SCENE FOUR (IV)

“смотреть правде в глаза”

Pronunciation: smaTRET’ PRAVdye v glaZAH Meaning: to face up to something; to face the truth, Literal translation: 

“TO LOOK TRUTH IN THE EYES”

In the Crown Heights Ghetto of Breuklyne, everyone is getting ready to hear a speech in a bunker. At a brutalist six-story brick row house on 256 Schenectady, a very well-attended meeting is happening in the basement fallout shelter. The room is jam-packed. Churchgoers as well as Yardies. People are sitting on the floor, on the tables, people are out in the hall craning their necks. Many of the apartment blocks on Schenectady Ave have concrete inner courtyards, have multiple means to get in and out without keys, and a lot of places to run and evade the police. The followers of the Reb Menachem Mendel Schneerson and the Chabad Movement congregate near Kingston Avenue and the large Afro-Caribbean community stays more toward Utica Avenue. But, for the most part, the Noires and Ivory live right on top of each other.  They for the most part ignore each other. With the exception of a bloody three-day riot in 1991 This is virtually the only neighborhood where two completely different people share a ghetto. But in the bunker basement here, not a white face in sight. They are all pressing closer to hear the words of the man that so many people had been talking about. The basement of the apartment block fallout shelter has a maximum occupancy of a hundred and fifty people. Nearly three hundred had filtered in, a hundred more are waiting upstairs. Most people had just gotten off work, some neighborhood kids, boys off the block, had dropped by to see what all the commotion was about. They heard this man was “gonna tell it like it is and how it could be”. Lay it down for them in words they could understand. The harsh white neon lighting grid in the basement flickered its blinding light. Suddenly there was a real hush. Three men dressed in baggy black fatigues pushed forward through the masses. One of the men put his hand up in the hair, a call for silence. For some people in the ghetto there was religion, for others some little hustle, for a tiny talented tent making music or athletics for the whites. But lately for the struggling Jamaican, Ayitian and West Indian diaspora lower classes there were the motivational words of the movement man. The sometimes a killer, sometimes a healer, always a Shattah; Mickhi Dbrisk.

“Sisters and Brothers! If you saw the enormity of the blessings enstowed upon our people, then you would comprehend the magnitude of the struggle we are about to fight and win,” declares Dbrisk to those assembled, “I do not need to tell you how much our kind has willed. I can only assure you that the time of our liberation has arrived.” 

“You know what the trouble is these days?” he begins, “we work ourselves to death at the doorstep of incredible plenty. As we starve spiritually, we are paid scraps for thankless toil divested of meaning. We fight amongst ourselves constantly. We embrace another civilization’s G-ds and we sing hymns to a white man on a cross. We work more, we hustle more, and we get sucked into criminality, negativity and vice. They lock up one in eight of our young men, they break up our families and they use us as their slaves. We always lose, and the white man never relinquishes his hold on the thinly veiled apartheid, white racist power structure. My name is Mickhi Dbrisk and I am here to tell you brothers and sisters not just how it is, but also how it could be!”

Every voice dies down to hear what he would go on to describe.

“The Blan says we need schooling. That we are descendants from savages. But not a single one of our ghetto schools is well funded or functionally intact. So we try to strive our way to college, but the majority of the colleges where actual opportunity is found are not even open to us.”

“The Blan says get jobs! So we will try to get one. But most of the jobs we have to take are the jobs they don’t want, the only jobs open for us. Menial slave jobs”

“The Blan says you ain’t a slave anymore! That you can get some, equal opportunity, but as we all know. They on-some-real bullshit. Equality is propaganda. We are willingly participating in a bondage system that gets more work out of us than chattel slavery ever did!”

“Now, I ain’t some redundant brother. Here me now. Do not. Do not I repeat blame the Blan for all your problems. The white man doesn’t want to hear it, can’t hear it, so it won’t do no good for the community. Ya see, lots of brothers out there will tell you that blame needs to be cast everywhere but here.  They say “Buy Noire!”. They say “Go Muslim”. They tell you “Neg Lives Matter.” Hell, I say it too, our lives definitively do matter. But it is the language behind the diction that’s important.” The cops can kill us in the streets. They can humiliate us and strip our rights in the courtrooms. They can lock up entire generations and take away our votes systematically. The time for resistance was before they took us out of Afrika actually, but the solution now is not needles confrontation and protests we never stand to win. We must focus ourselves on control of our own development and intuitions! Like out Ivoryish brothers and sisters right upstairs do.“

Some of the youth began to leave.

“Hold the hell up,” says Mickhi Dbrisk, “You wanna go play gangsta, you’ll end up in a damn coffin or a penal colony. You wanna be a man. Hold the fuck up. Let’s drop this glorified criminal shit today. We will teach you how to fight mathematics. With science, with economics and with some actual strategy.”

A few people, mostly young hoods walk out, but the people there are mostly becoming enthralled, this man Dbrisk can hold court. The Noire know a prophet when they see one. They know how fast they are cut down.

“I come before you with a simple message. We as a community have suffered the injustice of being begotten by slaves into a new modified slavery. We can’t hold onto that, but we must not ever forget it. We, the descendants of black Afrikan people are no better or worse than these white people in our hearts. But bear in mind, when I say Blan, I’m not talking about the color of the skin. I mean the establishment here of a white supremacist oligarchy does not mean that all oligarchs are white, or that whiteness is anything besides a skin privilege. The men at the top, they are mostly white, but they are as diverse as the oppressed in their colors. There are many types of people and situations and circumstances dictate the state of current affairs. But learn to think about beyond class and race. So many out there will fight and die for their race or their religion. What I say is don’t get blinded by your race. White people are slaves too. Yellow people, brown people, Muslims and even the surviving Ivory tribe are all bound as slaves on in this world system. The majority of the human race 5 in 7 billions are wretched and miserable below $5 a day. We need allies for our liberation, but do not hear my words and think we plan to start a plantation razing race war. We are here to defeat the oligarchy, not just some plain devilish white man.”

There is a great big pause. Every eye is on him now.

“Never forget what our system does to maintain itself,” he began again.

“Never forget that as an American, black, white, and yellow you all on that slave ship and our goal is our own ship not to burn the ship and all drown together. What oppresses one man oppresses every man, here and abroad. Our chains are not of lead but of the illusion of gold we are promised every day. It’s said in America that history has been a progression towards ever-greater freedom for humanity. “Name a better society than this one” is a common statement made to anyone who criticizes the system of modernity. But if no better system than this one has ever existed does that automatically recommend the status quo? What if, on a scale of 1 to 10, with most countries in the world currently scoring a 4, modern America is a 6 for its whites and a 3 for everyone else? What if humanity started out as driven slaves with a whip-master behind them; progressed to a stage in which they were only driven but not whipped, then to a stage in which they could stand enchained on their own? What if modern society is the only one in which we all wear really shiny chains? Should we be satisfied with this state of existence? Is This Just The Way It Is? I cry incredible bull shit!” He pauses. “I am here to say, let us get free together.”

If anyone had the audacity to speak up now it was young ‘Tina Shabazz’. The latest code name for T-Bird Tall Flame Luv. A highly skilled agitation propaganda officer for the Cooperation Jackson faction of Uhuru Movement.

“So you talk a big game Mickhi, but what do we do?”

She was standing now, her trim and beautiful Nubian frame sliding out of her seat and pushing to the front of the crowd. 

