MEC-AI-S-XXXX

S C E N E (XXXX) 

Isle of Mann, Newyorkgrad, U.S.A., -April 2017 ce-  

***  

It is a Passover to remember or at least not to immediately forget, drowned in wine and implausibility. At least as far as Sebastian was concerned. The house was entirely packed to capacity, for the same reasons my birthday was. “Tonight’s the night, am I right?!” My very last night in America.  

I never had any delusions of grandeur about being Jesus, mostly because I don’t think I am a good enough person. Too much dirty shit with women, too much killing people. But it is fairly well understood by some that this is my last supper, in Newyorkgrad, and it happens to fall on Passover. 

“Emotional blackmail at its highest theological and ideological levels!” just maybe for some. But what was I really getting out of any of this besides loose sympathy? Later, some of these friends and family would complain that I had traumatized them with my conduct in Kurdistan! That somehow, they had suffered worse than me! Imagine the power of social media. 

The House of Adonaev, the family name of the soon-to-be S.D.F. Partisan Kawa, also to be known by his Arab guerrilla name “Abu Yazan”, was down on the edge of the District Financial had not seen such a feast in years. It was the second night of Passover of the “Hebrew Year 5777”, the spacious loft apartment of Avram and Barbara was filled around a long makeshift series of contiguous tables. Candles flickered, Israeli pop music, Jazz and Afro-pop played over the sound system. Red wine, white wine, Champagne, and Vodka. The place kept filling up. In the coming morning, in eight hours, Sebastian Adonaev would leave for Cuba. From Cuba he would fly to Moscow, travel by train to Nizhny Novgorod, then fly to Iraq and shortly after being smuggled into Northern Syria. It was unsaid, but reflected on popular attendance, that many were making sure they did not miss the last chance to see him alive they might get. Adonaev was always known for having dinners, political salons and regular salons, Jazz with red lights and Hebrew feasts like Passover, Chanukah, Sukkot, but not Purim; that sort of used the excuse of a holiday to get everyone under one roof. 

“Everyone was genuinely nice to me, nicer than usual, presuming they would never see me again. Most did not even really bother to stay in touch during my various travels, with friends such as these! Later, those left breathing and sober went out together into the night. They did techno at the Output, a mega venue. Never was fun, never was good for talking to women. At least if art or politics was involved it didn’t feel like I was selling myself.” 

It was evident by the music that there was no soul to this. There was no battle cry, no telling out of a forlorn love song, there were not even words. There was no feeling of anything except the thumping bass, which crept through the warehouse and rattled the bones more than the nerves. The people look like zombies, they make little words and ideas, they make transactions. And everyone was on drugs. So, it probably didn’t matter what was or was not being programmed into them. 

In the mass of gyrating, listless corpses were vampires selling more cocktails. It would be easy to speculate that the dead could dance if you called a lot of this dancing with crystal powders, bumps of this and that, the bass began to shake the floor in pulsing waves. Sebastian could sense other tribesmen, knew Israelites were here and there buying and selling. 

“This is underground to them; this was the full extent of their capability for a rebellion.” Escaping from empty, meaningless lives into technology. He imagines that maybe each session was different by a little, but he liked words, liked romance. His worldview was fine if Dancehall, Soca and Calypso. His world was either a world of the future or a golden age, or both, there was no middle way, this was hell and demon shit. This was fire and brimstone. Perhaps that allegory gave it too much credit. This was the neo-Rock and Roll, the beat drop in all the capitals of the empire. 

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

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

When the world ends, he guesses ‘the last Harrah’ will make the burning man look meek. But there will be techno. Now that it’s 5am the zombies are gonna fall over. Well, that is what they pay him for. That possibility. If he smoked some weed, he’d be better adjusted. Everything about civilian life is hard. What’s your name and what is your number is so-so hard. He’d sooner intubate a child in a moving ambulance. Well, that is extreme. It’s hard to talk to people you fundamentally don’t believe are human anymore. And there’s never anything to say. All parts of his identity betray him. If only he were a strong and silent type, but he is not. All the things he wants to talk about are unattractive. Actually, all of them, beginning with dialectical socialism, history, Russian literature, bipolar disorder, theology, parapsychology, medical internationalism, black power, Cuba, Haiti, revolutionary theory, and maybe also the Israel Palestine conflict and his role in it. But all those things are unattractive to most women. So, he tries to pretend that things like their careers, their interests, and their history are interesting. But he can’t take that so far even as ‘an Empath.’ All he can think about right now is when will this stupid fucking zombie party be raided by the cops. Wonders if he should go down the alley and make that happen. He would but that idea passes, he is not a snitch. This is not a party for people who don’t take drugs. 

“All that time I kept thinking; this is the last time I will see Newyorkgrad alive. The day after, really the early morning after Passover, I boarded a plane to Havana. I was sleep deprived but felt so excited to be out of this Babylon rat race. I felt like landing for the second time in Cuba. I was setting foot on liberated territory. Hard defended rebel turf. It felt like I was making this little Communist pilgrimage before my dangerous mission.  And that is because I was convinced of the barbarism of my own country and the vile greedy rapacious nature of Capitalism in modern times and historical context. 

“I never go to sleep on the night before a flight.”  

Flying is always a terrible and unnatural experience. It is not a fear of death; it is as a fear of not waking up as the person I was before the flight. Waking up in a strange land, code switching to who I would like to be believed to be. There are times I wonder who “brainwashed” me. Was it the Israelites, was it the Haitians, the Cubans, was in the Kurds? The easiest answer is that I am a mad man, and a zealot. An entirely possible explanation is that everything I am doing is “all American”. But in retrospect it is not fair to blame others for your own madness.  Sometimes, I do feel like a higher power is doing something through me. Guiding my hand. But most of the time, I cannot recognize my face in a mirror and sperate what is dream, what is nightmare, what is enabling evil, and what is an act of pure and utter good. I take a long lukewarm to the cold side shower in the morning. I put on my flight suit, a gray cotton tracksuit. I take a cab to J.F.K., mumble something about the educational, non-touristic purposes of the visa, pay a small bribe called “support for the Cuban people visa” and then I fly directly to Havana.