

 

“I don’t know what Faith is talking about, Mary. I swear I do not have a negative contract with Marius.”

 

“Are you calling Faith a liar?”

 

She pauses for a moment obviously weighing the options.

 

“Not a liar, but she is seeing something that isn’t there.”

 

“Is she really?” Mary stands up.

 

“Why would she lie,” asks her husband Tom.

 

“She would lie because she thinks bringing people up will make her seem more responsible in the family. Come on Mary, Marius and I know the rules. Why would we violate them now?”

 

“Why is it that I don’t believe you,” sneers Mary again.

 

Marius put his hand to his face covering his eyes. When he looks up he has a look of hatred in his eyes.

 

“Fuck this,” says Marius. “We shouldn’t be ashamed that we’re in love. You’re all a bunch of fucking hypocrites. This place is filled with liars and you’re all lying to yourselves.”

 

“You insolent little shit. Better shut up or we’ll have someone shut you up,” screams Mary in her shrill voice.

 

Cosette gives Marius a look communicating how stupid she thinks it is that he admitted the contract.

 

“What you guys demand is not natural! Who’s to say two people aren’t allowed to fall in love. You people think you’re gods playing around with us like this.”

 

“Get in the corner, Marius!” yells Tom.

 

“Fucking make me!” Marius yells back.

 

Around the table all the boys stood up.

 

“We can do this the easy way or the hard way, Marius.”

 

In a situation like this a man measures his odds. Fight, flee or submit. Slowly and defiantly Marius pulls a chair to the corner, removes his shoes, and sits down facing the wall.

 

“As of now, you’re both on blackout with each other. I’m tempted to put you in the corner too, Cosette, but I have a better idea. You’re going to make a sign and wear it around your neck everywhere you go. The sign will say: ‘SLUT’. Marius, you’re on blackout with girls. Do you want to take some inventory?” says Mary taking her seat again.

 

“Not really,” Cosette mutters.

 

“Sit down. If you’re not ready to take inventory by breakfast you go to the corner too. Understand me?”

 

“Yes, Mary.”

 

Cosette sits down at the table casting a quick look at Marius. Their little romance has ended just like that. It will be impossible for them to communicate. From now on everyone will be watching them.

 

“Sebastian Adon, please stand up,” says the man named Big Bob who looks like someone who might start and finish a bar brawl.

 

He stinks of tobacco and smokes like a fiend. He is short, but looks as if he could snap at any moment. There is a wild look in his eyes. Apparently he is my Program Sponsor. Whatever the hell that means.

 

“Sebastian arrived today. He’s from Manhattan. Sebastian could you tell us a little about yourself? Why you’re here. What your impressions are,” the gruff little man named Big Bob says.

 

I want to tell them they are all insane. I want to tell them I will flee the first chance I get. Instead all I say is:

 

“I’m from New York, but I guess you knew that. I’m not sure really what to make of this place, but I guess everything will be explained to me eventually, at least that’s what everyone says.”

 

“Why are you really here, Sebastian?” asks a suddenly very calm Mary Thénardier .

 

“I’m not really sure.” I answer.

 

“I think you’re here because you have a drinking problem,” suggests Big Bob my sponsor.

 

“But I don’t think I do,” I say.

 

“No one ever does, dear. No one ever does,” says Mary.

 

I wonder if I could ask them a few questions, but opt to keep my mouth shut.

 

“Let’s see,” says Tom as he paws through a file.

 

“Apparently you’re on a no drawing sanction. Terry put him on it. Why is that, Sebastian? Most new arrivals go at least a day without getting on sanctions.”

 

“I suppose Terry thought my drawings were negative. I arrived with a sketchbook. It was taken away during the search.”

 

“Alright. You know what that means. You’re not allowed to draw. If anyone sees Sebastian drawing, be sure to bring him up,” says Mary to my brothers and sisters of Family 4.

 

“Do you have anything else to say before we move on?”

 

“Not really. This place seems nice enough and I look forward to meeting everyone.”

 

“Well isn’t he well mannered,” said Mary. “You may sit back down, Sebastian.”

 

I hope that is the last time I have to get up in front of the Family. I just have to keep under their radar like Red October.

 

***

 

My shadow’s name is Winston Smit. Your shadow goes literally everywhere with you, even to the bathroom. Winston is muscular and seems like he is both intelligent and athletic. He had been assigned to shadow me during dinner. I was also told he would be my Junior Sponsor. Winston is wearing a preppy red sweater, a blue tie, and khakis. I try to imagine what he was like before he came here. A wigro probably.

 

On the surface people go about like normal kids. Talking, laughing, playing board games, and hanging out. What I had heard at dinner scared me. They got right into little Angelika Vine’s head and programmed her to spill everything to us. I saw two people reprimanded for having a crush on each other. I listened to people tell a fat girl she had to eat less because no one likes fat people. Mt. Sinai had been about disjointed attempts at psychoanalyses coupled with periodic bouts of physical brutality to make you submit. Texas had been about behavior modification. This place is something new. They seem to be able to break peoples’ minds.

 

At some point Big Bob takes me aside to have a little mano a mano.

 

“So you know I’ll be your Sponsor, right?”

 

“Yeah.”

 

“How do you feel about being here?” Big Bob asks.

 

“I mean I’m hardly ecstatic about the whole thing.”

 

“Of course you’re not. Your says you have tried to escape from every place your parents put you.”

 

“I don’t like being locked up.”

 

“No one does, but you’re here because you have a problem. Your intake file says that before you were sent away you had a serious drinking problem. It says you tried to kill yourself and that you assaulted someone with a wine bottle. It sounds to me like you have a problem.”

 

I’m not sure what to say to that.

 

“You were a messed up kid on the outside, Sebastian. You hurt a lot of people. Your brother and your parents especially. You’re here because you are sick. And we will cure you. You’re going to hate us, but in the end you will know we’ll have made you a better person. This place is about personal change. Every kid in here was an asocial little deviant in some way or another but we make ‘um better. I’m not gonna beat around the bush. Your parents signed you over to us. You’re in our custody. You’re gonna be here for a while. Minimum stay is a year and a half. Most people stay here longer.”

 

So it was true what the guard Smith in Texas had told me about the minimum stay here. Well, that’s for sure not going to be me.

 

“The file says you’re manipulative. It says you know how to make people do you favors and give you things. It may have worked in Texas. It won’t work here. Your IQ scores are really high, but that doesn’t mean anything. Smart people are harder to break, but by the time we’re done, you’ll make a 180-degree turn in a new direction. You’ll be happy, healthy and successful, and you’ll thank us.”

 

“I just don’t think I have a problem,” I tell him.

 

“You do and the sooner you learn that, the sooner we can help you. It will take time. You’re going to have to hit bottom first.”

 

“What’s hitting bottom?” I ask.

 

“It’s when you finally accept that you aren’t in control, that your life has become unmanageable, and you’re ready to change in a positive direction.”

 

“How do I know when I’ve hit bottom?”

 

“Oh you’ll know.”

 

***

 

After evening Adoration–they go all-out Catholic on Sunday apparently–Winston leads me down the hill from the chapel to the upstairs barrack on the third floor of the Family building. It is the only residential area in all of the Family Building containing two rooms with eight metal bunk beds. Tim says goodnight to us then seals the door activating the alarm system.

 

There are several other boys in the barrack. The rooms are small and painted. There are two rooms with two double-decker bunk beds in each. There are two bathrooms, each connecting to one of the rooms. I meet the other boys. Winston Smit, my ‘shadow’; a quiet Russian kid named Vesiely Pavieda, who everyone calls ‘Vessy’ who sleeps below me; and an over-the-top kid named  ‘Fat Mike,’who is over-weight with extremely Semitic features. Winston is the bunk leader. Erik Blaire is the leader of the adjacent room. He’s the same kid who had earlier helped the Jew Rubin Carter move my stuff over. Erik is clean cut and a natural prep. He has short brown hair and could easily be the poster child of the Foundation. He is one of the top senior members of the Family. The goofy kid Vincent Alba, who I had met earlier, is in the other room. The two others are named Colin and Scotty. Colin has lots of acne and severe ADD. He can’t really follow a conversation or put together a complete thought. Scotty is blonde with glasses and looks like a skater dressed up like a jock. These are my new bunkmates. The newer kids sleep on the top bunk so we have to wake up the person below us if we try to escape.

 

After putting my things in a drawer I ask if I can take a shower. Winston escorts me to the bathroom and tells me I can only shower for four minutes. He then takes a seat on a chair in the bathroom and starts reading a book.

 

“Don’t I get any privacy,” I ask.

 

“Not here you don’t,” Winston Smit responds.

 

I strip down and get in the shower. The water is so cold I begin shivering attempting to get out of the way of the flow.

 

“How do I make the water hot!” I yell in shock.

 

“You can’t. We only get cold water. It keeps people from jerking off in the shower.”

 

I do my best to stand clear of the water while soaping myself up. I rub Pert Plus into my hair and hold my head under the freezing torrent to wash it out.

 

Will checks the stopwatch.

 

“You have two minutes.”

 

I am freezing and decide to end the shower prematurely.

 

Erik Blaire leads the eight of us in prayer before bed. He recites the Lord’s Prayer and thanks God for another day of sobriety. We all get into our beds and Winston kills the lights.

 

An hour later I find that I can’t sleep. The bed is shaking because Vessy is jerking off. The frame shakes just enough to give him away. This is my first night in the Camp outside of Hancock, New York on 431 Chapel Hill Road. I look into the darkness outside my window. I see nothing but the uncertainty of endless night.

 

The next day we awaken before the sunrise. I head to the bathroom to brush my teeth half dazed. I look at my reflection hardly recognizing the kid in the mirror. I look like a leukemia victim. My eyes sunken. All my brown hair gone. When I begin to put on my clothes I find that they all seem to be too small, too tight, as if they aren’t my own clothes. I dress in khaki slacks and a button-down shirt with a green tie the color of pine.

 

Dressed and ready, we march up the hill towards the chapel. The hill is quite steep, treacherous when icy I suppose. Hundreds of internees move together, all drifting slowly. We shuffle in columns up the hill to the chapel.

 

The chapel has been built at the highest point in the compound. From the top of the hill I can look down upon the compound. This is apparently to be my world for two more years, a veritable eternity in the life of a young man.

 

It is still relatively dark and lampposts light the way along the hill. As we walk I wonder why no one uses this time to flee. We enter the wooden and stone chapel through the main entrance. The female internees enter from the rear. Some internees pick up rosaries from off a rack that holds dozens of them. I choose not to partake in any gratuitous displays of worship. When the pews fill up, the kids begin opening folding metal chairs and take their places on the edge of the row. It all happens like clockwork, taught through repetition, carried out in pious silence to the hum of organ music.

 

Nothing is quite as stupid as religion, organized or otherwise. It is difficult for me to get used to the fact I will have to sit in a chapel twice a day. Up until this point I have only entered a religious building a handful of times. My parents used to drag us to the high holidays of Yom Kippur and Rosh Hashanah. The only churches I had ever entered were as a tourist in England and France. Stained glass windows, high ceilings, flying buttresses, take a few pictures and then I was done.

 

A middle-aged priest named Father McMullins with a crew cut and clerical robes enters and assumes the pulpit. He leads us in a solemn chant of the Lord’s Prayer followed by a slew of Hail Marys. Catholicism is such a drole and scary thing. I begin to wonder how such a backwards religion is still so widely practiced. I wonder if any of these kids actually pray or if they do what I’m doing now, letting my eyes wander to the left of the chapel and imagining myself banging out one of my so-called sisters. This is all such incredible bullshit. I can’t believe they make the Jews go through with this. I close my eyes and try to sleep, tired yet caught in a wonderful lust fantasy. I feel someone nudging me.

 

“Say the words,” Winston Smit whispers.

 

“I don’t believe in this,” I whisper back.

 

“Say the words anyway.”

 

“I’m not a Christian.”

 

“Just do it.”

 

I start mumbling the Lord’s Prayer. I wonder how many of my people have been killed in the name of Jesus. Quite a damn few. So many deaths at the hands of pious fanatics convinced their man was the right god-made man and their god, the only God. The prayers drone on. I wonder how long I can last in a place like this.

 

***

Breakfast consists of two pieces of sausage and some runny scrambled eggs, powdered quite likely. A glass of something trying to pass itself off as orange juice sits in front of my place at the table. We set the table the evening before and seats are not assigned. A large, three-part hot plate is plugged into the wall. Our food is in it when we got back from church. Everyone lines up as the girl named Cosette and some chick whose name I don’t know serve us. The Camp is run almost entirely by our labor. Unlike the other places I’d been, there seems to be far more internees than administrators, doctors and guards. Mt. Sinai had three staff members for every patient and the ward was sealed off in a locked hospital wing. The San Marcos Treatment Center had a response team of fifteen guards that could get there within three minutes of a code yellow or green should an incident occur. It was a locked walled, and barbed compound lit with floodlights.

 

I contemplate the elements of the equation as I eat: number of students, number of staff, locality, and the overall probability of escape. I watch Winston Smit more closely than he watches me. He is about twice my size and quite capable of taking me down if he has to. Sudden flight did not seem to be the best option. Winston is never less than five feet away from me.  I had examined the lock and alarm device that sealed me and the seven others into the top floor of the family building. Knowing nothing about electronics, tampering with it does not seem to be the wisest of ideas. The door is physically open, but turning the knob alerts the whole compound. Then it would be run, run, run, but to where?

 

While I think about escape, in reality, it isn’t my highest priority. It isn’t as if I have anywhere to go. At least this place was far better than Mt. Sinai Hospital or San Marcos Treatment Center. At least here the kids seem relatively high functioning. At least here I can attend class and actually accumulate high school credits. A least here there are girls. One way or another, I am going to have to find a way to get rid of Will. The best way seems to be to feign cooperation with the treatment program while I get my bearings.

 

I can tell powdered eggs whenever I eat them. Powdered eggs are a staple food item for almost every lockup. They look like real eggs, sometimes they even taste like real eggs, but I know the truth. It boils down to add water and cook. It would be too much of an expense to serve out that many real eggs each morning. I scoop up the last bit of eggs and place them in my mouth. I wash them down with the orange juice wondering why you have to be eighteen to have a cup of coffee in this place. You can’t smoke at age eighteen, just drink coffee. Tom and Mary tell everyone to ‘hush up and be quiet.’ It’s time to start bringing people up again.

 

***

 

There are no classes because it is Sunday. After the students clean and vacuum the family building, a sign up sheet goes around telling us we can play soccer or watch a movie. Figuring that soccer will allow me to meet kids from other families I sign up.

 

There are way too many kids on each team. With only two facility guards on the field, mass escape would have been easy. Why don’t they all just run, I wonder? There are seven people waiting around sixty-feet out from the goal and two goalies, a kid with no shoes and me.  Everyone else is running around after the ball. I notice again that the kid closest to me isn’t wearing any shoes. His socks are wrapped with garbage bags and duct tape. He seems like a good person to start with. He has on a name tag which says, ‘HELLO MY NAME IS KURTZ’. I remember the pyromaniac Buddhist from LA who was locked up down in Texas with the same name.

 

“Nice shoes, Kurtz. How long ya been here?”

 

“This is my third day,” he answers not making eye contact.

 

“I got here last night,” I mutter not looking at him either.

 

“What family are you in?”

 

“Family Four.”

 

He doesn’t respond.

 

“How do we get out of this chicken-shit outfit?”

 

“That might be a little hard.”

 

“Why?”

 

“Have you talked to these kids? They’re all fucking insane. It’s like they believe that they are really sick and that this place helps them. It’s like everyone’s watching everybody else to make sure they do what they’re supposed to do.”

 

“There aren’t too many guards.”

 

“They don’t need guards because the students guard each other. Everyone wants to get out of here and they connote compliance with progression. They get brownie points for ratting people out so everyone and their sister is an informant.”

 

“Well I’m not,” I say emphatically.

 

“You say that now. We’ll see in a week.”

 

“What do you know about the surrounding area, Kurtz?”

 

“Not a whole lot besides a town called Hancock and a whole lot of forest. My shadow is watching us so we gotta stop talking. Otherwise they’ll put us on blackout. It isn’t safe to talk about shit like this out loud. Pass me a note on a work detail when you think you have a good enough plan,” Kurtz says.

 

A blond kid with short hair crew cut and glasses approaches us covered in sweat.

 

“You two shouldn’t be talking unsupervised. Kurtz, get out on the field. How many times have I told you not to talk to new kids?”

 

“Sorry, Seigfried Sassoon.”

 

I watch Kurtz head out to midfield where an unceasing pursuit of the soccer ball seems to be getting nowhere. A few dozen kids are chasing the ball around with little to no direction or cooperation.

 

“What’s your name?” asks Seigfried Sassoon, a senior member.

 

“Sebastian Adon.”

 

“You shouldn’t talk to other new kids. All you’ll end up doing is talking about negative things that will complicate your treatment.”

 

“We were just talking about the game.”

 

“Maybe so, but watch yourself. The first few months are the hardest and you should try to get off to a good start.”

 

“Are you Kurtz’s shadow?”

 

“Only while we play soccer. I’m from Family 3. He’s from Family 5. It just happens his shadow isn’t much of a soccer player.”

 

“How long have you been here?”

 

“Fourteen months and 27 days.”

 

“So you’ll be leaving soon?”

 

“Probably not until the summer. I’m court-ordered into the program, so at this point I’m just doing time.”

 

“If you don’t mind me asking, what did you do?”

 

“I stabbed my old man.”

 

“Oh.”

 

There really isn’t much one can say to that.

 

“Some people follow the program right off the bat. People like that normally get out of here after 18 months.”

 

“That’s the minimum time?”

 

“Generally. Most stay for closer to two years.”

 

“No one gets out sooner?”

 

“There’s really only four ways you get out of the Family School. Either you finish the program, which is how most kids leave, your parents take you out, or you turn 18 and can walk.”

 

“What’s the fourth way?”

 

“It’s pretty inconsequential ‘cause few really make it,” he tells me.

 

“Make what?” I ask.

 

“An escape.”

 

“You ever try to escape, Ben?”

 

“If I leave the program, I do jail time. It was never in my interest to escape.”

 

“How come Kurtz doesn’t have shoes?”

 

“He tried to run on his second day.”

 

“So his family took his shoes?”

 

“It’s a standard protocol here.”

 

“He isn’t on blackout is he?”

 

“Not yet, but mark my words, he will be if I see you two talking again. New people always think they can sneak around and lay low. It doesn’t take the family leaders long to spot it. Terry Quimper has us constantly analyzing the system in order to improve it. That’s why Family 3 is tight as a drum.”

 

“It was your family my parents visited when they came here to see the school.”

 

“Almost all first time parents visit our family. Terry is one of the primary architects of the system here. Family 3 a show piece.”

 

“That guy scares the shit out of me.”

 

“You learn to understand him.”

 

“I’m sure.”

 

“Like I’m sure you’ve heard, everything makes sense in the end.”

 

Up on the hill on the ridge above the field, three figures move slowly back and forth. They seem to be carrying something heavy in buckets. A fourth figure is watching them. I wonder what they are doing. Seigfried Sassoon rejoins the game.

 

***

 

There are four people in the corner when I get back to Family 4. Marius is still there from last night. Apparently the other three have been put in over the course of the day. Two are seated without shoes and two are standing without shoes.

 

“Why are they in the corner?” I ask Winston Smit.

 

“Fred Hampton cursed out a kid while playing soccer. Marius got put in last night for that thing with Cosette. Cosette got put in after she ripped up her sign and Vessy has been in the corner for the last three weeks.”

 

“Oh. Why do Fred Hampton and Vessy have to stand?”

 

“Standing in the corner is common protocol for anyone who’s been here more than six months and still resists treatment.”

 

“How long has Fred been here?”

 

“I don’t know, maybe seven months and some change. Cosette and Marius are senior members. Some people just try to lie their way through the program, but they get found out in the end. That’s why Vessy is on all these sanctions. He’s been here for like three years and still won’t follow the program.”

 

You lying your way through the program too, Will? I wonder to myself.

 

 

***

 

Negative contract is the term used to describe any joint activity against the treatment plan. Anytime two people help each other cheat on a test, sing a negative song (All rap and techno), make physical contact, plot escape, cursed together or do anything that goes against Family School regulations, it is deemed a negative contract.

 

Negative contracts happen all the time and the Family leaders are always devising new ways to root out people who are secretly conspiring to avoid treatment. The informant system is extremely successful. With most of the students constantly bringing each other up to appear more responsible, negative contracts are sometimes real and sometimes invented. Sometimes a student brings someone up because that person has brought him or her up previously. It is a subtle and brilliant system. Terry had realized a long time ago that using guards would be not only expensive, but that it might encourage more active resistance.

 

It is brilliant. The students guard each other.

 

This means that to get out of here a person has to deceive his peers. Students prevent most of the escapes. Students inform on each other. Students chase down runners. Students pile into vans and are driven to where a runner has been last seen then proceed to chase them down. Since the entire town of Hancock is more than willing to help apprehend runners, call-ins are frequent. If a runner makes it past the perimeter fence they often try to hitchhike through Hancock to Binghamton. Many times the driver will just bring them back to the compound and they are dragged out of the vehicle by students and taken to the quiet room. On other occasions a chase team is assembled, put into one of the three Family School vans, and driven to the area where a runner has been spotted. The chase team is always made up of the boys on the school football team. The team runs down the escaped student and returns them to the school.

 

Anyone who actually makes it out of the area and gets back to their own town or city often finds police waiting to bring them back to the compound. Many families are convinced by the school to hire snatch squads, professional transporters that move deviant young people to holding facilities. It is quite possible that there have been more than three successful escapes. The problem is that no one talks about it. Everyone remembers the date they arrived at the Family School. They always know how many days it has been since they were brought in. All other events are but a dream. We are taught to live in the day. Slowly but surely people stop remembering what they did yesterday and what they are going to do tomorrow. Isolation, division, confusion and conditioning. These are the four real principals of the Family School.

 

Home visits are not allowed for close to a year and a half. The initial meetings between students and their parents are supervised sessions that Terry almost always facilitates. Parents come up to attend workshops on their children’s manipulations. They are warned of the lies their children will tell them to try to be taken out of the school. It is a flawless system in the mind of its creators, turning the dregs of modern society’s youth into productive citizens. It is a holy war they are waging turning lost souls into keepers of the faith.

 

Religion is integrally rooted into the Program. They call it a higher power, but they might as well call it Jesus. With enough bombardment even the most resilient individual begins to lose sight of what he truly believes. Suppression of the individual is what this is all about. You are not unique. You are merely a societal anomaly. You are being taught to behave.  If a student is to re-enter society they have to be broken down and rebuilt with new values and new ways of thinking.

 

***

 

Winston Smit, who is sitting across from me, gives me a kick under the table.

 

“Pay attention,” he whispers sharply.

 

“I am,” I whisper back.

 

Mary gives us an evil look.

 

Angelika Vine, who is sitting next to Mary, whispers something in her ear.

 

“I’d like to bring up Sebastian,” says Angelika.

 

I rise, a bit confused, and stand in front of the table.

 

“A girl in family 5 says you were staring at her during church.”

 

“Staring?” I ask.

 

“Let her finish,” yells Mary.

 

“Because you’re new, we feel it isn’t necessary to make a huge deal out of this, but we wanted you to know the policy here when it comes to relationships within the school.”

 

“I wasn’t…” I try to interject.

 

“Shut up and listen!” Mary bursts out again in a manic rage.

 

“All the girls here are your sisters. You are to treat them as such. Your sisters are not sexual objects. None of your sisters want to kiss you and none of your sisters are keen to your advances. It may be difficult for you to understand this at first, but you will end up in the corner quickly if you continue to behave in this manner. Do you have any questions?” Angelika asks me after her lecture.

 

“Yeah. So say, I think you’re cute. Am I supposed to actually pretend you’re my sister and not feel attracted to you?” I ask.

 

“Precisely,” says Mary.

 

“So you’re telling me not to feel?”

 

“We’re telling you not to lust.” Mary clarifies.

 

“Lust?”

 

“One of the seven sins.”

 

“Lust?” I ask again.

 

“Are you fucking stupid?” asks Big Bob.

 

“No, I just don’t understand why I’m supposed to pretend I’m not attracted to a girl?”

 

“You are not here to form sexual relationships. People like you are too fucked up to actually grasp what it means to love another person. You are sick and you are here to get better. Staring at girls like you want to rape them is not only bad for your treatment, it is a sin and an obvious reflection of you asocial behavior,” explains Big Bob like a tough guy.

 

“I wasn’t…” I try again.

 

“If you don’t understand maybe some time in the corner will help it sink in,” Big Bob says.

 

“Maybe that’s a little premature,” says Tom, the mustached second Family leader who never really yells at anybody.

 

“Do you get anything we’re saying?” asks his wife Mary.

 

“I do, but I just don’t feel that being attracted to a girl is wrong.”

 

“It’s not the attraction that’s wrong, it’s the lust. It’s the objectification of women that needs to stop. People form healthy relationships here based upon a mutual desire to get better. Sexual relationships will only distract you from the program,” Mary explains.

 

“We won’t put you in the corner, but we better not get any more reports that you’re acting out. Alright?” Mary says.

 

“Yeah.”

 

“I didn’t get that. Yeah isn’t a word.” Mary tells me.

 

“I understand.”

 

“Now sit down.”

 

***

 

Everyone is sitting in the Family 4 living room ready to watch a video. My sponsor is in the storeroom behind our unit yelling at one of the other kids. I can’t hear what he’s saying, but his face is bright red and he’s up in the kid’s face. I’m playing chess with Winston Smit and losing like usual. Most of the kids in my family are doing their homework or playing board games. Movie at 10 and then back to the barracks by midnight. A fat woman with red hair who I saw for the first time tonight at dinner motions for me to come over.

 

“Sebastian, my name is Susan Galliford. I’m one of your family leaders. This is your second day here correct?”

 

“Yes m’aam.”

 

“Just call me Susan. You can drop the m’aams and sirs.”

 

“Sure thing, Susan.”

 

“Sebastian, let’s go for a little walk.”

 

“Okay.”

 

She leads me to the administrative office in the main building. It’s the same room I was searched in when I arrived. She asks me to sit down and then removes a thick file from one of the green cabinets.

 

“So let’s get down to business,” she says.

 

“Is this an interview or something?”

 

“Something like that. I just have to ask you a few questions to better frame your treatment. First off, tell me why you’re here.”

 

“I’m not sure exactly.”

 

“Your file says you were transferred here from the San Marcos Treatment Center. What were you doing there?”

 

“They were trying to figure out if I have a mental condition.”

 

“Do you think you have a mental condition?” she asks me.

 

“Not really,” I answer.

 

“Neither do we.”

 

“So why am I here?”

 

“That’s what we’re here to talk about,” Susan says.

 

She pauses to look over the file.

 

“Where were you before San Marcos?”

 

“I was locked up in a mental hospital in New York.”

 

“For how long?”

 

“About a month.”

 

“Why were you hospitalized?”

 

“I tried to kill myself.”

 

“Why would you do a thing like that?”

 

“I was depressed.”

 

“About what?”

 

“About my life.”

 

“Your parents put you in there?” Susan asks.

 

“Yeah.”

 

“Do you resent them for doing that?”

 

“No. Not really,” I say remembering the agony I have been through in the past half year.

 

“Do you have any idea what you put them through?” Susan asks me.

 

“Something terrible. But I think the places I’ve been in mess people up worse,” I tell her emphatically.

 

“I doubt it. Do you think people like you can just run free and do whatever you feel like? Do you even comprehend all the hell you put your family through?”

 

“They didn’t want me around so they had me locked up. That’s what it really comes down to.”

 

“You don’t really care about them do you?”

 

“What do you mean?”

 

“You don’t even love your own Mother and Father.”

 

“I don’t feel anything.”

 

“What about what you’ve done? What about all the people you’ve hurt?”

 

“That’s why I’m here isn’t it?”

 

“You don’t really believe you have a problem do you?” Susan says.

 

I think about it for a second.

 

“I don’t know.”

 

“So maybe we should just let you leave. There’s just one problem,” Susan continues.

 

“What’s that?”

 

“You can’t seem to function in normal society.”

 

“What do you mean?”

 

“You do bad things, Sebastian. Horrible things. You hurt people. You lie and steal. You are an alcoholic. People have given up on you.”

 

“My friends haven’t given up on me,” I tell her.

 

“You don’t have any friends.”

 

She is staring at me across the table. Her red hair is bright under the neon lights of the office. She is wearing tacky gold earrings. I want to punch her in her fat, stupid face.

 

“Have you ever loved anyone in your entire pathetic life?” Susan asks me sarcastically.

 

“Yeah,” I respond.

 

“Who? Roxanne?” Susan asks.

 

How the hell did she know who Roxanne was? I felt a tear start to form in my left eye.

 

“Now I know you’re sick,” she says to me with a sneer.

 

“Fuck you.”

 

“You mean fuck yourself. It’s what you’re good at. You couldn’t even get Roxanne, the one person you ever cared about to love you.”

 

I brush the tear away. I feel rage and pain just at the mention of her name.

 

“I know you tried. All of us tried but in the end we had a disease and there was only one way to stop destroying our lives and relationships.”

 

“Fuck you,” I repeat quietly.

 

“She was disgusted by you. You made her sick. You know why?” Susan rails on.

 

I feel the tears running down my cheek.

 

“I’ll tell you. She was disgusted by you because let’s face it, who could ever love someone as self-centered and vile as you, Sebastian?”

 

“Leave me the fuck alone.”

 

I want to get up and leave. I want to be alone to feel shitty about what I have done with my life.

 

“You will not get better until you ask for help,” Susan tells me.

 

“I don’t want your fucking help!” I yell.

 

“You’ll fight the treatment hard, won’t you?”

 

“Stop fucking talking, you fat bitch!”

 

“Roxanne must regret ever having met you.”

 

“STOP SAYING HER NAME!”

 

“It makes you angry when I tell you about people you hurt?”

 

“I never hurt her.”

 

I am really crying now. My face is wet with tears. I want to crawl out into the woods somewhere to die. I hate myself for everything I have become.

 

“Yes you did. You’ve hurt everyone. And now it’s just the two of us. The two of us with nowhere to go and nothing to do. Nothing to do but get better,” Susan concludes.

 

ג

 

A new kid arrives at lunchtime. They introduce him as Robert Childen. He seems partially retarded and reminds me of a wigger Adam Sandler. When they ask him to get up in front of our family he tells everyone to fuck themselves. I like him right away. They sent him right to the corner. Then he refused to sit in the corner so they sent him to the Hole. The Hole is what I call the quiet rooms in the back of the gym. They are just like the quiet rooms of a mental hospital.

 

People expect mental hospitals to have padded cells. They get this idea from watching movies about mental institutions.  This is not the case. Most detention blocs, or at least the three places I have been, don’t use padded cells at all. Here at the Family School there are two cells roughly six feet by six feet with a floor pad and a camera inside. The walls are painted blue and are supposed to be scratch proof.

 

Unlike at Mt. Sinai or San Marcos you are not sedated when you act up at the Family School. This means that a person put in the Hole is likely to bash his head against the walls, punch and kick the door, and defecate in the cell. I heard from a loose-mouthed senior member that a person was not let out until they sat in silence for an entire day. Then they are sent back to the corner.

 

I want to see the holding cells so I volunteered to mop the gym when it came time to volunteer for work detail. We pick up the mops from the supply room and are sent over to the main complex building. My shadow won’t let me near the quiet rooms, but I can hear Robert yelling at the top of his lungs as he tries to kick in the door. The other kids on my crew act as if they don’t hear a thing.

 

***

 

Fred Hampton the soccer buff and I spend our work detail in the kitchen where we can steal a little extra food. Both of us are incredibly quick when it comes to doing the dishes and always work in the back room on the dish line. The kitchen has three separate chambers. One is the cooking area that holds enormous vats to boil soup in as well long stove tops for mass cooking. There is a huge walk-in refrigerator. The last chamber is the cleaning room, which contains a three-person dish line and a dishwasher for silverware, cups and plates. The dishwasher is a massive steel box and everything goes into it on plastic mesh trays. Someone has to feed the tray racks into the machine and manually open it with a large lever every three minutes to push in a new tray. Kitchen Crew is a twelve-person detail that never takes less than half an hour because the crew will forfeit their next meal if they don’t have the kitchen cleaned in that amount of time. There is a small office where a staff member sits to watch the detail. All knives and lighting implements are locked in the office for obvious reasons.

 

It takes six crews a day to operate the kitchen: a Prep Crew to prepare each meal and a Clean-Up Crew to do the dishes after each meal. The crew schedule changes each month. For the month of September, Family 4 is assigned to lunch cleanup.

 

***

 

Ruben ‘Bunchy’ Carter is certainly not a rabbi, but he teaches me the second round of my religion, that of the Jews. On the outside the half-Black, half-Hebrew Stuyvesant High School student had been an industrious coke dealer. Ruben Carter is one of the internees. He is the only senior member that leads a religious service.

 

He has a curly black Jewfro and is dressed well for a Family School student just barely pushing the limit of what might be considered a subculture negative look. As he said of himself, ‘I’m an affirmative action wet dream.’

 

Rubin was one of the first Jews interned in the Camp. It used to bother him how few of them there were, never more than fifteen at any given time. Eventually he got over it. It was Rubin that had won the one day of prayer for his Hebrew brothers and sisters. It was Rubin who had fought to get the bus that took the well-behaved Jews to the synagogue in Binghamton once a month. When he was told that he had to conduct services in the church, he had politely requested that they cover the crucifix and the statue of St. Francis Assisi and the Virgin Mary. They had granted his requests. Rubin has almost single-handedly created the Jewish community of the Family School aided by another senior member Ian Simeon and an Irish Jew in Family 4. They have fought for this minor freedom.

 

Rubin believed in the program because before he had been interred here he was heavy into drug dealing and all the negative implications that come along with that trade. That had almost gotten him killed. Yet as much as he trusts the Family leaders and retains his status as a senior member, in the back of his mind he resents the institution’s policies that undermine his religious beliefs.

 

Jews in the Family School are not allowed to keep shabbos. Everyone works on Saturday, Jew or not. Jews in the are not allowed to keep kosher. Everyone eats the same thing and there are no exceptions. Rosary beads are mandatory and Jews are expected to pray with them substituting Hail Mary for Baruch HaShem.

 

Rubin deosnt’ not believe the school’s policies were anti-Semitic. The Family School is predominantly Christian and the AA program is rooted in that faith. He knows not to push too hard too fast. Everything in this place is gradual. Gradual treatment and gradual change.

 

Rubin Carter heard that there is a new Jew in Family 4.  I had been in a week before he got to see me. There had been no way to substantiate this because he is on a six-month blackout for getting into an argument with Terry about the issue of keeping kosher. Rubin secretly believes that Terry has done this to spite him. The blackout prevents him from leading services and it prevents him from interacting with ¾ of his congregation. He has prayed to not be angry with Terry for putting him on these sanctions, but in the end there is a hatred that he cannot not suppress. Terry Quimper brought that out in people.

 

***

 

I can’t get over how easy the schoolwork is here. I’m sitting in a Global 1 history class with kids a year or two younger than me. I got stuck repeating freshman classes because I never got credit for any of my Bronx Science courses. The teacher is talking about the Second World War. At least it’s more interesting than any of my other classes.

 

Most of the kids in my class are new kids and aren’t from my family. The classroom can hold about fifteen kids and has two marker boards on the wall behind the teacher. The teacher has a desk with a computer, which is, of course, off limits to us. The textbooks we use are fairly new, but paint an even more candy-coated picture of US history than the ones we used at Bronx Science. There are two windows in the classroom that face out up the hill to the barracks. Sometimes Mr. West strays from the text and provides us with handouts from more in-depth sources. The book sums up the Holocaust in a single paragraph. I skipped ahead and it has half a chapter on the cold war and the Soviet Union adding up to sum total of six pages.

 

I’m convinced they don’t want us thinking too hard. From what I have observed it seems the entire system rests upon the presumption that we will inevitably trust them enough to be molded in their image. But what the hell are they? That’s the question. The staff are all recovered addicts and alcoholics, a bit right of center, patriotic and submissive to their narrow version of God.

 

I have not prayed sincerely since that first night. Whatever saved my life that night on Nadia’s terrace must have a cruel sense of justice. I offered my life or a lifetime of doing It’s will. And here I am locked up in a third camp, a facility far more sophisticated than either Mt. Sinai or San Marcos.

 

Kurtz passed me a note earlier today. He said we ought to escape as soon as possible, that the place is getting to him and that he needs my help. The problem is everything. Logistically Kurtz and I are never alone to come up with any sort of plan. It is difficult to even land the same work crew. When I said hello to him in the hall he said, “Blackout,” the magic word for non-existence.  We have study hall together twice a week. Besides that, we have no contact. There are other more substantial problems. There is no way I am going to outrun Winston Smit in fight or flight. He is easily twice my size. Like most of the senior members he is a straight A student and a jock. There is no way I can get the doors open without alerting the entire compound.

 

Even if I do make it off the compound,  I don’t have any idea where I am or how I can get back to New York. And once I get back to New York I have no idea how I can evade capture. The Family works over the parents as well as the internees. I am on blackout with my parents for another three weeks. They had attended an orientation with Terry and other parents of the internees. They call us students, but I know better. I don’t know what went on in the orientation but I have a feeling it was divide and conquer. I asked Will what they tell the parents and he says that Terry educates them about the things I’d try to say to get released from the program. The reason for the month long blackout with my parents is so they can work all of us over enough to insure that I am not going anywhere. According to Susan and Terry, I am stuck here until I turn eighteen. That gives them over two years to break me.

 

Perhaps this is my hard penance.

 

I am not so inclined to believe that someone up there likes me. I don’t believe in karma, reincarnation or the luck of the Irish. Come to think of it, the Irish have had pretty shit historical luck. And until that night on Nadia’s balcony I did not believe in God. Had I heard something divine or was that all in my head, more Mike Washington schitzo-babble? The doctors said something was wrong with my brain. I have no reason to doubt them. The drugs keep the nightmares away. They stop the voices. I haven’t had a dream I can distinctly remember since May. They have me on something called Tegratol. They kept me so doped up most of time in both Mt. Sinai and San Marcos that all I did was try to sleep them out of my system.

 

I can’t emember what Donny Gold looks like anymore. I try but all I see is just a blank face with a blue FR baseball cap. It makes me sad when I think about him. I talked with him on the phone in Texas. He told me that everyone was on drugs and that maybe it was for the best that I was away from it all. And then there’s Roxanne.

 

I think about her every day. I see her in flashes when I dream. I don’t remember what the dreams are about but I wake up feeling like I’ve spent some more time with her, time that I know she’d never allow in the real world. She has become a symbol of hope to me. For three weeks of my life I was with someone who made me feel happy and then I had destroyed it. I know she never cared about me the way I cared about her. I had devoted myself in the last weeks of my stay in San Marcos to filling three notebooks with poetry lamenting my one unrequited love. I know I don’t deserve a girl like her. All I deserve is everything bad that’s happened to me. But still a man can pine.

 

Stupid  prayers are uttered daily but surely unheard because they are empty. If this God did have a plan; albeit a plan that I did not fully comprehend, it would only be revealed if I played my part. There is no way I am going to escape and even if I do, where am I going to flee? Unless I change my ways they will destroy me, that is to say, I will destroy myself.  I would surely return to the nightmares and poison. To beat them and to beat my evil ways, I had to surrender to them like it or not.

 

In a complete about face of my double thinking, I decided I was going to bring up, inform them of my plot with Kurtz.

 

***

Bang. Bang. And then a shit ton more bellowing, I hear him yelling as I sweep the gymnasium.

 

“What the fuck do these stupid motherfuckers think that I can’t handle? Keep me locked in this fucking cell for weeks! When I get out I’ll break every fucking bone in that Terry faggot Quimper motherfucker’s face! I’ll burn this place to the fucking ground. FUCK!” yells Robert in a thick Jersey accent.

 

Robert Childen hits the door so hard his knuckles started bleeding. He had been pounding away at the door all day as if he might break it down and make flight to freedom.

 

“YOU COCKSUCKAS!” he yells as he continued his portal barrage.

 

He kicks the door. He punches the door. All they had given him to eat was a tuna sandwich and a cup of water. The tuna is dry and old and surely leaves a foul taste in his mouth.

 

“When I get out I’ll BEAT THE SHIT out of all of you Motherfuckas!”

 

Robert was apparently brought to the Family School from his home in North Jersey shackled in the back of a transport van escorted by two big Black guards. He tried to hit one of them so they doped him up and chained his ass down in the back of the van.

 

I learn later Robert is fifteen and part Italian. He smoked pot and drank profusely. He had gotten a girl pregnant and refused to admit it was his kid. The girl had been forced to get an abortion. Robert stole. Robert got into fights. A year ago he had broken the jaw of a student at his school because the kid wouldn’t let him copy his test. Robert was an angry kid and his parents, as they say in AA, were sick and tired of being sick and tired. Two years ago he stole the family car and crashed it into a neighbor’s yard. His father had disowned him and his mother wanted him locked up in a juvie. Because of his age there wasn’t much they could do.  The family met with a consultant whose job it was to place kids like Robert in a variety of programs around the country designed to straighten out delinquents. For a fee he referred Robert to the Family School. His parents read about its wholesome yet revolutionary approach to getting youth back on track and signed him over to the school. And here he was.

 

“YOU FUCKAS, YOU SMALL DICKED PUSSY ASS BITCHES! Let me out! I have to take a piss!”

 

Robert peers out the tiny window on the door. The student guarding him is gone. Sitting in the chair is a tall, lanky, elderly looking man with grey hair that looks like an evil Mr. Rogers. Robert recognizes the man.

 

I quietly sweep and eavesdrop.

 

“TERRY YOU FUCK! I’m gonna Kick YOUR FUCKIN’ ASS!”

 

“I heard you were calling for me so I decided to drop by,” says Terry Quimper.

 

“FUCK you.”

 

“I’ve decided I know what to do with you, Robert. Shall I share my plan with you now or would that just ruin the suspense?”

 

“Go fuck yourself, ya faggot.”

 

“We need to work on that vocabulary of yours, Bob. May I call you Bob?”

 

Terry didn’t wait for a response.

 

“So, here’s the plan, Bob. I’m gonna leave you in there for three days. You’ll get one tuna sandwich and one cup of water each meal. If you curse or even so much as hit the door, you won’t get fed. You’ve already lost tomorrow’s breakfast. If you remain quiet for three days I will let you out and you can meet your family. Sound fair?”

 

“Go fuck ya’self. How’s that for a plan?”

 

“I want to share something with you, Bob. I can be your friend. I can be the best friend you’ve ever had. I can get you off drugs and alcohol. I can get you into college. I can help you get your life back together. Or I can be an evil prick. Everyone gets a little leeway here so I’ll give you a couple days. I can make your life a living hell. Just remember that Bob.”

 

Robert looked directly into Terry’s eyes and banged as hard as he could at the glass.

 

“You’ll never fuckin’ change me, ya queer prick!”

 

“Using a popular cliché, that’s what they all say,” Terry says as he settles back in the chair for the evening.

 

***

 

Class is over. We are back in Family 4 doing homework while we wait for dinner. I decide that I should tell Winston Smit about my decision.

 

“Winston, I need to talk with you,” I say.

 

Winston put down his books and asked Big Bob if he could take me down to the pond for a chat. Big Bob reluctantly agreed only because he trusted Winston’s commitment to the program. There is very little a senior member couldn’t do in the name of helping his shadow. He can outrun me if I make a break for it.

 

We walk down to the ground level and head out to the pond and the picnic benches. It is still light out, but the day is quickly fading.

 

“You try and run, I’ll catch you,” Winston starts.

 

“I’m not gonna run. I was thinking a lot about my treatment today. I want to work the program. I want to take the first step.”

 

“Are you trying to bullshit me?”

 

“No. I realize that if I ever want to be happy I have to change.”

 

“What makes you think you’re ready to take the first step? You’ve been here a week.”

 

“I know. But, I know I need to make some serious changes in the way I live my life.”

 

“What made you come to this conclusion?”

 

“There is this girl named Roxanne on the outside. She is the only girl I ever in loved. She isn’t into drugs and alcohol. She is a good student. She is a sweet heart, everything that a nice guy could want. I won her over for a little while, but it didn’t take long for her to see through my shit. She had heard how I treated girls and was wise to my game. Only time I ever really liked a broad and I lost her over, well over being a sinner man.”

 

“You get healthy for your own damn self. You don’t do it to win back a broad,” Winston tells me.

 

“I know.”

 

“Can you really admit that there is a power greater than yourself? Are you ready to submit?”

 

“I believe in God, Winston. I didn’t want to admit it at first but I do believe. I believe that only through God will I be happy. Only through God will I be a better person.”

 

“I’m guessing you want to pursue your Jewish faith?” Winston asks.

 

“Yeah.”

 

“I’m not gonna lie to you. Being Jewish is hard here. There isn’t a spiritual counselor like Father McMullins or Pastor Palmer. Rubin and Ian Simeon do most of the Jewish faith work on the compound. You know Ian right?”

 

“Blonde kid in our family? I thought he was Irish?”

 

“I think he’s half Irish. You should talk to him and find out about the services. You won’t be allowed to leave the compound for a few months, but there are services on Tuesday and Friday.”

 

“So what do I do now?”

 

“I’ll bring you up at dinner and you can tell the family what you told me.”

 

“Sounds like a plan. There’s something else I need to let you know about.”

 

“A negative contract? With who?”

 

“This kid named Kurtz from Family 5 passed me a note today telling me we should escape. I met him my second day here and we talked about fleeing back to New York. Until today I was really considering it.”

 

“You’ll have to tell the Family and then tomorrow go and bring this Kurtz kid up in Family 5.”

 

“Alright.”

 

“It’s getting dark. We should head back inside.”

 

ד

You can lie to a lot of people. If you’re good enough, you can even lie to yourself. People do it every day. They convince themselves that they are great lovers or fighters. They impress people with fancy clothing and tall tales of self-aggrandizement. My old friend Izzy Vitz is cut from this cloth.  Lying to other people is easy.  Lying to yourself takes time and repetition. To fool yourself you must first learn to detest something about yourself so much that you need a justification to keep on going.

 

When I was a little kid I got picked on in school viciously. The Depacote pills that they put me on to control my petit mal seizures made me eat too much. I got kind of chubby like my old man. Girls were never interested in me and I never got picked for anyone’s team in gym class. Every night I’d come home and feel real shitty about myself. One particularly sullen night my babysitter and surrogate sister, Natalie Desmond, asked me what was the matter. I told her that I was miserable in school and that all the other kids picked on me all the time. I was probably about ten at the time. Natalie told me that it was just a part of growing up and that it wouldn’t matter when I got older. I told her it was easy for her to say. And then she told me something that I’ll never forget. She told me how to control my dreams.

 

We were sitting in my parent’s apartment at Waterside Plaza. She had just snuck out for a cigarette and I could smell it on her clothing. She sat me down across from her at our four-person dining room table.

 

“You’re a good kid, Sebastian, but there’s an important lesson you have to learn.”

 

“What is it?”

 

“Life is hard. People are assholes, young and old. Sometimes you have to cling to your dreams and shut out all the negative shit that people want to put on you.”

 

“How?”

 

“With control over your own mind.”

 

“I don’t understand.”

 

“You can train yourself to forget painful memories. You can also create dreams that make you feel better and allow you to do whatever you want when you go to sleep. And that’s just the beginning of what you can learn.”

 

“That’s impossible. You can’t control your dreams.”

 

“You can and I can show you how. When you’re about to go to bed, close your eyes and concentrate on an image. Repeat it over and over in your head. Try to visualize whatever it is you want to dream about and focus your mind on it. Start small. As you get better at it you can create whole worlds and storylines, wind them all together.”

 

“Like meditating?”

 

“Yep. All it is, is breathing, meditation and regaining control of your mind.”

 

That night I went to work on blocking out memories and creating new ones. If I had been made fun of, I changed it to a memory about being popular. If I had done something particularly stupid or embarrassing, I reversed the situation in my mind. After months of practice I could begin to block things out and then came the risky process of rewriting my memories.

 

***

 

When Winston Smit and I are coming back from mowing the lawn I see four kids with buckets walking back and forth on the hill.

 

“What are they doing?” I ask Winston.

 

“It’s a work sanction. Pointless labor designed to break people who don’t work the program.”

 

“You ever get put on one?”

 

“Yeah once. They really get you back in line. I was on mine for like two weeks. They had me hauling cinder blocks towards the end. They set them up in rows and I just picked um up, carried them to the next one, picked up another and carried it on over and over and over again. You will never accept what they tell you until you hit bottom.”

 

“I hit bottom once and I accept what they tell me now,” I tell him trying to also convince myself.

 

“Nope, you don’t get it yet. You’re going through the motions just like every other kid does in their first few weeks. You believe in God. You pray at church. You go to class. But you haven’t truly come to terms with your disease. A part of you just wants to get out of here. You pretend like you’re gonna work the program, but trust me, your true colors will come out.”

 

“And then they’ll put me on a work sanction?”

 

“If you refuse to work the program.”

 

I watch the four kids carting rocks two buckets to a person. Two shadows are watching them yelling for them to move faster. Will brings me to the bottom of the hill and I suppose he wants me to get a good look at what’s apparently in store for troublemakers. This won’t happen to me I tell myself. I plan to work my program and get out of here as soon as I can. I try to lie to myself about wanting to change, but I knew the moment I sold out Kurtz in front of his family that I was becoming like them. I still can’t decide to what degree I buy what they are telling us. It’s like Christian fundamentalism mixed with behavior mod.

 

“Don’t you think it’s a little simplistic to blame everything we’ve done wrong on alcohol?”

 

“I think it makes perfect sense. What good could possibly come from wasting one’s life drinking poison?”

 

“Most of the real bad things I did, I did sober.”

 

“You did it with an alcoholic’s mentality.”

 

Whatever that means. I am really already beginning to go back into my old train of thought. As much as I want to believe this system will help me, my doubts are returning.

 

I have just gone to Family 5 with Winston Smit to bring up Kurtz. The look in his eyes was desperate as if he couldn’t believe I was selling him out. They took away his shoes and put him in the corner. It wasn’t so hard to bring someone up. One of the leaders of Family 5 complimented me on my decision and said that if I continued to work the program I’d be off shadow in no time.

 

What really bothers me is my art class on Friday.

 

The art teacher Mr. Yuri Yurimov speaks with a thick Russian accent. There is art on the walls of the classroom, all replications of old masters. It is surprising how good the students are at copying these famous paintings. Mr. Yurimov asked me go through a pile of famous paintings and pick one that I wanted to reproduce. I asked him if I could just do my own. He said that was not the object of the class. He looked me straight in the face and said he would fail me if I didn’t copy the work of the masters. Like a Stalinist Norman Rockwell he told me that nothing I could create would come close the work of previous artists until I fully understood the technical mastery that went into their pieces.

 

I find it strange coming from an art teacher that I’m not supposed to create my own art. I have looked forward to this class as a way to get around my no drawing sanction. I find it telling of the Program that we copy older works instead of creating our own. I chose a bleak picture of a Russian fief. The dark sky reminds me of the dreams I used to have. I haven’t had a dream in weeks. There are six other kids in the class all replicating work.

 

Then it dawned on me. To achieve sobriety we are supposed to abandon our free will. We are supposed to buy everything they tell us. They plan to remodel us in their image. The thought of it chills me to the core.

 

***

 

Vessy is going to turn 18 within the week. If he’s so inclined, he can walk he tells he one night before bed in the barracks. At the Family School people that leave the program when they become legal adults take what is referred to as the long walk. The compound is roughly three miles from the main road. A person who leaves the program before their treatment is finished takes that long walk up the hill, past the staff houses, up another hill and past the fields. The staff tells us that this long walk will be the short road back to relapse. It is called the long walk because every step you take away from the compound before you are ready means that you have consciously returned to the disease that will consume you if left untreated.

 

Vessy is firmly committed to the fact that in three days he is going to leave. Other senior members have had little one-on-ones with him at the behest of the family leaders but to no avail. He has spent three years of his life in the compound. Everything about it sickens him. The hypocrisy, the self-denial and the pious bullshit. He is ready to return to living like a real person. He has not seen the real world in three years. A part of him is unsure he will be able to adjust. That is what this place does to you more than anything else. It separates you from the sins of the world and tells you everything that isn’t embodied in its bold new doctrine is a road back to perdition.

 

Vessy should be a senior member. He has been here longer than nearly every other internee. He has had his lapses into believing the things they feed you. He has done the religious thing. He has done the hitting bottom thing. He has brought people up and he knows the ins and outs of bullshitting the other kids. But you can’t fool Terry. Terry always told Vessy he would walk. For over five months now Vessy has begun to slip. He shows up to work detail Jell-O Brained. He flirts with girls. He stopped praying. The closer he gets to being 18 the more he feels like it is time to leave. He has done his time. He paid for what he did. He is off coke and doesn’t really see a good reason to go back to it.

 

Whenever Terry thinks a senior member is going to walk he strips them of everything. He is determined to make their final weeks in the school as painful as possible. Many family leaders think this tactic is counter-productive and even contributes to some of the kids leaving.

 

Terry doesn’t care.

 

He wants them to get a taste of what awaits them if they leave and continue to use drugs. He wants them disgraced. That’s why Vessy is carting rocks up the hill with bags for shoes. That’s why Vessy is in the corner. That’s why Vessy is eating day-old tuna sandwiches and is on a poverty sanction that has resulted in most of his possessions being taken away from him. In the end it doesn’t matter. In three days this long dark chapter of his life will be over and he will be free.

 

***

 

Robert Childen, the huge wigger, is walking up the compound hill carrying two buckets of rocks. He’s out of the Hole. Supervised by two other students, his detail involves picking up rocks at the bottom of the hill and bringing them to the top. Then he dumps the rocks and brings two more buckets back down the hill. He is on a work sanction for three days before being integrated into Family 4. The plastic buckets are big and heavy but physical labor beast the quiet room in which he has been confined to eating tuna sandwiches for the past week.

 

Occasionally the two students guarding him ask him how he is doing, but he ignores them. They had taken him out to the hill at about 5:30 in the morning. It is real sunny out and Robert is sweating profusely. In theory he could drop the bucket and run. Eventually he’d get to the edge of the compound, jump the fence and head in the general direction of Jersey. The compound is large, but there aren’t any guards. Robert isn’t thinking about consequences in a particularly rational way. He’d come here in shackles and he knows he’ll probably leave the same way. Everyone keeps talking to him about juvie like he should be afraid of it. One way or another he know that’s where he is heading. At this point he really doesn’t care. He doesn’t rationalize what he has done nor does he have some abstract desire for punishment. There is just a dull pain that never fully subsides. It is only slightly pacified by instant gratification. So as he passes his two student guards he swings one of the buckets at the bigger of the two and hits him in the head with a bucket full of rocks. Then he takes off running down the hill and across the field.

 

***

Carlson is the only Black staff member. He never yells and just about everyone thinks he is a good guy. He works in Family 4 and has just announced that they needed volunteers to capture ‘a runner’ as they called it. Some new kid called Robert has just taken off. All the male members of the family not on shadow raise their hands, as not volunteering is always suspect and can result in getting brought up. Rick Best and Fred Hampton both raise their hands. Carlson selects ‘the Best’ but not Hampton because no one trusts him after he tried to escape three months ago. Along with several of the bigger, more athletic boys, Carlson and a handful of volunteers from Family 5 load up in a van from the parking lot and head off the compound to the road where they believe Robert is heading.

 

***

 

Vessy, Marius and Cosette are all still in the corner.

 

All three have had their shoes taken away. Marius and Cosette are seated, but Vessy has been made to stand. As he stands there staring at the wall he hopes Robert will be able to avoid the snatch squad and make it. It is real easy to run, but few get away. Vessy has seen quite a few successful runs in his day, but most of the time the cops pick the kid up and bring him back.

 

Vessy realizes that this place casts an invisible net over you and makes you believe you need it to stay sober and sane. People in the Family School are definitely changed by the Program, but is that really the right idea? Vessy realizes that in his three years here he has changed a great deal. But what is worse? The monster he had been or this thing he has become, which he believes to be incapable of surviving in this world or the one outside. For three years this stretch of farm has been his world. There have been a couple trips off for this or that but when you dream you are still here and the prospect of separation is causing anxiety.

 

Staring at the wall is tedious and he thinks that maybe he should just leave now, but he knnow that he has to wait. Three days and that will be that. He’ll probably drink and do drugs soon after but anything is better than this place. The disease makes more sense than attempts at defying human nature. “An unnatural place producing unnatural people, its fodder the broken torn,” is what he believes a sign above front gate should read. Soon he will be gone. The tuna fish sandwich coming for lunch just doesn’t hold the same allure.

 

***

 

Around 3:30pm, in the town of Hancock, New York, the local kids are coming home from school. They watch in amusement as a van pulls up, a group of guys jump out, and start chasing some kid down the street. The kids from the van tackle the kid who is running and escort him back to the van. And as if nothing has happened everyone goes right on about their business. This kind of thing happens from time to time in Hancock.

 

“Just the cult doing it’s housekeeping,” one of the local kids observes out loud.

 

ה

Until I discovered booze and young girls, school was easy. Low and behold I find it easy again.

 

I talk in all my classes and I know what I’m saying because for once, I do the readings. That’s not totally true. I used to be a good student at UNIS. The classroom takes up most of our time here at the Family School.

 

I feel uncomfortable with my shaved head and dress clothes that don’t fit. I just attended a lecture on presentable dressing. The instructor described how on the outside we tried to define ourselves with the bizarre and tasteless clothing we wore because we lacked real substance. He told us that one’s character is presented for the first time with one’s dress. The more tasteful the dress, the better we will be received.

 

They really cover the bases here. They are reinventing us. Since we all came here fairly broken from other institutions this is not as hard a feat as it might seem. However, every person holds onto memories of their friends and of those times on the outside. They tell us drugs and alcohol are to blame for the way we are. We begin to believe it after awhile because for every single good memory we have, there are many more bad ones.

 

I have arrived at a state of indifference. Each day one learns new lessons about our lives on the outside. Yesterday a Black kid, there were maybe a dozen here, got up and talked about how rap music poisons our generation.

 

My indifference stems from two places. First, I feel that fighting them will get me nowhere. Second, I finally realize that if I want to be happy, everything about me has to change.

 

***

Robert Childen has been eating a whole lot of tuna fish and is developing a keen awareness of geology. That is of is just a fancy way to say they have been making him pick up rocks all day. After being restrained in the quiet room for two more days, Terry has put him back on the work sanction, this time with four shadows not two. Robert’s job is to pick up rocks, put them in a wheelbarrow, and then run about a hundred feet with the filled wheelbarrow to build a rock pile on the other side of the field. It is hard work but actually doing it is Robert’s new fuck-you. He figures he’d better play it cool as Terry holds over his head the filing of assault charges for hitting his shadow with a bucket of rocks. His arms ache and his legs are tired. It is real hot outside. The dirt from the field cakes his hands and pants legs. He asks a shadow for some water, but the shadow shakes his head.

 

“Four more runs and we’ll bring you a cup.”

 

Robert figures he’ll try to run again pretty soon although that had certainly not ended well. Somewhere between the rocks, the tuna and quiet room he realizes hardship lies more in resistance than in just doing what you are told.

 

“Hang in there, Robert,” said another shadow cheering him on.

 

***

 

I am doing dishes. There is a three-person conveyer belt of Rick Best, Fred Hampton and me banging out the messy pots and pans that come from our very mediocre dinner.

 

Rick and Fred are theoretically both on blackout with me because Fred has been in the corner and Rick Best has a six-month blackout anyway. They act as if I do not exist at all. No eye contact even. I like these two a lot for some reason. I can tell that on a certain level they are defying the treatment. Of course they will not admit it to me for all they can say is “blackout,” but I know they’re up to something. There is a vibrancy in their eyes that shows they do not buy into this place completely. I can relate because neither do I. Sometimes Rick talks to Fred on the wash line, but he’s really addressing both of us.

 

Under the surface of all the piety and clean-cut values is a perversion of individualism. It is not just our vices that have gotten us here, it is as fundamental as who we are. The 180° turnaround that we are being asked to make relies on a rejection of absolutely everything we have been before. Texas had taught me that this was bigger than one person. Texas had made me realize that fighting symptoms does not cure the broader disease. The disease overtakes you in the end. Every single thing about the Family School is programmed to reorder the way you think about things.

 

Like America itself, a righteous intention has resulted in a deviant breed. This compound is a world unto itself. Inside its walls 200 students from across America are being re-socialized. This is a place to die and be reborn. The god they want me to accept is their god. Their call to admit powerlessness relies on my submission.

 

This is impossible for me. I have already died many times before, yet those experiences have not instilled in me a real sense of bottom. Every week someone tells about how they have “hit bottom.” Some of the stories are pretty bad. Giving hand jobs for drugs, being badly beaten, a rape here and there.  Like in Texas, these stories are much worse than mine. The 12-Step Program relies completely on surrender. When you do not surrender, you do not change. You only get the strength to beat your dependency on drugs, alcohol and other vices through faith.

 

So why don’t I just run? Are Rick Best and Fred Hampton going to chase after me if I slip out the screen door and run out across the field into the woods? They probably will because their ability not to be programmed relies on the others thinking that they are on the right track. Whatever illicit compromise is between them extends only to that particular partnership. They would chase me to protect themselves. Even if can escape I am still in limbo. I cannot go back to my friends and family like this. I would still be the same person as before. There is right thinking and there is right practice. The key to both is neither who I was or in what this place wants me to be.

 

Each week they reduce my meds. This means the dreams will return. In the absence of a vocal God I might just have to settle for a cryptic imaginary friend.  About two days after discontinuing my medications the dreams return.

 

***

I find myself in some sort of stone quarry. A massive excavation, a big dig. The dunes surround the quarry in all directions. Deep, cavernous trenches into a massive cave of a pit. I can’t move at all and I’m covered in white dust. I’ve been dumped here, partially buried and left to die.

 

A girl with red hair is digging in the trench. The two guards shadowing her had brought her to the bottom of the quarry and down a path to a flat dirt field. Her head had been shaved earlier and the blue overalls are too baggy. The fiery red hair is growing back. This dirt field had seen a lot of excavation. She flings the dirt aimlessly off to the side. She knows this isn’t a place to dig for treasure but a whole in which to be buried.

 

I am dressed in the same blue overalls. I spy on her from the ridge above.

 

She figures that she can go on like this as long as she has to. She will never give them the satisfaction of surrender. They are all hypocrites. This camp is just like everywhere else she’s been sent to. But there is nowhere else for her to go. The only thing that feels real is to defy them. The girl realizes that in trying to correct all these deviants they are creating a different extreme. The world is not black and white like they make it out to be. If only she knew what had gotten her here she might be able to formulate an alternative. In the meantime she longs for a cigarette knowing she is still pretty despite their alterations and brutality. It is getting very dark as the sun fades away behind the dunes surrounding the quarry. The girl keeps digging. There is, after all nothing else for her to do.

 

And I know this place. These pits of death. The prisoners dig and then the guards shoot them from behind. I want to save her, but Mr. Washington is nowhere in sight. And I’m just a limp body, good for nothing.

ו

They have added a girl to our family named Janis. She’s Hispanic and exotic, but hardly pretty. She refuses to eat. She’s an anorexic or a bulimic or whatever disorder helps our female population’s pursuit of Barbie slender. Her shadow has to watch her closely because she will try to throw up any food she eats. This isn’t a hunger strike. She wants food but is apparently terrified of obesity. It’s neurotic. Someone should put her onto exercise.  Winston Smit tells me that there are a lot of girls with these eating disorders. They don’t have chemical dependencies like the rest of us. Instead they hurt themselves with their diet or lack there of. The institution treats them the same as the rest of us, all just variations on a theme according to them.

 

The staff doesn’t blame society in the least. We are the deviants. We are abnormal, not them. And who is them? It is our society. It’s all those people stratified and subdivided who churn out an American culture that feeds our conditions. How many places like this are there? These insanity camps, mental sterilization facilities, these containment centers to prevent the madness from catching. How big is the population of stored away decadent youth?f

 

Janis won’t eat.  They are threatening to force feed her. That sounds pleasant. Winston Smit mentioned in passing that about a year ago, a negative contract had been exposed and all six participants went on a hunger strike. It got real ugly and two of them were sent to a local hospital after severe malnutrition set in. I feel that hunger strikes are very admirable, quite a statement to waste away to bring attention to a cause. Janis’s only statement is that she thinks she’s fat, hardly worth the effort. Hardly a cause.

 

Tom and Mary are yelling at her loudly but I’m not paying attention. The two of them would make incredible models for a New Age American Gothic painting. They are the grown-up, wholesome archetype of recovery via those twelve steps. Mary has a soft side and is White trash beautiful. Several staff members live inside the compound. I suppose they are redeeming themselves for past sins.

 

Janis has started to cry. One of my family members has called her pathetic and disgusting among other things in a harsh rebuke of her dietary noncompliance. I wonder where she got it into her head that food is so terrible. Had she been fat once, I wonder? Had she been picked on as a child because of her size and this was the result? Her misconceptions about her body had to come from somewhere.  Maybe it was Barbie’s huge tits and skinny waist, which is our conception of beauty. Some of these girls want to look just like her.

 

Janis’s whimpers are drowned out by a cacophony of taunts, threats and ridicule. Mary tells her in that shrill voice of hers that they will hold Janis down and force-feed her if she doesn’t finish her meal. Mary then graphically describes what that will be like. I wonder if any of the girls I know on the outside harbored covert diet abnormalities like Janis’.

 

What disease are they really talking about? It is broad in its symptoms. It makes one drink and smoke and fuck and disrespect people. Where does it come from? The 200 students here are predominantly middle class. It has infected all of us. Janis’ eating disorder is the same as my drinking. We have both sought negative cures for over-powering emotions.

 

Janis cries on as this spectacle continues. There is a psychotic empathy in the room at all times. All my Family members are convinced that the healing energy is flowing. Now Janis is screaming at the top of her lungs, a total breakdown. Mary is standing up and yelling for her to

“SHUT THE FUCK UP!”

 

Tom suggests that Janis cool out in the quiet room for a while. Four girls are volunteering to bring her over.

 

Janis is led away sobbing. One of the girls carries Janis’s plate because getting out of a meal is out of the question. This is tough love. This is the new way. This is the road to redemption. If we are unwilling to help ourselves they will drag us kicking and screaming toward their conception of salvation.

ז

I have sworn I will do everything in my power to prevent myself from getting brought back up to the head of the table for these moral inventories everyone seems so intent on taking, though it is rarely a choice. I have not forgotten my first call up by that beast of girl, Faith who accused me of having wandering eyes. And now that cow brings me up again.

 

“Aren’t you just the little rapist,” says Mary sneering.

 

“Excuse me?” I say.

 

“You’d rape your sisters if you could…no respect for women at all.”

 

“We’re being a little unfair aren’t we,” I say.

 

“You’re disgusting!” yells Faith.

 

“I wasn’t looking at you.” I respond.

 

“Stop talking,” snarls my sponsor Big Bob.

 

“And this is the second time isn’t it? The second time in two weeks. You must imagine how this must look. A little leeway in the beginning is acceptable, but I know your type, you’ll search out a negative contract with the first girl that will let you. You’ll retreat into your lusts,” says Mary with her tone rising.

 

“I hate it when you stare at me. You’re not supposed to look at your sisters like that. We’re all here to get better and selfishly you just keep on thinking with your penis! A real man can control himself and recover; but you aren’t a real man are you, Sebastian?” says Angelika Vine coldly.

 

She is probably the only person I may have in fact been checking out.

 

Different girls get up and relate how I make them feel like pieces of meat. I look them in their eyes when they talk and try to guess which ones actually believe what they’re saying. Maybe all or maybe none. It doesn’t matter. It is very hard to gauge how long this might continue. I am not allowed to speak. Various girls tell me how repulsive I am to them or keep repeating that rapist line. It may be hurting my pride a little, but I am certain that most of these girls are just playing off each other like they always do during these mock trials. It is as if the staff is making a calculation about how healed they are based on the things they are saying. It starts getting personal as they assault my style, my physique and my general demeanor. I am trying hard to tune them out. None of this is helpful to me. I am certainly no rapist.

 

“You should all be aware that on the outside Sebastian did some fairly reprehensible things to women,” says Mary.

 

“That doesn’t surprise me at all,” says Angelika Vine.

 

I guess senior members don’t have to raise their hands.

 

“He gave girls booze to fuck them,” says Big Bob.

 

“You disgust me!” yells Faith mechanically.

 

“He disgusts all of us, Faith,” says Angelika harshly.

 

And it goes on and on. Now the guys start talking about how a so-called ‘real man’ treats women. Now they want me to take inventory. I fumble miserably and get sent to the corner. The interrogation and insults lasted a long time. It has been draining. It is not that I really care what these people think of me. It is more that I am unused to being ridiculed this thoroughly. They did not taunt me to build themselves up; they did it out some sick compassion. They have all been where I am.

 

When it’s all over, I take off my shoes and face the wall.

ח

Everything moves slowly when you’re in the corner. You stare at the wall isolated from the rest of the family. You’re out of the corner during class, but as soon as you reenter your Family unit it’s up against the wall, motherfucker. You’re ostracized and ignored. They take your shoes because people are twice as likely to run while they’re in the corner than out. There is a sullen understanding that in the corner you are a non-person. You are on blackout with everyone except staff and your junior sponsor.

 

Since I went in they have let Cosette out, albeit on blackout with boys indefinitely. Vessy has turned 18 and walked and Marius has managed to escape. Vessy and Marius are non-people, but at least they are free. When you leave the Family School in any way other than with their blessings, you cease to exist. A rumor is circulating that Marius will be recaptured soon. Every time someone escapes all of us who resist this place secretly wish them the best of luck.

 

After three days in the corner with too much time to think, I realize that I cannot be the person I have been before coming here. Things are changing radically in my head. Maybe this is the path to my salvation.

 

Good things will come if I just cooperate.

ט

It’s October.  The weather is cooler and the leaves are falling.

 

The family leaders decide that Family 4 is in dire straights. Three new students remain defiant, Vessy has walked and Marius has escaped. ‘Permissive flexibility’ can no longer be tolerated. Tom and Mary are devoting an entire Saturday to the crisis in our family. A marathon bring-up session is underway in a classroom in the main building that started after chapel. No one will escape criticism. One by one family members are interrogated on everything from deed to motive.

 

The opening round was for Janis.

 

This is more intense than anything I have seen before. Students are talking longer and are more inflamed. By the time it is over she swears she will eat whatever food they give her. They sanction her double rations to beef her up a bit.

 

We take a five-minute break for bathroom and water.

 

Robert is up next.

 

Family leader Tom opens with a story about getting anally raped in prison to get us off to the right start. Robert is just standing there staring into space with a smug look on his face, a defiant half-smile really. Janis had been lambasted for her diet and now Robert for his criminality.

 

He has managed to largely tune us out during his three-hour interrogation. Unlike Janis he has not broken. The only conclusion has been less food and more work sanctions. All that talk has not yielded much.

 

There is another break.

 

“Sebastian, please stand up,” says Mary.

 

“What are we going to do with him?” asks Tom.

 

“You’re all over the place, Sebastian,” says Mary, “One day you work the program. The next you go right back into that head of yours thinking of ways to cheat.”

 

“We don’t know very much about you. Most of your family members haven’t heard your story yet. They just know you like to look at girls,” says Tom.

 

“What got him here?” asks Mary.

 

“Drinking, fighting, and terrorizing his parents. Stabbing his friends in the back. His deviance is hidden behind his intellect. Sebastian wants us to think that he’s the victim in all this,” states Susan Galliford.

 

“Sebastian was in a couple mental hospitals. They tried to tell him his disease was a condition,” says Big Bob gruffly.

 

“You’re not crazy are you, Sebastian?” asks Mary.

 

“No,” I respond.

 

“So, what’s this all about? Why are you here with us at the Family then?”

 

“I don’t know how this whole mess started. I don’t know why there are so many kids like us all over this country. I do know that not everything about me is wrong. I do know that I had my good moments.” I continue.

 

“Few and far between, sweetheart,” says Susan Galliford. “You are a burden at best and at your worst you are a serious problem case.”

 

“I’ve tried to get through to him,” says Big Bob, “He’s almost unreachable. Whatever he might say, he doesn’t believe in anything we’re doing here.”

 

“You’re right. I don’t. I think it’s crazy to break people and remold them. I think you’re probably doing more harm than good.” I say in a rare moment of honesty.

 

“His disease speaks for him most of the time,” says my sponsor Winston Smit.

 

“Whatever that means,” I say.

 

“So you think you’re a normal kid then?” asks Mary.

 

“I never said that.”

 

“Well tell us what made you do all those things that got you here. Your parents found us remember. We didn’t kidnap you in the middle of the night,” says Mary.

 

“I made a few mistakes,” I admit.

 

“I’d say hitting someone with a wine bottle is pretty out of control. I’d say drinking all the time and doing drugs isn’t normal. And when exactly are you going to take inventory on the things you’ve done to your parents? You’re here ‘til you change,” says Tom.

 

Or until I escape, I think to myself.

 

“You remember what you were like on the outside?” he asks me. “ Things were so bad you tried to end your life. You drank and drank until you couldn’t feel anymore, but that didn’t stop the demons. You want to go back to being an ungrateful son and worthless friend? No one wants you around them,” says Susan Galliford.

 

“I know this Program won’t help me,” I tell them.

 

“You don’t have the faintest idea what our Program is about,” says Mary.

 

“It’s about admitting that everything about me is wrong. I can’t do that because I’m not convinced that your way is any better. There is more to me than my addiction and my vice.”

 

“No, not really. You’ve defined yourself via negative things. Whatever good there is left in you is blotted out by the string misdeeds you’ve committed,” says Tom, “You either change with our help or you’ll destroy yourself.”

 

“Did you like being in the mental hospital, Sebastian?” asks Tom.

 

“It was terrible.” I tell them.

 

“Did you like being treated like an animal? Has it dawned on you that your behavior was so irrational that people thought you were insane? This is not just alcoholism. Your disease has manifested itself over and over again. Time and again you have proven how out of control you are. All you have to do is admit it and you can begin to take charge of your life,” Tom continues.

 

“I can’t,” I admit.

 

“And why the hell not,” yells Mary. “Look at you. A disgusting pitiful mess. You are weak and sick and further accountable by your overall desire to do nothing about it. We’ve read the transcripts from the hospital. You cry out each night tormented. Yet you insist on escaping blame.”

 

“That’s the problem,” says Susan Galliford. “He thinks this is all emanating from somewhere else. You are the person to blame. It is you who have done something wrong.”

 

“Maybe. Or maybe it’s my sick fucked up country. How’ bout that?” I answer getting more agitated and aggressive.

 

“That’s a load of shit and you know it!” yells Big Bob.

 

The volume has just gone up a couple notches.

 

“You had the dream!” yells Tom.

 

“You went to a good school. You lived in a nice house and you had a good family. Everything was in your favor. And look what you are. You’re a mess. Your own family has cast you out for being out of control. We are the last line of defense between you and oblivion and you spit in our face with defiance!” yells Mary.

 

There are many eyes looking at me. I try to play it cool. I try to tell myself that this is what they do for a living, to change kids like me. I’m comforted to know I’m with professionals.

 

“Still playing it cool?” says Mr. Marlborough standing in the corner leaning against the wall.

 

“I don’t know what else to do,” I admit.

 

“You should surrender because that’s all you can do. Remember that night in Hell’s Kitchen when you wanted to jump off the balcony? You knew all along that your life had become unmanageable,” says Big Bob.

 

“This has nothing to do with my life. I wanted to die because this girl couldn’t love me. She was the only thing that ever made me happy.”

 

“His beloved Roxanne,” mentions Susan Galliford.

 

“You do not have the faintest idea even how to be in love,” says Big Bob.

 

“She was disgusted by you. Do you want to know why?” yells Tom.

 

“I know exactly why,” I mutter.

 

“No, you don’t get it at all. She was a good girl from your description. It wasn’t just that you were a punk. Even she could not believe a creature like you could make good on anything resembling love. How does that make you feel to be unworthy of the only thing you’ve claimed to love? We know you don’t know how to be a good son or brother! Why would this be different? You are not a good person at all!” Mary yells.

 

“Think long and hard about your life, Sebastian. Have you done a good thing for anyone in all those wasted years?” asks Susan Galliford.

 

“I have been a good friend to some people. That’s something isn’t it,” I blurt out.

 

“You’ve been a friend to fucked up people just like you,” says Big Bob coldly.

 

“If your friends were so good why did the best one you had rob your house? These weren’t friends. You couldn’t be a real friend. You don’t know what that would entail.”

 

“Could somebody put this is in language he’ll understand?” asks Tom.

 

“I can,” says Winston Smit my Junior Sponsor.

 

“You’re a fucked up, selfish half-person. You were a terror to your family and they’ve given up on you. Your so-called love couldn’t care less where you are if she even thinks of you at all. And all your friends are diving deeper into a pit of drugs and alcohol. You are alone and you are forgotten.”

 

My heart beats real fast. My eyes dart around the room looking for some sympathetic eyes. None are to be found. In the brief silence meant for this massive accusation to sink in, I feel something inside me twist.

 

I am a half-person. I am vile. I am right where I need to be. All I have to do is admit it. I am in agreement with the charges leveled against me. There is look of terror in my eyes. Everyone’s glaring at me. I’m finally not the kid I thought I was.

 

“He has nothing left to say,” says Tom.

 

He was right. I didn’t.

 

“We are at the edge, Sebastian. You can finally make your life right if you surrender. Are you ready to take inventory?”

 

I stare blankly out into their accusing eyes. I’ve abused a lot of girls. I’ve stolen from a lot of people. I drank too much and had nothing to show for it. So right here in the upper room of the Main Building in Hancock, New York, I know it is time to stop pretending I am a victim. My life is unmanageable. I can no longer hide this from anyone. I drop to me knees.

 

“I surrender.”

 

My family applauds. We’re all having a real moment together wallowing and basking in my defeat.

 

“Tell me how to get better,” I say wiping tears from my eyes fallen for my fifteen wasted years.

 

The applause is followed by a lot of hugs.

י

A condition for my getting out of the corner is that I have to join the school chorus. They feel that the chorus will instill discipline. I am not on blackout with girls, but they say if another sister brings me up for staring again, I will be. I wake up the day after my interrogation feeling open minded.

 

The leaves are starting to turn the colors of fall and the mountain air of upstate New York is refreshing in small doses.

 

Since getting out of the corner I begin to take my first step, the acceptance of a higher power. My conception of God is hard to place. They talk about how we needed to live like Jesus did. I pursue a Judaism of sorts. Our God and their god is like a watchful parent who keeps track of what you do, but more importantly of what you are thinking. I am being taught that intentions are everything. If I am to avoid a relapse into my self-serving delusions, I have to embrace this parent who judges everything I do.

 

I attend adoration on Sunday because I am assured that it is a deep spiritual experience. Sitting there on my knees I stare up at the Jesus statue and fumble around with a set of rosary beads. It doesn’t matter to me that this is all Christian stuff. It is the same God. It is the same religion. All can be forgiven as long as I work the program.

 

Days are passing by. I settle into this new routine. I go to school and do well in my classes, which are all very easy for me. I learn how to copy the masters in art class. I am almost done with some desolate Russian painting of a forgotten lonely road. I don’t have anything to distract me anymore. The girls have become my sisters. I have stopped masturbating and feel fresh everyday no longer affected by the Jell-O- brained after effect.. I try to not think about my friends or my life before this place. I have started a new life. On one day, God willing, I will be able to return to the world fresh and reborn. I have finally realized that I have a disease. And this place offers the cure.

 

***

The girl digs slowly in the dirt quarry knowing exactly what comes when her cavern is at a suitable depth. The guards don’t care. They’re paid by the hour and time is on their side. As the days go by I am less inclined to intervene. I still have no sensation below the eyebrows. I’m paralyzed completely.

 

I hide on the ridge above watching her work. Sometime after Wakefield I had arrived here. Sometime after they took my head. Said they put it on Mike’s shoulders, but I still act the part of a coward. They’ll kill her eventually. What control do I have?

 

Suddenly the devil clown waddles out the pits below.

 

He’s more jovial then ever and singing in some forgotten tongue. He is a fat man prancing around encouraging everyone to sing, grotesque and flamboyant. The two guards begin to to belt out chords along with him. The chorus is ruled by his iron discipline. For what seems like many hours, for days even, I sort of hide in the background as they torment her while belting out Germanic carols in the trench. The girl digs even slower. She is wasting away and it shows.

 

Her red hair is just starting to grow back. I finally realize that this is the girl I saw in the Pale City square years ago when they executed her hero husband. The clown strikes her with a whip and commands that she sings as she digs. Her guards and the demon clown fall silent.

 

She looks particularly tortured as she sings. Her voice is beautiful. Still I watch and do nothing.

 

***

 

After study hall, dinner and chapel we head back to the barracks. They are installing some new buildings to house Family 4 boys all in one place as they clear the upstairs area in the Family building for a new renovation. My shadow Winston Smit is helping another boy with a take home assignment. I’m in one of the barrack’s rooms with Vincent Alba, the funny Middle Eastern looking kid. He is trying to convince me that Judaism isn’t a race. The barracks are real run down. There are too many boys right on top of each other, metal bunk beds everywhere and a cheap linoleum floor. The whole place looks like it might fall in on itself.

 

“There’s no such thing as a Jewish race,” says Vincent Alba.

 

“Yeah there is. Jewish people are descendants of the twelve tribes,” I tell him.

 

“That isn’t correct. All the tribes were lost in Babylon or converted to Christianity.”

 

“That’s crazy talk. Where did you get that from?”

 

“Father McMullins told us so in theology class.”

 

“I know that isn’t true.”

 

“You’re not Jewish. You’re White. Jewish is a religion, dude,” says Winston Smit.

 

“It’s a culture and a race too. You can be Jewish and not believe in God,” I tell them.

 

“Now, that isn’t true at all,” says Vincent, “How can you be Jewish and an atheist?”

 

“I used to celebrate Hanukkah and never pray. I’m just saying that before I came here, I was culturally Jewish without believing in the religion.”

 

“Well, that doesn’t matter. You were all fucked up before you came here,” says Winston Smit.

 

“Do you have a problem going to church six days a week?” asks Vincent.

 

“No, not really. It’s all the same God, right?” I ask them.

 

“Exactly. You’re a smart guy, Sebastian,” says Vincent.

 

“Your Jewish race theory is your disease trying to make you different from us,” says Winston Smit.

 

“Yeah, he’s right,” says Vincent, “You need to stop trying to find ways to be different. I mean you’re only different in that you have a disease. Everything else needs to be directed toward working the Program.  The Jewish religion is fine but this Jewish race stuff is negative.”

 

“I don’t really see how. It’s like being Black. How can race be negative?” I ask them.

 

“You just need to focus on being like the rest of us. Stop looking for ways to stand out. That’s what got you here,” Vincent tells me.

 

“Standing out?” I ask.

 

“Yeah. Outside we rebelled from everything good in society to be different. Now we need to settle down in this positive community and fit in,” said Winston Smit.

 

“Isn’t it good to be around so many positive people?” asks Vincent.

 

“Yeah,” I say, “real good.”

כ

 

My painting for Mr. Yurimov’s art class is finished and I have started a second one of a train station. I am doing a good job of keeping my nose clean. You just had to get yourself to certain state of mind. All the idiosyncratic things about the people here fade away. You just have to constantly be on guard for negative thoughts and action.

 

But certain things give you slight doubts here and there.

 

Things like how Robert Childen the wigger is being worked to death everyday. He’s been in that corner a very long time. But you have to suppress doubt if you are going to get better. After all, if Robert just admitted defeat like I had, he’d be spared the work sanction. They’d welcome him with open arms.

 

***

The same reoccurring dream comes with night, freezing rain tap dances on our barrack’s linoleum roof. I eventually shiver into slumber.

 

The clown is gone. The girl is closing in on her target depth for optimal concealment. Some time in the night a few more guards brought a bag of lie and yellow earth moving plough to cover her all up when she finishes. Not much pretense anymore. My legs and body are still numb, I can’t do anything but blink my eyes.

 

“If you want to get closer, I’m not gonna tell anybody,” she whispers into my mind not looking up from her slaves pace dig.

 

I look down at her and she smiles.

 

“What’s your name,” she whispers into my mind not moving her lips.

 

The guards meander, reading instructions on the earth mover.

 

“Mike.”

 

“I’m Red. Do I tempt you?” she asks my mind.

 

“Awfully.”

 

“Shame to let them kill me here I’d think.”

 

“I’d help you if I could. They did a real number on me. I can’t even move,” I think to her.

 

“So you aren’t like them,” she asks.

 

“Like who?”

 

“Like these other brainwashed motherfuckers who let themselves become soap.”

 

“I woke up here,” I tell her.

 

“Why?”

 

“Because I don’t have any other answers for what has happened to me.”

 

“What happened to you, Mike?”

 

“I fell down and lost my head.”

 

“Well I’m done for unless you make it rain.”

 

“What sense does it make to fight them? They’re too strong.” I tell her in my mind.

 

“Don’t lie to yourself. It isn’t flattering. Just because we’ve been ground under their heel does not make us weak. They’re practiced in oppression.”

 

“I can’t get up, I’m sorry,” I tell her.

 

“Self doubt is a dangerous thing. It leaves us too obsessed with the self for our own good. That’s how they manipulate us. The constant introspection is all a part of them trying to regulate how we think.”

 

“I should stop watching you and just die,” I tell her.

 

“You should pick me up,” she says.

 

I think hard about what she’s saying.

 

“A sick fucked up world,” she mutters in my mind.

 

“I’d like to help you,” I whisper.

 

“You’ll just have to be more inventive if you want to keep me alive,” she whispers back, “I dig just a little deeper and I’m done.”

 

I feel an itch in my trigger finger, but it’s just an itch.

 

ל

Now it’s become November.

 

The conventional wisdom is that the more a student worked the program, the better his grades will be. Family leaders like to point to the academic miracles here as signs of progress. As far as I can figure the teachers are good enough. Educators rarely excite me. I have always wished that one day I could find a teacher that would mentor me and make learning enjoyable. Dr. Maskin was a teacher like that and surely I had proved myself a disappointment. The last time I had heard from him was a quick get well letter he’d written when I was in Mt. Sinai accompanying a homework assignment prior to my transfer to Texas.

 

I have begun to gain the confidence of my history teacher Mr. Wiley West. He is a young and bespectacled graduate of SUNY Binghamton. He dresses casually and is slightly out of shape. He is clean cut without being preppy and witty without making one laugh. This is his first teaching position. He is a history teacher. In my experience all my history teachers have been somewhat prone to the subversive.

 

He handed out copies of articles to supplement our learning. He asks us to look at patterns. He asks us to question each period and see how they reflect a continuum of trends. He likes me as most of my history professors have. It is a subject in which I shine.

 

There must be restraints on what he can teach but less so than other subjects. That’s the thing about history; it is subversive in its own right. History is mostly the history of war. There have been wars going on since humans could hold a spear and maybe before. As civilizations developed, the wars became more frightening in scope and destruction. I used to play violent war games with my brother using GI Joes, bombing cities, shooting people and making war.

 

I realize violence is a plaything in my country. We are highly desensitized to it by now. We have violent video games, violent movies and a violent culture. We love war movies and we think of soldiers as heroes, but history gives one a perspective of the realities of it all. There is nothing cool or funny about the Rape of Nanking. Just fifty years ago one of the most advanced, industrialized societies on Earth had fought the most wide-scale and destructive war of human history.

 

Mr. West doesn’t moralize or justify. He doesn’t blame this group or that. He says we have to come up with our own conclusions and that he can only teach us the facts. There is a pattern behind it all but it escapes me. History is the chronology of great human suffering. If the bloody events were to lead to great realizations or a lasting peace, then the death and destruction could be somehow forgiven. But it not an evolution; it is a cycle. It is the cycle that Dr. Maskin had taught me only a year ago. Think, build, preserve and destroy over and over again.

 

I am frustrated by the madness of it all. I wonder where I stand in the context of history. I wondere if there is something that binds me to some bigger picture. I want a context to explain why our history is so terrible. Sitting in that class I know for the first time that I have to look beyond the immediate pain of my life and realize it is all part of a broader ordeal. There is a connection somehow between what I am feeling, the things that got me here, the broader society and the historic self-destruction of mankind. I have no framework to deal with it all, just a vague notion in my head that things are not as they should be. I am experiencing the first pangs of a fleeting new idealism. Winter, the guard on Texas, had said that humans act in the interest of the group.

 

It’s getting colder up here. When we wake up at five every morning for the great shuffle up the hill to the chapel, there is a sharp breeze, which runs through you. The fallen leaves are everywhere. Kids on sanctions are doing lots of raking. I remember as a child playing in the big piles of leaves. That would not quite fly here. I am doing well at keeping out of trouble. The only dull protest in my bones is spending the turn of the millennium here. That’s a terribly depressing thought, missing the biggest, most negative party on Earth. Sobriety is a lot of things, but fun isn’t one of them. But had I actually had fun when I was free? All those house parties hadn’t gone anywhere productive. But that wasn’t the point. I missed friends that I wasn’t supposed to be thinking about, especially Michelle. The idea of another dance party in the gym on New Year’s is not an uplifting notion. But I am learning to suppress these thoughts because they can only lead me down the road to self-destruction.

 

I have come to learn that my friends are destructive from my numerous talks with my Sponsor Big Bob. When I try to explain my attachment to Roxy he calls it a foolish and obsessive love. He cheapens it completely and explains that a person like me is incapable of really loving at this stage in my life while my disease is in control. He says that I don’t even love my own parents. And he is quite right. I feel a vague sense of camaraderie with people like Andrew and Donny, a curious loyalty to Michelle, and a feeling of unending love toward Roxy. But toward my family I feel very little. I am sort of glad there have been no visits because I’m not even sure what to say to them. That’s quite a twisted notion. Tim tells me the best way to compensate for this is to get well. To prove to them that I am sober, healthy and doing well in school will speak more clearly than words. There is a visit scheduled for the end of the month.

 

A sick and twisted world produced us. The school teaches us that we are purely deviant. I am sure we are just the tip of the iceberg, that America can’t build enough places like this to contain the problem. The problem is an implosion of the youth. We are moving too quickly. We are too easily convinced of escapism and self- indulgence. We are acting out the drama of a generation raised on fast food and television. We are directionless except for some need to…to what? What the fuck are we after?

 

These inner monologues that used to run so frequently through my head now only come intermittently in violent bursts. And each time when I reach no conclusion, I just accept that I belong here.

 

***

 

And look at Robert. He’s out of the corner and off the work sanction and politely sitting at the table in Family 4 after coming clean and taking inventory. He’s fresh and ready to work the program. Everyone is out of the corner except Ryan O’Neil. Ryan got added to Family 4 three weeks ago. He keeps getting in fights with the Family Leaders, his shadow and just about everyone. Half the time he’s in the quiet room, half the time he’s out in the field doing something manual. And the funniest thing is to see him up before us now as Janis and Robert give him advice. Fucking hypocrites. I know Robert isn’t convinced. He just doesn’t want to work anymore. And I see Janis drop bits of food under the table while she eats.

 

November ticks by.

 

The routine is never-ending and one loses a real sense of what day it is. I paint more paintings of other people’s work. I read the Bible. I eat. I pray. But it’s all so surreal. There is this massive juxtaposition of happy healthy kids praying and going to class and fucked up delinquents being interrogated and doing hard labor. It would make quite a Magritte painting.

 

As it gets colder and more leaves fall, the surrounding area looks more and more like a wasteland. The vast, uncultivated fields at the base of the compound go out several miles to the woods. There is some talk of cultivating them after the winter. What a joy that will be. I wonder who will be doing this joyous work. A farming club perhaps. I can hardly wait.

 

***

 

One day they catch Janis dropping her food under the table. She goes ballistic and refuses to eat. Spitting and screaming and way out of control, they bring her to the quiet room. For days she refuses to eat. Kids in the gym can hear her wailing. Finally they take her out to the local hospital to have her force-fed. She comes back and they put her on a triple portion of food. A vicious cycle ensues and then she’s back in the quiet room. I overhear a discussion as to whether she should be transferred to a psychiatric hospital or kept here. The Family Leaders feel they can reach her eventually. The cycle goes on throughout the month.

 

***

Rubin Carter and I have started having after class chats about the material I picked up in Mr. West’s Global 1 Class. I ask him roundabout questions on the whys of history. He gives me roundabout answers on power, government and economics. Rubin attended Stuyvesant High School, the sister school to Bronx Science, so we like to intellectually spar after we light the Friday shabbos candles.

 

I have asked Mr. West if he can assign me extra reading for class because I still can’t read books on secular topics. He tells me he has to find out about that.

 

“I have to be careful with what I give you all to read,” he says.

 

“Who decides?”

 

“You mean on what’s negative or not?” Mr. West asks.

 

“Yeah.”

 

“I have no idea. When they hired me they gave me a speech on so-called subversive history.”

 

“What’s subversive history?”

 

“It’s a generic term conservative people use to dub material that paints events in the past as being interconnected through the faults of a political or economic system. Basically, some historians think that if you study history it follows patterns, which move in a specific direction.”

 

“Well does it?”

 

“It really depends what school of political thought you adhere to.”

 

“I’m not sure what you’re even talking about. You mean like Democrat or Republican?”

 

“No. Those are parties, not ideologies.”

 

“What’s an ideology?”

 

“It’s a set of principles that explains how to order the political structure of a society.”

 

“Well what’s the one that America is?”

 

“It’s called liberal capitalism.”

 

“What’s the opposite of liberal capitalism?”

 

“Authoritarian socialism.”

 

“That’s the one that I believe in.”

 

“And you should just keep that to yourself and wait until we read about the ends and means of socialist societies.”

 

“Why? Is socialism subversive history?”

 

“Many people here would say that it is.”

 

“Well I can’t wait.”

מ

Suddenly it has gotten real fucking cold. I don’t have a heavy coat so I take to layering up and wearing the ridiculous black puffy North Face jacket they have as a loaner. One could flip it inside out and it was neon orange if you are so inclined. I am not.

 

Once dressed and coldly showered we march up the hill for the morning service.

 

I never pray for real. All this Christian shit makes me uncomfortable, though I stole some rosary beads because they might be a descent good luck charm. I’m thinking about breaking the crucifix off, on principle really. The religion stuff is way over the top. Coupled with the bring-up sessions, religion is the other staple of our recovery. But I hate being in the chapel. I hate having to repeat prayers I don’t mean to a god that is not my own. My conception of God doesn’t need daily worship. He’s quite secure in his self-esteem. After all he’s God. God does not need Sebastian to tell him he’s great and powerful. Yeah, I tell them that I believe to stay under the radar. And sure, I go to all the Jewish shit for the food, but the Family School and I have very different conceptions of how to please one’s maker. My God let’s me sleep in.

 

***

On Tuesday afternoon, the night before Christmas a new kid tries to hang himself in Family 2. They transfer him to a psyche ward down state.

 

Today we are celebrating Christmas. One by one our families open what is under the tree and we’re then told whose family has gotten us the present. I am right in expecting something I certainly don’t want. Like a mini-rain stick. What the hell am I going to do with a mini-rain stick? I also got a blue pair of corduroys, but they are immediately taken away because the brand name is Lithium. They can’t decide whether or not that is negative. No gloves of course. The girl who’s family bought my presents has never spoken more than a couple words to me, a real hippie space cadet. I look at the 7-inch Shamanic rain stick. Pray for rain I suppose.

 

When the Christmas ritual is over we lounge around the Family Unit. I look out the window at the snowy hills and dead hanging trees, barren fields, and the out-of-place suburban houses belonging to staff members. I see Ryan outside in a T-Shirt and shorts. Instead of presents they decide he should be kept outside to freeze under supervision. He’s shivering in the cold. If that isn’t torture, I don’t know what is. Hypothermia or work the program right? There are three kids guarding Ryan. Ryan would run, but he’d probably freeze out in the woods somewhere. Worse still is the prospect of juvie further upstate. He’s court-ordered which takes the run out of him. God he looks cold.

 

***

 

The winter break goes by quickly. I watch each day go by as the clock ticks towards us missing the greatest collective party night in the last 2000 years.

נ

Mr. West and I are sitting in the classroom after class. We have just studied the history of the Cold War. There was about a paragraph on communism, but the bulk of the history book outlined things like the Berlin Airlift, the Korean War, the Cuban Missile Crisis and a few other flash points of the Red conflict. The book had a chapter expounding on the failed Soviet regimes of Stalin, Khrushchev, and Brezhnev. I learned cool words like perestroika and glasnost, but I didn’t know what a proletarian was until about five minutes ago.

 

“So why did communism fail?” I ask him.

 

“There are a lot of theories, but the most simple explanation is that the communist revolutions were largely led by armed minorities that replicated the power structures they replaced, and the command economies set up faltered on inefficient production management and little worker incentive.”

 

“That wasn’t a simple answer.”

 

“Look, there is a real difference between what went on in the Soviet Union and China and what Marx envisioned.”

 

“Marx is the founder of communism?”

 

“He and a man named Engels codified the bulk of what is early socialist theory in a book called the Communist Manifesto.”

 

“What’s the basic idea of communism?”

 

“That all human history is the history of class struggle. They call it the dialectical materialism. Marx and Engels wrote that throughout our existence there have been two primary classes, the haves and have-nots. Though arranged in different formations and holding different names, these classes have always struggled to control what Marx calls the means of production. That is the economic resources of the given society.”

 

“That was lot to take in. First, what is class struggle?”

 

“It’s generally a violent conflict between the haves and the have nots over something called the means of production, revolutions to realign economic control of the society. Marx outlined five epochs of history where the economic structure has been radically altered. According to Marx we have been in the epoch of capitalism for the last hundred and fifty years. This is the final struggle between the two existing classes called the bourgeoisie and the proletariat.”

 

“And the proletariat is the working class?”

 

“That’s right. It is wage earners that do not see the ultimate fruits of their labor because they do not have any significant share in the means of production.”

 

“Proletarians are all communists?”

 

“Well, that’s kind of the problem. There has always been a huge disconnect between the Communist party’s calling for revolution and the actual workers. That is not to say many proletarians don’t like the idea of communism, but many are too busy working to survive to gamble on a revolution.”

 

“What is the objective of the communists?”

 

“A classless, stateless society where workers own the means of production. The manifesto outlines exactly where they stand and hundreds of other theoreticians have expanded the idea substantially.”

 

“Are there communists in America?”

 

“They are not a substantial political force, but there are several parties with a collective membership in the tens of thousands.”

 

“Can I join one of these parties when I get out of here?”

 

“Were you so inclined.”

 

“Are you a communist, Mr. West?”

 

“I’m a history teacher. We’ll leave it at that.”

 

“How come the history book doesn’t have all the stuff you just told me in it?”

 

“Because history is written by the winners. During the Cold War the U.S. was terrified of the global communist movement. Poor people all over the world were overthrowing their governments and establishing various socialist regimes. The fall of the Soviet Union meant the end of the Cold War, but America invested over a hundred years of foreign policy around putting down the Red Menace of the ‘Evil Empire.’ Calling yourself a communist in America puts you quite at odds with the winning team.”

 

“Well, I’m cool with that.”

 

“Sebastian, this isn’t a fad or a style. Before you call yourself a communist, you should spend time really studying the texts.”

 

“Can you get me the Manifesto?”

 

“You’ve been here three months?”

 

“Yeah. I can read whatever. Is it banned or something?”

 

“I don’t really know what’s banned and what’s not, but I see a little conflict between what this place teaches its kids and a revolutionary atheist ideology. This whole place is based around belief in a higher power, a higher power communism explicitly denies.”

 

“Can you get it for me or not?”

 

“I’ll have to ask.”

 

“Don’t ask. That’s what these capitalist pig exploiters would want.”

 

He chuckles.

 

“You’re my best student. You get A’s in all your classes. But I need to think about my job.”

 

“Why do you work in a place like this?”

 

“Because I need to supplement my adjunct professor salary at Binghamton and this is the most unorthodox teaching job I’ve ever had.”

 

“Well ain’t that the truth.”

 

“I’ll see what I can do. If I get you the book can you promise to be discreet about expressing your views on it in front of the other kids?”

 

“Wrap it in a Bible cover or something.”

 

“It’s funny, in the Soviet Union it was the other way around.”

ס

New Years Eve arrives not with a whimper, but with a BANG.

 

We’re as dressed up as we can be in the gym for a mixer without much mixing. Just about all of us are thinking the same thing,

 

“Best party on earth and here we are in this gym.”

 

I’m wearing khakis and a tie. They decided three weeks ago that I could only wear ties once a week. They felt I was trying to dress myself up. They almost put me on a poverty sanction when I denied that it had anything to do with anything other than style. I don’t look sharp, but it will do under the circumstances. They even have a DJ playing some music and some punch.

 

Just before midnight they cut the music and the fat choir instructor Paul Greer gives a speech about a new century and a new opportunity to change out lives. Everyone is seated on the floor. Suddenly people’s watches start beeping. Paul has rambled on into the new Century.

 

But because they control everything about this place, they also seem to control time. They reset the New Year for five minutes later. They even do a count down. It’s depressing to watch everyone count down aloud to something they just missed. And that was what I was thinking at the turn of the millennium.

 

***

Back in the bad land quarry I believe the girl with red hair doesn’t have much more rope.

 

“You realize in another life we might have made a cute couple,” she whispers up into my head.

 

“I think we make a cute one now,” I whisper in response.

 

“So you’ll rescue me?”

 

“Soon,” I say.

 

“Can you expedite that?” she asks.

 

“Just waiting for my hand to work.”

 

I see a guard turning on the earth mover.

 

“Better concentrate on that hand, Mike.”

 

“What would change about ourselves if we got out of here?”

 

“Nothing, but you can’t be a slave forever. And better a slave on the run then a dead girl in pit.”

 

“Every night I watch them do terrible things to people. I take part in it. I watch the ways they change us and how they break us down. But I have stopped believing that all blame for the past falls on my shoulders alone.”

 

“Where could we go,” she asks, “Santa Fe?”

 

“Back to New York, my friends will hide us for awhile.”

 

“I don’t know that place. Will your friends recognize you, Mike? Do you recognize yourself any longer?”

 

“We can’t stay here.”

 

“How’s that arm feeling?”

 

The guard tells her to drop the shovel and get on her knees. He cocks his rifle. The other guard whispers to him, he puts down his rifle and cocks his cock.

 

“I believe a great crime has been perpetrated against our kind. If I stay here I will walk away unable to decipher how all this misery has gone on for so long.”

 

“Given enough time, they change everyone. I’ll be here three more years. They will kill me you realize. I don’t hide like you do. Let’s run away tonight. Let’s flee into the dunes and watch the sunrise on the new millennium free,” she whispers into my head slightly frantic.

 

All my focus is on lifting my left hand. I’ve been paralyzed on my stomach watching them. I think they mean to rape her first. I twitch my wrist and the rein maker in it. The shamanic magic device makes quick work. A guard looks up as the heavens crack open. Down comes hard rain. Comes down as an ocean. The sky is falling. The guards have never seen rain. They see me. They hear the whir-whistle of the rain stick. I still can’t move.

 

One aims at me, and right then the girl named Red kicks his legs out from under him, grabs his pistol and puts two in his liver, one in his head, spins and empties the clip in the second guard’s heart. As the rain comes down eroding the quarry walls, she’s still lying on the ground squeezing an empty clip: CLICK. CLICK. CLICK.

 

The rain water carries me up and dumps me down the hill. I’m covered in mud.

 

“And what are you, Mike?” she asks me and picks me up.

 

“A person still too weak to face the world,” I say.

 

“Well then I’m wasting my time with you. I was under the impression you were strong. We are caught in quite a jam. Stay here and drown or flee to this ‘NuYurik’ that I’ve never heard of before. I’ll tell you this. The crimes committed against us here in this camp will last us our whole lives.”

 

“I can’t move. You’d better leave me.”

 

“I’d slap you so hard right now if you hadn’t just saved my life.”

 

“And that would be the least I deserve.”

 

“What the fuck are you waiting for, Mike? Some kind of realization about your life? You won’t find it here.”

 

“I can’t feel anything. I could barely shake that rain stick.”

 

“Here’s a little motivation to get it all up.”

 

She kisses me in the rain, mud and torrent. Her tongue gently caresses mine and her lips are soft. It was a passionate kiss and soon I’m erect. In all senses. Leaning on this red haired girl we take the guards’ weapons and climb through the muck out of this quarry camp. I realize they’ll never control a girl like Red and if I’m worthy of girls like her I should never let them control me.

 

Whatever we gotta do to get out of this hole we’re in, I’m up for it.

ע

Sometime in early January my English teacher turned over a short story I had written about a week earlier.

 

The descriptive language is quite good. I believe it is the most important thing I have ever written. When they read it aloud in Family 4 it takes quite some time for people to realize it is more than a beautiful description of some divine paradise.

 

A sinner man ends up in heaven by mistake. Everything is beautiful and people look dreamy and at peace. An angel gives him a tour on his way to meet God. Floating pleasure gardens, Greco-Roman architecture, fluffy fucking clouds, but something is missing. None of the people there have conversations about meaningful things. No one creates art or music, and no one is allowed to dance. The dead believing in God uphold the whole afterlife. Their belief buttresses the very pillars of heaven. Doing anything other than believing threatens the whole structure with collapse. Anything that averts attention from prayer and worship is not allowed.

 

The sinner finds this ridiculous. What’s eternal bliss without a good conversation he figures? Finally, he meets his maker. Billions of souls standing on metal disks around a great ball of light that projects everything you did with your life simultaneously. That is my conception of God. An old dude with a beard seems a little trite. So, every soul is stripped down to their purest essence. Their skin and bones burn away and they turn into something angelic and pure, ready to be reunited with God. The sinner does not submit. He is not sold on this kind of salvation.

 

The devil, always one to retrieve a lost sinner emerges from the gaping opening in the floor of this heavenly atrium amid smoke dancing on fire. In contrast to God the devil is just a Caucasian in a black pinstripe suit. The angel guide tells the sinner man that if he goes with the devil, paradise will be lost to him. The sinner needs to pick a side. The man pauses then jumps into the lake of smoke and fire, down into the cave of hell. Hell is, of course, uncertainty and terrible freedom, at the cost of pain and fire. Before he jumps he says, “I’d rather be a free man braving hell than a slave with chains of bliss in heaven.”

 

They took me right out of school after that one and put me to work in the fields.

פ

The winter is not a good time for forced labor. It’s bitterly cold and you get sick from sweating. Your muscles ache constantly and the snow ends up getting in your boots. The days are long and the work is futile. To compensate for shorter days they just make you work in the dark. One day you’re digging trenches. The ground is too hard and it takes forever to get anywhere. By the second or third day you have a little half trench of six or seven feet that runs maybe a foot or two down. They make you fill it in because a lasting change to the landscape is too much of an accomplishment. Then you’re running wheel barrel loads of rocks back and forth creating enormous piles and then moving them back. By the third or fourth day your delicate rich-kid hands have blisters between the thumb and the index finger.

 

Thanks to the story and the general defiance they seem committed to making my life miserable. It was inevitable really. I have watched tens other kids go through this. I had turned a blind eye hoping my day would never come.

 

They have decided to take away my clothing after I got into a fight with one of my guards. They dress me in dirty blue coveralls. They shave my head again in case I am thinking of trying to pick up any cute girls during my sanction. They cut my rations down to two tuna sandwiches a day. I am determined to resist everything they throw at me.

 

So it goes on. Digging trenches. Filling them in. Hauling buckets of rocks up hills. Building piles of rocks with the wheelbarrow. Moving cinder blocks back and forth. I’d run but there are always two shadows with me. By the second week I’m quite delirious. Time moves very slowly when you’re being worked to death. I feel dirty all the time. I feel weak and the only thing I can cling to is some abstract idea of making an exhibit of my own defiance. Or maybe I’m just proving it to myself. I’m preparing myself mentally for flight.

 

At night I shiver in the barracks knowing that the next day will bring more pointless work.

More back-breaking digging assignments. Less food. More interrogations in front of my Family unit. Less opportunity to surrender. More rocks. More dirt. More sweat. More blisters. A constant shiver and a dull ache in my bones. Less belief in anything they have to say to me.

 

But it all takes a toll. There is too much time to reflect. The camp itself becomes some kind of halfway house for the soul. I find myself beginning to doublethink once again, holding two contradictory beliefs in my head and believing in both of them with equal conviction simultaneously. Be wary of a man that double thinks for he is pliable.

 

I have lost the date. It must be my birthday soon. These three weeks have been timelessly miserable. Each day makes me weaker yet somehow I go on. Terry tells me I can stop if I just give in. I spit on the ground and tell Terry that with enough forced labor one can get anyone to admit anything without sincerity. Later that day I fall down on my work sanction so they stick me in the quiet room. Lying there dirty on the linoleum floor on the blue mat I bask in my misery, but I really do not know whom to blame any longer.

 

In the morning Terry Quimper and two kids from Family 3 that I don’t really know come to get me from the quiet room. They have a shovel with them and a tuna sandwich. I eat the sandwich like a refugee from Somalia and then follow them out into the woods down a trail in the southern section of the compound. It’s a rather ominously silent procession. The trail leads to a snow covered clearing. Terry tells me to sit on the ground and hands me the shovel.

 

“You’ve been on the work sanction three weeks,” says Terry.“You look like shit. You aren’t in school and everyone knows that you have no intention of working the program. So what are we gonna do?”

 

“You could let me go home,” I mutter.

 

“That as we all know is not a possibility. We decided last night that you are on a path of certain self-destruction. We decided that there is only one way to get you to realize what is in store for you. As you are so obsessed with self-destruction we have decided to let you dig your own grave and lie in it for a little while. For death is the only thing you intently strive for.”

 

I say nothing.

 

“You will die having accomplished nothing. You have led a wasted life and here is where you admit to yourself once and for all that you have run out of options and you are alone. So take that shovel and dig. You have paved the way to your own death.”

 

“I bet when I get to hell I’ll see your smiling face, Terry.”

 

My voice is hoarse because I’m sick, but it conveys the point. I pick up the shovel and start to dig. What other options do I really have? I’m too weak to run. I’m too confused to rationalize my plight, pick a savior or even save myself.

 

The ground is hard as rock. I’ve never dug a grave before. I shiver and I dig. It’s absolutely freezing and the coveralls weren’t made for winter. The two other internees watch in silence. At various points they’ve attempted to reach me about the rationale of the treatment. We’ve bonded and on certain levels, I love them like brothers. They don’t like watching me do this but they know that this place has run out of ways to get into my head.

 

I hack away at the ground. The brown black earth opens up as the day goes on to swallow me. Someone brings another tuna sandwich later in the day. I’m standing in a three-foot pit. On my last leg I work harder than before. I want my grave to be perfect before the hypothermia sets in. By nightfall I’m lying in the ground in a crude 4 by 5 by 6-foot deep grave. I’m ready to die. One of my collaborator guards takes the shovel from me before I begin to pass out.

 

I’m staring up at the night sky from my hole in the ground. Time has gone on without me. My body is broken and my mind is playing tricks on me. I think I see Michelle pass by with some daffodils.

 

“I’ll never forget you,” she whispers to me, her breathe like smoke in this cold.

 

My whole body is numb. I try to reach out for her but she’s gone. I hear the wind howling through the trees.

 

“Are you happy with what you’ve done with your life?” asks Jeremy Winter, my guard from the San Marcos treatment center in Texas.

 

He is seated on a chair where the Family School guard just was.

 

I try to respond but I’m too cold to speak.

 

“I think there may be ways for him to redeem himself.” I know that voice. I haven’t heard it in quite some time. What a definitive internal dialogue. I hear Mike Washington. Images swirl around in my head. Things I did wrong. Things I’ll never do again. Ways to be. Ways I once was and could be again.

 

“GET ME OUT OF THIS BASTARD HOLE!” I bellow.

 

A whisper is right next me, “The abyss inside the cave is deep. One easily loses their way.”

 

It is Mike talking. I jerk my head to see him, but no one’s there.

 

I try to climb out but I’m too weak.

 

“What did I do to deserve this?!”

 

I’m panicked and take quick, short breathes.

 

“Lot’s of things,” says Mike Washington.

 

“GET ME OUT OF THIS FUCKING HOLE!” I yell again rasping each word.

 

“Do you see it yet?” asks Mike.

 

“See what?!” I murmur.

 

“What you have to do.”

 

“GET ME OUT OF THIS FUCKING HOLE! PLEASE for THE LOVE OF GOD I WANT…”

 

“What do you want?” asks Mike.

 

“I want answers!”

 

“Answers are not available at this point in time.”

 

“I want to make up for what I’ve done!” I plead.

 

“On whose terms?”

 

“Mine, my fucking terms! GET ME OUT OF THIS FUCKING HOLE!”

 

“That’s not good enough. You need to remember how you got here.”

 

“What..do..I have…to..do,” I mumble between screams.

 

“Let go of everything that conspired to make you the way you are. Run from it all and along the way help carry the fallen caught behind enemy lines.”

 

Mike Washington is standing above me as I look up at the sky.

 

As I begin to black out I whisper, “Let me…out…of this fuckin’ hole.”

 

Everything is grey and I realize that I’m now screaming at the top of my lungs. All the healing energy and soul-searching life stories can’t reach me. All the corner time and all the sanctions were for nothing. That’s why they made me do this. But I have already died and become reborn in my dreams. The symbolism of it on the physical plane is more real and more frightening. It is the actualization of this realization that I must now accomplish. And I am so weak and so lost. This place has left me blinded as to what I really am. It has intermittently sold me on more false gods and prophets. I have dug this hole for fifteen years. This country has made me that kid that I am. No more conversations with the self as to the “why” only the discipline of the “how” holds interest.

 

I’m blacking out. I’m shivering. I smell the earth swallowing me up. But this is not how I go out. This is not how the story is going to end.

 

“GET ME OUT OF THIS FUCKING HOLE!!!”

 

Too weak to move, even my screams hold no real conviction. When you hit bottom two things can happen. You can cling to the first rope offered and fool yourself into a false salvation. Eventually that rope is just another noose. Or you keep digging until you reach the other side.

 

“There are no reinforcements coming,” says Mike, “You’re going to have to do this alone. Do you have the constitution to take this as far as it needs to go?”

 

A dull chill rattles my bones. I’m silent and broken. But the answer is,

 

“Yes.”

 

I possess that kind of grit.

 

***

 

Terry returns at about ten pm. Two kids from Family 3, the two shadows are nervously looking into the grave Sebastian Adon has dug.

 

“How long has he been in there?” asks Terry McCarthy.

 

“A couple hours. He was screaming his head off until about five minutes ago when he just went silent,” one of them says.

 

“A complete break down if you ask me,” says another.

 

“I didn’t ask you anything. Take him out of there and bring him to the quiet room. Make sure you get him a blanket.

צ

When they let Sebastian return to the family he did not look quite the same. The work sanction had broken him. They let him out of the corner and they let him return to school. He is quiet and can’t smile or joke the way he used to. There hasn’t been an inventory to get out of the corner. He can’t really bring himself to talk. Now that the upstairs renovations are done, there are plans to create two more Family Units. Rosters are being created as to who will be in the new families. Family 4 leaders decide to transfer Sebastian and Ryan O’Neil out to try and give them a clean slate after their weeks out in the fields.

 

ק

Sebastian has been moved to Family 2, Michael Wassabordo’s new family. Suddenly all his sanctions have been removed and he isn’t on shadow anymore. He is real quiet and just about everyone thinks he has been broken from all those weeks on the work sanction. He carries a Bible around with him everywhere and just sits intently reading it. The shuffle of students into new families has led to a temporary amnesty for many of the troublemakers who have been moved, but everyone knows that by the end of the week, anyone not working the Program will be penalized anew.

 

Sebastian is keeping a real low profile because Sebastian is getting ready to run.

 

The school wraps itself around the internees putting up a certain barrier between them and an attempted flight. Sebastian is waiting until he finishes it, the thing that is wrapped in his Bible. Once he knows what a proletarian is he’ll be ready to shake, rattle and roll.

ר

I turned 16 on January 30, 2000.

 

Because Mr. Wassabordo feels discipline is lax in the new family, we’re spending my birthday weekend cleaning the floor with toothbrushes. Its tedious work and I zone off fantasizing about getting out of here.

 

The other day I was assigned to the breakfast crew as the juice bitch. It’s the worst job on breakfast crew involving filling up hundreds of cups of juice and carrying them out on trays to the different families. But this job provides the potential for flight. I am alone for fifteen minutes between when the alarms go off and when I have to show up to the crew. In those fifteen minutes one might take it upon themselves to flee into the woods.

 

I continue to scrub the floor with my little green toothbrush contemplating how shitty a birthday this is. I have also continued reading my subversive history understanding very little, yet enough to put my plight in context. I have continued filling up cups with juice every morning knowing that one day the whole assembly line breakfast would have a break down as the vital juice component went for a mad dash toward freedom. You might say I am biding my time for the great escape.

 

With the exception of Rubin Carter who gives me a curious glance every time I run into him, I am certain that no one is the wiser.

ש

It is really between you and God at the end of the day if you buy into anything this place preaches. Undoubtedly there are people who need to be here. You can’t just leave the bulimics, cutters, junkies, nymphos, drunks and anorexics to their own devices. But is the substitute better? If all these disorders, vices and conditions are the product of a sick capitalist society then a substitute that places the blame purely on the individual is wrong as well. Perhaps time will tell.

 

These last days at the Family School I am watching the perverse world, insulated from reality, breed people incapable of dealing with the larger issue. Kurtz had said there were thousands of places like this and I believed him. You had to put us deviants somewhere, anywhere that could displace the blame for our condition. Blame the TV, or the music, or the parenting, or the culture, or the friends, or the schools or anything else. Blame action movies. Flexible curfews and premarital sex. Easy access to cigarettes and liquor. Blame Kurt Cobain and rap music in general. Blame low moral standards and not enough Jesus in our lives. Blame the lack of a work ethic. Blame allowances that are too large. Blame daytime television.

 

I have blocked out all the distractions. I have honed my thinking into an ideology to explain what has happened. I hypothesize that a system has produced me. All the kids here, including me, are the natural product of American society. I am tuning out all the religion, chastity, brotherhood and self-reflecting, twelve-step nonsense. I will focus on my responsibility for my actions. I will right the wrongs I have committed. But I am dead sure that this country I live in is responsible for a great deal of human suffering.

 

With a sophomoric understanding that boils down to the idea that the proletariat is the people who get fucked over and the bourgeoisie are the ones that do the fucking, I declare myself a communist. I believe that a revolution can make the villains pay for their misdeeds and create equality for the have-nots.  I focus all the blame for the misery of the world, and my misery in particular, on the capitalist system.

ת

It’s St. Valentine’s Day.

 

I wake up for breakfast crew as usual. The snow is falling and when the door is unlocked at 5:45 am I take a long look at the compound and figure this is about as good a time as any to make a break for it. It is, of course, a bit more premeditated than that. I have smuggled my backpack up to the barracks in my laundry bag. I packed three books on communism, a change of clothing and a loaf of bread.  I will have until 6 am until they know that I am missing. That gives me fifteen minutes to get as far as humanly possible from the compound.

 

The snow is knee deep and the going is slower than I had hoped. Heading up the hill I keep getting stuck in the snow. All I can think about is Michelle. I know that, Marx willing, I will be back in time for Valentines Day. I keep running. Every so often I fall, pick myself back up and keep going. The snow is blowing past the electric light posts and it looks quite surreal. In my head I am playing out a simple scenario. I am a Jew escaping from Auschwitz and if I am caught I will be shot. It makes me move quickly. Twice more I fall on the icy pavement of the long road leading to the main gate.

 

They will kill me for sure if I am captured. Maybe not with a bullet to the back of the head, but they will do it spiritually. They will suck the artist out of me. They will make me forget about places where equality might have existed. They will take my identity, and they will put me back in the hole. Just a little bit longer and I’ll be at the road. I can hitch back to New York, back to the freedom of my concrete jungle.

 

The snow keeps blowing in my face. Finally I reach the road. I know to my left s Binghamton and to my right is further upstate. Remembering all the stories I’d heard I know that by heading to Binghamton I’d increase the likelihood of being captured. I need to evade the local police and potential vanloads of Family School zealots ready to bring me back to the fold.

 

I turn and run to the right. Up the hill I go. I look at my watch. 6:02 am means that now they will come looking. It still isn’t light out when I see a car coming up the road. It slowed down. Terry is inside smiling and waving. Maybe he thinks I’ll be recaptured and he can restart his regimen later that day. Or maybe he is just happy to be rid of a godless troublemaker like me. Who knows? It creeps me out and I quicken my jog to a full run.

 

In that desolate winter snowstorm I know I have finally arrived at a point in my life where a great road is to be crossed. For sixteen years I have lived in a daze and the culmination of the daze has been excruciating. I don’t know if I have fully taken in the significance of the book I carry in my bag. I would like to think that it offers me the perspective that can explain the troublesome last few years of my life. The over arching question that runs through my mind wi if I make it back to New York, what can I do about a country that produces people like me? What can I tell about what I have seen that might move my friends to take action? But these are the big questions. The little ones involve hitchhiking and putting fifty or sixty area codes between that fucking compound and me.

 

Within fifteen minutes I get a ride, a cigarette and thirty dollars from an old woman in a beat up Chevy. After giving me a life lesson on drugs, Christianity and premarital sex, she leaves me in the suburban tenement strip mall in Monticello, New York. After wandering the strip near the Greyhound bus stop I manage to raise the additional six bucks to take the bus to New York by cleaning a bathroom and doing some dishes. The place is a ghost town in the mountain badlands.

 

***

 

The rest all happens quickly. I arrive back in New York City at 1:30 pm. I hop the turnstile and ride the #4 train up to Bronx Science. I haven’t seen my friends and compatriots in over ten long months. I see everyone and all at once I am home. All is forgiven for now. Most of them are so shocked and half delighted to see me again that they temporarily forget the person I’d been. No apologies are in order, as if my debts have been paid.

 

Hubert O’Domhnaill  finds Michelle in the cafeteria and rushes her upstairs to see me. As soon as I see her my eyes light up. We embrace fiercely; passionately even like dear, dear friends forced apart for too long, as if ten months has been a decade in the life of a teenager. And by sundown Michelle and I are passionately kissing on Donny Gold’s roof in York Town. Happy Valentine’s Day to us. Michelle represents everything that is going to be right about my new life. She represents the side of Sebastian Adon that is worth knowing. Before we part she presses a long letter into my that contained six months of bottled up feelings for me, which I read later on the train savoring every goddamn word. By nightfall I am on the corner of 96th and West End calling Nicholas Trikhovitch on a pay phone to say,

 

“Brother, I’m back.”

 

Over the course of a single day my seemingly inescapable fate has been dramatically reversed. A great sense of possibility engulfed me on the Greyhound ride. But that idealism is tempered with a violent and heartfelt rage. By my own devices I have spirited myself away from that camp and made a great escape. And while perhaps I should be content with this draw of the cards, I see only red. Blood red rage at what has been carried out upon me lying in that freezing self dug cave. And while the joy of my reunion with friends, my taste of freedom and the soft caress of my Michelle ought to have filled me a new hope, I am still made blind with a wild and unyielding hate.

 

 

PART FIVE:

Movement Arm Thyself

“The characteristic of a genuine heroism is its persistency. All men have wandering impulses, fits and starts of generosity. But when you have resolved yourself to be great, abide by yourself, and do not weakly try to reconcile yourself with the world. The heroic cannot be made common, nor the common the heroic.”

                              —Ralph Waldo Emerson

 

א

 

 

The infamous and quixotic Mr. Adon is back. There he is after a ten-month disappearance wearing a pine-green jumpsuit and a white beret. He is urging his compatriots to get organized. He proudly proclaims that he has become a communist. No one is entirely sure what that means. He says that drugs and alcohol keep us from our full potential and that we have to become a movement of young people dedicated to retaking our society. No one has really ever heard a person talk like that around school. He wants us to become revolutionaries.

 

Within three days of his reappearance he has made quick rounds of the NYC magnet high schools to organize a meeting. Trikhovitch certainly isn’t going to give up alcohol and become a communist, but he is intrigued by the concept of this ‘change by struggle and fight’ that Sebastian Adon has been preaching since his sudden return.

 

***

 

There are about forty kids sitting on the Rock on February 16th, 2000. They are mostly Sebastian’s old crew from the public magnet schools as well as his little brother Benjamin and a few of his friends. Everyone is milling around near the summit smoking cigarettes until Sebastian and Nick Trikhovitch arrive wearing black suits and dark sunglasses. The dress code was Trikhovitch’s idea.

 

Sebastian begins his call to arms.

 

“As many of you know I committed a string of vile and self serving acts in my previous life. I was sent away because of them. If I’ve put any of you through bullshit, hell or otherwise, I sincerely apologize. I’ve been locked up for ten months and I have learned only two things of any value from this trial. The first is that we have been deeply wronged by the forces, which govern our nation. The poverty, misery, and general oppression, which are the fruits of our American comfort, have raped the soul of our generation. Our dreams have been perverted and our ideals warped. We all used to think that we could the world. Now, all we want to do is get fucked up, shut down and drop out so we don’t have to acknowledge the fact that we once believed in things. All that is left is for us to make money, make babies and die.  The second thing I learned is that it is never too late to revive our lost hopes and dreams. We don’t yet have a plan. We don’t yet have points of unity or a list of concrete grievances. We just know something is wrong within this nation.”

 

Those assembled process his proclamation in different ways. To some it is a minstrel show from out the 1960’s, to others it is like witnessing their pent up frustrations and middle class rage being channeled into pieces of a dream.

 

“Mr. Trikhovitch and I want to create an organization, an association of young women and men ready to fight. We don’t even have a name yet. We just want to get ourselves organized and learn how to take our country back.”

 

Trikhovitch doesn’t say a word. He doesn’t have to. Those assembled know the boys worked out the particulars behind closed doors. This is Sebastian’s second attempt at making a speech. There is no applause this time like there had been when he ran for Freshman Rep. Just 40 youngsters in the February cold, hands stuffed in coat pockets, thinking with fire and breathing out smoke. No one says a word. No one walks away.

 

“We can use the copy machine in my Dad’s study to run off your little manifesto,” volunteered a husky and extremely wealthy Canadian named Belfy Andrews.

 

***

 

One of the first things I did as a free man was to go down to 23rd Street and 7th Avenue to the Communist Party USA Headquarters and sign up to join the party. The building looks run down. Everyone inside calls each other comrade, which for some reason seems a little silly. I have to be honest with myself. I’m still not exactly sure what dialectical materialism really means. I don’t have class-consciousness. My knowledge of communism is limited. My understanding is that capitalism is a system of competition that pits people against each other and benefits only a select few. This select few is a group called the bourgeoisie. They control something called the means of production. Throughout history there has been a constant struggle to take back the means of production. With each struggle a new group lands on top. Communism is about achieving equality. The group that is able to do that is called the proletariat.  Once the proletariat seizes the means of production in something called a revolution there will be freedom. There will be opportunity. And there will finally be true equality.

 

After haggling with an elder statesman on the fourth floor of the office, I receive a Red Card and become a 16-year old, card-carrying member of the Young Communist League.

 

***

 

I decided somewhere along the way home from the Family School that I will no longer drink alcohol or take drugs. It is not so much that I associate substance abuse with my previous condition. It is more to prove to myself that I did not need the Family School to be sober. I looked up some AA meetings in the City and have started going to a group called Midnight in the West Village. People are really shocked with my ability to give heartfelt survivor advice but I am used to the sharing rhetoric of AA from my time at the Family School. I found a sponsor at my second meeting. He is a gay news reporter from CNN.

 

I bounce around friends’ houses for the first few weeks. Then after a long dinner with my parents, they decide to let me move back in. I assure them that I am able to live in the City and not get into further trouble. We try to figure out what schools I can get into this late in the school year. They are nervous, but happy to see me. I guess a few people are.

 

***

 

Nick Trikhovitch has been reading the Communist literature I brought back from the national office. I have been trying to turn him commie red. We are attempting to put our ideals into writing.

 

“Largely from here on out it becomes an issue of good propaganda,” he observes. “The message is good, right? But we got to give um some quick victories, show them their time and energies yield dividends.”

 

“Go on,” I say watching Nick collect his thoughts.

 

“I’m not saying that I’m a theorist of any kind. I’m not even really convinced I get everything Marx is saying. But I understand enough. I understand that I live in a society with massive inequality and that one solution is rooted in this text. But we can’t call ourselves commies. If we do, we won’t get anywhere.”

 

“It’s always been like that, right? The lie that this society is better than the ones a couple hundred years before? The history books in school make you think it is,” I respond.

 

“The books are filled with lies. There may be no real way to quantify human suffering but like I said, if our manifesto smacks of socialist crazy talk no one will join.”

 

“So we’ll stick to the basics,” I say.

 

I pause smoking my Newport. We are sitting on his roof with a typewriter in the bitter cold.

 

The unpleasantries of life,” he says as he types, “are to be blamed first upon our own inaction.”

 

“I like that,” I tell him.

 

“What did you really learn in the camps Sebastian?” he asks me for the first time.

 

“Self reflection at gun point.”

 

“Fitting.”

 

My silence and perhaps hateful stare communicates to him that this is a subject I am not yet ready to talk about in depth. He types a few more notes. Feels like we’ve been up on this roof writing for days.

 

“This organization is being created to get our compatriots to understand that something must be done about the way we live?” he suggests.

 

“Not exactly. This organization is being created to train revolutionaries.”

 

“What is that fucking phrase? Don’t use words that set off red flashing lights. That phrase is used to sell cars and beauty products too, you know. No one knows what it means, not even you,” he tells me.

 

“Excuse me?”

 

“Teenage angst is society’s way of marginalizing the confusion and breakdown of our ideals. We are all being changed living in this country. We are being force-fed conceptions of beauty, economic relationships and the necessity of material things. Our social circle is the perfect example of bourgeoisie youth reeling from the contradiction of what we know is right and what we are taught to accept. We grew up with everything in the world at our finger tips, but it is all based on this grotesque system exploiting other people for us to have our comforts,” he tells me, “Revolution means we’re gonna tear it all down and blow it all up and start from scratch.”

 

“Well isn’t that what we want, Nick?”

 

“It’s a stupid buzz word and a scary thought to the sane. You’re talking about different kinds of exploitation here, Sebastian. Are you saying American wealth is predicated on the suffering of the international working class or are you saying that we’re suffering because of our socialization to accept this reality?”

 

“I’m saying that we’re asking some pretty big questions for kids who are just sixteen. What I saw in those camps was the tip of the iceberg. We need to keep asking these questions and we need this organization to put these ideas in a format regular people can understand.”

 

Nick pauses looking at me intently for a moment while he flicks his Newport over the railing.

 

He reads as he types the second sentence of our treatise,

 

This organization is being created to absolve us of the horror our nation has unleashed upon this world.”

 

“That I can dig,” I say.

 

“What are we gonna call this little outfit?” he asks me.

 

“I’m not sure yet. Something militant.”

 

***

 

I’ve spent the whole day making out with Michelle Tagomi. I told her some stories from being locked up. There are others I keep to myself. We have been going out since I got back and we make time to hook up for lost time. The formation of this new organization is taking up a great deal of my time, but I want this relationship to work because I care so much for this girl. Part of me is more than aware of my previous dealings with females. We are watching a movie at her parent’s house on the border of Chinatown and Financial district. Her mom and dad are separated although friendly. The apartment I’m visiting her at is her mother’s. Her father is a well-known quantum physicist who is big in something called “string theory,” which is quite impressive were one to know about such things. I couldn’t understand a word when he tried to elaborate over dinner one time.

 

I like being around Michelle. She’s a sweetheart, and quite beautiful. Her style is not typically Asian. She is half-Chinese and half-Japanese, which despite the untrained Western eye are distinctly different ethnic groups. I know this relationship shouldn’t last too long. Sex usually complicates friendship. The love between us is the love of loyal friends not so much of a physical lust. I know that I am not uneasy on the eyes, but I recall something from the last time we hung out the day before. I remember her giving me a hand job and rushing through my head was the phrasing of a novel story I might recount later on getting a hand job from the daughter of the Einstein of Asia. I realize that such thoughts are a violation of the admiration I ought to show this girl. I am running the risk of destroying my most important friendship. It is a lot to think about, but in the mean time we just kiss and kiss and kiss, quite happy to be reunited after all this time.

 

But the Texas camp guard Mr. Smith proved right in the end. The passions of teenage romance are fast and fleeting. We broke it off on good terms about three weeks later lest I ruin a beautiful thing by not yet knowing how to be good man just yet. The only relationships I prove truly faithful to upon my return are those committed to my revolution, for better or for worse.

 

ב

 

Every day I jump on the #4 train and head up to the Bronx. Today 1 am handing out newly printed broadsheet flyers that hammer out our rough little call to arms. I am taking down numbers when a kid I don’t recognize approaches me. He introduces himself as Simcha. He is Chilean Jewish and his look is difficult to place. He wears neat clothing, formal but not preppy, and has an intense look about him. He isn’t tall in stature, nor is he incredibly articulate or easy on the eyes. He looks a little Latin and a little Gorski. Unbeknownst by me, I have just met one of the first great ideological influences of my blossoming political ideology.

 

“My name is Simcha Rathajzer. We’ve met before but you might not remember me.”

 

I extend my hand to give him a pound, but he shakes it firmly instead.

 

“Sebastian Adon.”

 

“I know exactly who you are, comrade. I want to talk to you about this club you’re putting together.”

 

“What do you want to know?”

 

“What is your intention by founding this organization? I understand you’ve recently become a member of the Young Communist League.”

 

“That’s true. I joined last week. How did you know that?”

 

“I was surprised to hear you had become a communist. Some people are saying the organization you want to found is a front group.”

 

“I don’t know what that means.”

 

“A front organization is an issue specific group funded by a larger communist organization to bring young people towards political action and then condition them to accept communism. You are somewhat familiar with the loaded nature of your new affiliation?”

 

“No. Not particularly.”

 

“You haven’t exactly picked the most beloved of ideologies to embrace for your new found desire to be political. There have been nearly a hundred years of government action against the party you are affiliated with, not mention assassination, imprisonment, and deportation of many of the more radical members,” Simcha continues.

 

“I’m hangin’ on your every word, but how do you know all this stuff? Everyone else is like ‘politics, yeah that sounds cool’ but you seem to have thought about a lot of this stuff before.”

 

“I’m a socialist. I’m not a member of any of the big organizations. It’s just something that my family has believed in and I grew up with.”

 

“Isn’t a socialist like a halfway communist?”

 

“I get the impression, and this is not meant as an insult, that your reading of the Communist Manifesto is your only real exploration into this school of thought. You’re telling everyone that you embrace the most hated of adversarial cultures in American society, an ideology our government fought a bloody hundred-year, international conflict to contain. You’re going to make a lot of people nervous with all this. I just want you to be aware of that.”

 

“I’m quite aware.”

 

“There’s another thing. Your own political ideas aside, once again, what is your intention by creating this new organization?”

 

“To build a fighting force for people’s struggle.”

 

“You need to pick your words carefully. Is your objective to spread Communism or is your objective to make apathetic high school students care about political issues?” Simcha continues to grill me.

 

“Well I hardly see those two ideas as mutually exclusive.”

 

“I thought as much. Did the YCL put you up to this or are you acting as a free agent?”

 

“They don’t even know I’m going to do this. We have a meeting tomorrow to request to use their meeting space on 23rd Street.”

 

“Do you have a name yet?”

 

“Youth Resistance Front.” I tell Simcha, proudly.

 

“You need a better name. That name connotes violence and no one will join.”

 

“Well, we have ‘til tomorrow to come up with something better.”

 

“I’ll join if you change the name.”

 

“Will you help me better understand my ideology so I can articulate more effectively to the kids around the City? I could use a person like you on my team.”

 

“Yeah, I’m down. I want to help you with this thing. Just remember that what you’re doing has a lot of baggage that comes with it. You really ought to read a bit more before you jump head on into organizing a project like this.”

 

“You can make me better informed as we go.”

 

“Yeah, have you talked with Isaac Zucker yet?”

 

“Who? Crack? No, why?” I ask remembering the friend I stole from before I was locked up.

 

“Zucker and his brother are both members of the International Socialist Organization. Hubert O’Domhnaill ’s brother is in the same organization you are. You gotta connect with all these kids that are already political to help you get the kids who don’t have a clue.”  Simcha advises.

 

“O’Domhnaill  and Crack are socialists?” I said incredulously.

 

“Isaac is and recently, Hubert has become highly sympathetic to certain working class ideals.”

“This is perfect! The four of us ought to sit down and work this out as a group.”

 

“I’m sure we could make that happen.”

 

 

***

 

Zivia Lubetkin is following this organization stuff with mounting interest. She and Sebastian had been very close before he was sent away. She is curious to see if the massive overhaul of each of their lives will allow them to continue the near-sibling relationship they once enjoyed. Sebastian is now sober and political. Zivia is not so sober and a platinum blonde, candy-raver girl.

 

Zivia has observed that kids end up getting involved in the new organization for a variety of reasons. There is the shock of Sebastian, this crazy kid everyone knew who has come back reformed, preaching a firebrand popery of communism, personal discipline and individualized reclamation of one’s purpose. It is not like Sebastian has a unique ability to make a political issue make sense. Zivia thinks that he is articulate but not always well informed. He does have charisma pouring out his ass.

 

Zivia knows that he is making all of this up as he goes along. Even though he openly admits to his communist leanings, his political rhetoric is acceptable because he knows that all of the kids he targets are united in their political ignorance. The first step is to educate the group about what is wrong with the system. Zivia sees that Sebastian recognizes that the real challenge is youth apathy. She has watched his sidekick Simcha chime in and list the things we should care about—problems like nearly perpetual war, worker exploitation and wide-scale global poverty. Then the potential recruit always says,

 

“Tell me more.”

 

Then Sebastian takes down the kid’s phone number. Sebastian and his crew are not pretending to have detailed explanations or pseudo-intellectual horseshit solutions. They just say that there are many problems. Then they invite the recruits to help get some resistance going.

 

That’s what they are calling it: a resistance movement.

 

***

 

There are fifteen minutes left before the scheduled meeting with Mr. Leban, who is the local Communist Party leader. We are meeting with him to negotiate getting the permission of the Communists to allow us to use one of their rooms as a meeting hall. Izzy Vitz, Nick Trikhovitch, Hubert O’Domhnaill , and I are all sitting on a stoop on 23rd Street trying to come up with a name. These are the kids who have really pledged to help me make this new organization happen. The only concrete thing we have decided is that there will be four cells that take on different jobs. The service cell will undertake grassroots, community projects. The publication cell will put out a political newspaper. The recruiting cell will agitate and get more members. And the activist cell will organize political actions. Each cell will have a leader. The four cell leaders will be the leadership of each chapter. The decision making body will be called the Executive Committee. It will be made up of two cell leaders per chapter. We plan to focus our recruiting at the magnet public high schools. The name everyone involved has unanimously shot down is my Youth Resistance Front.

 

“So what names are we still toying with?” asks Izzy.

 

“Youth Resist,” reads off Trikhovitch.

 

“Nope,” says Hubert.

 

“I don’t really like that either,” I say.

 

“Students for Change.”

 

“Definitely not,” says Izzy.

 

“Youth Protest League? That’s just retarded.”

 

“Next,” says Micky.

 

“Youth United for Justice.”

 

We sit on that one for a minute.

 

“These names fucking suck,” I say.

 

“Hold on, what’s the point of this whole thing, Sebastian,” asks Hubert O’Domhnaill .

 

I think on it.

 

“To put everyone on equal footing.”

 

“Then how ‘bout this for a name: Youth United for Equality?”

 

“The Y.U.F.E. Yeah. That could work,” I say.

 

“Is that pronounced yufe or yufee?” asks Trikhovitch.

ג

The founding meeting of Youth United for Equality took place on the fifth floor of the Communist Party Headquarters on a Tuesday afternoon at 4 pm around a wooden table in a sparsely furnished room. The YUFE organization was brought into being by 6 key organizers and me. Simcha Rathajzer, the Chilean socialist. Lauren Zivia and Zivia Ferenz, the girlfriends of Nick Trikhovitch and Izzy respectively. I was very annoyed that Trikhovitch and Izzy weren’t in attendance.  Hubert O’Domhnaill , who had always served more as a rowdy political muse, than as a party man; but his brother was a communist and his family owned an apartment on 34th Street not far from the CP HQ. Finally, Isaac Zucker, once dubbed Crack or Soul Train in another life arrived to assume responsibility for the new organization’s Information-Education Committee. My little brother Benjamin showed up 43 minutes late, but as usual supports me unconditionally.

 

I learned my first important lesson about political organizing at our first official meeting.  It is advice that is a given in all asymmetrical warfare. Make good with what you have and make small numbers feel valuable.

 

“So, down to brass tacks,” says Simcha.

 

While I talk big and radical, Simcha moderates the tactics and the girls give realistic feedback about what the kids in this City will and should not be getting into. They advise that political education must become the most paramount aspect of our initial development. In the words of Ms. Lauren Zivia,

 

“Without the ability to articulate our program and demands, we are but a rabble of angry school children.”

 

We established our command structure. Chapters will be student clubs at our schools. Each chapter will be lead by a Command Cell with four officers: a) the Activist Cell, for recruiting and operations, b) the Education-Information Cell for political training, c) the Service Cell for community projects, and d) the Literary Cell for articulating our message.  Zivia’s father, a German economist of some note told her that only terrorist groups have cells. In light of this and in our ongoing effort to be as inclusive as possible, we replaced the term cell with committee. I may have lifted the word from a book on the Warsaw Ghetto uprising. It wasn’t a real sticking point.

 

Once we had more than three chapters, we’d activated an Executive Committee, a body of one delegate from each Chapter’s Command Cell. I mean Committee.

 

I lead the Activist Cell, which will carry out political actions to bring attention to capitalist institutions that cause human suffering. When Zivia asked what that actually meant and what tactics we’d be using, I saw a GAP Store’s windows explode in my mind’s eye.

 

“Tactical shut downs,” Hubert says, “We can create flyers about worker exploitation and give them out in front of stores, try and talk customers from going inside.”

 

“What will go on the flyer that’s so damn convincing?” asks Lauren Zivia. She is the person taking the notes.

 

“We’re not going be able to convince people of anything with slogans that don’t say anything,” Simcha explains. “We’re gonna have to give people enough facts and training to literally talk people out of going in.”

 

“I read that GAP and NIKE are notorious for making young Asian women work in sweatshops. We need to target our propaganda to specific companies that are directly responsible for exploitation,” I say.

 

“GAP?” asks Zivia.

 

“Yeah, GAP. And their subsidiaries Banana Republic and Old Navy and just about every other clothing company we get our threads from,” explains Simcha. “Mainstream brand name labels and counter culture stuff alike. Everything we wear is made with foreign blood and sweat.”

 

“We should personalize the suffering of the Asian workers,” Zivia suggests. “Let’s get a picture of a young, hot sweat shop worker and write, ‘My names so and so. I make your clothing for . . . we’ll insert some low-ass wage.”

 

“We can’t just hand that stuff out. We have to make each and every customer aware of what these exploiters do. We have hit up multiple stores simultaneously, and we have to make sure all our organizers are articulate, attractive and well dressed,” interjects Lauren.

 

We accept at face value the fact that these companies aren’t paying workers what they need to survive in their own countries. It has ceased to be a shock to me that the very fabric of my society is woven with the sweat of others. The rafters and support beams of the whole architecture drip in blood. Our desire to distance ourselves from this unfortunate fact begins with flyers. But that is not enough. Just telling people isn’t going to stop them from participating in this great crime.

 

“I like the principle,” says Isaac Zucker. “I can easily create fact sheets for our activists to drill off of from stuff on the Internet.

 

We set up a two-week deadline to produce the flyer and a fact sheet. In a simple vote we decided to target Disney, GAP, and Nike as flyer locations based on the fact that Simcha says all three chains are notorious exploiters. The initial action will be that over the course of a week. A YUFE cell will enter a target store each day and plant 250 flyers in the pockets of the clothing. On a Sunday afternoon we will mass our members outside the three Midtown flagship stores of the chains we are targeting and try to outtalk commerce.

ד

Irregularly medicated after my great escape, the dreams have returned.

 

Red and I are on the run.

 

I’ve on my feet for many days. The girl named Red is leading the way. We’ve changed our clothing at a tiny underground weigh station three days back. The blue overalls of slavery discarded, we’re clad now in the light grey shawl tunics of the desert pilgrims. The girl carries one of the dead guard’s pistols strapped under her tunic and bag that contains lord-knows-what, the size of a bowling ball, with a checkered stripe across it of the rude girl unity flag.

 

When I can’t walk anymore she nearly carries me across that desert. Ten thousand miles of off white dunes to clear. She never says much. Just harder, faster, stronger. Time is a little different now. Every time I go to sleep at dawn I find myself dreaming of the boy in AMrika. He is building an army.

 

Red is a woman possessed. She’s convinced we can clear this desert by sheer tenacity and reckless constitution. We ran out of water a few days ago. She says we’ll reach the depot soon. She is hiding something in her loose grey pilgrim’s shawl that she hs changed into after we had hot, naughty desert sex at the weigh station. It appears she’s a few months pregnant. I hadn’t noticed before.

 

She is holding me one night looking at the stitches around my neck. She keeps calling me Michael, but I know better. I’m just the boy pilgrim. Sometime before sunrise, easily a week into our death march I drop to the ground in spasms. We move at night mostly through vast, ever-changing dunes.

 

“It’s just a day’s journey further, Michael. We’ll rest a bit. We’ll reach the depot by dawn.  I’m parched and delirious. Never was a fan of exodus without manna and quail.

 

“Why. Do. You call me by his name,” I stammer on my knees.

 

“I guess it’s time to let the cat out of the bag,” Red says.

 

Gently she takes me in her arms, takes my head against her breasts.

 

“They just cast you as the knock-around guy,” she says as she breaks the stitches around my neck.

 

I don’t feel any pain. The quick sound of flesh ripping. Then the Grey’s Anatomy of dreams. My head is torn back and out of my neck I birth the body of a pilgrim boy without a head. In a jumble of blood, sand and slime this headless boy wriggles free.

 

I lie on the desert floor bleeding. Red takes Mike’s head and some surgical knives out of her checkered bag. How long and how often do I become Mr. Washington? How often does he speak for me in this place and back in AMrika?

 

Like a makeshift Bedouin surgeon she carefully implants my head back on the boy pilgrim’s body. The head of Mike Washington is stitched back on the body, which carried me thus far. Red sits between us running IV lines between our bodies filled with neon blue, glowing fluids. She jams a thick syringe in the heart of Mike’s body. With a great spasm and then shudder, the hero is reborn. There’s a lot of blood in the sand. Her tools are not so sterile. Her grey tunic is a dirty mess.

 

“Was it good for you two?” she asks us.

 

Dawn is coming. Mike and I are several days to ambulatory. Red places oxygen masks on both of us from a liter-sized tank with Acadian markings. Concentrated manna. There sure was quite a lot of crap in one little bag. I fade in and out of consciousness. She covers us in some organic micro quilt, which forms itself like a cocoon around both our bodies.

 

“I have to reach the depot. Come after me when you guys have regained your strength,” Red says.

 

Then she covers us with sand. The quilts and manna will sustain us from the elements.

 

“Sleep tight, pilgrim,” Mike Washington mutters under his quilt.

ה

The cells from Bronx Science and LaGuardia are putting our clandestine flyers in the pockets of GAP apparel at stores in Midtown. The flyers have a picture of Mi Yun, a young immigrant from Saipan. They state that her wage for making the garment is 23 cents an hour before directing the would be consumer to three leading union sites for further reading and self-substantiation.

 

Belfy Andrews, the jolly Canadian stopped helping us with flyer production in early April. His father had found a short manifesto he left on the copier and accused his son of ‘letting socialists manipulate him into economic tomfoolery.’ Belfy, who added little to the movement besides free copies apologized for the slip, but informed me he could no longer help us. Prior to this logistical break down he had helped us pump out 10,000 micro flyers. The end of this ‘in’ means we need for a new place to print propaganda. It’s hard to build a political movement with no money or experience nor control of a printing press.

 

If we have an enemy other than the land-of-do-nothing itself, it can only be ourselves. I have started to tell people that “the wool has been pulled over our eyes.” I have no idea where I lifted such an anachronistic phrase. I keep using it anyway just like I refuse to call our various units committees. I called them cells to the great consternation of Zivia and Lauren who work tirelessly to make us seem more moderate.

 

The majority of our members think that our core issues are police brutality, sweatshop labor and peace in the Middle East. They don’t make connections among the issues. There are only two or three of us that see these as systemic problems, somehow rooted in the economic order of capitalism. I’m not in a battle over an issue or a system. I am in a life or death struggle for the hearts and minds of the youth. The moral and spiritual slumber that defines my peer’s condition has become my obsession. The blood of this empire is all over my hands as long as I take no action.

 

I keep hearing the word revolution thrown around at the Communist party office. I bought a second copy of the Communist Manifesto and am relearning it with the guidance of Simcha and Isaac. I have started trying to read Leon Trotsky’s Permanent Revolution, which I had stolen from the Family School Library along with another book called Marx and Marxism, an obviously anti-communist reader for precocious young kids. Even as poorly as I understand it, communism is my ideology. I am learning that, according to Trotsky, all communists are sworn to make revolution.

 

I am caught between a deep feeling of violent purpose and my gross personal limitations.

ו

Donny Gold’s long time girlfriend Tamar has a Russian cousin named Lisa Spiranski.

 

“Let me tell you something about your so-called communism,” says Lisa Spiranski with a smirk.

 

Izzy  brought me to her house because she grew up in the Soviet Union. I realize from body language alone that if Izzy isn’t cheating on Lara with Lisa currently it is only a matter of time.

 

“I don’t think you’ll associate the material deprivation the people of the USSR went through during the communist years as a positive thing because you’ll either do what left wing intellectuals do and claim it as a failed experiment vis-à-vis state capitalism or you’ll simply glorify material deprivation and the repression as a necessary road to classless, stateless society,” she tells me.

 

“To be perfectly honest, I don’t really know what you’re talking about. I’m really not very intellectual for someone who spends a lot of time in his own head.”

 

“Not to sell you short, Sebastian, but you’re tossing around loaded words and starting a political organization with only a partial idea of what Marxist theory even is. I’m not sure why you’re doing it.” Lisa says.

 

“Me neither, kid. Lots of people are joining YUFE over issue politics. More would probably join if they didn’t think you were a communist.” Izzy adds.

 

“So-called communist,” interjects Lisa.

 

“Excuse me?” I blurt out defensively.

 

“If I asked you to explain what communism is, I’m sure we’d arrive at an ideology called Sebastianism. I think you’ve put a communist brand name on your own increasingly radical, dissident and highly personalized politics. I’m not gonna sit here and begin a long conversation on what communism is and is not, but you are tossing around words that make people nervous. The question you have to ask yourself is why? There are long-term implications to having that ideology.”

 

“Like what?” I ask.

 

“Like how many gallons of blood come out of a communist revolution?” Lisa asks.

 

“I have no idea.” I answer.

 

“More blood than the means of production are worth,” she quickly responds.

 

***

 

By May the YUFE movement has small clusters of activists in about ten public high schools in New York. The largest chapters of 15-20 activists are at Bronx Science, Hunter High School, and Stuyvesant. There are weekly chapter meetings with education committee presentations on a variety of issues. Sweatshop labor dominates as the main issue with mentions of homelessness, the Amadou Diallo shooting and U.S. intervention in Colombia. There is some vague sense of outrage for continued sanctions on Cuba. YUFE is embracing activism piecemeal. Leftist student group isn’t the right term, but it’s the first one that comes to mind.

 

We have learned a key tactical maneuver. If after every large meeting there is a small party, then YUFE’s political agenda isn’t all that troublesome to anyone. People want to rock out and we give them a social avenue that supports a good cause. It is hard to gauge to what degree our general membership buys into the ideology that we are trying to formulate. For all I know this is sexier than the debate team and has cuter girls than Amnesty or AA. It is Karl Marx meets the Sebastian Adon show. Simcha and Isaac infuse healthy doses of socialism while Izzy and Nick Trikhovitch insure big turnouts for any event that involves socializing. It doesn’t matter. Person by person I am bringing most of our social circle into the YUFE fold by hook or crook.

 

In the immortal words of Hubert O’Domhnaill s,

 

“It’s gettin’ hard to know ya and not get pulled into your political enterprises.”

 

And that is precisely the idea.

ז

 

Red, Mike and I are sitting on a bench in a grey concrete bus depot along a black asphalt highway that looks like an airport tarmac. It has taken me six days to recover. On the seventh we haul ass across the barren dunes to reach the depot. We’d barely spoken since the Transmogrification. There has been no strength for more words.

 

The potential means of transport can vary incredibly in this place. Not another vehicle in sight. Enormous deep desert sand dunes surround us although the sands are now rocky and red. A change of wind and the highway depot will be gone. Mike Washington and I are wearing the black pinstripe suits we took from a locker in the depot. The funny hats and implanted jerry curls mean that we’re both dressed as Orthodox Jews.

 

Mike hands me a lunch box. It says Molly’s Escort Service on it. There’s an image of a stripper in lace with handcuffs on it painted black and red. Something inside it is rather heavy.

 

“What’s this?” I ask Mike.

 

“Open it.”

 

“I think I’d rather not.” I say.

 

“What advice do you give a soldier too afraid to pull the trigger?” asks Mike.

 

Mike Washington leans against the bus stop wall and pulls a green pack of cigarettes from his pocket. He flips open a gold Zippo lighter and lights it up. He takes a pair of scissors out of his pocket and cuts off his jerry curls. He throws the black hat into the sand.

 

“You’re the Mr. Pinstripe Suit. You’re the fuckin’ killer,” I respond.

 

“You said it, not me.” Mike says.

 

A bus pulls up with Acadian writing on the side. I don’t know what it says. Mike Washington motions for me to get on the bus. The fare card reader is broken and the driver points to sign that has the number 40 and a Mesopotamian letter next to it. Mike hands the driver a wad of various coins in different currencies and the driver shakes his head in annoyance and waves us through with his hand. The bus is packed with people all speaking in different languages. I move to take an open seat in the front of the bus. Mike stops me.

 

“The Blacks didn’t bleed to sit in the back bus for Jews to get lazy and die near the front.”

 

“What are you talking about?” I ask Mike

 

“Always sit in the back of the bus.” Mike states emphatically.

 

“If you say so.” I respond.

 

The bus driver shrugs as we cram our way through a wide aisle obstructed by blocking limbs and bags probably best consigned to the bottom of the bus. There’s the redheaded girl taking up several seats stretched out and a bunch of what look like guards around her. She’s even more pregnant. Four guards in brown suits are standing while everyone else is sitting. She’s dead asleep and Mike tells me with his eyes to keep moving. We find two seats in the last row. I put the lunch box on my lap.

 

“Don’t you wanna know what’s inside?” Mike asks me.

 

“I already know what’s inside,” I say.

 

The bus chugs to a start. It drives for a few miles and then clunks to a stop. In a jarring lurch the front of the bus elevates itself on hydraulics. There’s a pause and clank. The bus rockets into the upper atmosphere. Clouds fly by the windows. Not even the children cry out. I see metal steam punk wings extend out the sides of the bus.

 

“Let go of your nose. You look like an idiot,” he says. He takes out his cigarettes. They were inside my suit pocket.

 

“You probably can’t….” I begin to say.

 

He’s already smoking on the omnibus.

 

“That isn’t just a pregnant girl,” Mike says.

 

“Huh?” I ask.

 

“That isn’t a girl at all anymore. If I told you that that wasn’t a pregnant shiela but a ticking time bomb inside a pregnant woman hiding itself? How would you deal with the situation?” Mike says.

 

“Only you ask questions like that.” I tell him

 

“It’s a valid question. Think the kid’s yours?”

 

“Huh? Here’s a better question. Why would I ‘deal with’ anyone? Why would I deal with a pregnant girl in the first place? And it definitely isn’t mine,” I tell Mike.

 

“She’s the kind of woman that has the potential to spread confusion up and down the aisles,” Mike says.

 

“Why?”

 

“Because that’s the kind of broad she is.” Mike says.

 

I feel a cold sweat and clammy palms. I feel the fear of something too impending to plan properly for.

 

“I’m not into this today,” I tell Mike.

 

“And I’m not a reincarnated Warsaw Ghetto fighter babysitting an insolent boy pilgrim either.”

 

“What?

 

“What kind of name is Mike Washington?”

 

“It’s a generic American hero name,” I respond.

 

“Remember when you used to stay up all night letting me write stories for you? Stories about me for Mr. Van Kirk.”

 

“Yeah…” I stammer.

 

“You made up a name for me. For the guy you wanted to be. What name was that?” Mike asks me.

 

“Mike Washington,” I say.

 

“Yeah. Do you think that’s my name?”

 

“Probably not.”

 

“Who carried you through your ten years of prison hospitals when all you wanted to do was let them program you or die? When you were screaming down in that hole, who did you call out to when you needed to be strong? Me, motherfucker. Me. When the devil whispers your name do you tell yourself it’s the voice of God? Are you having trouble picking sides?”

 

“You are the fuckin devil!” I spit out.

 

“Don’t cheapen yourself by thinking that the spiritual dichotomy is as simple as two guys in a room playing chess. And don’t paint a saint a sinner simply because you haven’t read the right books, or know the rules to the great game.”

 

“Where is this bus going?” I ask, tired of his tirade.

 

“Someplace the little time bomb inside that woman shouldn’t go. They think they have a virgin but what they really have is a sad and sorry whore from Babylon. The men guarding her don’t even know who they serve. Someone ordered them to seize the mother just like someone ordered me to protect you. We all have our orders, little pilgrim, but that don’t change the fact that you’re still Mr. Pinstripe Suit on a mission.”

 

“What the fuck does that mean?”

 

“It’s a lyric from a Big Bad Voodoo Daddy song.”

 

“I know it is. What does it mean in relation to me?!” I demand.

 

Mr. Always-on-the-go,” he sings, “I know you got the answer, and we all wanna know.”

 

The men in the suits look in our direction. When they talk it sounds like nails scraping across a black board.

 

“I can’t kill the beast, pilgrim. You may have the answer, but you still don’t know how to fire your weapon and we’re seriously running out of time.”

 

The eyes of the four men go pitch black. The children on the bus start screaming. One of the bodyguards picks up a small girl who is yelling loudest of all and flings her across the bus. Her head cracks against the windshield. Her dead body hits the ground.

 

“If I told you we were gonna soon engage in actions that sacrifice innocents for a greater good would you be willing to do it? Some people are gonna have to die to save the whole. You and me, too if necessary.”