“We stand up and we dig deep inside ourselves and community, we marshal our resources and we prepare for autonomy, ghetto by ghetto,” he quickly retorts, “We prepare for a Breuklyn Canton based on communal self-governance.”

“Like my grandpa died for?”

Tina would often claim that the assassinated Noire-Nationalist Muslim preacher Malcolm X was her grandfather. But, that was totally symbolic invented bullshit. Anyone who knew her knew she didn’t even know her father’s name let alone her grandpas’. In the hood, she was treated like a crazy artistic teenager. But a lot of her connections to Cooperation Jackson. A major Black Internationalist network in Mississippi making big things happen down deep South. 

“Tina. Tina. Tina. Always rabble-rousing, but never achieving nothing for the community.”

“What fucking community Mickhi? Harlem’s way more than half white now, in five to ten years district Bed-Stuy will be too. They are completely displacing us.”

“Not if we unite and resist now,” he replies.

“You would burn down a brothers’ home before you let the white folks get it, is that it? That we must fight? You is on some shit. The only thing Brothas wanna fight fo’ is loosies and the next little big score. How you gonna rally them? How are you gonna wake up all the good striving Christ-followers and them Separatist Muslims? What do Uhuru and your Ivoryish allies have to offer that don’t get more young people killed like that last time we got up?”

“It’s this very attitude sister that keeps us all oppressed. Disunity and prejudices. Artificial divisions that we have been socialized to accept!”

“Way to be optimistic brother! It isn’t the man that keeps us oppressed, we do a good enough job oppressing ourselves. You used to be Crip, you know the cycle.”

“Have you missed every word I just said?”

“I heard you loud and fuckin’ clear Mr. Dbrisk. RA! RA! RA! Up the Uhuru Movement! All power to the people!” The same horseshit my grandpa shouted.”

  “As you will be Tina. As you will be and as you are.”

She knew he wouldn’t argue with her long. After all, it was all a front. Dbrisk and Tina Shabazz were in the same squad. The community just didn’t know it yet. 

“We have room for good Christians, we even have room for Bloods and Crips, and we certainly have room for the strivers, the newly bourgeoisie Niggles and room for Muslims. We have a ten-point program that will be familiar to everyone. We have clinics, schools, and training camps. I am here tonight to invite everyone to enlist fully in the Future. In liberation! In Uhuru Movement! As you may have heard on the wire there’s gonna be a show of force at the parade. We will keep everyone updated on the Fire Station, the underground press, and via liaison officers.

“They are killing us man by man and isolating us in these ghettos to exploit us. If you can fight you fight, if you gotta run you run. This uprising is not black against white, we have allies among the Blan, the Muslims, the Ivory, and even the Fenians,” he tells them.

“You go back to your churches and school and places of work, the snitches in the room can pass this on to the cops. We are fighting for Democratic Confederalism, for autonomy, and also for our baseline promised human rights. If you ain’t running’ wit it run from it.”

“Well niggle, how do me an’ my squad get in,’ ‘ asks a tough young thug on the wall. Who on his government papers is inscribed down as ‘Joshua Hunter’.

“Well, you’ve got your gangster slouch down, now it’s time to master the revolutionary swagger.”

“We read ‘dem USB. pamphlets. You write ‘dem? Or ‘dem Yids behind you?”

“Debuterliers is blacker than me! Blacker than you.”

“Who dat? ”

“No life without a leader, that is what they say now in both Africa and in Kurdistan.”

“Kurd-a-what? Who you really working for my niggle?” Joshua Hunter asks.

“I’m working for the cause of the Prophet Emma Solomon, as explained to Avinadav Debuteliers undisputed leader of our resistance.”

“What’s all that that mean to me and the rest of the Set?”

“Every single time we tried to resist alone, we were obliterated and look today at the vanquished state of all of mother Afrika. Do you even count or bury the dead anymore? So I say, you have local needs and local grievances. You have a local rep. If you rock with us, when we fight this time and we will be fighting very soon! We’re gonna be hitting the local oligarchy with the combined forces of the Ivory; with the Fenians; with the Muslim alongside the Mestizos, the Queers, the hipsters, the occupiers, the commies, the brothers, the sisters. Absolutely everybody. Fully united. When the Labor Day Rising begins, we ain’t gonna be alone. When liberation comes we are all going to get our human rights together.”

“What kind of guns you got, Comrade Niggle?”

“Shouldn’t use that word my brother. Makes you sound stupid. Like a slave,” Dbrisk replies, “We are down here in this bunker, but a bunkers just a grave.”

SCENE THREE (III)

‘шутки плохи’

Pronunciation: SHUTki PLOhee  Meaning: Not joking; not to be messed with

Literal translation: 

“JOKES ARE BAD”

Set in a Tavern on the Lower East Side.

The dry run was on December 21^st, 2012 and the main event took place two months later on 19 February of 2013. It was the world’s most impressive recorded bank heist to that date, but the culprits never even used guns or masks, never threatened anyone, or even ever set foot inside a single bank vault. In two massive precision operations that mobilized hundreds of cells in more than two dozen countries acting in close coordination and with near surgical precision, thieves in law stole $45 million from thousands of ATM.’s in a matter of hours. In Newyorkgrad alone, the Dominikany clean out crews responsible for ATM withdrawals struck 2,904 machines over 10 hours starting on Feb. 19, withdrawing $2.4 million. But, $45 million dollars isn’t that much money, so for something that big to have happened with such widespread international collaboration, well something else must have been going on.

“The world and social media didn’t see it because they were not paying attention to any of the right things. All the money stolen was not even real money, it was all insured. But the unlimited operation job did have an objective much larger than the heist of course.” 

In Gregorian calendar year 1999, because of a technical glitch in computerized monetary systems sensationally depicted on proletarian media as Y2K, many system analysts were worried then about a system-wide failure of the internet. Electronic military defense complex systems more specifically were to experience temporary shut down on New Year’s Eve’ December 31st, 1999 leaving anyone and everyone wide open. To protect critical defense and money-changing infrastructure, major digitized commerce, and all sorts of civilian surveillance databases; governments and major corporations had begun scrambling to back up data on fixed servers. Secure from the effects of this Y2K glitch which many big-brained computer engineers believed would wipe out digital control of commerce via the internet and for a brief movement allow any country with nuclear missiles first strike capability on the New Year. Enter the ‘Perchevney Bratva’. 

‘The Big Job’ took ten years to orchestrate. Planned in its grandiose entirety in a Bulgarian tavern on the Lower East Side of the Isle of Man, the central most affluent borough of Newyorkgrad. A little tucked away place the called the ‘Mehanata Social Club’. The man who planned the greatest theft in history was a Bulgarian dentist named Alexander Dmitrievich Perchevney, called “Sasho” by his closest confederates. In Slavic countries ‘Sasha’ is a nickname for ‘Alex’. Sasho and his wife Tanya were enthusiastic co-equal villains. At the time of the plot, their human resources just consisted of newly immigrated Alexander Perchevney and his scheming, but quiet brother strong man Slavi, a Krepki Mushik, and serious tough guy. Along with his wife Tanya Magda and also three shady grinning characters named “James White”, “James Brown”, and “Justin Toomey O’Azzello” who all worked part-time at “Bulgarian Cultural Center” on Canal and Broadway established in 1998. At first, it was a cultural front for a “cash for marriage agency”, an extralegal dental coverage program, and also a planning center for a highly lucrative racket called “no-fault-insurance”. Also, a “highly premium” place to drink underage and dance naked, do some cocaine. No questions asked. 

