Scene Three
Upper West Side
They look out over privilege itself. The rooftop deck on the 17th story of the Trickovitch Family Penthouse looks North and West over the Hudson River, the Upper East Side, and also the George Washington Bridge. So much light and so much air, yet still under nine hundred American dollars, much to the chagrin of the Satmar Ivories who actually own the building; the House Trikhovitch is rent controlled.
Sebastian Adon is wearing his favorite cap and looking somewhere between manic and marmalade. His eyes strange and happy as though he wishes to recite a poem. On an adjacent bench in the roof garden, shirtless with a Noblisse dangling out his lips is his best friend and long-time partner in conspiracy Nikholai Trikhovitch.
Penthouse J has been in the hands of the House Trikhovitch Family the early 1981 Common Era. That was not such a hey-day for New York City as some newly arrived hip individuals have come to believe. Heretics all; by the mid-1980’s looters and vagrants were scaling the walls to steal anything not tied down. Well we thought it was called the 1980’s, that’s what smart phones and TVs said. Crack was wack! Heroin is back, they said, but who do you know that has tried it, sucked the moon rocks and kaboom! 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 for drugs, self-murder and petty crime. 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 $1,200 American a month for it adjusting for utilities and service fees. A good number of Jewish lawyers have been paid to figure out how to extract them from this property, so far unsuccessfully. For the Trickovitch family employ and are related to Jewish lawyers too. It was once a little more of zoo filled then filled again with animals and young girls with long legs. Now it is a sad empty place for plotting with Nicholai’s brothers living in other cities and his parents more frequently at their upstate Dacha.
Nicholai it is rumored is paralyzed with some dark depression, some sickness in him which makes him analytical. For a time he was married and making house in Midwood, Brooklyn deep in the shtetel but then his wife vanished and he barely leaves this Penthouse except for jaunts, benders really of consumption, mild whoring and occasionally a revolutionary plot.
Sebastian speaks of “her eyes” so he appears less crudely animalistic speaking of breasts and other luscious appendages. Behind this charade of romance, knowing him for so long, since teenage times; Nicholai knows the poet from the lust and savage.
“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,” mutters Sebastian Adon looking out north toward the palisades and George Washington Bridge where Harlem goes to die, or commuters go to Jersey.
This is the place to jump when you really want no mistakes made on the outcome, you have an 100% probability of death, and everyone knows that. Fleetingly Nicholai Trickovitch thinks of self-murder and Sebastian as he too videes the same Fort Washington district rising up as the highest point on the isle of Manhattan. Sebastian ruminates in butterfly flap of mental head space of all the times he’s wandered Fort Tryton Park with a lost lover holding her cold hands. One lover in particular comes to his mind for Fort Washington District; the Russian Jewish quarter perched up in the rafters of New York City. For after her, none of the other previous ones had mattered. But, then came Daria to kill him.
But, some neurons fire faster than others and then his mind quickly reverts to his newest fascination with the fairer of the species. All previous lessons are lost. Were Futurist New York anything like more medieval times, both Sebastian Adon and Nicholai Trickovitch; are the disgraced sons of Hebrew Dukes. In lay person terms, the prodigal sons of the Upper Middle Classes of New York Jewry; both blessed with privilege, education, several serfs and white skin coats; cursed with mental illness and revolutionary thinking.
Nikholai was briefly a private detective moon lighting as an accountant, wiggling his way listlessly through college. He is now working as a driver for the Red Cross in their vast housing and logistics Ponzi scheme, taking money raised from one catastrophe to band aid and water supply the next one.
He is also technically, mostly by association with more militant Sebastian; one eighth of the leadership of the Z.O.B., a network of insurgent cells and the editor of its underground newspaper, “the Banshee News Service”. He highly prefers conducting his revolutionary duties from the computer of this same Penthouse, moving things about the internet, correcting pamphlets and movement speeches. He was persuaded to manage the logistics for the First Haiti Operation, he was then persuaded to manage ground logistics in Port Au Prince for the expeditionary forces, and still later he joined the medical guerrillas in Colombia. But, he has only so much will to walk.