 

I stare at the men with the black eyes and look at my hand. My hand is shaking. I don’t dare open the box.

 

“Open the box, boy. We don’t have much time,” Mike mutters under his breath.

 

The other passengers have moved as far away from the four men in the brown suits as they possibly can and are cowering in the back of the omnibus near us.

 

“Are you still a communist, boy? Are you still one guided by your belief in some collective good?” Mike continues.

 

I give him a dead blank look.

 

“The greatest amount of good for the greatest amount of people right? Individuals have to sacrifice for the greater good. Sacrifice or be willing to sacrifice others cause we ain’t leaving without her means of production.”

 

He slaps me on the back and stands up.

 

“Just remember that you’re the fuckin’ omelet,” Mike yells at me.

 

The rest happens very quickly. Mike’s cigarette hits the ground. He reaches into his suit pocket and pulls out a golden handgun and takes off down the wide aisle running. Whenever this happens I think in onomatopoeia. Too much Adam West when I was little.

 

He pushes his way through the crowd and bum rushes one of the brown suits giving a flying kick to one as he shoots another in the face. BLAM! As he lands on top of the man he kicked, he carefully fires quickly point blank at the head of second. BLAM!  It explodes like a firecracker in a watermelon. Blood gets on everybody and everything. The passengers are screaming as he darts up the wide aisle, he catches the arm of the third as he reaches for his own gun and turns around and shoots the fourth. BLAM! Mike swings the gun around and brings the barrel down on the face of the third suit he’s caught the arm of. Shit brown blood is all over the place. The last man standing manages to get his pistol out, a German Lugar, and tries to fire at Mike. Mike twists his arm and the man fires haphazardly all over the bus. Several shots hit the driver and the controls. The omnibus lurches into a dive. Mike manages to overpower him and shoots the final bodyguard in the back of the head. BLAM! In less then five seconds my imaginary friend has shot four brown-suited men and his face is covered in their blood. So is the pregnant woman. This is Mike at his most decisive. The pregnant girl is pale and silent. There’s blood splattered running down her face. Her hair is colored with the cheap red die Eastern European women seem to love. Like Jessica Rabbit. The color crimson. I run up to the front. The control panel is covered in the blood and brains of the dead driver. We’re now in free fall.

 

“If the bus gets to ZION, so help me God, we’ll be in trouble!” Mike yells.

 

“ZION? Is that where we’ve been going?”

 

“Open the lunch box and end this situation. Those were not men of flesh. This is not just some frivolous girl. We cannot let this bus get to the City of Lights in one piece,” Mike continues.

 

“What’s in the box?” I ask again.

 

“You know what’s in the fucking box.”

 

I think to myself that my imaginary friend wants me to shoot this pregnant red haired girl and I wonder what that says about my mental health. The holes in the heads of the four brown shirts close up. Slightly groggy they start to get up.  Mike, still looking at me, shoots them again quickly without batting an eye. He slides the magazine out of his handgun and drops the empty clip to the floor.

 

I open the box. There’s a silver plated stethoscope inside.

 

“You thought there’d be a gun in there?” he smirks. “You don’t know how to shoot. What makes you think I’d give you a gun? Go listen to her heart.”

 

I place the stethoscope on her right side above the breast.

 

“Left side, pilgrim.”

 

I replace it. I hear the rapid thud of a panicked girl’s heart.

 

The beating heart becomes like a vibration. The heartbeat is transmitting a code. I interpret the code mentally like a black and white comic book. I see Mike, the girl named Red and myself on the flying omnibus. It’s very Roy Lichtenstein.

 

“What’s your name?” I watch myself say.

 

“I told you my name is Red. I’m scared. Please don’t kill my child and me. They got inside without my permission and they’ll enter someone else as soon as you kill us,” I watch her say.

 

“What do you want me to do?”

 

“Don’t trust anything you hear me say without that stethoscope. It will try and get you two to bring me to Zion. You need to get him out of me before we get there or you’re going to have to kill us both. I trusted him and he got inside me. Please help us.”

 

“Who got inside you?”

 

“The laughing devil Clown. Please don’t let your friend kill me and my baby just to stop the beast.”

 

“Bring…down….the….bus,” she whispers in my ear.

 

I remove the stethoscope.

 

“There’s gotta be some other option,” I watch myself say.

 

“Those things will be up in a minute. Ammunition is finite even in dreams. If you think drinking is bad while pregnant you can be sure sky diving is worse,” Mike says.

 

“With what fucking parachute?!”

 

“With the parachutes in our goddamn suits.” Mike yells.

 

“What about her? What about the other passengers?”

 

“In AMrika a crisis decision is between Coke and Pepsi. For everyone else it’s about the least worst option.”

 

“And what’s our least worst option, Mr. Washington!?”

 

“I shoot out a window and we dive out of a plane with the woman tied to me because if the shoot doesn’t support two people you’re the only person who’s absolutely not expendable for the time being.”

 

“That sounds like a terrible idea,” the pregnant redhead says.

 

“All of us dying a flaming, horrible death in a flying bus accident is not exactly on my agenda, sweetheart,” Mike tells her.

 

“So here’s a better idea. I change out of this suit and she gets her own parachute. You and I can share.”

 

“I’m under strict orders to keep your altruism from getting us killed,” Mike says.

 

“I order you to let me give her my parachute.”

 

“What makes you think I take my orders from you?” He snaps.

 

The omnibus dips vertically and I nearly fall over and careen down the aisle.

 

“Time is of the essence boys,” the girl moans.

 

“This isn’t Terminator, Sebastian. Just because I protect you doesn’t mean I have to listen to you. You have less then a minute to keep some of us alive. Changes of wardrobe are absolutely out of the question.”

 

With reflexes faster than I’ve ever seen the four men are back up and on top of Mike tearing at his suit, their fingers extending multiple joints wrapping around his body with their screeching screams piercing our ears. Mike struggles to pick up his gun that has been knocked from his hand. Mike kicks the gun in my direction. The four suits strike his face and wrap tentacle fingers around him like a ball of suited male violence. They crash up the aisle and smash directly against the front windshield. The glass strains and cracks.

 

He lets out a terrific yell. Like a war cry.

 

The windshield breaks and the five of them fly out the window.

 

The air sucks through the bus. A passenger tumbles down the aisle and out the window, too. I manage to grab the girl’s arm. I’ve been socialized to grab onto attractive young women in the event of an emergency as if it were protocol. This can’t be very good for the baby. The thing inside her feels nothing. With one hand clutching the girl I empty a few rounds of Mike’s pistol at a side window. The air pressure sucks the shattered glass outside. Holding the little Red head tight I mutter a prayer to a vague conception of a higher power and jump out the window.

 

There’s a deafening rush of air. I’ve never seen the sky this blue. The bus disappears below me. Out of the corner of my eye I see Mike’s parachute inflated like a great, grey balloon, a brown suited figure hanging off him. A kick sends the brown suit tumbling toward the ground miles below. Where the fuck is the ripcord, I wonder afraid to let go of the girl who has wrapped herself around me with all her strength as we plummet to our deaths. It doesn’t matter, soon enough the blue balloon parachute inflates on its own with a RIP and POP and BANG. Red is wide-eyed and holding onto me still for dear life. I’ve lost my hat. Least of my concerns, I reckon. It’s automated-action adventure time and I’m a good three miles above the desert with Red wrapped around me tight. I wonder what she’ll name the baby.

ח

Nick Trikhovitch and I just bought his manual on guerrilla warfare from St. Marks books in the East Village. Simcha says a lot of what we’re organizing is playing out now in South America. The Cuban revolution, the FARC-EP rebels in Columbia, Shining Path in Peru. The Allende Regime in Chile, which the US toppled in 1973. Salvador Allende was neither guilty of having communists in his cabinet, nor of coming to power via the armed overthrow of the Chilean government. He was something more intolerable still; he was a democratically elected Marxist.

 

On September 11th, 1973 Allende’s socialist experiment came to an end. The military seized power and General Augusto Pinochet took power with the direct backing of the CIA. A brutal crackdown followed. The day after the coup the head of the air force proclaimed the need to exterminate “the cancer of Marxism.” Members of the Allende government were rounded up and placed under detention. Thousands of alleged leftists were detained, questioned, and tortured in the national soccer stadium. At least 3,000 Chileans were killed or disappeared in the aftermath of the coup-and this is by a conservative count. Simcha’s father had been one of them. In the place of a democratically elected socialist government Chile received a military dictatorship that would rule with an iron fist until 1990.

 

The guerrilla warfare manual teaches us how to convert a shotgun into a rocket launcher. It demonstrates how to ambush enemy columns and illustrates the best way to make Molotov cocktails. It makes me recognize something that wasn’t entirely clear in the beginning. Having a revolution may entail killing a whole lot of people. I don’t know how I feel about that.

 

Being that New York isn’t exactly known for its jungles, I suggest a trip out to Long Island, the closest thing to jungle light. Nick wants to fuck Lauren in my parent’s hot tub and I want to terrorize rich people in the woods. The irony of guerrilla warfare in the Hamptons escapes no one.

***

Nick Trikhovitch and Lauren Zivia, Izzy Vitz and his girlfriend Zivia, Simcha, Zoe Zapata and I take the LI Double R to East Hampton early Saturday morning. Zoe is a busty Chilean with a huge crush on me. Benjamin and my parents are already out there. It never ceases to amaze me how much Zivia has changed. She used to be a quiet, somewhat bookish girl with glasses and now she’s a Raver with platinum blonde hair and neon bright clothes. Zivia got hot while I was away. How she and Izzy ended up together is a mystery to me. By evening we’re all in the hot tub. Izzy is joking about an orgy, but he and I know he’s not really joking. Izzy and I are the kind of guys that can’t get into a hot tub without thinking about group sex.

 

“It really stands for ‘Y U Fuckin’ Everybody,” Izzy whispers to Zoe about my organization and I jokingly elbow him in the ribs.

 

Everyone’s been drinking Coronas and Red Stripe all day and I have to remind the crew that we’re not just out here for recreation. We, after all, have to learn how to kill the capitalists.

 

“So who’s a capitalist? Besides your parents I mean,” Nick asks laughing.

 

“My Dad isn’t a capitalist,” I retort. “These books would lead us to believe that a capitalist is anyone who exploits their workers.”

 

“So we’re supposed to kill all these capitalists?” Izzy laughs.

 

“All the ones that won’t come over to our side,” I say.

 

Izzy Vitz has read more about communism than any of us but doesn’t believe in any of it.

 

“In America that would mean killing a whole lot of people. Too many, if you ask me. By the time the revolution is over you’re talking Hitler-Stalin proportions,” argues Zivia.

 

“But you have to admit that there are a good chunk of people that profit extensively from the majority of the world being poor,” says Nick as he slaps the side of the hot tub, “like Sebastian’s parents.”

 

“Doesn’t mean you have to kill anybody,” says Lauren Zivia.

 

“Well what is it that you think a revolution is?” demands Izzy.

 

“That’s exactly what a revolution is, and that’s why I don’t believe in revolution,” says Zivia.

 

“It doesn’t have to go down like that,” I tell them.

 

“Oh, and what do you have in mind Mr. Wants-to-run-around-in-the-woods-to-practice-guerrilla- warfare?” asks Lauren.

 

“With Sebastian you have to separate his reckless adventurism from his politics every once in a while,” says Nick as he lights up a Newport.

 

“No, you don’t. If I have to kill a capitalist or two to free my people I’d do it. I’m just not about genocide,” I state.

 

“Who are ‘your people,’ Sebastian? Why do we have to kill anybody?” asks Zoe suddenly interested.

 

Zoe is the whitest Chilean I know and I want to fuck her brains out. Her orange bikini fits her nicely. She’s liked me for a while and Izzy is trying to get me laid. There’s something intense about these Chileans. Ronnie Lestor who robbed my house, Simcha the socialist and now this cute thing.

 

“Ah, the difficult questions. What will it be, Sebastian? How much do you want that omelet?” asks Simcha channeling Fidel Castro with a Coheba cigar in his mouth.

 

“Sebastian doesn’t want blood, he wants social justice,” interrupts Lauren.

 

“Let him answer for himself,” says Izzy.

 

“Let’s be clear with these terms first,” Simcha says, “If a capitalist is an exploiter, well fuck it then, they’re our enemy. If a communist is a freedom fighter for the workers and oppressed then that’s the side we want to be on. And if a revolution is the right means to end exploitation and suffering, then that’s what we want. If we have to kill a lot of people, then we didn’t do something right during the planning stage.”

 

“I’m well with that,” I say.

 

“Is YUFE the planning stage to a commie revolution?” laughs Nick Trikhovitch.

 

“We’ll just have to wait and see,” I say.

 

“Planning the revolution from a hot tub in the Hamptons. I love the irony,” says Simcha.

 

Two hours later Simcha, my brother Benny, Trikhovitch, Lauren Zivia, Zoe Zapata, and I are dressed in olive and black fatigues stalking through the woods with water guns and two dangerously realistic toy shot guns. We’ve played this game before. We call it Operation Reinhardt. In this game of vandalism and make believe, we are all transported back to Poland in 1943 as Jewish partisans behind Nazi lines. In the past we’ve dug up road signs, stolen flags, destroyed property and incinerated the local high school football goal posts. This time we’d be ambushing cars. Zivia and Izzy Vitz aren’t really into the whole game as much as they are into doggy style in the hot tub. They wish us luck and tell us not to get arrested. After crossing through several other properties placing many a chair into a pool, we arrive at a highway intersection. Using caution tape and orange neon rope we section off three sides of the intersection. With two Super Soaker 2000’s and several water balloons our objective is to lie in wait until a car stops at our blockade. When a person gets out to move it we’ll hit them with everything we’ve got.

 

I am crouching with Zoe and my brother in the woods, Super Soaker rifles ready. There isn’t any wind so the trees don’t rustle. Whoever stops at the blockade is going to get drenched. That in itself is a harmless teenage prank, a bunch of drunken kids fucking around on a Saturday night. Only I am somewhere else. To me, when that person stops they aren’t just some Hamptonite about to get soaked. I am suddenly in the middle of a great revolt and I am going to kill someone for the first time. I am engaging in political violence. Once I do this I can do it over and over again, kill as many people as I have to. I hear the car before I see it. I am in a trance. My enemy uses violence. I must use violence against my enemy. My enemy causes suffering. I must make my enemy suffer. I pump my water gun. It’s heavy like the biggest water gun ever made. 3000 won’t be out ‘til summer. In my mind it goes “click clack.”

 

Caught somewhere between the Holocaust and a violent future that I can see inevitably coming, I get ready to shoot.

 

In dreams I have seen buildings burning, I have had front row seats at an execution and I’ve seen children beaten with rifle butts. I’ve seen them in my mind, but what the mind makes real forms the basis of conviction. I see Nick ready to fire and I see Lauren and Simcha readying the water balloon launcher. And I hear the car coming. Maybe it’s a troop transport. Maybe it’s a tank. Don’t shoot ‘til you see the whites of their eyes. That one always stuck with me. It’s a black Escalade. The driver slows down, stops, and then gets out. It’s a dude in a sweater. It’s a soldier. It’s a capitalist. Don’t shoot ‘til you see the whites of his eyes.

 

I yell, “Fire!”

 

My brother Benjamin and I fire the opening salvo. He jumps in the air and yells out. The girls hit his car with water balloons and a girl yelps from inside. It all happens real fast. We don’t wait around to see what happens. All six of us tear ass back into the woods to meet up at the rendezvous point. I snap out of whatever fucked-up fantasy land I’m in and hightail after my brother deep into the tree line.

 

We repeat the process two more times at different intersections. Finally someone calls the cops on us and we have to hide in the woods for what seems like an unusually long amount of time as some cops walk around with a flashlight looking for us. The column gets back to base without any casualties.

 

I climb into bed next to Zoe and she starts rubbing my cock. Soon we’re going at. Zoe has enormous Chilean breasts. I lose my virginity to her about three hours later. It is exactly as special as I thought it would be. Believe me when I say I won’t be the first, nor the last high-minded rebel leader to cum on a girl’s face.

ט

 

Right before school ends for the summer YUFE has organized its first citywide strike against GAP Sweatshop Labor. It takes place on the same day as the Puerto Rican Day Parade. All seven chapters are assigned a major GAP retail location and we decided we would try to dissuade people from shopping there for a day. Our activists descend on seven different stores with signs and flags and pamphlets. We learned about some ordinance that states that as long as we have less than twenty people with no sound amplification outside a given store and aren’t blocking pedestrians, there is very little the authorities can do besides lecture us. Maybe it is a real ordinance; maybe it’s not. The cops find it convincing enough. The idea of all-American, GAP clothing being produced via shadow contracts and indentured labor in so-called free trade gulags enrages us. Here was a clothing line we all grew up with. Here is another American symbol soaked in blood. So we get real loud this Saturday. For every hundred people who won’t take a flyer, there is some person, generally a woman, that encourages us to keep on protesting. People tell us that we remind them of things they used to do in the 1960’s. That was a time when all the students were on the march. It is something in the back of our minds that needs to be replicated.

 

Something is changing within my mind. I wake up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat unable to sleep, convinced my name is Mike Washington. I go for late night Camel smoke rambles evaluating what direction we are taking the YUFE. I reflect constantly on matching my YUFE rhetoric with my daily life. The need for discipline is becoming pronounced. The desire to focus all my time toward advancing our goals is central to my thinking. And then there are the false memories. I have talks with my compatriots making reference to things that I have dreamt about thinking they are real.  It is idiosyncratic, but not blatant enough for anyone to think anything other than that I am slightly confused. I dream a conversation or event and think it is real.

 

I have started wearing a brown work jacket with a Mike nametag that I boutght at a Less Than Jake Ska show. I have accumulated several Mike work shirts and wear them whenever the mood comes over me. Sometimes I introduce myself as Mike Washington at a house party. From the outside this may look like some bizarre obsession or an identity issue. It is both. Since the start of June I am becoming more and more like Mike Washington. I feel like there is a strong disciplined revolutionary inside me that I am learning to let speak and act for me. There is an inherent weakness in Sebastian Adon. Still rep obsessed, self-aggrandizing and putting my dick in the cookie jars of too many bright-eyed recruits, I feel that I am certain to fail unless I rely on Mike for discipline. My sanity is stretched. I am certain normal people don’t let imaginary friends do the talking.

 

I spend long nights confiding in my friend and lieutenant Lauren Zivia. She has become a sister to me, a girl I’m not trying to kiss with whom I can share the mounting madness. She does her best to give advice. At times I talk about the various YUFE girls I hook up with. Other times I tell her about the Family School and why I can no longer slept. We traveled to Boston together for an Amnesty International Conference. After attending a few workshops, I discover I have the signs and symptoms of PTSD.

 

I seek to testify to Lauren Zivia what has happened to me. I have hidden it from my brother, my comrades and certainly from my parents. Beyond the YUFE rhetoric and the great sense of mission I try to instill in everyone around me, I still feel the madness slowly taking hold.

 

Lauren is very active in the YUFE organization, more so than my best friends Trikhovitch and Izzy. My boys are my boys and they come out to benefit parties and film screenings, but it is their girlfriends Lauren and Zivia that do most of the work for the organization. Simcha and Isaac handle political education, but the girls keep it marketable to the growing number of students involved.

 

I have shared my fears of insanity with Lauren Zivia. She says I am working too hard and have watched Fight Club too many times. She says I need a vacation or I am going to get burnt out. I have achieved straight A’s at the Smith School. YUFE is growing quickly with more and more students opening chapters in their schools. I never stop recruiting. I look out at our enormous social circle and have found ways for as many people to be involved as possible. I have been the after-school special at a different New York high school each week convincing my fellow students of their obligation to our struggle. I rarely sleep more than a couple hours a night before a nightmare wakes me up and I start scribbling YUFE manifestos or notes to speeches.

 

Lauren Zivia accuses me of becoming a zealot. She has advised me to spend more time with the boys, my best outlet for non-political hedonism (other than the chest of Zoe Lubov) or to go out to the Hamptons for a few weeks now that school is over to sit by the beach. I have other plans. I am off to look at Nazi Death Camps in Poland.

 

There are all kinds of Zionist trips one can go on to learn about Jewish heritage via Death Camps and Israel. Since an early age I have been obsessed with the Holocaust. I stole tons of books from the library on camps like Treblinka and Auschwitz. I know how to sketch the camp layouts from memory.

 

It all goes back to my Bar Mitzvah, back when I was a rather unwilling Jew. I remember around the age of eleven being told that I would have to attend Hebrew school on 23rd and Third at East End Temple to learn Jewish history and a new language. I was less than thrilled. My grandparents on my father’s side are the Jewish ones. My mother is a convert from something called the Unitarian-Universalist Church. In a rabbinical sense that doesn’t make me all that Jewish since it gets to children passed on the mother’s side.

 

My grandmother Adon was always dying.

 

From as far back as I can remember she’d come down with a critical condition and we’d promptly cancel a vacation and go to Florida. For a while I was convinced that only the elderly populated the state of Florida. Later on I learned about the Cubans and the neo-Nazis. It was important to her that I become Bar Mitzvahed. She was willing to hold off dying despite incredible predictions to the contrary until I made that happen.

 

I found out that Hebrew School wasn’t all about learning Hebrew and Jewish history. Most of it was about remembering the Holocaust. The unwilling Jew that I was hadn’t any idea the extent of the whole thing. My teachers filled in some details. Stolen textbooks from the East Hampton Library added more.

 

The reason that I stole the library books had to do with how much I mark up a copy. I could have asked my Dad to buy me any book on the subject, but I was keeping my obsession on the low. That is to say that I didn’t want anyone to realize how truly disturbed I was by the subject. The Nazis had wiped out virtually half the Jewish population on earth in less than five years. By in large the Jews did nothing to stop them. My research was to document Jewish resistance in the Holocaust. This was at the heart of my intellectual obsession. Warsaw and the Treblinka death camp were what I knew the most about. There had been a takeover of the Sobibor camp by Russian Jewish POW’s and minor fighting in Lodz. A few women blew up a crematory in Auschwitz. The gas chambers seemed like a better target in retrospect. There were isolated incidents generally launched by the young and quickly crushed, except in Warsaw, which lasted about a month and change and killed several hundred Nazis. My interest increased after escaping from the Family School. I began collecting research material. Before getting locked up I thought about the subject frequently, but didn’t proactively seek out books. Now I was proactively seeking out survivors and had convinced my parents to send me to see the camps.

 

“You’re kidding, right?” says Lauren Zivia with a not so amused look upon her face. “That sounds like the worst idea I’ve ever heard come out of your mouth.”

 

But the trip has been planned for months. I am going to fly to Warsaw, look at camps around Poland, take a train to Prague and then fly to Tel Aviv. The whole trip is going to take the month of July.

 

“That trip is gonna make whatever you’re dealing with far worse,” Lauren predicts.

 

I feel like I am going to a vast and terrible place, a heart of darkness. In the decidedly grandiose and epic way in which I think, I equate learning about the imprisonment and murder of people as a way to understand my own demons. I empathize in an impossible and perhaps psychotic way with the victims of this great and evil crime. This has been quite exacerbated by my imprisonment in the hospital camp upstate. I realized that my dreams reflect the camps. The barbwire fences, the caravans of people off to the slaughter. The Holocaust was a time when my nightmares were in the waking life. The Holocaust was humanity at its worst, the systematic murder of six million of my people. I feel that by going there I can connect to something. Or maybe it will just make me crazier like Lauren Zivia says. But if you don’t take dangerous chances, you just won’t learn anything worth knowing.

י

A whole long plane ride without peanuts later, I am in a crappy hotel in Warsaw with about forty Jewish kids from around the country. The kids are bright-eyed and terrified. I play it cool for about a day sketching in my black sketchbook without being very social. We spend the day checking out synagogues that have been used as stables and hear about the creation of the Warsaw ghetto. They put 450,000 people in an area the size of Harlem.  The ones that didn’t die of disease and starvation were loaded on trains to get gassed at the Treblinka death camp.

 

The kids on the trip can’t decide whether to laugh or cry. They can’t seem to figure out if we are on vacation and should horse around or do the whole thing real stoic. I figure they’ll be a bigger mess when we get to a camp. The Polish guide keeps calling me the “tough New York shtarker.” I wonder how tough I’d have been back in 1943. I’d like to think I would have not died like the rest of these sheep.

 

People ask me a bunch of questions that I’m not prepared to answer. Some confide they wished they could have skipped the camps and gone straight to Israel. I don’t tell them that Israel isn’t why I am on this trip. I know nothing about the place. I have a vague sense of it as the Jewish homeland but beyond that I don’t feel much of a connection.

 

The trip has been designed to show the horrors of Holocaust era Europe and the magic of the Holy Land. Most of these young Zionists want to come to terms with the past. I want to dwell in it. I would have stayed in Poland longer than two weeks if I could have.

 

***

 

I am real friendly with two guys named Er and Onan. Er Gerblich has a girlfriend he intends to be loyal to. Onan Weinstein wants to hook up with as many Jewish girls as he can, and some Polish ones too if they don’t all hate Jews. During the tours of the ghetto I am dead serious about doing sketches and taking notes. I want to do a graphic novel like Art Spiegalman’s Mauz about Jewish resistance to the Holocaust. I photograph everything I don’t have time to sketch. I ask a ton of questions. Anytime we get introduced to one authority or another I break out my tape recorder like an investigative journalist and ask more questions when the kids are on break. If you were to watch me during the supervised tour you’d think I am writing a book or something. But as soon as we get free time, I am off fucking around with Er and Onan.  We get the impression Poles still don’t like Jews much. Maybe they just don’t like obnoxious American tourists, but I rationalize that they also don’t like Jews.

 

Sometimes the boys and I play cards in the back of the bus on the way to some site of mass execution or group killing. When no one else is paying attention I tell Onan to put his mouth around the exhaust pipe of the bus for the full Holocaust experience.

 

There is old death all around me. And we keep on digging it up and playing with it.

 

 

***

 

 

Warsaw looks like it is still stuck in the Soviet Bloc. The weather is dark and dreary. It rains the first few days we are here. The boys and I go into store after store of Polish hardcore porn that line the strip they let us wander on. I toy with the idea of purchasing an electric, vibrating post-Soviet vagina. It is only about sixty zlotys. That doesn’t seem like all that much.

 

I didn’t know too much about the Warsaw Ghetto uprising before I got to Warsaw. I know that some Jews made a stand. Being Johnny-ten-billion-questions when I’m interested in something, I leave Warsaw with tons of archival photos and a reading list. Most of my research had been about the Jews that took over and burned down Treblinka and those that had escaped en masse from Sobibor. Warsaw was a battle. It took longer to crush the ghetto rebellion than it took for the Nazis to take over Europe. Less than eight hundred students with pistols and Molotov cocktails held an area the size of Harlem. Hundreds of Nazis died. They had to burn the whole ghetto to the ground and it still went on for nearly two months.

 

In the middle of Warsaw, we come to a green hill with a small monument on top. The hill is on 18 Mila Street. Under this very hill had been the enormous command bunker from which the Jewish resistance fighters called the ZOB (Zybotso Organizatia Bejudeoa or the Jewish Fighting Organization) had directed its guerrilla attacks against the Nazis. On May 8th of 1943, on the twentieth day of the uprising, the Nazis surrounded the bunker and dynamited each of its four exits. The Nazis pumped Zyclon B into the bunker through holes they drilled in the ground where Commander Mordechai Anielewicz, about 120 other fighters and several hundred civilians were trapped inside. Most of the fighters killed themselves before the gas took hold. We only know this to be true because two or three got out through the sewers. Under this hill are the bones of my heroes. I pick up a rock from the ground and place it on the memorial stone. I’m not sure why, but that’s what we Jews do to commemorate our fallen.

 

 

***

 

We are journeying deeper into the darkness.  I had barely understood Joseph Conrad’s book, which described his trip up the Congo River into the violence, rape and destruction of colonial Africa. Our shitty metal Polish greyhound is taking us deeper and deeper up that metaphorical river of our own people. A Polish contract security guard with a pistol follows us around. When we first arrived we toured the cities. We had traveled to ghettos, the streets paved with Jewish tombstones, the synagogues saved because they’d been made into a stable and remnants here or there of an old Ghetto wall. Up next is the mass graves the Nazis had the Jews dig out in the woods before they lined them up and shot their families.

 

I don’t know who to hate more, the Nazis who built the camps or the Poles who allowed it to happen in their own backyards. I have started keeping a list of which kids on the trip would have survived the Holocaust. Not very many I figure.

 

Kids keep breaking down all over the place. A good deal of hugging it out stabilizes our little crew. I convince myself that these emotionally concentrated moments aren’t taking a toll on me. I’m not going to cry about something I can’t change. These people have been dead for fifty years.  These stories aren’t shocking to me anymore. There was unprecedented human misery in the war years and one more story about another raped Jewish girl, or another baby impaled on a soldier’s baton isn’t going to change my worldview.

 

I am only in Poland to find out about the Jews that fought back.

 

***

 

After a long bus ride we arrive at the site where the Treblinka death camp once swallowed up 800,000 of my people. I hadn’t imagined it like this. I know what happened here. A book I stole from the Hampton’s library painted the whole picture. There isn’t a camp anymore. It looks a whole lot more like a cemetery. There are over ten thousand tombstones, but they don’t mark bodies. They mark villages, whole villages wiped out with carbon monoxide in a building that must have looked like a barn. The double layer barbed wire fence is gone. So is the barn. At the epicenter of the slaughter site is an enormous monolith. Screaming faces are carved at the top. The tombstones are small jagged projections upon which are inscribed the names of Polish towns.

 

The Polish guides asks me to tell the story of the camp uprising because they know I’ve studied it. In the spring of 1943 the camp knew its days were numbered. The great experiment of Operation Reinhardt, which had created the camps of Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka was near its end. The mega camps Auschwitz and Birkenow were fully capable of murdering Europe’s Jewry at the rate of 40,000 a day with Zyclon B.  The camp leaders had formed a committee to escape and destroy the camp before they too were liquidated.  On August 2nd they covered the camp in petrol, set it on fire and fled into the woods. About 40 made it out alive. A couple wrote books about it. All of the leaders of the uprising were killed. They managed to kill a Nazi and two Ukrainians. I couldn’t decide what about the story of Treblinka was particularly amazing to me. The results of the uprising were not miraculous, so instead it must be the miracle that it happened at all. Jewish Resistance to the Holocaust usually seems like a myth. But if you set about the kill 6 million, I guess a couple would have fought back.

 

Why had so few fought back? They had truly gone like sheep to the slaughter. They had put the patches on their arms. They had moved into the ghettos.  They had helped load each other on the trains to these camps. If a people will not fight to save itself, does it even deserve to be a people?

 

I have wandered quite far from the group amid the vast graveyard of names I can’t pronounce or remember. And what arguments can I make for the goodness of humanity when such a crime was carried out in the heart of Europe. Where was the Allied bombardment of the camps or the railroad tracks? Why had countries like the U.S. turned back refugees even after it knew what Hitler was doing?

 

Two things in this graveyard terrify me. First, I can no longer sympathize with the Jews that didn’t fight. Second, I am unsure that our nature was truly good. I don’t hate Poles or Germans anymore. They had done what they said they were going to do. I hate the scared Ghetto Jew that let the Nazis kill his family. I hate Anne Frank for hiding in some attic while her people were being killed. There has always been slaughter going on somewhere. People with bullets and bombs or machetes have done the job just as well as the Nazis did with gas chambers and Zyclon B. The Jew was not killed because he was a Jew; he was killed because he made the perfect scapegoat for the darker forces of Europe. He was picked to die not for religious but for sociological reasons. There is no Jewish race. It is some kind of construct created in exile. My people are the most reviled of any group in Western civilization.  Not even fit to be slaves. I realize right here and now that while it may have been Hitler and Eichmann that had the final solution, the nations of Europe didn’t protest all that much. The miserable Ghetto Jew had been nearly eradicated by Western civilization. Hitler was the architect cheerleader but the devil was indifference.

 

These thoughts come to me quickly and spin in my head. There is something very wrong with humanity. I have only scratched the surface of the ice. How much human suffering remains frozen below? If I were to tear apart my many society-created identities, like Jew or communist or New Yorker, then I am just a man. And the evils, the injustices and the weight of human suffering falls on my shoulders like those of every person who came before me.

 

I am crying. I weep amid tombstones of obliterated towns and at the foot of one of the great pyres where they burned the bodies where no one can see me but my God.

 

After awhile I wipe my tears knowing they are a waste of my water.

 

I realize I am not a great fighter, but perhaps one only knows how to fight in the face of one’s own destruction. I’m the kind of guy who can get a hand job on the bus ride to Auschwitz. I’m the kind of guy that jokes around constantly in the face of tragedy. My connection to being Jewish has more to do with mass graves in Eastern Europe than with faith in God. But during these two weeks in Poland surrounded by the monuments to the destruction of my people, I have realized that when I die, I’ll die fighting as a Jewish revolutionary.

 

I have no discipline, no organizational abilities and up to now, I have squandered my leadership skills in vain self-aggrandizement. The context of my struggle is different than those born Jewish in Poland or Black in Africa. Mine is a struggle that I am under no pressure to join. The West is, of course, the Aryan side and the rest of the world is the ghetto marked for differing degrees of degradation or destruction. If I choose not to fight, if I return to America to my parents loft in the Financial District, their house in the Hamptons, to college and then law school, I am as guilty as the Poles. The phrases Nazi and Holocaust are loaded and extreme as is their parable. But East New York is every bit as much a ghetto as Warsaw. The poverty in Newark, NJ kills as many as Treblinka. My tribe was chosen to be the radical example of our of our human darkness. This is the moment of my greatest realization.

 

I have to fight or I am an accomplice to human suffering and slaughter.

 

Squatting down in that cemetery I vow before my God, to whom I have not reached out since the day of my great escape from the Family School, that I will give my life to make sure this will never happen again. Now my struggle is universal. The only event that can change this reality is the revolution. I am going to do whatever I have to do to help my people, which is to say all people who are the victims of the whims of oppressive governments, even if it cost me my life. In the bone yard of Treblinka I am making a palaver with my God, Mike Washington and whatever unseen powers of the universe choose to listen. My quiet tears water the bone yard and I take a rock from this place of death to hold as a token of my pledge.

 

***

 

We have seen most of the big camps in all their rusty, barb-wired glory with their gas-chambered bunkers and forests of death and ash.  Madjanek. Auschwitz. Treblinka. Birkinow. The Israeli guide tells us that Madjanek could be up and running in a day. The guides jam the 40 of us into one corner of the gas chamber at one of the camps.  All the kids start screaming and crying. To me it is more tasteless than moving. I came here to take pictures and hear a story, not to role-play. Never had a taste for Dungeons and Dragons. Bunkers and Gas Chambers isn’t a game I have too much time for either. Everyone has a good cry. I don’t need the reenactment with dreams like mine. In all the flailing crying mess I think about reaching for the security guard’s pistol just to prove a point. If Trikhovitch were here he’d call this a bad idea.

 

Nothing is worse to me than the parade of photography. I hate the moments where we have to wait for the guides to snap photos with the forty cameras in a pile. That might fly with me at the Sea of Galilee, but not so much in front of Schindler’s factory or the memorial stone at Mila 18.

 

After seeing most of the camps and enough sites of hapless horror to last me lifetime, we are back in a cheap Warsaw hotel about to board a train for the Czech Republic. It is a midnight bullet train. We are leaving for the next leg of the trip that will be more picturesque than meaningful, an interlude before our flight to Israel for the last leg.

 

“Nothing that we’ve seen makes you cry? None of this goddamn horror has any effect on you?” this broad Amy Niseman from Ohio demands of me.

 

“I just don’t get emotionally loud anymore,” I explained.

 

“What’s your point?” she demands.

 

“We have to stop thinking of ourselves as Americans of Jewish descent above all other things. What happened here goes on all over the world,” I coldly explain.

 

“If we extend our sense of identity too far we will lose our ability to know ourselves as a people.”

 

“Or we will finally realize that our identity is a false construction designed to divide us from the only identity that really matters, that we are one people.”

 

“I would be curious to see if you still believe this in ten years.”

 

“In ten years I’ll be dead and the only thing that will matter is if you believe it,” I tell her coldly.

 

כ

 

When the El Al flight touches down in Lod International airport I begin a tradition I swear I will always continue. I said the Sh’mah (the main Jewish prayer, “Hear, O Israel, the Lord Our God, the Lord is One”) to myself and kiss the tarmac as soon as we disembark from the plane. I have finally arrived in the land of my Hebrew people. Jewish people not just Zionists are always talking about a connection to the land. I feel it as soon as I land. The juxtaposition of the land of the camps in Europe and the land of the Jews in Israel is most likely a calculation made by the Zionist agencies that run these kinds of trips. I cannot escape the contrast. The hatred of Poland and the love of Israel crystallizes over the next two weeks. I fall victim to the very mentality I have preached so adamantly against–a nationalist identity.

 

We pray at the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem. I tuck a simple note into the cracks asking God for the next sign to let me know what to do with the YUFE. We party in Tel Aviv, which to me is not unlike New York City on a Mediterranean beach. We watch Russian hustlers take hundreds upon thousands of tourist shekels in the three-card game where they keep moving cards and make the mark guess the ace.  A gorgeous blonde insider keeps betting, winning and losing all night, luring in men to lose their cash. We swim in the Sea of Galilee where my new summer Zionist trip love, Amy and I make out on a beach. I wander off to make new late night friends. I lost my Father’s watch while swimming. We go to Safat and learn about the Kabala. I cut myself climbing the Masada in the middle of the night and then burn my wounds badly floating in the Dead Sea. We go to Ben Gurion’s grave in Sde Boker and look out over the Negev desert.

 

There are beautiful women everywhere we go. Racial mixing makes you hot would be a good slogan for the country. There are Jews from every corner of the earth fighting hard and making babies. I am overtaken with pride of place. It has the effect of tying our identity to this land. I’m not even really aware of the subtle packaging that produces this effect. Of the forty kids on the trip only one or two might make Alliaya (immigrate to Israel) but the rest will keep coming back on vacation and send checks for life. Israel’s existence depends equally on American military aid as it does on international Jewish solidarity.

 

I am convinced I am home. In a country that takes eight hours to travel north to south and about two hours east to west, there is every type of diversity and every type of climate. I stand by the Sea of Galilee and in the peaks of the Golan Heights looking down on Damascus figuratively and literally. The deserts of the Negev enthrall me. Tel Aviv is an underground clubbing boomtown. All the darkness of the country has been locked away beyond the reach of the scheduled tour. If there is such a thing as a Palestinian, I would never know it. Nothing quite simplifies a socio-political situation quite like a guided tour. I can’t tell a Druze from a Bedouin, or an Arab Israeli from a Palestinian. It just doesn’t seem relevant. This country is ours. Israel from the perspective of a Zionist Youth trip is a only a question of Arabs vs. Jews. You ultimately miss the subtleties if you take the three-hour tour over a two-week period.

 

***

 

The trip allows kids with Israeli relatives to visit for the weekend. I want to tag along to get a less supervised picture of the country. Onan invites me to go with him to see his relatives on a settlement southeast of Jerusalem. The term settlement doesn’t mean anything to me. Onan’s Israeli relatives are Orthodox. I have never experienced an Orthodox Sabbath or shabbos. We were picked up in Tel Aviv and driven into a region of Israel called the West Bank.

 

We arrive at a fortified settlement amid the meandering red hills of Judea. All of the men wear the black suits and hats of the Orthodox. The culture and practices of their particular sect are lost on me. Children play everywhere. Ten or eleven kids per family is normal. We get there before dusk and attend to shuel with Onan’s male relatives. I watch the shabbos ritual with keen interest. I have seen the lighting of candles before, but never in the company of the religious. My Dad’s grandfather was an Orthodox Jew. My grandfather had downgraded to the Conservative movement. I was raised in the liberal Reform tradition. It had taken three generations to achieve the American Dream. So within four generations I guess you forget where you came from.

 

Unusual for me, I stayed quiet. There are twenty people gathered for the shabbos dinner. There is a lot more praying than I have ever seen in New York. I’d grumbled at the Conservative Bar Mitzvahs I had attended. All my Hebrew is gone and the prayers mean nothing to me, but I understand the basics–the woman of the household lighting the shabbos candles, the prayers for the bread and the wine. What is new to me was the set of regulations delineating exactly how much rest you are to engage in. It was explained that from sunset on Friday to sunset on Saturday, the period of the shabbos, no one is to do any work.

 

All the food has been prepared in advance because you cannot cook during the shabbos. Lights cannot be turned on. You can’t carry or use money. You can’t drive or take the bus anywhere. You can’t smoke or draw or a million other little things. Sleep, eat, fuck and hang out with your family is the idea. It takes a little getting used to. I am to infer later in my life that because of this ritual the Jews had actually laid the groundwork for the modern weekend. It is my guess that before the Hebrew faith, people just worked (normally as slaves) seven days a week.

 

When I tired of asking 300 questions about Judaism, I decide to go for a little walk. I jump a low concrete barrier and start walking through a valley, a desolate barren stretch dotted with small trees that don’t offer much shade. There are other settlements in the distance. And if the hushed warnings of the Jewish community I am staying in are to be believed, the inhabitants are a violent, warlike people known as the Palestinians. Because I never believe in a one-sided argument, I feel it is my duty to meet a real Palestinian so I can offer a halfway descent rebuttal.

 

The Zionist trips never mention the grey area that is the green line. It is always portrayed as the Jews versus the faceless Arabs, the ‘snarling horde’ held back by the valiant IDF. It is a carefully packaged simplification for the young and foreign. You end up believing in it if you just stay for the three-hour tour.

 

I want to know about the reality that has been hidden from me by the national monuments and the attractive, olive-skinned soldiers clad in tan and green. I want to know what a Palestinian is. I had looked down from the Golan Heights and wondered what heart of darkness lay in Damascus. The notion that snipers lurk in the olive trees and that they’ll kill me just for being a Jew seems too simplistic. I am walking into that valley to make contact with the other side of this state.

 

I see three figures smoking a hookah surrounded by a herd of black billy goats at the other end of the valley. I can’t tell because of the glare whether they are Israelis or Palestinians or Bedouin or Arabs or Druze or any of the complicated mix of Arab sub-groups that live in this place. As I get closer, one of them stands up and points. They are very young.

 

They are yelling to me in what sounds like Hebrew, but it isn’t. It is distinctively sharper, more melodic perhaps. It’s Arabic. They try Hebrew, but I only know a few words of my own language. I walk up and sit down next to them. There is novelty on both sides. I don’t quite dress like anything they’ve ever seen before. I point to myself and extend out my hand.

 

“Sebastian. From New York.”

 

They have great big smiles when they hear this. Convinced that I must speak some Hebrew they ask a thousand and one questions all at once, right over each other. They wear ratty jeans and plain faded T-shirts. They keep smiling, laughing and I guess not knowing what to do.

 

The oldest looking kid points to the youngest and says, “Amir Ishma’ieli.”

 

Then to the other and says, “Mustafa.”

 

Finally after looking at me for what seems too long to be casual, he points to himself and says, “Kareem.”

 

Something is said in Arabic and the youngest kid, Amir, starts pouring four cups of black tea from a small pot on a low burning ember fire. He pours it into four plastic cups that look like they’ll melt from the heat of the brew, scalding being the operative word. I sip on it and then for about two hours as the sun beats down we fumble and meander though Heeb-Anglish phrases and Arabrew miscommunications. We drink all the tea they brought and smoke grape-mint tasting ‘sheesha,’ the Arabic word for hookah. Finally I make it clear that New York is in America. They hesitate a minute, as if that goes against something they thought they knew. Then Mustafa jumps in the air and starts air machine-gunning in pantomime.

 

“RAMBO! RAMBO!” he yells as he machine guns, half Waltz of Bashir, half air guitar.

 

The other two laugh hysterically. I smile and rat-tat-tat an invisible machine gun into the desert in no particular direction for comedic affect. In the middle of some Judean desert wadi, the empire that I had grown up believing was a champion of freedom across the globe, is being reduced to a Palestinian impromptu performance art piece of a muscle-bound, Italian guido in a B-Movie filmed to make us feel better about losing Vietnam. I suppose the depth of this is a few years away from my understanding.

 

“You,” Mustafa stutters in broken English pointing to me, “You Rambo.”

 

He pauses a second thinking.

 

“Me,” he points to himself, “Palestinian.”

 

A million Zionist youth trips a year might assure you that before the Jews came to make the desert bloom there was nothing here, but dust, sand and poorly irrigated olive trees. You could talk about nations and say this was a Roman province, then the protectorate of various great Islamic empires and finally an English mandate. Just desert, sand and olive trees. Always a backwater of some foreign occupier’s great empire. Could you really be a people without a nation? A people without a country or some land? Well, the Jews had been proving this was a rational idea for about 2,000 years. That the Palestinians might hold a similar view is not so unthinkable.

 

After a few more hours of pantomime, sheesha smoking, and whatever else we may have been trying to communicate, Mustafa, Amir, and Kareem wave goodbye and begin herding their goats out of the valley. Before he leaves Kareem paints with his index finger a wide circle in every direction, then at his own heart. He utters something with hard, but quiet dignity.

 

“Palestine,” he says to me.

 

I shake their hands and head back to the settlement soon to be admonished for my ‘foolish adventurism’. I am telling this story to a large group of Orthodox kids when Onan’s cousin Moshe interrupts me sternly.

 

“They could have killed you,” one of Onan’s Orthodox cousins tells me, “They’re a bunch of bloody savages. They’d kill us all if the Defense Forces didn’t protect us.”

 

It’s all about enforcing the national myths when the kids are young. I have spent my first Orthodox shabbos finding Palestinians. I feel that God knows my heart is in the right place.

 

Shabbos ends and Onan and I return to the three-hour tour.

 

***

 

And this is how I came to see Israel 1.

 

Israel 1 is a term I coined later life for the first alehya, the first time one goes to the Israel. The dinner with the Druze, the camel ride, Ein Gedi, the Oasis near the Dead Sea, the Tel Aviv night life and of course the Wailing Wall photo op. We have finally arrived in Jerusalem. I wrap tffilin for the first time and place my first message in the wall.

 

The Wailing Wall or Ha Kotel is the western-most wall of the Second Temple that Herod built after the Babylonian exile, which the Romans razed to the ground. The Muslims built the Dome of the Rock on the temple mount where Mohammed ascended to heaven. The Church of the Holy Sepulcher down the street is where Jesus ate his last supper. It’s an Abrahamic madhouse on the weekends, a virtual cornucopia of devotion packed within the Old City walls. You can sense the religious fervor. It tastes like blood and smells like falafel.

 

I try to see as much as I can. I miss nothing. Israel had retaken the Old City and East Jerusalem, along with the West Bank, Gaza Strip and Golan Heights of Syria in 1967 in just six days of war. I think they nabbed the Sinai Peninsula too. Everyone was happy to have our little wall back. In just six days the landmass of the country had virtually doubled and Israel inherited roughly a million-plus Palestinian people, those that didn’t flee into a second mass exile abroad. The cost of the Wall was the need to continue a military occupation, which has lasted for 33 years. Two subsequent wars in 1973 and 1982 and an uprising called the Intifada in 1994 has changed precious little about anything. Egypt normalized relations in 1982 in exchange for becoming the world’s largest recipient of U.S. aid after Israel. Jordan did so in 1994, always less than eager to battle the ‘Zionist Entity’ to begin with. But, what’s in a history?

 

There’s a great picture of me in an orange vest with ‘Rudeboy’ emblazoned on the left breast, with a multi colored yamulka-kufi, white UFO raver pants with tfillin on my yad and roshe as I stand in front of the Wailing Wall. So that’s what Israel 1 has been about–keeping history simple for the photo-op. And so it seems I have cast my lot with the Jewish State on this trip, in irreconcilable contradiction to the political views I now cling to.

 

I fly back to New York four days after the Western Wall photo-op.

 

ל

Over the course of the summer with the help of my parents and a civil rights lawyer specialized in educational issues, I have been readmitted to Bronx Science in September to begin my sophomore year.

 

If change has typically been made by small, idealistic groups of people organized for a common good then YUFE chapters have been created by small, idealistic groups of hot girls and young men with silver tongues and spoons.

 

Zivia Ferenz helped set up YUFE at the prestigious Stuyvesant High School as a club. She and Lauren Zivia are the real go-to people that help me get all the other chapters properly functioning. They moderate my rhetoric, are generally charming and sooth all concern. Unlike Lauren Zivia, Zivia is not much of an organizer, more of a connector really.

 

There are now cells of YUFE activists at Horace Man, Chapin, Hunter High School, Sacred Heart Academy for Girls, Fieldston, Brooklyn Tech, the Lab School, Beacon, and Smith. My little brother even started a small one at LaGuardia with an old UNIS classmate of mine named Katrina Shah. The movement is growing because it is an easy to sell. Change is not only possible, it’s sexy. We are the new radical-chic.

ם

Lauren Zivia tells me about a Bronx Science trip to Italy and France to look at art and party in Europe. My old buddy Case Yadger, Ari Wilner, Lauren and a few of our other friends have already signed up. She says I need a vacation ‘without any dead Jews’ and that it will be good for my art. I convince my parents that it is a good birthday present. The trip is supposed to leave sometime in early February and come back after two weeks abroad.

מ

Sweatshop labor continues to be the cause célèbre of YUFE. This is a logical jump from a blanket fight against apathy to an international struggle on behalf of the developing world’s working class. The picketing turns to flyering with our guerrilla runs into all the major chain stores. We carried out one ‘city-wide-strike’ covering three major stores simultaneously. Strike isn’t the right word. Simultaneous, erratic and un-permitted protest is more accurate. We stationed several hundred protesters with colorful signs and fact sheets over the eighteen largest GAP branch stores, out of maybe thirty in the whole city. Between noon and six pm we have tred to convince people not to buy nothing. Any person in and out of the stores is going to have to learn about sweatshop labor from our bright-eyed gang of cute idealists. Thanks to heavy recruiting organized by the lovely black Irish Julia Donahue we are thick with Catholic schoolgirls in plaid miniskirts. Believe me these mini-skirt brigades do more for the child workers of Saipan than any other card in our deck.

 

January 2001 will mark nearly one year of YUFE activism dating from the time I  escaped from the Family School and read the Communist Manifesto. We want to throw a huge Unity Concert in the Communist Party building on 23rd Street. We plan to get a few bands and DJs and celebrate one year of our movement’s work. We set the date for January 15th.

 

In the early fall a few of us had activated the first guerrilla unit of the YUFE movement, the Ghost Shirt Society. The name was derived from an underground group in a Kurt Vonnegut book, which was taken from the Rebel Indian Confederation of Black Elk. The fictional group had gotten their name from a group of Native Americans in the Dakotas that had organized a bunch of small tribes to hold off Federal seizure of Indian land. They were the ones who fought the losing battle. Before they made their last stand against the much larger Federal army, they put on special garments that symbolized the idea that they were sure to fight and perish. However, the ghosts of their resistance would insure the world would never forget that a small group had fought against incredible odds for their freedom, and one day another generation would pick up the torch. They were the Spartans at Thermopylae. They were the ghetto fighters of Warsaw. And they were all passing that torch to us.

 

Our objective, although not all the Ghost Shirts were privy to all the details, was to use a series of potassium phosphate bombs on remote detonators to fill several large GAP Stores with thick white, non-lethal smoke during the height of the holiday shopping season in November. All the bomb components were available to us in our chemistry classes at school. What we couldn’t snatch quantity-wise in class, we would get from an easy break into the school at night. The creation of the bombs was to take place in a makeshift lab in the elevator shaft above my building with burners and mixers we also stole from the school. The actual chemistry we downloaded from a White Power militant Web site from a public library. We were all to help in expropriating the chemical components. Three cells were formed to handle the rest of the logistics. One group was to build the electronic detonator component using the handsets for remote control airplanes. Another cell was charged with mixing the chemicals and pouring them into nine metal Coke cans we’d screwed the lids off of to work as casings. And the final cell was to disguise themselves with make-up and wigs to enter the stores, hide the apparatus inside and depart quickly to alert the detonation teams to trigger the smoke bombs. Entrance and exit was to take no more than five minutes. Each apparatus was to be created from three cans soldered together. The mixture was to be ignited by remote control and was supposed to smoke out a city block if the Web site was to be believed. No one would be hurt. The smoke was non-lethal. But three smoking chain stores connected to sweatshop labor would draw a great deal of media attention to the anti-sweatshop movement. We planned to leave a communiqué at each site and send one to the New York Times and another to the Village Voice.

 

Despite the fact that I attend an honors science magnet school, I don’t know anything about temperatures, proper storage or really anything one needed to know about chemistry to mix the bombs themselves. I am going to have to outsource this crucial job.

 

The YUFE Movement launched the second citywide strike against the GAP on December 8, 2000. Over 200 YUFE activists took positions at eighteen of the largest GAP Stores, Banana Republics, and Old Navies in Manhattan.

 

But all that day I wondered what really was being done. This was still agitation, not action.

ן

December rolls on by. A huge citywide march we take part in with the AFL-CIO against child labor gets YUFE into the Daily News. More YUFE meetings and actions and the first wave of UHO tables operated by the YUFE in the freezing New York cold unfold. A coat drive is coordinated across the City by our chapters yielding over thirty bags of warm winter clothing for the homeless. The snow comes down hard and it gets real, real cold. We’re organizing a workshop series on ‘Peace in the Middle East’ and I’m cuddled up with a foxy Egyptian.

 

There are a lot of bright-eyed broads getting down on the movement. Women are the crux of our organization most directly responsible for the wave of community projects being orchestrated under our auspices. I like female attention, but then there is Nina Yoh.

 

I have never met a Lesbian before. This bad sister is one of the key organizers on our Executive Committee from the YUFE chapter at Hunter High school. She is so brilliant that she already does college-level research as a part of an advanced science program. She is always dressed in black and has jet-black flowing hair. I believe she is at least part Chinese. She always makes her boyfriend bring her donuts in the middle of the night while perpetually denying him sex. I never met the boyfriend, but it’s all a cover. She is one of those people who know a great deal about many esoteric things that no one else knows well at her age. Like psychiatry, noire film and exotic Chinese dance. Or like biochemistry, breaking and entering and BSDM. She’d be a man-eater black widow spider if she didn’t have a thing for chicks.

 

“Men are violent monkeys,” she tells me one night over coffee at the Yaffa Café.

 

She wears dark black-framed sunglasses even at night and can pull it off without ridicule or the endless refrain from that terrible song ‘I wear my sun glasses at night’ by god-knows-how-many hipster scum. She looks like a Weatherman. She knows where the wind blows.

 

Nina is a bad chick. We have an extra-curricular breaking and entering hobby. We engage in long talks about training ourselves as philosopher kings. I talk with Zivia and Lauren Zivia about many of the same things. Although Lauren certainly cares about me her answers are less profound than Nina’s. Nina is the first person to make me break down logistics and infrastructure questions about the revolution from sanitation to corporate decision-making. She forces me to examine that I don’t come close to having suitable answers for how to run a country.

 

Breaking and entering isn’t quite the right term. More like casing and trespassing to be clear. We enter buildings like hotels, subway conduits or construction sites and see how far we can wander into the space without encountering a locked door. We know we can always feign we are lost or just looking for a place to ‘hook up.’ Our little escapades have escalated as time goes on. To casing, trespassing and pillaging.

 

Another destructive pastime was our car emblem and flag collection. We’d snap the hood ornaments off BMWs, Jags, Mercedes, and anything else that looked fancy on the Upper East Side where her belligerent stepfather owned a building on 68th Street. This is a few years before widespread use of eBay so we aren’t thinking about selling them. The flags are all over the place. We climb up fences and cut them down. She distracts doormen while I lower huge ones down central poles in an apartment block square. It is a low intensity protracted guerrilla campaign against boredom. Neither of us sleep. Neither of us are drinkers.  It is like beating tiny little fists against a great big machine. Like property destruction in the suburbs. Like a series of ‘only when with Sebastian’ moments that might go on indefinitely the rest of my life. But the box under her bed is filling up with hood ornaments and a growing collection of flags. The girl is a vamp and sharp as hell.

 

One January night Nina Yoh and I break into the Plaza Hotel and make off with just about everything that isn’t tied down in the kitchen. More unjustifiable reckless adventurism.

We sit by the statue across from the Plaza Hotel on the southeast corner of Central Park. You can see our exhalations like smoke. We have a duffle bag filled with silverware, liquor bottles, plates and assorted other paraphernalia. We have even expropriated a wedding cake.

 

“I finally figured out what’s up with you,” she says, wrapped in a black trench coat still wearing black sunglasses.

 

“Please tell, my dear.”

 

“Remember when you were talking about your birth? How you were a month late and how your head got stuck in the birth canal. You said you and your mother almost died and that they had to perform a C-section to get you out alive. During the time your head was stuck, the pressure could have damaged your frontal lobe. You may have received brain damage from the trauma. The front of the brain is where behavior, mood and inhibitions are regulated. Your behavior is generally out of control. Your moods swing wildly and you have few inhibitions. In the immortal words of economist Stephen J. Dubner, ‘you have an overdeveloped curiosity and an underdeveloped sense of fear’. This would lead me to believe that your so-called mental illness, as you refer to it, is a medical condition that evolved as a result of your traumatic birth. You went from petit mal epilepsies at ages 11-13 to nightmares and onset symptoms of bi-polar 1 from the age 13 until now. It may continue to evolve. Your imaginary friend’s increasing breakthrough into your waking life points toward another evolution.”

 

“Which is?” I ask.

 

“Bi-Polar 2, effectively maintained, early onset schizophrenia. The break of your psyche into competing parts followed by visions, voices and psychotic episodes,” she explains.

 

“So that’s the prognosis Dr. Yoh?” I ask her.

 

“Good as I can come up with,” she says.

 

“And the pills I take? The Zyprexa yellows?” I ask.

 

“May slow this evolution of the condition,” Nina responds.

 

“So I’m gonna lose my mind regardless?”

 

“Research doesn’t tell us much about how the human brain actually works. The pharmaceutical companies prescribe a cornucopia of drugs to offset the various symptoms, but you have to realize that it’s all just a business and a lot of money gets made off the one quarter of the youth population of the country diagnosed with various forms of mental illness.”

 

“What would happen if I stop taking my pills?”

 

“You’re mind would begin cycling and you’d quickly lose control without an alternative, say more holistic, Eastern means, to control your condition.”

 

“I’ve told you a lot about Mike Washington and about the dreams, but what do you think it all means?”

 

“I think you either have a serious mental illness or, you’re just seeing the world in a way that’s lost on the rest of us as you continue to teeter-totter between brilliance and insanity,” Nina concludes.

 

“I like that phrase.”

 

“It’s from a hip-hop song by King Latif and Lyrics Born.”

 

“So stay on the pills?”

 

“As your friend I’d say, yes. As an outside observer curious as to what you might do next I’d say go for it with this cautionary thinking in mind. You’re quite brilliant and I don’t pay compliments easily. As for your condition, you share it with some of the most influential people in history. If you go off the pills you might learn things the rest of us just can’t see. You might also just lose your mind and end up back in the Crazy Nut Bin.”

 

“That’s Izzy’s phrase.”

 

“No, he stole it from me,” she corrects me.

 

As neither of us drink, we pour the liquor we just nipped in a trashcan in Central Park, eat some cake and light the trash can on fire.

נ

I don’t really know what an anarchist is, except that they shop at Hot Topic. They don’t believe in having a government is about all I know. A bunch of them had rioted in Seattle last year before, lit McDonalds on fire and smashed up a few Starbucks at a protest against the IMF. They had called this the Battle of Seattle. To me it was college kids acting the fool.

 

But this girl is really cool. Hard like Nina, but still likes men from the vibe she is givin’ me. She is something called a vegan, which means she not only doesn’t eat meat, but she doesn’t use animal products like cheese or milk. It is supposed to be very healthy if you know how to do it. I met the girl recruiting for YUFE at Bronx Science through my old buddy Deleon, the funky straight edge, black Jew. Simcha and Isaac continue to school me politically. I have just arrived upon these radical theories that they have studied for years. This vegan, self-proclaimed anarchist girl is a junior with sexy dreadlocks. She has moved beyond Marx into the anarcho-communist ideas of a theorist named Peter Kropotkin. She rattles off a whole list of books I need to read to be taken seriously as a revolutionary by authors like Bakunin, Proudhon, and Emma Goldman.

 

The girl tells me that her mother is double Brahmin, the highest caste in India. With no higher prospects for marriage she had gone one caste higher, she’d married a New York Jew. I haven’t met her Mom. Maybe they are split. Maybe she is dead. The girl never says, but she lives with her old man in Hell’s Kitchen near Nadia.  She could have passed for White, this beautiful, dreadlocked, half-Indian, half-Hebrew anarchist broad, Soreiya Levy.

 

She is determined to make a real revolutionary out of me. I will hold all subsequent anarchists I meet up to her. She defies what is the common misconception about anarchists after Seattle, that they are young, White, dirty punk rockers who hate their parents more than the state and haven’t read a book in their lives. This is the ‘anarchism as a punk social scene’ that gets all the media attention because of actions like those in Seattle. They have some abstract notion of anarchism as anarchy–no laws, no rules. Soreiya explainse that anarchism, on the other hand, is the only revolutionary ideology that has never been tainted by the civilian bloodletting that tainted Communism. According to her once the revolutionary parties seize power, they replicate the same relationships upon the people the revolution had set out to supposedly abolish.

 

“The word revolution is grossly bastardized by the radical chic and by mass marketing,” she tells me over coffee in the Yaffa Café on St. Marks and Ave A, my new after hours haunt.

 

She says words have specific meanings as well as meanings conferred by society. All the words of the revolution are going to have to be redefined for it to succeed in America. She will never call herself an ‘anarchist’ to people outside or even within the movement. Like Simcha, Zivia and Lauren she agreeds that YUFE’s greatest victory is its utter dissociation with the New York leftist community.

 

“Hippies, hipsters, NYU students and armchair motherfuckers,” as she describes them.

 

“Anarchism is a lifestyle and philosophy, not just an economic theory like Marxism. The liberation of the working class will come from changing power relations not government structures and economies. Gender equality, racial equality and freedom of sexual orientation cannot take a back seat to the people’s war with the state. Sweep these under the table and you end up with another Soviet Union, a one party state constantly delaying the end of its proletarian dictatorship.”

 

I’m sure that the inclination to create the Ghost Shirts and write Socio-Economic Factors of the Second American Revolution (SEFSTAR) comes largely from my interactions with Sorieya, as well as those with Mr. Zucker and Mr. Rathajzer. She advises me never to talk about revolution in the context of YUFE.

 

“You can’t have a serious, above-ground revolutionary movement,” she explains.

 

Nor does she think that my friends and I are old enough or ‘life experienced enough’ to take that path just yet. She says it is bad enough to walk around openly telling people I am a communist.

 

“Most people will think you’re naïve and the remaining few will mark you as potentially dangerous.”

ס

Sorieya Levy and I are sitting under the World Trade Center towers on the plaza looking up. The whole YUFE crew is out getting twisted at MaoMao and Co, the bar on Chambers that is the latest no-ID-needed spot. It is really, really cold. I am wearing a thick brown cashmere trench coat I’d bought at Love Saves the Day and a grey corduroy scaly-cap I have taken to wearing nearly all the time. There is a Communist party emblem from the former Soviet Union affixed to one of the upper buttonholes on the jacket. She is wearing a black jumpsuit with thermal underwear underneath and an olive military jacket from the Vietnam era.

 

“There isn’t a real leftist movement in this country. The commies have been marginal for over sixty years,” she explains.

 

“It’s half their appeal,” I respond.

 

“The anarchist movement, if you can call it that, lacks viable leadership, tactical organization and overall direction. This whole mess is being funneled into the new anti-globalization movement. But globalization is a phenomenon that really only hurts the developing world. And who can start a movement on an anti? Anarchism is misunderstood by everyone including the anarchists. It’s more punk rock than Peter Kropotkin. The black bloc tactic won’t evolve into direct action cells. It’ll peter out into reckless adventurism. The closest thing to an organized revolutionary group in this nation, barring all the highly trained and organized right wing paramilitary formations operating under the auspices of the NRA, like the one that carried out the Oklahoma City Bombing, would be the ELF/ALF.”

 

“Earth Liberation Front?”

 

“And the Animal Liberation Front. Small decentralized eco-terrorist cells that burn down hotels, blow up McDonalds, mine construction sites, sabotage logging equipment and for the last ten years have caused millions of dollars of damage to a whole mess of corporations that destroy the environment. No civilian casualties and only a few dozen or so arrests. You never hear about them in the press. They’re the largest domestic terrorist organization in the country. Over 2,000 claimed actions this year, and 430 plus using IEDs.”

 

“What’s an IED?” I ask incredulously.

 

“An improvised explosive device. It’s all interrelated. Capitalism is all consuming. It isn’t just about exploiting workers for their labor. Why can’t the government stop them you ask? Because they have no central leadership planning the actions. It’s just clusters of anarcho-primativists of no more than three or four that supply themselves and keep moving around the country. If a person in a cell gets caught, they can only incriminate the several other members of the cell. Catching one won’t lead to another.”

 

“If I knew a group of people that wanted to carry out said actions, where might I learn what I needed to know?”

 

She looks at me very seriously.

 

“We’ve created a small direct action working group within the YUFE. We want to carry out a complicated operation against the GAP. We’ve done all the casing and divided responsibilities but I’m holding everything up making a certain thing we might need,” I admit to her.

 

“What kind of action is it?”

 

“We want to smoke out three large stores in the GAP chain with potassium phosphate during a weekend holiday shopping day. We have all the plans and necessary components. I’m just afraid of blowing myself up trying to make them.”

 

“Why are you telling me this?”

 

“Cause I trust you”.

 

“You don’t know me well enough to trust me.”

 

“If I have to make these things myself, I’m going to end up blowing myself up and looking like a terrorist and a bad one at that. Not to mention bringing all sorts of obvious negative attention to the organization.”

 

I light a cigarette.

 

“Well I don’t know anything about bomb building,” she retorts. “This seems quite a jump from handing out flyers to me. Why GAP over any other damn company?”

 

“Because the GAP is a notorious exploiter of sweatshop labor and I want the whole country to know that marchin’ in the middle of the goddamn road won’t change thing.”

 

“You have all the right quantities of what you’ll need?”

 

“We just need the chemicals mixed properly. We know how to make the detonators. We have our plans and operatives together.”

 

“Can everything fit in a small bag? You have burners, mixing containers and everything else certain Web sites might have taught you to obtain?”

 

“I can get you everything tomorrow afternoon.”

 

“I don’t want you to get me anything. And please tell me Steal this Book is your primary sources.”

 

“White supremacists from Kansas. Why?”

 

“Cause that book is circulated to make less studious revolutionaries blow themselves up.”

 

“You know how to do this stuff?”

 

“I might know people who know people who affiliate with the kind of people who know how to build you a bomb.”

ע

 

I meet with a contact from the Anarchist Movement in LIC a couple days after the party to get trained in the construction of various devices for mischief and mayhem.

 

Before long, three devices are cached somewhere safe and one of my volunteers is going to make sure the detonators are properly attached. The Ghost Shirts meet in the South Street Seaport to set an operational date. Although the optimum time is the holiday shopping season nearly a year away, we are eager to confirm their functionality in upstate New York. One of our volunteers says he will begin to buy the things we need for the electric detonators and that we can carry out the test run within the month.

 

The Presidential elections, which none of us are old enough to participate in are all over the news. Gore is running against Bush. That’s all I know and that Ralph Nader is running as a third party candidate with the Greens. It doesn’t seem relevant, but Bush seems like a much worse option than Gore. Somebody told me that Gore claims to have invented the Internet, which seems really pathetic and silly.

 

2001 youth culture and Internet are more about AOL than Wikipedia. We don’t know about Internet surveillance. We don’t really understand the seriousness of what we are about to do.

And so after we set a rough date for the test, I emailed it in from MikeWashington@aol.com to the Ghost Shirts list. Nothing seems to be particularly wrong about that.

פ

The actual mechanics of the 2000 Presidential election are lost on all of us. All we grock is that a Republican President who hasn’t been elected is now going to run the country for at least four years. I only understand electoral politics in the most vague sort of way. The International Action Center, a front for the Stalinist Worker’s Word Party is organizing buses to D.C. to protest the Inauguration. The party hacks at the IAC center said that YUFE can get a reduced price student discount. I volunteer to be a Bus Captain for a joint YUFE/SCALE student bus. They gave me a stack of yellow tickets and told me to see how many I could sell to our group. We sold 40. We made a huge grey banner emblazoned with four letters in yellow: Y U F E.

 

***

Julia Donahue from the Sacred Heart Chapter borrowed the bullhorn from their school. Zoe Zapata brought the number of a lawyer at the DC ACLU and glow in the dark condoms. There are Catholic schoolgirls from Chapin this time not wearing plaid skirts, but black fatigues with their hair tied back. They brought lipstick.   Hubert O’Domhnaill s brought his blue puffy Northface jacket in case they hit us with batons as advised by his Communist brother Shamus O’Domhnaill  who is coming as well with nothing more than a book on Chile. Simcha Rathajzer brought a little Red Book by Chairman Mao to read on the four-hour bus ride. Lauren Zivia brought along ten bandanas of various colors to tie around our faces. Soreiya Levy brought two, one soaked in vinegar in case they used tear gas and a black baraclava in her jump bag. Isaac Zucker brought a raincoat and peanut butter and jelly sandwich his mother had packed. Zivia Ferenz and a handful of the Stuy kids thought to bring stacks of YUFE flyers so we could spread our message to youth from other cities. Nina Yoh brought her camera, more dark sunglasses and her comrades Sasha and Tasha. My brother Benjamin, who had been with me at our first protest with Hubert against police brutality, brought a fold-up game of magnetic GO.

 

All in all, our numbers come to 40, just like in the beginning.

 

This busload of us is heading to D.C. the rainy morning of January 20th to take to the streets in opposition to our newly non-elected President. A lot of our people sleep on the bus. I don’t. There is something in the cold, wet January air. There are storm clouds around our nation’s capital physically and metaphorically.

 

We arrive in D.C. at 8 am to streets filled with disembarking protesters while freezing slush rains down upon us. There are riot cops and checkpoints everywhere. The police are armored up in turtle shell storm trooper blue-on-blacks, on horses, on scooters and lined up in columns. We roll right off the bus into the thick of things. We are looking for the march route when we see hundreds of people running down the street being chased by cop cars sirens wailing and mounted police. We join them. Our column tries to stay together using the YUFE banner like a big grey flag. People are yelling and chanting and bellowing,

 

“WHOSE STREETS? OUR STREETS!”

 

We join in the war cry with Hubert bellowing over the Sacred Heart bullhorn. Finally this break away march arrives at an intersection where several hundred people dressed in black are lining up arms linked behind a banner which reads “Whoever they vote for we are ungovernable!” I suppose they made it before the election. They have two large, reinforced wooden boards, which they interlock into a wedged mobile battering ram with handles. Simcha shouts that they plan to charge the checkpoint up the street. There’s this guy who has taken a baton to the head getting wrapped up by a street medic. A large contingent several thousand strong from the National Organization for Women is chanting while carrying circular NOW signs. A couple dozen people from the Maoist Revolutionary Communist Youth Brigade wave bright red flags and all wear masks like terrorists in a video game. The Y U F E rallies around its banner. There is a large green dumpster. An anarchist in a black balaclava and green cammo jacket climbs up, drenches a large American flag in kerosene and lights it ablaze.

 

“POWER TO THE PEOPLE!” Simcha yells over Julia’s bullhorn throwing his fist in the air.

 

The site of the burning flag sends more fists up and everyone with a red or black flag lifts them high. The police are inching in on all four sides of the intersection. An announcement is made that we are not on the designated march route and are all subject to arrest.

 

“WHOSE STREETS? OUR STREETS!” the mob yells drowning them out.

 

A black bloc, the quintessential anarchist flying column, forms up behind the shield wall and rushes the police line. Batons come down on people as everyone rushes behind the wooden shields. Communists lob chunks of concrete and bottles at the cops. The feminists and our column rush forward with the bloc that the anarchists and Communists have broken through.

 

There is a turquoise bandana around my face that Hubert has given me, tied like a Mexican bandito Zapatista. I look around to make sure we have everyone. Nearly impossible to verify in the melee. It is hard to keep track of peoples as we are all running, charging, ducking and weaving. Where is my brother I wonder? Lauren Zivia has him by the hand and they are dashing after the bloc of radicals with the police mob right behind.  There are more sirens and more riot cops pouring in endlessly.

 

Behind me I see something WHIZZ, POP and BANG and see a cloud of yellow-gray smoke billowing toward us. Shamus O’Domhnaill , Hubert’s long time communist older brother once told me if you can see the tear gas it’s too late. My eyes begin to sting as people closer to the plume begin choking on the gas. The cops beat and arrest the gagging stragglers, striking wildly at whomever they can. Our dash with this black bloc finally reaches a large square right on the Inauguration Parade route itself. There are hundreds of Republican supporters in the bleachers with tickets to watch the parade. Anarchy ensues.

 

The police seal the several thousand rampaging protesters into the square. Iassic Zucker does a head count and we’re missing three people, members of the Stuyvesant chapter. One’s missing outright. Another, a kid named Hans, a Bronx Science freshman who is with the vanguard of the black bloc, is surrounding the central flagpole. We break up into the buddy system and spread out to watch the anarchists hoist down the enormous American flag from the central post and search for the missing YUFE member Alexandra. The radicals are skirmishing at the base of the patriot totem pole with several undercovers and Republican patriots attempting to protect the flag of their forefathers, the red, white and blue. The patriots are outnumbered and retreat bloodied. This is the rage that has been unleashed upon the Capital. All eyes in the square both radical and patriot turn from the parade as a large black flag is sent up the captured pole. A small red one from the Maoists is hoisted underneath it. The NOW feminists are content to yell.

 

“POWER TO THE PEOPLE!” someone the in the roar begins.

 

Hubert begins chanting it over the bullhorn and soon the whole crowd is yelling it too like some rebel mantra.

 

Fights are breaking out everywhere between the radicals and the Republican supporters in the bleachers. Riot cops secure the route as best they can. It’s a square by square touch-and-go for real estate and vantage points. My brother and I strike at people from underneath the bleachers with wooden poles while others pelt the Republican patriots and their families with trash. Patriots begin to flee with their young children and plump desperate housewives. Soon no one is left in our condoned off square other than the radicals. Reinforcements come to double the line on the parade route with riot cops. The radicals are now surrounded on all sides. People start hitting the police lines with rocks, bottles and garbage. Rubber bullets ring out and street medics run to patch up people left and right. Truncheons swing and blood runs.  The parade itself is all military vehicles and cheerleaders and marching bands. When Bush’s limo finally drives by he is greeted by more catapulted refuse, more war cries, and cat calls, more challenges to the police to physically hold their line. The mob surges. The black and the red flags are still flying. We have gotten close enough to give our new king the kind of reception he deserves. An egg hits the Presidential limo. The riot cops go bat shit and drive back the swarm of demonstrators with batons and pepper spray. The spokespeople for the assembled factions is holding and ad-hoc meeting to figure out what to do. As radical numbers thin from arrest and flight, police numbers just keep increasing. Simcha sends scouts to all edges of the square to find a good exit strategy.

 

“If we stay much longer, they’ll arrest everyone here,” we are informed by Hubert O’Domhnaill s and his brother Shamus.

 

The rain is coming down really hard now. There is a missile on a transport truck being displayed on the parade route. More anarchists are getting dragged away by the cops.

 

“No one agreed to get arrested. We need to get out of here,” says Lauren Zivia from behind a purple bandana.

 

“This is the beginning of bad days,” whispers Soreiya Levy to me.

 

“It’s time to leave,” says Lauren, “If we get arrested it’s gonna be for nothing.”

 

Most of the assembled YUFE kids agree.

 

Nina Ygoh with her friends Sasha and Tasha come back from the north side of the park to say the police are letting people out who are wearing masks.

 

As the 40 of us, minus three from Bronx and Stuy who opt to remain maneuver our way through the lines back to the busses with the women from NOW, we see a dozen odd armored personnel carriers pulling up to unload more riot cops. We make our way in the rain back to the buses. Soreiya Levy ws the last YUFE member out of the square watching the military convoy on parade with tears in her eyes no one saw but me. She has gone back to convince Hans and his two Stuy buddies to fall back.

 

The riot cops close in soon after to mop up and arrest whoever is left behind. We hear yelling and the racket of rubber bullets being fired as we retreat. The sounds of a rising being stomped out. The riot cops get the American flag back up soon after. George W. Bush becomes the 43rd President.

 

***

 

I am sitting in a black Lincoln Town Car being driven downtown following the Inauguration Protest after party in Brooklyn. The bus dropped us at Port Authority. We’d all taken the Q train out to deep Brooklyn to some place called Midwood where Zoe hosted an after party. I’d snuggled up with Zoe for awhile and she’d called me a gypsy cab around midnight. I have five missed calls.

 

The first two are hang-ups.

 

The third message says:

 

“Listen to me very carefully,” my brother Benjamin, who never goes to Brooklyn, says in a frantic voice over the phone. “The police came to see Mom and Dad today while we were in Washington. They said you’re in a terrorist group and that you’re building bombs. DON’T COME HOME.”

 

I have the car service make a cut toward the FDR and drop me at the home of Donny Gold.

צ

It’s a little hard to kick in the door and Gestapo style search an apartment in Manhattan’s Financial District that has a heavy metal outer security door, an elevator operated by a second key and a third door to the actual apartment with a huge metal door, even more difficult when the family has Jewish lawyer relatives on call. So, they call in advance. I don’t live there anymore and there isn’t anything for them to find.  I had slept over the night before and cleaned everything out.

 

In the morning, as per the arrangement with our lawyer, four plainclothes detectives arrive with a warrant to search my parent’s apartment. They are professionally dressed in suits and ties. Dispassionately the three proceed to conduct a rigorous search, while the fourth attempts to violate my Fifth Amendment rights.  The warrant is very specific. Most of the search has to do with bomb-making components. The warrant is about two pages long. I say nothing, as per the instructions of my family lawyer. I know there is nothing for them to find. They can ask question after question about gas mask collections that don’t work or street diagrams marked and clearly related to water balloon fighting.

 

I am only sixteen and like nearly all Americans don’t know the Constitution from the Bill of Rights from the Declaration of Independence. What a Fifth Amendment right is, however quite clear to me as per a workshop with Isaac Zucker. They don’t read me Miranda rights because I’m not being arrested yet. But I know not to say a word. They ask questions about the ‘Military Arm of the YUFE’ to which I keep repeating the number 5. They ask me questions about animal rights and environmentalism to which I state that they are not really my area of expertise. They don’t tear the house apart as much as do a room-by-room shuffle through everything. There is suspicious, perhaps circumstantial evidence. The WW2 gasmask collection all non working, some commie books obviously covered under the 1st Amendment, some maps I’d drawn for a water balloon war we are planning, and some violent Nazi killing art. Nothing that will hold up in court. They collect all of it in plastic bags and brown legal boxes in the entrance hall. I’m not sure they are even planning to charge me with anything. They search every room in the loft and cart away computer hard drives, YUFE literature, and a variety of things that insinuate sophomoric subversion. They read aloud passages from YUFE manifestos declaring the rhetoric ‘militant.’ This is the first time I have ever interacted with the NYPD up close. I find them generally polite considering they are looking for evidence to prove I am a terrorist. But they have no such evidence.

 

I respond inconclusively to everything mostly with the numbers 1, 4 and 5. They never say how they came to suspect me nor what they actually accuse me of attempting to carry out. It isn’t good cop, bad cop. It is stern cop, friendly cop and two more rummaging through your shit. Whatever they might find proves nothing. All they have is an email with some particularly menacing allusions. AOL had handed my account over to them to inspect all my previous YUFE correspondence. They will never find the bombs because they are stashed somewhere intricate and off site. They’ll never find the lab because it is not within the apartment. Frustrated and knowing they aren’t getting anything out of me; one of them goes to look through my backpack, which I had brought with me from Donny ’s house. It is filled with schoolbooks, some clothing, a sketchbook, and an empty test tube with the residue of potassium nitrate, which of course is only used in low yield explosives.

 

One of them holds it up and shouts for the others. I just shrug and say nothing. After confiscating the literature and the hard drives the NYPD now has a contact list of 98% of the roughly 250 key YUFE organizers and roughly 700 more supporters and new recruits in over 19 New York City magnet, public and elite private schools.  They lifted enough correspondence from my AOL account to know who the ‘key agitators’ are.

 

They then set out to put the fear of prison and the wrath of the state in our membership. Over the next few weeks the detectives visited numerous YUFE leaders they suspect of being involved in the Ghost Shirt Conspiracy. Mothers cry and fathers go ballistic when the cops tell parents we are members of a terrorist group cadre linked to the dreaded eco terrorists the ELF. They tell some that they know I am the main conspirator in the plan and have enough evidence to send me to Spawford or worse. They declare since I am the one planning the whole thing that if people give me up, the others will all get off the hook. They tell others I’d already sold them out and accuse people of being behind all the chemical and electronic components.

 

Hubert O’Domhnaill s is thrown out of his father’s home and has to move in with his brother Shamus. Others are grounded indefinitely. A couple get a belt or a black eye. More computers are seized. Isaac Zucker goes on the lam. Simcha’s mother barricades the door to their Washington Heights apartment and tells the cops with a shot gun loaded behind the door that they’d better come back with a warrant because the Rathajzer’s don’t cooperate with ‘the capitalist pigs.’ Zivia’s economist father says he’ll throw her on the street if she attends another meeting. Lauren Zivia’s mother tells her she is not to see me again. They drag a few Ghost Shirts down to Police Plaza and attempt to question them without lawyers.

 

But no one tells them anything. We’d seen enough movies to sort of realize the harder they push the less they really have. But that chemical vile with the residue has convinced them along with the language of the emails we have been plotting something.

 

How far along we have come to executing a high publicity, non-lethal chemical attack against the GAP is in the end really only known to Simcha, Sorieya and me.  The Ghost Shirts meet behind Bronx Science a few days after the initial search of my family’s apartment. We agree on a set of facts. We are aware that unless we are under arrest we are under no obligation to talk to the authorities about anything. We reason that even with some residue in a test tube they don’t have a real case. Some of us might get our names added to the young potential subversive list, most likely just me, and the rest will be leaned on to testify this was all really my idea. The last thing I tell everyone is that under no circumstances are any of us to believe we had a snitch among us. We arrive at a story and stick to it like bad children do when caught misbehaving.

 

Eventually they drag me down to Police Plaza 1, the brick Bastille of lower Manhattan on the other side of the Brooklyn Bridge overpass next to the building where my family lives. My interrogators declare they have me good, that my hard drive has revealed that I have a long online data trail of ‘radical revolutionist’ Web sites and informational links to bomb building training sites that match perfectly with what I am being accused of. They then ask me an endless set of questions about the Earth Liberation Front. I declare I have no idea what that is. They tell me over and over again that another member has ‘sold me out’ and has ‘pinned the whole thing’ on me. They say that I had better get a good lawyer because very soon they will have all the evidence they need to arrest me for ‘conspiracy to commit illegal acts.’ They say I better not make any plans to leave the City for the next few weeks.

 

The cop is Italian. So is my plane ticket to Milan.

 

ק

Rico da Judah and I are running down St. Marks towards Tomkins Square Park. We’re running fast because we have just barricaded off First Avenue with dumpsters and someone has called the police. Rico is skinny and has a close-cropped beard. He looks like a half-Puerto Rican, half-Hasidic Jew who’s cut off his peyos. He’s wearing a battle worn bomber jacket. He’s been drinking from a hip flask all night. I met Rico at Bronx Science quite a while ago, but this is the second time we’ve kicked it. Pulling dumpsters in front of a major street is a political action, but it is not one that will ever receive the respect it deserves. It is what I would call low-intensity guerilla warfare.

 

Why do young people vandalize restrooms? Why do they engage in pointless destruction? Would burning down a police station be such a stretch from the Molotov cocktails that went off in the dumpster across the street from my school?  Rico and I are on the front line of the great American rebellion without a cause. Does blocking that street do anything? Of course not, but it is a dress rehearsal for the coming revolution. Close off every city intersection at once and ta-da, the City grinds to a halt. We are attacking the source of all evil. We wage war on our own complacency. None of it matters. I’m going to leave this place in less than ten days and never come back.

 

Rico and I were sitting at school earlier today. I told him everything that was going on with the Cops, with YUFE, with the Ghost Shirts. He sat there silently taking it all in. Nursing a bottomless hip flask like John Dillinger from San Juan.

 

“Your options are decreasing every day you stay here,” he told me.

 

“Any day now they can bring the charges against you and your whole organization will crash like a deck of cards. No one can keep his mouth shut forever. I heard half the stuff you told me from a girl I hooked up with a week ago. Yer people are freaked out. They weren’t committed to yer revolution to begin with. You guys fired um up and showed um where the new party was at, but they ain’t in this after the party’s over. I’m sayin’, what do yo’all know about revolution? What do you know about about clic-clac-up-against-the-wall-motherfuckin-pig struggle? It ain’t about the protests or the flyers or the long-ass talk-talk-talk meetings. It ain’t about kumba-fuckin-ya-we’re-all-equal. It’s about the guns, the bombs, and do-whatever-the-fuck-you-have-to-do to break the back of the Federal government. I be sayin,’ you guys had the right idea, but where was the movement behind it? Who’s your community? Who do you rep? I think yer crazy. I think Isaac and Simcha wouldn’t have had the balls or the charisma to make YUFE this big. But you did it. Wit’out you dese kids would still be goin’ to house parties and getting high all the time and not knowin’ shit about shit. But now it’s your back against the wall. It’s you facin’ the law man’s charges. Schoolhouse camaraderie cracks in the face of a good subpoena. Ya came back and done built dis from scratch. A lot of people helped you, but YUFE is yours. So what’s your plan? Whatcha gonna do now big game player?”

 

“I have a ticket to Milan with the Bronx trip. What if I don’t come back?” I mused to Rico.

 

“Is that gonna be good for your mission?” If you leave, you’ll leave behind everything. Yer family. Yer friends. Yer life. Yer identity. YUFE won’t last out the summer, kid. You won’t speak the languages of the places you go to and you’ll be livin’ ‘poh for all yer trip. If you don’t leave, you’ll maybe not end up in jail, but it’s all over anyway. People be defectin’ already. Ya gots-tah weigh the costs,” Rico concluded.

 

“I hate living in this country. I hate how fat and complacent everyone is. I hate how little YUFE can do. I hate how ignorant I am about the world and how little I know about making this revolution.”

 

“The mission is the man, daddy. One way o’ anotha iz always one o’ two men or women that carry the whole struggle on they backs long enough ‘til it tips and people believe in it enough to die for it. If ya do this it will make you hard. It’ll either kill ya or make ya the man fo da the job. It will be the most gangsta thing I’ve ever seen someone do. And people will talk about it, and one day, if ya survive, ya come back with the tools you need to finish the mission ya started.  Ya ready for that kid?” Rico had asked.

 

Yeah. I was.

 

“See. You knew what you were gonna do before ya asked me, big spenda. Yer gonna get on dat plane and take a one way flight to Europe,”  Rico declared.

 

When Rico and I were done blocking 1st Avenue we ran back to the Yaffa Café to drink more coffee and wine. Soreiya Levy, Nina Yoh, and a fruit rude boy named ‘Gay Mike’ are still drinking cheap wine at 3 in the morning. We have been going there for all night banter on philosophy, human nature and God for around month. I wrote my best manifestos here in the witching hour, and now I am plotting my flight.

 

It is sort of like a running-away party filling my head with ideas about what I’d be looking for when I got out of the country. They all know individually that I am about to leave. It gets later and later. The coffee and wine and waters are going to everyone’s head. I haven’t been drinking a thing and feel elated. These late night sessions bring up everything. Finally the conversation touches on bi-polar disorder.

 

“They say I be Bi-polar,” mutters Rico Judah.

 

Everyone looks at him.

 

“Dey diagnosed me young. It was a week or two afta’ I saw this accident on the Westside highway and my parents sent me to a head shrinka. I was playin’ in the park and a driver skidded off the road, went through the windshield and his head sort collided with the green metal gate near the edge of the park. He was all dead an’ broken. His body done cut into a ton a’ little bits. I sat der starin’ at him right until the paramedics came six minute later. I don’t remember bein’ scared. I jus’ taught it was the craziest thing I’d ever seen. Iz actually one of my earliest childhood memories. The paramedics found me trying to touch his face. They sent me right to a shrink who said I had the bi-polar.”

 

“That’s a really fucking morbid story, Rico,” exclaims Soreiya Levy.

 

“Where in the hell did they infer bi-polar from dat. I was like ten!” Rico adds.

 

“I can’t even remember when they put that on me,” I say.

 

“It’s an industry. I heard like a quarter of the kids in the United States between ages 14 and 21 are diagnosed with something,” says Rico.

 

“They done have a million little drugs to fix our generation, but iz all symptoms of some great social trauma afflicted upon us all,” says Rico bluntly. “I’ve never taken none o’ dem stupid pills and look what a well adjusted person I am.”

 

Everyone goes quiet and then starts laughing.

 

“What do they have you on again?” Nina Yoh finally asks me.

 

“Tegratol. I have no idea what it does. I guess it makes me dream a little less,” I tell them.

 

“You need to get off that shit before you bounce. Not like you’re gonna be able to get in the streets of wherever you end up,” says Rico.

 

“Let’s just hope the disease doesn’t overtake him and he loses his dangerous little mind,” laughs Nina.

 

“It’s not a disease. If you listen to anything I’ve said ta yous, take in dis above the rest. What you and I feel, what anyone with our condition feels, is an intense emotional understandin’ of the world beyond every other person at this table. When we feel what they call manic, we taste an elation people can’t come close to with any amount of designer drugs or dirty sex. When we get depressed, we tap into a misery beyon’ whatever loss a human can feel. We feelin’ a spectrum of emotions removed from the rest ah humanity. Fundamental, we understand what it means to be alive. And because of that we can relate to rest of humanity in a way beyond the mindless empathies of these proles. If the streets and dangerous foreigners don’t mange to kill you, iz only gonna be through this condition that you learn whateva it iz yer meant to do with your life. Or it’ll kill you. But before it does you’ll mange to die awake,” Rico says.

 

“I come from the highest class and most privileged race of this country. I kiss a different girl every week. I have a good family and can go to any school I want to enable me to have any career I want. But this condition has made me realize that I am a part of a great human evil that I partake in every second I remain here. While the charges brought against me might send me to jail, I am fairly certain I could ride them out and beat them. But I need to learn lessons about life I can’t learn here. I need to break from this beast completely. This society has made me everything I am. Perhaps my condition, as you call it, has made me see that. But my purpose is clear. The path to the revolution is by cab to JFK International airport next Thursday, and then out into places unknown,” I declare to all of them.

 

“And so we ask you,” smiles Gay Mike.“Do you possess the constitution to take your path as far as it needs to go?”

 

“Til freedom or death,” I reply.

 

Rico raises a wine glass he had filled with his own Stoli.

 

“Ladies and gentlemen rememba da face of dis man. He’s goin’ to be the first American refugee, and if he survives, Mr. Sebastian may return a revolutionary. Raise those glasses motherfuckas.”

 

Gay Mike, Nina Yoh, Soreiya Levy, and I raise glasses of cheap red wine, water and coffee respectively.

 

“To the freedom or death of Sebastian Adon,” exclaims Mr. Rico Judah

 

Clink.

ר

Although I do everything by committee, I realize there are people I can tell and people I can’t. My committee had spoken. I am spending my last week getting ready to never lay eyes on my City again. I tell everyone I am transferring from Bronx Science to Urban Academy. I pass my black sketchbook around like a yearbook and fill it with last messages from close friends.

 

Besides from my Yafa Café committee of Soreiya Levy, Gay Mike, Rico, and Nina Yoh, there are a few more people with the right to know. I sit outside in the City Hall Park with my brother and tell him I’m not coming back. He is very quiet the whole time. He doesn’t try to talk me out of it. He says to be careful and gives me the phone number of his friend Manuel in case I go to England. I give him the YUFE money and computer disks for every chapter that I have typed up at Izzy’s house. It has all the YUFE literature and advice to expand each chapter.  I explain the reasons I have to leave. Benjamin seems to understand.

 

I also tell Hubert and Isaac who assure me that the movement will be here waiting for me when I get back. Hubert writes that I am capable of being a great leader one day. That means a lot coming from him. He gives me the turquoise bandana I had been wearing in D.C. in case I end up needing to cover my face. Isaac Zucker says I should use my time to expand my knowledge of revolutionary theory and obtain as much training as I can.

 

But my closest friends will try to stop me. I kept Zivia, Lauren Zivia, Izzy Vitz, and Nicholas Trikhovitch, as well as the bulk of the remaining YUFE membership and my parents in the dark.

 

***

 

I fuck the living shit out of Soreiya Levy the night before I leave. We bang out to Dead Prez and Nina Simone.

 

We spend the night talking about the Zapatista’s, an indigenous people’s struggle going in Chiapas Mexico and their masked leader Subcomandante Marcos who has brought their tiny struggle to the world stage. She suggests that I make my way to Latin America where the revolution is still being waged. She tells me she doesn’t really believe in God, her father being a Heeb and her mother being a Hindu, but she says she’ll pray for me to something because I am really going to need all the help I can get. She asks me to hold out my hand.

 

“Just a little added protection,” she smiles as she places her Star of David pinky ring on my finger.

 

I awake the next morning and take a cab to JFK looking at my City for the last time as the sun rises on tall buildings of steel and glass. I watched 8 million commuters rushing to work. We pass parks and squares in which I’ve gotten twisted and stoops I used to sit on drinking 40’s toasting nothing important. Over the Brooklyn Bridge I go. West on the BQE and across the Brooklyn heartland to JFK. Out of New York. Out of America and into self-imposed exile.

ש

It only takes a minute to get my passport back from Mr. Schlussel, the gay art teacher who organized this trip. I go off the pills immediately and the mania began to take hold.

 

I begin cycling almost immediately. Cycling is a radical shift between mania and depression, symptomatic of untreated bipolar disorder. The day before I make my great escape, I go to the Holocaust Memorial near Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris with my newest cohort Jaiwarrior Stroud. We are sitting on metal deck chairs on the outdoor balcony of a small street in Paris in the cool evening air.  I tell him what I am going to do in the morning. He, a Canarsie storefront minister’s son, talks to me about God and exile and things to come.

 

Jai walks me to the Gare du Nord Station to catch the Chunnel train from Paris to London. Before I embark, Jai has me write a few never-to-get-delivered letters to all the people that will be the most upset about my disappearance. He tells me that he will give them all to Lauren Zivia.

 

“Try and not get killed, brother,” are Jai’s last words to me. “At least not over something stupid.”

 

He tells me I’m on a road to Jesus.

ת

I’m in an empty car with big comfortable green seats taking a six-hour nap. I’m curled up in big plush chair on the Chunnel Train having a pleasant dream about being back in Nice.

I’m on a green sprawling estate in Nice, but it’s not the real Nice. It’s a mini Nice on a calm, artificial blue sea, the size of a small estate. Outside of the estate are miles of sand dunes and deep desert. It seems that the train I am riding to London has taken a slight detour. Once I’m off the pills, I’m back in the desert. The train is pulling into a station coming out of a large dune. Mike Washington is waiting on the platform with a French girl. Everyone else on the train is slumped over asleep.

 

“There’s something you have to learn before you go any further,” says Mike Washington, “This is Tanya, and she’s charming, lethal and partly French.”

 

I shake her hand and leave my bag on the platform.

 

I take a warm bath in an antique metal bathtub with thick suds and green drapery. The mansion of the estate is some kind of fusion between Grecco-Acadian architecture and Middle Eastern interior. It looks like a big white mosque if Mohammed had conquered Rome and remodeled the Pantheon. The rest of the estate is in a French classical, mini-Nice style.

 

After my bath they give me a white linen robe with a large black symbol on the left breast that I’ve never seen before. I sit on pillows on the floor eating dinner with Mike and Tanya at a low table with a bright red cloth. They tell me it’s a vegan meal with an Indian recipe from vegetables all grown on the estate. In case I end up in places where I can’t eat anything clean, they want me to remember what it tastes like.

 

When the meal is over we go through a large hall. We pass a room with several doctors and medical equipment attending to the pregnant redheaded girl from the flying bus secured to the table. Her vital signs are pulsing intermittently. They urge me along the way to what looks like an indoor firing range with a couple of black pistols laid out on a long table. Mike stands smugly in the corner.

The girl tells me her name is Tanya. She looks a hell of a lot like Michelle Tagomi, but slightly more French. As she looks into me for few minutes Mike doesn’t saying anything.

“You see, my little pilgrim, Mao teaches us that revolutions are violent and tumultuous. You must separate the term, of course, from your American revolution, which was bourgeois. Your capitalist pig country uses the term as a marketing slogan.”

 

“Of course.” I respond.

 

“The capitalist pigs have made us workers suffer for hundreds of years. They steal our labor and they exploit us completely. The violence they do against us is physical, psychological, and complete. Our two classes cannot co-exist. We must eliminate every last one of them, their children too.” Tanya proclaims.

 

“Innocent people?” I respond.

 

“Who is innocent? The young bourgeoisie have not a care in the world. And the bourgeoisie middle classes of the great power nations, you pay taxes non? You live in the metropol power without political involvement or revolutionary activity. You are also to blame,” she states.

 

“So you have to kill a lot of people?” I ask.

 

“This is real revolution. Don’t wars kill people? War and poverty kill people every day. People look at the writings of Chairman Mao and say he is violent. They look at his revolution and call it genocide. To this, my dear, I respond, violence has been perpetrated in every major historical epoch. Do you know what makes every epoch similar except the epoch of communism?” Tanya asks.

 

“Tell me.”

 

“Every epoch has kept the masses down and kept the means of production in the hands of the few. No longer! Now is our epoch. This is our time. We’ll kill all if we have to!”

 

She hands me a gun.

 

“You know how to write, correct?” she asks.

 

“Yes,” I respond.

 

“Now I’m going to teach you the other side of the coin. I’m going to teach you how to defend your words. The pen and sword, my little Pilgrim comrade, combined will set us free,” Tanya bellows.

 

My eyesight is unusually good. She tells me to hit the target, which is radiating circles around a map of the United States. I load the clip into the gun, remove the safety and cock the weapon. I squeeze the trigger, but it’s not the map that is pierced with the bullet, it’s Tanya’s left shoulder.

 

She’s bleeding profusely, but doesn’t squint or articulate any pain.

 

“Shoot again, Comrade. Learn to do violence to those that have oppressed us for so long. Your vision is off! You’ve hit the right target,” she yells.

 

I fire twice more. The map doesn’t change. Part of her face blows off and her chest is now gushing blood.

 

‘SHOOT! SHOOT!” she yells, half her jaw missing.

 

I fire more rounds. I unload the entire clip at the map. I hear the dry clip of the empty magazine.

 

Mike Washington has been shot a few times in the chest, standing like nothing happened. Tanya is oozing blood from all over. My chest feels damp. I’ve shot myself in the heart. I fall over. The pistol makes a metallic clank hitting the marble floor. I just make a thud.

 

I awake in large metal frame bed with green sheets. I feel my chest and there is no wound at all. Mike and Tanya are sitting in armchairs in the room. Mike is reading a book. It’s the Bravest Battle book from my bag. It’s the day-by-day account of the Warsaw ghetto uprising.

 

“What’s in a name,” asks Mike, “Would a revolutionary by any color not shoot as straight?”

 

“What’s the lesson now?” I ask him.

 

“DO you know who I am?” he asks.

 

“You’re me as I want to be?” I try.

 

“Not quite,” says Tanya with no French accent this time.

 

“It’s not time to be me, Sebastian. I made in my short life all the mistakes you will be spared. I fought a losing battle with all the wrong types of ammunition far too late in the game. You and I serve the same powers and it’s my job to make sure we aren’t wasting our time with you. Mike Washington isn’t my name and Sebastian Adon isn’t yours. There’s a name we share that It gave to us before we were even born.”

 

“I don’t follow.” I ask trying to understand what he is telling me.

 

“Your name contains your purpose. I’m here to tell you your real name. It’s the name that you will have when you are re-united with your creator and it is the name all that know you will associate with your contribution to the struggle,” Mike continues.

 

He closes the book.

 

“Before you go would you like some Poland Spring? The water in England leaves something to be desired and before you leave that place you’ll get all the water you’ll ever need,” Mike tells me as he hands me a water bottle.

 

“It was nice to finally meet you, Zachariah Artstien. We’ve all been hearing such good things,” says Tanya who looks a lot like Michelle Tagomi.

 

***

 

I wake up back on board the Chunnel train in an empty car. I rummage through my rucksack and take out The Bravest Battle. In the middle of the book are archival photos of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising. There are surviving pictures of twenty of its several hundred key participants. The last picture is of smug, twenty-somethingish Zachariah Artstein. He’s good looking and bears a vague Polish resemblance to Mike Washington.

 

I swap the “i” and the “e” in Artstein and that is how I came to be called Zachariah Artstien by most of the people that will meet me abroad or in the context of love, revolution and God.

 

I see the English countryside sweeping by in the dark. Rain is hitting the train and water runs down the side of the exterior windows. London has been the refuge over the last several hundred years to exiled revolutionaries like Marx, Herzen, and Bakunin. Some of their best ideas have been shaped in the rain and poverty of this city I am quickly approaching. It seems fitting that perhaps I will come up with some ideas here myself. Or maybe I will just run out of money during the rainiest most desolate part of the year and do everything and anything just for another meal.

 

Either way there’s a bunch pink pills from an orange bottle that I pour into a toilet during my final minutes on the Chunnel train to make real certain that this will be a one-way trip.

 

I think about the nine odd, short hand letters Jai had me write to explain my course of action. The first one to my parents, the second to Lauren Zivia, the third to Mr. Schlussel who with tenure probably won’t lose his job after I fled. I had about three hours for Jai to drink coffee and talk about Jesus while I wrote some parting letters for those I am leaving behind. The fourth to Trikhovitch who I assured that I would return some day. The fifth to Izzy thanking him for supporting me through all my domestic strife. The sixth to my brother apologizing again for leaving. I doubt he’d fully taken it in when I told him. The seventh to my adopted kid sister Zivia, the eighth to Simcha Rathajzer to forgive me for abandoning the YUFE movement he had helped me build. And the final letter to Michelle Tagomi.

 

“I’m sorry,” I wrote, “That I had to keep this from you. I’m sorry that I could not return to you a year ago able to reciprocate the love you had shown me in my imprisonment. But I was terrified you might see the Sebastian Adon I have grown to see with shame and misery. When you receive this letter I will be long gone. And gone for much I time I will remain. A sane man in an insane world is still a man apart. And while I have shared with you what I have hoped is both my feelings and my soul, imprisoned I was further changed for worse times. I am consumed with rage. Rage at the country and times which made my heart so black and my actions so callous. Rage with myself to be so ineffectual to stir my compatriots to deeds of change. Into exile I go ‘til answers find me. Remember me fondly, dear Michelle. My rage can no longer be placated with protest songs and talk of change. My redemption will only come out from this house of bondage. I pray to God my constitution will not fail me. I hope this time in foreign lands can make me an instrument for the wretched masses and working people who have become my strength. Remember me sometimes. God willing I will return to you a man changed. A man capable of more lasting good deeds.

 

Here’s lookin’ at you kids as the struggle looks deeper into me.

 

PART SIX:

The Grind of the Great Escape

 

 

“Throughout recorded time there have been three kinds of people in the world

 The High, The Middle, and The Low.

The aims of these three groups are entirely irreconcilable,

 The aim of The High is to remain where they are,

The aim of The Middle is to change places with The High, and

the aim of The Low, when they have an aim for it is an abiding characteristic of The Low that they are too much crushed by drudgery to be more than intermittently conscious of anything outside their daily lives,

Iis to abolish all distinctions and create a society in which all men shall be equal.”

 

–George Orwell, 1984\

 

 

א

February 12, 2001

 

 

I’m standing on the Waterloo Bridge in the dark. The rain is pouring down expanding the splash and flow of the River Thames upon the jagged brick banks. My bag is heavy. I have been walking for a long time. Thinking back to what Sorieya Levy had advised me to travel with, I have packed in slight excess. Now, it’s starting to rain again turning a soaking into a sopping.

 

I am consumed by the unspoken desperation of finding myself alone in a foreign country. I have less than one hundred dollars in my pocket. I don’t know a soul and it’s pouring. Well that isn’t entirely true. In my pocket, tucked next to the lighter Jai had given me and my passport, is an index card with two numbers, my brother’s friend Manuel in London and Nina Yogh’s aunt in Madrid. My escape destination had been between those two cities. I decided it was better to go where they speak my language, albeit a bit strangely.

 

It was odd going through British Customs. I remembered from previous trips to Europe the tremendous speed with which Americans are moved through the re-entry gates upon returning from abroad. There is that comforting sensation that it is our home and that we are protected. The Chunnel had let me out at Waterloo International. When I passed through customs, I waited on line with hundreds of people. The customs officials took their sweet fucking time. I felt a bit embarrassed with myself that I was reveling in American expediency so soon after having rejected the U.S. Perhaps the rejection isn’t fully developed. Perhaps it will come with time.

 

I am cold and vaguely hungry. There is no going back now. I had known that the minute I stepped on the train in Paris. The rain had started as a trickle and is now coming down harder. I am staring down at the Thames. It is dark and murky. I can see an enormous white Ferris wheel up the river. I think of my dreams. The city seems so dark. There are scarcely any people on the streets as I approach the north bank.  The river divides the city in more ways than one, but I don’t know that yet.

 

I have the track “Golden Brown” on repeat playing on my CD player.

 

I quicken my pace. The rain is getting heavier. I am looking along the boardwalk of the north bank for some kind of overhang where I can stay dry. I could try getting into some building and sleeping in the stairwell. This seems like my best bet considering the weather. There is a sharp wind coming up from the river that is blowing the rain directly into my face.

 

I have arrived in London during the coldest, rainiest part of the year. Of all the places one could be homeless I have picked the worst. But of this too, I am unaware. The concession I have made to eliminate the language barrier will be cancelled out by the unceasing downpour.

 

All that is on my mind is what I have done. My decision hasn’t totally sunken in. I keep telling myself that I am on the threshold of what will be my greatest adventure. But I am afraid. Now I’m really alone. There are no friends’ houses to sleep at or possible reconciliations with my parents. I won’t ever see my country again. That is the stark and bitter reality of my situation. I shiver turning my gloves into mittens and wrapping the scarf tighter around my neck.

 

I can see the billboard for the Lion King just up the street. There are some people out, middle-aged couples with plump children making their way to homes with river views after an evening of theater. I suddenly remember that I have been to London once before. I completely forgot. When had that been? Nothing about the city looks familiar. The buildings seem to tower above me. As I look upward toward the heavens, all I can see are a million individual droplets crashing down upon me in slow motion like pebbles of dew.

 

I look down at the underpass running underneath the bridge. I can see five or six figures wrapped in crusty old blankets, resting on large slaps of cardboard padding. Some have fashioned makeshift shelters. To my right there is a sculpture park. The central figure is a ballerina, bronze and skinny, graceful through the storm. My bag is heavy so I sit down to rest at its base.

 

The statue seems to be staring at me indifferently. It makes me think of Roxy. I have to stop thinking about her and my old life. That life is done. Sebastian Adon is dead.

 

“Well, God, I could really use some direction right now,” I implore to the soggy night.

 

I find myself praying sincerely for the third time in my life. I once heard a hip-hop verse that said,

 

“I’m an atheist who prays to God in times of desperation.”

 

That about sums up my relationship with the Lord. And for the third time in my life, the Lord delivers. Deliverance comes in the form of a German lesbian on a rickshaw bike. She is wearing a pink parka, slacks and brown boots. Her hair is brown and nappy, beginning to dread. Her accent sounds like a verbal cross-pollination of French and German.

 

“Eh, you want a ride somewhere?” the woman hollers at me in the rain.

 

Her rickshaw is a yellow, three-wheel contraption with an elevated seat and a passenger cabin that could hold three people. A canopy covers the passenger cabin.

 

“Actually, if you want to know the truth, while I may look like a rich American tourist, I’m looking for an abandoned building to live in.”

 

Just thought I’d throw that out there. She looks puzzled and climbs down off the bike.

 

“Right, um. It might be hard to find a vacant squat this time of year. You know anything about plumbing or electrics?”

 

“Can’t say I do.”

 

“What are you good for then?” she says sarcastically.

 

“I’m an artist.”

 

“That doesn’t help me much.”

 

“Help you with what?”

 

“I’m working up a squat in Tulse Hill. I’ve been there two years, but the place is still a mess. I got the water going, but can’t get it to heat. I got the power back up, but it’s real drafty. It is funny that we would run into each other, but I’m still not convinced you’ll be of any use,” She says clearly weighing the pros and cons in her head.

 

“I can cook,” I lie.

 

“Probably nothing I would eat.”

 

“I guess I’m not much use to you.”

 

She takes out a packet of Big Top and begins rolling a cigarette thoughtfully examining me. I take out a pack of Marlboros and offer her one.

 

“No, I don’t support that company,” she says rejecting my offer.

 

“Why not?”

 

“Because the man who owns that company hates homosexuals, blacks and Jews. Also yeah, it’s a multinational company pushing a highly addictive product that will kill you,” she adds.

 

“Good a reason as any I suppose.”

 

“What to do with you then?”

 

“I’m an artist and an aspiring revolutionary.”

 

“Are you, then?” she says with a smile in her eyes.

 

“On my good days.”

 

She pauses, licks the paper of her rollie and sparks it. She takes a drag and says,

 

“Mmm, all right, I guess ya can stay with me, eh.”

 

“What’s your name?”

 

“Tatiana.”

 

“I’m Zachariah. Zachariah Artstien.”

 

“Got a pen and pad?” she asks.

 

“Yeah,” I dig a note pad out of my jacket pocket.

 

“My squat is in Tulse Hill. That’s south London, south of Brixton. You’ll need to take a bus cause the train won’t run there much longer.”

 

She jots down some directions and puts her phone number on the bottom of the page.

 

“Thanks a lot.”

 

“Now, let’s show you around real quick and then I’ll get back to work. Welcome to England.”

 

She peddles the rickshaw quickly giving me quite a ride. It has stopped raining but she tells me that it will start again soon. She takes me through the theatre district into the West End and Soho and then over to Piccadilly Circus. She drops me off and tells me to be at the address she gave me around 4 in the morning when she gets off work. Three drunken young men in black suits flag her down and they jump into the back. All of them are wearing pink pig masks. Tatiana takes off down the main street with them in the back leaving me in the heart of London.

 

Piccadilly Circus is like Times Square but less vertical. It’s lit up brightly with huge glowing advertisements and there is traffic everywhere. The bars and outdoor restaurants are jam packed with people drunk or drinking. I put down my art on the mat and try to move something.

 

I weigh down one side with my backpack and the other side with a large brick dislodged from the square. I start putting down pieces of my artwork, both photos from the Inauguration Demonstration that Nina Yogh printed and my own sketches. The wind picks up and sends the pieces all over each other on the ground. Picking up little rocks from a planter I weigh each piece down from the corners. I’m a bit unsure about how to go about doing this. I’ve only sold art twice on the street and that had been in Soho in New York.

 

I am only here for a minute when a group of drunken girls comes over, falling all over themselves and almost stepping on my pictures. I quickly move to get in the way.

 

“Watch out for my work,” I say.

 

“Sorry love, my mates are hammered,” a homely blonde says to me as she tries to pick up one of her friends from falling. They are being loud and are attracting a lot of attention.

 

I take out a smoke. One of the girls leans over and pukes all over the ground. A policeman stops her and asks for her identification. He looks like a New York cop but cleaner cut with a neon-yellow reflector jacket. I stop paying attention once they’re clear of my art.

 

I need to quickly figure out how to sell my art. I only have fifteen sketches and seven of Nina’s photographs. I feel a new raindrop hit my forehead. My little reprieve from the drenching is apparently coming to an end.

 

The police are taking away one of the girls.

 

***

 

 

It seems like I’ve been walking for hours in the rain.  Eventually I arrive in Tulse Hill.

 

Romola Road is at the bottom of a hill. The road is only one block long. Everything in the neighborhood is closed. The building is not what I expected. I had this mental image of what the squat would look like. In my head it was a large loft looking space, clean and lit with candles. If the yard outside is any reflection of the interior, I am in for a bit of a surprise.

 

It is the most rundown house on the block. It is painted white, but the paint on the house is chipping badly. Each house is built right on top of each other and is no taller than three stories. Everyone’s yard looks tidy except for Romola 33. There is a beige weathered couch outside, which is torn and wet. Brambles are growing up the side of the building. Garbage litters the area of Tatiana’s yard. One of the threes on the door is about to fall off. The glass on the door is shattered and a wooden sheet has been nailed up over it from the inside. I doubt the inner furnishings are much different.

 

Regardless of its condition, I am certain that it beats sleeping on the street. I remember what Jaiwarrior had said about options. It is definitely time to drink from the first glass I found. Taking cover from the rain I sit under the doorway and smoke yet another cigarette waiting for Tatiana to get home. It is around 3:10 in the morning.

 

Finally I nod off into half sleep, squatting in the squats entrance alcove. I had walked forever in the rain on the dark and empty streets of South London.  I decide to take a nap in this covered alcove, as I feel exhausted. I un-strap my green roll up camping mat. I prop my pack behind me, but keep it strapped to my back so no one can try to steal it without waking me. And then I go to sleep.

 

***

 

Someone is shaking me. It’s the woman, Tatiana.

 

“I have a better place ta sleep than the doorway.”

 

“Good to see you. How was work?” I ask in a groggy voice

 

“Made out pretty well. The rain is good for business.”

 

She opens the door and the inside is a reflection of the yard. Water is dripping from the ceiling. To my left is a half painted room with all sorts of shit scattered on the floor. We climb a wooden stairway to the second floor of the squat. The kitchen is in front of me with all sorts of produce, some fresh and some in various stages of decay. Grime is everywhere. On a rickety wooden table sits a large, rusted hotplate, which looks ancient. There are several pots and pans.

 

The next room up the hall is a bathroom, which is clean enough compared to the rest of the house. There is a bathtub with a clear plastic drape hanging from a metal bar. The paint is peeling from the water running down the ceiling. The next room cannot be entered because furniture has been stacked and packed into it floor to ceiling. Tatiana’s room is the last one before the stairs to the third floor. It is locked and she opens it with a knife from the kitchen.

 

“The neighbors are vicious thugs. They broke the downstairs door window and one of them tried to hit me the other day. I keep all my valuables in my room because you can’t be sure if they plan to break into the house. Take a nap and then we’ll go to this party, eh?” Tatiana tells me.

 

“Sounds good to me.”

 

I take off my coat and hit the bed. The room smells like dry rot and incense. The sheets on the bed are green and the bed doesn’t have a frame. It’s just three mattresses tossed on top of one another. Tatiana puts on some music and crashes in a beat-up easy chair as she rolls a cigarette. The music is tribal drumming intermixed with chants. Very new age.

 

“You want I should let ya sleep or ya want to come to a squat party?” she asks me.

 

“I’m up to go,” I say.

 

“Then we’re off.”

 

She lights her cigarette and we head downstairs to the living room where there are two bikes propped against the wall.

 

“Do Americans still know how to ride bicycles?”

 

“Yeah, we still know how to ride bicycles.”

 

The rain has stopped coming down as we ride down backstreets shrouded in darkness. We’re in the Styx. The houses all look the same and no cars are on the roads. Eventually we make our way to what appears to be a movie theatre boarded up on the outside. Letters have fallen off the marquee and the last movie shown appears to be Titanic, but the marquee reads Tit Anic. We walk our bikes to the back of the theatre. There is a parking lot littered with trash and three kids are smoking hash in a small blue car while people sit around a burning garbage can all fucked up on drugs. We chain our bikes to a fence and walk toward the back entrance where a kid no older than 14 is collecting two quid per person for the entrance fee. Tatiana pays for me and we wgo inside.

 

We emerge behind a large screen, which has been slashed down the middle. Already I can hear the base thumping. Most of the seats have been torn up and a plank has been laid down between the stage in front of the screen and the area where at least fifty-plus people are dancing. It reminds me of the way Andrew used to describe the old rave scene in New York. A DJ sits in the projection booth above us spinning jungle music. The projector is running and the shadows of the dancers fall on the slashed screen like ghostly silhouettes. There is a foul odor in the place. It stinks of urine, but I guess everyone is too fucked up to pay it much attention.

 

“Brilliant isn’t it?” Tatiana yells over the music.

 

“Yeah. Fucking cool.” I tell her in amazement.

 

There are kids everywhere. Crack heads and derelicts that have taken shelter in the theatre share the space with weekend partygoers. Some of the kids look like candy ravers. Others have that dreadlocked darker look that I remember from Concrete Jungle in New York. Everywhere people are dancing. Someone offers me E. We walk down a hall into what looks like the lobby. There is a large chandelier that looks like it’s about to fall, and very much ruin the evening of some party kid. Two strobe lights have been set up and they blare to the rhythm of the jungle beat.

 

I see a group of kids lined up sitting on the floor giving each other back rubs obviously rolling face. I never was into hallucinogens. Out of the corner of my eye I see Tatiana pop a pill. Better keep my eye on her being that I have no idea how to get home.

 

“Tanya!” I hear someone yell from the balcony above the lobby.

 

I look up and I see two men waving. Their faces are painted in tribal patterns of purple and green streaks. They are dressed casually and the tall one has a crazy look in his eyes. Tatiana waves back and tells me she wants to introduce me to two of her “work mates.”

 

Tall George is tall and lanky. He’s skinny like a stick and has wild eyes that dart around as if he is unable to focus. He is wearing what could be described as English club clothing, but there is something just a little off about the way he puts himself together. The other guy is named Matt. Matt is shorter than Tall George and has a grim celebrity to his looks, like you’ve seen him on the television or in a movie. Both work for Bug Bugs, the largest rickshaw provider in the city of London.

 

“Right. There’s something wrong with this one’s voice,” says Tall George pointing to me. “His accent is funny, like he speaks English eh, but doesn’t pronounce things correctly.”

 

“He’s American,” says Tatiana.

 

I can tell by looking at her that she’s beginning to feel the effects of the drugs.

 

“I know he’s Merican. I’m just taking a piss.” Tall George speaks low-English enunciating each word with hand gestures and quick reverberations in his posture.

 

“What’s your name?” asks Matt.

 

“Zachariah,” I tell him.

 

“That’s a right regal name you know,” says Tall George. “You’re lucky to have such a name. That’s like Amish or Biblical like. Don’t let people call you Zach. You shouldn’t abbreviate that name.”

 

He talks quickly and I see him grind his teeth. His pupils are like saucers and he’s obviously fucked up on something. He keeps on talking. He’s not looking at me. He’s staring right over my head but continues to engage me.

 

“You’re a small geezer for an American, Zachariah. I had to haul these three fat Americans all over London. They were well daft. Pronounced Trafalgar Square incorrectly. Had to weigh like three hundred pounds apiece. It wasn’t healthy. To tell the truth, I sort of went slowly like, didn’t want to tip over on a turn. You want some war paint?” he asks me.

 

“Yeah, sure,” I say.

 

“Where did that Suzy go? She is well fit. Most English girls are dogs. I bet you’ve seen that already. It’s the teeth if you haven’t noticed. I blame the weather. There’s no sun this time of year. You need sun otherwise things wither and die. English girls look like the undead. Like fucking zombies,” Tall George tells me.

Tatiana and Matt head off into one of the other theatres to listen to the music. Tall George suddenly sits down as if spooked. I take out a cigarette and offer him one.

 

“No thanks, little brother. Those things will kill you. I wouldn’t want me lungs black like a Sudanese hooker. Black like a politician’s soul. Me lungs are pink and robust. Want to keep um that way. You gotta right. Pick your poison. I like mushy mushes and little E pilly willies,” Tall George tells me.

 

“Rather poison my lungs than my mind,” I say.

 

“Well, that isn’t the right way of lookin’ at it, eh. It’s about finding that way to break through to the other side. They don’t poison your mind, they open it.”

 

“I have enough trouble with the other side without the drugs.”

 

“Visions of the darkness? Terrible things that make sure you don’t sleep?” he asks.

 

“Something like that,” I say puzzled.

 

“I can see that in you, geezer. They want to get out,” Tall George observes.

 

“Who wants to get out?”

 

“That’s about all I can say on the matter,”

 

“Who wants to get out? Where are you getting that from?!”

 

“Once Tall George decides to stop talking, that’s the end of it,” he tells me emphatically.

 

I decide not to push the matter and figure that it’s just the drugs talking. Tall George wanders off looking for an elf that has been taunting him.

 

All around me a carnival world erupts throughout the theatre. Fire dancing, jungle music, people with painted faces, teenagers having sex in phone booths. I’m in another world. Looking at the theatre from the outside you’d have no idea what is unfolding inside.

 

Here I am on my first night of the great escape reveling in the abyss and loving every minute of it.

 

ב

I begin selling art right off of Piccadilly Circus in central London. The statue of Eros in the middle of Piccadilly competes with the billboards of Nike and Adidas and the GAP Super Store. The god’s powers wane daily as people pray to their new consumer gods.

 

Tatiana and Tall George and dozens of other riders zip in and out of the West End in their rickshaws. The riders are refugees just like me. I share the strip with junkies and artists. There is an old woman selling trinkets and a punk rocker with a portable amp and guitar.  Packs of college kids roam from bar to bar looking for love or violence.

 

I spread my art out on my green squat mat, on which I have drawn the hammer and sickle emblem. I am so damn proud to be a communist. I treat everyone with a dignity and respond to any interaction with “thank you for your time, comrade.” Every piece of art is a childish lash against the place in which I was born.

 

As I study the Manifesto and Che Guevara’s manual on guerrilla warfare line by line I re-imagine the red dream. Day and night I dream about fighting the Colombian government with the FARC-EP or the ELN or about traveling to Cuba to be trained as a doctor. Like in America, people always ask me about Russia. Russia is the idealist’s deal breaker. They always want to remind me about how bad Russia was. People tell me to read 1984 or Animal Farm, or Gulag Archipelago. They tell me to study how many tens of millions perished under Stalin, Mao and the Khmer Rouge. I tell them that none of that was communism. Those were just brutal dictators calling themselves communists.

 

I am on the train on the way back to the squat on my first Friday in London and an Orthodox Jewish kid gives me a small plastic packet with grape juice, two shabbos candles, a small piece of hallah and the Friday prayers. So, before I go to the squat party tonight, I fumble through the shabbos prayers for the first time since my visit to the Orthodox settlement near Jerusalem. The ritual is strangely comforting. It will become something I try to do every Friday that I am in London. I don’t really kept the shabbos in a restful sense, but I always pray for some direction.

 

If there really is a God, it seems to communicate best to me in dreams and traumatic experiences.

 

In the dreams Mike Washington and I, the Pilgrim now called Zachariah, are still moving a captive and possessed pregnant girl across a vast and ominous desert with adversity, near escapes and gun battles at every turn of course.

 

In my waking life, I begin organizing a Leninist cell system on the ever-pouring streets of London, the very city where the Manifesto was written. Every day I wake up feeling that my God is with me. That my God loves me as a communist. I look proudly up to the martyr whose name is now my own. I am glad Sebastian Adon is dead. As though I shot him myself, I pray daily to be as strong as the real Zachariah Artstein.

***

 

I quickly sell Nina Yogh’s photos from the Inauguration demonstration along with my own paintings for about 10 pounds each at my makeshift art stand. I feel like these pictures say that not all Americans are complacent. Business is never great. If I sell something, it is usually at the end of a particularly long conversation and probably more due to the novelty of my ideas than my artistic technique. Resistance Art, as I have dubbed my stand, is generally more about getting them to stop and ask about the hammer and sickle. At times a few drunken English men during general pub hours in the evening pay a single quid each for me to draw something obscene like priests sodomizing little girls or themselves receiving blow jobs. And who am I to not accommodate them?

 

I close up my art stand when it starts to drizzle and head over to Old Compton and Frith where the pedicab riders congregate.  I am wearing my tattered brown cashmere jacket with the grey corduroy scaly cap on my head. I am carrying all my stuff in the grey gas mask bag.

 

“It’s the last American rebel,” yells Tall George from a yellow rickshaw across the street.

 

I only have a vague recollection of my delirious chat with him at the squat party. I remember him saying something cryptic.

 

“Not the last, just the latest,” I call back to him.

 

“I wonder if there is a correlation between how fat most Americans are and how lazy they seem to be,” Tall George continued.

 

“Yeah maybe, either way I left.”

 

“And what is it you think you’re going to find here in London, geezer?”

 

“A little freedom from the American tyranny.”

 

“Aren’t you too young to be talking about things like that?” Tall George asked.

 

“How old do you think I am?”

 

“Sixteen,” he answered.

 

“I’m seventeen.”

 

“And you already have the rhetoric of a little cosmonaut. A communist monkey to be shot into space, eh?” Tall George commented.

 

“Or took a train into the heart of the UK.”

 

“This was once a place of darkness said Mr. Conrad.”

 

“What the fuck is that supposed to mean?”

 

“A place of a dark and savage river, geezer. A place where Roman legionnaires shuddered in their frigates at the howling of the savage Gaelic tribes. They had to be pacified at great expense. The mighty General Hadrian had to have a wall built to keep them away from the colony. Eons ago. Now there are more walls to keep the modern barbarians away from the gilded skyscrapers and sports cars and cameras everywhere to keep the savage Gaelic tribe of the New IRA from leaving popping packages in the tube. It’s still a place of darkness, hidden beneath the glow of consumer, quasi-civilization.”

 

“Cameras?”

 

“Closed circuit television. The whole city is wired up. It’s supposed to stop the Irish from setting off bombs, but that’s just an excuse to keep track of the dissident and criminal English. The real IRA blew up the BBC today with a car bomb. CCTV hasn’t told um anything but the color of the car. It was once blue, but now its charred and blackened,” George tells me.

 

“What’s the real IRA?”

 

“It’s a splinter group of a splinter group.”

 

“What’s a splinter group?”

 

“It’s when terrorists can’t make up their mind over the reasons they’re putting bombs into fish and chip shops,” George explained.

 

“And the real IRA is?”

 

“It’s the most violent of the fighting Irish that got tired of putting bombs in Protestant pubs in Belfast and brought the bags over to London.”

 

“What do they want?”

 

“Fast cars, cocaine and loose and easy women like everyone else. And Northern Ireland free, of course,” George explained.

 

“Northern Ireland, free?”

 

“It’s the longest running separatist conflict in modern human history. They want the six northern counties of the island to be returned to the Irish Republic. But most in the north are prods from the Church of England, and nearly the entire south is Catholic. A Catholic minority lives in the north and gets treated like fourth-class citizens. Some ten thousand bullets and bombings later, the north awash in blood, and low and behold, the situation remains the same. Not only communists have few scruples killing lots of innocent people for a rosy dream,” George said.

 

“I have a friend in New York named Hubert O’Domhnaill . He always used to beat around the bush when it came to the issue, but get him drunk and he’ll start talking about free Ireland,” I tell him.

 

“Scratch an American Irishman and you’ll find a Sein Fein supporter or funder,” Tall George continued.” The political arm of the Irish Republican Army.”

 

“Political arm?”

 

“Geezer, ya can’t just put bombs in candy shops and think that’s gonna make people turn over some land to yer people. Ya need an aboveground, election-based party to make statements and speeches and tell people why the bombs goin’ off in the candy shops and wedding halls and government buildings advance the interests of the given group. A political arm is the above ground wing to further the objectives of the group. The military arm is jus for causin’ problems when the political arm isn’t getting what it wants.”

 

“So it’s about Catholic and Protestant?”

 

“There’s no real differences between a Northern Irish prod and Southern Irish Catholic, other than what side of the line they were born on. It doesn’t matter about religion after the second or third bomb goes off. Once the violence begins ya rally around a flag or a religion until the killing gets too out-of-hand and someone alerts the West. Ireland’s like a Middle Eastern country with freckles and a drinking problem. I’m half Irish meeself,” George says, proudly.

 

“So it’s really about land?”

 

“Or that’s what they tell themselves to shoot better. Whose fuckin land is any ‘o this anyway? Two thousand years ago, the maps looked different. In two thousand years they’ll change again. Britain went around the world with France and Belgium and put little flags and churches everywhere and told the brown and yellow people they had a queen. At first they were confused and then they were exploited and then they started blowing things up, too. People thinkin’ that just a bit of killin’ is all it takes to get their people a land. You can talk yer commy-talk ‘til ya turn eighteen and then ya should pick up a few books an learn that communists kill people as quick as anyone else.”

 

“I get the jist of your story, but history doesn’t always repeat itself.”

 

“Yes it does, with bigger and more efficient weapons. Yer young. People hear ya talk and think, eh, I remember when I thought like that, but then I grew old and cynical and had ta worry bout taxes and a family and the next big war. Talk like that when yer twenty and people ell either ignore ya er think yer daft,” George says, emphatically.

 

“There’s only one ideology that accurately explains the world, gives people a plan and a vision for a better life. Communism is the only good chance our people have for some kind of just existence.”

 

“Religion gives people the same. Communism is like a religion to you. You have faith in the higher power of the will of the people, an explanation for the world in the sacred texts, rituals like armed struggle, and salvation in the coming of the next great revolution. But leave it ta humans ta smash rose-colored glasses under a mounting weight of self-interest, age, and cynicism. But at least we have Shakespeare…”

 

“Huh?”

 

“The expression of every vital human emotion and interchange in the richest gradient of the English language. I’ve committed him ta memory and in doin so finally grasped the very essence of our eternal struggle to put meaning to this shite life of ars,” George says.

 

“Do tell…” I responded.

 

“That the world is wrought with human misery and the love of woman or sometimes a man is the only justifying factor to any of it at all. No single religion, ideology or creed will matter worth a damn to you once you find yer love amid a vast chasm of bloody power struggles, plans fer revenge and the overall tragedy of us bein quite abandoned by our Creator to our own sinister devices,” Tall George tells me.

 

“You have it all memorized?” I ask, incredulously.

 

“I’m a manic-depressive they say. I’m pure brilliant and three-quarters mad.”

 

“Either it’s indeed catching, or we attract to each other. You’re the third one I’ve met this year. I’m told by the experts in America I’m bi-polar which, I think means the same thing,” I tell him.

 

“How old are you again, Mr. Artstien?”

 

“I’m seventeen.”

 

“Get ready fer a lifetime of ever unfolding drama. Yer curtain is about to rise. They’ve asked ya if the glass is half full or half empty, but you threw the water in their face an told um ya knew where the well was an could drink to your heart’s content forever,” Tall George exclaims.

 

***

 

I am very, very cold. It’s damp and an awful draft permeates this hovel. I spent much of the day unloading furniture piled ceiling high in the room next to Tatiana’s. It was like a Gothic Alice in Wonderland, a room full of rusty chairs. I carried each one to the third floor, which is awash in bird shit. The house is almost as cold as the streets outside, but only half as wet. Water trickles down here and there. The waterlogged floorboards creak. It is not unlike a sinking ship about to collapse. Tatiana has warned me to not walk about without shoes as there are rusty nails protruding like hundreds of tetanus thorns. She told me to hammer them down when I find them.

 

Once the second room is finally cleared, I can’t help but notice a rather large hole, roughly the size of my head in the brick wall in the back of the room. Lacking a much better solution, I put a broken door against it. I sweep the room as best as I can and drag a dresser, a small table and a less rusted chair from an equally cluttered room in the basement. Tatiana has given me a cleanish mattress she probably found on the street and a Mickey Mouse blanket and a pillow. It is a room of my own.

 

It looks like Grozny only forty minutes by bike from Central London. The power works, the water runs. Cold and undrinkable, but still running. The doors lock, although they are intermittently peed upon, smashed, or boarded shut by our angry West Indian neighbors. We keep a crow bar in the bushes outside because whoever owns the building periodically boards the door with a solid wooden sheet, which is problematic to remove by hand. Tatiana warned me that the neighbors might try to attack me because we are squatting. The rents, even in this shitty South Brixton tenement, are high. The tube doesn’t run to our part of town, but there are the bikes and the commuter train runs until midnight. It isn’t a place I can ever bring a girl I like to, unless she is Bosnian.

 

Tulse Hill is an extension of Brixton, the Black neighborhood of London that is located south of the Thames. There is a shitty pub up the street, a small grocery store and a laundromat. All that is missing is jerk chicken shops, 99-cent stores and a few churches and you could imagine it to be East New York with a ridiculous accent. There’s something slightly less intimidating about a thug when he sounds like Pierce Brosnan. That’s until he beats your face in. But the neighborhood doesn’t seem that dangerous. There aren’t packs of junkies or young hoods on the street corner.

 

Most people are old and were once Jamaican, except for the neighbors in Romola 31 who are young, Jamaican and angry. One of them, I think it was a family with about three sons a little older than me, smashed the glass of one of our windows with a brick the week before I moved in. They are always throwing trash in our garden. And by garden I mean the pile of weeds, refuse and concrete bricks piled behind our house. They’d set us on fire if we didn’t share a wall. At night you can hear screaming, knockdown fights going on. Their old manias always bellowing or boxing with one of the sons.

 

I have finally managed to plug the hole with some bricks and mortar that were in the basement. It is perhaps the handiest thing I’ve done in my life. But that doesn’t keep out the cold. There is always a chill up my spine that no matter how far under the blanket I climb, I can never shake. There are perpetual wrinkles on my fingers. The cold is something I eventually learn to shut out with layers.

 

The rain comes down every other day in buckets. Biking back from selling art or squat parties, I always get drenched through and through. New York winters were bad, but I began to cherish any moments spent dry and wrapped in my growing collection of blankets. I often get quite lost navigating the South London streets back to Romola 33. The moment I finally arrive at the squat, I strip down naked in my room to dry out. I swear I have never seen my penis so small but in conditions like this. I once saw Nick Rosenbaum have sex with Lauren Zivia in my parent’s freezing swimming pool in the near dead of winter. I do not possess that kind of constitution. But once I am bundled in dry clothing and wrapped in layers of blankets, I retreat into slumber as best I can.

 

One day Tatiana brought home a space heater she had either found or bought from a friend. It is missing its front cover leaving the glowing bars quite exposed and ever ready to catch the squat ablaze. I can even light my rollies off it. She says it will keep me warm. Yeah, keep me warm or burn the fucking house down.

ג

Tall George took lunch break at 4 pm. He telss me that he has absolutely forgotten what day of the week it is and that it’s been like that for quite some time. With no bills or scheduled hours or meaningful relationships, I remind him that he’s totally unregulated by the “chains that bind” or “reality.” Tall George has to remember to eat. At nearly seven feet, he’s as tall as a basketball player tall and as thin as a sapling stick. His big brown eyes have a crazy look to them that he swears is caused by something called bipolar 2.

 

“Enhanced bi-polar,” he claims. “The kind of bi-polar other manic depressives covet more than they covet a return to sanity.”

 

Tall George can’t stay still for very long. He fidgets about and is rarely ever seated. The profession of a rickshaw driver is ideally suited to his very nature. Tall George wears velvet black suits with cuffs that are hemmed too short for his spindly legs. They appear neither inexpensive nor designer, simply man-sized, as if buys them at a big and tall shop with no attention to any precise fit. It is a look.

 

We are soon finished with our coffee and Tall George is back on his bike. He leaves me on the corner of old Compton and Frith with a table of art and a street without people.

 

It’s not raining for once. It’s just intermittently cloudy and grey. I got to Old Compton and Frith before noon.  I have moved my stand to the front of an expensive jewelry store called Nottinghams. It’s a small corner store that sells mostly tasteful silver and gold necklaces. A British girl with freckles and shoulder-length hair came out and asked me what I was doing.

 

“Selling art,” I tell her.

 

She looks it over for a minute and then goes to get coffee at an Israeli-owned coffee shop called Duke’s next to her store. She returns with two teas and gives me one.

 

“You’re not gonna sell anything, I think.”

 

“Not your style?”

 

“I’m not sure what my style would be, but your art is all guns-and-breasts radical iconography. You should change it up a bit perhaps.”

 

“I like my art,”

 

“I like your art. It’s quite unique in style. But who really wants to put hammers and sickles in their home?”

 

“Communist revolutionaries,” I counter.

 

“Well, perhaps the wrong neighborhood, in the wrong country, in the wrong time period, but good luck.”

 

“Thanks, I typically need all the luck I can get.”

 

She goes back in her store and sits behind the counter. We can still see each other through the glass. She is smiling at me. I never know how to react when a girl is checking me out. I feel like I should always look away lest I make a stupid face. She’s too petite to be totally British. She’s not beautiful nor is she unattractive. She has an intelligent look about her. Or am I reading this wrong and she is internally debating how a homeless street urchin selling art might be bad for business?

 

I get into a wide range of conversations at my art stand. Most are about communism and my ever- expanding political ideology. I am a soapbox sideshow with abstract diagrams. I am the walking, talking proof that not all Americans are fat, lazy, and apathetic. I am the singing, dancing spokesman of the great unwashed. People will ask me later if I made it over to Hyde Park corner, where people speechified about everything from Aliens to Jesus to Jesus being an alien. I never did because radicalism seems all the more striking in a vacuum.

 

But I still believe in the old man’s late great gospel.

 

I believe that the last hundred years has been the first charge. I believe that if the revolutions failed it is because of their leadership’s corruption not a failure of the ideas. The time is coming for a fourth wave. The social conditions around the world are little better for the common person. We are just going to have to keep drilling it into people’s heads, person by person, that this fight can be won. We are going to pick up that red flag again, cast off our iron chains, and fight our exploiters to the last bullet, to the last drop of blood.

 

Or so says the large cardboard placard, I have erected in front of my makeshift Resistance Art stand on the southeast corner of Compton and Frith.

ד

Tatiana and I biked up into North London for a small rave her friend Ilya is spinning this Thursday night. It is in a non-descript, ultra-modern pub with strobe lights and white walls with white leather-cushioned benches with tables. We arrived about 3 am because Tatiana was a bit confused about the address. I think the music is called drum and Base. All I really know is that I hate something called house, like something called happy hardcore, and favor jungle best of all. I still can’t really tell them apart unless a connoisseur points them out to me.

 

The bar is nearly empty. I meet Ilya, a bald man in his late twenties, early thirties with a red and black striped sweater and tightish jeans. He may have been a Russian once. He is very intense and slightly cold to me. I wander into the bar’s second room where two girls are dancing about dressed kind of like American candy ravers with yarn intertwined into their hair. I am in little mood to dance so I sketch the two of them. One has brilliant, died-red hair and the other is a platinum blonde, English Lara. The whole place is thumping with music for just the three of us.

 

The girls notice me and come over to see what I am drawing. And that is how I met Fairy Helene and Fairy Tink. They, like many young women, love my art in a way that can only halfway be attributed to the merits of my artistic technique. My art is the great opener of minds as well as legs. I am instantly taken with Fairy Helene. It is like a reunion with a missed connection from another life. Tatiana and Ilya, bound to his decks, watch the three of us play from a distance. Tink is loaded up on something she calls life but which is likely a British variant of methamphetamine.

 

Eventually the five of us leave to go to another party up the street. That party goes on quite indefinitely. As long as the sun is down, the London party scene sprawls eternal. You can keep going down that rabbit hole from warehouse to warehouse, basement to basement, couch to couch and pill to pill.

 

Everyone needs an adorable fairy friend fueled on new age spiritual thinking, fire dancing and a cornucopia of hallucinogenic drugs. I found mine that first night when Fairy Helene wrote her number in my sketchbook with red lipstick. They have a fairy posse, many of whom we meet that night. Whenever a raver says something like “you look like the dawn,” I cringe inside. No one should be that hip-happy-crappy, far-gone euphoric even on lots of drugs. Helene may be on something too but is far more coherent.

 

Somewhere amid the flashing do-it yourself strobe lights, buildings not made for dance parties and the ever-thumping base, I have lost Tatiana and finally pass out on the couch at Ilya’s tiny apartment where Fairy Helene lives. The whole night is a mess of color and conversation. I remember vignettes like Helene and I in a bathtub without water swooning as she drew on my chest with her red lipstick. What a cute fuckin’ mess. At one point Tink disappeared into a deli bathroom and emerged dressed as a flight attendant needing to catch the light rail train back to Surrey for work Friday morning. Ilya repeated twice before I passed out:

 

“Ask Tatiana what they’re making at the Button Factory.”

 

ה

I have written two short poems for Daphne Collins, the pretty young clerk at the jewelry store across from my art stand called the Florence-B. I left them with her co-worker, Lorraine.  Lorraine is a full-figured, blonde Irish girl who finds me “quite adorable” and “perpetually malnourished.” She feeds me all the time. Although I’m quite partial to Daphne, Lorraine has won the battle for my stomach. I have made quite a point to take nothing for free. I never ask for money and I never ask for anything that I won’t trade for a picture. But women love to feed me because I’ve grown quite skinny since I arrived in London. I look like a newsy in my grey scaly cap. I thought it was called a beret, but the actual term for it, I was told by some English punk, is called a scaly cap. I never take it off. Except the other night when we caught a bite and Daphne drank near a whole bottle of wine in the basement of an Italian restaurant down the street. Then we jumped in a taxi and she gave me head in her bathtub. I took my cap off for that.

 

I have’t written a poem for a girl in quite some time. But I have this ability for making words come together without it being cheesy. Daphne is quite taken by me because there is something quite romantic about an American boy refugee who sells art on the street. For about two weeks we’d had an odd little courtship of me leaving her little poems under the door of the shop before I headed home about 5 am and her buying my “proper English to-go breakfasts” on her way to work with the blonde co-worker Lorraine instigating for both of us.

 

We went out last Friday and she got quite plastered again.

 

“I’m not going to sleep with you tonight,” she says as are lying drunk in the bathtub again in her flat with candles all about the room. I really, really like getting head in a bathtub with candles all around me.

 

Daphne Collins is something of an amateur photographer. I think her work is quite good, real horror show material. I only say that because the work is quite dark and that’s the only kind of photography I really like. It is nearly all black and white, but even the color stuff takes on a real Bette noire-gothic kind of look, chocked full of homeless grimaces, 50 quid whores, bombed out tenements and warehouse fare. Some shots have been staged of a floating female corpse in a lake. She gave me several of these as a present and I glued them into the back of my sketchbook archive. They are the photos of a crime scene. She may want to be a  photographer, but she has to work at a jewelry store while she attends college.

 

Daphne lives with two female roommates. One thinks I am ‘adorable but really quite too young for her’.  The other one can’t stand me because I am ‘some urchin off the street likely to pawn something for drugs.’ Daphne was committing statutory rape when she started fucking me two week later. I am seventeen and she’s twenty. I’m for sure not going be the first seventeen-year old boy in the history of England to file a statuary rape charges on an attractive older woman. I’m not sure she has ever asked me my age or my real name. People always think I’m much older than I am as soon I start talking politics.

 

Now I’m in a kind of monogamous relationship with Daphne. I guess that looking at my previous love life, it will be short and relatively painless. With the exception of the times I wake up at someone’s house after a squat party to find an older woman in her thirties playing with me and then precede not to offer much resistance, I am quite loyal to Daphne. She is very good to me. She is conscious of how poor I am and finds ways to not make me feel awkward about never having money. While she is gracious with her money, I work twice as hard so I can take her out to something simple once in a while, like out for Italian food or to the ‘cinema for a picture.’

 

 

***

 

After enough nagging Tatiana eventually brought me to a Ska show at the place Ilya calls the Button Factory featuring Madness and the Selectors.

 

Twenty minutes northwest of Tulse Hill, this squalid factory is now a Punk-Rock-Ska venue, an anarchist infoshop, a vegan restaurant and a home to thirty to forty European anarchists. In between one of the Ska sets I wander up to the Infoshop and pick up a large glossy political flyer that says “May Day Monopoly 2001.” It is an anti-capitalist call to arms for the 1st of May with the city laid out like a monopoly board. The flyer put out a call for decentralized “direct action” against corporate targets as a lead up to a massive anti-capitalist march across the city. This isn’t a protest about an issue. This is a protest against an economic system on international workers day. The protest is two months away. I am informed by a few of the people at the store that the year before a famous English statue called the Cenotaph had been vandalized and a few McDonalds had been set ablaze. Rioting is sort of like football here, a national pastime for leftists and hooligans alike. The plan this year is to move beyond protesting to encourage affinity groups to form and plan action against specific targets without a centralized command, a type of mayhem that the London police would be slower to catch on to and would make it harder to stop.

 

These European anarchists are very impressive to me. There is a real culture to it all, an alternative social system attached to the squatters movement.  It is better organized and more disciplined than what I’ve seen in the United States. Anarchist is just a term to me at this point. I can barely connect communism to a specific economic model. I know there is more to it than “no government.” That is just childish. But these people are very action-oriented. I tap right into it. I got my hands on a 46-page, direct action training book with diagrams and materials needed for a wide variety of political actions. There are even workshops I can go to at the Button Factory like Direct Action 101 and Basics of Mobile Shield Walls. There are tons of books there I can borrow. There is a whole community I quickly plug into as I am determined to involve myself with the “May Day Riots” as everyone outside the anarchist community calls them.

 

I am not really that aware to what degree people associate words like anarchist and communist with violence, at least outside the Button Factory anyway, where the words mean freedom and liberation from the ruling class. I associate communism with violence and a failed economic system as opposed to anarchism, which I think stands for violence for the sake of more violence. Radicalism is easy for me.

 

I see no reason why I ought to spend my entire life waiting for slow reforms accomplished by liberal politicians. I see no reason at all why I am not justified in using violence to further my cause as long as no innocent people are killed. This is the fundamental difference between a revolutionary and a terrorist. A terrorist simply no longer differentiates between political objectives and innocent human lives. For those associated with the Real IRA, no one is innocent. This is not to say that I am so naïve as to think that these things happen bloodlessly. Sometimes I sit up very late in my squat huddled over the space heater thinking about if I can kill a person for what I believe.

 

I have begun to internalize the radical nature of my trip. It is one thing to say you are willing to die for an idea because of some wrong carried out against you in life. It is quite another to say you are willing to kill for the same ideal. I have been going to informal lectures at a coffee shop near the Button Factory on the theories of revolutionary violence by Mikhail Bakunin. I am learning to differentiate the various schools of anarchist revolutionary theory. I am beginning to realize two things from my new comrades. First, the revolution cannot simply be a change in the economic relationships within a country. It has to result in a change in the power relationships as well. If this basic tenet is not adhered to at the beginning, the society created from the struggle won’t change. Second, direct action is the tactic best suited to accomplish our goals. It was explained to me with a quick parable.

 

You and a comrade work at a factory with unsafe machines. One day the machine takes off your comrade’s hand. This has been a reoccurring problem and the managers refuse to make the safety correction. You come back at night with a wooden shoe and make sure that the machine never works again.

 

Like so many others of the Great Unwashed I believe in the product we were making.

ו

There are probably thirty fairies at the Sunday afternoon jungle party that Fairy Helene has taken me to near the Old Street Roundabout. They really dress the part–face paint on some, clothing of every color under the florescent rainbow, colored yarn called kwali-locks intermixed in dreads. Some of them hold jobs and don’t dress like this at work. Ilya is the only one that doesn’t really like to dress up. But it is a charming surreal little moment when they all come back from the rave parties of North London and converge in this sad little pub for a few pints.

 

Fairy Benjamin told me, “A suit en tie is just the least interesting costume at the party, but whose anyone to say it ain’t just dress up of a different kind. Here’s one fer ya Zach. The tie is like the noose of the capitalist beast bout to string ya up its tree.”

 

I am only getting close to three of the fairies. Fairy Helene because I fancy her, as they say here. I hang out with her once or twice a week excluding the parties I see her at during the weekends. She make sthe rounds. She sometimes comes to sell art with me. She sits there by the makeshift table in Soho and helps me flag people down. I always try and give her a cut of my meager earnings, and she always turns it down.

 

“I’m just a fairy here to protect you,” is what she says.

 

I have quite a crush on her, but am not entirely certain she isn’t hooking up with her squat mate Ilya who is easily twice her age. There is something more to it than that, but that doesn’t make it less creepy, I tell myself self-righteously.

 

I take fairy Helene to the movies when I can afford it. We saw Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon on Cranberry juice and she seemed quite filled with glee. She always finds me at work and takes me on these all-weekend adventures across derelict factories and the couches of acquaintances with interconnected stops at never-ending jungle parties. Or drum and bass or happy hardcore. I still can’t really tell the difference at all.

 

Fairy Christian is an aspiring actor. He is very good looking with a remarkable disposition and a disarming smile. He does something called fire-staff at parties, which is basically twirling a long stick that is on fire at both ends. While all the Fairy’s are aware I am quite communist- minded, it is really only Christian that is well-read enough politically to carry on with me all the time about it. Ilya takes in these bar room polemics quietly nodding in approval. Christian however pushes and pushes. He’d forces me to defend every element of my “so called communism.” He gives me the “who-picked-up-the-trash” questions he tells me that brash young revolutionaries never like answering.

 

Sometimes Ilya interjects that I am “too young for the school system questions,” and should stick with the “barricade and handgun theories” that “make such work attractive to young men.” His non-engagement would have probably enraged me if I weren’t more uneasy about his hinted-at romance with Fairy Helene. But the Sunday jungle party at the pub by the Old Street Roundabout has became a school of rhetoric for me unlike any other. Christian and Ilya force my hand. The three of us engage random fairies recuperating from the weekend in the finer points of the struggle sitting around a table in the back. And while they are dancing, I mostly stare out over the dance floor from some elevated ledge and ruminate on the next set of questions or the previous ones I haven’t answered well. I am enrolled in the Stella Artois School of Radical Rhetoric every Sunday afternoon. If I get an ‘A,’ Ilya might buy me a fish and chips.

 

Once in while when it is real late Christian stares off into the night sky and talks about getting out of dreary London to go be a famous actor somewhere with a little less rain. He talks about it like a vision, not a daydream, to get very far from this place and to be captivating to others on a stage. Like the “Rocky Horror Picture Show” but as a play.  None of this vapid English scenery turning my waking life into a Richard the Third allegory for human existence.

 

“If you can cross an ocean to be a communist, no reason I can’t do the same in the name of being fabulous,” he said one night watching me smoke a rolly on his roof. “It’s all in the process and motives when it comes to the exile.”

 

The third Fairy I know isn’t in the Fairy crew with Helene, Tink, Kwali, Benjamin, Ilya, Christian and the rest. Her name is Lim Lim Simone. She is a fairy only in her lifestyle but a revolutionary in her disposition. I met her at one of the parties Helene brought me to. Lim-Lim is a real connector, a real pro-active sister who delights in strangers being brought together through her. I stayed at her strapping Colombian boyfriend’s home the night I met her joining them for Sunday afternoon tea and a late nap.

 

When you work in or frequent the squat party scene this is code for “been up all Friday night, gonna drink some tea and sleep  acouple hours at a stranger’s home before I go back out for Saturday.” For me these little excursions might start Thursday night and take me all over the couches and abandoned warehouses of North London and then return me to my home after a few pints with the fairies late Sunday night or Monday morning near the Old School Roundabout. If I ever lose sight of Helene, she leaves me in someone’s company who feeds me, or fucks me or baby-sits until she re-collects me with a text message.

 

Lim Lim is Malaysian with thin black spectacles. She dresses more camouflage than candy raver. She promotes for a variety of underground party companies, in particular the ones that happen on Tyler Street every Saturday. Part of the fun of knowing her and the fairies is never paying for a single party ever again, especially when Lim Lim is involved.

 

I talked to Lim Lim about helping me create an Affinity Group for the May Day Monopoly protests and she agreed. She says she’ll think of whom else she knows that can help. She says that I should call her before Tuesday so we can talk about some specific plans. She is filled with energy and optimism. All the fairies are and that is a good community to have when you are always hungry, wet, cold and tired.

 

Lim Lim is like a fairy Che Guevara, always encouraging, always reliable, “hasta la victoria siempre” but in Malaysian. There is a dauntless optimism ingrained in the upbringing of Ms. Lim Lim Simone. No one has ever bothered to tell her the human race is not capable of inherent good. I have finally found a kindred soul with whom to plot and conspire. And you only need two for a good conspiracy.

 

These are my fairies. I follow them around their surreal underworld in their neon-shaded garb.  I follow their little cookie-crumb trails of uppers and downers with Helene and Tink as my royal tasters. Like some urban fairytale the girls’ Orange phones, free-texting feature bring more fairies out of the woodwork–jaded-but-aware political fairies like Ilya and Christian down to chat for hours about the bloody road to universal health care and rebel fairies like Lim Lim, ready to start something new and leave something behind.

 

***

 

These weekends are like daydreams carried out in the dead of night. Too dark to be called a dream, too surrounded with good company to border on being a nightmare.  This is how I came to like electronic music, even if I can’t differentiate one style from another. This is how I honed the ideology I call communism into a coherent intellectual strand, even if I don’t know my Lenin from my Trotsky or the Tao from Mao. I am growing more articulate on the basics.

 

Some people go to church on Sunday. I sit around a table at a bar in the north of London honoring a whole different higher power.  The dawn is breaking through the fog of a pouring night in North London. The bar doesn’t seem to close, or if it does, Fairy Helene or Ilya can get its doors open with a phone call.

 

Lim Lim and I are up on the roof this morning staring out at the city right before the dawn with cigarettes in hand. A fog has swept over the boulevard heading right into the roundabout. The roundabout was lit up telling us to buy Nike Shoes. We have been hashing out all the most important details of our proposed May Day operation, which we aim to carry out with the aid of our political compatriots.

 

“You think this will work,” she asks to no one in particular, even though I’m the only person on the roof.

 

I am at the stage where talking takes some concentration.

 

“You know that saying?” I say slowly.

 

“Which saying. I’m English. We have a million different sayings.”

 

“The one about winning or losing not being important, it’s how you play the game?”

 

“If our collaboration has the long term result of my face on a t-shirt and you get a book of snappy leftist quotes, just know, we should be terribly disappointed with ourselves if the body count gets way out of control,” she finally says.

 

I mull over her words for a second

 

“Well how much would you call out of control?” I ask.

 

These are the fairies my God sent down to watch over me in the wilderness.

 

 

ז

 

I came home at 5 in the fucking morning to find the door to our squat boarded up. Someone or some group of people haS nailed enormous wooden plywood boards over the front entrance. I say group of people because three of them were still sitting on our porch.

 

“Git the fuck outah here you fuckin’ squattah!” yells a Black kid in a leather jacket about my age.

 

Then a rock hits my head and I am almost knocked over. I feel blood coming down my brow. I stumble a minute trying to get my bearings. I’ve never been stoned before, not like this anyhow. One of the kids is kicking me in the stomach and pushing me into the street. I topple on my ass onto the wet pavement.

 

They are all about the same age, which is to say, my age. They are yelling and pushing me. I’m not used to violence like this without even the hint of a reason. I’ve never seen pure hate like this.

 

“GET THE FUCK OUT, SQUATTAH!”

 

One of them cracks me in the side of the head. Another gives me a kick in the ribs. I manage to stumble away. I crawl backwards down the street away from them prodded by the occasional kick or shove. I think one of them just spit on me. They stop attacking me when I manage to get about twenty feet away. A few blocks later I am still winded and shocked and have a few abrasions on my face and hands from the floor to which I was knocked.

 

I realize I’m crying. Not sobbing, just really mortified that my neighbors jumped me because they’re angry I don’t pay rent. Senseless violence seems more fun on the screen.  I slump down for a while against a white gate across the street. I feel a lot of more pain from the kick than from the rock. It’s drizzling and I fumble in my coat pocket for a ten-cigarette pack of Marlboro Menthol Lights I’m carrying.

 

That was certainly a whole lot of anger out of fuckin’ nowhere. Maybe there is something that Tatiana hasn’t told me about her relationship with our neighbors. Or maybe I’m just in a shitty Black neighborhood in South London. Or maybe, just maybe, Tatiana is a little liberal with the ‘N’ word.

 

I light the cigarette. The blood on my fingers is all over the cigarette. I am smoking it anyway. There is the coppery taste of blood in my mouth mixed with the dull throb of smoke permeating my open wounds.

 

Suddenly, the door opens behind me. It’s a tiny old man, a Black Yoda West Indian with a portable oxygen tank and a withered old Irish woman with freckles and red hair. For god-only-knows-what-reason I begin speaking in an Irish accent.

 

My neighbors are tiny and frail. They invite me inside and give me a cup of black coffee and an ice pack. I’m in a daze. A fake Irish daze. They ask me if I want to call the constable. I don’t know what a constable is, but my squat and my legal status don’t involve the inclusion of constables. Not at all.

 

This is like the first time that I got beat up only just a little bit worse. That time in New York Dan Marino’s friends got the jump on me in the park. It came out of nowhere, kind of like this. Both times I had the distinct feeling that I hadn’t done anything to deserve it. I am yelling that sort of shit in a fake Irish accent at whatever un-godly hour of the morning it happens to be. The woman isn’t talking. She just keeps bringing me damp towels and new cups of cold water or fresh, black coffee.

 

The old man keeps giving orders and muttering, “He’s in a bad way.”

 

After a few hours, I am feeling less sore and willing to move. The rain has gotten heavier, which hopefully means no one will be out there waiting for me. I go up the street, make sure no one is in front of our squat, and remove the crow bar from the bushes. As quickly as I can, I yank the boards off the door, unlock it and go inside quickly locking the door behind me. I wonder where Tatiana is. I wonder what kind of things she’s said to them.

 

There is a small bruise above my left eyebrow and some other light bruises from where they hit me. It isn’t as if it is their house. It isn’t as if they get anything out of us paying rent. Maybe they think we are drug addicts. I suppose Tatiana is a bit of a drug addict. It doesn’t really matter, as it is likely a combination of many factors. You shouldn’t ever use race to explain why a group of people want to make your life nasty, brutish, and short. That’s what my surrogate sister Natalie Desmond would have said.

 

I am physically exhausted and mentally bankrupt. I have been up for over three days now and have not been back to the squat. The days and nights have bled into each other and I feel as though events have entered into a single stream of consciousness.

 

I keep hearing my name everywhere. I turn and no one is there. I have gone to five separate squat parties in north London almost back to back. I have sold nearly all of my stock of art and have something like forty quid in my wallet.

 

My gait has been reduced to a stumble. I’ve been walking all night since I left Lim Lim and Ilya and the fairies at the last party. I keep having bad visions. Every time I try to rest, I see the Pale City. It’s breaking through into my waking life and I can’t stop it.

 

“Zach.”

 

I turn around, but the street is empty. I think I’m losing my mind.

It is raining lightly, more of a gently spray really. I reach into my jacket pocket to look for a pack of smokes, but realize I’ve smoked them all already. Nothing is open. Not even a corner store. The streets are desolate. There aren’t even cars. This place is a ghost town.