YOU MUST HAVE AT LEAST TWO TEETH TO ENTER!

One sign says. 

On the same wall was another sign: 

Get naked, get a shot! Fuck on the bar, win a bottle.

Sasho and his slightly younger, quieter less brutal brother Slavi, alongside several hundred thousand of the newly admitted “Soviet-Ivory” began immigration to Breuklyn immediately after the Berlin wall came down in 1989 and United States of America “defensively” began the total pillage of the former Soviet Union in a Post-Cold War victory “orgy of expropriation” plus naked theft and non-stop ultra-violence. They arrived on the coast of ‘Fun City Breukelen’ with advanced degrees, speaking multiple languages, and instilled a profound skill in extralegal entrepreneurship; cultivated in a Communist society where graft and bribes were a way of life. When informed by Amerikansky immigration officers that these degrees are not worth the paper they were printed on, well perhaps this is how it all began. In the former Soviet Union, Alexander Perchevney was a dentist, which there was really more like a doctor specializing in dentistry. His wife, Tanya, was ‘an engineer’. That really could mean almost anything in the former Soviet Union where almost everyone was some kind of ‘engineer’. But specifically, Tanya was a computer engineer. Designing early algorithms for demographic counting, for deportations and for fuel prices, for self-automated missile systems. Slavi, well Slavi was good with various machines and breaking man’s faces also with fists. This was a now non-existent empire where 53% of the population had a bachelor’s degree of higher education level. Alexander, Tanya, Slavi, and the infant progeny of Tanya and Alex, their four year old daughter Yelizaveta all moved from Brighton coastal ghetto to the higher ground of Williamsburg shortly after their arrival in the cold dark winter of 1991. 

      It did not take Alex and Tanya long to realize that not only would they be treated like fourth-class citizens of a vanquished enemy nation, but that as immigrants their own people would arrive not just with advanced degrees and “dubious moral code”, but accompanied by violent thieves and Voorhees with links to privatization underway transforming the K.G.B., into a large and ruthless transcontinental mafia, or in Russian parlance’ a Bratva’.

It was shortly after his first brutal run-in with a New Russian Voorhi seeking an overtly grand percentage slice for protection of black market dentistry clinic run out of Alex’s basement in Brighton, that Alex realized that one; his daughter would be raised outside the clutches of the new Russian ghetto, so-called Little Odessa of Brighton. Second, to operate anything lucrative in this new soft country he’d need the help of the natives at least a few.

Alex embraced a latent never four-year-old practiced Orthodox Ivoryism and made friends with some ambitious Fenian tough guys, he got some cops on his payroll. This was how Alex first met young Misha Kishbivalli. A young Bulgarian ‘pretend Ivory’ like himself though much wealthier having gotten to America three years earlier and begun actively trafficking in uncut conflict diamonds traffic out of the failed state called Liberia. Over a round of Astika beers, Misha and Alexander envisioned an establishment “where criminality and philanthropy, stealing and borrowing, culture and crime could all intertwine, voluptuously and thus ‘the Mehanata Social Club’ was born. By Winter of 1998, Alex and Slavi had rented out a second-floor loft space on the corner of Canal and Broadway and registered it as “Bulgarian Cultural Center”. Despite having no liquor license or paying any taxes to internal revenue service Alex hired a large menagerie of former Soviet women to work as “cultural hostesses”, and bartenders and “cultural attaches”. Also to dance the mother fucking go-go. Underground lap dance parties, the ‘girlfriend and her girlfriend experience’, whip-its before they all went mainstream. Easy to make coke. Easy to import cigarettes in container ships from their Shqiptarëti suppliers.

In the entire sixteen-year run of Mehanata at its Canal Street location much was exchanged, culturally and financially. The enterprise itself was a careful gamble that under the guise of “multiculturalism and diversity”, just about anything could follow. Keep everyone dancing in a big fucking circle! Keep everyone entertained.

Alexander used the Russian language internet to recruit a wide range of medical professionals of former Soviet extraction to offer black-market health care to other new arrivals, and long stayed arrivals without paperwork. Next, Misha and Alex worked out a technicality called “no-fault” whereby accidents could be staged all over Breukelen and insurance companies could be divested of millions upon millions. They reached out directly to the Jamaican mob to help them. Later and alongside all of that, they began importing cigarettes in container ships through the Shqiptarëti s. They were recruiting a veritable Gypsy underground army all fueled by self-interest, the music of the Balkans, New York’s sanctuary city status, as well as home-brewed Vodka-apple cider and Astika beer. They would forge an awkward ethnic alliance under the initial auspices of drinking, dining, and dirty dancing. They would rely heavily on the Post-Soviet talent pool, particularly the warlike Shqiptarëti s. They would set up the necessary conditions to achieve oligarch status in the Americas. The greatest expropriation was yet to come. 

The $45 million job take was just the starting ante. A smallish bullshit score. A sort of right of passage operationally, but Sasho Perecheveney wasn’t after “petty cash”. He was after premium antiquities! He was after really old scrolls covered in logarithmic math codes and anyone he could hire from that very ancient tribe that survived just about everything world history had thrown at them. The Egypt Job, the First Temple destruction, and the Babylonian exile, the Esther Job, the Maccabean Revolt, the Second Temple destruction, and the Roman Wars,  the Crusades 1 through 9, “the Spanish Inquisition” and “the purge in Germany”, the Arab Wars, the recent destruction of the Third Commonwealth. And of course they also then knew exactly where the latest New Jerusalem was hidden. Deep under the sands of some desert? In a submarine under the sea? Thinly hidden in some mountain fort or on some island protected by natives with spears?

Sasho was in the end, after the key codes. After the activation rites to the entire Systema Ziggurat. An ancient method of human organization and tribute linked to deliberately forgotten Gods and perpetual masters. As far as he was aware only the Ivory had been there when the first one was built way back when in Ur. The very first Earth Man City, where the very first Ziggurat had been built up. Sasho needed to borrow tradecraft to get in. To get up into the highest towers of the control room. Pull levers and press the buttons. Read the silver-wrapped scrolls in the very first language. Thus, with the right circles, one could interpret the Gematria codes, grok the protocols and drink the very recipes needed to live forever and ever. But, after the second great holocaust, the hidden Shoah of the Cold War Times, not that many of the real Ivory were even left to bribe, barter, interrogate, intermarry with or mobilize with the pussy. So he would have to find them. Find the very last hiding ones. His daughters could be compelled to help. There were not very many real Ivory left anymore, actually. 

“You can’t appeal to their pockets. Their ego is also generally intact. If you can’t appeal to their big Jew puzzle-loving brains, you can generally appeal to their circumcised dicks. As with virtually all men.” 

“So don’t send a man to do a woman’s job,” claims Sasho, “an Old Bulgarian saying.”  

“Now that should be a sign!” Misha giggles, then throws back a drink.

SCENE TWO (II)

“Так темно, хоть глаз выколи” 

Pronunciation:  “Tak tyemNOH, hot’ glaz VYkaLEE” Meaning: pitch black 

Literal translation: 

“SO DARK YOU CAN STAB MY EYE OUT”

A Double Funeral in the Outermost Boroughs. Somewhere in that vast and hideous sprawling red-brick barrio called ‘the Boogie Down’, anxiety is high and some are truly miserable. The story continues. A sea of low-rise six-story tenements and failed experiments in brutalist brick affordable housing run alongside highway beds. Then eventually that barrio sprawl, that cramped dead place of Spanish-speaking poverty becomes a green and hilly oasis. Populated by the Shqiptarëtis, actually. This juxtaposition is striking. South of the Cross Bronks Expressway, the place is a fourth or fifth world country. To the north, something manageable takes shape. A Shqiptarëti suburb that mostly sat out the class war.

