ACT ONE
That Night

Set mostly in New York City, 2012ce

Prelude
Prelude
Moscow, 2019

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 posed by Rabbi Moishe Klein a lieutenant in the resistance army;

“A sane person in an insane world is what?’

And there by a conscious person in a sleeping world has what duty? And furthermore, if the readers will not 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 the battle for the survival of our species and is still an open question of who will win, for this is an ancient 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 a question of consciousness. The victory of the Oligarchy is a death sentence for all.

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

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

I will begin by saying that no matter what great changes or revisions may occur in the depiction of my narration that the world changed forever in a particular 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 historical 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 to that pass as world events based on total boldness.

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

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

Later on when they asked, or should I say interrogated me with beatings, drugs, and electricity why I joined the Great Revolt I laughed and screamed and also cried. Such is torture. How did I become one its so-called leaders, they asked me many times. The demanded I declare the moment when I embraced my zealous beliefs and by what life event wedded my totality to this cause. They pestered me with these questions though throughout their fun and brutal games, But, I had played no large or mighty 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 can 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. Dreaming of the day no woman or man will live as they currently do. I have no ability to reconcile myself to a so-called good life while these atrocities, yes they indeed atrocities persist.

The tortures went on for many months. They would beat us many times and make us many offers. I have no price after what was taken from me. It was fortunate the resistance wiped away my mind so I could betray only myself. Also, Watson Entwissle is a Haitian and therefore impossible to break. They say we killed an important man in Moscow.

“We’ve killed many of your men, and we will kill many, many poor,” that’s what Watson told them.

They always beat me roped to the ceiling or on the floor of a cell. The cell was frankly quite clean. I’ve been in many cells and really the one the Russians put us in was premium. They then referred me back to these poems. I’ve never seen such an interest in my poems before. The poems they claimed were proof of my highest-level rebel involvement.
They threaten our families.

“You can’t get to our families,” Watson told them.

They threaten our friends.

“You killed most of our friends,” I replied.

The uprising had not at that time sufficiently spread to the Russian Federation or the People’s Republic of China, Japan, Australia, New Zealand, the Koreas, or England proper. Only in government organized terrorist attacks or the periodic assassinations we orchestrated. It was raging almost everywhere else. The ground wars between the rebel armies and their proxies were raging in Latin America, the Middle East and Africa.

They really did a number on is Russia. But, I remembered nothing, well almost nothing well. I did remember several things, in bursts and flashes. Throughout the brutal interrogations that in a way sustained me through their inflicted brutality. Were these things real or imagined, implanted or devised I have no idea for I know neither science nor high-level Majik?

I am aware 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 controls the world system core. I know because I was there as a courier, an orator and gun runner when the Israelites formed it in Tel Aviv.

I know that no one knows what those three letters stand for nor are they originally in English. I am aware that agents of that same Oligarchy raped and brutally murdered my wife while pregnant with my child. They later burned my whole 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 learn then to fuel my un-ending resistance after these hideous events. There after I then breathed in the smoke monster. I drank only the blood of enemies, and I nourished an unfathomable hate.

Finally, I do know that an uprising began in 1791 in a place called Haiti and that it continues reverberating to this very day despite major quarantine and most disastrous setbacks. I know that on January 1st, 1959; that the same revolution spread to the nation of Cuba and has been entrenched there since. On that besieged island nation illiteracy has been irradiated. Their people live longer and in some degrees with more dignity than in the empire called the United American States. They say things come in threes. Who says that? Well, I forget. All things do though, for on 1st January 2012 that long quarantined revolt fought on the fringes of the developing world erupted on the streets of Port-Au-Prince and spread like wild fire worldwide, yet again. After what I lost and what I suffered, what those I loved most suffered. I joined it unflinchingly.

I know that I am entitled to certain protections under the Geneva Accords I will not receive as a uniformed combat Pararescueman. Clad in my rebel blue. Shield 2952 of the 99th Airborne Division from the Breuklyn Soviet, the new epicenter of the latest phase of our latest and most glorious uprising in the Americas.

They then beat me for many more weeks. They ripped out my finger nails. They drugged me into nightmarish worlds of horrible, grisly torture. Made me revisit all my losses, all my defeats and degradations. They called me “terrorist” as though it were my very name. 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 confided in you.

I am a just a worthless American exile. A writer and a poet who makes silly rhyming poems to bed young women. I’ve contributed nothing another million young women and men won’t put down beside me on the table of the war.