 

“Zachariah.”

 

I heard that. It sounds like it came from directly behind me like the devil whispering in my ear. As I reach the edge of Trafalgar Square, I realize I have to stop walking. I physically can’t go on. I wipe my brow with my grey bandana.

 

It’s covered in blood.

 

The blood is on my face and on my hands and on my coat and in my hair. There are puddles of it. No one is in sight. I drag myself to the center of the square. I slip and fall on my ass; foot got caught on uneven pavement. I don’t get up right away. I stare at the moon. It’s smiling at me. I smile right back at it.

 

I slowly get back on my feet. I need to rest. I think I can go to sleep now if I can only make it to the monument’s elevated base. I drag myself along like a wounded soldier.

 

Voices. Images. I can see reality shake.

 

The moon is still smiling. I hear violin music, but don’t know where it is coming from.

 

My last conscious thought is if I sleep on the elevated base of the monument, the likelihood of someone stealing my gear and wallet is significantly reduced.

 

I see a cat playing the violin perched on one of the lions on the monument. He is playing the world’s smallest violin just for me. The moon grins. The cat grins. And I grin too. And then darkness.

 

I hate sleeping outside when it doesn’t come with marshmallow roasting and a sing-along around the campfire. You might say I’m not cut out for the lumpen proletariat.

 

The moon is twice as large as it should be and I am looking out over a mountainous ravine that drops thousands of dirt-rock-sand miles below me. The stars are perpetually out of reach and always have been. I’m standing with Mike Washington next to a long grey/black Cadillac, its wheels affixed to ski-like boards on each side. What looks like a large model rocket is soldered to the roof. The back door is open and one of back seats has been dropped back, converted into a stretcher. It’s for the pregnant young woman we’ve been taking along with us or restrained and abducted. I can’t yet tell. She appears asleep. There’s an IV line in her right arm, the IV drip hep lock and medication hanging from a ceiling hook. Mike is holding a long rifle with a Tommy gun-like circular clip slung around his shoulder. We’re both wearing beige trench coats with retractable hoods.

 

“That’s a huge moon,” I say.

 

“The human body is 78% water. Imagine the effect the moon has on the tides and what it must do to us.”

 

“Where are we taking the girl, Mike?” I ask.

 

“Zach. You know exactly where we’re taking the girl,” he responds as if he is perturbed with me.

 

“I don’t ask questions to things I already know the answers to.”

 

“Yes you do. When the answers are scary and you don’t want to be remembered as the first person in the conversation who changed the rosy tune and got yelled at,” Mike snipes at me.

 

“Tune hasn’t been so rosy, Mike, and you never yell.”

 

“Get in the car, Zach. Driver’s side. If you please.”

 

“I don’t know how to drive a whatever-the-fuck this is.”

 

“It’s a Rapid Extrication Rocket Sled. You just strap yourself in and yank the lever. If the car doesn’t explode instantly the rest is remarkably straight forward,” Mike explains nonchalantly.

 

I close the back doors and look into the driver’s seat. Mike tinkers with a few things and climbs in next to me shotgun. He cocks whatever east-meets-west weapon he’s cradling this episode.

 

“Tell me when,” I say.

 

“When you see a 7,000 foot tidal wave. That would be a good when,” Mike responds.

 

There’s a rumble on the ground below us. The car shakes a little and sand begins to fall off the roof. The car is perched on the edge of a sand dune that’s the size of Mt. Everest. Mike looks to check if our young pregnant, female passenger is secure to the long board in the back compartment. A rumbling in the distance like a terrifying whisper is felt everywhere as sand starts tumbling off the car.

 

I give him a fuck-you look and fumble around for my pack of Camel cigarettes.

 

I don’t see the wave, but I can feel it. It’s a very long way down the side of the dunes behind us. The rocket attached to our car has rusted red fins. I climb into the driver’s seat and close the door.

 

“Where are we bringing the girl?” I ask again.

 

“I swear to God, you have to stop asking questions just to hear the sound of your own voice,” Mike says angrily.

 

Mike fastens his seat belt. Its seven separate interlocking straps buckle. One of them has a ‘wirr-click’ device to draw back all the traps. The wave breaks over the mountain range behind us. Oceans of water rush down upon our ridge. I have never seen so much water in my life moving so quickly towards me. Mike takes a green pack of cigarettes out of his pocket and lights one. He turns the key in the dashboard and the internal lighting of the car flickers on. He looks at me intently. I fumble a bit more and then the straps buckle themselves around me. The roar of the flood surging through the canyon is deafening. I pull the large red lever and with a mighty KABLAM! The car careens dangerously down the dune, water pouring after us.

 

The rocket propels our car down the dune with explosive velocity. The wave comes down behind us. Everything’s moving very quickly. I have no control at all. The steering wheel doesn’t connect to anything. It’s like some cruel, hopped-up Disney ride on juice. Mike’s cigarette flies out of his mouth. The wave is flooding the whole desert. I can hear the roar of the wave and rocket. I’m holding on for dear life really hoping this is the last ride Mr. Washington and I go on. All these high-speed transportation shenanigans are not so good for my mental heath. But then, neither is Mr. Washington himself.

 

The girl is still sleeping peacefully as if nothing is going on. We reach the bottom of the mountain dune and the rocket goes off as the car swerves into a straightaway petering out. Sparks fly as it grinds 300 miles an hour down a dilapidated, wasteland highway. The deluge isn’t so far behind. Mike hits a button, which inflates an enormous golden raft around the sides of the vehicle. The wave has spent itself by now. The flow of the water just picks us up turning the valley into a mighty river upon which the car floats quickly downstream. The water rises flowing down the dune and gently carries a car, then a rocket sled, now and a boat toward our destination wherever it may be.

 

“There are a lot more ways than one to escape a flood,” says Mike Washington.

 

 

***

 

It’s finally daylight. I am sore from sleeping on concrete, and I feel even dirtier than when I went to bed. I’m sure I smell. At least it has stopped raining. Thank God for small fucking favors.

 

Climbing off the base of the statue I realize that I’m starving. There is a supermarket with an orange awning on the south side of the square. I check to make sure no one took my money. I am pleased to discover that I still have two, twenty notes and some assorted change.

 

The supermarket seems slightly overpriced. I grab some bread, some cheddar cheese, some yogurt, a banana and a pack of Marlboro Menthol Lights.  I pay the Pakistani cashier six quid and head back out to the square to eat breakfast. It looks like it is going to be a beautiful day.

 

It isn’t a long walk from Trafalgar Square to the West End. Newspaper trucks are dropping off papers at the stands. Early morning traffic is light. Stores are just opening and bartenders are preparing the tea and coffee. Street sweepers fire water hoses out of sanitation trucks wetting the pavement and washing the rubbish into the storm drains. I’m never at work this early.

 

I realize that I only have a picture or two left and will have to sketch some more to restock my inventory. I decide to head to Duke’s and see if the Israeli manager will trade me art for coffee. I try to remember her name, but it escapes me.

 

As I pass Les Mis, a girl with a red hoody calls out for me to come over and talk to her. She is sitting on a park bench smoking a cigarette. Her dirty blond hair is shoulder length and she’s wearing expensive-looking sunglasses, which is odd, because I haven’t seen any sun since I got here. I’m still at that stage in my life where I think sunglasses cover your eyes from the sun.

 

“You’re that geezer who sells art right?” she asks in a thick cockney accent.

 

“Yeah,” I say.

 

“Wanna get fucked, eh?” she asks.

 

“Who doesn’t, but I don’t pay for a bird’s tail.”

 

“Learned some local fuckin’ vernacular, eh. Wanna get high then?”

 

“I don’t use the poison,” I tell her.

 

“What ya do then fer fun besides make stupid pictures?”

 

“I draw pictures for girls I can bring home in front of my parents.”

 

“That’s pretty queer. I can bring ya to this place, you’ll fuckin’ love it. There’s dancin’ an everything.”

 

“Are you a red light promoter or something?”

 

“Don’t ask stupid questions. You wanna go dance o what?” she continues.

 

“You heard what I said.”

 

“I know a girl who will suck you off for a painting for a hundred quid. Trick got two black eyes fer her reckless payroll scruples an she can use the business.”

 

I think it over.

 

“Still not interested,” I conclude.

 

“Suit yer self, geezer.”

 

“See you later, Dodge City.”

 

“Me name’s, Rosy. Find me about if you need something hard to find.”

 

“You can bet I probably won’t,” I tell her.

 

When I get to Compton and Frith there’s no one out except storekeepers setting up chairs and the sanitation department hosing down the streets. There’s an enormous hole in the pavement. Three orange cones and a roadblock keep people from driving over it. I drag it over in front of Daphne’s store and fashion a table out the roadblocks with my camping mat as the face. I secure the mat with tape and fasten my pieces on it. I find a piece of metal fencing by the road and lean it against the stand to put up more work. It looks official enough, but no one’s really on the street to see it.

 

Rickshaws won’t show up until noon at least. The few people on their way to work don’t really take much notice of my improved stand. The already darkening sky does not bode well for sales.

 

It never stops raining. When it rains I invent a million ways to keep selling. Like walking into coffee shops and bars and flagging down prospective customers. Like working below ground in the tube stations. Or covering my stand with cling film when it’s just drizzling. Each week a few pieces get too water-damaged to sell on their own and have to be cut up and collaged. I’ve been collaging a lot lately. Gluing magazine clippings or newspaper headlines somehow adds value to the sketches. While I still make 8 ½ by 11 sketches, a lot of my drawings are bigger and more intricate. I have gotten as much as twenty pounds for one of them.

 

Sales are always irregular. I’m never that likely to break thirty pounds in a day. A lot of it leads to long conversations, which are interesting and can also lead to food. I’m always pretty hungry or less than clean, so things like warm meals and hot showers are the most amazing things on earth. The conversations go all over the place within the realm of God and politics. Sometimes strangers will start arguing with each other or with me or go back and forth. I suppose the art is thought provoking and the exhibition catches their eye.

 

Everyone else in the West End I’ve seen doing art on the street makes hideous commercial caricatures. I rarely do pictures of people on request. My work is hardly photo realistic, so people get annoyed unless there’s some surrealistic aspect to make the piece interesting. The more I check out the sky, the more I think today it will really come down. At a certain point it’s just too wet to work and I head home or call a friend.

 

I’ve been hanging out with Bug Bug Rickshaw riders quite a bit. Tall George is quite a character. The other day he was explaining how he was putting away money for a sex change operation in America. Although completely straight he claims he longed to seduce women as a woman. There is a Filipino rider named Jatz who gave me a bowler hat and put me on to some songs by Chumbawumba that you just can’t find in the States like, “Give the anarchist a cigarette.”

 

Jatz lives with a Croatian guy named Dante. These are probably not their real names, but I don’t care. Sometimes we go over to Jatz and Dante’s squat after work on a weeknight when no squat parties are going on and play Risk, which I played quite a few times when I was locked up. Everyone smokes a ton of hash and the games become drug-addled renditions of our predictions on the current geo-political situation.

 

Sometimes Tatiana quits the games prematurely on some pretense of pacifism. We promptly annex off whatever territories she had into our respective empires. We generally start strategically with where we are from. Tall George and Dante take parts of Europe and Africa. Jatz collects Asian territories. I take North America, and whoever else joins a given game gets the rest. The games are rarely conclusive. The hash and whiskey see to that. We all talk quite a lot of nonsense and listen to jungle music, jazz or reggae.

 

Shir’lee, the Israeli co-owner of Duke’s Bar always gives me a huge breakfast for a picture of the store. She has about nine by now. When I offer to diversify she just keeps repeating that I haven’t drawn it to her liking and that practice makes perfect. She has black hair and is in her 40’s. She is real tough looking but has gentle eyes. Her accent gave her away in a minute.

 

As she was watching me eat one day she asked me if I am Jewish. I said that I am, but don’t really practice. One thing lead to another and I told her that I want to move to Israel at some point. That was a few weeks ago. She is very kind to me and tells me London is no place for a Jew. She encourages me to save money and fly directly to Israel as soon as I can. She says that I should move to a kibbutz and become a citizen. She says that they will take care of me by giving me money and a home and teaching me Hebrew before I go to the army.

 

“This is no place for a Jew,” she repeats over and over. “They hate us here in Europe. They don’t care what happens to our people at all.”

 

When I ask her what she is doing here she had responds with a single word, “Kessef.”

 

Dukes’ food is really good. I had eaten when I woke up but it didn’t really do the job. I sip black tea and work on my tenth depiction of the restaurant. Shir’lee says to come in whenever I want to eat something.

 

I only manage to sell one piece before buckets of rain break at 11:30 am. It’s too much water for the cling film.  I get the art off as quickly as I can and take cover in the coffee shop across the street. That girl that flagged me down earlier, Rosy, is sitting at the counter drinking a coffee. I drop my bag next to her and sit down. My five quid off my only sale of the morning isn’t going to designer coffee. I don’t think she notices me at all. She’s wearing a blue waterproof poncho with a hood. She has pale skin, looks more French than English, and has a predatory gaze somewhere between a professional criminal and house cat.

 

As I’m thinking of something to say she begins,

 

“What’s the next move then, geezer?”

 

“Wait for it to stop raining. A small talking conversation. Make more money. Buy food to eat.”

 

“What’s your hustle, eh? I watched you before the rain started. Ya talk a whole lot and don’t get nay money out of it.”

 

“Sometimes I do.”

 

“Don’t ya know ya gotta die before anyone wants to buy your pictures?”

 

“Perhaps they know it’s not long in coming so they buy um now as an investment.”

 

“Got yer number do ya?”

 

“Might say that.”

 

“Does that make you nervous? That you’re so young and you’re expecting it already?”

 

“I guess a whole lot of people spend their lives afraid of dying. For the last two years I’ve just afraid I’d die without having lived.”

 

“So you’re a bard, too, are ya?” Rosy says.

 

“I’m Johnny-on-the-Spot and you’re Sheila-fifteen-million-fucking questions.”

 

“How old are you?”

 

“What does that have to do with anything at all?”

 

“It doesn’t, but you’re pretty damn young to be where you’re at. You’re along way across the pond without a dole number. It ain’t gonna stop raining til Tuesday,” Rosy tells me.

“I think my kind have weathered worse. ‘Maybe Europe wasn’t such a bright idea after all, Moshe’ is the refrain of my fucking people,” I tell her.

 

“So you’re Hebrish then? You don’t really look like a Hebrish. No this…” she twirls her finger where a payas would be. “Or the big stupid, black hat.”

 

“I’m more of a weekend Jew.”

 

“Whatever the hell that means. So, they say yer people killed Christ. That’s what I learned in school anyways,” Rosy says.

 

“We smashed him over the head and cut him into itty bitty pieces.”

 

She sips her espresso expressionless. At least I think it’s an espresso. It could easily be any pretentiously named French/Italian coffee thing.

 

“Would you like a coffee? You’ve got hungry eyes you know,” she asks.

 

“I’m alright.”

 

“It doesn’t make you less tough to accept a drink from me. It’s very feminist you know.”

 

“Oh, I accept things from ladies all the time. I’m just not really a fancy coffee kind of boy.”

 

“I can get you a really simple coffee. American coffee if you’re so inclined.”

 

“I promise you I’m fine,” I repeat.

 

“Suit yourself. I was just trying to demonstrate the famous English hospitality.”

 

“I’m very familiar with it, sister. Both contemporary and historical. Everyone is familiar with the giving nature of the European,” I say, sarcastically.

 

I look outside at all that water splattering down over the London streets. What am I even thinking twice about? No. Nothing at all. There are little rivers running through the streets here.

 

“I’d ask you what you’re doing tonight if I didn’t think I was gonna get charged for it.”

 

“Who says you’d get charged for it.”

 

She has a smirk on her face. She winks at me like she’s Betty Paige.

 

“Just making sure we’re on the same page, Ms. Shady.”

 

“Ya ain’t seen nothing yet, rudeboy.”

 

“I ain’t judging you, Rosy.”

 

“You do what you have to do when you’re young and hungry. I never learned how to draw when I was younger,” she says.

 

“It’s sort of touch and go as far as my apprenticeship goes,” I admit to her.

 

“How ‘bout that. Me, too. You draw and I dance. If you don’t have plans tonight, I’ll dance just for you. Quite the deluge outside and here we are without our ark,” she says.

 

“And the animals around here aren’t so interested in water sports.”

 

“You’d be surprised what our animals are into.”

 

I was quiet a moment. Looking out at the rain with a half smile.

 

Low and behold. English bed boards make the exact same noise hitting against a wall that American ones do.

ל

I’m cold again and I’m almost always hungry.

 

That is what’s always on my mind when I wake up. The water has dripped through the saran wrap cover that keeps my art dry and has ruined two or three of my sketches. My tattered coat is sopping wet from the rain, and the smell of mildew reeks from too many nights wet and unwashed. I smell bad.  It has been too cold to take a bath at the squat. I keep meaning to drop by Jatz’s place to take a shower, but I keep missing him.

 

The riders haven’t been out tonight. I saw Spider drive his quad down the Strand on my way in, but that was about 5ish before the rain started really coming down. The eastern European crew passed by Old Compton looking for a pick up, but there weren’t any takers.  Normally they stay out of the West End, because that’s Bug Bug territory. Sutton Cab, Bug Bug’s chief competitor is based over by Kensington Station. They do a real knock up job when it comes to their bikes and from what I hear from Tatiana, they break down on a somewhat regular basis.

 

The whole rickshaw community is an eclectic mix of illegal immigrants, artists, poets and revolutionaries most of whom are part of the London squatter community. They are all pretty poor. Many of them are anarchists. Trouser from Sutton Cab keeps telling me he’ll front me the money to put the down payment on the rental, but I’ve been blowing him off. Tony tells me he’s a bi-sexual and mentioned something about she-male prostitutes and drug induced orgies. He keeps inviting me over to his place. I keep turning him down. He has a wife. She’s pretty homely, but so is he with his bad haircut and poor oral hygiene. Every time I talk to him I can smell booze on his breath, which he attempts to cover over by drinking shit loads of coffee and chain-smoking roll up cigarettes. I think half the people in this country have a drinking problem. The fact that they have to close down their bars at ten speaks right to that.

 

Most of us smoke the roll ups from these big yellow packets we stuff in our side pockets. When I came to Europe this shit was unheard of. This was dirty hippie crap. Three weeks in I’m half an ace. I can make a packet last me close to four days.   A pack of Marlboros can run you something close to eleven quid and most of us are pretty skim. Sometimes when I have a good day with a bit of cash on hand I buy the menthol ten packs cause no one seems to know what a Newport is in this part of the world. I think Europe might have a regulation against a product that not only gives you cancer, but also makes you impotent and shreds your lungs with fiberglass. What I wouldn’t give for a Newport. I ran into an American about two weeks back who had a pack and he bummed me a few, but normally I am stuck with rollies. I smoke them unfiltered and it yellows my teeth.

 

I’m not sure, but I think I have finally caught foot and mouth disease. Foot and mouth disease is the reason the English government is slaughtering and burning hundreds of thousands of animal corpses around the country. The meat is simply not good to eat in England this year. I have a red sore on the right side of my lip that is something of a cross between acme and a rash. Tatiana brought me to some herbal remedy store a couple days ago to get something for it. I don’t know what it’s called, but it smells foul and seems to be making it worse.

 

I don’t get to the laundry quite as often as I should and most of my clothing is dirty with scruff stains around the collars of my button-down shirts. And a few in the places that are the reason people shouldn’t wear white boxers. My few pairs of socks are always wet from the rain. Tatiana says I have to stop drying them on my space heater because it will start a fire. My feet are covered in a severe kind of athlete’s foot, a wet rot.

 

I have picked a less than opportune time to arrive in London. People keep telling me this is the most rain they’ve had in over thirty years. I think that might just be a lie they tell tourists. It’s cold as hell and our squat only has the two space heaters. Tatiana’s is a newer model. Mine looks like it might stop working pretty soon. That or burn the squat down.

 

Daphne Collins didn’t work today. We’re hooking up again intermittently. It worked okay when I wasn’t moody. I haven’t seen Rosy since I fucked her like a whore in some dirty hotel she brought her clients to. I found myself thinking I could pick her flowers or take her to the Tate Modern, but in the bed I treated her like all her Johns did.  You can fuck a hooker a little bit differently than one might fuck one’s girlfriend. Or maybe I just tell myself that to feel better about it all. I don’t know if she is actually a hooker because I never bother to ask. But all her friends are. Rosy and Daphne grew up on very different sides of the river. Daphne’s father does something with military contracting. Rosy never knew her father.

 

For the last two weeks I have set up my stand on Old Compton and Frith. I changed my location by a few blocks so Daphne won’t see me with Rosy outside her store. Daphne’s more my class and Rosy’s more my current station. Daphne’s fucking me because she thinks I’m a romantic starving artist. That’s bohemian to her when she’s dated sons of lords all her life and boat club boys.

 

Rosy’s fuckin’ me because that’s the only way she knows to keep a boy’s attention. I keep trying to make Daphne cum and can’t. I keep making Rosy cum and figure she’s faking it. I don’t know anything about women. I’m just making this all up as I go along like every other guy tryin’ to keep two broads happy. And the rain keeps coming down.

 

***

 

The poster for Mama Mia is grilling me. Grillin’ me melodically, but grilling me none-the-less. I’ve set up two blocks down from my regular post. The whole intersection is pretty dead and I’ve earned only pocket-change handouts, roughly four quid. The rain beats down. Not yet a deluge, but its coming down all the same.

 

I wonder about the merits of picking a country so convenient to discourse and so lacking in decent weather. Would France or Spain have been better? Too late I tell myself. I’m down to my last hundred dollars and I might not find a squat as quickly if I change countries.

 

I look at my pocket watch. It’s past midnight. Do I close up after making this little? What night is it anyway? Sunday or Monday or Tuesday? It’s one of them, that’s for sure. The rain is killing me. I see a man in a beige corduroy jacket heading towards me. He’s walking slowly enough to make me think he’ll stop. I check my inventory. Does he look like the kind of guy who wants to buy my art? Damn straight he does.

 

“Sir, do you consider yourself a patron of the arts?” I ask him.

 

“I suppose I might consider what you’re selling.”

 

“Nothing but work of the highest quality to be sure,” I continue my pitch.

 

“Obviously.”

 

He stops to look over what I have.

 

“Do you know what you need?” he says.

 

“What?”

 

“You need a drink.”

 

“I don’t drink,” I tell him.

 

“What the hell are you doing in London?”

 

And once again It’s honesty-with-strangers time.

 

“Engaging in a less than glamorous struggle to survive,” I say.

 

“How’s that going?”

 

“It’s harder than I thought it would be.”

 

“Constant rain and utter lack of appreciation, right? London can kill you,” he tells me.

 

“That’s reassuring, sir.”

 

“It will. The city is a beast. It will swallow you into its depravity and reduce your desire to keep going. That’s why we drink.”

 

“I haven’t had a drink in over a year.”

 

“Now would be a good time to start.”

 

“You’re the guy they warn people about in AA meetings.”

 

“Think of me as a guardian angel fueled on stout. I’m not a fag and I’m not going to molest you. You’re hardly my type. Here’s the deal. Close up. Come with me to this bar and I’ll buy one of your pictures.”

 

“Bars aren’t open this late in London,” I tell him figuring he’s a fag.

 

“The ones I go to are.”

 

“I’ll come with you to wait out the rain, but I probably won’t drink.”

 

“Just get off the street for a while. It’s getting to be that hour when hustlers and pimps peddle temptation to starving street children.”

 

“You a hustler or a pimp?” I ask him.

 

“More a hustler.”

 

“Fuck it. I’m not selling anything in this rain.”

 

***

 

We walk a few blocks south of the theatre showing Les Mis. The rain is coming down really hard now. I pick up a newspaper to cover my head. The man hands me his umbrella. I figure he must be a fag for sure. We enter an alleyway and walk down it, past some blue dumpsters until we reach an alcove guarded by a big Black guy in his late twenties. The man nods to him and he let us into the speakeasy.

 

The lighting is low and everything looks old school. The light flickers in the stairwell and we reach a smoky little bar upstairs with two pool tables and almost all Black clientele. There’s a makeshift bar set up in the corner and the man orders us some drinks. I sit down at a table and light a cigarette. He comes back with two pints.

 

“So, what are you really doing here?” he asks me.

 

“That seems to be the question these days.”

 

“Well of course. Most of the time Americans your age are on vacation spending dad’s hard-earned money being bohemian across the continent.”

 

I stare at my drink.

 

“You can tell me yer troubles if ya want. Odds are we’ll never meet again.”

 

“I just feel shitty about leaving everything I knew behind. It was necessary, but I feel real alone these days.”

 

“London’s a killa, like I said.”

 

“I can’t remember the last time I saw the sun.”

 

“Where ya holed up?”

 

“A squat south of Brixton. Tulse Hill.”

 

“Ah, the southern tenement abyss.”

 

“Huh?”

 

“The city underneath the city,” he responds.

 

“I don’t follow.”

 

“There are always two cities. The one during the day is the nine-to-fivers selling themselves to the machine. The suit and tie crowd with their cutting-edge décor bars and fancy nightclubs. They hate their miserable little lives but they are placated by the promise that not only does the system work, but that this is the best of all possible systems. That’s the London you see in the tourist brochures. Big Ben and the descendants of Churchill.”

 

“What about the other London?”

 

“The other London is a cold dark place where people struggle just to survive. It is made up of people that reject the system, but need it to survive. Their ultimate dependency comes from fooling themselves into thinking that they are free. They have their own culture and their own laws, but mark my words; they’re still bound to it. We’re talking about the dregs of the world. It’s a dark, vicious world and you’re stuck right in the heart of it,” the man tells me.\

 

“So there’s no real freedom. One world accepts but remains a slave and the other world rejects, but still participates in the end?” I ask.

 

“Sort of. Everyone is trying to get free. The people on the surface think their jobs and their paycheck will do it for them. Earn enough and you can finally enjoy life. The suffering of the people in the other city makes them more attuned to how this all works,” he continues.

 

I’m still staring at my beer.

 

“So once again, what did you come here to find?” he asks me.

 

“I don’t know anymore.”

 

“You came to see the other London. It could have been Paris. It could have been Rome. It’s more of a mentality than a place and now you found it.”

 

“I think it’ll kill me,” I tell him.

 

“It will kill your ideals.”

 

“People keep saying that. That I’ll grow up, get bitter and quit.”

 

“Your ideals are important. But ya ain’t gonna get through all this darkness with ideals alone.”

 

“I think I dig the whole free and suffering thing.”

 

“But you’re not free yet,” he says.

 

“I’ll get there eventually.”

 

I pick up the pint.

 

“To the losing battle for freedom.” I tell him.

 

He smiles and we clink the glasses. And that’s how I came back on the poison. What you call the disease, I call the remedy and what you’re calling the cause I call the cure. The stranger bought all my remaining art, purchased me some fish and chips and put me on the #22 Bus back to Tulse Hill.

 

Never caught his name. Just remember he was wearing a beige trench coat but had a face like a sad clown.

 

 

***

 

The #22 bus back to Tulse Hill was a good bet because I am too tipsy to ride the bike. It is almost daylight and the rain has stopped. I hope there is something to eat back at the house. I feel pretty trashed from the three beers I drank. I have to make a whole new stock because he bought everything off me for a hundred quid. The supermarket won’t be open for several more hours. I want to surprise Tatiana with a fully stocked kitchen to prove to my roommate that I’m good for something, even if I’m back on the sauce. I’m gonna sleep all day and go to a party with Rosy in the evening. But Tatiana will come home to a whole mess of fruits and vegetables. One of these days I’ll clean out the refrigerator. It looks like something died in there.

 

My head is throbbing. I feel pulsing at my temples. It feels like my brain is trying to squirm. I’ll be Cheyenne-Stokes before I know it. The whole house shakes slightly. Or maybe reality is shaking and house is standing still. I want to stay up until the supermarket opens. I push open my room door, strip down and fall into the shitty old mattress and tattered comforter. Once my ass hits the mattress I’m out like the Beatles.

 

* * *

 

“I would ask you to be very careful who you trust these days,” says Mike Washington as we sit by the edge of a small lake in the dessert.

 

There are trees around the water’s edge. They have plastic trunks and enormous plastic leaves. It’s almost sundown. The pregnant girl we’ve been traveling with is tied to a tree near us. She is gagged and has a blood pressure cuff around her arm. The car/boat/rocket sled is broken down fifty feet from us. Mike looks pensive.

 

“What are you talking about?” I ask.

 

“You’ve got poison in you. You’re not keeping good company,” he says.

 

“This from the man who’s kidnapped a pregnant woman?”

 

“We’re not talking about me right now, Zach. You put the poison back in you.”

 

“If only alcoholics in the program could have sponsors that visited them in dreams.”

 

“Your wit never ceases, but the booze is the least of your problems. You’re not bothering to take in anything while you’re in that city. The clues as to what you must do are all around you. There are neon, fucking flashing lights along the sides of your path. And you just keep on making pictures and kissing English girls refusing to see any of it.”

 

“I’m really not gonna sit here and appeal to you for a less cryptic message. I gave that up months ago,” I tell him.

 

“Grape-mint?” he asks.

 

“Huh?”

 

“Would you like a grape-mint?”

 

“I have no idea what that is, my man.”

 

He hands me what looks like a melon-sized grape with a color greener than anything I’ve ever scene before. He has a burlap bag filled with them.

 

“Why the hell not,” I say.

 

I take a big bite of it. It’s a cross between white wine, melon and mint tea. It’s the most delicious and refreshing thing I’ve ever eaten.

 

“You shouldn’t put things in your mouth when you don’t know what they do,” Mike warns me.

 

“I trust you not to kill me. You instilled that whole always-saving-my-life thing in me a while back.”

 

“You know that saying ‘what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger’?” Mike asks me.

 

“Yeah. Everyone knows that stupid saying.”

 

“It’s just because it’s so damn true.”

 

In that instant, the pool is sucked into the sand. The girl and trees follow in seconds. The car next. The sky turns green like the grape-mint fruit. The clouds race past us. Mike sits on the rock motionless watching me.

 

“See what I mean,” he says.

 

He’s sucked into the ground too.

 

Now, I’m alone in the dessert and it’s a dark green night with glowing emerald stars. The desert is lit up by a moon that’s fifty times bigger than anything possible in the waking life. I get ready for something dramatic to happen. It never quite does. It’s still and dark out here. And then the rumbling begins. Buildings erupt out of the ground, skyscrapers like midtown Manhattan push their way out of the earth. Highways rise out of the ground. Old school 1920’s gas street lamps and advertising boards more Betty Paige than American Idol erupt out this way and that. The giant moon illuminates the whole thing. The ground shakes and a promenade arises underneath me. I fall into a green, graffitied park bench. “G  D   G   M o N” is printed on it. Some letters are missing.

 

And just like that I’m back in the Pale City ten thousand times its size. What was once a small cluster of Canaanite-Acadian architecture, warehouses, brothels, barbed wire and fairground meets the village of East Hampton is looking all grown up and urban as hell. I’ve run and run and run to arrive right back where I was or perhaps somewhere worse. The dry heat disappears suddenly. I hear a thunder crack, streetlights flicker on and rain unlike any I’ve ever seen comes down. It’s jungle rain, rain so dense I can’t quite see clearly up the block. Water is rushing down the streets. I’m soaked through and through.

 

I search for an open door along the street to get out of the rain. Everything is bolted solid shut. I’m rattling pull-down grates. I’m trying door handles. I keep falling down from the water rushing down the street. Finally I find an alley and push my way through a side street door. The big carnie sign outside in neon red lighting says,

 

“ TA LE  ASE  AME  TORE”.

 

I miss it though. I’m trying to get indoors and out of the freezing rain. I push open the door and close it behind me. Water rolls off my suit onto the wooden floor boards. I’m shivering like a wet rat. There’s someone in the room. There’s a red velvet curtain in my way. I push past it.

 

“Take off your clothing. You’re going to catch a cold and ruin my carpets,” says an old, proud voice behind a second red curtain between the entryway and the main room.

 

“There’s a suit on the hanger that should be your size,” the voice says.

 

The entry is lit by a couple of large candles on metal hooks. A suit is hanging on a coat hook covered in plastic wrap.

 

“How do you know it’s my size?” I ask.

 

“Because you left it here last time,” the voice responds.

 

“Last time?” I say.

 

“Last time you came to see if your game was ready.”

 

I’m back in the game store. All that traveling got me nowhere at all.

 

“Where am I, old man?”

 

“You’re back in the City, of course,” he answers.

 

“The City is bigger now. It was small before like a camp. This is a sprawling city.”

 

“The place is mostly what it makes out of you. The locals are terrifying and the night life is constant because it’s never day,” he tells me.

 

“The City changed,” I observe.

 

“You got bigger. You are looking at more of a citadel than city. It’s gotten its defenses up. You make us all uneasy with your questions. You grew, you moved and the city adjusted accordingly.”

 

I can hear the deluge’s unrelenting pelting down upon the pavement outside. The boom of the thunder sounds like a building being demolished. I strip down out of my soaked clothing and change into the starchy black suit.

 

“M W” is sewn in light grey block letters upon the right breast.

 

I still can’t see the old man. The candlelight reveals a silhouette behind the curtain.

 

“You could spend a lifetime in a library and never come close to understanding the rules of the game,” the old man’s voice says.

 

‘What game?” I ask.

 

“The game you’ve been trying to win since the moment you were born,” he says.

 

“I didn’t ask to play this particular game.”

 

“That wasn’t up to you at all. But, you can’t win the game if you’re missing the pieces and you never bothered to learn the rules.”

 

“Where are the pieces, old man?” I demand.

 

I tear back the curtain. There is blood all over the floor. The old man is lying shirtless on the table. His chest has been cut open and little hooks have pinned back the flaps of his skin to reveal an enormous multi-level board game with hundreds of interconnected planes with maps emerging out of his chest. The game unfolds out each of his sides on hinges. To his left side, the planes descend towards the floor. To his right side, they rise above eye level. There are hundreds of little maps with points on each board. It’s like an enormous game of Axis and Allies folding out of the limp body of a sixty-something-year old man. If he’s in pain he doesn’t seem to show it. The blood is dried and is matting his white beard.

 

“Who did this?” I ask.

 

“That’s really not the most important question you should be asking.”

 

The there are tiny pieces and tiny people really all over the board. The closer I get I see they have actual discernable faces and clothing, all made of slightly different metals. Each one isn’t even half a centimeter tall. I notice there isn’t any blood on the game.

 

“This is why I never liked the book Jumangi,” I tell him.

 

“No, you grew up more in the time of Universal Pig. I think that the way you laugh in the face of death should never be interpreted as a testament to your bravery,” the old man hisses.

 

“Who did this, old man? Who cut you open and put my game inside you?” I ask again.

 

He ignores me completely. Someone put a few pillows under his back so he’s propped himself abutting the wall the table is pushed against in a half-lucid daze. There’s a magnifying glass on the table. I pick it up and examine this immensely intricate game of mine. As I bring the magnifying glass over a tiny piece on the middle level directly over his heart and vital organs and lungs, the central area of the board I’m examining has a map of New York City on it divided into thousands of little areas. The basic neighborhoods are intact but subdivided into hundreds of little units with flags and ethnic/religious listings as well as landmarks drawn to look as if they are rising out of the boards. Each area is tiny circle with a strange marking in it. The marking is engraved all over the magnifying glass’ gold handle. I notice the base of the magnifying glass has a tiny rod with a little green gem on the end. I’m like a Jewish Nancy Drew, so I touch the pin to the symbol on the board.

 

Up out of the green gem rises a holographic projection of Donny Gold. He’s sitting on a couch rolling a blunt, right as I left him. The TV is glowing in front of him. The door to his room is braced and jammed with a crow bar to keep his Mom out. As I touch the pin to more gems I see that on this central plane are the cast and characters of the New York map. The elevated boards have intricate city plans of about nineteen U.S. cities, Paris, and London. Every time I touch the pin to the board I can move about and observe the actions of the people throughout my life. And let it not be said megalomania pulses through my very essence. I have no control over any other part of the board. A great battle is going on and the only moves I can make involve disconnected people. I see Donny with the poison. I see Trikhovitch doing lines of cocaine and snapping Polaroid’s. I see Geanie fencing, Olu holding a rifle and a spear, and my little brother selling drugs to several of my friends.

 

“What pieces am I missing to win the game, old man?” I demand.

 

“Well written books and honorable life experiences,” he answers.

 

“What the fuck are you talking about?”

 

“You need to get these people the right book at the right moment when they first go through a near life experience. They need to be assured they are not going through it alone. They need to translate their personal cause into a universal struggle,” the old man continues.

 

“Well, how long til all that gets brought in?” I ask.

 

“I’d say we’re pretty cut off around here. I would say as far as experiences we’re in regular supply and you had best master the art of storytelling because most of the books you need haven’t been written yet.”

 

Someone’s banging on the door. The old man has a Bhutto-dancer-esque spasm from the spine up. The whole board closes in on itself. The man’s chest closes around the board in a split second. The man is seated upright at the table. He’s oddly smoking a cigarette it took less than a split second for him to light. In a land of allegory upon allegory it’s business as usual in the old town tonight. The curtain to the room closes behind me. The old man is trying to get out the back it seems. The banging on the door increases.

 

Somewhere next door someone has the Beach Boys on way too fucking loud. I have forgotten. That is always been Mike’s code for ‘we are completely surrounded.’

י

I got to work around noon. It’s rather nice out and there are loads of people passing through the West End. Most of the riders are out and my co-worker and newfound friend, a rickshaw rider by the name of Tony shows up with a bag of skipped food. It’s an enormous sack of pastries just barely good enough to eat. The riders take them from restaurants that throw out all their bread at the end of the day. Sometimes they’ll load up the rickshaw with tons of expired canned food, which they swear to me is all right for a day or two when you’re poor. Who am I to disagree when I’m this hungry. I’ve dropped maybe fifteen pounds since I got off the train. Foot and mouth disease is running rampant so I never really touch meat these days. Tony buys me a cup of coffee and we sit outside of Duke’s at one of their metal tables. The television is on. It shows the mass slaughter of livestock going on around the country to stop the “Foot and Mouth” epidemic. Tens of thousands of cows and chickens are being slaughtered and burned.

 

“Keepin’ off the meat like I told ya?” Tony asks.

 

“I eat what’s offered, Tony.”

 

“The meats infected the telly’s sayin. Best ta fill yerself off the base of the food pyramid ‘til this thing is under control. It’s like a third world country I reckon.”

 

“Do they know what caused it?”

 

“Capitalist system I reckon,” Tony replies.

 

He’s grinning at me.

 

“Leave me alone.”

 

“The cows never controlled the means of production! A revolution’s the only answer that’s in sight, comrade!” he continues to joke with me.

 

“Remember what we talked about at the rave this weekend?”

 

“You mean the bloody squat party? The radical shite with that geezer, Christian?” Tony asks.

 

“The radical shite with that geezer Christian,” I say always awkwardly using their slang.

 

“I remember thinking you sounded a lot like Tyler Durden when you talk to people about your views.”

 

To me that is a compliment. That’s where I am spiritually.

 

“What about it then,” he asks. “Ya told me you want to organize something. Something fer May Day Riots. Were you a barroom comrade or ya serious about it?”

 

He starts rolling a smoke. I let him simmer on it.

 

“So you remember then I gather?”

 

“I gotta ask, Zach. What’s in it for me? Why take the risk?”

 

“There’s something really wrong with the way things are here and in the States and everywhere else,” I tell him.

 

He grins for a little while and stares at the darkening sky looking deep in thought.

 

“You know what Spider told me once?” Tony said.

 

“What?”

 

“Why do they call an orange, an orange and not a banana, a yellow?” Tony asks.

 

“What the heck does that have to do with anything?” I say.

 

“Sometimes nothing is described the way the thing simply is. You’ve been all sorts of funny since ya started drinking again. I thought it would lighten ya up a bit, but you’ve only gotten more intense I gather,” Tony observes.

 

“Tony. I want to tell you something and I don’t want you to repeat it or think I’m crazy.”

 

“I know yer crazy. I repeat it to everyone who asks about y,.” Tony says, laughing.

 

“Do you believe in a higher power?”

 

“A better question is if that higher power still believes in me. I’ve yet to be given any definitive reason why I ought to put my faith in anything beyond my ability to peddle this bike,” Tony responds.

 

“I believe I have been sent to London on a great mission,” I tell him.

 

“By who? Wait. Why you think God sent you here?!”

 

“I think there’s something we have to do,” I tell him.

 

“I think you need to stop talkin’ crazy. I want to put you on to something, Zach.”

 

“What’s that?”

 

“I want you to give me a single reason why ‘God’ would ever send you to London. I want you to think about it. What possible cause is there for a seventeen-year old American street artist to be in London?”

 

“I had a dream last night.”

 

“Don’t change the subject,” Tony says.

 

“My dream said it’s all going start here,” I continue.

 

“What’s gonna start here?”

 

“The next revolution.”

 

“God wants you to start a revolution in London? Did I get that right ‘cause I thought I heard you say it but it just sort of struck me as something a mad man says not something one of my mates would say,” Tony says.

 

“You heard me right. And in the dream you said you’d help me.”

 

“So yer a feckin’ prophet now, are ya?”

 

“I didn’t say that.”

 

“You implied it.”

 

“All I know is that we’re supposed to start something here and that it’s gonna change everything. I don’t know what it is. All I know is that this force, which is unseen, yet we feel it all around us, wills us to take action against this government,” I tell him.

 

“God wills us…da you have any idea how crazy this sounds?” Tony says, “ I don’t even feckin’ believe in God come to think of it upon deeper reflection.”

 

“Neither did I til It reached out and showed me,” I continue.

 

“Showed ya FECKIN’ what!”

 

“That we don’t have to live like this anymore.”

 

Tony looks at me like I am insane, but there’s something in his eyes trying to make sense of what I’m saying. He’s barely flicked the butt when he starts rolling another cigarette. His eyes dart around quickly to see if anyone is listening.

 

“What’s worth fighting for anymore, Zach? Suppose I believed you about your dreams, which is a beyond dubious statement to the say the least. What then? I’m poor, Zach. I’ve been poor all me life. I never knew me Dad and me Mum’s a drunk. I live in a squat in northeast London. I barely make enough to stay fed and you want me to drop everything and help you save the damn world? No. Scratch that. Saving the world’s for college kids. You say that engaging in revolutionary violence is what the Lord’s asking for? Did I get that right?” Tony asks me.

 

“We’re gonna save ourselves from oursleves.”

 

“Save ourselves from what! What the hell are we fighting for besides survival?! I know you don’t make enough with yer pictures to even buy a warm meal twice a day! Ya can’t afford a fuckin foot and mouth burger! I’m tired of strugglin’ but ya know what? I ‘aven’t heard any solution to all the fecked up things in this world and with all due respect to ya, ya don’t have any good solutions either. God isn’t gonna feed us, Zach. It probably doesn’t exist and if It does, It’s forgotten all about us.”

 

“No It hasn’t. I didn’t believe for a long time and you know I’m not religious. All I know is that I’ve got some kind of reason for being here and if I can find the right people we can do something that will make all this horrible fucked up shit that’s happened stop happening to other people,” I tell him, more convinced than ever.

 

He looks at me. It’s a sorrowful look. I remember what Jaiwarrior said about a person’s eyes.

 

“My Dad used to beat me when I was a kid. He used to beat me for no fucking reason. He’d come home drunk and just crack me open. He left one day when I was eight and never came back,” Tony told me.

“I’m sorry.”

 

“Don’t be.”

 

“I had two loving parents. I come from a nice, wealthy Jewish family and I was a fucked up kid. I did all sorts of fucked up things and hurt a lot of people. I got locked up right around my sixteenth birthday. I was a ward of a series of Hospital Camps and youth facilities for about ten months. The camps enlarged my mind about the world.”

 

“Life is shite man,” Tony said.

 

“It doesn’t have to be.”

 

“This fecking God, if It controls the show, if It brought you here…what the feck does It have in mind. What has It done for you that makes you willing to follow Its plan after everything that’s happened?”

 

“It’s testing us,” I tell Tony.

 

“It’s like once in awhile yer like this normal geezer that wants a shag and a drink of beer and the other half of the time it’s like I’m talking to some kind of revolutionary preacher stuck in the body of a seventeen-year old,” Tony states.

 

“I’m not saying I have any answers, Tony. I don’t know if there is an answer to all this madness. All I know is that something needs to be done.”

 

“So if I believe yer right, an’ there’s this part of me that does, what then? Where da we go from here?” Tony asks.

 

I look him dead in the eyes so he knows I’m not fucking around.

 

“We organize ourselves properly and come May Day we give these bastards hell.”

 

 

***

 

The day is going slowly. The sky is grey and it looks like it is going to rain, but it never does. Not today. I am continuously ready to break down the stand at a moment’s notice. Weather like this is deceptive. It can come down in buckets at any moment. A week ago my pieces had been caught in the open when I went to use the bathroom in Duke’s Café. I had to collage what was left of the work, as the pages were completely soaked. My cling film system only partially works.

 

I remember before I got it in me to proposition for a commission. I’d be scribbling inside Duke’s Bar being fed by Shir’lee or inside Daphne’s store making small talk for hours just waiting for the sky to stop bawling. I’d debate whether or not to pack up and go home. This is long before I realized it would never really stop raining in England. This is long before I moved to double cling film stands, proposition commissions and to finally taking Resistance Art underground into the Tube. I would say that the Jew is no more an entrepreneur than any other group. You do what you have to, to survive. The Hebrew people have simply been surviving far longer than any other of humanity’s various tribes. Our adaptivity simply knows no bounds.

 

Daphne takes me out for lunch and asks me if I want to meet her British defense contractor father. Over an opening round of bread and water she explains that his sixtieth birthday is this weekend at the Wells family home in the country. I’m not exactly sure what a defense contractor does, but she assures me that it is just as sinister as I think it is. She has extended the invitation as a courtesy. If I go I will surely accomplish nothing but irrefutable proof of my vitriolic, sophomoric radicalism and she will accomplish nothing but an irrefutable proof of her refusal to date the good old boys from the boat club.

 

When she got off work around 6 we went to go see Enemy at the Gates, an anti-communist period piece on the battle for Stalingrad with Jude Law. It has great action, but I sort of feel that they could have gone a little easier on the Red bashing. That and it is odd to have English accented actors playing Germans and Russians. I like the snipers quite a bit. I asked Daphe to get one from her father for me. She gave me a playful shove. I told her I wasn’t joking at all.

כ

I’m riding the light rail into Black Friars without a ticket one Sunday in early April when I come upon a headline in a discarded copy of the Observer on the seat next to me.

“Police Chiefs will lose jobs if they fail to block May Day Anarchy”

According to the paper “the top officers have been issued with a harsh warning as anti-capitalists prepare for a huge demo in London. Amid warnings that riots could break out across the capital when activists from around the world descend, senior police officers have been told that their jobs are on the line if they fail to contain violence or damage.”

The Metropolitan Police had badly lost control of the ‘Carnival against Capitalism’ in the City two years ago. The riots resulted in £2 million worth of damage, 50 injuries and scores of arrests.

Senior officers in the MET, which has responsibility for the rest of London, admittied publicly they still do not know who is organizing the demonstration and have no idea where the radicals will strike. There haven’t been any preemptive arrests, although a raid had closed down the Button Factory’s training operations.

The MET is circulating photos of radicals off a wanted list from last year’s May Day demonstration, which brought chaos to Parliament Square, Whitehall and Trafalgar Square. Over the coming weeks they plan to make fresh appeals to the public to identify rioters from photos taken last year, and hope to seize the ringleaders when they arrive in London.

Police and media attention has been focused to the point of hysteria on the Wombles (White Overall Movement Building Libertarian Effective Struggle), a newly formed direct action group who dress in white overalls, padded clothing and crash helmets to protect themselves from police suppression.

The Observer declares that no more than 200 Wombles – named after the fictional TV creatures that pick up litter on Wimbledon Common – are expected to participate in the May Day demonstration. But the prospect of an organized core of demonstrators among a wider group of anti-capitalists is leading to predictions of mass unrest by the MET and the media.

It’s about to pour.

***

I almost never see Tall George off the job. He’s a tad reclusive. Once in awhile if the weather is bad and everyone takes off early we see him for a game of RISK with Dante, Jatz, and a few of the riders like Tony or Spider or the Hungarian girl whose name I never remember. Sometimes he comes out to a squat party. He lives in South London like the rest of us, apparently in a huge loft with no furniture, which he refuses to share the location of. Its actual size is a rider’s tale perhaps further inflated each year. I visualize it as a whole city block of white empty rooms perfectly cleaned in a series of hypo-manic episodes.

 

Tall George works with an ethic more resembling Sutton Cabs Eastern European work force than the stoners, artists and radicals that Bug Bug employs. That is to say, he rarely takes breaks. He gets there early and turns in late, and only comes around the Old Compton and Frith intersection to grab coffee and go. The others spend more time there than out on the road. The proclivity for loitering and chit chat among Bug Bug workers often leads them to let me take out the bikes as long as I give them a cut and don’t get in an accident. Spider and Tony taught me how to ride one day and everyone keeps saying I should go in for an interview and start riding full time. The money I make selling art doesn’t even come close. I can make twenty to sixty quid in a single ride.

 

I normally take Tony’s bike and cut him in 20%, which he never collects. Whenever a rider gets tired they can count on me to drop the art selling for an hour or two and collect a quick ride and a big tip. No one ever takes his 20%, but everyone laughs about it. I’m like the Bug Bug mascot, the lost American puppy they keep in their squats, feed and lend their bikes to when they want to take off for an hour.

 

The riders took me in real quick.

 

Not just because of Tatiana who few of them like but more because I’m just like them. Other than Tony and Tall George, there isn’t a single English man or woman among them. All of them are squatters. Most are illegal immigrants on long-expired student, but mostly tourist visas. More than half are artists or musicians of some kind. All vaguely hold anarchist or anarchistic worldviews. The use of hashish, opium or some combination of hallucinogenic drugs on the weekend is standard operating procedure. We are not the demographic that city planners hope will make their way into the city. No one pays taxes on anything. No one votes. No one has any feelings about staying or going. The job provides just enough to stay alive in London and few of the riders think too far ahead.

 

***
My kid brother Benjamin had given me a phone number for his London friend Manuel Atkinson. The number didn’t seem to work for my first month and half in London. I figured he was out of country. Then one day the number rang and he picked up. I went to meet him at his house in Chelsea. He lives with his family in a three-story brownstone in the wealthier part of town. He isn’t in school. He has a job at an art house theater that shows independent French and American films. He took me right in. He and my brother had been very close. I had met him once or twice before in New York. He gave me a shower and filled me with tons of food. We drank a few beers in his third-floor room.

 

Manuel is rather directionless. He has a vague desire to study film, a vague desire to move to Miami, a vague desire to be a famous graffiti writer and a not-so-vague desire to smoke weed in his parent’s house. He reminds me of an English Donny Gold. He is very witty and smart about most things. What he lacks in motivation he compensates for in good intention and generosity.

 

As things have gotten rockier with Tatiana who began losing her mind in the end of March, I stay with Manuel more frequently. He calls me “his American,” like a pet you might feed, house and listen to it spout radical slogans and calls to action. He and his friends actually encourage this. While I have not been able to secure any commitments from them to come out during the upcoming May Day protests, they have all participated one year or another in that widespread English hooliganism that involves going out to drink and riot whether they understand the message behind it or not. It is a lost cause to try and organize his bourgeois- hooligan-graffiti-writing-hash-smoking compatriots. But I am sure that Manuel understands why I am in London far better than his friends. The half-Mexican-American, half-British son of a family of activists and English politicians is not so far removed from the notion of exile. He commends me for my courage and feeds me for my troubles. He won’t ever come to an organizing meeting but claims he wis doing his part in housing and feeding “the revolutionary.”

 

So now I have a new housing arrangement.  I stay about two nights a week in the home of English MP in the city’s wealthiest district.  I stay two nights a week in a tenement squat without heat and the remaining three nights in a wide range of apartments and homes as I set out to recruit an army.

 

By the second week of April that Army is ready to meet face to face for the first time in the basement of our squat at Romola 33 in Tulse Hill.

 

***

 

I am in the huge Orange Internet café on Tottenham Court Road around four in the morning looking things up on Wikipedia with these two Irish waitresses I hang with after work. They booze it up with me and we all look up outlandish and subversive things on Wikipedia. At one pound per hour, you can’t beat this big orange insomnia nation.

 

When I describe the proposed structure of the Romola 33 Collective to the two girls, Cathy and Shannon, they look at each other and in the same breath say,

 

“Flying column.”

 

When I type it into Wiki, it came up as:

A flying column, in military organizations, is an independent corps of troops usually composed of all arms, to which a particular task is assigned. It is almost always composed in the course of operations, out of the troops immediately available.

Mobility being its raison d’être, a flying column is composed of picked men and resources accompanied with the barest minimum of baggage. The term is usually, though not necessarily, applied to forces under the strength of a brigade.

Flying columns are often used in guerrilla warfare, notably the mobile armed units of the Irish Republican Army during the Irish War of Independence 1919–21.’

I invite the Irish girls to the meeting the following day and thank them for the good definition.

 

***

 

I carry a tiny burgundy address book right next to my faded cartoon wallet. There are tons of email addresses and phone numbers in it. Everyone important in America. Everyone I know in England. On the last page are the numbers of the people Lim Lim and I have been organizing into a network of cells.

 

I met nearly all of them in similar contexts. They had approached me at my stand somewhere in London and it had led to several hours of discussion on what was to be done. I met some at squat parties with the fairies or Lim Lim, but most had been customers of Resistance Art. We have finally arranged a meeting on a Saturday morning in early April.

 

These are the people I have engaged and the people they carry.  The first real ‘in’ is Christian the fairy. Since he’s been here for all the early talks with Lim Lim, he figures the fates want him to  take part.  He carries Helene and Ilya with him, Helene who always looks over me and Ilya who passive-aggressively urges me to be disciplined about what I am trying to do.

 

The second real ‘in’ is Kristian the Ecuadorian anarchist. He found me in Soho one day. He’d been an anarchist since he was thirteen. He is studying the political economy of Latin America at an English University in North London while dabbling in chemistry.  Kristian carries two Americans named Sarah Black and Sarah Brown. They are loud and giggly. Sarah Black is attractive in a Middle American sort of way while Sarah Brown is slightly overweight and a bit more cognizant of what kind of meeting Kristian is bringing her to. Sarah Black thinks I am three times my age when I speak in the candle light of the basement but then starts calling me ‘the little prince’ when she finds out that I am only 17. Sarah Brown is here because she fancies Kristian and has caught the latent zeitgeist of European college radicalism. Sarah Black is here because the pubs aren’t opene yet and her boyfriend has locked her out of her house.

 

The third person ‘in’ is Tony, my surrogate older brother. He is here because I told him I needed him. He is also here because his father used to beat him. He lives shift to shift with some tragic sense that he’ll be poor his whole life. He is also here because he has heard a rumor that movement girls are easy. He carries Spider and Jatz who are planning to go to the riots anyway, so maybe they really carry him.

 

The fourth person ‘in’ is Shannon O, an Irish waitress I met in the rain one night when I was holding a sign “Will draw for food” outside a pub around 3 in the morning. She is a nationalist like my old buddy Micky. She is in London for the money, but certainly not for the English. She carrie Cathy and Kristy along with her boyfriend Thomas Cahill and his brother James O’Toole. Their having different last names has never been explained at length.

 

“Brother from the same mother, like Black people say,” explains Thomas getting the idiom completely wrong.

 

They are five Irish expatriates that hate capitalism and are looking for a “publicly tolerated way to throw petrol bombs at English cops and businesses,” says James.

 

James works at a grocery store that doesn’t pay him enough money to buy food at it.

 

The fifth and sixth ‘ins’ are Yoseph Asreali whom everyone calls Joseph the Israeli and Zayid who is from Lebanon. Yoseph and Zayid don’t like attending meetings or the bandying about of the Leftism of the Europeans, but share a dislike for British foreign policy and offer to help me. Yoseph had been a combat medic in the Israeli army before becoming an English pharmacist. He’d lost a brother in Lebanon in the last big war, which only ended less than a year ago. Zayid is a businessman and property owner of the same age who had fought on the opposite side of the Lebanon War and lost his whole family. Yoseph periodically buys me lunch in Soho and urges me to speed up my Alliya, my immigration to Israel. Zayid periodically buys me dinner and urges me to stay put and learn to be a better revolutionary before I go to the ‘thick of things’ in the Middle East. They’d never met.

 

Zayid is offering us a flat in the West End as cache point and operations center. Yoseph says he’ll rent some communications equipment and teach Lim Lim how to work a dispatch.

 

There is also a guy called Sprocket who constantly looks strung out who says he is part of something called the MK Ultra Collective and that they are “down for any and all good revolutions.” I suppose Sprocket makse the seventh ‘in.’

 

The eighth real ‘in’ is Lim Lim who with me makes up the eight who conceive of the general plan.  That accounts for the eighteen people at the first meeting of the Romola 33 Collective as we called ourselves. Eight cells ready to aid in the May Day anarchy.

 

The number of operatives is actually nineteen ‘in’ if you include Arnold Suthabee who arrives at the very last minute. Arnold found me at my stand. He has a very large apartment at Elephant and Castle and wishes to privately bankroll the whole operation for reasons, which are unclear. He says that it is what a ‘good Christian would do.’

 

“I would like to sit here and tell you all that what we have set out to do will make a change. I would like to encourage you that our blood or potential arrests and overall sacrifice will make one iota of difference in the global economic system, the universal political climate or that it will make us one iota more free,” I begin.

 

“That, my friends, would be a terrible lie. Our battle has been lost. Our struggle is not so much to convince the rest of the country or the world that men and women still struggle for our collective human rights and freedom. It is more to convince us. If the battleground were in any other major city the result would be the same. Whether we take out CCTV cameras, disseminate freedom propaganda, ignite retail stores or engage in combat with the police, two days later the city will look the same. The reality of our war is that it is in fact a spiritual war where the victory is not the result on the battlefield of London but in our own hearts and minds where we will bolster each others resolve to commit firmly to a path of resistance.”

 

The candlelight cast shadows across the walls of our solemn basement palaver.

 

“I have crossed an ocean to find a society in nearly every way like my own. The stakes here, my companions, are not the means of production, but instead the means to understand that we possess a constitution to fight long beyond the first of May, far beyond this city. The 19 people in this room will survive to bear witness to each other’s bravery, discipline and resolve. Most of us are strangers. If we in this short period can prove that we are comrades and that we can commit to an ambitious program of resistance on the first of May, each of us will emerge more convinced of our ability to exhibit solidarity.”

 

“SOLIDARITY. That is what this day enshrines. The solidarity of working people in the face of their exploitation. If you came here to change the world, we ask you to lower your ambition to simply examine yourself. To make you believe that if we fight them generation-by-generation in ways big and small, one day our people will see the dawn. This is the purpose of our little May Day demonstration. The risk is always great. The gain you will certainly never live to see. I have crossed an ocean to wed myself to the forces of great change, but more so, I have crossed that ocean so one day we can prove our lives worthy of being called revolutionary. Is there anyone in this room that cannot humor such a notion? Is there anyone here that would like to leave before we explain the nature of this May Day operation?”

 

No one moves. These strangers look at me and then at each other. They have not traveled this far south in the city for recipes for vegan pancakes. The candles in the gutted out basement are flickering, casting shadows of conspiracy across the maps on the wall.

 

“Then let’s begin,” says Lim Lim Simon.

 

We have been in the basement for about four hours sitting at chairs dragged down from the furniture room. The walls have maps of twenty CCTV cameras with accessible overhangs, three large roundabouts with accessible locations to drop banners, and 25 squares and public areas where stenciling of a message will be widely read. At the center of our schemes is Oxford Circus, which is the largest concentration of corporate chains, designer clothing stores and city retail outlets. It is circled on the map with a black sharpie.

 

Lim Lim breaks down the history of May Day, the day of international workers solidarity. I outline the objectives of the operation. We spend the next four hours reviewing the logistics, the risks involved and the price tag of the operation. On April 30th teams of three ‘flying squads’ will try to neutralize up to twenty CCTV cameras in the outlying areas of London by either dropping cinder blocks from above the camera or “spiking them” with long wooden poles affixed with sharp pikes. Five teams, four cameras.

 

Then moving toward the city interior, these teams will dump one bucket of paint, twenty total on the cement near public squares, and will then stencil “Red is for the blood shed by Capitalism.” At the same time one of our teams with a van will drop three 20-meter-by-20-meter banners with the same message at auto roundabouts. The van will hold our gear for the riots as well as be central command for the five teams. Around 8 am the five ‘flying squads’ will rendezvous with the supply van and drop their equipment to suit up as WOMBLES, the ‘armored anarchist shock troops from Italy’ the tabloids are yelling will descend on London. We will cut cushioning from couches on the street and armor ourselves up with padding, helmets and garbage can shields to take part in the collective assault on Oxford Circus.

 

We have a little over a month to scout our assigned locations and report back in two weeks to a ‘squad leader’ with a logistics plan for each flying squad. Joseph will work operator over the radio with Lim Lim in alternating shifts to keep track of flying squad activities. The MK Ultra Collective will drive a van to re-supply squads with paint or bricks. Arnold Suthabee volunteers to provide the financing we need for the operation. He claims a great aunt left him an “Anarchy Fund” that he wishes to spend toward this end. Everyone else will work as an operative in one of the five flying squads.

 

“Hopefully history will absolve the idle rich who might one day be declared a revolutionary class at the swipe of a pen in my check book,” mutters Suthabee as he smirkes while writing Lim Lim a check.

 

I go out to enlist more troops.

 

ל

The cold and hunger conspire against me daily. I don’t want to go back to the squat. Tatiana has been flipping out every time she sees me, subjecting me to her rants and rages. One night she lost her keys and almost broke the door down cursing and yelling while I lay asleep in my room. She said I was ignoring her, but I had really just been asleep. Then another night I left the door open for her and she screamed at me for not locking it. She is getting outraged that I store dried meat in the fridge. She says the food I buy isn’t true revolutionary food. I have talked to Jatz about it and he says that she has been giving the other riders grief too. It is like she is having a break down.

 

Or has it been low-intensity mental illness all along?

 

She confiscated the bike she had given me for her newest lesbian lover. I resign myself to the #22 Bus, which is a longer haul but 100% more dry. Bikes are highly overrated in the face of reasonably efficient public transportation. The rail goes down by midnight so it is an increasingly sleep-away-from-home kind of period.

 

מ

 

Tony chains the rickshaw bike about a mile away. We’re somewhere in southwest London north of Brixton, the Jamaican ghetto of London. We never normally take the bike this far south. First, Blacks never hire us, and second, someone might try and stick us up for the bike. We’re an odd juxtaposition, the London dark-skinned thug in American gangster dress with the snooty accent and me, the American revolutionary refugee. No one’s got a gun in London, so most violent crime happens at knifepoint. The bike’s down here because under its seat without much added weight we can move six concrete cinder blocks we lifted from a construction site. The consensus is to procure most of our materials by banditry and pilfering and use most of Arnold Suthabee’s money for banners, paint, body armor and bail, if needed, which everyone assumes we likely will.

 

“It’s utterly too complicated a madness for someone to not end up getting knicked,” Fairy Helene had said.

 

We’re out here doing research as to what is the best way to knock out CCTV cameras in outlying London neighborhoods. It’s either the carrot or the stick. Either drop a concrete “carrot” from above the camera or poke out the camera with a nice long wooden stick. I’m for the stick. Tony’s for the carrot, but I have never seen a CCTV camera close up. Some are very noticeable, others not so much. They cover nearly all major areas of the city and public squares. The essential ones, which will be filming everything on the ground the day of the demonstration, will all be active, armored and concealed. What we’re doing is merely symbolic. Hit them in the outlying areas because they aren’t expecting it there. That’s the art of war, engaging the enemy on your own terms when they are not prepared to respond. It is completely unlike the WOMBLE armored bloc. It contradicts every accepted rule of war of engaging the enemy full out on their terms with their numerical superiority. It’s more a Japanese tactic than a Chinese one.

 

Trying to knock out the camera with a stick is a complete failure. We can’t even pierce the casing.

 

Tony drags me away from the attempt after less than a minute. I can’t pierce the case or even knock out cables with the test scabbard we have made. The pike is too short. I’m not strong enough to tear through the casing. Even if I had been successful, who knows where I should have been aiming. Tony’s strategy is a football hooligan, old school trick. Get above the camera by going up a fire escape. Bring a brick up on a pulley. Then drop the brick over the camera. If you get a direct hit, the thing bursts into pieces under the weight. You only have one shot. You have to get away quickly whether you hit or miss because the sound of a cinder block falling three stories attracts the authorities.

 

I climb up the fire escape first and drop the rope over the side of the building into the alleyway to haul up the brick. While it makes more sense for only one person to climb up Tony feels he has better aim as he has seen this done before. When he finally gets up here I have already dragged the brick directly above the camera affixed fifty feet below to the side of the building. My hand-eye coordination is less than that of the typical American male because I wasn’t allowed to play video games until a later age. Soon after, I had discovered girls and alcohol, which seemed to make playing video games a very moot point. Tony gets up on the roof quickly. He peaks his head over the ledge to gauge the distance and to reconnoiter the square. He picks up the large brick from either end and holds it out over the ledge.

 

“To the revolution,” he says.

 

“To the revolution,” I respond.

 

We are having an anarchist moment.

 

I start moving as soon as he lets the thing go. I hear something crash and shatter as I dash over the roof and down the fire escape into the alley. Tony is right behind me and leaps from the second floor fire escape landing into a pile of garbage bags. In less than two minutes we bolt down two small side streets before remembering that running is suspicious and we don’t know where any other CCTV cameras might be set up in the zone. Tony is wheezing and doubled over. I’m not doing much better. My heart is racing so quickly. I am sure that the Bobs will be upon us at any moment.

 

“I took that thing clean off the wall!” he stammers reaching into his pocket for a pack of rollies.

 

A victory smoke is certainly in order.

 

“Carrot beats stick every time,” he says.

 

“When it is sixty pounds and you drop it on the target’s head from the fourth story,” I remind him.

 

“We got four hours to sunrise if ya feel a round two is in order.”

 

“I think, when it comes to destroying state surveillance infrastructure. Round two is always in order,” I respond still catching my breath.

 

“Well said,” he retorts.

נ

One night Tony and I are drinking some beers on the Waterloo Bridge. London is engulfed in the 3 am fog.

 

“What’s a Jew to you?” Tony asks me.

 

But I don’t hear him. I haven’t heard from Rosy in a week.  I have had another evil, pointless fight with Daphne Collins. I had an opportunity to kiss Lim Lim and didn’t go for it, but that might have been in my head. I have been crashing at her place a lot. We hold each other under rough military blankets because the heat hasn’t been paid for and was promptly shut off by the landlord. It is more mutual aid than foreplay, but we keep having these up-all-night-talks accompanied by the Levelers playing in the background. Lim Lim is becoming a sort of female shrink-of-the-month, similar to the role Lauren Zivia played in New York, where I confide more than I listen.

 

I made out with Lauren Zivia one night for no particular reason, as if to lay some kind of claim to her. I haven’t thought of her until just now.

 

Lim Lim is Malaysian, but part Vietnamese, part Chinese, part British, part yardy Black. She is a fairy warrior and a healer, but really more like a fighter. She has come close to taking me into confidence, but shuts off quickly before much comes out about her past before London.

 

My head isn’t in love or seduction. I like emptying my cock all over Rosy’s tits because they are white and juicy. I like slapping her around like a whore when I fuck her, ripping off her panties then stuffing them in her mouth as a gag. High-minded goddamn lover I am. Daphne is impossible to get off, or maybe I just don’t care enough. But I geve it to Rosy the way one does to someone in her line of work. I have crossed an ocean to learn as much about women as I have about struggle. Rosy had a black eye the last time I saw her. I asked if she wanted me do something and she laughed at me and then patted my head. I stormed out of her flat, got too drunk and nearly got run over on the way home. The next night Daphne mentioned something about Aquarians being more interested in politics than sex. I stormed out and got too drunk to make it all the way home.

 

I sleep in my vomit and tears on Trafalgar Square. I really have a way with women. I can’t argue with them, makes me think of my Mother too much. Speaking of that, Tatiana’s hysterics are reaching quite a pitch. I’m never at Romola 33 anymore. I’ve found the beginnings of new past time. One with silly black hats. One with a solid day off.

 

One night Tony and I are drinking some beers on the Waterloo Bridge. London is engulfed in the 4 am fog.

 

“What’s a Jew to you?” he repeats.

 

“Wander forever, learn nothing of substance,” say my eyes alone.

 

Five weeks ago in the Underground near Black Friars where I was selling in the station because of the rain, I saw a good-looking young Englishman with a yarmulke. He was clean-shaven, in his early twenties and wore a brown knit cap.

 

It was a Friday afternoon, so I told him,

 

“Shabat shalom.”

 

He is the first overtly Jewish person I have seen in my first two months here. We started talking and Avram, called Avi the Jew, told me that there’s a huge Jewish community up in Golder’s Green. The Jews in London keep to themselves if they can. There’s little mixing and they’ll have it no other way. He gives me his mobile number and tells me that I should come up for shabbos sometime. He jots down the name of some center and another number. Rabbi Gad, pronounced with a long ah sound after the g. If you mispronounce the “Rah” in Rabbi or his name, it sounds foolish. Avi the Jew told me if I give him a couple of days notice, someone will likely put me up in Golders Green for shabbos. A part of me thinks spiritual growth, a part of me thinks rekindled Jewish identity and a part of me, the part near my stomach, thinks food stamps.

 

One day Tony and I are drinking some beers on the Waterloo Bridge. London is engulfed in the 5 am fog.

 

“What’s a Jew to you?”  he asks for a third time.

 

I’m smoking a cigarette without a filter, a little drunk and tired, smelling like a wombat thrown in a river after lots of Rickshawin’ in the rain. Tony’s eyes are bloodshot. I notice his nails are yellowish from over a decade of rolling and smoking unfiltered cigarettes. He’s been coughing for a week. Real bad, pink sputum. Tatiana says its tuberculosis and I should stay away from him. I trust her like I trusted her foot and mouth remedy that inflamed half my face until I used Bacetracin.

 

Tony coughs some nasty discharge over the bridge and nearly spills half his pint. Once again I don’t respond, not because I don’t hear or don’t want to answer. My head’s spinning even though the bridge is standing still. There’s a dull ringing as I stare out at the Thames through the fog.

 

* * *

 

I’m looking through my binoculars for people out in the darkness. I’m looking for Mike Washington looking for me. I lost him some weeks ago in the Pale City and he’s here somewhere. I can feel it. The headlines declare that anarchy is coming. In more ways than they know. Mike is down in the tunnels with the girl and her child. Any day now the Old Man in the Steeplechase Game Store will have the final pieces to my game.

 

* * *

 

I think I get the rules now, I think I know how to act the part. Those vile pink pills have been out of my body now over two months. I stopped taking them during my mayhem in Italy then dumped them down the toilet on the Chunnel train. I am only sleeping in spurts now, sometimes two or three hours every few days. I also rest without sleeping, like I am right now, sleeping with my eyes wide open.

 

* * *

 

The Old Man waits in the north of the city. The pieces are to come through the ceiling in the ground.

 

* * *

 

I feel like I haven’t seen the sun in weeks. It’s just torrent by night and flood by day as if some celestial John-O-Dreams hysterical crying is taking place above this city, as if such a deluge can wash the cruel combination of deprivation and rape at the heart of a dead empire.

 

It’s as if Joseph Conrad looked up in the broken eyes of every brown and battered tube rider to say without moving his lips,

 

“This place was once a dark place, too.”

 

It needs no real articulation. The city is indeed a hellish nightmare for those left to the elements.  There are the drugs everyone takes to repress the shame.  There are the thieves in the lands south of the Thames and the daggers and traps of each dark alley.  There are too many pints before a false booze curfew, and there is the fleeting dream of the remembrance of majesty intermixed with proper greatness dashed at what they have really become. The darkness has swallowed London whole.

 

I have fled the center of one empire for the cemetery of another. I am here to sing the requiem for the Iron Heel, but have become crushed under its faded predecessor. I had too much to drink after we saw a group of yardies beating two Indian bus boys half to death yelling, “Dirty Arab!” at them. After neo-colonialism comes the wretched of the earth eating each other, the genocide of scraps.

 

The fog pulses and rolls. Whether that’s real or in my head is irrelevant. Flushing the pink pills down the toilet took away the realistic vantage point.

 

One day Tony and I are drinking some beers on the Waterloo Bridge. London is engulfed in the 5:15 am fog.

 

“What’s a Jew to you?”

 

“Chosen for something, ride or die,” I say without saying.

 

One day in April I am at my art stand rambling on to a client about how much I like Ska. He informs me that he’s in one of my favorite bands, Less Than Jake. I’ve never been particularly curious about the identity of musicians, so I don’t remember what his name is or what he plays in the band. But, Less Than Jake is big part of the things I remember fondly from living in NYC. Like Zoë, Gussy and Sarah licking Nuttella off my chest that one great well photo-documented night. Or YUFE when it seemed like we were winning the revolution, Ska is one of those things before and after the lockups that I loved so fondly. It is about everything that was good in my life. Being out with my boys. Getting shamelessly drunk with no negative repercussions, none you’ll admit until later anyhow. The band member is part Jewish and a huge Warsaw Ghetto revolt themed piece at my art stand has caught his eye. He trades me a ticket to his show for the sketch. I love the show, tire it up skanking, and then go home with four girls that live near Highgate Cemetery. Two of the girls, one Black and bourgeois and the other poor, crude and plain stay up with me until sunrise as I tell them the tale of how I came to be a refugee here.

 

It is the story of my exile from birth until now, the reasons, the trials and tribulations. One of the girls exclaims that I will surely be quite famous one day. I assure her that I’ll be quite dead before I am famous. This morning they showed me on my street map how to get to Karl Marx’s grave in Highgate Cemetery. They also showed me where the Jewish community of Golder’s Green is located. It is Friday morning. I called the Rabbi Gad two days ago to ask if I could stay in the community for shabbos. The girls press several 20-pound notes into my hand for a sketch of a large mouse-mosque on a moon made of cheese and one of two communist flash dancers.  I am wearing my grey campo pants, a bowler ha, and a grey shirt with a communist hammer and sickle.

 

Just a month before Tony and I were drinking some beers on the Waterloo Bridge. London was engulfed in the just-about 3 am fog.

 

“What’s a Jew to you?” Tony asked.

 

“A long hard road to a near victory,” I would have said.

 

Just a week before Tony and I were drinking some beers on the Waterloo Bridge. It’s nearly 4 am

and the London skies are pouring rain. The deluge beats down unrelenting as we smoke and drink

in the passenger compartment of our bikes.  Through the fog he says,

 

“What’s a Jew to you?”

 

“Mother fuckin desert people,” I mutter too quietly for him to really hear.

 

Just yesterday, Tony and I were drinking some beers on the Waterloo Bridge. It was near dawn

and the London skies were surprisingly clear. We’d chained the bikes and were hanging over the

Waterloo bridge railing with an eight-pack of Stella.

 

Tony had asked me, like he always did,

 

“What’s a Jew to you?”

 

“A people without a land forced into a land that still had people,” I mutter too quietly for him to really hear.

ס

Now finally, I am among the Jews of the English Diaspora in the gilded London ghetto of the Golder’s Green Jewish Quarter. I had made way more phone calls from Daphne’s house than is even remotely acceptable, even by free-loading squatter standards. Only one of them was worth a damn. It was the number given to me by the young Jewish kid I met in the Black Friars Tube entrance. It was the number of Rabbi Gad, a famous rabbi in Golder’s Green.  Our conversation on the phone was brief. I explained that I was an American Jew who wanted to keep the Sabbath in London’s Jewish community. He gave me an address, which I jotted down. I took the tube out early Friday morning and walked up a long hill to the address he gave me. I imagine that I caused a relative stir in my grey campo pants, communist emblem t-shirt and my bowler hat. When the Rabbi’s son brought me in he didn’t bat an eye. He asked me if I was hungry. I was asked to sit.

 

The house is large and neat. There is an elderly woman and five or six younger women who won’t make eye contact with me who are preparing a large meal in an extensively equipped kosher kitchen. They offer me tea. I wonder why this closed community has not abandoned the English formality. They ask me if I want to change my clothing. I disrobe upstairs as one of the rabbi’s many grandchildren gives me a blue kosher-cut suit. I keep the bowler hat on.  The hats the Orthodox wear always make me and everyone who wears them look silly.

 

The Rabbi is a large man with a long white beard. He sits patiently as I tell him the story of how I came to London. He asks few questions and his face givse no sign of either doubt or skepticism about my story. We are sitting in a large side office on the ground floor of his home. I am sitting in a plush brown leather chair and he is at a desk covered in neat, yet overwhelming paperwork. He is old and portly with a flowing white beard, but his energy is young. While indeed wise and deliberate his eyes have the kind of glee for systematic accumulation of knowledge reminiscent of a man who considers himself as much a student as a teacher. He is both a student of God and a teacher of men. He is doted upon almost constantly by relatives as well as a stream of attendants and callers asking for endorsements, blessing and money-money-money-money. He has a son hold them all at bay in the living room as he sits speaking with me for nearly one hour.

 

I have given him a sanitized version of my upbringing excluding concepts like the converted mother, lesbian Rabbi and Reform congregation. I don’t mention my political sensibility. I tell him I am an orphan, that my Jewish parents have been dead for two years and that my brother is in foster care in America. It is the lie that I have stuck with since the day I stepped off the train. It closed a door or two for me, you might say. I tell him I am sincere about rediscovering my Hebrew lineage and faith. This is perhaps the only wholly truthful thing that comes out of my mouth in this original meeting with the venerable Rabbi Gad of Golder’s Green.

 

And so I lie about how Jewish I am. I lie about my parents being dead. I lie about what I am doing in London. I play up my conservativism and religiosity, and basically fabricate a huge lie with the best of intentions to one of the most esteemed Jewish figures in England. If he senses my charade, he gives no sign. He gives me a room, a kosher cut suit and a blue patterned tie. He allows me to retain the bowler hat and invites me to spend the shabbos in his home to “rekindle my Jewish flame.” Despite everything that has happened, I am still compelled by how these strangers will take in wretch and street urchin like me and lay me in their own beds.

 

Every week since my great escape I have been sheltered and fed by three or four different strangers. My father had been right. I have been taken in, allowed to take a bath, given fresh clothes and invited to be in the home of man whose audience many people seek. I imagine that I am dirty and wild looking to them. Rumors are probably flying out in every direction about the New York street Jew staying in the great Rabbi’s home. It proves that my people exhibit the kind of solidarity I dream of for all people.

 

As the sun goes down, the large three-floor residence of Rabbi Gad has become a kind of court. There are four sons, three daughters, several with spouses, perhaps two dozen little Orthodox children and assorted court visitors calling for favors packed in a large dinning room. There are not enough chairs. An old man with a yarmulke kept on his head by the will of Hashem alone, came late with his wife. As there are no more seats, I got up out of mine and offered it to the old man. Not all of them wear the black Haradi outfits I remember from Midwood and Borough Park. Their dress is all modest and dark blue and grey and black tones. The fundamentalism isn’t there, but the religiosity is.

 

I hear beeping from numerous watches and electronic devices ss food is carried out in long platters for the House of Gad. The lights in the house flick off almost at once. There is a stillness as forty faces look to the patriarch of the house. Rabbi Gad begins to recite a prayer whose first sentences I remember from my Grandmother’s home.

 

Baruch ata Adonai, elohaynu Melech HaOlam asherkedishanu bauray mitzvotav vitzeevanhoonu lahadlick nari shel Shabbat.

 

It continues on for a few minutes more. He sings the prayers into the growing darkness as the 40 read along silently. When he is done, loaves of challah bread are broken and passed in both directions around the table. A son reads the extended prayer for bread, which I also know only the first verse.

 

Baruch ata Adonai elohaynoo Melach haOlam Asherkidi shanu baray mitzvatov vitzve vahnu lehadlicknair hamotze lekhem meen ha eretz.

 

Finally, gallon jugs of grape juice are poured in splashes into our cups by the sons and daughters of the Rabbi. The Rabbi raises his glass to me and begins to chant the prayer for the wine.

 

Baruch ata Adonai eloheaynu melech haOlam asherkedeshanu baray mitzvatov vitzee vanu lehadlicknari boray pre hagaffen.

 

The entire dining room is illuminated with candles. After the prayers, we begin to eat an Ashkenazi feast. I am introduced as a stranger in a strange land. The great rabbi instructs his household to treat me as their brother and to bring me around the community so I might become reacquainted with the laws of my people. A peace descends upon the Green. The streets are quiet. The winter air is fresh. The rain and the pain stay mostly on the plain, the plain being the rest of London. These people have built a fortress without walls. It is maintained with a mixture of faith and identity that has been over 4,000 years in the making. We may be miles behind enemy lines but our rear guard position is, for now, secure.

 

Like a great king holding court over a sacred banquet the Reb, as he is referred to by non-family members, is entertaining three guests besides me. It is now the day of rest for the Hebrew people, but life goes on. Business is conducted according to strict protocol. I remember the fist time I had ever observed the Sabbath. It had been in the settlement outside of Jerusalem. I had violated the rules of excessive movement, had smoked cigarettes and spent more time with the Palestinians than my own kind.

 

But all things that have a beginning must have repetition and rediscovery if they do in fact ever quite have an end. The first guest is a strapping young man in his early twenties with his short payace tucked in, black, knit yarmulke with a hei-yod on the right side.  He is a rather bookish- meets-gunslinger fellow, respectful like a suitor, impressive like a visiting diplomat. He is the son of another local Rabbi courting the daughter of the Reb.

 

They had been introduced quite young and had completed their third serious date. While his two younger daughters have perhaps hundreds of prospective suitors, the Reb seems, and this is of course rank detective speculation, more inclined to let their happiness supersede any business or alliance that can be formed. His control and say is total. But this is London in 2001 not Dnepropetrovsk in 1821. There is modesty. There are issues of family and community; but the heart has more room for freedom in this Babylon than that. Or that is what several younger granddaughters believe who told me as much before dinner. Before the Reb had introduced me they didn’t even make eye contact, not even his wife. And now I am an approved and temporary member of the family. It is old country as hell, but there is not much I don’t like about it. The shabbos means rest to me and rest is what I certainly need. Had God not brought about our kind would humanity toil on a thankless seven-day week? Would the Sunday Christian Sabbath even have been tacked on? I decide that I’ll mention that one-day to a Christ lover.

 

“We invented the weekend, holy boy.”

 

All eyes are on me when they think I’m not looking. That’s fine. I’m typically megalomaniacal enough to believe they generally are. The little children in particular seem quite bewitched. Several guests are trying to obtain something from the Reb, but he mostly listens then conspicuously guides the subject to something like one of his granddaughter’s musical achievements. The Rabbi Gad is as learned a man as a Rabbi should be, but is an elder statesman as well. Those who court him for this or for that are left to meander in their soliloquy to the quiet amusement of his clan. An older daughter or son interrupts from time to time if they persist in bringing attention to something theological or even quite mundane. It is a scene.

 

The food is delicious though totally bland, hearty but without soul. Compared to the meager rations I have been subsisting on for the past two months, it is ambrosia. Lots of white fish. Lots of potatoes, beets, green beans, something called kugel, an enormous bowl of something clear, delicious and red called Borsht and tons of things that my Grandmother has once fed me that too many years outside the Brooklyn Jewish quarter have taken from my memory. I put away five small knishes. Those I remember. You can get them at hot dog stands in New York.

 

I eat until I am bloated. The Rabbi Gad barely says a word to me, as we are on opposite ends of a great table and he is quite busy deflecting the propositions of men with much less tact. To the left of me is a chubby little boy around the age of four who is smearing little fistfuls of the thing called kugel onto his even younger brother’s face. A group of girls across the table are whispering and giggling, perhaps about me, perhaps about anything.  To the right of me is the old wrinkled man I offered my chair to. He is lecturing some younger redheaded rebel about Moshiach. The old wrinkled man is telling the young guest who looks more Oxford Business than Golder’s Green that Moshiach will only come when every single Jew on earth observes the shabbos. The wrinkled old man says Moshiach is already among us, has always been among us anjd that he’ll wait until his own house is in order before bringing unity and light to this world. I’d never heard talk like this, at least not from Jews. I didn’t even know we had a Messiah.

 

“What is the Moshiach?” I ask.

 

“The Messiah from the House of Judah, a blood descendant of King David!” yells the little boy to my left still playing with food,

 

“MOSHIACH! MOSHIACH!”

 

Several of the younger ones join in. Over them the redheaded business student leans over to say, “The Jewish Jesus to come.”

 

“Don’t blaspheme!” says the wrinkled old man.

 

“So we believe this person is coming to deliver us?” I ask.

 

“No. He’s here already. We deliver ourselves and then he announces himself.”

 

“Convenient,” says the redhead.

 

He is snide and brash.

 

“Deliverance rests on us first acting worthy of saving. We must act the part of the Chosen before our role is clarified.”

 

“Role?” I ask.

 

“We were not Chosen to simply eat kugel. We were not Chosen to make many doctors and lawyers and film stars. Our kind are the light unto the world. If but a single Jew drops the ball so to speak. If a single Jew does not live up to being one of God’s people, then we must continue to wait,” says the wrinkled old man with passion in his eyes.

 

“But this raises a question about why some of us should be punished for the minority that decide not to keep shabbos, decide to wed non-Jewish women and can’t stay off the pork chops. Why do we have to wait for the world to come forever when more than half our kind can’t play by God’s rules?” the redheaded student asks.

 

“World to come?” I ask.

 

The wrinkled old man turns to face me. The petulance of the redheaded rebel annoys him to assume a state of passive aggression. His total attention is on me.

 

“One day we’ll pass and be reunited with HaShem in the World to Come. This is not like the gentile Heaven. There are no pearly gates or rivers of wine or sex parties or cable television. You just get to be reunited with God. That is in the end the greatest moment of our existence. For our soul longs for union with that which gave us life. You’re too young to appreciate that. You can think only of what is to come in this life. That is appropriate and good, but all things are impermanent in this life. HaShem is not. The Moshiach we speak of will make this life a place of harmony, of plenty and of peace. God will be known to his people. We would be very lucky to live to see this day. But in the World to Come all things past, present and future are one, just as God is one. When we pass we will be experiencing every moment of existence simultaneously.”

 

“That sounds terrifying. I want out,” says the redheaded rebel smirking.

 

“The trouble is you young people are far too influenced by the Christian ideas of God and afterlife. You want gold hot tubs and women, and can’t even fathom the kind of light and peace achieved in union.”

 

“What happens to sinners in Judaism? Where do they go?”

 

“They go to hell of course,” says the rebel, “They burn in a lake of fire or red borsht.”

 

“There is no such thing as hell in the World to Come. This is a wive’s-tailed myth of the goyum to scare their children into morality,” states the wrinkled old man. “Hell is but a place where man has no knowledge of Ha-Shem.”

 

“Like in the South of London?” I ask.

 

The old wrinkled man looks at me solemnly.

 

“If only we were so lucky as to assume that South London was the only place of darkness on this wide earth.”

 

***

 

After the sixth course of food and the second course of dessert, the women all retreat. The solicitor guests are asked to leave, and the only non-Gad remaining are the redheaded rebel, the suitor having a quietly supervised few hours with the Reb’s daughter upstairs and then there is me. The old man with many wrinkles and the answers to everything had departed sometime after the meal. The Reb now holds a more intimate court as one of his daughters plays a harp for the several dozen of us left in the living room. A chubby baby is rolling about watching two slightly older toddlers lay tracks across the living room for a toy train. I mostly listen. I feel if allowed three or more sentences, I’ll give my whole game away. I’d either reveal myself as subversive or worse, not quite half a Jew.

 

The conversation pertains to morality. I follow it, as does the rebel. I neither ask his name nor is it offered. For all his rudeness, his combativeness,and cynical secularism, no one hinted that it is time for him to leave. There is clearly some dynamic I don’t yet grasp. If he isn’t a redheaded stepchild or prodigal son, he plays the part quite well. Eventually the house grows too hot for his liking and he invites me out on the porch. Had he offered me a cigarette it would have not surprised me in the slightest. He does not.

 

The air outside iss frigid, damp and English. I have forgotten I am still quite far behind enemy lines for the past few hours.

 

“Yer quite a long ways away from the Big Apple,” he says without looking at me.

 

“That’s the idea of exile isn’t it, quiet contemplation of your plight ten thousand miles from home?”    I respond.

 

“You calculated it, did you?” he asks me.

 

“Figure of speech.”

 

“Oh. I thought the farthest Americans could ever travel was five hundred miles.”

 

“Aren’t you clever.”

 

“There’s a future in being clever. There’s no future in being religious,” the redhead states emphatically.

 

“So why are you in the Reb’s home for the shabos?”

 

“My uncle is a great man. He’d be a great barrister, a great broker, a great businessman or general depending on what life and time he came into.”

 

“Your uncle?”

 

“You don’t see the resemblance?”

 

“It’s not important enough for me to have to try. Regardless, why even come to this neighborhood if there isn’t some question in your heart about our people having a higher purpose?”

 

“Because law school is expensive and the food is better up here than near my shitty little Kensington flat.”

 

“If everyone’s so religious why don’t they just up and move to Israel?”

 

“Because they don’t think it should exist.”

 

“Huh?” I ask, incredulously.

 

I thought all Jews believed in the Jewish state.

 

“The religious don’t think there should be a Jewish state on that land until Moshiach reveals himself.  Since secular forces, secular government and American backing keep that little freak show running, the religious for the most part boycott its existence in all but trade,” he explains.

 

“You ever been?”

 

“Once when I was younger. I don’t remember much except for how horrifying I found camels. You?”

 

“About six months ago. I remember really loving it.”

 

“Remember? It was six months ago.”

 

“It was like a dream. I wished it would go on and on but I knew I’d wake up any minute restored to the hellish place from which I was born.”

 

“Not fer nothing, but New York is pretty popular for some ‘hellish place’.”

 

“Like the old man with the wrinkles said, ‘any place without God’s a hell’.”

 

“I’d take my chances with New York, thank you. London is absolute shite.”

 

“I’ll move on any week now. I’m running out of things to learn.”

 

“Well stay away from this place then because these folks have libraries that run hundreds of miles underground. I can tell you weren’t raised religious, so before I go, let me tell you something important. In Israel there is something they call the Jerusalem syndrome. Restless secular Jews return to the Promised Land to find incredible solace in our people’s faith. While the temptations of the secular world are many, safely inside the city walls of old Jerusalem the 613 dogmas became easy to practice, even rewarding. In this Promised Land the religious carve out the World to Come, or at least the world, as they’d like it. As long as the religious remain in their communities, they feel saved. But if asked to go but one mile from the Old City, they are paralyzed in fear of temptation. Golder’s Green is the Jerusalem of England. They don’t venture too far beyond its metaphorical walls,” the redhead explains to me.

 

“And what’s your point exactly?”

 

“A Holy Land is just another guise to guild a desert ghetto. There are nearly 4 billion people on this planet. You think just because a group of several million of them have managed to not get wiped out they are somehow the most important, the most beloved by God? I try not to fashion my paradigms of existence around shows on the telly like the ‘Weakest Link’.”

 

“Well everything’s complicated I suppose.”

 

“Just you stay here. They’ll make it a thousand and one times more complicated, keep you blissfully confused, and you’ll never again get South of the river much less your Holy Land of sorts.”

 

“I get it. But I’ll always have to go south of the River. It’s where I keep the big abandoned building I’m squatting stockpiling all my subversive books,” I tell him.

 

“You think you’re being shocking. But, I’ve bought a picture off you before.”

 

ע

They have left a fresh suit out for me this morning. It is navy blue with subtle pinstripes. It is kosher cut and certified. It comse with a white ironed and pressed button-down shirt. A silk tie with an intricate series of blue, white and grey diamonds is also waiting for me. A matching small blue Yarmulke sits atop the pile. The alarm clock says about 10 am. I have slept like a baby. I don’t even remember my dream, which is a terribly good thing. The redheaded rebel isn’t up yet. It is the day of rest.

 

Careful not to turn on any lights, I grab the pile of fresh clothing and go down the hall to take a shower. The house is quiet. As I turned on the cold water, I wonder if they consider that work. Pipes filling with waters seems more overall “work” than electricity powering a light. I opt to dress without showering not wishing to offend.

 

The redheaded rebel’s name is Malachi. Irish pronunciation, not American: MAL-AKHI. He told me before we went to bed that to the religious virtually everything and anything is “work.” No turning on lights, no driving, no smoking, no reheating the food, no carrying money, no traveling on foot certain distances, and the list continued on and on. Pray, spend time with family, eat leftovers, study Talmud, and have sex (with your wife). He summed it up in that order of importance. I told him it was probably more fun if you had a hot wife.

 

“Or one with real hair,” he had added.

 

The Reb’s wife fixes us a large cold foods, meat brunch and tea. The kitchen has two refrigerators, two sinks, and two sets of every kind of dishware and utensil. One half for meat, the other for things milk-based. Before today I understood keeping kosher as not eating pork. It is a little more complicated. You not only can’t mix meat and milk in any dish, it can’t be served off the same counter or be in the stomach at the same time. There is no eating shellfish. No crab, no lobster, no prawns or shrimp. Meat that is lawful, and just about most products, has to be prepared in rabinically-approved kosher facilities. The animal has to be slaughtered a certain way, the blood drained and the meat salted. Just even try finding pepperoni pizza ten miles from here.

 

After brunch and tea Malachi brings me five minutes down the hill from the Reb’s house to a three-floor community center called THE JEWISH LEARNING EXCHANGE that takes up almost half a city block. I quietly follow him into the lobby and up a flight of stairs. The whole place is very modern and clean. A great deal of care and money has gone into build such a repository of knowledge. We don’t as a people build high and ornate, we build deep and utilitarian. There are glass display boxes with all sorts of relics, scrolls and archival materials on London’s Jewish community. The center is many things at once. It has a huge wedding hall and Bet Knesset. It has a massive physical and digital library on Talmudic Law, Judaica, Jewish History and numerous rabbinical lectures and writings available on tape to listen to on the premises. No materials can be taken out of the center, which makes intellectual pilgrimage during the shabbos intense. The place is packed with Orthodox in plain clothes and Hasidim dressed in black as well.

 

Malachi says it is always full, but has been swarmed the last few weeks due to a famous guest lecturer from South Africa, who is teaching at the Yeshiva for the year. His name is Rabbi Akiva Tatz. Malachi and I inch our way into a large auditorium space in which he is conducting his lecture. There is nowhere to sit. Rabbi Akiva Tatz looks like a Jewish Abraham Lincoln. There is a fire in his eyes and flow of articulation, which make him appear to be a firebrand even before I gauge the content of his discourse. I’m not sure what he is saying yet, but this Rabbi has my undivided attention. His drawl ias unmistakably intercontinental Africans. His movements are quick and aggressive. His tenor is total and certain.

 

“On the most fundamental level, we must re-evaluate, with precision, time and again, the reality of what it means for our people to have been made chosen via the series of covenants, progressively taken between Hashem and the people of Israel. The gentiles, in their blindness often presume that chosen, means something akin to the VIP section of heaven or perhaps not unlike a great spiritual lottery in which our kind won the proverbial spiritual pay-off. We know this to be untrue. When we die we are rewarded based on faith and merit. They end up exactly where we end up. We simply have to engage in a series of complex trials to get there. We were chosen not because we are special or superior. We are not a smarter people. We are not a stronger people and we are certainly not more loved by Adonoi. The designation of chosen could just as easily have been given to the Puerto Ricans had they been in that place, at that time, but most importantly of that constitution,” the esteemed Rabbi Tatz is saying.

 

There are no chairs left. I post up against a wall.

 

“Time and time again Adonoi sent messages to the people of Israel from Avram to Moisha to the prophets. Adonoi asked if the Hebrew people possessed the constitution to hold themselves to a higher standard. They were to be a light to the gentiles. Our community’s constitution was to be a reminder of what humanity could obtain when every atom of our being was marshaled to the attention of the one, true God. I ask you to think of the various civilizations that are now just ruins and ash. The people of Israel endure. Every epoch some tyrant makes an attempt to grind our people under heel, to subjugate us, or wipe us out completely.”

 

“Each time they fail and dash themselves in trying on the rock of our constitution. The Egyptian Pharaoh lost his first son and the first son of every Egyptian family in the kingdom. Slaughtered by the time the nation made its exodus. The Assyrians under Antiochus tried to grind us under the trampling hordes of their elephants and armies. We broke their legs. We smashed their armies and we drove them from our land. Does anyone even know what an Assyrian is anymore?”

 

“Whether it was–the Inquisition in Spain, the Shoah in Germany or the Tyranny of Soviet rule– the names Torquemada, Hitler and Stalin will be remembered only in the slaughters they unleashed against us and their own people. Our people persevere. Our people have faith in HaShem. We will outlive the empires of the gentiles. We will wait for the coming of Moshiach as long as we have to. We will wait on the timeframe established by our God. We, the Hebrew people, the children of Avram, Yitzhak and Yaakov, we made a covenant with Adonoi and now we must honor that covenant.”

 

“On the most fundamental level our covenant is about the seemly small mitzvahs we undertake that hold this community together in Diaspora. Each mitzvah is a signal to our God that he invested himself in a group worthy of such an overwhelming honor. We were chosen for no other reason than we have survived long enough to keep undertaking these covenants. It is only us that observe the commandments. It is only us that from the time of the original revelation until today survive as a distinct people. The sands of time have swallowed those tribes that did not honor HaShem. Gone are the noble houses that trampled their own people and the empires upon which the sun never sets. We, the House of Israel, the Children of Avram, Yitzhak and Yaakov that today call themselves or are called the Jews. Everyday you must thank God for the honor of being included in this noble covenant and through your actions live up to the historic mission our people has been willed to undertake,” the Rabbi Tatz says.

 

I have never heard it put like this. I have never been in the presence of a religious leader that brings out the awe and magnitude of the faith so succinctly. The mental attentions of the room are marshaled. The mood is crisp, the attention focused. His eyes cut diamonds or at least his words enable one to believe it possible. Rabbi Akiva Tatz has everyone’s undivided attention. This is no sniveling-Upper-West-Side-Yid-of-Woody-Allen nebbish faggotry. This is a Lion of the House of Judah. This is a high priest from the House of Levy. One did not hear a Jew talk like this in Babylon.

 

When the shabbos ends on Saturday evening, I politely take leave for South London. I am once again my other self, the exiled revolutionary with secret meetings and violent plans.

 

But, it has been a peaceful for 24 hours just to be a Jew.

פ

 

Ilya and I are walking to a fish and chips spot to score a meal on the cheap. I am once again subjected to his pedantic tutelage to get breakfast the morning after a good 48-hour party session with the fairies.  It is just the two of us for once. That is odd because I don’t like the motherfucker one bit. It is because politically he strikes me as an armchair revolutionary of the highest order, but, in reality, it is because I suspect him of being a pederast.

 

The streets of his neighborhood are empty, so maybe it is Sunday and not Monday. Not sleeping makes the illusion of time fall away. I’ve been with the Jews of the Green and then have gone right back into the grind of plotting, sketching and partying. The day of the week hasn’t been important to me in over a month. With my lifestyle it hardly matters anyway.

 

Ilya, as it turns out is Fairy Helene’s self-described, guardian/companion/statutory lover.  He is creepy and maybe old enough to be her father. He is her anarchist roommate. The neighborhood called Hackney is somewhere in the northeast part of London, some place you’d never go on a tour bus. Some place between Chigwell and Tysen Street in Dalston. The buildings are in poor condition and nothing exceeds three stories. It isn’t raining. In fact the sun is out. I’m not used to this much light.

 

Ilya strides with his hands tucked into his black sailor overcoat. He still has on the tight red and black striped sweater. His head is shaved. He looks thirty, but is closer to forty.

 

Both of us hide our bloodshot eyes behind matching bootleg Rayban sunglasses that we were given at the third of six raves we went to this weekend. He has the slight advantage of having smoked a good deal of methamphetamine over the course of the night and is just now returning to the real world from whatever manic nymphomaniac child kissing place he’s been. I drank six cups of Turkish coffee at the house we were just at, but I’m totally strung out. I danced my ass off at the rave. It was an Indian rain dance in reverse. I had prayed desperately to the gods for rain to never come again. It was four floors of an abandoned warehouse converted into a massive party space. It cost five quid at the door unless you knew somebody or would do something shady with your mouth in the cloakroom. When it comes to this scene, Ilya knoww everybody. His drug-addled, weekend dance party has gone on for the better half of two decades. Maybe he is indeed in his late twenties and the lifestyle has taken a big toll. Or maybe I just have a crush on Helene and don’t really care how old he is at all.

 

There is this pub in northeastern London that we go to every Sunday near the Old Street Roundabout. The pints are cheap, but by this point I can rarely afford them as my financial resources are always depleted by the end of the weekend. I should probably start selling art at the parties that I go to. It would allow me to drink more.

 

Ilya lives with Helene, or rather vice versa. She crashes on his couch, but mostly in his bed. I heard they were once involved, but it seems like they have taken on something a sibling relationship. He is, after all, nearly twice her age. It bothers me enough to repeat it over and over again in my mind.

 

“Will you be doing any May Day rioting next week Ilya?” I ask.

 

“I’m an anarchist. We’re far more subtle than the Telegraph would have you expect. We do not believe in government. Some structure, on the other hand, is necessary. It is structured authority that we oppose, hierarchy and codified power relationships.” Ilya explains.

 

“That’s a lot of big words to say you want some anarchy,” I continue.

 

“Anarchism,” he corrects me.

“Excuse me?”

 

“Anarchists want anarchism. Anarchy is what happens when there is no rule of law,” he continues.

 

“Fuck the law,” I say

 

Fuck the law you had no part in generating but uphold the laws of community consensus is more in line with our theoretical models. Anarchists want to abolish the state, which is buttressed by the false consciousness of class. We aren’t going to have a revolution just to replace one state with another, to establish new class and power relationships. What would be the sense in that?” Ilya says. Then he continues,

 

“The authorities monitor and record everyone who goes to those things. People march around or riot or whatever the weather permits and the police just expand their dissident file. It’s all about attention, posturing and reckless adventurism. Most anarchists don’t go to those things. I think few anarchists would even publicly declare themselves an anarchist. That could raise a few eyebrows unnecessarily. But it’s quite a large movement here compared to the numbers in your country.”

 

“The anarchists in Europe are different from the anarchists in America?”

 

“That’s quite an understatement. Like a jackknife to a swan. There is almost no basis of comparison. I suppose they both fly a black flag, but your anarchists are of the counter-culture scene, a punk-rock nihilism fused with teenage angst forced to break coffee shop windows for attention. Ours compose the forefront of the left wing political movement in Europe. Communism proved no better than capitalism. The epoch continues with anarchism the last untested political solution to our social dilemma. Government cannot provide, therefore we must abolish government. ”

 

“You’re losing me here.” I tell him.

 

“Why do you associate anarchism with destruction?”

 

“What’s anarchism? I thought you just believe in anarchy. You’re telling me anarchists don’t want anarchy?”

 

“Alright,” he pauses as if to phrase his words carefully, “Anarchy means lack of order, correct?”

 

“Sure. What’s the difference is what I’m asking.”

 

“Anarchism means democratically structured society without hierarchy. It is a social system and ideology that revolves around the abolition of centralized power and government in order to empower the individual to have stake in the place where he or she lives,” Ilya explains.

 

“So, basically, you want to smash the state and live lawlessly. In other words, in chaos. That’s exactly what I thought I’d just asked.”

 

“No. No. No. Anarchy is what American anarchists want. I’m not actually sure the American anarchist movement should be credited with having any collective or even coherent objectives. They want the state to collapse, but not as an organic process of the people’s social evolution. I gather that the American anarchists feel the act of a revolution gets mass consciousness to the point where the “anarchy” of the revolution ushers forth anarchism out of the ashes. The European anarchist movement has a more long-term strategy.”

 

“I still don’t get it. Anarchy means chaos, but anarchists believe in anarchism, which revolves around what exactly?” I asked, further confused.

 

“We are against systems of control that naturally lead to oppression. By establishing a government, by letting a boss run a factory, by subordinating women to men, power structures are established that lead to dominance. It is this dominance that enables the few to remain in power. It is this that we oppose,” Ilya states.

 

“So what’s the difference between a communist revolution and an anarchist revolution?”

 

“Do you know anything about the Spanish Civil War?”

 

“It happened in Spain.”

 

“Do you want to know what anarchism is or not?”

 

“Sorry.”

 

“The CNT-FAI was an extremely large, extremely well organized anarchist union. It had tens of thousands of members. When the fascists tried to seize power in the 30’s in Spain, the anarchists formed militias and fought them all over Spain. During this period, I believe it was 1936, the city of Barcelona came under full anarchist control for about a year. The center held. People still went to work. The war still went on. That’s because the anarchists were in control of the means of production. The anarchist revolution is the power of the workers harnessed through the general strike. The communist revolution was an armed minority seizing the economic strength of the state. An anarchist revolution relies on the leadership of the people, not a party. Eventually the Stalinists stabbed the CNT-FAI and their Republican allies in the back and the Soviet Union let Spain go Fascist, which seemed to be more manageable than an anarchist, free state in Europe. Orwell wrote a book about the whole thing,”  Ilya tells me.

 

“So an anarchist wouldn’t go to a protest?”

 

“No. A real anarchist would focus more upon the dynamics, which cause the bulk of this oppression and injustice, namely the apathy and inaction of good men. An anarchist cannot purely blame a government or a state, the degradation of hierarchy must first be countered on the most base level, among men and women, among employer and employee. The revolution must begin with just two people who understand that combination, not competition will set us free.”

 

“Kropotkin?”

 

“Ah, at least sometimes you pay attention.”

 

***

 

Now there are two weeks to go.

 

The papers are running articles every day predicting political violence. There is talk of an anarchist leader from Italy whom the police are trying to apprehend because he is funding much of the organizing efforts for May Day. There are more police on the streets than usual. They tried to shut down my art stand twice last week when someone told them that I was handing out flyers for the demonstration. One day I went for an afternoon pint at the pub. I left Daphne to watch my stand from her window. When I got back she frantically informed me that the Bobs had confiscated everything and were looking to pick me up as well. I had written some long, offensive poem about ambushing police with hunting rifles.

 

No one has seen Tony for a week. That is not unusual to anyone but me.  There is a rumor going around, mostly propagated by Tall George that Tony has been picked up. The May Day Monopoly Collective, the underground anarchist politburo directing this little project Mayhem Britannica, warned all of the groups participating that there would be preemptive raids and arrests this year. Apparently Scotland Yard isn’t going to put up with the levels of property destruction that had happened the year before. The news article say that the authorities have already identified the main organizers and are putting ten times as many police on the streets in anticipation of the yearly influx of foreign anarchists, which the paper say will compose the bulk of the rioters.

 

Last year a historic British monument called the Centitaff, a huge statue of Winston Churchill, had been completely vandalized during the rioting. Some anarchist glued a huge green Mohawk to Mr. Churchill’s marble head. This proved to be tremendously unpopular with the English business class and tremendously hilarious to many British working-class youth. The British don’t need a socialist holiday to engage in recreational hooliganism. A football game suffices. This type of defacement is what makes someone like my brother’s friend Manuel head out every year. But the word anarchist sells newspapers. So they just keep printing it.

 

Talk of the WOMBLES is everywhere. I’ve become an Observer reader. I scan the massive four-page spread in earnest disbelief. The media is the alpha and omega when it comes to profiting off the hysteria.

 

While the May Day Monopoly Collective says nothing, rumors spread like wild fire. The rumors speak of white, overalled anarchist brigades from Italy suited up in body armor and carrying tower shields. People are saying they are named after the popular British cartoon. Others say it stands for something. I can’t figure out what is true. Either way, it is widely believed the anarchists will be behind most of the property destruction. Like everything about May Day Monopoly, if it happens it happens because some autonomous collective undertakes to make it happen. The Telegraph published a picture of the Italian. His family lawyer promptly sued the newspaper. All this is lost on the Proles.

 

The Romola 33 Collective now number just under three dozen people in various affinity groups. At the meeting tonight we are doing a final logistics run-through of our pre-May Day activities that will go on the week before the big day. Most of our gear is cached at our base squat on Romola Road. The meeting is set for 23:00. Last night we received a particularly disturbing message from the May Day Monopoly Collective. A rumor is going around, leaked by a secretary employed at Scotland Yard, that in two days a massive raid is going to take place on the squats of South London under the pretense of looking for weapons and explosives. A list was sent out by courier to the squats that are to be targeted. Ours is on the list. While the Bobs may be looking for weapons, everyone sees this move as an attempt to capture as much equipment as possible prior to the demonstration as well as close down potential meeting places and equipment dumps.

 

The first knock on the door is at 7:40 pm. It is Lim Lim and her Latin American lover Andreas. They are carrying two long black duffle bags in anticipation of the move. She heard the news before me and has arranged a car to move banners and whatever else might be needed to a loft space in the North of the city. I give Lim Lim a respectful kiss on the cheek and Andreas a firm handshake, let them in and relock the door.

 

We enter our meeting space through the low-lying wooden archway. The basement room is lit with candles. There is a space heater plugged in. Some large maps of the city and a white board complete our makeshift, clandestine plotting command center firetrap.

 

As I head up the stairs to put on some tea I hear another knock on the door. It is the Sarahs and Kristian.

 

“Do you have tea?” asks Kristian.

 

“On the kettle now good sir,” I say.

 

I bring the tea down to the basement on a large tin trey. Andreas is hanging up a detailed map of The City, London’s financial district. Lim Lim is going over her papers tallying up the new CCTV locations found on their recon mission around southeast London. Kristian lights a cigarette and the Sarahs talk about class. Sarah Black switches the talk to her latest Spanish boyfriend. I hear someone knock again upstairs. It’s the Dublin crew. I could hear them before I open the door.

 

Kristy, Shannon O, and Cathy follow the brothers down to the basement. Kristy gives me a big wet kiss on the cheek and Shannon O slaps my ass as she passes. They are all wearing red and black syndicalist bandanas. Shannon O has a black balaclava pulled over her hair. Kristy has on dirty blue overalls that make her look something like Rosy the riveter from the vintage war bonds poster.  I follow them down into the basement, forgetting all about the second round of tea.

 

I take a seat in a withered broken wood chair and start rolling a stoag. James goes upstairs to do security by the front door now that so many of the ‘leadership’ are here. His brother joins him with a small wooden bat to let in new arrivals.

 

It is 10:02 pm.

 

“Should we begin?” asks Kristian.

 

The rest of our people show up in waves over the next half hour. Sure as promised and quite a long way from home even Daphne Collins arrives with Laurence her old mate from the university and a ‘brilliant’ photographer. The MK Ultra Crew arrives looking tired and Joseph the Israeli comes dressed in his white pharmacy lab coat. Even Ilya comes later with Helene. Fairy Christian comes representing the Fairies. Arnold Suthabee, dressed posh, but subtle pinstripe suit shows up last and late as usual, but only by ten minutes.

 

“We need to address the rumors of Tony and the raid,” I say.

 

“Raid?” asks John.

 

“The reason for this council meeting a day early is that the May Day Collective has issued a warning of a raid to take place in two days,” states Ilya.

 

“So they’re cracking down after last year,” notes Joseph.

 

“The MK Ultra Collective has heard rumors that they plan to use sonic barrage crowd control devices to paralyze the protesters,” said Sprocket.

 

“Duly noted,” she says diplomatically.

 

“We need to address the issue of the Tube strike scheduled for May Day,” adds Shannon O.

 

Everyone is shaken up about the raid. While it might only be a rumor as Joseph suggests, we can’t lose from a tactical perspective by caching our gear at several different locations. The twenty buckets of red paint, the spray cans and the stencils are to be stored in the Sarahs’ basement at the Tottingham dorms. The banners are to be moved from Romola 33 to Lim Lim’s apartment and then redistributed the night before our action. No one thinks it is necessary to move the pile of bricks in front of my squat.

 

“I think you ought to move in with me until the demonstration. Your tourist visa is quite expired by now,” suggests Daphne Collins. “You’re absolutely fair game for deportation and we obviously need you as our go-between at least until May 1st.”

 

Everyone agrees there isn’t much use for the squat anymore and that I am bound to be picked up in the raid should it take place. I opt to move up to Golder’s Green and keep my gear at Daphne’s.

 

“Any word about Tony?” Shannon O asks.

 

“Not a one,” I say.

 

No one has heard from Tony at all. All we can do on that note is wait. Sprocket suggests that perhaps they have taken control of his mind and that he has sold out our base.

 

“He’s either sick, dead or in jail,” she told me before the meeting.

 

“Our main objective needs to be the destruction of as many CCTV cameras as possible,” explains Kristy. “The more we can shut down, the harder it will be for Scotland Yard to keep track of what’s going on during the protests.”

 

While not everyone is willing to take part in the raid, all agreed\ we should go through with it. Lim Lim and Andreas, aided by a map provided by Arnold Suthabee, have marked the locations of over 900 CCTV cameras in pertinent locations around London in outlying, and unsecured areas. Overall we have a three-pronged strategy of attack. In one week we will send ten wrecking crews out each night with bricks and a list of cameras. Starting a week before, but intensifying the midnight before May Day, each crew will attempt to neutralize as many CCTV cameras as they can. Lim Lim and Andreas will check each destroyed camera off a list and serve as the dispatchers.

 

All of the original cells have joined Lim Lim and my little experiment in shake and bake guerrilla terrorism dubbed the Romola 33 Collective. We are now a network of nearly thirty activists divided into cells or ‘flying squads’ to carry out different missions during the course of the riots.

 

Somewhere along the line I have recruited a band of renegade, anarchist hippies from a commune outside of London that Lim Lim has dubbed the MK Ultra Crew. Lim Lim calls them that because of their leader, John the Elder’s, obsession with the secret American/British espionage experiments of the same name. They are bizarre and strangely disheveled, a throwback to the protesting Yippies of the 1960’s. They will furnish two squads to engage in the destruction of the CCTV cameras. They show up to our meetings or to squat parties with what Tony had dubbed a platoon of the great unwashed.

 

The Dublin Crew, who have been recruited by a young waitress named Shannon O. are merely her hyper-nationalist, expatriate Irish friends that work around London and believe in an ideology called anarcho-syndicalism. When they drink it takes some listening for me to follow what they call Gaelish. They are the 3rd squad.

 

The Sarahs will form the 4th squad with Kristian and a perhaps a few buddies from the University.

 

Fairy Christian and I will work together with Helene as the fifth Squad.

 

Lim Lim, Andreas, Arnold, Daphne Collins and Ilya all opt to work as operators and support personnel. They are the 6th squad, which we dub the Logistics Working Group.

 

Tony says he will get down with Jatz and Dante, but we still have no idea where he is or if the riders are still in. They are our 7th squad and are MIA. As a result each group will have to take out more cameras and this makes the whole plan all the more risky. This means we will only have five squads in the field to pull off a large, complicated series of late night operations.

 

“We don’t need to do all 100 CCTV’s. We don’t want to take pre-emptive arrests. You have to assume that as soon as they start going down, the Bobs ‘l show up to protect important marks,” says Shannon O.

 

People will pick up the bricks, banners and paint from a centralized drop spot location and move them to the vicinity of their targets around 11pm the night before.

 

At midnight, eight hours before the May Day Riots begin we will strike.

 

The first wave will be to take out as many CCTV cameras as quickly as we can. The other two waves will fall on the morning of the day itself. Early in the morning we plan to drop the three massive banners off three major intersections around the city. The three squads participating, the MK Ultra Squads, the Dublin Squad, Kristian’s and my own will pick their own locations and get the banners from MK Ultras van, which will park near our convergence center at Lim Lim’s house.

 

The MK Ultra crew will drop one at 5 am. The Dublin crew at 6 am. Kristian and my squad will drop a third banner at 7 am. Each banner asks the question we feel is at the root of our troubles:

 

HOW MUCH MONEY DOES ONE MAN NEED?

 

The last prong is to pour red paint on the streets of London and stencil “Red is for the Blood Spilt by Capitalism” by each spill. We have loads of paint that Kristian stole from his job, and we have the stencils. The May Day Monopoly Collective has called for Autonomous Actions all over London centralized around about fifteen specific locations. We plan to deliver the goods.

 

And then the issue of the WOMBLES comes up.

 

“They’ll converge at Elephant and Castle, if the rumors are to be believed,” states Ilya. “Wherever they show up, that’s where the trouble will begin.”

 

“And I suppose that’s where Zach will wanna be, too,” says Lim Lim.

 

“Indeed,” I respond.

 

“So the Dubliners, Zach, and I will be running with the WOMBLES,” says Kristian, the Anarchist from Ecuador.

 

Everyone else is sure that the idea of engaging in crude street warfare is rather suicidal. The Bobs have said they are ready for us this year. They said they will battle the WOMBLES in the streets and make sure any foreign nationals they catch will regret it.

 

The dispatch location to text and radio for jail support as well as to tick off targets using a number letter reference code, will be moved over the next 48 hours between a series of safe houses in shifts. The final safe house is to be either this dilapidated squat at Romola 33, Lim Lim’s tenement building in the southeast, Daphne Collins posh apartment, the Suthabee townhouse near Elephant and Castle or the flat promised by Zayid, my mentor from Lebanon. Each subsequent move will be sent over in a mass text message.

 

Finally James Cahill brings everyone back to order.

 

“Does our most generous benefactor realize that he might be getting himself into certain arrest and profound bodily harm?” Lim Lim asks.

 

“In fact that’s what I like about it. Anarchy, yeah!” shouts Suthabee.

 

“He can borrow me white overalls,” says James to a roar of approval.

 

“Anarchy!” yells Suthabee with two V’s for victory in the air.

 

“The word doesn’t have much meaning yet,” I say to Ilya.

 

“Oh boyo, it will by the end of the weekend,” responds Lim Lim Simon.

 

צ

Th3 crazy bitch tried to kill me with a knife. Fuck. Let me jump back a little. My heart’s beating like 200 beats a minute.

 

It’s about a week before the riots. Tatiana has either taken some drug or by her own dreams and demons has come to status epilepticus psychoticus. I hear her convulsing tonic-clonic in her room, which she has started locking. I kick it in to get to her. As she comes to, she assails me with abuse for vandalizing her door. She swears she was in a trance that I have interrupted. This is just the most major of a series of outbursts that has happened. A month ago she started hitting me when I opened the door at 5 am one morning after she banged and banged for hours. She claims that I “stole her key.” Then a week later I left the door open and she yelled and yelled about the “niggers coming in to steal all our things.” Then one day my bike was gone because she had given it as a token of affection to some new unrequited lover.

 

The squat situation is degenerating. I can’t gauge how much longer this can continue.  Maybe a week. Maybe a day. My days in London are numbered. I’m sure the riots will bring everything to a head. My tortured relationship with Daphne Collins. My playing anarchist in the south of London, as well as my playing Jew in the north. It’s like riding a pogo stick at a great crossroads, juggling belief systems and life paths. And the rain just keeps coming down. There is so much rain that it seems London cannot not long withstand this flood. Dark rivers wash every edifice as if God itself aims to re-baptize the sinful citadel once and for all. At night the rain drums against our roof like something wants to get in.

 

When I came home last night, Tatiana’s face was smeared with red lipstick like some gang-raped, sideshow clown. She knocked me down the stairs brandishing a kitchen knife. The blade broke off in a wall that was dangerously close to my head. She chased me down the street. I hid in an Irish pub until sunrise. When I went back to the house, Tatiana was gone. My room was smashed up. Most of the windows in the house were shattered. The meeting room looked like someone had excreted and then painted the walls with it. Just a day in the life, you could say. But I remember in flashes that Tatiana had tried to stab me.

 

So I called up the Rabbi Gad and three burley Jews in a van were there two hours later on a Saturday morning, breaking shabbos in an emergency to ‘evacuate a fellow tribesmen.’ They are members of the Golder’s Green Shomriim, Hebrew auxiliary police. One remarked that living on ‘Ram’Allah Road’is an evil portent.  And that’s how I came to live with the Rabbi Gad during the final countdown to the riots that are about to unfold.

ק

It’s my third Friday in the Green. I live here now so the Jewish experience doesn’t stop Saturday nights. There is a little less than a week to the riots. They will have zero affect on the lives of the people up here. What goes on in the rest of London stays in the rest of London.

 

I don’t really need money up here. Lot’s of people hint at different possibilities for me including job offers or yeshiva in Jerusalem. Yeshiva here is what they really come down to. Rabbi Down is Rabbi Gad’s assistant, his right hand Jew. Rabbi Down keeps asking me about where I come from. He doesn’t totally buy the orphan in London thing. Finally so as to not create controversy, I give him my parent’s number in New York who I refer to as my step-parents. I realize as soon as I do that one way or another my time in London is running short. You shouldn’t lie to people who harbor you. My intentions are good.

 

The more time I spend in the Green, I come to the realization that being a Jew is very important to me. The head Rabbi of London has taken in a street urchin, radical and sheltered me in his own home. I am sleeping in one of his children’s beds. Such generosity from strangers catches me off guard. It shouldn’t. I’ve survived off it for about three months now. Blacks, Irish, ‘Good Christians’, gays–especially gays, young women of every sort. All the religions, creeds and races represented in London have demonstrated the goodness of humanity to me. I’m just not that marketable of an artist.  God remembers me and humanity keeps me fed and relatively dry.

 

Ze-Chariah indeed. As long as ‘God’ remembers, will humanity continue to provide? My silver tongue doesn’t hurt. And my age works in my favor. But the fact remains that they took me in and sheltered me in less than five minutes of talking. They did it just because they consider me a Jew. It is just as my father said, “Know the language of the tribe and they’ll shelter you in any corner of the earth they scattered to.”

 

So I set off to better remember the language.

 

***

 

Malachi and I are sitting at what we believed to be the highest point in the Green. He doesn’t want them watching him light a cigarette on shabbos. This place is overwhelmingly calm without being overwhelmingly boring. It really doesn’t rain as much here, but I figure that is just in my head. I spend so much time at the community center that I would hardly have noticed. I pour over books. I immerse myself in a whole part of my life that I hadn’t thought much about until Poland. The world is illuminated when I sit in this building. It is like I have been wandering in darkness for far too long. The religion is giving me a torch by which I can find my way out this cave. For three weeks I have been here for the lighting of the shabos candles.

 

“I think they’re getting into your head, loaded rebel,” says Malachi, the cynic.

 

“I just haven’t seen anything like it. It reminds me of the first time I went to Israel and I saw the Hebrew on the signs. I felt so much pride knowing we had a country. I can’t explain it better than that,” I tell him.

 

“It wears off. If they discover your unorthodox background, whatever it might be, or your treasonous political hobby in South London, then you’re not gonna be so welcome here.”

 

“You’re parents are really dead?” he asks.

 

“When they need to be for the story to work,” I admit to him.

 

“So what are you really doing in London?”

 

“I wish I could give you a good explanation.”

 

“You’re really Jewish?”

 

“I’m not dignifying that with a response,” I tell him.                                                                 

 

***

 

I’m sitting in the Community Center at a new wooden table, in a well-vacuumed room trying to read the Hebrew passage I read once when I was thirteen, four long years ago. I can barely remember how the letters sound phonetically. I turn back to the English.

 

I remember being eleven and being told that my grandmother was about to die. That process began when I was nine but she really held out. I remember we’d be about to go on vacation, and then we’d rush down to Florida. She would be in a hospital recovering, like an old Jewish phoenix. My Father told me that she was both a battle horse and a bombshell in her day. There had been a line around the block on Kings Highway for her hand in marriage. She married the penniless son of an Orthodox Jew because he was a gentleman and a good painter.

 

I realize that I have no distinct memories of her. My father used to whisper that the elaborate Passover meals and those of other Jewish holidays were catered from the Jewish purveryors of Brooklyn and pawned off as home-cooked. I have no memories of what the food tasted like. Several times a year, mostly on the holidays of which the Jews have quite a few, we’d head out to Flatbush to have a family dinner with Grandma and Grandpa Adon.

 

I remember going to Coney Island to play at Astroland. I remember it being rundown and most of the other kids being Black. Mostly I remember staring off along the boardwalk at the red Space Needle not being able to conceptualize how it could be a so-called ‘parachute drop.’  I remember a rickety carousel where my brother Benjamin and I went around trying to throw metal rings on poles attached to the wall.

 

I have not thought about my grandmother for a long time. I don’t feel much. Actually I don’t feel anything at all. I have to concentrate really hard to remember the past. I can remember a night of Mike Washington sings the blues in more detail than grade school. My grandmother is a distant memory that I dwell on sometimes. I remember a ride back from the airport where I fashioned a crude metal widget onto a chain and called it a symbol of whatever my religion was.  A week later my parents told me that I had to go to Hebrew School. I was 11.

 

My father sat me down and explained to me that my grandmother was about to die, that it was no false alarm this time. She was in her last stretch and had only one dying wish, which was for me to be Bar Mitzvahed. She was willing to stay alive two more years if I was willing to enroll in a Hebrew school and go through the Jewish right of passage. He hinted there was some money in it, but that’s not what made me do it. Growing up with Christmas and Hanukkah insures that you don’t take religion very seriously. I did it because I was a good kid then and good kids give old dying women their last request. I was enrolled in East End Temple for three days a week of extra schooling in Talmudic law and history. Half was learning the Hebrew language and the rest was in some way about the Holocaust.

 

Two years later I could read and write Hebrew. I had a basic understanding of the faith. I had a Jewish identity well established around Zionism and the Shoah. For my Bar Mitzvah I read the passage in Exodus that was the Ten Commandments. Now I have that same passage in front of me in the Golder’s Green Community Center. It reads

 

I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery;

Do not have any other gods before me.

You shall not make for yourself an idol, whether in the form of anything that is in heaven above, or that is on the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth.

You shall not bow down to them or worship them; for I the Lord your God am a jealous God, punishing children for the iniquity of parents, to the third and the fourth generation of those who reject me,

But showing steadfast love to the thousandth generation of those who love me and keep my commandments.

You shall not make wrongful use of the name of the Lord your God, for the Lord will not acquit anyone who misuses his name.

Remember the Sabbath day and keep it holy.

For six days you shall labor and do all your work.

But the seventh day is a Sabbath to the Lord your God; you shall not do any work—you, your son or your daughter, your male or female slave, your livestock, or the alien resident in your towns.

For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, but rested the seventh day; therefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and consecrated it.

Honor your father and your mother, so that your days may be long in the land that the Lord your God is giving you.

You shall not murder.

You shall not commit adultery.

You shall not steal.

You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor.

You shall not covet your neighbor’s house; you shall not covet your neighbor’s wife, or male or female slave, or ox, or donkey, or anything that belongs to your neighbor.

I remember spending two years to learn what that passage sounded like in Hebrew. It is ironic that the commandments were confounded as I learned more about the religion. I remember my classmates laughing when I asked about ‘coveting my neighbor’s ass.’ It is just as funny four years later. This translation renders it as a donkey. I am still stuck on the ‘jealous God’ bit. I am still stuck on how high Mt. Sinai is and whether 144,000 could really run about the Sinai for 40 years on manna alone. I wonder what manna even is. Something between chicken and dough I figure. And is keeping shbabos more important than killing or stealing?  And why isn’t slavery abolished.

 

I remember the East End Temple packed with every relative I ever knew, both sets of grandparents, forty of my mostly non-Jewish friends. I was singing those commandments in front of maybe 100 people. It was my first moment of public speaking. It was the Jewish equivalent of a major Peewee football playoff. I think I did really well. They wheeled my Grandma up attached to an O2 tank on her electric wheelchair. She looked very, very happy for a dying woman. Three weeks later she died alone during her dialysis session in Florida. At her funeral I found out that my father had taken Judge Judy to his senior prom.

 

They do a lot of this, the Jews of the Green, remembering themselves in relation to the past, and studying the books to better grasp their relationship to God through their history as a people.   Hours and hours, days upon days getting to the heart of a few sections of the Torah. I feel like time has stopped. The rain doesn’t seem to fall as often on the Green. If riots are about to happen no one talks about them, nor does their hysteria appear in any of the Jewish Daily’s. The Green is the Golden Ghetto. The gentiles might be eating each other right outside the wall, but there are hourly meetings to review, and debate, and the Torah to pour over to discern what God iss really saying. It iss like how many Jews does it take to figure out the name of God? All the ones who aren’t keeping shabbos? Not true at all. That is the one type of work you can do on shabbos.

 

I have only been here one week, but it could have been a year. I am taking it all in. If a cell phone call here and there reminds me thereis a revolution on, I kee[ it out of mind as long as I can.

 

***

 

Have I kept two shabbfoses before they started to think I was Alice in Juedenland. They discretely asked themselves what rabbit hole I tumbled out of. It hadn’t taken them too long to figure out that I wasn’t the orphaned child of some dead American parents stranded in London. I think my manners gave it away in the end.

 

Natalie Desmond had taken painstaking amounts of time to get my brother Benjamin and  me to have class. To hold open doors for women and the elderly. To give up seats at the table or on mass transit. To use the right silver wear and know how to set a table. Street urchins shouldn’t know all that and you really can’t conceal it once you do. Once you have class, you never really lose it as hard as you might pretend.

 

I keep to myself for the most part. I am an attraction, the pet project or charity case of the great Rabbi Gad. I share meals with the family where I get to do things like say please and thank you, help clear the table, give up my seat to the Rabbi’s father and perform tons of little acts to play my invented and surely proletarian cover.

 

They called my Mother in New York when the shabbos came to an end. I had called her during shabbos to say hello. She hasn’t heard from me other than the email I send once a month to tell her I am still alive. It is a very short conversation. I tell her that the Jews are going to call her and ask three questions to which she will kindly help me by answering.

 

Is she my foster mother?         Yes.

Am I wanted by the police?     No.

And was she born a Jew?         Big old yes.

 

I am asking my mother to tell three bald-faced lies to a holy man that had sheltered me in his son’s very bed.

 

She says she will speak with them. She also asks me if I will meet her and my Father in Spain in a few weeks to talk about my situation. When I tell her I have no money to get to Spain she asks me to think it over. She also gives me the number of a Turkish businessman named Aziz that our family had met on our trip to Turkey last summer. I tell her if she playes along I’ll call him. I take his number knowing she isn’t going to lie to people who are feeding and harboring her son, even if it makes things complicated for me.

 

But, my mother is graciously shrewd. She knows what they’ll do when she tells them the truth.

 

The Rabbi himself called once the sun was down on Saturday. Once the meat and potatoes are out of the way, they learn that I’m not wanted by the law and that I am not an international truant. But my mother makes it plain. She tells them that she is my real mother, not a foster mother. She also tells them that she converted to Reform Judaism before I was born. She expressed great thanks to the Rabbi for taking me in, but told him that I didn’t belong in London. She let the Rabbi know that she has given me the number of a family friend who’ll pay for me to fly to Spain to meet my Father and her in a few weeks. She thanked him from the bottom of her hear for sheltering me.

 

The Rabbi Gad had me wait outside his study while he called my Mother. He weighed what was said. It took less than five minutes for him to make up his mind.

 

“Let me start by saying that I know your intentions have been good. The sincerity with which you pursue knowledge is remarkable, genuine and good. You are a good boy, Sebastian, even under another name,” the Rabbi addressed me using my real name.  He then continued.

 

“But you are not a Jew. Not at least according to our laws. It is a tragedy that you have gone through most of your childhood believing you are something that you are not.”

 

I can feel a trickle beginning to flow from my right eye.

 

“This is not a religion based simply on faith. The blood that flows in the veins of the Hebrew people is the blood shared with Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. But there is also the question of the second soul, which obligates a Jew to take on the 613 commandments that a gentile is not obligated to observe. You, Sebastian, are not obligated to this law. God loves you as he loves me. Your path is unclear to me but not to him. But the laws I must follow in being chosen by blood to obey are not your laws. You are a gentile, Sebastian. There is nothing else to say,” he tells me as gently as possible.

 

I have never felt this much vile self-pity in my life. I am being rejected by my own people on a technicality. There are tears flowing, but I have too much dignity to break down in front of the Rev.

 

“If you wish to pursue the faith, there are means to make a proper conversion. But your Mother seems to think it is best for you to go to Spain. I have called your family friend Aziz and he will pick you up at the Golder’s Green station in an hour.”

 

I am crying. Something precious has been stolen from me that cannot be replaced.  It is like an heirloom that reminds me of my beloved whose life has ended young and violently.

 

“I am sorry this misunderstanding has happened. My intention had been to help you in your study of the faith and quest for purpose. My intention was to secure a passage for you to a Yeshiva in Jerusalem. This, for obvious reasons cannot occur. Whether you travel to Spain, or back to New York or on to Israel, know that you are not a Jew, at least not according to the Torah and in the eyes of God. You may choose to follow this path. You are as bright as you are sincere, but it would be wrong to allow you to stay here to study at the center, to believe yourself to be Jewish, when, in fact, you are not obligated to this tribe or its laws,” the Rabbi concludes.

 

He is a kind man. He tries to be reassuring that everything will be all right. In between sobs I thank him sincerely for his hospitality. They are dry sobs for the most part.  I apologize and assure him that I didn’t know about this technical definition of Jewish identity. I go down on the back steps of the Center, which is near the tube station as my head explodes. Nothing in my life so far has been this cruel. Not the Family Foundation, nor anything else.

 

They have thrown me out of the house in which I was told I was born. I revisited the things that had gone on in the last few years in flashes. If I have been on a path, now I am completely lost. My own people do not recognize me. And since I never recognized myself, I am overcome by terror that I am now finally alone. It looks like it is finally about to rain up here on the Green. The sky is dark and emits a low growl before a storm begins.

 

I sit with my bag wondering if Aziz will get to me before I am washed away. I feel quite dead. My faith in a higher power is now second to a wish for blood to flow in the streets. A cruel trick has been played on me. I feel loyalty to precious little in heaven or on earth except for a whore named Rosy and a huge protest on the first of May.

 

ר

 

My black bag full of stuff is at the home of Daphne Collins. Aziz the Turk bought me dinner and tried to sell me on the idea of flying to Spain to meet my parents. But I’m not totally sold.

 

With the riots just a couple days away and both Aziz and Daphne urging me to fly to Spain, I call Rosy from a pay phone. It feel like it has been a long time since I have spoken with her even if it hasn’t. It is raining again and I have made just over five quid at my art stand. Fuck it all. I’m beginning to think in their slang.

 

The phone rang four times and then she picks up. The rain pelts down on the phone booth and I shiver trying to get deeper into my coat. The tattered cashmere rag is coming apart at the seams from too many torrential nights. My stomach hurts from the hunger and I wonder if I can get away with snatching a purse from the throng of theatergoers smoking fags outside of Les Mis and Mama Mia. Your morals deteriorate when you’re hungry.

 

“Hello?” answers Rosy. She sounds drunk.

 

“Hey, it’s Zachariah.”

 

“Hello, Zachy, what you gotten up to?” Her accent is thick and cockney this evening.

 

“Standing in the rain mostly.”

 

“Done selling are you?” she asks.

 

“Yeah. Was wondering if you wanted to get pissed.”

 

“I would, but I’m kind of on this date.”

 

She pauses. I can hear her talking to someone. It sounds like she’s in a bar.

 

“Right, date’s not a date proper. We’re at Kings Head Tavern in Camden. My guy wants you to join us,” she continues.

 

“Do you want me to join you?”

 

“He’s paying so it isn’t up to me really.”

 

“How do I get there from Tottenham Court?”

 

“Take the tube to the Camden Town stop. Black line. Call me when you get out and I’ll sort you out better directions,” she tells me.

 

“All right. I’m on my way.”

 

“And Zach?”

 

“Yeah?”

 

“I was thinking particularly lustful thoughts about you today.”

 

 

***

 

The bar is jam-packed. It isn’t posh but it is a lot more upscale then anywhere I usually go. It has varnished floorboards and candles hanging tastefully from small metal chandeliers.  Everything else is wooden and the walls are painted a pissy, pine green. It takes me a little while to find Rosy and her ‘guy.’ She isn’t dressed in her usual attire. She has taken down her hair and taken a curling iron to it. The guy she is with looks like he is in his early thirties. He is good-looking and well dressed. His shirt has the top two buttons open. It is off blue or maybe closer to off-white. He wears black slacks and well polished shoes. He has one arm around Rosy and is using the other to drink a pint of Stella. I wonder if he is a mate or a John. I am already second guessing if I want to even be here. He stinks of booze. His words are already slurring before he opens his mouth. He looks like a loud, drunken clown.

 

 

***

 

 

I got really, really wasted off this guys bottomless pockets. Jousting with him for too long for nothing more than to appear noble before a girl I treated like a whore without the courtesy of paying.

 

Now we’re walking down the street. I still haven’t asked what this guy’s name is. He’s holding Rosy’s hand and we’re heading to his house. We’re all pretty drunk and as the cars drive by I yell at them for driving on the wrong side of the road. It is raining, but not hard. The gentle drops fall upon my head and everything feels great. I am utterly content for the moment, half way across the world and punk in drublic.

 

Cuz Friday night we’ll be drinking Manashevitz goin’ out to terrorize goyem.

 

The song by the Brews is playing in my head. I am carrying an empty pint glass, which I smash on the curb. The glass flies up and Rosy jerks her head looking back at my destruction and me.

 

“Easy governor,” the man says.

 

“My bad,” I say.

 

“If ya gonna throw bottles, ya gotta throw um like this,” he says picking up a bottle out of a dumpster and chucking it at a car coming down the street. It shatters on the hood of a cab and the Afghani driver yells at us as he drives by.

 

“Go back to Pakistan, you sand nigger fuck!” The man yells.

 

 

***

 

We’re back at his flat now. It is large and well furnished. I have no idea where in London we are. I guess it’s in the northern part, but we walked so far that it was impossible for me to pinpoint exactly where we are.  I am lying on the couch completely drunk. My pants are missing and I’m damp from the rain. The flat isn’t well heated and I have the chills. Rosy and the man are nowhere where to be seen. What the hell was his name, I wonder. Just some man in dressed in black.

 

 

***

 

I feel my way around the apartment and find my pants on the floor. I check to make sure my wallet, keys and smokes are still inside. I am happy to discover that they are. I’m not drunk anymore, but I have that horrible taste in my mouth that comes after the binge. I can’t find my boxers so I put the pants on commando. I find a lamp and flick it on.

 

The room has a fireplace though it is apparent that it has not been used in sometime. The furniture is old and worn, but is tastefully arranged. There is a wooden dining room table. My grey gasmask bag is open and the contents have been neatly arranged. Everything seems to be there. My socks smell like shit, so I throw them into the wastebasket in the kitchen. The fridge is well stocked, but I’m not really hungry.

 

I try to wash the foul taste from my mouth with a glass of cold water. I wash my face and wonder where Rosy is. I’m not sober enough to be limber. I’m not drunk enough to be incoherent. I blacked out doing shots is all I remember. My first urge is to sleep it off, but I hear noise coming from upstairs. I creep up the staircase and I can hear the sounds of rough sex.

 

“I’m gonna rape you right up your tight little ass!” a male voice says loudly.

 

“Get off! It hurts!” whimpers Rosy.

 

Another male voice says, “Hold her down.”

 

I hear the bed knocking against the wall.

 

“Get off!” she yells again.

 

I quickly try to open the door, but it’s locked. I begin to bang on it and give it a hard kick. A second kick busts the door inwards. The Clash is blasting and the room smells like a whorehouse. Cheap perfume and nonconsensual debauchery.

♪ London calling to the faraway towns

Now that war is declared-and battle come down ♫

“What the fuck?!” yells one of the men.

 

Rosy is lying naked and prone on her tits and stomach with her hands handcuffed to the bed frame. Her black hair is all messed up and there’s blood on the bed. The man from the bar is sodomizing her while another bloke puts his penis in her mouth.

 

I yell something as I run at them.

 ♪ London calling to the underworldCome out of the cupboard, all you boys and girls ♫

 

The man who is wearing black sucker punches me without even pulling out of her and I’m laid out on the floor. He’s standing over me now and kicks me twice as I try to get back up. Jumping on top of me, his uncircumcised cock slapping against my chest, he punches me over and over again. I don’t really feel it very much after the first couple blows.

 

“Stop hitting him!” sobs Rosy, still cuffed to the bed.

 

♪ London calling, now don’t look at usAll that phoney Beatlemania has bitten the dust ♪

 

“Shut up, you tramp. Teach you to walk in on a man’s fun!” he shouts with the stink of booze on his breath. The man from the bar hasn’t stopped fucking her yet. And just like that, the guy beating me stops.

 

I’m lying on the ground bloody and winded. He’s standing over me naked as the day he was born. The man from the bar is making Rosy suck his cock, but she keeps trying to tell him something. Rosy is saying something to him, but I’m too far-gone to make any sense of it. He slaps her ass and then takes her head and slams it against the bed frame. Twisting her over so she can see me, he’s holding her tight by the hair.

 

♫ London calling, see we ain’t got no swing‘Cept for the ring of that truncheon thing! ♫

           

“You see that shit, eh? You ever fucking bring a friend along and you won’t get fucking paid.”

 

“I’m sorry, Zach,” Rosy whimpers.

 

I haven’t taken it in yet.

 

“Get out a ere, you fucking wanker,” the man yells.

 

“I’ll be alright, Zach. Call me tomorrow.”

 

I pick myself up and sheepishly head for the door. My face is damp with blood.

 

I stare blankly, head ringing, at the guy closest to me.

 

Something hits me hard in the back of the head like a glass bottle maybe, but I don’t hear broken glass. I don’t really hear anything at all. I fall to the floor. Apparently we aren’t the only people in the house. The last thing I can remember is a dull monotone voice droning out, “Let’s tag team this cunt.” The last thing I remember before passing out was the unzipping of a fly and the third guy pissing all over my head.

 

The Clash still playing in the background.

 

 

***

 

I wake up and look around. I’m sitting on a long wooden boardwalk. My entire face is caked in blood and I am sore all over. I smell like piss and my mouth tastes of metal and almonds. My gasmask bag is missing, but I’m wearing my grey poncho. The blood rain falls.

 

The city is twisted. This isn’t London. It’s the Pale City. I’m on a boardwalk looking over a terrible and stormy river that has been made into a sea. Everything is so vivid. I am sitting on the curb of a house that looks like the one I just left in the real world. No stars, no moon, but it feels real. The clang of machines below the surface is getting louder.

 

Suddenly every shutter swings open exposing every house on the street. Like clockwork. The shutters open and close banging. And I hear screams. I walk down the boardwalk peering in every window. Little girls and boys have their faces pressed against the window as shadowy figures rape them from behind. Small boys watch as the boogey man violates their mothers. Some scream, some gasp in silent agony. A cry of blood. The shutters synch up with the clang of the subterranean machines. Something darts behind me across the boardwalks wooden rotted planks and I turn. It was so quick, but I know she’s here. Mike Washington is nowhere in sight to protect me, so I start running as quick as I can.

 

CLANG! CLANG! CLANG!

 

I go as fast as I can down that endless boardwalk in my mind. The shutters are slamming faster. The thing chasing me is scampering underneath me.

 

CLANG! CLANG! CLANG!

 

I foolishly vault over to the street side of the boardwalk. I’m running down an alleyway trying to get away. My pancho flutters, but there is no wind. I pause and turn back. When I look ahead she’s standing in front of me.

 

CLANG! CLANG! CLANG!

 

Her white dress is always dirty.

 

“What do you want!?” I plead.

 

But I know the answer. It’s the little girl from the game store. Why would the city reappear and not come with its chief antagonist. It was just a question of how far could I run before facing inevitability.

 

A bag is pulled over my head from behind.

 

CLANG.

 

The gig is up. We’re caught.

 

***

 

“Is he dead?” someone asks.

 

“No, I can feel a thready pulse,” answers Lim Lim.

 

She wipes the blood off Zach’s face and puts a cool, wet rag over his head. He’s more fucked up than she’s ever seen a person.

 

“What the hell happened to him eh?” asks her friend John O’ Dreams.

 

“No fucking clue,” she says closing her first aid kit. “He had my number tattooed on his arm in henna. See,” she says exposing his inner left arm.

 

John O’ Dreams looks tired. At the trendy tea bar where he worked they called him Eely but he had another name for the underworld and weekends. Lim Lim dragged him out of a rave and made him drive to pick up Zach. Some squatters had found Zach lying in a back alley, naked, quite possibly raped, most certainly beaten. He was wrapped in his grey poncho covered in piss blood and vomit. At least some of it was his. One of the squatters had called Lim Lim once he read what was on Zach’s arm. He’d written her number in henna ink in case of such an occurrence. The kid had gotten the sickness living in London. She should have been paying better attention.

 

“Fuck,” she says.

 

That’s all she says when she sees him. She has known this kid less than a month. There have been a few nights out dancing that had translated into a plot for a May Day action. There is a raw intensity in this boy. You could love him for his passion very quickly before realizing his extremism will take a toll.

 

***

 

I am in a room. There’s music playing from a small stereo on a hostile-looking metal table.

 

♫ The ice age is coming, the sun is zooming inEngines stop running and the wheat is growing thinA nuclear error, but I have no fearLondon is drowning-and I live by the river ♪

 

The room is white. I am dangling above the floor suspended by my wrists in shackles. There’s a noose around my neck. I am completely naked. There doesn’t seem to be a door. Metallic tentacles snake out of the ceiling attached to CCTV cameras and flickering tiny blades. The wall in front of me opens. I am hung directly in front of an enormous TV. No image comes on just yet, only static. I try to swing in a way that will turn me away from it, but tentacles come out of the floor swooping up to hold me in place. Little green lights flicker. Metallic limbs grind and extend from the ceiling wrapping themselves around me like a spindly cocoon. My eyes are pried open and forced to watch the screen as tiny hooks attach themselves to my eyelids.

 

♪ London calling to the imitation zoneForget it, brother, an’ go it aloneLondon calling upon the zombies of deathQuit holding out-and draw another breath ♪

 

There are a bunch of small TV screens where I see my friends undone. The old man is being dragged into the street and beaten by a faceless mob that is burning the game store to the ground. I see a group of hungry looking, wild-eyed children beating one of his elaborate old board games to bits and dragging it off as kindling.

 

On another screen I see soldiers forcing a badly beaten and blindfolded Mike Washington against a wall and then shooting him in the back of the head. His body is unceremoniously dragged onto a pile and doused in some highly flammable liquid. Diesel maybe.

 

Soldiers are marching through the Pale City Streets singing about the fatherland and victory.

 

The pregnant and helpless young woman with the red hair that we were taking somewhere better is being leered at in a cell as a guard rubs his crotch and makes lewd motions with his truncheon.

 

The clown is now taking everything in with a thumbs up, with binoculars and with an intermittent pull on a cigar from an observation deck near the boardwalk. Mop up operations are commencing. We gave them quite a run for their money but we hadn’t gained an inch they didn’t give us. Just enough rope to hang ourselves.

 

♫ London calling-and I don’t wanna shoutBut when we were talking-I saw you nodding outLondon calling, see we ain’t got no highsExcept for that one with the yellowy eyes ♫

 

The noose on my neck pulls tight like it’s alive like a terrible metallic snake. A single phrase appears on the screen.

 

‘G O O D N I G H T  M O O N.’

 

“He’s convulsing!” yells John.

 

Zachariah is coughing blood and spurts vomit all over John O’Dreams.

 

“Hold him and make sure his airway is still open!” Lim Lim yells.

 

Lim Lim checks the pulse. It’s too fast and bounding. His breaths are quick and shallow. She only knows this stuff because her sister is a nurse. Zach seems to be breathing, but he’s twitching violently. His face is contorted in pain.

 

On the monitor I see a bunch of soldiers with faces edited out. They are igniting the pile of corpses upon which is the unmarked grave of Mr. Washington. Five soldiers are taking turns raping the pregnant redheaded girl over a rusty barrel doing their bit to kill the baby. I am forced to stare at the screen. I can’t turn away. AND then it comes. Not a sound. Not a word. It only takes a second. It’s my whole stupid mission ruined in the blink and flash of a TV turning on.

 

NEVERWILLYOUEVERHAVEAFAMILYORBUILDAHOUSETHATWEDIDNOTTELLYOUYOUCOULDBUILDNEVERWILLYOUDREAMDREAMSTHATSETYOUFREEYOURDAYSAREFILLEDWITHSORROWANDITISTHISSORROWTHATMAKEUSVALUABLETOYOUSTILLHAVENTLEARNEDANYTHINGYETNEVERWILLSTILLARENOTFREEEVENTHOUGHYOUTHINKYOURECLOSERTHANBEFORESTILLTHINGSREMAINTHESAMELOOKATALLTHOSEHAPPYPEOPLEWONTYOUJOINTHEMCARSWOMENMONEYPOWERTHESETHINGSYOUNEEDFREEDOMWHATISFREEDOMFREEDOMISADREAMANDIFITWEREMADEREALITYITWOULDBEANIGHTMAREORDERSTABILITYPRODUCTIONCONSUMPTIONCONTROL.

 

I can’t breath. I can’t see. I feel suffering like the weight of the world is on my shoulders and I’m about to slip. I want to burn every bridge I might have built. I want to stop running and beg for sweet surrender. I lost Mike Washington in the desert. We couldn’t save the girl and her baby. I want to wear Adidas. Somebody feed me a taco on Bell Boulevard.  I just can’t hold out anymore.

 

“Zach! Wake up!” Lim Lim yells, shaking him violently.

 

“I think we’re losing him!” screams John.

 

Lim Lim wants to tell John this is a squat not an episode of ER.

 

“What do you want me to do?!” John O’ Dreams asks, obviously panicked.

 

“Am I fuckin doctor, eh?!” Lim Lim screams back.

 

“Is he overdosing on drugs or something?!”

 

“Zach doesn’t muddle with drugs at all!”

 

“So what the fuck is wrong with him?”

 

“I have do idea. Some blokes obviously kicked the shit out of him. Yer guess is as good as mine. He’s been naked in the London rain all night fer all we know.”

 

“I’ve never seen shit like this.”

 

 

I’m screaming hysterically without realizing it. All I can see is the screen. It flashes ideas not images. It is beautiful and is burning into my soul. I believe everything it tells me. I have to stop fighting. The other side is just too strong.

 

***

 

 

I am awake and sore all over. I’m lying in a bathtub with no water. Someone has tucked a denim patchwork blue comforter over me.  I feel my lip and the bruises on my face. My whole damn head’s been kicked in. There are some soft tissue injuries and abrasions that have been covered by 4 by 4 sterile dressings and medical tape. It is very makeshift.

 

I wrap a towel soaked in cool, quasi-clean looking tap water around my forehead and look in the mirror. My face is swollen and I have a shiner on my left eye. There is a bandage taped to my forehead crudely securing the 4 by 4 and a gauze roll. It is stained in brown blood. I recognize myself less the more I look. I can’t remember the last time I looked in the mirror. I am skinny, skinnier than I’ve ever been. Not Holocaust skinny, but close. It’s not the Family School deprivation this time but three months of slowly wasting way. There are black and blue welts on my chest and they ache as I move. I’ve been beaten fairly badly or at least worse than any other time in my life. My clothing and my grey carry bag are missing. I wonder where I am again. There are stains of dried blood all about.

 

There is a sweatshirt and some jeans folded on the toilet. I put them on. They are a little baggy, but near enough my size. The sweatshirt is dark grey and has been silk-screened with the words ‘Reclaim the Streets’ in white block lettering. I push open the bathroom door and see Lim Lim passed out on the couch. Did I call her, I wonder. How did I end up here? What happened last night? What ever happened? It obviously didn’t end well. I look around for a pack of smokes.

 

And then it all comes back to me. Not in a rush like in the movies but out of sequence and completely disjointed. The man in black at the bar whose name I never asked. Rosy being raped. Was she being raped or was she getting paid to pretend she was? Everything is hazy. I try to picture the whole evening place-by-place, drink-by-drink. I remember trying to attack the guys who were fucking her. The last thing I remember is being beaten badly on the bedroom floor.

 

I need to call her. I need to make sure she’s all right. I see a pack of Pall Malls on the table. I light one and go outside. I remember from last time there’s a pay phone right outside Lim Lim’s house. It’s so close that no in the flat bothers with a landline.

 

I spent about fifteen minutes in a payphone booth outside before I figure out that I can’t remember her number. This is Rosy and Rosy only knew about shady things and bad people and fucked up situations. I’m still holding the receiver of the pay phone. I’m really, really sore. All the pain is in the ribs I think. My face feels poofy. I know I took a few too many shots to the head because I blacked out and everything is hazy.

 

Lim Lim pops her head out the screen door of her house.

 

“Like the Wild East of London this place is,” I tell her.

 

“I like my rents low and my neighbors brown or yellow,” she responds.

 

“I think I saw some Irish up the street.”

 

“The Irish aren’t proper White people. They’re like the Jews. They need to pick a fucking side.”

 

“My head really, really hurts,” I tell her.

 

“You got your blood all over my bathroom. I ain’t gonna clean it. That isn’t in the mutual aid doctrine at all. You shelter comrades, you don’t gotta clean up their blood. What the hell happened to you last night?” she asked.

 

“I fell in with a bad crowd.”

 

“A crowd fell on you from the looks of it.”

 

I pause. I have to lean against the phone booth just to stand up.

 

“Incidentally. I hate your fucking country. There isn’t one good thing I can really say about this whole fucking place to redeem it. Not at all. Humanity would be done a service if this tribe was wiped from the map,” I tell her.

 

“It’s not my country. Malaysia just got colonized a few hundred years back and now I’m a little whiter and have a stupid, poofy accent. You tired of London yet, Zach? That what I’m hearing?” she asks.

 

“I took a bit of a wrong turn on the continent it seems. I fled Rome to end up in Babylon. I found the rotting core of a dead empire.”

 

Another long pause. Lim Lim sits on the concrete block porch and lights a smoke. I feel pain throughout. Like a piece of my face is missing. Like I’m not as pretty as I used to be.

 

“What are you gonna do now then? Back to America is it?” Lim Lim asks.

 

I don’t respond.

 

“I want you to know that eventually everyone has to bleed for the things they believe if they are to demonstrate to themselves and others these things have any currency,” she continues.

 

She begins humming a song from my child hood that I knew now oh so well.

 

“One day more til revolution,” she hums, “we will nip it in the bud. We’ll be ready for these schoolboys. They’ll wet themselves with blood.”

 

ש

Sprocket, Kristian, the Sarahs and half a dozen other R33 Collective Members pile into a grey van filled with cinder bricks, about a dozen gallons of red paint, three, sixty-meter canvas banners and a CV radio system. There are small black knapsacks that contain armor, baracalvas, white overalls and gas masks for the seven R33 members who have volunteered to fight with the WOMBLES column. Everyone’s getting dropped off at their squad’s rally points to cache the equipment for the coming battle.

It is sundown on April 30th.

The van is parked near Lim Lim’s tenement. The dispatch is operational and all five squads are getting ready to begin operations. Soon it will be midnight, May 1, 2001.

I tried to sleep sitting in the back of the windowless van with the remaining rebels as they organized the supplies at the fifth cache point. There was too much anticipation to sleep. I could sleep when I died.

And so the game begins.

04:10

 

The Metropolitan Police start the day with a full English breakfast and a briefing from the Met Commissioner in an East London Marquee.

There had been such an embarrassment last year that a large number of jobs are on the line to prove to the public that anarchy in the UK is just a punk rock slogan of the 1980’s. The police are more than willing to provide the content that will sell papers splashed with menacing tales of internal anarchist trouble-making and the potential for violence. The word anarchist just always makes people really uncomfortable. There really are tens of thousands of young men and women who dp not believe in the concept of the state.

The police intelligence suspects that around 500 foreign nationals have entered the country specifically to engage in violence and agitation at the May Day demonstrations supplementing no more than 4,000 English protesters only some of which are anarchists.

More than 6,000 police have been called in for duty today and given a speech about ‘zero tolerance’ and preservation of the peace in the face of anarchy. The Met will avoid an incident like the vandalism of the Cenotaph War Memorial and the Statue of Winston Churchill the year before at all costs. This is just one of those English traditions that the Met knows cann’t end well no matter what happens. The protesters last year had desecrated famous national monuments, broken thousands of windows and virtually obliterated a McDonalds burger bar.

Sir John then makes the statement that every state agency invokes to raise the threat level. He says he is aware of the possibility of a strike by the Real IRA under the cover of the chaos today.

05:43

 

Tall George is riding his regular bicycle home. He doesn’t work the days of the riots, hasn’t since some hooligans had kicked his bike over three years before in the middle of a big skirmish near Embankment tube stop. He’ll sit it out if he can. You have to get off the streets on May Day. The Bobs have the potential for generating the kind of anarchy the rioters can’t come close to. He is crossing Liverpool Street when he sees several thousand of them form up in columns. Their riot gear males them look like totalitarian Ninja Turtles.

 

Thinks TALL GEORGE:

I’ve never seen so many police in me life. At least not since last year. I can imagine little Zachariah running around somewhere in this madness soon to come. How one of these grotesque and violent turtles would savor kicking his American head in discreetly. He has come quite a distance to see the fallen Empire from which his land castoff to little real difference in destiny. As the Bard says,

 

“All the world’s a stage, And all the men and women merely players;They have their exits and their entrances, And one man in his time plays many parts, His acts being seven ages.”

 

Seeing so many armored agents of the state, Tall George cycles in the opposite direction like the coward he knows himself to be. A coward who has nearly saved enough money to leave this terrible place forever. He is not about to have his head smashed for the dream of another man’s revolution.

 

06:00

 

Metropolitan Police APCs and arrest trollies as well as Met armed support units take positions around four confirmed anarchist staging areas. The largest deployment for the raid is at the abandoned ‘Bacon Factory’ in Bermondsey, on the south bank the Thames.

 

There is a bang that isn’t like an explosion. It is more like an epic thud or crash from downstairs. The police always wear black like us when they kick down doors and fire CS gas grenades. The sentry must have fallen asleep. The Irish Republican Army this is not. Cathy hears the crash from downstairs. They like kicking in the doors first and then throwing in some flash bang grenades. She hears the pop of the FBs going off downstairs amid general confusion. There is no valid reason she needed to have stayed here last night. But with all this dynamic tension, sometimes you just needed a shag. The rest of her affinity group isn’t here. She’s stuck in a warehouse with what seems like the whole MET running inside cracking people in their heads. What a waste. Over what?

 

Thinks Cathy in bursts:

I ‘ear people yelling downstairs. I ‘ear the crashing of furniture. I ‘ear a lot more yelling, a frantic, terrific clamor. I don’t really move at all. There isn’t a back door to this building. You have to get out through the roof.