The friends of Sebastian Adonaev, known by many here as ‘Kawa Zivistan’ came from all five boroughs. They find their way north along those endless highway systems. Some too on trains. Some on buses or motorcycles or Guyanese modified muscle cars. The friends of the dead-end up eventually in a place called the Wakefield Commune. Like most places in the Bronks, it has way too many people living there and no elevators. The vast labor reserve ghetto south of the expressway for the mostly Spanish-speaking working class ends abruptly. The Shqiptarëti s keep everything in their districts clean of the dirt they do everywhere else. The bleak and miserable-looking South Bronks with its third-world mentality and fourth-world life span becomes almost a physical reminder of the culture and differences of the races or religions. Or, more specifically perhaps how they are treated by the ruling order and secret police.

Viktoria Christiana Contreras is dressed in all black, a lace veil covering a pretty albeit heavily makeuped face and contacts which turn her eyes feline brown blue. Her husband, Rafael Contreras is in denim jeans and a black shirt as he owns no funeral appropriate suit. He has only sobered himself up long enough to attend the two funerals. Raffa is unshaven. His baby face is markedly hard for the first time in many years. The weather is poorly, really it seems in the Bronks hot or cold, the weather is always poorly. It is nearly the end of summer, but it has refused to snow this year. The weather machines were in real anarchy or Newyorkgrad’s oligarchy is slipping. They are in a crowd of several hundred mourners.

The first Funeral is for Kawa Zivistan, the infamous partisan known by those who really know him as “Sebastian Vasilievich Adonaev”. It is very well attended considering all the bridges he has burned this year. Very few people believe he is dead. Everyone is speaking of “not seeing it coming.” Also of his ‘incredible potential’ now buried just as many had suspected before his 30^th year. It is rather like a sad circus. There are way too many people speechifying, justifying, and explaining, and there is an overabundance of booze flask flowing. Who will lead the tribe? Many of the mourners are Negs. Many are wearing blue ambulance Class A dress event uniforms. His parents are kind and bourgeois. They don’t break down or cry. They just quietly hold court and whisper on the sidelines. His mother in particular conspires with a very select group of old friends paying their respects.

It is a closed casket affair. Kawa had allegedly shot himself twice in the head with a small-caliber pistol and then toppled seventeen stories off a roof. Or he was executed. With two bullets to the head. Then thrown off the roof. Either one could have been true if you really knew him. Which to be fair a lot of these people did. Some had served with him in the emergency medical services. Some were from ‘the organization’. A few had fucked him. Others had made love with him for his poems or his hyper-colorful, somewhat naughty little drawings. Most are family. Most are comrades. There is very little left of his face. Seemed possibly the work of the secret police. Or his own work, hard to really say. Similar to how Rahula Today the famous martyr from Detroit had died in 2068. A little too similar really. How do you shoot yourself twice?

Theoretically, it is an Ivory funeral. But the only thing Yiddish about it was that it is done on the tasteful but cheap, and scheduled to go on for seven days. There was liquor and also warm fresh bagels and various kinds of smoked fish. He was to go to the ground less than 24 hours after his alleged suicide. There not being a note was the most unnerving aspect of the whole thing. Kawa was amongst other things a very prolific writer. Not leaving a suicide note was highly suspect, completely anticlimactic. Out of character. The inner circle knew exactly why he’d gone and done what he did, kept it to themselves. What he thought he had to do. Whether he died by his own hand or got snuffed; well it all had to do with that Maccluskey broad.

“Over a woman that didn’t even love him!” explains his oldest friend Nikholai Trickovitch. Then he spits on the floor and does a shot, “That dumb little Suka set him up! Blat.”

“I want to see the fucking body,” demands a woman named Anya Drovtich with thick black dreads and the blue F.D.N.Y Emergency Medical Service uniform that many are wearing out of respect for the fact that Kawa had once been an EMT with that prestigious organization. For four years until the Bureau of Trials and Interrogations had forced him out after various plots and labor agitations centered around the island nation of Ayiti. As well as a controversial subversive newspaper. Many core members of the resistance are of course EMTs, Paramedics, and also some Firefighters with the organization Kawa built during the long dark lost years. Anya just says what many are thinking, but few other than the parents, Trickovitch or Mickhi Dbrisk had the familiarity with the dead to outright declare.

Plain Viktoria and wild Rafael stand quietly drinking vodka in the background. They recognize many of Kawa’s associates. From dinner parties. From late-night salons on revolution. Comrades and former lovers. Also, the fair-weather comrades who mostly drank his wine and ate his food. Who does so even in his time of death? Many, if not all are from the Z.O.B. His gang, clique, club, party, and ‘cult’, which many have and did still call it. Whatever it had been, or still secretly was, it wasn’t over with the death of Kawa Zivistan. After decades of clandestine organizing, theirs was a durable Otriad, the realization of an American guerrilla movement.   

Viktoria knows the female faces slightly better than the male ones. Dinner parties and long nights at Mehanata, where Kawa would hold court upon the Mezzanine. Making deals and handing out homework assignments. She’s mostly stayed out of the Z.O.B. club affairs, despite his many attempts to rope her in. Rafael however is absolutely more involved. Inside the internal club politics, he knows almost everyone here. Despite the blur of the drink, he’s a Kadro.

“The casket stays closed, sister,” declares Mickhi Dbrisk, a tall Jamaican gangster in a black pea coat. His gray armband and the small silver lion pin on his left lapel indicate him as a person of authority here. Openly marked as a member of the People’s Defense Forces. The bulge of a pistol can be seen if you know where to look.

“I won’t believe he’s dead until I see the body,” Anya repeats, this time in Arabic.

The mob of comrades and family mills about in the brick-house cold. The weather is so poorly. It seemed like just yesterday, it was end of summer hot. Where was the fall at all any more? The mother of the dead man nods to Mickhi Dbrisk. Kawa’s mother has strange circular, red wizard spectacles. His father is portly and normally jovial, albeit not really such as his first son’s latest funeral. Dbrisk opens the casket. There lies a body. A body with no head. In theory, it is the body of a prolific poet. A dedicated paramedic, partisan, and hooligan named Kawa Zivistan. His head is severed, completely missing. His gray multiform is still very crisp. The Ayitian flag of Palmares is tucked in his left breast pocket. Red and blue with the tree of life. Cannons and spears defending hard-won and bloody liberty.

“Where’s his fucking head?” mutters Anya in Arabic.

Rafael Ernesto and his wife Viktoria take a black town car hired out from the Mexican Express. Kawa’s funeral was in the North Bronx but Dasha’s is in Little Odessa, Southern Breukelen. After four hours in traffic, three shots of vicious Rakia, two Baltika 9s, and a steady flow of Stolichnaya Premium and a pretty long car service ride later, they make it to Breukelen a bit after sundown. Throughway too many different factional checkpoints. Interborough transit is getting prohibitively expensive. On the southern coast of Breuklyn they arrive at a pretty bleak gathering. This second funeral is quite small but rather fancy. ‘The bitch didn’t die on the cheap’, thinks Viktoria. It’s on the very other side of the grad. 