In this year, 2011 he can barely manage to leave this house except for liquor. He is a most functional alcoholic. Haitian Rum Straight. Makers Mark Straight. And cartons of Newport cigarettes. Sebastian has never questioned what Nicholai does for work. He clearly does something with the internet, living off his wealthy father and selling pills through Albanians to Columbia University students. The children of the elite are basically addicted to something called Adderall to study and take their exams. The Ivy League is really only nine blocks north. Sebastian stays out of his friends’ money. As almost all of his friends have clean ambulance money or dirty criminal money and not much in between. Colluding with angels and devils to make an uprising occur.
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. He can find a lot of things in the dark of the web.
“Go work form somewhere warm droog,” Sebastian always encourages him, but Nicholai is cold and spiritually long dead.
Rudely we have introduced Nikholai without introducing the Z.O.B. in greater detail; the clandestine organization of communists and ambulance workers and also West Indian entrepreneurs. A breeding ground for anarchist bomb makers, Russian petty criminals, sex workers and the forces of the great unwashed. A brotherhood and sisterhood that binds many of our friends together into a pact of lawless, perhaps degenerative mutual aid. Masquerading in the disguise of workers’ rights, human rights and maybe, maybe democracy. The group is best known by bombing campaigns extending back to 1999, its clandestine newspaper, pamphlets and foreign expeditions. This club and cluster is often called the “Banshee Association”, but these three letters; Z, O and B better indicate the club’s inner circle, and its place in the international freedom movement.
“It’s a human rights version of the ‘Westies’, that’s all I can tell you for now,” says Sebastian when asked. Actually none of the other eight officers in the cadre truly cared to know for it was not ideas but lived experiences that brought anyone into its ranks.
Taking a revolutionary between your legs does not induce belief via osmosis, or even diffusion. On the contrary, nothing could make one quite so utterly antagonistic to the ideas of Marxist-Leninism quite like loving or fucking for any prolonged period a determined revolutionist. For both male and female revolutionaries are insane, highly difficult people. They must be as they have set out to make impossible things work as if, possible. And many are also demented by that failure and by protracted murder disguised as ideas.
“The rhetoric has always been ridiculous and dynamic,” once explained Trickovitch, “people began joining when we threw good parties then began punctuating those parties by invading beleaguered countries and executing pimps, bankers and other enemies of the working class.”
“What’s the Westies again,” people sometimes ask. Quite a lot of people have passed through the front groups and splinter groups, the business fronts and the house parties. The bedrooms as well. There are always nine at the core, the Politburo; the Shura Council call it whatever. The people who make the decisions about surviving the years until the ground war. In actually constitutional terms; the Executive Committee.
“The Westies were a small but ultra-violent, hyper effective Irish gang from the 1980’s,” he often adds then distracts with some other story.
“What’s that stand for then, the Z.O.B.?” people ask Adon. People on the inner outer circle, or people that see the pamphlets or the posters on the work trains. People that associate Banshee with ZOB have put not too much circumstantial evidence together.
“If I told you….” and then he orders a round of water shots. He likes red wine. He likes Rum. He likes Vodka all by itself, but when it is time to do business he is most serious, almost sober man. Close to Muslim in his discipline, but of course these are not religious people.
Nicholai once heard him refer to the “Zealots of Brooklyn”, but sometimes they drank and took amphetamines for days and entered whole new unrealities. Parallel states of being that Sebastian drew and wrote stories about lying on the floor of the Penthouse with huge green eyes that didn’t blink after the third day in wake field. It had been a long time since they locked the Penthouse doors and dried to see the future in seven days.
So many people just call them the Banshee Association, the name of their political arm and Newspaper which came out irregularly as funds became available. They were thought to some kind of emergency medical service proto-union underground alluded to in a recent write up expose about them in the New York Times. Or accused of being Communist infiltrators in the New York Post.
Regardless. Some just called it “the Club”. People come and go, they disappear and some die. Sometimes people get tortured. Sometimes there is drinking and dancing, often enough to fun. There are always glorious toasts. There is always Afro-Caribbean music. Sometimes innocent people get shot up or blown up. That’s a thing. It isn’t ever taken lightly. The battle of ideas was lost a long, long time ago. The dubious morality of their political violence, the future being fought for; is all drowned in the terrors of the past and also present. But tonight was a casual night to talk about girls.