 

The cot she is cotched up on is in an upstairs room something like a cross between an infirmary and a library at once, but not very well swept. There’s a lot of yelling. She hears guns go off in short, controlled bursts and hears people howling in pain. The clamor hasn’t gotten upstairs. Is this the Bacon factory or the Button Factory? It doesn’t matter at all. She grabs her rucksack. She had been sleeping in her combat boots. She gets the door open and the CS gas hits her in the face. Low to the ground she holds a vinegar soaked rag to her face. AND then a huge combat boot comes down on her face. A few Bobs wearing gasmasks charge up the stairway. A few are upstairs already. One yells for her not to move. A second kick and she’s coughing blood. A Bob has his knee against her head when, more screams, another door flies open and less than a dozen semi-suited WOMBLES charge the four Bob on the landing.

 

There’s a melee that only seems to speed up as it rolls down the hall. One Bob fires a few rubber bullets at the charging WOLMBLES but the thick Plexiglas shields reinforced with lexan and the tin frame deflect it. The Bobs are knocked to the ground on top of and next to her.

 

CATHY:

My ears are ringing and I’m bleeding from me head. A big dreadlocked-WOMBLE is now beating a Bob with his own tear gas rifle. Another drags me out from under everyone. I don’t recognize anyone. They’re all wearing white overalls, gasmasks and various types of improvised armor. The WOMBLE is draggin’ me by both arms toward the backroom with the rear window exit that we can climb out. There were about thirty people in the building last night. From the sound of it a counter-attack is under way. More yelling, more shattered glass. More flash bangs, an endless clouds of CS smoke fer me to choke on. The squad of WOMBLES is throwing a Bob down the broken stairway. Another is firing downstairs with a captured rifle loaded with rubber bullets. The Bob that kicked me or the one in the general area he went down being mercilessly beaten by the WOMBLES on the second floor. I see a skin-headed WOMBLE rip off his gasmask and yell into the Nextel that they can’t hold the Bacon Factory much longer. Out of the corner of me eye I see a WOMBLE painfully thrown on the ground by a Bob in a way that tears tendons and makes bones go crunch. I see a metal nightstick crack a girl’s face in. She hits the ground uncomfortably bleeding from her temples clutching her head.  I imagine the dull the thud of body armor against the staircase sounds like storm troopers. I know there will always be reinforcements for them and for us, no help is coming.

 

You can’t see anything anymore. Screaming in rage not terror. Some hiding. Mostly fight then flight if you have to. The WOMBLE dragging me slams the corrugated steel door shut. He yells something through the APR mask he’s wearing but I can’t make it out at all. He has ‘fuck the law’ stenciled across a flack jacket. He yells again kind of dragging me to my feet. Then I see through the mask that it is a Black girl that’s dragged me to safety, not a man at all. Its like she’s speaking in tongues, the CS gas wafts under the door. I have a vinegar soaked rag against my face, which helps some. I’m still on my knees coughing when she kicks in some boards on the back window, on our escape route. Then she drags me through it and over the rooftops and through the woods.

 

Her eyes and throat burn from inhaling CS Gas. What a fucking way to start the day.

 

07:40

 

More than 500 cyclists launch protests by setting off for King’s Cross from Marylebone and Liverpool Stations disrupting traffic at various intersections they pass through.

 

Thought Jatz:

There have got to be like nine Bobs to every protester.

 

If there is a message to any of this whole charade, it is quickly being drowned in the militarized heel of the state. Any cries for peace or rights for workers are quite irrelevant when the population at large views the May Day Workers Festival as the May Day Riots. The drumbeat for peoples’ power. The drum roll toward anarchy. Jatz and Spider have to haggle with the Bug Bug supervisor to even take the bikes out today. The sensibility of the riders means that any company bikes in or near the periphery of the riots will have two consequences for the company. Damaged bikes or the good Bug Bug name equated with anarchy. Dante is hardly interested in working during the riots or coming anywhere north of the Thames where all this carnage might unfold. He stays in. Jatz and Spider being quite anarchistic in their nature anyway grab some bikes from the base and get to Camden Town as the kick-off to the critical mass bike ride is hemmed in. They are, once again, totally outnumbered.

 

Both Jatz and Spider can barely move their rickshaw bikes. A thousand cyclists hang penned in eating veggie burgers some halfwit hippie is passing out on trays. There are a lot of people with dreadlocks, which would surely validate the stereotypes about anarchists. The newspapers said that the movement came from 1980’s English punk fused with radical environmentalism of Reclaim the Streets. But that is ridiculous. Spider has dreadlocks but is only here to drink in public and pick up girls. Jatz doesn’t have dreadlocks, is fairly clean cut in dress and is Malaysian. He’d never identifies with the anarchists but resents living life as an illegal-alien-squatter subject to deportation at the drop of a hat from the country that had enslaved the one he had been born in punishing colonialism.

 

Jatz gets his hands on a veggie burger. It is completely flavorless. The mob of cyclists is yelling at the riot Bobs to let them ride. A loud speaker announces that to leave the square everyone has to present identification cards and submit to a search. Anarchy.

 

Some dumb blonde rude girl is sitting in the back of Spider’s bike. Jatz isn’t really paying attention. He is up in the carriage area of the bike rolling up a loose top cigarette laced with a bit of hash. The mob keeps yelling. Fists are being raised along with voices but no one looks all that angry. They are getting carbo-loaded from the veggie burgers after all. Jatz looks around for the hippie with the burgers. This big angry mob isn’t going anywhere.

09:10

IndyMedia Web site reports that the police arrest three people participating in the bike ride between London Bridge and Cannon Street where demonstrators have blockaded the road.

 

09:50

London Animal Action (the political arm, of the English division, of the Earth Liberation Front) begins handing out veggie burgers in front of McDonald’s at King’s Cross. Protesters blockading the McDonalds end up in a standoff with three rows of riot police that move in to protect the burger bar. Police begin to detain protesters who have refused to be searched under section 60 orders. The critical mass cycle forms a wall of bicycles around the hundreds of pedestrian protesters and the crowds begin chanting for the right to proceed without an inspection.

Two more protesters are arrested in Southwark on suspicion of drug possession.

 

Thinks Thomas O’Toole:

Where the fuck is Cathy, an’ why ain she picked up er Orange all into the morning.

 

Thinks his brother James Cahill:

Bet me brother’s bein’ a tosser worried up about Cathy, a ridiculous crush not gone nowhere.

 

Thinks Thomas:

This brick seems heaver than the last few.

 

Thinks James:

How many fuckin’ more cameras are we gonna break before they get the picture a where we are?

 

 

The cinder block is lashed to Thomas’ back with a harness outside a green Swiss army rucksack.

 

 

Thinks James:

That brick looks bigger than the others.

 

The back alley fire escape they’re on is making too much noise and the sun’s been up for too long for any more sneaking around breaking cameras.

 

One more to go, hopes James.

 

Thinks Thomas:

Where the fuck is Cathy?

 

Thinks James:

My brother carries bricks like a Jew.

 

Thinks Thomas:

Fuckin’ Cathy.

 

When they get to the rooftop, there are half a dozen yellow-vested Bobs waiting for them. Thomas tries to run back onto the fire escape. He slips because it’s wet. This is London. He falls off the roof, four stories down. The brick tied to his back aids the plummet. It’s the fourth story of some ugly brick building in Southwark with CCTV camera affixed to the front of the building. Trash bags only break falls well in cinema. Before James can bellow wide-eyed and look to the railing to see if his brother is alive, a steel baton cracks him above the eye and he hits the ground. Two Bobs get cuffs on him without too much of a scuffle. He still can’t see if his brother moving in the bins below.

 

James gushes blood from the temple. After they get him off the roof, they throw him into a closed paddy wagon. He’s yelling his brother’s name over and over and over again. There’s blood in his eye. He can’t see the faces of the Bobs jabbing their nightsticks in his ribs. The cuffs are on so tight his circulation is cut off.  Now he’s lying on the floor of the paddy wagon. He’s in shock. He keeps yelling “Thomas!” over and over and over even as they keep hitting him.

 

“The other one hit the alley like a ton of bricks,” a yellow-vested Bob chuckles.

 

James is lying in his own blood and tremors.

 

“This all looks pretty drug related,” says another yellow jacket.

 

“Drug deal gone real bad. Maybe an overdose with some vandalism. PCP. Make something up and keep it out of the papers.”

 

“Better call the paramedics.”

 

They close the back of the paddy he’s in and yank him up onto a bench. James thinks about nothing but his maybe dead brother. No moral, no lesson, no ideological parable about martyrs, capitalism or Ireland free hold any importance at all. Thomas isn’t thinking about much at all.

 

11:50

 

Approximately 1000 people are now in the Euston Station plaza. The MET Police are blocking them from returning west along Euston Road.

 

 

11:25

 

As crowds swell to around 1,200 protesters at King’s Cross, a slow march begins toward Euston station with a heavy police presence. Around 20 officers for every protester. Reports come over the newswire that several groups of protester have been arrested for wearing balaclavas over their faces and ‘being equipped to cause critical damage’.

 

Thinks Yoseph Azraeli:

They’re dropping like flies.

 

He’s been in the back of the van the collective rented through Arnold Suthabee monitoring a CV radio also rented by Arnold Suthabee. But the MK Ultra’s feel they need it for the larger banner drop so now he’s sitting with Zach’s girlfriend Daphne in the apartment of an Arab named Zayid feeling like this isn’t the socialism of the eretz he grew up with on the kibbutz and that this little army isn’t going to hold out the day.

 

Zachariah the instigator hasn’t keyed in since 0600. The two Irish brothers haven’t keyed in since 0900 after their sixteenth camera downed. The American college girls from Tottenam University checked in at 0914 to say that their banner went up without problems near to Mayfair but the police had ordered them out of the area. Presumably they were dumping paint all night. The fairies are over in the mob near Euston Station. No one is sure what they are doing. Spider doesn’t have a CV radio and neither doesf Jatz but they had reported in on their Orange phones by text around 1100 to say Bobs were searching everyone for WOMBLE gear and weapons.

 

Zayid the Arab is watching the march on the BBC. There are some signs in Zach’s handwriting lying next to him. It looks like Zach spelled imperialism wrong. Or maybe his handwriting is far too artistic for sloganeering.

 

The Irish girls, Shannon O and Kristy keyed in at 1000 to say they were gearing up WOMBLE style for a raid on the fortress thrown up around Oxford Circus. They said Kathy had never turned up at the equipment cache and they couldn’t reach her on her mobile. The MK Ultras took the van and disappeared. Their radio is turned off.  Joseph is unsure of what his job is at this point. Presumably everyone not picking up radio has been arrested. Other than the two Irish girls engaging in the WOMBLE column no more flying squads are still engaging in anything requiring a dispatcher. He’s been online all night. Lim Lim is supposed to come to the Zayid’s house at noon to relieve him. She’d be late.

 

Daphne Collins puts on tea. Zayid watches the BBC and intermittently smokes Marlboro cigarettes. Daphne looks nervous. Zayid looks slightly annoyed. He is a boyish thirty-something-year old from Lebanon. He owns a restaurant in the West End, a couple buildings throughout the city, and is opening an import station in South London. He met Zach the same way everyone met Zach. On the street with the pictures and high-minded rhetoric. He’d stopped one day a month back when Zach was arguing with an old man about human nature. It was Zach behind his stand, two lipstick lesbians and an old man yelling at Zach for being a communist. The old man called the police on the kid so Zayid bought the three of them drinks. They finished the conversation at a pub around the corner. The three of them pledged their time to the May Day cause that afternoon but they never saw the lesbians again.

 

Zayid’s house is now a makeshift HQ. He and the Israelite and the girlfriend of the little rebel leader are sitting around a computer, a CV radio broadcaster and the BBC.

 

Joseph the Israeli met Zach at a rave in North London. Zach had wanted him to be an action medic, but he wasn’t stupid and couldn’t loose his visa over anti-capitalist foolishness. Zayid and Joseph aren’t all that anti-capitalist. They are caught in the zeitgeist of seeing their younger selves in this American rebel. They won’t get caught up in these riots but they are taken by the boy who hadn’t thought twice about stationing them together for the duration of the demonstrations.

 

Zayid and Joseph had been alone in the command van until the MK Ultras commandeered it around 3 am. They and Zach went off toward the Old Street Roundabout to do the largest drop and never came back. They hadn’t talked much all night. They had both been in Lebanon in the end of their teenage years in the 80’s. It is obvious and unimportant that they had been shooting at each other then. Zach left his phone with Zayid when he went out for the drop. That’s why Daphne is here. She woke up thinking he was dead.

 

Joseph stares off not used to all-nighters since the army days and thinks that Zachariah is either oblivious or idealistic or simply naïve. Joseph used to talk like the young man talked maybe ten years ago before war and deserts and exile took the ideals from him. Joseph hopes Zachariah gets back to the safe house before nightfall. The radio stays quite dead. The procession builds on the BBC. The police far outnumber the demonstrators at Euston Station. In the meantime the radio is still dead and he’s having tea with his enemy out of respect for their new mutual friend.

12:15

 

A Section 60 has been declared by the MET at Euston. Police reinforcements have been called with the intention of doing a ‘stop and search’ of all the cyclists for weapons. Two groups of about 100 people have broken through police lines, and are cycling around evading the police.

12:35

 

At Euston Station people are trying to get out of the plaza. On Trafalgar Square the police have surrounded the square in response to reports of ‘mass pigeon feeding.’ Anyone who was feeding the pigeons earlier has been corralled in.

12:46

 

An Anti-privatization South London Picnic is taking shape at Elephant & Castle with 300 protesters. Their numbers are growing. ‘Wombles’ are there. A sound system has arrived. People have been moved off the road onto the roundabout, which the press is calling a chilled out atmosphere.

12:47

 

More than 150 cyclists are congregated at Trafalgar Square amid whistling and cheers from a crowd of several hundred engaged in mass pigeon feeding in violation of a new city ordinance. The Met Police have closed in and surrounded the square under section 60. The pigeon feeders are informed via a loud speaker that they must ‘cease feeding the pigeons’ and ‘submit to a weapons search’ to leave the square or face certain arrest.

 

Like back in the day, thinks Andreas.

 

He and Lim Lim are pinned in on Trafalgar Square following the police issue of a section 60 order. Several thousand protesters have locked arms and have refused to be searched. She has been trying to get in touch with Joseph all day but keeps getting a recording that says his number is disconnected. What had been a more of a carnival than a show of force and resistance has hardened itself up surrounded by police.

 

Andreas manages to look protective and at the same time is having a good time as he reminisces about the pro M19 rallies he’d gone to in his youth in Medellin. He had sworn that Zachariah was trying to sleep with his girlfriend for weeks when she started talking about him. There’s this internationally accepted code that grown men don’t get to have sleepovers with people’s girlfriends. But the little American won him over. Zachariah really has his heart set on joining the FARC-EP. He didn’t think Americans thought like that, even ones from New York. And that’s why he is at this ridiculous protest. Back in his own country you could disappear for going to something like this. In the West this is a high-octane spectator sport, a throw back to the sixties at best, an aberration at worst. He can’t figure out how pigeon feeding has anything to with anti-capitalism. It’s like the hippy-dippy crap that Reclaim the Streets is known for. A few earthy-looking activists are dumping huge buckets of pigeon feed out around the statues. It is a pigeon feeding frenzy. And then he gets it. Andreas Kirk thinks the ordinance about pigeon’s is pretty ridiculous. It is like making a law about playing in the rain, which he wouldn’t put past Westminster. The square is flooded with lots of people who didn’t know there was going to be a lockdown. Mothers are rushing to get their kids through the checkpoints as protesters hang black and red syndicalist flags from the Trafalgar Square monument.

 

13:05

There are reports that there have been some major scuffles between protesters and police at Elephant and Castle where several thousand protesters are gathered.

Sarah Black thinks:

I haven’t had this much fun since that night with the three hot bi-sexual Dutch exchanges students and I took those Gypsy mushrooms in Eastern Europe.

 

The little affinity group of Sarah Black, Kristian and her had dumped a good ten gallons, or roughly 36 liters of red paint over the streets of London the night before as they sprayed and stickered the R33 message ‘Red is for the blood of capitalism!’ about the city while people slept. Now over twelve hours later they have lost contact with most of the other affinity groups and are fueled on a vague mix of idealism and Ritalin. And Red Bull and coffee and every other stimulant that would keep them moving.

 

She is having a ball with this revolution stuff. It is like a big rowdy rebel carnival that is increasingly getting out of control. A cinderblock hits a patrol car and forty of fifty Bobs have started spaying CS and pepper spray. A person gets arrested here and there but it doesn’t disrupt the general cadence of the chanting and the spirit of anarchic mirth. Someone gets a text saying there is a huge mass of protesters gathered on Oxford Circus and a few thousand surrounded at Euston Station. The numbers are relative. Affinity groups keep cross-texting reports of vandalism or resistance all over the city. The mob here at Elephant and Castle is a convergence of dozens of the organizing factions among them ‘Reclaim the Streets’ and their mobile bike powered sound system. Music is blaring. The police are moving in to try and surround the roundabout where the crowd has gathered.

 

Sarah Black sees a protester in a green uniform complete with armor made up like a green devil pick up a loud speaker to yell,

 

“The police are surrounding the roundabout. They mean to arrest everyone. Lock arms and move in columns. WE WILL CROSS THE THAMES TO UNITE WITH OUR BROTHERS AND SISTERS OCCUPYING THE OXFORD CIRCUS. We are just protesting. It is important that people come along. Forces of the state: YOUR PRESENCE IS UNNECESSARY.”

 

A series of short speeches come up after denouncing the capitalist machinations against the working people of the planet. These soap box orators and thousands of rebel supporters remind her of the movie Michael Collins. Her family had been Irish at one point. That movie is her only point of reference for any of this beyond what Kristian, Sarah Brown and the little prince have taught her. She hadn’t known what the first R33 meeting was about. She hadn’t expected to attend this riot even after the third meeting. The little prince and Kristian are anarchists and Sarah Brown is a liberal, but politics never made any sense to Sarah Black then or now and probably won’t ever. She calls Zach the little prince because like the youthful extraterrestrial in the world famous children’s book, he has come to bring a message of idealism to a people not his own who are unready to hear it. Interestingly enough Zach has never heard of the book and the phrase seems to annoy him. She sticks with it though finding it fitting. And here she is holding the lines to the little prince’s revolution doing her part. The crowd forms columns and lock arms. Solidarity is the only thing getting this mob to the other side of the river.

13:19

From Euston Station a report from a woman just searched: Most people still surrounded. Police are attempting to photograph everyone from above, being asked for names and addresses. But people are refusing and the police are accepting this in most cases.

Christian the Fairy thinks that being searched is about 100 percent better than being arrested.

 

And so he submits to the mass search taking places at Euston Station on every member of the crowd assembled. Walls of armored riot police have cordoned in the army of the great unwashed. The public address system keeps repeating that all assembled need to line up, present identification and submit to a search under order of Section 60. Christian is a fairy and a thespian, not an anarchist or some kind of revolutionary like his little American friend Zachariah. So he presents his driver’s license to the heavily armored patrol man after standing on the exit line because the loud speaker tells him they’ll put him in jail if he doesn’t. It is the most logical reaction. Just like he pays his taxes or shows a passport when he needsto go to a foreign country. You don’t have to love or hate the state to know it can make your life miserable. And you don’t have to be miserable if you play by its rules. Some people whisper about rushing the lines and making a stand. Christian cuts his losses. The stage is his stand not the streets. He wishes to live to fight another day. So he takes the wallet out at the checkpoint and walks away.

13:25

There are reports that Oxford and Regent Streets have been closed to traffic and that the tube stations have been sealed off around it. Protestors are moving quickly up Regent Street to join a crowd that has gathered outside Nike Town in Oxford Circus giving out Monopoly money and fortifying the circle.

Sarah Brown thinks she has heard the people sing.

 

The protestors have marched over the bridge to the north bank several thousand strong from Elephant and Castle. Text message and radio chatter say the demonstrators are taking over Oxford Circus and have been reinforced by hundreds that have fled the quarantines on Trafalgar Square and Euston Station. Reports are coming in that dozens have been arrested thus so far and that armored police vans are attempting to hem in the crowds on Oxford Street.

 

The white overalls come out of her bag as they cross over the Westminster Bridge. The WOMBLES begin to reveal themselves. Armor is being passed out from a van in the convoy. It happens suddenly without an order. It is time to drop the gang colors. They are nearly 200 strong. Shields are made of trashcan lids, lexan sheets and PVC piping. Some protesters put on what look like rugby pads. Others have donned various types of shin guards or sporting helmets. The Sarahs are not so much up for this. She passes the armor padding and white industrial overalls to Kristian and he changes in step as the parade goes forward.

 

The WOMBLES lock arms and move in Spartan phalanx position with their shields to the front of the column. Like a flying, irregular wedge they form a human spear to charge the police lines on the other side. Sarah Brown sees the black flag fly behind them. Their little army is advancing on the heart of the economic empire they detest. These aren’t the liberal ideas she grew up with in America or the Marxist notions learned in foreign universities. For the first time in her life she believes she is fighting for something. Her parents will be pissed if this turns into a bloody riot and she gets deported. But as she hears the drum beats and music and the roar of this crowd in the name of freedom, she feels very proud to be there. This black parade will hit a police checkpoint in about two minutes on the other side of the bridge, but instead of hippies with flowers, this crowd is armed with bricks, bottles and bandit masks.

13.46

Police estimate the number of demonstrators gathered at Oxford Circus to be around 3,000 strong. All exits from Oxford Circus are being blocked off with reinforced checkpoints being set up to contain them at the roundabout. Columns moving across the Westminster Bridge and Leicester square have engaged the Met in a melee at several choke points.

Arnold Suthabee thinks that between the alarm clock, the police sirens and the big angry mob, it’s a sign that he’s missed brunch at the yacht club.

He lives very close to the Elephant and Castle roundabout. He hears the crowd outside but sleeps through it nursing a white wine hangover. Grumpy yet feeling as though he did his bit with the checkbook, he turns on the telly to the BBC. Flips from there through the sound bites:

BBC News: Riot police are slowly dispersing about 1,500 anti-capitalist protesters penned in on London’s main shopping street.

Some of the 6,000 police drafted in for the demonstrations are still containing protesters at Oxford Circus and thousands more are engaged in various processions around the Capital.

Officers are “gradually” allowing people to leave the contained area around Euston Station in an attempt to minimize the risk of the groups reassembling at their declared rally point in Oxford Circus.

Police and demonstrators have come to blows in a series of minor scuffles during the day, but there has been no sign of the extensive rioting of a year ago with less than forty confirmed arrests.

Earlier, there were violent demonstrations in Australia and Germany as May Day prompted protests against multinational corporations and trade bodies around the world.

Buildings were blockaded in Melbourne and Sydney and dozens were arrested as police moved in with water cannon in Berlin.

Schools and a library in Westminster were closed on May Day and dozens of London businesses lost millions of pounds after being forced to shut.

Fifteen activists, masked by balaclavas, stormed into a Sainsbury’s store in central London screaming anti-capitalist chants, while others hurled concrete slabs at police.

Arnold Suthabee who had once wanted to be a WOMBLE settles on making revolution a spectator sport. He’s cast a bet and hopes to see his hobbyhorse materialize.

14:01

The police have established a fourth containment zone on Regent Street. Officers in riot gear replace officers in regular uniform policing the demonstration. Police come under attack from a hail of wine bottles, beer bottles and sticks as protesters from Elephant and Castle attempt to surge north over the bridge.

Kristian the Ecuadorian Anarchist thinks war!

He is one of the first to crash into the police line. The parade becomes a flying column as the thousand-strong procession headed by WOMBLES charge the couple-dozen officers stationed on the other side of the Westminster Bridge. He sees some WOMBLES pummeling a bob. The crowd tramples over the officers that are downed. Few of them put up much of a fight. A police van gets rolled over and set on fire. The mob is guided by text messages. Hundreds of other protesters are alerting the May Day Monopoly Emergency Dispatch about the locations of the slowly moving police column. It is like a huge civil war battle with sticks and CS stones. He lost the Sarahs when the fighting began. He’s advancing on London’s theater and commercial districts with 30 or 40 other WOMBLES.  A CS canister goes off near him but he’s got a good gas mask. A WOMBLE lobs the canister across the street into a mob of American tourists caught in the crossfire. Anyone who doesn’t have a gasmask or an onion or a vinegar soaked-rag is choking on their own tears.

Several hundred protesters who follow the WOMBLE flying column Kristian is with are on some back street near Piccadilly Circus. People are texting and coordinating on their Nextells. The much larger WOMBLE column, 140 plus and the rest of the procession are north of Oxford Circus. A huge police cordon has hemmed in a couple thousand people in the roundabout. Any minute now both WOMBLE columns and the protesters will begin to storm the Circus and break the cordon. There are people passing by the side street looking with hatred, indifference, annoyance, glee, terror, awe and shock at the 40 WOMBLES leading the people’s army that has the undivided attention of the British government and media. This breather is short-lived. With the aid of the CCTV’s and birds-in-the-sky, riot cops come charging down the street right behind the column. As the riot cops advance into the smaller side street, they are met with a rain of bottles, rocks, trash and a homemade smoke bombs that envelope the street in thick, white phosphorous smoke. The smoke and improvised shrapnel cover the crowd’s retreat/advance on Oxford Circus.

14.04Scotland Yard says 42 people have been arrested and several officers have been hospitalized as the May Day Demonstrations in central London escalate. Police in riot gear and protesters remain in a tense standoff at Oxford Circus as other groups of demonstrators attempt to join them. The police are sending snatch squads into the crowd on the northwest corner of the crossroads at Regent Street.

Thinks Shannon O: “The best laid plans a mice and men.”

 

She and Kristy had been out all night. They’d smashed nearly twenty cameras running back and forth across London. They’d been apprehended twice but mini-skirts and cow eyes do numbers on the police forces of any city. She’d gotten a call in the morning saying that Zach got knicked the night before. But then anther call at noon saying he was with the WOMBLES trapped in Oxford Circus. Then nothing at all. James and Thomas broke contact before sunrise. Cathy never showed up at the rally point. A few times she checked in with the R33 Dispatcher Joseph but he didn’t have much news other than the American girls and the Latin American guy Kristian were wreaking a limited havoc across North London. Those nuttas in MK Ultra are as likely to be taking sonograms of housing projects as they are legitimately engaging in operations. The motley band of R33 is as likely to be as gone by May the 2nd as the WOMBLES. The idea behind it is good. It answers the May Day Monopoly call for do-it-your-self-shake-and-bake resistance. They can’t shut down something that is not centrally coordinated.

 

Like the little American she had come to London to learn to be a rebel. Albeit for the cause of a free Northern Ireland not and internationalist socialism, but she had bonded with over the notion of the former empire as the training ground for the modern urban guerrilla.

She and Kristy both have on their white overalls. They have linked up with the WOMBLE column north of Oxford Circus and are getting ready for the big push into the mousetrap. What had gone on all night were hundreds of flying squads striking at targets without any centralized guidance. Arrests hadn’t exceeded five citywide. R33 is just one of dozens of affinity groups that have answered the call. Now the tactics are catering to the media’s lust for shows of force. Knocking out CCTV cameras, splashing paint and banner drops aren’t sensational enough. A white-overalled column attacking police lines in the major shopping district is what everyone is after.

It is impractical. Once the two WOMBLE columns from Elephant and Castle link with mobs from Euston Station and Trafalgar square, the number will be right to storm the lines. Once they break through to Oxford circus they will be completely surrounded with no reinforcements and no way out. But they’ll have all the cameras on them maybe as many as 4,000 black flags flying.

It dawns on her as she pulls the black balaclava over her reddish-brown hair that this is not a demonstration as much as is a last stand. Everyone loves a well-intentioned suicide mission and all of her comrades inside the Circus will be arrested anyway. She positions herself to be at the head of the charge. But why charge if they can just slip through the lines. Shannon O urges the crowd to be quiet and has the WOMBLES help form everyone up into a long line two by two.

14:36

A group of 600 to 1,000 people has broken through the police lines on the North side of Oxford Circus. The group was led by around 40 “Wombles” protesters dressed in white overalls and padding.

Spider thinks it is a terrific idea that he sent his bike back to the base with that Hungarian broad.

 

He has never put himself through so much adversity to get laid. He’s got a black bandana tied around his face but has to keep snorting on a vinegar rag that this blonde dreddy-bird gives him because the CS is rolling at them constantly. They started at King’s Cross. Then the Section 60 containment went into effect. He and Jatz took seven protesters through the lines on their rickshaws claiming they’d been hemmed in while eating breakfast. They all still had to show ID’s but the WOMBLE gear is secured in the compartment under the two rickshaw bikes so they do well enough. Jatz, fearing deportation but also not getting enough female attention, heads back to the West End. Spider, wanting sex more than fearing arrest, calls up the Hungarian broad to take over his bike for the night. And then the cute blond dreddy tied a bandana around his neck and told him they were off to storm the Circus. Fuck. Yeah! he thinks. This day is just like the Wild Wild West. Just off Piccadilly Circus, he watches the anarchist broad named Lady Bug and her comrades adjust their armor, mask their faces and prepare for war. Harboring terrorists and now joining them to pursue tail, albeit violent anarchist tail, is the slipperiest slope ever. And all he has was a shitty black rag of a mask.

The mob he is with has over 600 people coming from Elephant and Castle. They’d broken through the lines just over Westminster and left a trial of vandalism and mayhem as they marched north toward the big rally point at Oxford Circus. Spider thinks he recognizes some girls Zach had brought around once. They recognize him because he has huge pink, reddish-blond dreds.

“Spider, right? You’re one of Zach’s work mates?” yells Sarah Black over the chanting.

He doesn’t remember the spunky American’s name but had gotten drinks with her a month ago to talk shop about May Day.

“Indeedy.” Spider answers.

“You seen the Little Prince today?” asks Sarah.

“Nope. Heard he got knicked on Old Street this morning,” Spider said.

“Who told ya that?”

“I don’t remember. Lim Lim maybe.”

“You’re in touch with her? We’ve been reporting to Joseph the Isreali,” Sarah said.

“I don’t even have his number. Lim Lim had me on ressupply for today. I wasn’t in a squad last night.” Spider said.

“So what’s the plan now?”

“Lim Lim says everyone that is still at large is in this area or about to break through the lines. My little blonde WOMBLE over there says that Oxford Circus is the rally point.”

“We lost Kristian somewhere crossing the bridge. I think he’s with the other WOMBLE column. We heard they snuck through the lines.”

“We won’t have it that easy from the sound of things.”

14:55

Police faced a hail of bricks from close range as protesters forced their way into Oxford Circus. Demonstrators attempted to break the windows of the Niketown store by hurling bricks but the windows held. Wooden boards used to secure various retail stores were pried off and lit a blaze in the center of the roundabout.

Ilya thinks he likes Oxford Circus like this.

 

The reinforcements arrive right in time. About a thousand come off some unguarded streets from the north and another thousand have just assaulted the lines on Regent Street and broken through. WOMBLES carry flags at the heads of both columns. Now the demonstrators go wild. Ilya and Helene had gone last year but weren’t really in the thick of things. There they are at ground zero on a bet as to whether Zachariah will get knicked or will make to the big rally point by 3 pm. Helene bets on knicked and Ilya agrees but wanted to put some faith in a pupil.

 

Ilya heard the whole plan because he’s been there every step of the way since its conception. He views its completion like a teacher might grade a paper of any other homework assignment. The flying squad that is meant to be composed of Christian, Helene and him never totally coalesces. First, Helene is far too immature to be put to work in anyone’s machinations of urban warfare. Second, Christian is a fairy not a fighter. Third, Ilya is too old for a stand-up fight in the streets of London. When things get hairy, which they will before long, he will get his ward out of the Circus before the heel falls. And fall it will. With the fire burning and the cameras rolling and a couple of choppers in the sky above it is getting very Grant Morrison around here. Ilya wants Helene to see it so she can visualize the things Zachariah always talks about at the bar with him and Christian. He’s always known that Zachariah doesn’t like him, or certainly doesn’t approve of the relationship he has with Helene.

 

The riot cops have closed down every entrance to the Circus. A group of anarchists have run out of bricks to throw. Makeshift missiles are being launched into the ranks of the riot cops left and right, but there are only so many things you can throw. The roundabout is all concrete. The crowd feels empowered, but iss completely surrounded now. The masses have taken the stage and quite a few people are waiting for the ACT II. The Met films everything. Only some of the crowd wear masks. WOMBLES stand guard around the core. A police PA blares.

 

‘You are being detained here to prevent a breach of the peace and criminal damage to property. You will be released in due course.’

 

The riot police are not allowing anyone into or out of the intersection of Oxford Street and Regent Street. The announcements declare a fifth Section 60 to be imposed and now the several thousand strong May Day demonstration is to be locked down and dispersed. The containment is erratic. Some get released if they look non-militant and will agree to be searched and photographed. A tense spoke’s council is going on in the nucleus of the square. Over sixty factions and large affinity groups are represented.

 

The R33 members that Ilya recognizes that have broken through are being counted among either the WOMBLES or not at all when it comes to the council. Ilya had volunteered only one thing concretely at the final R33 meeting and that was that he would be on hand at the Oxford Circus at 3 pm to do a headcount then report it to dispatch.  Ilya makes eyes at Spider, the three Irish girls, and Kristian with a K from Latin America. He gives a wave to the two Sarah’s from America. MK Ultra folks are missing. Christian went home earlier. Suthabee the bankroller never showed. Daphne Collins had been at Trafalgar but isn’t here. He knows this because he’d just spoken to Lim Lim after doing the headcount. Lim Limias at the home of an Arab named Zayid along with her boyfriend Andreas and the girl pal of Zachariah, Daphne Collins.  He supposes the Irish brothers have gotten themselves arrested.  And Zachariah, too. No one has heard from him or seen him since the morning.

 

After he does the headcount, Ilya looks around for Helene who is smoking fags with Spider and the blonde WOMBLE he is chatting up. To Zach’s credit the little American has done an all right job. He won’t know numbers until the debriefing Zach wants to have on Karl Marx’s grave May 3. But talking to Kristian and Shannon O give him some idea of the damage that has been done. It is much more than he expected, but even if it had it been only one banner not three, one bucket poured of painted blood not many, or one CCTV camera bashed in not ‘god only knew,’ the little American was utilizing everything he could muster to bring anarchy to the UK. And Ilya begrudgingly admires that. He hopes the boy is proud sitting in whatever prison the brutal pigs have thrown him in.

 

Helene pulls on his jacket sleeve and says, “Hava look see. They’re kicking in the windows of the H & M. Thas like my second favoritust store!”

 

A Black Bloc has torn off the protecting boards, passed them to a fire that was burning in the center of the circle and a couple young men with bats take out the window. Police rush to try and stop further damage and someone rips a Molotov that ignites a storefront. Eventually the bloc is beaten back to the safety of the crowd, which responds with cheers and missiles. The war of attrition has begun just begun for the streets of central London.

 

“I fuckin love H & M! Why’d they go en do that?” yells Helene as thick plumes of smoke roll out of the flaming store front windows.

15:42

Police have closed the Waterloo, Lambeth, Vauxhall and Hungerford Bridges to pedestrians, Scotland Yard said. Police on Regent Street are launching another baton charge in new clashes with demonstrators after some of the crowd moves north to Cavendish Square and then stormed through the line of police in Holles Street.

Sprocket thinks to himself that he is something worse than a traitor or a coward.

 

Sprocket is a cover. While the political sympathies he professes, as an undercover informant are not his own, his sympathies have grown for the views of the English radicals he spied on the more time he spent in their company.

 

And there he sits in the van rented by a Lord’s son Arnold Suthabee. The real marks had been picked up already only partially due to his information. The MK Ultra Collective members he had come with from the Oxford countryside are all in jail. They’d been picked up in the early morning at Old Street. All five of them are suspected to be an ELF-ALF cell responsible for various attacks on Huntington Labs employees and for other acts of terror and vandalism. The MET got them in connection with the failed drop. They will be charged separately based upon their files. He’s lived in their commune for over a year. They, like this cluster-fuck the Romola 33 Collective thought of him as ‘simple Sprocket’ who told yarns about mind control and is too fried from LSD to be a WOMBLE. Half the WOMBLES are undercovers anyway. His MET handlers had explained to him that the anarchists shun hierarchy. They seem to embrace a horizontal organization where affinity groups and flying columns replace regimented chains of command. You can always pass some Bobs off as an anarchist cell but never really get them into a position of power to know when these actions might go off. This morning is a good example.

 

The leader of this Romola 33 Collective, the American Sebastian Adon has been in a cell since before daybreak, but his little science project has been running amuck. There have only been two meetings. Even if Sprocket had photographed the maps in the basement he only knows what MK Ultra had volunteered to do because the four other flying squads the American had recruited  secretly picked their own routes and targets. He thought being on the supply van would make it easy but Adon had him drive in a huge circle all night dropping supplies that are getting picked up before he can call the MET.

 

Tony Perchance who everyone thinks has gone missing, resurfaced to tighten up R33 security in the 11th hour.

 

Tyler Boyar Dim, the undercover agent named Sprocket had been told to put a GPS unit in the van, but Lim Lim and Tony had rented it with cash one hour before they went out. Tony searched everyone at gunpoint before apportioning the supplies. All cell phones not belonging to the squad leaders were switched off and handed over. So he was flying blind all night as he made his rounds and the flying squads did their damage. Finally, around 5 am they stopped at Old Street Roundabout to hang the last ‘HOW MUCH MONEY DOES ONE MAN NEED’ banner.

 

The MK Ultra crew left him alone with the van and he promptly called his handlers from a payphone. The Bobs rolled up with Adon and one of the MK ULTRA girls named Day Glow, hanging off the roundabout in rappelling harnesses. The banner had been hung but not secured. A bit of chasing down an empty highway and some truncheon swings later the American Sebastian Adon called Zachariah Artstein became the first R 33 member to be detained.

 

The rest of the MK Ultra flying squad got knicked a few minutes later back at the van.

 

The MET went through the motions of arresting Sprocket too, but released him soon after and here he is sitting in the impounded van behind a station house feeling like Judas the traitor.

 

His handlers railed at him for not knowing the locations of vital things like the dispatch command of R33 or the May Day Monopoly where the remaining four flying squads are and what their targets are, the location of other ring leaders like Lim Lim Simon and Tony Perchance, and finally that some seventy CTV cameras have gone down over the course of the night and his intelligence had been ‘chickenshit.’

 

Why had Tyler Boyar Dim, Sprocket’s true name turned into a traitor? To avoid two years down country in a national prison for being a petty Meth dealer. His handlers told him to spy on the radicals or go to prison. Now they own him. The assignment to May Day had happened long before the creation of Romola 33 and was simply part of the broad ongoing effort to curb eco-terrorist activities in the Kingdom. That a random American radical would recruit such a motley band of radicals and bond them to some hybrid anarcho-Irish structure was pure luck. That the core of this group seemed to trust MK Ultra so little made it really difficult to supply the MET with any hard facts. His quick report about this shake-and-bake operation was written off as less critical than the plans to arrest the ALF cell to which he was assigned. And so R33 even without a leader unleashed its unhappy worst.

 

Boyar didn’t feel very popular or cool. He has just betrayed the only people that ever cared about him except maybe his now-deceased aunt. Worse, he helped imprison a young man that for the first time made him believe. The rhetoric the MK Ultra hippies espoused was flower power, firepower and earthy crap. He’d only spent an evening with Mr. Adon and the boy had told him everything about his violent American days and his mission through the revolution. Boyar betrayed him and now Sebastian sits in a prison cell facing deportation. The English have deep and unsettling hatred for foreigners in general and have long viewed them as the radical fifth column at home. Boyar feels like jumping off a bridge. Or hanging himself. His adopted comrades will surely be jailed for a confirmed and recorded set of house fires they have perpetrated against Huntington Lab scientists. They will send the boy to France.

 

Boyar the vile traitor contemplates a suicide he knew he didn’t even have the courage to carry out. His comrades from the ELF are surely hung already. As a last silent act of contrition he decides not to implicate the young American calling himself Zachariah Artstein.

16:20

Officers, some on horseback and some wielding batons and shields, exchange blows with demonstrators at several points around Oxford Circus. Riot police clash violently with protesters in the flashpoint area of Holles Street just off the roundabout. The violence is escalating as the weather worsens.

Helene, also a fairy, doesn’t know what to think of the riot in which she has become entrapped.

She calls Fairy Tink for a consultation. They totally agree that more ‘fairy power’ and fewer ‘Lumping Proletarians’ is the secret to a better world. As the rain comes down and the skirmishes over what to smash become more vicious, she gets hungrier and more tired. She whines to Ilya that she wants to leave. There is nowhere to use the toilet. The fire in the center will burn out soon. The hardcore elements of the protest are finishing their strange meeting over what to do. Suddenly she remembers Zachy and knows he has been arrested at some point over the day. She hopes that the Bobs haven’t clobbered him too hard because he is quite a nice person for an American although she wouldn’t let him ever have his way with her.

Unless of course he’d marry her so she could move to the United States, which is where the real fairies are. But if she marries him she’ll have to sign a prenuptial agreement because he is a penniless orphan and she just plays one in London. She is really the heiress of a sizable estate in Surrey once she turns eighteen in two years. Even Ilya doesn’t know that she is a little princess in disguise playing dead to spite her father.

These are the racing thoughts of Fairy Helene as she watches the revolution run its course on Oxford Circus. Hardened riot police are forming vast and impregnable ranks on all the streets leading into the Circus. There is no way out and now Helene goes back to being the helpless little child-love of Ilya the fearless Russian DJ. She created her disguise and will stick with it a while longer. Zach is in jail, but she has no desire to be.

“Ilya, I have to wee. Take my hand and let’s cross the police line.”

For a variety of reasons he goes along. He wishes Kristian and his remaining comrade’s luck. The boot is about to come down on them all.

17:50

41 people have now been arrested. The London ambulance service said that 15 officers have sustained serious injuries with many more protesters taken to hospital for a variety wounds.

18:35

At Oxford Circus as police move in to arrest the protester believed to be one of the May Day Monopoly leadership, they are forced back by a volley of missiles outside the boarded up windows of Niketown. Oxford Circus is now totally sealed off at the junction with the eastern part of Oxford Street. There is no indication when the remaining 1,000 people crammed into the sealed-off Oxford Circus area will be released.

19:10

Police and protesters remain in a tense and uneasy standoff in Oxford Circus. The demonstrators have been penned in by riot police and are awaiting permission to leave the area. Despite assurances against arrest this hardcore of protesters refuses to abandon control of the roundabout.
Tony Perchance never got caught up in that Oxford circus mess.

 

He is sitting with about twenty geezers from his boxing club in a pub watching most of May Day on a telly. Him an iz mates are at the same speakeasy on Tottenham Court road that Zach had brought him to the first night the kid had gone on about God and revolutions. He’d done his bit with Zach the night before. Nursed the all-nighter off with three or a dozen pints, now pissed but refreshed will take his boys out for a run on the Bobs. Not fer the revolution, not fer the boy. It is a working class rage that him an iz mates are gonna let fly on the Bobs cause they are all stuck at shite jobs or on the dole about to turn 30. Zach has put some words in him an he then relates them to his mates. Everyone knows ya can hit a cop on May Day an be out by Tuesday in the proper context.

 

They don’t have white overalls. If some of his dozen have taken out cameras the night before it is cuz they had mates down country servin’ time for smoking weed or have gotten a meter ticket too many. But that is enough for his flying squad to have done more damage than any of the more radical ones had. There is solidarity and rage you can’t drum up with an ideology.

 

The twelve of Tony’s club have various type of black attire on. The bank roller Arnold Suthabee had bought everyone a balaclava. Somebody has a small bat. A couple have some brass knuckles. With thousands of cops and robbers exchanging blows at Oxford Circus, Tony has a plan that needs no approval from a leadership that is unreachable anyway.  He unleashes his flying column on Tottenham Court Road.

 

20:31

Scotland Yard has said about 50 to 60 of the protesters contained in the Oxford Circus had broken away onto Regent Street at about 8:30 pm. More than 20 shop front windows on the road were smashed with rocks and other missiles, including those of Bank of Scotland, Abbey National, Royal Bank of Scotland, Barclays Bank, Coffee Republic and Habitat. A running battle seems to be taking place now on Tottenham Court Road.

Thinks Kristy: FUCKFUCKFUCKFUCKFUCKFUCKFUCKFUCK.

She is running down Tottenham Court Road through a cloud of CS and broken glass as rubber bullets go off around her amid yells and general chaos. She pauses for a quickly to spray paint FUCK THE POLICE on a wall while the WOMBLES next to her bring a bat through the window of a franchise coffee bar. It has turned into a smash and burn operation.

First they were penned up in the Circus and everyone figured it was mass-arrest time. The spoke’s council of the groups represented opted to rush each street one by one in hopes that some people could break out. It is the proper art of war. Keep them guessing where we’d make a real charge. We’d run out of boards to burn and missiles to lob. We are tired and hungry and they have the place locked up good. Anarchists don’t like tight spaces.

Most of the charges are bloody failures. Heads keep getting bashed in. But finally some of us broke through on Regent and fifty of us went tumbling across town rolling towards the West End. I saw that American girl get clubbed at the line. I didn’t stop cuz we had to get across. Whether she got knicked, I can’t say.

 

Kristy sees Kristian throw a trashcan through a window. She sees a crowd trying to turn a BMW over. They settle for taking out its windows.
They keep running and running in their white overalls joined by men in solid black that could be radicals or just opportunists. Some fat American gets in her way as she runs. He looks like he’s trying to stop her, trying to play a hero without knowing the score of the sides. He’s much bigger than her and is wearing a stupid polo shirt. She breaks his nose in front of his kids. Her fist makes his face crunch and he falls over bleeding on himself.

 

There is smoke and tear gas all the way up the street. She runs past the Orange Internet café where she and Shannon O first met Zach. Where is that kid? He’s missing the whole thing.   Pigs on horses and rows of riot police at a trot are rounding the corners behind them. There are a lot of windows broken with no differentiation between capitalist target and community business, like the fat American they just put themselves on the wrong side of a long and ambiguous war.Shannon O finally grabs her by the arm and drags her down a tiny side street where the masks and overalls come off. They are near the dispatch command at a flat owned by the Arab Zayid. The streets are too hot. They need to seek asylum.

21:13

“They regrouped very quickly and overturned a few cars as they went. They tried to set fire to Tesco’s in Goodge Street,” a police spokesman said. ” Some of them were arrested. Tension in the area remains high.” Nearby, British Transport Police closed the Goodge Street tube station after the attack and the Tottenham Court Road tube was also reported to be shut. After the battle on Tottenham Court Road, the army of the great unwashed evaporated into the numerous pubs and clubs of the West End sheltered by sympathizers.

Thinks Zayid: ‘It’s the after party!’

 

The safe house is packed with returning fighters. They are calculating scores. They are nursing blunt trauma with pints of beer. They are congratulating each other on not having become an arrest or a casualty. The mop-up operations are underway. There isn’t a curfew or anything good and totalitarian, but there is this nice feeling of almost everyone making it back to base. Almost everyone.

 

One of the Irish young women, Shannon O, is passed out with a comforter in the bathtub face covered in a cold moist cloth. She’d taken a hit or two with a truncheon. She told Lim Lim that she and Kristy had gotten about ten cameras down before joining the WOMBLES. They’d found Cathy in the West End. She was with a group of Critical Mass members that thought it foolish to get surrounded in Oxford.  Shannon O and Kristy had covered a trail from East to West going after cameras in the Pakistani neighborhoods.

 

While Shannon O sleeps the other two girls from Erin are pouring shots of some cheap Russian vodka and laughing out loud to hold back fears about the two of them that didn’t come back, the two brothers who couldn’t be reached on their phones. Zayid has never met any of these Irish rebels before. One of the girls called Zach’s phone and he picked up because the Israelite told him that Zach’s phone was the emergency number if the CV radio went down for some reason. The girl had called, and the Israelite was napping so he said they could take refuge at the flat. Now they are drinking all his vodka and wine because they are worried about their comrade lovers, the brothers with different last names.

 

The two Sarah’s, Black and Brown, are black and blue and without their Ecuadorian. Amused by this stream of radical women from other countries that keep arriving at the safe house, Zayid places a large order for pizza and Turkish food to feed Zach’s little band of veterans. He’s never met the Sarah’s, but Zach is such a confident storyteller that Zayid swears he knows these people. Like the Irish fighters, their man has fallen or has been apprehended. An Irish girl said she’d seen Kristian during the fighting on Tottenham Court Road. She thought that he made it out with some of the WOMBLES but his phone had been dead. The Americans sat around the TV and watched reports of the final containment efforts after marking the map with their drop, splash, and take- down efforts.

 

Tony Perchance had called about an hour after the Irish girl and the Sarah’s Black and Blue. Zayid had met Tony once before at a rave. Tony came by himself to report to Lim Lim that his flying squad had done a real number in two prongs. Tony says Zach had left him sometime around 5:30 am to make a run on the Old Street Roundabout. He put quite a few marks on the map on the wall and everyone there gives him and his squad a round of applause. He says there are about twenty guys who’d helped out but they had no class or respect for women so he left them at the bar to make his report. Only one of his guys got knicked and they are going to go down and make trouble ‘til they get him a court date and a bail amount.

 

Zayid can’t help but notice that this is the only English citizen in the whole organization. Every other fighter is a foreigner.

 

Of supporting members that escaped trouble, Spider (and the little blonde anarchist he didn’t come with), Ilya, Christian the Fairy, Helene and Daphne Collins are all pretty English too, but the fighters have all been from the former Empire. The Americans and Irish and company making a payback strike.

 

Besides the brothers James and Thomas, along with the Latin American Anarchist Kristian, there are quite a few more missing. Zayid suddenly notes that makes three Christians in this band– Christian the fairy, Kristian the Anarchist, and Kristy the rebel of Erin. What can that mean? Two whole flying squads are missing. The MK Ultra Crew and Mr. Artstein, the man of the hour that had brought this legion of strangers together.

 

The flat is thick with smoke. Nearly everyone has a cigarette. People keep bumming Zayid’s Marlboros but he doesn’t mind. He’s never met most of these people, nor would they ever meet again. His house feels like a scene from some 1960’s terrorist conspiracy, the rebel groups sharing a house one last night before they depart back to their intersecting Jihads. It is the United Nations of the revolution he once believed in when he fought the Americans and Zionists in Lebanon back in 1982. People like Yoseph the Israelite, Ilya the Russian anarchist, Andreas Kirk from Colombia and him are the elder statesmen of the room who have nothing in common other than they remember themselves in Mr. Artstein. They are also the only people that know his real name because he  trusted them with it in the trusting way that made you love him. The fighters are all young men and women in their late teens and early twenties. They love Zach too because he has an old soul and balls. And he is fearless like everyone thought an American is supposed to be.  He is an ambassador, a stranger in a strange land letting people know that there are freedom fighters still being born in the belly of the beast.

 

So Zayid opened one of his apartments as a safe house for this army of good ideals. He imagines young Mr. Artstein in some poorly lit English cell wondering if the blow his band has struck is felt. For a person like Mr. Artstein it never will be. Zayid figures everyone in the house know some different part of Mr. Artstien’s story.  The beauty of this story is that it contains most of the universal truths and emotions of the human experiences necessary for the boy to relate himself to his people.

 

All except one.

 

Zayid has spent a great deal of time listening to the boy talk about himself through the revolution. In a short life the boy has made himself articulate and tough. He has mastered empathy, passion, and has learned much about suffering, vengeance, redemption and hate. But Zayid, looking at all these young men and women who love the boy, the ‘Little Prince’ as he heard one of the Sarah’s call him, knows that the boy does not love them except for their role in his little revolution. Zayid knows them because the boy confided in him everything about his army. He knows that Mr. Artstein is a protector of lost girls, gluttonous for older and younger brothers to cover his desire to see his real brother Bejammin. He knnow that Mr. Artstien’s parents are not really dead, but in a sense they are his role models. The boy needs ten thousand mentors to rain endless questions upon.

 

He knows the boy had once been very much in love with a girl named Roxanne who had broken his heart. He knoww the boy has dedicated the whole revolution to her, or fooled himself into thinking this. Allah only knows. But none of this recruiting or collecting of people and knowledge and battle plans can teach the boy of love. Like the Count of Monte Cristo himself, the boy’s machinations are birthed more of hate than of a righteous love of freedom.

 

Zayid thinks these things as he drinks his wine. His hospitality and protection extend to this army, even the hated Israelite, because he loves the boy. The boy if he survives the trials of his youth will be a great leader one day. Zayid will be proud to say he was there for the first battle on the streets of London that first of May. A few calls later and they find out what prison Zachariah is being held in. Of the Irish brothers, there is no sign.

22:40

Police have finally released most of the people detained at Oxford Circus. Some of those detained began to get violent when they realized they were going to be held indefinitely. Tensions rose. The police gradually imposed a process of searching, photographing and releasing people one by one. Virtually all were released by 11 pm. Much of the West End is now like a militarized zone with riot police on every corner and vanloads more on every side street, as the police start to disperse those who were still in the streets adjacent Oxford Circus. Several hundred storefronts have been smashed in excluding Nike Town, which remained secure throughout the day.

Daphne Collins thinks that Zach would have really liked seeing all of these different people relaxing after a long day of anarchy. There are so many interesting people in this man Zayid’s house. Israeli soldiers turned Med students, Irish Fenians, working class football hooligans, American university students, dreadlocked and Indonesian rickshaw pilots, fairies and even a gay Black Panther. As the demonstration peters out the thirty-three odd comrades acquired by her American lover nurse wounds and share drinks and stories. When war stories run out, they begin to feel like comrades both in arms and drink. They talk of their wild and different backgrounds, of how they came to dark and windy London washed in rain.

 

They all got to this flat in different ways. First, through Zach’s art, then by his words, then by each other’s reinforcements. If Zach has been arrested, they’ll deport him. But other than missing him, this has no affect on Romola 33, which is disbanded already.

 

“A single outfit for a singular mission composed of irregular forces,” he told her in bed one night.

 

That it has been.

 

If he is an immature and disappointing lover, he is a dear inspiration. It is odd how she talks of him like he is dead. Like most of the elder statesmen present she knows him also as Sebastian Adon. She had snuck a peek at his passport one morning while he slept. It is not a bad name, but she imagine that there is something he hated about himself so much he needed a new identity. She does not like to play Freud with men she shags but he is a character that collects great characters. She will never bring him to meet her parents but will always think sweetly of him. One day he’ll be dead for the things he believes. She had nodded off and awakened thinking he was already dead. She called him, which brought her to Zayid who assured her that Allah, his God, protected the boy and watched over him even in a Brixton prison.  Zayid tells her she will see him on the grave of Karl Marx according to the plan. Like many a good man the boy might not know a thing about love or how to make it, but you can admire person dedicated to the preservation of their word.

23:43

Some 75 demonstrators have now been arrested in today’s protests across the capital, seven of them “foreign nationals,” police said. Police representatives say all of the dangerous radical leadership have been identified and placed behind bars.

Sebastian, who to most in England is called Zachariah, has been sitting in a small, clean white cell for what seems like a very long time.

The only thing the police don’t take is the MDM guidebook, which seems both sad and ironic. They have also not taken his name, as he carries no identification. His bag is in the home of Daphne Collins and his papers are with his family friend Aziz.

The MET doesn’t know anything about him, so they have held him for some time as they decide on some charges other than ‘going equipped,’ which is all they can really prove he did.

0101, May 2nd

 

In total 91 people have been arrested over the course of the riots, 17 have been charged for serious offences and at least 20 of them have already been held without bail. Charges range from violent disorder to possession of cannabis; destruction of CCTV cameras and public property; assault to simply ‘going equipped’.

 

Section 2.6 of the May Day Monopoly guidebook is entitled DON’T GO TO JAIL.

I seem to have missed that suggestion early in the game. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn I was the very first person arrested.

 

There is a bleeding wound on the back of my head. The cell is small and sterile and constantly illuminated with neon high beams. I’m in a very British jail. It’s very proper as far as prisons go. Not dirty and barbaric like I’d have imagined a prison to be. I wonder if I’m in a special cell just for Americans. I’ve been in police custody a couple times before but I’ve never been arrested and thrown in a cell before. It’s more imposing than a quiet room. There’s a tiny CCTV camera watching over me, a small urinal and sink, a small cot with a cheap mattress for a doze.   So I take one because I’ve been here quite a while and haven’t decided to give them my name yet.

 

I read the guidebook to kill time and keep my mind off my failures.

 

My eyes begin to close. I nod off unevenly. The cot is built into the wall and designed for utility not comfort. How long I have been in this room is completely unknown to me.

Eventually, I hide the book under the thin mattress and try and go to sleep as if this will hasten my liberation. I find a dead and uncomfortable slumber not long after.

 

***

 

I hear a tapping. I’m still in the sterile white cell, a bit of 1984 in 2001. I am still sore where I got clipped with a truncheon on the left shoulder and behind the head.  The gig is undone. I’ve been captured and my comrades surely all put to death or suffering under torture. I will tell them nothing. The tapping on the wall continues.

 

In the desert during our attempted exodus Mike Washington, who is apparently now quite dead, taught me about many things.

 

Nights around the campfire while we were keeping watch over the girl and her unborn child, he’d tell me of the old ways, of the one true God. He taught me the way of the gun as well as odd languages like Gaelic and dredyl, dice and hand signs. He told me the secret of language was not in the words but in what needed to be communicated so bad as to transcend language. Like how I learned to love the girl in red listening only to her beating heart.

 

The tapping went on dull and metallic like the Samuel Morse code.

 

The last things I remember came in many parts all happening at the same time. Being cast out of my tribe at the oasis was perhaps the worst. I remember my column being betrayed and surrounded on Old Street.

 

I remember being as powerless to stop Rosy’s rape as I was to keep my fighters from being arrested. I remember being separated from Mike Washington. The betrayal and capture of the old man, the brutalization of the pregnant Russian girl we were trafficking, and the slaughter of Mike at the hands of the firing squad. The darkness had swallowed us. I remember when the clown strung me up and tortured me. I remember boots kicking my head and the clown pissing on my face. ‘TELL ME YOUR REAL NAME,’ the fat bastard yelled as I bled handcuffed to a chair.

 

All over the city my fighters were engaging the enemy without me. I was in the hands of the beast.

 

May 2nd, 04:22

 

The various embassies of the arrestees have been contacted and their consulate staffs have been  informed that pending charges made official the next day, all seven internationals are likely to be deported.

 

More tapping on the wall I’m staring deeply into. I remember when Mike Washington taught me the Samuel Morse code on an old tin washboard.  I forgot the past too easy and too often. The tapping is a message. Over and over again, maybe for me, maybe just to testify.

 

DaDitDaDitDitDADADDit.

 

It keeps repeating over and over. I put my head to the iron caste white wall.

 

DaDitDaDitDitDADADDit. DaDitDaDitDitDADADDit.

 

OXFORD CIRCUS HAS FALLEN. NO REINFOREMENTS ARE COMING.YOU NEED TO TELL THEM YOUR NAME. REPEAT: UNDER THE TERMS OF SURRENDER YOU MUST GIVE THEM YOUR REAL NAME.

 

It comes over one more time.

 

OXFORD CIRCUS HAS FALLEN. NO REINFOREMENTS ARE COMING.YOU NEED TO TELL THEM YOUR NAME. REPEAT: UNDER THE TERMS OF SURRENDER YOU MUST GIVE THEM YOUR REAL NAME.

 

***

 

I’m awakened by the clank of the door being unbolted. Two uniformed British cops beacon for me to follow them. No rest for the wicked, but no name for the pigs.

 

 

May 2nd, 07:55

 

Most of the damage caused over the course of the protest has been cleaned up by dawn. All CCTV cameras that were destroyed have been reinstalled. The only remaining traces of the demonstration are some puddles of red paint dried in a few public squares their messages no longer legible.

 

I’m not sure whether I’m dreaming or awake. I don’t know what time of day it is. I know I’ve been fed three times. It’s not like in the movies. Everything is really clean. They even asked me if I have any special dietary needs. Like vegetarian, vegan Hillel, or Kosher.  I go with Kosher pretty amazed at the highly civilized way they seem to engage in their Fascism. I still haven’t given them a name. Twice they’ve sat me down to process me and twice I’ve been returned to the cell for not cooperating. I don’t even know what day it is or if the demonstration is going on. They don’t ask me any questions other than my name. I figure they’ll let me go once the streets are cleared. I take another nap. They even had tea in my Kosher prison meals.

 

Dit dadadditditditddadadaddditi.

 

Really rapid tapping.

 

I was going to be released if I cooperated. Mike Washington was dead.

 

Oxford Circus had fallen.           No reinforcements were coming. Mike Washington was confirmed dead. Body not recovered.

 

I need to give my name but withhold my rank.

 

***

 

The tapping has stopped. I am awake. I’m still in the cell. A dinner tray has been left at the door pushed through a metal sliding grate. If I have been imprisoned for 24 hours or 48 hours, I have no idea. They have taken me out to question me twice. The second time I got the impression it was really bad out there, as if perhaps we were winning. A national solicitor had informed me that I was only being charged with ‘going equipped’ and that if I just give my name I’ll be released on my own recognizance May 2nd after the hostilities on the streets are contained.

 

I rejected the offer and informed the solicitor that if brought before a court, I’d defend myself. It was all very dramatic and machismo. It just bought me another day inside most likely. I haven’t done anything of note. Just hanging a banner off a roundabout. That’s all they seem to know.  My plan has been a tremendous, disjointed failure. I hope that not too many of my comrades have been imprisoned for this foolish whim and vanity.

 

All things have come to a head. I am to rot in Brixton prison. The tribe I have been raised to think is mine has rejected me. I am a failure to the movement I believe in. My friends are all abandoned or across the sea. It is a sad and desperate wait.

 

If I give my name my time in England is surely at an end. To remain a prisoner over not giving a name is a vain and wasteful statement. I have nothing to gain or learn. If I call Aziz, my family friend, he can bring my passport, which will verify my identity and my intent to leave the country. The other options are all poorly conceived. I take another nap.

 

***

 

Ditdaddtdtdtdtatdataaatdtdttatdta. Tapity tap.

 

The person in the cell next door tells me they are transporting the girl on the 24:00 train to Natzeret.

 

I need to give my name. Rotting in a goddamn cell isn’t gonna bring back Washington or recoup lost fighters or prevent more rapes.

 

THEY CAN ONLY HOLD YOU IF THEY SUSPECT YOUR RANK IS ABOVE A CORPORAL. THEY WILL ONLY HOLD YOU IF YOU KEEP ACTING LIKE ZACHARIAH IS YOUR REAL NAME.

 

*

 

I had come to London to become a revolutionary and a good, strong Jew. Having failed miserably at both, I decide to leave with my head between my tail. I scribbled Aziz’s number in the margin of the guidebook. I bang on the door and ask for my one phone call. The guard tells me that in Europe you get more than one phone call.

 

20:01, May 2nd

 

Aziz the Turk is not so much a fan of England as he is of the lifestyle the British pound afforded him. He has a good looking Scots girlfriend, a fast English car and children from a previous marriage that are charming and beautiful through his ex-wife’s class and his good Turkish blood. His money has been made in electronics and textile importing. He has caught the IT zeitgeist at its flow and is currently supplying over 510 firms in the city of London with the upgrades and software they need to be in line with advances in new technologies.

 

Aziz and his girlfriend  met the Adon family in Turkey on a boat they had chartered for three days with some slightly play-boyish Italian newly-weds. He found them all very pleasant for Americans– Avi, Briana, Sebastian and Benjamin. The Adons had let him know that Sebastian was in the country but not by their choice. Aziz was also in the business of doing favors. If you did enough favors people always owed you something when your chips were low. But this is just a good-natured freebee because Sebastian is a character he finds interesting. The world always needs Sebastian’s kind not rotting in some prison.

 

Aziz booked a ticket for Sebastian out of Heathrow bound for Madrid for the fifth of May. He figures the boy might have loose ends to tie together before he leaves the country. If there is anything Aziz particularly values, it is having all loose ends quickly secured. They tell him the boy will be released sometime on the third of May.

 

06:02; May 3rd

 

I learn after much banging that it is Wednesday, May the third. I learn that the protests are over and that I can go home. A call and few more hours of waiting and Aziz comes to the station house with my papers. He takes me out under strict and binding orders that I have to leave the country by May 5th. He assures the police that a plane ticket hads already been purchased, presents it to them and says by the morning of the fifth of May I will be in Spain with my parents.  They release me on my own recognizance and drop the petty charge of ‘going equipped’ after informing the American embassy.

 

He tells me in the car that he has bought the ticket because there iss no future for me in London. There is nothing here for a young man to do, especially a young man like me. I tell him I don’t want to return to America. He says to keep going to somewhere with more sun and prettier women. England is not such a place.

 

“Go to the Middle East then and prove yourself to your tribe, whatever tribe you finally choose,” is his final advice to me.

 

He drops me at Zayid’s house after buying me lunch. I thank him for everything. He tells me to say hello to my parents.

 

11:01 May 3rd

 

Tall George sits in the West End earlier than all his work mates. The streets are back to normal. The Bobs turn their attentions to Yardies, Paki Muslims and street pharmacists and not would-be Emma Goldman’s of the wrong revolution. He sips on rich and unsweetened black tea. And to a passing fat girl he begins to quote bombastically;
“Our revels now are ended. These our actors,As I foretold you, were all spirits, andAre melted into air, into thin air:And like the baseless fabric of this vision,The cloud-capp’d tow’rs, the gorgeous palaces,The solemn temples, the great globe itself,Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuffAs dreams are made on; and our little lifeIs rounded with a sleep.”

ת

On Zach’s last night in England he broke into Highgate Cemetery with a few new and dear friends to visit the grave of his hero, the economist Karl Marx. There were quite a few drinks and a fiddle played by Tall George on the grave. There was a quick prayer for the dead and sad goodbyes made loud and joyous at the tomb of a dead Communist from Germany. An oath to fight like hell for the living was taken. There were absolute and zealous things his comrades revealed to each other, all high on several bottles of Russian and Irish drink.

 

Zayid observes quietly that the boy endears himself to strangers quickly, which has ultimately kept him alive during his exile. Daphne Collins takes a picture of Zach on Marx’s grave with a sly smile and bottle of Stolichnaya. It disguises the changes taking place in the boy that only Zayid can see, the changes made when rage takes too much control of action.

 

Daphne Collins was there all night and Zachariah lay with her that last night. They split a cab south from Highgate around 5 am as dawn broke and made fuck both drunk on vodka and whiskey and beer.   He awoke later in the day and met Lim Lim and Yoseph for a late breakfast. He met Zayid for lunch. His flight to Madrid was at 8 pm. Zayid offered to drive him to Heathrow.

 

***

 

Zayid is wearing a black leather jacket that looked a little too small. We are sitting in a Turkish coffee shop. The thick soupy mixture I am drinking is somehow always preferable to tea.

 

“You’re wasting your time going to the Middle East. The internal contradictions you’ve developed will destroy you over there. It took me four years to get to London. Ensheallah, I will never have to go back.” Zayid tells me.

 

“I need to see my homeland again.”

 

“Then go back to America.”

 

“That is not my true homeland.”

 

“Ah, and a Jewish ghetto in a sea of Arab fundamentalism, illiteracy and general despotism in which you have resided a net two weeks of your life is a homeland in what sense exactly? You think perhaps you will find a land of milk and honey in that dessert? I tell you that dried blood is far thicker than honey. What you should do is to stay in London. They’ll never be able to deport you if you stay out of trouble. No more protesting. Stay here and I’ll teach you what you need to know to be a great hero and revolutionary,” Zayid tries to persuade me.

 

I have trouble understanding Zayid’s desire for me to remain.

 

“I can’t even if wanted to. I gave Tony my squat key and the Jews in Golder’s Green don’t even consider me Jewish. I have no money and the police say I have to leave the country or they will actually charge me with ‘going equipped’.”

 

Zayid eyes me suspiciously.

 

“There is either God or there is Communism. You cannot have faith both.”

 

“And yet I do.”

 

“I was just like you when I was younger. I believed God wanted me to a make a revolution. I fought on the side of the Marxists during my country’s civil war. It was the early 80’s. I was a teenager with a head full of quotes from the Little Red Book, dreams of being an Arab Che Guevara, some vague notions of economics that I believed, at the time, were socialist. Sound familiar?”

 

He lectures at me for almost an hour over coffee in the West End. He keeps telling me I’m not going to find any peace in the Middle East. He tells me that what I think is a road home is only the continued road to Babylon because Babylon is everywhere that I am still not free.

 

Although it hadn’t been planned, both Tony and Daphne accompany us to the airport. I shake both of my comrade’s hands and give Tony a brotherly hug.

 

“Keep your head down in the desert kiddo,” are Tony’s last words to me.

 

“I’m happy to have almost known you, Sebastian Adon,” says Daphne after we kiss one last time revealing her knowledge of my name.

 

Zayid gives me a tight little salute.

 

I turn and I walk to my boarding gate for a Spanish-bound, four-hour flight.

 

***

 

“I think he practices looking like a tortured soul. I think this is what keeps him alive more than his actual technical proficiency in the arts,” Zayid tells the little group once Zach boards the plane.

 

“You practice your yarn of exile more thoroughly I’d reckon,” says Tony Perchance. “That kid’s soul is pretty tortured by nature.”

 

Daphne Collins doesn’t say anything at all. She just sits quietly with her pretty reddish-brown hair of some mixed Irish/English stock. She has a feeling looking at him. It’s one of those feelings people would call intuition in England, an aura in India, or a tingling Spider Sense in the US of A. Sebastian called Zachariah makes a proud and quiet salute from the boarding gate. She knows that this will be the last time she will ever see him.

 

 

 

 

PART SEVEN:

The Desert People

 

A Three-Part Chorus

 

SING: ‘What kind of man wear’s a pin stripe suit on a bus that costs ten dollars to ride?

And how many people does he have to recruit, to cross over to the other side?

He says he loves her, but is it true? He’s combined his two favorite songs for you.

And there’s been hard times that the booze cannot erase;

But everything of beauty is compared against her face.’

 

Sebastian Adon called Zachariah Artstein

 

“There was a great big bang kiddo. A flash of thunder and then some lying bloody in a long hard rain before lying even longer in a bright white ER; and in the confusion of that calamity I certainly lost my God. There was only a past I needed to now forget quickly, someone else’s made up religion to cling to and the realization that I had wandered quite far in the desert from my home.”  

 

Emma Soloman called Maya Rose

 

“Naked I came from the womb of that ship, but so help me God, naked shall I not depart.”

 

Avinadav Butler called Andrew the Saint

 

 

א

 

 

El Al flight 510 touched down at Lod International Airport on May 9, 2001 at exactly 15:04 Israeli time, which differs from the time in the rest of the zone by always being fifteen minutes behind schedule.

 

The passengers on the plane start clapping as the wheels hit the tarmac. Many of the passengers are very happy to be home, and happier still that the Palestinians didn’t manage to hijack or explode the plane. Someone whispers that things have gotten much worse in the weeks leading up to Independence Day. There were two bombings last week. The second Palestinian Intifada has blown the top off the kettle.

 

“Welcome to Israel,” the flight attendant tells us.

 

She gives the date, time and weather in Hebrew and then repeats it in thickly accented English, and then once again in Arabic, which is the second national language. English lettering is below all the Hebrew/Arabic signs because America foots the bill around here.

 

We descend onto the tarmac from the hatchway in the back of the plane. I have an urge to bend down and kiss the ground, but do not. It’s not very dignified something tells me, a voice inside that once had a name. It is brutally hot. I am wearing my kosher, blue pinstripe suit. I am glad I left my Kashmir trench coat in Spain. I stop for a moment and cover my eyes, lowering my head.

 

“Shma Yisrael Adonoi Elohanynu, Adonoi EhHad.”

 

This is the only prayer I can remember that makes any sense on this occasion.

 

 

The revolution has failed me completely. But I know I have also failed it. I have been misguided. The staunch atheism that the Family School instilled in me for a time was shattered by my last three weeks in Golder’s Green. Rabbi Tatz opened a door for me only to have it slammed in my face when Rabbi Gad declared that I’m not a real Jew. As I stare out the open window of the cab I see the green fields of my people’s land blooming, highways filled with compact cars and new buildings being erected everywhere. I am home and ready. Babylon is behind me. There is no more need to struggle needlessly.

 

***

 

All of Tel Aviv is bouncing off the walls. The streets are filled with loud and pushy people. There are beautiful women with olive skin and manly guys with tight t-shirts and jeans. They are all drunk. Everyone has a gun and a flag. It is Israeli Independence Day and Israel has just won the basketball championship against all of Europe. I have never seen so many beautiful girls in my life. Tel Aviv is wild and free like New York on a beach. They may have driven us into the sea with gas and bullets in Europe but now we are striking back with basketball and well, really fucking attractive women.  I find the basketball win hard to believe, but it makes me happy. The racist in me asserts that Ethiopians have evidently been put in charge of the team. Some girl told me they had just recruited a bunch of American Blacks. Even better.

 

I checked into a hostel on Kikar Diezinkoff or Diezinkoff Square. An elevated platform supports a white sculpture fountain with interlocking colored disks in the middle of the square. It is like a Union Square of the Middle East with more junkies and less skaters. The hostel smells like radio deodorant-free Europe. I am in a coed dorm room with twelve bunk beds.  My bunkmates are mostly South Africans. Africanz is the ugliest language I’ve ever heard. I change out of my suit, shower and head out to explore. I grab a street map from the front desk and wander out into the bustling, raucous Ben Yehuda Street, which I hope leas to the beach.

 

There is a rally going on in the square for the union, which controlled Egged Buses, one of the two major government-owned lines. Groups of teenagers are hanging out and drinking in public, which I’m told is totally legal here. A group of Russian punks gives me some very cheap vodka and I slam it back. I draw them a picture of a punk with a shotgun mashing. They give me more vodka but don’t speak a word of English. There is a large movie theatre on a corner of the square. What looks like a huge and shady motel occupies another corner under a huge red neon sign that says KDA. Hebrew is spoken everywhere or Russian.  I am enthralled and overwhelmed. It is almost too much to take in. The signs and language keep reminding me the land is ours. The cute girls with stacks of party flyers remind me that it’s not just another Friday night; it’s the biggest party night of the year.

 

Eventually I wind my way down to the beach. It’s an endless strip of mini skyscrapers, hotels highway and the boardwalk, called the tiyeled. It is the land of see-and-be-seen, play-and-get-hustled, hoot, holler and dance. Little wooden pergolas and stone benches run miles in either direction. It’s the coast of the Mediterranean, but it’s more like Vegas than Nice.    Everything is all lit up in a hundred shades of red or blue and there is live music being performed on mini stages along the way, mostly salsa and house music. I stand below a huge white terraced structure called the Opera Tower and look down the main strip from Hof Yersushalaim, the Jerusalem Beach. Some came to the Holy Land for that broken down wall locked up in the mountains, but I like my pilgrimages to end by the beach with a cocktail. Cars fly by with Israeli flags flapping out the windows. The occupants are yelling on the top of their lungs blasting Arabic sounding music from their vehicles. Everybody keeps offering me shots. Every crew and their Russian girl friends have multiple bottles of vodka and hookah set up for the fireworks show about to light up the beach.

 

As I continue to walk further down the boardwalk, halfway to drunk by now, I encounter every manner of hustler, hawker, pusher and thief. Children selling flashy neon toys. Eastern European émigrés hustling the tourists at games of three-card Monty lured in by a cute Romanian girl that keeps winning and might just be the dealer’s lady. Tables set up selling trinkets, selling temporary tattoos, selling smokes, selling girls who sell the smokes and not a single street artist in sight. Or copper for that matter. I’m not going to set up tonight. It’s the shabbos on top of Independence Day and victory over Europe in basketball. Rabbi Tatz said I would learn to carry out the mitzvahs gradually. But then Rabbi Gad said I wasn’t a Jew, so why I kept referencing those Jews of the Green is beyond me. The Israeli government counts you as a Jew if a single grandparent was Jewish. This is surely better odds than having a halachically-converted Jewish mother.

 

I heard one of the South Africans saying that it is good they let these not quite Jewish Ruskies in because with the uprising going on in, it is unwise to let the Palestinians cross the green line to work like dogs in all the jobs the Jews don’t want. Half the Russians I am drinking with have on gold crucifixes come. Guess they had a Jewish grandparent before communism made them Orthodox Christians or whatever-the-hell they are.

 

I’m happy to be reunited with my Noblisse cigarettes. I remember hoping they came in menthol when I first found them in the ubiquitous cigarette machines. They aren’t that bad for smokes, which cost six shekels. That’s just over $1.50. Thank god for no more TOP rollies. These are Israel’s general-purpose cigarettes. They are the cheapest cigarettes you can buy when you’re poor.  They are also smoked by the kibbutzniks, because if you live on kibbutz, you’re inherently poorThe Russians don’t smoke them. They smoke something only a little better called L & M, which feels more like a cheap Marlboro Light.

 

With my sketchpad and accented-English flying, I befriend a Russian named Roman along with his car, his bottle of vodka standard and his three lady friends. I take off in this former Soviet’s car, a Roman who knows where the party is up country. At a good party you can forget about everything. So I ended up staying in Tel Aviv in the arms of a wild little Russian sweet thing named Anya for nearly a week before I made my moves north.

ב

I am told it is very green up north in the shade of Mt. Tabor. I took a bus from the Techanama Gazit Central Bus Station to a town called Afula, which is as mediocre as it is relatively isolated. The kibbutz itself is still a good half an hour north, so I stuck my thumb in the air for several hours before a Bedouin trucker dropped me at the gates of Kibbutz Ein Dor.

 

My one-night stand that had turned into a good long week of come-on-in-sin has left me with less than $200 of my money left. I have decided to quit my evil ways and learn to speak the language of the world’s oldest tribe while doing a bit of the old agrarian collective labor.

 

Kibbutz Ein Dor was established at its present location facing Mount Tabor in the eastern section of the Lower Galilee in May of 1948. Its members came from groups of the Zionist youth movement Hashomer Hatzair from Israel, Hungary and the United States. Later groups from Chile and Uruguay and much smaller groups and individuals from over 30 different countries joined them. Today the kibbutz boasts about 430 members and candidates for membership, and a permanent population of close to 800 when children, parents of members and Hebrew ulpan students are taken into account. The kibbutz’s economy is built almost entirely upon its cable factory, Teldor, which manufactures telecommunication and electronic cables. The kibbutz still cultivates a wide range of field crops, has a dairy farm and raises chickens. That’s almost verbatim off the kibbutz Web site.

 

Ein Dor is situated where the Chesulloth Basin meets the eastern section of the Lower Galilee and the Jezreel Valley. There is a new electric entrance gate that is surrounded by a security fence made of barbed wire as old as the country itself. A guard is posted at the entrance. The young man has dark hair and a black uniform and is sitting with his feet up at the post with an Uzi submachine in his lap looking bored and disinterested. The guard is no older than seventeen.

 

All of the buildings are white stucco with red corrugated tin rooves that have a solid earthy appearance.  Massive olive trees and other shrubbery make the kibbutz exude abundance. The kibbutz feels like a fortress of bounty compared with the dry and dusty hills and the two small Arab villages with their scrawny sheep that flank it. Flowers have been planted everywhere and the grounds are immaculate. Green grass covers the lawns of all the kibbutz buildings. As I walk up the main street to the central building, I see what looks like a huge auditorium that serves as the central dining hall. A sign tells me as much in Hebrew and English, but not in Arabic.

 

The Russians, Roman and Anya had told me that the Israelis hate the weak, naïve American tourists. That I come from New York means a lot less here. A lot of fat, rich, lazy American Jews live in that city.

 

“A great big dollar sign flashes above your head,” said the Russian girl Anya who I made fuck with in Tel Aviv.  She then added, “Your nice words will not so much to protect you here.”

 

Sometimes Americans call Israelis sabras after the cactus-like, thorny fruit with the sweet center when opened up as if deep down these Israelites are warm and respectful to outsiders. That’s very wishful thinking, which doesn’t last long past the two-week tour.

 

I’m looking for a woman named Bruria who is the volunteer coordinator of the kibbutz.

 

Bruria’s closet-like office is in a small shed attached to the main volunteer office building. I can’t help but thinking she looks like a man in a dress. Her English isn’t very good and I am informed that it will cost me a thousand, two hundred shekels and fifty agarot to enroll in the ulpan program. Everything they say about the poor, impoverished kibbutzniks must be truish because they actually want my agarot; the bullshit Jewish penny. Nobody chases those down the street.

 

I feign agreement fully wondering where I am going to come up with that kind of money considering my net worth financially is perhaps no more than $180 at this time. She takes every penny and tells me I can pay the rest down the line.

 

It’s hard times in the hills of Galilee.  I now don’t have a shekel to my name.

 

The kibbutz does not make a great first impression. Built something like a cross between Jurassic Park and the Soviet Union, the adults seem embittered and cagey as Bruria brings me around. The facilities are pleasant, until we arrive in the area where the volunteers live. Stucco and pebble faced buildings give way to trailer bungalows near a sign that reads, ‘Welcome to our ghetto.’ There are close to twenty white bungalow buildings on a steeply inclined hill that are each only one story tall. Each bungalow has a porch with some irregular lawn chairs and assorted stools. Each houses four volunteers in two sets of living quarters. There are two outdoor showers per building, which four volunteers share. These dwellings overlook a series of olive fields and in the distance you can see the small Arab village of Deburiya. The adhan, the Muslim call to prayer echoes across the valley five times a day she warns me.

 

“It may sound like a scary cry of war, but it is actually how they pray. They are good Arabs, long time neighbors. We control now their water which makes them more good.”

 

Bruria unlocks my apartment and tells me to leave my stuff. I have just my one large black rucksack. The room she calls a living quarters is a one-room affair with two dormitory steel cots and two adjacent closets. My roommate is rather neat. His t-shirts are all folded, his stuff tucked inside the large closet. There are no posters on the walls or art, just a small wooden table with an alarm clock and a picture of a pretty Israeli girl in black and white with X O X O scribbled on it and a big red lipstick kiss. Guess that’s what he’s doing here.

 

It’s laconic, that is to say the bare minimum of what one needs. But after squatting for three months in a dirty hovel this is a marked improvement. She tells me my roommate’s name is Benjamin and that he is from Los Angles. That’s my brother’s name I tell her. She says ‘this is good.’

 

Classes are in session. The classroom building is on top of the hill. It is built in the same white stucco style with a red-shingled roof. Bruria interrupts the class and announces that I will be the new student. There are about twenty other people in the class. All of them are easily twice my age by the look of it. I was under the impression that there would be people my age forgetting that this is a program for new immigrants, not seventeen-year old radicals in some fucked up self-imposed exile. Everybody smiles and then gets back to work.

 

Later that day I am introduced to the ghetto’s ‘North American social club.’ It on is the porch of a bungalow at the top of the ghetto on the hill. It has a third fridge on the porch. There is a Russian quarter, an Argentinean quarter with a Columbian among them here to garden not to learn and the American section. The Russians only speak Russian; the Latin Americans don’t speak Russian or English well. And go figure, we don’t speak anything at all besides English including the Chilean girl and Canadian guy in my new ‘club.’ Everyone is learning Hebrew but vodka is the lingua franca.

 

My roommate introduces himself Benjamin Asher Callahan who is questionably Jewish. He is tall and lanky, has dark hair with freckles and knows how to freestyle rap. The Canadian John Yuma, whom everybody calls Johnny Bravo, is all things loud, drunk and misogynistic. Like Paul Bunyan and Izzy Vitz, he tells tall tales. According to his own booze soaked account, he was formerly a freelance soldier, this gun for hire in the French Foreign Legion for eight years. He boasts about combat on nearly every continent ‘with the browns or yellows’ and is visibly a degenerate drunk. Bobby Brown is the third American in the social club. He’s part bookworm and part smartass jock. He has glasses and flashcards. He goes for jogs to Duriyah. He’s liberal but still doesn’t trust Arabs. Both Ben and Yuma aren’t sure it has been worth their coming here. The more they drank, the less they like the Holy Land air and long summer months with no rain. Bobby Brown is a good little Zionist through and through.

 

It’s my first day at the kibbutz and they’ve extended me membership. Club activities generally involve pounding back Gold Star or Macabbi beers, the national swag of Israel, and puffing carton upon carton of Noblisse from the commissary. It is as if they pay us weekly in booze and smokes. That’s all our little company store stipend gets us in the end. Yuma spots me the beers.

 

“You’re new so you get the shitty chair ‘til you steal a better one,” Ben says to me.

 

He says steal-anything-that’s-not-tied-down is the way of things here.

 

Bobby becomes more social the more he drinks. John Yuma gets louder and more lewd.

 

School and work alternate everyday except Saturday. Depending on your assignment you work about eight hours a day with a two-hour lunch. Most volunteers are in the mess hall cooking, food prepping and doing dishes for nearly 800 three times a day, although I’m told many families eat at home. Other options include Yards, which means constantly weeding and laying sprinkler line; or Gardens, which is helping to maintain the flowers and trees on the grounds. The ambitious and trusted either milk cows or work for TELDOR making telecommunications wiring. Everyone tells me that I have to decide by tomorrow to work in the mess hall for obvious reasons like stealing food and air-conditioning, but I need to be outside using my hands.

 

We’re sitting on the porch of the North American Social Club drinking Gold Star beers that Yuma bought in Afula except for Bobby Brown who is immersed in the course work.

 

“So where are you going to slave?” asks John Yuma.

 

“I was thinking about Yards and Gardens.”

 

“That’s a lot of digging. You got to dig mini trenches for the sprinkler lines, which keep the place so green. You should get work to keep your soft hands not dirty. And fill our fridge,” Yuma says.

 

“You see, a kibbutz is about doing as little work as possible and getting drunk as often as you can. And givin’ it to every new girl that comes.”

 

“I only say it ‘cause you’re scrawny. Teldor and field work is man’s work,” says Yuma.

 

“Where do all the curvy kibbutz girls work?”

 

“They don’t. Most of them are real underage. Like get locked up underage. Pickings are very slim these days. There’s a fine Brazilian girl named Carla but she he has a kibbutznik boyfriend. She works on Yards and Gardens if you’re looking for good eye candy. Girl is stacked and curvy,” says Bobby looking up from his books

 

“I’m always looking for eye candy. I’m a horny seventeen year old.”

 

Just down the hill at the bungalow below ours some Russians in our ulpan program start yelling at us from their window and waving with their arms for us to come down.

 

“What do they want?” I ask.

 

“They want us to get really trashed on vodka,” says Bobby Brown.

 

“Come on,” says John. “It’s a kibbutz highlight that never gets old.”

 

It was one we would have over and over again. Bobby and Danny sit it out. I have no idea why because I figure it was just for a shot. The Russians apparently really, really liked sharing.

 

There are four Russians in the small room. All four of them are in their early thirties. Three are Slavs and the other one is a dark Georgian. They offer their names but I only catch one distinctively, Alexi, who is the youngest. The Georgian has a crucifix around his neck, which he never takes off. None of them speak any English. The vodka is very cheap and highly flammable as one of them demonstrates by igniting a wall briefly. We slam two shots in the first minute or two. Then we chase each shot with water. I am totally laid out by the time I reach eight. It burns my throat and makes my head spin. I fall off the cot as I yell profanity in drunken glee. Alexi shows us a picture of his sister or girlfriend. Who cares or knows.

 

Yuma tells him, “I’ll fuck her in the Commy ass.”

 

They all start cheering and patting me on the back.

 

And then a blackout and a blur of sweat and yelling and more shots.

 

The last thing I remember hearing was John with his arm around a Russian yelling, “WE’RE             GONNA FUCK YOUR COMMY MOTHERS IN THE ASS!”

 

They have no idea what he is saying so they just cheer and we all do another shot. I had to be practically carried back to my room by John and Ben sometime after midnight. I stunk of booze for a week. The Russians saw to that.

 

***

 

I settle on Yards and Gardens managed by a triumvirate of two Latin laborers and the kibbutz Yards and Garden foreman Mr. Jones. Mr. Jones is half English/half Irish. He came here in the sixties leftist and reckless. He had gotten an Israelite pregnant and never left. He’d acquired kibbutz membership, married the girl and had three kids. He is a good guy with numerous yarns, which all amount to a warning about getting out before I get one of their girls pregnant. The girls are all 12 he tells him. Then he says he was talking about the country not the kibbutz. The other two aren’t crew members aren’t Jewish either. Adonoi Gonzalez is Colombian and strapping. He’s been here a couple years. Says prospects are better here than in his own ‘piece of shit’ country. And there is the hot Brazilian, a tall gorgeous brunette, the hot sweaty eye candy Yuma had mentioned.

 

Our work is largely the maintenance of the sprinkler system. Without it the hills would not be so green. The Israelis utilize a drip irrigation system. The pioneers in less than a hundred years have reclaimed vast swathes of swamp and desert and rock, but milk and honey has hardly come. The kibbutznik dream of agrarian socialism is over. The kibbutzes have outlived their colonial purpose.

 

But if there is some timeless war going on, I haven’t seen any of it yet. Not in Tel Aviv or the Galilee anyway. I dig up sprinkler lines shirtless, never seeming to burn in the nonstop sun. I am getting a little less scrawny with the three meals a day. Everything on the kibbutz is routine. The same work. The same food. The same people every single day. I get shit hammered drunk with the Russians and the North American Social Club. I sit bored in the classroom pretending to learn Hebrew. I wonder sometimes if I am in too deep. I wonder if Zionism is really the end of the ideological road for me. It has been too easy. I wonder when the hammer will fall or the real test will come. I am living in war zone wholly sheltered from the war. I wonder when I’ll meet a Palestinian again.

 

I wonder if little Kareem from the wadi will light himself up in a bus that I am on or perhaps he has already. The kibbutz is a vacuum.  I hitchhike down to Tel Aviv as soon as the weekend comes. To see Israel. To get fucked and hammered and blown by everything except Palestinians. My dreams are a dull silence. Mike Washington is truly dead. I have learned to sleep like normal people do, in quiet but without peace.

 

Every so often some kibbutznik tells me to put a shirt on lest I burn up, but I never do. My blood isn’t wholly infused with the European. Just my skin. My great, great grandmother’s rape had not been complete, as I don’t burn. So I eat cucumber, onion and tomato salads, try to pick up Hebrew and fight the good fight to keep the yards and gardens green.

 

After work I sit on the porch with Ben and Johnny Yuma smoking cigarette after cigarette and downing frosty cold liter bottles of Coca Cola. We look out over the village of Deburiya and listen to their call to prayer go off around sundown. The ghostly adhan echoed throughout the valley. We can sit in our walled little compound sipping Coke and getting hammered on cheap beer. We can pretend the Intifada is taking place in the cities and won’t reach us. But like the village of Deburiya, we can cut off their water and lock them off their lands, but to ignore them is impossible.   

ג

I catch the last bus out before sundown on Friday and head south. Sundown on Friday is when they shut everything down, everything except Tel Aviv. I need eye candy and attractions. I need to sell art because I am completely out of cash.

 

I am selling well tonight, far out pacing any records set in London. The tiyeled is packed. The strip is lit up particularly brightly. I feel really good about getting back to this city. I am moving through the crowd impressed with how quickly I have made my 100 shekels. This is the  equivalent of nearly $25 and is chump change except on a kibbutz.

 

I can smell the cheap perfume of the Russian frehhote.  Many of the young Russian men have bleached their hair like Eminem. A salsa band is playing and an Argentinean Jewish woman is dancing and singing through a Madonna mike surrounded by a crowd of onlookers. Everyone is clapping to the beat. A group of Arab Israelis is hawking watches, lighters and bootleg L & M smokes from a foldout table. Some rough-edged Romanian hustlers and their friends take money off stupid, shit-brained cocky American Yeshiva boys in games of three-card Monty. On the beach I can see the flash of fire poi whirling in the night. The Opera Towers look huge. I  see a security guard patting down Yemenite Jews because they look Arab while he lets the paler Askinazim in without any trouble at all.

 

Canadian Dave who is the bartender over at Mike’s Blues Bar gave me a bunch of flyers to hand out. They are taking up half the space in my bag. He’s giving me fifty sheks and a meal to hand them out. I got this gig through a girl I drew on the tiyeled a week ago. There are several big parties tonight. I off load flyers to anyone who will take them at drop spots along the way to the the Dolphinarium beach-bar-restaurant complex, which houses a mega club called Pacha. It was built near the Dan Hotel where the boardwalk hits the Turkish Fort at Yafo. No one I give flyers to will actually go to Mike’s because it’s an American tourist jump-off right next to the American embassy.

 

It’s 10:40 pm. I make my way to Abulafia for a couple of mini pizzas. Abulafia is a 24-hour bakery that sells mini pizzas and pita soaked in olive oil with zataar, a green fragrant spice that tastes like Palestinian oregano. The place has non-stop business especially around sunrise when it gets swarmed with club goers on the way home. That’s when the fights break out between the Russians and Arabs or the Russians and the Ethiopians. It’s always the Russians and someone else. The owners of Abulafia have a lot of sons and nephews named Muhammad. They do a good business. One of them tells me they live in Yafo, in the Arab quarter of the Old City. It was the Arab port of long, long ago. The Yafo-Tel Aviv border is near the Dolphinarium and near a huge Ottoman prison that now houses a BSDM sex club called the Dungeon.

 

***

 

A man in a cab is approaching the Dolphinarium. He is wearing a club suit that covers a payload of ball bearings and nails. He thinks nervously,

 

‘It is too heavy. They will notice me as soon as I step from the cab. This vest and jacket are making me sweat.’

 

He looks out the window. The driver seems nervous. The man doesn’t say much. This is not a situation for small talk. He looks at his watch. It’s 22:53. He observes people strolling on the tiyeled as the cab speeds by. The cab passes the Sheraton Hotel. The man wonders if one day all this will be returned to his people. He wonders when these Jews will be driven back to hell.  It’s 22:57. He takes a deep breath and tries to come to terms with the fact that he will be dead within the hour.

 

***

 

Roman is standing outside the Pasha Club in the parking lot talking to his friends.  He thinks,

 

“Fuck this place. Fuck this place big time.”

 

Roman is of regular build and is wearing a tight black t-shirt and FOXX jeans. His shoes are polished. There is gel in his hair. He speaks in thickly accented Hebrew. He mixes in Russian words. When he gets angry he stops speaking Hebrew altogether. He never goes anywhere without his cell phone, which seems to never stop ringing. All his friends are from the Ukraine. They are racially Slavic and technically Jewish, which is to say that they have a Jewish grandparent. This doesn’t change the fact that they go to the Orthodox Church.

 

This is his third time at the Pasha Club. He doesn’t normally go to this venue, but the girl his friend is fucking dragged them along. Her friends are Russian and they act like whores when they drink like most Russian girls he knows. One of them is Georgian. Her family is using Israel as a halfway point between the former Soviet Union and the US. Like most of the olim hadashim from that part of the world, they have no intention of staying here too long.  Roman hopes his family get their U.S. visas soon because the Arabs are going crazy and he’s about to get drafted into the IDF.

 

The line is always too long. The Dan Hotel is across the street. Its plaza is large and white. He’s never stayed there, but he imagines it’s rather descent. When he gets to America he’ll stay in a hotel like that. Or maybe even own one if he works hard.

 

***

 

I remember the joy of walking in the damp sand by the water with no shoes. Zachariah and Sebastian equate this with happy childhood memories so it’s pleasing to the body they now share.

 

I finally break free from the crowd as I get to the end of Jerusalem Beach. I deliberately walk on the sand even if it means no people to take flyers. I can see Yafo in the distance. Compared to Tel Aviv it is ominous and lower key. I’m wearing my khaki pants with the tan button-down work shirt that says Mike on the left breast and has a Drop Kick Murphy patch sewn on the right.

 

I have passed out most of the flyers for Mike’s Blues Bar to groups of arsim and frehhote. They ask me questions in Hebrew or Russian, but I hardly speak either language well enough to know what they are asking me.

 

I reach into my pocket and pull out a crumpled pack of Noblisse cigarettes. There are only three left.

 

***

 

The waves are crashing against the levy. The rocks extend out into the water and you can walk along them toward the end, which is as a good a place as any to smoke hash. The levy is on the sea side of the Dolphinarium. This section of the beach is called Tiki Beach. During the day people play Congo drums and an outdoor café serves overpriced beverages with a scenic view. There is a private club next to the Pasha and a barbed wire fence prevents people from climbing from the levy into its outdoor section. House music is blaring from Pasha.

 

Slightly removed from the chaos, Ze’ev and his friends smoke a joint of tobacco mixed with hash. Ze’ev knows he’s a scumbag. The girl he and his friends had been gang-raping in his car has been left slumped against the rocks down by the water. They had pissed all over her before they left her. They’d slipped her a ‘knock out’ in the last club.

 

***

 

The man in the lethal club suit is approaching Target B in the cab. He has three targets to pick from.  He has rejected the other two as unsuitable.

 

He thinks,

 

“I have never been to this part of town before.”

 

He removes his wristwatch and places it into an envelope in the front seat. The envelope already contains his wedding ring, his wallet and other petty personal effects. The only thing that remains is a small snapshot of his son and roughly 2 pounds of military grade plastic explosives.

 

He begins a silent prayer,

 

“My God is merciful and all good things come of it. I will be your sword, my people’s sword against the Zionists who killed my son and stole my land.’

 

***

 

I finally arrive at the Dolphinarium. Long lines have formed to get into the club. Its clientele are mostly underage Russian immigrants. Dave doesn’t need or want this demographic at his bar, but fuck Dave. What’s twelve dollars and a beer? Absolutely nothing. I should just dump the damn flyers in a trashcan and rattle off some tourist spots I magically hit up.

 

There are arsim everywhere. The word is sort of like the Bridge and Tunnel Crowd of Israel. A little meaner actually. They are dressed pretty much the same. Tight t-shirts, jeans, hair gel. They all affect the same mannerisms and mentality. They always give me shit everywhere I go in the country while I’m selling art. My style is way too different for them. When they want me to draw something, it’s always crude and they never pay. They might sit and watch me draw and then wander off like crack heads with ADD. They are the club guys of the Middle East, the socio-economic equivalent to a mix of Jersey guidos and ghetto Blacks coming to Manhattan clubs with a hard-on and a roofy. They love the ultra violence. Most of them aren’t from Tel Aviv. They just come here for the clubs and the tiyeled. Packs of them will follow groups of girls around propositioning them until they score a rejection or a hook up or rape. They take Ecstasy. They are offensive to everyone. They frequent bad clubs and get into fights. Not unlike the Jersey guidos, they thrill me. Racially they tend to be non-Askinazi, Romanians, Russians and the Yemenites who live in Israel’s smaller, rougher cities like Bat Yam, Rehovet, Peta Tikvah and Pardes Hana..

 

I watch young, stupid people try to get laid after they wait on a long line for a high priced bottle of poison. The Russian immigrant girls look blazing. They are really loving this whole free market thing and are waiting eagerly to get visas for the US or Canada. In the meantime they’re made up as hell even when they are only going to the store for laundry detergent.

 

I see my friend of three weeks, Roman, talking to a group of pretty former-Soviet girls. The Israelis are curvier and less made-up. I walk over to give him a pound and he introduces me to several of the girls whose names all end in ‘a.’ They, of course, don’t speak any English. They are maybe Russian, but could be from Kazakhstan because they look a little Asian. I have no idea what they are trying to say to me. Roman’s English isn’t too hot either. We mostly communicate through gestures and the occasional sentence or two in Hebrew. He’s excited to have an American friend. Like most of the Russians I’ve met, I have only the most basic knowledge of who Roman is as a person. I’ve known him for less than three weeks. He is the first person I met in Israel and when I’m in Tel Aviv he always drops by to get his lady friends to buy sketches off me. Then we party in broken Hebanglish.

 

***

 

Ze’ev wonders what that American asshole is doing here. He remembers how the guy looked at the girl he was with last week when he met them for the first time at his stupid hobo art stand. Ze’ev thinks he dresses like a hobo. I should tell my friend not to let that American hobo into the club. Nobody looks at his girls like that. Ze’ev isn’t some little punk lookout anymore. He is moving pills and will soon get a piece of Jerusalem beach to milk or bleed.

 

Ze’ev knows everyone worthwhile in the Tel Aviv club scene. It’s all he’s been doing for the past four years. He gets comped at most of the low-end joints and a few of the mid-end. He’s still too young for the real hot spots. He doesn’t like the niggers so most of the hip-hop venues are out. All the bouncers know he deals and that he’s affiliated so he gets in quick if the spot is Russian.

 

He wonders why those girls are flirting with the hobo. It’s because he’s American and they want to get to America by using him. It’s the only explanation. His pictures are stupid and communist.

 

***

The human time bomb steps out of the black cab.

 

As he surveys the scene, he thinks, “I’m so close I can smell them. These Israeli girls smell like whores. It’s the scent of my enemy. They all look so young. I don’t see any soldiers. My lieutenant gave me orders, ‘Take from them their young as they do to us.’ In a few years they’ll all be in the army killing my people anyway. One of those girls is giving me a funny look. They know I’m an Arab and I’m wearing a suit that’s too bulky.”

 

Quick thoughts race through his head.

 

He thinks about his son. He thinks about his people. He thinks about the land that they stole from his people.

 

Someone points at him as he edges near the line.

 

He tugs the ripcord at his sleeve.

 

“Salwa, I miss you,” he whispers to his long dead wife.

 

***

I was chatting up one of the Russian girls when I realize I am out of cigarettes. I told the girl to hold on for a second. I asked Roman if he had one. He told me that he did not. Everyone smokes, but I really want a Noblisse. They all have L&Ms or worse. I didn’t want to stop talking to the Kazak girl, so I asked Roman if I could toss him some loot to buy me a pack. He didn’t pick up the phrase ‘toss him some loot.’ He looked at me like I was crazy.

 

I look at my watch. 11:31pm. I hop the barrier and am about to cross into the parking lot. I don’t even know if the kiosk is open across the street. I look back to see if the girl is still. . .

 

BOOM.

 

***

 

Ze’ev is telling his friend about ‘some chick that gave him head on the beach.’ That chick is a 16-year old that he and three friends raped. She is lying unconscious face down in the sand by the water. He tells them he came all over her

 

BOOM.

 

What the fuck was that he wonders. It came from the street by the club entrance. Of course he knows what it is. This is Israel.

 

***

 

Roman is on his cell phone. It’s hot as hell here, even in the night. He looks up and sees a quick bright flash.

 

BOOM.

 

***

 

I’m on my knees half deaf.

 

I hear a terrible ringing in my head, but I can’t hear anything else. There are tiny droplets of blood all over me, but I don’t think any of it’s mine. Dozens of people are screaming, slouched on the ground. Some of them don’t look like much more than bloody bundles of tattered flesh.

 

There’s blood on the ground and there’s blood in my hair. I don’t really know what to do. I am slumped down facing what was once the outside of a really popular nightclub. I reach into my pocket to pull out a smoke and I realize it is the fucking cigarettes that just saved my life.

 

My first suicide bombing.  Saved by a fucking pack of cigarettes.

 

There are a lot of dead bodies less than twenty feet away from me. I see the lights of the paramedic trucks and hear the sirens through the cluttered tunnel of my inner ear. I see people trying to pick themselves up and help the wounded. I’ve never seen so much blood. Not in real life anyway. Everything I think I know about anything has been ripped to shreds in a fiery burst of nails, ball bearings and sharp things flying through the air. Violence looks so cool until you meet him in person. Then he just looks like the Angel of Death.

 

I try to stand up. I can’t. I’m a coward in the face of it all. A part of me is thinking:  So that’s what a suicide bombing looks like. And another part of me realizes:  Holy fuck! I almost just got all blown up.

 

And another part of me, the part that has my undivided attention, is asking where the fuck was my God tonight?

ד

I am two hours late to work back at the kibbutz on Sunday morning. I show up for my duty on Yards and Gardens hung over, un-showered and looking vacant. My supervisor Mr. Jones sees the blood on my khaki shirt and the terrible look in my eyes. He sends me to go sleep it off. He doesn’t ask, nor do I mention. Maybe he knoww or maybe he doesn’t. I don’t say anything about the Dolphinarium to anyone. When I wake up the Associated Press has told the world. I crash out in my cot and sleep hard.

* * *

“Do you still remember the dream?” I ask myself looking into a mirror in the floor of a cave.

The person I see is older, harder and more knowledgeable of death.

The cave has no ceiling that I can make out. I look into a mirror that is a perfect circle on the floor.

“How did you get here, Zachariah,” I ask myself. “They even took away your true name.”

The cave is an enormous dome with no light or sound. I cannot see much. There is only a feeling of enormity and darkness that surrounds me.

“Death follows you, Zachariah. You whisper hope but are stalked by death.”

I’m talking to myself with a conviction that the person talking back is engaged in a dialogue. Mike Washington is dead and I am stranger because of it.

“Who is this Zachariah, the warrior and who is really Sebastian the terrified little refugee?”

A whisper emerges from the pool at my feet.

“Zachariah is your noble soul. Sebastian is only a reflection trapped inside a distorted cave.”

***

I am climbing Mt. Tabor after ulpan class as the sun is setting with the only person my age on the kibbutz, a young Persian Jew named Hadas Naphtali from the nearby village of Ramat Ishai. She claims to be an anarchist and practitioner of black voodoo magic. We have brought a copy of the Tenach from the kibbutz library. We say little as I follow her up the mountain. We watch darkness overtake the valley from the top of the mount. She begins to read, her “D’s” and her tease have me fully under her spell.  

She is recounting an interesting Biblical passage describing how King Saul consulted with the wizard woman from Ein Dor before his fatal battle on the Gilboa. King Saul had persecuted spiritual people during his Kingdom, so no wonder she was afraid of the King. Although he came to the meeting disguised, the witch recognized him. Saul required her services in order to get a sign about the future he would face in the crucial battle on the next day against the Philistines. King Saul brought back the ghost of the recently dead prophet Samuel, however Samuel did not deliver a positive outcome of the battle. Indeed, King Saul died on the next day.

It was at Ein Dor that King Saul learned of the fate of Israel as well as his own on the next day, which he was powerless to stop. His own Lord was silent. In the silence he put fatal trust in the witch of Ein Dor. And now so am I.

 

Hadas Naphtali, part Persian, part ravishing Israeli reads my palm. The valley’s Arab villages and the electric glow of Kibbutz Ein Dor flicker in the twilight. Hadas turns over my hand examining the lines of my palm. Suddenly she bites the thick part of my right hand below the thumb, bites it hard. I wrench my hand back.

 

“The spirits watch over you Zachy boy,” she whispers to me. ‘Take precautions, because nothing for you is totally written. You could be undone on Tisha’bav. They will strike at you on the day you are the most happy.”

 

My hand still smarts from where she bit me.

 

“What’s all that supposed to mean?” I ask.

 

“That you’re sexy and I like you,” she tells me.

 

***

 

I did not mention the bombing to either Hadas or my compatriots of the North American Social Club. But they can see that I have sunken into some kind of depression. I have stopped attending ulpan class and am beginning to drink more heavily. Yuma tauns me, or at least that’s how I perceive it.

 

Sometime in mid-June a new girl from Ramat Ishai, a small town twenty minutes to the north moved onto the kibbutz after fighting with her mother about curfew. She hasn’t even unpacked her bags before I take her on a picnic, get drunk in the cornfields and fuck her in the ass on the floor of her shower. She has black voodoo magic. The next thing I know we are taking nature hikes and she is interpreting my dreams.

 

Ben Callahan and I are growing closer. He has became a sort of older brother to me, following in a long line of slightly older men. After awhile we dropped out of the North American Social Club altogether to spend time with our respectively cute native flings. After a day in the yards we often sit on our own porch watching Debriyiah and sip from big bottles of frosty cold Coke. I always snare a few liters whenever I venture off the kibbutz. We pontificate about these wonderful desert women. He is set to marry one this time next year.

 

Ben is teaching me to free style, to rap off the top of my head. I have always been something of a make shift romantic poet and Ben tells me this will be yet another tool I can use to communicate my message. I have already shared both my past and my subversive ideals with him. Back in LA Ben had been a regular at open mikes in various hip clubs. In America I would have laughed at this, but this is the Middle East. You cling to what you were before on some gut level. He gave me my first hip-hop CD by out outfit called LATYRX.

 

I have been telling Ben more about my revolution.

 

He nods approvingly at most of it and wishes me luck as many slightly older men have done before him. He assures me that I’ll never be out of work here.  Something is always broken or exploding or burning down.

 

We rarely talk about the Palestinians, what they want or what should be done about them. Ben thinks they had more right to this land that he or I do. After all, they have nowhere else to go. Their only fallback position is death and defeat.

 

Ben isn’t a Jew at all, but had claimed his grandmother was one to get an immigration visa. He’ll be off to the Army in September once he completes the ulpan program.  He is 26, which puts him at the age for active service. I have neither renewed my soon-to-expire tourist visa nor made any real strides toward official alleya. Even Johnny Yuma has gotten his Todat Zhoot, which entitles him to some cash and subsidies from the government.

 

Ben says that even though I am a more bonified Jew with my candle lighting rituals and my intermittent prayers, I will be looking at three years service in the Defense forces.  It isn’t even theoretically legal for a 17-year old to be bopping about Israel with no guide or family, but no one ever calls me on this. My freedom of movement will just be further curtailed with registration.

 

Mr. Jones, my foreman in Yards and Gardens, urges me to catch the next flight out of here.

 

“Go back to Brooklyn, kid. This whole place is sinking in the heat of violence not too long in the future to be swallowed by the sands.”

 

I am getting a lot of advice about my future. Through it all Ben has remained neutral. In his cool, collected cold stoner way, he says I should take all the time I need to make a decision.

 

“Flee the shelter of this stupid kibbutz and see more of the country. Better now than when they stick you with a rifle to defend it.”

 

It is all good advice. Eventually I have to take some of it.                 

 

ה

Hadas Naphtali drinks like a fish and smokes like a chimney as such trite clichés go. Her English grows worse the more she drinks. She uses Farsi curses after every fourth word. She is a cross between a schoolgirl and a punk, a Persian or Jew depending on what she has to do after you take her clothes off. This little badass riot girl had gotten me into trouble before.

 

Moaglie, a kibbutz brat arse has some long-standing territorial claim on her. I am encroaching.

He is her ex boyfriend and wants to beat me senseless when Johnny Yuma informs on me, buddying up to him to get better food and watch HBO with air conditioning. The scum fucker Yuma told him that Hadas was sweet on me. That lip-flapping, eluding bastard sent the jungle boy after me. The little ape threw a brick at my head and chased me with a shovel across the field into the village of Debriyiah. The kid is huge. Some villagers let me hide in their little mosque.

 

I am taking this violent outburst of jealousy and its consequences as a sign to move after somebody turned my whole room inside out. One night I threw a brick through the jungle boy’s window and lit off a Molotov cocktail on his porch. ‘Us bitches are nothing but trouble,’ Hadas told me giggling after the fact.

 

Bruriya tells me to pack my bags and ‘get gone.’ She refunded a couple hundred sheks from the Ulpan and washes her hands of me. The best way is to keep it internal and banish me before the jungle boy or I try to kill each other.

 

I am on the next bus to Tel Aviv. I haven’t been there since the bombing. I‘m not cut out for collective living anyway. I had the phone numbers of my roommate Ben, the wild witch Hadas and Mr. Jones if I ever need places to crash.

 

The mood in Tel Aviv has grown darker.

 

The central bus station of Tel Aviv is still a maze of commerce and a madhouse failure in human trafficking. It is Grand Central Station with neither grandeur, elegance nor any discernable organization. It is like the Port Authority with five minutes to live. Increased security and soldiers swarm the area.  ID and random bag checks are done on everyone coming or going. Arab Israelis and Yemenite or Moroccan Jews may as well never put their identity cards back in their pockets. It is a kind of muted hysteria, not as edgy as being terrorized, but prepared to jump on anyone who looks suspicious. People are colder than normal. Everyone is more jumpy, more likely to curse out strangers and cut lines.

 

Nothing has really changed except me. I keep my eyes peeled for bag bombs and racially profile out my ass. I take a sheroort, a mini-van cab, from the bus station to Jerusalem Beach. I always wind up here. It is open and safe.

 

I drop my black rucksack and set up my art stand from the huge plywood piece near the foot de-sander sprinklers. It air-dries in about five minutes and so do I. The heat is something ridiculous Celsius. I am soaked through and through. I affix a large white tablecloth that I expropriated from the kibbutz to the board and then tape my twenty some odd sketches to it. I drop a handful of new Israeli shekels on my turquoise, bandana-wrapped archive sketchbook. I wedge a sign that some girl has made for me next to it, which says, OMANOOT MAQHAR, ‘Resistance Art’ in Hebrew.

 

With my makeshift art stand up and running, I sit in the shade and count out my remaining shekels.  I only have 280 left. I have few options for living free or cheap. The most rundown hostels cost 40-plus a night and we’re talking places you would only bring hookers to. I have to get some money and a roof over my head fast.

 

Squatting isn’t really an option. There is not really a squatter movement here in Israel, that is, unless you count the several million Palestinians as a kind of squatter community, squatting their own homes now deemed illegal. The irony of this is not lost upon me. Only junkies in bombed out shit holes don’t pay rent. They are constantly evicted. I don’t want to live in that kind of situation.

 

The boardwalk is empty because of the heat. A small girl comes up to me with her mother and then runs off quickly. They only buy my sketches at night when they’re drunk. On a Thursday or a Friday, it will get busy and I will do okay. Or at least that is what it has been like when I came down just for weekends. They can’t seem to get an American selling political art here. They also really can’t get their heads around a New Yorker immigrating here. They spend more time trying to talk me out of moving to Israel than buying art. Only girls and tourists buy anything for more than ten NIS. They buy what hangs on the board sometimes quite inspired by one of my scribbles. I don’t put the time into these that I did in London. A lot of them are photocopies of my archive colored in with pencils and sharpies. No one cares. It’s all a novelty.

 

No wonder they think I am crazy. Whatever AIPAC and the big US Jew lobby is doing, it works. Israel is the single largest recipient of US aid on the planet. What the country offers in intelligence or just about anything is too negligible for the amount of US dollars it receives each year. These are the subjects of lofty and opinionated books, but Israel is more like an outpost than a colony. Its claims toward both democracy and Westernness are highly exaggerated. Things are neither particularly Western nor democratic in the Holy Land.

 

Arab rhetoricians like to compare the ‘Zionist entity’ to the crusader state during the Middle Ages. That is weak, too. Israel wass clearly quite capable of fighting off joint amalgamations of Arab armies prior to the serious military aid that didn’t get started in earnest until after the war in 1956. The massive evangelical Christian support for Israel is geared to their Bible book of Revelations, based upon wishful thinking that the Jewish return will precede the end of days. The Evangelicals are thrilled about us coming home. The sooner we all return home and are slaughtered, the sooner Jesus will return.

 

This little outpost of 8 million people is also like a large ghetto in the sands. This outpost oasis will always be armed and walled and holding out for reinforcements, which are never coming. The hundreds of millions of dollars in gun money and the immigrant waves of several thousand a year can’t outgun or out breed the Palestinian will for their nation. We’ve built our ghetto on top of someone else’s. If it had been ours some thousands of years ago, that doesn’t matter on the Arab street. They aen’t going anywhere and neither are we.

 

That an American artist would come here to draw is neither logical nor in line with the Israelite dream. You do your army time and then move on to New York via Bali or Europe if your finances allow. If you get to America you don’t come back unless you come back rich. The Russians are just biding time. Their Zionist yearnings are in an entirely different language. If things have been shit for Jews in Russia, they are shit here too. Only Brighton Beach is paved in gold. For the Israeli kids it is in Williamsburg or DUMBO where these golden streets are to be found. They all just want out of here. They feel the walls beginning to chip.

 

Draft dodging isn’t just on the rise; it is a supported subculture. These Refuseniks, as they are called, claim insanity or pacifism or whatever they can. Most go to prison or flee the country. The ones who stay are ruined. Doors are closed to them not only for vital state monies for healthcare and school, but also for thousands of upper middle class jobs. You are marked as a traitor if you don’t join the IDF because the whole outpost relies on the strength and violence of its young to hold the fort.

 

The religious, or Dosiim as they are called derogatorily by my Russian friends, are exempt from the army and taxes. Their role is to maintain Jewish identity. They vote as a block and their SHAS party is always needed for any government coalition. This creates a tremendous amount of religious baggage that is foisted upon the secular Jewish state. It impacts nearly every aspect of Israeli life. You can’t get married if you aren’t Jewish. You have to fly to Cyprus to consummate a marriage that is not halachically approved.

 

Things are locked down on shabbos. Not everything, but just about everything outside of Tel Aviv. Russians and Arabs run their stores and clubs, but the national bus and train lines go down for 24 hours. You can’t find too many restaurants with pepperoni pizza. Technically you can’t have pigs on the territory of Israel but Russians get around it with elevated sties. There are ways around everything, but the real result is divisions that have been growing in Israel since the mass waves of Sephardic Jews began showing up in the 50’s fleeing pogroms in Arab countries after the first two wars had gone so badly.

 

The Mizrahiim, as they are derogatively called by the Askinazim, the white European Israelis, look like Arabs, speak and think in Arabic, eat Arab food and to an outsider are indistinguishable culturally from Arabs. The Jews and Muslims have done well enough together for about 1600 years, far better than Jews had done living in Christian Europe. Their status as a “People of the Book” has protected them under the Islamic Shari’ah Law for hundreds of years. There is intermarriage as well as vast cultural exchange as Jews have been integrated throughout the Caliphates. This ended quite abruptly in 1948. Beat enough war drums and shed enough blood and now less than fifty years later, the Jews and Muslims will swear they have been enemies since creation.

 

The Mizrahiim demographically are quite diverse but the largest contingents are the Jews from Yemen and Morocco. For decades racial and cultural tensions drove the first schisms within the Jewish state. The constant state of war, however never allowed these differences to be politically dangerous. There had been a Black Panther Party of Israel in the 1970’s, which fought discrimination. Eventually they were arrested or co-opted or forgotten about or ignored. When there’s a war every ten years and the survival of the state always seems to hang in the balance, these internal contradictions are swept under the great wool carpet. Then came huge waves of Ethiopian Jews in the 70’s and there was a new other, one more racially pronounced and completely unaccustomed to living in a quasi-developed, industrial country. But better to be a nigger in the outpost than a nigger in a war zone. Ethiopia went up in the flames of civil war and the 20,000 odd Ethiopian Jews were air lifted out and naturalized in Israel. They belong to two great African tribes that have been practicing Judaism for over 2,000 years and are widely believed to be the lost tribe of Dan. My Russian friends call them the Cosiim, which means Blacks, but might as well mean niggers. The Russians never play nice with Ethiopians. There are fights in the ghettos, fights in the schools, fights in the army and fights in the clubs. I almost got the shit kicked out of me in front of Abulafiah trying to break up a Russian-Ethiopian fisticuff right after I first arrived.

 

The Russian flood began in 1989 when the wall came down and surged by the early nineties.  Any Russian with even the most flimsy claim to being the grandchild of a Jew came in swarms. All over the former Soviet Union as former party and KGB operators grabbed up turf, men and weapons, the fall of communism meant a mass exodus of a million so-called Russian Jews to Israel. Fleeing poverty, repression and anarchy, these Russians are called Barbarians by just about every other marginalized group as they pack ghettos all over the outpost to capacity right next to Sephardic, Ethiopian and lower class Askinazi groups like the Romanians. The adjustment to this new immigration is still underway. My closest friends here, like the now exploded and dead Roman, are the children of this new wave. They speak English better than they speak Hebrew because they tune into MTV and VH1 everyday having grown up cold-war, capitalist-culture deprived.

 

There is another very important demographic in our outpost. They are harder to count because they have so many kids they don’t always report. They have their own ways and are as insular as they can be. A tagliit Birth Right Israel guide would call them the Arab Israelis, but that is a fiction for tourists not attuned to demographics or statecraft. There are easily a million Arab Israelis or Palestinians living in Israel proper. They are the ones who never left. Some of them are Christians, like the inhabitants of the town of Nazareth and Acho. Many are not. No one wants to call them Palestinians, but that’s what they call themselves. I have met a few on the tiyeled. They go out in packs because it is safer that way. They don’t have to join the army, but they benefit by staying. They are hated by everyone else and suspected as a fifth column in this latest Intifada.

 

There are two more subgroups of the Arab-Israelis with whom I have not had contact: the Druze and the Bedui. You have to count them separately because even though they are Arab they have always sided with the Israeli state despite any silly claims at ethnic loyalties. The Bedouin are Sunni Muslim like the Palestinians, but their nomadic desert nature puts them quite at odds with every Arab regime in the region. They are concentrated largely in settlements all over the Negev and periodically join the army as trackers. They are very poor and are also well integrated into southern crime and smuggling out of Egypt. I hope to meet one eventually. I haven’t been south of Judea. The Druze are more ambiguous still because they practice a highly secretive religion something like Hinduism and Islam mixed together. They live in little village citadels in the north in Lebanon and the Galilee. They are active supporters of the Jewish state and many sent their children to the IDF. I am told that even if I did meet a Druze, they’ll never tell me anything about their religion. They keep to the hills and to their own ways clandestino.

              

So our little outpost of 8 million souls, 11 if one counted the Palestinians in the territories, have quite enough internal fighting simmering to add to the twenty-plus nations in the region that continue to swear to kill us. There are also the internal contradictions of the inner city and the ghettos. I see them clearly on the tiyeled. I draw pictures about them and about the need for unity even with the Palestinians at war with us. It is becoming obvious to me that this internal fighting will do in our outpost far sooner than some Arab army can. All this building hatred is exploding around us three or four times a week. A bus here, a bar there. Sometimes it is just a child with a Kalashnikov opening up on people in a market. The suicide bombing campaign is low intensity and high volume. There are never more than twenty fatalities per attack, but it is taking its toll. The Israelis strike back with ‘smart bombs’ and checkpoints and road closures, but it stops nothing. This thing is just getting started.

 

Anya is the blondinit-streaked, raven-haired Russian girl that I am fooling around with from the town of Pardes Hana. She tells me it all started when Ariel Sharon and a huge armed escort made their way to the Temple Mount where the Dome of the Rock sits and demanded access to pray. A violent and terrifying fitna erupted within twenty minutes of the Prime Minister’s initial visit. This started the first Intifada. It must have begun less than a month after I first visited in 2000. Now, nine months later, the body count is in the thousands with daily retaliations. It is the bomber belt versus the F-15 fighter with their laser-guided rocket smart bombs that always knock out the terrorists and nine families living near them. It is blood for blood and bullet for bullet, a test of wills as to who possesses the constitution hold the outpost.

 

I see two carloads of Palestinians careening down the highway that runs alongside the tiyeled at over 70 mph this Thursday as I am working late. They are each waving four huge red flags with the crescent of Islam upon them. Thirty Israeli police cars are pursuing them with sirens wailing. It is a high-speed chase over what might have just been a first amendment question at a high speed, but is getting blown up into something more significant. It is quite gangster so see these Arab bandits tearing down the highway repping their colors. They’ll be very lucky if the Israelis don’t open fire on them. I hope I don’t see the end of it. It is really brave, really noble, more of a statement than exploding yourself in a club full of uninvolved high school kids. But that is naïve. Everyone is involved.

 

One of the Israeli squad cars pulls off a pit maneuver on the rear vehicle and it spins out of control into a concrete barrier and flips. The lead car takes off out of site heading south toward the Dan Hotel and District Yaffo. A crowd gathers around the vehicle and the police take positions with their pistols drawn. Some fat American tourists with handheld video cameras turne their attention from the three-card Monte stands to ‘the terrorists.’ A group of Russian youth swarm the site, but not too close in case the people in the overturned car ‘explode’ themselves.

 

A young Arab man is crawling out one of the broken windows. He drags his buddy with him. The police are screaming in Hebrew for him to put his arms in the air. A policeman fires in the air. I think you only fire in the air in third world countries. The young Arab rebel’s hands and shirt are all bloodied up. He hasn’t let go of the flag.

 

There are two more guys in the back who are pretty fucked up because they hadn’t been wearing seat belts. The paramedics are arriving on the scene as well as a few more cop cars. A loud speaker is telling everyone in Hebrew and English to get back in case the car is booby-trapped. Maybe it is because the fat Americans are filming. Maybe it is because he hates the sound of Hebrew. Maybe it is because English is the Modern Greek, the bloodied Arab rebel bellows,

 

“FreEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEdom!”

 

He doesn’t bellow it very long. Some of the gawking Russian kids overrun the security cordon and start kicking his face in. They tear apart him and his friend in the front seat.

 

The police beat the Russians back with riot sticks and pepper spray. Peace is eventually restored. Four young Arabs are in cuffs. Only one of them is conscious. The police call some ambulances for the four kids who cann’t really be said to have been doing much more than speeding with the pride of nation.

ו

I had stayed in a number of questionable places while I was a weekend warrior.  I’d slept in the kind of hotel rooms that you pay for by the hour and where small roaches creep up the bathroom walls out cracks in the ceiling and floor. Places where it sounds like someone’s raping then eviscerating a hooker in the next room. Grunts through paper-thin walls and bed boards banging like a carnal metronome. Sometimes I slept on Jerusalem Beach under one of the many wooden pergolas built on the sands. Occasionally I got offered a couch in a female or gay man’s never-seemed-to-be-air-conditioned apartment. I always woke up in my own sweat feeling hung over stinking of cheap vodka when I was lucky with a broad whose name ended with an ‘A.’

 

The place I’m at tonight is kind of swank and swingin.’ This happens when my morals are loose.

 

The weekend warrior tale has alternative endings. One is called the missionary. I split a bottle of vodka with a client or two and sit on the beach recounting my yarn of exile. We palaver on the boardwalk over a twenty-shekel bottle of still water chased with cola or cherry juice about how I came to this place and what is across the sea in that city they all seem so eager to run toward. That is missionary work. I have worked this tale so many times that it comes out like a sermon.  My congregants always spend more to purchase a picture after the homily is delivered than they would have before. They often give me a number to get fed or get fucked or have a place to sleep for the night that is not sand or pavement.

 

Far more often than the missionary comes the genie in the bottle. The small peace I felt through observing shabbos with the Golder’s Green Jews has been drowned in the even greater peace of drinking, fucking, smoking and fighting. I have reverted to the lifestyle I led prior to my internment in the series of hospitals and the Family School. The rapes and the robberies are gone, but in all other ways it is come-on-in-and-sin. I smoke opium and hash. I drink vodka alone and with my congregation.

 

My Russian compatriots yearn for New York Americana and I deliver it. I am a symbol of the city they pray every night that they might still get to grow up in. So their girls swallow my cock and fuck me even when I can’t speak a word of their language. Anya speaks a sort of broken half-English. Everything is in the future tense and every sentence includes a couple of Russian words, a couple of Hebrew ones and the curse word blat, which means bitch-fuck-shit-cunt. These street Russians use it like a comma.

 

Anya doesn’t live in Tel Aviv. She lives in Pardes Hanna on the road to Haifa. She’s down here on the tiyeled more than I am for her work. She never says what kind of work. One of the many Dimitri’s tells me she is a medical agent. These Russians roll really deep, like twenty people whose names I’m not expected to keep track of. Mostly they sit on the boardwalk getting drunk all weekend. The Russians post up where I sell across from the Opera Towers so now I’m part of the gang.

 

The only time I recall paying for a hotel by the hour is when I banged out Anya in a roach motel with no sheets. We’d drunk so much still water that it was hard to stand. We fucked frantically. I clenched her burgundy blonde hair as I sucked on her C-plus tits thrust after thrust.

The night she attempted to tell me about how Ariel Sharon started the second Intifada, I realize it would be nice to take her to dinner. Or at least have a picnic with a scenic view. Some figs and cheap white wine. Some crackers and some cheese. I don’t really want these girls to think I’m some dark fuck that has no romance in him.

 

I guess everyone likes an artist and I know I am playing a part in all these young girls’ fantasies. I’m that hero in the night who’s gonna whisper it’s all gonna get better one day after I tell them a good story. Never mind my art, it’s all in the epic sincerity of my various yarns. I give these girls something to believe in. I give them some hope that life is like is a mission and not just a journey in the darkness. I mean some girls fuck me just because I’m from New York, but I’d like to think that Anya can understand every fourteenth word I say. Then I can be a kid again and do the cute courtship type stuff, maybe write her a poem or something. It washes over me and recedes just as fast. My emotions would be wasted on her. It would add a sense of development to a relationship that has been taken as far as it can or should be.

 

***

I found a free place to live after three days in Tel Aviv.

 

I was selling art, as I generally do when money and options run out. A lanky and dark- complexioned Askinazi and a jacked-up Russian with spiked hair approaches me. Their names are Gilead and the Greek respectively. The Russian kid called the Greek understands more than he can communicate so he lets Gilead do the talking.  Gilead is something of a slimy ass. They are both aimless street kids. Gilead tells me there is place called Bet Ashanti where I can get three meals and a bed for free just by being homeless and underage. They say it is clean and relatively safe. I am sold.

 

I accompany them all the way down past the Dolphinarium and the drummers of the Tiki Beach beyond the Dan Hotel to the crossroads of Tel Aviv and Yaffo into a neighborhood named Florentine. At least the Bet Ashanti is clean. It looks like an urban kibbutz behind the Dan Hotel across from a rundown parking lot. There are twin wooden bunkhouses and a huge wooden porch cluttered with twenty boys and girls about my age on wooden tables and chairs. The rec room has computers and couches and a pregnant 15-year old Yemeni. There is something about it that is very Mary Poppins, but in reality it is more like Lord of the Flies. The older battle-axe of a woman who is on duty looks like she has punched a few of these kids out. My new housemates are sizing up what I have to steal even before I put my bag down. Most of them introduce themselves, but I can’t ever catch names when I meet more than ten new people at a time.

 

It just so happens to be sundown on Friday. We gather around a huge table in the rec room to eat a shabbos dinner, light some candles and sing the prayers. There are forty kids in all. The girls have their own apartment up the street. They gave me a locker without a lock and bottom bunk in large room full of kids that stay in and out of juvee. Greek tells me to hold down anything I have of value. I am one of only two or three Askinazim in the lot. They tell me not to do drugs and to come home by midnight. They say I can stay here until I get on my feet.

 

I like ‘food on the free,’ so I am pretty sold.  If it is going to get bad I’ll roll with the punches like always.

ז

It is getting about as hot as I’m told it gets. Bet Ashanti is keeping food in my belly and providing me a cot near a fan. If things go missing at least they don’t go missing with a knife to my throat. My CD player, my belt and some loose shekels all disappear down the black hole of the closet. My inner Jewish accountant says the meals and cot are worth it and to ride it out a few more weeks.  It is just so hot.

 

June of 2001 is killer. There are more bus bombings, more shootings, more reprisals and more death on public transit. The Europeans are condemning the Israelis because they keep taking out little kids in their smart bomb attacks. Americans condemn the terrorists while doing nothing more than keeping the money spigot flowing.

 

I hustle my art seven days a week in front of the Opera Towers, on the tiyeled and on the beaches. I am selling my art faster than I can restock. I am turning out sketches on demand. It is hotter and hotter by day and the Zachariah show is going strong.

 

I am making a day trip to Pardes Hanna to bring Anya flowers against my better judgment. She is a dead ringer for Izzy Vitz’s Lithuanian-Japanese ex Jackie Niche back in New York, but with bigger tits. She isn’t just a leisure agent. She is also an emergency medical technician for the Sheroot Leumi, which is a sort of do-community-service-from-home-to-stay-out-of-the-army jump off for females and the patriotic religious.

 

This is hardly a leap into monogamy. She doesn’t seem to want more of me than I can give. Anya doesn’t speak enough English to get deep about it, but she bats her eyes and asks me to take her to New York one day soon. This giving her flowers thing is a madhouse idea after a month of dirty drunk mouth-to-ass sex. Some nights we sit on the boardwalk on the piles of stacked up beach chairs. Whenever I am up her way we promptly fuck all over her ever-absent mommy’s house. Make love rather, if I haven’t been drinking.

 

I haven’t kissed a girl sober in a very long time. Not Daphne Collins or the other one in England, not Hadas and certainly rarely ever Anya.  In less than a week she had fallen for me. So I feign some lovemaking, some ‘slow fucking’ as Izzy once had called it. I came three times that first night. On her breasts and in her mouth and in a condom. I moan ‘suck my dick’ and some dirty-talk language getting head in the big steel bathtub. The girl lays with me in the dark at her mother’s small apartment in Pardes Hana and she begs me to take her to New York once her time in the national services is complete. She shows me a pistol and a ton of ammunition her ex had stolen for her.

 

She has really great breasts. I must be a titty man because I really need those things huge to get off. I’m socialized like that I suppose. And if I’m the American pretending to be an Israeli, she is certainly doing a bang-up job working to not be from here. She came here from Karaganda by way of Taskent in 1990. She often practices reducing her accent to nothing with the TV and mail order accent-reduction tapes. She isn’t Russian but wants to model there. She is cute enough, but she doesn’t have the starvation frame. She’s a curvy little former Soviet. In America you’d call her a ‘Russian.’ Here too, maybe, but in reality she is half Kazakh, half Uzbek. Unlikely any part Jew.

 

I told the Bet Ashanti’s madam that I am meeting an uncle in Haifa for the weekend. I hitchhiked up to Pardes Hana to get with Anya instead. She ahs quite a few boyfriends bopping around to stare me down, but that doesn’t stop us from kissing and fucking all night and whispering things about running off country. We fill her ashtray with three packs of butts and I get so caught up in the moment that I fail to see how quickly this girly has taken to me.

 

She is my comfort girl and I am her golden ticket out of Dodge City.      

 

***

 

I meet people really quickly and develop intense relationships in my line of work.

 

You take a reasonably intelligent person and they see this big art stand with pictures filled up with commie imagery, carnal orgiastic renditions, biblical allegories and current events. You break into some topic a picture you like alludes to, only to meet a young kid who defies every idea you have about Americans. That sort of explains how I am getting down.

 

I take a whole lot more numbers than I call. Numbers to get fed, to get fucked, to ‘finish a good conversation’ and even offers to take the Zachariah Artstein show on the road to quaint and quieter inner country locals like in Ashdod and Herzaliya. There are also young kids my own age that want me to paint murals in their bedrooms and rap for their friends.

 

I never do as well selling as when I work the tiyeled. It is July 4th and the masses are out in force. Bands play salsa music on small bandstands set up on the boardwalk. Street hustlers work games of Three Card Monty. Teenage girls looking for a quick summer buck sell all sorts of glowing toys to small children passing by as little boys hustle couples with flowers and Polaroid pictures. There is a whole culture of street hustlers that work the tiyeled. I am one of them.

 

I have been in Tel Aviv about a month since leaving the Ein Dor kibbutz and moving to Bet Ashanti, home for runaway teens. I sell my art every night. Five shekels here, twenty shekels there. It is just enough to eke out a desperately thin existence on ice cold mayiim, crunchy falafel, zaatar cakes and Noblisse cigarettes.

 

My new business partner, the half Russian boy named Ditri Massaud, watchs the stand as I work the crowd. I mingle in and out of the great crowds shouting in Hebrew,

 

Bo tista-clu al omanute sha-li!” or “Come look at my art!”

 

Ditri is twice my size and has lived in the desert town of Be’er Sheva. He borrowed the equivalent of nearly a thousand dollars from the local Romanian mob to finance and stock his stall in the market. The enterprise had been less than successful and he fled to Tel Aviv to avoid the consequences of owing dangerous people too much money. It is small country so they’ll catch him eventually. He doesn’t speak English so that our communication in my garbled Hebrew is limited, to say the least. His English is limited to “Yes,” “No” and “You are friend of Ditri.”

 

Ditri owns two pairs of clothing. He sleeps in the sand under one of the many beach pergolas. He has been barred from Bet Ashanti for a reason that is never really explained to me. Greek mentions that he is violent and crazy. Ditri is a bulky kid with curly blond hair and Mongoloid features. He is very loyal. Whenever someone tries to steal from our collection plate as the gangs of arsim often do, Ditri chases them down and clobbers them something awful. Maybe he is really violent, but it all works to my advantage.

 

During the heat of the day we share a bottle of Coke and watch the waves crash gently on the beach.  We space out slightly as a result of the heat exhaustion. I don’t know if I would call Ditri my friend, for I know precious little about him, but he serves nicely in our new symbiotic relationship as street hustlers.

 

Our best customers are the American and English tourists vacationing in Israel for the summer. That’s because ‘the ZA show’ works best when your English is good. Most of them stay in Jerusalem, hyped up on some propaganda-induced spiritual experience. Jerusalem is the brainwashing capital of the world as far as I am concerned. I haven’t even stepped foot in it since I arrived back in the country. Secular Jews visiting for a week always run into some Dos or Hasid who will give them a crash course in the workings of the Old Testament and get them hooked.

 

The religious Jews, the Dosim and Hasidim, are on the national dole.  These two groups are more offensive than the other groups of religious Jews because of their penchant for rock throwing and religious rioting. They neither pay taxes nor serve in the IDF. Most importantly, they never buy art. They don’t even stop to look. It’s good they don’t look because the Tetranomogram, the ‘Yod Hei Vav Hei’ gets incorporated quite bit and they’d flip shit over that.

 

Israelis don’t have any true need for a thing like street art. It’s not that they don’t like art, but they really need some persuading to buy it from a street vendor. To make a living from a street stand here, one has to know how to work the crowds, create a market and deliver a desirable product. This country has little time for charity cases, which is what I am perceived as most of the time.

 

My best sales pitch is to young girls who are fascinated with the American expatriate who loves a country no one seems to want to live in. Maybe that is a misinterpretation on my part. It just seems that each Israeli I talk to dreams of living in New York. While many people stop to examine our goods, the bulk of our money comes from the tourists and from the regulars. A regular is someone who lives or works by the tiyeled and drops money anytime they see us out. To survive in this game you need your regulars.

 

Svetlana Tchaadaev is perfect example of a regular. She’s an American-educated Russian trust-fund baby, which is just a code word for her daddy being a Russian mobster-robber baron. Ms. Tchaadaev carries on romantic flings with the artists and bohemians of the Tel Aviv subculture. Despite the fact that she is independently wealthy, she works as a flyer girl for Mike’s Blues Bar just up the beach. I’d been doing the same thing for Mike’s the night the Pasha club blew up.

 

Svetlana normally shares her beers and meals with me and always buys a picture. We try to steal yellow beach chairs from the lock up on Jerusalem Beach before they are chained together for the night.  She sits with me and helps me in the hustle. She is shady as hell. Ditri never doesn’t her. She always tries to get me to sell her my passport.

 

There are other far less problematic regulars, like curly, blonde-haired Ethiopian Lina, who even though she was born in village without running water or electricity seems more Americanized and hip in fashion and sensibility then most Askinazi Israelis. Abby and Rachel are the ‘two birds’ from Golder’s Green, students of Rabbi Akiva Tatz. They bring young men from Jerusalem to meet with me to spar on issues of Talmud and religion. These are the people that keep Ditri and me in water, meal money and smokes. I am the sales man and he is the strong man. It is like any Russian business except in ours the salesman gets to call the shots.

 

Although I consider myself a Resistance Artist, the truth is I am barely making ends meet. On a terrific evening, generally a Friday or Saturday, I might bring in close to 200 shekels, the equivalent of fifty dollars. The money I save is largely earmarked to take my girl Anya out to dinner when she comes into the city to visit me. You might say I am becoming like a normal person. Bit by bit by bit, less like street trash. Anything left over is earmarked toward pens, sketchpads, vodka, ice-cold mayiim and Noblisse cigarettes.

 

It is necessary to keep yourself looking presentable when you street hustle. You can’t have the buyers think that you are begging for the money. It is important to communicate that you are a skilled artisan, a poor and hungry skilled artisan, but nonetheless incredibly talented. When I feel humorous I compare my art to Van Gogh and Picasso when they traded paintings for food. I convince my customers they are making a serious investment and that one day these sketches I make will be worth a small fortune on the art market when I cut off my ear for a woman or go out against fascism in a hail of bullets.

 

My art stock consists of three types: political cartoons, dream-based consignment pieces and commissions. My favorite works are the political cartoons surrealistically drawn with black Uniball pens on 8 ½ by 11 paper. Normally they start with a cartoon version of myself blowing away the ‘pigs and capitalist traitors of the Iron heel.’ Then with that image somewhere in the page I drop in any number of red flag hammer and sickles, bare-naked women engaged in carnality or war or both. Then with a slightly finer pen, normally a Uniball Fine Point, I stencil in the message of the day, which could be anything really, but is normally anti-war, anti-state, anti-religious and Israeli-issue themed. Finally, I write bold needlessly proactive messages. The phrases are always in English, but sometimes in a, shall we say artistic, rendition of the phrases in Hebrew, Russian or Arabic.

 

There is little color in any of my work and the sketches take on a variety of subjects, but generally they are quite dark and violent in their depictions of Israeli or American social ills. Lots of ‘Join or Die’ type themes with the 14 big Israeli ethnic groups. If color does get used its either black or red Sharpie fill-ins, highlighter color-ins of people’s eyes or gold etched inlay on edges to simulate shadow.

 

The lowest I go on these pieces is 20 sheks a pop, although Ditri made a bunch of Photostat copies one day from my archive sketch book, and I loosely colored a few in. These we sell for just 10 sheks, or a comparable offered price, because frankly, a photocopy costs Ditri only 10 agarot to bang off.

 

My dream-based work is all in pencil on thicker matte paper far larger in size. These sketches are from the vivid dreams I used to have about Mike Washington and the Pale City. The gun battles against the screaming Zombie hordes, the Underground Railroad, the flying machines, the redheaded girl, the Old Man and his game. All of these take at least a day to render. Since traffic is so slow during daylight, I fashion most of these pieces then.

 

These sell almost right away for 100 sheks or more. I can crack out the political stuff on demand, but the dream pieces take longer as I have to remember them.  Most of the customers fixate on the controversial statements of the political work. It takes awhile, an hour even of conversation before a customer turns his attention to the dream pieces. As long as it is a good conversation and the offer price exceeds 100, I never haggle over the sale.

 

I have other artists work too. The twenty odd pieces always on display are generally half mine and half consigned stock. The consigned pieces are from a variety of young Israeli artists who admire my tenacity at salesmanship and are curious to see what prices their work might fetch on the open market in Israel. They are generous enough to let me keep 30% of the sale, for they can see I am destitute. Most of them go to art school in Haifa and my trade inspires them of the future they hope for in Williamsburg and DUMBO once their Sheroot Lummi commitments are finished. Just under half my earnings come from selling the Israeli’s their own children’s art. By the end of June I am representing over twelve Israeli artists, one Ethiopian, three Arabs, two Russians, three Mizrahi, two Askinazim and one dos, the derogatory word for the religious now added to my vernacular.

 

The commissions are where my living truly comes from. Most of the times it is a goods-for-services swap situation. I paint a small mural for a haircut or charcoal a portrait for a bath when I am hitchhiking about the Galilee. I am just ‘eeking out a very base existence, but Bet Ashanti pust a roof over my head and two meals a day in my belly.

 

The staff there thinks that I work as an overnight busboy. Otherwise, I’d have to be in by midnight. Because the other kids are such freeloaders they appreciate me working and let me slide. My entire cycle has been reversed. It’s too hot to do anything during the day and I can’t stand the sun anyway.

 

I sleep on the bottom bunk in one of the two boy’s rooms along with about twelve other kids. Most of them don’t speak too much English. Those that do hold day jobs and I rarely see them.

 

Bet Ashanti is a place for runaways, misfits and ghetto trash. It has been associated with a series of scandals over the years involving, but not limited to accusations of drug dealing on behalf of the residents, accusations of child molestation on behalf of the residents, high rates of Army desertion on behalf of the residents upon reaching age 18, and it had recently been in the papers when its owner and founder was accused of raping a 17 year-old female resident. That most of the boys are in street gangs, that no one goes to school, and that the mayor of Tel Aviv is under some public pressure to shut the operation down, nothing is any worse here than say, sleeping on a street while hungry.

 

As far as I can tell there are a lot of rules, but only three that truly matter. The first is no substance abuse, at least not on the premises. No drugs or drinking anywhere near Bet Ashanti. But these kids are all drug addicts and smoke hash all day on the beach. The second rule is no fighting. No one is allowed to fight anywhere near the Shanti House. But that’s also a stupid rule for kids who are members of street gangs and all manner of shady shit. I watched the Greek break some guy’s jaw in a prizefight he took me to a day ago. The last rule is no stealing. People are not allowed to take stuff belonging to Bet Ashanti or the kids that live there. One would think these rules sort of go without saying, but in fact there is seldom a time when these kids aren’t doing drugs, fighting and stealing.

 

By evening I have only seen a few of my regulars. Greek, the Russian kid from Bet Ashanti had dropped by to show me his new girlfriend. Svetlana had passed by on a flyer run. There were other familiar faces, but no regulars. It is very cool for an evening in mid-July. Business has been good and the collection pot is up to about 90 shekels. I had made an additional 100 shekels yesterday that I hadn’t gotten to blow yet on one of my girls and the still water. The colorful paper notes are tucked neatly in my billfold. New Israeli shekels, the good old ‘NIS’ currency looks like Monopoly money to me.

***

 

The evening is coming to a close. The bands have stopped playing and the crowd has thinned out to a trickle. Drunken revelers are dancing in the moonlight. There is a fight going on across the street. As it nears 2 am, I begin to consider closing up shop. I have close to 150 shekels in my pocket, a small comparative fortune.

 

I stand up to stretch.

 

My hands are sore from the non-stop drawing I have been doing all evening. I pop my knuckles and light up a Noblisse. This is perhaps my thirtieth stoag of the day. I tend to smoke I great deal when I am on the job. Placing the crumpled green packet into the cargo pocket of my ripped and baggy khakis, I palm Ditri a fifty note for his troubles.

 

“Thank you Ze-Hariah,” says Ditri, for to him this was a great deal of money.

 

“You are friend of Ditri.”

 

“Take it easy, big guy.”

 

The big oaf gives me a hearty pat on the pack that almost knocks me flat on my face.

 

“Ditri now sleep,” he says.

 

I have to hand it to him. His English is improving, as is my Hebrew. I am starting to understand phrases and bits of conversation, and can get my point across if I have to. Most Israelis learn English in high school and can hold a conversation. It is the Arabs and the Russians who refuse to learn English. There are exceptions but few that I encounter can understand what I am saying. Ditri bargains for me in Russian, but Arabic is lost on both of us, which is odd him being half Bedouin. I have recently considered doing the sign in Arabic and Russian to broaden my clientele, but keep forgetting to ask someone to translate it. Ditri is virtually illiterate and can neither read nor write in Hebrew or Russian.

 

Svetlana could do it for me in Russian, but she despises anything that reveals her actual and not imagined heritage. She feigns ignorance in order to not speak or write her native tongue. She has invited me for late night drinks at the Blues Bar and I have made enough money to easily cover my expenses for the week, cigarettes, vodka and more art supplies.

 

I am quite proud of myself for making that much money and decide to celebrate at the Blues Bar over a pint of Maccabi, which isn’t as good as the piss water Gold Star and can’t hold a candle to a Stella, but I guess I want to be down with the tribe. It is close to 3 in the morning. Ditri has found some corner to fall asleep in. I am just putting some last touches on a large pencil sketch.

 

I make a final count of my money and start packing up the pieces into my bag. I start with the 8 ½ by 11’s, peeling the tape off the back that hold them to the enormous tabletop I use as a display board. I have neatly inserted three of the pieces into my binder when I hear a voice behind me.

 

“So what exactly are you selling?” Her voice sounds like Brooklyn.

 

“Art,” I respond without looking up. “The finest street art in Tel Aviv if not the entire Western World. Except for maybe Barcelona where the street art is well, pretty fucking good also.”

 

I turn around to face her and lord, is she beautiful with long flowing brown hair and a smile to disarm any man. I catch her chest like a second later, but that smile caught me off guard for a minute, because I just don’t really look at that in a girl ever.

 

She is a little shorter than me and looks like a natural hustler. That is to say she looks elegant and she can hold her shit down hard like a killer. Like a stripper putting herself though law school, things aren’t always what you degrade them to be.

 

“It is pretty good, kiddo. You’re wasting time being in Tel Aviv, but you knew that of course.”

 

“I was about to close! You’re lucky you caught me. I wouldn’t want a girl like you going home without a piece of Resistance Art.”

 

“I bet, you say cheesy shit like that to girls all night and they throw their phone numbers at you because the color of your passport is dark blue.”

 

“Actually I leave for Cairo in the morning and this might be your last chance to buy one.”

 

“Right. Cause it’s not like you’re here every single night of the week,” she responds smugly, “and incidentally the Taba border crossing with Egypt is closed at the moment because they found four tunnels across Rafah they were carting rockets in through.”

 

I laugh with her a sec. At each other and ourselves.

 

“You’re just really, really charming miss?”

 

“Maya. Maya Rose.”

 

“Zachariah Artstein.”

 

She looks dead at me and smirks.

 

“I don’t think that’s your real name.”

 

“I don’t think you really told me yours.”

 

A pause.

 

“What’s in name? Buy some fucking art,” I laugh.

“How much for that one?”

 

She points to a pencil sketch of 40 red rebels holding the walls of Jerusalem with swords and rifles and spears against a massive army of the undead. At the center of the drawing stands a bloodied fighter waving a grey banner as he empties his pistol into swine depicted police forces attacking the rebels within the city.

 

“That one’s called ‘The Hero’s Last Stand at the Golden Gate’.”

“You just made that up right now.”

“No, I swear I put a lot of thought into naming them because of how, truly deep they really all are. So much fucking allegory, or something.”

“No, you just made that name up now. I mean its real good. I’ve seen your work before, but I never got a chance to get close enough to look and actually talk to you about it.”

“Yeah, the crowds are getting bigger and bigger these days.”

“Crowds? I was referring to your seemingly constant flirtation with mindless frekhot.”

“Flirtation? I just want them to feed me and fuck me, I have most basic needs.”

“If you were a little prettier I’d swear I met a long lost brother,” she laughs.

“Quite. It’s a smallish tribe though. I’ll tell you what, you tell me your real name and I’ll give you the piece for any price you declare.”

“My real name eh, for a discount? I thought you were a business man, Zach.”

“I’m in the business of telling people things they only thought they’d get to hear in movies and romantic novels.”

“Where does the resistance come in?” she says noticing my sign.

“I’m resisting starvation.”

“So what you’re selling is communist-propaganda-meets-an-elaborate-pick-up-American-line?”

“Yeah, that sums it up if you wish to cheapen and devalue nearly everything I believe into a sound bite.”

 

“I see you have this speech carefully worked out.”

 

“Maya, you don’t spy on me do you?”

 

“Someone as ravishing as me gets spied upon but does not spy herself. I’m just acutely honed at deductive reasoning.”

 

“So you’re a psychic detective moonlighting as a stripper, eh?”

“Maybe I’m just a law student moonlighting as psychic detective who likes to take my clothing off.”

“Yeah, so what’s your real name, Maya Rose?”

“A better question is what you’re really doing in Tel Aviv. You know, when you’re not being a hipster.”

“Darling, I’m glad you asked. I think that there is no such thing as the devil, but if there were, and the devil was the head of a large militarized state, his greatest trick would be making people believe they had something other than themselves to blame for the evils of the world. The wool pulled over our eyes and iron heel upon our necks are kept there by our belief that we shouldn’t do anything; that the fault lies with some huge and powerful other and not in our own lack of will.”

“Spoken like someone with soft, soft hands. I don’t know what any of that means. Give me something more definitive, Zachariah, cause I’ve heard this schpiel before. It’s 3 am and you’ve got only a couple minutes to make this sale.”

“One need not make the masses aware, nor arm them nor give them doctrines on dreams that do not feed their children. The working people who have long been taught to hate and kill each other over skin tones, invisible friends and flag patterns don’t need to feel unity beyond the communities in which they live. But if they could see such a stand and a story demonstrated for their children’s children to remember and repeat; then they would have that one crucial thing the workers republic will be founded on.”

 

“Controlling the means of production?”

 

“No. The new republic is a thing to be founded on hope.”

 

“I assume this is where you hope to make your little stand.”

 

“Here’s what I know. Give these Palestinians a little land. Re-absorb the Palestinian Diaspora into a combined Jewish-Arab nation and separate our shul from our state. No Rabbis and Imams allowed in Knesset. Accept that being America’s whore is far worse than failing to retain the ‘Jewish character’ of this nation. Since the Palestinians are a political football the other Arab states use to keep us weak and the other Arab states hate the Palestinians anyway, a Pal-Isra solution makes sense since all Christians basically hate Jews So in a nutshell I’m here ready for the revolution.”

 

“First off Zachariah, you’re pretty damn divorced from the political reality of the world in which you live. But that I can dig. Israel can barely support those living here now. There isn’t enough land and there isn’t enough water.”

 

“Lies.”

 

“Second, this is the JEWISH homeland. We can’t just turn it into another secular country cause   we’d lose the one place Jews can actually turn to escape persecution.”

 

“Rhetoric.”

 

“Third, what makes you think these people actually want to share the land in the first place?”

 

“Because in the end they’ll realize that it’s better to live side by side than to keep killing each other’s children in a turf war no one cares about but your average New York Times reader.”

 

“It’s been sixty years and no one seems to have learned that lesson yet.”

 

“This can’t go on for much longer.”

 

“I beg to differ. We can kill each other indefinitely. The US will never turn off the gun spigot and the Palestinians can hold their asymmetric war another couple hundred years unless the Israelis do something to make them look like Germans, which they probably won’t.”

 

“My Kazakhi girlfriend advocates gassing them all at camps in the Negev.”

 

“Says something about your tastes in women.”

 

“Listen, I came to Israel to start a new life. I believe that in the end there’s got to be someway to make peace in this land. If I didn’t believe that then I would have to leave.”

 

“There are other reasons to be here like fast girls, nice beaches and a good hustle. How can you be so naive about the world and live in Israel, the most divided nation on the planet? Not exactly the best place to demonstrate peace and tolerance. If ya hadn’t noticed we live in a state of constant and unending war.”

 

“Where better for me to be? In America people don’t understand the concept of fighting for an ideal. They’re fat with the glut of their own apathy.”

 

“Fair enough, but enough people want war in Israel to make this conflict go on for decades more. There’s never been peace in this country. It has been a big non-stop war for the last sixty odd years. We’re sitting on the wall of a war field, a vast experimental powder keg upon which our kind gather half their number.”

 

“And one day it’ll explode.”

 

“Explode? Maybe you don’t watch the news, but it explodes nearly everyday.”

 

“Witty. You know what I mean.”

 

“I’m not sure I do.”

 

“Before there can be peace, there needs to be a conflict big enough to show these people why they shouldn’t fight indefinitely. Most Israeli kids don’t want to dress in a uniform and impose curfews and checkpoints on the Palestinians. I find it real hard to believe that every Palestinian wants to be a brick thrower or a shahiid. Everyone wants peace, but all the leaders can think of is how to get a bigger piece.”

 

“The Jews never went out and murdered civilians.”

 

“Except in the cases of Baruch Kappel Goldstein, Sabra and Shatilla. or Deir Yassin! Suicide bombing is counter-productive to the Palestinian cause, but it’s the only method they feel that works. They have ten thousand rocks for every Merkava Tank we have. For every ten thousand trained soldiers in the Tsvah they have one young person willing to blow themselves up as a martyr.”

 

“And you want to give in to them. You want to hand then the keys to the temple and expect them to let us live here.”

 

“I didn’t say give the land away. I said share it because it’s not anymore ours than it is theirs.”

 

“Ha. Priceless idealism. I agree with you, Zachariah in my heart and principles, believe me I do. I just don’t see a possibility of hope for these people.”

 

“We are these people.”

She looks at me and smiles again like when I first saw her. There is a moment of silence as we stare at each other anticipating each other’s response. She reaches into her pocket and takes out a purple NIS fifty note.

“I don’t know if you’ve completely sold me, but here’s some props for having the right ideals. The real name’s Emma but don’t call me that in front of other people when and if we hang out again.”

I remove the piece from the display board. I hand it to her and her eyes ran the gamut of its details.

“I know I’m giving you far less than it might be worth.”

“Throw your number in and I’ll pretend I’m not disappointed in the slightest.”

I roll it up and hand it to her. She smiles and hands me a business card and writes a cell phone number on the back of it. I look over the card Emma called Maya Rose handed me which looks like a club flyer, laminated small blue and white. It said in English: THE DEEP.

“What’s The Deep?”

“It’s a nightclub. Drop by on a Thursday and we’ll make sure to sort it out.

“Sort what out?”

“If we’re shooting for the same side. It was nice to meet you, Mr. Adon.”

What a lady.

 

***

 

I have a three-day rule when I get a girl’s number. It’s from the movie Swingers. You can’t seem eager. So there went Saturday, Sunday, and Monday. I sold every piece I had this weekend. I hung out in a café in Yaffo with Anya all day Tuesday and call Emma tonight. She tells me she is running around promoting at a ton of parties and can’t give me any attention. She says it is best for me just to come to the Deep alone on Thursday about midnight-thirty. Then she can hang out with me all night.

I am making plans to move out of Bet Ashanti. I want to see more of the country, and the terms of the bread and a bed are fairly logistically constraining. I’m tired of the war of attrition going on to keep my property from being stolen. So, I say good-bye to Gilead and the Greek and pack up all my gear and leave. I have moved into a room at the Mugrabi Hostel on Allenby Street five blocks from the Opera Towers. I am renting a cot for 33 NIS sheks a night, which is manageable.

I closed early on Thursday night so I could make it to the club at some reasonable hour. For me closing early is closing anytime before 11. No one even hits the clubs until around midnight in Israel. In New York you’ve done three bars already by this time. It’s the heat that keeps the nightlife hard, cool and strictly nocturnal.

 

It was incredibly hot in Tel Aviv that summer. Humid and hot, not just desert person hot. And the sea offers no relief. I have moved into a room at the Mugrabi Hostel on Allenby Street five blocks from the Opera Towers.

 

I am renting a cot for 33 sheks a night, which is manageable.

I closed early on Thursday night so I could make it to the club at some reasonable hour. For me closing early is closing any time before 11pm. No one even hits the clubs until around midnight in Israel. In New York you’ve done three bars already by this time. It’s the heat that keeps the nightlife hard, cool and strictly nocturnal.

 

     The Deep is located in the heart of Tel Aviv near the monolithic white tower of the Mitzrad Hapaniim; the Ministry of the Interior. The Ministry is the near tallest building in the city, and right below it two streets down is an underground hotspot nestled on a dark side alley below gas lights and red rope. It is known for its wild after hour’s parties. It is run and operated by Black Ivorites. Emma works as a promoter and a partner. For every twenty five people she brings to the club, her boss Andrew puts five hundred shekels in her pocket, which is about $125 American. Apparently Maya is the top promoter. She is able to bring in roughly two hundred people every Thursday and twice that many on the weekend proper.