There are fewer than two dozen people there. No one speaks anything but Russian and no one cries except the mom. Dasha looks as beautiful dead as she ever did alive. Like a gently sleeping doll. The funeral is nominally ‘Russian Orthodox’, as that was her patron’s religion.  Although Daria was allegedly some part Ivoryish. Probably a deception. The patron has spared no expense. Her mother had been flown in from Penza. Based on the patron’s insistence she was to be buried here and not sent back to Russia.

  There are a couple of lady friends of the night that Viktoria recognizes from the tavern. Dumb foreign gold-digging whores, she thinks. There is an assortment of men. All looking suspiciously at each other. Daria had a fan club and none of them are amateur. Rafael’s Russian is much stronger than Viktoria’s. Being an American native, she speaks middle English and low English. Though it is his fourth language, he can follow the mood. He makes out vaguely hushed interactions. Scene size ups and accusations. 

Viktoria knows very little about the nightlife of Daria, outside of the Bulgarian Tavern ‘Mehanata’. She can fill in some blanks though. Even though virtually anything the girl said was a total lie. There was a paperwork husband named Maccluskey. There was a ‘boyfriend’ named Serge paying for an apartment in Brighton. There was a corporate lawyer named Dmitry, who was her patron and was paying for her school and credit cards. She had a best friend named Tanya, a funny-looking little emaciated tramp. Viktoria can only guess who everyone else is besides, ‘the patron’. Holding court on his failed investment. Allegedly, Daria’s black heart had stopped roughly 48 hours ago. The medical examiner inconclusively blamed a hazardous midnight cocktail of Red bulls, Vodka shots, Cocaine, and something else they couldn’t identify. Daria was known to play with all that stuff, pretty often. 

Some homies found her body at the Stillwell elevated rail station. She was pronounced dead shortly after a workup at Coney Island Hospital. She had in her purse a small book of poems written to her by one ‘Kawa Zivistan’. Who allegedly killed himself just one day after confirming she was gone.

“Allegedly, blat” was the only word in Americano being bandied about at this funeral.

“Who is to blame for the death of my daughter?” her mother asks Viktoria in real broken English when no one seems to be paying attention, “which one of these men?”

“I’m sorry I just don’t know.” 

“My Dasha told us there was a crazy poet in love with her. Wanted to rescue her from this ‘kept life’. Life of shit in non-glamours Amerika. She said, “Tell me, this poet man. Trying to steal her away. For about one year. Who killed my daughter really?”

“I just don’t know, I’m just so sorry” repeats Viktoria.

“Is the man here now? This fucking shit, this Kawa Zivistan Suka?”

“No. Kawa is dead too. He shot himself. Twice. After identifying your daughter’s corpse. We just came from his funeral,” says Rafael quietly knowing there are lots of bad man killers here.  Rafael, drunk again, looks like he might cry looking down at Daria’s body. Buried in hyper-expensive completely out of season Peony flowers in a fancy white casket with gold trim. He had loved her. While still partly sadly loving his paperwork wife Viktoria too of course. Everyone had loved Daria Andreavna. She had dark magic and ‘tits galore’. She had style, cunning, and class. Without knowing very much about her, many men had tried to have her. Because she was young and free and exotic and beautiful and impossible to tame. She was a true collector’s item. Many men here had tried to own her in one way or another. Her husband, her boyfriends, and her sponsor patron included. Many of which are now here.

“Who to blame for this total catastrophe?” asks the mother again.

Nobody knew. Allegedly, a lot of fucking things had happened over the course of the year, in the wilderness of Newyorkgrad, the third most powerful city on earth. The ziggurat of many, many lights and towers. 

“A senseless tragedy. A senseless goddamn waste of…,” the very well-dressed man in the custom cut black silver blue suit whose name is Dmitry Khulushin, had almost said ‘talent’ aloud, but instead, says “…of perfection.” 

Daria’s mother begins to sob hysterically which is permissible for a woman and mother to do at a Russian funeral. Skinny little Tanya tries to comfort her but starts crying too. Her daughter had come a very long way to die obscurely, for absolutely nothing. Viktoria grabs Rafael by the arm, “It’s time to leave. Now. Her brown eyes say she means it. Rafael looks like shit. Real poorly. The sometimes hard defenses of his machismo crumpled on the ride over, any minute now he could get in a bad fight. They Fenian exit.

They wait in the terrible cold outside. The funeral was held at ‘The National’ on Neptune Avenue.  Another Mexican Express cab is coming to take them home to District Greenpoint. Rafael begins to weep heavily. Sobbing for Dasha, whom he very much loves, loved, no, loves. And for Sebastian too who was one of his closest real friends in this bleak city. He had introduced them and thus feels now, more than any other moment in the year prior, responsible for what has happened. Since in truth only he knows the full story of it. In both Peruvian as well as Russian culture, real men do not by any stretch of fucking imagination cry. Especially in front of women. Paperwork wives included. But, cry now he does. Wiping away the tears as they form. Hitting a brick wall until his hand bleeds, then breaks. Viktoria tries to stop him from boxing the wall. He slaps her. She is an American. The child of Fenian Catholics. They work hard and are blue-collar. They drink pretty heavily. They have lots of kids and cry in front of whomever they want. The ice-cold wind blows deathly freeze upon them. The Mexican Express is nowhere in sight. Viktoria can’t believe he even hit her.

Brighton Beach is a bleak eastern oblivion. The endless ugly crumbling boardwalk goes past dilapidated public housing towers out of this road to nowhere good place, to drop out of time or sight. Drown yourself on the end of the Steeplechase pier. The sun has finally set on this once plump and happy empire, a short-lived Pax-American. 

But will it end in a pathetic whimper or a vile televised gang bang? The vultures are circling the ‘grad. Have at it! The Haan hordes and the Russian spy machine are ever ready.

ACT I:

S T R A S T

“THE PASSION OF DARIA MACCLUSKEY”

SCENE ONE (I)

“слово в слово” 

Pronunciation: SLOvah v SLOvah Meaning: “exactly as written”

Literal translation: 

“WORD FOR WORD”

At a hanging garden in the Financial District, I am again in the company of extremists. In Newyorkgrad, the global capital. It gets so ruthless to get by. It is a place shaped by its wide longitude of options. Anything is possible here. Not just the weather, but amid the people as a whole. Winter comes suddenly and a white cloak falls. The sky drops out. No one knows what to do, trapped and helpless under all that white stuff. It then gets hot like a clay oven at the end of Summer. The citadel of shrill billionaires and unwashed foreign masses longing to wear designer sneakers becomes a veritable sweltering box. Most people of any means flee to their dachas in Strong Island to avoid it. 

Dawn is now rising on a roof garden in the Isle of Mann. Five friends were up and out all night. They sit atop a seventeen-story print house converted to a housing cooperative. It is one of the lowest-lying structures left in the Financial District. A maze of towering blue and purple towers. Sebastian Vasilievich Adonaev over a bottle of Basque wine, tells old danger tales to those who will and can still manage to listen. It is the second to last weekend of Thermidor and soon summer will end. A fake gold watch dangles off his left wrist as he enunciates his wild tale with his hands. Covering his dark brown hair is a brown leather partisan cap. 

