ACT I
P R O L O G U E
نيويوركغراد
NEWYORKGRAD, 2018 ce
Sebastian Adonaev enters the Tavern. A place of refuge! The double doors swing shut and seal him inside. The place is entirely deserted. Music plays lightly. He is a fugitive and a soldier returning from a forgotten foreign war. He is losing his mind. A busty Slavic shot girl, Maria Silverstova with forty bullet shots, sells Vodka based drinks.
They meet in the eyes. He is “a completely used up Israelite gun man”. Brown hair and Chechen eyes.
SEBASTIAN ADONAEV
“During our border reentry run from Rojava back into Suly, most of our column was blown apart in repeated missile strikes. We hid in a dugout bunker for two days. I was covered in piss, shit, blood, mostly other people’s blood, mostly my own piss. Heval Jansher, my mentor and immediate commander, I think he died in a drone strike. Died getting us out of Rojava before the Turkish invasion began. I turned 33. An Armenian volunteer bought me an oriental woman. But all I wanted to do was take a long hot shower. Wash the filth and death from me. Get out of that fucking uniform forever and get on the next evacuation shuttle. Get back to Daria alive!”
I spent the evening of my 33rd birthday in a Chinese bathhouse on the outskirts of Sulaymaniyah. Yet not one thing in it was made clean. Or for bathing. “Suly”, or also called “Slemani,” is the more libertine of the Kurdish cities in liberated Northwestern Iraq. A liberated, but unrecognized country politically divided by two city states.
The Chinese sex worker bore witness to a madness that would soon follow. My colleague balls deep in something carnal his way come. I just kept washing myself vigorously. The filth I felt of cowardice. The shame of retreat. She put her hands on me for only a moment, and I shuddered. Pushed her away. I then fell on my knees, and I cried. I picked myself up, and the Armenian volunteer paid our bill. We had a beer in the adjacent bar. Right before midnight we took a cab back to the safehouse. They went through our bags to make sure nothing would flag us at an airport. Some party men put us in a van with tinted windows then we were hustled through security. My magic carpet landed in Baghdad. Then a 24-hour layover in Cairo. Almost fell out of the sky over the Atlantic several times. Then with no questions asked I was in JFK.
Now! I am back in Newyorkgrad, far from the war raging in Iraq, Syria, and Yemen. But! War and ghosts never leave me. I ride the train with plump and ignorant civilians. Some Chornay put on an obnoxious ‘show time.’ By way of Baghdad then Cairo, now I am back. My mind is not where I had thought I had left it, and neither are any of my friends and family. Is it March? It is March or it’s April. I have just done an eighty-day bid in the hospital. Might have been eighty with a two-day run for the mountains in between. I might be facing an assault charge. I might be tailed. I hide in the only place I think I can fit in. A Tavern on Ludlow Street. I call Sasho from a pay phone. He says to lay low and head to the Tavern right before nightfall. I don’t know what the hospitals did to me. I just want to kill myself, or at the very least get myself killed.
I showed up at the Tavern early. The place is empty. The owner Sasho isn’t around nor my friend and associate, the Gangster Medved. On the wire, I heard Ms. Daria will get married tomorrow on her 29th birthday, right after the curtain call in a play she sings in, in Midtown. She wrote to me every day during the war. I am just too late. I think I am being followed. I threw my phone in the river. Now I do not have a phone. I’m either chasing myself in a circle around the Isle of Man, or the follow-follow men are trailing me. Seeing who I meet with before they pick me up again. Well anyway, there is only one way in, but four ways out of this Bulgarian tavern. Other than a pity coffee here and there, everyone is nervous about me and giving me tons of space. Avoiding me. Not Medved, he is buying me a drink. Out in the wide open. Like he does not give a fuck!
In walks a newly hired shot girl Maria Silverstova. A chesty young thing. She says she is “from Moscow” but is from the glorious nation of Bulgaria.
SEBASTIAN ADONAEV
Zdrastvistia8.