“In Russia we were Jews. Outside of Russia we are finally called Russians. We are treated about the same,” once explained Yelizaveta’s father Alexandre. Yelizaveta was Sebastian’s partner and paramour for the past two years. She met him in the student movement days before she left for Medical School. While Daria was igniting some new desires and anthems, Nicholai had heard the songs all before. For years with Yelizaveta and a couple more before. Now Sebastian and Nicholai, born nine days apart were nearly 30, but once they were both 14. They had loved and lost many times, though Nicholai had loved and lost absolutely everting when his wife left him and disappeared into thin air.
They had all called in chips and put out feelers. No one likes to hopelessly clinging to a failing marriage then have it break apart. People like even less when the person they loves becomes a vapor. A ghost. When all the leads tried up. When they almost had every ambulance and every gangster, every snitch and every soundbite looking for Nicholai’s ex-wife. They went together finally to Alexandre Perchevney, the most dangerous man in New York City. The father of Sebastian’s ex.
He was called Sasho if you knew him well. He was a fierce and indomitable man, but also a gregarious buffoon behind the doors of his famous tavern Social Club when no one was looking but those he mostly trusted dancing about with a cigar grinning. Sasho was a mastermind. Constantly plotting and constantly cashing on his plots. A Ukrainian Jew when he felt like it. A Bulgarian Mobster when he felt like it. The very last man you’d ever want to owe. But they had owed him several times.
The family safe houses were too hot to talk about anything. There had been multiple police raids since 2000. So since 2006 the Z.O.B. movement had taken shelter under the roof of a loving lesser Post-Soviet Oligarch. And there were a lot of business relationship now facilitated by this. In 2010 amid a terrible blizzard Sebastian Adon had saved the life of his then girlfriend Yelizaveta Alexandre’s daughter or at the very least fought his way through a snow storm to rescue her from a broken tibia, lying bleeding and abandoned in JFK airport. That night was so pivotal for it was the first time Sasho owed anyone anything and found out about the secret little thing they had. But then lot of other things happened. Sasho was shot and nearly died. Sebastian was locked up for a month. Yelizaveta’s mother ordered her to break the whole affair off. So after a year on his birthday 28, she did.
Not that any of these things have anything to do with two fucks of an anything. Except to paint the portrait of Sebastian as more hopeless romantic puppy than a stone cold killer. He loved young Yelizaveta the prim, Jappy premedical student as ferociously as always did. He served her needs and courted her involvement in Haiti and she certainly did quite a lot of the expedition.
But, while Nicholai doesn’t ever memory road his ex-wife. Sebastian is regularly and often existentially dying when his partners reject him and his unstable pursuits. Before this recent anguish over Yelizaveta; there was Hali and there was also Maria Parsheva.
Maria and Yelizaveta were the two other former 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.
That was the time when Nicholai, Sebastian, Maria and a foxy little Chechen named Angelika had to hold off a murderous mob of sixteen working poor white hooligans from Gerittsen Beach with a briefcase, a prayer and Bangladeshi good Samarian.
Sebastian would forever view Maria as his “Betty Shabazz” as their black nationalist associate Justin Thomas described her. This was real gesture of flattery on Justin’s part by in calling Maria Betty Shabazz he was calling Sebastian a white Malcom X. Or something to that effect. Betty like Maria in most ways strong woman who stood behind her larger than life man without involving herself in the political melee, like Yelizaveta certainly had. Nikh just thought of Maria a Russian geisha, until he watched her do the train job, which we’ll have to consider the details of later in more depth. In that moment under fire her realness did come out. Nikh basically had no trouble after the break up confiding she was really just a Geisha, and Yelizaveta a spoiled daughter of a mobster. Which no one approved up since if Sebastian and Yelizaveta had ever married would have really put the Z.O.B. deeply in the pocket of the Bulgarian Mafia.
Nikh remembers young Yelizaveta emerging into the club picture, and Sebastian’s bedroom sometime in early 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. How she 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.”
Yelizaveta may or may not have helped them sketch out the entirety of the Haiti Operation during the 5th Congress though. She probably managed to secure about half the funding they needed for the first expedition. And probably coaxed or Jewish guilted Sebastian into joining the original brigade 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 the insurgency and the defense committees and general thought crime practitioners since 1999. The year they did their first job. There had been a lot of great and also highly 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 close associate; a proud Irishman named Hubert O’Domhnaill had coined that phrase. “Human Rights Westies”, and also the “Russian Amorous Period”.