 

A well-dressed Israeli Ashkenazi stands at the door with the guest list. Groups of drunken long legged Yemeni frekhot are trying to get into the club without paying. They argue in Hebrew, as I wait behind them to get in. The street is empty besides the girls, the gatekeeper and me. A Black male with a diamond earring in his left ear emerges from behind the red curtain. I assume he is Ethiopian, until I hear him talk.

 

“What the hell are your trifling bitches goin’ on about?”

It is the first time I have heard a trace of the Ebonics language in over a year.

“Excuse me,” I interject.

“Can I help you, cracka jack?” says a young black thug with the enormous diamond earring probably but not necessarily from the land of Zirconium.

I haven’t heard that since New York.

“I’m looking for Maya Rose. She said I was on your list.”

Like some fabulous ghetto St. Peter, this Middle Eastern gangster looks at his list scornfully. He shakes his head looking bored and tired. And then Maya emerges from behind the curtain in a red and white dress, hot and fabulous, tan olive skin.

“Dizzy, this one’s with me,” she says to him and takes my hand.

We walk past the black velvet rope down into a catacomb below the streets into a place that was once a blast shelter. The cavernous basement is packed wall to wall with Israelis who are black and brown. This bunker is dimly lit with red lights and strobes flashing to the beat of the music. There are huge black couches against the walls and white swings installed at the edge of the dance floor. The DJ is spinning Old School American hip-hop music; Tribe called Quest.

I take a seat at the bar with Maya. Other than her I’m the only Caucasian in the place.

“What are you drinking?” she asks me.

“Gold Star.”

“Gone pretty native I see,” she smiles.

She waves down the bartender and whispers something in his ear. I try to pass her some NIS shekel ten spot coins but she looks at me like I’m crazy.

“Drinks are on Andrew,” she says.

“Andrew is the guy who runs this place?”

“Indeed.”

“American?”

“Haitian. Well, Ivorite now. He used to be from Haiti, but his whole family got wiped out in the genocide and he snuck over the border to get here and got adopted by the Black Ivorites. Andrew and half the other people who work for this club are Black Ivorites from a little city in the Negev named Demona where the government keeps the nuclear weapons.”

She worked that in there is fluidly.

“You mean, the Ethiopian Ivories.”

“No, there’s a huge difference between an Ethiopian and a Black Ivorite. One’s humble and from Africa and one will call you a cracker and has a nasty jump shot.”

“Where did they come from?”

“Chicago and New York mostly. That was about forty years ago. There are maybe a couple thousand of them living in Israel now. Many like Andrew and other African refugees that end up here don’t have any citizenship. The State of Ivory still doesn’t believe they’re Ivories.’

“State of Ivory doesn’t believe a lot of people are Ivories.”

“It deports them whenever it can. Andrew built up the Deep’s rep for the past year or so a haven for Israeli Blacks who want to rock out. Ethiopians don’t have too many of their own places and I’m sure you’ve seen what happens when a Black guy dances with a White or Russian girl.”

A motherfucking zoot suit riot.

 

We drink more and we dance a bit, her much better than me. The hip hop turns into jazz soul and I call her Maya even though she introduced herself originally a week ago as Emma. Use Maya in front of everybody except Andrew she said quietly. I get introduced to a few dozen ‘Black Ivorites’. She introduces me to everyone as Zachariah. I am thrilled to see something like this here. I’ve seen some pretty raw racist shit in the past few weeks of Tel Aviv nightlife. As the night goes on I realize that all of Israel’s minorities are rocking out down here. No one’s white except Maya and I.

 

I finally meet Andrew the Hustler, as some of the Ivorites call him, the man behind this little operation who introduces himself as Avinadav. In a manic little rant about names while rolling up a spliff, he tells me ‘everyone calls him Andrew, but he’s been thinking, dreaming really, that it’s better to use his ‘Hebrew name’ and not his ‘Babylon slave name.’ He is related via adoption to a good many people here. He is the big brother who came to the desert to the big city and made good for the rest of them. He comes across as generous, maybe to a fault.

 

It is really after hours now, like 5 am.

 

Maya, Andrew called Avinadav, and     I are hanging out in the courtyard across from the club as Andrew rolls up another spliff. It is the first time I’ve seen weed being smoked in Israel.

 

“I mean, I’m not saying that a Black guy can’t go to the G-SPOT or the Gat Ramon or any other jump off rave psyche trance party. It happens, it do. But, if they wanna kick game to some Ashkenazi or Russia sister then its problems nine through ten. I mean shit; this Eretz isn’t South Africa or Southside bad. I mean it’s not legislated. I’m just sayin’ all my girlfriends not from the community in Demona are Yemeni girls. They knew about being Black before the Ethiopians and other African refugees got here. Shit, they think of themselves as Black. I think of um like Puerto Ricans actually. I mean the Black man will always be everybody’s favorite nigger. But the Canaanites are givin’ us a run. I mean racism ain’t shit next to holy war. I want chu’ to know I’m not fucked up and high. I’m just wired a bit ‘cause I couldn’t sleep last night. I mean I talk, talk, talk but I feel like you got some shit to say kid.”

 

Both Andrew and Maya call me kid or kiddo, but neither is much older than me. Maya is 18 and Andrew is 26.

 

“There’s hate based on race and a hate based on religion. Those are just pretexts for political leaders to consolidate powers. Likud and the governing coalition can play ball for years by keeping everybody divided. I mean the Russians, Yemenis and Ethiopians all live in the same shit neighborhoods and go to same run down hospitals, but they can’t wait to fight each other over any stupid thing. The Canaanite Christians, Canaanites in Gaza, Canaanites in the West Bank and the so-called ‘Arab Israelis’ are not even different peoples and they can’t even work together on the uprising. Bedouins and Druze are Arabs but have more in common with the Likud coalition government than with each other. For a nation of eight million there’s quite a bit of disunity.”

“We unified over beating’ back the other Arab states. Even Canaanites hate the other Arabs. The Jordanians butchered um in ’71. The Lebanese butchered um in ’83, and any person with an open mind knows they aren’t gonna give the Canaanites a country once the Ivories get ‘driven into the sea’. Egypt would take the Negev and the Coast until Ashkelon. Jordan would take the West Bank to the Sea, and Syria would swallow up what was left. Like a football those Canaanites get thrown around to be a thorn in our side. Fools of prophesy.”

“So you consider yourself an Israeli then?” I ask him.

“Even if they don’t consider me one. I mean I ain’t even got Haitian citizenship, I was never registered. I grew up in Demona. I was reborn in Demona and I ain’t even got a valid todat zeeoot. I’m a resident alien. Don’t even get me started on our troubles back in Haiti. It was worse before. The state has at least somewhat accepted we ain’t goin’ back to Chicago or Africa.”

Maya barely says a word. We both just listen. I guess she is sizing things up too. Andrew is both articulate and wildly knowledgeable about theology and political science. Maya hasn’t gotten drunk even though she never seems to stop drinking.

 

Finally, when everybody is gone except the three of us; the weed runs out. And Maya says, “Alright Andrew, Avinadav. Drop the fucking ghetto act and let’s take this one to breakfast.”

 

And dawn breaks soon after and Andrew called Avinadav, and Emma called Maya, and I traveling under the name of dead Warsaw ghetto fighter named Zachariah Artstien are now having breakfast at a lonely outdoor café on lower Allenby Street.

Avinadav starts right back up.

“So, you a change maker then? That’s a damn good thing ‘cause I’m a change maker too. Something has to give or break because it can’t be like this much longer. To fathom one day one of us bringing a family up in this Balagan. Unthinkable. I mean the three of us, we ain’t gonna see no small change. We’ll soon see a great fight; see a lot of death, but nothing’ we can believe in is ready. We all gotta lay a foundation for the future generations, gotta give our children a higher ground to fight from.”

“Andrew” chuckles.

“But really now, both of you need to try and call me Avinadav even if the others won’t.”

I nod and light one of Emma’s cigarettes. Was I to call her Maya in front of Avinadav even when he called her Emma? Like me she responds quickly enough to both.

She’s looking into me. I don’t know how to describe it any other way.

“So what brought you to Israel, Maya?” I ask her.

“I’m not sure I’ll tell you the really. People are obsessed with this notion that God has the power to dole out property rights,” says Maya, “but I’m mostly here for the beaches.”

“Sure as a pillar of salt once was a woman, God willed this land to us,” interjects Avinadav, “If you ask some Israelis, they’ll tell you that God promised us this land. Ask a Muslim they’ll say they’ve always been here and it is Allah’s will that they remain. Christians wanna take the whole planet anyway. Muslims too, but mark my words, God gave us this stretch to be for the Hebrews.”

“Hebrews?” I ask.

“The title of our thirteen tribes collectively.”

“You mean the Ivories?” questions Maya.

“I think its twelve tribes,” I mention.

“That’s not the proper way we’re called,” he retorts.

“It’s semantics. Ivories, Ivorites, Hebrews. What’s the difference? Weren’t you born Muslim in Haiti” Maya says with a laugh.

“When the tribes came back from exile in Babylon in the 5th century BCE there were only three tribes left, Judah, Simeon, Benjamin, and the Levites. The nine others, there were thirteen sister, were lost in Babylon, which means they intermarried, got inter-raped, converted or just never came back. Judah, which is also the tribe that Yeshua the messiah and King David come from, rose to prominence. Levi was the priestly tribe and Benjamin, they all had red hair and now they look Ethiopian. The Romans clashed repeatedly with the Hebrews in 66 CE during the first of three Roman Ivoryish Wars. Which led to rivers of blood, the leveling of the Second Temple and all of Jerusalem to its foundations, diaspora, rape and slavery. In 132 CE during the Bar Kokhba Revolt our people wiped out four Roman legions, the Romans knew these weren’t a people to fuck around with. Judah was the largest tribe so when Masada and later Betar finally fell and the full decimation and Diaspora all began, they derogatorily called our proud Hebrew people the ‘Yahuds’ or Ivories. It was like nigger, a slur imposed in bondage. Now think about the etymology. ‘ISH,” is kind of like. ChildISH, kind of like a child. IvoryISH, kind of like a IVORY. I’m a Hebrew. Even if I was raised Muslim, even if I grew up my whole like being told I was from a place called Haiti. I’m Hebrew. You two are Hebrew. Not only is Ivoryish a watered-down degrading title, it implies that we are all from the tribe of Yehuda. But we could be from Gad, or Manasseh, or Ephraim or Asher or any of ‘um. It’s like the Nigerians. Or the whole country of Niger. Sure sounds like Nigger to me. Where did they come up with that name I wonder,” he says sarcastically.

“I don’t really care whose land Hashem says it is as long as the violence eventually ends,” says Maya.

“Do you believe in Hashem, Maya?” Avinadav asks her point blank.

“Every other Friday.”

“Pardon my candor, but what has HaShem done lately for us?” I mutter.

“That’s a loaded question if I ever heard one,” she says.

“Yeah, but let’s answer it anyway,” Avinadav says.

“Well Zach, I suppose not a whole lot. But if there is actually is HaShem, who are we to interpret her actions?” Maya puts in.

“Her?” I ask.

“Hey, if you guys wanna rename whole religious ethnic groups, I feel free to de-masculinize the so-called almighty.”

“That’s fine, fuck the dumb shit” smiles Avinadav.

“Look, to me HaShem isn’t like a be-all-end-all safety net. You don’t get blessed by just believing in her; It. You have to trust It works through the actions of good people more than miracles,” Maya responds.

“And there will be more miracles,” states Avinadav banging on the table.

“I’m not ruling out the existence of HaShem. All I’m saying is that maybe Its given up on us,” says Maya

“How do you figure?” Avinadav demands again attracting the attention of other people in the café more for being Black and loud than for just being loud.

“What if HaShem decided humanity just isn’t worth all the grief we cause. What if it looks at us as a failed experiment and stopped devoting time to divine interventions and the like?” Maya says.

“I’m with that opinion,” I say, “I don’t find it so hard to believe.”

“So you think HaShem has bailed on us?” Avinadav asks us.

“Completely,” she smirks.

“Don’t blaspheme and sound ridiculous at the same time,” Avinadav mumbles in a grin.

“Well let’s not hold our breath on that one. I’m just doing my part working on that miracle in case HaShem holds out,” I answer.

“What kind of miracle, kid?” Avinadav asks.

“The miracle of resistance done right.”

“I like that. The boy’s articulate and totally insane,” Avinadav weighs in.

“I like that about Zach, too,” she says.

“Most people do I bet. Do you ever wonder the purpose of it all, Maya?” Avinadav asks.

“The purpose of what?”

“The purpose of Hashem sending this kid our way?”

“Folks, I’m really not that much younger than either of you.”

“It’s totally random. He just wants to nail me,” she smiles, “There’s no purpose, Andrew.”

“Avinadav.”

“Sorry.”

“Folks, I’m sitting right here.”

“If there is no purpose and there’s no greater meaning to it all, it is pretty pointless to be alive. I mean the things he says are the things this country needs to hear right now,” Avinadav says to Maya.

“He’s just young and you believe in HaShem too strongly. I’m a cynic. I like watching you two talk though.”

“Cynics are fallen idealists frustrated with the failure of their original ideals,” I interject.

“Excuse me?” she utters, “I would like to say I still believe in the potential for a better world, but lately I’ve begun to doubt whether humans would actually tolerate a better world.”

“Our kind is often very-very fucked,” Avinadav reflects openly.

“Only mostly fucked. There’s always high potential for eleventh hour change making,” I say.

“I’m not discounting the fact that there are many good people out there, but certainly not the majority. And less than four dozen in the country that would join what you are talking about. Most people just want to go about their lives and not have to think big thoughts about brave new worlds and the governing factors behind the human nature and if HaShem taps people to participate in history or a higher plan. You’re making demands that never get answered, Zach. Sure people come up with relatively comprehensible concepts explaining certain things about our existence, but even Socrates was working bound the shadows of the cave,” Maya responds.

“What’s your point?” I ask.

“It’s hard to keep the attention of the masses. There is something wrong with the world, but the good people, the heroes you hope to find aren’t interested employing the right tactics for change. Everyone’s trying to survive underground,” Maya tells us.

“What tactics would you employ?” Avinadav asks me.

“The most zealous ones I could find,” I retort.

“Such as?” Maya asks.

 

“You know. Something that tells the people of this country that we rebels aren’t fucking around. Like targeting members of the Oligarchy in Israel and Palestine; the war profiteers, the demagogues, the criminals and the collaborators and executing them one by one on national television. Clearing out our own house first.”

They stare at me for a second. Then at each other and then they go on.

“Spoken like a true zealot,” Avinadav states.

“And what the high fuck would that accomplish,” Maya asks us.

“It would tell the world that no one is impervious to God’s justice,” Avinadav responds for me.

“It would tell the people that the oligarchy is not invulnerable. That we can hit our violators in the face and the pocket,” I say for myself.

Maya takes off her dark glasses and gives us both a ‘you’re both talking like murderous terrorists’ look as she lights another cigarette.

“And then for your second round of organized anarchic calamity?” she inquires under her breath.

“Occupy the temple mount with a few hundred fighters then proceed to blow up the Kotel, Dome of the Rock, and Church of the Holy Sepulreche so no one had any misconceptions about how unholy this war was gonna get,” I say coldly.

“That one I like more,” Maya says, “And for a grand finale black female Jesus could come back with a fleet of gold plated tanks to relieve our hunted and abandoned fighters with the force of her miracles?” she laughs.

“A black Jesus and a female Mahdi,” Avinadav corrects her stone faced.

“There would be a mass retreat into the Negev then over the border into the deep desert of Sinai to regroup. We will unite with the million Bedouin partisans already in insurgency with the Mubarak military regime and capture the major coastal cities with the aid of Iran, a natural ally against the Arab military dictators and the Israeli State. Then we’d capture everything south of Be’er Sheva. Via a coordinated general strike and massive defection within the army, we’d take the central districts and cut the country in half before closing in on Jerusalem.”

“Ah, well. What would you do about the Canaanites and other Arab states that would love to annihilate us while we civil war amongst ourselves,” she says cold and sarcastic, “aided by our new friends in the Islamic Republic of Iran, of course,” is her snide inquisition.

“Well it won’t ever work unless the Canaanites are involved from the beginning within the rebel leadership. We will have to help invalidate Fatah and their Al’Aksa Martyrs Brigade because they’re secular, corrupt puppets. We will have to eliminate Islamic Jihad completely because they’re too nihilistic about their fundamentalism or at least drive them into merging with Hamas.”

They are both staring at me vaguely speechless by my choice of allies no doubt.

“Our obvious ally is Hamas, who will soon emerge as the premiere representative of the Canaanite Intifada and will have to be brought to the bargaining table by pressure from the Islamic Republic of Iran. Hamas, ironically enough, will be our closest ally, the only Canaanite player to fully mobilize their people for this endgame.

“Then we just have to defeat the I.D.F., Shin Bet, Mossad, political machinations of the Knesset and American forces, of course,” sarcastically interjects Maya.

“As I said. After the south and the Sinai are in the hands of the rebel alliance, much of the I.D.F. will join the confederated rebels after the general strike begins if we have properly done or organizing with due diligence. The Knesset and their American supporters will order the I.D.F. to end the strike, and open fire on their own people. Which will seal the fate of the Ivoryish State, America’s 51st. And light the fire a global uprising.”

“How in hell could you even dream of allying with Hamas?! They want to murder us all. I think you have not been in country long enough to know your people’s will well enough,” Maya scoffs.

“They’re led by Muslim fundamentalists. That means they won’t be co-opted by the secular Arab dictatorships that are American proxies. They hate the leaders of Iraq, Egypt, Syria and the Emirates more than they hate the Israelis,” Avinadav interjects.

“And that’s sort of my point. We want to unite a lot of people who are pretty fundamentalist about everything they believe in,” I say.

She looks at me like I am a mad man.

“Then like magic, and a lot of miracle magic is involved in your plan, these groups fall in line into a united confederacy and then later a governing body of some strange pan-middle eastern free state called called Pal’ Israel?” Maya scowls in disbelief.

“Well actually it would be the “Pal’Israelian Free State” if you wanted to be more unified in the national title,” states Avinadav. “But everyone knows that’s just called Zion anyway. That will never fly with the Arabs though, calling it Zion.”

“What’s in a name?” Maya smirks, “when we have such wild imaginations and so much untested magic.”

“Whatever you build on the Hebrew side you gotta build in Gaza and the West Bank as well. Anywhere with a large Canaanite or Hebrew Diaspora you need to send delegates to address. In New York; in Baghdad; Paris, Deerborn and also Tehran. When the uprising begins it will begin with direct action, proceed to a general strike, and then open revolt in the defense forces and then a rapid move to realign the new nation with the third world, the non-aligned movement and human rights.”

“So like Beirut in 1982?” she says, “Or more like Iran in 1979, but replace Shi’a fundamentalism with populist nationalism founded in human rights and democracy?”

“More like Haiti in 1791,” I tell her.

“Does he think it’s quite sexy when he says violent radical shit to strangers?” Emma says to Avinadav.

“Real sexy,” Avinadav says.

“Andrew the Hustler” is thinking hard watching a younger, whiter version of himself talk dangerously. He decides not to tell the kid anything about his teenage years in Haiti. His personal motivations for a holy war.

Maya put her huge black sunglasses back on and is sipping on her coffee while smoking a Marlboro menthol cigarette. A waiter brings out a large platter of hardboiled eggs, a pitcher of orange juice, another of Turkish coffee and something sort of like hash browns and Israeli salad, which consists of diced cucumbers, avocado, tomatoes, Zetar spice and onions.

We’re all eating from the same plate.

“What’s the blue print then, boys? You’ve fallen in love. I can see it in your eyes,” Emma says to us.

“Well then, Zachariah. You got some big crazy fucking ideas. HaShem sent you to us. That I know. I got the means. She’s got the will when she’s willing. We can talk all morning but fuck the dumb shit, as I like to say, what you playin’ with here?”

 

I am smoking deeply from one of Emma’s Marlboro Lights.

 

“I’ve been dreaming for a long time about making a stand, about a small group of people showing the world that we need not live our lives like slaves lashed to a rolling engine of war. I know this in my heart. If we can rally the wretched of this broken land behind a banner of unity, then the land of tears and blood will yield the milk and honey promised,” I tell them.

“Bottom line. What’s the very first step?” Avinadav asks.

“I did not come here to lead. I came here to serve my people as a front line fighter and lend my voice to this cause,” I tell him.

“Well what’s the first course of action that might bind us together,” Maya asks me, “And what’s our final objective?” she asks, “how far would you like to take this little uprising?”

“What do you want long-term, Zachariah? What are we conspiring to really do? I want you to say it a simple sentence so we three can digest the severity of what we plan to set in motion,” Maya says.

“Say it once and never again ‘til it’s real,” Andrew says.

I smother my cigarette butt in the cheap grey plastic ash tray.

“Our aim is to topple the government of Israel and use this Promised Land as a base to export a global uprising to secure universal human rights,” I tell them.

It’s finally dawn. July, 3rd 2001.

“I’m with it,” Avinadav says his eyes never blinking, “like a nuclear armed Middle Eastern Cuba.”

He looks to Emma for her stance and approval.

“And of course I am too,” says Maya, “somebody’s gonna have to make sure women don’t get cut out as usual when the freedom starts getting handed out,” Emma grins darkly. “I hope you got some real good magic, kid.”

 

“Or hope someone is on our side that is good with those miracles,” I respond.

 

“You bring the New York magic, Avinadav will worry about the miracles and we will find the zealots together,” says Maya Solomon.

 

 

 

ח

 

There’s water dripping on my head. How long have I been asleep in such an uncomfortable bed? It’s not a bed at all. I’m on the cold, wet floor of some huge cave. My right hand is shackled to something heavy that is beneath the surface in the pool next to me. Whatever it is, it’s heavy. I’ve been in this cave since London. Was it since my escape from the Tower? Or since the Turk with the flying carpet rescued me? My memories come and go and tell me nothing. But my guide is gone. I haven’t seen Mr. Washington and his gold-plated revolvers hammering out death upon those who would assail me.

I’ve been in this cave such a long time that I can’t clearly remember life before it. There was a Pale City, but how terrible it was is fading. Wasn’t there a redheaded girl I was protecting? Or had she been kidnapped? Or was it the father of her child, maybe? No, I can’t remember at all.

 

I saw a game store burning and an eviscerated old man being lit on fire on the curb of some street, still part alive while slimy, dead things poured diesel all over him. It’s hard to ignite diesel right away. So they cut more pieces of flesh from him first. It’s a war after all, isn’t it? These things happen in a war. Who is that girl with red hair anyway?

 

So a lot has happened, or maybe nothing at all. Maybe the shadows on the walls of the cave set my mind to racing and conjuring big things. Maybe I’m just a creative little fucker. Maybe those shadows are the redhead, and old man, and Mike…

 

Something almost pulls me in the water as it pulls itself out. It’s whatever my right hand is cuffed to in the pool. It crashes out of the pool.

 

“If I wasn’t so hard to kill, it would be easier to forget about me,” says a figure standing above me pulling me to my feet with the chain.

 

I don’t know what to say. I hope this man isn’t an enemy because we’re connected with less than three feet of thick iron chain. I don’t recognize him at first. He has bandages over eyes that I suppose have been cut out and a huge dressing taped up to where a bullet went through his head. I’m confused and I’ve been in the cave so long I can’t remember another human face. He can’t see, but he reaches out and feels my face. I’m chained to war-torn version of myself who has a name.

 

“They got us good in London. They took her and blew out my brains. The game and its pieces are gone. The old man is dead and his ideas have been abolished and made treasonous to believe in. And what can I shoot if I have no eyes. They took my eyes, Sebastian.”

 

“Who are you?”

 

“The cave clouds your will. You forget the past therefore you have no good frame of reference for some hope for a brighter future. They can’t kill you. They have to taint you, make you lose all hope.”

 

“I betrayed everything in London. The only things I remember clearly are helping them rape the girl and murder you.”

 

“You don’t know what’s real and what’s not anymore.”

 

He’s wet and dripping with the slime in the pool.

 

“I told them everything. I betrayed the rebellion. I sold out the teachings of the Old Man. They brought me in and the girl was covered in blood and piss and semen and they told me to fuck her again. They tazered us while we fucked. I fucked her like an animal on the floor of some cell in the Tower.”

 

My betrayal has come back to me with some clarity. I am crying and drop to the feet of this mauled man, Mr. Washington.

 

“They made me play marbles with your eyes,” I sob beating my own chest.

 

“Time to hit back then,” he said succinctly. “When you wake up, I’ll be there to teach you how to shoot. We’re going to get the girl back. We’re going to go after the things they love.”

 

“I can’t anymore,” I cry out.

 

He drags me on to my feet, and then slaps me across my face with the back of his hand. I stare into the bloody sockets. His face is dripping and then he begins to sing:

 

“As soon as you’re born they make you feel small, By giving you no time instead of it all, Til the pain is so big you feel nothing at all, A working class hero is something to be, A working class hero is something to be.”

 

He’s no bigger than me, but he’s got so much coal black hate and violence in him he could snap a man in half. He drags me along in the darkness through tight alcoves singing:

 

“They hurt you at home and they hit you at school, They hate you if you’re clever and they despise a fool, Till you’re so fucking crazy you can follow their rules, A working class hero is something to be, A working class hero is something to be.”

 

He shatters broken boards to ascending mine shafts with his other fist. He’s blind, but always sees better than I do. The manacles that bind us yank me along as I try and beg him to go no further. I’ve been in darkness so long I’m terrified to face myself in the light. It is better to remember nothing than wage a fight against the black future coming upon us. Still he sings. He’s wrong in thinking John Lennon’s song will give me any courage.
“When they’ve tortured and scared you for twenty odd years,
Then they expect you to pick a career,
When you can’t really function you’re so full of fear,
A working class hero is something to be,
A working class hero is something to be.
Keep you doped with religion and sex and TV,
And you think you’re so clever and classless and free,
But you’re still fucking peasants as far as I can see!”

 

In my head I hear a voice. It is the voice of the original Polish Zachariah Artstein who is also Mike Washington who is also perhaps the Archangel Mikh’hael. We plow together through the darkness.  He’s still singing.

 

“They took everything from me, Sebastian. Before the fall, before history, before my eighteen lives and time as a seraphim and then back into the trenches as an angel, I was once a young man lost like you. As we are to be so close for the duration of your time on earth for this round, I will tell you something I hope will make you more brave.”

 

He was dragging me by the chain at this stage in our ascent as I fought to return to the warm dark, bowels of the cave.

 

“A working class hero is something to be, A working class hero is something to be.”

“They say the voice of God is impossible for your kind to hear without a psychic breakdown or severe mental damage. And when one of us gets born that can hear the voice of God in flashes and gets the dreams, then we have to protect these people because of the epic good and evil they have the potential to unleash. We can’t have anyone kicking off anymore Islams or Christianities.”

 

I’m desperately fighting now to cling to the cave wall so he can’t pull me to the surface. He strikes at me whenever I fight to remain.

 

“You see anybody can theoretically reach out and connect with the higher power, but after the fall, humanity stopped listening, turned upon itself and the slaughter began. I’ll go over a great deal more of this when you reach the wilderness of Tzin.”

 

“There’s room at the top they are telling you still, but first you must learn how to smile as you kill, if you want to be like the folks on the hill, A working class hero is something to be. A working class hero is something to be. If you want to be a hero, well just follow me, if you want to be a hero, well just follow me.”

 

He is digging now as we near the final passage to the surface. I beg and scream for him to stop, that the light will kill us. That I just want to die in the cave. And then there is light. He tears through the broken tunnel and drags us both from the cave into the light, me kicking and screaming. This is not the desert of my mind. There are green and rocky hills jutting out the side of a cliff. I can see again. Both of us are covered in dirt and slime from the cave. Behind us is what looks like a subway entrance point that we have dug out of.

 

It might have once said the “Q Train.”

 

Michael Washington looks like he’s been in the trenches for a very long time. The bandages around his eyes are caked in filth and blood. The dressing on his head has fallen off and I see the gaping bullet hole where his execution had been carried out. But exposed to the sun we both become a little healthier and cleaner. The fresh wind is blowing the dust off of us. The bullet expells itself from his cranium and drops to the ground. Scar tissue is forming over the wound. His eyes are gone and not returning. We stand on the edge of this great green precipice feeling the glow of the sun at high noon. The desert is below us, but in the ocean of sand the day is serene.

 

We are both wearing black suits, which need to be traded in. They are caked in filth beyond what the wind and or any dry cleaning can expel. There are two shrink-wrapped suits in the sand in front of us. There are two gold-plated pistols on top of the suit with my name pinned to it. A long cavalry sword has been leaned against the subway tunnel we have emerged from. Zachariah, with great balance for a man with his eyes removed, picks up one of the guns and blows apart the chain connecting us. We disrobe and change into the suits that have been left for us. I shoulder the weapons in straps within the suit. Mike picks up the sword and throws it over his shoulder.

 

Below us is a valley into the wilderness.

 

“And on the seventh day God found time to leave us leisure suits and hand guns?” I asked.

 

“For on the eighth day, when the resting was done those weapons were wielded by the righteous. Time to put down the whores and still water bottles and step back onto the line, Mr. Adon.”

 

***

I haven’t seen the sun in over a week. I work from 9ish at night until close to 3 in the morning, chill by the beach and then go back to Mugrabi to sleep. I walk past the Opera Towers, about a mile north on the tiyeled, until I get to Mike’s Blues Bar. I shoot the shit with everyone’s favorite Russian-who-wanted-to-be-American, Svetlana, drink a beer, eat a burger, pass out a shit ton of flyers to Americans and trash containers, then go back and have Alex buy me a shot while Canadian Dave the manager tells me about being a sniper in the IDF. Turns out he and Maya, whom he also calls Emma were old lovers or something for a short time. I really like the guy. Once he took me on the roof of his building, a great crib on Ben Yehuda Street, and taught me about sniping with a broom. To exhale and then to fire. To always change positions quickly after firing. To wait for hours if you have to get the most bang for your exposure. He tells me that sniping is like ancient times when you have to remember the face of each woman or man you kill. I tell him I want to be a sniper in the army and he just figures the army I mean is the IDF. Lessons were scheduled for once a week, but only happened two more times.

 

I have ghost written a short manifesto with Maya and Avinadav and they have translated it into Hebrew. I don’t trust any of my Russians and don’t know any Arabs either who I can trust to translate it. We set up a timetable for me to establish cells in Haifa, Be’er Sheva and Jerusalem. I am to spend about three days in each city recruiting and then attempt to be back at the Deep on Thursday to check in. Maya will set up a ‘unit’ in Tel Aviv and Avinadav will be the money and logistics man.

The Organization, as we have come to calling the thing, was founded in Tel Aviv in late July of 2001. ‘A group without a name was formed to launch a movement without a color’ as our line goes. The initial objective of our group is the resolution of the conflict between Israel and Palestine. We believe that through the creation of a united front among the peoples of the region, a solution can be achieved that will serve as a springboard for a worldwide revolution against American hegemony and the cultural mentality it perpetuates. The principle on which this group was founded is that ‘we are in fact not an organization, but rather individuals becoming organized,’ another line from our playbook. The Organization is to serve as a network of very different people who can unite under common revolutionary goals. Our goals are to be better defined in a soon-to-be-written 10 Point Program for the Revolution in Israel.

I have been taking notes from Che Guevara’s manual on guerilla warfare and Mao’s Little Red Book. I am mixing it with populist Israeli rhetoric and Marxist overtones. We don’t use the word proletariat. We just say we are fighting for the rights of the working class. I am getting my training on the fly. So are Maya and Avinadav. Maya hasn’t’ revealed any ideological leanings other than progressive feminism. She comes across as pretty left without needing to declare it. She is Spanish by passport and Canadian in upbringing, but she’s been in HaEretz a year and a half. As a club promoter she has half the basic skill set of a revolutionary anyway, the gift of random gab. She has taken a role of support and advice and begrudgingly accepted a title on our cabinet. She urges me to hammer out a ten-point program before she tries to recruit anyone she knows.

Andrew Mannaseh Butler, aka Andrew the Hustler, whom no one calls Avinadav except for me, not even Maya who quite a few men called Emma, told me tonight over dinner that Maya and I can be the activists, but he has to ‘keep the focus on the mission.’

Avinadav and I talk all night. He lives in a sprawling penthouse near the outer highways and skyscraper towers of the Azraeli center at the edge of Ramat Gan. It is real near the Tel Aviv Light Rail Depot so I’d crash with him once and awhile at his ‘House of the Rising Sun’ as Emma calls it. There are always people crashing on the couches and the floors. There is a White rapper from the American hip-hop group Cyprus Hill who has been drafted to play for Maccabi Tel Aviv and then fucks it up somehow. Nice guy, but a huge show boater and big talker. Last night he and I picked up these two Ashkianaz cuties and he claimed he was rapping at GSPOT, this huge hip-hop club and could get us all comped. I closed up the stand and the four of us walked our asses all the way north to the Sheraton and beyond only for him to disappear into the club and ditch us outside.

I talk big too, but I pride myself on delivering what I promise with broads and bullets both. This guy has been living on Avinadav’s couch indefinitely. Disrael, the partner at The Deep with the ice in his ear, which he declares ‘It’s a cubit diamond from the land of Zirconium,’ is the only other rent payer besides Yashara, Avindav’s Yemenite special lady who looks Dominican more than Arab or Jewish. At any given time there are between four to seven ‘community relatives’ who’d have been exiled from Demona for this or that and are living with Avinadav until something comes along or they are forgiven.

“We were all in ‘back against the wall country,’ some of us more than others. So when the honorable Prophet Ben-Ami led seventy-odd Black brothers and sisters in 1969 from Chi-Town’s Southside across Africa to build the Hebrew Israelite Community in the badlands of southern Israel and then when your father gets into a fight with the Prophet over annulling a marriage and your whole clan gets tossed out of the community, but you and your brethren don’t have Israeli or American passports, well fuck the dumb shit, where we gonna go?” Avinidav explains to me.

“How many of you are there?”

“A couple thousand now. Not one a citizen. Ethiopians? They at least begrudgingly call them Jews. We don’t even get citizenship. If we the field Negroes, then you get some idea why it’s ‘Waleed and the Lethal Leisure Suite’ time for the Palestinians. It never comes down too hard on more than one demographic group at a time. The others make believe it won’t happen to them. Besides you Ashkinaz, everybody’s shut out of something.”

“Just like in the States,” I tell him.

“A microcosm of all the stupid suffering that the wretched of the earth are subject to because they refuse to fight back. I want you to dig inside, Zach. I want you to look into your soul and know that our struggle is doomed to fail like the thousands of other risings before ours if you can’t honestly see the soul you have is of the same worth as the one Hashem gave the Arabs and the Christians, the pagans, communists and atheists like Emma Solomon.”

“I thought she was agnostic like everybody else.”

“Nope. She just plays one on TV to get more answers out of you.”

“Ah. Answers about what?”

“To judge if we can trust you, a stranger, with our lives.”

“I’m not asking for that kind of trust. I’m asking for help printing propaganda, obtaining safe houses, and recruiting partners. What do my religious inclinations have to do with the mission?”

“What’s the mission then, Zachariah?”

“Empower the Israeli and Palestinian people to win a class war against the American backed proxy government of this country.”

“Which would take a miracle.”

“You’re not saying…”

“Who’s Mike Washington?” he asks me.

“How did you….?”

“Emma says you ask him questions in your sleep. Lucky you.”

“It’s not like that.”

“I know it’s not like that. The girl’s a goddess, heavenly just to lie beside. But back to Mr. Washington.”

“I have an imaginary friend who’s a sort of fire walking paramedic with a handgun, something concocted in my head since I was 13 to shoot all the monsters when I sleep.”

“Gets um all does he? Shoots straight? Never misses? Reliable? Brotherly maybe?”

“Something like that.”

“You believe in your dreams, Zachariah?”

“I’d say they confuse more than guide me.”

“You don’t have a guide in the waking life to translate for you what It’s telling you.”

“Who? Mike Washington?”

“Mr. Washington is just a messenger. Your name in Hebrew means ‘God Remembers’ incidentally. You ought to toy with the notion of our meeting not being accident but in fact providence. You ought to meditate on why you’re in the land so young.”

“One should be careful in presuming their dreams have any more meaning than necessary.”

“Be as careful. Emma and I are careful as hell. The road to Zion is paved in shit that can get you killed. And there are so, so many things worse than death in the world today. It makes hell quite superfluous to have a world like this.”

“I agree. Your allusions make me want a cigarette. By the way, I think I’m in love with Maya.

“With Maya or Emma?”

“Same person.”

“Are Sebastian and Zachariah the same person?”

“Emma told you my real name!?”

“Yeah, but I also learned it going through your pockets when you slept over last time. We have to make sure everybody is who he say they is. Got me?”

“Zachariah’s me trying to live up to the expectations of Mr. Washington.”

“Your being in love with Emma makes it complicated. I know you haven’t fucked her, but you guys have rolled up like kittens and cuddled three times in the past week on some pretext. What’s it to you to hold that girl?”

“It’s to remind myself I’m a good man whenever I’ve been tested. Otherwise she wouldn’t want me near her.”

“That’s part of it. What else you feel?”

“That I remember what love felt like the first and only time I felt it in my life.”

“Whatcha gonna do about it?”

 “Why? So you can tell her?”

“Information only flows one way around here.”

“Nothing at all. I can fall in love and have family in the world to come. I make a better fighter than a lover anyway, even though I try and kid myself otherwise. I’ll tell her how I feel before I cross over to the other side.”

“That’s reassuring to hear. It’s not romantic or right, or fair because you very well might give her the love she needs to restore her black heart. But I need two lieutenants who can be objective about what we have to do. We want to seize one of the most important spiritual hot zones of the planet there are some time honored ideas about infrastructure and discipline you would do well to embrace.”

“Yeah. Go on.”

“The bottle makes you play the fool. The smokes make you sick and will kill you before their bullets do, and a revolutionary gets only one love, his people. Regulate your vices as soon as you are able.”

“You want me to quit smoking and drinking?”

“And stop being promiscuous.”

“You and Emma are gonna do that?”

“Of course not. Everyone gets to be a hypocrite except for you.”

“Why the fuck is that?”

“Because you’re gonna be a mouthpiece for something massive. If you’re willing to have a message get you crucified, don’t let some run of the mill garden variety sin degrade your credibility.”

“You keep alluding to me being on some God trip, but we don’t know if God wants any of this. You’re saying you think Hashem got me all the way to the Promised Land to help you and Emma form and lead a revolutionary army?”

“If I have to dignify that with a response, it is really gonna take eleven more years.”

“Eleven more years?”

“People think 2012 is when the world ‘ends’.”

“The world doesn’t end.”

“If the masses were such great political scientists and theologians we probably wouldn’t have left the garden.”

“Why 2012?”

“It’s a Mayan calendar thing. It’s in the collective conscious.”

“You were quick to help me, Avinadav. Why is that?”

“Every community gets a few prophets right before tumultuous times. All the holy books say so.”

“I wouldn’t be so fast to construe dreams with prophesy.”

“I get dreams too. And so does Emma. So does everyone, but only some people get dreams that give um ideas about what Hashem has put them here to do. I believe in the things you say Zachariah. Your soul is eons older than your years of life.

Let’s just hope Hashem sends some reinforcements because this plan of ours will not go unnoticed for very long.”

***

 

So, we are building the thing, cobbling it together based on the various books we’ve read and life experiences we’ve had. The Organization, whom the Israelis call Ha Irgun, is structured to be a constantly evolving effort based upon an ongoing dialogue between Avinadav and me with Emma making corrections. It is the amalgamation of our three quite different viewpoints. Our goal is for the Organization to be composed of autonomous cells throughout the Middle East engaging in political work, community support, business and military operations, and whatever else proves logistically expedient to our ends. We have all done a bit of research on all this before we met. Avinadav has made himself Chairman and Minister of Finance. Maya is our Defense Minister. I have been elected to serve as the Minister of Operations handling logistics and recruiting. We set up a 12-person Cabinet that will command hundreds of 3 to 5-person cells in different communities across the country loosely organized around the Ten Point Program. Maya and I wrote the first statement that we will print on glossy club flyers with a grey fist.

We have selected the color grey as our standard because itis no color at all, but many shades of understanding and identity. We call our manifesto-in-progress the Little Grey Book. It begins simply:

“The Organization will not stop fighting until all people on this Earth are free.”

 

We argued about the name for a whole night then figured what’s in a name? We all had a couple of names, so why not the group?  We are organizing. It is an organization. The word for that in Hebrew is Ha Irgun, which sounds officious enough to me and was the street name for one of the original Israeli independence groups.

So we run off stacks of these grey cards with the black fist and a little call to arms.

ט

 

It’s the last week of July.  I am just about ready to take to the roads on my mission. 6,000 of our postcard-sized flyers are stacked up in boxes in a back room of The Deep labeled ‘New Years 2012 Party’. Avinadav has a cousin who is now apparently hip to these happenings. I get nods of approval from lots of young Black Israelites I don’t know. They might not know the score, but they know the big man ‘Andrew’ and I are up to something. I am always around the club, but never drink, never dance, not really laying game. I just keep going over plans and notes and make suggestions about operations. The general staff of the little Cabinet includes Andrew’s cousin Dizrael ‘Dizzy’ as Communication Minister, the Jamaican Claude as Education Minister and Svetlana, the Russian debutante, ‘can’t stand being from Russia’ as a financier. Svetlana was only convinced by Maya because she isn’t very fond of Blacks and looks at me like I am a loud, radical younger sibling. But last night over drinks Maya convinced her to crack the trust fund as long as she is convinced nothing violent is going on.

Svetlana paid for all ‘New Years’ flyers.

 

I am working as a day laborer unloading furniture and textiles from Southeast Asia toiling to raise money for a cell phone, a ‘decent’ suit and a black market handgun near Hertzolia Petoach. I make some sub-slavish wage to haul and sort tons of cheap imports with a handful of Arab workers. Ditri comes along with me. We walk away each day with close to 400 sheks. 100 bucks for ten hours of work isn’t so bad. I get a lot of odd slave work out of the Mugrabi Hostel. I post up in the lobby around 6 am and guys come to collect workers for menial one-day labor jobs usually paying about 400 shekels for the day. It is more lucrative than art selling especially weekdays. It isn’t always hauling. Sometimes it is scrubbing stoves or repainting housing projects or odd gardening job. I scrub shit and vomit out of party hall bathrooms after the party has gone on too long. I am doing thankless horrible work that won’t put money in the bank, but can feed me and get me a few nicer things for my time here. I have become a Mexican wetback, but a Pancho Villa kind of fucking Mexican. I am what I am supposed to be.

 

I bought a tough black and grey messenger bag for the road, a black leather planner, a white linen suit and a grey poncho from a Georgian retail store in the Florentine neighborhood.

 

I am always meeting new people. I need new ears for yarns and new women for carnal company. I also need new friends and new brothers and new parents. I adopt older brothers because I don’t have one. From time to time someone sees something in me they have to save. Like I’ve lost my way and shouldn’t be selling pictures in foreign boulevards. Normally this takes the form of either older women or homosexuals.  The homos invite me for sleepovers, but they like feeding me too, while giving me advice. Gay Avi wants me to be an event planner and the English girls from Golder’s Green tell me to get married and move to Jerusalem to train as a rabbi. The correlation of the two is beyond me.

 

I guess this guy Brent Avery wants to save me from the ghetto because he is in Israel converting young boys to Christianity. It isn’t pervy if it comes across like that. Brent isn’t just saving souls for Evangelical Bible-belters. It is more interesting and subversive than that.

 

The night I met him I was hooting and hammering, trying to find people to recruit for the Organization. This group of faggy White dudes comes up to me and asks me about a picture with a guy in a beret crucified with a red hammer and sickle tattoo on his bicep. I tell them Jesus was a communist. They are having one of those very Christian conversations with me full of polite contempt and always ready to drop a fucking gospel passage. But I have trained to play that game and the whole thing soon turns into a communist versus Christian debate as a crowd gathers. It is like this is Hyde Park Speaker’s Corner on the Mediterranean.

 

There are five of them. I know one is named Paul and one is named Che, who I ask if he is an Argentinean. He doesn’t get it. There are two other White boys not really talking and a chaperone. The chaperone is named Brent Avery. He listens more than he talks. I argue for nearly an hour with his minions. I know the gospel well from being locked up in the Family School. But our debate is for the spectators not each other.

 

It’s 1 am and this guy Brent Avery is buying me some pizza at Abulafiah. We aren’t talking about religion, but about what I am doing in Israel.

 

“Sex, pictures and reckless adventurism,” I tell him. “With a bit of drinking and a lot of smoking.”

 

For a preacher he isn’t all that preachy. He doesn’t have that really annoying habit of putting each segment of the conversation in the context of the texts of his creed. He doesn’t even drop the name of the J-man. He has been asking simple questions attempting to elicit god-only-knew-what. He is letting me talk a great deal about communism. He is pushing me to go into detail about tons of things I haven’t thought out so well. The phrases don’t alarm him. I say ‘death to bourgeoisie scum and their spies’ and he just scratches his beard neither judgmentally nor in any way in agreement. It is like two wild alien creatures asking small questions as if they have never been around each other’s kind before.

 

To him I am a hardened city-boy radical or just some lost street urchin with a Biblical moniker. He is a shit-kicker preaching gospel talk in the wrong fucking country as far I am concerned. I ramble about class war hoping to jostle him, but the guy just goes on asking questions letting me smoke my face off. I have him about the Family School, about my lengthy perditions, about exile in London and the struggle unfolding in Tel Aviv. He has a very good sense of punctuation. He knows when he should hold his tongue. He knows I will get up and leave if he starts his fucking sentence with, ‘In the second book of Timothy.’

 

When it is all said and done and my long political diatribe expounded, I don’t feel like I have said anything at all. He has let me go on all night with this tale of tragic misadventure.  As dawn breaks I feel my confidence begin to run dry. As the mission yarn wears thinner I see for the first time the great, great error I have made. He doesn’t need to do anything but let me talk to expose myself.

 

I have had a realization. There has been no reconciliation between my warring parts. I have not reconciled whether or not I can complete this mission without the very intervention of a God. I have an even harder time accepting the use of miracles in a class war. I have the hardest time still believing, as Avinadav does, that I am some mouthpiece for the dreams of epic, divine things to come.

 

The fat man named Brent Avery is remarkably good in his mission because of his commitment to patient tenacity. He, expert recruiter that he is, is not concerned with the quantity of converts but only with the perfect training of more recruiters. If he sees in me a potential convert, a lost soul, a broken sinner, he does not reveal this. As the sun rises he simply says:

 

“Your eyes betray you, son. You’re not convinced you’ll win.”

 

“What then would you have me do? Pray for more answers?”

 

“It would be in your interest to consult your maker as He will provide the necessary covenant for this battle you’re intent on waging. Many men and women have been slaughtered to avoid the coming of the things you speak of so calmly. It is time, Zachariah, to find your God in the wilderness.”

 

After breakfast we go to a bookstore. My head is spinning in the way it does when I don’t sleep. Before he leaves me to do the things I am now too aware that I must do, he buys me a hardcover book that it is high time I read. It is many books in one divided between two traditions. I purchase another book to take with me to make sure I have the whole trilogy.

י

The first night.

 

The city of Be’er Sheva is a way station on the dusty road to hell that runs through the Middle East four hours south of Tel Aviv. It’s the last stop of all the southbound light rail trains into the deep desert. The place pops out of the wilderness like a neon strip-mine. The first thing you see is a cluster of lights and white brick low-cost housing projects. This place has been way station on the road from what was once called Palestine to the region of Mitzraim now called Egypt for nearly 4,000 years. Things change hands and names a lot around here. The dust and sand don’t care if they are considered Muslim dust or Jewish sand.  The city of Be’er Sheva was originally on the Palestinian side when the partition came. It was seized by Haganah fighters during the 1948 war and was eventually annexed into the State of Israel relatively Palestinian free. There is nothing but rocky dunes of dusty sand and the desert people for hundreds of miles.

 

The desert people have been here long enough to see the borders change ten thousand times. They have been here for Israel parts one, two and three. They have outlived both Rome and the Ottoman Empire. The only difference now is how porous the borders are. They are no longer quite so easy to cross. It’s hard to say how many desert people there are. They might number in the tens of thousands organized into hundreds of inter-tribal alliances. The governments of the Middle Eastern nations place their numbers far lower. Some of them pretend they don’t exist at all. So they starve them or drive them deeper into the desert. The Israelis tried to make them settle, unsuccessfully, of course. The Ottomans tried to teach them agriculture. The Israelis built factories and tried to make their kids go to schools. The Saudis and Egyptians try to kill them off with bullets and helicopter gun ships. The Hebrew word for these desert people is Bedui. 

 

The population of Be’er Sheva is made up of some 144,000 souls. Its primary demographics are Russian immigrants, Romanian and Yemenite Jews, as well as over 10,000 Ethiopians. They were lured here with subsidized houses in neighborhoods that had just been built. The Russians took over the crime and gang operations from the Romanians and Yemenites within a year of arriving. By 1990 the various mafias controlled everything. The southern drug port was wide open and the dope flowed north. All drugs coming into the State of Israel from Egypt first pass through here. The Syrian and Lebanese border is sealed and so are the Jordanian and Egyptian fronts. It is easier for the drugs to flow where relations are normalized.

 

 

 

It’s the fourth largest city in the country but to most it’s just a way station on the road to Eilat, the Jewish version of Las Vegas on the Dead Sea. It’s also a college town and a place of broken dreams. The sprawling Negev lies between Be’er Sheva and Eilat. The desert is a vast and deadly wasteland uninterrupted by anything but black asphalt highways and an occasional Moshav settlement. Ben Gurion was convinced that the Negev was the key to the future survival of the State of Israel. He spent the last days of his life there and was buried at a kibbutz named Sde Boker.

 

Be’er Sheva is known to outsiders for a couple things they don’t talk about at the Chamber of Commerce– the wicked heat, which the soldiers all say is the worst in the country; the increasing isolation as no one wants to move here and the young never come back after the army; and crime. An interesting feature of Be’er Sheva is its massive number of abandoned buildings. Derelict Ottoman structures litter the city. Many are now inhabited by what the Israelis call narcomanim or violent drug addicts.

 

I only knew about Be-er Sheva through hearsay. It is a city on the edge of the desert and a perfect starting point for my trek. I arrive here on the last bus out of Tel Aviv about a half an hour before dusk. The central bus station doesn’t have a roof. It is just dirty orange brick walls with shops in a big L-shape where the buses dock. Everything is going to be shut down and I’ll be stranded in this creepy ghost town. The place is awash with beggars and junkies. They eye everyone looking for a mark. Some wander about like the living dead. The graffiti on the walls is all in Hebrew except for a large white sign sprayed in white paint ‘D E A T H W I LL FALL   OW.’ I see a bunch of Orthodox women, heads covered, scuttle briskly toward a gender-segregated charter bus.

 

I am carrying my box of water bottles outside the central bus station. There are Muslim cab drivers everywhere and there is general disorder as people hurry to get home before the start of the Sabbath. The shops, which line the outer rim of the one-story central bus station are pulling down their shutters. I was hoping to get to the desert before sundown, but no dice. I will have to walk there if I don’t take a cab, which is a stupid idea for a myriad of reasons.

 

Aifo ata tzarik leHhlectet?” A cab driver is asking me where I need to go. The cabs are mostly white here, smaller older models of their cousins in the Big Apple.

 

“I need you to drive me as far into the south desert as you can for 100 shekels.”

 

“You want go to desert? We are in desert already.”

 

“I need to go further south to the southern ridge.”

 

“Why? Is nothing there. Come. I take you to hotel, to Eilat, to hookers.”

 

“I need you to drive me deeper into the Negev. I need you to drive me somewhere without people.”

 

He pauses as if confused, like he wants no business if my business means trouble.

 

“Get in. I will show you the map,” he says.

 

He produces a foldout road map of Israel. It is completely worn. He points to where Be’er Sheva is and shrugs his shoulders, confused as the where I want to go. I look at the map for a minute and pick out a stretch of wilderness removed from any signs of civilization.

 

Bi’Quat Tzin?” he asks.

 

“Yeah. Take me there and I’ll give you 100 shekels.”

 

He looks me over.

 

“It will cost 200 shekels. This is hour south of here.”

 

They haggle over everything here, even over 20 shek.

 

“I don’t have time for this habibi. I’m not gonna sit down and barter with you. You’ll do it for 100 or I’ll find another driver.”

 

“175.”

 

“80.”

 

He gives me a look like I’m crazy.

 

“170, this is my final price.”

 

“100, like I said.”

 

“165.”

 

“80.”

 

“That wouldn’t cover the fuel for the trip. 160.”

 

“I think I’ll flag another cab.”

 

I jump out of the back seat.

 

“155!” he yells out the window.

 

The only rule to bargaining with Arabs is to know what you’re willing to pay and never, ever go higher than their price, which is a 500% mark up anyway. I notice there aren’t many cabs or passengers left in the shuttered terminal, just junkies, trash and electric security lights. I don’t have many options and he doesn’t have prospects except that it’s Friday night and someone always needs to get somewhere. So my bargaining needs to end soon.

 

There are at least five more taxis all caked in dust and mud. After propositioning a few more drivers I finally find one that will take me into the desert for 80 sheks. I put my small crate of water bottles into the trunk. We pull out of town along the southern highway named Derekh Eilat, the road to Eilat. I have no idea where we are going now except deeper into the darkness.

 

There are no other cars on the road. Eventually there are no more streetlights on the road. I can feel the dry heat with that sticky feeling of sweat running down my back. The cab’s AC is broken, my driver claims. In my mind I have a picture of how this little escapade will play out. I have 14 liters of water. I’ll need that in the desert more than anything else. I have a blue lantern that won’t take out my night vision to illuminate my way. I even got my hands on a white linen poncho for day and a black one for night courtesy of my demented old boss at the import warehouse.

 

Move at night. Sleep in the day. Yeah, that sounds right. You see scenes in the movies and read about it and hope that some of it is true and isn’t going to be Hollywood getting you killed. All I’m missing is a mother fuckin’ still suit. But this isn’t Dune and it is questionable if I’ll find what I’m looking for out here.

 

The driver says nothing. Maybe he doesn’t speak much English. I rummage through my kit and take out a map of Israel. There is a big patch of nothingness between Be’er Sheva and Eilat. I am heading deeper into it with every passing minute. I notice the driver looking at me through the rearview mirror.

 

“I am wondering what you plan to do when you get to the desert.”

 

I see no reason not to be honest.

 

“I plan to walk as far into the wilderness as is needed to hear a message from God.”

 

“My people say that God will talk directly to no one after the Prophet Muhammad abu aSaalam.”

 

“He spoke to me already. I’m looking for a more precise revelation.”

 

“And what did your god tell you, boy?”

 

“He told me that I needed to suffer so that I might become righteous.”

 

“So you’ve suffered enough have you?”

 

“I’m not sure. It’s all rather subjective.”

 

“What is subjective?”

 

“It means that that everyone experiences their own degrees of hardship.”

 

“My first wife died in childbirth. She was not very beautiful. At first I was very angry with God, but being angry with God is a useless rage. You cannot be angry for long with something you cannot control or understand.”

 

“I’m sorry for you loss.”

 

“It was the will of God. Now I have a younger wife who is more young and beautiful than the first wife HamduAllah. You say you must suffer to become righteous. I do not believe these two things are connected. You are only righteous when you can submit absolutely to Allah.”

 

“HaShem and Allah are the same.”

 

“You pray to “the name.” That is what HaShem means. Your people believe that the name is beyond your comprehension. My people say God has a name. That name is Allah.”

 

“Where I come from God has many names. In Babylon the McDonalds arches and the crucifix hold equal spiritual sway.”

 

“But those are distractions. When things are rounded out and counted, they will distract from Allah like a grain of sand distracts the tidal wave.”

 

“But for now they hold more sway than your sand grain.”

 

“You will also be distracted in a desert by the sand. Your faith being weak, you will wander after distractions chasing answers and then die. You are too white for that desert, Yankee.”

 

“Maybe. Or maybe I’ll get to see what I need to see.”

 

“So you think that by coming here and wandering into our desert you will have some answer revealed to you?”

 

“That’s the idea.”

 

“How long do you plan to remain in the desert?”

 

“Seven days.”

 

“You do not have the provisions for seven days.”

 

“Allah will provide what I may lack.”

 

He pauses and stares at me through the rearview.

 

“Why do you think this message will be heard more clearly in our desert?”

 

“It is where our people originally received theirs.”

 

He looks at me for a while and says nothing.

 

“Allah’s message is not heard in one place more clearly than another.”

 

“I know.”

 

“So why not ask your questions closer to home?”

 

“I have no true home anymore.”

 

“The desert is brutal. You will be always thirsty and feel too hot during the day. At night you will shiver and freeze as you lose your trail. When, tell me, will you be able to pray?”

 

“I will not stop praying.”

 

“If you get lost, you will certainly die.”

 

“So be it to hear the word.”

 

He once again seems deep in thought, continuing to stare at me, only occasionally glancing back at the highway. The stars are so very bright and provide illumination that the broken road markings cannot come close to.

 

“My people are born from this desert.”

 

“You are a Bedouin then?”

 

“Yes. From the great Tarabiin tribe.

 

“Your people can both pray and survive the desert.”

 

“You are certainly not one of us.”

 

“I am more like you than you know.”

 

“In what ways?”

 

“I always wander. I carry with me all I need to survive. I have no homeland. I have no national allegiance. I have only God and my belief in His will.”

 

“You are Jewish?”

 

“I am Hebrew.”

 

“What is Hebrew?”

 

“A wandering people of the desert who struggle on the path to do the will of HaShem.”

 

“I am worried that I am driving you to death.”

 

“Not unless it’s the will of Allah.”

 

“Both your people and mine share a saying.”

 

“Which is?”

 

“Don’t tempt God.”

 

***

 

The Bedouin cab driver drops me off at the main gate of the Ste Boker kibbutz, the last settlement of its size for hundreds of kilometers and the tomb of the great Ben Gurion. I have been here before but cqnn’t remember when. On the previous trip, obviously. The driver rolls down his window and yells something to the guard at the gate in Hebrew. Right outside the main gate is an army compound guarded by two boys about my own age. They sit by the camp’s entrance, clad in olive drab with M16’s slung over their shoulders. While the camp is covered in green cammo netting, one can see inside and make out the large tents and silhouettes moving inside them.

 

I start taking the water bottles out of the cardboard crate and try to figure out what to do with them. I obviously can’t just carry the box across the desert, however, there is no way I can fit any of these into my bag. Two liters a day is also possibly cutting this too close and dry.

I manage to fit two bottles into each side pocket of my white UFO cargo pants. I tie them against my upper thigh to keep them from banging against my leg. Four. I jam two into the bag. Six. I take out the black poncho and roll eight more bottles into a vagabond pouch slinging it over my shoulder.

 

The guard at the gate, an olive-skinned Israeli with a revolver strapped to his belt, watches what I am doing and yells for me to come over in Hebrew. I ignore him and look down into the valley planning my descent. The road seems to curve sharply winding down the rocky slope. Ste Boker overlooks a massive ridge of rocky dune that crests over vast badlands below it stretching on as far as I can see in every direction east of the ridge. The valley more is a place of darkness and shadows except for a small fire I can see in the distance

 

As I’m about to begin the trek, the nervous guard at the gate walks over speaking quickly in Hebrew. It sounds like a question. I think he wants to know where I’m going.

 

Bi’Quat Tzi,” I answer.

 

Lama ata rotseh leleHhet shama?” (Why do you want to go there?) he asks.

 

I ask him if he speaks English and he shakes his head. I try to explain why I’m going into the desert. I tell him it’s a nature walk. He stares at me blankly. I can’t remember the word for desert. Mitbar or mitbah? Kitchen and desert are pretty different words. I try to tell him I’m going into the wilderness for a couple days to camp. I am pretty sure that he doesn’t catch most of what I’m telling him. He looks confused and nervous, but he’s the one with the machine gun.

 

As I’m speaking to him I realize the water bottles have to be arranged differently. I untie the leg straps and try to readjust them. It’s probably a really good thing I arranged all these bottles after arriving at the kibbutz gate. With bulky undergarments being all the rage these days, they usually shoot first and examine later. I need a stick to attach to the bundle. As people do when they think they need to communicate important things and don’t speak enough of the language, the young guard gets louder and slower with me. I cut him off, laying down both my bag and my bundle to hunt for a stick by the edge of the road. He follows me out of the booth and takes out his cell phone.

 

Most of the wood is dry and breaks too easily but I finally find a branch that will do the trick. When I get back to the booth, the guard is talking quickly on the phone. He gives me a Dodge City look, but I continue preparing my kit. He probably thinks I’m an insane hobo.

 

The guard keeps asking me questions in Hebrew. I only get a couple words. I reply to the best of my ability. He tells me that he lives on the kibbutz and has just finished the army. I ask what unit he was in and he drops some name I can’t place. I ask if it was a combat or a jobnik unit. He says jobnick. Something about tank repair. I’m about ready to go when a big white and blue police patrol van pulls up at the gate. The driver rolls down his window and calls out to guard. The guard points at me.

 

Three big guys in dark blue police uniforms get out of the van. They come up to me and one begins to ask me questions with an intense look of concern in his eyes. I tell them ani lo medaber ivrit. ( I don’t speak Hebrew.) The officer who is driving the van tells me to come with them.

 

“You…questions…police station.”

 

“Why? I didn’t do anything!” I reply sharply.

 

“No…trouble.”

 

“You bet your ass I’m not in trouble.”

 

I try to tell them in Hebrew that I’m going to the desert for seven days to camp, but I don’t know the word for camp so I say it in English with an Israeli accent.

 

“Please…no trouble,” another one of them says.

 

They finally convince me to come with them in the van. I decide that there must be some purpose to all of this. Perhaps it’s all part of a greater design. It also crosses my mind that they might not be cops at all. Either way, I decide to let it play out. They have guns. I have no gun. That’s just how it is. They put all my gear in the trunk and we drive for what seemes like a long time back towards Be’er Sheva. I can’t be sure because the roads all look the same and its pretty dark by this point. I hope they won’t pat me down because I have an illegal knife strapped to the small of my back. They don’t pat me down, because I’m not under arrest. They keep reassuring me that I’m not in trouble.

 

The police station is a dusty little outpost surrounded with a barbed wire fence somewhere in the vicinity of a large Bedouin settlement and a village named Yeroham. There is a sign in English, Arabic, and Hebrew, which reads: Police. They bring me inside to a little office. The man inside, a sergeant according to his rank, hands me a cup of hot, hot tea and starts asking me questions in Hebrew. I tell him that I don’t speak the language. He switches over to broken English. He’s a rough, but jovial man who has been in the dessert chasing drug smugglers too many years.

 

“Why do you want to suicide?” he asks me.

 

“What the hell are you talking about?”

 

“Why you want to die in desert.”

 

“I’m not trying to die in the desert.”

 

“Kibbutz guard says you spoke this.”

 

“That’s because he doesn’t speak any fucking, English.” I annunciate each word.

 

“What you want in the desert?”

 

“Camping trip,” I lie.

 

“Camping trip alone?”

 

He gazes at me bored and unconvinced. His dusty, unpolished combat boots are up on a desk that is cluttered with auspicious looking piles of files, photos and paperwork. He’s wearing a dark blue uniform that looks more like military than police. He has a small blue yarmulke pinned to his black hair that is speckled with silver on the way to turning gray.

 

“You free to go,” he says.

 

“Just like that?”

 

“Not want to die. This is good. I have less paperwork that way. No one wants a dead American in our desert. It gives impression country is not safe for tourists.”

 

“Wouldn’t want tourists thinking that. The country is obviously safe for everybody, tight as a drum. Can I get a ride back to the kibbutz then?”

 

“Of course,” he smiles.

 

As they lead me out of the office, he says something in Hebrew to the officers who brought me in. They both have a good laugh. I laugh too, but am really thinking, why don’t you fucking primitives speak any English?

 

It has taken a half an hour to get back to Sde Boker. They stopped at a gas station to fuel up the van and I spent my last seven sheks on a pack of Noblisse cigarettes.

 

“Have fun in the desert,” an officer says as they leave me off back at Sde Boker.

 

Finally, after repositioning my 14 liters of water, I begin my trek down the narrow winding asphalt road that made a dare devilish descent several thousand meters into the valley below. I made my way to the floor of the valley in darkness. It is a day-night-day-night hike towards reaching a place beyond the watchful eyes of man and civilization. I follow the path that leads to the wilderness, the path to the Bi’Quat Tzin.

           

           

***

 

The stars are brighter than I had ever remembered them. The horizon appears like an abyss more distant and gargantuan than even the rocky precipice into which I have made my way. I am now a stranger in an even stranger land. While the asphalt road below me indicates that I am still in a place that humans have attempted to conquer, a total darkness sweeps upon me. The moon itself nearly vanishes, waxing out to a sliver. It is as if with each step I take I conjoin the worlds of my dark and violent dreamscape with the realities of my waking life. I don’t have a destination other than I know that if my God is with me, I will be guided to one. The objective is simply the journey. It is not a suicide mission unless that is what it is fated to be. I do not long for death, the long kiss goodnight; I instead feel that I have to obtain a blessing. I have to discover what has set me on this road.

 

Before a boy can become a man in any culture there is some test. For warlike and primitive peoples a young boy might have to best another in mortal combat to be baptized in the blood of some warrior ethos. Some have to pull sapling trees from the ground to demonstrate sheer strength. For some of the tribes of aboriginal Australia a boy might make his way out into the desert with a gourd of water and brave the wilderness for a period. My tribe, the Hebrews, have asked it’s young to familiarize themselves with the written word, with the law, and then to sing about them. You might say that explains a thing or two about our reoccurring brush with slaughter and extermination.

 

I feel the desert rocks and sand-caked embankments crunch under my feet.

 

After walking for what seems like several hours I see a small campfire casting dancing silhouettes on the rocky valley walls. The valley is hundreds of meters across and the asphalt road suddenly ends at a green metal roadblock divider, an unmanned checkpoint. There is a large wooden frame upon which a map of the Bi’Quat Tzin is displayed for campers, bikers and all traffickers of the ‘Ein Avdat National Park’ into which I’ve randomly progressed. There is a stack of folding trail maps in an old rusted tin box. The Jordanian border is 80 km away beyond the trail map. If I get that far, I will have long cleared the valley, crossed the wilderness and come to what appears to be a rail line somewhere in the deep desert. I am unlikely to find another human soul.

 

Several large dunes obstruct the camp. I hear what sounds like men laughing. There is a group of young men camped out under some desert palm trees by a parked military jeep. They have dirt bikes with them and are cooking something like a quail stew over a low burning fire.

 

“Am I intruding?” I ask.

 

I have startled one of the men and he almost jumps right out of his skin. He points a rifle at me. I realize I’m wrapped in a black sheet, I’m wearing a kafia and those 14 liters are all tied off underneath me. I appear to have ambushed a group of soldiers on leave who are camping out.

 

“You scared the shit out of me,” one of them says.

 

“Sorry about that.”

 

“You look like an Arab dressed like that. What’s the big idea? If I were more drunk I’d have shot you right now,” says the one I startled.

 

“Sorry, again.”

 

I pull off the kafia and drop my pack on the ground.

 

“I’m just getting a late start on a long hike across the reservation.”

 

“Reservation?” the third one looks up curiously from the stew.

 

“He means the national park,” says the soldier who pointed the gun at me.

 

“The Bi’Quat Tzin,” I say.

 

“It’s all the same. Lots of ways to talk about the desert, like we have some control over it.”

 

“What’s your name,” a third one asks still while working on stew. “How’d ya get here Americanski?”

 

“ZeKhariah.”

 

“I am called Ofer and these are my friends Alon and David.”

 

“Good to meet you,” I say shaking hands with Alon and David. Ofer nods and keeps stirring the stew.

 

“We’re cooking good dinner. You want eat?” asks the man named David.

 

“Yeah, sure. Can I add something from my kit?”

 

“You can if you want, but we have loads to eat. I’m not sure we need anything.”

 

“Wilko. Thanks guys.”

 

“So what are you doing out in the desert by yourself,” Ofer asks.

 

Camping. I’m going camping. Anything else might make them suspicious and not feed me delicious quail stew.

 

“Oh, um, I’m going camping.”

 

“By yourself, you camp?” asks Alon.

 

“Yeah, my lady in Tel Aviv might not love me, and my lady in Ramat Ishai likes threesomes, and my lady in Pardes Hanna thinks she’s fucking her way to green card. I need to clear my head a bit.”

 

“Welcome to Israel!” says David. “They smell your green passport from the sound of your American voice.”

 

“That does not make sense, David,” says Ofer.

 

“Our passports are dark blue,” I add.

 

“It does not matter. They smell them no matter what color they are!”

 

“Or you have a big dick and they want to be in love this summer. Who cares? Like he said, welcome to Israel and welcome to the Negev,” says Alon.

 

“More sand! Less Palestinians!” yells David.

 

“Our friend is already drunk,” says Ofer. “We’ve been guarding checkpoints for a month and we are now on leave for three days. This is our vacation.”

 

“I’d say you guys have a better reason not to be out some desert squandering your free time.”

 

“Maybe we have girl troubles, too.”

 

“Little frechot bitches!” shouts David. On the ground next to him is an empty bottle of vodka.

 

“So, how goes the good fight against Palestinian terror?” I ask popping a squat on top of my pack.

 

“We fight the good fight to keep the roads closed with checkpoints and reap terror on the Palestinian economic and transportation infrastructure,” explains Ofer.

 

“We sit in the sun all fucking day telling an ever growing mob of people they can’t pass without the right papers. As it gets hotter this mob gets bigger and bigger. The tension grows and the situation escalates. Someone throws a rock, or maybe a sniper fires a shot. With how these things go, it always degenerates into madness quickly. We fire in the air and tell them the road is closed. And they always have family in the town one hour away by foot or valid employment in the neighboring city. But when all is said and done if we let one guy through who’s a bomber and he blows himself up in some club, well what can we do? We have our orders. No one gets through.”

 

He looks around nervously.

 

“What’s it like over on their side, the West Bank and Gaza I mean?”

 

“Who says it’s their side?” mutters David.

 

“It’s quite bad,” states Alon. “They live in squalor and their leaders rob them blind.”

 

“They act like niggers,” says David.

 

“If you think its bad in the cities, it’s much worse in the trenches, checkpoints and territories. Worse each week, each fucking day.”

 

“They are like animals trapped in a cage, feral creatures backed into a deadly corner. No one else wants them and we can give them nothing,” states Ofer.

 

“What Sharon and our leaders did last September at the al Aqsa mosque was a pointless provocation. But what choice is there? If it had not been over the temple mount, it would have been over something else. Now the blood in the street flows freely.”

 

“I just had a whole ordeal with the cops and the Sde Boker guards. I got detained for two hours,”  I tell them.

 

“Glad to know that even in the deep desert we have hysteria and overly scrupulous security screenings. They didn’t speak English and you were wearing their headwear. You’re lucky you weren’t shot. David would have shot you.”

 

“I would have shot you,” David agrees.

 

“What do the Palestinians say to you at the check points?”

 

“That’s the funny part. They’re just like us until something sets them off. Their hate and disregard for a queue. Their boisterousness and arrogance. The young men even dress like us. We do so much to create an otherness about them, but they are our cousins after all. How different could they be?” asks Alon.

“But then they became feral. Then the rock throwing begins and it degenerates from there. The world was shocked and horrified when we accidentally shot little Muhammad Jamal al-Durrah. Then everyone watched in more horror on October 12, when the two Israeli reservists who entered Ramallah were arrested by the PA police then slaughtered. This Palestinian mob stormed the police station on live television and beat the two soldiers to death. They threw their mutilated bodies into the street from a second floor window. The killings were captured on video by an Italian TV crew and broadcast in Europe. They just publicly lynched two prisoners in their custody.  The sheer brutality of the killings shocked the Israeli public and were even generally condemned by Palestinian leaders, Our government launched a series of retaliatory air strikes against the Palestinian Authority, which did wonders for their credibility and overall control,” explains Ofer.

“Food’s ready,” says David.

He parcels out four portions of quail stew over steamed pilaf, thick eastern rice from central Asia. It smells delicious. The small plump chunks of pungent meat have that eat-me-and-grow-big smell. We hungrily dig in.

“So it began when Sharon went to the temple mount last September and escalated rapidly?” I ask.

“It began fifty years ago when we established a state. This is just another round. It’s no more or less violent. No more or less brutal. There’s the Internet now so everyone can weigh in from the safety of their homes. The suicide bombings will continue and in turn we will strike back at them,” says Alon.

“Death to Arabs!” says David as he finishes his food.

Alon, who seems a bit better educated, has been doing most of the talking. Alon was a member of the leftist HashGavroche Hatzair before he joined the Army. It is illegal to maintain a political affiliation while enlisted in the IDF. He doesn’t trust Sharon and is sure the Intifada will only escalate as the summer and heat go on. Ofer doesn’t have much of any opinion besides cynicism.

“If I have to kill an Arab, I’ll kill the Arab who’s shooting at me,” Ofer finally adds.

Only Alon speaks about peace, but doesn’t believe it will really ever come.

“Death to ALL Arabs,” says David.

David is in the Mugav, the rough-and-tumble border patrol you get in by having the lowest kaba scores. Alon and Ofer are infantrymen with a unit I can’t pronounce. They got drafted only a year ago so they have two more before they get out.

“What are you doing here then?” asks Alon as we all enjoy David’s Marlboros after our meal.

 

“I make and sell art. Sketches mostly. I sell them all over the country.”

 

“Why did you come to Israel to sell art?” asks Ofer.

 

“I know. You all hate your country. I should be selling art back in New York.”

 

“No. I wasn’t gonna tell you that. It’s just that no one buys art in Israel.”

 

“I’m doing pretty well.”

 

“You’re dressed like an Arab,” notes David.

 

“I’m not always dressed like an Arab. I do pretty well on a Thursday night in Tel Aviv.”

 

“Like how much are we talking about?” asks Alon.

 

“Like a hundred skek.

 

“That’s peanuts.”

 

“It’s subjective what a peanut is worth.”

 

“I’m not trying to be rude, but one hundred shekels is not a lot of money,” says Alon.

 

“I can live off it.”

 

“You can survive off it,” interjects Ofer. “We survive on a couple hundred shekels a month, but we have families and other jobs and have three meals and cot and still we think it unbearable.”

 

“Once you get past survival everything else is superfluous.”

 

“Once you get past survival everything is comfortable,” states Alon.

 

“What do you do besides keep Palestinians off the roads?” I ask.

 

“Ofer and I work for a tech firm in Ashkelon on and off. It’ll be our fulltime job in two years when the Army is finished. Information technology. They’re working on new software systems for cell phones. Our boss wants to turn cell phones into cheap, portable mini-computers. David sells ecstasy at rave parties.”

 

“You sell art?” scoffs David.

 

“Yep.”

 

“Like caricatures?”

 

“A little bit of this and that.”

 

“Draw us something. Maybe we’ll buy it if you’re any good,” says Alon who cracks a Gold Star and passes it to me.

 

“Fer sure.”

 

David makes some comment in Hebrew and the three of them pause then chuckle about something.

 

“What’s so funny?” I ask.

 

“It doesn’t translate exactly. He just said its ironic that you’d come to the middle of the East, to the middle of the desert, to make pictures of people who really just want to flee here to where you’re from and engage in superfluous professions like the arts over in New York. He just thinks it’s ironic.”

 

After dinner we bullshit around and they end up paying me a hundred shekels for a picture of the burning bush Moses saw in the Sinai desert. The stars are even brighter. They light up the valley. There are electric lights still visible from the basis and Ste Boker, but the young soldiers tell me that in one day’s time there will be nothing settled to the east for two hundred miles past the Jordanian border to the small mining city of At Tafilah. They say I should follow the highway out of the valley until I hit a high-elevated bridge that runs across the valley mouth. The rail line along the southern ridge leads out into the wildness then eventually to some phosphate-mining depot. The northern ridge line goes north up into Demona. They suggest that I hitch a ride on that rail to get myself out of the desert if I venture out that far.

 

The stars are so many and so bright. I quite love it. They try and talk me out of my intended mission like everybody has tried to. We get drunker and drunker and then finally I fall asleep.

 

The first day.

 

When I wake up everyone is gone. There’s still a couple smoldering embers left in the fire pit. The soldiers and the bikes and the military jeep are gone and so is the cover of night. I’m sticky with sweat. Before they went to sleep they gave me a topographic map showing me the three main oases of the area as well as a rough outline of the Tzin valley itself. I figure I’ll head to the outermost oasis and take it from there. Once I clear the valley I’ll be in the badlands on the edge of the great endless nothing that is the Bi’Quat Tzin.

 

After surveying the landscape I begin trekking in the direction of the first oasis. The valley is a geographical formation known as a wadi. During the winter these valleys flash flood and become lush with foliage. In what look like massive trenches below them are vast underground caverns filled with water that sustain the plant life on the wadi floor. An oasis is simply a break where the water is pushed out of this cavern and creates a constantly refilling pool amid the deep desert. Plants pop out near where the water breaks through. Mainly palms and shrubs. Nothing lush or pretty.  I have this Hollywood image of what an oasis is and I hope the reality lives up to it but I doubt it will. Huge palm trees, camels, Bedouins and large fucking fruits growing everywhere. I can’t wait to meet the Bedouin in their element. I realize that I have already met a couple of them ever since I left Be’er Sheva but it’s not Hollywood if they have a cab instead of a camel.

 

The heat is soon ridiculous. I’m walking along this small, nondescript dirt road following the tracks of a vehicle. There doesn’t seem to be a shady spot anywhere close. Around me are towering dunes of sand dust and rock. A few hours later the last vestiges of civilization melt behind me on the top of the valley’s northern ridge. I am wrapped in my white poncho and am using the black one as a bundled pack over my shoulder containing six of the water liters. I have two strapped down in each cargo pocket of my baggy white UFO pants and two more in my rucksack. The going is slow and tedious. I have to concentrate on not drinking too much water. I keep looking back to make sure Ste Boker is really gone.

 

My path winds deeper into this wasteland. I try to drink water only when I feel I need it, but I feel like I need it all the time. I’ve almost liquidated three liters worth by noon. I keep the empty bottles hoping there will be somewhere to refill them. I had aimed to ration off at about two bottles per day, which according to some soldiers I met in the Tel Aviv Central Bus station is far too little anyway. That doesn’t seem very realistic at this point. It feels like I’ve been walking for miles, but then I remember the rest of the world is measured in kilometers. I haven’t seen a person all day and the kibbutz on the ridge is no longer in sight. I am following a path marked largely by vehicle tracks and compressed earth. There is not so much as a breeze to reassure me. Not even four hours into the wilderness and my gait has become a quiet stumble.

 

It is hot, hot, and my brain is boiling. [°F] = [°C] × 95 + 32. Had I made it through Bronx Science maybe I could convert the fact that it is apparently now 33 degrees Celsius out here into something high and intimidating in my native Fahrenheit. My constant need to consume water and the sweat tricking into my eyes alerts me that the desert is a killer.

 

I’m such a stupid fucking American. Only my Lawrence-of-Arabia-reads-too-much-Dune, could conceive of finding a spiritual connection in this wasteland. How can I think of God when all I can think about is water? More water. Drowning becomes an orgiastic notion.  I guess I thought that by coming out here I’d learn something. I’ve learned that at the rate I’m going in three days or less, all my water will be gone. It pops into my head to turn back. I’m only half a day out at this point. Write it all off as a stupid notion and a funny day trip. Just quit. It’s too fucking hot.

 

“It always has to be so damn dramatic doesn’t it?” I say aloud to myself.

 

And then.

 

“I’d like to think I’m doing it for a good reason.”

 

“Hold you’re shit together. It hasn’t even been a whole day out here yet.”

There is sand and death as far as the eye can see. The walls of the valley deceptively appear to offer shade, but to reach them seems like several km to either side. I’m moving into sloping precipices of red and tan rock, of dust long settled and some tiny barren shrubbery called acacia trees or shittim, which the are apparently common in the wilderness areas, particularly near the stream beds.  The durable wood of this tree was used in the construction of the tabernacle and a number of its objects, including the sacrificial altar, table of showbread and the Ark of the Covenant. I know this because the back of the map has a small list of flora and fauna found in the Tzin Valley.

The map says the oasis is 15 km from the base camp where I had started my trek. The going is slow and hard.  My water is warm like soup. At least it’s wet. I can feel my exposed hands and face first-degree burning. There is a slow bake of my brain in the very cerebrospinal fluid it floats in. The thing about the desert is that you have to always find ways to occupy your mind or it plays tricks on you out of water glut. The parasympathetic nervous system keeps urging you to do the rational thing and get your body off the stove.

 

“There isn’t anything out here,” I whisper to myself.

 

I spit out something lacking fluid.  It’s just you, the voice in your own head, whomever it is you pray to and a whole lot of time between you and your next sip of water. The desert takes it all away. I squat under a low-lying bush that provides a little cover. Looking at my map it doesn’t look all that far to the Jordanian border. Only about 70 km, but the desert is very deceptive when it comes to distance. My tribe apparently spent forty years wandering this desert. They had just escaped from Egypt and I guess they were wondering what I’m wondering about now. I suppose God was a bit more proactive then with all the smiting of Egyptian armies, burning bushes and tablets with a plan. I need some tablets with a plan about now. I’m seventeen years old. I’d like to think I have a good idea of what I’m doing just no conception of how it is to be done.

 

I see what looks like a small lake in the distance. Fuck the tablets and just give me a kayak. Of course, just like in the movies, there’s no lake at all. It’s just more barren earth, which twinkles like a stream in the distance. I have a mad desire to drink more water and a profound sense of accomplishment that I’ve made my way just a little bit further. My death could be spelled by wandering too far off the road. There might be a real good metaphor waiting for me behind the next set of dunes at that mirage. I’m traveling toward death for something I’ve only imagined, but I’m the kind of cat that ultimately wants to see a burning bush. I just need to be given something to believe in.

 

I reach the first oasis about 4 pm. It’s a little cooler by now, but not much. At least the sunshine isn’t hitting directly under this grove of rugged palm tress. It blows my mind that this is the first oasis I have ever seen. It isn’t all that far off from what I had pictured. I guess once in awhile the movies tell the truth.

 

This first oasis, which the map calls Ein Avda,t is nestled in a tight chalk ravine that gets increasingly greener as you enter it with Euphrates poplars known for their various-shaped leaves. As one travels into this jagged cut in the side of the valley’s southern ridge, the dust is made lush culminating in a gigantic waterfall raining down in buckets into a bowl sixty meters across under an enormous ledge. The contrast between the wasteland and this place make the jaw drop. I strip naked and dive into the freezing pool. I’m the only one here for my first baptism. The water is fresh. It flows from a vast underground spring collected from the winter’s rains. I swim and drink and dive deep into the bottomless pool. I swim about underwater realizing the bottom eludes each dive. I break the surface and drink myself retarded from this first desert well. I spend the whole day at the pool recovering my strength.

 

The second night.

 

I find a chalk cave that runs twenty meters into a ridge wall situated above the pool after a quick climb. I unpack my kit and decide to make this cave my resting place for the night, which has fallen quickly. It’s getting quite cold in the valley and the winds have picked up.

 

During the winter this is a river if that can be believed. I’ve never even seen it rain in Israel, but one of the soldiers told me the Wadi fills up from an underground lake and sets off a chain reaction, which renders the valley green for several months of winter. Sure isn’t very green anywhere now except for where the water breaks the surface at the three watering holes.

 

Sometime after dusk I eventually fall asleep. I have wrapped myself in both of the poncho shawls in this small cave near the pool, refreshed and full from eating several tins of pears and nearly half a block of cheese. My greatest four-hour nap ever has been rudely interrupted by a wave of new dreams.

 

* * *

“Some of these caves carved into the chalky limestone cliffs of Nahal Zin were apparently used in the 6th century A.D. by monks from nearby Avdat. The monks sculpted out closets, shelves, benches, stairs and water systems. A Greek inscription was found in one of the caves. It is a prayer to St. Theodorus, a monk whose name is also found in a monastery in Avdat. At the top of the canyon are the remains of a Roman fortress. But that’s not where were going.”

“Five more minutes,” I mumble in Aramaic.

 

“Sleep tight, kid. When you get up there is quite a bit more ground to cover.”

 

Mike Washington is sitting on a rock by a low fire. This is not the deep desert. We are still near the way station, still near the seven springs, which sustain the life of the city and the desert people around it. I’m wrapped in blankets of wool on a bed of pillows of tough and durable sheets of red and black cloth. I hear him, but I’m so exhausted I don’t even open my eyes. It’s a deep and comfortable sleep I’m in, peaceful for the near first time in my life. Clean for the first time in as long as I can remember.

 

“You’re getting tougher boy. You’ve been tough, but now comes the test. ‘Tough ain’t enough,’ as they say.”

 

I still don’t say anything or try to get up. I’m afraid if I move or even open my eyes this tranquility will be lost forever.

 

“You have to wake up soon, kid. You’ve got to reach the second watering hole by sun up. This one’s a bit further out. Better to make the trek in the cool of night.”

 

I grumble something to him, or at him really. It again sounds a bit like ‘five more minutes,’ again in Aramaic.

 

“You don’t have five minutes. The devil’s gaining on us and you ain’t got a chance at a fiddle made of gold.”

 

I hear some foul and evil howl.

 

‘Let me start by saying that our God is not a God of tricks and tests and cosmic hoop jumping. It isn’t making any lists and checking them twice. God knows not only what decision you’re about to make out here, but all the ones you might make, or won’t make or can’t make based upon your limited awareness of the things unseen. God knows already that your knife will fail you in battle, that your water will soon be gone and that you will loose your way in the badlands of the deep desert.  It can also see you become a killer like me, deadly with blade and bullets. You might conserve your water. You might be better at topography than you currently appear.  Our God doesn’t get angry, or jealous or worry about what you do with your soul. It can see everything that ever has been, could be and is.”

 

I glance over at the voice of my mentor. Then I see him. His head is shaved and a grey rag is wrapped around his empty eye sockets. He’s wearing a dark grey sleeveless, collarless shirt plated in light interlocking armor, and a bulletproof vest for someone who has already been shot and doesn’t die. His gold pistols hang from suspender-like straps on his chest. A grey fedora hat sits on his lap.l His pants are black with white pin stripes. The suit jacket has been tossed over his shoulder.

 

“If you are being tested, if that’s what you want to believe, then you are merely testing yourself. There are many realities playing out simultaneously, so you have an equal probability of success or failure out here.”

 

I’m not moving until I have to. I know that as soon as I get up, the very second, is when the running and shooting and jumping and exploding of enemy heads will begin. I know that even without his eyes Mr. Washington can still kill.

 

“Wake up from your waking life and ask yourself, are you ready to face what made you from a single clot?” says Washington.

 

“We’ve bled quite a bit to get here,” I mutter.

 

“We’ve just begun to bleed.”

 

“You’re reassuring.”

 

“Not my job to help you lie to yourself, little Zachariah.”

 

“Tell me what you are.”

 

“I’ve told you before.”

 

“Then tell me what I am.”

 

He looks at me like I’m deaf and stupid.

 

“I tell you that every single time I see you.”

 

“I don’t believe you. I think I’ve gone and caught the madness.”

 

“You can’t be crazy unless you run around claiming you’re Jesus Christ.”

 

“I would assure you that there are way more subtle ways to go crazy.”

 

“But you’re just not a subtle guy, Zachariah.”

 

“Zachariah’s your name, guy. I’m Sebastian. I don’t ever forget that even if other people are led to.”

 

“The naming of names and changing of things doesn’t make a mountain less a mountain or a gunslinger anything other than a killer with a cause. We’ve come an awful long way for you and I not to embrace the purpose many have worked to steer you toward.”

 

‘”I see little purpose to anything I’ve done so far, Mr. Washington.”

 

“That’s sad. But oh, you’re about to. You’re gonna have to step up the game.”

 

“We lost already. Don’t you fucking remember? They killed everybody. I betrayed you all.”

 

“You can’t betray people you don’t know.”

 

“I can’t trust the people I don’t know either. You’ve jumped about in my mind for four years now. The worse I get each time, you do too. I don’t even know when you first came along. When I was young. Back when I needed something to believe.’

 

“You were only 8 when you first started writing and drawing stories about me. About us really, but you weren’t conscious of what I was then. The dreams followed the stories.”

 

“You’re a product of my sick, fucked up head.”

 

“You’re the product of God’s. That is if it had a head or emotions of any kind beyond love, admiration and mercy. It created the heavens and earth, the skies and the sea, the night and the day, and then there came a day when little Zachariah was called to deliver the next great salvo of changes to be made among your kind in a long tradition of such noble work.”

 

“Why don’t you go find a fucking rabbi?”

 

“Because the ranks of the righteous are always drafted from the fallen, the sick and the broken to make example.”

 

“What example?”

 

“That it hasn’t forgotten a single one of its children.”

 

“Even if that’s true. I can’t do it. I don’t even really believe. I’m not sure I ever did. I prayed to die and I guess it saved me. I begged to be saved in the foxhole and then dug deeper. I tried to be a Jew in London and was driven out of the tribe. The land I was taught was Zion is a bloody circus of fanatics. What reason, what proof have you that I am not so sick, that I’ve wandered so far from reason, that my very mind is split in this chalk cave babbling to an imaginary friend!? I AM UNDONE! You are a figment of my ego, a ghost of things I wish I were! YOU’RE A PRODUCT OF MY SICK FUCKING MIND!!!”

 

I dash my head on the wall of the cave. I feel a trickle of blood run down the right side of my head and a dull sting, but he doesn’t go anywhere.

 

He waits for my rant to end and then starts up again, as he is prone to do.

 

“I am what you were and will soon be again.”

 

I’m pondering what the hell that means when I hear a spine-chilling howl like the sound of a feral beast and a horse dying. If you mixed those sounds together, you’d kind of gather what that evil fucking sound, sounded like.

 

“Just to forewarn you,” he says putting on his gangster hat.”’ You’d better get ready to fight for more than your own lost soul.”

* * *

 

 

I awaken with a start, my index finger pointing at the cave’s entrance like it’s a handgun. I knew this would happen. The nightmarish dream world is beginning to break through again. I have no fuck or bottle to keep them back, no pink pilly-willies to shut them out. Those had been abandoned before London. I’m facing my demons out here head on and my imaginary friend, my guardian angel, has had his imaginary or angelic eyes ripped from his head. I have to step the game up because I can’t definitively say the howl I’ve heard is really locked away in my head or out here in the darkness.

 

My intention had been to haul out of here tonight, but it has gotten very late while I slumbered. I’m not up for any more rounding about under that brutal sun. All future ambulations will take place under the cover of the cold, cold night. My watch says it is 4:05 am. That won’t give me enough moon cover to get to Ein Boker. According to the map, this second oasis in the Wadi Tzin is the smallest of the three that are connected by the Spice Road on the highway out of the valley and into the wilderness, the Bi’Quat.

I am sitting in the dark of night smoking a cigarette. I remember something my father taught me a long time ago, how to field strip a cigarette. To extinguish it, to break the casing and scatter the guts. To pocket the paper and the filter for incineration. This is just one of the many interesting things my father showed me. He told me a good soldier doesn’t smoke because it exposes him and makes him a target. It makes him easy to track.

It’s freezing. It crept up on me while I was sleeping. I’m shivering thumb to toe. Neither of the linen ponchos is very thick. The chills swim through me. The chalk cave in the valley hill above the great pool of the spring offers very little sanctuary from the winds through the valley. I dig in, wrapping the poncho sheets about me like a cocoon and ball up in a tight fetal position as cold and thankless as the day I was born.

Something moves out there, scurrying across the sands in the darkness. And then something, which sounds like a terrible scream in the night, echoes off miles away, direction unknown. I clutch my saceen, and I hold out for the daybreak in this little cave, but despite my terror or more because of it, I do not ask for my God to help me. 

 

The second day.

 

I manage to awaken a little before dawn, because I never went into a proper deep sleep for more than four hours. I leave my gear up in the cave and begin climbing the rocks to the mouth of the spring on the south ridge from where the water flows. I only have my canteen and my book, the book that Brent bought me the morning of our first meeting.

 

I’ve already got some notions about this desert by day. When you are in the desert your eyes play tricks on you. It is like sensory bombardment resulting from subsistence deprivation. You’re running on a nearly empty tank at all times. Out there in that desert it’s you, and whatever name you call your god, and the freezing cold nights and the dead by dusk heat that makes you sweat even when you aren’t building pyramids.

 

People have the wrong conception of a mirage. It’s not so much that you think you see a lake or some body of water elusively situated upon the horizon. It’s a twinkle of salvation that stays just as far away each time you move towards it. The mirage represents some supposed place of destination generally always off the path. You can tell yourself it looks like water because water begins to occupy most of your waking consciousness out here. But it’s not water. It’s just another stretch of land, which you halfway die to get to, that yields oh so little in return. If the cold can end life by night then, the heat does you in by day. But the reason you let it do so, the reason you wasted all that water, is to chase some mirage that isn’t on your path at all.

 

The Negev is home to thousands of Bedouin, who have been here for roughly 7,000 years. Their tribal alliances stretch from the Maghreb of Northern Africa well across the Middle East into Iraq. These desert people fear their God and know their desert. They were the first converts of the religion of Muhammad and their armies spread Islam from Spain to China within three generations of the revelation. It was the Bedouin that emerged from the desert to carry the third revelation of the Abrahamic line to the people of the world. It was these people who lent their swords to the message of the Prophet Muhammad.

Throughout most of their history, the Bedouin have engaged primarily in nomadic herding, limited agriculture, guerilla raiding and the occasional fishing. At times various powers have provided them income by contracting them to transport goods and people across the desert. Scarcity of water and of arable lands required them to move constantly so as to not deplete the precious waters of the wadis and wells hidden throughout the great desert. There are no countries or empires the Bedouin are bound to respect, even the Islamic Caliphate they brought to power. When the civil war began after the Umayyad tribe attempted to usurp the reigns of power and murder the prophet’s family, the Bedouin began to understand that a thing fixed and stagnant is thing breeding evil and bound to be corrupt. The Islamic empire soon spanned three continents. Its leaders no longer emerged from the nomadic Arab tries that helped it grow in the early years.

When it came time for the collapse of the sick man of Europe, nearly thirteen thousand years after the battles in which the Prophet Muhammad and an irregular Bedouin Arab army had taken over the Arabian Peninsula, in the final days of the last caliphate, the Bedouin led by an English intelligence officer helped end the last great Muslim world power. The Ottoman Empire helped Lawrence hammer their supply lines and seize the port of Aqaba. Their alliances shifted like the sands. They carried Islam to glory then handed the region over to the infidel English and French out of contempt for the power of the Turks. The famous Bedouin witticism ‘myself against my brother, my brother and I against my cousin, my cousin and I against the world’ somewhat articulates the ever shifting Bedouin loyalties.

I haven’t see another person all day, Bedouin or otherwise. I take out the two books I am carrying, which contain three. The Tanakh and the Gospel and the Qur’an. The first I know from two years of Hebrew School, the second I was drilled with daily in the Family Foundation camp. I have never opened the Qur’an. I know that these three texts do not represent the totality of divine revelation. As ambiguous a believer as I am, I am not about to cut out Zen Buddhism, Confucian thinking, Zoroastrianism and 4,000 years of Hinduism just because the three I know are easier to grasp. But it is a path, is it not? I have to start with the revelations that were sent to my tribe. There are great linkages, which I cannot, and perhaps will not get to see. That all these religions are one isn’t even something I question anymore. But if I am out here to connect with my God, I need to do so with the traditions established for my kind, those of the Jews, Christians and Muslims.

Brent told me not to try to read these books cover to cover or to take their words literally. There is hidden meaning in each message, verses tailored to the individual believer.

So, I sit most of the day in the chalk cave rereading the Torah. It is targeted speed-reading really. I don’t know what I am looking for, but I process it quickly. I plan to spend just one day per book, two to meditate on them and two more for whatever I am meant to receive from this journey. I immerse myself in the spring regularly as the heat rises.

 

The lush oasis in the ravine is shelter from the inferno out there in the desert and I read on. I read of the beginning, then soon of the Patriarchs Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. Since King James was not living back then and these were desert people, I should say Avram, Yitzhak and Yaakov. I soon come across the fateful story of Abraham, or Avram, smashing the idols that caused me such grief in Hebrew School. I vividly remember crying, yelling and guarding my idol, or sculpture as I saw it until my father came to withdraw me from Hebrew school. I didn’t go back for seven more years when I began to get ready for my bar mitzvah when my parents found a Reform Shul with a lesbian, guitar-playing rabbi.

 

God surely whispered to Avram shortly after that it wasn’t about destroying idols but that it was about creating a new kind of faith. The beginning of the book tells epic stories of ordinary, even sinful people that prove their faith. Adam and Eve and their fall from the Garden of Eden. Noah and the building Arc. Lot attempting to stop the destruction of Sodom and Gomorra. Then a whole book traces the bloodline of the House of Avram. Of his children Yitzhak and the casting out Ishmael and of his grandchild Yaakov and the casting out of Esau. The twelve children of Yaakov are renamed Israel. Joseph was betrayed by his eleven other brothers over a Technicolor dream coat. Israel was sold into slavery in Egypt. Yoseph earns favor with the Pharaoh using his prophetic dreams to save the Egyptians from famine and then humbles himself and saves the families of this eleven other brothers when they come begging for food in Egypt. Genesis ends with the twelve tribes of Israel comfortable and settled as honored guests of the Egyptian state.

 

The Tanakh is not filled with saintly, righteous people. The patriarchs are polygamists. Avram attempts to sacrifice his son to prove his love for God. Lot is a drunk and gets his own daughter pregnant. The founding brothers of Israel’s twelve tribes sell their own brother into slavery over a coat. But the House of Adam and the Tribes of Avram persevere and uphold their respective covenants with the Lord. By the beginning of Exodus, the Israelites are slaves in Egypt and I take a brief nap.

 

When I wake up, I eat a can of tuna and some black Baltic bread. I read most of Exodus without speed reading or skimming. I read how Moses lead the 144,000 descendants of Israel’s twelve sons out of Egypt into Mt. Sinai and over into the very desert I am now sitting in over a 40-year journey. I spin through Leviticus, Deuteronomy and Numbers chronicling the 613 things Christians are sure they don’t have follow if they show up on Sunday or at least Christmas and Easter.

 

Every single Israelite including Moses dies in that great desert before reaching the promised land of Zion. Their betrayal at Mt. Sinai was too great. They waited 40 days and nights at the foot of that mountain for Moses to come down with the Commandments. They had set up a Golden Cow and were engaged in a drunken, wild orgy when their leader made the treacherous descent with the first tablets. Moses got to look out over Zion, but even he died before Yeshau, called Joshua by King James, led the children of these desert people over the river Jordan to drive the Canaanites from their traditional land. You can’t say history doesn’t repeat itself. It almost repeats itself verbatim.

 

I get as far as Canaan and have to stop for while. The Israelites, enslaved and oppressed in Egypt, after spending 40 years living in the wilderness of Sinai, Negev, and Arabia, then engage in a wild genocide to take over their promised land. I had only some half-baked notion about this particular incident. In some cases the Israelite armies drew circles around a village in Canaan and their priests declared that everything inside had to be obliterated, every structure, every piece of property, every last man, woman and child. It’s all in the Tanakh, but they sure as hell didn’t teach this stuff in Hebrew school. We had come a log way, suffered quite a great deal to soil our hands and souls first with the Canaanites and now again with Palestinians.

 

I want to vomit but instead dive again into the deep blue pool of my oasis sanctuary. There is nothing so chosen about my tribe that makese us any less capable of base slaughter.

 

Over the rest of the afternoon I read through the Judges, Prophets Major and Minor, and find little that justifies what the Israelites did. In the years to come they created a mighty little kingdom for one hundred years. But failing to fully eradicate the polytheists in their midst, and embracing brutal marshal law, they forgot their religion. They smashed more idols than they internalized faith in God. Their house was divided, the temple was destroyed and all twelve tribes were carried off into Babylonian exile. Ten of the twelve tribes were completely lost. They sang many songs of return, but did not foresee that even several hundred years later when Cyrus of the Persians let them return to Zion that they’d rebuild their Second Temple, forget the lessons yet again and loose everything for a thousand years, this time when the Romans ground them under the heel.

 

The night has fallen yet again.

 

 

The second night.

 

I now make my way toward Ein Boker oasis under the cover of the darkness and the coldI have picked up all my refuse and tied it into a bundle to carry out with me. I refill my three-liter jugs at the spring and take one more dip. It begins to get a bit colder after nightfall. I can feel the chemicals changing inside my body, my mind using new parts. I feel like a hunter. I secure my black and white checkered kafia headdress once again. I click on my electric lantern and tie the excess water bottles one by one to a stronger staff I have found. I strap my pack on and leave the oasis on a trail called the Spice Road, which I hope by morning will bring me to the next oasis on the route, Ein Boker. My instincts are honed in the cold night. There is a howl perhaps, perhaps something evil is out there lurking in ambush. Something worse than warnings of smugglers, an evil that has been with me all along that is finally ready to move in for the kill. Sleep is truly the cousin of death in the desert. If you don’t make use of the night for transit, you will be caught out during the day. This will drain your water considerably.

 

I calculate that I am 15 km in from Sde Boker. It is apparently 17 more kilometers to reach Ein Boker, the second of large springs in Wadi Tzin. If I don’t make this second crossing before daybreak, find the shelter of the wadi and the poplar trees, then there is little hope in maintaining the water I will need to get clear of the valley and into the wilderness beyond.

 

This break into the deep desert is approximately a 60-kilometer trek. The landmark that will tell me I have gotten that far is a train rail bridge that hooks over the ridge of the valley from a phosphate harvesting mine in the deep desert and runs out and up into Demona. The map is a great test of endurance laid out before me. Do I possess the constitution to get deep enough into the flaming mess and then ride out on a train one way or another? As I trek through the dark following the track bed of long haul rigs along the wide Spice Road, I understand that this section is a cakewalk compared to the third stretch between Ein Boker and the high bridge on the map. The valley has an upper and lower access. The upper access is to the south and involves a steep and treacherous climb from Ein Avdat to a parking lot several hundred meters above. I have come in the lower access.

 

Ben Gurion had lived the last years of his life in Sde Boker in the desert dreaming. Now I too am in this desert to dream. The map shows vast wide spaces, which are neither flat nor inviting. Dunes, boulders and scorched earth had fallen out from the smiting of the great Sodom and Gomorra that old heart of darkness. The lowest dry point on Earth is a mere 50 km northeast of my location. I will either prove myself its match or just die out here.

 

I make my way in darkness. I hear things moving in the night. If they make themselves my enemies I have a double-edged saceen, an Israeli hoodlum weapon acquired for ninety shekels in the Shanti House. It is a four-inch blade mounted on a metal handle whose base unscrews. By unscrewing the base of the saceeen you remove a second blade from inside the handle then re-screw it into a double-edged, six-inch sword. It’s all about those extra inches they say in American movies. Someone had taught me to aim for the right upper quadrant of the abdominal area. The liver contains 40% of body’s red blood cells.

 

My eyes are playing tricks. Something always seems to dart by me several hundred meters ahead in the dark. There is no moon and the blackness swallows the whole valley enveloping everything. The only way I keep my way is to follow the indents of the large semi-trucks that use the Spice Route on their way to the railway line.

 

There are things out here. What scurries by so quickly is quite possibly a rabbit or some kind of small deer. It surely has no monstrous claws and fangs to render me from my bones or to slaughter me after a sickly short chase. I unclip my sacceen and unscrew the dagger’s base. With one hand I hold my water jug staff, four bottles tied to one end with my lantern tied to the other. I wield the sacceen with my right hand should this thing in the darkness make its move. I trudge along leading with my lantern and my leftover food. According to my watch it is 3:30 am. The sun will be up around 7 am and unbearable by 8. There is really no way of knowing how much ground I have covered between Avdat and Boker. There won’t be a geographic indicator other than the sudden appearance of trees to really know. I keep moving. I keep seeing things in the darkness.

 

I am Dante with no participating Virgil. I am Lewis with no Clarke and no Indian guide. There are things moving in the night around me, but I doubt those things are Indians or the Roman poet of antiquity. Maybe the moving things are in my mind. They are the terror finally taking hold. As I progress I move deeper into the mouth of madness. The desert is an entirely different place when the sun is absent. At least by day your nemesis the sun fights you face to face, but by night your creeping enemies are more slimy, sly and elusive.

 

It’s about midnight and I have come to a fork in the wide dirt road.  I read a sign illuminated by my lantern, which is written in Arabic and Hebrew and English. To my left the Spice Route becomes the Old Spice Route.  It remains broad and sweeps northeast toward the High Bridge and Sodom. I imagine it in relation to Sde Boker, which I place behind me. The Spice Route also continues on through what appears to be a village of corrugated tin roofs and derelict hulls of rusted mining apparatus. The machinery sits dormant like a herd of iron behemoths. I is unable to place them as friend or foe, omnivore or carnivore. I pop a little squat for a pow-wow with one. I light up a Noblisse after not smoking all day, which won’t really help me pick a route as I  get off in a head rush. I smoke in the darkness attempting to ascertain which route leads to Ein Boker and which to the high bridge, the tracks over the valley. Since I don’t have enough water to make it to the bridge, especially since there is no water near the bridge, it is critical that I pick correctly on this one. I smoke away thinking about both my directional predicament and what thing creeps behind me somewhere in the dark.

 

I can feel something out there in the gloom watching me. It is part clown, part insect, part pederast and part Disney, a timeless evil dancing circles out there around me.

 

I had refilled five of my liter jugs with spring water. I finally gauge that Ein Boker, the second oasis before the deep desert, is straight ahead into the derelict bone yard. According to my little map, I will have to backtrack seven km from the spring to the bone yard and exit out the valley north to the high bridge. Otherwise I’ll have to cross some 20 km over rough dune, hill and brush without a clear path to follow, no fun at all. I begin to hike straight through the bone yard. I can’t fathom attempting such a crossing tonight.

 

It’s a misconception that everything in the desert is dead. At night you hear rabbits or small dear scurrying across the dunes. There are snakes and birds. Kill the birds and eat them and leave those snakes alone. All manner of the toughest creatures alive thrive out in the wasteland. At night it’s freezing cold and the wind rips dust across the wilderness. I’ve wrapped myself in the white poncho underneath with the black cloak on top. My face is covered, masked in the checkered kafia. The crescent sliver is very bright, bright like I’ve never seen before. It is better to move at night for obvious reasons, but I have to be careful not to lose my path. Things can get quite fatal out here without a grounded sense of direction. I have to cover as much ground as possible in these rough and frigid conditions. I have to calculate my destination carefully so that I will end up in at the next spring before daybreak. The freezing cold rips right to the bone and I wonder what is worse, the blazing heat or the frozen nights? But I guess I’m stuck with both. One will never see stars like this in America. There are no city lights or suburban sprawl in a hundred miles to dull their brilliance. I see a first shooting star tear across the horizon and I wonder if it is an Air Force exercise until I see another one. I don’t know the difference.

 

Somewhere far away I see a vehicle making strange circles deep out in the desert, in the direction of the Old Spice Route. I can’t hear it, but I see it out there chasing something, perhaps itself. Is it a Bedouin drug run or a Mugavnik Patrol? Neither will serve my cause. It is too far, too distant to make me out and it doesn’t appear to be closing in. My eyes still haven’t adjusted out here. I swear that in the bone yard I will find danger and make my way out of it quickly. These broken trucks and cranes remind me of the huge, slimy metal sentinels that usher the prisoner convoys into the to deep desert in the Pale City to be destroyed by the gas and the crematoriums. My eyes continue to play tricks. I see the trenches by the roadside filled with hooded bodies bloated from poison gas. I expect the large metal beasts behind me will rise from the sands at any minute to come crashing after me. But this is the real world, where they cannot go. I must fear them only in my dreams. There are no bodies in these trenches, just rocks and dust.

 

I reach Ein Boker before dawn. It is nestled in a little crater. Its pools are larger than those at Ein Avdat, but less pristine. It is questionable if the water in them is good enough to bathe in much less drink. There is a micro forest of Euphrates poplars. Someone has erected a lean-to tent with poplar branches and black sheets tied off. With several hours to dawn I bunk down in this little shelter. The oasis is deserted, but there are signs of a recently smoldered fire pit and several cigarette butts near the campground. I lost the car lights in the distance and have put a few km between the bone yard and me, but the mounting feeling of being hunted has not past.

 

I am traveling deeper into the wilderness with the works of the man Jesus Christ as my next lesson. I still clutch my saceen for all the good it won’t do me if something sets upon me while I slumber. I have Mr. Washington to protect me from my internal enemies, but out here it’s just this doubled edged sword.

***

 

Mike and I have been crossing the dunes for what seems like three days without a pause to even rest. The sea of sand we cross stretches out thousands of miles. And we cross it in a light ship.

 

The ship is roughly the width of a two-person sailboat but it is two thousand meters in length. It is named ‘Temptation’ and has sails that are nearly a quarter mile tall. It has elevated wings in waves about its flanks and is made of a paper-thin metal. Its mast towers far above us and flies a huge grey flag. The sails are of a thin white cloth with grey ropes stitching them to the mast and wings. We are nearly off the desert floor. The strong winds let us sail upon sand. Mike sits on the deck with a cigarette controlling ‘Temptation’ with a complicated network of pullies and levers. I sit gazing out at the vast and terrible desert we will surely never be able to cross without this terrific vessel.

 

Our destination is the thing on the other side of the Wilderness, the City of Many, Many Lights in the land of Zion. The Pale City from which we’ve spent over four years fleeing is miles behind us. The desert is measured in kilometers now, smaller in increments of ten, and far more civilized. I haven’t even seen him shoot somebody since we stole the thing three days ago at Port Said.

 

We have been living on manna and quail ever since. Manna tastes a good deal like frog’s legs, but perhaps a little like marshmallow lamb. Most of our trip is spent in silence. This vast sea of sand has taken seven days via this strange transport to traverse and now has come the morning of day eight. I put down the book I am reading to scan the horizon for structures, for people, for anything. Only red and yellow sand.

 

Our nemesis has taken the red-haired girl hostage and moved just two days ahead of us in a convoy to the City of Lights, that point where one could access God in this world. It is all that is left of a great civilization brought under heel by its own wicked leaders and its own lack of faith. 8 million had been put to death in the camps surrounding the Pale City I had been imprisoned in. Nearly every last man woman and child had their life and hope dashed. The sands swallowed a once green landscape.

 

These are the parables of Mr. Washington coming and going throughout our desert cruise and palaver.

 

Now nothing but zombies, fiends, demons and certain death.

 

The girl we are protecting needs to be brought over to the other side, the world of my waking life. She will bear a child of auspicious blood whose life will bring unity to the world of man. This child will carry the message of God across the wide world and humanity will know dignity and peace.

 

It is a nice fairytale.

 

I asked him why they are bringing her to the same place we had attempted to reach, to Zion and the City of Many Many Lights.

 

“Because they wish to crossover, too. The child inside her is a clean slate they hope to write profanities upon. This is a dying world you dream of Zachariah. Its days are few in number,” Mike says to me.

 

“They must have killed her child when they..,” I can’t go on.

 

“You can’t kill a baby whose name will be Hope,” he responds.

 

The vessel careened onward, blown over the endless sand.

 

* * *

 

I awaken from sand blowing on my face. Winds have sent a shower of dust upon the oasis. The sky’s color is different. The dawn will break soon. I have quite a bit more reading to do.

 

The third day.

 

After reviewing the Tanakh, it is time for the Christian stuff. The New Testament I set out to read is the Gospel of the man Jesus Christ according to four of his closest companions. But what of the other eight? What of the thirty years in Egypt? It is not that I doubt the accuracy of the gospels as it was reported they were written just 90 years after Jesus’ death, it is that I don’t have the whole story of his life and rebellion.

 

I make a small fire in the pit to prepare some tea in case anyone comes through this neck of the woods. It is an English tradition and apparently a Bedouin tradition, too. My breakfast consists of a sliced up apple with honey and some black bread with white cheese. I bury most of my water jugs to keep them cool in the mud around the spring. The waters here are red with sediment.

 

The Gospels leave out eight other lieutenants of Jesus’ holy war. You have to read between the lines. This was a Roman dominated puppet colony in the backwater of the Empire. The Pharisee priests were pawns of the Roman governor and the territory itself had no vital resources or great strategic importance. Then one day this man started healing the sick and helping the poor throughout the colony with a message of hope and renewal. He surrounded himself with the wretched, the broken, and the damned and with prostitutes, criminals and thieves. They called him Rabbi. Then the Roman Garrison was after him, the Jewish Police were after him, and he was moving about the Galilee giving sermons about freedom, love and unity. Ultimately they captured him, accused him of treason and naild him to a cross. Everyone knows this story. They teach that the Jews had to choose between executing Jesus and executing some Robin Hood type. They chose to murder Jesus because the miracles were performed in another part of the country and it was a wider world back then. They took him the night of Passover, tortured him and put him on the cross as a punishment for treason not for heresy.

 

I read the book a few times. It isn’t very long. Like the Tanakh, the real meat is in the front of the book. The Hebrew prophets had laid down quite a few benchmarks the messiah would have to meet to qualify for the role. The first was that he had to be born from the house of King David. His father Yoseph was indeed the thirteenth descendant from Jeconiah who was the last generation born in Babylon. Jeconiah was the fourteenth descendant of King David and fourteen generations before King David was Avram himself according to the Book of Matthew. The second criterion was that he be a ‘Nazarene’ living in the city of Nazareth. He met this criterion. Another prophetic detail was that he would be pierced, and pierced he was. Jesus was 42 generations in decent from the original patriarch, 28 generations descended from King David, and 14 from the last refugee out of Babylon. But other than these four accounts and some supporting details from the Roman historian Josephus, we don’t have much. That he was rebel is undeniable. He chased the Pharisees out of the Great Temple for their hypocrisy and taught a message of compassion and peace. Is it improbable for him to call for independence from heathen Roman, the vast and decadent empire?

 

As I read on I understand that for the Jewish prophesy of the messiah being from the house of David to work, Jesus could not be born of a ‘virgin.’ Only the union and progeny of Maryim and Yoseph could qualify for the Hebrew benchmark. For Marayim to bear a child who was God himself, this theology ruined everything. Christ as God himself? Christ as the son of the father who is being called God? This theology has no basis in the Gospel. It is the revisionism of the Council of Nicaea, the meeting 90 years after Christ’s death when some Gospels were deemed correct and others suppressed. The classic Greek that was the lingual Franca of Rome helped spread his message throughout the Roman Empire within a hundred years of his death. The early church made some strategic decisions about what was marketable. Well, only sort of marketable until they started getting fed to lions. Circumcision was out. Kosher eating was out. The commandments were out. Only four of eight gospels were put into circulation.

 

Was there a gospel of Marayim his mother? Was there a gospel of Maria Magdaliin whom they called a whore but was perhaps the mother of his child? Did Jesus leave even a single written revelation beyond what was written of him? Moses and Muhammad were quite prolific writers were they not? There is a lot about Christianity that doesn’t make sense to me. There is also the underlying lunacy that it is the only religion on earth that damns people to hell for simple non-belief. Even Islam sends people into hell to collect the righteous non-believer. Judaism, Hinduism and Buddhism don’t even have a real conception of some permanent hell. Christianity took the very noble message of the gospels and then its leaders said, “You’re either with us or with Satan.” The further preach that you only have one chance at making God happy. You only have this one singular life to obtain grace. I like the book though. I like the way he carried himself, this man Jesus.

 

As I read on, I feel I am only reading part of a larger story. This book doesn’t tie together the struggles and journeys of the first book. It is not as if things got substantially more just after the coming of the man Jesus. No, quite to the contrary, things became much worse. The very people that first toiled to build the early church, the converts from the Jews, were those most hated in the end because of it. And how many civilizations tasted plague, rape and the sword under the banner of a bloody cross? Islam at least only turned it’s sword on governments, but allowed people generations to follow the faith. Not so much under the Christian kings. It had been the final sick days of Rome, which co-opted Christianity to buttress the failing Empire. After the teachings were altered, made intolerant and vulgar, they spread through the Germanic barbarian tribes like yet another compact of war. You cannot deny the beauty of the man Jesus’ message and the goodness of his works, but his flag is quite a bloody soiled rag. I’m sure the Christians whisper the same things about the man Muhammad and the religion of Islam, or maybe they don’t even credit his life and message at all. Both Islam and Christianity place prophetic betrayal upon the Jews who see in both newer faiths a wild plagiarism of their original, untainted prophesy. But the Jews committed genocide against the Canaanites and then corrupted themselves as subjects of various occupying empires. I guess no one has clean hands.

 

I am suddenly no longer alone at Ein Boker. Three young boys, none of them any older than seven, are sitting on the rocky dune near the entrance to the spring. They have on dirty blue jeans and dusty t-shirts. I’m not sure how long they have been quietly watching me. One of them is much younger than the others. They appear unafraid in any way. There are likely many more of them I haven’t seen yet. The Bedouin always travel in groups. Suddenly a large number, maybe a hundred camels and twice as many sheep, pour over the dune the boys are squatting on driven by two older boys with reed crops and lashes. An arc is being emptied upon the wadi.

 

I rode a camel on my first trip to Israel. They are alien looking things neither ugly nor cute, perhaps both rugged and fairly downtrodden. These camels are rougher than the tourist mounts I had ridden on a three-hour tour within the Galilee. They have been driven all day, likely before sunrise if these Bedouin followed the migration patterns I have improvised.

 

The camels and sheep separate themselves roughly by their species and size. They pick the two largest watering holes to quench their humps. It is a total frenzy. I have never seen animals so thirsty. The sheep’s wool is covered in a fine desert dust. So are the camel’s manes. Five Bedouin boys now talk quietly never taking their eyes off me. I am a curious site in my white poncho with the Palestinian-checkered kafia wrapped around my head. This surely isn’t all of them.

 

AS SALAM ALEKUUM,” the youngest one yells down to me.

 

Alekuum Salam,” I shout back.

 

I take off the headdress to reveal my pasty Askinazi face. I don’t want to catch anyone by surprise even though my garb is still too clean and unorthodox to be mistaken for a desert person. Me being White did not surprise them as they had been watching me for a while. With the animals being quenched all around me the five boys cautiously stroll down the dune to where I sit in the tent. It is their tent and their grazing area even if the Israelis seem to think it is a National Park.  

 

KIF HALAK?” the oldest says to me.

 

I don’t speak a word of Arabic and remain quiet.

 

This doesn’t surprise them.

 

Ata medaber Aravti,” the smallest one asks. They ask me in Hebrew if I speak Arabic.

 

“I only know how to speak Anglit.”

 

Ente Bedui?” one of the older ones asks pointing to my kafia.

 

Ana Bedui Americai,” (An American Bedouin) I respond.

 

The oldest one starts laughing and then they all do. We all begin to try to communicate with whatever English and Hebrew we can muster. It is rough going. The youngest boys are sent off to keep the animals grazing and the older two offer me cigarettes. I prepare black tea for them. The ritual has been engaged. Communication is made easier with my sketchpad. I draw objects and maps and things I am curious about. They look at my pictures with caution and then a sort of curious glee. The younger three are between seven and twelve. The older two are around my age. At least three of them are named Muhammad. I guess it is like all those Latino kids named Jesus, just shouting out to the big guy. But like my first encounter in the desert with the Palestinians about a year ago, this too involves little hostility nor meaningful communication. They too, are just caught off guard seeing a White boy wandering about the wadi. I draw them a camel and they keep giving me a thumbs up. We smoke a bunch of cigarettes and drink more hot tea.

 

After about an hour a pick up truck drives down the road with a Bedouin man with a long dark beard in his forties and olive-skinned woman about half his age. He helps her out of the vehicle only after one of the children makes some quiet hand sign indicating that everything is all right. The man has a dark complexion. He has a kafia tied around his neck of a different pattern than mine. The woman is wearing the Muslim hijab and, upon seeing me, covers her face showing nothing but her obsidian eyes. The man is polite, but does not attempt to communicate. He directs all his questions to his oldest son. Finally he yells something to his wife who brings a large metal canteen out from the dirty white pickup truck. He offers me both a cigarette and his cold water. The wife begins to prepare lunch around the fire pit while his boys look after the camels and sheep. The man says almost nothing to me. His wife soon brings us Bedouin tea from a small black pot. It is sweet as hell and piping hot. The man just sits on a rough red mat he has unfurled from the truck. He is sitting with me in the shade of the lean-to tent making sure I never run out of Cleopatra cigarettes or sweet, hot tea.

 

He waves his hand quietly at the whole dessert. He points to me and shrugs his shoulders as if to ask what I am doing out here. Unlike his children, who delighted in attempting communication, he resorts to simple hand signs.    

 

I take out my sketchbook, map and books of revelation. I point to pictures of me attempting to reach the high bridge then trace my hand out into the deep desert. I point to various sketches I’d made of the coming revolution. I point to the Qur’an and the other two testaments and indicate that I am out here to pray and meditate. He nods looking intently at the drawings perhaps deep in thought. He picks up the Qur’an as if examining it. The only Arabic writing is on the cover. Then he hands everything back but the map of the desert. Reaching into the loose black robe he is wearing, a single piece like a long flowing shirt to his ankles, he takes out his Cleopatra’s, gives one to me and takes one for himself. He gets up and opens the door of his truck and takes out a map. On the ground next to my map he opens a detailed topographic map of the Sinai and the Negev. As his wife grills a huge platter of lamb sausages on the fire and his children chase after the wandering sheep. He points to his own eyes then to me and then points to a spot not on my map. It is maybe 30 km east of where my map ends. He indicates the loop the high bridge makes cutting over the ridges closing off the valley. The railroad track runs 30 km north to Demona and then south hooking back east towards the Jordanian border. Taking one of my sketches he points to a train I have drawn that indicates the track going east. Then he grabs another sketch he’s been looking at. It’s a sketch of the Pale City with its spires, high walls with barbed wire, the Ferris wheel, game shop, and the horrid clown. The man looks at me with terror then points to the spot where the train tracks end.

 

Jabal Tzin.”

 

He points to the spot on the map.

 

“I don’t understand.” I had intended to catch the rail from the high bridge and go north to Demona.

 

Har Tzin.”

 

I try to understand. He keeps repeating that this spot is important. He’s pointing to a spot maybe 40 some odd km away and indicating this is where the Pale City is. He keeps pointing back at the picture I’ve drawn.

 

***

 

The man’s wife has made us quite a feast for late lunch. They all prayed around noon out of site in a clearing they cut in the foliage. The eight of us are sitting on the rough, red mat around a massive circular tin of lamb sausage, grilled chicken, toasted pita, couscous and five huge and frosty bottles of Coca Cola, which we all drink out of tiny plastic cups. We’re all eating with our hands, watching each other. It’s maybe the first proper meal I’ve eaten three days. It’s a feast.

 

When we’re all fat and sated, the wife, who doesn’t look at me once, removes the platter and brings us more hot tea. The youngest boys are playing in the red waters that the camels and sheep have all but drained. The father and two elder sons return from another round of praying and sit with me in the tent. The son offers me a cigarette, but the father slaps his hand away to give me one of his. I attempt to contribute my two remaining tins of pears, but the father refuses them. I’m in their tent. I’m their guest. For a while all four of us are quiet. We watch the little ones play and the wife washes the cooking utensils and meal platter.

 

 

The sun begins to set, or hints that it will soon. It is no longer too hot to venture far from the lean-to. The man gets up and speaks to me in Arabic. He is very intense and sincere. He is aware I understand none of it, but perhaps he is testifying more for his children than me. The eight of us are around the coals of the low fire. The sky becomes fire red and then icy pink. I never ask his name, but it may be just al-Haj, the journey, because he repeats this phrase throughout his speech in reference to himself. I know from my own studies that Muslims are required as a pillar of their faith to attempt a journey called the Haj to Mecca and Medina once in their lifetimes. Perhaps he is recounting his experiences on that Haj. Perhaps he compares my journey to this Muslim right of passage. His wife speaks for the first time, looks at me and nods her head perhaps approvingly. For awhile there is silence. The woman says something to him. I don’t understand any of it.

 

Then the man offers me the kafia around his neck. It is dirtier than my own. It’s pattern more of roughly kit black and white checkering than the Palestinian one I wear. He takes mine and puts it into the fire. He then leans over and arranges its folds around my neck. I reach into my bag and offer the man the drawings of the camel, the revolution to come and the dreams of the Pale City. He refuses the ones of the Pale City and revolution and takes one of the camel.

 

Then he palms me his last cigarette. I tuck it under my ear.

 

The third night.

 

Sometime before darkness falls we go our separate ways. The man, el-Haj, as I will forever call him wishes me peace as the Muslims do and I return it. Then with his three youngest in the back, he and his woman drive out of Ein Boker towards wherever their tribe has pitched its tents illegally on the national park declared upon their land. I accompany the two oldest, with their sticks. They herd the camels and sheep back west on the Spice Route. I unearth the jugs buried by the banks of the spring and schlep them along with me. 11 liters, no longer 14. When we reach the junction near the metal bone yard, the boys in turn wish me peace and I them. I bear north to the high bridge and they to whatever clandestine route they enter the valley to graze their herd. It is quite fully night.

 

I am about two to five hours into my northward journey over a flat and brambled plain, when the whistling of the wind begins. The crescent sliver of the moon hangs high above me. The wind over this vast flat stretch is blowing dust into my eyes and face. The trail, in the darkness and distraction, becomes less easy to interpret. Twice I wander off toward dead ends. The New Spice Route has deviations from off-roading vehicles. It is upon correction of my second mistaken path that I hear a very real howl. Something very of this world.  The double blade of the saceen comes right back out.

 

The sand storm makes the going slow. Previously I had some covers from dunes, hills, wadis and ravines. Now the cover is gone. The sand is whipped up as the wind races through the valley. My new Bedouin kafia is tightly wrapped over my face, but nothing protects my eyes. I trip on my own feet and go sprawling onto my knees in the rocky red sands.

 

It’s probably not even past midnight. I can’t have covered more than a kilometer or two. I make my way off the road as the winds pick up blowing dust. I hunch down, squatting in a dusty dried up creek by the edge of the road wrapping the black poncho to cover my face from the sands. I will not be able to make a good crossing tonight. I will surely lose the road. It is not amicable, but will be necessary to move during daylight so that the highway is not swallowed up in the dark. The cold has returned and I shiver, shiver and shiver. I kick the ground in front of me in frustration. I long for a fire to huddle about for warmth. I toy with the idea of retreating to Ein Boker, but I’m not sure I can find it. The map I carry is of little use when one loses the road. I have no reference out this farT the valley twists and even the lights of Sde Boker cannot be seen. I wrap my two poncho sheets about me for all the good they will do in this cold night. I wonder if my God is watching me, not totally sure yet there is a God. The only escape from the cold is sleep. I smoke the last cigarette I have, after much trouble lighting it. Then I drift off to sleep curled up like a rabbit in a hole.

 

* * *

 

“We might have a little problem,” says Mike Washington navigating, still without his eyes, from the bow of the sand ship Temptation.

 

“With you the problems are never ever that little,” I respond.

 

“I’d encourage you to scan the dunes to the north of our position.”

 

I unclip some binoculars from the side of the bow. What looks like little specks over our left side in the skies some many miles away and above are fast moving zeppelins of enormous size, some several thousand of them swooping in like black and ominous locusts.

 

“I foresee this being a problem. Normally we have a far faster get away vehicle,” he says.

 

“You’re slipping, Mr. Washington. At that speed those things will reach us in under an hour.”

 

“Correct you are, Mr. Artstein. Any suggestions.”

 

“Run shooting and hide. That seems to have always kept us alive so far.”

 

“Well those three blue bags are filled with bullets, but all we have are your two pistols and this thing sure isn’t going any faster. It ain’t easy being green.”

 

“How far are we from the City of Many, Many Lights?”

 

“A day, not an hour.”

 

“The girl, is she up in those blimps? I thought we were chasing them.”

 

“We overtook their position last night.”

 

“Then steer in their direction, brother, because there’s no use reaching Zion without the red-haired girl on our arm.”

 

“I like your chivalrous, albeit suicidal thinking, Mr. Artstein. We’ll make a Quixote out of you yet.’”

 

“Is there anything between us and that swarm where we can land and make an ambush?”

 

“You realize our sails are nearly half a mile high? Inconfuckingspicuous this thing is not.”

 

“I see a small wadi on the maps thirty km from here near an abandoned rail bridge.”

 

“They’ll be on us before we get there.”

 

“Jettison the mast sail. Drop the wings. It will triple our speed and crash land us under a half-mile of white canvas sail atop a green little wadi before they get to us. And then we ambush them.”

 

For the first time he looks at me like I’m crazy. Then he smiles.

 

He flicks some release clamps and the near mile-high mast swings rear catapulting us forward over the sand. Another few levers and the side sails clamp tighter to the vessel. The Temptation rockets ahead. A tiny green spot appears in my binoculars under an aqueduct-like bridge over two rocky dunes.

 

There’s a very loud crash as the Temptation slams into the poplar trees of the wadi. The main sail breaks. The boat, the wadi, the well, Mike Washington and I are covered under this massive central sail as it rests against the high bridge above us.

 

Mike unclips his seat belt throws two ammo bags over his shoulder and jumps off the ship. I grab the last bag, the binoculars and follow him over the rail. We are under a great white tent of our mast sail. I follow him past a sign that says Wadi Farin over to a deep well with a thick stone wall about it. Mike rests the blue ammo bags on he edge of the well and pulls a bucket from this well that appears to be 4 meters in diameter. He fills up my canteen then dumps the bucket over his head. He throws his pin stripe suit top on the grassy oasis floor and upholsters a pistol. He passes the other one to me.

 

“Looks like a last stand at the Wadi Farin,” he says.

 

“Have just a little more faith,” I demand.

 

* * *

 

The fourth day.

 

I am totally exposed. The sun wakes me and even in half slumber, I polish off nearly a liter of water before I realize the path is gone. I’ve walked way off the trail. I’m sort of fucked unless I can act like a desert person and not some weak little tourist. But I haven’t ever been a tourist.

 

I’m a motherfuckin’ desert person by now. I like to wander as long as it’s on a strict timeframe. Because when you’re out in the desert you lose track of how long you’ve been walking and if you don’t budget your water correctly, this can be a serious problem. The desert is a place to go to lose yourself in exile, but it is a better place to be hardened for a future purpose. You move with as little as possible and what you carry is calculated: weight vs. necessity towards your survival. Like a water canteen, like a saceeen, like a blanket or a book of divine law. You grab and go. You move by night, and you think long and hard about the path that got you here in the wasteland.

 

The desert is also a place of extremes and it breeds extremists. It’s not just the night’s cold and burning hot days and animals or mirages or bandits and death. It’s when you take away all those creature comforts, those flashing neon signs, those places to buy some so-called happiness, you begin to see. The Misson. The Cause. The Struggle. Call it the idealized purpose of one’s life. They become a little more focused. Your role in it all becomes more defined. And the profit margins, the cost benefit analysis, your sophomoric, university-influenced conception of human nature? None of those things come out here with you. Your family is across an ocean. Your friends don’t know where you are. And the cute Russian girl back in Pardes Hanna can’t send you adorable text message smiles. When that’s all gone, when the water runs out, when you go off path following a mirage, when you’re out there without anyway to reach your destination, when you have been stripped of all distractions, you learn absolutes. You learn extremes and you universalize the human condition.

 

When the water runs out you have to think quickly about what matters. You have to conserve your strength, even conserve your thought process. You have to focus on getting out of the desert alive. But this is secondary to ascertaining what you came into the desert to learn. Desert people quicken their process. Time is never on their side. The absolutes are the lessons you’ve learned that translate into righteous action. The extremes are idealized conceptions of your beliefs brought into focus so one might take a stand. And the final realization of a desert person is that out here in the wasteland, no matter what nation, what religion, what race, or what people, without water everyone in the desert is going to die.

 

Desert people are out there for a whole lot of reasons. There are whispers in that desert that might give a person a semblance of a plan. I didn’t go out to that desert to fuck a whore in a casino, build a golden calf, or take ecstasy and watch a fifty-foot, man-shaped idol burn. Desert people do not engage in those activities. Not when they want to be right with whatever they call God. It’s a place to go when you have to make a decision. It’s a beginning point or an end based on what path you follow. It’s not a weekend retreat or a three-hour tour. Out there in that desert when the water runs out, you and whatever you call your God can take the precious time left to calculate what you’ve been doing with your life.

 

By midday it’s hot as hell and I still haven’t found the Old Spice Route. I think I see where the two ridgelines are. They’re way up ahead. They are beyond the hill and red rock where the north and south ridge meet and the valley drops off into a great crater out in the wilderness. Out there is the high bridge whose rail I can follow all the way to the Pale City.

 

Hot. Heat. Dripping sweat in my eyes stings like hell. I trudge on. The sun blinds me. I can feel my vital organs bake in my own blood and parts of my skin begin to burn and blister. I’m trudging deeper into an inferno. Jug 11 got consumed last night enroute. Jug 10 was polished off when I got up. Jug 9, sometime in the afternoon. I’m exposed out here completely. There is no real shade for miles. I’ve switched in my head to miles now because I need a unit of measurement based on past exertions to calculate the distances I am covering. Three or four miles later Jug 8 is half gone.

 

Now I’m moving uphill. Ascending over black and red rock. Rocks and boulders are scattered all over the trail. No more wadi, no more bramble grass, no more shade of the Euphrates poplar. I can’t stop because going to sleep out here would be real bad. Real, real bad. I should have done this at night. I have no idea how far it is to the high bridge. I’m not even sure if I’m going the right way. Fuck.

 

The road, if you can call it a road, is like an ascending path from one long rocky plain to another. I cross maybe four of these plains before I realize Jug 8 is empty. My water glut is going to kill me. I can’t even be certain there’s more water out here. There aren’t any springs on anyone’s map. I now only have 7 liters for the rest of this trek. I stop and sit upon a large rock out in the badlands to consider my lack of options. Pretty soon I’m going to have to admit to myself that I’m lost in the desert. One more day like this and the water is going to run out.

 

I rise slowly in the dry heat. I walk to the side of the road and lay my black poncho in a dried out riverbed. I take the white poncho and lay it over the creek making myself a tiny gully tent. I weigh the sides down with rocks so it won’t blow away. I polish off half a liter from Jug 7. Then I pass out from exhaustion in my artificial shade. It’s not unlike a shallow grave.

 

* * *

 

“How soon til they attack?” I ask Mike under our white sail cover.

 

We sit on the edge of the well waiting, a gold pistol for each of us.

 

“When they’re good and ready, thoroughly convinced we’re weak and afraid.”

 

Above our heads these huge black metal zeppelins circle above the Wadi Farin like oil soaked leviathans. A swarm of smaller assault craft is deployed out their sides. The skies above the wadi are dark. There are so many of these ships that they block the desert sun. There is a clanox siren blaring announcing their descent. A million howling zombies and their animalistic feeding frenzy haven’t been able to shake Mr. Washington. He has slain them in the tens of thousands, but whatever comes out of the belly of these zeppelins is something he has not much luck in besting.

 

For the first time he’s not convinced immortality will save him. He’s not sure these things will let us die or become reborn.

 

Thousands of smaller support aircraft and landing ships zip about the larger craft like buzzard crows awaiting the kill. Shock troops are being loaded onto them. They plan to spare no expense in their onslaught. They cannot see us. I can only see them because Mike Washington can see them even without his eyes.

 

“Why send so many after just the two of us?”

 

“Numbers don’t ever matter in a spiritual war.”

 

“Who do they serve?”

 

“They serve only themselves.”

 

The sand around us begins to tremble on the lip of the wall surrounding the well. The siren and roar above us increases in volume. Each of the zeppelins fires several long feeder tubes into the sand. The ground trembles as they impact. The tubes burrow into the sand below us. Then a sickly sucking noise. A terrible slurp for seven minutes and eleven seconds. The grass of the wadi shrivels and dies. I watch the well empty its water.

 

“They’re draining the wadi from the reservoir below it. They’re cutting the water before they rush our position.”

 

“Why. Why waste the time?”

 

“Just to flex their incredible muscles.”

 

“Pimps don’t need to masturbate,” I suggest.

 

“Pimps only get off when they masturbate,” he responds.

 

When all the water below us is gone, the steel tentacles withdraw. We hear the sound of a million soldiers laughing. Then comes the round of a million arrows unquivered.

 

In under a second Mike yanks the bags and me over the mouth of the well. It is covered with a corrugated tin roof. We tumble ten feet below the surface onto the soft bottom of the dried up well bed. The well seems to be made of several concentric circles so we can step up two five-foot rungs back to the surface. We get as low to the ground as we can as a million arrows tear into everything above ground rendering apart anything exposed. These arrows fall like a million pin pricks pinning the vast sail over the wadi and the well.

 

We hear a vast cacophony of laughter as these shuttles descend with an army upon us.

 

 

* * *

 

The fourth night.

 

When night falls I emerge from my trench and pick up the direction that I have gamgled will lead to the high bridge through this wasteland. Having jettisoned or consumed over half my water and food, the going is lighter. I think of people like Moses and his 40 days and nights on Mt. Sinai and the man Jesus and his 40 days and nights in the wilderness. What sustained these great men? Surely faith, but then where is my quail and manna. Soldiers, a spring and the Bedouin have delieverd it so far, but who is going to be out this deep? Although I don’t want to admit it, I wonder if my foolish insane self is enacting some tragic, Israeli-themed trek into a desert that will simply swallow me up. At least now it is just after nightfall. No terrible winds of cold, at least not yet. As I walk I page thorough my Qur’an. I take little breaks every hour to read a sura at random. I begin with the Takwir, Sura 81, the folding up. It is a very different revelation from the Tanakh and the Gospel. It is a powerful poem that sings to me as I sing to God.

 

When the sun (with its spacious light) is folded up;

            When the stars fall losing their luster.

When the mountains vanish (like a mirage);

            When the she-camels, ten months with young

 Are left unattended.

            When wild beasts are herded together (In human habitations);

When the oceans boil over with a swell;

            When the souls are sorted out (Being joined, like with like);

When the female (infant),

            Buried alive, is questioned for what crime she was killed;

When the scrolls are laid open;

            When the sky is unveiled;

When the blazing fire is kindled to a fierce heat;

            And when the Garden is brought near;

(Then) shall each soul know what it put forward;

            So verily I call to witness the planets, that recede;

Go straight, or hide.

            And the night as it dissipates;

And the dawn as it breathes away the darkness.

These ayas from the Takfir give me strength in the darkness. The richness of the prophet’s words differentiate these words from the Israelite tribulation accounts, or words about the man Jesus that were told secondhand. These are from the hand and mouth of a prophet of God. One has to recognize that the Qur’an is a substantially different document than the twin testaments. As I read on it I discover that it is less a story and more a poem from the one true God. I march on in the darkness.     

Avram passed his covenant to his children Yitzhak and Ishmael. The first son of Avram to whom the original covenant should have passed was Ishmael not Yitzhak, his second son to whom the Jews trace the origins of the tribes. Because his first wife Sarah could not bear him a child, he fathered a child with his second wife Hagar. God apparently finally heard Sarah’s prayers and she then bore her a child, the second son, Yitzhak shortly after. According to the Tanakh, Avram took young Yitzhak and offered him up in sacrifice at Mt. Moriah in Jerusalem. According to the Qur’an at some point Avram took young Ishmael off near Mecca and attempted to offer him up but Allah substituted Ishmael with a ram. Same story as the Jews tell about a thousand km southeast from Jerusalem in Mecca. I’m not dissuaded by biblical narrative. King David is a descendant of Moses who is a descendant of Joseph son of Yaakov renamed Israel, son of Yitzhak, son of Abraham. A lot less goes on in the Islamic narrative, less inter-scene drama. Mohammed, the progeny of Hagar and Avram and descendent of their son Ismael, revealed the new religion of Islam some 1,000 years later. That is three religions whose prophets all share the blood of Avram, the original forger of the covenant. That such fratricide occurred is inconceivable no matter how historic and real. The basics of these religions are very similar. The subsequent violence has been largely over the packaging and market competition.

Moses the prophet said to the Israelites in the Wilderness:

For I know thy rebellion, and thy stiff neck: behold, while I am yet alive with you this day, ye have been rebellious against the Lord; and how much more after my death? Gather unto me all the elders of your tribes, and your officers, that I may speak these words in their ears, and call heaven and earth to record against them. For I know that after my death ye will utterly corrupt yourselves, and turn aside from the way which I have commanded you; and evil will befall you in the latter days; because ye will do evil in the sight of the Lord, to provoke him to anger through the work of your hands.

The wickedness of humanity turned these revelations into more division and hatred. Our evil allowed us to co-opt words of charity, humility, chastity and virtue warping them into one more instrument of war. 

Something is out here with me that is neither Bedouin, nor devil nor self. Were it Bedouin I would not hear it. Were it animal, it would make a howl. I do not believe in the devil for man is devilish enough alone. I am beginning to doubt my madness more than ever. If I am mad I share my crazy blood with a host of noble martyrs and heroes, leaders and inventers. The blood in my veins is Hebrew blood that makes me capable of the miracles accomplished by others of my kind. I will not perish in these badlands. I will find my way out to the Pale City and I will slay the monsters there. I will demonstrate to my God that I am a rebel prophet as the angel Michael says I am.

Again I think I see a grotesque thing slither quickly against the dune besides me. I am so close to a portal to the dark world perhaps they begin to push their way out toward open confrontation. I think of the quiet clown in the Pale City who supervises all the destruction with a smug smile. That thing is not controlling us or directing the evil, it just grows strong basking in our failures and our bloodshed. It cannot ever overtake God. It can only even exist in the darkness where God is rejected. It is apathy, fear and death. It is no mighty other; simply a byproduct that would be washed away had our kind developed real virtue and true faith. It is a clown because we make a mockery of ourselves. A spider because it entraps us. A snake because it makes us poison ourselves. But if we looked at this horrid thing long enough, if we grappled with this so-called devil, so called Satan, Lucifer, prince of darkness and lies, we’d see only ourselves. We’d be grappling with our own emptiness, our own rejection of purpose and light. It is not the ego that slithers out there like a spider or a snake. It is us. It is the monster we make ourselves into. It is nothingness. It is the absence of light.

 

I swing my finger towards the darkness like a handgun. I can blow great shotgun holes in this thing by pointing and saying BAM. I should not fear it because it only exits when I am afraid.

I venture all night in the dark and cold of the badlands. I pause to read the glorious Qur’an and then return to the path, finger extended should the wicked thing come upon me. When I reach the high bridge, I will be one day’s journey from the Pale City. Here the thing will have nowhere to run or hide. In waking life I position myself at the mouth of madness to undertake a final test before I meet my maker. In my dreams Mike Washington and I make a final stand one day out from the City of Many, Many Lights to die trying to free the girl and her child. These battles play out simultaneously day and night. My water is almost gone. Only 5 liter-jugs remain. Dawn begins to break. I think I’m back on the Old Spice Route. I see the archway of the high bridge just around the orange of the dawn.

 

The fifth day.

 

The valley draws together at this point. The bridge towers above me guiding the light rain out of the wilderness up into Demona made of white stone. I thank God for preventing the need to sleep in another sweltering grave. There is vast shade under the bridge. I climb up the side of the ridge and I am well situated to spend the day’s terrible heat in a cave-like alcove under the main rail. I celebrate with a water glut. Down to 4 liters, 4 jugs. I watch the sun rise and stare out into the wilderness of Tzin, the Bi’quat on the other side of the high bridge. I look back at how far I have come. I do not see either wadi, nor do I see Sde Boker as if the desert swallowed them up behind me. I will wait for night then I will follow the light rail line southeast over the wilderness until I reach the place el-Haj called JABAL ZIN. Rest comes easily enough. I’ve walked many miles in the night.

 

* * *

 

My eyes aren’t open yet, but I’m breathing very hard. My ears are ringing. I take a deep breath and open, close, and reopen my eyes. A terrific explosion rains sand upon us from above, rocking the very rock dune we’ve been resting under.

 

“They’ve surrounded the oasis completely,” yells Washington as he slaps me awake.

 

There is an intermittent firing of rifles at our position. We are crouching in a dried-up well, the oasis itself cut off from the main spring a day before. I spring up and peak out a hole in the circular brick wall around the mouth of the well, severely damaged by projectile weaponry.

 

“WHAT THE FUCK HAPPENED?!!” I demand.

“You needed to rest, but they aren’t stopping. Now we’re hiding in a well.”

“Why are WE HIDING IN A WELL?!”

“We’ve been here almost 12 hours inside this well. It is the most cover from their bullets and arrows and cannons available in this little wadi.”

I peak out again. There is a volley of non-automatic rifle fire. Stones fly. Dust is sent flying. There are hundreds of thousands of arrows stuck in the ground around us. Tens of thousands of black fatigue-clad fiends have taken firing positions on every hill above and around our location. The bodies of dozens upon dozen of them litter the mouth of the well.

Washington’s eyes are still wrapped in a bloody rag. His pinstripe suit looks as though he went from Lindy Hopping to a weekend of trench warfare. His hat is gone. He is posted up against the stone wall, his gold pistols hot and smoking.

“How did you kill so many of them without any eyes?”

“I have acquired exceptional hearing from all those years of listening to you complain.”

In a moment of amnesty I peak out one of the holes. We are completely surrounded. There are thousands of them in columns and hundreds setting up more artillery pieces. Hundreds with swords and long bows. Thousands with antique looking single-shot carbines popping off shots. The oasis is shriveled and cut off from the waters. The foliage is flaming. The grounds of a once-lush wadi are scorched and inlaid with thousands of pockmarks and arrow shafts. The lowest point of the wadi, where we are making our last stand, is a dried up hole of a well surrounded by a small ring of cemented rock, much of which has crumbled under fire. Mike is reloading his pistols from the last blue ruck sac filled with empty magazine clips.

“I thought you never have to reload.”

“Only in Hollywood do people never reload.”

“I’ve seen us shoot hundreds of thousands of rounds before making a dramatic pause to reload a weapon.”

 

“They say that in real life, you run out of ammunition right before it’s your time to die.”

‘”I know you can’t die. You’re an angel.”

“So you believe that now?”

His question is punctuated by an explosion. A shell must have hit right near the mouth of the well. Dust and rock half bury us.

“We must keep assuring ourselves that there are far worse things than death.”

“Well, as I have sold out the only people I love, abandoned all that believed in me, then preceded to betray my imaginary friends and had to witness their destruction, I’d say death isn’t the worst thing I can imagine at all. You even got executed and your eyes shot. What’s worse than these things? Not death.”

A volley of arrows thud all about the mouth of the well.

“I will tell you something much worse than these or death itself.”

“Go on.”

“Surrender is far worse than death, surrender to anything other than God itself. God said to Moses and Muhammad, ‘There is no god but God.’”

“What are those things out there?”

“They are the horsemen of death. They delight in your suffering and will be only slightly amused when they eventually destroy you.”

“They serve the devil?”

‘”There is no devil. Only people and things that in the darkness reject that which gave them life.”

“These horsemen appear to have given up with the artillery.”

“They don’t have much use for weapons that don’t make us suffer greatly before we die. Even their rifles use a very low caliber bullet. They enjoy the blood that they get on their hands.”

“They control the Pale City we flee from?”

“And they control the world in which you wake to when I am absent from your council. They are the foul and fallen nature of your kind when blinded by religion when you lost your God.”

“Why don’t they charge us then? They must outnumber us 100,000 to 1.”

 

“Actually they only outnumber us 97,912 to 2. I killed quite a few of them before my ammo began to run out.”

“Why are they waiting?”

“Perhaps they think there are more of us. Perhaps they think this is but the mouth of a cave, a great-undiscovered rebel bunker. They took the time to cut the water off and burn out all the tree cover. They can wait a few hours more to move in for the kill.”

“You sure fooled them! Little do they know you have only two mags left of bullets and this is just a ten-foot grave? I should have stayed in the fucking cave.”

“COME ON. Don’t you want to see this thing to the end!?” he yells at me.

“It looks pretty clear that the end isn’t very far away. Good thing this is just a dream.”

“Die in a dream and wake up brain dead then. Wake up blissfully, fucking brain dead, Zach!”

I’ve never seen him upset before. It’s a bad sign when your imaginary friend gets angry with you.

 

“What do you need me to do?”

 

He turns his head toward me. He is dirty and tired, broken and bleeding.

 

“I need you to believe that there is something greater than yourself worth fighting for. I need you to believe that there is no god but God. I need you to understand that all good things in his world come from It. I need you to believe It is able to forgive anything you’ve done as long as you will make the old wrongs right with better future action. I need you be willing to serve our God by bringing a message of hope to our people.”

 

I realize that I want to be a gever. I want to be a good man. I know that if I accept what this angel is telling me, the struggle will only intensify. If I reject my God then I am no better than those that would kill me for this message of change I am called to deliver.

 

“I will believe the things you tell me. I will follow the path to Zion and serve our God.”

 

“‘Better late than never, kid. Our tribe was not chosen to make movies, invent the bagel and control the media. It was bred to produce the most receptive rebel prophets.”

 

“Why are we called rebel prophets?”

 

“Because the message you will soon carry is against everything humanity has been tricked into believing for the last 4,000 years. Once you make that message clear they will hunt your kind down in every city, every town, attic and bad place you might hide. They will unleash wrath upon you because you ask them to rebel against the nature, laws, and religions they have been fooled into thinking are the will of some God.”

 

“Do you smell something,” he asks me.

 

I look out one of the blast holes.

 

“Yeah. FUCK!!  Oil!!!  They’re pouring barrels of oil down the sides of the dune.”

 

I see a stream of tar black slick rolling down towards the mouth of the well. They will send us up monetarily in a plume.

 

“Now what, Mike Washington?”

 

“Told you it was a last stand.”

 

He presses the revolvers into my hands caked in dirt, sweat and blood.

 

“What do you want me to do?” he says to me.

 

“I want God to help us.”

 

The oil begins to fill up the hole we are standing in.

 

“God helps those who help themselves.”

 

Over some massive public address system the horde puts out a call for surrender kind of like a siren, a piercing screech that makes our noses and ears bleed transmitting the imagery of our submission right into the cortex. You can’t shut a noise like that out. It is the same voice and language, if it could be called such a thing, that I had heard imprisoned in the Tower of London. It tells us we will be raped and tortured if taken alive. It tells us it will revive our corpses for rape and torture if taken dead. We are warriors and ignore these gruesome taunts.

 

It tells us it will flay the girl and her unborn child alive if we do not come out of this hole. It asks us if we have ever seen a snuff film with 30 million studs and one redheaded whore. It mocks our resistance and mocks our God. Mike Washington spits blood.

 

The war siren goes off again. The oil is up to our knees. Out the bullet holes I see landing craft take positions hovering above the ground in perfect centurion phalanxes. Soldiers onboard each craft fire up flamethrowers that appear like crusty black super soakers with single cylinder backpacks. An oil flow smears down upon my face.

 

“Such a violation will not be visited upon the mother of our prophet,” he says.

 

He removes the blindfold shielding his bloody, empty socket, which once had eyes. He beckons for me to stare into them. In them I see his plan. He need not say another word.

 

He throws one pistol out of the mouth of the well. It makes a clunk on the oil soaked sand around us. He then hurls out one of the blue ammo bags filled with spent magazines. He removes a saceen half the length of his forearm out of his leather boot.

 

With one hand he clutches my right shoulder and whispers in my ear,

 

“BismilAllah al Rahman al Rahim,” this he whispers then plunges the blade into his chest. Blood spurts out his mouth, but he never screams. He cuts a four-inch laceration in his abdomen as I clutch him. He takes the remaining pistol from me and inserts the totality of the weapon inside his own chest cavity. He coughs blood all over me, his whole body drawn over in pain. I take a roll of duct tape from his ammunition bag and seal up his cavity. His blood is everywhere.

 

Now, blood is streaming out of his mouth, also out the open sockets of his eyes. I help him try to stand. I lean him on the second platform in the well.

 

‘”Want you to,” a pause to cough up more blood, ‘to, climb, out of this hole and kill our tormenters,” he mutters now as I tie a dirty blue cloth back over where is eyes were.

 

“I want you to avenge all the people who died dragging you toward your God.”

 

There is a foul and overpowering smell of petroleum wafting down into the hole we hide in. Enough black petrol fuel begins to drip through the cracks in the wall surrounding our well to fill the well to the second platform.

 

I help Washington up the third and final tier. For an immortal being he’s looking pretty human and broken.

 

“You’ll get one shot at the bastard,’” is the last thing he says to me.

 

I wave a dirty white flag of surrender then throw it over the stone wall. I drag Mike’s quite less then ambulatory body over the wall and the two of us slump over by the mouth of the well. The dark armada hovers above us. Small craft dart about the sky like insects. Tens of thousands of horsemen pointed various swords, arrows, boom sticks and flame igniters at us. I am clutching Mike Washington, or at least what is left of him, with one arm and wave the dirty, tattered white flag of surrender. On a telescreen perhaps three miles long on the side of one of the zeppelins, I see the face of the clown. The huge, hideous thing is laughing at us, as we lay there broken on the scorched earth of the Wadi Farin. It laughs and so do its legion of horsemen. They are all laughing the same way at the same time, like vile insects. The army of the clown snaps to attention. The clown and his army salute our surrender in unison.

 

* * *

 

The fifth night.

 

I have been sleeping under the high bridge all day with no sight or sound of a train. My food is now completely gone. Only three-liter jugs of water remain. This water is warm and no longer quite refueling. For all I know I am about to follow an abandoned rail line 20 kilometers into the deep desert, which will mean I have traveled about 60 kilometers from the starting point at Kibbutz Sde Boker. My water will run out before I reach my destination, the place called JABAL ZIN. I’m not even sure what JABAL ZIN is for I am really only making a leap of faith that the Bedouin man is directing me to the Pale City. What I will do when I reach this place is equally unclear. If the train line is no longer functional, then I am done for. I am too far out here to get back on foot. My few remaining liters can’t get me far enough back to the kibbutz, or eve.. to Ein Boker. So, nothing ventured nothing gained. I can only have faith that the light rail runs irregularly and that I will be able to hitch a ride from this place up north to Demona. As the object of this mission is endurance and faith, I press on. I climb the south ridge at dusk and begin following the winding tracks out into the wilderness. They make a steady path.

 

The rail has been built upon a mound that runs for many miles or kilometers rather. Every several kilometers or so a small concrete tunnel runs under the rail mound, perhaps a drainage tunnel for when a river run out here in the winter or perhaps shelters from the heat. It is night so I don’t linger in them too long.

 

The crescent moon has grown much fatter and now I see numerous shooting stars. I feel great pride in conquering so much distance. I know that at dawn it will be the sixth day of my pilgrimage and that using the rail line as a proper path I will reach this place the desert people indicated. The going is easier. The night is still and cool. I will cover much more ground following the elevated track bed than I did the night before navigating the end of the valley. I can see for many kilometers from up on this rail. This track across the desert exposes the wilderness as a sea of rocky dunes in a great crater. The Old Spice Route below me disappears eventually and I march on out into a vast dead unknown.

 

At night these dunes and growing mountains again appear like zeppelins or giant whales resting on the valley floor. My eyes continue to trick me into seeing things move out in the darkness, but I have no fear. No longer am I slow moving under the weight of my supplies. I follow the track straight to the east.

 

I arrive at a corrugated steel way station at about 3 am. It sits at a highway junction where a wide unpaved, three-lane road merges into one lane to cross the light rail track. The way station is unoccupied. It has four metal bars holding up a metal roof, but only one wall of thick green plastic on the east side of the little structure. There is a massive ten or fifteen liter drum of cold water. I water glut myself completely. I realize this is a good stopping point. I know the JABAL ZIN will not be much further away. I see no lights. I hear no people. As I sit in the way station I hear the rumbling of a car coming over the hills south of the tracks. I see its lights grind toward the way station in the darkness.

 

A clean-shaven Bedouin man steps out of the dirt red car. He starts asking me something in Hebrew, and then switches over to a shrug. I point east and make a waving motion with my fingers simply saying, ‘JABAL ZIN.’ He nods cautiously.

 

Mee Ata,” he says curtly.

 

Zacharias ArtstenIAH. Bedui Americai.”

 

He chuckles for a minute lighting a cigarette, an L & M, as well as offering me one. I figure they must give out loosies when they don’t have sweet tea.

 

Ata Tzarik Okhel?” he asks me if I want food.

 

Bevakasha haver.”

 

He goes into his car and takes out a brown paper bag. He tosses it to me without coming over again to the way station.

 

Layla tov gever,” he says to me, then gets back in his car and drives over the light rail to the north side of the tracks.

 

There is a bottle of apple juice, a chicken sandwich and a chocolate chip cookie in the bag. I eat everything then go to sleep in the way station under the stars of the deep desert.

 

The sixth day.

 

In the morning I meet a new Muhammad at the way station. He is lively and awakens me with jokes, some breakfast of eggs and potatoes on a tray. He seems starved for attention and has apparently been pre-informed that I am an American and am on my way to the JABAL ZIN. His English is as limited as the rest of them but his Hebrew allows him to get a few things across.

 

I have reached a mining outpost quite near, less than 5 km to the west in fact, of some landmark called the JABAL ZIN. Massive dump trucks cross the track all day long hauling some mineral out of the ground and loading it upon trains to transport it to a refinery near my intended destination. Muhammad guards the rail line, guards the trucks and counts each driver’s number of daily pick-ups and off-loads. They also place orders with him for their three daily meals that he radios over to the mess hall. It’s quite a lot of responsibility for a 14-year old. Mostly he sits in the way station making note of what run a given trucker is on.

 

It’s quite a large operation out here. There are quarry pits in several dozen sites although they appear to be hauling out of only one that is a few dozen kilometers south of the rail line. The truckers and miners are mostly Bedouin, but Muhammad indicates there is a second camp closer to the refinery for Yehudis. There are a few dozen men out here extracting minerals, probably a few dozen more and an administrative skeleton crew over at the base camp.

 

Muhammad notices I’m reading the Qur’an and takes one of my pens for a two-hour lesson in written Arabic. Eventually another Bedouin trucker jumps off the rig to place an order for lunch and hands little Muhammad a chessboard. As Muhammad scribbles Hebrew letters next to the Arabic letters of the same sound he begins to get up a game of chess. The Bedouin are wild and erratic multi-taskers when allowed some leisure time. He hands me back the Hebrew to Arabic cheat sheet he’s made and I notice only two or three letters don’t quite fit. He’s improvised a sound key.

 

We drink lots of water and play some chess. The Qur’an that is scribbled in an alien tongue is of little use to him. The only English he knows is the single phrase, “What’s up doc?”  He giggles every time he speaks this Bugs Bunny staple. He takes more lunch orders. When lunch comes I’m served a large helping of chickpeas, Israeli salad, a large cutlet of chicken, some brown rice and a bottle of Pepsi all from a Styrofoam tray.