MARIA SILVERSTOVA
Why hello to you my very strange one! My wayward and my leeward Amerikanski. You can say Privet to me, my old new friend. For I do know you are naked.
SILVERSTOVA
I had met Ms. Maria at the Bulgarian Bar the very night I got off the evacuation plane. I first met her again on international working women’s day.
She gave me a decent price. There are 88.95 Rubles in Dollar. Her shots cost 280. Her body is far more. Her mind is not for sale.
SILVERSTOVA
I tell people “I’m from Moscow,” though of course I am not.
My waist is tight, and breasts are quite ample. It is all contained under a little black cocktail dress. Holding around forty plastic bullets of Vodka; I sell them in the Tavern for 70 Rubles apiece. Ethnically speaking I am clearly one of Russia’s 157 sub-ethnicities, perhaps a Chechen, perhaps part Tajik or Uzbek. I think I am an exceptionally good listener.
Sasho said you were coming to hide out with us.
ADONAEV
I am looking for Oleg Medved.
SILVERSTOVA
And Medved, your friend the bear, he looks for you, droogy.
Sasho said, “try and make him happy.”
Sasho has a long history with him. Aiding and abetting a terrorist. The Bulgarians have never really expelled him from that ugly little tavern. In an on-scene kind of way, they encourage him. Giving him refuge.
Adonaev does not remember meeting me 80 days ago. He came here right from the airport. Had Sasho the Voorhi sorted out some work and some papers for him.
He looked and still looks like a terrifying person, a mad man.
He had just gotten that very same night in a stupid fist fight, beat a Chornay half to death yelling racial epitaphs. And was asked to exit, relinquishing his tavern card last Saturday.
I draw him over to a small table, though on duty as a shot girl I remain an inquisitive journalist.
ADONAEV
Maria, Tovarish Maria, how does life go at night?
SILVERSTOVA
I’m alive. It’s a start from which all options can follow. Would you like a drink?
ADONAEV
Not on your pale ruble.
SILVERSTOVA
There are other Rubles to pour from. Let’s sit. Tell me about the Syrian Civil War. A little bit, enough to have a sense of what anyone is supposed to do about you or your friends who came back to us.
ADONAEV
Far more good was done than any real evil. By my Otriad anyway. I am sure the others killed more Jihadists, and I did more medical care, but it was all a group effort. In which one did their little part. But really, few of my single serving friends have survived the war. The Arabs and Kurds are just going to grind away until Türkiye rolls in to squash the entire revolution.
SILVERSTOVA
What Otriad did you serve in? I am a little familiar with the actors.
ADONAEV
I served in the Shahid Firat Tabor of the People’s Protection Units, the Y.P.G.
SILVERSTOVA
Ye-Peh-Gay? Or WHY-PEE-GEE?
ADONAEV
The Kurdish Militia received American support to defeat the Islamic State.
SILVERSTOVA
Freedom fighting and or raw U.S. Imperialism, both? Same, same; not different?
ADONAEV
We were defending the only alleged Democracy in the Middle East, besides the alleged democracy in Israel. Türkiye was bombing us from the North, Al Qaeda attacking Idlib in the West, the Hashid Shaabi Popular Mobilization forces from the East, and ISIS from the south.
You take guns from whoever offers them in that kind of situation, nu.
SILVERSTOVA
So, on the Russian speaking news tonight. Türkiye has begun a new Operation against Rojava. You are aware Afrin Canton is completely overrun and Manbij is next, and the Turkish army will probably undo all if any progress you all had made out there, against whoever it was the Americans had you fighting? And have now abandoned it.
ADONAEV
I don’t sleep well anymore. I use combinations of masturbation, drinking, and drugs to put the lights out, I guess some emphasis on the drinking too. I get it. We all died or almost died or didn’t die and it was all for nothing. I get it. And Goldy and I will never see each other again, and I writhe in pain avoiding my face in the mirror.