You murdered my entire family; I periodically think inside myself.

Therefore, I joined the rebel alliance as uniformed Pararescueman 2952 of the 99th Airborne Division, also known as the Fighting 99th. It was we who helped retake Port Au Prince briefly in 2009 from the Brazilian and Argentine occupation. It was we who took back Jerusalem in 66, 112, and again in 1210ce. It was we who refused to surrender when all was taken away.

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

In another life. Before knowledge of their atrocities sent me out to first to Palestine. Then later to study in Cuba. Then to Haiti, Iraq, and Syria where I saw with my own eyes the fullness of genocide the Oligarchy was capable. Before I had read my Orwell, my Marx, my Zinn, of course, my Emmanuel Wallerstein. And then my Chomsky; peppered in with my beloved musings of tortured Mayakovsky, my Bell Hooks, my Emma Goldman, some Rist too. Or the intellectual excellence of Kropotkin, Bakunin, Proudhon, Luxembourg and so many, many others. Those doomed idealists and wandering rebel scribes. They all suffered grave mental illness to dared to theorize on our long promised coming emancipation. Those progressive privileged seculars! Those unrepentant exile part Jews many. Perhaps I was inclined to read more from my own tribe.

So many books and not even enough life times!

Blessed was I learn to value of persistent reading! A lost, proud, and dangerous art, the gateway to all sedition. It taught me a secret code to see the world in ideas, possibilities and hope.

Once I was a young man; filled with hope and promise. When the towers of the empire fell I was living on a kibbutz in the land of American occupied Israel writing small poems. I was laying out my very first novel I was working the land I thought was mine. I was laying sprinkler drip lines. I was picking tomatoes and cucumbers. Drinking cola in the heat of Middle Eastern summer after work. I was having flirtatious and sweaty affairs. I was learning to make 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 smile. The smile of the only woman I will forever love. Beaming at me as we lay in the sands by the boardwalk. There was so much hope that day we met that we could both leave this grim foreign city together and a bleak serf’s life.

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

Dorogaia, my dear one, I have failed you again most terribly. Where are you now! What have I again done to me and to you!! Or what new thing have I allowed to happen by own powerless frail human hands!!!

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

Written in Gematria, the Secret Ivory Code, ah ha; you’d have to know what that is your ugly one souled masked pigs! You’ve never met a Jew like me. Trained so well to steal, and heal and kill.

In another life, I wrote a boat load of stupid little poems no one ever read except her. Interestingly enough, or perhaps commonly my mind retreats into itself to escape the shame and torture. Also the unending pain of my total human sympathy. I should state comrade, my untouchable solidarity. My empathy as though each human misery was happening to my own flesh, and my own blood.

My memories it seems are crafted devices, walls of data to waylay my opponents and thus shelter my closest surviving friends and associates. What for are then these ridiculous poems? I call them but a masochistic hobby horse. But, they were all written just for her alone. The only woman who looked into my soul, and I into hers and we knew in that first meeting that we had always been together no matter how many lives we’d been torn apart. The poems, tough in English only, softer in Russian; they are my only way to put in words what she made me feel every minute of every Though they are not all without some talented intent, they serve me no good, not once or ever.

I wrote them all to four particular Russian women, but they were all a reflection of the first love, the only love that could ever matter on the level of the soul. The one they took from me in November of 2001.

“Love early and love often!” she once told me. There are so many kinds of love, so many gradients. Each magnifies the hero in me; each allowed me to survive the long years in the underground.

I did feel something for nearly everyone I ever kissed, mostly everyone, but after the loss of the first I didn’t ever love myself so could never be anyone’s proper companion. Just a ghost. Just a handsome smiling corpse to exchange art, and flesh and fluids.

It cannot ever be said or assumed that any of the four subsequent loves, incredible women all were properly loved. I loved each with equal rigor. As a dead man and a zealot, we all did our best. My lovers all tried to breathe life into a corpse. Our poetry, paintings, songs and sex art itself were manifestations of those attempts. They are not equal loves, and they were not all backed up with the same stuff. The same total longing. The same level of doing my deeds after my words.

It should be clear that while I slept in and beside these four women over a period of some eight years; I did only love one actually in a, shall we say, humane way. And only she loved me back in that same way. Everything in life takes time.

Now, in flashbacks, they’re yelling something loud in Russian! I pretend as though I do not speak it not at all, not one word. But how could I not for all and every of my strangest tragic 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 famous women. Though I took more than I probably gave, I did okay for a dead man.

