SCENE 9
2 September 2017
BAGHDAD
“GO STRAIGHT OR HIDE”

The lights are dim, but I can’t sleep. Sleep is the cousin of rest but all my cousins died in the Isis War.
I lie awake in my family apartments in the Green Zone of Baghdad and I tell you it’s much harder to get laid out here. I have jet black hair and a baby face. I’m a Shi’a bombshell, but I never feel pretty. I feel empty. I feel grey. He tells me I’m powerful, but I don’t feel very powerful lately.
I am trapped in a cage, it restricts my breathe and my imagination.
My name is Anya Sorieya Shubar Al-Baghdadi. My father is an Iraqi politician in a moderate Shi’a faction. My mother has developed an exiles taste for fine things. I spent most of my life in Beirut, but emotionally I’m coming of age in Iraq. I have lovers all over Erbil. I am not so libertine in Bagdad. I have crazy person dreams. I have visions! I am deeply unhappy in Erbil, it’s like a cage. When my mother moved us to Baghdad it became worse. There were less eligible bachelors. Sex is the kind of satisfaction that can get your mind off an existential crisis. So, when I become a young woman I lost track of my happiness and my sleep.
Sebastian told me that they were prophesies. He’s quite nice. We were never lovers, but he spoke sometimes about running away with me after the war. But, the war will never ever end so it’s a silly notion. He says that in the old country you cannot elope unless you’re half a person’s age, plus seven. I’m 19 though, so he says we have to wait until I’m 26, but he’s not that old. He’s 34. It’s not such a big deal. I am very bored in the Green Zone.
Sebastian is an American Israeli sweetheart. He’s an artist and a radical and I like him a lot, as flirtatious older male Kafr friend. He’s my sweet infidel always being optimistic to me on the WhatsApp. We had a jazz date and a drawing date and then I never saw him again. Our brief window to do something inappropriate, well it was missed. But, I agree that for posterity I ought to share the Shi’a visions I’m having. Not to freak anyone out, but I might just be the real deal. Though you tell the wrong person that stuff, you can get out right stoned to death or lit on fire.
I remember the night that dashing rebel gave me a brief explanation of Fourth Dimensional Powers. Which is to say the might he put it in my head that I, Anya Shubar of Beirut had some special cosmic magic. I was never sure what to make of him, but his motivation to save lives in my country was vaguely touching. It made it less frightening to hear it from an Israeli New Yorker medical worker, for whatever reason. Those people are known for sneaky super natural things. So, he explained, and I took some notes:
1. NSG is to be short hand for “New Social Gospel’ a volume I was to compile by virtue of being a receiver. Sort of a collective unconscious revelation in the form of porn and poems.
2. A “Receiver” is a highly evolved human, irrespective of race, religion or education that is using way above 12% of their mental capacity. By words for receivers include, a) mental illnesses like autism, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, and a variety of like diagnoses; b) watchwords in religion like Prophet, Nawab, Maadi, Meshach, Rasul or Saint; as well as c) pop culture terms like “mutants”,
3. 4d or ‘Fourth Dimensional Powers’ refers to the wide range of mental abilities receivers can engage via their enhanced and evolved mental powers. These are manifested in a wide range of gifts, but generally all exhibit:
4. a) limited precognition (viewing future and alternative realities)
5. b) Fire walking: manifest of the non-waking self into alternative plains of existence while asleep.
6. c) Longevity and Meditation: Extending life span and gaining superior control of the body in regards to harnessing the mind
7. d) Wine-ing; the ability to rapidly identify details and interconnections. While rubbing your gentiles all over someone’s ass.
8. e) Weaving: the locating of other receivers.
He made it seem so scientific, but I wasn’t all in. He admitted to me that early in his life he too had the sleepless night gift of prophesy, but had grown out of it and never really wrote it down. Being that Sebastian is a writer, it seemed likely he’d want to make some literary creation out of his adventures and enlist others into codifying the basic convoluted outline. Which it surely would be, convoluted.
You see, he can’t just tell his story in a line. Arrived in Cuba, fucked a girl. Arrived in Russia, fucked a girl. Arrived in Iraq, jumped knee deep into war and met a coy little prophetess. Then headed to Syria. I told him to try and make the book like tantric sex, no orgasm as all! No climax! Just the thoughts and notes and letters that got him to Syria, then Syria told by others since that was the meat in his stew. But, really not to be a spoiler, but he was just a small character in the major events of the end of the campaign against the Islamic State; it wouldn’t matter if he had even succeeded on his EMT training mission, not in the big picture of the war.
Any-hoo. Let me smuggle out a few Middle Eastern prophesies with his sad musings on Russian War and Peace and Kurdish ideological love, circle dancing and whatever else he’s trying to say. I wish to assert my voice and my Baraka! In Israelite tongue, which I guess he tried to give me Baraka means spiritual charisma. The majority of my so-called prophesies concern the coming of a female Mahdi. Which means Messiah in the Islamic tradition. I decided under his guidance to call each distinctive revelation a ‘KDAA’; which is a made up word for prostration.
I’m a little nervous for any of these to see the light of day, but hey, if we’re all going to die out here we might as well write down some of the interesting parts.

KDAA 1
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 Babylon. 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 faction 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.
I think I’m just whiling out, losing my mind in the Green Zone.