I need help from you or Medved. A different kind of bullet.
SILVERSTOVA
Prosto! You just need a new whore! Excuse me, I mean muse. Someone pays to love you even better than before. Not me, I’m too much for you too. I too want luxury carrots to remember. Not paintings or any poems. The couple times we eye to eyed, we even French kissed. It all just made me pity you.
You’re basically not a man to me or your Goldy. You have no car, no respectable job, no property, and for right now no ability to move beyond your own paralysis. She and others like us must think about papers.
ADONAEV
Ne-yet Prosto. Not simple. I need a revolver so I can restively and decisively shoot myself in the head like a man! Or turn it on her fat ugly Patron. That will be enough. I should have died with my friends in Afrin.
Do you even possess the understanding to know what is on the table there? Do you even have the care? They were liberating the women, they were instituting democracy, and they were planting trees. I feel like I briefly defended a utopia, only to be cast out.
Sent back here where I am less than a man. Less than a criminal!
SILVERSTOVA
Prosto! (Simple) Go back to the beginning of the narrative and explain to me your motivation!
Tell me how your valiant and slightly suicidal mission began and the connection between your ideas on free life versus a meaningful life in motion. Be, fucking linear! Tell the tale from beginning to end instead of dancing around like a crazy person.
ADONAEV
Tovarish Maria, I would like a dance from you first. I will pay the full amount in green dollars.
SILVERSTOVA
“Your money Tovarish,” they say is no good here. You cannot pay for a bullet or a dance. You cannot pay in Rubles, Dollars, or the now faceless Dinars9.
You can buy time with or without sympathy.
ADONAEV
Sympathy with the resistance?
SILVERSTOVA
Sympathy with the American Mayakovski, and those who enjoy his performances. Shamelessly flailing, shamelessly throwing himself in front of armies and trains, over what?
ADONAEV
You do in fact know what!
SILVERSTOVA
You know I don’t partake in the Lapland for free. Don’t you have a forest wife in Nizhny Novgorod and a son somewhere? It will cost you nine hundred dollars to degrade yourself and me tonight. That is 64,800 Rubles an hour. Supply and demand. I do not think you even have enough for a bullet. Certainly not enough to buy the only thing you really want.
ADONAEV
I do not have 100 Rubles to my name.
SILVERSTOVA
Then you get what you pay for! Which are nothingly nothings.
ADONAEV
What is my story worth?
SILVERSTOVA
It is worth less than a lap dance. More than a Dabka.
ADONAEV
I need her, you know.
SILVERSTOVA
Oh, that we all know that sad story. “It doesn’t take a weather man or woman to know which way the winds blow.”
Old American saying?
ADONAEV
I don’t follow your allegory.
SILVERSTOVA
Old Russian saying, “I want to dance on your face until your whole mask falls off!”
ADONAEV
That one I understood, almost perfectly.
SILVERSTOVA
As if I was making reports in Russian, or even Turkish.
“He has just returned from Syria. The duration of the self-deployment was around nine months were we to include Cuba and Russia and Iraq, Türkiye, and Egypt. He is haunted. And despondent, a veteran of the People’s Protection Units; called the Y.P.G, you pronounce the G as ‘gay’. He has been ideologically indoctrinated by the Kurdistan Workers Party and given some basic military training. Brainwashing. He is to be watched if necessary: eliminated.”
Well, I guess you did not die in the war.
ADONAEV
Well, I guess I did not die in the war.
There was a lot of shame in that. I was mysteriously back in New York, trapped and useless. All my best efforts were forgotten and amounted to less than one nothing.
SILVERSTOVA
Stop talking and thinking only about yourself for a minute, blat10… Tell me about your murdered Comrade Anya Campbell. Tell me about your soon-to-be-dead Kurdish friends. Confirm a little seditious rumor I heard?
ADONAEV
A rumor?
