SCENE 12
“A Passover to Remember”

Reads Sebastian Adonaev:
It was a Passover to remember. Tonight’s the night, am I right?! The House of Adonaev, the family name of the soon to be SDF Partisan Kawa, also to be known by his Arab guerrilla name Abu Yazan; was down on the edge of the District Financial had not seen such a feast in years. It was the second night of Passover of the Hebrew Year 5777, the spacious loft apartment of Avram and Barbara was filled nearly to capacity around a long make shift series of contiguous tables. Candles flickered, Israeli pop music, Jazz and Afro-pop played over the sound system. Red wine, white wine, Champaign and Vodka. The place kept filling up. In the coming morning, perhaps in eight hours, Sebastian Adonaev would leave for Cuba. From Cuba he would fly to Moscow, travel by train to Nizhny Novgorod, then fly to Iraq and shortly after be smuggled into Northern Syria. It was unsaid, but reflected on popular attendance, that many were making sure they didn’t miss the last chance to see him alive they might get.
Adonaev was always known for having dinners, political salons and regular salons, Jazz with red lights and Hebrew feasts like Passover, Chanukah, Sukkot, but not Purim; that sort of used the excuse of a holiday to get everyone under one roof.
Later, those left breathing and sober went out together into night. They did techno at the Output, a mega venue. Never was actually fun, never was good for talking to women.
It was evident by the nature of the music that there was no soul to any of this. There was no battle cry, no telling out of a forlorn loves song, there wasn’t even words. There was no feeling anything except the thumping bass, which crept through the warehouse and rattled the bones more the nerves. The people look like zombies, they make little words and ideas they make transactions. And everyone was on drugs. So it probably didn’t matter what was or was not being programmed into them.
In the mass of gyrating listless corpses were vampires selling more cocktails. It would be easy to speculate that the dead could dance if you called a lot of this dancing with crystal powders, bumps of this and that, the bass began to shake the floor in pulsing waves. He could sense other tribesmen, knew Israelites were here and there buying and selling.
This was underground to them, thus was the rebellion. Escaping from empty meaningless lives into the technology. He imagines that maybe each session was different by a little but he liked words, liked romance. His world view was fine if Dancehall, Soca and Calypso. His world was either a world of the future or a golden age or both, there was no middle way, this was hell and demon shit. This was fire and brimstone. Perhaps that allegory gave it too much credit. This was the neo Rock and Roll, the beat drop in all the capitals of the empire.

In the dark and red and base of this grim warehouse deep into the Queens/Brooklyn border, sitting in the corner collecting twenty dollars an hour to not do much yet, he wonders two things, at the same time. Firstly he wonders when his papers will arrive which give him ability to leave the Mountain for good, for it is better to die in battle than end your wasted self here. Second, though he doesn’t hope for it. He wonders how he got so lost. Was there not anything better he could be doing? Finishing up a manuscript, making the new girl a painting, writing the blueprint, sleeping in a bed. So alien here. In the corner writing a book no one will read on a smart phone with a radio in his pocket hoping it won’t go off, which there are at least 3 more hours of wishing, the zombies don’t drop tonight. Not cause he can’t handle it, but because he doesn’t care.

If she showed up here it would be sad. He’s slowly fucking his way out from under her memory, going through slow motions that he’s a single man. Better to not write about it, less maybe it’ll happen. He thinks it healthy to not even use her name in polite conversation.

When the world ends, he guesses the last Harrah will probably make burning man look meek. But there will be techno. Now that its 5am the zombies are gonna fall over. Well that’s what they pay him for. That possibility. If he smoked some weed maybe he’d be better adjusted. Everything about civilian life is hard. What’s your name and what’s your number is so-so hard. He’d sooner intubate a child in a moving ambulance. Well that’s extreme. It’s hard to talk to people you fundamentally don’t believe are human any more. And there’s never anything to say. All parts of his identity betray him. If only were he a strong and silent type, but he is not. All the things he wants to talk about are unattractive. Actually all of them, beginning with dialectical socialism, history, Russian literature, bipolar disorder, theology, parapsychology, Medical internationalism, black power, Cuba, Haiti, revolutionary theory, and maybe also the Israel Palestine conflict and his role in it. But actually all those things are unattractive to most women. So he tries to pretend that things like their careers, their interests, and their history are interesting. But he can’t take that so far even as an empath.

All he can think about right now is when will this stupid fucking zombie party be raided by the cops. Wonders if he should go down the ally and make that happen. He would but that idea passes, he’s not a snitch. This is not a party, for people who don’t take drugs.

All that time I kept thinking, this is probably the last time I will see New York alive. The day after, really the morning after Passover I boarded a plane to Havana. I was sleep deprived, but felt so excited to be out of this Babylon rat race.