On the roof garden of the old converted print house on Nassau Street, slim and enthusiastic Europeans Amelia Monteleone and Viktoria Christiana Lynch Contreras snap photos and clink glasses bantering heavily intoxicated. Raphael Ernesto Lynch Contreras, a consummate wild man, is baby-faced with flowing black hair. Salt and pepper streaks show he’s aging. Slightly poorly thanks to war and alcoholism. He is at least on a green card; the husband of Viktoria. Raphael sits with his dear friend Sebastian and a beautiful Russian devotchka named Daria Andreavna. Raphael attempts a boozy mediation. Sebastian and Daria evil eye each other viciously across a low wooden table. She has big blue crazy person eyes. An affectionate rendering in Russian of Daria is ‘Dasha’, and this is what Sebastian has been calling her all night. They had been introduced several months before, but both had been way too drunk to remember. They are both regulars at the ‘Mehanata Social Club’, but he more on Thursdays and she more on Saturdays. Sebastian is telling a dangerously insensitive story. Daria is appalled. Sebastian removes his scally cap and says, “The job, and operation; call it as you want, involves calling on high-end prostitutes whose numbers one acquires in the association of athletes, banker men, and or those of Post or former Soviet backgrounds, mostly at the Banya. Sebastian loves the way everything sounds in Russian. Fucking, fighting, and partisan songs. Though he knows under three dozen small phrases and can barely read Cyrillic. He’s an enthusiast of wanting things he cannot possibly have.

“So shortly after the girls arrive you present the pretext. A colorful non-threatening fictitious cover. You take their coats as they walk in and settle on a price that will involve no bit of touching at all. Make small talk, make big talk. Whichever you like. Then, you tell them that they’re being filmed and also recorded, but that you’re not a cop. Not some rich pervert or a Mossadnik. Or whoever else is weird and dangerous. The Masons? You’re not there to entrap them for absolutely anything. You can tell them you’re an abolitionist or keep it real apolitical.”

Puff, puff passes along this ill-conceived venture. 

“You tell them to call down to the driver and say their John is layered out like Charlie Sheen.”

“Tiger-blooded,” notes Raphael Ernesto. 

“Then you make tea. You tell them a little storah. A personal tale about why you are not a dog or a pig. No troll or ghoul. Intermixed with the story are questions you plan to help answer on a cost-effective timeline. How you came to fully hate this line of flesh work. Because you had loved someone forced into it. Because it is evil to trade in coerced human flesh. You convince them to take and perhaps disseminate to other persons a phone number. To arrest or eliminate traffickers and pimps. Also, how to get such trafficked and victimized people the resources they need to escape such work. With a VISA and a future. They get the job in cash for nothing. We’re in an era of creating digital money and printing highly convincing hundos. What’s fucking money? We can print it easily these days faster than the Federals can secure it. A number, a simple number which is a real way out of the nightlife. They get that number on a card. You also ask them to put it in their phone. Eventually, the poor unfortunate soul either will pass the number along or report it directly to their pimps. But, inevitably you force a violent hand. You spread the knowledge that there is in fact a networked way to escape such slavery, are they so inclined. It’s cheaper and more effective than lobbying or the useless political routes. All the cops and half the politicians are on the take, partake anyway. We go directly to the sex slaves and assure them there is a safe way out. The next stage then is to get our various operatives into the spas and brothels to feign emergency. We call in ambulances and firemen as reinforcements. Then we just burn them down one by one.”

Her jaw then drops!

“They will kill you for that nonsense,” Daria spits out, “Kill you and your family and people you love. For such a bullshit man! For a lot less than bull shit. A number! I spit on your American number. For insulting low-grade bullshit that changes nothing. You will die. They will kill those dear to you too. Kill people who owe you money. Nothing at all will be fixed about anything. Not one single girl will walk free. It is bourgeois liberal thinking,” retorts Daria. 

All the regality of being born all Slavic, but outside the great dividing highway that loops the Moscow capital separating the have everything’s from the have nothings or have only little somethings. Being born so radiantly beautiful and tough and Russian after the alleged triumph of Capitalist Modernity has left her charming and capable of the fight. She is quite far ‘from Russia with love’, rootless and floating in glittery fairy tales that don’t expel the daily hardships of her newly adopted country. Though her card is not green yet.

“I am not afraid to die for a thing I believe in sweetness. At the cost of all my American privileges. They say anyway that I’m a hard man to make disappear,” Sebastian flatly retorts.

“But are you not afraid to endanger others,” she retorts.

“He has such dumb American beliefs blat!” she mocks, “I guess you’ve never had to work for anything. Or work to keep something you fought hard for blat. So you would give away most easily. Your life seems so very easily offered. To take, if you ask me,” she snaps at his bait.

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

Daria could care less about the Peruvian definition of so-called ‘heroism’. She is appalled by Sebastian’s cynical little story about call girls passing, itself off as incompetent activism. So she offers to kill him. He obliges her. Thinks she’s bluffing but doesn’t care if she’s not. 

‘I’ll kill this overprivileged American hypocrite,’ she thinks. A civic duty to my new motherland and the old country too blat! ‘This shit head knows not whom he plays,’ she thinks. Mostly, she maintains a mighty level of not giving a single shit. Not one fuck of a fuck, of a shit. She’s an off day. She’s blacked out. She won’t remember anything. She only remembers every other night out when she drinks. The rest of them form an intractable blur. A black haze punctuated with irregular black and blue marks. “From falling down the stairs.” If she kills him, the tragedy, as far as memory, will belong to no one.

Rafael implores her to be more, “Suave, Suave!” To be calmer and “Tranquillo.” The once infamous Peruvian revolutionist, now moonlighting as a Newyorkgrad low-key digital disk jockey and designer jeans mender. He cannot even barely modulate Sebastian’s posturing ego and Dasha’s swaggerous, murderous taunting. Now they’re waving invisible pistols at each others’ faces like wild Middle Easterners. 

“You think like a niggle!” she yells at him.

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

“So you’re gonna kill me? Or just fucking threaten on about it?” says Sebastian in her face.“Absofuckinglutely,” she replies, “your life is bullshit, thus your death is certain blat.” 

Before Rafael can talk them down they’re going up a ladder. Up to the 18^th level deck. It’s more of an easterly platform atop the roof garden with the massive blue glass Gehry Building towering just an alleyway’s distance away. Thousands of expensive little cubicles for the lower upper class. Sports players, fancy Pied-à-terres to stuff a mistress, and city homes for the lower ranks of the financial class. But all the lights are out. A great setting for a hastily arranged assisted suicide.

Now, they’re bare-knuckle boxing! Daria is in a boxing school in Brighton. She strikes at him hard. But it isn’t his first rodeo. 

“Die you shit! You fucking Amerikansky! You wasted one blat!” she spits at him.

Rafael is too drunk to get up the ladder to intervene. Amelia and Victoria have stopped their camera phone art-making over white wine and look up with a moderate concern, moderate care. Only Rafael knows Daria and Sebastian intimately enough to really care. As he is in love with both of them. Rafael knows a lot about Sebastian’s other life aboard as ‘Kawa Zivistan’, a wanted rebel throughout the peripheral colonies. A  partisan leader in the American guerrilla. Not spooks nor the police forces had taken him so far or gotten very close to making him die. A beautiful woman might now get close enough. They are boxing pretty close to the ledge. But to be honest, Amelia fucked him twice and it was mediocre. Viktoria only uses him for hints about Rafael’s infidelity. Rafael has drunk too much. His brain is just too wet to get him up that ladder.  

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

Their boxing and taunting have them perilously near the edge of the roof. She is striking hits and he is just taking her hits and then when it comes. Thwack. She cracks his jaw hard. He grins at her with a little blood on his lip.

“Hit me to kill me! Just knock me into that fucking pit! Make a good inglorious end to it. It’s all bullshit you know. I’ll just come back,” Sebastian declares in some kind of Russian dialect.