 

He talks on and on to me in Arabic as if I understand. We play quite a few games of chess, him black, me white. I get demolished. His knowledge of the board’s terrain and the striking power of the pieces are far more experienced than my own. At first I think that were he not born a Bedouin out in the deep Negev, he could be so many other things. But I realize then that had I been born a Bedouin and not the child of a wealthy Jewish dentist, perhaps my rebellions and perdition would have never happened. Muhammad and I play on. While he may drink Pepsi, he wears a faded red Coca Cola tee as if to say Bedouins are sitting out both geopolitics and the Coke/Pepsi wars.

 

I set off when the sun begins to fade in the late of the afternoon. Before I do Muhammad orders me another tray of food in packaging that will outlive us both. I refill my four remaining jugs of water. He also orders me a small loaf of bread. Speaking on to me in Arabic he repeats several times the words, ‘JABAL ZIN, HAR TZIN.’ His hand shoots out over the horizon in a sweeping motion to demonstrate the gravity of this place.

 

I set off along the rail line east. I still haven’t seen a train all day.

 

The sixth night.

 

After much walking before total darkness, I reach what appears to be a giant whale beached upon the crater floor. It is a tan white whale with a pale belly. Its top is quite flat. Its eyes are small but pronounced even in the near total dark. The whale’s head is illuminated by the electric glow of a city directly to its northeast, the place the tracks end. This great creature’s name is JABAL ZIN, it guards the approach to the Pale City. I have reached it the sixth day of my quest.

 

I know such a whale will arise and devour me if I keep along the tracks so I make my way to the base of the sleeping giant through a chalk white quarry where these Bedouin truckers and Hebrew engineers extract the minerals from the dead earth. The air is dry and still as I make my approach. If this beast awakens, if it hears my approach, I will surely be sucked into the depths of the sands. The only things I have ever seen this big are the towers of my native city.

 

I carefully follow a trail through the quarry up to the side of the whale. The eerie glow of the Pale City is more felt than actually seen, blocked out in the shadow of this thing. It need not move for me to know it is massive and alive.

 

I follow a path up the side of the great white whale, iron rungs cut into its vast white frame. These rungs allow a person to climb slowly out of the desert onto the head and shoulders of this whale.  I would estimate the whale to be over fifty stories tall by the standards of the towers in my own city. I would gauge the whale to be as long as three city blocks, both kilometers and miles are of no use here. I climb the iron rungs. The lights of the Pale City begin to illuminate the head of the whale. Through nooks and crags I climb remembering my youth at the Mohonk Reserve in upstate New York. Such a climb would have intimidated me if I had not climbed a comparable whale once or thrice before. JABAL ZIN is a sleeping giant, a whale mountain upon whose head I will soon make a camp.

 

Finally after a clandestine, silent climb whose duration may have been about two hours, I wind my way up to the head of the whale. From this great perch I can gaze down upon the illuminated Pale City. I can  see its barbed fences, its watchtowers, the slow and steady grind of the wheel. The haunting of my mind for the last four years has not been madness. For in the twilight of my waking life I have journeyed to it in a real and physical state.

 

The whale remains asleep. I sit on its flat head facing east, the city glowing like hell below me. Stars fly by overhead. I will ride this whale against the city and snuff out this foul blight upon the world. Mike Washington and I are trapped and dying in the world of my dreams, but here in waking life I have surmounted both the desert and the whale and stand ready for a final assault on the damned citadel.

 

I gather many rocks about me, which littered the pediment of the great thing’s shoulders. To take control of this massive golem I have to erect a temple upon it, a temple for my Lord. As a mere man, I cannot move something so massive against my enemies below. With God represented, all things are possible. I carry the stones I have gathered to the west of the whale near the arch of its spine and tale. The head makese a forward, higher plateau from which the Pale City is visible. The back and tail make a second lower acropolis. I build a low walled circle of stones perhaps three meters across atop the white poncho sheet on the rear part of the lower acropolis. Mecca is to my southeast, Jerusalem to my north. I think of my own city, my own land from which I am an exile, made so by my reprehensible actions, my quest to be righteous, my political war and my God. Hashem. Yahweh. Jehova., Allah. The Muslims claim It has 99 names, and the Hebrews claim that 72 letters are the name of greatest glory. Here I am. I will build my little temple facing the city of towers, the city of New York with its many, many lights. Upon a stone like a red brick the size of my forearm I place three smooth stones. The whale’s back contains a geological cornucopia. I draw a crescent on one rock with a black Sharpie. This pen and a single drawing Uniball are all I have left of my supplies.  I gave the rest as a gift to Muhammad being the only Arab I encountered who liked to draw in defiance of his religious edicts. My drawing is plain in comparison to the real moon above me. On the north end of this red brick altar positioned facing the direction of New York, I drop a white stone with a crescent and a star. In the middle of the altar and to the left of this stone for Islam, I draw a fish on a second white smooth rock. I had read that the fish is the symbol of the man Jesus Christ who ought to be represented at such a ritual. I place a final third white stone to the left of the fish symbol. I draw the ‘Yod-Hay-Vav-Hay’ upon it, the sacred four-letter word in the Tanakh pronounced Hashem or Adonoi that religious Jews cannot write, touch or utter. I place the Star of David pinky ring that Soreiya Levy had given me for protection on top of the holy name of God. I position the two volumes of the three holy books inside this shrine.

 

I sit outside the temple and consume my final meal before stepping into the circle on the whale, my rough temple outpost that I have built at midnight on the sixth day.  I put the refuse into my nearly empty rucksack. I strip naked and pour two jugs of water over myself in a makeshift do-it-yourself baptism. I take a third jug just to wash my hair. Then, I take sand and rub it on my hands, feet and face. I take the last of the water and wash out my mouth. My supplies are gone. The refuse is stowed in my sac.  

 

I draw a symbol that once appeared in a dream, tattooed upon the forehead of the redheaded girl on a final smooth white stone. I had not seen it on her when we traveled with Mr. Washington toward Zion in the last year of my dreamings. I had seen it painted upon her right hand and brow in red henna only in a photograph she carried. It looked half like a rune, half like a Persian ideogram. Hadas, the 15-year old rude girl who I had fooled around with on Kibbutz Ein Dor had given me these references. The girl was familiar with Farsi and with witchcraft, so maybe she could reveal its origins. I had drawn the image for her one night. I had never seen Hadas again to find out if she had discovered something of its nature, but now caught in spiritual ecstasy atop the whale, I know it for what it is. It is the Ezekiel mark, the mark bound upon the right hand and forehead of the soldiers of Yehavah. It will mark those destined to make a great demonstration of the justice of the one true God in the coming dark times.

I draw this symbol from my dreams upon the fourth stone and place it above the fish for the man Jesus Christ, making it the representation of all other denominations, creeds, beliefs and ideas both divine and temporal. It is not just another symbol of a creed. It is the spiraling change of future things to come, of hope itself. I have been brought to God via the teachings of my tribe the Israelites, but this is only half my blood. The actions of the man Jesus Christ and the deeds and song of the Prophet Muhammad have led me across this perilous terrain.

I remove my talis, the prayer shawl from my Bar Mitzvah, which besides some parchment, my clothing, the two pens, the lantern and the saceen are my only belongings left. I am clean and naked beside my black poncho tied around me like a toga. I am tuning out the cold winds. My head is covered in the Bedouin kafia, my bag left outside the temple. I take the saceen and step into the circle facing west toward New York. With the blade drawn I slit open a quick cut on my left bicep. I plunge the knife into the back of the whale, my right hand dripping with blood I drip some on all four stones. I whisper out to the heavens.

 

“As great men bled in the way of the Lord, so now shall I. On JABAL ZIN I make my covenant.”

 

From the book of Deuteronomy in the Tanakh I read:

 

“Give ear, O you heavens, and I will speak; and hear, O earth, the words of my mouth. My doctrine shall drop as the rain; my speech shall distill as the dew, as the small rain upon the tender herb, and as the showers upon the grass. Because I will proclaim the name of the Lord; ascribe greatness to our God. He is the Rock, his work is perfect; for all his ways are justice; a God of truth and without iniquity, just and right is he.”

 

I prostrate myself like I have seen the Muslims do in submission to my god YEHAVAH, and call out his name taught by the Jews forbidden.

 

From the Sermon on the Mount I then whispered aloud the words of the man Jesus Christ:

 

“Blessed are the poor in spirit: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

Blessed are they that mourn: for they shall be comforted.

Blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the earth.

Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness: for they shall be filled.

Blessed are the merciful: for they shall obtain mercy.

Blessed are the pure in heart: for they shall see God.

Blessed are the peacemakers: for they shall be called the children of God.

Blessed are they which are persecuted for righteousness’ sake: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

Blessed are ye, when men shall revile you, and persecute you, and shall say all manner of evil against you falsely, for my sake.

Rejoice, and be exceeding glad: for great is your reward in heaven: for so persecuted they the prophets which were before you.

Ye are the salt of the earth; but if the salt have lost his savor, wherewith shall it be salted? it is thenceforth good for nothing, but to be cast out, and to be trodden under foot of men.

Ye are the light of the world. A city that is set on a hill cannot be hid. Neither do men light a candle, and put it under a bushel, but on a candlestick; and it giveth light unto all that are in the house. Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works, and glorify your God which is in heaven.

Think not that I am come to destroy the law, or the prophets: I am not come to destroy, but to fulfill. For verily I say unto you, Till heaven and earth pass, one jot or one title shall in no wise pass from the law, till all be fulfilled.”

And then again I prostrate myself like I have seen the Muslims do in prayer.

Finally I open the Qur’an to the first of the two suras I have selected for this offering:

From the Faatihah, the Opening and first Sura:

 

In the name of Allah, the Most beneficent and most merciful,

The cherisher and sustainer of the worlds;

Most beneficent, most merciful;

Master of the Day of Judgment;

Thee do we worship, and thine aid we seek;

Show us the straight way,

The way of those on whom,

Thou hast bestowed Thy Grace,

Those whose (portion) is not wrath,

And who go not astray.”

 

I prostrate myself before turning to my fourth and final selected reading. I reopen the Qur’an now to Sura Balad; the ninetieth Sura in the book. Somehow I feel like a wizard with a spell book about to open a vast and ethereal world of power. I brace my already bleeding mind for the coming break with reality. I chant something certainly not English and in no way close to Arabic. I chant in tongues phrases perhaps not on the page in front of me;

 

In the name of Yehavah’ Allah, the Most Beneficent and Most Merciful,

 

“Nay I do swear by my city,

And thow art an inhabitant of my city,

And the beginning and the end at once.

Verily you created humanity not into toil and struggle.

Think we, that Allah’s power has run out over us and other things?

Does man think Allah cannot see him?

Have we not made for him a pair of eyes?

And a tongue, And a pair of lips?

And shown him the two highways?

But he hath made not haste on the path that is steep.

And what will explain to thee the path that is steep?

It is: freeing the bondman;

Or the giving of food in a day of privation.

To provide for the orphan, with no claims or relationship,

Or the indigent down in the dust.

Then will he be of those who believe.

And enjoin patience, constancy and self-restraint.

And enjoin deeds of kindness and compassion.

 

Such are the companions of the right hand.

 

But those who reject Our signs,

they are the unhappy companions of the left hand.

On them will be fire vaulted over, all around.”

 

In my crude temple, my left bicep still bleeding, I prostrate myself again and this time, like when drugged with chemicals in the hospitals, like when forced into my grave in the Family Foundation, like in London when badly beaten, the reality falls away. The great whale sails off with a rumble out of the wilderness flying over the moon.  

 

* * *

 

The last phrase I hear is selected for me:

 

“Leave the dead to bury their own dead.”

 

I am on my knees not far from the mouth of the well. The scorched earth of a once lush oasis, the Wadi Farin, is a battle torn hell awash with pock marks from artillery, countless arrows protruding from the ground and drenched in oil. Mike Washington lays next to me tachycardially breathing, face down in a puddle of his own blood.

 

The army of the clown does not draw much closer. The face of the clown still flickers on a several mile high screen. The horsemen have black bags on their faces or what looks like masks of flesh with nothing underneath but TV static flickering from their eyes, souls long departed. They stand at attention not even moving a dull twitch.

 

I am watching Mike bleed to death. The arterial red pool collects underneath him soaking through his duct taped grey bandages. The pistol hidden in his gut must cause him incredible agony. He bellowed in pain when I dragged him out of our foxhole.

 

The horsemen stand over us less than fifty meters away. Their legions surround us and the well in a great enveloping circle of the thousands of zeppelins and assorted craft. The deliberate lazy apprehension is perhaps just a part of its game.

 

We are in a dead place. Only one day from the end of a four-year journey, we are beaten. Like in a good Western or tale of knights, they have the girl and we are surrounded. No reinforcements are coming.

 

I remember something Mike once told me about the early days of his rebel career, when he received his first paramilitary training in a cave complex deep in the hills of Judea. A reincarnated soul possessed with the ghost of the Chinese general of Sun Tzu was instructing the fighters of Bar Giora in the ancient arts of spear craft and asymmetrical war.

 

The oracle had enchanted a young boy whose blood made him able to receive the spirits of the dead. The oracle put Sun Tzu within the boy and the boy honed the irregular Hebrew forces of several thousand untrained farmers into the guerrilla army Simon Bar Giora used to smash Roman legions. Michael had served throughout the three Hebrew revolts following the death of the man Jesus Christ.

 

He told me he was only 17 when the war against Rome began. The death of the man Yeshau Ben Yoseph was taken by many to be the sign of the end. The man Jesus Christ, born Yeshua Ben Yoseph became a symbol to many throughout the Roman Empire that the iron heel of Caesar could be cast off. The Province of Judea in 60 AD was the first to try. Michael served as an officer until the very end, through 57 years of grisly desert war. In the third round of Hebrew-Roman fighting an entire legion, the XXII Deiotariana, was completely wiped out. The Second Temple of Jerusalem was razed and every last Hebrew man, woman and child were deported as slaves into exile.

 

“The ghost of the Chinese general told us ‘Death to traitors and spies.’ The first we slew were those in our midst who were pawns of Rome. The tavern owners, our corrupted class of priests, our foremen and merchants doing business with the empire, the harem proprietors, the spies and turncoats. The ghost of Sun Tzu taught us that many of our people never thought for themselves, had forgotten their people to fill their bellies and pockets and were more our enemies than even the hated Roman occupiers. He called them the living dead, soulless animals that consume but are no longer human. He taught us to cut off the heads of these zombies, to wash the streets with their blood. He taught us these zombies were the enemy within, that which consumes its own kind.”

 

Mike continued his story.

 

“I was there surrounded at the fortress of Masada in the first revolt, one of seven to survive the ordeal. They cut off our water, then forced our own people to build the ramp up the mountain. We slew those zombies by the thousands. When we ran out of arrows we threw rocks upon them,” he told me.

 

“The thing about zombies, or even these horsemen without their own heads, they take their orders not from a god but just one man. Kill a million horsemen they just keep charging. Killing a zombie just removes an immediate threat to your survival. But if you ever get to fire at Caesar, you’ll only get one shot. But if you hit Caesar, hit him right between the eyes and you’ll bring an empire to its knees. Few men think for themselves. They mostly just follow some tyrant.”

 

As I sit here on the ground, on my knees watching my companion die I remember these words. The old, fat clown is Caesar. To him all human suffering is a joke we bring upon ourselves. A grinding of gears and spiraling of machinery from the grandest zeppelin above lets me know the clown is coming. A great catwalk of warped metal and tubing is twisting down at me like snakes, descending to the dune directly in front of me out of these Babylonian Airistrocities. The screeching of the metal ramp does more damage than the air raid sirens above us. The ramp hits the oil soaked sand with a mighty thud. I still can’t see it. The ramp towers into the bowels of a great blimp above us. The other craft has begun extending docking mechanisms intertwining them all into a great aerial city. They intend to dock with Zion, to put out the many, many lights and send something foul and wicked to my world.

 

Mike is dying. He squirms on his side bleeding heavily from his gut. He spasms in pain but does not cry out.

 

As the dark thing approaches a quiet death takes hold. Slowly and deliberately it moves down towards us. It has gotten fat feeding on pain. It holds a gold chain in its hand with a green tube attached to something behind it we can’t see. It wears a regal white gown, a crown of thorns and a white golf shirt. Its red face is  acircle with a leering smile painted in red. Its eyes are blackened orbs. Its massive spider limbs creep out down the plank. Its body pulsates under the gown rising and falling like a serpent. As it gets closer the dark horsemen all fall upon one knee.

 

‘You’ll only get one shot,” Mike had said to me.

 

I know that as soon as it gets within firing distance. As it swoons over us to mock us, maybe shit on our head or piss on our wounds, I’ll tear the golden pistol from my companions dying chest and shoot Caesar between the eyes. The rest of the things will crumble. The horsemen will fall one by one like dominoes. The zeppelins will fall and be rendered apart like Hindenburgs.

 

In theory.

 

But the best-laid plans and theories of angelic gunslingers and mentally ill young men . . .  you know how the saying goes. Mike coughs more blood out on the sand when he sees it. A yank of the chain and she steps out in front of him. She is dressed in white, a burka nikab and a miniskirt, a miniburka. Her slender fleshy legs are exposed and nothing else. You could bend over to fuck her in the ass without ever seeing her face. I see her green eyes. She’s wearing makeup under the veil. The shirt is high like a burlesque show whore. The gold chain is around her neck. The green tube descends into her swollen pregnant belly. My nemesis is as cunning as we.

 

Mike’s sockets show no anguish, but his face is clenched in fury. But he’s too far gone to have to make the decision I’m about to. I see the redheaded girl tremble, a nervous flinch. She traveled with us too long to not suspect that we have some plan. ‘Knock around rebels for God’ like us cannot be brought to heel. But what makes her shudder is the look upon our faces seeing her like that, seeing her tied to him and knowing we can’t do a damn thing. The best laid plans. The tube goes out the clown’s beating exposed black heart winding down into her belly through a port and likely into the child.

 

When the creature addresses us it sounds like nails dragged across a chalkboard. It speaks in images.

 

“W,H,E,R,E,. IS,,, Y,,,O,U,,R; G,,O,D,, N,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,O,,,W?”

 

As it speaks I see buildings burning shortly in the City of Many Many lights. I see blood in the streets. I see its towers falling in flames.

 

“KIL,,L me wil’ yo,,,,,,,,,,,,u? You could try.”

 

Its voice makes me cry blood. Mike has no more eyes with which to cry.

 

“I am the gr,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,eat wooooooooorrrm. I aaaaaaaaaaa,,m the rot. In the darkness I feast on things which learn to kill each other.”

 

“WHA,,,,,,,,,T you do h;e,,,,re in the de;sert has had no meaning. We distracted you and ma,,,,,,,,,,,,de you si,,,ick like us.”

 

“WHERE IS YOUR GOD. IT HA,S ABANDONED YOU ALL TO EACH OTHER. I am the w,,orm ,th,a,t, ,f,eeds on the dying; YOUR KIND is a flower of death. EAT OF MY TREE.”

 

The thing grows twice as big, its torso expanding out of the arachnid frame of limbs, a worm, a tree of death. The red-haired girl cries from behind her veil. I know Mike Washington says to kill Caesar. He ended his life and broke his wings for me to kill the clown. But what use is killing Caesar when it is Caesar’s happiness to die. It sits leering, its black heart exposed. I could kill the beast but not save the babe. The babe will be polluted with the foul things dying breath. If this world is a dead world then I am death too. In the place of the whale there is hope. I’m going have to throw the baby out with the bathwater.

 

Fidel Castro once said history would absolve him. I just hope God will absolve me.

 

It thought us callous, but perhaps not hard. I tear the hand weapon out of my dying friend’s chest. I splatter open his abdomen into the sand. The gold pistol barks three times in my hand. The red-haired girl receives a bullet in her head, in her heart and in the heart of the babe. The babe with the power.

 

The thing screams its wretched screech. Its bellows blow down its legion. The horsemen spasm. Reality shudders then stand suddenly still.

 

All around me is the scene of a great war put on standstill. I see the clown king reeling on its tentacles and limbs screaming, now frozen. I see Mike quite dead, splattered open, frozen. I see the red-haired girl who for a whole year we protected, whose baby was named Hope. We were close to helping her cross over. The white miniburka is stained in blood. I have just killed her and her unborn child. Frozen too is the fleet of zeppelins merging above us and the army we held off from a well for half a day the now scorched Wadi Farin.

 

I am SCUD the disposable assassin. I am God’s Knock-around Rebel.

 

But from the hills above the wadi I see two small things move. In addition to me they are the only pieces of this desert Guernica that remain unfrozen and ambulatory. I recognize them at once and am glad. These are my two friends who have been missing for eight years. They stand less than one foot tall and move about on furry, weathered limbs like plush beanbag animals. They have the appearance somewhere between bears and klansmen. One is furry and whitish, the other is one furry and grayish. They have black marbles for eyes. I had thought them long vacationing in Mexico.

 

‘Black Bear and White Bear?” I ask amid the carnage, still on my knees still clutching a golden handgun.

 

White Bear has a voice like a smurf filled with glee.

 

This glee-filled voice says to me, “Looks like you found the golden ticket.”

 

Black Bear, called such even though he has a grey coat has a voice like a Negro Dick Tracy.

 

“Pedro thanks you for your going away present. He and his family are living in Los Angles now. White Bear and I joined a South Central Chicano street gang. Pedro’s girlfriend thinks I’m cute, but Whitey could use some new fur.”

 

“Such talk is fucking ridiculous Black Ass. Good to see you, old buddy. Looks like you’re still pretty loose with the personal possessions. That girl is dead as a doornail.”  His little voice is sickly cute.

 

“I didn’t teach you guys to curse.”

 

“The mother of the little Mexican boy did. We can’t fucking stop now,” explains Black Bear.

 

The two bears waddle up to me and I pick them up. They’re a little heavier than before. They also move, talk and are alive. I remember that the first time in my life when I sincerely cried and felt down and out and over-powered with sorrow was when I left these two bears in Mexico at the age of eight. Nine years later they walk about and spill foul language like milk and cheese.

 

“How now, Brown cow?” White Bear says to me. “I know you liked that girl, but you did what had to be done.”

 

“You did what needed doing,” says Black Bear.

 

“I mean, you can’t kill the devil in you,” states White Bear matter of factly.

 

“What’s that supposed to mean?” I almost sob.

 

From out of nowhere White Bear produces a remote control. With a click he turns off everything. One click and its just Black Bear, White Bear, me and the universe like back when I was a little boy.

 

Were lying again in the strawberry field. Black Bear hands me a cigarette. The bears grew up rougher in Mexico.

 

Where did you guys go”’ I asked a little more calmly now that the battle has receded in the distance.

 

“You were growing up. You needed a role model, not playthings for reckless adventurism,” says Black Bear smoking a fag.

 

“Good adventures went on though,” I say reminiscing. For the first time I can remember a lot of my childhood. It glows like a warm memory off the two little bears.

 

“Remember the Mohegan Dunes near Montauk?’ asks White Bear. “Do you remember when I showed you the rocket landing point, where the spaceship emergency docked and dropped off your coding?”

 

I remember a hastily constructed spaceport in the sand dunes of eastern Long Island. I remember playing a vast game of capture the flag brought there by the Pathfinder’s Day camp. White Bear and I went off to hide and unearthed a spaceship buried in the sands.

 

“Almost,” I say.

 

“Remember when you took me to that Art Barge one summer and in the sub basements of the sullied ship we found the endless maze of coffins, the great leaders of the world cloned and frozen for the coming showdown between man and his nature? The Art Barge was the mouth of a bunker, which contained part of salvation within it. It contained a frozen pantheon of leadership for when the world turns finally and fatally upon itself.”

 

“I remember the Barge, at least,” I mutter. “It was near a long string of metal radio towers on a sandy bay.

 

“There are so many adventures left for you, Sebastian.  I’m halfway jealous you’ve grown too old for imaginary friends,” says White Bear.

 

“Is Mike Washington dead finally?’ I ask.

 

“He taught you everything you needed to know. And you gotta realize nothing is ever created or destroyed. It just changes form,” states White Bear.

 

“Physics?”

 

“Common sense, change, movement, birth and even death are only upsetting to you creatures lacking a fourth dimensional perspective,” says Black Bear.

 

“Huh?”

 

“You might be like, ‘Fuck! I failed. The Old Man is dead. The game is lost. Mike Washington is gone. Who’s gonna lead me to Zion? I just shot the girl and her unborn savior baby who might just be your own child. The Clown ain’t dead. I still haven’t faced god and I’m stuck in a dream field talking to my two long lost teddy bears.’ You might be like, ‘FUCK, FUCK and fuck. I’m a victim and worse, a failure,’ “ rants White Bear.

 

I have no words to respond.

 

“But you’d be dead wrong,” says Black Bear suddenly breaking the awkward pause in the soliloquy.

 

“We, being fourth dimensional creatures can tell you definitively there is so much more going on than even the best human can gather in his mind’s eye. There are an infinity of worlds existing parallel to the ones you inhabit. You, as of just right,now exhibit limited control in two,” continues White Bear.

 

“Just two,” states Black Bear. “Two, out of infinity.”

 

“There are world’s where Hitler killed all the Jews and you were never born. There are worlds where you were raised Christian and athletic. There are worlds where the darkness reigns and worlds where the forces of Allah are triumphant. There are worlds where art is the sole and universal means of communication. There are worlds where humanity has wiped itself off the face of the planet in a thermo nuclear exchange. There are worlds. . .”

 

As White Bear continues his talk, Black Bear clicks his controller again and reality unfolds about us like a vast speedy filing cabinet replacing the strawberry field with countless snapshots, playing around us like grainy, silent films of the worlds the little bear talks of.

 

“Just because you can’t see a thing doesn’t mean the thing is gone,” says Black Bear. We step through one of the picture screens around us into a flat and grassy plain. It’s the Midwest before there were Midwesterners to terra-form and colonize it.

 

“Hold onto your slippers, were back in Kansas,” says Black Bear.

 

“Where are you taking me now,” I ask.

 

Around me is a vast green prairie emptying off into a small electric city. I see a skeletal rail and river town in the distance that by size could only house several thousand souls. A massive arch that makes me think ‘Saint Louis” anachronistically, somehow already constructed.

 

“Welcome to the grassy fields of Zion,” says Black Bear.

 

“Guess the Mormons had to be right about something,” I respond.

 

“You gotta be less judgmental. You gotta realize everybody sees little bits of the great truth,” says Black Bear.

 

I pick up the two Bears and put them on my shoulders. The plains are massive and I see this outpost in front of me on a river running north to south, maybe the Mississippi, or perhaps the Jordan. I see a rail line, which runs ten thousand miles east. This is the last stop as far as western expansion, as far as people needed to take it. We approach the outpost walls. A large green stone sign in Hebrew reads,

 

WELCOME TO ZION

‘City of Many, Many Lights’

Founded 2012

 

By the Rebel Saints Judas, Catherine, Maria, Nicholas, Nina, Michael, Jai, and Hubert

 

Population 144,001

 

“Doesn’t look nearly big enough to have that many people,” I say.

 

“Not everything takes place on the surface,” says White Bear.

 

It’s nearly dusk, but the city is bright as day on the other side of its massive stone walls. Its architecture is Victorian and wild western, but its fortifications are all red stone like the Alhambra. The tallest structure is the archway many stories above us, a giant gateway towering above the walls of the outpost.

 

“Everything is stone,” I mutter.

 

“Can’t burn a stone wall. Can’t break stone will,” mutters Black Bear.

 

We close in on the huge sealed gates of Zion. The red, impenetrable fortifications loom above us, the archway of the City of Many, Many Lights illuminates everything.

 

“We’ll wait here,” says White Bear, the two little things jumping off my back. They sit their furry selves upon a small and grassy mound perhaps 40 meters before the first checkpoint established on the ascending approach to the gates.

 

“This place is not for Angels and Djinn; it is a sanctuary for lost women and wary men. You will find us when you get the answers you are looking for,” says White Bear.

 

“Try not to leave us behind again. Things are moving quickly now. Everything with a beginning…”

 

“Has an end?” I interject.

 

“Nope,” says Black Bear, his little Teddy face pulling off a smirk.

 

“Everything with a beginning knows not yet of God,” finishes White Bear looking like a cherub. The Bears seated behind me seem to glow with their own halos. But only Black Bear has a Halo. White Bear is a Djinn.

 

I make my final approach on Zion.

 

The city outpost stands on a great mound. The vibrant green of the prairie at dusk is lit up not just by the towering arch, but also by watchtowers along the red walls. The walls are Spanish in character, massive maybe sixteen stories tall. Geometric and ornate, Zion stands like a great citadel.

 

The Old Man and his great game were swallowed by the darkness. Mike was slaughtered bringing me here safely. It took four years to make our crossing. What strikes me most heavily, what weighs down my stride are the Bears’ suggestions that the baby I had killed when I shot down the red-haired girl was my own. It is terrible enough to have fired upon her anyway. It took three shots to keep the clown out of Zion and out of my own world of the whale. But how was it my baby and the clown’s baby at the same time? The redhead was pregnant when we first abducted her off the flying omnibus. Her name she said was….how come I couldn’t remember her name? I’d spoken with her many times in our journey, almost a year, about ten months that the three of us were together. The bears are babbling. What am I fucking saying?  I am amid a vivid, lucid dream conversing with long lost childhood toys in a metaphor.

 

What color was her red hair, really? Orange-red like Jessica Rabbit? Crimson red like some Eastern European bombshell. She was Russian after all. Red like an Irish girl named Alice from outside Boston. Red like Rosy the working girl or Alana the Leisure Agent from Pardes Hana. I suppose if I can cross between the two worlds so could she. I suppose the only evidence of her original pregnancy was the word of the devil clown.

 

But I killed that little beauty because it had to be done.

 

Either the clown or I had made her with child. If she reached this place invested by it I’d be committing a vast inescapable evil. I put those bullets in the girl and her baby to save this city and my world from becoming like the land of the Pale City.

 

I am about to cross the threshold of a seemingly unguarded check point stacked in sand bags when it hits me like a ton of bricks. Well two things really.

 

Flashing through my head is the fourth dimensional truth that I am many things at many times. At the same time  these tribulations are so terrible because my condition allows me to live in two of these worlds at once, one dead, one dying. I realize I can be the scared little boy, the delinquent prodigal son or even the romantic artiste.  I can be the rebel prophet gunslinger, but if I wasn’t the black messiah and husband to this girl (which surely I was not); then I am the rapist, devil clown, too. The bears are right. The child was mine. I had forgotten what an evil thing I once was (am).

 

This hit me in the exact moment two men camouflaged perfectly with the ground emerged with lightning speed to bring the butts of their shotguns down upon my head. WHOOSH.

 

* * *

 

You can dream and still be awake. I know that now. You can struggle in the name of God and be confronted that you have been quite a devil, shrug and do nothing. The whale keeps sailing upward towards the moon to make a roundabout approach upon the Pale City. Soon I will get my audience with the One Most High. I feel like a hanging man.

 

* * *

 

When I return to consciousness, I find myself chained to the sturdy, outstretched limb of some great tree. It is not so inhumane. My hands are bolted in manacles above my head to the large branch but I am seated in a wooden chair with a red pillow. It is very bright out in this garden in which I am a prisoner. There is a welt on my head from the stock blow and there’s blood in my eyes.  But I’m back in the garden at least. At least they let me cross to the other side.

 

I can’t see so well because of the bright synthetic sunlight and the blood in my eye, but there are two chairs next to me at the base of this tree, both empty. One with a black pillow, one with a green pillow. I squint and see a young man across from me seated on a stool. I squint again. It’s Nicholas Trikhovitch, my dear best friend.

“Trikhovitch?”

 

“Actually here on the other side, it’s Rose, but yeah, buddy, it’s me.”

 

“What happened to me? Am I in Zion?”

 

‘Well you’ve been down and out in heaven and hell.’

 

“I guess these are the trials of a prophet.”

 

“So you know what you are now, buddy? Long scary ride to a simple truth if you ask me,” he smirks.

 

He takes a wet cloth, warm like at a Japanese restaurant and starts cleaning up my face.

 

“We weren’t expecting you so soon. You caught the sentinels offguard up top and security around here is tight as a drum.”

 

“It’s fine,” I mutter.

 

“They fucked you up good, brother. You’re still my best wingman since Flannigan went faggot on me. You’ll heal up in no time. The women around here are something else. They got character like the blazing beauty Stacy Epstein or the super coy Miss Sorieya Levy or Sophie’s cousin whatsername.”

 

“Whatsername?”

 

“The one with the great tits you fooled with.”

 

“I can’t remember.”

 

“It’s been that many?”

 

“I guess it has.”

 

“Well you’re a rock star. So, that’s what you get.”

 

“Am I dead, Nick? Did I run out of water in the deep desert and hallucinate my way to Zion through death.”

 

“Oh, you’re out of water in the deep desert back in the dying the world. That’s true enough. You ain’t dead yet though. You’re lights out on top of the Jabal Zin riding the great whale.”

 

“So what happens next? Can you take the chains off me?”

 

“What happens next is you get to meet the management. Those chains too tight?”

 

“No, not really, the chair is comfortable as hell.”

 

“On some nights we get to sit on pillows.”

 

“Management?”

 

“If you have to ask at this stage.”

 

“I don’t have to ask. Why the chains?”

 

“When Pericles yearned to hear the sirens, he had his men bind him to the mast. Such rapture was the result of this sirens’ song that countless sailors had dashed their ships upon the rocks to get closer to the source. Being your best friend and an obvious player in this great game, I cannot allow you to burst afire when management bestows you with your answers and guidance. We’ve chained you to the tree of life, bound you to it so that you know that when your meeting is adorned you must return to the dying world with the gift of your life. Get it? You’re a man and you are to soon meet your maker. We don’t want a lawsuit. Clear enough?”

 

“Crystal.”

 

“I’ll see you back in the Upper West of York.”

 

He gives me a hug.

 

“Keep repeating to yourself, ‘it won’t be like in the movies,’” he says.

 

Nick hugs me again then blindfolds me with a cool, damp veil over my head. I see grey then darkness and warmth.

 

I hear violin music playing in the darkness. I am boy again of only 11 years in my Grandfather’s home in Cape Girardeau, Missouri. The violin turns to a crescendo of Afro-beat, classical jazz. I’m in the wine cellar on a metal-framed bunk bed. There are four bunks that used to sleep my mother Briana, her sister Annie, and her brothers Bruce and Andrew. The house my Grandfather built is on a homestead several hours outside St. Louis on a highway through the prairie called Beautiful Downtown Dutchtown. The music fills the big, warm wooden home Gordon Wallace, my maternal grandfather, designed and erected. His children are all grown up. Just him and my Grandma now. He was an emergency room surgeon for 46 years then retired to the Cloister, as he calls this farm, to harvest and press wine, tailor 1940’s style men’s suits, cook elaborate meals and read a good many epic books.

 

I’m very small and very, very far away from New York City half a continent away. The music is beautiful and now I smell delicious food being cooked upstairs. I climb the steps into the living room with its red brick archways and big glass windows that overlook the valley, lake, vineyards and farm. My Grandmother is putting the finishing touches on an apple pie. My Grandfather has retired to an easy chair with a volume of some great book. He beckons me to come to sit on his lap. My Grandmother turns down the music and says dinner will be ready in five minutes. My Grandpa has a weathered grey suit on with a golden pocket watch tucked in his breast pocket. It’s a grey suit with white pinstripes he tailored himself. The man can make just about everything, but not without my Grandma’s adjustments and contributions. He’s very old, older than anyone I know. My Mom said he founded the Unitarian church of Cape Girardeau, Missouri because they wouldn’t let Blacks in the Protestant one. He is an old fashioned man, my Grandfather, but the traditions he upholds are the universal ones that you don’t improve on much.

 

My first childhood memory is being with my Mother in the strawberry fields near Montauk. The second farthest back is what I’m experiencing now, sitting on my Grandpa’s lap, my Grandma just about to feed us. He’s reading from a huge blue volume called ‘THE MISERABLE ONES’.

 

“We only have five minutes, Sebastian,” he says to me as I sit on his lap like a child.

 

“Let’s finish the story, Grandpa,” I say.

 

From the kitchen my grandma laughs, “That story you’re reading has no ending, and even if you finish all the pages, Gordon will just invent future exploits.”

 

“Well, that might be right, but I’ll give the boy some momentary closure.”

 

“We’ve been reading this book for years, Grandpa,” I say.

 

“You don’t like the book anymore?” he asks.

 

“It’s sad. Everybody is poor and no one cares about each other. The man Valjean was imprisoned nineteen years just for stealing a loaf of bread. The women had to sell her own hair and prostitute herself then dies of sickness before she ever gets to be with the daughter she tries to provide for. Her daughter is adopted and then forced into slavery. Then most of the other characters die needlessly on the barricades of a revolution their people never rise to join. It’s a terribly sad book this old French tale.”

 

“These miserable ones are not just some characters in an old French story. These wretched are among us. They starve in the streets and bleed in thankless trenches.”

 

“We’ve been reading this book for nearly four years, Grandpa. How does it end? Do they throw the man in prison after all this time? Does the young rebel bleed to death or get to run off with the girl? Why did they shoot the little boy helping to pick up the bullets? What song are the people singing? You keep jumping around the book. I’m so confused.”

 

“Slowly, slowly, little Sebastian. Life is no linear story.”

 

“Please tell me how it ends. Please?”

 

The young men take the barricades with their rebel group because they want liberty and justice for the workers. The National Guard that supports the dictator of France kills all but one of them. Thousands of young idealistic, men and women die because the masses don’t stand behind their rebellion. The barricades come down three days later. They kill the little boy trying to take ammunition from dead National Guard troops. They kill the rebel leader as he waves his flag rallying the students to keep fighting. They shoot down the girl because she loves the rebel leader and is on the barricades because of this love.”

 

“But one rebel survives. Marius, right? How?”

 

“Valjean carries him out through the sewers during the fighting.”

 

“Why?”

 

“Because Cosette is in love with Marius and Marius with her and Valjean realizes that their love is more important than Marius becoming another dead martyr.”

 

‘”What’s a martyr, Grandpa?”

 

“A person who sacrifices himself so that others can realize some freedom and some truth.”

 

“What truth did the students die for?”

 

“That working people must resist the iron heel trampling upon their liberty.”

 

“Isn’t that a good thing to die for?”

 

“Better to live and let a young man know what is the thing called love. In the case of young Marius, there were many, many others who fell that day in his place. He would have died had Valjean not risked everything to save him.”

 

“Because Valjean loves his adopted daughter, Cosette?”

 

“Exactly.”

 

“How does it end though, Grandpa?”

 

“With the revolutionaries soundly defeated and a thief stealing silver from the wedding of Marius and Cosette.”

 

“That’s boring. Wasn’t Valjean stealing silver from the priest in the beginning of the book and gets caught? Then the priest lets him keep it rather than send him back to prison.”

 

“This is the original act of mercy that rehabilitates him and puts him on the path to God.”

 

“What about the thief in the end of the book? Does Marius pardon him?”

 

“No, they have him arrested and imprisoned, I think.”

 

“That doesn’t seem fair.”

 

“But he’s the villain, Thernardiers, who worked Cosette as a child and then betrayed the rebels in the rising.”

 

“I don’t get the point of this book. Is it about rebels, about love? Is it about God or about forgiveness? We’ve spent so much time reading these people’s stories, but I don’t get the ending at all.”

 

“Time for dinner, boys,” announces my Grandmother.

 

I climb off my Grandpa’s lap and he set the book about the miserable people down on the nightstand.

 

“The only greater human purpose than martyrdom is true love and the only thing that catches God’s attention more than a person in love is an act of true redemption.”

 

“Is that the song the people sing?”

 

“The real story in this book is of Jean Valjean. It is not enough to change the way you live your life. This does not fully please Yehavah. Your God is most impressed when not only do you change your past wicked ways, but when you take action and deeds to help the broken and the damned.”

 

“Why did you pick this story, Grandpa. It’s different from Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn.”

 

“Only because it is epic and further from home.”

 

I join my Grandmother at the table.

 

‘Are you ready, Sebastian?’ she asks me.

 

There is a great flood of white light. Everything is illuminated.

 

The reason I would suppose I have been chained to the tree of life is because experiencing the management, that is to say to stand in the presence of YEHAVAH’AllahAdonoiElohanuHashem, and that’s only a 32-letter name, is comparable to how a caterpillar perched atop a pebble stone of grass might feel having a cup of tea with a supernova. Like measuring a dimple on one’s cheek then using this length to gauge the distance to the end of the universe. Like the government of Grenada in the Caribbean being asked to represent the solar system at some intercosmic clearinghouse. The feeling of something very small juxtaposed with something great from which your cloth is cut.

 

A great flood of grey light in the intricacies of existence is revealed as a thing of precision and clockwork. I’m floating up and up. For a minute I see fourth dimensionally. I see the existence of a great X/ Y axis of possibility and coinciding pasts and presents and futures. It’s like a cosmic factory, a storyboard picture show for all things that ever were and could ever be.  Along my sides spanning out in an endless corridor are all possible realities playing at once. Up and down are past lives of the souls inhabiting each possible world and rising toward the lives they will live. And then a golden flicker wraps about all these lives and images spiraling this X / Y nexus into a great unified sphere. It’s not the ‘holy spirit’ generating dimension three of this perfect, endless orb as much as it is this beautiful flame interlinking these countless human journeys like a shapeless, perfect fire. I see it. This is God. The interconnectivity of the dimensions of time, possibility and space. It asks me in the form of rose petals fluttering in the wind that I do not grovel or beg.

Can’t I see it’s been with me all along and could never bear to leave my side. I can.

Around me in vast, amazing linear order I can see the great game the old man sought to render on that board. I see stories unfolding about me. I glance for a second at the same story retold in infinitely different ways. Sometimes we win, sometimes we lose, but every single time we get to choose. And even the stories with gruesome endings, whose beginnings seemed weighted for failure, these souls get round after round to bring themselves back to where they began in some beautiful place with a gentle breeze at their back. Allah is all about them whispering possibility.

 

At the side of such power and union, you cry out to the Lord.

 

“What use have you for me?”

And It needs no words to answer you. Though the gaze you feel upon you has no eyes, what you can see feels like the first time you were in love and the feeling you got on the holidays giving your mother a hug. It loves me. Now I know that I can bear some other worse emotions because I have felt good things enough times to justify the fighting in the trenches down below.

A billion blue birds whisk up from the viewing post I stand upon. Up and up.  Still up.

 

“Am I righteous yet? Am I good enough?”

 

The birds launch me through the pool on the ceiling on the sphere. Through the window in the ceiling underground. There’s a sound like when a thermo nuclear weapon goes off and then the smell of lilac.

 

Drink deep from the waters of existence. I love you and have never left your side.

 

I am now seeing fourth dimensionally. I am connecting dots. I am living far more than two lives at once. I am not a Buddhist monk. I am not enlightened.

 

As Tyler Durden once said, “Putting feathers in your ass doesn’t make you a chicken.”

 

Being invited to drink from the water of existence does not prevent you from drowning in it.

 

They say the hardest part about seeing things in the fourth dimension is returning from such a state. You’ve become one with God. You see all that has been, all that will be, and all that could be. You are peace. You are mercy. You realize that the greatest power there is wraps around you. True and total love. You worked so hard to fight your way back to this place. You may be catatonic, stumbling through the desert water bankrupt at the foot of Jabal Zin, but that is only one time, one place. Oh how far you’ve come. In the fourth dimension you shed of your humanity and the human myopic egotism that your one silly life is the center of a vast cosmic circus in which you star. I’m floating now. At any moment now, lift off is achieved.  I am as pure as a baby in the womb. I am not my race, not my deeds past nor my future. I have no religion thrust upon me. I am for a short time without any sin.

 

“Don’t make me leave your side again. I see the terrific folly of our ways. I see what we do to ourselves when left in the darkness too long.”

 

The waters of existence can be anything. Man can mold them into a thing like a furnace and a hell. I will always send prophets to each world, to every man woman and child from behind those foul enemy lines. Your war is always waged with yourself in trying to believe that you have been forged in the waters of creation. In the furnace of your sweltering ignorance, in the dark of the mind’s cave, I said, ‘Let there be light.’ Who will be my torchbearers? Who will be my dawn breakers, my beloved rebel prophets? I said help was coming to your dying world, Sebastian called Zachariah. You are some help. You drank of me and grew humble. Now drink again of me and cast your fists in iron like a hero soon to be.

 

Someone’s holding me as every atom of my body attempts to reject reintegration.

 

Shake. Shiver.

 

I want to refuse this torch. I want to lie in the water of eternity just five minutes more. But I can’t. It’s not what was intended for this round. I plummet free falling back towards reality.

 

Memories, sweet memories return.

 

“Roxanne I did all this for you to see the good in me.”

 

There has been another battle, which has once again ended in a giant and inconclusive atrocious draw.

 

The whale dashes itself against the gates of the Pale City walls. On a giant wave it washes this blight from the dying world. The whale launches back up to the heavens, towards the moon. In the morning it rests again in the place called Biqu’at Tzin. The Pale horsemen are but dust. The Pale rider is only a delirious boy clutching ripped up holy books, babbling like a mad man with his plans hidden in his satchel.

 

The Pale City lays obliterated. Its gate to this world closes, it lies like a metal bone yard. Only its guts are exposed like a refinery and a phosphate strip mine. A threat is gone.

 

I remember chasing the clown, firing at it with Mike’s pistols and putting hollow tip explosive holes in its hide. I chased that thing across the Jabal Zin over into Jordan and into a pit of sharp spears. I rendered off its head; but it can never really die.

 

* * *

 

The seventh day and the seventh night.

 

An engineer working at a crane near the mine notices a young man chasing himself about the summit of Har Tzin. He sends a couple security guards to investigate.

 

At around 3 pm in the deadly heat, they find a half-mad teenager suffering from dehydration and heat exhaustion wandering near the base camp. He collapsed slightly before contact. The foreman orders a Bedouin trucker named Muhammad to take him back to Sde Boker for medical treatment; but a sandstorm shut down communications. They wait for nightfall to move the boy. A couple of the workers at the Bedouin camp near the way station sot with him while he yells out deliriously in a language they don’t understand. Two of them had seen him before he went up the JABAL ZIN. When he revives around dusk they swear he os possessed by Djinn.

 

The Jewish foremen intended to hand him over the Mugav as he is technically trespassing in a closed industrial zone. But the Bedouin take him to an illegal settlement south of Yeroham to feed him, then back to the outskirts of Sde Boker to hand him over to a chubby white American man he asks for.

 

Brent Avery.

 

Being a Messianic Christian and as it is Friday, technically he shouldn’t have been driving. But an Arab had called him just before sundown and said they’d picked up the nearly dead boy out of the deep desert. Brent is breaking the  Sabbath to save a life. The boy is asleep when he finally reaches the Bedouin encampment around the area of Sde Boker after midnight. The boy is wrapped up in blankets. Brent guesses that the two Bedouins are the ones who found him. One is young; one is old. They help the boy up into Brent’s car.

 

The kid doesn’t say anything on the drive back to Jerusalem. He just curls up in the back seat of the car clutching his black rucksack to his chest. The sun is on its way up by the time they reach the King David Hotel.

 

He stays in Jerusalem recovering from his wilderness trek for what feels like two more days but is very likely less. He and the Minister Brent Avery took Sunday evening to discuss the solitary contents of boy’s rucksack. There are two parchment pages filled to the margin on all four sides with diagrams, dates and small, tight unintelligible characters.

 

Other than his dagger, nothing else had come out of the desert.

 

The Minister says he’d expected something like these pages to come out of the desert. They spend Sunday night interpreting, or more accurately weighing the details of the dig. The boy does not remember writing the two parchment pages.

 

Brent Avery, a plump and very descent man who has rescued the boy from the wilderness, instructs him how to deal with these pages. Avery flew back to America the next day.

 

כ

Maya

 

That crazy kid. He’s wearing a plantation suit. He calls me Maya in front of other people, Emma when we’re alone, and both when we are with Andrew. He’s been gone a week without calling. I miss him already. It’s just plan after insane crazy plan. The madness of hope flies out his mouth.

 

He is SO totally sure of himself.  He’s only a year younger than I am, but he talks like he is twice my age. I’ve never met a boy like Zachariah Artstein. Sebastian Adon is just a slightly younger, male version of me, a doppelganger in exile. Svetlana, the Russian debutante, always says that lost souls find each other.

 

“People say we look like siblings,” he said to me at the Deep one night.

 

“Cause if you’re my brother, you’re not my man,” I laughed back at him.

 

He got it. I can’t fuck him for obvious reasons.  Why that is on my mind is because of some smart comment Andrew’s cousin Dizzy spat out. Disrael is real into me. His eyes don’t lie at all. He half said as much at the club each week. He made some smart shit fly out about Zach’s stuff at my flat. I didn’t react, didn’t read too deep into it until later.

 

Do they think I’m fucking him?

 

Zach is in Tel Aviv two or three days a week. He has a key to my flat. When he is in the city we nearly always share the bed.

 

There was one night we almost kissed while sleeping. Sometimes we snuggle. He comes in around 4 am, the last part of the night. I share the flat with two other people. It is sort of three, self-contained apartments in one. My roommates are a young corporate guy and a ‘dancer’ who is never, ever here.

 

Maya Rose is the name I invented sometime before Canada. It is a stripper name, the kind of name you tell a John. The real Emma Solomon is from a quasi-wealthy European family, the last Jews left in Spain. I have long flowing brown hair. My eyes change color all the time, but are usually hazel.

 

Sebastian Adon picked Zachariah Artstein as a nom de guerre. Zachariah Artstein sounds like the name of someone from a quasi-wealthy European family, the last Jew out of Warsaw.

 

I speak Hebrew and English, both with a slight Canadian accent. I am also fluent in German and Spanish.

 

When Zach, finally got back to Tel Aviv, I figure I’m is the first one he’ll call. But he called me from Andrew’s house phone, so I guess that’s how it is going to be. Two boys playing revolutionary generals. The girl just standing by looking pretty. I know it isn’t like that but I can already tell that the desert has changed him. I used to be his confidant, his best friend of one month, his lover without kissing. Now he has things to tell Andrew. He has to tell Andrew before he tells me.

 

Fine.

 

I met him on the beach near the Hilton Hotel. He is sitting by himself in one of the beach cafes sipping red wine and smoking a Marlboro red cigarette, not the Noblisse that was so much his steez. He is wearing dark sunglasses even though it is late in the night. That had been my steez for a while. My Dad used to tell me that you could never trust a person who wears sunglasses at night. “Only rapists and criminals do that,” my Dad had said.

 

Dizzy asked if I fucked him and I laughed at him. I can’t tabulate the kind of emotion the kid brings out in me. I’m just happy he didn’t die in the desert. He looks hard and tan.

 

There are huge red glowing orbs set up to illuminate the beach. I sit and order a large plate of fruit and a watermelon martini.

 

“Learn anything interesting out there?” I ask him.

 

Before he can respond I hug him and kiss his cheek and then withdraw quickly not knowing how he’ll react. He doesn’t.

 

“I missed you,” is all he says to me.

 

“Feelings mutual kiddo. So, what did you do in that desert?”

 

“The trip took a lot out of me. I had to rest halfway in Jerusalem for a few days.”

 

“I was worried, Andrew less so. He said you’d need a rest and that it would take more than a week for you to get back up country. Andrew has nothing but faith in and admiration for you.”

 

We lean back into the yellow plastic beach chairs. The waiter brings out a platter of melons and my fancy cocktail.

 

“How far out did you get?”

 

“Roughly sixty kilometers into the deep desert east toward Jordan.”

 

“Quite a ways to wander.”

 

“It was a good little mission.”

 

“You’re a pretty crazy kid. I realize that now. That takes some wild mix of madness, balls and faith to wander out into the deep desert for as long as you did.”

 

“It was what it was. Needed to get some perspective.”

 

“You had a vision did you?”

 

“A vision and a series of dreams. It was strangely complete. I don’t know if vision is the right word. It was as if I was dreaming the whole time, but reality and my dreams were meshed together so much intertwined that it was impossible to tell what was real and what was not. It was quite a fire walk.”

 

“You were out there in your own crazy head looking for an answer inside you. What did you see then?”

 

“I saw everything at once, the whole of what we’re meant to do. I’m not sure I’m ready yet to tell the whole of it. It’s etched itself upon me, simmering.”

 

He continues on, “I know it was all in my mind out there. By the fourth day, I lost the trail and began using too much water. By the sixth day all my water and food were gone. I blacked out sometime on the sixth day and woke up in small Bedouin settlement near the kibbutz where I entered the desert.”

 

“The Bedouin saved your ass then.”

 

“They found me wandering out there and carried me back to the kibbutz. When I came out of the desert I had no clothes. I was wrapped in a black linen sheet with a Bedouin scarf around my neck. My provisions, lantern, ID cards and my books were all missing. My passport, my wallet, my little red address book, my sketches, all gone.”

 

“Someone stripped you after you lost consciousness, probably the Bedui. A passport and a hundred bucks for your life ain’t a bad trade kiddo all things considered.”

 

“Except they left my shiv. My dagger and two pieces of parchment upon which I had written extensively while in my altered state were all that remained when I was awakened back in Sde Boker by the man Brent Avery.”

           

I pause to sip the watermelon poison.

 

“Well what’s on the parchment?” I whisper to him, “And don’t promise things you know you can’t deliver.”

 

“I’ve been known for several years to be excellent with a claim to follow-through. The only things that are truly impossible are the things a person lacks the will to do.”

 

“You have my undivided attention kiddo.”

 

“The problem with most political or religious movements is that they attempt to attack a problem from one side using one demographic. Nothing can be as simple as that and no solution can come from only one affected party.”

 

“So your parchment says what exactly?”

 

“The creation of a nationalist organization that takes no name or demographic should proceed as planned along the lines we’ve established. An association with a constantly evolving decentralized structure that seeks a one state solution by means of armed struggle here in Israel. When the world comes to an end such an association will stand as the water, bridge and wall to the city of Zion.”

 

“But you believed all that before you went fire walking.”

 

“Yeah, but now I gather we have the endorsement of the management.”

 

“So you presume. This is beyond crazy.”

 

“What is?”

 

“Everything you say. This entire conversation.”

 

“It’s only crazy until we pull it off.”

 

“This organization we’ve been building, what the hell does religion have to do with it?”

 

“Not religion, Emma, faith in the unseen. It preserves the good in us through the storm of war, through much worse coming times.”

 

“So, this thing is now to be an insurrectionary group led by a self declared prophet?”

 

“Not the right word either. Prophet presumes singularity of voice. It presumes religion, presumes gloom, doom, and apocalypse, fire and brimstone. I’d like to think of us as more highly evolved, as receivers, if you will.”

 

“And what exactly are we receiving, Zach?

 

“Instructions on how to make change. It’s in our blood.”

 

“What if you’re wrong about all this?”

 

“I’m not asking anything from you I wouldn’t have asked in the three weeks before the desert. We have power, Emma. We have a power to change the future of this nation.”

 

“Don’t put this on me, Zach. Don’t come to me and say my blood and bones make me chosen for some fight I never signed up for.”

 

“We’ve got chosen in our bones, Emma, that itch to do something when we know we are capable.”

 

“Says you and Andrew.  I joined this otriad for peaceful settlement and human rights.”

 

“These things are connected like day and night. Why did such a powerful thing as our God allow us to degenerate into wretched, evil suffering monkeys?”

 

“I never asked that question. I just accepted God hated us. Stopped believing we were worth It’s time.”

 

I stare off toward the sea. I hear the waves crash on the beach. I look up at the stars and know I don’t have the strength to read what’s wrapped up in his satchel. I don’t want to read gibberish and believe he’s just mad. I don’t want to read how the world ends and what I’m going to have to do. The crazy part is I met this boy less than a month ago.

 

“I’ll help you with whatever you need. You know that already,” I tell him.

 

“But you’re doing it for your people and don’t believe in things you can’t see?”

 

“Correcto. I’m not gonna read what’s on those papers, Zach. I’m not helping you because I think God wants me to. I’m doing it because I believe the things you fight for are right. Keep that God shit between you and Andrew. I’m a soldier, but not for any battles over the soul. I don’t need a religion to tell me to act right.”

 

“I didn’t come here to teach you your religion. I came here to remind you of the weight of your blood. This struggle was yours at birth.”

For a while I say nothing. We sit together and watch the city by the sea.

 

“What will happen when the struggle is over and there are no more battles for a person like you to fight?” I ask him.

 

“Surely I won’t be alive to worry about such a thing.”

 

“Tell me why you do this? Why do you bring people into such a war? Most would never know your war existed had you not persuaded them to play detective with conscious and soul. Tell me without any divine reference why you’ve closed your door on New York, crossed an ocean and wedded yourself to a bleeding, thankless desert quagmire.”

 

“I do it out of love.”

 

“Ha. More like you believe in the struggle as if it were love.”

 

“Perhaps, it was a whole string of events that began with my birth and won’t conclude until my death. The unifying theme other than a colorful protagonist has always been tragedy and needless suffering averted by a few moments of genuine love. I needed just three weeks of true, good love to illuminate the darkness shrouding the nearly 17 years of my life.”

 

“Who was this love of yours that made you so selfless?”

 

“Her name escapes me. It’s the idea of her that sustains me. She made me, if for but only briefly, believe my own human worth and goodness.”

 

“Sounds like love quite divorced from that of common people. Sounds a bit idealized and lonely. And so your bed gets filled with bright eyed young women who admire you even if you can’t love them as much as you love your struggle?”

 

“Sometimes. Have no fear. You’ll never be one of those women.”

 

“I know I’ll never be one of those women. I share the bed with you because you’re warm.”

 

“And you’ll help me in this revolt for the same reason?”

 

“I’ll help you because I once dreamed a young, handsome man would sweep me off my feet and carry me to a far and exotic land. He’d give me beautiful children and we’d build a happy home. So, I escaped the gilded life I lived in Spain to have a chance encounter such a young man. I crossed the ocean in the other direction to Montreal, Canada and became a prostitute at the age of 17. There was a great big, unlucky bang, kiddo. A flash of thunder and then some lying bloody in a long hard rain before lying even longer in a bright white ER. I certainly lost my God in the confusion of that calamity. The young, handsome man was just a brutal exploitive pimp who did great violence to a bright-eyed young girl. The exotic land upon which I landed is just a desert thick with fools, blood and black smoke. You are warm.”

 

I know all his war stories, but he knows few of mine. I tell him these things to show him that I, too, am hard.

 

“But your warmth is less interesting to me than your mission.”

 

He removes the grey corduroy beret running his finger through his brown hair looking at me earnestly. He still looks half like a newsy, a 1930’s street urchin hustler, in that cap. The other half is cut from the Cuban revolution. Maybe it’s his new clothes. The white linen suit he’s wearing with that Bedouin scarf tucked around his neck. Maybe it’s those red sunglasses, rose-colored like his vision. I want him to know I’m solid like he is, that I’m proud to know him and to let him know me. I want him to know that I’ll die by his side if I have to, to get this thing of ours accomplished, but I won’t do it for some God or some religion. I’ll do it for my fellow man. I want to tell him too many things at one time, so I just blurt out,

 

“Good luck to us.”

 

He smiles with satisfaction.  It’s the first time I’ve ever seen him smile like that with that look in his eyes that’s a cross between temperament and treason. But I guess it’s only treason if you’re a native.

 

ל

My logic is something along the lines of “fuck it then, the southland’s calling him and who am I to argue.” While Andrew sets about organizing his club and familial contacts into our new little shadow army, I am still unclear of what role to play. Zach asks me to assist him in setting up other cells outside Tel Aviv Command. It is only logical that I should get conscripted in establishing a beachhead in another major Israeli city. I am willing to help and am up for road trips. Southern Israel wasn’t my first pick.

 

Andrew and Zach say we need to establish four regional commands: one in Tel Aviv for central Israel; one in Haifa for the Galilee region; one in Be’er Sheva for the Negev and south; and, of course, one in the capital Jerusalem. It would have been logical just to start where we all live, but Zach and Andrew say we should go south first. I have taken a day off from promoting for the Deep to go with Zach south to Be’er Sheva more out of curiosity than to participate. I’m not even sure what he plans to do. Set up his table, sell pictures and win souls. Who knoww? I tell him I’ll give him a day. Be’er Sheva is four hours away. I have been there once or twice going to and from Eilat like other normal people. I never stayed there long. The place is a mess. A ‘southland desert slum park’ as Svetlana had ranted about it when I told her I was going.

 

Zach has just come from the Galilee so a southern powerbase is the next logical step. Andrew has him running up and down the country between the Golan town Qiyrat Shemona, the coastal cities of Acco, as well as the Galilee outpost of Tiberius. He hasn’t been to Haifa yet. I find the whole thing pretty anarchic. I feel like Andrew’s zeal and Zachariah’s newfound mania are a bad combination. The boy is tramping all about the north getting out our message and drumming up support. I haven’t done much so far. I’ve handed out flyers with him on the tiyeled. I’ve gone with him and Svetlana over to Jerusalem to meet with a cluster of new people. Most of them were young as hell, not young like us. Young like 14. I figure it’s relative, but I see who the kid attracts: the young, the poor and the messed up street urchins like himself. I think Andrew offered him a job promoting for us but he turned it down for whatever crazy reason.

 

I know he has a girl in the north because he comes back glowing. He never talks about that kind of thing with me. We sleep together less. Only once a week when he comes back from recruiting in time for Andrew’s Thursday party. Nothing comes of it. No heavy petting. No attempts to kiss me. If I don’t initiate holding him, he won’t even put his arms about me. But once I do he’ll hold me tight. It never goes anywhere. I don’t think I’d let it anyway.

 

We have been in the Tel Aviv central bus station for most of the day waiting for shabbos to end so we can jump on a bus. Zach keeps selling pictures and handing out the postcards we’ve created for the Organization. I back him up by wandering up to jump in on his pitch. Whenever I do this with girls they are annoyed. Whenever I do it with guys, they want my number. As we walk around the central bus station I pay attention to every detail of what he is doing trying to get a pitch together. He never really uses a pitch other than his art shtick. If the drawings and conversations lead to politics, he lets people take the lead. Mostly they share some detail of their lives with him. If he can relate it to our struggle, he does. We have been here for four hours. He only took a ten-minute break to drink some orange soda.

 

I am a little anxious being here in light of recent events. Why is a person wearing a coat? Does someone look nervous? Why is that guy lingering so long? I spend longer looking at the faces of the Arabs because it isn’t going to come from anybody else. The authorities have come on television and told us we have to ask ourselves these questions to stay alive. Every time I step into that bus station I constantly expect an attack. There hasn’t been a big once since the Dolphinarium, but there have been tons of shootouts and tons of failed attempts the security forces have caught. Hysteria is catching. They say another big attack is coming any day now. With the way Arab heads are getting smashed in the territories in the last couple days in Tulkarem, Jenin and Nablus, you figure it is coming soon.

 

I know Zach crossed into the West Bank several times while he was in the north. I knpw he’d almost been shot in Jenin when some Palestinian motorists left him there one night as he tried to reach Afula from Hadera. I know he never went anywhere without the Bedouin kafia now. He figures he’d gotten out of Jenin alive only because the gunmen searched his bag before they tried to shoot him. Apparently they fired in the air and he ran out of Jenin with the kafia tied across his face. I am nervous about stories like this. I knpw he’ll keep going deeper. He’ll try to reach Ramala or Hebron eventually. I worry his luck might run out. The situation is getting much worse. I have no idea what these border runs are good for. No Palestinian is going to join the organization during the current crisis. He thinks differently, but focuses mostly on the wretched of Israel.

 

He always reports back to Andrew, Disrael, Svetlana and me. The four of us are the core of the command in Tel Aviv now that we have cells getting ready to set up operating groups in Pardes Hanna, Acco, Afula, Bet She’ an, Rehovet and Netanya. He says with a few more good conversations and a sit-down we can bring in an Nazareth-based Arab Christian street gang of approximately several dozen in one clean shot. He says he’ll recruit an Arab Christian named Deeb who supplies toiletries, medication, and home appliances to numerous Arab, Jewish and Druze village pharmacies throughout the north. Zach has been getting around using the guy’s truck routes. This guy Deeb is willing to be a captain out of the Arab slums in Haifa where he lives.

 

I think that all these accomplishments in the north mean that we should firm them up with a day trip up north. Andrew continues to insist that we go south. He says if the accomplishments are solid they will still be ready to move in two weeks.

 

He has a lightweight metal bar stool with him. It was a good idea to take it. Rather than set up a stand, Zach wanders the bus station “picturing” people while they wait for their bus. He is getting better at his hustle. He invites a person to sit in the chair and look through his art portfolio, which increasingly has the work of several other young Israelis artists selling through him on consignment. I guess he has about thirty of his own pieces and about twenty consigned works, mostly of fairies and forest creatures. Real girly-girl stuff. After looking through the portfolio, people can then decide to either buy one of his pieces or have one commissioned while they wait. Most opt for what he has. I sit on the stool when my feet get tired. I imagine him sitting on that stool on the edge of the highway hitching back to us.

 

I have long come to the conclusion that Israelis are quite self-obsessed. Of the hundred or so pictures I’ve seen him move, nearly 70% are caricatures. He isn’t getting any better at them though, not realistic in the slightest. All his portraits of people look about the same. While hardly a photo realist, his unique style is getting a good response. If he draws the girl’s tits big and makes her man look strong, no one complains. But his ten shek a drawing commission deal is where he is making most of his money. He can really bang those out in around five minutes. It is cool to watch.

 

He is wearing his white wife beater with the hammer and sickle that his arrogant, motorcycle riding, journalist friend Danny from the Mareev gave him and some white UFO’s. He left quite a lot of clothing up north with his buddy Ben Callahan from the kibbutz. Eventually the sun goes down and the buses start running.

 

***

 

I slee[ through most of the bus ride, my head on his shoulder. It is dark when we arrive in Be’er Sheva around 9 o’clock. The central bus station is much smaller than the one in Tel Aviv. It is all outdoors and is only one level high with red mesh caging with shops on a dirty promenade. Right down the street is the railroad line of the southernmost stop on Israel’s light rail system. The Ramon Crater makes engineering a train line to Eilat too costly for now. The white cabs are everywhere. The sheroot minibuses are lined up for heading to Eilat. They are going at the rate of sixty skeks a person, which I imagine is a little higher than the bus fare and a good deal more cramped. Every time I’ve been to Eilat there were athletes, rluappers, private vehicles and a good amount of coke involved. No sheroots though. As our business will likely not be concluded until some inappropriate hour, these will be my best way back to Tel Aviv. Zach will probably end up sleeping here if past excursions are any indicator.

 

I know he only has what he made in the bus station. I bought him a shwarma from a stand at the station. We deliberate setting up in the central bus station, but decide it might be more fruitful to check out the Old City, which according to a guide has recently been renovated and is not too far of a walk. There is an enormous Mall next to the Central Bus Station. It’s got a white and tan rock foundation, blue glass and a tower on one end that is maybe thirty or forty stories high. It is the biggest tower in the city where the elite have homes and offices. It’s not a big mall really, at least not by American standards, but certainly for Israel. It looks like every other mall I’ve ever seen around the country. What stands out is the tall glass cylinder attached to the side of it giving it something of an aesthetic appeal. It’s getting dark, but the mall shines bright. There are junkies all over the streets begging near the bus station, but armed guards keep them out of the mall.

 

There is a highway that runs parallel to the Central Station. We follow it past a row of palm trees heading in the direction towards the Old City. The dry heat lingers but it is getting cooler as the sun goes down. You forget briefly that you’re in the middle of the desert with this electric strip mine of a city paved over the dunes.

 

When we get there, the Old City doesn’t look all that old. There is a well lit up stone plaza where skaters are doing rail grinds and jumps. There is a restored aqueduct, probably not authentic, that runs along the outside of the square made of white stone into a fountain that I guess they put on in the winter when the valley greens up and the river flows through. This fountain sits on the main connecting street and right up the block is a well-fortified police station next to a rowdy bar filled with Russians. There aren’t too many people out. At least not compared to the Tel Aviv Merkaz or Ben Yahuda Street in Jerusalem, but this seems like the best place for now. I forgot what it is like in the provinces. A massive yellow billboard on the top of one of the adjacent buildings is advertising for supporting the Lubaviture Rabbi. Some one has spray painted “Heroin is God” in Hebrew over it. Welcome to Be’er Sheva.

 

The whole square is made of red or white brick and laid out in a circle with descending tiers. There are a few bars and a few places to buy more Gold Star or falafel. But the Old City is a ghost town at dusk. I help Zach put out his green drop mat over a bench and then drape it in a sheet. He starts taping down the pictures. I put down his wrapped sketchbook and drop a few coins on it. No agaroat, only shekels as coin attracts coin. We lay out his statements of purpose that arty broad Dana wrote for him and at last the sign reading Resistance Art in Hebrew.  Time to go to work. I look at the time on my cell and tell him he gets until midnight and then he’s walking me back to the bus station.

 

***

 

We’ve been sitting here for an hour when he eventually gets somebody to really stop. He has made only one sale and traffic is nil to non-existent. Some arse tells us everybody is at some wild party at a mega club called the Forum. Finally after a whole lot of nothing gets done these two girls show up on the square. One is dressed in all black like a slutty goth, the other is a tomboy with blue coveralls and curly black hair. They wander past and stop. Both of them look very young.

 

“Why in the hell would you leave America to come here,” says the larger girl without any trace of an accent after reading his banner sign.

 

“Political reasons” he responds.

 

I look at him and don’t say anything. It’s all a little too many cards on the table all at once to people who probably don’t get what he’s talking about.

 

“What kind of politics?” asks the tomboy with the curly hair in a thick Israeli accent.

 

“Communist minded,” I smirk.

 

“What does that mean?” the slutty looking goth says. She has no accent at all.

 

“Politics is just a dirty word for the recovery and protection of people’s rights,” Zach tells them matter of factly, “Rights you were tricked into thinking you had all along.”

 

“And what is there to do in Be’er Sheva?” the little tomboy asks.

 

“Southern recruiting,” I say while firing up a Marlborough Menthol smoke.

 

“Recruiting for what?” asks the goth.

 

“Change making, sweetheart,” Zach continues.

 

“Wrong country, bad choice. Nothing changes here and nothing ever will” the slutty goth states.

 

“Says people who don’t like to dirty their hands getting what’s theirs by right,” I respond.

 

“But what’s a revolution ever good for?” asks the slutty goth who sounds Canadian.

 

“To end the violence in the land,” the little tomboy cuts in.

 

“Which side’s violence?” the goth sort of snarls at her for taking the side of strangers.

 

“Both side’s so-called leaders are equally to blame. Both side’s people have little say in perpetuating the bloodletting,” Zach says.

 

“So let me sort this out. You guys want to make revolution in Israel?” the goth asks.

 

“That’s his plan,” I nod.

 

She smiles at me with fakery. I don’t smile back. I think this slutty goth just wants Zach’s balls on her chin. The tomboy is a more interesting a candidate.

 

“There’s a guy you ought to meet,” the little tomboy says.

 

I’ve determined she’s probably a little girl who likes big boy things. She can’t be older than 14.

 

“He’s a local rocker. Plays in band with some guys we also know. I say this because I think you have a lot to talk about. He very political,” the tomboy says.

 

“When could we meet him?” asks Zach.

 

“Right now if you want. He’s probably over drinking at this rundown park and band shell near the edge of the city in the district Noat Loan,” the goth tells us.

 

“I’d like that, but I need to sell a couple more pictures before I close up. If you got an orange I’ll call you in a couple hours,” Zach says.

 

“I’ll buy one for thirty NIS if you come with us to meet this kid,” the little tomboy replies. She seems adamant.

 

“Which one you want then?” I say so Zach can’t object.

 

“I’ll take the one with devil versus Che,” the tomboy responds sharp as a tack.

 

I notice she is wearing a small silver, rebel star pendant around her neck.

 

“What are your names?” Zachariah asks.

 

“I’m Ester. This is Sahar,” says the slutty goth who sounds Canadian.

 

“A pleasure. I’m Zachariah Artstein. This is my partner Maya Rose.”

 

He’s real into the ‘remember my first and last name thing.’ It’s formal. I’m his partner, eh? Partner in crime.

 

Sahar hands him a crumpled twenty and a ten-shek coin, which is small fortune for him. He pockets them and starts breaking down the stand.

 

“So, when you guys say revolution, what political camp are you coming from?” asks the tomboy Sahar.

 

“That’s a big question for an Israeli school girl,” I say.

 

“Everybody is always more than they appear to be right, Zach” the girl Ester says.

 

“Indeed. Personally, I’m a communist. Ms. Rose doesn’t entertain such labels. The organization we are members of however is quite deliberately non-partisan. We want civil rights and demilitarization.”

 

“What’s the name of your little organization?” asks Sahar.

 

Ha Irgun.”

 

The Organization? What kind of fucking name is ‘the Organization’,” she smirks.

 

Sort of the way I first reacted to the name Zach came up with. Who do you think you are, Tyler Durden, I’d said to him once.

 

“It’s the name of original fighting units of the Jacobin Club in the French Revolution, the name of original combat units that drove the British out of Palestine and blew up the King David, the name of a wide range of Russian proto-anarchist formations, as well as the title for a group without a name launching a movement without a color.”

 

“That is an ominous little fucking title. You forgot Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge. They were called the Organization in the beginning too,” interjects Ester impressing me for the first time.

 

“It’s an ominous fucking line of work,” I say.

 

“What does your group do?” Sahar asks, ever the precocious little fucker.

 

“Right now we are setting up units around the country to engage in political education, propaganda work and training lieutenants to command flying columns.”

 

“What’s a flying column?” asks Sahar.

 

“Irregular paramilitary forces that resist fixed unit combat for asymmetrical strike and go attacks. The Irish came up with it,” Ester tells her companion.

 

These young rebels gravitate to Zach, don’t they? Or to the flags he flies with his pictures. You wouldn’t stop unless you knew the references he made in the art or thought he was cute and wanted to screw the artist.

 

“Exactly,” he says impressed now, “And three weeks ago we established ourselves on this front.”

 

“And your bottom line?” Ester asks us.

 

“It’s the People’s Republic of the Middle East, the united nations of the desert we are fighting for,” I say remembering the kid’s rhetoric from Jerusalem.

 

“Why should we give the Arabs anything?” Asks Ester, “Why fight our own government, which is crazy enough, to put Arabs in charge of their own countries as well as ours. Try selling that to anybody around here.”

 

Zach starts to respond but I cut him off.

 

“Well, we just figured since you guys are willing to slaughter each other for a two-hour by eight-hour strip of turf that neither you nor the Palestinians can actually wrest from each other without the business of all out genocide; we just figured on a long enough time line you’d turn your guns on the leaders who keep this all gong and not on each other,” I say.

 

“That’s as wild an idea as it is optimistic about a large number of factors. How many people have you actually convinced to enlist in your little shadow army?”

 

“A few dozen.” Actually quite shy of a true dozen actually committed beyond rhetoric, I think to myself.

 

“How many of them are Army age and older?” Ester retorts.

 

“Less than two,” Zach shoots back. “If we don’t recruit people before the Army and the war gets um and then it’s too late. You’re country is one big armed military-politico indoctrination camp.”

 

“You said front. Where are the other fronts?” asks Sahar.

 

Now there’s a question that I, too, was curious about, because I thought Andrew and I invented this thing with him.

 

“There are quite a few. I cannot gauge the numbers of the full international movement, but the man who brought me in said this body was active across the globe in hundreds of countries, operating under thousands of different names with one objective.”

 

“Which is?” asks Ester.

 

“To smash the international state system and replace it with a system that upholds human rights,” I respond.

 

I know his all his lines by now.

 

“How many other members, other than the ones you’ve recruited, have you met?” asks Sahar.

“I only know the man who brought me onboard,” Zach says.

 

All news to me.

 

“God, this sounds a lot like a terrorist group,” smirks Ester.

 

“We believe strictly in non-violence to non combatants.”

 

“Small favor as everyone in Israel is on their way to the Army or is in the Army or is on reserve in the Army until the age of 45. That doesn’t rule too many of us out.”

 

“Violence upon civilians is a tactic we will not reciprocate. But turning the other cheek will get you killed,” he says.

 

He folds everything up into its case and sticks the case into his black satchel bag.

 

“I don’t think non-violent revolution is possible,” Sahar responds, “Force is our method with everything. If you try to set up group here, they will dismantle it the second they perceive threat.”

 

“Not if we gain the right network of support and tread carefully,” Zach retorts.

 

“Explain to me how propositioning random strangers on a city street about a revolutionary organization is acting careful. We could be in Shebac for all you know,” exclaims Ester.

 

“But something tells me you’re not,” he says to her, “You’re too young. You’re too educated and we haven’t truly revealed more than rhetoric.”

 

“You’re right. I’m not in Shebac. I’m not even old enough to be in the Army yet, but never forget we have one of the best intelligence gathering forces in the world. If you are serious about setting up this organization, you are going to have to be a lot more subtle in how you recruit,” says Ester.

           

“Zach has a good way to read the people he brings on. And we’ll keep it tight as a drum when it comes to the things that get people in trouble. And they are too busy fighting Islamists to spot leftist radicals like us.”

 

Zach and little Sahar look at each other each sizing the other up.

 

“Let’s talk more about this in district Noat Loan,” Sahar finally says.

 

***

 

Ester is on the phone with that guy Gavroche and it’s two hours to midnight. He agrees to meet us and Zach says he’ll find me as sheroot to get back to Tel Aviv afterwards. Zach and the girls promise to walk me back to the central bus station. There are quite a lot of junkies and abandoned buildings that I’m not getting yanked into.

 

We’ve been walking for about twenty minutes along one of the city’s main north-south thoroughfares toward a neighborhood called Shkonah Dalet. Most of the city housing blocs are named after letters. I infer that only the good areas get real names. There are abandoned buildings right next to new high-rise developments everywhere. Ester says the city is trying to drive out the junky-squatter community by knocking down all the old buildings from pre-Allenby Be’er Sheva; but a ton of them are old enough to be historic landmarks. Many of them are considered historic treasures and the city has been ordered not to tear down anything without loads of paperwork and bureaucracy from the National Archeological Society in Jerusalem.

 

“Gavroche will meet us in fifteen minutes,” Ester reports.

 

“Aight,” says Zach posting up on a concrete barrier on the side of the central highway.

 

“Do you have somewhere to stay in Be’er Sheva?” Sahar asks him.

 

“I was gonna squat out in one of the abandoned buildings I saw on my way over here.”

 

“That isn’t smart idea,” warns Sahar.

 

“I can take care of myself.”

 

“Stay in those buildings if you want be raped or robbed. They filled with drug addicts. They’ll murder you and steal your stuff when you go sleep. They’re also littered with dirty needles and garbage and bird shit,” Sahar adds.

 

“We will find a place for you to sleep,” Ester promises him.

 

***

 

Near midnight we make our way to a park in the Dalet neighborhood of northern Be’er Sheva with a gang of some twenty odd kids. There are a bunch of kids smoking and drinking in the lot behind the row of apartment complexes on the main strip. They look like Israel’s version of punk rock. The air is dry and dead, but cold enough at night for leather jackets. It is dark. The only lights come from the electric white light grid on the housing projects as most of the street lamps are shot out. There is a string of beat up old shoes laced up over a wire above the street. Sahar says it is dope-dealing spot. We are introduced to the other kids. Their names mostly escape me. We are waiting for Gavroche.

 

He eventually rolls up wearing green coveralls. His nose is pierced and he has a small Jewphro that hasn’t been washed in awhile. He arrives with a skinny little girl that looks black Russian. She is petite, dressed all in beige Air Force khakis with a thin black overcoat. Her hair is pulled up and held in place with a thin metal hairpin. Her eyes are painted like a predator, like an actress out of Faster Pussy Cat; KILL! KILL!

 

There is some base line chit of chat and introduction. Their names are Gavroche and Katusha. His family was once Moroccan, hers was once Ukrainian, but they are Israelis now.

 

“Why are you here?” Katusha asks firmly and finally.

 

“Because I’m at war with my America,” Zach responds.

 

“Why take that upon yourself? And what makes you think the people here will support that notion and course,” she continues

 

“Because the chosen people don’t like building pyramids and sacrificing first born sons.”

 

“But we do like Levi jeans, punk rock our MTV,” responds Gavroche.

 

Katusha watches my every movement saying nothing else. Zach spins his yarn, makes his sales pitch. Then Gavroche asks the question of the rebel.

 

“So what is the real purpose of all this?”

 

“The great lie is that there is no purpose. It’s the world’s oldest lie. Ignore what you see now because one day you’ll be rewarded, one day you’ll get yours. All that Dos messiah and world to come horseshit keeps us from improving our lot. We plan to make a stand here in Ertez Yisrael. We need to level the playing field so that more people have access to the basic good things of life. That’s the great fear of Babylon. That people might come to think they have some right to things not being nasty, brutish and short.”

 

“Babylon?” Katusha smirks.

 

She says something to Gavroche in Hebrew.

 

“And how does one burn Babylon?” Gavroche asks with murder in his eyes.

 

“Anything can be done when a people becomes well organized,” I say to him.

 

“This otriad you have called us here to join, what would you have us do?” asks Gavroche,

 

Katusha jumps back into the discourse,

 

“There will be a lot of blood,” she says, “you’re both much crazier than our friend said. You speak of these things like one might describe a chess game. You are matter of factly stating that we take on the most highly militarized state in existence other than maybe your country of origin. You do realize that this country is armed to the teeth and adamantly pro-American across the board? And that the Pan-Arab street wants to drive us into the sea not unite with our people against their local governments?”

 

“In my mind this makes it the most logical place to start. We attack at a point of improbable victory, so improbable it is left unguarded to such an internal threat,” Zach retorts.

 

“It is a plan for pure and utter suicide you speak of,” Katusha tells us quietly.

 

Gavroche just grins and wipes his brow. It looks like he’s thinking hard about what Zach is saying or maybe he just still thinks we’re crazy.

 

“Well let’s hear the particulars of your plan,” Gavroche says.

 

Zach breaks it down over a Noblisse cigarette.

 

“First, we will group the settlements, farms, villages, towns, kibbutzim, moshaviim and cities into fourteen regions each named for the 12 tribes of Israel and the 2 Arab tribes of Ishmael and Esau. Each tribe or division will establish a command city. One unit, in each command city will coordinate the logistics for a network of cells within a given division. One captain from each region will sit on a cabinet of the leadership, which will command the 14 divisions, bound by our program and operating guide. No big moves until we’ve got soldiers organized in all 14 regions into viable flying columns. What we have is a rough outline for a structure and a one page written preamble on why we fight. Everything else that Ha Irgun becomes will be up to those that take over as captains and lieutenants. The day you join you will have an equal say on what will be the master plan for your division, Be’er Sheva, of course, being a command city.”

 

“The tribe of Judah of Shimon?” asks Katusha.

 

Judah. Shimon is Eilat, and Esau is the Bedouin triangle and National Parks,” I say.

 

“The overlap with the crutch of Hebrew religion makes me wince,” Gavroche says.

 

“There won’t be orders coming down from a high command. You’ll get no resources, no support and no reinforcements for the first year. Cells will work to circulate our program among the various areas of the country and train their own men and women under the leadership of their regional command without directives from the Cabinet. No one will move against the government until we’ve put infrastructure in place for the long, hard fight.”

 

“Until then you plan to keep everyone in the dark about each others identities?” asks Katusha.

 

“Only key people in each division’s command will know the identities of a few other division captains. We need to minimize a compromised unit or cell’s ability to neutralize other commands if captured.”

 

“And this organization will be open only to Jews?” Gavroche asks.

 

“That would give us less than half the people of this country,” Zach explains.

 

“We need the Bedouins as much as the Dosiim. We need Egyptians in the Sinai and Jordanians across the river. We need Filipino and Southeast Asian migrant workers, the Romanians, the Russians, the Indian Jews, both tribes of Ethiopian Jews and the Black Israelites, too. We need the Arab Christians and the Muslim Arab Israelis as well as the Druze, Jewish Iraqis, and not mention the Yemenites and Moroccan Mizrahiim,” I tell them.

 

“And fags and Palestinians, too, no doubt,” sputters Gavroche.

 

“That is correct. Fags and Palestinians also can pull triggers and field a general strike,” Zachariah tells him.

 

“To even speak of doing this with Palestinian involvement is heresy,” he continues.

 

He stares at us. Then smirks again insanely.

 

“I guess I’m very amused. You’re creative for so-called communists. I’ll give you that. With this little plan of yours, you have to do a great deal of cutting and pasting to just survive.”

 

“Will you join us then, my brother?” Zach asks.

 

“Why such battle, for a piece of desert?” asks Katusha. Unlike Gavroche she has no accent at all, but slow pauses between every few words.

 

“The deep desert of the Negev and Sinai is to be our shield. Great empires have dashed themselves attempting to uproot an entrenched desert people from the mountains of the deep. The Sinai alone can shelter over one million Bedouin from the wrath of the Egyptian state. The IDF has set up fortifications and bunkers all over the desert that we can take over and use as a great fortress. The ones in the Sinai are already under Bedouin control.”

 

“Like Masada?” Gavroche snorts. “You’re asking us to join an organization that doesn’t have an established name or program. You’re asking us to partake in what sounds like a terrorist plot that seeks to wreak havoc in my country for the purpose of undermining yours.”

 

“I’m asking you to join an association of women and men that will bring together an irregular force composed of every race, religion, and creed of this land. I am asking you to help me make this organization a reality and to set your people on a path to get free.”

 

“How many are you?” Sahar asks. She’s been listening in on the sidelines.

 

“Right here in Israel? I’d say a dozen solid, four dozen more briefed and deciding,” I say before Zach can aggrandize anything.

 

“It appears we caught you during the early stages of this plot,” Gavroche mutters.

 

“Like he said, if you become involved, your command will be what you make of it. Ha Irgun will become what you decide to shape it into.”

 

Gavroche looks on calculating the costs of any future benefits. He and Katusha lock eyes and she shrugs then fires up an L&M.

 

“Ester will find you a place to sleep. In the morning we will tell you whether we become involved. By morning you will either have Katusha and I as comrades or you will not. I want your promise though on something though first.”

 

“Go on,” says Zach.

 

“We would demand true and absolute autonomy. Not gonna tolerate some agitated refugees dictating how I should make revolution in my own damn country”

 

“But of course.”

 

The two men clasp hands. We women nod to each other.

 

A friend of Gavroche’s named Big Guy, a massive wall of punk rock muscle, drives us in silence back to the Central Bus Station. I am exhausted, but it feels like Zach is getting somewhere. If Gavroche gives him an okay, then he can stand to bring a massive circle of punk rockers and street toughs into this Be’er Sheva Regional Command Unit. I realize more and more that Zach says very different things to different people. This might get us in trouble one day.

 

Big Guy waits engine running and Zach walks over to an empty sheroot and gives the guy a five hundred NIS to drive me all the way back to my house on Hayorkon and Allenby. I try and stop him, but he’s easy come, easy go with his money. Where he’s suddenly become so flush with cash I have no idea. We have a tight and lingering embrace.

 

“I’ll see you at the Deep,” he says to me.

 

“Stay out of the sun neshama,” I say kissing him on the cheek.

 

***

 

I wake up alone in my bed in Tel Aviv a block from the sea about 20 hours later. The sheroot brought me home around 6 am. I’ve slept like I was drugged.

 

The apartment is empty and I help myself to a glass of orange juice from the fridge. A note on the bedroom door says that Veronica my stripper roommate had to go meet someone in Eilat for two weeks and that the rent is stuffed in her leather jacket pocket in her room. The note also mentions that Zach called and he left a number I can reach him in Ashdod. I pack up my gear and let myself out. What a weird evening. Lots of desert at dusk.

 

I’m out of minutes on my Talkman so I throw on some clothes and head out to the store. Sweat drips down my brow and it won’t be long before my t-shirt is drenched. It’s humid even at night in this city. I buy a carton of Marlboro Menthol Lights, a huge bottle of cold mineral water and a talkman card then take a brief walk on the Boardwalk. I call the Ashdod number a little after 8.

 

“What did they decide?” I ask him on the orange.

 

“They want in. Gavroche, Katusha, Sahar, Ester, Big Guy and a handful of others right away.”

 

“Nice job, kiddo.”

 

“To both of us. Gavroche and I tramped over to this underground Punk venue in Ashdod for a concert. Gavroche wants me to spend the week in the south so he can take me around a few towns and I can help explain Ha Irgun to lots of local kids.”

 

“Try and find some members older than eighteen, sweetheart.”

 

“If I do they’ll all be foreigners or Bedui.”

 

“Don’t be gone too long, brother of mine,” I say to him.

 

“Don’t miss me too much,” he responds.

 

“I stopped missing you yesterday.”

 

“Ashdod is quiet and serene.”

 

“You’ll put an end to that, kid.”

מ

“No nonsense motherfuckers. The Hebrew people were chosen to be the most receptive to God’s prophets. God’s word is unintelligible to most. It is corrupted and distorted by nearly all those who hear it. The Hebrew tradition allows its nation to bear messengers with a larger tolerance for the word. The Hebrew religion is both a spiritual and an intellectual discipline. Consider yourself chosen only in that you have to bear the hardest message ever heard,” says my no nonsense boss, partner and friend, Andrew the Hustler.

 

We are sitting in the large living room of the penthouse he shares with a few too many freeloading people. I don’t come by that often because I live so far away. He has called this evening a dinner party, but there are more words than food.  It is just a huge bowl of spaghetti, several loaves of bread and some white wine.

 

I am not a quiet broad, not at all, but it’s getting really stuffy in here. The boys are laying on the God talk, passing a mike between them preaching someone’s good word about the battles we are soon to face. Andrew has opened up his house to a great flood of people whom Zach has collected on the street corners and squares of greater Tel Aviv. The boys are having a lot of fun. They are like MCs in free style battle. They raise the ante each time they pass the mike. There are close to forty strangers here tonight listening to the Avinadav and Zachariah show go down.

 

The two leaders are standing in front of the group, Zach in his white linen suit and Andrew in a black one.

 

“Now, my chosen sisters and brothers,” interludes Mr. Artstein, “We want to talk to you about why we fight. We want to lay down why you should make the sacrifices the Organization says are necessary. Why it is time to tear the wool from off your eyes and storm the gates of the temple-palace. Not for money, not for power but because the things inside that palace defile us all and oppress our kind.”

 

I’ve only seen this show once before on a street corner in London as a child. I have a feeling they have practiced and memorized this speech. In their own ways Andrew and Zach are both salesmen as well as performers. I see Gavroche and Katusha from Be’er Sheva in the back the room. At least I think it’s them.

“Brothers and sisters, we welcome you home, back to the front lines of the longest battle we ever known. I welcome you home even if you’ve lived here your whole life because you’re going see this thing with some new eyes,” Andrew begins.

“We are here to tell you why the Organization chooses to fight, and why we want to you to join us shoulder to shoulder,” Zach continues.

The little street artist appears to be channeling the ghost of one of the dead black revolutionaries he admires. He pauses and then passes the mike for Andrew to take the cadence over.

“We cross the line between apathy and action when we decide that it is not only our aim but also our duty and our right to question the integrity of a system that embraces wealth as a status symbol, a system that breeds self-indulgence, rewards greed and has repeatedly taught us that the meek shall not inherit the Earth.”

“Those in power want you believe the battle is against the Palestinians and other Arab states. But the battle is at home. In our schools. In our churches and synagogues and mosques. And in our streets. But the eye of the storm, the devil you must grapple with if you have any hope of victory, is the devil in you. You must first struggle against your own conditioning to make yourself believe that there is good in humanity. Our victory is inevitable if we fight generation to generation with freedom dreams lodged in our minds, bodies and souls.”

“Despite this call to you women and men assembled here, the domestic crises have been made to appear insignificant in the light of a mounting international conflict. The Knesset has always required a negative external force to distract us from our domestic plights. Our government would have us believe that the front line is somewhere in the Gaza Strip or the West Bank, perhaps plotted in Damascus, Beirut and Tehran. That the fight for freedom is being fought and won in the settlements of Hebron and Ariel. The front line is here,” Zach points to his own head.

“What of the political prisoners in the camp complexes? What of the disappeared? What of the oligarchies in Latin America and Central Asia that we protect and arm to support our security and economic interests? What of the suffering in the ghettos and the collective poverty of the Askinazi conscience?”

Back to Andrew.

“This government spends obscenely more on defense than on social programs. We can wage a sixty-year war, but can’t get more than half the kids in the country to finish high school. We trumpet our first world trappings but our people live and act like those of a developing nation, each ethnic ghetto for itself. We are a pawn of a massive overseas empire and a forward command for that empire’s interests in the region. Our nation has a basic law, but no constitution. We throw people in camps without a trial of their peers and we don’t even directly elect our own prime minister. Does this uphold the promise of freedom and democracy? Is this the nation we envisioned? I say, fuck the dumb shit. It’s time for revolution, brothers and sisters. Time to pick up the gun in revolt.”

Zach chimes back in.

“The Israeli State is neither a democracy nor even a republic. One must differentiate between a democracy and a republic. Furthermore one must differentiate between a republic and a corporate oligarchy, which is a governing body of the ruthless corporate elite who dominate the crumbling institutions of our supposed democracy, including the Army, media, and big business as well as control the gross aid from the one Israeli political party with two faces. This Sharon government is stacked with ultra-religious third party crazies that enforce shabbos, prevent interfaith marriage and advocate deporting the remainder of Israel’s hardworking and surprisingly loyal Arab population.”

Andrew now picks up.

“The real political power remains in the hands of this corporate oligarchy. Our people have become too complacent, all too willing to let others decide our fate. We are asked to conform and submit in the name of security. Israelis have been reduced to stagnant apathy and fail to comprehend the origin of this paralysis. We are an incredibly unique society as a nation of brutalized refugees who over ran a colony, subjugated its continuously subjugated local people and then turned to further brutality. This false promise of security has been given to the people as a substitute for political empowerment and true social mobility We, brothers and sisters, live in a modern apartheid state, bank rolled by the only super power left standing.”

I see them all. A few of them squint to follow the English. Clusters have formed so that the details can be translated into Russian and Arabic. All the Askinazis speak pretty descent English. We have brought them here for shwarma and wine to tell them to enlist in our otriad, Ha Irgun, the only show playing like this in the entire nation. Zach allows a reflective silence before he takes the money shot.

“This country was not founded on the principle that when the government or ruling authority ceases to insure the natural rights of the individual, it is the duty of the people to rebel. That is the rhetoric of my own land’s broken freedom songs. Israel was founded after the slaughter of the Shoah to safeguard what was left of our beleaguered tribe. I see people here tonight who might not consider themselves members of this tribe. I see Black Israelites who were led here by the Prophet Ben-Ami and nearly twenty-five years later haven’t been recognized as Jews, given citizenship and face deportation at the whim of the state. I see Russians who don’t even consider themselves Jewish who fled the former Soviet Union as the last stop to Brighton Beach. I see a couple Bedouin and Arab Israelis that certainly consider themselves Muslims but are called traitors by the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza because they stayed to make a life in Israel where they had always lived. There are more tribes gathered in this country than stars in the sky. If we cannot agree we are Jews, then we should agree we are all children of the tribe of Avram. If not that, then we can all say we are a nation of refugeek.”

“What we must strive for is a true democracy, a rule by the people, not by those who falsely represent us, wolves in sheep’s clothing. A pluralistic society, not just one dominated by Askinazi Jews. Our slogan is all power to the people and this is our objective. Burning inside every person is the desire for a better world. We fight because if we do not, our government will carry out genocide and exploitation in our name. We fight because as Israelis we are held accountable for what our government does. It is not only our right, but also our duty to fight. If we do nothing, we enable the American iron heel to break our backs and stand upon our collective neck. We enable our own government to be but a pawn to the new Roman Empire.”

“My brothers and sisters, this is your call to arms,” Zach concludes.

The clapping begins in the back of the room, and then catches on. These people have never heard words like these uttered about their own nation. A couple of fists go up from the brothers. Gavroche salutes Andrew. Men of many confessions and colors pat each other on the back. The women and men assembled begin banging their fists on the tabletops. The forty gathered here lose themselves in erupted applause.

Andrew drops a big grey bucket on the table.

 

“Thank you everyone for your time. We need kesef for gas, need kesef for bus and rail tickets. We need kesef for printing a newspaper, distributing propaganda. We need kesef to buy some arms. We know you all feel what was said. There are envelopes and index cards on the table. Leave your name, city, number and email if you wanna enlist. Fill them envelopes with NIS if you can contribute. Just don’t walk out the door and put yourself on the side of our enemies by doing nothing. Battle lines are being drawn and we need you all by our side, shoulder to shoulder, ready to take back the nation.”

 

I slip out the door for a smoke while the two rock stars take questions, money and membership cards. I feel a bit of resentment, mostly at myself for not asserting more of a role in there. They wouldn’t have stopped me. I’m just not sure yet. I can play along, but it is a scary bottom line. I am looking at the sketch Zach gave me that night we met and see an enormous picture of one of his dreams. It is all of us at the Jerusalem city walls holding back a vast army. I am bleeding. Zach and Andrew have been shot a couple times. The picture is nearly the same as a reoccurring dream I’ve been having of us all getting killed over this organization.

 

I sit outside having my smoke wishing Zach would come outside and let me know I am part of the leadership or at least part of team. I’ve been plotting with them since the beginning and now I have to pry out what the next move is.

 

I want Zach to come downstairs, put his arm around me and sweetly say,

 

“How did we do up there?”

 

I imagine I’d respond, “Playing cards with you two is like washing your feet with your socks on.”

 

It is an old line from a B movie. But he never comes down. He is organizing.

נ

I went on another day trip to Be’er Sheva in the very beginning of August. The young, tough Gavroche went right to work enlisting the local, disaffected youth of the urban Be’er Sheva sprawl. He is not a great thinker. He is a young man of action. What he likes best is that there isn’t too much of a preset plan. He didn’t have to read anything to join. That is the beauty of it that makes so many people just plug in and fight. For years people have said things like this are only in the movies or in Russian literature.

 

None of that is important anymore because we are a machine. You come by. You plug in, or maybe enlist is a better word because by now we have written our own kaaba, an internal proficiency and placement exam. You learn about it because a friend has signed up. You see a group of kids learning how to take a soldier’s weapon, see them practicing martial arts in a park, and then one night it hist you. That fucking heroin dealer that used to be in that park is gone. So are the junkies posted up on the playground. You notice the gang graffiti on the bombed out buildings has been painted over. Sometimes just grey paint. Sometimes a small mural. Sometimes an odd black pictograph you’ve never seen in your life. A food basket ends up in front of your house. Just a little bundle, but if you’re hard up enough any bit helps. It comes again a few days later courtesy of Ha’Irgun. You pick up someone hitchhiking and they put you on to our righteous revolution. That someone is almost always the young Zachariah Artstein making rounds with his old buddy Hadas.

 

Zach gets in trouble anytime we go up the hill to Jerusalem. The Mugavnkiim arrested him and held him 48 hours when he tried crossing from East Jerusalem into NablusBalata Refugee Camp. He lost his passport in the desert and it is really lucky they didn’t hand him over to the American embassy or deport him. On a trip before this one, we got caught up in some Arab quarter unrest and had to hide for a few hours in a metal shuttered market stall with a couple of identical twin Palestinian brothers and their father as the Mugav storm troopers flooded the market with tear gas and shots rang out all afternoon.

 

But by the second week of August we’re solid in Tel Aviv. Mostly Black Israelites and European émigrés. The base of the Cabinet and flagship chapter is called the Manasseh Command. Our network is based out of the Deep Leisure Club and Avinadav’s loft on the edge of town. We’ve secured a printing facility and are working on secure lines of online communication.

 

We are also solid in Be’er Sheva led by Gavroche, Katusha, Sahar and a small army of punk rock kids and working class hooligans. We call the Be’er Sheva group the Judah Command. Out in the desert these young fighters are training on M1 rifles and learning Krav Maga. We are expanding to cells in Ashdod, Arad and among the Bedouin settlements.

 

We are solid in Haifa too, a large cluster of Arab Christian youth led by the young preacher Deeb al Hadid and some Askinazi art students at the university on the top of Mt. Carmel who follow Zach’s former kibbutz girlfriend Hadas. We call the fighters up in the Galilee the Asher Command.

 

We recently established several three to five person cells in Pardes Hanna among Zach’s Russian immigrant friends. In Akko there are a couple of Arab Israeli girls who own a tattoo parlor. Afula never seems that solid. The Bet She’an cell consists of a kibbutz hippy and his boyfriend. We’ve signed up a couple of paramedics in Rehovet. There are more Russian street kid friends of Zach’s in Sheroot Lummi and in Netanya. Right now we don’t have any representation in Jerusalem.

 

There is just one single mission. We will drive the U.S. influence out of Israel and we will make a stand for a government that upholds human rights. I have spent a good many nights wondering if Zach’s communism will set us free or just get us killed for nothing.

 

When I was a young girl I just hoped I’d go to heaven. I pictured heaven as this endless beach with tall white castles and all the people I’d ever loved are waiting for me to get there, waiting for me to come home. I wonder if God values the work we are doing even if I’m not sure about there being a God. I don’t think I can ever make myself truly believe. And now I know that the only heaven I might ever live to see is the one I am ready to fight for. The heaven we are creating right here, right now. Our Zion in the wilderness.

 

A Romanian Jewish girl named Noaah is making the rounds to collect donations for our relief baskets. Gavroche’s ladylove Katusha is editing the articles that will go into the first edition of our mini-newspaper. The little ones they called Sahar and ‘Molly the Fairy’ are sweeping up a massive abandoned building called the Bedouin School House where Zach and Molly live in a room under the great stairs. She has become his little protégé. She follows him everywhere. The little Russian half pint street urchin has been made homeless because of an insane mother and an abusive father who is a self professed ‘anarchist.’ She is just 13 and has enormous glasses, bright outlandish clothing and little braids died different shades of pink. She adores Zach and believes in the ideas of Ha’Irgun completely. Tribe Judah has a wide range of child soldiers, but it is the only command with predominantly Jewish members. Asher is largely Christian Arabs and Manasseh is mostly foreign expats and Black Israelites.

 

Three weeks ago the Bedouin School House in Be’er Sheva was overrun with junkies until Gavroche, Big Guy, Zachariah and few others from the our unit’s paramilitary arm EGROPH flooded the building with diverted sprinkler lines and drove them out. The junkies moved into the abandoned military base on the other side of the electric neon Old City.  Ha’Irgun took over the enormous two-story Ottoman structure destined for many years to be a science center. The boys padlocked the doors shut, dragged in meeting tables, bricked up some windows and called it the KDAA, some made up word surely of Zach’s creation.

 

You can’t teach what we are preaching because we are making it up as we go along. And there is no one to compete with. Hamas, Islamic Jihad and the Al-Aqsa Martyr Brigades keep everyone, for lack of a better phrase, pretty fucking terrorized.  While the second Intifada and our little revolution unfold around us so out of control, I never stop to think which among us might be the victims of either of these little wars. The Palestinian war ever punctuated with a bullet or a bang. Ours new and in the shadows, but we’ll have our bangs and bullets before too long.

 

***

Zach and I left Be’er Sheva on August 9 bound for a third try at organizing the Capital city into a regional command to be dubbed Ephraim. We get there around noon and get lunch at Mike’s Place Jerusalem, a sister joint to the one managed by my close friend Canadian Dave. We take our time eating. I think the kid is a little burnt out. He’s been busy and never likes coming to the holiest of holies. We are both more Tel Aviv kind of people. We male our way down to King George Street, one of the huge thoroughfares. Zach looks in his bag.

“Fuck,” he mutters.

“What is it?”

“I’m all out of art.”

Three blocks ahead of us we heard a BANG and I nearly jump in the air. We are frozen for a second and then watch the smoke and dust settle. The Palestinians have blown up a pizza place up the street. People are screaming. The place is a hectic mess. Zach slumps in to a green bench on the road and takes off his hat, as he sometimes does when he gets impassioned or upset. The cloud of dust and the screams of wounded people aren’t stopping.  Zach flags a cab and tells the driver to take us back to Tel Aviv.

The Sbarro restaurant suicide bombing took place on around 2pm. The blast killed 15 people, including 7 small children and wounded around 130. Both Hamas and the Islamic Jihad immediately claim joint responsibility.

He only says one thing on the way back to Tel Aviv, with soldiers and emergency medical personnel swarming to seal off the city.

 

“I ain’t gonna be caught dead in that city again.”

 

 

ס

 

Always read into shout outs. I know that from working in an underground hip hop club like The Deep. I know it better for my three months of work for the rolling rebel party ball, The Organization.

Most of what Zachariah writes about any collaboration we have is greatly overstated. According to the mythology he perpetrates, the Ten Point Program is the joint product of many representatives from the many ‘tribes’ of the country.

As far as I can figure, this is all we’ve got: A Sephardic Israeli, Gavroche from the City of Beer Sheva; a Russian Israeli, Katusha, Gavroche’s lover from the city of Be’er Sheva via Kiev; a Mizrahi Israeli named Hadas from the town of Ramat Ishai; an Ethiopian with a parent from each of the two tribes named Lina from Bat Yam near Tel Aviv; a young Haredi Dos named Aa’ron from a Yeshiva in Jerusalem; a Bedouin named Ditri who was born in Tel Sheva, but lived in exile in Tel Aviv; the son of an Arab Christian preacher named Deeb al Hadid born in the city of Haifa; a queer from Tel Aviv named Gay Avi. In addition to these people, we can also consider the following people a part of our endeavor: The little Russian street urchin that follows Zach around country named Molly the Fairy; the wealthy, cynical Russian debutante Svetlana from Moscow, residing for whatever reason in Tel Aviv; the well-educated albeit very young Ashkinazi students Sahar and Ester who has a Canadian father; and their more working class Romanian friends Noah and Big Guy. Zach runs everything by his defacto older brother for the season, Ben Callahan, an Irishman pretending to be a Jew. Few Southeast Asians, Indian Jews or Palestinians ever see the document simply because Zach really only speaks English. He has told me that some Druze have been examining our manifest but are not totally onboard yet.

A lot of people have signed the draft copy. But realistically Zach, Andrew and I came up with the list of demands almost the second time that we met. Zachariah wrote the whole thing on the home computer of a non-affiliated friend of his named David Levy, the founder of Israel’s greatest, first and only Ska band ‘the Beer 7’s,’ whose nickname is ‘the original rude boy.’ And sure he asked the opinions of all those people who’s name appears on the ‘secret and official’ first draft, but what I’m getting at is he likes to share credit for work he mostly does alone.

For the past week Zach has been collecting signatures on something we called the TEN POINT PROGRAM FOR THE REVOLTION IN ISRAEL. It reads something like this, but god knows how many changes have taken place between what I signed and what someone might read now.

“To every one of us the revolution in Israel means something different. To some, it is the creation of a society founded on economic justice and mutual aid. To others it means an end to endless war and grinding poverty. To others still it is a means to an end to halt the cycling ethnic and religious violence. To the women and men living in our streets it means a vocational training and a living wage.

The Ten Point Program is our list of demands delivered to the government of Israel and a foundation to the future society we seek to create. They are what we fight for and what we believe; they are the fundamentals of our revolution; and the first of many rights we seek to restore to the peoples of this land.

  1. An end to foreign war and illegal settlement.

We believe that any use of force that has the purpose of acquiring territory, expanding hegemony, making economic gains, or the imposition of culture upon another region or people is against the ideal of freedom. Not only do we stand against military conflict, we are equally devoted to the right of any and all people to practice their religion, culture, or creed without fear of forced submission by another power.

  1. A universal free and equal health care system.

We believe that every person is entitled to free healthcare and that healthcare is a human right. We believe that access to medicine, sanitary hospitals, and capable medical professionals must be available to any person who is in need. It must be ensured that every person can seek reliable medical attention without exception.

  1. A universal free and equal educational system.

We believe that a solid education is the solution to many of the nation’s problems. Education is an essential tool to abolish poverty, end discrimination, and promote general equality through equal opportunity. Through the establishment of a free educational system, everyone is set on an even footing, which creates opportunity for all, regardless of their economic or social background.

  1. The establishment of a community-controlled justice system based on international human rights.

We believe it is the right of every community to build consensus on how to deal with deviant behavior. Our communities should strive not to punish, but to address root causes of crime. Each community must participate in its own enforcement of the laws in regard to civil and religious laws particular to the community and all communities must be equal in regard to the international declaration of human rights established by the UN.

  1. The establishment democratic governance.

We believe that participatory democracy can only be achieved when everyone actively takes steps to decide the terms on which they wish to live to those who claim to rule them. People must have the right to communicate dissent and struggle collectively to improve the system in which they live and assert themselves upon the political apparatus. We must uphold a system of one person, one vote with political leaders directly nominated by the population of the nation.

  1. Abolition of labor exploitation regardless of industry.

We believe that an economic system motivated by the constant pursuit of profit can only result in exploitation. We believe that it is completely unacceptable for any industry or business to exploit their workers within our nation or abroad. We define exploitation as any economic arrangement where workers do not enjoy adequate benefits or just compensation for their labor.

  1. Adequate and sanitary housing, water and food for all people living in Israel proper and the occupied territories of the West Bank, Gaza Strip, Golan Heights and Sheeba Farms.

We believe that the means to live comfortably are natural human rights for any and all people. In today’s society, these items are commodities that are only available to those who are able to pay for them. We have adequate means of producing and providing these necessities for all people. These three things are indispensable to the very existence of life and any just political regime must secure them for the 12 million denizens of this land; regardless of confession or creed.

  1. An end to discrimination based on ethnicity, religion, and country of origin so as to work toward the ultimate goal of equality before the law.

We believe that society should grant equal opportunity to individuals regardless of gender, sexual orientation, ideology, ethnicity, personal belief, place of origin or any other aspect of their person. We believe our society should reward diversity not simply protect and privilege Jewishness. 

  1. The pursuit of sustainable environmental practices and lifestyles.

We believe that to adequately coexist with our environment, we must be invest in sustainable solutions to be employed through the use of renewable resources and healthy long-term environmental planning. We must work to ensure that no further damage is done to our land and to improve the health of our nation by eliminating a dependence on the petroleum controlled by neighboring hostile regimes.

  1. The end of the Arab-Israeli wars.

The wars between the Arabs and the Jews have caused a great deal of suffering and have done nothing to address the root causes of this religious-nationalist violence. We believe that all foreign powers must remove support and cease exporting weapons to either side in order for the Israeli and Palestinian people conduct meaningful negotiations on issues resulting in a treaty, which will be implemented via a bilateral national referendum. Until human rights and rule of law is brought to the region we must opt for separation and economic development, not vague road maps to a false peace.

POWER TO THE PEOPLE OF ISRAEL AND PALESTINE!

 

THE ORGANIZATION FIGHTS FOR YOU!

 

* * *

 

 

I haven’t seen everything because I have been caught up in the zeitgeist of the boy himself. I didn’t see how Andrew submerged the kid in a cold water baptism one night and then carefully wrote what the half delirious boy was spitting out. I had to half beat that story out of Disrael. I also hadn’t been invited to Andrew and Zach’s late night decoding sessions using the books of the Tanakh for making battle plans. Zach sleeps at Andrew’s more than my place, even though he keeps all his stuff in a large black frame pack tucked in my closet. But there is more unsettling shit I hear from people like Svetlana, Canadian Dave and other sources on the Tel Aviv wire.

 

Svetlana walked in on, and got chased out of a meeting where Zach and a new guy Gilead she didn’t know were supervising ten other recruits as they practiced ambushing and subduing soldiers from behind. Reviewing the movements of creep and attack using high-powered tasers to knock them out and take their weapons and uniforms.

 

Svetlana quit soon after she saw that, but assured Zach and I that she isn’t telling anyone anything. Zach hinted to me this is a major breach in security and that we should consider. . .I cut him right off. What is he gonna consider doing to the girl who gave him his first job in the country. He dropped it.

 

And now in late August, more crazy things are happening. I hear that Ditri, Zach and some of the EGROPH fighters from Bat Yam have lobbed phosphorous smoke grenades into a whorehouse and then brutalized some young pimp. Ditri, Zach’s big violent bodyguard demolished the young pimp’s face. Shit like this is big trouble based on who everybody knows control the whorehouses in Tel Aviv.

 

The McDonalds on Kikar Diezenkoff got their windows smashed in the same night as a McDonalds on the Haifa Carmel did too. There were more broken windows and phosphorous smoke bombs.A couple minor pusher’s have been beaten with bats in Be’er Sheva. The cops found a second drug dealer hung naked upside down, doped up from a tree soaked in kerosene.

 

There are rumors that are beginning to circulate in the southern part of the country about an underground political party named The Organization also known as the Ha’Irgun ShelShivtay Avra or simply as Ha’Irgun. There is blood in the streets and writing on the walls of the collective imagination.

 

It reads,

 

‘HA HaLoan Sheli, LeKhioat HofShee!’ (OUR DREAM IS TO BE FREE).

ע

One night in early September, Zachariah got what was coming to him. Blood. I was out of the city last week and heard the whole story on the wire mostly from Svetlana and Andrew who’d been with him in the emergency room. Everybody knows you can’t run around beating up pimps and pushers until somebody gets wise in a county this small. Thankfully, the crew Zach and the EGROPH fighters manhandled were Romanian not Russian because the reaction would have been very different. Suffice it to say, they would have just shot him. But had the Romanians known Zach was a rebel ringleader, not just resisting the shake down, they’d have shot him too.

 

Last Thursday night some time after I split with the kid over who loved who and how he had set up his stand on the tiyeled like he had so many times before, he went out with a big group of his Russians from Pardes Hanna and Netanya right across from the Opera Towers like usual.

 

Rumor has it that this brawl was over the shakedowns. A second more reliable rumor says a young pusher arse named Ze’ev just wants to kill Zach because Zach stole the pusher’s girl, a young hooker named Anya. The feud in all likelihood doesn’t have anything to do with Zach’s rebel moonlighting. It doesn’t matter. They nearly got him.

 

Four guys ran at him with knives while he was giving a speech to a crowd of twenty or so. It was quite a mêlée.  First he used his left forearm as a shield. The blade entered seven inches distal to his elbow and remained lodged in him the rest of the fight. He kicked the first attacker as hard as he could then pulled the big wooden board with the art between him and three of the others as a shield. Blood got all over his white pants and wife beater with the hammer and sickle. His little Russian comrades rushed to defend him. Dima and Ditri, I think, grappled with two of the attackers on the ground. Zach took out his knife at this point and a little Romanian thug named Ze’ev who everybody knows is a pusher around the clubs, lunged at Zach. The fourth attacker fled in the crowd. The two of them toppled clean over the boardwalk onto the sand. Zach’s dagger ripped across Zee’s shirt and right hand drawing blood. The two of them wrestled on the ground bashing away at each other. Ze’ev ended up on the bottom. Zach and Ze’ev were locked in combat with only Ze’ev’s knife between them. Then the fourth thug reappeared to give Zach a steel-toed kick in the side of the head. Romanians fight in packs.

 

Zach was bleeding from three stab wounds in his left arm and from his mouth and head. He was staggering from an arterial bleed. The fight wound its way back onto the tiyeled as sirens were heard bringing cops and paramedics. The Russian friends of Zach well out-numbered the Romanians. Those Russian street kids surely saved his life getting him out from under Ze’ev and the one with the steel-toed boots. The mêlée attracted a huge crowd of arsiim and frekhot bystanders cheering not for one side or another, only caught in the blood lust and thrill. Breaking apart, or pulled apart Ze’ev and Zach stared at each other on the boardwalk less than ten meters apart. Zach bled out his arm, face and head. He was panting, forcing himself to stand. Ze’ev looked down at his right hand. He has sustained a deep, gushing laceration across the palm his right hand.

 

Blood was all over the boardwalk. Romanian blood and Hebrew blood mixed. Both staggered ready to run at each other again. Their compatriots kicked the shit out of each other. The crowd cheered for no one in particular. The Russians were winning, if only through strength in numbers.

 

Sirens and flashing lights swooped down upon the battle.

 

When the cops got there they arrested Ditri who was pummeling one Romanian that didn’t flee. They arrested three Russians as they beat another Romanian half to death. Ze’ev the instigator and his last standing companion took off. Zach’s little strawberry blonde Kazak girl who he always had thought was Russian, Anya, was holding him when the paramedics lifted him onto a stretcher and took him to the nearest trauma center.

 

They put fluids in him and stitched up the three wounds. He got discharged around midnight in the care of his good friend Avinadav and his ex-comrade but still friend and confident Svetlana the debutante. Anya spirited him out of the city to Pardes Hana and nursed him back to health.

 

There was still more blood to flow.

 

פ

 

My first thought that is that it is a movie. My second inclination tells me that their government did it. Everyone in both Israel and America remembers what they were doing on September 11th. It is a day just like any other day. It is a day when America feels what we’ve been feeling for years. I believe political science professors call it the American exceptionalism.  We have lived with violence and terror all summer so the words on most Israelis’ lips when there isn’t a camera thrust into our faces, are, “How does it taste?”

 

Zach and I were at a nature party rave on the Sea of Galilee the night before with his friend and comrade, the precocious high school dropout and anarchist Hadas. It went on all night. We danced until around five in the morning on a beach. I was on ecstasy and he was on God. Prior to that September morning I had slept only in winks. We’d been partying and recruiting all over Galilee, trying to build up a Naphtali Command. I was enforcing a vacation on the kid who never slept. I like his friend Hadas completely. We both took Ecstasy.

 

It took three hours to get here on a bus. Two hours on a couch at some house on a kibbutz we stayed at passing north of Afula. Five or six in the Druze village watched over by the most omniscient children I have ever met. Lots of cuddling, heavy pettin, and time spent nursing his wounds. He’s still all bandaged up from his little brawl in Tel Aviv. The stitches came out too early. He drank a fifth a bottle of vodka, doused the three wounds and had me stitch him back up. He flinched but never whimpered, the little machismo son of a bitch.

 

We turned on the TV this morning to what looked like a Bruce Willis movie. We just turned it off. We tuned in later to discover it wasn’t a movie. The second tower has just been hit. There are rumors coming over the TV screaming repeatedly with pure hysteria that eight planes have been taken, that tens of thousand are dead.

 

“I’m not sure what to say to you,” Hadas says to Zach.

 

“I’m not sure I would know how to respond,” he says back.

 

He says the smoke rolling around the street on the TV is his parent’s street. Something in me wants to assure him that they are fine. But it won’t make him feel any different.

 

“Do you want to try and call your relatives?” Hadas asks handing him a phone.

 

“I know they’re alive.”

 

“How do you know?” I ask. “Why don’t you call?”

 

“I have a feeling they are not in their home.”

 

Hadas gives me a puzzled look to which I shrug.

 

“I’d make the call,” she says. “To be sure.”

 

He picks up her rotary house phone and dials the number to his house on Nassau Street in New York City’s lower Manhattan.

 

“THIS CALL CANNOT BE COMPLETED AS DIALED,” is the response we hear.

 

He tries again this time with Hadas’ mother’s cell phone. He gets a busy signal. His third call is to Avinadav. It rings only once.

 

“Avinadav, its Zach.”

 

“You’re watching this right!” Avinadav says clearly excited.

 

“Yeah.”

 

“You in Tel Aviv?”

 

“No, Ramat Ishai.”

 

“Can you get back to Tel Aviv by tonight?”

 

“Yeah. Why?”

 

“I got something you need to hear and that we can’t talk about over the phone. You get your ass back to my place, all right? You with Emma?”

 

“Yeah.”

 

“I need the two of you need to be back at my house by nightfall.”

 

“Then we’ll see you soon brother.”

 

Hadas rolls across the bed and lights a cigarette. She’s like a pampered, anarchist cat.

 

“Worried?” she asks him.

 

“I told you I’m not.”

 

“I bet you think this is a sign,” she says curtly.

 

“I don’t know what else it could be.”

 

“We have to get back to Tel Aviv,” I say to Zach.

 

“I want to see my sister in Rehovet. We can hitchhike out of here whenever you’re ready,” says Hadas.

 

We say goodbye to her kind French mother who likes Zach quite a lot and is concerned about his family and countrymen perhaps more than he is. We walk up to the main road to hitchhike southwest toward Hadera and the coast. We have Zach hang back in one of the cement bus shelters.  Hadas looks quite a bit like the actress Rose McGowan and it gets us a ride quickly even though three’s a crowd in tramping. We get picked up in five minutes flat.

 

 

***

 

Andrew’s apartment is packed with relatives. Most I know. Some I don’t. He is dressed in a black suit and his head is covered in a black kufee. When Zach and I enter the apartment he takes Zach’s bag and offers me a frosted glass filled with water kissing my cheek. We leave the main living room congested as it is with Israelites and go back to the small library study where we have most of our conspiratorial conversations.

 

“I had a dream last night. In it a great army took over Israel. They conquered us and we became corrupted slaves. The community in Demona was deported back to Babylon wholesale and a McDonald’s arch went up in place of the Temple in Jerusalem. These are the last days, my brother. Look at Babylon burn,” Avinadav points to the TV.

 

I had not realized the Pentagon was also hit with a third 747 and a fourth has been brought down in a field in Pennsylvania enroute presumably to the White House.

 

“It is frightening that we talked about this for so long and now it’s here. We are both going to be tested. We are both going to have to act. Did you dream anything last night?” Avinadav asks Zach.

 

“As of late I rarely sleep.”

 

“They say sleep is the cousin of death. Are you getting more visions?”

 

“Each day a few, but nothing clear or decisive since the time in the wilderness. The instructions transmitted on the parchment pointed in this direction to be sure.”

 

I had been excluded from those conversations until now.

 

“And what is it that you now see?” I ask him asserting myself.

 

“I see a mark upon the people that I love, but the mark is not the mark of the Chosen 144,000 or the Mark of the Beast. It is the mark of those that bring deliverance, a mark for Rebel Prophets 14 in number.”

 

“Don’t the Chosen bring deliverance to themselves?” I ask, throwing back his rhetoric at him.

 

“There are those that walk a fine line between heaven and hell. The man I described that visited me when I was locked up was one of those marked in my dreams. In the dreams I see the beast’s mark everywhere. It is the Nike Swoosh on sneakers. It is the American Flag emblazoned on T-shirts. It is the McDonalds arch erected on every city block. The beast has marked nearly everyone. The dreams I have are symbolic. Those that prosper and choose to do nothing, these are the ones marked by the beast. There are those that are marked as chosen, the mark of Ezekiel. This can only be seen in the end times and finally comes my mark, the mark of the prophets, those that will organize their people to resist Babylon. In my dreams I am marked and so are the two of you.”

 

“They say beware false prophecy,” I say to them both folding my arms in disbelief.

 

“He is no false prophet,” Avinadav scowls at me.

 

Andrew the Hustler never had a visible rage.

 

“What frightens me is the vivid way your visions and dreams coincide with my own,” Andrew admits rubbing his head.

 

“It was our fate to meet, to conjoin the lost houses in exile as Babylon goes up in smoke,” Zach cryptically utters.

 

“But what happens after your Babylon burns?” I slowly ask.

 

“The Babylonians retaliate,” says Andrew. “And we are all drawn deeper into a land of smoke, twisted metal and broken glass.”

 

“I have no dreams at all,” I lie. “I didn’t help found the Organization to play Jonestown.”

 

I have dreams similar to those of my two compatriots Avinadav and Zachariah, but I do not have the courage to make them as public.

 

“Everyone dreams, but few remember. You have to force yourself to have one foot in each world,” Zach says to me.

 

Avinadav places his hand on Zach’s shoulder.

 

“I have a notion you will reject at first, but later understand the necessity of. You have to return to Babylon. The days of your exile are drawing to a rapid close,” Avinadav suddenly tells him.

 

Zach looks like he wants to spit on the ground or strangle Andrew or curse at him. But he has enough restraint just to shudder. What Andrew has suggested has not even crossed his mind.

 

“Don’t ask me to do something that I’m not able to do,” Zach mutters.

 

“You were brought to the land of Israel up out of a Babylon to bear witness to your destiny. I would say as surely as those Towers crumbled, your time in exile is coming to an end.”

 

He looks pale at the suggestion.

 

“I cannot return to that hateful place.”

 

“You must remember your whole house, the people you love and nurtured. They are all trapped behind those lines.”

 

“I am not ready. I’m not strong enough to go back.”

 

“Of course you are. You’re one of the strongest brothers I’ve ever known. The things you saw in the deep desert. This Organization you were meant to build was written on the four sides of two parchments. It is an organization that must now be planted in the belly of the beast.”

 

I don’t say anything, but I take his hand because he looks real upset.

 

“Emma and I care about you, Zachariah. The grey banner you wave will go up on both sides of the ocean, but when Babylon is done burning, it will strike back. It will send its gunships and flying fortresses first against Afghanistan and then beyond. Emma and I will continue our work here. You must return to your land to ready your house for a stand and then an exodus.”

 

Is it the madness that one had caught from the other? Or have each of them simply exacerbated each other’s latent madness. I am glad I cannot dream so vividly and even gladder I never read the kid’s desert scribbling. I can’t make myself believe.

 

“Go try and call your family again and make sure they are all right,” I say finally to him.

 

The most troubling thing about Avinadav is that he believes that Zach has the powers of prophesy. He truly thinks some god spoke to the boy. If I were religious, any type of religious, or even a genuine leftist, these things I am hearing would have been written off as heresy, delusion or certainly mental illness. Both Zach and I have been diagnosed with the condition bipolar disorder. I try to forget that both he and I have a serious mental condition, that it is likely very responsible for both of our tumultuous lives. I try to forget that he hasn’t taken his pills for close to nine months. I haven’t taken mine for two years, the salts of lithium carbonate.

 

Either we are hearing the voice of God or going crazy or a little of both. The kid certainly is now on the edge of the abyss. He probably denied his so-called mission until Andrew started helping him put it into the context of that pan-religious potpourri called The Hebrew Black Israelite Society of Demona. I know about all the boy’s so called revelations and epic dreams. He has shared everything with me and is well inclined to put ink on paper.

 

The first revelation was the call up on the seventh floor of a Hell’s Kitchen balcony back in New York not to take his life and that a trial and suffering would come, and then righteousness. The second was a call and vision in the deep desert to get ready to fight, to create the Organization of the Tribes of Abraham to ready the people of the land for epoch struggle. And now his trusted friend and mentor Avinadav, who until we met the boy in mid June was just Andrew the Hustler, is instructing Zach to abandon his promised land and return to the place which brings the boy real dread. Zach makes his way through the mob scene that forms a large half moon in the living room around Andrew’s massive digital television tuned into CNN. Planes, towers, BANG, smoke, people jumping, people running, BANG, a tower falling, people screaming, ash and dust, terrorists, terrorists, terrorists. It plays on a constant loop.

 

Four planes, two into the Towers, one into the Pentagon, and one that crashed when the passengers resisted, or was shot down with a cruise missile in a field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania.

 

They are saying that as many as 6,000 people are dead. The Pentagon and Ground Zero are still smoking on the morning of the second day. Zach watches the 9/11 loop play over and over again. The commentators aren’t saying anything new. They don’t even know who is responsible yet. But September 11th has been quite a historically auspicious day in the annals of warfare and aviation.

 

There are short clips of street celebrations happening around the Muslim world. Clips of Palestinians handing out candy and dancing in the street. The Israeli press states that Hezbollah has condemned the attack on the Towers, but declares the Pentagon a valid military target, even if they used a 747 worth of civilians to hit it. American pundits, everybody’s pundits are going crazy with the blame game. But soon it is clear enough who was responsible.

 

There are 19 men responsible who in one cell of four and three cells of five had captured 4- 747 jet airliners with the intention of flying them into major symbols of U.S. hegemony. Fifteen of the hijackers are from Saudi Arabia, two from the United Arab Emirates, one from Egypt, and one from Lebanon. A man named Mohamed Atta was the key organizer, the lieutenant and leader of the 19 hijackers. He was a lieutenant of an organization called Al Qaeda, or, ‘the foundation’, or ‘the base’ in Arabic. This network is composed of thousands of hardcore, militarily capable underground fighters.  It is now presumed responsible for a range of terrorist attacks in the decade since the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan including, but not limited to the African Embassy bombings in ‘98, the destruction of the U.S.S. Cole, and the original attack in 1993 against the World Trade Center.

 

In sharp contrast to the standard profile of suicide bombers, the hijackers were well-educated, mature adults, whose belief systems were fully formed. They were not only wealthy and college educated, but most of them had grown up in Europe.

 

Volunteers are arriving by the train and truckload to aid a besieged and burning New York. Everyone is trying to help pull bodies out of that flaming hole in lower Manhattan they are now calling Ground Zero. 343 firemen are dead. That is quite a few dead fire fighters. 341 firefighters actually and two paramedics. We are getting all these authoritative reports, which are all white lies or half-truths or patriotic jingoisms. Everyone is terrified.

 

And everybody knows this thing that happened won’t be over for years.

 

***

 

 

Trikhovitch/ Adon Interlude 1

 

Everyone seems caught halfway between sympathy, ‘call your family’, and now ‘they know what we’ve been going through.’ The thing is huge. I don’t have my head around it yet. I just keep seeing the smoke and debris roll down my parent’s block. 140 Nassau Street is about two avenue blocks from the Trade Center, the Towers, the wreckage and smoking crater now called ‘Ground Zero.’ I know they weren’t there when it happened. My father would be at his dental office on Staten Island, my mother up in SoHo at the Scholastic building and Benjamin would be at La Guardia High School locked inside somewhere on the West Side in the Fifties. Since work and school necessitate all of them arriving at those places by eight at the latest, the attacks that also took place at eight and change would have put them way clear.

 

I dip my card in the orange phone booth across the street from the penthouse. I am calling Nick Trikhovitch on his cell. I haven’t spoken with him since February when the exile began.

 

The first thing I hear when he picks up are sirens in the background. Screams and sirens.

 

“Hello?” he yells.

 

“What’s up, Nick? It’s Sebastian. Is everybody okay!?”

 

“Holy shit! It’s been awhile. You’re over in the Middle East, right?!”

 

“Yeah. I’m in Tel Aviv!”

 

“Things are pretty fubar back in New York. I’m sure you’ve seen the TV.”

 

“Ain’t that the truth. Listen. I can’t reach my family. Can you confirm they’re all right?!”

 

“No problem, buddy. I got Benjamin and your Mom’s numbers. I’ll hit um up in a few minutes. The cell phone networks are better than the landlines, which are all down. The city’s a mess. The National Guard’s is trying to seal off the island at Canal Street! There’s lots of chaos going on. Sebastian…”

 

“Yeah?”

 

“Things are about to get bad here in America. It’s good you’re not here.”

 

“Should I come home?!”

 

“That’s on you.”

 

“Where are you?! How bad is the damage?”

 

“I’m bicycling into the ruins to take pictures. I snuck through the checkpoints near Chinatown with Brickman and Hubert O’Domhnaill s. We’re gonna get some footage and pictures of what’s really happening! ”

 

What he’s saying starts getting drowned out by sirens.

 

“Can you check at my house to see if my parents are okay?”

 

“Sure thing, brother. Be safe out there ‘Live in the Middle East’! Good luck with what you’re up to.”

 

“Thanks, I always need all the luck I can get. What’s it like back home?”

 

“The skies burning and it looks like hell.”

 

צ

 

Avinadav

 

“I want to make something abundantly clear. The American Empire is our enemy and occupier. It is Babylon. It is Rome. It is the absolute incarnate of what we as free people stand against. We can make no compromise. We cannot buy its products and we cannot adopt its means of governance. We must never forget the ways in which the American hegemony, the ability of our enemy to exert its power, has brought so much violence upon our land. It provides the weapons by which the Palestinians are kept oppressed. It corrupts our young people with its deification of wealth and luxury. It makes us its 51st state and promotes the violation of religious and cultural standards. America is a beast. It is always hungry for more power, resources and profit. Pal-Israel is one of many states beholden to its will.”

 

Those words come out my mouth, but I know these were not the words I would have used three months ago. These are the words of Zachariah Artstien to whom I am a student, but also a teacher.

 

After the Romanian gang went after him a second time I figured he would be safer in Be’er Sheva or the north. He recuperated for a week with his Russian girl in Pardes Hanna and then he began what he calls the loop. He’d stay Sunday to Tuesday in Haifa, take the light rail down country to the last stop in Be’er Sheva, stay there Tuesday night to sometime Thursday and then join me at the Deep Thursday night. Parts of the weekend he still spends in Tel Aviv, the Russians keeping him safish, I guess.

 

Zach and Emma. They got a fucked up relationship, which hopefully doesn’t involve sex. I don’t give my two cents. I don’t know if they’ve gotten nasty. Don’t care. I didn’t know they were in love ‘til recently. I could have guessed it. Zach has told me he misses her too often in passing. She never shuts up about him. I tell him to leave that shit alone, but what can a kid like that leave alone. Emma is a fine and beautiful girl and he’s got all that panache. But mostly, it doesn’t complicate anything.

 

It’s not a woman’s role to lead these things. Not a woman’s role at all. They think about it far too sentimental. They don’t get that to win this war we have kill. They just want peace without using a piece. Zach is brilliant, but he also a young dude. Emma is also very talented but she relies on not having to feel. He brings feelings out in her. That’s for sure. So much that when they are separated they pine for each other in round about ways, mostly via calling me and asking about the each other. The week before the Romanians cut him up, Zach told me he ‘could be old with her, if he lived to be old.’ May have told her he loved her. What a fuckin’ mess. Now I’m the middle man ‘cause things are awkward. No way to run an army, to make it plain.

 

He spent a whole week not working after the melee on the tiyeled. I knew he hadn’t kept the Sabbath more than twice in his lifetime, so the down time should do him some good. Took up with his cute little central Asian thing up north. Anya’s her name if I recall. But he’s the kind of man that doesn’t know what a vacation means. He’s got no use for rest because he’s fighting for his redemption and can’t pause a minute.

 

I’m up here hostin’ one of the so-called Shabbat Salon’s we encourage throughout the Organization’s network. I’m giving my two-man speech with Disrael tonight cause God only knows where Zachariah is. I figure he might be here later because the rail line runs near enough to my penthouse.

 

People come and go. Show love, show support. My Yemenite ladylove Scheherazade, who I just call Sherri helps tidy up. Finally I get a phone call. He’s still in the north. Doesn’t know when he’s coming back to Tel Aviv. He called to report what he had been up to in Haifa. He talked until his phone card died then called me back from another pay phone. We made chit chat. First about the Club. Not about Emma. And then onto the business at hand.

 

“The folks Deeb leads in District Hadar are all Arab Christians. Hadas and her people up on the Carmel at the university are all different shades of anarchist, syndicalist or bohemian radicals. It’s hard to get that mix to coalesce.”

 

“Just be sure them radicals get on that religious tip.”

 

“I’m working on it. Hadas is politically bipolar. We might have to let her keep her unit’s autonomy.”

 

“No.”

 

“No what?” he demands.

 

“Look. I know Emma is on the activist trip. I know she goes about saying go out and get um organized, but shit man, the unity is in the praise of God.”

 

“There’s a different catalyst for everyone.”

 

“Okay, but there’s what we say to get people organized and there’s the righteousness that we built this on. You let in all the longhaired, anarchist freaks, Bedouins, Muslim fundamentalists, whatever. You know I won’t jive too far or long about who wants to pick up the gun. Just make sure when they take aim they know at what and for whom. You go to Demona yet? ”

 

“I’m a little hesitant. It seems premature.”

 

“Don’t be so fucking naïve,” I tell him.

 

“What the hell do you mean!?”

 

“Don’t sweat the race thing. Shit. Just working at the club and I’m sure you know a few people.”

 

“It’s not a race thing. Trust me. I just don’t want to stroll into the Israelite community, unannounced and uninvited and ask Ben-Ami to take on the spiritual leadership of this organization.”

 

“Oh. You want him to ask you?”

 

“Always with the fucking sardonic wit.”

 

“You think you can throw me off with those big words, but I know your jive, Zachariah.”

 

“Alright. Fine. Just tell me what I have to do to get an audience.”

 

“I’ll make a call or two.”

 

“I thought you were banned.”

 

“I am. That don’t mean I don’t know every fucking Israelite in the whole the damn country.”

 

“Look. We really need to meet in person you and me.”

 

“I sure as shit ain’t comin’ down to Be’er Sheva.”

 

“I’ll be at the club next Thursday, then.”

 

“Now we’re talking.’ You can be around Emma with no bullshit, right?”

 

“What’s she say?”

 

“She just mad at you fo’ loving her. She love you too and she don’t want any of that bringing her back toward feeling. The girl is lost, lonely and lethal. Put a city in between you two for now.”

 

“So Friday we’ll do breakfast after the club?” he asks changing the subject.

 

“Yeah, that works.”

 

***

 

After unleashing his opening salvo of anarchy about the three major cities, his experience with the Romanians, but more so the experience with Emma, has changed his approach. He spends all his time in Haifa and Be’er Sheva. He has left me and Disrael in charge of printing a newspaper in Tel Aviv and has been gone all of August and early September riding the rail back and forth from Haifa to Be’er Sheva getting our people organized.

 

To my knowledge I am the only person who has read the four pages on the two parchments he carried out of the dessert. They are a chilling testimony of things to come, of our role and of wheres and when’s I can believe in. He brought those papers out of the desert and to me. They confirm his prophetic calling. The papers are a certain badge that if the boy survives the trials ahead of him, he might truly lead us to into Zion.

 

I say I am a student of his because even though he is only 17 years of age, his old soul communicates great knowledge to the people of my land. But he is unable to fully control his powers, unable to fully direct his revelation. So much so that even as I help him there is only one other who might be able to help him harness his gift of prophecy. That man is surely the prophet Ben-Ami who led my people here up and out of Chi-Town many decades ago. Prophets can spot their own after all. The kid is using the black-white racial tension shit because I think he is a little afraid Ben Ami won’t give him a seal. The approval of another prophet. So I suppose he is building his rep of miracles before the encounter that may never come.

 

The parchments are rolled up in a single metal pipe. I keep them at my home often studying the diagrams, the pictographic swirls and drawings, which accompany the simple truths the papers reveal. Although Be’er Sheva is close enough to Demona for him to easily make a visit to the Israelite Community, he procrastinates. I have not been in the community for many years myself and when he suggests I return with him, I, too, find excuses. As much as I was raised a person of faith, there is always some doubt when it is thrust upon one to be the mentor and protector of what might either be God’s latest prophet or a lost boy with terrible mental illness.

 

But the changes in the boy are as vast as they are subtle. He has turned his heart away for awhile from the sweeping business of the great revolution, turned his soul, perhaps, to the doing of good works with his hands outstretched to God.

 

In the weeks before the Towers fell he was occupied mostly with the cruel life of Avi Vodka and the saving Molly Viseman. These two short stories best illustrate the character of the boy Sebastian Adon who we all mostly know as Zachariah Artstien. He encountered both during the month of August as he attempted to set the country on its head and was bested easily by the ever-escalating war being waged by the Palestinians.

 

Molly Viseman also known as Molly the Fairy, was a drug addicted thirteen-year old street urchin when she joined the Organization’s Be’er Sheva Unit. She met Zach thorough Sahar, Ester, Katusha and Gavroche and quickly joined Ha’Irgun. She helped Zach hustle in the central bus station and is inseparable from him when he is in town. She has taken up residency with him at the Bedouin School House, that massive Ottoman thing they are squatting. Their relationship is that of siblings. He brings great things out in the girl by giving her an older brother and giving her something to believe. He mentors her, teaches her political science and religion. He convinced her to take two showers a day and eat three meals. In truth it is not Gavroche’s strong talk and campaign against heroin that has firmed up Be’er Sheva so tightly, although the war on the traffickers got some good results for a while. People are stunned to see Molly the Fairy start going back to school, start reading, stop taking ecstasy pills, acid and stop smoking opium. They are happy about the little girl having a big brother. Sahar Rosenfeld’s mother has spent many years reaching out to help the girl with disappointing results. Molly looks up to young Zachariah and changes herself because of him. Everyone whispers if these changes will continue once he goes away, which is what the kids’ parents in Be’er Sheva, those with parents, warn them will happen. She even moved back in with her father on Zach’s suggestion a couple nights of the week.

 

Zach focused his zeal into the lands of the desert people. The sun soon made his blood boil.

 

It hasn’t been all his influence. I just wanted to put our logo out there, plant our flag. I have never made Be’er Sheva a priority like he seems to. I sent my cousin Disrael in for meeting on a Wednesday night in early October. He recounted the comings and goings to me in shocking detail.

 

Katusha, in one of her few verbal contributions to the general meeting, says it is about time we clean the heroin out of the old city. She explains, her painted eyes full of fire, that we can give our Egroph fighters some hands-on experience and strike at one of Be’er Sheva’s worst problems. One of the kids lost a brother to a heroin overdose and it kind of went from there. Next thing I know Gavroche takes out a Sharpie and outlines on the map in the command center the area that we should try to take and the four main buildings we ought to occupy. We already control one and had it locked down. The KDAA, which they have already established in the Bedouin School House, still needs a lot of work, but five of them have already moved in. It is at least partially swept out on the first floor.

 

The next step is obvious. David Levy that they all call ‘The Original Rudeboy,’ told them about it and Zach had already scouted and proposed it at least once. The abandoned movie theatre is ideal because it has a stage in the theatre, as well as at least twenty other adjoining chambers and rooms. The problem is that it is fucking infested with Narcomanim. Molly figures that at least three live in it and god only knows how many others use it as a place to shoot up.

 

The other two locations are equally ambitious. The Ottoman Mosque and the Baasis. The abandoned Ottoman mosque because it is literally a block from the Afoock a la Foock youth center they are doing their recruiting out of. That is bad fucking news altogether because it is a serious dealing spot. I don’t even want to fuck with it. That would take a war. They have no idea about the Baasis. It is an abandoned Army post with ten or eleven separate buildings. There is running water and doors that lock. It, too, is supposed to be infested. In three months they have gone from feeding the poor to driving out the dealers. Zach sees no reason not to do both. As crazy as it all sounds, I can’t help but think of all those people I have known in Demona whose lives have been ruined by drugs. And every time Zach hustles the Be’er Sheva bus terminal he see’s junkies like Avi begging for agarot so they can forget for another day that they have wives, maybe a few kids, and ruined lungs from cleaning out chemical vats. Tons of the junkies are former employees of the chemical mines and extraction companies all over the area that employs Bedouins. Not that most junkies are Bedouin, just enough.  Something needs to be done.

 

So it came together over a five-hour meeting. Noaah and Big Guy makee their votes conditional on the fact that we will provide support for the addicts that aren’t dealers. Their idea, Noaah’s really, is that we take the Baasis first and use it as a detox clinic for the junkies that want to get clean. Sidra this Arab girl worked for three years for Maagan David Adom and can use her training at the drug clinic to provide rehab for the patients.

 

It was crazy and it was complete. First they would clean out three rooms at the Baasis and turn them into detox chambers. I don’t know anything about that, but apparently the medical cadre does. They started speaking Hebrew and no one bothered to translate. I trust Sidra and the three other girls that say they have dealt with junkies at the clinic. They assigned six people to scout the Baasis and report back how we can secure it. Once we have a means to rehabilitate the junkies, Stage Two will be to clean it out and take over the theatre. It can’t really be secured. Molly and Zach have tried, and on top of that, the smut store near the entrance is apparently a dealing spot and a place where junkie girls turn tricks in the back rooms.

 

Gavroche started talking crazy at that point, at least to the ears of my cousin Dizzy. He and some of the other Egroph fighters want to keep upping the ante. He wants to fire bomb the smut store, use it as a warning, and then clear the junkies out room by room like we have been training to do in the KDAA. He gets real excited and for a minute the room breaks out into a bedlam babble of Hebrew, Arabic, and Russian as the translators scramble to explain to those who don’t speak English how fucking crazy the plan really is. But, Zach likes it. He likes it a lot. The girls led by Katusha refuse to sanction any outright bombings until we have built a stable mass base. The fighters reluctantly settle on clearing the theatre, posting a sign, and then periodically enforcing it with a daily sweep. Then everything went into Hebrew and Dizzy didn’t understand shit.

 

Little Sahar, in faulty English, tried to keep Dizzy, whose Hebrew is very questionable in the loop. The fight going on between Gavroche and Noaah is about the old hard fact that odds are they aren’t going to stop these junkies from using with force. Gavroche won’t listen. A few girls have gotten raped over the years in these derelict buildings and I know he hates the narcomanim almost as much as he hates the police and mugavnikiim. In his head he can’t differentiate between user and dealer and outright deviant rapist. Sahar says that Gavroche wants to go after the source of the heroin first. At this point, Sidra starts laughing. Be’er Sheva is the source for all of Israel she says in English. Who the fuck are we to think that we can stop the heroin flow? Then everyone stopped talking.

 

“We can do it because we’re bad ass fucking revolutionaries. We’ll stop the drug flow one city block at a time,” Zach says in English.

 

And because he is their real leader, the plan went through by a close vote. Stage One would begin after the reconnaissance. They’d physically mark off Gavroche’s territory with spray paint. And then they’d start clearing the buildings. Like everything about Ha’Irgun, a few leaders in a cell, unit or command know what is going on and go ahead without consulting any of the other commands.

 

***

 

Back in Haifa on the top of the Carmel, Zach has ridden Israelis best and only subway up the hill from Hadar to Carmel Center to bridge an ethnic/religious divide between another vital Asher command of our organization. The meeting takes place in a bombed out restaurant in the park atop the hill near the north entrance to the sprawling Baha’i gardens. All the windows have been kicked in. It has become a northern home to junkies. Zachariah has reached out to an alcoholic named Avi Vodka living in the rubble. The man is the worst kind of drunk. He has come to Israel at some point to find God and found the bottle instead. Zach set about getting him off alcohol. Working with one of his Russians, a well-dressed brutal tough named Alon, he cleaned out a room for Avi Vodka in the upstairs of this restaurant and for a few days Alon and Zach worked in shifts to keep Avi from drinking. Zach did it because he is good and Alon did it because he is cruel. They smashed bottles. They chased him about being encouraging, reading from AA’ s big blue book. Finally, he disappeared for a day to remerge clean-shaven and sober.

 

Zach took the train back to Tel Aviv to tell me both stories. He is so fucking happy with himself for once. I tell him that he needs to sleep. He says he hasn’t slept in four days. He is manic as hell telling tales a mile a minute. He says he is seeing a great interconnectedness of things. I tell him to rest. I tell him that the only thing prophets have to do is reveal and record a message. I tell him no one expects miracles from him.

 

He clearly doesn’t have a good handle on his powers. That kind of thing can kill a man. He tries long and hard to humanize that wild little girl, get her out of the Bedouin School House and back with her father in Shauna Dalet even as ghetto as that shit is. Tries to get her going to school on time, doing homework and eating right. And a lot of local people help and support him.

 

He tries long and hard to get the drunken, crack-headed, possibly schizophrenic madman Avi Vodka, the best-known alcoholic mess in Haifa, to clean himself up. He and violent Brighton-born Kazak Alon hunt and hound him, torture him really.  They even lock him in a shed when he gets the frenzy in him. They feed him and support him until they think he is ready to get his AA on and be clean. And a lot of local people help and support him.

 

There were tipping points at each operation when Zach makes the local people in Be’er Sheva and Haifa believe the boy is working some magic to save these two lost and broken souls. Like a chain reaction they see little Zachariah a stranger in a strange land, an American no less, breaking his back to help a young lost girl and a sick old man. And those that are watching him work love him for the impossible things he is trying to do.

 

When the girl Molly was domiciled and in school and the man Avi was off the vodka one week, he reported back to me that these two cases are proof God is with us. The Organization has been growing each week. I warn the kid not to play God. I warn him that even if God is with us he should be in the business of giving great speeches and making fine art not saving souls, as he is a prophet, not the man Jesus Christ. I think he only half-listens. He reported the stories of Molly and Avi to me. He is certain that he is healing her mind and his liver. He is also still trying to mend the broken faith and heart of Emma Solomon called Maya Rose, whom he now professes to dearly love.

 

A few days later he called me quite broken. Said he’d bloodied his hands.

 

He had returned to Be’er Sheva to find Molly had been beaten up by her father, dropped school again, and laid herself out on junk in the very KDAA he’d built to teach these kids revolution and religion and that she had been molested by some junkies. He turned her over to Katusha and Sahar then led an EGROPH fighter unit of eight guys and Gavroche into the den of junkies in the abandoned Baasis. He told me they lost control that night. The fighters all had some relationship to Molly, a street sibling thing from Afoock a la Foock center and living on the street. They beat junkies with bats and slashed up a few. They dragged them into one big building on the base and covered them in gasoline. These probably aren’t even the same junkies, just six random junkies laid out in the near by abandoned base. They were beaten, cut-up junkies begging for their lives, offering shit Gavroche’s fighters didn’t want. The petrol was making them sick. Gavroche threatened to burn them alive if they didn’t say where the guys were who molested Molly.

 

The fighters crept one by one into an abandoned movie theatre in the Old City above a 24/7 peep show operation down a dark ally off the main square. The nine of them slipped though the narrow entrance way thinly barricaded by the narcomanim. The nine of them caught the two junkies that had molested Molly and tore them apart.

 

ק

You have to copy edit the stuff Zachariah writes because he never edits it himself. He’ll print a manifesto with spelling errors and poor grammar and feel fine signing it. That isn’t to say he’s lazy but his end of the labor is the creation of a thing, not its perfection, refinement or continuation. He’s a resistance artist, pure and simple. Not a résistance curator or the Minister of Information. He’s down in the wilderness again drafting his ‘Little Grey Book.’

 

I don’t think this Zach’s rudeboy friend David Levy has joined Ha’Irgun. However, most of our core documents have been written on his computer before they got edited on mine for printing. Zach tells me they are like brothers, like meeting your other half, or a clone of yourself an entire continent away in a park. David is close to getting his band ‘the Beer 7’s’ ready to play their first show. Zach heard their music. It isn’t amazing Ska, but you gotta give a pioneer credit when credit is due. I don’t even know what Ska is. Reggae with horns apparently. Zach loves that shit. David encourages and supports Zach with the revolution. Zach encourages David to run with his Ska band. In between guitar riffs David does some copyediting.

 

Two week after the events of September 11th, The Tel Aviv Manessah Command Unit distributed the first version of the ‘Grey Book’ with an appendix on something that the Haifa Anarchists called Security Culture and map of greater Israel with a 14 regional ‘tribal allotment.’ Zach ran it out to all three Regional Commands in Tel Aviv, Be’er Sheva, Hadar/Carmel in Haifa and about two dozen cells and support clusters, our term for people who won’t do work but kept harboring recruiters like Zach, Emma and Hadas.

 

We are giving it out on floppy disks. Zach is trying to make sure people don’t make stupid mistakes like the one that launched him into exile. Those Haifa anarchists were itching for, well for lack of a better word, anarchy.

 

Brutality, insanity and terror have marked the month of September. Rosh Hashanah our Hebrew New Year is coming and I am going to have a huge party at The Deep. The mood is getting worse and worse in both countries. America is pretty convinced that the people responsible for the Twin Towers and Pentagon attacks are holed up in bunkers in Afghanistan. There is a lot of saber rattling going on about some ridiculous ‘Axis of Evil’ composed of North Korea, Iran and Iraq who, as far as I could tell, have nothing in common other than all hating the United States.

 

Everyone knows the US is going invade somebody. It is the kind of country they are. Some Islamic Fundamentalists known as the Taliban runs Afghanistan. They still haven’t agreed on giving up this Osama guy who everybody says is responsible. In the meantime the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is getting renewed attention. CNN is blowing our crisis up as the half-time show.

 

To most Americans, fuck the dumb shit, I’d say the Israeli situation is as troubling as it is obscure. Most of them probably didn’t know what Hamas was until after 9/11. Hell, most of um can only find our country on an unmarked map because America teaches the Crusades like it was a relevant world event in high school world history and because we’re on the sea. While I sympathize with the plight of the Palestinian people, I would say that this, like most situations, lacks a clear definition of right and wrong. Everybody knows more Palestinians have died in our reprisals than the Israelis who have been killed in suicide bombings, rocket attacks and shootings. It is hard for an educated person to take a side without understanding the suffering on both sides of the green line. In the end you just take your own people’s side because ultimately, the other side just wants to kill you.

 

While much has been written on the subject I shall attempt brevity and merely report what Zach and I see on both sides of the green line.  He has spent a total of seven months in Pali-Isra and I have never left Israel once in my 26 years of life. Pal’Isra, in case you haven’t caught it, is his term for our war-torn, multi-ethnic nation converted to a land controlled by neither Jew nor by a free and well-educated populace.

 

To understand Pal’Isra you must attempt to look beyond the world painted by the media. One cannot know a situation through op-ed pieces and shock tactic journalism. To your typical Pal’Israelian every thought is not of this conflict. I run a club. Zach sells art and runs around chasing young girls. Emma is looking at various international law schools and sees a shrink. There are men and women with explosives strapped to them lighting off bars, clubs and buses. But those men and women had jobs and families and a country taken away from them before they became willing to blow themselves up.

 

Zach says it well.

 

“We are a whole nation of refugees that escaped persecution and slaughter only to take our turn perpetuating it.”

 

This is our wild ghetto outpost by the sea. Eight hours by two hours driving time in size.  The West loves how democratic and Western we appear but this is an illusion. There are mines and walls and war to keep our neighbors out. There are more fences to keep the Palestinians penned in. The struggle becomes a daily part of one’s existence. The bombings are a weekly phenomenon. To us terrorism isn’t this unseen specter haunting our every move; it is quite present and real. We terrorize the Palestinians and they, in turn, terrorize us. We are both of the same blood and possess the same iron will and constitution.

 

The way a baby looks ripped apart by ball bearings and nails lying mutilated in its Jewish mother’s half broken arms is the same way an Arab mother’s dead baby looks when laser guided smart bombs rip through the apartment next-door. I am Black. I am an Israelite. I might even say I’m a Jew; but I would light myself up like a Chinese candle in the middle of nursery school–wouldn’t care who’s in the nursery school, like a mother-fuckin Chechnyan– if some government’s Army killed my family, took my land from me and killed my baby.

 

Zach and I have watched Israeli bulldozers flatten Palestinian homes in East Jerusalem. We have watched the Mugav beat men and women with rifles at the checkpoints. We’ve seen the squalor of Gaza City through binoculars on a hillside near the high fence. I know this war will go on a very long time. No American President will tell me any differently. Like the Chi-Town ghetto my father fled from with the Prophet Ben-Ami, we have nowhere to go. We’ve been beaten bloody for so long that we are part animal ourselves. Now that we’re locked in this ghetto, this armed outpost by the sea; we begin to turn on each other. Ashkinazi on Sephardic. Russian on Ethiopian. Bedouin on Arab Israeli. Arab Christian on Arab Muslim. Romanian on Russian. Palestinian on Druze. Moroccan on Yemenite. Indian Jew on SE Asian immigrant. Black Israelite on the nation at large. Straight on gay. Woman on man.

 

They tell us on State Television that the Palestinians are our enemy and that the existence of the state always lies in the balance. Now more than ever. I think after all I’ve seen in the past several months that we are just like the Palestinians. Just like um. We act the same, fight the same and bleed the same blood. I’d say this war will go on for quite sometime. Unless something like The Organization takes control, my kids will have to fight this war. They say the greatest threat to Israel is the Palestinians. I say the greatest threat to the State of Israel is the disunity and self-hatred of the Israelis.

Oh Revolutionary, change thyself! Now it is clear to me. If the boy stays here he will surely be arrested or killed; or worse, his hope will die. Little Zachariah, you love your people so much. I cannot force you to do anything, but I pray you return to New York where you can hone your powers and your message. You’ve tasted some blood, some hate and failure now, but I’m not sure how you reacted to it. They’ve thrown stones upon you in Meer Shariim because you write God’s name in your pictures. They’ve tried to kill you twice with fists and daggers. The Palestinians almost blew you apart June 1st. And again on the 9th of August. Did you see enough yet? Did you?

I have. I am a believer that with a few brave men one changes history. With 144,000, with just 64, with a dozen, or even with just two.

When I met the boy Zachariah I was known to most as Andrew the Hustler. I let it slip to the boy that Avinadav is my Hebrew name. After that he has called me nothing else. Now I know that even if the whole revolution is a betrayed and is a colossal failure, I will try to be called Avinadav from now on, or at least, Andrew the Saint. I said once to this boy that I was both his student and his teacher. I helped teach him his religion, but I am a student of his hope.

 

 

ר

Emma

 

I’m drunk as hell coming back from a Sunday night party at the Gat Ramon when I see him sitting, puffing away on a Noblisse on my stoop. It’s not early enough for the gleam of morning light, but the darkness is almost on its last legs. It has have been three weeks since I saw him at the Cabinet meeting on Rosh Hashanah. I gave him a bottle or Red Label Whiskey as a present. Then he was gone. Not even Andrew has heard from him.

 

I didn’t even get a call. I just found him in front of my house one early, early morning, which is odd because he has a pair of keys. He looks a bit like death, skinnier than I remember him, bags under his eyes. We get upstairs and go out onto the small balcony facing the sea. He looks like he hasn’t eaten for a while so I make him a tuna fish sandwich on pita with zataar spice. He doesn’t say anything to me, but he has a black eye and some new cuts and bruises. The wounds from the knife fight have been re-bandaged. I don’t have to ask. He’ll tell me eventually. While he eats I take a rag and clean him up a bit.

 

Finally I work out my first salvo of words to him.

 

“You’re an inconsiderate fuck! I haven’t heard from you since New Years.”

 

“Good to see you too, Emma.”

 

“I’m Emma now? You have that kind of power now!”

 

“You’re always Emma except when you don’t want to be.”

 

He finishes his sandwich and takes out another smoke.

 

“I know what you’re doing.”

 

“I’m trying to create a base for revolt.”

 

“Against anyone in particular? I could swear you were just lashing out at everything around you until someone makes a useless martyr out of you.”

 

“What’s this really about Emma?”

 

“Svetlana said. . . “

 

He cuts me off.

 

“What, did that turncoat Russian bourgeois whore say?”

 

“She said you were getting ready to ambush off duty soldiers and take their guns.”

 

He gives me a wild look like a killer or a crazy person.

 

“You believe her!? After we threw her out?”

 

“She quit.”

 

“Whatever. You think she’d know something like that even if it were true!?”

 

“Is it true?”

 

First he looks away ready to lie to me then stops.

 

“Yes. We need some guns.”

 

“What?! Why do I have to beat that out of you! WHY ARE YOU DOING STUPID IRRESPOSNIBLE THINGS THAT ARE GONNA GET US KILLED?!!!!”

 

I am yelling at him. I can’t believe I’m yelling at him.

 

I hit him a few times. He barely tries to stop me.

 

“I’m sorry, Emma.”