SILVERSTOVA
Stop talking and thinking only about yourself for a minute, blyat..now I heard a rumor. It’s a, how do you say, doozy, of a rumor.
ADONAEV
Go on.
SILVERSTOVA
I heard that the same people that did 9.11 created the Islamic State from scratch.
Enter the Gangster Medved, Sebastian and Medved bearhug embrace.
ALAN OLEG MEDVED
Loose hips sink ships! Say no more serious things to this chesty one, my one old friend! Maria, call up some of your friends! This man needs a serious distraction.
But Sebastian Adonaev, being the Sebastian Adonaev, who I invest too much time and energy in, hopes to fully convolute the narrative. Blur apart the story of war and Islamic militancy and revolutionary fervor with busty sexcapades, pornographic poems, and some borrowed prophecy and Haitians. Chornay dancing about the room waving their flags in the air!
SILVERSTOVA
A simple patriotic task.
MEDVED
One night at the tavern, about one week after Sebastian arrived home. I was sure he was being followed. Shortly after our reunion, he was taken.
Shall I call them “American secret police?”
His voyage, quest, which began in Cuba, then to Russia, then Iraq, Türkiye, Iraq, Türkiye, Iraq, and then finally Syria, then out via Baghdad and Cairo. The detention lasted 80 days. All were behind him for now. He tries to tell me about his time in Kurdistan. In the end, the sad conversation always goes back to Ms. Daria.
ADONAEV
What news do you have about Daria?
MEDVED
Listen, man, not again. She has all cleaned up. Singing and dancing at the Millenium Theatre.
She has a lovely place in Midtown. A fully kept woman now.
ADONAEV
She wrote to me…
MEDVED
…every single day of the war?
ADONAEV
Da11.
MEDVED
They have AI apps that can do that now. Robots can also write to you every single day too. You don’t even need to pay them or sponsor their citizenship.
ADONAEV
She loves me. And I love her. And the rest of the details can be figured out. For nine months she urged me to stay alive and come home. I need to find her.
MEDVED
You can’t even consider supporting Daria, look at the state you are in.
Even if you were rolling in it, why would you support a woman and her son, who isn’t your son, to stay here? Out of made-up imagined duty to act? A perverse Russian American lovesickness?
The kind that sent you to Syria in the first place. You can’t even be your own damn Patron. She’s taken anyway, man. Someone else has been paying her rent, credit cards, and keeping her papers in order.
ADONAEV
Sergei? Dmitry? The Chubby Brahman? Corporate Robert Bruce?
MEDVED
What does it matter? Other people’s property now. Other people’s problems.
ADONAEV
I need to see her tonight!
MEDVED
Impossible. She’s a kept woman. Kept a lot closer now.
ADONAEV
Well, I have her tower address. Maybe leaning towards possibly, possible.
MEDVED
Leave her alone. If you know what is good for her. Also, for yourself.
ADONAEV
I need to do this. She wrote to me every day during the war.
MEDVED
Nope. You do not have to do anything, blyat! In a month, or less, you will have another woman. In the meantime, is your fucking Daria even talking to you?
ADONAEV
No, she is not. She cut the letters off a couple of weeks ago.
MEDVED
Prosto, that is it. You two were an okay team once. You supported each other, in a very strange way. But really, that Suka is a curse.
ADONAEV
She is only with whoever she is with for some spending money and a green card.
MEDVED
And you want a paperwork marriage and a world of work? You are not stupid Sebastian, but your head is not on the right path, again. Go slap yourself in the bathroom. Go jump on the shot girl for a ride. You have less than 100 Rubles. Two whole fucking American dollars, hard maybe.
You cannot afford a woman like Daria Andreavna. I will just come out and say that. You do not have enough shiny gold things. You are not a man of stability and security. You are a man of adventures too enamored with the “good of the people.”
ADONAEV
Not yet.
MEDVED
Not yet. What do you plan to do when this is all over?
ADONAEV
It is never going to be over!
WALTER SEBASTIAN ADLER 
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