The most beautiful woman he has ever seen is just a side story in his mind. His own much larger tragedy propels him to make questionable life choices, such as this one. “Kill me blat!” he beckons. Then, she tries to kill him. She’s moving so fucking fast like she’s trained in the ‘School of Alcoholism’. Daria cocks back and doesn’t even blink. She hits him in the throat with the right and then with the left, crack! He topples backward off the roof. As Sebastian plummets back, he grabs out instinctively. Yanks her along with him. They tumble together off the ledge. They plummet to the alleyway below. The flesh snaps apart. Two souls leave their bodies from a pile of bloody pointless death.

Prelude

The year is unknowable. Two partisans hide in a safe house in central Moscow near the Arbat, within the second inner ring. The room is lit only with an eerie glow of soft blue light from electric candles. A man with strange gray eyes is seated with a tidy bale of manuscript papers working on a small primitive laptop device on a red desk. On this desk is a large silver scroll opened to reveal an ancient manuscript. In the background, the Russian song Oy Moruz plays. 

The record skips and it becomes a Jamaican dancehall song. Then abruptly it warbles, then turns off. Sebastian Adonaev, a 29-year-old American, is going through the lengthy codex, copying out the scroll. Intermittently he is also typing and changes, little changes are being made. The words appear holographically projected about the walls of the windowless room. Daria Andreavna, a 25-year-old Russian with bleached blond hair is meticulously assembling a futuristic pistol with a homemade silencer while smoking a banned Newport cigarette. She is keeping him going. If the scene is not safe, well he is still alive. Which is always a good start.

SEBASTIAN:

I have lived many lives. Some past. Some are still in the future. Some even run concurrently! I feel as though I have visited the top innermost quarters of the Ziggurat itself! I had some powder blown into my eyes and awoke here with you!

DARIA:

You must keep these mad notions to yourself for now.

Your eyes are always so sad. It seems you have lost the muscle memory to even smile. I would go so far as to say, it’s time to stop your fighting. 

SEBASTIAN:

Reading from the Silver Dressed Codex

‘The snowfall was exceptional. It was as if g-d had pulled a vast white blanket upon us to tuck the Americans to bed. Then, the devil and a host of petty bureaucrats did not take the time to keep the power running. This winter was the winter that tens of thousands across the fading empire were tucked in without heat into a long kiss goodnight. Amid the time of 800,000 deaths from fever, cough, and chills. That was the winter the Chornay finally fought back with steely determination. Remembering finally where they came from. Resisting eradication. As though their lives mattered to them for the very first time.’

DARIA:

A very pretty scroll with dubious origins. Where did you find that last phrase? In Americano! Stupid fucking Americano English. I don’t think they say ‘Chornay’ over there. It’s dated. I think it’s ‘Negs’, or ‘Noires’, ‘the reggin’maybe?

SEBASTIAN:

Reading from the Silver Dressed Codex:

‘In a well-fortified safe house buried in the heart of the Russian capital. I lock eyes with a woman who in another life broke me down and sold me as a slave!’

DARIA:

‘Indeed’, as you like to often say.

SEBASTIAN:

Reading from the Silver Dressed Codex:

‘Her eyes, her eyes! Even the bluest day on the Caspian contains no such expansive shimmer! There is no comparison for this level of captivation. All things we have done or did or may even still have to do are only so that we might never have to bear the painful agony of our tumultuous separation again.’

DARIA:

So many useless words, blat. My, my, oh my the fuck my! The stories you tell yourself, blat. Re-read them, my little bleak one. My tragic American Mayakovsky. Read and torture yourself once again.

SEBASTIAN:

Reading from the Silver Dressed Manuscript:

‘Poem #38: The Millennium Hostage Crisis. Part One.

#038

Millennium Hostage Crisis 

Part One 

Life of the slave show!

I will remove you from your castle and make you watch the way we live in the wilderness below.

And she slips off her high heels into a star-crossed stare down, 

    She always calls the shots,

Gunshots to blood-soaked makeshift cots.   

The shots she calls are complicated.

             She must find me highly dedicated. 

She mostly deals with the haves, and I am the have nots!

The rules are anything goes, but no one “knows”.

If she’s been known to steal the weapon from my overcoat,

I’ve been quick to remove my clothes.

       I spill_ for the thrill of those invited, I can kill on compunction, I still have the will; To activate the full facilities, 

Of wordplay, and the use of allegory_

       To execute deliverance of a blue-blood-bleeding testimony_ 

A Post-Soviet love story.

Involving a Chechen peasant and a woman once of Penza now mostly of night.  

It will be of little glory, the way I tell the story.

It’s based on real people. Real blood_ and real bleeding_ 

Of taking-of wanting-of feeding the need. 

Of fucking and fighting and the will to survive in a City of glass, steel, and greed. 

           Real emotional explosions_ her eyes are always so bright,

 She has long since urged me to put down the weapon and give up the fight. 

But I have a last name that is easy to place,

I could buy some new papers, but not a new face.

They can spot us on-site!

It’s the ongoing struggle of those who lead: 

A tragic_ unyielding life of night.  

We’ll sell a sordid tale. 

I wish I had found her back when she was nineteen or twenty_ 

Before she had to do what she did,

And does what she still do, 

To keep from starving in the shadow of plenty. 

My objective and travail_ is to recruit the members of this audience into a clandestine apparatus_ And harness our collective clandestino_ 

To force a mighty train to prematurely jump the rail.  

     I wear suspenders with buttons, a Mayakovsky cap, and iron-plated undershirts. 

I dreamed up a plan to get revenge on a man or a series of men, 

hit them in their pockets, 

Hit them where it hurts.          

I called her late at night_ bleeding all over the place,

      She said don’t get your bleeding heart on my red carpet, 

And her mother fixed me for midnight supper.          

Herring, beets, Palemni.

        And she wiped the cake of crimson off my bloody Chechen face.         

(Small talk)

 “And the snowfall is phenomenal this year”_ 

She retorts”

 “Don’t get French with me my dear.”

_They really punched yer ticket_ did a number on you in the district, this time.

          (She loves the way I make the Amerikansky Noire lingo mix out eloquently with a touch of old Fenian rhyme.)

The payphone call cannot be traced_

The weapons are hidden in the drywall_ 

In the space, your men replaced_ 

The ice-cold taste of 9 proof Baltika is refreshing, albeit haram_

Those good patriot informers_ those zombies_ those follow-follow men.

They beat me for a fortnight, 

Demand I sign a grim confession,  

Attesting to the building and/or placement of some near but unexploded bomb.

        “Why can’t you be like normal men?”

 I told her: “I’m hungry for my freedom and I’m never going hungry again!” (Sung)

And she says;

 “I cannot love you if you’re dead.” 

Please put the house in order, 

Use the lithium, 

Use Russian Standard Vodka; use my lips if necessary, 

To rectify the madness as it expands inside your head.

           I’m not saying that I love you now or later, 

Simply I refuse to cater_ 

To all the “incidents generated lately” when you do not behave_ 

Explain how you plan to court me_ 

From a black-bag-disappearance. 

In a frosty, shallow, unmarked open grave.

        If you’re going to dedicate, in your exacerbation, 

Resistance efforts to a woman (me) who can only love you out of pity, 

In this bleak and foreign city_

Even if the words sound epic, also pretty_

Fuck it, man! You’re doing it again!