It seems they are less interested in the recently murdered guard colonel. They claim we killed a national icon! My Haitian partner Watson and I may have played the part of highway men to gun down dispatch. For a paramedic, in recent years we’ve killed more than a few.

It needed doing.

The torturers are less interested in our baser affiliations. It seems that the firm arm of the Russian Oligarchy is most concerned with the end of summer liaison that happened many years prior with a young buxom émigré from the city of Penza whose name was Daria Andreavna Skorobogatova who for some time I called Dasha. Or Dashutka, to be even more sweet, always against her liking or better judgment. She always preferred me more brutal, daring and infamous. Not sad, not sobbing, not inflamed in the tragedy of the world. Do not ask me to quantify my loves and my longings for I cannot.

I think that I’ve lost a lot of blood.

I will not accept, that even now they have the upper hand. Shall I dare say, 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. I used my whiteness against the enemy. That is the basis of all my high crime. I abandoned my lesser American aristocracy to make new friends in the Black and Russian quarters. I learned the healing trades of Cubans. I fought for the Muslims. I placed myself hopefully in the arms of sweet humanity. Because of that original transgression, I have made so many new friends. As well as eternal enemies.

Scene 1
Scene One
New York City

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.

Dawn is now rising, breaking and expanding on the garden roof of an ancient print house that’s been—at some time in the past hundred years— converted to a seventeen story cooperative. 140 Nassau Street, District Financial. On the 17th story roof deck, Sebastian Vasyli Adon, our antagonistic protagonist, tells old danger tales over a bottle of illegally imported Basque white wine. A fake gold watch dangles off his wrist as he enunciated his wild story with his hands, even though it is known that he is only one-half a Yid. Covering his dark brown hair, cut short for summer, is a brown scally cap.

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

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 various colors of money. “I’m 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, which “pays a little less but has more dignity” she claims.

Rafael Ernesto Lynch Contreras, a baby-faced Peruvian revolutionist with flowing black hair, with an increasing volume of white and grey streaks, is the husband of Victoria. He sits with his dear friend Sebastian and a ravishingly beautiful Russian dvotchka named Daria Andreavna Skorobogatova and attempts a boozy mediation as the two do increasingly evil eye each other viciously across a low wooden table. The stare down, which has endured now for the past hour between Sebastian and Daria is punctuated by accusations of impropriety.

Daria has big beautiful crazy person eyes the color of the Caspian Sea. She has an unnerving look, a cross between a size up and seductive stare, a dismissive dart of her eyes to cut men down. She 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 tightly in a light brown leather jacket.

Sebastian’s eyes are always sad. An auburn hazel slowly becoming green with the progressing sleep deprivation that is something of a lifestyle for him. Ernesto is their introducer and is a frivolous womanizing artist tamed as of lately by his government marriage to Victoria. Because liquor is so loose at the Mehanata Social Club, people sometimes have to introduced and reintroduced several times in different states of mental chemistry.

Sebastian is a dark brunette normally clad in a tattered brown leather jacket and pleather scally cap that none of his lovers ever want him to wear. Tonight he is in a white linen suit, hair done Dominican with products in his hair. It’s not his usual look. Normally he looks like a handsome grown up paperboy, but tonight a Latino drug dealer.

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

Daria for reasons more than bust and beauty is capable, knows Ernesto well, of putting out some siren call to which many men have smashed their ships. She quite literally humors no man for any more than one dance. Belligerencies that pour from her mouth when intoxicated, well, they cause fights. She captures much attention anytime she steps in the room and onto a dance floor. Her style is quite Post-soviet in its cut and colors. There is well composed sashay to her movements to and from the bar all night.

An affectionate, overly familiar rendering of the Russian name Daria is Dasha, and this is what Sebastian has been calling her all night, which is perhaps a little too friendly amid those who have just met. They had been introduced months earlier, but both had been too drunk to remember. Despite both being regulars at Mehanata for years, the two had never crossed paths before. She is never cold on the outside, but this morning she’s provoked and behaving badly to the host.

Sebastian said “don’t smoke in my father’s house,” so she went and smoked in his father’s house, because that was her way. So he yanked the fucking smoke from her pouty lips and threatened to throw her into a cab back to Brighton Beach. Then he “classlessly” handed her forty bucks for that cab, even though it’s really a sixty to seventy dollar ride, and more if you tip. Which is against all Russian cultural context, to tip a chornay driver or take a man’s money and walk out and get your own cab.