That was the Z.O.B. in a witty little simplified nugget of Irish witticism. The club now had a larger than life presence in certain regards or perhaps it should be said; circles. But that would still make Sebastian Adon into a humanitarian Mickey Spillane, founder of the original Westies. Perhaps the analogy if that’s what it was, was poorly conceived.
“How do you think that bodes for longevity? More importantly love making? The full blown Russianness of her” asks Nikh. As Sebastian had informed him that Daria was fully Slavic and all his other so-called Russian lovers were really Ukrainian Jews.
“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 Cold War flings. Those woman walk all over men with their parapsychology and high heels.”
Sebastian had come to believe that Nicholai harbored some rather base prejudices against the Russians 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 at least partly damaged dangerous women, Russian and non-Russian alike. Both men had fathers three of four generations removed from pre-Soviet Russia with Jew blood. Both had mothers eight or nine generations American by some distant way of Germany, Ireland, Scotland and famine. Both men share a political conviction perhaps reflective best of being born Petit Bourgeoisie in the leading city of an Empire.
Sebastian had not previously thought of how Dasha performed in bed. It was as if he had known that already, being a man. From first sight as she sized him up like a slave on an auction block being told to find a cocktail. She could clearly fuck a man into pieces. That wasn’t up for any speculation in his part. But this was not the immediate attraction, the shapely form and the physical curves, the eyes and crazy in her. There was some great familiarity she bore to someone he used to know. There are poems and songs about that. And it most certainly wasn’t either of his previous Postsoviet partners. He felt a sexual pull, animalistic in nature. But this was a different thing. A deja-vu about loss and longing.
“I bet she is most ferocious,” remarks Nikh.
An apt word for her, all things considering what transpired on that rooftop but two days ago.
“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. I speak not about a black out in hat Tavern. I must confide in low volume about other lives and other worlds. 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 choice words.”
“This is your main instrument of torture tovarish.”
Tovarish is former Soviet for, comrade. Nikholai is a Russian-Jewish-Irish-German mutt just like Sebastian. Neither of their mothers is even remotely Jewish, though Sebastian’s mother Barbara had gone through some motions to convert to the watered down Reform version. So the black hats would of course disavow them both as Gentiles. Neither Sebastian nor Nikholai could marry lawfully in Israel neither, but that didn’t bother Nikh as he had no intention of ever going to that colony. Sebastian and Nikh both look enough like “the Russians” but they speak and they think like children of the American Upper Middle class intelligentsia. Both of their fathers are medical professionals; Nicholai’s father is a neurologist and Sebastian’s a dentist. Both fathers are committed Jewish Atheists. Both gentile mothers being American hippy, open minded sorceresses perhaps predisposed the young two men to their communism as they’d be denounced as over and over. But, they were not orthodox communists. They simply were two young men of privilege aligning their lives with the plight of the much trampled masses. They were only about as Jewish as their value for education, but sometimes Sebastian was known to make a rude display of it in the form of Holiday parties.
Generally they did Rosh Hashanah, the New Years; Hanukkah the eight day gambling potato pancake party, Passover the Exodus Fest; and Sukkot the eight day tent party feast. And the rest were all causally omitted.
They had met in their freshman year of High School. Sebastian’s home had been robbed and Nikh had shown up with some weapons and an offer to help him get his honor back. They had never always agreed on anything besides opposition to government, but they were very similar men. In City, culture, genes and habits. Until the year 2010 though, Sebastian has been married to Zionism and Nicholai had been married to Krissy. But things fall apart. Sebastian was returned from his second homeland in cuffs and Krissy ran out, then as stated comply vanished.
And it was perhaps Nicholai’s inner misery over the fate of his marriage and Sebastian’s inner misery over being denied what he had imagined was his homeland or imagined was his destiny; that put them back together; left them open to suggestion. Lead to the expeditions into Haiti and the beginning of the armed struggle.