 

“It’s not good enough to say sorry. You and Andrew. . .”

 

“Avinadav.”

 

“You and Andrew make all these wild decisions. Then I have to do all this detective shit to find out what’s going on. WHY are you all escalating this shit before we’re ready and without telling me!? What are you fighting for, Sebastian called Zachariah? Please tell me. If I believe you then I’ll follow you forever, but don’t make me wait in the hall as you and Andrew plot your own destruction.”

 

I watch him look at me again with that burning passion that I love him for.

 

“I’m fighting to restore some meaning to this life I lead,” he tells me.

 

“And what do you believe in?”

 

“I have come a long way and made myself a refugee. But beyond that I have learned nothing. What I finally realize is that everything I hate about America, I hate first about myself. And I believe that if I change myself, make myself a demonstration of a new sort of human nature that I will get one shot to make this happen. After that I’ll die, but I believe I am finally able to say that I want for a stranger, what I want for myself.”

 

“So are you going to try to save me, Sebastian? Are you going make me believe in my salvation!? You going play Jesus with me!?”

 

He slaps me across my face like a man who’d hit a woman before.

 

“Don’t fucking call me that,” he says coldly.

 

I’m shocked he hit me. I realize I’m a bit drunk from the open bar at the Gat Ramon.

 

“All you zealots talk a big game, but you never have much of a plan.”

 

“All you useless cynics can knock anything that tries to make this world a better place and your plan is just to keep things as they are,” he coldly retorts.

 

“No more politics, Zachariah. I’m going to bed and I want to be cuddled. You are either going to cuddle with me or you’re going sleep on the street.”

 

I figure he’ll just run off and sleep on the beach out of righteous indignation, but he just keeps sitting there.

 

“I didn’t think you were the cuddling type tonight,” he says.

 

My bedroom walls are painted a dull yellow like the dunes. I look out the window at the sea and coast skyline. The streetlights cast a glow over the roof top water purifiers on every house. The walls of my room are bare except for a hanging HAMSA symbol, the hand of God and two sketches. There’s the sketch he made me once of the two of us. My boobs look huge. There’s the larger sketch with pencil that he made the day I met him. It’s of the day he’s going to die.

 

“Forgive me then?” he asks.

 

“Yeah. I’m sorry I was cruel. I just feel like you guys shut me out. Don’t hit me ever again, ok?”

 

I sit on the bed and he sits down next to me.

 

“You tired?” I ask.

 

“Not really.”

 

“Me neither.”

 

We sit in silence for a while. He gets up and kills the lights. I pull back the thin blanket covers and we lie down together. The sheets are cotton. I know it feels really good for him to sleep in a bed after more than two weeks on the road. I wonder if in the dark I remind him of Roxanne. But then I remember Roxanne was a flat, scrawny, half-Latin blonde and I’m a busty brunette, a full Hebrew. I take a little pride in that. I realize, however, that he’ll always need to find her in one form or another.

 

We both lie on my bed parallel to each other but not touching.

 

“Sebastian, hold me please,” I say.

 

He puts his arms around me. I’m only a little smaller than he is.  I cuddle up in his arms pressing my breasts against his chest.

 

I turn around and whisper in his ear,

 

“I want you to hurt me.”

 

He knows what I’m talking about.

 

“I’m not going to hurt you again.”

 

“Kissing doesn’t do anything for me so I don’t want you to kiss me. I don’t fuck boys either. Never really cared for it after the rape. But, I want you to get me off and the only way to do that is to hurt me.”

 

“Hurt you like how?”

 

“Twist my arm. Bite me. Just cause me some pain.”

 

“I think I’ll sleep on the beach tonight.”

 

As he’s getting up I hit him in the head with my fist. It’s more of an annoyance than a pain, but it smarts me as much as him.  I try to strike again at his face and he pins me down to the bed and twists my arm behind my back. I cry out in a groan in glee.

 

“You’re fuckin crazy, Emma, you know that right?”

 

“Do it harder.”

 

He lets go. He doesn’t want to give me another sick thrill.

 

“Do it again. You like it. All men like it. Force me to submit.”

 

He looks at me in the dark and I think about Roxanne his only love.

 

“I want you to stop, Emma,” he says.

 

“Look how helpless I am. Alone in this apartment you could do anything you want to me.”

 

“Yeah. You’re drunk. I’ll be down on the beach if you need me for anything that doesn’t involve your sick little games.”

 

I grab his hand and bite it has hard as I can.

 

“Owww!” he yelps.

 

He shoves me back against the wall and tries to yank his hand away from me as I clamp into the calloused flesh of his palm. I hold onto him biting harder and harder. He slaps me harder with his other hand. I let go, slink to the floor, and sit there holding my cheek grinning.

 

“It felt good didn’t it?”

 

“What? Hitting you? Hardly.”

 

“Zach. I want you to hurt me. I like it.”

 

“You play these games with everyone or am I somehow deserving tonight of this special affection?”

 

“Look. I don’t like kissing and I don’t like fucking men. It does nothing for me. You want me and I want you too in a different way. So play along.”

 

“What do you want me to do?”

 

“Come back to bed.”

 

He thinks this over. The religious part of him, his spiritual conscious, is probably telling him it’s against God to give a girl sexual satisfaction by hurting her. The artist freak in him probably thinks differently. He’s torn, but not that torn because when it comes down to it, he’s a seventeen-year old boy. I’m an eighteen-year old girl. We’re both a little lost, lonely and lethal. He sits back down on the bed. He takes my wrist and twists it hard. I groan quietly with my eyes closed.

 

“More Zach,” I groan.

 

I feel his hand squeeze my right tit. On certain level this shit turns him on too.

 

I lie on my stomach with his cock pressed against ass and he twists my arm back until I almost scream. And so I don’t end up falling into too much pulp fiction porn diction, this shit goes on until the sun comes up several hours later. No kisses, no fuck, just bound wrists and dripping wax.

 

“Sebastian?” I whisper curled up in his arms.

 

“Yeah?”

 

“Do, you think I’m fucked up?”

 

“Who am I to play the judge?”

 

“I used to be a nice girl once.”

 

“I didn’t say you weren’t nice, you’re just into the rough shit apparently.”

 

Out of nowhere I tell him.

 

“They kidnapped me and slaved me off to Canada when I was sixteen.”

 

He holds me closer thinking that’s what you’re supposed to do when someone says some awful shit like that. Heartfelt empathy was always hard for me to display. What does one even say to that I wondered?

 

“You’re right about one thing, Sebastian.”

 

“What’s that?”

 

“This is a very cruel world and people need to change it.”

 

He doesn’t respond to that, he just says quietly before he passes off to sleep,

 

“I’ll find you one day in fifteen years when this is over. When I’m better able to love you the way you should be loved.”

 

Did I hear him say that correctly?

 

“When we can both remember to kiss softly. Know that I will always love you in one form or another, Emma Solomon. Good night.”

 

When I woke up he was gone and so was his stuff.

 

All I have left of Zachariah is a picture he drew of me on my wall. He’d colored in the small Rosh Hashanah sketch of the two of us together. One picture of Zach with a rifle, and another of Sebastian and me, young and happy on a clear day in Galilee.

 

 

 

 

 

ש

 

Trikhovitch/ Adon Interlude 2

 

I left her beautiful and sleeping. I realize that I acutely miss New York.

 

My best friend Nick Trikhovitch has sent me an email that I am turning over and over in my hands.

 

He says things are getting a little scary stateside. People are not thinking clearly. Lots of rallying around the red, white and blue. Lots of pledging allegiance and beating the war drums. I haven’t spoken with him since he confirmed that my family was safe on September 11. He sent the email to a secure hotmail account, ZOBagent@hotmail.com, that I only use to receive messages from a handful of people stateside like Sorieya Levy, Hubert Lyons and Nina Yoh with whom I kept an irregular correspondence.

 

Nick uncharacteristically tells me he is scared about what is going on back in Babylon. He says he knows I am happy, but that now would be a real good time for the revolutionaries to come home.

 

In the Light Rail depot I use a rag to clean the dried blood off my black boots. I am wearing the blue pin stripe suit from Golder’s Green. I have spent my last money to have it dry cleaned. My possessions are only occupying half the space in the large black rucksack. I have left a little bag with my bowler hat and a portfolio worth of sketches at the home of Ben Callahan in Atilt who has moved off the kibbutz and into the home of his girlfriend’s parents. He is working as a baker until he is drafted in January. I have a few changes of clothing, a pair of sneakers I never ever wear, three volumes of photos and sketches in my archives and a few odd things like the Bedouin kafia from the Tarabiin tribe. I found out that the Tarabiin is the notorious gunrunning tribe on either side of the Egyptian border supplying the Palestinians with small arms. It is members of their tribe who had saved me in the desert. The gunrunners.

 

I have some maps. I have a compass. I have a new lantern. I have assorted art supplies. I have about nine Polaroid pictures my little hustler buddy has taken over time. Several of me preaching, several of me with cute girls, some of my art stand and even one of me all bloodied and hypovolemic during the knife fight. There is one of Emma that I threw away.

 

After events played out as they did in Be’er Sheva, I am running out of cities that bring me peace. I only had one left, in fact: Haifa. I have arrived in this port city as the last of all the major cities where recruiting for the H’Irgun takes me. I have for whatever reason never reached the Las Vegas of Israel called Eilat on the Red Sea, but I’ve damn near been everywhere else. Although I can stay in the home of our Captain Deeb, I don’t make any calls as I arrive this evening. Not to the gangster Alon. Not to Hadas, the busty anarchist. I haven’t even visited strawberry blonde Anya who loves me for nothing.

 

My head hurts. It is like something is bleeding inside. If I sleep anymore it is only the buses. A couple of hours here, an hour there. I  toured all our positions last week and have asked myself if they are ready. They aren’t. Most of them aren’t even in regular contact with Avinadav and Disrael who are theoretically in charge. In reality nobody is in charge. No one consults the Executive Committee for anything. But then, we’ve been telling them all along they don’t really have to. As a result there are a dozen mini-organizations that operate as affinity groups without any real hierarchy or chain of command. I had no idea that they torched the two McDonalds until I heard it after the fact. Gavroche and his brutal war on junkies is just totally apolitical. My tour of the country revealed that everybody still acts like the army of the great unwashed. No steps have been taken to regiment the movement like I keep asking. The cells either want action and go out and find it, or they want discussion and that’s all they do. Our written documents are a cluster-fuck of languages and messages. There is no unified cry to arms. Avinadav is right. I am no miracle worker. I am only a half-descent organizer. As many as three times I’ve gone to a place, gotten a salon together and then emerged with nothing. Then the junkies molested Molly while she was all strung out. Two steps forward and sixty-two steps back. That shit just means that I’m losing.

 

I found Avi Vodka in the basement of the bombed out restaurant blitzed out of his mind. He is screaming about the Knights Templar and smashing the basement mirrors with a stolen fire axe. His white beard has grown back all crazy. I was told he was in his forties but he looks much, much older.

 

“FOURTEEEN planes flew out north to Beirut. The SECret WAR! Only three came BACK.”

 

“Avi.” He turns suddenly holding up the fire axe like he’s going to swing it on me. I try not to flinch.

 

“Zachy, Zach, Zach! Welcome back!”

 

And just like that my victories are back to none.

 

“Can you put down the ax, Avi? You’re gonna hurt yourself.”

 

He has already. His face is peppered with minor lacerations from the exploding glass. He’s done in all the mirrors in the basement of the abandoned restaurant.

 

“You know, THEY can’t kill me, Zach. THEY can’t kill OLD ABRAHAM.”

 

“I know they can’t, Avi.”

 

“I CAME HERE WITH THE BEST O’INTENTIONS,” he’s singing now.

 

At least he’s stopped breaking things.

 

“I GUARD THIS place. I KEEP the DARK FROM COMING THORUGH THE GATES. The Templar’s had to SECURE The Portals. If they GOT A LITTLE KILL HAPPY, it was probably the heat.”

 

“How bout we go outside and have a cigarette, Avi.”

 

“DON’T you TRY and take away MY BOTTLE! You have no right.”

 

“I won’t. You ran us ragged for a whole week and still didn’t quit. They were right about you, you’ll never ever quit.”

 

He looks at me with a moment of half sobriety.

 

“THEY SAY you can’t QUIT either. BottLE won’t kill me half as quick as WHAT you’re addicted to boy.”

 

I say nothing. I light my last cigarette. I toss the crumbled green pack on the ground.

 

“I know about game,” he blurts out.

 

“What did you just say?”

 

“I didn’t say nothing.”

 

“You said. . . “

 

“Nothing. I CAME ERE WITH THE BEST O’INTENTIONS!” he starts singing again.

 

My watch says midnight. There ain’t nothing more I can do.

 

He makes a wild-faced sneer at me and spits on the ground.

 

“Dead bury the dead.”

 

“What?”

 

“I didn’t say nothing.”

 

He presses his head against the broken mirrors. He starts drawing with his finger on the wall. He makes low guttural chants. I take the opportunity to steal his fire axe. It isn’t huge or heavy. It looks like he stole it out of the hotel.

 

“YOU can keep the axe, George,” he says still pressed about the wall examining nothing with inherent precision.

 

My head hurts a lot more now. I want to sleep, but doubt I can.

 

“I know about the game,” he blurts out.

 

“I know about the game,” he blurts out again.

 

“What do you know about the game, Avi?”

 

“Never gonna have the right pieces.”

 

“What the hell does that mean?”

 

“I’m driving a race car. I’m EXPIREIn’ my first kiss. I grew up in Persia, but lived most my life in Egypt. If you don’t see it yet, boy, you never will. CHECK your blood pressure, BOY. Your head can explode once the door in your mind swings OPEN. Did you come here to eat from the tree of life or just prove you’ll kill for your God on the slopes of Mt. Moriah?”

 

He pauses and then continues.

 

“WITH THE BEST O’INTENTIONS!”

 

He staggers and then falls to the ground.

 

I move to help him, but he flails his arms and screams for me to get away, threatening me with a broken shard of glass.

 

He twitches and spits and then vomits on himself, a vile yellow sputum.

 

“I can help you, Avi. I’m sitting here in this bombed out building on the hill on a Friday night. I’ll take care of you, Avi. I’ll take you to a hospital.”

 

The old man everyone calls Avi Vodka suddenly with some last great strength clutches my wrist. He yanks me toward him and whispers in my ear something that chills me to the bones. Then he bellows at the top of his lungs.

 

“Yo, BOY. JUST LEAVE ME TO MY DRINKIN’!!!!”

 

These words end my brief relationship with Avi Vodka who had been named Abraham once. It happened quite quickly. Once again he is drunk. I’d attempted for a week to help him and it had been meaningless. The break up was as unofficial and as sudden as the beginning.

 

I am sleeping in Carmel Park for the second time in two weeks. I was right in expecting very little. Down the hill near the huge Russian bar Beer House, once again, the cops have routed the local punks drinking in the park. Their retreat has directed them to a broken down lot right where Avi sleeps. They’d give him more drink. His dismissal of me sent me storming off angry, leaving quickly without saying good-bye. He had been going on about something. I am a little too drunk to be dealing with a mad man’s rantings.

 

I make my way down to the walkway that overlooks the water. The broken derelicts of several dozen tanker ships protrude out of the current. Haifa is built on a great hill and now I look out from the top. I can see the lights in Akko. I keep walking down the road. There is an elevated park on a white stone terrace above me with palm trees. There are hotels there with the best views in Haifa. And then I see it or the first the light of it. The most distinctive site in the entire city, which few ask who built it or why. It is the Gardens of the Baha’i. Stretching from the port to the top of Mount Carmel are 18 terraced gardens and an illuminated golden shrine. Its architecture is taken from many ages. There is a copper-gold tiled dome on a multi-tiered white stone foundation. It is all a thing of such beauty. From my vantage point I can see the vast garden complex. I don’t even know what a Baha’i is. Is it a pagan rich person goddess culture or the Scientology of the Middle East? It isn’t Jewish, though. To me it looks like a spiritual casino, a real life golden cow. It’s elegant and astounding, but so are Eilat and Vegas. It’s like these Baha’i are rubbing it in all of our faces how messed up this country is. I can hate them without knowing a thing about them.

 

I forgot to drink enough water today. I haven’t eaten in awhile. My sleeping is irregular. I’m glimpsing at something. Things being what they are, I wonder. Am I too weak a messenger for the message being sent? The vessel has begun to crack.

 

The fire axe is wrapped in a black sheet. My bag isn’t heavy anymore. I have few things. This afternoon I looked at my reflection in the bathroom of a trucker way station. I didn’t recognize who I was anymore.

 

A FLASH in my mind, the dull crack of my fists breaking some junkies face.

 

Wet sloppy cracks. I stumble along the promenade overlooking the massive garden below me overlooking Haifa and the sea. I haven’t had a drink in four days but I’m drunk on something.

 

A FLASH out the corner or my eye. Junkies huddled under the highway bridge on the ridge above me. Then they’re gone. I slap myself twice real hard.

 

“Get a grip on yourself, Sebastian.”

 

Stumbling again. Why am I carrying this fucking axe. I should call someone. I should sleep. More FLASHES.

 

Dead hookers with their throats slit for fun.  I saw that once.

 

FLASHES.

 

The red-haired girl cradling her African child hidden in the garden below. She smiles for the first time ever. I see Mike Washington off somewhere in green and fertile hills practicing quitting smoking, learning to garden and not blowing people away with guns. I see him with his eyes back smiling from retirement.

 

I hear the air raid siren blow far off in the west.

 

FLASHES.

 

The dull pain in my head is getting worse.  Feels like my eyes are bleeding, but they aren’t. We’ve done a whole lot of shooting to get here. I mean that in every possible sense.

 

FLASHES.

 

Of some ambulance driven by paramedic Nick Barker bringing my mother to Mt. Sinai but having to stop at NYU instead.

 

I stumble and I fall. I sit stupidly on the pavement knowing no one is going to come and pick me up. Somewhere up in the tree line I think I see a man hanging from a tree. I get up. I hop the low stone wall and drop down into the upper terrace of the vast illuminated gardens. There’s no security. No cameras. Just a cobblestone path that leads from the place I jumped the wall down into the garden. I carry an ax to grind. I’m going to destroy something beautiful in this hateful garden.

 

I need to sleep. I need to rest my weary eyes. I need to eat something, remember what a warm meal used to taste like.

 

I think about New York. How I miss Union Square and Murphy Park and my friends from Hunter and Bronx Science. I miss my brother and Mom and Dad. I feel like a sham, like a failure to return so soon. Just ten months of having learned nothing, done nothing, helped no one.

 

As I wander down into the vast garden, I smell the fresh harbor dew. I walk further and further down the hill.  I’m going to find some idol to smash. I am going to chop down one of their fruit trees. I’m going to turn the ax on myself.

 

I have journeyed so far. I’m so tired. I’m sick. I’m going to take this ax and chop off my right hand. I’m going to bleed to death out in this garden. I’ll sacrifice myself on Mt. Carmel if Abraham is too drunk to do it himself. There won’t be a lamb. No one will stop me.

 

I got her here didn’t I? I got the red-haired girl and her savior baby back here. Didn’t I? Didn’t I? Didn’t I do something worthy of sleep? Worthy of death?

 

There are cuts and bandages all over me from fighting. My head hurts. I need to rest. I drop the ax and sit on small white stone bench about halfway down to the main temple with is beautiful copper dome. I’ve touched a lot of lives since I became a refugee. At least I’d like to think so. I’ve made quite a lot of art.

 

This condition I have has gotten the best of me again.

 

Am I bleeding out of my eyes? No, it’s all in my head. All in my head.

 

How much of what’s been happening is real at all? Some? None? Any?

 

I fumble with the straps of my black rucksack and produce the two parchment pages rolled up and tied with grey string. I open them up and read them. Brent has read them and told me I should destroy them.

 

“The devil has gotten in you,” he said.

 

Avinadav read them and told me,

 

“They’ll kill you for writing this and me for believing it.”

 

He said he’d follow me anyway.

 

I crumple the pages in my trembling hands. This is the mandate for things to come that I cannot control and that I cannot possibly live up to. I rip up the two parchments pages with their drawings and symbols and plans. I chew them up and eat them. I swallow them before they can do me any more harm.

 

There is a spiral pictogram that I started seeing in my dreams. I showed it once to Hadas. She said it looked like the Farsi word for change, the Hebrew name for God and the Rune meaning death all interlocked.

 

I showed it to Emma on the beach one day, she just said,

 

“You’ve got quite a mind, Mr. Artstein.”

 

I take a black sharpie out of the bag and draw that symbol on a flat smooth rock. I finally reach a building called the Universal House of Justice in the gardens on one side of their beautiful temple. I haven’t yet found the place to mutilate myself. This will do. I leave my bag in the upper garden. All I have is an ax and the marked stone. I take a couple of deep breaths readying the ax to chop off my right hand. There will be no words to imaginary friends big or small. Just do the deed. No use cutting down trees, smashing idols, being angry or showing rage. I have to sacrifice myself. This is the only devil left to deal with.

 

A good hard chop might take the thing right off. If I don’t scream like a little kid, I will bleed out all over the plaza of the Universal House of Justice.

 

Just then, I hear a voice.

 

“Don’t be a coward, my brother. Hold out for the dawn just a little bit longer.”

 

It is no voice of God, just the voice of a little half-Indian, half-Persian gardener named Du’uv D’Avon, a 26-year old volunteering time to the Baha’i World Service. I look up at this little Bah’ai gardener in his simple grey uniform with black lapels. The Baha’i nine-sided star is pinned to his collar. I let the ax clatter to the plaza floor. I am just not any good at making myself die. I tell the gardener as much.

 

“A Bah’ai from New York told me to give this to you,” I say and hand him the polished stone with the strange symbol from my dreams. The young gardener accepts this offering then leads me back to the upper terrace to retrieve my rucksack.

 

He tells me nothing of his religion. He says it is against the rules of his faith to proselytize, especially on holy land. He tells me that I don’t need temples or a great pilgrimage to find God. He says that my God has been with me every step of the journey. That He was with me at my birth and would be waiting any night, but tonight to take me to the sweet hereafter.

 

He says that I need to sleep. He walks me down the hill and lets me out the front gate at the base of the mountain. I sleep the night on the roof of building under construction in the shadow of Mt. Carmel and the shrine of the Baha’u’llah.

 

In the morning some construction workers wake me up and kick me out. I call Brent Avery with my last two shekels. I know he is back in the country looking for me.

 

 

ת

 

 

I’m sitting in that Haifa café with Brent Avery.

 

I’m wondering if there is any spiritual significance to any of this. Have I been wiling out for ten months with a serious mental condition or is there a real political mission that I am a part of? I’m leaning toward mental condition but the Jerusalem syndrome has me all hyped up hoping that there has been a purpose. That’s the main selling point of these religions and revolutions anyway. They give us a purpose.

 

I reflect upon the last four years. After I throw some God and struggle into it, it seems to justify itself. All the crazy shit I’ve gotten into.  All the lives I’ve made myself a part of. All the people I’ve hurt or helped or disappointed or inspired. It all looks so much more significant if the Big Guy has been involved. That’s what turns a seventeen-year old, bipolar, rich American kid into a prophet, right? The inspiration changes the perception.

 

But right now, I’m not fooling anyone.

 

We drive back to Tel Aviv in silence. I wonder why this guy is helping me.  I wonder if this means I actually have to go back to Babylon. I’m pretty sure that’s the impression that he has. Everything is pretty blurry to me. There is this uncertainty that is plaguing my last days in the land. I feel like I have been deceived. After that entire struggle all I have to show for it is a couple of scrapbooks of pictures and some neat battle scars.

 

Brent thinks I am ready to accept Jesus Christ as a lord and savior and to return to my family back in New York. Odds are I am over simplifying what boils down to some damn good intentions on the part of this Christian soldier. It has been a long time since I have gotten to know anyone well enough for them to tell me that I need to go home. Avinadav and Brent are the only two in the whole journey. Brent is convinced. I’m not. Many people I meet think my perspective changes radically ever couple weeks. I appear fickle. It’s not that my perspective changes, it’s just that my personality, my politics and my relationship to my higher power does. Nothing huge. Sometimes ever couple weeks or sometimes every five minutes. It’s a condition.

 

And hope sustains me.

 

***

 

I tell Brent that I have some unfinished business in Be’er Sheva. I get on the bus and take the trip down. I have to let those kids know that I am going back home. Brent has secured a temporary passport from the U.S. Consulate and booked a flight back to Newark, New Jersey.

 

When I get back to the KDAA, Molly is still sleeping. She has been up all night with Sahar spray-painting our logo around the area we mapped out that would be Tribe Judah territory. The regional commands had been renamed Tribes at some point in October. It is the first step toward our goal at reclamation. It has been a nice little dream.

 

As I tuck little fairy Molly under her blanket I think about the month of October and how we cut those two guys up. I try to wake Molly up and she tries to punch me.

 

“Ze-hariah, you fuck. Where have you been?” she says half asleep, in her thick Russian accent.

 

“It’s like three in the afternoon.”

 

“You just got back from Tel Aviv? I no have idea. It’s dark in KDAA. Under stairs, no idea.”

 

She slowly climbs out of bed and puts on her purple hat. She takes off her glasses and rubs her eyes.

 

“Let’s go get some food.”

 

“Food good,” she smiles.

***

 

We walk through the old city to the shwarma stand where we always get our lunch. The vendor Arif always gives us free food. A part of me thinks that it is because of Molly. Another part thinks his boss tells him to do it after the sheik had approved our food basket program. A day later half the Bedouin vendors were turning over their throw-aways wrapped up in bags to be picked up by Noaah at the end of the day.

 

I assemble all the Be’er Sheva Command at the KDAA. I tell them that besides from them and a cluster of individuals in Tel Aviv and Haifa, there is no The Organization. They tell me that they knew that all along. I am glad. I tell them there was no real international fellowship of resistance, that nothing tied together the world’s revolutionaries much besides belief in revolution. They know that too. I tell them that my real name is Sebastian Adon and that I am seventeen-years old and that I grew up in New York City.

 

The nineteen young fighters gathered in the KDAA accept these truths in different ways. All but one accepts that I need to leave. Gavroche rages at me in Hebrew. He over turns a table. He calls me a coward and storms off. Katusha, his girl with painted eyes apologizes for Gavroche. She thanks me for what I have given them and leaves quietly repeating that I am a coward. One by one the most loyal members of the Organization leave the KDAA. Their reactions are very different. They walk out until only Sahar and Molly remain.

 

The three of us walk in silence to a going-away-to-the-army party David Levy is throwing for his brother. He takes my repatriation the hardest as I have been the only real rude boy he has ever known.

 

***

 

David Levy let Molly shower and sleep at his house. He tucked her into bed and she wrapped blankets about herself. Daavid was soon making out with some girl in his shower. Sahar took a cab home.

 

“So you’re just gonna leave?” asks Molly.

 

“Yeah.”

 

“You’re real name is Sebastian?”

 

“Yep.”

 

“So what was point of The Organization?”

 

“We were sort of making it up as we went along.”

 

“So it was never as big as you said?”

 

“Are there people everywhere that hate the way things are and want to be free? Yes. Are they organized? Not at all.”

 

“You could stay and help organize us.”

 

“This isn’t my country. And at this point I don’t know if I have it in me.”

 

“Why are you being this fucking weak?”

 

“Because I’ve lost a lot of my faith.”

 

“Stupid God. You shouldn’t count on Him to help you through this. I never believed in God and still I’m fine. You, you go back and forth. It’s not healthy at all. Make up your mind. Either you crazy or there is God. Can’t be both. I think you crazy.”

 

She gives me a hug.

 

“Better I just to remember you a crazy. If you not crazy, you’re a traitor and a coward.”

 

It is tough talk from a thirteen-year old.

 

 

***

 

 

Brent Avery baptized me in the sea north of Tel Aviv on a cool, clear afternoon. I figure since I am no good at moving miracles or saving souls, I should just accept a final surrender. I have long an admirer of the man called Jesus Christ. Brent Avery who is a Messianic Christian evangelist accepts Christianity as the fulfillment of Judaism and practices a perfect mix of both. I figure that is a good thing. Brent Avery is paying for my plane ticket back to America not because he is a Christian or messianic Jew. It is because he figures a 17-year old is better off at home with his family in school than running around the streets of a war-torn foreign country dangerously preaching revolution.

 

The guy moves slowly and talks with a drawl. He is from Oklahoma City and had lost a very close friend when Timothy McVeigh truck-bombed the Federal Building and killed all those little kids back in the 90’s. I think he found Jewish Jesus or Yeshua Ben Yoseph as Brent calls him soon after.

 

I was baptized the day we flew home on a public beach in front of several hundred Israelis who probably felt quite hateful that an American evangelical is converting young Jewish men. I tell myself that it isn’t a conversion, just an upgrade. Nothing changed when Brent dipped me under the water three times. For a father, a son and a holy spirit. Nothing changed at all.

 

That night I burned the personal effects of Mr. Artstein. I made a little fire on the Jerusalem Beach and sent the last of my clothing up in flames. The sneakers I never wore, my white linen suit, my numerous pre-tied ties, the khaki pants with the Moon Ska emblem, the yellow baggy UFOs, my now-dirty wife beater with the communist hammer and sickle, Emma’s Gold’s Gym muscle shirt, Avinadav’s slick black button-down. All of it was fairly dirty and worn from being out in this desert too long. I dropped in what was left of The Organization’s literature. I dropped in the conspicuously diagramed maps of Jerusalem and Be’er Sheva. It all went up in flames.

 

The baptism in the name of the man Jesus Christ is a symbolic rebirth in the sea on the desert’s edge before I experience the re-taint of Babylon. This is a baptism by fire putting Zachariah to sleep for a while.

 

I remember Avinadav speaking one night about slavery in the language of Job.

 

“Naked I came from the womb of that ship, but so help me God, naked shall I not depart.”

 

All my things except the blue pinstripe suit that the Jews of the Green gave me in London burned in that fire. Everything except the three books of my archives and this pinstripe suit.

 

Long past midnight two wandering strangers, a young woman and old man joined me. They came from different directions. The man from the north and the woman from the south.

 

The old man told me, “You can’t change where you come from.”

 

The girl responded, “But you can change the where you are.”

 

Finally, I toss my grey corduroy beret that has covered my head nearly throughout my exile into the fire. I cast Zachariah Artstein into the fire.  But hope not only floats, it is inflammable. For my last act of this ritual I pick up a large ember of coal from my fire with the metal tongs people use to arrange the coals of the Nagillah and press the burning ember to the flat of my right forearm. Flesh sears for several minutes as the last of my effects go up in smoke. I take away the glowing coal and look at the seared red circle on my right arm just below the wrist. It is my mark, my promise that I will return again when I am stronger. It is a forbidden tattoo in the form of another battle scar.

 

Baptized in water, Brent Avery purified me before I made myself the prodigal son. Baptized in fire, I hardened myself lest I forget in the plush lap of Babylon, in the steel towers between River Hudson and River Euphrates, where I come from.

 

The days of exile are over.

 

 

 

 

Epilogue

 

 

There’s a smoldering crater a block from where my parents live. It’s a house of ash. It is the dust of asbestos and bone and the smell of jet fuel and death. On the flight back I conceptualize walking about down there with Nick like two astronauts on the moon.

 

But the moon and every other thing is now a terrorist target and south of Houston Street is sealed up tight as a drum. There are flags everywhere. Everybody rallies around them. We’re going to invade Iraq, or maybe Afghanistan people say. Saddam Hussein did it. Bin Laden did it. Surely North Korea and Iran are involved somehow. Screams and whispers on the television.

 

He meets me on the corner of 96th and West End in front of a deli and we exchange a pound and a tough guy hug and then buy a shit ton of 40’s.

 

Sitting on Nick’s rooftop I tell him the story of events, of women, places, things, friends and comrades made along the rocky road from New York to the desert and back. I tell him of the whores and radicals, of Milan, too, and Italian Genoa.  Of the cliffs and deep blue sea of Nice. The Paris of Pigalle and of urinating off their great tower. Of the train from Paris to London. Of London’s mean South Bank and of the Riots of May. Of my realizations in Spain. Of the tranquil interlude that came to be in Madrid, Seville, Cordoba and the red fortress of the Alhambra. I tell him of the Holy Land.  Of the kibbutz where no one seemed to like working. Of the Dolphinarium bombing. Of the desert. Of my battles, adventures and love affair with Andrew called Avinadav, Emma called Maya Rose and the battle horse of our invention: Ha’Irgun, The Organization.

 

There’s a quiet look of understanding in my best friend’s eyes. He gives me a hard pat on the back then gets up for another 40. We light up a few more Newports looking out on the Hudson River from his parent’s roof balcony 15 stories up. He looks like he’s about to say something, but instead just keeps smoking away.

 

Nick the cocaine fiend, child actor, womanizer and also a master of the art of storytelling. Nick who always put me up when I run from home. Nick Trikhovitch who founded YUFE and walked away. Nickolas Taylor Trikhovitch born only half a Jew on his father’s side, just like me. Hard drinker, hard smoker, first person I knew with a business card and a cell phone. Nick who always knows where the party is. My quiet second gunman. This gun for hire now that Mike Washington is in retirement on his ‘grapemint farm.’ I was always his wingman when it came to girls, but now I need a wingman for a different reason. I need him to offer his gun to the struggle.

 

“We could use a group like The Organization in New York right about now,” Trikhovitch says to me through the cigarette smoke.

 

“I feel that we should recognize that as far as we know, we are the last two sane people in the whole damn country.”

 

Nick laughs at that.

 

“Things might get real bad rather quickly,” I say.

 

“Repatriate a refugee and get a rebel, eh?”

 

“If you remember nothing of my story throughout the long night with no sleep, remember this Trikhovitch. If there are but two people sitting in a dimly lit room, their minds bent on hatching conspiracy and composing freedom songs, then no one can turn and say humanity is sick, humanity is evil, selfish and cruel. If no one can see it, God can. IT sees everything at once. Look there! Humanity has not made itself a total cowardly, traitorous whore. There are two. And two who love knowledge, love freedom and would offer themselves in sacrifice for a broken junkie, an orphan, the poor and the enslaved. These two can light a fire. These two can organize a million to teach, to heal, to fight. We will make our stand right here in the city of our birth. For those who love freedom, even two can beat their drums and use their words like artillery.”

 

A quiet puffing of Newport and Marlboro cigarettes.

No light out but the many lights of the City.

 

“Just you and me against the world then?” he says quietly.

 

“Like usual.”

 

‘We’re going to need a lot of reinforcements.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Hey Brother

This is the complete manuscript of Anfom Frere (Hey Brother) in it’s most up to date edition. If you would like to obtain a copy email me at ZOB.PRESS@gmail.com.

 

Anfom Frere!

 

[Hey Brother!]

 

 

 

By: Walter Sebastian Adler

 

With Excerpts from the journals of Phoebe Rusche & Dr. Dominich Asbun

 

Written in memory of those several hundred thousand souls, [perhaps as many as 316,000] we lost on 12 January, 2010 to the forces of nature and the negligence & vast abuses

Of both NGOS & Governments.

 

Dedicated to the rescuers and the freedom fighters of Port-Au-Prince.

 

Prelude

 

 

I ask you now friend, in whose reality do you live?

We all dedicate our actions to the future. But, what is it that we claim to do with our little lives as that future narrows? Have we all lost our faith in outer generations or a glorious world to come? Of course, all lives are both great and also quite little, but it was a matter of sure and soulful pretension; crossed of course a bit with the “sollidaritous” desire to teach a nation of certain newly freed slaves to fish. Allegorically speaking. The fishing and the slaves. More to the sharp of the point, we were training quietly amidst the dust and rubble the fourth detachment of a growing underground medical battalion, to aid a coming Great Revolt. A guerilla army of young rescue workers and student teachers preparing to accomplish the basic yet audacious task of combatting meaningless death and diseases of poverty pandemic on the island of Hispaniola.

The effects of 210 plus years of chattel servitude, rancorous massacre, ceaseless uprisings and putdownings; quarantines, blan occupations and an induced poverty inflicted upon this people from the outside.

In short, we are the latest reinforcements penetrating a long besieged slave revolt.

These long abused stalwarts, there are believed to be eight million poor unfortunate souls on the Haitian side of the line, but the number is truly anyone’s guess; no realistic census has been taken since the last coup against President Aristide in year of 2004.

Which was ten years ago. The date is presently 4 June, 2014. Thus 210 years and six months since the declared success of the initial rising.

Year Zero, After Revolt (AR).

I will tell you now where power comes from. It comes from any grouping of people that can devise a just means to secure ones Maslow hierarchy of needs and elevate then a given population toward their droits de moun, human rights. The power is not in any violence or coercion and fear but in the bravery of provisioning hope. Ah, yes indomitable hope. Hope for the rights of man are an issue of freedom and freedom is well and good but what is freedom to misery and deprivation. What say I on due process when I must mix dirt with my flour to watch my family starve at a decreased pace! Or, watch my fallow fields yield nothing as my children die not long after birth of .Or, when my parents perish in a brown and vivacious filth of their own vomit shit and piss from contaminated water. What are our rights when we cannot read and we cannot flee and we cannot work and there are no schools and we die by the age of mid fifty.

Thankless faceless and unknown niggers. vStatistics the UN tallies on we slaves. Power comes from control of the means of development! To those who run the schools the clinics or the farms the means to secure basic things so that hope is alive again and then once fed clothed housed secure I can wonder on about my so-called “rights”.

The trouble with the utilization of stranger volunteers in any operation of stress and seriousness is tri-part for vast complication. Since there is no material compensation it is hard to prevent adventurism and privateering. Since they are all mostly strangers it is hard to enforce the chain of command flat as it may be. And since they are often multidisciplinary; a linguist, a paramedic, a marine, a fire commissioner, a spook and an inner city transport e.m.t. they are all mostly unfamiliar with the dynamic of free association based two tiered consensus utilized by the People’s Army. The third part of the problem beyond privateering and command control is loyalnost. Sebastian and Adelina are lovers living together for the last nine months in the exile of Massachusetts so despite it, or her total lack of interest not one shit given not a shit of a shit on the subject of politics or dialectics, she does truly love him and he loves  her as well and therefore she controls him. Abstaining from the politics of the coming operation she can dispassionately suggest the common sense approach.

This approach is hardly common for here if you wonder about the chicken and the egg you are working often with a sea of self-proclaimed experts that expertise on shells or eggs or how they crack. Or chickens and how to raise them. Or which comes first. But all the local people the Haitians on the street are not concerned with theories like this. They are concerned with survival for themselves and their families. Once everyone has survived peaceably for some time then maybe there would be time for speaking of the perfect egg the just economy or the chicken the functional state. If that’s what chickens and eggs are really about. And all these experts these NGO technocrats speaking English or Portuguese,  Spanish or French they don’t trust governments and seeing nothing in the economy to so easily carry off. For there is nothing; they devise ways to raise chickens from broken eggs from sick diseased chickens. Then they blame the Haitians in languages they don’t speak. But they are still just fighting to survive.

The quarantine, such as we call it is 210 years old. It began the day the revolution was declared victorious with the separation of the tri color into the red and blue bicolor ripped by JJ Dessalines. The revolution which had begun by the Jacobins in France whose ideas spread to the blood soaked paradise of St. Domingue purged the entire island of foreign rulers, resulted in a loss of life of an estimated 500, 400 inhabitants and 60,000 soldiers from France, Spain and Greater Britain. It began in 1791 and culminated in the only victorious slave uprising in 1804. Shortly after the quarantine and civil war between blacks and mulattos began; JJ Dessalines signed a purge order of all whites of the island which remained. And by 1805 there were less than 300 blan alive in greater Hispaniola, mostly female, Polish or medically trained. White physicians and Polish conscripts had also fought for newly freed Haiti. The quarantine was not about race or racial antagonism. Whites Negs and Mulats fought on both sides of the great revolt. The issue for Napoleon and other leaders of European powers was that of newly freed slaves. With weapons and armies cannons and turf proclaiming rights of man that had been defeated in the cradle of the uprising France. The issue was still that in the Americas in Europe, Africa, Asia and most of humanity remained a type of slave and this revolt might spread rapidly.

To the other islands of the Wild West Indies; to all of Latin America; to the USA and reverberating out back to Europe and the surfs of Russia and China. In fact the defeat of the Haitian revolution was one of the greatest foreign policy objectives shared by nearly every power. And since the armies of Spain, France and England had not been able to re-impose the hated regime of chattel servitude the new policy was containment.

They had by 1802 captured, tortured and killed the only man Toussaint L’Ouvature who had the moral authority and military genius to secure a multi-racial Hispaniola as a rebel base. He was the father of the revolution. The great powers stirred racial tensions inside and lock Haiti off from the world. And by 1806 JJ Dessalines had been assassinated and rebel Generals Petion a Mulatto in the south was at war with Christophe in the north and these exhausted former slaves were freed to a country mostly burned to the ground in 13 years of violence. Most of the people functionally illiterate content to retreat to tiny plots allotted to them and world their own land staying away from the intrigues and civil conflict between Cap Haitian and Emperor Christophe and President Alexander Petion in Port-au-Prince. And the outside world whispered sedition and tightened the quarantine. The revolt which could not be suppressed had to be buried. Economically this was a success. Haiti no longer had her sugar infrastructure or the means to export anything. So Alexander Petion in a historic meeting with Simon de Bolivar in Jamel the southern port city agreed to export the revolution. In exchange for Haitian guns and fighters bolivar agreed to liberate Latin America and free all the slaves there. By 1820 both colonialism and slavery in Latin America were finished. But newly freed slaves and revolutions do not always quickly make chickens eggs or democrats and by the time Bolivar was dead there were new oligarchies laying claim to all of the newly freed turf. By 1822 Haiti was unified under Haitian President Boyer who surrounded by French war ships signed the indemnity. These freed slaves would pay back France. 21 billion USD between then and 1947. To end the quarantine the economic blockade Haiti would impoverish herself further. And there would be coups. 22 coups until 1915 when the US occupied Haiti with troops until 1934. Imposing a new slavery. Building roads and new plantation infrastructure. And an army which a man named Francois Duvalier would use to come to total power in 1957. And he and his son Jean Claude would rule until 1986 with vile secret police the Maccoutes supported by us money and CIA support for the killing of communists. And a revolt from the peasants and church brought to power a priest. The liberation theologian Aristede. Toppled in 1991 after serving 9 months. And then more bloodshed and coup and more us occupation. And then came a quake which killed 300,000 perhaps. Or 220,000 or 100,000; no one actually knows. As rounded numbers suggest. But, it leveled the capital and the technocrats descended and missionaries. And now four years since the quake a pop singer and Duvalierist is president. A UN occupation is in its tenth year and there are still over 10,800 small, medium and international NGO taking about chickens and eggs and such. The quarantine never really ended. And now 98 percent of the trees are gone. Life expectancy is 56. Half the population cannot read. And a cholera epidemic introduced by the UN troops has killed 9,000 and crippled over 600,000. And yet still people speak of building back better with the Sai Ah Industrial park mega sweat shop or the tourist build up in Ile-a-Vache or new plans to link Haiti into the globalized economy.

But the typical Haitian wonders about the power which goes on for two hours day for the world cup. Or the water supply. Or how to afford two meals a day. It is not so much that one must believe in this narrative but one must listen for a narrative. Or the quarantine succeeds. It succeeds by painting these newly freed slaves as savage primates unable to have a country. Haiti instead of being a triumph of will for human rights and freedom is used then as a cautionary tale. For the long suffering Haitian people do not always get their new except by radio. And since most cannot read French there are only irregular reports in Haitian Creole about the success of failure of this revolt they began. That it spread to Russia, China, and Cuba and then to Algeria, Congo, Mozambique, Ethiopia, Vietnam, Iran and dozens of others plantations. That for those with the ability to read history and current events it seems to be spreading like fire into the Middle East.

This revolt is an apolitical desire to enjoy the human rights codified by the UN in 1945. It isn’t about government or economic organization. After the abolitionist battles and legal end of slavery there are still 37 million slaves worldwide. The great powers and their oligarchies propagate the race hatred and then utilized the quarantine of the Soviet Union as blackest proof this socialist modal was unsound. But there remain bastions. And again it is not about the politics or the economy but about justice. About no spending a half-life fighting only to survive like an animal.

We have broken the quarantine the physical quarantine with ease because our passports are blue and we have 15 USD and a base of operations in this dusty old fort. But perhaps we will have to spend the rest of lives breaking the secondary quarantine. The false consciousness. The separation of fakeness and real imposed by the oligarchy telling us who is white and who is black. Man and woman. Haitian and foreigner. Capitalist and communist. It is a matter of knowing that all of these divisions are lies. Separating us from our human rights. Rights such as healthcare, education, food water, living wages unions, the right to speak or write our opinion without being put in a bag by masked men. Raped. Cut into pieces. And dumped by the roadside at night.

Sebastian and Adelina, shortly joined by the Marine Peter Reed and e.m.t. and Jean Louis a Haitian American e.m.t. and Eric Admen a fire fighter paramedic from Seattle Soviet none shared a simple identity or view. If such labels were too imposed about nationality all were card carrying Americans. And it was this exploitation of privilege that we hoped to use to win. The oligarchy of any country relies on division. And therefore our greatest strength is not our nationality or privilege but that we are forcing an opening. Haitian leadership in Haiti. A simple objective; teach more 40 Haitians to save lives. But we have a narrative though not agreed to by all of this ad hock unit; it forms the underpinning. If there is to be change here and abroad we must control our own means to human development. As a means to human rights.

Covered in dust and baked by heat and surrounded by endless miles of corrugated shanty dwellings and walled compounds no will pay much attention to us. The revolution began by murdering the oppressor. For 210 plus years that fight has been fought to a stalemate. And the resulting rights have been transient and largely un-won.

So we are switching the tactic in accordance with orders from rebel leadership here and abroad. We are internationalists. We are willing to travel country to country to go where needed to most remote jungle or mountain. The oppression is real. The violence is real. The slavery is still real. Our oppressor will still stick a gun in our face and drag us away in a sac and torture us over rights. The way we win is make our oppressors irrelevant. For they wish to read us some Machiavelli or Hobbes and tell as we are but violent little monkeys. That without them wed eat each other. I will say that when men and women can fish; can educate heal and keep roads open and trash free then we will not need them. We will not pay them taxes. We will not let them use our money or hard earned money to buy guns and kill people just like us over their ideas on chickens and eggs.

We are not alone on this island with this idea. My place in the chain of command is that of a staff sergeant. They day we got here we were but five more reinforcements. We have broken the first level of the quarantine by penetrating the siege. And now with but a few devices carried in supported by the local arm of the resistance we train 40 more souls how to save a life. The insurgency began with weapons and ideas. I will not survive this war to see Zion. But that is not my role. Nor Adelina or Pete Reed or Eric Admen or Jean Louis. You give a slave a gun and say freedom and you will wash the blood of an entire generation onto the sea and streets. You give a         slave training to heal and save and the blow to the oppressors on the mountain is fully sustained. We are but an army of newly freed slaves who have choose to build the world we wish to see, rather than again set on fire a world already burning.

 

Within the confines of a dusty but patriotic fort barely held together by cinderblocks rebar pillions and chipped paint; partially over run by cats a small internationalist unit composed of but five volunteers who will garrison the outpost beginning 3 June, Gregorian Year 2014. Behind a mammoth red iron door is the concrete skeleton of a school called “Ecole Shalom des Frères”, which means a ‘school of the brothers of peace’ being intermittently erected. And in the adjacent courtyard is a two story maze of chalk board dimly lit classrooms, a small mess hall and some ten second floor rooms worth bunks to accommodate the inbound reinforcements.

There is a water tower that supplies clean chlorinated water to the locals at 5 goudes a liter. There is a parade ground field covered now completely in debris an impassible dumping ground occupying half the forts enclosure. There is a field kitchen and a wrangle of mangy creatures that when bled or squeezed make what passes as food. Or, eggs. There is a small partially compensated staff of locals. There are two former restoviks one 12 and one 22. They accomplish various tasks of carpentry banditry plumbing an electric work. Three female cooks live in town. One is old women is young and the third of medium age. There is transporter named Colbert; a former taptap driver on staff along with several other useful quasi useful or only vaguely advantageous adjunct personnel with vague if not wholly nepotistic function. And the ground commander gong on his business card as a “country director” is one Mr. Avinadav DeBuitléirs educated at the University of Stony Brook in long island who affiliates himself with the diaspora aspirations of various movements in Brooklyn. But, he directs little outside the walls of this miserable fort; and even here he often prefers delegation.

 

And, Avinadav was directly support by a petit blan named Laura Levi, but since she was on some business in Ethiopia she had been replaced by a temperamental wench a Quebecois from Montréal named ‘lady Catherine’. Her last name was completely unpronounceable except by the haughtiest of francophone so we said Lady or ‘Madam Catherine’, or Catherine Q because there was universal contempt for her amongst the volunteers. She has too well assimilated into the habit of barking orders at Brown people.

 

And that is as we say “what it was”.

 

On 3 June two members of this unit crossed the rocky road called a National Highway from Santo Domingo to the City of Port-Au-Prince on the Capital Cruiser armored bus service which showed the movie Fast and the Furious part 5, at least five times. At first, it was quite loud but by the third run it was silent as no one on the bus spoke anything besides Spanish, French or Haitian Creole, and the initial plot points of the rock and Vin Diesel the most famous of Mulat action heroes had been grasped. And now it was all tits giggling and exploding cars. And the road fell apart right after the Jimani checkpoint crossing. They served us a ham sandwich a bottle of cold water. Sebastian Adon could see the color slowly leave Adelina Blazhennaya’s pretty and petit face as the border was crossed. He could see and via the omnibus rattling feel the road become not road. The structures of the country side become not structures. The lush foliage become barrens. And as the color of his partners face fades Sebastian also wonders how she will react to what is to come. Jostling jolts hit the bus and traffic slows to a trickles pace as the driver forms a one lane convoy behind mac trucks build in East Asia shuttle merchanting goods from Dominican Republic into Haiti. Sneakers and such. Also cocaine or people sealed a valise.

In the mind of Sebastian Adon whose hair was brown and heart was neg. He imagines this infiltration as a patriotic duty for there was some Haitian blood in him for once we took an oath.

The trappings of normal human development crumble each kilometer the bus rumbles into Haiti and the endless dust. A cloud of whirling particulate swallowing the charmless and desolate environs.

At the border, there was nothing to buy except Pringles. In addition, soda of every kind. The customs agent asked Adon in Creole what was his business in Haiti; tourism.

Adelina Blazhennaya and Sebastian both crossed the border in black boots and blue uniform pants and black shirts and therefor the customs agent knew that tourism wasn’t really what they were doing in Haiti. But, no one cared. The Brazilians, Chileans, Argentinians, and a poperee of other lesser nations were running the functions of the disbanded military. The Americans were subsidizing the state. The Cubans were running the hospitals and several thousand NGOS perhaps as many as 10800 were the only economy besides transshipment, allegedly of bulk packaged cocaine.

No cares given in a meaningful way. Much less an under compensated customs agent. They both had blue American passports. Crisp and newly issued. Who cared what their intention was if they had such blue passports and fifteen USD a piece. The two enormous satchel valise roller bags went completely unexamined. As did their two green voodoo tactical rucksacks. Who cared?

The omnibus continued two hours west down the national highway. There was corrugated tin shack after shack. Contrasting the anything to D.R. is an exercise in futility. One can simply see that this the same island and anthropologically speaking that is where it ends. Without a lengthy discourse on history colonialism and superficialities of cultural antagonism well honestly it’s night and day except they both like cock fighting.

Three months ago the president of the Dominican Republic signed an executive order denationalizing of over 200,000 Dominicans of Haitian descent.

They had the tenor of slightly over fed happy slaves noted Blazhennaya. Not the Haitians. Neither happy nor well fed. At each juncture of slow down as she grew more pale seeing the descent into some land before time some utter desolation. Naked children drooling covered in flies. Tents and shanties. Everywhere unfinished construction sites and partially erected edifices. And the cloud of dust hovered over the endless misery.

When they finally reached Port-Au-Prince it was just before tusk and Avinadav DeBuitléir accompanied by Marco Balan the light skinned apparatchik and Colbert the driver loaded them in and shuttled them both away to Croix des Bouquets down the unlit impasses to 808 Rue Double Barrel They were given a choice of three rooms all very dusty and Spartan. Settled a little before midnight. Adelina Blazhennaya sat on their twin bed in a room with no window coverings just a window space with sheet nailed to cover it.

And then she cried heavily.

Not at the overwhelming poverty; the blight scorched earth of the quarantine. Not for fallen friends and those surely to fall. The quiet tears of Adelina Blazhennaya were for herself. For to protect the man she loves and is so devoted she will lose everything and everyone she has ever known. This was a dying place. A ruined pocked and parched Island at or near the bottom of the mountain. Horror has exhausted tears, thinks she. She cries because what hope have they or humanity in general to win. There enemies are hunting them. She is so far from Chelyabinsk Tank City. She cries and Sebastian holds her. Darkness seeps in. They take their place in the trenches joining the reality, the tragic ranks of newly freed slaves. It was one thing to follow a man into hell, it was another thing all together to fight your way from that hell to the heights of Mt. Olympus if not higher!

 

But before there was a Haitian Emergency Group, before there was a resistance movement winning ground in both Haiti and the United American States; there was a mighty quake which took the lives of between 100,000 to 316,000 men, women and children. Round large disparate numbers which revealed a great unknowing and uncaring. For when the oligarchy cannot crush, kill or discredit a thing they quarantine it.

 

It was a spirit of solidarity that brought us from Brooklyn to stand beside our Haitian brothers and sisters in their darkest hour; it was the Haitian defiance of empires and the world system itself that made us stay in Hispaniola and continue the battle for freedom beside them.

 

 

 

 

01

 

 

 

 

The year December of 2009 Common Era, snow still falls heavy on the Isle of Man.

In the wood ceilinged restaurant of a Russian Bathhouse Spa 88 that stinks of sweat and also vaguely of fornication, buried below the streets of the Financial District a long conversation is coming to a close. An emergency medical technician named Sebastian Adon is finishing up a good yarn to a young Ukrainian medical student named Zoe Lubov Perechenova who has recently become his platonic confident. The aim of such storytelling is that she might let him pour cold water upon her, let him gaze at her nearly naked body, captivate him with her bright eyes and take in his all his ambulance war stories. Of which he has plenty. He’s been writing her for months. She has full and wavy black hair and she smiles with such mischievous knowing that her beauty and bright smile stays with him long after she is gone. But, it’s not romantic never has been, she simply likes to hear him tell his yarns.

 

And this has been a great success for the last four hours.

Everything is fully dilated.

 

They know each from a student group many years ago, when all in this country talked more openly about equality. Sebastian Adon is an avid fan of former and post Soviets. And she is the loveliest Israeli he has ever known. They remind him of something that is tough and also fearless; loyal to a red line and of course exceedingly beautiful and open minded in the bed room to just about anything. Adon has been writing Zoe letters for over seven years. He’s not sure why. Attention? It isn’t simply to sleep with her. Although as a man of course he would not turn that prospect down for she is surely beautiful. He’s a man always highly in need of a confidant, for he’s nearly always in some form of emergency mode.

It has been a rocky road of activism, arrest, trial and tribulation since he first came back from the State of Israel nearly ten years ago in 2001 shortly after the 9-11 martyr operation.

To her he’s a fiery train wreck of comedy and tragic idealism. She observed him young early in his student movement days, then briefly at Hunter University, once at yoga and on the Book Face for some time intermittently. He cannot possibly be cut of normal Amerikanski cloth. He is a curiosity to which she can devote sporadic time. A minor deviation from her studies at Oberlin.

 

The story this time has been about his moral descent post deportation from the State of Israel. He had recently attempted to return there to visit a long lost associate by the name of Maya Solomon.

He was immediately arrested at the airport.

His two days in Lod Prison were recounted and about Israelis not taking kindly to him working on a Palestinian ambulance for a week; four years prior was much of today’s yarn. The Israelis kind of hold a “whose suicide are you on” type grudge. About them beating him, water boarding him, hitting him with lights, electricity and kicking him repeatedly in the groin bellowing in Russian.

Sebastian Adon ethnically speaking is one quarter Irish; one quarter Russian; one quarter German; and some part Polish Jew; therefore he makes a good little Brooklyn mutt. Or perhaps at best an exceedingly good liberal New Yorker. He drives ambulances for FDNY going on two years in the South Bronx; he sometimes drinks too much liquor and brutalizes a girlfriend sexually; but nothing rapey or violent. Cuffs, anal, threesomes with whores, foursomes with couples, loads on tits and faces. Family oriented fun like that. The product of a generation raised on porn. He’s got loose and transient morals that he justifies with his ambiguous vocation. He likes the idea of human rights, but isn’t sure if humans know they have any, or sometimes if they deserve them. He likes the idea of communism, but isn’t clear why the communist revolutions were mostly violent autocracies. He has basic values that are in essence good, Zoe agrees, though she is vaguely appalled to hear him speak of his sexacapades’ and depravities, they cheapen him profoundly in her eyes.

She heard that Maria his longest running ex left him because he got drunk and swam into the Atlantic last September after a fight. The Russian rumor mill was faster medium than Book Face.

Sebastian has led a small revolutionist club since his return from Israel in 2001 that has caused him considerable trouble; but alas capitalism still rules in the USA, despite his and others best efforts to defeat it.

 

“There’s a half black president promising to end the wars, forgive student debt and provide universal free healthcare,” Zoe says, “we weren’t all totally defeated.”

She had at one time organized a chapter of the movement at her all girl school Chapin, but that was in almost another life.

Occupy was two years away and the general uprising called the Great Revolt about three.

“Why are you an ambulance man again?” she asks him”

 

He says to her:

 

‘An ambulance is a vehicle for transporting sick or injured people, to, from or between places of treatment for an illness or injury, or to heaven or hell. The term ambulance is used to describe a vehicle used to bring medical care to patients outside of the hospital or to transport the patient to hospital for follow-up care and further testing, or bring their souls to other vessels should they be fit enough to live again. The word is most commonly associated with the land-based, emergency motor vehicles that administer emergency care to those with acute illnesses or injuries, hereafter known as emergency ambulances, but in numerous developing and socialist nations community health workers have performed this work on foot and commandeered vehicles when needed. These are usually fitted with flashing warning lights and sirens to facilitate their movement through traffic. It is these emergency ambulances that are most likely to display the Star of Life, which represents the six stages of pre-hospital medical care. Other vehicles used as ambulances include trucks, vans, station wagons, buseshelicoptersfixed-wing aircraftboats, and even hospital ships.’

 

“So says Wikipedia,” smirks Emergency Medical Technician Sebastian Adon reading off his half smart phone, a little black android.

 

“Why do you have to quote Wikipedia, like every six conversations”, mutters Zoe Perechenova, perhaps the object of his desire, a perky, tough as nails golden eyed, raven haired, shut up he thinks, making words rhyme doesn’t make you any kind of poet.

 

While completing a degree in Political Science at City University Sebastian took a job as an emergency medical technician and this seems to have tempered some of his previous radical fervor, but not by much.

 

 

“I like helping my people,” comes his scripted response.

“You people?” she replies.

“Everybody, who needs some help.”

 

 

Sebastian is just under six feet tall. After they get dressed and meet in the banya lobby where she tries to pay and makes sure not to let her. He’s wearing a blue FDNY job shirt he’s gotten personally emblazoned with the Israeli flag, an irony under the circumstances of recent events. The Irish had been putting on such patches for years, however the window for other ethnicities was about to be cut short once the West Indians began wearing their flags into battle so to speak. He has bags under his eyes because he works life’s night shift. He wants her in every way a man can desire a woman but has never told her thus so far in the two years he’s known her. After Maria left he intensified the courtship. That is largely because he at first was fooled into loving another, lesser woman, second because he’s a coward when it comes to his actual emotions and did little to pursue the more likely reaction to his affections; which was surely bewilderment and rejection. So he just kept the letters about big ideas not passions.

 

“I like collectively written documents. And you’re just being a snob because your Oberlin teachers always tell you never use it. It’s a fucking great definition of an ambulance if you ask me.”

Zoe likes things with scientific references. She likes looking up anything that seems suspect, which when it comes to Adon, is a lot.

“I like some of your collectively written documents. But you go on and on sometimes and need to get to the point,” she says.

“Sometimes your art is overdone, over drawn, you make the boobs big and gross and subtract from your bold uniqueness, in my opinion,” she smiles.

Zoe likes things with references. But she is fully an artist at her core, in her heart and soul. She likes looking up almost anything that seems suspect, which when it comes to Adon, is a lot. She knows he keeps things from her to preserve a somewhat sanctimonious appearance of some kind of bohemian revolutionary ambulance hero.

 

Just fifteen minutes before they’d both been lying near naked in a Russian Banya called Spa 88. He was putting the story on her about something crazy that had just gone down on what was supposed to be his first vacation in three years. After some other story about a threesome with Maria his ex. Which didn’t ever really happen, it was just something that turned him on to say in front of her. In reality, he had gotten into a fight with her in September on Block Island and followed Jeremey McGaffey’s ghost out to sea for several hours. The local police found him several hours later walking naked down the road with and carrying an enormous rock.

He has a very subjective reality compared to the rest of us she thinks.

She knows he keeps things from her to preserve a sanctimonious appearance of bohemian revolutionary ambulance hero.

 

“I think you need to go back to school and get more medical training,” she says, “you’re a glorified cab driver with an oxygen tank. You’re not living up to your expectations of yourself.”

“I’ll forgive your lack of appreciation; we’re god’s avenging angels with sirens I’ll have you know.”

 

When Adon feels cornered he typically drops into even more grandiose rhetoric.

 

“Sebastian. You, are a terrific story teller, but let’s not forget where we stand in life’s chain of command shall we. I am a student and you are a truck driver with a stethoscope, if we wish to be more than that there is such a long road ahead. ”

He wishes she was less coy; less belittling of his profession and what was left of his idealism. He guesses it isn’t truly love, not when sentiments of rough degrading sex run across the conscience. But if it was simply do her in the back of an ambulance type love, she’d have seen right through it, likely been appalled. He believes in impossible, undoable things. Kids himself into thinking he’s the man for the job.

But she’s not impressed by all that.

 

Sebastian Adon, is of course in the twilight of his young adult life. He has been driving an ambulance for three years thinking someone would call him a hero at some point, hoping, believing that there was gonna be a chance to save some lives.

“I’ve saved eight lives,” he informs her as he sometimes has before. It’s a justification for why he hasn’t quit the job yet.

“Well don’t let anybody take that from you,” she retorts.

“I want to reiterate that the reason we civil servants feel so entitled is that the rest of you are unwilling to work the conditions we are and face the raw un-adulterated bullshit the people of this city are quite willing to put us through. We guard you while you sleep and you pay us like pizza men. I think this job has taken more from us than we were able to give to our city. And when the city is gone I assure you it is because we have abandoned hope in it.”

 

“You’re so preachy and poetic, I kinda hate, sort of love it,” she utters as she rubs her fingers together, “that is the world’s smallest violin playing just for you.”

 

Adon is the kind of man who at this juncture can still be motivated by even the world’s smallest violin. At least to him life then has a theme song.

 

 

 

 

 

02

 

 

 

Her name is Tanya T-bird Tallflame Luv; her slave name was Tanya Barbara Albert. She works on a Transcare 911 unit out of Brooklyn Hospital.

 

In her own words:

 

Only reason I’m out here this gorgeous Friday evening is that I don’t make a living wage and thus do an insane amount of overtime to keep myself in the lifestyle to which I am accustomed. I want to be a firewoman. I made the list, I passed the physical, and then the recession bullshit happened. Come the fuck on, I said to myself; I’ve paid my dues. It’s time for them to let me the hell out of this chicken shit outfit, this EMS bullshit. Its 1905, and I’m gonna bang out at midnight. The rain is beating down on the windshield, and I’m prayin’ to black baby Seventh Day Adventist Jesus that we don’t get any more damn jobs. b

 

Now don’t get me wrong; I have no romantic ideas about fire suppression. A woman, a black woman, I know the deck isn’t stacked in my favor over there in the goomba-squad. But you know what? I been askin’ myself a lot lately; what it is exactly those people do for 90,000 plus a year that makes them so much more valuable to the department than me. My unit is in the shit. We could do ten jobs a day on a summer shift in the Stuy. I don’t wanna say some shit like those fire fighters don’t work, they work a bit. And a real blaze, albeit hard to come by these days happens and yeah they heroically run in.

 

But number wise; come the fuck on.

 

In my five years in 911 EMS I’ve gotten fifteen confirmed saves. That’s eleven returns of spontaneous circulation in the field post cardiac arrest and four ‘hauled my ass at the speed of light to King’s county after some young brother got blasted away.’ They only gave me nine little sheets of accommodation ‘cause I think one of the arrests bottomed out in the ER 40 hours in. And they don’t give out nothing for shots and stabs. For ass haulin’, life savin’ spectaculars.

I done carried three tight asthmatic pediatrics out of projects and got them intubated up in my bus and on the treatment. Nothin’ for that. I’m sayin’ I don’t want a bonus or nothing but the sum total of my work, of my personal life savin’ five year total is high as hell. And yeah I buff, but you gotta buff to keep it all interesting.

 

I’m a fast Haitian motherfucker. My hands move so damn fast at that wheel I can clock under four minutes on any notification anywhere in the borough of Brooklyn. I a demon behind the wheel. And if not for the recession I’d be getting’ mine. I’d make it through their academy and be up on a ladder by now. Savin’ property not life is where the green is. The fame too. Just last week the Daily News ran a two page spread bout a fire engine crew that delivered a baby on the Belt. Not to be a complete hater, but I done delivered six babies now, they even named one after my unit; Sonja “B” Carter. ‘Cause I hold it down in the Stuy.

 

It’s aggravating that the press loves the fire fighters so much. Not that they don’t deserve it, it’s just we need a little love too. It gets to a tech when year after year they out in the trenches and they feel more like a cab driver than a medical professional. We always post the firefighter saves in the lounge whenever we see them, as if to say we do that shit too you know. We save lives too. It’s been near a decade since the merger and still they shit on us. They still think we’re the red headed step children of the emergency services.

 

But the cops know. They see us out there more doin’ our thing with the shots, and stabs, and EDPs. I heard just a week ago some EDP put a gun up in some crews face and demanded that his girlfriend be given Narcs. EMTs don’t carry narcs. We got Aspirin (the ASA), Albuterol, Oral Glucose (a fancy word for a sugar tube) and Oxygen. That’s it. TV has everyone thinking we’re paramedics. Anyhow, I got upwards of thirty recognized and mostly unrecognized saves and I want out. I want my goddamn promotion ‘cause I’m closing in on 29 and then they cut ya.

 

I heard that EDP motherfucker near shot two of our boys last week on 44I in Brownsville. Heard he shot his girlfriend, hit an MOS close range in the leg, then shot himself. The crew member saved the cop by hittin’ that EDP with his asp thirty times in the face. Bleedin’ out his damn leg he called a 10-13 and held direct pressure on the wounded cop. Don’t see that in the Daily News. Don’t get any thanks when we have to act like enforcement. But a Fireman who delivers a baby is a god among men. Or a firefighter who does just about anything in front of a camera.

 

I want out. I want into Fire. I need the stimulus money to stop getting ‘lost’ in paperwork before it trickles down to EMS. I need to stay in shape, not burn out, and not let the resentment over take me. They say it’s for the good of the service, but I’d like the service to do a little good for me.

“31Sam for the Multi Trauma on Livonia,” the dispatcher cuts into my thoughts.

“I hate East New York,” mutters my partner Melvin Clarke. And he’s a 6 foot 6 Jamaican.

“31Sam, I got trauma and I ain’t got any other units available,” the dispatcher Shirley states, too always too camp casual on the air.

She tones us up, the loud extended beep to wake up sleeping crews.

“31Sam pick up your radio!”

“31Sam; sent it over central!” I hoot into the radio. It comes over flashing on the KDT.

“That looks really, really bad,” Melvin mutters. I glance at it without reading anything.

“Yup. Let’s ride,” I say not lookin’. “Central show us extended!”

Clarke taps me on the shoulder, points me to the screen; he never mentions the job enroute unless it might matter.

 

Apparently a dog is eating a little girls face.

I move far faster now, faster than the speed of public safety, or life.

 

 

 

03

 

 

 

It’s the 20th of December, 2009, Jeremy’s been dead for about a year. Maria, she left him about six months ago, hasn’t been a good year, Sebastian’s a Jew at heart, at heart he starts counting the year from September. A real shit year all things considered, it isn’t rounding out to be the decade he’d hoped for either.

 

He’d believed in so many things once. Hope, change, justice, freedom fighting via militant nonviolence. Making bombs that didn’t kill. Things he learned in the Middle East.

 

Adon has been technically working for the FDNY since January of 2008, but a month into the Academy his best friend Jeremy took a pistol to his foolish head and got off two rounds. Now that was zealous work. Two shots to the head and from this world departed the best partner Sebastian ever had. Jeremy and Sebastian used to organize people back in college, try and make a little change in the community. They’d together built a revolutionary social club of several hundred dedicated to human rights and epic change. They were a good team. But now Jeremy was dead and Sebastian didn’t believe human beings were all that good anymore after about two years in the South Bronx and Bedford Stuyvesant, and the other places where the side walk ends.

 

Before FDNY, Adon used to work on a Transcare Transport Unit. About a month after Jeremy died on January 31st; of 2008 Adon worked his last Transcare shift with a paramedic named Emile Cange. After dropping out of the FDNY Academy he picked up overtime where he could.

 

He’ll retell it to you in a flashback:

 

Its late night, in the old city, sometime around 4 in the morning, no calls, the transport bus was seated somewhere out deep in Canarsie, waiting of orders on the Nextel for work. As Transcare tended to assign per diem employees random partners, Cange and Adon were total strangers, met that night.  It was a Sunday, Emile Cange tried to never work on Saturday ‘cause it was the Lord ’s Day. He was a practicing Adventist now and had recently been educated how the Lord’s Day was actually Saturday, not Sunday. Sebastian always tried to work on Sunday because everyone else had been fooled into thinking it was the lords day, and that drove the call volume down.

 

“Why’d you become and EMT?” Emile asks him.

“To do the Lord’s work,” Sebastian lies.

“Brother amen.”

The conversation then turned to God and the Jews, and it was a conversation that had gotten old to Sebastian, as he’d had by now with what seemed like every other black person he’d ever road with, a talk about god, late at night, on an ambulance, a talk about Jews. Blacks were obsessed with Jews it seemed to Sebastian, couldn’t decide just how anti-Semitic they were as a people, the answer was that blacks were pretty anti-Semitic as a people. Emile wasn’t though.                      They talk for a while, their palaver leaves an impression on Emile, but to Sebastian it’s the same old song he’s been singing to blacks for years. But he likes them as much as he likes the Soviets, which is to say more than anyone else via projedice.

 

“The lord’s work is often done by an unwittingly righteous person I’ll have you know,” Sebastian interjects.

 

“Amen to that. God has a plan, and man is filled with all sorts of arrogance that he can generate one, better to let the lord work through you.”

 

Black people are just fuckin’ loaded with biblical insight, thinks Sebastian. But Sebastian’s lungs are black and his heart too, so some of that knowledge he can relate too. But, Sebastian doesn’t believe in God any more, has no use for her.

 

It has seemed increasingly that he is to walk his life Alone. In the past year, tragedy in the form of questionable suicide struck. Everything had gotten a little surreal since then. He’d retreated into his work, the bringing out of the sick and dying. By the time he met Emile Cange, there wasn’t too much going for him, days he slept, nights he worked, and on free days he was drunk, bad, bad-evil drunk.

 

 

“God even has a plan for you brother,” Emile had told him.

 

 

He doubted it. He deeply missed Jeremy, often wondered what kind of guy let’s his best friend off himself without seeing it coming. He’d seen him a week before he did it out at Woodhull hospital psychiatric. He wonders what kind of piece of shit he is when that’s the best friend he respectively takes on. He wonders if he’ll ever get the nerve to kill himself.

 

Sometimes Sebastian sits on the Brooklyn Bridge, all horror show and wonders if he has the nerve to jump. Imagines his body hitting the cold blue black brine and moving on to the sweet hereafter. He doesn’t mind the ambulance work, seeing all these sick and dying people. He’s already dead. His body just has to catch up with his mind.

 

 

 

 

 

04

 

 

 

My name is Scott Sevastra; I’m 33, slightly overweight with silver freckled hair and spectacles. I wear spectacles, not glasses. That’s different. Adon and I both work out of Station 35, Woodhull Hospital on something called vacation relief, which means we hardly ever work the same unit, with the same person twice. Vacation Relief is a fancy of way of saying ‘people not showing up to work relief’. If Adon has a friend on the job, that buddy would be me. I used to be a fire fighter in Schenectady. He never lets me live that down.

Adon and I work out of the Woodhull Hospital’s garbage hangers where 35 is based, the so-called ‘Belly of the Beast’. The whole complex looks like the death star, all cast iron exterior, towers and flood lights.

One would suppose the beast is called Bedford Stuyvesant.

Bedstuy is a shit hole, no matter what color you are. It’s a bunch of dirty row houses that get no light and the people get no opportunity to do more than collect government money and get into shoot outs over stupid beef and universal staring problems.

To some this work is like a calling. We were all drawn here for different reasons, some were quite noble, and some were not. Tammany Hall is fifty years dead but being an Irish grandson of a fire fighter still opens a few doors. They call it ‘legacy’. It goes in a file, then without being officially recognized other than a check box will wind a new EMT in Station 43 Coney Island then over to the Rock in a year to promote to suppression. There are a myriad of systemic problems around here. But you have to have a fairly analytical mind to see their connectivity.

After the towers fell a wave of civil service activism-romanticism swept the nation and the FDNY were once again working class rock stars. A brief era of patriotism took hold and the ranks of the emergency services were stocked with young men and women who might have gone white collar except for the collective ejaculation of national trauma. The FDNY, the greatest full time-part time job secret the Irish and Italians ever kept were quickly re-couping man power and by 2003 the waiting list for the Fire Suppression open competitive exam was nearly 25,000 deep. EMS was the expeditious way to cut that line if you weren’t legacy, hadn’t passed high school, and may or may not have been in the top of your physical class.

In 1995 Giuliani merged various emergency services to cut the costs of their respective civilian bureaucracies. FDNY was 98% white, catholic and male while EMS was heavily integrated. FDNY with a force of nearly 12,000 fire fighters couldn’t justify keeping that many trucks in the field. EMS was already doing nearly a million calls a year with a force of under 3,000. The merger was toxic to everyone involved and it took another decade for the firemen to even look us in the eyes when we arrived on scene.

I wasn’t here for most of that. I was a paramedic and a volunteer firefighter in the city of Schenectady upstate. I earned a degree in Fire Science and had promoted to paramedic via my volunteer company. Everywhere but NYC becoming an EMT or a Paramedic is a promotion. In the city of many lights you promote to fire fighting. I became an EMT because my uncle was a paramedic and I grew up in the glow of emergency lighting. I was built for this mentally. In the words of technician Adon; ‘I possess the constitution to take this as far as it needs to go.’

There is no money in this. We probably lose 8 brothers and sisters a month to just about any other thing hiring. Attrition continues to thin the ranks. Studies report a disproportionately high rate of divorce, alcoholism, and suicide in EMS comparatively to Fire or Law Enforcement. We are asked and often mandated to work 12 to 16 hours a day in adverse conditions, in some of the most depressed regions of the country with outdated low-bid equipment, little public support, and virtually no encouragement from the city we serve. Moral is so low that the national statistics report that the average span of an EMS career is a little under four years. The department asks us for 25. Run the numbers and that’s why we’re always at 60%, that’s why you can find as much overtime as you can swallow.

Out of the 8 that leave each month, 5 quit, normally within their second year. 2; their number came up on a civil service test; normally PD, Sanit, Correction or Suppression. The last one sustained a line of duty injury; real or concocted to get them off the streets on LODI for a few months to collect AFLAC benefits. We lose members far faster than they can recruit. There is a virtually endless pool of EMTs to draw from, but most worth their salt go work for a Voluntary Hospital and can triple the wage we make. Others just know that the department will bleed you dry chasing a pension and a dream. They have recruiting posters in city shelters if that says anything.

The critical systemic problem is twofold. First because of low pay, hard hours and appallingly low morale we lose our toughest and bravest to the fire fighter promotional at a rate of a few hundred every three years. We lose our brighter and more ambitious members to the private sector and the field of nursing. This leaves us with a broken mish mash of skells, burn outs, a few zealots and a high rate of obesity in the ranks. The other side of this is the lowered expectations to close the staffing gaps.  That means on a segment 1-3 priority call you might get a truck load of CFR and long board trained fire men or a waddling glob of minority goo with a gold chain and an un-tucked shirt.

 

“This job is a calling, you either believe that or you’re on your way out,” I say to Sebastian.

 

But Sebastian is staring off into night. He’s chasing ghosts from the past.

 

“You can’t have an unrequited love affair with a whole people! Not for a whole damn country,” I tell him.

He doesn’t hear me.

 

In November of 2009, Adon, myself and eight other EMTs started a group, a new otriad called the Banshee Association, an EMS fraternal organization grounded in Human rights. We’d sense put out three issues of our newspaper citywide and made quite a name for ourselves as a ‘Jew-Commy conspiracy to ruin EMS for white people’. The Brothers and the Latinos, who make up over ¾ of the force seem to support it though.

There’s really only one newspaper for true blue EMS sedition, and that paper is the Banshee. Our editorials rant along the lines of:

“They say there’s no rest for the wicked, but I haven’t done anything that truly bad in quite some years. These streets will run you ragged. Bleed you dry if you’re inclined to let the reaper take you.

But on a long enough time line everyone is going to die. Oh, Technician Adon sing the blues:

Our mission, in so far as our misnamed, disheveled, brow beaten lot; can call the nature of our trade a profession with a mission; is that when you die you may do so in warm bed, surrounded by Jewish doctors, West Indian nurses, attentive and curious, cute, young internists, and of course your family, all around you pouring out that thing called love before your long kiss good night.

It has been said that on a long enough timeline our kind will lose all ability to feel. That one of our number might stand above a mass of splashed and splattered organs, avulsed intestines scattered across a black tarmac in the glow of streets cast upon our troop; to then light a cigarette, make a stupid fucking joke; and then take a camera phone picture of your son’s dismembered corpse. There are rules against such conduct, but not a one in our number would turn away. If your son’s body lay splayed across the freeway, before that thing called god one at least or more would say a silent prayer, reach down their blue gloved hands and wrap a hospital sheet shroud over the body, close his eyes. And perhaps the one of us with the camera phone might say something crude or racist, normally to a cop doing crowd containment, to show our compatriots he or she felt nothing. But when your son or daughter fell, ingloriously in a bloody heap it was us who carried their bodies off that street, it was us who had gang rushed, blaring in that dead of night racing brave to save them. And we’d do anything in our means to bring them back to you for just one moment more.

I don’t want you to try and call us heroes. We just want you to know that we have given everything to our trade, every drop of our sweat, every ounce of our blood drained; to our or third or second marriages, to our child support bills, to our black lungs and swollen livers, before we find pension we’ve poured out upon these streets our humanity for you in the 25 years of servitude to our city of many, many lights.

We don’t want a Daily News two page Spread on the four through six; and I don’t think you’d buy a calendar of me topless in my PPE out-city, ‘heat resistant’ post-911 fireman pants to raise money for our fallen soldiers. Well maybe of you would. We don’t need their medal ceremonies, their cheap metal bars to pin about our blue collared breasts. I just want you to know we exist, and that we’re coming as fast as we can, and that we’ve sacrificed ourselves completely, become a people changed trying to help, and remember; you called us.”

So read the preamble ramble, the editorial of the Banshee Newspaper, issue 3, the only rank and file controlled EMT-Paramedic Newspaper, a paper founded by me, Scott Sevastra and Adon in November the year prior.

 

The paper made the Department crazy.

 

But, since the Israelis worked him up in Lod Prison, since his girl Maria left him, since he can’t get over his friends death, since he may in fact be bipolar, well Adon isn’t talking so tough anymore. Our other Banshee Association leader Mickhi DBrisk, an EMT over at Transcare called me.

“He ain’t got no girl, he ain’t got no country, he hates his job and slinging papers ain’t gonna save him. You watch his ass,” DBrisk had told Sevastra, “just the slightest thing could set him on a road to self-destruction.”

 

It was nearly new years of 2010, and we were all a little worried about Technician Adon. The Department has him on a black list for slated termination and so does the State of Israel. He has a bad habit of making new friends in all the most powerless places.

 

 

05

 

 

 

Paramedic Emile Cange is working Transport Unit 808 out the Transcare base in Canarsie. He his slim and wears black spectacles. It’s Christmas and he shouldn’t be here, but his church teaches Jesus wasn’t really even born on the 25th, not even born in December. His partner is a tall Jamaican named EMT Mickhi DBrisk. Mickhi is smoking a Newport out the Ambulance window, watching the snow, and thinking about his son Jayden.

 

“I just need to get out of Transcare,” Emile mutters to Mickhi.

“This shit ain’t worth no $10.00 an hour,” Mickhi responds.

“When is yer Medic upgrade class finishing?”

“It’s complicated.” That’s Mickhi’s way of saying he doesn’t wanna go into it.

Suddenly Mickhi becomes talkative.

“Son, no one has ever heard of my job classification. I am technically not an “ambulance driver” because I do not generally ever drive, being that I have no license to do so, and I am not a “medic” because that would imply I was a Paramedic in our EMS vernacular; and my qualification certainly prolongs life, but does little to diagnose and virtually nothing to treat. You can become State certified to do my job by sitting through a three month class and being over the age of 18. I believe people as young as 16 perform our skill set on Volunteer Ambulances and as young as 14 in developing countries. It’s about eight basic life support skills you need to perform for medical and traumatic emergency and sixty some odd sets of signs and symptoms it would be good to memorize, but a frighteningly small percentage of my graduating EMS class could recite off less than six months out of the program.”

“What’s yer point brother? Didn’t you read the memo, no one’s ever gonna say thank you except the patients. ” Emile Cange asks.

“I can’t remember the last time that happened. I was one of ten brothers in my class of 65 at LaGuardia Community College which is viewed as one of the best EMS training centers in NYC. They made this game out a whole lot different than it turned out to be.”

“Well if you’re white in EMS: you’re crazy, a fuck up, or tryin’ to be a fireman for the FDNY. Then again, if you’re any other ethnicity in EMS you gotta be just a little crazy, a fuck up, or attempting to become a nurse. Because when it comes down to it: we are the hip hop of the Healthcare Industry. We make money takin’ lives. Ain’t savin’ nobody on the long enough; not even yo self.”

 

Emile Continues:

 

“We can’t make you better like a doctor can, we don’t have to slightly pretend to care like a nurse does; we can’t stabilize in a pre-hospital setting via our own training like a PA can; we are EMS; people shoot at us because we look like police in the din of narrow housing project lighting; we might not know what you have but we can keep you alive for at least seven more minutes; and unless you’re missing your head, you’re not legally dead until we get you to a hospital.”

“Ain’t that the truth,” says EMT Mickhi DBrisk.

On the wall of the Transcare Men’s room at the Brooklyn Base in Canarsie on 800 Bank Street: ‘We scare ‘cause we Care’ is scrawled in sharpie in the men’s room second stall.

“I work for the Wal-Mart of ambulance corps I’m fond of saying. At $10.00 an hour I have a worse healthcare package and wage than a Starbucks employee. And I don’t get any stock options after six months. We are the city’s, and soon to be country’s largest ambulance provider. I was hired exactly two months ago; most employees quit or transfer after six months when they go 911; and be nervous about the ones that don’t. Transcare is an enormous business like virtually everything else about Healthcare in America. I spent less than a day of the five day training being reassessed for skill retention; the remaining time went into how to prevent myself (and the company) from being sued, how to tastefully obtain patient insurance information, and how to properly fill out the Patient Care Forms so that that we can legal bind the patient incase their insurance won’t cover the cost of their trip.”

“This shit is business more than its medical profession,” notes Mickhi.

“Like most Americans, you and I are terribly misinformed when it comes to how the dark underbelly of how the Healthcare system functions in this country. It may be illegal for us not to transport a person who can’t or won’t sign, but this company will terminate technicians that transport those that can’t sign “too often”.

Mickhi tosses his mostly finished boag out into the falling the snow. Mickhi is an activist with the Adon’s club; on paper at least it’s Chief of Operations. Cange talks like an activist, but he isn’t one. Like most of EMS, he likes to explain, likes to complain, but it won’t lead to activism. Mickhi gets that, Sevastra and Adon don’t.

Emile pauses then resumes his critical stress debriefing, “During patient assessment a transport EMT obtains vitals; while the other ensures the airway, adequate breathing, and circulation. We gather a past medical history, a list of medications, any known allergies, and pick up any paperwork from relatives of the hospital or nursing home that might give us more clues to the patient’s current condition. At some point, generally when they’re loaded onto the ambulance, we ask them to sign a form that most EMT’s describe as patient confidentiality statement, but it is actually a billing release. It is drilled into us in our retrain days 2 through 5 that we must always obtain a signature. That’s because it costs several hundred dollars for an ambulance ride. People wrongly think that calling 911 is a quick free way to see a doctor. That isn’t a very realistic conception at all.”

“Nope, FDNY shakes um for about 500 too,” says Mickhi.

“My work for Transcare brings me into the projects, townhouses, homes, and apartments of New Yorkers in all five boroughs. We also bring patients to places like Connecticut, Long Island, and Upstate New York. I always have a different partner because I work irregular shifts generally overnights and weekends. Most shifts will mandate you to work over 12 hours. One makes plans with a cushion when working; you’ll always be late if you have plans after work.”

Mickhi has heard all this before, said a hundred different ways. The paper articulates a lot of these basic points, puts in writing what most already now via word of mouth.

Says Emile Cange, “My partners fall into two categories of which I am in the second. The first have been here more than six months and have made a profession in EMS transport; that is to say non-911 pick-ups of the morbidly obese, chronically ill, or psychiatrically unstable. They like the job because by the third year it comes close to Starbucks pay and is particularly accommodating to larceny and laziness collectively. Going 911 would mean working harder, going to another Private company or FDNY might mean working harder and being more tightly scrutinized.”

Only about one/fifth of Transcare employees in EMS (they also operate a fleet of non-EMS Access-a-Ride Para transit buses) are in this category.

Everyone else is out of here in six months, Mickhi and Emile included.

The remaining group is generally right out of school and looking to quickly accumulate experience before they either go 911 and transfer to better private or get accepted in to the FDNY Academy for EMS.

“A small subgroup of the second category is just logging the 200 hours they need to go Paramedic. The real difference in partners is those that want to do this career or those that see it as a complicated hustle getting paid to do precious little. It should reassure you slightly to know most of the people who will be doing this on a 911 level care enough to keep their skills sharp if not care enough to care.”

“I care enough to care,” admits Mickhi DBrisk, “One day when Ayden asks what an e.m.t. is, I’m not going to recount even a single story about my work. There’s something really, really trite and cliché about an EMT or Paramedic rattling off some crazy war story. The only thing more pathetic I feel is when an alcoholic or drug addict does it. You should take it for granted we see things that are crazy every single shift we work. It’s a big city full of people that are sick and dying.”

“I find that most of my partners from your second category have a micro/macro view of our work. On the larger macro level we are a vital link in the emergency response chain able to get the sick and wounded to a hospital that in NYC is never more than seven minutes away,” Emile responds.

“Our job at its most basic is to quickly bring the dead and dying to somewhere they can be kept alive,” says Mickhi.

“On the one on one micro-level we are the people bringing out the sick and dying when they are scared and with the people they love. More than any other link in the Healthcare chain we deal with people at their most vulnerable and it falls on us to earn their trust with our compassion. I keep songs on my cell phone in sixty different languages; people’s faces light up when I play them as we drive to the hospital,” explains Emile.

“One of my partners keeps several copies of the Malcolm X Autobiography for when we transport wounded prisoners to psychiatric wards and infirmaries. Another keeps teddy bears in his jump bag,” laughs Mickhi.

“A lot of people are a little out of it when we move them. Some beg for Jesus to take them or tell as terrible stories of tragic lives. A lot of people want to die because this life has been so hard on them. I try and make them feel special, or at least respected. Sometimes I’ll get people over a hundred years old and I’ll try and get them to tell me a story about their life. Sometimes I’ll transport a desperate middle-aged soul still quite totally confused about the purpose of their life.”

“It’s sort of easier to give someone a toy or a book and competently engage in a transport than to have that sort of universal empathy that lets you communicate your sympathy in a way that’s genuine; if it’s forced its counter productive and you should stick to the competency and giving of gifts,” says Mickhi.

“You can’t just nod you head and whisper sweet nothings of compassion; you have to empathize via a real experience to be related back. You have to honestly care, not transCare,” states Emile.

“People are either very scared or very intent upon dying. I’ve seen a person survive a nine-story drop because they were hyped up on PCP and believed in a thing called love,” war stories Mickhi.

“I’ve seen a partner restore stable vitals to someone with a “Do-Not-Resuscitate-Order” with a bag valve mask and the blasting of gospel music,” war stories Emile.

“I’ve seen people slip a twenty to bunch of kids when their single mother went to the ER so they could get something to eat,” war stories Mickhi right back.

“We are absolutely not paid enough to care. We can only engage in this line of work on a long enough time line because of the human good we are able to do. The death and suffering would surely take its toll on our mental health if we did not find outlets to make our works worth more than a skill set,” explains Emile, “that’s why I’m gonna become a doctor one day.

“I’ll tell you straight up; I would never have gone into East New York if it hadn’t been for this job. I wouldn’t be learning Spanish, I wouldn’t have such a large collection of foreign music; I wouldn’t know my city nearly as well as I’m about to in the next few years. This job is good because it is compatible with my sleeping habits, values, and allows me to flex my empathy,” says Mickhi lighting another Newport. Emile cringes.

“You will learn to believe in a thing called love when you a carry a nameless 87 y/o woman in your arms who has no legs, has an external bladder you must also carry called a Foley Catheter that has made her sheets stink of urine; and although quite blind she “sees the light in you” and wants you to pray with her even when you ain’t been to church in a hot minute,” says Emile. Emile has been to Church yesterday. He’s rubbing it in with Mickhi as he sometimes does.

Emile continues: “I always feel like I’m bearing witness to the end of the world each Friday I go out. The clamor of the ER, the speeding around on lights and sirens, the murmurs of your dead and dying, and the precious little we’re good for except maintaining your vitals and proving to you we care. Or perhaps each shift we must prove it over and over again to ourselves; because it isn’t the paycheck and benefits that keep us out in that bus; it’s a love we can’t explain for people who we are not obligated to love or empathize for; but have to if we want to keep up this work.”

“There are a lot of sick people in this city; some made sick by circumstance, some by trauma, and many by ignorance about personal health. We will treat them all irrespective of class, race, religion, gender, or sexual orientation,” says Mickhi almost paraphrasing the Banshee Operating guide he helped write.

“But I’m only busting out the pillow if you’re old, or if you’re Haitian,” jokes Emile.

The night is brick as hell. Christmas dinner for Mickhi was a Delhi sandwich and a pack of Newport regulars from Obama Fried Chicken bodega on Rockaway Parkway. He fills the tiny confines of the compartment with carbon monoxide.

“I don’t play games and I don’t take prisoners; I got buck wild debt, I got child support to pay and big dreams,” says Dbrisk.

“Amen.”

“Just nine more hours of this bullshit to go, then we get up off the plantation.”

“Hey brother, amen,” says Emile Cange.

 

 

 

06

 

 

 

On January 11th, Emma Solomon whispered now by many to be ‘the mother of Messiahs’ arrives in the City of Port-au-Prince. She is athletic in build; olive tan, her brown hair is still flowing and while she appears Canadian, she travels on a Spanish passport still having much noble data within the space between her ears that must be passed quietly to underground on this island before most of them are wiped out by devils in the next 72 hours.

 

She carries with her a black baby in a swaddling cloth and a hard copy of the New Social Gospel.

 

The Haitian customs agent turns around to face her and lord; is she beautiful! With long flowing brown hair and a smile to disarm any man. He catches the baby on her chest like a second later, but that smile catches him off guard for a full minute, because he just doesn’t really look at that in a woman as prominently as before. And with that smile, that little baby her beauty and her tan white skin he doesn’t bother to search anything at customs, waves her along.

She is a little taller than her curly blonde, spunky travel companion Phoebe Rusche the courier and looks like a warrior. Phoebe is a lover and admirer of Haiti and a talented writer. She has been offered a job as a masseuse at the hotel Olofsen and plans to stay there for some time writing her latest book. Emma has hired the young Phoebe to bring her into Haiti and make an introduction for her at the legendary Hotel Olofsen to a certain Mr. Morse.

Phoebe recounts her impressions:

I flew from Chicago to Miami, Miami to Port-au-Prince. At O’Hare airport I sat next to a couple with a baby boy. The father held his hands and sang while he danced obligingly, a clumsy baby cha-cha, fat round limbs tottering cutely to the beat. The mother eyed me. “Are you a missionary?” she asked. “No.” “You work for NGO?” “No.” “Writing a book about voodoo?” “No.” She seemed perplexed. I saw them again in the Miami terminal, the father holding his son tight.

On the plane I sat next to a priest. He wore a cassock and thin wire-rimmed glasses. His face was very kind. He asked me if I liked to sing and I said yes and he wrote down the name and address of his church. Port-au-Prince wheeled below us. It was cloudy, the harbor colored slate. I saw hills carved out of the earth itself, shanties like some metastisizing growth, some blight. “No trees,” the priest apologized. He eyed me. I tried to keep my expression neutral. “People say bad things about us. You will decide for yourself.”

“Good luck,” he said as we stepped onto the tarmac. “I think you will like Haiti. Contact me if you need anything. Come sing in my choir!”

There were only two baggage claim carousels at Toussaint L’Ouverture International Airport. I stepped up to the dolley-rental window and attempted to speak in Creole. “‘Luggage’ tanpri?”

The woman behind me in line laughed. She was very pretty with curly braids and laugh lines by her eyes and a denim skirt and stylish leather boots.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“No, it’s wonderful that you are trying,” she said, and introduced herself as Chantelle from  Evanston, a Chicago suburb not far from where I live. She was visiting her parents. She and her brother helped me lift my bags off the carousel onto my cart.

Two bored looking policemen pretended to rifle through our things before hurrying us Along. Outside it was humid, the air pregnant, electric. The leaves of the trees were fat and waxy. The sky was yellow. “It looks like it’s about to rain,” said Chantelle.

Hustlers descended upon us like locusts, offering to help us with our bags, but Chantelle ushered me past them. “No, no, no, no, no, no, no,” she said. The men’s mouths opened and closed like fish. Their eyes were desperate. I felt like I was underwater.

The man sent from the Hotel Olofsen to pick me up introduced himself as Marco. He wore a polo shirt and khaki pants.

“Call me if you need anything,” said Chantelle from Evanston as Marco loaded my bags into the trunk. A man in a dirty Adidas t-shirt came up to our van and put his hand over his stomach, then touched his fingers to his mouth.

Mwen grangou,” he said, then seeing my incomprehension, “Blan. Give me money.”

Marco waved him away, shaking his head in disgust. Emma seems to be acknowledged an left to herself as thy move through the city.

We drove toward the Olofsen, through streets narrow and winding and hillier than San Francisco. We drove past the Champs de Mars and the National Palace. We drove past restaurants and hair salons and walls with shards of broken glass glinting on top. We drove, narrowly missing small children and intrepid goats, and I marveled at this other world I’d entered.

That was the first time I saw Port-au-Prince. That was the last time I saw Port-au-Prince. I wonder if the priest’s church is still there. I wonder if Chantelle and her brother are alive. I wonder if the baby boy died. If so, I hope his father didn’t survive.

My companion Emma Solomon claims to a journalist, but she doesn’t ask that many questions. She paid me very well to bring her here from Chicago and places unknown, but seems more confident walking around in Haiti than I ever could be in my own skin here or in the states.

 

 

06

 

 

 

Remembering nothing, we begin again. Vodoun dreams; awake for the Quake, oh Papa, the horror. Legbe, open the door to the crossroads of redemption and salvation.

 

The earth shook and then swallowed in just a few moments over 100,000 to 250,000 to then 316,000 souls. Many more would perish from their injuries in the days to come. They were wretched souls to begin with, abandoned and often exploited souls kept in such a state by their own leaders, and powerful gangsters, and the apathy of the world at large. But those images that came over the telescreens on the 6 o’clock news woke everyone up for about five hours, didn’t let the good ones sleep so well that night. In a unanimous voice across the globe many asked what was to be done. An entire island of poor, unfortunate souls had been rendered apart, cleaved asunder by the ground on which they’d eked on nothing.

 

One famous American televangelist, that bat shit crazy devil, that hateful fuck Pat Roberts quickly explained to his vast pale flock, “It’s because once upon a time the sadistic leader of that misbegotten slave Island made a pact with the devil himself.”

 

There is only one thing every white, every blan so-called knows about the Republic of Haiti; that some many years ago they killed every single white person on that island in a successful revolt against slavery and have lived in misery ever since.

 

While Sebastian Adon lay half-drunk from defeat in bed coming off a 16 hour graveyard shift in the trenches of Central Brooklyn, his arms around a Chinese miss thing, a fashion designer named miss Julie Chu; Tiputti Capois, an 18 year old medical student in Port-Au-Prince watched the central dormitory of the General Hospital collapse on over 200 sleeping nursing school students as the ground moved in a vile and grumbling wave. There was then screaming everywhere, thick plumes of smoke death and dust. More screams, hysterical screams that no Haitian ever had made before. While Dany Bélair field stripped Engine 17 in Atlanta, Georgia coming off work Jacque, a shatah joined a frenzied mob attempting to dig some several hundred school children out from under a collapsed school house with their hands. A pretty girl with crushed and dismembered legs was bleeding all over herself next to a man in a daze who just saw his family disappear under his housing complex. Screams, frenzied prayers in creole: Papa why? Hadas Hadaad, a slender Israeli was getting her nails done did in Soho; while Jasmine-Yvette yelled, bellowed really at a UN peacekeeper to get help, lots and lots of fucking help, and then another few buildings came down on a mass of praying, pleading people in the aftershock and the UN peacekeeper drove right off. Zoe Lubov Perechenova was studying in Oberlin; with James Miranda in the library at Stony Brook six months from the Boards; when the Carrefour municipal complex collapsed killing no one, except for just about everyone in the city as they slept being the epicenter of the terrible quake. Emile Cange was at the wheel of an ambulance in Far Rockaway hauling a morbidly obese Italian woman to a dialysis appointment, when most of the nation’s major hospitals and the doctors inside of them perished in the blink of an eye.

Everything that wasn’t much left is gone. The quarantine has now become a killing field.

 

08

 

The website reads:

“The Bedford-Stuyvesant Volunteer Ambulance Corps (BSVAC), the nation’s first minority-run volunteer ambulance corps, was founded in 1988 by two EMS workers, Captain James “Rocky” Robinson and Specialist Joe Perez.  The creation of BSVAC was their response to the crisis in emergency medical service that afflicts New York’s minority communities.

As in other minority communities, many residents of Bed-Stuy do not have health insurance.  As a result, they are less likely to visit the doctor’s office for routine care or for treatment in the early stages of disease.  At the same time, African-American men and women suffer disproportionately from high blood pressure, diabetes, kidney disease, heart attacks and strokes.  These factors lead to a disproportionate number of emergency room visits  —  75% of all emergency medical calls in New York City come from minority neighborhoods.

In continuous operation since 1988, BSVAC is the busiest volunteer ambulance service for its size in the nation, answering over 100 calls per month.”

For its size means that it has only one functioning ambulance. It’s very easy to talk a lot of trash about the BSVAC, so better to embrace them with a ‘god bless you for trying’ which is what Borough President Marty Markowitz did when he bought them a trailer to base their Greene street operations out of.

On January 12th, a quake of 7.0 magnitude ripped apart the city of Carrefour killing nearly god knows how many people outright and burying an additional tens of thousands under the rubble, thereby creating an evolving MCI that would cause traumatic injury to and additional tens of thousands in a nation lacking even a rudimentary EMS system.

 

On January 12th, just four hours after the ramifications of the quake were reported, the Bedford Stuyvesant Volunteer Ambulance Company (BSVAC); a single ambulance outfit, self styled as the nation’s only minority run ambulance service decided to respond to the disaster in the event that the world would be unwilling or unable. BSVAC went on Channel 12 and 1010 Winds and announced that if anyone who was willing with medical training to respond to the disaster in Haiti showed up at their door, BSVAC would find a way to get them on the ground to Port Au Prince.

They didn’t have a plan. Like the first responders at 9/11; moved by a duty to act their volunteers mobilized immediately as did over 90 civilians who answered their call.

And clearly, based solely in the noble realm of heroic idealism they succeed. By December 16th 104 volunteers, 14 from their network and 90 assorted medical professionals boarded a VISION charter airline paid for by the Church of Scientology, and staffed with a motley crew ranging from the East Norwich Volunteer Fire Company, 40 nurses and doctors from the Haitian Physicians Association (AMHE), EMTs and Paramedics of Transcare, AMR, Assist, and FDNY both Fire and EMS, as well as Scientology volunteers covering the gamut of disaster relief specialists, to nurses, to midwives. 104 strangers were to board that plane, which following a layover in Miami touched down on a desolate and newly reclaimed airstrip December 17th, 1700 at Toussaint L’Ouvature International Airport, the stench of death in the air.

As the world froze for a week and the media gawked awkwardly at this catastrophe, 104 women and men were to enlist for immediate action with the BSVAC.

Adon upon returning to work watches the pictures flash over the telescreen bolted within the 7-11 on Atlantic Ave. It was like 911 times 10,000. No one had any idea how many were dead, how many were wounded, how many were trapped.

His phone rings as he watches bodies pile up on the evening news.  It’s his friend and comrade Mickhi DBrisk.

“If we had a way to be in Port-Au-Prince in the next 48 hours would you go?”

How could he say no? He’s been training for this moment all his life.

“Just find us a way onto the island my brother.”

“Hey brother, that work is done.”

 

09

 

 

 

Mickhi Dbrisk was not allowed on the plane he found.

 

He had no passport to board.

 

But Sebastian and 103 other Haitian, West Indian and African American medical volunteers organized by the BSVAC and AMHE managed to get on a Vision International plane paid for by the Church of Scientology, on the morning of January 15th, 2010.

It all happened so fast, Adon in a near sea of heroic strangers with a green ruck sac and a blue uniform.

“What do you know about Haiti,” Sebastian leans over the seat to ask the only other half-Jew on the plane Alex Furlini. Furlini is little fellow with a brown beard and eager eyes. Sebastian is slender and is wearing a brown skally cap beret.

“Not so much,” the young bearded architect, part time EMT responds.

“You ever done something like this before,” Sebastian asks.

“No, never, I guess I was moved by what I saw on the TV.”

“You know, I’m told I have a good head on my shoulders, an imagination of some repute, but for the life of me I can’t imagine what we’re flying into.”

“Well I know it’s gonna be bad, real bad.”

“Yeah, but how bad!? I can’t picture it at all.”

“So you’re an EMT with the fire department?”

“Yeah, Bedford Stuyvesant and the notorious Woodhull hospital.”

“I live down the street from there.”

“What do you do in New York, Mr. Furlini,” Sebastian realizes he doesn’t know the guys name.

“Alex Furlini. I’m an architect.”

“Well there’s gonna be work for you for years my brother because there aren’t any buildings standing in that capital,” quibs a brother sitting next to them, “my people just can’t ever win.”

“They say joking is the healthiest way to deal with tragedy. You are?” inquires Sebastian.

“Fire Fighter Danny Bélair,” the brother responds.

“So what do you think we’re flying into Fire Fighter Dany?” asks Sebastian.

“Well hell I’d imagine. I’d imagine the worst thing you’d ever seen or suffered and multiply that by ten thousand.”

The worst things Sebastian had ever seen were a double lynching in a Bedstuy school yard, the utter crushing and disembowelment of a crack head he knew struck on the Cross Bronx expressway, as well as a picture of his best friend Jeremy who’d taken a hand gun to his own foolish head. That’s the worst he could remember seeing in this objective reality, the land of reach out and touch me. In his mind was a darker place in which he’d seen quite a bit far worse.

Furlini had gotten his EMT certificate during a period of uncertain depression taking a leap of faith EMS might cure him of his nervous twitch, his vague desire for heroism. In fact, he’d never been behind the wheel of an ambulance in his life. He’d only read about dead and dying things as well as sickness.

“No, I don’t think any of us will have seen anything like this,” mutters Sebastian to Alex and Bélair. Most of the cabin is passed out.

“Exciting right,” grins  Bélair the joker. A third generation Haitian fire fighter, a half Jewish architect and part Hebrew mutt EMT share a moment.

“Well you know what they say about good intentions,” says Sebastian.

“Oh, they’ll kill you,” glibs Bélair.

Sebastian couldn’t but dart off the faintest recognition that he’d seen Alex Furlini before.

The airlift was organized in wild fire mode via the two truck, ‘minority run’ Bedstuy Volunteer Ambulance Corps. They were just about the only thing left behind from the fabled Black Panthers, well besides a substantial prisoner population and some folklore posters and memorabilia. About four hours after the first quake hit they went on the local telescreen network and declared they were going to Haiti on a rescue and relief mission. Donations poured in, volunteers lined up, they partnered with Haitian Physicians Association to ensure a steady wave of doctors, nurses and a few loose millionaires.

“Did you know Haiti has more millionaires than any other West Indian island,” says Paramedic Emile Cange to EMT Dominich Asbun.

Dominich is composing the opening chapter of his journal account of the happenings to follow. He’s tall, dark and handsome with a goatee.

“I didn’t know that. Did you know there are more Palestinian doctors than any other group of Arabs in the Middle East?”

Neither of these ethnic factoids are verifiable, they sort of served as proud rumors one might make national small talk over.

“My sister was working at the UN when the quake hit. She was outside getting coffee when the building killed all her co-workers,” explains Emile Cange.

“Lucky.”

“Maybe, but the living have to bury the dead.”

Emile Cange and Dominich both work for the Transcare Corporation along with several others on flight 749 Vision Air chartered by the Church of Scientology to fly 104 medical volunteers to Haiti on the 15th of January, 2010.

“What are we gonna see down there you think,” asks Dominich.

“The end of the world,” says Avinadav Sultan, another Transcare Medic.

So, after Bedstuy Volunteer Ambulance Corps partnered with Haitian Physicians Abroad they realized that FEMA and UN were not admitting civilians into the country. The 82nd Airborne had landed and there was no functional airport, no functional port to off load aid. They built a supply garrison and had to repave-re-erect Toussaint L’Ouvature international airport. That was when an elderly and calculated man named Patrick O’Conner showed up at the office depot on Green and Malcolm X Blvd promising back end logistics and a plane with a landing docket. He was a representative of the Church of Scientology’s volunteer ministry.

“So what the hell’s up with all these Scientologists?” asks medical student, EMT certified Jim Miranda to his buddy Kevin Wessel, two of four volunteer fire fighters from Long Island.

“Who the hell cares, they’re getting us there,” responds a half asleep Kevin always an Irish optimist.

“Don’t they believe in aliens?” mutters Jim.

“Tell me something Miranda, if the Klu Klux Klan itself was gonna pay for and secure the clearance for this relief mission wouldn’t we still be here?”

Kevin had heard Sebastian make that glib in the JFK terminal line to Emile Cange in the same context. Kevin wasn’t sure what they’d find down there either, but he was sleeping the nervousness off.

“No, I think I’d be just about as nervous. I mean ask yourself about motivation buddy.”

“No I don’t have to. It’s a large scale disaster MCI rescue mission, it’s just gonna be 10,000 times worse than anything we’ve ever seen before.”

Jim has black hair, a grey GO NAVY shirt from his past service. Kevin has brown curly hair and is wearing a black Bedstuy Volunteers t-shirt and blue BDUs. Both are firefighters with the East Norwich Fire Rescue Volunteers, both carry stethoscopes around their necks and jack knives on their belts, they wonder what they’ve gotten into so rashly. So like everyone else they cling to a talisman.

There are a lot of Haitian nurses and doctors on the plane. The EMS contingent is however rather diverse. What people saw on the TV screen they could not ignore. If there was a way to go they were going, that’s simply how bad it all looked.

“We’re the ones driving toward the burning building. In this case, it’s a burning country,” said fire fighter- paramedic Dany Bélair. If that was even the right allegory at all.

 

 

EMT Dominich Asbun writes in his journal, as it is calming to do so.

“Apart from the hella time I’ve had psyching myself up for this – the news images, the stories, imagining rotting bodies and dying babies and limbs and the violence wrought that I might witness, and my own emotional state and turning the tap back off as tight as I can – one of the funny things that comes up is the feeling of importance, of mission. I guess this is what someone going off to war with the cheers of his country feels like: something you’ve trained for, and the rules of society bent towards your purpose. The world is watching with its mouth open while you pack your bags, and they’re asking you everything and thanking you, and suddenly some part of you takes in the hype and expects everyone to care as much. Riding my bike on the sidewalk towards Bed-Stuy Volunteer Ambulance Corps (BSVAC), I see cops, and yeah I get off my bike (it’s the law), but for a second, I consider riding by. When they’d stop me, I’d say, It’s OK, Officer, I’m an EMT; I’m going to Haiti today to provide medical relief. “That’s cute,” said Mercedes, and, “That’s so noble,” said Ashton, and “That’s amazing,” said Pascale. I guess I care more who it’s from than what they said –  I don’t know what I’d say myself. But, anyway, this thing ain’t mine and I want to keep foremost the idea that the people in Haiti need it, that importance and compliments or not  – compliments or not, I have absolutely no idea what some pain is like and what I can do is put myself somewhere to help. They’re singing ‘Lean On Me’ on the bus to the plane, ha, while the plane gets fuel problems fixed. I’m not saying I don’t do this for the adventure, though. Isn’t everything we do, in the end, in some way for ourselves? Not everything – it’ll be in the details, the actual actions that I do for people, not in the general ‘Going to Haiti’.

 

The fucking plane leaks fuel. Then, it doesn’t leak! It was over fueled, and delayed, and we lost our time slot in Haiti for landing as assigned by the Marines.

 

‘Going to Miami/Bienvenido a Miami’. Hurry, wait, Hurry, wait, Hurry…Flying is a magic, ” sings Asbun.

 

Recalls Hadas Hadaad:

 

It’s vital that you don’t spend all your emergency funds on the landing slot bribes alone. You need as well to rent a plane. And hope you end up with one that doesn’t leak jet fuel and explode in a ball trying to cross Cuba. Or that the so-called religious group your government funds, one of two as means to move people around the planet in a hyper clandestine fashion; you hope that front group religion with their yellow shirts and odd touching rituals doesn’t rub the locals the wrong way.

 

 

 

10

 

 

They had to ground the plane on the evening of the 15th in Miami because the fuel was leaking, or they had over fueled, there were a few excuses, anyway, something was wrong with the plane. They missed their landing slot and the Scientists put everyone up in a Howard Johnson. It only fueled anxiety and the unrelenting anticipation.

 

Not knowing still what he was getting into, he’d taken some napkins from the airplane and written about his fears and excitement, jotted um down in quick bursts and mailed the napkins off to Zoe so she might root for him through the upcoming travails, or perhaps mourn him if he fell in what was looking like a shit show of unknown proportions they were about to fly into.

 

Sebastian also did what was in his nature, he went and ordered some Stoli from the hotel lobby bar. Doing also what was in his nature he ordered a drink for the slender, raven haired Israeli alone at the midnight watering hole.

She was slender but stacked, clearly Israeli.

 

“Hadas,” she introduces herself.

“Sebastian.”

“So you’re an e.m.t.?”

“Yeah, and you’re a Scientist right?”

“Scientologist.”

“You know I don’t really believe half the stuff the media says about you guys. I think not paying taxes is an important step on the road to freedom.”

“Sebastian, I think you’re the kind of guy who says anything to get laid.”

“That is a mostly accurate picture of me Ms. Hadas.”

“Why are you going to Haiti Sebastian?” she asks.

“To meet young women who like medical attention.”

“I’m quite healthy for now it appears.”

“Well you say that now.”

“It’s a very special island were going to. I hope you and the other volunteers appreciate the whole of what you’re embarking on.”

“I just know they killed all the white people in 1804.”

“Does that make you nervous?”

“I’m Hebrew, not white. I just hide in their skin,” he winks.

“What do you do back in New York, for the Scientists I mean?”

“Scientologists. I work in communications.”

“I had you pegged for their tractor beam operator.”

“Does it help you to laugh at the great unknown so you can feel less scared for your potential short comings?”

“I like to laugh at almost everything.”

“Wanna see a cool trick,” she says getting close to him.

“Do you like getting you dick sucked,” she asks him.

 

 

Drink me and grow enormous.

Sebastian Adon wakes up in cold sweat in a stranger’s bed at the Howard Johnson, he’s not awake but he sees some things that he’s never seen before. Like some taste of things to come. Like seeing his own corpse got up and walked across the hotel out into the future.

 

The Scientologist had hypnotized him perhaps, or poisoned him and soon he was dreaming. What had she done, certainly not sucked his cock off. Men will engage in very detailed dreams to avoid frightening realities.

She knocked him out with something between an assist and the power of suggestion.

Mother fucking Israelite spies, what the hell were they doing in Haiti?

 

 

 

11

 

 

 

 

From the journal of EMT Asbun:

“The landing and waiting for the plane’s stairs, and waiting as the sun sets and dims the dust that’s miles into the sky, and sleeping in my seat for I don’t know how long until finally we shuffle out.

Haiti, holy shit.

“Volunteers to help unload bags?” and then bam, bam, bam get the bags out bam, bam, make a chain bam, bam, bam we need people to unload the supplies one more up here, up here! And up into the belly of the plane yelling and sweat and broken water bottles, you stay there, we need one more! And sweat and your back tickling the beauty’s ribs. On the ground piling boxes and sweating and piling boxes, straps and moving, sweating and water and then we sat. And sitting and standing and sitting, the tarmac as a world – the UN, the Japanese, the media, pictures, shout out and interview, sitting and standing and waiting, writing by tarmac light and directly above you a few constellations, the moon like God’s fingernail that was there reminiscent at dusk now gone – interrupting your writing to catch the football, but no you guys can’t play here, then helping the Spanish firemen been here since Thursday. Shit they’re all kinda wild, their eyes, but talking to them maybe that’s what firemen are like in Castilla de León or maybe they’ve just been here since Thursday. The Spanish and the Japanese and the Brazilians and the EU, the Canadian military “evacuating citizens, and everyone,” BedStuy and our black shirts, the military zipping everywhere in golf carts or 4 X 4 or not zipping but a heavy, heavy presence with all those planes and neon lights everywhere, and everywhere the sound of propellers or jet engines and the indecisive wind of this first night in Haiti. Whew. And waiting.

Out of the bowels of the plane they unloaded crates of food and medical equipment on trucks that drove right up onto the tarmac. There was no customs, there’re wasn’t much airport. The whole place was lit up with glowing halogens, various relief agencies of over thirty nations were assembling beachheads around the airport’s periphery.”

The military was everywhere, the whole thing looked like direct aid D-day.

There was a smell in the air when they disembarked onto the tarmac. It was the smell of mass death. There was a breeze and before the sun went out they saw the mountains above the city far in the distance, tall and glorious. Each volunteer formed his or her own notion of how they’d react once the relief effort began in earnest.

A few had taken the most direct route to see their families as hustlers with hearts sometimes do. EMT Tanya T-Flame Tallbird Luv was one of that number. She watches as the fire boys pass crates of supplies down a line onto the flatbeds. She watches pudgy Haitian nurses and doctors who haven’t been home in a decade in hushed voices whisper prayers. Everywhere, even with the breeze they can smell the death of the city. The unburied and buried alive. Tanya drops her pack and lights a Newport. Tanya knows her family is out there somewhere and as soon as she’s able she’s gonna spirit herself away from the rescue to find them.

 

 

Asbun recounts:

 

“And piling the bags of like 50 people into the last two rows of the bus – it’s our system, and the other buses use it, and more sweating and when finally we finish and the ordering, organizing is done and it’s so goddamn nice to have simple and clear goals, to think hard and on the instant and work hard and then sit back tired on what you did. After waiting we drove out (10:45 pm), past the variety Marines’ planes and past the people lining up to leave on the same vessels. We came in on and past the hummers and the gates, onto the dirt road. We’re away from the jets now and it’s all silence and a ’lil ringing in my ear and the Third World. If it weren’t for the faces and vegetation and the letters on the walls it could be La Paz, or Costa Rica, Syria, or Cuba, India. Maybe I’m lumping things together. But it’s there: the dust, dust, dust; what it is to know so well the smell of diesel car exhaust, and where the smell itself takes you; people on top of things, agile; concrete and concrete crumbled and faded paint; ‘el Inflatable Perro’. We drove through some shit, didn’t see hella destruction, but at night things are different. Staying at ‘T. Ness Club’, a gym. They use car parts for weights on the dumbbells; the Third World. Outdoors sleeping on an unpitched tent for cushioning, fuck mosquitoes and this light is dim. I don’t know about this journal type thing. A first is a first I guess, we’ll see. I’m in a group (Team 1) with Paramedics Emile Cange (Team Leader) and Sammy Sultan; also EMTs Jackie Hyatt, Tanisha Hill, Stephania, and Cassidy Vale. A dormir.”

 

 

12

 

 

 

Phoebe Rusche is a curly blonde American expatriate holed up at the famous Hotel Olofsen: She is one for strong opinions. She asks herself:

 

“Have you ever been to a Haitian market place in Port au Prince? Have you ever walked through the masses of humanity huddled on top of each other selling their wares; selling their spices, or their oranges, vegetables or meats? Have you ever smelled the air or the dank odors that rise up from below your feet as you try and make your way around — avoiding, if you can, stepping on someone’s merchandise, all the while swatting at flies? Bonjour Madame… Bonsoir Monsieur… Market ladies talking, laughing, quiet, arguing or simply still, lying on the used clothing for sale or rearranging for the umpteenth time a pile of three eggplants that refuses to sell itself. Watching, taking it all in, planning.

It’s not healthy. It’s not right. It wouldn’t be acceptable in Europe or Canada or the United States. The health inspectors would close the market down; the fire marshals would be bought or chased out. The wooden markets have already burned down. How many people are permitted to exist per square foot in the Western world? How many toilets must you have per person in the Western World? 1? 2? Gold toilets? Ones that wash your hands, zip up your pants and flush themselves!

Since Haiti’s earth quake, I’ve been complaining about the living conditions in the tent cities (bed-sheet-cities too) and then I started to realize that the living conditions in the tent cities aren’t that different from how Haitians were living before the quake. Sure, before the quake the homes were often made of cinder block, tin or cardboard instead of tarp or canvas, but these pre-quake homes didn’t have running water. These pre-quake homes didn’t have indoor plumbing. These homes didn’t have refrigerators or stoves. So really, how much adjustment had to be made to go live in a tent? Not Much.

The international community is rightly concerned about water and toilet facilities in quake-stricken Haiti but how come they were never concerned about the living conditions or Haiti’s urban poor before the quake? How come the UN never shouted out before the quake? How come the UN didn’t scream out before the quake about how Haitians are living? How come the UN thought it was so important to drive around in bullet proof vehicles with their weapons out but they accepted so openly the way people were trying to survive in the cities? The UN adapted to the squalor instead of putting an end to it.

Last night, while I was sitting at my desk, it suddenly occurred to me that Haiti’s new tent cities actually look like the suburbs when I compare them to the fly infested, mud strewn conditions of the Haitian market places. The economic conditions which cause people to stay, live and work in the market place environment are ironed out in the fancy restaurants of Petionville and the meeting rooms of Washington D.C. Even more disconcerting; I’m assuming that most of the people that are going to the Haiti Donor Conference are strictly going to get a piece of the 11-14 billion dollar pie that’s being recommended for Haiti’s resurrection from the rubble. The people at the donor conference are not really concerned about the inhumane living conditions for Haiti’s urban poor. If they were, they would have shown that concern before the quake. Are the market ladies going to the donor conference? Are RAM musicians who live in Tent Cities going to the donor conference? The folks going to the donor conference are probably the folks who created Haiti’s current economic condition. Should we expect change for the better from the same folks who gave us change for the worse?”

 

 

 

“No slavery, no colony.” These were the watch words under which a 12,000 strong French invasion force set off over 2,000 miles to bring the Haitian Revolution under quarantine and control. Its orders were simple: pacify France’s most important colonial possession by locating and exterminating the rebel leadership, reinstituting slavery, and reigning in the mulatto pretensions to equality with whites.

In the year 1801, Napoleon reinstituted slavery in all French processions in the Antilles, all save Haiti which had via bloody revolution seized control of what was the most profitable colonial exercise in the Empire, brutal iron home to some 700,000 African slaves.

When Toussaint L’Ouvature, the brilliant former slave commander was betrayed and carried off in shackles to die imprisoned, that invasion force had been decimated, the country was a house of ash and his lieutenants proceeded to purge the colony of the remainder of its white inhabitants.

Sebastian Adon had to learn the history of the Island on the go, in bits and pieces, many of them aggrandizements or half-truths. He learned some on the omnibus to and from the general hospital which became the focal point of the rescue and reconstruction effort in January of 2010. Some he learned from hyper-educated Haitian doctors like Louis Hinge and William Savoy, other bits from Marious and Fitz the massive mercenaries, some from the Scientists, dialectically speaking. The book ‘Black Jacobins’ filled in quite a bit albeit from a fairly Marxist, revolution loving perspective. The young men he helped train as volunteers, those that spoke English seemed unfamiliar with history. It was as if the world’s historians chalked up Haiti in two sentences. There was a slave revolt led by Toussaint in which all the whites were murdered. Haiti became the world’s only black republic freed via revolt and proceeded to become the poorest, most wretched nation on earth. But Sebastian, the EMT, the Hebrew detective as his friends joked loved ‘bigger pictures’. Much to the consternation and tireless patience of his new partner EMT Cassidy Vale his delve into the back story would consume him.

On the first night down, Sebastian attempted to inventory the meager supplies. He sat around a pile of empty card board boxes with Alex Furlini and EMT Cassidy Vale cutting cardboard boxes into splints. They were tragically low on many things they presumed they’d need. There were cases upon cases of water and not a single vile of albuterol, or morphine or even Motrin. There were endless crates of power bars, but no traction splints, no multi-trauma dressings, no sutures, no antibiotics. Of the 104 volunteers 48 were emergency medical workers, 40 EMTs and 8 Paramedics, seven cross trained as fire fighters. There were 30 nurses and ten doctors; there was a Scientologist logistics and supply crew comprising the rest of the company of rescuers.

The compound was located in ‘District Tabarre’ to the Southeast of the flattened capital. It was poorly secured, guarded by a truck load of young men with shot guns. A Haitian EMT Jimmy Severe sat outside the main tent surveying a stick to dirt compound map laid out by Dany Bélair. Sebastian watched and listened to the night standing near them with his chain smoke.

“The place is totally indefensible,” muttered Severe.

“Why would anyone attack medical workers,” asks Sebastian.

“Because they were desperate before and will become more so every day. We Haitians have suffered every single type of injustice and do not break, they see us as dollar signs, behind these walls foods to feed their families. When we are sleeping, or when we grow tired or venture away they will move in and loot the compound.”

“Maybe not,” says Bélair.

“You haven’t been here in years, brother; you don’t see our people for what they’ve been reduced to. They know we will all be gone in a week.”

Jimmy and another EMT named Juno Jerome spoke at length then with the young guards in Creole sizing them up it seemed. The guards, open the primary gate and let Sebastian, Juno Jerome, Dany Bélair, and Jimmy Severe inspect the road, there is nothing outside but crumbled structures, dust and death. A sickly looking dog is the only intruder that wanders into their blue and white LED lights.

“No one’s out here,” says Sebastian smoking another smoke.

It seems like only Severe has been here in a while, beyond their color and their tongue this Island is as alien to these Haitian rescue workers as it is to the few whites that have come along.

“And the quake has changed the game again,” translates Severe from what the guards have been saying in Creole.

“They say that the people believe this to be sign about the end times. There is an old legend in the Voodoo lore about a series of destructions that will befall the island, before the return of a promised leader. They say the whole world has come here finally to help us, sent its doctors and armies to rebuild and to learn how far we fell as a tribe. The legend says the world learns how to save itself in Haiti before similar disasters strike across the planet in the coming dark days,” translates Dany Bélair.

“I can’t tell, is that ironic, optimistic or just plain silly,” responds Sebastian.

“Well hope floats right, they’ve been left to die for over two hundred years,” explains Bélair.

The cynics trusting not the young guards too thoroughly break the remaining night into three two hour shifts, but all end up sitting on watch ‘til dawn. Sebastian hasn’t slept well in about two years. He keeps loosing people he loves, his luck had run out. He consigns himself to the island, having not much to lose by simply doing what he’s been trained to do, but for a higher calling.

He’d been contemplating from a place of great darkness for about three months, nothing felt quite clear anymore. He’d fallen apart long before. There were growing suspicions he harbored about his own sanity. Back in Brooklyn chained to his thankless ambulance in midnight hours under the glow of Woodhull hospital he remembered only Jeremy’s ghost.

“How did you end up on this mission,” Dany asks him.

“My Jamaican best friend called me the night after the earthquake and asked me if there was a way to get to Haiti, if we had to leave immediately could I go, and I figured the answer was yes.”

“You don’t know what you just got into white boy.”

“I reckon I will have some idea in the morning.”

“What happened to your Jamaican wing man?”

“He didn’t have a passport.”

“Why doesn’t he have a passport?”

“Why doesn’t Haiti have lights or roads,” interjects Emile Cange.

“Or ambulances?” mutters Jerome.

“Or hospitals,” says Dany.

“Or anything. What the fuck,” says Dany Bélair.

 

One of the local kids addresses them in Haitian Creole.

 

“What did he say,” asks Adon.

“He said ‘Everyone’s dead,” says Emile, “he said everyone’s dead, and they’re trying to kill us all.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

13

 

 

“Patience is a virtue. Merde, humility is too.” Dominich recounts the first day:

Yesterday we woke up at 6 am, sat around till like 2, got word from the meeting with the UN and were at the hospital by around 3 pm. Tried to coordinate finding Tanya ’s relatives, she told me from NY she hasn’t yet heard from them, but it’s not possible right now. Yea, it’s the third world and I’m ten places at once but also its specifically and absolutely Haiti, and Haiti after what they’re calling the worst earthquake in 200 years, the most deadly in history. Driving you don’t see every house upside down, or not at first, like the news would make you think, but you damn well see a good number of the city blocks fucked up and it’s crazy. People still living their lives but hella those lives now on the street and off of broken houses and buildings. We drove yesterday to the hospital by the presidential palace and by Champs de Mars. And they gave us two big, adjacent rooms in an abandoned part of the hospital and said, “Here.”

When I was a kid, and since, there’s been always a little of an adventure in exploring things broke down – derelict buildings and dark rooms full of trash and trashed offices. We set up a 5 station ER type room (check-in, triage/vitals, code green, code yellow, code red) and the world is ours and we kicked down doors and dug through destroyed rooms looking for supplies, and whatever appeal I picked up from movies and climbing shit as a kid swelled up to grown-up size with our purpose and getting shit down and ready for people that six days after the quake still need a splint or a cast or an amputation, or simply clean water to drink.”

 

 

 

Paramedic Emile Cange gazes out in horror at an island that is his by blood, and supposedly by birth but is a place to crush a man’s belief in the goodness of god. N95 masks smeared with vix-vaso-rub barely mask the stench of the air around them. The streets are clogged with mopeds, with bikes, with shiftless and dazed masses, with techno-colored Taptap mini-buses, with push carts with the broken and dying legions of his kind.

After the Health Minister ‘authorized’ their deployment at the General Hospital two large white dented, dirt crusted omnibuses moved most of our contingent into what was left of the largest Hospital in Port au Prince. The rescuers passed vast tent cities, crippled thoroughfares, the ruins of the presidential place. The world of the capital had come to an end. Vast thongs of desperate partly injured people lined the streets seemingly glaring at the two buses inching their way through the rubble.

“A Haitian never smiles at a white or a stranger,” Jimmy Severe had explained, “but they aren’t staring you down like they want to fight, this ain’t that Brooklyn glower.”

Severe speaks with a thick accent by the way.

“We are an immensely curious people,” says Nurse Jeanette Sangosse explaining the phenomenon to Sebastian again on their way in. She is in her late 40’s, a Nurse at Queens General Hospital.

There are tears in the eyes of many of the rescuers seeing all this wreckage by day. Some take pictures to testify back home, or sometimes taking a picture is easier than looking at something for too long yourself. The Haitian people stare in at them. They never smile or flinch.

There are big green gates at the General Hospitals compound which its security roll open to reveal a near abandoned medical facility about the size of Union Square in New York. Several buildings had fallen in and all was in disarray. The rescuers had been asked to restore the triage and emergency area in a two story building near the gate.

There are several hundred patients, hundreds of crush injuries and amputees. Cold calculation and perhaps pragmatism had sent the first day in medical relief workers on a chopping spree. Infection was now setting in on day six since the original quake rocked Carrefour and the capital into this teeming hellish scene.

Sebastian, Furlini, Miranda and a dozen others were charged with clearing out the lower triage bay. There was blood, dust and refuse everywhere. Attempts were made to sterilize some beds. Beds made of doors, beds made of anything one could lie upon near death.  In the upper ER were roughly 150 patients, largely amputees and assorted mass trauma. Dr. Gary Baptiste and Dr. Hinge began a rundown of total patient count in our area of the facility. A few Swiss and Canadian Red Cross tents had been erected a five minute walk down from our building. Partners in Health were operating an OR up the central hospital road, coldly and without much enthusiasm to share much patient information with our company, but who could really blame them, they’d been here 20 plus years, and to them everyone else was a disaster tourist. There was an International Medical Corps contingent, largely a group of thirty internists from Massachusetts.

With dirty water and cleaning fluids the rescuers mop the lower triage bay. The structure seems sound enough, but the place is ghostly and grim. Ruined files, over turned furniture screams for help everywhere. Half our number set off to make some semblance of order in the bay, while the second party began attending to the hundreds of crippled victims in the upstairs ER.

EMT Cassidy Vale, a scrawny Irish bar back at the Niagara Bar back in Manhattan takes it upon himself to outfit and organize a quartermaster of supplies in the lower bay operating room, if that’s what it was before the rescuers declared it such. It was in his nature to create order, to make a thing systematic; he’d learned in the boy scouts and working in bars. Sebastian did what was in his nature. Sebastian too had some talent for organizing people apparently delegated with Hadas the sexy Scientologist and Dany Bélair the fire fighter the improvised layout of their area into green, yellow and red zones ad hocking some basic themes of MCI command with the bare necessities they were working with. Long wooden benches were hauled in for the walking wounded and family members, what beds were available for the yellow and red, the more critical under their care were filthy.

Kevin Wessel the young fire fighter started dragging every manner of broken off door, of ply wood boards and binding them with rope to gurneys making a second semblance of beds. They poured and swept that bay clean to the point it could be feasibly rendered, shouting orders and piling meager lifesaving equipment, salvaging what was left from various stock rooms. There were no oxygen tanks, no bag valve masks, hardly any medicine, the tech bags each rescuer carried were laden with mostly trauma dressings and assorted articles. Cassidy stacked and filed all that the rescuers found. About two hours to sun down there was a salvage made complete. They began in taking patients. Children missing arms, a crazed woman screaming as if possessed they sedate and tie to a chair. It is thankless work, soon all the beds are filled.

Captain Raeburn is the Bedstuy leader tasked with ordering the rescue workers in the EMS command what to do on the ground, but he’s never much ordered anyone around as a four month on the street EMT and let’s his selected ‘squad leaders’ do most of the organizing. He’s a good man, but a largely inept leader with no real authority besides the two gold bars on his lapel. Miranda, Sebastian, Emile Cange, Dany Bélair and Severe had been placed in charge of groups of 7 to 10 EMTs. None of them had ever been Bedstuy volunteers before the expedition, but all seemed capable enough, with enough influence and charisma to direct the crews working on the ground. Raeburn was a frail looking leader who could be swayed toward a course of action by nearly any of the younger appointed leaders.

Miranda is about three months away from a doctor so most of the EMS treat and differ to him like one. Some of the EMS go far beyond their protocols and skill sets under his direction, but some like Sebastian don’t. Sebastian doesn’t totally like Miranda, but still differs to his clinical judgments if a doctor isn’t on the floor. This is more a question of male ego and world view more than one of medical opinion. They shoot everyone up with salvaged pain killers and antibiotics, infected wounds will kill as many as the quake and the crews have to debreed a good deal of maggoty four day old makeshift dressings.

 

Everything is done in a rapid fire succession of escalating crises’. Most of the EMS crew that with the best of intentions came here because it was the island of their blood, had never been in the NYC 911 system, they were transport techs largely, hardly ever used their trauma skills. There was the expected flaring of ego and ethnic tension, there was also eventually a coalescing of teamwork under fire. The IV tubing and saline lactate ran out by dusk. Both floors were filled with bleeding and injured, but not a single Haitian seemed to cry.

 

Cassidy Vail and Kevin Wessel kept running off, kept hauling back boxes of supplies from adjacent crashed structures, kept reporting on possibly a thousand patients in various throws of dying outside on gurneys and cots assembled like a MASH unit in the park within the compound. There was this crew of good old boy green berets from Mississippi that had come down to adrenaline junky it up. They were a pedestrian ambulance, them and two Haitian translator-porters hauling critically injured off the street and into the now apparently open for business ER. EMT Tanya T-Flame Tallbird Luv (who was planning to defect at sun down) kept getting into it with them. They were brusk and machismo, talking down to everybody as they ran in.

“Where the fuck would they be bringin’ um if not for us,” Tanya mutters to a scientist midwife named Leah Caro whose been attending to a growing number of pregnant women brought in from the yard outside in a make shift OB setup behind the quarter master office.

The screaming crazy woman suddenly comes to and starts thrashing in her chair. Dany Bélair gets called in by Miranda to sedate her again. Hadas suggests leaving her on the street in the compound and Sebastian finds that to be quite heartless yet somehow compellingly pragmatic.

A truck pulls into the entrance bay. The admitting policy seems quite likely to be American dollar bribery.

Raeburn eventually ordered everyone to pack up and pull out, as it looked like night was setting in and security was well, negligible to non-existent when the lights went out. Some rumor kept circulating about all the prisoners escaping from the largest prison in town, about rioters and looters, about general un-safety. How much of that was real and how much was in our alien heads wondered Emile Cange aloud and nurse practitioner Jeanette Sangosse seemed to agree. They had not toiled in the bitter wet heat and grime re-occupying this building to abandon it and hundreds of boxes of supplies that largely were fixed and committed. But, Captain Raeburn was insistent and many were scared. Few of the whites were nervous thinks Tanya T-Flame Tallbird Luv. She supposed they had already thrown themselves into this expedition, prepared somewhat for the presumed dangers mentally. They were not now afraid of the night like perhaps they should be.

“What the hell is he talking about,” exclaims Emile Cange, “if we pull out all the supplies are gonna get looted and half these people are gonna crap out.”

Sebastian watched the company draw mental lots on who would side with Emile and stay the night. Captain Raeburn didn’t really quarrel with Emile, or Dr. Jean Baptiste, or the doctor’s girlfriend Monique who were now arguing a heartfelt case to stay. The night was setting in. Finally it was asked to the assembled volunteers in the lower bay who would staff a night watch. Kevin’s hand shot up, as did medical student Jim Miranda. Of the higher medical authorities stayed Sangosse and Baptiste, his PA in training (whatever that meant) girlfriend, Monique. The fire fighter Dany Bélair and Emile Cange were the only medics. EMT Cassidy Vale was the only person who understood the quarter mastery job remained, as did EMTs Alex Furlini, Sebastian Adon who stupidly feared nothing anymore, and EMT Tanya T-Flame Tallbird Luv who sought to spirit herself away and find her family. The Scientist Leah Caro was busy with her midwifing attending to a total of four women in various stages of labor, she stayed as well.

The remainder wished them luck and pulled out on the white dented omnibus. The rescuers watched the skeleton crew of a hospital staff chain the gates, then chain the doors to the ER triage building, and an old man with a shot gun and a quasi-officious uniform posted up on a chair outside.

“This is a little crazy,” Tanya confides and repeats in Sebastian her squad leader.

“We’ve drawn a lot of attention today, word will travel we’re in here with food and supplies and it might get nasty.”

“I think it’ll be fine,” Sebastian mutters. They’re re-bandaging swollen, puss inundated dressings of a 17 year old girl with no legs.

“Well aren’t you Mr. Brightside.”

“It’s been a real bad year, something tells me our god is gonna pull a miracle max any minute now.”

“Your god, my god, the spirits, just ask for all the help we can get,” Tanya says.

 

 

 

14

 

 

 

Taking it back about a month Sebastian Adon was handcuffed and on his knees surrounded by Israeli border control agents at Ben Gurion Airport. He was attempting at the time to repatriate himself to warmer, more Hebrew climes, but he had both a history and high security index, as well as number of ‘questionable’ things in his bag. It had been by all accounts the beginning of a very shitty year for technician Sebastian Adon. The doors of life kept swinging closed and bloodying his face on impact. Still he prayed.

To Sebastian, god was somewhere between the force from Star Wars and a Yiddish contract negotiator. His religion, if one could call it that was vaguely Zoroastrian; a cosmic balancing act and struggle between darkness and light; as well as tinted with a large helping of cultural Judaism. His mother was an Irish atheist, his father a Russian Jew who hadn’t prayed at any time except once in Vietnam. On his knees in irons at that Israeli airport in Lod, he hadn’t tasted victory or anything close in quite some time.

EMT Sebastian Adon is a high school dropout who at the time of his arrest was roughly 16 credits over what was needed in achieving a degree in Political Science at CUNY Hunter. In the past two years his luck had taken a turn for the worst. There had been the small matter of his closest friend taking a pistol to his head the day after his 25th birthday. Jeremy McGaffey had sure as shit shown some resolve on that one. Then there had been Maria, which he had thought was love, if love caught fire and exploded in ones arms like a Palestinian. He drank quite a lot, smoked even more, toyed perpetually with the idea of poor turnout at his own funeral.

He was a pretty good EMT. That was just about all he was good at; prolonging life if just for another 15 minutes. No one, unless they blew their brains out or went and hung themselves was really ever dead to Sebastian. Even in cardiac arrest, when they got to the hospital, they got better or they went to Heaven with Jesus and the rest of the happy, basically good human race.

But Sebastian had moved to dark and uncomforting place within his mind. Sometimes on his way home after working 16 or 20 hours on the bus he’d see Jeremy in the back of his car peering out the rear view mirror at him. Sebastian wasn’t adverse to imaginary friends, but dead real friends when driving wasn’t so high in the book of sane he carries.

There are scars all over his arms and knuckles from brawls he only vaguely remembers.

In life’s game he was losing to himself. When his Jamaican friend EMT Mickhi DBrisk said let’s go to Haiti, he hadn’t totally thought the whole thing through. Like EMS in general, the saving could be redemptive at times, bring a little calm to life’s bitter grind, and surely there was an epic amount of saving to be done in Haiti.

Mickhi didn’t have a valid passport and never made it on to the plane.

A man with nothing left to lose, no lady, no joy and few friends doesn’t always make the best most calculated decisions. The fatal blow to his common sense of duty and purpose had been his deportation from a land which he still believed could have saved him. They had cuffed him, searched him, stripped him interrogated him and strung up and out. He was no true subversive, but he’d crossed the green line once or twice too much for them. In 2004 he’d gotten smuggled across the barrier wall into Balata Refugee camp in Nablus. It was his first real work as an EMT, first time he’d seen people and buildings explode from the other side’s point of view. Just two months out of his training program he worked on a Palestinian ambulance for 13 days. It cost him his security index and spot on the Tel Aviv beach. Jews have a long memory and Israelis ask all to pick clear sides.

That’s a piece of his back story, when Mickhi said ‘let’s go to Haiti to save people’ Sebastian calculated it as a last ditch effort to try and save or perhaps even destroy himself. There are anti-heroes, tragic heroes, movie heroes and the brotherhood of the blue cloth; but there are not many happy heroes for were life making them so happy, alone or with another they would perhaps not risk as much.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

15

 

 

 

Working in a fetid, crumbling hospital compound with a skeleton crew with no supplies is made worse by a total lack of light. The night shift must utilize LED torches and touch tunnel like prowess to navigate the care of the approximately 340 patients in the upper and lower ward of the triage building.

Cassidy Vale with a burner strapped to his globe rummages frantically through ever diminishing supplies while Sebastian and Furlini monitor some 40 patients on all manners of make shift bedding, debreeding maggoty dressings, taking vitals, keeping everyone hydrated. The heat is not much alleviated by the night fall. Leah and Tanya attend to screaming, writhing woman on her first pregnancy who keeps curling up in a ball, bleeding from her female parts on the less than filthy floor. Hundreds of family members are curled up on card board sheets, beneath around and under the bed. Miranda puts out the idea of sticking them all in the yard, but the Haitian rescuers tell them that the family always stays with the sick. When they aren’t in the way they are helpful, they hold the blue LED burners while we work, they help pour water and orange electrolyte fluid down their loved ones wounded gullets. There’s a lot of disfigured kids, but that doesn’t phase Sebastian, little does. He takes orders from Miranda and Nurse Sangosse. The more critically injured are upstairs with the medics Dany Bélair and Emile Cange, under the instruction of Dr. Jean Baptiste.

Dr. Jean Baptiste has a private practice in Fort Greene and hot but temperamental girlfriend, Monique, who might be a PA sooner or later but gets to play one in Haiti hands on. He’s smooth guy, never gets excited or angry or frustrated. He’s got 6 emts, 2 medics, nurse Sangosse and about a dozen come and go hospital staff that stayed put with us.

Periodically there’s some bellowing at the gate as families in the hospital yard try and get their crushed and crippled family members who are dying unattended into the building. Jeanette Sangosse keeps letting them in and keeping the security guard from shooting them.

Around midnight a large crowd of youth has apparently gathered outside the hospital gates and is yelling something that most of the Creole speakers are worried about. Tanya, who still hasn’t left yet, probably won’t ‘til dawn and Furlini are sedating a small boy who is missing his left arm and leg, the remaining leg is in a make shift traction splint involving gravity and a brick.

“What are they yelling about,” asks Furlini. The lower bay has large windows which face the street.

“They’re debating with the guards out front as to whether they should kill us and take our food,” responds Tanya T-Flame Tallbird Luv.

“We don’t have much food to take.”

“They just keep yelling about whites in the hospital.”

“I felt safe until you translated that.”

They get back to work and haggle shouting continues.

Leah and Miranda yells that delivery is imminent for one of the girls in our OB. The girl has been doing a lot of bleeding. Kevin arrives with a stretcher which is an army medical cot strung onto a gurney with rope, the latest instrument of his MacGyvery. Sebastian and Kevin rush upstairs with the girl so she can deliver under the supervision of nurse Sangosse. In passing Sebastian asks Emile Cange if it’s true a mob has gathered outside to maim them.

“It’s a small but growing mob,” says Dany Bélair over hearing.

The girl passes out on the gurney, but sometime after midnight Miranda, Leah and nurse Sangosse deliver the first of several babies made that evening. As the little baby cries everyone explodes in laughter and five minutes of hope. The baby named Kitty, is wrapped in perhaps the only sheet of silver baby bunting in their supply.

When the ringer lactate runs out around 1am Kevin and Sebastian volunteer to go outside the building and get more. Dr. Jean Baptiste states he advises against it, but won’t stop them. In the darkness outside they wheel a gurney to blue light glow over a cobble stone walkway toward something called the Radiology strong room, apparently a depot for water, food and irregular supplies as per a Haitian nurse who stayed the night. As the pair roll out into night they see hundreds in a vast tent city assembled in the hospital yard. No one is taking care of them, but they’ve come here perhaps in hope the hospital would start functioning again and they’d be higher in the queue.

People call out to Sebastian and Cassidy, but they just keep moving. There are surely ten times the injured out here just in the yard, they need to come back with supplies not more patients Miranda had warned.

Radiology has no lactate ringer, but they load up with water, Motrin, bandages, IV catheters and some food. An English speaking doctor advises they might find some cases of the fluid in Pediatrics, but can’t adequately explain where that is. They roll the supplies back and go out again. The buildings look unstable, but Sebastian and Cassidy find what they are looking for after a bit of rubble scavenging.

Saline drip and ringer lactate are important not just for administering various drugs, but nearly all the patients are badly dehydrated and the sheer volume makes conventional rounds irregular. The compound is a maze of refugees, half the buildings are knocked out and the LED lights only light up the ground in front of you. There’s blood and feces on the floor, nails to snag you, but the rescuers work on.

There’s a body in front of the gate in a shallow gulley grave which Sebastian and Monique saw on their way in, but it’s apparently too dangerous to go out and move it.

At about 4am most of the patients are stable enough for half the crew to bunk out on two vacant beds kept for this purpose. It’s been a long and wretched night, but they’ve brought 3 little Haitian babies into the world and kept all in their care alive.

Furlini and Cassidy are asleep on the two cots, Miranda and Leah are still with the last pregnant woman. Dr. Jean Baptiste, Monique and nurse Sangosse are taking a rest in the chairs upstairs. Kevin is on watch with Dany Bélair and Emile by the upper ER door. Things finally slow down and that’s when the singing begins. Tanya and Sebastian hear it first.

In unison, the patients in the lower ward begin a solemn hymn. Sebastian understanding a little French can make out two words. ‘Dureanne papa’. The chorus overtakes the silence and the still.

“What are they singing,” Sebastian asks her.

“Thank you Father, it is nothing.”

 

And sitting there in the dark of the lower bay Sebastian realized that these people could just about bear anything and for this he admired them still more. Not for resilience but for solidarity and faith

 

 

 

16

 

 

 

Shatah Man Metayer has scars all over his large and chiseled body and can move through the night like a runaway slave. He’d been brought to Flatbush as a boy, murdered a few, got wrapped for one at the age of 16, did ten years upstate in Attica and then got deported back to Haiti. His gang calls him Shatah man because he’s quick to fire and never seems to miss. The men on the hill rent him out to knock down whomever angers them. He doesn’t like the day time, he kills for money and sometimes for fun. He’s always the quickest one to fire the gun. If he spoke English once he refuses to speak it anymore. Sometime in the mid-nineties it was rumored Shatah man strangled a copper with his bare hands. Snapped his neck in a dancehall because he didn’t like his lawman look.

In the darkness the Shatah man sits across from the gate to general hospital, quite curious about what these Americans have brought with them in all those buses, boxes and bags. He sits with his men apart from the angry group of kids yelling about storming the place. Not a good move he tells one them, they haven’t been here long enough to have brought enough. Scare um or kill um now an all that wealth stays put at the airport.

It was day seven about to be, and still all the youngsters watched the relief agencies and endless armada of planes bring crate after crate after crate after crate; but them crates were shiftless. They stayed at the airport with all the men with big guns from the States, Brazil and Pakistan. Shatah man told the youngsters wait and see.

 

“Wait and see what good things the blan bring from the crates,” he says.

 

 

 

 

17

 

 

Finally dawn comes as all are breaking from exhaustion. Sebastian and Monique are donning pathogen barrier suits because they want to move the body before the dawn of the second day. Dr. Jean Baptiste is adamantly against it. Not only would the two of them be alone on the street with no security, but the body surely is host to any number of contagious things. Sebastian is not one to quarrel over such things, but Monique is. She’s demanding to move the body. Sebastian figures for her its cathartic, but for him it’s a routine. You don’t leave corpses lying about in Brooklyn.

The patients are yell-asking for water, Dany Bélair looks like he needs a cigarette, but good firefighters don’t smoke. Monique is getting more adamant. Leah is finally asleep. And then the building shakes like a wave and everybody tumbles. It’s about 6:30 am when the second quake hits and everybody loses their composure. Patients tear IV lines out of their arms, a girl without legs grabs Sebastian’s arm and begs him in Haitian Creole not leave her as he yells for everyone to try and stay calm, but a stampede exodus has already begun. People are running for the door, literally dragging hospital beds outside into the yard, passing them, carrying out family members in their arms. There is look of terror in the eyes of all. Miranda yells for Cassidy to ‘pack up the goods and get out’, but there isn’t a whole lot of time to figure what to take as the structure buckles and dust flies into the air filled with hysterical screaming. Sebastian abandons any hope of getting people to stay where they are. He’s never been in an earthquake before, actually none of them have except for Miranda who went to live in California once and Leah who’s from LA like most Scientologists are.

Dany Bélair and Emile Cange are literally carrying people out of the building and pushing beds onto the street where a mob is gathering. “Just one more run and then stay out,” Miranda yells at Kevin who’s got that kid with no legs on an army stretcher, him and a stay put with us Haitian nurse. Sebastian has blood all over his FDNY job shirt, the building is no longer shaking, but it dawns on Cassidy that if it does come down its gonna take out all their supplies.

It’s Tuesday morning; does anybody know where the hospital is?

Outside the building they seemingly had occupied and re-converted into Haiti’s only functional 24 ER, is now a mad house mob scene. A pile of bleeding beds and their horrified patients. Miranda is yelling orders as it seems he’s trained for, Dr. Gary and nurse Jeanette (they’re all on a first name basis after a night like last) are now frantically running around the yard trying to re-start IVs and attend to a woman in hemorrhagic shock after she literally crawled without legs out into the yard. It’s just about the worst thing Sebastian has ever seen logistically.

A platoon of 82nd airborne guys making rounds can’t help but notice what looks like a medical zoot suit riot in the court yard of the General Hospital. They investigate, and then jump in. Four of them keep running back into the lower ER with Cassidy and Sebastian loading up supplies onto carry stretchers and dumping them in the ER parking lot near the evacuated mob scene. Everybody is fully engaged now on the last legs upon which they stand. Running and running and dumping and dumping, unsure if the building will topple, but seeing it as their duty the soldiers, Vale and Adon schlep most of what was left outside into a huge balagan of a pile. Balagan in Hebrew for your information means ‘a shit storm of a mess’.

With half their patients bleeding from open bandages, the other half freaking out from the post-quake terror the crew of rescuers keep running back to this pile of stuff Cassidy is trying to re-organize onto shelving Sebastian and a marine dragged into the lot.

“What do you need us to do brother,” a sweaty marine from Houston urges Sebastian.

His name is staff sergeant CJ. Sebastian looks at CJ and points toward the pile.

“We gotta play one of these things is just like another,” Sebastian responds.

CJ orders four of the other soldiers who just arrived to start sorting things, but they organized as they are used to man killing toys not lifesaving toys and this stuff is all alien to them. Cassidy takes charge again of the goods assigning two men to stack drugs and another two to look for ‘foley bags, IV equipment and tubing’ which they move closer to the mad house cause re-running lines is the priority. The soldiers puppy pile the cache and slowly but surely this clutter gets sorted in wild fire mode. Which is fortunate, because Tanya tells Sebastian ‘people will just start taking stuff’ if it isn’t restored quickly enough.

All that work and the operation is in shambles. Another crew of marines comes in for back up and crowd control, and media vampires roll in like flies to corpses to catch all the hysteria on CNN and PBS. I guess word got down to the airport about this fiasco up at the hospital.

Emile prays to Jesus that the day tour gets here one of these days to relieve them because they can’t hold out too much longer. They’ve all been mostly on their feet since 4pm yesterday.

More shelves get hauled into the yard, a whole quarter master has been resurrected, the marines get their first taste of medical warfare, that is to say getting drafted into the relief effort by guilt and Jesus. Sebastian looks like shit, covered in dust and blood. Cassidy throws him his canteen.

“Drink some water baby.”

Sebastian does feeling his head throb.

The worst is over, the Red Cross rolls in with collapsible stretchers. Partners for Health conscript Emile, Dany and Kevin to build a tent in the yard for the evacuees.

“The professionals are taking over now,” some smug shit bag of a Boston doctor from Medical Corps International informs Monique. Around 8am the Day Tour arrives and sees the night tour looking like death, haggard and beat.

On the behest of Monique, CJ and another marine finally bag with no tag the stiff rotting out front, but not before those media vultures take about a thousand pictures. To go with the ones they put in all the Western papers of young Haitian men looking crazed with masks over their faces. And riot porn over food drops. And hell on earth as art house photography.

 

 

 

18

 

 

 

With a wink and a swagger, EMT Tanya T-Flame Tallbird Luv snuck off the morning the second quake after shock, rocked the hospital and undid much of the first nights hard work. She moves now through the ruined city, mostly confident that she isn’t given away to the Captain or the volunteer leaders. She’d informed Sebastian, her nominal ‘squad leader’ and he said he’d cover for her. She was off now across the ruined, dusty city to find her grandmother’s home, make some arrangements for family members to get out of the country before the steel trap closed.

Amnesty was being granted to 30,000 plus Haitians in the States slotted for deportation, some of her family had the paper work to leave. You helped Haiti, by helping your own first was her logic. That’s how there were all these nurses and doctors in the AMHE ready to come down and help, because they’d gotten out at some point.

Poison was the island, you might be proud to be a thing, like Tanya was to be Haitian, but you couldn’t ever say things had been good here for anyone. There was always someone trying to tear something out and cart it away, scheme or profit off the people. It wasn’t hard to love this place, but you had to seek it out.

Otherwise all the death, suffering and tears would blind you to the goodness and resilience of the people. Off Tanya goes to find her family home, not sure it’s there, not sure who’s dead or alive. She walks by the crumpled Presidential Palace, a ruin and a rubble strewn mess, the plaza square now another tent city. But, under the tarps and dirty sheets of the sprawl she sees and remembers that no one for a moment has truly been broken and her people are getting up, shaking off the dust and soldiering on like they’ve done before.

There’s a mother singing to her little baby in a tent she passes, a make shift barber shop in another, in another kids around a radio listening to Kompa music. She’ll find her family she thinks.  Jesus tells her that her family is still alive and the quake didn’t’ hit her house. Jesus and the spirits have never lied or have betrayed her before.

 

 

 

19

 

 

 

JANUARY 20, 2010 from the journal of EMT Dominich Asbun.

 

About images: in Camera Lucida the dude says something like, “Whereas in the mid- and early 20th Century we were a nation of ideals, now we’ve become a nation of images.” Try separating yourself from what you think of yourself; Goddamn, and now we keep hearing what the US media is reporting: looting/riot, one in a million saved people amazing miracle stories, the aftershocks still coming strong. Yes, but it’s hard being here and feeling like you can break it down like that. We’ve felt protected the whole time, especially now with Army everywhere at the hospital, and we could write an encyclopedia on miracles (and the opposite), and the 6.2 quake of this morning was a tremor for us, small, out there in District Santo, moved yesterday – me and my group are still at home and hearing a lot of conflicting information about the aftershock but it was still big, the kids working overnight at the hospital felt it strong, they say. So things are thick out here for sure; I guess packaging it into headlines just feels like you’re cheating someone of something. I don’t know.

 

It’s strange because after all the psychological preparation I did I find that this isn’t emotionally as tolling as I thought. I guess I haven’t been much exposed to the death of it (yet?), oh boy I’ve seen the pain but my role in it is proactive, and I think the purpose and system (ha) and busyness of it all keeps your mind working and concentrated on the next wound, the next broken bone, holding the next hand while the kid trusts you but screams. And when you’re done you’re so tired it ain’t hard to sleep, and you wake up feeling the urgency of everything still and make your way back to the wounds.

 

Spent like an hour or so changing Mickhi Something’s wounds – 8 year old with degloved right leg, degloved right hand, some exposed bone, abrasion on left buttocks taking up the whole cheek, large abrasion lower back, 3 cm X 2 cm laceration back of head, a hole that took off half his nose and upper lip, hard as fuck to get a line and an infection that pusses just about everywhere open and makes him hot, very very hot to touch. I was starving and thirsty and needed a seat, but changing the dressings by flashlight (generator out), the child’s father holding the flashlight for me, helped me turn to him and smile, the way the kid smiles. “The Haitians are some of the strongest people I know,” said one of the doctors the first day, and seeing Mickhi’s dad sleeping under his son’s “hospital bed” on a flattened cardboard box I see the doctor was right. Maybe you see the trauma of it all more clearly in writing; maybe I said it hasn’t been as emotionally tolling as I’d expected, but the emotion knows how to find you anyway. “Ain’t no reason things are this way, its how they’ve always been and they intend to stay.” Going to check on Mickhi tomorrow, when we get back to the hospital.

 

I said coming to Haiti reminds me, certain elements of it, of a general Entering the Third World – but here, now, in a lot of ways it’s like you take those elements and intensify them a hundred-fold. Things are broken and crumbled everywhere; daily living is so raw sometimes that all the life pushing through feels that much more taut. It’s bold the way a freak accident is, and people push on even harder and the beauty and strength of it comes through even brighter and even bleaker than it does in other dire situations in Third World countries I’ve seen. Gotta stop giving myself so much credit: these things, in different ways, happen in a million places, and there are some big differences between peaceful, systematic poverty and disaster or war-torn poverty. I’m learning. El Inflatable Perro here is a small frame of bones draped with a gray or tan and black or white, loose coat of hair.

 

We’re still outside after the tremor, people are getting their hair cut with a generator, I’d go if it wasn’t $5, should’ve buzzed it before coming. Yesterday was only Day 3 out of the US, but we are already thinking in terms of, “Hey, I heard there’s a bathroom down that hallway across from the ER.” “Oh shit, word?” “Yeah, and with a toilet that flushes!” Last night after the generator pumped enough water up I took the first shower since I’ve been here, and I don’t think I remember being so dirty before, what with the sweat and dust and blood and sweat and dust and all. I pull pieces of charcoal from my nose.

 

Last night Raeburn brought a box into our ER/triage thing (working out hella nice, though people and experience still short – I’ve put in lines and set casts and dispensed intramuscular antibiotics – more on that later) and the box was full of Humanitarian Aid meals from the US.

Seen the Bolivian UN twice now, ¡Viva Bolivia! Jimmy Severe is teaching me Creole.

Jimmy apran’n mwen pale kreyol.”

 

 

 

20

 

 

 

Sebastian paces the yard of the new compound, the night is a balm most generally on the senses assaulted all day. The Tabarre base was deemed indefensible by Mr. Whitley and Gardel the newly appointed head of our security. Mr. Whitley appears to be the rescuers fixer. He is calculated man, calmly taking everyone’s questions and nearly always on the phone arranging transport, setting up meetings stop gapping problems. Like most of 104 volunteers neither he nor Gardel were members of the Bedford Stuyvesant Volunteer Ambulance Company prior to embankment. He was someone making use of their pipeline. Actually besides from Cassidy Vale and Captain Raeburn it was unclear if anyone was previously affiliated with Bedstuy. Certainly not a single one of the nurses or doctors from Haitian Physicians Abroad, and most of the EMS seemed self-deployed. The details of the triumvirate were a marriage of connivance shrouded in murky intrigue. Before they bedded down Sebastian, Miranda and Cassidy share rumors.