She debased him best she could as a “useless man living off his parent’s wealth.”
And said “never in my life have I been so offended by the callous, pompous behavior of an American dog such as you!”

“Less than a dog!” she had proclaimed. And the other late night-early morning Social Club regulars sort of stood about in silence, out of annoyance and also out of inebriation. But, Daria took her time. Intermittently insulting Sebastian. And Ernesto tried to calm her down and Maxim Bender, a Muscovite got annoyed and left on his own. Sebastian, to show he wasn’t a pushover to this bombshell, star lit scarlet that no one probably ever said no to, he feigned outrage about the cigarette which barely mattered, just showed total disrespect. Who the fuck did this bitch think, she was. That rolled about his head.

“I’m gonna call you a cab,” he said. And then she knew she’d won anyway.

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 late night cheapening. Yet, because she was pretty stunning and pouty and her heels took too long for her to fasten, in effort of perestroika he asked her to stay and then they all ended up on the roof to catch the sunrise.

Then the dawn break on Mary Lia, Victoria, Daria, Sebastian and Ernesto. And sometime just after that a dangerously insensitive story gets told. And Dasha is again beyond appalled. Sebastian 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 or restaurants Wall Street guys hang out.”

Banya is Russian for bathhouse. In the past few years Sebastian has been bathing with Russians regularly. He loves the way music sounds in Russian. Though he knows under three dozen phrases and cannot even barely read Cyrillic.

Dasha watches his words take form. Her eyes just peer right into you, and they are not always as happy as the completely convincing 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.

“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 touching at all. Then, you tell them that they’re being filmed and recorded, but that you’re not a cop, or whoever else dangerous, you’re not there to entrap them. 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.

“Tiger-blooded,” notes Raphael Ernesto.

“Then you make tea, like advanced civilizations do. 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 volunteers into brothels to feign cardiac arrest and call ambulances and firemen in as reinforcements. It basically has be understood as major disruptive campaign against all elements of the sex trade. ”

Daria’s jaw drops.

“They would kill you just for that,” Dasha spits out, “for bullshit man! For a lot less than bull shit. A number! I spit on your American number. On your 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 get out” retorts Dasha.

She’s not a debutante, not a true New Russian here to hunt. She has all the regality of being born Slavic, but perhaps outside the great dividing highway that ring roads that loop Moscow 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 supposed triumph of American Capitalism has left her charming, but more capable of fighting. Daria is far from Russia with love, rootless and floating in glittery fairy tales that don’t expel the hardships of her new country adopted via an arranged marriage for papers.

“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 in half-cocked rhetoric.

“He has such American beliefs!” She mocks.

Ernesto always has applauded his radical specifications and foreign adventures over the past three years he’s known Sebastian. He’s done his initial trench time, agrees Ernesto. Palestine, Israel, Egypt, Haiti, the worst assignments in 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,” Daria snaps at his bait.

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

A few too many baton cracks in the Gulliver. A few too many months adding up to several years inside uncomfortable facilities. Sebastian’s given lots of militant speeches but never done any violent actions with his hands. He’s piloted an ambulance for the Fire Department for four years in all the city’s worst districts. He has traversed the Levant organizing against the occupation, the American occupation of Israel and the Israeli Oligarchy’s occupation of Palestine. 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.

Dasha could care less.

She is appalled by the rude cigarette yank and further appalled by his cynical bourgeoisie story about call girls passing itself off as utterly vain and stupidly incompetent activism. She only stayed because she doesn’t have a home that’s enjoyable to return to at this hour; an hour away in the Russian ghetto of Brighton.

She offers to kill him. He obliges her. Thinks she’s mostly bluffing.

“I’ll kill this over privileged American hypocrite,” she thinks. A civic duty to her 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,” she claims to her keeper.
If she kills him, the tragedy, as far as a memory, will belong to no one. Maybe there’s some demon in her. Maybe she’s just blacked out a few hours ago and won’t remember any of this.

Ernesto implores her to be more, “Suave, Suave”. To be more calm and “Tranquillo.”

The infamous Peruvian revolutionist is now a New York low key digital disk jockey at the Social Club and cannot modulate Sebastian’s posturing and Dasha’s swaggerous, murderous taunting. Now, they’re waving invisible pistols at each other’s’ faces like wild Cold Warriors.