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 eleven years the Z.O.B. underground accomplished things no one had thought possible. Like organize a newspaper, which organized a general billing strike in EMS, which lead to a trade union of all the Eastern cities via EMS, which build an ambulance guerrilla movement on the island of Haiti; and developed a training blueprint for international medical guerrillas. Which then spread to Cambodia, Burma, Moldova, Russia, Bangladesh, Dominican Republic, Iraq and Syria. The re-organization of the People’s Defense Forces in Brooklyn and the beginning of the bombing campaign. The Siege of Wall Street. The People’s Army now poised to smash the financial, 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 collective death only averted because of certain laws of physics. Well it was impossible to truly know, Yelizaveta the young 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 the 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 toppled and 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 hearts racing and looking down into seventeen stories of death she then 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,” Sebastian finally admits overtly.
“Before, eh. Tovarish. You need take more of your medicine.”
“No, I mean maybe. But this was different. I am not making chemical electrical mythologies droog, I remember Dasha Andreavna Skorbogatova Maccluskey from before.”
“You’ve always been a sick fuck. It gets worse when you low dose or drop dose, or of course wake field and don’t go to sleep. And you need to not let fourth dimensional things interfere with the gathering war effort,” Nicholai replies and lights another menthol smoke.
“Well then she calms down and we do this kind of half swoon, half cuddle, half make reevaluation of an enemy. As she did just try and push me off a roof and kill me. Daria 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. She asked me if I wanted to take her on date. She told me she knew the Financial District very well and could tell me who and what to hit.”
Sometimes Nicholai Trickovitch believes his best friend is mad Hebrew profit and inspiring leader. And sometimes Sebastian is draining.
“Don’t project and don’t believe her Russian 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 very stage. You know, right before the biggest job to date. Don’t think with your dick. You’re not her type. What are you holding? What do you have in the bank? The whole thing looks fucked at every angle of evaluation. She tried to kill you.”
“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,” Sebastian suggests.
“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 Russian woman’s mouth drunk or sober. We both know all women lie,” Nikh replies.
“Just about anything can become true or untrue, dangerous or stunning. A top or a bottom. 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 even true? All women lie and these Soviet women lie highly convincingly as if it were story telling as art or advanced parapsychology. You magnify and exaggerate all suffering to fit in the contexts of your often convoluted radical politics. You make every single woman around you’re your damsel in distress from Capitalism! You’ve done so time and again. I’ve been here for it all. Remember your truest equal partner Hali Vik, the one you quite nearly married? Before you dated and slept with former Soviets in this endless succession you did date and slumber erotically with Americans for a time.”
“Nikholai, you’re making something out of prejudices. I had just two partners after Hali. I know what you’re getting at. But really man, there was only Maria and then there was Yelizaveta. And there were a couple short stands in the Stans in between, but they meant so little and felt like so nothing that I all but stopped my fucking for fun. My own hand gave me greater pleasure,” smirks Sebastian.
“Hali Vik was the kind of woman you need to find again, steal her back from that Italian hipster she dates or something. Not these cold, possibly morally vacant Russians. They will never understand you and they’ll never join this cause,” says Nikholai, “and just like Maria and Yeli; Daria will reject your ideology, reject your lifestyle and leave you the very minute you become hard to deal with. Which you are. Incredibly hard to deal with,” says Nikh.
Nicholai Trickovitch is referring to the only woman that anyone ever thought had made a realistic and well suited partner for Sebastian Adon. All of his friends, comrades and co-officers never went so far as to say “Maria Parsheva is a Russian Geisha”, or “Yelizaveta Perechenova is a condescending, high maintenance Jewish American princess”, but they all said it when the two women broke off the relationships.
Hali Vik, Irish Swedish wild rebel Hali Vik was not an easy person either though. Sebastian remembers momentarily the time Hali cut her own risks and he had to get up to Massachusetts and find her doped up in a road side motel. He also remembers the Lowell Job, when they burned down half the Meth Labs in the city and engaged in a running gun fight with the Cambodian street gangs. 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.
Part of Sebastian’s condition was that everything was always happening at once in total recall. If he did not take a medicinal salt to lock into the present, he get overwhelmed by the intensity of everything.