Apparently the Scientologists have paid for just about everything. Both safe houses are properties they own, the charter plane was a cost they shouldered. All of these crates of water and Cliff Bars they paid for too. It bothers Miranda, but the others don’t seem to care. It looks like most of the back end negotiations are being handled by Dr. Hinge and Dr. William Savoy from the Physicians Association, they and Mr. Whitley seem like gate keepers. Because of their respective NAVY and FDNY affiliations Miranda and Adon had been brought Along to meet with Health Minister Dr. Alex Larsen granting the triumvirate NGO status at the General Hospital the previous day.

So Bedstuy had put out the call, the Physicians Association had provided the legitimacy and the more highly trained personnel and the Scientists had paid for everything. Most of the EMS crews from day one have been snickering about the ‘alien cult’. Cassidy overheard Mr. Whitley (whose full and proper name is Whitley Dessalines) on the phone talking about how we ought sever contacts with the ‘Sci-Tys’ lest all our work get ignored by the mainstream press. Miranda was told by Monique and Dr. Jean Baptiste that the Physicians Association wanted little to do with them either.

“They seem nice enough, I don’t know what the big deal is,” mutters Cassidy half way to sleep by now.

They did seem nice enough. Leah Caro had worked all night with them in the trenches. Hadas was preparing to negotiate some kind of patient exchange between the Israeli Military Hospital in the Industrial District. Cash Cassalus and Larry Rusche; their apparent leaders seemed highly on top of their game. But why they were in Haiti was quite unclear. ‘To help like everyone else,’ was the basic response. Also something about the ‘eight dynamics’ which sounded real logical, largely about the overlapping needs of humanity as the Maslow hierarchy of needs gets met exponentially. Sebastian introduced himself to a few of them, a film maker named Michael who looks quite a bit like some celebrity whose name Sebastian can’t place. Larry, who wears what looks like a blue train conductors hat has a daughter somewhere on the island working in a place called the Hotel Olofsen. Apparently she’s a talented writer, came to write a book about Haiti a day before the quake hit. Larry seems to pace around deep in thought, constantly checking in with the other Scientists each assigned to various ‘working groups’. He shows Sebastian and Cassidy a photo of his daughter Phoebe. It’s like Hollywood moment, because she still doesn’t know he’s here.

Quite a lot of what they do is straight out of LA, their talking patterns seem highly focused, their lines of reasoning systematically turning over ‘data’. It’s like getting the cast of Star Trek to act like they live in Beverly Hills was Miranda’s summary.

“Bedstuy sent us in before their regular members. Looks like most didn’t have passports. The Scientists needed Bedstuy and AMHE to legitimize their presence,” says a light skinned Haitian volunteer with thick black glasses joining them on the balcony of the two story pastel stucco villa.

“The Scientologists had the plane, but needed a black medical contingent. AMHE needed a plane and had one provided. Bedstuy put out al call and you all valiantly responded. And here we all are. My name is Rouis Hinge Jr.”

He sticks out his hand and Miranda, Cassidy and Adon all shake it.

“I am making a film about the relief effort,” he states, “my father said you all worked very hard last night. We thank you for your service to Haiti.”

Mr. Whitley, wearing a black and red leather jacket comes to collect Lou. They are off to the airport, they plan to stick a video camera in the face of a wide range of NGOs and embarrass them into mobilizing supplies off the airstrip and into the city.

 

 

 

***

 

 

Sebastian awakes after just four hours of sleep and finds Larry Rusche standing under a large tree watching Gardelle the head of security sever several coconuts from the upper branches with a machete. The make a dull plop as they strike the soil below. He has a salt and pepper beard.

Bon jou mon frere,” Gardelle says waving down at Sebastian.

Gardelle owns a flower shop in Brooklyn, hasn’t been on Island since he was boy; that was 40 years ago. Papa Doc the dictator still Francois Duvalier, a former health minister disappeared his father for disloyalty. Had the secret police cut off his arms and legs and threw him in a ditch along the highway to Dominican Republic. Gardelle came to Brooklyn with his brother and mother and never looked back. He’d unflinchingly thrown himself into getting supplies down to New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina and he did the same for this calamity. It was unclear why Mr. Whitley appointed him head of security, but he never missed a detail. Although as long gone from the island as any of the others, he fundamentally understood the people better than most seemed to.

Sebastian watched him lob and chisel the top of the coconut holding it one hand and striking the top with the long swing of the blade. Larry the Scientist, being a quirk wanders off with his coconut perhaps attempting to devise an alternative means to extract the juice.

Sebastian asks Gardelle to let him try. Gardelle attempts to dissuade him.

“Many a Haitian youngin’ has lost them some fingers playin’ this game untrained.”

“I’ll be careful.”

“You’d better be, it’d be a short career as an EMT with only one hand.”

“I’ll be careful,” he repeats, “just tell me what to do.”

“Ya gotta take the coconut in yer left hand, I assume yer right handed. Get yer fingers around it, but cup um tight behind where you’re gonna strike, one wrong move and ya lose digits.”

He makes the strike in slow motion, twice before passing it off.

“You got’a aim with your eyes not with your hand, striking around the cap, cracking the shell systematic in a circle. Now watch carefully.”

Gardelle brings the blade down in quick successive movements turning the shell in his hand. Nine quick strikes and the meat is exposed. He passes the coconut to Sebastian to inspect and partake. Sebastian tries to pass it back, but Gardelle urges him to drink.

“The machete is a part of our history. The slave masters gave um to us for agriculture, to put seedling holes in the soil and to cut the cane. These instruments of our servitude were the earliest weapons in the revolution. Bands of slaves sneaking up to the plantation house to cut off the heads of the master’s sleeping family.”

“Well no one wants to be a slave,” was Sebastian’s response.

Sebastian remembers all he had ever learned about the Haitian revolution and could chalk it up into two sentences. Toussaint L’Ouvature raised an army of freed slaves sometime shortly after the French revolution. They had killed all the white people on the island and plunged Haiti into 200 years of cruel poverty and isolation. But, knowing that it probably was better than being a slave.

“No one, no one ever can tolerate being a slave very long,” Gardelle continues, “you can make a person into a zombie, but even a zombie remembers at some point, if only in a rumor, what it was once like to be alive; so does the slave in a dream remember being free. He remembers this idea of how he could have lived if he hadn’t been born in chains.”

“This is storied island Mr. Gardelle.”

“You should be proud to be a white on the right side of that story for once.”

“Oh, I’m not really a white, I’m a Jewish.”

“You know the color of thing never has mattered to a Haitian, just his intentions on the island. There’s always been a handful of whites here. Hell a few thousand Polish fought on the black side during the war for independence. Historians wanna make this a race war island cause we killed most of the whites during the revolution, but most of the whites kept singing no slavery, no colony and no one liked that tune one bit.”

“I don’t ever really try and moralize history Mr. Gardelle.”

“Let more tell you one thing, we Haitians fear nothing.”

 

When Sebastian finally goes to sleep, he dreams about ambulances. Ambulances flying about Bedstuy at all hours of the night like safe light, red glow flies above a festering wound. He also dreams about his Zoe, how calming it might feel kissing her lips. The balcony where he and Cassidy have made their bunks overlooks a half-finished compound with shirtless, emaciated little kids playing in rubble, dust and muck.

 

 

 

 

21

 

 

 

January 18th, 2010: Asbun diary.

“We got to the hospital yesterday after the aftershock and they’d moved most the patients outside. Throw in the Red Cross, IMC, PIH, MSF and the other groups of the NGO soup, media, militaries, me, the people putting on medical gowns and sneaking into the hospital in search of work, and, fuck it, even some firefighters from Europe or the Mid-West into the hundreds of people hurting and waiting, hoping to get better and out of there.

So we spent the first hella hot like four hours caring for people in the sun. Giving morphine like a holy grail to limbless wailing masses, sweating through ya boots, just about, outdoor surgery and femur fracture traction with cinder blocks and people missing calves and a cut from the hip to the ankle like an anatomy lesson; people flirting and people yelping and people chasing Anderson Cooper and his cameras, people, people, people, the OB team giving birth outside and we’re trying to sneak a view, we’re running through wounds like words at a spelling bee, doing more in one day than some EMT’s do in their lives. Still feel like we can handle anything, despite the exhaustion – imagine giving a 12-year-old Halloween ‘soldier’ a real tank to drive to school. Got to make sure to pay all attention and ask all questions before doing these things we ain’t learned; it’s exciting and empowering to help people so directly and in such an involved way, but you don’t keep a solid eye on your humbleness and you’ll be hurting someone who needs no more of pain, though she’s singing as you stick your finger through the incision into her stomach to clean the infection. We walk around with a hundred pockets and backpacks full of supplies, strapped with that purpose and presence and sooner or later it’s hard not to feel like you’re filling into some part of something. Guess we are a part of something, oui? People who worked that overnight of the aftershock said when second quake hit it was chaos, people running outside like they still had both legs, ripping out IV lines, craziness. Those kids had it tough – they then had to move everything out.

 

I asked about the ’lil kid and heard he was one of the first to go to surgery after they started operating, hope he pulls through. Found a patient on a bed outside waiting for attention with like three right lower leg fractures, bone protruding on both sides of leg, left femoral fracture without traction. Glad to get him to pre-op soon, splinted with casting.  I’ve run into some death already. Worked ourselves numb but somehow felt we paced ourselves and found people to laugh with, laugh at, drink water. The variety is nice, people’s energy and how strong they push through and all the crazy things we’re seeing and absorbing and loving apart from what we’re pushing through ourselves makes it a silently growing, giant of an experience. Bonjour Papiiiii, from the crazy lady from two days ago, her foot’s worse, and I’m saying Bonjour Mammmiiii. Found out the husband of that pretty, pretty girl who’s been around for a few days was under rubble for three days before they pulled him out; he says his eye popped out and he put it back in. Fuck not with Haitians. This is from driving back the first night from the hospital, looking out the open back of the taptap:

 

It’s dark and dust from the road swells behind us, the cars behind with headlights like flashlights highlighting the endless silhouettes of homelessness on the streets; tires burning, people on bicycles, people selling mango or loaves of bread or something in the dark. These shadows come and go the way the shapes of buildings buckled to sections and still crumbling come and go, leaning power lines and car exhaust and the way we ourselves pile into a bus or van or taptap and come, and go. I’ve seen the presidential palace and it is destroyed – it is one thing to marvel at how big man can build, but it’s another, significantly more astounding thing entirely to see it fallen.

 

Sammy Sultan has friends who have friends here who’re about to pick us up and drive us to a few addresses, we’re trying to find people that have family in the US (who we know) that haven’t been able to get in touch with them. A bunch of people are hella anxious to go home – home to real showers and real shits and the freedom to cook or buy McDonald’s, to use a mattress – and they’re leaving tomorrow probably, or the next day or talk about how long they can stay down her while bills pile up back in the states. Me and Sammy been hanging out all day, drove around a ’lil in the van back from dropping people at the hospital and now back at the compound waiting on the ride, our friends’ friends. We took a walk and exchanged Clif and Balance Bars for candy and a sharpening of our knives. No luck with the mangos though, and I’ve got to pick up money from Western Union. Sitting by a mango tree barefoot, trying to get blood off my boots.

 

 

 

 

 

22

 

 

 

On Wednesday, Hadas Hadaad, EMT Sebastian Adon and Dr. William Gibbs, Along with Paramedic Emile Cange all took a TapTap mini-truck over to the Industrial District, north of the airport to negotiate patient exchanges between, the now basically functional General Hospital. Since the debacle of the second big quake on Tuesday morning, increased media frenzy had drawn in an increased medical response. The son of famous Dr. Louis Hinge, leader of the AMHE, Lou Jr. and the clandestine character who knew everybody Mr. Whitley, took a film crew down to the airport and the UN Compound filming lots of agencies sitting on their hands and asking uncomfortable questions got a ton of cameras and aid trucked over to the General Hospital. By the time the Night Shift returned to duty Wednesday  night, a 24 hour OB had been set up by a crack team of Cuban nurses, Red Cross Canada, Switzerland, and Norway had dug in deep, and a few dozen Haitian nurses, PAs, and technicians had taken over posts and tents partners for Health was operating by day.

There was a phenomenon which Partners for Health called ‘freelancing’ which was apparently occurring in Haiti on an unprecedented scale. Groups not traditionally linked with the powerhouse NGOs had self-deployed and set up a slew of ad-hock operations all over the city which were laden with first timers and nearly all fueled by self-righteous, self-important recklessness. The largest of these freelance operations was certainly the Bedstuy-AMHE-Scientologist agitations happening around the overnight medical squads.

They were a thorn in the PR side of the traditional players because all of the traditional players were cognizant that the all civilian, all green to disaster, nearly all Haitian staff would engage in projects that would fail to separate fact on the ground from emotion in their hearts.

Red Cross, UN agencies, Partners for Health and all the others had been down in Haiti for years, this was not gonna be a quick and easy rescue mission. When freelancers jump into the game you set up a dynamic where the expectations of the population can be raised far faster than the logistics of the agencies can accommodate. And that can lead to a scary dynamic.

 

Mr. Whitley had suggested Sebastian might get Hadas out of her yellow scientist uniform with its cross of the eight dynamics and into a blue-black EMS uniform. Emile smirked as Sebastian haggled with her for what seemed like an hour on the TapTap ride over. Eventually she begrudgingly put on his blue Station 35 t-shirt, which wasn’t uniform, but looked official enough. Something about the yellow Sci-Ty Volunteer Minister shirts and jackets were creepy, to Sebastian and Mr. Whitley. “Like bees swarming our blood honey,” the sly fixer had muttered.

 

The Israelis seemed incredibly organized, no surprise, Adon and Hadaad great Ethiopian Jewish special forces soldiers at the perimeter gate in Hebrew. The taptap is waved through.

The base is large, functional and well regimented. It even has plastic surgeons and a Neo-Natal unit. Hadas is speaking Hebrew, and Sebastian speaking rough-and tumble charming sat Wednesday morning with Dr. Baar and Colonel Kreiss of the Israeli Military contingent explaining the night operations and attempt to reestablish a Haitian controlled medical facility at the heart of town. The Colonel, impressed as he was with this son and daughter of Israel way out, unsupported in this madness had to tell them it was unlikely if the Army Hospital would be there after Tuesday coming. It was a stop gap measure.

I think all of us were appalled inside to hear that.

But, he agreed to a 3 for 3 exchange each day as long as they were on the ground. The Israeli Army Hospital had everything; neo-natal, advanced surgery, all the facilities of a modern hospital with 300 beds erected in a field in a rough, quasi-defensible district near infamous Citi Solei. As Dr. Bar and Dr. Gibbs reviewed which stable green patients might get traded for three critical red patients, Sebastian stood impressed with the tribe from which he’d three weeks ago been forcefully excluded. It was PR where they could get it, and most likely they’d break it all down in a week, but the speed behind the set up was mind blowing. Getting all this here so quickly. But then leaving after barely two weeks on the ground? For what?

The 3 stable patients were to be loaded on to a bread truck staffed by four fire fighter paramedics from Miami lead by a young man named Eric Alvarez. Alvarez and his little band of brothers had gotten into D R, the day after the quake, bought a bread truck and driven it over the border. They were now a makeshift ambulance with military carry stretchers secured to the back of the rig.

They’d take our team back to General Hospital then move three of our less stable patients back to the field hospital. Great guys, crazy motherfuckers. Running a four man non-stop ALS unit out of a bread truck. We exchanged numbers.

Dr. Gibbs helped selected the most unstable patients to send back to the Israelis.  The General hospital seemed overwhelmed with NGO medical groups seeing up tents throughout the compound. Partners in Health, International Medical Corps, MSF, Red Cross, Red Crescent, and tons of others. All pretty much doing their own thing. There was no shortage of work to be done.

A lot of amputations were happening. I saw the doctors come out the orthopedic building and looked like death. They, and others cut off a lot of arms and legs. In a few days they’d go back to MIA. No moral judgments or ethics. Infected crush injuries with sepsis equals death. But they cut off all these legs, maybe gave the Haitian patient anesthetics, probably not.

And now our ER is filled up with lots of people that are malnourished, dehydrated and have infection and incredible pain from limbs cut off a couple days ago.

I’m new at his. The triage thing.

 

Later, Sebastian sits with Cassidy Vale at the Spanish pumping station, where belching bladders and whirring clicks pull water out the ground and make it safe to drink. Sebastian has befriended a few of these Spaniard rescue engineers and explains with his hands how he and the others go home at the end of the week it might as well be as if they never even came.

Fire fighter, water engineer Juan Suarez and his boss Tomas listen to this little palaver quite impressed with these reckless Americans. Cowboys, every single one of them.

“So we clean out and secure a hospital, but then the ground moves and we gotta relocate into Partner for Health tents, then this place swarms up with NGO medical workers working with no rhyme or reason; you know what that tells me?” Sebastian asks.

 

“What does that tell you baby?” smirks Cassidy taking a fifteen minute break from his work in the new strong box quarter mastery Monique is pulling together with some Scientists and Haitian hospital staff. He’s made her promise that after today, no more quarter mastering, he’s actually here for patient care.

“It tells me that when we’re gone all the usual players play all the usual games. This little guerrilla union of healthcare providers is gonna have a pretty short shelf life me thinks.”

“Let me remind you that as much as it may go against your ideals, they are the professionals, they are the ones that stay here for the duration. And we are volunteers here on good will, and immediate need. It won’t even be legal for us to be here doing this in a few weeks, well a few months.”

“This country has been pretty horror show for the duration, before and after that quake massive. As if one purpose?”

“I see little gears in your head turning baby, and before you say anymore, let me advise you that on Saturday I’m gonna pull out with the others when the second wave comes in.”

“I have a bad, but needed idea.”

“I can tell you it’s a really bad, bad idea if it doesn’t involve you sitting in the seat next to me on that plane ride home.”

“We need to leave something behind they can use. We need to enlist these tent camp kids, these patient family members and organize ‘um into a guerilla EMS force.”

“That is a terribly noble idea, but I assure you your aims will make you juggle fire, then burn apart. This place cursed,” interjects Spanish Fire Fighter Juan Suarez from Madrid whom they’d met in the first hour of their landing on the tarmac.

Helped him and his team unload their crates of gear at the airport.

“Well I can’t say I got much back in New York that I can’t part with.”

There was something that clicked in Cassidy’s head too at that moment. I mean he was a bar back, living on his uncles couch with a girlfriend in Baltimore who he liked, but didn’t necessarily love or want to marry, and here for three days it’d been the life and death, true blue hero stuff he’d thought EMS was made of. So, you ran off to some beleaguered alien land and you did something daring, and one thing followed another and the life you led before, had its volume turned way down; and the drum beats and the death, and what you felt was noble in your heart drew Cassidy to this place as well.

“Well, Bueno. Let’s hear this stupid also crazy plan of yours Mr. Adon,” encourages Tomas the Spanish Hydraulic Engineer.

“So, it goes simple and sweet,” Sebastian smirks lighting up his billionth cigarette so it seems as though he delivers healthcare in an endless plume of smoke.

“We tell all these shiftless, traumatized tent kids and all the family members milling around waiting and tell them that were gonna have a tryout-training for a makeshift EMS class Friday, that will give them skills and knowledge to become an all Haitian Volunteer Rescue service.”

Juan and his boss grin in the wet, hot pumping station. America, the cowboy nation manifested before them, but they were well meaning these little cowboys when they didn’t have guns.

“And who is going to sanction this little operation, pay for it, equip it, you know hand out the certificates to all these newly to be trained Haitian EMTs?” Cassidy Vale asks.

“Well I suppose the same people that were presumptuous enough to bring an end to slavery and make the country free, well free-ish.” They look at him eye brows raised. “Well, I mean without white people tellin’ um what to do.”

“Oh, the Haitian people themselves you mean?” asks Cassidy.

“Precisely.”

“Well, not to state the obvious, but that equation hasn’t worked out so well ever,” states Cassidy Vale.

“Well call me Mr. Brightside,” Sebastian responds.

“Stop referencing a pop song to mollify your madness,” says Cassidy.

And in the mind’s eye of Cassidy Vale, without knowing it his one week rescue mission extended itself exponentially.

 

“Well hermanos, what do you need from us,” asks Spanish Fire fighter Juan Suarez.

“Well,” says Sebastian, “we actually need all the help you’re willing to give.”

 

 

23

 

 

My name is Phoebe Rusche, I arrived in Haiti the day before the earthquake. I am staying at the Olofsen Hotel working as a masseuse. The woman I traveled here with is named Maya Sorieya Solomon and she has been in long, endless meetings with Richard Morse the hotel’s general manager I know not over what.

After dinner I join Will and Gaston on the driveway for a jam session. We pass by three men in identical orange t-shirts. “Who are those guys?” William asks.

I shrug. “Missionaries?”

William plays guitar while I sing ‘Yesterday’ by the Beatles and Gaston harmonizes in falsetto. I close my eyes. When I open them, Richard is standing by our circle of deck chairs.

“Hey, Phoebe, can you come with me a second?” he asks.

“Yeah,” I say, feeling like a pupil about to be reprimanded. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing, I just want you to meet someone.”

I am big headed for a moment as we walk up the steps of the Olofsen. Richard Morse wants to introduce me to someone. Well, shit.

Richard leads me toward a man in a yellow t-shirt and conductor hat sitting in the lobby. “Pleased to meet you,” he says.

My sense of reality lurches and shifts like a tilt-a-whirl.

My dad is in Port-au-Prince.

Dad has been in the country since Sunday. As soon as he heard about the earthquake, he arranged his flight through Scientology Volunteer Ministries.

“Give me a moment,” I say, sitting down. “This is all just a little too weird for me. I mean, why didn’t you tell me you were in the country?”

“It was supposed to be a surprise,” dad says. “You don’t have to come with me if you don’t want.”

“No, I do. Just give me a minute.” I run down to the driveway to say goodbye to Will and Isabelle.

The Scientologists are sharing a compound with the Haitian American Association of Physicians and a group of (mostly Haitian) EMTs from Bedford-Stuyvesant in New York. How these people came to be working together, I’m not sure. Neither are they. (I asked.)

The compound was meant to be a private residence, completed but unfurnished at the time of the quake, and given to the Scientologists for free. A Haitian model home, complete with coils of razor wire topping the fence. Like the rest of the country at present, it’s a pajama party under the stars.

The next morning Dad introduced me to Gardelle, a Haitian man with a salt and pepper beard who runs a flower shop in Brooklyn. “So you are going to General Hospital today?” he asked. “Are you sure you want to do that?”

“I know some medical stuff,” I said. “From my massage training. I might be able to assist the nurses. At least, I can hold people’s hands or bring them water.”

“Prepare yourself,” Gardelle said. His eyes met mine. “Mentally. You freak out, you become a problem.”

“Understood.”

“There are people with wounds on their arms, legs, could have been fixed in the first couple days with Neosporin and gauze,” he said. “Now there are maggots crawling in them and the limbs have to be amputated. Are you ready for that?”

Perverse as it may sound, yes. Not because I’m a particularly strong person, but because I am no longer processing things as I’m experiencing them. We just passed a dead body rotting in the sun? Oh. I missed it. Do you have an extra power bar? I’m starving. Thank you.

Our heads can only wrap themselves around so much horror before they return to the selfish and mundane.

My first day at General Hospital, I spent eight hours unpacking boxes of supplies and helping to organize the pharmacy. The next day, I spent thirty minutes throwing everything- Ibuprofen injections, catheters, bags of saline, baby formula- haphazardly onto stretchers for the EMTs to carry outside.

After the second earthquake, the 6.1, all the patients were evacuated in under an hour. When I arrived at General Hospital, what I saw was another tent-city, this one populated by amputees, flies dancing on their plaster casts and ulcerated wounds, flying in morbid haloes around head scrapes. There weren’t enough poles to hold up the tarp, so doctors and nurses had to squat where the canvas hung low, held together by extra IV tubing.

Monique, a tiny physician’s assistant from Miami, and her Haitian boyfriend Dr. Baptiste were quick to enlist my help behind the nursing station. I wanted to go around giving water to the patients who were starving in the sun, receiving little to no aftercare from the overworked staff, but Monique explained to me that without knowledge of each patient’s particular condition, performing this simple act could kill them.

“I need this pharmacy organized,” Monique panted, wiping her forehead with the back of a French-manicured hand. “I need this to look like the states, or they’re gonna shut me down.”

“What do you mean, shut you down?”

“They’re not gonna send me any more supplies unless I can get this shit in some kind of order.”

With all the aid being delivered, antibiotics and diapers, colostomy bags and syringes, had been thrown onto counters and into corners with no regard as to what they were. More and more boxes kept coming in every minute. Monique swept a motley pile of medical supplies off a table and said, “Here, here’s your station. Babies and wound care. Everything baby, everything wounds, you’re our girl.”

“But- but-” I stammered, not wanting to stash things arbitrarily. “Uh, where do you want everything?”

“It’s on you, girl. Just make sure shit’s visible, we can see what it is, we grab it. You understand?” She stepped over a mountain of tampons to answer the query of a nurse at the window and I set to slashing open a box of sterile alcohol swabs. The nurse needed several bags of lactated ringers to start IVs. Monique shrugged apologetically. “I’m sorry sweetheart, I don’t have it.”

“Can I come in and look for it?”

Monique shook her head. “Soon as I get this organized, anything you need sweetie, I get it for you, no problem.”

“This is my country,” the nurse said. “I am Haitian. I want to come inside and look for the supplies.”

“I’m sorry, but I can’t do that. It’s my job to secure this station.”

The nurse began to curse Monique out in Creole. Monique threw up her hands defensively. “Look, honey, I speak patois, not Creole, my mom’s from Montserrat, so I don’t even know what you’re calling me. I could have the cure to AIDs in these boxes and not know it, you understand? I don’t even know what’s in these boxes. Soon as I do, I help you, no problem.”

The nurse sighed and walked away.

At first I found Monique’s control-station routine self-important. But as we continued working together, becoming more and more symbiotic, I came to understand her better. The Haitian nurse certainly wasn’t going to steal supplies. But there were plenty of hustlers, kids in their early twenties, wandering around the hospital posing as nurses or, even more dubiously, cops. And Monique and Dr. Baptiste had spent the past three days in a row at General Hospital.

When all the Red Cross people and Bed-Stuy EMTs went home at nightfall, leaving the thousands of patients they had worked so hard to save during the daytime, only Monique and Jean-Baptiste stayed to follow-up with a handful of nightshift EMTs. Only Monique and Jean-Baptiste drifted asleep to the sounds of their moans and supplications. To the sound of traumatized people dying mostly alone.

I am not a Monique or a Jean Baptiste. I am not Sebastian Adon, a twenty-something EMT who has saved lives all over the world, worked with both Israeli and Palestinian patients during times of crisis, is now running around the clock to arrange patient exchanges with the Brazilians and the naval hospital and seems to believe that if Haiti does not successfully transition to democracy in the wake of this disaster, he will have failed the Haitian people.

I need to take naps. I need to shower. I need to listen to my iPod and stare at the ceiling and think of nothing and be of no use to anyone.

But I could be Sebastian Adon. We all could be, if we were willing to sacrifice some part of our soul, the part that preserves itself. I am not ready to do that, and don’t know if I ever will be. But someone has to be Sebastian Adon.

Someone has to stay at General Hospital at night. Someone has to clean the shit out of the bedpans, and sleep one hour a night, and subsist on nothing but power bars and water. Someone has to put in the time needed to truly rebuild Haiti.

Last week I overheard an exchange between one of the Oloffson’s waitresses and a hotel patron that I misinterpreted to be a complaint about the slow service. Feeling protective of the establishment I’ve grown to love, and not a little self-righteous anger, I told the man that he just had to be patient. He turned to me and said, “I wasn’t talking to you, and I wasn’t complaining. You don’t even know what I was saying. And anyway, who the fuck are you? I am Haitian. This is my country.”

I spent an hour afterward feeling stupid and chastened, but also pissed. It was wrong of me to butt in, to misdirect my personal annoyance in a country full of mourning, agitated, angry people. But what did me being American, and him being Haitian, have to do with it?

My interactions with the Bed-Stuy EMS team helped me to place this interaction in context. Most of them are members of the diaspora community. For many, this is their first time back in many years, and to see the beautiful  landscape of their memory so twisted into ugliness is shocking. They left their country, but they care enough to come back and use the credibility afforded by their American educations to try to fix it, at this critical juncture, while everything hangs in the balance, while Haiti has a police force but no government, hundreds of foreign organizations but none that will stay past the end of next month, a U.N. presence but not one that does more than charge them to drive around in armored trucks holding shiny toy guns.

I don’t understand the U.N. Why spend such massive amounts of money just to throw your weight around, either here or in a place where men are being killed through acts of man rather than God, like Darfur?

Either shit or get off the pot?

The hotel patron and Haitian nurse were right. It is their country, they are the ones who will be here long after the pageant of largesse is over and we have returned to our lives. Who the fuck are we?

There is need for humility in service.

From the window of the nursing station where Monique showed me the ropes (“a nurse asks for sodium chloride, you think saline, you think Pamela Anderson. Oh, you need a Pamela? Coming right up!”) I watched a seventeen year old boy talking on his cell phone from his hospital bed. Both his legs were amputated above the knees.

One of the biggest problems I can foresee facing Haiti is an entire generation of disabled youth unable to participate in an already crippled and jobless economy. An entire generation of lives being saved so they can hobble in the streets and beg.

I shared my thoughts with Monique. We agreed that we would start writing proposals for grants as soon as possible to start a school for children and young adults disabled by the quake, to give them vocational training and a way of supporting themselves.

“If there’s one good thing coming out of all this,” Monique said, “I think it’s making a lot of folks realize their purpose. Where God needs them to be.”

I shivered.
A man with a grey beard and a stethoscope around his neck came to the window. “I have some bad news,” he said. “Tell all your friends your work has been for nothing. The building is structurally unsound. We have to evacuate.”

“I must be imagining this shit,” Monique said, voice hoarse. “Did he just say what he just said? Fucking Haitian political bullshit,” she hissed in my ear. “They don’t like that a little P.A. bitch and her boyfriend are running this joint, it makes them look bad. So they’re shutting us down.” She shook her head. “We have to remain calm, we have to pretend nothing is happening or the patients will freak out, you understand? If I tell the others what that doctor just said, will you back me up?”

I nodded, although I didn’t really understand what was going on. There had been another aftershock that morning, and there was a leak in one of the back rooms ominously gushing water. But from the way Monique was talking, it sounded like she thought no one would believe the evacuation order wasn’t a figment of her imagination.

She told Baptiste. He took her to see the doctor who had given the order. The doctor was in an office, feet on the desk, eating. None of the staff had eaten all day. The doctor denied giving the order. Said Monique was dehydrated and delusional.

Baptiste made us leave the building anyway, for good measure.

The next day we cleared out the pharmacy we had worked so hard to stock.

Afterwards I gave a massage to a woman about to go into labor. My Latex gloves snagged her skin uncomfortably so she ended up just laying her head in my lap while she panted in the heat and pleaded with a doctor to change her pad.

Women cannot produce breast milk during periods of intense stress. In the midst of so much death (the smell sulphurous and pervasive, like bad eggs) our bodies refuse to support life. In the pharmacy, before our work was summarily undone, we had four bottles of formula for newborns but no nipples. In the maternity tent, there was no formula at all.

Now that the Scientologist Volunteer Ministers have been granted NGO status my dad can move off the compound and into a tent at the airport. Returning to the Olofsen this morning was like returning home. It’s good to be back with the sequined Vodoun flags and sculptures of breast-feeding mermaids and it’s good, I will admit, to regain some separation from everything out there. To decompress.

Like I said, we are not all Sebastian Adon. This experience is teaching me my own limits, not only of what I am actually qualified for but how much I am willing to give. I spent most of my second day at General Hospital just sitting around, knowing I could find something to do if I wanted it badly enough.

There is a job to be done. Who will do it? Who will sacrifice their limits?”

 

 

 

24

 

 

There had been a little light insubordination that night. It was Friday, the Friday of the now much talked about enlistment where the towering Fitz LaForrest, Sebastian, and Tiputti Capois as well as the Spanish water engineer Juan Suarez had undertaken four hours of drilling and two hours of explanation. There about give or take 70 Haitian recruits. Sebastian first speaking via young Tiputti Capois and then through a local Shatah everyone respected and feared named Jacque Métayer. In three sentence bursts, in a square next to the morgue under a massive water tower Sebastian spelled out the intention: a Haitian run and operated rescue service.

They called the outfit Unit C. It’s objective was to drill under fire so to speak, in six person crews each under the supervision of a certified EMT, they’d cover the city beginning on Monday mapping for still possibly trapped civilians or clusters of critically injured unable to reach the General Hospital of facilities around the airport.

It was quite a disparate group of volunteers, gang members, church kids, medical students, Rastats, Shatahs, and anyone else. Some obviously were just looking for food or work, but some were visionaries. Some saw this as a means to change something about a country where you starved, became a criminal, died of some sickness or escaped on a raft flotilla.

Late in the day, it was getting a little cooler comparatively from the usual tropical stir fry and Sebastian looked tired and was out of smokes. A girl, a young girl; there were only a few female volunteers she asked in Haitian Creole and Jacque translated, “Who will keep training us when you all leave?”

“I’m not gonna leave until this outfit stands all Haitian,” Sebastian promised and Cassidy scowled thinking ‘what the fuck are you promising man?’

Tiputti pulled him aside and asked, “Do you understand what you’ve promised? It’s good you’re blan so they won’t believe you anyway.”

And he did and he didn’t, but it seemed like his destiny or duty to raise this thing or die here he explained. They signed up 64 definite, told everyone to return Sunday at 2pm.

“What if people can’t get onto the grounds,” Jacque translated a question.

“Hold up a water packet and I’ll shuttle you through,” Sebastian said holding up the plastic water pouch the UN was handing out in the thousands, a little ¼ liter bag of fluid most everyone could get their hands on.

Then it was nightfall and Sebastian went to light some Shabbos candles which he always did and got some bread and grape juice form the Magan David Adom unit based out of the Canadian Red Cross compound.

“Are you sure you will stay?” Tiputti Capois asks him, the promise, deed and damage done already.

“I gave my word didn’t I brother.”

“The word of a white man is worth nothing here, if you leave no one will hate you so much for too long.”

“I’m staying, and that’s that.”

“Well then God is with you, Jesus and the Lwa too,” the kid mutters.

“Well I hope so. What are the Lwa?”

“The Old Spirits of Guinea; Africa. The ones that will still be here when all the white men leave.”

The General Hospital empties out. Western medical students and doctors pulling frantically back to the airport, as if they fear vampires, ghouls and zombies. The first wave is pulling out too, but that leaves the hospital pretty abandoned. They’d fought hard all week to prove it was still a 24 hour care affair.

Cassidy Vale and Dominick Asbun for slightly different reasons choose to stay, perhaps a few days, perhaps a week, they both are stretched thin, but both admire Sebastian’s resolve. Captain Raeburn admires it too, but back in New York Chief Rocky Robinson has ordered a total pullout, the second wave due to arrive Saturday night. Mr. Whitley convinces both Raeburn and Robinson that it will be good to let the boys stay on as a transition team. Saturday night and it’s gonna be a leaner, meaner bunch of Bedstuy regulars and secondary leadership, but Whitley has been whispering things to Sebastian about the ‘bigger picture changes’ which they both see.

Cassidy Vale wants to not be a shiftless bar back anymore, wants to stay and make his way, might go back to see his girlfriend, close his life, but one week in he’s sold on the need. He has a rough plan to be in Nairobi in a year for nursing school, he could well stay put if this rescue mission called Unit C pans out. His girlfriend might leave him, but he could sort of live with that.

Dominick Asbun wants to be in Dominica in four months for medical school. He’s been accepted already, he works per diem for Transcare. Here he’s never seen so much work. The need over powers him too, he can’t stay for the duration, but he can give more than a week.

Sebastian, is Sebastian sold on his own visions.

Mr. Whitley is planning something drastic, so he wasn’t going back anyhow.

Eventually, Sebastian gets approval from Robinson on the satellite phone to extend his tour, not that if the old armchair Bedstuy battle horse had refused it would have mattered. Mr. Whitley said it was the political thing to do to let the old tyrant think he still had the power.

Everyone wishes them luck and gets on the bus for the pullout. The night before Miranda and Sebastian were yelling at each other for an hour about ego and also foolish things without merit. James Miranda, the medical student was the closest thing Sebastian and the night tour had to a leader besides nurse Sangosse and Dr. Jean Baptiste. There was inevitably going to be a standoff between them because Miranda was responsible and saw the mission as limited, while Sebastian was reckless and saw the mission as un-ending. It nearly came to blows, but only because the men respected each other’s resolve but not necessarily tactics. Overall, James Miranda was particularly unclear on how an EMT who didn’t speak Creole with white skin might build an emergency medical system out of nothing.

Sitting down in the evacuated triage bay they took the first night, Tiputti, Sebastian, Dominick and Cassidy slump down on benches and chairs assuming that besides form Dr. Jean Baptiste and his girlfriend Monique up in the new quarter masters; they may well be a ‘flying column of four’ for a hospital now housing easily a thousand plus with a lot that could go wrong.

Cassidy notices that Sebastian’s hand is shaking and looks like he could use some sleep. Or a lot of sleep.

“I’m still alive, though I’m barely breathing, as I pray to a god I don’t believe in,” sings Sebastian to himself a song from the radio.

It’s just the four of them and some odd supplies and some technician bags and a lot of hope and faith. Tiputti takes vitals, that’s just about all he’s good for besides translation and enthusiasm. He’d sort of showed on Wednesday in a Haitian Boy Scout uniform and been truly indispensable in organizing unit C. The night before Adon, Cassidy and Asbun had brought Tiputti and his friend, another scout named Tiputti back to the safe house to brief them on the objective. A wallet had gone missing, Miranda blamed Tiputti, blamed Sebastian, and another last big fight had broken out. Now it was Friday and everyone in the first wave was pulling out.

“We may have to ready ourselves for the possibility we’re gonna lose some people tonight,” Asbun states the obvious.

Everyone one them sort of whispers a prayer to the respective gods they part time need to believe in and as they walk up out of the bay those Gods deliver. The place is getting rigged up with flood lights, Staff Sergeant CJ gives Sebastian a pat on the back.

The miracle finally arrives after a week of asking, the 82nd airborne has been ordered to set up shop in the General Hospital a company strong, a few of which are EMTs and paramedics. As military trucks shuttle men and supplies through the front gate a cab pulls up.

A stocky, muscular Italian has covered a lot of ground in the last 12 hours. He carries two large black military bags filled with disaster supplies, a good deal of medications, his name is Rocco, he’s a 30 year Paramedic, retired from the FDNY, he’s gotten his ass from Bayridge to Port Au Prince on a backup mission. Sebastian half embraces him, he’s just taken a cab from the airport, just flown in, dropped in whatever. Another damn miracle, thinks Sebastian to the god he doesn’t believe in. Rocco is surely and disheveled, a brolic bag of tricks.

 

His arrival and that of the 82nd airborne, certainly seemed to have improved the balance of things. But not by too much. For those of us thinking critically, thinking consciously about how this atrocity has happened, who is to blame and how people are forced to live like this; the duty to act that we took as a vow on our last day of EMT training; you all have a duty to at people should not live as they do.

For all the help that had arrived by day, by night fall they had mostly abandoned the hospital to a skeleton crew of Cuban nurses in the OB tents in the hospital court yard, a had full of Haitian nurses still on call, and there were thousands of patients now Alone in the dark on various levels of dying.

And that meant, at least until dawn there may have been as few as two doctors, four to tens nurses, and now six EMTs and paramedics for what might have been close to 1,000 plus unstable or critical patients. At least with the 82nd airborne here had a little back up. Which amounted to lights, their combat medic which is pretty much an EMT with needles, and the military carry stretchers we would need to run people who were craping out back down to the ER bay.

A little after midnight the screaming began.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

25

 

 

 

“I am to work an overnight shift,” thinks Asbun. Hella different than all night with Transcare, though. There was going to be virtually no one staying overnight – the night before a plane left so no one stayed and this was going to be the second night in a row – it’s hundreds of motherfucking patients, most of them under tents outside, and no one except maybe two sleeping nurses to look after people. So we stayed: I wasn’t planning on it and kinda tired as usual but so were Sebastian, Cassidy, Monique, Dr. Jean-Baptiste, Rocco (FDNY medic for 25 years who misconnected with BSVAC and took a plane to Santo Domingo and then a couple hundred $$$ taxi ride to Port-Au-Prince and had just showed up in time for the night shift. Ooooh boy.), two scientologists (one a dentist who’s “more of a listener” and one nurse EMT who at first seemed not too oriented but turned out to have been coordinating shit in hella disasters (911, a million hurricanes, etc., so he said), and yep, that was our force for then. Halfway through the night everyone started acting kinda…erratic, the situation got erratic, you could say, had an hour long meeting where the scientologist nurse set down his expertise pretty hard and then a bunch of petty and some substantiated attacks, things a mess, I told everyone the problem is we’re all there to be active and do things but establishing in a way our own authority, via justification/validity from some “higher” organization – Scientologist/AMHE//BSVAC/ – and didn’t have an overarching structure or organization to set things straight. People got offended; I think they took it as me saying that their desire to help out wasn’t pure, or something. I didn’t get much attention and then they started arguing again, starting off with a debate about whether or not scientologists can wear their bright yellow shirts around the hospital.

By midnight-thirty, these reinforcements weren’t amounting to much. Dr. Jean Baptiste was half passed out after seven nights on his feet, his girlfriend Monique a little more shrill and hysterical than usual. Rocco and Sebastian were in the south compound making rounds, when as if on cue half a dozen patients began crapping out and it wasn’t like the movies where one could do a little CPR and give some breathes and they’d roll over looking beleaguered, albeit better. No, these people were dying and Cassidy, Dominick and a half-awake Gary Jean-Baptiste were out of half a dozen critical western innovations to remedy this catastrophe. Oxygen tanks were locked up down the hill in a Partner’s for Health supply wagon. There wasn’t a single functioning monitor in the place, not that there were cardiac medications should one even know what was wrong with a patient’s heart.

But, the real problem was infection. People in odd corners, not in camera light not getting care, now waiting ‘til midnight-thirty to die in the night shade.

There weren’t radios, but Tiputti ran down the hill to collect Rocco and Sebastian. They took off running back toward where the dying was happening. That’s when Sebastian notices some LED lights flickering in what had been thought to be vacant ward.

It was a scramble to bring everything under control. Dominick and Sebastian break into the PFH trailer to get an O2 M tank and strap it to an army stretcher running up the hill. Eventually when it seems like everybody is mostly stable a young, Haitian nurse tugs on Dominick’s sleeve and lead him and Sebastian to the corpse of an old woman with a sad little kid tugging on the dead woman’s arm. Sebastian checks her carotid, but she’s cold and dead.

“What’s her name?” Sebastian asks.

The nurse shrugs, ‘cause she doesn’t speak English. Sebastian checks the makeshifitery of a chart, basically a couple sets of vitals taken two days ago and the name ‘Mona’.

Dominick goes to flag down a soldier to get a body bag, but they don’t know who has any. The little boy, her grandson maybe sits at the edge of the cot. Sebastian closes her cold dead eyes, and looks around for Tiputti to inquire about the faux-pas of Haitian burial rituals.

“Everyone’s Catholic, then we go in the ground,” is what Tiputti tells him.

Sebastian and Dominick get a long board and carry Mona’s body to the morgue. It’s locked, which is almost for the better because looking in the glass window it appears that the hospital workers have stacked a few hundred corpses on top of each other, with not a whole lot of precision or order. So, they wrap Mona’s body in one of the last sheets they have and tell the little kid they’re sorry for his loss, which doesn’t mean so much because he doesn’t speak English either.

Seated on the step of radiology Sebastian brings the kid an MRE ration bag and a UN water pouch, hands the nurse a smoke.

“So if this were Brooklyn, right, we’d give them a slip with time of death or burial instructions or something right?” Sebastian asks Dominick.

“I see what yer trying to say brother, but this ‘in Brooklyn’ shit needs to get out your head, we’re in Haiti now. They’re gonna take that dead old woman and throw her on the pile with the others.”

“Well, at least she died with a name.”

“I don’t think that comforts anybody but you.”

            And low and behold those blue lights Sebastian had seen were a two person Scientologist medical team consisting of a paramedic-nurse named Luckner who refused to produce any verification of his credentials and a Dentist named Fred. Nobody had told the night crew they were gonna be there, and now Sebastian was bellowing at Luckner asking him why the fuck hadn’t he helped out with all the chaos that had been going down.

Luckner, a man who looks young for his late forties takes in Sebastian yelling about Scientist subordination to the rescue workers, yelling about total break downs in communications and bizarre underhanded general conduct. He takes it in, looks Sebastian in the eyes as they sit at an impromptu staff meeting in the quarter master building with the others at about 2 am. Looks at him and sizes up how fast this rascal can be nabbed and shipped out of country.

We underestimate Scientologists, thinks Dominick, because we think they believe in aliens, which they do, but we often fail to gauge how ruthlessly calculated and base covering they are.

Luckner and the dentist were off in some side building with a dozen frail, dying patients that for whatever reason without a hint of central coordination they had decided to post up and watch over. When all the crapping out in the dark was going down about an hour ago, they’d not left those patients’ side. “It would have been abandonment,” Luckner explains a bit like he’s talking to a child, which is basically how he views Sebastian, a big entitled, emotionally charged child.

 

They’re all posted up in the quarter master building in the middle of a lull. Rocco is smoking and Cassidy is sterilizing his equipment, and Dr. Baptiste is more than half asleep, and Monique looks frazzled and well meaning, but strung out, also with darty amphetamine eyes. Tiputti says nothing and Dominick is trying to moderate this escalation between Sebastian and Luckner, while the elderly dentist says nothing too. It’s Saturday morning, but the sun won’t rise for maybe 3 ½ more hours. A lot more can go wrong, the 82nd airborne sent up three guys with some EMS training to assist, they mill about outside, a bit bored and confused, but thankful not to be in Iraq as fucked as this place seems to be.

Finally Sebastian stops ranting about, “Who the fuck do you Scientology people think you are?”

And Luckner calmly poses a similar question. Then it turns out he’s very well-credentialed, very tied to the UN, the military, the health minister, he poses the same question to Sebastian and adds an answer; ‘you’re a shell shocked EMT with no idea about how all this goes down.’

It gets hostile, Luckner really tears Sebastian and all his emotions apart. Not maliciously, just attempts to assert just how little experience he and the others have with ‘this sort of situation.’

Everyone likes Sebastian, mostly for his enthusiasm, but Luckner is right, right about how deep they are in this without any supply pipelines, international backers, or ‘bigger picture game plan’. Cassidy Vale takes all that in, Dominick too.

“Look, clap, clap, clap; you all came down here to help on the drop of a dime, but pick a number kids. We’ve been down here for years and the situation is much worse now than any other time. Mr. Hero Sebastian over here can’t run around like a cowboy making highly charged and problematic calls on things he’s not even trained to deal with, like an MCI of this magnitude. If it were up to me, which it could be I’d have you on a plane home by tomorrow afternoon after a cot and two hots, but here’s where I go, you’ve worked hard and you mean well so get some fucking sleep and we’ll talk about this in the morning.”

It was quite a bit harsher than that, but the gist once again was to leave the rescue effort to the professionals. Everyone is sold at least on Sebastian going to sleep. So he does, and the night goes well enough poorly, Rocco runs, literally a manic, frantic gate as cries emerge tent by tent for ‘doctor, doctor’, but Jean Baptiste is the only doctor here. He’s a wreck, his girlfriend too. The skeleton crew holds out until dawn with only two more deaths.

Sebastian’s asleep, but others have ways of getting sentimental about the named dead in the morgues shallow grave. It’s all meaningless, thinks Cassidy, the place is doomed, but it’s a passing thought. Dominich makes mental notes for his journal about testifying what’s happening.

The other afternoon Sebastian had been mumbling to Cassidy and Dominick about his plan, about getting out of the city, into the mountains and training some of these kids how to be EMTs. Foolish talk, thinks Dominich, leave it to the professionals, humanitarian tourists go home.

Around 9am an omnibus shows up to pull the last standing of the first wave night crew off the lines. By noon, Dr. Jean Baptiste, Monique his temperamental lady, and Rocco are on a military EVAC plane out. Rocco had 25 years in the FDNY, a medic true and blue, but he knew a losing battle when he saw one.

The terrible tent to tent run, the hopelessness had drowned him in just one night. This was the end of the inglorious first wave, the hospital shortly would be the focal point of all relief, a media hot spot, a green zone. They’d secured it in a week of cruel toil, but in the larger realm of things, this cluster fuck was the countries only working hospital.

So, Sebastian prods Dominick and Cassidy into ‘one more week, get the second wave orientated then pull out’, but he’s got this look of resolve, the others suspect he plans to stay.

The new safe house, in the Santo district is mostly empty. Tiputti, Sebastian, Dominich and Cass are all passed out in small pile on the second floor balcony of one of the two villas in the compound, stucco and orange paint like Sante Fe. Gardel is still on duty, all the Scientists are relocated to another base camp at the airport, the second wave is due in at sundown.

Dominich writes:

That was the hardest night so far – apart from the seemingly endless attention the endless patients need, running to save a man’s life, and carrying a woman to the morgue after being called by one of the sleeping nurses to declare her dead; leaving her on the floor right by the entrance and still having to deal with drama between the people you’re working with. Before Sebastian and I started carrying her, the sleeping nurse asked if we wanted a cigarette. Things are a different color in the night, and the Army presence is odd somehow too; Army rolls deep now at the hospital, hummers and trucks with big ass wheels came through the other day like 200 deep, 82nd Airborne. The American Army that under the helmets and bullets is more than anything Hispanic or Southern boys, boys thrown into Haiti “for…the foreseeable future”; they were good guys even though some of them got bored and a bored soldier can be an annoying soldier. Not to undermine the strange and quiet satisfaction that is to speak in their accent and welcome at least the feeling of security, welcome familiarity. There’s more to tell about that night, but for now look at this: Rocco, that medic with solid skills and a very thriving heart, who made a whole experience of just getting to Haiti, took the next morning’s plane back home.

 

 

 

26

 

 

“I want you to look deep in your heart and ask yourself if you’re really up for this,” Dominich asks Adon.

“Just think about what you’re giving up,” Cassidy interjects.

They should be sleeping after last night, but they’re back at the compound nursing Prestige beers post a three hour snooze, in the hot-hot 11am heat. Besides Mr. Whitley and Raeburn, all the others are gone.

Adon has this plan. It is a romantic and terrible plan bound to fail. Not just because Adon doesn’t speak Haitian Creole and isn’t qualified to carry it out, it’s bound to fail because forces will make it fail. Forces Adon certainly cannot control.

“I feel like if we don’t get him on a plane home this could end badly,” Dominich says to Cassidy Vale.

“I like the plan, I like the guy, I like everything except the obvious outcome.”

“He’s not gonna just stay here.”

“He might just stay here,” Cass responds, “hell, I might just stay here too.”

And in the afternoon the Second Wave arrives eager with swagger.

 

 

It is now 24 January.

 

The next day most people from AMHE and everyone from BSVAC (except for me, Cassidy, and Sebastian, and Chief Raeburn and Mr. Whitley who coordinated things) left Haiti. Sebastian was really excited about changing things and then we got to too much talking and it happened that, surrounded by the ideas everywhere and in the wake of last night and still tired, all the commotion started feeling too separate from the reality of things, the cloud kept floating higher and higher; suddenly, for the first time, I got a loud twang of I want to go home, and I felt it. But at night the new crew rolled in fresh from New York – the three of us had got back to planning the things to get done with the hospital and we were then the veterans, and the fact that it was us getting things together got me away from the other shit in my head, and slowly I stopped feeling like I needed someone to touch me back to reality; that purpose, again, sets your mind and time and energy in motion. Like I said the new BSVAC people showed up – the “next wave deployed” – and the three of us from before were the ones with information and plans, no matter the BSVAC chain of command and saluting and all that shit. A group of them were from Jersey (I believe) Search and Rescue, and they brought a rescue dog, and these kids’ chests out and ready, and it’s kinda nice cause in general we didn’t see egos flaring the way we’d been warned they might, and they were serious, very serious about getting shit done.

The next day after that, today, we organized people and it looks like there will be MORE people on the night shift, holy shit, the new group has like 16 people doing overnight too so when I go back tonight it’ll be a real different story, hurrah. Been trying to talk anpil kreyol with Stephanne and her kid, they hang out at the house and 5 year old Adriano is a bad lil fucker but a lot of fun. Sometimes these days it’s hard to describe how good it is to divert your energy towards running around with a ‘lil kid and charading Creole to a girl that laughs a whole lot. Mesi anpil, mwen vole pale kreyol. I mean, mwen vle pale kreyol. She’s been trying to get on flights to the US – she showed me pics of her blan husband and his family and all the men rock mustaches. She has passports for her and the baby, but we guess it’s still not easy to get out. Thousands in tents waiting on the airstrip for evacuation.

A distinctive characteristic of the Second Wave was that almost none of them were Haitian, mostly Bed Stuy American blacks. Also, while most of the First Wave, other than Raeburn and Cassidy were not previously members of the BSVAC, most of these folks were. They came in looking hard, ready to get to work, they had a guy with a cadaver dog, they had a dozen Jersey fire men. They were really into this totally made-up chain of command they’d created on the plane, lots of chiefs and few Indians. Chief Womble, a big fat guy with a glyph carved in his hair, Chief Luna Charles, the only female the Chief of Operations. Chief Pointer, the founder of Bedstuy Vollies son, also a wild eyed Jewish Paramedic with bad teeth from FDNY who had ‘done these sorts of things before with FEMA’, a young ‘captain’ named Danny Marks. Hey had all the right sounding, brassy titles like ‘Chief Operations Officer’ or “Chief of Logistics”, but they weren’t fooling anyone, they looked scared.

Ego was likely to clash, especially between Sebastian and this cat Chief Pointer, who came in with an insolent look in his eyes to match the self-righteous zeal in Adons’. A look that said ‘these crackers weren’t giving any good advice from no one week of deployment.’

 

Like the NGOs they were gonna transplant a structure that probably didn’t apply here. They assumed their black skin mattered more than it did.

There were much fewer of them in the second wave, around 40 medical people almost no Blan or Haitians.

It was however agreed, they should all deploy the next the day, and some 16 people would double up and work the now infamous night tour.

 

 

 

27

 

 

 

The crowd swelled, it wasn’t just enthusiastic as it was unruly and unmanageable. The 70 ish-odd-assorted officially signed up to train had all told a few more friends and now there were a few hundred inside, and a few hundred outside the hospital gates who all sought to join ehemteh.

Tiputti Capois and Fitz LaForest (the towering wall of former military muscle that arrived between waves and may have been working for the CIA, the Scientists, or the Haitian police) try and line people up, but Haitians really don’t do that well. Jacque Métayer, the gangster barks commands and makes rows. Sebastian passes out waters and comically urges people to get into formation. There are a lot of flies in the air, they are all out behind the quarter master strong building under the vast water tower. Spanish fireman Jorge chuckles off to the side, not yet sold this will work. The gathering of so many young Haitians, well it sort of makes the white doctors from America nervous. News has spread throughout the hospital grounds that the second day of the enlistment is proceeding chaotically. Quite a few professionals are kind of whispering to themselves that was gonna kick off a riot. The 82nd airborne is a little nervous, although Sebastian keeps Staff Sergeant CJ in the loop over the course of the day running messages on progressions.

It’s a production and a trying ordeal. It’s not realistic to presume they can train 300 or more, they need a screening exam or a means to differentiate who is serious and who just wants to land a job. Simeon, another identifiable leader of the Rasta kids steps up, Tiputti Capois brought his friend Obenson to help translate, a cluster of leaders emerges, but it’s hardly as if they can effectively turn people away at this stage.

After about two hours of yelling and maneuvering, some training begins. Fitz the soldier; he’s a child of a wealthy Diaspora family with strong opinions on everything that have to be sort of moderated by his equally diesel companion Darious. He’s grilled Sebastian a few times in the three days he’s known the guy. Grilled him about why the hell he’s promised to remain in Haiti.

Touch and go, that’s how the training goes. Jacque and Tiputti are making a list as it goes on who should really be included. Simeon has already suggested that once this final list is set up the training gets moved off the hospital grounds. The hospital director isn’t exactly thrilled this is happening anyway. Who’s gonna pay them, that’s the question all the professionals keep asking. Who’s gonna certify them? Most of them probably can’t even read, the professionals suggest. This is getting out of hand, is what most of the blan volunteers are feeling.

The Spanish fire fighters lend stretchers and keep everyone well hydrated.

Sebastian, in three or four word spurts keeps instilling this nationalist pride rhetoric which astounds and impresses Fitz LaForest, as and Darius (Fitz’s equally massive bearded side kick also arrived between waves from thin air) into helping. The two of them came in right before the Second Wave. Nobody really found that odd because it was really hard to keep track of all the comings and goings among strangers. Day shift, night shift; three dubious of each other partner organizations without any clear sense of who worked with which-what faction.

Word comes that the soldiers are getting uneasy, a BSVAC ‘captain’ one Danny Marks, a humble well educated dude runs to get Sebastian because that’s who they all keep asking for a the gate. Twitchy white southern soldiers just see a vast and unruly colored mob trying to get in; no good at all. Of such circumstance a Mogadishu made.

Jacque and Sebastian race with Captain Marks down the hill. Sebastian is thinking about a comment Gardel the head of compound security. A comment about how bad it would be for the whites if a twitchy soldier in the heat fired just one shot.

Sebastian gets up on a table at the guard booth with Chief Womble who’s already out there. Womble in his American life is a transport EMT at the Midwood Ambulance co, here he’s chief of something, about forty some odd, hard Second Wave rescue workers.

Lots and lots of yelling and pushing and haggling and the soldiers look more and more nervous about the mob. It is a mob, not a threatening one if one knows Haitians, but the white soldiers just see a shit ton of screaming Negros, pushin’, clawing.

 

The soldiers from the 82nd airborne raise their weapons, the crowd ignores them surging, surging to swallow up Sebastian Adon and put their names on his list.

 

Finally, Jacque speaking for Sebastian bellows in Creole, “We will make a training list! It does not guarantee a job, but we will call everyone on it to apply!”

 

Tiputti Capois has made his way down. Everyone’s now shoving and clamming to hand Womble and Sebastian, John and Tiputti slips of paper by the hundred with names and numbers. For some peculiar reason they’re all showing the national ID card as they do it, which must be some island fascist thing drilled in um thinks Sebastian.

 

“We must move this crowd down the street before the soldiers open fire,” says Tiputti, knowing what will happen if white soldiers fire on a black crowd in Haiti, in this precise environment. They’ll kill every single white on the streets.

 

“We need to move away from the hospital,” bellows Jacque in Haitian Creole, “these Blan soldiers are getting nervous!”

 

So they do. This PBS camera crew watches this scene and films away, of Sebastian and Jacque and Tiputti moving a crowd of hundreds down the street as they swarm to get on the list. Hundreds of little slips of paper filling the cargo pockets of Sebastian’s BDU pants. At a point it seems the crowd has swallowed him. But then he emerges again moving further and further up the street. There is a glee of hope in the crowd, a job and training to be part of the rescue. Most might only vaguely understand what ehemteh is, but the word travels quickly. These were the people who have been over night in the hospital for a week. The EMT acronym here is something of fearless rescue, the hope is contagious anyhow.

It takes nine city blocks and the help of Simeon and Jacque and Tiputti to finally end the enlistment. The four of them return to the hospital. Sebastian looks excited and a bit drained, he’s never seen people react like that about a thing. In New York an EMT is glorified cab driver with an oxygen tank that doesn’t have to sit in traffic. Here he’s a folk hero.

In the now evacuated triage building, which no one will go in because of the aftershocks that keep happening, the site of the original night’s deployment; Sebastian joins Cassidy who is seated on crate.

“That was something.”

“The soldiers thought they were gonna kill you.”

‘That’s how soldiers think.”

“So now what?” asks Tiputti Capois.

Sebastian takes out the hundreds bits of paper, starts putting them into large plastic bags.

Jacque says, “We must move quickly now. No government in Haiti likes a list like this.”

“It’s an EMS training list,” says a shocked Cassidy Vale.

“It’s to them something they don’t want, they want you foreigners to be our EMS, they don’t wish to see the Haitian people have an institution like this.”

“Who is they? There is no government,” says Cassidy.

“The people in Petionville, the people on the hill,” mutters Jacque and spits.

“The rich people who make a lot of money taking money off the top of the relief effort,” says Simian.

“So what? Sebastian is in some kind of danger now?” Cassidy can’t fathom why.

“Well all of us are, as long as that list is in our hands,” explains Tiputti.

“So we have to get out of the city, begin training as planned,” Jacques says calmly, “we will type up the list and go up into the mountains to train a few leaders who can then train those that are serious.”

“This isn’t a political group or a guerrilla band, there has to be some way to get the hospital director or the health minister to sign off on this if handled appropriately. I mean, ‘go up in the mountains?’ What the hell are you gonna train with; the power of suggestion?” Cassidy couldn’t see this ending well ‘in the mountains’.

“Let me be simple about this,” says Jacque who’s English is best of all of them, “This country is a quarantined drug airstrip with a police force, a Republic of NGOs in service of the CIA. The people on that huge mountain hill live very well thanks to illegal commerce and NGO graft. They will react violently to this training program. We must be quick or die fruitlessly.”

“He is right about that,” says Tiputti Capois.

They translate that all back to the others.

“Tonight we will pick eight to twelve of the leaders who are serious and movers of men, we’ll get them ready to leave tomorrow, you have to be careful, they will try and arrest you and kick you out of the country,” Simeon explains, “this is the rumor in the hospital.”

“But what about all the dead and injured in the Capital? If we just pull out we abandon the relief effort,” Cassidy neigh says on.

“The NGOs are all hear to pick up these pieces, what we will build in the mountains is about the future of Haiti,” Simeon says, “let the dead bury the dead, and the blan take pictures together in the rubble and filth.”

Captain Danny Marks runs up to where they are sitting, “Pointer wants to talk with you, says you started a goddamn riot!”

“It was an enlistment, not a riot,” Cassidy explains now for the fortieth time to someone who just wasn’t there and is making a big deal of it needlessly, acting as if there was explicit danger.

“We’ve signed up a few hundred people to train as Haitian EMTs,” Sebastian explains.

“Who’s gonna fucking train them?” Marks asks, who ‘Captain Marks’ is nominally within an organization devoted to training American blacks as EMTs. An organization that tried to capitalize off the Haitian earthquake by going on the news and promising things they didn’t have. Like Haitian doctors and nurses (which AMHE provided) or logistics and plane (which the scientologist provided) and now here they were three weeks into the carnage having not even contributed heavily to the first Wave on the ground.

 

“Apparently we are,” says Cassidy, for the first time admitting to himself begrudgingly he won’t be on a plane back to the states in a few days as planned.

“You two crackups?” says Danny Marks.

 

“He’s Irish, I a Hebrew, I think we can get the job done,” Sebastian says. The new bosses Pointer and others tried to dress them down, but Raeburn who was still technically the commanding officer of the brigade and Mr. Whitley still its main local fixer defused it. Squashed

the beef real quick.

 

“Well whose command are they under?” demanded Rocky Robinson, the official despot and Chief of BSVAC, he demanded the three (Adon, Asbun and Vale) return home immediately. But Mr. Whitely grinned, he took the satellite phone from Raeburn; ‘they’ve been commandeered sir, they are under the command of the Haitian people now.”

 

 

 

 

 

28

 

 

 

            The UN soldiers and Haitian police arrested Tiputti Capois at the hospital and brought him to the Tabarre police station for interrogation. They were unable to locate most of the other ring leaders, as only Tiputti came from a home in the Lower Delmas district still standing. The police, were in many ways a uniformed force in attire alone some prone to joy riding, others prone to racketeering, some albeit brutal patrolling, nothing compared to the Brazilians. They had the boy for only an hour when two Americans, Sebastian Adon and Mr. Whitley managed to trade his freedom for three boxes of Prestige beer and $1,000.00 American. Clearly all a big misunderstanding.

The Haitian police said they couldn’t care less, they’d been told by the military to arrest him and also three Americans in blue uniforms.

Before anyone from MINUSTAH was able to order an interrogation Capois had been spirited away to the Santo District safe house.

“Who has the list,” was the first question that interrogator might have asked had it come to that.

Several people had it now, but it was useless except really as an idea. The idea was that the Haitian people would be organized into a body to rebuild and reclaim their own country beginning with prehospital care of the sick and injured.

Dr. Hinge, now two days departed was quite interested in the idea behind the list. No one had any real expectation that Sebastian, a blan would galvanize a people’s army, a riot maybe but not an organization. Both Mr. Whitley and Dr. Hinge, who were both fond of the young man’s enthusiasm knew enough about to Haiti to know that organization, even volunteer medical organization was a miraculous feat. That the young EMT might undertake such a project was a testimony to his idealism, madness or both.

“Who has the list,” Whitley asks Tiputti in the air-conditioned barber shop slash safe house the three now sit.

“Multiple people,” Tiputti responds in Creole.

“You are all targets now thanks to those fucking scientists,” explains Whitley, “and you,” he says pointing to Sebastian, “You do not have many friends left on this Island at all.”

“I am his friend,” Tiputti responds.

“That is why we have rescued you. You must get the other ring leaders and get out of the city. Many people are plotting against you all. I have collected Dominich and Cassidy, Corporal Fitz has them safe. He wishes to move you all out of the city and let you attempt to organize them into a medical detachment, but are you aware that if you are not 100 percent on this, now is your last opportunity to leave. Without perhaps disappearing completely or leaving in pieces in a bag.”

“I know what you are planning Whitley, and I suppose I am behind it. It is not my ambition to play politics in your country. I simply thought this volunteer force was a needed good.”

“It’s dangerous to be so naïve here. The Scientists want you deported, for your safety they assure me. The Bedstuy contingent is nervous and twitchy too, that you will jeopardize their newfound NGO status, laugh me out loud.”

“And you?”

“You’re only useful if you succeed.”

“Well of course I’m only useful if I succeed.”

Tiputti is quiet as the older men talk. He listens though intently.

“If you can raise a medical column it would have to fall under the leadership of the Haitian people, certainly not the non to barely-existent Haitian government or the republic of NGOs as it were, or be some free-lance shit.”

“Well of course.”

“Of course of course, but there will be blood and you are a medical man are you not?”

“I am not so alien to the things you plot, although I am completely alien to the conditions in which you plot them.”

“Then get gone out of the city before the real bloodshed begins. Any day now a UN slider or US solider will get too hot and fire on a crowd and the Lavalas movement will use that exact moment to drive every hostile foreigner out of our country. Not every white, every hostile foreigner, but that can get very confused in unleashed popular anger. Get the risk frère?  I will make you my junior officer. You and Tiputti and the others must be ready in case heavy fighting begins, which once we get though the trauma of this event and bury the dead, it will happen suddenly as if we’d been organized for 200 years or longer.”

“That will take us at least a month I reckon, to train 40 people proficiently.”

“You are a rose colored optimist. I will give you three months, Fitz will bring you to the mountains where you will help others build a medical compound for the wider rebellion.”

“What of the relief effort?”

“What of it, the dead will bury the dead. The country must rebuild itself. Any time a foreign power comes here with relief they stay three decades taking our blood, labor and treasure.”

“So I work directly for you now?”

“You work for the Haitian people. As for supplies and logistics, you work directly for me with Fitz and Capois as your go between and translators. Cassidy, Dominich and you will train, the others will translate and insure discipline. Our odds here are always very bad, your unit joining us will not be easy you get that right. You’ll be a Jew, an Irish and Palestinian in almost all black uprising. Are you 100 ready to ride or die?”

“I pledged to those men and women we’d train them save.  I’m 100.”

“If you ain’t running with it run from it. President Aristede will be smuggled back into the country in the next six months.

“What kind of training to you have besides EMT, this emergency group is going to have to be Johnny on the spot once the uprising begins. We’re not using lethal weapons and we’re up against a lot of foreign and domestic fire power.”

“Dominich is pre-med maybe has some chemistry he also speaks Spanish, he’s half Columbian. Vale can jerry rig all kinds of things, me well, I have two years of agitation propaganda training the Israelis gave me.”

“What the hell is agitation propaganda training?”

“I can train people how to turn grievances, atrocities and injustices into political opportunities.”

“Welcome to the underground brothers. It’s time to take our country back.”

 

Sebastian who was treated for last two years as a glorified cab driver with an oxygen tank back in the Bronx and Brooklyn appears to be 99. He looks around this place and sees what you might call destiny calling. And the only thing he things about shaking the hand of the rebel alliance of alien land is a young woman with black curly hair and baby faced smile named Zoe Perechenova, his well hidden love. Wrong word? Yes absolutely.

 

 

 

29

 

 

There was this sickly looking fat guy that came in with the Second Wave. He was staggering, and someone suggested he had some kind of communicable disease, others suggested he was completely unfit for duty, as if the standard was anything other than a willingness to be there.

“Don’t worry, I’ll get him on the next plane,” Dominich Asbun promises the Second Wave leadership.

 

Writes Asbun in his journal: Back to that second overnight I did, with the new BSVAC people there and actual higher medical staffing there all night. Holy shit. The “second in command” at the hospital had mentioned how this was only the second night to have an all-night crew. No, I said, we’ve been running it – barely – for a week. But, in the end there’re much higher powers at play and I think our overnight traumas will be left entirely to us to remember.  And so it goes; and again we saw first something that needed to be changed but they waited to think of it themselves before changing anything. But fuck it at least there was a change, and anyway things change from one day to the next anyway in that world so it’s not like we had to wait much. The hospital I left was a different place from the one I came into, so think of that map I drew way back on Jan 21 as only a part of the picture. By now (and for how long?) most patients are in tents outside the buildings – maybe 25 tents in total? Most of them big tents, housing maybe 40 or so patients – apart from the group of people still swamping all open space in the park area in the middle. That last night I was there, there were even two tents set up for the triage area we’d established outdoors 2 nights earlier, with were of pretty crucial importance ‘cause of the heat at around one pm and the implications of working or be treated without shade. The triage was open all night though, which means patients coming in all night, though number-wise it was nothing compared to patient arrival during the day.

 

I don’t want to turn the night into a narrative but I’ll say that despite the comparatively huge staff (half of which worked the whole day prior) we were still running around a lot and getting in trauma patients and people dying: a 30-something year old, and a 2 year old, and I think two babies born but not survived. I saw a kid born 2 months premature – didn’t even have O­­2 for the ‘lil one but the nurse said he’d hang on. Strong from before they’re fully developed babies, these Haitians, ‘til they watch American EMTs slip their 30-something year old boyfriend into a body bag, ‘til when they’re in their 50’s and have spent 10 days under a broken building and still, somehow, still pushing blood through the arteries. (I’ll mention here that when I talked to Mami and Papi on the phone one night and told them about an 84-year-old woman that came in after more than a week under a building, they said they’d heard about it in the news. Apparently she did make quite some headlines; I looked her up getting back, her name is Marie Carida Romain. Not only is it interesting to see a story like that when you were one of the people working on her, but at one point we all decided actually we should let her die. There were barely any signs of life, she was stiffening up even, and given not only how starving we still were for medical supplies but also how many people with a better chance of survival desperately needed those supplies we figured it’d be best to give her a heavy dose of morphine and let her pass in peace. I stepped away from the table and then a news crew rolled in and filmed her, and then I got back to the table and then the doctor said we were going to do what we could to keep her alive as long as possible. I don’t mean to imply something cynical here, and I’m very glad the doctor gave us that order, but it’s funny to see a different side of things. Anyway.)

I took the 30 year old to the morgue (actually inside this time) and what me and the other kid pushing the stretcher saw was like a horror movie; not that bodies were piled up everywhere – there were only a few that we saw – but in the physical feel and dirtiness and stains of the place. Maybe it’s the TV we grow up with or maybe all the preparatory thinking I did to brace up for a night like this or maybe instinct removing you from the emotion but the death I saw didn’t feel like it hit me, or not sharply. For one thing I’ll say right now that I didn’t work specifically on keeping alive any of dead I saw; in other words by the time I got to them they had passed, and I think it’s a whole other story when all of you goes into saving someone and you don’t. The person I put the most work (emotionally) into saving in this way was a lady who came into the hospital in the back of a truck, dusty and completely limp from the “coma” the people bringing her described. This was the morning after that first long overnight shift. They ran to me, “Doctor! Doctor!” and like I said she was already completely out, and I said I’m not a doctor but I couldn’t find anyone to help me so I asked one of the people with her to help me put her on and carry a stretcher, the ones you lift. On the way to a tent I found Rocco and she started vomiting something clear Rocco immediately turned her on her side, we put her on the ground between tents because we couldn’t find a bed at first. Rocco worked hard on putting in a line, I couldn’t even find a radial pulse and this man looking for a vein to prick and his sweat coming down heavy like tears; I’ll say again how long of a night it had been and Rocco after putting so much of himself into the work had little energy and sympathy left, he’d burned it all in the dark a few hours earlier. But he got the line somehow – I’ve never seen someone as good as him with a needle – and the family said she hadn’t eaten in like 5 days so we put dextrose through her veins and she was still out, completely, throwing up still sometimes but skin cold and I kept thinking goddamn this girl is more dead than alive; the small oxygen tank I found was the only air around and it ended soon too. But, after like twenty minutes or maybe even less something about her changed and her eyes started moving – “Bonjour!” I said, and they moved over to me and then she actually said, “Bonjour” back, and motherfucker I couldn’t believe it, I would’ve married her if I’d have thought of it. Turns out her mom was diabetic so probably her too and probably she was just hella hypoglycemic after 5 days of no eating and I ain’t no doctor so coming that close to what felt like death on someone I’d been trying to keep life for showed me how there’s a huge difference between one exposure to death and another. So when I’m carrying the body bag and feel strangely numb I need to remember that, no matter what separation from the situation I have, before a body it was a person with life. It’s a thin line to walk between keeping a real sense of humanity even in someone’s passing and risking it hitting you heavy, on the one hand, and on the other keeping yourself safe away from emotions…but also risking losing touch with the wonder of life, and the wonder of death, and the very real respect to be kept for both.

 

We got Phil, a hero of 911 morphine up at a clinic near the airstrip. I took a picture with Sebastian and Cassidy and evacuated on a military plain before dark.

Asbun wrote:

It was Monday now. This sick guy’s name is Phil, apparently he got sick long before Haiti driving a volunteer ambulance toward the twin towers as they fell, he looks like shit. BSVAC sent him down for symbolic value. But he looks like he’s crapping out.

Was hoping to get on a plane Tuesday night but Phil and his one kidney got dehydrated and they needed someone to go with him to the airport and on the plane. Cassidy and Sebastian came with me, as Sebastian said, “We’re a unit and we have to stick together,” and we did until I left. After the overnight shift of Jan 25 and chilling at home we went to the scientologists’ camp which is in the big area of foreign camps by the airport; more military and tent living and lock and load whether you’re securing gate security or lifting Phil’s stretcher at the University of Miami field hospital there or carrying a box of water bottles, same all-from-everywhere international feeling, and fuck it people helping. We finally got on one of the government planes Phil and I – a coast guard cargo-type plane with canvas seats for about 30 people and propellers as big as God’s teeth. I hadn’t slept the night before (more on that later, still) and was hella tired and transporting someone, transporting Phil, not easy to deal with when you’re hella tired, but he was sick with something, maybe even altered mental status. Flew to Homestead, FL, got the immigrant/refugee type welcome treatment: they gave us coffee or hot chocolate or both and a bunch of snacks to choose from, and cots and blankets and went through each of our bags and then there was a shuttle to Miami airport, and I took it and then a Delta flight to JFK. I’m still hella tired, and still absorbing the reality of this reality.

 

Then there were two. It wasn’t that Dominich wasn’t partly sold on this irregular medical guerrilla column notion. But realistically, there was no way they could pull it off without a miracle. And bringing back Phil was a good reason to get out of this heat, get back to New York to think clearly about what had happened so fast.

 

 

 

30

 

 

 

“You need to sleep sweetness,” Cassidy says to Adon.

Sleep and to get the hell out of dodge.

They’re walking down the boulevard away from the airport toward the UN Logistics base. They heard there are Cuban cigars there and normal food. Adon’s supposed to pretend to be the strong and silent type, but he keeps telling yarns. Talking about subversive stuff he used to organize in New York and Israel, about his dead friend Jeremy, about some broad named Zoe who he swears he’s in love with, but will probably never see again.

Cassidy takes it in, tries to change the subject with lighter talk about if this was Star Wars, what character would Adon be. They’ve been up it seems like the better part of a week. The whole rescue operation feeling overwhelming and extensive. Cassidy looks at Adon and wonders if the man is really up to some true blue, unheard of hero shit.

Cassidy is increasingly worried that Adon is soaring far beyond all reasonable goals, worried he’s lost himself in some romantic voodoo dream of martyrdom, or worse can’t see the probability of futility, of death.

Sebastian and he had been on the airfield. The BSVAC and Scientologists had kicked them off the Tabarre base.

“All this death and dying in a place that had so little nothing to begin with…” Adon mutters.

“Yer gonna end up like Kurtz you know, especially if you listen to Whitley and take off into those mountains. If you don’t disappear, you’ll go real voodoo on us.”

“Let me be as clear as I can on this Cass. It isn’t up to the two of us to fix this. Nothing can fix this but the Haitian people themselves.”

“Yer not Jesus baby. You can’t assume this kind of burden.”

“Why does everyone always say that stupid shit? Like twice a year some asshole has to remind me I’m not Jesus. What the fuck does that even mean?!”

“Woah, baby I’m just sayin.”

“It’s like when I said I was going to Haiti, everyone was like ‘yer gonna get killed.’ I didn’t come here to do anything more than be an EMT, but let’s be real, they need a lot more than EMTs, they need things that they control to save themselves. SO if we train them, if we do that one little thing before we go off and act like some fucking tourists, then I can look back at my stupid, selfish life and say, I gave all I could in the City of Port Au Prince.”

“Daddy O. It’s not your responsibility.”

“No one’s gonna take responsibility.”

“Why you? Why Sebastian and by default your newfound partner Cassidy? Why is it up to us in any capacity to make any other difference than what we’ve made already. No one is asking you to assume this burden. Not Tiputti, not  even Whitley, not the people of Haiti. You’re putting something on your shoulders you inherently cannot bear.”

“I’ll bear it if I have to alone, you leave if you must.”

“Well I’m not leaving you here.”

“Well then you’d better help me then.”

“We’re going back to the states.”

“In cuffs or in a bag, but let me just say this. This country has been wronged. Its entire history comprises more suffering than the mind can bear. And I think back to when Emile Cange and I used to talk about God and I say that here is where I’ll make my little moral stand. I didn’t come here to play hero, I came here because there was nowhere else to go. I am not playing at anything outside my means, I possess the will to teach and Tiputti possesses the will to translate. We cannot fix everything, fixing everything is not my objective, but we can teach them how to save a life and that would be a damn good place to start.”

 

“You speak well Adon, and I worry that’s what will kill you. Scary that so many are listening to you while so few even understand your language.”

“We speak though others. It’s straight forward ideas.”

“Why are you doing this bro? I can’t get on that plane until you get on that plane. I ain’t leaving you to die in Haiti.”

“If you die in Haiti you just come back as a zombie.”

“Well I guess we can’t die here then. I guess we have to play to win.”

 

 

 

 

31

 

 

 

Tuesday afternoon, the boys piled into a van with some bright eyed Scientologists chicks to go participate in a food drop operation in some place called Kenscoff. Adon asks too many questions to the Haitian translators accompanying them. But these questions make it clear that Kenscoff is hardly the neediest place in the country.

Quite a lot of resources have been assembled to more 14 tons of olive oil, rice and assorted provisions way up above Port Au Prince into an area that looks a lot like the South of France. The rubble, the screaming, the piled bodies, the flies the smell of death blocked out by vicks vapor rub all becomes lush rolling green mountains and pleasure villas.

So this is where all the very, very rich people live, thinks Cassidy.

The little van is filled with Scientologist girls. The whole thing seems like a partially scripted episode on a frighteningly surreal reality TV show, thinks Adon. They’re making a donor movie, with the city still a ruin.

It only took about an hour and half of driving to leave the hell of the earthquake behind. Now it was tropical paradise, it was clear some live rather fucking well in Haiti.

The Van makes a pit stop, some of the girls wander off to use the bathroom, and obviously the Sci-Tys have a lot of sympathizers they pay for with green money. Adon lights one up, Cassidy looks out in the rolling green valley, looks out at what the Island must all have looked like once, once like a really long time before the blan got here.

Adon is completely insane. There’s never gonna be an EMS system in Haiti, all you can do is join hands with them and jump, Adon keeps arguing that anyway. It’s like in all this mess he’s found his moment. It can’t end well. Adon, like these L.A. Sci-Tys doesn’t seem to see the clear and present danger of asking for change on the Island of Haiti.

“It’s like a movie,” muses Adon.

‘What kind of movie?” Cassidy responds.

“Somewhere between a noire and a western. They certainly add to the surrealist element those crazy scientists. But I keep having this feeling like there’s something high above us watching. Rooting for us even.”

The feeding was a shit show. The Haitian paramilitaries, probably off duty cops or worse just gangsters for hire from the once a military were basically funneling thousands of people into a court yard two by two through a thin opening in a gate. These people, like the first round of patients in the General Hospital were unfeasibly well dressed, they were the slaves and servants of the Kenscoff rich. While the scientists shot B-Roll, paramilitaries hurried the pickup along, piles and piles of USAID food getting into the hands of the completely least needy.

Soon the crowds overwhelm the security posts, the whole thing is going down in a school yard, there’s always some clever strategy on how to not make a food drop turn into a zoot suit riot, but that strategy never works.

Soon police-enforcers whoever are striking people with batons, a few shots are fired in the air, the mob storms the compound and Adon gets swept down a narrow alley separated from the extraction truck.

“Remember, no one wants to harm you, they just want the food,” a Scientologist had informed them. It was true.

But there were all these little kids and they looked like they’d get trampled and Adon kept trying to get people to get the food and get out. Now there were mobs coming into the compound from two entrance points, and Cassidy is up on a roof yelling that it’s time to leave.

In the back of his head Adon hears Gardel the security guy, (Mr. Whitley too) telling him to separate fact from emotion. Telling him he’ll only succeed if he can kill his petty Western sentimentality and embrace the darkness out here.

And these hungry little child slaves out here trying to nab a bag of rice, they do look pretty hungry, but Cassidy is yelling to pull out so Adon climbs up a basketball hoop and jumps onto a corrugated roof where they dash mast a swarming crowd toward the trucks.

The Scientists are appalled Adon was separated, that wasn’t part of the script.

The mob nearly overt turns the extraction trucks. Finally they break free, they get clear, they speed down the highway road through this place of relative safety and wealth cut off by a sea of rubble and death called the Capital.

 

 

 

32

 

 

 

It’s Wednesday and Cassidy is looking around the general hospital for an NGO for the boys to fall under. Adon has set up shop in the now empty lower triage bay, all the patients are afraid of being in doors even though structural engineers have evaluated the structure at least five times now. The city is a world of dirty tents and rubble.

Adon is speaking with five or six of the Unit C training group leaders led by Tiputti Capois, Obenson Etienne, and Jacque Metayer. They’re hatching a plan.

“You need to get to the Olofsen Hotel, the people there will help us, or know where we should turn,” states Tiputti Capois.

“The Olofsen hotel is known as a place for these kinds of plots,” says the Shatah Jacque.

“That’s where Phoebe is living,” Cassidy reminds Adon.

“They might know where we can base this training operation,” says Tiputti.

“That guy Morse knows every strange move in this city,” says Jacques.

“I’ll get over there tonight then,” says Adon.

 

 

***

 

 

It’s dusk, now. Adon and Cassidy are on the road back to the airport.

“You’re talking so crazy even the Scientologists are raising their eyebrows,” Says Cassidy, “you’re get us abducted and probed.”

“I get that I’m abrasive, but this thing needs doing.”

“Why are you the one who has to do it, that’s what I’m saying?”

“I promised them. I made an oath. I swore to them I’d help them.”

“You have to go home. You’re not being rational baby.”

 

“I’m gonna cross the city tonight, I’m gonna go see Phoebe at the Olofsen and find out what the next step should be. People at that Hotel are apparently affiliated with whatever is left of the resistance here.”

Lavalas, the cleansing flood, that’s what Mr. Whitley had said.

“It can wait for morning, there’s no reason to be out on the streets.”

Adon had just threatened a couple Scientologist bigwigs. He’d called um colonizers, said they should be shot. Advocated driving the Brazilians and t the NGOs out of Haiti. It was mad house speech of crazy violent, impassioned talk. It wasn’t out of the blue, after nearly two weeks in the thick of things obviously he needed a long nap, and a flight home. But Adon wasn’t hearing that.

 

“She ain’t an oracle baby, she’s just as confused as you.”

“I wish you’d all stop talking to me like I’m stupid and crazy.”

“Yer not stupid brother, but you are a little crazy. You told the Scientists you’d have them all shot. Have them burned out of Haiti. You were running around in a field last night chasing the moon, making everyone even me nervous. What kind of crazy talk is that?”

He’s developed some stress induced narrative that the Scientologists, the Army, the NGOs, well everyone was here to colonize the Haitians once and for all. He’d wigged out.

“Adon yer acting paranoid. You’re obviously a bit overwhelmed by this whole thing, hey its heavy shit. But don’t go running around in the dark. Think of your Zoe.”

They’d spent the better part of Tuesday afternoon on that airfield engaging in Q&A. He certainly had a plan, as outlandish as that plan was. EMS in Haiti, Haitians saving Haitians, guerrilla EMS columns organized in the countryside to redeem the nation.      Cassidy had never met someone so caught in a moment on fire. And it was heady, wonderful talk, but it was something that one couldn’t wing.

“Think of Miss Julie, and what about seeing Zoe naked,” Cassidy repeats the names Adon had jotted on a piece of paper, the two women he was supposed to call and say Adon wasn’t coming back.

They hadn’t only talked about this wild plan. They’d spoken a lot about the road to Port Au Prince. Adon had written Zoe a long letter on a bunch of airplane napkins and mailed it from Miami. He’d wanted to testify about what was running through his mind before he jumped ship. He’d written another letter about why he was staying, needed Cassidy to give it to her. Cassidy was committed to saying just about anything to get Sebastian back to Brooklyn, where they could then revisit everything once rested and in perspective.

Haiti in the imagination of the world was a simple house of death. But Adon had his eyes opened wide so be believed. He was enthralled by these people who bore the world’s weight, who were literally dying not just because they’d been abandoned, but simply because no one seemed to care.

“I don’t have anything to go home to Cassidy, this is my road.”

“Nothing is that black and white. What about that girl, the blonde Ukrainian medical student you always hope is rooting for you, what about her?”

“She won’t notice. But just in case I don’t come back tonight tell her I loved her.”

“Tiputti and the others are tying up a hope in you that may be beyond your ability to carry through. You’ve taken on your shoulders a weight no one asked you to bear. It will break you.”

“Cassidy. Shut up.”

“Damn it Sebastian. I can’t go home until you go home.”

“Well stand your ground then brother. We’re not done yet.”

 

 

 

A little after midnight Adon is running down the road, Cassidy and some army guys are chasing him. The Scientologist Luckner had made a few calls to the UN troops and the 82nd Airborne, said a “wacked out AWOL FDNY EMT” was agitating a group of Haitian street youth to riot and revolt. Told them this “New York spoiled shell shocked crack pot” had threatened violence against some volunteer ministers. Adon surely had a way with the white people.

Adon out runs Cassidy and disappears into the night.

He makes his way into total black darkness completely unafraid of all Haiti’s imagined monsters, ghouls and gangsters, Shatahs, zombies, killers, cannibals and the Loup Garrou herself! There was nothing here but solidarity. There was nothing here but a people made to suffer for over two hundred years for their defiance of the world system and the salve masters.

The Haitian peasants whispered that when the end times come, the great calamity before the end of the existing epoch; the new age the Mayans believed would begin on 21 December, 2012; about two years away; the enduring liberation struggle would be fought and lead by Haitians who knew better than any people how to survive in the wilderness and to out maneuver the salvers and oppressors.

Sebastian Adon now knew with his eyes what he’d long known in his soul; that he man man! A human with integral needs and rights; and he knew as all women and men are forced to know that this world the leaders of it, the big bosses, the capitalists, the bankers and oligarchs they trample our rights. But they are literally killing the poorest of the poor. This island was to be a symbol of the revolution against the oligarchy; and they cut it off, they fueled civil war, the extracted indemnity; they bank rolled murderous dictatorships like those of the Duvaliers. The send NGOs to cripple self-reliance. They, they, THEY! Yes they, the Euro-American colonizers they had tried to exterminate the Haitian people and everyone else.

 

“There is a statue of Haitian hands holding up the world at a junction several kilometers from the airstrip bearing west,” explained Tiputti Capois.

“You will follow the highway right to it. No one will stop you or bother you. If you are lost, if something happens to me and I am late, you will hold fast at that statue and I will get to you before midnight. And we will cross the city together to the Olofsen hotel. If you see a stranger just say, ‘ANFOM FRERE, it means hey brother are you well; and you will be treated like a Haitian. ANFOM SEOUR if you see a woman, the same thing.”

 

He wrote a note in Creole for me to read asking to borrow a mobile phone. I waited at the statute for him after evading the marines. He was there by 10:30.

 

Thus we two travelers set out before midnight from the statute at the junction 2.5 km from the airstrip bearing west carrying nothing except an iridium glow torch and a small bag of medical supplies. The night was a glorious salvation from the tropical hot, hot heat.  One was a low level healer, sometime type of Shaman from Brooklyn called an ehemteh, his whiteness caught the shimmer of the full moon. His government name on the US passport was Sebastian Adon, but his Israeli passport said another name. This was his thirteenth day on the island, in the witching hour of his life’s held beliefs. The second traveler was named Tiputti Capois, a Haitian born through and through, no family left at all alive expect his mother and his sister, no more than 18 years old he led the rebel shaman though the sea of refuse, of still unburied bodies, of death’s dying dust in search of an oracle and a fixer. A woman holed up in the Hotel Olofsen, receiving visions that the healer believed might divine some insight as to recent comings and goings, plots and a divine intervention.

The name of that woman was Emma Solomon. He had known her in another life, had last seen her ten years before when they met in Tel Aviv and she was murdered.

The fixer, he was the owner of a grand ginger bread hotel, a white Haitian, a musician and shrewd fixer of political events in country his name was Richard Morse. If they could get to those two people, if he could get Tiputti Capois an audience. It would be ok if the marines took him away back to Babylon.

 

Following broken shattered roads, downed power line, crumbled homes with gof only knew how many people trapped now certainly dead underneath them and fallen street signs trekking ever on the incline. Sebastian feverishly pursues the oracle, feverishly being driven by the spirits toward his destiny. Tiputti feverishly pursues a glimmering hope he ties up in Sebastian’s plot, also perhaps a twenty dollar bill Mr. Whitely gave him, also inspired by the words this blan spoke of freedom, of rights, or liberated Haiti; it was as if the four father took turns speaking though him; it was like the Lwa rode him for here and used his pale corpse to address them of the new opening, the new chance to achieve the aims of their 200 plus year revolution; and the moon lit the way rooting for no one.

Occasionally the pair would come across a young man or woman sitting along the road staring out into the nothing left of the city.

Zombies” explained Capois.

They would sometimes revive and ask Tiputti where he was taking the blan healer clad in blue and black uniform with a red bandana tied around his neck. Tiputti would point toward the mountains, tell them in Creole help was coming. At times they’d give him a short horror story and he’d write down their address in hopes the aid trucks began bussing food rations into the cities interior, instead of just up mountain to the elites. Sebastian would look on, or smoke a cigarette and watch the smoke entranced.

On and on they climbed that night, when the roads ceased to be, over rubble piles over bodies, past the stench of the recently dead.

 

They passed US soldiers surprised to see a white man in an FDNY uniform passing through the night. They made no effort to help or hinder, but filled his canteen up with water. He asked them to notify staff sergeant CJ at general hospital that he would not be returning to duty there. They took rides from Haitian National Police. The took taptaps, the walked for miles or in Haiti kilometers from the airstrip to the Olofsen. Eventually a group of young men with red bandannas on their faces greeted them near the third perimeter.

The tertiary defenses of the Olofsen.

Dawn approaching with rooster cries they came across a large assembly in a square not far from the hotel. Several men and women were giving orders, they were all around a big UN map of the city, marked with dots and squiggles.

“They are planning to raid MINUSTAH supply depots.”

“The UN?”

“The occupational army of Brazilians that torments us and keeps the NGO and retired Maccoute regime in power, yes the UN.”

They all wore red bandanas. They at first seemed shocked to see Adon, uncomfortable with a blan these dawn raiders, these Haitian freedom fighters, whatever they were.

Lavalas,” explained Tiputti, taking him away from the gathering.

“What’s that mean?”

“The cleansing flood, followers of the exiled President Aristede. The largest political party in Haiti; the liberation theological movement of Haiti’s only ever democratically elected leader; exiled President Aristede.”

 

Sometime around dawn they’d reach the gates of the hotel, and by god the oracle hopefully had some answers because the ground was still shaking and this little rescue mission wasn’t going at all as planned and from the heights of Port au Prince, from the Hotel Olofsen this lonely pair of hope slingers needed to see a miracle or two if they were to persevere.

 

The Lwa, Jesus and Tiputti Capois guided him up that mountain through that quiet war zone now totally crumbled, body strewn and piled broken capital city of the rebellion to the gates of the Hotel Olofsen.

 

 

 

33

 

 

Now its morning, dreaded and baked by the hot, hot heat. Through a narrow peep hole they are examined, they wait for approval, a blan in blue uniform, and red bandana; the difference between the uniform of Lavalas v. the Tonton Maccoutes is denim of the secret police as opposed to dark navy of the rescuers and the resistance. The red sash of JJ Dessalines or the red flag of socialism.

“Psst, Phoebe.”

Sebastian Adon is leaning over my mattress, his Haitian translator standing behind him. I rub my eyes. Isabelle groans and turns over.

“Hey, sorry to wake you up. I can come back if-”

“No, no, that’s alright. What’s going on? How’d you get here?”
“I walked.”

“Oh. Wow.”

“Tell me if you think this is just me being naive, but I really think everyone makes Haiti out to be more dangerous than it is as part of this big international racist smear campaign.”

“I agree.” And I do, completely. Although I would not walk halfway across Port-au-Prince in the middle of the night.

We move the conversation up to the Oloffson’s patio so as not to disturb the Morses’ slumber (there is a big space between Izzy’s pillow and mine where William used to be.)

“So here’s the situation,” Sebastian says. “The soup with too many cooks. So many organizations with so many agendas and too little coordination and too little aid getting to the people.”

“How much of the delay do you think is due to the roads being impassable and the phone lines down and how much is just due to fear of the Haitian people?”

“It’s fear,” Sebastian whispers. His eyes are red. There’s a huge hole in his pants. “Most of the food distributions have been in Petionville. No one wants to go into the poorer neighborhoods.”

Petionville is to Port-au-Prince as Beverly Hills is to L.A.

(You would think after several centuries the Western world would forgive Haiti for winning its independence. But our governments and the media still seem to have a vested interest in making us afraid of Haitians.

This perception of Haiti, and resulting dehumanization of its people, has to change before anything else can.)

“If you’re in this line of work, isn’t a certain amount of personal risk part of the job description anyway? Because if you aren’t helping the people, what are you? Just profiteering. Just another racket.”

“You should eat,” I say, gesturing toward the untouched bowl of cereal I poured for him.

He nods vaguely. “It’s the same situation as with General Hospital. There’s aid in the daytime, but none getting out at night. I want to facilitate between several different organizations, kind of act as an intermediary, to create a night-time aid convoy. Most of the other EMTs have gone home, but I mean, I want to stay a while, I mean, what else do I have to do? I love Haiti. This place amazes me. But what you were saying about the novel you wanted to write before coming here and now you don’t know if that’s what you’ll do, I feel that, because you know I had all these plans of how to be useful-”

“Sebastian.”

“I’m sorry, am I rambling?”

“You need to sleep.”

“Ok, but so here’s what I came to do: I need to talk to Richard. I need someone who can give me a clearer picture of what’s going on here, what the situation was like before the earthquake. And I need to see how much it would cost for space on the driveway.”

I lead Sebastian and his translator down to my mattress and tuck them in, hoping Sebastian will at least take a fucking cat nap, and go off in search of Richard. I find him lying on a foam pad in his living room, moaning with pain. It’s his kidney stones. Again.

For some reason, Richard being in pain crosses some threshold that all the rubble and refugees don’t. The destruction, I can compartmentalize. But Richard Morse being in any way incapacitated makes me feel like I’m about to hyperventilate.

“What do you need?” he asks.

“There’s an EMT guy who wants to talk to you. He was staying in the same compound as the Scientologists. He wants ideas on how to be more effective. I’ll tell him you can talk to him later.”

Eda, an Olofsen employee, massages Richard’s side with some sort of peanut oil. Richard tells her to put some on my hands. “Now rub them together.”

The oil warms faster than Tiger balm, without burning. Why massage therapists across the world have not discovered this amazing product, I don’t know. I ask if Eda is a massage therapist. She shakes her head.

“Everyone in Haiti knows a little massage,” Richard says. “Because we don’t have massage therapists. I’m going to tell you something. It might sound a little funny. I’m an innkeeper and a musician. But when people need favors- presidents, prime ministers- when they’re in a political jam, they call in. Then once I get them out of it, they fuck me over, they red zone me so I can’t even afford to paint my hotel. It’s crazy.”

I nod, because I don’t know what to say, and walk down to the driveway. Sebastian has disappeared.

           Tet fe mal. My head hurts.

Immanuel, it turns out, is going across the border tomorrow, not today. I tag Along with Regine and a doctor from the states to visit a displaced persons camp up the hill.

I have been questioning my role and capacity for usefulness here in Haiti. I don’t want to just be an atrocity tourist, sight-seeing sadness. I suppose my contribution is this blog but it is hard to know, from the Oloffson’s patio, what the hell is actually happening. It’s hard for anyone to know what the hell is happening, even people who are out on the ground every day.

I also feel mighty hypocritical criticizing the aid effort while I am blogging and drinking Prestige beer. (A girl was recently found alive after fifteen days trapped in the rubble, and here I was talking shit about the Search and Rescue efforts.)

My skill set: singing, but people have more pressing needs than listening to the blues right now. Massage therapy, but I have no medical training. Writing, but I only leave the hotel to tag along on errands.

But then I realize that Richard really isn’t just a hotel owner and rocker, and Regine isn’t just a film maker, and Sebastian is one person branching out far beyond EMS into diplomacy, and the camp I’m standing in was set up by a couple of nuns. They didn’t have any big international organizations assisting them. They didn’t deal with bureaucracy and red tape or bemoan the “logistical complexity” of the situation. They found an abandoned gingerbread house with a large yard and set up makeshift homes for hundreds of people.

Regine cradles a pair of twins born in the street several hours after the quake. I make funny faces at a trio of little boys peeking out from the flap of their tent. The tent is set up against the fence, giving it a back wall, and bolstered by two nearby trees.

“See,” the American doctor says. “We’d never figure that out. Americans would still be up on the roof of some building, waving their arms and screaming, ‘Help us, help us!’”

The mental image makes me laugh.

“The sleeper Adon, is finally asleep,” we are informed.

“Please wake up Morse.”

 

            There are several young men who help carry the quite unconscious, possibly dead body of Sebastian Adon to a bed in the bunker far below the Hotel Olofsen, a storm shelter, a safe place adorned with a massive veve of Papa Legba in blue grey ash and sand. Earthquake proof. Maccoute proof. Everything proof.

They lay his corpse and strip off his uniform for wash and mending. Lay has flaccid dead and naked self upon a bed. They cover him in herbs we use to raise the dead.

 

“Death is only scary to those who are not living right, that’s clear. You’re not afraid and neither are the 316,000 martyrs because you know that you’re going soon to the ocean going back to Guinea; then to be reborn. Among you are the Old Souls, those that can remember what they have seen before.”

 

A voice comes to me in death, but it is not god or Emma Solomon. It is the Uogan Richard Morse.

 

“You are a student of history and you are well read, considering how few people in humanity can even read or have access to books often it is easier to drown out the truth than suppress it. Or alter it beyond recognition. Did you know they, they the Oligarchs feed on our pain, which is why they cause it; not wealth or power! It excites them, they commune with it. Nearly 7 billion human souls screaming in torture, like seven billion circles of hell up a ghastly mountain fortress though to be a globe. Slavery is the greatest trick, the longest trick they ever pulled upon us and we Haitians were the only strong enough to defeat it. And this is why we live now as we live.”

 

I am dead, it’s easy to listen in death.

 

“Did you know that everything that Jesus and Mary Magdalena, all the ancient people they had practices to heal, to raise the dead they lived without war and without poverty or famine for many thousands of years. Did you know that all the speak of zombies, cannibals and satanic rituals were the very monstrosities our many prophets fought against. Did you know they have taken the words and likeness of Yeshua and Prophet Muhammad and slaughtered humanity in the names of old soul heroes?

 

 

“Maybe one day they will say Sebastian Adon died in Haiti, died three times overwhelmed by what he saw. Died one time in failed plane to get there. Died again poisoned by assassin in Miami. Died in the aftershock which took out the hospital, killed him as he huddled with a limbless woman. Died in a hail of gun fire when marines fired into the crowd. Died in the night, sucked dry up the Loup Garrou; the werewolf slash vampire of Haiti. Eaten alive my zombies. And died again in the mountains, captured and killed, shot twice and dumped in shallow grave alongside Tiputti and ten other leaders of the latest revolt.”

 

It’s so dark, dark like the womb not the night. Dark like the universe not the grave.

 

“Or maybe they will say that Adon the tragic hero came alive for the first time. That it was we Haitians who gave you the salt of freedom, the salt to bring the Zombie back to life. Perhaps angels guarded you from birth, perhaps the spirits joined them for it seems to me that no matter what mythology we equate to your survival; you are one of the luckiest men on earth. Incredibly protected and incredibly hard to kill. For each and every time you have died, Emma has found you and shifted reality, pulled you out the rabbit hole each time in a new reality alive, alive and ready to keep fighting for your people.”

 

I have no mouth to scream or no eyes to see for I am again a soul without a vessel.

 

“Emma cannot see you today. She is herself spread thin transferring all these souls off the island and out to sea, out to spread the message of the new social gospel, and finish the work of the greatest uprising the world of man has seen. It is good to meet you, for I have read a lot about you, read a lot about your work.”

 

“My name is Richard Morse,” I’m the master of this house. I’m the guardian of the machines we are using on this island to turn the tides against the devils who have kept us bleeding for so long.”

 

“You will awake in a new body. You will be immediately arrested and taken back to Babylon, taken back to the citadel on the top of the mountain where your oligarchy bank rolls its war machine. You will return to the island in one year’s time under the pretext of training Haitians in medical skills, but it will be a joint exchange; you will teach us tools to mitigate injury and illness; but we will teach you tools to proliferate freedom.”

 

“You will use the things we teach you to break the quarantine once and for all.”

 

            “They will whisper that Haiti and Haitians changed you, and it does, it changes everyone for far better or far, far worse. It exposes the animal or the human in man, and in woman. You have been on this road for so long that you forget your face. You have been seduced by your plantation and forgotten there are many, many many more plantations killing away at far faster speeds than your ambulance plantation in the City of New York.”

Emma Solomon, mother of messiahs anoints you and the 316,000 other fallen in the temblor send to kill us and crush our bones. And the souls of you martyrs, the martyrs of 12 January will leave this cursed, and battered place and awake in the bodies of future heroes.”

            “For all my power and all my connections I know not who caused this quake. Were it gods, vile things in the sky which hate us. Fight them for us. Were it the work of Scientologists, Israelite spies, neo-Duvalierist or oligarchs I know not. Fight them. We are human goddamn it, we are women and men and they reduce us to ash. You fight. As long as you have a heart that still beats, and two lungs to give speeches and breathe air, hands to write, hands to heal hands to fight you, legs to stand; you fight you never give those rat bustards a single inch, not a centimeter even, not a speck.”

 

The cold corpse of Sebastian Adon gasps air.

 

“Pretty soon daddy you’re gonna wake up in Brooklyn Babylon and you’re gonna, get the drugs and alcohol out of your vessel, you body system; you’re gonna come back online with the fire of old soul self-burning. You’re gonna remember fighting besides Cyrus, fighting besides Yeshua ben Yosef, besides the prophet Muhammad, besides Saladin and Johanna of the Arc, fighting beside Robespierre and Toussaint! Besides Lenin, Fidel and Che. You’ll remember the January 1st raid on Wall Street and the Great Temples. You’re gonna remember what your destiny is. You’re gonna remember what they did to your wife and your child. You’re gonna hit back for every single one us. Hit back alongside us. You’re gonna teach men and woman to heal.  You’re gonna wake up the dead. Some men dread 30, but historically that’s when Old Souls do their finest work.”

 

 

            The blood flows back to my body. My heart beats again.

 

 

 

 

34

 

 

Adon lay on the mattress looking up at the sky. He hadn’t slept, not in a long time. There was a letter folded over in his breast pocket, seven pages worth of detailed instructions for Tiputti Capois and their compatriots, written in terse military language. A shorter second letter, although perhaps more lush of language was a complete admittance of his tremendous feelings for Zoe Perechenova, the woman he’d been writing for seven months to save his soul.  It was his intention to send the first letter to Tiputti Capois, via Tiputti who’d accompanied him on his long night journey he’d pledged to the others his undying loyalty. His letter for Zoe would be given to Cassidy, who surely would try and leave the country by today, despite all his proclamations to hold the mission down.

 

His mind wanders far and wide. There is very large rip in the leg of BDUs that needs mending, wait it has been mended. Strange. Will Zoe think it cruel that he only finds the courage to love her on the edge of his possible death, or actual death revived? He believes that if he can get to the mountains by the end of the day, he may die, but good and noble courage might carry the plan through without him, in that case the first letter is useless. More likely is the impending calculus that he will be arrested, and deported ingloriously, where by the second letter can serve no use.

Failure like flies swarm him as he lies, Phoebe has gone off, perhaps to inform on him, perhaps to find Richard Morse, perhaps to her duties, whatever those might be. He sleeps not so long, less than ten minutes, it isn’t fair, a tease really to even call it a nap.

Awaking with a convulsion on the mattress, he is alone except for Tiputti Capois his friend and guide. Tiputti who had shown up at the General Hospital on the very first day in a boy scouts uniform to help. Tiputti, who wanted to be an EMT enough to risk crossing the whole damn city at night Tiputti, is keeping watch over Adon. Hopes he’ll sleep.

One of the Hotel security guards tells Tiputti Capois that the American military are looking for Adon at the General hospital. Whitley paid 20 USD for Tiputti to watch over him last night. Adon had paid Tiputti 20 as a tip for crossing the city alive, Tiputti was insulted and refused the money. Now Adon awoke quickly from his slumber, pressed an envelope into his hand. Again Tiputti resists.

“What is this?” asks Tiputti.

“In case they take me today. A plan for Unit C to survive in case they take me, or I can’t get back. Its diagrams of leadership structures and a list of groups and people I’ve met here that might help you. Give it to the other leaders.”

“I don’t understand. We don’t need you money.”

Adon takes out the remaining cash in his wallet, hopes he’s made enough of impression on Phoebe to not be charged for his breakfast. It’s about 80 bucks.

“It’s all I’ve got. Give this money and show these things to the others if I get pinched today. I suspect I will be taken.”

“We don’t need anything from you, except your brotherhood. Here or in foreign lands.”

“You already spoke to Morse. We will leave quickly then, to the mountains, I will find the others. This was your plan,” insists Tiputti.

Morse, yes Morse what of Richard Morse the man he came to see. It was as if he’d had his mind wiped out. As if no sleep had let the Lwa ride him, do the talking for him. Carry him for the past two weeks.

“You need to go find Cassidy. Go find the others, I’ll call your cell when I wake up, after I talk to Morse. ”

“You spoke to Morse already blessed your hands.”

Interesting what this man does and does not remember. Such as speaking with Morse in the lower temple, such as Richard Morse offering his vast forces to shield Tiputti Capois and the medical guerrillas of Unit C from the numerous aggressors. Notably the UN, CIA and former Maccoutes.

“If you leave, no one will hate you,” Tiputti tells him.

“We’ll be in the mountains by nightfall frère.”

Tiputti doesn’t leave. He knows he’ll probably never see Sebastian Adon again, contrary to predictions the Ougan Morse has made. He doesn’t hate him for proving what many whispers said was inevitably true. The whites tinker ‘til tired then leave. They get tired quickly in the death and the heat.

After Tiputti finally falls asleep on the deck, the not really sleeping went on, Phoebe still hadn’t returned, he was sure he looked like a mess. He didn’t want to be charged to sleep on this mattress. The Olofsen just wasn’t as nice as everyone hyped it up to be. It was shady though, and well-arranged and classical, and the voodoo flags flew in the sometimes gust of wind. Not much wind.

Always this smell of death and smoke.

And the wandering mind remembered the night before, the walk from the Airport to the Olofsen, taking in all that death by night. There were spirits in the darkness, but they did not malign Adon nor his guide. They had walked all night to find answers, immediate answers Adon somehow kidded himself into thinking were held in this place.

Morse would laugh at him and his plan, hadn’t he? Or had he blessed it. And Phoebe, she was just a tourist too. They were well meaning tourists, but all tourists go home. He’d get picked up pretty quick in a blue FDNY polo shirt that bore his name. Why’d he come here again? Just to help. He’d helped, he already outstayed his tour of self-deployment, he was already two weeks AWOL from the FDNY.

Why’d he run all the way across night up into the hills: ‘Cause if he stayed at the airport they’d have deported him. Just like in Israel a few weeks before.

He thought about the night journey, passing miles and miles of collapsed buildings, and body piles and all that stench of death that pervaded the nostrils, soaked to the clothes. All those people that had been lost, largely because the government of Haiti didn’t have building codes.

“Nobody asked you to do this, you took it upon yourself,” EMT Cassidy Vale had told him. They all had, all the brave men and women who’d dropped their lives and come down in the first two waves. Thousands from around the world. But all those volunteers, had something to go home to.

And even Cassidy felt inside that their work wasn’t nearly done.

Adon had a job that sought to kill him, bleed him dry. A woman he was fucking who was a passing thought. Another woman he realized he loved, but as he was a coward, such a coward he needed to hide behind an island of death to express that emotion in writing. A Zion he wasn’t welcome in. Why go home now? Stay here rest a little, recuperate, and escape to the mountains.

He needs Cassidy, his current partner, his voice of reason, and the partner he ditched in the dark streets running into last night.

He needs to put the last thirteen days in perspective. He begins to quietly cry looking down at the City of Port-au-Prince. Cries like he’s never cried in his life. He sees finally, finally on the thirteenth day what might be called the totality of suffering. He sees it all at once. The rapes in the sugar cane, the crack of the masters whip, the mutilations of slaves, the tin masks, the burning colony, the two hundred years of isolation, the Duvalier years the purge of Lavalas and Aristede. Imperial meddling. The boat people, the sharks eating corpses, the trafficking, and the quake. He had briefly been standing to smoke, but falls to his knees and discards the cigarette.

He sees that he is just a scared little boy. Not as tough as he thought he should be. Not ready for what he’s supposed to do next.

He slaps himself, hopes machismo alone will drag him if it has to into those mountains. So many wretched people, living like this for so long. And he was just a man. The terror of balancing the world on your shoulders, is when you slip, and slip you will, no one else will want to try and pick it up.

Paramedic Emile Cange almost stayed, promised he’d comeback, said if they were gonna do this they had to do it right, plot it out back in Brooklyn. Bring back a solid crew, some real equipment, get a base.

A reporter from the Washington Post snaps some pictures of Adon crying his eyes out in uniform. Dirty, bloody sweaty grime on FDNY uniform that he shouldn’t really have been wearing.

The guards watch him sob to himself on his knees in the dirt. Seated among them is Fritz LaForrest.

“Why does the blan cry?” one guard asks another.

“He cries as if this were his people, perhaps we were his people in another life ” notes Fritz in Haitian Creole.

Adon is on his knees, his head in his hands, his head in the dirt. He sees Zoe’s face and wants her to hold him, wants to cry in her arms more than he’s wanted anything in his life. He wishes he was dead, better to be dead than to be a coward. But he does not possess the fight to lead Tiputti and his men to their glory, and he’s not a man willing to lead others to their graves. Nor is this his land, his people, his country; right? No one asked him to come!

“I would clap for you two or three claps, or perhaps you would prefer I play a tragic violin,” says towering Fritz, who works for someone who pays well and wants this man out of country before dark, or two shots.

“You did a very good job Mr. Adon. Now it is time to get you home before the hostilities commence.”

For the earthquake had only interrupted briefly the long running war between Lavalas and the former Maccoutes and the Group of 184; the local oligarchy running the show.

Fritz helps him up out of the dirt. Hands him his medical bag and his kit. Adon gets into a waiting car. It drives him to the airport. Twice the driver asks him, hospital or airport. Hospital where the Unit C men are waiting, or into the hands of the marines for arrest and deportation.

The Marines place him in immediate arranged custody, Cassidy talks them out of bringing him back to America in full manacles. Reports are filed, then lost. Everyone seems happy he’s alive. Post-traumatic stress disorder. A Marine, tells Adon, ‘you meant well brother, but this is a mess best left in the hands of the paid professionals’.

And sure it was.

Cassidy and Adon are to be evacuated to Miami, Florida a little later in the afternoon in a military cargo plane loaded with Haitian civilians who were lucky enough to have blue passports.

Sak passé?” asks Cassidy Vale.

Nap Boule,” Sebastian Adon responds. We’re on fire.

The afternoon before they left, before Sebastian showed up to be arrested at the airport. A woman called someone from Unit C and asked to speak to Cassidy Vale, she introduced herself as Maya Solomon from the Jenkins Penn Haiti Relief Organization; a new celebrity funded endeavor; they had head a group of young Haitians wanted to be EMTs, had heard Cassidy Vale was “a dependable dude.”

Why don’t you get Sebastian back to New York, you wait two weeks you hear from us we’ll salary you for six months to form up a team to take care of the camps on the Petionville golf course. That’s called in a Gaelic, am offer he can’t refuse based on a duty to act that is clear as the sky turns black and blue.

 

 

 

34

 

 

 

 

            Dominich Asbun, the Palestinian-Columbian EMT, soon on his way to medical school reflects back in Brooklyn about their recent trials, works and projects. He packs his things from out his tint apartment near the above ground J train rails in on the Bushwick-Bedstuy boarder.

 

It’s harder than I thought it’d be, even though I haven’t (much) questioned my decision to come back now. I don’t know what it is  that I can’t shake, but I think it’s less of what you might expect off the top of the dome – I don’t feel appalled by the return to excess that is American living juxtaposed with living in and by a situation of such deep scarcity. Nor is it really a comparison of all that suffering in Haiti to all this comfort and self-centeredness in the US. Though, I was pretty fucking annoyed at JFK waiting for my bags by CNN on over the luggage carousel, with breaking news of a car chase in Las Vegas, no reports yet on who is being chased or why he or she’s being chased, stay tuned for updates, and Quest’s Travel Clinic, germs are everywhere and you should wipe everything down with wipes after someone touches it, wipe your passport and wipe your hand and wipe your cock, and let’s follow Quest to the store and buy this and this and this and this – “Spend money now, stay healthy later” – then why we should invest in gold or buy an LG TV, and in world news John Travolta arrives in Haiti, carrying a team of doctors and nurses and Scientologist Volunteer Ministers. So let’s say the frivolity and dumbassity of our mainstream culture can be bothering but that’s nothing new, though I guess it is much harder to put up with after something like the experience of Port-Au-Prince. But, as I was saying, it’s also moving away from a direct and irrefutable importance (if you want to see it that way), a feeling of doing something and doing something good that people really, really need, and then walking away from that importance and that need and not sure if you’re turning your back on someone or on yourself or it’s just hard to get back to stability when part of your mind has switched to Survive Within the Instability mode. I don’t want to talk too much to (most) people about so much I’ve seen in so little time (where the fuck do you begin? How will they ever care the same way you do) but for now at least it’s always there.

 

It’s like being in love: it haunts you the same way and your eyes move to its pulse the same way, and here I am needing sleep, and still actually in love, and plus the in love of leaving Haiti, and already thinking of how and when to get back. Like Emile said, though: gotta be sure to give your mind a break and if you go back, go back strong. I know, and that’s part of why I left, but like in love reason is hard to digest sometimes. It is what it is, as Sebastian once said.

The first day back to work with Delta during briefing there’s debate over when to waive baggage fees, and when to remember that it’s a business and even High Value Customers in this newly begun Year of the Customer have to pay sometimes when the mistakes are theirs. “Atlanta prints a list of which employees waive the most bag fees, as a percentage of total bags checked, and it’s very disturbing to see that some employees waive 100% of the bags they check.” Apart from the hella things to think initially, and I’m at briefing still short on sleep, but nonetheless: at some point in the discussion I’m happy to see these cocksuckers arguing over checked luggage; a lot of them I’m sure are tired of Haiti in the news and most of them, I’m glad, don’t know or really care that I went and, in many ways, am still more there than at JFK. “There ain’t no reason things are this way,” goes one song, and the other, “Maybe this is how it’s supposed to be.” Yea – and like the kids last night in my apartment joking about rotting corpses, we’re nothing but I don’t know how many trillion separate worlds jostling together, sometimes really making our way into one another, but mostly removed and living in the flash of time we’re given and in the end – as far out from everything as you can get – there’s no one to blame for nothing.

 

My own sphere’s been changed deep and permanent and I’ll keep it that way, just like I’ll keep somewhere with me that first text from Emile Cange about going to Haiti, the next few days of rushing to prepare, a couple hundred dollars here and there and then waiting waiting waiting like it might not even happen; the text on Saturday morning and me telling Al, “I’m going, hommes!” – airports and heavy bags and standing in line forever, the plane over-pumped and missing the landing slot and another fucking night to wait in Miami; getting to know Sammy and kickin’ it with the team and ‘window seat, please’ and landing at last and inside the plane throwing boxes of water bottles out and sweating, hours on the tarmac and leaving and that’s slowly how we started seeing Port-Au-Prince: one small section at a time, hours there and then bused somewhere else and hours there; at the first compound sleeping by makeshift gym equipment and using the bench press mats for sleeping, the tent as a mat, the people posting up on the roof next to us and making everyone a little nervous; the boxes of Balance Bars and similar and three people guarding the distribution of water; Cliff Bars and Vic’s huge bag of things to eat, the dogs roaming the compound and eating our scraps, somehow; the bright yellow shirts of the scientologists and what the fuck are they all doing here anyway, though they did help us a lot, and watching them heal via touch assist and maybe I should grant them the same respect I grant all religions in general despite my general apathy, or maybe it makes complete sense to be bothered with the healing by touch when real medicine is such a scarce and desperate commodity right now; the first trip to the hospital and setting up the first ER, getting blood on your gloves and IV lines, the media everywhere, the abandoned rooms full of absolutely necessary supplies and organizing them and running around looking for more and the first night’s ride back looking out the tap tap at the phantom world around us; the buildings destroyed but not the people and not their movement and the big aftershock and the lady jumping off the balcony and people not wanting to go back inside and what it means to sleep outside on your sleeping bag on concrete with Orion’s Belt and the Big Dipper and Polaris and all the rest of the order up there steady and constant above you while your shoes are your pillow; more days at the hospital and nights at the hospital and fighting to keep your head level, your senses clear, alert; to need sleep but go on without it because people need so much more and always something to do if you want to keep moving badly enough; the media spotlight if you want it and a little disgust at the camera-chasers whether you want it or not; getting to know people brought up in Port-Au-Prince and stories and seeing the maddening beauty of some Haitian women, and the almost-mad way some Haitian men offered and asked for blood-backed loyalty; talking one friend out of suicide over that loyalty and talking another into getting the fuck out of Haiti, despite that loyalty; still needing more people and more supplies in a place already so congested; meeting cousins of friends and cousins of friends of friends and looking for family members out of touch and looking at the endlessly heavy piles of rock and steel and wondering always how many bodies still down there, how many people still alive?  The life of the island itself, separate from the people: dogs and chicks and hens and the mountains, distant but surely alive, barefoot again in the grass and with this same pen in hand, climbing the mango tree and carving into it, the way the sun came steadily no matter what had transpired during the night, the wind and the ocean in the distance, all of it a reminder of how small our presence is compared to the permanence of the land; the smell of bodies and it wasn’t everywhere like the news said but when it was there you knew it and it felt like the smell knew you, somehow – writing shit down as if trying for poetry has absolutely anything to do with it, but my pen handy still….the new wave of BSVAC and to be a leader and to see how little you can affect anything on a large scale, and praying it doesn’t become funny and still coming up with plans and ideas; the camps by the airport and the UM field hospital feeling better than the General Hospital, even at night AC, and feeling somehow rogue everywhere thanks to the guns and the disorder and they say it’s a good idea to stay with your group but you can do whatever the hell you like, ultimately, except get on a plane to the US without an American passport; flashing my passport and waiting for the plane, waiting and finally a Coast Guard plane opens up and it’s strange to fly and not have a window to look out of, the movement keeps you guessing at everything but when you land you know for sure; the flight back to NYC and the haze that is lack of sleep, not sure of what you’re doing and still in love with something horrible and beautiful – I’ll keep it somewhere with me and I don’t know when I’ll go back. It’s with me, even though each day back is a little more grounding, and even though the boots I wore jumping into planes and lifting people and moving me through the blood and earth of Port-au-Prince, Haiti, are now being flushed with New York City smog and snow.

\

 

35

 

 

 

I soon later met Cassidy and Sebastian about a week after they got back, sometime around 4 February, Sebastian picked us up in a White Honda Civic. We drove to the Dutch Kills Bar in Queens near the Citicorp Tower. The floor was covered in saw dust, there was gypsy Jazz playing and we took a small table in the back, for a critical stress debriefing.

Sebastian asked the tender for a drink called ‘the fire fighter’, I had vodka soda, and Cassidy had a beer. And we tried to as to figure out, what had or hadn’t’ happed. Who was to blame and why.

Sebastian told me about Unit C, about his promise, that crazy promise too many people probably made the Haitians to come back with resources. This was interesting though, a plan to train them as EMTs. We drank a lot at the ethanol fueled ‘post-stress debrief’. Having shared such a mass trauma it was important for all of us to believe there was something we could do, we made a pact to try.

 

Cops pulled us over on the bridge home at a check point on the Pulaski Bridge. We were all drunk as shit, Sebastian at the wheel. But out car full of EMTS though got to keep it moving. I was off to medical school in Dominica, Cassidy would be back in Haiti in just a few weeks and would stay there laying the ground for the Unit C group and surely a lot was still to be done. Sebastian pledged to use his group the Banshee Association to pull together the resources we’d need for the redeployment. The plan was intuitive; to form an EMT Modular training and teach whoever was left from Unit C how to carry it out.

Then mass train Haitians as rescue workers.

I don’t know if anyone can take away from a story what we saw down there. All the bodies, all the misery and all the death. I wouldn’t be able to rejoin the efforts until after my training as a physician. Cassidy would spend the next six months in Haiti and three months after in Pakistan and his life would never be the same again. Sebastian was apprehended by the secret police and ambulance workers the day after our pact in the bar.

 

He was supposedly interred in Coney Island Hospital and put to death via drugs and needles, electricity. While inside those hospital walls being rearranged and tortured the FDNY began a most rigorously staffed investigation to purge him from its ranks.

But, Sebastian Adon, so beloved by the gods and spirits; forty days later he was reborn and an angel was sent to retrieve him and put him back to his hard works. The trial and the witch hunt for card carrying Banshees soon upcoming, organized by the FDNY’s Bureau of Investigations and Trials were to actually be the very least of his concerns.

 

 

The Chief of the New York City Fire Department, Chief Perugia a bluberous man, long alarmed by the Banshee News paper’s general agitation in union, wage and racial equality concerns stated bluntly, “this is exactly what we need to put him on trial and discredit that goddamn paper once and for all. Investigator Shields and five others would interview no less than 75 witnesses over the next two years and produce 38 charges against Adon for Haiti related matters.

 

In a recorded interview conducted by the Bureau of Investigations and Trials:

“You know what gets me with all you tree hugging “save the world” psychopaths? You all go running down for the latest cause, and then leave, having made yourself feel good. How come none of you want to relocate to Haiti? I mean come on, you are all gonna save the planet, and everyone on it… Why not go live there? Oh that’s right… because if you tried the shit you all pull up here they would cut your fucking heads off with a machete!

Tell me Sebastian “I must be a legend in my own mind” Adon, hypothetically speaking of course… What is your opinion on a person who leaves his post on his City Ambulance to just run down and play hero for two weeks? Do you think that person should be butt fucked when he gets back to work?

What kind of a message does that send to the rest? I mean, a person just leaves his post because he feels the need to be a raging asshole? And what about the people who work at that job whose lives get disrupted because they are now forced to work in the slots created by the self-absorbed liberal scumbag who left his post? What do you think about a scumbag like that, hypothetically speaking?

I can tell you my opinion… Hypothetically speaking, I hope that the employer of that raging scumbag bends him over and drives the ambulance he walked away from straight up his ass…Sideways.”

Such was submitted by the Bedford Stuyvesant Ambulance Corps. Both Rocco who had served down there but one night and Danny Marks only by day, who both testified against Adon in the upcoming trial. Captain Raeburn, the commanding officer refused to testify in either direction.

In another letter, of which there would eventually number hundreds both praising and indicting EMT Sebastian Adon to the Bureau of investigations and trials:

“With all due respect, I do not approve of anyone using profanity, or launching personal attacks on anyone, in any forum. While Sebastian is to be admired for his drive, there is a reason that protocols are put in place, and it is not “as you put it, the piece of paper” that is essential, but the background, education and experience that is the most important asset in working mass casualty incidents.

Mr. Adon, not only misrepresented his level of training, but attempted to circumvent the Command structure established for the safety of all working on the ground in Haiti. Furthermore, he violated several well established and venerated safety procedures that in fact, placed others in grave jeopardy.

Among the worst of his transgressions, was believing that he had the authority to try take command over a compound that was being led by individuals with more experience, knowledge and organizational skills based on years of performing disaster emergency medicine.

His behavior ultimately disrupted the continuity of care, he refused to accept what his designated role as not important enough, and decided to freelance, because working within the team concept was unacceptable to him. It is a shame that he did not want to be humble and learn and a further shame that he had to be detained by the USMC to ensure that he left the country.

Lastly whether he likes it or not, he has a job in NYC, and he is relied upon to show up for work and perform that job. Having his relatives call him in as sick and lie about his whereabouts is just plain wrong and dishonest and places a strain on an already heavily stressed 911 system.

His intentions might have been well placed, but his poor judgment and actions cannot be excused, nor should they praised, because he became more of a problem than part of a solution.”

This came from an “anonymous responder”, but along with many more came from the Church of Scientology due to their “fair game” policy or ruin any and all who critique them.

 

In another letter to the Bureau of investigations and trials:

“The actions and tactics used by EMT Adon were dangerous to personnel on the ground in Haiti. They exhibited a total disregard for authority and leadership structure of any kind.”

 

 

 

Epilogue

 

 

 

Fuck. Where the fuck am I? Where, the fucking hell am I?

What did they do with her!

Damn my weakness!

I’ve shot myself in the face and the foot, again I know it.

 

Sebastian Adon wakes up in a small locked room in Coney Island Hospital. He’s wearing aquamarine scrubs; the left leg has the hospital name and logo on it, that’s just about the only way he knows where he is, or what time zone he may be in. Déjà vu, in the worst possible way over takes him. The last thing he remembers, or suspects is a party valid memory; he was riding in the rear of tap-tap truck into the tallest mountains of Haiti. He was dying of thirst, amongst other things. He thinks he remembers the smell of iron. The taste of his own blood, the smell of rotting corpses and their rankness magnified by the impervious heat clearing out into cool mountain air. He is in cuffs. He is blind folded. He is huddled with other prisoners. He is then taken and shot twice in the head and the last thing he remembers is the smell of the grass.

 

BRAKA. BRAKA.                                      

 

Gunpowder.

 

But now he’s back in Breuklyn, or is it Brooklyn; which means quite a lot hasn’t gone to plan; at least also for those that had meant to put him in the ground.

He now rubs his most groggy head.

Stands shakily up in his small locked padded room. Looks in a wall mounted mirror, all his hair is gone. He looks a little fitter, looks a little tanner, but he still doesn’t really recognize his face. His last memory of Haiti is sitting in the back of a flatbed truck, driving into the hills to train guerrilla medical workers. Being captured and shot for it.

 

Something obviously has gone quite wrong.

 

He takes water from the sink and splashes his face. The name “Cassidy Vale” is stuck in his head, but he doesn’t remember who that is, completely, if at all. The last thing he was thinking was how fresh the grass smelled lying in it and how the tropical soil smelled as he bled into it.

How the Island might bring him back to life.

The Island and what was buried below it, and the machines that caused the earthquake.

The machines? Yes, the machines that caused the earthquake. The flying saucer men!

Mad thoughts.

His no good, terrible, very bad year when all had completely fallen apart was now coming back in parts. 2010, a shit show. The view from an Israeli prison window was emerging; Jeremy and Maria were dead; Theodore Becker too. He was attempting to piece everything back together. And then the ground shook below him.

Knocking him to the floor.

 

The year is 2010 Common Era. He tries to repeat what he knows about himself like crazy people do in movies or bet noire lit. ‘I’m a City EMT. I’m locked up in the funny farm, again. Except, something, everything has been changed.’

 

 

What the hell was he doing back in New York City?

He dashes the face he can barely recognize against the mirror.

Plow!

The next day, they discharged him as if nothing very serious had happened.

 

    They said some “special lady friend” was coming to collect him; told him to take it real slow, that he needed to take his meds and not let his mind wander; that he was “one of them”, “a hero”, part of “the department”. They told him he might have some memory lapses, but not to worry; everything was going to be fine. He had the Seroquel blues and five other various vials, lithium of course; the hand-shakes, the world was a black and white copy; he’d done this all before and it didn’t seem real.

This broad, who he doesn’t recognize with long blond-brown hair picks him up in a white Honda Civic that she says is his, but he remembers driving a yellow Chevy Blazer.

She says her name is “Adelina”, but that’s an untruth as far as his inclinations tell him. She looks gorgeous so he plays along. She tosses him a pack of American Spirits, but for shit sure he always thought he smoked Newports. Or Noblisse; what’s Noblisse he asks himself.

Never mind.

‘Adelina’ says she’s taking him to a good Russian banya. A clean one where they don’t speak English. The Mermaid Spa in Seagate to lounge out and get his stress out.

“My head’s all back fucked,” Sebastian says to this broad, who is apparently also his old lady, “what’s today’s date?”

“It’s March baby, March 13th. You better drop more on flowers and dinner for me tonight babe.”

“When did I get back from Haiti?”

“Haiti? What are you talking’ about babe?”

“I went down to Haiti on January 16th.  Right after the earthquake. With the Bedstuy volunteers and the Church of Scientology. When did I get back?”

She looks at him a little crazy person look. She quietly stares, watches him take a pull of his cigarette, she looks a lot more like a “Elena” than a Adelina.

“Baby boy, listen, you gotta try and remember that not all you remember is real. You tried to kill yourself on February 2nd, the anniversary of Jeremy’s death. You took a lot of those blue pills. Near Overd’ed; you’ve been in Coney Island Hospital since then. About forty days they wanted, but you’ve got friends in the management. Which isn’t that bad. You kept asking the doctors about Haiti, telling um you were down there as a medic, but baby, you ain’t ever been to Haiti. There’s no such thing as a Haiti.”

“What about the earthquake, I mean I vividly remember going down to a place called Haiti after an earthquake.”

“What earthquake? What’s Haiti?” But he can see in her eyes she knows what Haiti is.

“The big fuckin’ earthquake. That just happened in Haiti.”

“What’s Haiti? What are you talking about?”

She gives him a look.

“There wasn’t a big earthquake. There’s no such place called Haiti. The doctors say you concocted this whole fantasy world after your attempted suicide to cope with the problems in your life. But it’s going to be ok. I’m not gonna leave you un-attended.”

“What do I do for a living?”

“What? Are you serious?”

“Dead serious, before I tried to kill myself what did I do for a living.”

“You’re a fire fighter baby.”

That didn’t any logical sense.

“I thought I was an EMT.”

“You used to be an EMT before you took the fire fighter promotional a year ago. You really don’t remember?” She looks at him sympathetically. Puts her finger quietly to her lips.

“Everything is big grey mess,” he says.

“Baby, you gotta be careful, you gotta take your pills, this bipolar disorder is gonna do you in. You make me so worried about you.”

“But I don’t know how to fight fires. I drive an ambulance, I carry fat hysterical Puerto Rican women down stairs. I give people their oxygen.”

“Are you sure about that? Think harder about that.”

Then pins begin to fall and Sebastian gets a shiver up his spine. He doubles over a second, and low and behold, she was right. He hadn’t been on an ambulance in over a year. The Republic of Haiti never existed at all. He now remembers becoming a fire fighter at the age of twenty five; remembers working first on a ghetto Engine in Brownsville before getting sent back to the South Bronx, remembers it all more clearly than any of the vague notions of this “Haiti” he’s clinging to.

Something has clearly been changed. He never stayed as an EMT, why would anyone do that shitty miserable job even if it paid more than enough to survive? He’d never gone back to Israel and been viciously programmed and tortured. And the earthquake never happened, because there was no such real place as the Republic of Haiti. There had been a switch, and he was clinging to fragments of memories from a reality that was unraveling quietly.

“Get it Sebastian? What happened on that island was all in your head. You have bipolar baby, shit, you’re a sad mess my brave battered lover dear. But you baby are a hard bodied, sexy hero. New York’s Bravest. And I’m gonna stick by you no matter what, and ride the shit out of you when we get home.”

What’s real anyway?

This broad, this broad who he’s never seen before in his life, claiming to be his lady friend. The name “Blazhennaya”, seems stuck in his head, who that really was he had no idea either.

“How long was I in the bin?”

“Forty days Daddy. They had to use the current on you, get the pins to realign in your crazy man head.”

“It felt so real, I was in Haiti; and I was an EMT!”

“Like a paramedic baby? In Haiti? If I didn’t love you so much I’d never be able to put up with your way too crazy shit. You know I love you so much baby, right? Otherwise I couldn’t put up with this mad shit.”

“Yeah.”

And yet he thinks, who are you again?

What had happened? The airlift, the medical internationalist column, the revolution, Cassidy, Dominich, Tiputti Capois and the machinations of Mr. Whitley, and now, back in New York it faded away like a bad dream. His “girlfriend” was alive, he’d never become a medical worker that long, he’d never gone to that evil Jerusalem colony; and he was severely bipolar. But you can forgive a New York City fire fighter just about anything except pension fraud. Sebastian Adon looking out the car window onto Ocean Parkway begins to cry with joy.

It was all just a terrible nightmare.

“Don’t cry baby. Men don’t cry,” the woman he’s never seen before tells him.

She opens the glove compartment of ‘his car’, and hands him a soft embroidered plain grey bandana. He covers his face with it to wipe his less than manly tears.

 

 

 

By the time they’re done with the banya, nine hours later and he’s naked in her arms fucking her like an savage animal, it’s as if the whole “Haitian” episode was a spooky dream, the “girlfriend” feels and fucks familiar, as he packs his cock inside her from behind he thinks her hair color seems to change color as they tantrically thrust. Like maybe she is super natural. Or maybe she is someone he’s had by his side for a while. Her eyes get big as she sucks on him.

He fucks her violently.

She resents such animalism coming from such a fourth dimensional man.

He still has a job on Engine 808, because it’s a civil service position and even firemen go crazy once in a while. As long as they do it off the clock and out of public view.

“Firefighting.” A good gig.

After screwing this stranger in every single orifice he goes on to the roof and opens the door to the elevator gear room where he remembers there to be a small metal box. Rubber banded to the top of the box is a dusty laminated placard which states, “IN CASE OF EMERGENCY”. Inside is a pack of Noblisse cigarettes, a signal flair, and a grey leather bound book filled with poems, some naughty drawings, some photos, letters and diary entries. It’s a memory box for the reality he has now arrived in

 

And that is how he begins to separate the fakeness from the real. With the help of the smoke monster, that sexy brunet angel and maybe also his god hashem. All he’d needed to be well has a good hard fucking a hot banya. To scrub off the death. Scrub off the hospital. Good and well as new.

 

With Brooklyn snow falling on his face. Ayiti then called Haiti, Haiti made to disappear in the minds of all these plump Northern Euro-Americans and all her sacrifices, all the things that were to come, for a minute he can separate the fakeness from the real. They had lost 1/3 of over 500,000 slaves in a rising against France, England and Spain. They’d exported the revolution to Latin America and abolished Spanish rule there. They were quarantined, forced to pay 21 billion to France occupied by the Americans from 1915-1934, they endured the brutality of Papa and Baby Doc, they endured the hurricanes, floods and now the earthquake. And now no one in this citadel, in this country on top of the mountain cared any more about those poor unfortunate souls.

He’s made an oath to those people that he’d come back with equipment, materials, people and training. He realized that the place in which he had been born was a citadel on the highest mountain, that it was a reality far removed from the hundreds of thousands dying in the ravines below.

He knows that as soon as he puts on that mask and lights a Noblisse he’ll remember absolutely everything, especially thirty days later after a fast to purge the hospital drugs from his mind and body. He knows; he knows he’ll remember his past lives and the other dimensions and the world to come.

He remembers exactly how many times he’s been struck down fighting for the truth.

 

Adelina, that beautiful creature arrives on the roof in a grey bathrobe. She barely even shivers in the falling snow. Sebastian is on that roof with his little box of memories.

She pities him a little all the things he’s had to do for god, country and Emma Solomon.

 

“So now with your pretty new face, your cushy new job and two Z.O.B. cells I have in mind for the work and frankly so does your boss Emma Solomon; now that you’re rested, now you got shit shaved showered and fucked like a champ; now you’ve got just nine months to get back down to the island and train those all those people how to break the quarantine once and for all. You up for all that Adon?”

He says something in Hebrew, but she speaks only English, Russian, and Czech and German, he salutes, she salutes and takes her down stairs for another few rounds.

Sebastian Adon loves taking orders from women.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

PART TWO:

“The Fix Up”

 

 

The story of how a rag tag band of ambulance workers, spooks, sex workers and freedom fighters raise a brigade to invade the battered Republic of Haiti and begin a guerrilla medical program for the people.

 

 

 

#808 Fearless Hopeless Hearts

#808: Fearless_Hopeless_Hearts

 

“Tell me story time!”

She curls up on me her ethanol engine exhausted.

I want to fly us_so far away:

This cab is now a magic carpet for a story cabaret.

Using-a-punchdrunk-kitten in the back seat of a Breuklyn-southbound-gypsy as my muse. One doesn’t choose,

_the muse they use. Or when.

There were worse assignments.

Given to more cowardly men!

And my constitution is and always will be_a wide canvas for futurist painting_

My-heart-when-fainting_

Is grinding, then breaking it_causes Brighton to flood and post Haitian earthshaking:

My soul is for barter_sign the dotted line,

I’m a phantasm now-shaking collapsing-and up for the tainting.

Exsanguination! Being bled dry!

There’s blood in my eye,

A mind game, that’s fine, but the mind can unravel before the right time, and the things it envisions; the things you complete; like a thousand lifetimes emptying out of your whispers_

_Like two shots in the dark_unloading my heart on the cold of the street!

 

Vasa, she whispers:

“Why so sad all the time?_Tell me a story  with Camels and Bandits and rhyme!- and keys strung to kites_ mix your bi-winning antics and Arabian nights! Make more epic poems! Can-we-not-agree_the audience cannot swallow_ an endless account, as you wallow in all of your feelings for me.”

 

 

Starry night burns bright, I begin again:

I have the will!

In a previous life she believed mostly in kill-or-be-killed.

She comes from place_ So brutal, so base, frustrated, consumed by the men in her face,

The following ointments, which vodka let boil to a brine of pure hate_

_juxtaposed with the partisan flame of my zeal,

I’ve been reborn in a futurist gate.

_And invested with powers to steal or to heal!

Absorb all of your pain_ and restore your ideals!

And you will open my chest with your fingers: And start spinning the wheels_

It’s Russian roulette, the way that she feels!

Magic carpets to carry us so far from this place where we are_Highspeed races and chases_

_ Drive bys taking place without use of a car!

Her kiss is the bullet of deadly surrender.

The sweetness of service she’s willing to render_greatest by far:

To enroute replace my pumping mechanism, without medical training_without even leaving the hint-of-a-scar!

A pipe dream_a pipe bomb_ a zen.

Near endless composition, the art of storytelling unleashed from my phone or my pen_

In base thirst for a woman I’ve known in other lives.

And desire to keep knowing forever_

_If forever could just be again, and again.

I am trained to fix a broken heart, my own excluded!

For the heart is a time bomb_ your emotions are fire ball bearings_

_Your wiring is now made faulty,

Your rational mind is at times misguided-deluded…

  • Vasili, please, I’m lying here counting on your story to ease, I want erotic adventure, daring or fun, no more talk of feelings or the latest bombastic-head-fuck-with-a-gun, I like allegory, the-cave-with-the-thieves? What’s the name of that story?! No more tales of the mechanical heart, right before bed!”
  • “I’ll tell you my dreams about star crossed Chechen peasants instead”.

 

II.

 

How can I, live so many lives; but be without you so many nights?

Cold sweats. And the ache of separation, imprisonment and then exile:

Broken bottles or spears or my pen’s wronging rights,

Sweat itself often passes as tears.

While writing my politics off as mere hooligan fist fights?

I didn’t mean to trouble you with me, But! We seem unable to end it quickly,

Or end me quietly.

I have been hunted like a partisan and I found refuge in your secret kisses.

Now we are partisans together I suppose, but you warned me you prefer the cities to the forests. The Peony to the Rose.

What about Peony verses Prose?

I prefer bath houses to General Winter_and the wearing of my solitude below four layers of my clothes.

So how now?

Where will we find shelter?

We’ve run helter-skelter on the glass-bottle-broken-beaches or that Bulgar tavern where we hide.

            They have done so many things to me,

Until now I cannot recognize my own face.

I listen it seems, but prefer to confide.

But it is just the face of a man claiming love!

Cupid’s arrows mutilate.

The barrage burns apart my barricades like katusha rockets, raining from above.

Don’t fail me fearless heart,

Ill get back to you!

From Shali, the mountains, Brighton or Grozny too!

With black eyes, black ties, last tries; this is no mere seduction, or simple desire:

 It’s a visceral longing to woe. 

Putin has declared war! But foolishly I long for just peace on this front line fight_

_A lull in the violence allowing me to steal my way back to you_guided by moon and my tragic-parachute-knock around-dagger man-incite.

The barricade-we-made was cobbled together with useless albiet pretty word;

Damn all my grandiose promises,

The misuse and abuse of fables and myth that confuse what I see with that which you claim that you heard.

I am almost quite old.

In old soul time.

I bought what you sold. Dash my face against Dagestan’s rocks, break all my bones if in this life I am more coward_more villain than hero and bold…

 

“Silly Vasa,” she giggles, pulling her supple  body supine even closer to closeness of mine, “Your passions on fire when you press your fingers to prose,_I’m drawing a line_ press your fingers to hold, I want Ambulance Action Peony ambush_No thorns of the Rose, and my grand design for the story this time is to hear about the dark in your soul, the black rabbit hole where your ambulance goes!”

 

 

III.

 

A Poet paramedic: warm body, heart now made stone cold. I have the will, I carried bodies in piles through Bed-Stuy,

Up moutains_we always will battle the Reaper uphill.

I never cried then, I did not even wince,

Every night I’m not dreaming of loving your company, kissing your lips_I’m flashing right back_senses under attack: to life tremors we trembled_in the City of Port-au-Prince!

We carried legions off to what passed as hospitals.

I’ve had to watch ten thousand die, now all I want is to carry you away from the coast of Brooklyn, magic carpet fly.

Fly in the face of your husband, your secrets;

The dance I do with my stories, in trains or in cabs, returning with you

To the place that you lie.

But I dance again from time to time. You bring it out of me.

“Why cry old soul?” She whispers.

“I saw things I wasn’t meant to see.”

“Women like me?”

“You’re a dangerous creature we both can agree.”

She gives me fourth and fifth tries, the body dies, but the song of the heart is timeless, therefore free.

 

IV.

 

Because when you are gone there are only words. Words make the basis of poems_ forming a plea from the deepest depths of my heart’s agony.

When each parting seems so long my mind invents monsters which lurk which are not even there!

In a silky, billowing dress_ I’d hide under your covers, I’d caress the folds of your being, run fingers through darkness through the locks of your hair.

  • “Until I’m safe too?”
  • “Like my fallen angel with her wings on gold fire; Dorogaia I need you.”

I pace the Brighton Boardwalk so long that all these lives mesh together ’til the story seems too wild, too Noire to be true;

  • “Turn this cab toward the seaboard, turn Idlewild, let’s run away, before we break day_”
  • “You haven’t a clue! Mad man! A poorly laid plan!”

Begging for some proof of goodness of his kind.

  • “The validity of his mind!”

A million cold stones acquired over long tenuous adventures, but regrets are for traitors on rewind.

Battles and then conflicting accounts of my enemy’s treacheries abound.

An escape plan is successful only when the underlying logic is found!

The logic is half based on a whisper, and half on a dream.

Their scissor hands dripping from love of the kill. Demons enter the portal with intention to scheme. To make you their mark, or turn me to a skell or their shill.

They separated me from my humanity, loving you is against my rational will.

She’s half in the old world,

And half in the new,

Half iron curtain, half crystal glass shoe.

The cab nears the Verrazano precipice, the Brighton abyss where we will be separated anew.

Tell me Odysseus: What mean me to you?

Was that voyage anything but unjust for all involved?

Once I had a white motor cycle, I was a fugitive slave, I was evolved. I killed the master and stormed the plantation and then half of the problem was solved!

And on it you waited to escape north toward the blue moon.

  • “Sooner than soon? Did your love for me grow after the rooftop fist fight in the light of my murderous swoon?”
  • Dorogaia that’s right.”
  • “I don’t want such a life; a life of no humor, a life or death struggle, the terror of night.”
  • “Stories for night, are about all of the wrongs swept away by the dawn and the light. I require one muse only. One significant. One longing. Never again in the trenches so vast, so empty and so lonely.”
  • “The story of us? Us is a wild tragic roundabout fuss!”
  • “Is_to_be_a_tale_of_triumph. Over the hopeless heart via the art of romantic prolonging!”
  • “Righting or wronging?”
  • “I sought out your company.”
  • “Do it again.”
  • “I do it still out of the longing.”

 

I have a voice and I have a loud pen!

And I have passion and it overflows my body until I see miracles in the streets.

The strength of forty men!

And the moon winks.

Then on Banner Ave. the story nightly completes.

And then again, the world’s smallest violin plays just for us, she thinks.

Why does such a long shadow fall over his house every time he drinks?

We are not star crossed.

We are not divided by a sea.

Or by barricades. Maybe we’re just in defiance of destiny.

Or the flaming up of the ghettos in the latest Caucasian raids.

When I looked to the sky I saw three ships sailing us apart.

You off to marriage and the world of the continent.

Me, bound forever to the belly of the ship enslaved only to my own fearless heart.

And as they sailed us apart, to never meet again,

Some sailors sang out, “The Nina, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria!”

“To the glory of the new world!” they toasted.

Vain Braggarts and white men.

But I begged the moon:

“Dasha, Dasha, Dasha! Why can’t you love a wild peasant like me?”

What fate was this where we have to part our story time in endless tragedy?

Death itself could not stop this kind of beating in my chest.

If am reborn another thousand lives,

Each time waking from a long kiss good night,

Each life I will call out to you again as my test.

The body will die, but its sleep is the cousin of rest.

So, tied again to the mast.

Shackled and blinded I swagger on hopeless, fearless heart.

In dreams, don’t forget me.

This was begged long ago.

I will steal away and climb to the roof of Mt. Olympus if I must to give the gods a show.

I’ll ask for the help of the spirits if God has no time for us courtesans.

Wild peasant partisans, from good families with magic carpets and reckless bi-winning minds. The heart yearns, the back breaks, the soul is on fire, the real man, he grinds.

Black until blue.

Carrying me, one day, with wings home to you.

And if you read my verses see if I still appear a slave.

And we can say we knew each other when I was a free man and you were a free woman. I’ve traded my weapons of war for the power to save.

There is only one chain I cannot learn easily how to break.

And that, is the one I first broke to be by your side. By your side, give or take.

I long for you.

It will always be that way. It has been that way since Labor Day.

But then, story time is easy for an old soul with a pen.

  • “You’re not like other men.”
  • “Hopeless, Fearless Heart how long apart must I wait to stay gone?”
  • “Vasa, I don’t know, forever. Or Until Dawn.”

#88 Ineffable Might!

# 88: INEFFABLE MIGHT!

 

 

1!

I have to get through tonight.

Through mid-trepadarious forward assaults on the best of my iron vest incites.

My failure of amorous insight I like best,

The hole in the hollow, the pump that replaced the very black heart you stole from my mostly tumultuous chest. Mm-hmhm.

The pretend of a sigh, I know not the reason the rest of us feast while beyond citadel gates the rest of them die.

You have no idea how I try, when each time, each slight, each break of a promise of long life to come presides over the wisp of a hum!

After a long kiss good night and each missing delight.

Is the price I pay, I repeat what I say’ I slip not a single bit eager away, since your departure, wrong or for right

Grim departure into Moscow’s deepest ring roaded abyss, the spire of citadels cracking the rims of the night.

Did I get the last part of this parable right, the cold comes so quick and pulls blankets across over and under, unearthly so deathly, so white?

Was the price that I paid for surviving the run and gun into 30 decay; the brak and bray of the fire fisted fight?

All just a lie, a lie upon lie; a fuck upon a fuck of hardly giving anything since your flight back to Moscow my mind run amuck!

Know the palm of my hand, from the width of my spite. And the nose to the palm and the fist to the fall and dashing and lashing the fuck of if it all,

Ineffable might!

The spittle the bleeding the taking the needing of need, the needing the worst kind of slashing and misreading, the cut of my guts and drop of the floor .

I can’t take one more bit of this shit; the wanting and needing and lusting and ego size feeding the lies that I tell in the dark in the blood in the the spit.

I have written nothing of note in a fortnight, the sublime in a rhyme the taking and selling and trading of time. The wasting of me, taking all I had left of shadow of man with an blackness of soul, that hole in my chest and the tack of the toll.

The words that in hatch marks we chiseled on the the tree of life, cut into the fabric of magic unknown. We cut with a knife a most frivolous thing; a tantric phallus with fairies, with cantankerous birds and bare breasted women based on the porno graphs as a young man I was shown!

Warbler please, I balter blather bother as I beg you on my knees, as my own skin is a second hand cloth that I have no mastery of, daphnia grazing swans as stabbing eyes.

The tower lies. the science of lord of the flies. and the words they use the fish gut stench of reasons for the uncouth means their ways implies.

Dear one, citizen scientists playing along using flashier cars well-oiled sport teams ongoing efforts to pretend that they’re strong;

Hyper Development just setting in the death of man in the forest somewhere is a trumpet cacophony playing along.

 

2!!

I have to get through tonight.

A black breaded bite.

A bit from a stripper pop cake, or the glare of cattle do ambulance lights!

Exploding the quiet of poorly spent plight. I am sure that even my audience will agree I pick a most precarious fight?

How did i find a woman like you? A painted face pixie/ glowing indomitable spirit. A triumph of happy delight.

For my pain is leviathan. Swallows me Jonas like whole, the whole of the real the epic created the lies and masks and the anted up toll.

The world to me is mountain.

A treacherous fort on a series of hills.

At time my heart stops for a minute or two and escape I go from the physical plane; a gust of grey smoke; above the knives of the killers

The laugh of the joke;

the spies and their lies; the whores and the pills; the dagger men banking on newly spent kills!

I escape.

With an ephemeral form; ineffable might.

I arrive in the future, a futuristical place; optimistically new: a futurist man remade in my vast powers of so endlessly loving the very most essense of you. (Adelina)

The sheer will of my love, you say what know me of love?

Its in my vertebral wires, the pumps and valves below and above; a flame driven of ebbing and tidying; expending reason, self abasing, or pleasing, it keeps sails on the good ship Adler aright;

The good ship takes flight:

With red balloon ballast; for the love of the goddess they’re calling a piece, I fly like a battalion of eagles, no goslings or geese! Get me out Sharkasa Waltham; take me back to your arms; take the thick of me deeply and thrust away all this pain give me back my Adelina, give me back my release!

Release to your arms, then everythings right; and out of the sickly black whiteness of my last winter’s long running night.

 

3!!!

How did I come to be in this place. In this night. Despite all my lastingly brazenly brokenous promises made; most find my goodness of motive in fuck or in fight.

I chose this. You’re right.

No Waltham, no you. That’s what I know. That steel hand on your chest is a pledge that I’d love and support you through it all.

No matter how far. Or the places apart that we go.

No matter the heights.

Unlimited loving, but lately my powers are limited few; alone in this grim Shrakasa camp; staring at screens, talking in circles. Dreaming of you. When i look in a mirror I see a masked man; hiding his weakness, his murderous features a terrible blight.

What know me now of love. Perhaps you were always right.

What questions are these?

My face has been dashed. I’ve had current, a beating or two, my face has been water board splashed. Bleedings and squeeze.

You hate when I beg and you hate worse when I bellow; but if I can pray prostrate to the thing I call god;

I can beg the swifter return of the woman I love on my knees.

 

4!!!!

 

Black Gates of Ringed Roads..

Halve the bad lands in between! Moscow where is Moscow! I am blind and bleeding from the ghastly things I’ve read but also seen!

I’m going to cut my very timber eyes-hatchets out for falling fancy i have invalidated the thrusts of bulldog black intent.

Replicate in my countenance a bleaker predilection, vast pre tension boils over; guest workers four leaf clovers; borrowed money money poorly spent.

Click boots on black tarmac prospects covered in haggardly snows, my un sound and both unquiet mind plays ballads to your kind;

to flaunt all trepid interpretations of my base medical vocations, back hand to brackish bankers, my boots will crunch his jaw and leave all these business men coksure now cock less grind.

I will beat him palpy pale, I’ll kill your Thomas cop I’ll brutalize your vile builder Andre and stab his heart with dagger bursts rip apart his vicious tale. Thought you my poems pretty song?  I’m a most violent violent nemsis to any motherfucker who has done my woman epic wrong !

Moscow where is Moscow its a place inside my mind; it’s a fortress its a mountain citadel, its a place I am kept from my only love and therefore it becomes a hell.

The deadness spreads inside me.

And the poems end but not my own is rightly neigh. I hate the thought of poetry, I like the thought of killing; killing myself to slaughter out the oligarchs and all your laundry list of vile, brutish  guys.

I hate now the face of me!

I could kill ten thousand Europeans

burn out every sand of Europe’s soil

Its just a place to rape and shit and pee.

What people want they go to see! I try and tell them what to think more of perfect you and less of violent raging me. And you underestimate the violence that was done to those by Europe done to you and done to me. Done to mine and done to yours, I have fallen and am in drowning in my tears of madness dash my face upon the floors;

You left me here for Moscow, I am thus a dog a broken wolf and breathing smoke.

Hanged men hang for forty days before thieves decimate the corpses for the secrets in their cloak.

What near a life by proxim we.

Three continents apart is our manufactured destiny.

And you so fearless, you so noble, you so perfect and so true. Were the only thing that held be from these bastards back, of fear for me and more for you.

The Moscow spires and the snow fall, the oldness and the thrill. The vastness of separation is a poem not a kill.

The winds howl out and call for layers, my words mean nothing but effigies of deed and love between our warring peoples might seem ineffable, indeed.

I see you in my all my happy dreams, your thrilling beauty juxtaposed with my potential coming might. But for now like tragic Mayakovsky and his Tatiana;

I am red.

And you are white.

#81 The Screw Tape

#81: The Screw tape

 

 

 

Lost in the screw tape meant to bind you!

Used to bind your half-caste hands.

We covet, oh how much we covet in just one day.

 

I like the idea of her long cream legs,

I like the sin.

I used just now entering her every.

Pause, I am no animal.

 

I have some morals, I have rationality;

A mountain of treason, I mean reason.

 

She, like Daria before, is spoken for.

And, with child.

And here I go to smash it.

 

Ah, the devil in me.

 

 

Ego? What the shit is that?

Ego, he convinces my lusting lumen,

“There are so many fish,” you say.

But, I snatch gleefully.

 

Empty down.

Down my gob will go more pills.

 

I suppose, so I can be well. That’s what the wise men say.

 

I can be well in hell.

They’ll take back my blue pajamas,

My brigand self.

Fix me I’m part white!

Take out me of here,

Give me my fucking oysters.

 

Lord, knows what citycide I could do.

I’d like a fuck right now,

Not the blue pill,

Not the white one.

Seven pills later.

I’m better now!

You know on the outside I’m a 13 year paramedic?

 

One day they will take that too.

 

 

I’d like a fuck.

A ludicrous notion, for I more deserve a bullet.

In the head.

For asset endangerment.

I deserve a backhand, at least.

 

For more broken promises,

For more dashed expectations.

Do enough of your hate me yet!

 

Two shots in the head, for endangering the Alawiite Mimi.

Mimi Marouf.

A blood daughter of the profit,

That’s why her group,

They got to trample on everyone in Syria.

 

When not lusting, or masticating horseshit.

Am I evolving?

Into the Baha’i Malcom X?

The Zionist general?

Universal happy man who tells jokes?

 

 

Grow up man.

Grow up.

They’d all say grow up.

33 is gonna be s big year.

 

 

Feed your ego no more triph.

Remember your wife and child.

Fight the desire to reduce yourself.

To loon. A killer. Or a devil.

Take you hand off your cock and close the screen.

Peasant. Serf.

The niggardly whitebacks are looking.

No one knows your code.

The leach, rip it off.

Your phone, into the river.

The poison,

 

It takes 40 days to get clear.

The Apple Biter himself!

 

“Grow up man.”

 

They took so much

You have,

You have,

You remember?

 

She said on the boardwalk,

 

“Grow up and do, great things. If you die,

If you die right now.

All the work we put into you was for nothing.”

 

Nothing at all.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

TarWir-Hadiir.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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