Ernesto then urges Victoria and Mary Lia to intercede on some level of Feminine Mystique but they are long drunk too, now taking lots and lots of pictures of the Sunrise hitting all these steel and glass towers. And, the two young women have seen “Dasha” make a properly rude scene before. They’ve seen her throw drinks in men’s faces and punch men in the face. They detach from this drama for art; when men, “get smart”.

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

The job of any and all men as far as she is concerned is to amuse or please her by makings sure her drink is never empty. That life is a series of taken care of attractions, to make her life easier. If one is well formed and handsome and he does enough work then, well, you know. Sebastian has failed on all fronts in his utterly crass, self-serving arrogance.

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

There was nothing healthy about his love life ever, which was a fact.

Even the use of the word “love” bids a kind of shame inside him for perpetually having to beg back affections from those he’d thought he’d die for. A year ago his previous paramour Yelizaveta finally cut him off. The struggle took its heavy toll over the years boxing with monsters and holding such hopes for humanity, always repeatedly underwhelmed by human actions. His Icarus sky walled expectations! His place in the chain of command remains so unclear. Only “the existential problems of an overly privileged first world revolutionist”, as Yelizaveta used to declaim. His last six months have been an abyss of medical studies on how to beat back death with drugs and electricity, and small talk.

Something like that.

A veritable blur of 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 now more specific.

He is enrolled in a one-year paramedic upgrade program. He had thought to jump country, apply for work abroad. He was ordered to hold the post in the city and just keep working on recovering his mind. Lt. Moshe Klein, the orthodox Jewish 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, for that, is what so well-meaning associates accused him of trying. Shouldering a burden not placed or asked of him. No one ever asked that of him or expected that he delivers on it. Just be happy, they urged him, just work on what’s right in front of you.

His weekends soak in vodka or with wine, sometimes one poured in the other. And the boozing keeps his eyes closed to certain things. And now he’s drunk now again. Acting poorly in the company of a bellicose Russian woman, yet again. Drawing bellicosity out of people well known for poker faced reserve and dispassion.

Kill me for the sake of it, he hopes. It’s what the world would surely not mind all too much. Though he knows he’d have a modestly well-attended funeral; it’s evil drunken, self-destructive thinking. From a fallen man who has locked up and been hit in the head a few too many times.

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

“Absofuckinglutely,” she replies.

Before drunken Ernesto who is now very, very sloshed, and also very, very tired can react. After spinning his music from a lap top all night can talk them down. Sebastian and Daria are climbing up a ladder. Up to the 18th story deck near the gear room elevator tower. It’s the highest accessible point. An easterly, elevated deck off that 17th story roof with a deep and deadly edge of plummet to death with the Blue glass Gehry Building towering above and looking down. A million cubicles of an upper-class aquarium. Like a Sorcerer’s tower of steel rising above the East river. Were anyone it awake now, left over from a coke party; they could see the two protagonists now sparring.

A great setting for a hastily arranged assisted suicide.

They’re now actually boxing. Daria is properly in a Brighton boxing school. She strikes at him hard and then even harder. “Die you fucking Amerikanski, you damn wasted one,” she thinks.

Ernesto, 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 possible concern. Not a plane or a mob on a train could have killed him so far. Not jealous those ex-boyfriends, vanquished competing lovers from trysts and lusty engagements he’s partaken in, nor spy agencies, nor police forces with much bigger better-threatening fish to fry had gotten this close. A beautiful woman might get close enough this morning, all by accident.

“You don’t want to live here forever?” she taunts him. Their scrappy boxing and taunting have them perilously near the ledge and the edge of the fire pit.

The roof deck is a glamorous lit up garden at dawn. The ledge is just feet from the fight, and so is this big pit, for old buildings have deep internal fire ventilation caverns. A 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 in the month before. The pit is just a dead drop, it’s a Fire code ordinance for building in late 18th century, a ventilation shaft for the 19 real story print house now a new richer-intelligentsia. A queer, liberal, Jew coop on the financial district’s northern most edge at the mouth of the Brooklyn Bridge and City Hall Park.

Daria is striking out at him, and he is just taking her hits. And then, then it finally comes.

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

The most beautiful woman he has ever seen is just a side story in his mind. A tandem episode to his tragedy. She cocks back and doesn’t blue eyed blink. “Kill me,” he beckons and then. She finally tries to kill him.

Daria hits him with one swift, hard jab, and he tumbles backward. He crumbles awkwardly toppling into the abyss.

As he plummets, he instinctively grabs out and yanks her back with him in a tumble off the ledge of the roof, falling now together toward certain death in the alley way eighteen stories below.