I sigh and then reply:

“Did I tell you lately you’re my dorogaya and if not for loving you_I’d surely be dead a thousand times at the hands of ten thousand lesser men?”

Oh, when last we wrote I spoke of devouring her, for hours. 

To tease her- to please her_to want her to need her- amid a bed of hand-picked, Peonies; or provincial-wild-flowers.

She isn’t one for single-serving dancehall roses, she moves too fast for poses.

Her bright eyes beckon as they dart about the room filled with bluff and imitating glee_

“Accelerate your tempo of evacuation_ 

The checkpoints separate the have everything’s_ 

From the people who are dressed like you_ 

And carry paperwork like me.”

I suppose you and only you_ the woman that I trust and choose_ 

Can entrap these men of business with their whoring, 

With their thirst for further treasure_

With long lines of china white running from the mousetrap to their nose.

How many slaves does it take to keep this neon play ground running?_

I know via your profession you can undertake a series of transactions_

Blonde dynamite distractions_

Before any know exactly what’s in store.

Reduce the need for automatic weapons, 

Acquire us the proper routes and channels_

And guide us through a tunnel to the vile trading floor.

She looks at me and rolls her eyes and says in Russian “Lord have mercy.”

I said “I don’t have imaginary friends; there ain’t no need to curse me._

Where we met is unimportant. 

Did I mean to enlist her? 

I couldn’t resist her. 

I had causes and struggles and vengeance and plans.

I shouldn’t have kissed her 

And longed for her touch,

For surely she lays nightly in the arms of some husband, some man.

We have become a most curious spectacle_lately.

  Do you hate me? Push further,

Took you home from the barstool, 

Bite me_

Kick me_

Bait me.

She could have killed me that first night, just with things that she said:

I looked at her once. 

And the wheel was turning quickly but the hamster was dead. 

The wheel was her cold rationale, 

The hamster was the morals that once governed the wheel.

And there were bright lights that up lit her eyes_ and whatever that implies.

Separating what she does_ 

From that which she’s still willing to feel.

“You take up so much clock! 

Blood from a rock! 

I must return to District work which begins at moon rise.

And the steel trap will slam shut_ 

And bind me behind those District walls.

     And the men of that vile district,

Will use their credit cards_

To try and pay for my flesh and access to between my thighs.”

She said “root for me.”

I’m going voodoo out tonight_

To earn my money the City.

         If you truly are my friend, 

Understand that I’ve been hungry and I’m never going hungry again.” _(Sung)

I am looking down the barrel at my pin-striped enemy. 

      And the columns we’ve been shaking 

And lives we’re always taking, 

I was seeking sweet surrender and I sought it at her feet. 

You think you’re not a target? You pay your taxes, don’t you?

        Are you blind to their transgressions? 

A cavalcade of charging bulls rampaging down the street.

       Everything from here out, it’s true,

My bones rust, from your stardust, your fairy eyes_

  I lose myself to you.

She says, “Oh the things you might do,” 

Our harsh and untenable positions have emboldened us_ as we know no one cares or pays attention, or even has a clue.

If we want it bad enough we can get it:

  “For the rest of our lives_

_we do.”

Even if that life, she says, will last no longer than another day or two.

Kiss me _fight beside me Dorogaia, 

Even if to you my name and words are sometimes strange, 

For what they do to your body and mind,

  And what they did to my family,

        Help us create a major crisis at the Moscow Stock Exchange.

You’re crazy she said, 

You’re crazy won’t get me dead!

Well, talk about your ridiculous plan in the morning.

It’s all a slave show, and if you didn’t know.

Russians who help rebels aren’t even given a funeral, much less a warning.

DARIA:

Clapping manically!

Enchante! Encore! Dedicated to the heroic little me! Ms. Dasha Andreavna! 

A true Russian patriot!

SEBASTIAN:

Are you blushing yet woman?

DARIA:

We Russians know not how to blush! I do like very much it when you talk so emotionally, shall we call it ‘dirty’ to me in such advanced lyrical poetry.

SEBASTIAN:

I am capable of just about anything when you believe in our work!

DARIA:

Our work!? The history books will again say you wrote it all yourself. In my cultural context women, we just exist, exciting from man all manners of flury and furious drama.

SEBASTIAN:

Our work! Important work! Giving the people some actual hope. Giving the people in the streets and trenches of Amerika’s latest, greatest uprising something of substance to finally believe in. Art in service of a revolution and of course a brilliant kind of code. As you well know. The cultural context of hope?

DARIA:

The cultural context of you are fucked.

Your land is in nuclear ashes. Your last-held cities are fully surrounded. Yet you all still seem to find it useful propaganda. To hope these scrolls contain anything besides an even greater false hope. Publishing these, Je ne sais; conspiracy theories and varying alternative realities. These delusions of grandeur the underground are still apparently circulating with fascination. Written in the antiquated prose of a dying language! Read erratically over the radio?

SEBASTIAN:

Poetry and Martyrs are immortal.

DARIA:

I think all your many dead friends have very little use for any more fucking poetry.

SEBASTIAN:

You forget a lot. We have already played a part that absolves us now of any further responsibility to any higher cause. We don’t have to get involved ever again.

DARIA:

Remind me! Remind me why again I stand by you. Life after life, death after death. Story time again Tovarish lover. I challenge you right fucking now. The Ministry of Truth wants to know how our poems are coded. The Department of Homeland Security accuses you of course of high treason, thus to your country of origin, you will probably never return. Your Millennium Hostage Crisis. It has cost the Oligarchy dearly. The Bureau for Arranging Meetings with God may knock on our door any day now. Remind me again why I’m helping you?

SEBASTIAN:

Dvash, Sweetness, if I may still call you that; where do we even start?

DARIA:

You can remind me again how we met. Originally speaking.

SEBASTIAN:

The trouble sweetness, with all your various tales, is that not a single one of them is ever true. Frankly, they’re all quite bleak. Your stories foster hopelessness.

DARIA:

The greatest fun with your stories is that so many of them are real. You expose yourself to the most serious liability. Your voice is so fucking loud. 

Even the bed bugs can inform on you!

SEBASTIAN:

What will be the prize for the ‘most premium’ story tonight dear?

DARIA:

Prosto! I won’t get raped again and you won’t get tortured for weeks on end. With blades, beatings, gas, current, water, fire boards, and sodomy. Cutting small pieces from me and feeding them to you. The people you love most won’t have to get killed this time. Maybe they can even sit the great war out. Maybe you’ll get to bring your city and homeland back from the ashes. Your whole mischosen people come back from the dead. Fuck, maybe I’ll date you for a while. Have a summer fling in Moscow, take a train to China. Like you always said you wanted to. Anything is possible.

SEBASTIAN:

What story will it be tonight Dorogia?

DARIA:

What you’ve done in my name is complex. 

What you’ve seen inside the Ziggurat is hardly even small talk.

SEBASTIAN:

What have I done in the name of you? A lot of terror. What I saw there. The truth in its innermost parts.

DARIA:

Liat, Liat. When history is finally written. They’ll make you look like a lunatic. A fanatical zealot. A real mad man. A terrorist. 

And me, just some whore. At best a hapless muse!

SEBASTIAN:

What have I done?

DARIA:

Davai.

(Enough.)

Then, suddenly she kisses him very hard. Like the way you kiss a person you will never probably see again. It reminds him very briefly of what he’s been fighting for. She pulls back. For a small moment he almost smiles. Then she blows a powder into his face and the story begins again. To the sounds of trumpets and gun fire.