Well anyway, Hali was safe in Italy now and while there may have been a little bit of torture, murder, barbarism and war utilized to get her there, well nobody was dead and buried in Lowell that didn’t deserve somewhat to be dead, burned and buried in Lowell.
Nikholai and Sebastian being best friends talked a lot about their women. But there was one woman that Nikholai new precious little about and that was Emma Solomon, but he was correct that Hali Vik the only American was in fact the only person he might well have married in a normative sense of what that word means. For in the State of Israel, Sebastian was in paper work at least 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. Was it these four women that had made Sebastian believe in the struggle as if it were love? No, only Emma did, and fine perhaps also Yelizaveta in a completely separate way. Because she had worked on his body very thoroughly. And he had worked heavy on hers. They were together for only three months when the storm hit, someone broke her leg, someone tried to kill her dangerous father and Sebastian fixed it all. Then was imprisoned. There had many lovers, not an inappropriate amount but a good amount still. Sebastian had well ripped the heart out of their 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. Sometimes, he felt like all his pain with loving women that couldn’t love him in the same way was due to what he did to Joanna.
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; she actually didn’t leave their Midwood, Brooklyn apartment very many times in the ten years they lived together. The product of near ceaseless sexual harassment and advances on the street, she preferred the life of a managed house wife. Her father was rather wealthy and also in the CIA. The parents disowned her for cohabitating with a Jew, Nikholai. Though really he wasn’t very Jewish at all and didn’t even have a Jewish mother, or a Bar Mitzvah. 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. She didn’t want one she wanted 3 or 4. And he didn’t know if his life wanted to look like that. The money wasn’t great at his job and she was really even a little more homebound than he was which seemed extreme. They bargained and fucked, bargained and cried. Then, they divorced and then she completely disappeared, into smoke. As if her father had managed that which maybe he had. The very last time they saw each other to sign the divorce papers she gave him a parting fuck. He poured olive oil on his cock and put it deep in her ass for as long as he could think to. It was the kind of rough good bye sex from movies, which passionate angry people have in real life. It was the kind of sex Yelizaveta and Sebastian had for a year, since they broke up about once a week for a year. Nicholai doesn’t like to really equate his last encounter with Krissy as sodomy with Italian olive oil. It was a lot more than that. She had completely rejected him and then cut him off.
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? In all likelihood her father probably just gave her a trust fund and sent her abroad somewhere. But dark minds make up the worst possible scenarios about everything. After Krissy, every single woman Nikh was with looked like a lumpy mommy. Literally, nothing to write home about any single one of them. Women that emasculated him even further.
Then Nikh put out the past with his cigarette;
“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 love. 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, Yelizaveta completely emptied your bank account. She also humiliated you on a weekly basis by refusing to give the relationship any stability after you got out of prison. 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. She was the only one who followed you into the camps remember, into Palestine. He was a quality woman. But, you were bored and cheated on her left and right!”
Yelizaveta had a most brilliant father. Bulgarian by nationality. Ukrainian Jew by blood. But he was highly bipolar. About as high functioning Bipolar as a major criminal/ business man can get. When he arrived in America in the 1990’s the ambulance men carried him off all the time, like every other year. Until he had every single paramedic working north of 168th street killed. Had New York Presbyterian Hospital burned down. Made Washington Heights once again since the 1980’s a completely unsafe place to live. 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.”
That’s what Sebastian’s condition was also called; Bipolar1.
Sound firm and logical now, but not in 2009. After Sebastian secured Yelizaveta during the blizzard and brought her to a hospital for treatment. After Sebastian, Nikholai and some of their men thwarted and Italian mob attack on Alexandre. After Sebastian was taken by the secret police for a month and disappeared into torture land. Well, despite the conflicting recent record of heroism, Yelizaveta’s mother Tanya Marina forbid Yeli and Sebastian to see each other and a woman with only one functional parent will follow the will of her mother in the end. But, Yelizaveta was a little crazy too, and loved Sebastian. So for a year it was on again off again, rough and deep, hard and passionate, presents, secret rendezvous and lots of art, poems, dinners, flowers and rough sex.
“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, a lost friend.”
He almost said, ‘murdered wife’ but he decided that Nikholai would then really mock him. As everyone had and would that he suggested something like that to.
“A damn construct man! Do not mistake your fucking black Israelite training for reality or it will consume you, again,” that’s what Nikh would yell at him in simulations.
“You love dangerously and inappropriately. Just remember that Hali Vik was also the closest time, in my memory to you being killed by another man, group of men really 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, per say. Maybe she hasn’t got a dark past at all, maybe it’s just a mind game. 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 about that night at all.”
“A black out as a reconciliation for your improvised murder? Prosto, so if she had killed you she wouldn’t even have remembered it!”
“A black out woman always thinly hides a dark past in my experience.”
“I fail to see what, at all, is attractive about her willingness to murder you!”
“This isn’t lust. Or love. This is something surreal brother. They say she has been coming to the Mehanata Social Club for a little under three 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. I have no idea how I could have missed a busty, wild thing like her.”
“That my friend is only called a trap. She is not what you or we need right now. She is nothing but big tits with trouble.”
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.
“The trouble is you’re not a hopeless romantic,” continues Nikh getting yet another 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 former 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. You are lecturing me about my love life as if I were proclaiming a new love. I am speaking about something else now. I am remembering things that were, shall we say deleted. Mediated away. Washed down with salt! I am telling you not that I plan to try and bed Daria Maccluskey. Of course I will try, that is what men do. I’m trying to tell you that with all the sleep, salt and training in the world; I know that woman from before.”
“All of them. You say things like this about all of them. It’s either a blessing or a terrible 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 bard than as a loosely grounded resistance fighter. ”
“I have no idea anymore, I just feel something in the molecules my friend. I am telling you that what we have been planning might well hinge on this person. 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 and sucked it out of me on her knees. They are all quite different loves. One loves the struggle because one always thinks it noble, or heroic and the cause just and the suffering of our people, all people immense. One loves a woman because she emboldens him. Makes him a real man by showing love as something justifying of our human condition.”
“Different Sebastian’s have said differing things on the matter over this decade mind you. You must look yourself in the mirror more often or more deeply. For one thing you’re too lean for my liking and you hair is too short it means you aren’t eating. That is always a giveaway that you are about to do something reckless. Police and imprisonment tend to follow old friend.”
“You’re being a Jewish mother now. More praying is perhaps in order too?”
“I certainly don’t care what you pray to this week, but you do need to eat more, drink less and certainly not be chasing around a woman you hardly know, who happens to show up now. Three weeks from the job. The biggest job ever. 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. We could sort of vouch for Maria and Yeli, but who is this bitch? Seriously, who the fuck is Daria?”
Nikholai then asks Sebastian quite specifically, “What really happened up on that roof?”
Sebastian blows out his smoke.
“I died and was immediately reborn, like the last few thousand times,” quietly responds Adon puffing his cigarette, “we toppled to our very deaths. We died in a very inglorious real way. Stupidly and drunk. But, miraculously we then awoke panting in the alley way, holding each other’s near death hand. This all happened in the blink of an eye. Then we got up and I dusted her off and we walked out as if nothing happened. She gave me her number and 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. If I’m so fucking crazy why is anyone following me into this war?”
“Because we’re all crazy. You’re just persistent,” Nikh replies.
But Nikholai Trickovitch does not judge him for too long because he too knows what it is like to bear forced separation from one you love. He too is gifted with long memory and knows what Sebastian lost that brought him to revolution road. He simply is aware of something that Sebastian Adon is not because Sebastian is at least partly sleeping while Nikh is completely awake.
A full blown uprising is but three weeks away. And that enemy, the Oligarchic collectives, the criminal enforcers, the secret police, the Federal police and many other adversarial elements know 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 he 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. Nicholai knows what she is. Not a honey trap, a bonnified hunter killer. Who in all likelihood, coming out of nowhere at this precise time; is undoubtedly an agent of something terribly wicked this way come. The Mossad, maybe, or even far worse, the inner most Secret Police of the regime. Those ruthless agents setting up for murder or total disappearance all who resist the iron heel of the Euro-American Oligarchy. That grand cartel of power and plutocracy. But Jerusalem and her agents would certainly try and murder them, though Nicholai taking in the whole story.
Firstly because of the secrets they had stolen from Israel. And those they now planned to capture shortly from Wall Street under the guise and distraction of the uprising.
WALTER ADLER 